If you go to the zoo or the circus, or even a farm in rural India, Thailand, or other parts of Asia, you may find elephants in captivity.  These very large, gentle, and powerful creatures are really quite agreeable to working with humans.  Yet they are often tethered by very little more than a rope.

It seems absurd, of course, that a huge beast would be secured with such a feeble device.  Talk to elephant trainers and they assure you that the rope is symbolic.  The elephant really can break free.  So why doesn’t it?

Here you are in Thailand, working a rural road project, and there is the vast hinterland.  Other elephants to have sex with.  Endless bounty of food.  Why is the elephant picking up that huge log and moving it?

The answer is deception.  The trainer used the rope when the elephant was a calf.  At that time, the rope was too strong, and it could hold the calf.  So the calf learned that it did not break free at that time because it could not.  It learned a fact that became false as it grew.  And now it does not break free, even though it can, because it is convinced by a past experience which is no longer applicable.  The trainer has deceived the elephant about current conditions through experiences in the elephant’s past.

Don’t get all high and mighty about your brain, just now.  The elephant has a very large brain, compared to its body mass.  Its brain is much larger than yours.  These are not stupid creatures, but amazingly complex, social, and creative beasts.

Your Past

There are two components to any event that has happened to you. The first aspect is what happened. The facts of the event. Who did what, what was said, to whom were things done or said, when, where, and how. Notice that the “why” is not included.

The second aspect is what you made it mean. You not only have the experience, but you have your interpretation of it. You have your reasoning about “why” these things happened.

The elephants do, too. The elephant as a calf was roped. It did not break free.  So, yes, I am saying it has an interpretation of what happened. And it became convinced that because it did not break free, it could not break free.

It may have become accustomed to the rope, to the captivity. It may have become inured to the routine. And presumably there were “carrots” as well, food, some nice things to play with, showers, mud, and whatever else elephants get in captivity. But the interpretation remained: I cannot break these ropes.

That’s really just not so. It applied to the elephant calf that was, but not to the adult elephant that is. The events of the past may even be forgotten, but the interpretation lives on, is clung to, is held as baggage by the ponderous pachyderm. It remains captive because it generated a true interpretation that became false. It did not break free because at one time it could not. Now it can break free, but it does not. Such is deception, such is illusion, such is your captivity.

Your future

So the next step, the difficult and vital step, is to separate what happened from what you made it mean. And to see that what you can now do is find a more empowering interpretation for what happened.

What happened is not who you are. What happened to you is only what happened to you. Part of the “baggage” aspect of it is that you are clinging to what happened like it is your identity. But it isn’t your identity. It is only your past.

Your opportunity now is to design the future you want, design the person you wish to be, and create that future, and create that person. Part of that future hinges upon the past, because what the present is came about because of the past. But part of that future is wholly free form and available for design from tabula rasa, from a blank slate. And letting the past continue to rule who you are and how you can be means limiting what you can do now and what you can create in the future.

If you make the future by looking at the past, and then adding things that you prefer and taking away things you dislike, then the future becomes more like the past in some ways and less like it in others, but it remains MORE or LESS the same. And that won’t do.

You are more than a version of the past, you are capable of creating a future that is more than a stepwise alteration of the past. You are capable of designing a future from whole cloth, and realising it entirely without reference to the past.

But to gain that capacity, to fully express that capacity, you have to release the past, let go of it, as in letting go of the things you are clinging to, the baggage of the past. Not as in erasing memories – you cannot erase them. Not as in denying that things happened – you neither can nor would deny what happened. But as in acknowledging that they happened and then noticing (being empowered by noticing) that they do not bind you. That the past has no chains for you.

Then you see that you are fully free of what happened, because you have finally gotten beyond what you made it mean.

They learn to obey mommy and daddy (or whomever the child-rearers are in their lives), and to transfer those patterns of obedience on to and to adopt them from individuals and institutions of all sorts: schools, churches, teams, states, media, politicians, leaders, prophets, bosses, generals, traditions, cultures.

The Bellamy salute, Occupied Hawai'i, 1941

Precious few seem to ever learn the value of questioning everything put to them by these people and institutions, to deconstruct the self-perpetuating mind-viruses they transmit, and to confront the truths of our common reality for themselves. Instead, too many fall into those patterns and enact those little mental programs.

The most successful of these programs ultimately include directives to retransmit them to others — and to shun those who refuse to absorb and adopt them.

“Christmas is the most important holiday of the year” is a proposition many would agree with — despite the fact that “Christmas” and “holiday” are mere social constructs built upon thousands of years of mindless obedience to unfounded tradition. Their value emerges not from any aspect or quality of the world as it is, but rather from the social acceptance gained by going along with and acting according to the proposition.

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” — a mind-control slogan if there ever was one, cloaking the interests of power elites to enslave and exploit their subjects in wars for profit, while invoking “goodness” and “community” in the form of the imaginary construct called “one’s country”. Militarism reached its pinnacle thus far in the 20th century, and one can only hope that the mountains of millions of corpses it generated will be its only legacy into the future. I can’t help but wonder, though, if we as a species, as a global culture, have been at all purged of the tendencies and weaknesses which led to all that slaughter.

Indeed, as I look around, I seriously doubt it.

Mind you, writing your own programs for life in this world we share is hard. Nobody teaches you this in school. In some ways, it is a skill that can’t be taught in traditional fashion, since metaprogramming the human biocomputer is not something which lends itself well to being broken down into the component bits that the Prussian-model education system we are all so many of us are products of requires.

Be born to Muslim parents, and you’re expected to be a Muslim. Grow up in Pittsburgh, and you’re expected to be a Steelers fan. Become a citizen of Norway by accident of birth, and you’re expected to self-identify as “Norwegian” for the rest of your life. Be born to “democracy”, and you’re expected to be a voter. And on and on.

Violate these patterns, and those around you brand you odd.

And this is considered “normal”.

Normal people scare me.

YES WE CAN!

And we can do it.

Just do it!

Do it now. Do it because your country wants you to. Do it for… do it for love! Do it for… do it for God and CHILDREN and justice in your neighborhood. Do IT for consistency! Do it for philosophy. DO IT FOR AMERICA!

We can do it! Together! We can do it for fun. We can do it for PEACE. We can smash the state (and avoid collapse, mass starvation, conquest by hostile aliens, etc.*) before next Tuesday! We can create a voluntary society based on love and compassion. And we can do it for MASSIVE PROFITS!

Would you like an action plan to improve your life? Do you want to guarantee your retirement and your children’s future? Do you want to know just how EASY all this is? How you can make it all happen by accident? And all for the very special introductory price of $19.95?***

INSTANT SUCCESS — or triple your money back!

I would like to invite you, right now, to get out of your chair. Please: put down your laptop. Please leave your iPhone on the table. Please turn the volume WAY UP LOUD! Please start the music. And, please, get into your body — and go out of your mind!

Turn on, tune in, drop in. Drop in any time!

Shut up and dance!** Get off your ass and get on the path. The path to TRIUMPHANT FALLIBLE FRENZY!**** Arise!

ACCESS ALL AREAS.

DJ Misjah & DJ Tim, “Access”, X-Trax, 1994

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o4joooH5tg

Whatever you do, DO NOT DOWNLOAD AND WATCH THIS FILM (isohunt.com, search for “arise subgenius”). You have been warned.

Collaborators will be shot. Prosecutors will be transgressicuted. Deviation and counter-revolutionary talk will not be tolerated.

That is all. Return to your assigned work allocations and dwelling units.

* By reading this sentence you agree that neither nostate.com, Rabbi Guano Infusion PhD. (deceased) nor Michael Jude Gogulski shall be held responsible for damages caused by reading this sentence.

** Seeing this footnote indicates your legally binding consent that should you lack the appropriate number of functioning limbs necessary for dance in your jurisdiction that neither nostate.com, Rabbi Guano Infusion PhD. (deceased), nor Michael Jude Gogulski shall be liable for loss of life, liberty, productive capacity or future potential profit brought about by seeing this footnote or other means.

*** If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

**** Do not over-meditate.

Answers varied wildly. The exercise, as constructed, was great, because I didn’t know this answer for myself until doing it.

My answer: Compassion. Compassion is my highest value.

Next: What’s your vision for expressing/achieving/maximising that value?

My answer: End all legal privilege. Smash the state.

Next: What is your unique ability to contribute to making that happen? Where is your comparative advantage?

My answer: Crypto/web tech to support the growth of peaceful black and gray markets.

Agora! Compassion! Action!