Unplugging your Mind

We have no idea how to judge anything
All the associations have been embedded in our brains by the world we made
And when the Tunnel appears before us, we'll mistake it for the flickering glow of the TV

"I know there's a big world out there like the one I saw on the screen
In my living room late last night it was almost too bright to see"
(The Postal Service)

"Tunnel Vision"

 To come to knowledge of oneself, it is really imperative that one turns off their TV;

Stop watching 'your shows', most trending movies, most popular music, news, and so on. Just gain some distance.

We're being systematically brainwashed, desensitized and psychologically manipulated, and our value as a person is being cheapened.

I cannot imagine how in touch a person can be with themselves if they willingly continue watching the general stream of shows and media. It seems impossible. I find myself immensely disturbed.. The world I exist in in my head is so far removed from the image of the world presented on television - what is taken for granted as ok, what emotions people should have about what, what their attitudes should be, it is difficult to maintain hold of myself and my real feelings and thoughts in the face of such garbage. I know that this is not far from the general attitude of people in society in general as well. There is no reason I would willfully expose myself to this. It's soul pollution, and the whole world is plugged in, unable to think straight. Media presents an image of the world, and it intimidates and corrupts and controls everyone. There is power to the popularity of things, and the unanimity of the attitudes presented, and it's incredible how psychologically intimidating this can be, even for the most strong minded people.

Unfortunately I cannot avoid it all, I do have to deal with popular music at work, or ads here and there on the internet, or the reflective culture in all the places I go in the world.

I deal with it, I have to. I've lashed out before, but I usually get in trouble when I do. This is why I ended up buying pepper spray and a taser, actually. So I just grit my teeth and try to filter it out as much as possible, and am more tactical with how I lash out now, to avoid lash-back. So I deal with it. and I suffer.. And then I come home.. I am alone, and my own thoughts reign free again. Gone is the pounding bass of whatever airhead pop whore and her raging, predatory sexual power and ego, designed to intimidate, manipulate, and sell. I put on my own song, I close my eyes, I think of nothing.. This song is quiet, sentimental, sincere, exposed... and I am aware I have feelings again. Not the false sentiment of "aww" moments on Full House, or the one slow song on a major rock album, but real, deep feelings. There is this soft place inside me, and no one is trying to prey on it, to intimidate it, forcing me to run and hide, and conceal it. No one is trying to gain ego power over me, to belittle me, there are no walls about me, it's just me. I could cry... it is difficult to explain the depth of the contrast between this ineffable world of my own, and the shell of the world we have made through media. We are so out of touch that being in touch with yourself makes you feel like you're the only one in the world who understands it. And... well, maybe you are. Because people open their mouths, and, even more difficult to understand than the contrast between these two worlds, is the fact that most people seem to exist in this shell of a world 100% of the time. The things they say, the opinions they express are too unexplainable otherwise. It is difficult for me to understand that other people seem to exist in this psychologically manipulated state nonstop. This is something that has taken me years and years and years to fully face and come to terms with and admit to myself. I didn't want to believe it, it's just so hard to accept that other people's experience is different from my own. Other people really do exist in a much different place in their head, despite how much I could never believe it. It's like they don't even exist.. it's like they could reach the end of their life, suddenly become aware, and then realize "what the hell happened my whole life?" like they were asleep, almost. Just one thing they were told to be and do after another, and they never consulted themselves, they never asked questions.

We're building walls around ourselves with all this garbage, and the walls become who we are, and we no longer exist. Just dead souls, just the shell.

Really, there is little interest in me in getting to know people who are much absorbed in all this media. When a person subjects themselves to enough of it, it shows me that they are not themselves, they live in a false world deeply out of touch with themselves and it would be useless to interact much with them, they are wandering as an absent minded zombie, they are not passionately digging through their soul to find pieces of truth and understanding. They live vicariously through the image presented to them and are the sum of all the influences that prey on them, waiting for something to make their lives right, thinking that all this culture is headed somewhere, and playing their part, when really it's just a perpetual loop, a dead end, a distraction. No one really knows what they're doing, but you've been tricked into thinking they do. You are too afraid to take initiative and admit that the only answers are inside you. To dare to put your heart in charge.. The world outside you is just too intimidating, and speaks with authority that you do not dare to find inside yourself.

All this media is underlined by the same psychology.. power, body, sex, ego.. social heirarchy, manipulation of love, value, devotion, and loneliness.. exclusion and inclusion.

I don't even have to speak about ads.. we all know how they're preying on us. But if you can't see the same thing happening in the shows, in the music, in the news, in the bookstores, in the social movements, you don't have a deep understanding of exactly what's happening and the profoundity of the situation....

We all want love and validation.

We all have a personal world that on some level we cherish and want to see treated with compassion and gentleness and understanding, privacy and value, significance, just general validation.

We see how this love and validation is utilized by others as a tool to gain power. Through the pursuit of validation as a means of ego power, this love is abused and the ultimate value in it, as love, is destroyed. It is no longer love, it is only sold-out ego power.

We see this, and we desire power for ourselves in response, because it is the only way to defend ourselves from the power struggle of personal validation, and without it, we are naked souls. And when we sell out and give in, love is lost, and can never be regained.

And love, this validation, it's not just something marginal. Love represents the completion of a person's soul. This is literally a person coming to wholeness and completion. We wander this universe alone and incomplete, looking for a part of ourselves that will make us feel love. To be completed. Existential loneliness is the condition of humanity. This is reflected in religions and spirituality, for example, by the search for 'god'.. the search for 'god', when you boil it down and shake everything off, is just the search for this same completion.. only the attempt to extract, divorce, or abstract it from the search for another human soul, and rather find it in a more amorphous state. So what's happening here, this power struggle we see manifested in the media, it cannot be understated how profound it is.

This is what I mean by power, body, sex, ego.. etc. This is the exact basis of the whole culture of media. This not only motivates it all, but is the reason we find it so "appealing", and why it is everywhere, like a plague, like a morbid fascination that we all can't help but succumb to, and we have no way of sufficiently combating it as long as most people are shallow, dishonest, power hungry, sell-out sluts. They'll always push the envelope, media will always degenerate, and this is nothing new. Do you think the depraved culture we see today is something new? It's not, yet it perpetually seems like it is. As far as I can tell, humans have always been psychologically the same, and so they'll find whatever way they can to express their inner ugliness, gain power, and destroy love.. this cannot be mitigated.

And that's not all. Through media we have created an image of the world that we live through vicariously. We live our lives and view the world through the imaginary world created by all "our shows". We see things that aren't there. We see lifestyles and movements and fashions and sub/cultures that aren't meaningfully real, just media sensations that we wish to be a part of, a place in the world that we want to be a part of, but which is idealized in a way that is totally untrue of the kind of bleak lives we all actually live, the actual lack of color and life in human culture. You know these images, the punk rock thing, the biker thing, club culture, hippie culture, indie culture, the nuclear family, activist culture, social movements, political ideals, college and career, trending internet memes, it's all lies. There's nothing there. We created this image to tell us that humanity is special, and that our nations and governments and lifestyles are worthwhile and hopeful, and headed somewhere. That we mostly have it figured out, just with some problems to work out. That we are not just mostly animals, capable of animalistic folly and confusion on a massive scale, far from any sort of deep enlightenment or understanding. But as a whole, we are.. Thank you John Hughes, for all your feel-good movies, you useless hipster. We created these images to live through vicariously because the real world we live in is so horrifyingly disgusting and ugly that we cannot face it, and if we do we are honestly liable to kill ourselves. It's truly hopeless and destroyed. It's funny and ironic that this shell of a world we made, this power struggle, represented by media, is both our escape from the world, but also what made the world this way in the first place. We exist in all these debates, the political ones, and the social movements, and all the media, and the real world is lost to us. And we follow false hope and optimism, forever. I find it difficult to express how lost and screwed up the world actually is, when you can gain enough distance from media to take a look at the world from the outside, from a clearer, more objective perspective. I know people say the world is screwed up, all the time, but they do not mean what I do, they do not mean it on the same level. They mean it in relation to their particular side of an argument in the confusion they are lost in and controlled by. The real ugliness of the world is intolerable, and I'm not talking about the cliches of "children starving in africa" or the wars, or whatever. War is only an escape from the horrors that are our lives, as with the "social issues". The preferred escape, the desperate solution.

And it goes on.. through the narrow minded images we have presented in media, in our imitation and lack of self-knowledge, we believe that art can only be the way it is. I'm talking about being unique.. We have this sense, like everything has been done before. But if you can step far enough outside the media box, you realize it's just this tiny sliver in all the possibilities. Through psychological manipulation we all imitate and fall into common patterns of behavior and being and this accounts for the vast majority of people. We don't know that our souls are free.

So, it's not hard to understand that sometimes some people, you know, get so disgusted by society that they go to hide and live lives as monks. And it's also not hard to understand why becoming more alienated from society in this way is often associated with becoming more spiritual, and why sexuality and spirituality are associated as being at odds with each other, as they should be. It's not just a false association, this is the fundamental reasoning for it, although culture is always trying to force them into the same basket, so they can claim to have their cake and eat it too. But we're all being lied to. It will never work. You can't sell out on love and be love.

So.. this is my plea, please, just unplug. Join me, because it's cold and lonely out here, and those of us that exist outside are few and far between. And I could really use the comforting relation of knowing someone is willing to travel with me and know me. Turn off your shows and all that garbage and just get some distance and come to yourself. If there's some long-forgotten part of yourself that feels that sense of disturbance at the things you see and hear, don't repress it. Don't be ashamed of it, admit to it. Listen to yourself, listen to that sense you have, and give it power. It's your heart speaking, and you should listen. It will grow stronger, and you in turn will grow stronger, as a spirit. And in the end it will tell you to turn all that other bullshit away, and everything in life will begin to make the most overwhelming, interconnected sense.