Imagine a virtual reality experience that is so comprehensive and authentic that it is indistinguishable from real life. Now imagine that what we refer to as real life is actually a simulation and that the interface that drives the engine of this reality is implanted in our heads.
It speaks to us in a voice that we consider our own. It projects multi-sensory images onto our consciousness. Many players are so distracted by the voices, images and emotions that come from this interface that they can barely play the game. The name of this interface, with all of its blinking dashboard lights and warning sirens, is the human mind.
The human mind is celebrated by some as the seat of consciousness, yet it is the very mechanism that most interferes with our conscious awareness of the environment.
How many of you drove today? When driving, we’re in a state of total sensory awareness, right? None of us are mentally rehearsing what we’re going to tell our supervisor, or our employees, as we’re hurtling along the road at a mile a minute, right? None of us are listening to that song on the radio and remembering when we first heard it in the company of that certain someone and felt that elevator-drop stomach across years of time and space, have we?
The mind is like those annoying-ass advertisements that pop up on your web page the instant that you arrive there to look at something. It is constantly cloying for attention.
Like a motor vehicle, when the mind is left to idle it pollutes. All sorts of unbidden images emanate from it. It bends the attractive woman, who would have nothing to do with you if it weren’t her job to pour you a cup of coffee, into any and every position of domination and subservience that can be dredged up from the dungeons of your subconscious. It turns her obligatory smile into a warm invitation. That’s right, your mind is a creep. What could be creepier than looking over your shoulder when you’re making love to someone and inserting other people into the action without consent? The girl you lost your virginity to in high school. Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.. Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles. The attractive neighbor whom your mother played tennis with who once gave you an appraising look when you were sixteen. All of this injected into what is supposed to be a moment of intimacy and connection between you and your lover.
But don’t dare to call it such because your mind loves to justify things. It deflects responsibility. It likes to make itself seem much more important than it is. The mind is jealous of the heart. It tries to tell it what to feel. It tries to make sense out of things that are much too real to be understood.
The mind is an arrogant thug and a bully. Have you ever seen what a steel trap does to a living thing? It crushes it; twisting, tangling and snapping it into a bloody pulp that is substantially less than the sum of its parts.
The mind is also a heinous P.R. maven. Look what it has done – It has turned the word “mindful” into an accolade and the word “mindless” into a pejorative. There is a method to its madness. It keeps you up all night, chattering away, to keep you from hearing the entreaties of its chief rival – the heart.
The mind is a serial killer. It escapes justice because every one of its victims is classified as a suicide, but it is always the mind that gives the order to pull the trigger, swallow the pills or kick the stool out from under the neck-lined noose. It is the mind that authorizes the transfer of pain from ourselves to others. It is the mind, working 24/7, even as we sleep, that creates the great work of fiction that we call reality.
The mind is not so much a well of creativity as a wall, separating ourselves. It is the condensation on the mirror, the darkness infused in the glass. This keeper of knowledge keeps us from knowing that there are no barriers between us, that what affects one affects all. The illusion of individuality is bolstered by the inadequacy of language to capture our condition because pronouns distort our true relationship with one another. We are one.
All conflict is self-conflict. One virtual partition trying to destroy another virtual partition with a virus, when they’re both on the same memory drive. Murder is suicide. Exploitation is self-harm. And on some level we know this. Throughout human history we have attempted to waylay the mind by various means. Through various mind-altering substances and rituals and chants and ceremonies that temporarily disrupt its relentless onslaught.
The mind is a bad influence. We have a co-dependent relationship that impedes true fulfillment. I could only write this because I’m completely out of my mind.
Literature in Small Doses 