I had an entertaining dream last night. I’m sitting next to Marilyn Manson at a bar in a very small town in some unknown locale. He says to me, “Is this all that happens here?” I look around and notice the bar half filled with men and women, mostly men, all of them very plain looking, dressed in grays and beiges, nearly expressionless faces, and talking in low humdrum voices about nothing of import or interest. So I say to him, “Well, this bar has theme nights. It’s Mundane Monday tonight.”
Manson nods his head and takes a drink from a bottle of liquor. “ I was hoping for something a little more adventurous.” I tell him that there’s one other bar in town just down the street. “I don’t know if I’d call it adventurous, but the people there are definitely different.” He looks at me and I try not to act alarmed while looking at his opaque eye as he asks me how they are different.
“Well, it’s mostly their appearance. I’m not sure they are any more interesting in terms of the way they talk or act, but they are visually striking if that sort of thing gets you going.” He stands up and spreads his arms wide, showing off his black cape, the chains and piercings on his chest, and whatnot. “Yeah, I get it, Marilyn. I think you’ll dig the people there.”
As we’re walking over he asks more about them. “Well, there’s two basic types. One type has torsos like a pyramid and the other has torsos that look like inverted pyramids. I made the mistake of thinking one type was male and the other female, but they don’t have reproductive organs. Anyway, the ones with pyramid bodies have heads on top of the point of their torsos while the others with inverted pyramids have heads in the middle of their torsos. Both types have arms and legs of all sorts, though. You might see one with a pyramid torso who has spaghetti legs and tree branch arms whereas one with an inverted torso might have one elephant leg—for hopping—and bicycle wheels for arms.”
I didn’t actually describe these beings in words. It was more that I saw them take shape and form and, by doing so, it was as if I was telling Manson about them. What was interesting to me, though—because Manson sort of faded away as I was seeing these things come into being—was that it felt sort of like I was creating them but without conscious effort. When I got to the legs and arms, especially, it was very much like I was awake and wondering how to complete their bodies, as if I was thinking about them and determining what to “draw” next. But they just kept coming and coming, all different types. I was amused at first, then intensely focused on “seeing” how they formed in such a way that it seemed I was making them form, and then I was laughing in my dream. In fact, I woke up laughing.
Every once in a while I have “laughing dreams.” They’re immensely enjoyable and I always feel in total control while simultaneously participating as a “character” while creating them as I observe them. There’s three levels of what, I guess, could be called consciousness: participation, creation, and observation. The observing part of me feels most like the “God” part of my being, the creative part of me feels like “me,” and the participant feels like a role being played, only partly under my control—its consciousness as a being almost like a lower life form.
It’s that lowest life-form being of participant in the dream that seems like how all people are in their day-to-day presentation of themselves. Perhaps I could call it “ego,” a rather limited manifestation of being with only limited consciousness. At times, throughout life, I’ve lived in my waking hours that way, mostly unaware that there is greater depth of consciousness within my being, what little awareness I have that there’s “more” is felt as a nagging sense of “There’s something not right; this doesn’t really feel like me.” Whenever I come out of that state, grow into a more aware, creative and observing consciousness, I breathe a sigh of relief, laugh at myself, and think, “How silly of me to have forgotten that I had adopted an identity and then believed that that was actually the totality of me, the ‘real’ me.”
For a time, anyway, I remain conscious of the roles I play within various identities and try to enjoy myself and learn as I do so, but with the awareness that I’m not being what I am, that I’m really at play within a chosen identity. The trouble comes when I forget and become “stuck” in that role, forgetting that there is a process to free myself from those shackles that were either imposed or chosen consciously at one time. That process, for me, comes through attentive breathing which is why I wrote about it the other day. See, I think a lot of people become “stuck” in particular identities, sometimes for decades, sometimes for life. Identities, though, are no more than roles being played. No one is an “accountant.” No one is a “teacher.” No one is a “lover.” No one is a “fighter.” No one is a “soccer player.” No one is a “daughter.” No one is a “spouse.” No one is a “parent.” No one is “African-American.” No one is “Asian. No one is “white.” No one is a “woman.” No one is a “man.” No one is a “child.” No one is “kind.” No one is “evil.” No one is a “rapist.” No one is a “rape victim.” No one is “poor.” No one is “rich.” No one is an “owner.” No one is a “renter.” No one is “homeless.” No one is “intelligent.” No one is “mentally ill.”
All of those things are roles being played. In today’s parlance, roles are interpreted as “identities” and for the past few decades we have been in the midst of a revolution of identity politics. It’s become so pervasive, so socially meaningful, that people become truly trapped within those roles with little to no possibility of escaping. A lot of these identities are imposed rather than adopted. If you are born in America and have pigmented skin (and even skin with no pigmentation), you are identified and corralled into a racial or ethnic identity. If you have a vagina, you’re a girl or a woman. A penis means boy or man. If you have a child, you become known as a mother or a father. If you’re under a certain age, you are a child. If you are born in the United States then you become American. if you choose a career in law enforcement then you are identified as a police officer.
You are not allowed, in a social context, to be a person or a being with consciousness with the ability to play different roles. In a sense, we all possess the possibilities of stem cells even throughout life. The possibilities become more and more limited over time because of our mortality, but the idea that the canvas we painted through the identities imposed or adopted over the course of our lives was “who we were” is a pernicious distortion of the possibilities we possessed from moment to moment. We have decided, as a culture, to measure ourselves by “what was done” and “the choices we made” and “the identities associated with us” rather than the very live possibilities in between moments before we made the decisions we made.
If you consider the fact that we have the capacity to make decisions then it should be more obvious that we are not the decisions we make. We are (or were in the case of the deceased) the conscious ability to decide what we wanted to become — or not become. Who we are not, as identities, is as much who we are as whatever we decided to be. That’s a radical notion in our culture. It may even seem to many to be fantasy. But that’s because most people identify as being the decisions they have made, the identities imposed, and the roles they adopted. They forgot that they could have chosen to identify as inverted pyramids with spaghetti legs.
I am the stem cell of consciousness fueled by breathing. To say it another way, I am the possibility of becoming while already being. If there was a model for how everyone could be, I suppose it would be Speed Levitch. But I know this: no two Speeds would ever be alike and no one Speed would ever be the same in one moment as he was in any other. And Speed would understand that in the moment it was forgotten. I suppose it could be said that my experiences in Amsterdam were an exploration in Levitchism even though I did not know of Levitch at the time. But that’s because Levitchism defies association with any particular being at any particular moment. And Levitchism would always deny that it is an “ism.” Because it isn’t and wouldn’t be even if it could.
Movement cannot be a movement of a political sort because it can’t be a civilization; movement is never still in the way property is. The very concept of property prevents movement in reality. Oh, the lands I would travel were there no property! Civilization is a mistake that can’t escape form itself and it has trapped beings inside compartments called identities that must follow the rules of movement limited by ownership, limited by political and monetary currency. There are other currencies, those still found in moments that have as of yet remained unbound. That’s the thing, though: these currencies are created and discovered in moments and then dissolve completely as if they never were. Those currencies can not be owned because they are tangible only as they happen.
Nothing secure has ever been fun. Uncertainty was betrayed when it was made a principle. Living need not feel like dying. We could, but we don’t. Society is the means by which psychopaths turn the masses into sociopaths. Other things that could be written.
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