Mother Goose

Think about it this way, if you will. Was the 40-something Caucasian woman with short brown hair wearing the yellow and brown 1970s pantsuit standing behind you in line at the grocery store freaking you out? Not because she was doing anything unusual or looked strange by any measure. No, simply because she was a being extraordinarily similar to you. Your awareness of this reality began to expand outward at an ever-increasing rate of time, although the expansion started at the quantum level so it took a bit until you were able to experience a mind meld. Or maybe you had checked out by then. After all, you only wanted to grab a ripe red tomato and a two-liter of Orange Crush. 

But maybe for a little while there, fifteen seconds or so, you were trapped in line with nothing to do other than becoming aware of yourself which then led you to become aware that the other beings around you were fucking other beings around you! Your awareness became the fullness of your consciousness to the point that you could scarcely function. It was good fortune that the teller was a loud talker because you were gibbering in a desperate attempt to mute the intensity of your awareness of being aware. 

This awareness of awareness terrified you mostly because of the potential emotional or spiritual connection with that woman could have occurred if you had become aware just a few seconds earlier. But later you realized that the vulnerability you experienced was ultimately unsustainable in the world as it is.

The world is too hard for vulnerability. You gotta build the walls. With little windows in them. Do you have the image of the Disneyland Palace sparkling in your imagination right now? Do you have a goose in your hair? 

…

Ted: Dude, you can’t go in there.

Bill: Why not?

Ted: That’s where the money is.

Bill: I know, that’s why I’m going in there.

Ted: No, that’s, that’s why you can’t go in there.

Bill: Look, we’re in the middle of a field the size of Nevada. There ain’t nobody anywhere. I’m fucking going in there.

Fred: What’s going on?

Ted: Bill wants to go in there.

Fred: He can’t go in there. That’s where the money is.

Bill: What the fuck is with you two?

Ted: Nothing.

Fred: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Bill: Something’s going on between you two. I don’t know what it is, but I’m going in there and I’m getting the fucking money.

[Ted looks at Fred. Fred looks at Ted. Bill shrugs, opens the door to the shed, walks inside, and then walks back out.]

Bill: Where’s the fucking money?

Ted: Yeah, about that.

Bill: What the fuck?

Fred: The money is in there, it’s just … you can’t see it.

Bill: What do you mean you can’t see it?

Fred: I mean it’s … Ted?

Ted: There’s something wrong with the money.

Bill: Yeah, I know. What’s wrong is there is no fucking money!

Ted: No, there’s money. It’s just …

Fred: You can’t see it.

Bill: Yeah, well, you better figure out a way for me to see it or I’m gonna blow your fucking heads off, you cocksuckers.

Ted: Hey, hey, no reason to get upset. The money’s there. You can’t see it, no, but you can hear it.

Bill: I can hear it?

Ted: Yeah.

Bill: What the fuck are you talking about?

Fred: I don’t know exactly what it is about this place, but we’ve been here a while waiting for you and … this place is different from other places. 

Ted: Like the money. At first, we could see it. Then the next day, we couldn’t see it.

Fred: We thought the same thing you did, but then two days later when we checked again … we could hear it.

Ted: We couldn’t smell it or feel it or see it, but we could hear it.

Bill: How the fuck do you hear money?

Fred: It’s kinda hard to explain.

Bill: Yeah, I can see that.

Fred: Really?

Bill: What do you mean, “really”?

Fred: I mean, can you actually see the hard time I’m having explaining it?

Bill: What the fuck are you talking about? I swear to God I am going to put a hole through you so big your mother could walk through.

Fred: You think he could do that, Ted?

Ted: I don’t know what’s possible and what’s not here, man.

Bill: Give me my fucking money!

Ted: Settle down. Just give us a minute, okay. I think there’s a way to help you understand what’s going on.

Fred: There is.

Ted: Exactly. Okay, Bill, after the first couple of hours after you got here did you happen to notice that there’s always the same amount of light no matter where the sun is in the sky?

Bill: What?

Ted: Look at where the sun is now. It’s pretty low in the sky on the western horizon, but it’s still light out like it’s noon.

[Bill looks up at the sky, turns around in a circle, observing.]

Bill: You’re fucking crazy, man. This shit, it stops now.

Fred: No, Ted is right. We didn’t notice it the first day until the sun went down. Instantly, it turned from day to night. It didn’t slowly go dark. It was like a light switch.

Ted: Creepy as all hell. We tried to drive out of here as fast as we could but the road, man, it just keeps going back to this spot.

[Bill pulls out a handgun and shoots Ted in the chest, leaving a huge hole in him.]

Ted: Ah, shit, man.

Bill: What the fuck? How are you not dead? 

Fred: We’ve been trying to tell you, this place ain’t normal, man. The things you think are going to happen don’t happen here. The things you don’t think will happen, happen.

Bill: I can’t … I can’t accept it.

Ted: What are you saying? Can’t you see that I have a hole in me the size of Fred’s mother?

Fred: It’s a good look on you.

Ted: Thanks.

Bill: I gotta get outta here.

Fred: Good luck with that. 

…

One theory of truth claims that the battle is between hiddenness and disclosure rather than falsity and honesty. How this relates to an ontology of wholism versus the atomization within science and analytics is a question no one answered. What is real may not be compatible with existence as the prepositions “in” versus “from” suggest that paradigms are overshadowed by boundaries. Projections on objects depend on the application of personal pronouns: “I am” versus “You are.” Being qua being can choose itself and gain itself only because it can also lose itself; this is a central premise of mindness. Authenticity is the mode of being qua being; self-relation understands itself and knowingly takes hold of itself. Inauthenticity loses hold of itself as being qua being because it is the “wrong” kind of being. The assertion of mindness is the process of being a self for oneself. Process implies time, but no one has asked the necessary question about the interdependence of the relationship between time and being, perhaps due to a likelihood that such a question cannot become coherent without obliterating whatever relationship may (must?) simultaneously occur and be continually. 

Identity has no comprehensible ontology. Self-conception is independent of becoming, an expedient conditional and contextual choice of shape or form always subject to change. Being qua being requires an abandonment of role-based choices; the construction of identity is a compartmentalization narrowing the possibility of being’s infinite exponentials; an apt if limited analogy is to create a closet as the falsity of “I am” and thus rejecting the universe of authentically understanding self to knowingly (“awarely”) allow itself to become itself as infinite potentiality. Being qua being concerns itself with itself without succumbing to diminishing itself to that which is a fragment of itself (such as identity).