The Baal Dialogues

Mirrors and masks.

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust"

I speak these words to you, who I imagine to be real, but yet there is always a sense that you are not. I see you, hear you, have felt you, tasted you, but always this lingering doubt that you are a phantom, that in all actuality I am speaking merely to myself. No matter, the conundrums of solipsism worry me no longer...they are the doubts of children who fear to be alone. We are always alone, even at those moments when we believe that we have achieved unimaginable union with another soul. Inevitably these moments are chemical in basis, our biological machines tricking us into thinking that sexual pleasure is in some way bringing us closer to the Other. It is a lie, egocentric lies of the highest order.

Apart from the very few, sexual congress achieves little but a few moments of isolation, an escape from the doubts of everyday mundanity. We make love to our fantasies, to our dreams, to our make-believe ideals of who we want the Other to be. We make love to ourselves, and it achieves little other than to make us See less, and fool ourselves more.

But this is the wrong way to begin. I want to talk on other things first.

As I lie within this symbol of power I begin to feel the disassociation of old. Who I am, my persona, my ego, my selfhood, call it what you will, begins to feel irrelevant. What matter these constraints we have chained our lives to? Why the need to define ourselves to these sets of rules, these archaic Judaeo-Christian morals, this purposeless way of thinking?

It is the constant fear that we never know who we really are, the fact that we cannot define ourselves that makes us try, all our lives to force ourselves into a rigid set of parameters within which we can operate. It's that old humanistic need to define again, our desire to have everything, down to the tiniest detail. neatly tied up with pretty pink ribbon, and labeled so everybody can see what's contained, without ever having to get down in there and have a look. To get our hands dirty, if you will.

But it doesn't work. Not with ourselves. We can't define who we are, no more than we can ever understand how anyone else thinks. Sure, we can get an idea from how people act, we can guess how their minds operate, but everyone is playing roles constantly anyway. Nobody is ever just themselves, no matter how close to them you may think you are. It's just not possible to be yourself when somebody else is around, because there is no yourself to be.

Who you are is merely a reaction to that person, and who you perceive them to be, and who they are, and how you perceive them is merely a reaction to their perception of you, the you that you present to their presentation, that they perceive through their own filters. Madness isn't it? The perceptions continue like shards of a mirror until we fractalise down into madness.

Madness is an interesting topic, and ties into this whole thing. It's also impossible to define, so I'm going to go ahead and define it anyway just to rouse some arguments. Insanity is a mind that has broken out of what we term as 'socially acceptable parameters'. All that programming that we receive throughout our lives that makes us nice respectable members of 'society', with normal behaviour, and normal ways of going about things. Insanity is a mind that rejects this program, has changed or altered or mutated in such a way that it is no longer compatible with the program, or possibly, that the program is just too primitive for it to understand.

Do we investigate and study and learn from these people, like we would with a computer that won't load a program. Do we try to find out why the program doesn't work/isn't recognised? Do we even consider for even a second that maybe, just maybe, it isn't the fault of the mind at all, but a rejection of a program that is obsolete?

No. What we do is lock them in a room until they decide to downgrade to the basic model like all the rest of us. If that doesn't work then we'll load them full of drugs and slam a few giga-watts through them until we ruin their minds effectively enough that the best it can achieve is to blindly follow instructions that we feed it. We kill the differences because they mess up our perfect system, they upset our perception of what is right and normal. We fear change, and this is why we cannot, will not see that the only way forward is to reject those rigid systems of thought and move on from this cardboard cut-out world that we have created.

Practically all the suffering in human history has been caused by our inability to see any other viewpoint than our own. Why do we carry on like this, always trying to affix rules to the minutiae of our lives until we become machines, incapable of seeing any other way? We need to look into ourselves, seek out the boundaries of our minds and smash through them. See, they're only mirrors, not walls at all. Yes there will be casualties at first, but with time it will get easier and easier. To walk out of the courtyards of our minds we need to forget the rules, forget who we think we are, and just be...

...We all know how to wear those masks. Do we remember how to take them off?