Birthright

I was born a white boy of modest means, narcissistic and wanting to be pious.  Wanting to do good for some unconscious, or at least unexamined, motivation to make people respect the person I would be.

We all have different faculties, various levels of intelligence in different parts of our mental landscape, and my epigenically determined topography turned me into my particular brand of automaton.  And so it was until whenever it was when I started to get a hint of that the key to unlocking the mind, like unlocking the phone, involves hacking into the programming.  Until a person challenges the algorithms (fundamental belief systems) on which they operate, they remain zombies, of a sort.  The Matrix, as it were, is more real than people believe.  Unplugging requires both an act of courage and defiance.  But it's a very special brand of defiance, not against any legally recognized entity, but against the habits of a lifetime since mom and dad and authority and the social machine have imprinted on your one's life.  The courage comes in facing the unknown -- what has been a companion for years, a go-to set of values and rules, regardless of whether they've lead to any sort of tangible success or not (depending on the most basic idea of what success might be), and abandoning it for what?

When I was unlocked, I had had a few years, a few key life experiences under my belt, and a whole lot of learning to draw from -- exposure to such a wide variety of ideas from science, science fiction, literature, philosophy, human nature. . . making it a more seamless process than it is for most, perhaps.  It was catalyzed by some emotional trauma in the form of a near simultaneous divorce and consequent move, major career change, and etcetera, leaving me without the stability I'd had before and so the freedom(?) to embrace a fundamentally different ideology.  Not everybody gets that chance, and I suppose I wouldn't wish it on anybody, because that level of upheaval in one swell swoop is not necessarily what I'd call a pleasant experience.  But the sooner I stopped judging the new array of experiences, the sooner the pain ceased.  And the sooner the ineluctable and unique peace that comes only from substituting will to awareness.  Because will is an effective blinder to what they world is offering you.  And what the world offers is simply this: The opportunity to approach your circumstances with honesty and fearlessness.  Not recklessness, not brazenness or bravado, but the faith that there is no absolute imperative to meet any arbitrary expectation, yours or others'.  Your expectations have served their purpose (getting you here) and may now be retired, and theirs, you no longer need to heed because their expectations are for them to deal with, not you.  You've got a life to lead, and their boxes are no longer constraints (blinders, fetters, hand-cuffs, bars, thumb-screws) that need to be heeded).

All that stuff put me here, today, in 2015 San Diego, and to do what with in this tiny plot of world I inhabit.  So, what am I going to do?