Humpjones

I Hump, Therefore I Am

Posted May 12, 2007 7 comments

So which one of me is real?

You know what I mean? If you’ve never asked yourself this question, this is going to read like schizoid rambling, but you’ll still get something out of it.  If you have asked yourself that question, then you might be wondering how I could possibly tie in issues of Distributed Identity with human sexuality.  Some people are “steady as a rock”, some people “wear many hats” and some of us swap entire flesh-suits several times a day.

The most disturbing part of trying to establish Exactly Who You Are is the dawning realization—which most humans fight their entire life, methinks—that there’s really no central vantage point you can hold to.  Our internal, subjective perception of Who We Are is comically distorted by the cognitive biases that all humans fall victim to.  We want to believe we are good, smart, attractive, important people....so we tend to focus on what confirms that hypothesis, and to edit out what contradicts it. 

Worst of all, if you’re thinking “well, I’m pretty honest with myself” then you’re lying to yourself right now.

EXISTIENTIAL PARALYSIS

I need to write this carefully, otherwise I might start philosophizing.

When someone writes me an email critical of my “arrogant and humorless” tone over at Skilluminati Research, is that actually adressed to the person reading it?  When some bitter troll leaves me comments here at Hump Jones about how trite and meaningless they find my trite and meangingless articles, is that actually a reflection on who I am?  Most interesting of all, when I write a Brainsturbator article with no specific conclusions anywhere and people take me to task over statements I never even made, what’s going on?

I was first introduced to the metaphor of Indra’s Net by a beautiful and psychotic Russian girl who claimed to be related to Vladamir Putin.  I don’t know if those circumstances are relevant, but it’s part of the sensual subtext to my personal history so I include it just the same.  I have never smelled anyone like her.

“The net of Indra is a philosophical metaphor used by the Hua-yen school of Chinese Buddhism,” he explained, handing me a piping hot mug of blackberry tea as I set up my Sony tape recorder.

My eyes were glazing over. He paused. “Look. As Buddhists, they saw that everything was connected, but they didn’t want to collapse that interconnected field into a gray and amorphous soup of pure unity. That’s the Brahman move, the merging-with-the-one thing. Instead, the Hua-yen sages emphasized that every single thing both reflects and causes everything else in the universe. To demonstrate this to the Empress Wu, Fa-tsang showed her a room completely covered with mirrors. At the center of this room sat a statue of Buddha, whose image was reflected everywhere. The question is simple but profound: one or many Buddhas?”

Daybreak stopped talking, and seemed to expect a response. “Well,” I said, “when I was a kid, I remember standing between two reflecting mirrors and thinking that I would have been able to see into infinity if I didn’t have a head in the way.”

“Are you so sure you have one?” he asked with a grin as he leapt up to grab a pile of books off his cheap plywood shelves. “Check out Tu Shun describing Indra’s celestial Net, which is the great model for our interconnected universe. This is from around 600 AD. ‘This imperial net is made all of jewels.’ Each eye of the net is a jewel—you can think of them as nodes. ‘Because the jewels are clear, they reflect each other’s images, appearing in each other’s reflections upon reflections, ad infinitum, all appearing at once in one jewel, and in each one it is so—ultimately there is no coming and going’[3].”

The image resonated through my synapses, it’s obvious similarity to the Internet sending a shiver up my spine. For a moment, I felt the trace of that cosmic awe that used to overcome me as a child, when I’d lie awake at night and try to wrap my mind around the notion of infinity, repeating the mantra “the universe never ends” until my mind cracked and the void spilled in. Daybreak poured me more tea. “Pretty flipped out, huh?”

From the always-excellent Erik Davis. Serious question—is it true that Micheal Jackson has a room like this?  I’ve always figured I’ll have the means to build one of those in my 30’s, because that shit has gotta happen at some point. You could just stand in there and smoke bowls with no lights on, it would be like a whole space program in your own backyard.

Can’t Blame Everything on Drugs

There is no shortage of earnest suburban mystics who will insist that drugs are not nescessary.  They will tell you, with a straight face, that you don’t need weed because you can get to the same place, man, with meditation. But as the Buddha once remarked, “it’s amazing what you’ll believe when you don’t know shit about shit.”

Marijuana gets us high because it enters your bloodstream and conveys THC to special cells in your brain—cells that have evolved with the human species and exist in nearly every human brain—cells solely devoted to the detection of THC.  They’re called cannabinoid receptors, no joke. 

I’m not trying to mock suburban mystics, or explain the biochemical effects of weed, just explaining why this essay is going to be less coherent than usual. 

Just to recap, then, sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I’m trying to load my argument, of course.

That’s from an Alan Moore article on the history of pornography.  It’s pretty damn good.

The Primacy of the Flesh

I would submit that most of the time, there is no authentic self. 

I would suggest that Chaos Magick and R.D. Laing actually got it wrong when they concluded there is no authentic self, no center of the storm—that’s just true most of the time for most people.

I have reason to believe that martial arts, especially tai chi, are methods for getting the mind working in harmony with the body, which effectively creates a genuine center where there was none before. 

I take it for granted that orgasms are a pretty reliable method of achieving that same effect for a much shorter length of time.

I’m willing to bet that my libido is the real dynamo behind my creativity and curiosity.

I hump, therefore, I am.

--this is dedicated to Dan Briggs

Filed in: Zeitgeist

Next entry: Welcome to the Porn Business, Mr. Jones

Previous Entry: The Sex Lives of Scientologists Exposed