Conversation overheard in a darkened sub-corridor at Twitter HQ somewhere…

–ACT ONE–

Quester:
My ambition is to completely overcome my ‘self’, meaning all the personality elements which cloud and pervade my thinking and daily preferences and preoccupations. So that I can become a suitable servant of humanity. I even include logical rational calculating in this cleansing process — because it interferes with my unfiltered acquanitance with reality. I aspire, above all, to mindfulness.

Elon Musk:
If you work here, you’re teminated, effective immediately.
Except if you’re a coder, in which case I need to pick your brain first.

Knower:
It is true, in a way.
To become what you are, you first need to get rid of what you are not…

–ACT TWO–

Quester:
Did I not detect a –but– in there somewhere?

Elon Musk:
No buts. I always speak butlessly. Fired, unqualified.
If you code, you have a non-optional 12 hour reprieve, that’s all.

Quester:
I didn’t mean you, dopey! I’m speaking to the guy who knows something.

Knower:
Well, be still a moment… (pausing 45 seconds)
You see, the egoic aspects of your being do interfere with your capacity to notice what is, to simply BE. To be present rather than absent, our common condition, unfortunately.
And it is true, as the Christian good book outlines it, that our original condition was one of a paradaisical connection with God, a unity. We experienced all as One. We were never not present.

–ACT THREE–

Elon Musk:
Who the fuck is this guy? Does he have a blue checkmark?

Knower:
I have blue jeans.
And a blue plaid flannel shirt.

Quester:
Right, so all we need to do is turn back. We fell from Paradise, from the endless experienced peace of Now, into the personal, into our egotistical separateness, into the chaotic mudpits of our individualized minds…

Elon Musk:
This is major league effing bogus!
Don’t you people grok that the future of humanity depends upon us getting to Mars, Jupiter, and Alpha Centauri before all the future babies who refuse to learn math and engineering irreversibly clusterfuck the planet?

Quester:
…and Jesus said it, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. (uttered with growing animation) It is right where we are! Everywhere. All we have to do is REPENT. Change our ways. Turn back into the silence and knowing and seeing. The Unity. Turn away from the sin of individual desires and antipathies. It couldn’t be clearer!

–ACT FOUR–

Elon Musk:
OK that’s it. You humans are low-key hallucinatory and retro. I’m calling Security.

Quester:
Elon, don’t you have an electric bluetooth-compatible hoverboard to design or something?

Elon Musk:
(Sits off on a stairwell stage left & starts to tweet out a Code Yellow alert to the Security AI…)

Quester:
(looking pleadingly at Knower) Right?

Knower:
Well, be still a longer moment if you can… (pausing 75 seconds this time)
Whenever you think you’ve wrapped the mystery of All up in a tidy bow, a devil is obscuring your inner vision.
Put your feet on the floor and ask yourself: Why did we bite the apple of independent sensation? What was the drive, the appeal? I mean — it was competing with ultimate experiential paradise, no? And why was the choice even presented in the first place? Out of what wisdom? And why was it womanly seduction which carried home the persuasion?

Elon Musk:
(from offstage) I know a little about womanly seduction. Hey, you guy’s hungry?

Quester:
(more chill now) Can you say more?

Knower:
I can, but only if we pause three full quiet minutes… (pausing 180 pregnant seconds this time)
Recall a saying of Christ. “For Thy sake, the Earth has been corrupted.”
The great design of the Deity is hinted at in this. Much as we can presently swallow.
The purpose of Creation would be no purpose at all if it merely consisted of the opportunity for our eternal unindividuated enjoyment of Cosmic Benificence.
Instead something far more radical and Love-infused was envisioned.
The Deity/All intuited a new class of Being, who could potentially give to the Cosmos out of its own free decision and gifted morsel of sacred Divinity.
A new evolution of Love.
Mankind.
That is why the alternative was proffered. Is it not so?
That we might traverse the long eons through lonesome alienation, but with independence, to forge our own uncompelled wisdom.
The forge of isolated experience.
But still linked to the All if desired: “I will be with you unto the end of Time.”
And what better vehicle to introduce this crossroads than sexuality?
The mystery of sexual pull and sense experience.
The embryonic seed grains of what Love could one day BE.
Mindfuless is just a brief way station on the long path.
A necessary vantage point in which to gain a foothold’s appreciation for the potential benefits, and persistent elusiveness, of radical Presence.
A necessary nutrient allowing us to place one foot determinedly after the other.

–ACT FIVE: EPILOGUE–

Elon Musk:
(scribbling in a notepad) Have to get that dude’s neurons uploaded into our AI pronto. Guy’s a gold star threat to the Singularity. Verily.

Quester:
(last seen working as an Uber driver in Dubai)

Knower:
(last seen laughing with a grasshopper in a garden somewhere)

_______RS

Notes : Ideas drawn from lifelong British farmer and meditant John Butler with appreciation. I recommend his videos; he out-Nows Eckhart Tolle in many ways.

[ Image : Deviant artwork from graycolor42 who may or may not be AI machine learning software. ]

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