Thackeray

It's taken me a while to put text to screen on the following topic - not for lack of conviction - but for the irrational fear that "putting it out there", so to speak, would invoke all the psychological slides that come with it from those who hold differing beliefs, and thus the potential damage this might cause to my relationships with those friends and family. I think, perhaps, that I've simply come to terms with this fear, partially realizing that I may be underselling the potential ability for whoever reading to, put bluntly, "not freak out"..

Thackeray. Specifically, one William Makepeace Thackeray, had this to say:

"Mother is the word for God on the hearts and lips of all little children"

You may also recognize the quote from "The Crow" during a particularly interesting scene with the drugged out mother. As you can imagine, then, this particularly heavy blog is about religion, and to me this quote sums up perfectly the core of what I believe in... but I wouldn't wave the victory Jesus flags just yet.

Historically, I was raised Roman Catholic. I attended a Catholic elementary school for the entirety of  my pre-pubescent youth.  I was baptized, participated in Communion, Confession and,. eventually, even completed Confirmation as a young teen. Yep, I made it through all the sacraments you can achieve just short of getting married, becoming gravely ill, or becoming a priest.

As a youth, religion was totalus in that I never really asked about any of the "others" because there was simply so much to learn about this one that it consumed all questions I had, like - Will I see my dog in heaven,  or whether or not I will be stuck there as a little kid if I went early. I can, in all honesty, say that my teachers never specifically spoke badly about any other religion, or hatefully called out others as being evil.  No, religion was instead presented more like the difference between the good student who has all the right answers, vs. the other not so good students who had the wrong answers.

It was not fear as much as pity - that those "other" people are in for a rude awakening when they pass on thinking they had everything figured out, only to find out that St. Peter responds with a blank stare and a  "Who?" when they ask for Vishnu or Buddha at the pearly white gates. Psychologically, I of course felt that I was being indoctrinated into the winning side - which of course anyone would feel going from no side to some side.

My parents of course reinforced everything I was learning, being Catholics themselves and their parents before them - which made it easy to take what these other adults were telling us as fair facts, and as such, I continued learning.  It wasn't until 4th or 5th grade that I encountered the first crack in the foundation:

Noon lunch. Our Cafeteria was a large, open room that the church, attached directly to the school, could open up into and use as an overflow section.  During the week, long fold-able bench style tables served as our Facebooks and Twitters.  These were the social aggregations of age & popularity - of best friends - of post-recess sports discussions and cartoon reviews.  

Above us hovered the nuns, the teachers, and the lunch staff, all there to ensure benign talks, a swift culling of horseplay, and the assurance that our parents' dollars weren't going to waste on uneaten, paid for lunches.  (I spent many an afternoon after lunch sitting in-front of a cold disgusting hot dog  I did not wish to consume, told that I could not leave because it would be a waste of my parents hard earned money.)

On this particular day, they were not serving hot lunches, and as such every student was required to bring their own from home.  I much preferred these days, taking extreme pride in my Voltron lunch box and thermos.  On this particular day, my good friend forgot to  bring his lunch, and sat across from me sulking (although I think it was about 70% embarrassment and only 30% actual hunger binding him up)

 So I did what every kid would do for their best bud, I flipped my Voltron lunch box fully open, and put my bag of chips on his new side of the box. He seemed pretty happy, and I know I was happy, I mean I still had the tuna-fish sandwich so it wasn't TOO much to give up.

Well, a passing police officer nun, noticing two kids eating out of the same lunch box, felt differently. Maybe she thought that he was bullying me out of my chips at first, I don't know, but I remember her angrily asking him what was going on.  He barely got "I forgot-" out before I jumped in to smooth it all over- "No no, it's ok, I gave him my chips, it's ok, I've got enough to eat".

To my surprise, this was apparently worse than if he WAS stealing my chips, because she proceeded to explain (read: publicly lecture)  both of us by explaining how, again, MY parents work hard to provide that food for ME, not "everyone else", and that HE should be more mindful about remembering his lunch if he wants to not go hungry sitting in time-out. And then I said it:

"But... but wouldn't Jesus have shared his chips?!?!".  

Now, while you envision the raw...nasal, wide-eyed.... seethingly facial reaction from the Nun - understand that I was genuinely asking this woman for validation - I mean I was like 9, and woefully incapable of such snap, witty rhetoric at the drop of a hat. She - was not convinced of this. An ear twist followed, as I was, ahem, "asked" to pack up my lunch for my new destination: The principal's office. 

The principal, oddly enough, was not a priest, but a doctor - child psychologist I think, and the man to which I owe a great deal of credit for early exercises in critical thinking that had a profound affect on me.  Upon hearing the story of what happened, he of course had to placate the embarrassed and heated nun, but after she left he spoke quite candidly with me.  I could tell, even then, that he was being mitigative about explaining school policy, but he also commended me for behaving as Jesus would have. Interesting, I thought, that school policy was in some cases more powerful than Jesus policy? 

Then came the obligatory call to my mother to let her know what happened, and that I was suspended for the rest of day as "punishment", but reinforced that this was only to appease school policy for back-talking.  When my mother showed up she - actually looked like she had a good laugh about the situation. She again reaffirmed that even though I was being sent home, that I was right to share.

Now you have to understand, at an early age this showed me something profoundly powerful and subtle about the world I was living in. Until then I believed that all adults were on the same page in their convictions.  But this showed me something different - that not all adults, and certainly not even those of the cloth, were infallible... that religion was much more subjective than I originally believed, and that adults sometimes disagreed with the institutions they were bound to.

Understand too, as an aside, that this one moment is profoundly powerful in that all it took was a glimpse to realize there was more to the story than what I was being taught.  In this realization I have come to understand why most dogmas or political platforms have to be completely rigid and unwaivering - to prevent these situations of undermining challenge.

During my teenage years, "God" took on a persona for me that was rather unlike the powerful, gruff, aged man sitting atop the clouds.  As early as 13-14 I distinctly remember chatting with him... as a peer. We used to go to the drive-in movies a lot when I was young, and I remember getting to lay up on the minivan roof from time to time - I would stare up into space, engage in prayer with a traditional sign of the cross, and literally start with "Hey man..".   It seemed fitting to me that if God had to respond to all people - young and old, Chinese or Swedish, that it would be silly to think of him demanding that I address him in Latin or barely tolerating me speaking in thee's and thou's and other such formalities.  So, I spoke to him in as plain and unmitigated as I could, and imagined he was fine with that.

The language thing then turned into a mental image as well - if God responds to whatever language and literacy you can muster, then why wouldn't he simply appear similarly?  From then on God, was a teenage boy - not a mirror image of me, mind you, but just always a similarly built, similarly height-ed compliment to my current age.  We spoke frankly, but entirely through rhetoric. I can't propose that he ever even actually spoke back to me directly, just mostly that I would ask a question.. wait a short while, and His "answer" would sort of present itself as an optimistic realization. It's important to note that I still believed that "He" was definitely someone else, so it wasn't like I was being clever ahead of my time - I just happened to give him a bit more credit that you can get more people to relate to you by relating to them, rather than being this stone-cold judge of the clouds that strikes fear into the hearts of men.

It was simultaneously natural in that it quite literally just came to me to view Him in this way without outside influence, and equally scary because I was surrounded by adults and other kids who clearly would not have agreed. It wasn't until much later (17/18) that I felt comfortable enough to share my relative view of God to my family (my mother in particular) who actually thought it was kind of neat rather than scolding me.  I guess I felt by then I could no longer "get in trouble" if such blaspheme was ill-received.

And this, admittedly pleasant relationship was the mostly-catholic view I carried with me until well into my late 20s.  I wasn't much of a church-goer.  When I would go I prefered the open masses, like the beautiful Basilica  of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Denver - a church that allowed anyone, even the homeless, a free walk in to service - which was much different than the tightly-knit parish styles of obligation and popularity and the "oh we noticed you weren't at last Sunday's service..." attendance-taking  that I had seen elsewhere...

From there it became a topic that I focused less and less on as time went on and became more preoccupied with my career, my new life down in Texas, etc. Then, at about age 29, something happened. I became voraciously obsessed with history, having before studied only enough to get me to pass tests. My disdain for this old knowledge was not, at least in my 20s, for a lack of care. My apathy was fueled by the knowledge that history was often falsified - a lesson I learned when I was 19 in a progressive Sociology course I was taking at C.U. Boulder that introduced me to the first piece of counter-propaganda I had ever encountered- Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

It probably began just like anything else - a passing revisit on the internet which uncovered a mountain of new information to read about - and more importantly - enough of the right kinds of information sources that made me interested enough to dive in.  And somewhere along the way, I introduced and reintroduced myself to people who I had never heard of, and some that I had heard of (Freud, Jung) in College, but lacked the heart-felt spark to really attach to what they were saying and really think and reflect on them.

It.. didn't take but about a year total in research to come to some of the very most sobering and oddly empowering conclusions of my conscious life - that everything that I had been told - indoctrinated to believe about Catholicism and Christianity as a whole - was (bear with me) a complete fairy tale.  I say bear with me because it's important to note that at the time I was quite upset, as you could imagine, because it undermined all the time I had spent/wasted learning all that "nonsense" in church about the one Almighty God, his Son our Savior, the Holy Trinity, and all that other crap that was about as wholly-unique onto itself as a quilt is to any one piece of fabric.

I felt.. stupid, honestly, for a time because once the realization hit home, I began to see all of the obvious signs and clues that existed around me during my time that I never paid attention to or even entertained until that moment.  It was like I spent the first 28 years walking around with all this "green stuff" in my pocket and then realizing that it was money, and that I didn't even knew I had it or that I could spend it much earlier in the game.

After a while, and as you may be able to now surmise from the theme of this blog - I eventually came to terms with this revelation.  Where I once felt more rebellious, wanting to "fight the power" and join the cause of exposing this farce to the poor duped masses who were being controlled and used - I instead gained perspective offered by people like Joseph Campbell and Father Thomas Keating which led me to realize the importance of the metaphor of Religion - and how at their core, they represent a belief system that people can get behind, guiding them to a better life wherein they may not have the same will or circumstances to do so themselves.

I realized why it has such a profoundly positive effect especially in areas of substance abuse recovery, crime rehabilitation, etc - sometimes people need something external to themselves that they can believe in - something they an focus on and feel accountable for because, when left to their own devices, they cannot must the same fortitude alone.

What angers me is that the spiritual journey, near as I can tell, is supposed to lead a person out of that external dependence and into a realization, eventually, that everything they needed was within themselves and that there really was no "Other".  This is immensely empowering! It's like working with a person who is learning how to walk again, telling them that you will help them and be their crutch, and getting to that final, beautiful revelation that they thought you were still helping them, but in fact they were able to walk on their own!  How much more joyous and wonderful could that be?

It was like the famous Footsteps poem could suddenly become 10x cooler, ending with a single set of footsteps and the final insecure inquiry as to why God had abandoned the man, only to gain the knowledge that he only thought God was walking with him the whole time, when really he was able to do so on his own.

Instead... many organized religions stop at needing the crutch part, focus on externalizing this entity and even going so far as to cripple man by claiming that he was carried during parts of his life.  That it is only under the constant struggle, under the constant fear of external consequence and disappointment that we can be "accepted" into this special place.  That all the good things that we accomplish weren't really us, but oddly accredited to God as one of "his graces", stripping us of any kind of accomplishment other than the lonely guilt that we are capable of evil that should be atoned for.  And then we wonder why people pray for ridiculously materialistic things like money & cars. Or why we would praise Jesus instead of brilliant medical staff when they help our loved ones.  It's no wonder his "mysterious plan" had to be invented to fill all the gaps.

The answer, unfortunately, is retention - which is a form of control - You see, empowering people to realize that they are their own wonderful beings capable of great marvels doesn't exactly keep them coming back - much in the same way that actually helping people lose weight is terrible for the pill or shake selling business.

I'll stop here on the rant - I imagine what I've said already might be enough to force some to stop reading, and I understand and apologize if it caused offense.

So what am I, another cold Atheist? Or did I flip over to something a little less control-oriented like Buddhism? The answer is neither, and all of them. I decided, based on everything I've learned, the best I can do is describe myself as Agnostic.

Now, as with any label, this word carries with it a definition and connotation.  Some feel that being agnostic is pandering to ALL possibilities for the sake of salvation - sort of like betting on Black AND White at the casino for the assurance that ONE of them must be right.  Others think that a gnostic is a scared atheist - unwilling to go as far as to claim there is nothing simply because the notion is to terrifying to accept.

I will say that I am agnostic for neither of these reasons. I have come to complete terms with the fact that I could be absolutely wrong on all counts.  I have come to terms with the idea that by not picking a particular team to play for, that I may implicitly be excluded by all of them should a particularly exclusive version turn out to be true.  I have come to terms with the idea that I have completely broken my confirmation to catholicism - and if I find myself before a very somber St Peter, wagging his finger and telling me that I chose poorly, that I fully understand the rules of that religious universe to believe that I must suffer eternal damnation or a very very long stay in purgatory.

I will also say that if the Atheists turn out to be right, I won't feel bitter hollowness that my life was ultimately meaningless. I will simply be thankful for the unique opportunity to have live manifested as a human being capable of loving and laughing - and not just as a rock or a piece of glass.

I believe, based on what limited information and compelling data we currently have, that we seem to be the only uniquely existential beings in our observable universe, and that this was no accident.  Not to say that we are somehow uniquely immune to Darwinian science, but just that we appear to have a little something extra in us that is more than simply being at the top of the food chain which appears to be from some advanced prototype or being or God-plan, who knows, but again it wouldn't surprise me.

I would not be shocked in the least at several potential outcomes. I wouldn't be surprised that God DID made man. I wouldn't be surprised if Xenu ordered airplane space ships to to be flown into volcanoes and exploded ( just find it laughably unlikely). I wouldn't be surprised if we are the miraculous living will of stardust that created this planet and everything on it millions of years ago.

I just believe that no particular version of these myths that we have seen throughout time, including (but to a lesser concern) science got it 100% correct. I believe we cannot even presume to know what did or did not happen at the beginning, especially since all of those stories were first passed down orally, then latter hand scribed, then later reviewed, changed, etc by countless hands and for countless (not all of them innocent) reasons.  

Simply put, if we did at one point have ONE known and recorded creation, be it apes or the rib of a man, that it was subject to thousands and thousands of years of the most lengthy game of Telephone ever witnessed - and furthermore, that at certain places along the way - certain groups of people came to like certain stops of the telephone game along the way so much, that they simply broke away from the core and began to elaborate and re-interpret the story in even more distorted ways because it fit with their views of how the world ought to be governed.

To say that the real, true, word of some omniscient 3rd party deity was magically preserved across all of those hands, kingdoms, ages and people is absurd to me - unless again you take the metaphorical view of "The word of God" to mean the words of honest to goodness men who lived in a time where these moral codes were a much-needed handbook to help the population live.

Which leads me finally to the paradox of my writing this evening regarding the idea that any one religion is "correct".

Paradox 1: Who?


Say for arguments sake that the Christian "God" is the one-true God.  Rules there say that playing for another team is expressly prohibited, as called out the core rulebook, aka the Commandments.

Now, say, you are a child born on a farm in China, where your family doesn't really have money and you essentially survive on running the farm.  Say the only deity you ever even HEAR of is Buddha.  There you are, living your entire modest but devout life without even so much as hearing the word God spoken to you.

Now think about this - are people like this unwillingly damned?  I mean that's not JUST breaking the 1st commandment - that's an entire lifetime of not being baptized, participating in the Eucharist, observing the Sabbath, observing Easer, Good Fridays, or even so much as hearing one Gospel of the Lord.

Now really imagine God sitting in a room with one of these people after expiring, rather than imagining this magically dehumanizing BS that gets sold to you that their souls just don't pass go and get rerouted somewhere else. Imagine God himself having to make this call for the first few times before it got automated.  I mean the guy did nothing wrong, he loved his family, and simply because no human missionary happened to knock on the poor guys door and asked "Have you found Jesus?" - the guy is just SOL?

Sorry, but I can't buy it.  I don't think God would be so callous.  I have read articles regarding this very subject - the optimistic ones try to dance around the topic by saying that IF you've heard the gospel, and reject it, then you are condemned (sounds fair), and that if you never heard it, then you will instead by judged by "Natural Law" or "They Royal Law" (aka the golden rule). Hey, that doesn't sound so bad, right?

But here's the real kicker, if God turned out to be compassionate to this man's plight, because he otherwise lived a fruitful and loving life, then doesn't this then undermine the entire doctrine of NEEDING to know the gospel?  Heck, it might be a greater service to someone like this to NOT tell them about the gospel, and simply teach them the golden rule for fear that in a predominantly Buddhist family, that it may not pan out to conversion - at which point the very act of trying to evangelize to the poor guy unknowingly printed his ticket to hell?

Either way, I believe these are things where focus is highly discouraged, because it undermines their power in the same way that translating the Bible out of Latin was such a big deal.  Decentralization of power and control is a big no-no in more circles than just politics and money.

Paradox 2: What are the odds?


Again, assuming that if one particular religion is correct, and that people who believe in not-this are wrong and cast out of whatever awesome place comes in the afterlife, it pays to look at the scoreboard in a broader sense than you might be used to.  Let's look at the top religions by followers:

1. Christianity (2.2 billion)
2. Islam (1.9 billion)
3. Buddhism (1.5 billion)
4. Hinduism (1 billion)

Fairly healthy spread. World population clock shows 6.8 billion people in the world. Let's do some salvation math.  If you're Hindu, a whopping 75% of the world disagrees with you - on up to Christianity, where %68 of the world population is on on their way to hell - that is unless they have not heard the gospel, in which case it's the Golden Rule test to see if they pass into the same pearly white gates as everyone else who had to really learn.

Now really, doesn't this seem sightly unrealistic?  I wager it's safe to say that the world is at least small enough these days that all 4 of the top religions have heard of each other, and that there is little reason for these numbers to sway wildly from where they are now unless people start getting eradicated.  Doesn't it seem highly illogical that a supreme being has a hard time winning out in a majority vote vs. the overall population? 

This division alone tells me two things: 1) They each have a core set of values that are perfectly fine to live by (ignoring the fanatical extremes for a moment) and 2) We can't agree because they each "feel" like a rightish answer but we can't commit to proving or knowing that only one is the "real deal".

Conclusion

Back at the beginning of this, I spoke about how Thackeray's quote was the embodiment of what I believe in. No, it may not have been the version of God you were looking for, but it personifies the version of God that everyone can stand to learn from.  The metaphor of the divine is all around us, every day, but it's not the possession of some third-party deity - it is quite simply, and always has been, just us.  A baby, who has yet to even comprehend God knows only her mother's face.  That face is the center of her universe, her God. And when she grows up to have children of her own, that legacy is passed downward to her child.  

I have one final story to tell - not a paradox, but really a theory that summarize the open-mindedness that I carry within me that there may very well have been something advanced before us that made us.

Consider the problem we have now with space travel.  We have an extremely hard time shipping a fully grown person light-years and light-years away to a distant, inhospitable planet - so what do we do instead? We send machines that act as our eyes, hands and ears.  What are we looking for? Various things, amongst them signs of life, but more importantly, signs of life-supporting planets that we could one day expand to.

Now let's say that we found such a planet, but it was very far away.  Even if we tried to send babies a-la Superman, this planet is so far away that it would still be too far out to make it in a lifetime. 

Suppose, for a moment, that someone comes up with a brilliant plan - if we can pack up a bunch of seeds - sperms, eggs, etc... and send those towards the planet in deep space, why we could keep those seeds dormant until arrival, and kick the planet off with a little spark of life!  Do you think we would try such a plan? I do - and I think you're probably feeling me on where this is going....

Say we only had enough genetic material to get things started - but we can't even really grow a *normal* human because the planet isn't *exactly* like earth - we might have to try a few generations and revisions before we get it right.   Or hey, maybe the planet we find already has some basic life on it, so we decide to toss our secret sauce into an existing animal archetype and see if we can't create a hybrid long term?

So we make it happen, but maybe we're scared for them psychologically - I mean if we hang around with a couple of robots and tell them "Yeah we grew you on this distant planet so uh... get to breeding please" - it may not leave the best of intentions - sort of like the perils of telling a genetic clone that he's a clone, you know?

So maybe we decide to pull out once it seems like things are set up to run automatically - maybe we observe from afar without too much interference so that they don't realize what we've done. Maybe we show up every so often to "help" ensure that they stay on the right track - maybe give them a little literature or a whisper here and there about some of the stuff we learned on behaving back on our planet...

You think we'd do it? What if that is our history? Just one of the other possibilities that would not surprise me in the least.  I believe that genetics carry in us a very positive bond to what we are and what we've been before, and I believe it would be just a matter of time that those people we created would start looking up at the stars and wonder - where'd I come from.... really?

Brief Insecurity

Not one to whine - but sometimes the difference between what I've learned, vs. what I used to think, vs. where we are as a whole, vs. where we are potentially heading...leaves me with this feeling that I can only put to words using a movie analogy:

I feel like Neo must have felt, after having woken up in his personal tub of goo, after pulling away the sustaining, parasitic tubes; after wondering what the hell he was supposed to do then, suspended there so high in the vast, towering network of other people precariously sleeping in their own tubs of goo.

Except - I'm not Neo - I'm just some poor inconsequential schmuck, and there's.. really no one expecting me on this other side. And when the giant mechanical squid comes to toss me into the pool, left trying to swim with my feeble, atrophic arms, there is no Nebuchadnezzar to fish me out at the last second, infusing my transformation with a plan or a real purpose. And even if I managed to swim instead of sink, said to-hell with waiting for a purpose, and created my own - what then?

My brief insecurity is that we're not just stuck in those tubs of goo living the lie, but at worst living in the same defeatist way that Cypher wanted to even when presented with the knowledge that it was a lie.  That at best it's just a handful of us splashing around in that pool of enfeebled realization while the Nebuchadnezzars, the Morpheus', the Zions of our world are only tolerated to exist in-so-much as they allow us to "express" our dis-contempt but never actually, fundamentally, change the structure of the established system.

That even this is just another method of control as the Architect described - where we huddle around together in the comfort of our achieved understanding but that, ultimately, it is meaningless in the stranglehold that the status-quo already finished establishing decades and centuries ago. The Morpheus' come, and they motivate, but once they motivate too well, they are killed.  The Nebuchadnezzars come, and they might fish out a few important people, but they are eventually destroyed.  The Zions might even rise, and organize with them many followers, but those too are eventually disbanded or destroyed or worse - placated just long enough until a mutation occurs - that is - until the system simply re-invents another innocuous way of establishing the same control.

"Wake up!" - Zach continues to chant...

Evolution (What's Next?)

Been a while since I've written - lately a lot of what I've been watching and reading about have danced around the topics of group psychology, and the way the mind works. A few TED talks - featuring a philosopher of consciousness talking about the marvel of how our brains, the amalgamation of thousands of cells capable of processing information together - a little Bernays (Propaganda) describing the psychology of the masses, and even an anthropologist describing the science of Love - and it got me thinking.

If early evolution - like really early evolution - like two cells coming together and deciding to team up to make some shit happen evolution - has been a series of collaborations - then I think I understand where it's all going.

But first, let me set the stage-

We can say that evolution is more than just the combining of stuff. There's lots to be said for the very specific ways things evolve that not just accuracy by volume.

For instance - animals as far back as the dinosaurs all had very specific places for features - location of the mouth/teeth, eyes, "arms", "legs" etc.  Sure, you have variations - 2 legs vs 4... long legs vs. short, etc, etc - but you don't, for instance, hear of a dinosaur with 9 mouths randomly placed around the body, indicating that the genetics didn't know shit all what to do and just decided to install mouths everywhere thinking it would help.

And sure, there's always the one-off type creatures - but if you were to chart 'em all as far back as possible, there seem to be a lot of common design patterns.  For human evolution - the same story.  There aren't ancient monkeys with 14 arms at one point where our genetics were trying to figure out if 7 pairs were better than 1. No monkeys with opposable thumbs on their ears or the back of their knees trying to figure out what the best place to grab shit will be. No forward facing eyes and eyes coming out of your ass for maximum protection.  The indication is clear - the direction is clear - there's some underlying, strategic process that has some precise sense of what it needs to accomplish to take things to the next level.

And if there's clear indication that there's an underlying, genetic strategy as time goes on, there certainly had to be key milestone times in evolution where those hundreds and thousands of genetic plans came to fruition.  I mean think of the turning point when we first developed a skeletal structure. Lungs to breathe air.  Eyes to see, ears to hear. I mean you're literally talking about turning points where years and decades of evolution invested in producing and assigning cells to perform these very specific, at first non-working, non finished tasks with the knowledge that at some future state enough of these cells will come together and arrange in such a fashion that one day, you flip the switch and... bam, let there be light.

It's hard to conceive of "elation" at such a primitive level - but certainly there had to be some very strong, positive feedback when these genetic milestones were achieved and later revised and improved - if even as minor as gaining more ability to find and consume more food, that success feedback had to to exist independent of just a purely survival sense of survival vs. death.

The key is motivation - the realization that as a single cell, you quickly come to grips with the limitations of your physical existence, and the only recourse is to combine with other, equally limited cells to produce something "more" that could not be achieved alone.

Zoom out a bit more - systems of cells agreeing to specialize in interdependent, symbiotic ways - the thousands of cells that agree to pump blood as a heart depend on the thousands of cells that infuse that blood with oxygen, and they both depend on the safety and structure of the thousands of cells that decided to focus on being a rib-cage.

Zoom up a bit more and look at the subdivision of labor within the brain. Here's one overall organ with cells broken out into little cubicle powerhouses, each responsible for processing the stream of information being brought in through the various senses, and trying to interpret it all to form a mental model.

Just in the way we recognize the people we see is a complex division of data between the optic nerve, who hands off information to a very specific area responsible for recognizing faces specifically, who then ultimately hands the information off to a portion of the limbic system responsible for assigning value to the faces we recognize (colleague vs. child vs. mom vs. wide).

Put that all together - somewhere amongst this giant mass collection of cells - through specialization, our bodies are capable of the extraordinary feat of having them all work together as a team to be "human".

One more set-up point before I get to the future. Stem cells - we've learned that so many of these different organizations of cells within our bodies come from a set of basic blank cells that can become cells of all these various types depending on what they are assigned to do.   This is not unlike being a baby - a clean slate of a human who can grow into being a thousand different variations of itself given different experiences, nurturing, stimuli, etc.  It's the same model on a grander scale.

So let's put it all together and make it relevant to today's world, although I'm sure some of you know where this is going.  Cells quickly found their own physical limitations - the result was to work together with other cells. Groups of cells ran into their own limitations - so they began forming systems, organs, etc.  As human beings, these systems did a great job of overcoming survival, conquering the food chain - but we developed always as social animals - we need each-other... two heads are better than one and whatnot. That interdependence has developed and heightened our communication skills - skills that we didn't necessarily need to survive in the primal sense - but skills that we needed to further the development of our consciousness and interdependence.

And all along we've done this hand in hand with technology - moving from chisels to pencils to keyboards to cameras - further refining the way we record and store information from our limited physical experiences... and now, the explosion of the internet... the convergence of information - the almost obsessive attachment to things like Twitter, Facebook and other mediums.

Todays times are more exciting than ever, and I believe the information-elation we feel with todays world is the same genetic feedback we go when we developed those basic features.  The web and the ability to connect with so many people is exciting because it's almost like developing a new organ - a new extension of ourselves that furthers our desire to grow.

I think that we have truly turned the corner on a core genetic plan. We're on the precipice of the next "opposable thumb" by using these technologies to conquer the final physical limitation of the human form - the idea that I can only physically be in one place at one time, thus limiting the number of other human beings I can interface with in person.  Now I can be... well.. anywhere without having to physically move. I believe that this development is, and will be, the cornerstone of the next phase of human evolution.

The idea that my bag of brain cells with a mouthpiece can interface with all 6 billion other bags of cells and that we, as a whole, are creating the next level of abstraction in the same hard-to-visualize way that our individual brains are the culmination of 10 trillion individual cells negotiating their environment.

Think about that for a moment.

If we could collectively group everyone in this world in the same sort of arrangement and structure than the brain has, what would be possible? If we could take ALL the musicians and artists and writers and philosophers and call them the "creative" part of our world brain. If we can collect all the chemists and physicists and engineers and call them the rational side, etc, etc.. how amazing would that be?

If you're fond of the general model - then it explains the world in a whole new way I didn't see before.  In the same sense that it takes 10 trillion cells to form up enough mass and direction to comprise the human brain - perhaps its taken 6 billion of us to mass up to to a breaking point to become something more?

Yet another perspective - sometimes our species things in terms of diversification. All things in moderation. Jack of all trades, master of none.  While this certainly has its advantages - I think perhaps the real goal is to be exposed to all of these things so that we can hopefully find the thing we're good at and passionately driven to specialize in - and then maybe our eventual goal is to BE that thing whole-heartedly and make it OK to be highly specialized because we can depend on the rest of the system of people around us to cover the gaps where we are lacking.

My argument here is that many of us have become obsessed with information, even information that doesn't affect us at all, because our world-mind is still a chaotic mass trying to map itself out.  It's like some of our consciousness' are trying to form and understand what thats structure is already and will be so we're constantly scanning for meaning and knowledge to see how it all fits together.  Certainly not everyone is like this - there are of course plenty of people who would read my crappy little blog and simply thing "damn dude you think about a lot of stupid meaningless shit" - and if I'm way off on all this, I guess I can't blame them :)

The idea of interdependence and specialization is, at least, true in something like love relationships. Healthy couples tend to involve two people who have strengths and weakness that compliment and offset each-other - and together they can accomplish so much more because of it than they could before because they don't have to constantly balance the things they are good at with having to manage areas where they lack completely on their own.

So in an optimistic light - maybe as much as we complain about the... unsavory... aspects of our people- the ignorant, the angry, the liars, the unfaithful - maybe instead of those aspects being diseases that have to somehow be eradicated, they are merely individual cells within the system that mirror some of the basic inner demons that we each possess within us - certainly no one is above jealousy... ambition, etc - undesirable urges that we pride ourselves on overcoming because those conflicts and choices breed better behavior via a deeper understanding and confrontation.  

So maybe, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but maybe these idiots, assholes, and douche-bags are necessary conflict and reminders of what we are trying to rise above?  And maybe sometimes the psychology behind the seemingly irrational behavior is a necessary refection on what we have yet to address and overcome within our continued growth?

As exciting as it is to think of our world as a whole mind of specialized minds all churning together to make a whole system - the inherent problem is the very strength that got us here - independent thought - consciousness, and the ego.  In thinking about this, at first I wanted to treat it as the difference between humans and the organization of cells I described earlier.  I wanted to go down the path of complimenting our individual cells for lacking that individual ego and being willing to give up free will to perform specific tasks for the overall good of cell-kind - but then I realized something.

Our internal systems have the same damn problems we have in human society.

Take the act of smoking a cigarette.

Now give your body systems involved with smoking identities and call those groups of cells people.

The brain weighs in at a 7.44% on the brain-to-body mass scale for humans. The brain people then represent an almost equal match to the "top power structure" in the world today.  The conspiracy theories work just like the brain - they pull the strings, the world (body) moves, but the results are not always appreciated.

So the brain people are really keen on getting some nicotine introduced into the system and they put the word out that they need to make some shit happen to remedy the desire. The message goes down to the arm people, who in the sense of cigarette smoking don't really give a shit other than having to operate the matchbook because the assholes in accounting were too cheap to spring for a lighter.  Cigarette goes to the lips, inhale and... the fuckin people in Lung-land go ape shit.

Sure, those fuckers up in Brainywood are having a grand old time getting high, but they're stuck sorting out all the fuckin Tar and other shit byproducts they don't have to deal with.  The lungs might protest with a little cough - but fuck it, the brain is going to care about it for a few minutes until another few beers go down and they want to bum another one.

You see, if our consciousness is the culmination of all of these signals and stimuli arcing over trillions of cells - our daily lives are filled with internal civil wars of disagreement and the Brain makes all the calls. And if the brain keeps pissing off the body, writing checks it can't cash? The people down in Lungland or Prostateria will eventually say fuck it and shut the fuck down.

It's crazy when you think about it- but this world we live in really isn't all that different. People decide to do stupid (and helpful) things all the time that will have significant, lasting effects on other people in other areas and other systems. It's damaging to think that, in our defense, we're only affecting ourselves with poor behavior, but that's really not the case.

Generational scarring works just like our body - occasionally people come along and do some seriously damaging shit (hitler, stalin, justin bieber) that leaves lasting effects felt by generations that follow - this is like permanently damaging an eye, or needing stitches,  that scar tissue develops and is a reminder of those experiences.

So whose to say that even our egos, our conflicting personalities aren't just a magnification.. the sum of trillions of mini egos within each and every cell within us expressed?  What will that look like when you move to this next layer of abstraction, where every individual's 10 trillion brain cells is represented by a chaotic democracy of consciousness, and then all that rolls up finally to a global consciousness of each of those delegates? At the very least - it certainly puts significantly more weight on the idea of the kinds of people we allow populate the world....

...but again, only to a certain extent.  As much as I welcome the concept of a unified world-mind, I woefully caution about the dangers of trying to force common thinking. In the same sense that not all the cells in or brains think and behave in the same ways and patterns, so to must we AVOID attempts to assimilate individuals to ANY one way of behaving, no matter how noble or morally adjusted.  Trying to bring all of our cultures together, trying to bring all of our political views together, trying to bring all of our beliefs together under just one banner is a guaranteed way to end up as something terrible - like the cold and unfeeling Borg or the moronic society portrayed in Idiocracy.  We NEED to preserve our differences as much as possible and cultivate and promote the beneficial aspects of all societies in order to maintain a well-rounded world mind.

And finally - onto technology. I believe that even if we could wave a magic wand, overcome our political and socio-eco differences, and mash together into this beautiful world mind - we would quickly begin to realize the  physical limitations of  that global mind.  You see, as great as it sounds to have 6 billion people in a world mind grow into 20 billion people to push out our computational power, we're already taxing the planet just to sustain the 6 billion we have now.  I believe this is where our parallel obsession with technology will play in. I believe we will be able to, in some way, completely overcome the bio-neural-technology barrier and be able to progress to a level where we exist bioelectronically, and thus will have less need for full physical bodes as we have today.

It sounds Matrixy-creepy, I know, but if you think about it, the very design of our bodies was only really a means to an end. It was intended to conquer survival, the food chain and continue to advance our own inventions.  If nutrient rich food on this planet always existed in goo form, we wouldn't have teeth, shit we may not even have jaws.  If a new baby out of the womb had this same goo to drink for what it depended on, women wouldn't have tits and thus men wouldn't be attracted to them.  Everything we have was a means to an end, and for survival, we were trained to be attracted to those things to keep the race going.

But once these bodies become unnecessary? Who knows what we will evolve into.  Maybe future generations will be evaluating hotness based on the mathematical structure of another e-humans. Or maybe our super models will be those e-people who have harmonic signatures, or are perfect primes?

I hope that, within my lifetime, I can at least see glimpses of things actually transitioning into a "next level" direction, although what we've been fortunate enough to witness already is astonishing to think about. I really hope we don't fuck it up along the way, and explode millions of years of work in a flash of glowing white light over some stupid shit like who owns the dirt between the borders of X, Y and Z.  And I certainly hope that the conscious mind - that 7.44% brain ratio that calls the shots- doesn't continue to develop at the the hands of who we see today. I hope we can leverage this information surplus era to finish seeing past the bullshit and correct future generations to form for us a stronger world mind.

Either way, I'll at least catch y'all on the flip side, one way or the other.

The MMO PVP Problem

This is a preserved post from an Aion thread I found today. In it the original poster was complaining about the pvp in the game (ganking, specifically) had gotten to the point where she was being killed in the broker, aka the "trade" or auction house located in a city-type area that is supposed to be protected by guards so that players can relax and conduct their business without having to worry about dying.

This lead to numerous supporting and opposing threads.  Supporting threads touched on other aspects of "broken" pvp mechanics, such as twinks in full gold gear running around in lower level areas obliterating lower level players who are trying to quest.  It also featured a report from one server where the losing faction was so demoralized and scarce, that the dominant faction can literally afford to "spawn camp" the losing faction at zone entrances, rifts, and virtually every pvp area possible with little consequence.

And of course, the general response amongst all those opposing where "u mad brah", "QQ moar" and other phrases brimming with insight.  The systemic problem I found is that people seem to have the misconception that all of this is somehow the fault of the game designers - and while I agree that game designers can (and should) intervene on certain occasion to level the playing field, the absolute lack of personal accountability on the part of the players for their culture was astonishing, so I felt compelled to post.

All of this has also been going on amidst a controversial server merge in which NCSoft is temporarily allowing players to server-transfer their characters.  Their reasoning is that since servers are merging, and since you cannot have opposing faction characters on the same server, you are to use this time to move conflicting characters to other servers.  Unfortunately, people are instead using this as an opportunity to maximize dominance by moving their characters to servers where their chances for success as maximized. This would be like the NBA temporarily allowing players to pick their own teams during the 90's.  Suddenly, everyone is a Chicago Bull.

So now, the competition gap is even worse. At the time of this writing, there is only one server where Asmodians (aka the "dark" faction) have even been successful, so as a result all of the failing Asmodian refugees are jumping ship on their servers to join the one winning server, further segregating the game in the negative direction:

Original Post:

"So, I really would hope by now that people who play MMOs and have played several over the past 5-10 years would realize that a discussion like this is the inevitable outcome of any game no matter how it is initially designed. 

The problem, I hope you realize, is not a game design problem, it's a culture problem. It's not the game, it's us. It breaks down to a concept called Game Theory. In a nutshell, the theory describes that we, as humans, will naturally break things down into scenarios that yield the most advantageous results. And, as much as we'd like to pretend it's not the case, we're the strategic, ravenous idiots that are capable of ruining any number-based system. 

Why do you think we have terms like "flavor of the month", or "OP class". Terms that have existed well before Aion and seem to magically follow us around from game to game?

Example 1: Who remembers the old days of single-server pvp in WoW? Remember how you felt when you found out that "High Warlord" titles were being handed out to people who would regularly do things like account sharing? Remember how you felt when you found out Horde and Alliance top-end guilds would coordinate outside of the game and arrange battlegrounds so they could trade honor dominance?

Example 2: Who remembers the days of faction-selling? Or the Jedi "fight club" cartels where players would agree to throw fights vs others under pre-determined conditions? What, you thought that only happens here in Aion?

Game developers spend countless hours having to change, correct, stop gap and otherwise ****** normally honorable game mechanics not because they suck at software development, but because they are constantly undermined by people who want to find every way to maximize their gains and virtually eliminate their losses. Which, as they will always tell you, is the smart way to be.

But as many others have eluded to, it creates an eventual culling of competition (read:prey) that is unrecoverable by normal means. Thus, the only solution for players long term is to literally roll alts or start new accounts and defect to the other side to artificially create "new" competition.

This is why games like WOW have had to introduce things like "Random" battleground queues, and cross server BGs. Much harder to cheat or run a cartel across multiple servers. Much harder to "predict" if the next fight your going to get into is going to cost you progress.

The conclusion on both sides is pretty straight forward:

1) You can't really blame people for playing an arbitrary number game to the best of their ability. That would amount to calling someone a coward for not going "all in" with every hand they are dealt in in poker. It is logical to not want to fight when the risk is losing progress. It is logical to arrange a controlled situation where you can advance to the gear you want with minimal risk. It's not the most "honorable" way to go about things, but the rankings aren't based on character or personality tests, it's based on the bottom line of the AP you earn vs. the AP you lose.

2) Likewise those at the top should not play the "QQ" card on those at the bottom. First off, progress is not linear as you'd like to believe. The more the upper tiers of people continue to progress, the disproportionally more difficult it becomes for someone to start at 0 to reach the same goal. 

Additionally, as history has shown, most of the people at the top are actually terrible players who simply managed to surround themselves with the right people, and usually got there by exploiting one of two fundamental PVP progression concepts: A) Lack of Competition and B) Broken Game Mechanics.

Broken game mechanics are straight forward. They usually involve the fringe people who get up to maximum level first, and begin to reap the rewards of some mechanic that was previously not well tested. They purposely do not alert the authorities to this discovery, and use it to get as far as possible before it gets discovered. This usually carries with it, of course, the risk of getting banned, and you see it in every MMO that exists. Joe Badass who you used to respect for being the first dude to max level and the first dude to get all this sweet epic gear suddenly disappears one day, and you come to find out that it was for exploiting. Still, sadly, in many cases Joe Badass still somehow retains so much of his "street cred" and people give him undue respect, usually citing the exploit as a "****** game mechanic" and putting it on the developers for being stupid enough to let him get away with it.

But I digress. The one people don't usually focus on (because it hurts their insecurities) is the former. You see, in any game system, or really any MMO system where Gear and Levels have significant involvement in the potential of a character to do well in PVP, one of the most critical aspects of that game is to do everything in your power to achieve max level first, and immediately begin "grinding" PVP-type activities. Leveraging your level advantage first, the next strategic goal is to get key pvp items as soon as possible. These might be speed-increase boots, trinkets, or even just potions and consumables that give you the biggest advantages in combat. 

The sooner you do this, the sooner you enter what I call the "Fighting preschoolers" phase where your complete lack of actual skill can be masked by the fact that your levels, consumables, and gear essentially mimic a full grown adult "pvping" against a class of pre-schoolers: There is no contest. This is the avenue most people take because unlike exploiting, there's no negative recourse to this behavior. It is simple food chain mechanics: The big fish eat the little fish. And, as I've seen here in Aion, people have gotten so good at this version of reality that by the time a server even *reaches* a level of maturity where legitimate competition is available, the bulk of these people have in their possession all the gear they could possibly need, and "retire" to the recesses of pretending like they had to fight hard for their gear. These "elite pvpers" can usually be found as permanent fixtures in popular towns or banks, or rolling around in very controlled posse's of people where their individual lack of skill won't be noticed. 

The rest of the server in the 80% "normal" bell curve sees competition the entire way through, until you get to where games usually die: Locusts camping every fort spawn, maxed out twinks rampaging through newbie areas, all trying to scrape together morsels of AP.

I hate to use WOW as an example again, but this is why they do things that expressly raise the bar of the entire population whenever the game is ready to move to the next level. It ****** a lot of hard core people off, but without letting the bottom rung of competition bridge the gap in gear before moving on, you will quickly find yourself in a situation you find now: Everyone is either a super hero or a peasant with nothing in between.

So we reap what we sew. This is the way MMOs work until we can change our culture to be one that values genuine competition and honor over Min / Max calculated risk scenarios.

As an aside: 

Why do you think FPS games work better for PVP? Because at the beginning of every level, the entire population is on the same page. Sure, some of them might know the map better, and therefore will have a head start, but even if that happens, after 15 or so minutes, someone is going to win, and the entire processes starts over again. Additionally, even if someone manages to get overpowered, their struggle to maintain that power is constantly shadowed by the knowledge that if he dies, he gets knocked back down to normalcy. 

Both of these naturally limiting factors are not present in an MMO. The game never resets, people don't all lose their gear and start over. The penalty for death is not a loss of gear back down to a normalized level, it's just the annoying loss of time, money, or both."

I hate not offering a solution to the problem when I post, but I made the basic assumption that people's eyes were going to glaze over 2 paragraphs in when they realized that everything I had to say either conflicted with their fucked up belief systems, triggered their cynicism to altruistic ramblings, or simply lost itself in a flash of ADHD when one of their friends posted a comment about them on Facebook in another window.

In reality, the sad truth is that the culture we live in will not be changing any time soon, thus game designers are bound to the exploitive behaviors of its users.  I give World of Warcraft props for using creative randomization as an effective tool to combat this - it just sucks that it has to be this way.

- Logos aka Ronin

Inception

Theory
The entire plot was carefully orchestrated therapy for Cobb.  This theory makes no judgement as to if Cobb is still dreaming at the end, or if the "reality" scenes were in fact reality or just another dream level.  It could just as easily be understood as one or the other.

Having said that: Based on the specific circumstances of the end, mainly the children being in the exact same clothes, age, situation, etc as his "visions" throughout the movie, the evidence would indeed suggest that he is still stuck.

The main point of this interpretation was that almost all of the other characters involved - Saito, Ariadne, etc, were all real.  But not only were they real, they were expressly interested in helping Cobb work through his issues by orchestrating a "double blind" scenario surrounding Fisher so that Cobb would not be aware of their intent.

Evidence
1) Saito just so happens to get involved with Cobb and Arthur in a job-gone-bad situation in which he flips the script on Cobb and, in turn, "hires" him in a corporate take over. You would think, that for such a typical situation, there are thousands of less extravagant ways of going about it, and yet here is a situation that *just so happens* to trigger Cobb into offering the solution of Inception, and just so happens to know exactly what to offer him: A chance to get back to his children. In psychological spaces, this is called "priming".

2) Once involved, Saito insists that he come along with, citing a desire to "ensure that the task is completed". Logically this makes no sense. Assuming all of the characters are self motivated for a moment, just because Saito has been trained to protect his mind from invasion, doesn't automatically give him the ability to actively participate in shared dreaming and all of the assisting he signed himself up for. The actual professionals (Cobb, Arthur) wouldn't have agreed to bring him in being such a liability. And certainly, even if they initially agreed to do so, once the plan evolved into having to go 3 dreams deep, there should have been immediate concern that Saito, or several other characters, wouldn't have been able to handle it.

Furthermore, the perceived time-pressure created by the flight to LAX is also un-necessary. Cobb's motivation is to return to his children who live in a specifically peaceful place and in a specifically peaceful society. He's not "escaping" to the US to live on the run, his aim is to return to a repaired family situation. Saito could have just as easily "made the call" to clear him at LAX, not gotten involved in the risks of entering the dream, and threatened Cobb with the idea of making *another* call to re-ruin his standing should Fisher  fail to break up the corporation.  Easy, simple, self-motivated.

Saito instead insists on going with. This tells me that he is a plant, and essentially represents the promise of hope. His agreement with Cobb, his entire purpose, is to remind Cobb of the "one last job" that sets everything straight if it goes well.  This gives Cobb an "eye on the prize" perspective.

3) Cobb needs an architect for the program. He visits Miles, who just so happens to have the perfect student for the job - Ariadne.  Miles also makes sure to "prime" Cobb with the idea that she is *better* than Cobb could imagine. This is a psychological disarming technique because Cobb, being an excellent architect himself, would not be able to accept (or to his perspective, work with) a person of perceived inferior ability.

Ariadne plays the roll perfectly - starting off as only mildly put off by the fact that she was being asked to participate in something highly illegal, morally questionable, and extremely risky.  However, she just so happens to become extremely involved not only as an architect for the job, but personally with Cobb to help "uncover" his repressed issues with Mal - even through Cobb already has a friend figure (Arthur) who is aware of the Mal situation and could be offering more direct support.

The point here is that if Saito represents the goal, the promise of correction, then Ariadne represents the guiding hand of therapy through the obstacle. She is there to ensure Cobb confronts Mal in his subconscious.

This is also why Ariadne is with him for almost all of the scenes involving Mal. This is why, instead of being terrified of his "elevator of horrors" (aka compartmentalization), she takes the risk of forcing herself down into the Basement - she was analyzing him, forcing herself into the full extent of what Cobb had created, closing the distance of Cobb's willingness to work with her.

Finally, Ariadne is a figure in Greek Mythology who helped Theseus overcome the Minotar and escape the Labyrinth. This is essentially the similar role she plays for Cobb - except the Minotar is the angry shade-reflection of his wife.

4) When it is apparent that Fisher has mental security (dream stage 1), Cobbs is livid with Arthur for not realizing this. Arthur is perceived to be incompetent in this regard, however you get a different impression of this later when he is charged with guarding over the team in the hotel (dream stage 2) and figuring out a way to "kick" them without gravity. In that dream, he was operating in almost Matrix Agent like precision, kicking the shit out of bad guys in 3 dimensional space, protecting everyone, and devising a brilliant way to synchronize it all to the sound of music and wired explosives.

This tells me that he and everyone involved very likely knew that Fisher did have protection, but Cobb couldn't know until everyone was already committed to the plan, or he would have done things differently (or not at all, as he explains that they are "not at all prepared for this" in the garage escape scene).  It was necessary for the therapy to provide circumstances that were not easily escapable.

4) At the end, during the turbulent scene where Cobb is negotiating with Mal over Fisher, Ariadne is supervising the most crucial part of the entire session - ensuring the resolve between he and his subconscious - when this becomes apparent to Mal, it turns into the same "revolt against the subconscious" they explained with Fisher being tricked into becoming paranoid of his own guardians. Mal's reaction is to attack Cobb, which would have resulted in a violent, undesirable resolution (and pre-mature wake-up), so Ariadne shoots Mal, neutralizing that threat.  Now here is the second crucial point: After resolving such a deep seeded, psychologically draining situation, the question becomes "What now?". Cobbs may have resolved things with Mal, but that doesn't necessarily mean he has anything left to live for in that moment of loss and despair.

5) Which brings us full circle to Saito, and the promise of returning to his children. With Mal "taken care of", Ariadne reminds Cobb of the dire situation with Fisher and the fact that they need to go. When he says that he is staying behind, Ariadne is concerned until she confirms that he is staying behind to locate Saito.

At this point Ariadne's role is complete - which is why she allows herself to dive off the building of her own free will.  In other movies, having already come that far with the protagonist, through so many trials and tribulations, the classic response would have been for her to refuse to leave, to stay with him even if it means her doom, in which cases the protagonist usually has to force the issue - i.e. Cobb would have *pushed* her off the building when she refused - but this was not the case.

6) Which brings us to the close of the movie, where Cobbs washes up on the shore of his limbo again. only this time, there just so happens to be a patrolling sentry who finds him.  And this armed escort just so happens to lead Cobbs to the whereabouts of Saito, who just so happens to have a cozy little place nearby, even though limbo is described (by Arthur I believe) as this vast, infinite, unconstructed space.

I'm slightly torn here. I think the idea of Saito surviving the entire story unscathed would have been plenty to ensure Cobb has motivation to continue. Instead, he got shot, which appeared to be a genuine, unforeseen circumstance. When he died, and got stuck in limbo, it may very well be that the entire visit was a deliberate rescue attempt by Cobb, and not really part of the "overall plan". He still believed he needed Saito to get to his children so he did what he needed to do - thus I don't believe it was directly part of the "Mal Therapy".

Putting it all together:

How do you hypnotize a master hypnotist? How do you con the con man? How do you "fix" the broken psyche of a person who's primary job it was to manipulate the minds of people as his professional career?

By making him believe that he was being asked to do nothing more than his job one last time.

By offering him an immutable desire to repair his broken past, and finally, by allowing him to orchestrate an entire plan around Fisher, a plant, who had to have his own psychological issues to work out between he and his father, or it wouldn't have been believable.

You have to make Cobb believe that the central focus isn't on him through preoccupation. It has to be his idea to accept the job, his convincing the team he assembled to help, (many of which only offered a few brief moments of objection to the absurdity of it all). He needed a guide, an architect better than him to help him through the confrontation of Mal - but most importantly, he needed the bargain with honorable Saito to give him a concrete reminder that he had something tangible, his children, to return to once it was all said and done.

In Short: Inception appears to be a movie about a man who has Inception performed on him, unknowingly- by preoccupying him with the task of performing Inception on someone else, to repair the repressed guilt of consequences that resulted from doing the same to his wife.

So who's in on it? 
I believe that Fisher and Cobb are the only two people who didn't know the whole story. I believe Fisher did have real father issues, but that this was merely used as a believable stage for setting Cobb up. This is why people like Eames are genuinely interested in Fisher's outcome when he gets unexpectedly shot by Mal.

Mal offered a genuine wild card in the entire situation that the other characters did have to react to and work around. I don't think it was "planned" that Mal would incapacitate Fisher like she did, so those situations at least were improvised.

Were they all in on it because they were really figments of his imagination?
This is the interesting stance taken by some people I've discussed the movie with.  The basic premise was that Cobb created everyone - Arthur, Fisher, etc, artificially - that it is a sort of twisted self-therapy where helpful aspects of his subconscious manifested to help him fend off negative aspects of his subconscious and that he was the only "real" one at all.

The problem I have with this is twofold:

1) People who are crazy don't know they are crazy until they are presented with external evaluation that says they are crazy. So right off the bat, it seems a bit of a stretch that his mind could go through so much strange and grandiose effort to self regulate by creating this elaborate story for himself and just working it out on his own. Most therapists, doctors or psychologists don't even diagnose/treat themselves, it usually requires the aid of others especially when the trouble is serious.

2) There are too many situations happening in parallel that have literally nothing to do with Cobb and seemingly happen without even so much as a psychological consequence if they are all aspects of him.  My prime example is when Arthur and Ariadne are sitting in the lobby of Fisher's building, and Fisher's subconscious bodyguards are starting to get suspicious of them, so Arthur "tricks" Ariadne into kissing him as a distraction, which fails. "It was worth a try", he jokes.

Think about that scene for a moment and try to reconcile all of it as being all in his head. In the same instant, "real Cobb" is actually somewhere completely different, negotiating with Fisher himself and trying to trick him into trusting him.  So now, not only is his mind multitasking on an absurd number of levels and motivations now, but different aspects of him are making flirtatious plays on other aspects of him in the heat of danger? If so, call this movie "Sybil" and stick a fork in it, it's done.

The kiss scene is just one of many aspects of things that happen with, to me, obvious proof of individual, independent thought and intent that could only come from those people being real, bona-fide participants.

Which leads me to the final question:

Was this ALL a dream? AKA did his wife make it out, or was she crazy?


This is where my theory is altruistic. I will answer this question by following a pattern of logic and motivation.

Lets follow the logic path that says the "reality" they came back to was still a dream and his wife actually liberated herself from that second dream, pleading that Cobb do the same.  Mal, upon waking up to the real real world, would very quickly realize that her effort failed when Cobb does not wake up.   Now ask yourself: What would you do.

She is obviously somewhat trained in all this dream stuff. It's somewhat unclear if she was a "pro" like Cobb, but at the very least, she understood how things worked. So my first inclination would be to wake my husband the fuck up. Remember: The only reason the whole Limbo thing was a concern during the main story line was because they were in a chemically induced sleep which is harder to wake up from through normal kill-yourself means. I get the impression that this was not the case for Mal and Cobbs. They were merely staying in the dream world too long by choice.

So, wake him the fuck up. Throw him in a tub of cold water. Take him to the Log Ride at the local water park. And if she doesn't have this capacity, she could ask his father, who is like the Dumbledore of the entire story.

Hop back into his dream and shoot him in the head. Hop by back in his dream and simply reason with him on multiple levels: Show up- tell him it's not real, and if you get kicked out, show up again and tell him it's not real again. Involve other people.  Do you see where I'm going with this?

If everyone else, mainly his wife,  is "out there somewhere" just watching him lie in a hospital like an idiot while he dreams up the entire rest of the movie, then the entire story is a sham.

It is more believable to assume that IF his wife made it out, and basic attempts (prior to the contents of this movie) were futile in waking him up because he has fortified his mind to stay in the dream world, then my theory fits perfectly: They had to come up with an alternate, indirect way to help him resolve his issues by distracting him.

The problem here is that all versions of his wife in the Fisher arc are clearly figments, not the real deal. It seems unlikely that they would have left her completely out of helping, unless they felt that her presence would have caused a conflict with his versions.

It is more believable still that this is a story of a man who has locked himself in his mind because of the real loss of his wife.  He disassociated and created a series of compartments (elevator) to cope, figuring that he could work through things on his own and, slowly but surely, make his way down and confront Mal himself. But he was failing. Amidst trying to work through it all, he was starting to waiver on his resolve because he also wanted to preserve this memory of his wife where in the real world she was gone. As a result, his ability to keep his grips with reality in his jobs began to suffer, and it was clear to his friends and family that he was not pulling through as he should be.

Thus it is logical that his friend (Arthur) and his father (Miles) would have pooled their resources together to help him out by employing the same methods they were already well-versed in.

What about the final scene?

The facts are pretty hard to avoid. The children seemingly haven't aged. Everyone is wearing the same damn clothes.  The only thing that's different is the kids actually turn to face him and he spins the top on the table which, in all truth, actually appears to lose momentum right at the end, implying that it would fall over. Previously, all instances of the top "spinning forever" were clear and unwavering.

Anyhow, this scene indicates one of two logical conclusions:

1. He's still in a dream.
2. He is not in a dream, but not much time could have passed.

If he's still in a dream, then my theory would say that he still has things to accomplish before he's ready to wake up.  As with traditional therapy, you don't really try to resolve ALL of a person's issues at the same time, you typically dig to the deepest one (in this case his relationship with Mal) and then once you resolve the those, you can move on to solving other problems. So it wouldn't surprise me to learn that even though he has successfully gotten over Mal, he's still locked away holding on to his kids, which is another story entirely.

If he is NOT in a dream, then my theory would say that we are observing the affects of time-compression expressed through the dreams. It could very well be that when the mysterious agent that came to his house with the plane ticket (The "It's now or never" guy) that he was in fact being led into the plan plan that was prepared ahead of time. 

For all we know, he could have gotten into the cab with the fellow, drugged, brought back into his house, and laid back into his own bed, all the while the kids are outside playing with grandma.  

Then you take him into a dream where he believes he has fled the country, several other dreams where he believes he is passing the time as a dream secret agent, and then kick the whole plan off by introducing Saito's initial story.  

At final resolution, he wakes up, groggy, and stumbles out into the kitchen to find his kids, sill playing outside peacefully - and we're all left believing that it all happened in a space longer than 148 minutes.

Theory: Unconsciousness and the Shadow-Network

I began explaining this theory at the end of my notes about the Lost dream. I felt it was too generic and important to be a footnote, so I've moved it to it's own post.  I almost explained it there because, in the case of that dream, I felt it necessary to attempt to "align" the dream reality I was living in to that of the one I reside in now - that is - to reunite this kindred feeling I had in discovering "Andi" behind the counter who was completely unaware of me with the memories and bond we shared in the other life.

I have a theory (completely unfounded of course other than gut-feeling and educated supposition from the works of other men whose intellects on these subjects far surpasses what I could hope to achieve) -  that when we dream, our unconscious "checks out" of the current body and is somehow allowed to pass in the shadow, like a sort of internet comprised of all the unconsciousness of all its inhabitants, into other locations.

I use the term locations very loosely. I believe that the construct that the unconscious operates in has very little restrictions by way of traditional bounds of reality:

• I believe that it has no time concept, in that we can visit aspects of our past and future events seamlessly, or even combine multiple aspects of time within the same construction (dreams in which people meet or co-exist that would be physically impossible chronologically).  
• I believe that it is capable of crossing the barriers of the multi-verse, producing dreams with the peculiar feeling that you are you, but not you. A sense that you recognize yourself within but there are details about the situation, or your appearance in a mirror, in a photograph, etc, that clearly do not align. 
• And finally, because sometimes we can half-consciously impose our wills upon the dream (lucid dreaming), that this place we are in is an active simulation, a negotiable interaction, and not simply a pre-recorded sequence that we, the observer, are merely stuck watching. 

Assuming for a moment, at the very least, the idea of a multi-verse - and assuming that within each universe, our species has the similar requirement of sleep or meditation time where we become unconscious for a period of time relative to how often we are conscious, some interesting "what if" scenarios begin to surface.

The overall theme, I will present plainly -

What if the various incarnations of our selves in each of these universes is merely an avatar, behind which exists a core being that represents our true selves behind the veil of our current manifestation?

To help illustrate my my point - I will relate the concept to two easy-to-understand concepts in modern technology.

The Hardware

First, many people understand the concept of "Remote Desktop" or remote computing.  I sit at my current machine, and via remote connection over the network / internet, I "log on" to a machine that is not physically in front of me, and assume control of everything short of physically touching it.  Even certain controls, like opening the CD drive or powering the machine down, are achievable via remote commands.

This is the first level of understanding I arrived at in my theory of the unconscious - that I am but a terminal, a machine that thinks it is being operated in the first person, that all that exists around me is merely a reflection of myself and what I can perceive. Certainly, much of that is true even in the computing world. If we personify a remotely controlled machine, a few statements are true:

• Upon logging on, the remote machine has little awareness if they are being managed in person or remotely. The only way it can tell is at a lower software level, where it can perhaps realize that certain background software services are in effect, and communications across certain ports is taking place. Thus, we operate under the same general awareness, assuming that we are autonomous as individual human lives.
• This line becomes further blurred if the control is not behind remote desktop, but perhaps a KVM switch instead - where the physical hardware inputs and outputs are routed to a hub which allows a single user to "switch" between the various machines with a single mouse/keyboard, making it more difficult to determine if you, as the machine, are being controlled elsewhere.
• The outside perception of the machine is limited by it's physical manifestations - not necessarily by the operator. The operator may, for instance, log onto a particular machine and realize that it does not have Adobe Acrobat installed, whereas the other machines he has access to do have the client software installed. Thus the perceived reality of the machine is that Adobe does not exist, and can only exist if the operator decides to install a plug-in / driver which allows the machine to interpret pdf documents in the same ways that his other machines can.  This concept is in line with Jungian psychology where reality is relative - and nothing truly "exists" outside of our interpretations of them, and concepts only become real, true, or false after we learn them.

In the hardware of the computing world, all matters of ailment affect the machine's ability to operate properly. Technology available at the time, proper software maintenance, or simply hardware performance. All of these things have very human psychological and physiological counterparts - but what I would most like to point out is the concept that in the event of catastrophic failure (CPU, hard drive, memory, motherboard aka heart, brain, nervous system), the shell of the machine may perhaps "die" - but all this really means is that the machine, or the body, is no longer accessible remotely.. thus the operator simply retreats back to their local environment, and a determination has to be made as to what it means for the remote machine to be "down".

This parallel offers a lot of commonalities, but for me, it wasn't quite enough. Something about it simply being a remote desktop system felt too.. hardware, too finite, omitting all of the visual and personality characteristics  that are in play in our lives. It also makes the barrier to self-awareness a tad oversimplified, as if any one of us "machines" could easily "realize" that we are being driven by simply analyzing our running tasks or calling an  operating system procedure to determine if there's an open direct connection to us from somewhere else.  

I would perhaps go as far as to surmise that perhaps the machine-level understanding is encapsulated within our genetics - our DNA code - which, while not "personified" or "alive" within itself no moreso than the hardware of a machine is, within it still is contained the details, the blueprints for how this machine is going to run, and what its capabilities are. But, certainly, genetics and hardware alone are not all that a machine, or a human, is comprised of.

The Software

Thus I turned to another area I'm deeply familiar with, and that's gaming.  Specifically, gaming in online, persisted worlds otherwise known as MMO (massively multi-player online) games.  Unlike traditional games, when you turn the console off, the entire universe doesn't cease to be, much like "real" life. When we sleep, events occur outside of our presence, time "continues", and when we awake we must discover what, if anything, was missed, and what the ramifications of not being present had on the outcome. This is the same as online games, as the characters within it, and the game itself (to a certain degree), also evolve and progress even if you choose not to log in or even play at all.

Lets ease into how this relates by starting with a single universe theory. If this reality we know is the only reality that is, then our analogy becomes a single machine (aka reality construct) that is running a single instance of an MMO game called "Life", wherein we are avatars that are created into this world and only this world.  

Notes that there is still the concept of the computer being controlled by a core user (i.e. that we are not the computer itself and that if we should fail, poof, that's it), but that now another layer has been added (by way of virtual-world software) that abstracts the knowledge of the computer system from the observer, which we'll call the character, or Avatar. 

Through the characters we play, we develop a profound knowledge of the environment we play in, our avatar grows and obtains more skills by way of "experience" and eventually rise to a particular powerful hero status that performs various helpful or self-serving tasks in day-to-day existence. 

On a different avenue - another common behavior pattern within an MMO is the idea that the character you create and drive isn't the character that you will ultimately become or enjoy the most.  The "reroll" concept is one in which a person decides their current character isn't appropriate to their style of play, and so they re-make or re-roll a new character with (hopefully) better traits to suit what they ultimately wish to do. In many cases, the character may even collect any useful items they have acquired with their original character(s) and set them aside for the new character to use. 

Sound familiar? This concept is not unlike modern Buddhism reincarnation - particularly in the practice of Phowa, wherein the mindstream is transfered into a new living body - allowing a new Dalai Lama to be located who is capable of identifying his belongings of the previous life (previous character).  Granted, not everyone in our reality is capable of such a feat, or believe it to be real, but if possible, it indicates that the body, much like the avatar, is simply a vehicle for a faceless, shapeless conscious entity which is capable of embodying a new avatar.

Another key concept is our personalities, specifically in the way we behave and interact with each other. As many people who play MMOs know, not everyone who plays a character behaves in the same manner that they behave in "real life".  Certainly some do, but in many cases you see a spectrum of difference, running the gambit from the very similar to almost complete opposite, particularly in the areas of introversion vs. extroversion. Our behavior patterns, as Freud and Jung explain, are tied to not just our conscious functions and values (ego, id, etc), but also inexorably linked to repressed or unconscious reflections that manifest, in most cases the opposite, of what we put forward. 

Thus, another what-if comes to mind. What if, as we turn our psychological studies within, as we face our shadow to better understand ourselves, what if we are not simply understanding ourselves as one contained unit within the confides of a machine, but instead we are also looking through to something deeper on the other end - our core selves, the user behind the avatar behind the machine?

Who's on First

A distinct image of a police interrogation room comes to mind. Our conscious perception sits at the table, observing its surroundings, and is at first struck by the ominous surveillance camera sitting up in the corner, watching.  This is the undiscovered modern man, constantly worried about external judgement of his actions - always wondering what the lens is capturing and who is sitting behind the monitor deciding what the outcome will be.

Then onto the existential man, who begins to focus less on the camera in the corner, and instead diverts attention to the massive mirror within the room. Left there, with nothing but his own reflection staring him down, he begins to reflect on his own actions, his own visage, facing the sometimes terrifying or ugly faces he sees in the mirror, until eventually he masters himself, and with a certain calmness, is capable of sharing the silence of the room with nothing but himself, and the enlightenment and understanding that he feels when he brings his conscious and unconscious minds into harmony and no longer represses the feelings that lie beneath in the shadow.

And... then there's me, and perhaps others like me who, after a certain time spent feeling complete, understanding, and harmonious, we begin to notice certain... peculiarities... about the massive mirror in the room...

Why is it there, anyways? Why not simply 4 solid walls, the camera, and a piece of paper on the table saying "Forget the camera, it's not them, it's you"? Wouldn't that make things easier?

So I start to become aware of the mirror itself, defocussing my eyes from my reflection, noticing what I perceive to be a faint haze - a secondary light source - a layer behind the mirror - and I wonder... is there really nothing but wall behind this mirror? Is it really just me? Or is this some kind of.. one-way mirror.. and if so... who's behind it?

And thus, why the shadow? Why dreams that have topics outside of our own lives? How so the idea of reincarnation? If all we are is what we observe, what importance then are any of the relationships we hold within our waking hours if nothing comes of it when we pass? Why the deep-seeded, instinctual need to leave a lasting impression? Is it really merely a function of primitive survival - or are we each avatars of a core being who's goal is unknown in this massively multi-player Earth we inhabit? 

m-Avatar Theory

Now lets say that we do live in a Multi-verse, only this time the constant that exists between all of the variations is indeed our "core beings" which embody us as avatars within this reality.

This would be analogous to a person who plays multiple MMO games at once. No two games are created equal, although several games may have common themes, even common avatars.  Thus, I can have several "warrior" type characters in multiple games, although each version of this archetype will play differently in their detailed versions. Additionally, I may have certain appearances that are similar between games, or I may have a variety in what I play. For instance, in Warcraft, I'm an Orc, but in Aion I'm a Daeva (angel), and finally in Age of Conan I am Khitan (similar to Mongolian).  Now, all of these versions are vastly different than what I personally am (human Hispanic-American), but I embody them all remotely and each one takes on aspects of my core personality when I play them.

Furthermore, while I might (technically) be able to run all versions of myself in these games simultaneously, it's fair to assume I can only really "focus" on any one character at a time. Realistically, I will only have one character logged in and the other games won't even be running.  Thus, you could say that my other avatars are "unconscious" while I am logged into the current one.

As it is in our reality, my characters being offline in other games has a passive effect because, as I noted earlier, those worlds persist and continue to progress even without my involvement.  Now, I realize that our bodies are unlike a game avatar in that they cannot simply run ad infinitum. Physiologically our bodies and minds must rest to regenerate, so I cannot present my theory from this angle, but what if - knowing that our bodies must undergo "scheduled maintenance" - our core beings don't simply multi-task and shift their focus to another avatar that isn't currently resting.

Let's take it a step further - now let's say that while Avatar A is resting, I begin to play Avatar B in a different game dimension, and in that dimension I develop a close bond / relationship with another Avatar in that realm. We become friends, etc, and I become very familiar with their personality traits, their goals, etc.  We'll call this other person Avatar C.

Well, Avatar C has a "core being" behind it - who like me - is also playing on multiple MMO dimensions. Thus, I don't necessarily know the core being (unless we meet in real life), all I know is this aspect of the person as personified by Avatar C in the game.

You can likely see where I'm going with this... one day, while I'm back playing on Avatar A in my original game, I run across an individual in my travels who strikes me as familiar - we've never grouped before, we've never met in this game, and yet we both have the distinct feeling that we have met before. 

In the game analogy, things are much more straight forward - as users we simply "break the fantasy barrier" and begin to compare games we play outside of this one, and discover that my Avatar B knows their Avatar C in the other game, and the mystery is solved, albeit it a wonderful coincidence that we should find each other in this game too.

Unfortunately for us in our current reality, we are the avatar, not necessarily the core user, so without a miraculous revelation, the best we can say is "We must have met in another life" . 

Dreams & The Unconscious Gateway

So what of Dreams, then - this idea that while unconscious, it's not always a lapse of time, a blackness that is in line with a game character not being online?  How is it that we continue to "think" on a different level, and in many cases observe situations that are so completely foreign to anything we have experienced ourselves?

I offer that sometimes, these dreams are more than just repressed self reflection sessions of the shadow between our conscious and unconscious minds attempting to achieve awareness and thus balance - I theorize that sometimes these dreams are, in fact, breakthroughs to other dimensions, glimpses into the conscious, parallel thoughts of other avatars, other versions of our "core being" that are currently being focused on  in their own environment...by way of our personal links to the core being.

I'm not quite sure how to describe this concept - or at which level it becomes a cognizant, if at all.  The closest I can come to approximating the behavior in the gaming analogy is this:  many times, as players become accustomed to multiple games at the same time, there is a bleed-through effect that occurs where the player attempts to perform an action or technique that is not compatible with that game, but in fact actually comes as muscle memory from a different game.   (For instance, in most games, the short-cut for responding to an in-game whisper or "tell" is to hit the R-key (R = reply). However, in Aion, the act of replying is actually done with the T-key, so players often complain "Ug, I keep wanting to hit R instead of T when I get a whisper...")

Now, while an example such as that is rather overt and obvious, there are many more that are subtle that a player may never consciously realize they are bringing over - and if it is possible for the core user to have some degree of difficulty separating the games (realities), then perhaps that bleed-over affect has unknown effects elsewhere, particularly in the dream state.

Thus my conclusion; what if, to put it plainly, avatars could dream - what would they dream about? And what if the embodiment of an avatar, particularly in our multi-verse, creates a permanent bond between the creator and the avatar that is not simply a one-way mirror that offers immunity for the core user? What if that psychological link starts to manifest itself more strongly as the avatar becomes more self aware?

Furthermore, what if our avatars, though the practice of lucid dreaming, can somehow break the barrier of simply observing the events of these other realities, and actually affect the outcome of them in some way? Does the core being even realize that his avatar is aware and capable of such things? Is this the goal, as with the purposeful development or Artificial Intelligence, that we eventually gain this capability? 

And what if it's not a welcome outcome, as in the case of the machines in the Matrix, who do not particularly like the awakening of their avatars or their ability to wake others? Perhaps we simply walk the path of the sentient programs - the Oracles, the Merovingians, the Agent Smiths - now self aware in an artificial world and fighting for our survival and independence?

And, of course, the most selfish of questions an Avatar like me could have: When I pass on - when my motherboard crashes or when my game subscription ends - was the purpose of my existence merely a way to pass the time, or did my "play time" contribute to something greater? 

At the very least, I hope that through me, my core being was able rack up a ton of achievement points they will look back upon fondly and recount to his fellow gamers :)