No doubt most of us have heard of a factor called 'home court advantage' in relation to sporting events. In some sports this is a bigger factor than in others. That it is a truth is undeniable. It's an interesting fact that if a smaller dog attacks a larger dog on its home turf that the larger dog will generally be driven off. We've seen this in war zones like Vietnam and the present day Middle East conflicts where more superior armed invaders have been driven back or had their advantage neutralized because they were fighting an 'away war'. I was thinking about 'home court advantage' earlier and in the process a number of things came into my mind about it.
We've all got a home somewhere, though lately, more and more of us don't. We've all got a body and we've all got a mind, though lately, more and more of us don't. I took half an hour this morning to run through a number of pages at the Perez Hilton Hollywood gossip site because I wanted to see what was going on with the latest screw-ups and publicity games among the pathologically ego-driven. Every now and then I do a little slumming at locations I wouldn't ordinarily visit because it gives me some view into the lives of the people who fascinate the minds of the people who pay attention to them. It helps me to understand how this potentially beautiful world has been turned into such a plastic shit-shop filled with culturally engineered refugees from The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Recently I've been serializing an on line book at this location. The last two chapters have dealt with the 'reactive mind'. Controlling the public reactive mind is something the media does. Schools do it. The military does it. Religions do it. Scientology has made its fortune off of it, though they, instead of you, wind up at the controls. Your parents tried to shape your reactive mind so that you would be a normal or better person, according to what they thought was 'normal' or 'better', which is how so many of us wound up as examples in this Phillip Larkin poem. Personally, I'm with Bruce Cockburn; "the trouble with normal is that it always gets worse."
I'm going to get a little philosophical in this posting and the point of it is maybe to get more of you to use certain weapons that you have at your command and that you use reflexively already a la the reactive mind in your day to day walking round the endless corner of life in search of whatever comes next.
The 'home field advantage' that I want to talk about is your mind. You're stronger, or should be, than all of the thoughts, impulses and survival concerns moving in and out of your mind and generated by all sorts of things like appetite, boredom, television commercials, day dreaming, car horns and some endless expanse of naked leg. The world of the media and the other criminal gangs of government and religion and the marketplace; those manipulating life into a migrating slasher flick that serves popcorn and everything else in every shop window in the whole world- have to first control the minds of the majority of people in order to get the interest and participation necessary to involve you in watching this cosmic train wreck while you wait for your turn in the barrel.
They do this by creating a fabricated message and a middle elite of managers who run their portion of the scam according to directives from the head office. If anybody doesn't play, then they fire them or kill them or put them in jail; not necessarily in that order. All the priests and politicians; all the talking heads and entertainers, all the corporation heads and varieties of suits control whatever little pond they are swimming in and all the frogs and other life forms go along with the program or wind up sleeping in the alley, or dead or in prison; not necessarily in that order.
Now, there's a reason they don't want a bunch of people to hold hands and levitate the Pentagon. There's a reason that they don't want you to wear shirts that say "9/11 was an Inside Job." Or "Bush swallows Gannon Yogurt" but will allow you to wear shirts that say, "I'm a dirty little -jezebel-", or "blow me" even if you are only twelve years old. The fact is that if you get enough people together to levitate the Pentagon something is going to happen because the cats at the top are in to magic (for a reason) or they wouldn't have all those secret handshakes and symbols and they wouldn't be drinking the blood of children out of gold cups during secret ceremonies. Look at the secret and occult history of the world and see how much of this sort of thing has been/is going on.
As for the t-shirts... well... the medium is the massage... messages have power. It's all about control and since we can't just march into the White House and strip Bush and Cheney naked and then roll them in pig-shit and whip them up and down Pennsylvania Ave (yet) with all of the rest of the neo-con psychopaths, we need to look into things that we can do.
Do a little experiment for me. Pick a really stupid show on TV; something you wouldn't ordinarily watch and sit down and watch it. Note that for the first few minutes you are aware that you are watching. Your objective mind might be pointing out to you how inane and mind-numbingly stupid it is but... sooner or later you are going to forget that you are watching. You will have been sucked in. This is what happens. It happens when you read a book. It happens when you are day dreaming. It happens when you are engaged in routine tasks. You have moved from the objective to the subjective, from the conscious to the automatic. From here your reactive mind can be manipulated according to the intentions of the puppeteers. You're actually in a state of hypnosis. It's like what happens when you stare into a fire.
They have to be able to get inside your head - they have to make you believe in war and famine, fire and plague and Madonna's talent before they start to whip it up in the kitchen. They have to sell you the product before they fill the shelves with it... or empty the shelves of it. They have to get inside your head. It is at this point that you can do something about it. You can turn it off or you can consciously react. I would like everyone here to start practicing a conscious reaction to the lies of the day. Begin to say, "This is bullshit." "This is a lie." Say it out loud. Say it in your head. Say it to your fellows and explain to them that this is guerilla action. If all of us get together and join hands around the world we'd be like Archimedes with a mental lever. The mind is magic and all magic comes from it. They have to get inside your head before they can motivate your form.
The key to freedom is to be able to see what hypnotizes you. If enough of us can short circuit the hypnosis then the power moves away, just as it is moving from mass media to the blogs, just like it went from network to cable... just as it can move from the nasty and trivial of this moment to the more refined and deeper presence of which we are capable.
It is a unity of mind and purpose that causes us to collect and protest against the confines of our prison warders and which can lead to a collective turning away from the machinations of those whose intention is to get inside our heads. The meaning of the word 'Adam' is 'namer of things'; what we identify things as... are what they become to us and there is a venal and murderous operation at work to do the naming for us. You can't get free in your life until you become free in your mind.
The movie, "Monsters Inc" has some penetrating truth to it.
We have to collectively agree that we are being lied to and call it... turn away from it and the power goes out of their cable. Our attention is their fuel. You are feeding your prison masters with the juice they use for that purpose. I suggest a world movement in which we constantly say, "bullshit", "that's a lie" I suggest we put clown noses on all these leaders and use the fun house mirrors of our minds to make them ridiculous and laugh at them. They can't abide scorn. We've got to start somewhere and no matter what you choose to do it has to stop... and start... in your mind. Use your home court advantage.