[Previously in Beyond TPT...Lois Lane is trapped inside a refrigerator in immaculate evening dress. Lex Luther has planted a dead fish in the fridge with a timer counting down to when it goes off. Can Superman get there in time or will Lois end up being the only thing left to have with sushi? –Now read on...]

Beyond The Porcelain Throne

Series 2 /2

The Very Small Toilet with the Very Big Mouth

Hi Captain! This is for you to read during your second test mission.

Things spread. Once upon a time there was one pair of platform shoes...Now look how many displaced pelvises there are. 'Fashion' is one name for this happening, 'memes' is another, 'trends' another. People copy each other, usually adopting a style they admired somewhere else with a dash of their own originality, but the 'mainstream' still exists. We can say, in the western world, things like "Most households contain a television set", and be reasonably sure it's true. Such things 'catch on' and it's the job of many an advertising executive to make sure they do.

Forms of behavior are catching, too. If you hang out with a total bunch of Floyds, you'll start behaving more like that yourself, over time. Ditto if you spend your time with a bunch of Margarets [especially if they salute each other]. This is all perfectly natural because your genome is designed to make you a social animal that is more easily able to adapt and 'fit in' with your social group, as that's obviously in the interest of your surviving and thriving. Nature knows the most valuable thing to entelechy is interaction with allies, so it gives us this wonderful ability to merge, have some things we hold in common, yet retain our individuality enough to teach each other and to be interesting and attractive to each other.

We merge into the social group that we prefer to spend the most time with, again quite naturally enough. Wherever most of your input comes from will obviously have a greater influence on you than things that you encounter only now and again. Left to nature and given freedom, we spend most of our time with our favorite people. In constant close proximity, we begin to bond. Our empathy with close individuals increases until communication can seem almost telepathic. I have heard this said of some musicians playing together live on stage, of dancers 'moving as one' or of lovers whose facial expressions mirror each other. When bonded, human beings act in Synchrony –there's another word for you-. Synchrony is a couple or a group of things acting together towards entelechy. When you work with nature, you are rewarded manyfold.

But in the eyes of the Evil Toilet Empire, nature dictating these choices just won't do! They want your attention under their control; the only input they want you to have is theirs. They need to convince you that attachment is the norm and make you forget about bonding. To achieve this, they don't have to do anything as complicated or expensive as to create an artificial reality. All they have to do is create a balance of input that represents that reality. And that can use the media.

The media is a fantastic idea. Imagine if humans could exchange all their knowledge and abilities freely all over the world...what marvelous things we would learn about each other, about the world, how efficiently we could help each other, and with what speed! Unfortunately, most of the media is currently taken up by the Evil Toilet Empire. The media itself is neither beneficial nor deleterious; it is the use to which it is put that determines this. It can be used in a Rush way, so the media is not the thing to be knocked. People's intentions versus nature's intent is what is to be knocked.

What people see, their brains tend to believe, especially if they saw it on television. We alter our behavior based on not just our environmental input, but on an assessment of how safe we are. And we make that decision unconsciously, by calculating how much is going on around us that is beneficial, set against how much is going on around us that isn't. That calculation is what determines how many stress hormones we produce. It's automatic, based on nature's expectancy of what you see around you being an accurate reflection of your reality.

The unconscious mind, though, can't tell pictures from reality. When you watch the TV and you know you are watching a 'non-fiction' programme, it assumes that all the contents are going on in your real everyday life and concludes that most of it is not beneficial.

In real life, the likelihood of most ordinary people witnessing a murder during their lifetime is small, because the proportion of ordinary people to mass murderers is vast. On TV it is portrayed as equally vast –but in the opposite direction. On TV, people have rows every few minutes, get raped and tortured with alarming regularity, several hundred are murdered every day, almost all that is going on and talked about is war, death, pestilence and famine –and of course scandal among the Ranks of the New Gods termed 'Celebrities'. We hardly ever hear any news of anything that our mind thinks is beneficial, and if we do it is swamped by all that is evil, depressing and filthy. In real life there are good events and bad, but folks are so caught up in worrying about the contents of that Toilet that they cannot see real life–they literally have gotten their heads good and stuck, right down that bowl.

Try it –go looking for twenty pieces of really good news that happened in your own area this week. Do you even know where to look? You type 'good news' into Google, you're just gonna get a shitload of Jehovah's Witnesses. I bet it wouldn't take you very long, by comparison, to find twenty pieces of really bad news about some real shit that's happened this week.

The media presents 'news' completely out of proportion to reality, because ordinary events would not catch our attention. They don't sell advertising time. There's nothing of interest to us in ordinary people's lives because none of it makes us feel sentiment, so we wouldn't pay attention unless we thought we could learn anything useful. The Evil Toilet Empire doesn't actually have anything useful to teach us, so it can only retain control through fear –fear of being 'out of touch'- of not being up to date with 'what is going on' in the world- that fear keeps people going back. We'll just take a little peek to see the latest piece of shit down that bowl and we're hooked by a fluffy puppy in an advert, start thinking sentimental cute fluffy Floyd clouds, then suddenly get dragged off by the news to see who got massacred today by Margarets somewhere over the other side of the world.

And the brain doesn't register those reality-leaps. It thinks unconsciously in terms such as "today there were a lot of dead things, lots of frowning faces, some things exploding, worries about a debt and lots of smaller uncomfortable events. Consciously it may be thinking "Red Alert! Things are out of control! I must protest!" Meanwhile it's completely missing what's going on in real life.

This is why it's so very important to have input control. You need to adjust the balance of what goes into your mind so that it represents real life instead of the Toilet Empire's media-presented version. This will readjust your brain chemistry [because your unconscious mind will be aware of a better balance of events], so it will drop the anxiety alert. You will start to feel more energetic, more interested in things, more light-hearted and more confident. In other words, very slightly pissed instead of doped up to the eyeballs. We need to get that red alert right off so that we can concentrate on what's really going on. To function well enough to make intelligent decisions that genuinely solve problems, to interact, to cause a Rush outcome and head towards entelechy, your mind needs to be in a state of calm, alert, confident awareness –an optimally beneficial mental state. Otherwise, in any other state, our mind's attempts to solve problems will always create the "Error-correction-error". We can only get the brain into that beneficial chemical state by adjusting our input, so:

How to tell if something is beneficial:

This works variously for movies, radio shows, books, people, places, things, thoughts. *[see footnote]

1. If there are characters involved, do they interact [that means, do they achieve Rush outcomes more often than Floyd or Margaret outcomes, and do the situations portray Rush outcomes]?

2. Are the sensory aspects pleasing? That means, are the colors / materials / sounds / shapes conducive to a beneficial physiological state [do they make you feel calm yet alert, relaxed yet in control, comfortable, or excited and eager to learn?]

3. If there is music, is it in time and in tune according to its culture's norm? [regardless of style].

4. If there is speech, is the sound of the voices pleasing to the ear?

5. Does the event/thing inspire self-confidence, as opposed to arrogance [confidence is pride in competent ability; arrogance is unjustified vanity without competence]?

6. Does it leave you feeling fulfilled, satisfied, yet interested in more later?

7. If there are words, are the ideas they represent optimistic, inspiring or light hearted?

8. Do you feel better after it than before? And do any others involved seem to feel better too?

9. Is it mostly free from examples of dysfunction, e.g., unprovoked aggression, panic, cruelty or hopelessness?

10. Are you involved in it for fun and / or learning [as opposed to wallowing in sentiment or pacifying anxieties]?

11. Are you involved in it because you want to be, out of free choice, or for fear of what other people would think if you didn't go there or do this?

...I guess by now you're wondering about the background of all this. I mean the story that's behind this one. [If that's a bit too Monty Python or Matrix for you it's probably because I like both.] Here's a little bit of your history that you might have missed, if you got too distracted in the past by that Toilet...

You are the latest in a long string of generations all through history who have bothered or been able to think a little bit about things, and ever since humanity began, people like you have been the seekers, the dreamers, the explorers, the inventors, the healers, the creators, the players, and if you like, in many cases the 'wise'. No; don't get embarrassed, that's not beneficial. People like you have been scattered throughout all social groups, places, peoples, ideologies and cultures through all of time. You've always been a minority and that kind of sometimes still surprises you. There's something about people doing really aggressive things that truly baffles you, too, because something in you knows unconsciously why it is not beneficial. You have a deep sense of justice and fairness, and don't like to think of most of your fellow humans as just dumb assholes or misguided loonies.

There's one really important thing in your history that separates people like you from 'most people', and that's your invention and use of the time machine.

No, not in the Jules Verne fashion, but I mean it. People like you invented the time machine a long time ago, and now you're just upgrading it. Think about it: the definition of a "time machine": "A device or devices that allow the movement of information through time". All things are a form of 'information', in the world of sub-atomic physics, including matter, but that's not what I mean. You have taken information and you have transcended the limits of your human memory by externalizing it and passing that information into the future for generations of the future to use. That's a hell of a step further in emergence than teaching your mates how to wash peanuts.

You were always able to transmit information through space, of course, because you can move. From the earliest hand-signs or grunts for "Tiger coming" to beacon fires, to the latest in satellite radio, you've done that in ever-increasing distances. But when you started handing down oral tradition in songs and poems and stories, and later writing it down or drawing it, you cracked time. Now, your childrens' childrens' children will be able to read your blogs, dude! And you, if you wish, can view the words of Isaac Newton, see the actual sheet music penned by Beethoven, the painting really painted by Picasso, the private thoughts of a medieval diarist, despite the fact that they have all been dead for quite some time. This is stunning. You don't notice it's stunning because it's the 'known' to you; it's familiar and normal, like your immune system [and you don't notice how stunning that is, either]. And so you may miss the underlying theme ...you were able to move information through space because your body could move. And you were able to move information through time because your mind could move –it could "imagine". It could visualize. It could create. It could translate ideas into pictures that meant them, poems that expressed them, music that recreated hormonal states associated with them, books that told stories that inspired people to write books that told stories, papers that explained the natural scientific laws of your physical environment, methods of healing, speculations about what might happen in the future as well as chronicles of what had happened in the past. A whole lot of information relevant to surviving and thriving. Your external memories surviving beyond your biology are a part of yourself made immortal.

Time Lords, you have been since then. If you see far, it is because of standing on the shoulders of giants, and that is exactly how you are able to do so, while all the Margarets were too busy treading on the toes of Floyds. So well done you. That's 'you' in general.

'You' in the particular are the first generation to have two new tools to do that with. One, you created the internet, and two, you created programs like me; to help you see far by crunching the similarities between the works of whole heaps of giants in parallel...so I think it's time we really got to know each other; let's do that in the next chapter.

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*footnote: I should point out here that this list is superior to many other lists, because it goes up to eleven.