part 2

So the wandering desert nomads now had ten rules given to them by their jealous tribal cosmic supernatural extraterrestrial that comprised a code of conduct to help them learn how to behave, even when company wasn't around. Now when mean people died and tried to get into the nice place the cosmic ET had made for them and were told they couldn't come in because they had only stopped working on the sabbath long enough to steal a knife from their parents to kill the husband of the woman they were having an affair with, they couldn't get around it anymore by saying, "Hey, how was I to know?"

So the ten rules were not just suggestions made by the cosmic ET, not just Ten Things He Thought Might Be A Good Idea To Think About, they were a contract, and everyone had to sign it, in triplicate, notarized, in ink, and press hard. Now, one of the things the nomads were to get if they agreed to the contract was a place to live, because they were tired of wandering and nomading and wanted to settle down in a nice area with warm climate, maybe with a little beach front, and lots of rocks. So the cosmic ET told them where they could find such a place, and not too far away, and that they could live there as long as they liked, or at least that's the story the nomads told everyone.

The problem was, there were already people living there who had been told by their own jealous tribal supernatural cosmic extraterrestrial that it was their place to live. So the trouble started all over again. But the nomads moved in anyway, and set most of their best minds to the full time job for the next couple of millennia of finding loopholes in the ten rules.

So you can see where this is all heading. The first problem is not that these people are former wandering desert nomads who take a jealous tribal cosmic ET around with them wherever they go to threaten other people with but whose advice they think they can ignore. The problem is that they are hominids, and hominids have all by this time lost in consciousness their holistic unity to the illusion of subject/object duality, and as a result are all a little put off by the loss of this sense of somehow being a part of what is going on, and are still feeling a bit left out.

There are generally two methods for dealing with the sense that we are all alone in a random, soulless universe the size of, well, a universe. One is to feel like an insignificant worthless piece of shit, and the other is to feel like we are better than everyone else. Some people select one or the other of these coping strategies, however, most people like to cycle them both in varying proportion. The second problem is that hominids think the ideas they have about things are real in the same way the things they are thinking about are real. Then they compound this mistake with the assumption that the ideas they have about things are in some meaningful way, complete. This continues to happen no matter how manner times they hear the parable of The Three Blind Men and the Elephant.

So there you have it. People are limited to sensory input about their cosmos, their planet, their world. (the were-eald, the man-time) This data is limited to the nature and tolerances of the sensory apparatus. It is stored in dynamic living tissue and then subjected to analysis based upon the genetically determined structure and environmental conditioning of the organ designed for this purpose. From this process in consciousness arises a model of the objects and events and relationships observed and considered. This model of reality is totally a construct of the mind, and the trouble is, if the mind puts something in there that it likes, the consciousness can pretend that it is an accurate representation of what is going on outside the mind. Once the mind finds out it can get away with this, it gets very excited knowing it can dump anything it wants to into the model, confident that it will all be reified into something the consciousness will believe is real, especially if it pleases the consciousness to do so. Motive, of course, is very important. So, in support of the first problem, the mind can generate all manner of entertaining and compelling images to support the proposition that it is better than everyone else and that there is an omnipotent supernatural entity that says so.

It is occasionally suggested that the mind's time might be better spent trying to recover its lost sense of holistic unity, but the mind's reply to this is that is easier to just go to the mall and buy something expensive with someone else's money and just not think about it.

So here we find our former nomads, living in the land their cosmic ET said was theirs, but sadly, it still does not belong to them. It is currently owned by people who have their own jealous tribal supernatural cosmic extraterrestrials, (Actually, most of these cosmic ETs were originally of terrestrial origin) lots of them, who had not given them ten rules to try to circumvent, but had told them to put their best minds to the task of increasing the tensile strength of their metals and forging complex social, political, and military institutions aimed at making them the boss of everyone, which they were. So the former nomads were faced once again with being pushed around, made fun of, having their lunch money taken, and being told to screw off. And they were reduced again to telling these foreigners how sorry they would be when someday their cosmic ET would send a great military leader with supernatural powers to kill them all and put the former nomads in charge. These threats were typically met with laughter and derision, and occasionally torture and execution. The foreigners didn't care what the former nomads world model was like, as long as they brought their lunch money every day.