It was time again for another walk to the nearby town, and as most of the walks I did during my psychotic periods it was a mixture of reconnaissance to find out something about my enemies, of a good opportunity to fight with them, and of trying to gather omens from the ordinary world. Everything that happened to me at such an occasion was indiscriminatingly scrutinized, scanned for the smallest peculiarity which was then interpreted with my giant association implying apparatus, which is a wonderful tool when it comes to subtle analysis of meaning nuances in ancient literature, but which frankly sucks when there's a bug inside, as each bug in an association production machine has the property of generating other bugs, which on their part create even more bugs, a whole avalanche of bugs that get neatly organized and clumped in a way that makes their combined result appear just as solid and real as any old thought any old human on this earth would come up with.
Needless to say, once your system is bug-infected it won't work as well as it should anymore, the accumulating contradictions are counterbalanced by short memory, ignoring of facts, impreciseness of thinking, and a general suspicion about the validity of the statements of others, something which actually is a strongly beneficial individualistic trait of character, but which - when exaggerated - can make you believe the opposite of what they say without examination of their meaning context, in which case you rather go wrong because of hasty conclusions and the drive to be different, instead of going right because of the drive to be yourself regardless of others and concluding in a proper way which is just as difficult and time-consuming as trying to figure out the meaning of this sentence, which should be quite easier than making it in the first place, but also dearly worth the while as there is so much wisdom in it that a couple of reads at different speeds and with different mental background settings are recommended to fully explore all its resonances.
I once used to say, "the same thought means different things, depending on who thinks it", and I can add, "the same thought means different things, depending on when and how you think it". That's for sure a reference to the fact that each thought is nothing without its context, it would be just a succession of letters or words, and the more meaning you can summon up and associate with it the more you understand, but of course you already need a tiny amount of thoughts to begin with if you want to grasp the full meaning of the following.
Imagine you are walking at full speed towards the small town where you went to high school, at the shortest direct way cutting cross country, and suddenly you get attacked by Neanderthals. They're extinct since long, for sure, but it's not their physical bodies that attack you, it's their spirit bodies, and also the spirit bodies of some of the unfortunate people in the surrounding country that are closer to the Neanderthal mind than to that of the Homo sapiens sapientissimus, of which you are a premature exemplar that is not easily tolerated by the racist instincts of those. Unless you fool them, that is, by mimicking their behavior and keeping them appeased about your harmlessness, which isn't so easy because your intellectual conviction is that evolution will go on, and it's likely that one day the Homo sapiens sapientissimus will even get replaced by the Homo supersapiens sapientissimus, and it's difficult to imagine those Homo presapiens and pseudosapiens in that place, but anyway, it can also be easy to fool them if you don't give a damn about the future and just savor the present.
After all, evolution doesn't go like it does because individual people do this or that, it goes like that because it runs towards promising possibilities, and the possibilities mankind has with all that technology and science and brain size simply are there, for anyone to see. The only thing someone like me can do is to try to speed things up a little, but if I don't do that or if it isn't recognized by anyone the train will all the same reach these destinations, so actually the only thing that counts for me is my own internal pleasureship.
And so I'm writing about things nobody can understand, lots of fun and joy, the only living being on earth who reads this, but the problem is that my thinking concludes that the experience of writing and reading it later is just the same regardless of whether there is audience or not, and even worse, the experience of writing and reading it later is much better if there is no audience at all since the quality of what I do is much higher if I adjust it to myself instead of adjusting it to people whose reactions and judgments I can only maladroitly imagine.
That said, the fun could be multiplied if there is an audience for whom this is not written at all but who gets something out of it. I know, such audience would be kind of weird, they wouldn't understand what I'm saying but they would understand other things, which maybe even adds to my own understanding, but it's also kind of crazy how this works, conventional authors can't figure this at all in their naive assumption that communication is like A saying this, and B reading it and getting the message, but, there is no message at all!
Communication is just an internal picture of the game.
And other internal pictures are much more frightening, much more intense, even joyfying, just like this one. So I was there, persecuted by Neanderthals and some of their animal friends, among them the gargantuan cave bear, while there were lots of other personnel and beings involved in that story, which I don't want to recall in detail as it was complex and not really trendsetting, and not worthy for conservation, except for a few facets.
One of them was that I entered my old high school, and it was a bit changed, the formerly gray walls painted with strong colors, there was a library in the hall whereof a certain book contained a passage which I read which gave me tears, and there was a permanent exhibition of minerals which I showed to my Egyptian friends, so that their ancient interest in metal and chemicals would get some nourishment. They were excited, and so was I, and as we know we both are in my brain, or should we say, in our brain, therefore this excitement was not mine or theirs, but something mutually stimulating itself in both places.
Suddenly a teacher came and asked in a hoof-out voice, what was I doing here. He was right, I was completely out of place, looking like a hippie, with dirty sandals and a cap atop my long hair that said "Barefoot Shoewearer", which somehow made me suitable for being a pupil, had there not been my age, which was more like that of a teacher, but for being one of those my outfit didn't fit. A half hit in two places can sometimes mean a full hit in both, but here it was a full miss.
I told him I was a former pupil pursuing the reminiscence path. He asked my name. Upon hearing it he actually remembered me, and it turned out he was a former teacher of mine, but without the hair and twenty years older I didn't recognize him. We chatted a little, and I was allowed to stay, and maybe come back regularly again and attend classes, and live out one of my recurring dreams, that of going to this school again, doing again my graduation diploma, don't know why this seems to be such a topic in my internal landscape, one idea is that it's simply used as a symbol for learning, and learning is what my inner being really loves to do.
In reality I would abhor having to go there again, starting with having to get up so early in the morning, and then the boring lessons, almost everything I learned in this business high school was completely unnecessary for my later life and a waste of time. The only positive thing there was myself at this age, and that most likely applied to all the other pupils, as at this age you have such a wealth of inner experience that almost anything you do is exciting and fine and interesting, something that is natural then but with a little bit of an effort can be extended up to later on.
Well, I didn't stay long in that school that day, also wanted to visit the junior high I went to, which is just next to it, and there were more and deeper perceptions that could be labeled magical, but which also don't add much to the progress of our story and have to be left to the author's (mine) memory alone. Then I walked towards the town center, slowly and interruptedly, since there was lots of telepathic activity, the pupils all were there in their combined spirit body, and some teachers, also the one I just met, and some of them were evil and disturbed others, and had to be put onto their proper place, because mostly the reason was that they wanted to be too high in rank, and there were four ranks, one, three, five, and seven, according to the number of electrons in the atomic orbits, and the pupils were one, and the lower teachers were three, but some of them wanted to be five, and had to be punished and degraded, and the worst problem was of course with those from rank five who swindled themselves up onto rank seven, as this was the rank with unlimited power, only reserved for the Pharaohs, the rank of mercury, that super fluid metal with the atomic number 80, almost the heaviest stable element, and the wisest of them all, much better than gold, and these were some of the speculations that flipped through my mind at this time.
Not really useless, and with some relevance to the material world, much better than random systems of mythological thought, but still another system of mythological thought, and having to be treated as such, as a structure in the mind that is not like it is because of necessity and truth, but because of aesthetic pleasure and the ability to dwell in luxury.
Dwelling in luxury is, by the way, one of the highest achievements of evolution, of the human brain, and it feels great to have the power to do so, although at that time of my life I unfortunately wasn't able to regard this as the highest of my goals, better, I did always regard it as the highest of my goals, but wasn't able to prioritize it adequately due to having been caught in my own webs which I constructed in reaction to those of others.
Close to the town center I sat on a bench and watched some passers-by, one of them an old man who walked very feebly, and suddenly that other part of me said, Manfred, and I thought it's him, that he had come down from the stars, adopted a human form, and did all this in order to harm me. Don't know why at that time he was an enemy, maybe because of some Akhenaten interference, but it actually was strange that this figure that was the most important in all of my spiritual life appeared here for the first time in human form, or almost the first time if we remember that car parade, and another occasion where I thought this could have been him, without really believing it.
But then I honestly thought it was him, but because he was an enemy I played it down and feigned ignoring the issue. It wasn't of a lasting importance, anyway, what would it matter whether he had a human body or lingered in the stars when he could attack me so fiercely as he did later that day, shooting a sting into my foot that hurt so much that I jumped.
And the most interesting thing here is that his other part of mine just guessed, as she was guessing quite often, but I stupidly believed she were infallible and always told the truth, and she must have believed the same about me, although I often also just guessed. Another interesting example of a communication where guesses and more guesses produce "truth", a thing that happens among people as well, but is most noticeable in the internal dynamics of a schizophrenic.
Then I left town, decided to walk home, and there it was, an ambulance car with a paramedic who started to talk to me, saying, where are you going, oh, but it's dangerous to walk on a street without pavement, and, what's wrong with you, and I really got annoyed by such a softie who maybe noted this air of lunacy in my face, or maybe just was a pedantic conventionalist whose people have to use a car when going from one locality to another, and who doesn't tolerate any deviations from the norm.
After having replied a few essentials I walked on and didn't mind them following me, and just to tease them I took strange paths across the vicinity of the street, which must have alarmed them to a ridiculous extent, as they called the police, and then these custodians of law and order were behind me, at the outskirts of a small village I just crossed, and called me with the megaphone, saying I should come to them. I was in the middle of a field, approaching a forest with my home village after it, and didn't want to walk back as this would have meant a longer way, and I didn't want to spend any additional effort just because of some superfluous police action. Walking on, they shouted after me, in that case you have to run very fast, and the prospect of having to run wasn't too inviting, either, and it seemed they really were after me as suddenly a second police car came and approached slowly. I thought, hey, well, seems they're having not much to do this day, sending two cars with four people, plus the ambulance with two people, just because some weirdo is walking cross country instead of taking the bus.
Although I thought it might have been some fun to play cops and robbers, running into the forest which I knew well and hiding in places they won't find, I was too exhausted for that and decided to cooperate. I went there, showed them my papers, talked like an ordinary guy, feigning to be upset because where is the right to walk where you want, chatted with them amicably to show that I was not crazy at all, and after a ridiculous long time of checking my paper on their wireless they let me go, helpless in front of such extravagance and determinedness, the ambulance at a short distance, waiting to take me with them, but finally having to leave crestfallen.
I'm not sure why this thing happened, I'm certainly not the kind of person who is halted by ambulance or police in a regular fashion, it was more or less the first time, if we don't count the Aachen episodes, which however were more caused by me looking like an outlaw rather than a mental health case. Anyway, it's interesting to see how easy it was for me to feign being normal, and I would have done the same on the next occasion two days later, had there not been this funny misunderstanding.