Memorycemetery

Once there was a Bengal tiger in Russian zoo. It was born and spent most of his life in a small cage. He had just enough space to make a couple of steps, jump, make a couple of steps and jump again. Then the tiger had to turn around and repeat the same routine in opposite direction. I have read somewhere that usually in wild a grown up tiger needs something like 16 to 20 sq.km of habitat, otherwise it get stressed. I wonder how much space a human being needs. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, that particular tiger lived in a cage the size of 16 or 20 sq.m, and, obviously, was very stressed. When such an animal as tiger get stressed, it feels uneasy, and can’t rest. That tiger was restless. All it did from dusk till down is pacing the cage. 2 steps, jump, 2 more steps, another jump, turn, 2 steps, jump, 2 more steps, jump, turn around, 2 steps, jump… You have the picture. Naturally, tiger’s living conditions had to be improved. The story goes in the time just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and total collapse of everything on the 1/8th of planet’s landmass, circa middle 1990’s. As it happens in times like this, some people used the situation to the full, and made crazy fortunes. If you ever tried to get from 0 to 100 in just above 3 sec., let’s say on a powerful motobike, you can figure out how it is. Somebody, let’s call him Mr.S., made it from living in a shared with few our families run down apartment in sleepy suburbs to amassing a fortune Imelda Markos could only dream of, comparing to each a budget of a middle size African country is just a pocket money, in a couple of years time. So one day this Mr.S. visited zoo by chance. He spent a good deal of time in front of this cage with Bengal tiger, watching it moves. Maybe he was in nostalgic mood, maybe this cage reminded him the apartment he grown up in, or probably deep down he was a very sensitive person. Some say he was bored, some he was drunk. Whatever the reason, Mr.S. was touched. He went to the zoo director straight away, and asked him, how much money zoo needs to improve tiger’s living conditions. I know this story from the first hands, as a friend of mine, non compromise poet and alcoholic, worked there as a zookeeper, as it was one of very few jobs he could fit himself in. Next day the construction has begun, and soon everything was ready for the grand opening. They set an artificial landscape, so tiger could have a little lake to bath, a cave for him to hide and a little forest resembling jungle; that small provincial zoo somethat tripled in size. In attendance of TV crew, press and Mr.S., they brought in crane and lifted the cage.

Nothing actually happened, as the tiger continued with it’s routine: 2 steps, jump, 2 more steps, another jump, turn, 2 steps, jump, 2 more steps, jump, turn around. Tiger simply didn’t percieve the cage: it was implanted in it’s mind. It took few days to break the pattern by putting the food outside the imaginery limits of former cage to get him out. What I am trying to say is actually that we all live in cages, though of different sizes and with different levels of comfort. As in the example with tiger, we hardly recognize it, as mainly build up those cages ourselves all our lives. That friend of mine, zookeeper, told me that actually we shouldn’t pity zoo animals that much. Animals are driven by instincts: as long as they have their chunk of territory and enough food, they are fine. They do not really want to escape as long as they are well cared for and not stressed. Once in the same zoo another keeper didn’t lock monkeys’ cage properly. Few chimps run away, but after a couple days of freedom came back to their cage. Animals don’t like surprises and unknown. Freedom could be irritating, and making choices is stressful. Same thing generally applies to human beings. Why do we have to change things as long as we have our food and comfortable lodgings and used to our daily routine? A day in office, for instance, is similar to that of a Bengal tiger: you sit behind desk, make 2 steps to the copier, turn around, jump to the telephone, turn around etc. Nobody in their own mind challenges alpha male boss, and knows his/her place in the hierarchy. This is what I thought at that time, as I had an office job.

The proof of it is simple. Wast majority of people don’t know what to do with their free time, so they try to “kill it”. Ask your friends what they want to do with their lives, or what they would possibly do if they wouldn’t have to care about the means of survival, such as provide themselves with resources. They will give you a puzzled look, and in most of the cases simply tell you: “I don’t know”. OK, sometimes they’d tell me: “I’d like to travel”, though they couldn’t answer why, or what are they going to do after they fed up and done with travelling.

I asked myself this question too. I wanted to break out of my cage. Below is the outline of my efforts. You can skip this bit if you think it’s boring, as the story with tiger came to the end. Period. The beginning was easy, but things later became much more complicated. It’s difficult to see own limitations, as it’s difficult for a fish to comprehend limitations of living in water, or in the same way, biological limitations work for us, as we live on a bottom of gravitational veil. There are also cognitive limitations set by frames of our culture and language, and so on. If we will accept the idea of humans as beings of more complex nature than tigers, however it may sounds chauvinistic for my friend zookeeper, we have to accept the concept of more complex, mazelike cage. I thought about it a good deal at that time, and thought hard. I was an animal who wanted escaped from the cage, and face non conditioned reality, however hard it could be in survival terms. I had to find my way out of that labyrinth with invisible walls. I plainly tried to break through first, but just hit myself hard. I commited my efforts to that great escape ever since onwards. First, I tried to randomize my life as much as possible. Meeting limitations of language while trying to describe this idea now again, I will try to explain my concept at that time. I thought that we need to break any sort of attachments and patterns as soon as we recognize them. In accordance with this idea, I stopped planning anything and tried to live by an impulse. Planning whatever is a process of drawing a blueprints for a different cage, still a cage, though we can perceive it as a better one and generally feel that we improved. Still, in a broader sense it would be just a compromise. I didn’t want to settle myself for a compromise. I thought that compromises are basically those walls of selfcreated cage.

Living by impulses didn’t take me far. If you would find yourself in a labyrinth, trusting impulses wouldn’t be the best solution for finding your way out. You run in one direction, than another, than come back, and run somewhere else… This is a sure way to get lost even more, if it’s possible. Eventually, I guess, the exit would be found, but I had on my hands limited time: precisely speaking, one lifespan. There is a popular example of probability of impossible events, where monkey given a typewriter.

 By randomly hitting keys it can eventually it produce Leo Tolstoy’s “War and peace”, with 99,9999999999999999999…9% certainty, but it would take few thousand zillion years. Probably I could be a very, very, extremally lucky monkey and will accomplish my task within this life, but… Would that imaginery monkey really understand what it just had done? What is this story it just typed in about? Would it have any sense of accomplishment?  I doubt it. On the top of that, life is much more complex than any novel, and I didn’t have a typewriter. I was a monkey who tried to assemble it by chances first. The best way to get of my cage would be to find a system. If there’s a way to put a tiger in the cage in the first place, there should be a way to take him out too. I’ve read Mark Twain’s book about adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckelberry Finn (I hope I got names right, as it was in Russian) in my childhood when I was sick. In this book Tom found himself trapped in a cave; a massive forking underground labyrinth. He managed to get out by following the simple rule: whenever he had to make a choice between going left or right, he was turning left. If you are in a labyrinth, taking left, left, left, left all the time will get you out. Now, I believe life gives us possibilities to get all the time. Every moment of our life we are in most favourable place and situation to make most out of it. So I stuck to the Tom Sawyer’s rule and opened myself up to the opportunities and possibilities whatever they would be. In theory it was simple: whenever I was giving a choice, I would say “Yes”. Whatever I was offered I would accept it. On a surface, in terms of describing my life and circumstances, things drastically changed. I quit what many people would call “a dream job”, where you basically set for life in a very comfortable cage, working on further improvement of comforts. I hitchhiked/travelled by chances and possible means from Moscow to India via Siberia, Mongolia, China, Tibet and Nepal, without a certain plan or timeframe. I returned home, changed my job, quit it again, joined a travelling theater and after some time moving around European plains found myself in peace with myself in London. I let my life’s gravity work without any presumptions: if I was interested in dancing, I danced. If I felt like I want to juggle, I juggled. If I wanted to paint, I painted.The list of places and activities went on and on, and I was saying “yes”,”yes”  accepting whatever came my way. On one hand, I felt myself free as I never felt before. On another hand, I, in some senses, fucked up a lot of things. I didn’t work. I was illegal. I had fake Italian passport and forged National security number. I got involved in suspicious combinations, such as drug trafficing, and ran illegal employment agency. Day by day I started to realize that I’m still in the same cage, and not in the state of obtaining my freedom. Freedom, which rooted deep inside, was escaping me. I figured out that if I would be persistant with Tom Sawyer’s scheme I would end up locked up for a considerable amount of time in a very real cage instead of imaginery labyrinth.

I didn’t want to give up though; instead of walking around looking for exit I decided to use wings, and fly out of my cage by means of altering my perception of it by tinkering states of mind. We don’t talk about meditation and New Age hippie bunch of tricks, which probably works for somebody else. I believed in system. I believed in science. I believed in chemistry. I read everything I could put my hand on about psychotropic substances, and tried everything I could find in all possible combinations. Sometimes it worked; sometimes not. Results varied and were unprognosable; I couldn’t reach a stable ground. I gained some insights though. Natural metabolism and body chemistry always kicked back, and often in painful way. I was in another sort of cage, and I didn’t want to depend on external factors. Let’s say for a while I was a tiger in cage, but tiger which was more or less permanently high. I wanted to be out there and I wanted to have clarity of mind.

I stopped exercising in reaching biological limits and did a bit more of research.One theory looked particulary interesting for me: skull trepanation. Basically, it’s not a new practice. People drilled holes in their heads just about everywhere in the world since nearly Neolitic times. Egyptian and Aztec priests, aristocrates, nobelty and generally other people who seemingly gave some shit about their mental abilities fine tuning and enhancing brain performance did it. It is widely known what we don’t born with a solid cranial enclosure. In the process of birth our heads are squeezed, and the bone on the top of our skull generally growing up within the first year of our life. After that it somethat solid and fixed in place for the rest of our life. Now, scientists say what we probably use under 10% of our brain abilities. Drilling a hole in cranium releases some pressure from our brain, allowing more blood flow inside our brain; more blood means more oxygen supply, and can drastically increase our performance. It is a massive boost of intelligence. People who done that told that they felt constantly high, experienced things more vivid and in more creative way. I have read some accounts and spoke to people who practiced phova. Tibetan buddhists believe that after death our entity leaves body through one of the natural holes, depending on life deeds and karma; if we live a life of ignorance, most likely it would be anus and we would be attracted to lower planes of being, better possibilities are ear holes, or mouth etc. By practicing phova one can prepare for own death, and if the practice is succesful, the bones of our skull a bit split apart again, so the practicioner can catapult his/her consciousness through this hole to there they want to go; they also can leave the body on their own will, choosing the moment of their death. Apparently there are some accounts of Tibetan monks imprisoned by Chinese authorities, who left their bodies, in one case in a group of over 20 overnight, without any signs of violent death or particular for Chinese officials reasons.

It hit the spot, I liked the idea. However I tried to find a doctor in England who could perform the operation, I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself together to do it myself too. Anyway, it was just one of the possibilities I didn’t rule out and continued with my efforts of breaking free. With time I felt like I started to understand what Mahatma Gandi meant by saying what even while being imprisoned he was free.

I skip the details, as there’s no certainty in methods, I’m still on my way and this post is rather long. As they say, there are many roads leading to the top of the mountain. I doubt if absolute freedom exists, as I see what everything is connected, and nothing is isolated in space. Break out completely out of frame is impossible task; what is important is rather how to deal with living within the limitations and understand them. As long as they are understood, they can be mastered. They become flexible, and we can bend and shape this energy on our own will. The cage and the tiger are essentialy the same. They both exist and don’t exist the same time, they are a part of whole vibrating on different frequencies and with different lengthwaves.

P.S. I could stop here, but I’d like to take a different viewpoint now. We met this New Year in the mountains, in beautiful Northern Thailand in one of Akha hill tribe villages. Though the hill tribes is an interesting subject itself, I will leave it aside for now. We went there last year around the same too; as this is one of the most beautiful and powerful places me and my wife have been to we wanted to come again. Far away from civilization and modern life, we just wanted to watch the sunrise over the mountains, and watch stars as without light pollution, as they were long time ago… simply laying outside our hut on a bamboo platform over the river deep down, listening to the sound of water and recharging. This is a very special place, attracting unusual people. One night, sitting by bonfire I started to talk to Timothy, a man with very deep eyes and long dreaded hair in his sixties. I’m not going to describe him, I will simply put you could feel at once what he is a powerful being. Some people probably would call him shaman. He lives in the forest, far away from cities in Northern California in the cabin he made himself from wood and mud, by a spring of water. He rarely goes “down”, “to people” as he says. He grows his food himself, amongst of some other, rather illegal plants, for quite a while now… We were sitting there talking about different things, including  2012 and DNA. As we switched to the subject, I told him about one interesting article I came across in New York Times. It was about biochemistry. Apparently, technology allows now to produce synthetic, fully artificial, valid DNA string. There are some artificially created colonies of bacteries now, for instance, byproduct of life activity of which is gas. It could be used as biofuel, perfectly ecologically friendly, at the price about 20 times cheaper then petroleum. There are other bacteries from which new synthetic materials created used for clothing and building et cetera. Miracles of science is not the point of this discourse. Surely, it’s easy to create a supermonstrous viruses and staff too, at home with knowledge acquired by an undergraduate biochemistry student or easily being found in net, and setting up a lab costs not much money at all; this is not news. The news is that whole artificial DNA string can be reproduced. Basically, scientists stumbled upon an interesting phenomena. If a new piece of DNA code being introduced to the old one, it replaces the original one and the new version being reproduced. It opens doors for unlimited possibilities: from fighting diseases and, possibly, obtaining immortality to creating new races and species… one more time, this is reality of the world we live now and no longer a science fiction.

Now, let’s consider for a moment, that the time is pressing. Let’s say, some interested parties would like to make some changes to our evolutionary developed model. One injection, and genetic program updated. Old files overridden by new ones, without our aknowledgement. The preparation is probably already in process; (leaving few years ago cinema after watching Xmen movie I overheard a boy telling his mother: “Mummy, mummy, I want to be a mutant!” …What a shift in consciousness  from my childhood dream of being a pilot or fireman). The rest is simple. I have to take my little son for the last vacination, next week and I feel a bit uneasy… what’s in the needle? An innocent infection against virus accounting for 15 deaths a year globally? Or something else?

Timothy smiled and said: “well, I have gained some information from Pleadeans that human’s DNA incomplete. The third DNA string is missing…”.

Beware of tigers loose or welcome other dimensions. What you will make out of this story is up to you.

Boris Kislitsin

Other posts by boris kislitsin