And he left, leaving her in tears, wiping up the blood, holding her torn clothes. It was like she had been trapped by a bear, there was nothing she could do, she told herself. Yet in the end, a part of her LIKED it. She was disgusted, with herself, with Peterlee, with her family.
Only then does she realize the hands are still holding her, gently. Mort has her face cupped, she could have run, easily. He did not trap her like the Uncle. He was like her father, she saw it now. Everything she saw in men, it had been the uncle. She never married, that was the uncle. All the choices, not to have children, to focus on the career, to live in New York: All of it was to avoid this sense of disgust inside her.
She finally understood her father, what drove him. The disgust was that some part of him LIKED what the priests were doing.
CLOSE
Mort said, very gently. "Now you see what I have been trying to tell you for twenty years, Sandy. When we hide from ourselves, hide from the fear, where do you think we put it? I will tell you, the good people bury it in their hearts. The bad people use it as knives to defend themselves. It is so easy to see other people's issues. It is easy to see the pain that is driving another, yet it is so hard to see it in ourselves.
"Oh wat gift the givee give us, to see ourselves as others see us." He quotes Robbie Burns.
Sandy shook herself free. How could she have forgotten this? HOW did she forget the most distressing incident in her entire life? But of course, repressed memory, isolation, fear. They all form a lock over a blind spot. This makes up the shadow that controls us. "You saw this, the first time we met, you saw this? Here I was thinking you were showing interest in ME, but I was just another case study."
"Of course you were," Mort says brightly. "But let's not get wrapped around the details. I am an instrument of consciousness and do as I am bidden. Psychiatry tries to tell us the mind is a machine, and that we run like clockwork. Pavlov's Dog, epi-genetics, trained responses, etc. This is true only until we wake up, remove the pins, and start to see the obvious. Sandy, it was terribly obvious to anyone with half an ounce of sense that you had skeletons in the closet. But the thing is, I admired how you handled it. You made it work for you. It gave you benefits. You were driven to succeed, for one. You pushed yourself hard, got tremendous grades, and got yourself a doctorate in record time.
"So whatever it was that started this, and I have no idea what, though I presume some sort of incest, but whatever it was THANK that person. They gave you the impetus to be more than a beige shadow wandering through life. That incident burned you, but it also MADE you. It created the drive and gave you the will to get out of Peterlee, to get an education, to get to New York, and to study with the best in the business. That's me, in case you haven't already realized.
"Thank that person, deeply, from the bottom of your heart. You don't have to forgive them, or forget, or pretend it didn't happen, but you do have to thank the universe for acting through this person, and giving you wings to fly."
And the wall within came down. Mort's trumpeting of the truth broke the Jericho inside her. She was shattered on one hand, destroyed, yet on the other, finally, she felt truly free. She nodded, she understood. She saw the pathetic man, frustrated, angry, lost. He was a bus that ran into her, a bus being driven by his unfulfilled passions. He was not evil, he was simply stupid and selfish.
"Sandy, we have our physical self, we have our spiritual self. Between these two states, we have emotions, memories and a mind. In almost all people, the connection between true-self and their physical reality is broken. The way this happens is through some sort of trauma. Energy has come in and pinned them to a fear. This fear is like an eddy in the river of being, where a part of us gets caught and swirls around and around inside it.
"When the pin is removed, the river starts to flow free, WE start to flow freely. Only then do we come into our power. Everything up to this point has been sticks and logjams and frustration, but now the dam breaks and our truth opens up. Now YOU are set free."
Sandy is still shedding tears, not uncontrollably, she is allowing them to flow. She gets it. She finally gets it, the stuff she learned in the first year under his tuition. She repeats his words from so long ago: "And tears are a sign of the clearing. They are the flood coming through to cleanse out the past."
"I see it now, I see how and WHY you held Amanda Cassidy like you did. I see WHY you slapped her when she cried. Are you going to slap me now?"
Mort laughs. "I had to wake her up. You are already awake, you have always been awake, but submerged. You have been living your life up to this point underwater, Sandy. One of the ancient cultures referred to the physical, emotional and mental states of being as the 'Marine Planes'. We are living underwater and drowning in convention. Only in true self-awareness do we reach the surface of understanding ourselves, only then are we free of the surrounding morass of conditions.
"You have finally found free air, so breath. And now, the next step: The trick from this moment on is to take those shattered pieces of self, the parts of your internal dialogue that you suppressed, and rebuild them into a bridge. This is a process the Tibetans call 'Mudra', taking the pieces of the past and using them to construct a doorway to a new reality. The whole time, you must THANK the person responsible, let them pass through the Bardo, let the past flow by. The architect of your next moment will always draw your future from the shape of your gratitude for everything life brings."
"This whole trip was about me, then?" she asks.
"It became about you the moment I saw you at that park in Harlem. I had other things to do here, but when the universe knocks, I pay attention. Now, the real point. I had been asked to recommend someone for the main teaching role at Columbia because, despite how the faculty saw me, the Dean is a wise man. To be honest, I had not thought of you until that moment, and when I saw you were still carting the baggage I wasn't sure. Now I am. You proved your worth here, you have shown me you 'got it'.
"And the really good news, apart from the accommodations and benefits, you will have two months off a year to come see your Mum."
Sandy was still a little confused. "You know, I really thought you were interested in me, but I get it now, you were, but not in a boyfriend interest way. You were genuinely interested in ME. I cannot believe I saw it any other way."
"Good lesson, the Censor will shape everything we see in the way it wants us to see it. We are not really in control of our thoughts or even our mind until we are free of conditions. This is what breathing free air is really all about. You want to go see what was delivered?"
Sandy opens the door, and a small, A4 sized envelope is there. It is addressed to her, surprisingly. She opens it, a letter from Columbia, inviting her to a position in Psychiatry, and with it - a contract for her to sign should she accept. "You knew before we even left?"
"Well, my new and very deserving Professor, to truly read the universe correctly, you first have to trust it knows more than you do. I know nothing except what I know in this present moment. I saw you at the park, and it went 'click'. You were the best person I knew for the job, and whether you would cross that hurdle to be the VERY best person, I had no idea. But I had faith, I had trust in the universe, and I believed you were strong enough. And you tell me, what else does a soul need?"
"Love," says Sandy.
Mort laughs, "There is that, but there is love everywhere. I see it in kids playing, flowers growing, birds singing. Anything that flows OUT is love, everything that retreats inside is fear. That is the entire basis of everything I ever learned about life, the universe, and the people in it. Forward with love, or retreat into fear.
"Congratulations on the new job, Professor. It is well deserved. One small request: Can you look after my little projects in the hood? I don't see me going back."
"You are retiring at last? What at merely eighty-three?"
"I have decided that I will be staying here, Sandy. I only realized it when I got to Peterlee, but there are a lot of people th
at need a lot of help, plus I think your Mum would like the company. We share a daughter, after all."
Sandy was shocked. "You old dog!"
He hugged her, she cried. She was back in her father's arms. Finally, she was free - but more than this, she felt HIM smiling. Somehow her father knew she was released from the prison of shame. Her Mum walks in, her face beaming with a huge smile, "Well, let's get supper ready shall we?"
Dedicated to friend and Mentor, Professor George Cockcroft - "The DICEMAN"
No Virtue in Reality
With the increase in Fake News and Social Media being used to highjack opinions and sabotage people's lives, I begin to ask a simple question - What is real? Soon Virtual Reality will be so all encompassing that people may get lost in the dance of electrons that create the images they see. Do you KNOW you are sitting here reading this? Or is it a projection, and you are really in a prison in Idaho? Will you wake up and realize all this is simply a way to control you?
Uncommon days often start out as ordinary ones. It was just another day when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but years had gone into the creation of that moment - a moment, an action that determined the course of world history. Erik Bilgins was no Caesar, he was a small-town realtor who stumbled across the invention of a local kid, intent on creating a new type of VR, and realized a way to make a buck.
He was now based in Chicago and making a fortune. Rundown houses were put through the 3D modeling to look like a million bucks but sold for half that. The thing was, the improvements had not actually been done. The invention was a radiant beam that targeted the optic nerve, which caused the person to 'see' in pristine detail exactly what the program told them to see.
Yes, there was a counter there when they touched it, but the program was so perfect that you 'felt' the cold touch of marble, not the rough and worn laminate that was really there.
People like Emily Florishem, wife of Senator Florishem, had snapped up what seemed to be a bargain. Granite kitchen, fully renovated, oak paneling, stunning bathrooms, just what she wanted for her daughter and she paid top money for it. Only when the daughter arrived, it was a rundown wreck. The contract did state in the small print that the inspection had been completed using VR technologies, but no one paid attention to details like that.
Well, the Senator did, and Eric Bilgins was run out of business when legislation was quickly passed banning any form of VR projection without express permission. Of course, Eric then turned to Porn and made much more money than he ever did in Real Estate selling off sex dolls with VR capability. But again, he stuffs it up. He sells one to the son of a Saudi Prince and the father is enraged when his son has no interest in marriage. The boy was addicted to his sex doll, the perfect woman.
So Eric died, and the incredibly wealthy Saudi bought up any and all patents relating to the concept. It would have been the end of the story, except the little kid who invented it grew up and showed what he could do for his entry into MIT. That boy then found himself with a university education fully funded by the CIA. He was underage when he signed his original contracts, so all patents registered for the concept were challenged and in a deal, the Saudis permitted the US government use of the IP they had purchased.
Which suited both parties. Now no one else would be getting their hands on the tech.
Which is where the real story begins, with the inventor, Tommy Majors.
Terry Rawlinson was in charge of covert operations at Langley. "So, even if I 'know' I am being projected with VR, it will change nothing? I will still see exactly what you are projecting into my brain?" Tom Majors nodded. "So how easy is it to set up the equipment, and what sort of time frame do we need for the programming?"
Tom smiled, holding up a newly designed microchip. "This chip carries the full load. It takes the images and processes them into Fourier Curves that the optic center reads as reality. It also sends the pulse into the brain to increase dopamine and lower serotonin. All it needs is an antenna. The only difficulty is that with such low power output, as we aren't using full transmitting beams, it has to be in immediate proximity to the brain."
Terry laughs, "So you got the notion to build it all into a damn hat! I love it. The band in the antenna, the chip sits in the fabric, completely undetectable. But where is the memory storage? This system must use Giga-Flops of memory."
Tommy nods, "It surely does. To get it down to a wearable size, as you asked, I had to design a transmitting code. What the hat 'remembers' are core routines and only when you hit it with radionic codes will its pre-sets be triggered."
"So the only real question is how do we get the target to wear a hat. And then, how do we get them to keep it on?" Terry Rawlinson was a smart man. Others would describe him as cunning, with beady eyes and a rat-like nervousness, but no one argued he wasn't smart. "Can we program this hat so that once he puts it on, he forgets it is there? I mean, it has to be a spectacular routine, where he obviously has to take it off when hopping into a shower, then put it back on. It also has to be something no one will ask him about directly."
Tommy was a brilliant technician, but he was a lab rat. Things like people and understanding them was pretty much beyond his grasp. However, he knew VR and he knew the clients wanted to believe. "I can work up a routine to have him be able to take the hat on and off, that's a set number of parameters we can deal with. But people are going to notice a guy wearing a hat everywhere. They will ask questions and we can't program pre-sets for every variable. It could break the illusion."
"How the fuck does this work anyway? How can you make a person see something or not see something that is in plain view?" Terry doesn't understand the science and doesn't see how you can fool someone ALL the time. He was one of those eternally practical people: If you can't see it or touch it, it isn't real. Now the thought was that if you COULD see and touch it, then it may not be real. This blew his mind. It threw a spanner in the works of his basic makeup.
Tommy laughed. He was still a kid, really. Twenty-four and never a day in the real world, literally. "All this started at thirteen when I saw my sister fall in love with this bikie. The guy was ugly, smelled bad, and even at that age, I knew he was essentially pretty stupid. But she loved him, and just saw nothing wrong with him at all. Mum just said to me, 'love makes us blind'.
"Well, my sister got over it and wondered what she ever saw in the fellow, but it got me thinking. There has to be a chemical reaction in the brain that causes it to not see the obvious. Something enters into the picture and people can only see what they want to see. I started to wonder if I could not convert the VR headset I had into something more immersive and then I tricked onto the frequencies that trigger the release of hormones. Chocolate does this, you know. It fools the brain into releasing the same chemicals created by someone in love."
"Cupid's arrow? Yeah yeah," said Terry. "I got all that. I see a perfect set of tits and all rational thinking goes out the window. But it is not the same. Those tits are real, I can touch them, feel them, or at least I can hope to. The part I don't get is how you make someone see what you want them to see. Any good story suspends disbelief, but how do you get them to believe in something when there is nothing there? They don't even have a script to read from."
"Bit of a mystery," Tommy answers. "All I can say is that I can encourage people to see what they WANT to see. When people are full of wants and needs, you only have to throw the right colors at them, and their brain rearranges it to suit their bias. As long as the hormones are triggered, and the Fourier Curves that generate the holographic imagery are focussed on the optic nerve, then it works. It seems that the way the brain translates this is extremely pliable, it just improvises on the hologram. You create an environment of seeing SOMETHING, and their own brain fills in the gaps."
"A kind of reverse 'blind spot'?"
"Kind of. More to the point, the blind spot in the brain is where the paint goes. We fill in the empty space inside them with a dream. An example is those sex dolls ... the men using
them KNOW they are plastic. They KNOW they are not real, but they want love so much that they ignore it all. The projections, combined with their needs, create a reality in their heads. Pretty soon, despite the fact they know better, they are in love with their sex toys." Tommy was laughing. He had tried one or two of them himself.
"So, tell me if I got this right. The whole thing appears as an absolute reality until a strong external influence breaks it up. What shatters the internal image are things like laughter or the reverse, remorse, anger, any sort of strong emotion. Which I have to say seems strange, considering what you are doing is triggering strong emotions." Terry loves the project, but he really doesn't get it.
"Paradox One. This is exactly right. It doesn't make logical sense, but we are not dealing with logic circuits. What we are triggering are the 'hope' circuits that release the Raphe Dorsal complex. Most people are depressed, or feel confined. The same reason why Cocaine makes you believe you are something fantastic is why this works. The endorphins, the dopamine, the drop in serotonin levels, all of this is stimulated by the frequency generator. It puts people into a state of hope. Holographic projections onto the optic nerves create specific imagery and, like the first use it was put to, a woman who wants a dream kitchen SEES a dream kitchen. She can see it and feel it, despite the fact it just isn't there. Whatever they WISH for becomes a reality inside.
"The trick is to simulate images IN their brain. Whatever you want to insert has to have a holographic reality, which is why we combine the stimulation with an actual hologram of what we want to project. But it has to be what they want, and if it is their brain just accepts it as a reality. Now, when someone gets powerful emotions, such as laughter, altering their hormones levels, this breaks the spell. Then people see what is actually in front of them. The overlay no longer works. They wake up, in other words.
Witch Hunters and Other Stories (2018-2019) Page 9