Oct 2012
Speaking of EYEBALLS, this installment would be useless without them. The chosen subject would be just as useless because this time, we will have
FUN with WORSHIP!
When learning a new worship or meditation routine, the first question a modern human would ask is, “What am I suppose to do with my EYEBALLS?”
One common answer is easily observable if you peek. Many worshippers consider the moment of maximum worship to occur whilst their EYELIDS are scrinched tightly together and thus eliminating the role of their EYEBALLS in the act of worship altogether. This short term blindness might be explained away as shutting out the perception of the base, profane and actually there world and instead, looking toward the idealized shiny hyper-reality that is already pre-recorded right there in your visual memories …as if we had tiny extra EYEBALLS inside our brains. These are the same tiny extra EYEBALLS we will use to see our afterlives.
Wouldn’t it be a real kick in the face to get to the Pearly Gates and discover there were no tiny extra EYEBALLS for your afterlife? One might ask, “I thought Heaven was supposed to be a beautiful paradise full of my happy ancestors. WTF?” Saint Peter would answer, “You’ve believed up to now. Why stop? Trust me. It is a beautiful place.” Of course, Peter could tell you it’s Heaven when it’s really just the inside of a box. But how? Tiny extra EARDRUMS? My advice, if you’re planning on a traditional afterlife, is remember to bring YOUR EYEBALLS.
Most forms of worship lead to custom afterlives that require years of training to know exactly what awaits you. Can you imagine the shock and surprise of reincarnation if no one had ever told you that it was suppose to happen? The whole point of an afterlife is picturing yourself and select departed loved ones in it.
A wide assortment of visual depictions of a heavenly paradise are available with which to imagine a pre-afterlife simulation in which to place your simulated after-self that will one day after-live there. Intense moments of worship can be achieved by equally scrinching the left and right EYELIDS while calling upon your pre-installed simulation from your memory. This sounds like an extreme example and it is.
Many modern worshipful practices involve gently closing the EYELIDS and some eschew pre-fab visualizations. But, as worship goes, all the modern forms have one thing in common. They are all wrong.
Today, worship is something one does only after the proper approved visualizations have been installed in memory. Anything else would be a waste of worship juice, right? Imagine the embarrassment of visualizing the wrong heavenly paradise!
These glimpses of Heaven are coming from earthly sources like sermons and paintings. That is because, long ago, some worshipper had a glimpse of Heaven that came from Heaven. That lucky soul must have had a clean slate and no expectations about their afterlife to get in the way. Did they then encourage others to try their luck with a clean slate, too? Not exactly.
The burning question is, which came first… worship, or something to worship? The real answer is… OUR EYEBALLS.
Worship once meant to stare with eyes held open and a mind with a clean slate and no expectations. Lucky worshippers would trigger presentations of unconscious learning built from connections made in the nyeep pool. It was our first means of harvesting the results of unconscious or intuitive learning in a tangible way. All we had to do was aim OUR EYEBALLS at something likely to trigger an experience of visualizing. This was long before we worshipped people or had to learn established visualizations. The individual one-off experience came first.
If anyone would care to try our distant ancestors’ original form of worship, they will not need any tiny extra EYEBALLS in their brain. Just the regular ones will do and both will need to be open and stay open. WORSHIP with YOUR EYEBALLS can take two forms: static and non-static. Static is more difficult so we’ll start with that form.
Find a palm or hand sized object with a shape that is unlike anything natural at that size or something natural in small scale. Civilization should make this easy. A coffee spoon will do. Place or hold the object nearby and in your line of sight. Relax, be still and stare. Go ahead and blink… as little as necessary. Continue… shortly, things will start happening. If you hold still long enough, some of your Sub-Cinema perception will start to timer-out. Eventually, Hippo’s perception will almost entirely stop delivering any new visual information because repetition has saturated the retinal sensors causing anti-colors and haloed edges.
The object becomes visually unreal or super-real and makes us a clean slate with no expectations. Should our lucky distant ancestor have a Stored Narrative Charge lurking around in their nyeep pool, this would be just the opportunity it was looking for to stream to the surface.
Many individuals had their own palm-sized visual triggers that became a treasured part of their identity. With just a moment of worship, the object could remind the owner of who they were before heading out for day. Ancient stories tell of kings who made tireless but futile efforts to rid their subjects of personal icons to worship. It was and still is for some, the old static method.
Most humans have and still prefer the non-static form of worship, which has the advantage of being share-able. Start with a lot candles or a campfire. Build and clad a large shiny object like a Golden Calf and place it just above the fire where everyone can see it. The flickering reflection on the un-moving object will minimize retinal saturation but otherwise quickly produce the effects mentioned above. A steady view will be easier to sustaine because now the image is flowing… changing instant by instant so our flowing Cinema View can lock on and follow the changing image. Even though there is apparent movement in the image, Hippo will eventually tire of looking at it and Sub-Cinema Perception will slow and stop trying to accurately see it. Cinema perception becomes mesmerized and cyclic. Now the object is ready to become the guest narrator of your own wisdom (or foolishness) that boiled up from your nyeep pool.
The downside of this experiment is that it is unlikely to do much for us. We modern types are so trained in narrative ability that we maintain our own identity without the need for a refreshing round of worship. Our untrained ancestors may have found this to be their only means of sustaining a narration.
So, should you find yourself at a place of worship and happen to spot something with an undulating shine, remember how it all began. You can’t worship what you can’t see.