I was going to write a series of totally meaningless sentences to illustrate the manipulative power of diversion but then I got off track and decided to start this issueí¢â‚¬â„¢s theme with the following story, only by then it was too late and we had this paragraph as our definite start, but looking back on it now, we do end-up with these past few meaningless sentences to kick us off, so, yeah biotch.

I bet you caní¢â‚¬â„¢t count to ten?

Huh?

Yeah Ií¢â‚¬â„¢m serious, I bet you caní¢â‚¬â„¢t count to ten.

The story goes that a Zen Master invited a great physicist to sit quietly and count to ten, following each breath, the object being simply to be aware of each number & breath without a diversion of focus.By the 2nd or 3rd minute after the fresh call to the exercise became dull in the wandering meadows of his mind, the scientist went back to the master and said, í¢â‚¬Å“I have two PhDs in Math and I caní¢â‚¬â„¢t count to two.í¢â‚¬ 

Try it. Take 15 minutes.

(Do you know when you are wandering? And if you know, then youí¢â‚¬â„¢re not wandering. But when do you not know?)

When he put his mind to this simple task, he discovered that he had no real control. Everything in the mind just arises.

Side bar in the middle:

Ití¢â‚¬â„¢s true, did you ever notice that youí¢â‚¬â„¢ve never intended any thought that has come to mind? Even the thought that you recall over and again, you could not have had it but that it came to you already. (To think what you should think is already to have had the thought.) The way that things arise í¢â‚¬“ the blood involuntarily to your heart, your lips in little murmurs at this sentence, there is a flow to everything that often eludes because we doní¢â‚¬â„¢t realize the very fact of í¢â‚¬Ëœa thought processí¢â‚¬â„¢ but rather perceive thought after the fact, using other thoughts to do so, ordering and trading these on other (often arbitrary) scales of meaning and so-it-seems-I-would-reckon: diversion is nothing but an after-opinion about how we hoped, thought or wanted something to be, thence organized in our minds but not even put there by us in the first place, uncertain whatí¢â‚¬â„¢s next in the matrix and, ah, really, is there any hope for this comedy routine called the human mind and what the hell does any of this have to do with anything?

30ish thousand years ago, which in time is like the equivalence of maybe the last paragraph of a whopping book telling the larger story of life and its survival on Earth, and probably because of the need to defend against larger predators, human thought, foresight and cooperation all evolved. Soon came farming and your strained little eyes plowing the netscape of this monitor, over and around which perhaps you wondered if there was ever any alternative beginning to this article, or if it was always merely the few lines laid down up-top, as is, and this is the miracle of your brain - the slightest abstraction fed by memory/experience in the recall of a past or future í¢â‚¬“ real or imagined: this is the power and creative faculty of human consciousness. This was the original diversion where we drifted from the pure non-reflexive awareness of the animal, and which was successful because it invented for us an illusion í¢â‚¬“ the future and the past. This doesní¢â‚¬â„¢t mean there is no calendar-time, but notice when you consider the past and the future, it is always considered NOW, in the present, and this, coupled with the innate survival fears enabled what we call identity, the í¢â‚¬Å“Ií¢â‚¬  and memory. The illusion. All of the blue pill. This (I-pod) is responsible for the evolution of ownership, calculated realms of power, ideology, religion and the whole í¢â‚¬Å“what ifí¢â‚¬  that has proved equally a blessing and curse to us.

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All images: Andrew Lindy