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CHAPTER 7
EIGHTY-SIX BILLION BUTTERFLY-TARANTULA- TELEVISION SETS
What if you had eighty-six billion butterflies and tarantulas and television sets right inside your head from the day you were conceived, even before you had a head. They’d be flying and crawling around, all trying to survive, while the TV’S, all with eighty-six billion channels each, broadcasting shows. Some current, on the air now. Others re-runs from a billion years ago. And still others might be showing previews that would be viewable only in the future.
That is the kind of thing going on inside your head every second of every moment of every day and every night of your life from the moment you were growing inside your mother (or someday in a jar) from fertilization and conception to death, and probably beyond.
It’s called consciousness and it knows no beginning and no end.
Music is always playing – a lilting Schubert, Mozart whizzing by. There goes Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, and oh, poor John Lennon. Isn’t that Arabic chanting calling to the Mosque? Tibetan Bells, Gregorian monks and wow Tommy Dorsey and his big band. Uh-oh, that’s the theme from Jaws. Scary.
There’s your mother’s voice calling you into the house for your bath. What’s-his-name’s campaign speech, that unlucky bastard. The last scenes from a thousand movies whose titles or names of stars you can’t remember but will never forget. The formula for methyl hydroxide , and puella, the Latin word for girl.
Oh, the head. Oh, that busy sleepless head that thinks so many thoughts at once. How to quiet that busy brain and give it a coffee break.
Doesn’t seem to want one.
Thoughts. Thoughts. Thought. Butterflies. Spiders. Memories. Music.
Memories like that beautiful night in Venice, embarrassing times you made an awful fool of yourself. The rage when you remember what Uncle Bernie did. The astonishment when you learn what really happened between Mom and Dad before you were born that explains absolutely EVERYTHING.
Then there are the fleeting moments when you wish so hard you were somebody else in the mountains of Peru, or your horrid dread that you will get sick and be all alone. And especially your dream of the perfect mate who is absolutely crazy about you and never hassles you for one moment the entire eighty years you are together.
Where do all these notions come from? Billions and billions of bubbles from the bubble machine buried someplace at the base of your neck, maybe?
What are thoughts anyway? Don’t seem to be at all in control of them. Some are tantalizing like pictures of delicious piping hot dishes you wish you were eating right this minute. Others are haunting. They torture you with tempting, seductive figures who pop in and disappear the moment you try to kiss the bubbles. Still, others are too painful to bear, because they evoke both a sadness that persist until this minute, or joys that have fled into the past without turning their head to say good-bye.
The human brain is the creative director of a colossal blockbuster movie, starring the brilliant wonderful, gorgeous, sexy, ever youthful ever popular, YOU.
You play yourself at six, thirty-one, and sixty. That requires imagination.
And what about those dreams of yours? They’d be too expensive ever to make. Where do they come from?
Like the one where you’re swimming in the sea surrounded by dolphins, or when a pregnant woman whispered the secret of life in your ear and you forgot the moment you woke up, or when you had sex with a cannibal in a church?
Holy cow, what prompted that one?
And that is going on in YOUR head alone. You also have to deal with the six billion other heads in the world. They are also operating twenty-four seven, same as yours. Just think of all that brain energy going on at the same time on the Earth alone. It never stops day or night.
Forget the cats and dogs, elephants and ants, tse-tse flies, rats, actual butterflies and tarantulas, all thinking their little wordless thoughts as they crawl, slither, walk, swim, and fly toward the same end without knowing why.
And yours. Your human brain. What is it? Is it just some yukky-looking gray pulp you’d never buy if you saw it in a butcher shop window?
(Although we do hear of some folks eating monkey or even cow brains and some tribes that are said to eat the brains of their victims – you know we’ve all had relationships with jerks who tried to do that)!
Those are from scary black and white movies people used to go see at drive-in theaters back in the nineteen fifties.
Or did you dream it?
Did you make all that up?
The brain cannot stop from inventing, creating, confabulating, distorting, defending, and just plain yakking. Thank God, too. The incessant chatter of the brain protects you and can easily concoct a bullshit story when you need one quick to get you out of a jam and forget something horrible you’ve done or witnessed and cannot bear to acknowledge.
That lump of cerebral protoplasm that looks like pudding that’s been in the fridge a couple of days too long–what the hell is it? Where does it get its information? How does it store it? And how in tarnation could it be the organ of transformation that searches ceaselessly for answers, Enlightenment, meaning, and some intangible invisible jell-o we call the Truth?
Science tirelessly yearns to uncover the trick behind the magic, in the hopes of finally pulling the curtain away and finding a poor, grizzled, fraud with stained pants posing as the great and powerful Oz. Reducing the mystery to a series of formulas and equations which will once and for all reveal what makes consciousness tick. C-T scans and microscopes will pierce the heart of whatever It is that creates creative thought and governs the human controversy over whether or not deep inside the brain there lies the possibility of Choice.
Are you directed to move about, arms extended in front of you, eyes only half-open like a sleepwalker, stumbling trance-like towards your Destiny?
Or can you awaken and change your course?
Can you actually change your own pattern of thinking, and in so doing, alter your Fate?
And what? It all depends on that pudding inside your skull? Eighty-six billion neurons held together by a glop of gooey matter and sizzling energy, dancing sparks of the fire of life? A neuron? What the hell is that when it comes to falling in love?
Electrical energy? Don’t ask me, remember I thought a toaster makes toast by witchcraft.
Something sparks that brain into life right from the time you are inside your Mommy’s tummy. Exactly when that happens we will have to let the Supreme Court decide (Ha-ha). Does it happen when you are born and the doctor slaps your little tooshie, you start drying and you get your first hint of what life is going to be like? Or it may be as the Right-to-Lifers insist, that it is the instant the Egg says to the Sperm, “Oh, all right, come on in. But don’t go datinig any other eggs!”
No question– the physical brain and everything in it is produced starting from day one and even before, in the DNA of your biological parents. All their memories, hopes, fears, joys and miseries from way back are packed into that little thing they call the zygote or something like that, which will eventually be you from that moment on.
From that moment on.
We shall see in a later section of this book just what the term “from that moment on’ actually turns out to mean.
But more questions arise. Does Choice begin there?
We’ll get to that, too.
But first, just think. From the earliest moment we can possibly imagine, the brain starts developing. It stores not only your memories, but those of your ancestors. Even though the tiny little cootie which will soon be you doesn’t have the gift of language or an intelligible conscious thought , it begins to gather awareness of itself coming into being–the where, the why, the when, and the how of it. The It — you becomes aware of its environment from day one, even on the most primitive level. It hears. It feels. It starts to begin being. Every moment is photographed, collected, stored. It becomes affected by outside circumstances and begins perceiving those circumstances and accepting them as part of its reality.
As the brain develops, the spine and the heart do also. Deep within, mysterious rivers begin to flow, setting in motion an even more mysterious set of clocks, called the endocrine glands.
They are your connection with eternity. You receive cosmic energy and information through these glands, and they are the true source of your ability to tap into the information of your past, present future, and oddly, your power to undergo your own spiritual transformation.
Therein lies your capacity for choice.
Ridiculous? Hare-brained? Half-assed? Especially from someone who nearly killed his chemistry professor with sulfuric acid? If you think that’s ridiculous, have you watched prime-time television lately? Now THAT is ridiculous. Especially because the human brain, your magical, blessed organ of thought, is being systematically drugged and shut down by modern life in the Western World.
The Food and Drug Administration together with many other powerful un-thinking leaders are actually responsible for the gradual disintegration and destruction of evolving thought and development of human consciousness. Apart from the small number of what many people think are kooks who eat organic veggies and refuse the wholesale medications indiscriminately prescribed by many western physicians, the brains of the human population are being consistently dulled on a daily basis.
I am not saying there exists a cabal of evil witches and warlocks who have evil designs on the human race. But there are many powerful people who are perfectly happy if the population at large is not filled with thinkers who ask too many questions.
So it’s a lot easier to sell cars with shiny grills, big tv’s, and sausage and cheese sandwiches between pancakes, fill the people up with fat and Xanax, than it is to cope with the discontentment that comes when you dare to awaken individuals from the slumber that poses for life.
But I digress.
You should do some reading on your own in real life science books on the endocrine systems, written by knowledgeable people. They know all the chemical terms for the hormones that flow out like mighty rivers throughout the human body.
My particular take on the endocrine system is all made up. I have no scientific basis for my claims. I believe however, that the glands and hormones read and define your cosmic position in the Universe.
The endocrine system, specifically the hypothalamic, pituitary complex, pineal body and all the hormones secreted by them, act as sanative receivers of environmental stimuli, to provide your subjective interpretations of those stimuli, and thus producing your perceptions, thoughts, feelings and emotions, which eventually evoke your actions and responses.
Here’s an example: You step off the bus one evening and start walking the three blocks to your house. It’s late at night. Suddenly the Moon disappears behind a cloud, and it is suddenly much darker. For some reason you are struck by the beauty of the reflection of the Moon behind the clouds, and you tarry to ponder the spectacle.
A few nights later the same event occurs, but with quite a different reaction. This night you get an eerie chill. The streetlight looks tall and thin and ominous. You could swear you hear footsteps. You hurry home, panting and out of breath.
Why would you suddenly take flight?
Why react so differently to the same stimuli?
Here is where your eighty-six billion butterfly-tarantula-television sets inside your brain start “reading” everything that is happening in every direction at every moment, extending infinitely outward in all directions in space and time.
Where does Astrology come in? I’ll get to that.
