...
I mean REALIZED what had only ever been a concept one couldn't argue with until that moment... about my mental conditioning... about how the ONLY verification for almost anything I only think I know is beyond my ability to find anywhere outside blind trust.
I read something about something to do with 9/11 at TomPaine.CommonSense — which I think is defunct — in, I think, 2003 or maybe 2004, upstairs in the McMansion on my mother's PC. It was such an outrageous claim, whatever it was, that I clicked on the contact button and demanded the author give me sources. The poor guy could only write back and say that he had been a journalist for decades and didn't know another way to convince me he was not making it up.
I'd already been working on my Zen for a decade, but STILL, after all that very pointed at this very problem research I had done, and deep contemplation over the wisdom from the ancients I had been privileged to receive, it wasn't until I received his meek and bewildered response that the light bulb went on.
Every day I ever spent in school. Every minute in the vicinity of a tv or radio. Every newspaper or magazine. Every BOOK. Every conversation. Absolutely every strip of everything that constituted what I know, outside my own direct experience, had either been only taking someone's word for it or what I'd made out of someone's word for it.
I realized my actual knowledge can only originate from my half of the cosmos, the demarcation for it being my skin. Outside my skin, just my little brainpan computer making things out of inputs, but from the equally vast expanse inside my skin HAS TO BE the only source for truth... actuality... fundamentally real stuff.
No other possibility. If it's real, it's RIGHT HERE.
Sure, yeah, my senses can make darn good observations on that. I know if I put my shoes on today. I know if the tree out the window is there or not, but as to the fundamental reality of anything going on in the whole world, I'm not even going to be able to trust fully a live stream of it I'm watching in real time.
Then I think back on the million times the point had been made to me, one way or another, and the other million times I'd figured it out for myself, and how in ALL those millions of times I had not seen all the way into the crux of it... not until that poor journalist got back to morally-outraged me... FIFTEEN YEARS AGO... when I was FIFTY years old!
Even if yer much older than me, stop fucking up, but definitely stop it if you're younger. It's all gone too far, waaaaay too far. The trouble is RIGHT HERE.
The solution is too.
pipe up any time....
