Babylon (12 page)

   IDENTIALISM AS THE HIGHEST STAGE OF DUALISM

   Tatarsky jerked his hands away and stared in fright at the words for several seconds. Then he put his hands back and the ouija board began moving again, but this time the letters produced by the pen were small and neat:

   
These thoughts were originally intended for the journal of the Cuban armed forces, Oliva Verde. But it would be foolish to insist on matters of such petty detail now that we know for certain that the entire plan of existence, in which journals are published and armed forces engage in action, is simply a sequence of moments of awareness, united solely by the fact that in each new moment the concept of the preceding moments is present. Although from time without beginning this sequence remains unbroken, awareness is never actually aware of itself. Therefore the condition of man in this life is lamentable.

   
That great champion of the liberation of humanity, Siddhartha Gautama, has indicated in many of his works that the principle reason for the lamentable condition of man in this life is first and foremost the very conception of man’s existence, life and lamentable condition - that is to say, the dualism that imposes the division into subject and object of something that in actual fact has never existed and never will.

   Tatarsky pulled out the sheet of paper covered in writing, set his hands on the ouija board and it trembled into motion again:

   
Siddhartha Gautama was able to convey this simple truth to many people because in his time their feelings were simple and strong, and their internal world was clear and unclouded. Hearing a single word could completely change a man’s entire life and transport him instantly to the other shore, to a freedom unconstrained in any way. But since that time many centuries have passed. The words of the Buddha are now accessible to all, yet salvation comes to but few. There can be no doubt that this is the result of the cultural situation that the ancient texts of all religions called the ‘dark age’ to come.

   
Comrades in the struggle! This dark age has already begun. And its onset has been brought about primarily by the role that the so-called visual-psychic generators or type-two objects have come to play in the life of man.

   
In speaking of the fact that dualism lisas engendered by the arbitrary division of the world into subject and object, the Buddha was concerned with subject-object division of the first type. The major distinguishing feature of the dark age lies in the decisive influence exerted on the life of man by subject-object division of the second type, which in the time of the Buddha simply did not exist.

   
In order to explain what is meant by objects of the first and second types, let us take a simple example, a television set. This is simply a box with a glass wall, which we are free to watch or not watch. When an individual’s gaze falls upon a dark screen, the movement of his or her eyes is controlled exclusively by internal nerve impulses or the psychological process taking place in his or her consciousness. For instance, an individual might notice that the screen is fly-spotted. Or he or she might decide that it would be a good idea to buy a television twice as big. Or think that it would be a good idea to stand it in a different corner. Until a television is switched on it is in no way different from the objects with which people had to deal in the Buddha’s time, be it a stone, the dew on a blade of grass or an arrow with a divided head - in short, everything that the Buddha used to illustrate his talks.

   
But when a television is turned on, it is transformed from an object of the first type into an object of the second type. It becomes a phenomenon of an entirely different order. And although the person looking at the screen does not notice this customary transformation, it is truly immense. For the viewer the television disappears as a material object that possesses weight, size and other physical properties. Instead of this the viewer has the sensation of being present in a different space, a sensation familiar to all who are assembled there.

   Tatarsky glanced around, as though expecting to find himself surrounded by this assembled company, but of course there was nothing to be seen. As he removed another sheet of paper covered in writing from under the board, he figured out roughly how long the paper would last, then set his palms back against the wooden surface.

   
Comrades in the struggle! The question is - who is actually present? Can we say that it is the viewer himself?

   
Let us repeat the question, since it is extremely important: is it possible to say that the television is being watched by the individual who is watching it?

   
We assert that it is not, for the following reason. When the individual viewed the television while it was switched off, the movement of his or her eyes and the flow of his or her attention were controlled by his own voluntary impulses, chaotic though they may have been. The dark screen with no image of any kind did not exert any influence over them, or if it did, it was only as a background.

   
When it is switched on, a television almost never transmits a static view from a single motionless camera, and therefore the image on it is not a background. Quite the contrary, this image changes at an extremely rapid rate. Every few seconds there is either a change of camera angle or a fade into close-up on some object, or a switch to a different camera - the image is constantly being modified by the cameraman and the producer who stands behind him. This changing of the image is known as technomodification.

   
We ask you to pay particularly close attention at this point, since our next thesis is rather difficult to grasp, although in essence it is extremely simple. In addition, the feeling might arise that we are dealing with something that is insignificant. But we make bold to assert that we are in fact dealing with the most real psychological phenomenon of the end of the second millennium.

   
The changes in the image produced by various technomodifications can be correlated with a virtual psychological process in which the observer is forced to switch his attention from one event to another and select the most interesting content from what is taking place - that is, to manage his own attention as the makers of the programme manage it. This psychological process creates its own virtual subject, which for the duration of the television programme exists in place of the individual, fitting into his or her consciousness like a hand into a rubber glove.

   
This is similar to the condition of possession by a spirit. The difference lies in the fact that in this case the spirit does not exist; all that does exist are the symptoms of possession. This is a virtual spirit, but from the moment the viewer entrusts the programme-makers with redirecting his or her attention at will from object to object, he or she effectively becomes this spirit, and the spirit, which does not actually exist, possesses this viewer and millions of others.

   
What is taking place could appropriately be called the experience of collective non-existence, since the virtual subject that replaces the viewer’s actual consciousness is absolutely non-existent - it is merely an effect created by the collective efforts of editors, cameramen and producers. However, for the individual watching the television there is nothing more real than this virtual subject.

   
Furthermore, Lapsang Suchong of the Pu Er monastery believes that if a certain programme, for instance a football game, were to be watched simultaneously by more than four-fifths of the population of Earth, this virtual effect would become capable of displacing from the aggregate human consciousness the collective karmic vision of the human plane of existence, the consequences of which could be unpredictable (it is entirely possible that to the hell of molten metal, the hell of knife trees etc. there would be added a new hell, the hell of an eternal football championship). However, his calculations have yet to be verified, and in any case this is a matter for the future. Here we are interested not so much in the frightening prospects for tomorrow as in the no less frightening reality of today.

   
Let us draw our first conclusion. Corresponding to the object of the second type, that is, to a television that is switched on, we have a subject of the second type - that is, a virtual viewer, who manages his or her attention in exactly the same way as a programme production crew does. Feelings and thoughts, as well as the secretion of adrenalin and other hormones in the viewer’s organism, are dictated by an external operator and determined by the calculations of another individual. And of course, the subject of the first type does not notice the moment when he is displaced by the subject of the second type, since following this displacement there is no longer anyone to notice it, as the subject of the second type is unreal.

   
But it is not merely unreal (this word is in effect applicable to everything in the human world). There are no words to describe the degree of its unreality. It is a heaping of one unreality upon another, a castle constructed of air, the foundations of which stand upon a profound abyss. The question might arise: why are we wallowing in these non-existences, attempting to gauge the degree of their unreality? However, this difference between subjects of the first and second types is of extreme importance.

   
Subject number one believes that reality is the material world. But subject number two believes that reality is the material world as it is shown on the television.

   
As a product of false subject-object division, subject number one is illusory. But at least there is an observer of the chaotic movement of his or her thoughts and moods - in metaphorical terms we can say that subject number one is constantly watching a television programme about himself or herself, gradually forgetting that he or she is an observer and identifying with the programme.

   
From this point of view subject number two is something absolutely improbable and indescribable. It is a television programme watching another television programme. Emotions and thoughts participate in this process, but the individual in whose consciousness they arise is entirely absent.

   
The rapid switching of a television from one channel to another, which is used to avoid watching the advertisements, is known as zapping. Bourgeois thought has investigated in considerable detail the psychological condition of the individual who engages in zapping, and the corresponding thought patterns, which are rapidly becoming the basic forms of the modem world. But the type of zapping that is considered by the researchers of this phenomenon corresponds only to switching between channels by the viewer.

   
The switching to and fro of the viewer that is controlled by the producer and cameraman (that is, the forcible induction of subject number two by means of technomodifications) is a different type of zapping, a coercive form, study of which is effectively prohibited in every country of the world except Bhutan, where television is forbidden. But coercive zapping, whereby the television is converted into a remote control for the viewer, is not simply one method among others of organising an image sequence; it is the very foundation of television broadcasting, the major means by which the advertising-informational field exerts its influence on consciousness. From this point on, therefore, we shall refer to the type-two subject as Homo Zapiens, or HZ.

   
Let us repeat this extremely important conclusion: in the same way as a viewer who does not wish to watch the advertisements switches between television channels, instantaneous and unpredictable technomodifications switch the actual viewer to and fro. Assuming the condition of Homo Zapiens, the viewer becomes a remotely controlled television programme. And he or she spends a significant part of his life in this condition.

   
Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: ‘There, that is Homo Zapiens.’ HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house.

   
At this point the question logically arises of why modern man has found himself in such a situation. Who is trying to replace the already deluded Homo Sapiens with a cubic metre of empty space in the condition of HZ?

   
The answer, of course, is clear: nobody. But let us not become fixated on the bitter absurdity of the situation. In order to understand it in greater depth, let us recall that the main reason for the existence of television is its advertising function, which is indissolubly linked with the circulation of money. We shall therefore have to turn our attention to that area of human thought which is known as economics.

   
Economics is the name of a pseudo-science that deals with the illusory relations between subjects of the first and second types as they are involved in the hallucinatory process of their imaginary enrichment.

   
This discipline regards each individual as a cell of an organism that the economists of the ancient world knew as Mammon. In the educational materials of the Front for Full and Final Liberation it is called simply ORANUS (which translates into Russian as ‘moutharse’). This more accurately reflects its real nature and leaves less scope for mystical speculation. Each of these cells - that is, each individual, when regarded as an economic entity -possesses a kind of social membrane that allows money (which plays the role of blood and lymph in the organism of oranus) to pass into and out of the cell. From the point of view of economics, the function of each of these cells is to absorb as much money as possible through this membrane and to release as little as possible back through it.

   
But the imperative of oranus’s existence as a whole requires its cellular structure to be bathed in a constantly increasing stream of money. Therefore oranus, in the process of its evolution (and it is located at a level of evolution close to that of a mollusc) develops a primitive nervous system, the so-called ‘media’. This nervous system transmits throughout its virtual organism impulses that control the activity of the monadic cells.