A Day for Damnation

FORTY-SIX

I KEPT fading in and out of consciousness.

My mind was like something else in my head. It was a voice that wasn't me. I had the weird sensation of not being my own mind any more. Instead, I was just a disembodied listener. All that babbling-it didn't have anything to do with me.

It was a network of connections. A computer made of meat. A reaction machine. Something with a hundred million years of history attached to it. A reptilian cortex. A monkey's reactions.

I remember, I started laughing, "Help me! I'm trapped inside a human being." And then I cried because it was so sad. Why a human being? Why did God make us into these things? Why hairless apes-!!

I could see the horror of it. I had a computer inside my head. A computer that I couldn't shut off. It was a vast, uncontrollable memory-storage-and-retrieval device. It kept bubbling up with thoughts and images and emotions-all those emotions-like bubbles in a tar pit. I felt as if I were drowning. I couldn't escape from it. I wanted to stop listening to it.

And then I did.

All that noise-that wasn't me.

It was as if I could see my own thoughts-so clearly-and how my body automatically followed each thought without question.

The mind and body were one. The body was a robot-and I was just the soul trapped inside, watching and listening. I had no control at all. I never had. It was the machinery that ran-even the freewill machinery was automatic.

At first, I thought--

Thought. Hmp. That's funny. Thought. How can you think about thinking without thinking? Thinking is its own trap. But I wasn't thinking any more. I was just... looking. Looking to see what was happening.

It was very peaceful.... It was ...

Like--

When I was sixteen, my dad took me to a programmers' convention in Hawaii. Globall paid for it. That was Dad's rule. You could do anything you want, if you could afford it.

The first night we were in Hawaii, we were taken out to dinner by three of the members of the convention committee. We went to one of those revolving restaurants that they always have on top of the tallest hotels. I remember, one of the ladies asked me what I thought of Honolulu, and I told her, I couldn't figure out what it was-but it was different somehow. But I couldn't figure out what the difference was.

She smiled and told me to look out the window. I did. I spent a long time studying the twilit streets of Honolulu below us. The cars were the same cars. The buses were the same buses. The street signs, the streetlights, all looked the same as I was familiar with in California. Even the style of architecture was familiar. It could have been a suburb of Oakland or the San Fernando Valley.

"I'm sorry," I told her, "I can't tell what it is."

"No billboards," she said.

I turned back to the window and looked again. She was right. There was no outdoor advertising of any kind.

She told me that there was a state law prohibiting signs larger than a certain size. She said that was one of the reasons Hawaii always seemed so quiet to tourists. You walk down a city street anywhere else in the world and you're bombarded with advertising, so you learn to "tune it out." All that advertising is like a steady chattering noise in your ears. In order to function, we have to make ourselves deliberately blind and deaf to that part of our environment. The advertisers know that we do this, so they increase the size, the color, the intensity and the repetitions of their ads. They give us more, better, and different ads. And we tune them out even harder.

But... when we get to a place where that channel of mind-noise is missing, the silence is suddenly deafening. She told me that most people don't even notice that the signs are there, but they notice that something is wrong when they're not. Like you did, she said, they experience it as quietude.

"I like it," I said. The herd is quietude.

Until you've experienced quiet, you can't know how loud the noise is. It's all the mind-noise in the world that keeps us crazy. All that constant mind-chatter is so distracting that it keeps us from seeing the sky, the stars, and the souls of our lovers. It keeps us from touching the face of God.

In the herd, you detach from all that noise-it floats apart from you-and all that's left is a joyous feeling of emptiness and light. It's so peaceful.

I think that's why people go to the herd. For the peace. That's why I did. That's why I want to go back.