Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Where were you?

Where were you twenty million years ago, when I was a kenyan monkey with a cataract? Where were you when I was on my toes, singing the songs of a wild bird set afire by the flames of afforestation? Where were you when the ice claws of infinity smothered me in my sleep? Where were you when gravity alerted Newton? Where were you when I was stuck at a railway station selling stolen second hand watches? Where were you in biblical times? Where were you throughout history? You were mankind, and you were lost to religion. Throughout. You are probably one of the 7.8 billion humans who believe in rebirth. Which means that you have been written about in history. You have been continually contributing, over the generations, to the present state of human history. Not a pretty state, mostly because you have visions, you can see the future, you have a religion with a foresight. It can tell you to face anything, and do exactly the right things at any given point of time. You have become zombies with a thirst for god, a belief in a pan quanta explanation for everything. You are as bad as the Jedi in Australia, and as confused as ASCII designers who happened to be Douglas Adams fans and made ‘*’ the universal character, that stood for ‘everything’ have a ASCII value of ‘42’. Ask Google, it can tell you the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Mankind has put itself into Google. It has contributed all its efforts to making sure that Google knows every single detail about it. Then Mankind goes right ahead and wonders how Google got so powerful. Google knows you inside out. This is no conspiracy, I think Google is a great thing, but just look at the things Google can do. You already know these things, yet you have not given them a second thought. Really, that is subtle design for you. Google is psychoactive on a level that you choose to ignore. It can hit deep, like really deep within you, and you won’t even know it. For example, Google can successfully turn up advertisements that are relevant to the contents of your mail. Google can analyse human written language, enough to know the most important words in the mail. It can then create a list of probable ideas you will have when you read these words, and then send up a relevant advertisement from its database. And this works, as a lot of people who advertise with Google would acknowledge. And it can do this automatically. Without human intervention. Google can know what an email means to you, without even reading it. But Google can be easily confused by the users. It can be used, but still misled. Click on the most irrelevant ads. Do not buy anything, and repeatedly click on the most irrelevant ads. Spam click them. For every search page you open that you think is relevant, open two search pages that you think are irrelevant. Play games with it. Try composing mails that have words uniformly three syllables long. Or set up filter bounces, like if you get a mail from so-and-so, you filter it so that it forwards it back to so-and-so, and so-and-so sets up a filter to forward all incoming mail from you back to you. Also maintain multiple mailboxes. Do whatever you want to screw with Google, but please do not, for heaven’s sake, troll about on Orkut. Just don’t mess with Orkut. That’s where the real people are, and we get hurt if you bullshit over there.
The Google technology mentioned here do not, in fact, exist. They are all made up. But if you fell for it, there is a reason. Try to figure out that reason. That reason, will reveal to anyone why they have killed the Messiah. You see, your religion is a dedication to one single idea. The attributed origin of that idea is the Messiah. Like Buddha, Allah or Jesus. These are the people that are attributed to supplying the ideas of the religion to their people. The Messiah wrote a text. The test was history. There are other Messiahs, its Lucas for the Jedi in Australia, Adams for ASCII designers, and Google for all the people in the world with an internet connection. Its Oscar Wilde for Aestheticism, Lamarck for Lamarckism, Marx for Marxism, Sidhu for Sidhuisms, Einstein for physics, The Nazis for film, and young people for MTv. Every religious text has an author. The author is your Messiah. And that author is dead.
Which makes religion something beautiful. Something pleasing, and something really gratifying. Admit this, because it has to be true. It is true because the author’s death has elevated religion to a piece of art. It is not being performed, it is static and immortal and aging. And with age, it becomes beautiful. It has bright, vivid colors that ripen across history, and the pigments of the art is the people of the faith ascended unto heaven. It is a thing of beauty so great, that it has matured beyond being the source of sadness. Sadness is a rapid rush, passing through you in a motion as if it has been sucked out from you. When you look at it, you will not feel sad. You will be beyond that. You will be horrified. You will not be able to bear it. You will want to leave it, but you cannot. It is sucking other things from you. It is a piece of art that you have surrendered your heart to. You cannot weep over it. The forms in the art have never changed. They have forever maintained the same function. The art was created, when the author died remember? You are the art. Where were you?

No comments: