|
|
|
|
|
|
Part 9 - Continued excerpt from the beginning
of the book, 'Listen Carefully to Everything he Says, Then Ignore it
Completely', by C. Livingstone.
(See here about the Book)
MTYD -- Part 9
Not all the hippies in Rochdale were Cheech and Chongers though. After only
a couple of weeks, I discovered that Rochdale College had a Peace Center.
Actually the center was a small remnant of original Rochdale residents who
were setting up the center to promote world peace. This was quite a bit up
my alley so I threw in.
Having a pretty good idea of what words like ‘Peace’ and ‘Center’ meant,
I looked up a like-minded disk jockey at one of Toronto’s new
progressive rock and roll FM stations. Reiner and I talked about things
for a while and came up with the idea for the Peace Center to produce a
weekly tape of world peace type subjects.
John Lennon and Yoko were still in the middle of their ‘peace-in’ hey
days. Reiner had communicated his ideas to them and they were all for it
and pledged to get involved.
Reiner would then see that the tape got distributed around the four
hundred and fifty or so similar type FM stations already broadcasting by
then around the world. And it would be under the auspices of the
Rochdale Peace Center to give it an air of authenticity. I was to make
sure an interesting tape got produced on a regular weekly basis as my
end of the deal.
We mapped it all out in theory. Excited, I proposed it forthwith to the
President of the Peace Center who was running the show. After all, when
you think about it, this was as good an opportunity for any whose
mission was world peace to have first rate shot at it at a grass roots
level with the whole world in attendance as you could get.
The Rochdale Peace Center was the bouncing baby joy of a late thirties
aged Englishman still trying to live out the original promise of
Rochdale. Turned out that the mind coagulation had been just as thorough
with this fellow as with everybody, just not so visible on the surface.
His mission wasn’t at all about world peace, it was about the Center
itself.
The Peace Center had been his original idea, plus all the doings to get
it founded. “No, no, no”, he said when I told him the plans for world
wide plan. “You’ve got it all wrong. The whole idea of the Peace Center
is for Toronto to accept the idea of Rochdale College as a good thing
and not a bad thing”.
“So what we’re going to do is print up a bunch of posters and put one up
on every telephone pole within a six block radius of the College”, he
continued profoundly. “Then after a few weeks we’re going do it again”
and everyone will know that we’re great for the neighbourhood. In a
split of a second he had exposed a completely imploded view of the
universe at large and Rochdale College in particular. I had definitely
read the cue cards all wrong on this one.
It looked to me like the principle of the ‘Peter’ kind was at work.
Namely, that people rise to their level of incompetence, then they stay
there plugging up the works for the rest of time.
The ‘Peter Principle’ idea developed from the observations of a high
school teacher in Burnaby, British Columbia in the mid fifties. The
school’s very popular and competent chemistry teacher had just been
promoted to the head of the department. The very first thing he did was
order enough Bunsen burners for the next twenty one years. Huh?
Thinking it more than a passing strange thing to do, the author started
watching his fellow mankind with a renewed interest. Sure enough,
suddenly he saw the invisible operand at work. Namely everyone rises up
until they reach a point at which their competency turns incompetent.
Then they now bite off more than they can chew. And then there they stay
stuck working completely incompetently forever. I hope you got all that,
it might happen to you some day.
Civil servants, who the union says you can’t fire, are the classic
example. In a ‘Petered’ world, nearly everybody functions at a level
where they are completely inefficient because nobody can fire them. You
have to keep moving them up because of seniority.
Ego, the ‘Peter Principle’ is a foregone conclusion of any bureaucracy
and I bet you thought it was because they were all just idiots.
Similarly every now and then a large Corporation will suddenly recycle
their whole top end executive branch. It’s because a Peter Principle has
set in and the Company was going to tank if they didn’t.
At any rate, I finally gave up trying to get through to the guy about
the global Peace Center Plan, withdrew from the Center, and started
thinking about going back to Vancouver.
While I had been trucking around with the Peace Center however, Greydie
had been trucking around a bit with the Marshal McLuhan’s group of ‘The
Medium is the Message’ fame. Even sitting in on some of the Master’s
lectures as a guest sitter inner. McLuhan also used to talk about
‘Information Overload’ which nobody paid attention to.
Actually it was just a bit before its time. ‘Information Overload’ is
now, in the new millennium, around everywhere like it owns the place.
“Information Overload’ has become a self-evident problem for anybody in
the medical professions, sciences, or computing world to try and keep
abreast of the changes in their respective fields. In some of these
fields significant changes are occurring about at the rate of clock
ticks.
The result is now that professional people are factoring themselves into
more and more specialized disciplines in their desperate flailing boat
type struggle to try and keep abreast. Where someone might have once
been a family doctor, they are now a foot specialist in left foot toe
disorders. I met a Chartered Accountant not long ago whose specialty was
now mediating disputes.
Because the technical aspects of things are pressing forward at an ever
increasing whir of constant new innovation, the problem is now that more
and more, no two parts from two different manufactures fit. Computer
technicians spend a large part of their time trying to get an Acme
computer to work with an Ace video card.
Nothing new here. Plumbers have been grappling with the same type of
problem for over a hundred years. They don’t get their eighty bucks an
hour or whatever it is because they can solder two pipes together.
They get it because they know which manufacturer’s pipe end goes with
which other manufacturer’s pipe end so they can stick them together and
the toilet doesn’t overflow. Now the phenomenon has spilled over into
the whole world at large. Hence, ‘Information Overload’, finally
arrived.
A group of us were yakking it up one day, and somebody commented that
it’s going to be a hundred years before technology finally gets its act
together. Somebody else immediately wagged in, “No, in a hundred years
from now we’re going to have two kinds of robots walking around. One’s
going to have a positronnic brain and the other’s going to have a
nucleonic brain and they’re not going to talk to each other”. And in
case you didn’t know, Androids like to refer to Human Beings as
‘wetware’.
In fact it’s entirely possible for the problem to become so severe even
robots won’t be able to read the manuals. In fact, consider the
following limerick from the twenty second century. ‘There once was a
robot named Roy. Who was asked to make a new toy. He twiddled and
diddled and fumed as he fiddled, but only came up with a boy’. Bad
robot, bad, no oil for you.
Here’s another imponderable to ponder. Those of you who are using modern
current versions of a word processor like Microsoft Word, may have
noticed something interesting going on under the spell checker option.
Namely, that it will also check the grammar and offer suggestions.
What caught my attention about this is that it will often offer up a
whole different sentence but basically saying the same thing as your
original. Oft times the results are pretty comical. No surprises there.
Here and there however, the sentences are not only good, but in some
cases better than the one you originally had. I’ve used at least a dozen
such computer manufactured sentences while spell checking this book. If
you can spot them you’re pretty good.
My using them is not the point. Think about the kind of programming
sophistication needed for a software program to take something as
illogically abstract as grammar, specially English which is known world
wide for not being particularly logical, analyze it, and be able to spit
it back out in an improved form while still keeping the original sense
intact is the point.
That’s the seed for computers to be able to openly communicate in real
time some day in the near future, and it is surely hurtling towards us.
The day my computer starts talking to me and I haven’t turned it on yet
is the day I know it’s time to head for the hills.
On the other hand, maybe spell checkers will in fact some day become
obsolete down the road. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde
Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are in.
The olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the
rghit pclae. The rset of te ltrs can be a total mses and you can sitll
raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed
ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Priyty nifty eh?
Here’s another arcane little item to ponder. The name Howard Hughes has
always been synonymous with fabulous wealth. We hear the name and
instantly conjure billionaire and the world’s richest man. There has
always been a fabled someone wealthier than everyone else to be envied.
In ancient times it was King Midas. In the old days it was the financier
Bernard Baruch. Next it was Howard Hughes.
In the future there will no doubt be many candidates. Among the list for
a certainty, will be software mogul Bill Gates, who is starting to give
big chunks of it away for useful human endeavours. Also Ted Turner of
Time Warner. Hurray, hurray, and hurrah.
These are no doubt the kind of world shattering ruminations that
Rochdale College had been founded to spit out. Unfortunately, Rochdale
had crash landed long before anyone had had a chance to start spitting
out anything worth culminating.
Some interesting things to know did manage to slide out between the
doorways of Rochdale nonetheless. One of them came from the lips of
famous Science Fiction writer and anthologist, Judith Merrill.
Judith was one of the original denizens of Rochdale when it was first
set up under its original mandate. She was also the last of the
originals to leave after Rochdale had fallen on its face, becoming sort
of like an iconic elder when the new group of loosies had started moving
in.
Being of a somewhat extremely interesting lady in her early fifties,
who always used to wear a floppy hat which I swear was at least three
feet across the diameter, Judith and I became good yak buddies.
She told me one evening that during the latter forties and early fifties
she had been married to likewise famous science fiction writer Fredrick
Pohl. Eventually, she, Fredrick, Poul Anderson, and Ron Hubbard, two
other distinguished Si Fi writers of the time started travelling around
together in a ‘Friends’ type clack.
Every Friday evening they would convene at the Pohl household to hold
fort around the kitchen table quaffing beer and bouncing new Si Fi story
ideas they had been contemplating off each other for feedback. On night
Hubbard came in with the idea of cults and how easy it seemed to be to
suck in gullible followers by the boat load.
Everybody else thought he was nuts so the bet was on. For a bottle of
good wine he bet he could come up with an all new cult idea which enough
people would swallow that the thing would go. In early 1952, Scientology
was launched. Scientology quickly developed legs of its own, and now has
followers all over the world who believe that elephants can fly.
Rochdale College also had some other useful outputs. While still at
Rochdale College before heading back to Vancouver, I had an epiphany
that ended my roach toking proclivities once and for all. It happened on
the morning of February fourteen, 1970 to be exact.
A few of us had touched base with a small joint, talked a little, and
then started heading off into our various little ways and means
activities. I passed near the arm of one of the gals on the way out and
a definite big spark jumped across. It had jumped well more than three
quarters of an inch like the static from a doorknob. But she was
definitely no doorknob and there had definitely been no carpets
underfoot.
This had unsettled me a little and I eventually lay down to pass it off.
Almost instantly I had the distinct feeling of falling. Like I was
sinking quickly through the mattress as I lay out flat. I woke up,
drifted back into doze, and the falling started again only this time a
lot faster.
Suddenly I hit bottom and was standing in front of what could only be
described as a huge Judge’s desk in a stately courtroom. Somebody was
sitting behind the tall Judge’s desk like St Peter himself in gigantic
white hair and long white beard.
To the left, someone was reading aloud from a big open book. When he was
finished, the Judge looked down at me and declared in a great booming
voice something like, ‘Since I had rejected eternal survival it would be
thus and so’. Then he banged down hard with his gravel.
I snapped awake in a cold sweat. That seemed wayyy too real to be a
casual little excursion courtesy of the Mariposa express. I also felt
with a certainty that it had to do with my frequent little occasions at
the end of the micro furnace. And that the frequent little toking was
the culprit of my evident fall from grace.
I have no idea whether or not it was true or not, or that I had actually
been at the foot of St. Peter’s desk or not. Anyway, whatever it was, it
sure worked for me. I haven’t been near the stuff since and have no
intention of ever starting again. Talk about going out cold turkey and
the turkey’s not even out of the oven yet.
Before the event however, the issue had been anything but a cut and dry
matter. You will have no doubt noticed that throughout this whole
epicisodic period of hippie declination so far, I have skated around the
issues of pot and acid without getting very deep into the specifics.
This wasn’t because of brain cell deterioration, it was deliberate. In
the eventual gradual self detoxification of the months after this
Judgment of Nuremberg event, I began to see more and more clearly how
much the whole so called high thing from psychedelia was sheer illusion.
I had been telling many of my compatriots about how much my
consciousness had gone from here, ‘hand at the waist’, to here, ‘hand
way over my head’, during the five years of the hippie and band cycle. A
guy in the fall of 1970 looked me right in the eye and said, “Your
consciousness probably would have expanded a whole lot more if it hadn’t
been for all the pot and acid”. And as much as anyone hates a know it
all, I knew in my little heart of hearts that he was probably correct.
It turns out that the switch had been turned on in the fall of 1963. The
mass consciousness went though an almost overnight explosion into the
awareness of consciousness. It is happening again now, in the wake of
the close passage of Mars to Earth late August of 2003. Only this time
it will be into the full fourth dimensional use of consciousness and not
just the awareness as explained in detail in The Revelatorium at
www.Revelatorium.com.
At the risk of sounding like Tom Cruise wafting Scientology, I mention
the Revelatorium from time to time because of its consistency. Having
been a budding mathematician and philosopher, logical consistency is my
thing except when deliberately lampooning.
The first sentences of the Revelatorium are one hundred percent
consistent with the last sentence. Plus every sentence in between is
true to the chord. A series of simple geometric drawings which even
droolers can follow provides logically flawless and therefore credible
rules for creation of Creation.
The net logical perfection of the material to me self proves the
validity of its statements.
Besides, no one says you have to read the stuff, so
what harm is done by my giving it a plush in everyone’s direction? What
is life for, if not to commit to at least something other than beer and
pretzels.
At any rate, at least as far as these sagely discussion are concerned,
it’s official, if you haven’t yet tripped the light fantastic, don’t. If
you’re doing it now, now is as good a time as any to quit. A very big
bus load of consciousness expansion is going on and you’re not going to
be on it by sucking on the exhaust end of the enterprise.
Don’t forget now, this is coming from someone who’s been there, did it,
and bought the tee shirt. Not from somebody in a lab coat spouting stats
about rats in a pack in a lab free of bats.
However, I can’t avoid mentioning a few items about the subject which
are too comely to leave out. I include them at this point just so long
as we don’t all get carried away and forget the rules. Namely that it’s
not for the sake of praise that they receive this mention, but for the
fact that hippydom was not without its whimsy. Plus, they do kind of
tell it like it was in a rather compelling way.
One winter during the middle of the band era, seven of us decided to do
the Hippie macho thing and see how much pot we could smoke in how short
a period of time.
Nothing changes but the venue. Red necks like to boast about how many
beers they can drink and still stay standing. Hippies liked to boast
about how much pot they could smoke and still know what year it was.
Hippies were no different than red necks in some respects.
|
| |
|
|
|
|
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
|