Electra: The Cognition Tax

THE COGNITION TAX

EXM - 1 ca. 1991

A long time ago, the people of the land were suffering from a dread disease that no one knew how to cure. The disease caused war and insanity and cruelty and delusions and all manners of corruption, temptation and seduction. After a while everyone on the planet was infected with the disease without exception.

Many religions grew up around the disease, in an effort to curb its spread and contain its influence. Because no one knew what caused the disease most of the cures and preventative measures were found to be ineffective and based on myth and superstition. But a thorough gathering of the native wisdom on the subject demonstrated somehow, somewhere the disease had a cause and a possible cure.

This went on for centuries, entire civilizations were born, grew, prospered, and died and then were born again under the influence and pall of the disease. At its best people lived in a facade of civility and social propriety, with a high standard of living for some at the expense of others who were held in contempt by the more powerful minority. At its worst, there were dark ages, terror and wars beyond imagination, leaving death and suffering all around - the ocean waves were made of tears, and the sound of the wind was the crying for the peace of the grave for as far as you could hear.

The disease hit people hardest in their spiritual and ethical centers of the mind, it made them believe things that were not true, and made them afraid of things that did not exist. It made them hallucinate evil in others where there only existed stupidity, ignorance and fear, magnified by their own infection with the disease. Cruelty, imprisonment, and slavery became the order of the day, sometimes subtle, sometimes outright, but always total and triumphant.

Schools were a bastion of religious and scientific fanaticism, pushing ignorance, superstition and myth as truth. Students were either apathetically well behaved, following in the deranged and degraded footsteps of their parents and teachers, or they became violent rebels bent on destroying the world, relishing the day it would all end even if it took them with it.

Out of this whirlwind came a man, a very great man by all accounts, possibly the greatest man ever to live. He was revered as Savior by some and reviled as Anti-Christ by others. But for those who knew his true story he was a dicom to the terror and nightmare of the time, and surely, what ever the truth was, some small spark of the Divine had become manifest again.

He claimed he was no different than anyone else, just a man, but he said all men were Divine, and I guess he knew if people did not come to realize this, they would all face a dark and terrible future that could only be called a Hell.

He grew up in the middle of the turmoil and spent his childhood going to school like everyone else, but somehow he realized that something was very wrong, that people did not understand the source of the disease that ravaged their souls, and so all of their efforts to cure it were in vain. When he grew up he wandered the lands both far and wide seeking wisdom where ever he could find it. He marveled how the wisest people were living in the greatest squalor, and those who had the highest standard of living and the technical expertise to produce it were practically dead in their souls. Wisdom had become for them a parlor game for the jaded in search of a joke.

He spent many years seeking the answers to man's woes in the pockets of wisdom that yet remained on the planet, and he finally realized that nowhere did an answer exist, and that he would have to start from scratch and do it alone. Now another man might have given up at this point, for in these lands people were tortured for seeking the truth, but this man rolled up his sleeves and went to work.

He worked for 20 years fighting off harassment from the governments and religions of the world, and developed a small following of people who saw the wisdom of his ways. They knew that he was different and if anyone had a chance to solve this thing, he did.

At the culmination of his work he finally solved the problem and attained a state of clarity, lucidity and enlightenment that had not graced the mind of men for untold eons.

He taught the mental Technology that he discovered to his followers and taught them how to apply it to each other and to themselves so that they too could free themselves of the awful strain that had been infecting their souls for ever.

For them it was a pioneering time, an exciting and joyous time, one that I long very much to have been part of.

As time went on, it became clear to the population of the land that this man and his followers knew what they were doing, they HAD something, something new and wonderful. They were kind and healthy and were not seething with cruelty and hatred, and they could be trusted. Their actions alone proved that the disease in themselves had been conquered, and what could be done in one could be done in all, for the source of the disease was the same in everyone.

Unfortunately some of the people around the 'healed ones' were so far gone that they could not see the changes clearly enough to recognize them for what they were, and many of them had, in their insanity, committed cruelties so heinous that they felt they would never be forgiven. These poor souls attacked the healed ones and tried to destroy them and for many years the future of the race teetered on the brink of ruin as the few held their ground against the police forces and armies of the world, a completely crazy and insane world.

But many new people were entering the fold, and although the treatment for the disease was very difficult and took the total devotion of a practitioner to his charge for days on end to bring about a complete clearing, those who made it became followers and practitioners of the Tech too, and so the movement spread. Light and kindness came into a world where only darkness and death had reigned before.

The Tech was an amazing thing. The Good Doctor, as every one called him, had spent years studying science and medicine and religion and yes, even psychotherapy and parapsychology during his desperate years as a young man in search of the truth. He had always hoped that around just another corner, in just another book would be the answer he sought, for surely with so many libraries with so many books there would just have to be someone who had written the truth at least once.

But it was not to be. The people of the world had just had this disease for too long, from before recorded history, and all of their writings and searchings and musing were strewn with the strains and delusions of the ailment that ruined their judgement and totalled their ethics and sense of the Divine.

You see this was a spiritual disorder, it affected the mind, it affected one's love and hate for fellow men, and it affected one's concept of God. The Doctor found that the highest concept of God written in the works of man was a debased and jealous God, one filled with self righteous cruelty and hate and punishment for his children gone stray. It did not take much for the Doctor to realize that this God was made in the image of what most people had had for parents.

This God sought to punish people FOREVER for the sins of four score and 10, rather than understand the very creatures He had made and help them ALL towards a final salvation.

The Good Doctor only found a God that filled the horrible need of sick and deranged men to harm and punish their enemies, enemies who themselves were only suffering from the same disease as everyone else.

Blatant cruelty was an early stage of the disease. Punitive self righteousness was a later stage of the disease. All were guilty and much to the Doctor's own horror, he found that all were headed towards a hell of their own making.

For down deep he found that all men were basically good, but appalled by the unexplained hatred and cruelty in their own hearts, they first took to warning others away from the same path by doing harm to them before they could do harm to others, and then finally they took their hatred and cruelty out on themselves to make sure that they could never do anything bad again.

Thus there was this terrible irony to this, and perhaps he was the first to understand it, but it was the GOODNESS of men and their fear of doing wrong that made them turn the insanity of the disease against themselves and guaranteed a dwindling spiral of consciousness, self respect and self control.

In the last stages of the disease people would actually take to provoking you so that you would kill them, they were so horrified by what they had become that they needed to know that someone, anyone, could cleanse the world of themselves, to end the horror of what they had become. They wanted to know that there was one decent person left, and for them, the one who pulled the trigger was it. It was sad. For they would provoke you to hate, which magnified the disease in yourself, but they were only trying to die with a clean and guilt free heart.

It never worked. As they died they realized that they had wronged you in trying to get you to wrong them. When they picked up their next body in their next life time they picked up right where they had left off, making their childhoods very unhappy and their relations with their infected parents almost terminal.

A sort of horrible karma came of all this. If you treated your children terribly and turned them into degraded robots at an early age, then when you died and came back looking for a new body, your children were all there were to have as parents. Thus what you had created in your children as a parent, you received as a child in your parents of the next life.

A serious game of what went around, came around. With a vengeance.

And through all this, never was a confession gleaned. No one could be trusted to give it to. EVERYONE WAS INTO PUNISHMENT RATHER THAN SALVATION. That was part of the disease. And besides it was better to hide what you had done from the world, for it would hurt OTHERS too much to know that a spark of the Divine had fallen into such ruin. Something that was impossible, but yet there it was.

'Long lay the world in sin and ERROR pining...' No where was there the sound of laughter or release.

People were sort of in a permanent state of shock. They couldn't believe that something so beautiful, themselves, could have done such a monstrous thing. But in seeking to hide it from others, they sealed their own grave, with the nails of SECRETS.

And so people kept it all to themselves, all the hatred and sorrow, all the regret and blame, for they figured that if everyone just didn't know, everything would be alright.

It never worked, the only way out was the way through.

The only way out was to know how you came in.

It took nerves of steel and a LOT of confront, because this thing had gotten just ever so slightly out of hand. But the way to happiness was a true confession, and THAT is what the Good Doctor discovered.

You couldn't hope to cure the person of the day it all went wrong until you had lightened the burden of years and years, of lifetimes after lifetimes of regret and pain, all kept inside in a desperate attempt to not ever let it out again.

But it had become a crime to confess.

You might remind someone of what, in all good honesty, they were trying to hide because it might take them over again and cause them to commit more horrible crimes. People were trying to solve it by not knowing about it, and that flew in the face of a true confession.

This did not bode well for the future of mankind, for he had boxed himself in with laws that made it a crime to practice any religion or therapy that did not conform to the present rituals of forgetfulness and degradation.

You can never solve anything by not knowing about it with force, and THAT was the second thing the Doctor discovered. If you could just bring yourself to know about it, to see what you had missed the day it all went wrong, that you could cure the evil and the turmoil in yourself FOREVER. Then you could let go of the problem and not know about it for real.

For the problem was DIVINE.

It was also somewhat MAJESTIC for the way to know something which you had chosen to not know, was to not know it some more until you knew it again. This was called Perfect Duplication, and was related to total responsibility.

And when he discovered THAT, the Good Doctor's science became a religion.

It became both a science and a religion.

First and foremost it was a science of confession. This confession thing was not a simple matter, it was not just a matter of going to a priest in some dark Church and telling him something, because most of the religions of the day did not admit to anyone having lived before. They were still trying to solve the problem of the disease by NOT-ISING, a term the Doctor came up with, that meant the effort to not know about something you already knew about and couldn't stand.

One religion of the time claimed the world had been created 6000 years before, but only because its followers did not want to admit what they had been up to 7000 years before.

You see it was their SAFE SOLUTION. 'God made me 6000 years ago, and so obviously I had nothing to do with that horrible thing I did 7000 years ago, no not me!'

A true confession must be taken back and back and back to the first day it all went wrong. This takes great skill and courage both on the part of the practitioner and the one doing the journey. Further the practitioner must have already completed the process himself or he would not be able to stand your confessions and would not treat you in good faith.

Worse this science of confession was dangerous. People's sole solution to the trouble in their souls for the longest time had been to not know about it. They were all SURE that if they knew about it again they would go out and do it again. They had given up trying to handle the thing that made them mad and angry and hateful and evil, and most of them felt quite safe just not knowing about it or anything else related to the matter.

(Ever try to get a question answered by your parents?)

Unfortunately people with this fear of confession took it upon themselves to prevent anyone else from completing a true confession either, for they felt it was their duty to protect others from stirring up the dangerous waters that lay within.

They would prevent you from confessing for your own good. They would punish you for confessing, they would destroy you for confessing. They would burn, torture and crucify your wife and kids if you dared to look into your soul and admit what you had done. They didn't want you finding out what THEY had done!

This scared the hell out of them that you could find out about THEM by looking into yourself.

Somehow they mistakenly felt that you would thank them for it later, this protecting you from knowing yourself, especially if knowing yourself caused you to take up a gun and start shooting people from the nearest bell tower, a common fear that lead to the solution to not know everything in the first place.

So there developed a tremendous amount of Technology around this subject of confession, how to do it right, how to do it thoroughly, how to get people to remember and admit what they had done, and to stabilize them in joy afterwards rather than leave them in fear and regret, or worse, compulsive evil.

In fact the Technology became so thorough and complete that it rivaled such works as the principles of operation of the supercomputers of the time. But through all this, it was still a simple, if courageous matter, to get a confession and complete the process, especially on yourself.

With the cleansing of the soul the physical and emotional diseases began to vanish out of people, they could see again, they could breath again, and they could love and cry again. Their bodies felt good all day long, and they regained their goals and aspirations and the courage to face their eternal futures with grace and humor. And without drugs.

And Oh, they could REMEMBER again. Their past lives, all those friends, all those lovers, all those children who had been so near and dear to them. What an endless beautiful relief. The tears of laughter washed away the tears of regret and Eternal Life became OK again. They could remember who they had loved and who they had cried for, and they KNEW they could make it all right with the world once more.

They were able to have feelings of awe and beauty again and most of all they regained a deep appreciation for the Divine.

It was called the Clean Slate Principle.

And those who did it right, swore by it.

And this is why the science became a religion, because after all was said and done, after one became an expert in the workings of the body, heart and mind, one found one self standing on the pinnacle of the soul, an unshakable source of goodness and light and not a little majesty (mischievousness). An imperial imp, a practical joker of magnitude, a soul that was the designer of its own destiny and ALWAYS HAD BEEN. A soul that made universes out of foresight and majesty, out of laughter and beauty, and used the darkness and gloom to enhance the light at the end.

And with the cleansing of their own slate and a return of light to their own consciousness, they could forgive others for what they had done, they could understand others as they now understood themselves, and they could help them when they were ready to reach.

And this is all anyone has ever wanted out of salvation, to be able to love one's self and ALL others no matter what, and to be able to lead them ALL to the way back home, back to the Divine Light of Peace that passeth all understanding.

And so having attained this self salvation of the soul, the Good Doctor recognized that such a Technology, such a body of understanding and application that anyone could use who wanted to, could only be called a religion in its fullest sense, a science of realization, not only of Truth, but also of Potential.

Realization of the Divine become Manifest.

You and me.

And so was born the Church of the Good Doctor, and rightly so. It was probably the only Church on the planet that made any sense and certainly was the only Church on the planet that could actually do anything about man's condition.

However, in the search for happy endings, men are often short sighted. The culmination and pinnacle of one man's life is often only a reprieve, a partial denouement in the ongoing story of the universal dance around him.

It takes many years for others to catch up with the work of any great man, and the work of the Good Doctor was no exception.

In the first place it was a long and time consuming process to bring a person out of their personal hell into a state of Divine Clarity, a process that took incredible skill, patience and courage on the part of the one providing the process. Further if two unskilled and untrained people tried to do it with each other, they almost always failed, the fear and the anger and the guilt, the shame, blame and regret, were just too great. And almost no one had the guts or fortitude to do it alone.

People would rabbit away from some terror they had dug up in their souls and their bodies would DIE of the physical turmoil. Children apparently are very serious about wanting to die to get back at their parents, and when this stuff is stirred up again, the body gets sick with every cold, flu and sickness it ever had. If a person panicked in the middle of session he could die. Often of fear and heart palpitations.

People have God and Devil sharply divided, but the truth is our Maker is some of both, and we ARE that maker.

If it is true that Heaven is within, then so is Hell. Getting better was a process of digging up those monsters, digging up that Hell, and cleaning up your own estate.

The way to happiness was, is and always will be a true confession.

Anyhow, this thing of 'getting better', of attaining Divine Clarity, of getting and keeping a clean slate, was definitely a trip that most people wanted a friend to go with them on, and when the going got tough it was imperative that the helper or guide be someone who had completed the process thoroughly himself. Someone who hadn't just couldn't be trusted to do it right. It was better to do it alone when you had advanced beyond everyone around you.

People were afraid that if you found out about your own past, you would know about theirs too, and that they just couldn't confront. Thus they would take steps, however subtle or openly, to stop you from confronting it too.

There was a phrase that used to go around at the time, something to the effect of 'forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.' And it applied, for in their goodness, people sought to enslave and imprison everyone in darkness so that everyone might remain good. Not only did they not understand the light, they were scared silly of it. Better to stay in Hell forever than face Judgement and Mercy. Thus most Hells were created as a safe solution to having to face up to the Divine Beauty from whence we all came.

To make matters worse, it was a full time job becoming a skilled and fully trained practitioner in this science, one that others could trust, and these people had to eat just like everyone else. They devoted their lives to curing others of the Divine Plague, and they deserved a standard of living equal to their worth in society. This entered money into the situation and this was probably the downfall of the Church although the historic records are not clear on the matter.

What is clear is that as the Church grew at exponential rates, its lust for administrative posts knew no bounds, and its need for advertising dollars to tell everyone that A Way had been found was insatiable.

In the beginning money motivation was frowned upon like a thundercloud, but with the attacks by the governments of the world, the tax collecting agencies, the police, the other phony religions on the planet, the Psychiatric Zombie Lords, the vested drug interests on the planet who NEEDED people in pain to push their wares, the need for money to handle law suits, pay taxes and place counter lawsuits became over powering.

To their credit it probably can be said that that this money was necessary, as the societies at the time had more life in their constitution and sense of law than they had in their people, and fighting it out in the courts was the only option they had. The Church often won their law suits, which was a good thing, because if they hadn't, death and darkness would have become mandated law for another very long time.

Governments certainly did not want people remembering their past lives, or getting out of their bodies and able to wander freely through the universe. What would happen to their WAR GAMES? What would happen to their SECRETS? How could a politician make a buck?

A cold draft was blowing through someone's gold lined pockets.

To their discredit it can be noted that members of the Church often stooped to the level of the enemy, and lower, in their defense of their position, and this got them into more trouble than it was worth and probably aided in their final downfall.

They considered themselves above the Law, they had declared a secret war against the land that had nurtured them, a war where any treason or treachery was acceptable in the name of FAIR GAME. They considered that their Divine Law and Divine Cause was above the law of the land, and that God and the Good Doctor would never approve of them if they allowed the law of the land to get in the way of their Divine Cause. It was for the good of the many that they raped, murdered and plundered the few.

They were doing it all for the Good Doctor after all. The world in its insanity was trying to destroy the one person who had cared for them, had loved them so, had seen they were worth saving, and had risked his life time and time again to assure their salvation.

Writing in retrospect I can see their point. There comes a time in every man's life when he must take up civil disobedience, when the criminality of the law places one above the law because one it not a criminal.

But the members of the Church turned this mandate into a licence to kill, a license to indulge in the hideous depths of the final stages of their own disease, all in the name of Justice and Divine Causes.

It's one thing to torture someone for information because you are at war with them, its quite another to torture them for fun, and them slowly when they are no longer able to talk. There is no honor here, no dignity, no respect. The guy you are doing in is a better soldier than you. HE told you nothing, not one word and did not break. YOU would have talked at the first whiff of someone doing to you what you had done to them.

In the end when you laugh at what you have done, when you boast to your buddies about the dying gasps of your victim, when you accord your victim no respect even though through all the torture they told you NOTHING, you are laughing at your own eternal grave, for to confess THIS kind of stuff is hard beyond measure, and puts you very far away from attaining the Divine Clarity that you so longed for in the beginning and which was the cause that you originally fought for.

There was no honor here. Worf would not approve.

The Church created Goon squads to harass people opposed to the Church, and they were allowed, no ORDERED, to do anything to ruin a person's life, including torture and hitting them over the head in the dark of the night. In an angrier time the Good Doctor had written something about the satisfying sound of the dull thud of one's enemies in the night. A principle that might have been valid in rougher times, and during an openly declared war, but cowardice and treason had become the order of the day. The war was never declared, so they lost it.

Continued in Part 2...