This or That with No In-Between: The Binary World of Absolutes We've Been Herded into

Ones and zeroes. This and that. Here and there. Mine and theirs. Us versus them. Nationalism. Religion. I have to admit to feeling a bit disappointed at the insidious sway of "black and white" thinking to which our American population is succumbing. Absolutes are very hard to come by as most everything is on a spectrum, yet the number of people who have been brainwashed into thinking in terms of "one or the other" with no in-between is truly alarming. But, then, the creation of this Game of Earth-based of Human Existence has set in motion some amazingly inventive means to ever-deepening the deprivations we can experience through the use of the Illusions of Cosmic Creation and the infinitely variable perceptions of "reality." I thought addictions were a great addition to the game's strategic bag of tricks but the expansion of consciousness and understanding of psychology of the Ego and its resultant refuge in the growing lists of "mental health" dis-eases and issues has been nothing short of remarkable. 

The success of depraved tactics like these have made me bored and disgusted with the Earth-based Human game--which is why I shall be leaving soon . . . and not returning. 

A "Kid-Free Zone"

What if we could create a haven, a "place" in time--a Kid-Free Time Zone--in which we did not have to be, or feel responsible for, our adult children? What would be wrong if we tried to recreate those spaces of time that existed before the introduction of the cordless phone, before the advent of email, before the hostile takeover of the smart phone, before the invention of electricity and/or the telephone itself! What if we could declare sacred a time period in which our dependencies from and to our poorly adulting children could be suspended, in which we could feel free, if only temporarily, from the instantaneous demands (perceived as "needs") of our less-than-thriving children. What might that do for our own personal sanity?

     Taking care of oneself with some undisrupted "me-time" certainly couldn't be a bad thing. What if you had a job that discouraged--or even prohibited--personal calls (and texts!) or cell phone use during work hours? Why not create a similar kind of bubble or "time zone" in you life, say, weekly, or, (why not?) daily? It might be the best thing you could do for A) your child's skills of autonomy and self-reliance and/or B) your own psycho-spiritual health. Co-dependency is hell!
     You can prep your kids by saying to them, "You will survive. And, if you don't then, so be it: We're all on the same relentless and inexorable trajectory with death. Besides, even if Your human bodymind is unable to figure out how to survive this crisis, You will survive. The real You will just retreat to that Place of Origin that you imagine, and the rest of the world will go on."

So, why not do your self a favor!

Education as a means to control the masses

Acculturation: originally this meant systemized homogenization: the institutional unification of a population through one language, one set of values, rules, ideals, and even dreams

Compulsory public education laws began to be instituted in the 1850s with all states having implemented compulsory schooling laws by 1918. Tuition-free public education was first formed in Massachusetts in 1952 and later, eventually, adopted by the other states. Tuition-based private schools (almost always oriented and backed by a specific religious sect) were allowed but discouraged (through denial of public funding) except by the upper class(es).

Public schooling was created specifically for the creation of a docile, malleable, robot-like workforce. In its original form, schools were devised as a means to the destabilization of the family. The greatest enemy to industry and consumerism were the independent and self-sufficient farm families and their small networks of mutually-cooperative farm families. Horace Mann and his "Captains of Industry" cronies needed a means to weakening family bonds, a means to acculturating the American youth with the information that they wanted disseminated, as well as a means for preparing America's future labor force for lives committed to the tediously repetitive manual labor tasks in the new-born mills and "factories."

Originally, the information and skills passed on by schools were distributed over a period of six years. The original compulsory public school laws followed a fairly standard model that had been set by years of ad hoc rural schools--schools that had served farm communities by occupying their children during the "down" times on the farm: usually about six weeks in the summer (after planting, before harvests), and six to ten weeks in the winter--before the next Spring's prep and planting season. Eventually, these were commonly systemized to required six years of attendance (to age 12), for six hours per day for 180 days. This trend predominated, with occasional codification, until the 1880s when the growth and demands of an increasingly industrialized society saw the appearance and growth of urban populations around the growing number of factories. These urbanizing communities needed schools and schooling to serve the child supervision needs of working families as well as the brainwashing needs of the states and the rich business owners that ran them.

In the 1870s, the public funding of "secondary" schools (later to become known as high schools and, later still, as junior and senior high schools) became increasingly fashionable (but by no means the norm). In an interesting note: a study of the content of the pedagogical material being offered by the average American school system now using the "primary" and "secondary" school paring model, it becomes fairly obvious that the content of the now-12-year curriculum is very much the same as that of the former six- and eight-year curricula available earlier in the 19th Century. Again: the curriculum has been diluted, thinned out over 12 years; there has been little new information or skill added, only busy-work. 

Secondary schools were originally voluntary, not compulsory. In 1900 compulsory attendance laws around the country allowed for voluntary drop out age of around 12. This was fairly universally raised to age 16 throughout most of the 20th Century. Now most of the states require school attendance to the age of 18.

In 1916 government began passing child labor laws. With the huge influx of foreign immigrants, the adult contingent of the working labor force began to organize and unionize: demanding that employers prioritize healthy men over cheaper labor force of children. In the 1920s, the school curriculum was diluted to eight years in order to help keep children out of the workforce longer. (It is here important to note that the knowledge base and skill sets schools were attempting to pass on to children was not being expanded: the same amount of information and skills were now diluted in order to be distributed over eight years instead of six). 

The rise and normalization of "early education" phenomena (translate: earlier free babysitting and earlier state acculturation), like Kindergarten, Head Start, nursery school, pre-school, pre-Kindergarten, and day care.

In another fascinating aside, through the 1990s there were only three specific requirements for high school graduation: one semester of American government, two years of physical education, and a variable ("X") number of total credits and/or attendance history. 

In another fascinating aside: throughout the history of the United States of America, no college or university had minimum age requirements for attendance/acceptance into their educational factory, that is, there has never been (until very recently) a requirement of a high school diploma or certain number of high school credits (or GED) in order to attend (and earn a degree from) an American college or university. 

Eugenics

The idea of improving the human population through a statistical understanding of heredity used to encourage good breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton. His theory was, initially, closely linked to Darwinism and the theory of natural selection--which sought to explain the development--or "evolution"--of plant and animal species. 

     A half-cousin to Charles Darwin, Galton had studied his cousin's theory of evolution. He developed a desired to apply it to humans. Based on his biographical studies, Galton believed that desirable human qualities were hereditary traits. Coupled with the introduction of theories and applications that would later acquire the name "genetics," Galton's theory relied on an ideology of genetic determinism in which human character was due to genes, unaffected by education or living conditions. Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory. 

     In 1883, one year after Darwin's death, Galton gave his research a name: "eugenics." Throughout its history, eugenics has remained controversial.

     Among the first to latch onto the idea of controlling the gene pool of humankind were ultra-wealthy elitists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford. Writings and quotations attributed to these men point to their purposeful direction of funds into causes and organizations (such as their "Foundations") in which their money could impose serious influence upon the medical, educational, and educational research policies of America's leading universities, think tanks, and institutions (such as public education). These "Captains of Industry" saw eugenics as another means to the shaping of society into a stratified hierarchy in which the largest segment would be the industry-supportive working classes (the new slaves). They purposefully shaped public education, fine-tuning it in order to help create a continuous flow of numb, blindly obedient (fear-based) humans who would be both willing and capable of handling businesses' dirty work. Private education (e.g. boarding schools) and exclusionary social clubs were endowed with the ability to isolate and protect the superior blood lines of an upper class. "Higher education" was then honed to support the steady perpetuation of a number of specialized skill-based "professions" that were deemed necessary to the support and administration of the class system,. These would be occupations such as lawyers and doctors, engineers and accountants. Even "higher education" has, over time, been shaped to continue to ensure and perpetuate the separation of classes: keeping members of the upper-middle class bound to their station through debt (education loans, professional insurance and dues for legal protection, the need to pay and insure a staff of underlings, equipment and its constant need for maintenance and upgrades, etc.) and 'employee' status, while denying access to the intellectually inferior and those unwilling to take financial risk (debt), ensuring the perpetual stream of laborers to fill the increasing number of factory and blue collar jobs. 

Originally, eugenics was conceptualized as a means to improve the human species through reproduction: It was posited that the qualities of the human species or a human population could be improved by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics). It did not take long, however, for the development of the extrapolated ideas of both 1) forced, state-mandated sterilization of members of the human population who might possess what are determined as "less desirable" genetic traits and then 2) the active, dedicated and preemptive weeding out or selective thinning of an already-existing population in order to improve its overall "gene pool." In the 20th Century, Germany's Nazi Party's policies of Lebensraum, racial selection, and ethnic cleansing for the purification of an Aryan "master race" were, in fact, coopted from American writings and policies.

Soft Parenting

There is a world-wide pattern that has been borne of post-industrial, "first world" cultures that is having a crippling effect on the youth cultures of our planet, it's called "soft parenting."

Soft parenting is the act of fostering an extended and overly dependent psychology in children by the parents, teachers, media, and whole adult community around them. It is an epidemic coming out of our own addictions and the codependent behaviors we adhere to in order to try to protect our addictions (at all costs). In order to hide or deflect the guilt and remorse and lack of control we have over our own ego-based patterns, we allow for a very unstructured, unregulated, permissive growth environment for our children.
     At the same time, our schools and media have been channeled into honing in their role as promoters of oppressive, mind-numbing agents of economic brainwashing as unbridled (over-)consumerism and addiction-building have become their true agenda. Ever since 1805 when the Prussian state began funding the idea of a creating a state-controlled school system that would create, solidify, and perpetuate social stratification; ever since a very excited New England aristocrat by the name of Horace Mann brought these Prussian ideas in front of a group of "captains of industry" with the promise of creating a work force for the new-fangled manufacturing mills or "factories"; ever since the court/legal system allowed to stand as legal precedent an opinion in the headnotes (a summation of a case and the opinions of the Supreme Court justices that usually presents itself on the cover or first page of a case decision document that is not even written by a Supreme Court member) on a 1888 Supreme Court decision claiming that "corporations are people"; ever since the ultra-rich Darwin-influenced eugenicists like John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford realized that their money could help form the education system the way they wanted; ever since research institutes funded by Rockefeller, Ford and other "philanthropic" foundations discovered that education presented them with a tool for creating a society of consumer-workers; ever since the anti-Johnson/Civil Rights New Republicans devised a new economic system in which debt would serve as a form of 'legalized' slavery--one that would ensnare a much larger proportion of the American work force than ever before (credit, debt, inflating all prices while pay/wages remained on a slow flat-lined rise), ever since Reagan and Stockwell tricked us with their baseless "trickle down" economics; ever since Bill Clinton's Demopublicans created GATT and NAFTA and allowed for the creation of the WTO so as to allow American labor jobs to leave the country; ever since Obama's government bailouts for corporations that were "too big to fail," ever since the Supreme Court's 2010 "Citizens United" decision that declared money to be an expression of free speech; ever since Trump's alliances with and allegiances to Vladimir Putin and the world's billionaire class, the American people have fallen deeper and deeper into the control (enslavement) of the 0.01%.
    Soft-parenting is a very natural outcome of the neuroses accrued by the effete, powerless, self-obsessed, addicted consumer slaves of the past 60 years. How soft-parenting is beginning to backfire on the 0.01% is in the form of youth who see the ills of society and their parents and who, then, choose to counter- or under-mine the established patterns by A) not falling into the corporate consumer-dependent culture, B) choosing to avoid debt; C) choosing to avoid responsibility and materialistic greed, D) choosing to live "below the radar" of corporate lure.

     The Coronavirus Pandemic taught workers and consumers worldwide just what is important and what is not, resulting in many hard working souls dropping out of their line of work in lieu of easier, more home-bound, and less workplace centric working conditions. The re-alignment of life priorities priorities has yet to exhibit its effect on capitalism and the economy, but the 60-year trend of infantilizing our children so that they can become submissive consumers has led to such social psychology maladies as Borderline Personality Disorder, the "me-generation" providing a breeding ground narcissistic personality disorders as well as America as a "Borderline society." We've managed to create new hyper-dependent generations that not only refuse to grow up, but that refuse to accept responsibility ("can't make decisions" for themselves), learning how to become masters of manipulation in order to perpetuate their avoidance and dependence. And now the underlying endemic that really reared its ugly head since the Coronavirus Pandemic has resulted in blisters of phenomena like the Hikikomori, parasitic children, patra-dependency, despondancy, codependent v. detachment, as well as the total rejection of capitalist work ethics. What's next?

Giants and other species pre-dating Homo sapiens sapiens

• The Universe ("this" universe) has been around for about 13.8 billion years (much longer if one counts its pre-Big Bang infancy as pure potentiality).
• The Earth is 4.543 billion years old.
• There has been biological life on planet Earth for 3.8 billion years.
• The land masses rising above sea (and ice) levels have existed for 750 million years.
• Life has been able to live on land for over 434 million years (plants and fungi acting symbiotically).
• Our current, seven-"continental" formation of land masses has been drifting tectonically to its current configuration for 250 million years. 
• Homo sapiens sapiens--the Latin name our scientists have given to our current humanoid biological life form--has existed for perhaps 100,000 years, "civilized" societies for approximately 10,000-12,00 years (since the Agricultural Revolution).

One would have to be obtuse, naïve, and impossibly defiant to discard the possibilities that A) in 3.8 billion years (or 750 million years, or 434 million years--take your pick) no other sentient life form has ever visited or engaged with the "Earth" planet biosphere, and B) our blip of 100,000 year old DNA represents the sum total of all humankind visited upon this planet we call "Earth."

     I am here to tell you, without hesitation or embarrassment, that there have been other experiments in form stationed and planted upon this (and other) planet(s). The Earth biosphere has served as a fertile and productive testing ground for many extra-spiritual forms serving as vehicles for three- and four-dimensional sentient life experience.

     Like the early experiments with under sea life suits, some of the earlier experiments in human form revolved around housing and mobility: trying to match the contours and limitations offered by the surface (and air and liquid) environments on the planet. Once an acceptable form was discovered (hominid) the levels of sentience, consciousness, and emotional capacities had to be sampled and appraised. Like the form, style, and conveniences integrated into the evolution of the automobile, this process took not only millions of years but thousands of attempts (many imagined, some physicalized). 

     The "giant" form was one that was experimented with. Just as modeling with the imagination is a given skill to most Monads, the abilities of telepathy, telekinesis, and other psi powers were also quite commonly endowed to human models and their numerous prototypes. It was only with more recent model versions that psychic abilities have been backed off in lieu of emotional stressors (commensurate with the more recent trend and desire to deepen the "dive" of the human experiment into conditions of increased spiritual deprivation). In fact, like the diving bell analogy, each incarnate giant was usually planted on the planet where s/he/it would experiment with mobility, construction (creation, art), and interaction with other forms and species, while remaining fully "linked in" to the higher Spirit World the entire time present "on" the planet just as an astronaut or deep sea diver might remain hooked into some communications network with his superiors or collaborators while exploring his "depraved" and "foreign" environment. There were also giant species used to explore more rudimentary skills like physicality, strength, the potentialities for construction, excavation, and physical conflict (fighting and war). Many Monads who participated in the giant experiments continue to use giant forms to this day when interacting with Earth incarnates in an etheric form (i.e., as a ghost, psychic, or dream form).

     I have been a giant. I can still access "memories" of giant lifetimes--including one that was very highly steeped in telekinetic and telepathic abilities. This hominid vehicle had a very immature/undeveloped emotional spectrum to choose from: mostly responses relating to curiosity, amusement (not necessarily humor), and satisfaction. It was, in fact, most interested in and focused upon experimentations within the physical realms of mobility, activity, organization, construction, repetition, and variation (and a little in aesthetics); in short, a very simplistic existence that provided useful information for future development and variations on the theme.

Reality Check

Come with me, if you will, on a little journey. An exercise. Close your eyes and envision yourself a passenger in an automobile that is driving on a highway through a pastoral countryside. You are occupying yourself by looking at the roadside scenery when you see two unremarkable houses set off from the highway a bit. The houses are fairly close together--at least closer than is typical in this region that is mostly dotted with intermittent farmhouses with their barns and other outbuildings. But what catches your eye is an old wooden barn set back behind the house on the left. The barn door has been left open and inside the large gaping door your eyes catch a fleeting glimpse of a larger rust-red box sitting on the ground just inside inside the barn. You only have a fraction of a second to take in this scene, but you are so captivated by the rusty red box that your mind captures it and begins to play with it. The box was definitely cube-shaped, definitely sitting on the ground just inside the barn. But it was remarkable. It had lines that were so smooth, so perfect, and a lucent sheen to its coloring as to make it seem almost out of place. It's rust-colored red was not colored due to rust, that was its color--its true color. And yet, the color, the surface of the cube that was colored rusty-red appeared to have no discernible texture--no glitches, no markings, no creases, no indentations or scratches. It was as if it was perfect. Perfectly smooth yet without dimension.
     As you play with that rust-red cube in your head you are able to zoom in on it and still you can find no flaws, in fact, you cannot seem to find any seams--though the edges are perfectly discernible and perfectly lined. You are transfixed by the out-of-place anomaly of this box--by the fact that it did not seem to fit with the hues and textures of the rest of the scenery of the setting in which you had seen it. The box has an otherworldly feel to you. It haunts you. You are able to keep it in your mind, to manipulate and explore it over and over, for hours after the event of passing by its farm.
     When you return to awareness of your surroundings, you find that you are seeing a completely different landscape as the car you are in is entering the outskirts of an urban area. The farm-scapes much less the box are far behind you. The question I must now ask you is: Where were YOU during the time that the car was putting distance between you and the farm? Were YOU in the car? Can you prove that you were in the car? Can you prove that you saw the box? Can you verify that the box in fact even exists? If you were to go back to that farm and find the box again and you got a better look at it and found out that it was nothing like the box you had played with in your mind, would it be the same box? Which box would be real? Would the box that you played with in your mind for minutes or more cease to exist? Would it be classified as "not real"? a figment of your imagination? Are perceptions of our mind--even imagined ones--not real? Who is to say that anything or everything that we see or sense is not imagined--for in fact everything that we give our attention to is perceived and manipulated in ways, through filters of language and individually unique experientially-influenced and independently created and manipulated categories?
     You going through this exercise with me allowed yourself to journey within the mind, within the imagination, for a passage of some time, in which you were able, I surmise, to create images and perhaps other sensory inputs to accommodate my directives, my descriptives. Was that time and were those images real? And, if not, what was real during the time that passed while we occupied your attention on that activity? And, most importantly, where and who were YOU in the minutes that we  used to focus on that exercise? Were you not the passenger in the car? The manipulator of the mysterious rust-red box? Was that not YOU? And, if you are able to admit that it was in fact YOU who was in that care--real or imagined--and who played around with that box--real or imagined--then who can prove that the real YOU wasn't really there (wherever 'there' is or was)? Who is to say that your mental imaginings weren't taking you to places that are real--places that are just as real or physically unprovable as any other place in your collection of memories?
     Who can prove that New York City's Twin Towers existed? I mean, who can provide physical evidence of the physical existence of the Twin Towers of the legendary 911 terrorist attacks? The answer is: No one! There is not one single person on the planet in this moment who can prove that the Twin Towers exist--or that they ever exist! You can show me a photograph, or google an article with photographic or videographic 'evidence' of the so-called Twin Towers, but these are merely representations, hearsay, they are not the Twin Towers: they are only representations that claim to provide proof of the existence of the so-called Twin Towers; they are not the Twin Towers. I repeat: no one, no thing can prove to me the existence of a thing but that thing itself. And then a moment after I have left contact with that thing, the proof of the existence of that thing has left also. The only way to prove the existence of a thing is to be in sensual contact with that thing. Therefore, any thing or event that we claim has truth or that we claim exists can only be proved to exist, to have happened, if the audience to whom we are trying to share verifiable proof with is also in the presence of that thing or that event. Otherwise, that audience is taking on trust that the thing or event of which we speak exists or happened. The only proof I have that I was 12 years old is the fact that I am in a body at this time on the planet--a body that shows all of the signs of being older that 12 years old which therefore, would seem to indicate that I had a time as a 12-year old since the pattern that we most often see in what appears to be a one-directional continuum of biological life cycle has other humans, like me, passing through a 12th year while on their way from human birth to the middle age state and stage at which I presently appear. But this is not truly proof that I was once a 12 year old because the 12-year old is not there before you. Even things that I might possess which I can claim were possessions of the 12-year old that I claim to have once been are only associated with that 12-year old version of my self by hearsay--and, for me, by mental imagery, memory, 'stored' though fluid, unstable and malleable data of the imagination.
     Take, for example, the memories you "share" with family or friends. If and when you were to each recount your memories of that event, of that time, or of that thing from your past, it is highly unlikely that you will each relate versions of the memory exactly as one another. In fact, it is almost certain that you will have stored, manipulated, remembered, and related the memory in a fashion that is quite different from the other people who claim to have been present at the original shared experience occasion of which you are speaking. Our independent ways of manipulating and accommodating information are unique and highly individualistic. Just as no two snowflakes, no two penises, no two sunsets or no two fingerprints can be the same, no two memories are the same.
     My point here is that independent identity or selfhood denotes a certain requirement or responsibility of unique and independent perception and interpretation. While this independence would seem to also connote separation and even isolation, even this becomes difficult to prove. How can you prove separation and or isolation of something that is within the field of our personal sensory experience? If I can see, touch, taste, and hear you then how could you possibly be separate and how could you possibly feel or perceive distance and isolation? This comes from the same paradox that was exposed in our opening exercise: the body--the physical vehicle that we use for transport and filtration of the sensory information to which it is exposed--is not always the primary reference point for the activities and preoccupations of our Mind. This, then, brings my second visitation of the question, Who, then, are YOU? Are YOU your body or your mind? And if you wish to choose "both" as your response then I must tax you with the extrapolatory inclusion of all that which you perceive as YOU. If you are going to allow for that which we call your body into your definition of that which you own or possess, then how can you disclaim ownership of all that you perceive--especially since it is all ingested, digested, processed, manipulated, and stored according to how important and or relevant to your needs, wants, and interests? How can you separate this information that you have collected from the information that tells you that you have a body, that tells you that you have an imagination, that tells you that you have a house, friends, and possessions? How can you separate the stored memory of information of ideas and beliefs and values from the stored memory of information that you have of a physical self, of a physical world in which you live, of physical things that you use and discard? How can forms that you have converted to mentally storable images for your Mind to have access to be considered as real when you cannot prove that they exist outside of your mind? How can you lay claim to a definition of reality that only points to things and events that are outside you when your only reference to them is from within you--from a holographic world that you alone have access to and which you alone can manipulate? How can you relay words and stories of people, things, and events that you remember that you can neither prove really happened (Can anything or any event from the past be proved physically?).

The perspective of the You, the Observer

The body that you claim to be, that you use as a gathering and reference point, is an illusion. Your body, according to science, to the most forward thinking, recent research and mathematical theories of science, is not real--cannot be real--and yet we think it real. Despite all of the evidence that the tells you that the human body is but a single reference point from which you can choose to gather information--one of an infinite number of such points available to you at any and every given moment--we persist in thinking, believing, and constructing belief and values systems around this "home base island."
     According to the facts of science we are made up of millions and billions and trillions of autonomous parts, individual entities all that are somehow willingly cooperating to present you with a usable vehicle--a body--for your Mind's travels and information gathering, experiments with manipulating the other seemingly autonomous and seemingly separate entities "outside" of your body. From a biological perspective, we are the conglomerate cooperative collective of cells who work together in organs and/or systems. From a chemical perspective we are an elaborately multi-layered and multi-systemed network of reactions and interactions between chemicals--a gelatinous soup of simple and complex molecules which are directed by protein overlords by way of their electro-chemical soldiers and messengers. From a physics perspective we are a mysteriously and inexplicably organized mini-universe of units of light that may or may not exist in a single location for a brief moment of time.

If this is true, how, then, are we able to function as human beings, with bodies of solid physical matter? How is it that we retain form, that we perceive ourselves to interact with and move within this veritable soup of light, physics, chemistry, and biology? How is it that our bodies of 20 X 10 24 units of light probabilities is visible much less feels solid? How is that this ocean of ever-changing, ever-shifting, light can present shape and form and movement and sensory information and interactability much less independent perspectives of consciousness?
     The key, of course, is this thing we call consciousness, that point of perspective and infinite storage of information that we call the Mind, the conscious point of Self-identity, the source of identity, the Observer. Who then is the Observer, the Self? Is this point of reference made up of "stuff" of skin and bones, organs and cells, molecules and atoms, subatomic particles and photons of light. My answer would be, "No." I am none of that. My existence, my perspective, is not dependent on any of those Things. I can and do use them--as I use systems and my body, my emotions, my thoughts, but I do not need any thing in order to experience thought, dream, imagination, or a multi-directional flow of information. So, then, the question still has not been answered, what or who am I?