The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable

The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable

Last night as I was lying in bed early and nursing a toothache( a rare event), an improbable thought arrived and strengthened my fighting spirits: I possess a sixth sense and my body and soul are unbreakable until I am in my late 90's.

I used to know a wacky, uneducated woman who claimed that she had a sixth sense and could visualize the visage of unmet humans. I didn't have the heart and the guts to tell her that she was full of horse shit. She tried to live a spiritual life, and generally quite moralistic, but she was highly superstitious and bossy and childish, and indeed had an unhappy life. The fault for her unhappiness lay within her: she thought too much of herself and thought her shit didn't stink, all because of an unresolved inferiority complex.

One must stop chasing one's shadow. One must not beg for anything, even for one's life.

"The gulf of experience between money and no money is so wide as to be almost unimaginable. Begging -- not just begging but being an anonymous pathetic on the sidewalks in one of the money capitals of the world -- damages your emotions, corrupts your view of the world, changes your view of yourself.

And, for all that, it says nothing about what is inside a person, who you actually are or who you could be."

The other day I happened to see a photo of the stupid coy bitch living in the boondocks of the Far West. Oh my goodness, the bitch was coarse and ugly and had no sense about fashion. Her hair looked like a crow's nest. No wonder she's had no success in finding a man. No man in his right mind would go out with a fake bitch like that. Enough of this bitch. Back to the Sixth Sense, like the disturbed child in the movie, I now see dead people as if I were dead myself already. This realization should scare me, but instead calms and soothes and strengthens me in my daily discourses and interactions with bitches and scumbags. Evil has stopped annoying me. It has become a source of delight for me to watch. To be human, for scumbags, is to wallow in the muck and filth of depravity and self-degradation. Actually the more scumbags I meet, the more I realize that I am indeed lucky and blessed of not being as depraved as they are.

Silence is the mark of wisdom and strength. The ignorant and the weak always try to cover their sense of inadequacy by making noises. "A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace. Confucius". I am no wise man, but I think of common things all my life, such as why Love is magical and even more important than sex, for a human individual but not for the species, and why it is important for scumbags to pretend who they are not. Most of what follows in quotation marks are taken from Pinker's "How The Mind Works".

"Conceptions of who we are:

Political Man in Classical times, Religious Man in the Christian Middle Ages, Economic Man in the Enlightenment, and Psychological Man in the 20th Century and after. Now, rather than understanding ourselves in terms of our place in the social order, our relationship with God, or our rational pursuit of self-interest, we are looking to Freud's theory of psychoanalysis and its conception of a complex psyche balancing its instinctual origins with the demands of civilization...

The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced I their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people. The mind is what the brain does. Specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation. The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world. The modulus's basic logic is specified by our genetic program. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve the problems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history. The various problems for our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes, maximizing the number of copies that made it into the next generation.

Thus, on this view, psychology is engineering in reverse....EP (evolutionary psychology) brings together two scientific revolutions. One is the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, which explains the mechanics of thought and emotion in terms of information and computation. The other is the the revolution in EB (evolutionary biology) of the1960s and 1970s, which explains the complex designs of living things I terms of selection among replicators. CS helps us understand how a midis possible and what kind of mind we have. EB helps us understand why why we have the kind of mind we have...."

Just because I am thrifty, most, if not all women with whom I happened to have romantic liaisons, thought I was a gold digger or a "social climber" (words of the fucking Laura) while the truth was not so. They didn't know my purpose in life was two-fold: love and mind improvement. Since I have not had the "love" I wanted, I have been busy trying to improve my mind. The more I "know" about "things", the more I develop a contempt for ignoramuses and scumbags who make noises about what they have just "learned". Little did they know that most of what they just read about, I did so more than 35 years ago. Needless to say, I don't love or give a fuck about Laura or bitches like her anymore. That does not mean I am a psychopath. I am only a functional semi-psychotic. There's a big difference between a psychopath and a psychotic. Most people can't tell and don't know the difference. Now I have witnessed at hand the workings of evil, I am more aware of the depravity of most self-declared "good" people. They all have a need to justify themselves. Curiously, they rarely admit to themselves and others that they are "bad" whereas a guilt-wrecked semi-psychotic like myself ruminates and verbalizes publicly on past errors and misdeeds. An answer on a test on a foreign language or on any subject would tell the level of understanding and honesty. An ignorant but vain fool would fumble around and reply in generalities. A knowledgeable and honest person would give a direct answer and is not afraid to show his ignorance.

No, I didn't enjoy employing sarcasm as part of my language repertoire because sarcasm, as Oscar Wilde (commonly attributed) remarked, is a form of lowest, cheapest wit. And nobody wants to be regarded as low and cheap. But I am a firm believer in self-defense which involves inflicting pain on those who caused me pain. Perhaps more importantly, I don't suffer fools and loud-mouthed ignoramuses gladly. But enough of this unsavory, distasteful, nauseating, revolting experience over a repulsive-looking and yet (maybe because of being repulsive-looking) vain and loud-mouthed individual. Let me regale you, if I may, with a very abbreviated "story", called "Omar, Bob, and Roberto"

Omar was a young corpulent, unattractive Hispanic high school math teacher. He was also a devout Christian who firmly believed in God and the divinity of Christ. He met Roberto at a poker tournament. A friendship ensued despite Roberto being atheistic. Omar tried to make his new friend into a Christian because he cared about his friend, and wanted him to be saved. Roberto was too dumb and stubborn to fall for Omar's impassioned evangelical pleas and exhortations.

The friendship endured. Over time, Roberto came to admire Omar's compassion and kindness, not just to Roberto, but also to everybody. Omar had only one vice: he was a binge drinker. Roberto, on the other hand, had no more than two beers whenever he went out with Omar, because every time he took a swig of beer, he remembered his father who died of liver cancer.

Roberto recently struck a friendship with Bob, an introverted, gentle, ill Vietnam War vet. Bob was drinking and smoking himself to death. Over two weeks ago, Bob could no longer drive (and Roberto had to do the driving whenever Bob needed to get around) because his feet and legs started swelling. On top of that, he had a bad cold and wheezing problem, but refused to see a doctor, in spite of Roberto's pleas. Three days ago, Roberto, while out on an errand for Bob, took Bob straight to the emergency room of a VA hospital, over Bob's strenuous objections, where Bob was immediately admitted. The emergency room doctor said that Roberto had saved his friend's life because Bob's sodium and magnesium in the blood had fallen to dangerous levels. Bob is recovering despite having alcohol and nicotine abrupt withdrawal symptoms. His hands shake badly. Last night, during a visit, Roberto sat next to his friend's hospital bed and delivered an impassioned speech:

"Bob, you've got to save your own life. You must find a reason to live. You must think of other people who care about you. You're a good man. There are many bad people out there who want to live. You're a good man, then why do you want to die? I care about you. I want you to live. I want you to be around so you can continue playing with your new toy, iPad, which I helped you purchase. When you recover, we'll play chess together as you often wished we would. But you must promise me you shall stop the booze and the cigarettes for good, once you get out of here, otherwise all my efforts to help you amounted to nothing, to a colossal waste of time. You must not break my heart. Meanwhile, pray, Bob, pray to your God, to Jesus, asking them to give you strength. It can be done. It has been done before. Let me tell you about my wonderful Christian, Hispanic friend, Omar, who opened up my heart, who changed me, who was responsible for my deciding to reach out to you in your hour of need...."

I shared the above story, "Omar, Bob, and Roberto" with the bitch. She failed to understand the intents and purposes of my sharing. Her failure dried up any lingering desire of mine to let her have a peek into my mind. She's too fucking dumb to understand, too insensitive to feel, and too stubborn to learn from past experiences.

Most young men, insensible and raw in life's experiences, fancy that war would be an experience to broaden their minds or drive up their adrenaline levels. So they volunteer into the Army. Little do they know what awaits them. They will witness at first hand how sudden and arbitrary and final death can be. And if they are lucky, they will survive but they won't forget how the smell of death hangs in the air. That was what Bob told me after serving two tours in Vietnam. He was stressed out and only booze could numb him enough so he wouldn't go crazy. He couldn't forget the people's faces after getting shot and killed by him. He said he was stupid to walk up to his victims afterwards when the "enemies" retreated in a hurry and left their dead comrades behind.

You would no doubt wonder if I really deserve to think myself in lofty terms. The truth is that I look at my "peers" and see nothing but mostly false pride and pathetic ignorance. I cast one look further and I see cowardice, laziness, and defensiveness. So to amuse and strengthen myself, I declare that I possess a sixth sense and I am unbreakable, which isn't really that far from the "truth". I certainly talk too much, however. I must respect and observe silence more. But tell me, why do the fuck that assholes and ignoramuses have to try to prove to me that they are smart and knowledgeable to me? Could it be that they lack intellectual honesty and true self-respect?

(to be continued)