“Say, for instance… most of us here are mostly pretty counter-culture types –
Y’know, we like our drugs,
We like this and that;
We like breaking a few rules.
But we don’t like The Police, in general.
Who here loves The Police? Hands up.
Nice one!
Coz I’m gonna teach you to love The Police.
Why do we hate The Police?
If we want to change things – everyone in here, let’s go down to the local precinct and join up.
Are we gonna do it?
Who here’s gonna do it with me?
Coz I’m not gonna do it..
And why?
Why are we not doing that?
["Coz they're dumb!"]
Right. So we’re hating these guys who’ve taken on this thing… we’ve chosen the biggest lunkheads in society to protect ourselves from the fuckers in Rikers Island!
Because we are scared of them!
Y’know, we are scared of them.
We are middle-class, libertarian liberals who are shit-scared of being raped in prison.
So we create The Police.
And we get these lunkheads…
Who will obey what we tell them do to.
They’ll actually obey us; those fuckers will do what we tell them.
And we say to them:
“Protect us from those real fuckers; those bikers, and those black guys, and all those awful guys who are gonna come and fuck us up and kill us and steal all our stuff.”
We put The Police there. Right?
We put them there.
And we don’t want to go there, because we are Smart People;
We are Cool People.
We don’t want to go and hit anyone.
We don’t want to go and enforce The Law –
because we don’t really believe in it.
But we know some poor bastard has to enforce it.
Why do we hate those guys when we put them there?
Why do we hate ourselves for creating this society?
Why are so many people in America obsessed with Marilyn Manson; corpses; dead people; misery; John Wayne Gacy…
John Wayne Gacy’s a fucking prick.
Y’know, he killed a few people and did some shitty paintings.
What’s that? Why should we be engaged with that?
And yet that has become.. what, “apocalypse culture“?
Where do we go from there, that isn’t that?
Where do we go that isn’t playing with our own shite?
The Answer…
Back to The Individual.
If The Individual doesn’t work –
If Patrick McGoohan was wrong;
Number 6 was wrong to stand on that beach screaming
“I am not a number, I am a free man!”
– what do we have left?
Because ultimately the guy who’s not a number and not a free man experiences neurosis, the longer he goes down that path.
I’m sure there’s a bunch of people here, like me, who eventually…
You’ve worked your way through this stuff;
You’ve read the books, you’ve done this shit;
You’ve taken the drugs; you’ve been there, you’ve seen it.
We’ve all experienced enlightenment in little bits.
You know it’s out there; you know this stuff is true:
The consensus doesn’t explain our lives.
But what does?
Imagine getting rid of
The Individual.
Imagine getting rid of that scaffolding.
What do we have left?
And here’s what I’m about to offer:
The more I looked into it, the more I began to see that we have these mutants living among us, right now.
The people from the 21st century; from the end of the 21st century are here. But there is no context for them.
In the same way that – y’know, if you lived in… Tunguska two hundred years ago, and you were an epileptic, you would be a shaman.
There was a context for you.
In this society, you’re an epileptic.
It’s quite simple; it’s a disease, and nothing you say is of any worth because it’s considered pathology.
If, on the other hand, you look at these people, who are the mutants… and what do they call it?
Multiple Personality Disorder.
This is what lies beyond the personality; the “I”; the bullshit.
Because if you take “I” to the limit – and like I said, I’m sure a lot of us here have done this – it becomes… all that happens is that self questions self. Endlessly; repetitively. “Am I doing this right? Is this the right way? Should I think about these people like this? Should I approach them this way; should I involve them this way?”
Self questions self, endlessly, and it reaches a peak… it goes nowhere.
On the national scale, that same thing – self questions self; self encounters not-self; equals borders, war, destruction.. that’s where it goes.
That’s where it ends. That thing ends in disaster.
It ends in neurosis on a personal level.
And it ends in war on the national level.
So I began to think:
“What could we replace that with?”
And I was looking at these poor MPD fuckers. And I realised they just don’t have a context.
What would happen if we decided to abandon the personality, and replace it with a multiple personality complex? Because as we all know – everyone in here, I’m sure.. I mean, I feel as if I can say this for certain, knowing human beings as they are: sometimes you do things that you don’t want to do. Sometimes you do things that are contradictory to what you think. Sometimes you fuck yourself up.
Why? Because there’s not one person in here; there’s hundreds.
And if you start giving them names, and you start shuffling them about; if you start playing with them, you become a bigger human being. Because you’ve no longer allowed yourself to stop at your boundaries.
Imagine the personality as… let’s choose Windows, even though that’s a contentious one.
Imagine the personality as Windows. Instead of the personality.. there’s so many people, I’m sure you’ve met them.. you talk to them, and they say “No, this is the way I am. I’ve worked on this. This is me. And I won’t change. And you’ll just have to work with that. This is me; this is important; this is what I’ve come to, and this is what I’ve Made Of Myself.”
Bullshit. It’s a trap. They don’t go anywhere; they’re stuck there.
What if those same people were then given Personality 2000? Which is an upgrade, and an add-on? And here’s a bit of your personality that likes hip hop? Here’s a bit to your personality that likes ballet? And because we’ve all got them. And we’ve got the fucker.. we’ve got the serial killer inside; we’ve got the wonderful new-age bastard… we’ve got whatever we like. We’ve got James Bond in there. We’ve got Pussy Galore in there. They’re all there.
So what I’m suggesting is that we start working with that. Abandon the personality; abandon the individual; abandon the “I” because it’s a lie, and it has held us down; it’s been like a weight round our necks. It was useful for the last two thousand years of history, because it created this out of the chaos that was – and this is more coherent; more useful; more meaningful. It has its problems; everything does; every system has – but we’re getting better.
And I think what we should do is walk away from the crap of the 21st century, and start thinking about what we’ve been experiencing.
My feeling about the 20th century, and about World War II and about Auschwitz and all of that stuff is that we had to go through it. We had to do it. That was humanity’s dark night of the soul, and it will never, ever happen again. But it had to happen.
Every single nightmare image, every image of hell that we have in our minds happened.
Everything you can think of; people were flayed, brutalised, gassed, tortured, cut into pieces, turned into pigs – everything you can imagine happened. The world was a wasteland. There were cities completely annihilated. We went through it.
Why did we do that?
Stanislav Grof has a conception of the ‘perinatal matrices‘, which was one of the big influences on the film The Matrix. You might recognise some of this. He says that things that happen to us around birth are really profound, and they have all kinds of weird effects. They effect society, they effect the self; they effect everything. They have reverberations.
And he claims that there are several states, that he calls “Basic Perinatal Matrices”.
The first state is oceanic bliss – which we’re all familiar with, I’m sure. Oceanic fuckin’ bliss, mate. And that is the state of the baby in the womb, untouched – everything is provided for; everthing is there; everything you need will turn up out of the blue.
Basic Perinatal Matrix 2 is a different thing. It’s when the womb starts to turn a little toxic, and begins to suggest we’re about to be expelled. And, y’know, we don’t remember this stuff – what happened? What was the feeling of that fetus in there who suddenly thinks: “My entire universe has been overturned and I’m about to be shit out”? Does he know where he’s going? “What the fuck’s this? Y’know, I was happy there. It was cool; I was getting everything I wanted.”
And so on into BPM 4 – which is kind of a release from tension; which is the birth process.
So I’m beginning to think.. as a society – and returning to the idea of ontogeny as history.. phylogeny, or whatever the fuck the word is.. what we’re looking at now is humanity’s process through Grofian matrices.
And what we went through is actually a Stanislav Grof Basic Perinatal Matrix 3 experience.
Every image that he talks about: death camps, control, the idea of people.. babies trapped in tubes.. you’ll recognise all this from The Matrix, as I said.
Oil, mechanisms, machines that hate us; destructive technology.. it all happened.
What if this little baby that is the universe; this little larvae that’s approaching culmination, has had to go through these stages? Because everything does. If you want to get rid of war, how do you get rid of war? You inoculate yourself against war by having the worst fuckin’ war you’ve ever had in your life. And everything after that’s just an aftershock. We’ve done nothing worse than what we did in those few years. Humanity’s never come close to anything like it. We’ve tried; there’s been a few lunatics who’ve tried. But nothing on that scale.
So what if we choose to imagine that humanity has passed through that stage?
We’ve reached the 21st century, and we’re now approaching Basic Perinatal Matrix 4. Which is: victory after war. Which is: the struggle is over. Which is: we’re all here; what do we do next?
There was no apocalypse; there was no Christ. There was no rapture. There is nothing. All this stuff is shit.
There is only us. And we’ve still got another thousand years, and maybe another thousand beyond that, and maybe another twenty thousand beyond that.
What are we gonna do?
Who are we?
Are we gonna stick to these personalities; these bounded, territorial things?
Are we gonna expand ourselves; make ourselves bigger? So that if you happen to like.. [say] ‘world music’ and I don’t, I can tap into your love of ‘world music’, and experience it – and it means something.
So all I’m suggesting here is that we all take up magic. Because basically it works. We can change the world. It’s quite simple; the technology’s there. The Buddhists have been telling us.. as I said, people have been telling us this for so long. And in the last two hundred years, it’s been driven underground and we’ve forgotten.
And people like us are here today to try and recover something of that. And the way to recover it, is to do it. Do the techniques. Go buy an Aleister Crowley book; [or] buy one by Phil Hine or Peter Carroll that’s a bit more up to date, and you don’t have to bother with that 18th century fucking language. But do the shit, and you will find it works.
And we stand here now. This is the counterculture. We are the counterculture.. this is like, this shit. I went to this thing in, like, 1987 and it was Robert Anton Wilson and the whole deal – and I remember sitting in the audience thinking “fuck, rave is dead”. Because it was that kind of thing; that version of it’s dead. The hippy version of it’s dead.
We stand here. And we’re looking ahead. What are we gonna do?
Abandon the personality is what I suggest.
Get rid of the sense of self. Get rid of the sense of “I”, and make yourself something bigger.
Imagine that every time you want to learn something new, it’s a new computer program; you can buy the operating system; the update. You can learn to fly a plane in seven days according to Neuro-Linguistic Programming – so why not? Let’s do it.
Do we want to change things? Or are we just sitting here talking?
No answer.
Are we talking at all? Do we want to change things? Yeah! Right – that’s why we’re fucking here, man. That is why we’re here!
So what are we gonna do?
If you want to change things, the first thing you have to change is yourself.
Because if you don’t change yourself, you will take on the world as if it is yourself – and fuck up. You will really fuck up, because you don’t understand your own dark side. If you don’t understand your own weird, shitty side.. if you don’t understand the fact that there’s someone in there who will kill your mother, if need be – if you can’t take that on; if you can’t take that on board and realise that Charles Manson and me and you are not much different; that John Wayne Gacy and me and you are not much different – except that he did it. Y’know, there’s those days when I’m gonna kill that motherfucker over there – but we don’t do it.
But it’s in us, and it’s there. And so much of this is denial. That we have no dark side. You know: the hippies, and those lovely people in the rave era who were all on ecstasy – they tried to pretend we have no dark side. And what happened was they got fucked up by their own dark side. As will always happen.
So let’s kiss our dark sides; let’s fuck our dark sides. Get him down there where he belongs. And he can tell us stuff. Y’know, that thing’s useful.
But above all: let’s become plex-creatures. Complex, superplex – be able to take on new personality traits; able to take on new ideas; able to adapt; able to extend our boundaries into what was previously the ‘enemy territory’ – until the point where we become what was once our enemy, and they are us, and there is no distinction."
And they’ll be watching, going:
“Man, that guy’s getting fucked; I wish I was.”
And they want in. They want in on this.
So let’s, like Doug said,
Invite them in.
Let’s take them in.
Let’s be like the diseased prion that destroys its host, and CJD.
Let’s go in there and give them something they cannot digest.
Something they cannot process. Something so toxic, so dangerous, so powerful.. that it will breed, and destroy them utterly.
Not destroy them – turn them into us.
Because that’s what we want. We want everybody to be cool. We don’t want to go in and think:
“That guy over there’s gonna kill me; that guy hates me; that guy’s got some fucking weird agenda.”
Don’t we just wanna talk? And let it all go, and just say:
“Hey, I’m interested in you; what have you got to tell me?”
That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? We communicate; we join up; we make networks; we make things happen.
And there are some people in the world who don’t wanna do that.
So let us infect them.
Infect them to the point where they become us.
Where there’s nothing left in this world, but us.
And then some kid’ll come up and fuck that as well.
And that’ll be exactly what we need at the time.
And that’s me finished, so thank you very much.
"So here’s my version of what happens :
Doing the comic, I set up these characters – the whole thing was set up as an adventure story, where there are some bad guys who live in another dimension, who want to enslave us all. And there’s some good guys who live in another dimension, who want us all to have a good time. In the middle, there is us. And we are obviously trying to have a good time; everybody wants to have a good time, y’know? Hitler wanted to have a good time. And, uh..
We all want to have a good time. So we’ve got to understand that, as a starter.
The more I set up these dualities – the more I set these people against the opposition – the more it started to seem like a complete crock, and that we’ve been sold this nonsense of opposition. And I began to find that the closer I got to the end of the series, the whole ‘opposition’ element of it was the least meaningful, least important part of it. And that we’ve actually been deluding ourselves in a lot of ways.
Beyond that, I found we’ve actually been deluding ourselves in the worst way of all by believing in the individual.
Kafka, Orwell, Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner.. everyone told us The Individual was the most important thing we could be.
Everyone is fucking ‘quirky’ these days; every shit in their window of MTV is ‘quirky’. Everyone’s cool; everyone’s smart… it’s not true.
What if the individual was the fake? What if the individual’s the crock? And we’ve actually been sold that by “them”; by the man, the establishment.. whatever you want.
Because what occurred to me is that when you talk about the individual, and you deal with the individual, you find that the end of the individual is neurosis. To be individual means that there is “self” and “not self”. Okay?
So where I stop.. the boundaries of “me”, right, this physical body; the boundaries of me that stretch out.. things I believe in.. I’m sure we’d all be friends if we talked – but would we be friends with Newt Gingrich? No.
But that’s the point: I stop, where Newt Gingrich starts. Why is that? Why do I stop there? Why does *he* define my self-sense? And I can’t absorb him?
Why do these fuckers.. why does the Skull And Bones Society, or the CIA.. why do the 33º Masons – why are they different from us?
They’re not – they want to explain things. They want an answer. They’ve found an answer that seems to suit them – which seems kind of uncool and cruel to me, because it involves exploiting other people. But they’re looking for an answer.
We’re all looking for the same thing:
Why.
Are.
We.
Here?
Why *are* we here? What are you doing here today? What do you expect? What do you expect to take home with you?
Can anyone answer? Can one person tell me what you expect to take home from all of this? Come on, put your hand up.
Yeah?
["Experience!"]
Exactly. Because that is all we have. And that is all I can offer you, is experience. Of having done this shit, tested it, put it in the crucible to see what happens – and it works.
So I began to think more and more about the individual, and I looked into what that actually meant. And what it was, was a structure that was pretty much created… the ego structure was created out of what Julian Jaynes calls the “bicameral mind” becoming one mind.
And apparently – according to him – he says that back in the old days of the Greeks, and the earliest writing of the world, people didn’t have self-consciousness in the way that we have. They didn’t have egos. They didn’t understand themselves as “I” in the same way that we do. Because the corpus callosum – that connects the two hemispheres of the brain – wasn’t connected.
So if you heard a voice, that voice was God.
And Homer, and all those guys, you’ve got plenty of examples of people hearing the voice of God, and acting on that. Alexander constantly acted on the voice of God.
Julian Jaynes suggests that it wasn’t the voice of God – it was the voice of the left hemisphere of the brain communicating with the right hemisphere of the brain, interpreted as a god.
So okay: now we’ve got the two things joined together. We’ve got this beautiful bridge in the middle that links the two. But we have the ego structure – which was created when those things linked.
Suddenly we’re like:
“Oh fuck.
I am I.
I am the I Am.
This is my.. my god is this.
I am separate; I am one.”
We made this idea that we’re somehow separated from nature.
Again, I read New Scientist last month, right – and they’re talking about nature: “We must control nature; we must do this. How do we deal with our relationship with nature?”
We *are* fucking nature!
There’s nothing on this planet that is not “nature”.
Power stations are nature;
atom bombs are nature.
Because nature made us to make those things.
Either you trust nature,
or you don’t trust nature –
and I trust nature.
So we have to ask:
what is nature getting at here?
If we ignore this crap that we’re somehow isolated from nature; that we somehow have to tame nature… nature knows exactly what it’s doing.
The planet is not in danger.
We are.
The planet’ll survive.
The planet’s been through, like, ammonia atmospheres and impossible-to-live-on, and everything dead – and it gets its way back out of it.
We’re in danger. Or so we think, because our hubris tells us that we are in danger.
Our hubris tells us that we’re about to destroy the world; we’re gonna destroy the planet;
we’ll fuck the atmosphere.
No. We’ll fuck *our* atmosphere.
But some trilobites’ll come along and live in anything we create.
So that is not the problem.
The problem is we’re standing here at the 21st century, stuck with individuality.
Because we’ve believed in it so much; it *seemed* so important that we should all be distinct.
What happens if we stop being distinct?
And what happens if we think about individuality as something that was actually just scaffolding for where we are now?
So if you create a skyscraper, you put up your scaffolding, you build the building – and what’s happened here is that we’ve overlooked the building, and focussed on the scaffolding.
Y’know – why aren’t we taking the scaffolding down?
Let’s do it today: take the scaffolding down.
Because the individual was a way to get us to this point.
And what I really think.. and basically why I’m here is to try and punt this notion.
After doing this comic book for six years; after thinking about this stuff for six years; after proving that it works for six years, I’m left with this notion: we’ve been fooled, and we’ve fooled ourselves, and we continue to fool ourselves – and, like Doug said: there is no “us” and no “them” – there’s just us. And somehow we’re trying to make this thing work. And it *does* work.
Say, for instance… most of us here are mostly pretty counter-culture types – y’know, we like our drugs, we like this and that; we like breaking a few rules. But we don’t like the police, in general.
