Your Personal Path to Power Begins with "No!"

On a Thursday morning not long ago I woke up very tired. I went to work but as soon as I got home I went straight to bed. Maybe I read for a little bit first by I was asleep by 10:00 PM.

Unfortunately I was forced out of sleep some two and a half hours later by the sound of some horribly loud music bouncing off all of the walls of the houses in the cul du sac where I live. As I lay in bed, I worked on letting go any feelings of anger or personal hurt and decided to try an energy technique that had worked for me in the past, the creation of a chi ghost.

A chi ghost is created by focusing on one's entire body to the point that every part of one's body is tingling, vibrant with life, and then the creator imagines taking a step forward and turning around to face the body self.

Then the chi ghost is given a task. In this case I asked the chi ghost to turn the music down or off and to return to me when the task was accomplished. And almost immediately the music stopped and I was happy and very pleased with myself for all of about 2 minutes when the music started up again. And so I tried the exercise again with about the same results. And then a few more times until frustration set in and I was no longer effective.

I got out of bed and took a walk through the neighborhood in search of the source of the music but as soon as I stepped outside, I could not tell where the music was coming from. I walked around a little bit until I noticed a big black pickup truck parked right across from my driveway. I stared into the darkness of the truck, in the window there appeared to be a person but I wasn't sure.

I was also beginning to feel frightened as well as frustrated. What kind of person is blasting music in a residential neighborhood from inside a black truck and doesn't stop when a neighbor comes out of his house at 1:00 AM in the morning? And where were my other neighbors? I felt isolated. Was I the only one hearing this?

Suddenly I found myself recalling a Philip K. Dick story called The Hanging Stranger in which a man who has been working underground in his basement all day heads to a TV shop he owns. Once there, he sees a body hanging from a lamppost. Alarmed he demands to know what it is doing there but the rest of the town's folk are ambivalent:

“Look at it!” Loyce snapped. “Come on out here!”

Don Fergusson came slowly out of the store, button his pin-stripe coat with dignity. “This is a big deal, Ed. I can't just leave the guy standing there.”

“See it?” Ed pointed into the gathering gloom. The lamppost jutted up against the sky—the post and the bundle singing from it. “There it is. How the hell long has it been there?” His voice rose excitedly. “What's wrong with everybody? They just walk on past!”

Don Fergusson lit a cigarette slowly. “Take it easy, old man. There must be a good reason, or it wouldn't be there.”

“A reason! What kind of reason?”

And there I was at 1:00AM on a Friday morning. Magically transformed into Ed Loyce.

You can read The Hanging Stranger free on Google books 

Even though I entertained the idea of running to a neighboring town, instead I decided to call the non-emergency number to the police station. The police arrived in less than 15 minutes and I could here them talking to the person/people in the black pickup truck. The noise had stopped but I still couldn't sleep. The police where out there for at least another 30 minutes and I was on high alert.

I decided to watch a Christopher Eccleston episode of Doctor Who as BBC America has been doing a fifty year retrospective of the doctors and for the Christopher Eccleston era they chose the two-part episode Bad Wolf in which our heroes find themselves unwilling contestants on snuff versions of reality TV game shows. The Doctor ends up in a Big Brother house. His main companion, Rose, ends up with a homicidal Ann Droyd android on a version of The Weakest Link, and Captain Jack Harkness ends up on an extreme extreme make-over show where first they change your clothing and then they rearrange you limbs.

Eventually, it is revealed that the Doctor's oldest and most dangerous foes, the Daleks are behind the entire thing. In fact, they have been quietly manipulating human development for centuries. The story ends in a cliffhanger as the Daleks have Rose and they demand the Doctor surrender or they will immediately dispense with her.

Well, the Doctor has a one word response to pepper pot bullies: “No!”

This brought me some comfort. It reminded me of a quote I had found for my Writer as Shaman class but never shared. I heard it on a podcast where the guest, one Frater X was quoting one Mark Passio:

The initial civil right of all humanity is the prerogative to say, 'No! Leave me alone! I do not want to do that!”

The Thursday morning prior to all this drama I had done a search for this Mark Passio as I was unfamiliar with him and I found and started watching a YouTube video of a lecture entitled: The Matrix Decoded.

After getting a couple of hours of sleep, I awoke to watch more of this lecture series and came across the bit on Neo's resurrection.

For those who haven't seen the movie, the Matrix posits we live in an ersatz, computer generated illusion called The Matrix in which machines entrap our minds and feed off of our vital energies, bio-energy, mental energy, and spirit. Neo is prophesied to be The One, a messianic figure who can free all of the human minds enslaved by the Matrix and lead humanity to a final defeat of the machines.

The only problem is, Neo hasn't woken up to his inner nature yet and, unfortunately gets killed by agents of the Matrix. But since his mind only believes he is dead, the Sacred Feminine in the form of Trinity is able to resurrect him. As he come back to life within the Matrix, the agents fire upon him once again and Neo speaks his first word after being resurrected: “No!” and he holds up his hand and stops the bullets mid-air and then lets them fall.

One of the dangers of entertainments like Doctor Who and The Matrix is the human mind may misinterpret the images and symbols of the One or the Savior or the Messiah to be something external to one's own self and the history of human atrocities has been the abdication of the mind's responsibility to accept that it is creating its own reality. That there is no external savior.

When we say, “No!” to the current control system, whatever that may be, we are taking our first steps, as tiny as they may be, to our own personal freedom. To create the world as we would like it. Not to accept someone else's idea of what the world will be.

Whether a stranger is hanging from a lamppost or a truck as black as one of Stanley Kubrick's monolith is playing music way too loud for the hour of the day, it is our individual responsibility to say “No!” And this is the end of our individual childhood and the beginning of something as exhilarating as it is frightening.

This is when the new day dawns. This is when consciousness begins to shift.

It won't look like a savior riding in on a white horse unless you look down and notice you are holding the reigns.

There are no saviors outside of what is inside each of us. There is no sanctuary outside of our own inner world. And nobody can be forced into someone else's idea of Utopia.

“No!” is the beginning of wisdom. The beginning of freedom.

Additional reference:
Frater X interview- The Secret War on Human Consciousness

Mark Passio's Matrix Decoded lecture: