Properly Using the First Key
Black Doors, Fruit Snacks, and Sticky Problems
Unnatural Selection
Why hello, my dear keyholder! Holder of the First Key, first of his name, Curator of Attention.
Did you do your homework last week? Did you pay attention to what you pay attention to?
My, oh my. What a silly question I’ve asked!
Of course you did, you breathtaking disciple you. The only type who would not have done it are the same type who shop Wayfair for the perfect cuck chair.
Definitely not my readers.
As you went about curating your attention you probably had a little problem. Maybe two. Maybe a few. You stepped in a little dog doo, and try as you might to scrape it away, it clung to your shoe.
What I mean to say is, you realized that curating your attention wasn’t so easy. Some thoughts you could ignore, yes. Some feelings you could wave away.
Others refused. They were a little sticky.
Maybe you succeeded in distracting yourself.
A bit of scrolling on the old Grammy? Liked a one, a two big booba’d goth babes? (Me three.)
That works for a little while. You override unpleasantness in the short-term by lighting up those pleasure centers, baby. That’s why I love coke.
The drink, I mean.
Definitely the drink.
It’s not like I’m into getting my face and throat numb.
I don’t even know what would cause such a thing!
But back to those sticky things—thoughts, feelings, musings, whatever.
Just when you thought you’d ditched them, they climbed back from the blazing depths of your mind like a hellfire demon. They seized you by the collar and shook—
You deep-fried ass clot. Look at me. LOOK AT ME!
Ooh, terrifying.
You’re a sick man, you know that? What kind of person is haunted by such horrible psychic creatures? Certainly not a saint like myself.
Now, let me guess, in your moment of weakness, you started to think, “This Jagger is such a lying fuckwad. I did exactly what he said and tried to curate my attention. And it didn’t work! Now life is even worse. At least before I was unaware of my problems. Now they won’t leave me alone! What a big phat phony he is.”
Why, yes. I am pretty phat.
But a phony I am not.
You gave it the old scoundrel’s try, my friend, and you earned the old scoundrel’s failure. Now, you’re upset because no one likes being a failure.
But there’s good news! My dear reader, you are, in fact, not a failure.
The failure is a failure. That’s all. You can see it; therefore, it’s not you.
You flexed your muscles, lifter boy. The weight was too heavy. Now, you’re sore, both in mind and in butt. You moved wrong and pulled a muscle. You got some feedback. Now, we can refine your form.
There’s more to the First Key than just handing it over. How heartless would I be to hand it over without showing you which door it unlocks?
That door is choice.
Allow me show you to it.
To Choose, or not to Choose, that is the Choice
Isn’t this a beautiful door? Such a vibrant red, and yet you paint it black.
Let’s fix that.
(Unless you’re goth and into it. I likey the goth chickies myself.)
Everyone knows what choice is in the mundane sense.
Put simply, it’s selection.
Yes or no? To be or not to be? Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to put two in the pink or one in the stink? That is the question.
Choice, however, is so much more.
It’s your fate.
Whatever you give your attention to, you choose. This is true whether you like it or not. Reality doesn’t care. Your attention is like a mirror. Whatever you place before it will be reflected back. This is how you seal your fate.
True as this might be, simply saying so is unhelpful to the animi fatui.
“Animi fatui? What’s that?”
That’s you. The stupid minds. We’ve got to make you less stupid.
Becoming aware of your attention is great, but isn’t enough on its own [link to Article 2]. You can give your attention away without desiring to. While this is still your choice (everything is), it’s useless information if you’re covered in sticky stuff. The animi fatui may as well be choosing for you.
“Davey, this is great and all, but what does this have to do with getting chicks?”
Stupido.
You understand being well-groomed, right? (Maybe not.) Shower, shave, a little spritz of cologne, dress up nice and fancy-like?
Everything in your reality starts with your mind. Mental upkeep should be summa prioritas. All will follow its lead. The mental begets the physical.
If you clean only the outside of your home, but inside is a hoarder’s den of garbage, old crack pipes, and all kinds of vermin friends, do you not think the filth will eventually work its way outwards?
Lack of bitches is a symptom, not the problem.
The problem is psychic garbage—negative thoughts, bullshit stories, old habits that need to die. They’re stuck on you. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say they’re stuck in you. Like a contaminated needle.
Think of me like the guy from that slop reality show where they help the hoarders clean their shit.
Together, we’re going to take out the trash and get you some shiny new crackpipes.
The Stupid Minds
The mind, while stupid, is an incredibly powerful tool. To use it effectively, you need to understand what it is and how it operates.
It is more than just your brain. It is linked to your consciousness, but is not your consciousness. The truth of it is somewhere between these two ideas. Kind of like my face between your mom’s thighs.
Did I say that out loud?
Whoopsie.
The mind is a problem-solver. A storyteller. It’s obsessed with control. And patterns. And productivity. And logic, and consistency, and blah, blah, blah. Boring stuff, though not necessarily bad. Great for keeping the sheepies alive while the shepherd is away. But left to its own devices, it inevitably does as stupid is.
If you leave food out where your dog can get it, do you trust your dog not to eat it?
The mind knows only separateness. This is white and this is black. This is up and this is down. David Jagger is a gorgeous man and you are… Well, you’re you.
If it was a person living in the real world, the mind would be a limpdick bureaucrat. Everything needs to follow the proper process. This paper has to be separated into this pile, that task belongs to that department, you can’t do this unless you file X, Y, and Z.
(How about you suck my P?)
Separate, separate, separate.
Through separation, it constructs a false self. An illusion. Its greatest trick is that it convinces you the false self is your real Self.
It is the enemy of intuition. By rejecting intuition, it believes it is being logical. Intuition is too whimsical.
You can’t follow hunches! Or feelings. It’s not logical!
The irony is that intuition transcends mortal logic. Intuition, understood properly, is wisdom of the highest order.
We can think of the mind as a choke valve for attention. It controls the flow and direction of it. Concentrates it. It creates a logical story based on observed patterns, keeps you consistent, productive with your goals, and zealously attacks anything that threatens this false self and reality. Those things are deemed problems. In this way, your mind turns on you. It makes the Self an enemy.
You should understand that none of this is inherently bad. Collapsing your reality based on beliefs and assumptions can be beneficial. The reason the flow of attention is narrowed is so you can maintain stable operation. It’s only when the current paradigm stops serving you, or worse, starts hurting you, that you notice there’s a problem.
If your own mind would make you out to be a problem, then I say give it a problem. Just as the mind turns against you, you can turn it back against itself. A proverbial bitch slap, dealt by its own hand.
Your mind has done to you what Set did to Osiris—it has fractured you, cut you off from You.
Not truly, but it convinces you it has. This is the game we must play.
You must simultaneously be Isis and Horus. Reclaim the scattered pieces of your Self and “defeat” the mind.
Once you do this, the Self is reborn.
Sticky White Stuff
Remember how we discussed that anything you can observe is not you? It’s not like I haven’t repeated it for the humpteenth time now. (And I’ll keep repeating it till it cracks through that concrete cranium of yours.)
Not only are your thotty thoughts and fee fees observable, but so too is your mind.
Think of it like a little mindception. You can watch yourself thinking about thinking about thinking.
How voyeuristic.
No matter how far out you extend this chain, the only thing you can never observe is your Self. There is always an observer beyond the observer, who sits there, observantly, in an observatory, observing.
That’s how grand you are. Almost as grand as me. You’re on your way, dear reader.
This realization is the first step to dealing with the mind and its noise.
The second step is realizing the mind loves problems. It perceives life as a never-ending chain of problems—you solve one, it invents another. Problems are the mind’s crack.
Remember those things you couldn’t ignore? Your mind believes these are problems. Whether they are or not is up for debate, but the fact remains that, for the mind, they are unignorable because they threaten the self—this is the mind’s identity, not yours.
Ignoring most thoughts and feelings works because most of them are nonsense. I can’t begin to count the narwhals in my daydreams and diamonds in my eyes. They come, they go, I watch my lovely narwhals surf on past, all coked up on life. I have no strong attachments to them. They simply pass by me in this metapsychic ocean.
Those sticky ones, however, are different. They spurt suddenly, white and globby. And so very sticky. Sometimes they make you feel gross.
(I was talking about glue, pervert. Get your mind out of the sphincter, reader!)
Ignoring those won’t work. They’ll keep on harassing you.
So, what do you do?
It’s simple. You give them the attention they so demand.
“Rah! Make up your mind. You told me to ignore them last week!”
Of course I did.
This is a structured lesson, dear reader. You needed to experience this to understand. Don’t you know I know what’s best for you? Would I ever let you down?
Give the sticky white thoughts your attention in the same way that you do a child throwing a tantrum—somewhat detached. It’s not that serious, they just want to be seen. They want to be acknowledged. They want to be understood. Even if the tantrum is about me stealing their candy. It’s not my fault babies make it easy. Maybe hide your fruit snacks, little loser. Your mom told me I could take some.
These thoughts, these feelings—you can’t ignore them because they’re trying to tell you something. Are they messages from your soul? From God Himself? From the collective unconscious?
You take your pick.
What’s important is you acknowledge them and let them go. Sometimes, it’s as simple as that. Other times, it’s a call to action.
Do what you have to. They’re trying to tell you something about you. Don’t let the mind box you in because it can’t accept possibilities.
On the other side of that unpleasant thing is an expansion of you into the greater Self. The Black Cube desires nothing less than your failure to do just that.
Stop Eating the White Stuff
Your mind loves eating the white stuff.
The glue, I mean. Yeah, the glue.
It loves problems. But it hates not being able to solve them.
If these sticky things are truly that sticky, you need to now ask why? Because for reasons only you can answer, you either haven’t accurately identified the problem, or you are unwilling or unable to solve it. Yet still you cling to it, like a baby (or me) to a single mother’s teat.
Once identified, the problem often ceases to be a problem. The mind flags it as a problem because of the truth it reveals:
The false self is a phony. It has far less control or problem-solving ability than it likes to believe.
Sometimes, it’s simply because you’re fatuus. But even then, are you afraid to admit to yourself that you’re an idiot? If not, why are you still stuck with this “problem”? If yes, then now you know. Work towards being less stupid. Or just be happy being stupid. The choice is yours.
In most cases, the problems are beyond your control. While these may be tragic, it’s important you sack up and drag those bowling balls along with you. A little acceptance of these is often enough to catapult you into that expansionary realm of the Self, which is exactly what you desire, whether you realize it or not. Maybe you’ll find the problem was never a problem at all. Sometimes, it’s a wakeup call. You may even find that once you stop resisting life, it comes to meet you.
Now, we need to put this into practice.
Unless you are like me, a perfect being, haunted by no demons, blessed only with narwhals and diamonds, you’ll need to find where you’re coated with the sticky white stuff (many report finding it in their hair, or their eyes, on their stomach, or even in their rectum).
Once you find it, acknowledge its existence, but remember it is not you.
Is it a thought? What feelings are associated with it?
Is it a feeling? What thoughts are associated with it?
Explore it.
Maybe it’s as simple as, “I’m lonely and no one likes me because I’m a loser.”
My dear friend, of course you are. But only because you keep allowing beliefs like this to run in the background of your mind! It was there all along, you simply weren’t aware.
This is exactly why you must acknowledge and integrate. Because once you have made these sticky things conscious, you can now begin scraping them off.
Do you see now why this has everything to do with getting chicks?
Capisce, amico?
Fantastico.
Now, off with you. Come back next week with fruit snacks and your report.
(Please bring the Scooby-Doo ones.)
Ti amo.