Empowered Individuals and Spiritual Draft Animals:
Now bear with me a moment while I stray ahead again. In the case of the horses pulling the weights, their task was quite straightforward and the creatures performing it (the horses) were quite simple. To achieve 150% efficiency for humans living their lives is a lot harder than to achieve 150% efficiency for horses pulling weights. There are a lot more aspects to living a life than there are to pulling weights, the people living those lives are a lot more aware of the different aspects of their lives than horses could be, and the people have a lot more aspects to their lives than the horses do. But it is possible.
Have you ever known people who seem like blissfully ignorant brainwashed simpletons who belong to some organization like Christianity, the military, a high school football team, or a religious cult, who, in spite of their simplemindedness always seem to have this perky, positive attitude and an inexhaustible supply of energy toward whatever they’re doing? That’s because those people are living 150% efficiently and you aren’t. The scope of their lives is much more limited than yours, hence the reason these people seem so simpleminded, but within the scope of their lives (such as they are) they always feel like they have some spiritual presence there to cooperate with them in all aspects of their (simple) lives, whether it’s a god or the Reverend Jim Jones, or a sense of companionship they share with their like-(simple-)minded athletes or service personnel. In other words, by limiting these people’s perspectives on life, someone has figured out how to turn these people into spiritual draft animals.
Of course, this isn’t to say that everyone who achieves 150% efficiency this way is simple-minded, just that they seem simple-minded to other people. I seem simple-minded to a lot of people. That doesn’t mean that I am, it just means that I refuse to see the world the way a lot of people think I should. It’s not that I have anything against filling out my income taxes, keeping a good credit rating, figuring out how new computer software works or whatever bullsh*t, it’s just that unlike most people, I relate the significance of those things to the grand scheme of human evolution, and despite what a lot of people want me to believe, that significance isn’t terribly much. There is some amount of evolutionary logic to sending in your taxes on April 15th instead of April 16th, but it’s a lot less evolutionary logic than the IRS would have you believe.
My point is, if you can live your life to 150% efficiency in whatever capacity you define your life, no matter how simple-minded you might seem to someone else, you’re still doing something that the “non-simple-minded” person isn’t, which is living your life to 150% efficiency. If they’re so smart, why don’t they figure out how to live 150% efficiently?
How do you train people to live 150% efficiently as a group? Well, to start with, some people are going to be more susceptible to this than other people, so the first thing you do is to find those susceptible people. Then you start teaching the people a limited or abridged version of reality, using as much subconscious emotional communication as possible so they won’t become consciously aware that you’re doing it. Then you start leading them in a bunch of rituals, such as wearing the same uniforms, cutting their hair the same way, talking the same way, exercising in drills together, training in drills together, showering together, marching the same way, standing at attention the same way, sleeping in the same barracks, eating in the same mess hall, cleaning their guns the same way, training to kill the same people, and so on.
How could individuals find that same spiritual draft animal strength within their own lives and without sacrificing their individuality? Simple. First these people would have to figure out the parameters of their own lives for themselves. In order to do that the people would have to figure out how to align all the forces of their own being, which as you shall see from the rest of this book, isn’t as easy as it sounds, but is well worth the effort. By keeping their instincts and intellects working together in harmony—which is not the typical state of life in agrarian civilization—these people learn how to cooperate with themselves. By keeping their instincts and intellects working together, the people can feel that they have something else there to cooperate with them, and they can see the results of that cooperation. By feeling like they’re cooperating with themselves, the people can live 150% efficiently and thereby become their own higher powers.
Some people even engage in rituals to help make that happen, but other people (myself included) don’t need to. For the people who do engage in their own rituals, they are calling their own attention to the fact that something important is happening, and thereby they prime themselves physio-psychologically to achieve the ultimate objective of the ritual in the usual Pavlovian way. Personally, I have trouble taking this idea seriously, to think that people should need to go to this much effort to circumnavigate their own spiritual being in order to bring it all into alignment. I mean, making the intellectual decision to call your own emotional instincts to the fact that you’re aligning your own intellect and emotional instincts? That sounds like an awful lot of unnecessary work to me. The funniest part is that people who go to all this effort always seem to assume that because I don’t go to that effort I can’t possibly be as spiritually “organized” as they are! But to their credit, for these people this self-imposed ritualism does seem to work.