I'm a meat puppet, and I don't know how to drive
Awake.
Consciousness, coming to grips with a stream of stimuli; light, sounds, touch.
Only to find, we're trapped! Encased in a meat puppet.
Our puppet grows, eventually we learn to control its limbs, finally well enough to move around the world. Over time we learn to put food into it, and what to do with the stuff that comes out.
All this time, we are telling stories.
Stories about the world around us, stories about our meat puppet, and its place in the world of other meat puppets. Some of these puppets look like ours, others are different shapes, and colours. Furthermore, some move about on four legs, use wings to fly, or flippers to swim.
Gradually we learn to tell our stories, so the other meat puppets like us understand. At first poorly, using sounds. We are often misunderstood. After some time, our simple stories help us navigate the world.
As we learn to communicate outside our puppet, our internal stories grow richer and deeper. For each story we share, there are hundreds and thousands we tell ourselves. Sometimes we hear stories from other puppets we don't understand, some are like the noises our puppet made when it was small; sharp loud bursts, while others have the rhythm of our language, but mean nothing to us.
Later we learn to control our puppet to convey our stories with magic symbols. Through these symbols others can know our stories, and we learn theirs. With these symbols we can craft a story, and make it known to others without having to speak it to their puppet. Our stories flourish.
And yet, we have so many more inside. Some of these stories are beautiful, many hold us back, confuse us. More and more, the stories we tell ourselves are imagining what stories the other puppets might be telling about us. A lot of time and stories are spent on making our puppet look and act like the others. We agonize over the possible stories they are telling. Will they not like our stories, or our puppet. Do we not conform to their story about the world?
Years go by. We continue to tell ourselves the same kind of stories. Many become foundational, locked in, shaping the stories we will tell in the future. Most puppets find ways to distract from their own stories, to still them. Some try to quiet the stories of others. A great number of the stories are untrue, some small matters of wishful thinking. Wanting to be seen in one way or another that isn't quite true. Others are entirely fabricated, tricks to shape the stories we tell ourselves, to convince us to act or think in a particular way.
We spend much of our time awake curating the story about our puppet, giving it the right accessories, styling it just so. Striving to convince the other puppets of the story we think they want to believe. Pretending to be something we aren't.
Over time a new story starts to grow. It's one we've told ourselves a million times, but this time it has a different ending. We don't know what we are doing.
We have the basic mechanics sure, the eating and pooing bit is straightforward after the first few years. But what are we actually doing? Why do we strive, and worry so about the stories the others might be telling about us. We begin to think none of the other puppets know what they are doing either.
We are all trapped inside a meat puppet, telling stories, trying to do what we think is right?
What if
What if we stopped pretending?
Sometimes we are tired, sometimes we are sick, sometimes we are afraid. Most importantly; we don't actually know what we are doing, and that's OK, neither does anyone else. There are many who have wisdom and knowledge, those that can paint a beautiful picture, reason through the physics of string theory, or grow a perfect tomato. Yet they too are trapped in their meat puppet, telling stories about their place in the world. Swept up in the same worry and pretense, of self-doubt and uncertainty.
Take your puppet to a mirror, look it in the eyes and say:
"I don't know what I am doing, and that's OK, neither does anyone else"
Then?
Once you've fully internalized this fact, the nature of being. Of being a consciousness driving a meat puppet, what should you do?
Pause to consider that every consciousness wakes under the same basic conditions, trying to do right, without a manual.
It is blind luck that you ended up with the meat puppet you got. There are eight billion humans, and trillions of non-human consciousnesses, trying to make sense of the world they find themselves in. If you are in a position to be reading these words, you are most likely amongst the wealthiest and most powerful 10% of people living on this planet. It doesn't feel that way for most, it's frankly surreal that earning more than $60,000 a year puts you in the global top 5% of earners. And perhaps more shocking still that the top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 95% combined.
How did the world get so lopsided? Mostly through stories; about rulers, about nations, about others not being the same as "us", and stories about this being the only way things could be.
And so
Stop pretending to be something you aren't, or don't even want to be, face the world as it is. Meet the other consciousnesses around you more honestly, knowing they are the same as you, just as confused, also trying to do the right thing.
Crucially, focus on building local communities with them. So many stories we are told, the world over, are produced by a tiny number of companies. Not living beings, but corporations that don't have our interests at heart. Controlled by the 1%, extracting wealth so they can convince us we can't live without them, that we need to consume, for others to think well of us, so they can extract more.
We don't know the people behind these corporations. By focusing on your community, you can learn their stories, and they yours. We can be honest with each other; we are trying to do what's right, sometimes we make mistakes, together we can learn to do better.
The meat puppet
I'm a meat puppet, others call me Sascha. I'm building things to help foster a sense of community, to build local networks, to let people in my community grow and thrive. I'm not a faceless corporation, I don't want to sell you anything you don't need. And I definitely don't have a PR team that does my hair and makeup to make everything look slick, I took this after waking this morning.
