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The Consciouness and the Car Problem: A Theory of Vessels and Movement in the 21st Century

"I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance" 2 Peter 1:13

You're watching a film. The specifics of how you came to be watching the film or why it was chosen aren't important. The film is a tightly cropped single take of a car, the driver inside makes slight adjustments with his hands that are visible through the driver side door's glass but barely register because of the lack of significant action; overall the film itself is unimpressive. It is merely a car with a driver as they move through an unrecognizable space. In fact, the car is cropped so tight in the frame that little of the background is visible and what is is bleary and out-of-focus, so at times you have difficulty even registering that the car is moving and that the driver is doing anything within it to compel that movement or make minute changes to the trajectory. The car and the driver, it is clear, are meant to be the focal point, but anything beyond this as far as "meaning" goes is abstracted from context. 

At some point while watching the visual stimulation becomes hallucinatory as your mind switches into auto-pilot and simply interprets the pure stimulus it is receiving without registering any of it as distinct, that is: as a car with a driver, their movements inside etc.

What occurs is that the actual shot becomes a still on the screen; but your mind, in the mode of having just received it as shifting stimuli for an imperceivable amount of time, still propels it, that is: internally your brain is still attempting to create the sensation of the external image's movement, which is a dissonant phenomena given that the image is in fact frozen--although still showing the original subjects i.e. car and driver within. This phenomenon of your mind competing with an actual external reality awakens you to the dualist state of your interpretation of things in relation to the image on the screen and you start to feel slightly uncomfortable, as if it's impossible to trust your own head or the external world, either way it never be wholly clear which is the culprit or what the forces doing battle really are fighting over. 

Right at that moment the driver side door of the car evaporates into thin air so that the fullness of the driver's form is visible where as before it'd been obscured by metal and glass. The driver is wearing indistinct clothes, normal attire for a human being of their size and age. The shot then widens in a zoom-out from the car to reveal the car is on a motorized system that spins the wheels; the rest of the backdrop disappears with various shifts and flickers of light as the space becomes a blank white room with nothing but the car and driver at the center, even the rotors moving the tires disappear leaving the image static again. You're growing more and more uncomfortable with the non-subtle shifts occurring just as your mind starts to grasp some aspect of what is occurring either in the film or internally, that is: within your mind as it observes the screen etc. 

Now the question becomes: is the car still moving or not? What defined it's movement? The interpretation of the stimuli in your mind, the actuality of it moving through space prior to the cut revealing it was on a rotor system spinning its wheels-which could easily be film trickery . . . ? What is true, and how could you ever really know given the circumstance of it being a film you're perceiving, a projection absorbed through fallible organs and senses and filtered through mental processes . . . You feel almost like you're about to panic for some reason, and just then the screen shifts again, this time the whole perspective moves slowly, the angle making a 180 degree tilt from the side of the car to the underside of its carriage, revealing the whole schema of parts and tubing that make the car function, all of which quickly dissipates into thin air like the door and setting before it, leaving only the driver suspended in the total white space in the same position they'd been in while seated in the car. As you're watching this you're fidgeting in your seat, trying to find some way of orienting yourself, and almost feel as through you don't have much mobility, that is: you can't seem to move your total mass as much as you'd like so a lot of it is mental, and you start to sweat heavily. 

Without warning the driver's clothing disappears, leaving them naked, suspended. Slowly, random shapes, pieces, move into the frame from the sides of the screen and gather around the driver's body. First is what can only be described as multiple "levels" of a full body suit fitting over the top of their head to the soles of their feet, it is a silver mesh like material with heavier looking mask and glovers attached, themselves darker than the rest, almost black. A visor-like chunk comes from the right side of the screen and fits over the driver's eyes. Then what looks to be a pin screen toy slightly serpentine slides under the driver's back from the left side of the screen and fits their shape perfectly; from both sides come independent halves of a curved cover that only reveals itself when it has fit together over the driver, as it itself is white and carries no shadow as their is no discernible light source in the void of space. Hoses and various wiring fit into the top of the constuction now, at the top, in a tight knot; and a base comes up from the bottom of the screen so that there is a fully configured "pod" centered in the frame. 

By now you're breathing heavy and legitimately freaking out as it begins feeling like there's some drive inside of you to push you through a membrane you didn't feel before but can "sense" and you try to stand up, blocked by an internal command that you begin to fight the more claustrophobic it starts to feel, the darker things grow inside and out, or if that's even a distinction that can be made at this point. You can't recall where you are, things like space and time seem immaterial as there arises a sensation almost like a voice but with no clear dictation telling you to keep trying to move as you actually try to scream and realize you don't have the ability to produce sound. You're trapped in sleep paralysis, but you know you're not asleep. It's a nightmare but that can't be because you know with certainty that you are awake; and just like that the whole thing reconfigures: you blink and you're absorbed, the total perspective changes so that you're no longer looking at a screen, you're looking at your hands in the heavy, nearly black gloves over them, you're not able to scream because there's a tube in your throat you can feel burning all the way to your gut with each new level of awareness; neurons begin firing at full-amperage and the whole of your mental space is dominated by actual feeling, by an actual acute awareness of being, not just the interpretation of external stimuli. You are you, the driver of in-inertia . . . There was the continued sense of momentum because the stimuli fed neuro-kinetically to your body and mind correlated to lived experience for as long as you could remember, when in actuality you'd never moved at all, not once: the complete erasure of your "memory" flickers like you'd been told your life would flash before your eyes at the time of your death but everything feels more energized, you begin pushing and pulling at things trying to disconnect them from your self, but it's too late: an alarm is going off, the strobe of its light faintly visible through a crack in the architecture of the pod cover. A moment later there is intense heat and near instantaneous engulfing of a total alertness that pushes you through consciousness itself into a wholly different domain all together.


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