Chapter Eight: What goes on Behind Closed Doors

“There are things known,

and there are things unknown,

and between are the doors of perception.”

                                                                 __Aldous Huxley

There is, also, a great old country song revolving around how no one really  knows what goes on behind closed doors. Regardless of which quote fits the moment for the collective entities a great deal depends on no one looking through the sort of doors Huxley was talking about. For the CE's even more than a wandering lover keeping those doors of perception firmly closed is an absolute necessity for survival.

Why would that be so?  Why would reality dictate that the humans remain ignorant of the relationships between the CE's and themselves?  When the situation is examined in depth several very good reasons present which impact on both sides of the equation.

To open this chapter I'll ask you to contemplate that in objective fact the relationship between any given CE and the individual humans (who are component nodes hosting its' life-force) is a very straightforward exchange of value: the CE acquires sustenance from the individuals in the form of their loyalty, their compliance and enactment into physical reality the definition which is the foundation of any given CE, in exchange that CE provides to the individuals some component of the self definition which is absolutely critical for a human's psychological survival within a complex society. Quite an easily seen symbiosis. So simple and so easily seen as to be easily ignored.

However like most things that seem simple and straightforward when some minor degree of asymmetry or conflict created by that simplicity gets amplified by it's very ubiquitous nature then what is found is a complexity of daunting proportions.  Witness that all of life is crafted from just six self replicating di-nucleic acids arranged in various patterns of complexity.

It is in that complexity of minor conflicts between what defines and separates similar CE's one from another that the CE's compete for survival and dominance. It is in the foibles of the human personality … the ego and the insecurities, the arrogances and the fears… interacting with those differences where the CE's find the tools and the weapons of their struggle for survival. 

A CE is literally a social creature, and life as a purely social creature is rough.  The situation is complicated enough when only the respective CE's are aware of the full dynamic in play.  Let any significant percentage of the human nodes become fully aware and the individual psychologies would be influenced by that complexity.  The situation would almost instantly becomes quite untenable from the perspective of both players.

Since there will be several CE's defining any individual human any conflict or contradiction between those CE's (particularly if the node has fully internalized them) assures those contradictions are echoed into that individual's psychological structures. Should the node be aware it was the CE's that provided him not only the components of his self definition but equally the source of the conflicts that trouble him the conflict count would go up significantly, particularly as the factors of human physiological emotion enter the mix.

If there are too many contradictions to resolve the individual will suffer, as will the associated CE's.  How could it be otherwise?  From the fate of one the fate of the other is derived, as one fares so fares the other.  It is not such a stretch to understand that the ultimate well being of both sides of the symbiosis is quite dependent on minimizing the incompatibilities, and the first and simplest tactic to accomplish that end is for the nodes to remain ignorant of CE's in the first place.

  And yet, such a thought just introduces another layer of complication into these exploration. By the definition offered each CE would…  just as does it's humans hosts who set the original template of their lives… have the instinct for personal survival, not to mention an ego self, and self importance that mandates the desire to grow and become stronger. 

From the CE's perspective these things are a serious conundrum: those differences which create the dangerous conflicts within the common host are, to them, the very differences that define them as unique living creatures.

For a, any, CE to achieve a significant degree of security would demand that  any moral or ethical differences (at the host level)  between that CE and the foundation definitions of the other CE's present (within their common host) had been eliminated.  The net effect would be to effectively collapse the society of Collective Entities to its' most primal levels… a population diminished several orders of magnitude.  By example, ceReligion might survive, but ceProtestant and all of her daughters most certainly would not.

At the time of this writing it is a very open question just how much of this conundrum is actually acknowledged by the CE's.  Just how self aware are they?

 Judging by the behavior of social forces which show every evidence of defining a major CE they are just as resistant to entertaining such concepts as are the humans whereon their lives are hosted, and for reasons that would run closer to parallel than otherwise. It may well be the humans are not the only creatures hiding behind doors of perception kept most deliberately closed. 

If there is truth to such a thought then another set of concepts must be introduced into the relationship between the humans and the CE's, the recently technology-awakened societies:  what happens if the Collective Entities inherit any or all of the psychological deformities which plague the human hosts from whence they derive their template of existence? 

A terrifying possibility to be examined in the forthcoming chapter "Round, like a circle in a spiral…"

...to be continued...