South of Maya - Second Chapter

 

II

 

“Just as every portion of the hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole.” 

Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe

       Look around you.  See how many highly-intelligent people have never managed to succeed. 

       Wonder how that is possible.

       Think of the countless hard-working people who have been so diligent that they gave up their lives to do their job well.  And yet they, too, have never thrived. 

       Why? 

       To Mann, and a handful of specially-gifted people like him, the reason was obvious.

       It was the box.

       The box, of course, is different for everybody.  Its walls are your core assumptions about the world, simplifications of reality expressed in mysterious phrases which, despite their obvious flaws, people accept as if they’ve been chiseled by the hand of god directly into their brains:

 

       The rich get richer.

       It takes money to make money.

       The only way to get ahead is to work hard.

       The world is against me.

       I only deserve to be paid what I’ve worked for.

       I’m not very good at (fill in many blanks).

       I just can’t (fill in many blanks). 

 

       And if you added up all these and at least a million other self-imposed cliches, spoken and unspoken, plus hard-wired restrictions buried so deeply in the human psyche that our species still hasn’t discovered words for them, you have roughly defined “the box,” as in: “think outside the box.”

       Yet for a few peculiar individuals, the box isn’t there.  For such a person, the existence of all these assumptions is mildly perplexing, a puzzle about life and the universe that there is no particular reason to waste your time trying to solve.

       These people are born without hard-wired limits on what they can accomplish.  Life coaches learn to spot them early.  You have to be careful what you say to that fellow, because you could send him in a direction and he’d be gone before you had your next call... 

       A person like that would bring a problem to a psychologist, talk it through, and walk out minus whatever problem brought him there.  In an hour.

       You couldn’t test for who’s missing this box thing.  Missing boxes don’t show up on IQ measurements, personality assessments or the interpretations of inkblots on a page. 

       Certain leaders of certain government agencies discovered long ago that only way to find this elusive, highly-desirable personality trait is by the crudest form of trial and error. 

       You hire a thousand intelligent people at extravagant salaries, bring them to Washington and give them situations to rectify.  A dozen, more or less, will be killed by various Other Sides in the course of bungling their missions in ways that could not be foreseen.  Eight hundred others, more or less, will simply fail to find solutions.  The talented survivors will succeed once, perhaps twice, before failing the tougher assignments due to obstacles of their own creation.  The smartest of these will become coveted analysts at Langley. 

       If the government is lucky, the thousand it hired will produce one individual who can, for reasons unknown to the psychologists, be reliably counted on to walk into a strange and dangerous situation and see what teams of analysts did not.  This person will fix the situation in the most straightforward, effective way, without making the kind of splash that attracts the attention of the local spooks, foreign authorities, and most importantly, the press and your elected representatives. 

       You will hardly notice he was there at all.

       This individual will be fast-tracked to the highest circles of his craft, into a very small network that is given deep access to how the world really works behind the dense, multi-layered facade of political posturing and the daily lies spoon-fed to the news outlets.

       A person like this is able to know people at a very deep level after a few glances.  Periodically, he will be put through days of testing, until yet again the psychologists in the Maryland laboratory have definitively ruled out the ability to read minds.

       “You're unusually capable of experiencing the world through the eyes and mind of others,” the psychologist told him, in the windowless office, facing the bookshelf filled with titles that he knows, because of their placement, were designed to impress.  The psychologist never quite made eye contact, which communicated as loudly as a shout that his interviewer feared this inexplicable skill.

       Why? 

       The subject remembers a young female assistant who came in earlier to hand the doctor a sheaf of papers.  He remembers now that, in his presence, the psychologist had avoided eye contact with her, and that, because of this, her face had registered fleeting anxiety.  Looking at the psychologist now, the subject realizs that the two are engaged in a clandestine affair.

       “You would have been a hell of an actor in Hollywood,” the psychologist said, a bit woodenly, making eye contact with the papers on his desk.

       “I would have made a lot more money,” the subject replied.  “And I would have had an easier time believing in my work.”

       The psychologist did not write this down, which told the subject something important: that the psychologist, too, harbored reservations about the various nudges, meddling and occasional quiet disappearances of people all over the world.  He filed it away.

       When, long before his time, the subject shocked his superiors with his premature retirement announcement, he knew that the psychologist would be among the few who would experience no surprise.  He knew that there would be be serious discussion about taking him (now no longer clearly white or black) off the chessboard, but the psychologist’s report would tip the scales in favor of his survival.

       He’d tell them that Mann’s mental makeup is not inclined to treachery.  After all, hadn’t Mann kept the secret about his relationship with the receptionist?