Vicious rumours

It has reached Pretty Lady's pretty little ears that there are some ugly rumours going around the Internet. To wit, Pretty Lady has been accused of being a pretty little fraud.

Pretty Lady has to admit that it's true. She pays a monkey six dollars an hour to do her typing for her. Not only is this sub-minimum wage, but the truly dastardly thing is, when the monkey types in the comments from her detractors, she lets him make them up.

Really, darlings. Pretty Lady likes to think that everyone is smarter than that.

For what ought to be staggeringly obvious is that Pretty Lady is exactly what she claims to be--words on a screen. Words on a screen, darlings. Everything else is up to the imagination of the reader.

Readers being what they are, responses to Pretty Lady are bound to vary widely; what she would like to point out is that, since she is nonexistent in corporeal form, there is literally nothing there that could possibly be 'fraudulent.' What is perceived by the reader is, therefore, undoubtedly a projection of the reader's own mind.

Thus, Pretty Lady's author has discovered that Pretty Lady, as a postulate, is an invaluable tool for uncovering the inner, hidden character of her readers. You see that Pretty Lady, as a postulate, as a noncorporeal entity, declares to her readers, "I love you, darling." She means it, of course. As a postulate, she can be made to mean anything that Pretty Lady's author wants her to mean.

What, then, is a person's response, when presented with this postulation? Hmmm. Noncorporeal. Love. Darling.

Pretty Lady is heartened to notice that the vast majority of souls, when presented with this postulate, jump up and down and say, "I love you TOO, Pretty Lady!" Or variants thereon. This makes Pretty Lady most certain that her initial postulation was not erroneous; she really DOES mean it. Her author too. And Pretty Lady's author's author smiles, she thinks, and says, "Told you so."

It saddens both Pretty Lady and her author, however, when the projections of certain other souls, for whatever tragic reason, regard this postulate with hostility and suspicion. In a further experiment, Pretty Lady cheerfully and habitually agrees to whatever identity these brothers and sisters would like to clothe her in. Pretty Lady is a harlot? Certainly, darling. Pretty Lady is a bitch? Why, of course! How perceptive of you, dear! Pretty Lady is a fraud? See above. Pretty Lady has never claimed to be anything else.

In tedious psychological jargon, this technique is called mirroring. People, in Pretty Lady's experience, generally see what they are looking for. If it is not there, they will still be certain to find it. Pretty Lady simply makes it easy for them. What they see in Pretty Lady, then, after a time, is a more or less accurate view of how they see themselves, their souls, those places they thought were hidden.

Which is why these people make Pretty Lady so sad. She is not sad for herself; as she has taken great pains to indicate, there is no Pretty Lady there to be sad. She is sad for them. She is sad that they are out there, stumbling around, projecting their distorted visions into the world, and then lashing out at those visions as if they were real.

For, to paraphrase Pretty Lady's dear friend, Ken Wilber, 'What if you dreamed you were walking on a tightrope, above an abyss full of snarling monsters, and on the tightrope next to you were everyone you knew? Then, what if you realized it was all a dream, and you could make it come out however you wanted? What would you do?

Well, you'd start doing tricks on the tightrope, of course. You'd bounce up and down, doing back flips, knowing that nothing could hurt you.

The only thing that would make you sad, however, is if your friends in the dream still believed it was real. You would want to assure them that it was okay. That would be your only true concern.'