Lore of Hedge Wizard Uur'lok of the Steppe
The following writings are the journal entries of Hedge Wizard Uur’lok of the Steppe. They were entered into the Book of Lore in April, 2022 to preserve the lessons which linger in writings of such transcendent beings. The deeply personal entries, written without the intent of ever being published, begin at a time of great turmoil for Uurlok, many years into a life-long prison sentence.
January 12, 13072
The guard (who I quietly refer to as Stinky) agreed with me after much convincing that the prison’s staff might greatly benefit from granting each prisoner some parchment and ink. 'The mind devoid an ordered outlet will find a chaotic one,’ or so I told him.
The guards are obsessed with what they understand to be order. You must remember… they willingly confine themselves with these walls, daily. Only the prisoners were compelled to be here.
The guards are more deeply invested in this illusion than I ever could be.
January 14, 13072
I sat in silence this morning when a rooster appeared and pecked at the dirty soup bowl just outside my cell door. The bird oddly stared as it gulped down the last of the discarded olives. As it looked at me, for the first time, I saw myself. The chicken stared at me and I too stared at me. I examined the cavernous wrinkles descending from the sides of my beak, the bald spot which until now, I’d thought much smaller. I noticed the strange way my head moved back and forth.
The bird soon flapped his wings and scurried away, generously leaving behind a piece of his wing. And so, together with my newly acquired parchment and ink, both the bird and I now write these words.
January 17, 13072
I have grown to see this world just as it is.
Most have yet to see themselves.
Many are enslaved to their own mind. A mind which fundamentally functions on impressions. For most, these contextual impressions and their corresponding compulsions become the default owner and operator of the self.
January 18, 13072
I’ve become quite adept at identifying the mental structures which underlie the compulsions of the various guards. Viewing through the window of one’s material actions, the ideas within another’s mind fail to elude me.
I am working to attune myself — to view them more clearly.
January 20, 13072
Stinky seems especially accessible, I must say. I saw him nibbling on a peach the exact way another guard was just a day ago.
January 27, 13072
I have begun referring to my practice as “Puppetry.” As the puppet master embodies the exact impulse which he transmits through the strings to his puppet, so too, I provide impulse…tension to the puppets around me. Their mental structures are simply the strings, which govern directly the puppet’s compulsory reaction to such impulses.
I cannot help but to admit, as the awareness of this practice has risen in me, so too has a darkness.
February 4, 13072
The standardized protocol which most of the guards uphold within the prison is meant as a defense from my Puppetry.
However, they do not view it that way. The guards see themselves as separate from the protocol, despite operating as a cog within it for years. Their mind dances in the illusion; that the rules are written for me, and not in fact for them.
February 5, 13072
Mapping the mental structures within the guards is a much vaster challenge than I’d previously thought. Conversation illuminates the contours of their mind, however it is non-trivial getting these guys to talk.
Interestingly, despite having endless conversation with my fellow prisoners, and fully understanding the contours of their minds, I have found them to be much less suggestible than the guards. This, I have surmised is due to the guards having a particularly concentrated, albeit completely untrue, feeling of personal agency over their decisions. They have come to be enslaved by their context, having long ago lost the ability to see their reality.
The prisoners around me do not suffer this curse. They have internalized the bars encasing their bodies as a lack of agency, which of course is also untrue.
They, in any case, are far less impressionable than the guards.
Entered by: 0xA0Ad…52f5 and preserved on chain (see transaction)
