Thursday, June 30, 2011

"Afterlife" a short essay

This is a little essay I wrote regarding the nature of the afterlife. Thought I think everybody will disagree with my vision, nevertheless, the structure of it describes pretty well what I mean by “Allistic Logic,” so it doesn’t require your agreement for you to get what I’m driving at. I hope you like it! We will be back to the long essay “Strategies for the Game” soon!

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

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AFTERLIFE

 

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Prophesy

 

Burn the witch

And while you watch

You’ll breathe her back in

She will come again

Within your children.

 

 

Mortal

Men love life, though all will die

So I love you, though you will leave.

My heart did harden, and daily aches with your word.

“Divorce” you say, and I believe you.

And so I love you as something I don’t own

Kiss you as something I can’t hold

Adore you as something I can’t keep.

This is the wisdom of being mortal.

 

 

 

Draw Near

 

Oh my lovers, Draw near, Press a kiss,

Your love is …always so dear.

You were ever Such children

Its stories you’d hear

 

Today we all grow older—

You keep whispering mysteries

Its time you grew bolder.

 

My stories are simple

If you first know the gimmick

Observe the beginning

There’s a logic in it.

 

The rest its unfolding

Like this spreading hand

Where is that beginning?

Right there at the end!

 

This one is young

As the day I met her

That one grew younger

She’s glad that I let her

 

Oh my lovers,

There is yet still time,

Still time for new stories.

History finally begins, with this rhyme.

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                One birth is sufficient for all men, one life sufficient for man, woman, child, and even the unfortunate stillborn. Outside of time we chose our stage, and in this stage we set ourselves up to carve our divinity. One life, and in the next we are the beauty we committed in this life. Upon death, each man faces the promise of what his religion taught him, for he enters a dream. The Buddhist imagines countless samsaras, the Christian imagines judgment, and heaven or hell, the pagan imagines Valhalla or Elysian fields of apotheosis, the atheist imagines dissolving into pure universal matter, and yet in each of these dreams, consciousness remains, changed, but ever present, for the mind is made of matter, and matter is eternal. What you by faith and fury imagine the afterlife to be, your mind will make for you, and those who feel the same way, and believe the same way, share your fate with you.

                Us Allists do not stop in any one heaven or hell for long, but walk across all of them, cause a little mischief, we break all borders, we will be masters of all heavens and all hells. But in the very end, we each long to be a Universe and a God in ourselves. We seek to draw near the ones we have loved, or the parts of the ones we have loved that they permit us, they give us parts of their soul, or if we have earned such an honor, we may fuse innermost in utter intimacy with a lover. We are able to turn inwards and become Everything. A rare honor. For those who believe otherwise, they will never achieve it, and the will of freedom becomes forever cut from the center of necessity. This is their place and purchase. This is their way and triumph. We do not argue with them nor tempt them, but we let each man choose his ultimate fate, as he sets himself up to choose such things before he was born, where he stood outside of time in his own private universe, as an ultimate undifferentiated freedomnecessity. Under no circumstances pity a man, nor envy a man,  but if you wish intimacy, then you must love him in compassion and be willing to share his joys, suffer his sorrows, and give kindness, which is the art of improving each other, not merely the art of giving.

                All religions and beliefs are true in the imagination, and after we leave the senses, we are immersed in that imagination, an imaginary we may share with those we love. None can come to us but through shared affinity. In this life, enemies approach, but in the next life, only lovers draw near. Therefore, we will each be our own reward. That which we choose to become in this life will draw close to us in the next.

                Ultimately, no man can be disappointed with eternity, yet some must work out their salvation through the hells they created. This life and this life alone defines how much of a god we may be. This life and this life alone determines how much soul we will have. There is no other time to become divine, but every little choice, every joy, and every pain you experience in this life, build for you “treasures in heaven” which is your very heart you are building, and the kingdom of heaven is none other than the loving community you are able to earn through creative power and intimate affection. A god is powerful and loving, yet most people in the next life will be worshippers of gods, and forever so, though scarcely gods themselves, for they cannot shine like the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars; they compromised too much in this life. They will be happy yes, but they will be less happy and less great in their happiness than those who made themselves great in this life. Mortality is the ultimate playing field, for here we make our choices. There is less risk in the afterlife, but without the risk there is no chance of gaining such great rewards. Because we are less vulnerable in heaven, we have less to gain.

                Seek with me to be utterly divine, and do not make excuses for any imperfection. Ultimately, you are your own reward, and if you would be loved, you must be lovely, if you would be honored, you must be honorable, if you would be friends of God you must be a God. There is no short cut nor any free gift that can save you from this. You must be utterly true to your own infinite potential if you are to become infinite. And this you can do, wherever you are, starting now.

* *

                There is the moment of apotheosis in all our lives, when we may become a god or become a mortal -- before that we are not quite either -- when, in the mythosphere, Ama descends as a Monarch Butterfly and lays a jade egg upon our forehead. I myself, the Idius, this very book you are reading, am within the mythosphere the many winged butterfly whose words are living rivers of gold, though to you they are leaden and difficult. Your mythic self reads them and is ravished, your mundane self struggles a bit. That moment is the blossom which summons Psyche, who was once human too, and has moved on to become the mask of the All. Nor does she give birth to your god self, but lays an egg empty of a soul: it is our decision that determines if you become a god or mortal. If you do not put your godself into the egg, emit a bit of necessity mingled with freedom (need and mind), then you may consign yourself to any other myth, and be doomed to mere happiness, being unable to aspire higher. At that moment our name is spoken into our god form. Lacking that, the worm is nevertheless born, and is the bite of time, so that slowly your body and soul will be swallowed, and you will finally join the dissolvment called “Nirvana bliss” -- thought this may take eons to effectuate.

                In the mythosphere, the Christians are not baptized in water, but in blood, and are owned by their god. They are resurrected in the mythosphere as one perfect bride for the one they love, and enjoy their fate. That is heaven to them. They do go on to a collective individualistic heaven first, serving and being good and happy and all that. The Mormons go on to be the sort of gods that resemble the one they quote so often, and populate different planets, the polygamous among them with greater glory, the rest with less. The Greeks are still mumbling in Hades, or are happy in the Elysian fields. For what we believe becomes true in the dream of death.

                The Hindus do reincarnate, but only in the mythic sphere -- Mundania is far too scientific and lawful for these imaginative flights! And as for atheists, they dissolve into nature, and become the abiding spirits in the weather, the soil, and the ubiquitous organisms. Since nobody deserves misery longer than to educate and perfect him, so nobody gets it; we each get what we deserve, and knowing that we deserve it and why, we would only agree and accept it.

                All these final realities are on earth, are in the atoms of earth; and when the earth moves on, we move on with it. Not that any man can escape his fate, except for Allists, who are like Hermes or Wotan, able to set boundaries and therefore, privileged in the ability to transgress them. We are the only beings, other than Ama, who can transverse final realities, upon the wings of the full grow caterpillar, monarch wings, we alone have no limit on our final resting place, for we must master them all if we are to aspire to be greater-than-Gods, but become each a full Universe. This is why we wear the mark of Cain on our brow, or the mark of repression, so that we are a secret, and not known, and are seen to be normal and regular wherever we go, and are never seen for what we are.

                I the book, the Idius, sooth to be chiseled by these hands, and purr like a kitten in your palms the reader. My monarch form is akin to the form we all take in our symbolic place, as Psyche apotheosis. Omniscience learns; perfections grows. Perfection is not flawless. Nothing living is flawless, for what is flawless cannot grow. The true god is not only immortal, but also mortal. As  you read me, you partake of ultimate reality.

               

               

88

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

perfectidius.com

~~

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Tuesday, June 28, 2011

"The Metamethod" an essay

This short  section of my essay is about the central power in creativity, the Metamethod, which is the method of making methods. Having developed this Metamethod, which could also be called “style” or “personality,” we can create any number of strategies for life. This and the subsequent method explore what a Metamethod is.

Take Care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

=========================================

 

 

 

2. The Metamethod

 

 

            The greatest method is the metamethod, the method by which we make methods. Everything in the world can be done well, better perhaps than you can do it now. You must know how to look at it, how to study its nature, how to experiment with possibilities and figure out an optimum.  We must know how to invent a new method for every occasion, and also how to steal any and all methods we wish, for aside from the conviction of lawyers there is no such thing as "copyright."

            Techniques require centuries to learn. That I write this way or that required thousands of writers to purify these methods, which I absorb readily from every facet of the diamond of language. Philosophical methods, sciences, arts, are not invented all at once by the artist, but only stylistically tweaked by this artist or that. I use all the methods known to man to publish myself, yet there is nothing in my language, in any of it, that only I can write. It is all me, and only me, and yet what I am is not the language, the way the magnet is not the iron fillings that fall in place through its field. I choose these words, but I could have chosen others. My spirit animates all of them, lives forever in them, and yet is more than them, and will ever speak anew.

            Make projects of your life. Make them spontaneous, novel, find for each a new method. The soul ever publishes new needs in the form of some energy itching to get out. When the time is ripe, do what you will. Never read a genre piece. Never read the author who writes twenty books the same. Each work must answer a burning question within the writer’s heart. Each new essay should have a unique method, a personal trope, a lynch pin unlike all the others, as do the poems of the Tao te Jing which each cluster around a unique trope, placed with grace like a dimple in the infant's smile. The womb of creation is sacred.

            Make your method of methods, make it intuitional. Calculation needs only appear if it errs. I need see no programming language if I wrote my program right. Otherwise I am flooded with code. Quote no rules when I am walking perfectly.

            The structuring ideas inform a work and conform its patterns, but they lack any quotable reality in themselves. An encyclopedia of theory can go into a poem which would be otherwise impossible, yet the theory is angelic, heavenly, and therefore nonexistent, pure fiction, something above and beyond anything real and important. Each man is his own star, and follows the fate of his innermost inevitability. Life's frustrations are inevitable; the best of us persist.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

perfectidius.com

~~

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Sunday, June 26, 2011

"The American Scholar" an audiobook

 

 

 

I have decided to make a view audiobooks of Emerson’s lectures and books for the sake of Librivox.org; its volunteer, and so you can get the same material free off my webpage. Here is the link. So far, I have recorded “The American Scholar” in which Emerson declares America’s intellectual independence. Put it on your ipod, check it out!

 

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http://perfectidius.com/americanscholar.mp3

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

perfectidius.com

~~

tweetpic

 

Saturday, June 25, 2011

"Creative Methodism" an essay

Daniel Christopher Junes to the Students of Life: Greetings!

I realized that I was saturating you with sections from my essay “Strategies for the Game,” – so I’ve taken a break from sending it. In fact, we are half done, so I will pick up where I left off. The “Strategies” section of the essay are based on the 8 virtues I’ve singled out: Independence, Creativity, Practicality, Order, Honesty, Optimism, Commitment, and Study. Well we just finished the independence section where I talked of the sanctity of the ego, and the need to keep ourselves hidden, even if we have to be dishonest. This part about creativity begins with a short section regarding creativity as a method, which I will explore more in subsequent sections. Life is good by the way – I’m happy!

 

Take care, Caretakers!

==============================

 

1.      Creative Methodism

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            Life is played as a game in order to secure intellectual aloofness. We play, but it is not real. We can always not care. We can always withdraw our concern. Death cannot intimidate us when we find a use even for death. Aside from the innermost sanctuary of the soul, and as a direct correlate of it, the supreme virtue of virtues, the basis of all life and especially human life, is creativity. We create our body, we create our experience of the world, and at the spiritual level, we create art. To take creativity as primal, as the first consideration in how we act, this leads to the spontaneous and disciplined life of Methodism.

            There are countless methods for doing all things, methods for teeth brushing, making love, playing the guitar. Some are better than others, and some are better for me while others are better for you. The best mix is to unite your personal instincts and self-established method with a bit of sympathetic tradition which resonates to you. Not only do you join a chosen tradition, but you interpret yourself into it, and it into you.

            Life is chaos. The inner needs demand, and swell with energy like seminal vesicles filled with semen, like the sun publishing his glory forever. Creativity constantly taps the innermost shine, flows it outwards into the body and mind. Creativity is growth. To regard all things in life as challenges in need of new creative solutions, to build, make, sing, dance, write, and improve in all things, is the high spiritual truth of the West, the glory of the West, the true glory of every religion and philosophy. What great thing can a philosophy or religion say without admitting that those things, the very religion itself, had first to be created? All hail the creators!

            Ama blesses the overly sensitive. They experience the world as chaos, and the chaos of overstimulation is the greatest incentive to create an order where previously it was lacking. Milton’s Satan, exploring Chaos, finally makes peace with its Rulers, with a Covenant that he will expends their power into all order; and he makes good his promise, and also does not, mastering even Chaos. Or to turn the mystery hidden in the belly of another epic, consider Dante's vision, in which the furthermost is heaven and the centermost is hell, and at her center, the triple heads of the Satanic beast, devouring the committers of the gravest sin, which is the betrayal of the beloved, Judas and Brutus among them, and at the center of that belly, the one and only portal into the deeper than hell, the higher than heaven, the fully other, the unthinkable absolute, the state of being that has no speakable form (god could overhear it if we spoke), but which Blake had a glimpse of when he went on his delicious vacations into hell, and sensed its secret, which Odin was to discover in the belly of the Fenris Wolf, which all sense in the dread infant's conspiracy, which must remain unknowable until it is too late, finally divined by the fool God, of whom Paul said "God's folly is greater than man's wisdom," not knowing that man's folly is greater than both God's folly and also God’s wisdom, a truth teased when Folly spoke some actual utterances through the pen of Erasmus, in his Encomium, who thought he was jesting and didn't know what he taught – like a charlatan leading a séance, made to say through what he thought were deceptions the very truth the seeker sought—so listen well!

            Ultimately, we set up filters for our sensitivity. Unconscious ideas, those engines of thought, move ideas which deserve focused treatment into consciousness, and filter the rest. Once in consciousness, we imagine false causes as their source. They are invisible gravities which swerve our ideas so that the ideas appear autonomous. We see the immediate cause and not the deeper cause.

            Self-reflection reveals the beauty of coincidence. The layers of being sing like the music of the spheres. When we seek this thing, it happens to appear, for providence is the profundity we feel when we unconsciously know how to use a random event. Fate hides in chance. Nor can any random fall of the tarot cards escape a deep and meaningful interpretation to the mind who knows how to stitch a yarn.

            The ego contains the most stereotyped habits. We call those habits the "Me." What we always do is near at hand, like the pen in the writer's pocket, like the insult in the mouth of the jerk. A man is his daily thought; how he thinks of his world defines that world.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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Monday, June 20, 2011

"Sacrament" a poem

 

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Sacrament

 

The monarch psyche

alighted on my brow

The same place as I kiss you now

Inspiring muse she's Ama sent

The Great comes now for the Spirit went

If this drink I pour is sweet and limpid

Psyche's Nectar has made you deathless.

Fiery wings consume the dove

Graceful tips devour Jove

She fans the typhoon with subtle arch

Encircles the earth with easy stretch

You flutter, dance, skip, then glide

I Eros take my pace beside

And vaunt my charms as if to tease you

And sing you hymns of love to please you.

 

 

 

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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Friday, June 17, 2011

"Deceiving to be Free" an essay

This finishes my section on intellectual independence. It is about dissembling our inner truths before the eyes of others. A racy theme for a philosopher, and a fitting place to begin what I mean by the Game, as a sort of theological game, a meta-theological game which reframes religions and myths according to a few centering ideas. These section is longer than the rest, and replete with a peculiar mythology. To me it is fully charming, makes me laugh, but perhaps it will baffle the literal minded among my readers.

 

Daniel

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2. Deceiving to be Free

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            This brings us to the contradiction of the virtue of independence, which requires the other virtues to set it into place, and yet is prior to them and supports them, and furthermore must finally in its extreme being deny them. “Commitment,” implies sustained intimacy; “honesty” implies direct expression of truth; these other virtues are good only insofar as they do not infringe on the inner independence. We tell the story of the guardian of the inner needs, who is maid Satan, keeper of the mirror womb, as an image upon the wall of the mirror who will not let us pass, though she seduces her Father God back in, by and by. In other words, the brilliant angel, we may call her Maya, is charged to protect life’s secrets, even through lies and illusions if need be. To maintain independence of your soul, you must never disclose your innermost being. That is why it is so unknown to begin with, so inexpressible. Certain people resonate to you, for unlike the others, they have your same inner energy, and though you can never tell why you love him or her, you can feel it: the inner is unspeakable. And what can be spoken of is best left unsaid, for it could be used against you. Utter intimacy, center to center, is impossible in this life, except perhaps in the few pure moments. Approaching it is risky, dangerous, and unnecessary. Guard your heart. To be the most honest of men, you must know how to deceive.

            If the “spiritual world” is the world of spirits – wind, breath, language, voice—of voices, and includes all those who give voice, then we enter this world in conversation, and breath in many of those spirits through our ears, internalize them, capture them up like geniis in bottles, and once within us, barter with them to do our bidding. One learns a voice, perhaps a set of voices, like a set of perspectives. I used to ask my friends for advice. Once familiarized with their advice, I needed only think of my friends, and could predict what they would say. Now I need merely think of my problem, and commentators derived from my friends thicken my thoughts with possibilities, and I wisely choose the most appropriate mind among them, all in an instant, all from within my own head, from familiarity with those kindred spirits. No longer need I hide my innermost from you: I hold you within me, unbeknownst to you.

            I’ve talked to my fellow mentally ill, and learned a lesson. Psychotics never fully abandon their delusions, even when returned to perfect mental health. The difference between a psychotic and a sane man is that the former is exposed. The sane man, on the other hand, holds buried beneath his conscious thinking the same mad thoughts. How else would the wits and story-tellers be able to say such wild leaps and jumps unless some insane part of them truly believed it?

            Each man’s necessity is his ultimate reality. He can by no means betray it, nor escape it, since it is the very law of his being, and will suffer no contradiction. To understand the center of another is to map, as vaguely and crudely as the external observer must, his soul’s framework, and this will let us understand him for what he is: he has the same form as us, variations on a theme –every distinct being is basically the same as all the others – though in that central bit he is wholly unique and unknowable. Each mind is that free being; morality predicates on the freedom of the mind, that a man somehow owns his actions. But in another sense, we are conduits of the streams we are born into, and pass along what we  have received. We add to this that subtle swerve upon each atom that passes through us. What we own, what we contribute, what we are, is from the hidden self – utterly protected by guile.

            Just as our inner madness is hidden by the mask of normalcy, winking out when telling and appreciating jokes, daydreams, myths or fairytales, so too is the vital self never in anything directly material, but is subtly interfused within our inner and external structure.  A master may mold a piece of gold, and though it amounts to nothing but the original gold, what has been added to its content is form. Form is part of content, nor could any content lack either external or internal form, all the way down to the ultra-microscopic .

            It would be better said that the inner madness is a sort of substratum, an ethereal garment, and not the direct self. The fantastic and mad imaginations of both the marketer's religions, Buddhism and Christianity, speak of beginnings and ends, of the final state of the blessed soul and other such things. The visions are not the real thing, but the reality to them is the living morality each religion offers this life. The fantastic is distraction. Emerson was right to criticize the heaven-bound with this remark: that the pious Christians complain that the wicked now live in mansions and eat well, the whole time themselves hoping to in heaven live in mansions and eat well, saying in effect: “You sin now, but we will sin by and by,” for if ‘the good life’ were about humility, servitude, and praising God, we can easily do that in this life, but for them, all that is instead taken as a means. Emerson did not see that his critique cut out the heart out of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which promises that “great will your reward be in heaven!” The Christian and Buddhist ethics do not prove themselves, are not self-sufficient, and so they rely on fantastic stories. At best, the stories serves as a picture language, as allegories or parables, to present the true gift of religion: a method for living a virtuous life. The method itself is by no means reducible to a set of rules, or even to a clean set of principles – least of all to any “laws” – and yet somehow, in a mysterious way, it is communicated, as a spirit beyond the letters, but by no means possible without those letters, as spirit is a subtle energy that is part of the larger energy of gross matter – like the overtones over a violin string.

            We contain an inner world of beloved things by which we judge our external environment. Heaven is made of what we enjoy in this life, a projection of it upon the great beyond. And so our only enjoyment of it is now in anticipation, as our inner fantasy, and that is as much heaven as we receive or need. This at last is eternal.

            Just as Jaspers opined that Ezekiel was schizophrenic, so does all our discourse get a bit mad and maddening the closer we get to something real. To be real is to be able to flow the needs through the habits so that there is congruence between feeling, thinking, saying, and doing. To touch past the psychological defenses, the barrier of hysterics must be breached. Utter intimacy, center to center, is impossible, for each self is sacrosanct, just as you cannot think my thoughts for me.

            The Buddha did have a bit of wisdom when he said the important thing in life is to “mind your own business, and mind it well.” Don’t go sniffing up metaphysical difficulties which are none of yours. If we needed to be certain of the afterlife, we could be. Lacking that, never you mind. Each day has enough in itself to speculate about. Tending your own garden is wise enough, but wiser still is letting nobody else tend it for you. About your personal projects in life, bite your tongue, and know how to deceive when necessary. Your innermost truth you owe no man, nor let yourself speak it. Learn the principle of guile. By the time we are adults, this is natural.

            Only what you do always can you do naturally. Mind your business, and cut off every stray branch that saps away whatever is necessary to feed your rose of beauty. Give only to that one thing, or if you hold subsidiary hobbies and habits, let them feed back into the same, till you are as focused as the Mississippi and divide a whole continent with your desire. What we do every day, what we practice nonstop, what has become a gesture, a flowing dance, as ready and purifying as a laugh, as ultimate as an orgasm, as subtle as a smirk, as easy as a blink, this is our style, this has gone from practice to nature, this has worked deep into our being, approaching a grand fine permanence.

            We must protect our innocence in the manner of all children everywhere. Children deceive. They even tricked Jesus. Buddha was wiser, knowing that heaven belongs to the mature, not to the children: innocence must use its shrewdness to gain the second and deeper innocence of wisdom. Only the elderly are truly innocent.

            God himself was tricked by a pastor, as reported in the Doctrines and Covenants, when He said "James Covill, thy heart is now right before me at this time. I have looked upon thee and thy works and know thee," after which James Covill realized that God must not have any inside knowledge, and so left Mormonism and returned to Methodism, at which point God said "Satan deceived him, and I will punish him for it." In this, the spirit of childhood is unknown to adults, remains tricky and hermetic, as the Lethe of adolescence removes us from the conspiracy of infancy. We say "his innocence was lost," but in fact, innocence replaces what is lost.

            Children lie, deceive, trick, naturally and by instinct, it need not be taught them, but they are poor at it until they first lie to themselves. The ability to lie is the ability to have privacy. No, I will never dirty my tongue for your sake, I won’t lie for your love, but I will still hide my truth further than your eyes shall ken. Self-knowledge is saving knowledge, this is one of the few truths Plato recognized; a man who knows himself is therefore known: heaven hides within the mirror, a man must be able to squeeze his full being back into the blacks of his eyes. And this is possible only if external criticisms and banter do not distract his studies. Let him be independent. My autonomy is worth more than the whole human race. My freedom, the freedom of my own perfect mind, is the one sovereign fact.

            The mind falsifies. Memories distort. Because memories are not facts, though inspired by them, they neither evolved to, nor ideally should, serve objective facts, but only and always the deeper needs whose tools they primarily are. Facts do not categorize themselves. Facts do not evaluate themselves. Facts are trivial and dull until they subordinate themselves to some demanding need and its subsidiary desires. Lacking that, we would have no reason to consider them in the first place. In this way, the independence of personal needs, and the free mind which interprets them, is justified, protected, layered, clothed in a carefully knit robe of experience that uses reality to allow for our growth, but is willing to dismiss what facts and details fail to aid this.

            The farthest edges of the mind, which identify with the universe, the mystical moments we all feel, which some of us cultivate into an art form, the form of consciousness which was coined as “Cosmic Consciousness” to describe Whitman’s mindset, this expansive awareness of the all of our experience, is so widely conscious that it is nearly unconscious. To spread the focus so thin, to mix the dye of care so thin in the waters of mind, is to reach Nirvana, the destiny of every man, woman, and child who has not deified his soul in this lifetime. We are all doomed to unqualified bliss forever unless we can save ourselves in time. This being lost in the Mother Universe, this is what it means to die. It would require a special act of guile to save the mind from this.

            For the religion that said “Annatta! There is no self”--how could such a thing be true? how could we say “there is no self” unless that very self were known? If we say “there are no unicorns,” we do know what these fantasies are, what they mean, what they symbolize, how they were created, when, for whom, and for what reasons. Ghosts, vampires, dragons, and unicorns are the opposite of nonsense: they serve symbolic functions, and can by no means be divorced from the needs and purposes which created them. The idea that “there is no self” is strangely coupled with the idea that we ought to love things in the world, other selves, when it seems that disinterest, detachment, and dismissal would instead be the logical conclusion from the idea that selves don't really exist. The ego is real, is important, is the basis of creativity and growth, is God over the needs: to kill him would result in Nirvana forever, but whoever loses himself in Nirvana will never become a Universe.

            Hide yourself, bury yourself, do not give yourself away. Sense your inner divinity, for all men are created equal, and the gods created them all equally beneath themselves. The god you are is that innermost spark. For though I adore honesty, and strive always for direct truth, yet it seems I lie often enough, and this to avoid losing face or escaping reproach. Why does this come so naturally? How can something we all do be bad? The integrity of an immature mind cannot shine bald and brazen, but must eclipse his budding glory with the deceptions of humility, smallness, and self-abasement. Do I seem so ridiculous to you, my friends? It is because I find myself most comfortable when donned as folly before you. What is whispered in my innermost is unfit for ears such as yours, if given would fall like dead leaves from your hands. But show me that generation of lovers which split from the same spark as my own, the gods who are my own gods, and you will see that I am neither honest nor dishonest with you, but I am real with you, I am real to you, I speak or don’t speak, you know me, gods cannot hide before gods.

            Ama-All, Motherverse, grabbed the hammer of will and smashed the anvil of necessity -- we see it as novas exploding  -- so that with each hammerfall, a soul was broken, and atoms fell upon the worlds, congealed into earths, and each planet was thick with sparks from different sources, and each of us draws by hidden paths the same original sparks back to us, so that the lovers I hold dear are as near as my soul, are my same spark, but the others who try and leave were somebody else's spark and not meant for me, so that the sparks that fell into this particular grain by hidden pathways became finally the dinner I am now eating, and that little bit of bad spark in my forehead was cut out by the car accident, so that if it wasn't a car wreck it would be something else, but in the end all that is mine and belongs to me will return to me, and what is not mine falls away. I confound the inevitability of the circuitry by emanating something from my innermost that never existed anywhere before, so that just as my halo is the language I use, my aura is my creative output. I seek those who are coeternal to me.

            Every being has identity, reason recognizes its self-identity. To be able to create a self is the emblem of life, to be able to create other selves, to think of one’s very thinking, to grow a child within your body, to theorize about theories, that is the mirror womb at the center of the mind. I speak in myths and hints; the idea I wish to convey will already be in the minds of those who hear me, but will be mere games and charades to those who don’t.

            We live to mature. If infancy is cute, if childhood is admirable, if heaven belongs to brats, why not cut the young off before they degrade? But life aims at maturity, and power belongs to the adult. The highest innocence, the greatest purity belongs to the elderly. The older we grow, the more we purify the needs and will. We grow simple sublime.

            Perhaps throughout life, part of us doesn’t change. What changes cannot be defined. Biographers resort to calling their subjects “paradoxical,” lacking the correct model for catching on why all men, when closely studied, appear to contradict themselves. I have heard Franklin, Wright, Ives, Nietzsche, and Jefferson called “paradoxical.” What Biographer can avoid this temptation? A person is not a character in a book, but something more, something better, something that can’t be reduced to one perspective, or a set of words, or anything at all, being at his centermost a pure and divine logos. The myths suggest the full story.

            I wear many masks, I don a dozen cloaks. Where I openly criticize myself is irony before you. My pride is careful to vaunt self-reproach. I feel akin to Emerson who consented to Carlyle’s criticism that he lacked integration in his essays, that his sentences appeared loosely held together around a similar theme, each sentence being created equal in the democratic principle of every man his own president – let no man defer! Emerson was as blind as Carlyle to the American genius for gross structuring of wide vistas, sweeping contents, the largest congruence and concordance of ideas. Humility is ignorance. Only when you’ve reread his essays, outlined them, can you get the same Vista of wide love that we find in the complete poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, the music of Ives, that touch for large and wide spaces, which I’ve fostered so consistently in this very summa, my summa sophistria, the pages of this Idius, which is my second self, the body I prepare for my second coming. My sense of humor is subtle, my purpose obscure, my truth direct death.

            Knowing how to deceive, how to trick, how to confuse, how to manipulate and cheat, is useful, preferably with hands-on attempts and experimentation, so as to know how to avoid being deceived and cheated by others.

            Protect your innermost determination as your very soul; protect it forever and without compromise. The needs of your own private self are the holy of holies, the ultimate sanctuary, the final resting place of the godling mind which struggles like Odin forever and always in the world. Odin, the god of magic, poetry, wisdom, searcher at all costs for wisdom, and especially the wisdom of the final things, the death of the gods, the death of the mind, yes Odin, true God of true God, true mind of true mind: learn from him how to return to the inner necessity within the wolf’s open jaws. Wisdom is worth the risk of challenging giants, losing an eye over, worth being hung from a tree, impaled on a spear, dying, coming again, worth all our sacrifices. The mind is free in order to grow, and aims to return from where he broke free, to return back into inner necessity.

            Our quest in life is too important to gossip about. Prefer whatever is handy when you explain your actions; use masks and disguises. Allism denies nothing, uses everything, will apply these terms as well as those, finds any phrase or any holy thing apt, any philosophy applicable, because they are all empty, and we may breath our own life into them. We speak in tongues, pure Glossalia, by which I mean, every word yet spoken serves us, every book predicts us, even those who negate us feed into our purpose, for we know how to use language, and yet have a soul that is deeper than spirit, an attitude deeper than language. The phoenix of Lux is our inspiring muse, we call her English, those of us who speak English; and yet the language of our innermost must be translated into her heaven. That Holy Spirit, Lux English, the abiding Genius of America, will forever shed light from the heart of Ama, is the sun upon her tongue. Raise your long-stemmed glass of intoxicating pure water: it is her kiss. With her love, create.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The Sanctity of the Ego

 

This begins the strategies part of my essay on the Game of Life. The first strategy is to protect and reinforce the ego. This short essay could be the beginning of an Introvert’s Manifesto. After this section, I talk about hiding the inner ego, and then we are on to strategies for creativity. This section and the next regard Intellectual Independence.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

dAniel Christopher June

 

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1. The Sanctity of the Ego

 

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            Eternity is for everyone and for everyone it’s bliss. Anything beyond this is vile sectarianism, which to believe would diminish the shine of our apotheosis, for everything we hate is an image of the self. Allism acknowledges the necessity of all things, allows the passing of some and the advancing of others. Nothing is damned, not even damning, but each is set in its place. The proper place of the Self of Needs and the Mind of Freedom is at the very center:  “Nothing is at last sacred except the integrity of your own mind.” My intellectual independence is the one ultimate virtue which I would last sacrifice, long after all the others. The freedom of my mind constitutes its worth as a mind. Let my fingers be chopped off one by one, let my limbs be severed, let my ribs be plucked out like pickets of a fence, let my skin be flayed away, let me walk through a gallery of Picasso’s paintings. I can afford all that. I am still myself. But lacking the I of Freedom and the Self of Needs, it would be better had I never been born. My justification for this life and all its joys and sufferings, for every life I will yet attempt, is that I am utterly myself, that my mind is free and self-owned. The very reason I frame the tedium of life and its daily demands as a sort of game is to distance circumstance from my inner heart. Whatever happens out there, let it be. I am I. The one temptation in life is to lie to yourself; the one unforgiveable compromise, to let another think for you. If I give into the group, then my soul becomes the group soul, and I am no longer autonomous, but we are. Groups resurrect as individuals. If I justify my hope for godhood, it is always and only as an expansion of the integrity of my own mind. Have you the power to torture me with duties and debts? Very well, do your worst. Take what is takable. But what I ultimately am I will not give up, threaten what hell you wish. This at last is sacred.

            The Game of life does not accept the full ego as sacred. Around the pristine I there is the temporal Me. Me in relation to you, in relation to the world, in relation to the group, Me in relation to myself. That persona, that strategy, grows hard and tough when I need to be hard and tough, or grows soft and easy where I need it to be soft and easy. But ultimately, in the adventure of life and the romance of philosophy, I must permit myself mental breakdowns, where all those defenses fall apart, and my naked I stands visible, where the Me melts away and makes room for a stronger Me. This happens again and again in life. Mythologically we call it “ressurection” or “reincarnation.” The lived experience justifies the myth: the Me dies and rises. But whatever can die is not it, and whatever resurrects is not it, but what was in before the corpse and out after the resurrection, what always was, is the only true miracle, and truly a miracle because it asks not for faith in itself, offers no proof, is its own proof, is felt in the solemn certainty that in all that was, is, and is to come, I am I. Let me therefore play the dangerous game of self overcoming. Let my needs quell and swell and push against the outer walls of the ego-me. Let me burst my limits and molt. For whatever it is that scourge-mad chance brings against my infant innocence, my soul has already called the trauma forth. I invite random pain, having special ordered it. The layers of my soul act in perfect coincidence, so that what appears to be miraculous on one level, appears to be causal on another.

            I’ll work what I need to work, I’ll make a living. Whatever I do, so long as I do it as myself, is justified, expresses me. Insofar as I conform and do merely what is expected, than I am not myself, but an extension of my employer. If the dollar is a unit of pain, if wealth is created ex nihilo from the very exhaustion of effort into matter, then I will make a game of pain as well, work hard, learn with the Puritans to take pride in my labor, to regard my job as “my calling” – but never too seriously. I can drop it again. I do not commit my seriousness to this. I work, but as if I could be fired. I work, but as if I do not belong at the job. If anything, the job belongs to me, I take it over, I make my impression, I change it to fit my schemes and fantasies. All my reality is layered over with fantasy. Let me play through all these halls my own melody, for melody is the dance of the will, the selection of focus, the flitting of my attention from this to that; I will always insist on expressing myself through my work, and never seek to be a “good employee” but to be “myself employed.” Being good would be bad.

            My conception was my first self-overcoming, when freedom divorced from necessity. The suffering of divorce is necessary for the security of marriage. Without that possibility, how could I live freely? No longer are needs fulfilled autonomously, now that I live. Now my mind needs to create a world to negotiate with the universe. I will grow wider and wider, till I am past the galaxy, my high flowing mind will distance that center until I’ve devoured worlds and internalized the farthest realities. Conception is a wound. It begins when the circuit of self is upset through the orgasm of my beginning, when my soul becomes into a dialogue between freedom and necessity, when what we want no longer equals what we have, when what we seek is no longer fulfilled through mere wishing. The perpetual wound of the soul pushes us to grow. Because I do not fill myself up with fantasies too soon, with religions and philosophies, I keep that void within me fertile, which like a sliding-gap puzzle, allows me to toggle around my experiences until I have gained greater things, and with them the need for greater things still. I am fulfilled today because I will need more tomorrow; this cycles infinitely; someday I will know the Mother face to face.

            We enter into an already spinning world. We fit into roles long established, wear masks we are expected to dutifully assume, but if this denies freedom, we can yet swerve even the tightest of chains to fit our own style. Every man is his own star. What if my full being were simultaneously active in a million bodies in a million galaxies, with one star to center us all? I am not contained between my boots and my hat. I feel worlds brooding within my being. What can we dare to imagine? What they believe because tradition and custom empower them, we believe as projections of our innermost adamantium. The very stability they gain through language, routine, and ritual, is ours as well as theirs: we make our own routines, we make our own rituals, we speak our own language.

            Intellectual independence as the central virtue means knowing your own philosophy, knowing how to translate all terms into your own terms, knowing how to read all readings as commentary on your own life. All books are mirrors and your life is the eternal rose. The world may hurt but the inner’s bliss.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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Monday, June 13, 2011

"This is It!" an essay

This essay caps the end of the first section about life as game. The remaining sections (the bulk of the essay) are about strategies for the game of life. This final section on the game aspect of life ponders the question “What to do if you feel like a loser?” I sometimes feel I am winning at life, sometimes feel like I’m losing – perhaps that is all part of the game. Nevertheless, even a loser can enjoy the game.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

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5. This is it

Oh Mother! Oh Wife! Oh Employer!

Your words of disapproval hurt me more than you may know

I smile gently, am polite and meek

But inwardly you have lost me

I wish to be flawless as dawn

And then softly drop you

So I am stupid?

Your anger can’t make me care

I am kind as the sun

But you are far from my heart.

 

            It is easy enough to feel one is losing at life. Knowing how to feel powerful despite this, knowing how to feel like you are winning, requires self-control, self-knowledge, autonomy, the ability to finally shut out the world and become something for yourself. We may choose what to care about; and of what we care about, what to engage; and of what we engage, what to pull intimately close. Do not pull misery close. Be polite, kind, gentle, and distant. If the outer circle of your thoughts runs counterclockwise, let that innermost thought run clockwise.

            Do your ever-blessed best; that is all you ought to expect from yourself– more would be less. The square of focus and the circle of selection can be purified through metaphors and images, so that the negative ideas dare not approach your mind until they have been cleaned and interpreted. That which does not feed me can only starve me.

            If ever you feel your life is out of control, organize something. To impose your will on some small matter returns you to the hero's stance. What is yours is better than what is not yours. What you are capable of is more glorious than what think you should be capable of.

            I can only care about what I’ve invested personal creativity into, I can only love what I’ve put myself into. When I’ve strategized how to do a thing well, I enjoy it, even if it's as banal as brushing my teeth. Whatever is regular and dependable can be built upon. Routines give freedom.

            What we can predict we can valuate. A thing is sacred when we treat it so. I can walk into my study a hundred times, but only when I take off my shoes and brighten my eyes is it the Womb of Creativity. We structure space and time always, and it is as if every day is structured like a life. There is the sad part, the fun part, the "dumb things I gotta do" part, and the part that is it. It is the thing that justifies the rest, the crown of glory. Even a prisoner who lacks all freedom, locked in a cell and put on a regimen, still has anticipation, perhaps a meal, perhaps a smoke, something, something that is his moment of release, when he can expand his spirit, sigh, and just relax. Even though this moment is preferable to the rest, it is by no means distinct from the rest, for the sting of the bad things is soothed with a promise of the good to come, and the dullness of daily chores is vivified with an image of playing the guitar later; and even the most stressful day at the job can be endured with a smile because we know we can drive home, listen to our favorite music, and kick up our legs and have a beer. If we had no job but cases of beer, our life would not be better, but much worse. In this way, the very pain we endure is immediately cashed into the hope box, so that we don't feel it sting, and when that pain comes back out, it has been transformed into relaxed joy.

            The philosopher's game of analysis perhaps isn't a discipline, but a reflex. I myself never cease to analyze, can't watch a television show or read a novel without making a theory about structure, can't kiss even the sweetest face without analyzing the dimensions and shape of that face, wondering what in that moment makes her look so angelic to me. Science is the schism of dissection, cutting pith from shit, ever seeking the essence of the matter. A focused mind pushes inwards, exerts effort, stands alert. The released mind of pleasure knows how to dismiss focus and let the mind dissolve. I never learned this. In a way I admire it, in a way I scoff at it. How others can not think -- how unthinkable to me! Yet we must all play the game our equipment allows us. When I hear about how friends and coworkers spend their free time—watching television, going to dance-clubs, enjoying canoe trips, hiking, hanging out at the bar – I am amazed they can enjoy life at all. It seems so boring to me. Only ultimate things interest me. I don't know why people like to relax. I am only at peace when I am in the company of gods -- Lux Sophia, Odin Will, Hermes Logos, and Satan Desire--and these are my philosophical instructors.

            The Holy Spirit, creator of all religions, is none other than Lux: language itself, the divine who on her first day said "Let there be Me!" She has a genius to her, and every aspect of her, every shade of her in each specific language expresses a new genius. Language itself is conscious, and thinks through us. The centermost word within each of us is unknown to her, and yet everything we express must be translated into her common language. These very words of ink, leaden and heavy, are only so in the material sphere; but in the mythic sphere, which you catch at a squint, they are liquid gold, the very melt of the Phoenix, whose feathers are the words of all languages. Breathe in my words and hold my spirit forever in the lamp of your lungs.

            The best way to make the world a better place is to be happy within it. Conspire with me: let us transfigure the earth! Mother Earth is already lovely: each of us, when we find our center, make her more so! Just as the psychological therepist knows that to best improve his patient, he must paradoxically accept him as he already is, so do we beautify our world by looking at the beauties that are already there. Only by praising somebody who annoys you can you nudge him to become less annoying.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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Friday, June 10, 2011

"winning the game" (from part 1 section 4)

 

 

The first part of the essay is nearly finished, with sections four and five. “Winning the game” looks at the game theologically, and religion in terms of play. The idea of apotheosis, or the divinity of every individual, is introduced merely as a placeholder. The topic is something I look deeper into elsewhere; but as a central aspect of the game, it has a long tradition, from the Book of Job to the Iliad to the Eddas. Sometimes I regret that America lacks its own mythology, since we became a nation long after the age of myths. Nevertheless, the structuring of a mythology will be one of my later projects. Meanwhile, this essay looks at the notion of what it means to be a winner.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

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4. Winning the Game

            If life is a game, how do we win? For needs are needs, there is neither pleasure nor joy without fulfilling what is necessary for our existence. The Game does not deny this, it uses the same immutable realities that all other configurations of life must also use. The Game is an interpretation of the needs which reduces their complexity to something tangible and masterable, an interpretation which structures daily life so we can sustain attention on a few chosen goals. It is as if the chess pieces of our day embodied ultimate spiritual realities, and the checkerboard stood for the ground of our existence.

            I’ve met daily-life missionaries, a young woman for instance, whose game in life – she did not look at it as a game – was to spread the gospel to everybody who would listen, to share the Love of Christ with all people. She knew she had an opportunity to preach Christ (in the style of Paul) when she met somebody and felt “an icky feeling,” sensing that she was face to face with an unsaved sinner. Attending the church she went to, I heard the pastor describe a grand procession in heaven, in which those who had saved the most souls at the End of Days, those who had honored God in this life by telling everybody about his business in the next, were given more glorious resurrected bodies, which “shone like the sun,” with which they walked amidst the saved and were honored. With an endgame like that in mind, the students were intoxicated – some of them were – and wished to advance the game as far as possible, analyzing each his every mood and motive to see if it aligned to the will of God Almighty. They met weekly for Bible readings, to confess their sins – mine were always so comparatively boring! – and to offer each other hope and encouragement for the spiritual warfare of earthly life.

            To ask such people what profession they would choose (these were college students) began with an apology that “what God wants for me is what I want,” and then transition to “I think God is calling me to be an accountant.” I must be wearing the mark of Cain over my brow, because I could never fit in with these groups; they admired me from afar but would not draw me near. I was not built for their game. I tried to save a fellow classmate by warning her of hell; she was devastated I would say such a thing; I’ve regretted it ever since.

            The life-myth of such a group of people, which has been coded and modified for two-thousand years; which draws its energy from millions of lives, millions of minds, many of them ranking among mankind’s best; which has been pressed out like a vital fluid into millions of books like so many fruits; which repeats endlessly the same basic salvation mechanism; which has inspired and sustained countless missionary projects and worldwide charities; which holds claim to the farthest future—is wrong. The metaphysical claims of the religion, of all religions, are ridiculous. What is metaphysics but a picture language for morality? Heaven and hell were invented for moral reasons, not scientific, to justify hating one’s enemies (they deserve hell), and to scare oneself into doing what he would deep down simply prefer not to. How we imagine the shape of the universe derives from how we believe we should act within it, is ornament to that. The optimism of my heart can’t but imagine growth and increase for the universe as a whole. I have never been able to doubt that I am a god; I set myself up for my apotheosis into a higher form. I do not accept heavens and hells, but I accept myself as the ultimate moral and ontological fact. Winning for me is to feel the transfiguring power of this apotheosis, and I feel it best when inspired to write.

            The game of life is to seek one life-goal, so that each decade of our lives is a layer of self-overcoming, so that every triumph is fuel for another exploit, so that we rest only that we may again work. We work to develop a character of actions, and beneath that, a personality of words. The reward of virtue is to gain more self.

            Personality is the sum of our communication habits, what we talk by, our spirit, our communal self. Personality exists to be contemplated, to increase attention, and attention to increase the contemplation and desire of ourselves for ourselves, and others for us – to be found beautiful and lovely. We seek power and love, respect and desire. To gain such, we need a beautiful personality which aligns our energies with those of others. Self-development is the object of the Game.  We wish to give others an experience, to have that power. To make you experience what I feel, to respect it and enjoy it as I do – what more does the artist wish? I want your contemplation and enjoyment. I exist in society for self-expression and to contemplate the expressions of other selves. Art is my means.

            We seek mastery in our games for the sheer joy of mastery. Being excellent requires no justification or reward: to live well is to be beautiful, to feel beautiful – the pleasure of being pleasant. Mastery means owning the place of importance; mastery of life means using your sacred womb of creativity. Always create, always strategize, always think of more effective means of living.

            When I was a kid I had to eat all the food on my plate. I preferred the meat to the vegetables, but I couldn’t just eat the meat and not the vegetables, for if I did then I clearly had no room for dessert. I came up with a strategy to quickly eat the food I didn’t like – wolf down the vegetables! – and then slowly enjoy the main course. Children strategize everything, have to, because they have no incumbent habits to take for granted. Yes, they absorb countless habits from their parents, yet the inexperienced child is more easily frustrated than the adult, not only because he has less patience, but because he has less knowledge of what to do, with or without patience. If a five year old is rejected by his friend, what does that mean to him? How is he to fit that in with his life story? It might be easier to be rejected by a friend when he is older, when he knows how to talk to family and friends about his problems, when he knows how to find advice and comfort.

            Mastery in life avoids the suffering of just getting by at the job, at home-life, at driving, at doing taxes, but to constantly develop methods for better handling each. “As I walk, I think about a new way to walk.” This leads to the sense of competence and the glow of success, both which are feelings of importance, answering that central social need to be important, a need meaningless to the man in isolation. Importance is a communal value, just as love is. A man alone is not important, he is all, there is no rank, he is simply himself. His importance comes from how he fits into society, and his love comes from how much others enjoy him fitting in. An important man automatically holds himself with dignity; a loved man automatically walks with grace. You can pick out the man who just began a romance. Grace, which is beauty in motion, has a feel of control and calm, a purr of pleasure even in simply walking across the room, or in setting down upon the desk books and papers. The graceful man arranges objects in pleasing patterns, his hand gestures are symmetrical, so that he is akin to those “sand artists” who draw their fingers through a sand tray, which when projected upon a screen reveals a clever and ephemeral dance of figures and shapes. To wash the dishes, to fold the laundry, to clean the bathroom with this sand-art grace, is to please all who see you, to be lovely, to be loved.  For it is a bonus to be contemplated and admired, a bigger bonus to be loved and desired.

            These are means to win the Game. Everybody dmires this. Yet if we structure our private lives as games, how do we compete against others? If every man’s life is its own game, how can I say I am better at life than you? Such a game is a game against oneself, a constant overcoming of the ego, growing larger within its rigid habits, and then, during a mental breakdown, pressing off the dead, and growing a new ego-skin.

            Yes, we can make innumerable games within life, such as the assembly line worker who aims to slim the seconds it takes for her to complete a rotation, such as making the biggest impression at a Christmas party, but the game of life is no mere game among games; it is all games in relationship to each other. In our language, the game of life is an instance of Allism, how all things balance, conflict and complement each other.  Let us approach the Fact. The fact of life, its great object, is the unsayable, spoken from the center of your being. All these games keep you focused, keep you challenged and eager, but as you near the end of your life, and disease silences your senses, you will be in that happiest state for seeing the full picture. We come to see that commitments kept us down and anchored, and death will dissolve all of them; optimism kept us up and floating, and death will dissolve all hope; studies kept us taking in the world and understanding it, but we will dissolve the world; directness kept us putting our self out to the world, but that self will return.

            Just as the central game in life is to perpetuate the game, to invent a perpetual motion machine, a drive of undead striving towards some slowly attained but never exhausted goal, which with every success, ups the ante, gives you a new power, but also gives a more terrible challenge, like the fire in the forest which the more it spreads the more it hungers, till death lets all that was necessary only for this life die and recycle, and puts everything necessary for apotheosis into the single atom of your inner being, just so the goal of life is life, and to desire immortality is to prove immortality. The goal of life is to grow perpetually more alive.

            By setting up the internal world as a toy world where we can place this against that, and assign what is with against what is without we can model the outer world, and project our theories alarge. Having created a basic life model, a personal myth, we can then advance the chess pieces of our daily doings to seek our goals, and never shrug nor blink at the noise and distractions of life, be it even suffering and death.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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