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!
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1. Creative Methodism
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.
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Perfection
Is
Easy
www.msu.edu/~junedan
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