This is not from the essay I’ve been developing, but spontaneous ideas of the nature of group energy, and its creative use.
Daniel Christopher June
Group Flow
You may be a genius without precedent, you may be an artist surpassing the very gods, yet you do not exist only as an individual, we all exist within the world, and we are part of Man, the great mind of us all together. Our creative energy, our jism, comes from fads, fashions, revolutions, insights, the great release of energy which bursts with every step of technological, artistic, and philosophical progress.
The Nazis had more than novel ideas, fit perfectly to entrance the nation; they also had a novel technology, the invention of propaganda and the blitzkrieg. Novelty is necessary to liberate the mind from custom, whether for good or for evil. Missionaries impress aboriginals not with divine miracles, but with novel technology.
The creative matrix of society is layered and complex. In these United States, different regions enact prejudices, mindsets, and personalities. The emotions are scattered geographically. NYC is harsh and brilliant; Grand Rapids is pious and uptight; certain cities as a whole manufacture serial killers or artists or whatever else, and each of those people epitomizes an idea, enacts it on the world. A murderer is vicious and must be punished, we must fight it; war crimes and petty crimes are made by accountable individuals, but only at one level; at another level, we all participate in them, even if we hate them; the fullness of Man is in all people, which is why we are akin to the extreme Buddhists who believe no man is saved unless every man is saved.
The triumphant people make the laws and set the politics; the defeated people make the morals and set the religion. The Jews, perpetually defeated throughout history, fed much into Western Religion. When Christianity triumphed in Rome, it ceased to be spiritual and became political, burning Alexandria, murdering the pagan philosopher Hypatia, all the deeds they accused their enemies of doing. The Christians lusted to return wound for wound, as the book of resentment, Revelation, makes clear: they were upset, so the whole world ought to be destroyed. I’ve known depressed people who hope for this sort of apocalypse. Jehovah’s Witnesses base their faith on it.
The Irish when defeated became bestowers of Celtic Wisdom. When Christianity defeated the Teutons, the old holidays survived in Christmas and Easter, with Santa Clause derived from Odin and Easter eggs derived from Astarte. The pantheism of the Native Americans, compounded with the injection of German pantheism, will win over this nation. The Greeks when defeated by the Romans yet made the Roman religion.
Zen Buddhism will make progress in the militarily neutered Japan, and we are waiting for Germany’s spiritual triumph. When the externalized jism, politics, is blocked, energy flows inwards and grows profound. The internalized energy becomes spiritual, wisdom becomes concentrated.
When the creative energy is released from the inner needs, it takes the shape of the perforation which released it. Our wounds bleed weapons. When Paul made a dagger from the corpse of Jesus, he was able to cut the throat of his religion and break the Law. God and Gods, the divine, the Absolute, are shapes of the All upon the sky, as if the outer bubble had imprinted inwards a shape we could consider. Where we shine the light, she presses in. She goes by whatever name we prefer, and is praised and cursed in the name of all Gods, Jesus, Buddha, Brahma, the Tao, Satan.
People pour like water over the land, trying out every possibility, working into every nook. To the individual it is unique and wonderful; to the wide mind it is statistical. The field must be fertile for the fruit to fill. The energy must be pent. The old forms must become decrepit, the traditions must ossify, and in the moment of their destruction, when the old gods, the Ancient of Days, fall to dust, the energy invested in them breaks forth in cathetic explosions. This is the era of creative exuberance, when the traditional breaks apart, releasing their desire.
Those madstars and madeyes ahead of their time, they will always be ahead of their time. If he was not outside his place, he could not wound the world-need and bring forth a new energy. I am misunderstood and ignored for a hundred years? Shining minds are always obscure. Nietzsche could not have been popular in his own time; now he must be. The creators must be insulated from their time, above reproach, without criticism. They are true gods invisible.
Why can’t the song be all chorus? Why be frustrated with a complicated verse? Why does the symphony have slow moments? Do we prefer its spiritual heights? They do not exist apart from the lows. It is not that the lows make the highs seem high in comparison, but that the high would be meaningless without the preparation and remembrance of the low which put it there.
Freedom grows restless and must out. Every system no matter how rational has problems. Those problems are the flexibility of the system; they are good. Every system has its tricks, every structure its exploits. The criminal element is part of the water that pours over society: there will always be evil ones, and they do society good, though they do you or me much bad. Our Utopia is already here wherever your foot falls, where mine falls – such is the power of our weight upon this earth –a utopia which expects the best of every system, and not some impossible abbreviation—a “good parts version.” The madstars offer a gesture, a symbolic act, which opens the possibility of its full expression. Works of art allow each of us to be wounded in the way Man is wounded; we each take in that unique energy which the sensitive artist felt first. Yes, he does mingle a little of his own self with his work, a selfish self-expression – how wonderful it is for this reason alone – but more so it expresses the times, it is world soul. It expresses the thoughts of Man.
Raphael and Picasso were not of the same genre. Stravinsky is the same kind of artist as Picasso, for the medium is the least part of the art. What matters the genre? It is the ideas they express which defines an art, its philosophical heart, so that all the genres of a given idea are doing the same art; but if one were to compare, say, painters throughout history, we would deceive ourselves that they were the same game, that these are all “equally painters,” as if medium mattered. The spirit of Allism, the idea of Mattria, is the soul of our art.
The Focus of I is a sphere. It may focus inwards or it may relax outwards, it may either compress or expand. But to move inwards, part of it must move outwards to counter-balance. For there is both focus and selection. To be utterly focused is to open the selection the widest. To put it into a different register, for the mind to be raised high to heaven the heart must be dropped to hell. The spheres of thought above the earth, transcendentalism, are possible if the heart sinks profounder. The consciousness lives in a series of times, a series of consciousnesses, and experiences them differently. When a philosopher, poet, or magician enters the inner world, his external presence seems irritable. Nobody can relate to him. Nobody can laugh with him. He laughs alone and is considered touched. Those who laugh together resonate together, but he is in a different place, a different sphere, though his feet still leave prints.
Yet his intellectual feet walk from cloud to cloud. How I have gone through days and weeks reading certain books intermittedly throughout the day, so that my mind stays in that sphere of thought, though I nevertheless engage the daily doings. Its as if I am alive when engaged in these ideas, while my outer form does his duty.
To stay within a mode of thought, within a sphere of consciousness, an internal and external apparatus must be instated to remind you how to stay there. The spheres of thought require a language and tone to maintain them.
How are you to maintain your family? If the family energy is down, time will replenish it, but you can still feel energetic on another level. Whenever blocked on one level, switch to another: jump boards. My employed self is different from my family self; I can be on fire on one level, though frozen on another.
The unconscious may be draining the energy for its own problem, and leave the consciousness depressed and blaming some immediate frustration that is actually unrelated. There is no end of things to complain about in this world if you are in the mood to complain, but the root cause is in mental energy, just as the sick person seems to be sick because of a rare fungal infection of his lungs, but really his lowered immune system is to blame.
Society moves in waves; the logic of its layers spread energy throughout; the substrate of energy is not money or food or love or anything other than ideas. An idea is information loaded with desire – nothing possible for a computer to process – the combination of an abstraction with a feeling. Assumptions are pure and without desire, but the habits of thinking fill ideas with desire. Lacking this directive, truth would have no value.
It takes incredible amounts of energy to knit a poem. The poet inherits most his tropes, adds just a bit. Ideas are the true treasure of a nation, a few books. To form something radically new, don’t expect anybody to care. It will take generations to sink in, the popularizer of the idea will get the credit. Yet somehow ownership never fails, and what comes from your innermost will forever be your own. Even the poets and philosophers, they must accept the guilt imposed on them of being selfish, egoistical, of insisting on hours a day for projects that make no sense to anybody. Something in them makes them think this “hobby” is more important then job, family, country, the whole world. It is all consuming. What oceans of energy he must hold under his hat! Somehow this person is expected to be polite, modest, equable, kind, generous – ridiculous! Let him insist on himself, he has that right.
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Perfection
Is
Easy
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