Give and Take
The more original a man is, the more he feels pressured to affect others. The need for solidarity would compel us to either go along with the group, or, if we are solitary, to directly and indirectly affect the group, as an example, as a distinct and valuable member.
That is part of the compensation of the universe: all things compensate, everything except the self increasing logos of the innermost self. Everything else balances and evens out. You are not a generous person if you only give. The most generous person takes as much as he gives. Yes, he gives more, he gives more intimately, he bestows gifts that open the soul and show the receiver a hidden beauty they already possessed. The greatest gifts are merely reminders of what you already have: but love knows no greater gift than to live for and with your friends, for a life, is possible, but a great life, even if short.
Give and take is the basis of love. If you want more from your spouse, simply giving more isn't enough and simply demanding more isn't enough. To get the boulder moving, you have to rock it forward and backward with more and more force until you can swing it into action.
With the characterization of God as the unmoved mover, we are saying nothing, really, except an ethical statement, that is it is of value to influence others, but it is not of value be influenced, unless that other happened to be God. Therefore, we have competing values of stoicism and sensitivity, steadfastness and vulnerability. For vulnerability also is a virtue, to be open is to vulnerable, but to know how to be open and yet prudent, that is mature. There is nothing admirable in an adult acting like a kid, trusting instead of self-reliant, believing rather than critical, no there is no good in being childish or childlike, but finding the virtues appropriate to your own situation, place, age, and time.
We live within a universe. The universe is a framework, and worlds are created by language. Worlds impose upon each other. A man speaks and everybody must react. The words resonate in the air, and parts of our soul resonate whether we intend them to or not. Not that we must submit. There are many good and necessary methods for resisting, when that is the action must suitable for our self-defined goals, and also good and necessary methods for submitting, when that is the action most suitable for a self-defined goals.
The needs speak through fantasy. We live in a world thick with fantasies, envies, hopes, curiosities, speculations, superstitions: our world is many worlds, our mind lives in many layers of existence. What is fantasy to me is ideology to you. My individual self has a fantasy hidden from you that none the less effects you, and my group self, the parts of my psyche dedicated to the various groups I have alleged myself to, is full of the group fantasies, the ideologies, that are also necessary and often beautiful and good.
How you enter a situation determines how you will leave it. The entrance point sets you with a valence. That first impression you make also impresses energy into you.
So many of us want to be an effect and not a cause, to obey God and follow the church and participate in the government and serve the poor and obey our parents, and all these effects of the wills of others. That is often good. It is not all. One must balance the give and take and also be a cause. The innermost self, after all, is absolutely no effect of anything whatsoever, is untouchable and unknowable by every man, angel, god, cosmos, and the universal all. That innermost part of you is entirely sacrosanct and can never be polluted, corrupted, or changed by anything whatsoever.
Yet the Universe reacts to her intuitive sense of that self, and created an outer layer to it, the Soul of your being. That soul is the poetry of your life, is a mixture of you and the mother, is your soul name, the name given to you from the all. And when that energy was summoned by your parents, your soul was given another layer, the layer of their love and bliss, which is a second outerlayer, a second layer of the soul. A third layer of the soul is our experience in these worlds of our society, how we were raised. The fourth and final layer of the soul is in our choice of who we will be, in our adolescents, when we choose the soul of ourselves, and the fifth layer of us our generation. These are the layers of the moods, attitudes, emotions, music, rhythm, life-pulse we call the human soul. They are not the innermost sun, but they collect the rays from the innermost sun, mingle it with materials drawn in from the world, and create art and beauty back out for the world. With every work of art we create, we create new complexity in the fourth layer of our being, in our self-defined soul, and also outwards into the world soul, the group being, into the culture and society we strive to fit in with and strive to differentiate ourselves from. All things compensate, all things give and take, except that innermost which only adds, the eternal addition to the universe as you publish your being far into the universe.
We want love and we want importance, to love and be loved, to be powerful and respected. The unmoved mover ideal cannot characterize the soul, which is a cycle, a pulse, is our blood, and must take in the world, selectively sip the world with wisdom, add it to the blood of our thought, and gestate new creations within the womb of our mind. The overly original man is anxious to change others, because he still wants solidarity. He is anxious about being contaminated by the world, thinks the world is bad, something that could nullify his beauty. His carefulness is wise, but it must balance itself with cheerfulness, a laid-back-acceptant attitude, a real joy at being alive in this world in this universe now.
We have not come to negate world religions, but to unify. The Allist is the height of every religion, just as my Allism is the height of Pentecostalism. Every Allist uses his childhood upbringing -- Muslim, Jewish, Atheist, indifferent, Mormon -- and uses that sour milk of the milkweed to metamorphose himself into the phoenix winged Monarch Butterfly of personal apotheosis.
When you metamorphose, all those things you took so literally do not have to be mocked, rebuked, and hated. The children take them childishly, but you have the power to interpret them as you will, to imbue whatever meaning you wish. I recall at a certain age asking me dad, "Santa isn't real, is he?" And he said that Santa was the spirit of giving. So be it. Its the same with Jesus, God, Allah, Yahweh, and all the rest: deep and powerful metaphors, eternal metaphors, that the children take childishly, but which the adult take as mere forms of art whose meaning would survive any other form. The sign is merely the conduit of meaning. But once you have the meaning within you, you no longer claim to names and places, but could just as well write a new scripture yourself, make all your actions miracles, and fully embody God in your own being. The best men have always felt it was so, but the childish tore their hair and screamed.
Great writers invent myths for their creativity, just as the religious writers anthropomorphize a state of mind Muhammad called his personal creativity, "Gabriel," Paul called it "Christ," Smith called it "Moroni," when all their insights and ideas came from within and to the wise mind are valuable precisely because they came from within. If they really did come from angels and gods, they would be useless to the mature soul.
At our name we are Needs of Fate. At our mind we are agents of Freedom. The Name, the Mother layer of the soul, the family layer, the society layer, the generational layer, and the personal layer, all come together to form our intuitions, our common sense, our table of values, what is intuitive and common sense. They structure our meanings without us knowing it. We take it as natural, but the meanings that bleed from the centermost and the meanings we take from the world are greatly processed and differentiated before we are conscious of them.
I bless you who forsake me -- your pride has made you whole. You draw near with your honey lips and in my trust I give you a taste of the flame, which you catch, cease the light and doge off with the spark to kindle your own fire in the night of your unconscious. The actual reasons you give for distancing yourself are superfluous -- wisdom doesn't listen to excuses. I trust necessity. And I recognize he flame I inspired when you bring it to maturity, and I tend the spark you accidentally drop, and burn a torch in honor of you as well.
Religion is Latin for "rereading." Religion is reading into things and creating meanings that stay. Love is a give and take, as we've seen, and lacking that it is an abuse and cruel. To give love without taking an equal amount is as cruel as simply taking taking taking. You corrupt others by giving in such a promiscuous manner.
Give your gift and let your friend process it. After experiencing the world, we take hours of processing. What is mirror meditation but a mode of processing. And after being in the world, you need that time in your Aria of personal space to decompress. Processing and decompression will align your mind and body, take you to your center, remind you of your many layers of names, and show you the thickness of meaning.
The are four layers of meaning. There are intuitions, or gut meanings, the sense of things that comes without thinking, the self-evident certainties which are usually correct and true. Perceptual meanings are the truths of facts, the realm of science, that a thing is, and has measurements, and can be predicted to behave a certain way. From perceptions are built conceptions, which are abstracted from percepts and made into ideas. Conceptions are the providence of philosophy. From broad systems of concepts come symbols, which with deep metaphors and religious truths, with divine names or poetical beauty, put all that philosophy and abstraction into systems.
We study science carefully, not doubting it behind what it needs to be doubted, we study philosophy and attempt to instate all the disciplines of reasonable thought, and we create the beauty of art, the language of symbols and signs -- we study religions, not negatively, but with a mix of the positive and negative, with admiration and with criticism, with acceptance and with denial. All these things orbit you like satellites, and you need only reach out and grab a world, a religion, a philosophy, when it will help you define yourself and grow.
Negative writings say no and criticize; positive writings say yes and celebrate. Use all tools, master your repertoire, and you will be equal to every challenge.
Every religion has created spiritual truths, tools, definitions, and powers, and invariable these religions misuse them on top of using them well. There is no religion that lacks a despicable use of its spiritual gifts. Christianity with its hell, Scientology with its brainwashing, Hinduism with its spiritual arrogance. Every power has its uses and misuses, and we won't even know all the uses until we have tried all the misuses -- but the misuses of religion have collectively caused more human suffering than anything else.
Just as psychoanalysis is the very disease it purports to cure, so is Christianity the very hell it claims to heal. Christianity is a hell of envy, resentment, guilt, cynicism, hate, and only once a culture has been made sufficiently sick in these things does Christianity than cure it with its more sublime givings.
In this, an Allist comes into his own when he grows beyond his religion, as the butterfly grows behind the worm. Before we crawled, and now we may fly. What went before, all we learned, gives us power, like the poisonous milk the monarch caterpillar eats, makes us invulnerable to attack as imagos, as adults.
Just as the shrewd lawmakers forbid you what you couldn't do any way, and command you to do what you couldn't help but doing -- for to be unable to do a thing is demoralizing, but to be instructed not to do what you couldn't do anyway, makes you feel powerful, obedient, self-disciplined good -- so do the laws give us the moral massage more than instruct us on how to live. Morality is good for children, but virtue belongs to adults. You can be good all you want, but I will be powerful.
What is beautiful, what is sublime, what is awesome, what is admirable is not the obedient, but the free, the self-defined, the autonomous, the shining Imago of Apotheotic Light.
\ ~@M@~ /
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