Daniel Christopher June to the students of Life --
I have to say, this has been one of my more challenging allays because integrating the diverse materials under the banner of explaining the Game of Life took incredible edits.
The basic motif of the allay is the sense of life as a game, something to play at and strategize, to gain love and power -- but the essay like the continental flight of the Monarch tastes the sweetness of a thousand flowers.
I touch on the mythic peculiar to allism, juxtoposing it to the world-games of the major religions, touching on the nature of a few playing boards they thrust over the world. I also touch on a few strategies for the game of life, the more abstract meta-theories that allow the greatest movement over barriers.
Check out perfectidius.com, which has been greatly updated to include, among other things, an mp3 book recording of my book Madeye, narrated by my dad.
Take care, Caretakers!
Situating Yourself Within The World Game
Our importance, that thing we are here to do, makes its environment both beautiful and ugly, so as to get its work done. That centralizing importance makes our worlds, the inner worlds of our known and unknown fantasies, and the outer worlds of language and being. Worlds are the spaces language carves out of the universe. A man is his world and he has some freedom of choice in creating it.
Our Choice made this place and time, selected it from out all of history, made the mind equal to the nerves-- though it will survive them, in them, through them; and not the skull, but the whole body is the phrenology of the brain, and the brain is the image of the psyche. The body is the mind's open secret, and wherever my mind exists, it will always also be as a body, a body always situated within a world. This metaphysical vision is enough to situate us broadly in our game situation.
What is a world other than a set of situations? Those episodes are all aspects of the Game of Life, and we live in dozens at a time, dozens of playing boards, dozens of games, all interlacing and feeding into one another. The Slovenian philosopher Zizek sought to replace philosophy with psychoanalysis, and argument with illustration, for that was how he played the game. Don't all philosophers only offer strategies for the game? We all play the game by the rules we take in from the world and from the originality of our own mind, we all use the energy from the world and also our aboriginal Necessity. We learn from philosopher, but like them we read to play the game.
A few givens make the playing board. We have the same basic needs, the same instincts, the same brains. To know yourself is to know all men -- and that part you thought was your unique secret is also your neighbor's unique secret. We place ourselves in parallel, and yet we are not parallel. With this one, Truth, with that one, Power, with that one, Grace, and each according to their own style and substance. The spheres of Me, the various identifies we make or are forced to make filter the world into the innermost I of consciousness. They are the outer ego -- me the father, me the American, me the Christian, me the Feminist, me the Atheist, me the Democrat. When we identify with a role, we open ourselves to taking in its powers, but we also take in its vulnerabilities. We take in the spirit of a new identity, its set of meanings, by making a space for it in our soul, by carving out for it a well. With initiation we inherit its forms of mental technology. Our group against theirs and here's our armory.
See the constant eros and agon between these groups? They love each other, they hate each other. Their agoneros is like the Greek men wrestling nude. Sex and besting are mixed as one. So is it with these groups, which use clean methods to dominate one another, or messy methods, which insult one another or lie about one another -- The Christians hate the Jews, the Jews hate the Muslims, and even in their scriptures, which are the letter this spirit surrounds, have fanciful accounts of one another. Why would Yahweh let the Christians take over his Bible? The Talmud must explain. Meanwhile, the New Testament explains why Yahweh left the Jews, and Islam explains how Jesus was a Muslim and not God. These letters are slowed down spirits which emanate and inspire other spirits. Letters are physical objects, weapons that cause wounds. Letters equip us to play the game. Our strategizer think and speaks formulas by which to love and strive. The most enduring spirit is the letter, and the ability to formulate a letter is a great power.
Have we no right to formulate our experiences? We formulate our experiences of your character and you counter-formulate my formula -- you would condemn all formulas -- as "stereotypes," and as "bad," thus stereotyping stereotypes with your hypocritical logic. The races, the sexes, the places and states, every physical reality by which we rally together and choose identities, let us pull together at the cost of pulling apart from others. Jesus said it himself that loving him was the same thing as hating parents and siblings and your own life: even if you do love them, you really don't. Not ultimately, and that's what matters. Ultimately, the heart of your love has been murdered. By hating them you love him. And he is the cultist. "Are you for us or against us?" His formula defines the religion's concept of love, it stereotypes itself, and so do we all.
Thus we create an Us by creating a Them. Allists escape this, at the level of his All. I am still that Christian-raised, Christian-critical man who votes this way rather than that, who loves these sorts of people rather than those, and all sectarian, perceptively limited, partial and blind viewpoints are necessary for my being, for all beings, for God and All alike -- and yet the All herself is more than that, containing each part, and when I join her at the level of the All of All, then I am with her, I take both sides, I am for both sides and against both sides, I am able to sympathize with each part, heart to heart, mind to mind, to know by direct experience how they experience themselves and how they experience me, for with my mirror mind, I am them.
I am thereby allowed to use the tools of sex and money, but can get behind them. The world is founded on money and the family is founded on sex. The situation created by Buddha and Christ is an artificial state where money and sex are suspended. There is a difference, after all, between believing Christians and practicing Christians. They play totally different games. A practicing Christian and practicing Buddhists live in poverty and celibacy, putting in the place of money and sex the message they would deliver, and the virtues they would adapt to make it pleasing -- charity, kindness, forgiveness, etc. Those, of course, are the outer virtues, the virtues practices to spread the faith, but they are not the inner virtues, which regard a sort of self-reflection that is projected either at the beyond or at nothingness, but which is really and always a man reflected on himself, called prayer and meditation.
They are the marketer's religions, they sell across the world, but where they were created, in Israel and in India, they are regarded as reactionary children which have subsequently been dispelled from the household. The games could only be exported.
These games situated us because they are established and we must react to them. What are we but situated? Our first act as Allists is to cast off the religion of our youth, and our later step is to take it back on, but on our own terms. Do we not identify with our city, with our state, with our nation, and so let the energies of each these expanding spheres to flow in us and through us? Do we not will to increase our power and be an utter Force? We are the red of passion, the blue of truth, the white of innocence, independent and pure. The red is commitment and optimistic ambition, the blue is study and direct speech, the white is the purity of order and the sanctity of independence. Our gold is in practicality and creativity -- the dollar sign being the sign of our pragmatic husbandry of limited resources. In this, our world doubles our purpose, and the symbols of our environment gain the meaning of our aim. The dollar sign is our symbol of commerce in the world.
Money is moral. How we earn it and how we spend it determines its ultimate value. As Emerson said, "Power is what the wise want -- not candy; -- power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought, which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied." Money is moral, and it depends upon competence and care, upon the monitoring eyes of Juno, to keep it true. Those who complain of the illusions of money forget that illusion also has reality. Laissez Fairre invisible hand guides and is even when the laws chain it down. How resources spread have a direct and indirect logic. That logic is money.
Money spreads through cash, love through words. The dollar bills merely stand for the money, they mean money, but most money exists as federally protected numbers in a computer bank account. The creation of electronic money reveals to us what money always was: an idea, a stable well-defined idea, a spiritual entity, a mental matter. So too is love, which is always a form of eros, or joy in unity, symbolized, given signs, expressed through words. Intercourse and conversation are as sexual as they are communal -- words are the binds that hold. Shall we side with the French was say "Love makes the world go round," or the Americans who say "Money makes the world go round." Clearly these two statements are aspects of one thing.
Words evoke a world, make a world; words also people it. What we say and how we say it draws both directly and also by the most crooked indirections those people who will make a scene in our situation, who will be key players in our version of the game. We draw them without knowing we do, we place people with our anger and our love. Our words, even the casual day to day small talk, is always casting stage directions, for what are words for, really, other than to direct actions? Words guide actions and inspire emotions, and we must remember the outward tending of meaning and feelings toward thought ideas, ideas toward speech, and speech into action. Language is the framework of a world. Our words are sex, they tie our bonds.
We are situated in a sexual matrix, as if there were levels of tension that could be seen through an eroscope. The tensions of aggression set limits on eros, make laws, set limits. Certain sexual relationships must be experienced as platonic. Our full experience, after all, is much wider and deeper than the narrow experience we consciously live. That part we consciously experience is the part relevant to what our consciousness is to do. The system makes sense, the rest is hidden for good reasons. Introspection is something useful, but not always. We might learn more by studying others.
Things teach their use, as we know, and people teach us how to love them. There is no promiscuous "love thy neighbor" that applies equally to each and every man the same. The form of kindness one man requires may seem brutal and cruel, while the form of kindness the other requires looks gentle and pleasant. The same directive moves both, for each is all. Spend for power, not for pleasure, for love is habitual pleasure, and when you make pleasures into habits, they are also duties. Love is duty. There is no love pure of duty, for duty is the way we maintain a love, and of course, where there is no love no duty can bind.
Marriage is a sacrament, as the Catholics and Mormons know, but as the Protestants have forgotten. The protestants, after all, wish to negate tradition and get at the original deal -- sex and marriage is a necessary evil. This is the truth of Protestantism even if the practice is of large families and an insistence of family values. That Jesus lacked any interest in family values, regarding the church as his "true mother and sister and brother" is a truth held lower than the place where family is affirmed; nor does either negate the other. Yet how does the New Testament envision woman? There is, after all, no substantial female character in the entire thing -- only passing roles. We must make a goddess out of the lightly-detailed Mary.
I envision woman ideal: powerful, but not castrating; autonomous, but respectful; confident, but without resentment; and loving, as she ever was, for the love of the Mother is the type for us all. Modesty, intuition, selectivity, sympathy, and grace are gems in her mantle too valuable for her to set aside They give her that unique power and beauty which is unique to women.
My goal in marriage was ever to allow Psyche to experience her Goddess nature, and not as her high priest, but as her husband God.
We accept our roles, married, for marriage is divine, or like that Bachelor God Yahweh, single till the end; we are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, we cannot escape these relationships, we cannot undo them. We are many Me's at once, many identities, many roles; the overall interrelation of each to all is the game of life. The all empower, they all traumatize, they all make a way to take the game. Our life is a resource.
And so the will sets routines. We build lifestyles and ways of life, we set schedules, we make parameters, we give our word -- for the word of man remains magical and sacred, still joins man to wife, and gets you coming to work on time each and every day. Our creative word, our living word, our viva voce, our Vivoce, is in the pen that writes, the tips that type, and the tongue whose dancing desire electrifies all our world. Language is the cloak of action. With enough language and thought, we can open a radically new lifeway. It is a matter of setting routines.
To set a routine you must map each part you would make automatic. You must either envision it, write it up, map it, out delineate it in speech, or at least absorb it intuitively from your environment and go with the flow. A man is institutionalized quickly, by violence or by smiles and frowns, whenever he enters a jail, a psych word, an office building, or whatever his place of employment. He takes on the clothes of the place as an extra layer over his me, and slowly those clothes seep into his skin.
To make strategies for the game of our own unique style, to spell out theories and set them in place, we need the habit-forming will. This bit of trauma upon our day changes our world, situates us differently. Habit is converting a theory into practice. Our assumptions are the theory, our habits are the practice. The theory is transformed into the sensation of doing. Ideas become feelings, the feeling of doing it right, of just living, no more do we think, for we properly are. Life becomes truth and truth again becomes life.
We take most our habits from our environment, adding just that crucial bit of personal touch to make them our own. We learn thinking habits through the structure of the conversation of our interlocutor. As we are taken into an intercourse, as a set of expectations communicated to us and persistently held over us, we must react to those expectations, must fulfill them or deny them, willfully, consciously--or naturally, if they pose no great threat. We quickly learn the tricks of thought at our new job, we start thinking like a banker, thinking like a journalist, thinking like a doctor, and again those habits, which are practiced with such a sense of importance for hour upon hour each week slowly sink into our character, so that after a decade, a man doesn't just doctor, but he is a doctor, on and off the job, and if his license were revoked, he would always have been a doctor, will always think like one.
We are naturalized into our profession, naturalized and normalized. Even those stubborn parts that resist being assimilated are pointed out as being stubborn, are labeled and gossiped about, are made familiar by calling them endearing, or by letting them stand as the source of grudges between you and your partners. Remember to spend long times each night reflecting alone. This is our religious balance to that informing of our character, by which we comprehend and dominate world influence. This charges us as players. Good conversation also helps.
Conversation teaches us how to think. We talk with the wise man each day and grow wiser, not because we want to, but because by merely listening and understanding, we are profoundly changed. A friend is best who reminds you of your purpose.
Our importance, our Purpose in life, is in doing a certain set of activities, of doing all activities, really, in a certain style. This is how we win the game, though the goals we set up here and there, inspired by our instincts and by societal conventions, are the immediate ways we win -- such as when we get that great job we want, or figure out that poem we were studying, or win that tennis match. To be able to meta out of the day to day and see your life week-by-week, month-by-month, year-by-year -- as calendars help you to do -- or decade by decade, or with a map of your whole life, with maybe even your trajectory into your next life as a God or an Angel, along with the more mundane and literal continuation of your work and your line of children on earth, gives you the full picture, the Odin eye over the whole world tree.
We learn some basic lifelong virtues, such as taxing ourselves daily, of working our will extra hard each day, to build our strength. The basis of physical health -- diet, exercise, and rest -- balanced against the basis of moral health -- earning and loving -- must balance against the third layer of the pyramid, the spiritual Creating of our Soul and our Heaven. Tax yourself daily, and seek to gain more power, more of a base to grow upon. Mature and overcome yourself. Those who prefer no hierarchies heirarchize that as higher than hierarchies. Don't be trapped by knots of nots. Self-reflect. Self-overcome by applying your own logic to yourself. Be mirrors. Those others value equality by making it unequal to inequality, thus negating their logic. The deepest logic however permeates all.
We each seek our own scripture, our own favorite authors, those men who speak best to our soul. As Allists, we have this here, but we also have those others dear to our soul. Emerson and Whitman are ever with me. For their words evoke their true abiding presence. Words also teach us new feeling habits. They're programmers. Art is the gentler trauma, art digs wells in our souls, and we say the art has ravished us. It opens us up, stretches new spaces for us to create new meanings. For meanings are waters that fill a well. The shape of these wells determine what sort of meaning will fill them. These words -- and all art is a language -- are desires communicated. Speech is desire. And as progress is prodigal, we expend great efforts at finding those words that speak best to our own soul. To have swallowed in a Word, to have gained the Voice of a speaking spirit, that is why we make love to these texts, and as book worms, make our chrysalis from their leaves, to arise again the psychic god, the butterfly of maturity.
Do not each of our faculties also self-overcome in this way, so that a man is more than a butterfly, but is a butterfly garden, glutting his love with study, and then taking time to refuse all food from such an author, to develop his own being from what he has digested? Invention and imitation are the two ways a man acts. We can get anxious that we are imitating too much, but let us get anxious about anxiety -- isn't it going a bit too far? It takes a William James to get anxious about anxiety, to lust after Eastern ideals of Harmony, dignity, and Ease, the whole time remaining in the agoneros with himself. "Be the change you'd see in the world" a bumper sticker advised the world ... evidently making a hypocrite of its owner. Well yes, I will be the change, but whatever I choose to be is the change I really believe in. A man is always secretly his highest ideal -- the humility and praise of ideals and virtues he doesn't have is ever a self-deception and world-deception. We make our character in not what we think is good but in what we actually do. Your practice, not your faith defines you. So how shall we practice?
"Overprepare and relax" is a basic test-preparation strategy. A student in college thinks he does best to pass this test or that, but what he learns best is how to pass any test, how to use the style of passing all of life's tests. I am assuming he is mis-educated, or taught irrelevancies or nonsense -- and if that were the case, for him to develop his own study methods would still make it all worth while. The style that over-actively prepares in advance, and then relaxes and is at ease -- this is a great success. The style is best that unifies all towards one goal.
How to unify science with the divine, such a prickly pear for our age and time. But the mind that has chosen its values, and with a keen ability to interpret is able to reconcile anything and everything science has to say to that value, that mind is the healthy one.
Our body, after all, is material, and yet matter and spirit are one, consciousness is a property of matter, and more than that it is, an eternal property of eternal matter. The body when it dies gives birth to a subtler body, for death is birth. And that cosmic body reflects how we morally view ourselves, and the world is made in the image of what we truly believe.
This body is situated and anchors us to one place and one time. Passion is in the heart, courage, resolve, fear in the guts, and those guts are the hell and nirvana and unconsciousness and womb. Guilt is in the heart. What those body parts do for us now--for they are a true phrenology of our brain, and that brain our mind--our analogues body will do part for part, as all beings are analogies for each other, a man for man, an animal for a man, a plant for an animal, a rock for a plant.
Our situation is both chosen and inevitable. Health and illness are both parts of it, both feed into the same. Redemption is in the whole, and no part will be removed or separated. Even separation fits in.
My own health is part of my game. My breakdowns are always also breakthroughs, and like the School of Resentment, I too seek to forge a tradition.
Those Wiccans and Feminists who make forgeries of history, and fake scholarship to answer their desires, are not unlike all religions everywhere. What else did the Mormons do with the history of ancient North America? And with their endless genealogies and their baptizing for the dead, they were not fulfilling a scripture that was important and overlooked, that Christ organized the church to include baptism for every dead man on the earth--as if the Gods' hands were tied otherwise!-- but the Mormons needed this tradition, it was a psychological necessity, for them to play their game they had to answer the question to themselves why God waited so long to reinstate The Church as he originally intended it. Each choice necessitate a logic, a work implies a balance of worlds, to do this you must also do that.
There is a logic in all situations, perhaps an infinite set of possible logics that are realized one by one when we interpret our place. We take our situation as the given and interpret it to make place for ourselves. That is how we play the game. What have the latest religions been, after all, but reactions against Christianity? Symptoms, therefore, of Christianity. The spiritual aspects of Native American religion, of Wicca, of feminism, of the Eastern inlet, meant to dwell in the mistakes and pains of Christianity, under the apparent pretense that their own systems lack anything analogous, when it is in the nature of every sect to be sectional, to take in as much as its mind can comprehend, doing a necessary injustice to the rest, overlooking some things. Such games could never be all, since they define themselves in terms of the other. The all game must be able to include and comprehend all the others, and not only on its own terms, but by sympathy using the terms of each tradition.
You've heard a debate
You've taken sides
The impudence of your enemy!
To deceive himself and you!
This inspires you to take a stand.
Good.
Now step back.
See how sides are formed.
See the logic of confrontation
See the faces of repudiation
Power is the ripening of fear
Understand how to love and hate your enemy--simultaneously
Use his logic against your own arguments
Help him push you down
Internalize every move of the opposition
See his face, hear his tone
Mirror him
He uses you to define himself
The inner I will watch
Be him
Feel the logistics of your emotional economy
Note the points of desperation,
And the bravado you assume to scare your enemy away.
See where you blind yourself
To make your side more self-consistent and unanimous
Mirror that back to yourself and express the same operation
Mirror a dozen critics of your view
Parents, siblings, heroes, idols, lovers, children
Be each one
Then fully be yourself.
You have internalized endlessly
Taken strategies and powers--
Best now to smile
And say something reassuring to your foe
Return to your solitude
And gestate
Defeating him at this point would blind you both
With the illusion that the matter had been closed
Instead of opened
Hitler's debate strategy was to listen to his opponents' speeches and arguments, and to understand their themes and repeated points, taking the time spent alone with the ideas to disarm them, and then in his speeches to anticipate and nullify them. Listening in silence can be a dangerous thing.
Allism credits theism and atheism, it says yes to ever side -- the corrective yes. Everything possible to believed is an image of the truth. Where there is resistance there is power, power for you to take and use.
My logic is water, it fills every crevice. Just as Allism is my life, not something I do only at night nor something could not do if I chose, but it is in everything I say and do. So too does my logic invade all places like water, is utterly intimate, gets into it all and knows. I am like the Tao, water of nature, and I am like the logos, a fire of purpose.
I begin, I persist, I finish; I begin the next, and then I quit. There is always the little extra before I quit. I step into the mythosphere and spread my wings. It was my vision, after all, in my metamorphoses, to be the world butterfly and cradle the world in my wings. The mythosphere is real though not literal, it is the spirit and earth the letter, it is Ama to Mattria.
We choose different parts of the world to project our meanings upon. That place of meanings is expressed in the fantasy space of the mythosphere. We imagine there what is spiritually true here. SIStem is the spider of technology that holds the world in her web. We imagine technology as a potential AI. Slowly, this science and this technology will invade every known place. Yet there is a gap in everything. There is no god of the gaps but gaps are god, and they will always appear, as traumas, as breaks, as places to tuck our meanings, wombs to create new meanings, speech centers, voices. Anything physical can be spiritualized.
These mythic symbols, these symbols we can physically hold, they are the tokens for attacking the mythic world. We make spiritual laws and defend them with real world violence, defend against blasphemy, or sanction blaspheme against other religions, to break what will be called "idols," of use of violence and death to uphold our views of the sacred. But God is that which can never be blasphemed, and Ama is she who can never be denied. She is utterly irresistible. Whatever you love in your heart, she is that. The killing of the serpent, who is divine as the virtual penis of woman, the protector in the womb, standing for female wisdom, became a cultural target for attack: Apollo kills the python, Marduk kills Tiamat, Thor attacks the World Serpent. That full plane of mythic space mirrors two mundane material world. With storytelling, with demonizing your opponents' Gods, as Zarathustra did, turning the Devas into devils, we affect the mythic. The Jews, Christians, and Muslims picked up on this sacred practice of blaspheming your enemies to such an extent that the more ambiguous the text the more you can insinuate into it. Evil Christians with their evil imagination are able to demonize anything and everything -- the whole world, every living religion, and most of those in their own religion who happen to be of another sect. Indeed, who slanders the world, slanders other religions, slanders other sects within their own religion -- who more than the Christians? They demonize and blaspheme everything out the world: the "world" the "pagans" the other religions, founded by and aimed at worshipping nothing but demons. The slander more than their Satan ever did, and indeed these Christians embody their Satan.
Well there's insinuation and there's poetry proper. Myth. A is notA -- the logic of myth. And every mythologem, those bits of mythic language, exists both in the mythosphere of our collective imaginations--Man's mind, the Earth's thoughts--and also as literal tokens in the world.
"Even if you misunderstand who I am, you will yet be blessed," says Ama. "And whatever you believe in, it is really me whom you mean."
She is not unlike a dry blanket. There is no such thing as a cold blanket. As soon as it touches you, you begin to get warmed. So is it to her when you open your mind and heart to her voice. She returns your warmth. When you talk to her, your own voice will always be an approximation of her meanings. The meanings are hers, the words created by your own voice. After opening your mind and heart to her, your inner voice will more and more closely approximate and finally equal her meanings, the fullness of the universe.
We adapt these strategies, but they adapt different ones. To insist that only your way is legitimate would merely be another strategy, another way to secure a sense, of security but in the process grow inflexible. Cost for cost, and play for play. Strategies are controlled through a sign system and a set of symbols. We learn many languages in life.
These languages that we use to address reality, that create reality by orienting us to factual parts, they often take years of discipline until we internalize that voice.
Psychoanalysis takes years of audacity and still doesn't work. Look before you, not behind you. Do what you were meant to do and allow your wounds heal on their own. For rather than trying so hard to face a situation forgotten, let yourself face its analogy today, and healing begins. A wound isn't healed by poking it, and the lewd interpretations that are so cleverly insinuated into the unconscious are like filth rubbed over a sore. Yet psychoanalysis by the sheer fact that it is a system does work. All of them do, every last theory, every last therapy and religion. We find that exercise cures psychological problems, that flexibility, endurance, strength, reflex training have their analogy in the soul, spirit, and psyche. The gymnasium is superior to yoga -- yet each has its place. Whatever form we are initiated into seems best to us.
We internalize a form and are initiated into it. Initiation is a type of trauma, and loyalty is willing to hold to the forms of that trauma. They carve out a space in your soul and put a meaning in it. Though it is painful to touch, and pleasant to use it as it is, we can yet redefine our meanings. Our experiences are our own. They can tell you you will go to hell if you think up your own thoughts, believe your own beliefs, dare to face reality with the eyes of experience rather than the eyes of dogma, and it is up to you to see through that.
Forms create. Empty forms are generative. Take sentence-making for instance. Let's say your sentence takes the form of this: noun is adjective not adjective, adjective yet adjective etc. So we choose a noun and get to work.
Emerson is tender, but not sentimental; inspired, but not zealous; passionate, but yet balanced; sincere, yet playful.
So it is with all sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters, books, genres. We internalize forms, countless forms, and to our own chagrin find it comes more naturally to be cliché than to be original. Being natural doesn't come naturally. Only when we start writing do we see how stereotyped and empty our thoughts can be, and then we can consider them enough to reflect on them and let them self-overcome, metamorphose into higher meanings. By memorizing the forms, and freely taking the empty forms wherever we see them, we increase our capacity, widen our repertoire of tools.
Our world situation, then, is to be Students of Life, to learn from all things, and to know that what we learn here applies to everything, and what we take from there can be used anywhere. A strong, flexible metaphor mind that can make a metaphor of anything coupled with the discernment to see what metaphors work best set our experience to work and open up the world to new experiences.
We learn from high, we learn from low. If we lose an argument, let's not give up. Better to purposely lose an argument if it will better teach you. The snuffed candle smokes the most, and when you have spiritually defeated an opponent, that is when he will most vehemently insist you haven't. He will come to his senses eventually, you've given him the seed of fate.
Such sojourns in the world, wandering the world accumulating all wisdom, must lead us to come home like a good bee with her honey. We are able to return to our world within a world, our imagination. History itself is nothing more than a solid imagined stage upon which to set our ethical and philosophical questions. History is hypothetical to begin with, but if history refutes us, we can make our own plausible stories to prove the same points. Fiction is convenient history. With our underlife, half of life is fictional.
Life is a series of relationships embedded in situations. When Language is upon me, I can tie all those relationships together in the appropriate Not. Their logic and mythos is usually beyond me, and I am mostly intuition and habit as I play in the world. Certainty is better than hope, so I let my under to its work, while my over does his. I take sides, I fight, fully knowing that taking sides means taking blinders. Like Arjuna, I heed Krishna, that these fights I understand to be necessary, that in politics and in religion, these fights are necessary, these ideas are thinking themselves out in the logosphere, that the gods of the ideas are playing us like a vast game board, and I fully know that Krishna is merely Vishnu, and Vishnu is the fingernail of Ama's left pointer, Brahma the fingertip, Shiva the bend of the finger joint, and the Om of the Brahman a spirit in her throat. They are all partial views, and so they tell me to accept partial views, to see it this way, rather than that. Should I see where her right middle finger points, with Allah the nail crescent, and Yahweh the finger tip and the Devil the twist? What does it all come to? Every perspective is comprehended in her, and she is equaled in the material world which she also is. Yes, I will fight these fights, as ideas think through me, as so many of the higher gods play games with these ideas and make sport of history--the mythosphere playing the logosphere-- for there is part of me that is older than all that, older than time itself, and this is the beginning of all times. I am both, I am all, and that innermost part is unknown, forever unknown, to all men, all gods, to God, to Brahman, to Ama, to Mattria -- is fully my own, from which I give gifts to the universal all. Glints of that shine melt through all these petty wars and politics, these squabbles and day-to-day mundane spats. There are many layers to the game, many ways to play, in love and power. The inner psyche is the outer world. I wrestle down the Gods, I give them my judgment, my directives, and my blessing.
If the unfathomable depths of a god's character explain a people, if a god personifies psychic forces, and if the veiled gods sleep each among their people, so that the nation's history is theology, so that the behavior of the race takes on its specific character from its underlying images, and so that their collective life reveal the nature of their God, then you already know Ama, even her aspect under this name, for her body is America. Michigan, her hand, rests on the water where she first looked down and realized she was divine, upon the reflecting waters; she draws a coffee black tear from her eye up to her gaze and contemplation, and adds the laughter of mirth to that sadness, and thereby stitches my soul. I remember this when I drink my coffee. I was made manic and mantic, a man of two poles. My situation whispers deeper truths.
Our unique situation empowers us in a way no other configuration can. Seeing its unique offer and using it centers us and gladdens us to be here. Each situation has its use, has its fields of overlapping power, its centers of resonance. Finding the central resonance and absorbing its powers is key. Being disabled has use, suffering has use, optimizing is our basic right foot virtue by which we step up.
We find a use for every resonance to double back our purpose, in our objective in the game, in our winning. I for one am winning when I write, when I can write, when I can mirror my mind back on itself through scripted ideas. My life converts to truth and the truth opens up more life.
Ideas are embedded in situations. We grasp this intuitively and plot through our lives. The philosopher puts this in a logical register, the mystic in a felt meaningful register, the poet in terms of sensual beauty, the hero in actions. The words we use evoke frames, and these frame the world. What frames we've felt we take with us.
As the boy, so the man, we contain all our previous situations, archived and set into working programs for our adult life. We learn how to trust and who to trust: a few true are greater than numbers. We are at first overwhelmed by the world, but we soon catch the clues. The pretended necessity is the dodge of politicians. We grow up and cease to panic when we read the news. We find ways to think unhabitually, to shock our system. We think with the world, we think against it, we think in a totally new way.
The question deck opens up thoughts unthinkable, and logic unhabitual -- showing combinations normality never permits. It can give us the emptiness necessary for generating empty forms. Empty forms, after all, inspire creativity to fill them. Knowing how to keep a pain meaningless is a subtle bit of genius. Learning the forms and the formula for their use is another word for thinking. Every tradition gives a unique set of tools. Allism gives the tool to grasp any other tool -- the grasp itself.
We walk the halls of Allism, this magnificent court yard of an extensive garden, and we note the clever truths, the virtuous immorality, the careful ease by which we live, we sense the loving fear we have over our treasures, and we use jesting sincerity to disarm our opponents, remembering our humble pride that we really are perfect, and that this doesn't mean we look down on others; we ask too much and desire it, we hold friendly enmity towards every living sect, and enjoy a strange normality amidst this flux of forms. We give a second view of the mindless study of our youth, collecting a treasure of simple wealth, sorting through the verbose confusion and scholarly nonsense, addressing our pains with angry calm or tear-choked laugher, and in all the world practicing our generous robbery. When we take, others improve.
For we are richer than money, and for us the giving is greater than the gift.
And as all mankind does, we too feed our fancies. What are the sacrifices in all the world religions but food for fantasy? And the sacrifices to the gods do their trick, for our own soul records everything, and opens and gives powers on behalf of the imagined gods. We feed our fantasies real meat, with lotteries or impossible flirtation, nurture the fantastic with the pretense to possibility. After all, a man who doesn't play the lottery can't enjoy the fantasy of winning, and the man who never flirts can hardly indulge in daydreams of torrentuous affairs, though he might be repulsed if one of his flirtations "gave the wrong idea," and led to the beginning of something real. How often we are sad when a favorite musician marries and bars us the chance we never had. Even among friends we can get jealous and petty over impossibilities and absurdities such as the woman who is angry her friend impregnated his wife. Sometimes a man will hold on to a guitar he never played just on the possibility he might, while his eager nephew has to scrimp and save to buy his instrument. Fancy cars and other props hoist up a screen for waking dreams.
They are fantasies and yet they are eternal. That idealist uses a lot of big words without much ground to justify them. That other one boasts that he is the truth, and calls himself humble. I listen more sincerely as the dancing candle sings a little in the breeze.
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle and the key to a riddle is another riddle." The intellectual has an intellectual illusion, the dullard a dull illusion, but we are all fascinated by our own projections, which bind us for a time in a given place till we figure out how to loosen the knot. A child has no grasp of ethics, but he still knows right from wrong. To do what you honestly think is right is always right, even if your thinking so is mistaken. The boy masters time through patience. It comes easier for the man, but would be impossible if the boy didn't first have his try. The child plays, and the man plays too, but calls it "work" and frowns.
We take roles in this game, we identify with masks. If one is willing to identify -- to submit to a thing--he inherits its powers and vulnerabilities. We take roles and we make roles but we have to make them work, make them fit.
A few lead, many follow; even those feigning their solitude still follow. To truly stand alone -- how utterly invincible that one is and ever shall be! You walk into your own world and it becomes a universe. We sweep galaxies, not floors, and our mundane struggles are unfathomably deep. We butt heads endlessly with the dullard and forget he has the thicker skull. Ignorance is strength. To the one who sticks to his convictions and never permits himself to doubt his prejudice, who won't understand criticism brought against him, his stupidity is strength, and there is shrewdness in his ignorance. The fancy word he prefers for his stupidity is "faith."
Yahweh, who didn't even know the shape of the world he claimed to create, will always have worshippers -- though their worth has declined in recent years. Evoking the desert spirits as they did, the Mormons were lead into the desert. That the faithful deceive themselves isn't even news. The subtext fascinates the plot. If we were open and direct we would lose our secret and seduction. They have "bluff good conscience," Dickens said about Americans, unable to admit to himself that people could be so simple and cheery. To an outsider, belongers always seem kinda stupid and simple. The sexy secret they hold in their souls, even to themselves, is the glue of their union. We call it eros, they call it fellowship. Simplicity is happiness.
I often think to myself, "I am truly happy" -- and when I think such thoughts, a book is usually in my hand. Am I not the idiot? My Idius is idiotic, I am a slow thinker, just as Whitman considered himself to be. In a lovers' quarrel, insincere accusations are a good way to deflect attention, and an ambiguously irrelevant statement adds enough confusion to sober an angry opponent. The ability to tie your opponents into knots requires going in a wide variety of directions at once. How to self-overcome? How to face my own stubborn simplicity? Do I not require a freedom gap, a No of myth, a mythic space to let me breathe and experiment? Not until I leave you, or at least consider it, can we come to a confirmation of loyalties. In the morning I shower and I baptize myself in my name, by water, by soap, by my sacred goal, Vivoce; I sing my morning hymn, I run my orientation of purposes and goals, I remain simple and insist always on myself, anchoring my world at last upon myself. Through LVX I add a new spirit to this place, to mingle in the American Oversoul above us, a spirit and a counter-spirit I create a new logos and clothe it in mythos. O manic coffee of my birth, O laughing sorrow of my worth! Is not the American heart rebellion? And at the heart of my heart I am independence. The myth is the internal fully externalized: symbols stand for sentiments, fantasies for thoughts. Life is once, so here I am, psyche and soma, two aspects of one thing.
Soul is blood, spirit breath, mind is nerves -- all three eternal. I am satisfied with my body, in its divinity, knowing that I am worthy of the highest heaven, knowing that in my art I make a higher heaven still. Laziness is industrious in making excuses. Have I not relaxed all my life? Use what is rather than regretting what's not. Your duty in life is that which on one else can do. Do to have. Duty is love's guard. To this nation of industrious devils and lazy gods, with Whitman and Thoreau working the least but meaning the most, shall we plead that the roses don't fall? Our beauty dies and that is eternal. We will not break our heart competing with machines, axing the trees until we ax ourselves. Our bravest moments are spent alone. And what we see here can never be believed. Yet those who know us feel it, and there is an unspoken certainty in all we are. As soon as we put it into words, worries stir, and they begin to doubt, but when it is unsaid it is fully communicated. As brass lasts better than gold, we are not ashamed to use low materials for high purposes. A book is a pocket garden: I give you therefore a book. It is the manual for playing at life. As nothing is more annoying than affected happiness, I will remind you that it is okay to strive and hurt and ache. We have nothing to prove, we are finally ourselves. Ask little. Give your due. Know that most blackmail is implicit, and also complicit. Be instead perfect, and play higher games. If you would advise, disguise it as praise. The golden chain binds tighter than steel, so prefer modest means. Even a sail can move against the wind, so go with the flow when that serves best, but break against the current when that leads the way.
Remember when considering your situation that your perception is a situator. You have some freedom in defining the terms of your journey. Your freedom is not absolute, you are anchored on necessity and upon the intransigent world. Everything you say and do lives on in this body and the next, you are your own reward, so play the game well, to win and to have fun doing so.
\ ~@M@~ /
perfectidius.com
