This allay is definitely an “allay,” – that genre by which the transfusion of divergent ideas hit like a particle collider – the infusion of foreign elements under the eyes of a theme are meant to expose the roots of the roots of ideas. Here I am after our ability to grasp the logical operators that exist in every object of discourse. Words, arguments, ideas, all contain an ambiguous sense of meaning and potentiality, but coming at them with the lens of a purpose, we see what these ideas are capable of, how we can use them and assimilate them to our Purpose.
Amidst the interstices of habitual ideas are a few glints of possibilities. This allay aims to instruct how to get at the possibilities. Needless, to say, it is one of my more difficult attempts.
daniel
Mining for Logical Operators
We are submerged in the logosphere, an air so thick with language and meaning that only our utter immersion renders it invisible. But as it is darkness that makes the shadow clear, so does a man appreciate meaning best when he has once gone insane. Having exceeded the limit, we respect the limit. When we find ourselves within a world of language and sense it as an alien game, we will gain the power to use or upset its logic. Within all ideas are logical operators by which they negotiate with the world of ideas.
Across the cultural logosphere, often embedded in artifacts, lie different resonators which put each other in place, and through their vibrations we find nodes, and each according to the shape of his antennae. We are all butterflies finding our flower, and amidst the values of the good, the true, and the beautiful we take our spin, our difference, our personal preference, and gladly do an injustice to what views contradict it. The atmosphere of the logosphere draws us through a field of meaning.
Amidst the field of meaning we seek terms which reveal ambiguities, not which avoid ambiguity or explain it away. Ambiguity is the room of transformation. The resonators make the scene, which contains and allows our actions, our language and thought, our inner feelings, the habits that make up life. Scene gives quality to action, already has all actions potentially hidden in its bosom. Those symbolic acts alter our being; when we take a subjective experience and glorify it as our objective essence, we alter our experiencer. Our essence is our perceiver, and is also the necessity which perceives—needs and minds, necessity and freedom.
These words, these sayings, this logosphere of talk, the flesh of Sophia Lux, who is the Light of Wisdom, set our limits and possibilities: this is the playing board on which we move. Proverbs for instance are fragments of a vast and complex dialectical structure. The words in the air rake the airways. All persons, all egos, those nexuses of powers, take as an essence some subjective experience, some object of contemplation, and set that as a personal resonator. That resonator tunes is into a world of pleasant and unpleasant positions. We need to choose a need, we need to set our purpose and having that we alter our vision. Watching the world through all our moods, we discover the limits of the mind.
Psychosis can be surprisingly conventional; stereotyped delusions allow us to mock those experiences. Yet in expressing through symbolic language something especially deep, psychosis is the deepest of creativities; it opens heaven to the world. The deepest myths and religions owe their best to this.
Whatever is opened for us, whatever excites a people--new power, new technology-- becomes the trope fountain. Computers have made us into computers; we see everything as computers nowadays. What we focus on changes the shape of our lens. A few buckers of convention play past the bonds. The exceptional people help through their obsessions, the regular people help through their compliance. Our temperament finds its place among the people.
We position ourselves in terms of the world; we are forced to have an opinion on the issues of the day; to not care is also an anticipated position, one often held in contempt. The staunch materialist is perhaps fighting down his own superstition to need to insist. Our lay of instincts and the educative images that structure them make the array of our motives. This system of identities, which is also a system of differences, configures these resonators either in hierarchies or as oppositions. Placing our ideas in this gridwork programs ideas to interface across our consciousness.
Our self develops as we foresee and internalize the networks of opposition to our goals, as we see ourselves through others' eyes. We deliberate our challenges, deliberate with an internal action acted out as a posture and presentation. Attitude emanates from deep images; little fragments of images mean so much to us; the memories of the first five years are converted into a mental technology beyond recall. The experiences of the first five years, which we subjectively experienced, are made into invisible objects, our essence, which is also our subjectivity. A man's subjectivity is his essence. As an unthinkable object it is pure subject. Our personality feels it as tone of life, attitude, common sense, truth.
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We seek a set of other people to develop our personality; we will even choose villains for friends, to our later seeming surprise, to bring this hidden essence back out in a final realization. For a lover, we seek not clones, but complements. And just as the forgetful person sets reminders on his path, so we choose friends able to hold us to our task. They stand at the limits of our course and push us in. Sometimes the pride of being a better parent than the one he had leads a man to treat his family in a way that even seems a bit unnatural to him. We latch on to moral oversimplifications and become fools of goodness rather than masters of virtue. And yet that pride, which is merely the pleasure in our own power, in the joy of being ourselves, seeks goals worthy of our potential; we wish to be all that we can be, for this is the sweetness of life. The logical operator in virtue is in the empowerment of self, just as the logical operator in morality is in limiting the power of others.
The religions often identify the natural instincts in man, and to be sexy, contradict them. A religion wouldn't be a religion if it didn't claim nonsense with a straight face. They do it on purpose to differentiate the loyal from the outsiders. Loyalty is how much you are willing to lie for love. What is true requires no loyalty, its power is self-evident. True loyalty trusts despite appearances. Love is the opposite of power in that it takes the freedom of power away, and sets it into the form of duty.
The charge -- really the only fundamental charge -- Christianity throws against all other religions is that they seek salvation through the efforts of man, instead of letting God do it for them. Even if this were true, it does not fit a father / son model. The proud father wants his son to succeed on his own efforts; it goes without saying that to lay out eternal punishment is unfatherly, inhuman, disgusting. To let that man slowly lift himself up by his own efforts is the station of a loving father. We have no respect for the mother who, to increase her importance, does everything for her children, rendering them helpless and dependent. You can also readily compare the spiritual progress the Christians make compared to Hindus. Paul attempted to give self-improvement a bad name, by saying that a self-perfecting man was an abomination to God, a sneer at God, who is afraid that a man may boast of getting into heaven; this paints an frightened God intimidated by the honest efforts of his children. Boasting characterizes Paul's mien, but most wise and advanced philosophers boast little, less than the religious -- lacking such a need. Pride never boasts. It is satisfied in its own reality. The logical operators implied in “faith not works” is a cynic dismissal of mankind.
To make a difference between your sect and the other sects of the world religion, between Islam and Buddhism and Mormonism, is to lay all the emphasis on a distinction. But that distinction is not intrinsic to your essence: it is a reaction to how the competitors have defined themselves. What makes you different from others depends on the others.
The terms would allow it, of course; the logical operators buried in every term are ambiguous, but ambiguous in a limited and suggestive way. God, like Democracy and Love, is such a hollowed out term that has held anything and everything, that could mean anything and indeed which means different things to different people such that the only seeming agreement is that it is an important being. It is a rhetoricism. “Belief” in God is an easy thing and implies no moral obligation. History's greatest villains believed in God. It makes no difference if a man believes in God; what matters is if God believes in him. All the Gods, though they contradict and nullify each other, are aspects of the all, are mere puppets for Pan, for the All Divine, Ama. To approach her, we may be conventional and choose a sect of the World Religion. Customs, forms, and first lessons hollow out a space for meaning, which is fluid. Yet a genuine talk with God, with the All-mother, will be in terms completely unheard of, in a private and peculiar way, in an instance utterly like anyone else in history. She will talk to you in the accent of your own mind's speech. Those who seek praise seek external assurance, as does God, but behind that is the One who praises us, who believes in us and adores us and lends us her power. That is Ama All. Use her inexhaustibility.
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Appropriating tradition is the basic gesture of all sects of religion and all parties of politics. We can, after all, see tradition and history as extending the details of our own private life, which is infinitely rich. Mundane life is the anchor of the rest, the justification and center of our flights. In this, conventions are useful.
Backed by the past, we are yet at the dawn of history, the beginning of history proper. Iris blue has blinked away, summer time skies have saddened grey. Our winter of gestation is poised and ready for the butterfly's flight. I hum silly songs of isolation to myself. My numinous reclusiveness elects friends with exclusiveness, Want a slice of my time, tickly my elusiveness. I am happy to move worlds while ever at home in my own. I use my distinctions and lose my normalcy.
We are all weird, and we all play normal. To emphasize our difference is useful, and to emphasize our similarity is useful; our universal and private experience charge our ideas. Ideas and traumas store energy that can be called upon in a time of need. All those shames and exclusions the world has dealt us, the fear of exclusion if our secrets were known, these well with energy, they give us use. We set our commitments by placing our lies.
Life is a ritual of commitment. We build our life with the resonators that keep us in place. We need buffers and layers of fat; to build stores of energy; to add some fluff to our bank account, to have the wisdom that enables us to be happy in all circumstances.
The gospel of prosperity -- which is the pragmatic if not the official religion of America, holding that wealth is a blessing, that we share in God's grace when we work with him towards our own success -- attenuates the English roots of our values. Amidst all this "materialism," how do we get at the higher materialism of our inner soul? How do we affirm our private beliefs?
A man's Belief contains the things he will tend to believe, insofar as he is able, holds the tone of what beliefs can become important to him. That catalog, that empty shape, works as a filter; our ego filters for tools. We have a sense of life which builds our attitudes. We mold our tools by our tending to use. Money is power as words are tools. Empty forms, upon repeating, fill with meaning; the words we say, though initially meaningless, thicken over time with meaning. It is only the frustrated meaning, the clogged desire, which requires art to ease its tensions and set it back to the flow of work. Use is meaning. The meaning of language is the activities it inspires. The meaning of a dollar is the effort to achieve it and the extent of what it can buy. Dollars convey effort; words desire. There are truths that only love can see, and there are truths that love cannot see. There is a weakness in power, a nerve of pain, which infinitely empowers it. Power is fear is distance, power is space of control. Words are close, encircle our heart – they gave it the safety of distance.
**
Our values are a circle of words we speak to our intimates. Unless we wish to identify with the thinnest and shallowest values -- the surest to deliver us through life unchallenged -- we must guard our hearts from the words of the world. We must objectify our experience into language to give us the power of distance over it -- power is distance -- for being too continuous in the stream of direct experience blinds us to its nature. Both the forgetting of experience and the reflecting on experience must be internalized to digest it and use its essence. Don’t just live life. Sometimes escape it.
This book makes the distance of my ideas from my heart. It is the oracle of the all. Use its inexhaustibility.
Avoid polite forms when facing the all. Polite forms are dead forms; they are intended rather than raw. Conformity dies in time. Genuine originality, not avent gard escapades of shock, comes from the eternal, and so goes to the eternal. Traditions give a stage, but that is all.
Religions are all by nature arrogant, only they mask that in the cloak of seemingly humble obedience so to command in us the most intimate and persistent focus and insist the most extensive authority over all details of our lives. Pass such impositions into the realm of uncriticizable – calling it God or the Divine. This fiction is an illusion to coax acquiescence to their demands.
The religions through their divine ventriloquism pretend they have the right to tell you what to love, how to love, whom to forgive, how to rear your children. How intolerable would all those manipulations be if expressed for what they are! But give them the fiction -- a fiction the people are begging for -- and they obey. They hold to slave mentality, but they require a legitimatization of their life of servitude, a way to make it respectable. Tradition deserves reverence, they feel.
What depression people get when they lose this justification. There are certain truths, evoked by a frowning mood, that in their undeniable simplicity exasperate hope. "There will be a last kiss between you and your wife." "You are young. Your greatest suffering is yet to come." Or as my self-doubting mirror sometimes says, "Your allistic project may be buried with you when you die." Should we put trust in scriptures? The ancient scriptures claimed to know more about the future than they ostensibly knew of history. Those evangelists insist because their fiction is weak. How to respond? The confidence to ignore a loudmouthed fool is a graduation of dignity. Every fool will find his level. Resolve instead to hold to your own and seldom bother to explain yourself, least of all when others want to misunderstand. Remember in your anger that when anger admits its emerging truth it is relieved. Anger completes its purpose not when it is suppressed but when it reveals the truth of its vulnerability. Meanwhile, do some petty thing to occupy yourself. The housewife's wisdom -- when frustrated, clean something -- is certainly useful in handling great frustration, which becomes manageable once the electric edge is taken off. Organize something. Practice simple order. Make art of your life. Art when comprehended implies action. Music inspires dance, architecture husbandry. Art is hortatory, life is for living, thought is for acting, and beauty is for inspiration. The study of life is for the creation of life, and creative power uses the engines of logical operation. Mine the meaning in the ideas that interest you, liberate the operator and apply it elsewhere.
\~ @M@ ~/
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