Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:
Greetings!
Today, America celebrates her Gratitude Feast, Thanksgiving, thanking providence for providing America to the pilgrims, and, insofar as the Native Americans can be grateful for having taken the land from the original original Native Americans (a few waves back), they can be grateful too. One Manifest Destiny later and we created a dynamic, self-contradictory, revolutionary republic, continually self-overcoming and redefining myself.
I am grateful for Ama, who speaks to me in the depths of the my night, and chases the shadows from my heart and brushes the cobwebs from my mind; I am thankful for my children, we keep me to my tasks and duties.
What I've noticed in this small clutch of allays is how persistent a few dominant figures have been in my education: Emerson, Nietzsche, and Jesus – I often refer to each of them, moving in and out of the allays. Whitman isn't far behind, and Kenneth Burke silently and invisibly adds his touches.
Take care, Caretakers!
* 852 *
As the world's oldest story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, demonstrates, the instinct for immortality has haunted us from the start, and has in its way given birth to all the world's religions. The instinct for immortality fulfills itself through having children, creating art ("Life is short, art is long"), contributing to a group that outlives us ("dying for the cause"), and, of course, in fantasizing visions of continued life on earth (reincarnation, resurrection) or in heaven.
The instinct for immortality may be the life instinct itself, yet the sexual instincts relate deeply to it, this giving up of self into children. The masculine will-to-power finds its correlate in the famous maternal instinct, which aims to create and nurture children, and to infantilize the adult partner by using the same gestures and methods. Love and power comprise the social goods.
* 853 *
"It is not suffering we object to so much as meaningless suffering," explained Nietzsche. "Once we find a meaning for our suffering, we can even will to suffer more." Certainly, an unfortunate fact can turn into its opposite, as when the early fans of Jesus faced a crucified rabbi. They invented a meaning for it, and thus the defeat became a sort of triumph. The trope was taken from the prototypical martyr, Socrates, willing to die for philosophy – though Plato and Aristotle needn't repeat his gesture. For Paul, Jesus' death mattered much more than his life – he isn't once quoted, not a parable, nor a quip, and anything like a human personality has been completely emptied out. There are no unfortunate facts. Everything can be used – where there is a will there is a way.
We trust our guts, and reach down to the Aboriginal Self in our reflection, and in this snip the lines of overdetermination that history and circumstance weave around us. Reflecting on the Self escapes time and space to that utopic point, the beginning of time, where at last we are free.
* 854 *
"The end of the world is nigh!" they've said for millennia, and they say it today. "Oh, the times we live in!" How they fret and pray their secular prayers. They do not see the universe is moral, that Justice tends everything. Had they witnessed this fact, they would worry much less.
Religious and political factions have been plotting the end of the world from the beginning, as a sort of ultimate gesture. Birth and death are mysteries. The birth and death of mankind are likewise mysteries. And where there is an unknown, pretense prevails.
* 855 *
My taste is the opposite of a tolerant taste, and most of what others love leaves me cold and unimpressed. I am difficult to impress, yet so eager to be. Yet, what I love I love with my whole heart; when I find a love worthy of sacrifice, then I sacrifice gratefully. Ama, you are my all in all; I never despair when you are near.
I preserve my innocence through a heavy contempt and cynicism of all the timely issues that electrify the world and its media. Saved by a laugh, I mock at all the fads and fashionable ideas, the great, oh-so-great topics on the table at the moment. Ultimately, time is boring and eternity fascinating. What is eternal in the new is all that matters.
* 856 *
There is much that is lovely in each of us, much deserving of love, yet not everybody can appraise this, few can see our deepest beauty, for it takes beauty to see beauty, and what is easily loved and by everybody requires little beauty to see, for it is obvious, and what is rare and profound and divine requires the rare and profound and divine to apprehend, and thus the one who can love deeper gains a mystical reverie.
* 857 *
Blessed are the poor? "Poverty is a sin," my Niviana claims, and pooh-poohs my systematic indolence. "Will I be loved as I would be loved?" we hopelessly pine, and settle for what we get. We must contend against the Amazons before we can marry one: you know a truth by attacking it. It is the Poet's to Name, a poet is a namer, and Ama we have named each other in folds and folds. Yes, the wealthy, the rich in spirit, rich in imagination, in creativity, in verve, justify life and make it wholesome for all. Exuberance is the ultimate generosity. Blessed are the rich in spirit.
* 858 *
"When Jesus is mentioned, men forget their knowledge and accept the apparatus of prophesy, miracle, positive supernatural indication by name and place and claim on this part to extraordinary outward relations; -- all these, which are the prismatic hues and lights which play around any wonderful genius, they regard as of an adamantine reality, and in the select society where Beauty, Goodness, and the Soul are named, these men talk of 'preaching Christ,' and 'Christ's being the ideal of Man,' so that I told them it might become my duty to spit in the face of Christ as a sacred act of duty to the Soul, an act which that benighted pilgrim in nature would well enough appreciate."
So says the Sage, which reminds me of that maxim, "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." These cult figures get exaggerated beyond recognition, and yet I recommend you face yourself in the mirror, then look upon heaven, close your eyes, and let the Utter Divine speak to you unmediated by any man.
* 859*
We learn our mother tongue during a window of youth: second tongues come with an accent. Likewise, the first time we fall in love, we learn the cadence of love, the language; the first time we experience the divine, whatever tradition or religion, we speak those terms and tropes, the sacred language, naturally, without an accent (or if accepted, an accent common to our people). For every language in the world, there is a corresponding accent when they learn English – so many stereotypical distortions. Likewise, a Christian who converts to Buddhism as an adult will have a Christian accent; a Catholic who converts to atheism speaks differently than a Protestant who does so; our first experience marks us for life. This is why there is such a fight to secure the "innocence" of the young. Every extant ideology hopes to impress them while they are impressionable.
* 860 *
The Holiday, usurped, as were many other tropes, from the Mithras cult, continued its gift-giving tradition under these terms: we give on Christmas because God gave his Son to us, and the wise men gave gifts to infant Jesus to honor the new King. So let us give ourselves to the world as incarnations of the All, of Ama, and let us give gifts to others to honor their divinity. Of course there is a spiritual giving; those of wealth can gladly give wealth, but those of other means will do well to give from their own riches: let the poet give a poem, let the singer sing a song, let the charitable give charity, and let the penniless give their bare presence.
* 861 *
Our life-narrative on any given day resorts so often to a synecdoche or metonymy of our current preoccupation – "How's life? Well, my car just broke down today" – and indeed, a moment can last all day if we dwell. What at this moment defines your life, gives it meaning, what does this part of your life stand for? Something now in today's terms, and, in tomorrow's terms, looking back, probably something else. What we talk about, think about, feel about, act upon, this is our life, the whole of our life. Know, therefore, how to insist your mind upon a few solvable challenges and ignore unsolvable distractions. What is the dominant fact at any given moment? What concerns us, what do we care about? We have some choice in this.
-- R ᴤ88s Я --
Perfection Is Easy
www.perfectidius.com
AMA LAUGHS!
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