Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:
Greetings!
The summer is wrapping up – the kids will return to school. I've been editing old books written a decade ago. I've been preparing to finish the Emilegends. Not too much to report otherwise.
Take care, Caretakers!
* 993 *
You will meet with cruelty along the way. Preserve your innocence.
* 994 *
Don't tell me how to be happy. Be happy yourself, and I will observe. I don't want your pity. I want to admire you. My best friends are a few literary sages who made my life worth living and my sufferings endurable, who gave me a great vision of how I too may be happy like them. The god helps without trying. He doesn't command. He lives his life.
* 995 *
You nominated the source of your joy and the stance of my pride by calling him – how could I have forgotten the title? You torture my lapse and ruthfully give my puzzles and riddles to tease me back into remembering what ploughs your earth so well. Just a bare letter, "D," I have earned so far!
So we wonder as we wander, ferreting our memories for that primordial lisp when Ama first cooed our nomination – while we loved so freely in our mother the womb. All the world echoes with your song, so long as we stop to listen, the lullaby of the lulling sea, the seas of people passing their waves.
* 996 *
Discipleship is a noble game. Women may pride themselves upon their maternal instinct, but men have a teaching instinct, and the entire pyramidal hierarchy of greatness has tempted us all to more daring heights. I've graduated from my discipleship to Emerson and Nietzsche, and hardly return to them now – they are yet so with me. I'm under Burke now, and tomorrow? — I can only imagine! Masters are so many stepping stones. Don't get sentimental: wed yourself to none. I express my gratitude by seeking my own greatness aside from you.
* 997 *
Every relationship is a dialect, and your words are tokens in your shared game. Actions are also symbolic – they advance play. We use a unique language for every person we talk to, and constantly compete and cooperate in the dual game of love and power implicit between us all. That we share a language is cooperation; that we attempt to persuade and command each other — directly or indirectly — is competition. We prefer the games that flatter us, the ones at which we can succeed. That is friendship. The one who honestly admires you is hard to resist. Those who bring out the best in you are your soul's mates.
* 998 *
"Everything in nature seeks its proper level," said the Philosopher, and so much so is this true for persons who, playing along with the game, fitting into this role or that as others wished of them, relax and expand when they fall into their proper place, surrounded by those able to really see and hear them for what they are. Such a birthday that is, such a holiday from striving and pretending. We come into our own. We doubted – yes we did, we actually doubted! – that anybody at all could appreciate our intrinsic beauty, had the beauty to see that beauty, but now we fall into the gaze of our own, and they see us for what we are. Such relax!
* 999 *
Every worldview has its language, its grammar of terms, its rhetoric for inspiring fervor, its propaganda for gathering adherents. The early Christian rhetoric of the end of the world, hellfire, the first becoming last, and the resurrection of the dead, appealed mostly to social rejects the first few centuries. The philosophers of the time – the stoics and epicureans – regarded it beneath their dignity even to engage them. The Christ cult inspired histrionic martyrdom, and as dying for a cause dignifies it as worth dying for, their rhetoric held traction. Modern day atheism, which makes a rhetoric out of logic, insisting, not without a subtle sneer, that theirs is the only reasonable logical worldview, and taking pains to catalog the logical fallacies of their opponents, holds a sort of elite appeal, not to the actual elite, the geniuses of philosophy and poetry, but to those who would be above an opposition that touts itself as the moral guides of the world – as the four Abrahamic religions tend to do. For Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism, morality became a rhetorical device: God has made us holy (this is their humble arrogance), and we condemn all that is unholy. It is not, after all, as if morality were the most important thing in the world. Ask a school boy if he wants to be good, and he will frown. Ask him if he wants to be more powerful than his classmates, and he will perk up. There is nothing artistic or creative in morality. But it is the rhetorical device of the faith religions: God cares most of all whether we are moral! The atheist counterclaim is that "We have an intellectual conscience, you however are liars and self-deceived." All those rhetorical modes have proven effective, just as did the worldviews, and their inherent ideologies, of Communism, Feminism, and elsewhere, Buddhism and so forth. That all these competitive enclosers avoid the intellectual self-praise of atheistic "reason" does them as much good as would it do the atheists bad to dismiss that wedge.
Allism, as usual, is all of them together, the way they all strike and parry each other, and thus make a meta-dialogue, a truth each internalizes when confronting the rest. The highest in each is Allism. All mystic symbols rhyme, and for the one who has experienced the Importance, rhetoric is noise.
Thus, the initial selling of the missionary religions amounted to a denouncement of spiritual elites in favor of democratized spirituality: Jesus railed endlessly against the Pharisees – not hypocrites, for all that, but sincere master legalists – preferring the kingdom for sinners and harlots; Siddhartha likewise denounced the Upanishadistic scholars in favor of the simple who seek the one thing needful, namely, to pull out the arrow of suffering without asking who shot it or why, and this through a streamlined four noble truths (though number three is rather unnecessary in light of number four). And so historically every emergence posits itself as the corrective of its parent, and really no child at all, but there from the beginning, the way late-comer Islam claimed the original bible and gospel said and only said exactly what Muhammad came to say a final time (what they actually say being allegedly corruptions). That all of this rhetoric and self-posing has nothing to do with truth need only let us repeat the most profound moment in the gospels, when Pilate silences Jesus with the question, "What is Truth?" For truth was never the question, but only projected desire.
-- R ᴤ88s Я --
Perfection Is Easy
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