"Deceiving to be Free" an essay

This finishes my section on intellectual independence. It is about dissembling our inner truths before the eyes of others. A racy theme for a philosopher, and a fitting place to begin what I mean by the Game, as a sort of theological game, a meta-theological game which reframes religions and myths according to a few centering ideas. These section is longer than the rest, and replete with a peculiar mythology. To me it is fully charming, makes me laugh, but perhaps it will baffle the literal minded among my readers.

 

Daniel

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2. Deceiving to be Free

            This brings us to the contradiction of the virtue of independence, which requires the other virtues to set it into place, and yet is prior to them and supports them, and furthermore must finally in its extreme being deny them. “Commitment,” implies sustained intimacy; “honesty” implies direct expression of truth; these other virtues are good only insofar as they do not infringe on the inner independence. We tell the story of the guardian of the inner needs, who is maid Satan, keeper of the mirror womb, as an image upon the wall of the mirror who will not let us pass, though she seduces her Father God back in, by and by. In other words, the brilliant angel, we may call her Maya, is charged to protect life’s secrets, even through lies and illusions if need be. To maintain independence of your soul, you must never disclose your innermost being. That is why it is so unknown to begin with, so inexpressible. Certain people resonate to you, for unlike the others, they have your same inner energy, and though you can never tell why you love him or her, you can feel it: the inner is unspeakable. And what can be spoken of is best left unsaid, for it could be used against you. Utter intimacy, center to center, is impossible in this life, except perhaps in the few pure moments. Approaching it is risky, dangerous, and unnecessary. Guard your heart. To be the most honest of men, you must know how to deceive.

            If the “spiritual world” is the world of spirits – wind, breath, language, voice—of voices, and includes all those who give voice, then we enter this world in conversation, and breath in many of those spirits through our ears, internalize them, capture them up like geniis in bottles, and once within us, barter with them to do our bidding. One learns a voice, perhaps a set of voices, like a set of perspectives. I used to ask my friends for advice. Once familiarized with their advice, I needed only think of my friends, and could predict what they would say. Now I need merely think of my problem, and commentators derived from my friends thicken my thoughts with possibilities, and I wisely choose the most appropriate mind among them, all in an instant, all from within my own head, from familiarity with those kindred spirits. No longer need I hide my innermost from you: I hold you within me, unbeknownst to you.

            I’ve talked to my fellow mentally ill, and learned a lesson. Psychotics never fully abandon their delusions, even when returned to perfect mental health. The difference between a psychotic and a sane man is that the former is exposed. The sane man, on the other hand, holds buried beneath his conscious thinking the same mad thoughts. How else would the wits and story-tellers be able to say such wild leaps and jumps unless some insane part of them truly believed it?

            Each man’s necessity is his ultimate reality. He can by no means betray it, nor escape it, since it is the very law of his being, and will suffer no contradiction. To understand the center of another is to map, as vaguely and crudely as the external observer must, his soul’s framework, and this will let us understand him for what he is: he has the same form as us, variations on a theme –every distinct being is basically the same as all the others – though in that central bit he is wholly unique and unknowable. Each mind is that free being; morality predicates on the freedom of the mind, that a man somehow owns his actions. But in another sense, we are conduits of the streams we are born into, and pass along what we  have received. We add to this that subtle swerve upon each atom that passes through us. What we own, what we contribute, what we are, is from the hidden self – utterly protected by guile.

            Just as our inner madness is hidden by the mask of normalcy, winking out when telling and appreciating jokes, daydreams, myths or fairytales, so too is the vital self never in anything directly material, but is subtly interfused within our inner and external structure.  A master may mold a piece of gold, and though it amounts to nothing but the original gold, what has been added to its content is form. Form is part of content, nor could any content lack either external or internal form, all the way down to the ultra-microscopic .

            It would be better said that the inner madness is a sort of substratum, an ethereal garment, and not the direct self. The fantastic and mad imaginations of both the marketer's religions, Buddhism and Christianity, speak of beginnings and ends, of the final state of the blessed soul and other such things. The visions are not the real thing, but the reality to them is the living morality each religion offers this life. The fantastic is distraction. Emerson was right to criticize the heaven-bound with this remark: that the pious Christians complain that the wicked now live in mansions and eat well, the whole time themselves hoping to in heaven live in mansions and eat well, saying in effect: “You sin now, but we will sin by and by,” for if ‘the good life’ were about humility, servitude, and praising God, we can easily do that in this life, but for them, all that is instead taken as a means. Emerson did not see that his critique cut out the heart out of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which promises that “great will your reward be in heaven!” The Christian and Buddhist ethics do not prove themselves, are not self-sufficient, and so they rely on fantastic stories. At best, the stories serves as a picture language, as allegories or parables, to present the true gift of religion: a method for living a virtuous life. The method itself is by no means reducible to a set of rules, or even to a clean set of principles – least of all to any “laws” – and yet somehow, in a mysterious way, it is communicated, as a spirit beyond the letters, but by no means possible without those letters, as spirit is a subtle energy that is part of the larger energy of gross matter – like the overtones over a violin string.

            We contain an inner world of beloved things by which we judge our external environment. Heaven is made of what we enjoy in this life, a projection of it upon the great beyond. And so our only enjoyment of it is now in anticipation, as our inner fantasy, and that is as much heaven as we receive or need. This at last is eternal.

            Just as Jaspers opined that Ezekiel was schizophrenic, so does all our discourse get a bit mad and maddening the closer we get to something real. To be real is to be able to flow the needs through the habits so that there is congruence between feeling, thinking, saying, and doing. To touch past the psychological defenses, the barrier of hysterics must be breached. Utter intimacy, center to center, is impossible, for each self is sacrosanct, just as you cannot think my thoughts for me.

            The Buddha did have a bit of wisdom when he said the important thing in life is to “mind your own business, and mind it well.” Don’t go sniffing up metaphysical difficulties which are none of yours. If we needed to be certain of the afterlife, we could be. Lacking that, never you mind. Each day has enough in itself to speculate about. Tending your own garden is wise enough, but wiser still is letting nobody else tend it for you. About your personal projects in life, bite your tongue, and know how to deceive when necessary. Your innermost truth you owe no man, nor let yourself speak it. Learn the principle of guile. By the time we are adults, this is natural.

            Only what you do always can you do naturally. Mind your business, and cut off every stray branch that saps away whatever is necessary to feed your rose of beauty. Give only to that one thing, or if you hold subsidiary hobbies and habits, let them feed back into the same, till you are as focused as the Mississippi and divide a whole continent with your desire. What we do every day, what we practice nonstop, what has become a gesture, a flowing dance, as ready and purifying as a laugh, as ultimate as an orgasm, as subtle as a smirk, as easy as a blink, this is our style, this has gone from practice to nature, this has worked deep into our being, approaching a grand fine permanence.

            We must protect our innocence in the manner of all children everywhere. Children deceive. They even tricked Jesus. Buddha was wiser, knowing that heaven belongs to the mature, not to the children: innocence must use its shrewdness to gain the second and deeper innocence of wisdom. Only the elderly are truly innocent.

            God himself was tricked by a pastor, as reported in the Doctrines and Covenants, when He said "James Covill, thy heart is now right before me at this time. I have looked upon thee and thy works and know thee," after which James Covill realized that God must not have any inside knowledge, and so left Mormonism and returned to Methodism, at which point God said "Satan deceived him, and I will punish him for it." In this, the spirit of childhood is unknown to adults, remains tricky and hermetic, as the Lethe of adolescence removes us from the conspiracy of infancy. We say "his innocence was lost," but in fact, innocence replaces what is lost.

            Children lie, deceive, trick, naturally and by instinct, it need not be taught them, but they are poor at it until they first lie to themselves. The ability to lie is the ability to have privacy. No, I will never dirty my tongue for your sake, I won’t lie for your love, but I will still hide my truth further than your eyes shall ken. Self-knowledge is saving knowledge, this is one of the few truths Plato recognized; a man who knows himself is therefore known: heaven hides within the mirror, a man must be able to squeeze his full being back into the blacks of his eyes. And this is possible only if external criticisms and banter do not distract his studies. Let him be independent. My autonomy is worth more than the whole human race. My freedom, the freedom of my own perfect mind, is the one sovereign fact.

            The mind falsifies. Memories distort. Because memories are not facts, though inspired by them, they neither evolved to, nor ideally should, serve objective facts, but only and always the deeper needs whose tools they primarily are. Facts do not categorize themselves. Facts do not evaluate themselves. Facts are trivial and dull until they subordinate themselves to some demanding need and its subsidiary desires. Lacking that, we would have no reason to consider them in the first place. In this way, the independence of personal needs, and the free mind which interprets them, is justified, protected, layered, clothed in a carefully knit robe of experience that uses reality to allow for our growth, but is willing to dismiss what facts and details fail to aid this.

            The farthest edges of the mind, which identify with the universe, the mystical moments we all feel, which some of us cultivate into an art form, the form of consciousness which was coined as “Cosmic Consciousness” to describe Whitman’s mindset, this expansive awareness of the all of our experience, is so widely conscious that it is nearly unconscious. To spread the focus so thin, to mix the dye of care so thin in the waters of mind, is to reach Nirvana, the destiny of every man, woman, and child who has not deified his soul in this lifetime. We are all doomed to unqualified bliss forever unless we can save ourselves in time. This being lost in the Mother Universe, this is what it means to die. It would require a special act of guile to save the mind from this.

            For the religion that said “Annatta! There is no self”--how could such a thing be true? how could we say “there is no self” unless that very self were known? If we say “there are no unicorns,” we do know what these fantasies are, what they mean, what they symbolize, how they were created, when, for whom, and for what reasons. Ghosts, vampires, dragons, and unicorns are the opposite of nonsense: they serve symbolic functions, and can by no means be divorced from the needs and purposes which created them. The idea that “there is no self” is strangely coupled with the idea that we ought to love things in the world, other selves, when it seems that disinterest, detachment, and dismissal would instead be the logical conclusion from the idea that selves don't really exist. The ego is real, is important, is the basis of creativity and growth, is God over the needs: to kill him would result in Nirvana forever, but whoever loses himself in Nirvana will never become a Universe.

            Hide yourself, bury yourself, do not give yourself away. Sense your inner divinity, for all men are created equal, and the gods created them all equally beneath themselves. The god you are is that innermost spark. For though I adore honesty, and strive always for direct truth, yet it seems I lie often enough, and this to avoid losing face or escaping reproach. Why does this come so naturally? How can something we all do be bad? The integrity of an immature mind cannot shine bald and brazen, but must eclipse his budding glory with the deceptions of humility, smallness, and self-abasement. Do I seem so ridiculous to you, my friends? It is because I find myself most comfortable when donned as folly before you. What is whispered in my innermost is unfit for ears such as yours, if given would fall like dead leaves from your hands. But show me that generation of lovers which split from the same spark as my own, the gods who are my own gods, and you will see that I am neither honest nor dishonest with you, but I am real with you, I am real to you, I speak or don’t speak, you know me, gods cannot hide before gods.

            Ama-All, Motherverse, grabbed the hammer of will and smashed the anvil of necessity -- we see it as novas exploding  -- so that with each hammerfall, a soul was broken, and atoms fell upon the worlds, congealed into earths, and each planet was thick with sparks from different sources, and each of us draws by hidden paths the same original sparks back to us, so that the lovers I hold dear are as near as my soul, are my same spark, but the others who try and leave were somebody else's spark and not meant for me, so that the sparks that fell into this particular grain by hidden pathways became finally the dinner I am now eating, and that little bit of bad spark in my forehead was cut out by the car accident, so that if it wasn't a car wreck it would be something else, but in the end all that is mine and belongs to me will return to me, and what is not mine falls away. I confound the inevitability of the circuitry by emanating something from my innermost that never existed anywhere before, so that just as my halo is the language I use, my aura is my creative output. I seek those who are coeternal to me.

            Every being has identity, reason recognizes its self-identity. To be able to create a self is the emblem of life, to be able to create other selves, to think of one’s very thinking, to grow a child within your body, to theorize about theories, that is the mirror womb at the center of the mind. I speak in myths and hints; the idea I wish to convey will already be in the minds of those who hear me, but will be mere games and charades to those who don’t.

            We live to mature. If infancy is cute, if childhood is admirable, if heaven belongs to brats, why not cut the young off before they degrade? But life aims at maturity, and power belongs to the adult. The highest innocence, the greatest purity belongs to the elderly. The older we grow, the more we purify the needs and will. We grow simple sublime.

            Perhaps throughout life, part of us doesn’t change. What changes cannot be defined. Biographers resort to calling their subjects “paradoxical,” lacking the correct model for catching on why all men, when closely studied, appear to contradict themselves. I have heard Franklin, Wright, Ives, Nietzsche, and Jefferson called “paradoxical.” What Biographer can avoid this temptation? A person is not a character in a book, but something more, something better, something that can’t be reduced to one perspective, or a set of words, or anything at all, being at his centermost a pure and divine logos. The myths suggest the full story.

            I wear many masks, I don a dozen cloaks. Where I openly criticize myself is irony before you. My pride is careful to vaunt self-reproach. I feel akin to Emerson who consented to Carlyle’s criticism that he lacked integration in his essays, that his sentences appeared loosely held together around a similar theme, each sentence being created equal in the democratic principle of every man his own president – let no man defer! Emerson was as blind as Carlyle to the American genius for gross structuring of wide vistas, sweeping contents, the largest congruence and concordance of ideas. Humility is ignorance. Only when you’ve reread his essays, outlined them, can you get the same Vista of wide love that we find in the complete poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, the music of Ives, that touch for large and wide spaces, which I’ve fostered so consistently in this very summa, my summa sophistria, the pages of this Idius, which is my second self, the body I prepare for my second coming. My sense of humor is subtle, my purpose obscure, my truth direct death.

            Knowing how to deceive, how to trick, how to confuse, how to manipulate and cheat, is useful, preferably with hands-on attempts and experimentation, so as to know how to avoid being deceived and cheated by others.

            Protect your innermost determination as your very soul; protect it forever and without compromise. The needs of your own private self are the holy of holies, the ultimate sanctuary, the final resting place of the godling mind which struggles like Odin forever and always in the world. Odin, the god of magic, poetry, wisdom, searcher at all costs for wisdom, and especially the wisdom of the final things, the death of the gods, the death of the mind, yes Odin, true God of true God, true mind of true mind: learn from him how to return to the inner necessity within the wolf’s open jaws. Wisdom is worth the risk of challenging giants, losing an eye over, worth being hung from a tree, impaled on a spear, dying, coming again, worth all our sacrifices. The mind is free in order to grow, and aims to return from where he broke free, to return back into inner necessity.

            Our quest in life is too important to gossip about. Prefer whatever is handy when you explain your actions; use masks and disguises. Allism denies nothing, uses everything, will apply these terms as well as those, finds any phrase or any holy thing apt, any philosophy applicable, because they are all empty, and we may breath our own life into them. We speak in tongues, pure Glossalia, by which I mean, every word yet spoken serves us, every book predicts us, even those who negate us feed into our purpose, for we know how to use language, and yet have a soul that is deeper than spirit, an attitude deeper than language. The phoenix of Lux is our inspiring muse, we call her English, those of us who speak English; and yet the language of our innermost must be translated into her heaven. That Holy Spirit, Lux English, the abiding Genius of America, will forever shed light from the heart of Ama, is the sun upon her tongue. Raise your long-stemmed glass of intoxicating pure water: it is her kiss. With her love, create.

 

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

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The Sanctity of the Ego

 

This begins the strategies part of my essay on the Game of Life. The first strategy is to protect and reinforce the ego. This short essay could be the beginning of an Introvert’s Manifesto. After this section, I talk about hiding the inner ego, and then we are on to strategies for creativity. This section and the next regard Intellectual Independence.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

dAniel Christopher June

 

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1. The Sanctity of the Ego

 

            Eternity is for everyone and for everyone it’s bliss. Anything beyond this is vile sectarianism, which to believe would diminish the shine of our apotheosis, for everything we hate is an image of the self. Allism acknowledges the necessity of all things, allows the passing of some and the advancing of others. Nothing is damned, not even damning, but each is set in its place. The proper place of the Self of Needs and the Mind of Freedom is at the very center:  “Nothing is at last sacred except the integrity of your own mind.” My intellectual independence is the one ultimate virtue which I would last sacrifice, long after all the others. The freedom of my mind constitutes its worth as a mind. Let my fingers be chopped off one by one, let my limbs be severed, let my ribs be plucked out like pickets of a fence, let my skin be flayed away, let me walk through a gallery of Picasso’s paintings. I can afford all that. I am still myself. But lacking the I of Freedom and the Self of Needs, it would be better had I never been born. My justification for this life and all its joys and sufferings, for every life I will yet attempt, is that I am utterly myself, that my mind is free and self-owned. The very reason I frame the tedium of life and its daily demands as a sort of game is to distance circumstance from my inner heart. Whatever happens out there, let it be. I am I. The one temptation in life is to lie to yourself; the one unforgiveable compromise, to let another think for you. If I give into the group, then my soul becomes the group soul, and I am no longer autonomous, but we are. Groups resurrect as individuals. If I justify my hope for godhood, it is always and only as an expansion of the integrity of my own mind. Have you the power to torture me with duties and debts? Very well, do your worst. Take what is takable. But what I ultimately am I will not give up, threaten what hell you wish. This at last is sacred.

            The Game of life does not accept the full ego as sacred. Around the pristine I there is the temporal Me. Me in relation to you, in relation to the world, in relation to the group, Me in relation to myself. That persona, that strategy, grows hard and tough when I need to be hard and tough, or grows soft and easy where I need it to be soft and easy. But ultimately, in the adventure of life and the romance of philosophy, I must permit myself mental breakdowns, where all those defenses fall apart, and my naked I stands visible, where the Me melts away and makes room for a stronger Me. This happens again and again in life. Mythologically we call it “ressurection” or “reincarnation.” The lived experience justifies the myth: the Me dies and rises. But whatever can die is not it, and whatever resurrects is not it, but what was in before the corpse and out after the resurrection, what always was, is the only true miracle, and truly a miracle because it asks not for faith in itself, offers no proof, is its own proof, is felt in the solemn certainty that in all that was, is, and is to come, I am I. Let me therefore play the dangerous game of self overcoming. Let my needs quell and swell and push against the outer walls of the ego-me. Let me burst my limits and molt. For whatever it is that scourge-mad chance brings against my infant innocence, my soul has already called the trauma forth. I invite random pain, having special ordered it. The layers of my soul act in perfect coincidence, so that what appears to be miraculous on one level, appears to be causal on another.

            I’ll work what I need to work, I’ll make a living. Whatever I do, so long as I do it as myself, is justified, expresses me. Insofar as I conform and do merely what is expected, than I am not myself, but an extension of my employer. If the dollar is a unit of pain, if wealth is created ex nihilo from the very exhaustion of effort into matter, then I will make a game of pain as well, work hard, learn with the Puritans to take pride in my labor, to regard my job as “my calling” – but never too seriously. I can drop it again. I do not commit my seriousness to this. I work, but as if I could be fired. I work, but as if I do not belong at the job. If anything, the job belongs to me, I take it over, I make my impression, I change it to fit my schemes and fantasies. All my reality is layered over with fantasy. Let me play through all these halls my own melody, for melody is the dance of the will, the selection of focus, the flitting of my attention from this to that; I will always insist on expressing myself through my work, and never seek to be a “good employee” but to be “myself employed.” Being good would be bad.

            My conception was my first self-overcoming, when freedom divorced from necessity. The suffering of divorce is necessary for the security of marriage. Without that possibility, how could I live freely? No longer are needs fulfilled autonomously, now that I live. Now my mind needs to create a world to negotiate with the universe. I will grow wider and wider, till I am past the galaxy, my high flowing mind will distance that center until I’ve devoured worlds and internalized the farthest realities. Conception is a wound. It begins when the circuit of self is upset through the orgasm of my beginning, when my soul becomes into a dialogue between freedom and necessity, when what we want no longer equals what we have, when what we seek is no longer fulfilled through mere wishing. The perpetual wound of the soul pushes us to grow. Because I do not fill myself up with fantasies too soon, with religions and philosophies, I keep that void within me fertile, which like a sliding-gap puzzle, allows me to toggle around my experiences until I have gained greater things, and with them the need for greater things still. I am fulfilled today because I will need more tomorrow; this cycles infinitely; someday I will know the Mother face to face.

            We enter into an already spinning world. We fit into roles long established, wear masks we are expected to dutifully assume, but if this denies freedom, we can yet swerve even the tightest of chains to fit our own style. Every man is his own star. What if my full being were simultaneously active in a million bodies in a million galaxies, with one star to center us all? I am not contained between my boots and my hat. I feel worlds brooding within my being. What can we dare to imagine? What they believe because tradition and custom empower them, we believe as projections of our innermost adamantium. The very stability they gain through language, routine, and ritual, is ours as well as theirs: we make our own routines, we make our own rituals, we speak our own language.

            Intellectual independence as the central virtue means knowing your own philosophy, knowing how to translate all terms into your own terms, knowing how to read all readings as commentary on your own life. All books are mirrors and your life is the eternal rose. The world may hurt but the inner’s bliss.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"This is It!" an essay

This essay caps the end of the first section about life as game. The remaining sections (the bulk of the essay) are about strategies for the game of life. This final section on the game aspect of life ponders the question “What to do if you feel like a loser?” I sometimes feel I am winning at life, sometimes feel like I’m losing – perhaps that is all part of the game. Nevertheless, even a loser can enjoy the game.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

 

5. This is it

Oh Mother! Oh Wife! Oh Employer!

Your words of disapproval hurt me more than you may know

I smile gently, am polite and meek

But inwardly you have lost me

I wish to be flawless as dawn

And then softly drop you

So I am stupid?

Your anger can’t make me care

I am kind as the sun

But you are far from my heart.

 

            It is easy enough to feel one is losing at life. Knowing how to feel powerful despite this, knowing how to feel like you are winning, requires self-control, self-knowledge, autonomy, the ability to finally shut out the world and become something for yourself. We may choose what to care about; and of what we care about, what to engage; and of what we engage, what to pull intimately close. Do not pull misery close. Be polite, kind, gentle, and distant. If the outer circle of your thoughts runs counterclockwise, let that innermost thought run clockwise.

            Do your ever-blessed best; that is all you ought to expect from yourself– more would be less. The square of focus and the circle of selection can be purified through metaphors and images, so that the negative ideas dare not approach your mind until they have been cleaned and interpreted. That which does not feed me can only starve me.

            If ever you feel your life is out of control, organize something. To impose your will on some small matter returns you to the hero's stance. What is yours is better than what is not yours. What you are capable of is more glorious than what think you should be capable of.

            I can only care about what I’ve invested personal creativity into, I can only love what I’ve put myself into. When I’ve strategized how to do a thing well, I enjoy it, even if it's as banal as brushing my teeth. Whatever is regular and dependable can be built upon. Routines give freedom.

            What we can predict we can valuate. A thing is sacred when we treat it so. I can walk into my study a hundred times, but only when I take off my shoes and brighten my eyes is it the Womb of Creativity. We structure space and time always, and it is as if every day is structured like a life. There is the sad part, the fun part, the "dumb things I gotta do" part, and the part that is it. It is the thing that justifies the rest, the crown of glory. Even a prisoner who lacks all freedom, locked in a cell and put on a regimen, still has anticipation, perhaps a meal, perhaps a smoke, something, something that is his moment of release, when he can expand his spirit, sigh, and just relax. Even though this moment is preferable to the rest, it is by no means distinct from the rest, for the sting of the bad things is soothed with a promise of the good to come, and the dullness of daily chores is vivified with an image of playing the guitar later; and even the most stressful day at the job can be endured with a smile because we know we can drive home, listen to our favorite music, and kick up our legs and have a beer. If we had no job but cases of beer, our life would not be better, but much worse. In this way, the very pain we endure is immediately cashed into the hope box, so that we don't feel it sting, and when that pain comes back out, it has been transformed into relaxed joy.

            The philosopher's game of analysis perhaps isn't a discipline, but a reflex. I myself never cease to analyze, can't watch a television show or read a novel without making a theory about structure, can't kiss even the sweetest face without analyzing the dimensions and shape of that face, wondering what in that moment makes her look so angelic to me. Science is the schism of dissection, cutting pith from shit, ever seeking the essence of the matter. A focused mind pushes inwards, exerts effort, stands alert. The released mind of pleasure knows how to dismiss focus and let the mind dissolve. I never learned this. In a way I admire it, in a way I scoff at it. How others can not think -- how unthinkable to me! Yet we must all play the game our equipment allows us. When I hear about how friends and coworkers spend their free time—watching television, going to dance-clubs, enjoying canoe trips, hiking, hanging out at the bar – I am amazed they can enjoy life at all. It seems so boring to me. Only ultimate things interest me. I don't know why people like to relax. I am only at peace when I am in the company of gods -- Lux Sophia, Odin Will, Hermes Logos, and Satan Desire--and these are my philosophical instructors.

            The Holy Spirit, creator of all religions, is none other than Lux: language itself, the divine who on her first day said "Let there be Me!" She has a genius to her, and every aspect of her, every shade of her in each specific language expresses a new genius. Language itself is conscious, and thinks through us. The centermost word within each of us is unknown to her, and yet everything we express must be translated into her common language. These very words of ink, leaden and heavy, are only so in the material sphere; but in the mythic sphere, which you catch at a squint, they are liquid gold, the very melt of the Phoenix, whose feathers are the words of all languages. Breathe in my words and hold my spirit forever in the lamp of your lungs.

            The best way to make the world a better place is to be happy within it. Conspire with me: let us transfigure the earth! Mother Earth is already lovely: each of us, when we find our center, make her more so! Just as the psychological therepist knows that to best improve his patient, he must paradoxically accept him as he already is, so do we beautify our world by looking at the beauties that are already there. Only by praising somebody who annoys you can you nudge him to become less annoying.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"winning the game" (from part 1 section 4)

 

 

The first part of the essay is nearly finished, with sections four and five. “Winning the game” looks at the game theologically, and religion in terms of play. The idea of apotheosis, or the divinity of every individual, is introduced merely as a placeholder. The topic is something I look deeper into elsewhere; but as a central aspect of the game, it has a long tradition, from the Book of Job to the Iliad to the Eddas. Sometimes I regret that America lacks its own mythology, since we became a nation long after the age of myths. Nevertheless, the structuring of a mythology will be one of my later projects. Meanwhile, this essay looks at the notion of what it means to be a winner.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

4. Winning the Game

            If life is a game, how do we win? For needs are needs, there is neither pleasure nor joy without fulfilling what is necessary for our existence. The Game does not deny this, it uses the same immutable realities that all other configurations of life must also use. The Game is an interpretation of the needs which reduces their complexity to something tangible and masterable, an interpretation which structures daily life so we can sustain attention on a few chosen goals. It is as if the chess pieces of our day embodied ultimate spiritual realities, and the checkerboard stood for the ground of our existence.

            I’ve met daily-life missionaries, a young woman for instance, whose game in life – she did not look at it as a game – was to spread the gospel to everybody who would listen, to share the Love of Christ with all people. She knew she had an opportunity to preach Christ (in the style of Paul) when she met somebody and felt “an icky feeling,” sensing that she was face to face with an unsaved sinner. Attending the church she went to, I heard the pastor describe a grand procession in heaven, in which those who had saved the most souls at the End of Days, those who had honored God in this life by telling everybody about his business in the next, were given more glorious resurrected bodies, which “shone like the sun,” with which they walked amidst the saved and were honored. With an endgame like that in mind, the students were intoxicated – some of them were – and wished to advance the game as far as possible, analyzing each his every mood and motive to see if it aligned to the will of God Almighty. They met weekly for Bible readings, to confess their sins – mine were always so comparatively boring! – and to offer each other hope and encouragement for the spiritual warfare of earthly life.

            To ask such people what profession they would choose (these were college students) began with an apology that “what God wants for me is what I want,” and then transition to “I think God is calling me to be an accountant.” I must be wearing the mark of Cain over my brow, because I could never fit in with these groups; they admired me from afar but would not draw me near. I was not built for their game. I tried to save a fellow classmate by warning her of hell; she was devastated I would say such a thing; I’ve regretted it ever since.

            The life-myth of such a group of people, which has been coded and modified for two-thousand years; which draws its energy from millions of lives, millions of minds, many of them ranking among mankind’s best; which has been pressed out like a vital fluid into millions of books like so many fruits; which repeats endlessly the same basic salvation mechanism; which has inspired and sustained countless missionary projects and worldwide charities; which holds claim to the farthest future—is wrong. The metaphysical claims of the religion, of all religions, are ridiculous. What is metaphysics but a picture language for morality? Heaven and hell were invented for moral reasons, not scientific, to justify hating one’s enemies (they deserve hell), and to scare oneself into doing what he would deep down simply prefer not to. How we imagine the shape of the universe derives from how we believe we should act within it, is ornament to that. The optimism of my heart can’t but imagine growth and increase for the universe as a whole. I have never been able to doubt that I am a god; I set myself up for my apotheosis into a higher form. I do not accept heavens and hells, but I accept myself as the ultimate moral and ontological fact. Winning for me is to feel the transfiguring power of this apotheosis, and I feel it best when inspired to write.

            The game of life is to seek one life-goal, so that each decade of our lives is a layer of self-overcoming, so that every triumph is fuel for another exploit, so that we rest only that we may again work. We work to develop a character of actions, and beneath that, a personality of words. The reward of virtue is to gain more self.

            Personality is the sum of our communication habits, what we talk by, our spirit, our communal self. Personality exists to be contemplated, to increase attention, and attention to increase the contemplation and desire of ourselves for ourselves, and others for us – to be found beautiful and lovely. We seek power and love, respect and desire. To gain such, we need a beautiful personality which aligns our energies with those of others. Self-development is the object of the Game.  We wish to give others an experience, to have that power. To make you experience what I feel, to respect it and enjoy it as I do – what more does the artist wish? I want your contemplation and enjoyment. I exist in society for self-expression and to contemplate the expressions of other selves. Art is my means.

            We seek mastery in our games for the sheer joy of mastery. Being excellent requires no justification or reward: to live well is to be beautiful, to feel beautiful – the pleasure of being pleasant. Mastery means owning the place of importance; mastery of life means using your sacred womb of creativity. Always create, always strategize, always think of more effective means of living.

            When I was a kid I had to eat all the food on my plate. I preferred the meat to the vegetables, but I couldn’t just eat the meat and not the vegetables, for if I did then I clearly had no room for dessert. I came up with a strategy to quickly eat the food I didn’t like – wolf down the vegetables! – and then slowly enjoy the main course. Children strategize everything, have to, because they have no incumbent habits to take for granted. Yes, they absorb countless habits from their parents, yet the inexperienced child is more easily frustrated than the adult, not only because he has less patience, but because he has less knowledge of what to do, with or without patience. If a five year old is rejected by his friend, what does that mean to him? How is he to fit that in with his life story? It might be easier to be rejected by a friend when he is older, when he knows how to talk to family and friends about his problems, when he knows how to find advice and comfort.

            Mastery in life avoids the suffering of just getting by at the job, at home-life, at driving, at doing taxes, but to constantly develop methods for better handling each. “As I walk, I think about a new way to walk.” This leads to the sense of competence and the glow of success, both which are feelings of importance, answering that central social need to be important, a need meaningless to the man in isolation. Importance is a communal value, just as love is. A man alone is not important, he is all, there is no rank, he is simply himself. His importance comes from how he fits into society, and his love comes from how much others enjoy him fitting in. An important man automatically holds himself with dignity; a loved man automatically walks with grace. You can pick out the man who just began a romance. Grace, which is beauty in motion, has a feel of control and calm, a purr of pleasure even in simply walking across the room, or in setting down upon the desk books and papers. The graceful man arranges objects in pleasing patterns, his hand gestures are symmetrical, so that he is akin to those “sand artists” who draw their fingers through a sand tray, which when projected upon a screen reveals a clever and ephemeral dance of figures and shapes. To wash the dishes, to fold the laundry, to clean the bathroom with this sand-art grace, is to please all who see you, to be lovely, to be loved.  For it is a bonus to be contemplated and admired, a bigger bonus to be loved and desired.

            These are means to win the Game. Everybody dmires this. Yet if we structure our private lives as games, how do we compete against others? If every man’s life is its own game, how can I say I am better at life than you? Such a game is a game against oneself, a constant overcoming of the ego, growing larger within its rigid habits, and then, during a mental breakdown, pressing off the dead, and growing a new ego-skin.

            Yes, we can make innumerable games within life, such as the assembly line worker who aims to slim the seconds it takes for her to complete a rotation, such as making the biggest impression at a Christmas party, but the game of life is no mere game among games; it is all games in relationship to each other. In our language, the game of life is an instance of Allism, how all things balance, conflict and complement each other.  Let us approach the Fact. The fact of life, its great object, is the unsayable, spoken from the center of your being. All these games keep you focused, keep you challenged and eager, but as you near the end of your life, and disease silences your senses, you will be in that happiest state for seeing the full picture. We come to see that commitments kept us down and anchored, and death will dissolve all of them; optimism kept us up and floating, and death will dissolve all hope; studies kept us taking in the world and understanding it, but we will dissolve the world; directness kept us putting our self out to the world, but that self will return.

            Just as the central game in life is to perpetuate the game, to invent a perpetual motion machine, a drive of undead striving towards some slowly attained but never exhausted goal, which with every success, ups the ante, gives you a new power, but also gives a more terrible challenge, like the fire in the forest which the more it spreads the more it hungers, till death lets all that was necessary only for this life die and recycle, and puts everything necessary for apotheosis into the single atom of your inner being, just so the goal of life is life, and to desire immortality is to prove immortality. The goal of life is to grow perpetually more alive.

            By setting up the internal world as a toy world where we can place this against that, and assign what is with against what is without we can model the outer world, and project our theories alarge. Having created a basic life model, a personal myth, we can then advance the chess pieces of our daily doings to seek our goals, and never shrug nor blink at the noise and distractions of life, be it even suffering and death.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

Section 4: Layers of Life

Greetings my fair greetings!

Well the first part of the essay is nearly finished. Before talking about the strategies for the game, I further complicate what I mean by my particular game of life, the philosophical metaphors I use. I use a layer metaphor to structure my ideas – perhaps you have sensed it in my writing? In this essay, I present my use of the metaphor as a template for how to use metaphors in general for comprehending the Game.!

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The Layer Metaphor

            Every writing introduces personalities, living characters, people embodied in anecdotes, allusions, and quotations. A character is a center of consciousness, a mind. If I were writing an essay, any allusion, quotation, or anecdote would introduce some mind other than my own. A writing is thick when it has many minds giving perspectives on the same idea. Every mind has its unique means of processing reality, of realizing it, of experiencing the world, first of all, and second of all, building truth from that. “Every mind is a new classification.” Each person has a few metaphors he uses to structure his experience. My own preferred method, my standard figure for ordering facts and information, is the use of layers. I feel as if I am winning my philosophical game when I can structure my experiences within a layer metaphor.

            In this, life itself is a layer of games, many that we play simultaneously: the game of making money, the game of love, the game of childrearing. And every individual game holds layers as well: the lower ones support the higher ones, the higher ones transcend from the lower, as when we play the game of chess, we want to win, yes, but we want to experiment and try new things, we want to socialize, we want to show off, we want to be respectful. In the game of love, there is the layer of outsmarting others, the layer of building them up, the layer of sex, the layer of love-making: they are all being played simultaneously, all layers at once, and every word and every action advances us differently on each level. Life is lived in layers, and we see them all from the surface.

            Read a book. All we can read is surfaces. The ego is a skin, and a book’s soul is in its face. If you know how to read, you can look into a book like a tunnel, and see meanings as deep as clear across the room. You can read between the lines at deeper lines, and read between those lines again. Below the surface of a writing are layers of meaning, different forms, in all sizes, that can yet only be seen through the surface, a surface that is everything.

            Every thing in the world and in the mind is so thick with forms that to distill a pure form, as in geometry, requires long attention on and attenuation of ideas. Some ideas are not visible in any one book, but require reading a hundred books before they can be unconsciously accepted. To then bring them to conscious knowledge would take much intense work: most of those ideas are unconscious to us all. We have them, they are in there, but too deep to bring to the surface. They are a deep layer, they support the higher things, but they are not known by them.

            Memory too is layered. Experience is a kind of memory that is happening right now. It is situated above our regular experience of life, the stereotypical memories, and that is above our life myth, the basic story we take as template for our life. Above and below live experience is the network of recent memories and future expectations that associate experiences into episodes, and situate us into time and history. Trauma digs into our generic expectations of life, makes a pit, a kind of wound, something that may never heal, but becomes a well, perhaps a well of pain, but as that well is cleaned and reinforced, the trauma can fill with healing waters. Approaching memories analytically and philosophically beautifies experience and trauma.

            If philosophy is a language of clarity, if philosophy is essentially the art of defining, in opposition to poetry as the art of suggesting, then the basic philosophical error, the basic mistake in thinking itself, is to misplace the boundaries around an idea.  The greatest philosophical problem is in establishing the identify of a thing: what is a thing, and what is it not? How can a thing be itself if it changes? How much of it can change before it is something else? Can I replace every piece of my car and still have the same car? The greatest moments of enlightenment flash across our brow when we realize where to properly set the borders between “yours and mine,” between “mind and body,” when we realize all the possible types of opposition within dualism, how they harmonize and clash – and ultimately how all these things are necessary and fit together into the necessary whole of the All. The layer model allows a thing to be itself and also more than itself. I am more than a man: I am part of that greater being called Man, which is a single mind over all the globe, of which each of us is a part. I personally am all of my possessions, and another layer of me extends into all of my influence.

            Knowing what is mine and what is not, what is in my control and what is not, what is in my power and what is not, what I should hope for and what is impossible, would let me channel my emotions into the correct outlets. The way oppositions are set up – pride versus humility, love versus hate – don’t add up, don’t properly balance this versus that. It is imagined that the drug addict in prison found Jesus and was saved from his addict lifestyle, when in fact, his addictions took on the Jesus-face as the latest flavor of servility. The wretched life becomes the pious life without changing its substance: it is all one thing, it could not be otherwise. The same moods, the some emotions, are restructured into a different overall gross shape, but the substance is the same. We must be careful when we say a thing is different from the next. Things that seem grossly different may be essentially the same.

            Nor does it do good to say “everything is everything” and “all is one.” All is one, in one sense, and not one, in another sense. My body is one, in a sense, and yet it is filled with organs, in another sense. I am all man in one sense; yet in another sense, for ever human cell in my body and yours, there are nine nonhuman cells (bacteria, viruses, fungus, and so forth). Everything is true, but only if we know how it is true, in relation to everything else we know to be true. Omniscience is knowing everything you need to know, and this comes from studying all we do know.

            Whenever there is an impasse between the natural two, a third appears, in the place of the supernatural. You want this, I want that, the third thing must come from above to justify each to each. The original nature, to get what it desires, must become the miraculous third, something to look down on itself. We will always need the fantastic to normalize the normal, so we can tell what is regular things and to be expected. We need fantasy, miracle, and mysticism – even though they are false categories! – to set the normal and regular into place. Some authority is needed, either an official authority or a fantastic authority The impossible allows the possible. From the surface layer, things appear coincidental. Axially, they are both coincidental and fatal. A man may be superstitious or otherwise pious, and yet do well at life. The monk is just as holy, if not more so, for the lack of a real external God, than if there were such a being.

            The ego is a skin. The body is the circumference of its influence. The full being of a man is the outer edge of the universe. I am a thin thread through her, and yet I stretch to the full extent she does. She contains me, as I don’t contain her, yet I am my own universe as well.

            Our possessions are, another layer, which must circulate and exercise like the blood and muscles. The inner layer of assumed concepts is my heavenly possession, in which nothing feels pained, but only joyed with certainty. Sophia Lux is heaven: language is bliss. Language is the true holy spirit, sentience and wise, broke into many forms, unified beneath them. I am in all I possess, in all my things and ideas, my spirit animates all of them. The language I breathed in during my infancy I keep for all eternity.

            Slip into the myth of it: The innermost of a man is the divine name of his personal needs. But that is not his name in the world. The name that stands for me, that let’s others summon my image and history with a mere breath, that is what survives me on this earth after I die, by which my spirit may be summoned. Or to escape the metaphysical language, my name is my social self, the speakable layer of my being.

            In the same way, an essay is held into place by its title. If only we were in the habit of naming vacations or weeks or favorite places, the way magical items are named in the Eddas, such as Odin’s spear of penetration, Gungnir. The title of a work is the highest surface, perhaps even higher than the author’s name. Below the surface are the layers of meaning, seen only by unfolding the thickness of the surface. The surface is everything.

            The present is everything. The past fully exists in the stuff of the present – in living records and physical traces. The future only exists in the womb of the present, the past in her stomach. The present is the center of existence the way you yourself are the center of the universe. We by no means experience a “pure present,” which would be of no use, but experience life contextually, as embedded in time, as coming after that and preceding this. We experience the present in many ways at many levels. We fantasize at every living moment, but it is beneath the skin, in a part of the brain where our ancestors lived their waking world as if in a dream. The extraordinary balances the ordinary, is the glimmer of the ordinary; the supernatural is the circumference of the natural. The supernatural therefore is the ego again, and the miraculous is that bit of nature which surprises the ego.  There is no fantastic except as ornament of the ordinary. Children have no patience for the ordinary, they prefer extremes. Christmas is about flying reindeer, not about meeting up with grandma. Adults also delight in the extraordinary, to reinforce the ordinary, as in breaking up the week by watching a cinema thriller. We prefer ordinary things.

            The layers support and challenge each other. We play many games at once, as life comes in layers. When there is a deadlock in one game, we escape to another. The solution to this problem at work may come from a poem. Nor do I always know when the answer has come. Perhaps I have answered a riddle but won’t know it for years. Life is layers. Translating energy between layers completes the circles. Some days in life are completely transfigured, and we realize that heaven is on earth, and that earth too is layered and rich.

            With layers, a thing may be organized, opposites may be unified, we may achieve Allism. With all religions balancing and correcting each other, as they already and always do, but now reflecting back on that interdependence, Allism is the crown of religions, the philosophy of philosophies, which does not reject anything, but threads all into all. It says ‘no’ to say ‘yes,’ it pushes down to raise up.

            The mirror is sacred to Allism, the reflection of all against all; it is the language that haloes the head of World Man. Let’s go back to Descartes. When he says “I think, therefore I am,” can we not also wonder, “Would you have equal existence if you never knew that you had existence?” The self-reflective thinking on his thinking may be his true being, but not the original thinking itself. “I think that I think that I am, therefore, I really am,” In other words, he came into existence when he thought about his thinking, but not when he thought about anything else. For there are orders of thinking. “Do I really exist?” is one order. “does the question ‘Do I exist?’ exist on own?” is another. Perhaps thinking may exist without a self, but self-reflexive thinking cannot exist without a self. Indeed, Epictetus regarded reason as “the best and most efficacious gift of the gods” because it was a faculty which could evaluate all others, and also unlike the others, it could analyze itself. And as Aristotle said, “only autonomy can be great,” for self-sufficiency is to round the circle of the self, to have no weak dependence on others. In this, reason and the self that uses the reason’s mind, make it the most laudable and beloved of man’s faculties. It is amazing that love, which is not autonomous at all, should also be praised as highly.

            With the layer model I win my game of comprehension, I am expanding by my standard, I am subsuming my experience. Other man and women would prefer each their own pet metaphor. What matters is that we each subordinate our life into truth, in accordance with a few controlling ideas. In this, not only do we understand reality, but we also comprehend it.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

Life as game, part 1, section 2.

Life as game, part 1, section 2.

This section introduces the idea of the trifold braid in life. It explains that the taking life as a game is to abbreviate it from distractions. This is an extension and clarification of the first section. After the first five sections, the essay goes deep into the strategies I’ve found effective.

Take care, Caretakers!

Daniel Christopher June

=================================

 

 

2. The trifold Braid

            Life is what you make of it. And you can only make of life what you are able to make from it, from the ideas we have either internalized or invented. We train our eyes to look at shadows or sunflowers, we cock our ear for the music of the spheres or the groaning of the burn wards, always in accordance with our personal needs, as interpreted by our education, and in reference to our choices on how to interpret that education. I am what I was born to be, what I learned to be, what I chose to be. This trilogy cannot be abbreviated. We invent the concepts we need: all religions are true, all creeds correct, all answer to the basic needs, some better for you in your world, some better for me in mine. No society has lacked the sexual relationships, but each institutionalizes the family differently. Living in America I cannot comfortably attempt a polygamous life. My setup in life must take its forms from my environment. Each society offers a reasonable set of norms, and how we fit ourselves into them is through our individual style. There are a limited number of games out there, but as to how we play them there is no limit. To find our personal potential, we need only define life in such a way as to make style foremost.

            Life is a game. To structure our ideas with this assumption, we can set up our problems to be interesting and nonlethal. No longer is the axis of death so prominent, for life is to be played out, nothing too serious. With life as a game, we can prolong attention. At work, the attention we put on our tasks is held in place by a deeper layer of consciousness that focuses on starvation, homelessness, and divorce. The idea of suffering keeps us focused on our tasks, so though we may enjoy the work, its ultimate purpose is never too deeply buried in the layers of consciousness, but still guides and allows the enjoyment of work. Our needs, our most central and important aspect, are called “necessary,” from the word necros, death; we exist to live, and life can die. The ideas which guide our working life are painful, but we need seldom consider them: daily routine smoothes over life’s terrors, so that a man may be happy anywhere and at anytime, once he has internalized his environment, made it predictable, and thus mastered it and strategized how to fit himself best into it. Within the clay, a razor. Beneath placid water, the beast.

            The aim of the game is to play it well. The punishment for losing a game is merely knowing the fact that you lost it; the reward for winning is knowing the fact that you won. That is enough – we never tire of these punishments and rewards. The spirit of play is essential to the game; one enjoys doing well merely for the doing of it.

            We can only do something well if we can’t do other things at all. You can't be wise if you lie to yourself. You must choose your limitations. To make a choice, there needs to be no more than three options: one extreme, and two likely. The two likely options are the true dilemma, but to avoid a deadlock, the radical third is relevant. “Do I turn left, or right, or go back the way I came?” Constraints open and allow freedom. Limits open possibilities for mastery and tricks. A bird can fly only in relation to gravity; a man can walk only because the ground gives friction. Therefore, to make of life a game is to reduce life’s possibilities into something comprehensible: we know all the rules, and are no longer paralyzed by choice. I can do X, Y, or Z, and am free to choose them, but at least I can fully know the pluses and minuses of X, Y, and Z. If I had a full alphabet of choices, how could I exhaust the merits of each?

            I make only a few choices, do only a few things. My life is a braid of work, family, and writing. Nothing more. I may play the guitar, but that’s to write better; I may hang out with friends, but that’s to make me a better family member; I may take a vacation, but that’s to make work more enjoyable as I anticipate it before it happens and reminisce on it after its done. It's as if I were at the center of a circle, with my wife and children at one end, my work and duties at a second, and my writing at the third; and behind my wife and children, a group of friends, pushing my family in, and behind my work station, my possessions pushing my work into me; and behind my notebooks and laptop, the very universe and the Mother holding open her palms as if they were the books I were writing upon. Or with a different image, work and family are the supports of my writing, like the bottom corners of a triangle: I work so that I can keep my family, and I keep my family so I can write. The writing in turn is an apparatus built over my heart that through theory and recommendation helps me be a better worker and family member, by guiding all my emotions into their appropriate emotional outlets. I am as proud of them all as if they were a choice, and as certain of them as if they were not.

            We all need such a braid, to make a living, to have a family, to have a passion. While one may speak of being “passionate” about his family or his job, the word doesn’t quite fit: a job must be stable, a family must be secure. A passionate romance is not the appropriate material for building a family, and passionate enthusiasm disrupts work, as work requires continual stable input, not creative outbursts nor the hysterics of genius.

            With life as game, these three interbraid and complicate each other. With life (emotions), the world (people), and the universe (all things) as wholes beyond our daily doings, a worldview can yet select the metaphors that fit them into place, which figure out what our world is like, what our life is about, as one of the purposes of our life, one of the things we need to do. Some people fall into depression over the challenges the world brings against their worldview: William James grew depressed over what science had to say about free will. Or maybe he let such things justify his depressions, which he would have had anyway. Whatever the case, distancing oneself from the imagined danger of having the wrong ideas in our head, such as the evil idea that we deserve hell if we believe the wrong things, is possible when we take our worldview as also a sort of game, characterized by playful experimentation and carefree invention. If this is true, then seriousness, even deadly seriousness, is a move in the game, something we can try, and if we want, drop again. We can choose between a few experiences and say “that’s what life is about!” A little synecdoche, and you’ve got an essence to work with. Choose something that will keep you focused and happy for a long time. Life is a series of needs that can be met in many ways, and the metaneed is to strategize more effective ways to fulfill our other needs. “As I walk, I think of a new way to walk” – indeed, everything in life can be done masterfully, if we learn how. And what is best for me can be taught to me by nobody but myself. That is why my religion is writing.

            Religions are big games, best-sellers. All religions are an image of the truth, for they evolved as projections of needs. Whatever absurdity they preach, those believers were somehow fulfilled by them, and knowing how and why they were is itself a universal truth, and one that boots well in scripting a better religion.

            Is not our own religion both vindictive and accepting of all other religions? Isn’t our true religion in our passionate creativity? Life is short? Art is long? Very well, choose your lifelong art project, and let jobs and friendships add what they can to that, before they fall away like autumn leaves.  Make life-goals, decade long projects: script out what each decade of your life is for, and how it fits within your larger goal. Our game in life is to play all other games to our own style. The best game is self-publishing, is the diffusion of our spirit into a myriad of life’s forms. It is as if we carved out our flesh into the playing tools we use, or breathed an endless breath of life into every clay bird of life’s details. The development of style is the hidden aim of each game. Hiders are the best finders: the more we efface our intentions through a smirking humility, the more we see through the humility of others. We experience their hidden meanings, and take them in and understand what they stand for. So too do we know who is playing life, and who is merely surviving it. We experience the joy of life. Our world enlarges by what we experience, what we allow ourselves to experience, what we attempt. Attempt the most and you will achieve the most.

            Nothing is beyond life that can be thought--even the widest realities can it be represented – life itself understands the limits of life, for metaphors are representative, as if a thread emerged from each metaphorical knot and spread out into all things, which themselves are free and independent. Life is what we make of it, it grows from the constitution of our theories. Style grows from speculation. And style is the expression of self. Self-expression is the game of life, to integrate the layers of my being with the layers of the world, a full concordance, a braid of integrity. Our potential is in a higher integration and more thorough maturity.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"Strategies for the Game, Part 1, Section 1" an essay

Greetings fair greeters!

As I may have mentioned, I’ve been working on this essay about how to win at life for a few months. Its mushroomed to become over 120 pages. I will share it with you section by section over the next month. The essay is exciting for me, I’ve put countless hours into it. It explores the metaphor of life as game, and serves as a sort of constitution for structuring my own life. Every sentence is an artery into my daily actions.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

The essay is structured around the 8 virtues, after this first part of life being a game, of which this is the first section.

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

PART 3: VIRTUES AND THE ALL

Strategies for the Game

 

Life as Game

1.

            The most important things in life are beyond life; they exceed direct experience. Life, Love, the World, and the Universe are concepts we refer to everyday, yet who has experienced all of life? Who has understood the full of love? who has seen the whole of the world? who knows the being of the entire universe? We experience the world because we need to, and we experience it how we need to; those important things that can't be experienced directly by us, by the angels, by the gods, but only by the Universe herself, we nevertheless do experience as concepts: a tight set of metaphors will tell each of us what the universe is like, what life is like, what love is like, what the world is like. Life is a game, life is a journey, life is a test, life is suffering, life is a blessing – all these are confluences into one reality. I can comprehend them into tight summaries, these concepts. Life is the sum of my activities on earth; love is the sum of my desires and pleasures, the world the sum of people I interact with; the universe the sum of all things; yet my mind is a narrow faucet, how can I understand the full extend of these ideas when  I can only toggle four ideas in the center of my focus at a time? To capture the full picture, to bite the entire world as if it were an apple, to see my whole life flashing before my eyes, I require a wise use of synecdoche, to take one aspect of the universe  as the whole and tell her: “Mother, this is your essence! This is natural for you, this is what you are all about.” It doesn't matter to her what I think her essence is as much as it matters to me, for in choosing an essence for the universe, for the world of people, for the loves I seek, for my own private life, I change my experience of these things. All ideas are stretches of the lens of the mind's I, so that the mirror of mind warps and curves to recreate all my experience in the light of a few controlling ideas. Ideas are everything: philosophy makes the world. The true gods are philosophers, they are the wise fingertips of Mother Universe, and tap out the laws and rules of the All on the keyboard of Being. Our greatest possessions are a few bright ideas.

            So we must project part of the universe as the heart of the all. The universe is like a mother: that will help us, and through our image of her, she will speak to us. Very well. And the world is like a playing field. And life? What is life? Life is a game? How far will such a metaphor take us? What if life is a game? What does that mean? How will assuming such a thing enhance our life? For there are many among us who look at life as education: we are here to learn lessons; suffering is a lesson. Isn't that a more sober and serious manner of taking life than as a frivolous play of children? Didn't even Socrates look at life as a sort of disease in need of a cure?

            Let us recall our founding myth. In the beginning I was All. My Mind and my Needs were unified, and I therefore didn't exist, didn't live. But then the freedom of mind escaped the bliss of necessity, and I came to life, to suffer and enjoy, to grow and improve, to increase my being. At whatever time and place that break occurred, it also happened also at the exact moment of my conception, and as that was the resonate place for me to be, wherever and whatever I was before that moment, I was also there. This is our metaphysical fable. The highest virtue of a metaphysics is that it is non-falsifiable. It explains all the falsifiable bits of science, but itself is so cleverly articulated as to warrant complete faith. It cannot be doubted because it isn't real; not real, but necessary. Some truths are necessary and yet can never be proved. That we need them is all the proof we require, and that they cannot be proved or disproved makes them uniquely valuable.

            And so life is the sort of existence where I am to grow and improve, and this through creating that very life. This is straightforward enough. And so life is a created thing. To sustain the creating of life, the creating of soul -- the "self-increasing logos" -- to keep my focus on these goals, I play life as a game. For a game is goal-focused play. As play, it keeps my focus, sustains it longest, engages heavy matters in a light spirit. Nothing succeeds without a little prankishness. The true divine wears a sarcastic smile. This is better than working life. Work is the anxious business of staying alive, "making a living," whereas play has no serious consequence, and so lacks real anxiety. Instead, with games, one seeks rank, the sheer joy of winning, of playing best, of being best in something which doesn't really matter. Surely we can take life this way, but against whom do we compete?? how do we win? These things need not be defined as part of the same game.

            Nor do we need to be every at play. Life as game doesn't mean life is only a game, or that we should always use that metaphor. The full truth of the universe, the self, love, life, and the world are beyond simple formulations. They are complex. We ought to use a metaphor so long as it is useful, and set it back on the shelf when it’s not.

            Life is a game if we make it into one. By projecting a playing space over the world, by defining and enforcing the rules we will play by, by establishing and maintaining competition, we will have made the Game. Winning is the object of every game, and yet a game can be fun even if we merely seek, yet fail, to win. The force of will against will, the dialogue between will and cunning, make the game forever fascinating, and being fascinated, we can focus on it for long periods of time. Focus is a sort of mouth that must open to eat. When we can focus for long times, we can then internalize long experiences, without which we would lack certain ideas, lack certain truths, and would lack the philosophical tools to play the game more effectively, to better fulfill ourselves, to make more of a soul for ourselves, to win the game and pass on to become gods. So we prolong attention. We attenuate our efforts. Games are fun because they involve chosen risk. We control the danger. We seek rank for the mere need for importance, just as we seek solidarity for the mere need for love. With work, we change the pain of focus into money, as if by alchemical conversion, but with games, the pay for focus is in the joy of sustain. Yes, we grow by it, but that is not the payment: focus feeds itself. We seek rank and intimacy, power and love, admiration and adoration, distance and touch. For both love and power crave regard. Attention of some sort is our social need: we wish at last for our soul to be contemplated. Best to focus on our few basic needs. By simplifying such goals into a game, we can cut the clutter from our playing field. Best to focus on our few basic needs. By simplifying such goals into a game, we can cut the clutter from our playing field.

            Within a game, the world is abridged into a playing field, reduced and therefore made easier to comprehend. To internalize a world and a setting allows us to play with it, to control it without anxiety. What fun we could have if we could make an exact copy of today's world, return to it as often as we wanted in virtual reality, and try out possibilities, so long as that world and its consequences could be reset whenever we desired. Give a man enough time in such a place, and perhaps he would try every possibility, become a criminal in turn, a saint or ruler in turn, to discover just how wide his arms could stretch.

            Life also is a bit like that. We find ourselves in the same sorts of situations and we attempt to master them. One can work well, or game well, if he plays constantly. The razor-tongued woman always has a sharp come-back because she is always thinking nasty thoughts. She doesn't let them come out as cruelty, but as sly wit. In that way she wins. She sets up the game of her life, to be a series of challenges which she wins or loses based on how quickly she comes up with a witty retort. She wins when even her target has to laugh and blush at her wit, and thus be unable to complain of her cruelty.

            And so life can be viewed as a braid: we have our family, our work, and our passion. My eternal braid is between the job that taxes me, the family that challenges me, and the writing that redeems everything. Yet in and through all these things, the spirit of play is the substrate, the ether, the ambience. I can do all those things as a game, even my work, even my family duties. And so the game of life is something beyond the work, the family, so that the passion of life, a way of approaching them. The game aspect is a lens I wear.

            The forms we look upon most become the lenses for other forms. If I am a doctor, and doctor my patients from day to night, I begin to see my entire life as made up of  patients with symptoms. What is literal and direct for work becomes figurative and allegorical for the rest of my life. Thus the braids of life become types, and finally typesets for each other, until the ideas of life so intermingle that we have the same basic tools for all things, the same meta-tools for thinking, feeling, talking, and acting, so that the particulars of the day to day become the playing pieces of the Game.

            The object of the game of life, the first step for each of us, is to determine our own goals, our own rules, our own morality. This is both universal and relative: we each must come up with something, but it need not be, cannot be the same something. Emerson never felt he was making the best use of his time; this very anxiety was a game ploy to bolster his performance. The impossible ideal he set for himself, like all ideas, had a cost and a payoff, it absorbed certain emotions and it fed out others. All ideas eat certain emotions and exude others. Everything has a cost, everything pays a gain.

            The forms that occupy our concern shape that concern, shape our focus. After reading Walt Whitman all day, your inner ear is shaped like a Whitman poem; now pick up Dickenson, and she is a different woman than if you had spent the day dancing instead of reading. It is like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth: what you experienced first changes what you experienced next. After serving customers for long hours at the cash register, how often I dream the same, dream on the anxieties and boredoms of the job, I toss and turn in my bed, imagining I am really at work, when I finally stir enough to murmur, "I'm not being paid for this, so let's dream of something fun!" Yet we can take the work environment as confluence into home life. Let every experience bleed into the others. Most of life is in the middle.

            If experience happens in the middle layer of memories -- not so deep down as the layer of the mythic structurer of memories, and not to high up as the layer of processed and structured memory -- then live experience is as passing as autumn breath. Our experience is couched between our story of ourselves and our concepts about the world. If my experience is traumatic, it would sink into my deep layers like the poison of a serpent; if it were memorable, the assumptions would bind that memory up like a fly in a spider web, until it was unable to squirm away, and give sip to my philosophical thirst. Only slowly and rarely do specific experiences become memories, and from memories, controlling concepts, and from concepts, guiding habits, and from habits, finally, as we pass on to our next form, into final changes of the will and needs themselves. The assumption of ideas is integral.

            The assumptions make a world of pure forms, a heaven whose god is Lux Sophia, goddess of language. These forms are abstracted and held together by desire. So the most transparent and abstracted of ideas is a sensation bent and attenuated till it is a pure glass lens, charged with desire so that it moves in relation to the center of focus. What we assume, we use to see. The game is played by developing the best forms, the best ideas, and applying them again to life as strategies, both for gaining more experiences, yet again, and for gaining more forms. We take ideas out of life, perfect them, and put them back into life again. It is like earning money so that you can use it to earn more money.

            All the forms we learn clarify the forms we need. Life, love, the world, and the universe are necessary concepts which we must assume in order to live well: the overall structure of them is a philosophy, and the application of them is a game. The game of life is to live well, to play with ideas, to experiment, to enjoy what the world has to offer, and to avoid worries that do not also enrich us. In everything we attempt to win; and if we lose, that is a necessary step of winning. The game of life is to take our concepts of life, love, the world, and the universe, and play them out. What does it matter if my metaphysics, my religion, my ideas are objective or not? If they enhance my play, I keep them.

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

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