Not even a draft, but some mediary thoughts on the nature of myth, symbol, and narritization in the process of achieving personal apotheosis. How is it we read a myth, see a religious symbol, or learn a religion, and are spiritually transifigured?
DANI
The Logic Of Situation
Narrative is a ritual by which the author crystallizes a meaning. We each create a new an unprecedented category of meanings into the world, and we all fall into a world of meanings, of societal meanings of the meanings of nature. To be able to take all meanings as your own, to use them your purposes, to organize them into your own creation, requires interpretive engines. Some stories do more than give an experience, and show some events, they also include a commentary telling you how you should interpret those events. An interpreter relates story to story. A strong myth can serve to explain and orient all stories. A primordial myth does more than tell how things were created. Historically is it useless. Better it is what it does: tell how things should have been created, and more, how we can create from our own world.
Stories present a context for an image -- and the image is the formula for a set of logical operations. Those operations let you put all experiences into standard notation, to put all realities into stereotyped logical relationships. The Christian answers all his experiences with the words "Sin" "forgiveness" and "God." Those terms become so thick and multifaceted that he can think anything and everything with them. So it is with all religious understandings.
The creating of original meaning sit he greatest of spiritual triumphs. Groups create religions, collective experience inspire us with symbols. Meaning comes only from experience and experience comes only from touch, from immersion, passion or empathy. Immersion is to feel the world, passion is to live a fantasy as if it were real, and empathy is to experience what a thing or person is by mirroring their shape and being.
Leaders commit adultery, rockstars do drugs not because they can, but because they must, because even if they forego the "temptations" of their genre, they must at least react to somebody else who did those rites, so that they may vicariously gain the same spiritual energy by which their work is done.
Contexts create unique energy, unique historical situations differentiate our creative energy, or Crea, so that we can use it to create a thing. The first apostles were in no position to create great cathedrals. It took generations of differentiated energy to create those spiritual monuments.
There is nothing more creative than enthusiastic anxiety. A man may perform relaxed, and that is best, but he creates tense. Practice the difficult, perform the easy. Public show should be no struggle. For the anxious struggle is private, and our greatest struggles in life will always be in solitude.
One we see metaphorically, we will see what cosmic struggles we experience in our mundane brushing of our teeth and taking out of the garbage. Those little habits, those little struggles, are the cosmic struggles under modest masks.
Intelligence is the ability to abstract, to take from a mundane thing a higher spiritual reality. We abstract the world through technology and come pt rely on our technology to exist at all. Our food must be cooked. Technology touches the world for us. We live within the creative womb of manmade artificiality. Looking about me in this bedroom, almost everything in every direction is manmade and man processed. So it should be.
We create artificial wombs within to create. Our Aria, or creative space, takes the shape of the work we would perform. This glass desk I write my books upon -- I name her Lapamalay -- is ritually cleaned and spiritually decorated to underscore the sacred tasks I exact from her. Your creative work is your highest sacred reality. What you create in this world becomes the heaven of the next.
The idea of a thing grows by language accretion, and builds into matter, thickens ontological existence. Your words, and the meanings those words are meant to communicate, permeate all existence, the way your soul permeates the atoms of your body.
We speak in symbols, we speak in metaphors. Symbols open up two realities -- remote spiritual dimensions of nature, and the mirror spiritual dimensions of our personal soul. As on the outer, so the inner, so that to study nature is to know yourself.
A symbol is part of what it refers to -- symbols are never arbitrary. To appreciate a myth, you must be willing to revere it, to see a symbol you must have already experienced the divine truth. People revere their myths in different ways. Literalists honor their myths by thinking they are historically accurate, and by being willing to be stigmatized as credulous and superstitious for the sake of that interpretation. They take it as a sign of spiritual achievement to be persecuted for their beliefs.
Other forms of reverence include celebration, as in those poets who celebrate beauty, or god or whatever else, in the musical magic of their language. Superstition is another language of reverence -- a man is willing to feel intense anxiety over the symbols of his world. The mere ability to experience a curse word as a curse and a blasphemy as a blasphemy, those anxieties, which are always present in the mind at least potentially, are other forms of reverence.
Wanting an honest politician is like wanting the purr without the cat: a certain atmosphere is necessary for the production of spiritual products, and like all creativity, we make byproducts which must be dealt with with a shrewd practical pragmatism that realizes that man shits, and this makes him no less of a God.
The priests invented the concept of sin and raped it deep into the souls of mankind -- pedophilia is a natural expression of Catholicism -- so that the most hysterical and susceptible were the first to "admit" they were sinful, and from there to infect the rest of an otherwise healthy society. And what does this accomplish? We gained a probe deep into the soul. As with all spiritual tools, there is use and misuse, cost and benefit. Every tool and object created by man, both material and spiritual, have a multitude of uses. The Midas man blesses and purifies all he touches, and no sin is bad for him, but he blesses the world in every thing he does, his very sighs create new heavens, so that not only does he leave every room a little better after he left if then when he found it, but he leaves every person he meets a little better off too, even if on casual inspection it might at times seems the opposite was the case. Sometimes the first step to curing a disease is to make its symptoms more prominent, and deeply depressed people often become suicidal upon being treated, and in such cases, suicide is a symptom of convalescence, of increasing power.
The myths, those archetypal stories of the gods, and stories regarding the gods so there can be no doubt that they are important, are the ultimate commentators on all stories. Each man has his eternal myth that is his own, he the god of it, that never existed in the world, but when it sings into the world, sense a thousand different stories resonating so that we pick them up and learn them as if they taught us something rather than merely reminding us of what is already ours. And those people who were broken from the same soul-crystal as we are, those are called to be our eternal friends, are the very flesh of our being, and will seek us out in the world to join us in the heaven in the next. What is the purpose of all these Allays, Essays, and Poems other than to siren my beloved to my private heaven?
Each religion gets its logic accross especially well with some myths, and derived from those myths, some rituals, and derived from those rituals, some sacraments, and derived from those sacraments, a few stark symbols. You could wear an astounding symbol around your neck, and nobody in the world would quite get your game, because, after all, it is your game, and for others to play it they would have to be able to learn and respect the rules.
The great task of Allism is the metamorphosis of the body and soul: nothing is lost, everything is conserved, good and bad, everything has used, everything is necessary, everything becomes divine. We grew fat on the lessons of this earth to become divine Psyche's in the next.
\ ~@M@~ /
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