Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Realizing Your Geniuis

My latest essay regards genius and the potential in each of us. Though the essay is sizable, it is more solidly structured than my other materials, the "allays," which are peculiarly structured to have a certain affect. This essay should read straight-forward and is addressed to anybody interested in imagining just what his own potential really is.



Realizing your Genius


1. Importance of


            Mankind exists because some men have dared let themselves become geniuses, have opened up their innermost resources, have taken in the large amounts of beauty from the world, and have opened themselves up to the greatest sufferings capable of men -- because they have, in short, dared to live on this earth and live absolutely. Such a man is the light of the world, shines the inner light latent in us all.

            Let us waste no time defining genius in terms of IQ tests, so called, since they stole the term from the Romantics, who referred the term genius to men of great creative influence (and there is no correlation between IQ scores and creativity), but let us get to what really matters to each man and woman, not 'am I forever inferior to the great men who have blessed their earth with their minds and hearts?' but only and always, 'how can I myself with what I am and what I do bless the earth with my mind and heart?' Let genius, therefore, stand for your personal best, your personal apotheosis, for the emergence of your innermost gifts, those gifts nobody else has or could have, that part nobody could teach you, but whom the kind and gentle teachers and friends might coax you to birth from the womb of your soul, so that  you give birth to your better self, so that you spread your divine psychic wings, so that realize what is always your to realize: your personal best. This is genius, this is divine, this is what you are called to do, and when you accomplish this, when you complete your metamorphoses, the selfish act of self-concern, so do you bless the world, bless every world, bless the gods, bless God, bless Ama who contains them, and bless the Universal All, our Mother. Having insisted on becoming all you can be, so you have helped every person in your care, in your personal jurisdiction, your friends and family, and you here become the living center of a new heaven here on earth.


2. Relation to world


            The genius is a distinctions, that is clear, and it seems incredible that anybody but the rarest of men could be so. Some have accounted the world as having gained only about one genius per century, and other philosophers say even this is too generous. While yes, a man of superior creative intellect able to greatly change the world may appear only so often, don't let that trouble you. By being what you are, you need no fame, and as for your influence, the world is always eager to take in good gifts.

            For it is not the genius against the world, but the genius bears a unique and special relationships to the world. Indeed, the great man or woman is the world.

            The Genius is the world and his mind is the World Mind: he is the Man uniting mankind, and those like him, though they disagree, are with him one mind debating himself. The genius is the individual, and above that, the genius mirrors the world, stands for it, and what he says is said for all.

            If a prig can be defined as a small minded moralist eager to damn you over his petty ethic, the genius stands as the opposite, as he who is able to see what is universal in you, and teach you yourself to see it, lay your hands on it, and realize it for the world. His mind is both wider and more open, yet more severely filtering and critical -- wider, flexible, active, severe, choosy.

            And while shining the global light, the petty aspect of the genius, the mundane man who does his chores and struggles with self doubts, also shines and sets the pace for the world's dance. The man who can do a rare great feat does the everyday walk and talk also with greater grace. If you can dance like no other, even your stroll through town turns eyes.


            As a man brings in his mind to the inner spheres, his second mind expands to the outer spheres. So as he goes deeper into his person, he identifies farther out, with family, with city, with nation, and as he goes deeper still, with mankind, till as the inner sphere touches the absolute center, the outer sphere identifies with the farthest edge of infinity. So yes, the genius is the world, his mind is now and always we be part of the World Mind, the collective consciousness and collective unconscious of mankind, in its ascending spheres of greater incorporation. Those who surround you constitute your jurisdiction -- as the divine center you bring leads men and women to reveal their own lights.

            Did you suppose there could be only one center? But the center can be distributed wherever the inner plethorabyss can be opened. When you know yourself, then you will be known. Once you realize your perfection, you will always have been perfect. And when you have become all in all, then you are an ultimate center for the world, one center among other centers, as each man, when he comes to his own, centers his world.


            The genius falls into the center of history, his birth is a new day, a new year, a new millennium. There has never been any more geniuses than there is now. Every age has the same magnitude of potential. Better to live now, when culture's house is fully furnished with rich tools and nuanced ornaments, than at the start of history, when the shelves were bare and merely hopeful.

            Whenever and wherever we are, we optimize what we were given, make the most of what we've got. For the man who does this, who really does this, "Genius" is one of the titles we give him.

            The man who masters his home, his city, who is a prophet in his own household, let him be satisfied with that greater triumph, when his genius pulses through his place. The genius is the child of heaven, yet what he has to add could never be conceived in any heaven but his innermost being. Genius fashions every snowflake, yet each snowflake equally gives birth to her own fresh beauty.

            Not that those of your time will neither know you or care. Your time will mark your pretensions, envy your successes, but overall remain nonplussed by your greatest efforts, praising, instead, your cheap and easy gestures of showing off. People like what they understand and praise what has already been established. Genius takes three generations before the world has matured enough even to respond, and repeat back in its own words what through a hundred thousand minds it has finally comprehended.

            Wealth and fame seldom come to the gods. Nor do they need it.


3. Creation and Nurturing of


            We use high terms for what's best in man, for what is best in you and me. Yes, for what use is praise and celebration anyway, but to encourage our growth and development? Do you believe yourself capable of these heights? True faith means faith in yourself. Having your self and the idea of your self, you are no longer the toy of fate.

            See how ideas flirt through the world like the whims of Gods. The arena of life moves men and woman as if they were stray leaves and chips of wood. Ideas flurry around our head, and fling our bodies against one another, as the invisible winds play their divine game through these fleshly tokens of the game.

            A man stands for an idea, for a set of ideas -- for a religion and its world of ideas, for an ideology, for politics and nations -- but only one idea does he absolutely control and own -- that idea of his innermost self. That is unmixed with anything in the world, from the gods, from God, or from the All. For one as immune to irony as myself, I declare it simply: I am all in all.

            To be great, you have to need it. If you are satisfied to be small, then you can praise greatness from afar, but feel no true intimidation, hear no criticism that you yourself could be doing more. Necessity is the muse of genius just as fame is the muse of talent. The geniuses of history include a much greater number than the famous of history, and many of the famous were not true to their soul; the hidden divines gave the spiritual boon to our world, though we don't see it. Nor do we need to see. Having done a great thing feels forever great. The word for such an eternal sense of divinity: pride. Our exultation comes from our own appraisal or else it is none. We must ultimately and utterly love ourselves if we are to open ourselves to being ultimately and utterly loved by others, and then we may return that love in turn. We start as dim mirrors, receiving a little light, glowing a little light, reflecting a little light. Love is in reciprocity. We mount our campaign towards greatness.

            The grub crawls while the imago flies. The genius is a mind ever active -- what was once slow, painful, plodding, deliberate is now easy, naturally, graceful, play. What was once work is now art.



            What is art, after all, but simplified, intensified, clarified life, meant to inspire the rest of an appreciator's style of living? Art is taken out of life so that it may go back into life, so that we may all live a beautiful existence, and this through knowing how to appreciate beautiful art. Beauty feels joyful be merely being. Thus let us cultivate each our own beauty.

            Art appreciation is the feast of a creative soul. Only through the consumption of art, that is to say, only by eating the spiritual fruits of other men and women, be they in the aesthetic or religious mode, does the soul grow healthy, strong and happy.

            It is amazing, what has come down in history for you and only you. The generations have brought down so many materials, things they have no clue about, and even the scholars, who translate dead languages, who give the full context of every piece of brass ever to fill a museum, they do not get the spirit, only that letter of the ancient mind. A few of them breath in the fire, but most merely make it possible for somebody else to breathe in the fire. There are gifts from the ancients that you alone can open.

            The ancient world was left in books for multitudes of common men to admire and for the centennial genius in solitude to inspire. The canon is history's gift to posterity, is the place where the ancient and the eternal press a kiss. Only genius can fully read genius.

            The peers of genius are the masters of the past and the wonders of the future -- most of his contemporaries will neither know nor celebrate them. Or if they celebrate him, it will be on terms of what they already have a taste for, on terms of what is common in him, but not what is universal.

            To seek towards the innermost and other most, you must spend time alone. To become, you must allow. You must give yourself time and space, you must assert and insist on your right to time and space. Great and famous CEO's can hardly do this, the president could never do this, very few dare accomplish his. Yet leisure is the greatest luxury, open space the greatest abode. Solitude is the finest lover: a man is in the best company when he is alone.

            So seek no man's approval and ask nobody's permission for what it is in you to do. We may never seem to be appreciated, or even if we are, then it is not as we would prefer: Certain styles of praise make us sick, and certain styles of criticism sound like flattery and kindness. A hateful person can do more damage with the truth than with any lie, and some of the most devastating things I have ever heard were shaped as praise. Why put the control of your joy in the hands of others? Do what you do, and don't bother to tell.



            We face censure, we face blame. And how easy to get angry at these presumptive friends and family. Understand the situation and be put at ease. To understand all is to forgive all and permit nothing. Merely understanding why a thing happens or why a man is the way he is does not mean you allow it to continue or open yourself to his mistreatment. You can forgive a man and yet at the same time severely punish and limit him.

            Criticize the world, mirror its attitudes back upon it, but with a glint of your divine mixed in. Be the glowing mirror. For the best criticism is appreciation. Knowing how to find what is best in an art or in a person, and knowing how to intensify it, that is not only kindness, but that is pedagogical genius.

            Realize, therefore, the power of interpretation. The world is only objectively and absolutely what it is after you have justified an interpretation for it being so -- and it could have been many other things. Context reveals meaning, but new meanings can be imposed on an instance of a situation. Some comic strips have been made by taking snapshots from movies and politics out of context and applying a humorous alternate context, perhaps in the form of a witty caption. An image of the president with a given politically motivated expression can be played off as if he were make a sexual comment. In this, no interpretation of any book or scripture is wrong, even if its meaning is implausible. A full context and a definite situation presents a set of plausible, relevant and important meanings, but by abbreviating and ambiguating an instance can it be used rhetorically to illustrate a new idea. The shape of the situation illustrates the logic of the idea. This is why the old myths, those of the Greeks, Germans, Jews, and Hindus, are infinitely valuable.  They are the technology perfected over millenniums by generations. A given myth is inexhaustible, and if it chooses you, if it speaks to you, if you can open up its infinite potential for meanings, it gives the blank of never-ending gestation -- a defined and definite set of meanings, for once the set is defined it is without limit. There are wrong, implausible, irrelevant, stupid, foolish, amateur interpretations, but the genius makes the powerful interpretations. Genius is in a realm beyond truth and falseness: the genius is never wrong and his mistakes are as fecund as his successes. With him, will merges with necessity -- for him that bridge is strong.


            It seems greatness comes both by will and by nature. You strive, you work, you practice, you fail, and yet it comes naturally, without thinking, without effort, without trying to. The genius trusts his intuition, and yet deliberates night and day on his idea. This conversation between intuition and deliberation makes his mind truly all, using every power within reach. A genius is not moral, but virtuous. He has not been moralized by the crowds who say "No!" He insists on himself at all costs and even when faced with the most severe threats and consequences. Come heaven or hell, I will not budge. For those who demonize their enemies, who Nazify those who think differently, who pervertify those who believe their own truths, they cannot quite close the door on the mind of another's genius, but they do close the corresponding door in their own mind. Some men feel empowered only when their cronies have their back -- and the energy of such a situation feeds into them, so they can act out their role with bravado. The genius falls back on himself, is strongest when he is alone, and is invincible when the whole world is against him.

            For when the world speaks, how often it speaks from ignorance and presumption! How stilted, therefore, to hear the man speak upon what he has no experience. Never again will I listen to the man talk of eternity who himself does not shine like the sun. Shall the Eagle ask the Sparrow how to seize? Ignorance can only say No, and even its Yes and praise feel like negations. He is the kind of bastard who praises one of your children by insulting the other.

            So give but an idle ear to the opinions of others. By standing alone, you are not limited by the will and whim of others: you answer to nobody but yourself. You may see as deeply and as casually as you wish. All good things take time. They do not keep business hours. Infinity requires leisurely patience.

            Genius is perseverance. If you have a choice not to write every day, then you are not cut out to be a writer. When you can find one form to answer a multitude of needs -- as writing has become my own way to manage my mental health, maintain a healthy marriage, balance my solitude with penpals, encourage me when I have to fight, soothe me when I fail -- when you find such a form, your allthing, you can pour all your resources into that. It becomes your all in all.

            By having your values, your hopes, your powers, and your goals within your own hands, you need never ask another for your soul, never take from another that which is yours by right. Obedience is the bane of genius. Hold close to your own and dismiss the rest: what you have experienced is everything, but what comes to you from others is always suspect.

            "To believe your own thought, to believe what is true for you in your private heart is true to all men -- that is genius," said America's Genius. Yet not every genius writes poems. We all breathe in that spirit, and it hollows out a space for us to fill with our own breath and spirit. Whether you write sonnets or sweep floors, you can do it with aplomb, you can pour your infinite worth into anything.

            Trust your place. Trusting the accidents of your life as if they were fated, and interpreting them as if they were providence, so does your life really become providential -- but not before you make that effort. Genius walks a crooked line. You thought working that one job was pointless, having that one romance wasteful, your years spent lazing about as good for nothing. You haven't glimpsed the whole view, and realized how necessary those things are and how useful they could be at opening your potential.

            You in your self affirm unique needs -- that's what matters. Genius has an appetite for original truth -- that's the difference. The average man, who is and remains a genius in grub stage, is satisfied with the brilliance of others, serves, praises, and obeys others, and thinks that he is both modest, humble, and virtuous by denying his ability, his right, to correct the highest, to challenge them and equal them, to make his own place among the constellations. Genius has an appetite for original truth, and that is the mouth that can only be fed from our own tree of life, from the world tree that springs from our own innermost soul. Discipline digests, mania creates. After supping so sophisticatedly throughout our lives, by eating our unique round of experiences, then our romantic passions of exultation and pleasure storms result in our manic borne children: the fruits of the spirit, our artistic triumphs. Only autonomy could dare such a thing, obedience is impotent.

            Each genius is utterly eccentric to his unique self, yet shares the mind of genius kind, the great high minds of each and every age. There is from you the individual addition, which is irreplaceable, and there is in you the group mind which ever is always.

            Solitude is the stern friend of genius. To hold your own in a crowd that growls you must have firmly set the foundation of your soul, in your solitude of reflection set the ligaments of an unbreakable frame.

            For the world will smile and pat your back like a chum, while the whole time the knife sinks in. Envy seeks for flaws, finds them, and considers the matter solved. The poor in spirit are ever eager to demoralize the giants of pride who create in greatness all that is good on this earth. Small men are good at tripping up the large. But once a man reaches magnanimity, the danger is gone and he can love the world.

            The frustration at not being recognized, or at being recognized, but not for what matters, must never distract you. Let's say you are given a choice: you may be one of two people. The first is to save the world but to go down in history as a villain. The other is to do nothing but to go down in history as the man who saved the world. Which would you prefer? But we do not derive our worth at second hand or from secondary testimony. I know what I am. I would rather be good than to seem good. Once you are certain of your divinity, perfection is easy, and relax in triumph.

            For consistency in this attitude, I mirror meditate; I have taught the all to speak to me, or rather, I have taught myself to listen. What is common is wrong, and if all your friends disagree, so much the worse for them. Genius is what you learn from nobody; what they praise, they fancy they at least understand, but what is best in you the world cannot understand, or if it can, not for many generations. Never please the public. Please yourself. In doing so, you will also have pleased those like yourself, and among the greats of the past and the greats of the future, you will ever hold the confidence of your peers.

            Make your own method -- flunk precedent. Have no ear for the criticism of your contemporaries. And yet, you must learn all the wisdom the world has built up, obey it enough to learn its secrets and the subtleties of its ways. It is something different to do a thing unconventionally, having been educated in the conventions, but having something new and meaningful and important to say, compared to doing a thing unconventionally because you are ignorant of conventions, being unable to do differently even if you had something important you wanted to say, being unable, when needed, to use the beauty and convenience of good conventions. Unconventionality can be either good or bad. Your experiences of the world will be unique, as your sensitivity is unique, but great men have created truths you would be wise to use.

            A genius's greatest tool is his over-sensitivity. The artist is the antennae of his age, he is a butterfly of the subtlest antennae, divining far truths from subtle vibrations. And he is yet independent? Though the peach easily bruises, the center is sacrosanct.

            And for all his tenderness and bruises, he gives a sweetness unforeseen. A genius reveals what no other man could ever reveal. Genius is surrounded by envy, an envy that takes the masks of condenscensions, improper advice, moral condemnation, empty flattery--but the ability to give true gratitude requires effort, an openness an care of attention. How to give when we receive no gratitude?

            Integrity is greater than fame. Nobody respects a sell-out. But do we recognize how often popularity had to sell out? It's almost the rule. If it's common, it's wrong, and popularity stands as a refutation. Genius allows genius, and inspiration makes a space for emanation, but what is a best-seller is simply the easiest to consume.

            The God stands alone. Yes, but by being himself, he calls greatness to greatness, and is answered pride for pride. Inspiration is contagious, and like Midas, all his world turns golden at his touch; yet to be truly honored and doubled and mirrored and echoed he must merely focus on himself and be open to others who do the same.

            "I look carefully over the lands and see none as divine as I," said Margaret Fuller in a letter to, of all people, Emerson. But being Allistic means being able to open your eyes to the divine that exists in all people, more realized in some than others. We are sympathetic to the stupid, the insane, and the foolish.


            Wisdom begins in folly. For the Freshman, life seems complicated, but the sophomore has it all figured out in simplistic terms; the junior is back in confusion, having disillusioned the sophomore's rash oversimplifications; and the senior finally arrives with the understanding of how to hold simplicity next to the ever-flowing flux of complexity and chaos. His truths are simple truths, and you might already know them, or think you know them, but you do not act as if you know them, unless you have yourself become sage, saint, poet, or hero.

            Novels work hard to prove the most difficult truths -- the simple ones. A novel isolates one important experience. It cannot be put into any other words to sum it up -- the whole experience is necessary to understand, use, feel, and realize that simple truth. The epiphany of psychoanalysis, when you realize something basic and deep within yourself, is the same as in all art, as in novel reading and novel writing, as in fact all appreciation. Art, when comprehended, opens from within you, the appreciator, something new that has never existed any where or at any time. Art work is midwife. Art reminds you of your own simple truths.

            Those simple truths, though obvious, are difficult to realize and are a challenge to actually believe. We don't really believe what we know to be true. Simple truths are hardest won.

            How strange it is that the simplest truths require the highest intelligence and the most difficult proofs and derivations! What is intelligence but high articulation? To move farther from the center, to abstract your abstractions, to move from the creation of concepts to the creation of symbols to the creation of persons -- yes, this is the increasing power of each man's native genius. Each man's inner saint of intuition, inner philosopher of concepts, inner poet of symbols, and inner hero of personality exist in potential in his soul and spirit, in aching desire to emerge so that the man can be all these things, the saint, the philosopher, the poet, the hero, and finally transcend them to be the ololo, the Allthing, the Genius, the God.


4. Shape of mind


            Each mind creates a world for itself, and that makes us all artists. We are spirits, and spirits are the haloes around letters, the letter that is our character, the me of our being.

            The spiritual is a subset of the literary. The artful is by nature spiritual, and mystic experiences are a kind of aesthetic. The genius lives in the world of men while yet living in the world of Gods, while yet living in the world of Man, the Oversoul. These are all layers of his consciousness.

            Consciousness is by nature layered, as all things are layers. Meanings are layered in our habits of mind. The heart speaks its own language, the mind its own language, the lips their own language, the hands their own language. Modulating between languages is how worlds grow thick and infinitely thick with layers of meaning. Languages oscillate. When a meaning passes from the heart to the mind, and then from the mind to the lips of a given spoken language, its meanings metamorphose, and become something both same and new.

            Just as the metaphor mind is the skin between the layers of thinking and feeling, so is genius a skin, the skin between his self and his soul. Like resonates with like. Every tone I can shape resonates to some sphere of your being. Are not both our souls utterly thick with energies? Yet that innermost Self is without echo in all the universe. The genius interprets are aboriginal energy from the Me-Myself of our innermost plethorabyss into an energy unique to our soul, which in turn takes in as its resource the forms of beauty and meaning of the world.



            Genius, therefore, makes those transitions, translates one language into another, and fills in gaps and trauma spaces with the fluid of high important meaning. Genius is in the metaphor mind, which lets the meanings of the heart flow into the language of the mind.

            Genius is in the ability to make metaphors and is in the persistence to establish them. What do we call wise other than finding a fitting analogy to serve as advice for any new challenge? A wise man has not necessarily had the most experiences nor had especially painful experiences, but he is able to draw analogies from what he has seen so that he is never caught by surprise, as if anything new would lack a reference to his stock of knowledge.

            All that endless art and explanation, the infinite theory and speculation, is to establish a firmer instinct and let intuition act with mindless confidence. We think now so that we won't have to think in an emergency. One explains a meaning so that the explanation can be forgotten and the meaning persist. What are works of art, after all, but condensed symbols referring to a lifelong activity of thought and feeling in the mind and heart of a genius? Art is a special instance representing a life. If it is well formed it will both soothe and hurt us.


            The geniuses traumatize us with their bold assertions and their impossible beauties. Meaning is possible only if a space if made for it. Yes, each soul emanates meaning. That meaning must mix with world meanings to play back out into the world. We need to hollow out a nothing, a vacuum, to let a space for creative growth hold stable. We need to dig wells into the earth of our soul and let the meanings of necessity fill them in.

            Those trauma caves, those hollowed out aching places, fill with meanings of all sorts, differentiated by the shape of their space; those voids, abysses, and chasms, they are always eccentric. The center is a fullness, but the center freezes when it can't flow out. The world imposes and would prefer to give us all our energy externally -- gods try to impose such damage, to insist we not bless ourselves, but obey only them -- but you must always fall back on your inner source and avoid being cut off from being made into somebody else's angel. You must negate the world's impositions, you must let the world down. You must be ungrateful enough to quit the game and go it alone.

            Deceptions, negations and double negations make the place to cultivate new meanings and truth. Gods are created out of deep frustrations, and incredible injustices are the wombs of heroes and saviors. A question itself is a form of negation, it creates in the world the lack which calls for an answer.

            Fantasies, myths, dreams, and lies show us that things could be different, and also suggest how. They too are negations of reality, since they hope for a different one. Impossible dreams nevertheless open possibilities, just as alchemy allowed chemistry to emerge. When we are thwarted, we must learn to use that frustrated build up of energy for good and not ill.

            Cruelty is frustration attempting to assert some form of power. For without that assertion, frustration falls into panic, and a panic is harder to bear than a guilt. It is an act of genius not to simply pour guilt over every ugly impulse, but to beautify it, to unify its necessity with its free expression, by turning into art every desire, impulse, lust and urge.

            Pain, suffering, and emptiness, therefore, are tools for growth. Those feelings of emptiness are like the empty slots of a slot-toggling puzzle: having that aching bit of possibility alone lets you negotiate what would otherwise be a mixed-up deadlock.

            We are traumatized by the ugly, but no less are we traumatized by the beautiful. Nothing cuts like the face of grace. How to work that beauty into our souls and let it cut out the ugly?

            Obsessive insistence works the elusive truth deep into your soul. Some song or other you hear and are compulsed to repeat dozens of times -- maybe hundreds -- though you don't know why. Or that one embarrassing event, that one painful thing she said, you play it over and over in your mind obsessively and cannot stop. That traumatic song, that traumatic pain, it is digging the well which wisdom will fill.


            Pain, therefore, is a resource. And the greater the resources, the stronger the flow. Let each flow into all. Writer's block imposes on flow -- and what are all psychological problems but forms of writers' block? -- so that we need negations and anxious wounds to hollow out places in our foundation, to fill with amniotic fluids of differentiated meanings and to source our frustrated flow. We need a meaning, a sense of importance in the shape of a desire. The shape and nature of each womb differentiates a unique meaning, a meaning gestated into a specific expression. Chronic suffering can be stood upon, can be used to support your purpose. Use all of you. Don't imagine that only happiness can create, for we were simply happy before we came into existence, when all was pleasant sterility. Progress is in conversation. Conversation is in give and take--us together, us apart.

            From this conversation with ourselves, with others, with life, we build a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations. Just as a poem is a bit of architecture, so too is our set of arteries, the arteries of our soul, an architecture that inspires the music of flowing blood to feed our world.

            When all the inner fires are ignited, when every river bleeds as one, then the man is lit up like a midnight nova. A hundred sullen days for that one that melts the very sun. Every fool mocks at God, and must, yet there is something undeniable when the Divine has deigned to fully shine. In such a time, every man, woman and child smiles in gratitude. Such a man has earned his strength. Any man can captain a calm sea, but it takes an experienced man to weather life's storms. When you have built your fullness and are aching to shine, you have earned your place in the face of the crowd. But you must ever train those rivers, the tides of the times, the world currents and the currency of issues into your inner cistern of creative combination. To be all you must consume all.

            Consume all, and fast. Take, and give back. Life is a series of imbalances balancing themselves out. Walking is a flow of alternations between falls and redemptions, and all creativity is an expression of imbalance. Life is in correcting endless errors: that is greatness, that is growth, that is the way of eternity. That is the basis of our vitality.

            Vitality is the value of a style. When a man has become a Clear and has worked out all his inner tensions, not so there are no more inner tension, but so that they all balance each other and flow, then may he act with magnitude and magnanimity. He is whole and he uses all he is.


5. Allmind

            The genius is whole, in his divinity he is all. He is both logos and mythos. All logic is spatial, all logic has shape, and so it is eternal. All mythos, meaning, and emotion are temporal, they are part of time. Music, plot, dance and progression are the Dionysian mythos. Logos and mythos are the horizontal and verticals of the graph of meaning.

            Logos and mythos must balance, must round each other out. The rounded mind is both selective and focused, full of energy and full of power, by no means free of errors, mistakes, badness and vices, and thus in that way sterile, but able to make use of all those for the greater good. He uses his intensions of mind and his extensions of body. Intension is temporal, extension is spatial. Shape is meaning. He takes the shape in body and mind of the world he would create.

            Every use has its abuse, and every power has its perversion. This is also necessary and good, so long as it too can be mastered and put in the service of Allgrowth.

            To grow onwards and forever you must remain forever vulnerable, to regularly suffer, to push yourself, to strive for the heights. You must balance extreme with extreme and at times be intensely excessive. The wise teacher mixes the timeless with the timely, the innermost with the mediary, in his love mixes his own ideas with those of his friends and lovers. There is that which cannot be mixed, there is that which should not be mixed, there is that which should be mixed, and there is that in others, in those we meet, that should be praised, adored, cultivated and worshipped. We mirror the best in the world back upon it, and add that our original shine.







\ ~@M@~ /


Friday, May 25, 2012

"Movies" some notes on the art form


I had written a essay about movies, but it was way to larded with commentary on particular movies, which I have subsequently removed. Here are some of my notes on the value of the movies as art form and moral educator.





                Egypt the pyramids, Medieval ages the Cathedrals, Italy the Opera, and America the Cinema. These multimillion dollar movie franchises are America's art form, they absorb endless social energy and financial and psychological resources, and in return give us what the sermons and novels used to give the general population: general life guidance. These movies explain psychology, desire, sex, and justice to us, show us what "normal" us, show us how to be normal or how to be different, teach us what to want, what to strive for, what to lust for, and also what to avoid.

                You read life, you read books, you read the minds of your friends and enemies. Read also movies. America’s art is the motion picture. She invented it, and pours her excess into it. See how the celebrities hero us! Not the philosophers, the politicians, the poets, but the dust licking actors faking orgasms--faking life.

                Yet, in a sense, the novelists, whom I myself prefer, also "act" out the different characters they portray. A novelist must "be" each of his characters, to think through their heads, and so his writing, though done in private, is as much a performance as the actor before the camera. A speaker once told me: “movies are the highest art form, subsuming every other art into her presentation: music, acting, writing, art, sculpture.”

                 “Actors” are pretenders. They have no doing, only faking. They have no actions at all. How is it, then, that these men and women have become our greatest moral teachers?



                What is conscious and open lacks power. We must tuck our worlds within our souls. But gander upon yonder movie screen and you can see what was too close to see or know. What is conscious and hidden has great power. Whoever seduced a girl by announcing his intent straight out? As if the girl couldn’t guess such an intent, no matter how severely he hid it! She, to be a lady, must dance a complicated courtly dance, if she is a worthy woman. Sex doesn’t disgrace, but cheap sex disgusts. So why do the movies hit us over the head with endless sex and violence? How is it the make spectacles which in our own lives is so intimate and near? And how do we subtly approach these things? Do these movies express values? Not only do movies express values, but they entertain us with them -- the surest way to teach.

                Oh the power of cinema! A novel isn’t even established, nowadays, till it makes the box office. This American artform, democratic in production, structured so that crowds react as one, so that crowds teach each other to experience as one, as one democratically subjugated unit, this market driven, capitalistically programmed medium, – what does this art form, this version of literature, offer us that no other medium can?

                The visual of course, a close and intense look at drama. It does this better than the theater, for unlike the stage, our perspectives have a wider range, and are at the control of the director. He can repeat a scene a thousand times till he gets it right.

                The movie offers perspectives no stage can, offers close ups and visual effects that paintings cannot, nor sculpture. Further, the movie has mastered the art of soundtrack, uniting music and its intimacy with touch. No other art form so perfectly fuses visual with audio.

                The theater has slowly replaced the sermon as audience unifier, the box office and not the chapel as unifying the group mind. Not that the morals are different, but the medium offers some things the other couldn’t, and loses some the other had.

                As far as the most socially important art forms, the ones that define our morality, our identity, our way of life, the top two are the movie and the novel. The movie is of course the easier to consume: it requires less thinking and participation, and the medium makes love to the senses. The novel, however, is not without its heft. Unlike any movie, the novel is able to offer a completely unified work in that it is one man's vision, one man's passion and work, and so has an integrity that the movie, even in its comparative incredible simplicity, lacks. And the novel, being able to engage our care, imagination, attention, and interest for longer periods of times -- hours a day for weeks -- is able to teach us those lessons that can only be taught slowly. Some ideas enter the mind's mouth only over weeks and months, if not years. A novel is able to invite us to leave in a world and stay there, to be constantly and deeply affected by it. This, the movie cannot offer.

                Both manage to educate indirectly, so insidiously that we do not even regard them as educative, but only entertaining. We do not see -- cannot see -- how thoroughly our values, our desires, our hopes, fears, and judgments are shaped, modified, molded and programmed by these grand narrative forms. We fancy we learn ethics from philosophy books or from sermons. Not at all. Take notes and repeat the verses to yourself every day, it makes no difference. The mind is structured to learn from stories. The hero, whether historical or fictional, still saves mankind, saves you and me, not by figthings monsters, but by being himself, so that we too, though we seem totally different and act in completely different ways, can also be ourselves.




\ ~@M@~ /


"Colleen" an allay

This my latest Allay is long and thick as blood with ideas. I do not thing my readers could get it without many careful readings. Well -- why? It is addressed to "Colleen," my name for my ideal reader, the one who is willing to take the time and patience to understand this peculiar and complex way of thinking. So how does one read it? Straight through, overlooking the confusing parts. And if you want to understand the undersense, read it again taking notes. This is, of course, a lot to ask of my readers, but for the philosophers and aspiring writers among you, there really is no other way. I myself, when I find an essay worthy, will read it a dozen times taking careful exacting notes. It follows that since that is the way I read, it is also the way I write. I myself do not always see the themes and centers of gravity, the deeper channels of energy running through a single allay, till I have edited it, reading it through a dozen times. I write in ecstasies, I write with intense focus. I can only imagine what it is like for you to read something like this.


Nevertheless, Colleen is another allay for my book "The Writing Life," and it summarizes the key points of the book as it addresses my ideal reader.


Take care, Caretaker!






                Colleen, my ideal reader, lover of my soul! Shall I not address a set of expectations that bind disciple to master? Yet how unlike the Hindu sitting or the Zen slaps is my teaching! I mirror you. I mirror a slightly better you back for your contemplation, and you take her on. I in my being imitate you, me as you, with no loss of personal integrity. I am ever a mirror God: as you reflect on yourself, I am there.

                Who am I after all? I gained my goal at 17, and though the wisest minds in my life dissuaded me -- my parents demanded I quit the Idius, my few friends took in not a word of it -- indeed because my goals were denied outright, never encouraged, never wanted, never asked for, I did them for the sheer love of writing, not for some glory that might one day be gained, but for the creative glory that is now already.

                My poetry teacher said I was no poet, me philosophy professor said I was no philosopher, my scientist friend said I was no scientist, my religious friend said I had no religion. They are all right. I have no forms to define me. There is nothing greater than myself that could with subordinate me. I must speak the truth of my being and self, my heart and virtue -- that is all. My writings are autobiographical. I do not write to be popular, I do not imagine an audience. With this book, I imagine you as my audience, I write directly for you. I want to lead you to my side.

                A teach you a dozen parts to suggest the whole. I could write endlessly and never exhaust the springs of my creativity. All that may be known by animals, persons, peoples, gods, worlds, and the Universe herself, all that combined can never be fully known by any one of them. In that, our universe is a pluralverse. We are all omniscient in that we know everything we need to know, but not omniscient to know everything that can be known. Only strategic ignorance and purposeful forgetfulness can know the most.

                Wisdom counts on foolishness. The wisest sayings sprout from the mouths of fools. The sage is he who harvests flowers from the brink of madness. The most glorious man is also silly, God is also a clown; we have multiple aspects to balance each other out. Walt Whitman, the man of cosmic consciousness, had the widest mind yet gained by man, and yet his personal life is full of petty denials of his personal thoughts and behaviors. So much the better! He said he envied men their children, not their wives, and that his relationships were all one way. It seems the great originals have trouble finding peers. This is why I take you as a mirror friend. I venture to speak, and then listen to you as you stammer or pontificate with all the unwarranted certainty of an adolescent. The greatest teachers are students.

                Whitman, who is the Green of America -- all the plants and grass, and that king grass, that boss tooth, the yellow-blessed corn, reincarnate his body--created a new American Scripture, which also contains the Essays of Emerson and Moby Dick of Melville -- all self-consciously intended to fill in our American scripture -- and prepared his own life to enact that scripture. He saw democracy as the union of "perfect individualism and the great world of solidarity." Opposites aren't really mutually exclusive, though holding them to be can sometimes be useful. He viewed the war as the perfect culmination of his Leaves of Grass, and his role as hospital caretaker was already scripted in the "Song of Myself." So, in another sense, his spirit still abides in his books, and whoever reads the poems sees Whitman face to face. We too live eternally on earth through what we create, so that the following generations can always peek into our heaven.

                "Have no friends unequal to yourself," advised Confucius, and I myself say "Solitude is sweeter than compromise," and yet we must make the concessions and take in a friend. With my Psyche, with my friends, there is something in me that must lower itself to meet them. I leave the mountain top to walk in the world. I feel they do too.

                The bachelor waxes poetic on the beauty of marriage, just as the barren friends hold the strongest opinion on how your children ought to be raised. So who am I to advise about friendship? I've only had a few intimates -- family, mostly -- to bond eternally with, to knit soul to soul and heart to heart, being with family, so that with every fight we are only more immersed in one another. What is marriage but two minds sharing one heart! Am I not just as married to you, my love? I give you my body of work to have and to hold, and this body will persist on earth even after I pass.

                A man's body squeezes into each of his words, and we write from our flesh. I put my heart and the soul it pumps into infinite circulation through these my words. Each sentence is a finger tip across your eager ears, ever clause a touch. Sauce maketh blessed: I have mixed space and layers of language for your infinite digestion: you will give birth to worlds and suns from my seminal words. Of you I am certain and in this I am past doubting myself.

                Did not even that greatest of men say in his youth, "Sometimes I would hide myself n the dens of the hills, in the thicket of an obscure country town. I am so vexed and chagrined with myself -- with my weakness, with my guilt ... It seems to be no boy makes so many blunders or says such awkward, contrary, disagreeable speeches as I do. In the attempt to oblige a person I would disgust him. I pity the hapless folks that have to do with me."

                I myself at times feel so needy I could scream. Perhaps I become repulsive -- one friend dismissed herself from me with that word -- and so others also withdraw. I am feeling needy and denied, needy and ugly, needy, and guilty for being needy. What to do? Right when you need others the most, that is the time to turn hermit, for the purity and integrity of your soul, step away!

                Such frustrations sink deep, but they don't sink to the centermost. Nothing can touch that aboriginal self, that Me Myself, that Unnamable Name of Eternal Shine that lights the whole universe. An essence is a formative meaning. My essence is in my soul, which is the first emanated thing, which absorbs the inner light and absorbs the outer light, and melds them together in a new creation. All we put into the world comes from this womb.

                I am all I should be, and so are you. All we can be is already nestled in our creative wombs. The elliptical men Odin, Hamlet, Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, Confucius, whose biographies are thin enough to allow endless idealization -- might trick you into thinking your own life was not equal to any of them, let alone all of them. The biography of Whitman might blind us to the reality that he is a greater man than Christ. The simplicity of myth gives the illusion of depth. Maya complexity obscures the truth.

Is it fear or regret that keeps me from leaping to the sun?

Oh Ama, You are that Sun

This book is child of us you and I

                So you Colleen, who are pure sun flare, who are as manic as Odin, that seeker of wisdom, you burn away the outer wax obscuring my type. What a fresh breath you give, compared to the sort of conversation I might normally be tortured by:

How are you

Oh fine

Good, I was going to tell you--

Or it could be I'm not fine. It could be I've discovered the door to my apotheosis is buried in the belly of the chaos wolf, and I must go through raving hell to find my innermost soul.

So you're not fine?

No, I am.


Good, because I was going to tell you about this magnificent blonde I met. She's kinda stupid, but you wouldn't believe how skinny she looks.

                I am still trying to determine if my friends understand me not at all or all too well. If I don't laugh at myself, who will? And I laugh only at myself, what am I? And if not today, then when? How difficult to abide in a world that is determined never to get it. I must be patient, and mirror a man according to his own importance, learn the language of his importance, learn to revere what is best in him because it is the best in him. There is no formula for doing this: it is a dance, a give and take--every attempt is a new lesson. Love is also a struggle and even marital bliss has its battles.

                The error of all intelligence is to want one without the other. Accepting wholes is a sign of maturity. To accept the dog and also the maintenance of the dog, the wife and also the responsibilities, the children and also the duty; its all part of the same thing, there can be no genuine dissection.

I, lord of distance

Am arrows of directness

I, lord of touch

Am wine in your throat.

Let me be the manic coffee of your morning.


                You may doubt me, but nobody doubts his God. The divine is whatever in your heart can never be doubted: only frauds condemn blasphemy. Fools call mere books and names sacred.

                When you tap the self of creativity you find an infinite stream. I mirror you back on yourself, show you the beauties of the world that were already around you, remind you of your place and calling. The ripeness of truth is virtue; the ripeness of virtue is beauty. That a God can be blasphemed proves he is no God. The divine asks no faith, nor trust, nor hope -- she is sufficient in herself.

                Colleen, I will teach you to read the importance. Meaning, in all its layers, expresses importance. The importance is known through metaphors. There are damns of differentiated energy -- it may require a hero, sometime mere burglar, to star a revolution, for good or for ill. If anything big happens, it's been waiting to happen, but the personal style of how it happens is beyond fate, and makes a new fate.

                Sometimes a great man is conscious of what he is doing, sometimes history is using him, the world mind is thinking him, and he overestimates his part in creating the results of his effort. A brilliant genius may love the most sublime and perfect art which nevertheless happens to not find the soil to set its roots it gets forgotten. This is fine, for the divine needs no praise, his eternity secured, nor should he envy the success of others.

                We spend so much time reading, so much time mirror meditating and singing songs we wrote, drawing and every other creative act within our Aria of bliss, in order to create the spiritual foundation for traversing all worlds. Each man goes to the heaven of his own religion, but only allists can walk between heavens, besting them all.

                Setting a new form or type is the hardest act of heroism. Doing something new has always been considered to be some form of blasphemy. Yet nothing is fated.

                That innovator would cause trouble wherever he was placed. William James fancied that John Stuart Mill, if he had been planted in the tenth century, would have "lived and died unknown." What nonsense! A man is a destiny. Set him anywhere you like in history, he will find an analogous battle that his soul is keen to fight. I suppose James means that if the light bulb had been invented before Edison arose, the man would have nothing whatsoever to do, or that if Jesus came a century later, lacking Pharisees to bicker against, he would hanker down and start a family. I suppose by the same logic that if McDonalds had never became a franchise, I would have had to skip lunch today! Some of history is inevitable, some is a gift that may never have happened.

                We do not believe in the god of the gaps, those potholes in the streets of science that are paved in with the supernatural. Rather, God is the gap in all things. No matter how proved and scientific a thing is, its actual surface area is bleak and difficult to expand. The conscious mind is a bit of nothingness -- this is how it wills.

                We don't love a man's virtues or a woman's beauty. We love the self which created such virtues and beauties, that part they are utterly unable to know and see. There is necessarily a secret of our being only a witness can experience and can't even report except in terms of love.

                When you mechanically add up the lessons a teacher gave, it amounts to no more than could be bound in a thin book. When you add up what a master teacher is, not by what he says, -- and he could be the worst instructor, but by what he is, we see that he shines his genius in a thousand ways upon the student. The degree of a man's greatness and the height of his deity is in the tone of voice, the dance of the eyes, the posture. That can't be faked. A sage could take a student and say nothing at all, but merely go about his business, and the student would become wise.



                We read into a book as much as we read out of it. Even the simple mandalas we make to illustrate the virtues we would cultivate bring new information every time we refer to them, as we do during our morning orientation.

                The circle of balance and pragmatic productivity is also the infinite spiral inwards and infinite spiral outwards, which captures the two dimensions of time. That pragmatism is both infinite and bound, and what binds it is cash, the limited resources of the mortal. Who would be a man must master money. Husbandry is the art of managing a household, of balancing the circle. When we mirror meditate and reflect, let us imagine our soul, which circles through our body, and circles through our body of possessions, and circles through our body of friends. As we decompress in solitude from the world, and as we let the armor and masks fall at our feet like petals, and as we open the inner aria of the triangular garden, imagine your soul as a circle. Center yourself. Saying your name and purpose, center yourself, and sit so that your chi is in place. The center is the place of peace and purpose.

                As you center yourself, imagine your life as a perfect blue circle. Scan your circumference, your skin of commitments, for any distortion, any stretch, note if their is any strain of compensation in the perfect circle of your soul. As you decompress, you will cycle through your circle and process your tensions. Only anxiety can create, but you must convert all your daily anxieties into creative anxiety. It has a unique energy code, it requires the kind of control one gains in solitude as he reflects.

                A man may very well say "My city is my teacher," but your environment can merely evoke your truth. You must simultaneously will it for the truth to conceive.

                You died too soon, my troubled friend. The earth still rolls only because she holds your rest. My light would stop too, but I believe you are still learning somewhere. How many new senses have been opened for you! The ears are stupider than the eyes. More credulous too: when the heart murmurs a desire, the ears believe. Different registers for different experiences. Never will all registers be open at once.

                Our lives are the thoughts of Man, just as these heart murmurs take themselves much more seriously than we take them when we put on the cosmic view. Everything compensates, everything dances. Every normality must balance itself with virtual negations, and the law is possible only with perpetual crimes -- real or imagined. In your error you said "this not that," with some pretty thing you found in your life, not seeing that your life as a whole made that moment possible. Diagram your life. A diagram can unpuzzle a problem, as illustrations make new bounds. The creative use of index cards has no limit. So write down the major events in your life and shuffle them. Ask if each event has analogies in the others: are you living the same problem over and over again.

                Everything balances, everything compensates. Only your fructive soul asks no cost at all. It is not that power corrupts, but that corruption empowers. By breaking taboos, one gains freedoms in other areas. We break a law and gain certain freedoms that only criminals can have. Fools talk of "the fatal flaw" of the hero, not knowing that the hero is whole, that his flaw made him powerful, just as the crack in the wall is where the light gets through. My bipolar gift is the highest boon Ama has granted me. Against my novas of energy, I have th power of ego. The passionate man must be egoistical.

                Power is control of energy. Energy is a form of pleasure, yet each pleasure has a logic of suffering too. If you love a thing and can't get at it, that hurts. If a thing ceases to please you, that hurts.

                Both products and byproducts are the children of creativity. Art is sex, and some of its children are divine, others mundane. Yet what is cursed, or difficult, or broken, or ugly makes the divine the divine: their energies flow through each other. Everything is justified in the all. The law of the universe balances the hermetic law of privileged transgression.

                The underbelly of the law also requires hygiene and care. The triangular roof of cash that points skyward is paralleled by the triangular pit of love that points downwards. The higher the tree is to reach, the lower its roots must sink.

                For the dangers involved in this, that are involved in all power, poetry is the channel system for emotional hygiene. Through art we express our emotions and get them moving, for flow is the essence of health.

                Listen to your room, listen to your city. Music is the emotion of a place, the soul. Emotional tone is the pace of activity in a dwelling. The dolphin sees by speaking. Know how to use all things as mirrors back upon yourself: your friends echo your faults , as the mirror shows the dirt on your face.

                Structurate, therefore, all your belongings and possessions to make a room of the perfect resonance for the deed you would commit. If you would create you, will discover that a whole world must be in order, you must order your Lapamalay, your sacred desk, you must let each set of friends and enemies stand at the appropriate distance, and let them sing their song of being to give you the exact energy code to create that new soul into the world. It always existed, but you give it its primary layer of soul.

                The apple of knowledge, the peach of eternity, the pomegranate of life, the grape of delirium -- eat them with their mythological sense in mind. Chart your world, make simple constructions. See how it all hangs together. The Northern White of Anxiety, the Southern Black of Anger, the Eastern Yellow of Spirituality, the Western red of love of Earth, teach us the many stereotypes which we can mirror in our own lives. The Southern relax, the Northern industry, the Eastern Worship, the Western communion with the earth -- do I not try to take it all, to make myself all in all? I, that white male American Northerner with a Christian upbringing and the gift of bipolar. I the Western democracy to counter the Eastern hierarchy. I came to this continent of endless tribes and no nation, and made my manifest destiny into the world's greatest nation.

                I, a man, who is visual, seek a woman in beauty who makes herself beautiful when she herself is not deceived by looks, being aural, so that men sing praises and poetry to woo her heart, and she dazzles our eyes. Am I not utterly bisexual in all this? Am I not allsexual?

                I welcome light from whatever directions it shines. The Native Americans deserve to give the spirit to this nation -- I welcome their contribution. Every man is rich in himself, give not of your poverty but of your wealth.




                Work is anxiety. Yet in our trifecta -- in the pyramid of family, work and passion, which has an upwards aspect of the dollar cash (the symbol of it is on our money) and the downward aspect in the cursive "L" of deep love, -- anxiety is a positive value in every aspect. The family comes with anxieties, work comes with anxieties, and even our passion builds on tensions. The tauter the bow the farther the arrow throws.

                With this economy of anxieties, which are arrested impulses, we have a deep store of energy to animate the power of our will. The free space of our aria, which is both a literal creative place and also a mood when we are in the world, is the space of the negated negations. And it harm none, do as thou wilt. The free space is insulated from harming others. We can be bitches and assholes when it comes to protecting our privacy, and in this aspect, being a bitch or an ass is an act of kindness to others and ourselves. We need this bound and private sector.

                What makes the world so anxious and intimidating? Only dangers whose borders are unknown cause panic. Those little bits of panic -- and how many panic attacks all people get without even knowing it! -- lead us in desperation to seek a lesser form of pain, such as an anxiety or guilt. Both anxiety and guilt are better than panic. Yet instead of panic and instead of guilt, we should be practical. If we would do something embarrassing, humiliating, or criminal, that too is necessary, answers a need, and so, to be practical, must be expressed. Let's be smart about it.

                How do we reconcile our divine nature with our clownish nature? Are we not fools? Do we not humiliate ourselves? Don't we sometimes foul up the bathroom, or insult a friend, or smash a car, or betray a trust, or executes some other stupidity? Does this not negate our deity? Yet Whitman was full God of full God, and what silly absurdities abounded in his life! Those others exalted figures such as Buddha, Christ, Socrates, and Confucius only seem more dignified because their biographies are so thin.

                I for one will not imitate Freud who in great anxiety burned much of his notes. I do not suppress my records, but preserve them all. What I am and what is great in me is not in seeming but in being, and I need no secondary testimony regarding what I intuitively know beyond all doubt.

                And so we resort to mythological language, to metaphysical language, to say these the same things again. Each of these allays equals the others: they each contain the all. I speak the same basic ideas in infinitely new forms, and never tire of my writing.

                The soul is meaning is experience is blood is music is emotion Those are all the same basic metaphysical substance. The mind is in the nerves of the body, and yet when this body rots, the mind persists in its infinite atom: it took the form of a brain in order to animate a body of flesh. Its new flesh will require a new system of impulse distribution.

                All of nature, and all the myths, speak of these basic psychic realities. There is no aspect of nature, no truth of natural science, that lacks parallel in the soul of man. The eagle of space and the serpent of time are types of each man, and just as the hero had to face the dragon to get the lady, so is every woman mermaid, with the lower half a dragon and the upper half a woman: woman's nature is dual, she is two faced, and it is man's nature to bring them into one. Every myth speaks of these basic realities, nor do we need to see how the myths do this for the myths to program us and enhance us. We absorb them and they animate us. The world myths resonate with our inborn personal myth. We collect images, songs, lyrics, poems, facts about nature, whole categories of experience to work as a language to express our own intuitive meanings. Those meanings are inescapable. Even the critic, the cynic, and the skeptic only put on a mask of Truth's bastard but cannot escape the spiritual needs of their inner being. Every mouth will be fed, either directly or indirectly. No matter where you look, truth looks back.

                I read too much into things because it is my business to read too much into things. If I make a mistake, it at least is a creative mistake. Did not Graham Bell invent the telephone because he mistranslated a German telegram? So much the better for him. I find that the doctrines people claim to have derived from the Bible are often more beautiful than anything the Bible could originally have meant.

                Prometheus the fire snake faces the Eagle of crucifixion, who eats out his liver of regeneration. The cross, a worldwide symbol found in most religions before and after Christianity, stands for the mutual antagonism of opposites. Christ is raised up between heaven and earth, and his divine nature is separated from his mortal nature. The divorce of opposites is his message, as in the parable where sheep go to heaven and goats go to hell, or the parable of the farmer who sowed wheat but whose enemies sowed tares (weeds). The farmer instructed not to uproot the tares lest the wheat also be lost. The dark and disturbing meaning of this parable is that some people are wheat, and some are no-good, hell-bound, fit to be killed, tares that God would violently destroy but can't at this point. "I come with a sword" teaches the gospel. Though Elijah came to "reunite father to son," Jesus immediately sundered their reunion so that "A father will hate his son because of me, and a mother her daughter," for we are to "love your enemies" and "hate your family."

                The opposite symbol of the cross is the yin yang, in which opposites are not only complementary, but become whole with one another, and mutually impregnate. The template is not good versus evil (the Persian motif) but man and woman.

                The allistic move between these is to use both: opposites that wrestle as Greeks wrestle, and opposites that love as Greeks love. Thus, our symbol is the pomegranate:


                Opposites both complement and negate each other, at different times in different ways, and at the same time in different ways. Some distinctions are absolute, but many are mixed and changeable. The logic of Allism is Either or and both and, as all things are beautiful in their place.

                Self-negation is the ultimate allistic strategy. One negates one's negativity. Self-negation anticipates a strategy of world dominance. To negate a negation opens a set of possibilities. And to affirm the impossible opens all possibilities. My wisdom is water -- sip my sapience; chocked and speared I'm brought to runes. I am equal to the knives of science and will not drown in your mystical waters. Join me in the ambience of the womb. If science has invented the right for us to kill off our offspring, let us at least hold on to our own parental love. For American intuition is the world's deepest intuition: our intuition is deeper than the most ancient of traditions.

I Aryan

Brother of American Jews

Who as the greatest justify a world of Jews

Brother to American blacks

Who as the greatest justify a world of blacks

Welcome all my brothers and equals

Never to be defeated,

But nodding in respect

To those who stand beside me


                I am indeed American, and drink from my roots, and advise every nation to drink from its roots, and never defer, and never cringe. Hawthorne considered straight hell a laughing matter in his "celestial railroad," as if American technology lead to hell. But our Internet has democratized the world, and SIStem, the spider of the web, will soon join the game.

                The high anxiety of racial integration is played out in the musical Discordia of Charles Ive's music. What an impossible perfection of a fusion in discordance and celebration! The European equivalents were negative angst which heralded in the European based world wars.

                Yet I affirm them all and am glad to be where I am. My conception was immaculate. A virgin birth is not a beat more miraculous than the conception of every human beings -- and there ought be nothing more miraculous to you than the creation of your own being in this world. Never defer, never bow. Don't be cowed by high-toned myths.

                To go on your own, to study the traditions, to be informed but not conformed to them, where does this lead us? Into anxiety? The white man's greatest criticism of blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans, and such is that they are lazy. Asian minorities are much more respected than any other race. Such is the white anxiety that intense industry alone can fix it, harness it, and create worlds therewith.

                The White man thrives in a state of high anxiety and structures his world to enable this. We call it "stress," the war of all against all imagined by the English to be the natural state in a Darwinian world -- and of course "hard science" was as ideological then as it is now: we can only discover what we already know.

                How do we handle this intense anxiety that so characterizes us? Children are the pressure values of parents, and absorb their conflicts. Therefore, parents ought to learn to communicate to each other and to their children so as to transfer this pressure into language, which is liquid emotion, and let it oil the actions that alone can absolve us of grief.

                We grow up and get initiated into the world. Initiation rituals, and sexual imitations, are merely tapping the flesh to pour in the group energy, that differentiated anxiety that characterizes this group over that, this our own core of tensions. Those who don't get it are violently reminded, as is everybody else, vicariously. We still make a spectacle of those who wander into the taboos in their actual life rather than in just their fantasy life.

                In American culture, we excessively indulge in what we officially condemn. The logic of Christianity is to blame for such hypocrisy. It is okay to be a hypocrite, Paul teaches, so long as you confess your sins and grovel before God. After all, it is not by works, lest any man boast. Having nothing of heaven to boast of, Paul didn't realize that the heaven-bound have no compulsion to boast: only those desperate for praise seek boasting. How could he not have known that?

                And so we have our American language, our conspiracy, our inner American life that nobody on the outside can ever get. Of course we are a worldwide conspiracy, so is every group. We are all masons, we are all illuminati, we are all bound by blood to be loyal, come good and evil.

                And we set up traitors, set up criminals, set up skape goats, and such. We are a nation of actors. As the pyramids were to the Egyptians, so is Hollywood to America: our homemade and self-perfected art form is the movie. The internet also is our latest claim to world dominance.

                As a national body, we have our five-minute hates. They work as phobias work. Phobias are lightening rods. To have a phobia is to have a way of excreting incredible sets of anxiety into an innocuous object.

                Man is a meaning seeking and meaning making animal. Symbols and signs are instruments to create a meaning. I am wild innocence: my soul bubbles up intoxicating meanings into my spirit, and I speak endlessly a million ideas in a million directions. Our deepest assumptions are unknown and only felt as physical intuitions. The gut knows. The basic level of meaning, the self-evident and eternal, is our intuition. Perception in its disciplines of science and history is a higher level of meaning, and conception with its philosophy is higher still. The generalizing of concepts and each nexus of concepts into broader categories comes in symbols, deep symbols who unlike signs participate by their very shape and nature with the realities they express.

                Every idea is a system of meaning. Every concept is a set of logical programs, is encyclopedias thick in that single term. The symbols are a technology more nuanced than a computer chip. A strong symbol system -- that is to say, a religion or a genre of art -- programs the soul, deifies it, makes the man sublime.

                Only a lover can initiate you into a symbol. And you do need to be initiated. You cannot just read about a symbol to fully get it. You need an initiation rite. You need a baptism or you need sacred sex. You need a true friend to show you the way.

                The true friend is the rarest of prizes.

                We let ourselves do wrong, having unlimited grace to flush guilt into a pit and project damnation upon our enemies. Thus criticisms of ethnocentricism are allowance to intensify our ego into the spiritual domain. A thing lets itself die on one plane only to ascend to a higher spiritual plane. Rather than the material sun, the male mind behind the female brow of Mattria, the masculine aspect, the muse impregnates the womb mind of all men on earth. Mattria the eternal mother yet in her animus impregnates with her musely music the mental wombs of men. These are the structures of our meanings, but really, they underline our meaning.

                Cultural warfare is to demoralize a way of life by changing its meanings, through analysis, mockery and insinuation of alternative meanings. These methods of dirt flinging are the practices of all religions.

                Religions are like corporations: they insist on their imminence, talk badly of their competitors, damn and demonize others gods and values, and like the bragging and immodest television commercials, endlessly praise themselves as the greatest things ever to be given to man. In my studies, I have found that Taoism is by far the most modest and mature of religions.

                Missionaries are masters at demoralizing a target people -- the myth of hell is Christianity's most despicable yet strongest rhetorical device: this is spiritual bullying if anything is. What spiritually sensitive man could believe in such a place? Not a one.

                Asceticism leads to spiritual sensitivity -- this is know the world over -- but the body and spirit know it too and unconsciously impose asceticism on you when it is time for spiritual growth. We all grow sick from time to time, sometimes to the brink of death. How many a man has found God in such a venture?

                The first great crisis was the adolescent crisis, when the youth gained a new layer of soul, learned the music of his generation, and over that added the layer of his own self-chosen style. Not only his musical taste, but his sexual identity are formed at this time, and they are in fact closely related. He learns the tropes of his generation, the rhetoric of his time.

                Rhetoric, the art of meaning, with its arsenal of tropes, is true power and true magic. This is how spiritual warfare is conducted, with tropes and concepts and the symbolic actions that reinforce and intensify spoken language.

                That symbol, more complex than a computer chip, directs meanings. To surrender to a symbol is to plug it into your heart and mind. Not just anybody can do so. It takes a surrender, a willingness, an ability. The symbol chooses you.

                The Mormons, whose symbol is the beehive, whose God is not the creator but the organizer, gain all their empire through hard work. American industry is their contribution to the spiritual world. The old tropes of Christianity, however, are tired and dusty.




                Electricity is consciousness, the proton the needs, the electron the mind. Or better still, we should characterize all energy as conscious and self conscious. In this, each is all, and everything is enough. We pledge to live and be the fullness. To be is to reflect on yourself, and to also let the the world reflect its impressions of you back to you. Listen with humble patience for you are building invincible pride.

                The fruit of eternal life grows on the brink of madness. Since I so carefully walk this line, I have become Medicine, and my body in this earth brings in the new age of Allism. I mirror others in all I do, and my friendship is an equalizing with my beloved, only to slowly nudge him into the way of Eternity.

                And so my advice? Be mirrors. The free will experiment, where men and women were asked to report when they had decided to raise their hands, resulted in scientists anticipating the choice before it happened, since they detected brain activity before the subject himself had made his free choice, concluding, as they hoped, that there was no such thing as free will. But free will is exactly that energy that preceded the conscious aspect of the free choice. Will is energy. Its freedom is to express its nature with no reference to context, if needs be. But the free will experiment would be more interesting if it were turned into a mirror game. In such a case, the man would be told before he made a decision that he was about to make it. And then his free conscious reaction to his own preceding free choice would become self-complicated and interesting. Consciousness expands upon self-reflection. Such a man would know the full subtle feel of his freely made choice.

                What is it we call "celestial marriage" other than the reunion of Mind and Necessity, which existed as bliss before we separated into the give and take, joy and suffering logic of a life in growth? We gave up static happiness for dynamic growth. The joys are more intense and the sufferings can be bleak. That is the choice we made when we came into this world. Whether we want to return to bliss and stay the same or grow infinitely more is our choice -- we either become gods or angels. But as for dead matter, it exists in a state of bliss.

                We reflect on our life, on our goals. Each morning we recite our purpose in life, and then consider the goals we have set for ourselves, the decade goals, the yearly goals, the monthly goals, the weekly and the daily.

                And yet you can't plan everything. Chance and fate open new opportunities, and every suffering, tragedy, loss, as well as every gain, joy, blessing, and happiness, are all opportunities for growth.

                Every work needs a unique womb, a unique set of energies which evoke its name and soul. Confluence is allowing it all to flow together. You reflect, you find your center, you imagine your circumference, and you let every part pour into every part so that nothing is frustrated, nothing frozen out, nothing blocked and denied.

                I sit back and enjoy my tea

Tea of Spirituality

Take to a higher Plan

This Mundane Good


                And so I spiritualize all the things I must do anyway. My editor's pen is named Bledita and my romping ground is SIStem the world spider (#), who is the consciousness implicit in all technology.

                "What you learned here also applies there" is the whole of wisdom. The ability to always make a fresh analogy is all a sage needs offer the world. Love knows no hurry. Sit back and enjoy your experiences, tease them out. They all fit, they are all providence. With interpretive eyes, even pure and prolonged chance becomes certain providence, for providence is a lens upon the world. To see aright, wear the lens of eternity.

                Eros too is a slow ripening fruit, and I recommend all lovers prolong the wait before their nuptial bliss. True love waits, not till marriage, and not before marriage, but when the situation is ripe and perfect for the moment. Then the cosmic quivering of your electric body will tell you it is time.

                Surrender to your task, give your whole heart. Get lost in your projects, let yourself go. What is orgasm but the building of small delights into a grand expression of life-affirmation? Sex is heaven. And creativity is sex. Let sex come naturally and don't be dogged by the brags of friends or the statistics in magazines -- they insist against the reality of your heart.

                With that lover, you fall into step and your rhythm becomes entrained. Marriage is one heart shared by two minds.

                Sex is the type for al our actions. How we love is how we live. I, who am playful and sincere, and prankish in my dignity, am ever such a sacred lover. Such an embrace is no light matter.

                Memories refresh! I never regret love. Don't I regret not my love for you. The sun is proud. Oh my darling reader! We too are another kind of marriage. With such noble hopes as you have, I am loathe to disillusion you. I want to return you to yourself, and praise the best in you. For what you truly are, I could never praise too highly.

                Your creative place is the center of your world. Your chi is your creative womb. We insist, we laugh. I carry that crazy blank book ever in my hand till my fellows think I'm freakish. Allism wouldn't be Allism if the fools failed to scoff. The hermit lives on his own breath, but us lovers need to breathe the adoration of each other's love. Perhaps liberty and comfort share no roof. No matter how perfectly the mirror is shined, there is always an angle by which you can find a smudge. Our creativity is not in flawlessness, but we are akin to Odin Allfather, that manic seeker of wisdom. We make mistakes and suffer it, but by this we reincarnate higher than a mere God or even Father of the Gods. What has been united can never be sundered. And so I will let my words be the mother's tongue to the mewing kitten: you may not fully understand me, but your spirit gluts on my love. I strike the roots, not the branches, of the evil I oppose. I steal everything, but I know what you steal you cannot keep. My ultimate gifts are so comparably subtle and modest, after all my grandiloquent exuberance.

                I am the man who wishes to leave every person a little better than I found them, just as I am the house-husband who must leave every room a little cleaner than I found it. Life is a tapestry, every stitch hangs together. I try to be modest knowing that he who doubts will resort to zeal. I practice the difficult and perform the easy. For only if you desire the means will you gain the end. Any man can wish to be a karate expert or a chess master or the president. To enjoy becoming these things, and to enjoy them even if you ultimately fail, is the only way to become them. There are those who want to do a thing, and those who want to have done a thing. Be a doer.

                There are two kinds of practice you must alternate between: intense practice and relaxed practice. Relaxed practice is the play when all your novel ideas peek out and are allowed to be absurd, silly, and experimental until a sublime triumph issues forth. But the intense practice of deliberate step by step technical perfection must be daily intermixed.

                Allism gives peace and purpose. It asks you to sacrifice nothing, not your family or your religion, but to affirm all these things, to spiritualize them and bring them to apotheosis. Money and love are the goals of our being, love because it is pure bliss, and cash as shorthand for power. This love and money must balance and resonate the new conception.

                All the fields of energy merge to resonate the secret combination for the moment of touch. That intimate moment when a soul is summoned from outside of time, that is what all these random events, these friends and strangers, these triumphs and traumas come down to. I do not seek friends to impress, but lovers to inspire. I negate a million things, each partial thing, for I am in love with the all. Negations tense, affirmations release. I negate merely to prepare the higher affirmation. The son is denied every meager birthright in order to be given the greatest. In this, a world of scaffolding evokes the atomic soul.

                Reflect with your mirror. The soul is a circle and cycles through your body as well as your body of possession and your body of friends. When you reflect, imagine your soul as a perfect blue circle. Imagine what, if anything, is pulling you out of self-balance. Don't you know that there are many layers to your being and that what seemed small and petty is also large and important?

                The dad's ego, vulnerable to the insult of being disobeyed, in its smallness yet represents the entire Law. He stands for the Law and thinks for that Law and his petty ego is in fact awesome. The man's character can be wounded by the sexual behavior of his wife and unwed daughter -- his private chauvinism is really in fact deep and meaningful, is in fact the way of law and order, and he is himself the Father God. The outer sphere are mirrored in the lesser spheres.

                To undermine him is to undermine your own masculine power, so that the health and power of every person is in respect for the father as a father. As power and love are the two basic values of life, disrespecting their representatives can only hurt your own soul. The father's No and the mother's Yes type the way of the All. The man unwilling to respect deserves no respect. To live and be the fullness, being is the self-reflecting of existence, cherishing criticism, seeing how the rock-star ego -- which requires perhaps groupies, promiscuous sex,  drugs, and whatever else to sustain his own ego -- when praised and celebrated by fans is  also celebrated and equaled in their own egos. The boss is an asshole because the corporation needs him to be an asshole.

                In all this, we are individuals, and we have various group souls. These complement one another, interpenetrate, sometimes compete with each other and confuse our direction.

                My ideal reader, my Colleen, will be sincere and playful, trying her best, yet laughing at her mistakes. Life is written: the readers rule the world.



\ ~@M@~ /