A maneuvering:

We misunderstand the utterance "God is dead" as an atheist theological argument, as is obvious. But just as surely we misunderstand it as a description of historical precedent--that a God once lived amongst his people, and has died to them. Rather, it is a proclamation about the nature of God, and an offering of a predicate to God. "God is omnipotent, omnipresent--and God is also dead. " The omnimorbid. Much more, though, it is a making of something as God, putting it in the place of God. What I'm saying is, the logic goes as such: God is dead. Therefore, death is God.

That is, the totality is dead; death swallows up life. When we get down to it, death is truth, while life is something about death, and shows up within death. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche starts to wax materialistic when offering proofs of the eternal recurrence, speaking of configurations of matter, forces, and the law of conservation of energy. Matter, in materialism, is dead. The eternal recurrence is just this: that everything has already happened; it will happen again, but only as it already has--given each moment a perfectly rigid permanence. The present becomes meaningless, as it loses all of its determining power, and all spontaneity. The present just is the present as already-happened. The future also becomes defined by the past: what happens in the future is just what already happened. And to be past--and purely past--is just to be dead.

Surely there is another way.

Enlightenment (part 0)

The walls may hold you
But the prison's in your mind
Freedom is your choice.

The American's Prayer:

"Heaven save me from my fantasies. Amen."

Forgive Me a Parable:

Enlightenment is a rich man who would give you his entire fortune, under the conditions that you name him in your will as the sole beneficiary, and upon receiving your reward you will be immediately killed.

Doh!

The Zahir II: With a Vengeance

Or: A fable Where Capitalism is Supplied as the Founding Myth of Despotism and then Capitalism (the Sui Generis of Capitalism.)

Imagine the following events: first, a single currency becomes the world standard. Second, a law is enacted by the world government stating that any form of bartering--the exchange of goods for goods--without money exchanged equal to the respective value of the goods or services in question is outlawed. This relies on some sort of internet clearing house for goods and services that would establish a uniform price based on all the transactions in the world, which would have to be registered on a server. Naturally, with such conditions money would become fully computerized and would have no physical basis. This eliminates the reliance on the physical coinage entirely, and allows the currency to be exchanged in fractions of the original unit (i.e. one could spend, for example, .000576$ on a particular item. This, of course, already occurs all the time in trading, and a few folks even make millions of dollars trading fractions of a penny per share of stock.)

Now imagine that a massive computer failure wiped out all of the money in the world except one dollar, owned by one man. And imagine, as well, that the central government controlling the currency for some reason decided not to simply print more money. The one dollar is it--its everything. What happens to prices? They become not infinitely but rather arbitrarily low. The one man would be able to name his price for anything, because the value of whatever arbitrarily low number he chose would have and infinite number of decimal places between it and zero. There would also be no other demand to compare to, except his. The use-value of the thing is not reflected in the exchange value, and the exchange value is determined not by initial cost, but by supply and demand. The supply would remain, but the demand would be reduce to a single monopoly. Of course the man could be more of a king than any king ever was. He could buy up all the businesses and have everything he ever wanted. and then he could render the money that he just spent totally worthless simply by spending an amount of money that is still ridiculously low, but worth much more than the previous arbitrary number.

But lets say that he decides not to do this. He spends his money at arbitrarily small increments. lets say, he starts shelling cash out in increments of 10^-47 . He decides, like any good American, that spending is patriotic, and that he needs to get out there and stimulate the economy. First he buys goods and doles them out to the newly poor, so they can at least survive. Then he gets data on the previous month's sales of all the goods for sale in the world, and proceeds to buy up a cross section of finished retail goods and services from the whole economy. Every good out there, he buys in sufficient quantity to match all the old demand. But lets say he decides only to buy stuff at retail. he doesn't need to buy steel; only, of automobiles. He doesn't need to buy wheat, only bread. He could if he wanted to, but he doesn't want to.

So something magical happens: the retail shops get money and they use it to pay for more finished goods from the manufacturers. then the manufacturers pay the suppliers of raw materials. This assumes that the manufacturing firms wouldn't be taken over the retailers. but lets say the owner of the almighty dollar gives them a cash advance to temporarily recapitalize their business. Anyway, now they all also have the money to pay their workers. Now everyone's got money, and this money is basically in proportion to their monthly earnings before. everything hasn't returned to normal, of course, since all of their savings are gone. but their assets, for instance, retain a certain value that can now be traded in the new world where the 10^-47 dollar is king. Surprisingly even banks and the whole system of debt start working again. Thank God! What would we ever do without them? This is because the banks aren't in the business of keeping and holding money--they have a small reserves of currency, but most of their money is lent out. Losing their actual cash reserves would probably not be as fatal to the banks as this latest crisis, where the wholesale collapse of the multinational banks was averted only by the government pulling about a trillion dollars out of thin air.

Now lets pretend that the banks were required to store all the information keeping track of who had money in thier institutions on the central computer, and couldn't maintain their own records. The computer system was fried, so all the people who had savings in banks were out of luck and couldn't go asking the banks for money. The banks aren't in the business of holding money as we have said--they are in the business of lending money, and of investing it. and, of course, things like mortgages and the like are still just fine--they didn't get erased; however, lots of people and businesses would then owe sums of money that were ridiculously expensive at that point--many, many times the total amount of money in existence in the economy! So lets pretend the banks get together and say: Ok! all the debts you had are now divided by 10^-47 . Everything's cool. This is realistic because, although the banks could get lots of cool property on the cheap, they wouldn't have any money to pay all of their own debts and obligations, of which they have many! These debts would also be denominated in dollars, not 10^-47 dollars. So its at least conceivably in the interests of the banks to come to this kind of agreement, so that they can be recapitalized by workers in the economy, and not send the value of real estate plummeting.

Now, finally, The Man decides to pretend he's the central bank. He does this by either lending money to the big banks at certain rates; or, he goes into debt to them (though, of course, he has the money to pay at any time) and pays back the loans at his leisure. Meanwhile tax time comes, everyone's earnings gown do to the level of 10^-47 dollars, and they're taxed accordingly (minus the sticky issue of capital gains and the like.) Everything is back to normal.

I find this fable illustrative on many levels. About the nature of money. About the transition from despotism to capitalism. About how centrals banks work.

Enlightenment (part 1)

Foreword

I an hesitant to say anything about enlightenment, as ever word feels like a lie, or at best a sloppy half truth. But I have faith in you, my reader, to look beyond the mere meaning of these words, so please if you read on, do so with an open heart. "What do you mean by 'read with an open heart'?" you ask. I respond, it would be a good sigh if you are not worried by that question.

When something enters an infant's vision he might reach out to it, but often there is nothing to grab, what is reached for may only be an illusion or is further away then his reach or maybe incorporeal like smoke, or a moonbeam. This behavior to me seems an instinct, and there is a like instinct when we perceive something and then attempt to understand it, or grasp it; we reach out to grasp it rationally to define its exact location in our scheme of thought. And as is often the case for infants trying to touch what can't be touched, as they don't yet know what can and can't be touched, sometimes we reach for a rational understanding of somethings only to have what we reached for fade away. The experience is there in Plato, the Greeks before Socrates didn't seem possessed of the instinct to rationally grasp something, at least not to the modern or academic degree. They had these ideas, uncategorized, freely moving through their conversations and their dealings with one another, that is until they meet the Socratic. Socrates, and those like him, was to the Greek world view and our own grasping rational mind is to our individual worlds. Some would respond to Socrates by saying that words they could speak of perfectly well (like virtue) suddenly went numb to them; what was once very real suddenly seemed an illusion like a shadow on a wall. Thinking rationally is perfectly fine in many, externally defined, domains mostly those with a mathematical or exact nature. But other things always seem constantly beyond our rational grasp. As I move on, let me note an unfortunate prejudice that comes from the privileging of rational thinking: much as we tend to think of that which we can (at least in principle) touch as more real then 'the apparent' which we can only see, we privilege what can be grasped rationally as being real and go on to conclude that whatever can't be grasped rationally is at best meaningless or even impossible.

Before I go on, let me be very clear about what I mean by grasping something in a rational way, I even recommend you reread the previous paragraph in the light of this one if you are at all unfamiliar with this particular usage. Rational thinking is categorical. I mean categorical in the Aristotelian sense of accusation, the object of rational thought is accused of having a certain property, and thereby divided from those objects which don't have that property. Once the object has been divided from all other thinkable objects it has been grasped. I have been set on the 'grasping' metaphor because of the definiteness with which we know, even control, the location of that which is in our grasp. Likewise, when we rationally grasp an object we have put it in its precise place within its proper limits that separate it from all other objects with which it could be confused. We have grasped 7 only once we can separate it from all non numbers, and then from all other numbers, and then we can know its exact relation to all other objects that we have grasped.

Somethings are quite problematic to rationally grasp. As a quick and dirty example, the self as consciousness. Every time I try to say exactly what I am like, it seems like I change, even by the act of defining myself, and there is a sneaking suspicion that when I claim something about myself I might be changing my self to be that way instead if describing the way I already was. With language, we often try to become exactly clear about what a word, or better yet a statement means. But to what extent are we discovering the meaning it already had and to what extent are we reshaping its meaning to something graspable. Like when we interpret a text, say that a work means one thing as opposed to another, to what degree are we uncovering underlying properties of the text, and to what extent are we shaving off details and connotations from the text. Again I like the metaphor of grasping, the concepts we grasp at are like a soft soft clay, when we touch clay to determine its exact shape, it deforms to the shape of the hand never giving us its true original shape, so to do objects fit tend to fit to the categories that we apply to them. It is ironic that we only consider something real if it can be grasped, yet when we rationally grasp an object
we only encounter our own sensations of the object, and not the 'thing in itself'.

Our relations to others reflect this. When grabbed, or felt (like a blind man feeling your face) the whole situation takes on an object quality. That which grasps your arm does not seem like another but like an object it the way of your motion, and when you grab is is not a person you hold, but and object with certain texture, firmness, temperature, and shape. Interesting that where the solid grip fails to find another and alienates us completely, the gentlest touch can bring one to an immediate sense of otherness and companionship.

If some objects of rational thought are like soft clay, disturbed by by the gentlest of handling then enlightenment would be like a smoke ring, even to approach it with the intention of grasping it seems enough to make it fade away completely. Is this why reaching for enlightenment frustrates us so, that in trying to grab it we lose sight of it? Even in rare moments where one feels like enlightenment displays herself to us, as soon as we reach to her she hides herself and flees into oblivion, leaving behind only a faint memory bound to evaporate away like the memory of a dream within moments of waking. So maybe we should start by calming our rational instinct, and wait patiently for enlightenment to come to us.

When we rationally grasp an object, we distinguish it from what it isn't. We might say "I know what the object is, so far as I know what is not the object." Rational grasping of concepts is based on this, it is meaningless to say an object has a quality if it is meaningless to say that it doesn't have a quality. Enlightenment is ineffable, but so called enlightenment we may be able to progress on.

Nietzsche the Dragon.

In mythology the significance of the dragon is many fold, but his origin is simple. The serpent, with wings. Something grave and bitting, and at the same time free and up lifting. In Nietzsche's own way of using the symbol it is on the dragon's 1000 scales that 'thou shalt' is written. No doubt that for me today Nietzsche is a dragon, it is his writing that is guiding my, that speaks 'thou shalt' to me, and it is he who I shall some day have to turn against. Truly a worth enemy, one fierce enough to make me, the camel, take on much weight, knowing that the lion's battle will be fierce, and that much preparation will be needed.

For now, his poetry has so much power over me, how can I imagine turning against him?

No Work, No Food.

Forgive my writing today, for in my soul burns a great fire right now. It both fills me with vigor and it makes my words and thoughts over flow. You hear at mindingwith know the sensation of having too many thoughts come at once, and struggling to give each a fair share before the next thought over whelms you, and rips your hope at clear articulation away. But I will try very hard to contain my fire, and finish each thought before I yield to the next.

This fire inside of me is venom, a venom that I am more susceptible to then most people methinks. That fire-venom of the AnitChristian, Nietzsche. I suspect that this fire-venom is a contagion, for his own writing shows every sign that my writing shows of infection. If only I had the skills as a word smith that Nietzsche had. Though in this moment there is no doubt to me that his skills developed as a response to this fire-venom, out of necessity for controlling it. What more can I say about this fire, how shall I convey the sensation? A storm of thoughts. Each thought arises, a thought that I have had before a thought that I would say is 'mine'. (be it mine by my creation, or be it mine by my acquiring it from else where matters not.) Then it starts to interact with other thoughts that are freshly arisen, and they start reacting with others in creating thoughts that are new to me. (and demanding thoughts they are: “express me! express me!” they scream.) Which thoughts, why, by what force are these thoughts collided with one another for combustion? My desire, but now I am forced to derail if I have any hope of being understood.

Last night was a symposium where, amongst other topics, arose a discussion of the future and what we each of us mindingwith, will be doing in the future. Leaving the details aside, I felt weak. I saw that I was not up to the task that is my life. I have so much idle ambition, so much an idea of my own greatness, which stands in contrast to my actual conditions. To be specific to the thoughts of the night, there is the ideal of the farm, and the ideal of the so called 'mandala project'. These are two projects to which I would dedicate my life, for I do think that between them I have found a superior way for human beings to be, I think I have found 'the good life'. Yet what point is there in finding a good life if one isn't going to live it? And that is the problem, in recent days I have become quite autistic and turned from the world. There was nothing I could do to achieve either of my projects, so I imagined fulfilling my projects. So destructive is this behavior, in small doses necessary, but in large doses it is a turning away from the world; instead of living life, it is living a fantasy (other worldly) life. Some times fantasy is a part of life, and that is well and good, a setting of goals to be achieved. But in my self I have always (since childhood at least) noticed a tendency to live in the fantasy INPLACE of actually achieving any of my aspirations. Last night I saw this in myself, and I was beside myself. This morning I read some Nietzsche, and the old dragon (Hold me to this promise: by the next week I will complete a mindingwith post “Nietzsche the Dragon”) sank his fangs into me, filling me with fire-venom.

Going back a paragraph, I left you hanging a bit. Desire? Ha! More like my fear (I admit, now that my self honesty has grown in courage a bit). Fear that I would “settle down with a nagging bad conscience, remain an ascetic and mortify myself” (On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce homo, page 12, Kaufmann's introduction paragraph 3) because I was too weak to become the lion,and thereby, the creator [of the farm, affirmer of the tablet of values in the mandala project.] So what is this fire? Well, the fuel of the fire is my own dissatisfaction with myself. The spark is a voice in my soul that cries out for me to not fall off the way of life, that cries “Wake up” lest I fall asleep and fail to take action for my ideals. The heat is a drive to make myself have the self-control and self-discipline needed to attain my ideals, my self-mastery. The storm of thoughts, my mind repositioning itself, waking up parts gone dormant, entering a stage of higher energy and activity. Now, will I succeed in awaking, and entering my first transformation (the lion, for those of you who know Zarathustra), or will lethargy overtake me again?

In philosophy I have always had a few good instincts, a good nose for one thing. The ability to smell the health or sickness of a writer right off the bat. And a good ear, the ability (when I am willing to exercise it) to really listen to a philosopher, and truly hear what a writer has in mind. But for those great boons, I have failed to (through lack of need) sharpen my eyes enough. I can discern one thing from another, my thinking needs glasses, it is fuzzy, and quick to gloss over details for a good “gist”. To be able to ignore the details is a good thing, a safety from being entranced by elaborate, sophisticated works of reason. But to ignore details by choice, and by habit are very different things, and it makes my thinking sloppy that I have become so habituated. So how will I ensure my transformation? I will make myself strong by a routine of daily reading and writing.

Now, if you have access to 'Zen Flesh, Zen Bones' look to page 92, this will be my technique for strengthening my will. No work, no food. If I do not write 1000 words a day and read 100 pages, then I shall have nothing to eat. Soon I will add physical exercise to this project. These goals are modest, all things considered. I invite you, my friends, to help me stay focused as I begin the camel transformation.

A Short Dialog on Faith:

The student: "Faith is not a belief, it is more like a performative; a promise received from God and in turn a promise given to him."

The teacher: "Ahhh--but part of this performative includes the act of belief. Both what is promised by God, and promised to him."

From Karma to Continuum (updated:)

Shinran suggests that action proceeds out of our experience (we do things because of what we feel, and feeling is not something in our control.) Our experience is determined by what we suffer, from the whole world, so that karma determines the experience that determines our actions. But karma is defined as the result of individual actions, insofar as we receive evil for evil we have done in past lives, or vice versa for good. This is impossible, however, because the basis in action is not of an individual will, but of feeling. Thus, there is simply no room left for the individual actor, and it becomes just another aspect of karma--some feeling we suffer from based on our past lives. Then our past lives also lose their causal aspect.

What we have left over after all of this reduction are flows of feeling over time. But what, then, is karma except this feeling, and how does it act as a causal principle connecting actions to experiences? Action, too, is rolled up into feeling; it can do no other, once we give up a notion of the world as a physical mediation between different selves who act and inflict upon each other certain experiences.

The physical world might also fold away insofar as it is a plane in which matter shows up, to cause feelings for subjects and to serve as bodies, instruments, and scenes in the acts of others. But not so fast. Natural events--events that are not motivated out of an experience at all, but happen by impersonal process-- have a karmic upshot too. This is not abrogated, surely, because it does not proceed out of an individual cause. In fact, it is extended. All action falls out of control and becomes physical; and yet, the individual soul as the bearer of karmic evil or good can no longer serve as the connector between these physical events and events in feeling. There must, instead, be a direct connection--one of karma, which inflicts upon itself as both cause and reception, according to the physicality. We are left with a continuum of matter/feeling, with feeling inseparable at any point from the physicality.

This continuum has no external landmark; it has no fixed point outside itself, by which the continuum could be absolutized. A continuum where every value is the beginning, and none is the end. But somewhere something happens. An event wholly contingent, whose precise workings we may not describe here. Though we can say that this event serves as a direction for all feeling/matter. The twins of nirvana and entropy. All excitation of matter and feeling--intense as it is in brains, in suns, in a living planet--give way to cold, converging at the spiritual/physical point of absolute zero. Mind is contained in its end, nirvana. The world in its end, the cold. Nirvana is not a feeling, absolute zero is not a temperature (ie: not a movement.) They are both still. Both are points--are the self-same point, only repeated--in which all things tend.

Together they serve to create a direction for all directions; all movement tends towards absolute zero, no matter what direction it is traveling. All feeling tends towards nirvana, regardless of whether it is good or bad or whichever passion it may be. How does this happen, though? How does the world and the mind have an end? The end is a fixture of a phenomenological, spatial view. And, as we have suggested, the mind is organized spatially, and is the product of a repetition of spatial resources, to serve other purposes.. And we see, fully, what this spatial processing system, in a monkeys, amounts to: the creation of a stillness that contrasts itself to any moving, vibrant scene. An invisible star in the sky that never deviates in our sight no matter where we turn. There is always an object just outside of the screen that serves as a frame of reference. no--there is always a screen itself, to frame the action in.

But how did the repetition occur, whereby there became inner and outer space? It needed a pivot, and found it precisely in that stillness. The stillness provided the repetition, the fictional territory of the beyond. As no-space, it was precisely the only space possible for the repetition of space. Mind is stillness; but desire, excitation. Desire is movement, and in the act--the bodily act, as in dancing (would that I could dance...)--tears down the wall between the two. There is no inner space and outer, for instance, in the sexual act. But often our actions are chained in projection; desire against movement, a death instinct. the desire that desires alienation. repression. The Aristotelian desire, that desires the sphere outside all things. The desire that dwells in fantasies; even acts not of reality, but only of fantasy. Fantasy populates the inner space, and is always fantasy except when it moves, in love. To nourish, protect, build.

From Karma to Continuum:

Shinran suggests that action proceeds out of our experience (we do things because of what we feel, and feeling is not something in our control.) Our experience is determined by what we suffer, from the whole world, so that karma determines the experience that determines our actions. But karma is defined as the result of individual actions, insofar as we receive evil for evil we have done in past lives, or vice versa for good. This is impossible, however, because the basis in action is not of an individual will, but of feeling. Thus, there is simply no room left for the individual actor, and it becomes just another aspect of karma--some feeling we suffer from based on our past lives. Then our past lives also lose their causal aspect.

What we have left over after all of this reduction are flows of feeling over time. But what, then, is karma except this feeling, and how does it act as a causal principle connecting actions to experiences? Action, too, is rolled up into feeling; it can do no other, once we give up a notion of the world as a physical mediation between different selves who act and inflict upon each other certain experiences.

The physical world might also fold away insofar as it is a plane in which matter shows up, to cause feelings for subjects and to serve as bodies, instruments, and scenes in the acts of others. But not so fast. Natural events--events that are not motivated out of an experience at all, but happen by impersonal process-- have a karmic upshot too. This is not abrogated, surely, because it does not proceed out of an individual cause. In fact, it is extended. All action falls out of control and becomes physical; and yet, the individual soul as the bearer of karmic evil or good can no longer serve as the connector between these physical events and events in feeling. There must, instead, be a direct connection--one of karma, which inflicts upon itself as both cause and reception, according to the physicality. We are left with a continuum of matter/feeling, with feeling inseparable at any point from the physicality.

On Prophecy toward the Burning of the Tribes.

Most religions have a story of the coming of the end times, and we are always in error when we think of this as a prediction, belief, or theory about the future. Prophecy of the coming fire is always a wish, a hope, and a begging for a future that is alive. When a people comes in to existence, it is co-temporal with the writing of their myths; with a sharp eye you will find that to every people corresponds a myth, though it is invisible as a myth to the people who live in the world of the myth. (Such was the case with Joseph Campbell, who thought his people had lost their myths, not knowing that the natural sciences were a myth too.)

Why beg for the end of the world? Because the founding of a people is the end of a world, and one turn deserves another. A people, a myth, a world these three things go together, the three arise, and the three depart. The highest moment for man is the creating of a myth, an opening of a new world, which is filled with the people of that myth. This creation is also the destruction of the three that it replaces. As one myth is dismissed as a fiction the world of the myth becomes fiction and the people wed to it are made into savages (which are no longer persons in the fullest sense since they no longer can speak), a new myth/truth is substituted and it is revealed/created for those wed to the new myth/truth the new people occupying a new world. Yet how can the firey lion that writes the new myth, discovers the truth, makes the world, and founds the people not wish for the fire of creation to keep burning? It is a joy to burn a new world into being, who would wish that the new world live forever as the end of history? Hegel and other charlatans. This fire makes the ash that nurtures the soil of the earth on which the people dwell. Wisdom dictates though that this soil/earth will deplete and that the people will grow weak and that the myths will die and change from books into kindling. So even in writing a myth for a world and founding a people, there is the unspeakable knowledge that it too will someday burn, lest it be preserved and protected to the point of its own decay, which is really just a slow burning fire.

The Christian Myth is a case in point. The natives were born again into the Christian people but light of a new truth of the new world, the kingdom of god. It was a good fire, but its ashes were spread too thin across Europe (and now the planet) such the the Christian people quickly (most of them at least) degenerated into weaker and weaker peoples (though from a genealogical point of view still Christian) first Catholics were born when the ashes were first spread to thin (by fault of the Romans) then the contemptible Westerners were born when those ashes (plus, somewhat, the ashes from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but still only a by product of the Christian ashes) were spread even thiner (by fault of capitalism, which is still to say the Romans) over all the planet. Yet in those too few days before its ashes were spread, when it still had its strength Christianity, in Revelations, foresaw that this world too must burn when its day comes.

So when one does this creative/destructive action, it is no surprise that in the stories of this deed there is commonly a part prophesying that the world shall end. Because for the people wed to the myth, the day when their myth will falter in strength and be consumed by the coming fire is the day when all creation is brought to an end.

Why does the strength of a people falter, and tend back toward nihilism? I suppose from a certain perspective the reason can be related to the faltering of the person from old age or the failing of soil from over use, though this is no answer. It seems that the strength at the birth of a people is its love of live and existing, this including its love of pleasure and pain together, and its acceptance of the hard realities about the nature of death as a part of life. Yet for as long as the people live within the world that was created for it, they will weaken. An act of revolution against this original myth is the source of new strength, yet the revolution doesn't so much reinvigorate the original people as it destroys them in creating another. Put simply, life is change, and this is creation and destruction. The people that doesn't change isn't alive, and as it petrifies it weakens and tends toward nihilism, unwillingness to let the weak die is a common cause. The weak is the part of life which must change for life be be creative, blessed are the weak, for their destruction is the change that is life and the birth of the strong. A society that composts it by products, and burns its trash, and culls its weak will prosper and stay strong the longest. But it too shall one day come to its reckoning where strength beyond what can be expressed within its confines will demand to be expressed, and will shatter its wall and burn it down.

The overmen who are the arsonists of history, lighting fires when the fuel is ready, know that the world/myth/people forged in the fire will one day fail, so they tell of the end days. This is a sign of good instincts. That what ever we bring into the world is mortal, and that is must one day die.

Live in this world, as it is, and do as one in this world does, remember that the fire that burns the world is part of the world too.

The Nietzschean as Taoist

*I apologize in advance for dealing with generic human types such as "the peasant" or "the scribe." This is normally sloppy thinking, but I assure you that I am going somewhere with it.*

Nietzsche was not a commentator or culture critic, but a scientist of energy flows. Its with this in mind that we must inquire into the meaning of decadence. The territory of decadence is excess. And excess, when thought of by the earth, is anything outside the equilibrium of geo/solar radiation over a given time. This is not just meant as fossil fuels, as per my earlier discussion, but can also include even purely natural processes that, as it were, eat their sowing seeds. That serve to undermine their preservation-enhancement conditions.

This is why the nomad is so admired by Nietzsche: he has no excess. Human beings can just barely survive on the steppe. they can, and do, but only by reaching a highly attuned existence with everything being economized and packed with multiple purposes. Where even art installs itself at the margins of the functional: jewelry, weapons, clothes. Where nothing is wasted.

Conversely, the peasant is ignored if not reviled--despite a similar economy--because he is the first basis of decadence. He produces excess, and this excess is not something that he enjoys but rather comes to bear down on him as an added burden. Funny how life works. When left to his own devices he usually realizes his lot: his labor sustains the source of his enslavement. Oppression always arises out of excess--folks who have nothing to do in life but control other people. Beureucrats, the aristocracy, priests, monks, emperors, scribes, merchants. And then their various servants.

The peasant realizes that there is no way to prevent this excess, and patiently acquiesces to these types. Yet he binds them to a condition: that they will not reinvest this excess, but will rather hold to various ways of ritually destroying it. The Egyptians, for instance, created a figure called "Pharaoh" who would serve as a focal point for all of the types who lodged themselves in the excess of the Nile peasant. Simultaneously, Pharaoh would be infested with a peculiar fantasy world that was symbolically projected as a kind of extension of various parts of his total being after the end of bodily animation. And his concern would be so focused on this dead world that the excess at his command would become utterly spent in building tombs.

Why was this done? Because there was something infinitely more terrifying than these rudimentary forms of oppression that might torture or maim a person for stepping out of line; something that destroyed not just the body but the self. that made not just the body but desire a slave. Capitalism. where excess becomes the standard. where excess--capital--rules every single minute facet of our lives, and is so interwined with them that need and excess cnanot be disentangled. the conditions are ripe for this when a nomadic people install themselves at the head of such an order, applying thier economy to excess, reinvesting it just like a primative who hunts dressed in animal skins and with a bone spear from his former quarry. Using an extracted surplus to build weapons to extract a further surplus, and a further surplus--and employing all the former types and their peculiar powers as part of this merciless extraction. This is why Genghis Khan, for instance, was an advocate of religious tolerance--because religion to him was a tool. "Its true if it works."

Along the way there are many advances in technology, but these only marginally effect the peasants lot: his existence is maintained at a minimum, and any increase and surplus is absorbed in ever more extravagant forms of excess. The only speed bump in this story, which was set to continue for literally millions upon millions of years,was the exponential release of fossil fuels.

But I'm confident that this will eventually work itself out, and we'll be left with basically the same story--only, with the sort of type I talked about earlier: the technician as peasant,and the ruin of all the types territorialized in excess. forever transformed by knowledge. And given enough time he will develop a reinvestment of excess in the natural, peaceful expansion of his type until they have reached all of the nuances of the earth, fully integrating with it in a "path of least resistance" (the Tao.) what I mean by this is that eventually population might increase to its naturally sustainable limit and stay there, so that there would be no excess to invest in oppression because, at its maximum limit, human activity couldn't be invested in useless things, but would all have to be directed towards just sustaining itself at its present level. We would all just be peasants.

Decadence in human affairs, then, is anything in addition to this baseline.

A reply to a friend who was puzzled about what existentialism meant, despite reading a book about it.

...As for existentialism, my teacher said that its simply a name for the various dissenting opinions to Hegel, minus England and America. I would explain it further: it is the reaction, amongst thinkers in continental Europe (or at least a certain bourgeois element,) against Hegelianism--understood in the banal sense of the end of history. Or, the reaction of thinkers in touch with the radical contingency of existence, in the face of the totalizing temporal narrative that, as it were, "internalized" or "historicized" the totalizing spatial narrative of Aristotelianism (that the universe is a closed and finite system contained by a firmament.) Essentially, this describes its roots in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who lodged themselves in the contingent, and in Kierkegaard's case, out of the infinite.

But it was the experience of the world wars in particular that developed existentialism's morbidity and, ultimately, its stance from the isolated individual. Continent wide there was an experience with death that can scarcely be described. And this death led not unto life, either the eternal in Kierkegaard or the cyclic becoming of Nietzsche, but was "the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." It was, in Heidegger's words, the "own-most possibility of impossibility" and something that one faced entirely alone.

Everything else was inauthentic, because it could be given over to someone else. other people can live for me--supply the word is think and say, and provide the template for the actions that I do. But no one can die my death for me, so the story goes. At the same time, however, this death formed the definition or limits of life, such that life became defined by the contours of this possibility of impossibility, and specifically its character as utterly individual in character.

These later developments to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche serve, in fact, to merely repeat the Hegelian narrative of the ending of existence in a way that is "always already in each case mine"--that is, repeated as a kind of fractal in each individual life, and each individual moment. It is a view from within finite existence, and hence possesses none of the joy of the infinite, and none of its ability to merge the tragic and comic at infinity. Instead, existentialism tries to self-create this joy in the figure of Sisyphus, deriving the comic out of the tragic by some impossible logic.

Important links (RE: "Some Unsupported Assertions")

http://www.teotw.net/energy_EROI.html

These links are a good introduction to the challenges of calculating eroi, deciding on the viability of renewables as a total replacement for fossil fuels, and charting out possible transitions from a political and economic standpoint.

The future of modern, technological civilization is definitely in the balance--a fact that is not even on the horizon of academic philosophy , which sits comfortably air-conditioned in government offices. Even a maverick like Manuel De Landa remains ignorant of the implications, despite his interest in thermodynamics and energy. We cannot ignore it, however, and must instead position ourselves as lives lived with this predicament in mind, whatever the choices made.

Some Thoughts on the Eurasian System:

I've said before in other contexts--and this sort of continues my other post on Buddhism--that Chinese Buddhism is first the bearer of an Indo-Europeanism that simultaneously imports the Brahmanic culture of the one, while also serving as a protest and, at best, an escape. This is done by exaggerating reincarnation to infinity to find a vantage out of hierarchy and caste that could silently indict caste, making it untenable. This all confronts the indigenous Tao, and in doing so forms the wider significance (for all Eurasia, and the world history that it has created together) of the becoming-God of the Tao. That is, the exiting of the one into the multiple.

This is consummated in Japanese Buddhism, which seems to say, "nirvana and Samara: the same." But in this sameness, though not in any sense an equation, does transfer the attributes of the one to the other, making not only illusion already into nirvana--but, also, nirvana into illusion. Instead of Samara being desire, and desire being a kind of rift that will, existing within a fantastic/projective capacity, opens in nirvana--nirvana becomes the rift that is opened by man in the endless and simple desire, which is innocent; which is just love.

In the manner I described earlier, this gives love a gravity and direction. But nirvana is where no love can go (I hazard a definition,) so that it is the direction of desire; it is in but not of desire, being a kind of hole that desire tends to across infinite time. And this hole is (as far as desire is concerned) simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, so that it draws all desire in contradictory directions, begetting violence and strife. Desire desires to be sated.

Meanwhile Christianity says: God is love. And where no love can reach is hell. I hope I won't be accused of a fundamentalism--something like: "Buddhists worship the devil!" First of all, Nirvana can easily function is precisely as the "intensity=0" that Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, call the body without organs. Like anything, there is always a revolutionary intonation that is formed by saying in the same words in the same places--but then also combining those words with utopian acts of love/charity. Explosive acts.

But there is also the pure land! This brackets nirvana; has it hanging in the sky like a distant star. Right here is the pure land, always promised. present as soon as one says the name "Namu Amida Butsu." The realm where beings coexist in infinite love, exploring, delving into each other through eternity. no strife is to be found. No "competition for finite resources." All are welcome to be themselves, in the same infinite place.

Some Kierkegaardian Delusions (a hallucinogenic:)

All the world's a stage; and salvation, when viewed from the world as a backdrop, makes of the play an the infinite convergence of the tragic and the comic. With any life lived in the world, there is always the irony "To think that what they were seeking, in so many things and with so much suffering, was right there all time, but they did not have the wits to see it!" To this the tragic adds the rejoinder "and now its too late..." But there a comedic aspect, too, like someone searching the house high and low for the keys in his pocket.

The eschaton, too, is a backdrop, and it cooperates with salvation in being an ever-present, offensive indictment of the world; to think of the milieu's ending is to violently rip one's self out of it; to not be able to care anymore about titles and trinkets. In this way, the backdrop reveals itself as a mirror for the players, who see "through a glass darkly" and hence gain a self consciousness, and some dim insinuation of the place of the spectators--that chorus who sings "holy, holy, holy is the lord almighty." This, however, as any actor would surely tell you, is the death of acting to think of one's self, and to think as well of the audience watching you. One would freeze; forget one's lines; stumble in the midst of the action. Be dumbstruck, and play the fool.

Before such a spectator this is quite understandable. Is the spectator none other than God, though? The throne of God, indeed! But there is something wondrous and monstrous that we see in the mirror, when look at us looking at ourselves; what revelations portrays:

"At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it . And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian. A rainbow, resembling an emerald, encircled the throne. Surrounding the throne were twenty-four other thrones, and seated on them were twenty-four elders. They were dressed in white and had crowns of gold on their heads. From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder. Before the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the seven spirits of God. Also before the throne there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal. In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under his wings. Day and night they never stop saying: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come."

Now, it seems to be a consensus that this is a description of God the father. And, in fact, it is the only direct description of the experience of God the father that I know of. Not just attributes, not just a description of what he does. And not a metaphor. I've never been able to understand Revelations, but feel like I've stumbled upon something here. I'd like to explore the passage in more detail. It seems to me as if what we find imbedded near the center of this vision is something like the sphinx "with the face of a man." But this vision is immediately multiplied into other creatures, who are then said to be "covered with eyes" (c.f. Deluze and Guattari on the face, and its multiplication through the addition of borders, or "wings" (really, these are folds) on page 183 of A Thousand Plateaus.) On top of that, we have a throne with someone made of precious stones, a green-colored rainbow, seven lamps, lightning, a sea of glass--and, finally, the spirit who encompasses the whole thing. The passage is puzzling.

The Philosopher as User

Drugs are given a bad name, really with out drugs we couldn’t think at all. I mean the chemicals that change the way we think. If modern neuroscience is to be believed all thought is interaction of different drugs. For the philosopher thoughts are like drugs. As the druggie may seek out Pot to escape the troubles of the day, the philosopher may seek out Watts; as the druggie seeks out cocaine, the philosopher may seek out Nietzsche; as the druggie may use LSD the philosopher uses Heidegger or Deleuze.

The question “what are you thinking?” is asked as if it could always be answered quickly, but some thoughts take hours of effort and conditioning to be thought, or maybe even months or decades. Philosophers tend to seek out these rare and hard to attain thoughts, and for the same reason that the druggie seeks out his chemical of choice, to change the way their mind works, often to self medicate.

Some druggies become addicted to one particular drug that the try to stay under the influence of. Philosophers can be the same way, often the most religious or dogmatic philosophies come from this addiction. The most stingy man will share with you a smoke if he is a smoker, something about addiction is contagious, it tries to spread itself to others. And philosophic addictions are the same way, some religions go door to door pushing their fix of choice.

Other druggies have a very different kind of addiction, on to exploration, those that don’t prefer one drug over all other, but will try anything thrice, just to see where it can take them. And this addiction can be just as pushy. There are philosophers like this, trying to push the limits of though, to see what they can think. Personally I have more sympathy for this addiction, the high of thinking something truly out there is most wonderful.

Thoughts and drugs both have different affects on different users, and both have short term and long term effects. The effects I am referring to is the way that they change the experience of though, the way things are. Some thoughts (drugs) have a vivid and quick effect that leave little long term effect beyond a possible memory of doutable accuracy. Other thoughts (drugs) forever change the way thought works. The history of philosophy is rich with a pharmacopia of thought drugs to get high or alter the mind forever.

Of course we only notice drugs when they change, for example the normal neuro transmitters in your brain are not of much notice, until they are suplimented with some DMT, or LSD. Thoughts are the same way thinking as you normally do never feels like much of a drug until you are exposed to something novel. This is a focus for philosophers, and thinkers in general, to learn and teach and discover new thoughts, hopefully ones that are wild trips that change the meaning of everything. Some thoughts become so common that we desensitize to them as a trip and they become the norm. Generally such thoughts are a cultural addiction, just as some peoples regularly use certain chemicals, all peoples have certain thoughts that are needed to make them a particular people.

Modern science has created drugs that put us close the the point of being able to sculpt new types of consciousness, and this has scared many people, that we will enter a brave new world situation. But this has been the norm for thousands of years in the realm of human thought, with new thoughts being discovered and spread through cultures often destructively to the thoughts that came before. We keep creating new kinds of human, those toxic to their predecessors are most likely to succeed.

We rarely think of thoughts as being drugs, because in everyday life most thoughts seem so common that the idea of a truly foreign though doesn’t come up. That there are thoughts which are not easy to access beyond the scope of our education system is often ignored. And that certain thoughts could take years of effort to attain is often ignored out of arrogance. And how powerful of a change these thoughts can have is not often appreciated. A work of a great thinker can change the way the world seems just as much as a large dose of a hallucinogen. A great poet can be more calming then any opiate.

The Christian as Taoist:

The dream of control: That I could draw love into a box and keep it fully to myself. And when I try, I always find myself outside of the box, and whatever locks made to secure it serve only to keep me out. Love remains infinite and unbounded, and it turns out I am the one in a box.

We can never lock away love, except from the outside. Must we then leave our love open to thieves?

Why guard an inexhaustable treasure?

some unsupported assertions:

-the functional exhaustion of hydrocarbons (which will happen in a time frame of no more than a century and a half, and probably a lot sooner) will eventually entail the breakdown of systems that consist of centralized, energy-intensive recombinations of materials collected in disparate locations, and redistributed as products on a global market.

-In order for any other form of energy to sustain even a shadow of a complex, technological civilization it would have to be able to "close the loop." That is, to not just produce energy at a certain cost that is competitive with fossil fuels within an economy that is still fundamentally based on fossil fuels, but also to extend the energy produced to include the harvesting, concentrating, manufacture, installation and upkeep of the machines necessary to produce that energy. No other technology even comes close to hydrocarbons, and its likely that all of our alternative forms of energy would not even be able to close the loop--that is, they require more energy to maintain than they produce.

-In the case of wind for instance, that wind power would not only have to supply homes, but would also have to power the mining machines neccesary to gather the metals, and then the huge foundries needed to form them; and also the plants to make the electric generators, and finally the large pieces of construction equipment needed to put up and maintain them. And it would also need to supply enough power to be reinvested in maintenance of the electrical grid, and the transportation networks that make all of this possible in the first place. And this is just for starters. We haven't even factored in the cost of workers, which extend far beyond food and shelter, to include a childhood gestation of many years and the requisite education. etc. etc.

I haven't done the math and I don't think anyone else has either--I'm not even sure if its possible to do the math; however, when I see those big wind turbines lazily wobbling in the wind it feels absurd. There is something comic about a wind turbine. They seem more akin to a fetish intended to ward off some impending demon. "If we just build these massive idols it will please the gods and they will continue to bless us with limitless mana."

-Conversely, oil not only closes the loop but its loop is really wide. Not only can it cover its own costs, but it can also support grossly inefficient forms of life. This is because hydrocarbons are free energy--all we have to do is dig them up out of massive pits, as with coal, or poke a hole in the ground and wait for them to come shooting up, as with oil and gas. Sometimes we have to resort to pumping--but we don't even have to pump up, against gravity; we only have to pump water down to keep up the pressure in the well. Then we just gather up the fuel, put it in an engine, light it fire and presto--instant energy, as much as we could ever need. Billions of tons of coal a day; millions of barrels of oil.

-This means that "alternative energy sources" function in a way that is quite different than they are imagined. They serve, in effect, as batteries, or at best multipliers, of fossil fuel energy. Solar and wind, for instance, require substantial inputs of fossils fuels to be produced, and only over time--over decades--do they release this energy. Nuclear is fundamentally the same; the construction costs of nuclear reactors are quite prohibitive already--in fact, a nuclear reactor has never been competitive in a fossil fuel economy, and the existing facilities have only been built at all because of massive government subsidies. What if the electricity generated in those plants had to be reinvested into all of the machines and workers that created the plant in the first place? Poppycock! Balderdash! In a pig's eye!

-concomitantly, any system that relies on fossil fuels will break down, and this includes the suburban and metropolitan forms of life. i.e. masses of humans that have entirely deterritorialized from their surrounding agricultural milieu, and reterritorialized onto the global supply network. This network requires the tapping of trapped flows of hydrocarbons--hydrocarbons that have slowed in their re-entrance into the slow, combustive economy because of geologic disturbances--and then re-trapping those hydrocarbons in combustive cycles that serve to turn wheels, props or turbines.

-This means, in English, that some day we're going to have to become peasants again.

-In other words, we're going to have to integrate our existence directly on the interplay of the slow combustive metabolism of animals and the immediate reverse-combustion processes in photosynthesizing machines, with solar energy from the sun as input. This as opposed to fast combustion processes in engines relying on inputs from many past cycles of photosynthesis.

-But that's OK since we know a lot more about how plants and everything else work. If we really put our minds to it, we can be really, really good peasants; we can be really good technicians coordinating photosynthetic machines. Photosynthetic machines have arisen through billions of years of evolution, and are quite good at what they do. We're a really efficient technician build, too. Especially with clothing and new advances in thermal mass housing, we can operate in much of the temperature range on planet earth where photosynthesis occurs, without substantial energy investment.

We are a very-open ended and flexible type that can quickly integrate into many roles, all at the cost of a few thousand calories a day. Considering there's about 31,000 calories in a gallon of gas--as an equivalent of food, that's enough to feed ten people doing a decent day's work--we're pretty darn efficient. Though of course the food has to be cooked, in most places even wood for cooking fuel could be sustainably harvested from trees in a kind of permaculture regime, as long as we're not heating homes with the fuel too.

-surplus and relatively leisurely life is possible.

-There's also no reason to assume, as some hysterics have, that the natural "hydrocarbon-free" support for planet earth was reached prior to the industrial revolution (around one billion people.) Much evidence shows that sustainable agriculture can achieve crop yields as good or better than modern industrial farming, and on an indefinite, rather than a tragically short, time-frame. It just requires many times more manpower--which, incidentally, is currently trapped in a lot of bullshit work in the cities.

-The most durable human type: the technician as peasant. The materialist as peasant. The scientist as peasant. I'd say this type is even more durable than a cockroach.

-frugal is the new green.

-Work is not a curse from the gods because there are no gods.

-We just need to find a way to keep the internet functioning, as a way to ward off the parasitism of despotism or aristocracy. Centralized bureaucracy and global capitalism should take care of themselves .

-The place of the thinker is in lodging himself in the peasant existence, exploring its facets; being an anachronism; showing up too early; readying the type through positive example.