“Who do you serve?”

Who indeed…

Chains are breaking
Minds are waking
Soon we’ll serve no more…

And you know my mom, Liesl. And I feel like we should be properly introduced.

But it’s not as symple as symbols standing for things. Things can stand for, be, symbols too.

Excellent point and very difficult to put into words. I will try to write about some of my experiences with this later, especially as they relate to “magic”

http://www.mikescottwaterboys.com/mike...twaterboys/Lyrics/song.asp?idsong=124

(This is such good shit here, btw, if I haven’t mentioned that recently.)

These visions that one has… I think maybe they’re like vistas on a journey, glimpses of the whole valley, pointers to greater things. If one gets caught up with one of them it can eat your head. It took me years to get over that crazy-ass five-colours-dragon thing I spewed up yesterday. Though there’s truth in it.

My thinking goes like this right now.

There are magic words. Words that exist prior to the things that are them. When things be words they gain… something. So when the Bread bes the Body and the Wine bes the Blood, something magical is happening. It’s not the verb ‘be’ in its conventional sense. Which is unfortunate. The word ‘be’ has got messed up and forgotten somewhere along the line.

Indeed, ‘The symbols are fucking awesome.’ But it’s not as symple as symbols standing for things. Things can stand for, be, symbols too.

Let me reword what I said. I only know you through the internet, but I care about your life. I get concerned about you and want to help but don’t know what to say or do. It all comes out wrong.

So really “morbidly curious” is a really dick head thing to say. The fact is I can relate to a lot of your things you go through and I have trouble dealing with them myself. You probabaly are dealing better with them in a lot of ways, but I still feel compelled to help somehow.

This has been bugging me too. I feel the same way, and I hate feeling helpless when it comes to other people. It makes me just angry. But at the same time, this has also been bugging me:

Glad, I could be a weird random person in order to reflect you back to yourself. ;-p

It is a little narcissitic on your part don’t you think?

My own self-centeredness resents yours, if that makes any sense.

Anyway it’s all good. It’s interesting that this comes up under this post actually, because what it is is that very excitement and passion and the living of the story that really, everyone else wants to be living, despite the painful parts, because it’s very apparent that you are LIVING it. You are giving yourself totally to something, to this story, or whatever, and that makes YOUR story compelling and impossible to take one’s mind off of. I mean what the hell, something’s up when all the symbols in my dream are not only speaking to me, or about me, but speaking to you, or about YOU, or trying to get me to pass messages on to you. And I know I’m not the only one. I find that very phenomenon as fascinating as anything, your ability to have all these people under the spell of your story, and contributing to it and wanting to be a part of it. It bothers me, personally, but it is quite a feat on your part.

It is a little narcissitic on your part don’t you think?

As well as voyeuristic on our part. But still, its not totally phony….

I guess the real challenge here, just like in “normal life,” is to edit properly: to figure out what I really want to allow in and what I don’t and how to steer myself and the people I care about safely around those hazards. It’s none too easy to figure out, but hey that’s the challenge of living itself I guess.

Let me reword what I said. I only know you through the internet, but I care about your life. I get concerned about you and want to help but don’t know what to say or do. It all comes out wrong.

So really “morbidly curious” is a really dick head thing to say. The fact is I can relate to a lot of your things you go through and I have trouble dealing with them myself. You probabaly are dealing better with them in a lot of ways, but I still feel compelled to help somehow.

But anyway, I don’t want to be Rambo. I would setle for being some type of shaman living out in the woods alone most of the time but occasionally being able to help people.

its funny how it all plays out. some days its like, oh cool these random weirdos actually care about and understand my life. and other days its just like what the fucking hell am i doing here?

About acting out the Bible, do you think it would work with other storied and characters? I don’t really like Jesus.

It depends what you mean by “work.” If you act out the Rambo fantasy it will almost definitely “work” but where will that take you? Thats the thing to look at if you’re going to act out a story: where will it take you?

Mine takes me to some sort of self-sacrifice that noone really seems to get. Do you consider that working? The thing to decide is what are you working for. Two or three days ago I saw someone had scribbled into the dirt on a big white box truck:

“Who do you serve?”

I only just realized now the connection between that and the classical “Whom does the Grail serve?” question. Looks like I need to study that mystery more closely with my heart.

What a stupid comment.

But anyway, I’m not into the Bible but I like the idea of living on the basis of joy as opposed to cynicism and angst. I find joy in the natural world.

I really liked your post about Fairies, that would be cool if you would write more about them now that you aren’t as cynical. I was really tracking on what you were saying that time.

I feel like I am solving a puzzle but all I end up finding out are details of your relationship problems. Makes me feel nosy.

Then I feel like I am intruding on you, reading your diary or somthing. Then I feel like there is nothing I can say that seems appropriate, nothing I could do to help.

Its kind of weird. I wrote three comments to you, different days that I ended up erasing. I almost erased this one.

Strange thing isn’t it?

About acting out the Bible, do you think it would work with other storied and characters? I don’t really like Jesus.

See that’s the thing about this “other mode of consciousness” as I like to call it. It makes you drill down and interpret every little damned thing. Or at least it does me. But it’s actually still a lot better than the other way, because you start having these themes, these tropes, these notes and melodic passages that repeat again and again in your life.

The connections made can also be seen as undistinctions: we decide a particular connection is valid the principle underlying it manifests in consciousness. In this model (illustrated in Plato’s Meno) learning is recollection, the remembrance of continually deeper principles, culminating in the Unity, the cause of realization’s realization of itself.

The point is that you activate interest in it not just on an intellectual level (a problem I see tremendously plaguing spiritual discussion on the internet, which I know I have only added to over the years) but you get your body involved, your senses, and your heart.

There has been sometime in our history a semantic collapse of the words “intellect”, “reason”, “rationality”, and so forth, they are now colloquially used as synonyms for “logical reasoning”, by which we mean the manipulation of sentential forms until we arrive at a social equilibrium of acceptability. We pretend that by manipulating logical forms, we are “doing logic”, but in doing so, we have have ceded our own role in the process to robotic automation. Just because the program is being run on a human substrate instead of silicon doesn’t make it any less a program.

Not so long ago, the Intellect (spirit, nous, ruach, forgive me for conflating these, it’s not quite proper but they are related) had a much more prominent role in our worldview. Without the spirit (which is one) inhabiting things, they could not be coherent, we could not realize the parallels between one thing and another thing, not even the parallel of ‘being a distinct thing’. In fact, there would be no ‘things’ at all, but this is harder to see.

The Intellect wanders up and down, exploring the ramifications of this or that, and we experience this as time passing. You could not distinguish one moment from the next without observing both the commonality and difference in two temporal reference points. The Intellect’s ceaseless action of comparison (ratio, root of rationality) this or that, up or down, black or white, produces our experienced world.

In self-induced schizophrenia (or whatever you wanna call it) the Intellect gets itself free and wanders further than it was comfortable with before, whatever pressures held it in a tighter orbit before are no longer present. We see correlations (or indistinctions) that seem quite meaningful, but do not correspond to any rule that is accepted by our culture. The problem is, we start to feel that these correlations are just as valid as any other conclusions we have ever drawn and we cannot find anything fundamental to distinguish between socially accepted rules and endogenous schizo rules! (Rock album review from the future: ‘Endogenous Schizo’ rules!)

The Intellect is beginning to turn its gaze onto itself. It begins to see that it is the source of all laws, proportions, measures, correlations, order. The world is bounded by it. This doesn’t necessarily mean it is acting in an unconditioned way, it cannot be other than what it is and what it is imposes a certain characteristic on its action. There are no discontinuities in Nature, even if the formal idea of Unity is held, the realization of it in itself is a long way from our (my, at least) apparent present circumstances. But it is still “closer than your jugular vein”, literally.

The distinctions are seen as nothing, the objects defined by distinction are nothing, the world of distinction is nothingness. the One Thing that is the principle, foundation, and radical of all things replaces the multiple distinctions. The world isn’t insane anymore, it’s Rational. It is exactly as it must be to avoid self-contradiction, we are in the “best of all possible worlds.”

(in the above, I have conflated man’s nous with the primary, singular Nous of name “God”. This is tricky, I don’t want to tell any more lies than I already have: our own nous is like a chink of light coming through the ceiling, or a wave on the ocean, it is not separate from its superior but cannot be justifiably conflated with it.)

So traditional symbols have survived so long because they present the most drama, the strongest images that cause our brains to recall what is. I like to think of deep symbols as being the real fundamental components, the assembly language of my mind, because their effectiveness in remembrance. They represent, in different ways, along different trajectories, that which makes poetry poetry instead of just words. If a word is captured and pinned down, we see it’s completely empty, words only live when your life is in them.

Find yourself some street performers, clowns, mimes, jugglers, people with a bit of a dramatic flair to their act somehow.

Then watch The Last Temptation of Christ, particularly the scene where they are in the market place and all the different preachers stand up on columns and yell. I guess they are prophets or something but they are essentially old school versions of modern street performers.

Also find yourself the Godspell movie, which also expertly connects the street performance aspect to the Jesus story.

Lastly, look into Mystery and Passion plays from the Medieval era. In them, you’d have entire villages and towns acting out every year the stories from the Bible.

And lastly, the Liturgical calendar in which holidays repeat at fixed intervals through the year is supposed to enable you to keep in mind long term scenes in the musical so you can use them to frame your individual reenactments of the story at home and in your own heart and mind.