The cardinal rule of writing, perhaps all creation, is to always hold a secret that can never be written, only hinted. You are looking through the works of someone who knew a secret so profound that it could barely be uttered, much less written. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

You will recognize these hints by the moments of silence they bring to your mind, or by a feeling of excitement and creative stimulation. Sometimes a shiver may run up your spine, a definite sign that you have a lead. Record or jot down notes on anything you find.

It’s a reckless sacrifice to seek words for such secrets, so be thankful of writers and appreciate the torment they subject their hearts to in prying symbols from its broken pieces.

Write your own spiritual texts. Make your own rituals then break them and remake them. Spawn a religion and a way of being every time you talk to a new person. Cast off the shackles of this useless drivel from age old texts or the cutting edge laboratories of human civilization.

These are my words, this is my prophecy. My path is not yours, but perhaps the tale of my ways will help you. Perhaps it will help me…

Axioms of My Awakening

I believe that words can touch and paint and that the language of the universe is poetry. However, no word will ever hold the truth. It can only represent it. I believe that nothing is black and white, nor is everything shades of grey. There is black, and white, and grey… millions of colours in the visible spectrum… and there are even qualities of things which our eyes are not yet evolved enough to see.

I have chosen an axiom as my operating principle: people are not stupid by default, people are not evil, in general.  Everyone has a profound place in the dimension of the sacred, for better or for worse. However, we do have free will, and we can chose our sides. Some have chosen to destroy themselves. Some have chosen to destroy others.

I believe that I have been, or will be, in every other persons shoes, and I also believe that that is happening right now. If I have been or will be you, that means I am currently you. I believe that this surrender into the idea of non-linear reincarnation is a timeless gateway into powerful compassion. I do not believe it reduces us into ‘one’.

I believe that unity is nothing without fragmentation. If something has in common anything with the things around it, it is only that it has nothing at all in common. Things are united and continuous out of convenience. Everything deserves recognition and uniqueness and respect: all of this emanates from the sacred.

Loneliness and solitude are two approaches to the same fundamental problem.

I believe that the universe is infinitely and incomprehensibly more intelligent than myself, but that that is not a good reason to try to simplify it or give up trying to understand it. I believe our ability to grasp complexity, subtlety and nuance is infinite if we have the courage to admit that it might be. I bow to the unknown and wander in the darkness. I feel better knowing I am lost.

I believe that no one way of thinking, that no one system of belief is useful without others to compliment it. The greatest human skill is to not need to believe in anything at all — to see from any angle. Every system of rules crumbles around the edges – therefore overlap systems. You don’t need eyes to see, you need vision.

The Voice of the Universe

There is one unalterable, inalienable, ever expanding, ever evolving truth and I do not believe in giving it a name. It is nameless, but not voiceless. We simply have to disabuse ourselves of our limiting ideas of what communication is, and from where it originates.

It is a great spirit that breathes it’s life through every fibre of every thing. It dances and plays sometimes sweetly, sometimes rough. There is an intelligence higher than ourselves … not god, more like ourselves… it is a by-product of intelligence as a naturally arising phenomenon. You could call it god, the holy spirit, whatever, but I really think its just another aspect of the whole. A feature, a benefit. It is one thing amongst many things, and permeates all.

I’ve had close encounters with it, and it blows my mind every single time. It was a communication with the universe. A dialogue without words, spoken or written. More like some sort of sign or encrypted code that used anything and everything it could, words included, but also people, events, memories, objects, sensations, coincidence and long-standing facts that we only just realize were not so binding after all.

It is so secret as to be unsayable, unthinkable. If you know the secret you can never, ever tell. It’s just not possible to give it up, so it is the safest, most secret of secrets, that even in plain sight can remain invisible. But if someone else knows it, then you can speak in certain ways with them.

I know courage and boldness to be essential. Fear, doubt, arrogance and ’showing off’ will cease transmission. Holding onto it as well is bad, because it is formless. It likes to use many people, events, things, thoughts, words, points of views, religions, gods, countries, languages… so if you depend too much on one source, you lose trace…

To know, you must unknow.

A Guess is Not a Proof

What does it mean to know? I think it means that we have made, to one degree or another, a kind of ‘guess’ about how things are. It is important to realize how profoundly everything we ‘know’ is actually a guess. Even mathematics has eight fundamental axioms. Axiom is another word for assumption, which is still a rather fancy word for a guess.

You know, with all our science, no one can prove a circle. Next time you wonder about god, remember that no math yet exists which can rationally prove a circle without imposing arbitrary limits.

To prove a circle to yourself, look and see. That must be enough. I want to help you look, but I cannot help you see. I am but an aspect of your own awareness. Being within your awareness, I cannot be your awareness, itself.

You see, we can prove nothing about the universe without first having assumptions. One of the most basic assumptions here is that we need to prove it. Especially to others. But who are we trying to convince, really? All too often, it is ourselves who needs these explanations, not other people.

Assumptions can be empowering in a linear, cause-and-effect way, but these very assumptions can be limits upon the observation of truth — therefore if one holds too tightly to assumptions, if one mistakes their best guess for actual knowledge, one cannot observe the truth. The truth transcends proof and falsification, but not in a superficial sense. It can be neither. It is beyond these things. Indeed the truth is not the truth as we commonly know it.

It is not ‘the truth’.

It just is. You do not need to prove what is. It is plain to observe to anyone who can free themselves from assumptions, and the need to prove. The mind likes to think and explain, rationalize and reason. This is all very well and good! Yet, it often impresses itself with this cleverness, but it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to approach the ultimate questions with cleverness alone.

One must have patience. Courage in facing the unknown, in facing fear. Freedom to express, explore, exist. One must be able to love even when that love brings pain and hurt. And one must honestly seek truth.  Then one must ask.

A good question can take effort to formulate. A good answer can take time to find. Avoid guessing before the answer comes. This may take a while, so cultivate non-judgement. Ask yourself: do I really need the answer now? Can I wait?

The best questions exist in a total lack of assumptions. The best answers take a lifetime to explore.

The Texture of Truth-Telling

Begin by telling the truth. By hearing your own voice speak the truth, you will learn what truth sounds like. By facing the joy and pain of truth, you will know what truth feels like, in your heart and in every cell of your body. By gazing into the shadows your eyes will adapt and shine like the owl’s. Wickedness then will fear you.

Tell the truth to yourself and to others, then you will inspire others to open up. Lies will sound on their tongue, so they too will abandon deceit. Abandon of deceit is a solid step toward humility, a measurable move away from delusion. To be yourself means you do not lie to yourself. If you do not lie to yourself, you won’t be concerned with making others see you a certain way. You are removing yourself from the Economy of Deceit.

We should always reflect back upon the darkness we ourselves came from. Reflect back on the times we were asleep, unawakened. They were there, and we are continually awakening so that our awareness, as it is now, will someday seem dim in comparison.

Knowing that we come from darkness and that our ignorance brought us suffering — let this sit on your heart. It will give you the patience and compassion to allow darkness in others — and faith that we can all find sunrise, that sunrise dawns upon us.

Yes, the sun rises over the horizons of our potential. Fresh air flows into all lungs. Water fills our bodies and sates all thirst. The earth accepts all paths. The stars house infinite imagination — you see, this universe surrenders itself both to the saints and who you name wicked. The light shines on the blind.

Don’t settle for “whatever works”, be fresh, do something new, say forbidden things — we all forbid ourselves to say things, but saying them can be powerful — maybe other people wish to say it, or hear another who feels the same. Then you are two.

A breath of fresh air breaks us out of the cocoon of habit. The light instantly pours through the cracks. Your words could bring breath and light, water and warmth, to someone else’s life. If a thousand people read something you’ve written, it is nowhere near as successful as if it is truly felt as sacred to just one person. This is why we mustn’t be concerned with the numbers of our audience — appeal to the mass and you pay in spirit.

The possibility of fresh air brings us automatically towards it.

Humility and Pure Learning

The Power of Humility is significant. Power is defined by dictionaries as the ability to act effectively. There are plenty of instances where power is associated with abuse, but power can be used for noble ends! Never before have I felt so much power, so much new ability to act, and learn, and know, and be. It is as a direct result of my recent insights on the virtue of Humility, which I wish to tell you of.

In a world of ego, humility seems the most nebulous of the virtues. Ego is not understood, so humility is not understood. At least, that is how I felt… I rarely use the word ego in talking and writing, because I feel so strongly that it is misunderstood and actually gets in the way of understanding. So I undertook a specific quest, a shift in focus: to find the meaning of humility in the desire to know the magic of Pure Learning.

It is my understanding that Pure Learning, what in the east is called ‘Beginner’s Mind’ can only manifest with great Humility. I’ve been searching for a teacher for a long time. This is hard for me, even though I am known to be a critical thinker, a skeptic and a doubter, despite my great faith in the universe and the gods. Despite all the instances in my life, the concrete experiences of interactions with the Divine, conversations with god-like beings and witnessing my own ability to perform great acts of magic and kindness, I question endlessly.

But it wasn’t ‘the certainty that I knew’ that was the hardest thing to shake. Something new is arising within me. Even as I write, I feel bumps shiver across my skin at the notion. The certainty that ‘all things should be questioned’ has been laid bare before me in my mind and suddenly I am not so certain that questioning everything is useful. This is becoming real for me now. The exact phrase eludes me, but the gist of it is that I have been challenged to believe in myself and through myself, manifest heaven.

To find my teachers, to be able to learn and move forward toward the truth, to become the master, I had to become the servant to a thing higher than myself. I have to give up one question, and one question alone, then give it my all.

Humility is the symptom of someone who has taken upon themselves the ultimate service. It is a badge of the initiated, and to be initiated into the fold of my higher self requires absolutely unquestioning faith in the highness of that self. It is an act of courage, obviously. And this type of service is not a sacrifice of freedom but a further movement into liberation. You see, all these virtues create intricate patterns and knots and interrelationships. Their sum is love, and that love is the illimitable sacredness of being.

Humility is the state of Pure Learning. Humility is strong, not weak. Humility is unshakeable. It is not to become meek, not to abase oneself to make other people feel comfortable. It is to become great and to use that greatness to elevate this earth and its peoples toward heaven in every action and gesture my consciousness allows me to activate as mine. It is the most beautiful progression toward perfected patterns of life. It is harmony with the transience of all things. It is music of the mind, body and spirit.

Humility has helped me find love, in you. Humility has allowed me to unfold and open in a way I have never even contemplated and for once, yes, such a blessed thing has happened — I am at a loss for words! A wordless energy now pours into my heart, into my blood and life force, translating into proactive awareness and action. I have sprung into new life, new awareness, new ability and this is what I mean by ‘power’.

Humility is to surrender the fight. To sit down and let loss blow through you and take your petals into the wind. It is great peace and solitude. It is to become your only opponent and your closest friend. Humility is not in competition with anything at all, not even itself. There is no ‘very humble’ person. There is either Humility, or there is resistance, obstacles, problems and the inability to listen, the inability to learn and thus the inability to heal, to live and to truly love.

With Humility comes a profound gratitude and appreciation. The burden has been lifted at long last. With gratitude come endless abundance and the ability to give. And Humility also allows me to receive, which is after all, a giving of the very gift of giving! A restoration of the balance. Allowing another to give and allowing myself to receive. I have become able to trust, and to have faith… in myself, in the divine and in you.

And with that I feel something I have never felt and have never named and in it, I am born truly into this life, and into your arms.

Air has never felt so good to breathe.

The Worship of Immortality

There is something beautiful in its subtle intensity, the simplicity of its grace, that pattern we intuit that expands into the infinite complexity we perceive.

It is this we love — this child-like abandon into that expansion of ageless, timeless experience. We love our immortality, which is reflected — projected! — as the permanence and infinity of the entire universe. We love our depth and live in awe of all creation, so afraid to claim it as our own.

This awe, or ‘awakening’ is the story of all creation. We are continually awakening from a dream and are sustained by the energy of Light — illumination and the nuclear fires it creates even to the center of our galaxy. A foreverness so vast … within and without.

Exist as you intend to exist forever — like all of the universe — live like you will live forever, play and laugh in eternal birth. It is not that there will be no tomorrow. Only the promise of forever today.

You can make it your last, or you can make it your first. But make it, for you are in fact its Creator.

Silent and Solitary We Ascend

In the end, it may be you, alone with yourself. It is a possibility, and humanity is thwarted if it develops myths in order to flee from this potential oblivion.

Unfortunately there are no answers out there for the self-seeking, self-actualizing person. You will come to know this, one way or the other, so I will be quite honest about it in my writing. The way can be shown, but you will be – must be — utterly alone in walking it. The alienation, the loneliness, the elitism, must all be confronted.

You will decipher the esoteric propaganda developed by the very gurus who seemed so powerful and mastered… you may even rip my words and world to shreds. You will endure the betrayal of close friends and some times it will seem that in all of the world, there is no one else who seems to ‘get it’. We all come to this test of our ‘faith’, of our ‘resolve’. It will come to the most frightening part: you will be forced by circumstances to make a decision, and asked to accept that you may just be completely alone, for the rest of your days. That everything you ever say, until the day you die, will be construed as babble, or taken out of context, or misinterpreted.

To walk the path, is to consider there may be no path. To find God is to consider that there may be no gods. You will be asked to seriously consider the idea that all of this, everything, is inside your head. And this is the origins of much of your terror, the cradle where your greatest fears are born.

When you surrender to the truth, whatever that may be – good or bad, ascension or oblivion, you will find it. When you are no longer interested in creating, or interpreting, or communicating the truth, the ‘Secret’ to others, that is when she shall come to you. In that quietest and most lonely and secret of moments. The enlightenment which thousands of years of spirituality has attested to shall be yours then, just reach out and never look back! There is no back. The soul will cry it’s loudest, and you will cry all your tears, and laugh all your laughter.

Then you will have a choice to leave this world, or come back to it as a teacher, a healer, a warrior. If you come back, you have agreed to a task. You know of what I speak. You know the task you have agreed to, though it may be difficult to express clearly to another. Do not be afraid: this was your choice.

It is the friends you’ve found along the way… when you awaken to life, when the mind follows nature’s laws. Coming home to the stalwart friends who have been waiting patiently for you all this time, who all seemed to have been there, listening to you all along, waiting for you, unseen, unheard, in secret — is the truest reward, and is completely humbling. It is the heavenly friendship of those who stayed by you when you were alone, who helped you though you know not their names or faces in many cases. A secret order of loving brotherhood, of nurturing sisterhood. They left you alone because  you had to be alone in order to find that ultimate Self which is enlightenment. They know the necessity of the illusion of solitude. They are quiet. They cannot be found until you can listen.

If you can face the deepest silence, the deepest aloneness, listen so closely that the soul cries out in solitude the happiness of knowing: you will find there is no such thing, truly, as being alone. You have a home, here, on earth. Come home. Although you see us not, we are here. Waiting for you, as long as we must.

The Compulsion of Labelling

Why do we feel the need to label things? It never stops. Why is there such a need to stamp a label on everything we experience?

I label because I have a deep desire to share. I am deeply in conflict with my own solitude.

On one level it’s because we believe that if we call it something, we have power over it, or that we can control it. Use it. To an extent, this is very true. To an extent, if you can grasp something conceptually, you can bring it into your life where otherwise it would be lacking. But we are always adding ‘more’ and we have a tendency to think that ‘more’ will get us what we want, eventually. Or power ‘over’ external things.

On another level we often believe if we’ve slapped a label on something, there, we see it, we know it, we understand it. We’ve defined it, it’s ours. We are eager to have our answers, to know. Labelling is a form of impatience, in this case. However, I’ve found that often when I do this, I often prevent myself from understanding it further. The truth is living, the labels are dead.

So as an exercise in perception, I might sometimes try and ‘look’ or ‘listen’ and explore the texture (what I’ve called psychotopography) of an experience without the compulsive labelling. With practice this can be refined and work ‘enough’ to get by. I don’t see it as being perfect, because the mind labels and divides. That’s what it does. It’s not me doing it, it’s a reflex.

But it can be trained, surely, and when it is, we gain access to these extended moments of clarity and understanding, even insight. But these moments never last, and if you believe in them too much you’ll just feel guilty when you label at all, and you shouldn’t. It’s not you labelling. It’s just labelling, and it goes on and on.

To Share and Err in Solitude

On the deepest level I yet have observed within myself, the need to label is very profound, and has to do with this conflict with solitude. Loneliness is another way that our absolute solitude manifests, and it is suffering. Even when you are in a prison with the worst criminals that can be, to punish you, the guards would put you in solitary confinement. Psychologically, we would rather be around the most wicked and dangerous of people than have to sit alone by ourselves for any extended period of time!

So I think our need to label may have to do with the delusion that we can share our experience of solitude. In a certain sense, yes we can, and language, up to a point, assists. It alleviates this pain, temporarily. Communication is communion and can have a very cathartic effect. Perhaps we can label that a spiritual feeling, but it’s a pain-killer… you might just as soon take an aspirin.

The deep compulsion to share, to struggle against loneliness, to ‘be not alone’, doesn’t cease, and so it can be very difficult to stop labelling, as I see it, until we abandon a certain hope.

Abandoning this hope, in the various ways it manifests, may be the only way to live life fully which is of course the task at hand. Hope, in this sense, is the delusion that all things can be shared, or in fact, should be shared.

And trust me, you are delusional. Especially if you think you aren’t.

But, do not stop talking.

I’m not going to advise anyone to stop speaking, or talking, discussing, sharing, labelling. You need to sharpen your mind. Conceptualize more clearly. Perfect your intelligence. Strengthen your memory. In all ways, purify and master your mind. Speak more clearly, discuss more fairly, share more effectively, label more prudently. Do not try to abandon the activities of the mind – instead, perfect them.

No. I don’t believe that I should shut up. I think we need to talk more, think more, talk better, think better. The breakdown of effective communication is the path to violence.

Are we doing violence to certain experiences, doing violence to ourselves, when we attempt to share these things which should be taken into our solitude utterly and transformed into the incommunicable secret wisdom of life, the universe and everything?

Yes, without a doubt. There are things that one should not attempt to share, because to share them compulsively, or in certain cases at all, causes conflict, struggle, pain and violence. They cannot be understood, and kept, and integrated, and studied, at the same time as they can be shared. First seek to understand, then and only then, to be understood.

I’m saying that if you attempt to share a certain class of experience, what you are trying to share no longer exists. For example: you’re reading this now, and maybe you feel a sense of wonder and clarity. ‘I should show this to so-and-so, they really need to read this!’ Wrong. That is a projection. What it means is that YOU really need to read this. No one else does. You won’t understand a single word of what I’m saying if you try to share it with someone else, or try to share it back to me, as if I don’t quite understand what I’m talking about and you can correct me…

Give that idea up.

This is happening inside your mind, not mine. I am not a ‘person out there’ writing something, it is being written into your mind and memory by you, right now, and your labelling process and your loneliness are producing a situation in which you believe there is a student and a teacher, or an idiot on the other side of these sentences or a wise person. None of that is ultimately true, because as you read this, you are not actually in a discussion or in communication with anyone but yourself!

If you fail to notice this, you have failed to understand solitude.

You could now imagine that I might actually write for myself. Talk to myself. Take notes on myself for myself to process again at a later time. That it has nothing to do with you at all. If my writing it has nothing to do with you, then certainly your reading it has nothing to do with me.

Forgetting Myself

The constant revision of the past, the repetition, is being fuelled, in a sense, by my desire for it to be different. And I think if I go over it again and again, I will figure something out, that it will become different. Sometimes indeed, we do find that with some thought, we have found a deception or an illusion we were subject to. But because we did not find it at the time, it is still subject to error. Fundamentally, memory is flawed. There is error. We cannot in fact gain new data from old data. New experience comes from the present alone. There is no new experience in the past, no new knowledge, no new insight.

Desperate for such things, we invent them through an imaginative process. This process contributes to the fundamental error of memory. It is proven that psychologically, our brain cannot truly determine the difference between memory and imagination. When I see this in myself I see that the past and the future are entirely constructed from memory and imagination.

There is absolutely no escape from this, through thought. The use of thought is memory and imagination. The use of thought is constructed from past experience. And this past experience is inalterable because the only access we have to it is in the realm of thought, through the use of thought. Because we can only enter this realm with thinking, it is limited. It is fixed, and it cannot be altered fundamentally.

Why can it not be altered, fundamentally?

Because it is thought, and the only alterations we can make to it is through thought. Fundamentally, it is only thought. New experience exists outside of thought, but instantaneously. The habit I notice most is how quickly, in fact, just as instantaneously, my present experience becomes thought. Here, labelling is involved. Sooner than I can perceive the shift, direct experience has been recorded and old recordings have been added to it. Therefore, it seems to me that even the act of perception is within the domain of thought.

Can I approach the event horizon where perception is happening and where reality actually is?

The ancients texts suggest not. So long as I carry this image of myself, this identity, this ego, this ‘I’ that is ‘me’, which is constructed entirely of memory and imagination, which is carefully, painstakingly, marvellously the masterpiece of all the thought and memory and imagination that goes on within me, I cannot.

I cannot bring ‘me’ into the present moment. Me is not the present moment. Me is thought, as memory and imagination. So long as I have a ‘me’, every time I try to become present, I fail. There is no ‘I’ becoming present. There cannot be. If there is an I being present, there is not presence. There is either ‘me’ or there is ‘presence’.

Can we find clues in the present moment, as to who and what we truly are, in our actual pattern? It seems that we must! Our advantage in observing the present far outweighs our ability to predict or recollect. Therefore the greatest clues we will find evidence themselves smack in front of our noses: I have found, at best, that an awareness of context is the most the past (or any conceptual framework) can offer. At worst, memory and thought will obscure the truth in those moments we need to observe — note here that thought is the past tense of thinking and also note how interesting it is that we use the word at all! Reflection (that is sitting, remembering, thinking, analysing, deciding and taking new action) can be postponed and relocated to appropriate times, rather than compulsively intruding on us.

So give priority to the present instance, collect all you can from it, and then and only then draw from past experience. Otherwise you risk constantly colouring events and people with stuff that isn’t actually there, stuff you’ve brought with you and you alone will add to the encounter. You will constantly be collecting the WRONG data from the present, which will create the WRONG memories which will further colour your experiences in a way that runs contrary to truth.

Memories, at most, should be treated as propaganda.

This is so daringly counter-intuitive! When I began the practice of prioritizing my inputs and treating memory as biased propaganda I found only an initial discomfort. We do this same exact thing to the perceptions of everyone else around us and to their input, identities and stories (even if we are gullible and naive, we do this more to others than we do to ourselves). We know they often don’t see themselves or what Jung would call their own shadow.

Memory IS unconscious! How can we depend on any available memory to somehow transmute itself into conscious awareness? Memory, in this sense, arises from mind and in my experience, (and apparently in neuroscience too) awareness and/or consciousness simply cannot be found in the brain or the mind.

The very act of remembering, if you permit me a broader definition than is normal, is psychotic and delusional in that it is neither the present, nor is it sufficient in and of itself to be the truth. Sift through this stuff with great caution and utmost suspicion, because it is constantly and aggressively telling you who you are when in fact we can be certain that it is largely unawakened, incorrectly interpreted, hyper-selective bullshit.

Survival is Exactly Equal to Death

We have reduced ourselves into isolated shells who begin and end at the boundaries of our skin, when reality would suggest otherwise. We have many more than five senses, but the first task is to re-align ourselves with those first most obvious five, in order that we might proceed into the realm of secrets and sorcery and silence.

Perhaps we humans have been alienated and marginalized in favour of machines, but I am afraid the story is much more grim than that. If we ever realized our fullest potential, even a handful of us, our world would be free. A hundred such people could change the world forever. One such person can change your life.

Of course, if you are that person, yourself … you take on the sacred responsibility of those who have frolicked under the covers with the divine and adored even the vulgar and wicked as part of the face of the gods.

I do not want to be a burnt dream, singing as an echo of life. I cannot live long like that. Soon, my disincarnate existence must end and I must return into the potential of my flesh. The poet must touch that which he intends to let his lips utter into the ether once more. The writer must meet his characters and discover his plot. My dreams must become lost within the true, my vision filled with eyesight and my heart abused and forged in the pure fire of truth.

The truth is only that: the fire behind our eyes. Our vision. An observation of the false. An unfettered awareness.

These things are not fiction.  I am on a life long quest to learn of them, become them, and teach of them to others who seek. What is it to be human? Hidden. Subversive. Incorruptible even as we stand in a world of darkness. We stand. We prepare. If all are blind, we must see. If all are chained, we must break free. From the habit of inaction we must play and dance like the flickering candle of consciousness: so new and fresh and tentative to this universe bent in upon itself in ultimate self-examination.

No one can truly hand us the truth. Better we look at our eyes, with our eyes, and see the mirror that creates the exterior universe so that it aligns with the interior — great illusions, great delusions — and if we cannot live, we must die: merely to survive is not uniquely human, though it may seem so in popular mythology.

Survival in our age is exactly equal to death. It is Living that must be our main concern. While the bombs still fall and life around us falls apart: we are consuming the insides of this egg in order to bring forth a new world. Let us enjoy the death of birth and find ourselves before the end. The sun always sets, and all torches expire.

It is Empire that is mediocre … yet Humanity is not a given. It is earned and kept, aspired to. Even the angels of heaven stand in reverent silence, unable to cope with the magnitude of what is at stake.

We always know what needs to be done. Always. It scares the hell out of us that we know, that we remember. Not a rambling discourse of schizophrenic voices in our heads, that would be too obvious — I mean that inside, in total silence, rests this hidden (yet not so hidden) knowledge. Obeying that knowledge is power.

It’s the only form of power that’s safe, that inner power over yourself: anything else, the demons will try their hardest to take from you. There are few other processes to living, and in terms of freedom, there is only this process of undoing the knots and the chains and the strings. It demands courage and sometimes, it demands justice. For every fetter you unravel from your spirit, the more you get to live.

Every chain you leave tied, someone else uses you or enslaves you. These aren’t your strings, they are someone — or something — else’s.  They will suck you dry and spit you out. Your shell may survive, but what of your spirit?

Origins of the Spirit

I have decided to retrace my steps back through the original ideas, that which arose within me at first as sheer madness is now the most clear and beautiful of nuances when I walk this city, and search for signs of intelligent life. I have searched for soul-mates and know the nature of the Nothing. I have woven sorcery and taken from the air, and earth and water and fire secrets that the first of us learned long ago. I have travelled through centuries and danced on the timeless shores of eternity with shape-shifting Valkyries celebrating every supernova courageous enough to annihilate itself for the benefit of all creation. When I close my eyes I see the Golden Age, here, now, already… hidden within the gaps of our awareness. Unconquerable, indomitable and utterly illimitable.

I have visited the edges of the mind, where the symbol becomes vacant, the word becomes blasphemous and the concept empties itself in terror and in awe of the cheap imitation of the real world that it has whored on the lips of street corner prophets and the imaginations of Order.

Yet there is sensuality. Perhaps a synonym for spirit…

What is not ethereal and mystical about sensuality? I think that many would argue that people are of two types: grounded or in their heads. What if someone was both… what would sensuality be to them? Certainly not a denial but an inclusion of the sacred, the divine, into earthly affairs: We are pressed tight you and I, in a fold of earth and sky: it is our sheathe, and it’s the way our world embraces us. So … if we are to embrace one another in fullness, let us imitate nature and press each-other in between body and mind so that our touch might rise to the spiritual dimension.

Touch makes lovers real — and that is what we are most afraid of: that our lovers might be real.

Unity

Our body, our blood, our breath all contain precious moisture — water that has been on this earth for longer than life has — upon which life depends. Many times our water has traveled the world over, helping many lives live. While inspiring, perspiring, expiring… leaving, mixing, pouring, spilling, raining, evaporating…

Being drank, sweat and urinated. Absorbed through osmosis by fruits and vegetables and deep roots from the earth.

Moving into streams, rivers and back into the deep memory of Life, the oceans — it shows itself to have its essence both in every molecule or drop, to every ocean and great storm. Truly water is a single whole — integrated to every fiber of every living thing. It passes back and forth from being to being from state to state: ice, liquid, vapor.

It resists nothing, yet is powerful in force.

Same with light. Light is white but when broken with a prism, shows a truly endless range of colours. Yet each different colour is the same light.

Lastly we must mention air. We must talk about breath. Perhaps our most constant, necessary rhythm yet for the most part we ignore it. But deprived of our air supply, we notice immediately and cannot last long this way.

Some would believe that when a fetus is created in the womb, life begins at once, if not at once, with the heart, if not then with the mind. I say that nothing that needs air to live its life is alive until it takes its first breath on its own. It is upon the first breath that the spirit enters, and on the last breath (the deep last breath, not the surface breath which seems last) that the spirit leaves.

Thus our center, our spirit, is shielded in the rhythm of our inspiration and expiration.

The breath will travel far while seeking out secrets, it is always once we return home, when we become centered once again, that we rediscover our spirit. And what you breathe goes into the lungs of others, and is absorbed by the plants and all life that needs oxygen or carbon dioxide to thrive. A global breath takes place, where in only a few short days, you have shared a breath of air with every other human on the planet.

Indeed, Science has proven what the ancients may have long ago knew: that everything is made of the same underlying energy — that even seemingly physical objects have more, much more, in common with air and smoke and water and light than not.

All this really means is that you, and the people — the energies — around you, have much less separateness, much fewer real, and meaningful differences than our material senses report to us and would have us believe. The earth holds us all down with gravity. The sky shields all of us from outer space, the sun shines on all men, wicked or just…

Yes, to know thyself, as the Oracle at Delphi requires, is not to deny and divide, but to include and unite — This is the foundation of self-knowledge: water and air and light. We do not end at the skin… we travel far and wide, and then return home.

All rivers lead to the ocean and rainbows are light in slow motion.

I’ve canonized Carse and his teachings, for the sake of playful irony, which I’m certain won’t be lost on the author when he inevitably finds his way here and laughs his head off.

Carse’s own words are incomplete and demand our participation as infinite players. You really haven’t gotten the idea of Immediatism and Infinite Play at all if you don’t dive in and talk about this stuff.

As an incentive, and perhaps a form of ‘prize’, if you comment and refer to the verse you’re talking about and I can take your thoughts and paste them into the core document, provided they’re as insightful as the rest of what’s here.

Rules

(1:1) A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play.

(2:1) It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play. (6) Otherwise, Infinite and finite play stand in the sharpest possible contrast.

(3:1) Finite games have temporal boundaries, a precise beginning and end, as well as spacial and numerical boundaries. Persons are selected for finite play. We cannot play alone. In evey case, we must find an opponent.

(4:1). The world is elaborately marked by boundaries of contest, its people finely classified as to their eligibilities.

(5:1) There are many games we enter not expecting to win, but in which we nonetheless compete for highest possible ranking.

(6:1) There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. The time of an infinite world is not world time, but time created within the play itself. Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time.

(8:1) It is by knowing what the rules are that we know what the finite game is. The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won.

(9:1) The rules of a finite game must be pusblished prior to play and the players must agree to them before play begins. The agreement of the players to the applicable rules constitutes the ultimate validation of those rules.

(9:1) There are no rules that require us to obey rules. They are valid only if and when players freely play by them.

(10:1) Finite rules may not change during the course of finite play — else a different game is being played.

(10:2) The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game, and to bring as many persons as possible into the play. They are like the grammar of a living language always evolving to guarantee the meaningfulness of discourse.

(11:1) Infinite rules are always designed to deal with specific threats to the continuation of play. The rule-making capacity of infinite players is often challenged by the impingement of powerful boundaries against their play — such as physical exhaustion, or the loss of material rsources, or the hostility of nonplayers, or death.

(11:2) Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.

(12:1) Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. Oppressors acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must agree to be oppressed. No one is under any necessity to play a finite game. Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on us. THerefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

(13:1) We can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves. Self-veiling is present in all finite games. Some persons may veil themselves so assiduously that they make their performance believable even to themselves. But we have always freely choen to face the world through a mask.

“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre)

(14:1) We are playful when we engage others at the level of chouce, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out. We are playful with each other when we relate as free persons.

(14:2) Everything that happens is of consequence.

(15:1) Finite play is theatrical. Infinite play is dramatic.

(16:1) It is the desire of all finite players to be Master Players, to be so perfectly skilled in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the beginning.

(17:1) To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.

Winning

(18:1) What one wins in a finite game is a title.

(20:1) A finite game must always be won with a final move within the boundaries of the game that establishes the winner beyond any possibility of challenge. A terminal move results in the death of the opposing player as player.

(21:1) There are games in which the stakes do seem to be life and death.

(23:1) Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play. Infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. They do not play for their own life; they live for their own play.

(24:1) The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

Titles and Names

(25:1) Titles are given at the end of play, names at the beginning. When a person is known only by name we open the possibility that our relationship will become deeply reciprocal. It opens up our future.

(26:1) Titles point backward in time.

(27:1) The titled are powerful. Those around them are expected to yield, to withdraw their opposition and to conform to their will. My power is determned by the amount of resistance I can displace within given spatial and temporal limits. The establishment of the limits makes it possible to know ho powerful I am in relation to others. Power is bestowed by an audience.

(28:1) If we defer to titled winners, it is only because we regard ourselves as losers. To do so is freely to take part in the theater of power.

Power and Strength

(29:1) Power is a feature only of finite games. Infinite players look forward toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpreation. Where the finite player plays to be powerful, the infinite player plays with strength.

(29:2) Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

Evil

(30:1) Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence. Unheard silence is not the loss of the player’s voice, but the loss of listeners for that voice. It is an evil when the drama of a life does not continue in others for reasons of their deafness or ignorance. There are silences that will never and can never be heard. There is much evil that remains beyond redemption.

(31:1) Evil is never intended as evil. All evil originates in the desire to eliminate evil. Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion.

(31:2)Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They do not attempt to eliminate evil in others. Evil is the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.

Freedom

(32:1) No one can play a game alone. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. We cannot relate to anyone who is not relating to us. Our social existence has an inescapably fluid character.

(32:2) Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.

(33:1) Infinite players are not concerned to find how much freedom is available within the given realities but are concerned to show how freely we have decided to place boundaries around our finite play.

Society

(33:2) Society is the sum of those relations that are under some form of public constraint, culture is whatever we do with each other by undirected choice. Society remains entirely within our free choice in quite the same way that finite competition does, however strenuous or costly to the player, it never prevents the player from walking off the field of play.

(33:3)Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play, culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society.

(34:1) Society is a single finite game that includes any number of smaller games within its boundaries. Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society.

(34:2)The prizes won by its citizens can be protected only if the society as a whole remmains powerful in relation to other societies. Those who desire the permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole. It is in the interest of a society therefore to encourage competition within itself, to establish the largest possible number of prizes, for the holders of prizes will be those most likely to defend the society as a whole against its competitors.

(35:1) Society has an established script. Deviations from the script are evident at once. Deviation is antisocietal and therefore forbidden by society under a variety of sanctions. Deviancy threatens entitlement.

Culture

(35:2) Culture is an infinite game. Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture — anywhere and at any time. Living in the strength of their vision, infinite players eschew power and make joyous play of boundaries.

(35:3) Deviancy is the very essence of culture. Great significance attaches to those variations that allow the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been — and therefore of all that we are. Culture resounds with the laughter of unexpected possibility.

Property

(36:1) One of the most effective means of self-persuasion and veiling available to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns a society’s property, and how it is distributed, are far less important than the fact that property exists at all.

(36:2) The purpose of property is to make our titles visible. Property is emblematic. Titles are timeless, and so is the ownership of property.

(37:1) When we ask precisely how a society will go about preserving its citizens’ property, we can expect the reply that it will do so by the use of force.

(37:2) There is no effective pattern of entitlement in a society short of the free agreement of all opponents that the titles to property are in the hands of the actual winners. No force will establish this agreement.

(37:3) Only by free self-concealment can persons believe they obey the law because the law is powerful; in fact, the law is powerful for persons only because they obey it. The laws protecting their property will be effective only when they are able to persuade others to obey those laws. Property is theatrical.

(38:1) Property owners must be at considerable labor to sustain this structure.

(40:1) It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as performed.

Poetry

(41:1) Societies depend on their artists. If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and great might must be performed brilliantly.

(42:1) While societal thinkers may not overlook the importance of poesis (the storytellers, innovators, original thinkers, artists), or creative activity, neither may they underestimate its danger, for the poietai are the ones most likely to remember what has been forgotten.

(42:2) Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be supressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to braise the society’s heroes.

(42:3) Another successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as the producers of property, thus elevating the value of consuming art, or owning it. In this sense, museams are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.

(43:1) Culture is likely to break out in a society not when its poietai begin to voice a line contrary to that of the society, but when they begin to ignore all lines whatsoever and concern themselves with bringing the audience back into play — not competitive play, but play that affirms itself as play.

(43:2) Art used against a society or its policies gives up its character as infinite play, and aims for an end. Such art is no less propaganda than that which praises its heroes with high seriousness.

(44:3) Art is never possession but always possibility. Nothing possessed can have the status of art. If art cannot become property, property is never art — as property. Property draws attention to titles, points backward toward a finished time. Art is dramatic opening always forward, beginning something that cannot be finished.

(44:4) One must be surprised by art.

(44:5) We do not watch artists to see what they do, but watch what persons do and discover the artistry in it.

(44:6) Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for a surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.

(44:7) Poets do not ‘fit’ because they do not take their ‘places’ seriously.

(45:1) A society is defined by its boundaries. A culture is defined by its horizon. A boundary is a phenomenon of opposition. It is the meeting place of hostile forces. Where nothing opposes there can be no boundary. One cannot move beyond a boundary without being resisted.

(45:2) A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. What limits vision is the incompleteness of that vision. One never reaches a horizon. Its location is always relative to the view. To move toward a horizon is simply to have a new horizon.

(45:3) To be somewhere is to absolutize time, space, and number. Who lives horizonally is never somewhere, but always in passage.

(45:4) Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon. Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary. Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a new vision, a new range of possibilities. It is an effort to find visions that promised still more vision.

(46:5) Culture is not restricted by time and space.

(47:1) Culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other. A culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. A culture iss sometimes opposed by suppressing its ideas, its works, even its language. This is a common strategy of a society afraid of the culture growing within its boundaries. But it is a straetgy certain to fail, because it confuses the creative activity (poiesis) with the product (poiema) of that activity.

War

(47:2) The manipulation of the government, the laws, the enforcement functions of a state either by persons within the society (through usupation or abuse of power) or by persons without (in other states) cannot in itself effect the decision of a people to be a people.

(47:3) A people, as a people, has nothing to defend, and nothing to attack. One cannot be free by opposing another. A people has no enemies.

(48:1) For a bounded, metaphysically veiled, and destined society, enemies are necessary, conflict inevitable, and war likely.

(48:2) Infinite players, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies. For infinite players, if it is possible to wage a war without killing a single person, then it is possible to wage war ONLY without killing a single power.

(48:3) The strategy of infinite players is not to go meet enemies with power and violence, but with poiesis and vision. They do not rise to meet arms with arms; instead, they make use of laughter, vision and surprise to engage the state and put its boundaries back into play. What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision and not what we are viewing that is limited.

(49:1) Poets can make it impossible to have a war — unless they tell stories that agree with the ‘general line’ established by the state. Poets who have no political line make war impossible because they have the irresistible ability to show the guardiance that what seems necessary is only possible.

(49:2) A finite player believes those who are being led to reason cannot be aware of it. They must be led to it without choosing it. Their poets do not create, but deceive. True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets — that is, creators of all sorts — seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.

Genius

(51 - entire)

I am the genius (generator, original source, creator) of myself, the poietes (Poiesis = creative activity. Poietes (pl. poietai) = creator ) who composes the sentences I speak and the actions I take. It is I, not the mind, that thinks. It is I, not the will, that acts. It is I, not the nervous system, that feels.

When I speak as the genius I am, I speak these words for the first time. To repeat words is to speak them as though another were saying them, in which case I am not saying them. To be the genius of my speech is to be the origin of my words, to say them for the first, and last, time. Even to repeat my own words is to say them as though I were another person in another time and place.

When I forsake my genius and speak to you as though I were another, I also speak to you as someone you are not and somewhere you are not. I address you as audience, and do not expect you to respond as the genius you are.

Since being your own genius is dramatic, it has all the paradox of infinite play: You can have what you have only by releasing it to others. The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all. The words die with the sound. Spoken to me, your words become mine to do with as I please. As the genius of your words, you lose all authority over them. So too with thoughts. However you consider them your own, you cannot think the thoughts themselves, but only what they are about. You cannot think thoughts any more than you can act actions. If you do not truly speak the words that reside entirely in their own sound, neither can you think that which remains thought or can be translated back into thought. In thinking you cast thoughts beyond themselves, surrendering them to that which they cannot be.

The paradox of genius exposes us directly to the dynamic of open reciprocity, for if you are the genius of what you say to me, I am the genius of what I hear you say. What you say originally I can hear only originally. As you surrender the sound on your lips, I surrender the sound in my ear. Each of us has relinquished to the other what has been relinquished to the other.

That does not mean that speech has come to nothing. On the contrary it has become speech that invites speech. When the genius of speech is abandoned, words are said not originally but repetitively. To repeat words, even our own, is to contain them in their own sound. Veiled speech is that spoken as though we have forgotten we are its originators.

To speak, or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary of the self. It is to leave behind the territorial personality. A genius does not have a mind full of thoughts but is the thinker of thoughts, and is the center of a field of vision. It is a field of vision, however, that is recognized as a field of vision only when we see that it includes within itself the original centers of other fields of vision.

This does not mean that I can see what you see. On the contrary, it is because I cannot see what you see that I can see at all. The discovery that you are the unrepeatable center of your own vision is simultaneous with the discovery that I am the center of my own.

(53:1) To be the genius of myself is not to bring myself into being. As the origin of myself I am not also the cause of myself, as though I were the product of my own action. But then neither am I the product of any other action. My birth and death are arbitrary points in an unbroken process.

(53:2)The genius in us knows the past is forever open to creative reinterpretation.

(54:1) Just as the titles of winners are worthless unless they are visible to others, there is a kind of anti-title that attaches to invisibility. To the degree that we are invisible we have a past that has condemned us to oblivion. It is as though we have somehow been over-looked, even forgotten, by our chosen audience. If it is the winners who are presently visible, it is the losers who are invisibly past.

(54:2) Unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win.

(54:3) Whenever we act as the genius of ourselves, it will be in the spirit of allowing the past to be past. It is the genius in us who is capable of ridding us of resentment by exercising what Nietzsche called the “faculty of oblivion,” not as a way of denying the past but as a way of reshaping it through our own originality. Then we forget that we have been forgotten by an audience, and remember that we have forgotten our freedom to play.

Looking and Seeing

(52:1) To look at something is to look at it within its limitations. I look at what is marked off, at what stands apart from other things. But things do not have their own limitations. Nothing limits itself.

(52:2) Targets of attention are not distinct from the environment, they are the environment. “Nature has no outline. Imagination has.” (Blake)

(52:3) If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Seeing does not disturb our looking at all. It places us in that territory as its genius, aware that our imagination does not create within its outlines but creates the outlines themselves. We learn to see the way we use limitations.

Touching

(55:1) There will be persons in whose presence we learn to prepare ourselves for surprise. It is in the presence of such persons that we first recognize ourselves as the geniuses we are.

(55:1) Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play. I am not touched by another when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center — that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response. When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within — and whoever touches me is touched as well.

(56:1) The character of touching can be seen quite clearly in the way infinite players understand both healing and sexuality.

(56:2) If to be touched is to respond from one’s center, it is also to respond as a whole person. To be whole is to be hale, or healthy. In sum, whoever is touched is healed. Healing restores me to play. When I am healed I am restored to my center in a way that my freedom as a person is not compromised.

Finite Sexuality

(57:1) Sexuality for the infinite player is entirely a matter of touch. One cannot touch without touching sexually. Because sexuality is a drama of origins, it gives full expression to the genius you are and to the genius of others who participate in that drama.

(57:2) Genuine sexual expression is at least as dangerous to society as genuine artistic expression.

(57:3) Sexual rebels, violators of the sexual taboos, do not weaken political and religious ideology but affirm it as the rules of finite play. It is convenient to think that sexual misfits violate the rules. The matter is subtler by far. Pornography is exciting only so far as it reveals something forbidden, something otherwise unseeable. Thus the mandatory hostility in it, the quality of shock and violence.

(57:4) Because sexuality is so rich in the mystery of origin, it becomes a region of human action deeply shaped by resentment, where participants play out a manifold strategy of hostile encounters. The players in finite sexuality not only require the offended resistance of those who refuse to join them in their play, they require the resistance of those who join them in their play.

(57:5) This is the plot of the classic pulp novel and of Hollywood romance: indifference girl won by ardent boy.

(57:6) The profound seriousness of such sexual play is seen in the unique nature of the prize that goes to the winner. Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent. The seduced opponent is so displayed as to draw public attention to the seducer’s triumph. A double game can be played in which each is winner and loser, each an emblem for the other’s seductive power. Finite sexuality is a form of theater in whcih the distance between persons is regularly reduced to zero but in which neither touches the other.

(58:1) Society plays little or no role in either causing or preventing sexual tensions. On the contrary, society absorbs sexual tensions into all of its structures.

(58:2) The only true revolutionary act is not the overthrow of the father by the son — which only reinforces the existing patterns of resentment — but the restoration of genius to sexuality.

(59:1) Veiled/finite sexuality is oriented toward moments, outcomes, final scenes. It proceeds largely by deception, like all finite play. Sexual desires are usually not directly announced but concealed under a series of feints, gestures, styles of dress and showy behavior. Seductions are staged, scripted, costumed. In skillful seductions delays are employed, special circumstances and settings are arranged. Seductions are designed to ome to an end. Time runes out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition.

Infinite Sexuality

(60:1) Infinite players have no interest in seduction or in restricting the freedom of another to one’s own boundaries of play. Infinite players reocnigze choice in all aspects of sexuality. One can never say therefore, that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celibate, or adulterous, or faithful — because each of these definitions has to do with boundaries, but with circumscribed areas and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned not with power but with vision.

(60:2) In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open, they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning, they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the genius of their own actions, to be whole. Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be a part of the play.

(61:1) There is nothing hidden in infinite sexuality. Sexual desire is exposed as sexual desire and is never therefore serious. Its satisfaction is never an achievement, but an act in a continuing relationship, and therefore joyous. Its lack of satisfaction is never a failure, but only a matter to be taken on into further play.

(62:1) Infinite sexuality does not focus its attention on certain parts or regions of the body. Infinite lovers have no “private parts.” They do not regard their bodies as having secret zones that can be exposed or made accessible to others for special favors. It is not their bodies but their persons they make accessible to others

(62:2) The paradox of infinite sexuality is that by regarding sexuality as an expression of the person and not the body, it becomes fully embodied play. It becomes a drama of touching.

(62:3) The sexual engagement is a poiesis of free persons. In this exposure they emerge as the persons they are. In doing so they expect to be transformed — and are transformed.

Worlds

(63:1) A finite game occurs within a world. The fact that it must be limited temporally, numerically and spatially means that there is something against which the limits stand. There is an outside to every finite game.

(64:1) Worlds exist in the form of audience. An audience consists of persons observing a contest without participating in it. No one determines who an audience will be. No exercise of power can make a world. A world must be its own spontaenous source. The number of persons who join an audience is irrelevant. So is the time and space in which an audience occurs.

(64:2) When and where a world occurs, and whom it includes, is of no importance.

(64:3) We are players in search of a world as often as we are world in search of players, and sometimes we are both at once. Some worlds pass quickly into existence, and quickly out of it. Some sustain themselves for longer periods, but no world lasts forever. (emphasis: Temporary Autonomous Zone)

(65:1) There is an indefinite number of worlds.

(66:1) I cannot be a finite player without being divided against myself.

(66:2)When sufficiently oblivious to their status as audience, the observers of a finite game become so absorbed in its conduct that they lose the sense of distance between themselves and the players. Each side of the conflict comes with its own partisan observers.

(66:3) We cannot become a world without being divided against ourselves.

Time

(67:1) For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free. The passage of time is always relative to that which does not pass, to the timeless. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player buts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.

(68:1) The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic its time is time lived and not time viewed. As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player’s temporality. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning.

(68:2) A moment is a beginning of an event that gives the time within it its specific quality. THere can be no such thing as an hour of time for the infinite player. THere can be an hour of love, or a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor.

(68:3) An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player’s way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of a moving toward a future which itself has a future.

(68:4)Infinite players cannot say how much time they have completed in their work or love or quarreling, but only that much remains incomplete in it. They are not concerned to determine when it is over, but only what comes of it.

Play

(69:1) Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer. Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiame, an object, of it. If the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but the possibility ahead of them.

(69:2) The essence of infinite play is the paradoxical engagement with temporality: “eternal birth.”

Nature

(70:1) Nature is the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture.

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” (Bacon)

(70:2) If nature does have a voice, then its voice is no different from our own. We can then presume to speak for the unspeakable.

(71:1) By presuming to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle of nature. If speaking about a process is itself part of the process, there is something that must remain permanently hidden from the speaker.

(71:2) To be intelligible at all, we must claim that we can step aside from the process and comment on it “objectively” and “dispassionately,” without anything obstructing our view of these matters.

(71:3) There is no such thing as an unnatural act. Nothing can be done to or against nature, much less outside it.

“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” (Heisenberg)

Silence

(72:1) We are speaking now of no ordinary ignorance. It is not what we could have known but do not; it is unintelligibility itself: that which no mind can ever comprehend. Unveiled, aware of the insuperable limitation placed against all our looking, we come back to nature’s perfect silence. Now we can see that it is a silence so complete there is no way of knowing what it is silent about — if anything. What we learn from this silence is the unlikeness between nature and whatever we could think or say about it.

(72:2) Far from stupefying us, it provides an indispensible condition to the mind’s own originality.

(72:3) At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about.

(72:4) The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.

(72:5) Our attempt to take control of nature, to be Master Player in our opposition to it, is an attempt to rid ourselves of language. It is the refusal to accept nature as “nature.” It is to deafen ourselves to metaphor, and to make nature into something so familiar it is essentially an extension of our willing and speaking.

(72:6) To kill is to impose a silence that remains a silence.

(73:1) No one can look in on an age without looking out of an age. There is no refuge outside history for such viewers any more than there is vantage outside nature.

(73:2) The mode of discourse appropriate to such self-aware history is not explanation, but narrative. Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context of the necessary; stories set all necessities into the context of the possible.

(73:3) Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inequiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.

(73:4) If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

Explanation and Knowledge

(74:1) I can explain nothing to you unless I first draw your attention to patent inadequacies in your knowledge: discontinuities in the relations between objects, or the presence of anomalies you cannot account for by any of the laws known to you. You will remain deaf to my explanations until you suspect yourself of falsehood.

(74:2) Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant herarers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your own error. Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent. It possesses the same dynamic of resentment found in other finite play.

(74:3) I will press my explanations on you because I need to show that I do not live in the error that I think others think I do.

(74:4) Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim to true knowledge. Knowledge has been arrived at, it is the outcome of this engagement. Its winners have the uncontested power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be listened to.

(74:5) Knowledge therefore, is like property. It must be published, declared, or in some other way so displayed that others cannot but take account of it. It must stand in their way. It must be emlematic, pointing backward at its possessor’s competitive skill.

(74:6) So close are knowledge and property that they are often thought to be continuous.

(75:1) Explanation must be oblivious to the silence of nature and in its success must impose silence on its listeners. Imposed silence is the first consequence of the Master Player’s triumph. The silence to which the losers pledge themselves is the silence of obedience. Losers have nothing to say; nor have they an audience who would listen.

(75:2) The speech of a god can be so perfectly expressive of that god’s power that the god and its speech become identical. One is speechless before a god, or silent before a winner, because it no longer matters to others what one has to say. To lose a contest is to become obedient; to become obedient is to lose one’s listeners. The silence of obedience is an unheard silence. It is the silence of death. For this reason the demand for obedience is inherently evil.

Infinite Speech

(76:1) Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefoer not about anything; it is always to someone.

(76:2) It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight to what is there, but to draw our vision toward what is not there and indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor is horizonal, reminding us that it is one’s vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing.

(76:3) Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not have had without the response of the listener.

(77:1) Because it is address, attending always on the response of the addressed, infinite speech as the form of listening. Infinite speech does not end in the obedient silence of the hearer, but continues by way of the attentive silence of the speaker. It is not a silence into which spech has died, but a silence from which speech is born.

(77:2) Infinite speakers present themselves as an audience by way of talking with others. Infinite speech forms a world about the other, for the sake of listening.

(77:3) A god can create a world only by listening.

(77:4) Where the gods to address us it would not be to bring us to silence through their speech, but to bring us to speech through their silence.

Storytelling

(78:1) Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed.

(78:2) The stories infinite players tell touch us. In their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly take the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.

(78:3) Fate arises not as a limitation on our freedom, but as a manifestation of our freedom, testimony that choice is consequent.

(78:4) Great stories explore the drama of this deeper touching of one free person by another. They are therefore genuinely sexual dramas asounding us once more with the magic of origins.

(79:1) There is a risk here of supposing that because we know our lives to have the character of narrative, we also know what that narrative is. If I were to know the full story of my life I would then have translated it back into explanation.

(79:2) True storytellers do not know their own story. What they listen to in their poiesis is the disclosure that wherever there is closure there is the possibility of a new opening, that they do not die at the end, but in the course of play. Neither do they know anyone else’s story in its entirety.

(79:3) No one’s life, and no culture, can be known, as one would know a poeima, an object, but only learned, as one would learn poetry, a poiesis.

Nature (Part 2)

(81:1) A garden is grown by an energy which originates from within itself. No machine has been made, nor can one be made, that has the source of its spontaneity within itself.

(82:1) Just as nature has no outside, it has no inside. It is not divided within itself and cannot therefore be used for or against itself. There is no inherent opposition of the living and the nonliving within nature; neither is more or less natural than the other.

(82:2) We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given pattenrs of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated.

(82:3) Nature’s source of movement is always from within itself; indeed it is itself.

(82:4) Chaos and order describe the cultural experience of nature — the degree to which nature’s indifference spontaneity seem to agree with our current manner of cultural self-control.

(83:5) The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability.

(83:6) Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history.

(83:7) The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more vulnerable to its unseeing forces.

(87:1) Indifference to nature leads to the machine, the indifference of nature leads to the garden.

(87:2) Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.

The Source

(88:1) Genuine travel has no destination.

(88:2) All travel is therefore change within the traveler, and it is for that reason that travelers are always somewhere else. To travel is to grow.

(88:3) Genuine travelers do not travel to overcome distance but to discover distance. It is not distance that makes travel necessary, btu travel that makes distance possible. Distance is not determined by the measurable length between objects, but by the actual differences between them.

(88:4) A gardener, whose attention is ever on the spontaneities of nature, acquires the gift of seeing differences. They dramatically open themselves to a renewed future. So, too, with those who look everywhere for difference, who see the earth as source, who celebrate the genius in others, who are not prepared against but for surprise.

(92:1) We see nature as genius when we see as genius.

(92:2) We understand nature as source when we understand ourselves as source.

(93:1) The infinite player recognizes nothing on the face of nature. God did breathe life into us, but in order to continue living we had to do our own breathing.

(93:2) The poet joyously suffers the unlike, reduces nothing, explains nothing, possesses nothing.

(93:3) We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it, we can only speak as it. Yet, though I speak as genius, I cannot speak for genius.

Myth

(94:1) Where explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.

(94:2) Explanations establish islands, even continents, of order and predictability. But these regions were first charted by adventurers whose lives are narratives of exploration and risk. They found them only by mythic journeys into the wayless open.

(94:3) Knowledge is what successful explanation has led to; the thinking that sent us forth, however, is pure story.

(94:4) A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths.

(95:1) Stories that have the enduring strength of myths reach through experience to touch the genius in each of us. But experience is the result of this generative touch, not its cause.

(95:2) If we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.

(95:3) As myths make individual experience possible, they also make collective experience possible. Whole civilizations rise from stories — and can rise from nothing else.

(96:1) A myths are told, they come to us already richly resonant. Their strength as stories lies in their ability to invite us into the drama. It is a drama that contains an entire history of voices, sounding and resounding from a thousand sources in our culture. For this reason myths are significantly unresolved — but unresolved in a the way of an infinite game, having rules, or narrative structure, that allow any number of participants at any time to enter the drama without fixing its plot or bringing it to a closure in a final scene.

(97:1) Myths of irrepressible resonance have lost all trace of an author.

(97:2) Myth is the highest form of our listening to each other, of offering a silence that makes speech of the other possible. This is why listening is far more valued by religion than speaking. Faith comes by listening.

(98:1) Magesterial speech is amplified speech; it is speech that silences. Loudspeaking is a mode of command, and therefore a speech designed to bring itself to an end as completely and swiftly as possible. The amplified voice seeks obedient action on the part of its hearers and an immediate end to their speech. There is no possibility of conversation with a loudspeaker.

(99:1) The loudspeaker, successfully muting all other voices and therefore all possibility of conversation, is not listened to at all, and for that reason loses its own voice and becomes mere noise.

(99:2) The myth of the Buddha’s enlightenment has the smae paradox in it, the same provocation to explanation but with as little possibility of settling the matter. It is the story of a mere mortal, completely without divine aid, undertaking successfully a spiritual quest for release from all forms of bondage, including the need to report this release to others. The perfect unspeakability of this event has given rise to an immense flow of literature in scores of languages that shows no signs of abating.

(99:3) [The infinite player is] a god who listens by becoming one of us. A god ‘emptied’ of divinity, who gave up all privilege of commanding speech and ‘dwelt among us’ coming ‘not to be served, but to serve,’ ‘being all things to all persons.’

(99:4) They no doubt preferred a god of magisterial utterance, a theatrical likeness of their own finite designs. They did not expect an infinite listener who joyously took their unlikeness on himself, giving them their own voice through the silence of wonder, a healing and holy metaphor that leaves everything still to be said.

(100:1) No myth is necessary. There is no story that must be told. Stories do not have a truth that someone needs to reveal, or someone needs to hear.

(100:2) Who listens to his myth cannot rise above history to utter timeless truths about it.

(100:3) It is not necessary for infinite players to BE something. Titles can only be playful abstractions, mere performances for the sake of laughter. Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.

(101:1) There is but one infinite game.

Writing has taken us to the very edge beyond which writing may be impossible. Any texts which could survive the plunge over this edge– into whatever abyss or Abyssinia lies beyond–would have to be virtually self-created… the last screamed messages of a witch or heretic burning at the stake.

“RAW VISION” (notes)

It is meant only for the artist & the artist’s “immediate entourage” (friends family, neighbors, tribe); & it participates only in a “gift” economy of positive reciprocity.

The only fair way (or “beauty way,” as the Hopi say) to treat “outsider” art would seem to be to keep it “secret”–to refuse to define it–to pass it on as a secret, person-to-person, breast-to-breast–rather than pass it thru the paramedium (slick journals, quarterlies, galleries, museums, coffee-table books, MTV, etc.). Or even better:–to become “mad” & “innocent” ourselves–for so Babylon will label us when we neither worship nor criticize it anymore–when we have forgotten it (but not “forgiven” it!), & remembered our own prophetic selves, our bodies, our “true will.”

SILENCE

We hear not the language but the echo.

The organic is secretive–it secretes secrecy like sap. The inorganic is a demonic democracy–everything equal, but equally valueless.

Within the organic (”Nature,” “everyday life”) is embedded a kind of silence which is not just dumbness, an opacity which is not mere ignorance–a secrecy which is also an affirmation–a tact which knows how to act, how to change things, how to breathe into them.

An occultist would ask how to “work” this silence–but we’ d rather ask how to play it, like musicians, or like the playful boy of Heraclitus.

The Wonderful World of Knowledge has turned into some kind of PBS Special from Hell.

There are some things bureaucrats were not meant to know–& so there are some things which even artists should keep secret. This is not self-censorship nor self-ignorance. It is cosmic tact.

We’ll play with the silence & make it ours.

CRITIQUE OF THE LISTENER

To speak too much & not be heard–that’s sickening enough. But to acquire listeners–that could be worse. Listeners think that to listen suffices–as if their true desire were to hear with someone else’s ears, see through someone else’s eyes, feel with someone else’s skin . . . start with your own!!!

Don’t entertained too subtle an idea about magic. The crude truth is perhaps that texts can only change reality when they inspire readers to see & act, rather than merely see. (To know and to not do is to not know.)

Seeing, & the literature of seeing, is too easy. Enlightenment is easy. “It’s easy to be a sufi,” a Persian shaykh once told me. “What’s difficult is to be human.”

…the theories I’ve played with–are just that: theories, visions, ways of seeing.

But even more we would like to purge our lives of everything which obstructs or delays us from setting out… not to escape the world or to rule it–but to open ourselves to difference.

Enlightenment is all we have, & even that we’ve had to rip from the grasp of corrupt gurus & bumbling suicidal intellectuals.

Writing has taken us to the very edge beyond which writing may be impossible. Any texts which could survive the plunge over this edge– into whatever abyss or Abyssinia lies beyond–would have to be virtually self-created, like the miraculous hidden-treasure Dakini-scrolls of Tibet or the tadpole-script spirit-texts of Taoism–& absolutely incandescent, like the last screamed messages of a witch or heretic burning at the stake.

I can sense these texts trembling just beyond the veil.

What if the mood should strike us … to risk the abyss? What if no one followed? So much the better, perhaps– we might find our equals amongst the Hyperboreans. What if we went mad? Well–that’s the risk. What if we were bored? Ah . . .

It’s as if there were angels in the next room beyond thick walls– arguing? fucking? One can’t make out a single word.

Can we retrain ourselves at this late date to become Finders of hidden treasure?

Finally, however, it will become necessary to leave this city which hovers immobile on the edge of a sterile twilight, like Hamelin after all the children were lured away. Perhaps other cities exist, occupying the same space & time, but . . . different. And perhaps there exist jungles where mere enlightenment is outshadowed by the black light of jaguars. I have no idea–& I’m terrified.

“The practice of immediatism will release within us vast storehouses of forgotten power, which will not only transform our lives through the secret realization of unmediated play, but will also inescapably well up & burst out & permeate the other art we create, the more public & mediated art.” [ ... ]

ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHY IN A NUTSHELL (notes)

Out of nothing we will imagine our values and by this act of invention we shall live.

Of course, illusions can kill. Images of punishment haunt the sleep of Order. Ontological Anarchy proposes that we wake up, and create our own day — even in the shadow of the State, that pustulant giant who sleeps, and whose dreams of Order metastasize as spasms of spectacular violence

Chaos Linguistics?

All forms of communicativeness should be angelic — language itself should be angelic — a kind of divine chaos.

Self and Other complement and complete one another. (They are not opposing polarities but a system of expressions.)

“Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill” – not an abstract noun. A process (praxis), not a “state” — a movement, not a form of governance. A kind of critical theory which no mere practical politics nor systematic philosophy can hope to evolve.

The greater the portion of my life that can be wrenched from the Work/Consume/Die cycle, and (re)turned over to the economy of the “bee”, the greater my chance for pleasure. One runs a certain risk in thus thwarting the vampiric energies of institutions.

IMMEDIATISM (notes)

And we should like to remember a certain psychic martial art which stresses the realization that the body itself is the least mediated of all media.

Publicly we’ll continue our work in publishing, radio, printing, music, etc. but privately we will create something else, something to be shared freely but never consumed passively, something which can be discussed openly but never understood by the agents of alienation, something with no commercial potential yet valuable beyond price, something occult yet woven completely into the fabric of our everyday lives

Game:

Rule: All spectators must also be performers.

[our games] will tend toward immediate techniques involving physical presence, direct communication and the senses.

An obvious matrix for Immediatism is the party… [ or dinner party ]

Awareness of the practice of immediatism as a response to the sorrows of alienation.

We wish to take the motives and discoveries of these earlier movements to their logical conclusion in an art which banishes all meditation and alienation, at least to the extent that the human condition allows.

Immediatism is not condemned to powerlessness in the world, simply because it avoids the publicity of the marketplace. “Poetic Terrorism” & “Art Sabotage” are quite logical manifestations of immediatism.

The practice of immediatism will release within us vast storehouses of forgotten power, which will not only transform our lives through the secret realization of unmediated play, but will also inescapably well up & burst out & permeate the other art we create, the more public & mediated art.

AN IMMEDIATIST POTLACH

[ see Game details http://www.left-bank.org/bey/imm_potl.htm ]

THE TONGS (notes)

The mandarins draw their power from the law;
the people, from the secret societies.
(Chinese saying)

I argued that secret societies are once again a valid possibility for groups seeking autonomy & individual realization.

He proposed instead that the establishment of multi-purpose neighborhood centers, with expenses to be shared by various special-interest groups & small-entrepeneurial concerns.

Most modern people seem unable to believe in the reality of something they never see on television — therefore to escape being televisualized is already to be quasi-invisible.

There’s no reason [an immediatist secret society] can’t be choosy. Many non-authoritarian organizations have foundered on the dubious principle of open membership, which frequently leads to a preponderance of assholes, yahoos, spoilers, whining neurotics and police agents.

The “secret” purpose of conviviality in the secret society then becomes the self-structuring & auto-valorization of free time.

The principle of the thing: secrets should be respected. Not everyone needs to know everything!

We are not interested in a return to the primitive but in a return OF the primitive, inasmuch as the primitive is the ‘repressed’.

In our times people are usually not kept apart by law but by mediation and alienation.

Simply to meet together face-to-face is already an action against the forces which oppress us by isolation, by loneliness, by the trance of media.

There are some people who do not need fifteen seconds on the Evening News to validate their existence.An

Elitist Attitude: a small group which exercises power over non-insiders for its own aggrandizement.

Immedtiatism does not concern itself with power-relations;– it desires neither to be ruled nor to rule.

It is a free association of individuals who have chosen each other as the subjects of the group’s generosity, its “expansiveness”… if this amounts to some kind of ‘elitism’ then so be it.

If immediatism begins with groups of friends trying not just to overcome isolation but also to enhance each other’s lives, soon it will want to take a more complex shape:– nuclei of mutually-self-chosen allies, working (playing) to occupy more & more time & space outside all mediated structure & control. Then it will want to become a horizontal network of such autonomous groups — then, a ‘tendency’ — then, a ‘movement’ — & then, a kinetic web of “temporary autonomous zones.” At last it will strive to become the kernel of a new society, giving birth to itself within the corrupt shell of the old.

For all these purposes the secret society promises to provide a useful framework of protective clandestinity — a cloak of invisibility that will have to be dropped only in the event of some final showdown with the Babylon of Mediation…

IMMEDIATISM vs CAPITALISM (notes)

Immediatism means to enhance individuals by providing a matrix of friendship, not to belittle them by sacrificing their ‘ownness’ to group-think, leftist self-abnegation, or New Age clone-values. What must be overcome is not individuality per se, but rather the addiction to bitter loneliness which characterizes consciousness in 20th century.

The first & most innocent-seeming obstacle to any immedatist project will be the ‘busyness’ or ‘need to make a living’ faced by each of its associates.

At the most mundane-seeming level, the group will fail to agree on a day of the week for meetings because everyone is ‘busy.’ But this is not mundane. It is sheer cosmic evil.

This monster called WORK remains the precise & exact target of our rebellious wrath, the one single most oppressive reality we face (& we must learn also to recognize Work when it’s disguised as “leisure” as would be described in The Hacker Ethic).

To be ‘too busy’ for the immedatist project is to miss the very essence of immediatism.

Succeed in actually physically meeting face-to-face with a group which is not your spouse & kids, or the ‘guys from my job,’ or your 12-Step Program –& you have already achieved virtually everything immedatism yearns for. An actual project will arise almost spontaneously out of this successful slap-in-the-face of the social norm of alienated boredom.

We’re not kidding or indulging in hyperbole when we insist that meeting face-to-face is already “the revolution.”

Fight them– by meeting with friends, not to consume or produce, but to enjoy friendship– & you will have triumphed (at least for the moment) over the most pernicious conspiracy in Euro-American society today.

If you are seen, you will be perceived as wrong, illegal, immortal — different.

And of course the chances are good that your immediatist group is engaged in something illegal (ie. these days, piracy of information and entertainment from the internet is common) — since almost everything enjoyable is in fact illegal.

Immediatism is the most natural path for free humans imaginable — & therefore the most unnatural abomination in the eyes of Capital, Control, Order, Simulation. Immediatism will triumph, but only through vigilance, self-organization of power, of clandestinity & of insurrection. Immediatism is our delight, immediatism is dangerous.

INVOLUTION (notes)

Consciousness in itself, as Nietzsche pointed out, plays a less significant role in life than power.

Immediatism remains for us more a game than “movement”.

Rule: It is produced for a group of friends; it is not produced for sale, nor is it sold, nor (ideally) is it allowed to slip out of the control of its producers in any way, shape or form. It is sacred and secret.

The best immediatist agitprop will leave no trace at all, except in the souls of those who are changed by it.

This is a game, not a movement; it has rules of play, but no laws. Immediatism would love it if everyone were an artist, but our goal is not mass conversion.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that suicide is not a ’solution’.

The Totality isolates individuals & renders them powerless by offering only illusory modes of social expression, modes which seem to promise liberation or self-fulfillment but in fact end by producing yet more mediation & alienation.

Simulation cannot reproduce the faint reflection of ‘aura’ which is allowed even to commodity-trash, its ‘utopian trace.’ Simulation cannot in fact reproduce or produce anything except desolation and misery. But since the Totality thrives on our misery, Simulation suits its purpose quite admirably.

People made to feel isolated, alienated, weird, queer, wrong, finally non-existent; people without voices; people without power.

America is full to overflowing with people who feel that no matter what they say or do, no difference will be made; that no one is listening; that there is no one to listen.

Each group of artists or peace activists or whatever is also made to feel that no contact with other groups is possible.

The concept of ‘networking‘ began as a revolutionary strategy to bypass & overcome the Totality by setting up horizontal connections.

Communication technology may still prove to offer useful tools in this struggle, but by now it has become just as powerful a force for Simulation.

“The New Autonomy will either infiltrate the media and subvert ‘it’ from within — or else never be “seen” at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the State’s ability to SEE.”

The TAZ must be understood in action.

Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap op. The first step is somewhat akin to satori - the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.

TAZ rises up from insurrection, from within.

TAZ is a not a new frontier, because there is no more terra incognita. TAZ has to do with a 1:1 mapping, a level at which the state system has a hard time keeping an eye on.

The map is closed but the TAZ is open. It unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the carography of Control. It is psychotopographical (and psychotemporal.)

Psychotopology/Psychotopography as an alternative science to that of the State’s surveying, mapmaking, psychic imperialism. Psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps and carry out actions that cannot be an item of surveillance.

Psychotopology is the art of ‘dowsing’ for potential TAZs, for flowering zones, spaces, which for a time have escaped notice by the map makers, or has been neglected by the State.

Reaction alone cannot provide the energy needed to “manifest” a TAZ. An uprising must be for something as well.

The band is an affinity group sworn to a bond of love. Hakim Bey is not talking about a cult! He is suggesting a re-tribalization, no less than McLuhan was predicting that the world was becoming retribalized
as an inevitability.

The use of time by the state: psychotemporal oppression.

‘Science’ of psychotopology indicates “flows of forces” and “spots of power” (borrowed occultist metaphors) which localize the TAZ in space time.

Vital to shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (rootless cosmopolitanism). Our minds are not grounded in any one belief or source, a consequence of our access to culture and lore from all parts of the world. We are able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden insect’s, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.

Psychic nomadism as a tactic. They are apaches (”enemies”) of the old Consensus. There is a need and desire for TAZ.

Terms below do not define areas but suggest tendencies:

• Net: totality of all information and communication transfer.
• Web: the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, non-hierarchic network
• Counter-Net: clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web.

The TAZ tends to ignore production altogether and simply picks up what it can use. (Collaborative, remix, piracy, bootstrapping)

The TAZ has a temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual location in space. The Web provides logistical support for the TAZ, it helps to bring it into being, but is not itself the TAZ.

The TAZ ‘exists’ in information-space as well as in the ‘real world’. The Web informs the TAZ, so as to compensate for its lack of duration.

The Web is a support system, capable of carrying information from one TAZ to another, of defending the TAZ, rendering it ‘invisible’ or giving it teeth, as the situation might demand. The web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. The key is not the brand or level of tech involved but the openness and horizontality of the structure.

If the TAZ is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of the tribe (sorely needed for restorative global action)

“Reality Hacking” plays a major role in the creation of TAZs.

Data-piracy, unauthorized transmissions and the free flow of information can never be frozen. Chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible.

The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation. It wants to experience its existence as immediate, not filtered through Simulation (see Immediatism). Breast-to-breast, face-to-face.

TAZ wants to live in this world, not just an idea of another world, or some visionary world.

TAZ lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power-spot at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals. (What I refer to as “The Weave“.)

The patterns of force which bring the TAZ into being have something in common with those chaotic “Strange Attractors” which exist, so to speak, between the dimensions.

Above all, TAZ will live, now, or as soon as possible, in however suspect or ramshackle a form, spontaneously, without regard for ideology or even anti-ideology.

TAZ is an intensification, a surplus, life spending itself in living rather than merely surviving.

The TAZ-hacker will work for the evolution of clandestine fractal connections. These connections and the different information that flows among and between them will form ‘power outlets’ for the coming into being of the TAZ itself.

The TAZ has occured, is occuring, and will occur with or without the computer.

Becoming ‘wild’ is always an erotic act, an act of nakedness, exposure, vulnerability.

Escapist communes become less possible the stronger the cartography of the state. Do cults qualify amongst these communes? Surely the state must frown deeply on it in any form.

TAZ can manifest as an interzone which opens up in the midst or wake of war and revolution. Meanwhile, keep on the move and live intensely.

Pirate economies: Living high off the surplus of social overproduction, a shared air of impermanence, of being ready to move on, shape-shift, re-locate to other places or planes of reality.

“The Will to Disappearance” - TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance. Disappearance is not necessarily a ‘catastrophe’.

Why bother to confront a ‘power’ which has lost all meaning and become sheer Simulation? Such confrontations will only result in dangerous and ugly spasms of violence by the empty-headed shit-for-brains who’ve inherited the keys to all the armories and prisons.

Disappearance seems to be a very logical radical option for our time. Strategies in the always-ongoing “revolution of everyday life”: the struggle that cannot cease even with the last failure of political or social revolution because nothing except the end of the world can bring an end to everyday life, nor to our aspirations for the good things. Nietzsche said, if the world could come to an end, logically it would have done so; it has not, so it does not. (Concentrate much more on the day to day of the individual/community than on long term global circumstances, though clearly the planetary stage is forever contextual to all our efforts.)

Hacking is another form of “education” with certain features of “invisibility” (I am very interested in developing some understanding on reality hacking. What is it? How does one go about hacking reality?) (The Hacker Ethic)

Refusal of work as a new mode of rebellion: self-employment, emerges out of the Hacker Ethic.

The area of “catastrophe” where the breakdown of the system can equal enlightenment (does global communication breakdown promise some form of TAZ\enlightenment? The Web appears neutral to the activities of TAZ and Control, thus the constant flux.)

If the TAZ can exist, it does exist. But perhaps only as a sort of alternate reality which we so far have not learned to perceive clearly.

The New Autonomy will either infiltrate the media and subvert ‘it’ from within — or else never be “seen” at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the State’s ability to SEE.

Psychological Liberation:

• Create moments and spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual.
• Know ways in which we are genuinely oppressed — also Shadow, self-repression and fantasy.
• Combat alienation. The TAZ must be the scene of our present autonomy but it can only exist on the condition that we already know ourselves as free beings.

We do not live in cyberspace; to dream that we do is to fall into CyberGnosis (McLuhan called it disincarnate existence), the false transcendence of the body.

The TAZ is a physical place and we are either in it or not. As power disappears, our will to power must be disappearance.

Liberation is realized struggle.

The TAZ offers a kind of ferality, a growth from tameness to wilderness, a return which is also a step forward. An acceptance of violence as actual and a release from the non-actual ideal of non-violence, of ‘peace’ may be essential (J. Krishnamurti)

The Yoga of Chaos

The TAZ is an art of life in continual rising up, wild but gentle — a seducer not a rapist, a smuggler rather than a bloody pirate, a dancer not an eschatologist.