SOCRATES' ASSIGNMENT

socrates midway between earth and paradise is running a wargame clinic ... why should he do that ... because he's been told to ... turns out the battles and the wars the campaigns and the different theaters are metaphors ... but metaphors in this subethereal palace are so thick and thin in various spots they obviate or become simple understanding ... as the armies are cardboard and the terrain is paper the story being told isn't the one that happened ... and as the students gather round the board there's something else they mean in everything they say or see ... achilles takes the field the dawning of the west meets the setting sun in the east ... athens and sparta disagree now the west is being born ... caesar's chasing pompey the republic takes a fall the epicure into hiding the stoic on his sword ... house against house to become a medieval king god's representative ... parliaments and reformers ... nations and their states ... government against government ... people against each other ... where after all in all of this would socrates be out of place

FINAL HOPE

we thought the death of the body meant the loss of the mind but that's backwards ... losing your mind can be as quick as a bullet or as slow as dementia but when the lower ego shuts the last system down and closes the door all the light and purpose go too ... and the body in that instant is compost ... what an ugly thought ... but it's a simple consequence of flipping that last switch ... one moment it's there the monitors testify to its still present administrative power and then it's gone ... and what it leaves behind requires a totally alien protocol ... it's the mind in particular its higher powers that we value most ... it's what we lose so death may have its high value among us its place of honor and disgust ... between the body and the mind in this my heart goes out to the lower ego ... he cleaned the soiled and polished the brass and in the end he's the one to go from room to room and turn out the lights ... and I can't but wonder what the higher ego's thinking as he does ... thinking I hope of duty and devotion of love and the lost manor ... of the light to come seen in the past

O-D

so by definition at least part of that definition what is death ... I say it's the separation of soul from body most noticeable in the loss to the body of the presence of the conscious mind ... it's how we feel cheated in talking to a senile parent ... the higher ego is shorted out ... the lower ego the one without a life jacket is in charge of the sinking ship ... all the intrigue and clever insight down with it to the bottom ... the present location of the higher ego and the spirit is unknown ... all during life we stage replicas of this death ... besides comas of the body we sleep we dream we take drugs ... we tune in and zone out ... the hard-working not seldom wrong lower ego is taken for a vacation on the corporate jet ... leans back first class and gazes out the window ... he can relax ... the details are far down below ... higher ego and spirit are his pilots ... all LE has to do is listen to their conversation on the PA ... there is something like a game in what they do he muses ... I know what they're saying and I agree but I'd never have thought to think it myself ... this drink is strong the smoke's a fog if this is death let me have more

EDEN'S TREE OF PRIDE

I'm not only a pacrist but I can tell you as the world's only pacrist that all pacrists are sinners ... when I was young I was a thief ... in middle age a lecher ... but I saved till the end the controlling sin of all the others the sin of pride ... in particular I was proud to be a pacrist but in general I was an annoying pain in the ass ... well thank god this more general complaint is settled by my seclusion and the pacres are assigned by way of penance ... to me and to you who read them ... you poor few who have nothing better to do ... but come let's have peace and call it a parsonage ... pasturage finally in our town ... age of the person ... for isn't that our salvation ... flooded in a valley cluttered with ideas there's only one high and wide enough to save us ... true it is a truth a necessary truth the one truth all the human mind must turn to ... but the necessary truth is a necessary being ... not like you or me the ocean or the galaxy not like us but with us ... nothing any of us could call to pin down as if we had the right ... but the living truth which we nailed to a tree

FREEDOM AND NECESSITY DOWN THE AGES

is anything necessary ... the ancients were of two opinions ... parmenides said everything's necessary nothing's left to chance for nothing ever changes change is an illusion ... heraclitus disagreed nothing stays the same he said permanence crumbles anything can happen ... plato said if you want necessity you'll find him at home in the world of ideas but down here in the cave things are a mess ... aristotle reveling in the mess organized cataloged necessity expanding then limiting it to his own four causes and much preferred the slogan always or for the most part ... then came the skeptics his successors the resurrected sophists and took away the conjunction and made the slogan a sneer and an academic prerogative to ask the question who can say always isn't really for the most part ... and the epicureans in shock took to refined eating and the stoics built walls and the walls fell ... and rose again round cathedrals and universities where the word spread that only one thing was necessary ... it was that which made us free

NOSTRADAMUS DEJA VU

modern philosophy at least since rationalism met empirical scepticism since kant met hume has been tossing a hot potato down the centuries ... necessity ... becomes certainy becomes logical implication becomes language becomes culture becomes meaning becomes custom becomes perception becomes sensation becomes neural becomes electrical becomes photon becomes my way of seeing the light and yours ... joins the east subscribes to maya hopes for nirvana but has this in agreement before it goes ... everything's mental ... either the universe has a mind or it's in my mind ... the cosmos is ideal maybe not perfect but made of idea experience awareness ... win or fail it's a grand intellectual adventure ... the sharper the mind the more precise and universal its control ... while the priesthood chants random selection the technicians adjust the dials ... while the academics certify chance and expel design the politicians rig the wheel and plan your future ... it's the age of nostradamus the cosmic gnostic

THE QUALIFIER THAT MUST NOT BE MISSING

LJC SOTLG HMOM AS ... name the authority ... give the source of his authority ... say what it is you want ... explain why you need it ... politics metaphysics and theology psychology anthropology ... say you do say the prayer and you find the edges mellow ... but you are warned against the unauthorized use of the prayer and are told two things to watch for ... irritability and humility ... that the first showed you going wrong ... think hitler ... while the second leads to the company of the sages and the saints ... but say the name of stalin ... he was wrong but not was he discontented ... couldn't he have lulled himself content with his own demonic litany his own luciferic light ... he was a seminarian he would know how to do it ... and just how do you say he couldn't be right even if he thought he was ... even if he said I did all that I did to push the needle through a thick patch and we closed up with a tight knot just in time ... put to trial he'd be proud ... his content would be fierce ... materialistic machiavellian gnostic eugenic he'd be someone's utopian hero ... he'd be all that but not humble

frederica matthewes-green, the jesus prayer, ch 2

PLAYING TO YOUR AUDIENCE

how can you pray always ... you'd bump into furniture and trees ... you couldn't talk to anyone else or hear them ... why you couldn't think straight about anything at all but this conversation with god ... or am I missing something ... well yeah there are lots of people who do it and lots of books on how they do ... but prior to such simple research how would you explain it ... we could start out using our prayer as a filler ... it would have to be short so you would know it by heart ... maybe just one sentence just a few short words so when you paused to take a breath you could throw it in on the exhale ... or when things begin to get dicey and when normal conversation and thought get crowded out step up the rpm ... instead of spacing out or going into shock you might go the other way and think the prayer slowly ... in the midst of a crowded discordant council in the middle of your head you could pray the room quiet with a cadenced repetition ... but this is tactical advice in danger of enlisting in the incantation choir and ignoring the strategic purpose of the prayer ... the one within you who hears it

THE TRUE IDEALIST WANTS IT ALL

I do love idealism but I have to remember that some ideas are true and some are not ... some for example sound great but then go on talking and ruin it ... say ideas are real as real as a dishrag but beautiful and filled with power ... say a planet say a star or the stars in conjunction ... which is to say a dance ... the waves lapping the hips swaying the armies marching air fleets and grand fleets sailing on the high seas of the brain's limbic system ... a chemical pool for dry synapses to recover and to flourish ... and each whole healthy brain pouring faster than its electrical pulsations into the mother's mind ... the world soul ... the overmind and universal perfection ... a system to remember ... therefore one that's right or wrong ... either or ... reincarnation or purgatory ... either one or both ... human perfection on earth or in heaven ... the planet's destination this planet or it becomes another ... it dries up into a dull red cinder a last speck of dried blood on the universal bandage or a walk into the light ... love while you can or love so that you will forever

cf penn jillette on red-eye, aired 11.9.10

RESURRECTION

I must practice detachment from the body because the body is going to die and the mind is going to sleep ... the body of course can sense that something is going wrong ... the mind isn't always sure but given time it comes to know ... indeed our culture is designed as an early warning system and if early enough it's like to suggest certain demands which more often than not are met ... and which require our conscious participation ... there comes a time when that can be difficult ... such times are rare for any comic effect though they do have their wry moments ... but the situation regardless for the most part of our participation is itself a thing that seems to have a will ... to put the mind asleep and to dissipate the body ... knowing that the situation always wins dramatically suddenly or gradually and more often cruelly than coolly I must get to work and practice detachment from the body in its current situation ... prepare the mind for bed and hope for a deathbed conversion of the situation from demon to midwife

SPIRITS

I'll go out on a limb as they say and wonder who's out on it with me ... if thinking is a conversation inside your head prayer is its perfection ... and further out on the bending branch to say ... all things by nature tend towards the source of the conversation the one who started it ... sounds gnostic ... it is after all about thinking ... but it's more ... you can tell because it doesn't end in itself ... if thinking is a conversation even when you're alone it sounds like talking to yourself ... but it's not ... we have a culture that's wrong and this is one of the ways it doesn't work ... what if in fact talking to yourself can't be done ... if talking meant a conversation and conversation meant at least two ... that whenever you were thinking you were never alone ... if we were part of a culture that took this for fact we'd do infinitely more with the thought of it than our culture does but first we'd want to identify the speakers ... what do they sound like ... what do they say ... are they right or wrong ... forceful graceful sweet or brutal ... what are they made of ... how do they live and do they die

THE GRAND INQUISITION

I'll talk politics with you all day if you'll answer three questions I've asked myself ... in one sentence state your theology ... I believe in god the father the son and the holy spirit ... your metaphysics ... I believe reality is composed of three ascending orders body mind spirit ... your politics ... moderate compromise on everything but principle ... let's try some test cases working backward ... where do you stand on hopes for a political utopia ... I think they're thought experiments whose inevitable conclusions warn against their application ... they're idealism disguised as engineering ... they elevate the mind above the body and the spirit to isolate and to kill it ... they are thereby a distorted image of the trinity with a sombre perversion in place of the son ... and gnosticism ... as utopia is an emerging political nightmare gnosticism is its epistemological parent ... how god would think if jesus were crazy or as the devil does think ... what about atheism ... gnosticism's father and son a never-ending circle always ending in death ... you say day I'll say night you say be I'll say not

ON THE ONE HAND

cut the ego off on the left ... now snip it on the right ... let it float to the surface ... let it fly through the sky ... give in on purpose to one of its wishes ... for solitude on high ... but bring it back down shortly ... set it up on dry ground a banner on a pole ... walk beside underneath ... what's the slogan for the day ... LJC SOTLG ... have mercy on me a sinner ... limited joyful community ... limited by law joyful by compliance ... a study in such compliance ... son of the living god ... for what makes sense of ethics but metaphysics with theology behind her ... I mean you can have evidence of design of coherence even a dim beauty but what's it worth with no light behind it and ahead ... I mean fine pick a ruler then call for his mercy but what's the point if you don't know who he is ... unless his name itself is all you need to know and you know it ... unless you know the god you worship isn't dead ... climb the pole bring the flag down give it a good washing the air here isn't what it should be ... lead jesus conquer ... lord jesus christ ... have mercy on me in my sins ... or have you my friend on the other hand something better

VOYEUR KILLING TIME

suppose you had curiosity but that was as far as you might go ... suppose that is you had the fatal kind of curiosity that went as far as it went to get the shortest answer but no further ... looking through the window it sees an attractive sight but must hurry on into the night ... listening outside the door it hears the truth outright but scurries on to the next spot without a pause to make a note ... till door after door and window after window the pictures and the sound flow by as if they were frames on a spinning wheel ... or in a film splattered on a screen ... the voyeur audience incapable of participation and at the end unable even to react loses two lives each ... the one on the screen so far out of touch ... the one in their seat alone in the dark of the crowded theater and a bright day filled with saints and sinners outside ... it's a shadowy world inside with bright colors that fade on the wall ... a passion you can make believe you share on screen and off with the idea of truth the beauty of it ... anything can be made to look true in slow motion but this makes slow motion look good in the real time we lose to watch it

plato, the republic, bk 7, the allegory of the cave

THE DEN

I have all these books because any one of them might be read ... the games on battles and wars might be run each a different way ... but I have no time no one does to read or play them all ... and it's not like any of them can be expected to survive me long ... but I see in each of them nonetheless the glint of immortality ... the paper map the cardboard counters the folio pages the quarto mass are only atoms in a fixed dance ... what does science say ... that in time they'll all go home pull up the covers and fall apart ... you see I didn't start thinking this on my own ... I was born into a community that understands what nothing might be ... nothing or something ... for a while or forever ... either chasing or till the day you die ... rolling downhill head over heels we stitch a seam in time ... inside a house in constant repair we find a room with no window or door ... no lock no key ... a room no one enters ... yet still you hear them talking ... and the words that come through the static linger in your mind and become a foundation ... we print them on a page we draw them on a map ... we see inside the room

IN REFLECTED GLORY: THE IMAGE OF GOD

does grammar parse theology ... the first person I is what each of us is to start with ... father to all that follows ... the second person is the most personal the closest we get when we each use the same word for the other ... you ... but when it came to the third person I found the analogy most impressive ... she he they it isn't me talking telling you anything ... it's past the first and the second ... it's on to the third ... and there's a fine expression within it where you and I and what they might think are no longer the subject ... what a relief to talk about something else ... and talk we have ... across centuries flooding into millenia ... you and I led the way made the family but we're not human till we go public ... till the third person arrives ... you I've come to love but we're no good out of context ... it's in the third that we know the context ... in the third person that we describe its contents ... there was an explosion we huddled together in order to survive from doing things together we began to make them together through family tribe kingdom and empire through art and science to the glory of god

WHY WE NEED THE SUPER EGO

conscious or unconscious choices ... I've heard of unconscious motives but am used to thinking of choices as necessarily conscious ... so let's see what you'd have to do to either word to make it fit the other ... conscious I take to mean me ... I mean the ego ... but I know when I do I'm being particular ... widening out to more general a sense of who I am we each may take freud's reflected trinity ... our expression of the father's power I'm sad to say is as you know perverted ... freud called it the id ... it's the id that's subconscious ... and now we want to say the id has its choices ... if you mean options you're pulling your punch back into the potential ... say rather choice as in your choice to make ... this choice you now are making ... how do I know ... I see what you're doing ... why isn't that just another option ... because you actually did it ... but if you find a gray area between the thought and the synapses firing ... between the action and the intention ... things there would be so foggy you might confuse the subway for the surface ... here the id might blend into the ego ... super ego would still tell us apart

peck, people of the lie, p105

SOFT CHAGRIN

what's this thing about pride ... is it simply selfish when sinful and generous when it's a virtue ... what good thing was ever done alone ... what bad thing that didn't try to hide ... the recognition of excellence entails a celebration a party a feast ... the commission of a crime makes you want to flee the scene ... and so with pride ... the good kind draws us together the bad kind makes us scatter ... what's the difference between aircraft debris landing in your back yard and the arrival of the first sparrow ... something broken and something well-made ... premonition of death and cause for celebration ... why is a wedding a twelve-hour festival and the honeymoon a mystery of being private but not alone ... what's the bond that pulls us apart ... the scheme that makes suicide the most lively option ... what's the motive behind false pride that isn't found in its name a lie ... waiting here patiently for the bus to take me from someone to someone else ... here for the bones creaking and the aches roaming there is no pride or isolation but for the moment time enough for a laugh

peck, people of the lie, "narcissism and will", pp 77-84

42nd STREET

the ego went for whatever reason the ego goes anywhere ... for the idea of it ... the id goes to sabotage the going there ... the ego infatuated with the idea intoxicated with the word of it prances mimics gestures across the stage ... in a word declaims ... but the spirit super ego the spirit is quiet it listens it considers and it learns ... next day too bad the id has pulled the ego down ... just on the verge of finding the word for what the spirit has said the id calls the ego to bed ... just as well the ego was on the wrong floor anyway well above its natural height ... they spoke in symbols up there as if the words they used were numbers in a line ... they spoke of narrow concepts at the end of long thin branches ... what a bird this ego would be to settle down so large and clumsy on such a line of thought ... besides perfection of a dissolute profusion was all the rage there when the ego still mostly a mumbler was trying to remember ... no wait that doesn't sound right ... what is that word the ego tries to recall ... the thing the spirit said

WANTED FOR POTUS: A NEW MENTOR

o'bama preaches and is driven by a sense of community as old as plato ... a sense indeed of community that is platonic ... power flows down through the strength of wisdom at the top ... children are separated as a class from an ascending series of adults ... from laborers to technicians through teachers to the guardians at the top ... where truth and wisdom are packaged and sent down the slope to the children at the bottom to raise them up from poverty and ill health ... it's a noble picture but it doesn't move ... each year from their birth we bundle each class up the slope to go as far as they can get ... but they're just details ... all the pattern of their movement their purpose that which makes them such a picture to see this design never changes ... but plato had a grandon who didn't agree ... whose nose wasn't in a book ... whose mind wasn't in the middle of a literary discourse ... whose fingers were stained in earth and blood dissecting animals all the way up to god ... who educated princes and advised kings and then saints when it was their turn to learn ... aristotle