albionspeak: a draught of language (6.6)
School Midterm 2: Lessons 4-6
Before beginning this School midterm below, I want to delve a bit into ethics & moral philosophy. As Scribe helped me understand in college, morality by definition involves choice. To kill or not to kill a random person, say, generally is not much of a choice, not an option we would tend to weigh; so a simple adherence to, let’s say, the Ten Commandments, does not particularly represent a moral pattern or paradigm for life[1]. In fact, to follow such Commandments blindly means, in most contexts, to give up your soul, since all you are is how you choose. Let me reiterate precisely: We are thinkers—to think is to exist—but we are not so much what we think, than how we think. Similarly, we are not our choices, but how we choose them. This can be connected to the wise proverb offered in many theologies that God truly is neither a noun nor a even pronoun, but rather a verb.
Now consider morality using our new words fibers and filaments. Filaments are the default trees & branches of a particular projection, “the history of a stone,” as Don once told us, which, he asserted, most people resemble in their busy, empty lives. And recognize, it’s sadly not too hard to predict the hard road ahead for an abused, neglected middle schooler failing class & taking drugs. Indeed, without serious intervention the path is all-too clear. Fibers, then, are the connections which allow us to alter these default histories. They connect the script & branches to a different path, new challenges & risks; and fibers can only be inserted through an act of will, an eternal choice. Moral philosophy, then, is the study of fibers.
So below, in addition to a minimal vocab challenge, I pose moral & ethical questions, to put my paradigm and draught of language to use. Souls live in motion, not stone. Thus for these questions there is often no single best choice or answer, for an answer, like a Commandment, like a graven idol, remains a thing, a noun, whereas the true value lies in the thinking, a verb or verbal process only. My answer key that follows then may prove unsatisfying. There may be no right or wrong answer, which I find amusing when talking about moral rights & wrongs.
I. Matching: Write the letter of the definition in the right column next to the term that best matches it on the left. Each letter is used once.
1. ________ aleph
2. ________ auroras
3. ________ Charybdis
4. ________ cricket
5. ________ fibers
6. ________ origin
7. ________ overseer
8. ________ port
9. ________ sequence
10. ________ soul
II. Multiple Choice: Circle the letter or letters next to the best answer(s).
11. Why do human souls go to School?
a) to learn skills & content & a trade to prepare them for adulthood
b) to get away from Home
c) because that’s what happens to humans developmentally
d) “to get to the other side”
e) to become their overseer
12. Which of the following is not true of flight?
a) Flying is effortless.
b) Born flyers face trials that non-flyers do not.
c) Flight has nothing to do with moral character.
d) Flyers often don't know what they do.
e) Flight is often propelled on the wings of ego.
13. Circle all of the following which are consistent with "Existence must be shared":
a) "No man is an island.”
b) If a tree falls and no one hears it, it makes no sound.
c) All human souls must live and die (thus no unborn souls).
d) A cave painting is unearthed. Its artist, if appreciated, is reborn.
e) Donald Trump tweets hate at 3 AM: 2 million old white men ejaculate.
14. In Anand’s Fable of the Shrine the ultimate goal is
a) to reach the mountaintop and find there is no shrine
b) to build a shrine from the objects left for the traveller
c) to arrange the objects in a form that one assumes
d) to reject all objects as knots in life
e) to learn that life is just a projection
15. Which is not a form of idolatry?
a) to kiss the toe bone of a long-dead saint, hoping for a miracle
b) to wave an American flag proving you’re not a Democrat
c) to believe that the angel Gabriel dictated the Qur’an to Mohammed
d) to think the Second Amendment is one of the Ten Commandments
e) to believe these words will lead you to salvation
16. Which is not true of humans in life?
a) All of us have souls.
b) Souls arrange our lives to teach us we are souls.
c) Most people don’t know they’re falling into nonexistence.
d) Souls manipulate us to give us free will.
e) People often care about their souls even when they don’t believe in them.
17. Which of the following is not a property of a human soul?
a) All human souls live a life in time & space
b) Before we fly, we must hop from point to point
c) Once we can fly, we move continuously like meteors to distant points
d) We are either here or there, but not everywhere at once
e) We are neither here nor there, but the absence between the two
18. What on Earth is tiger-swallowing?
a) A life or death struggle with a dream predator
b) When a new flyer embraces their power
c) When the soul kills the last of its Nine Men
d) A chance meeting in the forest with dire consequences
e) A normal development once a non-flyer reaches flight
19. Why is lunar attention so difficult?
a) To look at the moon must be an intentional act
b) To see the moon directly you must step in front of it, eclipsing it.
c) Its light does not come directly from the sun.
d) Self-awareness is an obstacle to lunar attention.
e) Lunar attention isn’t necessary to survival.
20. What is happening to humans over extended history in this timeline?
a) We’re learning to multitask.
b) Humans are gradually becoming flyers.
c) We are slowly losing the ability to see moonlight.
d) We are losing Heaven.
e) We are evolving into ants.
III. Critical Thinking:
21. Just as the Good is an “open set” (mathematically speaking), because flame, which is not Good, nonetheless arises from the Good, consider the Problem of Nature.
Given: “Nature” is natural and produces & reproduces itself naturally following its own natural laws & processes: physics, chemistry, and biology, including especially “natural selection.” Homo sapiens evolved from natural ape genera, making us biologically natural. If we accept this, how do we then think of plastics & herbicides & nuclear waste, or that breast milk, for instance, from mothers living near the Aral Sea is toxic to babies, or that no food grown in the state of New Jersey can be legally labeled “organic”?
Is Nature an open or closed set?
22. If we must knot ourselves onto existence in time & space, what knots are good? If, for example, I identify myself as a parent, how do I untie this knot? Isn’t tying myself to a karass just a form of knotting? How do I keep my children & wife from knotting themselves to me?
23. What is the difference between teaching and knotting? How do I persuade students without violating their free will? How do we structure our children’s lives without imposing a strict program that ties them down? If I give them discipline, how do I free them from imprint? What do I do when I see my lessons cause a child pain?
24. How can I care about the world and not fall into Charybdis by caring too much? If the world is just a projection going down the toilet, why should I care to save it?
25. I love (many, not all) sports, and the world needs healthy ways for males to release their testosterone short of bloodshed. (Females benefit too, of course.) But sports tribalism is idiotic. How do we encourage healthy competition without demeaning & demonizing one’s opponents?
26. Consider “murder,” not from a modern perspective, but from the view of ancient warrior tribes & empires. No Assyrian or Aztec or Roman or Viking thought of their wartime killing sprees, including rape and infanticide, as sinful. Often such acts counted as the highlights of their lives; often such pillaging was necessary to survival. How might my eternal teachers view such actions? How would your own eternal soul weigh such events?
27. Consider legal human killing: war, capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia, etc. What moral codes can be inferred from my paradigm of existence & projection? What about the killing of animals, of plants?
28. Can democracy exist without partisanship, without tribalism? Is the First Amendment possible without slander & fake news? How do we advocate for issues and leaders without advocating against those who think differently? Is democracy the ideal political system?
29. What ethics can be inferred from my paradigm regarding the manipulation of genomes, including Homo sapiens?
30. Let’s say my paradigm here takes hold, that it becomes “religion.” How best might it be celebrated or worshipped? Coming together on Sundays, say, to focus in shared spiritual practice surely is a good thing, probably necessary even to our planet’s survival, which will take luck, intent, & intervention beyond mere hard work & science. And yet it is the Individual, not the group who must be central. Of course, in Christian theology Jesus judges individuals not tribes; but most churches don’t practice this.
The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.
[1] Generally speaking ethics represents the moral codes of a society, while morality is one's personal code, which is how I apply these terms here. And generally in this curriculum, at least through Lesson 9, I am not concerned with ethics. Society & its codes do not offer a worthy model.
a) the base unit of human eternity
b) lines we draw to connect skew filaments
c) Earth dissolving, for soulless people
d) that chunk of our soul closest to the self
e) where souls collide
f) unfocused infant souls
g) a voice of doubt & denial only, fear
h) a world in a grain of sand
i) Earth, for all souls on this timeline
j) the Nine Men taken one at a time