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] Actually Anand called his fable a “fable of finding,” but Scribe & I renamed it for the sake of mnemonics, so we could later locate it among our transcripts.
albionspeak: draught of language (6.7)
School Midterm Answer Key & Explanations
Quick Keys
Part I: Matching
1-H 2-F 3-C 4-G 5-B 6-I 7-D 8-E 9-J 10-A
Part II: Multiple Choice
11-B 12-A 13-not E 14-C 15-C 16-A 17-C 18-B & E 19-all answers 20-not B
Full Explanations
Part I: Matching
1. H aleph- a world in a grain of sand. And no, I don’t know why Jorge Luis Borges chose the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet to name a single point that contains the universe, our definition here. The principle is outlined in his amazing short fiction The Aleph, in which such a point exists on the 19th step of a basement stairway and is the source of a rival’s writing genius. (What basement has 19 steps?) For my circle it means taking a whole universe of one’s gathered attention and shrinking it to a point. Human souls then fly from one point to another, but only after having cleared the fog of infinitesimals between. Contrast this aleph with Borges’s sibling story, The Zahir, a favorite nightmare.
2. F auroras- unfocused infant souls. Souls begin as wisps of energy, as visualized in perhaps our most primal spacetime metaphor. That we can see them at all shows our connection to them. On the verge of sleep before we dream, we dissipate into this state. Outside of life, we know, time is just a category, so “infant” & “adult” must be applied contextually. Auroras mature into firefishes, a visual representation of a flyer.
3. C Charybdis - Earth dissolving, for soulless people. Homer saw clearly. He depicts two archetypal obstacles in Odysseus’s journey: Charybdis, the whirlpool = death; Scylla the six-headed monster = the death of six men, but only if you hurry through the straits (of Messina?) before these heads swallow & bite again. Most interpret this to be a kind of “lesser of two evils” choice, but it’s far more descriptive & instructive, as I outline in Lesson 5. Charybdis represents a finite doomed being, a soulless human who falls into themself, spiraling ever smaller. Scylla, many-minded, is to lose oneself in infinity. I like to think this many-headed snakelike mentality is reflected elsewhere in Greek mythology, in the gorgon Medusa, for example. Most important to this curriculum, however, is the awareness that Planet Earth itself is our Charybdis. We’re already in this whirlpool, and few see it for what it is, projection only. To survive in eternity you must get out, knowing that Scylla awaits you. Prepare yourself.
4. G cricket - a voice of doubt & denial only, fear. The cricket is not our conscience, not an independent entity or true voice. Rather it's a kind of automated smart-alarm in our mind, which cries warning or foul at certain, pre-established tolerances. We understand nerve pain is a physical alarm. The cricket monitors one's mental domains & processing, where the mind travels. This alarm is programmed to keep you out of danger, from having dangerous thoughts (say, sex fantasies in speeding traffic). But, of course, it also goes off whenever your imagination steps out of the sunlight, into the Forest, where children shouldn't go. The cricket is programmed to see all forays & travels as trespasses. Now imagine further that this alarm is smart enough to find many ways to grab your attention & divert you from unknown dangers. The cricket "chirps" often quite loudly then; and as we grow in our minds, its chirping & smart, though unwanted, interventions also grow. We do not want, however, to turn off our vital safety alarms. Rather we must learn to distinguish the cricket's frightened chirping & finger wagging from our own authentic voice, represented in this Stone Age allegory as the serpent.
5. B fibers - lines we draw to skew filaments. Filaments, to contrast here, are the pre-existing trees & branches of existence, the set pathways of objects or thoughts in motion, or as Don illustrated, “the history of a stone.” Most people’s lives play out along set filaments. Fibers are what connect filaments not otherwise connected. “Synchronicity” is a big example, but any thought which connects disparate ideas—a comparison or a metaphor—is also connected by a fiber. Fibers always involve choice.
6. I origin- Earth, for all souls on this timeline. Human souls preexist as auroras in eternity and drift aimlessly like plankton. Humans also are infinite beings equivalent to gods. For our purposes in this curriculum, we have to plant our flag somewhere in infinity, to define ourselves, to lay a foundation and not drift randomly. To become ourselves in the Good is the opposite of chaos, so every eternal soul must somewhere say, “This is my life, the rock upon which all the rest follows.” Everyone on Earth today is, therefore, testing a potential foundation, checking out one life to see if it’s the one. Souls place their selves into given challenges and regularly manipulate these challenges, hoping the self in life will heed the lessons, though often we don’t. If the soul finds the self worthy, then they join their karass and continue beyond the self’s possible comprehension, beyond this curriculum. Otherwise, the life is discarded—not remembered, not reeducated, no reincarnation—and a completely different life is chosen. The cards are thrown in, reshuffled, and dealt again. Importantly, once we choose eternity for ourselves, as I and many others have, we don’t in eternity then abandon our puny lives in time, for that would only detach us from our origin to drift again like plankton. (Some pelagic plankton is actually quite large; a lion’s mane sea jelly can grow longer than a blue whale!) We keep our anchorage and revisit it, even to replay the “present” moments within it, altering both “pasts” & “futures,” as no projection is ob or final.
7. D overseer - that chunk of our soul closest to the self. Being discontinuous, a healthy human soul ascends by discrete stages eternally higher. The overseer is the first eternal face beyond the living self or, in our kite-metaphor, the first colour above the knots. Thus, our overseer is most directly responsible for the daily business of managing us in time, the living person. This is the voice we might hear as conscience, though the overseer has many ways to reach us. For example, for about ten years Albion "got my attention" via inexplicable calf injuries—small, acute muscle tears—tough lessons for an athlete. (He confirmed this at the ouija board.) You bet I learned to listen.
8. E port - where souls collide. Existence must be shared, at least two “hands” clapping, colliding, which, by the statistics of Infinity, can never collide randomly. Thus, all collisions are arranged with intent, starting from a place of collision, a port. Ports can be huge (Planet Earth), or they can be quite private (like our net's "pure place of absence"), a place where one soul can show something to others. There are endless possibilities & purposes. Scribes in our net, for instance, have a common scribal port, a place where their "guild" might focus on scribal ideas. One rule on this port, which certainly doesn't apply on most others, is that no structure be built with more than three walls. I offer this detail not because I understand it, but because it shows the careful intelligence that goes into creating such a place. (I do offer it as a riddle, however.)
9. J sequence- the Nine Men taken one at a time. Most people are not flyers; but all among the Jewel net face the same binary fate: fly or fall. While many Jewel members are born flyers, the Nine Men sequence was designed by the members of my circle as a way for the non-flyers—Scribe & me and probably Jane and Anand—to work our way step by step, out of Charybdis, this projection we call our lives on Earth. That said, flyers don’t need a sequence; and, dear Reader, I don’t impose this course on you, except that because you are process only; you need a process to become yourself. I cannot characterize this in any way but as a series of discrete & finite challenges. Scribe took five years; I took 22.5 to finish mine, longer, in fact, than Anand’s entire life (so I do not recommend anyone’s following my outrageous example).
10. A soul- the base unit of human eternity. See Lessons 5 & 7. This matching "definition" here, beyond all of a soul's infinities, highlights something the modern world is deeply confused about. Civilization is not what counts. Homo sapiens as a species ultimately doesn't matter and will go extinct soon enough anyway. Even our beautiful Planet Earth is just a wink of God's watering eye. What matters—and where we must collectively turn our focus, as a species & civilization and as a planet—is the individual soul. This whole universe is a port created for individuals, not herds, tribes, or congregations, certainly not corporations as people! Additionally, this world is a port for infant souls still forming, or failing to do so, a hatchery where souls might originate (i.e., iff they choose), one where most do not yet fly.
Part II. Multiple Choice
11. B to get away from Home (maybe a qualified D and/or E)
If you never get out, away from Home, Home becomes your Charybdis, a shrinking black hole; and you end. But this cannot merely be A, the learning of new skills, etc., which are just more of Charybdis; the rules haven’t changed. Nor can this be an automatic developmental phase of existence, C. School must be a choice, a choice to change. D, of course, is an amusing platitude and is a valid answer if you define “the other side” as a profound move to otherness, the “killing of a man” among your Nine (if you have nine men). If it’s just the other side of the road, of course, that doesn’t qualify.
Answer E is more complex. Yes, we want to be/become our overseer, and indeed the main purpose of School is to develop a relationship between self & soul. But it also is important to maintain a separation, distinct sets, just to be able to identify the overseer as one’s eternal soul. Otherwise we live in a blur, a soup of intermixed self & soul & cricket. Furthermore, even when one does leap from School to Vocation over the triad absence between Steps 6 & 7 to become a new figure, well, then the overseer just puts on the next face up. It’s like chasing a rainbow. The fact remains, the self is finite in time while the overseer is eternal. You can’t really become your overseer, just as you can’t ever reach the Good. It’s all process.
12. A Flying is not effortless.
After one finishes a flying poem or a soccer game, it may feel like little effort has been exerted. And one of the surest indications that you're in the middle of flying is a feeling of effortlessness. But it's work. Writing these pages exhausts me, day after day, though I never realize it until I try to get up and stagger to the kitchen for food. The reason why I long thought flight was effortless in part goes back to poems & soccer games in the first place, my own best arenas. A poem that takes five minutes to write simply doesn't take as much effort as working on one for three hours. Similarly, I always felt great after a flying soccer game, I think because my physical movements were so efficient & smooth that I literally ran less and exerted less energy over ninety minutes. I also noticed that I was rarely even dirty after such a game, whereas I finished most games covered in mud, grass, and generally my own blood. Attention is not infinite, and flying taps a limited source.
Answers B-E all represent ideas often confused & conflated with flight. Flight is a means only, and it is no sure ticket to an eternal soul. This confusion is rampant in social media. We ask athletes for their political endorsements, actors to promote medicines, etc. The irony is that many born flyers are themselves confused, unable to relate to the plight of non-flyers. Consider the born flyer who, through pure talent & driving energy, pulls themself out of poverty & racial injustice. It’s not uncommon for such a person, then, to turn their back on their former class & neighborhood. They think to themselves, “If I can make it through hard work, everyone should.” Born flyers often lack perspective, extrapolating unto others from their own unique & untransferable experiences, and many fail to choose eternity in life for lack of discipline or dreamtask in life.
13. A, B, C, & D, but not E not Trump tweeting to his dimwits.
Answers A & B are famous exemplars of the interdependence of existence. Another is the zen koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? (Here, you're actually supposed to come up with a proper answer, one that almost certainly defies logic in the ordinary sense. The master awaits. I would like to think that there as many possible right answers as people on the planet, but I am no master. I do have my own answer.)
Answer C (all souls must live & die) is indeed derived from "Existence must be shared," though it might be harder to see the connection. Life is our origin. Other beings might have other origins or perhaps no origin at all. But humans do. We deal ourselves the hand that we're born with, and the events play out with all the free will of following suit. The key is we play with other people, to get outside our finite bubbles, eventually to get outside Charybdis altogether.
Answer D: Theoretically, yes. The great art critic Sister Wendy Beckett, among others, found the cave paintings of Altamira (which I myself saw in wonder at age 11) to be worthy of aesthetic veneration. What does this mean? I would insist such veneration simply measures an eternal connection. At the ouija board we confirmed this overtly: When one connects deeply with a work of art, one, in fact, connects in eternity with its artist (although I don't think this compels the artist to attend personally to such a connection).
Answer E: Just as a karass is a “union of unlike parts,” so too must a sharing consist of different souls coming together. Donald Trump tweeting to his base is like two mirrors facing each other. Narcissists, in fact, can occupy the same space & time without sharing or learning anything.
14. C to arrange the objects in a form that one assumes.
All of the answers given are indeed goals that apply to the Fable of the Shrine,[1] but there is only one ultimate goal: to embrace or assume the Platonic form of the arranged objects, which are arranged by virtue of having constructed one’s shrine. The objects (or clues) are indeed left for us; they are not random. We gather them, one at a time, but they remain dissociated until we assemble them into something sacred. Yes they are knots; yes they are just projections, nothing in themselves as objects. But we need the content of existence as ideas, as forms, to establish our distinct identities. The shrine itself, of course, is just another idol, an anchor in Charybdis if we mistake the shrine for who we are. But the ideal of the shrine, an arrangement of precious ideas into a unity, which we then leave behind—this is the ultimate goal.
15. C to believe that the angel Gabriel dictated the Qur’an to Mohammed.
Answers A, B, and D are clear absurdities we witness regularly in the world. I have similarly visited extant cultures that keep handy the mummies & bones of their forefathers, as most ancient peoples once did, because these artifacts maintain the link to these ancestors who continue to govern their daily lives (often commingled somehow with modern technology). And Answer E is just as much idolatry. My words are just words. Maybe, if you take them to heart and apply them to your own path, you can save yourself. But you need to save yourself regardless of anything I say. Don’t get stuck in language.
Perhaps strangely C is the correct answer here. Did Mohammed really speak with Gabriel? I have no idea, though the Qur’an certainly seems an authentic revelation, especially, so I’m told, in Arabic. What matters is not the fact—since there is no ob—but how one pursues their path. Many Muslims save themselves through Islam; many Christians do the same with different beliefs. What matters is your faith, practice, and willingness to move yourself toward a perceived good. The content or facts can be patently false. I remind the Reader that our karass’s “fourth living member” was an atheist, someone who’d thought through life’s deepest questions most seriously. I expect upon his death that part of him, the self who passed, was pleasantly surprised.
16. A Not all of us have souls.
Donald Trump obviously has no soul. Souls must choose eternity while alive in life, where the soul, not the self, is the chooser. If you are worried about your eternal soul (and most people should be), it’s simple: What can you do right now to make this life your best possible life? Now do that; then repeat the process. Of course you have to determine the many measures for weighing your experiences & choices. What does your soul value in your life? What counts for forward progress? The past need knot define you.
17. C We do not ever move continuously, as humans are discontinuous beings.
This probably is an unfair question, as I discuss this more in Lesson 7. Yes, flyers/firefishes do shoot like meteors from point to point; but this is still just a metaphor. Between any two points, which are abstract ideas, lie an infinite number of other ideas, so we must leap over them. Or, seen another way, we bring two distant points together via our attentions.
A good test-taker will wonder how D and E can both be true, since they appear to negate each other. D concerns existence in eternity and the fact that humans are not many-minded; our attentions take one point/idea/world at a time. E, on the other hand, lies outside eternity, in the context of Infinity where we more truly dwell, not as the substance of our existence, not the points or choices we make, but rather as absent choosers. If Zeus comes to Earth as a bull, for example, and then later as a swan, it would be incorrect to say that Zeus is a bull or swan. Rather he makes choices, and even clothed as a human Zeus is not a man. (I love paradoxes!)
18. B & E A normal life or death struggle with one’s own power upon reaching flight.
Yes, I conflate several notions here, as Don himself confused us intentionally. First, our circle has two very different meanings for the word “tiger.” I will not address dream tigers here, which are indeed dangerous predators of the Forest. Instead I refer to a natural development in a human soul once a person has reached flight.
Non-flyers often fly; Scribe & I both did many times. But we didn’t have access to flight on any regular or volitional basis. Another way to phrase this is that we couldn’t access our own power. The soul is infinite, which means it’s far more powerful than the self in time. That power could then easily destroy the self; and furthermore that power is often not organized or constrained to fit neatly into the rigid mental patterns we form in life, especially our social imprinting, language & culture, etc. This tiger doesn’t care about our puny defenses & self-importance and is prone to just wipe out the cricket-chirping self with a quick swat of its claw. And yet once the self has opened the door to regular flight, the tiger is sure to come through. This marks a kind of rupturing of the subconscious into the conscious realm, and for both Scribe & me it was awful, terrifying.
What’s important in albionspeak is that I make the aspiring flyer aware that the tiger is a natural development, inevitable if you succeed—also, that your struggle with it is in no way assured. You can die, or you can be swallowed by your own tiger and lose yourself. But if you know what’s coming, if you understand that you must face & embrace what will surely manifest itself as fear or dread—whatever chink in your mortal armor is most vulnerable—then that recognition is your greatest weapon. The tiger is you and should rightly be your ally. So when you find you can fly regularly, get ready.
19. A, B, C, D, & E All of the above.
Lunar attention is an altered state, necessary to flight. While some peak experiences “just happen,” these often tend to be “sent” moments of intuition, not volitional; and albionspeak aims to help the reader achieve flight on your own. Thus, lunar attention as I frame it here, is a deliberate act. But if one tries to see the moon’s reflective light, the ego-self gets in the way, eclipsing the moon. (Eclipses in this realm can endure for decades!) Flight “has nothing in back of it.” My own best exemplar concerns seeing auras, which I’ve crudely accomplished before but don’t see normally. First, I rarely try to see other people’s auras because it involves staring at someone for a long time. (I do practice at concerts, where staring is fine; but I don’t make a big effort, because I want more to enjoy the music.) For a few years I practiced staring in the mirror and achieved minimal results. The key is that I have to want to see; but I can’t care whether I succeed, which is really hard. Furthermore, as soon as I start to see a glow, my excited self jumps in to claim or document success, thereby killing the moment. How do you try without caring? As the zen master says, “Don’t try; do.” And no, most people never know the light of the moon.
20. A, C, D, & E All except B.
Homo sapiens have walked this planet for at least 300,000 years, but even in historical times there have been tremendous changes in people, as our Guide tells us, who is as fully present to us as he is also to Josef at the start of history. Humans are not becoming flyers; it is harder for people today to shift into flight mode, lunar attention. We are rather becoming “busy ants”—not literally, of course, but beings who are full of empty activity, divorced from Heaven, from eternity. Despite our advances in science, or perhaps because of them, we are more rooted to our physical projection, discovering all sorts of scientific truths about Charybdis, as we simultaneously destroy it, this beautiful dying planet. It is not a pretty picture, and our Guide finds our trajectory incomprehensible.
Since the physical body & brain do not seem to be the cause of our collective spiral, I blame culture, language in particular and how it shapes our thinking. We are how we think, and we are nearly all language humans. How can we escape this looming fate already burning through our projection? I do not believe this process is reversible, but perhaps we can still pass through it. I devote Lesson 9 and subsequent volumes to this end.
III. Critical Thinking:
First something critical, more about absence: As I mentioned in the midterm introduction, you might find my “answers” here unsatisfying, dear Reader, because often there is no single answer. I used to enjoy frustrating my students who, at some point in every course I taught, would ask me if I believed in aliens (from other planets, UFO’s). I’d grin and tell them honestly I didn’t know. They didn’t like that; they’d protest & insist. They desperately wanted a yes or no response. I think this illustration is actually far more profound than it appears. Thinking, which is a critical element to my paradigm for Planet Earth, does not produce answers as much as it does questions. Consider two equations:
2 + 2 = 4 versus x + 2 = 4
The first is just a fact, something memorized; and in antiquity scribes & engineers would memorize vast quantities of math facts and carry books full of tables of sums that went beyond their memories, since adding with Roman numerals, for example, is ridiculously difficult. On the other hand, the second equation is algebra, something not even invented until the Middle Ages, well after Euclid’s geometry. It’s a powerful way to think. If you insert a variable, which is a mathematical form of absence, suddenly whole universes open up. We can do so much more when we don’t know something than when we think we do. Consider my “answers” below then similarly; in fact, please consider all of albionspeak in such a manner.
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.”
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? Homo sapiens evolved from natural ape genera, making us biologically natural. Is toxic waste then also natural? If not, how then do we explain its existence?
This problem took me roughly fifty years to solve. In fact, I suddenly, finally, & in my mind fully resolved this question while considering the vocabulary as I composed this very test. (The reader might then cry foul that I’d have the gall to include such a difficult problem here, but I supply all the tools & hints. And, I remind, there’s no grade in this class.)
It’s funny how long I struggled with this problem and how instantly it resolved once I considered filaments and fibers. The key is that Nature is indeed a closed set under natural operations, that it can only produce natural things. Filaments, the default threads of the universe are almost the definition of “natural operations.” But fibers are a different matter; they involve choice, and, as such, they come from eternity, outside the finite set of Nature. Now one can certainly choose a “natural” fiber; we do so all the time. But humans on this earthly port of projections can also choose “unnaturally.” I’m not sure which processes might be included in a list, although much of what science & industry accomplishes today amounts to unnatural interventions, the creation of chemicals & even elements seen, we might guess, nowhere else in the universe. However, by the same token we might equally insist that Hamlet is an unnatural artifact, something that could never occur naturally. And if Hamlet is unnatural, so is this very sentence, along with every original utterance published on Facebook. —Except, we might qualify, that once a new operation, like language or atom smashing, is introduced into Nature, then henceforth it becomes natural. If I, for instance, create a new species of wheat or human by altering a genome, then my new species can grow & reproduce naturally from then on.
So, did I solve this Problem of Nature, or did I merely move the goalposts with semantics? While quite satisfying to me personally, I don’t regard this as any more important than finally solving a tough Euclidean proof, a few of which took me four or five years to solve. (I refused to look them up.) And don’t worry: This is fun, not existentially essential, like the Problem of Evil.
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?
Whoa. This goes right for the jugular, the essence of existence. There is no objective answer to this, but it is of prime concern to keep this in mind when choosing in life. What can be said? Well, some knots are awful: drug addiction, causing others needless pain, the pursuit of money & power as an end, etc. Some addictions (which might be considered excessive knottedness) are not so bad. Was I addicted to exercise? I might have been, except my body & work schedule wouldn’t allow it. I physically couldn’t run on consecutive days, so I never thought about triathlons, for example—though if you have an obsessive personality, exercise is not a bad addiction.
For me the ultimate exemplar is family, especially raising children, which I regard as the most sacred act in life. Yes, I’m tied to my family. I love them deeply, and I’ve got the knots to show for it. But I don’t think I’m tied down. My children are now independent women; my sacred duty caring for their developing souls is over, and I’m no longer responsible for them. I’ve let go. I’d love to know my grandchildren, but I’m not waiting in anticipation for their arrival, and I will not be a parent to them. The key is that I’m clear in my own heart about my relationship with my daughters. I cannot save their souls; only they can do that. But I’m still here to love them, provide limited financial support, and offer my nagging sage advice (for what it’s worth). If there is no ob, then there are no ob knots either.
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 causes a child pain?
These are essential questions all teachers must consider, and I’ve seen all sorts of knots tied among teachers and their students, even to pathological codependency (it’s ugly). And while I regularly questioned myself in my dealings with students, I almost never had any problems keeping a clean & proper distance (S. being the rarest exception). For me, it was not about me; it was about math or social studies or whatever content area I was supposed to teach. If the goal is to let each individual student become themself, and the path to this goal is through learning a lesson—which often was more about discipline and training social norms—then I was quite free to play within my constraints. Importantly, my students were not my children. Teaching was my job & calling, but not a sacred task—as parenting is absolutely. It was only my job.
And yes, as I’ve already stated, I brought pain to many children, pain in many forms: discipline, failed grades, hard work, etc. And I did not like this part of my job, but it was necessary. But bringing pain to kids was always easier when I considered the alternative: What happens if I don’t discipline or don’t flunk a kid who doesn’t learn, or if give only easy work? I knew what I was doing, but more, why I was doing it.
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?
The world is indeed mere projection. It will end, just as my life is nearly over. Yet I do care. Even if my daughters both die and I have no personal stake left here, I care. Why? It’s quite simple: I care about anywhere I find myself. Wherever I am I try to do good. Of course, I do care deeply about this world timeline, the only one I know. I think it’s a beautiful world worth saving, and I think it can be saved, though I don’t know for sure. It has to end sometime.
After I’m dead, I’ll care less, I’m sure. Other interests & lessons will occupy me more. Once my grandchildren are dead I’ll have few knots left, though I might still be curious. Of course, I’ll have a stake in the Jewel Net members who come after me, though I suspect I’ll care more about their individual souls than climate change and the fate of the world. Ultimately I don’t think it’s possible to care too much, not if one’s caring threads are purely guided by the Good. Really this question is more about knowing the difference between caring & knotting. Knots tied with care & love & aliah know when to come untied.
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 & defiling one’s opponents?
A serious question to which I have no answer. For many males sports serve as a relatively benign rite of passage, better than warfare. Must we assume that males need such an outlet? Soccer was probably my greatest “fun” in life, and I played for over thirty years. I was a good team player, but I was never tribal. As a spectator, I “love” Manchester City, for example, and am therefore happy, in the English Premier League, to see rival Liverpool lose. Yet I think Liverpool is awesome and have high regard for each player, Jürgen Klopp their manager, and their beautiful lethal play. I have no idea how to convey my tribal indifference to many millions of fans, however. We know many people live & die by their teams. The whole economy of Sao Paulo, and thus Brazil as a nation, rises & falls with the vacillations of Tricolour Sao Paulo F.C. Should we accept this? Should we encourage it? If we do, does that mean we have accepted that a certain percentage of humanity will always be soulless fools? Plato certainly thought so.
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 these were 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?
This might be hard to hear, but ethics change from time to time, place to place; and even basic Commandments, those written in stone, can & do change. Stone tablets wear away. What doesn’t change is how you live by the codes of your society, what morals you adopt personally and the application of your beliefs. If you are born to a society that has horrible ethics, say Nazi Germany for a modern example, it’s going to be hard. Many early Christians thought martyrdom was required to reach Heaven. Others at the time believed that living as secret believers could accomplish more. (I am no martyr.) Ultimately the martyrs won the argument, but I don’t know which view was right. Again the key is not what is right, but rather how one chooses. Process is everything.
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?
Everyone I know & respect values life; I do, too. But I don’t think life is everything; it is, after all, just a projection. Killing takes a life, but most killing does not, in fact, harm a soul. Abortion is, I think, a particularly good example and needs to be taken in its proper context. Abortion is a modern ethical question only. In the past no one cared about the ethics of abortion; infanticide was rampant in many societies, particularly when food was scarce. I wonder about the evangelicals who see abortion as their sole cause, denying climate change, denying child poverty & abuse in our own country. I think most of these people are just too dumb to think past the simplicity of “innocent babies,” and I think much of the volatile politics involves the evil manipulation of such people for their money and for power. I would ask of these well-meaning simpletons, “What do you think happens to the soul of an aborted fetus?” Does it go to Heaven? to Limbo? (which is one of the dumbest concepts in theology) If one does believe that innocent fetuses go to Heaven, then abortion can only be considered a good thing, for growing to adulthood could well put you in Hell.
Another hard “fact of life,” then, from my paradigm perspective: If the goal in life is to establish a life origin worthy of a soul, no soul is going to pick a trimester in utero as one’s sole eternal foundation. A fetus is almost certainly soulless. To abort is to kill a living object, but not to condemn or consign a soul. By the same token, executing an evil murderer rarely harms a soul, as the damage is—in this hypothetical—probably already long done. Capital punishment in practice, however—weighing black lives matters and innocent lives taken—is for a different argument.
Finally, we need to eat. Plants must die to feed us, but we don’t need steak every night. I am not a vegetarian, but surely raising millions of cattle or billions of chickens for slaughter is not good for our planet. I have no set answer.
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?
I’m getting ahead of myself here, prepping you, dear Reader, for Volume Two. albionspeak is a two-pronged curriculum: 1) I want to help save as many souls as I can, knowing that each individual must save themself. 2) I want to save the planet, a mere projection, and the way I mean to do this is by teaching my paradigm. This, dear Reader, you know already. What I have not delved into yet concerns my ideas for how society might best reform itself once my paradigm is adopted. That is, I don’t consider my work original; I consider it inevitable.
That said, I’m a good American—who despises Trumpism, because it’s anti-American, a corruption of American values. I might be tribal—and acknowledge my bias—but I think the Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution represent true progress in this narrow window of world time we call “human history.” I believe in democracy and capitalism as ideals, because I believe the center of value on Earth lies with individual free will. There can be no progress toward the Good so long as people are clumped into tribes—which, to be clear, is not so much about social structures & political hierarchies, but is more about soul-bonding & identity. America was founded, I believe, in part to pave the way for the Individual on Earth.
Trumpism fashions itself as rugged, rifle-toting individualism. Except individuality today requires critical thinking. Fake news only works on fools stupid enough to swallow it. Thinkers consider their votes; they also consider how they spend their money, while consumerism, which is capitalism gone awry, depends on stupid buyers. Imagine a smarter world.
29. What ethics can be inferred from my paradigm regarding the manipulation of genomes, including Homo sapiens?
I’ve thought a lot about this, but I have no idea really. Surely it’s fine to use CRISPR technology to edit out of existence horrible genetic diseases that kill children in their infancy. And surely we’re not ready to run rampant with this new technology, giving all children Michael Jordan bodies with Einstein brains. But the line between these extremes is scary. Do we end Down’s Syndrome? What about ending dwarfism and making little people extinct? (While no ethical person would advocate for this, dwarfism could easily end unintentionally, by default.) I am happy, I suppose, I don’t have to face such choices. I do fear for the future, however. If environmental collapse cascades suddenly and Homo sapiens face extinction, altering the genome theoretically could be a matter of survival. Consider how so many problems of the world could be “solved,” since it’s possible, if we made our species photosynthetic.
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 Christianity Jesus judges individuals not tribes; but most churches don’t practice this.
I have no such ego, by the way; this is purely hypothetical. And no doubt Jesus, if He’s watching, is horrified by the idolatry in His name (even to the degree that I capitalize His pronoun). I aim for a world of thinking Individuals, ideally souls who choose to heal this planet; but cognition is not the same as choosing. Consider, when we look over the zillions of possible lives among all of Homo sapience through time, so far as we know, most people have chosen hunter-gatherer lives as the point of their eternal soul origins, foregoing writing & culture & art & scientific knowledge. Now consider also what we ourselves undoubtedly choose to forego, by living now rather than at some distant point future, after future Einsteins & Shakespeares have altered everything we know about living. Souls happen in all places & times; and, I suspect, so do the soulless. Remember my teachers’ warning: “Happiness is an ill.”