I walk over the river Arno each day, crossing the Ponte Vecchio to make my way into the city center. Today it is finally cool. I had forgotten the feeling.

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The following paragraph represents a final summation of my entire trip. I cannot overstate how much its implications have helped me. I have been working on it, chewing it down to this digested form, over the course of many weeks. Last night it finally took written form after several attempts. If it seems strange to phrase it in terms of freeing myself from the world, bear in mind that once a soul is free what comes after, for him, needs little elaboration:

If we want anything from others, we create a dependence on their sanction in regard to that thing; for we have granted them the power to withhold it and must work to remain in their favor. However, there is nothing to be desired from other people. The qualities they possess are derivative of the same source as our own being’s value. Once we see that this value is all there is worth desiring, others become like companions in a great venture – but no longer foundations of its meaning. Such a foundation is not specific to any created thing, yet is approachable through all creation. Since the relationship of it to our being is the soul’s only interest, there is no need to contract for secondary gains. The soul, independently, finds its joy solely in pursuit of this essential reality.

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It is therefore urgent that beneficial articles and books be written, clearly and definitely establishing what the present-day requirements of the people are, and what will conduce to the happiness and advancement of society. These should be published and spread throughout the nation, so that at least the leaders among the people should become, to some degree, awakened, and arise to exert themselves along those lines which will lead to their abiding honor. The publication of high thoughts is the dynamic power in the arteries of life; it is the very soul of the world. Thoughts are a boundless sea, and the effects and varying conditions of existence are as the separate forms and individual limits of the waves; not until the sea boils up will the waves rise and scatter their pearls of knowledge on the shore of life.

Thou, Brother, art thy thought alone, The rest is only thew and bone.

Something else I’ve noticed: People make a great clamor about serving others, and have even argued with me during this trip that everything we do should be done in reference to them. Perhaps they have not considered the result of that logic: That everyone else should orient their lives around them. But at any rate, while serving others is certainly a moral duty, none of our fundamental religious observances make any reference to other people. The obligatory prayers don’t say anything about our relation to others; they talk about who we are and our relationship to God. Fasting is a completely personal affair, not even really to be talked about. And Huququ’llah, while it may serve others ultimately, is expressed as a matter strictly between the individual and God alone. Interesting, no?

An analogy of the self, described as a racing car:

Imagine, as a young person, you are given a beautiful, high-performance racing car. This is your self.

The racing car sits in the garage at first, because we haven’t learned to drive it. It sits there for a few years, during youth, until around age ten when we first give it a whirl.

Because it is such a beautiful car, we are inclined to take care of it. If it were an old junker, however, or if we didn’t realize its value, we might let just it sit there and collect dust.

In other words: Our self-respect is directly related to the measure of our efforts toward self-perfection. Give a teenager in love with cars a Ferrari, and he will be out there polishing it every day, tuning the engine – into the late night if necessary. He will put all of his joy into making that car everything it can be. Because he respects what he has.

If you give the same Ferrari to someone who could care less, or if you give the same car but somehow run-down or needing repair to someone who doesn’t appreciate its potential, they won’t do much; maybe not even turn it on. They might get embarrassed about it, resentful, even hate its taking up curb space. They may start to wish it would just go away. Maybe they’ll even try to sell it, or demolish it themselves. This happens because they don’t respect what it is.

To go back to the teenager: There are two kinds who can appreciate such a car: The kind who want to be race drivers, and the kind who like fancy cars. Both will value the Ferrari and take superlative care of it. The latter, however, will be afraid to drive it. He won’t want to damage its perfection in any way. He is attached to its condition and doesn’t want to sacrifice it – even to unleash the potential of that awesome engine. It would be mean cleaning, possible nicks and dents, etc. He doesn’t want to put it to the test.

The race driver, on the other hand, may like and admire the Ferrari’s figure and material qualities just as much, but he loves the sensation of racing so much more that he is willing to do whatever work is required to repair any damages or weaknesses. He loves what the car can do more than he loves what it is.

So the race driver takes his car out for a pleasant drive. The sun, the hills, the wind in his face. He admires how beautifully the car drives, and is quite happy with it.

Then he finds an open stretch – something the car was made for – and he can just feel it: the rightness of the car meeting a test of its ability. He opens up on the gas and pushes her to top speed, screaming down the road.

If the car is the self, then being selfless is when the car is fully underway – when you’re so involved in driving it that you stop thinking about the car. At low speeds the driver is still very aware of his car; at high speeds he has no time to think about anything but where he’s going. He appreciates the car even still, but now it’s an unconscious appreciation, the way we appreciate our lungs or our heart, or our brain for forming thoughts. The car and the driver have merged into a single perception of speed and direction.

Where, in all of this, is what people refer to as the ego? We haven’t seen it yet, because ego happens when other people enter into the relationship between car and driver.

Back to the person who doesn’t like his car. That’s not entirely true. It’s a beautiful car, and he knows this because other people – other drivers – have told him so. He likes hearing it. When people give him compliments he takes out a cloth and puts out a nice shine; he gives a little energy, in the hope of more compliments. The more people who praise him, the work more he does. But he only does the work others will praise him for. He completely ignores the engine, because no one can see that. He puts all of his energy into a fantastic exterior – and then never drives the car because that would only force him to clean it again.

If no one stops by to compliment his car, he loses interest. He figures, why bother. There is nothing about the car itself that pleases him. He doesn’t drive it, he hasn’t learned what he has. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t know it can do, because his only knowledge of it is in terms of what other people say about it.

He could care less about the engine – but he knows very well what kind of exterior it has. If people compliment it, he’ll know all about waxes and what kind of paint and how many coats, in order to answer everyone’s wonderful questions. The point, though, is that he has no self-knowledge whatsoever; he thinks only what others tell him. His awareness of the car’s value exists only in relation to what other people think about it.

So on the one hand there is the reality of the car, and on the other there is an image that gets built up and torn down in direction relation to what others say about it. This image is the ego. It has nothing at all to do with the car, only its appearance. The car never changes – it has been the same car all along. It’s waiting to be driven.

The image, on the other hand, changes constantly. Every time a new person sees it and makes a comment, the image is altered. The owner will seek friendships only with certain kinds of people, because he realizes that the quality of the image is dependent on consorting with people who give the best comments.

If he were to meet a totally different crowd – for example, a group of race drivers who don’t care about images at all – he would feel utterly lost, as though they had crushed him. His image doesn’t exist in their world; he – in terms of what he thinks about himself through the opinions of others – just doesn’t exist for them. He would feel the vacuum of non-definition surrounding him like a choking hand – without ever realizing that defining a car and driving a car are completely separate matters.

Finally, humility in this scheme is very simple: Don’t drive your car where it can’t go. Don’t use it in a lake, don’t drive it off a cliff. Know that your car is a car, and use it accordingly.

Some believe that humility means not letting other people see their car – as a way to escape the ego, which is built on the comments of others. They hide it in a garage and rarely drive it out, hoping in this way not to be affected by what people say about their car. But this is not humility; it is self-denial: wishing not to have the car at all, so that one is neither affected by, nor affects, the world. No. You were given a nice car to race it, not to reject the gift.

The driver represents the will, and there is only way for him out of ego, and toward selflessness: Drive. When the thrill of racing down the highway reaches you, there will be no more questions, no more doubts – just the open road.

I would like to resummarize what I’ve been saying, again, by talking about the nature of light.

When I see a beautiful flower, I do not see the flower: I see the light reflecting from that flower into my eyes. When I look at a picture of a flower it can also be beautiful by causing similar pattern of light to strike the retina.

What I see as beautiful is the light, reconfigured in a form I appreciate. This light can also show me ugliness, or a host of other qualities. I will only talk about beauty right now.

The light comes from the sun, so in a way I am looking at a watered down version of the potential beauty of the sun. I can’t look at the sun directly because I wouldn’t see it anyway; it would just blind me. And without an object to reflect the light I wouldn’t see it either. Space is black, but it is filled with the light of our sun. It’s black because that light is not reflecting off anything. When it does, we can see it, as with the moon.

So I only experience glimpses of the sun by looking at objects, and then I see not the full sun or even pure light, but an aspect of its potentiality as filtered down by the nature of the object itself. The better the object, the greater the beauty my eyes will see; likewise with the worse.

Nor is beauty “in” the light. Beauty is the name I give to a partial experience of the light. No matter how much beauty I see, there is always something more beautiful possible. You could say that light bears the potential to be absolutely beautiful, but still the concept of “beauty” is a limitation of the light in respect to my qualities as a perceiver.

This means that there is a three-way relationship between the object, the subject and the light that permits the existence of “beauty” to become known. If one of these three did not exist, there would be no “beauty”. Beauty is not an attribute of the light, then, but of the nature of this relationship of perception.

I cannot say beauty exists in my perception of it. I cannot say it exists in the object I perceive. I am neither responsible for it, nor can I possess it by owning the object. It does not even exist, as the quality “beauty”, in the light itself! You cannot find it resting anywhere, ascribable to anything. This is because beauty is not an attribute, but an experience. Our reference to it as an attribute refers to the faithfulness of a certain object, in the presence of certain perceivers, under the right conditions to light, to offer the same experience again and again. The “beauty” is there only at the time it is being experienced. It is not “in” any of the three parts.

Our goal is not to reach the sun. We cannot. If our eyes are open, the goal – in terms of this analogy – is to seek out beauty. When we find it, we sit in rapt admiration, simply looking on and enjoying something that it is so wonderful. It is its own justification. Beauty is because it is beautiful. No one can invent beauty and say, “Ok, there is now such a concept as beauty and here is where to find it.” Beauty has been with man since the beginning, yet has ever remained inexplicable. Men know it by experiencing it. If someone cannot, such as a blind person, you cannot explain it to him. He may be able to grasp shape, but never beauty. Fortunately for him, he can find the same quality in sound or other media. It’s presence may be found via many roads; in respect to light, it’s called beauty.

To one of your ideas I have a response, and that is on the subject of “insecurity”. You can probably gather from my past letters that I’d have thing or two to disagree with you about on that one. :)

But what is insecurity. You’ve made me think about it. So I sat before my steak, it looking at me, me looking at it, and asking – not the steak, but myself – what insecurity might be, what it stems from, what it represents. Here are my thoughts:

I believe insecurity is our heart telling us something. Let us take falling in love as an example, since it is such a lovely example.

When a person falls in love, they know it. They don’t know it by asking anyone. Being in love produces an effect in the heart that becomes the very standard by which you know it’s happened. Being in love is the only way you learn that you are in love.

Such a person, if they meet someone new down the road, will still have the sense of this standard as they relating to this new person. They can know, by comparison with their past experience, if they are in love again. That is, the standard only says “Yes”; by experience, it can also say “No”.

The person who has never had any such experience does not know when his heart is saying “No”, because he’s never heard it say “Yes”. He thinks it might be saying Yes, he’s just doesn’t know. He has no answer. He is insecure.

The lack of the standard is like saying what a thing is not – without a voice; while the standard only says what something is – in an incredibly loud voice. Until you’ve heard the voice, you are open to other people’s opinions about the meaning of the silence.

Let’s take this same idea into another field, such as writing poetry. No one, in all of this trip of mine, has had one thing to say about my poems. It is possible that everyone thinks they are terrible. It is even likely that many don’t like them, considering such lack of comment. But I don’t really care anymore.

The reason is that I like to write them, and that’s why I do it. Once they’re written, I think maybe somebody does enjoy reading them, and that’s why I send it.

But what if I didn’t like writing it? What if the experience weren’t rewarding enough on its own for me to keep doing it? I think, in this case, that a person may begin to think he is at fault. Because “poetry” is said to be a wonderful, profound, romantic thing, if he doesn’t like doing it it must be because he is shallow and petty. He lacks the standard. He doesn’t know what his heart is telling him.

I think his heart is simply saying: don’t keep doing this, do something else. A person who likes what he does needs no one else to tell him if he likes it, and he doesn’t care if others don’t like the result because that’s not why he does it. I learned this about dancing. Most people are terrible dancers; but they don’t care. They’re not insecure about it because they go to dance, not to be seen dancing. Those in the latter category are very insecure about it. They don’t know why they don’t enjoy it. They want to be reassured that they are doing a good job, so that at least that feeling will compensate for the time spent: feeling that they’ve done a good job, even if the job itself offers no reward.

A person who is insecure in their life doesn’t like what they’re doing. If they’re insecure in their relationship it means they don’t like spending time with the other person. If they’re insecure about how they look, then they don’t like their body or the way they dress. Everywhere you find insecurity, you will find someone who is asking you for a reason to keep doing what they’re doing in spite of enjoyment. If you reward them by saying “Yes, it’s good”, they’ll keep on doing it only for that reward, rather than for the sake of doing it.

On the other hand, a person who is not insecure doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you think. He doesn’t care himself if it’s good or not. He does it because he likes to do it. People don’t ever feel insecure about masturbating, for example; it has an intrinsic quality that is its own standard. If anyone ever asks, “Am I doing it right?”, you’d have to answer, “My friend, if you’re asking that – you’re not doing it at all.”

We have to approach life that way, letting our feeling of insecurity inform us when something has no intrinsic value for us. This means ignoring those who tell us that a thing is worth doing even if it gives us no pleasure. If we buy into that – man, doesn’t that describe society? – we become dependent on them to keep confirming and rewarding us so we’ll continue. If our boss stopped coming to work at a job we hate, we’d stop coming too and just collect the paycheck. That’s the kind of job where you always wonder if you’re doing a good enough job. But if it were a job we liked, we’d forget why having a boss was necessary. That’s the sort of job where you never have to ask if you’re good.

I believe the opposite of insecurity is a self-discovered value in the thing itself, and that if something lacks this value, we will be insecure and look to others to convince us that it’s not our fault, and to give us a reason to keep doing it – because we think we should. If the value is present, well, then the world be damned if it’s going to keep you away. They can all tell you that you’re crazy, but your only response would be, “Whatever man, just leave me to it.”

The following is a copy of a response I sent to one person’s questions. I thought others might be interested also. She asked how I recognized that I loved programming more than anything else. After all, there are many things I like to do, and I had already been working as a programmer for fifteen years.

I remember when I went to computer science class at the university in 1990. My comment to people was, “This isn’t the computer science I know from home.” It was boring and tedious and I switched my major to philosophy. This was my first experience of the basic split between the programming that I love, and programming without that quality. At the several companies I spent time at afterwards, I gradually lost sufficient contact with the “programming I see at home” to actually believe my path lay elsewhere. I had always kept that love alive by working on my own projects, but in marriage this was difficult and I finally felt so much stress related to programming that I thought it was to blame.

It was not the field itself that was the problem, however, but the way I was interacting with it. I failed to find a successful way to manage life and my love, such that they could co-operate in a healthy way. I will keep trying to find a way. But at least now I see that the two are separate realities, and that my love is not to blame for the difficulties of life I experience while trying to pursue it. Even if the commercial programming environments had heaped a cloud of dust upon her, she never disappeared – just harder and harder to see. I am now involved in clearing that dust away.

Communing with God

There is only one goal for any soul: communion with God. If she can find this in her work, that work becomes worship. She does it wholly for the sake of God, meaning: the awareness of God she finds within it. It’s commonly referred to as love.

Scratch out all secondary goals: availability of work, pay, hours, benefits, etc. None of these are what you’re looking for.

The quality I refer to is hard to describe, but easy to recognize. You already know it. I’m sure there is something already in your life that you do because it has this quality – and for no other reason. A person who has no such contact with their Beloved would be moribund. You may find it in your children, your husband, or your backyard.

If you can identify what it is for yourself, you’ll notice a lot of traits present in your interaction with it. These are the traits I have always experienced while programming, but rarely with writing, for example. Some of them are:

• Losing a sense of time. The time available to you never seems enough.

• You would rather do it than talk about it.

• You find you can’t explain why it makes you so happy, except to a very small, special set of people who share your joy. If they don’t share it, you can’t talk about it.

• The secondary results are fine, but you don’t really care. If any of them changed or disappeared, you’d find a way to continue.

• You look forward to doing it; you have never said, “I really should do more of that.” The relationship is devoid of shoulds, musts, have tos.

• You get excited when you are apart from it and think about doing it again. It might be a quiet little heart flutter, or a total loss of sleep. It depends on how much the thing engages your material capacities, such as thinking, acting, etc.

• In the midst of life, you long to get back to it. The more you are apart, the deeper the longing. When you do come back to it, you wonder why you ever left. You feel sorrow at the thought that you might have to leave it again.

• You are willing to endure pain in exchange for time with it. You are willing to pay to do it, if necessary, rather than be paid to do it. If someone told you you never had to do it again, you wouldn’t accept the offer. If they said you couldn’t ever do it again, you would feel lost.

• It’s likely that you’ve known how much you liked it from the first time you experienced it. It’s possible to forget that joy over time, but it comes back whenever you’re near it again.

• When you’re in the midst of it, you don’t want to be interrupted. You don’t want to share it with someone who doesn’t understand. You don’t want to explain. You find words cumbersome and tiring. For you, there is only doing.

• You don’t explain much why you’ve chosen it. You never find yourself justifying the choice; it is its own justification to you. There is a kind of certitude about it that makes you shy away from explanations.

• You might complain when people or things inhibit your experience of it, but you never complain about the thing itself.

• When you’re doing it, you feel on, connected, alive, able, creative, awake, a sense of power and untapped potential waiting at your fingertips. It is a bit like flying.

• You easily lose sleep if you do it too late. You forget to eat, you forget other people. When they interrupt you, it’s like being rudely reminded that, yes, the world does still exist and expects things from you. Some people can manage these interruptions better that others, but it always takes energy.

• Other people who want your attention might feel jealous about the time you spend with it. They may even start to dislike it because they see how completely it gets your attention and holds it.

Some may say that all of these traits describe a compulsion. In my experience, as someone who has COD, a compulsion is something I feel I have to do. But the above I simply want to do more than anything else. I could avoid it, but why? I secretly dread compulsions, and want to be free; but this… I would find servitude to it for all the rest of my days an honor.

Now look at your life and identify anything and everything that approaches these qualities. You may very well already know what you want to do. Or, you may not have found it yet, but you’ve experienced it in other ways. It is a particular, unnameable quality of beauty – of feeling alive in the kind of world you believed in as a child – that you’re looking for. It’s out there.

… if we taste of this cup, we shall cast away the world.

Thank you to all for your letters back. I will right to you more individually later. Right now I have to release the bucking monster of an essay from my mind. He longs to run in the fields of words.

Last night I started re-reading part III of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, skipping over the descriptive parts and just reading what he said about Quality. I don’t know what to say. It was one of those rare moments when your soul feels near to bursting from longing for just one human being whom you could look and he would say, “Yes, I see it too.” I’m not sure my words will make sense, or that my essays have given enough of a background to make them coherent.

I was reading Pirsig’s writing about Quality, and discovered that I have gone deeply enough into Rand to prove that they are saying exactly the same thing. Two different authors, very different language, but there is not one difference between them. I can pick out sentences from Zen that you would almost think Rand had written, and vice versa.

As I thought about it, I found that all of the philosophers have been saying this same thing. Or rather, they divide into three camps all around the same issue. I will only talk about the first camp today.

Since they are all talking about the same thing, I started boiling away the differences to see the abstract philosophy which was the underlying theme. Each of these authors had looked at the state of the world, at themselves, and felt something wrong. They tried to identify what was wrong and provide an answer and a way out of the problem. If I were to reduce what they learned into a single sentence, my form of that sentence would be: “The cause of the world’s problems is that it rejected Bahá’u’lláh.”

That, of course, is re-interpreting it into a Bahá’í context, my context. We always have to re-interpret to talk about something, and once you do no one else is going to agree. So here is how they all said it, the people I’ve been reading:

Me: The cause of the world’s problems is that it rejected Bahá’u’lláh.

Rand: The world is heading toward death because man has turned away from his responsibility to achieve the highest value.

Pirsig: Our society is decaying because it no longer pays attention to Quality.

`Abdu’l-Bahá: The light of civilization is kindled by religion, and when men turn their backs on it they consign themselves to darkness and error.

Shoghi Effendi: The primary cause of the world’s difficulties is spiritual in nature and stems from the widespread lack of religion.

This, of course, started me wanting to understand actually what “religion” was, since I now see Rand’s books as profoundly religious, even while she lambasts religion and sees the idea of “God” as a chain around men’s necks. And I agree with her. So what is the underlying meaning that has everyone taking up arms for the same side, but differently enough that they fight each other?

In the abstract, there is a fundamental, universal, eternal religion that exists to foster the relationship between man and something that cannot be named. This thing that cannot be named is not dead, or an attribute of nature; it is living. The moment you try to reduce it to an understanding, you are no longer relating to the reality. This is Lao Tzu saying, “If you can name it, it is not the eternal name.”

Man exists to be happy, and his happiness consists in relating to this unnameable. The mechanics of the relationship are simple, yet complex. The purpose of religion – of all philosophy – is to guide man toward this relationship, and teach him how to appreciate it and deepen it. Full stop. End of story.

What makes the whole thing hideously complicated is that there are institutions that go by the name “religion” which are not religious at all – they are even counter-religious. For example:

When Christ took up his mission, he intended to guide people back to the unnameable so they could be happy. He found people worshiping idols – which means they had tried to define the undefinable and were now worshiping the definition. Wrong. So he swept the idols out of the temple, and showed men that the unnameable must be related to directly by man, not told to him by a rabbi. This offended everyone whose livelihood was based on promoting those definitions, so they killed him.

This early church was a church of helping men find the unnameable that they longed for in their hearts. It worked. Once men found it, they related to it directly, personally, without any distraction. They were easily willing to die rather than give it up and worship idols again.

At some point in history, however, people starting wanting to understand the nature of this relationship – much, I guess, as I’m trying to understand it right now. Curiosity is natural, I doubt anything is wrong with that.

But then came a day when someone loved his definition so much, thought it was so clever, he canonized it. That is when the spirit of religion died and an institution took its place with an opposite goal. Tolstoy’s book “The Kingdom of God is Within You” gives a nice historical review of the difference between these two forms of the church.

In place of the unnameable which had kept men warm like a fire, they were given “salvation” which was like telling them they would find that fire after death, but in the meantime it left them deathly cold. They knew they were cold but didn’t want to lose that salvation – their last hope – so their protestations of being right grew louder and louder. They killed anyone who dared to assert that they had gone astray and no longer knew the unnameable in their lives. A blood bath resulted, that ended in a church who worships idols under the alternate name of “icons”.

But anyway, the history of religions is horribly messy and does not have much to do with the fundamental religion, except that the greatest conflict happens when the two try to talk to one another. When someone following the fundamental religion – his own happiness and the fulfillment of his soul by knowing the unnameable – tries to correct the views of another who is convinced that he is right but feels that he might not be, a war results fueled by the false religionist’s terror at realizing he has accepted a substitute in place of his highest love.

Even when I myself use “Bahá’u’lláh” to talk about the unnameable, it is not accurate. The meaning of His name “The Glory of God” would be more so, but it would also be a definition and hence wrong. I even think that huge swatches of the Bahá’í Faith within the United States do not understand this fundamental religion, though fortunately no institutionalized rejection of it has yet come about – although such a rejection does exist in the hearts of some.

To me, Bahá’u’lláh is in one sense a very clear philosopher, and Pirsig and Rand are recounting the echoes of that philosophy. This would be who He is to me on the side of definitions. Beyond definitions, I cannot tell you who He is at all. I can’t begin to describe it. Only in my happiness can you see any evidence of that presence in my life He represents, and also in the actions that proceed from such happiness.

I think that an atheist can be the most fully religious person on earth, in terms of the fundamental religion; and that a leader of a congregation can be the most profound irreligionist. If I use the word “Bahá’í” to refer to a member of the fundamental religion, it is only a term related to my context. I could use Plato’s terminology of the sun, the seeing man, the blind man, and the men in the cave, and tell the exact same story. I may also believe that Bahá’u’lláh’s writings are the clearest expression of the fundamental religion available, but that doesn’t mean everyone who reads them will understand that, or that people who don’t read them won’t figure it out for themselves.

Rand figured it out; but it is very hard to work out all the terms correctly, and so her morality suffers in a few areas she didn’t see clearly. This is why a clear description is so valuable, since it is so unnameably vague what men are seeking. And that unnameable must be visible in what the author says and does, as well, which is exceedingly rare. And then on top of that, it must be expressed in a way to guides the reader past the expression at all times. The more this guidance comes directly from the unnameable and manifests its presence, the clearer it will be and the easier to apply such guidance. But since it is also something natural to human souls, sometime through sheer persistence one may blaze a trail of his own.

I want to excerpt a part of Zen, since it so beautifully describes Pirsig’s groping for the unnameable:

“I think there is such a thing as Quality, but that as soon as you try to define it, something goes haywire. You can’t do it.”

Murmurs of agreement.

He continued, “Why this is, I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d get some ideas from your papers. I just don’t know.”

This time the class was silent.

In subsequent classes that day there was some of the same commotion, but a number of students in each class volunteered friendly answers that told him the first class had been discussed during lunch.

A few days later he worked up a definition of his own and put it on the blackboard to be copied for posterity. The definition was: “Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.”

The fact that this “definition” was actually a refusal to define did not draw comment. The students had no formal training that would have told them his statement was, in a formal sense, completely irrational. If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity. When I say, “Quality cannot be defined,” I’m really saying formally, “I’m stupid about Quality.”

Fortunately the students didn’t know this. If they’d come up with these objections he wouldn’t have been able to answer them at the time.

But then, below the definition on the blackboard, he wrote, “But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!” and the storm started all over again.

“Oh, no, we don’t!”

“Oh, yes, you do.”

“Oh, no, we don’t!”

“Oh, yes, you do!” he said and he had some material ready to demonstrate it to them.

He had selected two examples of student composition. The first was a rambling, disconnected thing with interesting ideas that never built into anything. The second was a magnificent piece by a student who was mystified himself about why it had come out so well. Phaedrus read both, then asked for a show of hands on who thought the first was best. Two hands went up. He asked how many liked the second better. Twenty-eight hands went up.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “that caused the overwhelming majority to raise their hands for the second one is what I mean by Quality. So you know what it is.”

There was a long reflective silence after this, and he just let it last.

This was just intellectually outrageous, and he knew it. He wasn’t teaching anymore, he was indoctrinating. He had erected an imaginary entity, defined it as incapable of definition, told the students over their own protests that they knew what it was, and demonstrated this by a technique that was as confusing logically as the term itself. He was able to get away with this because logical refutation required more talent than any of the students had. In subsequent days he continually invited their refutations, but none came. He improvised further.

To reinforce the idea that they already knew what Quality was he developed a routine in which he read four student papers in class and had everyone rank them in estimated order of Quality on a slip of paper. He did the same himself. He collected the slips, tallied them on the blackboard, and averaged the rankings for an overall class opinion. Then he would reveal his own rankings, and this would almost always be close to, if not identical with the class average. Where there were differences it was usually because two papers were close in quality.

At first the classes were excited by this exercise, but as time went on they became bored. What he meant by Quality was obvious. They obviously knew what it was too, and so they lost interest in listening. Their question now was, “All right, we know what Quality is. How do we get it?”

Now, at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The principles expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not ultimatums in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what really counted and stood independently of the techniques – Quality. What had started out as a heresy from traditional rhetoric turned into a beautiful introduction to it.

He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose. And if a student turned in a bunch of dumb references or a sloppy outline that showed he was just fulfilling an assignment by rote, he could be told that while his paper may have fulfilled the letter of the assignment it obviously didn’t fulfill the goal of Quality and was therefore worthless.

Now, in answer to that eternal student question, How do I do this? that had frustrated him to the point of resignation, he could reply, “It doesn’t make a bit of difference how you do it! Just so it’s good!” The reluctant student might ask in class, “But how do we know what’s good?” but almost before the question was out of his mouth he would realize the answer had already been supplied. Some other student would usually tell him, “You just see it.” If he said, “No, I don’t,” he’d be told, “Yes, you do. He proved it.” The student was finally and completely trapped into making quality judgments for himself. And it was just exactly this and nothing else that taught him to write.

Up to now Phaedrus had been compelled by the academic system to say what he wanted, even though he knew that this forced students to conform to artificial forms that destroyed their own creativity. Students who went along with his rules were then condemned for their inability to be creative or produce a piece of work that reflected their own personal standards of what is good.

Now that was over with. By reversing a basic rule that all things which are to be taught must first be defined, he had found a way out of all this. He was pointing to no principle, no rule of good writing, no theory – but he was pointing to something, nevertheless, that was very real, whose reality they couldn’t deny. The vacuum that had been created by the withholding of grades was suddenly filled with the positive goal of Quality, and the whole thing fit together. Students, astonished, came by his office and said, “I used to just hate English. Now I spend more time on it than anything else.” Not just one or two. Many. The whole Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that mysterious, individual, internal goal of each creative person…

I think that is all from now, my mind is dizzy from hunger. I could write on this subject endlessly, I think, tying in one after another of the various terminologies of the world which were all originally intended to say just one thing. In The Way of the Five Rings the Japanese swordsman – whose name I forget – talks about it as the secret of the Way. Taoism talks about it, but warns against talking too much. Zen focuses on nothing but, while trying very hard to avoid letting it slip away by becoming dogmatic. Gaughin and his “I have to paint” recounted by Somerset Maugham; Howard Roark relating to it through architecture. It’s the same story, over and over again, since the beginning of the human soul and its need for this happiness that comes from knowing and worshiping the unnameable.

In my last message I left out one of my favorites, Jean Paul Sartre. He does fit into all of this, rather beautifully in fact. One of the things he has been criticized for is his inability to explain why consciousness exists. When faced with that problem – and he knew it himself – he sort of threw his metaphysical hands in the air and called it a “fracture in the heart of being.”

Why didn’t he realize the cause of the fracture? I think, personally, that his concept of transcendence was too well done. It was so satisfying to say that things transcend toward completeness that he stopped at the point of realizing there are varying degrees of completeness. Had he found this, he would have found the answer to the very anguish he was so brave to face: the completeness of awareness.

The fracture at the heart of being – the birth of the for-itself – occurred so that the for-itself could experience that completeness. In Bahá’í terms it is expressed as, “God wished to be known, so he created the heavens and fashioned the universe.” This dynamic was made possible by the fracture: the distinguishing of seer from seen, thinker from thought. Zen tries to eliminate this gap as if there were something wrong with it: in order to provide a permanent end to the angst Sartre had found. But this fracture is actually a part of the beauty we experience, for between these two is where knowing can happen. Not knowledge, but knowing.

Below are Pirsig’s words from Zen, who was walking over the same mountain as Jean Paul, but because his terminology is different – and because he comes from a different angle – he doesn’t drop things at defining completeness, but wants to understand what it means for something to be complete. He writes:

He noted that although normally you associate Quality with objects, feelings of Quality sometimes occur without any object at all. This is what led him at first to think that maybe Quality is all subjective. But subjective pleasure wasn’t what he meant by Quality either. Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality takes you out of yourself [!], makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity.

I don’t know how much thought passed before he arrived at this, but eventually he saw that Quality couldn’t be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. It is the point at which subject and object meet.

That sounded warm.

Quality is not a thing. It is an event.

Warmer.

It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object. And because without objects there can be no subject – because the objects create the subject’s awareness of himself – Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.

Hot.

Now he knew it was coming.

This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects [of the fracture!], which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!

Now he had that whole damned evil dilemma by the throat. The dilemma all the time had this unseen vile presumption in it, for which there was no logical justification, that Quality was the effect of subjects and objects. It was not! He brought out his knife.

“The sun of quality,” he wrote, “does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them. They are subordinate to it!”

He’s almost written a theology! Islam says it as, “The Divine Face riseth out of the darkness…” Quality becomes a perceptible reality not by descending to the world of matter, or names, or definitions; it is not perceived by becoming an attribute of consciousness; it exists independently of both but it is known by the potential of the two together to manifest it by their interaction.

Man is the worshiper, creation is the shrine, and when he prays at this shrine – not a real “shrine”, mind you – then “at that time the mystery of the famed tradition gleameth out of the darkness: ‘A servant is drawn unto Me in prayer until I answer him, and when I answer him I become the ear wherewith he heareth.”’

The Seven Valleys goes on: “For thus the Master of the house hath appeared within His home, and all the pillars of the dwelling are ashine with His light.” Through the interaction of subject and object in the pursuit of Quality – through man living wholly for the sake of his highest value, by Rand’s language – he comes upon something which is the whole purpose of his life and the very answer to the anguish he feels when apart from It. “The Divine Face riseth out of the darkness…”, something, unnameable, indescribable, unrepresentable, but clear and obvious as the sun, appears before that individual’s eyes and becomes the focal center of his entire existence (“I become the ear wherewith he heareth”). No one needs to tell him he is in love – and that this is his Beloved.

I will not belabor the point. If anyone has further interest along these lines, write me.

This trip, spending time alone in new places, has proven its value ten times over. If you are thinking of something similar, let nothing stop you.

The fruit of all this thinking has borne a realization: I do know what I truly want to do, what I love, what I have always wanted to do more than anything else in the world.

I do not want to study philosophy in school, or be a translator, or try to write for a living. I have never wanted to be anything other than a computer programmer.

I understand why I abandoned this dream. I saw my love bent and twisted in an environment that did not care for her, and my love was such that I was willing to live in exile rather than continue to be a part of it. It is time for the exile to return home.

This letter is to let you all know, my friends in Arizona, that I will not be returning there to become a student. I was never quite sure what I would do with those years in school. Whenever I think of working again as a programmer, however, I knew exactly how I will spend the next forty years of my life.

I am going to move to the San Francisco Bay after coming home, onto a Catalina 27 in one of the marinas on the west side. That will put me close to where the work is. I will start a company to offer my services as a programmer, and also to sell my own creations. I am not sure of the name yet, but it will relate to this quality that I love in programming, and will be creating once again through coding.

I will come to Tucson the first week of September to visit and say goodbye, after teaching a class at the Belmont Bahá’í School. Perhaps we could have a party, to see my friends and say goodbye, and welcome back something I have been pining for throughout everything I’ve written.

It is funny; after knowing this, everything seemed clear again. I could only sit on a bench, in joy, for several hours, knowing again my part in life. I couldn’t sleep, either; I could only think of what I wanted to do, what I wanted to see happen. I had to convince myself to remain in Europe, in case something further comes clear.

My company will serve the ideals of programming I knew from the beginning, but compromised for the sake of commercial enterprises with a different objective. I think it is the type of programming even such enterprises truly want. As I find time, I will campaign to help them understand this. Here is the web site’s front page:

Welcome to Artisan Software. We offer consulting services in the field of software development. Our logo is the hammer; a hammer is a well-designed, simple tool. It does its job well enough that you don’t think about the hammer – but how you will use it. This is the nature of simple things: integrity, dependability, honesty. Think back on everything in your life you found the greatest joy in using. They all had these traits in common. This is the kind of code we write and the business that we run. Please phone or e-mail to discuss estimates. Any job is considered if it can be done well.

If people click on any of the above traits, to read their definition, they will see:

In the context of something’s being simple, integrity means that it has a single overall purpose and that every element contributes to that purpose. No part of it tries to be what it is not.

Dependability means that you always know how it will behave and what it will accomplish. It never changes what it is or what it does.

Honesty means that nothing is ever hidden or obscure or false. The description fits the behavior fits the reality. Its being is one, self-consistent… simple.

This is the life I want to live, and coding is how I want to offer it to the world. I also understand that everyone wants these things, in their soul, and so I aim to teach them, to help them see this, and to find the ways to achieve it.

On the subject of Any Rand, we may be at too wide a gap for e-mail. I am not getting lost in her, rather she is causing me to lose myself in my Beloved. That is, after all, the object of religion. Its purpose is not other people, but God; the individual and his approach to his Creator. This is why Rand appeals to me: because she understands that, even if she uses a much different language.

Now, where do other people come in? It’s simple: because we are all one. We all want the same thing, at heart. We are all trying to approach the same God. If you see me approaching, it will help you take heart; if I see you exemplifying honesty, it will help me see its value. Everything we do wholly for the sake of God benefits humanity. What it does not benefit is human egos.

In that book2, there are two types of people: Peter Keating and all his crowd – who represent the majority in that story – and Howard Roark and his friends. The crowd in the “The Fountainhead” are people without a center, who do not care about God; Howard cares only for God.

Howard has no interest in “people”, because what they want is for him to be interested in them instead of God. This is the nature of his lack of feeling. The people know he loves God instead of them, so they call him heartless, cruel, etc. They don’t realize that he loves whatever aspect of God he sees in them also. They want to dictate his love, but it cannot be dictated.

If you feel he lacks a conscience for men, reread his relationship to Gail Wynand. Gail had the love of God in him, but he used it to feed others’ inward poverty. He worked to provide them with an alternate reality, of their choosing, and this is why Henry Cameron – a lover of man, not men – hated him.

But Howard knew the fire that kept Gail burning, however he misused it, and for this reason he loved him deeply. Some of the most profound “feeling” and “conscience” of that entire book is expressed by Howard Roark toward Gail Wynand. Howard loves man, but does not love the images that men ask him to love. When men feel slighted in that hope, they call him cruel and unloving.

Somehow we need the warmth of another to fuel our own creativity.

I cannot express how oppositely I feel to this statement. If they are fueling you, who is fueling them? The tree in the forest is not a conscious being. If I fell in the forest, I would be there to hear the sound. I don’t need anyone else to tell me what I heard.

The nature of helping one another deserves much thought. I do not help a man by pushing him up hill every day. I help him by inventing a cart and showing him how to use it. His response? To persecute me because I don’t care enough to keep pushing him.

To invent the cart I need to be left alone, in my own mind, fired by my own purpose: which is the love that makes me want to see the cart built in the first place. I don’t build the cart for the man, I build it for the sake of God. It happens that my efforts will benefit all men, and this is the nature of living for virtue.

If I ask you to tell me what is good, I can only write what you think is good. The limit of my ability will be the limit of your vision. This leads to a situation where all limits all, and the common denominator is held to be “the best” – because everyone can say so. The man who creates what you do not like, knowing you only dislike it because you haven’t seen it before, is the person who will offend you, ignore you, oppose you – in order to truly help you.

Mankind has killed all of its true benefactors. It does not like them. Nor did they succeed by looking to their fellow man for “fuel”. Withholding that fuel is the great punishment men have devised for keeping people in line. Had our benefactors depended on it, we would still believe that the earth is flat and the sun stationery. We always create alone. But then, we are not alone. There is God. And I don’t mean the God that exists beyond human affairs; I mean the God referred to by the verse, “He who hath known himself hath known God.”

You are a child of God, with a mind, a stake in living. We share this in common. I am writing to that aspect of you, because it is identical to that aspect in me and I will do anything I can to foster its growth. I worship what I love in life by writing a letter to you about these things; which I am writing not for you, but for Him. Which is to say, for you – for the truest part of who you are.

This is the difference between the ego and the soul. We are alone, amidst six billions, in terms of the ego; because the ego feels so alone it cries for companionship. But we are one – a single humanity – in terms of His light within us. There is no loneliness possible in that. Thus `Abdu’l-Bahá says that we will love each other only when we look to the light of God, that point of unity, shining in each person. It is only this Light that we can love. The person around that light may serve it, but deserves no special praise. That, I believe, is being selfless.

In my opinion, this is what the Seven Valleys refers to as the Divine Unity. All of the Prophets are different, yet They are one. When fight in respect to Their differences, but unite in respect to Their unity. When you pray to one, you are praying to all. When you write for one, you are writing to all. When you serve the highest in one, you serve the highest in all. There are no special claims to be made in respect to our distinctions, they are only attributes of this world – to be valued for beautifying the Light, but not loved in place of the Light. It is only in respect to such unity that the world can advance toward its ultimate Goal: not its particular members, but the beauties of God it is capable of manifesting.

Another essay, refining some of the thoughts from yesterday’s second.

As a side note: The essays I have sent you all are the outward form of an internal dialog. They are my own thoughts, expressed to myself using various forms of address in order to clarify them and see the logic played out. In my life I’ve found that nothing changes behavior more strongly than a clearly formulated thought. As if within there were a courthouse, and the two sides of our nature – higher and lower – were constantly arguing their case before the jury of the mind. It means that everything so far has been of the nature of a travelogue: some outward and telling of Europe, others inward and showing the effect of this time on my consciousness of it. I could not think of another way to address the world’s problems, if not by addressing those same problems in myself and then speaking in the language of our common humanity. In this way, a philosopher makes of himself a symbol for the whole, and unravels his own knots in public view so that others may draw inspiration from the effort.

The following essay means a great deal to me, more than those preceding. It brings into one perspective everything I have written so far.

“Noble I made thee; wherewith hast thou abased thyself?”

Man cannot but respect himself. At the core of his being, he knows who he is, what he can be. He loves his creation as the natural response of life discovering that it is alive.

His respect is founded in his values and in honoring those values. There is really only one prime value. Call it what you wish. Plato said we made from a spark of the divine. We know our own nature when we see it.

Somewhere, in childhood – whatever their reasons – we were asked to compromise that value. We would not. We faced punishment and all the claims of authority the world can offer. We were only children. We compromised. This was the beginning of sorrow.

After the first time it got easier, but our fundamental respect cannot be erased. It was a contradiction; we were a being torn in two. We knew who we were and loved it; we could not accept what we’d done and hated it. A moral being cannot forgive its own immorality except at the price of morality. He can only respond by correcting the error.

We also could not end the compromise and win back our harmony of being and action. We met with refusal, reprimand. The compromise was enforced and we had nowhere to go. We knew what it meant. It was the first time we had to ask, to combat this knowledge in our soul: “I’m good, aren’t it?” And when we heard the answer, like manna from heaven, finally offering a reprieve to our torture – “Yes, dear, you are” – the ego that lives through others was born. Our substitute self. The image we turn to when we cannot face ourselves with honesty.

It was buried, but not lost – that sorrow mollified by the ego. The conflict remained unaddressed. But we still could not right the wrong in our life. It grew deeper and more complicated as school, church and government all asked for compromises of their own. The pattern was set, the scheme outside our awareness. We were still too young to see it happening.

In youth and with the first gasp of freedom we fought, bravely, nobly. But we lacked a voice, a defender to show us the lines of battle. We fought, not the cause, but everything asked for by those authorities who had pushed us into compromise. We gained nothing but a pause, a breathing spell. Then academia, career, society, all put on the pressure again. Still we did not understand, and so it was easier to carry on in resignation than to hunt a foe we could not identify.

The rift only worsened; it never heals. It carries far into adult life, into our present. We seek anything to stave off the pain: alcohol, sex, entertainment – all wonderful anesthetics. The nobler the soul, the more its fury is aimed against itself for having been a party to all. Other direct their rage at the world. Still others strive not to care. We all want to end the heart of sorrow in some way. Some have taken their own life. Others go on denying themselves all respect – seeking to ruin whatever respect they have left – in righteous anger at the sacrifice of their values.

We depend on this world we’ve compromised with to convince us it was all worthwhile. To say it and show it in salaries, titles, awards. We fear what would happen if we were left by ourselves without it. The tie is like a cursed life-line that only sinks us deeper and keeps the wound from closing.

And yet to be by ourselves – in the truest sense – is exactly what we need. All scripture warns of the bond of ego; it places honesty, detachment and selflessness at the beginning of spirituality. Let us call “selfless” a man whose self is neither defined by nor sought in the world. Let us call “spirituality” the living of life in pursuit of the highest value.

Such a being has no defined “self”; he has only his being, his soul. That is all. He does not live in reference to the world, he does not compromise with the world. Religion asks man repeatedly to give up the world; perhaps this is what is means: To put off the vestment of self and stand naked, a bare soul with one function only: the love and worship the value it admires.

In doing so he is only himself, he lives only for himself. He pursues the highest value and that is all he cares about. By his morals he discovers whichever value can be approached by those morals – the highest morality leading to the highest value – and his virtue is the extent to which he embodies that morality. If he holds true to virtue, both by accepting punishment when he errs and approval when he does right, he is just.

This is the man who can know happiness: whose only companion in life is the value he seeks – everywhere he finds it. He does not care about the world. It does not exist for him. He knows only about the highest value he can conceive and worships it by his life, his actions. He creates a shrine to this value in every word and deed. This is how he serves his fellow men: by offering his life to the Highest and letting those who will come and see, even take part in the endeavor. Our achievements are the only gift we can offer to another being like ourselves. Any “service” that would substitute their own capacity to achieve would be the worst harm we could do.

The compromise, the sorrow, never needed to be. There has never been any reason to take it seriously. I can stop now. And then we may see that deep down, we’ve respected ourselves from the very beginning. That is the nature of the sorrow: that we knew what we were in the midst of who we were. Now we can forget it all, and pursue the value we’ve known is out there all along. To happiness.

Roger at sea

The following short story is a depiction in imagery of my time here in Europe.

The sun was still high enough to makes the waves a bright blue, changing to jewel green near the shore. Small darts of color moved in the current. The sand was pure white, still too glaring to look at. Laid out in the sand, with no towel, only his bare skin absorbing the heat, Roger reached his arm over his eyes for shade.

The skiff was a few steps away he’d come in; to sea, just beyond the coral reef, was his sailing boat, La Dolce Vita. It was a white line sprouting from blue at this distance. The skiff was made from polished wood, a warm brown in the light. Roger thought of moving, but the thought left him. A constant breeze flowed from the sea, leaving him warm and cool at the same moment. Individual grains of sand moved under his arms and legs. The sky was without clouds.

Roger turned his head toward the skiff. Between them a small crab walked up and down the ripples of sand. Its legs were little spasms of movement between rest. If found a patch of wet sand, ran quickly to a hole and disappeared. The sun was just a bit lower, but Roger did not notice. He closed his eyes.

In all this calm his thoughts were a storm. He considered life, death – all his usual preoccupations. Not one muscle moved along the length of his body. His fingers opened and closed once, but that was all. The wind kept touching him, caressing. He felt it all, parallel to his mind’s course.

Only with his body so empty could his mind be so full. No one knew the island but him, he supposed. He came here when the quiet of his city apartment was not quiet enough.

There were no clouds today. Everything was one color only, the anthem of the sea’s hue played in the symphony of the sky. He turned on his side when not turning was a greater effort. Dried sand trickled down. The sun was kissing his back, his hands, his legs; the wind and the sun together.

A new color came into the sky. He did not see it. It was the faintest green, impossible one moment, real the next. Had he measured, the sun would have seemed almost larger. It was fattening, gaining weight, slouching in the sky. Its cheeks were rosy. A jolly old sun, well past middle-age. Roger never saw the change. It did not ask to be seen.

The waves did not stop, but the receding tide made their sounds fainter. Only a whole day’s comparison could know the difference. He had spent a whole day. He did not compare or listen. The threads of his hair jumped about in the breeze: a flag to his state of mind. The stillness of his body was matched by the speed of his thought. Pressed, channeled, racing. He twitched a foot that itched for no reason.

The sun was only a flame now. The sea had the look of rippled glass. From shore to sun a red streak led into evening. The waves had left the skiff, drawing back. A single tooth had been added to the bite of the wind.

Roger turned again without realizing it. His body was aware; his mind spared no attention. The only sound was the sailboat’s main halyard, ringing on the mast. He had forgotten to tie it off. He had stopped hearing it hours ago.

The sun dipped and sank and the skies changed into night. Little points of stars winked into being one by one. The waves crept back up the shore. A sliver of the moon braved the horizon. There was still a shade of blue everywhere, but it was fading.

The sloop at rest was like a skeleton of some beast left to bleach in the sun. It did not drift. Nothing moved. Roger, his arm up, on his side, could not have said whether the sun had left. Its attentions were wasted. The wind kept up its embrace but slackened with the cooling of the day. Softly, gently, the night crept on without disturbing the placid figure. He may have moved even. It was too dark to tell.

At last his thoughts were complete and he took a deep breath as if remembering to breathe. He sat up and looked around for the colors now lost, for the sun now gone. It took a moment to name the vast darkness. Night. Night had fallen. He stood up and brushed the sand from his skin. Waves lapped lazily at his skiff as they had when he lay down. To a sailor, he knew what this lack of difference meant. Half a day under the sun.

Part II

Roger walked over to the skiff, its hull half wet, half dry, moored by its own weight. The world around him was like a revelation. So different from the day. He looked at the ripples of light on the waves, at the moon half-risen, as if his thoughts had conjured this place. Dapples of starlight played on the wet wood of the skiff. Light had left the world to become more precious, more poignant by its absence.

The wind was chiller now, though weak. The halyard had stopped slapping the mast. The waves and wind were a silence more profound than any lack of noise. Roger stopped in his walking, held fast by the tranquillity. When he could move again, he did.

The skiff was sluggish, in love with the sand. His whole back strained but it shifted only one inch toward the water. Then something gave way and its affections changed, reaching for the sea faster and faster until it was bobbing on the surf.

The moon was full, squat and huge on the horizon. Impossibly large. The night was a different world: a black sky and the sun’s ghost, the only cloud an arm of the galaxy. In this underworld the boat awaited him like Charon, to ferry the gap between life and the beyond. All the souls of heaven were waiting, points of light in the sky. The moon bore no crown, but was king.

Roger climbed into the skiff and set the oars, taking one last look at shore. It was empty, a single copse of trees only. It was also full of memories. A stage that fitted the theater of his mind. It had watched every act and its audience was the rarest kind: a reverent silence. How much he had seen where nothing was. Between the two, it was more bustling with energy than the cities he had left. Even a city, without its mind, would return to such stillness and void. He had made this place his city.

He pulled the oars, feeling a new resistance. The skiff did not like to move. His muscles bunched in his arms, straining against the weight and the water. Slowly the beach receded and a liquid form of sky collected around him. The oars dipped in and out, scattering pale lights in the near tranquil surface. Inside the reef, the waves were gentle, slight, breaking in thin lines on the sand. The moonlight streaked on the water, alive. It made the sea seem still and the lights in motion. He cut through it with his oars and watched the lights pass slowly by.

The sailboat was closer, enlarging as the moon shrank over time. There was an easy channel between the shore and the boat’s mooring. The reef could not be seen through the blackness of the water.

Soon the mainmast was high in the sky, the moon vaulting over. The wind had increased, from the shore. Or maybe it only seemed to change in relation to the island, submerged in vaster currents from the continent. It did not matter. While he was here all terms related to himself and his surroundings. The little island would have fit within a hug at this distance.

The sailboat was large and proud, a feline form relaxing but always ready. On the bowsprit the words “La Dolce Vita” were painted in blue letters. Along the waterline it was also blue. Or he knew it to be. In the moonlight everything was a shade of grey.

There was a cloud now from somewhere. It was small and brighter than seemed possible. The sense of its motion was supplied by the feeling of the wind. Otherwise everything was still, motionless. It was also all in movement – the cloud, the moon, the stars – but at its own pace. Roger reached to the boat and lashed the winch lines. He climbed the small rope ladder on the side.

Part III

The boat pulled tight at its anchor rode, straining as at a leash. From above it was only a slender white form in the void. It responded little to Roger’s weight. It was fifty feet in length and weighted for sea voyaging. The hull flared out with a generous tumblehome. The transom was slanted into the sea. The hull was a thick, white strip between the deck and the water. Roger covered the distance in four steps and stood aboard. He winched in the skiff, and it lay on deck slick with moonlight.

He turned on the arc-lights on the spreaders. The night was obliterated. As easily as a finger’s movement the stars were erased and the moon changed to a humble figure. The one cloud seemed darker now. It had not moved far.

Quickly, but with a practiced, neat efficiency, Roger awakened the boat from sleep. It was a sloop with jib and spinnaker available at a touch, electronically. The canvas was middle-weight, suitable for these latitudes. Roger untied the mainsail and latched the halyard, now banging again. His hand held the line with a sensual touch.

He hauled the main upright. Its weight resisted the call to duty, but it was willing. As the wind found it it became easier; the sail remembering its purpose and grew excited. The final pulls were both the hardest and the easiest. The canvas jumped playfully at the breeze; the leech slapped the wind in impatience.

Made fast, the luff taut, the boom shook from port to starboard and back. Roger tightened on the mainsheet and the sail filled. The only sense of motion was in the slackening of the rode. He steered over it, easing the anchor from the soil of the sea. He ran forward to haul it free and gathered the rode onto its drum. The links of the chain were cold and wet. The anchor held a few grains of sand that dripped to the deck. The boat was underway.

With a touch he unfurled the jib. It greedily drank in huge gulps of air and exhaled a fresh breeze into Roger’s face. The main took a firm, hard shape. The bow bit at the waves. Beyond the boat the night was calm, the waves low, but they gained speed in a close reach. The wind became stiff, ten knots increasing to twenty. The rudder responded like a waiting lover. The hull sang with inaudible music. The sail were full and proud, yearning into the distance with a palpable lust. She was alive and she was joyous, and Roger stroked her tiller’s curving shape with fondness. He could not imagine having left to visit the shore. This was his steed on which to ride the world – and he had left her waiting. It seemed unthinkable.

He killed the arc-lights and the night returned. The two were chasing the moon, making no headway at terrific speed. The one cloud watched them impassively, receding slowly. There were too many scales and measures of movement. He felt they were streaking through space on the wind itself; the wind did not notice their travel. The sea gave no clues, its distances intangible. The white spray at the bow seemed to come from nowhere: the wind brought low to the waves and fighting.

She kept on for hours without a course, preferring whichever direction kept the wind in his face. It was not the most efficient point of sail, but it was the most exciting. The boat seemed to deserve that after so much rest. He as well.

He steered with one foot on the tiller, leaning back, his eyes closed. Everything he needed to know his body told him – she told him through the tensions of her body. He listened to her song and adjusted whenever he heard a note of melancholy. She leapt at the loving caress, and the two fed each other’s soul until far in the night.

He did not know when the day came. They did not know. Exhausted, the wind spent, they merely lay still in the happiness of morning. When the day brought the winds back, they resumed. They were now as one, underway on the limitless reaches of the sea.

The sun was still high enough to makes the waves a bright blue, changing to jewel green near the shore. Small darts of color moved in the current. The sand was pure white, still too glaring to look at. Laid out in the sand, with no towel, only his bare skin absorbing the heat, Roger reached his arm over his eyes for shade.

The skiff was a few steps away he’d come in; to sea, just beyond the coral reef, was his sailing boat, La Dolce Vita. It was a white line sprouting from blue at this distance. The skiff was made from polished wood, a warm brown in the light. Roger thought of moving, but the thought left him. A constant breeze flowed from the sea, leaving him warm and cool at the same moment. Individual grains of sand moved under his arms and legs. The sky was without clouds.

Roger turned his head toward the skiff. Between them a small crab walked up and down the ripples of sand. Its legs were little spasms of movement between rest. It found a patch of wet sand, ran quickly to a hole and disappeared. The sun was just a bit lower, but Roger did not notice. He closed his eyes.

In all this calm his thoughts were a storm. He considered life, death – all his usual preoccupations. Not one muscle moved along the length of his body. His fingers opened and closed once, but that was all. The wind kept touching him, caressing. He felt it all, parallel to his mind’s course.

Only with his body so empty could his mind be so full. No one knew the island but him, he supposed. He came here when the quiet of his city apartment was not quiet enough.

There were no clouds today. Everything was one color only, the anthem of the sea’s hue played in the symphony of the sky. He turned on his side when not turning was a greater effort. Dried sand trickled down. The sun was kissing his back, his hands, his legs; the wind and the sun together.

A new color came into the sky. He did not see it. It was the faintest green, impossible one moment, real the next. Had he measured, the sun would have seemed almost larger. It was fattening, gaining weight, slouching in the sky. Its cheeks were rosy. A jolly old sun, well past middle-age. Roger never saw the change. It did not ask to be seen.

The waves did not stop, but the receding tide made their sounds fainter. Only a whole day’s comparison could know the difference. He had spent a whole day. He did not compare or listen. The threads of his hair jumped about in the breeze: a flag to his state of mind. The stillness of his body was matched by the speed of his thought. Pressed, channeled, racing. He twitched a foot that itched for no reason.

The sun was only a flame now. The sea had the look of rippled glass. From shore to sun a red streak led into evening. The waves had left the skiff, drawing back. A single tooth had been added to the bite of the wind.

Roger turned again without realizing it. His body was aware; his mind spared no attention. The only sound was the sailboat’s main halyard, ringing on the mast. He had forgotten to tie it off. He had stopped hearing it hours ago.

The sun dipped and sank and the skies changed into night. Little points of stars winked into being one by one. The waves crept back up the shore. A sliver of the moon braved the horizon. There was still a shade of blue everywhere, but it was fading.

The sloop at rest was like a skeleton of some beast left to bleach in the sun. It did not drift. Nothing moved. Roger, his arm up, on his side, could not have said whether the sun had left. Its attentions were wasted. The wind kept up its embrace but slackened with the cooling of the day. Softly, gently, the night crept on without disturbing the placid figure. He may have moved even. It was too dark to tell.

At last his thoughts were complete and he took a deep breath as if remembering to breathe. He sat up and looked around for the colors now lost, for the sun now gone. It took a moment to name the vast darkness. Night. Night had fallen. He stood up and brushed the sand from his skin. Waves lapped lazily at his skiff as they had when he lay down. To a sailor, he knew what this lack of difference meant. Half a day under the sun.

Roger walked over to the skiff, its hull half wet, half dry, moored by its own weight. The world around him was like a revelation. So different from the day. He looked at the ripples of light on the waves, at the moon half-risen, as if his thoughts had conjured this place. Dapples of starlight played on the wet wood of the skiff. Light had left the world to become more precious, more poignant by its absence.

The wind was chiller now, though weak. The halyard had stopped slapping the mast. The waves and wind were a silence more profound than any lack of noise. Roger stopped in his walking, held fast by the tranquillity. When he could move again, he did.

The skiff was sluggish, in love with the sand. His whole back strained but it shifted only one inch toward the water. Then something gave way and its affections changed, reaching for the sea faster and faster until it was bobbing on the surf.

The moon was full, squat and huge on the horizon. Impossibly large. The night was a different world: a black sky and the sun’s ghost, the only cloud an arm of the galaxy. In this underworld the boat awaited him like Charon, to ferry the gap between life and the beyond. All the souls of heaven were waiting, points of light in the sky. The moon bore no crown, but was king.

Roger climbed into the skiff and set the oars, taking one last look at shore. It was empty, a single copse of trees only. It was also full of memories. A stage that fitted the theater of his mind. It had watched every act and its audience was the rarest kind: a reverent silence. How much he had seen where nothing was. Between the two, it was more bustling with energy than the cities he had left. Even a city, without its mind, would return to such stillness and void. He had made this place his city.

He pulled the oars, feeling a new resistance. The skiff did not like to move. His muscles bunched in his arms, straining against the weight and the water. Slowly the beach receded and a liquid form of sky collected around him. The oars dipped in and out, scattering pale lights in the near tranquil surface. Inside the reef, the waves were gentle, slight, breaking in thin lines on the sand. The moonlight streaked on the water, alive. It made the sea seem still and the lights in motion. He cut through it with his oars and watched the lights pass slowly by.

The sailboat was closer, enlarging as the moon shrank over time. There was an easy channel between the shore and the boat’s mooring. The reef could not be seen through the blackness of the water.

Soon the mainmast was high in the sky, the moon vaulting over. The wind had increased, from the shore. Or maybe it only seemed to change in relation to the island, submerged in vaster currents from the continent. It did not matter. While he was here all terms related to himself and his surroundings. The little island would have fit within a hug at this distance.

The sailboat was large and proud, a feline form relaxing but always ready. On the bowsprit the words “La Dolce Vita” were painted in blue letters. Along the waterline it was also blue. Or he knew it to be. In the moonlight everything was a shade of grey.

There was a cloud now from somewhere. It was small and brighter than seemed possible. The sense of its motion was supplied by the feeling of the wind. Otherwise everything was still, motionless. It was also all in movement – the cloud, the moon, the stars – but at its own pace. Roger reached to the boat and lashed the winch lines. He climbed the small rope ladder on the side.

The boat pulled tight at its anchor rode, straining as at a leash. From above it was only a slender white form in the void. It responded little to Roger’s weight. It was fifty feet in length and weighted for sea voyaging. The hull flared out with a generous tumblehome. The transom was slanted into the sea. The hull was a thick, white strip between the deck and the water. Roger covered the distance in four steps and stood aboard. He winched in the skiff, and it lay on deck slick with moonlight.

He turned on the arc-lights on the spreaders. The night was obliterated. As easily as a finger’s movement the stars were erased and the moon changed to a humble figure. The one cloud seemed darker now. It had not moved far.

Quickly, but with a practiced, neat efficiency, Roger awakened the boat from sleep. It was a sloop with jib and spinnaker available at a touch, electronically. The canvas was middle-weight, suitable for these latitudes. Roger untied the mainsail and latched the halyard, now banging again. His hand held the line with a sensual touch.

He hauled the main upright. Its weight resisted the call to duty, but it was willing. As the wind found it it became easier; the sail remembering its purpose and grew excited. The final pulls were both the hardest and the easiest. The canvas jumped playfully at the breeze; the leech slapped the wind in impatience.

Made fast, the luff taut, the boom shook from port to starboard and back. Roger tightened on the mainsheet and the sail filled. The only sense of motion was in the slackening of the rode. He steered over it, easing the anchor from the soil of the sea. He ran forward to haul it free and gathered the rode onto its drum. The links of the chain were cold and wet. The anchor held a few grains of sand that dripped to the deck. The boat was underway.

With a touch he unfurled the jib. It greedily drank in huge gulps of air and exhaled a fresh breeze into Roger’s face. The main took a firm, hard shape. The bow bit at the waves. Beyond the boat the night was calm, the waves low, but they gained speed in a close reach. The wind became stiff, ten knots increasing to twenty. The rudder responded like a waiting lover. The hull sang with inaudible music. The sail were full and proud, yearning into the distance with a palpable lust. She was alive and she was joyous, and Roger stroked her tiller’s curving shape with fondness. He could not imagine having left to visit the shore. This was his steed on which to ride the world – and he had left her waiting. It seemed unthinkable.

He killed the arc-lights and the night returned. The two were chasing the moon, making no headway at terrific speed. The one cloud watched them impassively, receding slowly. There were too many scales and measures of movement. He felt they were streaking through space on the wind itself; the wind did not notice their travel. The sea gave no clues, its distances intangible. The white spray at the bow seemed to come from nowhere: the wind brought low to the waves and fighting.

She kept on for hours without a course, preferring whichever direction kept the wind in his face. It was not the most efficient point of sail, but it was the most exciting. The boat seemed to deserve that after so much rest. He as well.

He steered with one foot on the tiller, leaning back, his eyes closed. Everything he needed to know his body told him – she told him through the tensions of her body. He listened to her song and adjusted whenever he heard a note of melancholy. She leapt at the loving caress, and the two fed each other’s soul until far in the night.

He did not know when the day came. They did not know. Exhausted, the wind spent, they merely lay still in the happiness of morning. When the day brought the winds back, they resumed. They were now as one, underway on the limitless reaches of the sea.

Roger and his craft, together, came upon the approaching day. Without the sun yet in the sky, it appeared as if they were nearing an island of light beyond the horizon. First, the heavens turned a shade of pale, draining color from the stars, until one-by-one they stepped out from the hall of the sky. Then the waters became tinted as though somewhere, a secret hand were feeding blue drops into the black of the sea.

Though at first, it was all grey, only grey, the way the world may have seemed on its first day, before the creation of colors and of things to reveal them. Just a faint, weak grey turning black into not-black. The suggestion of colors occurred to the mind alone, who knew what they would become, and where appear. Then the grey lost its somber purity, admitting a secret joy that it, too, was eager to see the day come to life. He yielded – that pre-eternal, robed greyness of the first light – and stepped aside for the ladies, blue and pink and rose. Quickly they came, playing marigolds into the sky, throwing bouquets that fanned the light all over, from one side of the horizon to the other.

The sails of La Dolce Vita changed through every shade of white, now becoming true, and even catching some of the colored rays as well as the wind. The teak panels of the deck remembered their coffee brown, the mast’s aluminum its silver, the brass fittings their almost-gold, and the flecked lines their flecks, as they ran fore and aft. The sun rose to mount its throne in the sky, and he bestowed favor on all his subjects, ranking them by the colors he chose to give.

All around, there was naught to be seen but the perfect sea. Nor line, but the horizon’s circle that kept the border of ocean from heaven’s blue. The sun, that could not be seen, made it all visible, and all one by the many shades of blue: light above, dark below.

In the interface between water and sky, the constant congress of waves made a stately progression from east to west. Some large, some small; some true on their course, others erring to north or south; some meeting, some parting, some synchronized at ever the same distance. No two were the same, yet all were of one name, one essence. It was a kingdom of forms whose brotherhood was absolute.

And somewhere in those depths, Roger knew, swam the great mammals of the sea. Their pounding flukes offered towering sprays to the wind. Their noble brow might gather ten thousand heads of men to equal such a furrow. Their back slapped the seas like a child’s hand in a bathtub. Their heavy suspirations could be seen at a mile’s distance. Their eyes roved in watchful contemplation, whose sight had known all the fathoms of the deep. And somewhere, they toiled and played, raised their pups, sang great, epic poems whose heroes may have watched the first fires of men with dark foreboding. Yet none were visible in all the folded carpet of the sea’s blue. It was empty, that sea; yet it was full. It was the limit of the eye that made the difference.

Ahead rose the sun’s ruby crown. The king awoke to his labors, setting the waters aflame with ardor, summoning adoration by a mere glance, and bowing all heads that could not master the vision. The sea was his cup of wine, from which he rising head was wont to sip. As the redness of morning passed, he lifted up a wreath of golden fire, and covered his face in a veil of light that denied the furtive peeks of the profane. He stood so his head looked over the horizon, and his considered his creation thoughtfully, and found it merited another day.

But how long, a pilgrimage to that king; how far, the distance between. La Dolce Vita climbed over the waves time and again, hour after hour, but made no headway. He was the easiest goal to sail for, but the hardest isle to reach. Even with wings she did not possess, the wandering ship would have deepened her sense of failure. The whole of the sky was his kingdom, forbidden to foot and sail; while the sea was her domain: a great, vast, beloved journey, never beyond the reach of his warm embrace. It was admiration alone that made the two as one, united in their roles of king and subject – as night and day are divided and united by the sun – so that in admiration she continued, her eyes and heart a well-spring of treasures, while all else served the clarity of her perception: waves and sky and sea.

rivers.of.people

Commentary on The Seven Valleys

A commentary on The Seven Valleys – a Bahá’í mystical text – based on some of the ideas of The Fountainhead:

We search for Quality, for the living goodness which is the life of all things great and beautiful. To find it we must be free of the judgments and ideas of the world. When we stand thus, unashamed of our desire and knowing our being’s right and capacity to name it, then in proportion to our effort we will find it: The good, the right, that which answers “Yes” to the question of our being.

When we discover this quality, we must love it; it is the water of our thirst, that alone whose sight justifies seeing. Then we will see how much the world dishonors it, hates it, makes a mockery of it exactly for its beauty. They do not know. Those who fear it as the destruction of their idea of beauty, teach others to fight and destroy it. The more we see this perfection in the hands of those who worship imperfection, the more we want to rescue it from such hands, to save it from unworthy eyes. We would rather destroy it then let the profane mangle it by their words. This is pain, and the greater our love, the greater our agony.

This love would destroy us – in a world that seems to honor lowliness and forever sees greatness as apart from men – until we learn the nature of the good, and know its true sovereignty. The calumnies of its enemies are like praise: they show how much they fear it and know its power; their profanity honors it in the eyes of those who know: by making obvious the contrast. The water they would pour to extinguish it is changed to oil; the prison they would keep it in only banks the flames and intensifies the illumination. It is unstoppable, and both its friends and its enemies serve its cause.

Then we see that this good is everywhere, underlying everything. Nothing can remain in existence without it. It is the life and potency of every action – even those directed against it. And it is all one, this basis. It is one light, in the diversity of all its possible colors reflecting from every created thing. It is one spirit and existence is the body clothing that spirit. The world is a lamp, kindled to reveal its light. A man’s glory is not in his distinction from his fellows, but in his revelation of this glorious good that shines through him more completely, more perfectly, than anywhere else.

Now being seeks nothing more, for in its own being is true being: the good, the beauty it had hoped and longed for. It sees that it itself is the purpose for its own being, and that its self is the self of a perfection beyond words. He reads, “Forget all save Me and commune with My spirit,” and finds the answer in his own being’s purpose, echoing Rumi: “The beauty of my own emptiness filled me until dawn.” The single man starts to fade away, and in his place dawns Man – its meaning, hope and goal. He sees himself as both king and servant in the same instant; he is the seat of his Master, and the hand that answers to His will. He is complete.

A being so at one with its object, so intimate in its relation to the good, can see and appreciate its diverse forms with neither fear nor longing. Its forms are limitless, its beauty beyond any mortal capacity to bear. No limited thing can contain it, while no limitation can exist without reference to it. It surpasses the highest understanding, the deepest appreciation. The individual is torn apart in his desire to embrace and honor it, but it leaves him panting and disappointed. The good does not need him, but he cannot live without the good. He feels himself destroyed and uplifted by its greatness at every moment.

Until at last the shroud of limitation is put off, and the drop merges with the sea. This is not the death of the body and life hereafter, but the death of the effort to contain, and the life of being contained, at one. Now the drop and the ocean cannot be distinguished, nor can you separate one ray from the brilliance of the sun. Such a being may live a physical life, but he is no longer apart from the good, seeing it from outside – as the lover looks on with rapture at his beloved – he is become the good; its name is his name; there is no longer either division or conflict. Look for him, himself, and you cannot find him; but at the same time he is everywhere, taking part in everything. His being is the same as the first of mankind and of its last. When a being who strives for greatness looks him in the eye, he sees himself. For the lantern is now lit in its full splendor, and its being is the light it reveals; the iron of the cage around it is all but forgotten next to the purpose of the lamp.

Psychological implications of The Fountainhead

The ego that seeks the admiration of others represents the feeling of ourselves as despicable and a desire to escape any knowledge of that feeling. It is what we feel poignantly whenever we sit still and are apart from others long enough.

Self-destructive behaviors are a desire to end this feeling, since the ego cannot eliminate the fact that we despise ourselves. And since we can only despise something we know to be honorable and good, as fallen from its possible glory, it is our respect for ourselves we want to ruin in order no longer to feel that we have a right to despise ourselves. We hate because we love, and this love is tearing us in two because there is something very wrong we are not facing.

The answer is not found in salvation, or sacrifice, or suicide – or in dedicating one’s life to serving others because one feels unworthy to be served. The answer is plain, simple knowledge. Find out why you despise yourself, and you will know what to do to end it.

Every soul can find the answer to its problems. There are more solutions than problems in the world, because the mind is active, living, limitless; while problems stand alone, fixed, unmoving. A mind faced with a problem can name a thousand avenues of approach – while there always remains only one thing that is being approached.

To claim a problem cannot be solved is a wish that someone else will come and solve it. This is the same ego, wanting the world to live up to its hopes and defend it from the existence of the problem. Where there is knowledge and a will to know, however, the solution will be evident.

It is obvious that we do not like ourselves. Go anywhere and listen to people talk about their spouse, their boss, their job, their government, their country, their world. They are living in a place they do not like, and somewhere inside them they realize that the form of that world is only the contributions of those who live in it – including them. Everyone will tell you eagerly how much others have screwed up the world. This is the alternate side of the ego: it works positively to attract praise, and negatively to divert blame. We know the world is the sum of its individuals, and that governments exist by consent of their citizens; but only a few will admit, “I help to create and maintain a world I despise.”

For example, we are compassionate people who eat meat, knowing the animals are not respected and cared for – or trying not to know. Others want to end the moral conflict by withdrawing, living in their own gardens, naked and without convenience if possible to escape the sickness of our global condition. How can this be the answer, to regress all the hard-won efforts of civilization? Avoiding meat does not answer the slavery, misery, and poverty sustaining the lives of those with luxury and time to consider these problems.

How can we admire the world we see now? Id even one person willing to state honestly that the world he sees matches his image of beauty and perfection? We grow up in this turmoil, the mass confusion of a world repulsed by itself; we make compromises with it, losing ours ideals one by one to age and experience; we cut out a safe little corner listen to others tell us that no one can change it all, that one person is powerless against so much corruption, that if he lifts his head above the crowd in pride, it will and should be cut off.

But we cannot so easily fool ourselves. We are honest, noble creatures, every one of us. This is what makes depravity depraved: that one fallen low should have been high. We are the custodians and authors of our world; like any creation, it reflects our values and our commitment to those values. We look at the world and must turn away: we must not know what we have allowed it to become and remain. It is a mirror whose image is too painful to contemplate.

In response to this, in honest assessment of what we are and are a part of, we discover a horror too awful to admit. Numberless bromides, reasons, excuses are thrown up to block out that knowledge. Because we love ourselves, we cannot look at ourselves; because we love the world, we must give up on the world. This is why the ego exists and why we continue to do things to destroy our self-respect: If our respect for our self became too great, we would have to answer for the state of the world.

Why? Is one person so important he should consider himself responsible, by sin of omission, for the entire world? It is exactly because one person could change all of it, but runs from this knowledge, that he also runs from himself.

The form of change cannot always be foreseen; it may set in motion events that play out over centuries. But all such changes begin with the certainty, not only that it can be done, but it is the nature of man’s being alone to do so. There is nothing in existence which does not bow, in the end, to his creativity, his ingenuity, his persistence and integrity, and his resource for co-operative endeavor. The universe itself, in time, will become a means for realizing our vision, as has the sea, the air, the mountains. Look at man’s physical form – beautiful yet powerless before nature’s beasts – then go to a zoo and know who you are.

Only a man who bows before a problem cannot solve it; only the one who regards the world’s troubles with awe and fear cannot overcome them. Our race, as it stands now, began with a handful of individuals a long time ago, when the whole earth was a garden of dangers. Visit New York City sometime, and see the changes their kind have wrought upon the world.

Most religions and spiritualists seek an end to the problem of ego in humiliation, in completely devaluing one’s self. This cannot, however, but worsen the essential problem which causes men to look to others for a sense of value. It is only by exaltation and discovering one’s true value – and the consequent self-respect this must engender – that the cause of ego is undone, and man can face himself in the mirror of the world again.

Let us acquire this knowledge of our nature and of our power, and set out in life to do what will answer to our basic love of that life. The crucial factor is self-knowledge, and discovery of that certitude which moves not only mountains, but all the affairs of men if it has a mind to. The ego will ask, “How? Am I doing it right?”, but know who you are and you will go out and do it – whatever the form of your longing as part-owner of the world. The solutions will present themselves like able servants who had been standing, waiting, ready all along.

Guidelines for Writing

A projection of the character of Howard Roark into a set of guidelines for writing:

Write what you want to read. If you were stranded on an island with only your own work, how would feel about it? This is the goal to aim for: that it’s only your own work you would want to take with you.

In the beginning this means acquiring skills: grammar, vocabulary, techniques of imagery, use of punctuation. It also means practice, experimentation, effort – as with any activity whose end involves a performance of some kind.

As you develop, you will like what you write more and more. Writing will become a joy in itself, an experience of your own creative power. Your respect for your work will increase, and beyond one point it will seem precious to you, too sacred for profane eyes. What you write will become like love letters to your own soul, and you will treat them as such; until the only reader worthy enough is your own self; when publishing seems like a sacrifice of your finest pearls before the common eyes of the public. As a lover guards his beloved’s correspondence, reading them again and again into the late night – writing responses just because and burning them to honor their sacred nature – this is the writer’s highest experience of himself, his communion with the beauty of his own soul.

What is conspicuously missing from this is the role of others. They have no role. In the eyes of other people what you write may seem like garbage. But you are not writing for an audience or for any other purpose but to write. When an author has another purpose, he will start looking for shortcuts to that end, ways around the necessity of writing. But for the writer there is only writing; he must write; he needs to write like he needs to eat and sleep, it is the food of his heart and the breath of his spirit. Poverty as a writer is wealth to him, and riches without, no life at all.

Perhaps, when the world offers its response to his words, you will find him writing his future works on sand, or water, seated next to a crackling fire that feeds on paper. He writes, not in reference to the world, but to his own knowledge of whether that sublime quality he seeks is present or not. His pen is a lighthouse, and his being, a barge on troubled seas seeking land. What he writes is his gateway to heaven – and he writes only to discover that door.

Such an act needs nor wants any explanation. It stands on its own, complete in what it is. If people ask if you are a writer, hand them what you’ve written, giving and expecting no words in return. Writing is an act, not a title; it is the spirit, not the body. Everyone knows if a body is dead or not in the first instant; a writer knows as surely whether his work has anything to do with writing or not.

It may seem a lonely existence – but how can it be? He has writing for a companion! The very quality that makes for the truest, most satisfying friendships, is the quality he summons by the movements of his pen or the pounding of keys.

The harder part is not writing for yourself, but knowing what you truly want apart from what others have told you to want. The two can seem indistinguishable. If you like something, and never consider how much someone else would like it – if you haven’t time for such thoughts in the midst of your rapture – this is a good sign.

If at the end there is no joy, if it does not make you feel the happiness of a creative being creating, this is also good to know. Your artform lies elsewhere. The first role of education should be to help you find it; the second should be to give you the skill to explore it to the utmost.

The function of the soul is to love, and it can only love the highest, the greatest – in everyone and everything. What you do in writing is to exercise your capacity for that love and use your mind and faculties to create what is deserving of such love. It is a matter of life and death – of the soul. This is what it means to live for the sake of your soul. It is only by your deepest, your truest, your purest desire, that you will learn the nature and quality of your soul’s highest love: itself. Writing is an act of conjuration; the recitation of it is a spell of the highest power. And when you read another’s work of this quality, you will recognize yourself it. It is not a recognition of the self that writes: but of the Self revealed by such writing.

This is why it is paramount to write only what you want to read. Forget all else and commune with that spirit whose presence is the life of all true effort. Then you will no longer need advice of any kind.

As for living for one’s self: It was a revelation to me to find this hole inside my being, that my own soul was creating to escape from itself. I still do not know why, except that our instinct as children is to imitate those around us. In Rand’s terms, I was doing exactly what Peter Keating is doing: trying to eliminate the “I”. It is one thing to act as though independent, and entirely something else to cease referencing others. The “others” used to play in my mind most of the time – in the form of dialoging with myself using their words and logic. Yesterday was one of the first complete days that I realized I had almost never thought of anyone else – except in terms of their value to me – or what they thought about me. Yes, this is new to me, in the degree that I mean it now. It is so peaceful, sometimes I just lay back on the stone railing at the Piazza della Signora, and fall asleep there for a little while.

A poem with a very special place in my history, because it is the first I’ve written without thought of whether others would like it.

thing.to.die.for

A quote from The Fountainhead. This book has three main characters: Howard Roark and Peter Keating, architects. Peter is “the self defined by others”, commonly called ego, and Howard is “the self defined by its values”. The third major character, Dominique, is a being who is torn between these two, unable to fully accept either – and what happens to such a person.

Here is a description of Peter, and of the ego who is only what others name it to be:

Keating let himself be carried by the torment [of popular acceptance]. He needed the people and the clamour around him. There were no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform looking over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent – admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes; he saw himself born in them, he saw himself being granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and his body was only its reflection.

A poem to a bust in the Uffizi gallery, the most beautiful object I have seen in all of Florence.

dear.augustus

untitled

The pen I have been using has been of such quality, it deserves its own mention. It is a Pelikan M805, the whole pen serving as a reservoir for the ink. It can write a full day before running dry. During active periods, I fill it each morning before leaving the hotel. The ink is Aurora black, a rich black that flows well – exceptionally well after the pen has been cleaned of residue. I clean it every third or fourth day, and completely disassemble it for cleaning a couple times a month. The nib of the pen is gold, with a hard rubidium tip.

It bends itself to your writing style after about a month, and thereafter requires almost no pressure when things are flowing smoothly. If maintained, it never skips, or blots, or produces anything other than a consistent line of strong black. When the ink does not flow instantly, the moment the nib touches the paper, I know that it needs to be cleaned out. The ink contains sediments that I believe are collecting in the channels under the nib.

The pen itself is fairly large, but this prevents fatigue; it is black and silver, with a dark green window to show the level of the ink. The cap screws on, and the nib screws in also, making it easy to take apart, and having only three separate parts. You can see a picture of it .

when.time.is.fullest

I have been thinking more about a recent discussion with a friend, and something occurred to me which has never before: Life (living) is not an opportunity for happiness, as I had been thinking – it is happiness.

What is it that we feel as unhappiness? I think it is when the for-itself believes it belongs in the in-itself, and forgets its own being. This is what happens to us in youth, by the words and example of society.

This longing causes us to tear a hole in our being, into which the essence of our life is lost, and this is what I think we experience as unhappiness. From that point on, the desperation of our longing for the Other, while projected upon the in-itself, is our sorrow at the loss of this essence. While a person may long for a house, for example, there is a deeper longing to return to their youth, when the house of their parents was a permanent feature of their world. The object associates with what they truly want: the fullness of life they knew before they started to lose it.

What is the shape of this hole? It is the shape of what we are trying to build in the in-itself. The hole is asking if someone else will like something I’ve written – as if that had anything to do with why it should be written. The formula for good writing is simple: Write what you want to read; if you can’t satisfy yourself, improve your knowledge and skill until you can.

Because others can’t see us, the for-itself. There is writing, which they cannot see, and there is what is written, which they can. The first is an activity of the for-itself, part of life, it reveals to us the beauty of our own mind and imagination; the second is an object of the in-itself, it is a reality of the past, unalive: it can remind others of what is possible within themselves, but this is the limit of its value: it has no richness by itself, except as a token to inspire the for-itself.

If we admit the written into writing, we tear a hole in a living thing in order to grant it the attributes of a dead thing: permanence, visibility, a name. The written is dead, and no longer relates to the writer. Writing is life, it is happiness in the act of enjoying itself; it need satisfy only itself, because writing is nothing more than the writer realizing his values.

The hole in life that causes us to leak away, and ourselves to feel that we are disappearing into time, is not real, has never been real. It is we who are choosing to be unhappy, because it seems that society asks this of us in return for its acceptance.

But there is nothing such acceptance has to offer. Society has created a trap: “Tear a hole in yourself that we might fill it.” And when they cannot: “Try harder, do more, be better.” Society is simply demanding that hole exist inside you for whatever reason. This hole is our unhappiness. Maybe because it follows the crowd, or makes for a good consumer? I can think of no good reason.

And then… in a moment of discovery… the hole is gone. How was it ever possible not to be happy just by being? Our being is of God, it is not defective, it does not have holes that need to be filled. We are lying on a rack that we’ve built, climbed onto, and are operating by voice control. Let’s get off the rack! If you like the music you make, it is enough; if I like a particular poem, it is enough.

I still find in myself a “habit” of making the hole, maybe because I’m so used to its being there. It doesn’t offer much. It’s very easy to see when I’m working on it. Those are the moments when I lose touch with the present. Because the present is the being of the for-itself, and thus it is the present that we lose by constructing the hole. It still amazes me that we ever believed in the necessity for such a hole in the first place.

When the hole vanishes, being itself is all that being needs to be. That sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

Being is all that being needs to be.

You can stress every separate word of that sentence, and each inflection will stand equally true. It is so fundamental it should never need to be said. It is inherent to the definition of “being”. The only reason for this letter is that, in fact, we do feel we need something in order to be complete, in order not to feel lonely and apart from life. The hole is loneliness, separation, unhappiness.

undivided.being

Thoughts on writing

When writing, if we ask, “What do I want to see?”, it is a moral question because it can be answered only according to what we think is right and good. The question, “What will others like?” only they can answer, just as they cannot tell us what we will like.

By extension, the only way to live is to ask, “What do I want to see?” Which are the actions leading to a life I want to be part of? Our lives reflect our values if we choose according to this desire, and our values will reflect whichever morality we believe represents the good.

There are no “others” to consider in this decision, for writing or living, because knowing what is good is a separate knowledge for each person and cannot be consulted. If we try, those “others” we imagine are puppets made from the stuffing of our own mind – and taken from it to make them – and absurdly we dialog between fragments of our self, wanting in the end only to put a stop to the question, “What do I want to see?” because it has become too painful. This is why people are able to write things, and live lives, they do not like.

A poem to cool off with, after a very hot day:

a.cool.image

Another, a momentary escape from summer:

escape.from.summer

For the Bahá’ís in the audience, another essay, giving an introduction of my favorite text using some of the terminology of recent thinking.

Introducing the Seven Valleys

The happiness of the individual, indicate the Bahá’í Writings, depends on his nearness to God. Nor is He a remote God, or removed by immeasurable distances. The very meaning of “God”, of the concepts of proximity and remoteness, and the discovery of a happiness resulting from nearness to the Divine: these are the elements of the wayfarer’s quest described in The Seven Valleys of Bahá’u’lláh.

Written in 1852(?) in response to questions from a noted member of the Sufi community, this brief volume encompasses themes that have filled libraries in the past. It is at once the description of a journey, a guide, and a proof to those who read its pages with understanding.

Its subject is human development, which in terms of moral integrity, virtue, and heroic overcoming of the attitudes of one’s culture, has been of interest to thinkers throughout the ages. It is by no means the special domain of religion to contemplate how man may achieve those qualities of justice and perspicacity that lead to a perpetual veneration.

If we suggest that man is a being with the freedom to choose, and that he must make his choices according to his moral values, it remains to understand what values he will honor, and which morality can lead to the most perfect virtue. If religious scripture is viewed as the voice of God to man, it would indicate the actions he must prefer to direct his soul’s development toward God. In this sense, The Seven Valleys is a spiritual manual, “a guide for human conduct”[quote from `Abdu’l-Bahá in PUP], and both describes the soul who can succeed in his quest, as well as the nature of the quest itself.

There is much argument about the meaning of “God”, and whether such definitions as are believed in exist. The Seven Valleys does not attempt to define God. It is a book addressed to its human reader, and concerns his progress in this world – it ignores the unachievable concepts of theology.

“God” may be taken, for the sake of a beginning, as the ultimate object of all aspiration. Everyone who longs to discover the good, the real, the true meaning of happiness, has naturally based their behavior on a standard of values leading to that end. This is the inevitable response of a thinking being to the mystery of existence: How do we fulfill our existence and find happiness?

It has been the aim of every philosophy to answer this fundamental question of consciousness; it has been the purpose of each religion to define the terms involved: That humans seek reunion with their Creator, and approach him through faith and virtue. But due to the confusion of terminology, and differing ideas as to the meaning of “self”, “God” and “faith”, people are left with a bewildering number of explanations, all purporting to tell them who they are and how to achieve what they secretly long to be.

If we discard for a moment these historical debates, we are left with very few real elements: The reader; the interest that leads him to read this introduction; and his hope to satisfy that interest. Let us review The Seven Valleys in those terms alone.

Each person sees the world through his own eyes, and what he sees will depend on who he is. The fact that his capacity for vision can change through time is the first thing to realize.

When a person sees something, he acts in response to it, whether actively or by not acting at all. That is, he is capable of interacting with the environment he perceives.

Following this interaction, the individual is either pleased or displeased with the result he experiences. Because he is alive, he takes a personal stake in this resulting life. That is, the life one sees and interacts with has an effect on his inward state.

Everyone has an instinctive impression that a better life is possible. After a bad choice is made this is obvious, because the life before that choice was better than afterwards. Whatever we see that is good implies something that is better, and so on, beyond the best we have ever seen. The individual has an intrinsic longing for the most perfect life he can imagine, and seeks it out whatever way he can (with the exception of those who have given up on finding it).

These attributes are shared universally; they are the properties of being conscious in a changing and changeable universe. They imply that we possess the capacity to judge the quality of our lives, and the ability to improve that quality by making the best choices possible. It implies that our appreciation of this quality is an internal factor, and that as we grow and mature, our preferences will broaden and deepen. In other words, the development of the individual, both inwardly and by his actions in life, leads him to that better life he is seeking.

The key, then, is development. What does it mean to develop, and how does it happen? Education is involved, practice, trials, patience, recognizing success and learning from failures. But how does a human being consciously direct his development to make the most of his time on Earth?

This is the theme of The Seven Valleys: To direct the development of every interested individual toward his greatest happiness, which is coequal to realizing the fulfillment of his own creation. Bahá’u’lláh describes at each stage the qualities and the tasks that can open the way to changing one’s life for the better.

Nor are these descriptions a mystic’s escape from the responsibilities of living. They are, rather, of the essence of practicality, and one will find in them correspondences to many of the common sense wisdoms present in human affairs – such as the highly underpracticed, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” The notion that spirituality is disconnected from life can arise only from a misunderstanding of “spirit”. The Seven Valleys is essentially concerned with how we approach life, and the attitudes that will either blind us or help us see more clearly.

And so the first of these seven valleys, the beginning of the quest for fulfillment, is to achieve a view of things that is unbiased and independently critical. Then one can know for himself whether a thing is good or not, apart from what others may say is good or bad, regardless of the popular voice and the most moving of criticisms.

Once one has developed a clear vision, he can know himself, instantly, what he truly likes – the same way we know if we like a particular smell or a certain food. Self-deception is hard with regard to the senses, but all too easy when the subject is subtle. It requires sincere and profound intent on the part of the seeker to achieve such clarity, but once he does he becomes his own standard for judging what is good.

How does one know what is good? We can say it is what the soul, or the individual, prizes most; or inversely, that what one loves most is an indication that it is good – if that love is freed from external influences. We cannot define, but all of us know, the basic quality that our favorite music, food, or sight in nature, all have in common. It is this quality that causes the ailing soul to love life again whenever he encounters it. Everyone seeks it, but not everyone knows how to find it, or even to recognize it when they do. History is filled with such examples.

The Valley of Search aims to equip the individual with this capacity, that he might continue in his search for the perfect good. When he is able to seek it on his own, and finds it, he will immediately fall in love with it. It is the goal of his existence to discover and commune with such a good. The more the good is manifest, the greater his appreciation and absorption in it. It is the same for the atheist afficianado of fine music, as it is for the religionist seeking the purity of prayer. The quality of the good is universal, and relates to a universal human aspiration.

Once he falls in love, the seeker cannot imagine a world without this quality. Its presence defines for him the meaning of “life” – not the health of his body. If he were condemned never to discover this quality again, what would be the purpose of living? All his standards shift, placing the presence of the good at the top and its absence at the bottom. The arrangement of his life changes in response to this inward reorientation. We see this whenever someone discovers something they truly love and has the courage to pursue it. By such changes the degree of that quality in the seeker’s life will increase, and his life will being to change in its perceived character.

But do all things manifest the good equally or as strongly? Are there finer, more sublime avenues of approach? The seeker who is biased may think so, but cares little; while the one whose real aim is the light – and not the place from which it shines – will undertake to intensify his search, fired by his love of that underlying, essential beauty, wanting only an ever more complete experience of it and losing attachment to all particular forms.

Bahá’u’lláh tells there is a pain associated with this love. What is that pain? Why must one “escape from the claws of the eagle of love” to progress in his search? These questions must be left for the reader to discover. One aspect of the arrangement of The Seven Valleys is that each valley is addressed to those who understand it: it unfolds in meaning apace with the reader’s development. It is not intended to be read from cover to cover by someone who understands only the import of the beginning.

It can be inferred from this that the journey is progressive and sequential in nature. In the language of Sufism – where these Valleys are also described, though in somewhat different terms, in Faridu’d-Din Attar’s book The Conference of the Birds – there are two modes of spiritual progress: the momentary states (hal) of clarity that a person achieves when they focus intently on something, and the irreversible stages (maqam) of one’s progress, in the form of personal growth. The former is like a sudden, untested insight; while the latter is a seasoned wisdom, proceeding from one’s perspective on world.

In applying one’s self to this journey, there will be momentary insights that briefly change one’s experience of life. These give a sense of hope and a glimpse of the life ahead. But progress through these Valleys is describe, in the original language, using the terminology of progressive stages, and as such depict worlds of experience one comes to inhabit as a resident during the course of his inward travels.

Beyond this the text may not described further: it can only be attempted. There is no profit in analyzing the various stages, since the development of consciousness is a thing of experiment and individual effort – not to be sought in the words or opinions of others.

Nor is it necessary for another to tell if there is value to the ideas in this “most mystical text”. If one applies himself and discovers the gems of its meaning, the proofs will stand evident in the quality of his life. In the same way that a person may seek all his life to find love – and never have a single experience of it – yet the moment he find it he will know absolutely, without any previous knowledge and free of other’s opinions. This is the nature of the soul’s relationship to good, which religion describes as God or Spirit. The analogy of a lover and his beloved is used frequently in these texts for a reason.

If one finds himself wandering these ways, there will no longer be any need for introductions, and the seeker’s appetite for words will lessen and lessen, until his satisfaction comes only from Him, Whose presence is the very meaning of his search and longing.

I am writing now from inside the cathedral of Santa Maria Novella, which is located across the street from the train station. It is a large building, with flanking, enclosed courtyards, and a gigantic main room with several smaller rooms to the back and sides, most of them fully open to the central area.

The degree of detail is unbelievable. This building is filled, inside and out, with statuary, gardens, huge paintings, wood carvings, marble inlay, and stained glass. At the steps leading to one chamber there is an entire nativity scene, done in colored statues behind a wrought iron gate set into the stairway itself. There is so much detail that one cannot actually see all of it, like looking at the leaves of a tree, but seeing only one or two of the actual leaves. In the room that houses the massive altar – about ten feet high, eighteen feet wide, and five feet deep, carved from marble to appear as the House of God, with six or seven varieties of colored marble inlaid to give the impression of windows, dome, door; and the house itself has statues, in alcoves, carved from the marble of its sides, leading up to great angels with their hands folded in prayer – in this room alone, one of the panes of stained glass contains so many individual bits of brilliant color… even the hairs of the men’s beards are traced in fine lines. And that is only one square inch of a surface of murals and mosaic that would cover the flooring in most people’s houses. Each mural, and I count nearly twenty in the altar room alone, tells a different part of the story of Christianity. I can barely make out some of the finest details, the small trees and animals hidden in the background behind sweeping displays of man in righteous battle. The artist must have known no one would see that tiny creature with their heads bowed, seated in the pews fifty yards away, but if there is one thing true of this entire cathedral it is that no one spared a single detail. They say that ours is an age of over-specialization. I wonder with irony at how our specialization has rid the world of this kind of attention over the least little thing.

Among other changes, I’ve decided I would like to feel more physical activity, and so purchased a month’s time at a local gym (una palestra) where I go to reduce myself to a shambles of living pain before dinner. So far it does not take long. I watch my eyes in the mirror and think of that duel in the Princess Bride, “to the pain”. In ways it is a delicious fire, like an oil in the lamp of the body pressed from the fruit of the moment, and kindled to flame by the friction of the mind’s intent against unwilling flesh.

Temple of pain

In reading news, just as there was a sentence in Atlas Shrugged that (in my mind) connected it directly to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I have found a similar sentence in Secrets of Divine Civilization connecting it to Atlas Shrugged. It’s as though Rand had written it herself, eighty years earlier:

They [the administrators of Persian government in the late 1800s] have not properly understood that man’s supreme honor and real happiness lie in self-respect, in high resolves and noble purposes, in integrity and moral quality, in immaculacy of mind.

A poem written for a mime on the streets next to the Uffizi:

A mime

After finishing Atlas Shrugged, I found an American bookstore and bought The Fountainhead, to further refine some of her ideas in my mind. This led to the essay below. And also this thought, which occurred to me after just a few pages of reading about the fearless hero, Howard Roark: “The ego wants the admiration of others; integrity wishes only to
admire itself – with complete honesty.”

Her whole book, revolving around the life of two architects, seems to say:

You know, it’s the Parthenon, and it’s well done, but it’s just a building. We can admire the skill it represents, and that admiration should cause us to seek the reason for such skill – and how to find our way to the source from which great ideas come – but the building is only an arrangement of stone otherwise. It’s really long overdue to be replaced by something better.

A mark of greatness is seeing a building as just a building; it is greatness itself that deserves our admiration; it’s products are only the token. Or in other words, humility is to see a man as just a man; it is his spirit that deserves respect; the body and the form are only the vehicle.

This essay is based on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It will be difficult to make sense of without having read the first half of that book, which is entirely about defining the being of the In-itself and the For-itself.

Dynamic and Static Being

A last poem, also prompted by The Fountainhead:

Rays of light

Building a bridge between Rand and Sartre.

First, some implications of Sartre’s theory of being. The for-itself (IF), expressed as human awareness or consciousness, lives in contemplation of the in-itself (II), which is the being of the world. Of all the things which the IF may behold, it cannot regard itself. The IF is not “there” to be seen. It exists only insofar as it acts through the process of being aware. While its changes to the II may be described, it remains itself beyond the universe of description, except to say what it is not – which is what distinguishes its nothingness from non-existence. (In consequence, the IF is a purely solipsistic existence, since it may interact with other, similar beings only through their impact on the II, but not directly, for the same reason that it may not be immediately aware of itself.)

The II has the attributes of sufficiency, permanence of being, and of being regarded rather than regarding. It is passive, static – that which is acted upon. The IF, in contrast, is active, dynamic – and is fully itself only when it acts, since at rest it can have no properties of its own: the concepts of possession and attribution belong entirely to the II. While the IF may be described from experience as possessing a facility to act in certain ways, this description applies to its history as reflected in the II, and becomes a reality of the IF only which it again chooses to act in that manner.

Since the IF must ever be in motion to remain alive, and since the life of the II is independent, beyond time, there arises the false belief that the FI may make for itself a home in the II, there to rest and abide for a while before returning to the realm of action. This cannot be true, by Sartre’s logic. The IF has no “place”, so it can have no home. Its understanding of “here” is a function of its own active awareness, and is not positional. That is, it creates the concept of “here” by being aware of “there”, but this does not imply a supra-rational “here” to which the IF adheres. The example is the dream, where the dreamer believes himself to be located in a certain place, but this fiction of location exists entirely within his self-awareness. In the II there is neither “here” nor “there”, but an undifferentiated eternity that the IF carves into pieces according to its consciousness of being, as does the mind from the abundance of imagination when we are asleep.

Likewise, the concept of “now” and “present” are not realities pertaining to the FI, but a function of its awareness. The present may be said to be the IF, since the present is one’s awareness of the II, and the perception of moving through time allows us to have an experience of the act of perceiving.

The IF, being thus alien to the world, is alien even to itself. With regard to the II it is like non-being: the hollow space that makes a globe of clay into a bowl; but even less than this, for it has not even the attributes of locality. Yet, what we see of the II is in fact the richness of the FI’s capacity to perceive, for otherwise it would be saturated in its own plenitude and there would be no perception of it at all, but a single infinity without time, space, or attribution.

By this strange irony we find that the IF is the cause – the active principle – of the attributed qualities of the being of the II – the recipient – yet we cannot ourselves receive this static principle of attribution. The IF serves the II in one sense, by revealing all the wonder and magnificence of its latent beauty; in another sense the II serves the IF, by making manifest to the FI the wealth of its own capacity to perceive. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, realized when applied to the II, with its being being through the agency of the FI – but resident in neither. It may be described as a perceptive reality coming into being through the dynamic interaction between these two – which otherwise would exist separately as mere potentiality.

This again shows that the FI lives by interaction alone, by constant, ever-varying perception of the II. It this were to stop, the beauty is sees in the II would stop, and begin slowly to fade away into nothingness. The image might remain in memory, as a token of the past experience, but there would no longer be an experiential relationship to that image, and hence no beauty – for this quality exists in neither, but arises through the creative activity of the IF.

Sartre claims that the IF longs for the II, because of the properties it seems to possess which the IF is lacking. The IF would like to carve out a piece of the II – set its experiences in stone, as it were, to be repeated endlessly with the same vividness – and declare that it “owns” this piece: that in fact it is that piece, and since others may now be directly aware of it, the IF believes it has attained to the same permanence of being as the II.

In Rand’s terminology, the IF is the self, the ego, the living reality behind the man. To be “selfless” to her is to give up on the active principle of being and to worship the II as God – even though the II only exists in its diversity through the activity of the IF. In scriptural terminology, that part of the II which the IF attempts to carve out is the self, the ego, and to be selfless is to rid one’s true self of this fiction, and return his energy to where it belongs: the active being of the IF. These opposite uses of the same word have an identical goal: For the IF to stop clinging to the II in the existential sense of wedding its being to it; to “detach” from the world in order to gain the experience of real beauty found in dynamic, not static, being.

It is without name or attributes, yet the IF is the true cause of life in the world. Without it, there would be no “world”. When the IF seeks to build a static persona in the II, in order to retire there, it is longing to rest, to stop being the IF and become a part of the II, to give up the responsibilities of its consciousness and start receiving rather than creating attribution. We say it is “lonely” for the attributes it sees in the II but can never see in itself.

Why would the IF choose this route? It must be that it finds its own nature unendurable, such that incredible energy is spent on these castles of ego in the II. Is the IF doomed to the agony of non-being, in comparison to the sufficiency of the II?

Sartre seems to suggest as much, and simply to demand courage from people in facing the true nature of their awareness. Rand has a different answer: That we are the true representatives of being, and that the II is as non-being compared to us; except that we are not taught this growing up, and so we have been looking at reality with all the terms reversed.

Since the FI cannot be “in” the II, but is ever removed by the act of perceiving it, the FI can only experience quality by participating in the act of the II’s manifesting it through the FI’s perception of it. For example, if we go to scene in nature and see something beautiful, we are beholding in fact our own capacity for being aware of beauty by interacting with the contents of the II, by which we create that attribution of its beauty and bestow it upon those contents. In that moment, in the active state of creating a specific perception through the agency of our own awareness, beauty passes through us, so to speak, to land on the II. We now say that it is beautiful, but in truth we have made it “beautiful” by the act of appreciating it according to the values we hold.

A thing is beautiful only by this act of perception. The II may be sufficient in itself, but its sufficiency is without attributes. Those it appears to have are those we have given it by being conscious of it. The universe is folded up within us, and we walk about looking at a mirror that reflects our own soul’s capacity to see. The greater our creative ability in this regard, the more wondrous the II will appear to be.

To see that the wealth of the II is in fact the wealth of the FI is to entirely change our valuation of it. Before, it was seen as an unattainable treasure trove, to be pined for but not found – like the gold at the end of the rainbow, or the mythical city of Atlantis. With this shift in terms, the II turns into a palette on which we project the artistic capacity of our own being. The II reflects the FI’s own awareness of itself. And so, for the IF, to act is to create a newer and more beautiful world at each moment, and through this experience of creating beauty the IF is satisfied. “And this is that spring whereof the near ones drink…”

That the II is the lost Atlantis, forever beyond reach while promising the fulfillment of every dream, is the ideal of a heaven which need only to be found and the FI will somehow discover itself permanently satisfied without the need for action. It is assumed that it will be without the necessity of being. Rand shows this to be an impossible state, and tantamount to a longing for non-existence. When the II is portrayed in this way, and the false hope of continual beauty without effort of creation is extended, many are deceived into working toward it. The real nature of the IF is passed over, and we invest much time and effort in amassing things, names, dreams, ideas of beauty, rather than acting as the creators of living beauty – which is the purpose of the IF in Rand’s terms.

When a person believes that he has acquired something in the II, and they have ceased to actively support its attributive substance by the active valuation of it, then he requires that others do this for him, in order to feed off the glow of their creative act by sympathy with his memory of the experience. He can no longer know himself if its reality is good, and must depend on others to say it is good; they make it good for him. But a thing can only be good if it is perceived as good, so that resting from the act of perception will drain away its goodness, such that in order to preserve it while also resting from perceiving it, we require that others contribute the fruits of their perception for us. Naturally, this is a hollow substitute, a faked reality, which even the perpetrator will come to admit in time – if he allows himself to be honest. It leads to a situation in which we longer valuate things ourselves, but look to others to sustain – and even define – their value for us. Because we do this, we assent to the demands of others that we do the same for them; but since we have chosen to rest, we give them only the words that others have given, participating in an elaborate group fiction in which the name of goodness is now praised in place of the reality.

The FI that is alive has no stomach for the scraps of another’s valuation, even if it were an active one. He is satisfied only with his own. This means that he is never at rest, and that his being is founded on the act of creation – and not the thing created. Since the awareness of others can apply only to the latter, and since he lives in the world of the former, the two do not even meet. Two actors may become partners in the act of creation, but they cannot share the world of the created. (cf. people’s experience of Roark’s presence in “The Fountainhead”).

When such a being of the IF meets another who is at rest – whose hopes are set in the II – the first has nothing to offer the second, nor vice-versa. The active cares only for creation, and this implies the new; whereas the passive cares only about the created, and therefore the old. In fact, active being must imply a destruction of the passive being’s world, since the new is by definition a challenge to the old. When the passive attempts to offer its beautiful things to the active, it is like two worlds that cannot coexist; how do you offer a completed canvas to someone who has asked you for a blank one on which he can paint the inspirations of his mind? (cf. the reaction of society to heroes, in my earlier essay)

So the dynamic being lives through the creation of beauty – or more exactly, by acting a channel through which it becomes perceptible in the world: the manifestation of beauty – and the static being must being to die: because the IF cannot inhabit the II, nor derive any sustenance from it. The only way for an individual to join the II is in death, when the light of consciousness goes out and his corpse becomes an unalterable fact of the past.

The attempt to demonstrate this reality of the IF is the intent behind Rand’s books, I believe, as well as to expose the error we have made in raising the II to the status of completely independent being – independent even of the IF – whereas in the philosophy of Sartre the being of the II – in its diversity, as we experience it – depends utterly on the IF to “exist” in this sense. The II alone is indescribable, and to a dynamic being represents a static realm that he cannot approach. Our heaven is not there; the heaven of an active being lies in the ever more profound experience of manifesting beauty, not acquiescence to a static realm whose only self-possessed attribute is the lack of all movement and consciousness whatsoever.

The vapors rising off the ice:  
a sublime landscape of winter:  
arctic pieces of the sea trapped  
in the white amber of millennia.

The seals below bump their heads,  
the bears in white coats rumble their hunger;  
against the black night, the white fox howls  
and the rabbit hears him in the echoes of sleep.

A leaf falls into the river,  
swept away --  
entreaties are useless --  
the swift beat of time  
marked in nearing the sea.  
Turning and turning,  
jade green on the dark green below,  
and then nothing...

Just the river, and the tree  
and my memory  
to count the loss.

I watched a mime  
think he could paint the sky with his touch;  
his hands, dipped in white paint,  
drawing strokes that left no imprint.

Unless it was not the air  
he meant to reach,  
and his canvas  
not the emptiness around him...

But the eyes of his watchers,  
their little easels of hearts  
capturing each vanishing motion  
in the fondness of memory.

I told my pen it could stop  
but it fell in love with the blank pages;  
its kisses left black footprints,  
the course of its pilgrimage,  
running to meet its beloved at "the end"  
even if she runs alongside.

The Arno in the late sun:  
speckles of gold and silver  
on an olive green;  
green and gold and silver...  
a treasure of coins  
all minted in light  
on a moving, velvet green...

The moon speaks of its faraway sun  
in phrases of luminous rhyme and verse.  
It has no better story to tell.  
Its own form, the lines of its speech;  
every action a reference,  
every word a suggestion.  
It is a great mouth of light  
whose tale is the greatness of Another.

I asked for water: He made the rivers;  
I asked for a house: He planted the trees.  
I asked for a song: He gave me voice;  
I asked for comfort: He sent me the breeze.  
I asked for joy, knowing He delivers --  
so He made heaven, and gave me a choice.

The lights of evening above,  
crumbs of camphor  
scattered on sackcloth;  
or the leavings of a banquet in heaven  
whose connosieurs  
dine only on light.

They have trapped you in stone, dear Augustus,  
with eyes that still imagine southern fields,  
yet see only walls of museums  
like prisons of beauty that hold you fast.

Your brow is smooth and clear, untroubled  
by the centuries, nor creased in two millennia;  
without a blink, a nod, to disturb  
the contemplation of your empire in ruin.

Whatever hand -- that day long ago -- knew your beauty.  
This he preserved.  That is the you in stone.  
No more armies or governors, nor city walls;  
you look out now from a fortress far more enduring.

And I, who paused to return the glance,  
have met you across the fields of time.

Wan sun is all that fills  
the somber arch of the sky;  
one Eye, closing in restful contemplation  
of the denizens below;  
one minute, before its last ray  
jousts the sky, to be no more;  
one instant -- a pause of fading day --  
before acquiescing to enter the night.

Trees are aflame in a fire without heat.  
Golden reds and crimson yellows climb through the branches.

A kiss of temperate winds on the cheek.  
A feel of soft grasses, and sounds muffled by leaves.

The heat of summer days giving way.  
Cool nights of bullfrogs and cricket songs.

The moon, a shade of water's blue.  
The starlight neither hazy, nor winter bright.

Ah, true, sleepless one,  
I will ever write;  
it is only a question,  
should ears hear?  
or the river Tigris  
swallow the black tears  
that runs in drops of ink  
along these pages...

Perhaps I feel echoes  
of that joy Bahá'u'lláh  
had known  
writing for His heart's Revelation  
but knowing none could hear.

I possess no capacities as such  
yet every being  
is a symbol created  
by the accents of His voice.

The sunlight is honey  
filtered through the sky  
dripping onto my skin  
like warm fingertips  
of a loving Hand;  
the wind whispers  
what its touch suggests;  
even the silence  
is speaking to me;  
"even in fire"  
are words like a summer's evening;  
the colors blue, green, yellow --  
banners of the garden,  
words of one voice of light --  
joining in the symphony  
of whispering, honeyed,  
silent, flaming colors;  
they unite in pronouncing  
*one word*  
whose utterance is the final hope of man:

I have heard you, I said;  
"I wished to be known", He replied.

A maple leaf  
is a webbed, green hand  
that waves at the breeze.  
The trunk of its arm,  
roughened by years,  
ending in a shoulder of hill.  
Where are the feet of such a man?  
if not the pebbly toes  
still cooling in a nearby stream.

If a painting by Rafael,  
in a museum of lesser pieces,  
found itself hidden in a far corner  
would it be wrong if it cleared its throat  
and in the name of honoring its Maker  
requested a place at the highest point  
beneath the brightest lights --  
if it requested that artworks be ranked  
according to their quality  
and not some random or arbitrary arrangement?

Then why do men forget the Hand that made them?  
and shy away from the high places  
and the light and the admiration  
which it is theirs alone to earn,  
theirs alone to merit by superlative virtue?

Each thing reflects a degree of light  
from the Infinite Source,  
achieving color and luminosity in measure  
to its attributes and capacity.  
But if one these reveal  
the very image of the source itself --  
"I have created man in My own likeness" --  
how can he hide from this revelation,  
or dissemble his tie to greatness?

If a mirror is created to reflect,  
and the most stunning of beauties stand before it,  
how can it look upon itself as ugly?  
or fail to rejoice  
at bearing such a vision of glory?

The Rays of light from that Sun  
are as Swords that slay the darkness --  
a single shaft of which passes unopposed  
through all the eternity of space.

As it strikes the pure in heart, the chaste, the free,  
it rebounds in the direction of their regard,  
to reach the dark places, the hidden caves --  
every cavern and gorge of the earth's benighted depths.

And if it chance upon a crystal  
lying concealed in centuries of night,  
it will burst into a glowing warmth:  
a flower of light amid a garden of rocks and stone;

Until the lights of the Divine Unity  
shine even from the sightless heart of the Earth.

Look up there, at the clouds;  
look still higher  
to the white moon  
passing along the course  
of a sunlit day.  
And to the bright stars  
that are only planets:  
Jupiter and Venus,  
the ruddy glow of Mars.

These are the places man has gone to,  
when no other creature would;  
his eye itself, or an eye  
fashioned after his own design.

Look up into the skies of blue  
knowing that your kind of mind,  
your type of eye and foot,  
has reached beyond the steady grasp of Earth  
and kicked up dust  
on the face of that placid moon.

The rivers of people are all of colored drops;  
at a distance they merge  
into a changeless, constant stream.

It is never the same form,  
but always the same shape;  
Heraclitus would recognize it.

They flow, they catch  
on sandbars of momentary interest.  
Among the statues and churches --  
the deeps and shallows --  
the course of flow is changed,  
flinging up waves onto steps, doors, patios.

There are bargemen in steel coaches  
canoers on their bikes  
even traffic cops to direct the flow.

Funny that winter  
does not freeze them solid.  
So many separate drops;  
it makes one dream of waterfalls...

The moon behind a spider's web,  
making traceries of light;  
only the eight-fingered darkness  
by the side  
to tell the truth of it.

Tell me, whether wisps of cloud  
may be brought down by hand  
and added to my collection of dreams.

I had bottled the wind in my heart,  
but she blew no more,  
as the light died, that my eyes captured,  
the moment the lids were closed.

I have tried so long  
to build a heaven in my heart's chambers;  
I'd forgotten where I placed the door.

"Step outside," I hear the voice now:  
the cry of that wind,  
the shining of that light.

They forgive me, and call me out,  
and even that cloud  
cries no more.

Tonight there is a storm in Italy,  
angry in white shouts across the sky;  
its massive brow furrowing in cumulus piles  
grey upon black,  
throwing down water on the heads,  
leering, towering,  
a heavy fist that shakes in fury,  
wringing drops of its own, pallid blood  
on the earth below.

The sun hangs low on the river Arno,  
a goblet of fire over a lake of wine;  
casting images of gold on panes above the knoll  
of the bank and bridges where was an empire.

A gym  
is a Temple of Pain  
to which  
the votaries of Will retire  
and heap their bodies  
on pyres of agony  
burning away  
the minutes and the hours  
of their devotion  
until that exhaustion  
which is their spirit's joy  
is returned.

The rose  
over time  
weeps its petals  
in crimson drops of tears,  
still forms  
of velvet blood:  
its last claim to beauty.

Without the light  
it would not be seen;  
without eyes  
it would not be seen.

Between these two forms of nothing  
a being of phenomenon  
neither in the object  
or the eye or the light.

But there... a subtle shading of rose  
shaped into a smile  
beneath eyes  
like my own hope given form.

There... what is that shaft  
pushing its way into the labors of my heart?  
ruining the moment's peace  
and offering something  
I would live without peace for  
day upon day again.

Between two different kinds of void:  
a thing to die for.

Flowers break open like little hands  
with gifts of blue and gold,  
holding them up for the sun to glance,  
not thinking the act too bold...

Once a seed, it began in the dirt  
and the dark -- and fought to rise,  
breaking through when to move was deterred,  
a glimpse of sun for its prize.

Soaking in rays, and climbing higher,  
it followed its will to grow;  
and raised its head it verdant desire,  
nor wanting to look below.

Within it knew it could still be more --  
a child of the Shining Sun --  
and looked down deep, to its meager core,  
for a way to get it done.

It found that nature had hid inside  
the means to it all along:  
asking only the seed to provide  
the will to want to belong

To a world of beauty, fill with light,  
where the act of seeing is joy;  
and all eyes are endowed with sight --  
if the owner makes that choice.

Any wonder, then, that such a world  
honors beauty by the same?  
The highest worship, the choicest pearl:  
That a work of God's should earn the name.

It began undivided;  
it was the light of life --  
and light shines by its own brilliance.

Then, for a reason not given,  
this was no longer enough.  
Not that it was not, but now... a belief.

The light did a strange thing,  
it tried to contain itself in a single form  
so it could be seen --

Because the rays of light  
that illumine beauty  
are invisible in themselves.

So the light made a hole in space  
and began to pour itself in.  
"they return to that fire which feedeth on their own souls."

This imprisoned energy become matter,  
now tied to a time and place  
but no longer able to shine.

It could only become known  
by absorbing the light of others:  
reflecting back what it could no longer give.

  A light that was free, unkept,  
  poured itself into a hole  
  that it might be known.

But now it cannot grasp its purpose.  
Life, somehow, does not seem right.  
It polishes the bars... but something is wrong.

When time is fullest  
it loses all meaning.  
The hours go by in a moment  
and every minute  
is remembered as an hour.  
It passes faster than notice,  
and endures longer than possible.

Only when time is regular  
every hour counting for an hour --  
ourselves fully conscious of each --  
does it bear any relation  
to the passing of our lives.

It can all be said  in one word  if our hearts share  the  
vocabulary.

But even then,  
it's not to be said --  
better if shown --  
the nights themselves  
will tell the meaning.

Pain is the zest of life  
and joy  
the sweetness of the fruit within.

Whoever's bite is too shallow  
and shrinks back  
from the bitter, pungent  
necessity of contact

Never tastes the full bite,  
as teeth sink deep  
into a flesh designed  
to discourage the casual nibbler.

But if he go  
just that little bit further  
what a supple, succulent juice  
is his reward;

An ambrosia  
for those whose knowledge  
will not permit  
stopping at the first taste.

[Further on the passion of possibility.]

It must be so wonderful to play in a band. When I listen to musicians, I feel how connected they are to the raw power, and the moment, of creation. It is very different with writing.

When I was living in Watsonville, I used to feel crushed by the It at my work. Everyone around me complained, and I found myself complaining by week’s end along with the rest of them. Then I would have a lovely weekend, and feel literal pain on Sunday night, thinking that I was about to return to work, to have my soul crushed all over again. And one day when I talked to a friend, seeing how excited he was about starting a company and cutting his own path into the future, I realized how unhappy I had become at Borland, how much I was losing my battle against the It.

What changed it enough to be survivable was moving to Tucson, where I could create my own emotional environment. This still wasn’t a solution to the original problem, but at least it allowed enough flexibility into my environment that I could let off steam during the week too, instead of just on weekends. But at the same time, over the course of years, I found myself drifting away from Borland itself, feeling less and less honorable about the degree of my output.

This is the only way I can relate to what you might feel as a Martian returning to Earth. How sad it was, being at a conference or a trip, and thinking that, “Oh no, I will have to return to the world again.” Isn’t that something to ponder, that we could feel two different parts of one world as if they were two.

I think we are always in confrontation with life. Or rather, our morality confronts life as it presents itself, and we act to change it according to what we think is right. For example, you sit down in front of a blank slate, wanting to create music. It is your sense of what is right and beautiful, musically, that shines out like a path in your mind, and follow it toward the creation of something new and beautiful. This is a kind of confrontation: Confronting the pre-existent, and bringing it into existence.

We are constantly, at all times, being faced with a world we are responsibility for, due to our capacity to choose and act. We judge the world according to what we think is moral, and we respond to it. If our wife is doing something immoral, we call her on it – where the form of our challenge must also be moral.

In some of my earlier messages my tone was harsh. I was realizing that the opinions of others have really nothing to do with making a right decision. What I missed was that not offending people is part of a true morality. But the difference is that I seek not to offend people for my own reason – because I love the good, and the good is not to offend others unnecessarily – and not because I do not want them to be offended. Everything comes back to you, not to them.

So we challenge the wrong for the sake of the good – for the sake of our love for the good – and we challenge it in a way that is good. When we do this, the divine hosts themselves assist us, for theirs is the light illumining the hero’s sword.

Because of all this, when I interact with life, I have only one question to ask, and one answer to look for: Was it good? I have found that when I imagine voices in my head, arguing with me, it is not that I am taking their thoughts into account. Rather, I am having a dialog with myself, in which I have anthropomorphized some of my attitudes into the form of people I know.

For example, if I insult someone, I may then have a shadow argument in my head, trying to justify why it was necessary. In fact, what is happening is that I am arguing with myself. I know that it was wrong, but it very hard to judge one’s self. Instead, I am judging myself indirectly – through the imagined agency of a third party – and since I see them as a third party, I am arguing to lessen the sentence.

I do the exact same thing on the flip side, too. If I write something, I imagine other people regarding it as beautiful. What I am doing? I am afraid that my own admiration will not be enough? Or is it that my culture has taught me not to admire myself, and so I seek admiration by creating shadow puppets, and through them bestow upon myself the admiration I think the work deserves.

The elimination of this shadow gallery has been starting to happen, as I recognize that I face life only with my morality, and that only I can judge whether I am acting well or poorly. If I insult someone, I ask my own mind if it was wrong to do so. If so, I consult my moral code to see what the punishment is. If it calls for apology, I must apologize.

Knowing that one has done wrong, and having no judge other than one’s own self, is proving to be much more painful than I had imagined. When there is no third party to argue with, there is only the cold, hard truth. Then again, it is also much easier, and far more honest. And then is no need for arguments. My path is clear, and I just have to decide if I am willing to follow it.

And on the flip side, knowing that one has done good, and seek admiration for none except one’s own self, is proving to be far more lonely than I had thought. Why? The joy is life is in the creating, not other people’s admiration for the creation. Haven’t you often experienced that when people thank you, it feels a bit hollow? Because you can’t really know why they are thanking you, most of the time.

Being one’s own judge is simpler, more accurate, but also biting and immediate. You cannot hide. Life is not as glamorous, perhaps, but also a ton of energy is no longer wasted in appeasing the shadow gallery.

I have found, so far, that by working toward this recognition of my right to assess my own moral performance, it comes down to just Life and Me. Other People are instantly taken out of the picture. Of course, I still interact with them, but I interact with them by interacting with my moral code and finding the right action. I no longer reference them in deciding what I will do or create.

So I write a story, and I like it. Then I start thinking about how others will like it. But I ask myself, why is my own admiration not good enough? And I find that it is – if I allow myself to honestly admire it. Sometimes it’s not as good as thought. That’s the reality. And once I find that I like it, I discover the most important thing of all: That the joy of creating came from doing it, not the result.

The result is a done thing, now lifeless, fading into the past. Sure others will enjoy it also, but I can’t DO it anymore, I can’t interact with it. It’s so different to be on stage, than listening to a recording of the performance.

And so what do I want next? I used to want to revel in it, reap in the fruits of the labor. Now I just want more. That is what comes when we “own” our life, and the buck stops at our own front door. That is nothing to demand from others, nor anything to expect.

This is a profound loneliness in one sense. All the many voices fade away, and you are left standing alone to face Life. But then you realize: you have a constant, wonderful companion with you at every moment: Life! A wife can share that joy, but she cannot substitute for it. She is part of Life!, but not the whole.

So no, I am not lonely. I would like a friend here, man or woman, as a foil to create with, so that together we might reach greater heights than either one of us alone. But I am content. I look forward to returning to Tucson, not because of my friends there, but because being in America will give me more opportunities to further some of my creative ideas.

Here is one last story, to emphasize the difference: You know that I love scifi. Well, there are not many American book stores here. One night, I was pining for a good scifi story. That was a form of loneliness: wanting the world to provide a companion; for someone else to create the Beauty and present it to me, that my soul is always hungering for.

But then I thought, if it Life!, Beauty!, Joy! that I want, why not create it myself? Why expect someone else to do what I could just as well? So I started writing the story, not to write it, but to read it! I wanted the experience of good scifi, which is being immersed in another world, seeing strange things, encountering creative thoughts. Well, that is what I’m doing. And you know what? It is just an entertaining, it has all the same elements that I enjoy from good scifi. It takes more work, but this is offset by how much more satisfying it is to create beauty than just feed off another’s creation. That ended my loneliness, since I am everywhere that I am, and if I can give life to Life!, I become my own true companion. The benefit of friends is the scale of greatness we can accomplish together; but the essential joy of being human – to bring beauty and good into the world – is something available any time, any where, whether other people are present or not. What then would loneliness mean?

If this is all true, loneliness is simply wanting to rest. The soul desires beauty; we are lonely when we wish someone else to bring us that beauty, rather than doing the work to make it. And this would be because we value the experience of it, more than the experience of being the one to bring to life. When that is the case, creating takes a lot of work, and wouldn’t it be nicer if a great artist created just what I’m looking for, so I could listen instead of spending so much time composing.

That is, I think, in a subtle way, how the It starts to slip in. In fact, while it is a joy for humans to encounter beauty, the true station of man is to create it. And when a person gets a taste for THAT – and they can only really taste it if there is no intermediary between their mind and their standard of beauty, no shadow gallery – then seeing the beauty of others will prompt you to want to outdo it, not relax at the sight of it. To see Van Gogh and say, Yes! I know what you mean. And then be inspired by your own thoughts to go outdo Van Gogh. He was just a man like you and me. With a good eye, sure, but his spirit is the same spirit as ours.

In that light, I cannot be content with drawing beauty from my environment. I only feel really alive if I am putting it out. And if loneliness is the desire for a environment where one can rest and yet still feel beauty, then the feeling of loneliness disappears when that is no longer what we’re looking for.

I do miss people to talk to. But then I write about my thoughts on justice and I feel so high at the beauty of their logic that I forget about people again. Do you see what I mean? As long as my spirit is alive, communing with Life!, there is such concept as being lonely.

O Son of Light! Forget all save me and commune with My spirit. This is the essence of my command, therefore turn unto it.

Perhaps the real trick is not remaining in a situation where your outlets are being closed. Is this the nature of your confrontation? If a job doesn’t let you excel, it really is worth the pain to change it. If a wife demands that you be at her side, not creating, she has to recognize that she has no right to such a demand. Maybe the best approach in that case is not to say, “Leave me alone, I must create”, but realize that she is facing the identical spiritual quandary as yourself, and that perhaps together you can champion the cause of Life! If she doesn’t feel the electricity of creation, maybe it’s just for want of experiencing it lately. After all, the It does make people feel awfully comfortable, and it gets easier and easier to think that there is nothing more to life worth all the trouble. Isn’t that the It’s slogan? :)

How very strange that you would point out that side of it [feeling the passion of possibility]. It is true, I have been feeling that same sense of possibility I knew in youth, exactly ten years ago.

In fact, your message today took me back to that year before I was first married, and I thought about what I was doing then:

• starting a company to do computer programming
• reading The Fountainhead, by Any Rand
• thinking of ways to apply multi-dimensional geometry to descriptions of space-time
• writing my first poems
• believing that the world’s possibilities were opening before me

And now, every one of these things is occurring in my mind again, ten years later, after such a long lapse. Why would this be? What does “youth” really mean, that we should stop feeling these things in our adulthood?

I think the It Machine wants to put us to sleep. And no particular thing is the It. It is not our wives, our homes, our job, our daily necessities. These are a part of life, and so they should conduce to waking us up, not causing us to check out.

The It is what I have been trying to write about in these last several messages: the Enemy, the great Meme whose litany is the enervation of our freedom to choose.

Each day, every moment, we recreate the world we choose to live in. We could begin by destroying it and dismantling it right now, if we chose. We could run away to a desert island, go buy a gun for our skull, or start driving and not turn around, letting our bodily needs determine our actions. Every day we could do any of these things. There is no one to stop us but ourselves.

And so, by not doing this, we choose to continue the life we are in. These is essentially different from suspending choice and letting our mundane affairs carry us through life as in a fog. To choose to have a wife, a home, a city you love, a job where you succeed at challenges: is no less active a choice that climbing mountains or combing the bottom of the sea. The substance of each person’s choices will vary: the essential character does not.

To choose, to choose not to, and not to choose. The first two are our freedom; they describe us as dangerous beings, uncontrollable, bound by no man. Each of us is a walking bomb, choosing not to go off. The third route is safety, control, predictability. A corpse is predictable. That is why the It wants us to go that route, I think.

Creating music is divine, and so is getting up in the morning and facing the new day. Writing poems is lovely, and so too is going out for a walk instead of staying home to watch TV. I have been trying to see that shining – the great, noble purpose of man – is in how and why he does what he does, not what he does. A janitor can shine when he leaves behind a clean building; a president can shine who keeps a well-run company. From high to low Glory takes on different aspects, but in essence it is one Light. “Let none consider the largeness or the smallness of his receptacle.”

What a gift, the talent for music! To be able to add even higher forms of beauty to the compendium of human mastery. It is a battle you wage to find the time, but even in that battle there is glory, and its victory is the time you do get to spend. Every second can be victory in that way; the very act of breathing can become a willful, illumined moment of awareness, rather than the automatic dullness by which ones days begin to race away into oblivion.

The It cannot win. It wins only if we lay down and say, “Ok, I give up, you’ve won.” It is a voice without a body, telling us that we are too weak to defeat it. It speaks when we are most tired, most afraid, most in pain. It claims it knows the end to suffering, and holds the promise of peace. But its peace is not sitting on a hill watching the bay, worshiping God in your heart for the beauty of it, but the peace of the crypt, where stagnant air finds even a breath of cool wind too great an imposition.

We are, every single one, a hero, a champion. “Thou art even as a finely tempered sword concealed in the darkness of its sheath and its value hidden from the artificer’s knowledge”; ours is a sword of light, to which the darkness has no response. All the pain, the weariness, the days of defeat: these are our claim to life, an acknowledgment of the body’s weaknesses; but our choice, our freedom, our passion of possibility: these belong to the soul, and remain the possession of whichever soul refuses to barter his responsibility away for a moment’s respite.

It does not take a monumental effort, or a drastic change, or a feat of glory to draw the lines of battle. I imagine you are reading this in your cubicle right now. Well, look around and realize that you own it; that this entire world has been given to men by right of their intelligence and power to overcome it; that hands and minds like yours built that building, and those walls, and that if you were to withhold that power they would crumble at the slightest touch. The name of the doer is not the thing, but the magic of his being: the being of a man who is free to choose. With the sure knowledge of that freedom, the enemy wilts away before you.

Onward, O soldiers of passion! We cannot die who do not yield to death, or lose who do not give up without a fight! Even our merest gaze tears open the veils of the impossible, and grants us, whatever our task, a glimpse of the endless fields of Possibility.

“Let it not be imagined that members of this type [in society] would be impossible to find. Through the grace of God and His chosen ones, and the high endeavors of the devoted and the consecrated, every difficulty can be easily resolved, every problem however complex will prove simpler than blinking an eye.”4

Greetings again from the Florentine hills! Each day, from my hotel room south of the city, with its beautiful bathroom in blue tile overlooking the private garden, I set out north to a small Rosticceria that serves very good food at a reasonable price. The city itself is a gouge palace for tourists, with a 24 oz Coca-Cola costing $8.00. I am not joking.

I have tried about every variation of Tortellini by now: la ragù, la pomodoro, alla panna, ai funghi porcini. I’ve had it small, medium, large. Machine made and home-cooked. With and without parmesian cheese on top. Although my options for how to eat tortellini are coming to an end, fortunately my options of where to eat it have not. This will keep me well-stocked in possibilities for my favorite little bent-tube pasta.

The only museums I’ve visited so far are the Museo dell’Opera, which houses Michelangelo’s unfinished Pietà: a religious carving he meant for his own crypt, but destroyed before he completed it. One of his students collected the pieces and put most of it back together, but half of the sculpture is still rough, showing you what they look like before the sculptor puts on the finishing touches.

Also the Cappelle Medici, which has a beautiful library fronted by an entire room designed and partly built by Michelangelo, a room containing nothing more the stairway and door leading into the library. Now that’s a private library.

There is also very good pizza to eat here, and the Cappuccinos are heavenly. I have become a daily coffee drinker, because it is so good, without any sugar. The little cup of dusky ambrosia is gone before I start, it seems.

A few more poems. I am not expecting everyone to read all of these letters if they don’t want to. Some have written saying they are only skimming, as if they need to tell me. Do whatever you want to. If anyone is tired of receiving these mails, I will be happy to honor your freedom to request that they stop! :)

More Haiku

The swift river flowing past;  
a motionless fish  
is swimming fiercely.

Only a thousand stars tonight;  
the lights of the city  
consumed the rest.

the.rose

sun.hangs.low

maple.leaf

choice

a.leaf.falls

spiders.web

crumbs.of.camphor

borrowed.tale

untitled

I began this trip reading Zen, a story about seeking Quality in life. Then I finished Atlas Shrugged, about being devoted to bringing Quality into life. This led me down the paths of freedom, justice, responsibility, and the nature of man.

One of the Bahá’í schools in Arizona, Belmont Bahá’í School, happens to have chosen their theme for this year as “Bahá’í Law in the New Era”. It was only natural, then, that my class should be called “Justice and the Individual”. After these books I’ve read, I couldn’t have asked for a better general theme to talk under.

It is eerie to me now, that the only other book I brought happens to be Secrets of Divine Civilization, by `Abdu’l-Bahá. I pulled it out of my suitcase the other day with an odd sensation, as though the hand of fate itself had placed it there, knowing everything else I’d been reading and thinking would lead up to it…

As I started today, the first paragraph alone was like a summation. I include a few sentences here. For Randians, keep in mind that He is talking about Atlantis, not the looter’s world:

Praise and thanksgiving be unto Providence that out of all the realities in existence He has chosen the reality of man and has honored it with intellect and wisdom, the two most luminous lights in either world.

This supreme emblem of God stands first in the order of creation and first in rank, taking precedence over all created things. Witness to it is the Holy Tradition, “Before all else, God created the mind.”

Consider carefully: all these highly varied phenomena, these concepts, this knowledge, these technical procedures and philosophical systems, these sciences, arts, industries and inventions – all are emanations of the human mind.

Whatever people has ventured deeper into this shoreless sea, has come to excel the rest.

The happiness and pride of a nation consist in this, that it should shine out like the sun in the high heaven of knowledge. “Shall they who have knowledge and they who have it not, be treated alike?”

God has given us eyes, that we may look about us at the world, and lay hold of whatsoever will further civilization and the arts of living…. so that we, distinguished above all other forms of life for perceptiveness and reason, should labor at all times and along all lines, whether the occasion be great or small, ordinary or extraordinary, until all mankind are safely gathered into the impregnable stronghold of knowledge.

Supreme happiness is man’s, and he beholds the signs of God in the world and in the human soul, if he urges on the steed of high endeavor in the arena of civilization and justice.

And this is man’s uttermost wretchedness: that he should live inert, apathetic, dull, involved only with his own base appetites.

We must now highly resolve to arise and lay hold of all those instrumentalities that promote the peace and well-being and happiness, the knowledge, culture and industry, the dignity, value and station, of the entire human race.

Thus… the earth of human potentialities will blossom with its own latent excellence and flower into praiseworthy qualities, and bear and flourish until it comes to rival that rosegarden of knowledge which belonged to our forefathers….

A story of man

The following is a review of some of the ideas I learned while reading Atlas Shrugged, and a few others that came up along the way. It is told in the context of a revised history of man, and his essential struggle with himself.

Man has a great enemy, whom he has been fighting since the beginning of consciousness: himself. Any time you’ve heard a person ask, “What can one man do?”, you have heard the words of this enemy echoing through time. Symbolized as Satan, the enemy wants only one thing: the destruction of mankind. That may seem too dramatic; it would be simpler to say: the end of what it means to be human.

The enemy is insidious and successful, relying on people to forget what they can be. It is only in this way that humanity loses: when those among us give up on their potential. The hosts of the enemy – the living dead, those who retain a human from but whose light has gone out – are a host of shadows, with a voice that can repeat the past, but not invent the future.

Against these hosts is pitted the hero, the emblem of a true human being, whose life and actions shine with the light of virtue. It takes only one ray of such a light to scatter all the forces of darkness. And knowing their impotence, the enemy wages war in the only way he can: by convincing the hero to give up.

To understand how this could be, we must start at the beginning, and discover why this battle is taking place.

In the beginning of man’s history, just as in the beginning of each individual’s life, we started in a state of complete unawareness of who we were. Our life depended on the mercy of others; there was no justice at that time: there was no reward or punishment, no right and wrong. It is described as “bliss” and “paradise”, but by the enemy only, because that is the state he would like to return us to.

This infancy ended the first time we became aware of the difference between right and wrong – our first taste of knowledge – when we discovered the primary responsibility of consciousness: To choose one option over the other. We still did not know that whatever consequences follow from such a decision are just, and that we must accept them. This realization came much later, and we call it maturity.

The interruption of infantile unconsciousness by the introduction of conscious knowledge, has been described theologically as the fall of man and his original sin. I think instead that these are the words of the enemy speaking, telling the story in the way he sees it. I say this event began the rise of man, and was his first act of freedom. Nor did his rise begin when he ate the proverbial apple, but at the moment he became aware of its existence. Because he was not yet a moral being, man’s natural curiosity made the choice he was told not to – a thing every infant must do – and thus he learned of the gift of his freedom: the gift to choose contrary to God’s will.

We do not say that an infant falls from grace into the evil of adulthood. We view the growth from helplessness into independence as a noble thing, and maturity as a sign of worthiness to participate in the affairs of men. How, then, would it have served God’s purpose had we remained amoral, helpless creatures sustained only through His mercy? Our expulsion from the Garden was necessary to show us that there is a consequence for every action – the principle of justice – and our exile into a world of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, was how we learned that only morality can earn for us the unearned bliss we experienced when “ye were all gathered in My presence beneath the shade of the tree of life”. The choosing of such virtue is the greatest proof of the merit of goodness for good’s sake.

In history as in childhood, we were thrust into a world where we must find our own way. Our knowledge grew, and we sought constantly to know – by trial and error, study, reasoning – the road would lead us to the joy of living we caught glimpses of in youth.

At this time we were the most free and the most vulnerable. Our morality was not fully tested, and the most open to change. We looked to the experiences of others to learn where they had gone, what took them there, and how we could apply that knowledge to our own life. We were open slates, seeking a moral code that could unlock the secrets of life and happiness, and reveal the true glory of our nature, which the young naturally feel budding inside them like bulbs on a rosebush.

In response to this yearning for a right guide to choice, a knowledge of perfect justice, God endowed certain people with knowledge, free from error in understanding and practicing it. This was done, not because humanity could never find his way, but because of the enemy who is always trying to stop him from ever trying.

These prophets did not bring a reprieve from choice itself. They brought the terms of a code, and a living example of that code. That is all. Their proof is their words and their life’s example. A person who integrates that code into his life can make better choices toward becoming fully human.

Because of the machinations of the enemy, the words of the prophets were soon misrepresented, and advertised as a substitute for choice rather than a guide. In place of justice, the believer is told he may rely on mercy; in place of knowledge, he may rely on revelation. This misuse of religion is the greatest weapon is the arsenal of the enemy, and so effective at nullifying man’s judgment that words of peace are made a justification for unnecessary war. To see how this is achieved, let us look closer at the enemy.

Although I refer to the enemy as a third party, he is a symbol for what dwells in all of us: The desire to be free from choice: to relax, rest, quit, give up. Not the rest of the body, the rest of the mind. Choosing is painful, and because the world is complex, every action has consequences we cannot be predicted, but must be responsible for. It means that when we fail, we can only say, “I failed; the results are mine.” Failure hurts, and wouldn’t it be nice to escape from the pain? This is the enemy of consciousness.

A mature man learns that pain is the sign of growth, and there is reason to be glad for it. He accepts the consequences of his actions, taking pride in the good that he does, and learning his lessons from the evil. There is nothing that does not benefit such a man, who revels in success and grows in failure. To him rest is death, and giving up means giving up on himself – not on the difficulty of choosing.

Before a man reaches this state – before he discovers the beauty of his consciousness, falls in love with what he can do, and knows that there is nothing which does not service the purpose of becoming a better man, one of whom his creator would be proud – before this his life is only painful, with snatches of exuberant yet unfounded joy. The individual has not yet learned the glorious potential of man.

Like a seed in the dark, he sees only the dirt and manure, and every movement is a struggle without apparent reward. Even with the words of the prophets to guide him – who basically say: grows upwards, away from gravity, and you will find your way to the light – such seeds are liable to see the effort as futile and prefer the blissful state of rest.

Those who have grown can encourage him, and tell him that this stage of blindness and difficulty will end. This is the proper role of education. But if all that surrounds the seed is other seeds who gave up long ago, only the truly exceptional will keep at their task in the face of everyone telling them to give up. “What do you hope to gain?” they ask. “Who are you to think there’s anything more to life? We’ve been living this way for thirty, forty, fifty years, and it serves us just fine. All you’re doing is wearing yourself out and causing unnecessary pain to yourself and your neighbors. Don’t be an unreasoning idealist. Settle down now, and help us gather these minerals from the dirt. My fronds are aching; oh, how they ache!”

This is the voice of the enemy and why he wins: By force of numbers, by the social weight of a large number of people who have given up on going further, and expect religion to comfort them in their distress, and remove their responsibility through instantaneous “salvation”. Their influence spreads, attacking other fledgling seeds while they are young, convincing them that there is nowhere to go – before they even begin.

With enough time, no one would be left as proof that a different life is possible. With no heros alive above the ground, and the old words of the prophets over-interpreted into meaninglessness, humanity starts to die, like the onset of long winter. This is why God sends the Hero, the shining example, to awake the few who will awake the rest; causing the life of spring to return, until the summer, when blossoms reveal the true purpose of the hero. It is only that time and laziness, together, in the service of the enemy, tend to cause people to forget the real meaning of those shining words, and the whole process has to repeat again.

A society who discourages growth, seeing it as an imposition on the tender roots of those who have not grown, is a society that must ignore morality, re-interpreting it until it has slyly chosen another: the morality of its comfort. The enemy is the wish to rest, lean back, take a load off. Not joy, but just the absence of pain. This morality – or immorality – compared to the moral code of the prophets, is based on the principle that the enemy is the good, and true good is evil. It is a morality of death, because only death can offer the uninterrupted, blissful sleep that the enemy desires.

Witness how many modern churches dwell on the themes of heaven and hell: Heaven being an undisturbed state of bliss – where no work is ever done, nor growth or change – and hell is a place of constant labor and pain. The enemy doesn’t think that labor leads anywhere. It regards the struggling seed as a condemned fool. It sees heaven as the realization of all its fondest hopes, and its ideal of deliverance is for all of humanity, en masse, to proceed directly into that state of unliving bliss we started from.

The only piece still missing is the connection of the individual to the whole, where I believe the intent of life is expressed. Every human being is a seed of the same type, each has the same underlying potential, even if the particular forms of that potential differ from person to person. The potential of human beings is to manifest the glory of God: to give highest expression to the highest qualities of our creator, within the limits of this existence.

The seed who fights his way through the soil, and grows to his full height, and blooms into radiant color, is fulfilling the possibilities both of himself and of the entire species. Although the bloom is seen in one plant, you are seeing the same beauty that all plants of this type will express who fulfill their lives. A rose is a rose wherever it blooms. In this sense we can say that there is really only one Rose, and each particular rose manifests degrees of the qualities of that perfect Rose, for which the particular is the sign, symbol, life and champion.

If one rose makes it to the utmost of fullness and beauty, all roses rejoice, knowing they are seeing the same beauty which is hidden in their own selves. It encourages them all to grow since they are seeing the truth of their own selves. This is the unity of species, revealed in and through the individual. The species grows best who unites to foster and encourage the success of its members; not a success resulting in a forced harmony and uniformity, but where some few are always reaching to greater heights, providing the proof and example for others to do the same. This is an ever-advancing civilization, the opposite of the enemy’s dream of a state in which there is only pleasure and nothing ever changes.

As with the species, so with all of existence. It if there were only one, great being, whose body is the whole of creation, and who is revealed in whichever part of that creation achieves excellence. Each part is limited in what it can reveal of that glory, this divine Quality: The plant more than the mineral, the animal more than the plant; and man most of all, to a degree incomparable. Not only because of the beauty of his being, but his participation in this universal dawning of the All-Glorious is voluntary, and he shares in the achievement of its manifestation.

Man did not chose his planet, his form, or his life – a million factors were and are out of his control. He does not understand his own mind, or why there should be freedom of choice, or why beauty is beautiful and goodness is good in the way that it is. But he does know that he lives on a planet, with a mind and a choice, in a world of beauty and ugliness, good and bad. And so, while he cannot take credit for the essence of the beauty he brings into the world, it is by his choices that it appear where it was not before. Mercy is that we’re placed in this position, with the means to make a choice; justice and merit are that we make it, for the sole reason that goodness is good.

The enemy can offer nothing to compare with this, the life of a hero. It cannot fight: it has no power; it cannot offer an alternative: it has no content; it cannot stand in our way: it has no form. It can only win if we agree to surrender without a fight; if we give up on joy, and accept a world of nothing but toil and misery; if we give up on the black and white of justice, and accept a world of motley grey where every standard depends on the whim of the majority.

If we hear people telling us that no one can really change the world, this is the shadow-sword of Satan lunging for the heart. It takes only the words, “I can,” and his sword vanishes in a flash of light. And when you believe you can, you will see the way, until the answer becomes, “Of course I can; how else does the world change?”

At this point the enemy has lost you for good. You are now above ground, seeing the world with your own eyes. Although the dregs of humanity are likely to imprison you, or take away the life of your body, your spirit has become invincible: no darkness may approach it again. This is when you the seed becomes You the emblem of mankind, shining through the example of a single life. Whenever a man champions justice anywhere, that is your spirit; and this spirit is possible to us all: the inexorable spirit of the will of man.

It does not matter which hand ultimately reaches the peak of that highest mountain: it is the hand of man. By his choices the individual “makes ready his heart” for the revelation within himself of the full potentiality of his nature. It is in this condition that the individual would respond: “I am He, and He is I, except that I am that I am, and He is that He is”, and that Hallaj would claim as identity with the Primal Will – the divine Will radiating in the will of the self: the virtues of true justice, revealed in the actions of the individual.

This fulfilling of Man within man could be described as the relationship between his spirit and body, in which the former inhabits the latter as a light does a lantern. The essence and function of the light is universal; its place of manifestation is particular. In this sense I close with a few quotations, that reference this metaphor of unity, of the All within the part:

Thou art My lamp and My light is in thee.

… within thee have I placed the essence of My light.

Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.

I have breathed within thee a breath of My own Spirit…

My love has made in thee its home, it cannot be concealed.

Humble thyself before Me, that I may graciously visit thee.

Wherefore, do thou love Me, that I may name thy name and fill thy soul with the spirit of life.

… that thou mayest die in Me and I may eternally live in thee.

The temple of being is My throne; cleanse it of all things, that there I may be established and there I may abide.

Thy heart is my home; sanctify it for My descent. Thy spirit is My place of revelation; cleanse it for My manifestation.

Ye are My treasury, for in you I have treasured the pearls of My mysteries and the gems of My knowledge.

Ponder awhile. Hast thou ever heard that friend and foe should abide in one heart? Cast out then the stranger, that the Friend may enter His home.

All that is in heaven and earth I have ordained for thee, except the human heart, which I have made the habitation of My beauty and glory…

… My will and the will of another than Me, even as fire and water, cannot dwell together in one heart.

The candle of thine heart is lighted by the hand of My power…

Ye have suffered My enemy to enter My house and have cast out My friend, for ye have enshrined the love of another than Me in your hearts.

Thou art even as a finely tempered sword concealed in the darkness of its sheath and its value hidden from the artificer’s knowledge. Wherefore come forth from the sheath of self and desire that thy worth may be made resplendent and manifest unto all the world.

A pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God, that the true sun may shine within it and the eternal morning dawn. Then wilt thou clearly see the meaning of “Neither doth My earth nor My heaven contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.”

Whensoever the light of Manifestation of the King of Oneness settleth upon the throne of the heart and soul, His shining becometh visible in every limb and member….

For thus the Master of the house hath appeared within His home, and all the pillars of the dwelling are ashine with His light.

And the splendor of that light [of the Manifestations of the Sun of Reality] is in the hearts, yet it is hidden under the veilings of sense and the conditions of this earth, even as a candle within a lantern of iron, and only when the lantern is removed doth the light of the candle shine out.

In like manner, when thou strippest the wrappings of illusion from off thine heart, the lights of oneness will be made manifest.

zest.of.life

untitled

A final, short summary of Atlas Shrugged:

Rand’s fundamental idea follows the law of nature: A mother feeds herself before her young, on the principle that weak young can survive, if in part, while a weak mother mean death for them all.

So the life of the producer is the life of the whole, and demanding that he be “selfless” and drain his life for non-producers leads to the death of them all.

The producer is given reward for production that he may produce more. If the non-producers claim a right to this reward, because they have not also received it, they are begging loot in the present at the cost of their future.

Rand’s is a morality of letting life live, and not killing it because the death of one should mean the death of all. That type of “brotherhood” favors the immediate hunger of the body over the ultimate survival of the spirit.

This story is another product of this time in Italy, and also embodies many recent thoughts in a more picturesque form. It is just one chapter and an ending, but may not be finished because these are the only parts which really interest me. Still, it has things to say, and those with any interest in what has been sent before this may like it.

It is true that I value intellect over feelings. To make one’s choices by feeling alone, following the path that feels right, is the way of the animal. Man alone possesses the gift of intellect, a rational soul, and it is by the use of it that we distinguish ourselves, and are able to make choices based on what is just and true, rather than what feels good.

That said, it is also not infallible, since it is only as good as the assumptions we feed into it. Feeling can assist in testing those assumptions. I have included a passage below on the different kinds of proof.

I also value feeling as a part of the whole of life, and think that feeling good is a very good indicator of the right choice. By this I mean joy more than physical pleasure: the kind of pleasure that proceeds from the happiness of the soul in doing what is right.

It is by our intellect that we learned that the world was round, the sun is at the center of the solar system, and how to fly. None of these “felt” right; there are still people – though few – who argue against them because they defy common sense. The church and society opposed every one of these discoveries, because they felt so wrong at the time.

storm.in.italy

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The sun reaches a spot of burnished leafing above me and flowers into petals of golden light. Walls of ashen marble rise on all sides, straining for the sky, ending in spires like fingers aimed at their goal. Occasional statues step out from alcoves into the light, angels and saints in constant but silent praise of the votaries whose peace is their vigil’s hope. Cobblestones are spread out, pages from a book of stone scattered by the wind; their border in steps of granite, like an immense dais upon which this great house of prayer is laid, itself a statue, a body in stone with ribs of pews, vocal chords of brass pipe, and eyes of colored glass that gaze out in wonder at the lessening streams of the devout. The life and fate of the Duomo.

With a few brief steps to south and west, I am standing on the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge over the river Arno. It reaches in a long curve, a cat of stone caught in mid-stretch, its paws like arched columns, clawing and flexing beneath the grassy banks twenty feet below.

Still further south and west, the Palazzo Pitti announces itself to all passers in declarations of stone and brick towering in the sky. It knows no curves, understands no subtlety of language but the clear and definite line, the cutting angle, the surety of function over form. While it may seem an awkward guest at a city-wide ball of churches and bell towers, yet the clarity of its geometry, its unwillingness to dawdle around the point in circles and arcs, is refreshing enough to lend grace to the elegant, and charm to the well-mannered – and so their foil and counterpoint, a welcome addition to such a party.

Pitti stands, planted on square feet, at the entrance of the Boboli garden, of emerald leaves and grasses dipped in jade. There is a host of feline attendants, tiny butlers too attached to their fur coats to remove them, and to the langorous breeze and sunlight to respond to any guests.

In the back, at the top of curving stairs, awaits the rose garden. From there you can see all the countryside south of Florence: a painting of the Masters in colors that shift and move in sign of life. Rafael’s clouds are not trapped by canvas here, but graze in the blue sky like herds of heaven’s sheep; the trees, fields, and olive groves, stretch out for miles around, tugging your soul into a vast shape that might embrace the whole, or an endless, green palm that holds you suspended in a scene of beauty, until the moment when its fingers close, and send you back to the city.

enter.the.night

reach.of.man

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Another beautiful invention, in whose praise I smile at the beginning of each night: a device that plugs into the wall with a blue tab that keeps out mosquitos until morning. I’m glad for this, because otherwise I was nearing the rank of Mosquito Guru, when I would have been capable of locking eyes with a mosquito and staring him down by virtue of knowing him better than he knew his own self.

For up to this time I have left husbands without wives, widows weeping in the night, sons pining for their fathers, and every father a Jacob without hope of Egypt to deliver his son. I have caught them dallying on walls, turning corners on a lazy breeze, and mocking my fist by a quick leap into the air, thus dodging – but not succeeding to escape – the intentness of my lust for my own blood back. I have caught society mosquitos sipping at their sanguine cocktail, notably me, and left them only a bloody spot on my palm to show the merits of their epicurean habit. I’ve even heard it told, in the smallest, buzzing voices, that the great Mosquito King himself, surrounded by his consorts, has placed a price on my head, promising to all his bereaved children an equal share of the efforts of my heart. I’ve caught his scouts endlessly hovering near, perhaps waiting to divine my next resting place, to report back to the king’s armies. Alas, the lonely scout is now too flat to fly back, falling with the wind like a black leaf whose flesh is all but torn off by a bored child.

The gates of this great, blood-sucking kingdom of my adversary, where my name must now be legend and war chants specifically deride the name of Wiegley, is either at the pit of the murkiest swamp, or some damp dungeon, or some other place too loathsome and foul to hunt for at the time time when they are hunting me – when I would have had a chance to steal into the king’s chambers, and see what he makes of the DDT species of hemlock. So far I have not made the journey, nor intend to, but must confess in my heart a strange longing, as if a future Sherlock Holmes were musing on the whereabouts of his unseen, yet deduced, mortal enemy.

Perhaps the king has even appeared to me some nights, posing as a henchman – though quicker of wing and wittier with his sword, as one would expect from royalty. Maybe a whole legion of mosquito aristocrats has, at times, dined on what they report as a delicacy beyond forgetting – all the rage at court – a feast for the daring, the young, and the inveterate risk-takers who long for a chance to try their fate. Maybe, were I to confiscate somehow an issue of their Bloody Herald, I would see my own face staring back at me, bemused – though as seen through the eyes of a mosquito, and that being only the tiny patch of skin below my left ear they seem so fond of.

How long has it been, I wonder, with the tide of battle rolling black and forth like a storm n a crimson sea; ten thousand puny draculas, taking on the form of minute bats, flapping their wings eagerly under the moonlight in hopes of chancing on my unprotected flesh. If so, then after so many bites I wonder if this explains a certain renewed interest in tomatoes – that scarlet fruit – or a gasp at hearing a diner order a Bloody Mary, or my recent tendency to ask for steaks nearly raw, a little extra blood dripping on the side, please.

Does this mean the onset of tiny, gossamer wings, a promise of flight at dusk, a certain hungry look in the eyes when I see a spot of neck as a tasty snack? Surely the king does not hope to win me by conversion!? I would rather do honest battle as a heathen, then join the ranks of his black-clothed faithful, always humming in prayer – the voice a bit too shrill – and taking home, at my expense, drops of blood to pool together for their evening communion. Egads! Do they intone, in wicked unison, “The body of John”, as they sup on the labors of my own heart? Or expect some salvation from what, at best, is a salty substitute for the whole man? A legion of these black-robed Jesuit scholars of venal anatomy, expecting from me some hope of a future beyond the death imparted by my own hand, and seeking it in the very flesh of that hand itself?

I must write to the king and demand a stop to all of this. When his emissary arrives tonight, I will have a tiny scroll ready, etched on flakes of skin, that will tear the wings – err, lift the veil from this awful heresy, and permit us to resume our daily antagonism without the unnecessary fanaticism which has perhaps been the reason for so many bites lately. I’m sure he will understand. If there’s one thing a man can expect from a great enemy – who is not a man – is that his savior and final goal in life should follow his own form, and regard me only as a target with the disturbing capacity to strike back much harder than he is struck. There! I hear him now, trumpeting on his tiny bugle that the games must commence. I leave now for the trying task of writing down these words in my own blood… – No! I will not use you for a pen! Get back, scoundrel! SMACK.

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On admiration

“Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in answer to the same alternative.” – Any Rand, Atlas Shrugged

I believe man was intended to admire himself. His admiration is not for the part in exclusion to the whole, but for whichever part honors the best of the whole. The difference between men is not that of dirt to gold, but of a beautiful racecar either sitting unused in a garage, or out winning races.

A man admires himself according to his standard, by which he distinguishes better from worse, and this honest assessment is his surest guide and incentive to progress. Our modern culture, however, with its ambivalence toward the individual, both demands that men do what is admirable, and denies him the moral right to admire that result in himself.

Because we still desire the moral confirmation that admiration represents, we try to provoke admiration from others, as though looking at ourselves through their eyes – as if this were more accurate and true, being free of the stigma of “ego”. Yet we cannot know the standards of others, or what they are admiring, or even if it is an honest admiration. And when we do feel something, we must avoid it, like feeling the pressure of an advancing wave while running to keep from getting wet.

With such an ambiguous, indirect basis for self-esteem, it is easy to reach the conclusion that it is not worth the effort that virtue demands. Since many are willing to fake admiration for much less, it is even possible to skirt virtue entirely and yet preserve some hollow sense of value, which mixed with alcohol or amusement or overwork, is enough to avoid a moral outrage.

It results in an intricate, immensely complicated game in which we seek “points” without wanting to be seen doing so, or even to see ourselves doing it! And when we earn these nebulous points – for they only appear as admiration, we do not know for sure what prompts them – they must occur either in such profusion that we cannot dodge all of them, or they must reach us in moments of “weakness” when we are willing to accept them, only to renounce them later.

In this situation, in which we long for an experience of genuine admiration, but condemn it on “moral” grounds – even though admiration is the proper response to a correct moral choice – in this atmosphere of fundamental contradiction, it is no wonder that young girls, of breathtaking beauty, ruin their health in the belief that they are not beautiful. By their own standard they would know their beauty, and this should be enough – enough to honor their bodies and themselves, in admiration of the fact that Beauty has become so manifest in their person, according to their qualities and the pains they take. But since they cannot both admire themselves and feel moral, they rely upon the admiration of others – while instinctively understanding that they can never know the standards of others, and so it is an admiration they cannot honestly accept.

This phenomenon happens to us all; for most it is not physical, but mental or emotional. Like the kind-hearted person who believes they are always hurting others; or the generous person who cannot give enough; or the creative person who hates everything they do, calling it dull and trite; or the musician who will not play for anyone because it is never “good enough yet”. This conflict is a moral dilemma, in which the motive of reward – admiration – has been denied the individual, and the counter-incentive of punishment – self-loathing – is all that remains. The best a person can do is reach the zero, always knowing how easy it is to slip back into loathing.

Thus we are not taught to admire ourselves, but rather praised for criticizing ourselves. We can say all we like that what we’ve done is of poor quality, but God forbid someone stand up in a crowd and say, “What I’ve done is excellent, because I know that it is.”

This admiration is the foundation of happiness, for a happy being is one that lives his life well and knows it. What else can bring happiness? Is it not the final reward of justice, the peace of the just? And if it is just, one must be able to judge it according to the good, and for this one must know what is good, which implies a full awareness of the state of one’s being: good or bad, fulfilling one’s moral standard or not.

A happiness divorced from consciousness would never be sure of itself, it would always remain an untrustworthy feeling, likely to vanish at the first hint of opprobrium; and the bearer himself would never know whether he had earned it or not: he might be a faqir masquerading under a delusion. This false happiness cannot last, because man is at heart a rational being who holds himself to exacting standards. Only those worn out from the charade, who have given up on the inability of a moving standard to grant them what they seek, turn to whatever form of immediate pleasure presents itself.

The answer to this is to remember who we are: Who made us, what we’re capable of, what we’ve achieved: and know in our heart that a just man is the most beautiful expression of our Creator’s intent for this world, and that the just man is the man who is capable of judging his own worth and finding it good.

Our body, our brain, may be accidents of nature, unremarkable in themselves, but what the active will – the soul – chooses to do with that body is worth observing. The soul is a reality revealed in what it does; there is no way to talk about what it is. The ego wants you to praise the brain, the soul is shown in the thoughts of that brain; the ego wants you to praise the individual, the soul is all the beauties common to humanity that it causes to shine in that individual; the ego would have you honor Beethoven the composer, his soul would refer you to his music.

This spirit that is the life of all conscious action, the human spirit, thrives by approaching and achieving what is good. How it knows the good depends on its standard of values, and it is just insofar at it fulfills these values. Its virtues are the expression of those values in its choices – which requires that it know the good from the bad in its own actions. And thus it must despise and change the bad it finds in itself, and admire and encourage the good. Its sorrow and happiness depend on this fair assessment of itself. How else can it learn and grow? What external, or delayed, reward can compare with this? When society denies a man the right to admire his own good, it secretly wishes for him not to exist: to become a nameless, anonymous entity without extraordinary qualities, moving in docile acquiescence to whatever whim captures the fancy of the whole.

In these terms I would say that spirituality is the joy one discovers when he learns that the path to God – toward the perfection of the moral ideal, the Quality that gives life to Quality, the Most Glorious of all Glory seen in creation – lies in himself, is found in his values, is approached by his justice, is proven in his virtue, and whose reward is his happiness in knowing that he accepts and honors, and is accepted and honored, by the Good. This formula is expressed in the verse, “O thou soul who art well-assured, return unto thy Lord, well-pleased and pleasing unto Him.”

It one denies the capacity for self-admiration to the mind, he denies this process, because it dooms one’s pursuit of the Straight Path to being haphazard, random, depending on chance inspirations at unexpected moments to push him by grace, not virtue, in the direction of his soul’s longing. He condemns himself to the torment of knowing that his Lord is everything good, and that he was created to manifest that good, but his eyes are blind so he can never look at himself and know which of his actions are helping, and which hindering, his progress along that Path – which is the perfect morality, the ideal most to be admired.

If you read this and understand what it points to, admire yourself. Admire yourself for having a brain, knowing a language, understanding abstract concepts, caring about virtue and justice, and being aware of the good and how worthwhile it is to seek it. As I admire myself for being able to write about these things, and caring about them, and being willing to do whatever I can to fulfill them. These statements should never cause shame, or cause us to shrink from our own goodness; rather they are our badge of courage, our worthiness to stand and be counted among the human race.

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As for the barysphere idea: Imagine a globe, and that the lines of latitude are curved helicopter blades. Inside, the axle and its shaft resist the crushing pressure that comes in at the points where the blades meet. As the barysphere descends, the blades must be spun faster and faster. Hydrodynamic thrust will tend to pull the blades out, while water pressure will tend to push them in. At just the right speed, the two will cancel each other out, and no pressure at all will be felt inside the barysphere, other than on the axle shaft.

I originally found this idea while trying to think of a structure that could contain a vacuum, since that would be the lightest form of air balloon. However, such a sphere, even containing a vacuum, would be too heavy. I wanted something that would “bob” up into the Earth’s exosphere, and could be used to lift shuttles to very high altitude.

The place that I am staying is quite lovely. Because I am staying for 40 days, more or less, they gave me a nice rate of about $65/night. It would have been much cheaper to rent an apartment, but less desirable. All of the cheaper apartments are really just a room shared with other people. I couldn’t find any “single” apartments within the time-frame I wanted.

This hotel is in a huge mansion, and my room is down at the bottom floor, the only room on that level, in fact. So at night it is completely quiet, and I can hear nothing – which is quite a change from everywhere else I’ve been. It is large, with a double bed, and lots of hardwood furniture. And it has a fan, thank goodness.

The bathroom, though, is perhaps my favorite part. With white walls and blue tile, it has a large window that opens on a private garden in the back, so that when I shower I feel as though I am staying as a guest in a large chateau on the Italian foothills. I hear only the birds, the winds that blows through the windows, and the water pressure is lovely. I do not think I could have imagined better!

When I leave each day, I walk past the Boboli Gardens, and cross the Ponte Vecchio on my way to the city center. I think of you each time I walk across, knowing that your spirit has visited there often. Then I pass, go north a little ways, and have a cappuccino in the Piazza della Republica, one of my most frequented areas. There is a nice fountain there, the post office, a bank, and a movie theater. The other night I watched “2 Fast 2 Furious” in Italian. Well, movies about car racing do not need words, is all I can say.

This e-mail begins back in Sitges, where we last left off…

This weekend, my last in Sitges, is the festival of Sant Joan. The streets are entirely full of tourists, in every shape and color. The number of young children is surprising. They have blocked off sections of the street and “painted” them using flowers, dried grass, dirt, etc. There are all different patterns. On one street a line of giant ladybugs marches along in frozen procession, perhaps awaiting some fairy to grant them life and resume the music of the march. Other streets have huge flowers painted, faces, or just geometric designs.

It is truly hard to believe that I have been here for only three weeks. I can find no frame of reference by which to believe it. Every sense tells me that three months have gone by, and I remember the plane flight here only as a receding memory. I’ve taken three week vacations before, but this is like a visit to a parallel dimension, where time passes at one-third the rate, and every moment is filled with possibilities.

When I think that my vacation is not even one-third complete, that there remains more than double the time I’ve spent so far to peruse the Italian landscape – I don’t know what to say. All vacations should have this feeling. Having no destination helps, coming to rest rather than be active helps – activity comes of itself after enough time – and allowing the rest of the world to take care of itself for a while, without feeling guilty to be apart from it: perhaps this is the most significant factor of all.

I’m not sure if it’s the length of time, either. If I learned this vacation were ending on Tuesday, a whole other part of me would rejoice: the part that has things it wants to do back home. In a way it has both been too much time, and not enough.

There is a secret in all this, somewhere. I can sense it now that I wonder about it. This past week has seen every day filled with different kinds of emotional torment – for different reasons – the heat and humidity have prevented sleep, the babies next door keep me awake when the heat does not, a rib has cracked in my lower back… and yet I can write only of a radiant joy that makes me glad of all of it. They are my life. They are the product of my choices and life’s response to them. What I experience now has the sense of a work of art, and my will is the brush. Even though I make mistakes as I go along, failing at many things I attempt, succeeding at others: beneath it all is the feeling that what I am seeing, and the fact of my sight, is a gift of unaccountable proportions. Wherever I look, upon dust or sea, my eyes see gold.

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fireworks

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After the festival I walked to the port of Barcelona to board the cruise-liner headed to Genoa. It was not raining, but because of the misty I imagined it was:

The day is wet today. The clouds hang together like sodden pulp waiting for the transition to smooth paper. The sea is agitated by the rain, furrowing its brow into a haze of white streaks that slosh together. The rain is invisible to sight, but too visible to the skin, even through closed windows – for as I watch the interface between sky and sea, already I feel clammy inside, picking at my shirt to undo the impression that everything is sticking to me. It is not cold; but this is worse, confusing the senses further on a day when the world seems to slowly merge into an uniform mist.

Then the sky cracks open! showing a world of brilliant, golden light; as if the sun stood immediately opposite the sky, bearing down on it with such pressure that at times the filmy grey would crack, and split open for just a moment. Yet after that brief flash, the dim, motley sky oozes shut again, snapping together with such a roaring crash that it shakes the storm itself, pounding into my chest with the echoes of a battle in heaven.

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poetry

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In Atlas Shrugged I’ve found the one sentence that I felt the whole book was trying to say, from the first ten pages to the last. It is this sentence that expresses the connection to Zen and everything else I’ve been thinking:

… every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor – by our love for a single value6, for the highest potentiality of our own existence – and every achievement is an expression of it.

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And now I am in Florence, home of the Rennaisance! The first person I met was a friendly woman who spoke German, so we conversed on the ride to Pisa and she told me some of the basic things I needed to know. I’ve also found that pretty much everyone understands me when I speak Spanish, and that “mercantile” Italian is not so different so that I can’t understand it just fine.

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I have found there are many virtues to not planning ahead, if you have the time. For one, you can discover the lay of the land and the relative prices of the things. For example, I found that the cheapest room available was 30? – basically a room with a white, soft altar, upon which I was poached in my own sweat and offered up to the mosquito gods. The second room was 50?, a much smaller room with white walls – very nice if one must take up the gauntlet of Mosquito Hunter – and a fan, one of the most blessed inventions of the human mind – outside of evaporative cooling (which is also the principle behind the air conditioner, it just recycles its water supply using a compressor motor). The next place is also 50?, already reserved, where I will remain for the rest of my stay. It is in a quiet area just next to the Boboli gardens – across the street, actually – a three star hotel for the same price as the one star I’m writing from at this moment. That is just one of the virtues of remaining planless, although give yourself at least a week, so that you have a few days to get your bearings.

Another virtue is that I can spend a whole day, from past noon until sundown, engaged in nothing other than trying to lose myself among unfamiliar, back-alley streets, and gradually finding my way back again. At the point when you don’t know the time, the day, where you are, or what you did last – and don’t care in the least to be informed – you have rested.

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Tonight, after a week of heat that leaves one feeling like a stranded amphibian, nether fully of lake or land, but passing through the moist air perpetually damp, reaching out for mosquitos with a tired hand rather than a long and sticky tongue – after this we are prepared for a night of supernal breezes, zephyrs like the breath of a lover whose spirit is the wind itself. The heat has made us pilgrims, and this night is our shrine. With eyes half-shut, both in pleasure, as from the drying, blessed wind, each faces his object of devotion: The knowledge of what it is to find comfort after such endurance. The wind is our sigh; we need no other. It carries me past the feeling, the relief, the inward stretching like a cat in perfect stupor on a perfect day, it carries me away into dreams where no heat, no sweat, no salty beard ever was. It returns me to a joy of being alive, and shows all pain for its real intent: To come to know such exquisite sense of joy, as on an evening where nothing more than the wind, invisible, insubstantial, has caught at the fabric of my soul, has lifted it from all consciousness of matter or mind, and has brought me to this place where Beauty herself waits on a throne of moon silver, breathing soft, cooling words, “My child, welcome home.”

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One of the outcomes of recent thought is that other people no longer bother me. That is, they still do things that provoke anger, even outrage, but it is what they do that upsets me, not them themselves.

For example, if I sit down in a beautiful outdoor cafe, and the person next to me starts a cell phone conversation in a loud voice, my immediate response is to be disturbed. This draws my attention, and the next thought is, “What do I want to do about it?” As soon as I ask that I see three options: Ask him to stop or leave, leave myself, or accept it. Often I do accept it, but because I’ve chosen to, I accept responsibility for its existing in my world, and remarkably, it ceases to bother me. If I had wanted it to stop, I would have made it stop, one way or another. By not choosing to stop it, I discover that my desire is now to let it remain, and suddenly the “ownership” of the fact, if you will, transfers to me. And so my world is what I choose to make of it.

This has been true so far of noisy neighbors, sweaty nights, biting mosquitos – everything, in fact. And when I want to act, I do, without the hesitation I used to experience. This would all be mere thought, if not for the fact that I sit, trying to sleep, while the person next door is flipping channels, and the noise has no “owner” anymore; even though a human caused the sound, it is now just noise. By taking responsibility for my life, everything reverts back to me, and I look only to myself now if I want to know why things are the way they are. With that, I am able to fall asleep peacefully, with or without the television blaring. My love of freedom has reached its logical conclusion: the love of the freedom of others. I want them to choose as they wish, even if what they choose I may decide to fight against. As a human, I can only respect them; as for their action, I respond to it as I choose.

This is the where the ego fits in: When we regard ourselves as above and apart from others, so that we cease to respect their humanity and their freedom, and demand that they act according to our wishes rather than their own. This impulse, and what drives it, is the ego; not the pride of potential we feel when we contemplate our powers and what we can do. That is the pride of, “Thinkest thou thyself to be only a puny form, when within thee the universe is folded?” Cheng-Tzu’s analogy makes sense now, where he describes being hit by a boat twice while fishing, once with a man in it, the second time without, and how different his reaction was to the same actual event, because a driver was present the first time. When we live, free and responsible for our life, it does not matter if there is a driver in the boat or not: it is the event we respond to, not the person who created the event. Sometimes our response will refer back to its author – to ask him to stop – but what we ask is how we, ourselves, will respond, and not to make demands on how we wish others to be. Freedom opens up the world, while the ego wishes to limit it to a narrow band, in which no one is actually free, and the only events that can occur are the events it wishes to occur.

Since the driver of the other boat who hit us already made his choice, he does not enter into our reaction. Only if we expect someone to conform to our will, rather than his own, can we be angry at him for acting contrary to our wishes. And hence, taking things personally is the very heart of the ego. If we wish the universe to conform to our desire, I think it is impossible for us to know to what degree we are free from the desires of others. For the way we act toward the world is, in essence, the sign of our attitude toward ourselves.

In sum: To be conscious is the undertake the responsibility of consciousness: to accept that all that one sees or knows demands a response, and that doing nothing is also a willful response, an acceptance of whatever follows from inaction. Otherwise, if one attempts to delude himself that this is not the nature of awareness, he is forced into laboring to support that lie. It would be like attempting to see, without really knowing what one has seen, while still wishing to enjoy the experience of sight.

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And now to close with a brief essay, after typing which I will find a place to eat thin-sliced prosciutto and drink cappuccino – a positively divine beverage, here in these parts.

“See with thine own eyes, and not through the eyes of others.”

When a choice is before me, I look at it and at my preferred response, and I ask myself, “Is it right?” To find an answer I refer to my moral code, and if it is right – or not wrong – then I ask whether I desire the consequences more than some other option. This is just, and justice is complete when I have met and accepted those consequences.

However, if I face a choice, and choose a response, and then try to look at it through the eyes of everyone around me, my choice will not be based on what I know or believe is right, but on what will not offend those around me or what might please them. This is unjust, in that it refers choice to public sentiment, not morality – and thus is often in conflict with it. Since such consequences are so difficult to know in advance, ultimately one pursues, not the choice he thinks is right in his own eyes, but the one he thinks is least harmful in the eyes of others. Since this always implies a possible conflict with morality – and the attendant pain of being conscious of doing wrong – it leads to a cessation of unnecessary or unsanctioned action, and a tendency to dissociate one’s self from one’s actions, such that one claims a certain thing “couldn’t be helped”, or that it was “just not practical”.

Once this social engine is underway, an equilibrium is reached where the population feels satisfied enough to continue, but must not examine that satisfaction too closely. Youth instinctively rebel against this state of affairs, and are called idealists in opposition of the real. And if one arises who acts to remove the veil of this group conspiracy against morality, he will be penalized – not for speaking the truth, but for “corrupting the society”. The society has reached such a state of mutual compromise that any disruptive act is viewed as destructive, no matter its purpose. This is the real essence of an unjust society: that its preservation and feeling of well-being becomes the ideal, a goal utterly separate from any moral consideration.

When philosophers recognize this who are willing to participate in the self-deception, they usually become casuists, rewriting history and social ethics to make the “public welfare”, and other group concepts, seem more significant, while painting the individual and his right to choose as egotistical, evil, and ultimately irrelevant to what society is trying to achieve – or even opposed to it, which is often exactly the case.

There then arises a new class of guardians within the group, who do not seek the interests of justice, but to preserve the state of the group. If possible, they would keep this state constant, unchanging – but this is never possible. These guardians will refer to the casuist interpretation of ethics, coming to view “the unity of the group”, and harmony, and lack of disruption as the highest goal. “Don’t rock the boat.” If an individual discovers that a hard choice must be made because it is the moral choice, these defenders will portray him as a dangerous individual, an enemy of society, and act to end his influence.

These defenders, so conspicuously abetting the communal dream into which society has fallen, are willingly granted resources by the society to defend its state. These defenders have alternately been politicians, clergy, and sometimes kings – though since kings are capable of independent action, there have been kings willing to disrupt their commonwealth on moral grounds.

As the power of these defenders grows, the society becomes more secure in its impassive state from internal disruption. As it does so, the influence of individuals declines, for many reasons both personal and social. At the same time, the society starts to decay, as any prolonged aversion to justice will. The human spirit, in the end, cannot tolerate it, and the society can no longer thrive as it did in the beginning. More and more it will try to improve its state at the cost of initiative – thinking that its decline is due to the worsening qualities of its members – but this will only hasten the fall, until the society as a whole begins to welcome immorality in order to cease feeling its secret guilt, and escape from the ugliness of their life for a while.

If, into this milieu, there appear a hero who easily and resolutely exposes this society to itself – and this is not hard to achieve, but exceedingly hard to do – it will kill or exile him in very short order, more from horror at its own condition than from hatred of the hero. In fact, it secretly loves the hero, and in time this love will show itself and they will honor him as one of their best. It is the sudden horror of discovery, the desperate need to escape it, and the indignation of the defenders, that results in the quick action against the hero, who does nothing more than honor justice and point out the contradictions of the society.

I find it hard to explain, otherwise, why beings of such quality should meet with so fierce a negative reaction. Strong emotions require a great deal of energy. Saying merely that they “offended the established powers”, or violated tradition, or upset the status quo: none of these explain why everyone, from high to low, would feel such intense, violent passions as to long for their death. If mediocrity is really their enemy (the enemy of the heroes), how did the mediocre suddenly become such eager combatants? If the status quo is the enemy, what goes more against the status quo than sudden battle? If the rulers were afraid of losing their power, how to explain the universally belligerent response of those who had no power to lose, and who typically disliked the rulers whose power they worked to provide?

I think that as justice is one of the most significant of all virtues, and the crown of the human spirit, it is learning that one has betrayed this virtue that prompts the immediate intention to silence whomever has made it obvious. It is the contorted soul, living in opposition to the moral requirements of its own life, condemning itself secretly in its inmost heart, and actively suppressing any awareness of this self-hatred – it is such a soul, having fallen to the state a bat inured to the darkness, now disgusted by the light, and disgusted at itself for having turned away from the light – this is the soul who, though the laziest and comfort-driven of all people, will charge instantly to the call of battle when some stainless soul arrives to summon it back to the path of justice, even though this is the one true longing of that stricken soul’s life.

To avoid this corruption of society through acceptance of any standard other than our own mind, we must disregard the sentiments of others when asking ourselves which is the right way to act. However much this may seem “destructive to proper society” – and the degree of this will depend on the corruption of that society – such a reliance upon one’s own eyes, rather than the eyes of others, will ensure the health of one’s society far better than any other measure, and foster a public which may proudly stride into the future, because it knows – by its own moral code – that it has done well, and will continue to do so.