Thursday, April 16, 2009

Don't Tear It Down Take It Over

I am sovereign, I am the state.

I own who I am, I have the power that I have and I am responsible for the actions caused by my will. No one can take from me my identity, unless I choose to let them. No one can guide my actions unless I go along.

I can be a businessman, I can run for City Council, I can join Greenpeace, the Peace Corp, the ACLU, the KKK, The Freemasons, The Daughters of the American Revolution, Al Qaeda, The Minutemen, The Government, The Military, The CIA, The Church. I can live in New York, I can live in Wyoming, I can live in Tehran, I can live in Tokyo, I can live in the heart of the city, the sticks or the suburbs. I can kill a man, rape a woman or vice versa. I can have a child, I can raise a child, I can abort a child, I can help a child, I can teach a child.

I am not free and I never will be. Freedom is a crass fantasy that has lost all semblance of meaning. Freedom once referred to individual sovereignty. I have that, I am sovereign. No man owns me, but I am not free from my environment, I am not free from the state. I am sovereign, I am the state, and you are a shareholder in my life as I am in yours.

Money is not magical, it has not power, none at all. I have power, my will has power, my choices have power, and my perception has power. Without these money isn't even paper because no one ever bothered to print it. There is no they, only us. They is a label based on arbitrary separation created to sow the seeds of distrust. This does not mean that I do not recognize that there are people out there who have more power than I do. But here's the kicker, they alone do not necessarily have more power than I do, not unless they grow their own food or are a master of the martial arts, or have some kind of individual power that increases their sovereignty. Money does not do this. Money cannot do this. What money does is represent an avatar of power. We imbue it voluntarily with the ability to control and manipulate our actions. While it is the lifeblood of civilization, it is not a thing unto itself. It is a being of pure belief. If I stop believing in it, it will stop having power.

This is not to say that those who have money have no power over me. They have power over me only because money allows them to bind themselves collectively. Money can be used to purchase the will of others and devote it to my causes, just as I may sell my will to others and devote it to their causes. If I sell my will to another, I am active in that cause, I am complicit and I am responsible. I will be called to atone, though it is not certain that I will ever truly understand the means of my atonement. I judge and am judged, every moment of every day by every living being, based on criteria passed down through the generations from beings who have caused effects and been affected by other causes.

I am not a slave, I am sovereign. No one owns me, though I lease myself out from time to time. Sometimes I give charitably, but even in my charity, I am selfish, because I am sovereign. My means are devoted to my wants, and my wants are informed by my desires, so even the good I do, the help I do others springs from my own desire.

If I am ever disappointed it is because I had unrealistic expectations. I distorted my perception by my fantasies. This is nobodies fault but my own. I take full responsibility for this, I might as well, because I will suffer for it nonetheless whether I accept it or not.

What is God? God is the sum totality of all attendant will in existance, aware of itself existing through action. Because Consciousness exists at all, and consciousness is a collective process, God exists. Proof of God is Tautological, God proves itself. God is the result of all actions. Because consciousness exists at all, because I am aware, and because you are aware, and because by reading this we are aware as a greater entity sharing consciousness, God exists, period, the contrary opinion is not valid. We as consciousness, as awareness, as perception, as a piece of the universe are emergent properties of the universe, and therefore the universe is aware of itself, because we are aware of ourselves.

Claim what it is yours, take it, grasp it, own it, be it, and you will be no one's slave. No master may own you, unless you allow it. Another person can kill you, but they cannot make you do anything that you do not agree to participate in. You can be bound, you can be tortured and you can be killed, but you cannot be made a slave by the will of another. You have to break, you have to give in and you have to allow it for it to happen. If you would die before slavery, then you are free in the only meaningful sense of the word. You cannot escape your environment and its constraints, you cannot escape your society, you cannot escape your beliefs, so in that sense, you can never be totally free, but you can be sovereign.

Reality is Democratic. It is decided by the synergy of the aggregate will.

2 comments:

Joseph L. said...

Very Emersonian! But I'm rather dubious of ascribing all motive forces in human existence to conscious will. There are, for instance, unconscious wills, and they often counteract conscious intentions. When those two forces directly contradict within one soul, we cannot resolve the issue within the dimension of the will alone. An obvious example is the evangelical preacher who denounces homosexual degeneracy and consorts with a gay masseur in his private time.

Or, take feminine sexuality. The "will" in that context is paradoxical, as women sometimes find erotic intentions satisfied by being "conquered", by surrendering their will to a man's desires.

The theologically-inclined, also, would take issue with emphasis on the Will. The Will to What? The full meaning of Will implies a teleology, yet it rarely has one.

erek.tinker said...

I don't see how wills or competing teleologies necessarily contradict what I have said. No one ever says that the pathos of the individual has to be a perfect and harmonious organ. That's the notion of the imperfection/fracture/fallen nature of man that we see so often in literature all over the world. Uhura Mazda and Angra Mainyu battle for supremacy. We assume that God's mind is made up at any given time. Perhaps the collisions of matter, our wars with each other are the resolution of grander thoughts. The notion that we are so dominated by our entrenched philosophies tends to bear that out. Humanity has a mind that is beyond the individual, it's of course a metaphorical license, but we need to use descriptive language over which our command (well maybe not in your case) never fails to disappoint.

However, will as I am describing it can simply be a natural force like Gravity or Magnetism. We could say that Gravity, Magnetism, valent connection between atoms are themselves forms of the universal will. That does not prove anything, it is consciousness, which proves itself that gives the universe its mind. It is not special that we have a will, that we are able to make choices, but that we are able to perceive anything at all that is remarkable.

However, I would say that on rare occasions we hover balanced on a precipice. We balance on the threshold of decision, in perfect harmony, and in those times our will is in total control, not because it can allow us to do anything, not because it is not in conflict, but because we can choose which imbalance we choose. The rest of the time, we are bound to quandary resolution, seeking that balance again, but in moments of pure action we briefly escape the cycle of reaction, and become cause, not just effect.

That is when we touch the divine, when we know we are a part of the universe, a small part of it, and yet we have power over it in its entirety, because any change no matter how small changes it all.