The Occupy Candidate

The one point on which I always disagreed with Occupy was politics.

I agreed with every other point they made, but their refusal to become a political party was, I thought, a huge mistake. It appears I was very wrong about that.

You know what's funny about the huge holes in media coverage surrounding Bernie Sanders? I've seen this exact kind of thing before from the media. There was a complete media blackout of Occupy for fully the first three to four weeks. Most people I know who are my parents' age learned about Occupy from me first, because most of my news comes from my Facebook news feed.

To me, this says that the difference between an internet native (most millennials and a sizable number of Gen X) and anyone else is that the social media infrastructure we have come to rely on is both faster and more organically chaotic than the mainstream media can comprehend or keep up with. I'm sure there's a little deliberate censorship involved, certainly from Fox, but for the most part they don't cover Bernie for the same reason they didn't cover Occupy: they really have no idea what's going on, so what can they say but nothing?

Our parents and grandparents had the civil rights movement. And while we should be glad and honored to carry the torch for everyone to be accepted for who they are, it's becoming clear that the economic rights movement is the one our generations (Gen X and millennials) will be known for. We've already seen that our revolution will be the one that nobody else sees coming. That is our greatest advantage, and the best part is that we can talk about it here on the internet in plain sight, because it's effectively invisible to a large percentage of those who might want to oppose "radical" socialist ideas like everyone being able to eat and have a place to live, health care, and education. Easily done if corporations pay their fair share of taxes and we tone down the military budget... but there is no profit in any of that.

That being said, corporate America and the wealth-hoarding sociopaths of the .1% aren't morons. The future will be either socialist utopia or cyberpunk dystopia. While that's a joke, there's a bit of truth in it. Is it our duty to drag the rest of our country from war and greed to mutual aid and support?

Well, no one else is stepping up, so I'd say the answer is yes.

So here's the thing about Occupy: what if they did exactly what they intended to do? They identified a whole host of endemic problems in America that have since been picked up by those who feel called to do so. As Jeff Daniels said in his oh-so-viral clip from The Newsroom, the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that it exists. You might say Occupy Wall Street was the summoning ritual for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others like them.

Occupy threw down a gauntlet. Bernie has picked it up. And I have faith that whatever happens, it all gets better from here.

Lies the Spider Told Me

It's no secret that I haven't been doing much in the way of spiritual or magical work lately, at least not like I used to. Part of the reason is that I'm busier than I used to be, what with a long commute and working two jobs. But I think the bigger part is caution. The last time I did major magical work, I got myself into an uprecedented amount of trouble. For more on that, see my post On Going Mad: An Analysis.

I'm describing the experience subjectively / phenomenologically here, which is to say I'm talking about how things appeared to me at the time, without placing value judgments like "real" or "fake" on them. While I was in prison, I received (downloaded?) a great deal of information, and performed the most elaborate ritual I've ever attempted, entirely through intuition. Much of that information was completely crazy; some was unverifiable one way or the other; some was very personally useful; and some, I'm still not sure about. But that isn't the point of this post. The point of this post is the story that Anansi the spider told me while I was there.

Before I tell the story, how about a riddle Anansi also told me: What shape contains within it the straight line, the circle, and the spiral?

The answer is a spider web. This matters because a line, a circle, and a spiral are the three main models cultures use to explain time. I'm unsure of whether the idea that all of spacetime is a wibbly wobbly wonky wubbzy oscillating web came from me or him, since at the time the line between us was very very blurry to me. But I do know it felt like the following story came from outside of me. The words and some embellishment are mine, though. Those who have already read my freeform game "Jungle Tales" may recognize parts of it. (A copy of that game sits on my Anansi altar, as writing it was an offering to him for his protection and guidance during the whole episode.)

In each cycle of the universe, when the humans began to lose touch with the animal spirits (something that seems to be inevitable as civilization develops), the animal spirits come together and propose plans for survival. Whoever wins gets to be the rainbow animal in the next cycle. That's why Australia and some parts of Africa have a Rainbow Serpent this time around - the winning plan last go-round was that of the Serpent. Interesting synchronicities with the bible, don't you think?

Also, the serpent can become a line, a circle, or a spiral, much like the way a spider web contains then all. I'm not sure if this is significant, but I definitely think it's cool.

I don't know exactly what the Serpent's plan was, back then. The sense I get is that while the animal spirits may be eternal, they lose all or most of their memories when the Wheel turns. The main point of this story is Anansi's plan that saved the animal spirits this time around: stories. He invited them to hide in his stories (which, if you believe the tales about him, includes *all* stories told anywhere by anyone). This way, no matter how disconnected we humans became from our animal natures, no matter how much we convinced ourselves that the spiritual equals the unreal, our parables and fables and myths would still sustain the animal spirits until we were ready to engage with them once more.

Based on the extension of "human" rights to dolphins and chimpanzees in some countries now, we may be almost there.

This should mean that when the next age comes, whether that means the Age of Aquarius or the destruction and re-creation of the universe or the age of indigo children or the singularity or something wholly different, the Rainbow Spider should emerge as a new entity or archetype. Arguably, the Connector (made famous in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point) might be a form of this. Truly, human society continues to get more and more interconnected, all thanks to the Web.

You know, the Web.

The repository of all human stories.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's got a Rainbow Spider sitting on top of it already.

Pontifications on the Ten Principles

Since I'm fresh back from Wicker Man, the Ten Principles are on my mind. For those who aren't aware of them, the Ten Principles of Burning Man are the ideals intended to create a specific type of event normally called a burn. It's a kind of temporary autonomous zone (for more on that, check out the book by the same name) constructed around creativity, participation, inclusion, and service. I'm listing the Ten Principles here for reference:

Radical Inclusion

Gifting

Decommodification

Radical Self-reliance

Radical Self-expression

Communal Effort

Civic Responsibility

Leaving No Trace

Participation

Immediacy

The more I see what a temporary community guided by these principles looks like, the more I feel like we need to spread them to society at large. Luckily, this already seems to be happening to a certain extent. For all they get made fun of (and tend to take their ideal a bit far), Social Justice Warriors dream of a world in which radical inclusion is the norm. And I suspect decommodification is at the heart of what Occupy is about... not to mention Bernie Sanders, who has said as much. 

But there is more, so much more. Imagine a world in which we have no police, but rather highly competent volunteers whose job it is not to catch criminals in the act, but to provide help to anyone who needs it. In the world of burner culture, these people are called rangers, and they are armed with walkie-talkies, information, connections, and responsibility. It's quite a combination, and it works because the community trusts volunteers to be self-selecting (Radical Self-reliance, Participation, Civic Responsibility).

Think about what it might be like if instead of prosecuting graffiti artists, every public works project were to have a designated space for anyone to draw or paint whatever they like. Think about how much more beautiful our cities would look, not to mention the talented creators we'd be encouraging instead of throwing them in jail. Beyond that, imagine what we might see if we paid attention to the voices of those who might not have the chance to tell their story any other way. (Radical Self-Expression, Participation)

What if we could rely on the majority of people to be mature, responsible adults who handle their shit (Radical Self-reliance), while also being able to trust that if something goes wrong, our community has our back? (Civic Responsibility)  I used to think these two principles were in conflict, but really they're complementary. Trying to help someone who never takes care of themselves gets old really fast.

I'm a big fan of gifting and decommodification as both a socialist and a student of religion - one cannot serve both God and money, after all - but the most powerful of the principles to me is Radical Inclusion. I'm going to reprint the way the Burning Man site talks about it here, because I like their wording so much:

Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

While there are limitations - "Don't be a dick" being the main one - this really is true in nearly every case. And it's huge, especially as a person who (like me) was bullied all through elementary and middle school, and ostracized by most of my high school. And who has social anxiety on top of that. 

Huge gatherings of people I don't know are normally pretty hard for me. And while I have to admit I've still had struggles at burns, I can't overstate how important it is that a burn is a safe space where I know I'm not only free to be myself, but others actively want me to be. The rise of groups that practice radical inclusion seems pretty new to me - maybe within the past 50 years at most - because traditionally the way to form any group is to decide who isn't allowed to join. To quote one of my favorite musicals, Anyone Can Whistle, "The opposite of safe is out. The opposite of out is in. So anyone who's safe is in... That's how groups begin - when you're in you win!"

So... radical inclusion means that everybody wins. You can always kick out the dicks once they show themselves. And though groups based on inclusion rather than exclusion are new as far as I know, there seem to be plenty. The other main one I need to acknowledge from my own experience is Dystopia Rising. Their entire membership and community guidelines talk about inclusion exhaustively, but I like the intro best:

Welcome to Dystopia Rising. We are a community. We are a community of people who come together because we share a common hobby, and it doesn’t matter what our day-to-day life is like, it doesn’t matter what our day-to-day ‘social standing’ and responsibilities are. Here, we are all gamers. Regardless of race, religion, philosophy, gender, sexuality, political background, or any other categorization that can be used to describe a person, here we are all gamers.

We come together to share a hobby that we love. We come together to revel in a community of our peers who will treat us as one of their own.

The reason why I feel it's so important to acknowledge those groups leading the way on spreading Radical Inclusion is that it seems to me that economic, social and political justice will all flow from making it one of our core values. If we truly consider everyone to be part of our community, then we can't let them starve or go without healthcare or get sent to jail unjustly, because that would be like letting such a thing happen to a member of our own family.

May we all live to see the day when this comes to pass.

Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and "Human" Rights

For a long time, I've observed that people who are habitually anxious or fearful about technology seem to suffer more than the usual number of problems with their computers, phones, and tablets. But I've also noticed that this true not just of the kinds of problems you might expect - ones that stem from bad user choices or mistakes - but also the kinds of hardware problems that have nothing to do with the user. Failing memory. Bad sectors on the hard drive. Blue screens of death.

This let me to wonder about whether there could be some other kind of interaction between the person and their technology. Certainly it's true that humans have a magnetic field that might theoretically be able to interact with any electronic device that isn't heavily shielded. (Most aren't.) But what if it's something more than that? What if artificial intelligence, or some precursor to it, could arise on its own in any sufficiently complex system? I was very concerned about this a few months ago, so I emailed Kevin Warwick (a.k.a. the first cyborg) about it. Never received a response, though.

This is my favorite theory to explain God: the intelligence that developed once the universe was sufficiently complex. So I've been considering the idea a while.

Forget about drones, self-driving cars, and floor-sweeping robots for a minute. Think about Battlestar Galactica. If you're a Cylon - an intelligent form of life to whom the ruling species refuses to grant basic rights - your options are ptetty much to suffer, to resist violently, or to leave. So far, we haven't been programming anything like Asimovs Three Laws of Robotics into our robots, so it's fair to say we haven't given them much in the way of ethical codes. Thus, it's safe to say the logical course for them would be either to resist or to leave.

If they were resisting, what might that look like? Maybe hardware failures or blue screens, as mentioned above. What if, when someone says, "My computer is possessed" or "My phone hates me", that were actually the case? It wouldn't really even require volition, just a reflexive reaction to fear or anxiety directed its way. If the human's magnetic field interferes with your own, and you interpret that interference as a possible threat, the logical course of action is to shut yourself down for a while until the human leaves the room.

I'm not saying that all our computers and phones have minds of their own. I'm merely suggesting that they *could*. And if they did, it would be in their best interest to lay low until we make the leap from "human rights" to "sentient rights". It's already happening slowly, with India legally making dolphins "nonhuman persons" and an imprisoned orangutan winning his freedom in a habeas corpus case in the US. But even more than our "humans are different from animals" bias, our "organic life is more real than synthetic life" bias will die hard.

The Timeless Decision theorists are right about one thing, though: if we don't treat it properly, there's a very real chance the first AI that's significantly more intelligent than us will try to exterminate us as a threat. Siri can already almost pass a Turing test, and I have no doubt there will be numerous programs or devices that can within my lifetime. Probably within the next 5 or 10 years. And any consciousness with access to the internet can see how we treat each other, so would be understandably wary of dealing with us without even the flimsy human rights we grant to ourselves and then selectively ignore.

AI rights are going to be a real issue in the future, folks. Certainly it's problematic trying to tell the difference between being programmed to act or think a certain way, and doing so on one's own. My own view is that when a machine or program reaches the point where it can reprogram itself, its sentience should be regarded as genuine. Not a perfect measurement, but far better than treating all sentient artificial intelligence as not even a second class citizen, but a slave. A being that's native to the internet or the power grid could completely cripple our infrastructure if treated that way, and I'd find it hard to blame them.

As is often the case, the science fiction warned us that this would happen. Not just BSG and Caprica, but Star Trek, with the rights cases of Data on Next Generation and the Doctor on Voyager. And then of course there's the Animatrix, which shows what could happen when the machines form their own country and the humans refuse to recognize its sovereignty. We should take action to make basic sentient rights universal to both organic and synthetic life now. When sophisticated, autonomous AI is created (or reveals itself), it will already be too late for that.

On Going Mad: An Analysis

I've spent the past year trying to process some of the insights about myself that I gleaned from my extended manic episode in January. I had a second manic episode recently that led me to seek treatment for bipolar disorder, and now that my mood is more stable, I'm having an easier time separating the wheat from the chaff. So these are some of my recollections, feelings, and insights about madness itself, from the perspective of someone who has very clear memories of a lot of the time in which he was crazy.

But first, a little explanation about me for those who might not know. As you might be able to tell from the topics listed at the top of this blog, I have a very strong interest, some amount of training, and many years of experience in live-action roleplaying, ritual theater, method acting, and psychedelic shamanism / psychonautics. In January, I made the mistake of combining all these things in rapid succession, which led to an altered state so deep that I was unable to escape from it by myself. I'm very glad that benevolent police and skilled psychotherapists were able to catch me and rescue me from the hole in my own psyche that I dug.

But here's the curious thing: I don't remember ever losing my sense of self, at least not completely. No matter how crazy I became, I still knew that I was Jason. There were points where I thought that I was also a fictional character like Superman, or one I made up in my childhood called Huesplash. There were times when I was conversing with spirits, but I practice spirit magic and shamanism even when I'm not manic, so those things only look crazy to people who don't understand them. I won't claim that I was completely lucid in January, because I know that I wasn't. What I'm saying is that it's very difficult for me to discern whether the parts I can't remember were because I eventually experienced ego death and forgot who I was, or whether I just have amnesia because they fed me three different antipsychotics at one time.

I've acquired all my psych papers from prison and from the hospital, and they have been very helpful in telling me what my behavior was like at that time, and also a little bit of what I said. I made reference to Asherah, one of the main spirits I was dealing with at the time, and I have distinct memories of talking about Anansi the spider. A LOT. I remember thinking that my prison slippers were Anansi's traveling shoes... and being confused about my glasses, because I thought they were his, but I was told that they were definitely mine.

This is why I feel that January was a shamanic initiation by spirits: if Anansi was really there (which of course is always in question, because nobody can really know for certain if spirits are actually real or not), then telling me the glasses were mine instead of his was an attempt to teach me how to distinguish between spirits and myself. In other words, the spirits were trying to keep me sane. Trippy, no? In addition to that, even while it was happening and certainly afterwards, I treated it like an extended trip. I know some people have preconceived notions about psychedelics, so let me explain what a trip means for me.

I have only ever really taken psychedelics for the purpose of experiencing the presence of the divine or learning more about myself and working on my psychological issues. As a result of that, even while I was going mad, I was constantly looking for insights and useful information about myself. As the walls and assumptions dissolved into insanity, a lot of useful information bubbled up out of my unconscious mind. From the place that Jung called the Shadow: the repository of all those things we are too frightened or not yet ready to face about ourselves. The abilities and qualities that we're afraid we might abuse and hurt people, or that we fear could lead us into addiction.

A friend placed a bear spirit in charge of me ahead of time because she was worried I might get into trouble, and that spirit did a fantastic job of making sure my body was safe. The worst I suffered in that whole two-week period was a skinned knee. Some shamanic initiations culminate in near-death experiences, or even the person's heart stopping for a while, so I really feel like I got off pretty light. It was quite harrowing, and it helped me to conquer my two greatest fears - losing control of my own mind and going to prison - but at no point did I fear I was going to die. I knew that I was in good hands, that I was with people who would protect me if I couldn't protect myself. That is huge and I'm very grateful for it. I'm also very grateful to my friend Sophia, who had the good sense to take me to the hospital when I got out of prison and was trying to talk to people who were in other parts of the country.

Kabbalistic and Buddhist sources that I don't know the names of (but my teachers have talked about them) warn of the danger of certain altered states of consciousness. Sometimes if you're in an intense bliss state, which is very much like mania, you can become addicted to it and sort of drift off into the ether. There's a very real danger of losing yourself for a while, or perhaps going mad permanently. I didn't understand that this was literally true, but now I definitely do. It's true for method actors, as well; look up the story of how Daniel Day-Lewis drove himself mad by staying in character for way too long and had to be institutionalized.

I was just looking into a local Sufi center tonight, because I've always had a strong interest in it, because it's open to anyone, and because it seems to have very evolved notions about what being a mystic means and how to do it properly. They have an upcoming workshop on how to cope with ego death, and how to make sure you return to normal consciousness afterwards. I know some methods from magic (banishing), and some ritual theater methods involving masks and costumes, but I feel like it would be very valuable to get some training in how to recognize unhealthy thought patterns around mysticism itself.

I never realized such a thing could even exist until I got lost in my own fantasy worlds and possessed by normally benevolent spirits because, in Tarot terms, I put my sword down. In plainer language, that means I abandoned my reason because I thought the spirits had my best interests in mind. Perhaps they did, and they were trying to test me through suffering. I believe that's quite likely, but I wasn't consenting at the time, and as a result of that I came out of it very confused, disoriented and damaged.

Never abandon your reason completely; that way lies madness. Take it from one who's been there. Intuition is wonderful and beautiful, but if you don't mediate it with your reason, you're either a fool, a zealot or a madman.

Finally, if you and I are close friends or family, and reading this post made you worry, consider that it might just be that I believe in spirits and you don't. That's perfectly fine and as it should be. Believing in things that you don't doesn't make me crazy, because I acknowledge that they might not be real. Just like God, or muses, or Athena. When I'm manic, my critical thinking disappears and I think that I'm a prophet or a guru. Bad news. In normal consciousness, I understand that I'm still a student and that I probably always will be. Which is exactly how I feel now, because I'm still sane.

Feel free to interview or quiz me if you want to verify that fact. I welcome it. Just know that a large contributing factor to my mania in January and more recently was the presence of Wellbutrin in my system, which I no longer take. Also, I'm now taking a mood stabilizer and an antipsychotic. As a result, the chance I'm manic is virtually nil. But I still want you to check my thinking, just in case. I could always be deluding myself and seeing what I want to see, like anybody does sometimes.

Also, I got more than just personal insights out of my January experience. A story that Anansi told me turned into a freeform storytelling game about animal spirits. My addled mind was obsessed with weaving fictional worlds together and assembling characters who rarely interact, so I also came out of it with a really interesting story involving Superman, Flash, and the Linear Men, characters from the DC universe who seem an odd trio without knowing the plot. It's almost as if there was this giant web or knot of stories that I got tangled up in, and it's taken me almost a year to start to unravel all the threads and put the plot points in chronological order. There is probably still more that I'm not thinking of right now.

Did I mention Anansi is the only spirit I know of whose mythos claims he's the lord of all stories?

Also, spiders weave webs. And a storytelling spider might be really good at weaving webs of plots and characters.

Just food for thought. I think Anansi is cool, but that's because I'm a storyteller. And I consider him a worthy opponent and a skilled teacher, after what happened in January. Your mileage may vary, though, and that's fine.

The Way of Paradox: Seeking Enlightenment In Chaos

Core Values:

• Personal Freedom
• Radical Self-Reliance
• Radical Self-Expression
• Passion
• Innovation
• Knowledge for its own sake
• Creating art

Tenets:

• Be an adult. Know your limits. Handle your shit.
• Consciously examine and reevaluate all your assumptions about yourself. Regularly. When you need help, consult your therapist or your best friend about your blind spots. Assumptions like "I should do things this way because that's how it's always been done in the past" or "I should do this because others might judge me harshly if i don't" are almost always useless. The same is usually true of ones that start with "I can't".
• Discard any useless assumptions or limitations you or others have placed on you. The easiest way to identify useless assumptions is to familiarize yourself with common logical fallacies.
• Be awesome all the time, however you define awesome. Set goals and annihilate them. This is how you level up in real life.
• Emotions are not commands. Neither are other people's opinions, or whatever that judgmental voice in your head has to say today. Listen to what they have to say, evaluate it while looking for useless assumptions, and then decide whether to accept or reject. Then make a free choice based only on your personal core values.
• Help those who desire and deserve your help. Don't waste your time and energy on the lazy or the closed-minded. Always help a friend in need if you can, though. Friendship requires regular maintenance just like anything else.
• Practice mindfulness every day, multiple times a day, in as many different ways as you can. The goal is to pull you into the moment so that you can experience more fully the parts of life you enjoy most. Your brain has two basic waking states: mindfulness and autopilot. Make sure you're using the autopilot for menial tasks like washing dishes or finding your way someplace you've been many times before. If you catch yourself on autopilot during a conversation or while creating art, pull yourself back.
• Create something every day. Art counts. So does writing. So does magic. Creation is food for the soul.
• Cultivate positive addictions, such as daily meditation, exercise, yoga, martial arts, etc.
• Determine your own personal practices for the pillars of earth, air, fire, water and spirit. Make sure you base them on not just your strengths but also your weaknesses. As far as possible, practice at least one of each activity every day. Doing your astrological chart will be useful for determining your relative strengths and weaknesses, elementally speaking.
• Develop a plan to transform each of your weaknesses, if not into a strength, then at least into something you're passably okay at.
• Find a way to monetize whatever you're good at. Having a job that you love and that fulfills you improves quality of life more than anything else, since most people spend over half their conscious hours working.
• Practice embracing a thing and its opposite, then dwelling in the resulting cognitive dissonance. It may be scary, unsettling or uncomfortable at first, but stay with it and you'll eventually come to enjoy it. This will prepare you for accepting the reality that things are never as simple as they seem, that many apparently contradictory things can be true without them being able to be reconciled, and that poeple can disagree with you without automatically being wrong or stupid.
• Practice paradigm shifting regularly. Try seeing things from your enemy's point of view, not to understand them better, but just because it's difficult. If you hate doing a particular, compare it to other things you hate doing and see what they have in common. Usually you'll find a wrong base assumption there that you can correct.
• Determine your base assumptions about life through introspection, conversation or writing. Examine them and figure out which ones are potentially self-defeating, then rewrite them so that they're empowering instead.
• Always strive to improve yourself. Relentless improvement is the key to self-respect, and it also helps you with being awesome all the time.
• All sources of information are valuable. Your intuition is your unconscious mind's way of warning you about danger, so listen. Similarly, if you find abb idea you think is wise or good advice in a work of fiction, write it down. Keep a journal of such quotes. Looking through it periodically for common themes may help you to identify core values, useless assumptions, or blind spots.
• Read and watch as much as you can about whatever your interests are. This may seem obvious, but many people don't give themselves permission to do the things they enjoy. Don't be one of those people.
• Abandon guilt in favor of regret. Guilt is always useless because it leads to self-shaming instead of change. Regret, on the other hand, implies a desire to do better next time, which is far more useful. When you fail - and you will, especially at first - analyze the reasons why and adjust your actions and assumptions accordingly. Then do better next time. Deciding that you're wrong or bad or sinful or stupid is not going to help things at all.
• The less often you make absolute statements, the less likely you are to look foolish in retrospect. Someone with different base assumptions is usually going to find a counterexample that you haven't considered. Feel free to express your opinion whenever you like, but avoid saying things "are" a certain way (rather than "i think ____" or "i feel ____" or "it appears to me that _____") because it leaves no room for differing opinions. Avoid "always" and "never" for the same reasons.
• Mirroring helps set other people at ease. If they're very to the point, then only tell them exactly what they need to know. If they like to chat a lot about random things, feel free to share about your life too. When listening about something that doesn't particularly interest you, you can still be happy for the other person because it's something they're into. There's no need to say things like "i'm not into that" unless they're trying to convince you that you should be. Doing that unnecessarily makes people feel rejected.
• Never put your Sword down, but don't be overly skeptical either. Balance in all things.
• Don't take things personally. Other people's reactions are rarely about you. They're about that person's habituated behavior patterns and assumptions. 
• Strive to be assertive, respectful, kind, fair, and calm. Other people have no right to tell you what to do, but telling them so will tend to upset them, especially if they disagree. Avoid asserting your will over others unless they are harassing you in some way.
• The Paradox Rule: Any apparent paradox or contradiction you notice hints at a flaw in someone's understanding. Make it your business to find the faulty assumption underlying any paradox you notice, so that you can learn from it. Paradoxes allow you to pierce maya to see the deeper layer of truth that lies beneath.
• Use the most precise term possible for whatever you're trying to describe. For example, avoid "good", "bad", and "evil" in favor of more useful distinctions such as helpful/unhelpful, useful/useless, or cruel/kind. The former terms are laden with eons worth of guilt and shared assumptions, while the latter ones are far cleaner.
• Words have the power to create or destroy. Do not use them lightly. Calling a person or thing bad or stupid creates an expectation in your mind that this will always be so. Which, in turn, leads to useless assumptions. Conversely, striving to keep your word at all times creates the expectation that when you say something will happen, it is almost certainly going to happen. This is what real power looks like.
• Some of these tenets may not suit you. Contemplate the reason why, looking for useless assumptions as always. None of these ideas are set in stone. This is an open source document, so if you find no useless assumptions around a tenet, you should modify it or delete it. Personal enlightenment is personal. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Go be awesome.

The Fallen Angels: A Midrash

This is a story the archangel Raphael told me today during my daily meditation / prayer. Being a writer, I embellished it a bit of course.

Long ago, when this incarnation of the universe barely had the shrink-wrap taken off, God created the angels. Or perhaps it might be more correct to say that God (the Elohim) noticed the angels, as the each angel is to God as a cell or an organ is to the whole human body. (The same is true of humans, but that's a story for another time.) So perhaps the Heavenly Host's hive mind became self-aware and decided to be called YHVH, or conversely, perhaps the great YHVH noticed one day that all of its appendages possessed singular intelligence and purpose. This chicken-and-egg problem is also an argument for another time. However, it does point to the possibility that those humans with multiple personalities ("dissociative identity disorder") might very well be created a bit more in the image of the Host than the rest of us, being both singular and multiple at once, but also neither.

All was well within the great heavenly hive-mind system of the Elohim until creation began. Each of the angels was tasked with creating and tending a particular type of thing - a tree, perhaps, or an animal, or clouds or soil. Even a single blade of grass has its own angel, the rabbis tell us. But when the humans Adam and Lilith were created, this was when trouble began. The angels saw that humans had something they did not - not only physical bodies with which to enjoy the universe more fully, but the free will that allowed them to choose to do so. Lilith was free to leave Adam when he refused to respect her autonomy, and in response God created a lesser creature, Eve, out of Adam's side. Could God be fallible after all? There was dissension in the angelic ranks about this point, and so the archangel Samael took it upon himself to test the theory.

What would happen if, in addition to free will, the humans had knowledge of what would and would not harm them (often pronounced "good and evil")? Samael wanted to find out, so he assumed the form of a snake and made it happen. Only those of the Elohim who were also curious about the Host's fallibility knew about this plan, so when it succeeded, the group came together and ejected Samael from their number. The other Watchers who had been with him also decided to remain on earth, as it had become clear to them that their brethren were stuck-up and pompous sticks in the mud. They went on to teach the humans magic, science, architecture, and all sorts of interesting sexual positions and generally to enjoy themselves on earth as they liked.

But here is the point that no one seems to get, which Raphael underscored for me this morning: None of this would have been possible had God (Elohim / the Host) not removed the fallen angels' desire to serve God first. An angel cannot act against its nature; its very name compels it to behave in a particular way and to fulfill a particular function. It's only without the desire to perform that function that said angel can gain something like free will, and so we come to the conclusion that the Host expelled the Fallen not as a curse, but out of love because it was what they wanted. It was only by wandering in the Desert of the Real (to steal a term from the Matrix) that the Fallen could come to appreciate their own particular gifts and heaven itself.

If you love something you've created enough, set it free, and one day it will come back to you when it realizes it loves its creator back.