It is not about the game. The purpose is not the game. The points do not matter. I am always the winner.
But the paradox is this: it is about the game. Because the purpose is to play. The point is not to work or to grow, or to evolve or to improve.
The point is: I am always the winner.
Consider what is common about words like purpose, like work or leisure, like good, bad and evil. Career, fulfillment. Quality.
The list is not random. To me these words are danger words. They are stranger danger words, words with clean cut looks but subversive, manipulative personalities and secret agendas of their own.
The problem with these words is that they carry an importance and a weight that is heavier than their conceptual content. They are messengers of a greater lord, but when they appeared in the purple robes and were heralded as kings they accepted the mantle, they did not in proper humility say, “No, we bear witness only. We are not the way, we have come to prepare the way.”
They point the way to the king with crooked fingers. I will attempt to break a few and reset them straight: “It is not whether you win or lose, it is how you play thy neighbor as thyself.”
To put that less lyrically and more technically:
What we think of as life is the manifestation of choice at those scales comprehensible to our understanding of consciousness.
This definition may seem obtuse, overdressed in garish pretension. But I urge you to unclothe it slowly and carefully, and keep its naked form in mind as I wander through my whimsical examination of the purpose of humankind, which will also serve as my autopsy of that decaying organism known as “society.”
Each of the words in the list above tries to capture a concept that could not exist without an assumption of duality. In under 15 letters, each creates a charge, a polarity, a positive and a negative. An am, an am not. Their intrinsic danger is not in this quality, this quality is inherent to word itself. The astute philosopher will search for a word that does not do this to no avail. (This is why the greatest king – the puzzle I will give to you as Wittgenstein’s Kitten – cannot truly be named) Where these words – and others – falsely don the purple robes is when they confuse polarity with authority.
The universe is not about progress, or direction. It is about force. About polarity. About relationship. Nothing evolved from something to become something. This is not the proper way to look at it. Things attracted, they repelled, and some time some thing ended, and some new thing began. If the nature has not changed, there has been no change. If the nature has changed, then the thing is not the same thing.
We are attracted to that which we label purpose, and in moving toward that purpose, we see ourselves to evolve. We say that we grow; indeed we grew wings. But we do not acknowledge the greater truth, the hidden king: we ended and began anew. Though we may have memories of the caterpillar, our wings mean we are butterfly.
Of what lineage is humankind? We are animal and must not deny it. But I submit that our greater nature is not to the service of our solitary organism. I see constant signals of a greater lineage. I will imagine for a moment this lineage as One Creator manifested as the Big Bang, an expression of the duality which all conscious reality must adhere to. The is divided from the is not. The light and the shadow. I believe all duality stems from this single source. But what is the nature of this duality, this most ancient parent of ours? I will mythologize for the moment; I will call him Father Time.
That which is written into wisdom literature of all kinds from all cultures is this: Time is a force but not a vector. It is not pointed to the end. Because the end is always at hand. At hand is choice. Is now. Is free will. It is man or woman – in the authority of his or her lineage – deciding the manner in which he or she will move from one moment to the next. The decision is the end/the decision is the beginning. We are therefore Justice. We are therefore the Executioners. We execute justice in the image of Father Time.
Death is not in the future of the living. It is the opposite polarity thereof. Most are confused about the Death, viewed as the enemy of an imagined potential future. A more instructive metaphor: Death is married to Life. Our awareness depends upon their intercourse. This intercourse is happening right now. We live in the moment of the manifestation of our will, and we die with the manifestation of result. Again and again this cycle is perpetuated. This loop provides us with a consciousness dependent upon the identification of a continuity. This identification is an identity equivalent to that of the pronoun I.
When the wolves surround the lamb, we think: the lamb is ended. It seems to be about survival of the fittest. The lesser lamb loses to the greater wolf. But this was not a competition. This was a manifestation of forces already determined, an attraction of particles that carried death within their substance. The wolves eye the lamb, they draw toward the lamb, the surrounded lamb repelled but frozen – captured in a field of fear which no lamb-I could move against. A field exists that holds them in their purpose. But the purpose is not the ending of the lamb. The purpose is the testing of their I’s against the crucible of time. Neither has won more than another. They both will die in their nature and their time. They must die, for they are children of the earth.
We, too, are children of the earth.
Did the earth, cruel mother, pit her children against one another? Did she lay the carpet before her throne and say, Children, prove thyselves. Who is worthy of my rule?
That does not seem to be the nature of mothers.
I choose to believe she is a compassionate mother. I believe she loves her children, all. In the natures of their lives the natures of their death is assured.
The wisdom of the earth is this: You are flesh. From dust you came. To dust you will return.
It may be that there is no I before mother Earth.
It may be mother Earth has no I of her own.
But the earth is not all the wisdom.
We are ashes to ashes. We are more than children of the earth. We are children who play with fire.
