YOU MUST, they say, OR ELSE, they say.
I don’t know what’s true of course, other than that I am quite certain based on close and long term observation, that fear makes people batshit insane. Truly fucked up shit never comes from anywhere else, at root, although some people do a passable job of burying their terrors deep down in the hole. I always have, at least until now. Now, I’m sometimes the bad guy in my own dreams. I joined the other side. Or did I just become aware of it?
Rumi once said that no one who does not have both good and evil in them belongs with the Sufis. He was not extolling evil, obviously, but rather the AWARENESS of it. Anyone who thinks they are pure good is fucking somebody over, guaranteed.
No saints need apply for sainthood, if I might paraphrase a Lao Tzu line I have quoted often.
2. And the phrase came to me earlier “there are no calculators in Heaven”. There is no invisible accountant keeping a list of merits and demerits in a heavenly (or in the case, infernal) Excel spreadsheet, and planning to do a summation at the end, such that positive scores go one way, and negative another.
Imagine yourself as a painting in space. How much gray is there? How much yellow? What colors do you show daily? How do they vary? What forms appear? How beautiful or ugly are they?
What sounds would surround you? Tinny, muffled thumps, harps, rocks rattling in a coffee can?
What smells? How would you feel–pointed and jagged, soft, stiff, curved, straight?
Imagine that where you go is perfectly suited for who you are, and that who you are is absolutely obvious. And that there are infinite gradations, adaptations, and that tides and waves sweep regularly through the whole thing. You bob up and you bob down, in this infinite ocean.
3. How hard would it be for AI to imitate you? How patterned are you? We all tend to do certain things at certain times. But do you say the same things? If someone watched you for a week, could they easily predict what you will say to Jim at the gym, Gladys at the front desk? If you were cloned, how hard would it be to fool people?
If information is the degree to which a given evolution is unexpected, how much information do you produce in a given week? I would tend to submit that spontaneity and rigidity are roughly what openness and fear are to one another. If you do exactly the same things day in and day out, does fear underlie it?
Were you born merely to replicate something, or to create new riffs on the old, and to discover the new?
God loves new dance steps. Nothing is new, but much can be new to us.