Dogs like crates/cages, if they are the right size, and if they grow up with them. They seem to feel cozy to them. And dogs like being trained and taught how to do exactly what their human masters want them to do.
Likewise, most people seem to be more comfortable living in small places, like a “polis”–however understood where it happens to be–of AT MOST 10,000 people. That is the upper limit, and for most a few hundred is enough.
In our minds, we are most comfortable living in a small ideational world. We have a mythos, and understanding of God–or in the case of Communists, a rejection of God–and we do this on that day, and that on the other. This is acceptable, this is not. This is sacred, this we don’t care about. The details vary, but the rough container seems necessary on some level for all of us.
Spirituality, as I am conceiving, starts in chaos. We have no rules, no Law, no sacred. So we, as humans, create it. That ends an immediate existential emergency. And we learn to live inside our creation. This is good.
But then we become ATTACHED to our creation. We are sticky beings, capable of both order and disorder, harmony and anarchy, and even if we like to cross over the lines into the darkness (or light) we tend to want to come back to some home.
Satanism–and I will note that there are very open Satanic churches working actively to become politically relevant–is perhaps the order following a descent into darkness. A descent is still movement, isn’t it? We work hard to get stuck, then we get frustrated from an inability to move.
It’s always some fucking thing with humanity, isn’t it?
But communing with darkness is a movement. It is simply one which will sooner or later strangle those doing it.
In my view, the chaos led to order, but the next step is to move beyond the artificial order we created for ourselves–and here we differ from dogs–and which consists mostly in projections and partial lies about reality, into the universe as it “really exists”, if such a thing can be said. I don’t know. Maybe it IS all mind, and consists in whatever ideas come to us. But where do they come from?
It gets deep quickly. I think to the extent a “reality” can be spoken of, it is the reality that can’t be spoken of. Some Chinese fellow may have spoken of that, while he hitchhiked his way to Tibet.
But always there is this toggling between order and disorder. Walking, as I have noted, is literally a physical example of balance and imbalance. Walking in some respects is a series of controlled falls.
Think, though, of the samurai, whose life was inextricably intertwined with their master. Were they not dogs of a sort, in the good way? If their master was killed, they were expected to commit seppuku, or so I understand Bushido. If they did not, they became Ronin.
Many of us–myself included–look on this with a combination of admiration and horror. It can be both. That is one way to live, and a very simple one. The path of that sort of warrior is simple.
And that point has been made in several modern movies, such as Le Samourai, and Ghost Dog, in both of which cases the “samurai”, in learning their master has betrayed them, has their master directly or indirectly kill them.
And The Last Samurai has a romantic appeal, doesn’t it?
Think of freedom as the walls close in, and what it means to you. What is the point of it? What is its value for you, in your life? It may be to protect your particular form of obedience. That is worth something.
And it seems to me that we all need to develop a sense of the sacred for us, of the inviolable. Through this is the path beyond the sacred, and I think ONLY through this.
Even Satanists must take some things as sacred, which may include the necessity of sacrilege. Morphologically, it is the same, merely an inversion.