The Book of the Die. Luke Rhinehart

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       One & One SELF

      What is life but man’s maddening efforts to live a full life in chains.

      SUZUKI

       Anybody can be anybody.

       Luke

      The self is one of mankind’s ways of making life more difficult. In our effort to find and be at one with some imaginary centre, we resist our health – our variety, our flexibility, our ability to change. We seek changeless-ness in a constantly changing world, when the glory of life lies in change.

      What if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? – or, like the mastodon’s huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being someone represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails and turtles

       – from THE DICE MAN

      The normal personality consists of an accumulation of habits, attitudes and aspirations that lay claim to the title of character. We form these consistencies because our society rewards us for most of them and gets upset when we deviate from them too far or too often. By the age of thirty we’ve all become reasonably dependable machines, efficient for some operations, inefficient for others, but very limited in the tasks we can perform. It is a happy machine if it works in harmony with the other machines, but to do this the machine personality must not change. A mobile, eccentric or random machine would throw the super-machine called society out of whack. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds but is quite basic to the development of selves and society.

      Personal identification – name, beliefs, religion, family, possessions, and personal history – all are anchors thrown into the sea of life to try to control the flow. They are symptoms of fear. They represent grasping for certainty in an uncertain world; consistency in an inconsistent flow; stability within unstable societies; meaning in a meaningless universe.

      Seers and mystics have often urged us to be detached, grasp nothing, be free of ego. Some imply an actual withdrawal from activity, but the best mean that we should enter into each activity with all our might, to exert our last ounce of energy to win the race, but wander away when the laurel wreath is awarded.

       A beautiful statue Of the hardest granite looms With great dignity in the middle Of the garden. Ah … How the butterflies dance Around the unseeing eyes.

      We can be statues and impress people or be butterflies and dance. But we can’t be both. If we choose to impress people then we are turning part of ourselves into stone – the part that we think impresses. Statues are rather weak at dancing, and anyone not capable of chance and change will no longer be able to dance.

      WHIM COMMENTS: Hey, how about becoming the statue of a butterfly!? Not too cool, I guess.

       Place something on a pedestal and you turn it into stone.

      The tendency of every living creature is homeostatic – it wants to stabilize its relation to its environment at the simplest level possible. The creation of the self is part of this tendency.

      The tendency of chance, on the other hand, is to create instability and complexity.

      Living forms evolve through chance, through mutations – scientific terminology for the play of chance. Mutations are sudden, ‘unexplained’ altered forms of any given species. They are accidents. All living creatures – it is hardly a surprise to us – evolve through accident. It is the purpose of dicing to let chance into our lives so that we, like the species, may evolve.

      With dicing we try to let go of our attachments to attitudes and beliefs and behaviour patterns. We do this not to get at some central core of identity but rather to make room for new ones. Humans can only exist with a variety of contradictory aspirations and ideas. The error most men and most religions make is to try to force the individual into a singleness – to create One from the many. Our goal is different – to create more from the many.

      Mystics who claim unity with the ALLness are in effect announcing their embrace of multiplicity, for if you are at one with everything then you are multiple. However, those who claim to have experienced a single true Self or Reality or God separate from other false entities are creating a struggle and a seriousness which is central to the human sickness. If there are authentic selves and false selves then it is clearly a valuable goal to seek the true self and kill off the false; and life is a serious business. But if all selves are illusions then we can relax: we’ll never have any truer self than we have at any given moment.

      I, OBOKO

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