The Life of Allism

Preface

After over ten years of writing this book, The Perfect Idius, it has become a complete summa, at nearly 3,000 pages. I necessarily had to break it into volumes, of which this is the first. This volume includes the introduction, and the first and second book, which more than any part, lay down Allism as a way of life.

The entire text is organic, and will continue to grow in the same manner as Whitman's Leaves of Grass grew, not just at the tail end, but at every layer and every part. Join me, please, in the first promise of perfection, that a lifetime of work will fulfill.

Daniel Christopher June

September, 2011

INTRODUCTION

Every man and woman is a monarch. The monarch caterpillar eats the poisonous milkweed which will make him, when adult, poisonous to the devouring birds. Likewise, each of us spends the beginning of his life enthralled in lessons, learning, growth, and the creation of personality. We enter our chrysalis, metamorphose, and emerge a monarch butterfly.

A lick of flame through the sky, he fears no attacking bird. Weaned from sour milk, he freely sips sweet nectar. But first, the chrysalis. How silent broods the caterpillar within his jade palace! You would think him asleep. He lies within a prince's tomb, an unblemished jewel, a hobgoblin made vile during his own transformation. He is not remotely asleep. This exhaustive labor of self-birth epitomizes his struggle. He endures the subtle degrees between fat land worm and flower in the wind. The exchange of earth bound legs for majestic wings and coarse jaw for delicate spoon of honey crown this Monarch as a new creation.

It is no surprise then that few of us wish to endure this reform, with its stages of ugliness, with its uncertain identity, with its renouncing of habits and customs. Yet the freedom of fulfilled purpose is worth the labor. Life is worth the death. The ancients tell us know yourself. The moderns return, be yourself. These are two steps of three: know yourself, change yourself, be yourself. We choose the self we want to be, and become. First, we must know ourselves: the goal of introspection.

Like the plump caterpillar, we contain everything needed to introspect and transform; no new lesson, no new teacher, no new text is required. The common experience of every adult suffices for metamorphoses. Indeed, common sense is most common, for if blind to some, we see the other, and clearly. And what we see, we systemize: pattern our knowledge, acquire understanding, prepare new habits. Further education is noble, but let us sharpen our knives before we cut; let us inspect our inspection, judge our judgment, contemplate our contemplation, and discipline our disciplining.

Introversion is the labor; extroversion the birth. Do not rot within that chrysalis! The mature man has a dog-eared soul; he returns to introspection as needed, but seeks also the world. The joy of introversion is not enough; it ultimately isolates us, and isolation is the root of unhappiness. The introvert must turn from himself and take in the world.

This text is redundant, a reminder of what we know to be true, an identifying and formalizing of what is already in us. The monarch looks from his highest height at book one, the overview, then flies into the thick of the field, beginning with the heady book two, continuing through the hearty book five, and approaching close in the worldly book eight. It is a simple truth swaddled in complexity.

Let us now discover what we know to be true.

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Book 0: Overview

Map of the Universe

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*Universe

* ************************

* *world

* * *********************

* * *body

* * * ******************

* * * *mind

* * * * ***************

* * * * *habits

* * * * * ************

* * * * * *assumptions

* * * * * * *********

* * * * * * *memories

* * * * * * * ******

* * * * * * * *NEEDS

All men and women live according to the life of their mind, a life in accordance with their philosophy—the systemizing of ideas. System emanates as personality, personality as character. A hedonist seeks joy in his attitude, seeks joy in his thinking, seeks joy in his personality, seeks joy in his actions. Even the most carefree and thoughtless laborer harbors a humming engine of ideas underneath his skin. Insofar as life is to be lived, and lived well, one must think well, and so understands one's own philosophy. To do this, each must consider his philosophy in its basic assumptions. My assumptions are graphed in the Map.

In the garden that is a man, Need grows up like a seedling in the soil of memories, putting out roots of assumptions to nurture its purpose; our habits carry the force of this purpose into the flower of the mind and the leaves of the body, which blow in the world's breath, and drink in the sun of the universe.

Man needs; these needs imprint memories, these memories systemize into assumptions, these assumptions blueprint habits, these habits incite the mind, this mind moves the body, this body senses the world, and this world presents the universe.

Man is his needs and is his tools for fulfilling these needs. We need food, air, shelter, relationships, love, knowledge, achievements, and many other things: lacking some, we suffer; lacking others, we die. Since all our concerns—love, play, work, art, etc.—depend upon us living, needs insist themselves as primary. Need communicates as the pain of lacking, as the joy of fulfillment.

Needs record as memories. A memory reexperiences events and the reaction of our needs. We may recall any experience, either sensual or abstract: we remember a ruddy sunset, we remember a tearful loss, we remember a clever idea. Memories lump into episodes and abbreviate into event-names. We remember last summer in a few minutes; it does not take a whole other summer to remember.

Memories crystallize into assumptions. Without order, memories would be useless. We need to assume the truth from memories, the truth of what we should do. I may remember touching the flame, but unless I assume it will again burn to touch, that I ought beware it, then that memory will only taunt and distract me. Memories are the concrete things we experienced, assumptions are the abstract things we pull from them. We abstract the concept of blackness from seeing night, cats, and charcoal pictures. A child perceives blackness, abstracts black, notices that black can cause beauty, and decides she ought to use a black crayon to color a night sky.

Assumptions build habits. We assume what is true, feel its meaning, and decide what to do; having decided, we desire. We assume music pleases, assume we ought to please ourselves, and habitually listen to music. Acting wants repeating: the more we do something, the more we want to do it. Habits desire to feel, think, talk, and act in certain ways. We habitually laugh at comedic movies, habitually think about the plots, habitually comment on the movies worth, and habitually exit the theater afterwards.

The desires of habits influence mind. Mind is not how we think, but that we are aware. Awareness is an eye within a palm: what it sees, it may grab with focus. Mind can view the narrative of memory, the concepts of assumptions, desires from habits, the sensation of the awareness moving, and the sensation of the body in the outer world. By focusing on a habit, we enact it; by moving our focus between ideas, we connect them.

The mind moves the body. We will our body to dance and it dances. We will our body to speak and it speaks. The body limits itself to five main senses, bound by shape and perspective. The body limits itself to the strength of its muscles, bound by their shape and vigor. Through these senses and muscles we master the world.

The body lives in the world of the senses. In this world, we see our friends move, hear them talk, but we cannot see nor sense their mind. The people we love, the facts we incorporate, the objects we possess, all inhabit our world; therefore, we live by earning and loving.

The world of the senses is but a small part of the universe as a whole: all history, all matter, all geography, all people, all that exists in the absolute moment.

And so, an infant needs food. She feels hunger pains. She remember asking for her bottle and getting it. She assumes that asking again will again win her the bottle. She develops the habit of asking. The habit incites her mind to act. Her mind focuses on moving the body, and so she approaches mom, asks, and receives the bottle. The bottle is her desire of the world, and rewards her from the bounty of the universe.

Man needs; to meet these needs he uses the tools of memories, assumptions, habits, mind and body; he applies these tools on the objects of the world, and so on the universe as a whole: needs, tools, objects, whole.

Needs are primary; the experience of needs are part of what is memorized, memories are part of what makes up assumptions, assumptions are part of what makes up habits, habits are part of what makes up a mind, the mind is part of what makes up the body, the body is part of what makes up the world of the senses, the world of the senses is part of what makes up the universe.

From this system, all else follows.

Destination

History is infant, the world just yawning, mankind for the first time learning to walk on his own two feet; we have no right to anything but the grandest and most grandiose hopes for this genius species, this unparalleled mankind, without which, and without others like to man in farther reaches, the universe herself may as well have never blossomed, but cloistered her virtues in a simpler dream, so that we answer the question why is there something rather than nothing because of Man. Man is all. And the All that comprehends and encircles man rests and learns from his infant brilliance as she could from no other.

This is our place. This is our time.

The Greeks created the West, and without them, there should never have been a West, and without the West, mankind would lack its greatest hope—us! This is our place! We are the stars of fate—and after the medieval trial, we wrested Aristotle from the jaws of Aquinas, and once again claimed our place as Prometheus; a Renaissance first, a rebirth of the Greek, the rebirth of the mind, first in images and verse, for image alone opens a mind, till finally a mind like Newton can take these ideas into the sublimity of the heavens and make the age of Reason, of scientific Enlightenment. This is the beginning of what we are now bringing to head.

The enlightenment was the mind, renaissance the heart, and western man struggled and wrestled against himself and these ultraprofound ideas with a return into the naissance of renaissance, the Romantic period of heroic temper—Beethoven! Byron! Emerson!—and this grand struggle brought the high claiming overthrow of all tradition we call Modernism. And the great Modern man was Nietzsche, who with his God is dead, with his million acidic aphorisms, brought to climax the sublime disintegration of the ancient: welcome now the horrors called Freud, Picasso, two World Wars, Stravinsky, Joyce, the great disintegrators and not one of them possible without the breath of Nietzsche through their lungs, and with that poetic pledge, man was ready to discover Relativity, to split apart even atoms in the chaos of nihilistic analysis. The pieces did not die, could never die. The chaos was discovered to be what she always was, namely: playful. The hideous Moderns gave birth to the postmoderns, the joy of being fragmentary, the joy of imitating, parody, the joy of being barren, the joy of being hideous, the play of the deformed child, the dance of the club-foot, the whinny of the five legged horse!

And this, dear friends, is what we grew up with. And we, ourselves stand for, allow to be, create, will, make the age of Allism, Holism, where the individual and the ALL fuse together, individual and All like Yin and Yang, the great I and the great Everything: we are, let it be said, the first steps of mankind, the first minding of man: we are the beginning of history. Our place, our time, our glory, to make a mankind too great to need saving, as he always was: mankind the terror and perfection of the universe. Man is All.

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Book 1: Needs

PART 1: THE NATURE OF NEEDS

Needs are foundational

To understand ourselves, let us consider existence. To exist is to need, for essence implies need, in that we need what is essential for our existence. Whatever exists has requirements for it to continue to exist as it is: a rock requires cool temperatures to remain solid; an idea requires a mind to think it; a fish requires water to breath.

Need is also the core of human existence and the starting point for all else. Reason, awareness, and the unconscious are mere tools for need, and though man may readily study them, the core of man's existence—and so the proper core of his philosophy—is man's need. Human needs, fundamental to the being of man, are the requirements for man's psycho-biological existence, and so also for health and happiness, that man's functions fulfill working in a good environment. Whereas the needs of nonliving matter remain passive, the needs of life become dynamic: they guide the functions of life. In this, the needs of life cannot be said to be essential or intrinsic, but fundamental. We know needs are fundamental in that they found what exists in man, and insofar as we are to exist, we must fulfill our needs. Again, needs are fundamental in that our psycho-biological functions imply an objective (food for the stomach and the stomach for life); that is to say, we can interpret human characteristics only for the sake of needs, for if they existed for the sake of something unnecessary, we could then dispense with them and not suffer, and this is clearly not the case.

For of all objects of awareness, need insists itself as most real, most immediate, most important, allowing no other focus its airs except in reference to itself. Therefore, whatever doubts a skeptic may entertain about the illusion of the world, mind, or self, his need demands constant consideration—presupposes consideration—and therefore need necessitates itself the most certain and meaningful reality of human awareness. All people in all places at all times attend to their needs. Whatever doubts may come out of a man's mouth, food must go into it, whatever a man may say about man, he must speak to men, whatever a man may skepticize about reality, he must relate to it. To seek a first principle implies one lacks something, and needs it. Seeking presupposes consciousness, consciousness presupposes need. Therefore, man's first principle: life lives. For living means acting to fulfill needs. The infant understands this first, the adult understands this best.

And so needs are the Sun which pulls in its fuel, sends out its rays of joy, and guides memories, assumptions, habits, mind, and body in their orbits: a centering center.

In sum: man, at heart, is his needs.

Needs and life

If man, at heart, is his needs, what is man? Since he creates via reason, man is the ratio-creative life form. A form of life? What is life? Life is productive and reproductive organized energy. It is productive in that it produces a body, an environment for itself, and in the case of humans, thinking patterns, interpersonal relationships, art, and technology. It is reproductive in that its body reproduces its parts throughout its life, and it may also reproduce itself in the form of a child. It is organized energy in that it is a melody of movement that must move and act. Life fulfills through liveliness.

Needs are the requirements for life. Why search for the meaning of life when life is meaning? Meaning is life. There is no meaning that does not enhance life as there is no fulfilled life that is unmeaningful. There is no meaning to life outside of the life that it is. For if we needed something beyond life, what do we need it for but for life? Meaning is the eye of life. Life needs.

What does life need? Goods. A good is an object or objective which fulfills a need. To be good is to order your parts in order to fulfill your needs. To be bad is to order your parts to deny your needs. To be evil is to willfully deceive yourself, and thus thwart your basic means to survival: creative reason. Therefore, evil is not a privation of good, but a mismatch movement of reason. The only thing that is really good is a good will–but good for what? Goodness is not primary. Life is. The delicatessen's will for food is not good if he starves. Will must find purchase, and beyond that it is useless.

What is the will of the needs? If life contains various needs, what is the shape and bent of them all? Do they bow to some greater purpose? What is the sum and summum bonum of the needs? How is life most fulfilled? What more then by Creativity? Man's overgoal is Creative Greatness. For creativity centers all goodness.

So man needs creativity more than he needs humanity. If only one childless couple appeared every thousand years, to write, till, talk, converse, love, and experience creativity, though they left not a scrap behind them, they would be fulfilled. As would be the next pair, with no reference to the former. Life would be fulfilled in this: my life suffices to itself. I need no priors to bequeath me fortunes, I need no posterity to lap up my honey. That we have these things merely deepens what every living person already has: a mind to focus on his circumstances and to create his choice. No man, no matter how destitute, lacks this; every man is consciously creative, and that is the full meaning, purpose, and glory of his life. Poverty, disease, decrepitude, and still he holds the burning ball. For every man wears his halo: his awareness.

Is life to live under any and all conditions? No, the will to life is not survival by any definition, for life is not primarily concerned with survival, but a certain mode of survival, namely, as a doer of lively activities. Beyond that, life need not continue. There arise conditions inimical to life: the life of my justice may call me to risk my health for my cause. I may express my greatest value through the life of dying (there is no death, only life dying). Dying then becomes the liveliest of activities. Rare, but possible. Life equates to quality times quantity; since life may respite from the negative, life must be lived: life is always worth living. Which is to say, suicide denies life, but risk I welcome when the prize is worthy.

If needs are one, is will one? The will to perfection, the will to power, the will to productivity, and the will to life are all the same. Life acts, and activity allows life. Life is the only end, a constant beginning and becoming. A life form has aim, and aim means aim at life, for nothing can aim but life, and there is nothing that can be aimed at save life. Every motive, every desire, every lust, longing, sadness, joy, depression, and exultation is a sublimation of the will to life. The energy that seeks to self produce is the energy that lends itself to all activity. Creativity is the value for life; what then is the value of life?

Life is not a value, but the purpose of value. There is no value to my life, but everything has value according to the standard of my life. For an economy cannot be bought or sold, but bases how things are bought or sold. The economy has no value to itself, but attributes value within itself.

Life elects goods, but does good exceed life? Goodness fulfills need. Can goodness exceed need? Does a starving sculptor exceed his need? One need sacrificed for another. We need certain goods in degrees, others, as much as possible; we need only so much calcium in our diet, but we always need more beauty, more truth, more kindness, more justice, more politics, more productivity–the unlimited goods. These we ought to seek with all our vigor–indeed, vigor exists for this reason–yet what is this ought? Why ought a man do anything?

Needs versus duty

Morality is doing what you ought; it refers to actions, and the action of creating habits. Why ought a man do anything? Because it fulfills him. Given it is self evident that we ought to do what is really good for us, and given that what is really good for us is to fulfill our needs, then it is our moral obligation to fulfill our needs, at all costs and without consideration to anything else. And again, if one were to consider the reason for doing any action, it is in accordance with motivation, and the point of human motivation is to fulfill human needs. Needs are duty, duties are needs.

This requires clarification. How is it self evident that we ought to do what is really good for us? Self evidence means the opposite is inconceivable. Indeed, the opposite here, that we ought to at least sometimes do what is really bad for us, is inconceivable. For whenever it is taught that we ought to sacrifice or do good without considering our own happiness, the justification is always a reward that outweighs the loss. Consider the argument: self-sacrifice and selflessness are what is moral, even if this harms you, even if this costs your life. Why? First, who is it good to? Good is relative to specific lives. How is it good to me to die to protect you? I should never deny a need unless it fulfills greater need. No morality has ever and can ever prove that self-sacrifice is good, for man can be good only to himself; man can only be a good to others.

That being said, a man may indeed fulfill his own life by dying to protect another. Let us assume there is no afterlife. Is it still right to die for another? If you value her, and you value yourself loyal, then it is life-fulfilling to die for your loyalties and values. For to live life knowing we were cowards tortures us, and denies life. Life is not worth living unless it is lived right. It is conceivable that dying is the only moral act possible. For life needs not to live for as long as possible in any character of values, but only in the good character of values.

So one may die for his own sake: he dies for the sake of himself as loyal to others. For there is no act that is good for its own sake. Only men may have sakes, and the only sake that can have any meaning for my life is my own sake. I do not give for your sake, but for my sake as a giver.

Now assuming there is a hell, would it be good to be tortured to death for my sake as a lover if in the afterlife I would go to hell for it, to burn in her place, if that meant I would not feel pride for my decision, but feel panic and dread for all time, to become a coward, grazing in the flames? This assumption makes hell to annul my self as a good person, ripping my virtues from me. How could it fulfill me to suffer for all time? By the morality of self-sacrifice, however, this would be the highest good.

Thus, dying for another may fulfill our lives even as it ends them, just as letting another die, while we continue our projects, may also fulfill, depending on our values. Either way, we need to be true in life and death to our values, and as long as our mind lives, we must consider what is right for us in the long-run.

So let us first and foremost, and to the exclusion of anything else, fulfill our needs. Let us also fulfill our need to be kind. Abuse is by no means a concern for our own needs, nor even the concern for our own needs at the expense of others, for this is nonsense. We need to love others through kindness. The miser shivers on his money pile, the bully bleeds along with his victims, the gossip deafens herself with her own lies. Given this need to love, which is based on self love, emphasis on our own needs will necessarily direct us to the care for the needs of others.

Yet that is selfish. Would that men were more selfish, for they would be much kinder and much greater. Selfishness is the love for one's own life. Its opposite is suicide, which is the fear of being alive. Selfishness versus suicide. Selfishness respects all selves, QED. Abuse then is a form of suicide, and is not a concern for our own needs, but is instead a concern for a certain set of needs denying our need to love, fulfilled in a way that harms others. Instead, we know that where our treasure is, there also is our heart. And, truthfully, our treasure is our heart.

Your life was a gift. You don't own it. If I am my life, then this gift has no receiver. I am what I am. Our parents do us the favor of giving us life, of giving us a self. We return this favor by living our life, by being ourselves. I did not need to be created, therefore life did not benefit me. There was no me to be benefited. Therefore, life is not a gift. Being raised and loved was good, and for that we love and respect our parents. Our own life is the only thing we fully own.

Your life is a gift from God. If there were a God, he would create our needs according to how we ought to exist, he would responsibly command us to do what is good for us, and if he rewarded and punished, these accord with our needs as well.

Man's central purpose is to benefit mankind. Rather, the species exists so that individuals may live. The species has no literal existence. The individuals reproduce and enculturate one another to express themselves ("I will raise my children my way.) Though some of man's behavior benefits mankind," he does good for trade.

Man needs to belong to a group. Belongingness is a relationship the individual seeks to fulfill his own life. My life owns itself, is for itself, and cannot be owned by anybody else in any sense or degree. What I choose to trade from love or fear is my choice.

There must be some objectivity behind our moral imperatives. Why should I do this or that thing? Well why should I do anything? Should shoulds exist? Isn’t this very question a paradox? Therefore, we must answer, shoulds exist, and so are objective, they have being, and could not be imagined to exist without using the very function they serve. Unless the should is imagined to commit suicide: there shouldn’t be shoulds, then we must ask the further question, Why do shoulds exist? They exist at least as human ideas, and we already know what ideas are for: to empower the organism to fulfill its needs. There can be no escaping that shoulds exist for the same reason, therefore, that there can be no question To be or not to be? or should I exist at all? since that very should is already in reference to the should-er, the one who makes and uses shoulds for a purpose, namely, personal fulfillment. It can therefore be safely said that suicide, in an ultimate sense of absolute extinction, should never be sought, and furthermore, to seek such a thing would require some mental illness that upsets the reason, and the instincts it is based upon.

Needs versus happiness

If duty is need, and happiness is felt when need is fulfilled, then it is our duty to please ourselves; indeed, this is our only duty. Nevertheless, pleasure is not the proper goal.

Some have used the word happiness for what he seeks for its own sake, and not for the sake of anything else. How should we complete the sentence, I want to be happy because…? What do we say? We say, "I want to be happy because then my needs