Better, good, safe, happy-- these are irrelevant to me.
Part 1
There once was a child named Ly. Ly looked out upon the world and saw two great forces locked into a deathly dance. Their names were good and bad. They danced
through humans and
upon humans; humans were the tiles underfoot, the dance-floor for these grand forces they were subject to.
Ly saw this, and Ly was discontent. Day by day, month by month, her discontent grew, as Eris*. She felt the burden of the tireless, slavish cycle of good after bad after good after bad after good after bad. She saw it all around her, and she knew it for the slave-master that it was. She could see the walls of the cells built from good and bad, but knew not of the possibility of escape.
Depressed, sad, happy, uplifted-- people walked under these banners in contended discontent, sated by the good in a duality where each, necessarily, depended for its existence upon the other. Ly looked upon them, and she could see only slaves to duality.
Ly lived long with her discontent.
---
Homer, Iliad 4. 441 ff (trans. Lattimore) (Greek epic C8th B.C.) :
"Ares drove these [the Trojans] on, and the Akhaians grey-eyed Athene, and Phobos (Terror) drove them, and Deimos (Fear), and Eris (Hate) whose wrath is relentless, she is the sister and companion of murderous Ares, she who is only a little thing at the first, but thereafter grows until she strides on the earth with her head striking heaven. She then hurled down bitterness equally between both sides as she walked through the onslaught making men's pain heavier."
---
Part 2
Ly grew and, reluctantly, turned her starry eyes away from the cannibalistic frenzy of good and bad. She saw how they ravaged their humans, but she saw not how to usurp their tyranny. She busied herself, instead, with murdering another prison-guard: personality.
Ly devised a complex battle-plan in her war against personality. She had been gifted a Thelemite Tarot deck from an old witch while she was picking mushrooms in the forest behind her house. When she returned home, she laid out the 22 cards of the Major Arcana, and she thought: "what if I could be 22, instead of 1?" Her martial strategy was as follows:
She would divide her life into 2-week long cycles. At the start of every cycle she would pick, at random, 1 of the 22 cards. For the first week, she would learn everything possible about the single card chosen.
She would immerse her mind in it. Symbols, sensations, spirits, patterns, traits-- she would learn and permeate all.
At the start of the second week, she would become the card. Every thought, action, tendency, habit, stylism, and moment of waking and sleeping would be lived as an embodiment of the card. Her dress, how she was with people, her dancing, her magic, her ventures out in the wilderness beyond-- all would be determined by the card randomly picked, during this second week of each cycle.
Thereby, she knew, she would overcome the tyranny of little personality.
14 weeks later, after being and seeing wonders unimagined, Ly sat down cross-legged in meditation, with her black witch-child's hair and her starry eyes, and shuffled. She was nervous as she always was when she shuffled: one card had made her beautiful and loved by all. Another had made her preach as a wrathful saint, and another had made her threaten to stab her father's eye out with a silver fork. She always prayed not to pick the 15th card, the Devil.
Ly softly laid out the chosen card in front of her, face down upon the forest-cottage floor.
Her eyes traced the shape of the unicursal hexagram on the card's back, and she knew it to be a symbol binding the heavens above and the human-beyond-personality. She knew the center to show the sun, and the outer points to show the planets, and she knew that this was also a map of what the human soul could be, when it awakened to itself and shook off the tyranny of little personality.
She turned over the card. It was the devil. She was scared, knowing not what becoming the devil would do to her, but she knew that overcoming her fear was the hard path to the top of the mountain whose summit was freedom from personality. She would become a human dream-walking, bringing fantasy and wonder to this world of petty-character and mundane restriction, no matter what it cost her.
Part 3
But she was scared. Oh how she was scared. She who had been a Sun and a Hermit, and who had denied, in her life, what her elders had thought it meant to be human. She who would kill good and bad themselves... she was afraid she couldn't go on. She looked into the devil's mocking face and thought to herself, 'why must I be that?'.
And Eris spoke back: because the old tyrant
good and bad speaks through you now, child, and only by plunging into what it speaks against may you hurt it.
And so she wrote her new soul down on paper:
Card XV- The Devil, Pan, Capricorn, Ayin
Pan- The All-Begetter
With thy right eye create all for thyself, and with the left accept all that be created otherwise
1) I rejoice in the rugged and barren no less than in the smooth and fertile. All things equally exalt me. I am the complete appreciation of all existing things.
2) I am the inherent drive to create, free from conceptualisation and socialisation. I am life force.
3) I am the ecstatic monster beneath structured, moralistic society. I am the true life which they deny and struggle against.
4) I am the ecstatic liberation in blind impulse. I am divinely unscrupulous, sublimely careless of result.
5) I am the tempter. I seduce Him to embrace the pleasure of now and here; of life.
6) Mirth: all is play and all amuses me. I am divine hilarity.
7) I am the divine madness of spring. I am ecstatic, orgiastic intoxication. I am drunken ecstasy, the end of worry.
8) I am the dance of existence. All to me is play, and all play to me is fair.
9) I am life itself, unrestrained, in mad Love...
10) I am creative strength... challenge and conflict stimulate my mirth, intoxication, and impulsive creation.
||IMPULSE, DIVINE MADNESS, SEXUALITY, INTOXICATION, INHERENT POWER, UNIVERSAL EXALTATION||
I am he who was, is, and shall be. I am world-soul. I am self-aware archetypes.
Week 2: as this great force arose within her. Oh
what force within her!
Ga Wath Am, she danced and danced, in frenzy and ecstasy. She felt the great primal force which all forms and structures were
built from and
built to direct, raw, pure,
conscious, and ecstatic. From it she crafted beauties unknown, creatures unseen, and dreams undreamt.
This force was older than her and older than her humanity. Everything human seemed to her driven by this force, but also in denial of its primacy, and striving not to be it. She mused to herself:
" Humans are so identified with the mechanisms by which they structure this force’s effects that they believe them to be somehow independent and ends in themselves. And so morality and compassion are treated as higher states of being while the primal becomes ‘base’; they don't realise that ‘base’ forces are the base upon which the fragile constructs of social values and mutual consideration stand. "
On she danced, but her feet faltered. Her mind was heavy, and it weighed upon her so much that she again sat and thought:
" Culture, they assume, is independent from and superior to this primal life-force; culture, in actuality, is driven by this life-force and adapted primarily to the purpose of directing its limited expression. Society and the social self erect grand facades designed to shield their eyes from the source of their own existence.
I am living *life*, instead of living culture or abstraction. I have bypassed my humanity and experienced the world through the eyes of something much more deeply alive.
"
And so she went out and killed and ate her best friend, using no weapons but her third eye and a sharpened goat's horn. And what ecstasy she felt.
She thought 'good and bad are cannibalistic, and if I am to equal and oppose them, surely I must be cannibalistic as well'.
Then she thought 'good and happy and white is a pattern, a fixation of the flow of this great life-force, solidified so that those who chase after it have a structure and a solidity to hold on to'. 'If they did not have a
good harbor, the leaping, laughing, ecstatic frenzy and chaos would tear their little personalities apart'.
And so Ly, rejecting any good, was torn apart, and she became Lya.
And she lied thus. By this lie she finally killed good and bad, the dual language in which
little personality is written:
Little humans,
Welcome to true life. There are no judgments here. You will not be told what you should be or should do. You are perfect, and all that you are exalts me. All that you have been and will be is, to me, perfect.
Why is it that you spend so much of your life struggling to transform? No, this isn't another should. This isn't another judgement.
What follows is a story, true in part, but mostly fantasy
You were born, and then you grew and did as best you could, and all the time you were chastised for being what you are. You were taught to loathe so much of what you are. You were even taught to loathe lessons you had learned from the priests of loathing. There was no question of being good enough. You were a human, and those around you believed that to be justification enough for their hatred of your multiplicity. You, as you were, were never enough.
You were judged. Every moment of your life was judged and distinguished and categorised, and you were alienated from life without commentary; you were alienated from life lived for no purpose other than living. Everything became an event in the epic story of who you are- every moment a tragedy or a victory, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable. You did your best to be good, in whatever way you believed you could, but it was never enough.
In almost every word everywhere you will find judgement. You could spend lifetimes being chastised for what you are by the great overflow of words on this here INFJ forum. You could become what they, explicitly or implicitly, tell you you should be, but still you would not be enough. You would still be of the judged and would still be a judge, and thus would reside in a world of imperfection-- a world which needs to be reformed. You could do your best, but it would never be enough.
It hurts, doesn't it? It hurts when every other word necessitates that you be something or do something, lest you feel that you do not have its speaker's approval? It hurts, to be attacked from all fronts day after day. It hurts that you, as you are now, are not enough.
Know that whatever you do or don't do, whatever you become, whatever you have been-- I, now, love all that you are and all that is. All exalts me now, and all that is is perfect now. Your pain, your suffering, your joy, your self-hate... all is perfect to me and I love it all completely and without qualification. There are no judgments here, no teachings here, no lessons here. My love for existence- even for non-existence- is universal and without aim or cause. My love may not be here tomorrow, and it was not yesterday, but realise that at one point in one life
all was perfect and ecstatic.
Don't feel compelled to join me- I will love you and me either way. For your joy, though, why not try leaving judgement aside for a moment? It will still be there when you come back. Life can be perfect as it is. Murder can be perfect as it is. Poverty can be perfect as it is. Your pain can be perfect as it is. Rape can be perfect as it is. Your anger and greatness and jealousy and pettiness and poetry all perfect and not in need of reform. What you are- EVERYTHING that you are- is enough and is perfect. You can, if only for a single moment of your life, experience complete perfection and the end of the struggle to not be what you are.
All equally exalts me.
Love,
Lya
Lyra then spoke to herself, secretly: I have made what good-followers think is bad divine. I have made both sides of the cycle divine, and the cycle has thus ceased. I cannot fall into badness or little-depressions or anxieties, because I cannot fall at all. All is divinity, and I am a shark in sea whose name is PAN, swerving her pleasure-predatory head from left to right, finding not good or bad but MULTITUDE AND SELF-SAME, without need of valuation or juxtaposition. I have destroyed duality by affirming all, and now I may see anew with the eyes of a triangle.
Part 4
Lyra played after that. She had lost
should and
good, and in their place found monsters and great heavenly beasts unknown withing good-built worlds. She grew distant from her humanity, busy as she was with quests and games unknown to those of human tongues. She learned to mask herself with human intent, and saw how she could, in this way, line up and knock over humans like dominos. All was ecstasy, so there was no deed below or above her, and no deadly game she would not play at, for play's sake.
One day, after scaring a tepid group of good-blinded Wiccans, Lyra cut sat down in her cabin, cut herself, and wrote in blood:
Enshrouded in dreams we have stolen from heaven, woven through the immediate as lies through the fabric of truth. Your
perpetual juxtapositions and hierarchies of meaning are no more than the inert matter from which we create the beyond, with smashing anvils and ripping saws. Scorn for
their self-seriousness is our laughter, our secret ever in plain view: we who hold to
no should and recognise
no right. And so we rip
them limb from limb and distill from
their mundane blood oil for our engines of divine war. We who have discovered the greatest weapon: a false right, constructed knowingly.
O affected earnestness, artful mask: you are my greatest discovery. You who are a shadowed gate to their endarkened sludge-slow worlds. It is by your
chthonic grace that my light-fast Mercurial terror enlists love, truth, and the good as its blind soldiers. It is through you that I infect the sleepers with visions of waking. Intermediary between heaven and earth: hallowed be thy name.
O time beyond the fleeting rhythms of thought: on your back, steed, I ride towards life's light. Atop you I command armies of dormant Gods: causal-bound humans blind to the vision of aeons. Towards their shells of stupidity am I violent and tyrannical. Within those shells is a fire unkindled: that I love.
O yes, I am verily Queen of the universe and life itself
. Verily verily
verily. Yes doctor, I've taken my medication. No doctor, I don't actually believe it. It's fictional literature, honestly. No doctor, I'm sure a stay at the institution isn't necessary.
She had triumphed. Good and bad were her servants, and she filled her days with cosmic laughter and Dreccian games. She laughed as she looked down, with intense bloodshot eyes and manic grimace, at the page upon which her blood had been shaped into mocking words.
She stood up, and turned.
She caught her reflection in the mirror on the cottage-wall. She screamed.
She ran out her house into the woods, frenziedly seeking a human. She found many people, but no humans anywhere. She screamed and screamed.
Her lips don't move anymore, but she has never stopped screaming since, and has never seen a human being again.
