| The Cast of the Mental Paths |
| The Characters **Picture of the cast** |
*~* A philosophic conversation between Ze and Sie... *~*
Sie and Ze were together in a sitting room, a study of a sort. There were tall, dark wood bookshelves on some of the walls, desks with various intellectual toys like hourglasses, metronomes, scales, and so forth resting on them... there were high-backed chairs available for sitting on. Sie was currently sitting, the book 'Living, Loving & Learning' by Leo Buscaglia in hir lap; Ze standing and pacing, listening while Sie read aloud. "'This may sound very, very naive to you, but I believe that if you were to decide to "be" tonight.... let's say that you were to say tonight as you left, "I am going to to find out what it means to be a lover of life", or "I am going to find out what it means to be a lover, and starting tonight, I am going to behave as a lover. Whenever I start to say anything negative, I'm going to stick my fist in my mouth."'" Ze shook hir head, and Sie tapped a finger down the page. "Yeah, here... 'What would happen to you in the next three or four weeks would be outrageous. Incredible.'" Sie dragged the finger down, murmuring fragments from the page. "'self-defeating self....' Hmm, hmm.... Oh?" "You find it yet?" Ze rested on another chair, opposite Sie on the table with the scale. "Yeah, right here. 'But the real thing that we must dedicate ourselves to, if we're going to choose life, is choosing life in the present! Right now! Because that's where it all matters. Because we are also a potential. But in order to develop this potential, we've got to rid ourselves of 'self-defeating self'. Paul Reps calls it "the paraphernalia of anti-self". And boy are we full of it! We've got to rid ourselves of "don'ts." We've got to rid ourselves of "nevers." We've got to rid ourselves of "no's"---what a negative world! We've got to rid ourselves of "impossibles"---nothing's impossible. We've got to rid ourselves of "hopeless"---nothing's hopeless. These are words for fools, not intelligent people. Wipe them out of your vocabulary. Never say never! "Impossible? Of course it's possible."'" Ze shook hir head, and cut in. "So, basically, this book is calling me a fool? That's what you wanted to say?" "Hang on, I'm not done yet. There's still another few sentences here, and then there's another part just on a page or two later." Sie gave Ze a mild glare, annoyed but not angry, and continued to read. "...'I'm convinced that your incompleteness is responsible for causing you your greatest suffering. Become all that you are. Embrace it. But that's not enough. You may say, "That sounds like an awful lot," but keep doing it because that's a life's work. Discovering new learning, new abilities, new creativity. You could live to be 500 and you could still be producing like crazy.'" Ze looked like ze wanted to interrupt, but hir mouth stayed closed even as her fingers intertwined and ze leaned onto the table. "'But if you want to change faster, more magically, you must change that "I" and broaden it to an "us." You must include me. I'm really very tired of the "I" and the "Me" generation and I think you are too.'"
Sie put a hand up even while sie paused in hir talking, and flipped a page forward. "And here's the last part... 'To choose life, we must be willing to risk again and love again. Can you think of anything more important? What do we work for? What do we strive for? What do we suffer for? What do we hope for? It's love. It's life. To miss it will always be your greatest loss.
Sie and Ze stared at each other as sie closed the book, and Ze scratched at hir chin. "You must suffer... to love. You must be open and exposed to suffering... Do you honestly want fear, pain? Do you honestly want those things? I mean, really? That makes me feel concerned, wouldn't you rather have the love, and all the good things?" "I want love, yeah. But you can't just get the 'good' parts of life, you get it all together if you want to really feel any of it." Sie replied, shaking hir head. Ze frowned again. "Sure, that's part of how life works... But who wants to be hurt? Who wants to be mugged, or accosted? No one, no one of course, and since you see that, since you understand that... you don't actually want pain, you don't actually want risk, you want the good things that come from opening yourself up. So, let's make this world safer. "Let's lock away the criminals and get watch-groups on every street and cameras in stores and sex offenders watched by GPS and a hundred thousand more soldiers and police officers and, and...and... Why are you shaking your head? No? No? Come now, you can't be serious, of course you want children to be safe--" Sie nodded a little at this, and Ze nodded as well, "yes---and this is how we can! Oh, this, this is the way, or the best and most accessible way---the easiest way to protect the children! And if you don't support making the world safer for children this way, then you must have some better idea we can work on... no?" Sie said nothing, frowning, and listening. Ze stood up again, and began to pace. "No, I didn't think so. You just live in this idealistic world, but I tell you if you want to protect others, regardless of whatever risks you're willing to take for your hoped joys, then we must do this! You're just too idealistic, too caught up in your fantasies to realize that this is the way things are and this is the way they must be if we're gonna fix this!" Ze stamped hir foot on the ground, giving Sie the impression of the red-faced, heavy breathing stereotype of someone who's gotten worked up. Sie shook hir head, sighing, and reached a finger ahead onto the left side of the scale. "'This is the way things are supposed to be'.... they aren't the way the are supposed to be now, is that what you mean? And we understand the sentiment, and we understand surrendering ourselves in faith that, in fact, outside things may be the way they are supposed to be, that there's some plan we're according to that we just don't need to know, and that we can simply continue as things have just been..." Sie released hir hand, and watched the scales balancing out. "Up, down, up, down... It's not an overall up down, it's not one unto itself. It's some external object holding it in tandem, balanced, where on gives and the other takes, and neither can win and both lose as they're trapped with two or three choices: to be trapped in trying to subjugate the other, or giving up and being subjugated, or getting only parts of what they want---" "Compromise!" Ze cut in, frowning, arms crossed. "Is that what you're discouraged by? It's a necessary aspect of society! I sacrifice my freedom to kill anyone I want, with the understanding that you will also sacrifice that freedom; our freedoms to kill will be gone, so as to allow us a greater guarantee of our freedom to live! And similarly, there are other freedoms we surrender to gain other, overall freedoms..." They stared silently at each other for a moment, and Ze nodded slowly. "You don't like sacrificing any of your ideals, and one of your ideals is to never force others to create your own ideals... you like everyone choosing the same thing you have, on their own accord. So you can't get what you want until everyone agrees with you, and you don't want to let go of it, so you sit there, frustrated that your only choices are to continue striving within yourself with no specific hope or guarantee of success, or to give up and let the people willing to force others force your path... Hmm?" Sie nodded, frowning, poking down on the scale again, but remained silent. "Well... Let me see that book a minute." Ze put a hand out for the book, resting next to the scale, and started leafing through. "Page One Seventy... something...?" "Which part?" "That thing about being incomplete." "Umm..." Sie straightened up, glancing on the pages. "Next... next... there. One seventy-nine." "Mmm." Ze nodded, licking hir lip, and scanned down the page. "Yeah... there. You know what the first thing I thought of was?" Sie shook hir head. "That obsession you used to have with not knowing what you want to do... with asking me for advice, and that conversation we had about 'Xe' weeks ago..." "...You thought of religion?" Sie tilted her head for a moment, then frowned. "Let me guess... incomplete because I haven't accepted 'God'..." "You don't have to be cynical about it." Ze moved to put the book back on the table, and jostled the scale. The sides began swinging, and ze nodded again. "I mean it, though. You prefer 'spiritual' to 'religious', but isn't it the same idea? Whether it involves looking to god as a being outside yourself or inside yourself..." Sie shook hir head. "But there are such different ideas of 'god'... and when I hear you talk about..." Again sie shook hir head, and frowned at the scale pointedly. "Scales.... scales, and equality, and balance.... safety and innocence, and deserving justice or punishment or retribution or reward... like we're... uh, like, "What is now is not enough and cannot be. Happiness and good are all that should be, but we were bad and wrong and now we pay out retribution to Hir and all the payment may never be enough! But if it can be, if we can eventually pay enough, we'll die and next comes the life we didn't deserve this time, but upon equalling out our balance with Hir, Xe will give us all the glory and good and happiness there ever could have been so long as we utterly surrender ourselves to this deity... "And then, for people who are used to this idea of a scale but who doubt it, there could never be enough good to make up for the bad now, like we deserve good things just for having experienced bad things! We 'deserve' it.... I don't get it, I don't agree with it." Sie sighed, shaking hir head. "Why not 'surrender' with 'diety'...? The difference being that you still trust and love yourself, and aren't desperately grasping at spiritual authorities to tell you what to do?" Ze frowned at this idea, and noticing, Sie nodded quickly. "Remember when I came crying 'tell me what to do?!' to you? Isn't it the same idea, just quieter and with 'god' instead of a friend, for people to surrender themselves to this plan?" Ze had looked solemnly interested, and now put a hand up to hir chin again. "You see it as... a person who is more religiously inclined might be more inclined to submissively face life, dreading and accepting suffering, enjoying and praising love, but doing so in a manner that's more about what others tell them they should be doing?" "Yeah." Sie nodded. "I want... people to do what they want to do. That doesn't just mean the conservative nightmare vision of people deliberately doing everything that was lawless, attacking and killing and rampant sex, theft and taking from everyone else... I don't just mean what they want in themselves, all the actions we take to try to fill the inner incompleteness.... not pills, not food, not sex, nothing just for the sake of filling----to be themselves, full, now! To actually care about other individual PEOPLE, and not just the ideas of people, and trying to do what society or religion or authority tells them to do..." "And, what, you trust people to ever actually do that? Most people don't even conceive of such a thing, and then many of us who do still have no idea how to do so... Sie, you love this ideal, but can you tell me how to live like that? Or can you describe how you do, can you be a role model for me?" "No, I can't." Sie shook hir head, and sighed. "Then.... I don't know what you can say. It's pretty idea, but humanity isn't capable of that yet." Sie frowned, thinking, and glanced down at hir hands, flicking a few fingers up on each of hir hands. "It sounds just like heaven, you know that? Not... I don't mean that my idea's just a utopia---I mean, you make it sound like the idea of heaven, that we're too sinful and bad and ignorant to understand yet, that we'll be able to reach later... but for now we have to be miserable, and all we can do is try to help each other." Ze opened hir mouth, but Sie continued. "And then, you ask me to be a role model, to show you---to tell you---how to live without needing people to tell you what to do! I, how can I do that? It's not possible. It's completely against the idea for me to tell you what to do... Ze, you're assuming things that I don't think I believe. And it's not just you, it's lots of people...." "...Huh." Ze glanced over at Sie, staring at hir for a moment. "...It really bothers you, to accept an inability to reach perfection?" "Well... then... why are we trying to be perfect if we can't be? Why is there this idea of, of there could be perfection---could have been perfection, but now we can't ever have that again because we're such terrible beings down to our core... and the only place we ever could is the after life? I mean, from what I know, that idea came from the same kind of idea as the Eden story... a story explaining why there is pain and hurt and cruelty in a world that was supposed to have been made perfect by a perfect, good god. So it blames it on us, on us falling, on us being tempted by trying to be gods instead of letting god be god... So, then, the idea was that in order to fix things we had to go back to living with god, and with each other, in this perfect and balanced way of living. But then somebody added the idea that it's all our fault---and we can never fix it. Game over! We screwed ourselves. And that's the nature of existence. I hate that."
***To Be Continued***
The book referenced through this is one of Leo Buscaglia's books on love... I'll put the proper citation later. "XE"= A quick explanation of this name.
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