MAY 1982 / 28 JAN 1989
Taurus party
A year after Derek Valentine
first appeared in the mirror in May, 1981, he went to a party
with a bunch of play money. Each dollar was good for twenty minutes
of service, and they could be signed and given away by anybody.
It was a Taurus party, held in early May to honor those born
under the sign of Taurus (April 20 to May 20).
![[IMAGE]](gdollar.gif)
Not much in the way of service resulted, but the money caught the imagination of the players and made them feel rich and generous as they gave it away.
![[IMAGE]](g3dollar.gif)
1447
22 MAR 1984
THREE-VALUED LOGIC: True, false
& funny.
This is actually an eight-valued
logic, since all three values are
independent, representing three degrees of freedom, each with
two states.
FALSE TRUE FUNNY
0 0 0 Null reaction, meaningless.
0 0 1 Funny but meaningless.
0 1 0 Serious truth, belief, science.
0 1 1 True and funny, new truth, aha!
1 0 0 Serious falsehood, standard worldview.
1 0 1 Errors, jokes, the lie exposed.
1 1 0 Paradox, dilemma and conflict. Not funny.
1 1 1 Freedom from belief. Liberation.
Hilarious ambiguity.
654
30 MAR 84
The Upstart Spring by Walter Anderson
(1983)
Esalen and the American Awakening.
p.112 "Murphy didn't go around telling people what he was planning to do at Esalen; he asked them what they thought he ought to do. Once asked, they inevitably gave advice, and. . .developed a personal investment in the enterprise's future success."
On the other hand, as soon as Esalen set out to change the world its efforts started to fall flat. Esalen had departed from its own principles, which included the Taoist wu-wei, or going with the flow.
Ways of tapping spiritual energy were developed, but this energy could go only into middle-class male-dominant society, perpetuating and strengthening its insane course. This was spotted as early as 1968, and the movement identified as largely internal narcissism--the ME decade.
p.319 Esalen's Law: You always
teach what you most need to learn.
634
22 SEP 1984
This is divinity school
There's just
one rule about how we'll run our world: it had better be fun. It had better
be entertaining. Who wants boring gods?
To achieve this the class will reward the efforts of fellow gods with funny money, created on the spot to indicate how much fun was had by all. In this way we establish our combined creation on a firm economic base of entertainment value.
Where we go from there is determined by who has the funny money. The most popular and entertaining gods will make up the rules, turning the world upside-down and creating games which are continually being tested and refined by the dictates of the funny money system. some may even be marketable.
Some creations may be
based on romance, via romantic games. Then we can have fun both in and out
of class. If our gods are both entertaining and romantic then just maybe they're
qualified to go on to create other things and improve the world.
32
27 DEC 1984
Funny money
Spiritual currency sounds like funny
money, and it is. We can create it to represent how much fun we had, fun being
a prime spiritual good.
1337
02 JAN 1985
Heretics vs. Inquisition
Heresy is an
illicit and profitable type of consciousness-altering information. If allowed
to spread this could result in the overthrow of established belief systems.
The Inquisition's purpose is to trace this foul traffic to its source and put a stop to it.
USERS AND DEALERS. Users buy the heresy of their choice in units as small as one page. To finance their habit users may run some copies of their heresy and resell it. Thus users are easily tempted by the availability of copy machines to become dealers and the heresy spreads.
PRODUCTION: The source
of heresy could be anyone, anytime, which makes it very difficult to suppress.
In practice, a few creative people will produce the bulk of the heresy in
a few popular brands, and these are the main targets. They are easy to identify,
but still protected in this country by the First Amendment. All the Inquisition
can do is manipulate the heretical economy to bankrupt or discredit them.
499
13 APR 1985
Information and triple logic
Information has value, is a commodity that can be traded, produced,
concealed from other players. In the last case it is a secret. Making information
scarce raises its value.
Misinformation can also be generated to confuse competitors and conceal secrets, and the games that can be played with two-valued logic are both sophisticated and familiar. Generally the object of such games is to win by discovering what is true and what is false.
Advanced games use three-valued or triple logic. The three values are: true, false and funny. Humor has entertainment value and will generally earn more game currency than other types of information. All three values can be combined to create new levels of uncertainty, challenge and entertainment.
For example, falsehood posing as truth is familiar and serious (a lie) or funny (a joke). How about truth posing as false? That can appear to be a joke and the truth is protected (a secret). The deception itself is funny to the perpetrators, so they can laugh along with the victims but for a different reason.
That's an example of information that is both true and funny, and in fact triple logic admits of eight combinations. There is always at least one combination that can be used to outwit someone using two-valued logic.
For example, suppose
you use heresy to expose a false value system. The Inquisition will then attack
the heretics. But if the heresy is built into a game of "Heretics versus
Inquisition" then the Inquisition has been tricked into attacking a game
in which their roles have been pre-assigned. The further they go and the more
serious their attacks, the bigger fools they'll seem.
808
17 AUG 1986
If you're serious you've missed the point
What is seriousness? It is concern
over gain or loss. It is giving value to structures and symbols. It is insisting
things have to be a certain way.
Humor lives in abundance. Loss
is a joke. Structures and symbols are a joke when worshipped
as absolutes, and people are a joke if they think they must be
a certain way. The clown represents the truth of human changeableness.
774
16 SEP 1986
Deadpan
No matter how ridiculous
the material, deadpan holds up as a religious position. The alternative
logic, psychology (we're all crazy), economics and freedom of
belief are all part of a comprehensive religion. The game of
heretics vs inquisition is deemed essential also to religious
growth. The secrecy and levels are a mystery to be cracked (find
the grail).
8591
17 SEP 1986
Semi-revolutionary
Inversion is half a revolution
-- turning things upside down. Full revolutions end up where
they started.
8592
18 SEP 1986
Standing joke
Must be durable. Acting
it out is a source of continuing life-long pleasure, assured
by the payoffs alone, but before that fed by the incongruity
of worldviews.
767
16 MAR 1988
Creation
In the business of world-creation
we can get trapped in the necessity of it. But the world we create
will reflect our effort--so we'd better be light-hearted and
playful about it. There is no room for fanaticism or any limiting
of options.
427
Once upon a time a benevolent god answered his people's prayers and gave them exactly what they wanted: an unlimited supply of money.
Well, the chief priests of economics didn't like that. They said it would ruin everything. But the people didn't listen, and the economy boomed, and everybody got rich.
But the god was in trouble. He started hearing from a great many unhappy millionaires. What was wrong now?
It seems they needed to keep score, and most people lost count at a million or less. Then they went to pieces, losing their bearings in life, turning to drugs, even destroying their credit cards.
There was a growing opinion that the god had indeed ruined everything with his cursed gift, which could not now be removed. There was talk of looking for a new god who could restore meaning to their lives.
Now the over-generous god saw his career was on the line, and he understood why only the mean old gods tend to survive in this business. So he called his angels together to figure how to turn things around and stay in the game. To motivate them he gave them an unlimited supply of money, and their challenge was to make it count, to make it valuable, to make it mean something.
And they did. They made the money good for only the things money can't buy. This happened to be the answer to the latest prayers, which were all for things people couldn't buy with their wealth.
File no. 0139 -- 28 AUG 1988
10 FEB 1989
Laughter overrules lies
The fool does not get drawn into the battleground of truth and
lies. But what else is there? Our heretics must move in a third
dimension to escape the anvil of right and wrong. They move in
the direction of FUN, and never mind if something's true or false--is
it funny? Laughter overrules lies without a fight.
1061
05 MAR 1989
The last shall be first
"But many that are first shall be last;
and the last shall be first."
--JESUS (Matt 19:30)
Jesus was an Aquarian, some say,
and he was very specific. Not all the
first would be last, which suggests that there's a strategy for
heretics at
all stations of life to ride with this inversion of values. And
what would
that be?
"Verily I say unto you,
Except ye be converted,
and become as little children,
ye shall not enter into
the kingdom of heaven."
--(Matt 18:3)
The children, the mental patients,
the last--these have the least
investment in the prevailing insanity. They may already be wise.
Wisdom is
simple, simpler than intelligence. They may already be in heaven.
The rest
of us have to be converted back to sanity.
And to rub it in Jesus told the
parable of the laborers in the
vineyard. They all received the same reward, even those recruited
at the
eleventh hour. Those who have to work longest to get to heaven
find
themselves no further ahead than those who can walk right in.
Hmm... That was in Matthew 20. And here's another one:
"Blessed are the meek:
for they shall inherit the earth."
--(Matt 5:5)
St. Matthew seems to have picked up all the
references to inversion.
And he wound up first in the New Testament.
1084
THE ABOLITION OF WORK by Bob Black
full text (40k) available through your favorite search engine
here are some highlights:No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution.
...The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival.
...Like the surrealists ... I favor full unemployment.
...I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.
...Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick.
...But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential.
...Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible.
...Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic.
...You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous.
...Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship.
...Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work
is for saps!"
...The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health."
...At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand ... we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes.
...Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
...If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation.
...Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not -- as it is now -- a zero-sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.
Workers of the world... RELAX!
File no. 1095 -- APR 1989 -- Derek Brownlee