Esse Maxim Praxis

Esse Maxim Praxis

Samuel Bird

One should typically wait until they have finished living out a portion of their life story before they process it and begin to make it into a narrative. I am not doing this. I am in the middle of a chapter, and being in the midst of it, these experiences, characters, and circumstances swirl around me in a seemingly untamable swarm of dead facts. I will one day make sense of it sufficient to exclude some facts and accentuate others. For now, I share it in its current rawness as I find it. Since I was a little boy, I have been thrust into an existential dread. Life offered me no answers and yet constantly twisted my arm to act on facts I did not have. Greatest of all of these was my walk toward death. It is never far from my mind. Existence as all I have ever known, and then what? What lay beyond that last gentle pull of the eyelids over the sighted world? I am never but a few moments away from death presenting itself to me. I would stay up late into the night as a small child, trying to make sense of death. Some adults said that a God they couldn’t prove to me made a little heaven where my favorite cow and namesake great-grandfather would be. However, some other adults said there was no such heaven. Neither state could be proved. One state was a lie I desperately needed, and the other an honesty I was not brave enough for. However, neither of them knew. Neither of them could now. What it was like or if there was another moment after the last moment my body was, and no one could say. My friend death, walking close behind me all my years. I saw his role in the world around me, and from an age too early, I thought to join him. God was the question. He was the “if” for every soul needed “then.” While my parents stayed home, I would walk past golden fields of barley and emerald fields of alfalfa, to a church. I would show up early, help with setting up the chairs, and then sit there and listen as I tried to be convinced of the comforting of my mortality. However, God was still not necessary, at least to where I found myself in the world. I built my whole soul around something that from what I knew, could be otherwise. This dawned on me as I watched horrors mount. Finally, there was no God. Death was something for me to suffer alone and then to have nothing. God didn’t have the dignity to exist and left us to the devices of an untoward world. I will share this story in better detail later, but suffice it to say I was pressed into an atheism that I wallowed and lamented in from around the age of thirteen to nineteen. Life didn’t slow in the process. I experienced greater violence, starvation, and did not have access to an education. I could barely read, had no social skills, and had a speech impediment bad enough to make me sound unsound. My circumstances became more dire and my poor home life became no home life at all. I lived in backyards, barns, garages, and abandoned homes. Through broken roofs I would look up to stars and lament at God that He didn’t exist. Desperate circumstances became desperate action. A loaf of bread lifted, and then some accompanying water. A dumpster raided for mildly expired meat. My desperation mounted until I was doing this to survive that would kill me. As I will need to save for the climax of my life story, I found myself in jail. My mother, as troubled as she was. She came to visit me and chewed me out for being a good-for-nothing, low-down, moron. Before I walked away from that old metal phone, she calmed herself and said something that was contrastingly beautiful. “God goes to jail.” I didn’t know what she meant, but I wanted to. I attended a few Sunday services, at least so I could say I was a changed man, but I stopped because I was clearly not ready. Miracles unfolded and I found my way out of there, and eventually into the home of a good neighbor. I would come home from the new job I was legally able to acquire without parental consent, to see her reading her bible, burning through packs of cheap cigarettes, and drinking her sweet tea with enough ice to make you wonder if there was any liquid to come out. I would sit down and we would talk for hours. I shared my thoughts about God, but never really told her how I truly felt. She would tell me about how wonderful He was, but I only nodded my head. I had never had someone care for me before. I kept waiting for her to attack me, steal from me, or use me as someone to control. However, she never did. She only loved me and took care of me. One day, I came home and she wasn’t there. I looked all around, but nothing. I went to a neighbor that said she was rushed to the hospital. There was nothing the doctors could do, and she was about to die after being in a coma. Her husband, who passed away just a week ago from my writing this, let me be alone and held her hand as I tried to let words come from my shaky voice to her only possibly conscious perception. “I meant it when I called you mom,” I was somehow able to shake out. As I held her hand and life left her, something did leave. I didn’t know what it was, but it was something that the same portion in me could tell. You will note in my writings, I am a defender of the soul, though likely with a differing definition then some. Here, my definition was eerily similar to the contemporary notion. Life went on, despite me barely being able to do so. Later, I was lying in bed, dying of what I could not tell. A voice came to me in clarity and warmth to tell me to get out of bed, and go to the hospital. After doing so, I found out I was in such extreme heatstroke, the doctor said I likely had brain damage and would have died if I went to sleep. Life went on with me being shaken and curious. Finally, the day came. July twenty-seventh, two thousand and seventeen, I talked with God. I have been asked how literally I mean this or what I experienced, but frankly, it is my secret to enjoy. I will say, I don’t know how God could have been more clear, and yet, I still have to have as much faith as any other. This was the birth of Samuel and the death of Sam. I then poured my whole soul into the local church I went to as a child. I went to every scripture study, service activity, and service. I pleaded with the church leaders to let me proselyte, but they were reasonably concerned about my legal past. I spent two years keeping my nose clean. I would sit there every night, trying to sound out the words from the New Testament to learn how to read and talk. Finally, the day came and I began to minister. As I do, I gave my all and learned who I was. I became a leader. I learned I loved to learn. I cared for people. Finally, I went back home to my small slice of the world. I fell in love and we planned out our wedding, but as some women do when you don’t have much to offer them, she left. During the covid-nineteen epidemic, I was able to enroll in a church school because they lowered the criteria to get in. I was then enrolled in school, could now sort of read, couldn’t write, and certainly didn’t know about this whole algebra thing. I poured my soul into my schooling. I began to read more and more until I was churning through books faster than my poverty allowed. I poured myself into my classes and even enrolled in one about this thing called philosophy. My professor, who is credited in this book, would lead my mind through the history of thought. I would walk home with a racing mind and go on long and late walks to make sense of what I heard and how it resided in me. During this time, I met a girl. To my eyes, I have never before or since seen someone so beautiful. I won’t speak of her much, as I have too many chapters and songs, odes to her absence. I was right back. My mind went right back to the violence, the homelessness, the desperation. I found I had conquered no monster, just ran away for a while. I fell. Down and down my psyche went as I waited to land on bedrock, waited for God. I trusted in Him, but in my hour of greatest need, something was off. He became hazy, without border, and uncertain to me. I did the only thing I knew how to do. I thought. I reasoned, lamented, considered, supposed, hoped, feared, and whatever else it took. You will note I did not share the name for this church I poured my whole soul into. This is because I am not brave enough. What trust would I damage if someone who has tried to play a vital role in your life, fell for something like such? My shame is not infinite, however, as I was not inoculated with normativity or alternatives. I stayed with these ideas until an another philosophy class by another close friend. “Can someone still be in this church, and not believe this about God’s nature?” “No.” He said, with exactitude and confidence. Why did I ask? I knew the answer. My whole life, my redemptive arch, every relationship built over the last six years, they were now under a threat. This threat, the veracity of their joining idea. Months and months, tears poured into my pillow as I begged God, for anything but this. I worked tooth and nail to become someone who mattered, who was cared for, and these new thoughts would destroy all of it. However, God blessed and cursed me to always and forever by authentic to those thoughts in my mind, no matter the misery. With my hands over my bowed head, I told God, I would follow Him where I found Him. No matter the suffering, isolation, and damage. I needed a criteria for making sense of this transition. I came up with three, that you will note, are the criteria I used for “god Killing.” Is the idea consistent with itself, is the idea consistent with my experience of the world, and is the idea consistent with my self and values? The questions are ordered in hierarchy. I went through them with my current belief system, and said no. I sat back and decided this was what I needed to be authentic towards. I then had this interim period where my church was the forest and my bible the flowers. During this time, being both permissible and finally having some money, I tried alcohol for the first time and found out why my ancestors loved it. I kept my eyes open and waited for God’s call. I kept a close inventory of what I thought about God. This humble list would be my guide on where to find Him, of which no distance or treachery too much. I will now say the name of this church as I am quite proud of it. I discovered Eastern Orthodoxy. The first thing that caught my eye was their confidence to call sin, sin. If something is hurting me and possibly damning my soul, I don’t need a priest to sweetly tell me it is for my choice, but to keep me safe. This catching of the eye turned to a searching. The identity of God, which was central to my concerns, identical. My question on the veracity of truth claims being weighed by how authentically the mystics acted as if what they claimed to see was so was proven by the fear and trembling of the fathers. Finally, it was good for my soul. I was not building up some recent ad hoc conceptions of my grandeur. I was coming to God to offer up my relative evil and via His grace asked to be healed of what I chose and be made what He willed. Finally, the day came when reading needed to turn to ritual. I drove the hundred-or-so miles to a church. As I said in the chapter “Rituals,” I opened the heavy doors to smell the incense, hear the chanting, and feel holiness. Last week, after a year and a half of consideration, I was baptized. How many philosophers can you name who were baptized while writing their books? Even Simone Weil did not end up being baptized. I have to thank you. The first chapter I wrote was in the throes of this cognitive dissonance. You walked with me through this, and I will never forget your loyalty. And what of my life? I was willing to leave behind everyone, every memory, and even my whole sense of self to follow after God. No man that leaves house, brothers, and sisters, for God’s sake, to his holy sacrifice will be gifted anew. I really did end up offering up what I was threatening to, but God offered up to me something better. I now know exactly who I am. I am weak, I am scared, I am broken, but I drag my whole messy self to the divine no matter what it costs me. Now, why do you think I shared this story with you? Partially because you need to know who I am. However, what ideas am I trying to offer? I have already talked enough about the divine and the process of changing belief. Set down the book and consider. While I am too close to the story to see it clearly, I am sharing this with you, because I need you to notice something. Do you think I regret what I did when I was atheist or the old faith? By my values, yes. My values say such was sin and heresy. However, what of the metavalue? This is that one engages with one’s existence, and that what one honestly comes by to believe, that they act on it. You will note I was sincere and sacrificial to each instance of what I thought. I could not control the facts as they presented themselves to me for my processing. However, I could control that my belief as doxis, turned into action as praxis, all to make myself and my life have a meaning as telos. I prayed last night and this morning in hesychastic meditation. At the end of which, I asked that these ideas God and I handled together in our minds and hearts, that His grace would give me strength unto living them out. 

Suddenly, we exist. From that existence, we as consciousness gain an experience of existence. All the things in existence as well as the totality of existence now have a quality or seemingness to them. Of these qualities and the sort of things to experience, we have a towardness toward perpetuance or a desire to continue existing. From such, a certain sort of positioning to existence is valued. To remedy this, we possess the land of concepts as the mind. We can now look at experiences in existence to affirm or deny such that we can continue to exist. However, we now have cognition available to attempt to understand existence, and such finds it as something not very understandable. In part, this mind will always know that everything it thinks, it can also manage to think otherwise. What then does it definitely and definitively have to work with? Breaking from the parts of existence that we extract qualities, at some point the conscious soul steps back to swallow up the seemingness of all of being. Whether totalling parts of dividing wholes, it makes no sense. Why do we exist, when not existing would make more sense? Why do we have experiences of things, and then later experiences of the world tell us the first were inconsistent with the first? What brought about the infinitely unlikely world we live in, and where is the other half of it to explain itself? Of the values that we possess, which bring about our core will? Of what we see in the world, are these other things that allege to be the same as me really mes? As they all die, do I? When I do, what will I experience? If something, how would it be anything other than an ever-present momentous experience with no memory from the mind? While I have no surety of what this existence was about, that is not to say that there was not such. If so, would I then be accountable to that I had no reason to know? Our mind is dashed against reality with the sheerness of suchness that is more than one can take in and a vacuous void with nothing available to handle. We have nothing, suppose too much, and the whole time is pushed forward by a yearning so core to what we are, it may very well be what we are. The conscious experience mingled with the conceptual mind made a dilemma of existence, but it also made the means for attempting to fight back against the world we see through our minds by working in the world we see from our souls. In the mind, we saw patterns that brought about the valued resources, inferred causality, and made these systems more and more complex until they were sufficient for our survival. These models were then available to use their might toward the unsatiated end of the soul. We then go from thinking to continue existence to thinking to understand existence. We are not something to succeed in doing so, but we are something to need to attempt. From this, we are left with only the engagement of our existence as a point of success. This is where we get to my first dear love: Ideas. Ideas are those whole beasts made up of chunks of concepts and threads of seemingness. We build these ideas up as the supposing of the world, ourselves, and existence as their meeting place. These ideas then become something sacred as to man’s touching heaven with a quivering finger: Belief. Belief is that supposing that is most worthy to suppose, but there is another quality that makes it special. Belief is that idea that we suppose to be true to the extent that we act in the world as if it was. We can worry about which idea is best, but at least to survive, we have to believe. In fact, the causal interest in beliefs usually goes the other way as we seek a basis for an action plan to obtain valued resources. We have to have a supposed concept that we take as a given to then act in the world. This is the meditative position that I built Esse Maxim. One belief that permitted or demanded all others. We now have a conceptual model to work with to give a structure to the experience that were going to anyway, but now it is self-consistent. Our values in terms of being, doing, data, other persons, and seemingness are now left with us as beauty, goodness, truth, love, and meaning. The human soul now amalgamated with the mind that is pressed against the world has built a home ready for belonging. However, Esse Maxim is about belief. Why would we go through all the effort of understanding the world, especially in the core sense of utilizing philosophy, if we are not going to utilize it? Existence makes no sense. If we are going to rest in the void, let us writhe. However, then let us most importantly let us wrestle. If we believe something, it is the given mode we see the world as, and from such would necessitate the way that we acted in it. If we did not act in accordance with that belief, than we believe something else. Of course, we then have the challenges of centralizing that belief and action to avoid akrasia or failure to act on one’s values. Let us here conclude one thing, what we believe can always be otherwise, but that we believe it and participate with that belief is a fact we live out its affirmation. This is where modern philosophy betrays us. Let me build my beliefs and leave your deconstruction aside. Once I have believed, let my very being by the manifestation of that belief. Allow another mind to see my action in the world, and from it be able to identify my beliefs. We have talked about doxis as what we believe, telos as why we believe it, but let us come together this day to meditate and be present with praxis. This praxis is that one believes and that belief spills out into all other aspects of your being. We have philosophized to obtain HOW we address existence. Now, let us certify THAT we do address it. In the absence of certainty can be activity. I define belief as conceptual ownership. Why waste the few humble tools we traverse existence with?

Let us build from these simple ideas: We build beliefs so that we can have something actionable, so it follows given our values that once we have beliefs, they have an imperative to act. This is the sword mind battles world with. From this supposition of being, our seemingness is contextualized and values can be accentuated or ignored in reference to this new contextualization. At worst, these actionable lies keep us alive, and the only thing that can prove us wrong is the thing in itself as God in Himself. However, He hides and we seek. Let Him bless good faith, which is defined by the wanting of Him. As we suppose these categories of fact about the world force random pixels of possibilities to collapse and coalesce into specific and exclusive narratives are being. These shapes that came toward me in the fog, are they colors growing and shrinking, or persons coming to and fro? Belief is the doxis or the noun that we speak into the abyss. We posit what we think this mystery is. Such a doctrine is the instance of Esse Maxim. Existence is a deep pull of the breath of perception via any possible sensation to amass the most information to synthesize and value. However, as we amass more sensory experiences, this can somehow lift the unliftable in god killing. Deep meditation allows us to sit in our deceit to see how our vision broadcast over reality matches onto such, though we will never grasp it in its nakedness. However, we can’t say our beliefs can’t be because they are not fully represented in the world, when they are manifest in us. We then seek to realize our belief as much as we do to affirm them. I have used this example, and use it now. Hope is a light word that seems to gravitate on the towardness we can have toward expectation. However, living through writhing and desperation, hope is instantiated in the object of our deliverance. This object then amasses its own gravity which warps the light that goes past it in our desperation. Truth is traded for necessity and our behavior will demonstrate our soul trying to warp itself around a prickly objective. Suddenly, this light idea you might have used to say you hope the weather is warm, is traded for the deep longing for a future where you obtain. It emerges from the tertiary, to the religious. It becomes so, by your being present with it. A word, given meaning by living with it. It is so with all beliefs. We take them from the hearing of a word, to really and truly believing such a word is made flesh without us. This gradient of understanding has become painful and somewhat meaningless to me on the bottom end as of late. For example, I will read a text, and not know what they mean because I don’t know what they mean, in the sense of where these concepts are contextualized in a shared experience. I understand the words combination, but something misses me. I have attempted to resolve this by asking the more obvious question of what the writer would want these words to mean. For such reasons, I do not read to learn as an intake of granting their claims. Instead, I argue because I want to and can’t do otherwise. It is a conversation as not one assertion is taken because they said so. You will note, I also write like it is a conversation. Belief as conceptual ownership is then built upon the faith of the assumed brute item. We then only have context for belief in building God’s throne in the dark. And why build, why speak into the void the word we have written? Because what is belief if not action? If we found something to be true, we would act as if it is. In this is the wisdom of faith without works having no life. Not just a contingent fact, but a definitional and categorical truism. By your fruits, I can approximate, minus deviation of sin, what article of belief your will is toward. It will be toward that will that it most deeply concedes as being the case. You will note it is more than selling a specific idea to yourself. In my short example at the beginning of this chapter, I had faith to action each time, but some of those times I found the object of faith more worthy as so. The more you feel your belief self defends itself, the more you believe it. Your ontology will fight you for what it really has reason to believe and act in accordance with that otherwise. Why faith Samuel, have you abandoned truth and knowledge? Yes. there was never such. There is only some process happening and certainty that we do it. Of facts, they can be necessarily the case like tautologies, necessarily false like contradictions, or possibly the case as in contingent fact. By the case, I am alleging some sort of in itselfness. However, these first two are more useless than you think. My beloved Socrates did have to shove ideas into boxes uncharitably to make his reductio ad absurdums for his contradictions. Tautologies are positive and precise, but they are nearly nothing. For example, assuming there is a God, there is a God. Wonderful, but how do we get the antecedent in line alone to affirm or consequent to deny? You do not. We are then left with Contingency to these wonderful beliefs that keep us alive. Our existential survival hinged on something that could be otherwise. However, even if you recognize the contingency of your belief’s doxis, as your praxis, you will need to act as if there is not that contingency. You need to think your ideas, people, positioning, and values are special at least because of their proximity to you. You can’t play “God’s eye view.” This turns the application of the belief into changing what we say about its truth claims. For example, I recognize the counter-possibles for my faith in God. However, in the intimate relationship of believing and acting, I will need to act as if that is not the case. When we speak, we don’t just talk, we do. There is an action to language. If I were to say that God exists, that is not to say I am past doubt this is the case, but more likely, that in my belief of Him, I act a certain way about Him. Always ask what the “doing” of language is. For example, if someone speaks literally sweet words whose implicit outcome is your misery, be concerned. This leads to our humility in our faith, but this also will lead to a steadfast and confident effort. Belief as conceptual ownership unto action and faith as willed assumption. What could belief not unto action mean in any sense? If you did not deeply possess and realize one thesis over an antithesis such that you act like it is the case, then I can assume you do not possess it. You instead have a notion as an idea that you have the contents for its information, but you have not realized its depth. To be human is to navigate those concepts worthy of belief as we also more deeply realize them until they become the most effectively real thing to us. You have to live as if the contingency you built your belief in doesn’t exist. You have to think your people, efforts, and mission are the most important and most valuable. In modernity, we have ignored the divine and with such phenomenon of mind to alter the noumenon in the world. Even then, we can’t just manifest as we have the principle of “penguins,” or our mind not offering what we desire. For example, our brain can do much to heal our body, but it needs the ritual of living out and discovering facts it thinks are external to do it. For example, it would do much for your psyche to go to church, but thinking the same thoughts of church at home, won’t be as effective. We actually have to live out what we think is true, and then it becomes so. Is it just our pretension? No. Placebo known is better than none. It is then the ritual of the known fake medicine that gives us a sense of action unto worthiness. It will be your mind that heals itself, but it will need your body to live our adventures to give it the story to do so. In doing so, we need to have no pretensions of certainty or to disbelieve what we have humble reason to. Like reading a book, we are pulling facts from the world. Unfortunately, the abstract nature of the mind makes it difficult to pull facts from the mind, no matter how authentic you are attempting to be. The best we can do is frame our experiences, and then to pay attention to those things that wouldn’t fit in frame. How can we tell when we actually believe something? There are two ways. The first is when we wish we believed in it more. It is he who prays to God for more faith finds that he has it. The second, is when we naturally and unforced believe that by looking into our belief further, we will be proven more correct. When you want to believe something and think looking into it further will do so, congratulations, you built your destination around yourself. These two metrics make real ownership. Then assuming inference of materially reproducible experience, we can then use these beliefs built of experience to navigate existence. But Samuel, if I am to intake experiences, I will just be an ubermensch that needs no frame. If we engage with our existence without EM, we are to wander beliefs that are at odds with our last ones until we are a stranger void of conceptual belonging. To believe everything is to believe nothing at all, and then what can you act on but the ending of your life? Can we forgo belief to be agnostic to all? Before our consciousness and perception is a will ingrained into us. It allows variances of methodology for obtaining, but it necessitates that obtaining. We need belief so we have something to act on. We want something to act on, because our will wants before it has more reasonable avenues of values that turn into resources. Thrust into the world, and feeling some way about it. We believe toward the end of being, and for that reason, need certain beliefs to be and have a contextual awareness of that being.

To reflect on the praxis or energies of Esse Maxim, let us bring it once again into our minds in its essence or doxis. If we are assessing its noun, let us locate it. It is neither in the world nor in the mind before its construction. We are only given pieces to build, and a desire to do so. 

We do so because the sheerness of existence once pressed and now culminatingly weighs on your soul. If we are going to obtain these beautiful beliefs we have wished to, we are going to need a bedrock. Let us follow thoughts all the way down. And where do they go? Each fact is predicated on another until we get to infinite regresses that diverge into opposing directions. Esse Maxim is not the grabbing of a rope, but the paddling in the depths before we sink past where breath can catch us. At the bottom of all thought is nothing, but on the surface is you and your gasping and splashing. From nothing, we build the throne for the God that created all else as so. There is nothing that necessitates us to build such, but everything implores us. We now have the prime mover of belief. From this central first in the nothing, we get the second order in values and supposition of facts, peripheral in what specific beliefs we have about the world and manifest their acting out, and the tertiary in everything else. You will note, note all thoughts would come necessarily from Esse Maxim, but they would have to not be opposed. For example, knowing of God won’t inform every action you should make, but it will certainly let you know when a certain series of actions would be ill informed to Him. Let us look at the roles at hand. We first have the world as the thing that there is something that it is like, and the self as the someone that there is something that it is like to. Self as existence and world as entirety. Each has their facthood that we can never know in itself, but we can slip further down the gradient of realization to see it more in itself. On the other side is the valuing when it is not present-at-hand at all, but experienced toward. Fact of self as questions of what we are. Values of self as asking what values we instantiate. Facts of world as those items experienced. The value of world as the good, the true, meaningful, and the like. In Esse Maxim Doxis, we talked about Esse Maxim as a construction for us to posit, but let us look at what happens when we further explore the action. Affirming such will give us a basis for our epistemic. Facts in themselves can now be structured. We can now build our sciences as we did proper philosophy of science proper. We have access to the ethical, or the real components of values and sharedness. We now can purport to know what we prefer, what others do, and what love, God, or violence makes us care. We have a basis for the epistemic, or what narrative we structure our experience in. Philosophy has become idea math, but has lost the heart of being consciousness-centricity is started as. As fact, we can assess the items of the world, and as value, we can order those items into the truth we experience. We then have the existential or teleological. Teleology is abused by existentialists as something not so, but it is worse. It could be so, and we just don’t know what it is. As we find ourselves in fact, we can come to know ourselves through Esse Maxim. And of course, as value, we can give such an existence meaning. Finally, we have our end. We live toward death though we think we run from it. Meaning is infinitude and endings, and our lives need such. This death is the end for Esse Maxim, not of it. Esse Maxim is the best case for justifying our existence given Esse Maxim. When we die and go into the next, we can say of what we earnestly thought, we did so well. In the ethical, epistemic, ethical, and our end, we now have a structure for them to be built on. However, it is only a poorly written series of words until you breathe it into life by your action. If you seek the consequent of the meaningful life, you must create your Esse Maxim and more vitally, live it out. You must live as if it were true, because nothing could be more so to you. Let us consider time. Of what is to come, we fight. Of what was, we love. Let us build God’s throne when the dark sun shines, and then pray by only His grace He will reside there as we are bent knee below the black moon. Now, positionality. We find ourselves to be where God thrusts us. However, in His infinite wisdom and humor, that does not coincide with His hope for where we end up. There is where we find ourselves in our thrownness. But there is then the place we go to. We must be something and can’t be everywhere. As I have said of the mountain, there is no reason you must be there, but you want to be. Esse Maxim is your statement of where you stand and the living out of what you face. This is all well and good Samuel, but I read Esse maxim Praxis to understand how to make mine. Of course! How can we make it yours by living it out, if we have not made it be in the first? Here are some thoughts who’s shoveling will make a fertile soul for the sprouting. A philosopher I appreciate but sense they miss something major, said they don’t like to think about death. Excuse. Me, but what else is there to think about? That exact question is why you are reading this sentence. It is a hard stop to being of which we either can’t see past, or there is nothing to see. Outside of a benevolent God, what horrors to either. Sit there with death. Sit until you are depressed in spirit. Sit until your spirit bursts to life. Sit until your spirit now rests in anxious and yet peaceful curiosity. The next step is to engage with existence. How does it present itself to you and how do you find it? Notice your seemingness as you currently have it. I will note that of the three books I have to share Esse Maxim, the second is my life story. I found or built (not that I will ever know) Esse Maxim and my Esse Maxim, while I was living, not reading. The next step is to amass your sense of the idea of what you have reason to believe in. Your data points exact the mean the more you have, but note they will be representative of that part of the world you reside in. Finally, go to the void again. Note what comes with you. Exclude all categories of options clearly excluded by your prior meditations. Next, look at what series of categories are left. Finally, what do you will? You would have harvested in this process, not knowledge or intellect, but wisdom. That wisdom will have its say in the selection and as wisdom, it will do so toward you. Recall you can god kill later, but you need a god to act under. Then, affirm with faith as faith is placing a yes in a sea of maybes with waves of nos. After reading Heidegger I feel so behind on the first myself, so will hope to make it up with the last. I look at the absolute void of certainty and find that there is no fact other than my viewing it that can be taken from the void. I must affirm whatever is to be. However, in what sense would that affirmation be true if I just supposed something? It is then not just the affirmation of the antecedent to all being as thought, but as action. Living as if the world was a certain way, making it a given way to you. Where will we sit in the world to see it? Where must we? Where can we? What does wisdom say? After we speak it into the void, do we make sense and understand what we just made? How can we evaluate creation but by god killing measures? We will review the creation from the same state of mind that created it. Of course, it must pass this test, but it would never be enough to only do so. We now have the structure of our belief, but what is a house if we do not occupy it? Mental activity as knowledge, Intelligence, wisdom, value as the good, true, beautiful, loving, and meaningful, belief as doxis, praxis, telos,  aspects body, mind, soul and being as world, self, relationship: What do all these things have in common? Elements of us as subject participating with world. Now let us consider the predicate. The facts we find versus the facts we leave as truth. Let us talk about this participation as living it out. How do we live out Esse Maxim? Let us first say that failure to us would be to live like Hume. To talk of grand ideas, just to shrug it off and play billiards. This is all we have. Philosophy isn’t a means for academic tenure, but the effort of us trying to understand existence. Now that we have Esse Maxim, and have extrapolated it to necessary and possible beliefs, we can watch how this informs our daily imperatives and gives us an actionable system for navigation. Oh great, we went from considering ideas and being able to lazily say we didn’t know, to now have to live out our beliefs. Investments can amplify, but our return will still be in some proportion to what we invested. We must change how we act. There are two ways to do so. We can take a loan from the reserve of our soul to get energy to act in a vacuum. However, this diligence would need to be followed by our second means, which is that we accept the daily bread from our new God. Our soul is fed in the actions that cost it. Think of calories to sow and calories reaped. To master ourselves we must enslave ourselves. We must do so under the authority of our beliefs. You may wonder how we can get others to act on what they believe. Firstly, you can't do anything other than gaining sharedness and convincing. Secondly, what one believes is manifest, again will some failure, of what one believes. If they really thought existence was one way, they would certainly not always act another way. If they claim to, it is their reporting that is suspect. As we can’t force others for long, we can’t to ourselves. You have to win yourself over for the cause and then to act so is the reasonable. Atheists in my day seek to rob what they suppose to be the corpse of God for His values and sharedness. However, under heaven, those beliefs were reasonable to believe. It was not moral, but simply followed, to pray always as there was a being who was so omnipotent. Without God, it is not just difficult to get sharedness, it is unreasonable to act as if He were there when you are confident He is not. The action makes us own a concept, which makes us act on it, which makes us own it, until we bask in a cycle of meaning or god kill to restart an attempt at such. Of living out Esse Maxim, it is more vital that you do it than how you do it. Our metavalue of the holy try and the metasin of non-participation have built within them grace for misguided attempts. There is only no mercy for no attempt. Think of how forgiving you are of a character that fails and falls, but wants and works. You only have access to being from your existence which you see as a story, so examine your life. What can you pick up from it? Existence is worth identification if anything is. We must again avoid the metasin, which is in part a dismissal of the fact that we are at the void, and something comes from within us to speak into it. We must then live as if our Esse Maxim is true and uncontingent as second guessing is perhaps accurate, but it is unbecoming to our labors. Even when we god kill, we do so as a labor. When handling the more central portions of our Esse Maxim, we must do so ritualisticly, passionately, and with sacredness. Here is a question for an analysis of how well you lived out your Esse Maxim: Could an outside witness guess it was your Esse Maxim, or at least not be surprised ad hoc? I have decided to never  literally and explicitly tell you my Esse Maxim. However, I would hope you could guess its direction or at least not be surprised if you figured it out. We have talked about what Esse Maxim is and how we live it out. However, why should we have it or live it? It is not just that it gives us what we want or is the case, everything we can suppose is the case or consistently want is only post Esse Maxim. It is being and belief in unison. To make the soul alive against the world it exists in. To identify all we can by one consistent torch we carry with us. To prepare ourselves for that death we evaluated in We must negate Esse Maxim’s negation by not betraying the thing that gives loyalty. I sometimes write one of these chapters in one sitting, but this one I built up pages of messy notes until I wrote the whole thing in just a few evenings. In fact, this is the last part I wrote. I was so worried about writing this perfectly, that I didn’t write it at all. Sometimes you need to apply an idea to itself or to what you are currently seeing. I realized if it mattered the chapter was done well, it mattered it was done at all. Better a mess that people can make sense of, than dying with these ideas to rot in my skull. When you don’t know how or what to do, certify that you do something. God guides moving objects. We opened up talking about beliefs as something for us in order to address our existence. To not live out beliefs is to not use those tools that you carved out with your bare hands. For every doxis, praxis, and by doing so you breathe in telos. In cultures that never could have met, we find they had a God. There is a need for a central and foundational thing to make sense of being and seeming. Each of these societies also had sacrifice. It was to allow these God’s to help by proving how deeply we believed in them. We prove what matters by sacrifice and from it, it ex-nihilo becomes valuable in the mind of the willful expender of effort. This and any effort is done at the expense of another effort. This experience of the denial and refusal is suffering, but it is suffering unto and therefore meaningful. This denial then also leads to a shorter sequence for our imperatives. And to what do we sacrifice? Why does God hide Himself from me? Does he know I need to understand the stars?I just don't understand. However, whatever powers that may be will be impressed by trying. Willful wisdom has made of us more than what we are. There is a gradient in philosophy from metaphilosophical to normative philosophy. Most philosophy contemporary is present in the middle, They then miss the grounding from the meta and application from the meta. I have not well built out a system from my meta work to my normative, but Esse Maxim carries such in the bones. By seeing as such, we would act as such as our will is manifest from this curated perception. 

Why do I write? I recognize fault in my systematizing, writing, and reasoning. In fact, you may notice I deliberately don’t edit well, essentially to preserve my humanity and the spirit of the ideas as they sprung from me. However, my philosophy is not what I write, but that I write. You are watching the living out of the manifestation of my life mission as informed by my Esse Maxim. This book, every chapter and word is about demonstrating existential participation. What I say has some value. That I speak is the greatest lesson in illustration I could offer. I am not sure the long term format of the publication of this chapter, but for now I am planning to combine this year's chapters into another book under the title “The Passionate Ramblings of a Troubled Philosopher: Year Two.” I plan to do one more year of this, and then to take some other projects such as my book on Esse Maxim Doxis as structural thought, my book on Esse Maxim Praxis as my life story, and finally Esse Maxim Telos as a book I don’t know its essence yet. I also have a few small novels that I think would be fun to get out there. However, at my current pace, this chapter is set to be my last in this book, though the book is the middle of three in the series. As you will not I am tragically sentimental, this has me in reflection. We have had quite the year, haven’t we? Any order of chapters is as good as any other in my estimation, but let us suppose you came to this chapter after many more. How long did it take you? What changed in how you viewed yourself and the world? How do you feel about me now? Did we grow together? Were you at times frustrated with me? Did you at times feel my love for you? Did you see how I grew? I came from nothing, am no one, and have little to offer. However, it is not grandiosity that has me in offering, but need. I don’t like the thought of meeting God and having Him know I saw a need, and didn’t try. We offer up our holy try into a world that only provides what we earn. We then can’t say we expect, but we tell fate we stand worthy if anyone. I have worked, because I don’t want others to. I don’t like that everyone has to step outside of being to make himself from scratch and fight fate. There will always be heroes, but even then, those brave few can only do so much. From birth a man is owed by his people an offering of meaning and sharedness, a communal seemingness to collapse into being with. The point of this is not so you can be like me in the misery I took on for you, it is so you can benefit. Do me a favor, be better than me. Like my soul be your stepping stone to a beyond. Don’t sink to the depths I have for you, or else for what was the sinking? Take Esse Maxim, pour your soul into it, and feel yourself held therein. No more ubermensches. These men that destroy themselves to be something more are an ironic Christian offering for others, but it is not to the benefit of the ubermensch he was so, outside of the service of his people. Let few greats scratch meaning in nothingness and feel no shame to follow behind. Follow a religion in ritual and living, but don’t get distracted with theology. Once your Esse Maxim is built, live within its shade, you may not have what it takes to build it again. This is when the understanding of how it works is traded for the living it out. I can say my belief unto action has had a reciprocal relationship such that I believed to act, and now because of my action, I now deeply believe. My Esse Maxim is now my conceptual property so kin to my being as to scalpel it away would now take me. I seek to share a phenomenon with you. When I was a child, no good offered would not be held on the other side of cost of a reminder that there was something owed. This is because in the act of giving to me, the giver’s soul was expending that which it did not have, and required payment. Hear me. You never need to repay me. It is an honor and a pleasure to be with you. In the very act I expend energy for you and your life, my friend, I am paid with fancies of what it can afford you. Never pity me, no matter what a lazy viewing of my story would suggest, but feel jealousy for what I have before I give it to you. My tattered soul had more to offer than what it was by the currency of your thought. You owe me nothing. In what I gave you, only now consider what you can do with it. In fact, is it enough? My heart breaks to think of your soul caught in the grinding machinery of modernity whose mechanism is meaninglessness. I won’t lie, not only am I at peace with my offerance, I want more. I think of a someone. Someone to save the world. Someone to reach their hand into the human soul and pull it from its depths. Someone to hear what it is to be trapped just in existence, but modernity as a peculiar sort. Past arrogance and worthingness, I once again see a need, and repeat my prayer: “Whatever you have made me to be, God, don’t waste it.” I want nothing but to save the soul, prepare for death, make the world persist, and engage others with existence. My greed on behalf of my beloved has no limits, and God I only ask that if your will aligns, you let your fate be in my sail. I needed to descend below philosophy as metaphilosophy to defeat the end of philosophy in modernity. We have no knowledge and only faith, seemingness, and ourselves. I descended because someone had to, you needed to know that someone did, and others needed to be allowed to not worry about it. We need permission to be what God made us and to refuse modernity and the secret lie. I did it. I beat Hegel, Kant, and Nietzsche. In my honest descension, I can now say in this earned right that we can go back to that mind before them. To be a beast touched by the angels. No more reason, only being. Less central to my message but supportive of this effort, to implement regressivism, we will have needed to go beyond the meaningless assumptions of modernity. We went past it and in the journey itself found meaning. I do worry and wonder if I have the next book in me. I can feel my psyche fracture. It is not from the hopeless snap of Nietzsche, but the weariness of a good story. I want you to know this fraying was not done by you. It was so before these books, and it was the books that were an effort to hold myself together. When I descend into insanity or delusion, whether now or later, I will do so with peace. Outside of that, my health has fought me and the course of writing this book saw numerous causes of death make their threats. God grant only what He will, and it is what I want. However, as my last chapter mentioned, I have a dream. You are there. It is the land of Maxima where fate is king and we are stewards. This super structure for the building of a soul’s substructure is something I hope my reading and efforts could support. Whether or not my vision is ever shared with another mind, let alone in the shared world, I hope it is an image of hope. It is hope I want to leave with you. When you meditate on something, you remember feelings over facts per information at hand. Remember not my arguments, but that there was something worth arguing for. Our kingdom is not of this world, but that is not to say we can’t do something with it. I am just starting to wonder how limited my role will be. As world to map, idea to world is fraught. Maxima will never fully happen, though the vision could exact reality and our values enough that the partial manifestation would be worth the effort. However, it is too much to ask of fate to bring it about. Instead, I will ask of you to build Maxima in your hearts. Let us be citizens of the kingdom of the sharedness of our minds. After all, our kingdom is not of this world, and that kingdom is within us. Let us not seek to build any more than we have already constructed. If this world is brought about, there is still the question of by whom. I once again ask if you are the Alexander to my Aristotle. I made some ideas, but you remade the world. It is a cursed thing to know nothing past doubt and yet by commission or omission be forced to act. However, let us bask in that irony that is the making of the human. Where does my philosophy and thinking come from? Ah, here is a thought. Where is it going? Let me follow it. Oh, it joined another thought. This then leads to this thought. This then raises this question. This then makes me wonder about this sort or series of thoughts. This then leads to a novel thought. It is strange, I don’t recognize it. Furthermore, in how it seems to me, I value it. Or, if I don’t value it, I want to build up an awareness of where it is. No known philosopher systematized worse than me. Some philosophers have a similar general method of cognition. No other philosopher tasked a central and deliberate objective to this process, or at least when you were that objective. I realize I hate people that talk about what they are doing more than they do what they do, but in the end our relationship and it’s dialogue that I masquerade as a philosophy is about noticing. It is a loveletter to the human soul, of which I wish I was one, so that I may have it be in part about me. I keep trying to convince myself that if I can diagnose humanity, I can prove I was one. However, i am a spectator of one. However, it will always be about you. I am starting to wonder if I was wrong about time and the moment, slicing the past and future from fighting to loving fate. I was too greedy with the grandeur I expected from myself and my existence. I wish I wouldn’t have fought fate. Let myself be a fool, let myself fail, let myself spring up where God planted me and collapse into being what I am. I now wish I only wanted what God wanted, which is fate. Any real wife could have born me real children, but the mystical madame of my psyche can’t offer me children that I can hold in my arms. I cannot curse what infinite wisdom is placed before me, because my runaway wantings can imagine more. But Samuel, don’t we privilege our wantings? Yes, but we also must order them. My tertiary and peripheral wantings fall into place for my Esse Maxim. Which, I will share a portion of its secret, is related to God. I want nothing more than He wants, or at the very least, I want so. Returning back to this book, note the three main characters. Do you have a guess? Myself, of course. I talk too much about God, so Him. And finally, you. Philosophy has turned into academic pandering and lost the role of advice as the offering of beliefs to fight with. I have a few baseless pieces of such advice for you. Go for walks. Feel your feets swaying rhythm that carries some beat to your reasoning. Allow thoughts to come to you, or extract the one you need to address, just walk. Sometimes with someone you love, sometimes with just yourself. Sometimes thinking, and sometimes not. Sometimes in the sun, and sometimes in the rain. Sometimes in the night and sometimes in the day. Sometimes trying to solve, sometimes trying to express gratitude. Sometimes talking to God, sometimes listening to Him. Sometimes wondering what you need to change, sometimes revelling in what you were able to do. Sometimes being skeptical of what you believe, sometimes being. Wherever you walk, whether or not you remember me, I ask God’s blessing to join you in the company I didn’t get to while alive. I hope when in your walks my memory comes to you, that you feel my blessing. That your engagement with your existence as it seems to you and as you find it, is something you can find good, true, beautiful and meaningful. You’ll never see me, but I will never not be there with you. As you have heard me when I couldn’t see you, let me hear you. Speak out on this walk the things you need to say. What story do you see alone? What tragedy do you write from the circumstance? What ironies fly in your face? Mutter, mumble, and whisper, and I will hear every word. In a prayer I have not earned God’s graces to pray, I will talk to Him about you. I’ll tell him my biased position of your value, and my hopes for you. I am sorry I couldn’t be more to you than what I am. I let myself get in my own way, and the holy and divine you, my beloved, was hurt by it. Build peace within yourself. Build value. Build yourself. Don’t let my failure to you fully fail you. I want to offer everything I can in this selfish and obsessive love, but this is where I am humbled. I leave you in the hands of a world that broke me. This horrifies me. However, I also leave you in the hands of the God that was the only person I ever truly had. I’ll leave up to him what is best for you, where in His infinite wisdom His love and wisdom for you never overbear each other. When you go for these walks, wherever, whenever, however, whoever, whyever they may be, walk them. And please, don’t feel as alone as I was foolish enough to believe I was. Where am I? In your cold breath as it rises, the brook as it passes, the stars as they sparkle? Let us understand Esse Maxim in this regard. Am I ontologically present in any of those things in a mind-independant sense? Likely not. However, as perception makes being and is the only entity to value, we have learned that only somethings reside in the mind and held by the soul. The dead facts of perceptive information in the world now become what matters to us, and nothing else can matter. The law is written on the fleshy tables of our hearts, and only there. Then, to you, what sense am I not in the stars? In what sense can’t I be with you? Even if God does me the disservice of not existing in any mind-independant sense, He then couldn’t stop you from carrying me with you. Let my soul transform from the mess it was in the life it actually lived, to what it is you need in an instance. To become something great, if we are needed, we rise to the occasion. In death, I can still do this for you. What do we learn from this saving, privileging, and valuing of the human soul? No man, angel, or demon can steal away our values and conceptual needs. So then, if you need me, it is in that same instance that I will be there for you. Let your imagination be the wisdom of my direction. Then when you deeply perceive and witness your own existence, you will at least have the excuse and example of doing so with someone else. As I try to step past reason and even the void to find you in something bordering the prophetic, I metavalue you. I won’t appreciate everything you do, but I will be impressed that you did it. Let this recognition do what it can. My advice to you is to live in participation with what you find, but my hope is that I can do something to support that. Even if I am not walking alongside you in your mind, I will in spirit, wherever it is. You were always with me when I talked about ideas to myself as a child. The least I could do is likewise. Furthermore, I will worry about you until both of us are no more. Let me then edit my original thesis to this massive paragraph: It is not my, but our Esse Maxim manifest in what we did in this text. These were our labors in the reunification of being. This chapter is our labors in the reunification of being. Have we solved existence? No, but look at it so deeply, let us both set this book down and, having addressed it, do something great in it. I am not the savior of humanity earthly, but I raised their minds. Do you see it? Can you see yourself? Cesar, emperor, priest, king? Can you see it? I have loved you and I have good taste. I know what I was doing. I wrote this the way I did and didn’t edit it as I did to train, test, and prove it was you. What of other yous? Well, as you might fall a brother steps up or maybe you meet each other in this. However, it is, was, and always will be you. May I be blessed to call myself father of your mind? I wish I could have given you more, but heroes do so from a position of desperation, and we have certainly found that. I pray the blessings and providence of the God I love upon you as well as one parting message much wiser than myself. If I can’t make it to next year, it was an honor to be with you for this one. From my deepest driving love for you, Esse Maxim: Engage with existence.