The story that God and I wrote together

The story that God and I wrote together

Samuel Bird

I woke up as me again. How peculiar that I should wake up in the morning as the same person I was the night before. To you, perhaps the peculiarity is in the asking of the question. However, how sensible is the waking up as yourself when you consider the world where you don’t? What if there was a world where I could wake up as someone else. Some days it would be a notable person that I felt great prestige to be that person. Other days, I would wake up as something lowly and simple and the day’s labors would make me struggle to make it the rest where I could once again be someone else. How odd is it that my awareness always resides within the same person? They gave this person a name. In my case, it is Samuel. In your case you were assigned your own unique name to match the person you were assigned to. We are tethered to this person and are at no point allowed to step away and be someone else. The closest thing to a change-up is that I can once again be Samuel in his dreams in a different world. What makes this Samuel person so special that I am tethered to him and you to your person? He has many aspects of which he would probably just identify me as one. However, we are non-arbitrarily demarcable. Samuel goes off making all these choices that don’t align with what I want, and even surprise me. The thoughts are then left to repair whatever he did. All I can do is watch, evaluate, and be aware. I know Samuel is here, but it has dawned on me, does he know that I am here? He doesn’t technically need me. All the poor decisions and acting in the world could be done with himself and I would be free to be someone else or just to join the world and be aware of it. However, I am tied to him. I wonder what it is that I do that is of benefit to him, but I struggle to think of it. I can barely get a thought rolling in his mind and how would he know who the sender is. If it is not he who benefits from me, is it I who benefits from him? His complex mechanism for thought, organs for perception, and emotive experiences end up being all that I know. When I try to think of something other than those experience being Samuel has given me, I realize he is all I have. There is no experience I have passed being him. Therefore, if he experienced a lie, it would be truth to me as he and through him is the only world that I know. Perhaps it is a blessing to be tethered to someone, even if it is Samuel. Yes, I wake up as him and only him, or at least that is all I can recall, but that is the price I pay to hitch a ride with him. I am the awareness, and he is the existence, and between us we make a being. In a moment, I could step away from him and be someone else. In a moment, he could go off as an automaton and obtain as he wills. However, something about the way my specific person operates makes me think if he knew I was here, he would be pleased. The company to haunt his mind and potentially access something beyond the physical is worth the initial surprise of having a stowaway. Perhaps I can give him something, and we can make this relationship mutually beneficial. My existential instantiation of Samuel has a particularly strong sense of self. It has made it hard for him to step out of his mythos as well as to adapt, but it has kept his psyche alive through perils. I think I help him with it. I am still not sure how. While it feels so limiting to refer to us as the same person, I can’t find the lines where he ends and I begin. I can only identify aspects and then assume that they come together, though of course it can always leave us as parties to be reconciled. 

I made myself up. I resign myself to being this person I am every day, but I do so with an element of creation and artistry. I can’t step away to do otherwise. That role I can’t step away from, I play. And what role is this? In duality, I play the co-author and central actor to this story. How can one make themselves up? If they proceed from their existence, wouldn’t that existence be a fact before them? If we co-author, who do we write with? Can we play a character we like, and what of the world and other persons? All in due time, my friend. For now, let us be present with the void. Follow down all reasons we have for believing anything, and the “whys” end up in a vacuum ripe for and only impacted by our willing something and affirming it. We know God in this instance as, aside from our being, we will every effective thing after that. This is Esse Maxim. It is that meeting place between mind and world, that grounding assumption, that “yes” into the void, that we use to make sense of being. We have looked at it as a means to make sense of the world around us, but what of the world within us and the personed singularity we perceive from? There are three sorts of intellect. Knowledge as intaking and storing information, processing that data, and wisdom as the deliberate allocation toward one’s ends of either other type of intellect. Let us ask ourselves why we embark on philosophy. If we came to her feet to be told of our intellect, we have wasted our time. If we came to exact more power over the world, we will be skeptical of our doing so. We came to her to attempt to understand being. For our mind and world to meet and border at as many points as we can. We desire to know what the world is and what we do about it, but what about who we are? Precise work in our being and consciousness needs to be done to build out a system that permits the soul in the modern era, but these higher-level abstractions fail to allow us to make sense of the enigma we are. By the time you are accessing this question with me now, you will have had at least enough years with yourself up until now, at least enough to learn how to read or understand speech. What have you identified about yourself? You likely have a case, but you always worry or hope that you are wrong. Our sense of this thing that we are drastically changes the way that we live, expect, and make sense of ourselves after the fact. You likely have learned how to survive in the world you find yourself in, but past the beastly wanting to, why do so? Now, friend, let us go back to these aspects of ourselves. We have the organism as the beast, the mind as the boy, and the singularity of consciousness as the man. Together, these entities make up our being. However, within the mind is this image of the parts and whole of that being. I will remark that these are remarkably different. How would everyone say you appeared compared to yourself? That is not to say we privilege the way we are in the world over the way we are in the world, but there is great wisdom in this image of the mind. Our ontology is inaccessible to us. Even if we could trust our eyes, we can never see ourselves without a reflection, and then we have one more thing to trust. When people report struggling to know who they are, they are likely pointing to the being as organism, mind, and consciousness. To not doom our expedition, let us here resolve and resign to the fact that we can’t access our being. What we have of the self is then this image in the mind and not the fact. You will note how this is similar to our conceptual map of the world, except this one is more nested within the thing considered at hand. This image I call the “mythos.” I have chosen dramatic and aesthetic language for reasons we will detail later. Why do I make this distinction? An event can’t be its own cause, at least assuming some extremely properly basic assumptions. There will still need to be one unmoved mover, but we ought not make an unlimited number of these movers. I note this because how could I make myself up? First, I was an existent being who was conscious. This fact preceded my will and perception. I was only then available for making sense of. However, I was not a being available for just adopting who I was, as I can’t access my ontology. I am thrust into the world, but not told in that process what I am. I then speak into that void who I am. If we must do this willing, can we make it self-consistent, consistent with facts of self and world, and to serve our being? This was the basis for Esse Maxim. This holy effort then also brings a focal point and contrasting periphery for us to value. World and self are now eligible and in need of an identification of their seemingness. As always, it is always contingent what our mythos is, but it is necessary that it is.

Follow me through the shadows of memories. A small tea candle flickered a small flame that illuminated my holy wool blankets. I threw them across my cot as they kicked up dust that danced in the rays of the candle. At the age of fourteen, I pulled out a mathematics book for students a few years my junior. My body ached from a dawn to dusk shift of construction, and here is was somewhere around midnight hoping to fix something. I was unhappy with where fate had pushed me as a person. I was told, proved, and believed that I was not smart, and could not be. However, in my absolute faith in that, I still wanted to learn. I began to read through the book as I fought fate and what it was offering me. I struggled to follow the very basic ideas as I was barely literate. I felt a stab in my pocket and realized I had one of my few possessions still in my pocket. I pulled out a switchblade and my wallet and placed them in my boots under the cot. I was at least now indoors as the weather grew colder. Nights prior and for months, I had slept on that same cot under the stars. It was beautiful, but when you have four hours to sleep, rain is not welcome. I saw what fate had made me to be. It wanted me to stay as this thing. I am now nearly double the age and found that fate never permitted my ease of persistence and survival. However, I didn’t like who it said I was. I was an idiot who only went to two years of school years prior, was pushed into this role of the poor and dirty farm boy, and I didn’t like it. However, I didn’t have a better guess of who I was. I followed every reason I had to think who I was, and came up with nothing. I found then as I found now that “soul searching” was largely a waste of time. I get pushback on this, but I am a radical skeptic. I can only grant a modified version of the Cartesian finding as well as an inaccessibly qualified world as something to lie to me. Everything passed that is not available for my certain conception. There is no thought that could not be otherwise, other than in that moment, I identify the process of thinking and something to think against. In this absolute void as nothing but the perceiver we speak, and in doing so we intake all the possible that our perception places as possible over the not. This is my humble qualifier for the “quality of realness.” We do not have access to “real,” but we have access to things that at least have the dignity to lie to us. What facts of our being can we have honest faith in? Thinking of Esse Maxim brings about the focal and periphery, there are facts of self that would either be accentuated or mitigated. This is the wisdom of narrativism. If we make sense of ourselves, we can’t intake all facts, as we can’t possibly make sense of them. For that reason, we find general scenes, arcs, and a plot. We do so by accentuating some facts and mitigating others. Perhaps repetitive hours droning away in labor would play less of a role in your mythos than quiet and vital conversations with a loved one. We can now also split being in memory as passed and being as possible in the future. The actual is what we love as fate. The possible is what we fight as fate. We have analyzed the components of the story, but I have forgone the introduction of the greatest character for as long as I could because I kept hoping I could find an introduction more worthy of Him. If we co-author as we write, who is the other Author? God. Take liberty to wonder how abstract or literal I am here being. God as the inevitable prior brought about our being. We are only able to write because He brought us into existence from nothing. Once we are now existent, did he only write our first fact? No, he wrote not only your being as the introduction of the character, but He wrote the premises of the story. He upholds being “for in him we live, and move, and have our being.” These premises are then initiated, but did He bring us about to vanish? In deist denial, He continues to be provident in providence. Fate has its rule over us, and we have only the abiding. He writes our initiation, the premise, and all of the world except for the small part that we do, but we write our own character? We write the mythos, and He writes all else. My body's health, the order of the mind, and continued consciousness depend on Him. However, we are then left to then write that mythos, or at least seemingly and effectively so with freewill aside. Can we then play any character we like? No, because there are only a certain sort of character that can come from what God provided you. Can we then resign our will to the role God gave us? Now, because it is insufficient information to live out. We are then in this perfect level of dooming where we must be something, but there is nothing that we must be. God, in His wisdom, places us here despite our attempted escape. The context of our lives predate us, and are ever-present to us. You will often hear someone remark that an enemy or friend could have been the other if only they were to have been born somewhere else. Does this mean that we don’t fight? This would be to deny the desperation that God writes into the story. Why would He do this? If His objective was your good pleasure, this would be a failing, but do epics worry for the hero’s comfort over their greatness? Do I feel guilty for making my characters suffer for a good story? This is not a resolution of evil, but it is a perspective shift. If God writes the context, we write the content. Who do we will to be? What do they see the world as? What do they value before all else? And finally, and essentially, how does their living bring about these thoughts? As I write my story for you to read someday, I am glad I lived out Esse Maxim in its discovery. If I told you the story of how I sat there in comfort and came up with an idea that I never lived out, I might as well not write a story like all the other philosophers. However, because it was lived, in discovery and application, the story is now one worth the hearing. This is where we get to a vital last distinction. God writes and directs. We write and act. We are only then left with the playing of the character. He introduces a new, unique, unforeseen, and desperate circumstance before us to see how we will respond. We write the character and then exert effort, to then also wonder how we acted. In my age, there is a critique of our mythos as the “ego.” We are told to kill it as if there were an alternative. In its absence, we are left with a worse and less deliberate version. What they do find here that is worth noting is that the mythos is contingent, which we know. However, they also note that the mythos may finally not do the three things we want: Be self-consistent, reflect facts of self and world, and aid our being. We then go through the process of “god Killing" as “Death and Rebirth.” to bring the mythos in line with the story. Our pen is our will as we find it, and God’s pen is providence. His pen works out the “thrownness,” the fate we find, and the fate we are to find. We are made a “who” by fate, but what “who” is made by us? Our pen comes from ourselves as authentic identification, and writing the outlines as Esse Maxim. 

Before reading Hegel and Heidegger, I struggled to make sense of being across time. I now see being as that which makes time. However, as it is made, how do we live out how it seems to us? We co-author with God and must inevitably must surrender all to Him. However, we can still have our conversations. As time comes I greedily labor and pray for what I will then accept what His directing role concludes. However, I will note my prayers now exclusively ask for His writing of fate, though I tell Him I will be fighting as it comes to me. When I follow all I can for why God as fate does what He does, all I can come up with is that it has no certain meaning, and if it did it makes most sense as making a character. We are a dynamic character and I think God knows that and has as His end the end of our story. When we remark on stories and characters, there is a drastic inequality for their eligibility for evaluation. You have favorite stories at the exclusion of others. You do the same with characters. There are some future versions of yourself you would then admire more or less based on this vital aesthetic eye. I have so many stories I have wanted to finish writing as they burst from genius into my mind. I struggle to find energy to write them, but there is one story that keys onto the human experience so well, it is one of them I feel most angry I haven’t written yet. I don’t want to steal from that future publication, but the basic premise is three brothers who experience the same cruising horror that the found themselves so limited to fight against. Their psyche as sense of world and self is now ever in the shadow of this event. However, they pick different sorts of Esse Maxims and therefore become drastically different character. The first is the victim. He learned his helplessness and lives it out. He goes along with what finds around himself, but yet is bitter and more weak than resigning. This brother fails to bring about his values. The next brother is the villain. Unlike the victim, he is able to use what is around him to bring about his ends. However, he is not concerned with the values of others. More to his detriment, he fails to be central to his valuing and impressive to adopt God’s privileged valuing. In doing so, he wants his wants only to find them contradictory and cursing. His hedonism's time-horizon attempts to be as long as he can imagine, but he inevitably lives out his basest desire and never identifies the core of his will. He brings about his values only. Finally, we have the vigilante. You will note that I did not say here, and it is not just to keep the form. In an overly socially moralistic world, the hero is caught up in only bringing about others' values. This then makes him still subject to silly wants, but it is now others’ wants, and he is not as able to understand their wanting. The vigilante then wants to bring about his values, which as love would be your values. However, he doesn’t want to bring about your values, but his values on your behalf. In this instance, this great character doesn’t care if he keeps your laws, but he does care if he aids you as he sees it. If he gave in to your wantings and surrendered himself, he would just be the victim with more labor. He is still rebellious and autonomous. He builds power as the ability to alter the world. He breathes values into being and executes from magnanimity. He brings about his most core and true values as he attempts to align them with God. There are two more sorts of characters not listed here that I share to not make a false dichotomy of options. The first is the citizen who only lives as they prima facie find it. They are pushed by basic whims. You might note that they would be less bitter and pained than the victim, so why not be them? That is the point, any redemption that the victim has is in his mourning. He knows and grieves, even if he doesn’t act out. The citizen is a philosophical zombie, stuck and incurious in Plato’s cave, and not able to understand their assumptions. Why not be them? I would rather be the villain or the vigilante who at least knows why they do what they do, than their lazy henchmen or sidekick. Our metavalue is engagement, and civilians then metasin. Finally, there is the divine mythos. He is what the vigilante finds himself to be at the story's end. He is the mind that joins the primacy of fate with its sheer will to be all. I will not expound on that. He has joined God as much as his essence allows and is aligned with his being. I have ridiculed archetypes in part because the idea can’t take precedence over the instance. We must then worry about our instantiating this in action. You likely held up your mythos against these five and found them as distinctions to make sense of your mythos. As a leadership method, I use what I call “reputation farming.” It is essentially the effort to make known the mythos you are. Once we have acquired this character in the living it out, we then broadcast it the same way to ourselves, others, and God. Who are we? Impossible. We only know something by what it does. What do we do? While we can’t know what the world we are affecting is, we can know how we are affecting it. More than consequentialism vs some type of intentionality, we can see the seeming intention and the seeming consequence to find the seeming character as virtue ethics. The world asks you what you want from it, and then continually asks if you are sure. We can try to lie and say that we want and warrant much, but we know better. While worthiness is something I am not qualified to speak on and yet plan to write on later, we can ask what we are and how we can value what we are. Finally, let’s assume this God as fate is a perceiving and hence valuing mind. What would He value of us? How does He see me? What does He want for me? I humbly wonder if it is the mythos that is most self-consistent, reflects facts of self and world, and serve our being. In terms of greed for character, we ask the question of “Actualization Elevator.” What is sufficient? It is not just what future thing to we find that we accept, because we can simply love fate then. Rather, what do we attempt to become now, because what we attempt to do will alter our writing of ourselves to be. Do I shoot for that mythos I value most and die unrealized? Do I pick something accessible only to find excess energies after the fact? This is the issue with greatness. I am constantly torn by my modern life and running away to the woods to write. What I can say is that he who fights for the greatest greatness he can, will certainly attain some, and from that wrestling perhaps a little more. 

There comes a point where one’s actions do not coincide with one’s values. This failing is called akrasia. These non-valuable actions would then bleed into our accessible character to make us someone we do not value. When we find this, it can be tempting to destroy our values and pay the price of nihilism, but I think the labor to repent is a better cost for a better reward. There is also a point where we realize our mythos or conceptual sense of self is not self consistent, does not reflect facts of self and world, and/or does not bring about our values. What are we to do then? As I said, we can embark on the process of “god Killing” which is to reassess and reaffirm one’s Esse Maxim. We do this by the “Death and Rebirth” of allowing that prior character to come to their end and perhaps with the most dignity we can, in order to be a new sort of person. In terms of this story that we co-author with God, perhaps this is our editing. Of course, we write as we play, and for that reason can’t go back to rewrite and replay what was already. However, we can plead with the director and our own psyche to allow us to play someone anew. The later context of our lives will still bleed out onto the context we and God had previously written to make a new story with a new seemingness. For example, the redemptive story arc does not seek to deny that ills done by oneself, but to demonstrate that those ills did not continue because that character is truly something different. Editing an Esse Maxim is extremely difficult as how can we see our eyes through our eyes? Repetition makes a message and I will remind thusly: Is it self-consistent, does it reflect facts of self and world, is it for our end? More can and later ought to be said, but for now, this satisfies. Insofar as we do this analysis and editing of the self, we have in each expression an opportunity to make ourselves anew. I have personally changed my mythos a number of times and in extreme enough ways that my mind will need a while to establish and validate this mythos. I have had a meditation for a number of years and attempted to ask it to others: If someone had the secret message to fix my life, would I take it? Yes, it is dangerously close to the “secret lie” for us to think that a piece of knowledge can save us. However, I have seen people who bash themselves against an issue for years that everyone from the outside can see. Because of our limited awareness, that person is not able to grasp it, and likely is unsure of their mythos enough to hear it out from someone else. If there were such a message, would we be able to handle hearing it? I recommend a meditation on this for yourself, followed by perhaps an asking of the people around you, but I will give you a warning about the social ethos later. What we can say is that people are mirrors to make sense of ourselves, although they only explicitly say what they want us to have heard rather than what they have reason to believe. For these reasons, friends can be permissive to hell as they give advice we want to hear, or even advice that sounds pleasant but hurts us. We can likely assume outside of our parents and spouses, no one is more invested in you than yourself. Always ask for advice. Always be skeptical of it. We now have to wonder about conceptual autonomy. As we are limited in our awareness, when we go a direction, we turn around to see if everyone is nodding their heads at us. We need validation to confirm our direction. In “Seeing Oneself” I talk about the ability to do that process for others. We must start with other’s direction, our parents being primal, and then learn how to trust our own judgement while intaking some data from others. I won’t say the objective is to have the most or least of these affirmations. What I will say is, whatever source you use to affirm, see what it does. I would also challenge you specifically to attempt to be a leader. I didn’t wait until I found another uneducated homeless farmboy philosopher to be one myself. Don’t wait until you find a great person who looks and talks like you. Be that person that expands the habitus of expected and possible behavior as you see fit. We may have people around us when we die, but we will likely be the only one dying. We go that last bow and strutting from the stage alone. Any ovation as celebration or judgement as accountability, we do so alone. Do not haste to live how you wouldn’t truly and honestly will. Let us now further consider the issue of other characters. As their director directs and they write, they will need us to play characters for them. Insofar as we can obliged without damaging our character, there is no reason not to. As I remarked in “The Bloodline,” it can at times be enjoyable to step away from one’s mythos just long enough for reprieve. Social authenticity would in this situation be the greatest degree to which we can play their character while playing ours. However, at times the character they press us into being is not one we can reasonably play. I recall someone that I found to be evil became a new character when he had a chance to step back and pick a new person in a new social setting. To some degree, we can play their character. If it isn’t true to who you have found yourself to be, to help them in a certain way, maybe do so. If your desperation and safety require you to be someone else, perhaps it is worth it. However, to some degree, we can’t betray our character, and some parts of playing him will require us to deny them. Is the law for the man or the man for the law? I ask my Esse Maxim for all I need, but I would also give my all and die for it. We have asked about explicit editing, but what about when we are not sure if we are yet to a point to edit? We live out the character until we know. Bad ideas lived out reduce themselves to absurdity. This is how we know them when we test them. However, implicit in this is that we do in fact test them. Once Esse Maxim as mythos breaks any, some or all of self-consistency, self and world reflection, and being toward us, then we adapt. However, we only know to adapt and have the momentum when we are already living it. We identify what God wrote and what we can write. However, we also after the fact attempt to make sense of what we wrote. I don’t have the best memory, and for that reason love reading my books because I never know what’s coming next. We then seek to understand the thing that is trying to do the understanding, as we look to Socrates to “know thyself.” There are a number of tools to identify oneself, but one that seems to have some merit is “othering” yourself. To question the thing that is questioning, is like looking between mirrors to see their reflection. We always have direct proximity to ourselves and can never contrast it. We can’t step outside of ourselves to see someone else’s qualia or seemingness. For that reason we can’t know ourselves by contrast unless we can step outside of ourselves. A way to ask it is “how would we judge this character if we had not written them.” We are not talented as a race at self-reporting. The greatest artists and the worst artists confuse themselves for each other constantly. What we can then do is step outside of ourselves as having written something, while still holding our values, and ask what we value what was written. It is so hard to identify if some evil was warranted, but when you ask if you would have had another small child go through that evil, we jump to a resounding “no!” Othering is powerful, but limiting and even dangerous as we can divorce ourselves from the writing process. However, at times it is worth the use to see if we have been sloppy in our writing or harsh in our evaluation. 

When I was writing the original chapter sharing Esse Maxim in its breadth, I struggled to know how long to wait. I needed to get it out as soon as possible so it was available for reference, but I needed to wait as long as possible to make sure it was the best quality I could make. You may have noticed that I have really matured in my writing and thinking since then, and I knew it was coming. This chapter was started around that same time, right at the beginning. In the latter part of my twenty-fourth year, I worked on it. I added notes as I fished and hiked through my twenty-fifth year. On my twenty-sixth birthday, I tried to outline it but found I was not ready. After another year of adding notes, I finally put the outline together alone on my twenty-seventh birthday, and I am fleshing it out and editing it just a month later. I knew I could take my time, but I wanted to do it justice. I made myself up. He was a character I wrote, sought direction, and played. I played him to reflect the scene in which he found himself. I directed him along an arch I found a sense of. I wrote him to move from where he was to where he is. But I am not only the author, I am the character. Some analytic philosophers may point out that a fact can’t be its cause. However, with the “I” and “myself,” I am referring to different aspects of myself and in its juxtaposition. This character has a vendetta against himself, and yet I am honored to be him. It is an honor to share this writing with you and explore your own writing. This writing as the selfhood of Esse Maxim, isn’t just an idea, but an imperative. It pulls at us to live it out. Find your premise and character in what God left for you. Once the character is defined, write, and find him again in what he does. Find your rhythm, method, and writing voice. I have lived my life for the eyes that could not see and not for the moment. It did not give it ease, but it gave it a worth to witness. As my character grows, the world seems to shrink to be unthreatening and more adorable for my love and labor. By God and heaven, I cherish the pages of my story where your name graces its lettering upon my life. I hope in that heaven I can procure my own copy of what your life laid on page. I am honored by your witnessing my writing. Central and core to this and all is this: The story that God and I write together. I cherish His partnership and love of the story over ease of acting. His delicate tragedies have made my being beautiful across time. I am not sure I can ask anything more from God than to become a thought in a beautiful story, and I do wonder if that is what I have done. Grip your pen tightly. Hear His action calls. Live out that most marvelous person you have made up. Thank you for playing the role of my beloved. Is this enough for mind against the void? The story that God and I wrote together.