legba lodge: 8/1/23

.. if you aren't enjoying the game, you've already lost ..

.. tighten up; refine your game ..

.. the lines are always shifting ..

.. but you can @ll ways improve at engaging with the changes ..

“Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

- from Rounders

"Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all"

- Aristotle

I get my knowledge from the psst, the guy on the street - closer to the ground, the sound of the earth, a bit in the past. I buy what he's selling: there are other worlds than my own; the one I grew up in, was acculturated to, am accustomed to.

But we always fell a bit outside that application of social science, we didn't quite listen, because what our teachers were saying didn't quite make sense. They didn't get to the root of the matter and explain principles, they never quite answered the "why?" for... almost everything, and they didn't give us the tools for us to even ask our questions directly to Nature.-

Maybe some did, through special insight, an ability to get through all the fluff and noise, let go of the particulars of, to large degree, the isolated facts and fictions we were forced to study and read. In geometry we questioned why a triangle sums to half a circle, later to find out that even then it was more-or-less a blatant lie and is only true in a flat, empty, Euclidean space. History is taught without reference to who's written it - and our family stories, our own histories, are ignored at the preference of a Grand Vision of History.

The P(a)SST! - a loud whisper... I grab a bag - so I can let go of my baggage - I hop inside, a different set of stars and constellations appear; pin-pricks in the dark night sky that the bag became when I entered and sent out a breath... blowing up a balloon... A light shines on high: the hole where I entered the bag, receding, getting smaller as I fall[↧], but I can't feel it anymore... I seem to have stopped and the stars in the heavens start spinning[☸︎], barely perceptible.

A bright light appears in a distance, miniscule at first, then quickly enlarging and I can no longer look directly at it. I glance away... ah, that's nice, just another miniscule light out there now]..[then it starts changing colors and my entire field of vision is awash in tones. I forget about the pain from the light, I can't bear to remember, and do remember something about a bag filled with god-knows-what and a pisst on a s[tree]t which was nowhere to be found amongst the mass of shifting colors.

Oh great, I thought: now I've done it; I've gone in[to]o] deep. What was in that bag anyways? And now my vision splits in two; it seems a lace(d)work web now separates the colors, lies between them - moving, swaying, twisting, turning back on itself. Ah shit man... what do I do now, all alone on whatever trip I've ended up taking by jumping into whatever was in that bag?

I see flashes of light along the t[h]reads of the web, sometimes flashing off by tortuous paths to whatever final destination... if there even was one. Maybe some of the other celestial lights, holes in the bag like that, like me... but how do I move? The stars are still moving. I think: if I am like them in being some sort of source of some sort of light, color, and they move, there must be some way for me to do likewise.

The stars are rotating - I know this because some of them barely move at all and the others are like a spinning belt between this zenith and nadir. Maybe I can, have to, rotate too? But which way? And where are my hands and feet? Ahyeah, I remember, I did jump into this bag feet first, right? It would have been crazy to dive in. That light up there, at the zenith, that's the zenith, from when I started falling down - up there somewhere must be my head and down there in the blackness must be my feet, but I don't see a star... is there a star down there?.. maybe it's black?

I don't know, but I still feel awful alone... I need to get moving. woof, at least now I've got some reference, oriented a bit. I'm falling right? I recall, so there is some motion I'm making already going on here, but I'm just falling into the blackness - nobody's there, so that doesn't do me much good. Those threads are moving too, flashing with washed out pulses. Can I pull on them like a rope? Damn, I still can't find my hands, they've got to be somewhere... I did open that damn bag after all... didn't I?

It's becoming more difficult to remember, and the Unknown, being greater than the Known, by its weight, presses in through openings in the known.

".. I'm better even than I know how to be; & even I don't gnow what that means .."

- from the Stoned Sayings of Shades (fourth cumming)

.. shades ( .. thus named because he was most comfortable behind the camera; behind the scenes as it were, & not in the bright lights .. ) often found himself wondering if the profound & far-ranging implications of the assertion that reality is structured like a con fidence trick or 'con' were felt & understood in the fullness of their scope ..

.. to say that reality is a 'simulation', or, as the gnostics do, that the world as we experience it daily was made by an incompetent imposter, is to begin to appreciate the deeper implications of such a position ..

.. & yet, this isn't merely to fetishize the con nor to idolize the con artist, although certainly one could credibly argue that in a holographic world in which god is a con artist, to do either of these is in itself ostensibly an act of devotion or worship ..

.. certainly it would be an easy enough matter to dismiss such a perverse perspective which sets aside the lofty ideals of honor & integrity in favor of a hermeneutics of suspicion & deceit in which nothing is ever really 'simply' black or white ..

.. & yet, there are deeper levels of reading our thesis compared to which the latter is merely a surface understanding .. for one thing, when is anything ever obviously black or white ..? ... is it not more likely, & indeed, deeper in tune & true to our lived experience, that everything comes in shades ..?

.. & then there's another important con sideration, specifically, where are honor & integrity to be found today ..? .. for surely one must take the claims of those who boldly proclaim that they're possessed of such ideals with a healthy dose of salt .. indeed, this is especially true now, when some of these feel entitled to bid for our leadership & seek our allegiance ..

.. arguably, it is our understanding of honor & integrity that are lacking in subtlety & the discrimination to distinguish between those who are victimized by the greedy & those who unjustifiably feel entitled to make the lives of others worse in order to make their own better .. perhaps both might resort to honing their con artistry, but this with diametrically opposed goals ..

.. if this is an accurate analysis of things as they stand, then it's ultimately up to each individual to determine for themselves which of these is which .. & who among the entitled & the untitled is worthy of respect & support .. for such are the rules of engagement in what, if any are, is surely the very aeon of the con artist ..