Читать книгу The Book of the Die - Luke Rhinehart - Страница 10

Once a lion was born in New York City’s Bronx zoo. Until he was four years old he lived in cages in the zoo. When some of the older lions talked about something called ‘freedom’ he thought they were talking about living in the big cage – the one with rocks and a pool – rather than the small one, where he fed and slept.

Then the zoo sent him in a cage to Kenya for certain scientific experiments and there, by chance, the lion escaped and returned to the jungle. Only then did he realize how inhibited, constrained, circumscribed and caged he had been all his life. He had never realized how open and huge the world was. Now, in the jungle, he learned how he was meant to live. He realized his full, natural spontaneous life. At last he knew what the older lions in the zoo had meant by freedom.

Most of us have been brought up in a cage: the cage of the self. Until we have experienced freedom from this cage we won’t know what those who have escaped are talking about. But perhaps some strange day the bars around you will melt and the world will suddenly seem immense, and yourselves immense enough to fill it. At that moment you’ll laugh at those wax bars that you had remained behind for years – when all you had to do was push them aside and walk free.

Most of us live life in a daze. Every morning we retrace our footsteps, sigh the same sighs, moan the same moans and strike another day of our lives off the calendar. Habit forms a dusty crust on our daily schedule. It seems impossible to break out. But the dice are uncontrollable: Chance, not man, is their master. They will punch through to freedom, unfreeze synapses, road-test fantasies. They disable the logical naysayer. They will allow us to stop shaking our heads and start nodding, stop frowning and start smiling, stop standing and start moving.

The dice are all about new possibilities. Without dice each today is like every other day. But just one die equals six different todays, two are thirty-six, and the world explodes in possibilities.

There’s a part of you that’s hiding under the ‘you’ that everybody else knows. What do you really want? Make up six options and think about them for a while. Cross out the impossible, the unobtainable and the illegal, and you ‘U start to see the you that you’ve forgotten, the you that you’ve neglected, the you that you’ve given up on. Roll the dice and let that you ride again.

If you always just do what you think you can do, you’ll never do what you could do, what you dream of doing. Dice make dreams and daily life equally likely. And when that happens, the soul is changed forever.

– Matthew Davidge

It’s sometimes said that it’s impossible for a human to live without developing a firm and consistent sense of self, and that those dice-people who seem to be functioning happily may be doing so because they have, whether they know it or not, a firm sense of themselves as children of chance. ‘The idea of being a kind of random multiple man is an idea of oneself,’ said one commentator, ‘and if held firmly may represent a stable self even if the actions of this stable self are multiple and inconsistent.’

Sounds reasonable. However, if we become attached to the idea of being a dice-person then we guarantee that we are not one. It is precisely against the idea of believing we are someone that our methods are aimed. A self or ‘I’ can certainly be said to exist at any given moment but the wise man makes no claim of permanence for any of his ‘I’s.

A Diemaster once said: ‘All of my dieciples are good dice-persons except Whim. He alone is no one.’

STUDENT: But who are you?

WHIM: Here today, gone tomorrow.

STUDENT: But who are you?

WHIM: Me? I’m … oops, not any more.

Even the normal human knows he is multiple. For example, a man slaps his wife. Thirty minutes later another self bursts into his consciousness saying, ‘Oh, what a horrible thing to have slapped my wife. I love my wife.’ When the man returns to his wife the ensuing dialogue might go like this:

‘I love you, Sweetheart.’

‘You prick, an hour ago you hit me.’

‘No, no, I didn’t mean to. That wasn’t the real me.’

‘It was too you!’

‘Not me. I love you. I could no more hit you than I could kill myself.’

‘Then who was it using your body who belted me?’

‘Beats me, but let’s fuck.’

Die-ing eliminates internal conflicts by eliminating the illusion that some mes are more real, more important or morally superior to others. We assume that there is no real me; we are nothing but a collection of fakes, some of whom are under the illusion they are more real than others. There are layers of self-deception which wise men peel and peel until at last they stand face to face with the Ultimate: layer upon layer of further self-deception.

The sage rips off mask after mask until at last he is free of his compulsion to rip off masks. He begins instead to create mask after mask, joyfully and without guilt. He knows that no matter how many masks he ripped off he was still in self-deception; he knows that no matter how many new masks he now adds he is being utterly honest.

Scoop up water and the moon is in your hands,

Pick up dice and hold green stars.

Drop them, and watch the lightning strike.

Die-ing permits us to let go of our ‘true self’ and let Chance choose from among the optional aspirations we are willing to risk expressing. Soon we come to realize that our problems and conflicts are in some sense not ours to worry about: that no matter how hard we try, no ‘I’ can ever have any control.

In giving up trying to control life through an illusory self, one feels liberated, ecstatic, stoned. It’s something like newly-born Christians giving up their souls to Christ or God, or the Zen student or Taoist surrendering to the Tao. In all these cases the ego-control game is abandoned and one surrenders to a force which is experienced as being outside oneself.

Of course, there is the danger that at first we may cast the dice to choose among our options and think: ‘Now I must have the will power to do it.’ But obviously the illusion that an ego controls or has ‘will power’ must be abandoned. We will come to see our relation to the dice first as that of a baby in a rubber raft on a flooded river: each motion of the river is pleasant; we don’t need to know where we’re going or when, if ever, we’ll arrive. Motion is all. Later, the feeling of separation from the river will disappear. The falling die, the flow of experience, the succession of ‘Is’ will all blend into a single swim. The I will have died.

Of course, the death of the personality is a slow and unending process. In the early stages of die-ing only a few of the buried selves are able to offer themselves to the Die. But as we progress, more and more selves, desires, values and roles are raised into the possibility of existence; the human being grows, expands, becomes more flexible, more various. The strength of the normal dominant personality declines, disappears. We die. And, having died, at last we feel free.

DIE-ING WITH DICE, DIE-ING WITH MEDITATION, DIE-ING WITH ZEN, DIE-ING WITH THE SUFIS – IT DOESN’T MUCH MATTER HOW YOU DIE. THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO PRODUCE A CORPSE.