DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS: "ALL MORALITIES BEING EQUAL", Part 1

Hello all!

This is where we go deeper. Reader, beware.

How are you all doing? I hope your week is going well. No one have a major accident? Do anything dangerous recently? Has your life been pleasantly hum-drum? I want the last one, because I do want to entertain you, and it is far easier if you’re bored. Then, anything is exciting—or insurmountably frustrating, if you’re ‘one of those people’ who think they can be normal and boring. You aren’t. Quit lying to yourself. It’s remarkable how people who look gruff or homely and live gruff-and-homely lives, have some of the liveliest personalities when you get to know them, or how people who do exciting things for a living can be remarkably dull. They’d be more alive if they did something boring ‘n’ hum-drum. Such is life.

I started this blog with colorful claims—knocking Joseph Campbell on the head and referencing ancient religions like Gnosto-Hermeticism. I even plan on giving Karl Jung a good wallop for good measure, too, but I suppose if I did what I claimed to do and give them all a good drubbing in multi-part essays, you’d leave none the wiser. Poof! It’s the Google ™ effect—you learn a thing quickly and forget it just as quickly. It’s a bad way for humans to learn. Forget what you hear from mystics to philosophers and weirdoes—we aren’t connected to some Platonic sea of knowledge that flows through our heads and minds. (Yes, in effect Plato*’s Idealism believed that we humans were all connected to some kind of supernatural Internet, which is why we have knowledge and intuition.)

[*Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the 2 dozen other Greek philosophers that aren’t important but you have to learn anyway, because the former 3 are repugnant to the human mind, but the other 2 dozen’s wild ideas are way catchier and wilder. And even then, the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle can go just as insane as any other, with more devastating results.]

We aren’t that special. We are cavemen who learn by bashing rocks together. …Those rocks are in our head, and we smash them together into more understandable pieces, and then, like a mosaic, put those pieces back together into a picture. This is why thinking hurts—we’re smashing rocks in our heads! It is why thinking is as strenuous as wrestling—and why the Greeks saw both as important sports. The Romans? Eh…well they had one philosopher, who was also an Emperor. That counts for something. Most Romans wanted to be Conan, but for a cause—the ideal of Rome. That’s why they conquered three continents, the whole world of the time, and the Greeks lived like nerds in their basements.

I’m building a world you can understand, starting with what’s here and working backwards. I’m going to make some big and outrageous claims, though I will provide as much clarity as I can. Will it be all straight answers? No! We’re going to smash rocks with our heads. It’s about as much fun as digging for fossils, because you are digging through the archeology of ideas…and most of archeology is scraping off layers of dirt so that you don’t damage anything. Takes patience, but we’re on the Internet, so I have to get to the point.

We are going to talk about magic here. It’s not holiness or a state of sanctity—far from it. Don’t use it either, stupid, because the drawbacks are worse than the rewards. It’s partly magic, partly ideals, partly abstract—it’s wrestling with the air and ghosts and telling them to p*ss right the Hell off if they try to take up residence in your mind. I will be frank—as Christianity has retreated from the world, esotericism has crept in, and the new ‘neopagans’ don’t hold a candle to the real deal. Remember what about I said about cosmology and mythology? We’re at that level. You have to understand, because though they are games, the various role-playing games—the longest running ones—are all built upon cosmologies that are so complex, they’re almost like religions. They’re disqualified, though, from being too simple. And you can’t live out effectively any of them, so that disqualifies them as a faith—that is, putting beliefs into codified action and trusting them.

And it is because of this strange cross-roads, of human make-believe, philosophy, real-world mythologies, and abstract thinking, that I have to give two warnings. The first is against the central error of the twin philosophies, Nominalism and Existentialism. The first was a Medieval philosophy school that lasted from the 1000s-1400s, and the other was made by a Frenchman (damn the French!). Their central error can be summed up as ‘there is nothing truly real except what man invents in his mind.’ The other warning, I cannot give. The answer is too big for most people; not until they’ve grown up from being young and tender to strong and resilient; not until they’ve learned the night is dark and full of terrors; not until they’ve learned how to fight; not until they are happy that life is vast and strange; not until they are grateful and wise.

Was I any of this? No. I was stupid but listened to great men who lived long before me and wrote their words down. I was a pansy until I clinged to strength that was not my own. I was a fool who put my mind, my sanity, in danger and survived only because I was too damn stubborn to compromise my beliefs. (I learned the hard and painful way, and you may too.) I had to wait for answers, and even had to have life happen to me as I was making my way through life. And then in my twenties, I had an epiphany—‘Oh my God! Everything I was taught as a child was true!’

Fairy tales are true. That’s what I learned in my early twenties. Those silly tales taught to children, fairy tale or not? Wiser than the adults who tell them. I never would have believed it until I saw the morals play out in my young adult life. I suppose that is my second warning—fairy tales are true. Stories are true. Disbelieve them at your own peril. No, that’s not the second warning. Don’t get swallowed up in fairy tales, because then you’ll go mad. No, no, that’s not the second warning either. I can’t give the second warning—not until you have encountered that which cannot be expressed—but is real regardless. It will break you, and make you its slave, if you’re too weak. In that case, ask for an angel to rescue you. Help will come. Ask even if you are strong! The surprise will free you.

Let’s begin where it all started—a dungeon, and some dragons!

…Next post.

More to follow!