From: Man Alive! - "The love of Splendor is the life divine."

[Greg]

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )

by Greg Swann


Chapter 12. The love of Splendor is the life divine.

We see the world we're looking for. I see a world full of
children.

I see the adults around me, of course, and the houses and cars
and trees and birds and animals. I love everything in existence,
natural and man-made, and I take in everything the world brings
to me. But I focus on the children. I love babies when they're
barely old enough to smile at the world. And I love toddlers,
just learning to speak in verbal semaphore but already well able
to laugh in delight at absolutely everything. And I love
children, newly awakened in Fathertongue, newly awake to the life
of the mind.

I start to lose interest in kids at about age eight or nine --
when they begin to get good at inventing and repeating lies. And,
to say the awful truth, I don't give much attention at all to
adults -- and they tend not to like me much, either. If you're
still awake, and -- man alive! -- I can tell in a glance if
you're still awake, you will be as delightful to me as any
five-year-old. But if your mind is dead, if you have locked it
away in a mental dungeon to make sure you don't inadvertently
think or say something that contradicts some insipid dogma you
swallowed whole, I don't have much room for you in my thoughts or
in my heart.

But that can't be you I'm talking about. How do I know? Because
you made it to the end of this book. You can be assured that
anyone who cannot abide letting me live my life as I choose --
who can't suffer to let me _say_ these things -- fled the scene
in revulsion a long time ago. To me, it is absurd to experience
illness in reaction to mere words on paper, but I know from past
experience that the ideas I talk about can quite literally make
people sick. _That_ is the power of the human mind -- if you pit
it against itself. Me, I'm doing fine, and I hope you are, too.
And, if bad ideas can make you ill, I cannot see why it should
not be the case that good ideas should help you stay well -- and
feel elated.

I live in a world of Splendor, with a deeply satisfying feeling
of enduring delight underscoring virtually every moment of my
life. This is a particularly good day for me -- _I_ made it to
the end of this book -- but almost every day is a good day for
me. My mind is focused only on the good -- only on _my own_ good,
_my own_ values, _my own_ self -- and, in consequence, I live all
the time in the metaphorical universe that is implied by the
fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony -- by the _Ode to
Joy._

I wrote this definition of Splendor many years ago. It is being
supplanted by this book, of course, but I still love it as a
pocket-sized map to the fully-human state of mind: "Splendor is
the interior experience of being so enthralled by the act of
creating the values that contribute to and ultimately comprise
your idealized perfect self that, while you are experiencing it,
you _are_ your idealized perfect self." If you want to be like a
god, and not like an animal, then _behave_ like a god: In the
self-engendered universe-of-your-experience, create nothing but
your own values, and nothing at all of anyone else's disvalues.
If every single watt and calorie and foot-pound of your mental
energy is devoted to the things you love, there will be nothing
of hatred or pain or sadness or boredom or spite anywhere in your
life.

There is one more idea I want to take up with you, and I think it
is the most demanding one I know. You had to wrap your mind
around the self, after being told all your life to despise it,
and then I sprung the notion of self-adoration on you. I
undermined just about every dogma you have ever heard about, and
then I made you eat anarchy-pie and like it -- or at least not
spit it out. And now I plan to make you stretch even farther, to
go with me where no philosophy of reason has ever gone before.

Where might that be?

To heaven.

"Say WHAT?!?"

But, but, but... Heaven is for theologians. Heaven is for
priests. Heaven, every smug academic will sneer, is for wishful
thinkers who can't handle the infinite hell that is human life on
Earth.

I think you might be able to guess what I think about a claim
like that. If theological pronouncements about ontology and
teleology are intellectually useless, invalidities defended with
insipidities, so, too, are the metaphysical opinions of modern
philosophers, academics, artists, journalists and politicians. If
you hate the self, in time you cannot fail to hate life as well
-- your own life and _all_ of human life. You will not be able to
stop yourself from sneering at joy, at hope, at ambition, at
every value the fully-human life requires. You will look for
nothing but evidences of failure and despair in the world around
you, and your one, unique, irreplaceable human life will _become_
the infinite hell you insist you see everywhere.

But what if you were to point your mind in the opposite
direction?

This entire argument is the answer I am making to you, of course,
but my own private, interior, introspective experience of living
my life is my own answer. I live in heaven. I live in a paradise
on Earth, and I see nothing but angels -- brilliant young minds
-- all around me. I am one of those angels, just bigger and
clumsier, because I never once thought to shut down my mind, to
renounce my own thinking and ape someone else's, to denounce my
self and my body and my life _for being what they are._ I love my
self, and the thing I love _most_ about my self is that I have
gotten better and better, over the years, at living _up_ to my
self. I am not representing myself as some paragon of virtue; too
much the contrary! But what I am is a mind alive, a mind that
never stopped thinking carefully, and the Splendor I know in my
mind and in my body is the _product_ of that thinking.

The uniquely-human life is everything it is, not some
sliced-and-diced reductionist mess, and the _fully-_human life is
a thing of Splendor. The true _is_ the good _is_ the beautiful,
and, accordingly, the best expression of the fully-human life is
the _worship_ of Splendor. Thoughtful scholarship made a mistake
when it abandoned the idea of reverence to theology. Human beings
are everything we are, and one of the most important things we
are is _reverent._ We worship, and so it is a thing of the most
raucously comical absurdity that we have sought, through the
ages, to worship anything and everything _except_ the source of
all adoration -- the self.

Human beings worship -- and, of course, no other animals do --
and we become most worthy of our own adoration, each one of us
alone in the silence and solitude of the mind, when we worship
the self and all of the precious values of the self. The word
adoration is a holy word, and that's why I use it, again and
again -- to intensify, to beautify and to _beatify_ the idea of
self-love. You can adore your self only by always behaving
adorably -- by being adorable _to_ your self -- and when you do
that, your life comes to be ever more heavenly with every passing
day.

In the middle of this argument, I stranded you on a desert
island, all alone and without Fathertongue, to see how you would
do. Imagine if the first father of Fathertongue were stranded
here, in the modern world, in the big city. You can put him all
alone, in a place devoid all other people, but leave him every
artifact of modern life, all those riches you so blithely take
for granted. Give him time to learn and to study, to reap every
treasure Fathertongue has managed to pile up in the thousands of
years since he walked the Earth. When he finally got himself up
to speed, what do you suppose might be his philosophy?

Reflect that this man may have been the greatest genius ever to
have lived. Where each one of us was able to learn almost
everything we know in Fathertongue, from the discoveries of other
people, discovering very little, if anything, on our own, that
first father of Fathertongue had to discover everything he knew.
He had to unearth the truth, prove it to himself and then find
some way to communicate it to his brothermen. How do we know this
is so? Because discovery is particular to the individual. A
blinding epiphany happens only within an individual mind. The
experience cannot be shared -- no more than the process of the
digestion of food can be shared.

That one man was the greatest benefactor in the history of human
life on Earth. He lived up to the gift of mind before there _was_
a gift of mind. That precious treasure, for every human being who
ever lived, was a gift from him alone. Without him, the human
race might have perished entirely -- gone extinct. I never forget
how much I owe to my parents for giving _me_ the gift of mind,
but I never forget how infinitely much more I owe to that brave
and brilliant first father of Fathertongue for giving each one of
us -- strong or weak, rich or poor, bright or dull, reverently
grateful or superciliously smug -- the incomparable gift of mind.

We owe that man for everything we have and for everything we
_are,_ and yet we repay him nothing. We cannot pay him back, of
course. But we can always pay him forward, if we have the good
sense he gave us. This is what I am doing now, what I have been
doing for my whole life. What kind of philosophy might he have
written, if he were alive in the modern world? I hope and I pray
that this book is a pale reflection of the work he might have
done. I want more than anything to live up to that man, to live
up to everything the uniquely-human life can be, if I have the
good sense to discover it -- and to worship it. _That_ is the
_fully-_human life. That is the most and the best we can have --
but we can only have it by worshipping the mind, by adoring the
self, and by living _up_ in every way we can to the gift of mind.
_That_ is ontologically-consonant teleology. _That_ is Splendor,
and the love of Splendor is the life divine.

I wrote this little book in eight days. It took me thirty-three
years to discover and to perfect the arguments, but once I was
finally ready to _start_ writing, I felt no need to _stop._ I
burned and burned and burned as I worked, throwing off a blast
furnace of body heat as a secondary-consequence, and the words
just _poured_ out of me like molten steel. And although it might
be a vanity for me to say so, I know the work I have done here is
good. I set everything up as a three-act comedy -- establishment,
complication, further complication, resolution -- moving always
away from the worse, always toward the better -- and then, for
comic relief at intermission, at the second-act curtain, I _told_
you I was writing a three-act comedy -- in waltz time, no less.
That kind of artistic integrity is proof of nothing, but it is
very satisfying to me. The true _is_ the good _is_ the beautiful,
and I want for everything I write -- every map of the universe I
draw -- to be an accurate rendering of all three of those
wonderful ideas.

If I have added value to your life -- if I have led you to a
better understanding of your nature as a human being, of your own
uniquely-human life, of your self and of the immense values to be
reaped by your daring, at last, to _adore_ your self for being so
good -- if I have shown you how to correct and make up for any
errors you may have made in the past and how to do _much_ better
going forward -- if I have taught you how to discover, how to
worship and how to _achieve_ Splendor as you have never known it
before -- I want for you to pay me ( http://bit.ly/HpaDkk ). The
book itself is free and it always will be. If you found no value
in it -- or worse, if I have led you to nothing but pain -- I do
not want even one cent of your money. But if I have _earned_
compensation from you, then I _deserve_ it, and that kind of
justice is _completely_ in keeping with my philosophy of human
life. How does it square with yours?

But simply paying me in money is not enough. Philosophy begins
with ethics -- "What should I do?" This book is my answer to that
question. I've known for my entire adult life that I had to write
this book, that I owed it not to you but to that first father of
Fathertongue who gave me so much more than I can ever hope to pay
forward. The exposition of this philosophy has been my own "What
should I do?" You can pay _me_ forward by freely sharing this
book with everyone you know. Chances are, they need to hear these
truths even more than you did.

The grand edifices of Western Civilization -- of Western
_thought_ -- are crumbling to rubble not because the universe is
malevolent and not because some drunken raging paranoid fraud is
somehow simultaneously a brilliantly calculating mastermind of
evil. No, your world is collapsing around your ears because you
have been thoughtless where you should have been rigorously
thoughtful, careless where you should have been scrupulously
careful, mindless where you should always have been
full-to-_bursting_ with the infinite wonders of the mind. This
was a mistake, but you were hardly alone in that error. As I am
reaching out to you, to pull your philosophical lifeboat back
onto dry land, it is only simple justice for you to do the same
with everyone you love and value. I'm not trying to enlist you in
_my_ cause. I am recruiting you into _your own_ cause.

But even that is not enough. Redemption is egoism _in action_ --
in the real, existential actions of your life, those that can be
seen by other people but especially the actions you take purely
introspectively, alone in the silence and solitude of your mind.
You have been madly, badly, sadly wrong for a very long time, and
undoing all of your errors, and all of their cascading
consequences, will take some doing. So get busy! I told you at
the beginning of this journey that I love your mind -- but I
refuse to love your mind more than you do. I am happy to teach
you as much as I can about _how_ to love your self -- and how to
fight for it in this world-wide war on your mind. But you have to
do the fighting. There is no greater favor you can do for me and
for yourself -- and no greater honor you can bestow upon me and
upon your self -- than for you to make it your business to do
everything you can think of, today and every day, to live up to
these ideas.

My friend Jim Klein owns the most rigorous, the most penetrating,
the most thoroughgoing mind of any human being I have ever been
blessed to know. He started life driving a taxicab in Detroit,
and like a great many hard-working people -- and unlike most
"thought leaders" -- he knows by his own first-hand experience
the physical, emotional, financial and ethical consequences of
error. Like me, he never stopped thinking carefully, and his
ability to cut right to the core of any issue is a wonder to
behold. Jim came to visit us as I was writing this treatise, just
as I was dropping that second-act curtain, and we had a chance to
share food and share ideas and share Splendor as only
self-adoring human beings can know it. It was a beautiful
experience for me, very rewarding, not alone _because_ I was in
the midst of crafting this very-detailed map to Splendor.

As we were leaving the restaurant, walking to our cars, we saw a
laughing toddler with his father. That little boy could not have
been three years old, and his smile was like the dawning of a
cloudless day. We each one of us see the world we're looking for,
and I see a world full of angels, a world full-to-_bursting_ with
blindingly brilliant children. I made eye-contact with that
child, which I can always be counted upon to do, and he graced me
with a look of delight that could not possibly have been more
confident, more serene, more joyous -- more perfect.

Though he has not yet mastered Fathertongue, not yet gathered in
the precious gift of mind, that little boy was seeing the
heavenly world that I see, the universe where the true is
_always_ and _only_ the good is _always_ and _only_ the beautiful
is _always_ and _only_ the ever-more-perfect truth. I want for
him -- and for you -- never to _stop_ seeing that world -- never
to cling to falsehood in fear of the truth, never to behave
viciously in the vain attempt to evade the awesome responsibility
of virtue, never to surrender the ineffable beauty that is
Splendor, in a mind that has earned and deserved it, only to
descend by default into the unendurable hell of Squalor.

This is the philosophy of the uniquely-human life, of the
_fully-_human life, of the life _divine_ -- the adoration of your
self that _is_ Splendor. This is everything you have always known
could and _should_ be possible to human beings, but which you
have never dared to hope to find in your own life. This is
ontologically-consonant teleology expressed in three simple
words:

Love your self.





Save the world from home -- in your spare time!

That headline is my favorite advertising joke, a send-up of all
those hokey old matchbook covers. I don't know if anyone still
advertises on matchbook covers. I don't even know if anyone still
_makes_ matchbooks. Presumably, by now, smokers can light their
cigarettes with the fire of indignation in other peoples' eyes.

But I have always believed that ordinary people _should_ be able
to save the world from going to hell on a hand-truck. Our problem
is not the tyrant-of-the-moment. The only real problem humanity
has ever had is thoughtlessness -- the mindless acquiescence to
the absurd demands of demagogues.

That's the subject of this little book: The high cost of
thoughtlessness -- and how to stop paying it. It weighs in at
around 75 pages. I'm nobody's matchbook copywriter, and I would
have made it even shorter if I could have. But it covers
everything I know about the nature of human life on Earth --
what we've gotten wrong, until now, and how we can do better
going forward.

Why did I bother? Because the world we grew up in is crashing
down around our ears. Nothing has collapsed yet, and there is no
blood in the streets -- so far. But as the economists say, "If
something can't go on forever, it won't." My bet is that you have
been watching the news and wondering what you will do, if things
get ugly.

Doesn't that seem like a fate worth avoiding? And yet: _What can
one person do?_ My answer: Read -- and propagate -- these
ideas. The book itself is offered at no cost -- and it always
will be. Even so, the price I ask is very high: You have to pay
attention.

If you find that you like this book, I encourage you to share it
freely, far and wide, in any form, with anyone you choose. Print it,
photo-copy it, email it -- shout it from the rooftops if you like.

You can read it at SelfAdoration.com.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.html )

Or you can download an easy-to-share PDF version.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlive.pdf )

If you post to public forums or you have your own
web site or weblog, download the propagation kit.
( http://selfadoration.com/ManAlivePropagationKit.zip )

Why should _you_ bother? Because if anything is going to save
civilization from tyranny, it will be ordinary people like us. _And
there are at least 2.5 billion of us on the internet._ Think what a
big difference some new ideas could make in that many human lives.

How _do_ you save the world from home in your spare time? _One mind at
a time..._