- I was trying to be funny.* I know you don't believe me.
- You were more terrifying than funny.
- I'll try again.
- Start with explaining for me the title.
- 'Hello, Starbucks!'
- Yes.
- By mentioning the word 'Starbucks' I make sure our conversation will be entered into court records.
- Why?
- Starbucks, as a corporation, as a thing of ideas become mortal, as one of the legally defined lords of the territory of death, seems to believe that any sign of mortality I leave behind they'll be able to use against me in an ongoing lawsuit.
- Your words are signs of mortality?
- Dead as can be, buried within thousands of pagers of legal documents produced so far.
- What's it all about?
- I can't tell you. Starbucks got a judge to issue a gag order.
- Why?
- You know how the Supreme Court has determined that corporations are not what they really are, which is abstractions, a product of ideas, but rather are people that have free speech, that is, the legal right to the material act of bribing politicians to act in their material interests of hoarding and domination? Human beings for most of written history have been endeavoring to move in the opposite direction, from mortality to immortality, from a state of being tied to material realities to freedom in the realm of ideas.
- Human beings, according to Starbucks, moving in the opposite direction to corporations, from out of the mortal world instead of into it, have no legitimate use of words? Excuse me, but what are you and me doing now but using words?
- We're not using words in the attempt to kill them entering them in the tomb of legal records.
- What are we doing?
- To be honest you and me, we are mere characters on the internet whose only business is to lay claim to the reality of ideas. Is this a little funny yet?
- No.
- I'l tell you about one of the regulars I spoke with once at the night cafe, and then again this afternoon, a man who describes himself as a reformed bad guy. He told me, back in the dark times of lockdowns, that he meditates and has made himself through meditation into a force of good in the world. For example, I ask, what good has he done lately? With every little thing he pays attention to he is doing good, he says. He's doing me good now? Yes. What's the nature of this good he's doing me? I ask. He'll buy me a steak dinner if I'm hungry, he says. He's flush with money tonight. How come? He helped out a friend, and the friend gave him in return a thousand dollars. What kind of help? He allowed his identity to be used to apply for government funds.
- He got a thousand, and his "friend" applied for and presumably got tens of thousands in unemployment and other so called stimulus funds?
- Who was this friend?
- A family of gypsies who operate a fortune-telling salon in the neighborhood.
- Is this guy is some kind of idiot or what?
- He speaks with complete assurance of his reaching towards godhood. His reaching towards immortality, he tells me this afternoon, involves secreting away his spirit within the things of the world, invulnerably surrounding it in indifference to the things of the world. Invulnerable to the world? I ask. Yes. So if he stood in one of the villages in Ukraine being shelled by the Russians at the rate of one exploding missile every few seconds, nothing would happen to him? No. So if he gathered around him all the villagers and they stood close to him, they'd be safe too? He says, Yes.
- Why are you telling me this story?
- Because he is an example of just what human beings should not want to do, which is to do what the corporations are doing.
- Which is to bury an idea, which is immaterial, hiding it in the dross, in the protective shell of the material world.
- Yes. And do you know what was uppermost in my mind, listening to this spiritual identity criminal?
- What?
- That since I am not a corporation moving from immortality to mortality, rather moving in the other direction, I should be able to see in him the signs of the difference.
- How?
- By being able to recognize the form of what I am doing or trying to do and he is not.
- Is something like that visible?
- It can be. I was watching a video last night of a discussion between two very advanced in years Jewish philosophers, or rather since their actual knowledge specialities were elsewhere, say rather I watched two Jews advanced in years philosophizing. One observed that all people alike have to capacity to do evil. The other strenuously objects, No! We Jews could never create anything like the Holocaust. The first immediately retreated, agreed: No, we are spared that eventuality.**
- And do you agree?
- Yes.
- Why?
- Because Judaism codifies, and insures is put into practice, a technique that first appeared to history sometime in the first millenium BC. This is the trick of immortality, of movement out of the world of body into the world of mind.
- And what is that trick?
- I'll pretend this isn't the thousanth time I've been over this: when we act in the world we do it experimentally, with a sense of ourselves in a world that in flux is therefore undefined, and when we rest in contemplation of the world, we see only the whole, no passage of time no divisions of space.
- Neither in act or perception is there any sense of our being a thing in a world of things, because when we act we sense ourselves unrooted in any stillness able to fix a sense of reality, and when we rest in perception we don't see any divisions and therefore no particular things to locate ourselves within. Therefore acting in the correct form, seeing in the correct form, we are invulnerable to thoughts of mortality.
- Invulnerable to thought of mortality, but what about to the reality of mortality?
- That too, since mortality is an idea before it becomes a thing, armor for failed humanity to hide within.
- And the Holocaust?
- Isn't it obvious? People who believe and feel themselves immortal are not tempted to model the world into any form of mortality.
- I understand.
- Good. So I'm looking at the identity fraudster at the night cafe, asking myself, can I see this form, or rather, the absence of this form as I look at him?
- Could you?
- I could. I saw as he located himself in the things of the world in an intoxicated rushed blurring of words, I saw it in his self-attributed distinction of invulnerability to bombs, signified in the shell-shocked fixity of his expression.
- You saw a soul lowering itself to mortality. Or so you claim.
- A family of gypsies who operate a fortune-telling salon in the neighborhood.
- Is this guy is some kind of idiot or what?
- He speaks with complete assurance of his reaching towards godhood. His reaching towards immortality, he tells me this afternoon, involves secreting away his spirit within the things of the world, invulnerably surrounding it in indifference to the things of the world. Invulnerable to the world? I ask. Yes. So if he stood in one of the villages in Ukraine being shelled by the Russians at the rate of one exploding missile every few seconds, nothing would happen to him? No. So if he gathered around him all the villagers and they stood close to him, they'd be safe too? He says, Yes.
- Why are you telling me this story?
- Because he is an example of just what human beings should not want to do, which is to do what the corporations are doing.
- Which is to bury an idea, which is immaterial, hiding it in the dross, in the protective shell of the material world.
- Yes. And do you know what was uppermost in my mind, listening to this spiritual identity criminal?
- What?
- That since I am not a corporation moving from immortality to mortality, rather moving in the other direction, I should be able to see in him the signs of the difference.
- How?
- By being able to recognize the form of what I am doing or trying to do and he is not.
- Is something like that visible?
- It can be. I was watching a video last night of a discussion between two very advanced in years Jewish philosophers, or rather since their actual knowledge specialities were elsewhere, say rather I watched two Jews advanced in years philosophizing. One observed that all people alike have to capacity to do evil. The other strenuously objects, No! We Jews could never create anything like the Holocaust. The first immediately retreated, agreed: No, we are spared that eventuality.**
- And do you agree?
- Yes.
- Why?
- Because Judaism codifies, and insures is put into practice, a technique that first appeared to history sometime in the first millenium BC. This is the trick of immortality, of movement out of the world of body into the world of mind.
- And what is that trick?
- I'll pretend this isn't the thousanth time I've been over this: when we act in the world we do it experimentally, with a sense of ourselves in a world that in flux is therefore undefined, and when we rest in contemplation of the world, we see only the whole, no passage of time no divisions of space.
- Neither in act or perception is there any sense of our being a thing in a world of things, because when we act we sense ourselves unrooted in any stillness able to fix a sense of reality, and when we rest in perception we don't see any divisions and therefore no particular things to locate ourselves within. Therefore acting in the correct form, seeing in the correct form, we are invulnerable to thoughts of mortality.
- Invulnerable to thought of mortality, but what about to the reality of mortality?
- That too, since mortality is an idea before it becomes a thing, armor for failed humanity to hide within.
- And the Holocaust?
- Isn't it obvious? People who believe and feel themselves immortal are not tempted to model the world into any form of mortality.
- I understand.
- Good. So I'm looking at the identity fraudster at the night cafe, asking myself, can I see this form, or rather, the absence of this form as I look at him?
- Could you?
- I could. I saw as he located himself in the things of the world in an intoxicated rushed blurring of words, I saw it in his self-attributed distinction of invulnerability to bombs, signified in the shell-shocked fixity of his expression.
- You saw a soul lowering itself to mortality. Or so you claim.
Further Reading:
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** 'Our culture is so, that even the most deranged of us will have certain limitations.' (Physiologist Eric Kandel, hastening to agree with Holocaust surviver Elie Wiesel.)
