a possible way of living: the gamecaller

[Anonymous No.9734648]

Have seen a bunch of posts like this one over the last few days:
>>9733577
Since this is our one and only life, there are understandably a lot of people wondering what do and I want to discuss pic related.

Once you have gone from camel to lion to child and unspooked yourself of all those external 'thou shalts' (killed your father), then untangled them from the Lacanian ego (fucked your mother), you're left with the phenomenological subject. Where do you go from here? Lots of philosophers have proposed their own solutions: Nietzsche's will to power, Heidegger's return to tradition, Camus' acceptance of the absurd, etc.

Why not just do what the subject wants, living a life in tune, in each moment, with the way? Ignoring the metaphysical implications of this option, it is both impossible and limiting. You will never be able to live as an animal, and an attempt to structure your life like that will cut off many options you may have found useful. Useful to what? To being in a position to do what you, the subject, want to do. Deleuze talks about this when he writes about the dice game in Zarathustra—playing the game, even if it’s a game, can be a powerful tool—roll the dice, because the number it lands on will initiate the dialectical confrontation between the experienced subject and the other; it will create being through negation. The will to power, a return to tradition, acceptance of the absurd—these are all games; they are individually chosen ontologies that provide the rules within which the subject has the freedom to experiment with what it wants.

This book is an odd one. It is the memoir of someone who was in a cult called The Finders in D.C./VA. If you search for them you will get all sorts of conspiracy stuff about them kidnapping kids for the CIA’s monarch mind-control experiments, eating babies, etc. Whether or not that stuff has any truth, it’s not what’s described in the book. Basically, a bunch of bored people got together, handed over some cash, and let someone be leader. As far as I can tell, their only guiding principle was experimentation—the leader would give the members ‘games’, sometimes stuff like fake spy assignments, research projects, whatever; a bit like that corny movie, The Game (I doubt it’s a coincidental title), except deliberate.

Anyways, the book is an interesting look into how some weird people approached the problem of how to live. It’s not particularly well written, but I think it offers a very interesting chronicle of a real attempt at a pragmatic approach to the solution. Even if you don’t end up joining a cult, you will get an interesting perspective on the type of experimentation that’s possible—the enormous number of options you have open to you for how to live the one life you’ve been given.

Link here:
https://archive.org/details/TheGamecaller

[Anonymous No.9734679]

>>9734648
Damn that's pretty interesting. Thanks OP. Though that solution seems a little overly complicated to be a true way to live on your tao, the real way would be to see the life the universe has given to you as the game to be played. That is my belief anyway.

[Anonymous No.9734891]

>>9734679
What if you would like another game more, even if it was just the game of trying different games? You won't get another shot at a different game once it's all over.

[Anonymous No.9735773]