Highly Responsive to Prayers

Everyone has people that they respect so much that they wish to emulate that person. Real, fictional, historical; when we see someone we respect it is an instinctual response to want to become like them in some way. This is how children (and adults, but less so) learn moral codes: by emulating a senior's actions and thoughts whenever that person does or says something that catches their heart. What will catch their heart in such a way has some amount of randomness to it, but there is an underlying and objective pool of "good" that they will natural recognise as so, even if they could not come to the same conclusion independently.

The primary way in which we will emulate the good we see in the world is aesthetically driven: we do not and could not describe lexically the essence of the good that we see, but we understand it inherently. This causes us to emulate others wholesale, unable to carve out the pure good and understanding the surrounding decoration of the message as integral to the whole. An example of this is the young boy's obsession with warfare and weaponry. The vision of heroic soldiers and warriors as the epitome of masculine goodness is an inventory of both the moral and personal ideas (the important part) and the aesthetic baggage of swords and steel that are tied to them. This is by no means a bad thing, and as one grows up he will be able to whittle these ideas into purer forms, removing the aesthetic chaff to grasp at the inner core. This process, of course, must then be reversed in order for him to relay these ideas along to others.

I understand this aesthetic resonance by giving it the name "beauty". The beautiful is something that captivates in a way that will always prevail over both logic and animal emotion. It is almost never immediately obvious the cause of beauty, and that lack of understanding may be the very cause of it in the first place. Through beauty is how we respect, and without respect there is no passage to learn. This is why we do not respect or even consider the words of a madman or a layman, for their message is not beautiful. But once that same message is enshrined in the beautiful, it become at once obvious. We don't pay ear to the proselytiser on the street, for common consensus has branded them as unclean, but have that same message be relayed from the pulpit of a grand cathedral and many more heads would be swayed. This effect, of course is countered by the higher beauties. Many today see upmost beauty in science, which, in its diametric opposition to modern Christianity, has neutered the beauty that was once under sole purvey of the church.

Some may argue that this high resonance with beauty is something that is lost in the hyper-logical minds of the modern adult, and is now surely the domain of children and the hopeless romantics. I would say that this is narrow-minded in the definition of beauty. My idea of beauty stands as the very definition of personal taste and of opinion and respect. None may exist without the spark of the beautiful. The word "beauty" is usually used in an old-fashioned sense, most commonly linked with the ideas of the Enlightenment and especially of Romanticism (in Britain). But that same feeling, that same spark we get from these sources can be tagged to many a mundane sensation. The beauty of political rhetoric and narrative, the beauty of scientific propaganda or the beauty of carnally sexual advertisement. All of these things grab our attention and our soul, and if they truly capture it, can give us new outlooks on the world.

Beauty as a weapon is a topic for another time, but sufficed to say that beauty has been a weapon since time immemorial, and it is the only weapon at our disposal we can use to change others' hearts. To seek out beauty is too seek out wisdom, and to deny beauty is to deny the meaning of life.

Life after Living

A Chinaman and a Roman take a stroll up a rugged path towards the sun.

"What happens after you die?", are the words on both men's lips. The most human question that has ever been asked. In fact is is basically the question of our species. Asking what happens after death is essentially the same question as "What is the meaning of life?", or "Does God exist?". I have noticed there generally being two schools of thought on this topic: the Oriental and the Occidental perspectives, and both perspectives must be in turn viewed through a temporal lense.

In the East they believe in some form of cyclical life. One dies and is reborn as another being. In the age of God this meant that while your body may die, your soul would pass on to another body and continue living. In this, the age of reason, you live on through your prodigy and the collective. One does what they can to leave the collective a better place than they found it.

Here in the West we believe in a more linear life. Once one dies their soul passes on to the other side, whatever that may be. In times gone this meant your soul would leave your corporal body and pass to the afterlife, somewhere that you cannot return from. There is an interesting but seldom resolved difference between direct and delayed afterlife. That is whether the soul passes to the other world directly on death or waits until the end of time to pass on. In the age of reason we believe that you simply die. Your soul-worth is judged by others and your individual name will go down in the history books.

Both systems answer all three of the aforementioned grand questions:

Question	East	West
What happens after you die?	Rebirth	Afterlife
Does God exist?	Yes (No)	No (Yes)
What is the meaning of life?	To live a life of good	To live a life of good

As you can see, the first question is really the only one humans have ever disagreed on theologically. The second question is outside the scope of this post, but its a question that's solution lies in contradiction and has, throughout history, always been the sole purview of a priestly class. The third question is a cheat. We ask for a meaning but are given a purpose. A vague answer that really is just a retelling of the question. Rather than questions, I like to appeal to the sun and call them "equations". An equation is itself a truth. All the knowledge needed to solve it is held within the question itself, and all you must do is reorder the question to get the "answer".

I, as all Western men must, fall into the linear view of life. My vision of heaven and the contextualisation of the meaning of life was once explained to me by the son of a vicar. He explained heaven as a convergence of time. And as time converges upon your soul the deeds of your life are judged by the final form of yourself. So as your death approaches, your perception of time speeds up exponentially, making the final moments of your life seem to last for an eternity. In this eternal state you will be dead to the world, living in a world made purely of your own mind. And the details of that world depends on the memories you keep from your life. If they are good memories then your afterlife will be heaven, but if they are bad, you will be stuck in the eternal hell flames of regret. Purgatory could be seen as a period of judgement, as you go over every detail of your life until it merges into one: good or bad. I've always liked this explanation. It comes from a modern mind that was constantly locked in a battle of two zeitgeists: religion and science. Your life crossing across your mind as you trip over is part of this natural process. A process made of scientific jargon of oxygen deprivation and hormonal shifts that hold about as much water as a book written by an omnipotent formless trinity, that is too say: a lot.

Whatever your belief is, the important thing is to have faith in it. Realise that the answers to question A and B are meaningless in the face of question C, and as such you can never live a good life if you are stuck on the fundamentals. I believe this is the cause of many modern afflictions, primarily caused by a lack of faith. Much wiser men than you have found the answer: live a good life. The functionality of which is in question, but the path is clear.

A Chinaman and a Roman take a stroll up a rugged path towards the sun. They are locked in heated debate. Neither shows weakness in rhetoric nor logic: truly matched equally in strength. They both wear two faces. One of stern disagreement and of mortal toil, faced toward the other. The other of childlike glee facing forward toward the light. Together they pass into the light and become birds.

The Immaculate Love pt1.

What is pure love? It's a question that storytellers have been trying to answer for millennia. Many a story revolves around a love so perfect that it's power transcends all. Romeo and Juliet is the prime example of what we in modern Western tradition expect from the perfect bond: a love between man and woman that transcends all barriers and has a prophetic power that can never be sated until either it is fulfilled (marriage) or it is destroyed (Shakespearean tragedy). It's answer is core to the idea of being human and thus usually takes a centre position in even religious symbolism worldwide. While our modern, mainstream idea of perfect love may seem obvious and set in stone (stemming primarily from the idea of Christian original love, Adam and Eve), many artists throughout history have attempted to answer this question with answers that are widely different from our own preconceptions, with varying levels of success in spreading their ideas. One thing that must be said is that the concept of "immaculate love" lays at the very heart of culture, and so an attack on the concept, or even a suggestion of other forms of love, often elicits highly negative responses from people. It's not that our collective perception of these things cannot change, it does rather frequently. A love that was heinous in the eyes of our forefathers just a few generations ago can easily have found it's way into a generally accepted state in the modern time; homosexual love is an obvious example.

However, as culture is twisted and morphed at the hands of the Zeitgeist*, we, as actors in the culture we belong to, believe our conception of love is obviously correct, even if it contradicts with our own culture's foundations. A great example is found in the founding myths of Japan; before the existence of mortal men when only the first Kami (Japanese for Gods) were around, a time when the world was comprised purely of heavenly mist (or kamikaze**). These first Kami (or technically second Kami but that's superfluous to this explanation) were born in pairs: an older brother and a younger sister. These sibling pairs would be wedded in immaculate marriage, a marriage so pure that if lower beings such as humans were to attempt it, they would suffer divine consequences. This divine right turned divine rite, as the historical system of imperial marriage within the Japanese royalty involved a method of marrying within the family, close but lesser than the purely divine sibling relationship, since even the emperors are below gods. Now, to a Occidental theatre this worldview of immaculate marriage seems completely immoral, as our (modern) Christian based culture sees incest in any form as completely unjustifiable. But both of these systems seek to push the same end: the avoidance of incest through divine persecution. In Christianity the act itself is deemed wrong, in Shintoism the act is seen as reserved for only the divine. Both prevent the laymen from partaking in the act, and allow (to a certain extent) the royal class to partake in it (most Western royal houses used, and still use, incest to keep the bloodline intact and closed to outsiders).

Both religious systems see the marriage of brother and sister as a bond so strong it is dangerous. For how can two people be any closer? They are tied to each other in blood, life and romance, such a connection is so powerful it can never be rivalled. And as posited above, love is an unbreakable strength, and if marriage has power infinite Aleph-null, sibling marriage has a power Aleph-one. This equation of power and love feeds into the overarching heroic journey of the individual, leading to the concept of the heroes incest***, for the journey to self-enlightenment marks cairn at the marriage alter. A love that break all boundaries for its tenacious grip on those in a hyperdivine bond. A love that is so everlasting that it will never pass on. For a love born of hyperdivine heroic incest cannot produce valid offspring, and thus the ourobourotic cycle of death and rebirth is broken. Nirvana. The hero has become the god, freed from the mundane mortal cycle and that blood-tale takes it's place amongst the stars.

To be continued in part 2 (I'll actually talk about anime then).

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*Zeitgeist transliterates from German into "Time Ghost", meaning a ethereal, collective spirit that acts as a conglomeration of the world's thoughts at the current time. Or something like that. 

**Kamikaze translates to God-Wind and refers to the unseen power of the Kami being perceived by humans as mere wind. The term was used by the imperial Shouwa government to lionise suicide bombings as godly winds.

***Term NOT coined by NeutronNick.