Allan Ralph Andrews, born September 13

Our attempt to control nature masks our desire to control others. The local result of the attempt to subject nature as the other is the machine, according to Carse, and the attempt to work with nature is the garden. A machine depends upon its designer but a garden grows from within. Yet, to use a machine for control, is to be controlled by the machine. When machinery functions well both the machine and its users disappear. My relationships come to depend on the needs of my machinery. Weapons are machines of finite games that are designed to end the play. The indifference to nature leads to the machine and the indifference of nature leads to the gardern.

Waste is the anti-property that belongs to those who fail the finite game and win no titles. Society creates natural waste and human waste. Waste persons must be pushed aside in reservations, camps, ghettos, slums, retirement villages, etc.. Waste persons unveil us so we must purge them.

Myth provokes explanation and accepts no explanation. When explanation triumphs, the silence of nature returns. Explanations generate islands of order, according to Carse. Explanation floats in myth. A culture is no stronger than its strongest myths, according to Carse. Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is magisterial speech that silences and must be obeyed.

I would disagree with Carse, for me religion is the larger whole inclusive of both finite and infinite games. Jesus enters the finite game and suffers loss. The nature of his loss is subject to debate, but he lost the title in the eyes of the Jews and Romans of his time. But, it is necessary to suffer to give nature a face even if that face is a mask.

The higher game is that of forgiveness, which seeks to forgive the necessary evils that we have to generate to somehow live in a finite world generated out of the infinite game.

Allan Ralph Andrews, 3/19/2015 Bakersfield, CA

Now the odd thing about Carse is he is an academic and claims to be playing an infinite game when he is actually playing a finite game. He is play a turf war on the finite turf of rival ideology and obviously favors the awards of science over those of politics and metaphysics and religion. A true infinite game player takes no sides in the finite games because they are problems of locality and time. That is why the infinite game player plays for the love and integration aspect of the duality that Empedocles discovered between love and strife. The infinite game player plays the strategy of forgiveness for the evils of the finite game. The infinite game player understands that the game of strife cannot be played without sin and error and suffering because that is what finite games take on. The infinite game player does not punish roses for having thorns, tigers for pouncing and bombers for bombing.

He simply alters his play to save what he can save just for the sake of enjoying it. The infinite game player understands that the infinite game is inclusive of all finite games and therefore considers the finite game just another playing field of his play. Metaphysics can be used to support evil and it can be used as another field within the larger framework of the infinite. The dominance of males within the finite game is a mask over the true dominance of females for they have traditionally been protectors of the local time and space that is the home the WHEN, WHERE, and WHAT of the Eldest, Youngest, and Middle Daughter Yin. To overplay the infinite game is to overplay the energy and drive of the sperm against the cosmic egg, the Eldest Son Yang exploring the Middle Son Yang world and injecting his Youngest Son Yang jiva monad creative genius sperm within it.

In the end, true love is integration of the whole inclusive of the strife that constantly ruptures it.

Allan Ralph Andrews, 3/18/2015

Carse’s argument is an amalgam of special pleading, ad verbosum, ad hominem (who can trust a nasty finite game player), appeal to ignorance (since nature is silent who can know), appeal to emotion (finite games are evil and involve bombs and violence) and circular reasoning, plus hasty generalization. He never considers Astrology or Metaphysics because they are thrown out with the finite games, but somehow the assumptions of science quietly come back in. The genius that is talked about is the common sense genius. There is no consideration of the idea that all human players could be deluded, that it is not just the masks and costumes and deliberate ignorance and veiling of the finite game that is the problem, what if the very phenomenological and existential root of the person is misunderstood?

The existential possibility, the phenomenological possibility of the infinitesimal atom of the pure jiva is not one of his notions, nor is astrology or birth and rebirth. If all we have is persons than all we have is death because persons die. But energy is immortal, is neither created nor destroyed, the here and now is an infinitesimal spark of that creative energy clinging somehow to associations of finite quantum event particulars, and is thus free in a way that a person could not be free.

There assumptions do not occur to Carse, nor would he consider them it they did occur, for it is obvious that he is playing the finite game and has fooled himself into thinking he is doing some other kind of play. The truth is there is more than one level of infinite game play, there is the play of persons, there is the play of existential moments of personhood, and there is the play of the jiva that fly in and out of the person, associate and disassociate with it like bees climbing on a flower. Carse does not bring his discussion to this level. His argument assumes the failure of the ancient finite games, which means he is attached to the existing game and is playing it in away that veils his entrapment even from himself. He is playing for the title of greatest rebel. But it is still a title with an audience of those who buy his books. In this, like so many in a consumer culture, his final play is an appeal to numbers (the size of his world, the audience that looks at his play). In this he is very clever and worthy of some prize.

Allan Ralph Andrews, 3/18./2018

So am I a finite game player, or am I claiming the title of the wisest man like Socrates because only I know I do not know anything. I claim some possibility of having an I Ching metaphysics that explains the relationship of astrology and birth and rebirth to the visible world and its evolution, but I know that I know nothing about the larger infinite flux that makes the improbable probable. Thus, I may know all kinds of things about my body and where it comes from, but I know nothing about my phenomenological and existential monad jiva soul moment, which is my core WHO, is my true inner genius, is the primal thing about me. It may be deluded in its identification with this body and this brain. I have no idea what it is and where it comes from or how it arrived and what its past or future is. So I claim to know nothing, have no knowledge at all about the core of my existential inexistence, all I have is a faith that the best hope for it is the integration of all things in joy and love and inclusive peaceful forgiveness of all sins, including the pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, sloth, slavery, and gluttony generated by the playing of all the finite competition games, and the character disorder masks of narcissism, dependence, sadism, negativism, borderline personality, histrionic, schizoid, avoidance, etc, that its role playing persons and personalities are forced to wear.

Allan Ralph Andrews, 3/18/2015

The more I think about it the more I see Carse as replaying the ancient war between stoics and epicureans in a new dress. The finite game players are nasty state supporting over serious and hard working competitive patriotic Stoic types, but true infinite game players are happy joyous playful Epicureans.

Another way of looking at Carse is as a pitch for the Romantic and Existential Tempers and an Existential and Inspirational Ethic. Supported, as such pitches usually are, by Appeals to Ignorance and Hasty Generalizations. But, some of his observations do follow. It is certainly possible that much human behavior is simply primate posturing to hold the group together and what is desired is not inspiration by god or immortality, but the title of being inspired and being immortal in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of the audience. The real HOW in this dance is a kind of role playing hypnosis and the WHY is a set of entrancing suggestions that generate a staged dissociation from the real world. This is a theatrically generated group trance that binds the members of the group in their various appropriate places: narcissist, histrionic, dependent, sadist, paranoid, compulsive, etc.

In this sense, Carse supports the observations of Arnold Toynbee in his study of history, where he describes a series of group trances that hypnotize what he calls “the external proletariat” and the “internal proletariat” to the dances and rituals associated with “universal states” and “universal churches.” Certainly there is a Conditioning involved. Group rituals condition the participants to expect a social and psychological reward in the presence of certain holy objects and symbols. The participants become conditioned to holy rituals and imperial symbols and go through the motions of the dependent and masochistic personality systems in social roles conditioning them as if they we salivating dogs responding to a bell.

Toynbee finds some of this mythological systems to have tremendous power to generate what I would call trance states on the part of the participants. The Christian universal church, like the Moslem universal church, keeps returning in various old and new forms and motivating behaviors that are not rational and have nothing to do with the utilitarian reality trance states of their opponents.

There are many kinds of trance states in the world and many ways of gaining trance like behaviors on the part of humans, aboriginal and civilized. But, if I am correct, the problem is not just the public behavior, but the private behaviors as well. If the person is caught in the trap of the role playing and the conditioning that generates his trance behaviors, so are his phenomenological states very possibly trances states of the energize monads of the involution system, of the energy that turns inward to generate passion from its energy and pleasure from its states of integration and pain in its disintegration. This is Empedocles all over again and jiva souls subjected to integrating love and pain generating strife.

Are Buddha and Mahavira correct, are our phenomenological time state something other than they seem to be, does the infinite flux of all energy generate an unseen world of phenomenological infinitesimal monad states that is more real for the existential experience caught up in them than in the public world in which they become trapped. At this point I would offer a fallacy, an appeal to ignorance. By I would remind you that the ad verbosum of the material world is a kind of trance inducing false argument, as Carse points out. The finite game after all, only gives you an infinitesimal amount of information about the infinite game. Toynbee gives much evidence that the adherents to these ancient forms of civilization are held where they are more by public trance states than by rational concerns for public well being. With this conclusion both I and Carse appear to agree.

March 19^th 2015

The problem is that the trance generating operation that was most successful appears to have been the Indo-Aryan language group trance generating activity that appears to be focused on the use of the horse and cattle raiding activity moving out of the grasslands of central asia.

The beliefs of these people got frozen into set points of the language game when their daughter languages became basis to the Persian Empire and the Roman Empire, spinning off secondary imitations in the Empire of Asoka and the Empire of the Guptas, the Empire of Russia, and the later imperialistic efforts of England, France, the Dutch Republic, Spain, Portugal, Italy, German, Denmark, all of these generate languages with Indo-Aryan Roots. These languages became basic to a number of scriptures, the Vedas, the Buddhist Tripitaka, the Zoroastrian Scriptures, the Greek Bible, the Latin Vulgate Bible, the German Bible of Luther, the English Bible of King James. These language were the basic languages of philosophy, the works of Plato and Aristotle in Greek, the French, English, German philosophers, all writing in Indo-Aryan, Indo-European Languages, so all the Duranas, the philosophic works of India, the Buddhist Sutras. The writings of the Jains.

The major rivals are works in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, all non-Indo European Languages. But, Greek and Persian philosophy have had deep impressions on Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish thought, and Eastern Indo-European languages on China and Japan.

The Persian and India, the Germanic and the Greek have a prejudice that favors the upland and the northern over the lowland and the southern. Snow is more pure, the clouds are better. White is pure and brown is dirty. This generates a color based caste and status structure beginning with the purity of the sattva guna, and moving through the red of the rajas to the dark brown and green and blue of the tamas guna, the system being the true source of the three stripes of color in most of the Indo-European thought and language system flags. White is in the center because it rules the others.

The Persian empire and its notion of the good against the evil spun off copies in the empire of Asoka and that spun off a copy in the Gupta empire. Alexander copied much that was Persian and delivered it to the Greeks who passed it to the Romans and the Roman Empire, from here it moved back to the Greek Empire of the East and from there to Russian Empire. This was copied in the Muslim Empires of various forms and past to new Persian and South Asian Models from which it was carried at various times to Java and Indonesia.

The Empire of Rome spun off copies in the Hapsburg and German Empires, the Spanish Empire, the Empire of Brazil, the French and English and Dutch Imperial systems. The Chinese Empire was copied by Japan. The end result is a series of imperial languages: German, Japanese, English, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, Hindu, Persian, Indonesian, Javanese, Chinese.

Hindi and Persian tend to play the part of the Set Point Schizoid and Compulsive model ideal. German tends toward a Paranoid version, Japanese toward a Sadistic and Negativistic, English toward a Narcissistic and French toward a Histrionic, Russian toward a dependent, Arabic and Turkish toward dependent and masochistic, Chinese toward masochistic and avoidant, Portuguese toward borderline, Italian and Spanish toward antisocial, Bengali and Indonesian toward the Schizotypal. Indonesian tends to fight for aboriginal pride and Hindi and Persian for schizoid and compulsive aristocratic greed and caste, Arabic and Russian for dependent slavery and serfdom, Arabic and Chinese for dogmatic sloth, Portuguese and French and Spanish and Italian for vulgar lust and English and Russian and French for addictions to substance and gluttony. Partisan jealousy marks English and paranoid jealousy and aristocratic greed marks German, competition and sadistic envy and negativism as well as martial anger in the case of Japanese, and antisocial martial anger in Spanish and Italian. Thus, the imperial languages of the world mark off their own unique ideological territory and fight over ideological turf.

The scientific models generated out of the German, Japanese, English, Russian, French, and Italian intellectual and technical turf battles are generally correct in describing our tangible finite world. The problem is that data about finite matters in a reality formed by an infinite flux that makes the improbable probable, tell you an infinitesimal amount about actual truth, larger existence. The believability of our current world models are largely the result of arguments based on hasty generalization form the finite to the infinite, special pleading, appeals to numbers, to scientific authority, etc.., circular reasoning, even appeal to ignorance, you cannot prove our assumptions about thermodynamics, and relative, and quantum mechanics wrong. But, that does not make them right or justify their extension beyond the finite that they refer to.

I find that the complex astrology that I use mixing both Western and Eastern, Draconic, Heliocentric, and Geocentric, methods, using transits and progressions, has generated better predictions about events affecting me that the scientific models do. If I give in to science over my personal understanding, I am giving in to appeals to the authority of science, the numbers of its adherents, and other irrational factors.

But, how can I justify something beyond the scientific? If I use the old approach of the I Ching and of Empedocles, I can generate an interaction between a Heaven Trigram and an Earth Trigram in which the Heaven Trigram is an infinite flux making the improbable probable and the Earth Trigram is results emerging out of that improbable through evolution as entropy in the Thunder Trigram. This evolution is a shadow of the I Ching and Empedocles Ideal in Wind Trigram.

Earth Trigram is the equivalent of Earth in Empedocles system, the I Ching model is the equivalent of Air, astrology and the synchronicity that generates it is the equivalent of Water. Eldest son yang is the equivalent of the unfixed chance, the energy flux in the Empedocles system, and Eldest daughter yin in the equivalent of the fixed necessity. Middle son yang is the equivalent of the integrative love and Middle daughter yin is the equivalent of the disintegrative strife. Youngest son yang is the pure infinitesimal atom jiva monad of here and now time and Youngest daughter yin is the relativistic space time world.

The missing fire element is the Flame Trigram of Youngest son yang as sattva guna, Eldest son yang as rajas guna, and Middle daughter yin quantum mechanics and particle entropy and strife as tamas guna. So Flame Trigram is the Karma of Jainism that interacts with the Dharma of astrology in Water Well Trigram.

Allan Ralph Andrews, March 23^rd 2015, Bakersfield, CA.

In some ways this is the realm of Carse’s Infinite game, this area of Fire and Flame at the edge of Heaven, but Carse, for all his disgust at the finite title and property recognizing finite games and the finite game metaphysics, is doing a form of that metaphysics, even though he does not trust explanation, he is doing a form of explanation that is hooked in to the ancient Indo-European explanation and the imperial language way of seeing things. As Kovesi, shows in his book Moral Notions, our ideas of value and morality arise from our use of the title and property recognizing language community, the moral system of that community is what we are given unless we are given something else.

Let us rework an old myth of these language communities, the Garden of Eden myth which was long ago translated into the imperial Greek of the Eastern Roman Empire and the imperial Latin of the West from the Hebrew that emerged in the ashes of the Assyrian and Egyptian Empires and the rise of Persia and Rome. The Gods, called Elohim in the Hebrew, thought to refer to the persons of the trinity in Protestant Theology, but just as easily referring to some trinity of the day, possibly a version of the Osiris, Isis, Horus trinity of nearby Egypt, these Gods, create a Garden of Eden.

Now we can use this Garden as a metaphor for the actions of the infinite flux that makes the improbable probable, thus the Heaven Trigram generating the Wind Trigram, the Chinese Fire and Water Elements generating the Wood Element that can symbolize higher levels of organization. These emerge from evolution in the Thunder Trigram that uses strife, Middle Daughter Yin, particles, quantum events, light to generate the worlds that divide up the darkness. But, involution uses love, Middle Son Yang, to form Adam, the Genius of Carse, but the Youngest Son Yang Jiva, Creative Phenomenological Monad of our system, the infinitesimal atoms that generate primary time that complex into the manifold and strings of secondary Youngest Daughter Yin, World Time. These Worlds of the Snake, of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, of the Tree of Live, are the working out of evolution in the visible manifest spoken word world of the language community and the emerging finite game.

The gods of the infinite game are Shiva, the destroyer as Eldest Son Yang energy, Visnu the preserver as Middle Son Yang Love and Integration, and Brahma, the creator, the source of the Genius, of the Adam that is phenomenological at the root of the perception that allows the Elohim to see the world (Earth Trigram viewed by Mountain Trigram Adam Mind, called Wind Trigram Good, out of Divine Activity in Heaven Trigram). This is the pure youngest son yang area, but Adam as the creation of this phenomenology, later to be reborn as Christ, Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, etc, becomes trapped in the Eve Mind, of Eldest Daughter Yin natural law, and Middle Daughter Yin quantum mechanics, and Youngest Daughter Yin, space time relativity. In Eldest Daughter Yin, Adam discovers that he is a naked body, is enticed to eat of finite fruit by the snake of his nervous system in Middle Daughter and is cast out into the finite game world of work and toil for titles and property and suffering in Youngest Daughter Yin space time relativity of the finite game World, the Cosmos of the Bible.

The solution to this problem is given in Matthew, the Dharmapada, the Buddhist Sutras, the I Ching of Daoism and Confucianism, in the Gita as interpreted by Gandhi, is given by Empedocles, to allow the energy that is involving into passion and the information that is involving into thought and reason, to drive the involution of pleasure into the greater involution of love and joy and compassion, which carries jiva Adam off away into the pure peace, love, joy, and faith that is the infinite flux, returns him to the endless uncreated peace of the Garden.

Now I have mixed metaphysical systems and metaphors and myths, and explanations, but in the end this does not explain the myth, link it to a particular local finite game system in a way that force play in that system, rather one is left to play as one wishes, trapped in the Cave that is the Finite Game world of local objects and their shadows, the Material Elements of Kovesi’s book Moral Notions, or free to go and be what ever creative phenomenological systems allow him to be, even to emerge from the Cave back into the free light of the Garden just as Dante emerges from Hell into Purgatory and Heaven.

Allan Ralph Andrews, March 23^rd 2015, Bakersfield CA

The Jiva moment is a private monad of infinitesimal being from within pure existentially inexistent time. It is the pure involution silent opposite of the loud evolutionary strife and struggle of the world. It does not belong to the body but becomes trapped in it and eats of the fruit of its sad knowledge and enters into the suffering of the sad world of human lust and pride and greed. Detached, it returns to the pure immortal joy from which it came, the pure wonder, the pure freedom, immeasurably tiny, it penetrates all things and cannot be worn down, its weakness is its association with the color of the complex time and space to which it becomes attached.

But, in the end as pure creativity and pure being from within, pure energy turning to passion, pure information turning to thought, pure time turning to existential inexistence, pure integration turning to compassion and joy, it is the monad atom of God becoming the world.

If it wishes, it can attach and play the role of a body and a person as one of the endless numbers of pure time atoms that make existence as a body and a person complex possible, or it can detach and more back to the endless becoming that is its true source. Just as the finite game has distinct and final rules, there are no such final rules for the jiva monad, of all things it alone is truly immortal and truly free. The problem is getting it to remember this and detach from the troubles which it has accidently embraced in order to taste of the addictive pleasure of the embodied soul. This is one way of telling the story of the Adam as a jiva soul entwined with Eve of an attached soul body complex and the Snake as the symbol of the evolving world that causes attached bodies to abandon the Garden of Infinite Possibility for the Babylon and Babel of the World of Finite Games.