Allan Ralph Andrews, born September 13

The passage of this plunder generated a receiving class of servants and bureaucracy, the internal proletariat of the universal state, see Arnold Toynbee, and the Water Well Trigram absolutism. Out of this came many things, industrialism and utilitarianism in the rise of the industrial product state, trade and commerce and capitalism, and the market based state, imperialism, the universal church of the internal proletariat and the rise of missionary imperialism of various forms, Christian, Marxist, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Ecological, Darwinian, Capitalist, etc. and etc. If the sin of the Aboriginal was territorial pride, and of the Raiding clan, martial anger, of the City State, partisan jealousy, and of the Kingdom and Feudal State, aristocratic greed, than the sin of the Imperial State: slavery and the slave ruling and servitude mentality, of the missionary state, dogmatic sloth, of the industrial state, product gluttony in industrial purification of sugar, alcohol, drugs, etc, and in the market state, consumer lust of various pornographic forms.

This was the Tower of Babel, the Babylon of the World, the Whore that captured the soul, the pure sattva giva and stuck it down in the tar of the tamas guna, and covered it with the muck of gluttony and lust. It was this attachment that was the Kama that created the suffering that trapped the soul and the solution was Nirvana, its release from this suffering through the return to the Dharmapada of right speech, action, etc. that would restore it to its orginal Sattva guna purity. The Dhammapada, the Sermon on the Mount, the Central Harmony of the Confucian Classics, are the three critical works that enlighten this path.

Socrates, Gandhi, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, Pythagoras, Emerson, Thoreau, have set out the path to freedom.

Emmet Fox and his small book, The Sermon on the Mount, Ernest Holmes and his books, This Thing Called Life, This Thing Called You present the point of view the Jiva needs for true freedom. These are not formulas for success in the world, but formulas for using the brain and using the world as tools that will allow the Jiva to jump back into the river of freedom from which it comes with as little damage adhering to its pure creativity as possible.

James P. Carse explains the difference between the infinite and the finite in these relationships in his book Finite and Infinite Games, Free Press, 1986, according to Carse, finite games are for winning and infinite games are for continuing the play. Infinite and finite games are very different. Infinite games are internal in their definition and finite games are external. It follows that finite games emerge from evolution and infinite games involve involution and existential phenomenology. Infinite games have no space and time boundaries, now when and where, no what within a when and where as the single object, no prize to win as a definition of the end of the game.

Thus, the infinite game is the WHY of endless play and the HOW of continuing creativity and the WHO of the free player. The finite game is a bounded WHERE and a bounded WHEN with rules ending in a final WHAT. For our play, we call the HOW eldest son yang and the WHEN eldest daughter yin and the WHY middle son yang (the love of the philosophy of Empedocles) and the WHAT middle daughter yin (the strife of the philosophy of Empedocles) and the WHO youngest son yang and the WHERE youngest daughter yin, thus enclosing the finite with the so called Earth Trigram and the infinite within the so called Heaven Trigram.

According to Carse, you can play a finite game within an infinite game, but you cannot play an infinite game within a finite game. The rules of an infinite game are changed to enable as many people as possible to keep playing, but the rules of a finite game do not change during play, according to Carse. According to him, finite players play within boundaries and infinite game players play with boundaries. The limitations of finite play are necessarily self limitations. In finite games we take on a role and forget our freedom. Thus, we chose to face the world within a mask. Carse says that surprise causes finite play to end but is the reason that infinite play continues. In finite play, the past triumphs over the future, but in infinite play the future triumphs over the past. Training repeats the completed past and education leads toward continuing self-discovery. In finite play, you win a title. Finite players win an afterworld of continual recognition of their titles. According to Carse, infinite play is paradoxical and finite play is contradictory. Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of the play, so they must play as mortals, according to Carse. The WHO of finite games is the title and the WHO of infinite games is the name. Titles come at the end of play and names at the beginning, according to Carse. Finite games are about power and titles and the power is contradictory and theatrical. Infinite play is dramatic and open and plays with strength rather than power. Strength is an opening act and not a closing one.

Evil is the termination of infinite play, according to Carse. The termination of the thousands of native American languages is an evil, according to Carse. Evil begins as the attempt to eliminate evil, according to Carse. Example of evil involve the tidy resolution of history with a finite game that makes a nation that last best hope, that wants to make all infidels convert.

Infinite players do not attempt to eliminate evil in others because they recognize that such operations are the source of evil. Rather the recognize in themselves the beginnings of the evil attempt to eliminate the evil in others. Evil is not the inclusion of finite games in the infinite game, it is the restriction of all play to one or more finite games. This is where the finite game of getting drunk and winning the title of the drunk, is the evil destruction of life and the play of life in alcoholism.

In the finite game world all things are social and we deal with community, so when Carse talks of finite and infinite games, his reference is to the collective relationship of the WHERE to the integrative WHY and the disintegrative WHAT, the infinite game WHY and the finite game WHAT, the love and strife of Empedocles. His infinite game is the game of love and integration and his finite game is the game of strife and competition. Within this context, he relates to Zen and the notion of flux and a flowing stream, the Dao of the infinite game that we call Eldest Son Yang in contrast to the finite game Eldest Daughter that is the zero flux crystal of Absolute Zero and the Third Law of Thermodynamics, the weightless form that is given substance by the energy flux that gives power and strength to all things.

As a result we have a problem with keeping the seriousness of finite game play out of the playfulness of infinite game play. Politics is a form of theater performed before an audience. Society is what must be done and culture is the possibility open to the community. Culture cannot be bound by society and politics. Society is a form of theater in which humans wear masks and play roles to deny the reality of their true freedom. Since school give rewards and titles, they are part of the finite game. The power of citizens is determined by rank and title, not by strength and creativity. Bureaucracy grows keeping track of these tiles, according to Carse. Members of society cooperate to retain their titles, thus philosophy, art, science, politics, religion, literature, business, and other titles, depend on the mock seriousness of these formal games. They are limited by the boundaries, by the kinds of fallacy and moral system that are allowed.

The game of art plays out with hasty generalization and existential morality and the experimental temper. The game of philosophy plays out with special pleading and individualistic rational morality, with the empirical and impressionist temper, the analytic temper. The game of politics uses the duty ethic and the appeal to authority and the absolutistic temper, the Baroque temper. The game of literature and dogma uses a divine command, a human concern ethic and plays out with an appeal to emotion and a post-impressionist symbolist temper.

The game of science uses an ad verbosum, an appeal to argument and evidence, an appeal ad hominem to distinguish the expert from the untrained and a utilitarian ethic, a realistic temper. The game of applied science and business uses a parsimonious temper and an expressionist temper, an appeal to numbers, a hedonistic ethic.

The game of metaphysics and theology uses a circular argument and a virtue ethic, a Classical temper. The game of magic and religion uses an appeal to ignorance, an inspirational ethic, a romantic temper.

Each social process has its own roles and rules, is a finite game that defends its titles. Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy is a story of the philosophical titles, the academic titles, the religious titles. Each philosopher discussed has his titled work that is listed in the lists of books and works to read. It is the logos of philosophy with a finite story that begins with Thales and ends with Betrand Russell as its historian. You can see this game at work in Raphael’s painting, “The School of Athens,” an artistic WHAT that records the winners of various local philosophical finite games.

Carse says that patriotism is a way of protecting the titles that a society has gained. A society must give many prizes so there are many prize holders motivated to defend it. So ancient Rome plundered other lands and rewarded its own citizen with titles and prizes paid for with that plunder. It began to disintegrate when there was not enough plunder, not enough prize money, not enough finite games playing to reward the players enough to continue the play. Its enemies learned how to compete with it and drain its resources to support their own prize distribution systems.

The Zoroastrian system of Persia began to eat away at the Christian and then the Muslim system arose to feed on both. Our modern system and its professions and degrees is a way of protecting the titles that are the wealth of the elites that prosper thorough them. These social structures have the seriousness that comes with necessity. Society is abstract and culture is concrete. Society is the abstracted form and legal complexity that generates its status system and the roles and masks that must be worn to support its complex structure.

Society preserves works like Raphael’s to display what was won at that juncture in time. It gives the title of curator to those who win the right to preserve these works and explain their importance to the existing system of finite games.

Property makes our titles visible. According to Carse, these are areas where our victories cannot be challenged. By free concealment people obey the law. Property owners must introduce enough theatricality into their ownership that others will respect their titles. Property must take up space and be obvious so that it has an appropriate audience, according to Carse. Consumption is necessary, leisure is necessary to display our use of that property.

According to Carse, because property requires theater, then it requires artists, writers, dramatists, musicians to celebrate its achievements. Societies try to get members to become the audience for the display of its wealth.

Carse believes that nothing possessed can have the status of art. According to Carse, patriotism is inherently evil. Abstracted thought is metaphysics. A finite player goes to war to protect his titles and an infinite player opposes war and states because they erect serious boundaries rather than playful ones. Carse says that bounded and veiled society needs war and conflict. The threat of war generates obedience to the state.

Arnold Toynbee, in his Study of History, points out the Universal State is a dead end. A creative elite practices challenge and response and its politics involves withdrawal and return. Military challenge generates a focus on military solutions and generates a dominant elite which attempts to organize an internal proletariat and an external proletariat. When the system begins to disintegrate, the internal and external proletariats will organize universal churches, which are soon taken over and spread by the dominate elites. Christianity began with an internal proletariat and Islam began with an external proletariat. Both involved titles.

The state promotes evil with its titles and property, encouraging aboriginal pride, martial anger, partisan jealousy, aristocratic greed, bureaucratic slavery systems, dogmatic and ideological sloth, industrial product gluttony and lustful consumption and hedonism. The evil generated by the state destroys infinite games to promote the state sponsored titles, property and plunder systems, aboriginal languages are suppressed in favor of the great imperial languages and the imperial culture.

Carse claims that I am the genius of what I am, that you are the genius of you. What we all the WHO, the youngest son yang, is the genius of all personhood. The opposite of speaking with your genius is to speak to an audience. Being your own genius is dramatic, not theatrical, and it is part of infinite play, according to Carse. Genius exposes us to open reciprocity, according to Carse, and it erases the boundary of the self.

We notice limitations when we look but go beyond them when we see, according to Carse. New art sees the limitations of old art. Academic fields are territories that are looked at.

According to Carse, I am the outcome of my past and the transformation of my past. The Theater of my life is its recorded history and the drama of my life is the ruptures it generates in that history. Dramatically speaking, every birth generates genius. In our language, generates a youngest son yang WHO. Theater and politics gives me scripts and roles which my genius can reinvent in new drama.

The finite player is involved in winning, in gaining property and titles that he can be proud of and can be angry about loosing, can have jealousy for the titles of others and can be greedy about the property he obtains, which he may consume with sloth and gluttony and indulge in his lusts and desire to have slaves and be a slave to others. The state’s involvement in finite games encourages evil. My interpretation of Carse.

Carse brings up the problem of finite games. Those who fail at the finite game are condemned to be obscure. Only a failure can have the motivation it takes to win one of the finite titles, but his recognition that he is a winner makes him also realize he is not a winner or he would have never attempted the struggle required to win. Carse believes this is the basic contradiction involved in these finite games.

The more we win the more we remember our failures and become addicted to the pursuit of the finite game awards. The solution is to forget that our audience has forgotten us and remember to play the infinite game.

We touch each other from our centers and are moved by theatrical performances, touching is from our genius and moving is done by performances on the finite game stage. Touching shatters design and scripts. Moving is staged and uses masks. We are moved within our veils and masks, but touching penetrates the mask.

According to Carse, healing restores me to play and curing restores me to competition. Within the finite game, doctors treat the function and cure a person as a set of functions, who is otherwise dysfunctional.

You are dysfunctional when you are unable to obtain titles. Illness leads to death as a competitor. Sexuality and art are dangerous to competitive society and throws a challenge to a political ideology.

When this is viewed metaphysically, the genius of the person is left outside. Sex as a social function can be regulated within the prevailing ideological system. Sexual play within the finite game becomes competition for a prize. Sexuality is a game where the prize is the defeated opponent. In sexuality persons become property. In slavery and wage labor we possess the products of labor. Persons, per Marx, become abstracted from their labor. Sexuality abstracts persons from themselves. We become civilized as losers. Civilization takes on our resentments. Finite play and finite sexuality proceed through deception. Seductions are staged and done in masks and costume. But, infinite player, per Carse, have no need to seduce. Infinite players do not play in sexual boundaries, they play with the boundaries. Infinite sexuality wishes to relate to you in your body.

The world is an audience per Carse, in my system, I call it a WHERE. The world is the audience that watches a performance without participation. It is the events observed, the WHAT, that makes the World the World. Thus worlds require histrionic characters that seek display and narcissism that enjoys winning, and antisocial winning the wins by deception. The audience must be borderline, ready to fuse with the winner and escape from the loser. It must be dependent upon the world to set the rules and compulsively follow the rules, even if it must masochistically absorb loss or sadistically generate loss. Thus, finite games support both sin and the personality disorders that support the sinners creative dysfunction, the evil that is loss of genius in the infinite game.

Those who lose must avoid showing their face, must withdraw and become forgotten in schizoid, paranoid, and schizotypal disgrace.

But, unlike the finite game, as Carse points out, worlds do not last forever, which is why the stages of history seem so foreign and so strange, they were a very different world, a very different stage, a very different finite game, a very different set of contest and titles which past away from serious consideration long ago. That long ago may have been only a few minutes, a few hours, a few years, depending on who quickly that audience has been reformed.

The jealousy, resentment, anger, pride that drives finite games makes players their own audience and divides them against themselves, according to Carse.

An audience in a finite game is united in its opposition to itself, we cannot be a world without being divided against ourselves, without loosing, without suffering, without subject to trauma and traumatic stress, to serious addiction, to serious sex and love addiction, to serious wealth and status and power addiction, and the serious trauma and drama that comes with these finite game disorders and competitions and self promotion and self hating and self punishment, to desire the special status of a dramatic title and a role that transcends and masks the normal human condition is traumatic to our genius as a normal human. This theater of time is divided into historical periods with its own titles and roles and property records.

But infinite players do not consume time. They have a WHO that is able to generate its own time within the infinite game HOW and WHY and are not required to have the WHERE and WHEN and WHAT of the world of finite games, the finite game WHERE is the world of strife in the tradition of Empedocles, rather than the world of love and the gods of love that are the infinite game WHY of love an joy.

Carse says that time does not pass for the infinite game player. Infinite play is dramatic and not scripted and it is time lived rather than viewed. Each moment of infinite game WHO time is a beginning. Work is done to fill up time in finite games but it generates possibility in infinite games. A finite game player, per Carse, puts play into time, and an infinite game player puts time into play. Finite players cannot see the infinite games. Finite play wants a timeless title and its eternal life, but infinite play wants an endless novel birth that begins something new in the game that never ends.

Carse says that nature is the unspeakable and has no voice and is indifferent to human culture. The master player looks to nature as an opponent and struggles with her for the benefit of civilization. Our society prides itself on technological facts and processes that allow us to control nature. We look for an order within nature that will allow us to predict and control her challenges. We seek to explain nature and to explain why things must be the way they are. This is the nature of the utilitarian form of the finite theatricality of the realistic temper. It has generated metaphysical explanation like the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, the Pragmatism of John Dewey and William James, the modern Naturalists in the tradition of W.V.O. Quine, that want to adopt and emulate the methods of the successful sciences and operate in cooperation with these discipline that have one the prizes and titles that society gives to those who help it explain nature.

The lawfulness of nature indicates that it does not have its own genius, according to Carse. Thus, science seems to allow us to speak for the unspeakable. It appears that we have silenced the ancient gods with truth. But, when we deprive the gods of their voices, they end up taking our voice. We speak as the supernatural, the master of the forces of nature. But, what we thought we read in nature, we read into nature.

Thus, we must return to nature and her silence, per Carse. It generates metaphor and language. Our attempt to be the master player is an attempt to be rid of language, per Carse. Nature is the realm of the unspeakable and history is the realm of the speakable. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside, narrative invites the possible into the story. According to Carse, the silence of nature makes language and narrative possible and history possible.

According to Carse, true conversions require a new audience and a new world. Who ever wins the explanation wins the tile of true knowledge. These people must be listened to because they know the facts, the WHAT. Knowledge is like property and must be published, according to Carse. With a title comes magisterial speech. It is the highest honor that comes with a title. In the finite family, husbands speak for wives and parents for children and kings for the realm, according to Carse.

The gods have power through their utterances, their word. One is speechless before a god and a winner and one is obedient. The silence of obedience is the silence of death and the demand for obedience is evil. The silence of nature generates language. In conquest of nature, the gods speak for nature, but in making nature an opponent, they make their listeners opponents. In refusing the silence of nature, they demand the silence of obedience.

According to Carse, it is the metaphor aspect of language that makes it speech about the unspeakable, it does not point to anything. In finite speech, meaning comes before utterance and in infinite speech the meaning is generated by the utterance. Finite language is complete before it is spoken but infinite language exists only as it is spoken.

Infinite speech calls up the listening of the speaker. Infinite speakers do not speak before the world, but present themselves as an audience. The gods speak before the world as lords, they cannot create the world but are creations of the world and are necessarily idols. The gods create the world by listening, not by speaking. The gods bring us to speech through their silence. Infinite speech continues because it is a way to listen. Finite speech ends with a closure of silence and infinite speech ends with the disclosure of silence.

Storytellers do not offer truth, they offer vision. Story does not compete and does not seek to be obeyed. Great story explores the deep touching of one free person by another, according to Carse. With great story we see that everything still remains to be said. Society seeks the scripted laws to which people must conform. Infinite speakers know that what begins in freedom must not end in necessity.

We control nature in order to make it safe for our explanations and our titles and our laws and predictions. We explain and predict and control to support the compulsions and paranoia and narcissistic rewards, the reliable dependence, the histrionics and antisocial and borderline possibilities that allow us to avoid the dangers of nature and to undergo schizoid and schizotypal withdrawal from the threatening freedoms of her unending silence and infinite games. We have set ourselves up for self hate by our narcissistic predictions of our winnings and we punish ourselves masochistically for our failings and punish others with our sadistic competitions that generate further abuse and cycles of victimhood. We are trapped in the empty hollows generated by our addictive pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, drug addiction, alcoholism, sugar addiction, enslavement to wage slavery, addiction to consumption and drug addicted sloth.