The Three Directives

There are three directives which move a human being into action. These are “need”, “desire”, and “will”.
Need is the most basic and primordial mover. The human machine needs food, needs water, needs warmth, needs affection, needs to excrete waste. Once a need has been met there is a sense of concrete satisfaction that sets in until the need arises again according to the physical cycles of the human machine. Needs can be met.
Desires are a trickier monster. They arise when needs have been transformed through the symbolic structure. For example, thirst is a real need for the human machine so an advertisement for a clothing line might depict a well dressed man and a woman drinking from glasses. A human machine that sees the ad will unwittingly transform the need to drink into a desire for a dress or pair of slacks. The trouble is, that while drinking a glass of water will quench thirst, buying a pair of slacks will not. Satisfaction will be denied.
Desires can never lead to satisfaction because they are born of the symbolic realm and not of the real. This is true of any desire, it is what distinguishes desire from need. It is an endless circle, a wheel fit for a hamster. The pursuit of desires can never yield fulfillment. This is not because there is something fundamentally evil about desire. It is because desire is a need that has been disfigured by language and made abstract. You cannot eat, drink, or hug an abstract.
A young gorilla needs something to love in order for its life to continue. This need can be met by a kitten or a doll or a fury blanket tied to a post, as long as the gorilla can touch it, the need is met. The same is true of human animals. You don’t need a porn star to hug. You could give a squeeze to a warty old hag to meet the need. You desire a porn star, a picture from a magazine, but even if you meet a live porn model, she will never be exactly the same as the picture from the magazine. She may meet some of your needs, but she can never quench your desires, those will go ungratified into eternity.
Will stands in a category all of its own. It does not arise from the machinations of the human, physical or linguistic. It is neither a need nor a desire. It comes from elsewhere. It is infinitely more difficult to act on will than it is to respond to a need or a desire. Will often conflicts with the needs and desires of the human biological machine.
With both needs and desires occupying the attention and energy of the machine, it can be almost impossible to heed the strange call of the will. Desires are particularly an obstacle. While the human machine has a limited number of needs which have to be met repeatedly, the ghostly world of desire is as unlimited as it is insatiable. The desires will breed more desires and will come to occupy all the space of the mind, demanding that one thing or another be pursued until the will is nearly buried in an avalanche of desires.
Desires will propagate on their own without any effort being made on the part of the human machine, but the true will, if it is denied attention and left unused, will wither like an atrophied limb. Efforts must be made to invoke and support the will, efforts which may seem most unpleasant to the machine because those efforts will be of no direct benefit to it.

Warm Star

It is a lovely warm little star. Not the biggest type of star there is in space, a blue giant, and not the smallest type either, a blue dwarf, but a lovely yellow sun. A unique star in this part of the universe, in that it is steward of a planet that teems with carbon based life forms. A motherly star. A star with a warm heart. This little planet that it has fostered is rare too, at least within this region of infinite space. A sort of museum of varied life forms. In the minds of other planets and other stars within this locality it may well be that this planet and this star are regarded as a pair of deviants, a sort of mutant team hosting a sort of infestation. Or they may not notice at all. One must wonder over the beauty of it, the rarity, the precise positioning that makes this museum of life possible; the star doing its best and the planet offering the elements that make up its composition to spawn and sustain a myriad of creations.
Fantastic.
We humans have put a motherly face on the sun and then a fatherly face on it and a motherly face on the earth, thinking of it as male or female. We suppose that whatever we happen to be down here in the museum sets the standard for the principles of the cosmos. As if the painting dictates the nature of the painter.
We know nothing. Certainly nothing of the love of stars and planets. We see black holes as frightening, the death of a star. What if the black hole is the flowering, the blossoming of the star? Or perhaps what we know of as stars might be like the blooms on a tree, and the black hole resulting from the star’s super nova is the fruit. The fruit of one tree is the beginning of a new tree’s life. That fruit contains and feeds the seed until it is ready to sprout.
We imagine that some being or beings from outside might look upon us humans of earth and be wowed by our capacity to love and be stunned by our ability to hate. It is the equivalent of ants dreaming that their service to the queen will touch the heart of an elephant. An elephant would hardly notice an ant, or even an entire colony of ants, and if it did, intelligent though elephants are, they would not take the ants service to the queen in the same context that the ants themselves do.
We are rare and unusual, but we are not the center of the universe. All things do not correspond to our own evolution, our own processes of insemination and gestation. We are one possible outcome of certain conditions, randomly produced sequences of events. That we are a product of chaos makes us no less beautiful. That we were not planned neither adds to nor diminishes our potential. Our potential to do whatever it is that we can do using the most of our abilities.
Imagine a bucket of multicolored interconnecting blocks. That is the potential. Imagine spilling them out onto the rug and endeavoring to build whatever you can using as many of the blocks as possible. There would be different ways to configure them, many possible variations. It would also be possible to refrain from using all of the blocks, all of the potential, in order to build something that was only blue, or only white.
As far as our potential goes, we are like a child who hasn’t even seen all the blocks because he was so taken with the red ones and particularly the red squares, and is only vaguely aware that there are more blocks on the rug and he could build something other than a high red tower.
We know nothing. We wither as blossoms. The fruit never swells, the seed is never nourished, the gateway to the new tree is never opened.
Still, it is a lovely warm little star, doing the most it can. We are just a side effect of its own self explorations.

Fallen Star

It is so easy to see what went wrong when you look up at the scar in the clouds that marks the place where you fell through. Laying on the cold colorless concrete, staring up at the gray and white plumes, the blue leaking out of your eyes into your brain, things are so still. Your wings, destroyed by the fall, are folded peacefully beneath you. What once made you light has become a weight tugging at your heart and soul, an anguishing reminder of what has been lost. Your ruddy lips part slightly as you suck the cold air in and automatically expel it so slowly that your chest barely heaves.
Now that it’s over you know what went wrong, but in the moment made quick by the life pulsing through you, it happened so rapidly that you could not see it coming. Like the blur of a hummingbird’s wings, your thoughts, your emotions, your actions, were all one hazy apparition that took shape through the deepest strongest habit available: the habit of losing control, of falling, of dying.
In the end what you understood about flight made no difference.
Knowing what would cause a fall made no difference.
As you drew nearer to the sun absolute and its radiations coursed through your body in waves of hot electrifying pulses, every molecule from the subtlest to the grossest responded. Under that intense solar gaze, they were brought to a frenzied boil, moving faster, extending outward like the participants of the old bacchanal, at last undone by the fever of grinding bodies and fermented fruit, exploding into the dark wilderness like animals. In that moment they flowed away from the fire, out of the cauldron and down the riverbed already laid deepest by constant repetition.
Your habits are the shape of you. Not your thoughts, not your intentions or aspirations.
The foundation was weak, like a pot made by unskilled hands, the flaw in you was developed in the first step of your work on self.
You must learn to crawl down the right course before you can fly it. You must crawl in the trench every day, like a soldier, down in the mud, sick to your stomach with exhaustion, until that trench, that way which you aspire to take, becomes automatic to you.
Then you will learn to walk it. You must walk it every day, widening it, deepening it with use so that it can bear the force of a deluge of fire. Each day it must be tread weightily and lengthily, the iron of your will spilling upon it, paving it layer by layer, day by day, so that a river of fire may flow through it without destroying it.
Then you will learn to fly it. You will soar to the heights of the flaming sun once again. You will come alive in the solar caress, dance upon the wind, lit like a neon sign throwing sparks as it is raised higher and higher towards the embrace of OUR LORD HIS SOVEREIGN ENDLESSNESS.
And when your incandescence becomes unbearable, you will not stop. Like an ancient loyal Spartan, you will flow through the trench you dug and first tested under blood and sweat. You will follow the way forged of your iron will .
When your thoughts, your emotions, your body, and your intentions are drowned in the molten blood of the sun's core, you will stay the course, because you have become the course. The course you have laid and nothing else will survive that fiery embrace.
When you have become the way, you will meet and know HIS LORD ENDLESSNESS. You will become him, your own true self. You will burn eternally as a star, the sun absolute, a central point from which new universes may arise.
Look up, Icarus, to that scar and prepare to bloody your knees. This is only the little death. Eternity awaits you.