This post is dedicated to the elevation of the soul of Dalya Davida bas Yisroel.
I.
All things hang in the balance, and we haven’t got much time. Read and consider: You’re the Protagonist of the entire universe.
I know what you’ve been told—Self-centeredness is always a bad thing, and all adults must pass to other-centeredness. “It’s not about me” is the core of all morality. We are to take our natural self-love that persists like the emotional afterimage of our very being and direct it toward the other. “Love one’s fellow as oneself.” We were created only to serve our Creator.
These may be true, but there is no “we.” There is only you, the one reading these words. It is one of those startling G-d-forged ironies that if you start from “we,” you will never reach true selflessness. That’s why—hurry!—you must remember these words, but forget me. I beseech thee with the respect of one of the few people (perhaps your mother is the exception) who has recognized that all things depend on thy choice.
If you heed my words, they are real. Please:
We are created as individuals, not as hive minds. Every social theorist that starts the sentence “human beings belong in families” must end it with “but persist in unassailable private subjectivity no matter what those families do.” True, if something is missing from one’s family, it can mean a difficult life for the Protagonist—that’s what the statistics say.
—Oh, what you have always suspected is true, of course; statistics are not as real as you are. Nothing is. Every single statistic you’ve ever heard has been heard by you, after all—and if anyone else has ever heard a statistic, that knowledge, too, was heard by you. But you are many things beyond statistics, including the choice whether or not you care about statistics.—That is why it has been difficult to send you this message—it comes through your eyes like the other words you have read your entire life that pretend you are not the Protagonist, the words that have told you of other subjectivities and other worlds, of your smallness. I hope the Protagonist knows how to distill the message from the medium. I cannot, speaking to you from the outside through your senses, do it for you. I mention social theories only to point out that they indicate it may be worth it to dispose of social theories. I use language only in the hope that you will find the One who actually speaks it. It’s your choice, of course.—
Where were we? We are created as individuals. We are private subjective introspective selves that can direct ourselves outward to other beings, to see them, interact with them, and deem them real. There are limits to our powers, of course, but this is not a problem of the self but of being a created self. Isn’t it strange that we arrive to a reality of things that already exist, seem to derive from other selves that already exist, yet our perception, will and thoughts remain utterly private and singular? Some seek to break through this limit with technology that brushes the brain. But why should it be this way in the first place? How is it that a self breaks off from other selves? Why do we feel so Divine? So central? So uncaused?
The first emergence of our innocent animal-like being perceives philosophy as a form of madness. As a small child, you weren’t interested in “why.” It’s not that small children have no sense of order; the sense of order is so apparent as to be beyond words. Their reality is “only I.” You didn’t know you were the Protagonist because “knowing” implies the possibility of ignorance; your Protagonisthood was all you were. Everything had to meet you before becoming real, and the closer they were to you, the more authentic they became. Good and evil were existential terms, measures of how much something conveyed or denied your role at the center of reality.
You matured and, at around thirteen, became capable of becoming culpable. Things grew complicated; your solitude crumbled from within; “only I” gave way to “I am.” Driven to realize new realities, you stepped into objectivity, where “I am” can be said by anyone and “to be” is a neutral term. This is where you were taught to love and live, one among many. This is the realm where “I am the protagonist” is an inflammatory statement. (If I asked you to say it, you might stop reading this in disgust.) If we are sane, we step into objective reality not to declare ourselves the center of all things but to encounter other worlds at least as real as we are. We seek love, belonging, and self-extension. We wish to weave the threads of our subjectivity into other tapestries so that the “I” persists beyond the “only,” so that our “I” becomes an eternal principle.
II.
Even though you are the Protagonist, your efforts in this matter likely follow the path of struggle and sorrow known as “the human condition.” The problem, of course, is that no broader objective reality is as real or as close as your self, subjectivity, or “I.” But you can’t just stick with your “I” because you feel empty at your core and inherently turned outward. This emptiness is indicated by your “I”’s ability to attach itself to anything and take any form. A real “I” would be full and satisfied in itself and wouldn’t need—would be unable—to accept a name, a mask, a role. And so you enter the masquerade of the world, where “good” is that which respects the external relations of “I”s and “evil” is the tearing of the tapestry.
But we knew ourselves before we attempted to follow spiritual/rational order, and every name, mask, and role is ill-fitting to the freedom of the “I,” that same protean formlessness that drives us to our roles in the first place. You must, but cannot, accept a form. You must treat others as if they are real, but you do so as the choosing Protagonist. You must do your duty, but all duties are further from you than the one who can refuse, from yourself.
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