Over the years, members of our community have written a variety of
articles illuminating aspects of the More Philosophy and their experiences
of living a communal lifestyle based on the concept of perfection.
Here are a few to start -- we will continue to present papers & videos
from our archives along with more current news.
We live in a culture where we have the widely-held view that nobody's perfect.
Why do we so readily agree that nobody's perfect? This resistance to the
view of the perfection of mankind is based on the belief that life can't
be perfect if there is bad in it, and we can't be perfect if there's
bad in us. However, life consists of experiences and our evaluations
of them, from good to bad. A life without value (good and bad) would
be a life without caring, a life of complete indifference and sameness.
A person without values would be a total sociopath. If there were no
bad in us, our good deeds would be meaningless.
It is your judgments that are producing the world you experience - your
judgments are creative and your life is the fruit of your judgments.
A perfect life does not imply a life with only good in it. At first
it may seem so, but a really interesting, exciting, meaningful life
includes a full measure of good and bad. Perfection is not all good.
Perfection is beyond good and bad - it includes both.
Believing the words "I am perfect" in the presence of doubt is just a
matter of expanding your awareness and finding your doubt perfect. Maybe
everyone is perfect - that doesn't mean they couldn't be better. In fact,
their potential for improvement is an essential part of their perfection.
Perfection includes the potential for change, and every perfect moment
offers an opportunity for improvement. A perfection that can change
is more perfect than one that cannot. A perfection that can expand is
more perfect than one that is static. No matter how good things get,
they could always be better. Vic Baranco would often remark, "I know
things could get better than this, but I don't see how!"
The simplest concepts may be the most profound, for instance, the
idea of freedom, freedom to have a good life or a bad one regardless
of circumstances.
The value systems that each of us internalizes in reference to our
culture, society and family are arbitrary, but they don't feel
arbitrary. They feel as if they come from within (that could give you
some idea of how internalized they are). The value system of our culture
centers on the importance and power of bad. We are well informed of its
presence and constant threat. We get a lot of information on recognizing,
dealing with, and avoiding the bad in life and nearly none on adding
to the good.
When I was a little kid, long before I went to school, I was rewarded
for being "smart". All I had done to earn this recognition was
memorize. Memorization was easy for me and a pleasure to boot. I could
recite the little story books my mom read to me so, when I was three,
I could pretend to read to my baby brother, turning the pages at the
appropriate time.
It looked like it would be smart of me to cultivate this winning quality,
or at least the appearance of that quality since nobody knows how to get
smarter; you come with all the smarts you'll ever have. It appeared
to me that people who were considered smart got that reputation by
being critical, by developing their ability to seek and find the flaws.
So I became a human magnet for information that damned even the most
benign and accepted things. And life seemed to go very well on almost all
levels. I got better at finding fault, people were consistently impressed,
especially adults, so I got what I was looking for: acceptance, praise,
attention and all kinds of breaks. But I hadn't figured on the side
effects.
I was a dark and moody adolescent, which made me happy in a way because
I knew that serious, artistic people, people of substance, are not
chipper. So my gloom seemed to me to be further testimony to my value and
certainly to my intelligence. There were good times and lousy times in
high school, and sometimes I was really very happy. But that isn't how
I would characterize myself in general or propensity during those years
- I knew too much to be happy. I was a damsel in distress who dreamed
that the future would hold the good circumstances to make her happy.
Near the end of my second year of college I ran into an old high school
friend at a concert. She lived up in Hollywood and had a "glamour"
job in the pop music industry, which means that she got to rub shoulders
with music stars for very small pay and random free passes and records
(yes, vinyl records). This chick was the smartest friend I ever had. She
read novels and plays in German and French when she was 15 just for
the fun of it (or maybe to impress people with her smartness). An honor
student, she turned her back on "higher education" and, after high
school went to seek her fortune in the rock and roll biz. We hooked up
at that concert and next thing you know I had a "glamour" job, too,
and we lived together in a house in very hip Laurel Canyon up the street
from Joni Mitchell, between Denny Dougherty and the Turtles.
We both loved philosophy and having intellectual conversations especially
with each other because we were well-matched in terms of rhetorical
ability. One night we had a heated discussion, a discussion we'd had
several times before and one I had to win for my own reasons. My friend
believed deeply and unassailably (so far) in Fate. It seemed to me that
if she were right then there would be no point, really, to living. You'd
just be Fate's puppet. Since neither Fate nor Free Will can be proven or
demonstrated, a person's position on the question is one they choose
and live with for reasons other than proof. If you have free will,
you've chosen and if you don't have free will you believe as you
were destined to believe. So far, our battles on the subject had been
stalemates. My friend had said, by way of simple demonstration of the
rightness of her position, that no matter how many times you mix red and
blue together you're only ever going to get purple. And then it occurred
to me that I might have come up with a way to prevail in this difference
of opinion. Okay, I could concede that the circumstances and events of
life may not be self-chosen, BUT what about value judgments! Isn't
it up to me whether I say yea or boo to purple? (I had her, I had her,
I knew I had her!) But no. She just said "no". I didn't realize
until losing that argument how absolutely unassailable the basic premise
of fate is. If that's what you believe then everything is an example
of it. I may have lost the argument that night but I knew that I had no
hope of ever being happy unless, somehow, I was free.
So, at 20, I had the viewpoint that each of us is free to make any value
judgment we like. Not that I lived like that. I made my value judgments
with just as much victimization as anybody. After all, I wasn't getting
much agreement from any respectable source that happiness was truly within
my grasp, it was just an idea I favored in theory. About two years
later, when I met Vic, I got reality for the first time in a personally
convincing way that the world of my perception is the world of my creation
and the one I live in; that value is arbitrary and each of us is free to
assign value in any way we want. Yahoo! I won. But I hadn't recognized
the implications of freely placing so much positive value on smartness.
One time Vic said to me, "If you're so smart how come you're not
happy?" It wasn't the first time, by a long shot, that he'd tried to
get through to me that thinking that smartness is an asset that will get
me what I want isn't really so smart. It was the time, however, that
it began to dawn that my arbitrary attachment to being "smart" also
attached me to focusing on bad and, what's worse, since the universe of
my perception is the universe I get to/have to live in, I was destining
myself to life in a bad place by my own version of "smartness".
I didn't suddenly flash and "get well" or live in a blissful
universe of my own creation from that day forward. But it did become
clear to me that life is a moment-to-moment proposition and at any time
I can. According to Vic, it requires eternal vigilance to have a good
life. Having "the good eyes" is a deliberate choice and one that
must be made in opposition to a lot of cultural pressure to see bad. Just
knowing of your own freedom doesn't mean that you automatically choose
good or act in your own best interest. After all, what kind of freedom
would that be?
Life is fair. You get out what you put in. Seek and you will find. Seek
bad and you will find it. Seek good and you will find it. Find bad and
it gets worse. Find good and it gets better. Reach for good, aggress on
good, and it gets fantastic! Now that's smart.
Horse Halitosis was a regular feature of our newsletter "The
Aquarius". It was a way for our students to ask questions and get an
answer that was "straight from the horse's mouth".
Dear Horse Halitosis,
My boyfriend and I took Basic Sensuality together. He has been practicing
"doing" me and we are having a lot of fun. Sometimes, though,
he stops rubbing on me just when it is starting to get really good.
What should I do?
Signed, Just Getting Going
Dear JGG,
You and your friend are on a sexual adventure! It's great that you are
open-minded and willing to experiment. As you have noticed, sometimes
people become goal oriented.
In bed, these goals may get in the way of pleasure; for example, when
a person's attention is on the goal, it is hard to notice the strokes
right now that would naturally lead to greater sensation. From there,
it is tempting to judge the experience and oneself and bingo! You are
in your head and not noticing what is available to be felt. This is
compounded by the fact that in our culture, we do not commonly talk
while having sex, let alone acknowledge specific ways it feels good. So,
the person ends up non-confronting pleasure and waiting to come.
Sensuality is in another direction. You and your boyfriend have a
wonderful opportunity to research how delightful each stroke could
possibly feel. This would take deciding that this moment, this stroke, is
all that there is. It would take interest in and approval of each part of
each stroke. It would take gradient experimentation with pressure, speed
and location with communication about it as you go along. Have fun!
Signed, Horse Halitosis
PS The Fundamentals of Sensuality course offers a demonstration of this.
The presupposition of scarcity results in behavior that predicates the
very scarcity it seeks to avoid. 'Not enough to go around' leaves
you in a position where, even if you have abundance, it seems in your
best interest to limit your rate of consumption and reduce your pleasure
by consuming in secret so that others are not tempted to participate in
your good fortune.
If you are personally experiencing shortage, your anxiety to attain
and your resentment of others who have what you lack only serve to
effectively exclude you from gratification and provide you with further
evidence that life is fundamentally an unfair proposition. If you reduce
the outflow of good you will correspondingly reduce the inflow.
Consequently, if you're short, give; if you're broke, spend,: if
you're lonely, befriend somebody and if you don't understand all this,
explain it to someone.
