Excuse Me-- You! (That We Are So Much More, #1)

Yes, you. Walk With Me for a Second.

    Do you ever get the feeling that there is a presence, pressing through your conscious mind and the veil of time as if to punch through and slip you onto another timeline?

    Sitting on the hill, you see the confused and anguished clouds of another warm spring evening slipping away, the cold gathering... And words come to your mind to describe it. A smoky, tenuous blue. You've heard these words before: they were in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, you did not author them. 

    But then again, you did. You just felt them emerge from you, just as they emerged from him once; just as they did; this is not an assumption, this is apodictic, you felt the sigh of youth from a mind that is not yours, the tingle of fingers against a felt pen, a sense of a room with sawdust, and most clearly, a sense of a different time. What if... what if you are James Joyce...?

    No, that's silly. You're you. Obviously, this is my memory. I'm James Joyce. I also happen to be Parnell, and Julius Caesar. Come with me, quickly; it will take time to explain, and to figure out exactly who you are, and how you can use your pasts to become something truly new...

Something Like Reincarnation; I Guess it's More of a Cosmology

(as told walking through the subway at quite a pace; we are being followed, by the agents of some extremely powerful Peoples)

    I'm going to start with The Soul.

    The Soul is real. It is being synthesized in real time, and each living thing participates in its synthesis by living their life. Thus, when you die, the Soul contains the sum of the events of your life, the Egyptians understood this. What we call Souls is the region of this vast tapestry of Soul which you navigate during your lifetime. Innumerable organisms life-paths cross the Soul along routes through planes that are indescribable or comprehensible to our comprehension. I haven't seen any of this, but this is the hypothesis.

    In a sense, the Mahayana Buddhists were right too; souls are reincarnated. But only insofar as the shifting energies of the Soul as embodied in organisms has an outsized effect on how we live our lives. Somehow physical reality and the Soul have come into a tenuous arrangement such that bodies provide vehicles for the dynamism of the Soul. 

    Do we have free will? Perhaps. We have a brain, and behavioral tendencies. This organism can impact the physical world, and through the physical world, can impact the trajectory of other organisms, thus impacting the dynamics of the Soul itself. But most organisms aren't woke, so they just waste their lives doing shit thoughtlessly. Almost all organisms don't have the force of Life to imprint themselves distinctly on the tapestry; thus, almost all organisms aren't so recognizably impactful on the world in order to be identifiable on that tapestry. Siddartha Gautama recognized this.

    What makes exceptional organisms exceptional is that, through their actions, they change the Soul dramatically. They imprint themselves onto the form of the tapestry, by being extremely, exceptionally Alive. Don't think of their impacts as creating grooves in the landscape, because that would give you the false impression that people accidentally slip into the behavior patterns of, say, Confucius. That is no accident. These people were deeply alive-- that is, divinely awash in each moment, recklessly unafraid, deeply in touch with their world, and unconscionably decisive in shaping the lives of others. Confucius has shaped the soul; so has Hitler.

Someone at Some Point Thought of Themselves as Scientific, and Created a Typology of Souls,

    But I'll get into that when we get where we're going.

But There's MORE! You Can Channel Souls.

    Channel Souls? What is that? I'm about to tell you, actually.

    Channeling souls is difficult. It's a process by which you embody the soul of another living being. In order to even have the possibility of embodying these figures, you must be extremely, exceptionally Alive. It's hard to really define what that means. Socrates would say that you can achieve this by deeply examining your own life, and that the unexamined life is not worth living. That's probably good advice. In the meantime, you'll find that constantly being on drugs or in danger helps with this too. 

    Another good way to learn to be deeply alive is to understand someone who was truly Alive extremely deeply, which is useful because this is a necessary step for Channeling as well. In order to Channel someone, you have to deeply understand them, such that you can see the world as they do without effort. This is called Union. Once you have achieved Union, you can Channel their soul, filling yourself with the energy of a lifetime and using it to do some pretty incredible things. Jesus understood this; he tried to channel the Soul itself. (Side note: the requirements of Union  is also why it's so rare for people to Channel the souls of non-human organisms; we simply have nearly zero comprehension of the Soul's dynamics as understood by other organisms.)

    Take a left up here. That man in the trenchcoat is Stuck as a Pseudo-Goethe, he won't follow us past the Coca-Cola ads. I'll explain later, when I tell you who is hunting us.

    For now, I'll tell you where we're going-- We're going to a friend of mine, a crucial friend. She's most of the Witch of Endor, and the slight majority of the Oracle of Delphi, though she's been working hard to keep that majority. I think she picked up some Merlin along the way. Why are you looking at me like that? Oh, oh, yes, I've been unclear. 

    The Soul embodies in living beings. But when a living thing creates something or impacts something extant, they do so by means of the Soul, insofar as it is its own and insofar as it other souls. Homer is one of the more impactful souls ever; many characters are each more alive than most organisms in history, in that they are both of Homer's soul and separate from it, just as the rippling on a lake is both of the raindrop that caused it and separate from it. Created things have a life of their own, and can impact one's soul as a distinct entity.

    This highlights another crucial aspect of Channeling: it is a creative process. You are reinterpreting the figure through your own soul. You have to bring your soul close enough to it that the souls enter each other's orbit; this is Union. Which one will control which depends on the gravity of your life and of the life you're channeling.

    We're nearing our destination. No, it's not a dead-end, it's a Cynic's Street. Streets like this are a beginning of something new and much greater. The Witch is on the other side; she will tell you who you are. For now, I'm just gonna tell you a bunch of things and I'll explain later:

• Satan is real, and he wants your soul.

• The Illuminati are real, and they want your soul too.

• Eldritch beings pressing into the veil of our conceived world are real, and should not be looked in the eyes.

• Some people can perform Genesis and create things in matter from the energy of the Soul. When these things die or dissipate, they return to the Soul, but in the meantime they upset the balance of world and Soul.

• There's tons of curios, books, and places that have been imbued with the Soul, through individuals who make them or people who pay them worship by attention and significance. Do not put on Jeffrey Dahmer's sweatshirt. (Also, this is why Ley Lines are real.)

    Now, knock on the door. Of course it's not there, it's in your mind. Just knock already.

(Note: this is the first of a series of posts. The next two will, in some order, finish off the setting and start fleshing out the rules.)