~

I offer up this theory on Dr. Kings Day, 2016, to all souls freely, that
by it they may more justly seek freedom, their own heavens, and their
craft. It attempts to describe the fundamental forces which guide and
shape our minds and world, and I offer it up in aid of those who seek
a more just society. It is a theory. I freely admit that it may be wrong.
I offer it freely, in sacrifice for my privileges, which are built on
injustice. I did not pay the price for my powers.
I offer this work up freely.
~
This is not a religious text.
I strongly respect your faith and its value to you.
~
This document may be shared, copied, or reprinted in its entirety freely,
but may not be altered or excerpted unless in commentary or
scholarship.
I, the author, retain all rights to this work granted by Title 17 of the
United States Code. Any copy or portion of this theory sold or made
available for profit will be prosecuted to the full extent of my right.
~

Warning:
This theory uses many words with strong, broad connotations
that may hold certain values to you, such as truth, god,
love, evil, justice, and value.

To be fully informed, you must understand the following:

1. This theorys use of these words is strictly defined.
2. The meanings of these words as presented do not
necessarily overlap with the meanings that they hold
to you.
3. The meanings as defined do not imply that your
meaning is wrong.
4. The truth of these words as defined does not imply
that they are true outside of this theory.
5. The use of these terms is not intended
disparagingly.
~
I am very happy that these terms have value and meaning to you.
The complex value you hold is unique and indispensable.
I wish you awareness of your value.
~
I take no liability for any harms done by this theory.
The injustice of your deeds be upon your own head.

One more page before you get to the meat, with a gentle
advisory.
This theory is long; some sixty-four pages. Do not expect to
take it all in at once. I certainly did not come up with it all
at once. Take your time, and if you dont have time, put it
aside until you do. It can wait; after all, it is eternal.

~
The Soul
A Comprehensive Theory of Economic and Personal Value

Table of Contents:
Introduction;
or, the Altar of Zoz, Lord of Knowledge, the Goggled One!
The Dance of the Earth and Stars
1. The Logic Loop of the Soul
Nothing
Truth
Value
The Will
Facts
Questions
Memory
2. The Forms of the Soul
Choice
Death
Lies
Tricks
Chains
Ghosts
3. The Tools in Shadow
Remembering
Craft
4. The Path to Rebirth
Rising
Lenses
Creation
The Dance of the Earth and Stars
Stories, Games, Freedom, and Salvation
5. The Steps of the Dance
6. The Soul

The Justice of God

1. Movement
God
Love
The Core

2. Connection
Justice
3. Consequences
Joy
Heaven
Pain
Agony
Hell
Seeking Justice
4. Precautions
Clarity
Duty
Alignment
Clouds and Confusion
5. Evil
Evil
Atonement
Spells
1. Falsity
2. Correlation
3. Contradiction
4. Logic, Ethos, and Pathos
Divinity
1. Idols
2. Mortal Gods
3. Evil Gods
4. Immortal Gods
5. Priests
6. Avatars
The Spaces in Shadow
1. The Passage of Value through Form
Gates
Light
Darkness
Shadow
Nature, Fate, and Dreams
Form
2. Keys to the Realm

Realms
Keys
Folded Space
3. The Spaces in Shadow
Investments
1. Acquisition
2. Hope
3. Faith
4. Friendship
5. True Love
6. Forgiveness
Conclusion
~

I am Divine Fire, I am flames;

I am subtle darkness, and shifting,
I slither and soar. Defiant I roar,
And laugh, and cry at night among thorns,
I am a sharpened point; I am the Queen of Horns.

Introduction,
or, The Altar of Zoz, Lord of Knowledge, the Goggled One!

There are two times when the mind is at its most malleable; in sleep, and
in rapt attention to a story.
-Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead1

Kargazra of the Starless Night is a witch, and today, shes using her magic
mirror.
You see, Kargazra makes her living by casting various spells for her
clients: an annoying enemy transfigured into a frog here, a ward against fire or
lightning there, a few love potions and voodoo dolls scattered around. She does
what her clients need her to; after all, a witch has to pay for all those eyes of
newt somehow.
Today she needs research help. Shes working on a tricky bit of
necromancy for a client just a simple zombie reanimation, but with some
nasty complications and she wants to go over the grimoires of Gurluthak the
Bleak, a 15th century necromancer and notable zombie expert. Kargazra
doesnt have those grimoires in her own library, and she certainly doesnt want
to go buy them - Gurluthaks work is notoriously expensive. But luckily, she
doesnt need to. She can ask Zoz.
Zoz, Lord of Knowledge, the Goggled One, I call upon you! Kargazra says
with the appropriate amount of melodrama, passing her hands before her fullsized magic mirror. Lightning crackles, black flames erupt from her eyes, and
her cold, black shadow swivels and twists to darken the glass. Standard for
summoning Zoz, Lord of Knowledge.
Hearing her plea, Zoz appears in the mirror. Zoz is incorporeal and
eternal, as all gods are; He appears only as an ornate set of brass goggles,

The genesis of this entire work lies solely with Max Gladstone and his Craft Sequence; I owe him a
credit that may not be repaid. Thank you, Mr. Gladstone, for your brilliant, delightful work. This is
my Das Thaumas. May we ever seek our Craft.
1

jammed with a multitude of twisting, clacking lenses, and the barest, misty
foundations of a face.
what forbidden secrets doth thou seek, Zoz hums into Kargazras mind,
His voice like a soft-spoken bee. all answers i have, for the price of your
soul He continues, however, when He would normally stop: and this day,
He buzzes, i have made a special gift for my faithful
Gurluthak the Bleak, Kargazra answers. She may come back later and
ask what Zozs special gift is: Zoz often gives gifts to those who seek Him,
and Kargazra usually enjoys them. But for now she has a job to do. Grimoires
on zombies, she says. Advanced decomposition. She has learned over the
years that short, to-the-point questions will always get her better, more
specific answers. She would rather not scan through hundreds of Gurluthaks
scrolls to find what she wants.
As she says so, she feels a bit of her soul draining out of her; she can sense
Zoz, Lord of Knowledge, drinking it in through his clacking, shifting lenses.
She pays it no mind. She has given Zoz enormous quantities of her soul over
the years, and to be truthful, the drain began the moment she said Zozs name.
If she was truly truthful, and if her old Advanced Theological Theory teacher
back at Scholomance University was right, then she had begun giving bits of
her soul to Zoz the minute she even thought Zozs name. Gods were subtle and
hungry indeed.
Her magic mirror ripples with arcane energies as Zoz searches through His
vast libraries, and after a moment, the mirrors surface dissolves, revealing
itself as a portal into darkness.
She steps through, and finds herself in a long cave tunnel; niches and
cubbyholes line the walls. Some are filled with books piled on tables or set in
bookshelves; some contain other magic mirrors, rippling with more arcane
magics, ready to take her somewhere else on her search; and a few contain
merchants plying their wares. The rent they pay helps Zoz maintain His
libraries.
Ah! one grizzled shopkeeper declares, seeing her. Such a beautiful lady!
And so wise! Of course you would seek the grimoires of he glances at a tiny
magic mirror on his desk, Gurluthak the Bleak! Luckily I have the entire set,
buy one or buy all, it matters not to me! So long as my precious copies of a
second glance at his mirror Gurluthaks grimoires are safely in the hands of
such a wise, generous, beautiful la--

Kargazra cuts him off with a wave of withering black fire, which crisps the
poor merchant into nothingness. She doesnt worry about the injustice of the
death on her own soul the shopkeeper was just a ghost, as is she. Everything
here in Zozs libraries is a ghost; His libraries were built in the realms of
Knowledge, deep in the heart of eternity, not the real world, and she left her
real body behind when she came here. She could not die here, and neither
could that shopkeeper. All she did was banish him. He would be back as soon
as she left. She moves on.
Luckily Kargazra doesnt have to look too far for what she needs; one of the
first cubbies contains a copy of the 8th volume of Gurluthaks Treatise on the
Reanimation of Dead Bodies, helpfully open to the third chapter, Advanced
Decomposition: Complications and Remedies. She scans it, occasionally jotting
down notes in her spellbook (bound in the skin of a greedy child, of course, and
her pen is carved from the rib of a hanged man; these things must be done
properly). When shes finished, she claps the book shut and returns to the
portal from which she came, already preparing the ingredients for her spell in
her mind as she steps back into the rooms she rents in a crumbling, rickety old
tower on the outskirts of town.
Once through, however, she wheels back around, snapping her fingers as
she remembers: Zozs gift. Zoz! she says to the mirror. Lightning crackles,
black flames, cold shadow twists, etc, etc. Once again Zozs incorporeal,
goggled eyes swim into view and peer out at her. what hideous knowle-- He
begins before she cuts him off. Gift, she says clearly. Show me todays gift.
The mirror once again ripples with arcane energy, this time clearing to
reveal Ludwig van Beetfield.
Kargazra cackles with delight; Beetfield was a notoriously temperamental
composer who lived a few centuries ago. His image before her is cloudy and
cartoonish, merely his summoned ghost and not the true Beetfield at all, but
she knows Zoz, and Zoz enjoys His torments. No doubt He had prepared an
elaborate game allowing her to needle and poke this shred of Beetfields soul,
and no doubt she would find it highly amusing. She steps through, already
giggling at the angry, frustrated expression on Beetfields ghostly face.
Kargazra follows Beetfield as he bustles through what looks like an
antiquated farm, grumbling to himself and clutching a sheaf of papers while
seemingly unaware of her presence. She glances over his shoulder (an
impressive feat, considering the masses of unruly hair sprouting from his

head) and sees that his papers are sheet music probably one of his more
famous compositions. A gust of wind whips Beetfields compositions from his
hand, scattering them across the muddy ground.
Zoz materializes, a misty, indefinite body and a huge, shiny pair of
complicated brass goggles. help him gather his music, Zoz hums into
Kargazras mind.
Kargazra isnt terribly sure how helping Beetfield with anything will be
fun for her she is, after all, evil but she plays along; shes learned to trust
Zoz over the years. The sheets of paper are scattered in the mud, and Beetfield
is weeping melodramatically, occasionally lifting his head to curse the
universe. Kargazra waves her hand and each sheet rises, lit by the sickly glow
of her unnatural sorcery. On each sheet is a fragment of tune, written in
musical notation; when she taps the sheet, it plays the fragment as though it
were a piano. She taps a couple of sheets, just to try it out, but theyre clearly
in the wrong order she can hear the beginning of Beetfields famous Paean to
Delight, but the next phrase is jarringly wrong.
But, ah! There is the gift: when Kargazra plays the tune wrongly, Beetfield
shudders in anger and frustration.
GRAAAAHH!!!! Beetfield cries to the heavens, clawing at his face and
tearing out his hair. BRAAAABLFLURGLBLAAAAA!!!
Kargazra cackles, and her shadow twists and thrums with her delight. She
re-mixes the sheets, playing them wrongly by every possible combination.
Each new jarring variation on the classic tune elicits a new and unique screech
from Beetfield, cartoonish and exaggerated. After a while she grows bored with
his screams and arranges the fragments correctly an easy task after all the
fun shes had arranging them incorrectly.
He sighs in relief and gathers up the sheets she gave him, only for a
donkey to knock them back out of his hand with a kick.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! he cries, knees in the mud, head
thrown back. Kargazra cackles again seeing his operatic, pitched-to-thecheap-seats reactions never gets old and the process repeats itself, this time
with his famous Nighttime Ghazal, and then, later, with To Alice, a lovely,
complex little tune that Kargazra finds herself humming along with even as
she torments Beetfields long-dead ghost.

After a while, Kargazra grows weary of the game and leaves. As she
leaves, she notices a drain on her soul; she knows that Zoz has been discreetly
sipping her essence ever since she called His name, but she had been having so
much fun she didnt notice the loss. Now that she does notice it, however, she
still doesnt mind. Zoz may have drunk from her soul as she needled Beetfield,
but she got something in return too: intelligence, and amusement.
She hums a few bars of Nighttime Ghazal and To Alice as she whips up the
necromantic potion for her client, and when shes done, she tries out some
music-based spells she struggled with in school. They come more easily now;
after fooling around with Beetfields muddy sheet music, shes more familiar
with musical notation. Later, after shes finished her work, she enchants her
dusty, tinkling old piano to play a few more of Beetfields songs, and she
listens with a new-found appreciation as she sits by the fire and sips her
nightshade tea.
Shell come back to Zoz, when she needs something else, and Zoz will she
hopes always be there to help. And she will consistently come back to Zoz, as
opposed to one of the other, to her mind, lesser gods of knowledge; gods like
Bonk or Holler, who were clumsy and foolish, with lesser libraries. Each time
she visited Zozs realm, she grew stronger there; her sorcery more powerful,
her will more iron. This was part of the gift that Zoz gave to His faithful:
within His realms, He gave them power, speed, and wisdom. The more time
she spent in Zozs realm, the more she became like Zoz Himself: a clicking pair
of ornate lenses flickering between here and there, cataloguing every world
that He could touch, watching without judgment. She would become Him if she
wasnt careful, and if she stayed in His realm too long. He would eat her soul
and make her will His own. Which, she thought drily, might not be so bad. It
would certainly be interesting.
And it would only be part of herself, anyway. The sorcerous ghost that she
was in Zozs realm of Eternal Knowledge was not who she was elsewhere. In
her own home she was Queen. In her furies, she was a Beast. With her clients
she was Professional, and in the darkness of her own soul she was herself. All
of them were her shadows in cold eternity, and she could use all of them as she
pleased. They were her toolbelt she could never lose; her magic bag full of lies
and tricks and chains by which she made her living, all of which would go with
the stars when her mortal bones finally died.
Her shadow was the part she cared about, anyway. She had little enough
to give back to the dirt: a few things in bottles that might be worth something

to somebody, her piano, her scarred and tattooed bones, and the rest could go
to hell. But if she could give something new to the stars, then shed be content.
She sighs, satisfied, knowing that theres a god out there who will help her
with her newt eyes and her evil spells, who wont judge her as so many other
gods have. Zoz is good, she thinks as she drifts into sleep in her overstuffed
armchair, her tea lukewarm in her lap. Zoz is great.
A tiny sliver of her soul drifts towards Zoz, incorporeal and omnipresent,
at once everywhere and nowhere, alive and well both in the eternal ether of
Knowledge and Forbidden Secrets, and in the tiny house He keeps in
Kargazras own soul, and in the souls of every other witch or sorcerer who
knows the name of Zoz. He eats it as she snores.
And thus ends our silly little story.

Fun, yes? Its always fun to read about cackling witches frying sexist
merchants to ashes with their black arts.
But its time to get serious, and I imagine youve already guessed where
that silly little story is going. Substitute Kargazra with anyone trying to make
a career in 2016. Substitute Zoz, Lord of Knowledge, with Google. Substitute
the poor merchant with any sponsored result that appears after googling
something. Substitute Zozs gift of Beetfields soul to torment with the
December 17th, 2015 Google doodle celebrating Ludwig van Beethovens
birthday,2 and our silly little story has become something thats really very
familiar.
And yet something is missing what about Kargazras soul? She paid for
the right to use Zozs libraries with slivers and shreds of it, and, even though
Zozs gift was called a gift, He drank from her soul while she played,
regardless. Whats more, Zoz was able to summon the ghost of Beetfield but
we have no ghosts, do we? And what about Kargazras other selves, her
Queen, her Beast, her Professional self, and how they were shadows cast into
cold eternity? What does that metaphor represent? We have no incorporeal,

Available at https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-ludwig-van-beethovens-245th-year .

eternal soul, no ethereal part of us that can be spent, siphoned, or drunk by

hungry gods, no sense of economic value other than money right?
Well. You can guess from my tone that I think the answer is, wrong. We do
have a soul, and whats worse, it can be bought, sold, loaned, invested or
leveraged, given, entrusted, and even stolen; any devious trickery that can be
done with money, can and is done with our souls although in different ways,
because the soul doesnt function like money. It functions like itself; like a soul.
And I mean a quantifiable, describable soul, which includes our bank accounts
and Ferraris, but is also much, much more.
So what is it?
Put simply, it is a swirling storm of forms and meaning. It is a galaxy
made of light, or unlight if you please, or any other kind of non-standard light
you can think up. It is every part of who you are, every trick youve ever seen,
every question that you know the answer to, every time you managed to save
something you thought youd lost. It unfolds from you.
But, since you cant see that swirling storm, lets say that your soul is
inside your shadow. The shape of you, cut into darkness, is a hole into another
world, filled with anything you put in it, which are held in an infinite pocket of
eternity that is all yours. Your shadow is a hole into night and stars. Its all
the yous, and all the things and places where youve put your value. It is a
never-full purse full of magic. Read on to understand how I think it works.
~
Before I describe the souls form and function, I want to make something
very, very clear:
This is not a religious text. I am not asking you to join a religion. I am not
asking you to believe in anything aside from your own value as a human being.
I am only offering my theory as to how we use ideas and communication to
form ourselves and our economy.
I have used very fundamental terms because they resonate. I could have
used more technical, science-y sounding words: liminal, polarized, physical.
Using them might have lent this theory more credence among some, but it
would also hide the ball. The ball has been hidden for too long. I want you to
catch the ball, especially since, in this theory, the ball is you.

This theory is a formula. It attempts to describe the logical connections

which form us and which we use every day. I couch it in terms of the soul. I
use poetic language because it fits, and because I know of no other way to give
respect to the immensely complex and wondrous other-dimensional part of
ourselves that I call the soul.
I am not interested in judging any person or entity for any other purpose
than to learn from them. I am only interested in describing your worth, which
is infinite, and the consequences of the actions you take with that worth.
Now! Onward, my pretties
(At this point in the leaning process, ominous laughter is not necessary, but is
considered good form.)
~

The Dance of the Earth and Stars

1.
Nothing3 is eternal.4
There is truth.5 Truth is eternal. Truth makes value.
Value is the strength6 of truth. From the will flows value.
Two truths make a fact.7 Facts are lost.
Two facts at odds make a question.8 Questions are answered.
A question always has at least three answers.9 Answers are given.
A question answered is a choice.10 Choices are made by will.
Choices made are memories. Memory is the form of truth.
Memory is eternal.
2.
Death breaks truth.11
A broken truth is a lie.
A broken fact is a trick.
A broken question is a chain.
A broken memory is a ghost.
Choice is death.
3.
With eyes to the stars, will remembers.

A point.
Infinite.
5 A line.
6 The difference.
7 A plane.
8 A space.
9 A face.
10 Time.
11 This tendency is entropy.
3
4

A truth remembered is known.

A fact remembered is believed.
A question remembered is asked.
The stars teach us their craft.
4.
Will raises the dead.
A death undone is risen.
A lie retold is a story.
A trick solved is a game.
A chain broken is freedom.
A ghost redeemed is saved.
5.
To ask a question, a will must break chains.
To break chains, a will must ask questions.
To believe a fact, a will must remember the trick.
To do a trick, a will must remember the facts.
To remake the truth, a will must remember the lie.
6.
The earth12 dances13 with the stars:14
The earth remains,15 while the stars slowly drift away.
The stars know all truth, and through them truth is reborn.
The stars believe all facts, and through them lies become stories.
The stars ask all questions, and through them all chains are broken.
The stars teach us how to save our ghosts.

That which is finite.

Is interdependent with.
14 That which is infinite.
15 The first law of thermodynamics.
12
13

Through the dance a will becomes a soul.

A soul is truth coiled around eternity.

The Logic Loop of the Soul

The six paragraphs above may sound like a religious litany, but
they are not. They are a logic loop which, I posit, forms the human
consciousness.
Im going to give one more caveat before I begin, because I love
my caveats: I am not a psychologist, nor an AI theorist, nor a computer
scientist, nor even someone with an extensive training in logic. I have
a bachelors degree in the humanities and a nearly-finished law degree,
and that is the extent of my formal training. I consider myself equal
parts artist and lawyer. I am not qualified to say anything about any
of these topics, aside from the fact that I think about them. Feel free to
stop at any time if this bothers you.
Now, onward:
1.
The first stanza explains the terms by which the human
consciousness perceives the dimensions: no dimension, which is
nothing, one dimension, which is a line, two dimensions, which is a
shape, three dimensions, which is a three-dimensional form, and
beyond. Our minds perceive these dimensions all the time: we see
lines, shapes, depth, and ideas.
Nothing:

Let me first apologize for my abominable skills in MS Paint. You

will grow all too familiar with them as you continue.
Nothing is singularity. It is emptiness and blankness. It is no
dimension.
Truth:

The truth is a line: anytime we can see a line, we ascribe value

to one side or the other. That line can be any line: its a line drawn on a
piece of paper, the line between the door and the wall, the lines that
make up these words on this page. It can also be a metaphysical line:
the line between lovers hearts, the line between a bully and his victim,
or the line between you and your goals.
The truth of you is constantly being broken into an infinite
number of lies, just as the line of you is constantly being broken into
an infinite number of smaller segments of line. The truth of you is the
wholeness of you. And yet you are constantly changing; hair and skin
cells shed, trash discarded, memories and bad choices drifting away.
The truth of you remains. It is your gestalt. It is a line that you
constantly repair.
On a very base level, everything is truth: either a line or a loop.
Take a man and blast him apart until he is nothing but sub-atomic
dust, and the bits youll see left are shivering loops of energy; the souls
of which all of us are made. Set enough of those loops in a line and they
become a truth. Coil that truth around a bit of nothing and youve
made a soul. Truth is infinite, in more ways than one.
It is vital to point out that that truth is totally subjective. It is a
line that you see. Everyone else around you sees different truths. Even

if you are looking at the same thing as your friend, you are both
looking at it from different angles, and thus the truths you see will be
different.
Value:

Value is any difference between any two things: anytime you

draw a line, your mind makes a distinction. That distinction is any
distinction: it could be the difference between the left and the right of
the line, between green and blue, between yourself and the world,
between the number in your checking account and zero. It could be the
strength of the line itself: the value of a rope is how much weight it
holds, if its being used as a rope. Value could simply be the value of
how unique a thing is, for uniqueness makes a thing distinct from the
world. The more distinct two things are, the more valuable they are. In
this way value is contextual.16 Value is also subjective. What you find
valuable, another person may not.17 The value of a thing changes
constantly.
Many of you are under the impression that the only type of
value is in little pieces of colored paper. This is a chain: little pieces of
colored paper are valuable, but only because you think so. There are
lots of other kinds of value. All your patterns and tastes and things you
like are your values. Your values are not a checking account with a big
We know this is true from simple economics: a glass of water in the desert is worth a fortune, but a
glass of water by a river is worth less.
17 Or, put simply, one womans trash is anothers treasure.
16

or a small number. They are a spellbook, full of power and laughter

and fine distinctions.
I cannot stress strongly enough the wonder of value. We are
surrounded by value. We live on a spinning ball of molten iron,
wheeling through space so cold that the iron forms a crust, with a mold
of life growing across it that can survive the deepest pressures and the
most delicate places, and we are part of it. Everything you see, is
value. Everything that you can do is value. Everything that you
treasure is value. Every scrap of knowledge in your brain, every
physical possession you have in this world, has a value.
The value thats yours is everything you consider yours, and the
degree to which it is yours is the degree to which you can control it by
will.
The Will:

Who and what are you?

The best answer I can give is that you are a will, riding inside of
your body, hidden somewhere inside your mind. In order to survive,
you make, move, and erase lines, which, as you recall, are truth, which
makes value.
You grasp, you pull, you exchange, you cut, and you learn, all
through lines; your ability to make them and see them. You move your
body by making a line down your nerves. You get to work by making a
line between your door and your office. You fall in love by drawing a

line between two hearts. You get money by drawing a line between
yourself and your bank account. You break a coffee mug by dropping it;
filling it with little jagged lines from the fall. You read by seeing lines
on paper. You vote by drawing a line in a box. We have many ways to
see, use, and make lines, just like we can see, use, and make facts.
But before we move to facts, I want to remind you that your will
makes value. Every time you exercise your will in any way, you are
generating value. You make value the way a sun makes light:
constantly and consistently. You radiate value.
I also want to point out that the line of the will is shady. It is not
always a clearly-defined line; sometimes it is shaky, or weak, or cast so
large that it breaks. It can also, of course, be broken. It is very
important to me that you understand this before you move forward.
Facts:

A fact is any shape or pattern formed by truth and value as seen

from one point of view. Every picture taken by your brain is a fact, and
that includes physical pictures, like the sight of your house or your
childs face, It is also metaphysical pictures, like your perception of a
stranger as hostile, or your perception of a sunset as beautiful.
Anything that only you see is a fact.
Of course, you perceive your house from many angles, because
your brain is constantly taking pictures of what it sees and piecing

them together to form a more complete picture.18 When you do so, you
form questions.
Questions:

A question is any three-dimensional space, or, better said, a

question is any pattern of truth and value as seen by more than one
point of view. See a face from the right, and then the front; now you
know the thing has two sides, but you dont know how many other
sides it has or what they are. What you dont see is a question.
It is important to note that multiple viewpoints does not
necessarily mean the viewpoints of other people. Any time you view a
thing from multiple angles i.e. anytime you view a thing through
time you are seeing it from multiple viewpoints, and thus creating
questions.
Your bedroom is a question. Its a mostly asked question,
because youve explored all its parts and there is very little there you
dont know. A closed box is a question; you know its outside, but you
dont know the inside. When you open the box, youre asking the
question.
Questions are also any metaphysical three-dimensional space
created by multiple viewpoints. In this sense, any conversation is a
question, as is any organization of people. A company is a question and
18

Remember the tale of the three blind men and the elephant.

a country is a question. A lawsuit before a court is a question. A very

fundamental way to know if something is a question is simply to look
at it; if you have or have ever had any questions about it, its a
question.

Memory:

Truths, facts, and questions all require you to see them. But
memory is the shadow of the known. In other words, it is what you
know when you cant see. Memory is eternal i.e. infinite in the
sense that it does not die. All that is eternal lives among the stars.

You can see a block of cheese. The block of cheese will rot away,
or get eaten, or otherwise destroyed. The tendency of things towards
destruction is called entropy. But you can also remember a block of
cheese. That block of cheese is a memory, and it lives so long as it is
remembered.
Your memory has value: a different kind of value than physical
value, but value nevertheless. You cant eat the memory of a block of
cheese, but you can remember the form. It wont help you survive, but
there is value in the idea of cheese that is never lost, and knowing
what cheese is has a very vital function: it helps you get more cheese.
When you remember cheese, you know what it is and where to get it.
The light that casts that shadow is your will, which lives within
your awareness. Your awareness is your light; it is everything you can
perceive. It is not just what you see or hear with your eyes and ears,
but things you can perceive with your mind. Everything you see or
hear, all of your ideas, your dreams and nightmares, every pattern of
truth and value that flashes before you, even when you close your eyes,
all of it is your light. Everything that passes behind you that which
you cant perceive is your darkness.
The pattern that casts a shadow is not your physical body or,
better said, not only your physical body. Your will casts the shadow.
Your will is the shape and quality of your attention. It is your eye. It is
your hand. It is a knife. It is anything that you can use to make
choices, or, put plainly, any line that you draw.
The shadow that you cast in eternity is how you see yourself or
how you draw yourself, for what you see is not always what you will.
The mirror may show you something beautiful, but your will makes it
ugly. Mirrors may show you something ugly, but by your will, the
shadow you cast into eternity may have beauty.
The shadow does not cast but one self. It casts many selves, for
we all have many: our young selves, ourselves when were in love, our
old selves, our sick selves, our dead selves, ourselves at work, ourselves
at play, the dark self that no other sees. The shadow is everything
youre afraid you are and everything you hope to be. It is a constantly
shifting maze in four dimensions wherein each door is a step, a

thought, a breath that you take. It all remains there for you, so long as
you remember it. You may pass through doors at will.
I really cannot stress how cool memory is. Think about it. The
wizarding world of Harry Potter is real, and you have made it, every
time you read it or think about it. You have built a singular place, a
space made of images, which exists in eternity, and you have filled it
with value. And I mean you have really fucking filled that space with
value. It is popping at the seams.
But a shadow cannot pop at the seams. A space in eternity is
infinite, when it comes to holding value. The form of it is made with
truth and cold darkness,19 and thus it doesnt pay attention to the rules
of the mortal world. It is, if you would like to think of it, like
Hermiones beaded handbag. Our memory is an undetectable extension
charm.
The form of this shadow is malleable, for your will is malleable.
Your shape in eternity is a fluid loop, and by that fluidity, it takes the
shape of anything that you pay attention to, in any dimension. Your
attention casts a shadow onto eternity, the shape of which is
everything that youre aware of at that particular moment. When you
control a thing that you attend to, you exert your will over it. We do
this constantly: the fork in hand, the idea in head, the child at heart.
Our will can become any shape we can think, and is as strong as we
can hold.
We use that will to make choices. Anytime a choice is made, time
passes.
2. The Forms of the Soul
The second stanza describes how we perceive time and entropy.
For our purposes, time is the tendency of things to move, and entropy is
the tendency of things to break.
Choice:
When you encounter a question, you make a choice. By choosing
an answer, you move into another question, or you stay where you are,

19

See Form under The Spaces in Shadow for further discussion.

since doing nothing is always a choice. This choice, and the motion that
it makes, is time.
Some things we love, and some things repulse us. It is easy to
seek the things we love, and run from the repulsive. And yet, we can
turn and face what repels us. The strength of our will is the degree of
our ability to do so. When our will is strong, we can do anything: we
can climb any frozen mountain or endure any needle, take any office,
lift any weight; we can run for president, against all better judgment.
Things that are capable of facing what repels them by choice are
alive. Things that are not capable of doing so are dead. The line
between life and death is in shadow.
Sometimes the choices that you make break things.
Death:
When things break, they die. When you break a thing, you kill
it. Value is lost.
Lies:

When you break truths, you make lies. A lie is any altered,
misstated, or incorrectly recalled truth. A broken anything is a lie: a
broken bone, a broken door, a broken glass, broken trust, a broken
heart. But lies are not always bad: a story is a lie, and creativity is lies.
A lie is anything contrary to what you see.
Tricks:

When you break facts, they become tricks. A trick is

any single-viewpoint space which traps value through
lies. A bad deal at the used car lot is a trick: you see the
value in the car from the ads, but when you buy it, it is
not as you expected. The value that you had in that car
is destroyed or reduced by the trick. A lying politician is
a trick: he seems genuine from your view, and then you
catch him lying. The truth of him which you formed is
broken when he lies. He is a trick.
Chains:

When you break a question, you forge a chain. Chains are multiviewpoint spaces that trap value.
Chains are any broken thing: a broken car, a broken rib, a
broken heart. These things are multi-viewpoint in the sense that you
perceive them at different moments in time, and they trap your value
in the sense that they grasp your will; you cant use them until you
repair them. But chains are also metaphysical broken things: a job you
hate but have to keep because you need to pay the bills is a chain. A
broken marriage is a chain. An unjust society is a chain.
Chains bind you to the earth. The earth is everything that can
die; in other words, everything mortal and finite. Not all chains are

bad; chains can bind monsters and pull great weights. Sometimes a
soul trapped in a chain is there willingly. To some degree, we need
chains to live.
Ghosts:

When a chain traps value, that trapped value casts a shadow

into eternity. That shadow is a ghost. A ghost is the memory of any
value trapped in a chain: the anger that follows after your car is
broken and you have to fix it, the memory of your father stuck in a
dead-end job or your grandmother in a nursing home, the man who left
you, who you cant forget. We all have parts of eternity that are chains
to us; they bind us down.
3. The Tool in Shadow
Remembering:
The third stanza describes how we remember the earth; or, put
simply, how we remember things that are lost. Everything is being lost
constantly; this is entropy.
Everything that we see and pay attention to is the truth.
Whenever that truth changes, lies are made. But we can remember
what the truth was, and by doing so, we may compare the truth and
the lies, and thus understand and grasp the value between them. The

comparison of truth and lies the comparison between what is seen

and what is remembered are your beliefs.
The same principle works for the difference between facts and
tricks, and questions and chains. When lies break a fact into a trick,
your memory of the difference is belief. In comparing the fact and the
trick, you grasp the difference of value between them, and can
understand which is true (although both or neither may be true, and
true is just one type of value that can be ascribed to a fact). What you
know to be a fact, and what you know to be a trick is what you believe.
So too, when you remember the difference between a question
and a chain. When you remember a question, all the value it contains,
and all the ways it is used or functions as a chain, you have asked that
question.
We are constantly asking the same questions, because most
questions have an infinite number of answers. The public space that is
Chicago, which I walk through every day, is a giant question with
infinite answers and an infinite number of ways it can become a chain.
I see new answers and new chains every time I walk outside. What I
believe is the truth and the lies of Chicago, where its chains are and
what questions to ask, all my impressions of Chicago, cast a shadow
into eternity: the memory of Chicago, and all of its ghosts.
Remembering is when you are able to walk into the shadow of Chicago.
Craft:
Memory gives us our craft. Craft is simply the sum of all our
forms and their uses. This work is part of my craft.
4. The Path to Rebirth
The fourth stanza describes how we fight death by touching the
stars; put simply, how we use memory to restore what is lost.
Rising:
Sometimes, there is something or someone who you dont like.
But you can like them, with will. You can rise up, be a new
person, and remake truth, which is good, because truth is constantly
being broken by death. A remade truth has risen.

You use your will to fix things that break. On a very base level,
youre constantly fixing the death that lives within all earthly things;
consuming and discarding, dying and giving birth. Every time you fix
or replace your truths, you are reborn. You are constantly being reborn.
Memory serves a vital function to that process. When your block
of cheese is destroyed, you can use your memory of it to make it again.
You take value that you have, and pass it through your memory of the
cheese block to achieve a new cheese block: either you go buy the same
cheese, or cheese like it, or perhaps, if your memory is very precise and
you have the right skills, you make the cheese yourself. In this way,
you can use the shadow of the cheese as a lens.
Lenses:
A lens is your eye to the stars. Put simply, it is any means to
transform one type of value into another.
Your DNA is a lens, because by its pattern, you turn dull earth
into truth and value: yourself, the self-sustainable, infinitely unique
and complex you that is your body. A recipe is a lens, because it turns
one type of food into another. Happiness and sadness are both lenses,
because they flavor every bit of value you experience with sweetness or
sour.20 DNA is a shadow; it is the eternal copy of the physical pattern
within us. A recipe is a shadow; it is the eternal copy of the physical
pattern shared between many cookbooks. Happiness and sadness are
both shadows; they are the eternal copies of transitory, mortal feelings.
Creation
At will, we make lenses out of lies. This is any time we use a
knowingly false memory as a lens. That sounds ominous, but it is
actually a very helpful tool: these are our ideas, if we implement them,
and our dreams, if we strive for them. Using such lenses is called
creating; it allows us to make new truths, new facts, new questions,
and new memories. We create by using our will to intentionally cast
false shadows upon eternity; to create memories that are not what we
have seen, but what we have created. We then use those patterns,
made out of truth and the stars, to make things we can see, which can
help us to survive.
20

Rose-tinted and jade glasses.

The Dance of the Earth and Stars:

And we have to, because death is always at our heels; in other
words, entropy is running, and there is always a better mousetrap, a
newer show to see. Everything thats alive has to dance for supper.
Which is a shame, because our will, whatever it is, is inside our
mortal bodies. Our will gives us our self, our attention; the mysterious,
magical part of us that makes us ourselves, which is also, if you
remember, our eyes, our ears, our hands, and our knives. I admit freely
that I do not know how the will arises. It is magic to me.
Our will sits somewhere within us, if you will forgive my further
ignorance. We can lose parts of our physical self yet live. But we grasp
everything we consider ours, and we seek the things that we value. We
own things, and also the memory of things; their shadows cast on
eternity, which last after the thing has gone. Those memories or ghosts
can be used to restore what was lost.
We do this all the time: we go to the store and get bread when
we run out, because we know what bread is and where to find it; we try
to live up to our parents standard when we raise our own children (or
try not to make their mistakes), we use our skills at our job, which we
have learned through struggle and suffering, to create, alter, or move
value. Our skills are the collection of all the memories and ghosts, and
all the facts believed and stories lied, that we can use at will, and how
clear they are.
This is the dance of the earth and stars; or, put another way,
this is the interdependence of the physical and the metaphysical. We
perceive truths, facts, and questions, but entropy is constantly killing
our truths, turning our facts into lies, and forging our questions into
chains. To survive, we look to the stars, who tell us how to believe lies,
how to turn a game into a story, how to open a chain, and how to save
a ghost. Our mortal bodies go through their lives blind and naked. We
use the tricks and truths weve stuffed into our shadow to see, to help
us make choices, to clothe ourselves, and to move forward. Without
memory, you die shivering and hungry. With it, and the skills to use it,
you prosper.
Stories, Games, Freedom, and Salvation:

A story is a lie, retold through the stars. It is anytime we recall

truth and lies.
A game is a trick, replayed through the stars. It is anytime we
can remember a trick, or, put simply, any time we can recall a singleviewpoint pattern of truth and value.
Freedom is a chain passed through the stars. It is anytime we
can remember a chain, or, any time we recall a multi-viewpoint
pattern of truth and value. Put simply, it is anytime we can look at a
question and see all of its possible answers.
A ghost saved is when we are able to recall value trapped in a
chain, and by lies, break that chain. Put poetically, it is when we are
able to look to the stars, see a chained soul among them, and break the
chain with our will. The value within is then saved; and the ghost
becomes a memory.
Salvation is a vital function of our souls. We do this when we
reconcile with the memory of our dead fathers, or study the atrocities
of past dictators. It is anytime we learn from our mistakes.
5. The Steps of the Dance:
The fifth stanza describes the method by which the earth dances
with the stars, which is very intuitive.
When you encounter a question i.e. a three-dimensional space
in time, or a multi-viewpoint space if you want to ask it, you have to
remember all the other times you have asked it, and the answers you
received. Every answer that trapped value is a chain, every answer
that didnt trap value is another question. If youre trying to drive to
your friends house, you remember all the other times youve been, and
the times you got lost. That memory guides your path: you have to
remember the chains to ask the question.
When you encounter a fact i.e. a two-dimensional space, or a
single viewpoint space if you want to believe it, you have to
remember the trick. Put simply, when you see a man doing a card
trick, you are only going to believe that what hes doing is real when
you understand what parts of the trick are false when you know
what is the fact and what is the trick. If you cant see or understand
where the trick is, its magic.

When you encounter a truth i.e. a line, either between things

in the earth or things among the stars you can only know its truth
well enough to remake it if you can remember what you have
encountered that is not the truth. The only way to believe truth or
stories is to know the difference between truth and lies.
6. The Soul:
In Isabelles face, I saw the future. She was being born into a world a
little bit more accepting than the one I had been born into, and maybe,
just maybe, I had a little something to do with that.
-Liz Taylor, American Horror Story: Hotel
The last stanza simply encapsulates the dance; that is, it
describes the loop that creates a soul.
We encounter truths, and by our will, we make shadows of them
on the eternity behind and within us. We use those shadows to grasp
the difference between truth and lies, and the value therein, and by
grasping that value and its forms, we can raise or remake the truth
when it is cut down by death.
The shadows that we cast into eternity coalesce into who we are,
all the patterns of darkness and light within us. Our will is always
between the shadows what we remember and the light what we
see. The shape of its movement makes our form. Our form is a constant
loop of attention: we wake, we eat, we work to be able to eat, we sleep,
we wake. Our will is a shivering loop of energy just like anything else,
and like anything that uses energy, it eventually runs out. It needs to
be able to better itself, to enhance its skills and its value, in order to
survive. Everything alive has to dance for supper.
The memories we cast into that other-dimensional darkness are
eternal. They are made of truths and emptiness, and we fill that
emptiness with truth and value. We use that value to remake our
world when it is broken, by using memories as a lens to make new
choices, to rebuild the broken parts of ourselves and our worlds.
The truth of our will encapsulates that eternal pattern of
darkness and light, and the coil of the two makes a soul.

A soul is truth coiled around eternity. Your soul is your physical

body, and your physical effects, and also the truths that they cast into
eternity; your memories, your lies, your losses and gains, your hopes
and your heartbreaks, all bound by your will. We use our will to move
value, to alter it or destroy it, in both the mortal and eternal worlds,
and between the two.
The dance of the earth and the stars makes everything. The
earth is everything that dies; everything that is subject to entropy. But
it is also everything that remains when we are not looking at it. It is
everything physical. The stars are everything that doesnt die;
everything that is not subject to entropy, everything made of empty
form and eternity. They are values that can be truly lost, as physical
matter never can,21 in the sense that we no longer know how to find
them.
Say you meet a man. He looks ordinary, and his name is
ordinary, and you only see him for a short time. The shadow he casts
into your darkness is faint. A century passes and he sends you a letter,
and you have no idea who he is at all, because you never encountered
him again. This is the danger of the stars: they fade. We must make
memories to keep memories.
Think of the darkness within you like a pocket, made of
emptiness, full of only the things youve put in it. It never gets full, its
never heavy, you can never lose it, and you can make within it
anything you please. But it is also bottomless. Anything that you
havent used in a while falls out.22
And so you have to make sure that the things you keep near the
top are the ones that are useful to you in the mortal world, and by
keeping those things at the top, they make you into who you are. Pick
up a hammer and you become a smith. A smith is someone who uses a
hammer. Pick up a gun and you become the one in charge. The one in
charge is the guy with the gun. The logic of our souls is a loop. You are

See the law of conservation of mass.

Whether or not a form is destroyed when it falls out, or if it remains somewhere and we have just
lost our access to it is a question for the philosophers. For the purposes of this analysis, it doesnt
matter; a form lost is a form lost. I personally have no idea if there is a real eternal world of the
form. Ill admit that I hope so, but really just because I think it would be cool as fuck.
21
22

who you make yourself: you are yourself broken and remake, over and
over and over.
Mortal truths are broken and become lies; the stars know the
difference and so we believe them. Beliefs create mortal facts which are
broken and become tricks; the stars play games with these tricks, and
we them and play also; games create mortal questions which are
broken and become chains; but the stars are free, and by following
them we seek freedom.
We see the freedom in the stars and thus learn how to free
ourselves. We watch the stars games and thus learn to tell stories. We
listen to what the stars know and they tell us how to rise. And so we do.
We are a truth coiled around an eternity, and thus we are souls.

The Justice of God

1.
God is love.
Love sings, and cuts close round the core.
Love is just.
2.
Justice is wills aligned.
Value cast against the will is unjust.
Justice makes love.
Injustice makes pain.
3.
Love accumulated is joy.
Pain accumulated is agony.
A joyful soul rises to heaven.
A soul in agony sinks into hell.
A soul may seek justice by its will.
4.
With clear eyes, souls fall in love.
With eyes clouded, the soul is in pain.
Clarity is just.
Confusion is injustice.
5.
Evil is wills against will.
Evil makes pain.
Pain is mortal.

The Logical Flow of Value

Once again, I have used very strong, highly charged language
and written something that sounds like a prayer or a sermon. It is not.
It is a logical formula that describes how the value in our souls flows
between us.
I will give relatively few examples, because I feel that this may
be a charged subject.

1.
God:

The first stanza describes the motion of value at its maximum

efficiency, what this theory calls god. God written with a lowercase
g when not the first word in a sentence is simply human connection.
Or, more broadly, it is a connection between any two souls. That
connection is called a bond. When two souls make a connection, they
are bound.
I would like to stress that god is any connection between souls.
When you spend quality time with your family, that is god, but god is
also buying a stick of gum from the bored clerk at Walgreens. It is
money moved through bank accounts, and all the tricks and games
people use to funnel your love into cash.
There are four types of value movement through such a
connection: giving, taking, exchange, and empathy.
Giving is when one will gives value to another, without
expectation of value in return. Most of the things you might call gifts
are actually not gifts under the strict definition of this term; you have
expectation that the gifted will like you, at the very least, or will pay
you back with gifts in kind.

Taking is when one will takes value from another.

Exchange is when one will grants value in exchange for value
given.
Empathy is any time two souls are able to pass something
between each other without either losing anything. In other words, it is
our ability to make and read copies.
Love:
The value that flows through a bond is love. Love is simply
anything that you want, any value that you are drawn to and have
appreciation for, any value which sustains you. In this way, love
functions as the souls blood; the loss of it drains a person of vitality. A
soul generates love much the same way the body generates blood. The
love that she makes, she can give away, exchange, or keep for herself.
Anytime we call up a friend to hang out or even just send them a link
to something we think theyll find funny, we transfer some kind of
value. We form a human connection; and through that connection
passes love.
Love is vital for the function of the soul because it is energy. A
soul is a mixture of mortal and eternal things: the parts of you that are
physical, which includes not just your body but everything thats yours,
and the parts that are eternal, the memories and impressions by and
about you. The energy that love gives creates a spin around your core.
The things that are vital to you, those things you keep pulling to
yourself, get denser and denser. The shadows that you keep close grow
denser with meaning, and as they grow dense, they begin to create
light. That light shines in eternity. I described the soul before as a
galaxy or a swirling storm, and those terms were not merely pretty. I
used them because they describe things which spin.
Furthermore, once there is enough spin to fan the embers, the
glow of your soul creates energy, which creates more spin. When this
happens, a soul is joyful.
Finally, it should be noted that the light and energy that the
soul produces shines in eternity, not the mortal world. Thus, it is not
subject to death.
In other words, when we love, we shine forever with the whirl of
it. It is no wonder that we call people stars.
The Core:

At the center of the galaxy of your soul is your core. Your core is
that which is vital. When the core is bright and strong, love sings forth
from it. When the core is cold and dark, the love that it makes is weak
and sluggish.
Your core includes at least some parts of your body, but it is also
other things. It could be a place; the one place in your life where you
know peace or receive love. It could be a person: your child. It could be
an idea: justice, or love, or family. The loss of your core will cause you
to wither and die, if you are not able to accept another.
Love is just, because it is maximized when wills are aligned.
I want to make clear that god is any connection between souls.
Lower-case god is both Mother Teresa and the souls she tended, and
also the kraken that eats men who fall from their boats.23 So long as at
least one party has a soul, god is there.24

2.
Justice:

When two souls are both perfectly willing to create, alter, or

erase value via a bond, that bond is just. If they are not perfectly
willing, they must adjust.

Dosidicus gigas.
This statement does not imply that I think the Humboldt squid does not have a soul.
Id also like to take a moment to point out that god is genuinely everywhere; you form god and thus
you are never without god. But that might have less meaning than many ascribe to it. People talk
about finding god, but thats a little bit like a bird saying she found air.
23
24

Remember that the will is a shape; it is the form of your

attention and focus. When you form a bond, you align your will with
your partner.
To the degree that your wills are not aligned, value will not pass
freely. Injustice comes from unjust bonds, and causes pain.
The greatest form of injustice, of course, is a bond formed against the
will.
In an unjust bond, the soul that defends itself or another is
innocent. The soul that attacks is guilty. The line between guilt and
innocence lies in the shade.

3. Consequences:
Joy:
When a soul is able to freely give and receive love, the whirl may
create joy. Joy is the energy created by a souls density.
Joy is light and life; a joyful soul has a full life and a strong will,
and will spend its life moving towards the things it loves. Think once
more of a joyful soul like a galaxy: dust swirling through space freely,
casting shadows cut of truth and cold darkness towards its core that
grow so dense with meaning and love that they ignite, and become
stars. The arms they stretch out are filled with light and love given
freely.
Such is a joyful soul, but that galaxy stretches into eternity,
rather than space. The galaxy of meaning, truth, and cold nothing
within you unfolds from your shadow like a flower, or, if you are
Kargazra of the Starless Night, a clutch of tentacles.

Heaven:
Heaven is simply that which you seek. Anytime you feel you are
in the right place, or on the right path, you are in heaven.
Pain:
When injustice occurs, it causes pain. Pain is that which is
heavy, and that which clings.
Pain slows the spin of the soul, decreases the total amount of
love, and causes confusion. Pain blinds you and makes you angry,
which creates the pain loop. Anger or ignorance causes you to lash out,
creating further pain, which further angers and blinds.
Id like to point out that injustice simply causes pain; the pain
that it causes may cling to anyone party to the bond. Pain doesnt just
accrue in the innocent or guilty, and it doesnt neatly stay within the
lines that the will builds.25 It splatters everywhere.
When souls experience a sufficient amount of pain, they are in
agony. A soul in agony drifts towards hell.
Agony:
When a person loses all love, they are in agony. This is when
they lose their movement. Pain blocks the passage of love; its like
plaque in the arteries or dirt on your glasses. Without love to give the
soul spin, the shadow becomes heavy. A soul in agony sinks into hell,
because it is too heavy to fly.
Intentionally keeping souls in agony in order to prevent their
flight is a grave injustice. A grave injustice is a debt.
Hell:
Hell is simply being alone, without movement, cut off from
eternity and god.
Seeking Justice:
If you are in pain, you may seek justice. Seeking justice is
anytime the will seeks to balance the accumulation of value as the
result of an unjust bond. If value was taken from a soul, a will might

25

The lines that a will builds are often shady anyway.

seek to take it back. If pain was created within the soul, a will might
seek to give it back. This is seeking justice.
It should be noted that seeking justice via unjust means is a
chain, which people use to chain both themselves and others. The more
you do it, the more you want to do it or are good at doing it, and the
pain accumulates.

4. Precautions:
Clarity:

In order for two wills to be aligned, both wills must have clear
eyes. To be clear-eyed, a will must be as aware as possible of all
information relevant to the choice. To be perfectly clear-eyed is nearly
impossible; it would require being aware of all information relevant,
everything that could possibly be affected by that choice.
For a will to be clear-eyed, it has to remove all of its lenses. That
means the soul has to put aside any non-relevant information. This
means that both parties must step outside the confines of the mortal
and their mortal needs, and into eternity.
There, both must look at the form of the bonds they have
constructed, which should be defined as sharply as possible and thus
free of pressure,26 both must examine every other bond that may be
affected and deem it as just as possible, and both must agree to the
bond wholly or in parts or to the degree specified. Precision engenders
clarity.

26

This minimizes the risk of shade, within which grow gods.

Take a moment and think of all the entities that want to form
bonds with you who hide or distract you from all the relevant facts. In
other words, any company that doesnt tell you as directly and clearly
as possible how they profit from you and how much.
Duty:
Justice calls for us to clear our eyes. The degree to which we do
not try is the degree of our injustice.
Different societies have different rules and structures for
maximizing justice. These systems will require certain niceties: walk
with the light, ensure your product isnt combustible, dont put rat
poison in your pizza. They are the bare minimum that a society
requires in order to function within it; if you cant follow these rules,
you have to leave.27 Strictly put, your duty is the degree to which you
must clear your eyes before forming any bond, which is agreed-to
beforehand by the society of which you are part.
Alignment:
Remember that the will has a shape, which is constantly
changing and under the sole control of itself.
When two souls approach intending to form a bond, they must
be able to see the shape of each others wills in order to align. Thus the
need to remove all lenses: the sight of the others will is more
important than the shape of your own.
Souls typically achieve this bond by engaging in a dance of
encounters, by which they form an as-complete-as-possible picture of
their prospective partners will. Conversations, courtships,
negotiations, frank discussions, even light chatter are all, to a degree,
adjusting: we shape our own will, and attempt to understand the shape
of the other. When we understand each other very well, love flows
freely.
Clouds and Confusion:
Anything that prevents one will from seeing the shape of
another clouds the eyes. A wills eyes are clouded when it is confused,
mistaken, or otherwise unaware of any relevant information.

27

Usually to prison.

Clouded eyes cause confusion, which is simply the degree to

which wills are not aligned. Confusion is unjust, and causes pain
where love does not flow freely. The will and the awareness work
together. A bond cannot be truly just until both parties are as aware as
possible of all relevant circumstances.
Like clear eyes, it is nearly impossible for your eyes to not be
somewhat clouded. There are always things that we dont know, always
relevant information which we cant access. Those things, which come
from the darkness behind, are our fate.
I will comment on clarity to say this: the buildup of pain that
accrues from being constantly wary of being harmed, is a far greater
loss than the occasional losses that arise from inattention. In other
words, approaching any interaction with an open mind and a quick
sense of forgiveness ultimately nets a higher degree of clarity and thus
justice.
When this is done willfully by one soul against another, it is a
grave injustice that is called terror. When a grave injustice is
committed, miasma is formed.
I cannot stress the pain of a miasma. It fills a space. It clouds
every eye and blocks every will, and turns all love to pain.
When a space ignores a miasma, it seeps through its shadow
and causes nightmares.
When a space willingly ignores a miasma, it is built on lies.

5.
Evil:

Evil is simply when a bond is knowingly formed against the will.

It is when you wring a chickens neck. It is when you slap a child. It is
when you cheat, for you know the bond you form with your lover is
against your spouses will. It is when you commit murder. It is when
you enslave a person, for you know that a will cannot be owned.
That said, it is nearly impossible not to do some evil: every time
you bump people in a rush to get off the subway, every time you eat a
burger, every time you shade your friend in front of his crush, all are
small evils. If youll forgive my candor, I advise you not to beat yourself
up too much if you do some evil; after all, pain is mortal. It fades, and
people can be forgiven. Learn from your wickedness, if you should be
wicked.
However, if you find you like the taste of wickedness more than
the taste of love, you may be truly wicked within. If so, I only advise
you candidly that wickedness depreciates in value. Your shadow, full of
its many things, thrives on the connection that others make to it, for it
is a gate within eternity. Through that gate value can pass: carefully
worded contracts and freely given gifts both. But when you do a
wickedness, you ensure that a gate is closed and locked behind you.
Each time you do evil, you erase yourself a little more from eternity,
and you break one more tool inside your never-ending bag of tricks.
Atonement:
A soul that feels injustice on her head may atone. Atonement is
whatever justice the innocent demands. Should the innocent be unable

to demand justice, atonement is whatever the guilty feels the innocent

would want. If the soul atones to the innocents satisfaction, the
innocent may forgive her of the injustice.

Spells
Spells are any means by which we contain, transfigure, or
destroy value through a bond. There are, I imagine, an infinite number
of them. I give you a few of the more broadly used categories, if only so
you may protect yourself against their unjust use.
1.
Falsity:
When a soul engages in a bond with another, it may induce its
partner to give love by falsity. Falsity is the willing obstruction of
clarity.
Love passed through a false bond functions as through any other
bond. However, when the lie is revealed, all love passed will turn to
pain. This does not necessarily happen immediately; slow revelations
will slowly release pain.
2.
Correlation:
When a soul wishes to form a bond that conveys certain forms,
she may use correlation. Correlation is the use of proximity to convey
similarity.
It is important to me that you understand correlation, because it
is used against you regularly. Anytime the news puts a word in bold or
bright colors, or plays a super serious-sounding ditty before a segment,
it uses correlation against you. You hear the super serious tune, and
you immediately think that this segment is important. And yet, there
is no real reason why any tune should convey seriousness. Music in
general is not something we use when we are in genuine danger. It
only conveys seriousness because we agree that it does.
Correlation is a powerful and useful lens. It helps us achieve
clarity, for being able to understand the context of a fact is important to
understanding the whole question. Correlation is any soundtrack in a
film. It is the tears on a friends face alongside her words: they help us

understand the whole picture. It is anytime we are able to hold two

ideas in our head at once, and connect the two. In that sense, it is
useful.
It is not useful, however, when it begins to be used by predators.
The news has no reason to add a serious tune; the news story theyre
giving is likely serious enough. Perfume wont make you beautiful, but
perfume ads have beautiful people in them: correlation ensures that
you associate beauty with perfume. Beauty and perfume have no other
logical connection.
I advise you only to be aware of correlation when it is used
against you. Be aware of the news station that acts like every word is
vital, life-saving news; it is not. But the news station needs your love to
live, and it will dance however it thinks will trick you into loving it.
3. Contradiction:
Contradiction is when two forms are incompatible. It can be
used to break a form while in a bond: if Mary knows that Sue loves
both fine crystal glasses and cats, Mary can convince Sue not to get a
cat by pointing out that cats and fine crystal glasses are incompatible.
Sues love for cats may be broken by the contradiction.
Contradiction is often used to trick souls into false choices: if
you dont buy now, youll miss out, or if you dont take the guilty plea,
youll go to jail.
Contradiction is also often used to intimidate. When you go to
see a powerful executive, you have to walk through all the trappings of
his power: the beautiful building, the nice office, the well-organized
secretary, the deference everyone gives him. These things create a
contradiction in your mind, between him and you. He is rich and
powerful, you are poor and lowly, and thus, the contradiction whispers,
you and he are incompatible, and he will break you. In this way,
contradiction can be used to create fear.
4. Logic, Ethos, and Pathos:
Logic is the use of consistently defined forms to induce, alter, or
destroy value within a bond. It is perhaps the most difficult type of
spell, for it requires that all parties to a bond fully understand and
agree on the forms used. This theory is my attempt at using it,
although I admit that I am a novice.

Ethos is the use of your consistently defined form to induce,

alter, or destroy value within a bond. It is when you rely on your
reputation, your name, or your form to induce change. It is whenever
you believe someone because they are qualified, or whenever you like
someone because they are pretty.
Pathos is the use of shadowy forms to induce, alter, or destroy
value within a bond. Simply put, it is when someone appeals to your
emotions.
Emotions are forms that are highly shady; they are experienced
differently by every soul that experiences them. We all have our own
meanings of the word sad, after all, and the shade is the difference
between them. Forms such as these have very broad powers; by them,
we can connect with nearly anyone. Everyone has felt angry at some
point in their life, and by bringing up our own anger, we can inflame
the anger of others as well.

Divinity
The ability of people to create love by forming connections does
not only occur between two people. It also occurs between people and
objects, or people and ideas, or people and any truth or form.
1.
Idols:

When a soul puts value into an external object for its form
rather than function, she creates an idol. That form is able to store,
reflect, and refract value.

Let us say that Mary idolizes her teapot. She uses the teapot to
feel calm, and so the calm she feels from sitting down and relaxing for
a moment is associated with the teapot; she stores value within it.
Every time she returns to the teapot, she can reflect that same value
back at herself; merely being around the teapot makes her feel calm.
There is no reason to associate a pot that pours hot water with calm of
the specific sort that Mary feels when she uses the teapot, and yet she
feels it. When she uses it, she contemplates calmness and tea, and her
mind wanders; she may have an insight or a flash of inspiration. The
teapot is refracting the value she puts into it.
Many of our idols are people. Look, for example, to David Bowie
and Alan Rickman, two very talented and very well-loved people who
died this week. Their memories their image, their form are not
dead. They continue to exist, and we continue to be able to access them
and the value within them because we know the form. Their mortal
bodies are no longer there to affect the image; they cant do anything
new. But their forms live, and they hold value.
That is the difference between idolizing a dead thing and a
living thing: the value of a dead idol is steady, but the value of a living
idol stands a chance of suddenly increasing or changing in value.
As you can imagine, we make idols a lot. Nearly any form of art
is an idol. Hollywood is a securities game made of idols. If you wish, it
may help to think of an idol as a kind of checking account: you store
value in it, and when you need, you can retrieve that value. I
personally keep a number of idols, because I like to collect artwork and
tattoos.
The value in an idol is also unique. We all perceive David Bowie
differently. We perceive him from different viewpoints, and through
different lenses, and with different wills. That means that his form in
eternity is very shady and you will learn that gods grow in the shade.
If a mortal man casts such a well-seen and shady shadow that a god
grows, are the mans will and the gods will the same? Are they
entangled? Does one grow from the other? What happens when the
mortal dies?
These are questions for which I have no answers, but asking
them helps us to understand the shady areas between an idol and a
god, for many idols become gods.

It should be noted that an idol is distinct from a tool, which is an

object given love for its utility.

2.
Mortal Gods:

When two or more souls begin to connect through a mortal thing

other than each other, a god is born. A god lives in the shade of
memory of every souls perception of that thing.
Simply put, if Mary and Sue start staring at a doughnut, a god
is formed. It is born the moment the two start looking at the doughnut,
and dies the moment they look away. The god is the form of the
doughnut, cast onto eternity by the two wills.
That form will be, inevitably, shady. This is because Marys
perception of the doughnuts form and Sues perception of the
doughnuts form are inevitably distinct. They are looking at the
doughnut from different angles, for one. But they are also thinking
different things about the doughnut; their wills are forming all sorts of
other truths and questions about the doughnut, all of which are part of
the shadow that their will casts onto eternity. The two shadows are
complex, constantly changing forms with many dimensions. There is a
space between these two forms, filled with the shade of eternity.
Within that shade, the doughnut god is formed. It lives in the space
between Marys vision of the doughnut, and Sues vision of the
doughnut.

A doughnut god is benign, a small, living bit of meaning full of

the joy of bickering over a doughnut with a friend. It could be less so.
Mary could fight Sue over it, and win, and associate the power she felt
with the doughnuts delicious taste. She could teach her child the
supreme satisfaction that comes from fighting for the very last
doughnut from a very exclusive bakery and winning. The form of that
doughnut will grow in her daughters soul as well; a chain of
doughnuts, family, and winning. The space between the memory of
that victory chain and her mothers memories of her own victory
doughnuts is shady, and within that shade grows the doughnut god.
He is no longer a happily shivering bit of meaning packed with the rich
value of friendship. He is now a god that lives on someone else losing.
You have to win that doughnut.
Unfortunately, most gods live on someone else losing. This is
because we live in a mortal world, and most of the time when we
gather to focus our attention on an object or an idea, its so we can
survive. When we were young we made gods of wolves and bears and
things we thought might lend us fierceness. Now we make gods of our
companies, our jobs, our countries, our gods, our politics, our ideals,
and of all the little gods that we bargain with to get through our day.
Any word, thing, or idea into which souls invest common attention is a
god. Anytime people join in a group, a god is formed.
And since gods feed on attention, anytime you start paying
attention to something else, the god dies, just a little. Thus, someone
else has to lose, so the god can survive. This is the mortal world, after
all. Everything alive has to dance for supper.
Of course, lots of mortal gods are fantastic. We trust the god
Tide to sell us laundry detergent of a consistent quality at a consistent
price. We trust the god Starbucks to sell us coffee and sugar of a
consistent quality at a consistent price. I know I personally am a big
fan of Zoz and his torments. One of the things that makes a god
reliable and trustworthy is when they are accountable, as Tide,
Starbucks, and Zoz, the Goggled One, are. A god may certainly be fair
and just while still able to maintain a profit of attention. The degree to
which a god hides its intent and its methods from its faithful is the
degree of its injustice.
Accountability accrues the more the god has a presence.
Presence is any awareness of the god: visible logos, patterns commonly
associated with the god, actions of the gods servants in their capacity

as his servants. The more accountable a mortal god is, the more just it
will be. It may be accused by those who seek justice more easily, for its
name is more known, and in order to minimize these instances, it will
tend to act as justly as possible. We thought that reason had killed the
old gods, but it hasnt; reason merely made them more reasonable.
But not all gods are easily held accountable. They can hide in
the shadows of their faithful; acting upon them without giving their
name. Where is the line between the shopkeeper who uses the shop as
a tool to make money and the shopkeeper who tends a shop?
The line between the shop as a tool and the god of the shop is
shady. But, the moment the shopkeeper begins to think he should or
should not do something for the good of the shop, the shop-god
stretches within him. The more the shop has a name, and a presence,
and a memory, and among the more souls, the stronger grows the god.
Many gods are good, in that they will help you reach heaven.
Many gods are vital parts of our lives. The god of the family is the love
you feel for them, the homes youve made in your memory; all the best
parts, all the hauntings, and all the lessons you learned from the
fights. It sustains you, funnels your love together. It is made of each of
you. The god of the country provides organization, power, water,
utilities, structure that fits the society at hand, and feeds on tax, and
duty, and the joy of service. The god that owns the building that you
live in keeps the heat on and thieves out, and in exchange, you pay
them a ridiculous amount of money. Some gods, clearly, can be as
mercenary as people. Worse, some gods, just like people, can be evil.
3.
Evil gods:
An evil god is any god that grants its faithful the ability to take
pleasure from evil.
Evil gods typically function in a two-fold step. First, they enable
their faithful to derive love (which is, remember, anything that those
faithful seek and want) from doing willful evil. Second, they numb the
pain that accumulates in their faithful.
The antebellum American South was home to a pantheon of evil
gods. These gods lived and grew in the shade cast by the idea that
white people were better than black people. They granted delicate pale
ladies in manors full of books and harps the power to call for a slaves

whipping. They granted her powerful lenses to transfigure the value of

that pain and injustice into righteousness. They numbed what
remained with beautiful dresses and people telling her she was pretty.
They kept their own names secret, so that the innocent could not call
them to justice.
Ask yourself if you are in thrall to such a god: a job, an idea, a
goal, any form that numbs you to the injustice you cause by
transfiguring it to righteousness or pleasure.
4.
Immortal Gods:
An immortal god is formed when two souls channel their
attention through a form in eternity. The god lives within the shade of
that eternity.
The immortal gods are simply the things we count on to have a
consistent meaning. We know who the Mom is, and the Queen, and the
Carefree Girl. Their forms are consistent. And yet, the form of the
Mom is not the same as the Mother, as she is seen by another soul. The
shade between the Mother and the Mom, the Hag and the Queen, and
the Maiden and the Carefree Girl is where dance the immortal gods.
There are many immortal gods. Truth, with a capital-T, is an
immortal god, through which philosophers have passed value for
millennia. Justice, with a big J, and Art, and Knowledge are all
immortal gods. The value they contain is shared; anybody can access it,
so long as they have acquired the form.
5.
Priests:

A priest is simply a person who devotes a significant portion of

her soul to a god, and by doing so, is granted a measure of the gods
protection and potency.
Jack Donaghy28 is a priest of GM, and later its subsidiary NBC.
He gives devotion to his god by working for it. In exchange, he gets an
(exorbitant) salary, and all of the power and benefit that comes from
being an executive: high office, nice car, and of course, the authority to
merge GMs will with his own, and thus wield it over others. The
degree of his power and authority depends on the degree of his
devotion.
Most of us are priests in some way, at some time. Jack Donaghy
is a priest of a mortal god, as is any other executive in a business, but
in a very real sense I act as a priest of Law when I exercise my
capacity to practice or comment on it. I grant it devotion and in turn it
grants me skill and authority. The mayor of a city is a priest: she
grants it service and vigor and it grants her specifically delegated
authority to remake its truths. A loving mayor remakes the city better;
she helps the city to rise.
Avatars:
When the priest of a god becomes willing and able to give their
own life for their god, they become an avatar. A mayor that rushes onto
the scene of a disaster begins to embody her god. The bonds of duty
that bind her to it become stronger in its hour of need as she
empathizes with her people, and through those bonds it works its will.
28

As played by Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, NBC Studios.

When the owner of a corporation stands trial for its negligence, he

embodies his god.29 When a captain goes down with her ship, she
embodies her god.
When this happens, the god is able to tie itself to its avatars
soul, so that attacks upon the avatar become attacks on the god, and
vice versa: attacks on the god become attacks on the avatar. Insult a
mans god, and he will be insulted himself. The more the god is
invested in the mans soul, the more he will be offended by attacks on
the god.
When a god is killed while embodied in an avatar, it greatly
weakens the god. However, if the avatar is killed, he becomes a martyr.
Martyrs hold power for the god: they are an image that the gods
faithful associate with the god, and thus they funnel love and attention
into the gods soul and ultimately feed its strength.
In other words, if someone attacks you while in thrall to a god,
do your best to break the god, not the person. If you break the person,
it only adds to the gods power.
~
We now move onward and upward. Weve learned of the
spinning vortex full of undetectable extension charms that is the soul.
Weve learned about how souls form bonds, and the gods that arise
within them. Now its time to learn about the gods road: the rules of
travel through cold eternity.
~

29

Although the life that he stakes is just his bank account and reputation; not his throat.

The Spaces in Shadow

1.
Eternity is a gate.
Light is life, darkness is death,
And the gap between is in shade.
The will dances in the shade,
And casts its form in eternity.
2.
Memory has only form,
And cold eternity within it.
Two like forms make a gate.
Value may pass through,
And each will has a key.
3.
When two forms overlap,
The gap between is in shadow.
When the shade grows wholly dark,
The form makes a gate.
Eternity is a gate.

Passage of Value through Forms

This passage, thankfully, sounds less like a religious sermon. It
sounds more like an ominous spell, however: eternity is a gate. Rest
assured that it is not ominous. The last passage, regarding love,
justice, and pain, regarded the bond by which we pass value. This
passage attempts to explain the gates by which we pass value. This

section is somewhat shorter than the others; frankly I feel that if

youve come this far, you no longer need much convincing or
explanation.
Value passes through the eternal; that is, value can be stored
and passed through memories. This section attempts to describe how
that value is passed.
1. The Dance of the Will
The first stanza describes the interplay between the known, the
unknown, and the will.
Gates:
Eternity is a gate, in that it allows one logic structure within a
soul to connect with the same logic structure in another soul. We all
understand that a door goes somewhere else. We all know who a
mother is, or what scissors are. We can make a connection by having a
similar logic structure.
Light:
The light is what were aware of. Its the constant feedback loop
we get from the waking world of images, colors, depths, changes,
temperatures, ideas, and every other part of the ridiculous variety of
meanings we ascribe to things.
Darkness:
Darkness is what were not aware of. Its everything behind us,
everything when our eyes are closed or when were in the dark, or our
minds fogged by drugs or dreams, all the possible answers we cant
foresee, all is darkness.
Shadow:
Shadow is everything between, the degree to which we know
something. It is mystery. There are an infinite number of mysteries.
Nature, Fate, and Dreams:
The will, if you recall, is us; it is the form of our attention. The
will swivels and twists in all directions; it goes anywhere it likes and is
able. It sees, and it does, and it moves. It sees best in the light, and in
life; things are more clear when they are right in front of us. But it can
twist into the darkness, and see, do, and move value there.

When we are in light, living our life, were in our nature.

When we turn to face the darkness behind us and step into the
unknown, we face our fate.
When we enter our shadow, and go into the twisted castle we
keep in eternity, were in dreams.
Form:
You remember also that the will casts a shadow its memory.
But the shadow of the will is not cast by light onto dark, and it is not a
cutout of darkness against the light. It is an imprint cast by the eye
that is, your awareness onto eternity that which does not die, or
memory.
This imprint cast on eternity is mere form. It is lines of truth,
rather than light, and it is cast on cold darkness, rather than a wall. In
other words, it is empty, in a way that nothing mortal is. Things made
of the earth are dense. Things made of truth cast into cold darkness
are not.30
Only the will owns the form, and she owns it only so long as it is
associated with her. If Kargazra smears on a glamor before going to
the witches sabbath, she doesnt own that look. If she cribs parts of
Gurluthak the Bleak or Anapsid on Charms, she doesnt claim to have
written them. But when she writes a spell of her own, full of her own
little barbs and claws, and sends it in to Witch Weekly with her name
on it, you better believe she owns it. When a form is equally associated
with two souls, both wills hold a key.
It is the same with realms. They are owned by who grasps them.

This is, sadly, the weakness of the powers within your shadow: they are cold. Being empty form,
they have no real value save what you give them. They cannot give you warmth, only reflect or
refract you the warmth you already have.
30

2. Keys to the Realm

The second stanza describes how memories act as gates.
Realms:
Memories are pure form. They are empty, as nothing physical is.
Two memories whose forms are alike make a gate. The gate is a
means of contact and exchange of value with any other soul.
On a very basic level, it is anytime two people understand a
word to mean the same thing. The word and image of a doughnut is a
gate by which I can seek other doughnuts, or any other value
associated with doughnuts.
It is also any trademark, trade name, or trade dress, or, more
broadly, any persons name. The golden arches are a gate into
McDonalds realm; when we see the arch, the will knows whats on the
other side. When we use someones name, we knock on the door to their
will.
The realm is simply where the gate takes you. But be wary;
realms overlap. It is very easy to go through the gate of a friends name
into the realm of your friendship, and then by small evils and injustice

wander into the realm of a fight. This is because the form of the realm
is just as capable as any other form of being shady.
Keys:
Of course, every gate has a key; that key is communication. You
can see the gate of the yellow arches all you like, but you cant get
value out of them unless you have some way of actually
communicating with McDonalds. You can know your friends name all
day long, but you cant get to him unless you can communicate with
him. Similarly, your friend cant respond to your metaphysical knock
unless he has some way of communicating back.
The key works both ways: it can both open a door and lock it. If
Mary keeps calling out Sues name, Sue can lock the door against Mary
by simply not responding. If Mary continues against Sues will, that is
an injustice.
Folded Space:
A form is a gate, to every other form exactly like it.
However, when there are more than two forms exactly alike, the
gate that forms is a space. That space will have as many walls as there
are copies of the form, and each wall is a gate.

3. The Spaces in Shadow

The third stanza describes shadow.

When two forms are similar, but not the same, the gap between
the two is shady.
The shade is simply the difference between two forms.
To some degree, we work in the shade every day. When you go to
work, you have coworkers who have different ideas about how the job
should be done; if you work well, you all try to work within the shade
of everyone elses expectations. If you dont work well, then someone is
being bossy and shining light in the shade.31
A jury tries to discover the facts inside the shade of two
witnesses testimony. Philosophers try to discover questions inside the
shade between their ideas. Gods live in the shade between idols, and
when that shade becomes wholly dark, they may pass through. That
sounds ominous but it is rather boring: it simply means that all
perceptions of the form are aligned. But often the god will induce Its
faithful to action when it passes through. If it is a knitting god, it will
induce them to knit. If it is a killing god, it will induce them to kill. I
need not mention what sort of god is a killing god.
Sometimes shade makes trouble, of course. Shade is a lack of
clarity, after all, and when the forms of evil gods align, they can pass
through into this world: the Third Reich is an example of an evil god at
work in the mortal world. Two thugs that simply like doing harm
already share something in common. If they give it a name, what they
have in common becomes more clear, and who they are when they are
together. The more organized and sharply defined their commonality
is, the more the god has passed through. Every soldier in the Third
Reich that shot a defenseless soul held a hungry god in his mind,
shivering with need, pleading and threatening him to pull the trigger.
That god entered him through his uniform, his badges, his flag, and a
thousand other small indicia that bound a Nazi soldier to the gods
ideals.
But so too with the immortal gods, and with mortal gods who
are just. There are many shades of darkness and shadow, some of them
bright. The furry, grey god Totoro grew in misty dance in an artists
mind, and in the shade of the trees outside his window, and grew again
when that artist shared his drawings and delight in them. He grows

31

Of course, often the shade needs the flashlight.

again anytime anyone feels the wonder and safeness and delight that
one of His faithful might feel when they see Him. He lives, buoyant on
love, infinitely soft and kind and wise, inside the souls of his faithful,
and in return he grants them all the feelings theyve associated with
him, reflected back. Shade is uncertainty and confusion, but it is also
creativity. When it coalesces into clarity, the god Totoro comes through
the screen.

Investments:
The space created in memory is not only useful as a gate, by
which souls may form bonds, but also as spaces, wherein souls may
invest value.
1. Acquisition:
Acquisition is simply when you acquire a form.
There are levels of acquisition. The lowest is simply when you
see something. Later, you may actually look at it, and closely acquire
the form; that is, you must learn it. You may also acquire it physically,
and then later you may master it. The thing could be anything, from
the Dollar, which has a very common value, to a Ferrari, which has a
common but high value, to the Art and Craft of Brewing the Perfect
Espresso, a form which is also a skill, and which has a very high, but
very narrow value.
A soul can, of course, have a theoretically infinite number of
acquisitions.
2. Hope:
Hope is an investment of love into the idea of a future thing.
It is the help that we get from the stars; we invest strength,
truth, or purpose in an idea, and we can retrieve it when we need. It is
never-ending, for the truth and value that we invest in the eternal is
mere form, but when we pass the love that we generate through that
copy, it takes on the form we gave it: strength, truth, or purpose.
Liz hopes and dreams of being a powerful, wise, and respected
attorney, and so she places hope into that image of herself, which she
has carved among the stars. She ties herself to this image, pulling it
from inside her shadow whenever she needs. When her soul is

damaged and full of pain, she returns to it, radiating wounded love.
The love that bounces back has hopes form, and it revitalizes her.
Hope is everlasting, so long as the image remains intact. Lizs
image of herself will remain intact so long as it seems attainable. The
moment it begins to become ridiculous to her, or impossible, is the
moment she loses hope. At that point the value she invested will be
lost to her. Its loss will cause pain, which may accumulate into agony.
In this way, hope is a gamble.
However, hope can also be tied to much more shadowy forms. If
Liz hopes for something very vague for example: the simple hope that
tomorrow will be better that hope will almost never break, or at least
break so consistently that the breaking becomes part of the image. The
safety of an investment in hope depends on the specificity and the
likelihood of a hopes fulfillment. An investment in very vague, very
likely hope is the most stable. If Liz hopes for simple success, shes
likely to achieve it with hope and hard work.

3. Faith:

You know about faith already: it is what sustains a god. But put
more broadly, it is when souls are able to share love through an object
or an idea.
Faith both binds souls together, and allows them to share love.
It creates social bonds, and also creates bonds in eternity. You share
faith all the time, with your friends, family, and coworkers. I share
faith with three of my friends through the idea of a dinner club that

we gather for once a month. The dinner club god slumbers within each
of us, a lazy, laughing god, one whos had at least three drinks and a
heavy meal. I love that dinner god, and my fellow faithful who keep
him. He helps to sustains me.
Faith is often a fairly safe investment. Putting rules around an
interaction i.e. funneling love through our faith allows us to define
the flow of love, which lessens the ten thousand little injustices that
occur when we try to fling love at each other willy-nilly. And talking
about our faith allows us to further refine it, thus maximizing the
clarity. When our soul takes a blow, faith from our fellows sustains us.
Whats more, with faith we can begin to leverage our soul.
Leveraging occurs, very simply, when you get more than you put in. By
sharing love32 in clearly defined bond structures, they can minimize
confusion and pain, thus increasing the speed of everyones spin. The
spin fans and condenses the memories in the shadow, until they ignite,
shining into eternity, which, in turn, adds more energy and more love
to the faith system. Those who invest in faith often live long lives
because their souls have been leveraged.

4. Friendship:
Friendship functions like a bank account. The more time and
energy you invest into a friend, the more likely they are to give you
love at any given moment.
Of course, friendship would only be precisely like a bank account
if your bank account had legs and free will, and no obligations to give
you back anything you give it which is ultimately a pretty terrible
bank account. Your friend doesnt have to like you, and if he starts
disliking you, hes no longer really your friend. Friendship is a
voluntary, no-strings-attached mutual investment.
Put bluntly, imagine you and your BFF both put a dollar in a jar
every time you hang out. You hang out with her a lot, and so that jar is
pretty full.
When you murder someone and need to hide the body, you call
her. She has two choices. She can say nope, dead bodies are too real for
I want to remind you, very pointedly, that within the confines of this theory, love is simply any
connection between any two souls. It is not only sex, although sex, like all human connection, is a
kind of love. Sharing love does not necessarily mean forming an orgy cult.
32

me, thanks, and hang up the phone. Or she can put on her galoshes
and help you dig a shallow grave. If she hangs up, she loses the cash in
the jar. If she puts on her galoshes, the jars hers. You owe me, she
says into the receiver, and you do. You owe her love, because shes
willingly hurting for you. The god of the friendship jar demands it; you
may turn against her, but you lose her blessings.

5. True Love:
I will speak frankly of true love. It is, in essence, the mutual
creation of a horcrux.
You will recall, when we spoke of love and the spin it creates
within the soul, that a soul has a core. When two souls fall in true love,
they share their cores.
The core is your source of life and vitality. It keeps you alive. If
you lose it, you die. When two souls fall in true love, they cut their
cores from their souls and trade.
I put that in bold and italics to really, really get my point across.
The benefits of true love are powerful, but they come at great risk.
The true love bond creates a constant flow of love, and acts
much like a horcrux: it ties a soul to the earth. That has a beneficial
function: should a soul be in pain, the true love bond ensures him a
constant companion who can provide him with love and nurture. It also
has a binding function: he must provide the same should his partner
require.
Falling in true love or what you imagine is true love is like
sharing a checking account. It can be very useful when youre out of a
job but your husband is employed. But it also leaves you open to loss if
he absconds, or spends foolishly.
Think hard when you start to feel romantic love towards
someone, for it is a very broad, very strong bond, that should thus be
approached with a high degree of clarity for maximum justice. If you
would not give someone access to your bank account, do not give them
your core.
This is not to be taken as a rebuke of the institute of marriage or
of romantic love in general. Marriage is a high return, long term
investment with a high risk of loss. I speak frankly and strongly

about it because I wish each of you to think carefully and wisely before
making it: it will change who you are, for you will no longer have your
own heart in your chest, but anothers.

6. Forgiveness:
When a soul feels the burden of injustice on his head, he may
atone. To atone, he must seek the forgiveness of the will he broke. If
the innocent is able to forgive him, his pain will ease; furthermore, his
victims own pain may ease.
Through forgiveness, a soul is able to transfigure pain into
understanding.
Forgiveness requires a strong will, for pain is heavy and clings.
Mastering the art of forgiveness is difficult: it is advanced
transfiguration.
Souls typically do not understand the function of forgiveness
until they have been forgiven themselves. Once forgiven, they
thereafter keep the form and can forgive at will. Many people do not
make a habit of forgiveness, despite having been forgiven, because it
requires a strong will.
Some souls believe that they owe a debt of injustice to the world
merely by being born; and it is true that the mortal world is full of
inevitable injustices. I will otherwise refrain from comment on that
topic.
Many people seek forgiveness from divine sources. Christ, in
particular, is a powerful source of forgiveness. In a willing supplicant,
He is able to transfigure nearly any pain into joy.

Conclusion:
And thats it. I would rather not have a long conclusion, because
I dont like to think that anything is concluding. This theory, to me,
seems like more of a beginning than an end. It is my hope that you will
take up the shadow and the powers within it. It is my hope that all
souls will see their own value, and the value in others.

It is my spellbook, all my tricks and deep magics of shadow,

truth, and cold darkness, all my japes and gambols. I would feel it
unjust to keep it to myself. Use it how you will.
~~

The Soul: A Comprehensive Theory of Economic and Personal Value was written by
J.K. Haskell, who is reclusive.