User:Jeremygbyrne/Quotations of Sylvia Roslyn La Some

This article includes a random selection of quotations from and about Sylvia Roslyn La Some.

As wikific, this information is in flux; some of the content below may be inconsistent, and could be deprecated.

From

• The patternware app called Consciousness developed due to a tendency in the Universe to engender analogues of itself in other paradigmatic spaces. We exist because we map existence into meaning. We are the google of the Universe, the cartographers of reality. And, while we do "feel" with our minds, emotionally, we actually feel through the flesh; our bodies (yes, even our hair) are indeed "aerials" evolved to "pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain". It's what we're for.

• We believe that the "person" — what you might call the "soul" — begins to develop when it first brushes against the world and starts making sense of it.
  • (This quote has been interpreted to oppose abortion.)

• Every death is an insufferable loss to the universe; each of us is unique, irreplaceable. But for us our lives, our decades of dedicated reification are merely what we do; if we were suddenly to stop doing it, what would be the point?

• Why would I ever wish you harm, my love?
  • (Xianist mantra.)

• I can love my fellow man, but I'm damned if I'll love yours: this, this is the other side.

• If there were a line, then it would fall between people who enjoy making others happy and those who enjoy making others unhappy. Most of us are on this side.

• The fear must be taught to us; when we are new. It is not in us; by nature, we live for the moment.
  • (Cites studies of patience and delayed gratification in kids, eg. the giant marshmallow experiment.)

• We exist to add the meaning to the world.

• By really living in our bodies, by exalting in our corporeality, our Being in the Flesh, we come closest we ever can to loving our creator.

• Even our aesthetics has been shaped by the fear; symmetry spells fitness, and so we mistake it for beauty.

• Modernity means Humanity need no longer fear. We have reached a turning point in our development as a species and a People. We are now grown strong enough that fear is no longer adaptively useful; at last, its enormous psychological and emotional burden can be shed. Civilisation--everything Humanity has created from tool use, speech and symbolic representation to Ta Chi, Quantum Electrodynamics and lolcats--is a collaborative memetics project on which thousands of billions of person-hours of effort have been spent. It is Humanity's Great Work, and now, we are done; the peeps have worked it out. (We may have been done a Century or more ago, but our fear-adaptations have kept us on the old path.) We call the feeling we get when we love our lives, when we love the world and the people around us, "happiness". This vast, and unique, and unencompassably marvellous mindwork that we have wrought together, this modelling, this way of looking upon the world so as to see how to be happy; this glorious artifice, this wonder of wonders, this noospheric Kunstliche Welten; this spirit which flows into, slowly over years, us as we grow up in the company of other people, which animates our minds and welcomes us into its whirling gyre of beauty, trust and love; this is the greatest of creations. It is the Great Soul; we are the lover the Universe has dreamed. Modernity has finally brought us to the point where we can love her back.

• As we have expanded our souls, we have used fear to guide us. In many ways, the fear has driven us mad, and we cannot be at peace with her if we cannot see the world through sane eyes. We need a way of thinking which can make us see past the fear, past the distrust and the betrayal we feel towards her, and learn to be happy with her again. Sanity is the state of being sane; xianity is the state of being at peace, of loving the world back.

• The reason we should be happy working for a "future us" is because those people are, like any other people whose lives we touch, people who we can help to be happy, and whose happiness will grace the Universe. Because we fear, and feel we can only do so much, we often make the mistake of concentrating on future selves' happiness, almost to the exclusion of the happiness of those around us.

• Becoming xian is a little like playing the catching game of faith and trust. It takes faith to let go of fear, and only through trust can we know that both we and our world are in fact unthinkably beautiful, complex and infinitely intertwined.

• Of course the religious can be xian. No god who created both this world and us would want us to hate each other. Religions tell us what happens after we die; xianity helps us sees how to live. Whether or not we are rewarded by reuinification with our originator after death, living is why we were created. And living as well and as fully as we possibly can is merely doing what we're made to do.

• Jobs and things cause stress; contemplation of the future in a positive light (even the "there must be a better place than this; oh there must be", godbothering sense) relieves stress. And yet, we aren't made happy by the contemplation of this promised land, only less fearful. Hope is happiness infinitely deferred; Happiness lies in the instant, in the now. Now is the only thing that's real for a consciousness which dies and is born again anew 40 times a second.
  • (This sentiment is later portrayed by xianity's critics as a specific denial of the immortal soul.)

• Modernity has delivered utopia, but we've failed to notice. We continue to look around us for excuses to put off appreciating life — and many of us we find them. This is a hard thing to accept; philosophers have written fables to convince us otherwise. The most important thing we can do with our lives is to help others to be happy; in doing so, we fulfill both the promise of civilisation and the purpose for which the universe made us.

• Of course, our "future selves" are, by definition, others, and we're in a unique position to help them to be happy.

• The most important, pressing question in our lives is "how should I act, right now"; if we cannot find an answer which satisfies the heart as well as the head, we cannot be happy. Together, we can use eumetic principles to help us find that answer in ourselves.

• We do storytelling; it's what we are. But the only real story is the one we tell with our lives. (from final public sermon, 14 April, 2023)

• I wanted the Alchemy Cycle to be the literary equivalent of a dolly zoom, a viral meme scything like a diamond bullet through the American psyche.

About

• Bennett's cosmology is essentially about loving the world which created us as deeply and as strongly as we possibly can, and, secondly loving everyone around us, including our future selves; we love others by helping them to fulfill the purpose for their creation, and we love best--see the world and our fellows (including our future selves) in the best possible light--when we are happy. Bennett claims "xianity" because she claims that, allowing one substitutes "the universe" for "God", this is essentially the Christian message-although she later claims the idea was never central, and the "movement" as she likes to call it, was named for the city in which she conceived it and, later, from which she promulgated it, and she had intended it to be a way to bring Peace to the West.

• Xianists don't believe in life after death. Hell, they don't believe in life after birth! (NYT Op Ed, 17-Nov-12)

Notes

• Xianity exists in many variations, each with different doctrinal quirks (eg. The insistence by "morally conservative" xianity that a failure to adopt eumetic principles constitued a failure of bravery to overcome fear of the future and to have faith in humanity).

• Eumetics, the basis of xianity, is an open source philosophy which invites re-use, remixing and extension.

• It is hinted at that Maddie, Bennett's daughter, kills her not because she was driven temporarily insane ("Until I went crazy/and I killed her with a knife", "Take me back", Single Gun Theory) by the news that she had been her mother's lover for three years, but rather that Madelaina — who goes on to replace Bennett as head of (one faction of) xianity — killed her mother at the moment of perfect calm in which she realised that her own inability to accept that the relationship as anything other than incestuous, morally wrong and personally traumatising meant that this would be the happiest her mother would ever be again.

• It is Madelaina La Some's Jeremygbyrne/Sanity faction, a "de-mystified" self-help version of Xianity which forms the top-level framing story; its messages are found in the mouths of characters in the "Xianity as Scientology" presentation of the Cycle "more frequently than might be suggested by a formal reading of the [historical] documents"^[1].

• Although mixed with a range of more Sufistic principles in Xian, it seems clear that Bennett's Xianity "believed" that consciousness is of "separate stuff" to physical universe, but is generated by the universe in response to a tendency in the physical universe to create analogues of itself in other "paradigmatic spaces". Xianity's is a collective consciousness, a kind of group mind, existing outside and independently of the bodies which host it.

• "Things we all believe" is a Xianity website launched in 2011. It purports to demonstrate the commonality of all major philosophical systems^[2] and examine the proposition^[3] that an international society can be established on the basis of "things we all agree upon"^[4]

• While generally absent "external cause" beliefs, Jeremygbyrne/Sanity teaches that the reason we're on this Earth is to help everyone else to be happy. Sanity's "packaging" (eg. the disclaimer at the end of the Alchemy Cycle movies) always includes a specific acknowledgment that Sanity's information "should not be relied upon to reflect the observable universe".

• "Xian Love" is Madelaina's "breakthrough" essay, first posted on 04 April, 2021. It expounds a relationship philosophy which seeks to maximise personal happiness by devotion to the idea that "we exist to help others be happy", applying this specifically to personal relationships. Interviews with the writer suggest the idea was specifically modelled on the "I'll look after you and you'll look after me" understanding we have with our bodies.

• "Xian Love" defines a sane marriage as "an agreed-duration memetic contract" (aka 'promise') to "earnestly, absolutely, without reservation and holding nothing back", test the hypothesis that the surest way to happiness is to help one's partners to be happy.

• Later essays indicate clearly that the younger La Some is intent on her mother's mission to create and deploy a memetic system which would radically alter society. Her portrayal of the woman she murdered as a superstitious crank would seem to suggest her new religion will be as corrupt and morally empty as its progenitor.