The Heresies            The Book of Heresies:   I   The Principles   II  The Apocrypha   III The Recordings IV The Convictions   Info:   Name:    Gretchen Shannon   Email:    gretchen_911@yahoo.com

The Book of Heresies Permission granted to reprint the Book of Heresies is granted so long as nothing is ommitted, added or changed, and this notice is included. I The Principles Choose. 1-1 Creation To create a sound one must first destroy the silence that was there before. 1-2 Justice Justice is revenge cloaked in saintly raiment. It does nothing to heal the wound and only sours the healing. Killing the murderers of the world for the sake of vengeance will not bring back their dead, and only stains the hands of the self-appointed righteous with the color of blood. 1-3 Heresy A heretic is one who chooses for themselves. The meaning of the word has strayed far from its root in ancient Greek, but there is no dishonor in having the strength of self to choose. 1-4 Honor Honor is the refusal to surrender a self-affirmed code no matter what the threat to property or life or soul may be. 1-5 Individualism The associations we choose to make do not define us, nor can they limit us unless we choose to give them that power over us. We are defined by the boundaries that we draw about ourselves. 1-6 Jealousy Jealousy is a twisted emotion, the feeling that one's own absolute worth or potential is degraded by the worth of another. 1-7 Responsibility Humans are not sentient. Humans have the capacity to be sentient. The capacity is based not upon intelligence nor courage, but upon the willingness to choose to take responsibility for the world around one. 1-8 Ritual Ritual is the symbol of the thing. It gains value in what it represents to those who bear it. It bridges the gap between mind and reality, and forges an unbreakable link between the two. The whole power of a ritual is given up only to its creator. 1-9 Fear Fear is the greatest enemy one can ever have; it strikes from the shadows, remorseless, mercilessly, without compassion or distinction. Heroism is not feeling no fear - it is overcoming that fear which we all feel. 1-10 Beauty Beauty is always subjective. What is beautiful is that which puts into material form a part of the hopes and dreams and feelings that lie within us. 1-11 Control and Influence Control arises from power. Influence from respect. The first lasts only so long as the knife stands at the throat; the second lasts in all places and in all times. 1-12 Confidence Confidence is both an insiduous trap and the path from it. Confidence in anything other than one's own willingness to adapt and survive is merely arrogance; the failure of arrogance is that it breeds blindness. 1-13 Entropy Entropy is not chaos - rather, it is the ultimate state of order. Chaos is the ultimate state of infinite possibility. 1-14 Aggression Aggression is a reaction against the fear of the unknown; existence threatened, we fight to understand what was not understood before, or we flee, or we destroy if we see no other path. To speak of destroying aggression is to speak not of destroying violence, but of destroying the very will to live. 1-15 Denial Denial breeds hatred. Acceptance breeds understanding and, finally, mastery of oneself. Acceptance entails not submission, but rather an acknowledgement of the existence of the thing. In accepting a weakness in oneself, one is able to take the first step of many towards its mastery. 1-16 Freedom Freedom is of the mind, not the body. It is the strength of self to choose. 1-17 Violence Violence is a road, not a place, and sometimes it is the only road one can take to reach the place where one is going. 1-18 Respect Respect is neither a right nor a privilege. It is something that must be earned a thousand times over, from each person, young or old, wise or foolish, powerful or weak. 1-19 Strength The beginning of the path to strength lies in the admission of vulnerability. 1-20 Identity The name is not the thing itself. The act of naming defines by drawing a line between what is and what is not. 1-21 Humanity The most dangerous line that can be drawn is the one between who is human and who is not. 1-22 Hate We hate what we fear in ourselves. 1-23 Religion Religion is the set of beliefs upon which we rely. 1-24 Sacrifice The greatest sacrifice is giving up one’s life for another in the darkness, where no one will ever know. Is the sacrifice of a moment balanced by the potential sacrifices of tomorrow? The magnitude of the choice is irrelevant. The difference is not whether one person or a million is saved, but whether you, who had the capacity to act, acted. 1-25 Immortality What matters is not whether we win, nor how many we save, nor even the joys we cause nor the terrors we banish. What matters is that we fight and try, and try again, and do not let even the fires of hell stay us from our chosen path. And so we pass on our inheritance, we build our legacy so that something might stand when we are gone. We father children, we bear sons and daughters, we build something that might yet survive that darkness that waits for us all when, at the last, Death opens her arms and welcomes us home. We are strong not from what we build, but what we are. What we build or make will become a truth of its own. Our children, our works, they will be nothing greater and nothing less than themselves. What we make is not our strength; our strength is the might of the moments of our existence. Though the universe be rallied against us, we are in the end only the sum of our actions. No more, no less, but simply the raging of the light against the darkness that engulfs us all. 1-26 Fate We think ourselves free because the future is as yet undetermined, but in truth we are free because we cannot know the mind of Fate. 1-27 Action Life is a losing game, and one day the game will be called on account of darkness. Success is not the product of a lifetime; it is the product of a day. 1-28 Faith The ultimate expression of faith is the act of trusting another with no guarantee or expectation beyond that the act of trust is in itself the first step towards the building of a unity greater than the sum of all of its parts. 1-29 Gnosis If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. 1-30 Ignorance Self-ignorance is a form of self-destruction. 1-31 Success and Failure We are remembered by our successes, but we are defined by our failures. 1-32 Luck Luck always favors the best horse. 1-33 Sentience We are trained to think of our skin as the boundary between what is "us" and what is "everything else". Are "you" the microrganisms that assist your digestion? Are "you" the T-cells that attack unfamiliar elements? Are "you" the things that you see? The answer is simple: You are the thinking of the machine. Sentience is the waking from the slumber of instinct; it is the ability to see the universe in both its singularity and its multitude of consciously defined patterns. We are all of us the sum total of all existence. We are the hands of the universe building the furtherance of life itself. We are the hands of order; we are the hands of chaos. We are capable of miracles, for everything we can do is a miracle. 1-34 Love Who you choose to love shapes who you are. What you choose to love shapes what you are. 1-35 Surrender Only by being willing to surrender all that we are can we hope to gain all that we might become. 1-36 Emotion The struggle for survival births all other struggles. We live, learn, and love through this single reality. In other animals we call it instinct. In ourselves we call it emotion. That this is so does not damage the value of emotion. The source does not change what it has become; love is no less great for having reason and purpose beyond the fact of its existence. 1-37 Time Time is an abstraction; we chop it up into little pieces, calling this one a year, another one a day, this one over here a minute. The truth is that the divisions are of our own devising. What exists for a breath is as great as what exists for a century. Existence is the crucial distinction; all else are mirages born of our own imagination, distracting us from that which is. 1-38 Defilement What is done to us does not defile us. What defiles us is what we choose to do to others. 1-39 Loss It is only after we have lost everything that we can gain anything. 1-40 Perspective A chair is a piece of furniture designed to be sat upon; if it is cold enough, that same chair is so much firewood. Identity is determined by necessity. 1-41 Knowledge Knowledge not acted upon is merely a collection of facts. 1-42 Roads Roads are for journeys, not destinations. 1-43 Possession We own what others agree that we own. The tree recognizes no master. Cut down the tree, but still it will not recognize you as its master, only as the stronger of the moment. 1-44 Expectation Good things will happen to you and bad things will happen to you, but the choices you make should be independent of the expectation of reward or the fear of punishment. 1-45 Death Existence has no beginning and no end. Time is as much a dimension as location. What has existed once, will exist always; death is another word for change. 1-46 Apotheosis The action of awakening to our own sentience, the recognition of ourselves as the universe and the universe as ourselves is the first statement of apotheosis. The conscious choice to commit oneself to whatever choices the world presents to us, great or small, is the second statement of apotheosis. The act within the moment of the doing is the third statement of apotheosis. Click here to go to part II, The Apocrypha