Kill Yourself
Loosen the noose of identity
From birth, an identity has been slung together and tied around your neck like a hangman's noose: your nationality, your creed, your ethos, your duty, politics, family, tribe—your history, your morality, your caste and your class. Your position in the hive.
To complicate matters, you have of your own accord heaped upon this already heavy burden an even more cumbersome load: your proclivities, your preferences, your hopes, your plans and your dreams. Your taste. How tight the noose becomes! It is the strangulating vine of symbology with its coarse and twisted fibers.
Be freed. Breathe again. Burn away the restraining knotted and distended growth of abstraction that obscures perception; that hides you from yourself. Lean in—to what you are—so you can discover what you are not.
You are primary to symbol.
In the forest stands an aspen tree. It looms slender and white, wrinkled bark and green, pear-shaped leaves rustling in the wind. The tree stands among a hundred others in its rhizome, sharing roots, reaching overhead, quaking in the wind. Imagine yourself as the aspen. Sense how your roots extend down into giving earth. Feel your many arms reaching into an open sky, branching and spreading out into tips of tiny wooden fingers, bursting with porous membranes that absorb sunlight and life-giving carbon gas. You breathe imperceptibly with rise and fall of the sun.
What is the designation “aspen” to an aspen tree? Would such a linguistic label make you any more of what you already are? A tree is distinct and yet confounded. What use does the tree have for a label? What use does the tree have for belief?
And look at yourself, human among humans! Look how your feet are planted onto the giving earth and how your lips quake toward the open sky to catch a drop of rain! How our fixed beliefs and labels advance into irons around our feet. It is difficult to swim in irons, so we tread water, managing to breathe as we can.
To create a new world, you must destroy what you have known. Seeing the significances of yesterday as the palette of your own tomorrow, the smeared and brash pigment of your will written in the cosmos.
Nothing is out of reach—the earth is yours.
To be new tomorrow, you must be willing to die today.
Your reasons for destroying the world are your own. I am interested in creating ideas to inspire people to abandon the path we have been set to walk by biology. Let us become gods—or at least—the humans we take ourselves to be.
Reality is incredibly dangerous. But then again: death is perfectly safe.
What if we could become the generation that doesn't fear death?
What could that generation accomplish?
What would the world accomplish?
There is a new mainstream coming.
Are you ready?