Newsgroups: alt.magick

With reference to a discussion loosely structured around an original
question "what is so bad about having kids?"

I agree with Josh's opinion that kids are parasites who suck up much of one's
time. Also with Shava, who points out that the same argument can be applied
to one's career. In fact, one can apply the same argument to almost any
activity of choice, and say that (beer, frivolity, masturbation, running
in corridors, music on Sundays, fiddle-playing, poker, reading genre fiction,
smoking & drugs, etc) are all detrimental to one's magical activities.

Carry the attitude a little further, and one joins the fraternity of
gnostics, neoplatonists and manicheans who roundly condemn the entire world
of the flesh, and hypothesise a world of the spirit where things are pure
and wonderful. Our poor little souls have been trapped in the smoky, grimy
darkness of matter, and are struggling to free themselves and return once
more to a world of the spirit and the godhead. All we need to do is to
stop doing all the things which got us in the mess in the first place (e.g.
lusting after flesh, having children, eating gluttonously, and behaving like
the sordid little mammals we are). If you are a Buddhist you might have
a slightly different slant on this, but it adds up to the same thing when you
read the small print of recommended prohibitions.

I'm not suggesting that anyone on alt.magick is this extreme, but it is
interesting how personal judgements about the value of activities as seen
from some kind of "spiritual" standpoint have a tendency to encompass the
whole, and in doing so devalue almost any kind of living in the world. From
a personal standpoint, I am totally *for* living in the world, with all that
it entails, and I have no qualms whatsoever about the sins of the flesh; I
wallow in carnality and thoroughly enjoy it. At the root of my personal
philosophy is a conviction that there is no meaning or purpose in life other
than in living, that the quest for "something else" is a monstrous 
aberration of consciousness, that all the cults, religions, ideologies, etc.
are the true mind parasites. I am about to begin a Nietzschian rant about 
the life-denying philosophies of the human race, so I'll stop.

A saying which comes into my mind with increasing frequency these days is:
"Where some people see problems, other people see opportunities". You can
see kids as a problem, or you can see kids as an opportunity. You can
see your job (I don't have a career, only a job) as a problem, or you can see
it as an opportunity.  If you have a life-affirming, as a opposed to a life-
denying outlook, then having kids is the most life-affirming thing you can
do, and who cares if they are parasites? We are all parasites of something
else, and it is best not to forget the precarious game of give-and-take that
keeps us alive. Sure, kids can suck the energy out of you and blunt your
edge, just as Don Juan describes, but I don't care because I know that when
I die I'll be thoroughly dead, and I'm not living a life of niggardly care
in the hope that I'll discover something more meaningful as a consequence.

The meaning of life is here and now. If you don't know how to live in the
world, what use is your magic?

Colin