The Book of the Die. Luke Rhinehart
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to himself as ‘we’ and ‘us’, but soon enough it led to his being forced to visit a psychiatrist.
‘Why do you call yourself “we”,’ the psychiatrist asked.
‘Because we are,’ said Whim.
‘I only see one of you,’ said the psychiatrist.
‘We only operate one at a time and use the same body.’
‘Show me another of you.’
‘Here I am.’
‘Who are you now?’
‘Whim, we of many chances.’
‘But which Whim?’ insisted the psychiatrist.
‘Here today, gone tomorrow.’
The psychiatrist had been scribbling frantically but he now stopped.
‘So you feel you have many personalities,’ he commented cautiously.
‘Yes, we do,’ said Whim cheerfully.
‘And do the voices of these other personalities sometimes speak to you?’
‘We talk to each other sometimes.’
‘And do some of your other selves frighten you?’ asked the psychiatrist, sensing a breakthrough.
‘Of course not,’ said Whim. ‘We’re friends.’
‘Which of your selves do you like the best?’
‘Me.’
‘Who’s “me”?’
‘Meherenow,’ said Whim.
‘What’s meherenow like?’
‘He’s like himtherethen a few seconds ago. Now the one I like best is the new meherenow.’
‘I see,’ said the psychiatrist, his face twitching slightly. ‘Don’t you feel any continuity between your consecutive selves?’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Whim. ‘There are family resemblances.’
‘But what do you want to do with your life?’
‘Whose life?’
‘The lives of yourselves,’ answered the psychiatrist, not believing he was having this conversation.
‘Oh, we all have different plans,’ said Whim.
‘Well, what determines which one of you acts at any given moment?’ the psychiatrist asked. Whim smiled.
‘Ignorance and chance,’ he replied.
How many people have you been today?
To go from the cage of a single self to the amusement park of multiple living, we need to exercise: to play games which break down our self-imposed limitations and uncover new selves, experiences and talents.
Of course, the killing of the self is for most of us as difficult as physical suicide, although rather more rewarding. The challenge to turn over decision-making to chance rather than one’s ‘self’ is a challenge that most people can’t meet. Such a surrender of will is irrational! It’s absurd! But most of the consistencies we find ourselves locked into are equally irrational and absurd – we just don’t notice. But others notice. We see others, even our friends, as filled with the most absurd opinions, habits, interests, behaviour patterns, but as part of our unconscious social agreement we pretend we don’t see them that way. Everyone tacitly agrees to overlook their neighbour’s insanities. Unless he begins choosing his insanities by dice rather than ‘free will’. Then we’ll talk about him.
One dicer reported that when she first began making her decisions with dice she kept her use of chance secret. She noticed that although people thought she was behaving rather erratically they went out of their way to find rational reasons why she suddenly decided to get her hair dyed, have her nipples pierced, fly to Houston for a weekend, pick up a guy at a bar – all things inconsistent with the person her friends had previously thought her to be.
Then the dice told her to tell them that she had begun making decisions with chance. Suddenly actions that were actually consistent with her earlier self seemed to her friends to be bizarre, insane. Now if she went to a movie at random, even a movie she would have previously wanted to see, they were annoyed with her. Now if she dropped a boyfriend and announced it was a dice decision, some friends berated her, even though they had previously been urging her to drop the same guy. The moral is: we are allowed to make stupid decisions on our own but as soon as we make them by letting dice choose a few things, we are insane.
PARABLE OF THE LION
Once a lion was born in New York City’s Bronx zoo. Until he was four years old he lived in cages in the zoo. When some of the older lions talked about something called ‘freedom’ he thought they were talking about living in the big cage – the one with rocks and a pool – rather than the small one, where he fed and slept.
Then the zoo sent him in a cage to Kenya for certain scientific experiments and there, by chance, the lion escaped and returned to the jungle. Only then did he realize how inhibited, constrained, circumscribed and caged he had been all his life. He had never realized how open and huge the world was. Now, in the jungle, he learned how he was meant to live. He realized his full, natural spontaneous life. At last he knew what the older lions in the zoo had meant by freedom.
Most of us have been brought up in a cage: the cage of the self. Until we have experienced freedom from this cage we won’t know what those who have escaped are talking about. But perhaps some strange day the bars around you will melt and the world will suddenly seem immense, and yourselves immense enough to fill it. At that moment you’ll laugh at those wax bars that you had remained behind for years – when all you had to do was push them aside and walk free.
Most of us live life in a daze. Every morning we retrace our footsteps, sigh the same sighs, moan the same moans and strike another day of our lives off the calendar. Habit forms a dusty crust on our daily schedule. It seems impossible to break out. But the dice are uncontrollable: Chance, not man, is their master. They will punch through to freedom, unfreeze synapses, road-test fantasies. They disable the logical naysayer. They will allow us to stop shaking our heads and start nodding, stop frowning and start smiling, stop standing and start moving.
The dice are all about new possibilities. Without dice each today is like every other day. But just one die equals six different todays, two are thirty-six, and the world explodes in possibilities.
There’s a part of you that’s hiding under the ‘you’ that everybody else knows. What do you really want? Make up six options and think about them for a while. Cross out the impossible, the unobtainable and the illegal, and you ‘U start to see the you that you’ve forgotten, the you that you’ve neglected, the you that you’ve given up on. Roll the dice and let that you ride again.
If you always just do what you think you can do, you’ll never do what you could do, what you dream of doing. Dice make dreams and daily life equally likely. And when that happens, the soul is changed forever.
– Matthew Davidge
It’s sometimes said that it’s impossible for a human to live without developing a firm and consistent sense of self, and that those dice-people who seem to be functioning happily may be doing so because they have, whether they know it or not, a firm sense of themselves as children of chance. ‘The idea of being a kind of random multiple man is an idea of oneself,’ said one commentator, ‘and if held firmly may represent a stable self even if the actions of this stable self are multiple and inconsistent.’
Sounds reasonable. However, if we become attached to the idea of being a dice-person then we guarantee that we are not