The following is the first chapter of a book I completed in August of 1991. Let me know if you want to read more.

I AM THE EMPEROR

Fill yourself up.
Get it all. Do it all.
All you want and need most.

This and only this, I believe,
is the way we'll put behind us--safely and forever--
accelerating ecological ravage and the threat of nuclear war.

Sandy Weymouth

Introduction

Tangy stuff, right? Do it all? Get it all? Total self-gratification, total greed?Not what we were brought up on--not even the bad guys, I don't think.

This essay argues that total self-gratification is theprinciple of consciousness and behavior that will enable our species to circumvent finally and irreversibly the apocalyptic dangers we all wisely dread: gross and irreparable disruption of the Earth's ecology, nuclear war, breakdown of social and economic order, and general destruction of human and other life.

This essay argues that the history of life on Earth has reached its climax. At the climax of a life system, one species has developed the technical ability to destroy much, maybe all, of the life in that system. The tool in our case is nuclear weaponry. Also at the climax, this dominant species uses its burgeoning technological power to feed, entertain and otherwise serve itself exclusively, wiping out all plant, animal and other life that doesn't serve those purposes.

The essay argues that the very ways of thinking and behaving that have made this dominant, technological species so spectacularly successful must turn upside down so that the species' full power to alter and destroy is not realized. Only at and after the climax of life can a total self-gratification culture work. And from then on it's the only one that willwork.

This book is about surrender. Surrendering up to the deepest parts of us. Feeling the deepest parts of us. And getting for ourselves what we want and need most deeply and most authentically. The book argues that we couldn't live that way in the past. And it argues that we must live that way now if our species is to continue to survive.

Do and get what you want and need most now,and experience the feelings that come up along the way. That's the standard, the ideal of consciousness and behavior that this book proposes.

The ravaging glutton within us is the very best part of us. I believe that, and I believe that now is the time for us to learn it. Surrender to the glutton, to the Emperor, the Empress, to the animal within, to whatever you want to call it. Do that and you'll do the world more good than you're doing it now. That's the argument of I Am The Emperor.

- Contents -

Introduction

Part 1: Root
Emotional work
External absolutes

Part 2: Stem
Logic of life
Technology
Consumption
Nuclear war

Part 3: Blossom
Climax of technology 1
Climax of technology 2
Woods place
What if we did?

Part 4: Seed
Edith
Wrap-up
I Am The Emperor
Dedication

- PART ONE -

ROOT

Emotional work

Some years ago when I was 34, I got into emotional work. Very simple principle: experience your feelings. Yes, it can be helpful to look at them, analyze them, think and talk about them, express them in some way. But if you really want to do something about them, feel them. As deeply and completely as possible.

Rarely a day goes by that I don't spend time surrendering to feelings. Not acting on them necessarily. Humans may be unique in their ability to separate the experience of feelings from action those feelings can provoke. It's my experience that surrendering to feelings and letting them do what they want to do inside you reduces pressure to do things that might generate new and worse feelings.

I spend time most days experiencing feelings, often in bed before I get up. I'm curled up, surrendering, just feeling whatever it is--anxiety, impotence, inferiority, guilt at lying around in bed. Occasionally I put myself in a place where I can be fairly uninhibited--cars with all the windows up are great for this. If my feelings seem out of reach, I experience them as that: out of reach. But in a closed car on a lonely lane or even the far end of a parking lot, I can scream if I want. Pain, rage, fear, anything. For me, screaming usually becomes cathartic gut-coughing, climaxing with a cleansing wad of phlegm thrown from deep inside.

Sometimes I cry. That's hard for me. But when it comes, it's the kind of torrential washing and emptying that happened when I was little. Sometimes I scream joy and power, how great I feel. How great I am!

The result is a changed consciousness. The feelings--even guilt, anxiety and depression--have shifted or dissipated. I'm freer to act, to do what I need to do. What I need to do seems clearer. I'm energized, mobilized. I feel good.

When I face working on this book after time away from it, I get cottonhead. Wet cotton. Horizonless anxiety, numb despair, I don't have anything to say, I couldn't say it if I did, I'm under a sandbag the size of a house. What I do is go to my beloved '78 brown Corolla wagon. There I surrender. The last time I did this, last night, the groggy, impotent feeling changed to something positive. Maybe I can. Maybe I can do it (the book). I came back, I wrote, and here I am.

The effect doesn't last. But continued emotional work has a cumulative effect. It's clear to me that feelings are themechanism by which organisms respond to their environment. Worms, plant cells, algae all experience pleasure, pain, maybe even fear. Feelings teach organisms how things in their environment will affect them and what actions will best enable them to survive. Feelings show me my next step and how to take it. I learn whether the last step was best, or whether the best step now is back where I was before--or even back beyond that. Back is the best step forward sometimes.

Everybody "experiences their feelings", you say--more than they want to. That's the point, say I. They experience their feelings more than they want to, so they do all kinds of things to stop feeling them or feel them less. Surrendering to feelings just isn't something we're conditioned to do. So what do you do? How do you do it?

I've mentioned some of the things I do. A tidal wave of rage will get me in my car where I bellow for about all I'm worth. Usually vital to this is deep coughing climaxing with cathartic goop. Sorry, it works for me. Sometimes I scream pain. Same result usually.

At the other end of the catharsis spectrum, I periodically wake early in the morning, 3, 4 o'clock, feeling inert, inadequate, I'm an embryo, void of motivation, virtually void of life. Surrendering to these feelings draws me into a fetal position on my left side, to a corridor of energy that starts on the left side of my chest and goes up to the center of my head. When I fully surrender to this inertiness, this catatonia, something seems to percolate through this corridor. Energy goes from one place to another, and after a while I feel different. My mind goes to things in the outside world and I'm usually up and functioning without having consciously decided to be.

Is this what you should do? Scream your head off? Cough up goop? Curl up like a fetus and let void energy percolate up your corridor? Damned if I know. The trick is to do something other than ignore or suppress feelings that come up. To feel them completely--not just enough to know they're there.

Emotional work is a new game, I think. Not much is known about the specifics. I don't know whether you have a "corridor" or, if you do, whether it's in the same place as mine. People may have different ways and means of processing feelings. Or they may not. One friend of mine needs to be extremely violent, to hit, slam and kick violently where he won't do anyone or thing, himself included, any harm--on a wrestling mat, for example. Matter of fact, I like doing that myself.

Be careful about translating you're feelings to behavior, to outward action. There are laws, and as you'll see later, my exhorting you to do emotional work is not an exhortation to violate or abolish laws or community customs and mores. These will change in time. They always have.

The key is to experiment with the faith that the deepest, most authentic parts of you are perfect. They can't harm you or others, human or otherwise. They don't want to. They're perfect. That'sthe faith.

I got into emotional work in New York after a friend dared me to try the Casreal Institute. My life needed something, I was shopping around for a psychotherapist, and it seemed my friend had achieved much at Casreal in a short time. My first indication of what Casreal was about came while sitting in the dingy first floor waiting room of the Institute, a town house near St. Patrick's Cathedral. I was early for a "beginners group," so I was alone. From overhead erupted a mass scream like what must have been heard under the Coliseum when they told the Christians they were on in five. I almost snuck out.

In the beginners group were a couple of plants--people who, when it came their turn to talk, fell right into cathartic screaming and sobbing. This moved me. These people weren't beginners, but they weren't phonies either. I immediately had tremendous feelings for them and for what they were doing. A big burly guy sobbed in Dan Casreal's arms about Daddy. Dan was the psychiatrist who ran the Institute and was leading this group. At the end, he lead us in a group scream. I always think of the Exorcist girl when I remember the next several minutes. I didn't throw up any green stuff, but I bent forward and hissed out--we were all holding hands at this point--this guttural, wordless venom. Anger I guess, lots of it. I stopped way after everyone else. Dan looked on with approval: he had a live one.

I floated out of the Institute on a carpet of euphoria that lasted for hours, maybe days. I went once or twice a week to the Institute for the next year or so, with good Merck, the pharmaceutical manufacturer and my employer, paying 80 percent of the freight. If they hadn't, I probably would have weaseled out.

Occasionally I saw someone individually, but usually I went to groups lead either by Dan, a woman named Frankie Wiggin who was tremendous at cooking up pandemonium, or Parks Wightman. Parks, the wild man of the operation, had a complicated falling out with Dan and had to leave a year or so after I started. A number of us went with him. Parks had no credentials, so no more Merck coverage. But Parks was cheaper. Dan and Parks were in their early fifties then; Frankie was younger.

Early on in this whole experience, one thought emerged clearly in my mind that has stayed clear ever since. What really made the difference in these groups was emotional work. Dan, Frankie and Parks did a lot of attitude work along with emotional work. To me, the two are entirely different.

Attitude work, as I see it, undertakes to fortify a person with an "attitude," often a slogan, a way of thinking about things, a verbalized approach to life that you keep in your hip pocket as a general guide for when things get rough. Then you bring it out, remember it, and use it to get through the rough situation. One of the earliest things I remember Dan saying was "Just tell 'em, if you can get it up, you can have it." ("Get my male member up", he's saying.) Sounded like the special of the week. Lots of impotence around, and Dan loved his new weapon: dump the responsibility on somebody else.

I loved Dan and I love his idea. But the idea I love better is: surrender totally to the impotence feelings and any others that might be underneath them.

Frankie would feed you lines. In her groups, after you had talked about what was on your mind for a while, she'd say something like "Just tell your father 'I don't have to perform to get your love.'" You'd resist this and say it was stupid and you didn't want to do it, and Frankie'd ask you when you're going to learn that your way didn't work, and other group members would egg you on, and you'd talk and talk and maybe scream and holler and swear very loud. But finally, you'd murmur ok and after a long silence you'd look at each group member one by one and say "I don't have to perform to get your love," seeing in each face your father, of course. We sat in folding chairs around third-hand, faintly greasy wrestling mats you could go berserk on when you wanted to. Groups usually had six to ten people. Sometimes they were larger. Dan often held weekend workshops or marathons involving fifty to a hundred people. They were great.

So around the circle you'd go. "I don't have to perform to get your love. I don't have to perform to get yourlove." You'd say it and say it, maybe going around the circle several times, and then something would start to connect and you'd get louder and louder and start screaming and then scream other things that came to mind and then just scream. A-A-A-A-AH! And maybe you'd get really hot and leap on the mattress and kick and bang with your fists and by now everybody else who'd been egging you on is screaming their own stuff and banging and kicking and thrashing around on the floor. "JUST GO CRAZY!" Parks would yell when things got like this in his groups. These were adults, you understand.

It was great. Each of these therapists was great. Dan and Parks are gone, Dan of Lou Gehrig's Disease in 1982, Parks of cancer in 1984. Frankie, I heard, is leading groups in Florida. They all generated tremendous energy in their groups and their individual work, and they all put tremendous emphasis on getting into and blowing out feelings, loud and wild. And I'm convinced this had great therapeutic effect for many people, notably me.

However, the credo that emerged in my head as a result of this experience is different, as I see it, from much of what Dan, Frankie and Parks did. Credo: unexperienced feelings are what keep us down. I believe unexperienced feelings keep a heavily medicated psychiatric patient from being free of medication and as mentally healthy as most people; I believe they keep the world's most successful business people, artists and leaders from being supermen and superwomen. And I believe that unexperienced feelings immensely aggravate all physical and mental disorders, including birth-related brain damage, autism and other congenital retardation.

And the one comprehensive way to treat unexperienced feelings is to experience them. Feel them. They're our oldest, most potent tools for adaptation. When we allow them to operate freely, we adapt, move and grow. That's how they work. That's what they're there for.

And experiencing all feelings completely, I argue, is precisely what every human culture in the past has committed itself to preventing. They had to. We today are different. We're living at the climax of life on Earth. We no longer have to keep ourselves from experiencing our feelings. But we do anyway. And we use hosts of aids and techniques to "relieve"--i.e. suppress--feelings that present the slightest discomfort. And we give each other enormous support for doing it. An ethos of feelings suppression permeates our surroundings and comes at us from virtually everything that talks.

At Casreal and even with Parks, I became frustrated seeing attitude work in a process I thought was grounded in something bigger. I was frustrated when I saw someone present a slogan, an attitude, a way of thinking to someone else as a way of dealing with a problem or with life. So many sentences started with "Just tell yourself" or "You've just got to realize that..."

Parks loved aphorisms. They were the principal vehicle for his wisdom, which I think was prodigious. He looked a little like Ho Chi Minh, only longer, scrawnier and more scraggly-bearded. His aphorisms were funny and their off-the-wallness made them liberating. Only five words needed for communication, he claimed: No, Stop, Help, More, Now. Tips on getting laid included "stumble and drool power," which always came with a short demonstration. Parks was expert at drooling and saying "dah-h." Works every time, he claimed: takes the pressure off performing and being cool. Two Parksisms I particularly love: we rarely forgive those whom we hurt; and to really accept is to accept that we are not accepted. Here's another: obsessions are great. I love that.

I loved his aphorisms and so did many others. But the fact of the aphorisms ran against the fact of emotional work, which Parks also did as skillfully as I've seen it done. He loved to get people into their feelings. He loved noise. He believed that getting in deep, long and loud is thepotent healer.

But to me, emotional work, by orienting you to what youfeel, orients you to what youthink, to youradaptation to the world. Aphorisms, no matter how funny, off-the-wall and liberating, orient you to what somebody else thinks, how somebody else has adapted and is adapting to the world.

Don't get me wrong. Attitude work has a long history of success. Anthropologists tell us that literacy, the ability to use words, goes back millions of years and several humanoid species. It seems likely to me that as soon as people could talk, they started telling each other what to think and do. Attitude work, I'm convinced, has existed in all verbal cultures and, therefore, could be millions of years old.

Mothers, fathers, medicine-men, priests, wise men, prophets, philosophers, political leaders and corporate consultants, either in their proselytizing, in requested counsel, or in compulsory teaching, have told people what and how to think, how to look at things and what to do about them. Trust in God, think positive thoughts, stiff upper lip, never say die, one day at a time, I don't have to perform to get your love, cleanse your mind of all worldly thoughts. How many times have you heard "Your attitude's all wrong; your attitude should be..." And then there's "You shouldn't feel that way." Mouth foams as I write that one.

Part of the message of attitude work is inevitably don'tfeel your feelings. Even Parks believed people shouldn't feel guilty. I say: feel guilty? Feel guilty. Reallyguilty. Give up to it totally. Best way in the world to resolve it and get rid of it. Depressed? Sink into it. Deep as it goes. It's there for a reason. Suppressing the feeling, particularly with the help of mood-altering substances--caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and over-the-counter, prescription and illegal drugs--all these jam and impact, like a wisdom tooth, the reason for the feeling. Experience the feeling and you reveal the reason it's there. Free the impacted tooth of wisdom and let it out!

Attitude work is about teaching, counseling and proselytizing. Getting inside somebody else's head and changing the wiring. Steering them right. I.e., steering them where youthink is right. Away from where theythink is right.

In its purest form, emotional work doesn't teach, counsel or proselytize anything. Not even to do emotional work. Emotional work waits for openings. Opportunities to get behind people, get behind their feeling, thinking, saying and doing what they want to feel, think, say and do. Opportunities to validate them,the people, not ideas, particularly somebody else's ideas.

Am I violating my own creed? Writing this book? Telling you to experience your feelings? Telling you to do and get what you want and need most? Maybe. Am I telling you to read the book? Stop reading the Goddamn book! Do what you want to do most! Now! Writing the book's what Iwant to do most now.

Emotional work is more than a therapy. It's a way to interact. When it's authentic, when it's the only way we want to interact--not because I say so, not because it's the good way, the right way, but because it feelsbest, it's the most fun--then I think you've got the optimum. Optimal personal interaction. They'll never find a better way for organisms to interact than that.

Let other people--even our children--make their mistakes. They learn more by discovering than by being taught. More and better. We'll cover the toddler who wants to toddle the freeway. And the folks who want to molest children and eliminate races of humanity. But use the toddler to justify controls, manipulations and "I know what's best for you," do that and you're missing the boat, I think. You're making life a thousand times harder and the rewards a thousand times less than what's possible. For you andthe toddler.

You may have doubts--I don't--that from every point of view man has come a long way since he became verbal. And counseling, teaching and preaching--attitude work--has been essential to that progress. It couldn't have happened without it. Force, no doubt, played a big part, makingpeople think and act the way a community's ruling consensus wanted them to: love Jesus or burn. Like it or not, that too was part of humanity's success.

For eons, attitude work has disseminated the adaptation that was working for the social organism, be it family, tribe, kingdom or nation-state. Stiff upper lip and never say die worked for Britain and Empire. The cultural values they bespoke enabled the English to realize the enormous possibilities of a lucky geography. Limp upper lip, die sometimes maybe, and some other culture would have realized those possibilities.

Natural selection picks the winners and losers among all organisms, including human cultures. And attitude work—preaching, teaching, and coercing—has disseminated the adaptation, has gotten the word around within those cultures, winners andlosers. Whether or not a culture's competitive strategy for survival succeeded, attitude work is what disseminated the strategy among the members, new members for example.

So what makes things different now? What invalidates attitude work all of a sudden? Technology does. The clock of human history. Technology alone determines the nature and timing of change in human history, I believe. And when the clock says that a species' technology can wipe out virtually all of that species and is wiping out rapidly increasing quantities of others, it's time for a change. The great irony of our age--the age of the climax--is that what always worked in the past is precisely what won'twork now.

In the apocalyptically dangerous game of the climax, control is the route to failure, while fill-her-up-all-the-way/total self-gratification is the route to success. The precise logic of this belief I want to save until Part 3.

And emotional work--doing and getting all of what you want and need most and experiencing the feelings that come up along the way--emotional work heals and promotes growth faster and more completely than any kind of attitude work or anything else, if there isanything else. That's my conviction. What works best for the individual works best for the species--at least now and in the future it does. If this is the case, aren't we lucky? Aren't we lucky that doing and getting all of what each of us wants and needs most is theway past the horrific perils of our life system's climax.

Somebody or thing will make it past the climax eventually. If we blow it, life will keep on going. We don't have the power to destroy it all. Not yet. And either remnants of our species or some new species will evolve with the same powers we have now. Maybe they'll blow it too. But somebody or some thing will make it someday, and emotional work and what it's about is how I think they'll do it.

Me, I don't want to leave it for some species or some remnant down the road to get past. I, the Emperor, want to get past now. Thistime. Thisround. That's why I'm writing this book. Save the world. Why not?