GENTUT83.TXT General Tutorial for Lisa GJ2 Fic3 -- the f3 language explained as a series of tiny essays Written by Aristo Tacoma with L.A.H. Date: 2011:3:2 Numbers 01..99 in this series of gentutNN are circulated as needed, when more recently written articles make earlier ones unnecessary. Each article: copyright author, further distribution license the usual www.yoga4d.org/cfdl.txt. Kids: there are other tutorials for you. But you should find pieces here and there which are easy to read. In B9, use the search function, CTR-F or F4 within each. ***WHAT IS PROGRAMMING RELATIVE TO CONSCIOUSNESS? The question is worth asking -- the question in the title, that is -- because, at first, some might be so wrapped up in a hard division of 'what is a tool for something else, which is worth the while', and, on the other hand, 'what is worth the while'. If you do something which has its own elegance, its own beauty, its own meditation, its own symmetric and interesting lack of symmetry, its own rhythm and, more importantly, some arrythmic features like the height of the letters in an article or fiction piece written in the B9 font, and, in addition, IT HAS SOME USE, then, if somebody stares coldly at your work and asks: what is the use of it? -- then the more enlightened person would, with great eloquence, great virtue, a Psmith-like gentlemanish radiance, point out the utter futility and imbecility of the question. What is the use, my foot. Of course something worth the while doing for its own sake when it has its own meditation and clarity, and which is also related to some goals of use, and is within meaningful laws, and all that, do have some use. But it takes an unusually barren mind to reduce the whole activity to use. Indeed, those who divide usefulness from something which is worth the while in itself are people who carry the virus of corruption. Somebody who takes pride in the meditation of elegant supreme clarity in own work, also work which can be done fast, when that is appropriate, and even with elegant sloppiness, when that is appropriate, doesn't relish at all at the idea of taking bribes to forge a false result. The whole idea of taking money to screw up the action is repulsive, to one who has discovered that the journey is worth the while, at all points, each onto itself, both pantheistically and theistically. To program, then, is to express a sense of the poetic within the rigid, perfect frames of the Lisa GJ2 Fic3 language: the syntax which is ever-fresh, for it is born of a total adoration of consciousness as forever beyond the mechanical. Programming is part of the stream of consciousness. It purifies and perfects. It enlivens, it forces new questions to be asked, and it cleanses a person from a sense of "the world being hostile" -- that typical 20th century feeling in the so-called democracies which really are nothing but the dictatorship of fixed familes, dynasties, and the lottery of purportedly free money, money which is in effect a modernised form of racism -- for the computer responds to you perfectly when you feed it with right syntax and it responds politely enough with a request, always hopeful, if the syntax is not right. It doesn't criticise, just gently points out; it doesn't take bribes and it assumes that you are intelligent. It rewards you by performing your program. It appreciates your newness and gives you, each day you have the fortune of having a session with the computer, a blank screen, -- that which the ancients called TABULA RASA -- where you have no sense of gloom or doom, -- it is an open door for the most fresh of expressions. Programming, then, is a session giving you a real sense of rebirth, of fresh mind. You are touching the digital freedom from the debris of the analogous waves, which is at the heart of that fountain of attention within which we sometimes call THE UNCOMPUTER. For what is, in true terms, a "birthday", anyway? Surely it is not merely the slimy, bloody pushing forth of a body out of the womb and into the bathroom, of an infant so much an infant it is more animal than human, despite its potentials. Surely it is not the equally slimy, but fun, meeting of sperm cell and eggcell during conception. Neither is the expression of an incarnating soul or spirit with consciousness, but rather the dance of living sexual beings. A birthday, a day of birth, more properly, is whenever soul and spirit really gushes forth so as to renew the sense of life to an extent where the universe is experienced as a whole.