Chance and the Fat Laughing Buddha ~ a plug for The DIEing Society

'The Dice man is an experiment in changing the personality, in destroying the personality. To destroy the single dominant personality one must be capable of developing many personalities; one must become multiple. The Dice Man is a creature whose actions are decided from day to day by the roll of dice, the dice choosing from among options created by the man.'

Any other fans of The Dice Man philosophy? It seems like such an ideal way to exercise and stretch/expand the ego - I think it's great that Luke Rhinehart actually lives by it, or has lived by it at various points in his life.

For those who haven't heard of it, The Dice Man is a book written in the seventies by Luke Rhinehart http://www.lukerhinehart.net/ that explores the idea of crossing our personal boundaries and growing as a result, losing neuroses associated with the old ego as we embrace a new, more expansive many, by basing our choices, actions and interactions not on old habits and safe routines but on the completely impartial, totally random fall of a die. There's a sequel to The Dice Man and two associated books mainly concerned with a mythical character called Whim, the son of Chance, who doesn't appear in the others and his misguided search for UT - ultimate truth.

I'm in the process of creating a dedicated 'dieing society' at my university, to meet up and use dice together/share dieing tales etc. Need 12 members, Somewhat fittingly I have around 6. The idea behind having a dieing group is to encourage each individual to use dice more. It's difficult to keep up a healthy ego-expanding dieing lifestyle if you're doing it completely alone.

So I also thought it would be good to have an online dieing community, with a user generated bank of dice options, but there doesn't seem to be one. So I just started a dieing message board today, with forums to share experiences and a forum for each number 1-36 (for no particular reason). Being able to use options provided by others ensures that we play no comfortable, habitual part in the outcome. I guess they could be ranked in each thread title by difficulty level or whatnot. Members would throw their dice then look in the forum number corresponding to the outcome for the action they have to take.

The address at present is http://511132.xobor.com/ because I'm too poor to afford a proper catchy domain name at the moment, and I'm not sure if it will even be worth it - but bookmark it if you please, come to the site and sign up. It's not much to look at for now - bit of a prototype, but the more interest that is shown in this project, the more enthusiasm and investment i'll be able to put into it.

I thought it would appeal to evolvers. So if you're interested and fancy experimenting, the more the merrier! This will work best with a lot of people so I've been plugging on other sites too.

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Just to give a little extra flavour of what diceliving entails, here are a few press quotes about diceliving - taken from Luke Rhinehart's website:

The idea of a life lived to the whim of the dice is an attractive, potentially seminal notion.
— TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

The creator of diceliving has launched a psychiatric revolution.
— LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Inevitably Chance becomes a god and dice a religion. (Diceliving is) an unpleasant notion whose time has come.
— CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Diceliving is an extreme kind of creative play.
— VIRGINIAN PILOT

Dicepeople get from (dicing) a tolerably sharp sense of risk, impermanence and variety.
— NEW YORK TIMES

It is all part of a conjoint project that a number of us are engaged in to render the whole fabric of bourgeois society unworkable . . . in a total and totalizing revolutionary process."
— DAVID COOPER

and from MaybeLogic Academy, who ran a course on the books called Chance and the Fat Laughing Buddha:

"Although The Dice Man and The Book of the Die dramatize using chance to vitalize a person's life, the actual center of both books, like the novel Whim, is a search for ways of liberation: paths that will free humans from the unhappy messes we usually make of our lives. The relevant symbol of all three books is not a six-sided die but rather a fat laughing Buddha. Although the books may at times seem to be quite humorously non-spiritual, certain paths in Zen Buddhism and Sufism led Luke to the ideas in his books, and in turn, dicing is intended to lead readers to such Eastern Ways. [...] traditional religious beliefs and moral laws can be a trap on the way to liberation."