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  • Ultimate Spiritual Intelligence Test Version 5.1
  • Ed Bok Lee (bio)

Welcome.

You are an eternal spirit warming, temporarily, all the wondrous contents of your skin.

You greatly appreciate this inner, shiny viscera and bone that you are renting. (In fact, do you not daily walk it around, wrapped in tastefully matching colors and fabrics like a Christmas present?)

Of course, sometimes it feels like a burden, these contents encased in flesh and hair that you have been charged for the duration of your life to chaperone to and from work, school, restaurants, cinemas, grocery stores, cafés, toilets, etc.

Eventually, of course, the body you are inhabiting will break down. You will once again need to travel to a new dimension for recycling. In the meantime, your task is to discover the fundamental reason for why your spiritual essence was placed inside this particular mass of cells you regularly feed, clothe, delude, entertain, bathe, pacify, make love with, chastise, scratch, sabotage, read silently to, inebriate, etc. [End Page 155]

More specifically, your task is to learn your true and ultimate purpose for being in this particular time and place, before you die.

The stakes are high: Should you fail to learn your true and ultimate purpose for being, your spirit, like some student yawning through a summer remedial course in math or reading, will be assigned an even less inspired existence in its next life.

The following test has been designed to aid you in your quest to learn your true and ultimate purpose for being.

If you feel you already know your true and ultimate purpose for being and so do not require this test, please recall, once upon a time you also wished to be an astronaut or ballerina or cowboy or nun or hitman, etc. That is, can you really speak for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, one hundred years from now?

To begin, please answer the following as imaginatively as possible:

Ultimate Spiritual Intelligence Test Version 5.1

Question 1 (Please complete and circle only one of the following sentences.)

When I think of a clown, I am reminded that:

a) As a child, I once thought I’d die from

_________________________.

b) I love losing__________________

at carnivals and fairs.

c) The problem with the world is__________

_________________________. [End Page 156]

Examples:

a) As a child, I once thought I’d die from: eating an icicle stolen from the house of a neighbor who I later found out had cancer.

or: As a child, I once thought I’d die from: kissing the wrong person. etc.

b) I love losing my virginity at carnivals and fairs.

or: I love losing my sense of time at carnivals and fairs. etc.

c) The problem with the world is there aren’t enough clowns to frighten all the sad, sedated children.

or: The problem with the world is: there are way too many coins for capitalism. etc.

Question 2 (Please complete and circle only one of the following sentences.)

Some nights when I look up at the clearest patch of sky, I feel:

a) Geometry was created not by men, but

_____________________________.

b) There will never be enough time to

excavate_______________from complete strangers.

c) Every time a philosopher dies, a

new_________________ somewhere is born.

Question 3 (Please complete and circle only one of the following sentences.)

When I think of the day I will die, I feel:

a) I come from the sound [End Page 157]

Of_________________one million years afterward.

b) Fuck ‘Know Thyself,’ the dictum I live by is ‘Kill

_________________________________

_______________________________.’

c) Every time a CEO orgasms, a

new________________somewhere far away is born.

Question 4 (Please complete and circle only one of the following sentences.)

Pious people make me feel like:

a) Sometimes I’m nostalgic for a time when I didn’t know my

____________________________________

could hurt anyone.

b) My mother comes from the smell of

burning____________mixed with

____________________________on Sunday mornings.

c) When two planets collide, slowly the music tastes like

____________________________________________

___________________________.

Question 5 (Please complete and circle only one of the following sentences.)

Once upon a time, I lost someone and now understand:

a) Melted snow is

____________________________than tap or

bottled water.

b) Every...

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