I've taken it and have been trying to apply it to myself as a life philosophy. Fight Club is essentially my Bible, although I tend to take more left handed pathed messages out of it. Like many paths they try to get to the heart of deeper truths through symbolism, but these symbols make sense to me.
It's a modern right handed variant of Buddhism that turns many of it's tenets on it's head. The character is batshit raving mad (like I'd argue many messiah figures are), but his message isn't wrong:
How I met Tyler was I went to a nude beach. This was the very end of summer, and I was asleep. Tyler was naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face.
Tyler had been around a long time before we met.
Tyler was pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach. In the wet sand, he'd already planted a half circle of logs so they stood a few inches apart and as tall as his eyes. There were four logs, and when I woke up, I watched Tyler pull a fifth log up the beach. Tyler dug a hole under one end of the log, then lifted the other end until the log slid into the hole and stood there at a slight angle.
You wake up at the beach.
We were the only people on the beach.
With a stick, Tyler drew a straight line in the sand several feet away. Tyler went back to straighten the log by stamping sand around its base.
I was the only person watching this.
Tyler called over, "Do you know what time it is?"
I always wear a watch.
"Do you know what time it is?"
I asked, where?
"Right here,"Tyler said. "Right now."
It was 5:06 P.m.
After a while, Tyler sat cross-legged in the shadow of the standing logs. Tyler sat for a few minutes, got up and took a swim, pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and started to leave. I had to ask.
I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep.
I asked if Tyler was an artist.
Tyler shrugged and showed me how the five standing logs were wider at the base. Tyler showed me the line he'd drawn in the sand, and how he'd use the line to gauge the shadow cast by each log.
What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatu-long and the thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect.
The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he'd created himself.
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
There is such beauty in the works, and they don't try to peddle it as "peace". It's the Heart Attack Grill of religion; honest and self-harmful to get a greater message across.
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