u/Orb-of-Muck

The ignorance in this world is so great it has trascended any moral consideration and just becomes like water to a fish. It is a known joke that experts in any discipline wildly overestimate the average familiarity of the common man with it. The geologist mocks the average human for being unable to tell one feldspar to another. So stupid. The joke being, they are ignorant themselves about what the average human knows, which is not a lot.

The recent parents are now greasing their fingers with vaseline and stimulating the asshole of a newborn that hasn't discovered yet how to poop. Someone mentions skid marks in their underpants. In passing, like a normal thing. When you wipe your ass, you should do so from the inside to the outside. If you push the shit back inside, it will come back out later. Paper is ok, water and soap with the same motion is better. Always wash your hands thoroughly with soap to prevent infections. Even with that, change your underwear preferably daily, minimum every other day.

A teacher I had in elementary school discovered this worrying lack around 30 years ago. Poor Damien and his existential teaching crisis. What's the point of teaching maths and lingüistics and the ancients lineages of kings if this gal can't take a shower right? Wash yourself from top to bottom so the muck falls down. Shouldn't we spend some time teaching hygiene *before* algebra?

Same goes with spirituality, awakening, or enlightenment. Everyone gets all pumped up in accusing each other of dualistic thinking, of speaking through the Ego, of mistaking an epiphany for a rapture wait... Is that last one too much to ask? When you ask something out of someone, even if they owe it to you or you're paying for it, say "please"; when someone does something to please you, even if you didn't ask or need for it, say "thank you"; when someone is bothered by something you've done, even if you had all the right to do so, say "sorry". That's the basis for good manners.

You're all going to keep talking about how it's like my body doesn't ache or feel so heavy when I meditate and your morning breakfast is a brisket smeared in peanut butter. Cravings of food are a veiled way for the body to tell you what it needs. When your mind wants sweets, what the body actually needs is fruits and vitamins. It's only recently that we have been able to separate the sugar from the fruit. Your body is still asking for what it needs (carbs, protein, iron, omega-3, b9, whatever), but someone discovered they could make a ton of money by appeasing the sensation without addressing the underlying cause of the desire. Coca cola doesn't quench your thirst, it only feels like it does: it actually dehydrates you. Quit drinking soda! You actually want water and vitamins.

Same happens with the use of technology. A videogame provides the sense of achievement without any actual achievement, I keep doomscrolling for information but I leave more confused than I began, I fuck some dumb chick on Tinder but I still don't feel love or connection. Remember, only yes means yes is the basis for consent. Learning how to actually address the causes of desire can do more to liberate you from their grasp than a million vipassana retreats. When a desire is fulfilled, it's gone. Go have a delicious nutritive meal, pursue your ambitions to your heart's content, fall in love and feel the greatest of attachment to your children. Leave spirituality alone.

This is going to be long.

Because you're right in thinking this PSA is not actually about spirituality. This is wellness and self-improvement properly done. Learning how to maintain hygiene, give your body what it needs, hold a job, keep a budget. These are things not even the most elevated of mystical experience will give you, and to pretend it will fix your life is overextending our discipline. The circadian cycle of human activity spans 25 hours, while the day lasts only 24. But the melatonin produced while receiving sunlight and doing exercise shortens it. This means, if you don't spend enough time outside or exercising physically, you'll have problems sleeping, and the pharmacist will have to come with pills and benzos to help you at the cost of their side effects.

I have a motto: "Mundane solutions for mundane problems, spiritual solutions for spiritual problems". Exercise isn't going to help you lose weight, we're quite efficient machines in that respect, burn very little calories. Exercise builds muscle growth, and muscle fibers consume way more calories continuously. Sometimes the problem is not in knowing you have to go to the gym, but bringing yourself to do it.

There we can come, and explain you're not actually split into two selves with the whole cosmogony to back it up, or say that habits shouldn't be build on emotion alone. Whatever you want, the cost of having to move your ass to the gym is going to override it sooner or later. Your brain is always balancing cost vs reward. A good heuristic for keeping a budget is the 50-30-20 rule. From your total income, fixed expenditures shouldn't be more than half, and 20% you should be able to save for eventualities. Most people never get there, but when the proportions break, it's a sign you're living above your means and your situation may not be sustainable in the long run. You've seen the rent bills. The goal may be unachievable but that doesn't mean the situation is sustainable. Know where you stand, specially if that's on the border of a precipice.

Not thinking about it isn't going to make the problem go away. That's usually the first instinct: to deny the problem and stay in bed. A military officer once told me 90% of living your best life is being where you have to be when you have to be and that this is the secret to holding any type of job. Be there. Once you're on your post, boredom usually makes it easier to work than to wait in idleness. Sit in the yoga mat even if you're too tired to do anything.

There's no shame in admitting incompetence. We aren't born knowing anything, not even how to poop. Noone can be made responsible for their own education. That goes both ways. We don't even know how much there is we don't know. We have to be taught. You're not to blame for living in a society that didn't care to teach you. We forgot it even needed to be taught.

And yet, your teachers assuming you already know it is a mistake, presuming you're a functioning adult who knows why it is important to maintain hygiene, eat, exercise and sleep well. So when they say "there is nothing to do", that's more a mood than a command. Intended for the words to be experienced, not decoded into an invitation to degeneracy. Because any reasonable person understands that interpretation to be ridiculous.

But you're not a reasonable person, you've never been taught to be. You are not yet mature functioning adults. Your understandings of normalcy betray a million maladaptive behaviors, too many to address here, that would leave any close friend worried. What kind of enlightenment are you even trying to pretend to have, that justifies every indulgence and makes of your life and connections a mess? Why would anyone want that shit? Isn't dealing with skid marks a priority? Do not mix white fabrics with colors when using the washing machine in hot mode.

Even if we could enlighten you with a simple touch like the saints of old legend, you'd still be messing up and none of your neotenic concerns would be fixed because of it. You'd just be taking all those worries and placing them on your next of kin. An enlightened baby, free from suffering because everyone else around is sacrificing for them to survive.

You are not exempt from the basics of human life regardless of spiritual status. Be a responsible adult first. Get your shit together. In a box or a backpack, I don't care, as long as it's together. That's the practice. For the you that's in me, for the me that's in you. Together.

Bibliography

1. The joke is from an xkcd comic strip I'm not allowed to link to.

2. Damien is a Herman Hesse novel, a bildunsroman, a genre about characters being initiated into adulthood.

3. Part of the point is this being such basic knowledge people forget it needs to be taught, so it's not really a topic for recommending books.

4. But let's see what I have around here. The Carnegie one on social skills, at times a bit selfish? Some treatise on medieval good manners from DaVinci, teaches where to sit on the dinner table to murder someone. A few 101 things every man should know, and it's useless stuff about fishing and craftsmanship but no mention of budgeting or skid marks. You're supposed to have a wife for that I guess. Oscar Wilde on the art of talking, Schopenhauer on the art of surviving, Alan Watts on the art of being God. It's all useless. What you all need is good parenting. Not that I've had good examples of that. I had a teacher spend a week teaching us basic shit about car insurances and bank accounts instead of geography when I was 8. And I still can locate Sri Lanka on a map so nothing was lost and my asshole will be forever happy.

5. Freud is slightly misquoted here. Intentionally. I won't say where.

6. Nietzschean ressentiment demands for the audience to feel they would do differently if they had as much knowledge as the eagle, imagining themselves as morally good in their powerlessness to compensate for the humilliation of not having written this text themselves.

7. Cioran. Manual of anti-help, Alberto Domínguez.

8. The stereotype of the smug spiritual intellectual can be found in authors like Gurdjieff, J Krishnamurti or Gaudapada, with styles of debate and discussion that conflate intellectual superiority with radical clarity in the minds of their followers.

Have been wondering this morning how deconverted atheists may possess some extremely desirable traits and understandings in what concerns the path towards self-realization. One could say, they would seem to be closer to heaven than any devout by inheritance.

One, spiritual questions are considered to be of importance and not to be brushed off. The common layman doesn't concern themselves with why the rules are there or who's idea this whole deal about God is. Mundane concerns and appetites dominate the thoughts of the masses. An atheist spends more time thinking about God than any of the faceless numbers that fatten the lists of believers. It is critical for the process of deconversion. It is also critical for the spiritually inclined to give the same importance to the same questions.

Two, a rejection of faith. The only faith a spiritual seeker should hold is no greater than the one we give to school teachers, the one necessary to listen the argument to the end. Faith is an instrument of control for the disinclined masses, who wouldn't be able to follow an argument midway without falling asleep. A spiritual seeker is not on the path to believe, but on the path to know. All there is to know, at least.

Three, morality can be truly selfless in the absence of a trascendental reward, be it karma, be it an afterlife. Even the harshest of the relativists can't brush off the existence of a universal dychotomy between good and bad. Good is still good by definition, and no matter the particulars of it, it's always what ought to be done. There won't be qualms about rejecting an immoral order even if a divine vision were to order it. The immorality of religion is what starts the questioning in many hearts. The charicature of the atheist as an immoral monster is political propaganda. Surprisingly old political propaganda.

Fourth, God is already nature, they just call it nature. The God of the Atheist is not a null void, what takes it's place is the God of Spinoza, Newton and Einstein, the "God of the Philosophers", abstract and impersonal as it ought to be. While the devotee must go through the process of finding the divine image in all of creation, the atheist already starts with all of creation, and would need to go through the process of finding a relationship with it. Curiosity or defiance sound the most suitable.

Fifth, the marriage of mind and matter. It should be not that difficult to explain to a new atheist materialist that the brain they experience as the center of their consciousness is not their actual brain but a simulated image of what their actual brain would be. The world is already an illusion of the mind, even starting from materialist foundations.

Sixth, the absence of the soul. Seems to be the most urgent message every newly spiritually awakened wants to yell at the world: there is no me, there is no ego. But many who hear the message miss the mark, that the mistaken illusion being pointed at is not a trifle thing in the world of appearances, but the very center of it to which everything in consciousness appears to. The witness, the doer, the thinker, the feeler. In the words of Hume, "I don't have a soul. I am a soul". This transcendental self is already erased from the concerns of the atheist. When Dan Dennet says "Consciousness is an illusion", it is the same lesson being transmitted.

The trials and tribulations of the deconversion process deserve a great deal of respect. Many of the lessons learned through that process may have facilitated my own awakening, my "oh look it's God again" moment. Give me someone that already understands what it does not mean rather than someone who blindly believes in bullshit. I'd rather talk to the skeptic. Emptier from belief is better. My words should hold no authority beyond the reason contained in them. Do not frown away from a challenge and your understanding will grow stronger.

It would be understandable if the cause of the animosity against atheists were the toxicity of the present-day community, sometimes being more bothersome than is welcome to be; but this war is far older than dirt, and rejecting the questions that lead one out of spirituality is precisely what keeps many from actually advancing inside of it. You're not supposed to believe in Sky Santa as an adult. You're not supposed to believe Krishna is actually listening. Literal interpretations harm the actual spiritual value of scriptures. The questions posed by the atheist and the doubtful are legitimate and worth listening. Do listen to the critics. You have nothing to fear but your own gullibility.

You're supposed to understand why it is true, and no best way for that than facing why it is not true. That's the practice.

Bibliography

1. Jnana Yoga & Karma Yoga & Bhakti Yoga, Swami Vivekananda. First for the relevance of giving importance to these questions and being relentless in questioning. Second for the importance of selflessness in selfless action. Third is for the devotee seeing the divine image in all of creation.

2. God is not great, Christopher Hitchens. On the immorality of religion. I don't care what God told you of the cananites, nothing justifies so cruel of a genocide. The point of the reference is not the validity of the arguments: I'm pointing at the attitude towards morality. See also Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton & Godless morality, Holloway for parallel perspectives.

3. The God of the Philosophers, Anthony Kenny. This idea of God is more abstract and impersonal, sometimes becoming an equivalent to the laws of nature. See also Ethics, Spinoza and relevant correspondence from Newton and Einstein.

4. Enquiries on human understanding & Dialogues and natural history of religion, Hume. The comment about the soul, but also more comments about morality without religion.

5. The roman theologist Origen wrote in extense about how literal interpretations of scriptures would harm the spiritual content in them. Even if there was a historical figure called Jesus, the one written about is a different one, the purpose of the story being different from historical accuracy. We may not get down to wonder why an action is present in the narrative if we can just brush it off with "It's there because it happened that way".

6. I've been thinking, Dan Dennett. It's an autobiography. The mocked to oblivion statement that consciousness is an illusion but also a list of how he got to that idea through reading other philosophers of consciousness like Chalmers or Nagel. It always goes back to someone rediscovering the Upanishads. Probably the first thing the humanity left in writing was that you're not your Ego. That, or how bad Ea-Nasir's copper was. Both are equally shocking discoveries.

The absence or illusion of the self is an uninteresting truism, easily capturing the wonder of the novice, but becoming a mundane bad habit not long after. The universe we inhabit has no center, and yet the language and tools used for making sense of it demand it to be filtered through a specific phenomenology. There's nothing innately impressive about the universe or anything in it. But you've never conceived of a landscape having a mood without a person to watch it. You have no framework for what the asphalt thinks of you. The tree falls in the forest, noone to hear it, does it hurt? Imagine you're there, as you always do; but that defeats the purpose doesn't it?

Illidan yells at the Na'aru that he doesn't want to be cleansed. I am my scars!, he screams, destroying the last hope of Azeroth against the Burning Legion. Which wound are you refusing to heal because it keeps your identity intact? And why should there be a condemnation against it? The moment we presume biology to be greater than dreams we're chaining the spirit to the flesh and feeding the dystopian nightmare of the dark enlightenment.

You came to the monastery for everyone else to take advantage of you and make you exercise. Ones with words, ones with deeds, ones with emotion. Things you do because you want to do, are soon left undone once you're tired of them, like a kid with their toys; no discipline or constancy can be built through your own heart, meaning is always found from the outside in, and it's the job of the monastery to provide plenty of jobs, harder and lower than the outside would, to help you trascend.

To do what we want is to receive what one doesn't want, as per the reasons that built appetency to begin with. To want nothing is to be given everything, the art of not knowing trascends all sciences, to come to the place you want to see you have to traverse a million places you won't want to see. There is no person in the frame. Only practice. It's the things themselves that are suffering.

Bibliography

1. New phenomenology: a brief introduction. Hermann Schmidtz. Continuing the works of Husserl on phenomenology but removing the self as a reference point.

2. I'm thinking of ending things (2020), Charlie Kaufman. Dinner scene.

3. Existence, space and architecture, Norberg-Schulz. Rooms can have a mood.

4. Rejection of the gift - WoW (2017). Your faith has blinded you. There can be no chosen one.

5. In a dark night, St John of the Cross, Complete works. Path to the spirit of perfection is: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and even when up in the mountain, nothing.

A little insect behind my ear. Personal attacks from the merchants of the non-self. I'm not here but you're there and you're bad. Feels weird.

The pierced throat is poetic karma. It's also conflating the person and the thought in the public marketplace of ideas. Don't you know we can do things with words? Criminal things? Can we say an execution order is just fleeting words to be carried away in the wind?

In Ernesto Sabato's The tunnel, a painter becomes obsessed with a woman. Our use of social media is reckless, one never knows how the audience is going to react, and the bigger the crowd, the higher the probability someone waits at the end to follow you home. I have to kill you because you left me alone. The parting incrimination still resonates. You didn't understand what was happening, insensato. She loved you. She loved everyone.

To do wrong because someone else has done wrong doesn't negate the sinful action. Because the limits in our perception prevent us from being sure about any judgement about reality. We are all in the tunnel of our senses and our understanding.

You say X, that means you're Y. Why?

Freedom of expression is not freedom from consequences. That's why you didn't write a shopping list for a decade. Gradual, repeated exposure. Tame the elephant. What people receive is not what you put out, and will never be. Most don't understand subtext, rethorical figures or even genre. You've seen them asking for explanations of flat media. Probably can't even think in subjunctive mood since the language of opressors would not allow for it. Yet you need it to speak with them. Remember your training. It's kids, it's grandmas.

There's insults spelled with graffiti on the underground pass. True masters of self-dissolution. Written by one, directed to noone, affecting one hundred thousand ones. By the time you call the cops, I'll be long gone.

This is not for you. This is not for anyone. This is practice.

Bibliography

1. Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way, Ezra Klein, NYT & No, Charlie Kirk was not practicing politics the right way, David Corn, Mother Jones.

2. How to do things with words, JL Austin. This should not be controversial nor shall I take any merit for it.

3. El túnel, Ernesto Sabato. La experiencia me ha demostrado que lo que a mí me parece claro y evidente casi nunca lo es para el resto de mis semejantes.

4. The argumentation against doing evil to punish evil is probably from St Augustine or Kant, but forgot to write down. Help me find it! It was beautiful!

5. Burning paper instead of children, Adrienne Rich. There are books that describe all this and they're all useless.

6. One, No One, One Hundred Thousand, Luigi Pirandello. I am dying every instant, and being born anew and without memories: alive and whole, no longer in myself but in everything outside.

7. The Amazing Digital Circus. What was there left to understand?

In 1290, a farmer wakes up to the revelation her soul is the soul of God. It's the ultimate truth of the universe and everyone else is dumb not to see. Tells everyone, gets burned at the stake, becomes a statistic.

It always feel truer than true. It comes directly from the mechanism our minds use to create truth. Pure, unadulterated and sweeter than honey. There is never any doubt or uncertainty. Why? Few can really tell. Is it because of first principles or is it because people aren't normally trained in the art of second-guessing themselves? No, it's definitely first principles, it's the kids who are wrong.

In 1600, a forager hiking through nature has a sudden moment of clarity. Everything in nature is connected so everything in the world is one, and people are stupid not to be treating each other better. Keeps the secret to his death, dies in anonimity.

It always feels you're alone in this. But then you can do a quick search. Adyashanti, Sadhguru, Eckart Tolle, whatever guru is on vogue, they're all referencing this experience of unity in the universe, but you can't put your finger on it, yours is even better, they are barely grasping the surface.

In 1789, a nobleman experiencing great tragedies befalling his fortune, is invaded with a sense this world is not as important as it seems, that everything is an illusion and the masses are blind not to have noticed. Becomes a monk, hates the teachings but loves the peace, spends the rest of his life in silent contemplation.

How are people allowed to walk around without knowing the truth about themselves? Why is everyone trapped in such mechanical responses, complete slaves to their emotions and physical needs? Don't they know they are eternal souls impervious to whatever happens to their bodies? Don't they understand the soul is an illusion and this life is all they have?

In 1888, a body culturist discovers the nature of the universe is suffering and that the only way to wake people up from their state as sleeping automatons is to have them go through as much pain as possible. He only does so through pushing people to exercise. Dies of a heart attack at 40.

You have been chosen as many others have felt chosen. You have been revealed the absolute truth as many others believe their truth is absolute. You reject every other tradition or point of view as ridiculous because it can't be taught. It is your duty to teach it, humanity can't be spared your wisdom. But who else is there to be burdening you so? There's nothing to do and nowhere to go, all is fine. Greatness or degeneracy, both equally justified. Mine, I mean. My choice, the rule.

In 1910, the son of a rich merchant with a story of all kinds of abuse discovered his soul was the soul of the world and could find himself in the rivers and mountains. He also accused his neighbor of replacing his stomach with that of a jew and was internalized on a mental asylum.

Weird things happen when the capacity for self-doubt is compromised. A semantic explosion is waiting once a paradox is accepted. Me is equal to not me. Every statement can be logically proved true and every statement can be logically proved false. There is a space beyond logic. That's how we check if logic works. We don't have to be rational. Being rational is better. One can make a rational use of their irrationality and an irrational use of reason. Melancholia was once described as an excess of reason. Would then the opposite of melancholia be the opposite of reason?

In 1960 a group of friends eat a weird golden mushroom growing in rhino shit. The truth is revealed to them that alien spores are responsible for human evolution and that the meaning of life is having as much sex as they can. They all die of drug overdoses and sexually transmitted diseases over the next two decades.

The people into Perennial Philosophy and Non-Duality say there's a common pattern into spiritual awakenings happening through the ages. They say this pattern is the destruction of the self, the erasure of differentiating between myself and world, myself and God. But that's just one flavour, not the ice cream. Here's the congealed paste made edible,

Awakening is believing absolute truth has been revealed to you and being an asshole about it.

In 2022, one cold february evening, one guy got hit with the sudden illumination that there was no difference between one concept and another, one perception and another, between himself and world and other, and was invaded by an infinite sensation of peace and bliss that this was all there is. He thought he had been chosen by God, he feared he would be targeted by whoever had covered this absolute truth, he felt alone and isolated in his understanding, bound by duty to do something about it. Then he got to the internet to find a name for it and something happened that not many mystics had experienced before.

How dumb this all sounds from the mouth of another, and how little it matters that it's all actually bullshit when the universe already swallowed every single thing you knew. Truth and falsity stopped being a concern three conjunctions of the opposites ago, it's all just a game. This was about not feeling lonely. This was about not feeling special. This is about laughing at stupid nutcases. This is about how right and misunderstood I am.

Stupid is also me, and that's the practice. Tat tvam asi.

Bibliography

1. The mirror of souls, Margerite Porete.

2. Mysterium Magnum, Jakob Böhme.

3. In the darkest night, St John of the Cross.

4. The Fourth Way, Gurdjieff.

5. Memories of a nervous breakdown, Judge Schreber

6. The Alchemical Dream, Terence McKenna

7. Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley

For some, awakening is breaking free,
From every good manner they were taught to see.

For others, awakening is leaving the flesh behind,
Finding an eternal soul they're sure must be hind.

For others, the soul itself fades from view,
A beautiful illusion they once thought was true.

For others, it's the end of every "why,"
Though no answers arrive, the questions still die.

For others, it's the answer they've sought all along,
The note that completes their unfinished song.

For others, it's a realm beyond reason's domain,
For rigor proves difficult and ignorance friend.

For others, it's simple, as plain as can be,
It's just common sense! allowed to run free.

For many, it's one of these paths they embrace,
Or many together, entwined in one place.

For a few, it's all and it's none at the same,
Beyond every concept, beyond every rhyme.

There are those who have, and those who become,
And countless more standing between the sums.

A reason to humble, for practically none of them,
The crown worn in shadows beneath new names.

It's always one truth and you're always mistaken,
Opinions are smellier than people who make em.

But how will you know one from another's refrain,
Or separate colleague from wisdom or pain,

If you never sit still and open your ear,
And listen to voices you struggle to hear?

Bibliography

1. The Varieties of Religious Experience & The Principles of Psychology, William James. <- This is where the classification of the selves yesterday came.
2. The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley.
3. Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill.
4. Faust, Goethe. It's what's put me in the mood ngl.

There is a distinction that can be made between three selves.

One is the empirical self, discovered through physical experience as given by the senses, through the same criteria for evidence one would require for scientifical experimentation.

Second is the social self, the amalgam of social roles and constructs that regulates how we act in different situations depending on context, as given through cultural osmosis and/or indoctrination.

Third is the spiritual self, the soul, the thinker and the knower, center of the conscious experience, independent from the tribulations of the mind, eternal and unchanging.

The classification is from bibliography but source is intentionally omitted to favor honest discussion.

Let's keep it short today. Which of the three are you pointing at when you say the Ego is lost during awakening and mystical experiences?

If awakening was drug-mediated please note so along with your answer.

Life does not contain suffering. Life is suffering.

The question of why is there something rather than nothing reveals a deep seated expectation that nothing is what it should be. Existence is a geometrical abherration, a failure to harmonize one aspect of reality and keep it merged to the background. Everything that exists in experience is, at a minimum, a failure to reconcile an observer with an observation.

The three voids I saw without eyes during my awakening were a blunt mental translation of this process. Four voids would cancel each other out, and nothing would exist. But three mark the geometrical pathway for a missing fourth, an automatic motion to try to complete the perfect circle, that fails to do so because there is no such thing as non-being. This is what lies at the bottom of the waters of creation.

Remember that chinese artist who, when informed a high dignatary would traverse the halls where his works were exposed, exclaimed "I hope he doesn't notice!". What's good makes itself disappear. Only evil is truly creative.

The common understanding naïvely assumes, with goodness as with temperature, that there's this positive thing called happiness that comes in when suffering is extinguised, as coldness comes spitting from the AC when heat is removed. Scientifically, we know, there's only one thing called heat. In the same way, there's only one emotion, one perception, one mode for a thing to be, and that is ontologically suffering, incompleteness, unease, of which all knowing is composed of.

You think putting an ice cube in your drink is removing heat, but technically you're always adding some. Throw it into liquid nitrogen it heats it up. And so the error is one of a misplaced scale. The universe does not persists because it has found an equilibrium around the room temperature of our common lives, but because it has failed to disappear, and the disgusting promotion of the pursuit of happiness can only but guarantee we never feel much below zero celsius, much less approach the heat death of the soul, much less appreciating how far we are from the surface of the sun.

Fahrenheit is a joke scale not worth mentioning.

Bibliography

1. Scott Alexander, In what sense is life suffering? and The Goddess of Everything Else. Would have been faster to just copy paste those two articles. First does the temperature analogy, second for Evil being the creative of the pair.

2. Alan Watts, Aesthetics and mystical vision, Lecture 14. The anecdote about the discrete painter.

3. Byung Chul-Han, The Ontology of Pain, speaking of Heidegger's Zu Ernst Junger, about Ernst Junger On Pain. "Pain is not a subjective sensation pointing to a lack of something but a reception, even the reception of being. Pain is a gift."

4. CG Jung, The Black Books. A passing note I barely remember and may be misquoting about three being the number of life because it breaks both Unity and the Conjunction of opposites.

5. Eugene Y. Chang, Climate change is the world's greatest threat — in Celsius or Farenheit?. Argues the Fahrenheit scale obscures the urgency of climate action because of how numbers feel due to their nature as signifiers in relation to a reference point.

Jesterday I joked, if you don't want epidural may I have it instead?

The hospital has been working all night, smoke coming out the chimneys. She's now on her third serving. She solicited an underwater birth, with crystals and music. Wanted to let nature do it's thing peacefully, now asking no, yelling, begging to be sliced apart or put down like a horse in an aseptic metal bed. Girl next room surely hates her, and her complaints have an undertone of fear. It can't be that bad, can it? She must be exaggerating. Wasn't nature the kindest of the two?

You must not allow your mind to look away.
We always believe the limits of pain to be our greatest pain.
We always believe the limits of sorrow to be our greatest sorrow.
But the world knows of no such limitations.

A picture may show up in the news, a child without limbs, a kid carrying jugs of water, thin arms thinner than a toothpick, a stain of blood in the pavement, languid faces and moist eyes. The pain is there but never here. As if their pain is not like my pain, as if their world is not my world, it's just an intentional conspiration to make me feel bad, to induce despair. Spiritual warfare. Look away, stop doomscrolling. Out of sight, out of mind. In the information age, known criminals are the only ones who enjoy privacy. Convenient.

You must not allow your mind to look away.
We always believe the limits of death to be our deadly ones.
We always believe the limits of sickness to be our greatest weakness.
But the world knows of no such limitations.

We've been animals since Darwin thought so, and you've seen what we do to animals, yet that will never be done to me because I'm a special animal in a different world. Until I'm not.

You must not allow your mind to know such limitations.

Erase completely the notion of civilization vs nature. Erase the notion of foreign vs neighbor. Erase me vs another. The whole universe is one in it's essence of suffering, one in a sisterhood of crying. Let all dychotomies copulate yet produce no offspring, walk hand on hand to the extinction of all concepts, since a birth going smoothly can be as tragic as one that goes badly. Or would be, had we bitten from the outlawed pomme and allowed ourselves the notions of good vs bad.

Bibliography

1. Better never to have been, David Benatar.

2. Politics of nature, Bruno Latour.

3. Disavowal, Naomi Klein.

4. Gonna be an unc, O. Muck.

Human life being worth or worthless is the same unsupported ethos.

What thy end avails? The forces of life bring forth a new man of similar type, and mistery begins anew. What thy persistence avails? Darkness couldn't have risen and fallen, should life be redeemed by itself.

An army for a better world, an army for the world that is. And always a third country in every country, ignored. The fight for the pendulum to stay on either side, and the war against the pendulum.

Clowns crawl the empty streets at the first glimpse of dusk, hollowed eyes and minds empty, limbs and jaws limping. A field of lotus flowers guides the whitened path to the devourer of suns, and eternal bliss within. The nauseating nightmare calls, and they answer to be made of orange goo. It calls for me too. One day I must heed the siren's call. Me, or a new man of similar type, through the paths I wandered. Same ocean, same winds, same wave. The death of deaths, the cosmic slaughterhouse of the demiurge.

How does it feel to have the groundless shaken, to find the ocean to no longer be the ocean, the winds no longer be winds. The nothingness that moves, the motion of stillness.

At this age is humanity not uncovering truth but struggling to keep itself deceived, as it was decided long before this aeon that truth was indeed no good, existence by design constituted as an alienation of the things from themselves. Isn't this what language is? An alienation on top of another like a crooked tower of Babel?

In every self-destructive artist there's an assassin of meaning. In giving a heart in sacrifice to the realms of legerdemain, the imperfection of humanity reveals the fangs of truth through cracks of failure. Truth is never found by direct valiant combat, but through cowardice and weakness.

The more lies we consume, the craziest we get, the more the mask slips, that we always knew not to be who we were, that what we made was always a consequence of being made we had stolen authorship from. Powerlessness and confusion is the origin of all divine knowledge.

These are the mysteries of Eleusis, Corinth and Samothrace. The nightmare of the last philosopher: "There's nothing to be". The nightmare of the last scientist: "There's nowhere to see". The nightmare of the last man: "There's noone to know".

Satisfaction is a stochastic oddity. There's more interesting things to do with our life than failing at being happy. We can enjoy our inability to reach so many things.

Bibliography

1. A failure of the finger deleted it. All the plagiarism is obvious and nobody cares anyway.

Perusing the concept of Hyperobjects by Tim Morton, they are defined as objects so massively distributed across time and space that they trascend human comprehension and lose their status as "things".

Why this needs to be a concept is clear before I finish reading. Climate change, war, disease, billionaires. All of our century's challenges seem to neatly fall into the hyperobjects category, or rather outside of the category of normal human comprehension. All spanning unimaginable distances during several decades to uncountable peoples.

The genocide, the millions of big and small tragedies and humilliations, hurt to think about merely because of the sheer scale of it. I remember when I was a journalist, they recommended using football stadiums or buses for comparison. But what happens when there's too many buses and stadiums? What are you comparing an evil black hole in scale to, that wouldn't itself be hard to comprehend?

It's the things we're unaware of that hurt us the most. People are forbidden from eating while their mouth is with anesthesia because the absence of pain removed the usual limitations to harming themselves. What we can't conceive, we can't find a solution to. What we can't find a solution to, we don't solve.

The scientist asks for a two, the politicians negotiate a four. The politicians don't understand the natural world of the scientist does not negotiate. The scientist doesn't understand the scale of human stupidity.

We are mistaken to believe it is possible to understand. We believe we understand them because the word is in our heads. We spend much effort trying to explain, but as in quantum physics, it's a "shut up and do the math" situation. In spirituality, "shut up and do the practice". Observe yourself, read yourself, and the infinities will start showing up their ugly fangs. It is possible to find what the concepts refer to. We wouldn't have them if thousands of mystics had not done the math before us and designed the language we use to speak of souls or gods.

Who wouldn't expect the science of ultimates, as Underhill calls it, to be ridden with such. Hyperobjects are inherently spiritual. God's an hyperobject. The hyperobject of hyperobjects. So massive in it's apophatic "unlimited" non-definition it's not even conceivable as a thing, and yet not locked in any trascendental "away" realm. Have your seen it? Has it talked to you with words of love and care? Has it reassured you there's nothing to worry about and that we will all be safe and sound under the logistic collapse of food production and the siege of warmongering ethnic supremacists?

Self-induced anesthesia. I would sooner expect Azathoth to give me a good night's kiss.

Bibliography

1. Hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology at the end of the world, Timothy Morton. His lecture on romanticism is great, specially his understanding of William Blake's spirituality which I was ignorant of. Can't wait to read this one.

2. Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill. I have never received a worst edition of a good book in my whole life. Fuck you, Amazon. I need to find a better place and buy quality books but in english I'm at a loss.

3. Meditaciones, Marcus Aurelius. It was not written for you to read. The book, itself, was the practice. This is practice too. Or is it play?

4. The secret teachings of all ages, MP Hall. Here be egregores.

5. Complete Cthulu Mythos, HP Lovecraft & others. Azathoth is the primordial chaos anthropomorphized.

Emotions are the most powerful of masters to which every other master ought to be compared to for quality. It is merely made so by the mystification of not really understanding what any emotion is or does. Nothing is good or bad, desirable or undesirable or anything else, except as made so by our little mammalian laboratories producing the emotions by which we live. In ignorance, many follow blindly as overwhelming divine mandate what is merely an animalistic machinery easily tracken down and made subservient.

An emotion is not an object but a process that links mind and body together. As a result of the interaction between crystallized knowledge and our instinctual understanding of the situation we find ourselves in, a judgement is passed. Psychologists have identified some basic emotions this judgement can trigger, of which the whole range of shakespearian passions could be constructed by combinatory operations.

We could discuss to great extent the relationship between these basic emotions and actual neurotransmitters, but it shall be of no consequence to admit to it's arbitrariety yet use it any way in favor of it's simplicity and practicality.

The useful schematic functions thus: first, it is our own background that produces the judgement, and the identified element of lived experience determines the triggered emotion; second, each emotion is functionally relevant, does something that makes sense in context; third, it is contingent to understanding and situation, a change on any of the two would result in a change in the emotion. The latter is the use of the table provided.

Judgement — Emotion — Reaction — Function

There's no threat — Joy — Parasympathetic activation, rest and digestion: increase in openness, agreeability and risk-taking behaviors — Store resources, community bonding and repetition of what's good for us

There's a threat that can be overcomed — Anger — Sympathetic activation, fight, hostility and aggresivity — Defend against threats

There's a threat that can't be overcomed — Fear — Sympathetic activation: freeze or flight — Avoid threats

Something has been lost — Sadness — Retreat and reflect: isolationist tendency and increased mental rumination — Learn from our mistakes

Something shouldn't be here/may be harmful — Disgust — Vomit reflex, physical or metaphorical expulsion of transgreding object — Keep at bay the things that are bad for us

I don't know, representation failed — Surprise — Not actually an emotion but sort of a "reset" button that cuts in it's tracks whatever other emotion is present — Readjust our emotional state in the face of unexpected information

Safe to say, each one of these emotions could be discussed to greater lengths in order to better identify the causes and consequences that involve them, but specific deep dives may be a job for a different day.

The list intended to be treated as heuristic, but maybe in the partial de-mystification of discovering there's a reason for why an emotion appears, the reason being we produce it, we may stop treating the result of own faulty understandings as "guidance from the heart" or some crap like that.

Also, no emotion for love. The emotion of love is joy, but love itself is a different egoic process of a higher order that expands identification from I to We. Again, job for a different day.

My favourite color is sadness, if anyone was wondering.

PS: I don't actually know how to make a table.

Bibliography

1. *Emotions revealed*, Paul Eckman, the guy that advised the movie *Inside Out*. There's no actual reason to even consider emotions as discrete categories, but the elegance of it is undeniable.

2. *Cognitive-behavioral treatment of Borderline personality disorder*, Marsha Linehan. How do we actually deal with emotions in a pathological context?

3. *The conquest of brain*, D. Tammet

4. *El alma está en el cerebro*, Ed Punset

5. BIOCHEMISTRY, Lehninger

One of the polarities of experience is the phenomena I'm intuitively calling immersion. It is the opposite of what some people call awakening.

When we use a tool, we see the world from the perspective of the tool, not as a metaphor but as an actual embodiment. We shoot an arrow and we become the arrow. The arrow does not miss the Mark, *I miss*. A kid gets hit with a Game Over screen and yells to mom, *I died!*. The ahamkara of the yogic mind is revealed in the representational failure, an ever present active process of becoming, *Oh, so that's what I am*.

What non-driving people can't get, the cars they see on the street are living beings, internal nervous system and all, provided by the human inside for which the car is an extension. The construct of metals and wires no less of a body than flesh and bone. The human no longer feels human, he feels as the car feels. With it's eyes and ears and mushy parts on the inside.

It's a shift in perspective, but it's not a broader or greater perspective. Rather than waking up, driving feels like dreaming harder.

Oh, so now I'm a van. Five people inside, four as vestigial organs. Still a single living organism. But why stop there at the metal plates? Why not follow through and have the asphalt and the wind and the heat and the plants for my one and only soul? The answer is simple: precision. Economy of mind. Effectiveness. There's a goal bigger than ourselves, what's irrelevant gets pushed out, and only the road exists.

I wish I had a functioning AC.

A child drops a toy, and a pitiful hopeless moan expands through the fields. It is the worst thing that ever happened. A scalpel vivisects a big toe, yellow granoules of subdermic fat bubble through the wound. It's not a person that bleeds but a world that bleeds pain as a habit and chained us all into a brotherhood of suffering.

— ¡Oh my God! ¡I'm sorry! ¡I'm sorry! 

— No worries. You can deal with this. It's just a toe.

It's not one sack but the sack of us all. The moist gaze of the sick and the weak and the damned over the valley of the shadow of broken necks. Under the threat of caring, the social construction of production forces evasion and positivization improvisation. A thirst for annihilation resurfacing mimicks the denial of a denial. Humanity is suicidal. Ignores climate change, builds artificial intelligence to replace itself, surrenders to it's own evil nature with zenous zeal.

— I can deal with this. It's all fine. This has not happened.

But the toe is not fine. We have killed it and now live in it's corpse. The life of the egoic schema is still the light of this world. The feet symbolize people's values, that's why they're always dirty. Power washing is relaxing but ultimately a videogame. There was no heaven before the fall. The perfect point to return to, never existed, and we forget that lies and mistakes were already components of paradise without which the fall would have been impossible. Transvaluation of values my bleeding feet. Not a single glean of utopian bliss has started to cross my mind, a billion moans asphyxiate it. Non-nihility is what creates nihility, we are mourning the loss of something we never had, and our grieving cries are louder than blood.

— There is no toe. You are delusional.

The problem of comparing frameworks is that the framework is supposed to provide the grounds for comparison. The monkey says to the fish: we'll settle the score by climbing that tree. When we radically uproot people's toes and godrick the graft them on a different tree, we necessarily leave the center untouched because the center was never a component of the original structure. And as so you know the first question you'll be asked when presenting your new improved surgically-enhanced titanium toe, is what's in it for me. The structure moved, the center remains. Will it release me from suffering? Will it make me happy? Will it improve my material conditions?

What the system can't solve, can't solve by design. If no treatment works it's because the diagnosis was wrong. A happy life is as meaningless as an unhappy one. Give me a Cioran, a Mainlander or a Zappfe, who in their mystical pessimism offer no solutions but at least correctly identify the problem the human condition faces. That there's anything apart from myself is the original wound. When we bleed, the world and I, we bleed together.

Bibliography

1. My Big TOE, TW Campbell. I have no foot fetish, I swear, I don't even like Tarantino movies.

2. Poem anthology, Artaud. This went a different way than I expected it to go.

3. Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek. I wanted to talk about the journey of the soul and it's different stages.

4. Zarathustra, Nietzsche. Instead I write about comparing philosophical frameworks.

5. Memorias y testimonios, Ramana Maharisi. Which is in essence what I was going to do anyway.

6. Eristical dialectics or the art of being always right, Schopenhauer. As expanded outwards to the trascendent instead of the particular.

7. The Dispossesed, Ursula K LeGuin. It's just a disposable exercise anyway.

It is because of the concept of responsibility, essential for the functioning of our societies, being tied to the intuitive model of a cartesian dualism of the soul, that the self has no resource but to deny total ownership of every thought and emotion that crosses your mind, and exclude even the slightest movements of your hand or toe as the act of some alien misterious interference.

One of the freudian crimes in the discovery of the subconscious mind is to patch this problem in a very curious manner: by restoring ownership of an uncontrolled section of events, it breaks the control-responsibility association and finally makes you responsible for things you have no conscious control over, regardless of how you feel about it.

Still a ways out from Schreber feeling responsible for the wind and the rain.

Morality can be seen as a matter of geometry.

The capacity for abstraction brings with its mode of operating "ease of abstraction", as quality pertaining to the concept of a concept, belonging to the concept.

Harmonic completeness is the desired state, the just state, the morally good state. What things should be, as regulated by the cannabinoid parasympathetic home-genic pathway, to be recalled as fortress to retreat to under threat or pressure.

It is in a sense emotional, in a sense rational. As in music or art, there's rules of composition, but nothing to ground them in. We can discuss if a chess move is good or bad, but the rules must be agreed to beforehand. What we should value, what we should maximize, how to judge. Pawns wouldn't move twice at the start until it was agreed to in the 1400s, and that change also changed which moves would therefore be considered good or bad.

We should also consider that the board itself determines what the rules can be.

The illusion of an objective morality can be explained from adjacency. Axiomatic rules of geometrical analysis are constructed in the same way as general rules of representation. People would share their sense of morality in the same way they share a sense of sharing a reality. It is locally grounded in specific contingencies. The nationality or culture one belongs to, but also the species and planet.

We could not expect artificial or extraterrestial intelligences to reproduce the same sense of morality, yet it would be no surprise that they developed one in the same way, contingent on their laws of representation and history, in other words, as alien a morality as the eagle's sense of good appears to the rabbit.

Pain and suffering synergize with representational difficulty and failure. The inconceivable can't but be unwanted. The mystical experience can't but be unwanted, and we can't do by ourselves anything we don't want to do, as elsewhere explained. Awakening thus may always be, even in extreme cases of dedication, considered a mere accident. Passivity is a core component, considerations of merit or greatness, ridiculous.

There's a central vitrine for moral action in every spiritual path worth of consideration and respect. Yet it's usefulness is not dependent on the universe keeping a score. The nitty-gritty of moral dilemas is worth discussing but the expected spiritual benefit comes from the selflessness of the action rather than it's rigorous adherence to set rules. To think outside our own shoes, work for something greater than ourselves, undermines the egoic scheme and presents an experienciable alternative.

The figure of the narcissistic savior, as for example in effective altruism silicon types, counteracts the spiritual usefulness precisely because of the excessive geometrical mathematicalization. I am doing the most good, I am helping the most people. It's a perversion that no longer promotes recognizing oneself as an incidental part of a larger whole, as the world being more important than this arbitrary representational center.

The egoic scheme is not only left unthreatened but elevated by the same strategy intended for it's destruction. And yet, the simmetry is sustained that good is good, and the brain feels at home in its grasp.

That's geometry.

Bibliography

1. Ethics according to the geometrical order, Spinoza

2. Tractatus, Wittgenstein

3. Historia general de las drogas, Antonio Escohotado

4. Behavioral neurobiology of the endocannabinoid system, Kendall & Alexander

5. El fruto de la nada, Maestre Eckart

6. The Good Place, TV show

7. Karma Yoga, Vivekananda

8. Bojack Horseman, TV show

9. The why and how of Effective Altruism, Peter Singer

The legend goes the ancient inkeeper Procust used to steal from visitors by tying them to an iron bed. Yet on comtemplating with disgust the broken geometry of his "guests" always being taller or shorter than the bed, and the bed being built of solid iron, he proceeded to ease his unease by adapting the people to the bed instead of the bed to the people. Hammer down the joints and stretch the short, chop down the tall. Perfection.

It is in a similar way we work with our abstractions, trying to fit the world in them rather than adapt our thinking to what's in front of us. We know our eternal and unchangeable selves to be abstractions and not real *precisely* because of being eternal and unchangeable, as only a figment of the imagination can be in a world of perpetual motion. Yet when pushed to make both fit, the abstraction feels more solid than solid iron, and the world is soft and chewy, reactive and responsive. The lesson is not that our tools should fit the purpose and not viceversa, but that flesh is more malleable than iron.

We did not make this. We did not make ourselves. A world that could not work without pain, where all creatures and even inanimate substances come strung along by their unchosen nature to avoid pain and seek to reproduce more of themselves. A will-to-live, a will-to-die, a will-to-overpower. A path devised in the hands of a blind raging god that can only lead to catastrophe. Why blame a god when we can blame nature, when we can blame ourselves, when we can blame nature-as-god-as-me. Life is a fate worse than death, yet our deaths solve nothing in the scope of a wailing universe, so many voices screaming in desperation and pain that no atmosphere can contain their sound and results in only silence, silence between the stars. We're lucky there's not more life, we work very hard to make more life, we work very hard to make immortal silicon life to extend the screams of consciousness beyond the stars.

The afterlife is a funny one, the fangs of the demiurge setting the yellow bricks, denying death and replacing it with more life, a complete destruction of our only certainty. Oblivious that the theodicy offers no justification, the crime of punching your face isn't erased when I give you an ice pack. An eternal life of bliss is as meaningless and stupid as a mortal life without bliss. No matter where life takes us, how high the layers of heaven go, the geometry of the world is broken, what's already done can't be made up for, balance is impossible, two rights don't mend a wrong, there will always be a stain. Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One. Two. Why then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky.

Not dissimilar is the more respectable knowledge there's a world that goes on after I die. Subtle, still replaces the fear of death with more life, still crafts a hidden theodicy: the Myth of Progress, the unending march of nature towards a point that retroactively makes sense of it all, as if it wasn't clear what the game aims for. The purpose of a system is what the system does. More and more suffering until the ground collapses. Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O!

I am not forever and the world ends with me. My world, at least, not to be accused of solipsism. This may not be the truth, but it is the truth of the heart, the huge pig heart at the center of everything. The trick is not complete with thinking one's life shall have no end, it is also necessary for the hegelian opposite to live within, for the knowledge we live in the jungle to coexist with eternal life. This is the recurrent inversion I already observed with authenticity and ego, in fractal reocurrence everywhere, as tends to happen for one who wields a tuning hammer. The idealistic layer switching places with the realistic one with confident disavowal. "I know very well there's an afterlife, but...". "I'm not a racist, but...".

"No matter how much you think you love someone, you will step back when their pool of blood edges up too close". We keep fooling ourselves that we're better than we are, we keep fooling ourselves that we've been fooled. What we think we think takes the place of what we think. We hate it here. This phone is here to distract you from your life and you welcome it with open hands. The best moments in your life were those that took you out from the moment. Us knowing life is beautiful requires knowing life is unbearable. Us seeking salvation requires knowing there is no salvation. To traverse the realms of the spirit is to vivisect our animal heart. The goal is not for existence to be mended and for everything to make sense upon being annointed with grace. The better life is given up in the front door. Because that's the counterintuitive thing about awakening in the middle of the horrors of the universe. Not a single one of them is made right, not a single one of them is lessened.

Good news, you don't need it to. The universe doesn't need to make sense. It doesn't need to be mended. Good news, because it won't. You have no need for optimism to disappoint you. Look at the dead eyes in the butchery shop. Your meat is like my meat. Your horrible life is like my horrible life. Equally meaningless, equally unfair, just on different sides of the protective screen. We are all united in this universal brotherhood of suffering. And that's beautiful, but it's also true that there's nothing beautiful about it.

Bibliography

1. Find the references!

Who hasn't killed time? Not as a regrettable accident but as a deliberated murder of minutes. The world doesn't always need us, we don't always need the world. There's a cornucopia of these limino-temporal spaces where all possibilities collapse. Orphanages of raisons de vivre, often in between raisons de vivre, enemies of the jester and clown. We may be missing those now because their obliteration is immediate. The quick slap of the phone, the immediate inattentive vermifuge, the reverberation of all ungulating material of the mental rumen and reticulum. But their danger was very urgent to resolve.

It was paramount, and so it remains, you never ran out of entertaining fuel. As you feel entering the lavatory without your entertainment machine, imagine that same angst stomping on your face, forever. It is urgent you don't decompress your repressed emotions and thoughts, urgent you don't lose your individuality in the myriad of voices that populated your head, urgent that you don't face the meaninglessness of existence —undesirable negativity, devourer of divine positivity-, the realization of your status as an unwanted child of Mother Earth, destitute oversight of the universe at large, which can actually forget to assign you a proper job or relinquish your post. The heart, the great betrayer, keeps beating all the same.

There is no spirituality I've found that faces that fundamental error of the universe, that unforgivable incongruence. For the Creative plans of Yahwe, it's a gap without creation; for Shiva's Lila, it's the ultimate ennui. Only the atheists should see themselves as useless, and yet, "a mirror for the universe to see itself". Bullshit! What need has the universe of looking at itself? Looking pretty on a date with another universe? Nobody understands the metaphors anymore because downtime is just a storytelling device. The obvious literal interpretation is no longer so obviously wrong.

Now the power of electrons brings blackened mirrors to life everywhere, and in your pocket a window to all the information in the universe and endless inane interactions. There's no longer any long evenings where you're not just wasting your life, but it becomes wasted for you without resource. Always something to look at, always something to listen to, always something to read, someone to talk to. The myths of purpose and productivity and reason growing plump in fertile soil, perennials and evergreens.

There's no longer anything to fear. We've won. Time is dead, and we have killed it. In it's endless moving, it can't hurt you anymore. Mechanical hands are the ruler of everything, your turn begins before the sunrise.

I have been looking at this same store door for ten years. Law says my job is to wait, so I wait, and the guardian smiles.

Books I shouldn't read:

1. House of Leaves, Danielewski (Zampanò)

2. Hauntology, Mark Fisher

3. The great illusion, Stephen Hawking

4. Ruler of Everything, Tally Hall (song)

5. Before the Law, Kafka, as inside The Process.

6. 1984, Orson Wells.

"Candy says, I've come to hate this body and all that it requires in this world" ~Anohni

The human body demands work for it's maintenance. Difficult to say if women were considered second class citizens because their social roles relegated them to care and nurture the material existence of the members of the household, or if the platonic disgust for material reality was an extension of their misoginy. The world of politics and ideas, over which men ruled, was the important one, and our embodied existence, a mere hindrance in the journey of the soul.

The power of volition, unique of the levers of the mind capable of slightly modifying the position of muscle, they wanted to be supreme. As such invented all kinds of magicks and rituals, falsely attempting to establish that superiority, to no avail. Because matter is not to be subordinate to a single individual's mind. The influence goes in the opposite direction, with drunkenness and disease impairing and conditioning mental functions. This desire has never left us regardless. Even for most material atheists, the aspiration to become a disembodied ghost in the machine is more than apparent. It's in fact the final goal, the horrific endgame.

Many have taken a jab against this notion, Nietzsche and his hammer most prominently, but I find Mishima and his mysticism of flesh and steel the most iconic (blahblah you'd like this guy). Being a writer, rejected all kinds of intellectualization as intrinsically alienating from direct experience, and the moments of extreme physical exertion as the only road to salvation. Everything we define as eternal and unchanging is necessarily a product of the imagination, since the world is defined by constant change. Didn't spare him from the despair of seeing his own body deteriorate with age, as it had become of so much value in his philosophy, and it came with certain warmongering tendencies.

The mistake is that the poison was infecting all the same because it unadvertedly accepts the false dychotomy. The platonic dualistic ontology of opposing mind and matter. Yet everything we perceive and know about matter is also an appearance on the mind, as much as the mind's contents get influences by the brain's physiology. The famed inner kingdom is not detached from anything else, but in conversation with it all.

Give a bar of gold as an example. The modern platonist would say the actual metal isn't important, but that the social construction is what gives it value and makes it function like it functions. The modern antiplatonist would say the value is an invention, society is crazy, it's just a malleable metal. Both would be wrong. The properties of the actual material and the ideoform that replaces it, both are needed for a complete understanding of the totality.

The vessel we are for the untainted souls we believe we are. When will the prospect of uploading our consciousness to a digital circus become unappealing in it's deeply understood absurdity? When will we make peace with the having to cook and shower and clean and shit and fuck and heave as if liberation liberated from the nominal chopping of the wood and carrying of the water? And when will we stop sending stupid teenagers to take refuge in the contingency of a figurative inner bliss like mythical lotus eaters? Because at that point of putting yourself to sleep at the cost of everything held dear, better to just do drugs.

Bibliography

1. The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt

2. The End of Faith, Sam Harris & Nihil Unbound, Ray Brassier

3. Sun and steel, Yukio Mishima, Intro

4. The Case Against Reality, Donald Hoffman

5. Das Kapital, Marx, Vol. I

6. The Last Messiah, Zappfe

7. SOMA (2015) & The Odyssey, Homer