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Showing posts with label life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life. Show all posts

21 April 2013

On the Indestructability of Things and the Destruction of the World

There are two conditions which must be met in the conceptual praxis of a thing in order for it to be indestructable. It must be a) focused, and b) concept-agnostic.

"Focused" means that the thing has a conceptual coherence with is not overly loose. The conceptual coherence of the thing does not let loose of itself and dissipate. It does not wander, freehand, all over the place, refusing to alight on any kind of an identity. In other words, there must be no internal will or forces which lead to a diffusion of conceptual characteristics. There must be a sense of overriding conceptual unity and coherence.

An example of this kind of diffusion would be shattering a plate. If you shattered a plate, the plate would be destroyed. Plates, therefore, are not indestructable, because they can be shattered. A plate is "focused" because it is created as a work. It has an internal coherence. It is round, it has artwork on it, and it was created using specific techniques. All of these elements came together to form the plate. That is what gives it its focus. It is not, therefore, indestructable because it lacks focus. Rather, it is not indestructable because it lacks concept-agnosticism.

The term "concept-agnosticism" involves a very specific set of words. "Concept" involves an idea with a sense of relatively strict internal coherence. Implied in this word is the idea, mentioned above, of "focus." Concepts always have focus. A thing, in order to be indestructable, must not only be a concept, and hence have focus, but it must also be concept-agnostic. The choice of the second word here is very important.

I could have, but did not, choose the term "a-conceptual." A-conceptual things are things which strictly negate any sense of being a concept, or having concepts. They are non-conceptual. Such things may exist, but the attribute of being non-conceptual is not a primary facet in its indestructability.

I could've also chosen the term "anti-conceptual." This is a different concept altogether. To be anti-conceptual, a thing is opposed to any kind of conceptual coherence at all. It isn't merely that it lacks the attribute of being a concept, but that it repels whatever forces would have it become a concept. To my knowledge, the only things which bother to be anti-conceptual are annoyingly cliche New York artists.

The choice of words, here, are very specific. "Concept-agnostic" implies a certain geometry of related ideas, which work together to make sure that the "focused" and "conceptual" nature of the thing in question remains existent. We could return to the idea of the shattered plate. A shattered plate has lost its focused, conceptual nature. Now imagine if the plate were, in fact, concept-agnostic, in addition to being focused. Whatever the means which attempted to shatter the plate would have introduced a conceptual idea to the plate, but since the plate is agnostic of its own internal conceptual makeup, this means of shattering the plate would not have actually destroyed the plate.

So we can understand a thing's "concept-agnosticism" as a sense of openness to new conceptual ideas with regards to its internal conceptual makeup. The idea is that the thing in question is agnostic of its own internal conceptual makeup. This, of course, allows external concepts which talk to it to contribute to, rather than destroy, its own conceptual makeup.

Naturally, concept-agnosticism is important with regards to the indestructability of a thing, but it is not the whole thing. The thing must also be focused. Simply being agnostic of one's internal conceptual makeup does not allow one to be indestructable, unless something about it defines the thing as an actual concept. A thing which is not focused is not a thing at all, and therefore it is meaningless to apply any kind of attributions to it, or identify it at all, even with regards to its internal concept-agnosticism.

Now, to relate this to the end of the world.

The hippies believed that everything had to be completely concept-agnostic. My opinion is that this aspect of the movement can be traced not to the idea of Prajnaparamita and Buddhism, but to the influence of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (and perhaps also to certain aspects of the Hindu yogic tradition, though I haven't studied that very much). The Golden Dawn were a group of occultists who came about near the end of the 19th century. However, by all appearances, in the course of their studies of the occult, these folks became frightened of the significance of their own discoveries. As a result, they moved more and more towards a strict insistence on concept-agnosticism, and respect and reverence for imaginary deities which didn't really exist. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Golden Dawn has since fractured and fallen apart. They were not indestructable, because they had no focus. (It's important to note, I think, that modern Paganism and Neo-Paganism, as well as most Wicca, and other magical orders, are descendants of the Golden Dawn.)

It's not surprising that studies in occultism would lead people to become frightened of their own discoveries. There is a well-established link between magical practice and psychosis. Crowley (as it appears) drove his first wife insane, and she ended up in a mental hospital. People who take magic seriously often fall prey to the psychiatrists. The reason is the link between psychosis and magical practice. And the reason for this link is the obvious similarity between psychosis and power. The purpose of magic is to gain primary, mental control over the external world. Wiccans will deny this, and anti-Illuminati sentiment among Wiccans is very strong. But really, they don't know what they're talking about.

The exact same thing can be said about people who practice pedophilia, or Ritual Satanic Abuse, and so forth. Such people recognize their attraction to little boys or girls (or whatever), and they discover the correct way to exercise their desires and "get away with it," but they become afraid of the significance of their discoveries. The karmic result of this is magical suffering and/or psychosis.

Naturally, we can relate the idea of magical practice itself to the creation of the world, or at least to the creation of a "world order." But we also have to relate all this to the destruction of the world. Hopefully, we can all understand the link between magical practice and psychosis. And now, we may be able to understand the creation of a "world order" to psychosis as well. In my vast experience with psychosis (which I have experienced to a great degree and still experience from time to time), the most important thing to do to heal yourself from its grip is to kill yourself a little bit. If you're feeling psychotic, the only way to heal is to kill yourself with something like alcohol or sleep medications. Naturally, you don't have to physically die, but we all know what alcohol and sleep medications do: they destroy the ability of the brain to hold onto itself. If you introduce this sort of drug into your system, you'll begin to lose control of your mindstream. This is essential to healing from psychosis, because the essence of psychosis is too much control over your own mindstream.

Psychiatrists, unfortunately, might claim that there is no difference at all between psychosis and magical practice. This is not the case. There is a difference, but the difference is subtle. Magical practice is first-mental control over the external world. Psychosis is mental control over your own mindstream. (Yoga, too, is different. My understanding is that yoga is primarily external control over one's own mindstream.)

In terms of personal experience, we can identify two broad categories for each phenomenon (magical practice and psychosis). You can have magical practice which is natural, and magical practice which is suffering. Likewise, you can have psychosis which is natural, and psychosis which is suffering. I've already explained the way to heal from the suffering form of psychosis (by killing yourself a little bit). The way to heal from the suffering of magical practice is similar. You have to break things up a little bit, externally. Now I don't mean you have to destroy things. All I really mean is that you have to get a little dirty. You have to invite in a little bit of dirt, and allow a modest and measured amount of "probing" from other beings external to yourself. You have to make changes, compassionately, in a way that doesn't hurt people. In other words, if the words in the books you read begin to look more like shadows than words, the solution is to let other people read them, and then discuss it. Or to read different books.

If you look back over my blog, and if you're friends with me and read my personal correspondences, you may notice a recurring theme of myself calling for the destruction of the world. If you analyze the reasons why I'm saying these things, the picture should become clear. I call for destruction of the world when there is far too much control involved in the way the world works. That is why the world must be destroyed. Now I don't indulge in conspiracy theories, and I don't believe that anyone who attempts to control the world must be killed, or anything like that. However, it's obvious, if you think about it, that the compassionate thing to do when someone has too much control over the world is to destroy the world a little bit. Otherwise, it looks too much like suffering—suffering which is relevantly similar to psychotic suffering.

You may also jump to the conclusion that I'm talking about "The Illuminati." That is, when I call for the destruction of the world, the attack is directed at the upper echelons of whatever secret organization you think I'm referring to whenever I talk about "The Illuminati." This is nonsense. There is no such thing as an organization that has only a single member. And in any organization, some members are more advanced morally than others. And in any case, there are different kinds of organizations who call themselves "The Illuminati." And regardless, I may not even be talking about such groups as The Illuminated Seers of Bavaria or The Freemasons or the O.T.O. and so forth. I could just be talking about a specific coven of Witches, or perhaps scientists, cult leaders, or psychiatrists. It's obvious when I'm talking about the destruction of the world (synonymous here with the destruction of the "world order") what I'm talking about is the destruction of the controlled world order of whoever it is that is creating a world which is identical with a world of suffering.

As a matter of fact, whenever I say these things about the destruction of the world, it's probable that I'm talking about psychiatrists, or rapists. Rapists have the potential to cause people to become psychotic. Psychiatrists dedicate their lives to committing genocide against people who are psychotic. A rapist will call in psychiatry in order to snuff out someone who they've raped, so that their voice is never heard. Or, psychiatry, on its own accord, will sniff out someone who is psychotic (perhaps because of previous rape) and due to their hateful nature snuff them out on their own. Each group, the rapists and the psychiatrists, have created their own, neat little world order, and each world order must be destroyed, to the extent to which is enough to cease magical suffering.

The problem, in all cases, with each of our "world orders," is a lack of either sufficient focus, or concept-agnosticism. To use my own world order as an example, if I elect to completely forget about trauma, and forget about my own psychosis, and to give up on my ambitions regarding my sociality and possible future family life, career, and so forth, I will lose focus. If, on the other hand, I retain too much contact with people who try to control my life, or if I do too much to control all exigencies regarding personal finances, creation of artwork, and so forth, I will lack concept-agnosticism.

08 April 2012

A Trippy Thought

Here's a trippy thought: I've noticed in dreams when you are tasked with remembering something, and you remember it twice, the words are actually different both times, yet it's the same thing. What if reality were like that? What if in every moment everything merely feels like normal "reality," when in fact last moment's "reality" wouldn't even make sense in this moment?

23 February 2012

Some Thoughts on an Age of Aquarius Part 4: Psychiatrists

All parts include: Part 1: Ignorance; Part 2: Seduction; Part 3: Compassion; Part 4: Psychiatrists; Part 5: Hacking vs. Lying.

Psychiatrists

In my opinion, psychiatrists are the single biggest threat to any open society in alignment with the principles of openness. They represent a perversion of every principle of openness. (I'm referring to my Principles of Openness.)

  1. They appear not to, but they represent an undue extension of authority. They appear not to because anyone, presumably, can become a psychiatrist. And psychiatrists can change careers, move between jobs, etc. The position appears to be open. But. It's open to everyone except the most important person—YOU. YOU cannot become your own psychiatrist. YOU have no authority over what the psychiatrist diagnoses and prescribes. Psychiatrists affect you. But they have no formal accountability to you. By all rights, if you need to change psychiatrists, you should be able to, but all to often, you can't. And in cases where you can, like in Portland Oregon, psychiatrists actively oppose any peer-run psychiatry clinics on the fundamental belief that psychiatric patients should have no say in who gets to treat them.
  2. They appear not to, but they represent closing off the ability to participate. Psychiatrists work under the common assumption that they're doing good science. And that their experiments are not a "black box" in any sense. "Black boxes" are strictly forbidden in any open system, and the institution of Western science is such a system. But. There are multiple black boxes in psychiatry. First, there's the black box of the observed. The observer can observe the symptoms, and describe them, but she has no idea what they signify. No psychiatric science ever has been able to describe what symptoms signify beyond subjective and arbitrary labeling, and the ASSUMPTION that this labeling represents a license to take complete control over all aspects of the patient's life. Then, there's the black box of the symptoms themselves. No one has any idea what theoretical basis drives the symptoms and their respective diagnoses. They're just arbitrary labels.
  3. They appear not to, but they hold secrets. When you go into a psychiatrists office, since psychiatry is supposed to be a science, and medical, and approved by society, you'd expect no shady secrecy going on in your interactions with psychiatrists. But. Psychiatrists LIE as a normal part of their profession. As much as they may try to convince themselves otherwise, they know that there is no scientific basis for their diagnoses and prescriptions. So if a psychiatrist knows you have depression but no psychosis, and they want to prescribe you an anti-psychotic, they will LIE to the authorities to do so. And if they think you need to be hospitalized but they don't feel they have sufficient evidence to prove you're a danger to yourself or others, they will misrepresent, bullshit, and LIE to get you institutionalized. And most importantly of all, if they feel you don't deserve to know what they're deciding on your behalf, they will LIE to you to keep it secret.

I cannot stress enough how much psychiatry is the antithesis of openness. It is the biggest long-term threat to our democracy. Already, children are being medicated simply because they defy authority. They are being medicated under the pretext of an invented illness because they're bored. THESE are the change-makers, who are being snuffed out due to this travesty of science. And furthermore, since the institution of psychiatry seeks full autonomy in deciding whether to incarcerate or otherwise control people with "mental illness" on a whim, based on their "objective" (read: patently subjective) diagnoses, we can all expect key activists, politicians, and change-makers to be locked up for invented illnesses, just like they do in Russia, if we allow psychiatry any more legal leeway. Republicans already like to say Liberalism is a "mental illness." Surprise surprise. Psychiatry is an illegitimate institution—the product of Western obsession with control and a repressive and arbitrary suppression of the use of psychoactive drugs for psychological (and not psychiatric) purposes.

Some Thoughts on an Age of Aquarius Part 3: Compassion

All parts include: Part 1: Ignorance; Part 2: Seduction; Part 3: Compassion; Part 4: Psychiatrists; Part 5: Hacking vs. Lying.

Compassion

Due to the fact of the two previous points, particularly the first, it is necessary to insist on higher standards for compassion. Yes, that means compassion for murderers, rapists, adulterers, kidnappers, drug dealers, and so on and so forth. We all like to villainize people for certain things. But the fact of the matter is, you never know anymore whether the information is accurate, or whether the act was more pitiable than hateful. At the very least, I tend to think we should be even more careful not to judge. Cyberbullying is a terrible risk with the Internet.

Some Thoughts on an Age of Aquarius Part 2: Seduction

All parts include: Part 1: Ignorance; Part 2: Seduction; Part 3: Compassion; Part 4: Psychiatrists; Part 5: Hacking vs. Lying.

Seduction

This is the easy one. Everybody knows about this. There are two parts here: 1) You might be enticed to do things you don't want to do that will hurt you, and 2) you might be enticed to do things you do want to do that will hurt you.

In the first, I'm talking about pornography and death. An unmonitored child (and the fact is, whether you like it or not, every child is unmonitored at some point) WILL eventually access pornography and death. I did myself as a child. (Well, pornography. Not too fond of death.) I tend to think there are natural (or if not natural, cultural) barriers in humans against doing things that are evil, like having sex with young children or killing someone for sport. But the fact of the matter is, a couple of bozos out there will at some point decide to rape kids and kill people—and put it on the Internet. And as meticulous as Google is about weeding out the negative images out there, I myself, through no fault of my own, have come across fecal-play pornography and a corpse in the street with knives all over sticking out of him. I searched for completely unrelated terms, and those images popped up. You can't fight it: it will happen. Only you can figure out what to do.

In the second, I'm talking about scams. The Internet has ubiquitous access. This means you can use Google+ to access new friends and business contacts. However, it also means you may access a scam. Obviously, a scam will hurt you, even though you may want to participate. That's how scams work: They make you want to participate, then screw you and it hurts. The thing is, though, that at least partly due to the nature of the Age of Aquarius, these scams are becoming more insidious. I myself was part of one for a while. I saw an ad that advertised, "Free MacBook!" I knew it was probably a scam, of course. But the ad was in Facebook, and I found it hard to believe that Facebook would allow something illegal to enter their site. So I decided to check it out. I was clicking along, and it asked me if I wanted trial versions of products they had to offer. I clicked yes, thinking that "trial" implies "free." But I didn't read the fine print. The fine print said, essentially, that if I kept the product and did not act to cancel my contract, the site would send me monthly supplies of the same item, whether I asked for it or not, and charge my account the exorbitant prices they asked for the stuff—mostly useless crap like vitamins for pets laced with caffeine. I got myself out of the thing, but only after spending a good sum of money for no good reason except curiosity.

Curiosity may lead to disturbing things. Some may argue that it's better not to have access to any scams, pornography, or death, but I think the positive aspects of the Internet outweigh the negative. Ubiquitous access, when vetted properly, can be used to advance one's career and enrich one's life. Turning Art is a great way to access emerging artists. I love it, though it costs a lot. But hey, so does art.

Some Thoughts on an Age of Aquarius Part 1: Ignorance

All parts include: Part 1: Ignorance; Part 2: Seduction; Part 3: Compassion; Part 4: Psychiatrists; Part 5: Hacking vs. Lying.

Ignorance

The Internet has to do with completely open information. There is no unopen information on the Internet, because even if you hide things, by virtue of being "on the Internet," it can be found. Unfortunately, this has it's problems.

For one thing, there are certain pieces of information which aren't true. I ran into this problem on Facebook just recently when my friend Gideon caught me in an untruth. I had shared a picture of an indigenous South American who was crying, purportedly because the Brazilian government refused to listen to him, and moved forward with a plan which would destroy his homeland. Actually, he was crying because it was his cultural practice to cry when visited by distant relatives. I had shared the picture assuming everything said about it was true, when in fact, it was not. Which brings me to a point about the age of Aquarius: information is everywhere, but it isn't vetted by any authority. Therefore, it unfortunately may be false. Thus there still needs to be some respect for the authority of facts, or information will become meaningless. This is ignorance of individual things.

There is another kind of ignorance at play on the Internet. Because you have access to ubiquitous information, you may be lulled into a kind of false sense of security and believe you know all the truth when you in fact are ignorant. This is a general kind of ignorance. This happened to me too.

Back when Fukushima melted down, I found a website with very studied and learned people who came to the conclusion that Fukushima was essentially a media lie. Meaning, Fukushima posed no danger to the public, while a corrupt Western media continued to repeat maliciously that it did. They went to great lengths to secure their own trusted media outlets, and stream several of them simultaneously, watching and taking notes. They also studied the blueprints of the Fukushima reactor in depth, and proved why a core meltdown would be completely impotent in terms of human danger. Needless to say, this was all wrongheaded. The facts came to light, and, of course, Fukushima is now known as one of the more serious nuclear accidents in history. The people, including myself, who participated in this orgy of fact finding were not wearing the condoms of skepticism.

Both these kinds of ignorance result directly from the democratic nature of ubiquitous information. One should be careful about aquarian information, and make sure it is in fact correct.

23 July 2008

Joke

This life is a joke, and nobody's laughing.