Theoconceptor

here’s another page out of the neoplatonist playbook:

in the works of Proclus, and psuedo-Dionysus, who was evidently a student of proclus, (and did us all the favor of injecting platonism into early christianity, thus preventing the collapse of christian metaphysics into incoherent gibberish for about a thousand years) there’s a lot of concern with correct naming.

What kind of naming? Divine naming. The names one ascribes to god. Both proclus and dionysus give a tremendous amount of effort to making sure that people know how to correctly name and conceive of the creator.

Now, at first glance, it’s hard to imagine why this might be important. Especially for jaded post-moderns like us who instinctively recoil from arbitrary labeling and controlling of definitions on the part of ‘authorities’. But there’s more to this than one might realise.

Now let’s remember that in the platonic schema, intelligibility is the bridge between soul and god. That reason and intellect in the highest sense is how the individual personality can come to know true being. So having incorrect, incoherent, or contradictory ideas can be a real problem. And the higher the station that these incorrect ideas occupy, the worse the problem gets.

For that reason, according to plato, in the republic, the worst possible thing that a person can do is hold false ideas about god. Because when you’re talking about god, you’re talking about the nature of ultimate reality, and thus whatever ideas happen to occupy this position will influence all the others. If you have an idea of god as cruel, capricious, arbitrary, as having contradictory qualities, as embodying principles that diminish the good, or the one, this can only reverberate down through one’s whole being.

In a lesser way, having incomplete or inaccurate notions of the one ( the preferred platonic term for god) can also cause confusion. So proclus and dionsysus both describe a descending chain of titles and attributes, down from the most perfect one-in-itself, to the transcendent maker, the logos, the holy trinity and whatnot. Each of these has appropriate uses and implications that follow from those uses, and all subordinate in their correct order to the one-in-itself. Treating them as interchangeable, or worse, identical, is asking for trouble. Just like any other sophisiticated technical field, theology requires a precise language and terminology and that terminology has to be used in the correct way. Just as scientific jargon cannot be thrown around arbitrarily, so too with theology. If, that is, you want to get the correct result.

Not doing so can only result in the kind of muddled mess that we experience now where you have every kind of half baked theology and wrong headed conception of ultimate reality imaginable. What do you suppose the implications are for all these fundamentalist christians, who think of their god as an immanent, vengeful all knowing father figure who observes and judges them at all times, and is gearing up to scourge the world with fire? Or daft neo-pagans, who somehow equate spirit with nature, which even real old time ‘pagans’ didn’t do, so far as we know. If that’s your understanding of ultimate reality, or the highest creative principle, then how does that affect your self image, your sense or purpose or responsibility, your use of reason, your emotional and spiritual maturity? It’s serious. This is the kind of sickness proclus and dionysus in particular, saw latent in religion, and hoped to avert. Neo-platonic notions of god were adopted by the early christian church, judaism/ kabbalah, and down through islam, bahaism, and even the more exotic branches of esoterism like hermeticism, which all together spawned what we think of as the western occult traditions. In one form or another they’ve all adopted the idea of god as the infinite unmanifest principle that provides for all existence, in the same manner as the platonic good.

You can find the analogous theological principle in buddhism, which has the noble eightfold path, as the road to liberation. What’s the first one…? Skillful views. Holding correct beliefs, because what you believe will determine everything you do, or think that you can do. So again, what you believe are the highest truths of reality, or not, make all the difference.

neotany

Some times the structure of my ideas gets a bit stifling, which is usually a sign that I’m getting off track, so let’s just do a little bit of stream of consciousness kinda thing to loosen up a bit.

I’ve been enjoying the work of pierre grimes rather a lot lately, and one of the cornerstones of his method, derived, one presumes, from the platonists and neoplatonists, is an involved process of dream interpretation, ( also, likewise, of daydreams, with a similar method).

It’s hard to distinguish too clearly between what he does and how, and what someone like like jung or freud was doing, except maybe that grimes is resolute in the conviction that the working of the mind are intelligible, and that there is an intelligible order to everything the mind does. The themes and motifs of the dream are always relevant to one’s present circumstances, and indicate where one might be blocked. Identifying these blockages, and the false beliefs that underpin them, are the ideal goal of the practice.

I know for myself that I’ve had several themes reoccur in my dreams for quite a few years now.  Some of them quite insistant, such as finding myself back in high school, while knowing full well that I had graduated. I had mostly presumed that these dreams reflected the resentment I had towards high school and the people in it ( especially the teachers), but I now find myself making plans to go to college, and needing to actually take some high school courses I didn’t bother with at the time to meet the entrance requirements. I could theoretically take them for free at the college itself, but it would conflict with my work schedule, so it seems I’ll be taking them in the evening at an actual local high school…and wouldn’t you know it, but the dream hasn’t reoccurred since then.

It’s odd to imagine that there’s a part of your mind that is constantly trying to feed you personally relevant information, and yet you keep ignoring it, for the most part, all of the time. This is no secret to hypnotists, occultists, or psychotherapists, but to actually realise that on some level you’re making plans, formulating goals, and steering yourself towards them, in a state of ignorance is a pretty amazing thing to experience, and not just think about.

It makes me wonder how far that principle can be extended. alchemy is really about the reconciliation of opposites, with various symbols standing in for mind, soul, god, male, female, living and dead, past and future etc etc… and really that reconciliation is just a recognition that the barriers you put up between those things were provisional constructions that you were always meant to grow out of.  And that all the pain and suffering of life is your unwillingness to endure a natural growth process.

But it’s not really surprising that so few people endure a healthy natural ongoing growth process, because there are rather few examples of it actually happening in the world today. Our fantasy lives are telling: they oscillate between the infantile and the adolescent for the most part: power, sex, self importance, oral gratification, comfort and nesting, dominance, rampant egotism. These are natural at certain stages, for the child, for the young  adult, but after awhile it mutates into pathology.

For instance, the ever growing sexual obsession with barely pubescent girls? It’s not an explosive growth of predatory paedophilia; it’s more likely a sign of more and more people failing to achieve a sexual maturity beyond an early adolescent stage. Prolonged long enough, that could certainly mature into a predatory pathology, which I suppose expresses in our proxy sacrifice of the likes of Brittany Spears.

And why the failure to mature? As we said, a lack of role models, and a lack of clear transitional events. If society lacks the pressure to cross the death-rebirth threshold of initiation ( of any kind ), then the only possible outcome is eventually there are too many children and not enough adults. The children will, by nature, thrust all the responsibility on to those they perceive to be adults, or at least, a passable facsimile.

So naturally the power in such a society devolves to those who can best imitate adults without  actually being one themselves, in whatever context. So the whole thing turns into a stasis. The correct word is neotany. A bunch of emotional and intellectual children ruled by faux adults, all trying desperately to avoid a real test that would necessitate real growth. The epidemic of cynicism, disaffection, fantasy projection, escapism, drug use…mostly just a way to avoid a real ego death that would cause you to grow as a person. Also it makes sense that such a society would be heavily controlled, manipulated and rigged from every angle. That’s the only way to make sure nothing shows up to challenge the false ideas of psychologically stunted  people: stage manage the so-called challenges as best as possible or make sure they are so trivial that there’s no chance of failure.

Of course, when you’re talking about people whose picture of reality is severely stunted, their ability to recognize reality well enough to even avoid it is doubtful. Rather than a life full of minor experiences of ego death that would naturally lead to a full shedding of the ego -identification, you get a persistent pattern of completely avoiding it in any way whatsoever.  So it’s pretty likely the apparent situation will oscillate wildly from stage managed absurdity to abject horror with little rhyme or reason. The whole thing would be colored by an exaggerated shadow projection of the ego death experience, to the point of paralysis and abject infantilism.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Some Convenient Bullshit: Zero Democracy

Well, what’s left?

Anyone with a little bit of time can easily dissect most of the anthropocentric global warming hysteria, whether it be their shaky grasp of elementary physical principles, their unsettling demagogy, their ludicrous postulates ( if thus and so happens five or ten times faster than we’ve ever observed it to do, then we’ve got a real problem… so do something!!! yeah whatever…. )

But here’s a real underlying symptom, and it’s bound to show up in other places, even if this crap blows over, and it has to do with what real democracy is, and real science, and the difference, and the relationship between those two, accounting for those differences.

The way democracy is supposed to work, and by this I mean representative democracy, which is what most of us are supposed to have, is that the populace elects leaders who are of the highest possible intellectual, moral, and philosophical development. Nobody really wants ‘one man, one vote’ in the litteral sense, where we get the lowest common denominator or public opinion. No. We want leaders who will put forth a higher standard of understanding and character, which we can rally behind. We vote on who we think will best represent what is best in us.

So even in politics, this is not mob rule, and consensus is to be feared, not embraced. Even so, if the idea of consensus or popular opinion prevails, that’s still not a complete disaster.

For something like true ‘popular’ democracy to work, it presupposes an informed population. It’s almost tautilogical that to make correctly informed decisions, one has to be correctly informed. The more people you expect to include in the body of correct information, the harder it gets. This is the main reason why ‘true’ litteral democracy doesn’t work, and why nobody in their right mind actually wants it. It’s hard enough to keep the relatively small number of elected representatives in the loop, let alone the whole population.

But it seems like some segment of the scientific community wants to not only run science this way, but to then extend that brand of science into the political domain. They figure if you can marshall enough popular opinion in the scientific community that you must be right, and that politcal authority should then follow in the footsteps of this.

But as we’ve seen, even politics is not supposed to work that way, and certainly not science.

Science is not a democracy, in any sense, at all, whatsoever. It makes no difference if 20, 200, 2000, 20 000 scientists agree on something. None. The only thing that makes any difference is who has done the experiment, and who is adequate to interpret the results. If only 3 of those 20 000 are able to do the experiment, and have the background to interpret the results, then the opinions of the other 19 997, are not only worthless, but they shouldn’t even be solicited. It can only lead to confusion. SCIENCE IS NOT A DEMOCRACY. If you don’t have the grounding, YOU DON’T GET TO VOTE.

So, when the global warming movement tries to trot out some poorly conceived models and dubious conclusions, and proclaims that they have a ‘consensus’ behind them, no matter how large this supposed consensus is, you can rightly tell them to piss off. Ask them how many of those people are actually qualified to check the math.

And really, they know it’s shaky science. They must know, because rather than pursue the normal channels of peer review, they’ve elected to ‘take it to the streets’.
It seems that in lieu of real proof, that they will settle for stampeding public opinion.

Even democracy doesn’t work like that, or at least, it’s not supposed to. You’ll critcise the demogoguery of the war on terror and then happily indulge in the same tactics when it comes to global warming. It smacks of fascism, where the great leaders mobilise their street fighting rabble to help them seize power, on the basis of what? Pure bullshit.

If we start to run the world on the basis of consensus, we can only exepct the lowest common denominator. At best.

At worst, it’s really the lowest common denominator of what the rabble rousing demagogues can warm over for public consumption. That sort of shit is no good for politics, or science, or society in general. Do we really want mob rule? Do we really want science by shouting match? Do we really want to finish off any semblance of representative democracy in this world? Are we so eager to surrender any hope of rising above the ape theatre of misinformed
chanting idiots?

Does anyone seriously think that a factual scientific and political debate is going to be resolved in the right way, by taking it out in to the street? Has that ever happened before? If you actually think this, you need your fucking head examined.

Rather, maybe you should focus your efforts on making sure the system works the way it’s supposed to. When you do, you will find, suprise, suprise, that the people who see to it the system doesn’t work properly, are some of the same ones who now want to take advantage of it.

This is how fascism works, you fucktards; destroy the credibility of the system and then use that as a pretext for assuming unprecidented powers. Do I really need to tell anyone this? Are our memories this short? I realise most people have the attention spans of fruitflies, but the current pitifull state of our governance didn’t just happen, and now you want to ‘fix’ it, by appealing to the public, and building ‘consensus’? You should have fucking fixed it a long time ago! The solution is not some hysterical media animal show.

You really think that this sort of thing is going to result in a clean peacefull green utopia? It will like hell. Once you open that door to the chanting throng, once you’ve aroused that wave of fervour, you’ll have the reign of terror, not planet goretex, and it’ll be followed by much much worse. Some estimates of what would happen under a ‘green populist’ world government, have population crashing by upwards of one half, and that’s assuming that the ‘green vanguard’ can actually steer what they’re trying to unleash, which is debateable.

I would suggest you take a look at what the majority opinion of the public is on a number of issues besides global warming, before you get too invested in ’saving the earth’ this way. You may find you’re doing just the opposite.

House Cleaning

Some brief updates:

-I’m back up to 174, so I won’t die anytime soon. I’m off pop, candy and other junk foods. Feels good.

-more podcasts coming soon. recording them this week, editing them next week, and you’ll start to see them the week after.

- you may notice some old things dissappearing. just a few, but there’s a reason. I thought it was time to start a traffic in apocrypha, rarities and b-sides, lol. more on this later.

- a couple more missives on the global warming thing, and then I’m done with it. Like primitivism, anthropocentric global warming hysteria will eventually collapse from it’s own internal contradictions. I’ve given it some small push in that direction, and that’s all I wanted to do. After a while debating crap science and unsupportable genocidal postulates is like debating eugenics or something. You degrade yourself by even arguing it. Nothing I’ve seen or heard since I started has changed that.

the octagonal dipyramid at the end of history…

Well, seeing as how I’m on another futurism kick lately, I thought we’d play a little game, suggested by the laboritarian.

It’s rather simple: we pick a few of the most important variables that effect the future. Let’s say four, for the sake of brevity. I’m prepared to entertain others, but for our purposes I’d say the big four for this century are energy, technology, population and climate. You may come up with a different or more nuanced list, but I’m willing to say that those others are mostly, and will mostly, be determined by the first four. I’d say politics and economics are more a function of energy and technolgy than determinants in and of themselves, for instance.

In each case we come up with a best case and worst case scenario. Lets say for energy, the best case scenario is limitless free energy from some magnetic Steorn widget or some-such, or simply another middle east found under the hills of Wichita, or something. The worst case is the peak oil and gas hypothesis, specifically the olduvai gorge thesis, which more or less states that the lifespan of industrialised civilisation is 100 years. After which we cascade down a thermodynamic cliff into the stone age. We repeat this best case/ worst case for all the chosen variables.

Now if we do this just once it’s kind of digital, and one dimensional. If we apply two variables simultaneously we end up with a grid of four possible futures. And if we include four variables, which I think are the minimum to even begin to apprehend the scope of complexity available to us, we have 2×2x2×2= 16 possible futures.

So before we start, I’m prepared to hear out some thoughts on what other, more pressing variables might be, and if they’re radically different than these, some thoughts on what a best/worst case might consist of…

Otherwise, let the fractal chaos commence!

Evolution by the Numbers: Number Twelve

number twelve: start counting your breaths

 At any point when you aren’t preoccupied by something else, either walking or sitting, put your attention on your breaths and start counting them. Even the actual numbering isn’t that important, but if you lose track of the numbers it’s a good sign to reapply your attention.

 The nice thing about this is that you don’t need to know why this works, only that it will. Learning some of the subtle changes in focus will make it go quicker, but it’s just as likely you’ll figure them out yourself.

  Besides sharpening your concentration and calmness, this is a natural doorway into some profound meditative states, and with practice you can carry this anywhere doing almost anything.

  There is literally nothing else you need to know to become a master meditator. If you spend enough time with this process all else becomes clear. The only caveat is that it takes most people several years to really take off doing it this way, so I wouldn’t cut you loose on that alone. That said, the only reason it usually takes several years is that most people spend most of that time trying to avoid actually doing the practice.

  So do as you will.

Augoeides Day 16: The Mask of Bones

  Here is where we fill out our vision, and the description of the denizens thereof. This image is of kendo helmet, and it’s not what I saw, but it will help you understand what I did see, if that makes any sense.

 A choir of angels, or maybe the cenobites. Or maybe both.

In retrospect this may end up being how the angel presents itself, even if the initial impact is somewhat misleading. So feast your ears, guys and gals.

 Direct download: AUG15-mask_of_bones.mp3

podcast page here

Retorts and Rarefactions

..just a wee bit of housekeeping today.

 I’ve revised my blogroll a little bit, as I thought it a bit unfair to not make a distinction between those sites that are still up and running versus those that have gone dormant. ‘Not dead, but dreaming’ will now denote those sites that have a rich body of work that has concluded for the time being.  If it’s still here, then it’s worth your time, but for the novelty junkies the party has gone elsewhere.

 I’ve never felt the need to be one of those sites that must link to everything and everyone. part of my role that i take seriously, is to filter what’s out there and let people know what’s cogent to me and, if they happen to share my taste, to them.

  The ground zero category is the stuff I read most everyday, or friends, or simply sentimental value. you decide which.  If you’ve linked to me at some point, you will probably pass through ‘my house is your house’.  just so we’re clear, right.

   And for the real social networking pimps, you will be pleased to know I’ve established a junta on myspace, and am in the progress of becoming a ‘featured artist’ there. Who knows how that will go, but I thought it would be fun to IM some of ya’ll and have my stuff playing when you get there. In the meanwhile, if you have music up on myspace and you’d like me to put it up there, then let me know. for the rest of y’all, if you’re so inclined, then by all means ‘add’ me.

I’m also conducting an experiment to see how many ‘friends’ I can accumulate by being as confrontational and abusive as possible. I’m fascinated by the difference between the sort of ‘peer-esteem’ type dynamic that these sites are supposed to run on versus what it is they really do. The purpose of a system is what it does, kids. tattoo it on your forehead backwards so you can see it in the mirror.

there will be a test later.

God is not mocked, He knows our Business

    While i wait for my file hosting service to get unfucked, I thought I'd continue my habit of sharing all the interesting/unsettling/edifying materials I've got in the footlocker.

   Long overdue is a link to what i think is the very best text on meditation and buddhist style practice anywhere, Daniel Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. This is hard core stuff for hard core practice. There is way more detail and precision of language here than you will ever need to achieve your meditation and insight goals. all the traditional states, their names, and how to get there on a predictable time table. the only danger is losing your shit completely, and he goes into that as well. pure gold, right in the bank.

   and courtesy of channel null, if you aren't down with the the viking youth power hour, you are fucked in the head. Imagine a group of accomplished adepts pretending to be drunken idiots. or maybe they are drunken idiots. or maybe they're ascended masters, guiding us all to the pure land. penetrate the mystery here.

   And i think it's overdue that i give some mad props to mister null himself. not only does he relentlessly pimp my writing for no reward to himself, he's also putting in the work and and he's moving up in the world, unlike many who simply talk shit and conceal their ignorance. he's recently become a made guy in the key23 syndicate and will soon be putting cement shoes on anyone who isn't down with the program of spiritual advancement.   keep your eye on that lot. all chaotes are dodgy bastards, I'm telling you. but i'd rather have them on my side than not.

   you may have noticed or inferred my faltering steps into audio format and podcasting and whatnot. expect that to gather momentum rather quickly. I'm thinking I need a way to shake out the bugs and test the medium, so i tell ya what:

  anyone who wants to fire a question, comment or request for expansion on some point, do it now, in the comments thread and I'll read them and record the answers to be broadcast in about a week's time. do a real mcluhan esque audile/scribal synesthesia type thing. It'll be fun. no topic off limits. the alchemy is in the way we use our brains, my friends, not what you put in them. that's my story and i'm sticking to it.

  …return to more carefull wording and less swearing after i sleep for about 16 hours.

Hit the ground running…

Well, now that the flight from the wailing despair that was blogspot has concluded, we’ll be getting down to buisness as usual again in short order. but in the meantime i need a way to kill a couple days…

 since it seems we’re picking up some new market share in the attention economy, ( i feel slightly soiled even using the term, but I’ll file it under ‘nigredo’ )I thought I’d throw the mic out into the audience.

 feel free to announce yourselves and any general thoughts that do not neccisarily fit in the framework of my essays thus far.  I’m particulary interested to hear from anyone who is confused( hopefully not just in general, but in regards to something on my sites ), or needs something clarified, or has a request for expansion of some points. I’m planning to revisit banishing quite soon, and if there’s anything else you feel could use a second pass, by all means say so. I promise to actually try and reply rather than rain abuse and scorn on you as is my custom.

 otherwise, fire away with links to horse-porn, islamic jihadist recruiting sites, anecdotes from the homework assignments you’ve done up till now, suicidal cries for help, or simply ringing denunciations of myself and everything i stand for. I reserve the right to delete any or all of them without warning, of course.

 and while you’re at it, if anyone is knowledgeable in audio blogging or podcasting I’m intersted in doing something along those lines soon.

   talking shit is so much easier than writing it, dontcha know…