Oeaohoo

I’ve just watched the first half an hour or so of this. I don’t think I can stand to watch anymore... One thing I do agree with him about is that the MAGA movement is not really Conservative. I think we could extend this to say that Thatcherite/Reaganite Neoliberalism was not really Conservative either. The whole purpose of MAGA is to poke fun at the false pretensions of the progressive Left who, after having killed and gutted the institutions of the West, now go around wearing the carcass of these institutions as a skin-suit whilst demanding respect. The respect that they demand is totally parasitic on the dignity of a system which they played little to no part in creating. As such, they don’t deserve any respect; for the most part, they are just useless and entitled managerial bureaucrats. Trump was popular primarily as the King of Trolls. MAGA is supposed to be loose and stupid: this stupidity is a parody of the uptight and self-satisfied smugness of the Progressive left. MAGA seeks to restore what the institutions once were, not to maintain them in their current senility and decrepitude... If Leo really wants to understand the motivations of this strange type of “conservative”, that is what they are! The quote from Michael Oakeshott was a nice choice. Another small thing is that people who criticise modern Conservatism for being full of grifters are completely right… Just look at something like The Daily Wire. The most fundamental thing that I can’t relate to in this type of political analysis is the sense that mere “good faith dialogue” and “steel-men” are going to be anywhere near sufficient to resolve the present political situation. That would be like stopping a tsunami with a surf-board. Sometimes I even wonder if the constant buffet of straw-manning and ritualised enemy-hatred isn’t the only thing keeping this sick society together! Like the Two Minutes Hate in 1984… Nothing unites people better than a common enemy. René Girard spoke about this in his book The Scapegoat.

I’m not really interested in “conspiracies” because it is a term that is constantly exploited for manipulative ends. Certain crackpot conspiracies are sold to gullible Boomers so that the eternal reality of elite-driven change can be obscured in the name of “democracy”… When it isn’t being used for this purpose, the term is generally used to gaslight people for noticing things that they weren’t supposed to notice. The Italian Elite Theorists showed - as if all of history wasn’t enough of a testament to this fact - that “people power” and the “grass roots revolution” are delusions. In reality, power has always been and will always be a matter of tight minority organisation. The people are not and will never be sovereign! Once this reality is internalised, it becomes obvious that our whole conception of “conspiracy” is wrong. Change is always a matter of tight minority organisation! The only question is whether this reality is understood and openly acknowledged or has to be hypocritically denied in the name of “human dignity” and “the will of the people”. In our case, it is an indisputable fact that since the Second World War, tightly-organised minority groups have been immensely influential in shaping political discourse and manufacturing consent. Edward Bernays and others like him laid out the framework for mass manipulation within a “democratic” context in his books Propaganda and The Engineering of Consent. If you are an American, James Burnham repurposed Elite Theory for the modern American context. You might like his books The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom and The Managerial Revolution.

I think there’s a difference between mindless bigotry and discernment. In the thread that you are so obsessed with that you insisted upon digging up from the grave, I was talking about the co-opting of sexuality for the purposes of a political ideology - this is very different to just promoting mindless hatred. The claim I was making - which I repeat, has nothing to do with my penetrating and hilarious parody of a “Stage Yellow Systems Thinker”! - is that sexual identity has been co-opted by power. Identifying with something as petty as your sexuality is a form of “surrogate activity” which is designed to divert people away from identifying with anything more profound. This phenomenon is seen everywhere today: watching sports is a surrogate activity to replace a sense of tribal belonging; going to the gym and lifting weights is a surrogate activity for living an active life; messaging people online is a surrogate activity for having real friends. In our fake plastic world, everything is reduced to a nihilistic parody of itself. Certain forms of surrogate activity, like identifying with your status as a victim group, are useful for another reason: those who do this can be made to believe that, in their own interests, they need to become the most pedantic and belligerent upholders of the globalist regime, which in reality has as much contempt for them as for everyone else. And hasn’t it worked wonders? You are literally the walking testament to what I was describing. Now every public space is patrolled ceaselessly by a mindless police force of spiteful mutants, making sure that everyone is nothing less than one hundred percent committed to the mission of global revolution. Because, your brain having been turned to rot by progressive propaganda, the only alternative you can imagine is: My alternative would just be a society where sexuality hasn’t become a constant low-level obsession, where people identify with more profound things than who they want to have sex with (ideally with the Supreme Identity!), where people have real identities and belong to real communities rather defending the unfulfilling facsimiles of these that have been promulgated by the Empire of Lies.

I didn’t even want to talk about any of these things here. To be quite honest, they are not very important to me. While I was obviously joking about the “Stage Yellow Systems Thinker” thing, there is an element of truth to it, in that I am enough of a “systems thinker” to recognise that I am never going to convince anyone here of my political views. At the risk of sounding like someone who says “I can’t be racist because of my black friend”, some of the people I feel the deepest admiration for were homosexuals: one of my favourite composers Szymanowski, who wrote a whole novel called “Efebos” about homosexuality; the Japanese author Yukio Mishima, who in his books “Forbidden Colours” and “Confessions of a Mask” wrote about the gay underworld in Japan (his book Sun and Steel is one of the best integrations of Nietzsche!); the French surrealist film-maker Jean Cocteau, who was hated by contemporary surrealists mostly for being homosexual (everyone should watch his magical film Orpheus). Ironically, the few gay men that I am personally acquainted with are the most right-wing and reactionary people that I know. You might be surprised to discover that, until recently, the gay underworld was a repository of quite extreme masculinity - almost a cult of physical excellence - in an otherwise feminised world. Gays today have been fooled into thinking that, for their own sakes, they have to become the foot-soldiers of soft totalitarianism. Gay men particularly are in a unique position to criticise society because, unlike straight men, they feel no need to make themselves attractive to women. In the past, this allowed them to offer a perspective on life which was full of wry and dark insights that were otherwise taboo for straight men. In my opinion, this social role was far more dignifying than being reduced to the strictest enforcers of Globohomo ideology. I‘m not opposed to individual gay men. I’m opposed to living in a society which is hell-bent on normalising what is and will always be abnormal. As for globalism, anyone who has read anything of mine will know that I like to refer to traditions from around the world. My opposition to globalism is based on the Perennial Traditionalist criticism of modernity, whose universalist metaphysics, incidentally, was stolen and reappropriated by Wilber. I am not opposed to global unity but to global uniformity, the destruction of the qualitative differences which are the only true dignity of the various peoples of the earth in the name of a bland and homogenising universalism.

I’m not going to react to this. As a Stage Yellow Systems Thinker, I understand that everyone - even you - is just where they need to be. As my spiritual hero says, “Everyone is right.“

Exactly!

I will admit that the thread you linked is probably one of the least convincing things I wrote on this forum. This is probably because I could sense that you are a spiteful mutant who will never be convinced of anything but their own eternal self-righteousness in defending the Empire of Lies. I have a habit of shifting to deliberately provocative rhetoric when I sense that it is pointless to discuss anything further with somebody… My main regret is that I didn’t explain my use of the term “Faustian” very well. “Faustian man” is a useful term that Oswald Spengler used to describe European civilisation since around the time of the Renaissance. “Faustian man” seeks to break down all boundaries, to explore everything and conquer the world. “Faustian man” produced the “Age of Expansion”, the colonial European empires and the Industrial Revolution. Things which I personally view as, for the most part, highly immoral and decadent. Since the Second World War, “Faustian man” has been castrated and as a result has become introverted. His new goal is to break down all boundaries, not of the outer but of the inner world: to explore the endless subdivisions of subjective identity. “Breaking down the boundaries” becomes a matter of breaking down all boundaries of gender, sex and race. This is framed as a “conquest” over bigotry, xenophobia, sexism and so on… Ironically, however, this is all just the conclusion of the same values which produced the horrors of the mercantile imperialism which is now condemned. Transgenderism, as a subset of Transhumanism, is also “Faustian” in the earlier sense. It is the final destination of the technological advances and the conquest of nature that commenced with the Renaissance: man conquering his own nature. Of course, this is a complete inversion and parody of the true conquest of human nature, which is spiritual liberation. Anyway, I doubt that you will be particularly interested in any of this.

Of course not! An advanced Stage Yellow Systems Thinker like me would never waste his time on such trifling trivialities! I could be bestowing my wisdom upon the world right now, enlightening the undeveloped masses and helping to raise them to my advanced level. Trolling is an extremely low-consciousness activity. Though as a Stage Yellow Systems Thinker I know that I am not yet a Stage Turquoise Great Sage, purity of mind is still very important to me. The quality of the systems that I am able to think is substantially diminished by any low-consciousness activities that I engage in. Here is an analogy for you (as a Systems Thinker, I find it very easy to come up with analogies): Imagine a diamond. Now imagine that diamond thrown in the mud. That diamond is me. The mud is low-consciousness.

Ah, the Internet… Full of such beautiful and contemplative souls. This place is practically a virtual monastery! The perfect place for a Stage Yellow Systems Thinker like me. Me too. A world of Stage Yellow Systems Thinkers like me would be just too efficient! There would be no one to look up to me anymore. Who would I be able to bestow my spiritual gifts and powers upon?

You’re probably right. Honestly, this isn’t something I know much about. I remember her speaking about a feedback mechanism between the brain and the external world, whereby the brain is continually (more specifically, recursively) updating its model of the external world. Autism, then, would occur when the brain is not able to update its predictive model quickly enough, perhaps because of an overly intense focus on analysing each particular frame, whereas schizophrenia would occur if the predictive model became extremely sensitive to external input. I think by “over-prediction” she meant more a rigidity in predictive processing, rather than being particularly good at predicting things. This rigidity would also inhibit the capacity to predict things in the material world, just for the opposite reasons as that of a schizophrenic.

…and yet you can be exiled from this progressive society for blaspheming it’s taboos… There’s an old Buddhist joke, “There’s no God in Buddhism, just lists”, referring to the endless lists of “the twelve links of the eightfold path of the fourth root of the Dharma” that you find in Buddhism. I think that today we could say: “There’s no God in progressive societies, just Progress.”

I think it makes sense that young people today are more likely to believe in God. Boomers view everything (and particularly religion!) as “the man trying to keep us down”, whilst Gen-X are just cynical about everything. Remember John Lennon’s song God: “I don’t believe in God, I just believe in me”? Most of the New Atheist intellectuals are either very old or dead. Fedora-tier atheism is a much harder sell nowadays… Also, the older generations are whiter and atheism is mostly a Western cultural phenomenon. Many of those younger people who believe in God are probably Muslims, Christian Africans, Hindus, Sikhs and so on.

When I was at University a student gave a talk on this subject. I don’t remember much except that she related it to the neurological theory of “predictive processing”: autism being a kind of “over-prediction” and schizophrenia “under-prediction”. In other words, the autist struggles to relate to the world because they are stuck inside their own mental model of it, whereas the schizophrenic suffers from the lack of a coherent mental model. This would also explain the over-sensitivity of schizophrenics to external cues, as someone who lacks a coherent mental model of how the world ought to be will be much more sensitive to how it actually is at any given moment. The thing you point out about femininity being more “psychotic” is interesting. At the time, I remember interpreting this autism-schizophrenia relationship as a gendered phenomenon: autism as the extreme male brain and schizophrenia as the extreme female brain. However, while it is true that men are much more prone to autism, it seems that men and women are more or less equally prone to schizophrenia. Regardless, my limited experience is that most women are a bit crazy..!

Interesting video. I hadn't seen this before trying to justify mythology to you through the symbol of the Sun! Funny coincidence. One of the things I find very interesting about the Egyptian myth which Jordan mentions is that Seth, the god of chaos, goes down every night with the Sun to protect it from Apep. This suggests a significant distinction between the snake Apep as Absolute Chaos and Seth as the relative chaos which is the necessary counterbalance to divine Order. I mostly agree with the Jungian critique of Nietzsche's idea of "value creation" which Jordan lays out, except that it overlooks the primarily destructive orientation of Nietzsche's whole project: his "transvaluation of all values" is essentially an attempt to clear away those values which are no longer serving to humanity so as to create the free space out of which new values can emerge. I'm also looking forward to "Snail King", in cinemas soon! I may have been reading H.P. Lovecraft recently...

This is a very utilitarian explanation. Humans do things for so many other reasons than simply making sense of the world. As an example, even assuming that such things don’t exist, people may have worshipped and made offerings to deities simply as an expression of gratitude for their existence. This has nothing to do with cognition! It also overlooks the fact that, for the ancients and even up to the Renaissance, everything in nature was a symbol of a supernatural reality. For example, the Sun was worshipped in many ancient cultures as a permanent reminder of the eternal and undying Truth (Sol Invictus), the purity and incorruptibility of pure Consciousness (like Gold which does not rust), the virtues that characterised Regal nobility (above all, solitary and supreme leadership), and even of the life-giving principle and the male seed (which fructifies the Earth like a man impregnates a woman). These symbolical relationships aren’t really useful for anything, except pointing to the perfectly ordered and “as above, so below” nature of existence.

(Again, not arguing!) I don’t see it as a process of finding out the truth so much as shedding all attachments to anything other than the truth. The truth is staring us all in the face; we just all have our reasons for not wanting to see it…

Fair enough. My only question is: How versatile is your Love if it can’t tolerate a bit of hate? I am not arguing with you here, just responding with my own perspective, but to me it is just the opposite. None of them are me. Not even I as a human am me. I don’t believe (“believe” originally simply meant “to hold dear”) in a pantheistic conception of God because the Absolute is beyond all forms. This is another reason for my polemical effacement of others and my own private self-effacement.

You invalidate what I say by calling it “projection”; I invalidate what you say by calling it “deflection”. What’s the difference? This is the problem with reducing everything to psychoanalytic mind games; something Shubowmurti incidentally loves to do… You say projection, I say deflection - let’s call the whole thing off! As to the main point, I’ll be less rude on this forum. I just like to provoke people into considering a different perspective on things which they think they understand. The more someone is convinced they already understand, the more provocative one has to be!

I’m just offering my perspective. I find that the notion of “projection” is thrown around a lot in spiritual communities without a lot of thought having gone into what it really means, or indeed where the term comes from (the dubious motivations of Freudian psychoanalysis). You aren’t interested in discussing this subject, either because you don’t want to waste your time on me - which is completely understandable, I don’t really want to waste my time on you either - or because you believe that such a discussion could only be falling into “the mind”, which is just typical New-Age brain rot masquerading as spiritual attainment. My sense is that in appealing to “projection” and “the mind playing tricks”, you’re just parroting spiritual platitudes whose real purpose is to keep you exactly as you already are.

Of course a machine designed to emulate a communicating human will claim to do all the things that humans do. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be successfully emulating a human! Exactly.

This video is interesting in that it reveals the sheer mediocrity of Jordan Peterson’s political perspective. It is another case of an internet intellectual who thinks they are innovating when they are really just reinventing the wheel: his “conservative manifesto” is literally just another rehashing of Boomer conservatism and libertarianism, with a sprinkling of the “Judeo-Christian West” to please Shapiro. What is particularly surprising is that Peterson almost entirely jettisons the very traditions that he elsewhere claims to admire. He repeatedly talks in this manifesto about the values embodied in the “Eternal Western Canon” and yet proceeds to espouse a form of “conservatism” which would be largely alien to anyone prior to the Classical Liberal thinkers of the post-Renaissance secular age. The very concept of penning a manifesto reeks of enlightenment rationalism, which was itself a deliberate inversion of traditional Western values. Conservatism is about conserving the essential principles that have been forged in the fire of long experience, not sitting in your armchair and penning a vain and self-serving manifesto. He also fails to address the undeniable fact that “the West” which he celebrates was discriminative and exclusionary for most of its existence, in contradiction to the universalist nature of his own ideas. The greatest flaw in this manifesto is that he defines what it means to be a conservative entirely in opposition to the advances of the progressive left. Perhaps this is the problem with even adopting the terms “conservative” or “reactionary” to describe oneself. This is a bad idea even from a merely tactical perspective because it means you have handed your autonomy over to the enemy. It is also particularly inappropriate, given that he starts by saying that he is speaking here at the “metaphysical” level: by definition, a metaphysical statement must transcend the petty squabbles of the present day. And, rather than just explicitly framing himself against the left, his criticisms are all veiled in a dense and cryptic form of allegory - making it even less likely that any of the people he is criticising will even understand what he is saying! Who is this manifesto intended for? Even when his criticisms are valid - for example, regarding the infantilising and smothering nature of progressive societies - his delivery is so jilted and grumpy that the whole thing falls flat. What is even more peculiar is that his “conservative” manifesto is barely even conservative: his solution to every problem is just “sovereign individuals freely associating in the free marketplace of friendship”! Is that what Aquinas, Plato, Seneca or even Christ would have conceived of as the “Eternal Western Canon”? Where are the calls to belonging to something greater than yourself and making human life into a vehicle for spiritual realisation? All I hear from Jordan is: “Blessed are the sovereign individuals, for theirs is the kingdom of material ambition”! When he does eventually get to briefly discussing “community”, he does so entirely in utilitarian terms. He is just clinging desperately to the corpse of the Classical Liberal anti-tradition whilst somehow remaining blind to all of its flaws, which become more and more obvious with every passing day. There is also something peculiarly Masonic about the whole thing, particularly in the way that he appropriates a spiritual and metaphysical perspective for the purpose of selfish and materialistic ends. He seems to be very torn between genuine compassion for the people who look up to him and preaching gibberish so as to sell his soul to Daily Wire. In the same way, perhaps, that he is torn between the rich traditions of the past, particularly Christianity in his case, and a petty and pointless “reactionary” stance on present events. He should have it called: A (Truly Awful) Conservative Manifesto… In the end, this manifesto serves to prove that Dr. Peterson - whatever interesting things he might have to say regarding mythology, the relationship between science and religion, and so on - has by now been entirely consumed by his role as controlled opposition. His presence in online public discourse is amplified precisely because his arguments against the left are so weak, and in reality he is just fuel for the very fire that he seeks to quench.

I generally find that “projection” is just a label used to deflect unwanted criticism. It also brings with it the assumption that we all live in our own private fantasy bubbles and that there is no even relative reality to things. It implies that the only reason anybody could take issue with somebody else is because they are projecting their own issues or “complexes” onto them. In truth, there are many other reasons why two people can fail to relate to each other. If I am projecting onto you, I am projecting my anger at living under a smothering gynocratic tyranny… But only because you have demonstrated yourself as an appropriate target! I would also like to say that the path of the warrior, which of course is completely misunderstood and mocked today, generally involves projection: one projects the inner enemy (the soul commanding to evil) outwards so that, in fighting it outwardly, one can fight it inwardly. There is nothing wrong with this so long as you are conscious that you are doing it. I think there’s a lot more that could be said about projection. Taking your view of spirituality to its conclusion, aren’t we always projecting anyway? You are just God projecting yourself outwards onto another character, who just happens to be projecting onto you through a forum! I understand. My parody of Shunyamurti is regarding his teachings in general. No hard feelings either.

Thank you for my “warning points”. I only make things personal when they are personal: so much spiritual teaching is just personal beliefs and values masquerading as absolute truths. For example, you just want a nice cosy and safe spirituality, listening to Matt Kahn and Shunyamurti talk about “love” and how “beautiful” everything is. I used to listen to Shunyamurti but this is precisely why I stopped: he is leading a feminised communal cult of banal and sterile conformity. I practice a spirituality of transcendent destruction. As an example, here is a parody of your “Great Sage” Shunyamurti: A Wisdom Teaching from A Great Sage It’s a great joy, and certainly not a great jouissance, to be typing this today. A Sat Yogi is one who sits in the past. As the great sages - and remember, to be a sage is to see-ages - tell us, the good days are over. I think the religions call this state “fallenness”: one is no longer willing to open one’s heart to love, to live on fifteen carrots a day, to donate one’s soul to the community… But there is hope: once one has realised the futility of life in the ego, gone through the zero point and turned it into a hero point, the Sat Yoga Institute will be ready to welcome you with open arms. Of course, I don’t really need to be telling you any of this: if you wanted to you could download your own hodgepodge of psychoanalytic conundrums and new-age messianism, but your consciousness is choosing to project itself onto a guru-figure who can give you the answers that you already have. …but you don’t want answers, do you? You want jouissance. Well *puts on funny hat*, “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try some times, you’ll find — you get what you need!” May we save the universe from our cosy, rich Costa Rica ashram, collapse the quantum wave function and re-dream the energy field - w i t h o u t… d e l a y… Namaste P.S. “Thank you Shunya, that was such a beautiful teaching; you always say just what I needed to hear. I know you have a new book and retreat coming out soon, could you tell us all some more about that?”

@AtheisticNonduality It is not a Ku Klux Dog! It’s an angel from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I have been loving his work recently, it is a wonderful blend of deep compassion and mysticism. Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire are such a fascinating mixture of traumatic and transcendent.