Oeaohoo

There is still a nihilism and a subtle denial of the uniqueness of the human purpose in saying that human society and ant society are equally significant. A human birth is uniquely congenial to spiritual realisation because we have access to both the transcendent and animalistic realms, whereas an ant is basically just an animal (still being symbolic in a way of a spiritual reality, as all things are). That is why basically all human societies throughout history, from the most "primitive" to the most "advanced", have been oriented around a central transcendent Principle. Human society is an expression of Truth and exists within in reality. A society which is in alignment with Truth will be good and beautiful; a society which is out of alignment with Truth will be evil and depraved. Human society is even more significant to life! It would be very difficult to live without society. This is a very specific conception of society: society as something which seeks to smother your ambition, neutralise your individuality and your desire to express your deepest dreams, beat you down and strip you of your "freedom" so as to make you into a mere cog in the wheel. It is the "Disney-world" conception of society... A real society seeks to make you into a cog in the wheel of the Dharmachakra! Society can be a trap, so can turning your back on society! I do agree that for most people today society can only be a trap, but there is another perspective.

What a lot of rubbish! Ant = ant = ant = ant, human ≠ human ≠ human ≠ human. That is the difference and why human society is far more significant than ant society. What else is an "authentic, self-born individual"? Have you ever met any "authentic, self-born individual" ants?! I think this itself is one of the traps that seems particularly common around here: retreating into some solipsistic pursuit of self-advancement away from all integration into society. Then again, it is an understandable reaction to the total banality of modern profane society.

Any model in which Think and Grow Rich is two stages more advanced than Homer’s Odyssey is a deeply flawed one! I would say that Shakespeare is early Orange, with a lot of Blue (inspiration from Chaucer and late medieval literature) and even Red/Purple (pagan morality) hanging over, and some anticipations of Green (love of perspective, fetishism of human relationships, relativism). Later English authors like Dickens more or less continue this trend towards Green, though in certain ways Victorian morality constituted a last strong gasp of Blue. Moby Dick and most other American literature is much more solidly Orange, with admitted glimmers of that weird form of intense Blue which you get in the uprooted and desecrated land which is the USA.

A trap will always be specific to the individual. Most of the traps listed above are very specific to a right-hand path of knowledge and contemplation. I would also like to say that if one is on the direct path, yearning for nothing else but total liberation and full of what Zarathustra described as "the Great Contempt" for all mundane and earthly things, even falling into a trap could be a blessing. If there is a trap in this particular path it is thinking that falling into a trap is a problem. Naturally, this is a dangerous teaching to the earthly individual but... sometimes patience is dangerous too! Embrace misery and it may lead you to the ultimate Mystery!

The following is a response to (at the time of writing) the most recent insight on Leo’s blog. So far, so good. It is maybe worth pointing out that in a way it is nothing special: even ignoring the fact that technological capability has been ebbing and waning for millennia, the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent mass mechanisation of industry has already automated many occupations which were previously manual. The AI Revolution that is being described here is actually a pattern that can be seen throughout history: an original Thing A is destroyed by the emergence of a Thing B, only to be itself destroyed by Thing C, which was originally the creation of Thing B. For example, the Medieval Feudal order (Thing A) was destroyed by the mercantile bourgeois order during and after the Renaissance (Thing B), but in the end this bourgeois order was itself destroyed by Democracy and Bolshevism (Thing C), which were originally the creations of the bourgeois order (Thing B)! In the same way, a humanity which had higher priorities than churning out tacky rubbish (Thing A) devolved and created the industrialised world of machines and factories, which were however still run by humans (Thing B), only to in the end be destroyed by the total automatisation of the workforce (Thing C), which has only been made possible by the intermediary period of increasing standardisation and mechanisation of human life (Thing B). It is like Frankenstein’s monster turning back on Frankenstein himself, and Mary Shelley intuited something very profound when she subtitled that book “A Modern Prometheus”… It is at this point that the insight goes downhill. It seems the great prophet of Love has some work to do! “Does mankind have any redeeming qualities at all?” What a question! We act like a herd of blind idiots because there is no shepherd. There is no shepherd because secular progressive ideology tells us that people do not need a shepherd, that the new “stage of development” which has magically been arrived at means that people are beyond the need to command and obey. And when reality proves this wrong, and shows that people will always need a shepherd, such advanced “Tier 2” thinkers prefer to blame the design of humanity itself! Our government systems are especially inadequate for dealing with these challenges because they are based on the same delusional premises. It is exactly as Zarathustra said: “Who still wants to rule anymore? who wants to obey? Both are too burdensome. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.” But Leo… the whole problem here is evolution. A humanity which was really serving its function as humanity could never be replaced by robots. Humanity’s function is to be a mediator, a bridge between worlds, an intermediary between Heaven and Earth. Today, however, humanity thinks it has “evolved” beyond this function, preferring to exalt the Earth above Heaven, and so as has just been said it is fast becoming redundant. Like Christ said, “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” “The universe is too efficient”? Wasn’t the universe supposed to be a Love simulator? Now it is a simulator for churning out products at an ever more efficient rate. How would a fully-automated robot world test God’s Love? It would be a perfect nothing. This insight is an excellent example of the vanity and delusion of most of the self-proclaimed “Tier 2” thinkers floating around on the Internet today: if we could only immediately “evolve” everybody to be hyper-analytic autists like ourselves then everything would be just fine and dandy! The problem is that this is not, has never been and will never be the function of the vast majority of human beings; most people are passive and fit only for conformity to one or another pre-established and super-ordained social system. One thing is for sure: some nerds with nice beards and make-up like the ones in the attached video who think they are ten stages beyond everybody else because they know that “truth is complicated”, and who make sure to mentally shout the magical formula “Nuance!” into their third-eye every time they ejaculate, are not going to solve anything… That might be true, but we should not confuse cynicism and hopelessness with a clear-eyed assessment of reality: Maybe the present world order needs to be allowed to destroy itself so that a new one may bloom? Maybe we should even help it along! Misanthropy and finger-pointing would be totally inappropriate here because the enemy is not humanity! As I have described above, this is one of those situations where Frankenstein’s monster is turning against Frankenstein himself, the Promethean gargantuan monster of industry and mechanisation turning against its human creators. Personally, I will face the future with strength and courage knowing that the immediate future can only be helpless and negative.

I posted this a couple of days ago but the crash removed it! These are the ideas that I see as having the greatest potential to become dogma within Actualized. It is not that they are necessarily intended to be dogma but because they are (to me at least) partial and one-sided truths which lay claim to absolute reality, they are ripe to become so. I partly post this because in my younger life I was very dogmatic and the teachings expressed around here were part of that dogma! If anyone has any suggestions of other potential dogmas or thinks some of these shouldn’t be included I would be interested to hear it. The path to a good life is “the work” of self-actualisation conceived in terms of growth, personal development and the myth of the self-made man. All concepts are socially constructed and invented by humans. Existence is entirely made up of perspective and subjectivity and there is no objective world outside of direct experience. Mankind and the whole universe is constantly progressing and evolving. The “left-wing” are therefore more advanced than the “right-wing”. There is no ultimate purpose to human existence. We are just here to “enjoy the ride”. Your life is whatever you want and make it to be. You determine who you are and who you want to be. Life should be neatly divided into sub-domains which, whilst they might bolster and enhance each other, are to be approached separately. There is a duality between Truth/Love/Consciousness and “survival”. From the Absolute perspective all distinctions vanish. No preference is ultimately more valid than any other. It is almost like there is no truth from this perspective? It might not be immediately clear why these ideas are one-sided so here are possible counter-dogmas for each of the things I have listed above: The path to a good life is to fulfil one’s Dharma: to abide by the super-ordained law of one’s society and creatively express one’s natural traits within that. The Logos is an intrinsic aspect of existence. The human intellect is designed so that it can align itself with truth. Even profane and secular concepts therefore have a glimmer of the Logos itself within them. Existence is made up of subjectivity and objectivity. This is the original duality of existence, Purusha (consciousness) and Prakriti (substance), and the “first” thing in a non-temporal sense to arise out of the infinite unity of God. History is a progressive loss of spiritual potency at the cost of material triumph. In an Abrahamic context this is the Fall of Man, Original Sin and ultimate Redemption and Salvation during the apocalypse and the last judgement, in the Hindu, Buddhist and Greco-Roman context the descending Four Ages of Man (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron). The ultimate purpose of human existence is to align oneself with reality, which is comprised of Truth (Logos or Law) and Love (Eros or Nature). Joy comes from being in alignment with reality. Meaning is not just a human creation but part of God’s creation. You have been born with a nature and your purpose is to express and fulfil that nature. Every part of human society should be ordered around a superordinate principle: in the Christian Middle Ages God, in the Hindu and Buddhist world Dharma, in Confucian China Tao. This principle contains all the subordinate fields of creativity within itself and so these are understood as partial expressions of ultimate Reality which are never really separable. There is no conflict between survival and Reality. Survival is an expression of Truth/Love and Consciousness. To survive requires that you be in alignment with these things. From the absolute perspective all distinctions are transcended and included. There is no difference between anything precisely because all differences are contained within God as Truth. I think it’s also worth noting that many of these might be entirely appropriate to teach today but still one-sided from the perspective of pure truth. For example, society, which is supposed to be an incarnation of the divine Law, that exists today is not going to teach and encourage you to express and fulfil your true nature but to mislead and exploit you in whatever way it can. Therefore, the self-help dogmas #1, #5 and #6 are necessary. Additionally, emphasising direct experience can be appropriate simply because many people (particularly worshipers at the alter of Logic and Science who have unconsciously absorbed “Stage Orange” materialism and positivism) are very obsessed with the “external” and objective world. Then again, parts of “stage Green” radically overemphasise the subjective dimension: truth is a social construct, I am whatever I identify as, and so on; it is interesting that a couple of the ideas listed above, particularly #2 and #4, are basically these premises taken to their extreme conclusion.

Weird list of examples!

Yes the lower back is the physical reflection of an important part of the subtle body: Hara, the centre of sexuality and death, and Svadhisthana, the “abode of the self”. The fear of death is particularly associated with this centre because your identifications are stored here; naturally, then, liberation from all bondage and limited identity will affect this area! Why don’t you just stop using the drug if you are worried about it? Maybe you are intuiting that by using these chemicals you are burning through your karma too quickly. You could step back for a while and contemplate what you are still attached to and what you still fear.

@Dear Fiona Interesting to see this here! James did an excellent series with Uberboyo on Carl Jung’s Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self which is the only book of Jung’s that is really worth reading. I must confess I find this new phase with the two old Boomers a bit dull!

Absolutely! That is certainly part of the explanation but it doesn’t fully encompass the reality. A new form or context can only rise to dominance when the old one has exhausted itself; however, if we zoom out and look at things from a distance, we can see that the later expressions of a given form or context are generally more chaotic and dissolute as opposed to ossified. I would say that to a certain extent they become ossified and moralistic precisely so as to protect themselves from their inner chaos and dissolution; “civilisations die from suicide, not by murder”! For example, in Christianity the Protestant faith is notoriously comprised of an endless variety of sects and schisms. This is because it denies the authority of the Pope (going so far as to construe him as the Antichrist) and rejects the Catholic mass in favour of individual interpretation of Biblical scripture, facilitated through increased literacy and the invention of the printing press. However, to a certain extent Protestantism often goes along with biblical literalism and itself emerged out of the moralistic and ossified nature of late Catholicism so even here what you say is partly true. It is also true that (partly in reaction to this very phenomenon) in this phase you get certain extreme “reactionary” sects like the New-England Puritans and modern Evangelicals. What do you think are the most important problems it has identified with both of these?

This sounds like the dogma of anti-dogma! One of the things I find fascinating is the way that new dogmas emerge on the other side of the bridge of skepticism. For example, to a certain extent faith in God was a dogma, then there was a phase of skeptical free thought which esteemed positivistic hypotheses and empirical inquiry above all else, and then finally atheism became the new dogma! Yes absolutely. It’s interesting how different stages manifest this narcissism: Stage Orange denies principles and tradition in the name of the worldly self whereas Stage Green denies even the worldly self in the name of the self of subjective interiority. Even the more dogmatic types within Stage Blue tradition (that is to say, basically everybody within this category today!) often deny principles because they can only believe in the principles of their own tradition; for example, Allah, God and Brahman are all the same metaphysical principle but this is often not understood. This reminds me of something David Foster Wallace was always harping on: postmodern society overlooks the obvious and cynically derides what would ordinarily be basic accepted wisdom. Ideally this would create the empty space in which new forms could emerge.

I always though that it was arbitrary and misleading to claim that modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes are an accurate representation of how pre-historic humanity lived. Imagine the following scenario: the present global world order collapses, there are mass shortages of all survival needs and, because most people today are totally dependent upon centralised infrastructure, billions of people die, whilst a few independent bands of “survivalists” manage to pull through. What sort of life do you think these survivors would lead? It would be a much more rudimentary and bare-bones life. Who is to say that this is not the case for modern hunter-gatherers? They are the residues of the decomposition of ancient civilisations.

@Dumuzzi Amen to all of that! Nice to see that someone else has come to similar conclusions.

Yes, Nietzsche was a more profound thinker. I only mentioned him as an example because certain aspects of his philosophy fit in with this trend and I know you are familiar with him. Better examples would be Neo-classicism, Romanticism (particularly Percy Shelley and the English Romantics), Rousseau’s Noble Savage and so on. I know you would! I would say that postmodernism is a fall even below the ego. People are extremely collectivistic today, living from one “trend” and social fad to the next… This all comes back to the basic theme of interpreting history as an upwards or downwards trajectory.

The Self has been regarded as a transcendental entity for millennia so I assume that by self here you mean the ego. It’s not so much that the ego is a transcendental agency as that the ego can pursue its own self-interest up to the point at which it finally realises that what it really wants is annihilation in God. It is important to understand that this sort of naturalistic pantheism didn’t really exist except as an aberrant anomaly in the ancient world. It is a projection of the post-Renaissance anti-Christian cult of youthful exuberance, blissful nudity, extravagant sensuality, rococo elegance and so on onto the past. Nietzsche’s war against “pure spirit” in the name of “the instincts”, “life” and “nature”, for example. Nature for the ancients was always a reflection of something more than Nature. I actually agree that the ego is superior to eco (that is to say, to mere Nature). The ego is human and Nature is sub-human; Nature is the realm of fate whereas the ego is the realm of will. Both are inferior to the metaphysical plane which is the realm of Providence or Divine Will. Ecology is certainly not final or the highest spiritual ascent. Of course it is easier to approach God from a state which approximates God but that doesn’t mean that you must be in such a state to do so. After all, God is not a state. Anyway, It is called the “left hand path” because it is harder and more dangerous. Yes, there is a way in which failing to develop an ego is similar to transcending the ego. Interestingly, I made the same point about postmodernism the other day and you didn’t seem to like it: “God includes all distinctions and so all distinctions dissolve in God; postmodernism denies all distinctions and so there are no distinctions in postmodernism. They look the same but that is because the latter is a radical negation of the former”. Replace God and postmodernism here for “post-ego” and “pre-ego” in your evolutionary formulation and you have the same point.

Yes, that’s a nice way to put it. It gives “a flight of the alone to the Alone” a new meaning…

Guess I better stop walking around with that water bottle down my trousers then… What if it is just that women today like feminised men who are weak and vulnerable? In my experience masculinity is about striving and not accepting oneself just as one is. Only if you have already cultivated depth and purpose through the insufficiency and striving of masculinity, otherwise you are just a self-satisfied clown. I think this fake masculinity comes from the superficiality of modern life. Society today does not reward virility and nobility and women use the judgment of society to judge men. Men are therefore forced to prove their masculine nature with the woman herself. However, most women are not interested in manly things like the ruthless pursuit of truth, self-sacrifice and honour, hierarchy and discrimination so they recoil from the men who force them upon her and choose the fun feminine man. They would, however, be interested in the fruits these things would provide in a healthy and functional society.

Awake to what?

Well, if you’re going to worship the self you might as well do it well. The present narcissistic and self-obsessed world presents a certain opportunity in that true selfishness can be a spiritual path. After all, God is the Self. It seems to me that the few people who realise God in the present world situation will do so by pursuing their self-interest right up to the point of self-annihilation! Actualized itself is a very good example of this. From a spiritual-historical perspective I am very much against the religion of self and of self-help. However, like you yourself said this is just where we are today and you have to start from where you are. I agree, Woke Advertising has become a whole industry now and an ideology of lazy self-acceptance is perfect for keeping people dull and uninspired. I’m not sure what you mean by this. I would say it is just getting more and more absurd, devolving… Roman disdain for labour > Catholic work as prayer > Protestant “work ethic” > Socialist inverted religion of the Worker > ultimate depravity of work in postmodern world. Indeed! Slave morality, as Nietzsche called it. Of course the contemporary workplace is a very superficial and stupid environment. I recently quit my office job because it was such a degrading and alienating environment. I’m sorry if you are currently having to deal with it!

Yes, Gurdjieff was right to say that in most cases “man is a machine”. That doesn’t mean that you have no free will though because like you yourself have said you are not the body that is trapped in this matrix of manifestation. Your very existence is an expression of the infinite freedom of God, which is also your true nature. Then it’s time for a prison break-out! That is basically what spiritual awakening is after all. You have to realise you are in prison before you can break out though which is what is happening to you now. You are still free to do all these things. However, you might be realising that even so many of our ordinary desires are mechanically inherited from culture… Maybe some of these desires are not appropriate for you anymore. This all sounds like quite a typical Dark Night of the Soul and an awakening to just how asleep you have been throughout your life so far. Of course, this is not intended as a criticism of you specifically as almost everybody is asleep… You may not be interested but it can be useful to contemplate the problem of fate and determinism from a metaphysical perspective. It is significant that Fate is often associated with feminine figures: for example, in Greco-Roman mythology the three Fates are all women and the Norns (Fates) in Nordic mythology are all goddesses of destiny. A late reference to this can be seen in Shakespeare’s Macbeth with the three prophetic witches. Women represent Nature, the sublunary realm, the world of illusion (Maya) and the physical power of manifestation (Shakti). It is possible to overcome Nature herself, and along with her all fate and determinism! The virile masculine Hero was often conceptualised in antiquity as the one who overcame fate and the wheel of causality. The meaning of Buddha attaining to ultimate Liberation from Samsara (the wheel of causality and the cycle of life and death) is really no different. Realising how stuck you have been in the deterministic world should be an exciting call to: Be the hero! ”Become what you Are”, as Pindar said…

There seems to be a subtle contradiction in what you say here because the desire to eliminate suffering is natural to the experience of life itself. Accepting suffering is of course possible but it goes against the grain of nature, so if the aim is not to try to eliminate anything why eliminate the intention to avoid suffering? Suffering can be used for liberating purposes but in many cases the intention to avoid suffering is entirely spiritually appropriate; after all, the whole point of Buddhism is to depart from the world of dukkha (suffering)!

It is rather that self is the new global religion. For the wiser practitioners of this religion self-help is included within that but many others are not really helping themselves at all, they are just indulging their lowest and basest self. Often today the self is applauded precisely in contrast to any ideal of self-improvement: “you’re beautiful just the way you are”, “I don’t need to change for anybody”, “don’t let anybody rain on your parade”, and so on… In the post-second-World-War Western world self-expression seems to be the highest value; the quality of that self, unfortunately, seems to be of much less importance! Sometimes it even seems like the worse your self is the more it is deemed you should express it, like Yeats beautifully described in his poem The Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity”. Working hard isn’t the same as self-help and some self-help folks are rather lazy! The religion of work seems to have been more prevalent during the industrial period (the Protestant “work ethic”) and the Soviet era (the glorification of the ”Worker” in Socialist doctrine and the art of Marxist realism) but it definitely still persists today. Many people now, though, would ideally like to abolish work altogether, and this is no wonder given the pointless and mechanical nature of most of the work available today. Interestingly, labour is one of those words which the Christian faith inverted: in ancient Latin civilisation, “laborare” had largely negative connotations and it was even synonymous with toil and misery. In Christian civilisation, however, phrases like Laborare est Orare (to work is to pray!) emerged and the early forms of the fetishisation of work which you have described are probably to be found here. Of course, Latin also had the word “Opus” to refer to work in a higher sense. Incidentally, this is one of the ways in which Nietzsche was right that modern leftism, particularly socialism and the cults of Work and Change, are a sort of secularised Christianity. The same is true for words like humility and pity whose connotations were also largely negative; after all, we still call bad experiences “humiliating”!

Yes, I think this is true when Kundalini arises naturally on the spiritual path or when it is integrated within a safe context in which there is space to make the necessary changes that this new energy will force you to make. It is much less true, however, when it arises spontaneously/accidentally or when it has been aroused through physical practices without the necessary psychological and spiritual preparation. There is the additional problem that people often don’t know what they are getting themselves into with the spiritual path. In my experience, it is very difficult to retrace your steps with Kundalini; like the flaming Cherubim which guard the doors back to Eden once the Snake has gotten Adam and Eve kicked out! Fortunately I had already been through a dark night of the soul before getting involved with Kundalini practises. Even then, until we are fully awake there is always more self to die to! Yeah it’s very similar to psychedelics in that way. I would disagree with one thing here: it isn’t necessarily as simple as trusting in the process. There are all sorts of physical, spiritual and even intellectual problems which can arise as Kundalini unfurls itself. Sometimes it can be hard to find the right advice for a given circumstance; then again, there are people with deep knowledge of this field around today. So long as one can sift through the corresponding accumulation of nonsense all-too-readily available today they’ll probably be fine. You’re an infinite being playing the character of a finite being and that character can very easily be annihilated. The problems with Kundalini that many people experience generally arise when these two come into conflict. Kundalini forces them to move towards the infinite but their finite being is not able to catch up with the process. This can be very dysfunctional. Ultimately there is nothing to fear but relatively there is. Here, we are playing the game of relativity and it is better to play it well!

Narcissism could even be a spiritual path by taking the ego to its absurd conclusion. This is the esoteric meaning behind many of the evil Gods in mythology: Seth, Satan, Prometheus… Not only that but the evil figure often has an initiatory function: for example, it is only through Seth killing Osiris that Osiris was able to become the Lord of the Underworld. Being the victim of evil is often what drives people towards spirituality. William Blake certainly understood these things, not only in his famous saying that “the fool who persists in his folly will become wise” but also in the following description of John Milton’s theological poetry:

@Razard86 Remember that Kundalini is a feminine energy. Kundalini will show you the boundless nature of ultimate Reality because that is the feminine polarity. The masculine polarity is the one which gives form and finitude to the feminine substance. Ultimate Reality is the union of these two principles so it is simultaneously finite and infinite, in the sense that it is an Infinity which contains all finitude within itself. The Shiva Nataraja is an excellent symbol of this reality. It is not possible to integrate the pure feminine principle of boundless freedom alone into ordinary life because by definition it is a total violation of all structure and order. This principle has to be reconciled with the masculine principle which will allow you to see all of reality as the interplay of Form and Formlessness. This vision occurs at the Ajna-Chakra and is finally unified in the ultimate Liberation characterised by the rising of Kundalini to the Sahasrara-Chakra and out of the body.