Monthly Archives: August 2023

Narcissism

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Years ago I saw someone describe a particular narcissist as someone who is unable to understand that someone can fully comprehend his opinion, and still disagree with it.

I thought about this, looking at people who simply assume that their untrained, intrusive and often aggressive dogs will be universally accepted as “cute” by every “good person”, implying that you must be a bad person if you mind their bothersome animal intruding on your personal space. The same applies to their loud and obnoxious children, or themselves – loud, often drunk, and with poor manners.

Every single one of those people thinks that you must be a bad person if you don’t love them, which brings me to my observation: narcissism is a fundamental trait of human species. Humans implicitly assume that they are good, and everything that opposes them or hates them is evil. It seems to be an evolutionary imperative of some sort. Humans, essentially, believe that God can’t be a proper God if He doesn’t love them. You can see this in the comics – the difference between super-heroes and super-villains is that the super-heroes fight on the side of mankind against all kinds of threats; it’s siding with humans that makes a super-powerful being good, because you can’t be good and not side with them, good and loveable as they are. It’s stunning, when you observe it from a distance, removing yourself from the picture to gain perspective.

In spirituality, this creates a very stubborn but wrong belief that human core, their soul, is in its essence some kind of a “diamond in the rough”, that only needs to be properly expressed and polished in order to shine. I would be very surprised if people holding such beliefs ever made any kind of progress, among other things because their inherent narcissism makes them not “hear” anything that contradicts this firmly held implicit belief. I had such an experience with one former student – I would tell him that enlightenment works by surrendering yourself to God fully, in darshan, to the point where God burns away everything in you that is not of God, and then you learn how to manifest yourself as such a new person. That’s what I said. What he heard was that he had to learn how to express and manifest himself in the world. Never, at any point, did it occur to him that I told him that he has to die in God’s light, because his entire “self” is illusory and, basically, made of garbage that needs to burn. That part was simply not heard, but the idea of manifesting himself in the world, he’d go around repeating that at every possible instance.

Let me tell you what I think about this. Yes, there is a phase when you are a “diamond in the rough” that needs to learn how to “hone” the physical in order to be able to express high spiritual realities in terms of the body and the world. The phase I’m talking about is after initiation into vajra, when you are essentially Buddha in the world, the jewel in the lotus. You need to learn how to speak while bearing that power and reality in the words; you need to learn how to act. Truly, you need to learn how to manifest That, but in reality we are approaching the reason why the saints describe the angels as beings who “praise the glory of the Lord”. That’s what it feels like, but you’re not really literally praising the Lord, you are manifesting God’s light, bringing it into dark places where it wasn’t present before, and making it open up like an unfolding flower. You are praising the Lord by making everything you touch more satcitanandamaya, more of reality-consciousness-bliss which is a description of God’s nature. Angels, essentially, make God obvious by their very presence – they look at you and God’s presence awakens in you and all illusions are cast away as reality unfolds in your soul. That is so because an angel is essentially a being who abandoned any definition of self other than God. He walked into God and everything that wasn’t God burned away, and what returned was God’s light and reality in a particular shape, and humans tend to call this an angel.

The reason why humans have such a hard time with spirituality is because they expect it to magnify and enhance them, while in reality they are garbage that needs to be burned away, and God is the incinerator. There’s another narcissistic concept, that God made humans in His image. No. There is a process of being remade in God’s image and by God’s design, and it’s called yoga. This process implies that you surrender everything to God, one piece at a time, and allow God to remake you in His image – essentially, make you as He would make you, in the process un-making everything that you are, and as this process unfolds you get to learn true humility, by understanding that you were really neither great, nor loveable, nor agreeable to God. The only thing that can truly stand in the presence of God is God, and as you get closer, and in order to be able to get closer, you need to stop being a sack of shit that you are, and allow God to remake you in His image. In the process of being remade, everything that you are needs to die. If you oppose the process and attempt to keep yourself, you are destroyed because filth has no right to exist. If you surrender to the process and to God, you are remade and God acquires another name and form to be called by.

Tools and signals

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I saw a comment by Jordan Peterson recently, stating that tools are inherently “magical”, because our brains re-wire themselves in order to encompass the tool as part of personal identity. This rings as very true, from things such as swords and spears, to cars, computers and smartphones. When a good driver drives a car, his identity is so merged with the car, he for all intents and purposes is the car. When a swordsman wields a sword, his self is the sword. If you treat the sword as an outside entity between you and the threat, you won’t live long.

This is something that has long been the object of my interest, as I’ve watched videos of people talking about their tools – from axes and kitchen knives to guns, smartphones, computers and, yes, dogs.

What I found interesting is that people’s relationship with tools seems to be gender-specific. While men will merge self with their tools and project through them in the world in order to accomplish tasks – the tools being things such as axes, swords, guns, cars and computers – women will see those things as mere things that accomplish tasks; there is no extension of self through them and outwards. To a woman, a car is merely a thing that goes from A to B, a computer is merely a tool she uses to communicate or whatever; there is seldom any interest in how it works, or desire to invest effort in proper maintenance. There are exceptions, of course, but those make the rule. What women identify with, extend through and project into the world are clothes and accessories to their body: makeup, handbags, shoes and so on. Women will extend through those things with as much focus and force as a lumberjack through his chainsaw or a racing driver through his car. I would say the difference essentially comes down to the fact that the men’s primary focus is on accomplishing goals in the world, and their tools are the instruments of projecting self into the world and controlling it. If you want to fell a tree, you might not care what your clothes look like, but you will care for what your chainsaw does, because your life depends on it. A woman, however, seems to be primarily inward-oriented, where self is completely immersed in the body, and the tools serve the purpose of amplifying the body and signalling-towards, essentially advertising body-self as attractive and desirable, which then accomplishes the primary life goal of attracting a desirable mate and starting a family. Basically, a man projects self outwards and modifies the world to make it liveable, and a woman attracts a man towards body-self and tries to wrap the world around self in order to create a protective and controlled nest. Interestingly, there is very little self-awareness in all of this; people just do it and seldom think about what they are doing.

Not me, though. I usually give quite a bit of thought to things people just assume, or not even that. For instance, I observed how I identify with and extend through my tools, and how I feel computers differently, depending on whether it’s a laptop or a desktop. It’s much easier to envelop a laptop into self, because it’s one thing. A desktop computer is different, and I form contact with the peripherals – keyboard, mouse, monitor – while the computer itself is somewhere behind all that, a box with wires that is out of sight and out of mind, however I extend into the filesystem, the drives, the directory structure, the network connections, the software tools I use, and through that into the Internet, and there’s always the question of where exactly is my self when I’m on the Internet? It’s certainly not in the physical room, in the body that sits behind the desk. It’s in some forum, forming connections and interacting through the existing ones. I wonder what the actual topology of this would look like in the global astral – Internet “places” would probably look like those maps of illumination taken from Earth’s orbit, where more light means more human activity and presence, and ideal concept such as “brands” would be points of convergence, things people brush against to acquire their “scent” and project such “scented” self outwards, into the places where others come, so that they are perceived as “enhanced” and “accomplished”. The entire thing is probably quite comparable to dogs wallowing in shit in order to change their scent.

It’s not just brands, however – it’s a more general thing. It’s about being perceived as having the right attitudes about things, not just being properly accessorised. That’s why people virtue-signal on the Internet; they basically wallow in “right” kinds of shit in order to smell “right” and be acceptable and, hopefully, popular, in their desired social circle. Unfortunately, there is very little conscious thought involved in all of this; just social animals scent-signalling and marking territory, or declaring self as marked territory, in submission – I belong to nation, I belong to religion, I belong to “climate change social justice believe everything the authorities say” cult. Inject yourself with bioweapon in order to signal submission to the authorities and belonging to the main stream of the herd in order to claim its protection, and the sense of superiority to the “others”. Believe every kind of nonsense you are told and still declare yourself to be a free, liberal person, because that’s a thing you have to believe if you’re “normal”.

However, if you actually use your critical faculties to process the world around you, the silliness of it all is greatly outweighed by tragedy.

Yevgeny Prigozhin dead

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Yesterday, a private plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner group, and 9 of his staff, crashed, with no survivors.

There are several interpretations of this. The first is that it was an accident. Accidents are always possible, but somehow I don’t think so.

The second interpretation is that Prigozhin’s political ambitions turned him into a very serious source of strife and contention in Russia, where he actually tried to take his private army to Moscow in order to try and pressure the government to basically put him in charge of the military. They shot down several aircraft and got some good men killed. Putin defused this very volatile situation very carefully, and I still don’t know what the fuck that was all about. The entire thing stinks of hidden games and double play. So, the second interpretation is that Prigozhin had further plans for his Wagner group that would further his political ambitions, unlike the rest of the Wagner soldiers who had no problem being absorbed in regular military forces, and Putin basically ordered the FSB to get rid of him, so they shot down or sabotaged his plane, killing him and some of his inner staff. If this is the case, it’s a huge exception from the way Putin usually deals with bad actors who threaten Russia’s political stability; he usually publishes discrediting facts about them, finds some conventional crime they committed, has them arrested, tried and put in prison. The idea that Putin kills his political opponents is nonsense only the Westerners believe in. He’s a legalist, and has powerful legal instruments at his disposal, and he’s very proficient not only in real Judo, but also in political Judo. He doesn’t use blunt instruments if there are alternatives. However, Prigozhin might actually be an exception, because if true things are published about his likely crimes (have in mind that he had two private jets in the air at the time, which means he was working with incredible amounts of money that didn’t really go into the armament and salaries of Wagner soldiers), this might put a bad light on the Wagner group, whose soldiers are seen in a positive light in Russia, and this would create unnecessary internal strife that Putin doesn’t need, and Prigozhin already abused this fact. Taking him out and then absorbing his private army into the regular armed forces might have been desirable. However, this doesn’t mean that it was actually done. It only means nobody will cry over his fate very much.

The third possibility is that he was taken out by the same Ukrainian/CIA assets that have already been killing “undesirables” in Russia, and the Ukrainians already put him on their list. This is certainly a possibility, because it fits the modus operandi of Ukrainian intelligence – they use classic terrorist acts with bombs and don’t really care about collateral damage. They hate, they kill those whom they hate, and intimidate the rest.

To be honest, I initially thought the second option was the most likely one, but now I am rather partial to the third one. It’s interesting that there are still no official statements from the Russian government, which would mean that they don’t know how to handle this – they don’t have a prepared story to run, and don’t know whether to go with “good riddance” or “they killed our hero and now there’s going to be hell to pay”. I am certain that the black boxes from the airplane are being analysed and if the crash was due to an explosion on board or a missile strike, things are going to get very interesting very quickly. However, if the crash was due to a technical malfunction and the Ukrainians don’t admit they caused it, the entire thing will be shrugged off, because Prigozhin was an unbalanced person on an ego trip and nobody will miss him.

I’ve seen a video of the crash and it’s consistent with either a missile strike or an explosive device.

Heads up

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There are strong indicators of imminent American market collapse – the insiders are betting against America and selling American assets, similar to what happened in 1929.

Also, there are signs that the leftist governments in America and Europe plan to interpret any kind of non-extreme-leftist election victory as an “extreme right wing takeover of government”, which means we are having an extreme-left takeover of government and cancellation of democracy, which was a fig leaf hiding the hand of totalitarian oligarchs anyway. Canada basically announced that they will join the USA leftists in overthrowing any non-leftist government, and the Germans are planning to outlaw the only actual grassroots political party, the AFU. The supposedly leftists governments everywhere are merely a gay-looking fig leaf hiding outright fascism behind the surface, and the general populace is very close to being done with them altogether. The entire thing is a powder keg waiting for the right spark.

Fascism: a combination of a strong state and large corporations uniting forces to oppress the people. Yeah.

My recommendations are to avoid the herd mentality, and stay tangential to the zeitgeist. Focus on God. You already know my financial recommendations – everything significant in physical gold and silver under personal control, but keep enough currency in the bank account and in form of cash for one month of expenses, because you have to remain practical. Normalcy bias is a great danger, because we had two years where not much was going on and that created a very deceptive atmosphere, because things were going on in the background if you knew how to look. The “powers that be” tried to postpone collapse by all means at their disposal for quite a while, which means that the system is now analogous to a supercooled liquid which freezes instantly on the slightest provocation.

The entire thing is coordinated by one globalist mob, so I would expect things to happen instantly everywhere. There will be no time to react – the borders will be shut, you won’t be able to use Internet banking to transfer money from your account, the ATMs will have a very small limit on cash you can withdraw and so on. Physical gold and silver will be back-ordered by months, and the banks will refuse orders to wire money out anyway. Whatever you have planned, execute it now. Go through your emergency preparedness supplies and refill and refresh everything. Cash recommendation is 500 USD/EUR per person, everything above that in physical gold and silver. Don’t count on long-range communications such as the Internet being available. Everybody might be cut off from their remote assets and very likely restricted in movement to their current place of residence, and some kind of a curfew will be introduced; consider the covid restrictions a test run of what they have in store for the real thing. Keep under the radar, the evil ones are the most powerful now and you don’t want to attract attention to yourself before the foundations of their power crumble. Remember, the government isn’t here to take care of you, it is here to take care of itself; when they train for “zombie apocalypse”, shooting the zombies and keeping them out of where the “normal people” are, by normal people they mean themselves and by zombies they mean you.

What people value

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I was thinking about the difference between the things people say and what they actually do. For instance, they will say they are for equality, compassion, freedom of choice and so on, and in reality they just want to be seen supporting the popular things in order to virtue signal in society. So, what they actually want is not to be socially ostracised and isolated, they want to be popular and they want to have as much power and influence as possible.

Also, they say that money doesn’t matter, that love is everything, but on a practical level they will despise people who don’t have money, they will envy those who do, they will buy all sorts of trinkets in order to augment their social status, and so on. Hypocrisy is a significant factor, and so I can’t really take people’s word for it. Instead, I’ll use a different approach – see what people actually do on an empirical level. People will say that money doesn’t matter and you shouldn’t value people according to how much money they have, but the problem is that money is invented exactly as a measure of value. What else would I use? Saying money doesn’t matter in assessing how much people value someone is like saying I shouldn’t use a meter to see how big a house is. I’m definitely going to experiment by taking a look at where the money goes and assess people’s priorities in life based on whom they made rich.

Here’s a list of top ten companies by revenue:

So, it’s retail and online stores, energy and fancy computerised gadgets.

Let’s see who the wealthiest individuals are:

How did those people make all that money? There’s an empire of luxury goods, there’s one guy that sells fantasies about clean cars and going to Mars, one has a big online store and sells server space, several got rich on computer software, some successfully invested money, and one can imagine all those oil companies from the previous list made some people very rich, but curiously they are not on this list, probably because they are too wealthy and want to stay behind the curtains. There’s also that idea that religions are super wealthy, so I looked into that, too:

Surprisingly, whole religions representing beliefs of vast numbers of people and having all kinds of clergy to support pale in comparison with the wealth of individual billionaires, which brings us to the obvious conclusion that luxury goods for wealth-posturing are a greater priority for people than religion, statistically speaking, and judging by where they put their money.

I am trying to exclude anomalies such as the insurance industry and American health “care” from analysis because they don’t tell me much, other than the fact that America is based mostly on fraud of some kind, and most of that milks people for money; the fact that the insurance companies are getting rich means they are finding ways to eschew payouts, which means fraud. There are also huge conglomerates that own all kinds of real estate, that are conspicuously absent from those lists, and pharmaceutical companies that are incredibly wealthy, and also hidden from sight for some reason.

However, let’s say that people put most of their money in housing, which makes the banks, insurance and real estate companies rich. They buy cars and consume lots of petroleum products. They consume food and hygienic products. They buy smartphones and computers, and consume telecommunication services. Also, and quite disproportionally, they buy luxury goods in order to show off, and the interesting thing is that they all do it, and especially the lower and middle class, because the companies that service only the rich people aren’t featured on those global wealth lists – you need to cater to the average in order to be there. You see, everybody owns smartphones, everybody consumes energy, pays for housing and transportation, and buys food and hygienic products. Also, obviously, everybody buys LVMH products. They are advertised as “rich people things”, but obviously average people are the main buyers of “rich people things”. It also seems that Rolex products are mostly bought by the middle class, as it’s an aspirational thing.

Religion does feature in all this, but when you understand how many members they supposedly have, how much actual money they work with, and how much it must cost them to pay for the clergy and the expenses, they simply can’t compare with the incredible wealth of the people and companies that sell them ordinary worldly goods. The Mormons seem to be an exception, but other churches simply pale in comparison with individual billionaires, let alone the huge multinational corporations.

Many things are hard to see from those lists, but one can guess – for instance, gambling, gaming, entertainment, alcohol and drugs are huge business, that possibly outweigh most of what I already mentioned. Education must also feature somewhere, but it’s usually categorised as student loans, which enriches primarily the banking sector.

So, if we summarise, people pay for housing, cars, fuel, food, hygienic products, electricity, telecommunications, technological gadgets, medical costs, education, luxury goods, religion, vice and addictions. They will go to great lengths to present themselves as members of a higher social class, to the point where they will debt-finance luxury purchases, such as cars, trinkets and bling, and I should also probably include travel to fancy destinations and housing that’s too expensive for what they can actually afford. In addition to that, they will go to social media and show all of that off, and waste time trying convince others that they are happy.

In addition to that, 56% of Americans can’t cover a $1,000 emergency expense with savings. Some polls report even worse findings, such as the SecureSave, whose study found that a 67% of Americans don’t have enough money saved to cover an unexpected $400 expense. The implication is that even those families that are seemingly well off, judging by the size of their house and the cars they own, are running a very tight budget – their house is financed by a mortgage loan, their cars are either leased or financed, and they buy everything on credit cards, and juggling with monthly payments. If anything goes even a bit wrong, they are too stretched financially to be able to respond. They all look wealthy and prosperous, but the only ones who are actually wealthy in this pictures are the banks giving them loans, and the companies selling them stuff they can’t really afford.

The conclusion is that social posturing is so important to humans, that they will almost invariably choose to overextend themselves financially and put themselves in a position of stress, suffering and high financial risk just to keep up with the neighbours and show off a false facade of success, and this seems to apply more to the low and middle income brackets; the truly wealthy people seem to care less about showing off their money, and statistics show that the most common brands of automobile driven by American millionaires are Toyota, Ford and Honda.

Also, one in six Americans is on antidepressants. Millions are consuming opioids. When we add cocaine, alcohol, marijuana and other addictive substances, it is apparent that almost everybody in the West is addicted to something nasty, and it’s not because they are living happy, healthy and balanced lives. Oh, and I forgot the epidemics of obesity, violence and suicide.

However, when you ask those people what they think the world’s biggest problems are, they will invariably speak about climate change.