Category Archives: religion

No authority above

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I’ve been thinking about what I said about godless people, how they lack any virtue and morality and will do absolutely anything if it means getting rid of someone or something that’s in their way, as they see it.

What I find interesting is that I met Catholics who tried to use that same argument on me. Basically, I am not a member of a Church. I don’t accept authority of the Pope, or any religious leader in general. I don’t necessarily accept the authority of scriptures. I question everything. What is to stop me from doing evil? I have no commandments to obey. I have no authority above me. What is there to stop me from doing any kind of evil or immoral things?

I thought about it, not in a sense that I myself wouldn’t know the answer, but I tried to formulate it in a way that would make sense to others.

You see, the expectation that absence of clear authority means that I can just do whatever is wrong. Sure, I don’t accept authority of scriptures or religious figures in that sense, but this absence of authority makes me extremely careful, because if I get something wrong, I have no obvious place to ask for help. I am aware that I have no mommy watching my back. If I get something wrong, I will suffer terrible consequences. I might disappoint good people who rely on my guidance and virtue. This alone is stronger reason for me to be extremely careful in my thoughts and actions than most people can imagine. For instance, my family expects me to be stoic, reasonable, sharp and understanding; they expect me to be someone who will solve problems, not cause them. They expect me to help those who show weakness and make mistakes. This expectation stems from long experience. If I started doing stupid, weak things, their confidence in me would be shattered, and it is not something I would wish to experience. I am expected to be the light in the darkness, someone who calms fears, offers good advice, gives understanding of what’s going on and how to approach situations. However, that’s only part of my motivation. The core of it is something else, much more private and personal; it’s my relationship with God. I don’t wish to speak about it in detail, because that would be both disrespectful and a breach of privacy, comparable to talking about sex with my wife to strangers. It’s just not done. You may ask yourselves why I don’t talk about God or my newer spiritual experiences, and that’s why. When I talked about those things before, it was a terrible sacrifice on my behalf, which I made because I wanted to open doors for spiritual experience, to create mantrically charged text that would enable initiation. However, whenever I open those experiences to others and talk about them, they are lost for me, forever. Their sanctity and privacy has been breached, and my memory of those experiences will forever be contaminated by the astral interference by people who read it. Losing the most sacred part of yourself is exactly as appealing as it sounds, and any normal person would prefer a bullet through the brain; and yet, I did that in order to give others the opportunity they would otherwise not get.

Those times have passed, however, and I am no longer willing to expose my personal spiritual experiences to external interference. That’s the reason why I don’t talk about them. However, I want you to understand their importance to me. If you can understand not wanting to break your family’s faith in you by acting from weakness or sin, imagine a motivation orders of magnitude more powerful – being in a position that something I do breaks my relationship with God. I would much rather die, and I don’t mean just physically, which is something I actually look forward to. No, I mean being completely destroyed as a spiritual being; I would prefer it to disappointing God.

Your Church, your Pope, your religious laws and scriptures, that’s all children’s play. You evade and work around those daily. I am much more honest than that, in a very raw way. Making God disappointed in you because you fucked up, that’s something I never want to experience, and that’s the reason why I’m so extremely careful in everything I do. You can’t even imagine how much. I also take holy scriptures very seriously, even when I end up disagreeing. I see it as a discussion with my wife. Even if I disagree with her, I will take her extremely seriously, think about it with everything I’ve got, and disagreement will never mean disrespect. I don’t treat things carelessly, and I am always aware of dangers and responsibilities. The fact that I am the one making the final call just means that I have nobody to shift responsibility to. When I make a call, I try to make it the best one I can make, using all my abilities, all my insights and powers, and advice from all sources I respect and acknowledge. However, the final call is always mine.

It’s not what the atheists do – “oh, there’s no authority above me, I can do whatever I want, that’s great”. No. Terrible things will happen if I fuck up. I can disappoint people I love, and beings of such high order that I don’t even know how to describe them with words. I can’t even begin to describe how bad that would be, or what kind of a discipline this awareness automatically creates. To me, none of that is abstract or intangible. It’s a treasure of immense value, loss of which would be the greatest personal tragedy. You just don’t fuck with that; you rather suffer whatever agony or inconvenience instead.

So, no, I don’t have the authority of Church, Bible or Pope to guide my actions, but that makes me ten times more careful, controlled and responsible than you can imagine. The religious people can understand that in some way, but the atheists, they are idiots and scum. I have no respect for them whatsoever, they are moral and intellectual garbage. They don’t even understand the problems, let alone the solutions.

Sin against the Holy Spirit

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I’ve been watching that interview between Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk, and their discussion about the concept of the sin against the Holy Spirit, which Jesus mentioned as the only one that’s unforgivable, struck me as very interesting.

Charlie said it’s about using the garb of religion as a bludgeon against people, and in service of your ego, basically, and Jordan said it might be about rejecting the call of God to fulfil your destiny, or the failure to “aim up”, towards God. I thought they both have a valid point there, but something else came to my mind as I was taking a shower now.

I think the Evangelical, “sola scriptura” attitude, is the sin against the Holy Spirit. It’s the attitude that Holy Spirit was present when the Bible was written, and then took a permanent vacation. It’s the attitude that you can ignore people like St. Augustine or St. Theresa of Avilla because they are not in the Bible, and only the Bible matters because it’s the word of God, and God somehow went mute after it was completed. It’s the attitude that you own God, that everything outside of your own religion is of lesser quality, that it’s something that can be summarily dismissed, that it can’t have been inspired by God, and even if it were, it can be only to a far lesser degree than what you have in your own religion. To sin against Holy Spirit is to reject it in all things that don’t fit the mental framework of your religious beliefs.

It’s also about rejecting the living presence of God when it confronts you, and you think you are safe in your scripture and your religious rites and customs. It’s thinking you are always the one whose position is to teach, because that’s what your religion assumes, even when you’re confronted with “the living Force” that is trying to tell you something. It’s the sin of the Pharisees, who would lecture Jesus and try to trick him, assuming they own God and he’s some upstart.

Yes, it’s definitely about rejecting the path that leads up, and not walking through the door God opened before you, and it’s definitely about using the idea of God as a tool of your ego, in service of your self-aggrandisement. It’s also having the keys to the heavenly kingdom, but neither using them to enter yourself, nor allowing the others to enter, choosing to make the door an obstacle instead of a place of passage. It may also be using gifts of the Holy Spirit in order to confuse others and lead them away from God. There are indeed too many candidates, and I think all those interpretations are valid in their own way. Rejection of transcendence in service of your own lower nature, and using the form people associate with transcendence in order to deceive them away from transcendence and to give yourself power over others, though, seem like the best interpretation.

Godlessness is the root cause of all evil

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America is a smouldering powder keg at the moment. Some pro-trans leftard killed Charlie Kirk, one of the well known right-wing speakers who believed in inviting people to talk to him and try to beat his arguments. He was a civilised, well-spoken person with too much belief in the power of arguments when dealing with the insane ideologues who believe in using force to suppress dissent.

The murderer shot him from the roof of the adjacent building while he was doing his usual thing, inviting people to discuss issues on an open microphone. He left behind a wife and two children, because he made the same mistake as Gonzalo Lira. He understood that his opponents are unhinged cultists who have absolutely zero respect for the life of anyone they disagree with or find inconvenient, including but not limited to mothers murdering their own unborn children for the crime of messing up with their plans. Unfortunately, his actions were not consistent with his understanding, because he stood there in the open, having a discussion with people who would rather shut him up with a bullet than with a well made argument, and eventually one did just that. He’s dead, his wife is a widow, his children are orphans, and the leftists are celebrating his death as if they single-handedly defeated Hitler or something, rather than killing an unarmed man whose arguments were driving them insane because they were, for the most part, just logic and common sense.

I talked to Romana yesterday about it on the phone, and she said something along the lines of “Aren’t the right-wingers the ones who are supposed to like guns?”, and I answered “True, the right-wingers like guns, but the left-wingers like killing people”. Basically, the right-wingers will go to the woods and shoot a deer or a hog, and then make barbecue for the neighbourhood, waving American flags, or they will dress themselves up in tactical gear and go shoot at targets, thinking they are in “Call of Duty” or something. The leftists invented the guillotine and the extermination camps. They dream of rounding up and exterminating their political opponents as if they were vermin. They want to kill people, they want to solve discussions with a bullet to the head of their opponent. JFK was shot in the head from the roof by a gunman who was an unhinged extreme leftist, so unhinged that KGB refused to recruit him when he went to Russia because they thought him so crazy they wanted nothing to do with him. The right-wingers like to play with guns, but the leftists see them merely as means to an end, and this end is murder of their political opposition. They would in fact prefer the guillotine, the gulags or the killing fields, but the guns will do in a pinch; and all the while, they think they are the heroes beating Hitler, because Hitler is somehow a cardboard cutout they place in front of every person they don’t like, making them anonymous and killable. They even call the Jews Nazis, without stopping to think how idiotic that makes them sound.

But the root cause of all this leftist madness is the rejection of transcendence; the war on God, and the concept of humanism, of Man as the measure of all things. When you start seeing yourself and others as mere biological automata without a transcendental core, you start seeing them in a utilitarian way; basically, people are things that are either useful to you, or they are in your way, and there’s nothing more important than power, defined as imposing your will on others by force, and simply killing those who fail to submit. If they are in your way, they are Hitler, and of course you’d shoot Hitler if you had the chance.

Godlessness is the root of all sins and is the greatest sin as such. The problem we’re having now is merely a culmination of the evil that started before the French revolution, and caused unseen slaughters and dehumanisation. Godless people will lie, deceive, manipulate and murder. They have no compunctions or moral inhibitions, because why would they? Power is all that matters, and all is good that serves a good cause.

Atheism is not merely a crime in God’s eyes; it’s the supreme crime. It’s the negation of the most fundamental of all realities upon which all existence and virtue are built. It needs to be rejected and resisted.

Evolution of style

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Had you met me when I was younger, between 1984 and 2005, and told me that most of my lenses would be wide angle, and my photographic style would be defined by wide compositions, I wouldn’t have believed you; in fact, I’d say there’s no way. In my early photography, I defined good photography as successful presentation of a beautiful detail through isolation, using depth of field.

Here are some of my earliest preserved works:

Those are all colour negative prints, 35mm film, year 2000 or earlier, but nothing earlier than than 1998, I think. Everything earlier than that was left at my parents’ place when I moved out. You can see the pattern in all of them – basically, get close, get the detail, isolate it from the rest of the world, and capture that feeling. It’s not a matter of equipment; I used a 35-70mm zoom lens, so I could have gone wide enough, but I didn’t; even when I did, I sucked at it because I didn’t know how to compose wide.

This is my first successful wide-angle shot:

Probably because I used Romana’s film point and shoot camera which didn’t have the closeup functionality I instinctively relied on, I composed the picture differently, but that did not result in a change of style. In fact, my pictures in the following years were more in the line of this:

You get the picture; again, remove the detail from the world, find the beauty as separate, isolated, in a photographic equivalent of meditation.

It’s not that I stopped taking such pictures completely; they still make up a significant portion of my work. However, a typical shot I am aiming for these days is something like this:

I’m trying to figure out the differences and similarities myself, because it’s not that the wide-angle compositions lack that meditative feeling of the closeup shots. It would be too easy to say that I just learned to evoke a similar feeling with a different technique, but I don’t feel that it tells the whole story. You see, in order to do a closeup shot, you need to remove almost everything from the composition. With an ultrawide lens, everything that is in front of you will be in the frame, even your shoes or tripod legs if you’re not careful. With it, you can no longer abstract ugly and the mundane from your composition and create beauty by omission. You need to compose the entire world in front of you into an artefact of beauty. It’s not just a matter of photographic technique; it’s something about the worldview, about not fearing chaos and ugliness and escaping into reduction.

It’s not just a matter of using an ultrawide lens. The picture above is made with an 85mm portrait lens, at f/1.8, but I would never have used such a wide composition in my early years. Even when using a long-ish lens and shallow depth of field, I’m leaving more of the environment in the composition.

I mean, this is taken with a 400mm telephoto wide open, for fuck’s sake. If you gave this lens to my 2000 self, I’d have composed it so tight you’d see nothing but the cyclist’s head and shoulders, most likely. This is a normal, slightly wide composition, just with telephoto spatial compression. I remember a conversation I had with two people, somewhere around 1999-2000, about what equipment I’d like to have. The first thing would be a digital camera that has a 35mm sensor capable of full film quality, not the stupid toys that existed those days, but real replacement of film with digital technology with preservation of everything that’s good about film. The second thing I wanted was a big zoom lens, essentially this 100-400mm telephoto that I have now. What I couldn’t imagine then was the way I would use that big zoom lens. I would expect portraits of birds in their environment. I wouldn’t expect, essentially, normal to wide compositions with spatial compression:

I think I’m starting to understand what I’m doing there. It resembles the difference between meditating in a quiet, isolated room with your eyes closed, and learning to meditate with your eyes open while walking or interacting with people. It’s a difference between having to hide from disturbances, learning to ignore them, and finally learning to make them part of the experience. It’s a transition between waiting for your wife to stop taking pictures and remove herself from the composition, then composing her into the shot as a joke, and then intentionally composing her into the environment as a stylistic choice that makes the compositions what they are.

 

Illusion of choice

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I’ve been thinking how in the mid- to late-1990s there was that prevalent assumption in the “spiritual circles” that we are in the middle of some major global awakening, rise of global energy, mass Kundalini awakenings, spiritual insights and awakenings and so on. Here in Croatia, you couldn’t find a bus stop that didn’t have ads for Reiki-something, something-meditation or some guru or another. Even on the TV, there were esotheric/spiritual/something “shows”, popularising things from spiritual healing and health food to various gurus and spiritual schools.

Then, in the early 2000s, it all went “poof”.

My working hypothesis is that the popularisation of the social networks and smartphones completely shifted the interest from some kind of transcendence, however limited and flawed, to human interaction online, which essentially consumed everybody’s focus and energy. However, that’s not all. I also think there’s a lesson there about the illusion of choice.

You see, someone who was there in the 1990s would be inclined to believe that gurus, spiritual techniques and schools and transcendental realities in general were something common, if not ubiquitous. Enlightened gurus are dime a dozen, advertising themselves and competing for your attention, and you’re obviously so important if they all want you. You have a choice. Even if you chose something, a better thing might be around the corner and just waiting for you to get aware enough to notice.

It was all a circus, for the most part. Guys in Swami clothes and/or with weird names were mostly spiritual beginners with one or two samadhi experiences, all copying each other’s homework which is why they all sounded the same and there was this illusion that spirituality is a standardised thing, all rivers flowing to the same ocean and stuff. My students at that time mostly felt like I’m something normal and common, and if they don’t like my approach, a better guru is around the corner. Even I, myself, did not appreciate the uniqueness of my position.

In hindsight, there was no abundance of gurus and spiritual teachings, merely Hindu copy-pasta and lots of wannabes. The abundance of choice was like the abundance of make money fast and penis enlargement schemes on the Internet – all fake. If anyone knew what they were doing (and there were some), they had no following; those who had a following were all worse than useless. There was no global energy awakening, no ascension into higher realms, no “New Age”, all “channellings” were fake. “Kundalini awakenings” were almost all symptoms of mental disorders. The abundance of choice was just an illusion. It was just me and probably a handful of other, equally unknown people, our voices drowned by the cacophony of charlatans.

For people who had an actual opportunity to achieve something, this illusion of abundant choice was incredibly harmful, because most of them stagnated, missed their chance and will eventually have to do things the hard way. I think their situation was comparable to that of pretty girls on dating sites, where everybody seems to swipe right on them, but since they think wrong, they match with tall, muscular, rich guys who just fuck them all in a circle, while they live in an illusion that thousands of matches mean abundance of choice. Size of the haystack says nothing about the number of needles within. It just turns them into free hookers who soon rack up body counts appropriate for sex workers. Thinking you have abundance of choice is how your life gets wasted and at one point you wake up and realise that, other than the fact that half a kilometre of cock went through you, you also arrogantly rejected all the options that would actually work for you and make you happy. Now those good guys are married, your soul is crushed by all those side-fuck experiences, your youth is gone, and there seems to be nothing good to hope for.

The ego high created by the apparent choice is deadly. You think you’re on top of the world while you crush the best things in your life underfoot, and when the ride ends, it’s all gone. The choice that never was, the actual choices you arrogantly rejected, the time that passed riding the wave of illusion, and then you’re left with bad karma, ruins of a life you never started living, inflated ego and bitterness of being used.