Decreasing benefits

My wife and I were taking one of our usual photographic walks in the town of Hvar yesterday evening, after the rain.

The tourist season is starting, so it’s more crowded than we’d like, but there were some quite nice sunset scenes and we came back with quite a nice catch on the memory cards.

As a curiosity, Rimac brought quite a show of Nevera cars.

This, combined with the fact that quite a lot of superyachts were parked there, made me think – I’m probably surrounded by the greatest density of people with order of magnitude more money than me, and it’s incredible how little they can actually show for it. In the real world, if you encounter a God who’s an order of magnitude more powerful than you, they are actually scary powerful – they can snap a finger and cancel some event out of existence by modifying its origin in time, or they can assemble a particle cloud back into the destroyed object, or they can create/modify universes. Here, they can buy a bigger boat or a faster car you can’t actually legally drive faster.

I mean, it’s nice, but I can’t but feel it as damning with faint praise. Once you solve all your actual problems that are caused with lack of money, there’s precious little you can actually do with money. Buy a faster car with more expensive upholstery. Buy a bigger boat. Buy a bigger house. Buy more houses in many different places. Hire people to maintain it all. Have a space programme, or a charity fund, or something to give you the impression that it makes sense and is worth while. But basically, you do the same things you always did, just with no financial constraints. You still drive a car, only better. If you liked boats, you can get a better one. If you were into computers, you can get the best one. If you were into photography, you can buy the best cameras and lenses. You can get the house you actually like, instead of the one you could afford. But you still have all the human limitations, constraints and issues. There’s very little one of those billionaires can do, that a middle class person can’t. I mean, actually do, not just take a ride on a boat or have ten houses that require staff and staff managers. It’s like HiFi – you get to 90% of what’s possible with a few thousand euros. After that, ten times the money will give you the next 9%. After that, you can pay infinite amounts of money for utterly insignificant or even fictitious progress; essentially, you get to delude yourself for a hundred thousand dollars.

Money is absolutely crucial up to a point, and the difference between what your life is as a broke student or a homeless person, and someone in the middle class, can feel like magic. You can just pull out the wallet and solve things that would seem insurmountable to the other person. You can cash out a piece of real estate. You can go to a car salon and buy a new fancy car, cash. If you need a medical intervention, you can just deal with it because money is no object. However, after this miraculous ascent in functionality you can purchase, you get a weird situation where people can have exponentially more money than you, and they have to literally invent bullshit that does barely anything more, but costs insane money, just so that they could show that they can actually get something for that difference in wealth.

But that’s not how things work “up there”, in the real world. There, wealth/power is real, and it’s measured in soul-stuff. There, orders of magnitude do much more than buy stuff that’s invented so that you could pretend to be able to do more. The power differential is real, the way a power differential between a fire cracker, a 1 ton bomb and a thermonuclear device is real. Here, if you’re more powerful you can smoke an expensive cigar on your superyacht while you wait for the delivery of your new Rimac Nevera to complement your fleet of Bugattis. Among the Gods, if you’re more powerful you can correct the timeline, selectively freeze time, spend twenty years doing something and then go back twenty years in time to use the results instantly, you can create a universe to test a hypothesis, and you are actually spiritually capable of functioning on the same level with the fellow Gods. Here, it’s a silly game of pretence, where you act as if your power actually matters. There, it actually matters.

And the thing is, the effort it takes to earn a billion dollars, if we disregard luck which is actually hugely important, is actually comparable to the effort one would have to make in order to attain actual spiritual advancement that would produce actual, non-bullshit power differential in the real world, and this world so successfully hides those results, that barely anyone bothers with it.

About matters and seriousness

When I mostly wrote about politics for a few years, some people understood it as me “not being interested in spirituality any more”. When I started writing about spirituality again, shocked Pikachu face, I guess. So, what’s the deal?

Well, it’s kind of obvious. When I saw Western propaganda accompanying the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, I understood that such propaganda is something that would happen only if they had a long-term plan for a war with Russia. As I analysed the events from this perspective, it gave me such a good match that I started a political blog as a place where I can unload my thought processes as a form of a warning, because there’s no way for a war between West and Russia not to eventually go nuclear, and people should know about that well in advance in order to be able to prepare, and by prepare I mean be ready to absorb lesser impacts before the major one, and when the major one comes, be on good terms with God.

What do I mean by lesser impacts? Well, if you’re in Ukraine, you got to find out already. Likewise if you’re in Israel, or the region around Iran. It’s not particularly great in some parts of the West either; London, Paris etc. have turned into terrible shitholes that resemble Africa. America is also not a great place to be, and it’s getting worse.

I expected that, because the nuclear ultimate escalation isn’t something that just happens out of nowhere. You don’t attack Russia and China because you’re doing well. You’re doing it because your civilisation is at an impasse, and you’re looking for a desperate way out. Others react to your desperate measures in progressively more desperate ways, and it ends in mushroom clouds.

People have a silly idea about nuclear war – basically, both sides push a button and twenty minutes later there’s no world. I wanted to explain why this isn’t so, and why they will try everything else first, and why most people in the world won’t even know there was a nuclear war until much later. You need to understand the logic of those things.

So yeah, that was a priority. Also, the reason why I didn’t write about “spirituality” – God, I hate that word – is because I was thinking and meditating and figuring things out, and I don’t like talking just to hear myself talk. I basically needed a decade or two of processing to do, in order to get to the next level of understanding, and it’s not something you can copy-paste from somewhere, because, simply put, nobody has ever done it before. I did write bits and pieces as I was sure, and eventually “The Light Beyond” happened, as a culmination of all this. One of the more important reasons why I didn’t write much is because people who read it generate their own ideas that feed back into my perception, and then it makes it harder for me to figure things out and get a clear signal through all the interference. Then, as I got the pieces together, I could write it all down, since feedback loops no longer matter once I get it.

There’s another silly thing I found out recently; you see, I sensed that people ask Chat GPT and other LLM AI models about me. I asked Romana to try asking the questions I felt people are asking, and indeed, the answers came immediately, which means the system already had everything cached from recent inquiries. She copy-pasted some of it to me, and I found it incredibly silly. For instance, when you ask AI how competent I am, basically asking it to evaluate me because you trust a statistical evaluator of other people’s opinions more than you trust your own judgment, it tells you, essentially, that I’m quite competent at photography and programming, and less so at politics and religious philosophy – essentially, evaluating my deviation from the data pool that defines its primary neural networks as “being wrong”, while matches with consensus opinion are interpreted as “being right”. People who don’t know how that shitbox “thinks” will mistake it for actually having thought processes, which it doesn’t. The true interpretation of what it said is that my IT knowledge is generic enough that every competent IT person shares it, my photography knowledge is essentially what every competent photographer shares, and my pictures are composed along the lines of what is generally found aesthetically pleasing. My political opinions, however, are completely out of, what its western and leftist data pool of generally accepted propaganda defined by the CIA, defines as “normal”, so it’s “wrong” and “not substantiated by facts”, where facts are what the CIA tells the “journalists” to publish. Also, my opinions about spirituality are not the generally found copy-pasta; it’s actually the real thing, because I have my own independent access to the facts, which is orders of magnitude better than anyone else’s. In fact, some of the facts I have are my own memories from long ago, which are accessible only to me, and nobody else (with the exception of a few who also happened to be there); in simple terms, nobody else knows what actually happened because they weren’t there as it happened. I was. If someone didn’t learn it from me, they don’t know. So, Chat GPT thinks I’m taking myself too seriously, because it can’t verify my sources, so it thinks they are questionable. They are not.

Let me put it this way. Only a few people have been on the Moon. A few more have been in orbit around it. They have a unique perspective on it, and others are not really in a position where they can verify it independently. If they tell Neil Armstrong that he shouldn’t take himself too seriously with his stories about walking on the Moon, my answer is that they, in fact, are the ones who are taking themselves too seriously and they shouldn’t, while he’s taking himself exactly as seriously as he should, as he has an independent source of experience that they can’t access, duplicate or independently verify, so they should shut the fuck up.

Puzzle

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and writing only some of it down, while the rest of it remains work in progress.

I also made some interesting pictures:

It’s just that I’m having trouble figuring out what’s going on. The wars seem to be escalating, but contained within a pattern – none of the actors wants to disturb the world that holds the foundations of their power, and yet as the predictable certainties slip away, they seem to be forced into actions that they don’t actually want to make, with consequences they don’t want to accept. America wants to remain in power, but its economy is inherently broken, their soft power is all but gone, and their military is a one trick pony. Europe would want to act based on principles, and yet this sounds so ridiculous when it comes out of the mouths of atheists whose principles are something they themselves made up and is worth less than the paper it’s written on. Based on those principles they act in ways that subvert the foundational architecture that defined them.

Russia and China would want to be powerful and prosperous, and yet they don’t want to pay the price of that, which is to fight America and win. America abuses everybody and says “so, what are you going to do about it?” So far, nobody came up with an answer.

People seem to have found another source of religion. First they followed prophets and revelations of God. Then they followed science. Then they invented social media to receive validation from other humans. Now, they seem to chat with LLM AI, trying to get it to clear their confusion, answer their questions, and be their God. Considering how LLM is merely re-hashing the ideas of their own making and giving them what it sees as normalised results, this newest exercise in navel gazing is as pathetic as it is desperate, and reminds me very much of coprophagy.

But people, stupid as they are, will sooner ask Chat GPT about me, than ask me about Chat GPT. The Great Oracle will tell them what to think. That can’t go wrong.

It’s already very hard to find sources that are not contaminated by AI. With enough iterations, it will become completely impossible, unless you already know what you’re looking for, which makes it moot because searching implies finding new stuff, beyond what you already know. Younger people are destined to ingest the excrement of AI, thinking it’s information. It’s not. It is to information what a turd is to a hamburger that someone else ate.

I’m not saying AI is completely useless. I use it to remove noise from my images, and also for large-object generative cloning. Also, my camera uses it to detect people, birds and insects, and to focus on the eyes. I just don’t ask it for opinions, especially considering how often it fails to identify insects.

 

Price of purity

I’ve seen something on YouTube recently; a short fragment from the newest Harry Potter movies with young Grindelwald and Dumbledore. I actually watched only the first movie from the series but in this fragment the Kirin, or Qilin, bowed to Dumbledore, which is supposed to mean he’s of pure heart. People were complaining that it’s not right because Dumbledore was all kinds of flawed, and the authors missed the opportunity for the Qilin to bow to that fat baker muggle guy because he’s supposedly of pure heart.

That’s how people usually think, and they are very much mistaken. You see, people think that poor and powerless people are pure, and rich and powerful are sinful, but if you want to know how pure someone is, give him money and power. Also, I would add, if you want to know how pure you are, practice energetic yoga.

Dumbledore was the most powerful wizard of his era, from a wealthy family, and he made mistakes and corrected them and faced the consequences. He is not pure in some naive way, in which someone is pure because they simply lacked the opportunity or incentive to fuck up. He’s pure because he had to face and overcome his flawed and sinful nature. Purity that wasn’t fought for and gained at a great price might be lost as easily as it was attained.

Revolutions show what horrors poor self-righteous people are able to commit when given an opportunity. We’ve seen how corrupt people can become when they happen to attain money and power. It’s not realistic to assume that a pure powerless person will remain pure if suddenly given all the opportunities for sin, debauchery and evil. Moral purity isn’t something you get to be born with. It’s something you need to develop in face of temptation, error and personal weakness. If we assume that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, imagine how much of a struggle Dumbledore had to face and overcome in order to be this morally clean, while being so incredibly powerful? People think babies are pure, but Hitler was a baby, too. That’s not how that works. To be pure isn’t to never fuck up. It’s to fuck up, see that it’s wrong, say “never again”, and then consistently work on not fucking up again. I don’t believe in the concept of being sinless from birth; I believe in the concept of experiencing failure, experiencing the consequences, understanding the principles, and then working hard to overcome weakness. Only then you can have purity.

You can talk about purity in the context of butterflies, for instance, but if they lack any capacity to be otherwise, is it really of any value? Dumbledore is something like a vegetarian tiger, or a super venomous snake that refuses to bite even when provoked. It is in his nature to be Hitler, and yet he fights it and does good instead. That, I think, is more purity of heart than being pure simply because you lack the means and incentive to do evil.

If your instinct is to drink nectar from flowers and fly around, it is perfectly unsurprising if you hadn’t caused any great tragedy with your actions. However, what virtue is there in it?

Brainwashing in America

America has more in common with totalitarian countries like North Korea, than it does with the rest of the world, and it’s because they are so immersed in propaganda, and so ignorant of the actual world around them, that they are unique in the sense that they don’t notice their propaganda as such – to them, it’s just truth and facts. Here’s a good explanation of it:

I’m no stranger to propaganda, having grown up in communist Yugoslavia where you just knew what you had to say in public and what never to say in public, lest you end up on the Naked Island. The problem with propaganda is that sometimes you don’t know it’s propaganda, and I had to systematically deconstruct it for decades in order to even understand some of the more pervasive aspects of it, and of course it’s easier to notice the other people’s brainwashing, because it’s alien and sounds completely foolish. However, understanding things such as human rights, democracy and feminism as brainwashing and historical forgery is quite a bit harder. Even here in Europe, most of what we were taught from history is merely a narrative constructed to present a certain picture of reality that will support the currently ruling regime. For instance, I was shocked to learn, much later, how everything I was taught in school is a political narrative carefully constructed by omissions, selection of sources, and bombardment with insignificant and irrelevant dates and numbers that serve to dumb you down and block your critical faculties. It is extremely easy to keep someone completely brainwashed by merely selecting the sources, and the additional bonus is that the brainwashed person will think they are an independent well educated critical thinker. That’s how you get college educated morons.