Avoiding failure

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I recently saw a video clip of Dr. Jordan Peterson saying something that struck me as very insightful: if you want to advertise something to humans, the obvious idea is to frame it as offering success and well-being, but this is wrong. The humans don’t in fact care much about success and well being. They care about not suffering terribly and failing miserably. This is because “success” and “well-being” don’t really have much to offer, because human capacity for joy is quite limited. The threat of terrible suffering, however, is the primary motivational force, because the pit of doom is endless and promises untold horrors, and people would do anything to avoid that.

This struck me instantly as true, and it explained something I struggled with previously, which is the issue of status symbols. You see, status symbols are an obvious trap, something the super-wealthy people produce (thus increasing their wealth) and the people who are barely out of poverty buy, wasting their money and crippling their chances of ever becoming well-off financially. Essentially, one would do much better buying shares of LVMH or some other luxury-item business on the stock market, than buying their products. Basically, those luxury goods are upper middle class aspirational purchases, where someone who is barely out of poverty takes whatever money it is that makes him not poor, and throws it into fire. So, if you never want to make financial progress in life, do buy luxury goods and status symbols, because that’s the way to go. The reason people do that in such overwhelming numbers despite obvious reasons against it must obviously be very powerful, but the exact formulation eluded me. I used to think it was an equivalent of a peacock’s tail – a boastful show of opulence that serves no purpose for survival, and is in fact a hindrance to survival, so if someone can still pull that off, it’s a sign he’s really well off. An example of such a status symbol is a lawn. Initially, to have a piece of land in front of your house under grass or some aesthetically pleasing but non-productive trees was a statement of wealth – “you see, I have so much land already, I don’t have to plant something useful by my house, I can just waste it”. This explains other status symbols as well – they are intentionally wasteful displays, a show of how much money you can piss into the wind, because of how rich you are. Of course, when the poor or middle class people try to imitate that, and waste critical resources trying to look rich by doing what rich people do, they are completely ruined, but none of this still explains why people do it at all. Rationally, a response to “how much money can you waste on stupid bullshit” should be “none at all”. Also, wastefulness might be a show of opulence when really wealthy people do it, but when poor people do it it smells of despair and fear, like a scared cat puffing itself up to look bigger, not a peacock’s tail. This is where Peterson’s explanation clicked – they don’t do it because they want to achieve something positive, like being successful and happy. They do it because they desperately want to distinguish themselves from the grey, hopeless masses of poor, disenfranchised, doomed people barely clinging to the bottom rungs of the society ladder. There’s an instinctive recognition of dangers of being invisible, never seen by anyone important, never recognized enough for anyone to pay attention to you in any way because you are not distinguishable from the bland, grey, unimportant masses of people who barely make a living, working for slave wages. People are afraid of being losers, of being dismissed and mocked as irrelevant and unsuccessful, and will do almost anything to avoid this humiliation, and this explains sacrificing critically valuable resources at the altar of the false gods of status symbols.

However, there’s more to it than that. This is only the lowest “octave” that everybody recognizes, the physical one. It also extends into the spiritual realm, and I think that’s where the real issue lies. People don’t want to be mocked by Satan for being losers and failing his “tests”, and will keep investing their spiritual energy into attempts to achieve enlightenment in this world, to Satan’s great joy of course, because that’s how he can keep milking them dry. The spiritual equivalent of a Rolex or a Porsche are the spiritual achievements such as samadhi, or various demonstrable siddhis. Those things won’t necessarily get you any closer to any worthy goal, but they are a spiritual Rolex you can casually wear to some equivalent of a spiritual cocktail party, at least in your mind, and you think it will make you acknowledged, seen as worthy and accepted. In reality, the spiritual abilities that are of greatest use are usually the least “flashy” and “showy” ones, and collecting “experiences” like butterflies for your collection only shows your insecurities and fears of being unsuccessful and unimportant. It’s not necessarily even the experiences and abilities – sometimes it’s the spiritual titles, belonging to an established lineage and similar nonsense that gets people involved in cults and submissive to all kinds of weirdos who carry flashy titles, but that, obviously, seems like a path to being a weirdo in an orange robe who is generally recognized by others as spiritually successful. It’s the same circus as the Rolex and Ferrari crowd, only a different wagon, because if you know you’re not successful, you will go to great lengths trying to persuade others that you are. If you actually are successful, you won’t give a fuck. But of course, there are fakes who understand that and thus pretend to be the successful ones who don’t give a fuck. 🙂

Obviously, trying to fake achievement is something people devote an inordinate amount of time and effort to, in every sphere of interest and activity, and one could say that the same amount of effort, if invested in productive venues, could produce actual results. However, it seems that people actually give up on believing that they can actually do that – that they could achieve something real, be actually successful at something real and worthy, and trying to fake it is a sign of that. It’s a sign of someone who believes he has no chance of real achievement, but is desperately afraid of the depths of the pit of doom that awaits the losers.

The irony is, acknowledging that you’re a loser is the way to win.

When Satan mocked the souls that they would be nothing without constantly being in God’s presence, the “losers” acknowledged that, stating that God is everything of value and without Him they are nothing. Those “losers” are still with God in heaven, while those who wanted to be cool, emancipated and successful “winners” got lost here in Satan’s maze of reflections, illusions and quagmires, without God and all hope, still desperately trying to “achieve” and “succeed” in order to avoid Satan mocking them as losers.

Even in purely material things, avoiding the pitfall of posturing, acknowledging that you’re poor, saving and investing all your money, acquiring skills and living a modest life, are something that will eventually result in quite a portfolio.

So, what’s the lesson here? Trying to avoid failing miserably is probably the strongest motivational force in human life, and it can convince people to do the most desperate and counterproductive things. Also, people don’t “fake it until they make it”, they fake it because they gave up.

Recession

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Take this as an observation based on my personal experience with several recessions and growth cycles over the decades.

The way you can tell we’re at the peak of the growth cycle is the generally positive social attitude towards overt displays of wealth – people driving expensive cars, wearing expensive watches and other trinkets, and so on. The social attitude is, basically, aspirational – “good for him; we’re all doing well, some are doing better than most, but we all aspire to be there”. There’s abundance of money in the system, and there’s an abundance of people having lots of money, as well. The attitude is that if you don’t have money at that point, it’s your fault.

The way you can tell we’re entering recession is that the attitude towards boastful displays of wealth grows increasingly negative – an increasing number of people either lost their jobs, or had their salary cut, or the prices grew; the pension funds went bust, some people couldn’t pay their mortgage and so lost their homes, and so on, and the attitude is that we’re all basically fucked and trying to make ends meet, and the goal is no longer to make the most money, but to survive to the other side of this. The attitude towards wealth is no longer aspirational, because it’s seen as a dream we had to abandon and will most likely never reach, so displays of opulence are seen as someone poking at our wounds, intentionally reminding us of our misery and loss, and the rich people who don’t understand that the times had changed might find themselves at the wrong end of the stick.

I’ve been noticing this souring of attitude towards fake and real displays of wealth for a while now, which, to me, signals recession, and not only recession, but widespread pain of recession, that is not being acknowledged by the media, which makes it worse because it makes people assume it’s probably just them and not everybody else, and they feel as if they should keep up a facade of opulence in order not to stick out and be seen as losers, and keeping up the facade is increasing the financial pain. So, whenever they see someone who is buying a fancy new toy to show how well they are doing, they feel this as pressure to keep the expensive pretence and hasten their financial ruin.

Usually, when it’s publicly acknowledged that we’re in a recession, there’s a collective sigh of relief because then people feel they are allowed to show signs of adversity, because it’s seen as something that happens to everybody – they can keep wearing old clothes, sell the expensive car and get an old beater, not buy wasteful trinkets as holiday presents, and so on. Even the rich people usually have enough sense to tone it down, because they don’t want to be seen as the only ones not suffering; when everybody is doing well, doing better is good, but when everybody is doing poorly, doing better might single you out for retribution.

We are in an unacknowledged recession.

Avoid hacks

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I recently saw something that made me think about typical mistakes people make in everything they do. Basically, I saw one person trying to learn how to play Oldfield on guitar, and another wanting to learn how to play heavy metal.

I don’t know shit about guitar, but I would expect that what they are doing is going to fail, because in order to learn how to play something specific, you first need to learn how to play anything in general. You learn how to pick out notes, then you practice scales, then you elaborate from the scales and develop melodies and so on, and you need to practice this boring stuff ad nauseam, so it’s your second nature. This is the point where I understood that I saw this pattern before, with “spiritual” people. They all want to become enlightened. They all want to attain some very specific thing at the very peak level of achievement; basically, they want to play Oldfield. Invariably, they all fail, and I’ll tell you why.

They fail because of their contempt for methodical, gradual, systematic approach. They fail because they want to reach the top of the pyramid, but they don’t want to start at the bottom, because that’s boring and unpleasant. They just want a hack that will get them to the top. If only they reached the top for one second, they think, this would tick the “achievement unlocked” box.

Let me put it this way. My personal way of learning things was far from anything orthodox. I didn’t have a teacher and I didn’t belong to a spiritual school of any kind. I did, however, have experience with science, and I did have experience with writing code. I also had experience with failing many times in many spectacular ways, and I was smart enough to see a pattern in failures.

The pattern is that when you don’t invest enough time and effort into the ground work, into the “boring” basics, as you progress further this quickly results in chaos and disorder that inhibits your ability to go any further. Basically, it’s like climbing a ladder. It’s quicker and easier than building a solid structure that will allow you to ascend, but a ladder is flimsy and after a few meters you’re done. You either stop and fail, or you fall down and die. In coding, the equivalent of this is writing quick&dirty functions you don’t test thoroughly, and you write complicated stuff that can’t be tested independently and it all needs to work at once. As a result, when you get unpredicted or unwanted behaviour, it’s exponentially harder to fix as you build further, until you eventually end up with immensely complex, unfixable code that almost works. The pattern is, if you want to succeed, stop trying to succeed. Succeeding is a stupid idea. Instead, try not to fail. If you work very methodically on every single step not failing, you won’t have to work on succeeding, it will take care of itself.

The stuff I practiced most was perceiving what desires, emotions and thoughts do – energy goes in, emotion flares up, the thoughts whirl to give it reason and promote it, and then you grind through more thoughts to feed emotion, regardless of whether emotion is love or depression. The worst pitfall I perceived is a self-destructive pattern where you, basically, act like a baby that cries and makes itself miserable in order for mother to come and make everything better. I understood that this is a severely dysfunctional pattern that is based in physical body’s genetic design, and it’s a deadly thing, because there is no “mother”. Nobody is going to keep rescuing you as you make yourself miserable in order to get attention. All responsibility is on you. You need to stop digging holes for yourself to fall into and cry for help, because this leads to a perpetual fall into the pit of nothingness, and you fall apart in your misery long before you reach the bottom. You need to make sure that you don’t fail. Also, you need to control your impulses that result in fail-patterns. As you observe those things, your skill and accuracy improve. You perceive energies directly, and you learn that your entire mental and emotional structure is made up of various energetic loops and nodes that cause failure, and you work on gradually dismantling those, and absorbing the emotional energy of suffering that is released from them. As you suffer, you learn to release it vertically and learn Kundalini up-stream kriya. As you develop skill with perceiving the minefields of bound energies, you learn the inner-space technique; you basically learn to dig up mines by ringing various emotional “bells” that make them resonate, and then focus as you get a signal, poke where it hurts and have it show itself so you can deal with it. Basically, you learn to wallow in shit and poke at wounds. None of it is fun, none of it is “spiritual”, none of it is a quick hack that will give you a status symbol of having some achievement unlocked so that everybody will know how spiritual and enlightened you are. It’s just emotionally painful, hard and tedious work, and it goes on for months and years. However, as things progress you understand that you are spiritually much more powerful, and occasionally things just start happening, things like initiation into vajra, or being able to perceive higher realities, or being able to transfer karma from other beings, and “flash” a path towards God through their consciousness, or be able to purify energetic impurities from external objects, or be able to create objects of power, create and discreate souls, bring dissipated souls back into existence on kalapa-level, or work directly with structures created by Satan, depleting their energy sources, and then “spending” their control substance.

The thing is, the stuff I’m doing now is “playing Oldfield”, and most of that stuff I never practiced, it came to me easily and trivially as a consequence of other work. The stuff I actually practiced was, essentially, shovelling shit, draining pus from infected wounds, and suffering with calm detachment – basically, I did stuff nobody ever wants to do, and as a result I got to do stuff nobody ever was skilled enough to do.

How to leave

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I regularly get questions of this kind:

“If this world is a malicious trap, why not just cut your losses via suicide?”

My response to this is layered. The first argument is that suicide looks like such an obvious, simple and tempting option, if I were Satan, I would have built in strong safeguards against it – basically, those opting for it would have a much worse situation to deal with afterwards. Who knows what kind of a contract we had to accept by incarnating here, and what’s in the fine print. I don’t know, and I prefer to err on the side of caution. Let’s just assume that suicide might imply acceptance of all kinds of additional karmic attachments and retributive elements that we might very much wish to avoid.

The second argument is that self and body are joined in the incarnate state, and choosing to act against one might mean acting against the other, as well, with all the karmic consequences of such an action. Also not good.

The third argument is that we ended here despite this being a trap, which means it wasn’t obvious to us, for some reason. This implies that whatever reasons, that didn’t prevent our entrapment in the first place, might still exist, and unless we develop understanding that gives us resistance against it, we might end up being returned, and possibly in a worse situation than the one we have now. Take this very seriously, because now you know about me and you are reading this, and almost nobody on Earth knows about me, or cares. The odds are, you would be more lost, more confused, and who knows what else. In addition, Satan has an endless array of torments here for those who annoy him, and let’s assume that suicides make themselves karmically vulnerable to this. I think this is something we would want to avoid.

Hating this world and wanting to get out is, karmically speaking, not a decision against this world; only a consistent choice for God is a choice against this world, and I am pretty much certain that this is the only thing that would be interpreted as a liberating karmic choice. Basically, focus on God, and I don’t mean an idea about God. I mean God. This withdraws our spiritual energy from the world. Without us circulating power through the “electromagnet” of attraction, desire and attachment that holds us to the world, the world is released and we are emancipated from it.

Why things are a mess

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I guess the main question I get asked once I describe what this world is and how it works, is why anyone would ever incarnate here? It’s obviously a death trap; you get here, you get lost and confused, you start investing energy in misplaced efforts, you get attached, and eventually you get destroyed, broken up for energy and recycled. The souls on the other side must either see it falsely advertised as something great, or they think the potential reward is worth the risk. At least this is the expectation based on things we have experience with in this world.

Let’s start with the difficult part: I don’t know how the first generation of souls was convinced that incarnating here was a good idea. That part is a mystery to me. If I had to guess, I would say there were no bad experiences yet, and no precedents to infer from. It must have seemed like just another innocent experience to learn from. Also, Satan probably advertised it as something of a challenge – let’s see if you will still be devoted to God if things are not made perfectly easy. It could have been advertised as a gym, or enlistment into the army; invest sweat, attain glory, or something similar. In essence, at this point the souls were perfectly ignorant of any possibility of actual harm, and although I don’t know how this first generation got drawn in, it’s not necessarily a complicated thing to understand. Some wanted to be away from God to be able to explore the concept, never having experienced anything like it. Some accepted the challenge. In any case, nobody seemed to have read or understood the fine print on the bottom of the contract. Also, it is unclear to me whether the illusion contained any significant attractors at this point, beside the concepts of novelty and challenge.

The next generation is easier to understand – the first generation got stuck, and since they iterated on certain paths, those paths started to acquire energy and became the first generation of attractors. Those were the basic things – social influence, acquisition of wealth, sex and reproduction. At this stage, if there were no initial attractors, this was probably still a Buddhist world, and by that I mean a place where your own attachments are powered by your own investments of spiritual energy. Later, as things progressed, and the illusory world itself gained more energy, the attractors became so powerful, they started to generate attachments. You can understand this process either as seeing the attractors as paths in a forest, where people will usually follow the path of least resistance, and the more people travel a certain path, the easier it gets for others to just go along the same path, because breaking through the brush is hard, and following a clear path is easy. Another way of understanding this is gravity – the more mass there is at a certain place, the more gravity it generates, attracting more mass. In any case, I would say that at first this place was a Buddhist samsara, but later, as the attractors grew in power, the main mechanism changed: the attractors started generating the “main stream” of desires in the incarnated souls, and these desires then further powered the attractors, and everything together created the bond of attachment.

It is easy to understand what happened next. Some thought that those caught in the dragnet were weak, and they thought they could do better. Some felt concern for those caught, and thought that if they come as well, they might help them get out. Eventually, some very significant souls tried to incarnate as beacons of light to teach others how to be saved, but they invariably got caught as well, and their spiritual energy created and powered the next generation of attractors. The greatest aggravation of the already bad problem started taking place when those big souls, in their incarnated deluded state, but instinctively driven by their love for God, started confusing God with the creator of the world, thinking they must be the same, because that would have been normal and expected. Pledging themselves to the Creator, they basically created a very weird situation that had no precedent so far: they basically gave the unholy Dickwad the amounts of energy he could have never even dreamt of having, and this created an entirely new generation of problems.

Some of these “spiritual jewels” were used to make the world more attractive from the outside, to offer promise of spiritual achievement and greatness. Some were used to power “laws” that worked within the world, giving them the appearance of divine sanction and supreme virtue. Some were used to power “spiritual experiences” within the illusion, to be granted to those who show most obedience and devotion to the Creator – and you can already guess where this leads. A significant amount of “jewels” was used to power the scripts that protected the system from interference, mostly by means of encouraging desired behaviour, and discouraging anything that could interfere, tamper with or harm the system. Since the “jewels” are not a generic, fungible mass of energy, but discrete entities of very specific properties, and since they were acquired under very specific conditions and adhered to specific rules, Dickwad used them to incrementally improve his illusion, to patch holes, introduce rules, offer rewards, punish transgressions and so on; the system contains many layers and structures, and the entire thing looks like an inelegant, anisotropic mess. Furthermore, Dickwad occasionally had to make concessions and compromises in order to retain the fig leaf of karmic innocence; forms had to be obeyed. If he had to dispose of someone inconvenient, it had to be made to look pretty. This then required additional patches and layers of misdirection to be put in place, and sometimes he had to change some of the rules and parameters when things started getting away from him. An example of this is when people start creating attractors that conflict with his purposes here; if a religion is formed that creates an attractor towards actual transcendence, he had to intervene to modify it, so that energy is invested into something that confuses the purpose and binds more than it liberates.

In any case, the process must be described as “iterative” and “inelegant”, and the resulting structure looks more than a crow’s nest or a beaver’s dam, than some elegant structure with clean lines and beautiful form. This, however, explains why this world looks like such an incoherent, inelegant mess; it’s because all kinds of forces tried to pull each in their own way, and the present layout is the way it is because of some compromise, or an ancient spiritual battlefield whose front lines were cemented into laws and borders, that were contested at some point, revised and patched up to offer a semblance of rationality rather than necessity and compromise.

The most counter-intuitive aspect of it all is that to improve this thing, one needs to make it much worse. If you try to disassemble this trap, you need to remove layers of control, powered by distinct “jewels”, and when you do that, it’s like removing air conditioning or plumbing from a building: things get worse, and sometimes they get much worse. If you deplete energy sources from false-religion scripts that provided false comfort for the slaves that are being sucked dry for energy, things get subjectively worse. If you remove the layers that perform fake karmic compensations and re-routing, things will start looking really, really bad. If you remove layers of illusion that make ugly and dangerous things look beautiful, it will seem as if you turned a beautiful world into a nightmarish hell. In reality, it was always a nightmarish hell, and the “beautiful”, “spiritual” and “fulfilling” things were all just bait on the hook, things that cover and misrepresent the reality of the hook, things that misrepresent the mousetrap as a heavenly feast. If one removes all the things that make this world a deadly, consistent, nightmarish place of all-but-certain doom, powers down all the energy conduits between various traps, illusions, rules, patches and cover-ups, if all of the stolen spiritual virtue and power is removed, and stops powering deadly illusions, what you end up with is the reality of this place – evil that is starved for your energy, offers you nothing but doom, is desperately pathetic in its emptiness and mockery, and shows complete failure of any alternative to God, and to the world as God made it.

The good part is, there already is a perfect world, the real world, and it was here long before this place was even conceived in the mind of Satan. This place doesn’t need to be improved, or made better. It needs to not exist at all.