Watching Alex Jones on his YouTube channel, one would get the impression that “the globalists” are the enemy.
Or is it the leftist liberals, the neo-Marxists, feminists?
Or is it the neo-cons?
Or is it the Muslims and their fifth column in the West, which tries to weaken our resistance to shitty civilization-forming ideologies and the shitty cultures that they form?
If you ask the liberals, it’s “bigotry” and various “oppressions” that are the problem.
So let me tell you what I think.
I think the problem is several levels removed from the place where humans usually look for it. As St. Paul said, it’s not the flesh that’s the enemy, it’s the evil spiritual structure that dominates over it. The war is not against human bodies of this or that group, it’s not against hardware. It’s against software, against the spiritual power, against ideologies and belief systems that contaminate the minds and cause evil and suffering.
Buddha would say that the problem is suffering. The cause of suffering is projection of spiritual power into illusory and ephemeral things. The solution is to detach and withdraw. When the inertia of the flywheel is spent, the result is nirvana.
Jesus had a different take on it. He said that the problem is that Satan basically has power over the world, and is an active force that lies, binds and destroys souls. The solution was to redeem the world from his power by offering sacrifice of sufficient value, and simultaneously forcing Satan to administer the deathblow. It’s a complex equation, but it’s elegant and it had a good chance of actually working.
Because, you see, I think Buddha got one thing wrong, the one Jesus got right. The world is not a passive place where you just happen to invest your energy in form of projections and desires. The world is intentionally designed in such a way as to delude you regarding your true nature and the nature of reality, and to continually sing the sirens’ song of attraction, that provokes attachment and binds your fate to its own. The world is not a passive factor in our situation. It’s in fact the determining factor, exuding influence of such magnitude, that almost any degree of individual choice is outweighed and overshadowed. To say that the world is merely a given and that our attachment to it is our own problem to solve is like stating that gravity has nothing to do with the fact that we don’t happen to just spontaneously fly into space, and that we are holding on to the surface of the Earth by some act of our own volition. In a word, it’s false.
As for the humans, I would divide them into several groups. There are the ones who are aware of the situation and are actively working to counter it. There was about a handful of those throughout history. Then there are those who are aware that there’s some serious problem here, but are unaware of its exact nature, and are doing things that are sometimes useful, sometimes harmful, and sometimes useless.
There are those who don’t see it as a problem, but a great thing, who completely align their spiritual vector with that of the world, and who see attachment of spirit to matter as a great thing, and not a problem. And in the end, there are those who are unaware of anything, and just stumble around life like idiots.
The biggest problem is that the last group forms the vast majority of mankind throughout history. The vast majority of humans are as stupid as rocks. They merely want to preserve their existence as they see it, they want there to be more of things similar to them and less things that are dissimilar or threatening in other ways, they want to reproduce and they want to gain more influence. Tantric yoga would call them “the pashavi”, from pashu, which means “animal”, so it’s roughly translated as animalistic ones, the ones who are stupid animals who fight, feed and make little pashavi. In tantric yoga, the opposite of a pashavi is a yogi. A yogi understands that there’s a problem, he understands that he has to do something to get out of the problem, and he takes active measures, such as gaining knowledge, finding a guru who can teach him, and practising yoga with the goal of attaining liberation from the world.
So, essentially, the humans are divided into staunchly different groups according to the software that runs in their brains. They can be stupid cattle, they can be Satan’s henchmen, and they can be beings who strive for spiritual perfection and freedom, with varying degrees of success. In rare cases, they can be the agents of God, who possess true knowledge and power and are actually able to do something about it all.
As you are probably able to tell, my perspective differs significantly from anything that is widely believed.
My perception of the current state of worldly affairs is that the evil humans are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, wishing to do some evil, but without a supreme guiding evil force to direct them, and so they often contradict each others’ efforts, while increasing chaos, suffering and the overall amount of evil. The stupid ones are as stupid as they always were, only in greater numbers due to the exponential population growth, and the good ones are so outnumbered and they feel so dispersed and powerless, they are on the verge of getting completely confused and going crazy in this mess.
The thing is, the evil ones are not clearly divided according to ideology. You can’t just say “separate a certain ethnicity or religion or a political group, kill it off and thus solve the problem of evil”. You have evil globalists, but you also have evil nationalists, and evil Christians, and evil atheists. The evil ones are not all Muslims. Basically, there are different intellectual and emotional contents that exist on different spiritual vectors, and it’s the actual vectors that I find interesting, not the labels people put on them. I care whether someone has a spiritual connection to the transcendental or not, whether he understands the nature of the transcendental and the nature of the world, and whether he understands what spiritual choices and actions create what kind of a destiny for himself and others. Heinlein wisely stated that goodness combined with ignorance invariably results in evil, and I would express that as a mathematical formula, where intent multiplied with understanding determines the result. Good intent multiplied with shitty understanding equals evil. Shitty intent multiplied with good understanding equals evil. Only good understanding multiplied with good intent produces good results. Having in mind that people’s understanding of reality is shit, for the absolutely vast majority, you tell me if their intent matters. They are as likely to do evil deeds if they have the best motives, as they are if they have the worst ones. Having that in mind, I’m rather cynical about those who think they have a recipe for fixing things. The communists had it, the Nazis had it, everybody had it. Every damn fool thinks he can make the world a better place, and Buddha would rightly say that the only result of that is being attached to the world, and I would add that the additional result is usually adding your energy to the exact force that makes this world such a terrible place to begin with, because multiplying ignorance with zeal increases the overall “heat” of the chaotic pot in which we are all being cooked.
It is my opinion that the solution is not in introducing more energy into the system, in form of various efforts within the world. It’s not in the attempts of self-control, as if we are the ones to blame for falling, and not gravity. It’s not in trying to magically extract and transform evil that is contained in the world, in hope of making it good. The solution is to break the pot in which we are being cooked, even if we are to fall into the fire at first. This world needs to die.
I know these are some very simple thoughts, but if we break down all complexity and multitudes of approaches to the existence of this world and ourselves, all that is left are two basic possibilities: either there is a God, or there isn’t.
1.) If this world is indeed created in an explosion caused just by some accidental instability within singularity, and that’s all there is to it, then it’s all for nothing — simply put.
Every great personal or historical moment, every genius and every accomplishment, it’s just all completely useless, temporary and irrelevant. Every battle is lost before it even started. It doesn’t really matter if you try to make a world a better place. In fact, it would be advantageous to be stupid because it would be easier to accept life.
It looks like there are two main arguments atheist like to point up when somebody presents this kind of worldview.
First one looks something like this: it’s natural that life doesn’t make sense, that’s because you’re supposed to make sense of it on your own and do something interesting you find enjoyable. I don’t know who was the first to coin this phrase, probably Clarke or Feynman. Everbody later just kept on repeating. I’ve never really felt completely comfortable with this explanation. It’s like saying, well, yeah, you do have cancer, but you’re free to choose any painkiller you like.
The second is a suggestion we can actually prolong physical life to last much longer than it is now. With the right kind of technology, maybe even achieve immortality. This is actually much more funny that the first one. I really don’t know who in their right mind would want to do this to himself. It’s like they never saw a human being older than 50, and how worn out, bitter and defeated they feel. Prolonging that for 300 years sounds like ultimate masochism.
2.) If we assume there is a God, then things start to look different, because we can try to make some sense of this place. Problem is, his existence is not obvious, and his intentions are unclear.
So it looks like we can take on two stances from here.
Either to dedicate yourself to some practice in order to try to find out who he is and what are his intentions – or to comply with the given state of things, assuming that this was his intention anyway, otherwise he wouldn’t put you here.
If we chose to comply, then there is no absolute goodness or evil, there is just his will, whatever that will is, and it’s up to us to align according to it. If we do that, it’s good, because his will is the absolute rightness.
The thing is, if you are here, it means you’re a human. And if you’re a human, this comes with a package of certain properties. Basically, it means you’re some kind of animal driven by animal instincts. You’re supposed to find food, protect yourself, and reproduce. These are unavoidable facts, this is all a given if you are here, so it must have been his idea.
But why would such place be his idea? It doesn’t really sound particularly exciting, although it’s extremely difficult to have any quality opinion on that matter when only perspective you have at your disposal is the one from inside.
So I guess, at a certain point, one starts to ask questions. And if you go practical, that’s where various forms of spiritual practice kick in. Can we call that some kind of self-control?
Now, you just said: “It is my opinion that the solution is not in introducing more energy into the system, in form of various efforts within the world. It’s not in the attempts of self-control, as if we are the ones to blame for falling, and not gravity.”
What does this exactly mean and how far it goes? Because it almost sounds like giving amnesty to everyone involved because they were deluded. How does this coexists with personal karma?
1. Doesn’t follow. It’s like saying that the fact that a car was made in a factory by robots proves that you can’t have fun driving it. You have the concept of spiritual interference in the matter which can both alter the nature of the physical universe and define a huge amount of the combined physical/spiritual experience. Also, there are emergent properties, like speed for a car. Speed is not a part of the car, but occurs when the parts of the car perform their function. Basically, if the physical universe is responsible for only a part of our experience, its reduction to simple origins doesn’t actually reduce the complexity of our experience.
2. The problem of God isn’t simple, because it has two basic parts. First is, whether transcendental reality exists, and the second is, what is the nature of this transcendental reality? To reduce the question to “is there God” is to assume a pre-packaged answer to the second part, which I am seriously disinclined to do, because that part is the most interesting. To figure out God’s nature is much more interesting and demanding than figuring out whether there’s a God. The trap religions set is the assumption that if there is a God, it must necessarily be the kind of God they are talking about, and my experience doesn’t really lend much credence to that assumption. Things seem to be much more complex. To figure out whether transcendence exists is quite easy; so easy, in fact, that I don’t have a very high opinion of those who fail at that simple task. To figure out God in fullness might actually be theoretically impossible, because it is provable that a higher-dimensional being is incomprehensible by a lower-dimensional one. Between fullness and nothing there is, however, a very large grey area, and in my opinion, it is the purpose of a spiritual being’s existence to enlarge that area in the direction of better comprehension.
The other important issue is the assumption that God has some direct connection with our position in this place, or with this place as such. Everybody just assumes it, but I find it to be false. God doesn’t directly control entities in this world, such as my computer. If I can put a virtual reality engine on my computer, and plug someone into that using Oculus Rift, and God didn’t have anything to do with that, it is therefore quite easy to extend that onto this world, and conclude that it is quite possible for this place to exist without any direct causal connection with God. Some lunatic on some astral world could have created this place as either a science experiment or a trap, and we ended here for various reasons, some of which might be quite mundane, like stumbling into a trap, or trying to get a friend out and getting stuck in the process. In fact, this is much closer to what I think is actually going on, and this is further corroborated by the obvious discrepancy between the nature of this world and anything one would expect a benevolent transcendental omnipotent being to create. In fact, one would expect something much more along the line of the world reported by the NDE experiencers, who also report that this world feels like a super-restrictive hellhole in comparison. The conclusion that this is a reduced reality similar to what we can create with our computers in this world is not that much of a stretch of imagination.
3. About your objection, stating that shifting responsibility from souls onto the world means amnesty of evil choices, I have a twofold response. First, the nature of this world is so damaging, that the very concept of amnesty is moot. It is my opinion that the souls that get trapped here are unlikely to escape unscathed even if they made all the right choices and lived pure and saintly lives. This world is inherently corruptive. The more pressing issue is how to rehabilitate the souls and repair the horrific damage induced by physical incarnations, not how to punish them for all their transgressions while trapped in a lobotomised state. The second part of the response is that the intrinsic nature of the world is manifested as sinful actions by an incarnate being. Essentially, if you don’t actively interfere, things go downhill. Accepting this fact doesn’t mean amnesty of evil choices, it just means you don’t spend your time self-flagellating over each and every transgression; you understand that your attention slipped, you correct and you go on. If, however, your spiritual influence is too weak to successfully interfere with the body, there are two more important questions: how incarnated are you in the first place, and if you are incarnated, is the magnitude of your soul sufficient to do anything to influence the automatisms of the body and the global spiritual field that attempts to manifest itself through your body? Essentially, if your hands are not big enough to move the steering wheel, how can you be blamed for crashing the car? But if you are that small, you are so insignificant you are actually borderline nonexistent. So, this is not much of an amnesty. You are expected to try. You are not expected to completely succeed at everything you try (which BTW is one of the lessons in Bhagavad-gita; it’s the gunas that act, and atman is merely a witness, and you’re not expected to produce results, you’re expected to do your best along a certain spiritual vector). However, if you fail to even try, then you’re essentially worthless, which is a much greater karmic sentence than anything you could get from karmic retribution for your actions.
So, basically, if you’re deluded, it’s not an amnesty. It’s a very bad diagnosis, like saying that someone isn’t responsible for his actions because he has a very bad form of brain cancer. I’d rather be responsible and guilty than have cancer and be excused. 🙂
“To figure out whether transcendence exists is quite easy; so easy, in fact, that I don’t have a very high opinion of those who fail at that simple task.”
I am very curious how do you think this task is best accomplished. I figured several years ago that this reality is not all there is, but if for example there was someone who has not figured it yet, what could I do to help him/her to see?
As I said, it’s very easy; you read the experiences of the saints, you read the NDE experiences, the evidence is very good. It was good enough for me to accept the fact that it is all perfectly real at the times when I was all about science and physics. If I could do it then, merely based on the presented evidence, I just don’t accept anyone’s claims that the evidence is insufficient. Now, figuring out the exact nature of it all, that’s a problem.
Thing is I have couple of friends who seem interested and want to know more when I mention some of this “stuff”, but they are not exactly this type that will practice, either be that some form of meditative practice, or maybe nagualistic lucid dreaming or whatever that gives access to different states of consciousness which actually prove that this reality is not all there is.
For me, just realizing existence of astral was pretty huge deal, and I think it would be good for everyone skeptical to get taste of it, just to shake their beliefs.
I was thinking about how I managed to figure it out even without any kind of strong personal experiences, and I guess it all comes down to the fact that the path toward truth consists of two equally important parts. One is avoiding falsehood and deception, and that part is easy for the skeptically minded. The other part is accepting the facts however unpleasant or inconvenient they might be for your worldview and self-image. So, one needs to avoid bullshit, but one also needs to accept and believe in the truth. That second part seems to be all but impossible for some people, and that’s why they waste their lives firmly entrenched in square one.
Honestly, I can’t see how lucid dreaming proves anything. I’ve had lucid dreams for years. That was the norm for most of my childhood actually, without ever trying or knowing what it’s called. I could wake myself up whenever I want just by killing myself and I guess it was fun for awhile, but it’s still just a dream, not real astral projection.
Not to sound smart-ass, but for anyone who ever tried to get any practical accomplishment, I think convincing someone else or trying to explain anything is the last thing in the world that would cross your mind, because you would be so much absorbed in your own inner struggle. If anyone really wants to know, he will ask you, and even then you would be tired and reluctant to explain anything. That’s why I find these kind of conversations pretty fucking incredible, there is no rational reason for Danijel to answer to anyone, let alone write sheets of text sitting at midnight in front of the screen.
Long ago I had a mistaken idea that people don’t believe in God because they lacked evidence, so I did a streak of performing spiritual initiations every other day for a few years; I would make spiritual contact with someone and bring the joined entity into the state of meditation, essentially showing them transcendence directly. The result was not what I hoped – essentially, they usually accepted that those things exist but never reacted as I would have, by working like crazy to reach this thing again and follow it wherever it leads me. They would like it, as an addition to their own lives, or as means of achieving their own goals. Unfortunately, I trained a few quite competent dark mages. Some others chose denial, resulting in varying degrees of madness. I was forced to renounce my belief and accept that you can’t really hasten spiritual evolution by much. When the fruit is ripe, it falls from the tree by itself, you don’t need to prod it with sticks and stones. So yes, evidence and proof. Big words, but it turns out that too much is made of them, and even if they are provided, they are either readily rejected or people shrug and go their own way. People who actually are ready to find things out invariably do, and evidence and proof are what spontaneously happens during that process.
What I do now is explain, and whoever finds it useful, is welcome.
We discuss about this matter from vastly different positions, so anything you say will probably be much more to the point, but I can say two things.
1. Whenever I met someone who tells me it’s important to be confident and to know what I want in life, because I more often than not look like I don’t, I burst into laughter and tell him to go fuck himself. Most confident and most pushy people I’ve met are in the same time the most materialistic and narrow-minded. They think they have a solution for almost every problem, and those solutions always come down to giving advice on how to be most successful animal in the animal kingdom. Even worse if they try to mingle into spirituality with that kind of confidence, because then we get cold inflexible, dogmatic who thinks he can stuff life into a few simple rules, and if you don’t agree, it’s his rightful duty to force you to, or at least preach with his nose in the clouds.
Almost everyone else is mostly burdened with doubts and insecurity. Most interesting and smart people I’ve met in my life were completely wrecked in one way or the other. Melancholic, antisocial, gay, suicidal, or just distant, weird and self-absorbed.
2. To bring any real knowledge to anyone, even if he wants it and he’s ready, you have to be not only wiser, but more importantly, much, much more powerful than him, so you don’t fuck up yourself in the process of making a contact.
Just a few trivial examples from the past three weeks or so.
I was at the coffee bar with this girl I haven’t seen for awhile, I guess it was some kind of date or something like that. She was talking about business, her parents and stuff like that, but what was really on the table is something else she barely mentioned. She’s in her late twenties and she’s alone. It bothers her so much, the pain is tremendous, although she’s trying to act strong and finds escape in working 30 hours a day. I don’t know if she would openly admit it, but I get that same feeling every time I see her, so no mistake about that. It was exhausting even to scratch over that, and besides, I don’t know how to help her, but to marry her, which is the idea I’m not particularly excited about, to say the least. It took me two days after that to stop feeling like shit, or at least taste my own shit instead of someone others.
Second example. An old friend of mine got engaged and I’ve gone to meet her. Since she’s someone new, I was actually closely paying attention to what she’s saying. She talked about her trips over the globe, nothing special, but it was more than enough to absorb me in her mind so much I was not the same person when I got to home the next day. I was literally looking at some of the half-finished projects on my desk in front of me and wondering what the fuck is this, why did I even start doing it, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Again, it took me about two days to restart into default myself. It’s not like anything’s especially wrong with her, she’s a fine girl, but I don’t like being her, she’s just too different.
So yeah, it looks like, if you really want to bring something to someone and remain unharmed in the process, on a scale of 1-10, you have to be at least level 8 or 9, and the other side is at the level of 2 at max. Otherwise, it’s just a mess.
Over the years, I’ve found a solution to this close-contact problem by simply not engaging in any kind of contacts. Even if I go to for the morning coffee at the local bar, I try to do it around 7AM when the youngest person in the room is my neighbor Ivo who’s 83 and can’t sleep well. He’s almost dead, so he’s fine.
It is my experience that it isn’t enough to just have a quantitative difference in strength of the astral body, you need to have higher initiation so that you can treat your astral body as a sacrificial part that gets damaged and repaired without it influencing your soul structure; essentially, all your personality elements need to be withdrawn into the higher bodies.
Lucid dreaming with what is generally known about (psychology) is nothing really important, but if you try to do what Carlos Castaneda described in his books, then you realize that you can get out of your personal dream bubble and experience astral. There are countless discussions whether characters of his works were real, notably sorcerer Don Juan, but it seems it doesn’t matter as everything he said can be experienced. There are countless forums dedicated to nurturing this ancient knowledge as it apparent that practice of this “real deal” lucid dreaming exists in Latin America for at least pre Columbian times.
I agree with you regarding explaining. Even though I don’t have much practical experience, when talking with people around me, I get easily tired. People either want to know everything so they ask series of questions or they ask something and joke around which confuses me little so I don’t know if they are mocking me or are genuinely interested. That is why I said to myself that I will never again start these types of conversations in real life, only that when someone mentions some bullshit or wants to talk, I will just share a few things, nothing too serious.
My usual reply to this: when I wanted to find out if there’s something more than the physical world, I looked up how to do astral projection. I didn’t even put much effort in. It was trivial to get enough results to prove that yes, there is something. What that something is, and whether AP is the right way to explore it, that’s another question entirely. It literally took less effort than a masturbation session. If someone wants to know? They can easily find out. Guides on how to do AP are all over the internet, I tell them they’re free to see for themselves.
They don’t want to know.
If someone has an entrenched worldview, it’s a huge impact for that to shatter. The psyche does not want to accept it. It takes a lot of mental fortitude and personal integrity to accept the truth. Here’s an example that taught me this.
Myself and two other people saw a ghost. We all saw the same thing, simultaneously: a white apparition that quickly exited the room, but inundated us with its emotional state. At the time I was a hardline atheist skeptic. This shook my worldview upside down. I was searching for a “logical explanation” for days afterwards, in a frightened, desperate state. Because, if this exists, what else exists that I had no idea about? Had I been I walking around the world with a black hood over my head, exposing myself to dangers unknown? Ultimately I had to accept what I’d seen and the frightening changes to my worldview.
Several years later I asked one of the two other persons if she remembered the incident. She said “but wasn’t that someone throwing paper out the window?” …That was one of the first things we’d checked, initially, and even asked around like awkward idiots. That wasn’t it.
So while I’d accepted the truth and its consequences to my worldview, the other person chose to rewrite their memories in a more comfortable way.
The more powerful the proof, the more desperately the person will struggle to return to their status quo. Especially if they don’t naturally have a lot of integrity and mental fortitude, and if they’re naturally disinclined to such knowledge. Too big of a differential to bridge.
I’ve actually had a friend, pretty smart and benevolent, but complete sceptic, cold and rational (whatever that means). I didn’t care much about all that because friendship functioned quite well nonetheless.
He would like to pride himself quoting pop-sci figures like Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence!”
So I said, what would you do if one day, just like that, some saint, ghost, God or whatever, just appeared here in your room, out of nowhere, to bring you a message. You would surely know it is something transcendental, not just because how outwordly experience looked, but it felt that way too.
He thought about that for a second and responded he would carefully listen to what this non-physical entity had to say, and then the next day, after the dust settles a bit in his mind, conclude he has accidentally eaten some hallucinogen, like ergot, kind of mold that grows on rye and it can end up in bread.
But why would you do that? Because something like that can’t exist, and if it happened and he saw it, there’s something wrong with him – he responded.
Well, at least I can’t say he wasn’t completely honest.
When someone already has a pre-packaged response to an experience he never had, he’s definitely not a skeptic and certainly not a rational person. If you asked me what my reaction would be to a completely new order of experience that I never had before, I would tell you that I don’t know, because I can only base my opinions on things I have experience with.
So yeah. Also, the materialists always think the spiritual experiences have to be some sort of hallucination, some sort of pathology. That’s because they assume that what they are experiencing is the reality, and if something isn’t in line with that, it must be an illusion. In fact, the spiritual experiences that I had were never along the line of me being me and then experiencing something. No, it was along the lines of having a veil of illusion stripped away from me so that I could experience reality. It’s an experience of the higher order. If anything is a hallucination, it’s the normal physical experience. It’s a state of narrowed consciousness and perception, like taking stupid pills and being reduced to the level of rats and chickens. A spiritual experience is like reality interfering with a dream.
“Also, the materialists always think the spiritual experiences have to be some sort of hallucination, some sort of pathology. That’s because they assume that what they are experiencing is the reality, and if something isn’t in line with that, it must be an illusion. In fact, the spiritual experiences that I had were never along the line of me being me and then experiencing something. No, it was along the lines of having a veil of illusion stripped away from me so that I could experience reality. It’s an experience of the higher order. If anything is a hallucination, it’s the normal physical experience. It’s a state of narrowed consciousness and perception, like taking stupid pills and being reduced to the level of rats and chickens. A spiritual experience is like reality interfering with a dream.”
I’m not even sure we have to dive into some deep spiritual states to feel something that qualifies as an experience you just described. Something like, you know, being deeply in love with someone?
1. It feels completely out of the ordinary, qualitatively different experience, nothing like daily life? Check.
2. It feels like you see that person for the first time who she really is, without any superficially imposed judgement? Check.
It still may be an illusion, but at least it feels like an illusion of much lesser magnitude.
In fact, it may be indicative that most of the atheists I’ve met were also somewhat constricted in their emotional spectrum too.
No, it’s much more than that. Falling in love is within the range of usual human experiences. A spiritual experience does resemble it in a sense that it is transformative, extraordinary and better than normal, but it’s also way more than that, because it’s about having restrictions at least partially and temporarily removed from yourself, which is something both qualitatively and quantitatively above the range of normal human experiences.
The thing about atheists being emotionally limited is an interesting observation, because I noticed the same thing – they often display cynicism, irony, sarcasm, ridicule etc., but it is not adequately balanced, and the whole higher emotional range that I would normally expect is missing. Also, they are unable to grasp abstract ideas of a certain kind, very much like children whose brains haven’t sufficiently developed. So, when they talk about religious symbolism, it’s obvious that they don’t get the complexity. I knew some people who were unable to “get” the movies because “it’s only actors, it isn’t real”. Atheism seems to be something similar – inability to simply accept the form and imagery in order to get the substance.
You should have responded with: “I find your lack of faith disturbing” 🙂
I guess I find my own life too disturbing to care about anyone else’s.
Legendary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzs-OvfG8tE
Sure, I know what you meant.
Yeah, that’s a good story. It’s a ready reply to any experience out of the ordinary: hallucination. And what if more than one person has seen it? Mass hallucination. “It’s more common than you’d think.” It’s a combination of perceptive blindness and a deep-seated motivation to remain in their status quo.
The way that person rewrote their entire memory of the event was eye-opening to me, because it didn’t match reality at all. It was a simple shrugging off, despite all evidence. “This is easier to explain (and the alternative is frightening), so it must’ve been this.”
I get a bit frustrated when people just shrug at the possibility of existence outside of the physical world. If they ask about it, I tell them the AP story and how they can try for themselves (with the caveat warnings from my experience). To this date, nobody has tried. This lack of imagination and curiosity is just ludicrous, but it shows you which motivations have weight. So I just go my own way, and mind my own business.
“This lack of imagination and curiosity is just ludicrous, but it shows you which motivations have weight.”
It doesn’t really look so much like a matter of imagination and curiosity, I think there’s much more going on here.
Although people are different and their motives vary, I’d say we can put all those sceptics I’ve met so far in three main groups.
1. Those who are just too crude to comprehend the possibility of anything non-physical.
They don’t truly believe anything they can’t see, feel, taste or touch and are mostly very pragmatic. Most of them doesn’t like fine art and can’t even understand any point in it, since it doesn’t produce any practical results. Their vision of ultimate success is mostly money and social prestige. Since they love to play it safe, paradoxically, most of them are actually devoted members of some kind of mainstream religion, whatever that happened to be in the area they grew up. It’s not like they have anything against God per se; they just don’t care, because they don’t see any use for it. They like life just the way it is, and if God is able to preserve that, then he’d be welcome.
2. Second group certainly shares some traits with the group 1, but in addition to that, they allowed themselves to go full retard.
Those are the kind of women that had multiple abortions just because they didn’t like the idea they should have to work to raise someone, men who cheated on their wives numerous times because they thought it makes them look badass, all the people who destroyed their family life due to alcoholism and other vices. It’s not only that they don’t like the idea of God, they hate it wholeheartedly because any kind of absolute moral values grid makes them look like a pile of shit in retrospective.
3. This group is most the most peculiar one.
Unlike the group 2, they didn’t necessarily do anything obviously wrong, and unlike the group 1 they aren’t so stupid to not have enough of perceptive capabilities. They just willingly choose to refuse God, even if you flush them with all kinds of evidence. It’s almost as if they have some conflict with Him on a personal level, and they moved here underground intentionally just so they can pretend there is nothing else left. This guy I mentioned before certainly belongs to this group, although I’m not sure why.
Maybe he somehow got hurt pretty badly long time ago, and he blames the powers that be. So he turned his back in revolt and started with evangelical atheism. He invested considerable amounts of time reading what Dawkins, Hitchens and the like have to say, and it gave him enough material to build pretentious, smug and self-confident image of himself as someone who knows much better than all of those unwashed masses. But now comes the special trick. At the same time, he’s aware it’s all bullshit.
I know he knows, I’ve been closely examining him.
But it’s all buried down so deep, ten times deeper than the oil reserves. I don’t think he will ever let himself completely admit it because there would be nothing left of him, his ego is now based on those efforts, and you can’t just like that take a saw to the branch you’re sitting on.
Also, although he’s very calm on the surface, there is a strong subconscious undercurrent flow of anger and hatred, some kind of urge to destroy everything and hate everyone. Since he’s outspoken leftist, it really helped me to understand much about left values in general, just by examining one person, because every time I saw a hardline leftist, I had a chance to see a very similar pattern, whether it be some feminist, multiculturalist or whatever. They would certainly like to see all established values burned to ashes, but without any particular idea on how to build anything of value afterwards, except their own ego.
I don’t know what happened to him one day, I guess he was having a moment of weakness, but that one time, that single time, he admitted to me he actually hopes he was wrong all along, and there is something bigger on the other side after all. We never again talked about this. It’s like you accidentally saw someone naked for a second, both of you just pretend it never happened.
While I agree that there is an underlying, deep set motive to reject God, I was talking about the general layer of apathy and blindness in the population. Even in people who are otherwise intelligent and imaginative. Truth is just that well hidden here, to the point of irrelevancy.
Those are some interesting observations you’ve made, I agree. I did say similarly in my earlier post, they don’t want to know. But this was another aspect that I wanted to point out.
Sorry for the late reply, I knew this would take me more time than the others so I left it to be the last, but anyway, here goes…
The whole story with the paragraphs 1 and 2 was just an introduction to the paragraph 3, which was the real question, so I didn’t really expect any comments on them. But OK, scribomania is welcomed. 😀
That was not the not the point here.
I was just trying to display two different concepts, reduced to their most simplistic form. One completely without a God, and other with it. Both from the perspective of their apologetics. And then the consequences.
You can’t say that the first concept makes sense by entangling him with spiritual interference, because then it’s not the first concept anymore; it’s the other one.
I mean, I don’t even have much of a problem with the concept of the physical universe as purely physical, with physical origins and physical evolution, as long as our actions have ultimately non-physical consequences. That would give them sense.
It’s all about the context.
Sure, I could have fun with a good car. I like to drive, and I enjoy driving fast, no matter who made it. In fact, if somebody offered me anything I like within human limitations, I’d probably take ten 20-something-year-old good-looking hookers, lots of cocaine, and I’d be gone on some tropical far-out island for a month. After that, it would probably get tedious.
Also, having fun doesn’t imply any sense of accomplishment, so for that matter, it would be much more better to hook up with just one pretty lady, using your words and charisma as a tool, without any money or fancy clothes.
And yet, having a sense of accomplishment doesn’t necessary imply a feeling of satisfying serenity and harmony with myself. For something like that, I’m going to need free summer night and opened windows so I can hear the crickets orchestra while I do 3D modeling without any special reason.
But none of that would completely solve the problem I’m talking about. I don’t know is there even a name for something like this…? Let’s call it existential anxiety.
To follow your analogy with driving, say you just happen to appear out of nowhere, with your memory erased, driving a car. You would’ve probably liked it, at least at first, then after some time it would get boring. You would be wondering why do you need to drive it anyway. What significance does it have, who put you there and why. Something that was fun at first would slowly become an agony. You would occasionally meet other drivers and ask them those questions, but they would tell you there is no point in trying to find a sense, you just need to find a sense of your own, and that means picking a good radio station and go on driving. You only have only so much gas left, and when it’s gone, you’ll freeze to death.
Sure. I’m familiar with your writings and your most recent stances on those issues.
But, as I said, I was trying to make concepts as simple as possible, and that is a complex upgrade. We can easily reformulate my initial question and move from from God to “is there a life after death?”; rest of my first comment would be still the same.
One of my roommates actually had a car crash and something like an NDE while he was in an ambulance, he was telling me about it, but I don’t have any personal experience with it.
I do, however, have some limited experience with drugs. I recall myself on one occasion describing the experience as quite liberating. It’s not just about excitement and joy, there was something else about it, more interesting. It felt like taking off heavy knight armor or space suit and putting on silk kimono, I didn’t feel so restricted anymore.
Sure, cognitive abilities were severely impaired, but awareness was not. It’s like the constant spasm I didn’t even know I was in all the time was relieved, and what I find intriguing was how that temporarily changed my outlook on the world. There was no need to feel resentment against people who fucked me over, because I finally had everything I wanted, so how people treated me didn’t even matter anymore, I could afford to be generous to anybody.
Yeah, it’s all obviously artificial and unsustainable, but still interesting
After that, I’m somehow inclined to think that one of the main problems regarding the feeling of constriction is the entanglement of conscience to the psychical brain. All other features of this world, like vulnerability, hunger or aging are nothing compared to that.
Oh yeah. Now this is where it gets really interesting.
You sure made a clear response to my question, but at the same time posed some new dilemmas.
1. For example, what does it mean to “do your best along a certain spiritual vector”?
What exactly is a spiritual vector? Is your concept of a personal “spiritual vector” similar to the concept of personal dharma?
2. How can you tell to what extent is someone incarnated here? If he’s not completely incarnated, why is that?
I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it seems to me that, paradoxically, for the majority of people, their very young age is the age of their lives when they are most firmly present here. Older you get, more aloof you become, and more accustomed to the limitations.
If there is anything I have, I have very good memory, and I can tell that almost 100% of my “triggers” into feeling present and alive are just parts of recollections of my early childhood. A trigger can be anything; just a sensation of the cold wind blowing over my cheeks for a second, the smell of fresh snow, some radio hit I haven’t heard for ages etc. I guess there is some biological force at work in our youngest age, being the most potent when we need it to perceive and learn as much as we can at the shortest possible time, but it wears out eventually.
This is intriguing because, in a practical sense, children are the ones who take the real world least seriously of all humans, and most of the day are completely detached in their fantasy bubble of imagination. But when you get older, it looks like you were more “here” than you are now. What the hell…
3. Why does one even need to “incarnate”, why it’s not an biologically automated process?
Let’s say you have some very well developed soul who for some reason happens to be born here. He had experience of vajra before (it’s not really important, it can be any other level high enough to make a point), but now it’s not a part of his active personality. If I got this correctly, he actually has to put a significant amount of very well directed effort to get back to him, what was supposed to be his in the first place?
Am I wrong if I say that, for all practical intents and purposes, there is no significant difference between him and someone who never in his entire existence felt something like that? If they want to get there, they both have to overcome the same obstacles, because now they have the same starting point.
4. In the comments on one of your articles, you mentioned you have internal “shorthands” for different gradations in sophistication and size of human souls. To be more precise, you told the person you were talking to, he “feels like a college student”. Maybe not particularly useful, but certainly very interesting. Would you mind doing the same kind of x-ray scanning for me? I don’t mind even if it’s somewhat offensive or humiliating, just shoot. It doesn’t even has to be some “shorthand”, it can be anything interesting to hear.
My full attention, focus and spiritual capacity are bound within my other duties at the moment so I lack the capacity to properly answer your questions at this time. I will answer them when the current pressure subsides.
Sure, take all the time you need.
“I was just trying to display two different concepts, reduced to their most simplistic form. One completely without a God, and other with it. Both from the perspective of their apologetics. And then the consequences.”
I’m not sure I can imagine a godless world. Seriously. I know too much about how things actually work and it’s like imagining a world with inverse gravity, but with anthropomorphic life forms. You see, if you invert gravity, you have a universe consisting of exponentially rarefying hydrogen; no fusion, no complex molecules, no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no life. This is a trivial example but imagine a universe without the “dark energy”, as they call it, or negative curvature of the empty-space manifold, as I call it, which is essentially a weak antigravity force, so finely tuned that it is de facto evidence of intelligent design. Its existence and nature was only proven years ago, so unlike gravity, one could have assumed its nonexistence up until recently and he would’ve gotten away with it. People could’ve been completely agnostic regarding its existence. Yet, were it not there, and were it even slightly different, our form of life would have been impossible. A today’s physicist cannot imagine a world without this slight negative spatial curvature, and yet physicists 20 years ago knew nothing about it and they didn’t feel its existence is necessary for their models. So basically, the less you know, the more you can imagine.
That’s what I mean when I say that I cannot imagine existence of anything without God, simply because I know that God holds the entire relative creation within His mind and no form of existence whatsoever is possible outside of Him. The scientists who imagine Universes popping up from “something” have no imagination, because otherwise they would have realized that they just assumed the existence of “something”, space within which Universes can exist before space and time were created. One such as myself would see this as a huge problem because I can’t just pull shit out of my arse like that, but apparently they have no problem with that, because their science is no longer about facts and evidence, it’s about hysterically making up any kind of theory just to avoid God, evidence be damned. So, materialistic universe just isn’t a realistic theory to me, it’s like imagining a world made of candy or cheese, and not even bothering to work out the specifics. I don’t have imagination that good. I either know, or don’t know. If I don’t know, I guess, and I am completely aware that it’s a guess. However, I can’t guess when I know that the likelihood of accuracy is negative, basically that there is positive evidence of impossibility. For instance, I can imagine superstring-based interactions, I can imagine a Higgs-field based matter, but I can’t imagine a chicken soup based universe. My brain simply refuses to attempt imagining useless shit that contradicts evidence. In a similar way, my brain cannot imagine reality without God, because it so strongly contradicts evidence, my mind simply refuses to work with the concept. It’s like imagining Moon that’s made of cheese with invisible dragon eating it in order to create an eclipse, and farting it whole out the other end. People who know less, can imagine more.
“You can’t say that the first concept makes sense by entangling him with spiritual interference, because then it’s not the first concept anymore; it’s the other one.”
As I said, I can’t imagine a purely material universe. In such a universe, a huge percentage of things that I experience in my daily life wouldn’t be possible. It’s like asking you to imagine a universe where gravity is a force whose strength falls to zero beyond the length of a hydrogen atom, and at the same time there are humans in this universe. You can imagine it only if you’re incredibly ignorant.
“I mean, I don’t even have much of a problem with the concept of the physical universe as purely physical, with physical origins and physical evolution, as long as our actions have ultimately non-physical consequences. That would give them sense.”
Also, I know too much to be able to imagine this. It creates consequences that contradict observation in a very bad way – for instance, it defines consciousness as an emergent quality, while I have evidence that it is not, because I can directly influence the consciousness of others without any material causation or mediation. It’s like having two computers without a network connection and one computer’s software influences the others’ hardware. It’s impossible if software is the result of hardware’s functionality. Someone who doesn’t have this experience can imagine all sorts of shit. This doesn’t make any of it realistic, just imaginable to the ignorant.
“1. For example, what does it mean to “do your best along a certain spiritual vector”?
What exactly is a spiritual vector? Is your concept of a personal “spiritual vector” similar to the concept of personal dharma?”
It’s very simple, really. As with any vector, you have magnitudes on different axes, and from these you can calculate a vector’s direction and magnitude. A spiritual vector is a vector defined within a spiritual space, where the coordinate system is defined by the basic spiritual qualities. Let’s say those are reality, consciousness and bliss, to stay within the paradigm of Vedanta. A (0,0,0) vector is nonexistence. A (1,0,0) is the form of existence a rock would have – its existence is positive, but it has no consciousness or bliss, and self-awareness of existence is minimal. A (20,20,-10) is the existence of someone who is both based in reality, has good conscious awareness of reality, but is at the same time suffering. A (-10, 5, 20) is someone who is a liar or deluded, has some conscious understanding, and is very happy – for instance, a drug user who is a pathological liar. A (100, 100, 100) is a saintly philosopher who has understanding of reality, great intelligence and is blissful because his consciousness is in God. A (infinity,infinity,infinity) vector is brahman.
So, essentially, when I say that something is on a certain spiritual vector, I mean the general direction rather than the scalar component. (1,1,1), (20,20,20) and (1000,1000,1000) are on the same general direction, but they differ in magnitude, so to speak. In worldly terms, if you intend to go from Zagreb to Split using a car, Karlovac, Mala Kapela and Dugopolje are all in the right direction.
“2. How can you tell to what extent is someone incarnated here? If he’s not completely incarnated, why is that?”
You’re not incarnated if you’re not really making choices in your life. If your choices are already made by societal expectations and inertia, you’re merely a passenger and the life isn’t really yours, it’s more like you’re the one who’s owned, not the life.
“This is intriguing because, in a practical sense, children are the ones who take the real world least seriously of all humans, and most of the day are completely detached in their fantasy bubble of imagination. But when you get older, it looks like you were more “here” than you are now. What the hell…”
In my case, it’s the opposite; in my childhood, I was more a passenger than a driver, because I had neither understanding nor choice. I had only a strong conscious presence and awareness.
“3. Why does one even need to “incarnate”, why it’s not an biologically automated process?”
Because being alive isn’t just about bringing enough oxygen to your cells to maintain their metabolism. It implies some sort of volition.
“Let’s say you have some very well developed soul who for some reason happens to be born here. He had experience of vajra before (it’s not really important, it can be any other level high enough to make a point), but now it’s not a part of his active personality. If I got this correctly, he actually has to put a significant amount of very well directed effort to get back to him, what was supposed to be his in the first place?”
Yes, this is the way this world works, and it’s one of the reasons why I think it’s not designed by a benevolent entity with spiritual evolution in mind. In fact, if you wanted to spiritually break and destroy souls, that would be the ideal way to go about it.
“Am I wrong if I say that, for all practical intents and purposes, there is no significant difference between him and someone who never in his entire existence felt something like that? If they want to get there, they both have to overcome the same obstacles, because now they have the same starting point.”
Not quite, because the one who doesn’t have the higher initiation doesn’t miss it. It’s like the difference between a guy who is separated from his girlfriend and misses her, and another guy who doesn’t have a girlfriend. They are both apparently in the same situation because they are currently alone, and the one with a girlfriend can actually be suffering because of the separation, and so you can say he’s in the worse position, but that’s not really the case. In fact, sometimes it’s a greater sign of spiritual achievement to be in pain and depressed than it is to be happy. For instance, you have a guy whose wife got killed and he’s borderline suicidal, and you have another guy whose wife got killed and he’s indifferent or happy. Which one has the bigger problem?
“4. In the comments on one of your articles, you mentioned you have internal “shorthands” for different gradations in sophistication and size of human souls. To be more precise, you told the person you were talking to, he “feels like a college student”. Maybe not particularly useful, but certainly very interesting. Would you mind doing the same kind of x-ray scanning for me? I don’t mind even if it’s somewhat offensive or humiliating, just shoot. It doesn’t even has to be some “shorthand”, it can be anything interesting to hear.“
I feel and perceive things, but it’s incredibly difficult for me to quantify them, because I see them in a completely different way, very subtle and complex. It would be too easy to generalize, but this generalization would not describe my perception accurately. However, based on the differences in the quality of my response, you can guess something about the difference in the way I perceive different people. For instance, I will answer your questions in great detail, unlike some character who thinks he’s very spiritual, whom I’ll send to go finger his sister in search of his father’s wedding ring, to paraphrase an excellent reply I recently read in the YouTube comment section. 🙂
Damn, that was some good read.
Unfortunately for me, I don’t happen to have that kind of recuperating abilities you and Wolverine seem to have, so it’ll probably take me another week to write anything about it.
Small first steps with care. No killing…
No killing? This world is a constant bloodbath. And what would happen if nobody was ever killed? Extreme overpopulation, Hong Kong turned global, extreme ecological strain and devastation, extreme loss of quality of life? No thank you.
Every projection of the future that I can make is a bloodbath. One is a limited nuclear war, the other is a war with Islam, another is collapse of the socioeconomic system with widespread riots, civil wars, extreme loss of the quality of life and extreme increase in violence. I can’t imagine an extension of anything resembling status quo over the horizon of five years. The trends are overwhelming. So, embrace killing, you’re going to see lots of it, if you are unfortunate to live long enough. And I approve – I had my fill of humans and their idiocy. I watch the news every day and I’m disgusted by the Americans who seem to do nothing but lie, hate and try to provoke wars with everyone, which I can’t stop because nobody gives a damn about my opinion. So I say, go ahead finally, nuke each other, I hope you all die. Fuck me if I care.