Oeaohoo

You invalidate what I say by calling it “projection”; I invalidate what you say by calling it “deflection”. What’s the difference? This is the problem with reducing everything to psychoanalytic mind games; something Shubowmurti incidentally loves to do… You say projection, I say deflection - let’s call the whole thing off! As to the main point, I’ll be less rude on this forum. I just like to provoke people into considering a different perspective on things which they think they understand. The more someone is convinced they already understand, the more provocative one has to be!

I’m just offering my perspective. I find that the notion of “projection” is thrown around a lot in spiritual communities without a lot of thought having gone into what it really means, or indeed where the term comes from (the dubious motivations of Freudian psychoanalysis). You aren’t interested in discussing this subject, either because you don’t want to waste your time on me - which is completely understandable, I don’t really want to waste my time on you either - or because you believe that such a discussion could only be falling into “the mind”, which is just typical New-Age brain rot masquerading as spiritual attainment. My sense is that in appealing to “projection” and “the mind playing tricks”, you’re just parroting spiritual platitudes whose real purpose is to keep you exactly as you already are.

Of course a machine designed to emulate a communicating human will claim to do all the things that humans do. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be successfully emulating a human! Exactly.

This video is interesting in that it reveals the sheer mediocrity of Jordan Peterson’s political perspective. It is another case of an internet intellectual who thinks they are innovating when they are really just reinventing the wheel: his “conservative manifesto” is literally just another rehashing of Boomer conservatism and libertarianism, with a sprinkling of the “Judeo-Christian West” to please Shapiro. What is particularly surprising is that Peterson almost entirely jettisons the very traditions that he elsewhere claims to admire. He repeatedly talks in this manifesto about the values embodied in the “Eternal Western Canon” and yet proceeds to espouse a form of “conservatism” which would be largely alien to anyone prior to the Classical Liberal thinkers of the post-Renaissance secular age. The very concept of penning a manifesto reeks of enlightenment rationalism, which was itself a deliberate inversion of traditional Western values. Conservatism is about conserving the essential principles that have been forged in the fire of long experience, not sitting in your armchair and penning a vain and self-serving manifesto. He also fails to address the undeniable fact that “the West” which he celebrates was discriminative and exclusionary for most of its existence, in contradiction to the universalist nature of his own ideas. The greatest flaw in this manifesto is that he defines what it means to be a conservative entirely in opposition to the advances of the progressive left. Perhaps this is the problem with even adopting the terms “conservative” or “reactionary” to describe oneself. This is a bad idea even from a merely tactical perspective because it means you have handed your autonomy over to the enemy. It is also particularly inappropriate, given that he starts by saying that he is speaking here at the “metaphysical” level: by definition, a metaphysical statement must transcend the petty squabbles of the present day. And, rather than just explicitly framing himself against the left, his criticisms are all veiled in a dense and cryptic form of allegory - making it even less likely that any of the people he is criticising will even understand what he is saying! Who is this manifesto intended for? Even when his criticisms are valid - for example, regarding the infantilising and smothering nature of progressive societies - his delivery is so jilted and grumpy that the whole thing falls flat. What is even more peculiar is that his “conservative” manifesto is barely even conservative: his solution to every problem is just “sovereign individuals freely associating in the free marketplace of friendship”! Is that what Aquinas, Plato, Seneca or even Christ would have conceived of as the “Eternal Western Canon”? Where are the calls to belonging to something greater than yourself and making human life into a vehicle for spiritual realisation? All I hear from Jordan is: “Blessed are the sovereign individuals, for theirs is the kingdom of material ambition”! When he does eventually get to briefly discussing “community”, he does so entirely in utilitarian terms. He is just clinging desperately to the corpse of the Classical Liberal anti-tradition whilst somehow remaining blind to all of its flaws, which become more and more obvious with every passing day. There is also something peculiarly Masonic about the whole thing, particularly in the way that he appropriates a spiritual and metaphysical perspective for the purpose of selfish and materialistic ends. He seems to be very torn between genuine compassion for the people who look up to him and preaching gibberish so as to sell his soul to Daily Wire. In the same way, perhaps, that he is torn between the rich traditions of the past, particularly Christianity in his case, and a petty and pointless “reactionary” stance on present events. He should have it called: A (Truly Awful) Conservative Manifesto… In the end, this manifesto serves to prove that Dr. Peterson - whatever interesting things he might have to say regarding mythology, the relationship between science and religion, and so on - has by now been entirely consumed by his role as controlled opposition. His presence in online public discourse is amplified precisely because his arguments against the left are so weak, and in reality he is just fuel for the very fire that he seeks to quench.

I generally find that “projection” is just a label used to deflect unwanted criticism. It also brings with it the assumption that we all live in our own private fantasy bubbles and that there is no even relative reality to things. It implies that the only reason anybody could take issue with somebody else is because they are projecting their own issues or “complexes” onto them. In truth, there are many other reasons why two people can fail to relate to each other. If I am projecting onto you, I am projecting my anger at living under a smothering gynocratic tyranny… But only because you have demonstrated yourself as an appropriate target! I would also like to say that the path of the warrior, which of course is completely misunderstood and mocked today, generally involves projection: one projects the inner enemy (the soul commanding to evil) outwards so that, in fighting it outwardly, one can fight it inwardly. There is nothing wrong with this so long as you are conscious that you are doing it. I think there’s a lot more that could be said about projection. Taking your view of spirituality to its conclusion, aren’t we always projecting anyway? You are just God projecting yourself outwards onto another character, who just happens to be projecting onto you through a forum! I understand. My parody of Shunyamurti is regarding his teachings in general. No hard feelings either.

Thank you for my “warning points”. I only make things personal when they are personal: so much spiritual teaching is just personal beliefs and values masquerading as absolute truths. For example, you just want a nice cosy and safe spirituality, listening to Matt Kahn and Shunyamurti talk about “love” and how “beautiful” everything is. I used to listen to Shunyamurti but this is precisely why I stopped: he is leading a feminised communal cult of banal and sterile conformity. I practice a spirituality of transcendent destruction. As an example, here is a parody of your “Great Sage” Shunyamurti: A Wisdom Teaching from A Great Sage It’s a great joy, and certainly not a great jouissance, to be typing this today. A Sat Yogi is one who sits in the past. As the great sages - and remember, to be a sage is to see-ages - tell us, the good days are over. I think the religions call this state “fallenness”: one is no longer willing to open one’s heart to love, to live on fifteen carrots a day, to donate one’s soul to the community… But there is hope: once one has realised the futility of life in the ego, gone through the zero point and turned it into a hero point, the Sat Yoga Institute will be ready to welcome you with open arms. Of course, I don’t really need to be telling you any of this: if you wanted to you could download your own hodgepodge of psychoanalytic conundrums and new-age messianism, but your consciousness is choosing to project itself onto a guru-figure who can give you the answers that you already have. …but you don’t want answers, do you? You want jouissance. Well *puts on funny hat*, “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try some times, you’ll find — you get what you need!” May we save the universe from our cosy, rich Costa Rica ashram, collapse the quantum wave function and re-dream the energy field - w i t h o u t… d e l a y… Namaste P.S. “Thank you Shunya, that was such a beautiful teaching; you always say just what I needed to hear. I know you have a new book and retreat coming out soon, could you tell us all some more about that?”

@AtheisticNonduality It is not a Ku Klux Dog! It’s an angel from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I have been loving his work recently, it is a wonderful blend of deep compassion and mysticism. Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire are such a fascinating mixture of traumatic and transcendent.

If we are engaging in a dream-measuring contest, I had a wet dream last night! I have them every couple of nights and it gets a bit annoying sometimes. Maybe my subconscious is compensating for my hermetic lifestyle…

Schmachtenberger’s polyamory certainly gives “in search of the third attractor” a whole new meaning!

Hate to say I told you so… One look at the guy and I could have told you he’s in a polyamorous relationship with a couple of morons. He’s the quintessential evolutionary psychology game theory nerd who convinces himself he’s smart because he’s read books like Sex at Dawn… I realised why I dislike this guy so much. He’s like all the worst aspects of Leo without any redeeming features. At least Leo actually reminds me that my ultimate nature is Absolute when he isn’t ranting about how Trump is Hitler and progressive leftism is the embodied equivalent of divine Love!

Fair enough. The only thing that seems arrogant to me is the way that you conflate the aloneness of the Absolute with you as a human. It’s not just speculation. It is possible to become directly conscious of what prior civilisations were conscious of. You just aren’t interested! Not that you have to be… I only insist on this because you yourself have framed your awakenings in terms of what no other human has ever understood. How do you know if you are so dismissive of understanding what others have understood? Not to reduce things to a merely logical level, but this seems like a Motte-and-Bailey fallacy. You have been advancing a very outlandish reframing of awakening as the practice of compiling psychedelic insights into the endlessly weird capabilities of consciousness. Then, being challenged on this, you fall back onto the traditional conception of awakening.

I understand that you seek to ground everything in your own direct experience and throw off the false authority of contemporary spiritual teachers. In the end even the Buddha told his followers to be a light unto themselves! All that I am objecting to is the way that this is framed as though anything other than your own direct experience is sheer nonsense. Just because you claim to have arrived at a point in which any external teaching is no longer of any use, that doesn’t invalidate their relative value. What is more enlightening: TYT or the Corpus Hermeticum? Not are, were! We live in the ashes of human civilisation. Boasting that you are the most awakened man alive in 2022 is like being proud of being the tallest man at a midget meet-up club! The bar is set so low…

Yet, with respect to everything other than the pure possibilities of consciousness, you yourself are completely uninterested in anything other than your own beliefs, which then ironically contaminates your teachings about consciousness itself. For example, you recently claimed that “no human has ever become a spiritual trickster”. This is just laughable. Likewise, the fact that the Earth is conscious was commonly understood in all pre-modern human societies, as was the possibility of shape-shifting and adopting animal or superhuman forms of consciousness, but you are so ignorant of human history - except through dumbed down YouTube spirituality or some mediocre “Integral” books which handily reduce the grand complexity of human existence to a few colour-coded stages - that it is all misinterpreted as being some grand new awakening that nobody had ever understood before. Anyone who challenges this is quickly dismissed and if they do so too incessantly will be permanently dismissed! And since you have drawn such a harsh distinction between consciousness and everything which is merely human, this unstable mixture of advanced spiritual realisations and your own attachments to “petty human bullshit” is destined to become more and more volatile, as we have already seen. This is why I have recently called you “the most awakened bug-man”. While you have attained to advanced states of consciousness, your assumptions about human life are exactly those that one finds among the modern secular materialistic bugman: we are just apes on a rock in space and there is no greater purpose to life than “just enjoy the ride, dude!”

Berserk is wonderful. He captures the shift from the angelic to the demonic which took place in Europe around the time of the Renaissance in a very evocative way. The opening story of the Manga (before the Golden Age arc), in which a gallivanting knight comes home to find his wife in an orgy with Baphomet, has stuck with me ever since! What does it mean to you?

The essential difference is that every traditional form of spirituality demanded everything from its participants, orienting every aspect of life towards that which is beyond life. Leo’s form of spirituality is instead designed to be perfectly compatible with a degenerate Americanised lifestyle of “building your own biz”, picking up bimbos at clubs, “partying with god”, masturbating to pornography, living in Las Vegas (the “city of devils”!), the Satanic doctrine of progressive leftism and of course the narcissistic cult of “self-actualization”. It is no wonder, then, that the use of psychedelics is the only spiritual path that Leo can imagine, for the use of psychoactive drugs is probably the only way that someone living such a mediocre lifestyle can attain to any spiritual heights, however temporary these may be. Naturally, this is all justified by the alibi of a “spirally progressive” view of historical development. We, however, can watch and laugh as we witness the spiralling out of control of a narcissistic ego high on its own supply! Indeed, if anyone needed proof that the overuse of psychedelics results only in ego inflation and the dissolution of the personality into an incoherent mush of crass narcissism, self-centred nostalgia and soppy sentimentalism, it would be hard to find a better case study. In the end, and as has fortunately become very apparent recently, Leo is just the most awakened bug-man, and his followers are little more than a nest of other bug-creatures worshipping their bug-leader in true bug-style. Crush the bugs! SPLAT!

Anyway, as a true degenerate it seems that I have initiated myself into the 333 Current as Shugal, the Howler in the Desert of Seth! I will finish with an extended version of an earlier quotation and then be gone from here for good: With that, I shall take my leave from this place. Goodbye! And Good Riddance!

@Epikur Given all the money he must have, you would think he would have been able to afford a few lessons in lying! "I don't know, it's meaningful..." *quickly moves on*... "I don't remember..." *quickly moves on* After all, the Zuckerberg tribe have always been known for their deep commitment to honesty and forthrightness! Have you come across his sister Donna? She makes a living reinterpreting ancient texts to fit a feminist and progressive worldview. In response to which I can only quote my favourite passage of Aristotle: Sounds like a strong feminist to me! "For the common people too would fain be a monarch" is such a perfect description of our predicament. Tyranny of the idiots...

Well, we'll have to see. Schmachtenberger and all of his kind can take off into stratosphere, where the fundamental human realities of authority, hierarchy and power have finally been transcended. I will be here with the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus ("what is always, what is everywhere, what is by everybody believed").

Yet they are serving the function of a priestly caste: mediating knowledge and helping people "make sense" of the world. Even in saying some pretty words about "love" and the "community" they are still playing the game of top-down aristocracy. If only that was what was driving them! A true leader could speak truth to power and power to truth... That is what I meant earlier about Nietzsche: for all his flaws, he never forgot about the basic realities of power and immanence. These people are just floating off into the clouds. It really is worth reading about the etymology of the word nuance! It literally comes from "fog", "veil", "dark and dusky"...

This is actually one thing I find subtly ironic about his kind: their very existence proves what I am trying to say. The competition today is, as it has always been, who is going to be the new priestly caste? The typical guest on Rebel Wisdom wants to be a member of the new priestly caste; the Game B guys want to be the new priestly caste; the shrinking Integral crew want to be the new priestly caste; mainstream media wants to be the new priestly caste; and so on. They all want to be but none of them are going to be! Or, rather, they all end up being the priestly caste of these bizarre virtual congregations which by their very nature can have no real impact on anything. Yes, that seems to be what he's going for: a Founding Father for the 21st Century. In other words, a founding father who will never actually found anything! Besides, it seems the 21st Century wants more of a Smothering Mother... Haha... Like I said: I am indeed a degenerate. So are you!

More of them than I would have liked to have... The entire problem today is that every idiot has to figure it out for themselves. They lack the capacity for this, as they always have, so someone else makes sense of things for them. Welcome to human society! The real issue today is that rather than having a holy priestly caste making sense of society for a given group of people, we have a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds and nepotistic elites making sense of society for unprecedented numbers of people. The whole framing of things in terms of mere “sensemaking” buys into the same delusional humanistic and egalitarian premises as progressive leftism. The essential delusion here is the idea that we can somehow escape human nature within human society itself. What I ultimately can’t stand about all these models - Spiral Dynamics, Wilber’s adaptations, Game B - is that they are just even more smug and self-satisfied versions of progressive leftism. At least your ordinary garden variety progressive normie has just been indoctrinated from birth into the “it’s a small world, Disneyworld” ideology. These people are actually actively contemplating the nature of society but yet coming to the same ridiculous conclusions.

Hey! This is Leo for Actualised dot org, and in this video I’m going to tell you about my deepest awakening yet. This awakening was so deep that it’s going to be hard to put into words, so I’ll start by telling you how it happened… I was sitting on my couch, staring at my hand, saying to myself: “Wow, that’s a beautiful hand!” Then I got up and walked to the mirror. I saw my body standing there and I said: “Wow, that’s a beautiful body!” I was so enamoured with the image of my body in the mirror that I actually started kissing the mirror. I was kissing the mirror so hard that I could feel it start to break. I was in such a heightened state of consciousness, however, that I knew that even if the mirror broke and cut me all over, this would be no different to eating ice cream at the cinema. As I kissed the image of myself in the mirror, a tear came to my eye and I said to myself: “This is what Love really means!” When I was a kid I really wanted to be a game developer. Now I know you’re probably thinking: “Little did I know that in only thirty years I’d have grown up to be one of the most awakened people alive!” That’s just the thing: I really didn’t know. I need you to understand that it has taken years of deep growth and inner work for me to get to the place that you see me at today. I didn’t just get here by accident. Once you understand that, you’ll realise that one day you can reach my level of development too. Anyway… In this awakening, I finally realised… *looks away and tear wells up in eye*… I finally realised that I haven’t had anything worthwhile to say for years. All I do nowadays is repeat old stories about how I got to where I am today and intimidate people for not having taken the same dangerous untested substances that I have… It was a level of awakening so deep that I realised I’ve become a complete idiot. It was a level of awakening so deep that I realised that the only thing I’ve “actualised” is a rather questionable drug habit. It was a level of awakening so deep that it made me really start to question what I’m even doing here. That’s when I remembered: I have a gun in my draw! Why don’t I just get it out and end it all right now? I walked over to the cabinet, brought the gun over to the mirror, gave my reflection one final kiss for old times sake and got on my knees. I put the gun against my neck and my finger around the trigger. At the exact moment that I pulled the trigger I finally realised: “I am God!” Note: this is not an endorsement of suicide. What worked for me might not work for you. Not everyone will see the same results from this practise as I have.

You end up blowing your brains out? Or you end up making a mockery of a “spirituality” forum? If the latter, I would say that that is just another version of the psychoanalytic interpretation that I have described above. It is just a way to deny that there is any reality to things and turn everything back onto the individual psyche. It is one part of the confusion of our age that I have called “collective solipsism”: the idea that we all create our own realities. Naturally, certain vague ideas within New Age ”spirituality” fit together all too nicely with this one…

I tried watching this video a couple of times today. I couldn’t stop laughing every few minutes. The guy says the most basic things in the most contrived vocabulary. His idea is literally just: we should pursue good outcomes and avoid bad ones. Thanks Einstein! He isn’t necessarily fostering fear. If he sincerely believes that the present civilisation is heading towards catastrophe then for him that is just a simple fact. How one reacts to that fact is quite another matter. To quote an author that I quoted earlier here:

Go pick up some bimbo at the club. Have a few beers whilst you’re at it! That’s not BORING at all…