Oeaohoo

I posted this a couple of days ago but the crash removed it! These are the ideas that I see as having the greatest potential to become dogma within Actualized. It is not that they are necessarily intended to be dogma but because they are (to me at least) partial and one-sided truths which lay claim to absolute reality, they are ripe to become so. I partly post this because in my younger life I was very dogmatic and the teachings expressed around here were part of that dogma! If anyone has any suggestions of other potential dogmas or thinks some of these shouldn’t be included I would be interested to hear it. The path to a good life is “the work” of self-actualisation conceived in terms of growth, personal development and the myth of the self-made man. All concepts are socially constructed and invented by humans. Existence is entirely made up of perspective and subjectivity and there is no objective world outside of direct experience. Mankind and the whole universe is constantly progressing and evolving. The “left-wing” are therefore more advanced than the “right-wing”. There is no ultimate purpose to human existence. We are just here to “enjoy the ride”. Your life is whatever you want and make it to be. You determine who you are and who you want to be. Life should be neatly divided into sub-domains which, whilst they might bolster and enhance each other, are to be approached separately. There is a duality between Truth/Love/Consciousness and “survival”. From the Absolute perspective all distinctions vanish. No preference is ultimately more valid than any other. It is almost like there is no truth from this perspective? It might not be immediately clear why these ideas are one-sided so here are possible counter-dogmas for each of the things I have listed above: The path to a good life is to fulfil one’s Dharma: to abide by the super-ordained law of one’s society and creatively express one’s natural traits within that. The Logos is an intrinsic aspect of existence. The human intellect is designed so that it can align itself with truth. Even profane and secular concepts therefore have a glimmer of the Logos itself within them. Existence is made up of subjectivity and objectivity. This is the original duality of existence, Purusha (consciousness) and Prakriti (substance), and the “first” thing in a non-temporal sense to arise out of the infinite unity of God. History is a progressive loss of spiritual potency at the cost of material triumph. In an Abrahamic context this is the Fall of Man, Original Sin and ultimate Redemption and Salvation during the apocalypse and the last judgement, in the Hindu, Buddhist and Greco-Roman context the descending Four Ages of Man (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron). The ultimate purpose of human existence is to align oneself with reality, which is comprised of Truth (Logos or Law) and Love (Eros or Nature). Joy comes from being in alignment with reality. Meaning is not just a human creation but part of God’s creation. You have been born with a nature and your purpose is to express and fulfil that nature. Every part of human society should be ordered around a superordinate principle: in the Christian Middle Ages God, in the Hindu and Buddhist world Dharma, in Confucian China Tao. This principle contains all the subordinate fields of creativity within itself and so these are understood as partial expressions of ultimate Reality which are never really separable. There is no conflict between survival and Reality. Survival is an expression of Truth/Love and Consciousness. To survive requires that you be in alignment with these things. From the absolute perspective all distinctions are transcended and included. There is no difference between anything precisely because all differences are contained within God as Truth. I think it’s also worth noting that many of these might be entirely appropriate to teach today but still one-sided from the perspective of pure truth. For example, society, which is supposed to be an incarnation of the divine Law, that exists today is not going to teach and encourage you to express and fulfil your true nature but to mislead and exploit you in whatever way it can. Therefore, the self-help dogmas #1, #5 and #6 are necessary. Additionally, emphasising direct experience can be appropriate simply because many people (particularly worshipers at the alter of Logic and Science who have unconsciously absorbed “Stage Orange” materialism and positivism) are very obsessed with the “external” and objective world. Then again, parts of “stage Green” radically overemphasise the subjective dimension: truth is a social construct, I am whatever I identify as, and so on; it is interesting that a couple of the ideas listed above, particularly #2 and #4, are basically these premises taken to their extreme conclusion.

Weird list of examples!

Yes the lower back is the physical reflection of an important part of the subtle body: Hara, the centre of sexuality and death, and Svadhisthana, the “abode of the self”. The fear of death is particularly associated with this centre because your identifications are stored here; naturally, then, liberation from all bondage and limited identity will affect this area! Why don’t you just stop using the drug if you are worried about it? Maybe you are intuiting that by using these chemicals you are burning through your karma too quickly. You could step back for a while and contemplate what you are still attached to and what you still fear.

@Dear Fiona Interesting to see this here! James did an excellent series with Uberboyo on Carl Jung’s Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self which is the only book of Jung’s that is really worth reading. I must confess I find this new phase with the two old Boomers a bit dull!

Absolutely! That is certainly part of the explanation but it doesn’t fully encompass the reality. A new form or context can only rise to dominance when the old one has exhausted itself; however, if we zoom out and look at things from a distance, we can see that the later expressions of a given form or context are generally more chaotic and dissolute as opposed to ossified. I would say that to a certain extent they become ossified and moralistic precisely so as to protect themselves from their inner chaos and dissolution; “civilisations die from suicide, not by murder”! For example, in Christianity the Protestant faith is notoriously comprised of an endless variety of sects and schisms. This is because it denies the authority of the Pope (going so far as to construe him as the Antichrist) and rejects the Catholic mass in favour of individual interpretation of Biblical scripture, facilitated through increased literacy and the invention of the printing press. However, to a certain extent Protestantism often goes along with biblical literalism and itself emerged out of the moralistic and ossified nature of late Catholicism so even here what you say is partly true. It is also true that (partly in reaction to this very phenomenon) in this phase you get certain extreme “reactionary” sects like the New-England Puritans and modern Evangelicals. What do you think are the most important problems it has identified with both of these?

This sounds like the dogma of anti-dogma! One of the things I find fascinating is the way that new dogmas emerge on the other side of the bridge of skepticism. For example, to a certain extent faith in God was a dogma, then there was a phase of skeptical free thought which esteemed positivistic hypotheses and empirical inquiry above all else, and then finally atheism became the new dogma! Yes absolutely. It’s interesting how different stages manifest this narcissism: Stage Orange denies principles and tradition in the name of the worldly self whereas Stage Green denies even the worldly self in the name of the self of subjective interiority. Even the more dogmatic types within Stage Blue tradition (that is to say, basically everybody within this category today!) often deny principles because they can only believe in the principles of their own tradition; for example, Allah, God and Brahman are all the same metaphysical principle but this is often not understood. This reminds me of something David Foster Wallace was always harping on: postmodern society overlooks the obvious and cynically derides what would ordinarily be basic accepted wisdom. Ideally this would create the empty space in which new forms could emerge.

I always though that it was arbitrary and misleading to claim that modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes are an accurate representation of how pre-historic humanity lived. Imagine the following scenario: the present global world order collapses, there are mass shortages of all survival needs and, because most people today are totally dependent upon centralised infrastructure, billions of people die, whilst a few independent bands of “survivalists” manage to pull through. What sort of life do you think these survivors would lead? It would be a much more rudimentary and bare-bones life. Who is to say that this is not the case for modern hunter-gatherers? They are the residues of the decomposition of ancient civilisations.

@Dumuzzi Amen to all of that! Nice to see that someone else has come to similar conclusions.

Yes, Nietzsche was a more profound thinker. I only mentioned him as an example because certain aspects of his philosophy fit in with this trend and I know you are familiar with him. Better examples would be Neo-classicism, Romanticism (particularly Percy Shelley and the English Romantics), Rousseau’s Noble Savage and so on. I know you would! I would say that postmodernism is a fall even below the ego. People are extremely collectivistic today, living from one “trend” and social fad to the next… This all comes back to the basic theme of interpreting history as an upwards or downwards trajectory.

The Self has been regarded as a transcendental entity for millennia so I assume that by self here you mean the ego. It’s not so much that the ego is a transcendental agency as that the ego can pursue its own self-interest up to the point at which it finally realises that what it really wants is annihilation in God. It is important to understand that this sort of naturalistic pantheism didn’t really exist except as an aberrant anomaly in the ancient world. It is a projection of the post-Renaissance anti-Christian cult of youthful exuberance, blissful nudity, extravagant sensuality, rococo elegance and so on onto the past. Nietzsche’s war against “pure spirit” in the name of “the instincts”, “life” and “nature”, for example. Nature for the ancients was always a reflection of something more than Nature. I actually agree that the ego is superior to eco (that is to say, to mere Nature). The ego is human and Nature is sub-human; Nature is the realm of fate whereas the ego is the realm of will. Both are inferior to the metaphysical plane which is the realm of Providence or Divine Will. Ecology is certainly not final or the highest spiritual ascent. Of course it is easier to approach God from a state which approximates God but that doesn’t mean that you must be in such a state to do so. After all, God is not a state. Anyway, It is called the “left hand path” because it is harder and more dangerous. Yes, there is a way in which failing to develop an ego is similar to transcending the ego. Interestingly, I made the same point about postmodernism the other day and you didn’t seem to like it: “God includes all distinctions and so all distinctions dissolve in God; postmodernism denies all distinctions and so there are no distinctions in postmodernism. They look the same but that is because the latter is a radical negation of the former”. Replace God and postmodernism here for “post-ego” and “pre-ego” in your evolutionary formulation and you have the same point.

Yes, that’s a nice way to put it. It gives “a flight of the alone to the Alone” a new meaning…

Guess I better stop walking around with that water bottle down my trousers then… What if it is just that women today like feminised men who are weak and vulnerable? In my experience masculinity is about striving and not accepting oneself just as one is. Only if you have already cultivated depth and purpose through the insufficiency and striving of masculinity, otherwise you are just a self-satisfied clown. I think this fake masculinity comes from the superficiality of modern life. Society today does not reward virility and nobility and women use the judgment of society to judge men. Men are therefore forced to prove their masculine nature with the woman herself. However, most women are not interested in manly things like the ruthless pursuit of truth, self-sacrifice and honour, hierarchy and discrimination so they recoil from the men who force them upon her and choose the fun feminine man. They would, however, be interested in the fruits these things would provide in a healthy and functional society.

Awake to what?

Well, if you’re going to worship the self you might as well do it well. The present narcissistic and self-obsessed world presents a certain opportunity in that true selfishness can be a spiritual path. After all, God is the Self. It seems to me that the few people who realise God in the present world situation will do so by pursuing their self-interest right up to the point of self-annihilation! Actualized itself is a very good example of this. From a spiritual-historical perspective I am very much against the religion of self and of self-help. However, like you yourself said this is just where we are today and you have to start from where you are. I agree, Woke Advertising has become a whole industry now and an ideology of lazy self-acceptance is perfect for keeping people dull and uninspired. I’m not sure what you mean by this. I would say it is just getting more and more absurd, devolving… Roman disdain for labour > Catholic work as prayer > Protestant “work ethic” > Socialist inverted religion of the Worker > ultimate depravity of work in postmodern world. Indeed! Slave morality, as Nietzsche called it. Of course the contemporary workplace is a very superficial and stupid environment. I recently quit my office job because it was such a degrading and alienating environment. I’m sorry if you are currently having to deal with it!

Yes, Gurdjieff was right to say that in most cases “man is a machine”. That doesn’t mean that you have no free will though because like you yourself have said you are not the body that is trapped in this matrix of manifestation. Your very existence is an expression of the infinite freedom of God, which is also your true nature. Then it’s time for a prison break-out! That is basically what spiritual awakening is after all. You have to realise you are in prison before you can break out though which is what is happening to you now. You are still free to do all these things. However, you might be realising that even so many of our ordinary desires are mechanically inherited from culture… Maybe some of these desires are not appropriate for you anymore. This all sounds like quite a typical Dark Night of the Soul and an awakening to just how asleep you have been throughout your life so far. Of course, this is not intended as a criticism of you specifically as almost everybody is asleep… You may not be interested but it can be useful to contemplate the problem of fate and determinism from a metaphysical perspective. It is significant that Fate is often associated with feminine figures: for example, in Greco-Roman mythology the three Fates are all women and the Norns (Fates) in Nordic mythology are all goddesses of destiny. A late reference to this can be seen in Shakespeare’s Macbeth with the three prophetic witches. Women represent Nature, the sublunary realm, the world of illusion (Maya) and the physical power of manifestation (Shakti). It is possible to overcome Nature herself, and along with her all fate and determinism! The virile masculine Hero was often conceptualised in antiquity as the one who overcame fate and the wheel of causality. The meaning of Buddha attaining to ultimate Liberation from Samsara (the wheel of causality and the cycle of life and death) is really no different. Realising how stuck you have been in the deterministic world should be an exciting call to: Be the hero! ”Become what you Are”, as Pindar said…

There seems to be a subtle contradiction in what you say here because the desire to eliminate suffering is natural to the experience of life itself. Accepting suffering is of course possible but it goes against the grain of nature, so if the aim is not to try to eliminate anything why eliminate the intention to avoid suffering? Suffering can be used for liberating purposes but in many cases the intention to avoid suffering is entirely spiritually appropriate; after all, the whole point of Buddhism is to depart from the world of dukkha (suffering)!

It is rather that self is the new global religion. For the wiser practitioners of this religion self-help is included within that but many others are not really helping themselves at all, they are just indulging their lowest and basest self. Often today the self is applauded precisely in contrast to any ideal of self-improvement: “you’re beautiful just the way you are”, “I don’t need to change for anybody”, “don’t let anybody rain on your parade”, and so on… In the post-second-World-War Western world self-expression seems to be the highest value; the quality of that self, unfortunately, seems to be of much less importance! Sometimes it even seems like the worse your self is the more it is deemed you should express it, like Yeats beautifully described in his poem The Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity”. Working hard isn’t the same as self-help and some self-help folks are rather lazy! The religion of work seems to have been more prevalent during the industrial period (the Protestant “work ethic”) and the Soviet era (the glorification of the ”Worker” in Socialist doctrine and the art of Marxist realism) but it definitely still persists today. Many people now, though, would ideally like to abolish work altogether, and this is no wonder given the pointless and mechanical nature of most of the work available today. Interestingly, labour is one of those words which the Christian faith inverted: in ancient Latin civilisation, “laborare” had largely negative connotations and it was even synonymous with toil and misery. In Christian civilisation, however, phrases like Laborare est Orare (to work is to pray!) emerged and the early forms of the fetishisation of work which you have described are probably to be found here. Of course, Latin also had the word “Opus” to refer to work in a higher sense. Incidentally, this is one of the ways in which Nietzsche was right that modern leftism, particularly socialism and the cults of Work and Change, are a sort of secularised Christianity. The same is true for words like humility and pity whose connotations were also largely negative; after all, we still call bad experiences “humiliating”!

Yes, I think this is true when Kundalini arises naturally on the spiritual path or when it is integrated within a safe context in which there is space to make the necessary changes that this new energy will force you to make. It is much less true, however, when it arises spontaneously/accidentally or when it has been aroused through physical practices without the necessary psychological and spiritual preparation. There is the additional problem that people often don’t know what they are getting themselves into with the spiritual path. In my experience, it is very difficult to retrace your steps with Kundalini; like the flaming Cherubim which guard the doors back to Eden once the Snake has gotten Adam and Eve kicked out! Fortunately I had already been through a dark night of the soul before getting involved with Kundalini practises. Even then, until we are fully awake there is always more self to die to! Yeah it’s very similar to psychedelics in that way. I would disagree with one thing here: it isn’t necessarily as simple as trusting in the process. There are all sorts of physical, spiritual and even intellectual problems which can arise as Kundalini unfurls itself. Sometimes it can be hard to find the right advice for a given circumstance; then again, there are people with deep knowledge of this field around today. So long as one can sift through the corresponding accumulation of nonsense all-too-readily available today they’ll probably be fine. You’re an infinite being playing the character of a finite being and that character can very easily be annihilated. The problems with Kundalini that many people experience generally arise when these two come into conflict. Kundalini forces them to move towards the infinite but their finite being is not able to catch up with the process. This can be very dysfunctional. Ultimately there is nothing to fear but relatively there is. Here, we are playing the game of relativity and it is better to play it well!

Narcissism could even be a spiritual path by taking the ego to its absurd conclusion. This is the esoteric meaning behind many of the evil Gods in mythology: Seth, Satan, Prometheus… Not only that but the evil figure often has an initiatory function: for example, it is only through Seth killing Osiris that Osiris was able to become the Lord of the Underworld. Being the victim of evil is often what drives people towards spirituality. William Blake certainly understood these things, not only in his famous saying that “the fool who persists in his folly will become wise” but also in the following description of John Milton’s theological poetry:

@Razard86 Remember that Kundalini is a feminine energy. Kundalini will show you the boundless nature of ultimate Reality because that is the feminine polarity. The masculine polarity is the one which gives form and finitude to the feminine substance. Ultimate Reality is the union of these two principles so it is simultaneously finite and infinite, in the sense that it is an Infinity which contains all finitude within itself. The Shiva Nataraja is an excellent symbol of this reality. It is not possible to integrate the pure feminine principle of boundless freedom alone into ordinary life because by definition it is a total violation of all structure and order. This principle has to be reconciled with the masculine principle which will allow you to see all of reality as the interplay of Form and Formlessness. This vision occurs at the Ajna-Chakra and is finally unified in the ultimate Liberation characterised by the rising of Kundalini to the Sahasrara-Chakra and out of the body.

@Bobby_2021 At the most fundamental level, reality is composed of an infinite variety of forms (Logos) and an infinitely formless substance which receives these forms. Humans have the capacity to align their intellect with this Divine Intellect (Logos) - the metaphysical storehouse of the forms and ideas from which everything is manifested - and human sciences are (at least supposed to be) a reflection of this. That is the real meaning of Adam naming the animals in Genesis, for example. Of course biology is not reality itself, that doesn’t mean it is just “pulled out of their ass”. The modern science of biology, like all other sciences of our day, seeks to map out reality ever more tightly without ever pursuing it directly, which was the approach of the sacred sciences of antiquity. I can agree that modern biology is mostly socially constructed because, in the world where “God is dead”, science is rooted in a denial of the metaphysical dimension. I can even more or less agree that biology can only exist through the mediation of a society, though a single person could engage in biology so it doesn’t necessarily require a social circle. I think this emphasis on social constructivism is something to do with the dominance of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in New-Age circles (particularly the latter, as Buddhism with its emphasis on no-self and the void lends itself very well to a nominalist philosophy), Stage Green anti-logocentrism and postmodern deconstruction. It is possibly even related to the feminisation of modern society as the formless substance is feminine while the form-giving essence is masculine. It is also related to the preference for Love over Truth in spiritual circles and the general preference in modern society for sentimentality and passion over logic and reason.

Why is biology a social construct? Biology means bio-logos, the human discriminative faculty applied to the biological realm. The realm of bios itself, therefore, must be outside of and separate from (relatively speaking) the human discriminative faculty. Notice also that the idea of a “social construct” implies a profane conception of society and the humans within it: what if God ordained society and the human discriminative faculty? “In the beginning was the Logos”!

One of the basic problems of political analysis today is a failure to distinguish between polity (rule of the virtuous many) and democracy (rule of the corrupt many), as Aristotle defined them in the Politics. In common parlance today both of these concepts are included under the name of “democracy” - such that any claim that not every vote is equal within the democratic process is conceived of as “a threat to democracy” - whilst for some others democracy refers only to polity (rule of the virtuous many); for these latter people, democracy itself (as rule of the corrupt many) is a “threat to our democracy”! The real question in politics today is: who are the virtuous many? Who’s vote should be taken seriously? The same distinction between two groups - one who define democracy as “vote of all citizens regardless” and the other who define it as “vote of the virtuous many” - is useful here. For the latter group, democracy has become synonymous with the maintenance of the decadent global American empire, so the values of this empire are what defines virtue: a bizarre mixture of bread crumbs of tradition, corrupt corporate capitalism and woke neoliberal ideology. Anybody who diverges from this value system is not included within the “virtuous many” and so is regarded as a “threat to democracy”. It is only natural then that those members of the first group who do not share these values would turn against democracy as defined by the latter group. They are the enemies - “the corrupt many” whose vote should not be taken into consideration - of this democratic system and so it would be absurd for them to support it. Many believers in this latter form of democracy (rule of the virtuous many as defined by the decadent global American Empire), however, seem to be surprised when the people their democracy has defined as enemies… define democracy as its enemy in return! After all, this is the basic delusion of liberal democracy: the attempt to transcend without including the distinction between in-group and out-group, friend and foe, us and them. As a metaphysical aside, in one of Leo’s videos (probably the one on Gödel or paradoxes) he showed how self-referential systems breed paradoxes. Democracy is a self-referential system (people can vote on how they feel about democracy itself; by voting for an anti-democratic leader, for example) so the paradoxical situation can emerge where the citizens of the democracy democratically elect somebody to overthrow the democracy! Is that democracy or isn’t it?

@Matt23 Just skimmed through it, way too many hyphenated words and vain pontificating. Truth should be simple! So much of Stage Yellow just seems like nerds mentally masturbating and sharing their ejaculate with an internet community. Maybe I’ll come back to it another day!

@Carl-Richard Interesting song, hadn’t heard it before. It reminds me of this (beautiful intro and outro!): Listening to Holdsworth, I always feel it’s a shame he didn’t branch out a bit more into other genres. His stuff all seems to be very locked within the heavy jazz fusion sound world.