Oeaohoo

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Everything posted by Oeaohoo

  1. Of course, he was. And so am I… “They’ve got a name for the winners in the world… I want a name when I lose!” At the same time, his lyrics are very humorous and his music speaks to a hopelessness which is quite common in English life, especially in the lower classes. It’s just the antithesis of American-style self-help or Nietzschean vitalism, in which one can never be a victim. Interesting point. The only Velvet Underground song I really like is Candy Says, since I have also come to hate my body and all that it requires in this world… What do you think I’d see, if I could walk away from me?
  2. Oh, you handsome devil… ‘There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more!’
  3. Except that it’s a cyclical process of rise and fall rather than a linear and progressive trajectory. The subsiding of survival pressures creates decadence because it allows people to forget the harsher realities of life. This leads to societal collapse, out of which emerges a new, less “free” social order.
  4. Exactly. That’s why they deserve to be ruled by him. Every country has the government it deserves.
  5. Greed is GOOD! Sounds like my idea of hell. I like the bit in American Psycho where he is breaking up with his girlfriend. She says, “What about all of our friends?”, and he says, “You can have them.”
  6. That makes sense, I just can’t bring myself to play the bit… Maybe someday I’ll have to. What does it look like for you? The trouble with not playing the bit is that you end up in a weak and vulnerable position, more and more conditioned by the very system which you are trying to escape. This has basically happened to me. Well, I feel the same, only the other way around… Then again, I’m not in America! By the way, Trump’s rise reminds me of Spengler’s theory of Caesarism:
  7. I imagine a Wilberian would say that you have regressed to Stage Green. Accepting that model, it makes sense to me that you would do this since you seem quite attached to the pleasures of modern life - partying, girls and so on - which are all very Green in our time. Most “cool” people in European cities are Stage Green. Being Stage Yellow would probably make you feel much more out of the loop…
  8. Interesting. What made you turn away from Ken Wilber? Maybe I had something to do with it… I never got that into Spengler, something about his style always turns me off — it’s like Nietzsche but lacking the same depth of insight. I do like his idea of the “second religiosity”, the debased form of spirituality which one finds in a late and decadent civilisation — it fits the “new age” phenomenon, including most of what you will find in the Spirituality tab on this forum, very well. Anyway, maybe one day I’ll get you reading Guénon and Evola…
  9. “I just want my government to import less migrants.” ”Ah, the dreaded Authoritarian Personality rears its head again! Will we ever learn?! Sit down in my armchair, inmate, we have a lot of work to do on you… Now, tell me about your Mother.”
  10. Why psychologise it? The resurgence of the Right in the West is happening for political reasons, not psychological ones.
  11. It’s not about “mankind”, it’s about America. Whatever role America had in “advancing mankind”, it has long lost it.
  12. Just here to wish all of you beautiful Americans a splendid next few years living under Adolf Satan Trump! Democracy triumphs, yet again!
  13. This graph explains EVERYTHING: Change, Progress, Evolution, Growth, Development, Actualisation, Becoming, the Future, the Path… Copyright: This graph is borrowed from Ken Wilber’s little known work Integral Progress. It shows all of the Stages of Development in their dignity and simplicity.
  14. This is one of the central delusions of this place: anything other than invoking a constant state of existential crisis through psychedelics or nihilistic deconstructionist philosophy is a “mind game at the avoidance of truth”. The implicit heresy here is the idea that the mind and Truth are diametrically opposed to one another; the reality is that the rational mind is a lesser emanation of Truth, subordinated in the hierarchy to intellectual intuition, the divine Logos and the Absolute. There is no real antithesis here, only degrees of realisation.
  15. This is another thing that I find quite odd about Wilber: he inhabits a strange middle-ground between espousing the esotericism that you are describing and selling out to whatever is trending in postmodern academia. I think he probably thought - as Mircea Eliade, Henry Corbin, Louis Massignon and a few other academics had done before him - that by combining the Perennial Philosophy with contemporary academic developments, he might be able to reintegrate genuine metaphysics into secular academia. This seems like a rather futile effort to me; I suppose we will have to see…
  16. Yeah, that is definitely the reason. There is the additional component that - since Hegel and the adaptation of his ideas by Marx, along with the “enlightenment” Philosophes - modern philosophy in general has tended towards progressism. Even here, though, we could wonder why Schillber fails to integrate all of the criticisms of these developments, for example those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the first case and Burke and Carlyle in the second. It would seem that all of this is just dismissed as belonging to a “lower stage of development”: this is a false argument, however, because the people who created the theories of progress to which these people were reacting belonged to the same “stage of development”! To me at least, it all comes off as an arbitrary personal preference for liberal progressism masquerading as “integral” thought. I must admit that I am not so familiar with developmental psychology. I do know, however, that it was a field based on the most extreme form of positivistic rationalism and scientific materialism. It is not surprising that, if genuine progress was to be found anywhere, it would be found in a field with these premises: nobody could deny that, within certain limits and in merely material terms, progress can be demonstrated. The trouble is that, even when this material progress does not serve to actively deny spirituality, it generally only serves as a comparatively empty compensation for a lost spiritual potency. It also seems very strange to me to combine the discoveries of this field with the revelations of what Schillber himself calls the Perennial Philosophy, whose epistemology is completely antithetical, as though there is no real discrepancy here? @A_v_E I don’t understand everything that you have said. I suspect that we have slightly different reasons for objecting to Schillber; nonetheless, some of what I do understand is very funny and on-point! Particularly: This is my impression too. Schillber seems more concerned with creating a cosy private fantasy world - in which lines, streams and waves of developmental growth and evolutionary progressivism must infinitely ascend into the clouds of relativistic integration, forever and ever - than engaging with reality as it actually presents itself… Thanks for the suggestion. I watched a little bit of this video when it came out, though I didn’t get very far… I will consider watching it again!
  17. Of course. To paraphrase one of Leo’s favourite phrases: “That’s not a bug, it’s a small creature!” At the same time, whilst there is an obvious affinity between reactionary thought and Perennial Traditionalism, they aren’t the same thing. Wilber himself opens his book Spectrum of Consciousness with a quotation from Frithjof Schuon and the first footnote in his book Integral Psychology is a reference to the main exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, who I have mentioned above. Why doesn’t he include their negative vision of history, not as Spiral Progress but as cyclical decay, in one of his handy little “developmental charts”? Schillber’s writing can be very beautiful but it’s essence is: progressive. When it isn’t an appeal to a purely hypothetical future in which the degradations of postmodern nihilism and deconstruction have magically given rise to a spectacular New Age inhabited only by Tier 2 Systems Thinkers, “honouring” and “embracing” every “stage of development” (for lack of any humans left still worth honouring and embracing!), his defence of modernity is literally just the same old tired appeals to “liberal democracy” and “feminism”… Why does he fail to “integrate” any of the completely valid objections that have been raised against these demonstrably terrible ideas? I call him Schillber because, as I have demonstrated, his so-called “Integral Theory” is conveniently selective as to what it “integrates”…
  18. I agree with you. It is worth saying, though, that we live in a time where everything is dangerous. If you think you have found something “safe”, you are deluding yourself. In our times, the best that you can do is to pick your poison. Or, as the Tantric texts written for the Kali Yuga in which we find ourselves say, find a way to hendoku iyaku, “turn the poison into medicine”…
  19. If it were up to me, we would bring back the ancient practice of anonymity: then there could be no question of obsessing over “the work of Ken Wilber”, with all of the vanity and irrelevancy that this entails; it would simply be a question of upholding truth and denouncing falsehood. Just stick to what you are good at, Leo: taking drugs and bragging about how “Awake” you are, and how “not Awake” everyone else is; leave the complex thought to us Stage Yellow Systems Thinkers! Stick to regurgitating the same old inane drivel, pretending to explain all of existence by reducing it to “survival” and some colour-coded stages of Spiral Progress. Stick to denigrating everything other than your so-called “teachings” as “petty human bullshit”, whilst telling people to “think for themselves” and chastising them whenever they dare to think differently from you. Stick to boasting about having transcended all systems of human authority whilst sucking the tit of TYT and CNN like the good little bug-man that you are. Your followers are so stupid, as they must to be to follow someone as stupid as you, that they will probably never tire of it… Hahaha… When all else fails, you idiots will always have the accusation of “toxic gaslighting” to fall back on! I sincerely apologise for my “toxic gaslighting”, blaspheming your precious idols: Ken Schillber, Lex Fraudman, Daniel Schmachtenbullshit… Funny how none of you have any objection to trouncing on Christ and the Buddha, but whenever someone criticises the likes of Schillber, Fraudman and Schmachtenbullshit you frantically rush to their defence… One more aspect of the contemporary pseudo-religion. He won’t be remembered at all. The Global American Empire is doomed to collapse, from insanity within and hostility without, and Schillber’s vain and inconsequential work will perish with it. Everything that he has taught will be reduced to a pile of dust before you know it. This is all extremely obvious to anyone who doesn’t have a vested interest in not seeing it… For all their talk of having transcended the biases that “survival” imposes, it would seem that most people here are entirely blinded by their own preferences. If Schillber is remembered, he will indeed be remembered as the Junk of our time.
  20. As if I haven’t noticed it! As if it isn’t carefully cultivated… Notice how the modern pseudo-intellectual class is more concerned with nice manners than the pursuit of truth. @Nilsi Never mind… It’s clear you aren’t really willing to engage with ideas outside of this progressive evolutionist wannabe-deep-thinker thought bubble. No point pretending otherwise. This will always be the perfect parody of all of these idiots:
  21. There is also a glaring contradiction throughout Wilber’s writing: whilst claiming on the one-hand that history is a progressive evolution from matter to spirit, he simultaneously acknowledges that modernity has systematically reduced all of reality to a “flat-land” in which all that exists is matter?! This makes absolutely no sense.
  22. There he is again! If you want to spend your time in the Dynamic Wave of Emergent Synergy Fields, suit yourself. To me, it’s just obvious drivel. The main thing that has struck me reading Wilber is that his model is completely backwards. At the centre of the “Holarchy” is not matter and physics but spirit. Every other level of manifestation is a lesser emanation from this centre, the divine Heart. The soul is a lesser emanation of spirit, the mind is a lesser emanation of the soul, and the body is a lesser emanation of the mind… Pure matter is the most peripheral manifestation of consciousness. As such, it should be equivalent to the outward circumference of the “Holarchy”. To place pure matter at the centre of the “Holarchy” is simply ridiculous, as can be demonstrated by the simple question: what is the centre of your being? This is obvious to anyone who really understands that this universe is a Creation. The essential problem here is that, so as to integrate Tradition with modern depravity, Wilber is forced to look at life from the merely human point of view, as opposed to looking at it sub specie interioritatis (from the inner point of view). From this point of view, there can be no question of emergence: instead, as I have already said, everything that exists is an emanation of the One.
  23. As to the supposed innovations of Wilber, it must be acknowledged immediately that every Tradition was integral. Christendom contained contemplative practises and Theology alongside the sciences of the Trivium and Quadrivium. These were all unified by their animating principle, the Christian Tradition. If you are hostile to Christianity as many are today, this is equally true for the other Traditions; consider for example the six astika or branches of study within Hinduism. As another example, Aristotle wrote on Biology, Physics, Metaphysics, The Soul, Politics, Ethics, Poetics, Rhetoric, and so on, recognising the inter-connectedness of all these domains; and he didn’t just compile other people’s thoughts together into pointless “meta-systems” like Wilber… He actually thought things through from first principles! So-called “Integral” is just a desperate attempt to reintegrate the different domains of knowledge, after they had been fatally fragmented by the decrepitude of late-stage Kali Yuga (or what Wilber, in his willed ignorance of traditional cosmology, calls “modernity and postmodernity”), which is indeed characterised by what Guénon described as a “dispersion in multiplicity”. In short, there is nothing new here. Just another moronic American self-help “guru” who wants to delude himself into believing that he is a deep, important and innovative thinker.