psychology – Page 121

The Three Orientations of Bravery

Bravery is generally thought of as an ability to maintain calmness and composure in the face of danger, especially in the context of going forward into that danger for the sake of achieving some moral goal. It’s almost univerally thought of as a highly desirable personal quality and usually thought of as a masculine one. Originally bravery referred to physical courage, but, as this essay will show, there are at least three major perspectives that one can take on the concept.

These three perspectives translate into the perspectives of iron, silver and gold if one takes the approach of elementalism or esoteric alchemy. These can be thought of as forms of bravery that evolved from a successful resolution of the challenges that led to the previous form.

The form of bravery that corresponds to the iron is the simplest and most universally understood of the four orientations. Here the iron responds to upwards – a form of bravery that is oriented up the dominance hierarchy, towards one’s parents, one’s boss or the local king. Here, being brave is a matter of standing up to those who would try and hurt you.

This orientation of bravery is usually understood in a martial sense, and indeed we can see that Mars, which represents iron, gives us the etymological origin to words like ‘martial’. In the context of esoteric alchemy, ‘martial’ means ‘like the iron’ and therefore reflects a sense of being sharp, strong and unyielding.

As a warrior proves his bravery in the arena of iron (by whatever means) and succeeds in keeping dependents safe, he naturally comes to take on a shine, which represents his entry into the arena of silver. He learns that keeping the peace is as much a question of diplomacy as it is a question of beating the shit out of people, and he finds that he no longer needs to orientate himself up so much.

This form of bravery is the form of bravery that goes outwards. In the same way that a given volume of silver can cover more area, when hammered flat, than the same volume of iron, the bravery of the man of silver is that which orients itself over a wide area.

Once a great warrior comes to take responsibility for his tribe and becomes a chief, the next step up the hierarchy of silver is to take responsibility for a wider and wider geographical area. This is natural as long as he continues to shine, because this will cause people from far and wide to seek his judgment and mediation.

The bravery involved here is not so much slaying dragons and more a will to confront the real nature of the physical world and to strive towards its mastery. This means the real nature of the world in terms of its physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology and related disciplines, as well as statecraft.

When the man of silver moves beyond his prime years for taking responsibility for his people, he enters the arena of gold. Gold represents the form of bravery that goes inwards. This is like gold because it is the rarest and most precious form of bravery.

A person who orients their bravery inwards learns to make peace with God, which is the hardest thing of all to achieve because this orientation has the fewest biological instincts giving it power. Biological instincts are not generally concerned with bravery in general, because that is a moral orientation – they are concerned with survival and dominance.

One reason why this form of bravery is so rare is that not everyone understands that it takes bravery to truly look within – but it does. It takes a lot of bravery to look into your own soul and to ask yourself if you are truly good or evil, or if such things really exist. It takes incredible bravery to really truly ask yourself if you can be comfortable saying goodbye to all of your attachments with this world upon the moment of your physical death.

The three orientations of bravery, therefore, relate to the challenges that naturally faced people in the historical past as they overcame the dangers of their environment.

Why Books Will Surge Back Into Fashion

The next great invention is like a comprehensive collection of webpages on a specific topic, printed on paper and with no advertisements or intrusive pop-ups, bound into what’s called a “book”

Way, way back in the almost prehistoric age of 1993, the Internet was barely in its infancy. Compared to its form today, the Internet of 1993 was practically at the zygote stage. As the elderly readers of this column may recall, gathering information mostly involved a building called a library, which stored information solely in hard-copy format (i.e. books).

This system had worked out pretty well for a few thousand years, as it became common for kings and rulers to build royal libraries for the sake of attracting scholars from near and far, which made it possible to have an educated middle class, and, with that, all the trappings of what we now call civilisation.

In the mid-90s, at about the same time as the introduction of Windows 95, things started to change. Although there were still very few people who had decent websites or information portals up, there only needed to be a few thousand such resources for the Internet to be bigger than most people’s local libraries.

A tipping point was then reached. Once the Internet started to contain more information than the average library, it started making more sense for researchers to make the Internet their first port of call. Most of the early Internet pages were built by nerds and hobbyists who were obsessed with their area of expertise, meaning that you could go on the Internet and effectively find entire books worth of information from digital libraries all around the world.

This made researching many times more efficient than it used to be. Early web browsers like Netscape, Northern Lights and Metacrawler allowed people to escape the nightmare of index cards and misshelved books. This made it possible, with technological enhancement, to learn many times faster than one otherwise could have done.

Then, something terrible happened. Someone realised that this unprecedented access to information was so valuable that you could start sticking advertisements on it, and people would still consume the medium. At this point, the televisionisation of the Internet began.

It was subtle at first. Just a “sponsored post” here and there, or a notice that the big banner ad underneath the header was now necessary owing to increasing bandwidth costs. But as the shekels rolled in, more and more people became attracted by promises of easy money, and started making websites specifically to put ads on them. When Google introduced AdSense in 2003, the floodgates were fully opened, and have remained so ever since.

In 2018, advertising on FaceBook and Google search is as intrusive as television, radio or newspaper media ever was. What was once a portal away from crass commercialism and the mindless pursuit of more money, the Internet has now mostly become a collection of billboards-for-rent. Websites such as VJM Publishing, that do not advertise apart from a list of links to our published books in the sidebar, are extremely rare.

Worst of all, the surge of advertiser money has seen the advent of mass censorship, as leery marketing executives put pressure on platform providers to make controversial speech less accessible so as to ensure their product is not associated with anything unfashionable. This has sent people who want access to quality information elsewhere.

The final result of this is that books are going to take over again. The Internet won’t go away, because it continues to fill an extremely useful niche in study and research, but people will start using it less for actual information (because of the ever-more intrusive ads), and more as an index through which quality information in the form of books can be found (which is ironically closer to its original purpose than it is today).

Because the Internet is so vast, it allows for tremendously specific books to be written and to be easily made available to readers, despite the ads. This new breed of books will be responsible for the resurgence in book readers over coming decades.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

To Deny That Cannabis Is Medicinal Is To Deny The Humanity of Medicinal Cannabis Users

Opioids kill 1 in every 10,000 Americans every year, but they’re fully legal

One of the most awful aspects of being a medicinal cannabis user is getting lied to by doctors and mental healthcare workers who deny the emotional and spiritual benefits of cannabis use. The problem isn’t that they won’t help you get hold of cannabis medicine (because there are plenty of people who will) – it’s that they refuse to have an honest conversation with you about the benefits and side-effects of using it.

It’s impossible, in most places, for a sick person who uses medicinal cannabis to expect that their doctor will listen honestly to what they have to say. If the patient mentions the benefits of their cannabis use, the doctor will insist that the patient must be mistaken when they believe that cannabis helped them. Even if the doctor goes as far as conceding that cannabis has some medicinal value, they will almost always attribute all manner of ghastly side-effects to using it.

Worst of all, it’s impossible to change the mind of your doctor by presenting evidence from jurisdictions that have legalised medicinal cannabis. It doesn’t matter that medicinal cannabis was made legal in California in 1996 after the doctors there looked at the evidence – those doctors are simply presumed to be wrong, and recklessly so. End of story.

This refusal to speak honestly with patients is, from the patient’s perspective, a dehumanising experience. It’s a way of saying that your experience can be discounted, because you are worth less than a normal human being. With almost every other medicine it’s possible to tell a doctor that it alleviates your suffering and have it considered enough to get a prescription.

This is even true of opioids, which kill 1 in every 10,000 Americans every year, and which have been so recklessly overprescribed that the opioid crisis now has its own Wikipedia page.

Not so with cannabis. Somehow cannabis has the mysterious property of causing suffering that only doctors, politicians and pharmaceutical company lobbyists are able to see. A patient might feel that their suffering is reduced from using medicinal cannabis, but unfortunately for them, they are not considered full human beings on account of the claim that cannabis causes psychosis. Therefore, their belief that cannabis alleviates suffering can be dismissed on account of it being a belief held by a psychotic person.

It’s a vicious Catch-22: you might feel that the cannabis takes your suffering away, but this can be trumped by the declaring that using cannabis robs you of your ability to reason, and then anything you say can be dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic.

If a person is suffering psychologically, and they take a substance that they believe to be medicinal, and their experience of using this substance is that it ameliorates psychological suffering, then how can anyone else possibly presume to judge otherwise?

It might be that the side-effects of using some particular medicines are so great that, on balance, it’s better to look for an alternative than to prescribe them, but significant side-effects from cannabis use are non-existent.

The feeling from the patient’s perspective is that doctors are saying that ameliorating your suffering, in particular, is not worth pursuing because you are not valuable. Elderly Baby Boomers are getting stuffed full of opioids at the first murmur of complaint, but if anyone else wants to use some cannabis they have to risk several years in prison.

Psychedelics Fill The Vacuum Left By The Destruction of Genuine Spirituality

In the West we have no common spiritual tradition. The closest we come is an empty imitation of the old myths and legends of a Middle Eastern tribe of genital mutilators. Where the Buddhists pray for an end to the suffering of all sentient beings and the Hindus know for certain that consciousness survives the death of the physical body, we Westerners are still mutilating the genitals of our baby boys and living in utter terror of the day our vital organs shut down. Luckily, there is historical precedent for solving these problems.

The natural spiritual traditions of Westerners were destroyed by successive waves of Abrahamic invasions, beginning when the Romans made the terrible mistake of taking in Abrahamic refugees. Allowing this evil supremacist tradition into the West had the effect of corrupting those tasked with maintaining these natural spiritual traditions, ending with their replacement by hollow lies.

Before the Abrahamists invaded, Europe was rich in folk spiritual practices, with use of the amanita muscaria mushroom in the North and psilocybin mushrooms in the South allowing our forebears to reconnect with God. Not only did the ancients use psychedelics, but they did so frequently and with reverence, like any skilled practitioner would use them today.

The amanita muscaria folklore lives on in our stories about Santa Claus and his reindeer (Santa’s red and white costume represents the mushroom, his rotund build represents its roundness. The reindeer are there because Nordic shamans would potentiate the psychedelic effect of the mushroom by inducing reindeer to eat it and then drinking the animals’ urine).

The ancient Greeks partook in the ceremony at Eleusis once every mushroom season, and they did so with such reverence that to this day no-one is quite sure of precisely what the recipe of the kykeon was. This enabled them to see the world beyond in a way that had up until then been the province of exceptionally gifted shamans.

The Abrahamists destroyed as many of these traditions as they could, as Abrahamists have done everywhere in the world they have set foot, on account of the unique viciousness of that religious tradition. But they could not destroy the mushrooms themselves, no matter how severely they punished their use. And so it was only a matter of time until they lost their grip and the folk spiritual traditions reasserted themselves.

This causes problems, although we don’t realise it because you need a little bit of spirituality to realise it, and we have none left. If one of us does become a little bit spiritual, they tend to realise all of these problems, and this often leads directly to the state of psychological collapse known as psychosis.

Because our culture is rotten with materialism, we have no commonly understood way of recognising when one of us has achieved a state of spiritual insight. Indeed, the usual response appears to mock them for being a “loony”, as if the eternal truth of materialism was so self-evident that only a mentally ill person would even pause to question it.

This is why Westerners who achieve a spiritual breakthrough usually end up with a psychiatric diagnosis in short order. Our culture is so spiritually dead that we cannot recognise spiritual gnosis even when it’s right in front of us. We sneer and jeer at any hint of it.

But knowledge of magic mushroom use (alongside that of LSD) has slowly seeped into the Western consciousness since the 1950s. Thanks to the Internet and what’s left of our culture of intellectual free inquiry, it has been possible for those who have heard the call of the shaman to share their experiences with others, and after much discussion it has become clear that the psychedelic experience and the spiritual experiences of the ancients are much the same thing.

The Church did such a good job of destroying natural spirituality, and they did it for so long, that they are unable to act when it starts to arise again (as it is doing now), because they have forgotten what their enemy even is. This means that knowledge of how to use psychedelics will once again become widespread, and this will once again lead to a spiritual golden age.