Category: psychology

The Dualistic Perspective, Positive Thinking and the Lower Self

There is a tendency in society for people to praise so-called ‘positive thinking’, because it is believed to oppose negativity and negative thoughts. How do you oppose negativity? Opposition is not the same as allowing, and allowing is not the same as capitulating.

Fighting negativity is the equivalent of war on terrorism. You cannot cease aggravation with aggravation, and you cannot wrangle the world into a peaceful situation by insisting that your perspectives have raised you above it all. From the perspective of duality, you are always inextricably complicit in the world’s dysfunction.

While it may be true that the subject of your thoughts involves ‘nice’ things, say, generosity, or hope, or love, the upshot is that you are still dreaming the dream of duality. Reality is already here, and does not correspond to the thoughts and judgments we make about it.

Much of the motivation behind positive thinking, as with any other branch of dualistic thinking, is that it is crafted to oppose or ward off other kinds of thoughts or events, like a talisman. What appears to be loving and peaceful turns out to be an elaborate exercise in nonacceptance. Dualistic ways of thinking oppose accepting the way things appear at this moment at the cost of peace. Duality always has an agenda to push, whether it is destructive and wishes to make things ‘worse’, or constructive and wishes to make things ‘better’.

Things don’t ultimately get better in a dualistic world. This is the ‘bad news’ if you are intent on staying within that limited paradigm (in reality, this is neither ‘bad’, nor is it ‘new’). It means that all of your efforts to screen and filter incoming experience for both yourself and others will be doomed to failure.

This is not fatalistic, because this too is merely a perspective. This is a natural consequence of your insistence on seeing reality divided into fictional categories, including ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘holy’ and ‘unholy’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, and most other polarized words you will come across in any dictionary. Things don’t get better in a world where you have designated the rules as dualistic and therefore inherently unstable and combatative.

From the viewpoint of unity, there is peace and deep acceptance of whatever comes to pass, because it is acknowledged deeply that everything is unified. This could be called many things, but essentially it means not minding what happens. This is not the same as apathy, or fatalism.

Apathy could be defined as not caring what happens because the world is seen as unsatisfactory, irrespective of what it should happen to contain. This is clearly an expression of duality.

Fatalism has two distinct philosophical meanings, the first is the belief that everything that happens is fated to happen. This may or not be true, and does not fall within the relevance of the present moment. How could anyone know this? What difference would it make to reality for you to believe it?

The second meaning is that of an extreme form of pessimism. This again is duality. Perspectives always see the world through a lens, which means they always imply an agenda – shoulds, should nots and endless efforts at negotiating with what is.

Reality has no agenda, it simply appears unfolding in the moment. Any notion of there needing to be something different to how it presently is occurs only within our cranial vaults. The view from beyond duality reveals the entire cosmos to be marvellous perfection. This can only happen when the false tyranny of the fragmentary mind has been deposed. When the conditioned structures which cloud your vision and prevent you from seeing clearly are removed or at least become transparent, you will see for yourself the breadth and perfection of the Divine.

People who despise the world, having mistaken part of the world for the whole and identifying suffering as essential to existence, are often some of the most vociferous. If you really don’t care, why is it that you care to have your opinions expressed to as many people as possible? Is it a sign of strength to want for others to know your opinion of not caring? What is the nature of the fleeting sense of satisfaction this expression offers you? Do you achieve a specialness from feeling more separate, do you feel adulated as a victim?

All cultures and subcultures, like all individuals, claim specialness, either overtly or implicitly.

It is ironic that there are even subcultures which claim their specialness by being indifferent to wider societal values. They are never so indifferent as to cease insisting that the society they wish to be seen opposing recognises them, even if only to push them away.

Even the most anarchistic and refractory of these subcultures insist on showing their open contempt for the rest of society and their rejection of its values and interests.

It is not enough for them to quietly keep their thoughts, beliefs and values to themselves. Like most egoic entities, they want you to either agree with them, or react against them. If they were truly indifferent and special in the way they would have us believe, why do they do they continue to insist that their differences be recognised by those whom they claim to be possessed of less wisdom?

Again, because all social divisions claiming special status or exclusion are ego based, it is that they want to be recognised as being different (and therefore special) by everyone else. Otherwise, ego would have no audience, and that is not a game that interests an entity whose only conception of being is based on perception of popular opinion – reflected image.

Within both society and individuals there is a strongly ingrained egoic yearning to appear special and to ‘stand out’. Advertising is built upon exploiting this self-induced fiction. The way that egos attempt to establish specialness and distinction is limitless, but they all derive from the same source, the same fictitious drive to appear in order to appropriate being or ‘realness’.

The compulsion to identify with unpopular or unconventional things is not indicative of freedom/authenticity or having somehow transcended the cycle of suffering, rather it is confirmation of the mind/ego’s insistence upon rating everything according to popularity and convention, even when expressed in ‘negative’ terms.

People are particularly aggrieved when something which they like which is relatively unpopular suddenly catches on as a craze. This is why there are bumper stickers and t-shirts which say “I liked (x) before it was popular”. Why should this happen? What is the relevance of this personal investment?

Liking something which is relatively unpopular confers a certain exclusivity. When this thing, whether it is a food, band, or a person, becomes widely appreciated, i.e. ‘popular’, then your claim to exclusivity is forfeit – a piece of life which you thought made you special is now lost, and there is a resulting pain.

This has curious effects. One might be that the thing which was previously identified with is rejected, and your attitude undergoes complete reversal in reaction to popularity – you become a ‘hater’. Otherwise, you might continue to enjoy it, but not feel the capacity to let go of your story about how at one point in your life you had the wisdom and refinement of taste to appreciate (x) before it gained popularity, hence the perceived need for the t-shirts and bumper stickers which congratulate your good taste.

There are people who reject popular films solely by virtue of their popularity alone and insist on praising the merits of less-popular films. This is where the terms ‘overrated’ and ‘underrated’ become especially relevant. You can be in chains by playing the role of the conformist, but you can be equally chained by playing the role of the dissident.

The lower self will happily work either way. One ego might see strength in crowds, popularity, and herd mentality, as in the case of most religions and global fads.

Another might reject the popular on the grounds that they would not be highlighted as sufficiently special, and adopt unconventional beliefs, dress, tastes, lifestyle in order to stand out. They see their implicit rejection of society as a show of force and a testament to their strength.

Ego will work with anything it has available in order to appear stronger. Going with the flow of society appears to have strength and momentum, and opposing it creates ripples. Either way, ego seeks confirmation of its relevance and specialness.

Awareness itself has no dog in the fight. It does not even register the conflict, since it does not arise from inherent duality as the lower self does. Mind is dualistic and therefore highly selective about the kinds of experience it would like to have and those it would rather avoid. It separates possible experience into categories and forms strategies for manipulating life in what it perceives to be its favour.

Awareness just watches. It does not discriminate between fictitious categories of experience or quality. It exists in radiant openness to this moment.

The more energy and ‘time’ that is invested in a life replete with mind, the more plans your mind will make for you, which means fabricated problems, disappointments, thrills and complications.

The more energy is withdrawn from mind and back into the source of that power, which is pre-reflective awareness, the more you live a life that is peaceful, ordinary, and free from the desperate need to stand out or ‘make it’. Identity is free to rest as itself in vibrant awareness.

From a higher perspective, none of this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It is just where you happen to be at this point in life. Not everyone’s relationship with this moment is dysfunctional, but most are. Some of the effects of this are stress, dissatisfaction, yearning for specialness and recognition, anxiety, depression and a persistent sense of disconnection from life as well as other people.

It isn’t surprising that people gravitate towards consciousness when their suffering increases. Some people feel that they are pleasurably lost in the complexities of life – that’s fine. That’s part of the game too, only sooner or later everyone will be reminded that all experiences are temporary.

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Simon P. Murphy is the author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a collection of short horror stories that deal with questions of transcendence, terror and spiritual absolution.

New Swear Words For A New Digital Age

“I got in trouble for saying the F-word,” goes the common lament of schoolboys across the Anglosphere. Just about everyone understands the quoted sentence – but few realise that it has two different meanings.

For most of the modern history of the English-speaking people “the F-word” meant ‘fuck’. Swear words are usually taboo because of their association with a sacred subject, so it’s not surprising that a culture subjected to the sexual repression of Abrahamism would make a swear word out of the sexual act.

However, we’re no longer in a sexually repressed age. Far from it – arguably no other cultural tradition has ever found within itself the range of sexual expression and alternative identities as the modern West.

In fact, if anything we have swung the other way (no pun intended). Now it’s seen as deeply immoral and aggressive to criticise anyone for any sexual expression, even those undertaken in front of children in broad daylight.

And so, the F-word isn’t ‘fuck’ any more. The F-word is now ‘faggot’.

If you don’t believe this, just try using either word on social media and see what sort of response you get.

People use ‘fuck’ all the time on FaceBook and nothing bad ever happens to them. No-one reports it, no-one cares, and no-one appears to be seriously suggesting that it breaches what community standards FaceBook has.

However, people calling each other ‘faggots’ is strictly discouraged by means of bans – even though the word was barely considered a profanity 15 years ago.

Even better, observe a young person when something undesired happens to them, like stubbing a toe: chances are that they will cry out ‘faggot!’ rather than any variant of ‘fuck’.

They are also much more likely to tease their friends by calling them faggots than by calling them fuckwits or fuckheads. This is now also true of ‘nigger’ and various epithets for Jews, such as ‘kike’ etc.

So any young person trying to be edgy isn’t going to bother saying the old F-word. That’s so passe that even our grandmothers use it without blushing.

The swear words of this century will reflect this century’s social mores – casual sex is in, setting boundaries is out.

Chaos Worship Is The 21st Century Manifestation of Slave Morality

Muslim culture might express significant contempt for homosexuals, but the two groups are nonetheless united in their resentment for those strong enough to uphold the current world order

Looming over the world stage of today is a shaky alliance of groups who not only appear to have little in common, but whose goals appear to be directly antithetical to each other. There is, however, a unifying tenet within this group of people: that order is inherently bad. In other words, they are chaos worshippers.

On the surface of things, it’s not obvious what a homosexual rights activist might have in common with a Muslim. Homosexuals are hated by Muslims; the Koran and hadith make it clear that homosexual acts are sins deserving of punishment.

Indeed, in all of Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, homosexual activity carries the death penalty.

Nor is it obvious what either of these groups have in common with communists. Both Islam and homosexuality were heavily suppressed by the Soviet Union, with adherents of either practice regularly shipped off to the gulags.

So what is the basis of this modern alliance of homosexuals, Muslims and communists?

The answer lies in what Nietzsche called slave morality. In particular, it is the resentment of the weaklings towards the strong that have seen those weaklings put their differences aside (or at least pretend to) and unite against The Man.

A similar phenomenon can be observed in chimpanzee troops, where weaker males sometimes come together in order to take out an individual stronger male.

Essentially what many individuals in these groups have in common is a grudge against the current order of things.

Homosexuals want to be treated with the same respect as heterosexuals, but they never will be because their sexual orientation does not maintain the existence of the human species.

Muslims want to be treated with the same respect as non-Muslims, but they never will be because the moral principles at the foundation of their religion lead inevitably to segregation, mistrust and violence.

Communists want to be treated with the same respect as those of other political orientations, but they never will be because their philosophy expresses a contempt for individual human life that the majority of people consider abhorrent.

Because all three of these groups have found themselves in a position of weakness, on account of that all three of them have been shunned for expounding a way of life that is detrimental to the human survival project, they have found cause to unite around their common resentment of the current order.

Their resentment is so great (this being the outwards projection of their immense self-hatred) that they have no interest in modifying or refining this order.

What they want is simply to destroy it. Whether or not a better order will arise after this act of destruction is not important. The overall goal is to destroy the current order.

In other words, many individuals in these groups are chaos worshippers.

Chaos worshippers don’t believe in correct order. To a worshipper of chaos, all order is bad because it is all oppressive. Thus, any individual or group serving to maintain that order is the enemy, no matter who they are or for what reason they maintain order.

Sometimes the chaos worshipper goes as far as to disbelieve in concept of order at all. This can manifest as a refusal to believe in the march of history.

Some chaos worshippers believe that the laws of human psychology that have led to the march of history no longer apply, or that things will be different this time. As a result they refuse to learn anything from history, mindlessly insisting that the world can be made into a paradise merely through sufficient adherence to an ideology.

One disastrous consequence of this attitude has been the European decision to let in tens of millions of Muslim immigrants in the belief that they would all decide to fit in to the local culture and essentially become Europeans with slightly swarthier skin.

The reality is that mass immigration of anyone to a foreign locale almost never benefits the locals, as is plainly obvious to anyone who has studied any amount of history.

This is irrelevant to the chaos worshipper, for whom mass immigration has the benefit of destroying existing social bonds at all of the local, national and super-regional levels.

In other words, mass immigration of obviously incompatible cultures is great because it spreads chaos. This is why chaos worshippers universally support it.

After all, if you are a pathetic loser at the bottom of society, then all order is bad. All order is oppressive. All order is necessarily immoral. All order is “keeping you down”.

So for these losers, enslaved not by chains of iron but by chains of silver and gold, destruction for destruction’s sake has become its own imperative.

This is the form that slave morality has taken in the 21st century.

Trip Report: 100mg Methoxetamine

2100: I take a gelcap with 50mg methoxetamine. I am at home with only my mother and two cats for company. I have just had an excellent week on holiday with some good friends and so my mindset is optimal.

+0.30: I take a second gelcap with 50mg methoxetamine. This makes it a total of 100mg, which is a very heavy dose. The reader ought to note that I weigh 115kg, and so the vast majority of people would not need as strong a dose as 100mg to have a similar experience.

+1.00: It’s starting to come on for real. I turn my head to the side and it seems to take a while for my perception to catch up.

It’s not like how it usually is, where the turn of the head seems to take place at the same time as the change in focus. Somehow there is a sense of viewing everything though a camera.

It’s as if there is some kind of perceptual space in between the sensory action that is detecting the physical world and my consciousness that observes it.

As if my eyes have been removed and replaced with cameras, and these cameras feed input directly to my consciousness somehow.

+1.30: I’m enjoying watching myself do things. There is a strong sense of comedy, as my body appears to be doing things without an exercise of will on my part.

For example, I just went out of my house to go up the stairs to another house, and it’s more like watching an extremely boring movie (although the novelty of one’s life being observed second-hand like a movie makes it interesting).

I realise that I am in a state of dissociation, and there is a mild sense of alarm at the possibility that I might do something without being in control of myself, and come to regret it.

This alarm never becomes anything major, as my body fortunately rolls along without doing anything stupid.

+2.45: It’s interesting to pat a cat in this state because of the dissociation. The cat seemed to me as it usually does, except for one distinction.

I was happy for the cat because I knew the person patting it was a good person who meant no harm. Because this person was going to bring happiness to the cat, I was happy for the cat’s sake.

That it was my cat and that it was me patting it didn’t come into the picture, despite that this is the usual course of events.

I knew it was my cat and I knew that the cat being happy made me happy, it’s just that I was unable to comprehend that it was me making the cat happy. It was as if my consciousness just hung in physical space, a short distance from the man I was watching, and followed him around like a will-o-the-wisp.

+3.30: The dissociation has helped me to realise something. That the person I’m observing in this highly dissociated state is actually a decent fellow.

It’s an interesting state because I don’t usually feel this way about myself, a feature of having clinical depression. But the dissociation has allowed me to view myself as if through the eyes of another. It seems natural to assume that this is a more objective state, having been stripped of all the psychic flotsam that otherwise occupies the mind.

I realise that everyone’s opinion of themselves is, to a large extent, conditioned and therefore has been arrived at by involuntary means.

That I appear to be watching myself, and that this self that I am watching is a decent fellow who I don’t need to be afraid of, doesn’t seem particularly strange in this moment.

+4.00: It has occurred to me that methoxetamine is an excellent anti-depressant. I have not taken my anti-depressants for a week before this trip so as to avoid serotonin syndrome (methoxetamine, like my prescribed sertraline, is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor).

I am feeling pretty happy, but not in a high way. Methoxetamine doesn’t appear to be an especially giggly drug like the classical psychedelics.

The sense of joy rather comes from a removal of the cloud of ignorance that I had about myself. It’s as if I dared to peek behind a perceptual curtain and was rewarded by feeling better about myself.

+5.00: The trip is starting to wind down. One pleasant thing about dissociatives is that the comedown tends to return the user to their familiar, everyday state of doing things in a way that is a relief.

This contrasts with the feeling I get on psychedelics, in which the comedown to familiarity often comes with a sense of disappointment, of being stuck here again.

All in all, I’d highly recommend a solid dose of methoxetamine, however I would only do so under certain caveats.

In particular, this drug is probably a terrible choice for going out partying or in public, on account of that the dissociation makes normal human communication a bit of a crapshoot.

On the flipside, it seemed like an excellent choice for hanging out at home and getting to know yourself better. Thus I would suggest that using it more or less like psilocybin should work out okay.

Also, I get the feeling that methoxetamine should probably be avoided if a person has low self-esteem or hates themselves. This is because the dissociative effect might bring this lack of self-regard starkly to the fore.