shamanism – Page 17

We’ve Had the Great Financial Depression, Now We Have the Great Spiritual Depression

We’ve got all the money and stuff we ever wanted – but it’s not making us happier

Tyler Durden in Fight Club told Generation X that “Our Great War is a spiritual war.” This is the truth, and we have been too slow to see it. The narrative has changed since our parents’ and grandparents’ time: the major struggle of human life is no longer physical survival, but making sense of our lives.

Durden was speaking directly to Generation X because ours is a different story. The Great Depression that our elders endured, while terrible, was ultimately a financial one, and we were guaranteed to get out of it once the markets reset. What we have to endure is also worthy of the epithet Great Depression, only what we have to endure is spiritual.

This Great Spiritual Depression has been caused by a perfect storm of factors.

The first major factor is the rottenness of what passes for spiritual tradition in our culture. It’s obvious to any outside observer that the Christian rituals are empty and meaningless – this can be determined simply by speaking to the average Christian and hearing his hatred of other religions, of homosexuals, and of drug users. It’s apparent from that that Christians do not have any privileged access to understanding the mind of God.

A person who enters a Christian church to hear a sermon from a learned man is far more likely to hear something political about the need to obstruct progress on gay rights or drug law reform. If that person stays to talk to those who think they understand the nature of God, those people will say that a women’s place is subordination, and that anyone who doesn’t worship the Magic Jew will be condemned to an eternity of hellfire.

If there was ever anything spiritual in the Abrahamic tradition it has rotted away centuries ago.

The second major factor is that all of our cultural and political narratives are entirely materialistic. It’s materialist capitalists versus materialist socialists. Whichever side wins, we get materialism. Neither side has a solution to the problems of human existence that goes beyond accumulating more physical resources or power.

This materialism has arisen as a reaction to the fact that religion, in the guise of Christianity, retarded progress in the West for over 1,000 years. Because of this, the people and societies that developed an interest in discovering the truth naturally came to distrust anyone who spoke about non-materialist concepts. Moreover, most of the advances in alleviating human suffering made in recent centuries have come through materialist sciences such as medicine, engineering, biology, chemistry and physics.

The problem with this materialism is that people have been thinking in these terms so so long that most of us have forgotten that any other terms are possible, or even sometimes necessary. Emotional, intellectual and spiritual paradigms have all been forgotten in favour of who controls the most stuff. Even psychiatrists – supposedly doctors tasked with healing the soul – can only think in terms of chemical imbalances and pharmaceuticals.

As Terence McKenna was fond of saying, “the way out is back”. Westerners have historically shown themselves capable of exceptionally sophisticated metaphysical thought – one only need read Plato for ample proof of this. The solution is the revival of the perennial philosophy and the perennial, universal, cosmic religion, in a form that suits the world of today.

This will have two major benefits.

The first will be the return to each human being of their birthright to be initiated into the spiritual truths. Instead of being brainwashed from birth with some horseshit story about being specially chosen by God, virgin births or last prophets, and how God’s love is conditional upon obeying the moral dictates laid down by the political authorities of the time, people shall be instructed truthfully from the beginning.

This means that something like the Eleusinian Mysteries will have to be reinstated, and the ceremonial mass public consumption of psychedelics encouraged, but in a highly ritualistic and orderly manner. This will mean that the public at large will once again be connected with God, and all will know the truth. This will lead to our spiritual elders transmitting useful information to the youth instead of old Middle-Eastern stories that justify genital mutilation and slavery.

Because the spiritual elders will no longer be lying, there will no longer be cause for the men and women of silver to respond by going in the other direction. Thus, being a freethinker will no longer correlate highly with being a materialist (as it has for the past three or four centuries). People will be free to discuss metaphysical subjects without the assumption that they are dangerous fanatics.

The second major benefit will be to cause the coming of new political ideologies that are not based on materialism. These will transcend the ancient capitalist-communist paradigm. In other words, they will not be grounded in settling arguments about who gets what stuff, and who can extort what labour, taxes and rent out of who. These ideologies will be much better suited to meet the challenges we face because they will reflect reality more accurately and faithfully.

What exact form they do take is not clear, but it is likely that they will be grounded in reducing the amount of suffering in the world rather than the redistribution of resources. This specifically means reducing the suffering of sentient beings, through all of their thwarted desires.

It’s certain that cognitive liberty will play a central role here, as it has been the lack of cognitive liberty that caused this Dark Age in the first place. We can guess from this that the social sharing of consciousness-altering sacraments will flourish – not merely alcohol and cannabis, but psychoactives that are capable of a wide range of desirable effects.

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Alchemical Silver, Silver Magic and Silver Magicians

Silver is brilliant and dazzling, and its magic can pacify the man of iron and bring peace and order to the world

The elementary masculine division is into precious and base, into good and bad. The secondary masculine division is the further division of the precious into silver (colourless precious) and gold (colourful precious). This essay describes more closely the paradigm of silver and the phenomena associated with it.

In biological terms, silver represents intelligence. It is the quality that arises from finding the correct balance of masculine and feminine to suit the situation, instead of the masculine extreme (represented by iron) or the feminine extreme (represented by clay). This means that silver does not win by violence, as does the iron, but rather by deception. It’s no coincidence that spiders spin silvery webs.

Characteristic of silver is that it shines or dazzles – hence the metonymn “silver screen” for the cinema screen. Silver is so amenable to polishing that it can be made into a mirror. This is symbolic for how a man of silver can be highly educated – to the point of being able to shine in oratory, scientific achievement, philosophy or letters. People of iron or clay cannot be polished so brightly on account of their inherent baseness.

Science, knowledge and social status is the paradigm of silver. This is its own hierarchy, entirely different to the hierarchy of iron, which is all about who can beat who in a fight. A college of men of silver would frown most heavily on the use of iron magic within their group. The hierarchy of silver is who knows the most about something. More esoterically, it refers to whoever can see physical reality the most accurately.

This is the basis for the power that silver magicians have over iron. It isn’t obvious how a physically weaker person can dominate a physically stronger one, and in a state of raw, primal nature it’s extremely difficult. It’s not necessarily enough to be more intelligent, because the physically stronger man might not respect that the man of silver is more intelligent, or they might simply not care. One must make use of that intelligence by performing silver magic.

Crucially, iron may be harder than silver and dominate it when it comes to physical battle, but silver will dominate it on all other occasions. Therefore, peace, order, civilisation and goodwill are all cultivated by the man of silver. Inventing alcoholic beverages, by means of which the muscle advantage of the man of iron can be neutralised, is an example of silver magic.

It’s necessary to note here that silver itself has no moral sense. For a person of silver, any non-violent way of gaining power is legitimate, including fraud. After all, fraud can be considered a battle of intellect, in which the person defrauded lacked the wit to defend themselves against the fraud attempt.

That doesn’t mean that silver is immoral, per se, rather that morality belongs to the paradigm of gold. Silver is perfectly capable of reducing the amount of suffering in the world. Indeed, it must do so to some extent, because it must bring peace and civilisation to all in order to counteract the physical dominance that the men of iron have.

Also characteristic of silver – and this is the crucial way in which it is different to gold – is a cold, ruthless elitism. This elitism is capable of manifesting all as kinds of narcissisms and resentments. This is otherwise known as the Conceit of Silver – it is bedazzled more than anyone else by its own reflection, by its own glory.

Neither does silver have any sympathy for the resentment caused by its apparent brilliance. In the mind of a person in the paradigm of silver, it’s simply natural for beings of clay and iron to understand that they are of lesser value to the person of silver. The conceit of silver is such that it cannot countenance the thought that everything has its own value, in its own niche.

Having said that, much of the self-regard that silver possesses is fair. The man of silver knows that if it had not been for his predecessors, the human animal would still be much like a monkey – it was he who mastered fire, he who developed the flint axe, he who understood the military advantage of a spear. That the man of iron has resented him ever since is due that the baseness inherent within iron.

It’s common for men of silver to identify with this as their primary characteristic and to eschew bonds of nationality, race or religion. Voltaire once wrote “When it comes to money, everyone is of the same religion”. Indeed, to the men of silver, being wealthy (in the sense of possessing alchemical silver) makes you part of an elite inner circle of initiates.

This can easily be observed in places of heavy concentration of silver, such as universities or the CBDs of major financial centres. In such places, it’s rare for anyone to express a will to enforce the rigid divisions between groups of people that the man of iron loves to enforce. No-one cares if you’re black, or gay, or from a religion that worships goats – as long as you have class.

To the silver magician, bonds of blood and solidarity are for plebs. All that matters is wealth. If I am wealthy and you are wealthy, then you are part of my ingroup, even if we are of different races, peoples, cultures etc. The man of iron sees this as a betrayal of blood, which helps to fuel his resentment and chagrin.

The Ways in Which White People Are Stupid

There is a lot of talk nowadays about how intelligent different races are. Some say that white people are smarter than the others, some say that this is impossible. In the vein of our previous essay about the complimentary dimensions of intelligence and stupidity, this essay – while happily conceding that white people are capable of feats of great intelligence – looks at the unique ways they are stupid.

There are basically two categories of ways that white people are stupid. The first category relates to their inherent nature, and the second relates to the environment they have created.

When children are born, they don’t naturally understand lying and cheating. The human infant is born in a highly immature state when compared to the infants of other mammals. As a consequence it comes into the world primed to rely on learning, not on instinct. It adapts to its environment primarily by mimicry.

This makes the human infant exceptionally trusting. In most cases, an infant that grows up around people who are honest and upstanding will come to learn that other people are like this. The heuristic becomes established that other people are trustworthy. They can naturally come to assume that everyone in the whole world must be like this, because if they are not exposed to the horrors of other people while young they might never get it.

This is the reasoning behind Sweden’s insane and suicidal decision to open their borders to mass Muslim immigration. The banks who control the media decided that they wanted cheap labour and upwards pressure on house and mortgage prices, and mass immigration from the Middle East and Africa appeared the best way to achieve those objectives.

So all the banks had to do was instruct their media pets to declare that mass immigration of cheap labour was good, and those opposing it were evil, and the white people of Sweden believed it all without question.

Another way that white people are stupid is a low social IQ, which relates to autism. White people are widely acknowledged at being good at abstract thought such as science, philosophy, computer programming and finance. Part of the reason for this is that the white brain has evolved to solve the problems of a cold climate, which means that evolution has selected for white people who can solve problems of physics, mathematics, logic and architecture.

But part of the problem with this evolution is that white people were not selected for solving social problems. There wasn’t a selective advantage for those who were skilled at this, owing to the low population density of Europe (and the population density gets lower, and the people more autistic, the further North you go). White people tend to assume that anyone smiling at them is their friend – which is why they are so readily suckered by democracy and television advertising. White people are more gullible than any other racial group, by far – and that’s a kind of stupidity.

The second category of ways that white people are stupid relate to the environment that they have created. This is not an inherent stupidity, but a secondary stupidity that arises as a consequence of the damage done by the inherent form.

White people, for all of their vaunted ability to see far into the future to overcome the cold winters of Europe, have utterly failed to anticipate and plan for the long-term environmental effects of the capitalist industrial system that they created. This capitalist machine rumbles ever on, free of any bonds, restraints or true oversight, consuming ever more of the natural world.

There is growing evidence that this capitalist-industrial system is unsustainable, such as disappearing Arctic ice, disappearing rainforest cover and disappearing insect populations. In fact, it’s already clear to most intelligent people that we’re headed for a mass collapse, like a train going over a broken bridge. Certainly a group of people who invented a system that caused the biosphere to collapse can justly be said to be stupid, because they will inevitably go down with it.

For whatever reason, white people are not intelligent enough to see this trainwreck about to happen, and so they continue to stoke the coals.

Perhaps worst of all, this insane and inhumane system causes an appalling amount of psychiatric disease in the people that it rules over. Western nations consume baffling amounts of anti-depressant, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medication, reasoning that the terrible side-effects are easier to deal with the effort of trying to live in a way that makes sense.

But the major reason why white people are stupid, over and above all the others, is that they have no spirituality. White people might have a low social IQ, but if there was such a thing as a spiritual intelligence quotient, white people would be to that what Australian Aborigines are to a standard intelligence test.

Instead of following a spiritual tradition that links white people to anything meaningful (i.e. either God or the natural world), most of them follow the dead traditions of a Middle Eastern tribe that almost none of them are descended from. They are even stupid enough to get tricked into persecuting their own, true spiritual traditions, in particular those based around meditation, cannabis and psychedelic drug use.

This lack of spirituality underlies all the other stupidities of white people, as well as their others. Because materialism is the widespread belief, most white people don’t believe that consciousness survives the death of the physical body. This makes them disinclined to consider the truly long-term effects of anything, whether it be financial, environmental or demographic.

A Closer Look at the Four Masculine Elements

The masculine is to go upwards, outwards and onwards; to shine without burning

Previous essays here have discussed the difference between the four feminine elements and the four masculine elements, and the four elementary perceptions. This essay looks more closely at the four masculine elements and, more specifically, how awareness of them arises in perceptual space.

According to one manner of thinking, masculinity is judgment in the place where femininity is perception. Where feminine divides into light and dark (where both have equal value), masculine divides into good and bad, where one is prized and the other despised.

Thought of in terms of elements, the basic masculine division is into precious and base. This means that applying the simplest possible masculine lens to the world will divide it into things that are valuable and things that are not valuable. Those things that are already valuable don’t need to be (or ought not to be) acted upon, because they are good as they are. That which does not have value can be freely acted upon, because such actions do not (or ought not) destroy value.

The elementary masculine action is to impose order upon chaos. This means to impose order upon the world. Before this can be done, the masculine perception must be adopted, so that the world can be divided into precious and base. The precious does not need to have order put to it; it has value inherently. The base, however, can freely be worked because in doing so one cannot damage anything valuable, and can in fact improve the value of it if the correct order is imposed.

Regarding the base, the natural masculine question is to ask: can some of this be shaped into a tool? If a blob of clay – which is simply an ordinary part of the natural world – can be shaped into an object that is useful as a tool, then the crafter has performed an act of basic alchemy: through an application of will he has turned clay into iron. This he has done by imposing a useful order upon it.

Imposing useful order upon clay makes it more valuable than mere clay, because it is possible for information to have value, and if that information is encoded into the shape of an object then that object also has value. A worthless blob of clay can be thrown into a pot, and a pot has value as a tool because it can be used to store things. A stick can be fashioned into a spear; rocks can be melted to produce copper and iron, which can themselves be formed into tools.

The two precious elements – those which are perceived to be good and valuable instead of otherwise – are silver and gold. Both of these are very bright in comparison to the base elements, which is how their essential masculinity manifests – as light. Because these elements manifest themselves as light, and because light is associated with valuable things (like warmth, the Sun, daytime etc.), these elements have inherent value.

Ultimately, the reason why gold is more valuable than silver is because it is richer. Gold is shiny like silver, but where silver is colourless, gold is a vibrant kind of yellow. In this sense, gold contains all of the range of colours that clay does – all the colours of life. Thus, it is easier to distinguish gold from iron than it is to distinguish silver from iron, which means that the gold is more obviously valuable.

Metaphysically speaking, this arrangement of the world into four elements of increasing rarity and value tells an entirely different creation story to the seemingly random appearance of the feminine elements of earth, water, air and fire. It tells a story of order emerging out of an ocean of chaos by means of an act of will, first hardening itself, then polishing itself, then finally refining itself to become something immensely valuable that somehow stood as an avatar for all of life – a God.