Arriving At The Beginning

Much of what we call ‘waking up’ or ‘enlightenment’ is really just about our finally becoming comfortable with living paradox, which is to say living as paradox.

Our usual modality is to live through the screen of the mind with its beliefs, judgments and preconceptions. Awakening isn’t really a choice so much as it is a conscious recognition of that which is happening regardless. What is it that is finally real? Who is this one to whom we attribute all of these thoughts, experiences and memories?

These are answers you will not find in any book.

When you awaken to the truth of who you are, you aren’t in a state of knowing or unknowing, rather you are in a state of authenticity. This becomes self-evident, because no further question emerges. Even calling it a state does not adequately pull together the breadth of awareness that transcends all states.

It isn’t something new that you come across. It is always immediately available as the closest truth of who you are. It can’t be an object of knowledge. There isn’t a separate someone to figure it out, and there really isn’t anything to figure out.

Our various traditions have played a part in advertising awakening as some kind of permanent removal from the challenges of earthly existence, in which we are removed to some distant heaven or nirvana in a perfected state. The trouble with this view is that our freedom is very intimately linked with our authentic engagement with this moment, wherever it is that we happen to find ourselves. In one sense, our ground of being is so ordinary we do not see it and we therefore completely take it for granted.

We have also inherited a notion of someone who as awakened to their true nature as being someone who has ‘arrived’ on a spiritual level, which is really another extension of the dream state.

These people can easily become attributed with all kinds of projected virtues and assumptions. This invariably leads to much confusion and disillusionment.

It is intoxicating to the ego to imagine that people have crossed over the threshold in this way, and the allure that we too could also achieve this, on the implicit condition that we follow instructions carefully and repeat the program step by step. In other words, if we act and behave just right, we will get it. Can you think of any other field of human life this condition has been promoted?

This is a remarkably dangerous misunderstanding. Everyone has seen the effects of this in our world. We worship those we think have made it, and this attitude filters down into every facet of life until our entire worldview and life structure is dictated by the insatiable need to arrive. The big ways are easier to see, but what about the small ways in which we give away our freedom?

For example, allowing others to decide when we are happy or upset, or placing our sense of worth in the eyes of others – as though we even knew what they were seeing!

This is all a very elaborate, coherent, and above all convincing illusion, and it is one we have all bought into at some point. Some of us continue to pay the subscription to this worldview, while others among us have grown to see it as flimsy and untenable, but are not really quite sure what could replace it as a foundation.

This brings us to awakening to yourself as awareness, which is simply the withdrawal of identity from the pervasive illusions of the mind-ego, and quite literally, coming to your senses.

This withdrawal from illusion is actually easy in principle. You simply stop investing your energy in what you recognise to be illusory. The mechanism is quite simple, only it requires a lot of honesty which is usually leveraged upon the total dissatisfaction with the consensus of illusory beliefs which form the status quo.

The difficulty comes from the tendency to withdraw from illusion being quite painful, at least initially. It can very often lead to pain in the same way that recovering from a foolish investment can be painful, because often there is a great degree of investment by way of time, money and resources.

When there is only who you truly are, then what will end is the mind’s fascination with the mythologised ‘other’ which is always frustratingly just out of your reach. Your hunger for spiritual attainment will naturally retire, and you will accommodate no opinion of yourself – yours nor anyone elses, because you will know that in the final analysis, none of this touches who you truly are.

This is not a theory, but an experiential transition. Be forewarned – you will not gain anything. In fact, you will lose your fictional world, and you will know your place humbly amongst your brothers and sisters. The only part of you that desires reconnection with what is real is the only part of you that is real.

We are so hungry for the imagined reality of this success that we will often bargain away nearly anything in the transaction, including our honesty, our integrity, our happiness and well-being.

People are often quite prepared to allow themselves to be brainwashed by whoever they have delegated authority to on the condition that they will be allowed to partake in their share of glory.

The discovery of who you are is the termination of the primary identity pursuit, and the ending of the persistent denial of one’s own inherent freedom and worth. Awakening is the end of existential insanity.

Fortunately, you never need to worry about trying to figure out who you truly are. All you need to do is to stop energizing every thought and movement away from your natural state, and witness that which is right in front of you. Your arrival at the beginning is simultaneously to comprehend the nature of the end. This unspeakable depth of experience is what is hinted at in the symbol of the ouroboros, the serpent eternally swallowing his own tail.

It is one thing to believe that there is neither beginning nor ending, but another thing entirely to bring forth that truth within your experience. This is the sacred invitation to living paradox. You must eventually come to arrive at the point that you always were. How could you do otherwise? What else is there worth doing? All that it requires is the complete willingness to forfeit every idea of who and what you are – just for one moment.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

Own Or Be Owned

Most Westerners are starting to realise that their positions are little better than those of chattel slaves. The average Western worker now understands that they will never own their own home, no matter how hard they work, because the house price to income ratio is too high. Awareness of this state of affairs is causing widespread misery.

If you control land, you also control the people on that land. It follows that anyone who doesn’t own land is the slave of those who do. Non-landowners, as a class, are effectively put to work by the landowner class. Proof comes from the fact that the average hours worked to pay rent alone is not much less today than the average hours worked full stop during the medieval era, despite centuries of labour-saving technological advancements.

If you don’t own land, you have to pay rent to someone who does, otherwise you die of exposure to the elements. If you try to live on land that you don’t own without paying rent, the Police will come to smash you and throw you out into the street. So in order to make money to pay rent, you have to labour for a second landowner, who takes profits out of your productivity. Then you have to pay income taxes to the Government, representing the landowner class in the abstract.

This arrangement was tolerable when the worker had enough money left over, after profits, taxes and rents, to enjoy a decent standard of living with a decent amount of leisure time. But this hasn’t been the case for decades now. Moreover, it is getting worse. The average worker now labours all week, often 50-60 hours, and is left with almost nothing after the landowners have taken their cuts.

The reason why this state of affairs is so heavily resented is because it’s reminiscent of a state of barbarism. To labour all week and be left with nothing is similar to the system that existed when we were earlier primates, where might makes right and anything you can extort out of another person is legitimately yours.

In a state of Nature, your options are: own or be owned.

Males of sexually reproducing species compete for territorial dominance, because this implies control of the resources in that territory. Whoever can establish that he is willing and able to kill the other also wins the ability to control all the resources of that other. Because females of sexually reproducing species are primarily concerned that their mates demonstrate a capacity for resource acqusition, there is a strong incentive for males to own as much as they can.

In human society, the most valuable thing you can own is other people. Ownership of women allows you to control reproduction. Ownership of men allows you to control resources. Ownership of both allows you to control society. Owning people is heavily incentivised because the more people you own, the more secure your position.

Most people in our supposedly free societies are owned, little different from livestock. This is especially true of those who labour all week but are left with nothing after profits, taxes, rents and basic living expenses are paid. This isn’t categorically different to how a unit of livestock produces e.g. a certain volume of milk but is not paid for it.

Some other people are owners. In every stable society, this ownership class raises a police force from among the owned. This police force is then paid, and paid well, to enforce the ownership claims of the ownership class. Without such a system, a society will collapse into violence over control of land. As such, a police force that smashes anyone who questions land ownership rights is essential for stability.

Wealth, throughout history, was primarily a matter of how many other people you owned. If you were the patriarch of a large family, you might control a dozen other people. A chieftain of an average village might control a dozen dozen. The lord of a fiefdom might control a dozen dozen dozen.

Today, people are owned indirectly, through owning the land underneath them. This allows for great profits without having to go through the hassle of managing people. The owners of tenement housing don’t have to worry about what their tenants do with their days, as long as they pay the rent and don’t damage the housing stock.

If life as a non-human animal is kill or be killed, life as a human is own or be owned. Class and caste systems can be seen as ways to formalise the ownership arrangement so that societies suffered less internal conflict.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

VJMP Anzac Day Address 2022: A Foundation Myth for the Anzac Nation

With the news that America intends to respond to China’s move towards militarising the Solomon Islands, it seems apparent that Northern Australia will now become a militarised zone. If China does establish a base there, America will inevitably establish one to counter it in Far North Queensland. The Anzac nation seems to be preparing itself physically for war.

The Anzac nation also needs to prepare itself metaphysically for war. This must involve reflection upon why divine forces would have called us into existence in the first place.

In the opinion of this author, the Fall of Singapore could serve as a kind of origin myth for the Anzac nation. This was the closest we ever came to destruction at the hands of a hostile outside force. But thanks to the exceptional bravery and warfighting skills of our ancestors, and assistance from some close friends, we overcame that challenge.

That the Fall of Singapore was followed by Japanese defeats, at the Battle of the Coral Sea and at the Battle of Milne Bay, can be attributed to divine favour protecting the nascent Anzac nation. The foundational myth of the Anzac nation holds that this divine favour is still with us, and will guide us safely through the 21st Century and beyond.

An element of our national myth ought to be that we are inherently more likeable than our enemies, and as such have a moral right to triumph. This is because we are originally good, honest men and women who stood up to corrupt power structures and were exiled for it. This shared history is the basis of our national moral imperative of a “fair go”.

If there is to be war in or around Northern Australia, we will need to make sure to win the propaganda war at the same time. Winning this soft war will heavily influence the extent to which we are to gather support for the hard war. So we need to establish in the minds of the world that we are more likable than other nationalities.

For the most part, this will not be too difficult, because many people have had experience with Anzac travellers, and most of those experiences have been positive. For every drunken bogan we send overseas we send several cultured and educated people. So those of us who cannot contribute to the hard war can still contribute to the soft war.

The foremost work in this soft war ought to be spiritual. The most heavily-armed and most well-liked force can still lose if they don’t have spiritual wealth. Manifesting this wealth into the material world is the true work of the Anzac nation in the 21st Century.

The Anzac nation should hold, as part of our foundation myth, that we are destined the lead the rest of Planet Earth into a spiritual Golden Age. We are uniquely suited for this role owing to the fact that psilocybin mushrooms grow plentifully here, including the world’s most potent version, the psilocybe subaeruginosa.

That the world’s most powerful subspecies of arguably the world’s most powerful spiritual sacrament is endemic to the Anzac islands can only mean one thing: that divinity itself has chosen us for spiritual leadership in this new age of the world.

Australia and New Zealand already have some of the world’s most psychedelic-friendly populations. Apart from the West Coast of North America, there are few places with the widespread experience of using psychedelic sacraments that Aussies and Kiwis have. Psychedelic sacrament use is an established element of our festival culture, and any Anzac who has ever truly wanted a psychedelic experience has been able to have one.

Fittingly, Australia is the location of the world’s first psilocybin mushroom trial. Subconciously, it may be that many Anzacs understand the role of magic mushrooms in the future spiritual health of this nation. Let it be said that our role is to bring a new understanding of the perennial spiritual philosophy to the entire world.

Supporting this sentiment is the fact that Aussies are the 18th and Kiwis the 15th heaviest users (out of 164) of that other common spiritual sacrament of the Indo-European people: cannabis. We Anzacs love our spiritual sacraments, which is why we are able to produce genius-tier animated film like Choomer Island 2, one of the greatest explications of spiritual truth produced this century.

Let us let it be said that God spared the Anzac nation during World War II because God wished for us to play a role in promulgating God’s Will in the next Great Age of the Earth. In return for this favour, the Anzac nation is tasked with spreading true knowledge about spirituality and how certain natural sacramental substances can be used to reconnect with the divine.

A foundation myth that explained how we Anzacs have divine favour in all of the past, present and future is something that needs to be added to the national consciousness.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

If You Want An Alliance To Work, Leave Out The Christofascists

Suggestions did the rounds again this week that the minority parties unite under one banner. This has been a perennial suggestion since my first time in the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2007. Now, as then, egos prevented the suggestion from getting anywhere. One thing would make forming an alliance to get over the 5% threshold much easier: leave out the Christofascists.

Ironically, the most recent suggestion to unite was made by Brian Tamaki. But few are willing to work alongside Tamaki on account of his toxic reputation. Tamaki is a classic example of a Christofascist, Christofascism being “the political direction of all attempts to place Christ at the center of social life and history.”

Tamaki, like his fellows Elliot Ikilei and Leighton Baker, wants to use the State to smash people he hates: drug users, homosexuals and prostitutes being the usual targets. The Christian fascist logic is that these people shouldn’t be tolerated. Like other fascists, the Christofascist has a massively overflated opinion of their own moral judgment.

Christian fascists don’t work well with others. Combining the ruthlessness of the authoritarian right with the arrogance of the authoritarian centre, these fascists are everything politics shouldn’t be: narcissistic, pompous fanatics who literally believe they’re appointed by God to rule over the rest of us.

Few others are as obnoxious as the Christofascist. Like their Abrahamic counterparts the jihadists, the Christofascist exists in a perpetual state of war against all outsiders. This puts him in a mindset of antagonistic, spiteful aggression, exemplified by their rejection of cannabis law reform.

As was observed at the Wellington protests earlier this year, co-operating with Christian fascists is extremely difficult. Not only do they want to hog the stage and the PA system, but they have no respect for other points of view, are happy to negotiate on behalf of everyone else without getting their consent for it, and are willing to jump in at the last minute to steal the limelight.

This level of arrogance is not as great as the arrogance that launched the Inquisition or murdered Hypatia, but it’s getting up there. It’s an arrogance that can only be submitted to, not co-operated with. So the proposal of this essay is that we don’t co-operate with them, i.e. we leave the Christofascists to form their own party and let the true freedom movement unite under a separate banner.

This arrangement would leave New Conservative, Advance NZ, ONE Party, Vision NZ and any Brian Tamaki, Elliot Ikilei or Leighton Baker-related vehicles to form their own Christofascist party. This party could then have the policy of banning all drugs, homosexuality, prostitution, music, dancing and levity. They can even freely propose to again make it legal to rape your wife.

The non-Christofascist parties outside of Parliament won 138,455 votes in 2020, or some 4.9% of the total (New Zealand First 75,021, or 2.6%; The Opportunities Party 43,449, or 1.5%; Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party 13,329, or 0.5%; NZ Outdoors Party 3,256, or 0.1%; Sustainable NZ Party 1,880, or 0.1%; Social Credit 1,520, or 0.1%). If these parties would combine under one non-Christofascist banner, they could seriously challenge the 5% threshold.

Possibly this would have to be a Winston Peters-led movement in order to get enough votes, and he might reason that he has a better chance by himself with New Zealand First (which is fair, considering that he’s been in Parliament with them before). Some might not think favourably of Peters, but he has one quality that contrasts him with the Establishment – he’s a nationalist.

An anti-Establishment, anti-Christofascist alliance would inevitably be nationalist in character. As such, it’s fitting for Winston Peters and his party to be at the centre of it. This might make it hard to integrate The Opportunities Party, who are led by – of all things – a foreign ex-Goldman Sachs banker. But integration of the others would not be too difficult.

The Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party is already nationalist in the sense that the vast majority of their voters are New Zealand-born, and very few of their voters are immigrants. An alliance that explicitly rejected the War on Drugs could easily win the support of ALCP voters, and this would suit a nationalist vehicle, as the War on Drugs was an imported foreign concept from the beginning.

The Outdoors Party, Sustainable NZ and Social Credit have several quality candidates in (among others) Sue Grey, Vernon Tava, Chris Leitch and Amanda Vickers. If candidates like these could ally with the high-IQ Kiwis in The Opportunities Party (like Dr. Ben Peters), with a token representative from the ALCP, and under the paternal guidance of Winston Peters for one last crusade against the Establishment, they could do well.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!