1. The objective definition of virtue is the ability to overcome suffering in order to achieve one’s Major Aspiration.
2. The subjective definition of virtue is the ability to overcome suffering in order to achieve one’s Minor Aspiration.
3. Virtue is will exercised in the service of the divine, when mercury is in line with gold.
4. Virtue is activated rectitude.
5. One is more virtuous the more one’s true will is aligned with the will of the divine.
6. The first failure of virtue is a failure to overcome the Underconditioned Self.
7. The second failure of virtue is a failure to overcome the Overconditioned Self.
8. The Underconditioned Self is the beast that rises up from below, and which represents chaos.
9. The Overconditioned Self is the angel that falls down from above, and which represents order.
10. A failure to overcome the Underconditioned Self leads to violence, rape, filth and mayhem.
11. This entertains the gods only somewhat, because it’s indistinguishable from animal behaviour.
12. A failure to overcome the Overconditioned Self leads to saying No to life.
13. This also entertains the gods only somewhat, because it’s indistinguishable from death.
14. The Great Fractal can be compared to a single line that threads its way throughout all possible physical and metaphysical space.
15. Likewise, the will of the divine threads through a person’s life. Abandoning it causes suffering; following it alleviates suffering.
16. The most virtuous is the person who zigs when the will of the divine is for them to zig, and to zag when the will of the divine is for them to zag.
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This chapter is an excerpt from Elemental Elementalism, the foundational scripture of the new religion of the Age of Aquarius.
1. All physical, emotional, mental and spiritual truths exist as vibrations within the Great Fractal.
2. This includes all possible scientific, spiritual and philosophical truths, which all exist as vibrations within the metaphysical realms of the Great Fractal.
3. Speaking the truth is a matter of expressing a vibration that is appropriate for the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual environment that one is in.
4. Speaking falsehood is a matter of expressing a vibration that is inappropriate for the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual environment that one is in.
5. Speaking falsehood is usually motivated by a desire for wealth or status.
6. There are two ways to wage war: force and deception.
7. In cases where force is not appropriate, war must be waged by deception, and falsehoods must be spoken.
8. Waging war by deception does not allow one to escape the Law of Assortative Reincarnation. The speaker of truth will reincarnate in a world full of speakers of truth; the speaker of falsehood will reincarnate in a world full of speakers of falsehood.
9. The speaking of truth is the path of peace; the speaking of falsehood is the path of war.
10. The best reason to speak falsehood is to entertain the gods.
11. Reject the truth, and suffer; suffer, and entertain the gods!
12. Expressing falsehood always leads to an amount of suffering that matches the magnitude of the falsehood. This suffering can be physical, emotional, mental or spiritual.
13. The magnitude of a falsehood is the degree to which the vibration expressed differs from the vibration of the environment, multiplied by the number of people who hear this expression, multiplied by the degree those hearers believe the expression.
14. The most egregious of all falsehoods are those which deny the Four Tenets.
15. The most common egregious falsehood is denial of the First Tenet.
16. Much of the suffering in the world is the result of denial of the First Tenet or the Fourth Tenet.
17. Correctly understanding these tenets is to understand that consciousness, in its natural state, knows everything, and therefore all learning is remembering.
18. The best reason to speak truth is to alleviate ignorance, and thereby to alleviate suffering.
19. Skillfully spoken truth will alleviate ignorance as well as entertain the gods.
20. Speaking falsehoods may or may not be a bad thing, if the suffering prevented outweighs the suffering caused, or if the suffering entertains the gods.
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This chapter is an excerpt from Elemental Elementalism, the foundational scripture of the new religion of the Age of Aquarius.
A wave of young people in China, driven to exhaustion by the relentless demands of their industrial culture, have launched what they call the ‘Lying flat’ movement. They protest their workplace pressures by doing the absolute minimum amount of work possible. This essay will suggest that it’s time to bring the lying flat movement to the world stage.
The lying flat movement is inspired by the idea that a chive lying flat cannot be reaped. In this context, to lie flat is to refuse to be exploited, to disengage from the rat race. The usual path involves moving to the countryside and living as cheaply as possible. Someone lying flat might still work, but they’ll do it for themselves or their family or village instead of some corporate.
The lying flat movement began in China as a reaction to their onerous 996 culture, which insists on a 9am to 9pm, six day workweek. These 72-hour workweeks are incredibly profitable for those who own and run the factories and offices, but, for those supplying the labour component, they’re brutal.
Such long hours are tough even when well-remunerated. A 72-hour workweek leaves very little time or energy left over for recreation. It’s an extreme grind, and will drive a worker to exhaustion in short order.
Unfortunately, the post-nationalist capitalist mentality is that workers are just replaceable parts, and if one breaks down it’s a simple matter of chucking it out and replacing it with a new one. The Chinese industrialists, like the Western industrialists, import outside cheap labour to replace the native labour that they drive into the ground, only theirs comes from rural China instead of everywhere in the world.
The net result is the same, however. An oversupply of labour can only lead to one thing, and that’s a discounted labour price, which itself leads to the impoverishment of the working class. The mass importation of cheap labour has such a destructive effect on native wages that the inevitable end result is a shit life for everyone except for the employers of that cheap labour.
The Chinese have figured out that there’s no winning for workers under these conditions – so why don’t we?
Why don’t we take the lying flat movement to the whole world?
A global lying flat movement would firstly recruit the already rapidly-growing legions of NEETs in the West, and the hikikomoris in Japan. These groups have already dropped out of the industrial profit machine, and are essentially part of a global lying flat movement already. They were the first to realise that the equation of how much was being asked of them to how much they were rewarded did not add up, and their example can inspire others.
The movement would next recruit anyone who works full-time but can’t buy a home or raise a family on their wage. The individuals in this group have not yet suffered psychological collapse, unlike those in the first group, and are still able to labour. However, the equation doesn’t add up for them either. The difference is that this second group is now close to 50% of the working-age population, and higher in the younger demographics.
Before either group can be recruited, a canon of high-quality propaganda must be developed. This propaganda must suggest persuasively that industrialised hyper-capitalist society is in fact evil, and that refusing to power it with one’s life energy is a moral imperative. One example of such propaganda argues that a life on welfare is morally superior to a life as a worker, because the welfare beneficiary uses fewer resources, and resource conservation is now more important than production.
This propaganda will be effective because many who hear it will already be receptive to it. Many are already tempted to drop out of the system, having long ago calculated that their wages will never allow them to save enough to own their own home and raise a family. If they see that other people achieve a higher standard of living by dropping out of the system, they’ll become motivated to drop out as well.
That people will drop out of the system is inevitable at this stage of the cycle. Working hard in the city only makes sense during the boom times, because in the boom times the workers have the leverage, and so they can get a fair share of their own productivity. But capital always outpaces labour (link goes to .pdf), so when the bust part of the cycle hits, the people who own everything will maintain their share by reducing the share of the workers.
If you’re a worker and not an owner, then, you want to be living cheaply in the countryside when the bust hits. This is what great numbers of young Chinese have already figured out. It’s harder to do in New Zealand, because we don’t have villages everywhere, but it’s still possible. The basic leverage equation makes city life less and less worthwhile with every year that passes.
A global return to cheap, low-stress country living would cripple the industrial capital juggernaut, and shift the balance of wage negotiation leverage back towards the worker. Starved of cheap labour, the ruling class would be forced to pay a fair wage or go without producers. It’s time to go tang ping, and bring the lying flat movement to every corner of the industrialised world.
1. The fool believes that this world is all there is.
2. There are an infinite number of other worlds, some better than and some worse than this one. All are different.
3. The Multiverse is the name given to the division of the Great Fractal into worlds that make sense.
4. The Multiverse is a subset of the Great Fractal.
5. The Great Fractal contains all possible sensory and perceptual impressions.
6. The vast majority of possible paths through the Great Fractal make little coherent sense to the fragment of consciousness that would observe them.
7. The gods are more entertained by a path through the Great Fractal that makes coherent narrative sense than by one that does not.
8. In order to maximise the narrative coherency of the experience of moving through the Great Fractal, the Multiverse was created, and with it the illusion of birth and death.
9. The Multiverse is broken up into an infinity of worlds, covering the entirety of the Great Feminine Axis.
10. Each of these worlds has a base vibration and a base frequency.
11. Beings incarnate into worlds wherein the frequency of those worlds matches the frequency of the consciousness of those beings.
12. All beings whose frequency of consciousness is below a certain level will incarnate into the Multiverse, where there is birth and death, instead of the higher parts of the Great Fractal.
13. No-one can complain about the awfulness of this world, because it simply matches the frequency of our fragments of consciousness.
14. For us to be worthy of incarnating into a higher-frequency world, our fragments of consciousness would themselves have to be higher frequency.
15. The Multiverse serves to bind those of us of lower frequencies to a particular world.
16. This action is taken as a kind of quarantine. It prevents, to some extent, beings of higher frequencies from being sullied by the presence of beings of lower frequencies.
17. This quarantine process is voluntary, because it is understood by all honest beings to be necessary.
18. Low-frequency beings might need to incarnate in a world of birth and death before they can become motivated to learn the importance of behaving correctly.
19. High-frequency beings are liberated from the Multiverse, and can explore the Great Fractal without the restrictions of death and incarnation into a physical body.
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This chapter is an excerpt from Elemental Elementalism, the foundational scripture of the new religion of the Age of Aquarius.
