Uncovering Occultic Insights While Gaming

by DIE SIENER

I grew up in the 80s and spent my free time playing games on some comparatively inglorious rigs. My first rig, which I had to share with my dad, was an Intel 80286 PC with a monochrome tube screen running some archaic version of DOS. Big bulky sort of thing, it made noises like an old truck engine when it cranked up. It booted the operating system from an 8-inch floppy disk and most programs ran from a secondary floppy drive – no hard drive on this puppy at all.

To my preteen self, this was the most glorious piece of technology ever invented by man and I spent countless hours having a crack at text-based RPGs, carefully manoeuvring my ASCII character through dungeons fighting text-based orcs and warlocks. At the time, I would never have thought that one day I would be able to play a game such as The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim on a gaming laptop tens of thousands of times faster and oh so exceptional at displaying all those monsters and dragons on a full 24-inch HD screen.

Apart from gaming, I have also nurtured a habit of delving into the occidental occult. From the arcane wisdom, I have learned a lot about myself and the nature of the Great Fractal.

I habitually continue to learn through daily observation, even in times I’d rather just chill out and forget about work and family commitments. It was a bit of a surprise though that, while I was playing an Elder Scrolls game, I was elevated into a meditative trance. It just goes to show that if you are receptive to God, he is always willing to reveal the mysteries, no matter your current disposition.

Before I delve too deeply into the nature of this trance, let me first clarify some mechanics relating to the Elder Scrolls franchises’ game mechanics.

In the Elder Scrolls franchise, your avatar is ultimately represented by three forces. The first of these forces is called “Health” and is habitually coloured red. The second force, which is the mirror of the first, is called “Magicka” and is coloured blue. The third force is often called “Fatigue” and is coloured green.

Now from here on it becomes a bit more complex and varies from franchise to franchise, but, in general, we can say that these three forces are derived from some additional factors: the star sign under which a character is born and also the class of character the gamer chooses. These two choices influence the three forces in such a way as to govern how the character will develop in-game.

A gamer would usually complete this creation process at the start of a new game and your avatar is then born into the game-world and the “you/avatar” team can then start exploring and taking on quests etc. So, this is the basics of how the avatar is created.

The gamer will now manipulate the avatar around the game world and, based on its primary forces, will favour any number of different playing styles while solving various challenges.

A physical character would have high health and fatigue reserves and so would favour going into combat directly with heavy weapons and armour, trying to cause a lot of damage and ultimately outlasting his adversaries. His weakness would be his lack of mana which will leave the avatar incapable of casting beneficial spells, say casting a healing spell or a protection spell.

A character that is focused on predominantly casting spells and using magic to overcome challenges would benefit from a high reserve of mana and fatigue as it will have to manoeuvre around heavily armoured foes rapidly, and cast different forms of magic to overcome its foes’ greater physical prowess.

As the player continues along his path, completing quests, clearing dungeons and fighting random monsters in the game-world, the character slowly builds up experience in the skills that it favours. This then reinforces the nature of the character since each time it levels up, the characteristics which enable that type of character to become better at what it does will naturally be chosen.

At first, tasks seem hard and you fail often, but the better defined the character becomes, the easier it finds its way through quests and challenges.

Now coming back to the other night when I entered an altered state of consciousness. You see, I realised once again that we humans are not much different from this make-believe digital avatar. The catch is that in real life it takes tremendous effort to separate the actor from the flesh and blood avatar.

It doesn’t only take effort once – like RPG games, it takes the repetition of challenges, each tougher than those before, to define our primary attributes and train our avatar to follow the instructions of the actor and not the other way around. How we as individuals choose to address these temporal challenges also determines the type of character our souls ultimately develop into. It affects our fate – something which receives far too little consideration in modernity.

This tripartite nature of our reality is, unfortunately, a mystery deeply hidden to the masses who, for the most part, remain asleep and forgetful about their true nature beyond the flesh. It is this forgetfulness which inhibits our higher selves from taking control of our encounters and overcoming the challenges and uncertainties which we are all fated to experience. We remain trapped in the forces which govern our lower aspects and never seem to overcome them. The lesson that all occultists can take home is this warning.

In RPG gameplay, you can easily become lost in the fantasy, just as you can in real life. It takes real effort by the actor to distance himself from the avatar, to see things for what they truly are and to overcome them through the effort of body, mind and soul.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 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 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Spirituality Is Bad For The Economy

Many people feel that spirituality is a taboo topic. Part of the reason for this is because it reminds people of death – questions of God and life’s meaning go hand-in-hand with questions about the afterlife. Therefore, talking about spirituality is bad because it reminds people that they will die one day. As this essay will show, this is only part of the reason.

The purpose of spirituality is to reduce suffering.

The objective of the Buddhist path is to achieve nirvana, the objective of the Hindu path is to achieve moksha and the purpose of the Western esoteric traditions is to achieve ataraxia. In all cases, this state of ultimate enlightenment offers a liberated existence independent of material acquisition, status anxiety, social anxiety or attachment to food, sex or power – a state in which one no longer suffers.

Buddha was motivated to end the suffering of all sentient beings, and his conception of the Eightfold Path was an attempt to teach how an individual could achieve this for themselves. He taught that happiness could not be found in the material, which was an illusion. Every person had to look within themselves.

Buddha is famous for advocating meditation as an avenue to enlightenment, but all true spiritual traditions teach that happiness (or at least an end to suffering) is found within. Analects 15:20 quotes Confucius as saying “The Superior Man seeks within himself. The inferior man seeks within others.” The Tao Te Ching, likewise, is replete with admonitions to find satisfaction in everyday life and not to strive for it.

Looking within is the secret to ending suffering. From society’s perspective, however, a dilemma lies therein.

In our society, the most important thing of all is money, and getting money requires jobs. In order for a job to exist, there has to be demand for goods and services. This demand comes from only one place: human dissatisfaction. Without human suffering, there could not be money. Therefore there must be human suffering.

Many people have never comprehended the fact that other people exist, and that they are conscious, and that this consciousness suffers just like one’s own does. These people act as if the world was a virtual reality game that only they were playing, and everyone else was just an NPC. In life they are as hungry ghosts, their insatiable appetites causing them to lurch from one instinct-fueled lust to the next.

In our culture, the dissatisfaction of these unfortunates has been channelled towards buying stuff. New clothes, new cars, new toys, new foods – and all of it greases the wheels of commerce. Consumerism is therefore powered by this dissatisfaction, by suffering. It follows that anything that stops people consuming is bad.

Spirituality, though, tends to have a profound effect on people’s consumption habits. Once a person starts to look within, they start asking questions like: did that most recent purchase really increase my happiness? Or did I get more happiness from the chance social encounter I had in town last week? Once a person starts thinking like this, their lives start to change profoundly.

When a person becomes skilled at meditation, it’s easy for them to feel a more powerful sense of satisfaction from meditating than from buying new stuff. Meditating is the ultimate activity in many ways, and one of the main ways is that it is anti-consumerist. The dissatisfaction that people feel in everyday life is assuaged by meditation. So people who are into meditating are seldom the same people who line up overnight for the next iPhone release.

It follows from all of this that the engine of consumerism runs on godlessness. The further a person is from God, they more they suffer, and the more they suffer the greater the volume of goods and services they consume. The ruthless logic of the markets has led to a horrific outcome: genuine spirituality has deliberately been attacked in order to power the capitalist machine.

People with genuine spiritual insight have been persecuted for thousands of years, but this has intensified in recent centuries according to the demands of capitalism. Witches have been burned at the stake and hippies – their cultural descendants – have also been attacked. True spiritual sacraments such as cannabis and psilocybin have been criminalised, those who grow or gather them locked in cages.

Worse, false spiritual traditions have been promoted to distract people from the true ones that would help them. There are hundreds of different Christian churches who teach that wealth is evidence of God’s grace, and hundreds of millions of other Abrahamists who mutilate the genitals of their children, persecute homosexuals and who consider women and non-believers to be subhumans.

This combination has obliterated the spiritual wealth of the masses. In doing so, however, it has caused the material wealth of the elites to overflow. Thus, it is perpetuated. Spirituality is bad for the economy, and that’s why it’s been suppressed.

We can hope that, in the coming years, the economy will be considered less important, and human suffering more important. At the least, we can hope that it will be remembered that the economy is a means for ending human suffering, and that human suffering is not a fuel that should power the economy.

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An Introduction To Great Fractal Theory

Works such as The Verity Key (published 2012) make reference to something called the Great Fractal, a concept expounded upon in an essay published here in 2017. Great Fractal Theory is a subset of a wider philosophy known as Elementalism. This essay provides a basic introduction.

Great Fractal Theory starts with a simple premise: that consciousness is the prima materia. Consciousness was the first thing to exist, and everything else comes after and is dependent upon it. Consciousness is more fundamental than both time and space, and therefore does not need to have a beginning, an end, a cause, or a final destiny. It simply is.

Everything else that exists falls into the category of ‘the contents of consciousness’. Here we find the metaphysical world (that which Plato referred to as the ‘World of Forms’), and the physical or material world (that which we’re used to calling ‘Earth’).

The material world is not truly real, despite the fact that it appears very real. In fact, it has been dreamed up by consciousness, in the Great Act of Creation. Consciousness is therefore the creator of the material world, in the same way that it creates the worlds we navigate in our dreams. It is the stage upon which the play on life takes place.

The material world is most accurately understood as not being a place, then, but rather a matrix-like series of self-similar sets of perceptions that manifest in conscious awareness. Consciousness perceives a field of impressions that collectively create the illusion that we are bodies living in a material world, as opposed to consciousness dreaming it up. As such, we appear to be ‘living’ rather than simply experiencing.

The essence of Great Fractal Theory is that all of the possible fields of impressions that consciousness could ever perceive are related to each other by way of a fractal matrix. This matrix, known as the Great Fractal, contains every emotion, every thought, every desire and every sensory impression that could ever possibly manifest in conscious awareness.

Our lives do not involve being bipedal fleshsuits moving around on a rock in space, but rather being fragments of consciousness navigating through an eternal and ever-changing Great Fractal of self-similar fields of sensory impressions.

The easiest way to conceptualise the Great Fractal is to think of one’s own life.

Consciousness is, right now, experiencing not only your current life but also all the possible gaps in between your birth and your death. Your own personal fragment of consciousness may be living right now, in 2020 A.D., but other fragments of consciousness are living out every possible moment of your life, simultaneously.

By “every possible moment”, imagine that your life was divided into a billion or so chunks, each corresponding to a second or two of awareness. Think that all billion of these fragments of consciousness are living their own lives, unaware of the presence of the others. Then think that each of these billion fragments could themselves be divided into a billion fragments.

Now imagine these quintillion or so lives, each separated by one or two nanoseconds, rolling from birth to death like freight carriages on a railway. One ends and one begins every few nanoseconds, and follows the exact path of the life that you are experiencing right now, past and future. This is what Nietzsche meant by eternal recurrence: your life is lived again, by another fragment of consciousness, forever.

Now imagine a parallel streak made up of lives of people who are of the other gender to you. Their lives are otherwise exactly the same, only they came into the world female instead of male (or vice-versa). These lives would have followed an entirely different path on account of that they would have had different instincts and would have been treated differently, but a life they would have had.

This parallel streak of lives can also be divided into a quintillion separate existences. Now takes this dual streak of lives, and change another facet from masculine to feminine or vice-versa. If you are rich, imagine another dual streak of lives that is poor. If you are short, imagine another streak of lives that is tall. If you are white, imagine black etc.

Every possible way that a human life can differ from another is another dimension of the Great Fractal. This number of dimensions is close to infinite – there are as many different dimensions of this Great Fractal as there are ways to distinguish one human life from another. So not only does every moment of every human life exist in the Great Fractal, but so does every moment of every possible human life.

If we say, for simplicity’s sake, that there are a hundred different dimensions along which human lives could differ, that would mean that the Great Fractal contained at least one quintillion to the power of a hundred different human lives in it – a number that defies comprehension.

All of these lives are being lived right now.

On top of this has to be added not only the lives that are possible according to the specific world that has manifested to us (i.e. Earth), but all the possible lives in all possible worlds. These possible worlds might also differ from each other over a hundred different dimensions.

This would mean that the number of human lives being lived right now is (at least) one quintillion to the power of a hundred to the power of a hundred. This number would cover all the fragments of consciousness that are right now experiencing a human-like life in an Earth-like world, somewhere in the Great Fractal.

Trying to understand this is enough to understand that the Great Fractal is humming with consciousness.

On top of this, we could add all of the non-human lives being experienced by consciousness right now. There’s no reason, other than anthropomorphic conceit, to believe that only human beings are conscious. Once it’s realised that consciousness is the prima materia and not a phenomenon of the brain, it becomes entirely possible that all other animals, indeed even insects and trees, are conscious like we are.

If we assume, for simplicity’s sake, that the number of dimensions along which life can vary is a hundred, then the number of different lives being experienced by consciousness right now is at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 ^ 100 ^ 100 ^ 100. This is a nonsense number as there’s no way that a human mind can comprehend it. However, our failure to comprehend it is the glory of God.

In sum, anything that can possibly be perceived by consciousness lies somewhere in the Great Fractal. All moments of all lives of all possible creatures in all possible worlds are contained within the Great Fractal, to be experienced by consciousness eternally. Your life is simply an infinitely small fragment of this incomprehensibly vast whole.

Getting what you want out of life is not, as most think, a matter of manipulating and dominating the material world until it accords with your will. Making your dreams come true is simply a matter of navigating your consciousness to the part of the Great Fractal in which those dreams are experienced. This is, however, a topic for another essay.

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Why Is Rent-Seeking Legal?

Our legal system has many quirks and contradictions that defy easy explanation. It seems strange that doctors are allowed to mutilate the genitals of infant boys, yet they are not allowed to prescribe medicinal cannabis products that would save lives. This article will discuss another activity of questionable morality: rent-seeking.

Rent-seeking is an attempt to increase one’s personal wealth without creating or producing any. It is the use of resources, such as land, to extract economic benefits (known as rents) from others without making any contribution to the overall economic good.

The most common form of rent-seeking today is found in residential property. There are some 625,000 rented houses in New Zealand today, and the average weekly rent is $390 a week for small houses and $525 for larger ones. Assuming an average rent of $480 per week, rents on residential property bring in some $15,600,000,000 every year in New Zealand alone.

Rent-seeking is correctly understood to be a form of parasitism. As with other forms of parasitism, rent-seeking is a net negative for the overall health of the system. Not only does it suck money away from the productive and gift it to the unproductive, it also incentivises anti-social behaviour. Economically, it disrupts market efficiencies, limits competition and creates artificially high barriers to entry for market participants.

Despite being a form of parasitism, rent-seeking is a long and honoured tradition in New Zealand. Many a fortune has been built in this country by taking advantage of people’s need for shelter from the elements. As a previous essay here has discussed, there’s nothing as profitable as human suffering, and being exposed to the elements is one of the worst kinds of suffering.

The beauty of rent-seeking is that it carries little risk. All you need to do is to own property and the Police will keep people away from it unless those people pay you money. As long as there are men willing to enforce other people’s claims to property in exchange for a wage (and there always will be), then owning some of that property is effectively a licence to print money.

In reality, there’s little difference between a landlord charging someone rent on the threat of throwing that person out into the street, and an armed robber charging someone their wallet on the threat of stabbing them in the guts. In both cases, the power to charge a fee or levy comes from the power to cause extreme physical suffering. Both are a form of extortion.

Given the apparent net harm of trying to extract wealth from the system instead of creating it, the question has to be asked: why is rent-seeking legal?

The main reason why rent-seeking is legal is simply because the rent-seekers make the laws. It was they who, way back in the day, invented Government by paying some weak-minded arse-lickers to defend their property against outsiders (this is all that Government is). Those arse-lickers bifurcated into the Police and security services (whose prime directive is to protect and serve property owners) and the Government (whose prime directive is to organise the protection of property owners).

At the end of the day, the Government is there to manage the affairs of the rich, and they don’t care if the poor are impacted adversely. People too poor to own property don’t have a seat at the table. This is the same reason why businesses were compensated directly in the form of wage subsidies, rather than workers being given a universal basic income – the wealthy take the lion’s share, the poor get the scraps.

This arrangement has created a great deal of resentment, however. Those forced to pay rent on threat of being thrown into the street don’t feel much less resentful about it than those forced to give up their wallet on threat of being stabbed. The fact that rent-seeking is socially accepted in our culture barely softens the blow. It still feels like a robbery.

As is usually the case for such abuses of power, this resentment has built to the point where it threatens to spill over.

The Sixth Labour Government has made it illegal to evict tenants from residential property for the next three months at least. Some groups of tenants have realised that, if they collectively refused to pay rent until the end of the coronavirus crisis, they could pretty much get away with it. There’s no way to enforce an eviction during the lockdown, so anyone who refuses to pay rent from now on can get at least three months of living rent-free.

Other people and places overseas have already declared rent strikes on account of that the coronavirus has made earning their usual income, and therefore paying their usual expenses, impossible. Housing Minister Megan Woods has said “there was also an obligation on tenants not to abuse the situation,” but it’s hard to see why, other than the possible threat of being blacklisted in the future.

The only reason why property owners can get tenants to pay them rent in the first place is because they have the power to force them to on threat of eviction. If that power is taken away, there’s little reason for those who had been coerced into paying rent to continue playing ball.

Perhaps the fairest outcome would be to continue to allow the extraction of rents, but to levy a 90% tax on incomes derived from it. An outcome similar to this was discussed in a previous article here that proposed the introduction of Georgist-style taxes on rent-seeking activity.

In short, rent-seeking is legal because it always has been, and because we’ve never questioned it. We’ve never been able to, because not only did the rent-seekers control the law enforcement forces but they also controlled the apparatus of propaganda, and these combined to normalise the practice. The legitimacy of rent-seeking doesn’t survive scrutiny, and there is a very real chance that it will be as illegal as armed robbery later this century.

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