religion – Page 29

Civilisation Is An Act of Alchemy

The art of alchemy is the art of transmuting base elements into precious ones. On the personal level, a successful alchemist will transmute their own baser nature into something that is in tune with God. As above, so below: such a process also occurs on the collective level. Civilisation itself is an act of alchemy.

The main life objective for any spiritual person is to overcome their raw animal instincts, especially when those instincts cause suffering to other sentient beings. The instincts to dominate and destroy, and to kill and conquer, are controlled by the spiritual person so that they don’t harm anyone. The spiritual man seeks to impose order upon the chaos of his soul.

Chaos, in this sense, represents the vital biological energies and instincts that have been shaped by evolution to meet survival and reproduction challenges, and which would have found expression with or without consciousness. Chaos represents the workings of Nature in raw form.

As awesome as the workings of Nature in raw form may be, they don’t take into account the suffering of conscious beings. Nature is famously indifferent to that. In a state of Nature, men fight and kill each other over food and territory and women, and survival to adulthood is rare. The spiritual impulse is the impulse to transcend and to overcome this.

Transcending and overcoming is the reason why so many religious traditions practice some form of abstinence. To fast is to learn to go without food, which is to learn to be at peace with one’s instincts to eat. To be celibate is to learn to go without sex, with is to learn to be at peace with one’s instincts to reproduce. Admonitions against violence and greed are likewise intended to encourage people to go against their savage natures.

It’s also why many religious traditions practice repetitive tasks, such as Buddhism with meditation, which requires a person to sit still for some time. If a person can learn physical discipline, then they can try to learn mental discipline, and if they can learn that, then they can try to learn spiritual discipline. Achieving spiritual discipline is the highest goal of the alchemist.

The ideal is to take the energy of some instinct, such as for sex or violence, and to sublimate it into a higher order, such as an art. This is what is meant by the transmutation of lead into gold. An alchemist can take their base impulses (represented by lead), which are indifferent to the suffering of others, and transmute them into energies (represented by gold) that work to reduce those others’ suffering .

As above, so below: all the things stated above as truths of personal alchemy are also true on a global level. There is a work of alchemy taking place right now on Earth that amounts to the imposition of order upon chaos on a planetary scale.

The fundamental act of civilisation is, like the fundamental act of alchemy, the imposition of order upon chaos.

The history of civilisation is the history of the imposition of the higher order of will upon the chaos of raw animal instinct. To be civilised is to have developed the ability to resist impulses to attack, rape and steal. A civilised man can laugh off insults, because he knows that to give in to his instinct to punish would be weakness. His highest value is not dominance but composure.

Our society invests a tremendous amount of time in trying to teach young people to think twice before giving in to temporary impulses that might have permanent consequences. Children are told morality stories from when they are old enough to listen and they continue getting lectured well into adulthood. The idea is to induce them to behave in ways that do not cause suffering to others.

Civilisation, then, is the same thing as alchemy, only it is the name given to alchemy at the collective level.

A statesman transmutes lead into gold by passing a law that proscribes certain behaviours. A great author does the same thing by writing a novel that gives its readers insight into the human condition. A great sportsman transmutes tribal bloodlust into a performance of improvisational theatre. All of these people further civilisation by minimising actions that cause suffering.

An ideal civilisation will operate on the frequency of gold. At this level, the ruling class is guided by God, and all of their actions are in tune with the will of God. If the ruling class is correctly devoted to God, then those devoted to the ruling class will be devoted to God, and so on, so that even the simplest peasant acts in accordance with the divine will.

A civilisation that has lost touch with God might operate on the level of silver, as ours appears to. We are godless but are yet to disintegrate into the level of all-out warfare – although this may happen if we fail at the great work of alchemy that is civilisation. A civilisation at war has fallen to the level of iron, and one that falls so far that its very survival is in question has regressed to the level of clay.

The alchemical future of our civilisation will depend on whether we can reconnect to God, or whether we fall further into violence and savagery. It seems that many of our most primal instincts for acquisition and competition are making a comeback, and this has led to a lower frequency of consciousness all over the world. If it keeps decreasing, then war is all but inevitable.

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Why Alt-Centrism is Necessarily A Spiritual Movement

Central to alt-centrist philosophy is that, although it’s possible to understand why people support the other political positions, all those positions are fundamentally misguided by ignorance of the true nature of reality. Because the Establishment positions, the alt-left and the alt-right are all materialist, alt-centrism must distinguish itself from materialism. As this essay will explain, alt-centrism is necessarily a spiritual movement.

Keeping in accordance with the Five Rejections, the alt-centrist believes both that: 1) the current political system has failed and is causing misery, and 2) that the most popular of the proposed solutions to the current system will also fail and will cause more misery.

The ultimate underlying reason for all of this is the process of spiritual degeneration that has taken place over many centuries. Since the destruction of the Eleusinian Mysteries by Christian zealots in the 4th century A.D., the Western World lost touch with the methodologies they once used to connect to God.

Over the past 1,600 years, we’ve gradually come to believe, more and more, that materialist solutions are the only possible ways to alleviate suffering. This morphine-over-meditation reasoning has made us creatures of sensory pleasure. We have abandoned the old ways that led to acceptance of the world and the truth that life is transitory suffering on the way to reunion with God, and replaced them with a child’s narrative that we will never suffer again if we have enough stuff.

This has led to great innovations for making war on our enemies, but has done little to alleviate the suffering of sentient beings. The hyperfocus on knowledge that would allow up to build better weapons or to manufacture greater volumes of widgets has allowed for great physical wealth and power, but it came at the price of a commensurate lack of focus on spiritual knowledge.

We no longer know the spiritual truths of existence. We no longer know that the material world is an illusion borne of God’s will to play, and we no longer know that consciousness survives the death of the physical body and comes thereafter to associate with other consciousnesses on a similar frequency. Because we now believe that this world is all there is, no concern is given to one’s situation after death. It’s simply assumed that, upon the death of one’s physical body, one simply stops existing.

Therefore, much like an 80-minute game of rugby, one must score as much as possible as quickly as possible before one’s time is up.

This leads to a scramble for material wealth and power. Because spiritual knowledge and wealth is considered to have no value, the order of the day is to accumulate as many resources as possible. In New Zealand, and many other places, this has taken its most obscene form in the obsession with rent-seeking. The praised man is not one who has found peace and set his heart to order; the praised man is the billionaire.

The ultimate materialist dream is to own a large amount of property, because then rent can be charged. With enough property, it’s possible to charge enough rent to maintain a lifestyle without doing any work. It might sound incredible, but the popular model of success in our society is someone who has become the largest parasite they could manage to be.

In our severely degraded culture, the man who absorbs wealth from the wider system without working for it is lauded and envied.

The problem exacerbates when crude displays of success at resource accumulation is the only way to attract women. In a degraded age, women are not able to perceive or value higher qualities in men, so they become attracted to superficial ones. This leads to immense resentment, both from men and women, as they come to feel that their chances for a happy marriage were robbed from them.

The alt-centrist rejects this materialist obsession with resource acquisition. It’s obvious that the crude obsession with wealth has locked the vast majority of us into a zero-sum contest for the best-looking women, the trendiest places of residence and the highest positions in the social dominance hierarchy. This is zero-sum at best when the population is small; with a population as large as that of the current world, it’s a recipe for widespread misery.

As mentioned above, however, it isn’t just the Establishment and our inherited culture that is materialist.

The alt-left are atheist and Marxist, and therefore utterly materialist as well. The alt-left, like the original left, considers spirituality a means by which the poor are tricked out of their real wealth. In accordance with the Five Acceptances, alt-centrism accepts that there is some merit in this concern, and that many people claiming to possess spiritual truths were really crooks. The alt-left, however, has gone too far.

In any case, we insist that no number of religious criminals can invalidate the value of genuine spirituality.

The alt-right recognises that the left is materialist, and that this leads to death camps and gulags, but their error is to demand a return to Abrahamism. Alt-centrism rejects this nostalgic attempt to return to the past. Abrahamism has always been a millstone around the neck of the world, and currently it serves only to further entrench pre-existing hatreds. The world needs a new spiritual methodology that unites people across divisions.

The alt-centre, therefore, must be spiritual by way of contrast to the materialist ideologies that have caused so much suffering.

This is another way in which alt-centrism is entirely different to centrism. A regular centrist is likely to also be a materialist, on account of that they are trying to find a balanced compromise between other materialist positions. They note that the left and the right are both materialist, so agreeing on that point seems like a good start. The regular centrist merely follows along with social convention.

The alt-centrist says “Fuck that!” and declares that the fact the paradigm is materialist is evidence to support the case the paradigm needs to be overthrown. If all of the corrupt actors responsible for a failing system tell us that materialism is correct, then it is more likely to be false.

Alt-centrism then, is about a return to spirituality – but not a return to religion.

A return to spirituality would allow for the genuine moral and spiritual self-improvement that materialism denies is possible. If people would focus on this, instead of on acquiring more physical possessions, achieving liberation from suffering would be more realistic. A spiritually improved population would succeed regardless of the political system they laboured under.

Overcoming the Black Pill

Many are familiar with the paralysing despair that seems to leak from the stomach, into the bloodstream, and into all the other organs, especially the brain. One looks around and examines the world, and the resulting despair makes life seems hopeless and pointless, and suicide like a viable way of ending the suffering. Those who recognise it call it the Black Pill. This essay looks at how to overcome it.

It’s worth noting that getting black pilled is very different to being depressed from a chemical imbalance or similar. The Black Pill is not the same thing as depression, which usually arises as a consequence of brain damage brought about by childhood neglect and abuse. Depression is a clinical condition; the Black Pill is an existential one.

Black pills arise for a variety of reasons. They can be generalised into three groups, however, which crudely correspond to the spiritual challenges that this column has described as the Three Hurdles.

The first major black pill is the realisation that no-one knows what the fuck they’re doing on this planet. Basically everything you’ve ever been told by an authority figure (with the exception of a few scientists and similar) has been a crock of horseshit. The world’s politicians, priests and captains of industry don’t see reality accurately. And they’re leading us to disaster.

The environmental situation on Planet Earth is a black pill so large that it has to be taken as a suppository. It’s apparent to anyone who looks at the climate science that we’re currently exhausting the Earth, and some major lifestyle changes are necessary for the human species. The alternative is, potentially, ecological collapse – a collapse that will take us with it.

Anyone searching for meaning in this place eventually realises that it’s impossible to ask any authority for this, because none of them know what the fuck’s going on either, and asking them for direction will only lead to one’s own enslavement. Authority is achieved by understanding the rules of politics and the political environment, not by understanding reality accurately. Therefore, none of our rulers can be said to be legitimate.

The second major black pill is that this life ends, and it isn’t obvious what happens then. The fact that we’re all going to die is about the only material phenomenon that we can predict with absolute certainty. Although many of us entertain thoughts of an afterlife, there are very few who are absolutely certain that they will reincarnate somewhere else.

It really seems that we can take nothing with us from this world into the next, and therefore there is nothing to be won here, nothing to be achieved, collected or hoarded. Therefore, it isn’t obvious that there’s any meaning to life in this material plane. To know that all one’s works are to be dust is not a pleasant experience, but that appears to be the fate before us.

Many who realise that all of their works will be lost with their own death try to get around this by reproducing, but the inescapable fact is that one’s offspring will all themselves die, as will theirs. Simply spawning like any other animal may be a massive distraction that lasts for decades, but it doesn’t make it meaningful. It doesn’t take the black pill away, it just distracts you from feeling it.

The third major black pill is that living for pure pleasure is not fulfilling in anything but the immediate short term. It might be possible to accept that the world is going to end and that we’re all going to die, if only we could enjoy ourselves while we’re here. But it doesn’t seem to be as simple as that.

The human brain is wired up in such a way that repeated exposure to a particular stimulus eventually leads to a weakened response to that stimulus (at least, under normal circumstances). In less technical terms, too much of the same thing eventually becomes boring. This is the reality that every hedonist has tried to escape in vain. You can’t chase the dragon forever.

It might be true that the brain has a reward/punishment system built in that makes us feel good or bad, but there’s no real meaning in just stimulating this system until we die. At least, not in the sense of trying to maximise pleasure. It’s impossible for a mortal being to maximise pleasure because their mortality, and inevitable decline into death, inherently means that their life will be one of misery.

The combined effect of these three black pills has been too much for millions of people throughout history. The butcher’s bill for suicide is attestation enough to that. As a consequence, people have devoted an incredible amount of time and effort into overcoming black pills.

The art and science of overcoming black pills is, more or less, the same thing as spirituality.

All suffering arises from the illusion of separation from God. Where it gets tricky is that all life itself is the illusion of separation from God. It was understanding this grim calculus that caused Buddha to conclude that life itself was suffering. Indeed, life itself is suffering – that is the biggest black pill of all. But the fact is that, once one has accepted this, it’s white pills all the way back up again.

Life, after all, is temporary, and if life is suffering then it follows that suffering is also temporary. No matter what might be afflicting one in this material plane, there is no guarantee that it will continue to afflict one outside of it.

In fact, if life in this material plane is both temporary and suffering, that means that the true state of consciousness is one of bliss, and only through temporarily becoming enthralled in the illusions of the material world do we ever leave it. Therefore, a return to eternal bliss is inescapable. This realisation is the true Good News of spirituality.

Understanding this requires understanding that materialism is a false ideology, borne of the same simplicity that caused people to once declare the world is flat. Just because something appears to be so, doesn’t mean that it actually is so. That is just as much true of the existence of the material world as of the shape of it.

Materialism causes black pills because it insists that the brain generates consciousness and so consciousness is extinguished with the death of the brain. This leads directly to the assumption that nothing has any meaning, and therefore that causing suffering to oneself and others is just as good as doing the opposite.

The truth is that this reality in which we find ourselves is not material, but the dream of a God, whose consciousness has been split into an infinite number of individual consciousnesses, whereupon each of those individual consciousness falls under the delusion that it is the only consciousness that exists. This is for the sake of maximising the sense of novelty arising from exploring the metaverse of illusion, something otherwise known as the Great Fractal.

The meaning of this existence is not to achieve anything in particular, because God is already perfect and there is nothing to achieve. In reality, there is nothing more to do than to entertain ourselves for eternity. God seems to be of the opinion that the game of forgetting the great spiritual truths of reality, and then remembering them again, is exciting enough to repeat over and over again, forever.

We can take our frequency of consciousness with us from moment to moment, and it may be true that we take it past the death of the physical body as well. The Black Pill can thus be overcome by focusing on being the kind of energy that one would like to see expressed in the world. This will cause one to eventually incarnate in a part of the Great Fractal that reflects this energy.

Did The World End on December 21st, 2012?

Many people thought that the end of the calendar year 2012 would mark the end of the world. Not only had it apparently been predicted by ancient Mayan astronomers that the world would end then, but Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero program supported those predictions. This essay examines a terrifying possibility: that the world actually did end on December 21st, 2012 – we just haven’t realised it yet.

People have been conditioned to believe that if an end of world scenario arose, it would look a particular way. Nuclear war, comet strike, zombie virus or mass tsunami are the most popular examples, but we have been made to think that it would be spectacular and cinematic. Chest-rattling explosions and flashes of light and fire come to mind.

Therefore, when December 21st 2012 came and went, and no-one got engulfed in a firestorm, most people assumed that the world did not end, and that it was business as usual. However, there are other, much subtler ways for the world to end.

Leading up to the end of 2011, televangelist Harold Camping ran an extensive fear campaign about an upcoming apocalyptic event called the Rapture. This event would involve all of God’s chosen being “raptured” up into heaven, leaving us sinners behind.

Could something like this really have happened?

Since the end of 2012, many people have been struck with a sense that something is going wrong. It seems like something took a dark turn at some point in the recent past. Since then, there has been less kindness in the world – less light, love and laughter. Things seem to have become unusually grim and serious.

This is reflected in the rising suicide rates. The suicide rate in America has increased by 33% since 1999, and the rate in New Zealand is the highest since records began. Not only suicide, but phenomena correlated to suicide have also increased. There is more depression, more opiate addiction, more loneliness throughout all levels of society.

Some commentators have chalked it up to the lingering financial effects of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, something which bankrupted many businesses and created mass unemployment. The problem is, of course, that the unemployment rate has since recovered: in America it’s an almost nonexistent 3.6%, and in New Zealand it is 4.2%. The malaise has not.

Many feel like we have been forsaken by God. It’s possible that the world really did end in this manner: God’s presence may well have withdrawn from the material world.

It’s possible that the world ended in the sense that the forces that constrained the evil and chaos of the world are no longer present.

Something like Camping’s Rapture may really have happened at the end of 2012. It may be, however, that instead of being pulled into the sky in rapture, those of us who had pleased God enough simply disappeared, their consciousness returning to God’s embrace while the rest of us continued our lives.

After all, we don’t know which of our fellows are conscious and which are not. So it’s entirely possible the consciousness of many people, perhaps a large percentage of people, withdrew from the material world and reunited with God, leaving the rest of us here.

The effect that this would have on the remainder of the world would be subtle, but over time it would become clear.

Absent a divine spark, people will come to make decisions based on the raw programming of their bodies. This means instincts and conditioning, with no higher functions. Apart from sheer intelligence, such people have no tools with which to moderate their behaviour. Not being conscious, they are incapable of using empathy. Metaphysical gold is absent.

Consciousness is essential for empathy because, without it, it’s impossible to truly imagine that another person is conscious, and therefore it’s impossible to realise that causing harm to that person causes suffering to their consciousness.

This means that raw animal lusts, particularly for wealth, status and women, start to reign. When they take over, concern for suffering caused to other people is thrown by the wayside, and the world becomes a much nastier place.

It could be that, on December 21st 2012, a significant amount of consciousness was withdrawn from the world, leaving the rest of us here in a place that had essentially ended.