Buddhism and the Lessons of Suffering

When we are suffering, usually the first thing we are programmed to do as an ego is to curl up and figure out how we can be ok, and how we can look after number one. This is a very deep conditioning, which at a genetic level, precedes every other primitive psychological drive. Self-preservation underpins all of our genetic responsibilities. How this plays out on an experiential level is fear. Fear of annihilation, fear of suffering, fear of not making it. This is the deepest conditioning of the genome, conceivably going back all the way to the origin of our DNA. What if our deeply-rooted assumptions are totally upside-down, from a spiritual perspective? There are many reasons for thinking this to, in fact, be so.

The Buddhist tradition embraces a concept of compassionate service. Imagine a universe written as code. From the bottom up, you have been programmed to act in one direction, so that everything in any other direction would serve only to compromise your genetic existence. What kind of education would that be? An exceptionally challenging one, in my experience. Everything would have to be reviewed, from the very foundations up.

How it is that we are genetically programmed to insulate our suffering by withdrawing into ourselves? Picture a hedgehog rolling up into a ball when it senses danger, and you will have a workable mental image of how our genetic conditioning has encouraged us to respond. This may be perfectly fine insofar as hedgehogs are concerned, but what about us?

Why do spiritual traditions such as Buddhism subvert what we might call genetic values? Why would any spiritual tradition teach us anything even remotely different from that hedgehog’s response of curling up into a ball when in danger? Is it some kind of strange coincidence that the teachings of those who came to bear such massive spiritual influence are at loggerheads with the moral principles encoded into our genome through natural selection?

Here are some of the common threads of these spiritual teachings: unconditional compassion and love for others, including all animals – compassion given even when no material or genetic return could possibly accrue. Unconditional forgiveness, acceptance and understanding: even though people may be our physical adversaries, ideological enemies, or simply those that intend to visit harm upon us.

Why does the moral calculus of material considerations, including genetic fitness and resource-hoarding, function to close the spiritual heart, causing us to contract into an existential foetal position, while spiritual practices of compassion open the heart? How could becoming more vulnerable be any kind of answer to the threat of pain and suffering? Why should these worlds be at such great odds, the material or biological world, and the spiritual world? What can these ancient traditions, mere thousands of years old, tell us that could be more materially valuable than genetic systems that may have been operating for billions of years from the first cells through to primitive burrow-dwelling mammals, and now us?

Are our spiritual insights an aberration, a kind of warped illusion of freedom from the forces of nature? Or could it be the material world is where falsehood always lay? Do these two facets work side by side as educational tools? These are weighty philosophical questions. I want to put these aside in favour of the here and now, and look at what immediate human involvements are relevant to the discoveries of traditional teachings such as Buddhism.

Whereas many traditional religious systems emphasise moral purity and categorical rejection of evil, Buddhism focuses upon wholeness, skilful living, compassion and wisdom. Seeing the bigger picture in a philosophical or theological sense is nowhere near as important in Buddhism as what we choose to do here and now. Buddhism teaches that our intentions, from our merest thoughts to our most fleeting actions in the world matter supremely. We are either making these decisions skilfully, from a space of what Buddhism calls ‘right view’, or we are perpetuating delusion that was born of the push-and-pull conflicts of the material world, the ‘maya’, which Buddhism views as rooted in illusion.

This Maya, this ingrained system of delusion, incidentally, is a precise reflection of the genetic morality, the unspoken code which promotes striving for power, resources, knowledge, experiences, reproductive leverage over others, warring with others, and outcompeting other groups. This Buddhism identifies this activity as an illusion rooted in fear, the origin of all psychic human suffering. Because all fear activity is based upon a premise of separation, being that you are distinctly separate from the world around you, it becomes a self-reinforcing hypothesis, as well as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This suffering is set to last at least as long as the power of the illusion holds sway over the mind.

How does this impact our life here and now? What are we to do with this insight, how are we to translate this insight when we are actually in the very midst of suffering? When we are in suffering, we are not experiencing the realm of the theoretical. None of our ideas, however advanced, lofty or comforting, may be applied. This is something I have seen from experience. As a long-time meditator, I have observed that when I am in a state of suffering or imbalance, the most pertinent lesson is not that I have failed to understand something intellectually, nor is it that I am being punished because I have done something wrong, but that there is an element of something present that is outside of my immediate control.

It just is. It is a brute, present fact. I have often learned the most in meditation when I have come face to face with what I do not have the power to move. Every meditator eventually meets this phenomenon. The reason we have an entire cultural history of saints, sages, gurus and mystics is testament to the presence and power of suffering. They demonstrate the hunger of humanity, the deep drive to transcend that which torments us at our human level. Without suffering, we would have none of these teachers, nor would a single one of their timeless lessons be relevant to us.

What I have discovered personally in my own lifetime is that following the directives of self-interest is often harmful in very immediate and direct ways. Self-centredness is a compassion-inhibitor. An attitude of selfishness has never produced anything for me other than misery, even when I managed to get exactly what I thought I wanted. Amazingly, the opposite has been true. When I looked after the well-being and interests of others, I never had to take thought for myself, and even when I didn’t get what I thought I wanted or needed, everything turned out just fine.

So why would it be the case that what should, at least on paper, get us more of what we want lead to even less well-being for us personally? Why doesn’t it feel wholesome, why doesn’t it feel like a good fit for our inner life? I have experienced many miseries that were the result of selfishness, but I cannot think of one single episode of caring and giving in which I experienced forlornness or regret. This may be symptomatic of the fact that in this state, others are visible to us and welcomed within our world, while we ourselves remain almost invisible actors, like God’s unseen hand. This may be why Nisargadatta said: “Wisdom tells me I am nothing; Love tells me I am everything – and between the two, my life flows.”

In the same way that we all share in an eternal divine nature, we also share in a universal, human brokenness. There are not the pure among us who have somehow got it perfectly right and have escaped all suffering, and there are not the evil among us who have got it wrong and eternally bound themselves to suffering. We all meet somewhere on the spectrum as humans, because to incarnate into a biological form means to court some degree of suffering. What systems such as Buddhism offer is medicine for this suffering.

Let’s go back to my original example of the way a hedgehog reacts to a dangerous situation. While this might be totally normal and practical for a hedgehog, it isn’t normal and practical for a human mind. Natural selection may even have developed minds to react this way, but natural selection has no stake in your mental and spiritual well-being. The only variable being considered is differential genetic success. Evolution applies these pressures to other people and groups as well, and it couldn’t care less which survives. Like a mother squid with thousands of offspring, it has no favourites. There is not a shred of evidence that your genetic success, or lack thereof, has anything to do with your soul – which is to say, your psyche, or your True Self.

We will come across suffering in this life, we will meet with challenge – this much is certain. What I have discovered, as a very slow learner who has historically been very prone to over-intellectualise, is that compassion is the single most vital emergency medicine of the soul. Buddhism cultivates practises of loving compassion for this very reason, for ourselves, even for our enemies. Why? Because it actually works. If you want to see how, try it out for yourself.

Moving from the hedgehog to ourselves, when we suffer, the worst thing I have discovered we could ever do is to close down. We revert to an almost reptilian state of self-obsession in which we are in a kind of genetic first-aid mode. We do anything we can to make sure number one is taken care of – ourselves. We obsess over how every tiny thing that could help us matters, or any way in which we could feel even slightly better. This is not only a magnification of suffering, this is the closest to hell I have been, experientially.

As I mentioned before, selfishness is a compassion-inhibitor. Armouring ourselves is the same movement as shutting down our connection to others. Buddhism shows us how this orientation of shutting down in self-protection and self-armouring actually harms us spiritually. Nothing will make you more miserable than focusing on yourself when you are deeply suffering, distressed or upset. All spiritual teachings have acknowledged this in some form. What is also understood is that this presents a double-bind – how can I look after myself and making sure I am going to be ok when self-consciousness is the one thing that will worsen my condition?

Again, the answer is the practice of compassion. Have you ever wondered why prominent Buddhists such as Thich Nhat Hahn or the Dalai Lama go to such extraordinary lengths to ensure the comfort, happiness and well-being of others instead of focusing on themselves? Recall that these are both men who have lived through the devastating effects of loss, war, political adversity and being driven far from their homes. Why do they choose outgoing compassion, ceaselessly?

They understand. They have suffered enough to understand and witness the truth of the Buddha’s teachings. We cannot merely look after ourselves – there is service to others in a field of compassion that includes us. This is the very medicine by which Buddhism offers the means to transcend the dreaded double-bind of self-consciousness, and thereby, the knot of suffering.

Another way to say this is: try to focus on the well-being of others, then see what happens. Your own situation will change quite without effort on your part. Remember, Buddhism prescribes medicine, not miracles – though these have certainly been known to happen from time to time. We all have the means to direct compassion outward. We do this by opening our heart to whether others are really ok. This could be as simple as giving our full attention to someone who is expressing themselves, or brushing the fur of a pet.

There is infinite creative potential available in how we attend to others compassionately, even if it is only in thought. If you want to know whether it really works, I can tell you from experience that it does. I can also point to the testimony of many others, including Tibetans held captive as political prisoners who ceaselessly share love and compassion with their prisoners and torturers. They testify that this practice has served as the one thing that has kept them from being sucked into a vortex of despair.

The same conditions may be present to us as traumatic personal history, mental illness, grief or loss. Making sure that others are alright should not be seen primarily as a moral prescription put forward by Buddhism so much as it is an invitation to wisdom, an entry point to experiencing the relief of suffering in our ordinary, daily lives, right here and now. This compassion then becomes a living example for others, showing them how their helping others also relieves their own suffering. Where else could we apply such wisdom but here and now?

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.

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The Concept Of Christian Nationalism Is Nonsensical

With the release of Andrew Torba’s book titled ‘Christian Nationalism’, the subject is now prominent in the popular consciousness. Kanye West’s recent appearances in the alternative media, with assistance from Nick Fuentes’s America First channel, boosted the concept. But Christian Nationalism is nonsensical, an oxymoron.

To begin with, Christianity and nationalism are direct contradictions.

Nationalism is all about bonds of blood and soil. The word ‘nationalism’ shares a root with the words ‘Nature’ and ‘natural’. Nationalism is the natural form of organisation for an extended collection of families. Indeed, a nation can be considered an extremely extended family, in the sense that all members of it are related, however distantly.

Christianity, by contrast, is all about bonds of faith. The Christian Bible states that bonds of blood and soil are meaningless because all are one in Rabbi Yeshua. Christians are even encouraged to turn their backs on their own families if those families don’t worship the magical rabbi: they must hate non-Christian members of their own family to be worthy.

Rejecting one’s own blood because of a Jewish religion is utterly incompatible with nationalism.

Many Christians believe that their non-Christian ancestors are suffering eternal punishment as a result of their refusal to worship Rabbi Yeshua. The Christian belief that non-Christians are doomed to an eternity in Hell also applies to their own kin. They feel no shame at holding such contempt for their own people.

Neither do Christians feel any shame at their preference for sharing an eternity in Heaven with hordes of 70-IQ Africans over sharing an eternity with their own kin. Cult before kin is the motto of the Christian. This is fundamentally a traitor’s mindset. It’s the same mentality that led to acts of treason such as those committed by the Rosenbergs or the Cambridge Five.

If white Christian Nationalists are asked whether they would prefer a non-Christian white nation or a Christian non-white nation, they will opt for the latter. Some so-called Christian Nationalists would be happy for every non-Christian member of their own nation to be replaced with Africans, as long as those Africans were Christian.

Christians are more than happy to knife their own nationals in the back if they believe it will further their cult. This is one of the main reasons why Christian churches and NGOs are obsessed with refugee resettlement. Every sub-Saharan Christian they can import means another kick in the guts for nationalist sentiments, which depend on solidarity to exist, which itself depends on kinship intensity.

The deeper motivations behind this new wave of Christian Nationalism are twofold.

The first is to bring back theocracy. Christian Nationalists aren’t honest enough to admit that they want to go back to theocracy, so they hide it behind the label of nationalism. The truth is that they don’t want nationalism, they want theocracy. To them, the Dark Ages were good times: people may have been forbidden to read, but at least they were all Christian.

Christian Nationalism is identical to theocracy in almost every respect. Women are to be subjugated, non-Christians are to be banned from public office, pre-Christian spiritual traditions are to be destroyed, and Christianity is to be forced on everyone consenting or otherwise, as Christians did to Europeans between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.

The second is to lure nationalists into Christianity. Being a universalist cult, and having the tenet that everyone on Earth will be made to worship Rabbi Yeshua whether they like it or not, Christianity endeavours to insert itself into every possible niche. So in the same way there are Christian Anarchists, Christian Communists and Christian Capitalists, there are also Christian Nationalists.

Christian Nationalists make a strenuous and immensely dishonest effort to shoehorn Christianity into nationalism. They will claim that all of the nation’s problems exist because of an absence of Christianity. They will twist any line from the Christian Bible to create the appearance of support for nationalism, even lines like Isaiah 40:17, which states that national divisions are as nothing to Yahweh.

They will even go as far as claiming that Christianity is a white supremacist movement if they think this will gain converts. Those who put on this act are in the habit of calling critics of Christianity Jews, even when it’s the Jewish origins of Christianity that provoked the criticism.

Ultimately, then, Christian Nationalism is merely the latest variant of the Abrahamic hydra. Christians will not rest until all competing religious or spiritual traditions are destroyed, and pretending to be nationalists is just the latest way they plan to wreak this destruction. But Christianity is, and always will be, a universalist cult, beholden to globalists, and in opposition to all natural interests.

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VJMP Predicts 2023

As another year in Clown World ends, many are casting their mind forwards to the future. VJM Publishing has taken it upon ourselves to bring the light of edification to the Anglosphere masses, in opposition to the great stupifying force that is the mainstream media. To that end, we offer some ideas on what might happen in 2023.

The general prediction is that basically everything will get worse, save for a few things. And those few things will be subtle and not appreciated by all.

The area that we can be most confident will decline is the economy. Everyone is predicting a recession for 2023. Recession appears inevitable to most people, given that interest rates have risen sharply across the world in 2022, and that most countries and individuals were heavily burdened with debt before the rise. Maximum debt plus maximum interest rates equals maximum bankruptcies and maximum pain.

On top of the macroeconomic trends, we can also expect high consumer inflation next year. Electricity and food prices have risen sharply in Europe in 2022, and we can expect this to continue into 2023 now that Emmanuel Macron has signalled “The end of the age of abundance.” We won’t see Weimar conditions next year, but we will edge towards them.

Most ominous are the signs of the world continuing to split into the three territories predicted by Orwell in 1984. The Ukraine war has already divided the world into a Oceania (Western) bloc versus a Eurasian bloc. All that remains is for China to fall out with Russia, and to carve a sphere of influence for themselves, and to call it Eastasia.

The mainstream media of 2023 will continue to create the impression that megadeath in nuclear hellfire is imminent. In reality, the true threats to our well-being will be increasingly precarious housing, medical care (especially mental health care) and employment. In other words, the adverse microeconomic trends of recent decades will continue.

Life quality will also decline when it comes to surveillance technology, in particular facial recognition technology. Predictably, this tech will be marketed to us as necessary to keep us safe, but in reality will be used to monitor and harass dissidents. Artificial intelligence will also play an increasing role in identifying wrongthinkers.

The economic maladies will contribute to an ongoing collapse in social cohesion. In urban areas all over the Anglosphere, the atmosphere will become more desperate and nasty. Main street shoppers will find themselves subject to more aggressive panhandling, and public drug use and sexual displays will become more common.

2023 will bring us more and more videos of people beating the shit out of each other in public. The collective IQ will continue to decline from the degeneration of social media, combined with decades of dysgenic breeding. Pointing out that society resembles Idiocracy will become a cliche. Reading books will become a core part of the counterculture.

Television, in contrast to books, will become extremely unfashionable, the preserve of Boomers on their way out. Boomers themselves will become openly hated. Whether justified or not (and it mostly is), Boomers will start taking the blame for every aspect of Clown World.

Trust will reach all-time lows. Already, at the end of 2022, there is almost zero trust for politicians and journalists. This will spread to other professions traditionally considered trustworthy, such as professors and doctors. The ability of mainstream media to manufacture trust in authority figures will decline. This will lead to rapidly increasing support for the alternative media.

Social isolation will become more common, especially among young men. Escapism in the form of screen time will increase (where it’s still possible). Social media will continue to replace other forms of socialisation, and it will become increasingly toxic. Smart people will deliberately remove themselves from FaceBook, Twitter and Reddit.

Despite all this doom and gloom, there are a few good reasons to be optimistic. The Fifth Hermetic Principle, a.k.a. The Law of Rhythm, tells us that even as most things get bad, pressure rises on certain other things to become good. Although we can expect things to get worse in physical and emotional realms, the forecast is that improvements will come in spiritual areas.

Increasing acceptance of traditional spiritual sacraments such as cannabis and psilocybin suggests that a new spiritual age is dawning. We predict a revival of the prisca theologia, the perennial philosophy of which there is a multitude of religious expressions. Small groups of dedicated spiritual seekers will form, away from the oversight of the nihilistic masses.

These small groups will explore incredible, far-reaching new realities. Eventually they will start to join together in order to influence the human race as a whole, away from the darkness of ignorance and towards the light of theognosis. The observed effect of this action, however, will remain subtle throughout 2023.

In summary, most things will get worse for most people, but there is still plenty of good energy coming our way.

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The Cosmic Penitentiary

My mother has a theory that this world is one gigantic prison, known as “The Pen”. This theory is based on the observation that most of the people walking the streets of the West look like the inmates of mental asylums. It’s apparent on first glance that there’s something seriously wrong with most people here – so what’s going on?

This essay will explain from an Elementalist perspective.

Many of us have found ourselves wondering how we got here. Of all the possible worlds that one might incarnate into, what did we do to deserve to incarnate into this one, full of violence, sickness, death and misery? It seems like a punishment to be born into a world where we inevitably die, and almost always in extreme pain.

The truth is that we’re all in The Cosmic Penitentiary, a.k.a. “The Pen”: a prison for criminal souls.

As above, so below: we got put in The Pen for the same reason that criminals in the human world get put in prison. In the human world, society decides that certain elements within it are injurious to the greater good, and so it expels them into quarantine zones that we call jails, prisons or penitentiaries. This is roughly analogous to how the human body expels excrement and urine.

In the cosmic world, elements that are injurious to the greater good are similarly expelled – into lower dimensions that serve as quarantine zones. In Elementalism, these dimensions are collectively known as the Hell Realms, as depicted in the theology of many different religions. This world is one of them.

If we do enough self-inquiry, and are fully honest with ourselves, we will agree that it’s perfectly fair that low-frequency fragments of consciousness are forced to incarnate among their own kind. Once this is accepted, it’s possible for true healing to begin; it’s possible to direct one’s life in such a manner that low frequencies are transmuted into higher ones.

A penitentiary is somewhere a person is sent to if they are too arrogant and need to learn some humility. Each of us have been forced to incarnate into The Pen on account of that our selfish behaviour in previous lives has disgusted God. The punishment for this is to die – that is to say, to experience the utter helplessness of dying and death, with a view to being inspired by this into spiritual reformation.

The beings in the higher dimensions, who we share the Great Fractal with, did not want to have low-frequency consciousnesses stinking up their otherwise pleasurable experience. This is entirely understandable. Public restaurants don’t allow people who haven’t showered for months to stink up the ambience, so why would beings in higher dimensions allow the spiritual equivalent?

We are forced to incarnate among our own kind, whether we like it or not.

In the same way that trashy people attract trashy people in this world, and in the same way that classy people attract classy people, trashy fragments of consciousness attract trashy areas of the Great Fractal, and classy fragments of consciousness attract classy areas of the Great Fractal. As per the Law of Assortative Reincarnation, every fragment of consciousness reincarnates in a world full of similar frequencies.

All of us have a relatively low frequency of consciousness as a result of crimes committed in previous lives. Some of us were murderers, others were rapists, robbers, liars, fraudsters. All of us were odious enough that the majority part of the Great Fractal does not want to be associated with us. But because of our pride we are unrepentant. As such, we have to be punished.

To punish a criminal consciousness, it isn’t enough to subject it to suffering. So the Hell Realms are not full of demons who were created specifically to torment their victims. It’s much simpler than that. The Hell Realms are populated by beings who create Hell around them through their own selfishness. And as such, they punish each other.

A being sentenced to The Pen, therefore, has behaved in such a selfish manner that the rest of reality has forced them to incarnate here, where they are surrounded by other selfish beings, and thereby learn that selfishness is antithetical to Godliness. This they learn from the suffering caused to them by the other beings, all a reflection of themselves.

Proof that this world is one of the Hell Realms comes from the fact that everything here must die, and that we must kill each other to live. Such a grisly reality makes clear to even the most incalcitrant fragment of consciousness that selfishness is against the Will of God. And if it doesn’t? You just reincarnate here again until you do figure it out.

A world in which one must die is a perfect ego shredder. Just as people are humbled within this lifetime by being put in prison, people are humbled between lifetimes by being put in The Pen.

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