Natural And Unnatural Religions

There are many different ways to classify the world’s religions. The usual way is by reference to their group origin: Dharmic, Taoic, Abrahamic etc. Others make the division into Western and Eastern religions, or esoteric and exoteric. A previous VJM Publishing essay made a distinction between spiritual and political religions. This essay will try a new approach: a distinction between natural and unnatural religions.

The central contention of this essay is that there is a natural religious tradition common to the entire human race, and that the many deviations from this are mostly unnatural. In this sense, religion is an inherent behaviour, like making music or building shelter. These natural religions follow a typical path, with some local flavour.

The natural religions start with ancestral veneration. This itself begins with the understanding that the ancestors are the reason why you yourself occupy the societal niche you do. Those who came before you battled the elements and outside enemies in order to defend the space that you now subsist in. Gratitude for this is the first spark of natural spirituality.

Ancestral veneration leads to the understanding that those who follow you will venerate you. As they enter into the niche you have saved for them, if this niche is a good place in which they can thrive, them venerating you is natural. A person who understands this will steward society into a better future instead of acting selfishly and exploiting it.

An appreciation of both those who came before and those who come after leads to an appreciation of natural cycles. In the same way that the Sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, the human being rises in their youth and declines in later adulthood. These cycles are a fundamental part of life. Knowing this, a naturally religious person will – without needing to be prompted by an authority – celebrate the high points of the solar cycle: the solstices and equinoxes. The fact that the world will get darker (or lighter) after a certain date is imbued with a deep spiritual significance.

An appreciation of natural cycles leads to an understanding of reincarnation. If the Sun rises every morning after setting every evening, and if the Spring comes after every Winter, it’s logical to believe that a new birth occurs after every death. This is essentially The Cyclical Argument given for the immortality of the soul in Phaedo.

When Socrates made this argument, he was not stating something he came up with himself. Because Greece of the time followed a natural religious tradition, he was simply stating a widely-believed fact. The ancestral veneration of the Greeks had developed into a pantheon of gods, much as it had in India, China and other places that followed natural religious traditions. This had led to the celebration of the high points of the yearly cycle. From there, the priests among the Greeks (as those in other places) came to understand the truths of reincarnation and karma, as described in Phaedrus, Republic, Timaeus and other dialogues.

Thus it can be seen that the natural religions develop naturally. The unnatural religions, by contrast, are made up for a particular purpose.

For example, Christianity was invented by Jews to place themselves at the centre of the lives of anyone who adopted it. Much of the New Testament was written by Paul, who acted intentionally to bring this Jewish religion to Rome, knowing that Rome could serve as a springboard to spread it to the ends of the Earth. His success has centred Western life around Jews ever since Constantine.

As a result, the Crusaders were more concerned about liberating Jerusalem from Muslim rule than Spain. This is a highly unnatural state of affairs, but, being Christian, Jerusalem was at the centre of their lives, with Europe decentred. Unnatural religions devote the attention of their followers away from their ancestors and towards the creators of those religions.

The Baha’i religion is a transparent attempt to bring all world religion under an Abrahamic umbrella. The deeply unnatural quality of Baha’i is seen in its insistence, against all evidence, on the equality of all human races. Only someone with a desire to subjugate the entire world under one rule would insist on the equality of all its peoples. It’s typical for an unnatural religion to claim to be universalist, but to be arranged so that one particular group is central and thus inevitably in charge, even if informally. In the case of Baha’i, like the other Abrahamic religions, this is Semites.

Unnatural religions do not generally believe in reincarnation and karma, instead pushing a “one judgment for all eternity” narrative in order to create maximum fear, this in order to maximise control. Neither do they use spiritual sacraments, knowing them to decondition people from the brainwashing unnatural religions depend on for power.

Also characteristic of unnatural religions is a rejection of one’s natural allies. The subjugation of women was not a religious principle before Abrahamism, because it was understood that a husband and wife are on the same team. Rabbi Yeshua preached “I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law’;and ‘a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.’He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me”. Yeshua, like any psychopathic cult leader, demanded that followers put him above their own families.

Natural religions, by contrast, emphasise the importance of one’s own ancestors.

Unnatural religions also hate and fear the natural world. Covering all women in burkas is exceptionally unnatural, but Abrahamist sexual prudishness considers anything related to sex to be sinful. In fact, all of biology is denied in the unnatural religions: Abrahamists today deny both evolution and racial differences, an echo of how they used to deny heliocentrism. Perhaps the most invidious aspect of this hatred of the natural world is the hatred of natural spiritual sacraments, especially cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms. This is one of the major causes of the world’s spiritual ignorance today.

Elementalism is a hybrid of natural and unnatural religions. It’s unnatural in the sense that it was deliberately created and not a development of inherent spiritual instinct. However, it is natural in its emphasis on appreciating the cycles of life, on the use of plant-based spiritual sacraments, on the importance of fighting evil and on the truths of reincarnation and karma.

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Thoughts On Suicide From Someone Who Hasn’t Done It Yet

I have endured a lot of suicidal ideation in my life. As I have written and spoken about at length previously, I have a traumatic stress disorder that has damaged my nervous system. This has led to constant hyperarousal of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is deeply unpleasant to experience. Symptoms of this include nausea, insomnia, anxiety and depression. This has involved a lot of vomiting, a lot of migraines, and a lot of deep breathing until the pain has passed. Although I strive always to say Yes to life, and although I have never made a suicide attempt, I am very tired and will be relieved when this life is over.

This essay has been inspired by the passing of Shane Christie, former Tasman Makos captain, who was well-known in Nelson. I now know a handful of people who have died by suicide, and many others who have made a genuine attempt to die. Many VJMP readers will know at least one suicide victim. The New Zealand nation suffers some 600 suicides every year. Despite our familiarity with the subject, it’s not well understood.

The first thing that people ought to know about suicide is that it’s done because people want the suffering to end.

I was about 13 the first time I felt true suicidal ideation. I had been having a bad time as a result of my mother getting institutionalised for an acute psychotic episode (again). This was the first time it occurred to me that death would solve my problems (I did not believe in reincarnation at this time). I was walking through town, and I realised that I could permanently liberate myself from physical suffering by throwing myself under a truck.

Since then, I have always suffered suicidal ideation to some degree or other, although much less in recent years. It was worst at particular times. 2003, when I realised the West was committing suicide; 2006, when my marriage fell apart; 2013/14, when my grandparents were dying. At these times, the thought of anything in the future evoked the deepest dread. The future itself seemed to be an infinitude of misery, inescapable, an ocean in which I had already drowned and sunk to the bottom. Often I would walk across a bridge and wonder if it could really be so painful to dive head-first onto the road below.

These are typical thoughts for a person tempted by suicide.

I have kept going for mostly two reasons – one, I received unconditional love from my grandparents, which created a large part of me, deep inside, that thought the world was maybe a sort of okay place, despite the bountiful misery elsewhere; two, I was lucky enough to be born really smart and I wanted to see where this could lead. It seemed like an egregious waste to throw that away. In recent years there has been a third reason: the Elementalist imperative to live in a manner that entertains the gods, which involves overcoming suicidal ideation.

People who have more-or-less decent lives usually don’t appreciate how unwelcoming life is for those at the bottom of society. If you were abused as a child, you learn that the world would be better off without your presence. If you were abandoned by one or both parents (and over 20% of New Zealand children grow up without a father in the home), you learn as a child that the world doesn’t want you. Add on top of this the confusion that comes from sexual abuse (this didn’t happen to me, but it happens to many), and it’s understandable why so many make the decision to exit.

I actually hope to die by suicide, which might sound strange. But this is only because I would like to go out on my own terms, mentally prepared. The way Hunter S Thompson did it – just as the decline into old age began – strikes me as ideal (this is still at least 25 years away). Dying in such a manner would not necessarily be a tragedy.

In my religion, Elementalism, there are tragic and understandable suicides. An understandable suicide is when there was, rationally considered, no quality of life remaining. A typical example is an elderly person with terminal cancer. Only sadists would demand that such a person carry on when they don’t want to.

A tragic suicide is when there was significant quality of life remaining. Many tragic suicides are when people surrendered to a bout of depression. These are cases when a person might have gone on to live a decent life, but succumbed in the moment to what should have been a temporary impulse. These cases are truly tragic because of all the lost opportunity they represent.

It’s important to me to reduce the amount of tragic suicides. I support this in my personal life by keeping a friendly ear open for depressed friends and family. I support this in my civic life by advocating for investment in mental health care, particularly for treating depression. Many people don’t realise that a large proportion of suicides are effectively depression deaths. It’s also not well known that depression is usually treatable to a major extent.

The biggest problem with depression is that, when you have it, you don’t think rationally. You become deluded. It’s entirely possible, when depressed, to think that everyone hates you and wants the worst for you. In reality, even if you have a lot of enemies, you don’t have that many. But when depressed, you can feel hate oozing out of every face you see. It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re not wanted on Earth.

Another big problem with depression is that if you ask your doctor about it they will throw you on antidepressants and tell you to get back to work. These antidepressants probably won’t be very effective and will probably come with awful side effects. The doctor won’t do the most helpful thing, which is explain to you what depression is and why you have it. So you will have to learn about it from somewhere else.

What I plan to do is to keep informing people about the reality of depression in particular and of mental illness in general. I feel like my own life has been saved thanks to being able to access useful and accurate information about the condition. I feel great joy at the thought I could save another life by popularising such information.

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Coping With The Transition To A Low-Trust Society

Everyone with any sense can feel that society is breaking down. The general atmosphere is much less pleasant than it was ten, even five years ago: more anger, depression, madness. Less laughter is heard. All the economic news is bad, and people no longer speak of the future as a friend, but as an enemy collecting a debt.

There is precedent for understanding what is happening: broken families.

There are many broken families in our society. These families are broken societies in microcosm. It’s common for parents in broken families to be negligent or abusive, even to have abandoned their own children. This is closely analogous to how governments work in broken societies. What the New Zealand Government did to its own people with Ruthanasia differs only in scale from what a parent does when it abandons its family, and Ruthanasia was only the worst of many examples of governmental neglect. More are to come.

Broken families produce low-trust people. Trust is essentially a person’s estimation of the probability of encountering honourable behaviour. Neglecting one’s children is a highly dishonourable act, a total failure to be an adult. A child so neglected will very likely grow up to be a low-trust adult. They will seldom punish dishonourable conduct, having normalised it, and they will seldom reward honourable conduct, believing it to be an aberration.

Broken societies are full of low-trust people. They expect the worst from others. As such, they’re not willing to give any “benefit of the doubt”. This makes them generally unpleasant to be around. But, like broken families, they aren’t natural. They only exist when an authority figure refuses to do their job properly. This is why low-trust societies are full of rebels and revolutionaries. As Western society becomes lower and lower trust, we can expect more dissidents of all kinds, especially violent ones. As low-trust neighbourhoods produce gang members, low-trust societies produce revolutionaries and tyrants.

A high-trust environment is honour based. Respect is apportioned on the basis of honourable conduct. People’s reputations for past honourable conduct determine the extent to which they are respected. Sophocles once said “Better to fail with honour than succeed by fraud”. In high-trust environments, a person can expect to lose but still be respected.

A low-trust environment is fear based. Respect is apportioned on the basis of malice. Only people malicious enough to do harm are respected; everyone else is exploited. In a low-trust environment, exploiting people is seen as intelligent. A caring person is just a target. Kind people are stupid, because if they were smart they would have perceived that they were operating in a low-trust environment. Low-trust people don’t view the kind as the freemasonry of society (which they are in high-trust environments). They view the kind as wolves would view a lamb.

For instance, people in Thailand have different attitudes to theft to people in Singapore. In Thailand, if you leave your property unguarded, the assumption is that you’re too stupid to deserve to own that property, and therefore stealing it is okay. The logic is similar in gang environments: if you’re too weak to defend your property through fighting for it, them you’re too weak to deserve to own that property, and therefore stealing it is okay. This kind of logic will become more common in the future.

In a low-trust environment, you exploit people up until the point where they push back. The low-trust presumption is that they would do they same to you if they could.

In a low-trust environment, you expect people to be lying. Speech is not assumed to be factual: people are assumed to be “talking shit” unless proven otherwise.

Low-trust thinking and short-term thinking overlap a great deal. As such, a high time preference is another psychological weakness we will have to contend with in the future. People in low-trust families don’t make rational long-term decisions. Neither do governments in low-trust societies. Probably Western governments will torch their economies in coming decades to keep Boomers in comfort. What comes after then will be a truly low-trust environment.

Coping with low-trust environments is primarily about lowering expectations. Lose the expectation of honourable conduct. Lose the expectation that your property rights will be respected. This means to become more cynical, paranoid and suspicious, which is a shame. But it’s a reasonable reaction to the way society is going. High-trust people are going to get destroyed.

Also important in the transition to a low-trust environment is learning to control oneself (to some extent this is downstream of lowering expectations). Living in a low-trust environment is stressful. One’s threat detection mechanisms are often running at full power. Adapting to a low-trust environment means suppressing emotion, both in range and intensity. Unfortunately this means that many people will become sadistic, even psychopathic. But many will have to choose between honour or survival in coming years.

Because low-trust environments are fear based, overcoming one’s fear of death will gain you respect. Thus, a genuinely spiritual attitude will gain you respect. People in low-trust environments have only contempt for the superficially spiritual. But if a person’s spirituality enables them to endure physical deprivations, stresses, threats and intimidation, they will do much better in low-trust environments than non-spiritual people.

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The Secret To Attaining Enduring Pleasure Is Seeking The Subtlest Forms Of It

Everyone wants to maximise pleasure and minimise pain. The drive to do so is common enough that it’s believed to be an ancient biological phenomenon, going back to the most primitive forms of life. Achieving maximum pleasure is all but impossible for humans, owing to the complexity of our lives. Nevertheless, it’s possible to give some pointers.

The simplest forms of life – and the simplest forms of human – seek out sensory pleasure first and foremost. These sensory pleasures relate to the basic functions of life. In particular, food, drink, drugs and sleep are indulged in heavily by simple people. These are all powerfully gratifying – in the short term.

The vast majority of people soon realise that mere consumption does not bring happiness in the long term. The pleasure of gorging on food is matched by the displeasure of craving, and the pleasure of drinking alcohol is matched by the displeasure of hangovers. The pleasure of using drugs is matched by the displeasure of withdrawals, and the pleasure of sleep is matched by the displeasure of seeing one’s life pass away for little result.

It’s much better to work on getting strong or fit. So reason the slightly more complicated forms of life. Being strong or fit is a subtler pleasure than mere consumption. When in excellent physical condition, the body seems to hum with a vital energy that is as good as any stimulant. Also, one is routinely respected for having achieved something tangible (people notice big muscles immediately, in a way they don’t notice education).

Soon, however, that wears thin. Unless one is regularly fighting people or playing sports, there is an upper limit to how much utility you can get out of being strong or fit. Most sportsmen will interact socially with very rich people, and will have noticed that there are privileges afforded to the rich that aren’t afforded to them. This is especially true by the late 30s, once the body passes its physical peak. From that point on, getting rich becomes the higher priority.

Wealth affords pleasures more enduring than anything physical. With wealth, a person no longer has to worry about the myriad of nagging stresses that come with being swamped by bills and the need to fix things. One achieves a psychological peace of mind that muscles cannot give you. It’s also then possible to afford a higher quality of physical pleasure.

As the saying goes, though, anything that you can buy with money is cheap. Sure, you can get VIP access to a lot of places, but they only want you for your money. They don’t care about you. So the pleasures that are attained through wealth are still mostly gross ones, and ones which don’t last and which leave you craving more. The rich man with no friends looks at the popular man, the cool bartender, artist or musician, and envies him.

The pleasures that come from quality social interaction are more subtle than any of the physical pleasures. They’re also more enduring. Having a genuine friend is a joy that far outstrips the joy of merely owning things. A genuine friend is a true sign that one has become a person that others choose to be around. This is why people with Old Money tend to be conspicuous with it.

The problem is that many people are at this level. Most intelligent people who were raised well get to the level of appreciating subtler pleasures than the sensory, physical or financial. So there are many people at the social level to compete with for invitations to the most fashionable gatherings. Some of those people are interesting, and some aren’t. The most interesting people are the most fun to talk to, and get invited back the most often.

This is where the arts come in: the arts provide something truly interesting to talk about. Interpreting any given piece can be a hilarious social journey. This can be true even if one is only discussing whether the art is genuine or taking the piss. The pleasure provided by the arts borders on the spiritual. It’s much more subtle – and private – than the pleasures mentioned above. Best of all, there are no side-effects to, or withdrawals from, engaging in artistic pleasures. In the realm of art, the highs are higher and the lows less low.

If only it were all that simple. There’s a problem here, too, though: there is so much subjectivity in the realm of art that it can be extremely difficult to state that any given artwork is truly good or bad. One person’s opinion seems to be as valuable as any other’s. As such, the pleasure of the realm of art lacks the purity, or objectivity, to be deeply fulfilling. An honest person is naturally driven from here to the sciences.

Something truly awesome is felt by the astronomer who reflects on the vastness of space, by the chemist who perceives the simplicity of the elemental world, by the biologist immersed in the diversity of life, and by the psychologist grappling with the mysteries of consciousness. The awe so instilled is a very subtle pleasure that few are ever privileged enough to feel. One stands outside of time, and, therefore, outside of suffering.

But, as Werner Heisenberg wrote, the one who masters a science finds themselves inevitably confronted with spiritual questions. As glorious as science is, and as awesome as the intellectual pleasures felt by scientists are, the truly honest person needs more. Science cannot help a person make sense of any meaning to life, and it cannot answer moral questions. Pleasures such as knowing one’s actions to be in accordance with the Will of God are extremely subtle, too subtle even for science.

The most enduring pleasure, and the most subtle one, comes from meditation. From meditation, one comes to appreciate the Fourth Tenet of Elementalism, viz. “The natural state of consciousness is one of perfect bliss”. A person who can enjoy themselves meditating has conquered life.

Knowing the natural state of consciousness to be one of perfect bliss, it’s possible to sit in silence, wanting nothing. Being in a state without want is the ultimate joy. Such an extremely subtle pleasure has no side-effects or withdrawals, and is therefore the most enduring of all. A person who can attain such pleasure without sensory, social or even intellectual stimulation is a true philosopher.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

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