Category Archives: religion

About Western supremacism and hate speech

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How do you deal with existential threats without hate speech?

Let’s think about this a bit, OK? Hate speech is supposed to be a bad thing, inciting hatred and violence against some group of people. But what if you have a group of people that poses a serious threat to your civilization and threatens to either alter it beyond recognition in a negative way, or outright destroy it? It is politically correct to mention Nazis as one such group – they are commonly accepted as a group that needs to be suppressed in every possible way, and probably the only group against whom hate speech is commonly acceptable. There’s nothing better for virtue-signalling than hate speech against Hitler and the Nazis, right?

However, what about communists? They actually killed more people than the Nazis; the commonly cited numbers are 100 million people killed by the communists, vs. 25 million people killed by the Nazis. Yet, it seems to be popular to declare yourself a “socialist”, speak about social revolution and wear a Che Guevara t-shirt, despite it being a commonly known fact that Che was Fidel Castro’s executioner who personally killed hundreds of people, and wrote about enjoying the feeling immensely. However, I have a feeling that condemning any kind of socialism and putting it on the same level as Nazism would be recognized as some form of hate speech.

If so, I’m all for hate speech. Hate speech is great, I love it. It’s an intellectual immune response against abject evil. Everybody should practice it, in moderation of course, and it should be seen as the most normal response when faced with villainy and evil. You see it, you feel revulsion and hatred for evil, you speak out against it in clear terms. Evil political ideologies, that intend to transform civilization into Gulag archipelago and killing fields and concentration camps need to be hated and condemned.

However, how far is it permissible to go with this? Hate speech, yes, definitely. However, I am rather uncertain about active measures, such as the use of violence against proponents of evil ideologies. It looks like a slippery slope where you’re so effective at fighting monsters that you become one yourself, as Nietzsche would say. Fighting for peace or killing for non-violence sounds very much like fucking for virginity. You can’t use the means that are inherently opposite to your goals. Or can you?

Can you imprison Nazis for denying Holocaust and praising Hitler? Or does it oppose the very tissue of tolerance that is supposed to make up our civilization? Can you imprison people for tolerance, or is it akin to fucking for virginity?

However, let’s explore another possibility – it’s not about tolerance at all. What if “tolerance” is just a bullshit word that was simply pulled out of someone’s arse, just like the concept of human rights, in order to obscure a deeper, yet inconvenient truth: that our society was built on the basis of a Graeco-Roman philosophy and law, Christian ethics, and scientific approach to the physical universe? What if tolerance and human rights had nothing whatsoever to do with it, and were invented by someone who didn’t like Christianity and wanted to do away with it, similar to AD (Anno Domini, year of the Lord) designations being replaced by the CE (Current Era)? What made our civilization great is neither tolerance, nor adherence to the concept of human rights. Our civilization, in fact, put a man on the Moon before those concepts were even accepted in the common discourse. I would actually go so far as to state that the acceptance of tolerance as a virtue, and acceptance of the concept of human rights as a basis of law, is the point where our civilization started collapsing and decaying to the point where it isn’t worth fighting for unless we abandon those two parasitic concepts and go back to the roots, to the real reasons why our civilization is great.

The Nazis were not defeated because we were tolerant. They were defeated because we had more guns and soldiers than they did. That’s all there is to it – the Nazis were defeated not because they were necessarily a philosophical evil, but because we killed more of them than they killed us. The victors in this bloody war then invented all sorts of rationalizations about why this was some cosmic fight of good against evil, to make it seem it was all worth it, but the fact is, we don’t even know if the Nazis would have killed the Jews in the concentration camps and resorted to various evils had they not been violently opposed by other countries. They did attempt to deport the Jews into Israel, for instance, and had they not been opposed in that, and had that succeeded, they would have simply get rid of all their “undesirables” that way, and we would have the state of Israel that we have today, and Hitler would get on with his megalomaniacal architectural projects in the capital of Germania. I am certain that, had there not been a war, the Germans would eventually get rid of the Nazis, just like the Russians got rid of the communists. The best way of keeping arseholes in power is to oppose them by a foreign threat. Without a credible foreign threat that would marshal the population into submission, the dictatorial regimes have to accept blame for their own failures. So, if the Nazis proved to be incompetent rulers, I seriously doubt they would manage to stay in power “for a thousand years”.

The reason why Nazism and Communism were perceived as aberrations is that they abandoned the common core of our civilization, which is Christianity. They are both Modernist ideologies that wanted to get rid of the Christian heritage and replace it with something new and “better”. They killed so many people because they had no compunctions about destroying the “ancien regime” they hated, in a way very similar to the bloodbath that was the French revolution. In a very real way, all those revolutionary regimes show what people are capable of when they don’t expect to be judged for their actions by God. If there is no judgement other than by “history” or “mankind”, if there is no good greater than the good of your political class, race or nation, what is there to stop you from just wiping out everything you don’t like? It’s not tolerance that stops the Christians from killing people. It’s the faith in resurrection, the faith in the afterlife, the faith that this world isn’t all there is, the faith that you cannot solve problems by outright slaughter, because your war isn’t against the flesh, but against the evil spirit of Satan (Ephesians 6:12). A Christian doesn’t attempt to solve problems by killing his religious and philosophical opposition, but by defeating it in both debate and in the criterion of fruits – a Christian desires to be the tree that bears the best of fruits, and here we come to the true reason why our civilization out-competed every other in good results. Science itself was invented by Christians who wanted to mine the physical world for truths and goodness infused into it by its Creator. That’s all there is to it. Science isn’t some eternal opposition to Christianity, as atheists would want to convince you. Science is a tool invented by the Christians in order to explore God’s creation and to praise Him by bearing the abundant fruits of knowledge. Only later was it hijacked by the modernists, by those who wanted to get rid of God and Christianity and create their own kind of order, watering the earth with human blood in the process. They, the murderers, the evil ones, are the originators of the concepts of tolerance and human rights, because they needed those empty and meaningless words as something to put in place of God’s law and God’s judgement as the reasons to be and do good.

What made our civilization great is the Augustinian interpretation of Christianity, the concept of Creation as the process of progressive revelation of God through greater knowledge of both the spiritual truths and the physical world. This understanding is what gave birth to science and technology, and it was later hijacked by the Nazis and the Communists and other Modernist ideologues who tried to uproot science from its Christian origins and use it as a weapon in the hands of the atheists that can be used to violently hammer God out of the minds of people.

This Augustinian understanding of the Catholic Church is in complete opposition to the “sola scriptura” principle of the Bible-fanatics, who don’t understand that the Bible itself doesn’t exist as they understand it, as a singular document of revelation, but as a progressive emergence of religious concepts in the minds of people. As the Catholics understand it, this process of revelation didn’t end with the formulation of the final canon of the Bible. No, it just took other forms – of revelations by saints, of saintly and good deeds of people, of science and technology. The fact that the Bible stops telling the story at a certain point in time doesn’t mean that God stopped talking. Some of the things He had to say took form of this computer I’m using now in order to write this. That’s what I mean when I say that the core of our civilization, what makes it great, is the Augustinian interpretation of Christianity.

It is not great because it is inherently tolerant. In fact, I would argue that it is inherently intolerant, and that it needs to be. It needs to testify its own truth, by living its own ideals and heritage, and producing great things as a testament of living according to God’s plans, because all those great fruits of science are the results of figuring out how the world really works.

And when we figure out what our roots are, when we figure out what made our civilization great, how it became so much superior to everything produced in China or Africa or all those tribes everywhere, we will reclaim our rightful place in the world: of teachers and masters, rather than the guilt-ridden people who need to watch every word in order not to offend some tribe of fucking idiots who understand both God and the world wrong, which is why their civilizations are worthless and they all come to the Christian-made paradises of the West to get some of that. And the irony is, instead of changing in order to be more like us, and therefore better, they try to change us in order to be more like them, not understanding that being like them is the very reason why their own countries are hellholes from which they are now escaping. Their countries are hellholes because they lived there. When they migrate over here, without changing their evil ways, they will turn this place into a hellhole, too. What we need to do is make them either change, to make them reject whatever stupid bullshit they used to believe and practice in their own shitty countries, and to accept our superior ways and beliefs, or get the fuck out to wherever they came from, and now. That’s all there is to it. We need to stop apologizing for being better than everybody else. We need to embrace our right to rule the world, given to us by the very simple virtue of being the ones who figured it out.

What is truth?

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Pontius Pilatus once asked a rhetorical question, “What is truth?”

I noticed a pattern: people who are the most skeptical about the possibility of existence of an absolute truth are those who are morally and intellectually corrupt, who have made so many compromises and wrong choices that they no longer have any soul left. When someone questions the existence of truth, it’s his own existence that is in question, because he no longer knows who or what he is.

The matter of truth, however, is a tricky one, because it is usually defined as statement of fact, and what is considered to be a fact can indeed depend on one’s point of view, or depth of knowledge. It was long considered a fact that the Sun moves around the Earth, because that’s what was perceived. Only with deeper intellectual and perceptual insight was it revealed that the movement of the Sun is an artifact of Earth’s rotation. However, the statement that the Sun moves on the sky is true, and this truth was a necessary step towards the discovery of deeper truths about orbital mechanics. If you deny that the Sun moves, you can’t measure anything properly, and without measurement the door to further discovery is closed.

I therefore define truth as a process of discovering reality. Truth is a process. This process goes from establishing and stating the basic facts, as they are perceived, and going from there into the abstract layer of interpretation, of figuring out what it means. You state the fact that the Sun and the stars move across the sky, you measure what precisely is going on, and if your measurements are accurate enough, a Newton can use them to apply calculus and create a model of the solar system. However, there will be discrepancies between the model and the reality, and those discrepancies need to be carefully measured and noted, because an Einstein can then use them to model his general relativity. So, accurate perception and clear statement of facts are the necessary prerequisites in the process of following lesser truths towards the greater ones, on the path of revelation of reality.

So, as much as truth is a process, so is lie. Lie is a process of obscuring the facts, of incorrectly reporting them and interpreting them in a way whose purpose is to hide reality and replace it with an illusion.

The absolute, final reality, the goal at the end of the path of truth, is God. To lie, is to stray from this path, and to lead others astray. To choose lies, to relativize truth, makes one an enemy of God.

Freedom and its limits

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of freedom.

Let’s first see what we have here, because freedom seems to be one of those nice-sounding words, like love, that are used for manipulating emotions, and can mean anything to anyone.

To get the obvious out of the way, if we define “freedom” as “the ability to do anything”, nothing short of total omnipotence will match the definition, so, basically, only God can be free in that sense. Also, if we define “freedom” as invulnerability, so that you don’t suffer adverse consequences to your actions, it’s even more tricky, because here we face ethical issues. For instance, you would probably want someone who wants to kill you to face consequences for his actions. Also, any kind of choice shapes your personality, and you’re not the same person afterwards, because you made a choice, by doing A or not A you chose to become the person who does A, or not A.

So, we have potential limitations to freedom which belong to three categories: of power, choice and other beings. If you are not able to do something, you are not free to do it, and that’s the limitation on freedom that stems from the lack of power. If you can technically do something but you don’t want to because it would spiritually shape you in adverse ways, it’s a limitation on freedom that stems from ethical choices. If freedoms and will of other beings prevent you from exercising your own freedom and will to the full extent, it’s the limitation on freedom that stems from other beings.

So, let’s see the examples. A limitation on power is that you can’t visit Mars. Nobody is preventing you from going, and going there has no adverse ethical consequences, but you just don’t have the ability to do so. A similar limitation stems from the lack of available choices. For instance, if you were born 100 years ago, you didn’t have a choice to buy a PC or a Mac, simply because they didn’t exist yet. You also didn’t have an option to board a plane and fly around the world, because the planes didn’t do that yet. Also, if you are very poor and live in some uncivilized and backward part of the world, you don’t have an option to buy a new car, or to board a plane or to buy a computer, not because they don’t exist as options for others, but because they don’t exist as options for you specifically, because you can’t afford them. So, sometimes options exist for the powerful few, and sometimes they don’t exist at all, and in all cases, this limits freedom.

I am deliberately omitting the limitations that stem from logical consistency, because those are merely trickery; for instance, the ability to do A while doing not-A, or specifically, the ability to make wooden iron, the ability to make a rock so heavy even you cannot lift it, or the ability to factor prime numbers.

So, what does that mean? It means that total freedom doesn’t exist, not even for God. Even God has to choose whether to do something or not. You can’t really both kill and spare someone. You can’t both tell a lie and be truthful. Even if you’re a God, if you grant someone some privilege, you can’t both revoke it and be consistent. So, one of the most important things to understand is that there are limitations even for the Gods. For instance, if you create souls, and grant them the freedom of choice, you have to allow them to face the consequences of their choices, or otherwise you are canceling your grant of free will. What kind of a freedom of choice is it, when you don’t have the option to fuck up? It’s like going to school and getting an A regardless of what answer you give. Freedom of choice necessarily comes with the possibility of choosing the wrong thing, and “wrong” isn’t really wrong if there are no adverse consequences.

This is the true answer to the question of “why did God create or allow evil”? Well, once you truly understand the problem, it’s no longer a meaningful question. The true question is that of freedom – is God free to do whatever he wants, or is he limited by ethics, logic, consistency and reason? We then come to the paradox that a good God is a limited God – he is limited by the boundary between good and evil, truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. An unlimited God is an omnipotent indifference, a force of general chaos that is closer to evil than good, because for each thing such a hypothetical being could technically do, there is no reason not to actually do it.

A good God, however, can indirectly cause evil to exist. He can, for instance, create independent beings and grant them freedoms to exercise their will. They can then use this freedom to explore options that are beyond God’s limitations – they can decide to create illusions, where falsehood can prevail over truth. They can create veils of ignorance that can obscure the light of God. They can choose to inflict malicious harm upon other souls and instrumentalize them for their own purpose. Essentially, once you create an independent being with creative powers, you can no longer be fully in control of the course of action, because such a being can choose its own spiritual path which might be completely different from your own, with consequences that might differ greatly from what you personally would find acceptable. And you can’t just nullify those consequences, not because you technically couldn’t, but because it would nullify your previous choice to allow those beings freedom.

Because freedom to choose and to do implies the potential to fuck things up. Freedom to choose means necessity to suffer the consequences of your actions and, in theory, you can be more “free” than God. You can be “free” to lie or to deceive, however this cancels your “freedom” to be truthful, honest and based in reality. You can be free to betray, but then you lose the freedom to be loyal. So, in case of ethical choices, “freedom” is really a matter of rhetorical trickery, because what can be seen as bondage to some, is a freedom to others. Some see the truth as a restraint on their freedom to lie, while others see lies as a restraint on their ability to be truthful.

Obviously, there are some freedoms that aren’t really worth having – such as a freedom to lie and betray your friends and be a complete bastard. Even if you can technically do it, you wouldn’t want to, because it would adversely influence your spiritual vector and turn you into the kind of person that you don’t want to be. This is how satanic temptations are to be interpreted, because demons will tempt you, they will say they are more free than you because they can do all kinds of things that are forbidden to you. The answer is, “It is true that you can do those things, but not because I couldn’t do them, but because I choose not to. I am limited by my choices, and, if you ever try to reverse your course, you will find out that you are limited by yours.”

About tools

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Whenever I write something about the “material” things, I feel the negative reaction from the “spiritual” people who are “above those things”.

Let me write something about tools.

There is “logos” – the consciousness, the creative spirit, the mind presiding over matter. That’s where ideas are made. Then there is energy that sets things into motion and powers action until it is completed. And then there are the tools, that are driven by the logos, with energy, and they accomplish the creative act within the physical world. Whether the tool is a piece of stone, or a piece of paper and a pencil, or a camera, or a computer, is beside the point. Whether the energy takes the form of money, or gasoline, or food, or electricity, is also beside the point. The point is, without energy and tools you can’t get anything done here, and if you don’t appreciate them, you are ignorant. This means that your logos, the content of your spirit, which pretends to be too absorbed with spiritual heights to care about the material things, is full of ignorance and you don’t know what you’re talking about.

If one isn’t passionate about his tools, and if he doesn’t appreciate the energy that needs to be invested in a creative act, he probably never really created anything of value to begin with. A soldier is very passionate about his weapons and armor. An artist is very passionate about his instruments. A scientist is very passionate about his lab equipment. If you try to accomplish anything of value, you’ll understand that there are requirements, and you will respect and appreciate those things that make possible everything that gives your life meaning.

It is important to me how my lens draws. It is important to me how my camera handles, and how the sensor captures the image. It is important to me what kind of tactile feel my keyboard produces, or how my mouse handles, or how my monitor displays colors and reflects ambient light. It is important to me how quickly my storage drive responds to requests, how quickly my CPU processes multiple concurrent tasks, how securely my data is stored, how accurately my headphones reproduce sound, and so on. Why is it important? Because my mind connects with those tools and projects energy through them, manifesting ideas into concrete form, be it text or image. If the tools suck, the end result will suffer, and the creative process will not be seamless. If the tools are good, I can manifest thoughts and emotions more easily, without annoying interruptions caused by waiting for the computer to do something so that I can go on issuing mental commands that I already have queued. Essentially, if the keyboard and the computer itself allow me to type as quickly as I can, and if the computer gets me the information I need quickly and without pointless delays, I can proceed to elaborate on the line of thought that I’m following. If the tool lags behind me too much or interferes with the creative process in some other way, it doesn’t contribute anything positive, and can be a significant hindrance. If a camera handles very poorly, I am more likely to leave it at home and forget about photography altogether, than take pictures.

Tools are important. Energy is important. They are not a substitute for the guiding light of consciousness that reigns supreme over those things, deciding where to invest energy and how to apply the tools, but they control the result-side of the creative equation. You apply consciousness and energy to the tools and you get a creative act.

Any person who thinks he or she is above those material things is basically too fucking stupid to understand the first thing about doing anything useful, and above all, is too fucking stupid to be allowed to have an opinion about any kind of spirituality, because spirituality isn’t for idiots.

The role of intellect in spirituality (translation)

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(I received a request for translation of one of my older articles in Croatian, so here goes.)

What makes logical sense to the human mind does not therefore necessarily have much to do with reality. This is the reason why the overly intellectual systems, such as the medieval scholastics, that were based on the authority of logic and reason, historically fared rather poorly. Those systems, however, that placed intellect second, and observation of facts first, such as the modern science, gave much better results in practice.

One could now say that science is an extremely intellectual discipline. That is true, but it is only secondarily intellectual, and primarily factual, observational and perceptional. If observations contradict an intellectual construct, the intellectual construct will be discarded. In a scholastic, neoplatonic system the facts could contradict a theory all they want and it would still remain standing, simply because its adherents could say that their intellectual construct is founded in the world of ideas and as such superior to the imperfect, transitory and limited matter, which due to its deficiencies fails to meet the requirements of perfection set by their theory.

The human mind is, therefore, a weak instrument of cognition, and unless we keep it in check by a contact with reality, it will be capable of forming utterly ungrounded ideas that can exist in contradiction to facts and can be accepted without positive evidence of any kind, without any kind of correctional feedback. If we observe the history of human thought, which can be more truthfully called the history of human folly and nonsense intermixed with occasional sparks of lucidity, it becomes clear that the only way for us to avoid the pitfalls of navel-gazing madness, is to stick to the specific, to that which has foundations in experience and observation. To disregard observation because it doesn’t fit our theories is a common sign of psychotic behavior, to which few are immune, including science. The example of that is ignoring the transcendental experiences, which simply do not exist for science – they are either ignored, or attributed to delusion, hallucination or deception. Essentially, the witnesses are not trusted, in the same way in which Lavoisier didn’t trust the eyewitnesses of meteoric impacts. The lesson is that the ego-stimulation, caused by the sense of having it all figured out, and having the intellectual comprehension of the totality of all existence, is such a seductive and powerful drug, that it is capable of turning the otherwise reasonable people into fanatical cultists capable of ignoring absolutely anything that threatens their drug supply. What makes science, at least in theory, superior to the alternatives, is intellectual honesty, due to which a pet theory will be discarded if it is contradicted by the facts. At the point where science starts ignoring the facts, it ceases to be science.

In what way is all of that relevant to spiritual practice? Well, it is my personal opinion that there is no significant difference between physics and spirituality, other than the obvious fact that they are dealing with different kinds of subject matter, and vectors having a scalar component that isn’t kinetic, thermal etc., but emotional, karmic etc. All the basic principles, such as the law of conservation of energy and momentum, equivalence of action and reaction and all similar geometric laws therefore apply to both, they just need to be adapted to meet the specifics of the field of study, and we then get something that could be called the law of conservation of overall spiritual energy, or karmic momentum. Likewise, similar problems remain due to excessive fondness for a particular worldview and aversion to its dismissal when it is contradicted by the facts. The greatest difference is in the fact that in spirituality, human consciousness is in fact the laboratory in which the experiments are performed, and predictions are either confirmed or falsified. That is where the aspects of reality are perceived and interpreted.

If the fondness for delusion and errors of all kinds persists in physics, which is based on objective sensory measurements, it is significantly more so the case with spirituality, where everything takes place within the mind, which makes the concept of completely neutral sensory instrument and measurements impossible. This makes the situation so difficult it is really hard to find people who would indeed approach spirituality in a way that could be considered scientific. However, it is not only possible, but is a direction I think is necessary if the true advancements are to be made. For if the follies such as alchemy and astrology didn’t produce good results in physics, they will fail in a similar way in spirituality, and we should instead choose to rely on principles and methods that produced better results.

Now we get to the point where spiritual practice must part ways with the customary methodology of science, which tends to be cold and distanced. For if we are to use the spiritual states as a laboratory in which experiments are to be made, it means we must at the same time calmly observe the events, and at the same time be completely involved in some, often extremely intense spiritual state, such as ecstasy, love, sorrow, happiness or suffering. Likewise, due to the specifics of the human mind, the things that will yield results can often be the direct opposite to anything one would recognize as scientific. For instance, a state of elation produced by listening to music or reading literature will almost certainly produce some kind of spiritual experience, while cold analytics will rather suppress the latent spiritual potentials. The part of consciousness that is useful for analysis and interpretation of an experience, therefore, lies in direct opposition to the part of consciousness that is useful for actually attaining a spiritual experience. This apparent incongruence is the cause of a great divide between qualifications necessary for a mystical practice, and qualifications necessary for the correct intellectual formulation of the practice and its results. Consequently, the spiritual practitioners are often to be found among the intellectually incoherent persons, while the intellectually coherent ones are hindered in attaining spiritual experiences by their very coherent and disciplined mental structure, and are therefore limited to having an opinion about the spiritual experiences of others. I would say that I am a huge exception in this regard, perhaps due to my specific approach to mind, which I treat as a tool or an instrument of a sort, that needs to be maintained in order to be useful for correct formulation and expression of ideas, but I don’t actually use it as an instrument of cognition, in a way similar to that in which a military radar installation doesn’t use a computer for getting information about the size, position and direction of the aircrafts – for that, it uses the radar. The computer receives the information detected by the radar, and proceeds to analyze and display the information in a symbolic, coherent form.

It is exactly due to the frequent intellectual incoherence of the spiritual practitioners that we have to deal with the deluge of false-positives, where incoherent persons posture as spiritual practitioners, without any factual backing. I met my share of those, and I’m afraid it would serve no useful purpose to indulge in lengthy analyses that would aim to discern them from the authentic phenomena. I use my “nose” for discernments of that kind – if it stinks, don’t eat it. If a person emanates a “stench” of spiritual rot and decay, all the while rambling about his high spiritual achievements, run the other way. The criterion of fruits, as established by Jesus, is quite applicable: if a tree produces acorns, it is definitely not a fig tree, or, as the Romans would nicely put it, “Sed nemo potuit tangere: merda fuit”[1]. However, with a similar analogy, I tend to avoid eating blackberries from a bush that is placed at just the right height for a passing dog to piss on – or, in other words, I avoid the good spiritual fruits that have been intellectually processed in such a way that the overall result is inedible. The example of this are the authentic mystics who have moulded their experiences in the context of their own religion, which by itself is more of a spiritual pitfall than a path, and it is better to take the entire thing with a grain of salt, rather than to risk accepting it all without reservations and ending up in some pathological following.

One will ask how is it possible for deranged and clinically stupid people to have authentic spiritual experiences. I would say that one of the possible causes lies in the instability of their minds, which makes it rather malleable and prone to all kinds of influences, ranging from authentic spiritual experiences to various mental disorders. This doesn’t make the experience itself less valid, but it can be mixed together with other phenomena, often so problematic that the overall result is rendered useless. Likewise, mental rigidity can be a powerful inhibitor of spiritual experience, which requires a great deal of spiritual flexibility, or deviation from the mental paths most commonly traveled. If one’s inhibitions reman active at all times, they will correct all deviations and thus effectively roast all possible seeds of spiritual experience. On the other hand, if such inhibitions are completely absent, the mind can simply disintegrate into madness due to the enormous number and strength of various deviations. In my opinion, the useful approach is to keep the mind active and useful when necessary, but to allow it to get out of the way of the spiritual states that are incompatible with its very nature. It’s like sex: you need the mind in order not to end up in bed with the wrong person, but when you are in bed with the right person, you can safely turn it off and enjoy the experience. The question is therefore not whether you need the mind or not, but where do you need it and in what way, and when you don’t need it, it is to be set aside. It is similar to the way in which a soldier wishes to have the best possible rifle, one that will always accurately hit and kill the enemy, that will never jam and for which ammunition is abundant, but he doesn’t carry it around with him all the time, but only when necessary.

[1] Martial 3.17: “But none could touch it: it was shit”.