Category Archives: religion

False dichotomies: abortion

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The next false dichotomy is abortion, with “pro-life” and “pro-choice” options, and I will now show why I think it’s deceptive.

The pro-choice argument says that it’s woman’s body, she gets to choose what happens with it, if she doesn’t want to be pregnant and give birth, she can have an abortion.

The pro-life argument says that a fetus is a human being from conception, it has human rights, and you can’t kill a human being legally, so its right to life takes precedence over any other consideration.

So basically the false dichotomy is whether you believe the fetus is a human being or not. If it is, the concept of human rights applies. If it is not, when does it become one? At the time of birth? When is that, considering all the premature births that survive in an incubator? The pro-choice option really has a problem there. The pro-life option has a problem of trying to ban abortion outright, and most people intuitively agree that this might not be the best idea, although it’s difficult for them to argue why exactly without sounding like monsters.

So here’s my take on this. A fetus is a human being since conception. However, humans don’t have any intrinsic rights, whatsoever. There are only duties and privileges. Privileges are derived from contributions; since the mother contributes her body for a parasitic entity to use for its growth and to deform her in the process, and demand her resources and sacrifices for decades to come, any privileges of the fetus, including its privilege of life, are realized at her expense. This gives her the right to simply refuse to donate her body as a host for the fetus. The father, too, has rights, or should I say privileges, considering how he provides for the woman with his resources. Since having a baby is also realized at his expense, and might pose a serious burden on him, he also has a voice in the matter. So, what exactly is the position of the fetus in all this? The fetus is a guest, who was invited into the family by the act of them having sex. It’s a soul that started the process of incarnation based on that invitation. The invitation can be rescinded, but that is done at the soul’s great inconvenience, is very traumatic to all sides and they better have a valid reason for that, because it’s definitely an action that goes against both nature and common decency, because if you tell someone that he’s so unwelcome and such a burden that you’d rather kill him than suffer his presence, that’s a really serious message. So, nobody has rights, but there are other things that are actually much more binding than the concept of rights. One of those things is basic decency and goodness, out of which you simply don’t kill your child unless your life is threatened, or its body is diagnosed to be deformed, in which case you destroy the body in order not to force the soul to endure life in the trap of a deformed body. So yes, in theory the mother has almost unlimited rights to do whatever she wants with the fetus, because all its rights are derived from her personal contributions and sacrifices, and it is her option to decline. The father, too, has rights, because it is expected of him to support the family. The child, in theory, merely consumes resources and is an inconvenience, and has no rights whatsoever. In practice, the child is a guest, who came into the mother’s body by invitation, and if that is so, its protection is a great ethical priority and an obligation. If the child was conceived by carelessness, the mother can rescind invitation, but it always comes at great spiritual cost, because she basically not only made a mistake, she also forced someone completely innocent to suffer for her mistake. If the pregnancy is the result of rape, she is perfectly justified in doing whatever she wants with it. She can have an abortion at no moral or spiritual expense, or she can shrug and decide that she wanted a baby anyway and simply keep it, taking ownership of the situation.

So, in theory I advocate a purely pro-choice position, but in practice, I am almost as extreme in the anti-abortion stance as the most ardent pro-life advocates. That is because I don’t base my moral stance on the concept of human rights or liberties, but on the concept of having God, who is the absolute goodness, as a role model, and not wanting to live my life in a way God would find objectionable. This is the crux of the pro-choice position: you choose not only what to do, but what you will become as you do it, and not all outcomes are equally desirable.

About testing gurus and used cars

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I occasionally encounter the concept of testing a prospective guru before accepting his authority. It sounds a lot like the idea of testing a used car before buying it; basically, you need to know what you’re committing to, lest you get screwed. But the idea is so fucking ridiculous in this context, that even entertaining it is a disqualification. Let me tell you why.

First of all, the fake gurus have been reading the same manuals for recognizing the true gurus as you have. They are familiar with the criteria, and they are great actors. Whatever you can think of, they already rehearsed to perfection. Essentially, it’s like trying to figure out a conman. If a conman is easily recognizable as such, he’s not really much of a conman in the first place, because he sucks at his job. A good conman looks more like the real thing than the real thing. Every criterion you can test him by, he already tested himself to see if it’s perfect. So you can’t go by appearance, you need to go by substance, which requires you to know what you’re doing, essentially you need to be very qualified at the subject matter; essentially, in order to qualify as a Jedi apprentice you need to be a powerful Force-sensitive, and it’s not that you’re going to test a Jedi Master to see if he’s qualified, he’s going to test you to see if you’re qualified.

And that’s the crux of the matter. You’re not going to test shit. You’re going to be evolving a long time before you’re qualified, and when you are, a real guru will test you to see if you have any brains in your head. You’ll need to see through appearances and superficiality, you’ll need to be able to react to high spiritual energies favorably, and you need to be intellectually competent. Basically, the guru is in charge, not you, and he’s in charge simply due to the fact that he’s a spiritual superpower, so the entire concept of testing something… well, if you think you have to test someone to know whether he’s a guru, either you’re not qualified to be a student or he’s not qualified to be a guru, because in the real spiritual relationships of that kind the concept doesn’t even appear, it’s an automatic thing, a key/lock click.

Another issue with the concept is the expectation that enlightened people don’t have anything better to do than teach kindergarten here, basically that they want to accept students. I certainly don’t, and neither do any incarnated Gods that I know of. Their missions are usually related to other things. Also, the Hindu guru model is the vast minority of what actually takes place in real life. In real life, spiritual relationships more often follow a husband-wife model, or something along that line. The expectation that a guru will accept students who are significantly below his own spiritual status are unwarranted; basically, he’ll look for someone very similar to himself, and won’t really care for a great number of such people, and since such things are negotiated in advance, prior to incarnation, you can see why a husband-wife model is more attractive than the guru-student model. It simply solves all problems. Sure, the guru-disciple model isn’t really incompatible with that, but more often than not, if you want to find a guru’s most advanced student, look for his wife. According to the apocryphal gospels, “the disciple Jesus loved the most” was his wife, whose name was later replaced with a generic “John”. Ramakrishna’s most respected disciple was his wife. Lahiri Mahasaya’s wife was an enlightened saint, according to Yogananda. Mirabai’s husband was enlightened. Marpa’s wife was a very advanced saint. As I said, it’s not really a rule because there are many exceptions, but it’s more of a pattern than not. Just ask yourself, if you were some kind of a God who planned to incarnate here, and you wanted to teach one advanced student, what would be the best way to arrange that? Sure, as long as you’re here you might as well teach others, but it might be only an afterthought. Teaching might not really be anywhere near the real reason why you are here. The true reason might be closer along the lines of cosmic politics, as in the case of Krishna’s incarnation. Sure, he had advanced saints as wives, and sure, he had a demigod friend-disciple Arjuna, but the real reason why he was here was to deal with the problem of too many fucking idiots incarnated in the warrior caste, giving the world a hard time.

So, testing Krishna to see if he’s a worthy enough guru to teach your highness? He’d intentionally fail all your tests just for shits and giggles. If you have to test him, it means you are not qualified. The ones who are qualified instinctively and immediately recognize him as the Lord and organize their entire lives around him. So, you can see why I find the concept ridiculous.

But of course, the vast majority of situations where you learn from some spiritually advanced person doesn’t follow the model of a life-long profound personal relationship. Most often, you can be spiritually influenced by several sources, each of them giving you a small nudge in the right direction. It can be music, someone’s photo, a sentence, a spiritual darshan. Reducing spiritual learning to the Hindu guru-chela model is too simplistic to reflect anything real, at least to the vast majority of people involved.

When in a hole…

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I’ve heard people praising persistence in the face of difficulty and failure in so many places, from business lectures to spiritual advice, it’s making me sick, because my experience is quite different. In my experience, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If something you have been doing has fucked you up, maybe, just maybe, doing more of it and harder isn’t the brightest idea. Instead, how about stopping to think and change your approach, maybe even revise your goals? Because if things are not working, you have several possibilities, and you can present them in simplified form as a 2×2 matrix, where the possibilities are that you are doing either a right thing or a wrong thing, and you are doing too much or not enough. So, the troublesome possibilities are that you’re either doing too much of a wrong thing, or not enough of a good thing. At the point of failure, assuming that you are doing the right thing, and only failing because you’re not doing enough of it is simply stupid.

Let’s put it this way. Life is a process of learning, from the point where you’re pissing into diapers to the point where you are reading articles such as this one. You had to go through certain steps in order to get where you are now. You didn’t get here by doing more of the things you did when you were 5. So, assuming that the first thing you will try will also be the last thing you will ever need is to assume you will die failing there. If not, you’ll outgrow it. You will either try it and see it’s not working, in which case you’ll find something more useful for attaining your goals, or you will try it, succeed and progress to the next level, of both understanding and methodology, and, quite possibly, of goals, because if your goals are still the same you had as when you were 5, you’re retarded. Your goals need to change with your growth in understanding.

The next issue is not that of right or wrong, but of approaching the problem adequately. If you don’t have a hammer at hand, it’s probably ok to hammer a nail or two with pilers, but if you didn’t get up to find a hammer after the second nail, you’re a lazy fuck. You need to change your approach as you do things; you need to adapt, learn, think. If your problem is something simple, such as unloading a truck full of cement bags, it is completely solvable by linearly scaling work. The more you work, the more gets done, and the more bodies you throw at the problem, it gets done faster. However, such problems are usually solved so quickly you can’t really call them “problems”. The stuff where you are likely to get stuck or fail is usually the stuff that requires a change in approach, basically you need to do things with your brain turned on and with your eyes open, observe what’s going on and focus on accomplishing your goals, and not necessarily on keeping your methods the same.

In spirituality, this is the most frequent reason for failure, and reason why failure is the norm and success is the exception. The way it works is that religions and cults assume their way is the right way, that more of it gives better results and all kinds of failure are due to not doing it enough or in the right way. Essentially, their basic assumption is that there’s nothing wrong with them.

Really?

Islam, for instance, thinks that solution to all problems is more islam. It doesn’t understand that the problem of islamic countries is that they are islamic. Ataturk understood that and worked on removing Islam from the position of Turkey’s solution-seeking paradigm. The result was that Turkey became the most advanced “islamic” country, but that’s a misnomer because it became advanced exactly because of not being islamic. Of course, there are always those who don’t understand that, and who think that the way to solve the remaining problems would be to introduce more islam, because that would make it better; of course it would, since there’s nothing wrong with it. Right. Also, in order to survive in the modern world, religions adapted by stating that you can take just the spiritual and ethical part of them, and for the rest you can have science and modern technology. However, if a religion fails at science and technology, if its approach is a dead-end there, what reason is there for you to think that its approach to God and ethics is any different? Most likely, its’s the same kind of failure, only more difficult to demonstrate because people were taught to accept bad assumptions as axioms.

Every stupid cult in the world thinks like that, and that’s why they are all dead ends. They are not solutions, they are problems. If you start from the premise that you already have all the important answers, you’re deluded. Spirituality is a process of transformation, and if you stick to all the ideas you initially brought with you, there’s no transformation, and doing more of that same shit will just waste more time.

No, the way to get somewhere is to assume you are on the starting point and you don’t have all the answers. When you get stuck somewhere, you can’t just assume that you need persistence. What you need is to stop and think, to see if you’re doing something wrong and that’s causing the difficulties, or you are in fact doing everything right and it’s just hard.

Persistence, of course, is essential when you need to do something that is difficult, takes a lot of time and effort, and you can’t just stop every now and then and check if 2+2 is still 4. Sometimes you indeed do have to persist and just grind the problem away. However, to assume that all problems are like that, that’s going to put you in a world of fail.

Ideologies and group identities

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I’ve seen an interesting way of thinking in the Western jurisprudence, a sort of an extreme individualism which sees every possible guilt only on a personal level, disregarding even the very concept of collectivism.

And yet we constantly see how people act in groups, with group bonds of belief and emotions, which create common thoughts and joint actions. When you have thousands of football fans breaking each other’s heads, your problem doesn’t exist on the individual level. It’s not individuals performing those actions, it’s the groups. Individuals are just instruments which the abstract group entity uses to assert its dominance, attitudes and beliefs. In that sense, nations really do exist as entities with emotions and willpower. Football clubs really do exist not only as administrative entities and players, but also as an idea that binds the fans into a group entity, connected on some very basic common denominator.

It’s very easy to get sucked into binding your personal identity with some group. When you do, it’s important to understand that you don’t become more than yourself, you become less. You don’t become something larger than yourself by identifying with a group, a group becomes something larger than it was by increasing its membership. You, yourself, simply ceded parts of your identity, and replaced your individual, personal thoughts with collective thoughts, collective emotions, beliefs and goals. It then becomes possible for you to attack people you don’t personally hate, but you hate them as part of your group identity.

For me personally, it’s interesting how I became capable of truly understanding some things about biological conditioning and inclusion of animalistic mechanisms in spirituality only after I chose to stop self-identifying as human. I literally stopped seeing my identity as part of that of human race, and started seeing myself as a separate species, that is still close enough to human to reproduce with humans, but no closer than a dog is to a wolf. I started seeing through social and reproductive strategies that were usually seen as spirituality, and my entire perspective on ethics changed. For instance, humans have no ability to tell good from evil if you separate it from what’s good and bad for humanity. For instance, if somehow some other species evolved on Earth which was far superior to humans, and the absolute karmic law would demand that humans go extinct like the Neanderthals before them, the humans would view that as evil. If an absolutely better species needed to go extinct in order for humanity to go on, humans would choose themselves. That made me think: what if all other ethical opinions commonly held by humans aren’t what God would want, but what the self-serving humanity wants? God would want sat-cit-ananda to manifest. Humanity wants there to be more humanity. That’s all there is to it.

As I said, it becomes interesting when you dissociate yourself from the group you implicitly belonged to since birth. You start noticing things, the same way you’d notice things if you dissociated yourself from some more obvious social identity, only with more profound, more liberating consequences. One of the most important things you notice is that people aren’t very interested in the truth, they are more interested at “being right”, being on the right side, and the right side is the winning side. It’s just an animalistic instinct of wanting to be on the winning side, because those on the losing side are traditionally either killed or sold into slavery. Also, if one side offers no advantages to you if you pick it, you pick the other side. Truth, reality, that doesn’t even show on your instinctive mind’s radar. Truth is what the winning side tells. Reality is that the winners live and consume resources. That’s what mankind is about, not God, not truth, not manifesting sat-cit-ananda. It’s about who gets to live, reproduce and have resources. God is what is invented to rationalize the winning side’s right to do what it does, and to allow it to keep what it had taken. If a real, true God existed who would question the order of things, he would not be acknowledged as their God. Essentially, if you had a-prefixed deities, where “a” stands for “absolute”, aGod and aSatan, and humans could choose which one is God and which one is Satan, what do you think, how would they do it? Using rational philosophy, metaphysics and transcendental ethics? Or by the criterion of being allowed to live, reproduce and consume resources?

What do you think what Allah or Jehovah are, in the absolute sense? aGod or aSatan? An entity that lets your tribe kill, plunder and rape, own sexual slaves and demands blood sacrifices, does that sound like the sat-cit-ananda Absolute that created the dual Universe in order to manifest His fullness as a multitude? From where I see it, from my non-human position, it’s either completely fabricated, made up as a sick fantasy of warlords and madmen, or it was inspired by Satan as a system of belief that will bind humans into groups that are most useful for his goals of keeping souls bound in ignorance and sin, and leading them to perform sinful deeds that will propagate their enslavement to this place.

I once heard an interpretation that a division between God and Satan is within religions and not between them; between individual ideas and concepts and not so much between whole ideologies. But I wonder. Some ideologies, as a system, seem to be consistently promoting beliefs that are conducive to ignorance, bondage and resistance to any change from that status, and people assume group identities based on those ideologies, aligning their destinies with the group vector.

So yeah, think about that the next time you cheer for your country on the football championship, when you identify with others based on what OS runs on your computer or a phone, when you identify with others based on your species, race, nation, religion or other stupid bullshit.

The only thing you actually are, is what you are when you stand naked before the spirit of God, in His light. Every other identity is a descent into some illusion or another, promoting and propagating bondage and suffering. And guess from which perspective your actions are going to be seen and evaluated when you die?

Live your life in such a way that you can stand before God, stripped of any kind of collective identity, and have God see your life as his own, something that was His manifestation in the relative world of duality. Because where you’re going, there are no football clubs, nations, races, genders or religions, and the only true judgment that is passed on any action is whether it is of God, who is sat-cit-ananda.

The flowchart of madness

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I was thinking about hierarchy of belief and how it can cause apparently unrelated problems.

Let’s illustrate it with a flow chart which shows how a terrorist attack at a gay club becomes possible:

flowchart

Basically, you end up with very bizarre beliefs and behaviors that are a logical consequence of accepting previous, apparently logical and sensible steps. That’s how you get people who believe that Earth is flat, that dinosaurs were contemporary with humans and that Earth is some 6000 years old, but that’s also how you get people who get to believe that the Earth is over 4 billion years old. They just follow a different hierarchy of belief: for instance that the world is real, that its laws are constant, that it isn’t a simulation that’s running on some astral computer, that it all behaves linearly independent on existence of observers, etc.

If at least one accepted belief in the chain proves to be false, the final conclusion will be worthless. So when we see a terrorist who takes an AR-15, goes into a building and shoots people (whether they are gay, Jews, workers in an abortion clinic or audience at a heavy metal concert is irrelevant), we naturally think he’s fucked up in the head because his beliefs and actions are contrary to all reasonable and accepted behavior, but the thing is, you can’t just dismiss his internal flow chart. There is some decision-making process he went through and came up with those conclusions. It doesn’t happen at random. Also, people don’t just happen to join cults at random. There’s a flow chart: is there a God, are there people who know God and can lead others to God, is this guru one such person, how should one act when he meets such a person, and you end up shaving your head, wearing a saffron robe and chanting 16 rounds of Hare Krishna a day. The conclusion sounds ridiculous when you’re unfamiliar with the particular flow chart, but when you think of it, people are usually lead down the garden path of consistency with all previous steps taken, where one thing follows from another, until you get something that appears to be completely irrational.

That Muslim shooting 100 gays, he wasn’t irrational. He just accepted that there is one God, he’s called Allah, he sent a prophet called Mohamed who revealed the perfect and authoritative scripture called Qur’an, and there are also the Hadith about his life and sayings that clarify matters further, this is all authoritative and if one wants to be saved for eternal life he must adhere to those instructions.

That those internal flow charts exist is obvious; the true question is, what is yours, and what if it contains faulty premises that result in fatal errors?