As you could have guessed by now, I read and watch many things, often quite weird, in order to be better informed about the state of things in the world, and the creatures that love to think of themselves as children of God. I recently watched many YouTube videos about gun culture in America. Some of those videos are harmless fun – some guys shooting targets with various guns. Some are about people field-stripping rifles, or even reconstructing them completely, or making their own ammunition.

Some, however, use the guns for their intended purpose of killing. There seem to be areas in America that have problems with coyotes and wild pigs. Only in Texas, there are over 4 million wild pigs that feed on crops, and the farmers are trying to do the best they can to deal with the situation.

One farmer grows pecan nuts, and the pigs come every night to eat his pecans, and at some point he called a friend with a gun and a night-vision sight to, basically, convert pecans into hams. Pigs eat his pecans, he compensates by killing some of them when possible, and eats them. I can understand that and I actually sympathize with the man. His position is “no wonder the pigs taste so good, they’ve been eating nothing but my pecans”.

Some farmers take it further and install fences with GSM controlled trap doors and cameras, and they capture pigs at the rate of 30 at a time and sell them for meat. This method is actually so effective it can be seen as the most effective pig farming method. Take some corn as bait, capture 30 pigs; I don’t know how much corn farmers normally use to grow a pig but I would bet it’s much more.

But this is when I get to feel sorry for the pigs, because they are getting hit disproportionately to their offense. The only decent thing I’ve seen those pigs experience from humans was when the hunter took pity at them and sprayed them with a water hose to cool them down, and I can just see how smart and aware of the situation they are, they’re not stupid animals, but very close to human level of awareness and emotion. You can see their fear and even emotional pain, the feeling of “please don’t kill me, I was just eating some corn”. And that’s just it – that’s the extent of their crimes. They ate some corn. I can see the farmers’ position. He grows his crops, be it peanuts, corn or pecan nuts, and the pigs eat what doesn’t belong to them and harm him, so he has to do something about it. But I also see the pigs’ position. They were eating something tasty that was on the ground, and they are captured and being driven to the slaughterhouse. They are not evil or malicious; they are smart, cute and like tasty things.

There are words that people use when they want to depersonalize you in order to feel morally justified when treating you extremely badly. One such word is “animal”. It’s a very general word for beings that move around on their own, and are not humans. It is so broad it encompasses everything from bugs to whales. If something is an “animal”, it means it can be excepted from empathy. It can be killed and eaten. God doesn’t protect it, moral law doesn’t protect it.

There are worse words, like “vermin”. “Vermin” is the subset of animals that is seen as harmful to human interests. A cockroach is vermin, for instance. You can kill it with no remorse and it’s actually a good deed. A rat is vermin, a wild rabbit is vermin, a coyote or a fox is vermin, and apparently a wild pig is vermin. The word “vermin” is emotionally charged in such a way that one feels absolutely no remorse for eradicating it. They are pests and they are stepped on like bugs. This works especially well when you exterminate vermin from afar, seeing it as a tiny speck in your rifle scope.

When you kill vermin from a helicopter, it’s a funny target practice. There’s no empathy, because you’re shooting vermin, and they are just rat-sized moving targets seen from above.

But that’s the trick: humans can be seen as vermin, especially if you see them from afar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTHF2OeskEQ

You see an image on the screen and you decide whether it’s human or vermin. If it’s vermin, you press a button, see puff of smoke and vermin falls down. If it continues moving, press button again until it stops. Vermin eradicated.

There’s a reason why the Nazi concentration camp workers and commanders lived perfectly normal lives and didn’t suffer from any particular stress. They were not killing people. They were eradicating vermin. It’s a good thing, it has to be done for the benefit of your kind. You are a child of God, and that’s just vermin.

A cockroach is vermin, a rat is vermin, a pig is vermin, a Taliban is vermin, a Jew is vermin. From afar, all vermin is alike, they are cockroach-sized specks you can place a cursor at and squish them until they stop moving. From up close, a pig is conscious, aware, afraid and feels pain because it knows it is about to be killed for the horrible crime of eating corn. From up close, vermin that is brought to a concentration camp for orderly extermination is Anne Frank. But you don’t want to look up close, you shave their heads, dress them in rags and treat them like pigs or rats or some other species of vermin. It helps you make the moral distinction between you, a child of God, and vermin that needs to be exterminated for the greater good.

Humans like to feel good about themselves, they like to feel they are better than vermin, than animals, than “that scum” they are shooting. Americans in particular seem to be very fond of that attitude. They eradicated the Indians who were vermin. They eradicated the American bisons by shooting them from trains for sport. They went to Vietnam where they treated the patriotic locals as vermin, and occasionally eradicated entire villages full of vermin, the strange looking people who didn’t speak English and instead made incomprehensible vermin noises. Obviously it’s not a problem, it’s not like they’re killing good Americans.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a famous Buddhist teacher, told stories about how the Americans killed his students in Vietnam, either by accident or in their valiant effort to exterminate vermin.

It’s interesting how vermin can be quite smart and sophisticated. I, myself, used to be that caged pig, and I used to be an ant-sized creature in someone’s targeting scope when he shot rocket-propelled cluster bombs in the general direction of where I used to live, along with other vermin that was to be indiscriminately killed. The Americans who pay for the opportunity to shoot at pigs from a helicopter remind me of the so-called “weekend Chetniks”, who found great entertainment at shooting the Croatian vermin in Vukovar during the siege. It’s not like they were shooting at proper humans or anyone of value. It’s not like my wife was there as a child, throughout the entire siege, and was hit by shrapnel from a tank grenade that exploded in her home. I must say it’s an interesting experience to be seen and treated as vermin, because you get to learn much about humans and how they rationalize the evil of their existence. They, the children of God, who are doing only what has to be done for the greater good, exterminating vermin and fighting evil.

But what if the table were to be turned, and you found out that “vermin” were in fact the precious children of God, and you are a dark abomination in the eyes of the Gods? What if they saw your extermination as a good thing, as destruction of the evil spawn of Satan?

(to be continued…)

Positive thinking is all the rage in the New Age circles.

In my opinion, that probably contributes enormously to the general outcome of them not managing to achieve jack shit, because positive thinking is a slave-girl mentality.

I am now going to make a rather graphic presentation, but I assume that if you lasted here so far you are a mature enough person and a fainting couch will not be needed.

Imagine a New Age/Wiccan paradise of people somewhere in the early Holocene period, who worshiped Goddess Earth, praised her for all her bountiful gifts – fruits, grain, domesticated animals that provide you with eggs, meat and milk, and not least of all, sex. Focus on the positive, feel happy, praise Goddess in all things. Earth is beautiful, it loves us and showers us with gifts.

Then there are other people, with horses and swords, who look at that place and they also see the gifts of the Goddess Earth – fruits, grain, domesticated animals, and humans to be enslaved as domesticated creatures that provide you with sex and labor. They, too, will praise the Goddess for her bountiful gifts of food, sex and slaves.

When you praise Goddess for all the resources She gave you, you think of wheat and apples as resources, you think of cows, pigs and chickens as resources, but you never think of yourself as a resource that will be harvested by someone else, who will praise Goddess for giving him your body and servitude to enjoy, because he is so loved and appreciated.

There’s a reason why men have a different attitude towards positive thinking on a genetic level. It’s because men who were thinking positive ended up castrated and died working on some field or in a mine or building an aqueduct. They didn’t leave descendants. Those who were cautious, aggressive and who were assuming the worst, who have taken up arms at the first sign of trouble and simply killed all the enemies, they lived to reproduce and have their offspring reach maturity. Positive thinking simply died out in the male line because it’s a lethal trait.

In the female line, things worked differently. If the females were loving, submissive, forgiving and positive, they took well to captivity and servitude. As they were thinking positive thoughts, lived in the present moment and tried to use the situation the best they could, they fell in love with their captors, admiring their positive qualities and ignoring everything negative, such as them having butchered their former husbands and children. No, that’s past and can’t be changed, but the present moment is what’s important in order to build the future. As they were thinking positive, they were radiating a sexy kind of energy and producing nice hormones, making their captors’ cocks hard, so they proceeded to fuck them. Those who were the most positive had the most orgasms while fucked, were the most favored slaves, and as they got pregnant they were elevated to a higher status, their children survived and their genes went on. Those who were loyal to their former husbands, who were angry at their captors, or were sad and depressed, were either outright slaughtered as potential danger (Judith and Holofernes, anyone?), or were relegated to menial labor where they wilted away and died without leaving offspring, and so their genes died. Women were therefore genetically selected to be happy, tolerant, positive, loving and forgiving slave-girls who live in the present moment and build their future from there. Men were genetically selected to be aggressive, ruthless, paranoid and cautious, mindful of past experience, understanding patterns, and carefully planning ahead. Men who thought positive died as castrated slaves building an aqueduct or mining copper.

New Age is a religion of successful slave-girls. It makes defeat into future victory and submission into orgasm and pregnancy. It makes rape a victory because you belong to a better man and you need to be thankful to Goddess for giving you into the care of a better provider and a source of more successful sperm. A successful slave girl doesn’t mourn being enslaved by a warrior tribe, she immediately starts daydreaming about how sexy and strong those men are, and falls in love with them. They don’t have to rape her, she’s all willing; she’ll orgasm before they manage to take her panties off. That’s what makes her successful: she’s so positive she’s seen as cute and bountiful gift of the Mother and the captors take to her immediately, in fact the leader will take her for himself. The less successful ones will die doing laundry, for both the men and the successful slave-girls and their children.

Buddhism, however, is a religion of super-successful men. It is realistic to the point of pessimism. It admits we’re fucked, diagnoses the problem excellently, and prescribes therapy. It doesn’t care for positive thoughts. If you’re hit by an arrow, positive thinking doesn’t do shit for you. What actually helps is to admit you’re fucked, to try to figure out how to remove the arrow without bleeding to death, to suppress infection and to survive the ordeal.

It’s not at all surprising that Buddhism was invented by a prince from the warrior-caste. His ancestors lived because they were pessimistic, they assumed the enemy was stronger than it is, better armed than it is and has a better strategic position. Then they assumed that his peasants were more productive, his blacksmiths made better swords and his horses and elephants were stronger. They then proceeded to organize their state so that the peasants were more productive, the blacksmiths made better swords and armors, the horses and elephants were bred to be stronger and more resilient, the walls of the cities were taller and stronger, they occupied better strategic points and their spies gave them better intelligence about the enemy, and they struck first and won.

That’s why Buddhism is useful for conquering the world and getting out of jail free, and New Age and Wicca, the favorite female religions, are useful for being a happy slave-girl who showers her captors with love, kindness and servitude, heart warm with feeling and pussy wet with acceptance.

If you want to achieve anything in spirituality, the positive “all is well” attitude is the first thing you need to lose. The only kind of positive attitude that you need is that of believing that it’s possible to get the fuck out of here if you do everything right, if you ask for and receive all the right kinds of help, if you use your luck and opportunities to the best possible advantage, if you’re not discouraged by failure because the situation is so dire that it’s expected. The true positive attitude is that you invest all your energy into efforts that will produce liberation, and retract all energy from things that further your bondage. That’s the way of thinking that helped men keep their balls in their sacs and their heads on their shoulders, and since this is the kind of mentality that actually works for winning, and not just for being a happy loser, you would do well to pay attention, men and women alike.

New Age borrowed a great deal from classical Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga, and the list of such adoptions would be too extensive for this format, but the process didn’t necessarily go only one way. It is my opinion that New Age actually contributed some important new aspects to the classical lore. It’s as if New Age treated all its sources according to the GPL license; it took everything it found interesting, but it also left the open-source contributions in the thoughtspace.

For instance, the New Age lore on Kundalini is much more extensive than anything I could find in the classical literature. In fact, the classical writings are often deliberately deceptive and written in some sort of code, where the “key” for proper understanding was orally transmitted from master to disciple. Also, the chakras and their connection with the higher bodies are much better understood and explained in New Age. The problem with the classical concepts of lineage is that very few people actually had the opportunity to experiment with the techniques and contribute to the lore; essentially, it’s like closed-source software, where small isolated communities of programmers work on problems, compared to the open-source community where many more brains can be thrown at a problem and contributions are pooled together. Of course, not all contributions are equally valid or even positive, but the same can be said of the classical Upanishads. Not all ideas were equally brilliant, or ever contributed to the solution of any kind. One of the greatest contributions of the Kundalini mailing list from the 1990s is that it pooled together all sorts of people who mostly unwillingly experimented with Kundalini experience, and you could see what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes it was worth more to see the consequences of a wrong approach, and seeing a lot of people go crazy on a pattern told you volumes about going crazy. To me, personally, the most valuable aspect of the entire thing was confirmation of the reality of the phenomenon, confirmation of the basic concepts I personally established by experimentation, and understanding what happens when you don’t do it the way I did. Also, I got several useful ideas about things I personally hadn’t thought of, but once I tried them they were quite intuitive. I, too, contributed my personal findings to the data pool.

The problem is the same as with the open source community – most contributions consist of hundreds ways of coding a notepad or a calculator. There are many different “projects” and micro-communities that don’t necessarily do things the most efficient way, but at least you have choice. There are people who merely copy other people’s work and present it as their own in order to bloat their ego. Essentially, you need a certain amount of skill in order to be able to safely navigate this mess, but you can say the same about the classic literature about spirituality. In any case, the New Age Kundalini community probably did more for extending the bleeding edge of human knowledge about yogic mysticism into the realms of unknown than any single conventional school of yoga that I know of. In fact, while the New Age community was busy really exploring spirituality and doing often messy experiments in vivo, the traditional schools of the time were mostly doing jack shit. They were merely rehashing old ideas, having mediocre results, and boasting their ancient authentic lineage. So, it’s something like Linux. When you hear about the way it was made, you are tempted to conclude that such a thing can’t possibly work and that a traditional operating system would be much more reliable. In reality, if you want your server to run reliably, run it on Linux. The fact that it is open source exposed all its flaws and made it possible for them to be fixed quickly and easily. The fixes and contributions were all made public and contributed to the overall reliability and quality of the system. The chaos and the bullshit that is often part of the creative process tends to cancel itself out because for the most part only the useful and good stuff is actually used, and the rest is summarily discarded.

The problem is, there’s usually quite a lot of theory that is never properly tested and is merely accepted; sometimes, wrong conclusions are propagated because they seem to work well in the limited range they were tested in, and sometimes things are accepted because they simply feel good, or because they were accepted from a trusted source. There are many problems, for sure. However, if one actually approaches things carefully, vetting sources for credibility and competence, and avoiding obvious confirmation bias, such an approach to things can be quite helpful. I do, however, admit that I made greatest progress when I worked alone and relied on my personal methods of testing things, because then I could feel comfortable exploring ideas that were so uncommon and “out there” that I couldn’t really rely on anyone’s feedback, and silence was the best company.

In the previous article I wrote down some thoughts about why the New Age wave collapsed, but then it became apparent to me that the more important question is how it came to be and what it actually is. I then tried to think of a sound-bite that would explain it in a single phrase, but that’s not easy because of the vast diversity of the phenomenon. However, as I thought more about it yesterday, typing a brief summary of the article-to-be into my laptop before checking out for the night, one idea stood out as the most important.

New Age is the bastard stepchild of Modernism. It is an attempt of finding a form of spirituality that will not be threatened by science.

You see, the basic idea of Modernism is that “the old age of religion and ignorance is over; now is the time of science and progress”. Mankind is to raise above the ignorance and superstition that held it chained to a rock for ages and is now taking its destiny into its own hands.

This attitude was overwhelming in the salons of the Western civilization, but it didn’t produce one universal outcome. The simplest way I can use to describe it is the contrast between Friedrich Nietzsche and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, where Nietzsche represents the main-stream of Modernism, and de Chardin represents the New Age.

I teach you the Superman! Mankind is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome mankind?

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves. Do you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and revert back to the beast rather than overcome mankind? What is the ape to a man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just so shall a man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Even the wisest among you is only a confusion and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I ask you to become phantoms or plants?

Behold, I teach you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beg of you my brothers, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and those blasphemers died along with him. Now to blaspheme against the earth is the greatest sin, and to rank love for the Unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing: — the soul wished the body lean, monstrous, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth. But that soul was itself lean, monstrous, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of this soul! So my brothers, tell me: What does your body say about your soul? Is not your soul poverty and filth and wretched contentment?

(Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

This is quintesential Modernism: all spirituality is bullshit that was invented to distract mankind from its impotence in the face of the material world that is harsh, brutal, merciless and great. Now, mankind has power over the world, it has knowledge, it has science, it is the driver and no longer a mere passenger. All blind leaders, such as religion and culture, that served mankind as a comforter serves a child, need to be abandoned now in face of a breast full of milk that is science and technology. Mankind is not only free, it now has the true guidance of knowledge and awareness of its surroundings.

However, there were dissenting voices, that agreed with the general sentiment of such statements, but interpreted the available evidence differently. Interestingly, the greatest and most sophisticated alternative to Nietzsche’s interpretation came from the Catholic Church in form of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who would probably have been burned at the stake in different times for heresy. Be firmly seated now, for I am to quote things that might shock you by the very fact that they come from a singular source.

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

“Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.”

“Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things…as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.”

“Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.”

“By means of all created things, without excaption, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers”

“God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my sewing needle – and my heart and thoughts.”

“The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.”

“There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. … Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken. For in fact, pure spirituality is as unconceivable as pure materiality. Just as, in a sense, there is no geometrical point, but as many structurally different points as there are methods of deriving them from different figures, so every spirit derives its reality and nature from a particular type of universal synthesis.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

As you can see, I quoted probably the single most influential source of all New Age. To quote Wikipedia, “His posthumously published book, The Phenomenon of Man, sets forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of thecosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity, to ultimately a reunion with Christ. In the book, Chardin abandoned literal interpretations of creation in the Book of Genesis in favor of allegorical and theological interpretations. The unfolding of the material cosmos, is described from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is “pulling” all creation towards it. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal-driven way, argued in terms that today go under the banner of convergent evolution.”

So, essentially, unlike Nietzsche who thought that the goal of evolution is the next better animal called Superman, unlike the contemporary evolutionary biologists who think that evolution doesn’t really have a goal and is simply a feedback loop that favors the organisms that are better suited for the environment, de Chardin re-introduced Augustine, who thought that God attracts us towards him, through space and time, from the point of omniscience beyond space and time, where the final form of creation was known from the start, and the initial conditions were set in the beginning of time as to produce it, and we are now traversing the spacetime from Alpha-point to Omega-point. Essentially, what de Chardin states is that we were already shown Superman in the form of Christ, and we are in the process of collective transformation of mankind as a singular unit, towards the Omega-point, in which Christ becomes the reality that is collectively achieved.

Knowing all that, the conclusion that seems to impose itself is that all of New Age seems to be the process of having de Chardin rehashed and recycled by inferior minds.

Sure, you have Vivekananda and his “one God, many paths“ approach. You have Yogananda and his concept of raising the “vibratory level” of human body/soul unit in order to be able to approach God and attain higher levels of consciousness, and his religious syncretism where all religions and their teachers are placed in a single lineage, trying to force it all to make sense within a singular system. You have Osho and Richard Bach and Paulo Coelho and zillion others, but essentially, what one gets from it all is that the purpose of the Universe is to help you learn and evolve, that nothing is really bad or evil, that if something feels better it must be more true, and you therefore get an echo-chamber of confirmation bias where everything that confirms the feel-good ideas is integrated and everything that questions the whole concept or those involved is rejected as “negativity”, where negativity seems to become the replacement-word for evil in the worldview without evil.

Being the bastard stepchild of Modernism, the New Age shares its basic idea that what we do matters, that it is important, that some things are better than others and that we are on an evolution-vector. However, as Modernism gave way to the post-modernist despondency, which sees no difference between cultures, races or ideas, and where one’s emotions are the supreme judge of value and even permissibility of anything, the feedback loop of “I have the right to feel good”, and “everything that doesn’t feel good violates my rights and is evil”, quickly brings the entire thing to the point of structural collapse, because truth was relativized and warped and raped so much, it no longer means anything outside of “the thing that makes me feel good”. The entire community “followed their bliss” into an autistic echo-chamber that isolated itself from all diverging opinions so much that it fails to make sense to anyone who is not already heavily invested in the system. Having started as a Modernistic evolutionary system that makes clear judgments about right and wrong, better and worse, superior and inferior, and defines greatest good in terms that make sense and make demands upon the individual, the transformation into a post-modernistic state, where everything goes as long as it feels good to the individual, where “heart-centered” female spirituality of emotions dominates the narrative and is explained as God-based and an achievement in itself, and every idea that compromises the “I feel love” emotional state is perceived as disruptive, negative and, essentially, evil, degraded the whole movement. By creating a framework that is perfectly unappealing to the best minds, it committed intellectual and spiritual suicide and is now a decadent backwater of the stupid, narcissistic and cowardly.