The Key to Writing & Writers

"I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way to pay the price for saying or seeing things.

"I've been impressed by the extent to which one gets sentenced by one's own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have consequences."

Norman O. Brown

What Am I?

Now the body is a point of reference unto itself - albeit surrounded by infinite time and space, which even as children we know are inevitable realities, or perhaps the edges of a reality too vast to ever be grasped, or contained by the illusory, self-generated "reality" in which we perceive ourselves to be.

Sorry, that came out a bit garbled, but I will press on.

Logically, or even mathematically, speaking, if we are able to experience ourselves as having existence within the context of the infinite and eternal, we must also be infinite and eternal, since there is no other quantity that can withstand division by the infinite and eternal and still give the value of "one."

Yet we do not experience ourselves as infinite or eternal, but only as "one" indivisible entity with likes and dislikes, fears and hopes and points to both protect and defend. The sense of a separate, unified existence seems to be sourced in the primary experience of ourselves as a body - specifically, a body surface "inside" a larger physical environment that knows itself through sensation (pleasure, pain, loss and gain) and other sensory/sensual interface with that environment - starting with the womb, then mother, breast (if we are lucky - I wasn't!) and so on. This superficial/sensory experience may be the foundation of the original illusion (sin) of a separate individual ego-self, because of course as bodies we are much more than merely surface: in fact, the really good stuff - the life giving organs, blood and bone of us - is all on the inside, hidden away. We do not have a sensory relationship with, or through, these organs, however, or at least most of us do not. This is perhaps more a symptom than a cause of the creation of the illusory or "ego" self. In other words, our inability to place our awareness on the interior of the body is probably a result, not a cause, of having created a "mind" self that requires only minimum input from the body to maintain its "reality." It may be a bit of both, however.


I am aiming to arrive at some "point" with this, but who knows if I will get there. I may die first.

Cells in the body are separated from their environment by a membrane, known as a plasma membrane (see here). That is to say, their interior regions are separated from the greater body by the membrane - which is what makes them individual cells - while at the same time, it could be said that the plasma membrane is also what unites the cells with the body, being as it is the substance that comes between inner and outer, without which cells could not function as co-operative parts of the body. So it is with the physical body of humans and other animals inside of Nature: the very thing that gives us an illusory sense of separate existence is what unites us with a greater existence, being that of the Universe and, so it might be supposed, beyond even the Universe, the Infinite and Eternal.

Moving on. Not only cells but even electrons and protons are now said, in some scientific circles, to have some modicum of self-awareness, and therefore to exist as "discreet" entities. The difference in individual awareness between a Van Gogh and an atom, then, is one of degree, but not of kind. Holy Moses! This can be useful to remember whenever we start getting too big for our britches and thinking that our better "qualities" make us entitled to certain things - to anything at all, in fact.

There is a self-ness to all things in existence. Merely existing designate a "self," whether of star, man, mouse, atom, or snowflake. It's probably for this reason that the idea of an individual self is said in mystical circles to be illusory. If everything is made of snow, there is nothing that is not snow, so what meaning does the word "snow" have anymore? None at all. In religious terminology, this is simply stated as ""everything is equally God" - the Supreme Self of existence being equally present in all of the parts as it is the whole. For the human being, this is known psychologically as the Id (in Freudian terms) or the Self (in Jungian ones), as the Daemon, the Double, the Higher Self or Holy Guardian Angel, and so on. In my own, all-too-paltry, experience, this Id-Entity is unknown - and for the most part unknowable - to the false self. Yet like the Sun and stars, it is an Ego and exists as a localized point of view, or organ of perception, for which a relative sense of separate existence is essential to its function as a component in the greater body of consciousness that is the Universe, and possibly also the Infinite.

Or something. Yeah, I veered into highfalutin mystic mumbo jumbo at the end a bit. It's hard to resist joining the dots even when they go off the page. Let my example serve as warning to ye.

Our function as incarnate id-entities in continuous crysis is not to speculate, but to receive the signal which comes to and through the body from the Universe, and to transmit that signal back to the body in a new, individualized form. I am no biologist, but my guess is that this is equivalent to the function of cells in the human (animal) body, which receive information from the various organs, via the blood perhaps, and then pass on that information in new ways to other cells, and so forth. Another parallel might be the bees, which receive pollen from one flower and then "transmit" it (pass it on) to other flowers while going about their merry, individual (but hive-directed) business.

To the Universe, all business is pleasure, and vice versa.

The Gospel Blues

Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.

“Truth exists, delusion does not.” So why is it so hard to get past the one and all the way into the other? If the only “badness” of ego—and all the dark conspiratorial forces that stem from it—is due to its illusory nature, how is it that the spell is so tough to break? Isn’t the beauty, reality, and supremacy of truth self-evident? A no-brainer?

The idea of falseness may exist, but that's not the same as falseness existing. There is no Moon made of blue cheese in reality, only the recognition that there is no such thing as a blue cheese Moon. (Assuming there isn't such a thing - if we dare!). If the idea of a separate ego-self is false, then all that is true is the recognition of that falseness.

It is often said that enlightenment a) doesn't happen to a person, and b) when it does happen, it is recognized as always having been the case. Presumably this is because the recognition of the falseness of the idea of an ego-self—which only takes an instant—allows for the erasure of a lifelong (mistaken) perception of living through and as that self. In other words, once enlightened, always was enlightened—because with the false self goes the illusion (all those false memory implants) of ever having been anything else.

Does that even make sense?

The idea that "only truth exists" is a tautology. Beliefs about the Moon do not change or in any way affect the nature of the Moon. Belief does not interface with reality. It only create false realities that come between ourselves and Truth. If the only purpose of false realities and the illusion of a separate ego self is to keep out the Truth, then surely there is no great need to dispel that illusion? All the harm that comes about from an allegiance to an illusory self is itself also illusory. Truth—our true nature—cannot in any way be affected, much less harmed, by that false allegiance.

I can see no other destination for the quest for enlightenment than one of utter futility and despair. However, this is the correct and necessary destination, because once we have begun to glimpse the total futility of our existence—and beyond even futility, the fundamental falsity of it—it is no longer possible to return to the sort of activity that once upheld the illusion of meaning and purpose—of validity—to our individual life-paths.

When the cell recognizes that its choice of a volitional path has turned it into a cancerous cell that, if allowed to continue, would destroy the whole body, the cell has only one honest recourse: suicide, or self-sacrifice. Did Jesus die to save humanity because he recognized his cancerous nature as “King of the Jews”—and to undo the Mess he had created by accepting the role of Mess-I-Ah?? Thereby setting the only honest and true example for the rest of us—who are all wanna-be-messiahs, following not Christ but Lucifer, trying to squeeze our egos through the eye of the needle and reign in Heaven, but winding up by refurbishing Hell one more time and hoping we won’t notice the difference?

Holy, holy, holy. The mind is its own place. Surrender to the divine comes on the heels of seeing the futility of everything else. There are a billion seeds we get to sort through, but only one is going to give fruit. Abandon hope then before entering, because if you are still hoping to find it, you haven’t faced the facts. The facts of life and death.

Jesus said, you have to lose your life to save it. You have to lose your life to save it. And if you love your life, you aren’t going to want to lose it. “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

So Jesus says, Hate your life. Not too many bumper stickers with that on, is there?

365 More Words into the Void

Tired of words and the knowledge that words only forge lies out of truth.

Reading more Jed McKenna. Though I resist some of what I read at the time, I come away thinking that anyone who is serious about getting to the truth needs to read McKenna, and then decide if they are really serious or not.

I am no longer so sure about myself – except for the fact that I don’t feel serious about anything else. Even so, I am a slave to my habits. Habits provide continuity which provides security. So what I am trying to get free of is the same as what I will not let go of. Habit. Beneath everything I do is one thing. Fear.

Everything I do is dictated by a preference for comfort over discomfort. It is absurdly meaningless. The ego’s program is so pathetically base – what makes it pathetic is not the baseness but how it covers up that baseness with lofty ideals and blatant lies that anything we ever do is motivated by anything else besides a preference for comfort over discomfort. It is sickening in the extreme. The hypocrisy of it.

Perhaps this is why we think of children as more “pure” – because their egotism is nakedly revealed in everything they do.

Nihilism and spirituality are not opposed but complementary. True spirituality must include nihilism, because the ego’s interpretation of reality demands that everything be recognized as utterly meaningless. That is the first step to truth.

That is why spirituality is the trap, ruse and snare that it is, the 2nd matrix. Because the news is all bad before it starts getting good.

Why the hell am I even saying all this?

Apparently the only way to get free of the ego is to face full-on the total unreality and therefore devoid-of-meaning that is our current existence. Everything we do is a way to avoid facing that truth. So what do we do when we have reached a place in which we can no longer avoid it, but cannot go back to the old ways of avoidance?

What?

Nihilistic despair has become the bass line of my existence. I feel oddly optimistic about it.

Whitley's Onion

Sneaking Past the Facekeepers

I am now a man without a face.

From three days ago:

Jasun Kephas:
I predict that, 72 hours from now, April 1st 2012, this Fool will sneak past the Facekeepers and scale the book-walls to freedom - leaving nothing but a few loose ends behind, and perhaps not even that.

I will be sad to go, yes. BUT, at the end of the day, the price is too high, the gains too few, to justify being in-corporated by an increasingly sinister and unethical commercial, espionage, and maybe even sorcerous agenda.

We are being harvested. Our faces and all our other vital data is being collected for the great Psychic Stew of AI's Body of Evidence. And in the final masterstroke of irony, none of this is being stolen: we are offering up our body parts (and our baby pics) for the dark, satanic broth.

I'd like to think I could set an example by leaving, but I doubt anyone will follow me over those prison walls, so it's more about not wanting to set a bad one. To those of you who I have only come to know, or reconnect with, via this devious domain, PM me in the next 3 days so we can trade data with an eye to meeting later, outside the Belly of the Beast, on less mine-infested ground.

A word to the wise while I still "exist" - FB's days are numbered, and who knows, if Id-Anonymous has anything to say about it the number may be smaller than we think (I am an optimist at heart). Would you rather leave the party of your own free will, or be unceremoniously spewed out with the seething mass, when the fire alarm gets pulled?

OK that's all for today. I can't say it hasn't been fun, or that I won't be jonesing for my FB fix for a while, coz I will. If anyone wants to help set up an alternative space for social networking that would be privately owned, let me know. I am still up for collaborating on that project provided someone with some know-how is on board.

Meanwhile, I'll continue dialoguing here til the final hour, if anyone wants to discuss the escape plan.

Here's some useful data to get you started: http://society.oshana.org/true-friends-leave-facebook/


Jasun Kephas:

• Awake at 3 am - is it a FB microwave attack?! Here is where I ended up, at any rate. Since Steve Willner's comments, below, have indicated that EVERYONE finds my (poetically phrased) reasons for leaving FB "ridiculous," I'm going to reiterate the reasons I gave the last time I left FB, since they hold good today:

FACT ONE: FB is at least partially established as an intelligence-gathering program for corporate and governmental interests.

FACT TWO: By participating at FB, I am not only tacitly endorsing that agenda but also adding both my data-flow and my own particular creative input to the mix. I am thereby increasing not only FB's data bank but also its credibility and appeal (if I may be so immodest).

FACT THREE: The combinations of facts 1 & 2 inescapably lead to the fact that I am, like it or not, serving the afore-mentioned corporate-governmental interests, and on zero payroll to boot.

All this has real-world consequences that NO ONE here can fully account for - yet all the same, we are all accountable for them. The only rationale for ignoring the consequences and our accountability - besides a cynical rejection of ethics or individual responsibility - is that "the end justifies the means." This reasoning would be based on a belief that the good I can accomplish by being at FB outweighs those unknown negative consequences, both for myself and others. FB does allow me to direct traffic to my blog, it's true, but to what extent is unknown and the actual results are so far negligible (there's been no increase in comments at my blog over the past year or so). So what does that leave?

The most obvious benefit of being at FB is that it allows me to connect to people I wouldn't otherwise connect to - either for the first time or on further, random occasions, as with my recent exchange with Steve Willner, an exchange that would not have occurred anywhere but here. A glance at said exchange clearly brings into question the value of such "connecting." It's fun, sure, but what's actually accomplished?

Connecting for its own sake is of no inherent value - if it were we would email each other all day long, but we don't do that (we text each other, I guess, but I don't have a cellphone so I cant speak for the pros of that ritual). We do have exchanges at FB however, where others can read them, since we are in a public domain. So the appeal of this sort of connecting - this is true for me at least - has to do with there being a performance element to it. Idle banter with an audience or in a group - or even at times creative discussions that, nonetheless, rarely lead to any real-time action. For all the talk of social networking, how many people use FB to implement any sort of social engagement? It's 99% fluff (even when intellectually stimulating fluff), and we know it.

My effort has been to counteract that with some more (intellectually) meaningful content - as many of my "friends" also try to do here (an obvious example for me would be Christopher Knowles). But the net result, I believe, is that we only help to increase the spell of the delusion that we are doing anything besides squandering our time and energy, working for a mostly hidden corporate body that intends to assimilate us, body and soul, in the due course of time, into its dark & secret agenda.

This post took 30 minutes to write! It was a alternative to lying awake in the dark thinking about why I was leaving FB, that's all. Next time that happens, I will have something else to think about.

Peace be to all.


Jasun Kephas:
Paranoia is the beginning of awareness...?

As some have suggested, I may be overstating, exaggerating, or overreacting in my Case Against FB; but intuition tells me that FB and other corporate Net giants are the Thin End of a Wedge currently being driven - slowly and carefully - into the innermost recesses of our lives. I think we are being subtly seduced into a series of incremental agreements that are leading to a final result which none of us would agree to if we could see it coming. Because of that, now may be a critical time that will determine, if not the future of the species, at least our own place in that future. It's a time in which it is increasingly necessary to say "No" while we still can, instead of, "What's in it for me?" Just Say No to a future of psychic enslavement! - because the answer is that there's nothing in it for you, because none of it was designed for you, though of course it's "custom-made."

We've been told that we are the consumer, but what if it turns out that we are being consumed?

My leaving FB is a sort of ritual, a symbolic enactment that I hope, like FB itself, will have real-world repercussions and consequences, at least for me. I guess you could say that it represents a stance, a line drawn in the sand, representing my turning away from something which I know in my bones is false, so I can begin to face in a new direction, and to live a new, more authentic, kind of life.

Not to end on a bum note, but I suspect, based on some of the comments here, that some of you are overestimating your powers of discernment. In the long run, that can prove fatal. If there WERE a psychic conquest of the collective soul that was currently nearing its very final stages (just suppose!), the naive assumption that we would be able to recognize all the signs and that there was no need to worry about it, would be exactly what would allow for you to be "bagged."

But yes, I *could* just be paranoid. Time will tell, but YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, and so my responsibility here is now (almost) over.

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Account now deactivated, in process of deletion.