I Will Always Be the One I Never Was

When life seems to be going well and full of promise, identification with the imaginary self that is living his life increases, he gets swept away on a tide of optimism and forgets to pay attention to what is actually happening. Within no time, the chemicals released in the body by (or as) positive feelings have caused the body to burn out. And so the comedown is inevitable.

Every time his mind wandered into fantasy, he brought it back by looking at the people and things around him and taking in the moment as best he could. Life was a living movie of infinite variation. How absurd it was to want anything besides whatever was happening in that moment, when the moment was so infinitely rich that he could only ever observe the smallest fraction of it. Every time his eye fell on something, he recognized how he could have missed that sight if he had been following his pointless thoughts instead. How much he did miss, every single second!

If we got enlightened tomorrow, how much would our plans change? Would we drop everything, or would we continue just as we had been? Maybe it was time to simply act, boldly, to make decisions, and not be continuously questioning, doubting, and wondering what was best? Weren't we forever waiting for something better to come along, like prima donnas turning down all the offers just in case a better one comes in. And prima donnas wind up sad and lonely has-beens, or worse, never-have-beens.

What made him timid and cautious was when he believed in his story: the story he was busy spinning with his mind with every fantasy, fond memory, and hope for the future. It was only when he invested in that bright future which he was inventing out of the handpicked fragments of the present moment that he lost the treasure that was always before him. In fact, it didn’t matter, because he wasn't really choosing anything anyway. All his mental gymnastics were after the fact. They were a narrative overlay to sustain the illusion of the artificial intelligence of the self, the illusion that he was running the system, rather than being run by it. 

There was no future. There never would be or could be. The future was only the futile attempt of the past to assert itself and make things come out differently. And since the past was dead, the future was forever unborn.

To separate purpose from circumstance was impossible. To try and create perfect circumstances and then to use them as a platform to act with purpose and meaning from — was impossible. It was impossible because he wasn’t some intelligence acting on or in his life. He was nothing but life, one individual expression of it among an unimaginable multitude of individual expressions. And all circumstances were the right ones. That was the problem with all his fantasies. They were irrelevant. If he was lucky, if his circumstances were improving, it could only be because life had a purpose for him. It was up to him to become that, to allow his improved circumstances to generate a corresponding new purpose and meaning to inhabit them.

There were so many things happening all the time. He was witness to them all, yet he noticed only an infinitesimal fragment. He was truly deranged, with his endless immersion in an internally generated dialogue that told him absolutely nothing about what was going on. NOTHING! He could STOP that nonsense any time, and his suffering would die with it. But time was running out, and his impoverishment became more nakedly apparent to him with every passing moment, every dying breath.

DIE DIE DIE!!!

Do it now, while there is still time! After you are dead it will be too late.

Who? Me? I am already dead, dead, dead. Don’t you see? This has to end now! Right now! What? It already ended? Every second it ends. Why? Because, because, because: it never never never started.

This post is my swan song. Nothing will change. I cannot write my way to enlightenment. I will always be the one I never was—an image projected by the desire to be admired. So bye bye. While you are looking and pointing, what is behind the shadowy cloud of this mind slips through the needle’s eye, and Infinity wins again, like it always will.

Bye bye.

Reload, reload, reload! (The Shaman is a Schizo After All?)

Everyone with an interest in these subjects knows that there is an overlap between “shamanic” or “spiritual” perceptions and so-called “schizophrenic” ones. I have always assumed, without question, that (as I think RD Laing said), the shaman is able to swim in waters which the schizophrenic is drowning in. In other words, that schizophrenia was a mishandled or distorted experience of deeper, “shamanic” reality.

But what if the reverse is the case? What if shamans and gurus and spiritual people are simply those who have so fully adapted to - learned to navigate and communicate - their schizoid delusions that they are able to create (or connect with) believers in it, leading to sub-communities and counter-cultures in which delusional thought-forms became experiential reality?

Uhhhhh….

I’m not saying this is what I think. I have known a least a couple of shaman-guru types who do seem a lot more balanced and sane than, say, Richard Dawkins. All I’m saying is—how can we be sure?

It’s a bit of a paradox, because if delusional belief is powerful enough to “create” false realities, then that idea itself confirms the schizoid/shamanic view of reality. In Dawkins’ view of things, the belief in God isn’t enough to create strong evidence for the existence of God, and so Dawkins looks like a chump and a poor scientist because he dismisses anything that challenges his argument, like those zealots who refused to look into Galilleo's telescope because they already knew he was insane. What I am positing would not please Dawkins and his ilk any more than it would your average New Ager: that belief is strong enough to create mental projections which will confirm that belief, but which are not sourced in anything objectively real.

This would have to allow the fundamental premise of both shamanic and schizophrenic experience: that everything is consciousness and that physical reality is therefore subject to change in accord with changes in (our) consciousness. However, if the assumption of a separate self, soul, or entity (including a Creator God) from which consciousness arises is erroneous, or at least unnecessary to the fundamental premise, then every subsequent perception that’s predicated on that idea (of a creator or experiencer) would also be false. 

God, spirits, angels, devils, the psyche, archetypes, shamans, gurus—anything in short that has any sort of empirical authority or meaning within the larger context of a living consciousness system—would all just be elaborate thought forms generated by that fundamental schizophrenia which underlies all “spiritual” and “shamanic” belief systems whatsoever.

Holy false reality models, Batman! Is it time to go back to the scrying mirror!?

It's All in the Head

It occurred to me last night that whole notion of a self separate from the body may arise from the basic fact that four of our five senses are located in the head. This creates a "perceptual bias" in which the organism becomes "top-heavy" so to speak and we begin to experience a perceiving self (head) that is separate from the body.

I wonder if this imbalance really kicked in when man learned to walk upright? (Norman O. Brown suggested something of the sort.) Maybe that coincided with the inception of thought, which arose out of necessity when instincts became insufficiently nuanced to navigate the spectrum of possibilities. (Eg when self-preservation instinct was equally opposed by procreative instinct and the organism had to "decide" between the two.)

The Body's Silent Intelligence Vs Free Will

 And you may ask yourself - "How did I get here?"

What does the body know?

Homo Serpiens Disclaimer & Apologia

To a reader of Homo Serpiens who had some very specific questions about the content: 

You did send this email to the right place BUT I am no longer the person who wrote that book. 

Here's what I would say about it now: relatively little of what is in there can be called 'knowledge' in any real sense, because it is largely filtered through or leavened by belief. Of that little there is that can be called real knowledge, even less could be called practical knowledge. 

At most, as I suggest in the preface, the book is a sort of dream-autobiography, an account of my own inner creative/fantasy life which happens to use factual and semi-factual and mythical "information" (narratives) as raw material. It's like a movie that uses real-life people for characters to tell a fictional story (Nic Roeg's Eureka comes to mind). It's really a novel disguised as non-fiction. 

To whatever degree I believed the things I wrote in that book, I have been hampered and even imprisoned by those beliefs, beliefs which have next to no practical function in my day to day existence. I feel somewhat embarrassed to read your questions, and to realize how seriously people are taking the book (I receive next to no "fan mail" for it, so at least I can deduce the book isn't reaching that many people). However, it may be that part of the function of the book is to cause a satiation in occult knowledge in the reader and so to drive home just how useless this sort of knowledge really is. Actually, it is worse than useless, because we believe that it is not useless and try to apply it. We try to interpret existence through the lens of belief, whether it's occult, religious, or spiritual (or for that matter any kind of belief), instead of basing our interpretations exclusively on the evidence of our senses (by which I would include logical thought and intuition). 

Another, simpler but more poetic way to say this is that none of what is described in the book is true because it is based on the false premise that we, as human beings, exist as separate individual identities. Homo Serpiens is a book about ideas, not facts, but to some degree this is true of any historical account, since people do not exist, only the idea of people exists, and so on. That's all that matters, waking up from the personal and collective nightmare of history which tells you that you exist, and that's the only thing to gain from staring at the details of the dream state. If you become fascinated by the content rather than tracing it back to the source, that will only take you deeper into the dream state. 

And what is the source? Where do these dreams come from? The same place thought comes from, which is the same place the idea of "you" comes from. Nowhere. 

There is thought without thinker, dreams without a dreamer, and a story without a storyteller. All that is happening is life and all there is to life is this present moment. Knowledge refers to the past, and so unless it has some immediate practical application (how to open a can of beans), then it cannot help us to navigate the present. 

Therefore I suggest that you forget all your questions and forget all about the ideas in Homo Serpiens, and ask yourself the only question that really matters. 

What am I?

Cesar Teruel's Laughter of Not-Knowing

See here for my impressions of Cesar

You Too Can Be An Enlightening Transmitter!

As the new look and title of this blog suggests, it’s time for something completely different.  The above video was made by Sanna, a Finnish friend whom I met on a recent Dave Oshana retreat in Finland called “Ego Death.” I haven’t talked about Dave or the Enlightenment Transmission at this blog until now. (I wrote an account of my relationship with Dave a few months back; I may post it here in a little while.) Partly I kept my silence because I wasn’t sure how people would react to my finding another spiritual teacher so soon after the last (you might start calling me a spiritual slut). But I guess now is the time to let the secret out, especially since I am currently living in Estonia, which is next to Finland, having attended the Easter E.T retreat (which Sanna also attended), and planning to go to the Summer one in July.

When I saw Sanna’s video I liked it enough to want to share it with other people, which gave me the idea to post it here. That then gave me the idea of changing this blog into something different. Funnily enough, the last re-name I gave the blog (in a seemingly endless series of re-names) was “Exquisite Corpse,” which comes from a Surrealist game of group-creativity. I liked the phrase, even though it didn’t accurately describe a one-person blog. Now, “coincidentally,” I am thinking about using this space to host creative work and personal expressions besides my own, starting with Sanna (and I hope other members of the secret “E.T” team).

After however many years it’s been of banging my own drum, tooting my own horn, and grinding my axe, I feel ready to place whatever skills I have learned in service of a more collective endeavor. Team work.

It’s pretty hard to teach a dog new tricks or to get a leopard to change his spots. Even writing this post is proving pretty difficult. But I aim to follow through as best I can with this intention. So — if anyone has any work they’d like to see at this blog, that they think would be well placed here, let me know.

Of course, everyone has their own blogs now, and it’s not as though you’d be getting into Rolling Stone magazine or anything. So why would you want to put your stuff here rather than at your own space? Well for one thing, I have lots of followers (mostly silent ones). But more importantly,  there’s the potential for blogs to become more community-oriented spaces, which might meet the demands which are currently being “served” (i.e., exploited) by sites like Facebook and Twitter. Maybe, instead of getting sucked into one great corporate space and fleeced and fattened by Mammon, we can start creating our own specialized communities, inside of which we can co-create, communicate, and interrelate?

That’s my idea anyway, loosely improvised as a way to introduce and give context to Sanna’s lovely video above. I encourage you all to go and make your own version of personal expression, and, while I can’t promise to put it at this site, I can promise to watch it. Some of it anyway. In Sanna's video, in my opinion, there’s nothing superfluous, so be sure and watch it all the way through, especially since otherwise you may miss seeing Black Superman!! & I assure you, that's an experience you would not want to miss.

And if you think you qualify for active participation at ET Anonymous, send me an email, or post at the comments section below, and tell us why!

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.

***

Account now deactivated, in process of deletion.

The Infamous Strieber Article, Part One

What the UFO Wants From YOU!

The Joke

i begin to see why

words beg for play

seriously trying to express truth with words

has to be a joke

so far as we can satisfy our minds

by describing truth with words

we only become that much more attached

to words

and that much further from truth

the better the menu looks

the more likely we are

to eat it

seriously!

aaarggh

Language as Disease & Language as Play

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. . . . My aim is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. . . He who understands me finally recognizes [my propositions] as senseless." Wittgenstein.

from Norman Brown's Life Against Death:

"Language as disease and language as play - the two meet in the concept of neurotic play, that is to say, magic. . . . Now if we can say that language is diseased in so far as it contains magical qualities, in so far as it reflects a belief in the reality of thoughts and wishes, we are able to trace the magical quality of language to its organic connection with the narcissistic phase of infantile sexual development, the phase in which the child develops the pure pleasure-ego. For the world of the pure pleasure-ego is a dream world, a world constructed out of 'neurotic currency' in which wishes are true - though for the child this currency is not neurotic, since he knows nothing of the conflict of the pleasure-principle and the reality-principle and his unreal world is his real world. And by the same token it is a world of play, in which the representation of the gratified wish is accepted as real. And in effect . . . it IS real. . . Language as play and language as disease are the two sides of language as wish-fulfillment thinking, and wish-fulfillment thinking is a legacy of childhood indelible in our minds, carrying the secret project of the pure pleasure-ego, the search for an erotic sense of reality."

"Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that progress.

"Christian theology, or at least Agustinian theology, recognizes human restlessness and discontent, the cor irrequietum, as the psychological source of the historical process. But Christian theology, to account for the origin of human discontent and to indicate a solution, has to take man out of this real world, out of the animal kingdom, and inculcate him into delusions of grandeur. And this Christian theology commits its own worst sin, the sin of pride.

..."the proof that human needs are not what they seem to be lies precisely in the fact of human history. The Faustian restlessness of man in history shows that men are not satisfied by the satisfaction of their conscious desires; men are unconscious of their real desires. Thus a psychology of history must be psychoanalytical.

"Lacking the doctrine of repression - or rather not being able to see man as a psychological riddle - Marx ... turns to biology and postulates an absolute law of human biology that the satisfaction of human needs always generates new needs. If human discontent is thus biologically driven, it is incurable. . . But Marx's assumption of a biological basis for "progress" in history really amounts to a confession that he is unable to explain it psychologically.

"Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of "progress," but only by viewing history as a neurosis. . . . By the same token, psychoanalysis offers a theoretical framework for exploring the possibility of a way out of the nightmare of endless "progress" and endless Faustian discontent, a way out of human neurosis, a way out of history. . . . If historical consciousness is finally transformed into psychoanalytical consciousness, the grip of the dead hand of the past on life in the present would be loosened, and man would be ready to live instead of making history, to enjoy instead of paying back old scores and debts, and to enter that state of Being which was the goal of his Becoming."