Once upon a time, in some out-of-the-way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.
― Nietzsche
This week’s episode we spoke about breathing general, types of breathing, why energetic breathing is different to other forms of breathing, and how I believe a good breath should work for us all in our day to day lives. A little of my journey and how I arrived at these understandings, and a few details on why the commonly promoted nose breathing, or slowing breathing down while good is nowhere near enough. Not for serious practitioners. We talked at the end, as we seem to now, on the doing vs thinking dichotomy. This keeps coming up as it’s a critical part of self-transcendence, and given the Zeitgeist of the present time, the violent passivity induced by our distractions and strategies, it’s worth offering up regularly as a counter view.
I had a few wines under my belt. Realised on editing I wasn't as sharp as I thought and missed some things I wanted to add. Nevertheless, there are some nice technical details for the 3 of you engaging in the supreme battle of the higher executive centres vs the primitive centres. The akshual battle for the age.
HYPERSPERGERY
I, and Kevin also, but more so me I’d say, consistently rag on hyper-sperg intellectualism, pointless philosophical and political arguments. We see them for what they mostly are: an enormous distraction, indulgence and ultimately a waste of precious time. I know when I go down that rabbit hole I need help remembering the totally important opinion or idea I had 2 minutes ago. Yesterday….what was important…Let alone last week…Last year…? And so on.
In this respect, my claim has always been simple: thinking is not what we think it is, and the terms "self-referential, thinking, sentient beings" are complete misnomers. Betraying grave misunderstandings of the fundamental nature of conscious awareness and our experience of the world.
Thinking is really nothing more than a set of adapted reactions. Self-consciousness is not self-consciousness as we think it to be. For this reason, emotional or rational appeals to our belief in free will are illusory and delusional.
When people say that most humans appear to have no soul, I believe they refer to this general psycho-physiological scenario I’m describing. No real self-consciousness, not even a spark of it. Chatbots. In truth, we all have a lot of this going on.
This is the significant problem we face as an animal.
I laugh or roll my eyes when humans online habitually act superiorly with words and concepts. As if they know themselves and the world better and more definitively than all others, and these magical sound utterances in some way define them differently. As they sit on the toilet in the morning scrolling their phones. I disagree that thinking yourself into something better is possible. On a deeper level, whenever I feel this tendency now, I try to find something I’m covering up. Something I’ve not faced.
I believe it’s right to say, without self-reflection and work, most things we say and think well-up atomically from a place of almost total ignorance. This taints what we say with a kind of simian nastiness or commonness, what I have termed copelessness.
You heard that here first - "copelessness" - this shapes almost everything we do. Rightly or wrongly, unless something goes really bad, we tend not to bother really thinking about whys. And nature seems to be fine with this. Just so long as we stay off the slab long enough to pop out some units. Ensuring things go on much as they always have.
We are not conscious, nor are we wilful. Any talk of wilfulness is rather absurd in this way. Blind will is much closer to the mark - Schopenhauer correctly diagnosed this I believe. One of the ways the illusion of wilfulness occurs is through the hypnotising nature of words and concepts. We have extraordinarily fruitful fantasy lives. Although I think Nietzsche was right to assume some degree of wilfulness is possible - it's just as far as I can see, no one knows how it is possible. More on such technologies below.
LAYERS OF DECEPTION
As some of you know, I have recently been editing some footage of a group analysis session with Dr Christopher S Hyatt. There is a willing group there prepared for this endeavour. He drills down on each person himself in the group's presence but also uses the group's judgements as a form of analysis of each individual at the seminar.
Through various clever devices, he lays bare the many of the attendees true motivations for certain behaviours or courses of action in life. What is always amazing is how many layers of falsehood we can build up upon our rather pedestrian biological drives. We are just really, really confused. It's funny to watch the lengths we can go to to avoid, at all costs, having to acknowledge the truth of what we want. And why we want it. To face up to what we are or the situations we put ourselves in. The true reasons for our apparently self-aware reactions to challenges in life.
Most of us know well that we can maintain these vast knots of lies for many years before something forces them to unravel. Entire lifetimes are spent expending vast resources and energies on maintaining these narratives. Great misery is often preferential to facing the truth. Many will never get to the bottom of what's happening to them. At best, some will get a shrink to patch it up with feel-good Instagram platitudes. It's easy to tell with victims of modern psychologists that, deep down, there's still a significant degree of "questioning anxiety". Underneath those deranged positivity/motivational posts.
So, I've been trying my hardest to present this work and what it is getting at as clearly as possible. It is an exceedingly tricky message to convey because of our strong desire to hide our pettiness under a cloak of superiority. Superiority feels goods. We can imagine ourselves into feeling good. And imagination is cheap. Very cheap.
A type of non-intellectual insight, one that has broken the back of fantasy, seems to be required to truly understand the position those like Dr Hyatt, Gurdjieff and others put forward.
I am starting to suspect that, sadly, most people are simply largely incapable. It is apparent with comments and DM's that many people don't have the faintest idea of what's being said. I don’t mean this arrogantly, but it poses some challenges. This I believe to some degree this is an autistic problem on my part, and I am trying to improve my clarity in communicating such ideas with every post.
The Bioindividual Oddcast is an excellent first step in this direction for those who can concentrate for a few hours.
"Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."
― Nietzsche
To get it out of the way, I believe eugenics will form a part of this transition mans attributes. This is usually the solution offered online by many of Nietzsches' adherents. Warfare and selective breeding. I think elements of these things are promising since, as far as I can tell, nature left alone doesn't have too much interest in even a basic quality right now. But more is needed for all the reasons I have discussed ad-neuseam here before.
For those that insist it is enough, I have questions. I believe this outlook reveals a kind of half-understanding of what we are; what human nature really is. The problem of biological limitations runs far deeper than this. Even in the "eugenically bred", many of the same limitations would apply. The same hardware remains, with roughly the same processes. If Nietzsche were around today with access to the information we have access to, he would agree with this assessment. This is not to say you could selectively breed in profound and interesting ways. Alas.
Gurdjieff once said, "We are sleepers trapped in a nightmare".
Cue religious technologies.
The question I often ask regarding meditation or breathing techniques, yogas and different physical cultures is “why did humans have the motivation to develop these physiological processes to start with?” Many of these exercises are as old as us. This being the case suggests something about us as a species.
No other animal does this. If we were like other animals, surely we would just get along with being as we are? Without trying to change it? And it's true; most of us do just this.
I think more is needed to explain why these things arose. Some people, like the heckin' religious right describe these practices as a kind of sinful desecration, or in the case of based right wing evo scientists - some kind of genetic pathology. Retvrn to the Glorious Stone Age enjoyers think that these things developed as a means to return to what we once were. Re-primitivising tech.
Other people beat me incessantly with mid-witted critiques like "denial of will" or other silliness to explain an ascetic practice stemming from the practitioner's inability to face life. To be fair, the typical variations of these claims contain some elements of truth. Yet overall they are woefully incomplete and more often than not, completely mistaken.
Part of the poor analysis stems from the fact that those making the claims and assumptions are irredeemable wordcels; they simply can't see how there can be knowing outside of the concepts in their heads. They haven't practised or experimented with the thing they speak about. They can't see the practice's impact as a result.
Many people who do practice have attached religious notions to their experiences, meaning that while they may have the experience or "states" they only see it through a religious or moral framework. And tend to direct it towards whatever end that tradition sets out.
The question remains, why not just stay as we are? A chimpanzee or a cat stays as it is, with no desire for self-directed change. So why do we seem to create psycho-physiological practices?
….Man is a rope tied between beast and overman - a rope over an abyss.
The answer to this is probably way more straightforward than we would like to admit. I believe it goes like this. Primitives experienced pain or dissatisfaction with their haphazard adaptational physiology and its reactivity to different new environments.
They recognised on some level the severe limitation of their cognition and cognition of their limitation - because of the pain or poor results obtained from being highly reactive. They saw that they were being lived by their drives in negative and often hilariously self-defeating ways. So in a high-level way, these self-change processes came out of nature itself as an adaption. Suggesting they are here for a reason, a perhaps yet not fully realised reason. Not merely as pathology. Why else would we bother?
The ancients designed physiological exercises and saw changes. Physiological technologies. Some of them codified the changes into religions or movements. They time-bound the learnings with language, myth and metaphor. Developed doctrines to help explain the implications of what was going on - in their languages and as per the understanding and spirit of their times.
For example, the Wim Hof grift is predicated on holding your breath. A tonne of science shows that if you hold your breath for a minute or so, a rapid decrease in markers of emotional reactivity and rumination occurs. This is old science and has been known for many decades. Problems or anxieties tend to be strongly attenuated with this deprivation. It's not so hard to see how over time our ancestors would have noticed such things. Developing quite elaborate systems, pushing the sophistication and limits of what is possible. Methods for controlling the physiology - or upgrading it, so they become, even in small ways over time, more than human.
Evidence is emerging, for example, of our ability to switch specific genes on and off with many traditional body-based practices.
Split brain patients show how balancing our brain hemispheres lends us more creativity and intelligence and a better experience of life….And how meditation or whatever else just happens to provide the perfect means for doing so...
Meditation creates the growth of neural fibre connection between brain centres, even on the corpus callosum itself, facilitating enhanced communication between hemispheres.
And the list goes on…
What's impressive is the ancients intuited all this. And now, we can see many of the tangible physical changes that many practices create. The power of these ancient systems is now undeniable.
I see this inheritance as one of the tools the bridge man will require. I believe this is the sole reason the drive towards these practices developed in us. A small subset of humans just became sick of being human, and wanted something more.
The next age, I claim, the post-human epoch, will be the age of the conscious manipulation of physiology for actual superiority.
A word on the lack of broad applicability…Much of this work was considered "esoteric" because it was recognised as extremely dangerous to show the world as it is to the sheeple. The horrors of the existence they dream their way through merrily.
So it was always better to dress it up with talk of heavens, the ability to condemn your naughty enemies to hells, and many other comforting fictions. Ways to reinforce the sedating dream state, keeping the good stuff hidden. We have many stories of such people stupidly showing such truths to the filthy peon masses. And well…nothing quite like getting burned to death by a sadistic monkey for your troubles.
It remains dangerous to this day.
LOUSY DESIGN WORK
Lousy design and Haphazard Adaptions…That's what we're up against - if you want something better to arise.
Many do not; many just want to plod along as they always have. This is okay.
But I have a suspicion. My suspicion is that nature wants to get on with something else. A different form. If not right now, at some point soon. Nothing in the universe is static. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Nietzsche was right to recognise that the higher probability play is that nature will move on to something else reasonably soon. All the signs are there, many of which I've just discussed with you. In the transition, in crossing the bridge, normalf@gs will probably be left behind. They'll likely serve as batteries or food. They really are already that.
Ultimately in this process I believe they'll become a dead end. Another fossil to be examined, recorded and filed away.
So when going into this episode, keep all of this in mind. Keep it in mind when you think about why you would even want to change or control your physiology. It's not just Tim Ferris optimisation. There's something more significant at stake. That's the correct view. It’s a greatly motivating one.
ENERGY AND REACTIVITY
We have a lot of energy tied up in reactivity. Focus and observation are energetically expensive. Untying yourself, therefore, is the work of freeing up energy to become a superior observer, a seer. For example, a Zen monk is working on becoming a supreme observer as a primary activity. To see everything as it is in its correct context. So aside from religious assertions, this kind of work is that of becoming a sophisticated observer beyond our primitive biological reactivity, as much as this is possible to do.
The same can be said of many other esoteric traditions.
Humans also have lots of biological hangovers from the deep past…bits and pieces that are not useful anymore. Functions that are entirely unnecessary as we live today. Vestiges of chance adaptions that no longer serve our ends. This fact has always fascinated me and shows that we are not completed works - we are something in process, even if it’s not obvious to us. It also tells me there is energy bundled up that we have access to with the correct practices.
And this is where the work, as Kevin and I describe it, comes in. This is what its aim is. These are the reasons you deliberately retrain your physiology. To make changes at the deepest level.
It is our best attempt at getting this work into more hands. And likely, it will come to nothing in the end. But the spirit and drive are there, and hopefully, one of you, with your valiant efforts, will make the great breakthrough one day and set off a causal chain no one in their right mind would expect to happen.
No oddcast or newsletter for a few weeks; I will be on retreat.
Until then, I wish you all the best.
Links (No time stamps this week as I have no time. If anyone wants to do for me feel free)
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Yep, there's a lot of being human that involves limited perception in favor of survival.
One that has been exploited by psychopathy is the social drive, which wasn't a problem until we grew out of the tribal phase.
As you said in another post, religion was the tool to help people work in bigger and bigger groups. Unfortunately like all systems, the exploits have been found and capitalized upon, leaving us with the husk of what the original intent of such religions were.
"The evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel found that humans use large parts of thinking power to navigate social world rather than perform independent analysis and decision making. For most people it is the mechanism that, in case of doubt, will prevent one from thinking what is right if, in return, it endangers one’s social status. This phenomenon occurs more strongly the higher a person’s social status. Another factor is that the more educated and more theoretically intelligent a person is, the more their brain is adept at selling them the biggest nonsense as a reasonable idea, as long as it elevates their social status. The upper educated class tends to be more inclined than ordinary people to chase some intellectual boondoggle. "
-Sasha Latypova
I wonder if there are some unquestioned assumptions here. For example, you speak as if there exists a purely material world. It's remarkable how many months it can take to work through this almost universal assumption, for which there has never been and by definition, can never be even one scintilla of evidence.