We're taught to disown ourselves - the goal of any work worth doing is not optimisation, is not power per se or any number of other abstract goals; it is to encounter and own oneself.
Although this seems obvious - it is only through hard physiological and cognitive work that one can even begin to comprehend the difficulties inherent in this great task, this most important task.
When we experience ourselves by accident, perhaps via drugs or crisis - we have a moment where we describe our sense as being "surreal" or "otherworldly". Some people might even describe such experiences as "spiritual".
As infants, we simply have experiences. Experience is an impersonal and emergent phenomenon. As we grow, we are told which one of these emergent phenomena we should have and which we shouldn't. In Western civilisation, such judgements take the form of good and evil in a general sense. On the whim of cultural habit and neurotic adults, we are told, very often aggressively to really drive the point home, which are good and which are bad. Such properties; energetic streams, pulsations, nonetheless occur as they will. As we form habits of body, synapses of mind, as children we contract around this emergent core, becoming rigid against it according to the chance occurrence of childhood.
In this way, we learn to go somewhere else – we "run away" from what is happening – we run away from ourselves as we are.
We become bundled up in knots. We are erratic and tense - as any good shrink would say in our era “well socialised”. Into adulthood, we attempt to resolve the inner conflict we develop during our formation, attempting feebly to live out the fantasies of the past as our momentary experience, in a doomed attempt to resolve them.
The question we need to ask is: "If the root culture is absurd, completely contaminated, and those imprinting metaphysical values on us are completely insane, should we simply accept this as just a good thing?"
I have heard many argue from this position, saying for example that the entire psycho-analytic culture was simply because some people couldn’t adapt to this or that civilisations cultural habits. I think there is an element of truth to this, but this project goes far beyond that.
Another question we should ask: "What if the conclusions we drew with an undeveloped brain were equally as ridiculous?"
The pre-frontal cortex and executive brain areas are undeveloped in children and are poorly connected to the rest of the brain. Synapses and connections between brain sections are undeveloped compared to an adult and the executive functionality is very much so. Higher-order cortical centres, in particular, mature later than primary brain areas. Children have much less bias. Thus, we cannot choose if something is diminishing to us or not. Without developing the ability to determine what is nonsense and what is poison - our synapses develop over time, forming us. In the most fundamental, material sense, we are not strictly self-defined.
We are being lived by our brains, ptterns imprinted prior to having sufficient neuro-physiological capability to choose - and much of this remains hardwired, and once seen challenging to break.
Should these personal metaphysical beliefs continue to guide us?
While some may say “this is simply a universalist way of cultural continuity socialisation” I would say that some of the species greatest delusions, thousand year long hysterias and stupidities have been allowed to continue through the same process.
Mediation as Anti-life
As an ascetic ideal? I call this complete nonsense.
In meditation the experience of the streams of feeling or sensations, even thoughts, as they are feels "otherworldly" or "strange". On this basis, some see this act as turning away to somewhere otherworldly. At the heart of the practice, this is wrong.
I’ve read stories online of individuals going mad when they simply notice sensations, feelings and thoughts for an extended period. Think about how out of touch you need to be for that to happen. How far away one is from their primal selves - their authentic selves, that they go mad.
As tribal animals, our function is simply to be part of the tribe. As a primitive tribal brain becomes separated from base primitive environs, we've tended to become bizarre and pathetic. Millennia of absurd adaptions (adaptions are not always adaptive) heaped on one another, heavily polluting our brains and physiology. The emergent static outcome of this is a mirage we call a “self”.
Part of this work is about discarding external mental constructs that block us from ourselves – this is what we commonly call a self – a physiological contraction we use to run away from the experience as it is. "My self" for most is nothing BUT "otherness".
The bio-individual emphatically rejects the mass man's most cherished notions of the importance of his sefldom, since in general there is no real self to speak of. The mass man is completely disconnected from the organic.
The Bio-Individual says that the individual is the primal unit and makes no apologies for this. All his efforts are to cultivating this aim.
Traditions and “eternal values” are inner-directed – in this situation, our values are determined by other people.
Our hope: the individual becomes genuinely autonomous - the primal unit. This must be achieved by a process of dismantling and building back. It is not enough to dismantle only as some suggest.
This physiological technology will breed what's to come. This is a self-perpetuating technology.
We should all attempt to bring forth the post-human era.
Words on Space
Many of us are increasingly forced to live in close quarters due to a monetary ledger trick older generations have used to cover up the cracks of a system in decline.
What defined West Civ as the best was our desire for space, our desire for expansion – wide open spaces.
Democracy is a sham; it is the pure example of everything being determined by everything else – it is zero. According to democracy, whatever the majority says is reality.
The idea everyone can vote on everything is the most terrifying thing I can imagine – that the majority of this loathsome animal determines what reality is on the daily.
Some of us cherish that our reality is determined by others, the games of others on all the platforms we visit.
The bio-individual rejects this. And in its place, it pursues freedom and space above all else. Self-definition is the only game in town.
Self-definition is the pursuit of psychic space.
Some Questions for Readers
There is nothing unique about the common man and his habits.
There is nothing self-defined about the common man and his habits.
There is nothing virtuous about the common man and his habits.
They all do what they are compelled to – none of it comes from "them".
How do we get back to ourselves?
How do we own ourselves again?
How many of you reading this NOW are aware of your breath? Why did you forget about your breath while reading this? Where was your consciousness situated?
What does it mean to operate a life from the belly?
What does it mean when you do something here, and you are somewhere else?
Does reincarnation really mean that we die a little death at every moment – not an occurrence after death like we think? That at every moment, we are born into a web, and we are reborn again into a another web not of our making, and so on until death - we are consumed by circumstances outside of our control. That it is only through cultivating awareness of this web that we can create a truly self-determined space - place to remain stable in this flux of emergent properties? To blow out the candle?
What thoughts were arising in you as you read this?
In reading this, why did you do so in unawareness?
Can you be aware of your belly and also read?
If you can, what does this mean?
As Gurdjieff said – were you "remembering yourself"? How often do you remember yourself?
Do you like to read about Gurdjieff and argue online about Gurdjieff more than you act our Gurdjieff’s advice?
If you can remember yourself often, does this make you superior? How do you think this differentiates you?
Leaving Somewhere Else
If a terminal reader, e-philosopher, "Buddhist" or "Vedantist" or any other number of labelmongers cannot remember themselves, what does this tell you about them?
If you can do it, and they can’t, does this mean you're still lesser than their "tradition"?
Do you think they waste their time worrying about tradition when they should be worried about practice?
In the reader' or e-philosophers' case, did they waste their time making statements online? Are they simply fooling themselves like anyone else with a nice set of words and terms tha makes them appear smart, edgy or cool. Do they really care about the statements they make? Or is it just more of the same? More talking and reading.
Owning yourself is the purpose of all physiological practices; all the practices of traditions are technologies and tricks. Zen…Vipassna…Mahasattipana – we have been taught to disown ourselves, and such methods in their true essence are a means and method of owning ourselves again.
To come into communion with ourselves.
To see everything that is foreign to us as primal. If anything is of us, it is this. If we are anything, it IS this. All else is merely downstream. Including our words and 'thinking".
When mother dearest slaps us and we start crying, she may say to us, "Oh, no, I didn't hurt, don't worry". In this way, we learn not to own ourselves. Who did you believe? Entire millennia spanning ideologies, orientations, religions or ideas stem from such a place - they are adult reenactments.
The idea is to repossess and to stop making ourselves weak.
In being alienated from our bodies, our true desires we instead develop a drive for something otherworldly, something out there.
Bringing yourself into communion with awareness at every moment – this is not running away - this is it. This is life.
And the breath – deep, slow breath from the belly – is awareness.
From this place, all activity should come; this is the place of now.
Coming into touch with this place dissolves imaginings.
The false self I have been describing is a problem for man. The false self is a physiological and neurological contraction that impedes us from fulfilling our destiny as individuals, and I believe also as a species.
This type of false-self-centredness is stasis – it is the source of the death cult that we call modern life. It is the source of all confusion. All incorrectness. All delusion.
It should be dismantled.
Proper focus – free will (an absurdity if not for this) comes from being free from compulsion, free from reactivity – only choosing what we want to choose, understanding what has led us there – what we know that we want from being in touch with ourselves – from possessing ourselves again – free from the idiotic distraction that tries at every moment to impose on us, from within and without.
This place or space is the individual as the primordial unit.
This is the nature of the transition man.
If you should return to anything – you should plan on returning to this – at every moment.
We must work! There is no philosophising our ways out of this. Philsophy is nothing but a justification used by the deluded to run away.
Philosophy, like politics with no action, serves (now) as nothing but a cheap way to feel superior to people who are in effect exactly the same as us.
The actual exceptional human knows the feeling; can see the sensation – but through his work – his understanding, his focus –the feeling, the overpowering sensation – the transition man has learned how to dissolve it – such things cannot stand the light, they shrivel up and dissipate. If it doesn't serve his ends.
This is the true meaning of "free-will".
Will you go with it, chud? Just have a little reactive hissy fit. Is this what you think Nietzsche meant?
Or will you master it?
Sensations, thoughts, emotions – you must understand that even these are not objective – they are simply interpretative.
Some say, "we just need a human with better sensations and instincts." This is only partially true. Even with eugenics, the human is still all too human – it is not enough.
What will this transition man lead to?
"The armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature.
The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in “material” but in “spiritual” things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature." - Wilhelm Reich
I'm liking these shorter articles - straight to the point.