Powering Down the Reified Self
A matter of personal and group potential - SOFCast Newsletter, 23rd October 2022
Hello friends.
This is really part 2 of my no-self series. I received a few e-mails and comments, with the usual misconceptions, even with what I provided in part 1. These typically surround the idea of selflessness as a kind of deterministic blank mental state where knowing of what’s going on disappears into blackness. This is often how Westerners misunderstand the experience of selflessness.
Having said that, wide varieties of people, Buddhist exponents or otherwise, tend to get it wrong.
This is a natural outcome of focusing on metaphor and language-based concepts to explain something experiential. It leads to constructs built on constructs, and we often misconstrue the related experience as a result. Akshually, this is primarily an experience. It can be related intellekshually certainly.
Stupidity is further compounded when medieval language descriptors are applied to these matters. We were not brought up in these cultures, we do not speak their languages, we’re not initiated into their systems, not really, and we do not have the same teachers. As a result, religious language does not suit the average westerner, in my opinion.
Is Religion Enough?
Religious language and systems are more often than not embraced by reactionaries. Which is to say, many in our spheres whom despise "the left" (and whatever that term represents in our heads) and "materialist science" - quite rightly, I personally despise what these terms tend to popularly designate. As reactionary Western cultural beings with Aristotelean laws of reasoning, we will simply take the opposite side of our adversaries and embrace it, in its totality, as a matter of necessity.
This is definitely throwing out the baby with the bath water. In my opinion, mankind is certainly deluded now. We are hyper-rational, wholly removed from our biological drives, perhaps more so than ever. We are "dysgenic" - a practical term but not one I particularly like. (What survives and thrives, survives and thrives, it's difficult to argue with that). And yet, it is within the ideological and nihilistic foment I see a significant power lies.
Great power lies in our potential love for the material and its pursuit. Material is beautiful. It is astonishing. It is not lifeless or evil.
Arguably, that's where our power as an expansive people arose. In some way, the worst excesses of this endowment should not steer us from our course. All great people develop a love for material.
Like anything in life, we can take what is useful and discard the rest. We can do this with religion, and we can do this with scientism.
What I suggest is a great syncretism. A non-ideological embrace of the practical and pragmatic. Viewing the significant problems of what we are in such a frame. Perhaps, better said, the self-limiting factors entwined with our biologically and cultural inheritance, as things that can be overcome without otherwordly assistance.
It is simple. Whatever was working doesn't work any longer. Out of this breakdown and chaos, something better may arise. But it's not a guarantee; we sit on a precipice of long-term subjection or transcendence.
Religion, as it is today, will not help us. It may help you - but that is a personal matter. Old political ideologies won't help, either. They keep coming up in different garbs with the same results.
What is required is excellent pragmatism and an honest assessment of our "material" conditions. Probably this means altering the very substrate in which the world expresses itself through us.
This is possible through the techniques of some religions, physiological work, and action in the real world, with goals extending far beyond our lifetimes, setting the wheels in motion for significant energetic expansion.
The species and we, as individuals, are at a crossroads. Like being in a terrible marriage, we must make a choice.
Live in mediocrity and misery? Or to shake things up?
My choice is this - using words and concepts where needed as a hammer of destruction, a vajra, mercilessly taking it to your own "inner world" and anything that someone with foul aims or stacked delusions should try to imbibe you with.
Only the few can handle such a vision. The many prefer to hang on to anything, no matter how absurd, because they are fundamentally anxious. Gripping all sorts of nonsense as a matter of necessity.
Victory is not a given; I'd say there's a 0.5% chance.
The Problem of the Reified Self as Non-Religious
Approaching the concept of selflessness is confusing. It's confusing to us for several reasons:
Most people are not subtle thinkers and can only think about thoughts and cultural constructs - language-based absolutes.
As a rule, the West has embraced the notion of an individual soul, which wrongly gets tied up with the idea of a reified self. I don't think one is contingent on the other. Where it gets confusing is the idea that the individual soul is a little homunculus, directing experience from somewhere non-descript.
The West has therefore embraced the idea of complete Augustinian free will & self-direction as a matter of obviousness. However, this was an inheritance of medieval mental gymnastics, trying to overcome questions of original sin. It amazes me how much impact one idea can have, barely anyone even notices.
As a general rule, the West has completely ignored the body or impact of physiology, making such insights very difficult to have - because they are not necessarily purely intellectual insights.
On the other hand, deterministic materialism bends such an idea to the other extreme. Complete nihilistic, lifeless, mechanistic, causal determinism. And while causal date or determinism may be the case in an ultimate sense, it doesn't feel that way for us practically or change the fact we must make choices.
Religious language has dictated that this realisation, or any grasp of it, even if not total, is near impossible - because you haven't lived 80 gorillian lifetimes as a latrine worker yet, and you'll never be able to get it. Confusion ensues. Some of the worst offenders of this are Buddhists or Vedantists.
It is thought that a stable self is required for any significant work to get done. It is true; most that did had this. But is it necessarily true that nothing great would occur if many didn't possess it? This hypothesis is as yet untested.
No-self isn't the idea that there is just blank, and we don't know when there is something that is ours. I know if something is my computer, If I'm eating something, or if these are my shoes or whatever else.
The idea that is overcome is that whatever is reacting to patterns externally and internally is in a concretised, stable state. In its concretised stability, it exists externally from everything else, there is a subject and an object, and the subject is separate from all else.
This is how we all live, and this is the great delusion.
Here is where I offer an alternative:
The notion of a concrete reified self is essentially deluded - meaning it is an incorrect way to subjectively view how we interact with the world - and thus, ironically and paradoxically - it is by its very nature self-limiting since it is delusional.
In this way, the delusional experience of a reified self means we tend to act in concretised, fibrotic ways. Often in hilariously self-defeating patterns. We feel like we don't have much control. And we do not.
Although it seems paradoxical, the lack of reified self is immensely freeing. You don't fall into causal meaninglessness. No - you realise that is where you have been spending all your damned time!
Practising to see that there is only a changing pattern of engagement with other patterns and that we are necessarily impacted by all different patterns in a non-self-directed way - A way that is constantly changing and not fixed at all. This is one of the ultimate liberations.
This is the meaning of impermanence. With the proper practice, one can begin to realise that the substrate of your awareness is always utterly unaffected by the thoughts, emotional reactions, ideas, words and obsessions of what you habitually see as concretised immutable self-directed experience.
With enough insight (brain re-wiring) work, this offers you greater degrees of behavioural freedom to choose what you're being drawn into. To be, or not to be affected? This is as close to "free will" as we can get.
From this ultimate perspective, you develop a greater scope for choice in how you act. You are no longer at the whims of your simian reactivity. Resting in that place of awareness, you can choose what you want to hold on to or not.
This does not need to be religious. From the perspective of a Western mind - it is not religious. It is awareness noticing itself, watching the ultimately insubstantial and non-self-directed nature of what we refer to as our self-experience.
Of course, we know what's ours. In that sense, there is self-experience. But whatever experience is, wherever it arises from, is not self-directed. In this way, then, the experience itself is devoid of selfdom.
This is not intellectual. You either see it, or you don't. If you see it, you know it to be true.
Some Final Thoughts…
In my opinion, this is a great task facing us as individuals and as a species, race, or whatever label we want to use.
To treat fibrotic selfdom as a neurological self-limitation to be overcome. The main stepping stone.
We can choose to be forever at the whim of circumstances that arise from the substrate of whatever the hell it is, grab hold of it and get bent over by it.
Or, we can choose to see mental processes for what they are and act in space from that standpoint.
We can choose transcendence as a way forward. To live life consciously, rather than to be lived by life and its usually rather pathetic circumstances. For most of us.
The question is, "how many people are capable of that?"
And well, I think this is why we're fucked, and probably a cataclysm is required. This is how wildcard scenarios play out. And what I'm presenting here is definitely an evolutionary wildcard scenario. In short - hardly anyone, probably.
Work and Channel Updates
There is going to be a channel direction change. There will be pawdlcasths. I don’t really like podcasts anymore, I tend to get a feeling of hopelessness from them, as if i’m spinning my wheels in mud. However, I've been working on a philosophy/moto vlog fusion. Taking my love for motorcycles and being alone and combining it with my simmering hatred for humanity and fusing it into something aesthetic. I have had a steep learning curve, but I think you will enjoy it. Many of you have probably heard of La Niña - this system has been inundating many areas with a great deluge, hampering filming. Apres Moi le Deluge?
I can't find many Buddhist groups that lack…how shall we say…a feminine heart-centric focus. Which feels very gay to me and annoys me. So I like to go out bush by myself and practice. So it will be a mix of AMSR and thinking of titling it - Philosophy Readings to Make Love To. With my dulcet, tremendously powerful sexual voice. So when that comes out, it would be best to have a lady around.
The pawldcasthst will be more practice-focused. I’m sick of people “having ideas”, if it doesn’t create an effect on material, I just don’t care anymore. After the failed spirit right project to which I offered my video editing services initially, I've realised that I'm mostly uninterested in my opinions. Also, those of almost everyone else. I'm not sold on "fruitful ideological dialogues" any longer. As you know, I don't believe normies are reformable. I hope I'm wrong. Recently, I'm sick of the intellectualism and politics of this broken species.
Politics bores the shit out of me; it's all anyone talks about. To make matters worse, 99.999% of commentators are really ordinary. Anyway, I stand behind the fact that it's not in and of itself the answer. It's the ordinariness of it all that I find personally distasteful. So do what you gotta do, but I want to focus on offering some refuge, somewhere you can work on yourself and become qualitatively better.
I am working with a sound engineer to release a full-blown course in breath and meditation. It is designed to quickly provide the benefits and insights of breath, bodywork and meditation. So you can move on and use these tools as you see fit for your situation. For most of you, that will include furiously masturbating over powiticawl sowushuns. Or logging into Twitter to read some prominent accounts that offer utterly dogshit life advice. DrAgOn EnErgY and psycho-sexual energy may not blow out your asses and send you reeling off to outer-space in different SpIrItShUwAl DiMeNsIoNs of devas, or some utter sun symbol or statue head trash - but you will feel better for doing this work anyway. I will try to treat you as if you’re not an imbecile, even though I suspect this is a shortcoming in terms of getting popular.
It is astounding what some people fall for when such value is right there in front of their idiot faces. Still, we are where we are for a reason, right?Finally, working on a publishing company with our friend Wayward Cloud (forget the @ sorry, not on twitter anymore) we're looking at books to get started with. Please let us know if you have anything out of print you want to see.
Please leave a like or comment on what you think above. I'm always looking to be tested, but for whatever reason no one takes me on in the open. They’ll take it a post on twitter after my post mysteriously on the same subject yet without reference as to why such a synchronicity arose, but they’ll never take me on directly. And that’s really gay. I’m getting good numbers reading these things too, so I know you’re reading. I can hear you breathing you fucking creeps.
Until next week, be well
- A