Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

Exploring the Philosophical side of the Occult.

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Cybernetic_Jazz
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Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

This got me thinking a bit more, especially as I've had to really wrap my mind around the idea in the last few years that not only does merit and effort not requisitely yield success but people can be absolutely destroyed for their best. I like the idea of calling that last idea a symbolic truth, ie. that you act as if its true to guide yourself to have merit and put in effort but you know full well - at least by the time you grow up - that we're morally in the cold of outer space and there are plenty of ways that such notions and efforts still hit a brick wall with a universe that isn't even remotely anthropocentric. In that sense life sometimes just feeds people head-first directly into the plastic shredder. It would be one thing maybe to have ten seconds of unbearable pain as such but there are whole lives that can be lived where that destruction of a person is stretched out from a relative high-point in early childhood on a downward ramp through the shredding blades and very little might be left by the time they find their biological end.

So out of curiosity - thinking of that in a metaphysical sense - how would you describe what's happening in that case? Does it have any sort of meaning, is the universe just amoral math in motion where sometimes the math is pleasant, sometimes it's really ugly, and being alive amounts to a dice-roll whether you'll get beaten with the ugly stick? Is that an indication that the naive materialists are right at least about morality and nature being an oxymoron when put together and does that also apply on the metaphysical levels of being?

I get the impression that a lot of people are tough enough to survive nearly anything, but - there's a catch. They have to have the right story that gets them through it. Without that right story they're as likely to fall to the shame, fall to the judgments, and fall to the snow-balling effect I think of as social stigma and punishment where when one starts to head into hard times people see them heading into hard times, assume like Job's friends that they must have deserved it if they get screwed enough, and rather than any sort of support base or prevention of that fall coming together it actually fuels and expedites a total fall to rock bottom. What I do understand is that people are primarily ape, there's a little bit extra that comes in through the heart chakra and might reside in the mind as well but otherwise there's not a whole lot chimpanzees do that we don't still do (or with added telecommunications capacity do far more brutally and effectively). To fall behind your friends, to watch other people succeed as you run on not just an eternal treadmill but one where you run twice as fast not even to stay in the same place but to still be farther behind but just not as far as you would be if you didn't run - surviving that morally takes a hell of a good story and a heck of a lot of personal conviction, I mean you have to be able to not just think from first-principles but feel from them and become the type of person who truly, absolutely, doesn't care what people think of them.

Not sure to what degree people here can relate to these questions but any thoughts in particular? I get this might be a tough question because among culture, and possibly a lot among 'manifesting reality' types of people the only issues worth considering are those of the winners/victors. Technically though I think it can happen to just about anyone and I'd love to think, especially if the deck is stacked, that there's more for people to do than just honor suicide themselves if life doesn't go exactly according to plan. If the later were the case I'd have to say that we're still in a very backwards and pathetic culture, one that's more bent on stabbing people to take their stuff than worry about how such 'devil take the hindmost' approaches to life retard human progress.
You don't have to do a thing perfect, just relentlessly.

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blindwake
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Re: Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

Post by blindwake »

This is difficult to me because there's multiple perspectives to consider. For example, if you've ever almost died, you'd probably have noticed that as your mental faculties start to shut down, it becomes apparent that the things you take for granted as being you are not to be taken for granted. It'd be like if you had been seeing a face in the moon for ages, only to realize that there is no face, only your interpretation.

I'm biased to believe that the universe is mostly neutral. I find it hard to think otherwise, because it seems natural that for every good thing there's an opposite bad thing. In that sense, I see it like a roller coaster ride. Maybe it gets intense at some points, but later you often find the bumpy parts nostalgic. Rather than think of things as "why? that's not fair!" think of it as "it could have happened, so it did". There's no point in justifying suffering any more than there's any point in arguing with yourself about your own stupid decisions: it's not your job to choose the "perfect" choice, but to understand your choices regardless.

I don't believe in "toughness". I don't think you can enter a difficult scenario without knowing you'll win or not already. No matter how hard you "try" to be strong, you just are who you are. It's like Dungeons and Dragons where people have to do stat checks with dice; you don't make up those traits on the fly.

If you can unsee the optical illusion that is your own ego, just for a second, you'll probably know what I mean. It's just a script. The actors do what they do because they think they have to. Part of the process is exhausting all the possible scripts until the actors understand enough to do something else.

Here's how you can test this: visualize something arbitrary, now apply an arbitrary meaning. Note that the visualization in no way implies the meaning, it's just a convention. Keep doing that until every time you see the visual, you automatically think of the meaning. That's why you pull your hand away when you accidentally touch a hot stove. That's why you close your eyes when you're tired. The feelings don't mean anything until they make you do something; it's just convention.

If you reach near death, your fear reflex actually seems to cut out because the "human" part of experience partially disappears. Pain stops hurting because the human doesn't respond to it anymore, etc.

So to me, the destruction of a person just means making them no longer act like themselves. That's not a bad thing. It means the good guys can try being the bad guys, and vice versa. Or maybe some people want to try being the ocean, ants, or anything else.

Maybe this is all abstract. My point is that for any reason / understanding you achieve, it'll only seem right to you. The difficulty is that we apply meanings to things that don't have intrinsic meanings. That's not to say everything is meaningless, quite the opposite, that everything must mean something to everyone, like it or not. The point is just that there is no single meaning.
When everything makes too much sense, that's when you know you've got none. It's this confidence in reality that makes me uneasy.

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Re: Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

Post by Kath »

Seems this is about aspirations vs. reality.

No detailed plan survives first contact with the enemy. If anyone wants to get out the seppuku knife over that, then they're just conserving oxygen for realists.

Sometimes the universe beats you, and you let it slide.
Sometimes the universe gives you a break, and you take it.
Sometimes the universe gets out the beat stick, and you do not let it slide.
The last case, is when you 'enter the game' so to speak, and roll your Will vs. the fates.
I would submit, that unlike an rpg where there are maximum stats, that the only limit on your Will is the limits you accept.
If you have a "then we will fight in the shade" attitude, you can roll shockingly high.

You may not win. But you can at least usually go out in a blaze of glory. Of all possible ways a mortal existence can end, there's probably no better one.
Don't underestimate the potency of Will to manifest though. Particularly if one's Will is a single refined diamond of self, un-fractured, and fully self aware.

Or, you can slip on a wet floor and crack your skull on the bathroom sink, irregardless of your gusto.
In 2008 I very very nearly died from something dull and mundane. No sinks were involved, but so to no opportunity for victory or epic last stands or meaningful endings or last words...
I was certain I was going to die, in the immediate sense. Fortunately, i was mistaken.
I had 3 thoughts. One, was "well I guess that's that." Two, was more a feeling, a sinking sensation in the pit of the stomach, not fear exactly, but mildly unpleasant. Three, was a sense of all of the things in my life, attachments, pulling at me like strings. Both "unfinished dreams" things I wanted in my life but never got to do, AND attachments to things that were in my life, even silly attachments to objects, will the food in my fridge just spoil? That sort of thing. Like a sort of web of needs, wants, connections, responsibilities, relationships, property, etc. no one of which standing out distinctly, but cumulatively pulling like a thousand threads. The subtle feel of it left me with the impression that it would have been much worse if I had OCD. Perhaps it illustrates that we all have "some" OCD, which we allow to flourish, so that we don't do things like leave our purse behind at the mall. But it did a bit drill home the idea that we don't own things, they own us.

I find I feel a little bit distasteful towards the sensation of those strings. Not that one should avoid enjoying value in their life, but that I didn't quite like the manner in which I was (on a visceral level which I was not until that exact moment conscious of) connected to the myriad variables that define my living existence. It felt 'off', misaligned.

The last thing was a searing white-out pain, as I experienced about 50 g's of force for a moment. And then it was just sparkling white as the pain kinda went past capacity to process it and i was just weightless in sparkling whiteness. That much force is enough to cause bruising in places that didn't even bump into anything, so it didn't feel good. But the whiteness receded, and sensations gradually started to filter back in. First pain again, then a sense of time, self, place, injury, etc. There was blood in my eyes so i couldn't see, and so i was very attached to finding out if being blinded was among my injuries. was that yet another string? One I forgot to fret over when i thought i was going to be smooshed? an attachment to vision?

What does any of that mean? I can't say.
One thing I'd point out, is that "meaning" is a construct in the mind of an observer, not a trait in that which is observed.
So if I did tell you what it means, it would really just be opinionated prothelytizing, as is all defining of meaning.

I do feel as though a near death experience should have had a more profound impact. Like I went through something you generally only get to experience once. And it should have some deep deep aspect to it. It wasn't totally uninstructive, but I've had more profound sensations of epiphany without smashing a bunch of bones. Eventually I'll get to see again, maybe I blinked during the punchline.

As far as satisfaction with life while you're alive...
"life sucks, the trick is to ignore it and have fun anyway"

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Omnicentrik
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Re: Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

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but - there's a catch. They have to have the right story that gets them through it.
I agree, but I would like to add: "the right story for you". I am not speaking of some form of "all is relative", but that the key to the "right story" is "know thyself". If you can get to the bottom of that age-old statement, then you can get a functional story resulting in sustainable magical capacity. In that sense, I view "know thyself" as the crux of a mystery in the esoteric sense- an arcanum, if you will.

In my own work, I found that magic works when the story is semantically coherent, meaning if it makes sense. Making sense, however, depends on context. The occultst, if they expand and deepen their existential context can tune into self and world beyond the boundaries of convential existential presence or awareness. Then their story reflects greater existential coherence.

I would say that the story weakens when we fool ourselves, rather than if we simply don't know or are not sure. A story can be objectively "untrue", but can sustain semantic coherence expanded and deepened nevertheless, and to the point that it becomes mythically empowered. That is what I believe is effective. Myths are like organisms. A myth- including the concept of fate- is as much an organism as a spirit or any other entity, in my view. This doesn't just include gods and stuff, but the whole temporal unfolding of the events representing such entities, and not only. That's one factor.

Another is realizing the influence of one's own assumptions. Do they really reflect the nature of existence or are we trying to add sustance to shadows of objectified conjecture? Does light not exist because one is blind, for example? Here are some ancient assumptions that mystics and occultists in the past have found usuful in sustaining their practices, lives and desires: One is that the microcosm and macrocosm are reflections of each other. In Hebrew mysticism there is the Adam Kadmon, the universal human. In Tantra there is the Purusha or Person at the universal level. Then there are correlations between aspects of existence reflected in statements such as "as above, so below".

As it stands, we may be facing an evolving existence that is striving to establish continuity between micro and macrocosm. In considering this, it helps to have a better sense of the nature of time itself. This, in my experience, is not given by scientific theory, but through esoteric cultivation- itself a rather involved topic beyond the scope of this post.

To put it more simply, if I grow up in a violent neighborhood, I will very likely view the world in terms of my adaptations to that kind of life. If I grow up with a bunch of psychopaths, and if the mass of humanity is just as clueless or more than its every been, my conclusions about existence will be influenced by that as well. But if I travel and see more, I may still be prejudiced for a long time because of my early experiences no matter what's going on unless it breaks through my programming.

Human society is a sloppy mess in more ways than one. But so are paints before the painter puts them on a pallette- where the hack can still make a sloppy mess and sell it as genius to many. My sense is that what's happening is a sloppy mess where the mythos of humanity is coming into crisis. That latter word means crux or cross-road. Paradoxical and contradictory stories (intentions, motivations and dispositions) as well as complementary ones are meeting. I realize one might wonder if it can't be nicer. No, for two reasons I see off the bat: first the physical plane, and even more subtle existential dynamics close to it have a high degree of intertia and disposition toward entropy. So without strong currents of causality things just stay as they are and decay from there, if they don't pass a critical point of entropy-reversal.

Second, the forces or existential motives, dispositions and myths meeting at the crossroads include irreconcilable contradictions (open-ended life vs. exitinction for example) as well as reconcilable paradoxes such as love and the "negative" emotions such as grief, fear and rage. Sometimes a contradiction will present itself as paradox, such as hate vs. love or life vs. death. In my experience (and ultimately there is no proof of this outside of expanding personal experience into collective experience), in a confrontation between them, hate and death always win. Why? Because they are mono-characteristic (my word since I don't want to use the inaccurate term: "pure"). Death, however, can become transformation and thus divorce itself from entroy. And hatred is not just the reversal of love, but a singular force of its negation. And without love it all falls apart.

Does that mean destruction is desireable when it manifests suffering? No. But that is not the point. If one gets cancer the point is to heal, and to that end we look toward causes. We don't do it to justify the cancer, or assume that's the way it has to be, just as we don't assume that our suffering reflects an abusive macrocosm and expect to overcome anything- which doesn't stop people from doing so.

I could have written far less, but I realize that many would debate any idea that justifies a mythos created to address the paradoxes and contradiction at our "crossroads", where we are indeed (esoterically speaking) the center of the universe. Many choose nihilism, some probably because they believe everyone else will go first and they can just be the ones who shuts the door behind them, or because they feel that if you can't beat something, you might as well join it. Or because they feel empowered by tapping into the force of magical potential released when everyone just goes down the existential drain. like running a turbine using the flow of a giant toilet flushing. That's them.

So if the above sounds like gibberish, just consider this: what belief system makes you healthier, stronger as a person, more resilient and feels meaningful and more natural (as things should be)? Forget what's "real" (for now), and start with that. Because if the macrocosm and microcosm reflect each other, isn't it wiser to enter into relations with an empowering reflection? We are mutifaceted and so is the cosmos, but as we have a core being, so does the cosmos, and it is one with ours. After all, isn't magic about fulfillment through changing the status quo?
Last edited by Omnicentrik on Sun Jul 19, 2020 2:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

Post by CCoburn »

I was just reading your post and noticed a typo :
One is that the macrocosm and macrocosm are reflections of each other.
Just thought you might want to fix that, or not, just sayin'.

Neither here nor there : CCoburn : The Road Scribe

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Re: Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

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Done. Thanks for that.

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Re: Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

BTW, I wanted to say something - excellent and beautifully thought-out replies in all cases.

I had a kiss of similar trauma hit me again this summer, you could say that I was working over 100 hours per week for two months with no guarantee that my future wasn't going to be mangled by idiots completely beyond my control and that 100+ hours per week was me raising my middle finger as high as I could. Still not sure if this 'entry-level' job will evaporate out from under me but the good news at least - I've really pushed so hard and gotten so much done correctly that I ran circles around these people and they've really lost most of the leverage to say 'He's weird - lets pile our incompetence on him, bury him, and forget about it' (I still need to read more Rene Girard but he tells my life story beautifully). It seems like a completely bumbled and unmanaged project, which was in some spiritual narrative sense supposed to turn into my career execution with me as the only programmer other that someone else doing some API's on the side, and even the client is starting to get the idea that I know my stuff, that I am highly competent, and it's getting likely that it's my boss and a few coworkers who have no idea what's going on.

When I said that bit immediately above about a 'spiritual narrative sense', I'm still checking in on that to see if it's a thing at all - meaning I have some other things that have been happening to me in the kundalini sense lately, sexual pushes of sorts, and I think I'm interpreting them correctly but I have to then walk out a theory as to whether what I'm seeing actually lines up with being pushed toward alignment with future events. That later bit is my best guess as to what a lot of this is and I've been on record, here and in other places, as a determinist - ie. I'm pretty sure we live in a block universe (ie. Minkowski 4-D structure) and that if hard determinism is true, which I believe it to be, then it would make sense that there are fixed roads to the future and - if the future is already there AND we're in a universe made of conscious agents in the Donald Hoffman 'Case Against Reality' sense, then no kidding there'd be all kinds of pulls, pushes, and buffeting while one is getting from point A to point B.

I think if I'm seeing anything about life right now, particularly from some of what I've mentioned above, it's not supposed to be comfortable. Maybe if I just baked in the royal 'we' in that last sentence I should pull it out, maybe some people's lives are supposed to be comfortable, I've found myself in the same place Nick Bostrom joked about Elon Musk being in - ie. where your life is so strange that you start finding some form of simulation theory cogent just because - what are the odds of you being you?
You don't have to do a thing perfect, just relentlessly.

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Re: Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

Post by Kath »

I find this a strangely apropos moment to mention that I like your quote-tag Cybernetic_Jazz.
it kinda fits into the thread.
Although I'd argue that doing a thing relentlessly 'is' doing it perfectly ;)

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Re: Metaphysically understanding the destruction of people

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

That quote is actually from 2015 or so, when I was really trying to storm the beach and 'break the 4th wall'. I calmed down a bit after doing Israel Regardie's One Year Manual, for 18 months actually, and not getting the results I was expecting. My approach now I'd say is something more like evaluate what you'll learn from it, give it an earnest enough try to see if the results you get match your expectations, and course-correct accordingly.

My take on this stuff anymore is that it's not a tidy stack at all, rather it's like anything in nature massively recursive, pieced together by very similar processes to Darwinian evolution (or really the same stochastic processes in different places) so that it's a struggle, takes a lot of work, and that there's loads of thatch that need to be worked through without any proven methods to get from point A to point B in every case isn't surprising.
You don't have to do a thing perfect, just relentlessly.

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