symbolism, meditation, prayer, psychedelics

Jung’s Mist

There’s a time in your life - if you can think back far enough - where you did not know that you were separate from everything else. When you did not discriminate between you and an ant crawling through the dirt. Everyhting is One and One is All. Carl Jung called the moment of realization the ‘stepping out of the mist’.

“[..] That was in my eleventh year. There I suddenly was on my way to school I stepped out of a mist. It was just as if I had been in a mist, walking in a mist, and I stepped out of it and I knew, “I am.” “I am what I am.” And then I thought, “But what have I been before?” And then I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing how to differentiate my self from things. I was just one thing among other things.” – C. G. Jung

Once you ‘step out of the mist’, you become like god. And you - like him - are alone.

Adam and the Apple

The word fruit appears in Hebrew as פֶּ֫רִי (pərî). As to which fruit may have been the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden, possibilities include apple, grape, pomegranate, fig, carob, etrog or citron, pear, quince, and mushrooms.

Adam was not conscious before eating the forbidden fruit. He had awareness but He was not conscious.

“And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

Good and evil have no objective existance, you can only be taught what good and evil are. Without betraying god, loyalty to god was meaningless. Eating the forbidden fruit gave him the experience of evil and provided the contrast to good.

Yin Yang

This is usually oversimplified as “the bad contains a bit of good” and “the good contains some bad”. This hides the truth. If you deny one side, you never experience the other side to its fullest. You lack the contrast. This is conveniently left out from the movies.

“One quickly learns that the Jedi Code does not give all the answers. If you are to truly understand, then you will need the contrast, not adherence to a single ideal.” – Kreia

There is no virtue in a harmless persion for not harming.

Are you a nice person who could never hurt anyone? Are you unable to fight? Are you… harmless? Harmless people are not good. If you can’t harmm there is no virtue in not harming.

“[..] fear and cowardice, dressed up as morality.” – Nietzsche

If you are not capable of cruelty, you are the victim to someone who is. You have to be capable of it and then learn to control it. How else are you supposed to respect yourself and demand to be respected?

Weak people are dangerous because they deny their potential for it.

“if you are going to be a figher, you have to want to win and you have to want to hurt people. But not for the sake of hurting them, thats what makes you different than an evil person. But you have to have that capacity. You have to develop that. And you know, thats a step to the way of enlightenment, weirdly enough, because that isn’t what people think.” – J. B. Peterson

In Kung Fu Training you will learn how to break the arm, ribcage and nose of an attacker in a single fluid motion on your first day of training and practice it on your peers and your peers on you. Injuries during training are common. You might just get a bit too carried away or not have paid sufficient attention and injure or get injured. You learn quickly how much harm you are capable of inflicting unintentionally, and it will dawn on you how much more you could do intentionally.

With time you become very dangerous, but at the same time, you learn discipline and mental strength. You learn how to be focused, and confident. When somoene tries to provoke a fight, you can respond with confidence to make the aggressor rethink his choice - and if he doesn’t, he will regret it.

In the end, learning to fight is the best way not to get into fights in the future. Strong people know how dangerous they are and learn how control it.

The Shadow

You have to understand that you are no saint, in fact you are much closer to being satan himself. Jung said your shadow reaches right down into the depths of hell. Given the right circumstances, you’d be exactly like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, … And if you don’t know that, you know nothing about people or yourself.

Learning that about yourself is not fun. That’s why you didn’t do it. You have to be willing to descend into hell to learn things like that. If you want to find wisdom, the answer is behind the door you do not want to go through at all. That’s where you kept it all this time.

Integrating the shadow means to step out of the moral framework you have built around you. All the things you denied yourself to feel or experience. Whatever you supress has to be brought into your life and integrated into it.

By denying those things, you also deny feeling the opposites to their full extent.

Spiritual Disciplines

They work. But not how they are practiced today. They also don’t require supernatural beings or explanations. They work even if you do not believe in them. I’ll tell you how.

Prayers

Especially in the western/christian world, prayer has been bastardized into begging “God” for handouts. People think praying for strength will magically make them stronger. The Clergy will tel you that if you pray for strenght, god will put you into situations that will give you a chance to practice strength.

Cute, but doesnt work like that.

Prayer was taken alot more serious in the past. Why do you think prayer is still a thing today? Do you think the people who started your religion were praying like you and had the same answer-ratio that you got? No. Their prayer worked 9 times out of 10. Even though there is no god.

You see, 10min of prayer is not enough. You want to pray for a prolongued amount of time. You will know when you are doing it long enough and right. Repeat the prayer over and over and over…

Mantra

Mantras are phrases or sounds you repeat at a certain rythm, almost like a song, over extended periods of time. The human brain is quite bad at multitasking, so, by repeating words or sounds, your brains language region is occupied and can’t function in autopilot. That basically means, you deny your brain to create and think thoughts for extended periods of time. Your brain does not like that. It will try its best to make you stop. First you will get bored, then you will slur the words or sounds and break the rythm. Those little errors will kick your mind back into autopilot and you will have chatter in your skull. If you persist, eventually you will start to hallucinate as your brains visual region takes over the task of thinking thoughts.

Meditation

People do it completely backwards. Meditation is not about saying “Om” and focusing your attention on your breath or heartbeat. Its not about controlling your mind. You are not supposed to stop thinking. What you want to do is to let the thoughts flow freely and stop passing judgement on them. The goal is observe them come and go and to practice mindfulness. You should be able to be consciously aware of thoughts before they are completely ‘prepared’ and your inner voice starts to speak them to you. You should observe and take mental notes on what sensations you feel in your body when you experience certain thoughts. You do this until you dissociate from your ego and watch your thoughts like an external observer.

Fasting

Once again, fasting has been washed down and turned on easy-mode for todays population. Intermittend fasting as is now being practiced does bring some health benefits, but it will not get you closer to “god” or “enlightenment”. You want to starve yourself for a week or two. Some monks sat in a temple and meditated without food until they died sitting. Some were even turned into statues and preserved forever. Don’t you think they’d have gotten up if nothing happened to them in their mind as they were approaching death? The closer you get to death, the more you will learn. Clearly one of the worst ways to affect your mind. Not very healthy. But there’s always a time and place for everything.

Sacrifice

Imagine standing in front of an altar in a dark, candle lit underground room. Surrounded by other people in robes, chanting prayers. On the altar, there is a young woman, naked, blindfolded, breathing slowly and deeply. The ritual master slowly raising a dagger above his head as the people chant louder and louder, until he brings the dagger down with force, stabbing the woman in the chest and her screams hall through the dungeon as she fights a losing battle for her life.

Just readng this should have made you feel something. Imagine experiencing something like that for real. Do you understand? Traumatic experiences alter your state of concsiousness. I think I’d rather do a few weeks of fasting.

Psychedelics

The fastest way. Most religions originally had their special potion. Clearly, a psychedelic potion. If I were to start a religon, I’d ‘prove’ it right by giving my acolytes a potion laced with psilocybe mushrooms and set up an appointment with god or satan for them.

Ego Death is is the key. Given a high enough dose of psilocybin for example, you will be convinced that you are dying. No matter how rational you think you are, even if you remind yourself that you are just on psychedelics and everything is fine, you will still believe that you have done it this time and taken too much. For all you know, you are literally dying. But your body survives.

“If you die before you die, then you won’t die when you die.” – Inscription over a door at St. Paul’s Monastery on Mt. Athos

The most astounding property of psilocybin and possibly other psychedelic agents - however, I only know this about psilocybin for a fact - is the ability to re-mount your subconscious from readonly to read/write.

You can put a spotlight on any automatic behavior, any impulse response, and then just “will” it into a new behavior. It’s as easy as saying “this behavior no longer serves me, i will not do this anymore” and the next day you wake up a changed man.

For reference: I’ve spent ~9 years in PTSD therapy, stationary for significant amounts of time, been on all kinds of drugs which get prescribed randomly and switched for others in the same random manner, countless hours of therapy sessions and talking about everything. This yielded zero improvements. One heavy dose of psilocybin with the conscious goal of improving my life and 8 hours later, I was virtually symptom free and started functioning. But not only that. I did a career speedrun the likes of which nobody would believe.

You will never be able to talk me out of advocating psychedelics. They are a great tool and they have saved my life.

Zen and Desire

The root teaching of Buddhism is the following: You suffer because you desire

As soon as you start practicing zen, your spiritual teacher will use mindgames on you to break through your mental conditioning. He will guide you towards enlightenment like a prankster. First he will make you give up all your possessions - often by donating it to him. Then he will start giving you more and more chores and excercises until you are completely overwhlemed and have a mental breakdown. Here’s an example:

• Student: I am suffering.
• Master: You suffer because you desire.
• Student: What shall I do?
• Master: Try not to desire.
• Student: I have tried not to desire for many months now, I still find myself to desire
• Master: Try not to desire less than you can.

[often never or after a long time]

• Student: I now desire not to desire

The more you desire enlightenment, the longer it will take you to accept your inevitable and unavoidable defeat. You will be trapped in a loop, a catch-22 - like the Oroburos eating its own tail. Eventually you will have a breakdown and accept your inability to do what is asked from you, and during this painful emotional resignation, you may truly understand:

• If you seek it, you can not find it.
• If you dont want it, you have it.

The Buddha himself sat in the mountains under a tree for weeks trying to achieve enlightenment, and only at the last moment when he accepted defeat and got up, it suddenly happened to him.

Englightenment

The experience of enlightenment is indescribable and incomprehensible until you get a taste first hand.

1. You experience three ‘people’ inside you.
   • one that is your identity, the ego
   • one that creates thought, the thinker
   • one that processes thought, the prover
2. The thinker finally shuts up
   • no more chatter in the skull, no compulsive thinking
   • silence in your mind is the new normal mode
3. A feeling of peace at an unimaginable magnitude
   • calmness, serenity, hearing birds chirp and truly appreciating it
   • no more anger, more patience
   • seeing through peope playing out the act that is their ego
   • no worries, no anxiety, just acceptance
   • understanding why things are the way they are
4. A boost of Confidence, you no longer identify with your identity
   • your identity is put in the background
   • you stop caring about status, fame or power
   • you start to see whats really important
   • public speaking is suddenly easy
5. A feeling of connectedness with everything
   • feeling reborn
   • no longer fear death
   • highly enhanced sense of empathy

Those effects last forever as far as I can tell and are the new default.

You will still get sad, worried, angry, start obsessively thinking thoughts and get worked up by all of it - but as soon as you notice, you can just stop.

You will find a kind of enjoyment in negative emotions. YOu can face your fears, like the fear of heights by sitting at the edge of a cliff in absolute terror, then take a step back - in your mind - and observe your thoughts, all the sensations you feel in your body and take mental notes as if you were an observer. This works for everything.

You can speak your mind without fear of being ridiculed, you no longer worry about what people think about you. That’s why you do not lie. You don’t work for money, you just work for knowledge. You get a minimalist life and home without much stuff because you don’t need many things and dont desire things you dont need.

You go to bed and your mind is no longer reminding you of all the fuck-ups you have (or surely will) commit in the future. You’re fine with fucking up every now and then. Nightmares disappear.

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Edit: After the death of my Dog and weeks of grief and sadness on a level I’ve not experienced before, not even for a human, I am still standing by what I’ve said above. I was able to embrace the grief and sadness but also put it aside when I had to.

R.I.P Inu.

– Nov 28th 2020 - Oct 21st 2024

footnotes

‘the thinker’ & ‘the prover’ borrowed from “Prometheus Rising” by Robert Anton Wilson