This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.
First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth journal on the ongoing virus panic and related issues, so anything Covid-themed should go there instead.
Second, I’ve had various people try to launch discussions about AIs — that is to say, large language models (LLMs) and the utilities they power — on this and my other forums. The initial statements and their follow-up comments always end up reading as though they were written by LLMs — that is, long strings of words superficially resembling meaningful sentences but not actually communicating anything. That’s neither useful nor entertaining. Thus I’ve decided to ban further discussion of this latest wet dream of the lumpen-internetariat here, and have extended that ban to LLM-generated content of all kinds.
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Before we go on, a couple of book-related notes. First, there was some question a little while ago about the availability of my novel Twilight’s Last Gleaming, my one near-future political-military thriller. It wasn’t showing up on sales websites for a while. Fortunately that was just a temporary glitch in the publisher’s software, and it’s available again; you can get copies here in the US and here elsewhere. Since it’s looks like the current US administration might be blundering into a war in Venezuela that could end in much the same way, it may just be a timely read.
Fans of my translation of Gerard Thibault’s Academie de l’Espee (Academy of the Sword), the one known surviving text on a Western esoteric martial art, will be excited to hear that another publisher is producing an edition of the book’s original plates in close to the original size. My translation reproduces the plates, of course, but the gargantuan size of the original 1628 book would have made a reproduction at scale unaffordable. HEMA Bookshelf is now producing an elephant-folio edition at close to the original size. It’s being funded by advance orders, but the demand’s certainly there — it slammed through the main goal (the minimum necessary to justify a print run) in a little over two days, and kicked down the door of the first stretch goal just under six days later. Now the publisher’s looking at various upgrades to the project. If you’d like to support that goal, or simply want a set of the most gorgeous illustrations of swordsmanship in the history of the martial arts, you can place an order here.
With that said, have at it!
JMG,
Hello.
Every couple months or so I ask you for a brief distillation of your perspective on Russian-Ukraine war as well American and European policies towards/involvement in it.
There is so much divergence in the way these things are reported and I like that you seem to draw your conclusions from a wide variety of sources.
Wondering if you’d be willing once again to share a bit about anything of note you see happening/shifting in that complicated situation.
Thank you,
Edward
TL;DR
If the first death can take, say three days, rather than hours or even minutes as in the frail and infirm who have been dying slowly for some time, are there thoughts on how the conscious personality should navigate or entertain itself during the process?
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Having had a death in the extended family recently (old age and long decline after a full life) and seeing some of the reactions of the living, I’ve been reviewing ‘death’ and the death process from the perspective that many traditions want to be alive in the material long enough to achieve aims, and, as the etheric is the ‘body of life’ it will likely have been strengthened through practices.
So, if a material body dies and the etheric body is strong, whether through youthful vigour or other reasons, and this strong etheric makes the first death a slightly longer process, thoughts come to mind.
If one is conscious through the dying processes (as opposed to being unconscious and only awakening on the astral level), I wondered if it is a case of having to await the dissolution of the silver cord [metaphor] or whether, for a practitioner, a conscious choice may be made.
Thinking that the exercise of practising death could work to smooth/prepare for the process; I’ve heard of the idea of a silver cord, but never worked with it and took it as a metaphor attempting to describe consciousness being at the etheric level while still having a living physical body.
In a memento mori exercise visualising the death process, an interesting idea came into mind. In the visualisation, consciousness views the body from above [so to speak], and during this a sudden thought was: ‘when it is time, a conscious choice must be made to turn away from the material to beyond’ – it was one of those things that appeared in mind but did not seem to have an origin – given what I was doing, it seemed unprompted but was suddenly and very clearly ‘there’ – intense but without emotion.
If the first death can take, say three days, rather than hours or even minutes as in the frail and infirm who have been dying slowly for some time, are there thoughts on how the conscious personality should navigate or entertain itself during the process?
Not thinking about it from a sudden car crash type death situation where a disoriented consciousness might result, but in a situation of a practitioner who is approaching it from a practical perspective.
Thank you.
A happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
In honor of Buy Nothing Day coming up this Friday, I have posted another entry from my Cheap Thrills column. In the process of acquiring just part of the groceries needed to host our modest Thanksgiving Dinner tomorrow was extremely expensive. Learning how to be downwardly mobile is a skill. In this piece I apply it to style and fashion, hence its title “The Downwardly Mobile Dandy and the Trailer Park Quaintrelle”.
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/the-downwardly-mobile-dandy-the-trail-park-quaintrelle
Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it, and enjoy your day sitting around reading books, listening to records, or going for a crisp hike in between eating leftovers on Buy Nothing Day.
JMG,
I was raised Catholic and still have some connection to the tradition (though I’m also greatly interested in world, indigenous, and esoteric traditions as well).
I’m not sure if you’ve also noticed it, but why are so many Christians convinced that they have the absolute true, one way?
Though I still connect to some aspects of this tradition (while not connecting to many others) I find it alarming when people speak in those terms. From my perspective, what we call the divine is far beyond human comprehension and labeling. It seems to me that humans are delusional when think that their religion/reality map is so amazingly right and true . It also seems to be that humans are being idolatrous by treating human words and concepts as holy rather than realizing that what’s behind and beyond the concepts is what’s holy (and that such folks could use a thwack from a zen stick). Wondering if you’d be willing to share your thoughts on any of the above. Thank you, Jacques
Could someone please explain just what is an “influencer”?
Can our gracious host be so described?
Is an influencer any old body who likes to yap online?
Obviously no formal qualifications are required but should or must the aspiring influencer have some kind of corporate or deep pocketed support?
Do folks aspiring to influencer status tailor their offerings in such a way as to attract corporate or deep pocket support? Can the coveted status be acquired without such support?
While I have every sympathy with anticredentialism, I also don’t necessarily welcome the elevation of hordes of pretentious mediocrities.
Something fun. “Jesus heals a demon possessed man by taking away his smart phone”
https://babylonbee.com/news/jesus-heals-demon-possessed-man-by-taking-away-his-smartphone
Nice picture of Jesus performing the deliverance with accompanying news story.
Jesus told the man to go and scroll no more.
Hey JMG and commentariat,
I’m probably just slow on the uptake and this is completely unsurprising but conversations with several different people from my (PMC-coded) environment led me to an observation on just how much their ideology borrows from Christianity. Not only do they believe in a progress-induced Heaven, they also consider the past Hell. The resemblance goes beyond identifying both the past and Hell as a bad place; to misquote the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “This state of definite exclusion from communion with Progress and the blessed is called ‘hell'”. I merely substituted “Progress” for “God” and “exclusion” for “self-exclusion”, the latter because, at least from a materialist standpoint, you obviously have no say in which age you are born—in other words, the Cult of Progress has borrowed predestination from Calvinism.
The circles of Hell, then, are the different ages, and going further into the past means going deeper into Hell. Interestingly, at least in some cases this is seen as dogmatically true as opposed to just a general trend that modern historians do a semi-decent job of superimposing onto what we assume to know about the past. In a conversation with somebody on whether progress is inevitable, they went as far as denying that the fall of Rome had any impact as the Western Roman Empire was (allegedly) immediately replaced by the Holy Roman Empire.
In general, everything before WWI seems to terrify the Cult of Progress. In the same conversation, they replied to my description of Dune’s society as “neither utopian nor dystopian but almost medieval” that that meant it is in fact dystopian. Several times now, I have read the birth- and deathdates of different people all living before the discovery of penicillin (the earliest one during the Renaissance, I think) who died in their late twenties, early thirties and remarked that they died young in the presence of a different (as in, distinct from Dune/Rome person, but always the same person) Progress-cultist and invariable got the reply that “people didn’t live that long back then.” I tried explaining the difference between life expectancy at birth and at (say) 12 but to no avail.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that medieval times weren’t as great as certain other ideologies make them out to be. I certainly like not being sent to die in a pointless war by some feudal overlord who thinks he has a claim on his cousin’s territory or something like that—but then again, being sent to die in a pointless war by some politician who thinks he has a claim on Putin’s territory hardly sounds any different. At least the feudal overlord pretended to protect you in peace time.
But if by some miracle, I’d be transported a millennium or so into the past, assuming that I don’t immediately get myself killed by being a city-dweller unadapted to life back then, I’d probably be content with learning to farm, trying to start a family, and praying that no sudden disaster will take that peaceful life away from me, just like most humans have done since the Neolithic. The Cult of Progress, however, seems to hold that nobody could possibly ever have been happy in the past.
—David P.
On the latest Magic Monday you wrote
“I’ve begun developing a concept I call “cognitive collapse” — a phenomenon in which apparently intelligent people lose the ability to relate abstractions to meanings, and retreat into the repetition of verbal formulae.”
Is cognitive collapse a phenomenon in all civilizations that have reached the end of the age of reason and the barbarism of reflection? Or is it just a specific phenomenon about our civilization?
JMG,
I would like to propose another set of unlikely technologies that are ruining the American Empire. The adoption of artificial turf and lighting across schools is having ( in my opinion) a negative effect on upcoming youth. Before, football and soccer were over for the year when the ground got soggy, and the days practice was over when the sun went down.
I live next to a new grade school that installed ” Field Turf” and lights when it was built. Now soccer and baseball teams play games and practice till 9 at night every day of the week ( including Sunday). Now I think youth sports are fine in small doses, but this new schedule seems to throw a lot of things in to disarray, from homework, family dinner and free unstructured socialization. I see kids out there late at night as young as third grade. The field is used by kids of all ages despite being located at a grade school.
This type of obsessive sports preoccupation at a young age seems to reflect parents lack of confidence in their kids future in productive activities and see only a chance at the riches of professional sports to be worth pursuing. But what else might be going on.
It’s occurred to me recently that people may not be taking FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) seriously enough. It’s generally recognized that it’s widespread among Millennials and younger generations, but seems to be treated as a relatively minor issue that people are expected to grow out of. But I think it’s a bigger problem than that.
First, I submit that many other social ills, the FOMO epidemic was a deliberate bit of cacomagic by the ad industry. We’ve been bombarded since youth by an overload of consumer choices (and let’s be honest, this is what most FOMO is about in one way or another) all competing for our subconscious minds. The goal is insecurity and hence the urge to buy the product before we miss out. FOMO is one way that security plays out; irrational brand loyalty (where my choice is right and your choice is wrong, wrong, wrong; Apple vs. PC/Android is one famous example) is another. Either way somebody’s getting money you could have spent more wisely.
Second, I think for a great many the insecurity metastasizes to essentially all areas of life. It makes nearly any large decision far more difficult than it needs to be out of fear of the shame of making the wrong decision. The thought, “Look what you missed out on,” starts occurring preemptively, before the missing out has even occurred. This leads to difficulty committing to any course of action and, ironically, more missing out which only reinforces the frame in your head.
This metastasis I think has a lot to do with the Millennial+ obsession with avoiding spoilers: you don’t want to miss out on that “high” of the novelty from learning it first-hand. It also connects with some political dysfunctions that trigger the feeling that we missed out on the world we could have had, and so now instead of accepting that, we’re going to wallow in it. (This also connects with the secular original-sin-without-forgiveness angle in modern politics.)
Third, the lack of growing out of it points to a bigger fault about Millennials and Zoomers: there are a great many things we were expected to grow out of, but just didn’t. Over the last decade our political and cultural landscape was almost totally remade by Millennials and Zoomers who everyone assured us were just going through a phase and would grow out of it when they hit the real world, and now it’s being rewritten again by a similar cohort with different politics.
Long story short, our maturity got stunted, partially by circumstance (the world our parents and society promised us dropped stone cold dead just as soon as we were entering it), partially by choice (I suspect on average we really are a bunch of spoiled brats at heart, even if we’re well-behaved on the outside), and partially because of intentional manipulation (gods forbid the Boomers hand over power and responsibility).
So, yeah, I think FOMO is a big societal problem. And I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done collectively about it until the Long Descent slaps some sense into us the hard way.