Every year or two I field an earnest message from someone who’s just discovered that the human ego is the cause of all the world’s problems. The sender’s invariably a relatively young man, and he’s usually sure that he’s discovered something that no one has ever thought of before. His preparation for his great discovery might be anything from 750 micrograms of LSD to a decade spent wallowing in abstruse philosophical writings of east and west, and the discovery itself may be embodied in anything from a short manifesto to a book a couple of inches thick, but it’s always the same discovery and it’s generally backed up with the same tendentious arguments.
My reaction to this is always pretty much the same, too. Once it’s clear that I’m dealing with yet another of these earnest young men, I extract myself from the conversation as quickly as I can and back away hard from any attempt to prolong the acquaintance. There’s good reason for this choice of tactics. As it happens, I’m familiar with the arguments in question and disagree with them, but I’ve learned through repeated and unpleasant experience that there’s no point in discussing this fact with the young men in question. They don’t react at all well to anything short of enthusiastic agreement. It isn’t going too far, in fact, to note that their responses to criticism are rather oddly similar to the actions of an egotist.
Their behavior is one form of a tolerably common social habit in modern life, which may as well be called the no-ego ego trip. If you’ve spent time around middle class American Buddhists, to cite another example, you’ve likely seen this habit in one of its other manifestations. There, if my experiences are anything to go by, it takes at least three forms. Most common is the basic social-competition form: “I’m so much more egoless than you are.” Less common is the belligerent form: “You’re speaking from ego and therefore wrong, and I’m speaking for egolessness and therefore I’m going to bully you.” Rarest and most toxic is the carnivorous-plant form: “I have no ego, so you should surrender yours…to me.” Here again, the language of egolessness is being used to justify behavior that, by any measure, counts as egotistical.
To make sense of all this, and not incidentally to connect it back to our ongoing discussion of Situationism and the Spectacle, it’s going to be necessary to go back to first principles. What exactly is this thing called ego? Is it really the source of all the world’s problems, and if not, why does it keep getting blamed for that? Finally, why do those who make a point of rejecting the ego so often turn around and give such a fine demonstration of the return of the repressed?
Let’s start with basics. The word ego is the Latin first person singular nominative pronoun, exactly equivalent to the English word “I.” It got picked up out of Latin in the 18th century and put to use, along with related words such as “egotism” and “egomania,” as a way of talking about people who are too fixated on themselves. That’s why the first English translations of Freud used “the ego” as a convenient equivalent of the German phrase das Ich, literally “the I.” (English borrows easily and often from Latin, while most other European languages don’t do this anything like as much—that’s why, for example, we use the Latin names for the signs of the zodiac, while most other Europeans use the ordinary words for ram, bull, twins, and so on.)
English being the cluttered and contradictory mess that it is, some mystics also picked up the word “ego” for a different use. To this day you’ll find mystical writings that use “the Ego,” almost always capitalized, to represent the essential core of the self. This is not what I’m talking about in this essay—though it’s also fair to note that some of the young men mentioned earlier, especially those influenced by Buddhism, don’t recognize the difference between this and the more general use of the word. What I have in mind is the meaning of the word in ordinary English—when, for example, we say that somebody has a big ego, nobody needs a footnote or a dictionary definition to figure out what that means.
Nonetheless the perspectives we’ve been discussing for the last two months or so have useful guidance to offer here. One of the basic themes of philosophy for the last few millennia or so is the difference between appearance and reality—between the world as we perceive it and the world as it actually is. It’s an important theme in making sense of the world around us, but it also applies to the world within us. Psychology first started to turn into something useful when a handful of psychologists—Freud, for all his flaws, among them—noticed that there’s a big gap between what we think is going on in our minds and what’s actually going on in there.
It’s not a new discovery, though it was news to modern scientific thinkers back in the late 19th century (and some of their modern equivalents haven’t yet dealt with it). Here again, philosophers and mystics were there well in advance. In one of the traditions in which I’m an initiate, we say this to candidates for initiation just before the ceremony: “We do not ask you who you are, because if you knew that, you would no longer have anything to learn; but we ask you, who do you think that you are?” The distinction is a crucial one in spiritual practice, but it’s also crucial in terms of the theme I’m developing here.
The ego is what each of us thinks we are. It is what the self sees when it tries to perceive itself. That’s what it is, and that’s all it is. We could say “self-image” with equal accuracy. It’s not quite the same as the personas we put on to deal with the world—the various images we try to project to our family, our friends, our employer, and so on—because these are masks we wear to interact with others. The ego is the mask we wear to interact with ourselves.
The notion that this mask ought to be taken off and thrown away seems to come naturally to a great many people. Think through what’s just been said, though, and it becomes clear just how problematic that notion is. If the ego is how we perceive ourselves, then tossing away the ego and then trying to perceive ourselves simply guarantees the creation of a new ego. To perceive ourselves at all is to perceive an appearance—that is, an ego.
Mind you, it can be extremely useful to discard one ego and replace it with another, and this is something that’s done quite often in spiritual and occult traditions. Consider a man who’s built his ego around the concept of “loser.” That’s quite common, of course, and it often happens for plausible reasons: for example, the man may have spent his childhood being shoved by parents, teachers, and peers into situations in which he could only lose, and came to perceive himself accordingly. (That was what put me in that situation, for example.) Still, it’s safe to assume that everybody has the potential to be a success in some aspect of life, and getting past the self-identification as a loser is a crucial step in making that potential a reality.
Dissolving a dysfunctional ego and replacing it with a less problematic one can be done in many ways. In my case, meditation, ritual, and certain New Thought methods involving affirmations and journaling did the trick, enabling me first to understand the experiences that led to my seeing myself as a loser, and then to refocus my efforts away from the many things I don’t do well and toward the small number of things I can do very well indeed, so that I could parlay those into a basis for success in life. In the process, I stopped spending so much time fretting about myself, which also helped considerably.
One of the implications here is that egotism doesn’t necessarily follow from an overinflated sense of self. It can just as easily develop in response to an underinflated one. The guy who insists that he’s God’s gift to women when he’s actually a sleazy creep is one kind of egotist, but the guy who insists that nobody could possibly love him when he’s actually a pleasant person is another kind. What they have in common is that they spend all their time staring into a fake mirror and defending the twisted reflection there against anything that tells them it’s wrong. What defines the egotist is obsessive concern with a false image of the self—and having a false image of the self more or less guarantees that sort of obsessive concern, as the image must constantly be shored up against the pressure of contradictory evidence.
We can take this a further step, into the territory inhabited by mystics and occultists. It’s one of the core insights of the world’s mystical and occult traditions that the difference between who we think we are and who we actually are isn’t limited to the misunderstandings of personality just noted. What is this thing we call personality, after all? Examined closely, it turns out to be nothing more than a set of habits. Our usual thoughts, very much including thoughts about ourselves, are core elements of personality. So are our usual feelings, again very much including feelings about ourselves.
There’s a further set of habits of consciousness, to which the philosopher Owen Barfield gave the useful label “figurations.” Most people think of themselves as passive observers of a world that is “out there.” Sages, philosophers, and scientists have been pointing out for a very long time, each in their own way, that this isn’t even remotely true. What we know about the world is a stream of disconnected sensations that we assemble in our minds into a more or less coherent picture. That process of assembly is what Barfield called figuration. It has much more in common with imagination than most people like to admit, and like imagination, it can take place in many different ways and express any number of biases and quirks.
Thus our personalities consist of habitual thoughts, feelings, and figurations. These are the filters through which we experience the world and ourselves. Most people identify themselves with their personalities, and the habitual image of the self that rises out of that identification is the ordinary ego. Ask them, along the lines of the initiatory question given above, what they think they are, and you’ll get an account of those aspects of their personality that they’ve included in their ego. Human beings being what they are, the resulting image is pretty thoroughly edited, and quite often is embarrassingly false in at least some of its details.
This is why mystics and occultists practice meditation. There are many ways of meditating, but all of them are exercises in learning to be conscious of consciousness itself. Whether you’re repeating a mantra, praying the rosary, observing the rise and fall of thoughts in the mind, or reflecting on some symbol or teaching in a discursive manner, you’re confronting the experience of being conscious of something. You’re learning that consciousness has its own qualities and characteristics, its own breadth and depth of focus. In the process, you become aware of your thoughts, feelings, and figurations as objects of consciousness distinct from yourself as subject of consciousness. You learn through this that you are something other than your personality—and that insight, as you follow it, leads you through the walls and into the Light.
(There’s a fashionable school of modern philosophy called eliminative materialism that claims that consciousness does not exist. It’s quite clear from reading their writings that none of the people who promote and uphold this notion have ever practiced meditation, and that their testimony about consciousness is therefore about as relevant as someone who insists that Philadelphia doesn’t exist because he’s never visited Pennsylvania. Regular meditation, by contrast, makes it vividly clear that consciousness is the only thing of whose existence we can be absolutely sure: everything else is merely an appearance to consciousness. Matter? All anyone knows about matter is that it’s a hypothesis that makes a certain amount of sense of some appearances to consciousness. Still, that’s a discussion for another time.)
The school of occultism that I practice and teach holds that consciousness isn’t just a passive blank that receives impressions. Here again, meditation is the key. With practice, it becomes possible to perceive structures within individual consciousness. These structures have an active dimension, which we can call will or intentionality, that balances the receptive dimension of consciousness as such. These structures make up what this school of thought calls the individuality or higher self, which is distinct from the personality or lower self. Nor is the individuality the end of the road. Go further, and consciousness opens out into infinities.
To borrow an old metaphor, the personality is the glove, the individuality is the hand, and the hand blends seamlessly at the wrist into a body and a brain on a far vaster scale than glove-centered thinking can even begin to imagine. In this metaphor, the ego is the thumb of the glove, the surface against which the other fingers of the glove press now and then. Technically, it opposes the fingers—that’s why we talk about humans and other anthropoids having an opposable thumb—but that hardly makes it the enemy of the fingers, much less the source of all discomfort and unhappiness for the hand.
What about those people who claim to have transcended the ego? Those of them that I’ve met—well, they do indeed claim this. In fact, they tend to claim it very loudly. They make a highly public parade of how special they are, because they’ve transcended the ego, and they can get quite remarkably brittle toward those who don’t bow down to them in a hurry. I confess to a certain amount of skepticism about these claims. That said, I don’t think they’re lying. I think, rather, that they truly believe that they’ve transcended their egos, and in fact are no longer aware of their egos—but this does not mean that their egos have gone away. What it seems to mean, rather, is that they’ve succeeded in repressing their egos.
Repression is a known phenomenon in psychology. Its most obvious symptom—obvious, that is, for everyone but the person in question—is the “return of the repressed,” the process by which a mental content that has been shoved out of consciousness projects itself onto everything and everybody around them. Most of us have seen this at work in others; some of us have had the useful experience of catching ourselves at it. Jung used to point out that the things that irritate us most in other people are inevitably the things we don’t want to deal with in ourselves. This applies to the ego just as much as to anything else, and may explain why people who repress their egos make such a fuss about insisting that the rest of us ought to do the same thing.
Now it may be that there are enlightened masters out there who have in fact transcended their egos. The genuinely wise people I’ve met, however, are those who have domesticated their egos and keep them on very short leashes. If you know that your ego is simply a flawed, partial representation of your personality as you perceive it, you’ll find that you don’t have to put any energy at all into defending it. If you encounter something that shows you that your ego really is an inaccurate representation of your personality, for that matter, you always have the choice of using this as a learning experience, and adjusting your self-representation to fit the facts.
The spiritual and occult practitioners who’ve impressed me the most all do this. They’re well aware of their self-representations, and treat them with the kind of wry kindliness many people direct at an unusually clumsy puppy. They treat each encounter with the world or themselves as an opportunity for learning. Furthermore, since they aren’t emotionally invested in the habits that make up their personality, they can change those habits any time this is useful—being kindly or severe, brisk or patient, meditative or explosively active depending on what the situation needs. They recognize that their egos are tools, not truths. They understand their personalities and their individualities in the same way—and the vaster presence that exists beyond the individuality flows through them into the world, and gives their words and actions a vividness and a power that baffle the rest of us.
It’s at this point that we can return to the insights of Situationism and find that they make an unexpected kind of sense. The ego, the reflection of the self in the blurred and partial mirror of the personality, is itself a Spectacle in the Situationist sense. We can think of it, in fact, as the Spectacular self. It bears exactly the same relationship to the personality that the Spectacle bears to society. Furthermore, just as the Spectacle does, the ego has a political dimension.
Very, very few of us deliberately invent our own egos. Most of us take our self-representations off the rack, as though we were buying a Halloween costume, and tolerably often the costume in question has at least two problematic features. The first is that it fits very poorly. The second is that it benefits the manufacturer much more than it benefits us.
This is where the Marxist background of the Situationists tripped them up most dramatically and prevented them from making constructive use of their genuine insights. As I noted in an earlier post in this sequence, it’s central to Marxism—as to most leftward ideologies these days—to insist that group identities trump those of the individuals lumped into the group. Of course groups have identities, which fill the same role for them that the ego fills for the individual. Since group identities are always blunt instruments, however, they will never be more than a miserably poor fit for any individual, and are at least as damaging to the individual as the most distorted sort of ego.
Yet there’s another issue here. In an important sense, our lives are lived along a spectrum that reaches from the most private dimensions of the individual to the most public dimensions of collective society. The power individuals have to carry out change is always strongest on the private end of that spectrum, and weakest on the public end. By ignoring the private end except as a dumping ground for ideological dogma, Marxism castrated itself and put genuine change out of its reach. It was one of the greatest achievements of the Situationists that they almost grasped and corrected this. We’ll discuss that achievement in an upcoming post.
I’ve always wondered about the special ego boys. They can have a lot of identity built up around a supposed lack of identity. Spirituality has many traps for the unwary.
Realizing that the ego, the self, is less of a single point and more of a complex harmonic was extremely helpful. So was adopting the puppy mindset. “Never treat yourself worse than you would a friend” is one of the personal aphorisms I have adopted and I’ve found it to have extremely good results. Turns out gently questioning and correcting yourself with understanding and compassion is far more effective at fostering change than berating yourself for being inherently inferior.
I think it’s important to bring up magic, psychic self-defense, your ego, and other people’s impression of you here.
Human beings are magical creatures, and your ego will be magically reinforced by coincidences over and over and over again until you change it. Thinking yourself a loser will, in other words, present you with plenty of opportunities to confirm that self-image.
Likewise, how other people perceive you, particularly the people you live and work with on a day-to-day basis, will bring about confirmatory coincidences. When you imagine that a person is a klutz, for example, life has a way of putting banana peels in their path whenever you encounter them. Thus, one of the reasons why psychic self- defense is so important. It’s the banal imaginations of people that can have an extreme effect on your life, tripping you up (sometimes literally).
I hope we get a book out of this series of blog posts similar to Retrotopia and Dark Age America.
Great essay! Some time ago I asked you in an MM post what the broad Western esoteric view of the ego is, and you gave the explanation that you gave here—but this more long-form discussion gives extra food for thought. Interestingly enough I’ve been doing meditations on the Path of Resh this month as well, so it fits together nicely.
There is another related notion of the ego, though, that to me also makes sense and has significance—that being the part of you that recognizes or at least feels itself to be separate from the rest of the world and allows one to make the distinction between self and world, a distinction which may be illusory to some degree but also arguably keeps our sense of individuality from dissolving away. Whatever you call it, it seems to me to be a healthy function, since I once met someone who had become totally depersonalized following a bad acid trip and they certainly did not come across as anything like enlightened.
Hi JMG,
Great post! I’ve been a practicing Buddhist for about 20 years, and your observations about those who claim to have transcended their egos rang so true it made me laugh out loud as I was reading this in the office.
I figured this comic might be topical: (https://imgur.com/a/yMhGkXP)
If the ego is simply a self-image, then becoming ‘egoless’ isn’t actually becoming egoless, it’s rather the creation of a more pernicious invisible ego. In trying to escape the ego you become more enslaved to it. Overall the attitude reminds me of the Christian knee-jerk habit of amputating aspects of the human person that are difficult or unseemly. Sometimes literally, as may have happened with Origen 😉
You’re preaching detailed how-to sermons to us weirdos and individualists so that we spam the machine by finding knowing and BEING ourselves
X
This is a great post and a lot to think about. Thank you, JMG. Out of curiosity, when you say, “ram, ox, twins,” why ox (castrated bull) and not bull?
I knew plenty of ego-transcending egotists when I lived in California. They were invariably Buddhists and yoga practitioners, and enjoyed posting pictures of themselves online. I never thought to call it “making an assana of yourself,” but I should have.
It may be a bit outside of the topic, but I’ve noticed that there is a particular game that people in those kinds of circles play. It’s not at all unique to them– in fact it’s common both to religious and political cults. It’s the one that goes, “The fact that you disagree with me just proves how wrong you are.”
In its Buddhist flavor, it usually goes: Person A demands that Person B abandon their own beliefs, religious or spiritual practices, or some major aspect of their personality, and submit to some doctrine about nothingness, emptiness, anatta or anicca. Person B objects quite strongly, rightly perceiving an attack on their identity. Person A then tells them that that’s just their ego talking. In a social setting it’s obnoxious behavior. In a setting like– oh, I don’t know, a free ten-day meditation at a remote location– it is a step in the process of brainwashing, reprogramming the personality, and cult indoctrination.
Of course, we were all recently subjected to a political version of this, which went: Person A: “You’re a racist.” Person B: “No I’m not.” Person A: “That’s just your White Fragility talking. Your defensiveness just proves how racist you are.” Brainwashing and reprogramming immediately to follow.
One can see the same thing with Christian groups and twelve-step organizations, where Step 3 goes, “That’s just the devil talking” or “The fact that you think you don’t have a problem proves that you’re in denial about your problem.”
And there’s an all new version that’s been rolled out recently for our new generation of budding right-wingers, which has to do with gender. I found it recently in a video about marriage roles that YouTube’s algorithm really wanted me to see. Here the steps are identical, except that Person A is a husband, demanding that his wife accept a role of total subordination to his needs and desires, just as The Bible says she must. Person B, a wife, objects, presumably on the grounds that she’s a human being with her own needs and desires. Naturally, this proves to Person A how right he is. The video said, “If she becomes defensive, that shows you that she knows you’re right.”
In every case, the point of the game is to create a double-bind which the target can’t escape: Agree, and I’m right; disagree, and I’m even more right. Done correctly, the result is to break the ego of Person B and allow Person A to re-write it according to their own ideology. Invariably, that ideology requires Person B to subordinate their interests to Person A.
Allie001, thank you for the aphorism! That strikes me as a very useful way to sum up the appropriate attitude.
Dennis, granted. There are many more dimensions to all this than will fit in a single 3000-word essay. I realized partway through writing this, for example, that I’d actually figured out the answer to one of the great enigmas of our time — why can’t the left meme? — but that will have to wait for a later post.
Anon, I’m certainly considering it.
Alex, that definition of the ego is closely related to the one I’ve used. You can’t have a self-image unless you can define yourself as something different from your surroundings, after all. That brings in a whole cascade of further problems, of course, because there is no hard line dividing “self” from “other,” and it takes quite a bit of practice to learn how to perceive that distinction as a broad zone of interaction rather than a rigid boundary.
JamisonCR, glad to hear it. I’ve had similar experiences, as you can probably guess, with American Buddhists among others.
Nephite, yes, exactly. This bizarre conviction that you can achieve wholeness through amputation is perhaps the besetting sin of the Piscean era, and of course it’s going to extremes these days as that era unravels.
Erika, very good. I thought you’d probably catch on to what I’m trying to do here.
Inna, because I was writing in a hurry. I’ve corrected that, thank you for catching it.
Steve, ha! I’m borrowing that phrase. As for the double-bind head trip, yes, emphatically. Gregory Bateson wrote some very fine essays (collected in his anthology Steps to an Ecology of Mind) about the way that sort of evil trickery, inflicted on children, produces schizophrenia. Teaching people to recognize that is a good step toward inner self-defense — because the target can escape it with perfect grace so long as he or she can see it for what it is, name it, and confront the person who’s doing it on the basis of that knowledge.
Such a wonderful post. So well grounded and practical. The ego may just be one’s opinion of oneself, but, it is a vital one to manage and live in the life we find ourselves in. Buddhism has a lot of truth to teach and a powerful way to discover it, but, taken too the end stage only works in a monastery. Glimpses of the experience of the state pointed at are best left to grace and let go of. I don’t believe creations goal is to escape or end it. I think you have presented a beautifully useful and integrated overview of the subject. Thank you for your work John.
A great article, JMG, and synchronistically something my good friend Oli Genn-Bash recently wrote about with specific relationship to psychedelic culture and the preoccupation with “ego-death”: https://chemical-collective.com/blog/2025/09/23/the-obsession-with-ego-death-in-psychedelic-culture/
I was involved with a neo-advaita cult for an embarassingly long time (up to 7 years, give or take a few periods of disinterest), and it’s taken me some time to mostly unravel the damage I did to myself by trying to follow the practice. The best thing I probably took from it was a certain training of the will, through lengthy meditation sessions and whatnot, but unfortunately it was directed towards a disembodied, dissociated state that was catastrophic for the natural expression of my vital force. I became utterly stagnant, stultified, and passive.
I’m a lot better now, but I still get horrible flashbacks of that absolutely bloody *terrible* music they played at those ‘satsangs.’ Urgh. Sometimes I’ll be making myself a cup of coffee and I’ll hear a grating (and very, very Western) voice singing “OMMMM NAMAHHHHHH SHEEEVAAAAAAAAAAAYEEEAAAHHHHH!!” and I’ll feel like screaming bloody murder into a pillow.
Ahem. Excuse me, I might have to go put some heavy-metal on to drown out that memory now. 😉
Thank you, Papa, I need this
X
What you describe as people imagining they are without ego sounds a good deal like the noologists in TWOH. I met a lot of American and European Buddhists with similar misunderstandings, not so many (actually no) native Asian ones. One widely misunderstood recent teacher (most frequently by his own students, of course) noted often: “things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise.”
It is the initial condition we must all engage with before we can occasionally get glimpses of something deeper. Or, to quote the same man: “mind the gap.” The whole journey is cause for a lot of joy and humor. The first sign of someone whose worldview is poisoning them is a lack of those. A lack of appreciation of the crawling chaos, if you will… Thanks for this article and your continued patience in exploring the blindingly simple somehow not obvious deep truths that are continually being forgotten.
“The genuinely wise people I’ve met, however, are those who have domesticated their egos and keep them on very short leashes.”
When I read that, I was reminded of Biblical quotation “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The word “meek” always bothered me, until I read that the original Greek word would be better translated as “tamed,” and that it was the word used to describe a wild horse that has been tamed. So the aggression is still there, but you’ve harnessed it, so now it’s useful. https://www.sermononthemount.org.uk/Matthew/Matthew_5_5_blessed-meek-inherit-earth-background.html
Love the glove metaphor. I hadn’t heard it before.
On the frequent occasion I hear someone explain the “essential” no-self realization, I can’t help but point out that whenever they show up, there they are. And that they and most everyone I know has a lot of visual and behavioral consistency:-)
I’d argue that a distinction needs to be made between ego and persona (using Jung’s distinction.) Ego to me is not just self-image but a system that can hold and deploy energy. It’s central to what’s now called executive function and is an evolved anti-look-squirrel mechanism. Like all biological factors, too much or too little can be equally toxic.
Last– and I hope this isn’t bad manners, but I hit publish hours before I read this piece, and they rub together in interesting ways, IMHO–here’s something of mine. If this is bad form, please gong it.
https://darwinianinterlude.org/animist-veridal-imaginal-imagination-as-perception-practical-mysticism-010/
I’d like to make a revision to my comment two weeks ago. The Individuality isn’t an “unmediated” way of experiencing reality, but a healthily mediated way of experiencing reality. Presumably, if one has woken to their Individuality, they likely have a healthy ego.
Also, it irks me the way that people think you can’t be in the “present moment” while you think. You can think in the present moment. Just gotta do it with intention and remain aware of Will/consciousness/Self. Which admittedly is a challenge when thinking on a juicy discursive meditation theme.
Better the ego you know? 🙂
Thank you for the food for thought.
Another great essay.
I’ve read so many different definitions of the ego from the New Age-y end of things over the years: the false self, edging God out, the sense of separateness from others, the sense of specialness, a survival mechanism that resists change, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. Generally you’re supposed to get rid of it to attain spiritual enlightenment, or bypass it to manifest your dreams, or something like that.
I came to the conclusion that a lot of times the word “ego” is modern pop-spirituality jargon for “pride,” specifically in the sense used by some fundamentalist Protestants who have concluded that since pride is the name of a sin, it’s also a sin to be proud of your accomplishments, your children, your country, etc. In my experience, this hangup has caused a lot of people a lot of grief, in ways largely identical to the no-ego ego trip. I really think they’re basically the same phenomenon.
However, saying you should get rid of your ego has always struck me as even more dangerous than the pride thing, since of course ego has the other meaning of “sense of self.” I’ve read several passages about getting rid of the ego in New Age writings that, taken literally, would imply that the goal of spirituality is to stop caring about your own well-being and instead care about whatever causes the author is on about.
Thank you for yet another insightful essay, JMG. It truly gives me a sense of more breathing room, as it were, in my dealings with myself and others. I am certain that reflecting on it will add to my sense of personal agency.
My ancient mother, now grappling with dementia, spent her life alternately fighting and sucking up to what she vaguely referred to as “the group.” The members of this group were generally a caricature of whatever had her attention at the time.
A lifetime spent in an unreflective reactive mode goes to an unhappy destination, I think. We see the results all around us.
OtterGirl
Great post
This is an article from Darren Allen
https://expressiveegg.substack.com/p/folk-and-the-culture-war-2
He pegged you as right-wing which is bit odd
I love Darren as an author , His writing has often profound impact on me.
But pegging you as a right-winger is bit odd. And he after your last article on the Spectacle where you wrote that Marxists have a collective view of morality. He wrote that prior racial colonization was not a collective view of morality which is correct but you would have written about it before right.
Reminds me of and old Mac Davis tune:
Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble
When you’re perfect in every way
I can’t wait to look in the mirror
Cause I get better lookin’ each day
To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man
Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble
But I’m doin’ the best that I can
I think this also relates to the thought I had two weeks ago: the need for the self as third element to change the binary of reality and appearance into a ternary. Trying to remove your individuality and personal biases from the picture in order to be objective is a noble goal and often very useful but in the extreme limit it doesn’t produce objectivity, it simply produces a picture that doesn’t account for your impact.
It occurs to me that if we apply the principle that everything has a reflection (that is, a corresponding aspect or element) in everything else, then focusing strictly on the domain of appearances, the ego is easily seen as the correspondence to the self, just as normal perceptions correspond to reality, and illusions are aspect within appearance that correspond to appearances as a whole.
We can analyze the other two in the same way: reality contains the body as the reflection of the self, the world as the reflection of reality itself, and art as the reflection of appearances (the terms/concepts here aren’t quite right but I hope they suggest what I’m getting at sufficiently well). And finally the self contains perception (the faculty, not the perceptions as such, which belong to appearances) as the reflection of reality, imagination (again, the faculty) as the reflection of appearances, and the personality and/or character and/or will as the reflection of the self within the self (again, the exactly terms/concepts might need some work).
I’ve found that westerner’s struggle so hard with understanding no self. It really should be ‘no intrinsic self or no inherent self. Basically that the self is congruent on many factors and things that all create the illusion of self. Basically I in my next life will not be me, the person writing this but someone else with my karma and merit. But this is why most lay Buddhists don’t worry about it and just worry about trying create enough merit for their next rebirth. Its a level of understanding that even I struggle with and i’m planning on ordaining.
But I know exactly what you mean by the western Buddhist that goes on about killing the ego especially when they’ve done drugs. You can find them on reddit and they are obnoxious. I’ve noticed they like to use that to shut down on any traditional Buddhist that disagrees with them.
I am no fan of Yuval Noah Harari, but I feel compelled to note that, according to Google, he practices two hours of Vipassana meditation a day.
Anyway, here’s a question: How did the individuality come to receive that name? If it’s a seamless projection of something even greater, ‘individuality’ would seem to be a misleading term. Which, I realize that when we’re discussing features of existence that transcend the human level, all we can do is use clumsy, ill-fitting terms.
Re: Wholeness through amputation
Do you think the gods guiding the souls in those kinds of traditions regenerate or do reconstructive surgery for the amputated parts for those who achieve the end goal of the system?
Hello John and commentariat. First, thank you for telling us your own personal life experience as an example of ego change. You’ve been honest IMHO. Second, the ego topic is indeed a very argued topic in Buddhist, yoga and New Age circles, and of course often goes toward wrong and ridiculous extremes, like you’ve depicted in this last essay on your blog.
There’s a “twin” topic which quite often is motive for arguments in Buddhist, New Age and yoga groups, I’m talking (of course) about the rational mind. Of course, for a lot of this “spiritual” people, Mind is the worst problem previous to reach the Nirvana, the Personal Growth, the Light or whatever high goal they propose…I think a heck of spiritual seekers have mistaken a self-limited use of discursive reason (mind) with the modern addiction to the mind thoughts, like obssesive and repetitive thoughts. This fine difference between having a mind and being a slave of your mind isn’t well understood by too much self-named as gurus, masters or (wannabe) beings of light. I write about this demonisation of mind knowing it by first hand, because I’ve gone to several yoga and spiritual groups during my life, and well, of course there have been people who see the mind well “domesticate” as a poweful tool to use sometimes in your everyday life, but it seems to me they aren’t majority in this “esoteric” little world. Mind as the evil is the most followed trend, me think. So mind is evil because it creates ego and blah blah blah.
I don’t want to finish my comment today without paying attention to the relation which John has done between ego and spectacle. I thought I had understood the Situationist ideology/philosophy well, but it had gone under my radar that fact (ego as inner Spectacle of each individual person with him/herself). It’s really bright that point of view. By the way, marxist background of Situs of course didn’t let them go beyond their supposed full radical thoughts, so they had some blind corners. However, I also think there are blind points in whatever ideology or philosophy which has been thought along the human History.
Your definition of the ego as what you perceive the self to be if very useful. I had been going around with myself over the same problem, deciding that the fact that humans naturally develop an ego is a clue that it cannot or at least should not be eradicated. It struck me as a useful servant an a terrible master. But I was missing the part about how even if you rid yourself of on ego, the first time you look in a mirror you get a new one.
This is a fine synchronicity, because just last night in my contemplation practice (staring at an object for a while an trying not to let any thoughts or judgments enter, just perceiving), and struggling with intrusive thoughts and feelings, I suddenly had a sense of just how silly this whole episode (me distracted during the practice) would feel once I leave this incarnation and personality behind. How silly all of my egoic vacillations would feel. Instantly, my sense perceptions locked in and I was able to go for a nice stretch with no intrusions. Naturally they came back later, but now I have new tool when my ego hijacks my perceptions.
There’s a Zen koan you might like. It’s entitled “The Western Barbarian Has no Beard.” That barbarian, of course, is Damo – Bodhidharma. And he most certainly has a beard. When a student is given this koan by their teacher, they usually have some sort of “beard” or another – something going on in their small self, their ego – that they either refuse to or are unable to see. Stuff like anger, spiritual superiority, defeatism, all that stuff. Meditation works by shining a flashlight into those dark corners. It’s just a natural consequence of the practice. Now, the student upon seeing that they do, in fact, have beard has a couple of options. He can try to shave. A lot of them do and invariably they fail. That stuff grows back right? And spiritual electrolysis is only available on the arhat plan. The better option is acknowledge that beard, buy some jojoba oil and a grooming kit, and keep that thing under control.
May your beard be glorious!
I think this is the clearest explanation of ego I have ever read. Many thanks for this.
I understand from this that you can have a strong ego, that is an ego that is robust to unwanted external influences, and a deliberate ego, that is one that you chose for yourself, without having to spend the majority of your time focusing on maintaining it, that is being ego-centric.
“What [both kinds of egotists] have in common is that they spend all their time staring into a fake mirror and defending the twisted reflection there against anything that tells them it’s wrong. What defines the egotist is obsessive concern with a false image of the self—and having a false image of the self more or less guarantees that sort of obsessive concern, as the image must constantly be shored up against the pressure of contradictory evidence.”
Without going into details, I have experienced this over decades by interacting with people really close to me. Only recently did I notice how exhausting these interactions were. Especially when the person you are interacting with is trying to gaslight you into believing how such a wonderful person they are while the interactions leave you frustrated, drained, and silently angry.
I had only started to pin that down to the constant effort required to maintain that self-image and convincing others of it. This explanation makes it much clearer.
That being said, I think there are two ways for the effort of maintaining a false image to lower. The first is to change your self-image to better acknowledge the full consequences of your thoughts and actions, partly by *critically* and *honestly* reflecting over the image that others reflect you to judge for yourself what has actual basis and what doesn’t. This hopefully leads to adjustments that are better aligned with the consequences one actually wants to have. The second is to maintain a false self-image so strongly that others actually adjust their own image of you to the one you deliberately maintain.
I feel like both approaches actually have a seed for changing the world. However, the second is fraught with pitfalls, including opening yourself wide open to rather obvious manipulation by those who actually notice your desire to be reflected a certain image of yourself.
JMG, you might have also mentioned that id is the nominative and accusative neuter pronoun.
Latinisms get used for a lot of things, such as species names, but that one baffles me. How does one get from neuter pronoun to whatever the id is–subconscious, atavistic memories?
Chuaquin #27: “I think a heck of spiritual seekers have mistaken a self-limited use of discursive reason (mind) with the modern addiction to the mind thoughts, like obssesive and repetitive thoughts. This fine difference between having a mind and being a slave of your mind isn’t well understood by too much self-named as gurus, masters or (wannabe) beings of light.”
I’ve encountered a lot of that distaste for rational thought among “New Age” people. While I agree that it’s often because they fail to make the distinction you described, it’s also sometimes just plain laziness, or inability to think clearly. It takes practice and concentration to learn to follow an argument, let alone make a coherent one; it’s easier just to describe any rational thought process as evil, or as an example of outdated thinking.
Dennis, thank you. Buddhism, like so many other things imported from elsewhere, is great when it’s done well by people who actually understand it, and horrible when it’s turned into schlock by Western intellectuals who misinterpret it in the service of their own dysfunctions.
Luke D, thanks for this. The essay’s a solid one and worth reading even for those who don’t use drugs. I’m sorry to hear about the bad experience and the horrible music; for what it’s worth, I find that Wagner’s music is a good cure for dreadful pseudo-mystical schlock music, but of course your mileage may vary.
Erika, you’re most welcome.
Clarke, good. Yes, the resemblance isn’t accidental. As for Buddhists, granted — I’ve yet to meet an Asian Buddhist, or for that matter a properly trained Western one, who made the mistake I’m discussing — and joy and humor are in fact among the best touchstones for this. Losing the ability to laugh at yourself and the things that matter to you is a warning sign never to be ignored.
Yavanna, hmm! Thank you for this. I was unaware of that translation issue.
Alan, thanks for the essay. I freely grant that the term “ego” can be defined in a dizzying number of ways, and I rather like the phrase “anti-look-squirrel mechanism.”
Luke Z, good. There can be no unmediated way of experiencing reality, because the act of experiencing implies mediation — there’s always an experiencer, an experience, and a means of experiencing. As for being in the present moment while thinking, of course you can do this — you just have to be paying attention to the thinking itself, not to whatever the thinking might relate to.
Daniil, oh, sometimes the ego you know is a problem, and in that case you can change it.
Slithy, I somehow never encountered the “edging God out” bit. Maybe I have an inadequately pure mind, but combining the words “edging” and “God” in a phrase like that makes me think of some sort of prolonged theological onanism, which is presumably not what the people who use the phrase have in mind! You’re right, of course, that the rejection of pride very often is a version of the no-ego ego trip — I’ve met far too many Christians who were inordinately proud of their humility, for example. In both cases, a useful bit of advice (“don’t treat yourself as superior to others”) has been turned into a tool to manipulate and exploit others.
OtterGirl, you’re most welcome. That last sentence but one in your comment is a keeper, by the way — a very fine theme for meditation.
Arnav, it’s important to remember that a spectrum isn’t limited to its two ends, and thus “right wing” does not mean “all the way over there with Hitler and Pinochet,” any more than “left wing” means “all the way over the other direction with Stalin and Pol Pot.” As I noted more than a decade ago, I’m a moderate Burkean conservative: that is to say, a little to the right of center, but well within what used to be the broad consensus of American political thought before our society suffered its collective psychotic break. Thus Allen’s not technically wrong. As for “prior racial colonization,” that’s not a view of morality — it’s simply a label for a historical event. What should be done in response to it, on the other hand, requires reference to moral views, which can be based on individual or collective morality.
Old Steve, ha! I can all too easily imagine a bunch of American Buddhists, squirming just a little in discomfort as they sit in lotus posture, singing that as their mantra.
Slithy, excellent. I’d take it even further. Objectivity, strictly speaking, is impossible — you can’t have an object of awareness without a subject, and every subject has a subjective view of things. The attempt to be objective thus always amounts either to repressing one’s awareness of one’s own subjective viewpoint, or just flat-out lying about it. (When somebody insists that you ought to look at something objectively, what they’re actually saying is “Look at it the way I do.”) Thus taking into account the reflections, as you’ve suggested here, is the only honest approach.
Seeking, exactly. As I understand it, anatta doesn’t mean you don’t have a subjective viewpoint and a self-image, it means you know that your subjective viewpoint and self-image are temporary products of the ongoing process of dependent origination, and so you recognize that it’s silly to get emotionally invested in them.
Cliff, there are at least two ways to take the word “individuality.” You can read it as “not subject to division within itself,” or you can read it as “not divided from the Whole.” I find the latter interpretation more useful.
Patrick, nope. The people who make that mistake have to fix the damage themselves, generally in some other life.
Chuaquin, that’s another very good point. Yes, the thinking mind makes a bad master but a very good servant, and it’s also very, very inconvenient for corrupt spiritual or political masters. Any time somebody’s bashing the rational mind, it’s worth seeing whether they’re trying to convince you to do something that anybody with the brains the gods gave geese would know better than to do.
Kyle, delighted to hear it. Humor in general, and a sense of the absurd in particular, are powerful tools in any spiritual quest — if you can laugh at your own ego, you’re more than halfway to getting it properly housebroken.
Mark, I somehow managed to miss that koan! Thank you, and may every dog you pass be brimfull of the Buddha-nature. 😉
Viking, yes, exactly. The difference between the two ways of dealing with an inaccurate ego image is precisely the difference between white and black magic.
Mary, you get there by being a 19th-century European like Sigmund Freud, and thus convinced that everything other than your rational mind and a handful of socially acceptable emotions is a seething, churning mass of animalistic passions and cravings. “It,” the label we use for things rather than persons, would come to mind quite easily if you had that wildly dysfunctional view of yourself!
@Seeking #24
I was hoping you’d chime in!
Isn’t there a sutra in which the Buddha is asked if the self exists and flatly refuses to answer, then when his disciples ask him why he didn’t answer despite teaching no-self so often, he says something like, “Because he would have gotten hung up on ‘no-self’ and it would have become a worse fetter for him than ‘self'”?
I’m fond of David Chapman’s take on empitness and no-self: he calls his particular understanding “nebulosity,” which literally means “cloud-like-ness,” and points out that there is no objective way to say where one cloud ends and another begins, or which water molecules are inside vs. outside, and so a whole host of questions you might naively think must have well-defined answers simply don’t. His point is this isn’t just clouds: everything is at least little like that in just about every possible way. Then, following the Heart Sutra, he flips it around: everything also has form, which he calls “pattern,” with some things exhibiting to greater degrees than others (if a cloud is on one end of the spectrum, a polished river stone is on the other end but neither is pure nebulosity or pure pattern). Since everything is like that, so are people.
So getting back to rebirth, we can conclude that the question “Will my next life really be me or not?” does not have a firm answer. The Buddha remains silent. And I think this works even from a Western perspective where we are much more comfortable pointing to an object before and after some significant transformation or series of transformations and saying, “Yep, it’s the same thing.”
“Matter? All anyone knows about matter is that it’s a hypothesis that makes a certain amount of sense of some appearances to consciousness. Still, that’s a discussion for another time.”
Very much looking forward to this discussion
Yavanna # 32:
That explanation of the mind demonization by new agers, which you’ve written in your comment, could be also right…Too many people (including some fake masters) are too lazy to think really deeply beyond their plastic second hand thoughts. It’s a reality we must take in consideration.
————————————————-————
John, you’ve written a brief paragraph in your today essay about the “eliminative materialist” philosophy. I think about this school of “thinking” they indeed aren’t cspable to explain what the heck is consciousness in their materialist terms, so they have to say consciousness doesn’t exist. It’s a ridiculous trick, because as you’ve written, every person who has meditated knows self conscience is the first real mind state…
These philosophers are doing the same trick than the usual narrow minded scientist: if we can’t explain it in materialistic terms, we deny it…A poor understanding of reality.
To bring this back to Yeats, would the true mask be when a person sees their opposite, the object of their willing, and recognizes it as that opposite (distinct from ego) and something to pursue; while the false mask would be one whose ego is equivalent to the mask, unable to see that they are quite different even though others can see it clearly?
These essays have definitely gone up in depth. It is the first time I am not totally sure I can feel the safe bottom of the pool.
On ego being the fount of Pride.
I’m totally with Slithy on the modern interpretation of ego as if not Pride itself at least its source. I would even add that the lashed ego results in Envy and the other vices of the mind. Ego death was more the balancing act of dropping that mask to avoid being blinded by Pride or Envy or Humility or Empathy, or other vice or virtues pushed to extremes.
I also loved the metaphor of the mind hand and ego being the thumb. In that regard, i would see group think as the sleeve covering the arm of the mind universe.
I’m reeling from a sense of profound synchronicity at the moment. My inner thoughts and have for some months been focused on my need to reimagine myself, to move past maladaptive habits and conceptions about myself. The word ‘metacognition’ just leaps to my mind regularly these days, reminding me to observe myself thinking. So much about what you’ve shared about your journey ring very true for myself, I hope to find as much success on my own path. I will be rereading and pondering the wisdom you have shared this week. Thank you John.
JMG,
Is it possible that those young men you have come across ,who see the abolition of the ego as a solution for the worlds problem, are just poor souls who have been subjected to the ravages of someone who suffers from a cluster B personality disorder.
Many of us have had the misfortune of being subjected to the to someone who is borderline personality disorder, or a Narcissist. These interactions can be very destructive ( both of mind and property). If one does not understand what is going on with this type of person it can easily be misunderstood as the work of an overblown ego.
One of the learning curves in my life was to realize what a shocking portion of the modern population suffers from some type of personality or psychological disorder.
I second Anonymous #3’s suggestion– this series of essays is too good to be lost in the electronic depths of a blog. If by itself it’s not long enough for a book, then Situationism plus Wagner’s Ring Cycle plus… what other series of JMG’s would everyone like to see compiled in durable, cellulose format?
Steve #9– so sad to see that the usual predators are coat-tailing on this New Religiosity wave. This horror– biblical verses weaponized into mind-control techniques against half the human race– is something I fear. I think all those witches and hex-slingers are motivated by the same fear– they did their best to escape it, often fleeing from cruel upbringings, and “now here it comes again”.
Interesting that YouTube was pushing it at you so hard… what are their politics again? 😛
But, JMG, here’s where this essay and, commentariat, your comments, comes in. This is hugely timely for where I’m at these days. I need to re-read this essay, and your comments, multiple times. My fear of biblical weaponization is some kind of “thing”, a “cocklebur in my mind”, that I need to deal with. Something I need to be able to step back from, at least a half step, and “go meta on”.
Thank you, all of you.
Hi John Michael,
That’s the thing with some conversations, they can come knocking at your door looking for all the world like an unwanted guest. Ain’t nothing you can do about that. It’s the response where your will steps in. Very occasionally I stuff that response up. Oh well, and good learning lesson.
And I so hear you about re-wiring the brain so as to chuck off unsuitable habits, and the effort really does tune the internal ear to see what is going on in there. Some of it may be dark too, hmm. You may have noticed dysfunction in your own journey? Incidentally I began that effort as a very young adult. A desire to act better than what I’d observed to date in the adults around me, was motivation enough.
As you noted, and to which I heartily agree, if you’re not exercising your will, it is very possible that someone else is.
Hope you’re doing OK.
Cheers
Chris
Exactly put I think. Your ego as it were changes over time and you shouldn’t get too attached to it. The key isn’t repression, its accepting your thoughts and feelings and letting them pass, understanding that they are not you. So many western Buddhists think that the goal is repression for some reason.
As to objectivity, I agree. I don’t think its possible to be truly objective. We all have biases and worldviews that color our preconceptions and beliefs.
The ego as a clumsy puppy! I love it, because it’s true that the ego is always tripping over itself and smacking into things. Taking an attitude of humour and kindness towards our own ego stumbles seems a lot healthier than resenting oneself or the world over the collisions. Thank you very much.
Wow, as far as I know, on this plane of existence one cannot live without ego, School of Shiva (I am not body, I am not mind, I am not emotions), here the problem is what is called “ego”, JMG responded to me weeks ago on his other blog, he gave an explanation about a meme he published on Magic Monday that deals with the topic of today’s post. Many things are lost in translation and one of them is the meaning of “ego”. Long discussion for another day. What I want to emphasize is that and a lot of confusion due to the mixing of teachings.
There are people without egos (in the sense JMG gave in this post). Yes, as mentioned, but they don’t go around boasting about it, which is the problem. You take off one mask for another, and in this case, you fall into pharisaical virtue.
In another context, I’m sorry but there’s something that’s really worrying me, and that is that about a month ago, one of the mystics (path of love) that I watch on her podcast was the victim of a psychic attack (she channels things from the astral), and they were inviting her to commit suicide. Weeks ago on Magical Monday there were discussions about souls (another confusing word, but a separate topic) that don’t belong to this plane of existence. I don’t know how the discussion ended, and in the end I didn’t read the entire discussion, but after thinking about it a bit it may be that the psychic attack on the mystic and the topic of beings that don’t belong to this plane have something in common, and that is that the desire to flee and escape the precarious situation of society is very strong. These thoughts reached the astral, and entities of negative polarity (including people, although I have my doubts that there are any competent people, perhaps they are just being swept away by the tide) are taking advantage of this to induce suicides in people.
My concern is the state of the collective unconscious and the type of astral plane to which this collective unconscious has access. I’m using Charlotte Beradt’s book “The Third Reach of Dreams” as a reference, and I believe we’re dealing with a similar case, with very marked differences, of course. The psychic attack on her was severe. She didn’t sleep for several days (she wouldn’t say how many, but more than two is certain, and I dare say more than four). She spent several weeks without sleeping well, and now she has post-traumatic stress disorder.
You can destroy my hypothesis if you want, or just ignore it, but I would like to know if you have recently suffered a similar psychic attack or know someone (podcast, YouTube, etc.) who suffered a similar psychic attack.
A-ha. I wondered what was going wrong with so many writers as I was journaling along on a non-dual consciousness route out of a nasty bout of PTSD. (Successfully, if anyone is interested.) The difference between non-dual and ego-is-bad escaped me since I wasn’t looking and both are marketed pretty much the same way. However – the outcome left me with less ego baggage and some room to start asking questions. (Druidry is an effective method for working on those questions, imo.) I did notice the way the Situationists got close and drew back. Lately, I wonder if the Spectacle is fragmented to the point that practitioners of competing spectacles can’t (rather than won’t) communicate. If not, will a new spectacle rise to dominance? What does that do to the egos involved? Nothing good? I have a sudden urge to run up triple red and black storm flags for the inbound Super-Spectacle.
@34 Slithy Toves
Hi! I like reading your responses as well!
Yes, its the idea that people get really hung up on the idea of no self when its not conducive to liberation from samsara. So many people especially westerners get caught up in it not realizing that it doesn’t matter. Its considered an advanced teaching for a reason. I think that’s why a lot of western Buddhists when they try Vajrayana end up badly. Ultimately it doesn’t matter the details of how rebirth works. what matters is rebirth exists, karma exists, and the path out of samsara exists.
Rob, so noted. In the meantime, I recommend this as a theme for meditation. 😉
Chuaquin, the whole eliminative materialist thing is such a tangle of logical contradictions that the fact that it’s treated as meaningful in some circles shows just how debased our modern intellectual culture has become. Consider the claim that consciousness is an illusion. Er, the existence of an illusion implies that someone is being fooled by it, and this in turn requires that someone is conscious of it! Then there’s the circular logic hardwired in any attempt to explain consciousness on the basis of matter, when “matter” is simply an abstract generalization of certain experiences in consciousness. I could go on. It’s like the very closely related claim that there is no such thing as free will; if this were the case, what would be the point of trying to convince people of it — after all, lacking any freedom of will, they have no choice but to believe whatever they believe!
Kyle, it’s somewhat more complex than that; we’ll get to the structure of the true and false masks in a later book club post.
Rashakor, nah, groupthink is an unusually clumsy mitten pulled on over the glove!
Selkirk, you’re most welcome! Once you come to grips with the need to work on your own thinking, you’ve embarked on one of the greatest adventures any human being can take up. May the journey go well.
Clay, I have no idea. I’m not a psychologist, and I certainly haven’t had the chance to sit down with the families of origin of any of these young men and try to guess what their psychological diagnoses might be.
Cicada, the Wagner sequence has already been turned into a manuscript; I just have to find the time to revise it, and then find a publisher foolhardy enough to take a chance on it. This sequence — well, we’ll see how long it goes. It’s not quite to book length yet, but it could get there.
Chris, oh, I’m doing quite well. Busy — more so than I’ve been in a long time, and I’m off on another trip on Friday — but those aspects of my life that aren’t as I would wish are at least tolerable. My journey, well, it started off in a much harsher way, when I reviewed my life after the death of my only child and realized that I’d more or less wasted twenty-odd years. Changes followed from that.
Seeking, thanks for this. I suspect the reason so many Westerners are fixated on repression is their background in conventional Christianity, which teaches repression of unwanted impulses under the guise of morality. A bad habit, but try telling them that!
Kfish, you’re welcome! It’s not a bad puppy, just a very young and inadequately housebroken one. 😉
Zarcayce, your hypothesis doesn’t seem at all unlikely to me; there’s an appalling amount of nasty psychism and evil magic flying around these days. I haven’t come in for anything noticeable, but that’s mostly because I’m an experienced occultist and practice effective protective rituals on a daily basis. This is one of the reasons I so often urge people to take up, at the very least, a daily banishing ritual!
Rhydlyd, glad to hear of your successful self-treatment. It’s actually quite common for the Spectacle in any given society to fall to bits in periods of severe social crisis. Eventually, once the crisis has been resolved, a new Spectacle emerges, and people either let themselves drift into it or hole up in little subcultures hostile to the emerging order.
For whatever reason, I’ve always been particularly aware of the things you describe above. The ego and personality have always felt like masks or outfits to me. Sure you gotta deal with them, but they are in the end more ephemeral affectations than true expressions of anything.
I regret to say that for a long time this keen awareness resulted in a kind of spiritual snobbery. “Why can’t other people see what I see? They’re so benighted! How could anyone be fooled into thinking they’re actually their personality? Dimwits!”
Now, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that while the awareness of the masks we all wear is true on one level, it can be pointless or even harmful as well. It can lead to nihilism or navel-gazing. Indeed, the people I respect most in the world have no such awareness. They simply get on with their purpose in life of being useful and loving.
@Viking #30: In his autobiography, C.S. Lewis describes the life he led with his tutor, before entering university, as egoistic to the extreme, because it was entirely dedicated to learning, without having to take care of anybody or earn money, and because for himself and his tutor, reading and speaking about serious matters was the supreme pleasure – and at the same time as not a bit egocentric, because (according to Lewis) they spent hardly a moment a day thinking of their self-images.
It wouldn’t have occurred to me to call this pattern egoistic (though it might be in comparison to the life of a husband and father), but the distinction seems valuable in other contexts, too.
Leggo my ego
And, relevant – https://www.bitchute.com/video/I704I1DohzqH
JMG, do you often contemplate the massive, MASSIVE, good karma you must be accruing from getting people to think about certain stuff that does end up impacting their lives positively? I wonder. Cheers.
JMG in response to Rhydlyd (#46), “It’s actually quite common for the Spectacle in any given society to fall to bits in periods of severe social crisis.” OK, I get it, and I’m with you on this one. I’ve seen this movie before. “Eventually, once the crisis has been resolved, a new Spectacle emerges, and people either let themselves drift into it or hole up in little subcultures hostile to the emerging order.” Hm… seems like a binary to me. Would you please elaborate? Where do you see yourself on this divide as we proceed through the inevitable stages?
This post reminds me of a quote from Emerson’s famous essay Self Reliance:
“I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ ”
That is the kind of thing I often say to (and about) those who “love mankind in general, but don’t like people very much!”
Clay #40: “One of the learning curves in my life was to realize what a shocking portion of the modern population suffers from some type of personality or psychological disorder.”
Yes, indeed! Same here. That is why I make such “heavy weather” of Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski’s Political Ponerology. A good Substack is this one:
https://ponerology.substack.com/
Also, Josh Slocum (who was raised by a Joan Crawford-type mother) has a Substack called “Disaffected”, which focuses on this particular problem:
https://disaffectedpod.substack.com/
I recommend both these sites for useful perspectives on this issue.
> the whole eliminative materialist thing is such a tangle of logical contradictions that the fact that it’s treated as meaningful in some circles shows just how debased our modern intellectual culture has become.
Eliminative materialism: the belief that there are no beliefs, no ideas to believe, no people to have the ideas, and so we need a “successor concept to truth” even though there are no concepts. Its main adherents are of course highly respected thinkers in the academic world despite not existing by their own logic (which is also not real).
And people think Bishop Berkeley was crazy.
Funny enough both Paul Feyerabend and Richard Rorty began their philosophical careers as eliminative materialists and started developing their more famous postmodern-ish philosophies in order to be able to dismiss the criticisms of it, only to realize that once they’d thrown rationalism overboard, EM was no longer attractive.
I wrote out a post to Rob before deciding that it would contradict JMG’s instruction to him to meditate on his question, but I do want to share one interesting point I was going to make:
In Indo-European languages, the word for “matter” tends to descend from a word that at one point meant “wood.” In Latin, “materia” was the heartwood of a tree, the densest and most solid part.
I’m not aware of any counterexamples to this in Indo-European languages though I admit I’m far from knowledgeable enough to rule it out.
Zak, of course. The ego is always happy to denounce other people for having an ego. 😉
Bruno, I don’t concern myself with that. I doubtless generate my share of bad karma, too! What matters is doing the work I’m here to do.
Inna, I already belong to one of the odd little subcultures, the one labeled “occultism,” and it’s always at least a little hostile to the conventional wisdom of the age. So I sit off to one side, watching the fighting, and trying to say something helpful to those who are close enough to hear.
Michael, did you ever read Dickens’s novel Bleak House? Mrs. Jellaby’s obsession with improving the lot of the natives of Borriobooli-Gha, while her own children go hungry and her house falls to bits, is a tolerably common bad habit.
Slithy, Bishop Berkeley was at least logically consistent. The eliminative materialists have perfected the art of the self-refuting argument. As for wood, hmm! That’s a good point, and not a surprising one — wood was after all the most convenient and readily available raw material for our ancestors for many hundreds of generations.
Re: Eliminative materialism
I think many lay materialists assume that those philosophers (if they even hear of them– Daniel Dennett was well known) are proving that consciousness is generated by the brain and not by the soul (their own presupposition) by arguments that they are too dumb to follow. Similarly, some of the people in the fable really did assume the Emperor was clad in invisible robes.
(Yes, I am talking about past me, and the Patheos Atheist blogger/commemtor community I participated in.)
Oh… “one of the odd little subcultures”… now I get it. As an overexcited rookie, I didn’t think you would talk about occultism in such diminutive terms. Thanks for the clarification. I’ve started reading Circles of Power, and your excitement comes off very strongly from the pages of that book, and it’s infectious. 🤩
Pride is thinking you’re hot shale on a silver platter. Edirp is being bummed that you’re NOT hot shale on a silver platter. Edirp is pride spelled backwards. Humility is knowing, seeing.and accepting who you are with equanimity – the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the ordinary, the extraordinary and aiming to play well the hand you have been dealt, applying the good you have and improving over time the not so good..
Patrick, thanks for the report from the trenches. I’m sorry to say that wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
Inna, keep in mind that I wrote that book in 1996, not quite half my life ago. In those days I was all afire with the dream of restoring Hermetic occultism to what I saw as its rightful place as one of the world’s great spiritual traditions, and I hadn’t yet realized that I was more or less in the position of someone who tried to get a small town high school science fiction club to build a rocket that could fly to the Moon. “Diminutive” is perhaps the kindest word I’d use for the occult subculture these days…
BeardTree, fair enough. I prefer the good old term “justice.” From a Stoic standpoint, it’s as important to be just to yourself as it is to be just to anyone else. If you’re going to love your neighbor as yourself, as your god put it, it seems to me that this means you have to love yourself.
That’s all well and good but I still intend to found the Cult of the Unopposed Fingers. And since I have the most non-existent ego, that makes me the Pontifex Gluteus Maximus, obviously. 🙃 (But of course the position comes with a funny hat. Why would even ask? 😉)
You know, this post comes at an auspicious time for me. A lot is changing in my life and I’ve begun doing the hard work of popping the hood and rooting around in the dank cellars of my mind. I’ve quickly learned that sometimes the answer to “Why can’t I just do X or change Y about myself?” is as simple as, “Well, why don’t you just do it?”
I may not ever be a sage or hermit or occultist or spiritual whatever, but someday I am going to be a person I can like. And who treats the people who care about him the way they deserve to be treated. So I guess, long way of saying thanks for your continued work on, JMG.
Hm… and what’s the unkindest?
Yavanna wrote, “‘The genuinely wise people I’ve met, however, are those who have domesticated their egos and keep them on very short leashes.’ When I read that, I was reminded of Biblical quotation ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ The word ‘meek’ always bothered me, until I read that the original Greek word would be better translated as ‘tamed,’ and that it was the word used to describe a wild horse that has been tamed.”
Oh my goodness, thank you so much for sharing that translation clarification, which I had never come across before. Meek or domesticated, as in tamed (apprivoisé in French), like what happens in Le Petit Prince to the wild fox who has to explain to the prince how he might eventually be tamed with enough consistent effort (comment l’apprivoiser). Ever since my first reading of The Little Prince, I’ve always thought of taming as befriending, albeit with a copious smear of negative connotations to obscure its empowering nature. So those who have domesticated their wild ego might have simply learned how to befriend it, thus cultivating appreciation for it and influence over it, much like a wild horse that has been tamed.
Your Greek meaning leaves me reading “Blessed are the befriended, for they shall inherit the earth.” But who or what is it that befriended and tamed them? Who had to put in the consistent effort for that taming to eventually take hold. I’m not yet sure whether I prefer to imagine the initiate having to sit patiently, waiting for the wild energy of the divine to decide to venture close enough to forge a relationship, or divinity being the one sitting ever so patiently, waiting for the wild initiate to venture close enough to be tamed. Regardless of who it is who first initiates that befriending, the whole laborious process is bound to proceed more smoothly should we have already put in the necessary effort to learn how to appreciate, regulate, trust, discipline, nurture and work with our wild and wacky ego (comment l’apprivoiser).
Not long after making my previous comment here, my “mental cocklebur” encountered the equivalent of a cosmic Bic lighter.
I did a web search to try to find out how many people are afraid of Christians, and instead turned up a lot of hits, especially Reddit pages, on Christians who are afraid. These were mainly afraid of (a) being tormented for eternity by their Creator if they screw up too badly, or (b) are afraid of being obliterated entirely by said Creator. One Reddit whose URL now escapes me (probably for very good reason) was just heartbreaking.
A good search term is “christian fear reddit” on DuckDuckGo, the little [ahem] helper window at the top of the page will collect all the Reddit hits together.
My pet phobia pales in comparison to the existential fear these people have.
A definite perspective check.
Hello all, Quin here with the weekly prayer list announcement. To see the current list, you can visit here. You might notice that I have shifted the prayer list to a new domain at “ecoprayer.dreamwidth.org”. There is a reason for this.
Today I would like to put out a request to anyone out there who might be interested. Recently I find myself without the resources to always be updating the prayer list in a timely fashion. Not only that, but there have been a few occurences where I completely missed someone’s prayer request embedded in the weekly comments. I have also been rather inconsistent in sending out the weekly e-mail version of the list to interested parties.
Rather than make excuses– and sure, we all have excuses, sometimes even valid ones– I would just like to tackle the issue in a way where any failings on my own part will still result in prayers being made to those who need them, when they need them.
Are there any other regular readers out there who are interested in helping me to run the prayer list? If we share out responsibilities, and work out a system to pick up slack when others are too busy, I think it could help things a lot. If anyone else is interested, please leave a comment under this linked post (not here in the Ecosophia.net comments, as I don’t want to bother JMG too much), or send a private message to the old “tunesmyth” dreamwidth account.
Hi JMG,
Could you recommend a book on taxonomy of ego? Something that explores e.g. soul vs ego vs whatever we call “I” when dreaming – but on a serious level?
JMG, this has been added to my favourite essays list. It brought a reflection to the surface:
I’ve studied non-dual vedanta for some time, and one of the key models that tradition provides in the model of the Antahkarana (a model of the 4 functions of the subtle inner landscape of the human being). One function is called the Ahamkara which is usually translated into English as ‘ego’, but the meaning is slightly different in Sanskrit.
It is made up of two words Aham, meaning ‘I’ or that sense of conscious existence, and Kara meaning something constructed or created. So one way of understanding their version of the ego is that function by which the sense of existence comes to be associated with a ‘thing’ or construct, such as a role, persona, or sometimes even an object. In the literature it gets a really bad name, and you can see that when people’s sense of existence gets completely absorbed in some identity, it becomes a trap.
My reflections though are that is is a natural part of existence, we _need_ to have this faculty in order to play roles, take part in the society and world around us. It would be impossible without it. So I treat this faculty as neutral – I can see it would become a problem if you blended with an identity to the extent you could no longer distinguish the ‘I’ from the ‘construct’.
One of the other four parts of this model is the Buddhi, which is a faculty of discernment, and from what I understand, one way of looking at this is that the primary importance of this faculty is to discern the difference between the ‘I’ and the ‘construct’ to protect us from losing ourselves – it’s just that whereas we get the Ahamkara for free, it seems we have to work to develop the faculty of discernment.
Very interesting all around!
MCB
JMG # 48:
I agree. No argument here. “Eliminative materialism” IMHO isn’t a real philosophy, it’s more a poor thought Ersatz which tell us very much about mind misery in the nowadays society.
——————————————-
Slithy Toves #56:
Thanks for your comment. I didn’t know Rorty was one of those “thinkers” for a time.
@Aldarion #50. Interesting. I read egoistic and equated it to egocentric, that is focused on the self-image, but the distinction you make is indeed useful. In both cases you are not spending much time thinking about others, but in the first case you do this to pursue your own interests, and the other, to maintain a self-image.
@JMG Thank you for the reference to “Steps towards an Ecology of the Mind”. Some aspects of the family dynamics dissected with great insight in it feel somewhat familiar… It is also very good to have confirmation that reifying the underlying communication patterns allows one to free themselves from double binds. I definitely had agonizing moments of thinking all of this would have been less painful were I not to think so much. I now see that this road leads to self-amputation and possibly schizophrenia. I am very glad I dodged that bullet.
And now that you mention that trying to impose an inaccurate self-image onto others falls under the Black Magic umbrella, that makes me realize that the appearance of spiritual “advancement” is definitely a good catalyst to make the rest of the image go through…. Mixing metaphors: A wolf in a holy glove.
When the the language of egolessness becomes embodied and turns inevitably into what is patently a huge ego, it reminds me of people who claim there are no absolutes. Which of course is an absolutist statement.
Hi, regarding #3, John Michael, I would encourage you to write a book on Western Occult Philosophy. I know you have written a lot of books, including one with a similar title, but maybe it is time for you to write your masterpiece.
There are probably a lot of people like me who spent a lot of their time and attention on the arts and everyday craft. Now, we are looking for all the stuff in the middle. And, Oh My God, that middle has been Philosophy academics, church christians, scientologists, and people pretending to be witches. Renaissance fairs and Society for Creative Anachronism stuff gives me the creeps. Politicians and hucksters.
As an American, I like the story of Western Occultism that arose from our sacred shores. I want to know where it all went and what persists.
I get the idea that ego is a (or maybe even the?) spectacular interface; some kind of semi-transparent screen through which we perceive the world. Images can be projected onto that screen both from within and without, thus changing how we perceive.
Most people have no idea that there is a screen, let alone who is / are projecting on it…
–bk
One night during a storm on Anglesey, when I was four years old, I saw a supernatural creature at the edge of the forest, illuminated for a moment by a lightning flash, and I looked it right in the eyes. Since some fairy tale monsters are apparently real, it follows that one can only be reasonably safe as a wizard or a knight. So I’ve always stubbornly opposed the present world and instead lived as a wandering mystic knight.
>And people think Bishop Berkeley was crazy.
What’s the difference between crazy and philosophy?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/
>and the Analyst, an acute and influential critique of the foundations of Newton’s calculus
So he’s one of those guys that never got past the handwavy “Oh, just go ahead and assume the limit turns into what it looks like it’s turning into”. Every calculus teacher gets a little bit weird when talking about the limit operator, at least the ones that know what they’re teaching.
Who do think I am? A young questing woman. So I was taken aback last week while out walking, to hear a little boy thoughtfully tell his mother, “Move over here to let that grandma by”. Well, yes, I’m old now, but I don’t feel like that on the inside.
John Michael, allow me to thank you for the continuing richness of your essays. Week by week, you offer your readers a depth of reflection that’s become increasingly rare in our time.
If I may venture a small stylistic observation: you tolerably often set off an entire paragraph within parentheses. I take it this is a conscious choice, meant perhaps to mark a digression or side-thought. As a reader, though, I’ve found that this convention can momentarily draw one out of the current of the argument, almost as though stepping into an eddy beside the main stream. Your prose and reasoning are strong enough, I think, that such asides could stand gracefully in the open current without that typographical boundary.
In any case, please accept my gratitude for your continued work and for the lively discussions it fosters among your readers.
Hi John Michael,
Getting back into life is great news. And your wings are regaining their strength, I see. Respect. Hope you enjoy your travel, and it’s been years since you’ve done such activities as recently. Hope you find your place.
Truthfully, I don’t travel far these days, but have done so in the past, but it’s more the frequency of moves when I was a kid which drove home just how rootless I was. I’ve lived in I believe about 17 different houses in my life, mostly due to economic and social reasons. It’s unsettling. Hope you work out where your travels will take you next.
Far out, it’s been remarked upon elsewhere that burying one’s child is the hardest activity of all. As always you have mine, as well as most of the people here, sympathy.
Sadly, death hovers around us all, and the best we can achieve is to keep the hungry monster at arms length for a while, and enjoy some good convivial laughs and maybe a fine dark ale beside a warm fire. When younger I’d not appreciated the merits of a good dark ale, and this is an absolute travesty, as you’ll no doubt agree. Regrets, we’ve all had a few.
Absolute respect too for taking charge of your life, although that’s an horrific way to start the journey. But then pain can motivate and it serves a purpose don’t you reckon?
Thanks for the insight, and I’ve heard other folks say similar things. My wiring must be a bit unhinged, because despite all the earlier rottenness and sheer hard work that is the day to day existence, there’s been this pesky Joie de vivre hovering over it all. Probably did something very bad in a past life… 😉
Cheers
Chris
re: Eliminative Materialism and Experience of Consciousness
Great post! I especially enjoyed how you have more explicitly tied in occult perspectives with what has heretofore been a more psychological/sociological/political series.
As for materialist views of consciousness and Will, Sam Harris presents an interesting edge case, or at least did the last time I checked in with his writings several years ago (I’ve heard rumblings that he may have gone off the deep end with TDS). I don’t think he was ever an eliminative materialist, precisely because he’s intimately familiar with consciousness through extensive meditation work. Somehow, though, he wrangled himself into disbelieving in Free Will because of his direct experience of consciousness. If I remember the argument from his Free Will right, it was roughly something like “if you meditate enough, you realize that all of your thoughts, feelings, moods, and so forth arise, seemingly of their own accord, and are perceived by your consciousness. ‘Wanting’ or ‘Willing’ something is just another of these experiences and comes from the same deterministic physical matter that your consciousness does, so ‘willing’ something is no different than noticing that you’re daydreaming about lunch or the pretty girl across the room.”
Even when I was a materialist, this struck me as obviously wrong, but it completely falls apart if you reject consciousness as an epiphenomenon of a material brain.
Cheers,
Jeff
An interesting post – thanks for the definitions up front. Sometimes that help keep people on the same page.
I recall learning about the Id, Ego and Super-Ego in Psychology 101 in junior college, and thinking at the time it was mostly hot air and mumbo jumbo to keep professors employed. My whole life I’ve looked at the pragmatic application of knowledge, and have always struggled with psychology and philosophy, perhaps because when framed with personal experiences I don’t believe I bring much baggage to the table, but maybe that’s because my ego gets in the way.
What I do know is that when in my early 20s, I thought I had all the answers – to any issue that I considered important. This viewpoint has changed with age. I seemed to have maintained a balance with my views as an agnostic and seasoned with a heavy dose of humility which is part of learning from the School of Hard Knocks.
One of my junior high teachers summed wisdom up one day – “The more you learn, the more you realize what you don’t know….”
I am not sure if this fits. When I had my brain injury happen, I split into several selves. Each with their own personality and thoughts. I have had to grapple with either integrating the selves or have a “general” self who commands the others. It is quite an adventure.
That leads me to schizophrenia, where you have ask the person, who am I talking to, since there are multiple selves.
How does that fit into ego? Or does it.
I was over at Naked Capitalism for my morning coffee read. Ran across this
https://x.com/hispano_studies/status/1978466313728295337?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1978466313728295337%7Ctwgr%5Ed7ecca6069a30ffa5f6db48cb816bbdd594de8d3%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2025%2F10%2Flinks-10-16-2025.html
I think that it dovetails nicely with your current expose on the spectacle.
I remember Golda Meir’s quote: “Don’t be so humble, you are not that great.” I guess that sums up the idea of the egoless being superior to the rest of us. I always found the idea of getting rid of the ego some sort of death wish. And the Easing God Out that I heard at AA meetings always meant give up your will and turn it over to God. However, it always presented a double bind – you needed an ego to stop drinking, and if you stopped drinking, it was God’s doing. That alone keeps you dependent upon the group, which is what AA wants – the continued existence of itself by making dependent people on the group. I guess that to me is what saying give up your ego is about – you become dependent on someone or something else.
Hello Mr. Greer,
One of your finest essays.
I had arrived at a lot of these points myself, largely in my mid- to late twenties. I was studying to become a scientist, so I was absorbing (on the side) a lot of philosophy of science, epistemology, etc. on the side. I was also very enamored of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, particularly after learning that Einstein and Wittgenstein had a good opinion of it.
“The power individuals have to carry out change is always strongest on the private end of that spectrum, and weakest on the public end. ”
I think from this quality of individual power comes the power of the Spectacle. It allows an individual to feel morally superior by belonging to the “correct” group while doing abso-f…cking-lutely nothing in real life except for staring at the screen. Most wars, for example, at their core are about resources. An individual can do the right thing by consuming less (lowering the thermostat, cooking from scratch, living in a small place, and other boring things). Try to tell this to a screen starer … Oh, the look on their faces… you’d think they found a cockroach in their salad. 😁
About double bind, and all that.
I was reading about White Fragility and Anti-race theory. The writers – Robin DiAngelo (a white woman) and Ibram X. Kendi put everyone in a double bind. There is no middle group between racism and fighting racism, only racism and antiracism. Kendi stated, “The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s drove for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral one.”
He tells how to be antiracist – “We can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.” No one is cured, they have to constantly have struggle sessions as governed by what Kendi says.
Meanwhile DiAngelo in her book rails against white women crying for the suffering of Black people. If they cry then they force the person to comfort them. but if they don’t cry they are racist. She kept telling how “white” people disliked her lectures. (White includes Asians).
My reaction to both was “Who died and made you Queen?” How is it that you are the final arbiter of my being? It reminds me of being distinctly Maoist, of constantly extinguishing the self to please the arbiter.
I guess that is why ego is considered dangerous – it involves a self that determines for itself what it will.
StarNinja, delighted to hear it — on both counts.
Inna, this is a family-friendly blog!
Cicada, that’s really sad.
Quin, thank you for this. I deeply appreciate all the work you’ve put in maintaining the prayer list, and (as we discussed) I think having an assistant or two might be a good thing for you as well as the community.
Oleg, I’d be delighted if such a book existed.
MCB, trust Vedanta to have something that precise and useful! I’d use different terms, of course, since Sanskrit isn’t familiar ground for me, but the basic insights are common, I think, to most esoteric traditions.
Chuaquin, that seems like a reasonable description to me.
Viking, you’re welcome — Bateson is well worth close study. As for mixed metaphors, granted, but it communicates quite well.
David, a valid comparison.
Moserian, I’m not ready to start that yet, but it’s on the list.
BK, a good workable metaphor.
Tengu, delighted to hear this. I had a slightly more winding road to walk; I figured out at age 10 or so that I wanted to be a wizard when I grew up, but everyone around me insisted there was no such thing. It took me years before I found out that they were wrong, and of course it was then that the really hard work began.
Other Owen, calculus really is witchcraft, isn’t it?
Sarah, so noted, but I choose the whole-paragraph parentheses quite deliberately to mark digressions. Thank you for your enthusiasm.
Chris, thank you. I had some messy karma to deal with coming into this life, and some of it has landed pretty hard. That said, my life continues to improve over time, and I expect to have a tolerably good time during as many decades as I’ve got left in this incarnation.
Jeff, it’s almost a guarantee that people like Harris will put all their argumentative strength into side issues and ignore the elephant in the room. In the case of the argument you’ve cited, of course, it’s his insistence that consciousness and will both come from “deterministic physical matter.” How do we even know that matter exists? We don’t — all we have are appearances in consciousnessness, from which we extrapolate an abstraction called “matter.” Do we know that this abstraction is deterministic? No, people like Harris simply assume that, because the models they like to use work better that way. So it’s as though he’s convinced himself that there’s a giant, invisible, intangible vulture perched on top of his head, and then insists that everything else is imaginary but the vulture is real!
Drhooves, I like the way that the creators of Transactional Analysis turned those highfalutin’ abstractions “id,” “ego,” and “superego” into habit patterns in the psyche, which they termed the child, the adult, and the parent. It’s much more straightforward; are your actions and thoughts based on emotional and cognitive habits you embraced in childhood and never modified, are they based on the way your parents behaved when you were young, or are they based on your current adult knowledge of the world?
Neptunesdolphins, I’m frankly not sure. A good cognitive psychologist could probably tell you.
Degringolade, very possibly so. I may see if I can get a copy of Clouscard’s book, though I may not be gentle with it; from a non-Marxist standpoint, he seems to be saying, “Those evil capitalists! How dare they make people happy and comfortable with their lives, instead of driving them into misery so my Marxist friends can exploit their wretchedness to seize power!”
Neptunesdolphins, exactly. Anyone who tells you to give up your ego is trying to replace your ego with theirs.
Ennobled, glad to hear it. Yeah, Schopenhauer can get you most of the way there all by himself.
Inna, I’ve come to savor that look. Maybe that means that I’m not a nice person. 😉
Neptunesdolphins, nicely anatomized. Yes, exactly — it’s all dishonest double-binds. Translate what they’re saying and it amounts to “How dare you not be racist — my grift depends on your racism!”
I know of two people with Multiple Personality Disorder, a friend and a brother of a friend. Both victims of horrendous childhood trauma and abuse. My friend who was high functioning with a reputation for forgetfulness due to separate personalities doing things the others weren’t aware of. As time went stuff went crazier and he is now in therapy attempting process the trauma and integrating his parts. The brother of the friend, in his sixties is in prison for life for a vile crime he doesn’t remember doing though there were witnesses and clear evidence. He has made his peace with his condition receiving and knowing the love of God through Christ. He prefers to remain in prison as it protects him from doing something horrible. His other self rately manifests as my friend growing up along with the sister who both only recall a few instances of encountering a chilling empty person.
Re: Free will
IIRC, Harris argued that if we do have souls, then his arguments work just as well: the conscious mind simply ratifies the decisions “made” by the immaterial yet strangely mechanical soul. His argument is based on studies showing that brain activity researchers associate with a decision appear several seconds before a decision is consciously made. (You’ve written that our Daimons send down desires to our Personalities to act on as they choose– maybe the echo of that process is seen in brain activity?)
I also watched a Youtube video arguing that our conscious minds play the roles of confabulators– we do stuff based on mechanical, unconscious thought processes and then our conscious minds confindently invent reasons for why we are doing those actions. It was based on studies of “split-brain” patients where the left side of the brain knows little about what the right half is doing, so it confabulates to protect its Ego-identity.
Cartoonist Scott Adams said something to the effect that Orange Julius’ Ego is a tool that he uses that he can inflate and deflate at will. Adams said that when he met OJ, he got all of his attention and listened very intently, and was not (for that moment) the egomaniac that the media portrays him.
David S. # 72:
It’s a big paradox, if someone says there are no absoluts, indeed that idea is an absolut…Well said!
@Other Owen
> Every calculus teacher gets a little bit weird when talking about the limit operator, at least the ones that know what they’re teaching.
I’ve never taught calculus but I don’t think it’s that weird: the limit of f(x) as x → c is just what the value of f(x) would be if f was continuous instead of having a hole in it. That might sound abstract and airy, but in actual practice it’s usually obvious what should be there. (This works for the derivative f'(x), too: it’s just that function with a hole is in terms of Δx instead of x.)
As for Berkeley’s criticisms of Newton, it was influential but he was ultimately shown to be wrong: we now have multiple ways give good rigorous sense to the notion of an infinitely-small value. A lot of mathematicians still don’t like infinitesimal calculus but it works just fine and it seems to be easier to learn it that way.
Sarah Jones @ 77, when I visit my daughter in NYC, I never have to stand on the subway or a bus. Someone always stands up to give the old lady a seat. Sometimes they even apologize for not rising sooner. Back in Utica, of course, I am that crazy (but harmless) old woman who walks everywhere. Us weirdos are survivors.
My sense of what the ego is comes from A Course In Miracles, the basic principles of which I am mostly in sympathy, if not its mega-absolutist attitudes and prescriptions. ACIM defines the ego as the illusion that we are distinct beings separated entirely from the Spirit or God, as opposed to the truth of our ultimate Oneness with the Spirit. The overlap with your definition of the ego would be, I tend to think, a false sense of who you actually are. ACIM advocates “unlearning” the ego, which I suppose one could characterize as a gentler form of amputation, but I have always been dubious about how helpful or realistic any such attempt may actually be. I certainly do think that putting the ego in command of your personhood will turn it into a monster very quickly, and it certainly has to learn how to be subordinated. I’m guessing that there is a lot of overlap between how ACIM and how Buddhist philosophy define the ego.
Deringolade @ 82, if I may, part of the X post to which you linked:
“The so-called “new left,” which replaced the old dialectic of labor and capital with the politics of desire, sexuality, and identity, became the perfect ideological vehicle for the new consumer society. What the text identifies as Washington’s project to build a non-communist, liberal left that focuses on civil rather than social rights is, in Clouscard’s terms, the political form of capitalism’s cultural evolution: rebellion repurposed as consumption.”
First, something like this did actually happen. Focus on Old Left preoccupation with labor and capital was indeed replaced with “politics of desire, sexuality, and identity”. As for how and why that came about, opinions vary. Was this one more CIA or other bad actor psyop.? Possibly. I wouldn’t put it past the various bad actors in the shadows. I have come across another theory on the traditionalist Far Right. Here, it is asserted that the mischief is primarily the fault of one Michael Foucault. Now, Foucault was, let us say, not a nice person. From what I can gather, he is to the sexualized Left roughly what Alistair Crowley is to occultists. MF is alleged to have made a deal, (with whom exactly is not specified, possibly those same CIA operatives who inserted Agent Steinem into feminism, quien sabe?) for sexual carte blanche for him and fellow degenerates in return for abandoning the traditional left, in other words, labor and labor unions. My own cynical take, FWIIW, is that 60s left activists found out that labor union leadership was not going to retire or stand down in favor of a bunch of loudmouth intellectuals who had never themselves done a day’s work. So, the loudmouths had to find a new road to unearned power and influence.
No, I have not read Foucault and do not intend to do so. Life is short.
JMG I do take leave to differ with you about capitalism. It seems to me that the comforts you mention were the result of industrialization, not capitalism itself. Capitalist apologists are quick to claim that the two are one and the same, which clearly they are not. My complaint about capitalism is that I see it as tremendously wasteful, as also is socialism. It does seem to me that both systems use human beings as interchangeable modules.
BeardTree, thank you for this. Ouch.
Patrick, Harris is just as wrong in that case. The fact that brain activity spikes before a decision is made simply shows that the brain activates in a situation where a decision needs to be made — it doesn’t show that the decision is made in the brain before it becomes conscious. Once again, he’s seeing what he wants to see. As for the split brain experiments, why, that fits very nicely with the thesis that the ego is the self-representation — first you make a decision, then you confabulate reasons for that decision that fit the ego, while repressing the actual reasons why you made the decision. Freud was there a century ago.
Bradley, Trump has a very solid background in the New Thought end of occultism — when he was young the church he went to had Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, the most famous New Thought teacher of his generation, as its minister. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that he benefited from that training.
Mister N, despite the difference in definitions, your suggestion makes just as much sense in occult terms as in those of ACIM. The ego as self-representation is hardly something you want to put in charge of your personality!
Mary, so far, at least, there are only two known systems that foster industrialization — capitalism and socialism — and only one of them has produced the kind of culture of easy consumption that we’re discussing. I freely admit that capitalism has plenty of vices, and some of them are really heinous, but it seems to me there may be a virtue or two hiding in there as well.
JMG:
This essay reminds me of when I started praciticing meditation with a Buddhist group in Worcester about 20 years ago. I had the thought that personae (in the good ol’ classical sense of masks you voice a character through), was a tool or interface: good for a job, not something you want ot get rid of, but also something ou don’t extend beyond the scope of the job it does. Don’t use a hammer to drive a screw (even if you can). I had not made the connection of the Ego as another persona, but one you present to yourself. Does that make the Ego a tool we use to understand ourselves with the exacerbated problem that it is hard to keep in mind that it is a flawed tool? ( As I was writing that I had the thought that examining where the Ego is an inaccurate protrayal of yourself indicates where you are ignoring parts of yourself because you lack that interface through your Ego persona. Looks like a fine topic for meditaion!)
All this kind of reminds me of an experience I had at about the age of ten – my then best friend was extremely controlling, decided everything, and treated me as an owned object. Eventually I came to the conclusion that being a Christian didn’t mean I had to be a doormat, and stopped being her friend (after a long drawn out situation in which I said no, she apologized, I forgave her, and then she did it again, then came to apologize a day or two later but I realized she didn’t mean it and I just said nothing and put the table in between us. Which she followed up by trying to bully me and getting her other friends to try to bully me, which just made me mad and all the more certain she was not my friend). After which I was a lot less willing to be pushed around, even if I couldn’t do much about my stepmother for a long while yet.
I’ve ended up being a quiet, generally fairly amenable person who can only be pushed so far, and really dislikes/fears other people being in positions of power over me.
I don’t think being a Christian means you should be subordinating your identity or giving away your life choices to another human. I trust God with that power. I don’t trust man.
“English borrows easily and often from Latin, while most other European languages don’t do this anything like as much—that’s why, for example, we use the Latin names for the signs of the zodiac, while most other Europeans use the ordinary words for ram, bull, twins, and so on.”
It was pointed out to me recently that all the direct, honest, unambiguous words in the English language are of English origin, while all the weasily, euphemistic, evasive ones are Latin or Greek borrowings.
Mary Bennet # 95:
A very interesting comment about the “New Left” and its god-like guru Mr. Foucault. You really don’t miss nothing if you have never read his pedantic rehash from Marx and Niezstche! I don’t know if MF was in fact coopted by the CIA or the French intelligence, but indeed it’s a sign of the times to say it, this very interesting fact: MF made himself famous as “radical” AFTER 1968. During the French May riots he was only known for being another boring university teacher, whose only “alternative” activity was his obvious gay life…He never went to the barricades at Paris cough cough…This sudden fame makes me think bad about this leftist holy cow. We’re suffering the effects of this imposture nowadays yet.
Pygmycory #98:
I mourn your toxic friendship which you had in your childhood. It’s an experience I wish nobody had to endure at that early age. However, at least you finally understood what was not a true friend. I’m a Christian like you, and I also think we must be good people but strong to not be bullied by toxic people. Thank you for sharing this painful experience with all us.
Dear JMG,
I would like to ask you a question concerning this part of the text:
“What is this thing we call personality, after all? Examined closely, it turns out to be nothing more than a set of habits.”
I thought that personality is something different; when I perceive a person (not only people, but it can also be an animal or, to an extent, a tree), I usually perceive a unique “feeling”, a whole, which fits only that one person (and that is still true even if that person has died). Sometimes, I can identify the presence of a person just by that “feeling”, not seeing nor hearing them. This identification is always accurate (unlike recognition by more usual senses).
In what relation are my feelings (which I hitherto considered being whole images of personalities) to your definition of a personality? Or what am I perceiving, if not a personality?
Thank you.
With regards,
Markéta
@Patrick and JMG
> The fact that brain activity spikes before a decision is made simply shows that the brain activates in a situation where a decision needs to be made — it doesn’t show that the decision is made in the brain before it becomes conscious.
IIRC, later research found exactly this. The original experiment by Benjamin Libet asked the subjects to flick their wrists at an arbitrary point in time and noted that a signal in the brain, called the readiness potential, would consistently activate before the subjects were aware of their decision to flick their wrists. They interpreted this as evidence that the decision was made unconsciously and therefore contradicted the idea of free will.
(Are you done laughing at how ridiculous this is?)
But later research showed the readiness potential could activate even when the subjects did not go on to flick their wrists. And if memory serves (it’s been over a decade) there was a different signal — the transversal readiness potential — that was much more tightly correlated with the decision to flick the wrist but which occurred slightly after the subjects were aware of making the decision.
There’s a Jewish joke a propos this issue. One of the many versions goes something like this.
The rabbi is praying in the synagogue, and says, “Oh Lord, before you I am nothing.”
The cantor, standing nearby, also prays, “Oh Lord, before you I am nothing.”
A pawnbroker, standing nearby, also prays, “Oh Lord, before you I am nothing.”
The cantor turns to the rabbi and says, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”
— which very elegantly, and pointedly, sets out the ways that self-regard can make its way into various ostensibly spiritual activities. There are similar Buddhist stories, by the way.
Dear John,
I hate to opine on materialism again, but I just can’t help myself. The thing that really grinds my gears about materialism is how despite being a metaphysical position (and not a very good one), it masquerades as science and parasitizes the prestige that science has. Worst of all, it has infected the scientific community with its prejudices and has become the default set of assumptions for many scientists when science should ideally be metaphysically neutral. I wonder if future scientists with less of a materialist bias will make discoveries that our generation has ignored simply because they aren’t compatible with our prejudice.
“Scientism today is doing what the church did in the fifteenth century: forcing theory to fit a predetermined metaphysics.” – Bernardo Kastrup
@Logan Jones
> It was pointed out to me recently that all the direct, honest, unambiguous words in the English language are of English origin, while all the weasily, euphemistic, evasive ones are Latin or Greek borrowings.
Surely you mean “all the straightforward, forthright, onefold words are of English origin” 😉
>Other Owen, calculus really is witchcraft, isn’t it?
>I’ve never taught calculus but I don’t think it’s that weird: the limit of f(x) as x → c is just what the value of f(x) would be if f was continuous instead of having a hole in it. That might sound abstract and airy, but in actual practice it’s usually obvious what should be there.
But do you really know for sure (ie. with a proof) that that’s what it is when lim goes to whatever? Or are you taking it on faith? This gets rather philosophical and surprise surprise, someone like Berkeley latches onto it. Most people are of the opinion if it gives the right answer and it’s useful – eh, go bother someone else with the philosophical implications. Or, as Feynman would say “Shut up and calculate”.
But remember back when you were first taught this stuff and he went over limits. I remember him getting a bit weird about it, a little bit “You need to take this on faith” sort of weird. I just shrugged my shoulders, shut up and calculated back then.
Chris, exactly — the ego is a tool, not a truth. It’s also a tool that needs quite a bit of work before it’s really fit for the job!
Pygmycory, that seems very reasonable to me.
Logan, the irony here is that the only one of those adjectives that comes from English roots is “weaselly.”
Markéta, well, since I’m not you and don’t know what you’re perceiving, I can only guess. My guess is that what you’re perceiving is the self, not the set of habits I’ve called the personality.
Slithy, thanks for this. I don’t think I’d encountered that detail — just the original experiment, which didn’t prove what it claimed to prove.
LeGrand, ha! Thank you for this.
Nephite, as I see it, it’s a little more complex than that. Historically speaking, the metaphysical position of materialism is tangled up in the very roots of modern experimental science. It was because the founders of modern science were thoroughgoing materialists that they turned their attention strictly to replicable, quantitatively measured material phenomena. That’s smart if you want to figure out what you can make matter and energy do without bringing any other factors into the equation, and from that comes most of the last four centuries of technological achievements. The problem comes in if you then take that artificial and arbitrary limitation as your sole guide to the universe as a whole.
@102 Markéta
I don’t understand much of The Cosmic Doctrine, but it seems to me that as people make choices, they lay down tracks in space that the atoms of the astral, etheric, and even material planes settle in, and you are perceiving that structure.
@103 Slithy Toves
That makes sense.
Chuaquin @ 100, thank you for this. Here in the USA we have our very own St. Noam Chomsky of very similar life trajectory. So far as I know, Chomsky isn’t a degenerate, except intellectually. Neither of these poseurs was country when country wasn’t cool.
@Other Owen
> But do you really know for sure (ie. with a proof) that that’s what it is when lim goes to whatever? Or are you taking it on faith?
Have you ever taken a real analysis course? The fact that limits can be proven without resorting to at-the-time exotic elements like infinitesimals is the whole point of limits. Unfortunately when you’re first presented with the results of limits it’s usually in a sloppy “trust me” kind of way, but it really can be proven that lim(1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + …) = 2 in the specific sense that however close you want to get to 2 by adding the terms of the series, I can give you a number of terms to compute such that if you compute that many or more, you’ll always be that close or closer, provably. And it can be proven that this isn’t true of any number but 2, because for any other number r ≠ 2, after enough terms you’ll always be closer to 2 than to r.
“I remember him getting a bit weird about it, a little bit “You need to take this on faith” sort of weird.”
I remember my calculus instructor saying, “Just press the I Believe button” a few times. Sometimes the proof of what you are doing requires more math than you have at that point. The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra is a good example. They knew it must be true but proving it was a chore.
“A first attempt at proving the theorem was made by d’Alembert in 1746, but his proof was incomplete. Among other problems, it assumed implicitly a theorem (now known as Puiseux’s theorem), which would not be proved until more than a century later and using the fundamental theorem of algebra. Other attempts were made by Euler (1749), de Foncenex (1759), Lagrange (1772), and Laplace (1795). These last four attempts assumed implicitly Girard’s assertion; to be more precise, the existence of solutions was assumed and all that remained to be proved was that their form was a + bi for some real numbers a and b.”
And they weren’t done, see the Wikipedia article for more gory details.
Another example is first order kinetics. The plug and chug equation from 9th grade is final concentration = initial concentration times e^(-Lt) where L is lambda and t is time. If you are doing radioactive decay L is the natural logarithm of 2 divided by the half life. A simple straightforward equation. (Provided you have the same time units in both L and t so they cancel out 😉)
Figuring out where it came from takes three semesters of calculus and then you finally have the toolset to wade into Ordinary Differential Equations.
I’m not sure where I saw it first, but the division of Knowledge into what you think, what you know, and what you can prove in court (or to your thesis committee) is a useful distinction.
Slithy Toves #106: > It was pointed out to me recently that all the direct, honest, unambiguous words in the English language are of English origin, while all the weasily, euphemistic, evasive ones are Latin or Greek borrowings… Surely you mean “all the straightforward, forthright, onefold words are of English origin”
Ha – I was reminded of the T-shirt that says “Polyamory is WRONG!” and underneath it says “It’s either multiamory or polyphilia, but mixing Greek and Latin roots is wrong.” https://thefirsttees.com/product/official-polyamory-is-wrong-it-is-either-multiamory-or-polyphilia-but-mixing-greek-and-latin-roots-wrong-t-shirt
i have to take a break from going through the emails of my landlord situation as i put my cases together, because last night i noticed that simone started ambushing us shortly after i’d written the management company to install rails in the shower for James because of his cancer.
this stuff is soooo dark to re-live.
i’m writing that because i’m going to nudge this conversation in a wider direction by pointing out that this isn’t all just theory hanging in the air like a cigar smoke cloud, we’re ALL IN PLAY RIGHT NOW.
i prayed before the sun today to use me where i’m most needed because i don’t know if anyone else but Papa and likely Maxine have noticed, but we’re we’re in a new …”gear”?
i watched Alex Jones on Tucker because i just love Alex Jones but i can’t watch his shows directly. i have to come at him obliquely, via others. i can only focus on a little bit of him at a time because that’s all i need. anyhow, he said we’re gonna lose in the third quarter but come back in the 4th, regarding what God said.
i mix my stories and don’t know or depend or even refer to the bible unless it feels apt, and that feels about right.
i see the guys like Papa and El Gato Malo, Absurdistan woman et al, are already moving culture and i’m running alongside them. they’re having a collective discussion. i was gonna read Paul Kingsnorth’s book, but heard a couple here say it’s so bleak, so that’s the last thing i need right now.
i am facing this case and all of my questions i’ve discussed with Lilly, as clueless as we are, have been answered and discussed here and on a few other sites. i knew there was a bigger conversation when i saw Gato Malo had said, “betas only show their true colors in private. alphas show theirs in public. and this results in mutual incomprehension.”
i was comparing it to my little sister as i was figuring out how to write this case out. and THAT is it: i have less to hide because i’ve already died and for my mother and sister, their crafted personas ARE their art. and when i come and ruin the facade, all hell breaks loose.
so that’s the reason for the civil war we’re already IN. and all these guys with joan crawford mothers are putting out cluster b personality websites and podcasts, but the only way to wrestle back the culture is to ridicule them back into their place. the guys have already started, along with a few of us weirdo odd girls and women.
that’s why going to court feels harder than playing the Apollo.
what i’m saying is:
if anyone has any live stories of trying to work with this ego — whether it’s with you or someone else — i beg you to share TECHNIQUES, because that’s where we are and why i need this discussion.
this isn’t as …what’s the word?… this isn’t as abstract as you all are making it sound here. this is NOW. and the western side of the country is seceding as we speak, and trying to corral us and make us feel even more despondent. that the pillow guy and alex jones are still getting financially sodomized by their own country is not a good sign. i’m a pipsqueak and seeing the same games and shtick in court being used against ME.
i don’t know why i’m still HERE why? i asked the house if it is keeping me here. i want to go. i’m already looking forward to Adocentyn in New England. i looove New England all year round but fall and winter are YUM and smell soooo fallen leaf childhood warm houses fireplaces wood stoves and people weren’t all blood thirsty vampires. no. they weren’t.
but i figure i’m here for a reason and learning a lot how “They” think. the Betas. they’re deadly. they destroy they’re envious they’re the Germans now, the UK, us… Devouring Mothers Betas…whatever you call ’em… we have to get our swagger back.
i was canceled 15 years ago and became niggrified and i FEEL it and i know others can SENSE it. i’m outsider.
so i implore some of you players to not let these discussions get too solitary and abstract and take them out into the world like feathers or bumper cars, anything, just TEST PLAY. you’re creators here, mages.
i’m talking to the real name people because the first step is:
can you BE and SAY yourself, your truth, with your full or real name???
if not, then go ahead: you all keep it abstract until you’re good and ready. yes, as you get naked in public and disrobe, you WILL get that woozy high vertigo feeling and fear dying because you ARE dying as your fake self.
i got scared, too. i still do.
i couldn’t watch/listen to the Tucker podcast with the congressman from Tennesee, was it?–who talked about UFOs under water. i only know that i LOVE that there’s new mega mystery but it could likely mean that we’re not as much on the top of the food chain as we thought.
i stopped watching because it is distraction. the internet is in fact dying before our eyes. i struggle to write on my own substack. all ALL new thoughts worth anything are for the paper ENDCAT books. i’m not doing it on PURPOSE, i “feel” it. Naomi Wolf barely writes and i see Gato Malo struggle to come up with something new.
Papa G is riding that and TEACHING in the moment, using the vibes the “egregore” as his prompt. i can feel it. because he’s on top of the conversation and not just calling it out but helping some of us FLY with it.
right now it’s getting very heavy thick and dark. but the internet is over and even the DJs are talking on the air about how night life is dead. and no love and everyone’s shy.
that’s why i feel like my role is to be middle aged chaperone of shy wallflower high school kids at the dance.
but right NOW is the wobbly time. i’m past looking at either “side” at this point, except for small details. the “right” are going their own overly simplistic ways regarding women art culture etc and us few weirdos need to dare to be none of ’em and everything.
and this is ALL about ego and who you think you are and ought to be even yeah, even when i think i’ve figured it out, i get head rushes again. like realizing how evil mordor truly IS and how blase i was about staying here. i thought, “how bad could it GET???”
i keep going through these emails and finding out and REMEMBERING… i was a hero to my baby sister for punching an older girl who was bullying her in the face, but i didn’t see all the HATE behind that. she’d trot that story out and i’d go “aw shucks you’re my baby sister!” and i fell for the flattery like a trite dime store leo.
we have to make culture. some are out there. it’s going to take WAVES of this. they, the betas little sisters soy boys, whatever you wanna call them, they fear being WRONG.
as someone pointed out, it’s us one at a time, not some great Charlie Kirk push. it’s “what happened TODAY?”
and how did you manage it differently besides just being quiet and going online to kvetch about it? how did you confront it, jujitsu it, or fluff it up???
i wanna KNOW. we’re in play. i don’t think we have but a few years at MOST to make the new status quo wobbly. the vaccines showed the permission structure is how they’re led. it’s too easy.
we have to upend the STORIES.
my friend Jeffrey who always fights with me admitted me sticks around even though i’m the devil and voted trump, because i’m “MORE INTERESTING.”
i laughed. wanted to ask why force yourself to wear hairshirts as a white man???
yes. this is religious. i had no idea secular meant NO god of any kind. but that Man is God. i had no idea it was …so elemental to my understanding of The World.
so beware of that idea where we think the finger pointing at the moon IS the moon. i ask because i’d love to hear from those who’re going beyond the tricky talking and are into the DOING. experimenting.
x
So … Mr. Greer,
How I parse the basic gist of your post, in a nutshell ( All Praise Peanut the Squirrel! .. ‘;] ) is as follows: Egotistical + Reflection .. e.i. ‘mirror’.. = Egomystical!
“It was because the founders of modern science were thoroughgoing materialists that they turned their attention strictly to replicable, quantitatively measured material phenomena.”
Were the founders of modern science materialists? I was under the impression that at least some of them were interested in the occult/spritual. I thought that early scientists were materialist in methodology but not in philosophy/ontology. I admit I could be wrong here.
“The problem comes in if you then take that artificial and arbitrary limitation as your sole guide to the universe as a whole.”
No argument here. I think the difference between early and modern science is that early science knew it was restricting itself to a smaller part of reality, whereas modern science denies the existence of whatever may lie outside its purview.
Whether this recent ‘incident’ of mine reflects this post remains to be determined: I had a rather, uh, interesting event happen whilst I was tending my garden plot just the other day I, with another member of the com. garden that I’m a member of, we’re having a rather sedate conversation re. the negative aspects of public school attendance .. with regard to our individual issues of compliance of curriculum policy vs. teaching that matters for the student that has trouble with the rigid bureaucratic mindset that prevails.. and has for decades .. within most public school districts. The conversation went well .. until I mentioned how, in one class that I attended (e.i. ‘remedial math’..) that, in the main .. most of the students in that particular class were there because there was nowhere else to place these kids – many, though not all, were from lower income black families .. who, were totally • outta • control. As an added, uh .. plus, they picked on moi because they could; threatening me with bodily harm.. just because ( I was NOT by at all, in ANY way, popular amongst the various highschool cliques!). I stated that, in my estimation .. that perhaps the current Fed. Dept. of Education should be nixed, to perhaps allow other solutions to spring forth, thereby bringing new strategies toward for students to thrive toward a better scholastic outcome.. Oh man! the shale hit the fan .. BIGGLY LIKE! My ‘fellow’ garden mate went absolutely BALLISTIC! ..screaming at me.. throwingF-Bombs in my mug.p, not letting me get a word in edgewise, and made all sorts of accusations/assuptions towards me that were unfounded, to say the least!
It was rather unsettling from my end, and I was wondering if things would result in fisticuffs .. or worse! He later gave me a somewhat half-hearted apology , stating how he had REALLY STRONG FWEEINGS on the matter(s), or some such..
Here’s the kicker: he apparently is some Democratic party pooba within the local blu community..
He later apologized, basically stating that he, um, ‘overreacted’, and was sorry to have lost his cool.
I’ll take his apology at face value .. but will no longer talk to him about anything, save the weather!
Concerning the political dimension of ego:
Note that you never send the government an identity card that says who you are: instead the government sends you an identity card that says who you are.
@Patrick
“His argument is based on studies showing that brain activity researchers associate with a decision appear several seconds before a decision is consciously made.”
Every study I’ve seen that purports to show the same thing has the same shortcoming: they ask the participants to make some insignificant decision, like when to push a button, or whether to push button 1 or button 2, and to make it “randomly”. I haven’t seen any similar study based on any other kind of decision-making.
The problem there (well, one of many) is that the conscious mind doesn’t really do “random” decisions. What I suspect is happening is that the decision of when to press the button or whatever is handed off to unconscious processes, which then return “you should press it X seconds from now”. The participants could still consciously choose to not press the button at that point, but they have no reason to refuse and arguably it would be going against what the study asks them to do, so they go ahead and press it.
In short, the studies ask people to make a decision with minimal conscious involvement, and then materialists look at the results and say “this proves that all decisions are made with minimal conscious involvement”.
My three year estimate (I was fudging by saying “few”) is adjusted from my thought that we have a year and a half. My timing is always waaaay off, too early, so I’ve adjusted for that.
I think Adocentyn Next Year is MY kick off date. I want to be done or mostly done with legal issues here. I think I’m going to help start a post-industrial chitlin circuit. Thanks for the post industrial part, Papa. That’s perfect!
The Ones Who Use Their Names are up next. Don’t underestimate how terrified the nom de plumes are to merely be seen in The Real. You’re up because someone’s gotta get up and dance first.
X
“The school of occultism that I practice and teach holds that consciousness isn’t just a passive blank that receives impressions. ”
There is a noticeable resemblance here to the Marxist blank slate theory, and the overall Liberal assumption that we are all nurture and no nature, pure culture without genetics. It’s a lie of course, and emphasizing pure nature/genetics is an equal and opposite lie. As usual, the truth is in the middle; we consist of both.
@JMG #58: I haven’t read Dickens’ Bleak House, but the Dissident Right uses that book to illustrate the pitfalls of Pathological Altruism, or Telescopic Empathy (among other names) which infects the modern West. There was a Curtis Yarvin article on that, in which his tagline was “I just wanted to point out the mountain of skulls”, lol.
@JMG #96: I beg your pardon, but there’s a notable exception to that dichotomy. Aside from Capitalism and Communism/Socialism, there was another ideology that successfully industrialized, namely Fascism, with its attendant Third Position economics. Sure, it went down in flames, but Fascism never failed, it was defeated (after taking on the world and making it a close battle). Some argue that modern-day China is an analogue to Fascism, with its private sector blended with state controls. Or do you consider the Fascist Third Position to be a subset of Socialism?
@JMG #108: I think there’s an occult belief that the modern West was assigned the task to discover as much as it could with pure matter & energy, and having completed this task, it would burn itself out, and make way for future societies that will have a healthier relationship with nature and the higher planes, all while benefiting from our technology. Notably, it was only through our Faustian excess that we could’ve unlocked such forbidden knowledge, so the absurdity of treating the world as dead matter was simply part of our mission in the grand scheme of things. Is this accurate? I think I remember reading it somewhere.
Also, I hope this isn’t too much to respond to! My queries are in the latter two blurbs, if that helps.
I was going to post this anyway (or try to), but I think it fits in well with Erika’s plea to be/get real. (I won’t use my real name, however.)
When I think of “ego” I think immediately of Carl Jung’s definition. I believe it is congruent with JMG’s, though the words are different.
The ego is the center of consciousness. To “lose” the ego, to be ego-less, to be without an ego, is to be unconscious. To be conscious is ipso facto to have an ego. In phenomenological terms (Jung was an empiricist and a phenomenlologist, though not to my knowledge a follower of Edmund Husserl), consciousness is a field, with a focus and a horizon. However, for Jung the self consists of both consciousness and the unconscious. If the ego is the center of consciousness, and if the self consists of both consciousness and unconsciousness, then the ego ipso facto cannot be the center of the self. If the ego behaves unconsciously, that is to say, if it remains unconscious of the unconscious, and gets too far out of whack as a result, if it gets too imbalanced in its conscious attitude, the unconscious will compensate for that lack of balance, sometimes in embarrassing ways (slips of the tongue, behavior, etc.). So what the ego needs to do, and JMG’s analysis points in this direction, is to adapt to the unconscious. However, the unconscious will contain … it is perhaps an understatement to say disowned elements of the self, because the ego is so far from recognizing these elements as parts of the self that they are projected onto others; these include the shadow and the contra-sexual elements. In order not to be blindsided by the unconscious, the ego then needs to turn towards the unconscious and start to recognize and then to consciously integrate these disowned (that is, the hitherto unrecognized) elements into consciousness. The ego then moves closer to the center of the self, because the self is consciousness plus unconsciousness, and the ego is the center of consciousness only, not the self, so the ego has to move. Jung describes this as an unpleasant and even a humiliating process, to recognize these other elements.
Jung was a psychiatrist. Patients came to Jung the practicing medical doctor with adaptation issues. One order of business is to be able to adapt to the world around you. Equally important is to be able to adapt to the world inside you. The world inside you is just as much the world as the world outside you is. The psyche is a product of nature. But as JMG has pointed out, “the world out there” is just as much a product of the psyche.
Now, if it is the case that I (huh, “I”) need to move the center of my perceived self, my conscious self, off center, as it were, to accommodate the demands of my unconscious self, not to mention the world around me, then where am I going? Clearly, this is not selflessness, nor egolessness, but rather moving closer to the self, whatever that is, and that is a process of discovery.
@NephiteNeophyte, 116: Yes the founders of science were absolutely materialists. So was Hegel, btw. I recommend Ortega y Gassets Essays on History and History as a System. He will open your eyes about German Idealism and all the rest of western philosophy since the Eleaticas. Ortega was perhaps the best philosopher of the 20th century.
Oddly enough another blog I read – Kristina Hazler’s – covered a very similar topic around the self today. For those who read German: https://bewusstseinsbooster.substack.com/p/bewusstseinsbooster-11-du-bist-die
@ennobled, 84. Ortega y Gassets thought pretty highly of schopenhauer. He said he touches everything but can’t manage to see all the metaphysical terrain he encompasses.
xcalibur/djs @ 121, Bleak House is far from being among Dicken’s best novels which are, IMO, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Dombey and Son. His criticisms of Victorian society, the age of “dark, Satanic mills” in England, are hardly applicable to the US today. I have yet to see the leadership, you should excuse the expression, of either major party squarely face the fact that we do not now have a vigorous, healthy population. God help us if any foreign power invades.
Hi JMG,
That was interesting. In my study of Druidry, I have found my ego, my I, to be very mailable. By using the methods of Druidry I learned from you, I have developed an ego that is very content and happy. My family and friends are delighted about how I have been able to change myself.
I look back on my former personality with some puzzlement as to how it developed that way. My goal now is to see how much farther I can take the process.
Hugs from Maxine
Off topic question: I’ve had a lousy day, so lousy I came to wonder if astrological factors were involved. I checked my transits and found that Saturn in the second house kf finances is applying to an opposition with natal Mars in the eighth house of death, which explains why my day and week went the way they did. When Saturn starts separating from the opposition tomorrow, will the transit still be in effect? Or will I not have to worry about more close calls or worse until Saturn turns direct and again applies to the opposition?
Mary Bennet # 110:
Yeah, Chomsky is very overvalued by the US leftism especially…Time will put him in his correct site…
———————————-
John and soneone else have said science founders were all materialists. Well, the man I’m going to remember wasn’t a scientist, but a philosopher. However, he founded modern rationalism, which is very correlated with materialism. Of course, I’m talking about René Descartes. So well, this reason champion was a believer in Catholicism, including his devotion to Saint Mary Virgin…
One can extend your glove metaphor to describe those who have transcended the ego. They have given up their opposable thumbs and so can grasp nothing!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. This one is going to be read and re-read thoroughly. Much to ponder…
Erika #120:
There is some value in not using your full name. I can talk both politics and occultism to people that I know, taking things as slowly as necessary, rather than being rejected as a lunatic from the get-go. Little strokes fell great oaks, but only if you can land the strokes in the first place.
—David P.
Great read, its nice having something to look forward to mid-week so thanks JMG!
Also as I’m fairly new to the blog, it’s great to see you unearth forgotten concepts in real time, I hear that’s your schtick! I wonder how the group of frenchman would respond to seeing their ideas played with on the interweb by a Druid and others in the technofuture decades…
One of the things I hold dearest about my Britishness is the way we poke fun at the French, so while it irks me to take some of their ideas seriously, I do enjoy any jabs you might throw…
I’m sure some readers know about the famous Hartlepool Monkey?
If not, during the Napoleonic Wars, a boat wreck off the North East Coast of England brought with it a caged Monkey… The locals, who had been fed anti-French propaganda for millennia already, were convinced this animal was none other than a French Spy, and proceeded to hang the said monkey!
Whether its true or not, everyone in Hartlepool still knows about it…
https://northeaststatues.com/2022/03/12/the-hartlepool-monkey-hartlepool-marina/
With regard to the topic of ego and the young individuals you speak about in the essay. I think part of the problem is that culturally, the secular folk (who seem to be everywhere) have by-and-large spared Buddhism from their attacks, and so anyone who has those thoughts of ‘maybe there’s more to life’ and is still looking to be an acceptable member of their social groups, families and whatnot, sees buddhism and meditation as the most socially acceptable form of engaging with that religious/ritual impulse. This was at least what happened in my case. I’ve spent many an evening around a liberal dinner table listening to people complain about religion but praise Buddhism because it feels less preachy. So naturally when I looked out for greater meaning, I turned in that direction. Thankfully I found Alan Watts who made things lighter for me, I also did quite a few years of Transcendental Meditation, and had some very peaceful and tranquil moments, but it took me a few years to unwind from that egotistical ‘no ego’ stance which I’m afraid plenty of hacks seem to engage with, there’s a very creepy western non-dual youtube circle that I dipped my toes into and they all look as this they’ve just seen a ghost, completely devoid of vitality, for anyone else suffering from that affliction, I’d say get to the pub, and fast!
All the best
T
(maybe not a direct response, but definitely inspired by Erika’s writing)
My life was never really about finding out who I am, but more about finding out why I am here. On some deep level I’ve always known that the spectacle is not the truth. The difficulty was that I could not see through it and that I was living in a world where everybody treats the spectacle as if it is true.
That has been quite hard, but it has one great advantage: I know what it’s like to live in a world that doesn’t make any sense.
Most people in my environment realize on some level that the world they thought they knew is crumbling apart, and many of them are scared, angry, depressed and/or are drowning in a sea of passiveness. I, on the other hand, feel stronger day by day, and my attitude is more akin to ‘bring it on, I’ve been waiting for this’ 🙂
Today I realized that these people are starting to experience something I’ve known all my life, and I understood that I must help them with that by becoming a leader of sorts. I’m not sure I like it and have no idea how to go about doing that, but there you have it.
(Erika mentioned names and I’m not going to reveal mine, but I can tell you that I share it with a great leader from the past. I doubt my parents knew that and thought of it only as a beautiful name, but I guess they have given me my true name)
–bk
Reincarnation is at odds with the blank state, because you are not a blank state if you have past lives and your actions in the past lives affect your current life today.
@ Patrick # 59
I was also one of those fools at one point in my life. I was convinced that matter is the source of all things Mental and spiritual. I also believed that matter is mechanical and moves according to predictable and mathematically precise laws. Also, I understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics to mean that these motions are inevitably going to lead to the Heat Death of the universe, which the utterly boring diversity of directionless motion that is the conclusion of all motion.
The result, of course is that I (1) stopped believing in my own will and saw myself as a mechanical clock thing, and (2) saw Death as the only and inevitable purpose of life and all that life can create. I felt that the part of me which experiences qualia – the Witness or what have you – is just strapped into a bag of flesh and forced to watch a movie without so much as a pause button.
I treated Life like an inescapable curse, even though I didn’t quite word it like so. And yes, this led me into debilitating depression, which very nearly ruined my Masters degree and my career. This went on for a while until one single thought pierced through the darkness like a pinprick of light.
If I can only experience qualia, and cannot do anything about the arrangement of particles in the universe – even inside my own brain – then how do I register the experience of qualia in my own memory? Memory is physical, and represents the state of the brain, does it not? So if I have no control over physical matter, how is it that I am able to “write” into my memory the record of my experience of qualia?
I can explain my memory of things I have seen by noting that the physical apparatus of the eye, the optic nerve, the visual cortex, and the rest of the brain are enough to record the objects my eyes perceive. But what about the qualia associated with vision? Not only am I experiencing them, but my brain’s physical state is marked by the record of that experience. Not once – at some point of time in the past – but at every instance of my living existence.
This thought woke me to the possibility that my soul – or what have you – does have some degree of control over matter. And from there, I pulled on that thread and kept on pulling until the entire materialist and mechanical premise shattered and I was free.
Hi John Michael,
Respect for acknowledging the karmic load you’ve carried with you, and then doing something about it. It takes work to improve, make amends, or even just make a difference.
Man, I’ve never felt that wasted time feeling you described, but have heard many other folks expressing that same sentiment and that’s long been of interest. You know what annoys me though? When people waste what time is available to me. 🙂 The passing of days is felt and known, and it’s not exactly a loss, but more of a lessening of opportunity. Most of the folks in my family drop off the perch in their early 70’s.
Cheers
Chris
Rajarshi # 135:
You’ve described your past life as a mechanical materialist like you had living in a nightmare…Oh wait! Indeed, you had been in a real nightmare! By luck, you managed to free yourself of it.
————————————————
When I was more or less 6, I started to think one day: “Why am I who I am now?” I think it was my first phylosophical doubt…
Issac Newton is considered to be a father of science, but also was an alchemist and one tenth of all of his writings dealt with alchemy. So I don’t think that the statement that the fathers of science were all materialists is true.
Erika, I think a lot of people are waking up to the fact that the world is changing very fast. I try to give the techniques that I know, but you’ve already heard all of those — I have a limited toolkit that gets a lot of use, and I’m pretty sure that most of the tools work for me as well as they do because of my quirky nervous system and the details of my childhood — so your mileage may vary and so may everyone else’s. That said, you and everyone else will hear of my discoveries as I make them.
Polecat, that’s one way to frame it.
Nephite, granted, that was a generalization, but many of the founders of the scientific revolution were in fact thoroughgoing materialists. Some of them, like Robert Boyle, pursued alchemy because they thought it was a material process — and of course that’s why his alchemical work failed so miserably, and never went as far as Newton’s did.
Polecat, of course you got a screaming meltdown. The eleventh commandment of modern liberalism is “Thou shalt hire ever-increasing numbers of bureaucrats.” That shows the class dimension — job creation for the university-educated bourgeoisie has become the be-all and end-all of social policy. By suggesting that a bureaucracy should be dismantled and people allowed to pursue their own solutions, you cut at the heart of the guy’s class interest, and got the predictable reaction.
Paradoctor, good! Perhaps we should start sending the government identity cards that say who it is.
Erika, I’m far from sure why people insist on online pseudonyms. Nothing online is ever really anonymous, and nothing online is ever private; everybody who posts or even reads or watches anything anywhere online has their name and other personal details recorded in an assortment of public and private data banks. That’s one of several reasons I always use my name online.
Xcalibur/djs, I’m not aware of a country in which fascism carried out industrialization from scratch. It can certainly exploit an existing industrial system, but only capitalism and socialism seem to be able to take an agrarian society and turn it into an industrial one. As for the destiny of our society, that’s certainly what I was taught; every great civilization has the task of exploring some part the whole landscape of human possibility, and the straw we drew assigned us the task of figuring out everything that could be done with matter and energy all by themselves. Every civilization’s belief system suits it to its task, and so ours was as unbalanced as the work required.
Asdf, I don’t find that definition of ego useful, as there are certainly states of consciousness in which the ordinary ego is absent: consider dreams, in which fragile, temporary “dream ego” takes the place of the waking ego, or those “oceanic” states where consciousness remains but the distinction between self and other temporarily dissolves. That’s why I make use of the definition of ego as conscious self-image.
KAN, thanks for this.
Maxine, delighted to hear this.
Patrick, once an aspect begins to separate its power drops off very sharply, and it can often be overcome by an ordinary effort of will.
Chuaquin, that’s why I specified “scientists” and “materialism.” My comment, as you demonstrate, doesn’t apply to rationalist philosophers!
Bfp, that works!
Tobes, heading for the pub is a good cure for quite a few toxic philosophies. Maybe you and the Hartlepool monkey can lift a pint or two for me, as I’m condemned to get by on American beer for the time being. 😉
Anon, yes, and since the blank slate argument works so very poorly in practice, reincarnation becomes a more probable option.
Chris, I’ve never seen the point of wasting time. I can always do something with time not otherwise allocated, and I propose to put the rest of this incarnation to good use. I hope to be around a good bit longer — my father smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish (what’s more, it was cheap cigarettes and low-grade box wine), and also had longterm damage from illnesses that doubtless shortened his life, but he made it to 86. I’d like to see three digits if I can manage that.
Anon, I believe I used the word “most”…
Sorry, I was responding to Chuaquin who said “all”.
To quote Weird Al, “Thing you’re really righteous? Think you’re pure of heart? Well I know I’m a million times as humble as thou art!”
@JMG
> I’m far from sure why people insist on online pseudonyms
A couple reasons: first, there’s a roleplaying element. Some people take it as far as playing characters very different from themselves (Twitter/X is known for many such accounts), but it can be as simple as a kind of online masquerade: you put on a “mask” that makes you smile to see it, and which somewhat distances your online persona from your real-world history. (For example, my handle, Slithy Toves, is a reference to Lewis Carroll’s delightful nonsense poem “Jabberwocky,” which I’m rather fond of.)
Secondly, I agree that pseudonyms are no protection against governments, big corporations, or dedicated doxxers — with modern Big Data and AI analysis techniques, pretty much nothing is protection against them — but they at least prevent it from being trivial for someone to find public posts that run afoul of the latest moral panic, and provides plausible deniability for all involved.
@Yavanna #15
Regarding the mistranslation of the word “meek”—
I remember hearing somewhere that the original intent of the passage is closer to:
“Those who have swords, and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed, will inherit the earth.”
I’ve lost track of the source for this idea; it might have been Jordan Petersen, but it doesn’t really matter. Whether or not this is the “correct” translation, it strikes me as excellent advice.
JMG # 139:
I use my true name online like you; I agree. It’s quite ridiculous to use a pseudonym in internet, because we all are controlled online. In addition to this, I don’t have a reputation to protect or a shameful identity to hide online.
About Descartes being a pious Catholic but not a scientist, you’re right. However, the followers of Rationalism often are mixed with the usual scientific materialism bag…So I think it’s an irony a lot of atheist rationalists and fake skeptics are following (at least in spirit) a devote christian like Descartes…
Mr. Greer, thanks for your response(s). Maybe the mirror in which he gazes into .. assuming he owns one, is cracked, thus reflecting multiple, conflicting egos..
>i watched Alex Jones on Tucker because i just love Alex Jones but i can’t watch his shows directly
Eh, it’s hard to catch him when he’s on, it seems like just about everyone but the Humble Water Filter Merchant is manning the desk whenever I check on Infowars. So even if you want to watch him directly, he’s hard to find. 10 years ago, would you have ever contemplated yourself watching Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson? Do you giggle a bit thinking about it? What about 20 years ago? Both were around back then (although Tucker was quite the boring partisan hack, as I recall). Had a dorky little bowtie and repeated whatever he was told to.
@132 Tobes
It only appears that secular westerners spare Buddhism from religious critiques because they think Buddhism is just a shallow version of zen meditation. Sometimes they remember that Tibetan Buddhism exists. You should hear how they talk about Pure Land Buddhism sometime. Oh boy, I always have to brace myself every time a westerner mentions Pure Land.
Got to love being called a superstitious Asian who doesn’t practice ‘real Buddhism’ aka secular hippie drugs out the wazoo and meditation crap.
> Nothing online is ever really anonymous, and nothing online is ever private
It’s a question of what one’s threat model is. Though I don’t use a pseudonym, I try not to reveal my last name here so that these comments won’t be found by a cursory google search. This seems to work. It won’t protect against somebody competent actually out to get me personally but I don’t expect to land in that situation anytime soon.
—David P.
JMG and all:
I find eliminative materialism very seductive, even after 20 years of mediation and almost 4 years of working though the Golden Dawn system (with a lot of help from JMG’s books on the subject). I think it has to do with the technological results of our sciences – our socieity has build some incredible stuff (some of it good, some of it pernicious) working within that paradigm. We can talk about our cultural biases favoring eliminative materialism, but I think that really comes from the fact that we can point to our paradigms and models and say we really accoplished a lot through them. Of course, eliminative materialism mkaes the mistake of raising our parasdigm and models of reality from the status of tools (where they belong) to the status of ultimate explanation of reality (which even few myths dare to do).
Luckily, I am skeptical by nature. If I wasn’t I would have just fallen in line with eliminative materialism and not taken up meditation and later magic practice. Of course, eliminative materialism can also hit me in the skepticism (you can’t prove its not true after all!). So even though I understand that eliminative materialism is a myth claiming to be an ultimate truth, I have had some experience that is not compatable with it, and I understand even at a viceral level that it is the elevation of useful tool to myth, it has a lot of power over me still. It is a major challenge to my pracice. (Or maybe its the story being told by the real challeng to my practice). I must be making progress because its pull has been really nagging lately.
About anon names,
I have always thought of them as alter-egos of people. You can tell a lot about a person by their chosen name. I go by my actual name elsewhere. Only reason why it’s Neptune’s Dolphins here, has to with wanting to link to my WordPress blog. On FaceBook, I am Virginia Carper, on Substack Virginia Knowles Carper. Anyway, I think we have many names as alter-egos since we have many facets. I answer to Squirrel! and Squirrelie! also. I have other names depending on the circumstance and the group.
What I do find interesting is the Cosmic Pan-Pagan names that people do come up with. Usually involves Raven this or Crow that or some sort of witchy name. Although I haven’t encountered a Princess Cosmic Moondip., but I have encountered Political Witch Smart Crone Talking (anti-Trump of course).
And what is even more wild are all the creative names that Smart Crone and her buddies call the various members of Donald Trump’s government. By calling Trump all sorts of vulgar names seems to diminish him in their minds. The other names are equally vulgar and are used with other people. The other side has their names too like Jazzy Jaz and the like.
So names can be indicators of egos of the person themselves and how they move in the world by how they see others.
JMG #139:
<<
Perhaps we should start sending the government identity cards that say who it is.
>>
It’s called voting.
RaabSilco #143:
Those who keep their swords sheathed shall inherit the earth.
@Chris Smith
> eliminative materialism can also hit me in the skepticism (you can’t prove its not true after all!)
Oh, but I can! If eliminative materialism is correct, then words don’t have meanings (since these are non-materialism), hence there are no true statements (since they can’t mean anything). Ergo, eliminative materialism, however you might state the position, cannot be true.
Now solipsism on the other hand… if I really were a solipsist, there probably isn’t anything anyone could say that could argue me out of it, even if I were perfectly rational. Thankfully, the universe requires we be a bit irrational, anyway.
(What would a perfectly rational universe look like, anyway, if such a thing even could exist? I shudder to think.)
@neptunesdolphin
> Political Witch Smart Crone Talking
Oh dear gods. And it only makes it worse if you understand the combination of pop-witchcraft “empowerment” culture, “We are the Smart People” credentialism, and the “A(n) [insert identity here] is talking!” trope that came together in a single individual to convince them that that name is anything but the utmost pinnacle of tacky.
Ah I remember Rene Egli’s “the LOL²A principle” and Eckhard Tolle. Not to be unfair to Eckhard Tolle, there will be good points about him;
However, their lecture gripped me for a short period before I ever considered myself spiritual or dealt with such things consciously. Very short that period was indeed, for the rosy overblown positive thinking messages of probably more Egli than Tolle had a disastrous effect, and I turned away.
For Tolle, yes I read him later again, to live in the moment and see life as transient, is that his message? If I recall that even correctly.
Otherwise, so the ego aka the pain body belong to us, and these parts of us constantly try to make us trip and fall and experience more pain.
WHY?? Why would human evolution remotely support that? Wouldn’t a different species have prevailed then, better suited to life in a at certain times unforgiving environment, that has not inheritet a built-in, default self-hampering mode aimed at nothing else but to weaken your own mind and efforts?
The question WHY we should have something like that never seems to arise to them.
The best definition of “ego” I had heard years ago, maybe here? Was that this is a reasonable natural faculty of survival we have, not necessarily aimed at deeper self-knowledge, only at survivial, and so those who want to do the next step in spiritual evolution want top overcome this baser of our nature. Makes more sense at least.
I’*m not a friend of the Dalai Lama either, at least my amazement know limits. When in one of his books he recommends never to fight back, let yourself be humiliated if someone attacks you, smile the smile of subduction, literally.
“I prefer people who utter their anger now and then to those who keep it all in for a decade until they storm the supermarket with a pumpgun” a friend back man years said befittingly well.
If met these greatpeople, bulging with rage, contempt, all else, “I am fine, FINE! I LOVE LIFE!!! I am HAPPY!!!!”, they even have a certain kind of irritating smell at times.
PAPA G: “Erika, I think a lot of people are waking up to the fact that the world is changing very fast. I try to give the techniques that I know, but you’ve already heard all of those — I have a limited toolkit that gets a lot of use, and I’m pretty sure that most of the tools work for me as well as they do because of my quirky nervous system and the details of my childhood — so your mileage may vary and so may everyone else’s. That said, you and everyone else will hear of my discoveries as I make them.”
THIS is why i think you’re a prophet meant to be here at THIS TIME. i trust that you go with what you’re picking up/being told/feel/know. Your existence and your WORK keeps me from despairing and keeps ME in this game, this STORY, as an active participant. Thank you immensely. Without James I’ve needed someone I can look UP TO in this role, to keep me on track. The evil black worms in our brains is a real thing to keep us in our places. Metaphorical or not they’re mad REAL and i contend with them all the time still.
Thank you ever so much for never ever attenuating all you know.
——-
PAPA G: “Erika, I’m far from sure why people insist on online pseudonyms. Nothing online is ever really anonymous, and nothing online is ever private; everybody who posts or even reads or watches anything anywhere online has their name and other personal details recorded in an assortment of public and private data banks. That’s one of several reasons I always use my name online.”
When i got my first apartment and was excited about my first listing in the phone book as an adult, my father told me, “All the people who use only their first initials are women. Everyone knows that.” So I used my full name and never got bothered but found by the people i was glad who found me.
and hiding online is already feeling really old, hackneyed, fake. Like it’s a security blanket for the ones who NEED the anonymity, but it’s more like seeing someone in a bad wig and horn rimmed glasses thinking they’re in disguise. if I’M bored with it, i know it’s “past its pull date” as you’d call it. it feels like part of the trans and younger online fantasy of a myriad of shallow online personalities to choose from. But it remakes US in its image.
And yes, between IP addresses and everything else, hiding is impossible online. As an author, people found my home address when I thought i was hiding in the ’90s, so i gave up and stopped getting wigged out about it. most of the stalkers weren’t able to function in person. that’s why they’ve taken over like bureaucratic black worms in brains.
THAT’S WHY i’m counting on bringing back wedgies into culture. if betas hide who they are and alphas are open about it, i aim to out the betas and shame them by re-taking back the story of actually DOING things, especially in spite of them being “scary.”
—–
BK says:
(maybe not a direct response, but definitely inspired by Erika’s writing)
My life was never really about finding out who I am, but more about finding out why I am here. On some deep level I’ve always known that the spectacle is not the truth. The difficulty was that I could not see through it and that I was living in a world where everybody treats the spectacle as if it is true.
That has been quite hard, but it has one great advantage: I know what it’s like to live in a world that doesn’t make any sense.
Most people in my environment realize on some level that the world they thought they knew is crumbling apart, and many of them are scared, angry, depressed and/or are drowning in a sea of passiveness. I, on the other hand, feel stronger day by day, and my attitude is more akin to ‘bring it on, I’ve been waiting for this’ 🙂
Today I realized that these people are starting to experience something I’ve known all my life, and I understood that I must help them with that by becoming a leader of sorts. I’m not sure I like it and have no idea how to go about doing that, but there you have it.
(Erika mentioned names and I’m not going to reveal mine, but I can tell you that I share it with a great leader from the past. I doubt my parents knew that and thought of it only as a beautiful name, but I guess they have given me my true name)
–bk
—
From me to BK:
BK THE FIRST STEP TO GETTING OUT OF YOUR OWN EGO’S FANTASY OF GREATNESS IN YOUR HEAD AND START TO MANIFEST YOUR LEADERSHIP DESTINY IN THE REAL WORLD IS TO USE YOUR REAL NAME.
until you can go that far, what have you to tell me that i need to know and can use??? until that moment anything else is babble and wasting precious time we’re very short on right now.
i think we will lose in the “third quarter” because of this kind of indulgence to talk think and watch other writers. that’s why i think Naomi Wolf has quit writing. What’s the point? she’s been trying to save the world then when she came out as a zionist she was hit with Jew-hating screeds.
screw it.
when my gay/lesbian/feminist fans turned on me, canceled me for questioning the inherent misogyny of encouraging butches to lop off their titties, i went into despair: “who was i writing for??? and WHY?”
i still feel like writing is an indulgence, a way for people working regular jobs to kill time drinking coffee and reading me. that’s not what i’m here for, all my skills just… entertainment??? wasted???
no dice. not interested.
however i WILL write for me or for clarifying what i’m trying to do. / now writing publicly is to hold MYSELF accountable. like saying “i’ll do THIS!” and making myself too embarrassed to punk out because everyone i know knows i keep my word or will twist myself inside out to make it so. timing may be off, but that’s life now.
but that’s why the internet is dying. too much plausible deniability sloshing around and it’s gotten boring now that we’re ALL in the proverbial very real world headlights. i still keep a few main website names but i let most lapse now. people will find me who need me get me feed me. it’s back to secret alleyways in the 80s where we’d have to RISK trudging through the world to get there.
that’s a GOOD thing. / That’s why Adocentyn. it’s my coming out party, my middle-aged debutante ball.
Papa’s one helluva leader and that’s why he’s willing to be shunned hated ignored. He said he wasted 20 years feeling like a loser but i think that was necessary schooling, otherwise I wouldn’t believe a thing He says about twisting that into His power as a prophet during these terrifying times.
i’m sad to see so many here wasting what he’s writing for NOW TIMES, action words, VERBS, and re-corralling it all back into safe online discussion pens. This is how fans and followers kill their leaders and prophets. They waste them.
But Papa, probably BECAUSE of his ways, is immune to the flattery of this position. his ego is on ice or something. he’s got one, but it’s … it’s NOT OURS. he’s immune to us ravaging it and making him …neuter.
i saw this back when James was first into the Archdruid peak oil website. i’d never seen anything like it so i trusted Him and still do. Papa’s never disappointed me. only that partial one-time when i thought he’d casually bail on America and all he’d set up.
Now i don’t see it that way. i don’t know what America is anymore or will be. and again, it’s back to the INDIVIDUAL. i trust that wherever Papa lands, it’ll be God… i tried to write “Good” but am letting “God” stay there in my mis-typing. it’s an apropos typo.
(smile)
x
it’s hilarious that even talking endlessly about defending alter egos becomes its own self indulgent discussion! who has this kind of endless TIME??? retired folks and people with desk jobs.
own the choice but know what you’re DOING indulging spreading and inciting.
when a ton of INDIVIDUALS scamper around as THEMSELVES it spams this machine because you are uncategorizable. you are choosing safety in some Borg fantasy.
Papa is teaching BEING YOUR OWN kind of Johnny Appleseed. / it’s not talk: IT’S A VERB.
JMG, Erika,
A lot of people have had experiences where things fell apart in a relationship, or a job offer was cancelled, or an apartment application was denied, or other things of this sort, because someone else searched for your name, and found something that offended them. Even more people have had the experience of wondering about that was what was happening. Since it is hard to remove a lot of things online, and it used to be fairly easy for anyone to find stuff if they were curious, I think a habit of avoiding using your real name online is not inherently unreasonable.
It will obviously do nothing to hide my information from government and large corporations, but it does protect against nosy neighbors, psychotic exes, and others of that sort.
I use the same pseudonym for online comments that I used as my name for my former blog, Living Low in the Lou. My real name is given on one website and on one of your Dreamwidth posts, neither of which draws a lot of traffic, but I don’t want it known more widely than that. My reason for using a pseudonym in most online spaces is the same reason I keep the house doors locked at all times: to protect against crooks of various sorts who will take advantage of ease in making trouble for me. The majority of physical crooks won’t take the trouble to break into the house if the doors are locked, and the majority of troublemakers online won’t bother me if I don’t use my full name all over the place.
Well, about real names, who am I?
1) Patricia Anne Shaw….1939-1964
2) Patricia Anne Mathews/ Patricia Shaw Mathews
a.k.a “Pat” because (a) it feels like me and (be) there were 3 Patricias in my3rd grade class: Patty, Patsy, and Pat.
3) when in the ABQ neopagan community before it jumped the shark, and people were taking “witchy” names, the only one that worked for me was The Grey Badger, which is a better fit than a good many of my clothes.
Okay – stop laughing and let’s talk abut ego in both senses of the word . Ego I: = “I am SO good with words (or tech or, or, or….) that I am the smartest person in he room, and don’t understand why I’m having so much trouble with everyday things.” A lot of it fed by some of the science fiction of the period, a lot of which had the following plot: “We who were born after the A-bomb are super-intelligent mutants, and normal people hate and fear us for that.” You talk about pumping helium into a lot of ego balloons! And having said normal people react just as the stories said (oh, not because I’m talking like a donkey’s read end, oh, no!) —- you get the picture. It helps by having had the intellectual arrogance knocked out of you in unmistakeable terms. Or – if you’re one of the above, go take the Adult Intelligence Test that breaks up the IQ into its component parts, and it’s a lot lower when your superpower is not taken into account (they give you both figures: with, and without.) And then check “Executive Functions.” OMG: welcome to the plain old ordinary everyday human being world. A great relief … you can trust thing like the road signs and not second-guess them; you’re one of the people they’re designed for.
OK: Ego #2: the “You” that lives on when one monkey costume after another is stripped away, to the tune of “You know not your own life, nor what yu are.” And yes, like many another, I’ve tried on some second-hand identities, trying to find one that fits, and a closet-ful of those that don’t.
anyway, what’s this all due to? Message after message after message that said “There’s something wrong with you. You’re not acceptable the way you are. ” And a fun quote from the MBTI: “The IDealist is the only type that tries to peek themselves like an onion in order to find their True Self. Others know who they are by what they do. Their duty as they see it for some; the results of their problem-solving for others; the work of their hands for still others.
What it all boils down to is being engaged in a massive onion-peeling here…….with the layers laid out on the table including the brown paper-like skin…. making life more complicated than it is, at great length,until someone more down to earth summarizes if it two sentences or whatever.
And now back to doing tthe dishes and cleaning off the clutter.
““Those who have swords, and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed, will inherit the earth.”
Speak softly but carry a big stick.
Peace through superior firepower.
“It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, Master Warden,’ answered Éowyn. ‘And those who have not swords can still die upon them.”
There is a common theme there.
ah! NOW i remember why people are terrified of me! because if i call myself out i will call others out and expect you to do the same or it’s all phatic communication i’ve no TIME for.
so one last one before i try and finish the bulk of legal writing this weekend:
i am speaking to the ALPHAS among here. you know who you are. if you’re familiar with trudging through your quicksands of nauseating and vertiginous terrors because you’d be ashamed of yourself if you DIDN’T, i’m talking to YOU.
if you have a ton of boring excuses that are about safety comfort and keep you comporting and appearing like everyone else, then you’re BETA, a FOLLOWER, and THAT’S OKAY.
just own your supporting position and WORK IT, that’s fine! I’M NOT TALKING TO YOU HERE.
i’m trying to save the alphas from drowning in the neutralized abstract discussion, which has its place, but for me that was loooong long ago.
there is no time nor do i have the inclination to INDULGE anyone anymore, to lie or make the betas “feel okay” and safe and like this is all okay when i’m in court fighting a coven of blood-thirsty JACKALS who’re all about appearances toxic positivity and “SEEMING” Nice while James suffered and they’re coming for me with smiles and pitchforks down their pants because nothing else is working down there.
this isn’t general or abstract to me in the real. i have made choices and continue to pay the consequences for being my own Johnny Appleseed. there are and always WILL be consequences. but my life, and James’, has been made into hell by people who go along to get along.
stay away from me. there’s nothing i can give you, nothing i have.
i speak only to the Alphas anymore. otherwise i’ve wasted my entire LIFE and no, i can’t go for that, nooooo.
no can do, baby loves!
be safe, get along, but own the consequences of YOUR decisions. and how everyone’s perceived “safety” isn’t really that.
let them find you. BE FOUND.
then what?…
that alone will blow your mind change your life and possibly save us all from The Enclosure of the Human.
until then, blah blah Ginger to all the EXCUSES.
i’m calling out the Alphas to step up whatever excites but causes the bile of abject terror to rise in their throats. the alphas know this feeling well. especially lately.
okay, back to work for me. i am taking care of MYSELF by Only Seeing Pretty Things like the Alphas. that’s who i am here for in this world. betas are fickle. their gods are “run!” / i’ve already done that and it’s tedious to nod fake understanding and change the subject because i can’t stand the conversation anymore.
Next Year in Adocentyn! i promise i will bring my best.
(told you i was getting ready)
x
P.S. and O.T: relevant to modern politics as well. We have a Caesar now, and he may meet the fate of the original. But while Brutus held the dagger, I’ve often thought the hand holding Brutus’s was that of his father-in-law Cato. Cato was a hard-line conservative, a Stoic, and a man of unshakable integrity – read Plutarch for that – and one who went his own way, completely oblivious to what others were doing except as they clashed with his principles. He did, BTW, give Utica a good and honest government when he was there, and his march through North Africa’s desert showed him to be supremely good at logistics. But the point is, he could not be other than he was, *what he was hard-wired to be. * (Read Plutarch’s biography of him very carefully!) and it may be such a one who goes after the Orange Julius. But then look at him again in the light of what we’ve been saying about Ego. I think it’s illustrative.
(And that I have too much time on my hands today, to ramble on at such length.)
First, I can say maybe I’ve been too blunt in my last post commenting about real names vs. pseudonym. If I’ve written with rudeness against commentarists who prefer pseudonym: I’m sorry for harming your feelings. However, I keep thinking IMHO it’s better to use the same name as in real world, well it’s my view (though I respect the other option, I don’t share it).
——————————————————
David P # 148:
OK, I use my true name like you, too, but the same as you do, I don’t write online my last name. I think my ego is satisfied without writing my full name.
I didn’t think a cursory search on Google could find a full name, well thanks for your advice…
————————————————
Neptunesdolphin # 150:
The idea of pseudonyms online as alter egos seems interesting to me, though I also think the need for running away from the true name could be quite neurotic in some people. Why that need to hide it? I’m not very convinced by that explanation, but of course it’s my personal opinion so everybody can do whatever they want online…
Chuaquin #163:
It depends on how common your name is, of course. Try googling yours and see what comes up. For me, it’s a post on my high school’s webpage and my bachelor’s thesis (See, that’s another threat model thing: if I was really trying to protect myself from dedicated people, I wouldn’t have said that, as they could use it to confirm they actually have the real name). Me apparently being the only person with that name as far as google is concerned, comments here or on MM that match my full name would definitely be included there as well.
—David P.
This makes me remember a joke I heard or read many years ago– the wannabe-buddah-type comes out of his meditation and says “I have no ego” and the janitor replies “Yeah, says who?”
–which, is both funny, and I thought it was a decent point.
As to internet anonymity– at this point, anybody who is going to “cancel” me over opinions expressed online is someone I’d rather not deal with. I broke myself –mentally, spiritually, and physically–working for a woke organization and hiding every facet of wrongthink. In retrospect, I wish they’d googled me and gotten out the pitchforks and torches long before I had my breakdown. Alas, I suppose I must have covered my tracks too well. If the state decides they’re going to round us dissidents up into Gulags– well, like I like to say “they’re feckless, but not that feckless”. They can find you behind such masks. So on the one hand: I don’t really want to hide, and on the other, I can’t. Yet somehow I can’t kick the habit of not using my full name. Go figure.
Chauquin @ 163, please, elephants have thinner skin than me. In my time I have been insulted by experts and learned how to protect my privacy. For what it is worth, I think online IDs are fun. I like seeing what other online persons come up with. I think my all time favorite, from a long lost forum about rose growing is “Will work for roses”. So, what exactly was wrong with the War Nerd making up the Gary Brecher identity?
I take the view live and let live and if something ain’t illegal, go for it. I find it a healthy and enjoyable way to relate to human society. I will say that I can’t stand the habit of assigning nicknames. A person’s name is what that person says it is. Period. Even if you think it an intolerable affront to be asked to pronounce three or four whole syllables.
JMG, you stated above that the world is changing very fast. I think it is reverting to pre-modern norm, with the center of wealth and culture in East and South Asia, and a more or less isolated New World of countries and citizens happily doing their own things. My hope is that some of Western Civ can be preserved, the horticultural and craft legacy, for example, and that the institution of slavery be forever banned.
p.s. and re not trust nom de plumes of anyone, i may QUOTE boriqua gato, but i don’t trust him for NADA. he admitted to being a spook once but i think he still is some kind of double spook. his god is beach front property or he thinks that’s his audience’s is. you don’t get beach front condo property and have designer furniture you show off to the world unless you’re trying to attract other azzholes or you’re faking it. and he says he went to boarding school. it’s CLASS y’all. you think he’s a boriqua in the bronx dancing on linoleum? he could also be a fat guy online in his mother’s basement. it doesn’t matter. there’s too much artifice and slickness. he’s playing a role. he’s too of the online world. he flies there but i doubt in real life much. i think he’s also slipped in his own photo into his memes the way a painter slips himself in a reflection in the corner of his painting.
i don’t know who el gato is but i read him for the double take. what do they want us to know and what is he trying to mold regarding opinion on the right? he’s way too into online culture to be that suave in real life. he’s probably equally awkward.
i don’t believe anymore. even real names only go so far before we meet and i’m MYSELF. otherwise (shrug) i don’t know anything for sure like the cowboy way. only what i know myself from my own experience. all else i see how i FEEL. if it feels slimy wiggly unreal…
black worms stay out of my head.
I’m a sigma 🙂 not interested in leading anyone, even less interested in following anyone (getting in trouble for talking back to the boss all the time…). I use this name because I like it. It’s me, while I’m online. Who thinks that the name someone foists on you at birth is somehow more authentic than the one you choose for yourself? They’re all fake.
Hi John Michael,
🙂 Good stuff! Carpe diem!
I note above in the comments that you were discussing toolkits, and one tool you bestowed upon your readers long ago (the specific details are now lost to time), and it clarified the process for me, is that we perceive the world we encounter using mental models. Previously I’d not appreciated the extent to which this occurred. And peoples installed mental models may not actually work all that well, or they can be prone to simply ignoring new inconvenient information regardless of the reasons for doing so.
Dunno about you, but I have to use the tool of discursive meditation to modify my mental models when they don’t survive tests against reality. Always nice to hone those models so as to provide more workable guidance for the future, although I have been accused by other folks that I’m a bit quick to jump to conclusions. The past is a good teacher don’t you reckon? It amuses me to hear people dismissive of the lessons of history, and that always makes me wonder as to their motivations… 😉
This interweb forum has honed you over the years, well, at least that is my belief. This is a fascinating discussion.
Cheers
Chris
@ Celadon. I’ve heard of Ortega y Gassett. I’ve never gotten around to reading any of his material, but he struck me as first rate.
Thank you!
Telling headline in a Pocket article. from “The Cut: ”
“I used to be a DEI consultant. Now I’m working as a nanny.” At $25 per hour. I note: she pulled herself together and found what work she could.
It occurred to me that the platonic ideal of a bureaucrat is essentially egoless. A bureacrat is given authority which is not their own, in order to act on behalf of someone/thing else. When they are acting in that roll they are supposed to act as the representative of the (owner, king, state, corporation, whatever etc) setting aside how they personally may feel about the issue/s. Arguably the same is true of priests and there Deity. Is there a correlation between the bureaucratization of a society and the relative attractiveness of destroying the ego?
JMG,
With regard to “the dream of restoring Hermetic occultism,” I think you just need to start in the right place, which is reincarnation. Once you get people believing in reincarnation, everything else follows.
And it’s pretty easy to get people to start seriously considering reincarnation if they’ve ever discovered a hidden talent within themselves, if they’ve had two or more children, if they’re transgender, if they’ve had dreams where they were someone else, and I’m sure more of your readers can fill in more conditions.
Furthermore, reincarnation is much more reassuring to most people than a one-way ticket to heaven or hell (and let’s be honest, most people know where they would go and it’s not heaven) or dissolving into nothingness, so that’s another reason people are open to it. Once they’re open to reincarnation, you can then suggest meditation as a way to get in touch with your past lives, and to journal those meditative journeys to see what they can figure out.
There’s this other aspect where if you don’t believe in reincarnation yet believe in other aspects of occultism, you’re not going to have very strong beliefs in your ideas because reincarnation is what ties everything together. And once you believe it, that’s when you start to develop a strong belief system.
I’ve even gotten some of my super devout Christian friends to consider reincarnation since I’m of the belief that my second child’s last life was a dog, and enough of her behaviors are oddly doglike that people notice, and once I explain my belief, they start to wonder if the most obvious explanation is the explanation.
David # 164:
I’ll try googleing my name soon to see what appears online…Well, my name isn’t very common, but I’m not the only one in the world with this name..,
—————————————————
Mary Bennet # 166:
Thank you for your comment. By the way, I think too like you the world is reverting in a certain mode to its premoderm norm, turning towards an Asian center.
—————————————————
Ennobled little day # 170 and others:
About Ortega y Gasset, indeed he was a bright thinker. I’ve read “Rebellion of the masses” and it’s a good reflection about collective minds and ideologies of the past century.
Erika said” “however i WILL write for me or for clarifying what i’m trying to do. / now writing publicly is to hold MYSELF accountable.”
That’s what I was doing: it’s a public statement of my intent and it’s purely for myself. It’s why I said it’s not a reply to you, but inspired by you. Using my full name is not relevant, as you will not come knocking at my door asking if I have done anything yet, but I will ask myself if I am really doing what I said I would do.
(For me not using my full name helps me to write freely by not having to think about the effect it may have on my daily life: it’s why I can play jazz here. You may choose otherwise, but both are valid options)
And to be clear: it’s something I’ve already started doing, without really understanding why I did that. I very much like to be left alone, and I’m in the beginning of leaving that position. The realization I had yesterday was about the reason for that, and suddenly a lot of things fell into place.
Yes, I used grandiose words, but why not? 🙂
–bk
Re Tobes about the monkey hangers:
Many years ago I was touring the uk with a band, and I think it was in Newcastle that we were told the story and it always stayed with me. It’s strangely ridiculous and it’s easy to say those people were stupid, but there’s also a lesson in there..
–bk
About online anonymity / pseudonmity:
David P said it correctly: it’s about your threat model. If you are Ed Snowden, your requirements are a bit different then when you are just someone who wants to be able to browse the internet without almost everybody knowing which websites you visit.
There are basic techniques that can help you with the latter, but that are quite useless if you really have something to hide. Saying that everything you do is useless is not true.
–bk
@JMG
Re: Your answer to fellow Ecosophian Clarke
You said: “Losing the ability to laugh at yourself and the things that matter to you is a warning sign never to be ignored”.
Totally agree; although I’ll say that laughter is just one vehicle among many for doing this kind of “bringing oneself back to the Earth” self-correction. I personally think that being able to bluntly say “yes, I f**ked up on XYZ, and I regret it; hopefully, I’ve made the necessary course-correction, but that’s for others to judge it, not me” to a well-wisher (but not to a stranger or something for practical reasons) when he/she points out one’s mistake is another route. I am connected to a few schoolfriends and am very close to them; and when we talk about the stupid stuff we did as kids in school, I bluntly told them “yes, I know; in fact, if time travel was possible, I’d love to go back in time to my school days and soundly whack my twelve-year old self with a cricket stump for being such a prick” – I don’t know if that makes my present self humble, but I think it’s certainly a good first step on a long journey.
I must confess that I’m not as humble as I’d like to be – I think this is a journey which need not necessarily be concluded in this life itself. The Hindu view of reincarnation says that those who are living the last of their many lives in material incarnation are those who have a fully settled karmic balance, and have learned all the spiritual lessons earthly life has offered – it’s pretty easy to put two and two together and realise that it is exactly such people who have a balanced ego, as opposed to the PMC Western Buddhists discussed above. In my own case, I’m nowhere as spiritually developed as many people here, or even many people who I personally know and respect; that said, I do think it’s important to “catch oneself” when one is letting his/her ego dominate to an unhealthy extent – I do this by reminding myself every time I start feeling a bit too full of myself that people like Grigori Perelman exist, and I’m glad to say that this sort of “self-correction” has basically become default enough to be a reflex action of sorts, for me. That said, I do personally want to become humble at least to the extent where I will not need to remind myself, but that means that I will have to reach that point where I do not feel full of myself for this correction to be applied, and suffice to say that it is, as described above, a long-term thing.
As an aside, since we’re talking of humility, I was reminded of a meme I saw elsewhere which basically has Donald Trump saying “I’m good at being humble; nobody does humility better than me” lol.
Rambler, ha! Thanks for this.
Slithy, so noted. That plausible deniability routinely gets used in sleazy ways, though.
Chuaquin, oh, granted — but rationalism and materialism aren’t actually that compatible. If matter really is all that exists, how can one justify the claim that the mental habits of one species of social primates on one small planet (which is all that “rationality” means from a purely material standpoint) are absolutely true?
Polecat, something’s cracked… 😉
David, so noted.
Chris S., interesting. Would you describe it as an emotional attraction, and if so, what gives it that attractive aura?
Neptunesdolphins, now there’s a blast from the past….
Paradoctor, no, that just sends them an identity card saying who their figurehead will be.
Curt, this notion that the ego can be described as “the pain body” strikes me as impressively wrongheaded. It may become that under some very dysfunctional conditions, but not otherwise. I also wonder if the people who teach that have a lot of karma they’re not dealing with…
Erika, you’re welcome. I don’t know that I’d take “prophet” as my job description, but it’s true that I adopted Gandalf as my role model at the age of ten and never really outgrew it. I’ve ended up in a very odd situation where I have the freedom and the opportunity to speak out; the venues where I write and publish aren’t subject to cancellation, and at the moment I have nobody whose safety I have to worry about. So I can speak, and hopefully motivate people to do something less foredoomed with their lives than trudging blindly ahead under the dominion of any of the fashionable self-defeating ideologies of our day.
William, so noted. I may just be unusually sheltered or something.
Patricia M, and of course if you pump helium into ego balloons, they all start talking in those absurdly high voices… 😉
TylerA, ha! Thank you for the joke.
Mary, the institution of slavery is still alive and well in much of the world, so that, too, is reverting to normal. Your broader model, though, seems quite reasonable to me.
Chris, discursive meditation is my main tool for working with mental models, so I’m glad you also find it useful. As for my being honed by this and other forums, good heavens, yes. I’ve learned an enormous amount about communication from the last 19+ years of blogging and fielding questions — it’s been a transformative experience.
Patricia M, delighted to hear that at least one person formerly in that grift has found honest work!
Dagnarus, good heavens. That hadn’t occurred to me, but you’re right — hmm. I have some serious thinking to do about that.
Dennis, er, no, that won’t even begin to cut it. Plenty of people believe in reincarnation as it is. The restoration of Hermetic occultism I had in mind was the revival of a great and potent system of practice — including meditation, ritual, divination, physical exercise, healing, martial arts, and more. People can change their minds about the afterlife without grasping the need for practice — much less the kind of integrated system of practice Renaissance Hermeticism was at its zenith.
Viduraawakened, of course there are many ways to test, and exercise, humility. The inability to laugh at oneself is simply one diagnostic tool that suggests that yu may need to check the pressure in your ego.
Dennis #173:
Christianity and reincarnation are not mutually exclusive. There is no reason purgatory couldn’t be modelled as reincarnation. At least that’s what Geddes MacGreggor propses in Reincarnation in Christianity: A New Vision of the Role of Rebirth in Christian Thought.
—David P.
“system of practice — including meditation, ritual, divination, physical exercise, healing, martial arts”
I love this. Not impossible either although very tough if you pile a 10 hour workday on top of it… unless your work is healing, martial arts, or physical exercise. Reminds me of Plato’s perfect citizen.
On the thread of Buddhism and ego. I have witnessed practioners throw the practise away once it does not meet their ends. A shapeshifter may take up the practise and use it as a gentle mask to make the shaping of others safe for the public.
JMG #139: I guess you’re right. I was thinking about the transformation of Germany, but they were already industrialized since the 19th century. So I guess Fascism can accelerate, but only Socialism & Capitalism can transform a society from agrarian to industrial, as you said.
It’s notable that Socialism and Capitalism are both Liberal concepts, just with a different emphasis: apply Individual Liberty to economics, and you get Capitalism; apply Equality to economics, and you get Socialism/Communism. Not that their proponents would ever admit the close relation, but it’s often siblings who squabble the most, and this is no exception.
As for the modern West drawing the materialist straw and being assigned to work with matter & energy, it’s good to have that confirmed. It’s also reassuring to know that our absurdities are in service to a greater cause, that there’s a method to the madness.
@JMG:
Thank you! And Oli sends his gratitude as well. I’m listening to some Wagner now, as it happens. If ever I encounter a no-ego tripper again, I think I’ll just singing “kill da ego, kill da ego” at him in the voice of Elmer Fudd. 😉
JMG # 179:
You’ve seen an elephant in the room (materialist&rationalist room), a contradiction in which I didn’t think before. I’ll take it in consideration…Thanks a lot.
I wonder how many middle managers and bureaucrats in the future will have to end up finding jobs as nannies et cetera when the bottom falls out of the American economy?
I would like to jump in to defend Eckhart Tolle’s pain body. My read on that concept is that the pain body is the same thing as the Jungian Shadow. I don’t recall Tolle identifying pain body with ego. It’s been awhile since I’ve read him so maybe I’m projecting my own understanding on the concepts, but even if I’m wrong, pain body works really well as the Jungian shadow.
JMG:
“Chris S., interesting. Would you describe it as an emotional attraction, and if so, what gives it that attractive aura?”
The seductiveness of eliminative materialism for me is operating on two levels. On one level it is a coherent and simple explanation of the world. That is simultaneously comforting and a red flag. On the other level, and ‘seductive’ is the wrong word for this, is the worry that I am wasting my time with meditation and magic. For instance, I feel the energy centers and circulation of energy during the middle pillar exercise. But I can dismiss that under eliminative materialism as just in my imagination, and from there I may worry that I am just imagining the feeling as a burst of wishful thinking because I want things to be other than they are under eliminative materialism, but things are not. It is like eliminative materialism is trying to bully me into making it the default setting.
One way this manifests is a feeling that “for all the work you have done, you’ve never seen a god, or angel, or spirit have you? But you’ve seen material stuff.” When I catch myself doing this, I have to remind myself that yes, I have had some encounters with some gods and I should not dismiss that because they did not appear in my living room in a material form. That’s a case of assume materialism get materialism. Why should gods manifest in the same way my couch does?
I fight this by continuing my practice, and focusing on the need to put experience and data over theory. I remind myself that theories and models are tools for a job and always provisional. I think this essay is a synchronicity for me, because eliminative materialism has been really screaming to be the default setting. (It’s like that browser you use occasionally but every time you open it it nags you to make it the default browser.) It’s annoying to get nagged by something that you is wrong.
I think the seductiveness comes into play because eliminative materialism offers a facially coherent and simple explanation for the way the world is, with the above noted defense mechanism (it’s all in your imagination and a product of wishful thinking. Its got a carrot and a stick.
Covid stikes me as an example of a spectcle that can be looked at as our civilization’s ego. Progress means we do not “go back”, but what if some things become so unsustainable, we needed to “go back”, but could not bring ourselves to it?
Some jobs, like a customer service representative who actually answer the phone, went away during covid, never to be back, as one example. A society built on progress can not just cancel those jobs, but covid provided both the distraction and excuse to do it. We are not a society in decline who can no longer man phone stations you see, there was a pandemic and we responded rationally.
Erika,
Dale Carnegie
JMG and Dagnarus (#172),
“the platonic ideal of a bureaucrat is essentially egoless.”
Oh, it’s not only Platonic. The Soviet ideal of a bureaucrat was also totally egoless, embodying the ego of the state. There was a lot of propaganda about being selfless and not succumbing to the evilest evil of selfishness. How dare you act in your own interest and not in mine?
“Is there a correlation between the bureaucratization of a society and the relative attractiveness of destroying the ego?”
To me, the answer is “yes”, but “bureaucratization of society” sounds too benign. I would call it “ideological machinery of the state”. It’s heavy, oppressive, and yelling at you loudly, “Don’t do you, you little shmuck. Do me.” with a thousand little voices at school, college, and work, with working for yourself being prohibited. It had (in Soviet times) some useful side effects. For example, people were not pursuing money with such a passion as can be seen today. To my mind, American trends today are similar, but way milder.
JMG,
Going back to the title of todays article. It seems that todays ” No Kings Protest” is in fact just a giant Ego Trip. I have seen no evidence that the protestors and organizers have any concrete path forward to get the things they want. They don’t even hold any signs that express anything but gripes. It seems that the only purpose is to boost the egos of the losing side in the last presidential election. To validate the self image that they hold in their minds. Of Course the dark forces paying for the whole thing have other motivations, but it is the furious need of the protesting foot soldiers to massage their own egos as “Justice Warriors” and ” the good people” that really powers the thing.
I read Tolkien at a very young age and being a wood elf or a wizard caught my fancy. Now hobbit mode enchants me – comfortable home, cooking. good meals, friends, a sense of local community, gardening and flowers, trees outside my window, a pleasant human cultivated landscape, meaningful work, afternoon naps, good ale, even pipe weed! – I now enjoy an occasional cigarillo (miniature cigars) with my son. Though wizard and wood elf fancies still linger.
There was a phase in my life when my ego would rapidly switch from extreme confidence to utter self-loathing. When my ego was inflated it would keep inflating and my pride and confidence would keep swelling till it reached the point where a tiny mistake or failure would be enough to pop the balloon. When it popped, I would now go swirling downwards until I reached a point where I held myself in extreme derision. At this stage, a tiny achievement would pump new life into my arrogance, and I would be back on the inflating phase. And so I kept oscillating back and forth.
My ego is still too flexible nowadays, my self perception still gets influenced by significant events in my life. I’m no longer that volatile, but still too fluid for my own liking. I have noticed that the state of my ego affects everything, including my attitude towards loneliness and even lovemaking. But at least, my control is improving. I wonder if it will help if I choose a consistent self-image and then meditate regularly on it?
Also, I must ask Erika: were I to say that my real name is Matthew Hayes, will you believe me? Or will you accept that my name is Gina Gelder from Connecticut? Just because I use a full name doesn’t mean it’s my name, right? Since there is really no way to verify, we are all anonymous on the internet, at all times.
In Swedenborgian-derived usage, “proprium” is used (in its negative sense) to refer to “one’s own self”, that to which one holds onto as one’s very own. I tend to associate it with the image of the four of pentacles in the Waite-Smith tarot. For those who have read George MacDonald’s Lilith, it is that which Lilith is unable to let go.
In a sense, and still in the same current, the antidote to this is the Shaker idea of simplicity, which might very well be one of the enduring or recurring themes of American spirituality, which has been highly influenced by Swedenborgian ideas.
From another part of the world there is the maxim “Bu ding bu diu” (不顶不丢), not getting stuck and not disconnecting, which on a physical and emotional level has to do with working through the “flinch” reaction to intrusion, but instead remaining present at the interface with the outside or the other. Getting stuck and running away are both defensive reactions, that one could say are ultimately rooted in “ego” or “proprium” — which, with practice, one can work through.
John Michael, thank you so much for sharing Lady Pixie Moondrip’s Guide to Craft Names for the betterment of the many fashion-conscious members of your readership. I expect we should all of us give Lady Pixie’s Random Craft Name Generator (release 1.0) a try in order to bring that certain je ne sais quoi to Ecosophia’s comment section.
As for myself, in my newly obtained no-ego, vibrating-at-a-higher-frequency, open-chakraed mystical-actualization, I would like to dedicate my own inspiring, newly-minted craft-name as a prayer and invocation for the fulfillment of all wise souls’ oft-dreamed-of, but thus far out-of-reach blessing. Drumroll, please!
My new name shall henceforth be Larping Pagan Swansong! I dedicate this new name for the betterment of the entire cosmos; may it come to pass, forever and for evermore; and may the gods delight in its flawless perfection.
Thanks for this post, JMG. I had been curious about your view of the ego for a good bit now, having read only snippets and suggestions in the comments in the past. This is a topic that feels familiar to me, as I’ve had to revisit it over and over in my life thus far (how I see myself, how others see me, to what degree are those images true or false, and so on). I hadn’t commented thus far because I didn’t feel I had that much to contribute, since many great points have been made already. I feel I am learning quite a lot, simply reading along with the comments, so thank you to the commentariat as well.
@erika lopez and JMG re: pseudonyms online
If I may, I do have some thoughts on this topic I would like to share. As someone who has grown up on the internet, using it since a very young age, it had always been reinforced to me (by adults) that the internet is fundamentally a shady place full of predators and other unsavory characters. It’s debatable to what degree this applies in practice, but that image was very strong especially in the 90s and early 2000s.
While this image probably isn’t accurate to 90% or even 99% of people you will meet online, to a degree it is actually true. Especially for young women, particularly if they gain any form of notoriety online, cyber stalkers and doxxers have been known to go to great lengths to figure out their address, place of work, and so on. They will not only trawl the profiles of the person they are stalking, but any known associates, friends, family, etc. So even if you aren’t a popular young woman online, any imprudence on your part could still affect someone you know, and while young women are the most at-risk demographic, it doesn’t mean that men or other groups are necessarily safe, it just happens less often to them.
While it’s true that most people have all of their private information cumulatively recorded across a number of databases, the average doxxer or internet stalker isn’t going to have easy access to this information, especially if they don’t have your full name. Even if they did, if you have been using pseudonyms for a great number of your interactions online, the data they have access to is limited. Unless they can prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the pseudonym is you, anything you post under that pseudonym will simply be lost in the noise.
Thus, the use of pseudonyms, in my view, is a simple prudent measure one takes to protect against such people, akin to locking one’s doors. A determined burglar will still get in, but it “keeps honest people honest”, and discourages most people from prying into your personal affairs.
Sure, you could argue this is overly paranoid, or that most people are not of the notoriety (and don’t know anyone of the notoriety) that this is a major concern to them. However, I would respond with two points:
First, especially if you are young, can you confidently say that will always be true? Especially with the way nothing on the internet is ever really private, and everything you say can come back to haunt you years later, I would say if anything that’s even more reason to be overly cautious. The internet isn’t just public, it’s almost super-public, and so even though I would have no issues speaking my real name in a public place, I have serious reservations about doing it here. It’s not that anyone in the commentariat is particularly shady, but they aren’t the only ones reading. JMG deletes trolls all the time, and I’m sure there are many more lurkers who simply read and rarely post. Do I trust every single one of them with my real name, particularly if it’s uncommon? What about every post I make here in the future? Even if I trust everyone reading now, do I trust every future visitor to this site?
The second point is that while not everybody who uses pseudonyms online actually needs the protection, more people using pseudonyms makes their usage more effective. If the only people using pseudonyms were people who really, truly needed them to protect themselves (or people they are associated with), that would still effectively paint a target on their backs. Many people using pseudonyms online adds a great deal of noise that makes it much harder to connect any given online identity to a particular person.
It’s very true that pseudonyms and anonymity are endlessly abused on the internet, and often lead to unpleasant interactions with people who like to hide behind a screen. However, the abject failure of Facebook’s “real name policy” shows that forcing people to use their real name online doesn’t necessarily make them less awful, either. Given the above points, I personally believe the merits of anonymity are worth the tradeoffs, and would defend any person’s decision to use a pseudonym online, so long as they weren’t doing it to hurt other people.
Finally, despite saying all of this, I want to acknowledge that I actually agree with Erika’s core point, which is the importance of authenticity in how you interact with others. It is an admirable thing to strive for, being true to yourself. Still, taking the step of linking that authenticity to your real-world identity can indeed be a big step for a lot of people, something many or even most would not be willing to do because of the baggage tied to their real name, or perhaps because they are using the pseudonym to explore aspect of themselves they do not want to share with the real world, for various reasons. Identity is a complex thing, and so I can’t say whether it’s the right step to take for any given person at any given time. I believe that should be left up to the individual.
I will just say that personally, I believe it’s possible to be authentic even if you’re using a pseudonym. Sure, pseudonyms make it easier to be dishonest, but you don’t have to treat them that way. As long as you are consistent in how you act regardless of pseudonym, and you stick to the same pseudonym in any given venue, I consider it pretty much the same thing as an actual name.
For example, I will always be Untitled-1 in any of my interactions here, and I have no intention of ever changing that. I don’t act particularly differently here than I do anywhere else. If I were to ever meet any of you in person, I would happily share my full name and perhaps even a bit of my life story, if you actually cared to know about it. However, given that this is the internet, I’d prefer not to share that information, for the reasons I gave above. Feel free to disagree, feel free to call me paranoid, but that’s genuinely how I feel.
Mr. Greer: “something’s cracked” alright.. a certain Mr. Hyde comes to mind. Wonder if he’s attending our ‘locally astroturfed’ no kings soiree?
Since “the meek” (οἱ πραεῖς) has been discussed, and I have often wondered about the best translation, here is the fullest dictionary entry I can find (you get there from Mt. 5.5 clicking on οἱ πραεῖς). The meaning “tamed” (of animals) is certainly to be found there, under A.2. and under II., as are others. Surprising to find that Euripides applied this adjective to Dionysos in the Bacchae!
PS: Also surprising that the same adjective (here translated “kindly”) is used to ask for a gift from Ares:
Shed down a kindly ray from above upon my life, and strength of war, that I may be able to drive away bitter cowardice from my head and crush down the deceitful impulses of my soul.
(line 10 in the original)
After this essay sat a bit, I find myself thinking that a lot of people these days are running around with very poorly fitting egos. Maybe not quite to the point of a “no-ego-ego” but close. Every time someone starts talking with that execrable formula : “As a [insert identity here” to preface their words, they’re denying their individuation. They’re shoving themselves into a little labeled box, and pulling the door closed behind them.
Even worse when it’s a self-diagnosis of mental illness. I know it’s hard to get a good diagnosis of mental illness– lord knows I’ve plenty myself, and I’m not confident the psychologist got it 100% right– but there’s a difference between suspecting you have a condition and trying the steps others suggest will help you cope, and making that self-diagnosis your identity. It’s an even less helpful little box to stuff yourself in than the ones based on minority ethnicity or sexual orientation. It’s ironic, since the people who really go into for this Procrustean bed of identity-as-ego really ought to know better: their own literature is where you find the concept of “intersectionality”.
I’m not speaking as an anything here, for the record. I’m speaking as myself, whatever the heck that is.
“The restoration of Hermetic occultism I had in mind was the revival of a great and potent system of practice — including meditation, ritual, divination, physical exercise, healing, martial arts, and more.”
It may not ever catch on broadly, but I realized on reading this that I have a practice that includes all of these things. Broad changes of human consciousness or behavior seem to be rare, but at least some individuals can be inspired. And if anyone is on the fence, I highly recommend the suite of practices mentioned.
@ Dagnarus – very good observation on bureaucracy…
Hi John Michael,
It’s an exceptionally useful tool. I could cheekily add that it allows matters of all sorts to be played around with in the mind as one would do with a Rubik’s Cube. Mind you, I have to out myself as having defeated that dreaded contraption by cutting the Gordian knot and disassembling it, then reassembling it. Probably against the rules, or something like that… Actually, discursive meditation fits the brain well, unlike trying to blank the mind which is an unnatural struggle, and never seemed worth the effort, for me at least.
Hey, on that discursive meditation note, is it just me, or do you feel an immanence of trouble brewing? My brain keeps trying to comprehend why our masters would be pushing ahead with using super big expensive (upfront and ongoing) computers in an attempt to automate service jobs. I mean, policies over many decades, probably in an attempt to keep unemployment and prices low, have pushed the services work. Drop too many people off the economic ship though, and the debt game will unravel, then we’ll all get to see what ‘real wealth’ actually means. The whole set of choices just seems crazy to me. However, when few paths have good outcomes, that’s when we’re probably living in a future world.
It’s super windy and also dry (although green) this morning. The forecast is suggesting an average, but also wet week coming up. The forecasting models being used of late are having some difficulties due to the recent sudden warming of air over Antarctica, and the oceans surrounding the continent are way warmer than the past. One benefit of all this extra heat is the lack of late frosts, so far… Might get a good apricot and almond crop this year as a result.
Cheers
Chris
@Chuaquin,
Gregor Mendel was a monk when he figured out basic genetic inheritance. Not very materialistic…
@JMG,
I like being able to use a pseudonym online. I’ve gotten increasingly out of sync with local recent social mores, which tend to be quite woke in my area. Using a pseudonym means I feel a lot safer to actually say what I think. I know governments and other powers that be can find out who I am if they ever care enough to bother, though I have taken a couple of steps to make it a bit less easy for them (moving back to linux, firefox instead of google, going on facebook only when necessary and refusing to talk politics while there). But I don’t want my family and friends to cancel me, so I’m careful about what I say where and to whom. Which includes avoiding saying certain things with my own name openly attached to them.
Though since I’ve gotten concerned enough recently that I’ve started signing petitions and bugging politicians about said issues under my own name (I can’t stand silent anymore), I’ll probably get yelled at by my friends and family eventually. I just don’t feel like speeding that day up to today.
Re: nom de plumes
We were all told when the internet was a baby internet to not use real names and never to meet up with strangers from the internet. Do you remember that?
But as the internet grew up, for me, I had my nom de blog, and my nom de musician, and now I have a nom de editor, and if you are, say, trying to recollect who it was your friend told you is her music teacher, and you go to the internet to search, and you remember my name but all the first page of results are the blog handle, well, how does that serve you or me? Or if you get the booksellers’ websites? You think you have the name wrong or that my contact information is unavailable. (And the professional names are unique: if you search them you will find my services within the first page of results.) Not finding me by finding me in another form serves neither you the prospective student nor me the teacher.
I am the same person, of course, but a different business. And it happens that my businesses are the sort where the personal name is the important thing, that one on one interaction, that’s the identity of the business. My husband’s business is known by a nice set of letters, as is normal in his field.
So for me, it is one part old internet custom and the rest cold-headed business sense, and in these days of the senescence of the internet, I’ll leave it as it is, and if we go back to phone books I shall have two listings in the Yellow Pages.
I would rather spend time in the company of an upfront egomaniac like Salvador Dalí, who frequently and gleefully declared himself a genius, than in the company of the professionally humble, as exemplified in the words of this fictional character:
“I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,” said Uriah Heep modestly, “…My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in an umble abode, Master Copperfield… My father’s former calling was umble…”
Clay Dennis # 191:
OK, but I’d add to your comment: not only the protesters were reinforcing their ego, but making the Spectacle of pretending a strength they maybe don’t have…
———————————————-
Pygmycory # 204:
I’ll take note on it. I didn’t remember Mendel the scientist was a monk…
I’ve read several books written by a psychologist and catholic priest from
my country, who was very controverted some years ago in spanish pious circles for his “unorthodox” view of religiosity. Well, as always happens, the zealots worry about void orthodoxies. His name was Enrique Martínez Lozano, and I bet you’ll don’t knew him.
I don’t have to share every point of view of him (for example his too much devotion to Ken Wilber), but I found interesting his approach to Jung psychoanalysis, especially when he applies the concept “Shadow” to spiritual life. His most controverted idea was the following: we humans really don’t have a real ego, because self is a necessary fiction to everyday life compared with Greatness of God. However, you cannot live without this fiction as individual, you cannot live without mind(another necessary fiction), but ego and mind must be limited to its position within personality, not hypertrofied like in this western world. He also supported the reality of mystic experiences of whole oceanic fusion with God/universe like final real reality. Well, he seemed very influenced by Indian phylosophy mixed with christian mysticism.
What do you think about these ideas?
Mastery of matter and energy – Dion Fortune said that. I’m thinking of the two meanings of “mastery” . One is that of a master craftsman; the other is “master” = “boss.” Which can become “slavemaster” at the end of that road. A great deal of the Weird of Hali series shows where that ends up. (As a side note, I just finished reading Mary Renault’s “The Last of the Wine” and its sequel “The Mask of Apollo,” a.k.a Ancient Greece feeds itself the hemlock, and at the end we get Alexander of Macedon. (the Romans handled that one somewhat better.))
@Cristophe #195 – ROFL!!!! Laughing my head off!
Anonymous @ 185, I just hope the out of work middle managers don’t end up as commissars in charge of regulating people’s home gardens and orchards. There is already an organization, forgot the title, which is dedicated to finding local govt. appointments the said MMs can apply for. Instead of Joe who grew up locally, or Jane who has lived locally for decades and been involved in everything from girl scouts to PTA to Friends of the Library, let’s have some clueless snob from DC.
JMG, about slavery,, sure, I know that, but someone needs to be willing to say this is a wickedness, the very pattern of what Christian theology calls a Sinful System. You would think the same folks who denounce what they are pleased to call immorality would understand how the peculiar institution encourages and abets the sexual exploitation of its victims.
Why do people maintain such a deep attachment to their ego even when it hurts them? I find that I have aspects of how I view myself that only hurt me and hold me back, yet I hold on to these views like some treasure, holding them close to my heart and unwilling to let go, as though I shall win some prize for going through life like this.
Slithy Toves at 152
The elimination of meaning is one of the features of eliminative materialism. It replaces meaning and intentionality with function and behavior, leading unsuprisingly to functionalism in psychology (a more dressed up version of behaviorism). Words have a signaling function for behavior, but no meaning. We are just behavior machines with no more intentionality than a computer.
I cam across eliminative materialism in grad school when I was contemplating the qualia problem. In short, what if the way I see red is the way you see green and vice versa. It occurred to me that you could eliminate the problem by eliminating qualia. (I love a gordian knot type solution.) So I did further research and discovered the whole world of behavioral functionalism and eliminative materialism. Great stuff if you want a simple answer to the complexity of the universe. Struggling with meaning, intentionality, consciousness, non-material stuff? Rule out its existence altogether and go from there. I was skeptical even at the time I was learning about it on the grounds that you cannot solve a problem effectively by narrowing the domain.
In a way, I think eliminative materialism is the scientifically minded equivalent of Biblical literalism. Can’t explain the evidence that the Earth is billions of years old in a way that reconciles that with the age of the Earth according to the Bibile? Paper over the problem.
Simple answers with their own internal coherence are beautiful in their own way and give easy answers. When you think through them, though, especially through the parts of life they are trying to shut down, you find that internal coherence is valueless when the model in question bears little connection to reality.
Chris @203 – “is it just me, or do you feel an immanence of trouble brewing?”
Since the US is still doing bubble economics, I am waiting for the blow-off top. This past week, a Goldman Sachs analyst declared that AI is “not in a bubble,” so you know the TechWreck2.0 is going to kick off soon. Add in a government shutdown and a serious affordability crisis in housing, and we have dark storm clouds rolling in.
Another headline I saw this week: the county of Los Angeles has declared a temporary state of emergency over the ICE raids (as in, a federal agency enforcing federal law) and declared they will assist the illegals with paying rent and legal fees. Yet for the past several years, I’ve seen all kinds of news stories on homeless camps and working class Californians living out of their vehicles because the rent is so expensive on the west coast. All I know is that if I lived in Los Angeles county, I would be a VERY angry American citizen because the county board only cares about people who line-jumped the immigration process. Especially since ICE is still rounding up all the ones who have criminal charges pending against them since they came here. Talk about being tone deaf!
As it is, I remind hubby that we are out here at the dead end of a dirt road (in a rural corner of an already rural county) in the hopes that we don’t catch much (if any) shrapnel out here. Well, there’s also the bit about wanting chickens and dairy goats.
TYLER:
‘As to internet anonymity– at this point, anybody who is going to “cancel” me over opinions expressed online is someone I’d rather not deal with. I broke myself –mentally, spiritually, and physically–working for a woke organization and hiding every facet of wrongthink. In retrospect, I wish they’d googled me and gotten out the pitchforks and torches long before I had my breakdown. Alas, I suppose I must have covered my tracks too well. If the state decides they’re going to round us dissidents up into Gulags– well, like I like to say “they’re feckless, but not that feckless”. They can find you behind such masks. So on the one hand: I don’t really want to hide, and on the other, I can’t. Yet somehow I can’t kick the habit of not using my full name. Go figure.’
—
regarding, “I can’t kick the habit of not using my full name,” you’ve already apparently died in real life so you’re in the advanced class now: don’t get hung up on being so literal about your “last name.” find whatever is the equivalent in REAL DAILY LIFE and just press a little bit harder. as you apparently already know, it doesn’t take very much to blow.
i see you, dear Brother! keep going. you’ve already died as yourself, keep dying. you’re mad beautiful and alive. shine on you crazy diamond.
x
RANDOM, pray tell: why Dale Carnegie???
i looked him up again and was struck alive by those Chataqua lectures he wanted to be a part of. were those Chataqua lectures mentioned HERE, before??? they sound like exactly what i’m envisioning starting. please tell me more, anyone who knows. i’d never heard of them before but they sounded vaguely familiar.
x
okay i don’t wanna really do Chataqua lectures at a fixed location right now. i see they’re still up and running. i’d read the wiki on dale carnegie and he wanted to be part of the TRAVELING Chataqua lectures. i was envisioning the 19th century lecture circuit where people traveled on trains to towns to talk and spread ideas.
back to Post-Industrial Chitlin Circuit.
okay, so why Dale Carnegie, Random???
Untitled-1 @196 makes very good points about internet pseudonyms.
As for Chris’s feelings, “Hey, on that discursive meditation note, is it just me, or do you feel an immanence of trouble brewing?”
There is a lot of that going around. Fourth Wednesday will be full of angst. Another case of missing collateral for bank loans is in the news. First was Tricolor who made car loans to illegal immigrants who drove the collateral to Mexico when they left, then First Brands who pledged auto parts inventory they don’t have as collateral.
Then this oldie but goodie,
“the bad loans reported by Zions Bancorp and Western Alliance Bancorp can be traced back to the bankruptcy of one commercial real estate investment firm in Southern California earlier this year. …
…But two things went wrong simultaneously. First, MOM CA Investco filed for bankruptcy protection, leading to a planned sale of some its properties. Second, it turned out that, for those buildings that served as collateral for the loans Zions issued, other firms actually were ahead in line of the Salt Lake City-based bank to be paid should the real estate be liquidated.”
In other words the same collateral was pledged to two different banks for two different loans. Maybe I should say at least two different loans.
We can add a jewel robbery at the Louvre to the angst list if you want.
“@ Dagnarus – very good observation on bureaucracy…”
i second that opinion. that’s actually mind blowing, Dagnarus, and explains soooo much.
and to the mass of people here who defend their multiple identities, no defense NEEDED.
the way i am is rare as a lot of people like me don’t make it this far anymore. i’m speaking to the already dead. the ones who’ve got nothing left to lose or hide because they’ve already died.
i’m not for you. i never have been. you can look at me from afar and make up assumptions like everyone else in my real life. even the ones who’ve known me decades.
i’ve been through things that make people insane. i’m from underneath your polite society. James taught me they made me so i cannot be an aberration. i am of them. their underside.
i don’t want or need to be “liked” or even acceptable or acceptED. i exist now to help the others who’re face down on the asphalt because they can’t even be face down on their BED as they no longer have one. the EGO can do in the best superhero and i am here to help love them back to themselves the truth of themselves the way James did for me.
you can have your safety and little moments of drunken or spiritual freedom. i don’t aim to take them from you.
i am for the mad insane who’re stumbling back to themselves, to God or their Gods.
don’t waste time trying to prove your effectiveness to ME. i’m struggling with MY OWN and i aim to find the Kyles and Tylers. the ones who’ve died and are wobbly.
i don’t know what they’ll find but if they’re pointing in the direction of UP instead of DOWN and into themselves and up their own butts, whatever they find will be better in a Johnny Appleseed kinda way.
yes. i now see why and how we’re going to lose in the 3rd quarter. but i’m working for the long game so that whoever’s here after us can pick up where we left off and win in the 4th one.
so be safe and dribble out your real selves as you wish where you wish. i’m not going to challenge or bother YOU. i’m for the already dead. the 13th card.
x
For me, getting rid of the ego is similar to certain branches of Christianity that believed you could live without sin. It happened once you were saved and sanctified and was through the power of Christ, of course, but was to be attained. Any sin committed after being saved and not immediately confessed to God for forgiveness meant you were in a back-slidden state and in danger of hell. As a child I was taken to one of these churches and remember them ridiculing the idea of “once saved always saved”. I can’t tell you the damage this does with people struggling with areas that fall under the sin category (Their definition of sin, of course, is very broad) . It also lead to many outward appearances that were meant to signal your holiness, such as proper attire for male and female, no jewelry, no makeup, no dancing, no drinking, no smoking, no swearing, etc. Of course people cannot live perfectly for long, and this results in people becoming very rigid trying to live such a life, living a lie (oh, the secrets I heard about people once I grew up), and paranoid about people who don’t conform. Having gone through that, I wanted none of it later on, and while I did attend an evangelical church as an adult, it was no where near as restrictive as my childhood fundamentalist church.
The above story lead me to see how the present day woke movement is very fundamentalist in spirit. The conformity, the rigidity, the signaling, the shaming, it all fits. They don’t use the word sin, but they do treat people as if they had sinned if they step out of line with the narrative. I suppose dissensus would be the word to use for such naughtiness? Actually I think the woke movement is worse than my childhood church; at least there was the Christian teaching of forgiveness in the background. I haven’t seen much evidence of forgiveness among the woke crowd. I guess once shamed, always shamed is their control mechanism.
So how does this comparison of fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Woke-ism weave into no-ego? You can’t get rid of ego, any more than some groups try to get rid of sin or dissensus. That leads to repression. But it’s still there. I would think just observing and adjusting your attitudes and actions as necessary would be the sensible thing, plus recognize that this will be a life long task, not a one time deal. And be careful what group you join or teacher you follow. It’s a crazy world out there…
Joy Marie
Speaking of “eliminative materialism” Material limits are going to put the kibosh on all the earnest cultural, social, philosophical, religious, scientific discussion and controversy as our industrial high energy system gets reduced and eliminated in the coming decades. Attention will turn to survival and doing the best in tough times. Here is a good summary of the trends producing this material elimination. https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/how-i-came-to-believe-that-civilization-fe3
Something to keep in mind and, yes, accept, as the right time to begin to attempt to materially eliminate this outcome is now a half century in the past.
On topic for this is the Buddhist writing of origin I can’ t remember (I actually linked you a discussion on this years ago, JMG) is that lay people who become Arhats must get to a monastery within three days or die. IMO, if one really got rid of their ego, they might resemble a vegetable; Unable to carry out basic tasks of self preservation.
Hi Untitled-1,
All good points. However, I have a riddle for you (and advise you to think very carefully and deeply if and when you reply): Do you live in my part of the world?
Cheers
Chris
But in the meantime let the discussions and commenting continue!
@Mary Bennet
Part of America giving up her hegemony over much of the world will be the loss of our ability to impose our moral beliefs on other cultures.
Unfortunately, slavery will continue to exist for a long time to come because a) it makes economic sense, and b) it satisfies the sadistic impulses many people have (especially those raised or coming of age in cruel societies).
The age of Western dominance that is winding down now wasn’t exactly a “golden age” for most of the world. I think this is because to most of us distant countries are abstractions that we learn about through sporadic media coverage, that don’t have to line up with the facts on the ground. Hence why many mistakenly thought that Zelensky’s Ukraine was a democracy threatened by a Hitler-wannabe, to name one recent example. So it might be better for us, karmically, to leave most of the world alone. If we and our descendents bar the evil institution of slavery from The Land of the Free and the Brave, then we will fulfill our moral duty.
Erika,
It seems part of your premise is Gato Malo’s idea that “betas only show their true colors in private. Alphas show theirs in public. And this results in mutual incomprehension.” I disagree with el Gato.
People who “think” based on instinct and emotions don’t understand people who “think” based on values and ethics. People who think based on values and ethics understand people who think based on instinct and emotion. They often don’t agree with them, but they understand why they think what they think.
Leaders need to understand people in order to lead them. If you want to be a leader, you shouldn’t discount the reasons people give you for the decisions they have made. What they are tactfully telling you is that you have not communicated effectively or convincingly. To say that they aren’t your intended audience, well, that’s just silly. Who is your audience? Anyone who did what you said to do because you said to do it or you won’t speak to them anymore… definitely NOT an alpha. And anyone already doing what you think needs to be done, why do they need you to tell them something they already believe?
Dale Carnegie wrote a book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. Some of it probably isn’t as useful as when he first wrote it, but there are some gems in there.
A few people mentioned cancel culture. I hadn’t updated my views recently enough to take that particular part of the internet into account, but I agree it’s another valid reason to keep a pseudonym. Regardless of the party in question, the fact remains that some minority of people on the internet may or may not wish you harm in the future, and so a pseudonym makes it just a little harder for them to make your life miserable.
@ Siliconguy #219
Thank you! I’m glad it resonated.
@ erika lopez #221
Fair enough! Apologies if I came off as presumptuous. I wish you the best in your life journey, and I hope you continue to speak your truth.
@ Chris at Fernglade #225
Hmm. Okay, well I’m going to make the assumption that the question is meant literally, which would mean it seems to be doing two things. First, since the question itself is absent any actual location, there is an implicit invitation to learn more about you, based on the information you’ve provided. Second, my response necessarily requires volunteering some degree of personal information, and I would guess that you’re curious about how I would handle that? So, given the points I’ve made, how would I say interactions like this should be handled?
The short answer is: I believe this is another thing best left to individual choice. Although I have laid out the arguments for why I behave the way I do, for anyone else it amounts to little more than advice. Each person can run their own risk assessment, and make the choice for themselves as to how much they’d like to share.
As for the longer answer, since the question seems to be an invitation to learn about where in the world you reside, I performed a search and stumbled upon your blog (hopefully you don’t mind the plug!) Based on the information I found there, it would seem that you live in Australia? If that’s true, my answer would be “Nope, I live in the United States, on the West Coast.” The answer contains the level of detail it does simply because that’s what I am comfortable with, no other reason.
So there you have it. If you’d like to know more, feel free to ask, and I’ll let you know if we reach anything I’m unwilling to share. If, on the other hand, you meant the question in a metaphorical way or in some other way I’m not accounting for, please let me know, and I’d be happy to answer accordingly.
I don’t remember now names or comments number, but I’ve read between your comments before mine that woke ideology is really a new (or not so new) form of Protestant fundamentalism in a certain mode. Well, it’s made sense for me. Living in a country of Catholic tradition, it seems to me woke ideology has been imposed by the postmodern local “left” in the last years with ideological and verbal violence, because it was too strange to the spanish culture…The effects on our culture have been bad, and nowadays the pendulum law is turning the masses Spectacle to the (far) Right side on politics and social customs…Nothing good can be hoped from this sudden changes (understand me, in a historical sense).
As the great sage Weird Al Yankovic said, in the “Amish Paradise” sutra:
“You think you’re pretty righteous? You think you’re pure at heart?
Well I know I’m a million times as humble as thou art!”
Dear Mr Geer
I was at my local Buddhist centre once and the question of transcending the ego came up. The response was that short of stream entry or enlightenment you could not transcend the ego. It would always be with you like your body is with you during material incarnation. But what you could do is to become more aware of your ego and how this is informing your actions. Awareness was the key.
Seemed wise advice to me. After all the urge towards enlightenment will certainly have a great deal of ego in it, so trying to kill off the ego would be a bad idea.
Another thing I heard somewhere is that you can’t transcend your ego until you have an ego. There seemed to be some good advice in that as well. Having a strong sense of who you are provides you with the strong foundation for climbing the ladder to enlightenment as long as you becoming more aware.
Hi KM Gunn,
It’s been remarked upon elsewhere, and long ago, that possibly such news very much depends upon whether there are positions which need to be unloaded onto err, chumps. And yeah, such statements can suggest that all may in fact might not be well behind the scenes, for such viewpoints in essence, should most likely be self evident.
Go the chickens and dairy goats. Respect. Dunno about your part of the world, but what interested me in the histories I’ve read of The Great Depression, is that by and large, most city folks, stuck to the cities. Sure, in the rural areas there were itinerant workers, but that’s always been the case, and was true down here. The old swagman of yore. However, my understanding of your country was that the rural population actually increased by about a million people in the late 1930’s. People may have moved back with rural families, because after all, at least they could eat.
Cheers and greetings!
Chris
I think there might be some truth to the no ego thing. Maybe even the highest truth. But I also think it’s the most unattainable truth of all. Most of us are probably better off just trying to get a little good karma out of life.
Hi Siliconguy,
I’ve been reading about some of those incidents as well. Not good. Yes, increasing rates of fraud is a known mark of trouble.
Hey, did you know that louvre windows are a sort of multi-paned window where all of the glass panels turn in unison? Dunno about your experience with them, but when I was a kid, if I’d left the keys inside the locked house, those panes were super easy to remove from their frames. Hardly secure… 🙂
I read about that too, yup. There goes the insurance bill again.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Untitled-1,
Thank you for the polite and also delightful reply. It’s an intriguing question, and much deeper than it first appears to be. There were several paths you could have chosen, and I applaud your navigating skills. One of the many intentions was to illustrate to you a certain power imbalance, which you’ve addressed in your own way. Respect. Communication is facilitated when among equals.
On the other hand, years ago I read an amusing bit of advice from a long time respected crime journalist, and it was: If you don’t want your car stolen, drive a manual (stick shift).
My understanding of the human condition, is that each of us has different levels of privacy. The interweb however, is not a private place, and the handle simply stops the opportunist, and that’s all fine from my perspective.
Cheers
Chris
I think the “dirty secret” of the apparent attractive of eliminative materialism over some people is simply like that “philosophy” itself: it allows to renounce every human responsability. Because if there isn’t consciousness in people, there aren’t personal or social values and qualities like responsability neither. In addition, the obssession of some materialist “thinkers” against free will reinforces the scorn against responsability idea. It’s so obvious: you can’t really choose nothing in your life, then you’re not responsible for nothing.
Unfortunately, the abandon of free will, conscience and responsability massivedly only can lead IMHO to allow totalitarian systems to power, because personal responsability, free will and conscience pre-exist before democratic values, me think.
I’d say, (for redirecting myself to the main topic again) the ego/non ego problem isn’t a easy solution problem. I’ve thought about it several times this late days, and I’ve remembered the teachings of the several yoga teachers I’ve had in my life. Maybe the wisest words have been what an old yogui told to me a lot of years ago: when you meditate seriously, ego retreats, but (at least in this reality level of meditation) it doesn’t disappear absolutely. It remains the “witness”, who doesn’t judge but looks over the silence…that’s indeed a very little ego.
I’ve often experienced the “witness” level when I’ve meditated, so I’d like to give the reason to this man, but I’m not fully sure of it.
Maybe my old teacher was right, maybe wrong, what do you think about it?
JMG wrote, “…are your actions and thoughts based on emotional and cognitive habits you embraced in childhood and never modified, are they based on the way your parents behaved when you were young, or are they based on your current adult knowledge of the world?”
Hmmm. Good question. Not sure actually. I crystallized my views on the spiritual realm when I was 11 years old or so, as my older brother dragged me along to some of his gatherings when he was a bit of a Jesus freak for a couple of years. His interest was far greater in the preacher’s attractive daughter than my soul, and some of the ridiculous arguments proposed by the faithful turned me quickly into an agnostic. My parents were providers but not too dogmatic, though we did have a knock down fight over attending confirmation classes, which – again – had more to do with keeping Grandma happy than concern for my soul. I freely admit my cognitive habits have been pretty static since childhood.
My current adult knowledge of the world is certainly constrained by my materialistic views, but it doesn’t keep me awake at night. Everything we experience, IMHO, is processed via the brain….and human brains exist. On the material plane, no less. And the material plane appears to be the only consistent way and place to interact with other human beings, with other planes requiring pre-built models of reference and/or experience. The resultant combinations of “individual experiences” makes it much more difficult to apply the other planes to reality across the masses.
Since following your writings, I’ve adjusted my view somewhat in that if anyone proposed I possess an inferior or untrained brain which does not permit me to perceive other planes of reality, I wouldn’t argue with that train of thought. After all, as an agnostic, what do I know? The idea that I’m a “new soul” in the sea of 8.4B humans on the planet, if true, would explain a few things….
Patrick @ 227, thank you for the thoughtful response. I am puzzled as to why you think slavery makes economic sense. The American south, Dixie if you will, is blessed with a long coastline with more than one good harbor, good farmland, a long growing season, and still for most of our history managed to be our poorest region. Plantation economy, I would argue, does not create wealth for the polity in general. JMG stated slavery is alive and well in the world today, including here in the USA, albeit illegal. I think all or nearly all countries have laws on the books forbidding the dreadful institution because they want to be able to send representatives to the UN. I have read that it is in the Middle East where slavery is most openly practiced, again places which don’t seem to be creating much wealth except by extraction.
As for imposing our own values, that does go two ways. Someone who chooses to move into my country needs to accept and respect our institutions and values as he or she finds them. The left has been promoting high levels of immigration for decades in order to get back at those annoying self-righteous WASPs. This kind of silliness results when people try to import and impose foreign ideologies, whether Marxism or Austrian economics, on their adopted countries.
@ Chris at Fernglade #236
Haha, yes exactly. A stick shift isn’t necessarily going to stop a real professional, but it’s another fine example of deterrence, and that’s really all we’re talking about here.
And I’m glad to hear it was a satisfying response! I did take note of the power imbalance, and I think that while it’s an inevitability to some degree, as there are countless people on the internet, and each will come in at differing degrees of initial comfort, I do believe that through conversation these can be addressed as tactfully as one can manage. For what it’s worth, I agree that dialogue is best facilitated among equals. All the best to you.
Another wheel comes off.
“Vipin Raina’s company, India’s largest precious metals refinery, ran out of silver stock for the first time in its history due to high demand from Indian customers.
The shortages in India were soon felt globally, with the London silver market also running out of available metal, and traders describing a market that was “all but broken”.
The silver market crisis was caused by a combination of factors, including a multi-year solar power boom, a rush to ship metal to the US to beat possible tariffs, and a sudden spike in demand from India, particularly during the Diwali holiday season.”
Silver is currently $51/oz, gold is $4362. Relative to precious metals the USD is collapsing.
@ Chris at Fernglade #236 – I like the crime journalist’s advice, but curiously…
The only car that was ever stolen from me was my beloved first car, a manual FRENCH geared, 1979 Renault 4… man, it was fun to drive… 😉
Of course it had another peculiarity, for a while, which was that I could not take the ignition key out of the ignition, and in my rural area this did not seem like a problem more urgent than one of those “long finger” ones…
One morning I woke up to find that, as they say around here, “there it was, gone!”… Still, I found it later that day parked slightly off the road shoulder two or three miles further down the windy road into the valley… as the key was still stuck in the ignition, I was able to drive her home again. We suspected, but never ascertained for sure, that one of our neighbours saw, and took, the opportunity to get home, late, and drunk, that bit quicker than on shank’s mare.
There is a large ecosystem here, and not all of it is actively hostile, some is just opportunistically inconveniencing…
Still, I respect the DIFFERENT choices people make as to what they will wear on different occasions… not everyone chooses nudity for all seasons, and in a panopticon, perhaps some will want to opt for the camouflage option, of the kind that has a long and storied history in every ecosystem… 🙂
Brilliant, deep and even funny! thanks. I particularly liked:
“Very, very few of us deliberately invent our own egos. Most of us take our self-representations off the rack, as though we were buying a Halloween costume, and tolerably often the costume in question has at least two problematic features. The first is that it fits very poorly. The second is that it benefits the manufacturer much more than it benefits us.”
I use different words to capture very similar ideas. I think of having many models that can be used to understand and predict observations. Story or myth or metanarrative are other words that have overlaps with what I call a models. The key question is how complex is the system being observed. For something as simple as a baseball on its arc, we have very good models and can usefully talk of having predictive understanding of an external reality, as long as we remain aware of the approximations and limits of the model and of our observations. For simple questions, most models are best understood as simply wrong if they are not very close to a group of models that give accurate results. For the things we really care about: like how to live a happy and fulfilling life, the system includes a global ecosystem and human culture that is so extremely complex that our models can never capture much reliably, and so we use models or stories from traditions and cultures that have been tried and found to work tolerably well. Here you need multiple stories, or I would recommend adopting a story that embraces paradox and mystery and is flexible enough to adapt as we observe new aspects of the strange attractor that is humanity and its ecosystem. The self is a extremely complex system, but not at the incomprehensible complexity of our entire ecosystem. The models we use to understand ourselves is the topic here. I’ll need time to internalize how your description of ego and consciousness relate to the many different pieces of models of myself that I use.
Erika,
Occidental arts and ecology is still doing their annual Chautauqua revue, this years is already done, but they will do it again next September. You are within driving distance of Occidental California so could go next year if you team up with someone else who wants to go who has a car. I went once, years ago, to one of their matinees and realy enjoyed it. oaec.org/events ( Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, OAEC, has been stewarding the location for 30 years now, This is the location that a great many years ago used to be the Farallones institute ) They still have Wednesday volunteer in the garden days if you can ever get there for that, I would recommend it as it is a very good location to re-center, the wild beings are strong there and you are very close compared to most of us who have gone
Siliconguy # 242:
I’m afraid we’re derailing on the off topic, but thank you for informing us about silver shortages in India. They’re another sign of times!
Can’t resist, but if you have modeled yourself on Gandalf (a good choice), has there been a Saruman in your life?
What do you think is The One Ring?
These days, I think that the ability to manipulate human thought and desire unleashed starting with Bernays and the Committee on Public Information (Creel Committee) plays that role. Though more like what would have happened if Boromir or Denethor had gotten their hands on the ring.
“Dunno about your part of the world, but what interested me in the histories I’ve read of The Great Depression, is that by and large, most city folks, stuck to the cities. Sure, in the rural areas there were itinerant workers, but that’s always been the case, and was true down here. The old swagman of yore.”
What the modern world has that the 1930s doesn’t are car dependent suburbs – those are going to suffer the most in a second Great Depression.
Something that hit me this morning: since the end of WWII, the USA has been on a world-class collective no-ego ego trip. Despite being the dominant imperial power in the world, we have refused to recognize ourselves as having an empire — as you’ve noted in the past, all the talk from the Left about US imperialism is couched in bizarre language that treats the word “empire” as some sort of abstract phenomenon and so avoids actually calling us “an empire.”
And it’s not hard to see why: our self-image won’t allow us to be villains on the world stage the way even the best of empires must be.
This has made us almost uniquely unfit to be an empire. We have to be constantly making a show — a Spectacle, you might say — of being the benefactors of the world even as we ruthlessly extract its resources to fuel our own extravagance. But since we can’t bring ourselves to actually conquer the places we want to rob, which would at least give them the dignity of being a formal part of the empire, all our alleged benevolence usually amounts to is endless meddling and humanitarian theater benefitting (at best) a regime made up of even-more-than-usually corrupt rascals picked for their willingness to give us what we want instead of their ability to govern.
A proper empire is a bloody affair. But what we’ve built is a tower of lies, and as the saying goes, every lie is a debt to the truth. Pretty lies become delusions, and finally derangement. And that’s where we find ourselves.
I forgot to mention this: as another piece of evidence of our collective no-ego ego trip, consider how for decades the Department of War was euphemistically renamed the Department of Defense.
We still got into wars, of course. Though, curiously, Congress never got around to declaring any of them officially — despite approving literal trillions of dollars of funding for them and almost all of them making a show of their support for them!
This ties into the topic, loosely. If the vast majority of people are uneducated regarding their egos and the proper maintenance and care thereof, does that correlate with what appears to be peak excess money, peak worldwide corruption, peak avoidance of ordinary reality a.k.a. peak untruthfulness, peak consumption of inessentials and peaking pollution? There are more peaks, here, like population, etc. that the Club of Rome discussed. That’s the way it appears to me. It’s fudged imaginary turtles all the way down… And, I wonder, to what extent have I contributed to all this?
Before we go on, I’m sorry to say der deutsche Volltrottel — ahem, the abject moron from Germany who’s been spamming my blog — is back in force. My spam filter has screened out more than 200 attempted comments by him over the last two days. While the siege continues, any of your comments that accidentally get caught by the spam filter may not be rescued; please try reposting.
With that said, now that I’m about half caught up on sleep, let’s proceed. 😉
Ian, I found it possible to do the fundamental training and study, along with one or two of the practices at any given time, in 2-3 hours a day. Get rid of your television and that becomes easy…
Xcalibur/djs, oh, of course they’re liberal concepts. Liberalism, in the classic sense of the term, was the guiding ideology of the West from its origins after the collapse of Renaissance culture straight through to the failure of our age of reason. It’s the collapse of liberalism that’s produced the current struggle, with the postliberal left and the never-liberal right duking it out amid the ruins.
Luke, ha! “Wid my Speaw and Magic Hew-met!” as the instruments of death, no doubt. 😉
Chuaquin, you’re welcome. It was about ten years ago that the self-contradictory nature of rationalist materialism finally struck me, and I’m still trying to figure out how best to communicate it.
Anonymous, as many as possible. At this point the single most important barrier to dealing with any of our collective problems is the sheer mass of bureaucrats who were officially hired to solve those problems, and by the inescapable logic of the Shirky Principle, work full time preventing those problems from being solved.
Luke Z, so noted; I haven’t read Tolle, so was going by what others said.
Chris S, interesting. So it’s the cultural charisma of materialism — for eliminative materialism is no more simple an explanation than, say, animism; it’s just that materialism is fashionable these days while animism is not. Gotcha.
Bakbook, that analysis works!
Inna, thanks for this! That’s another useful set of data points for a set of ideas I’m beginning to explore.
Clay, yeah, that’s basically my take. It’s an attempt by a privileged class to make up for its waning influence by LARPing being the Good People.
BeardTree, it’s a fine and comfortable way to live! Still, Gandalfery works for me.
Rajarshi, that kind of oscillation is a normal result of having a brittle ego — and it’s very hard, for reasons I plan on discussing soon, for people to grow up these days and not have a brittle ego. No, creating a fixed self-image won’t help. Dispassionate self-knowledge is the only way out.
LeGrand, I really do need to read more Swedenborg one of these days. (I was appalled, on a recent visit to Cambridge MA, to find that the fine little Swedenborgian church there has suspended services and has no current plans to restart them.) Which of his works gets most thoroughly into proprium?
Larping, thank you for this. Her Irreverent Absurdity, the one and only Lady Pixie Moondrip, sends her benediction of amused approval. 😉
Untitled, you’re most welcome. Thank you also for the explanation of internet pseudonymity; I originally decided not to use pseudonyms during the same period of interaction with the Neopagan scene that led to the writing of “Lady Pixie Moondrip’s Guide to Craft Names,” and extended that to the internet once I got online — but it’s interesting to see another side of it.
Polecat, except Mr. Hyde was actually capable of doing something. Okay, something brutal, but it wasn’t Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Larp…
TylerA, those are excellent points. The use of group categories as a substitute for a functioning ego is particularly toxic — and all this will be addressed in an upcoming post.
Kyle, I still have hopes.
Chris, I think the LLM frenzy is one of those prisoners-dilemma situations that afflicts systems in terminal decline. Even though the whole thing is obviously going to end not merely in tears but in shrieks of genuine agony, nobody can afford to walk away from the game; while it’s still in process, that’s where all the money is, and if you don’t do it, someone else will. So the game goes on, the music gets louder and more desperate, and nobody gets away unscathed.
Pygmycory, so noted!
BoysMom, I do remember those days. Maybe I was just pigheaded, but ever since I started spending time on the internet I’ve used my real name, precisely because that’s the name on my books and I wanted to get it out there into the public memory and imagination.
Kevin, an excellent point!
Chuaquin, I suppose you can use the metaphor of the ego as fiction to talk about the inevitable difference between self-image and the whole self, but I have no idea what Martinez can mean by a “real ego.” The ego exists, in the same way that the reflection in a mirror exists; to say that the reflection isn’t what it reflects is common sense, but to insist that it’s not a “real reflection” because it’s not what it reflects is really rather odd…
Patricia M, thanks for this! I need to put Renault on my short list.
Mary, er, what does it accomplish to say that X is wicked? I can certainly see resolving not to do X because it’s wicked, but I’ve always been a little confused about what’s supposed to be accomplished by yelling about those bad people doing the wicked thing X over there.
Waffles, that’s an excellent theme for meditation!
Joy Marie, thanks for this. I didn’t have to live through that kind of church experience, and I’m grateful for that; thank you for the data points.
BeardTree, the average Athenian — even the average free male Athenian — used a minute fraction of the energy per year that you and I use. Did that prevent them from engaging in earnest, enthusiastic discussion of culture, society, politics, religion, or science?
Luke Z, it’s one of the secrets of monastic traditions that all of them have a certain number of mystic vegetables on site: people who got too deep into altered states and literally can’t wipe their own backsides any more.
Jasmine, all of that is excellent advice.
Ahem, in that case, it might be better for the purveyors of the no-ego business to shut up and let each very advanced mystic discover it for themselves…
Chuaquin, that’s a valid concern. Dehumanizing ideologies such as eliminative materialism lead very promptly to dehumanizing politics. As for the ego thing, the ego is flexible; when you finish your meditation and go to the store to buy food for dinner, does your ego remain limited to the “witness”?
Drhooves, and in that case, live your life, learn what it has to teach you, and leave everything else for later. The universe is patient and you will have all the time you need.
Siliconguy, I note that other fiat currencies don’t seem to be holding up very well in relation to silver and gold either…
Ganv, glad you like it. A certain flexibility when it comes to models is always a good skill to have.
Jessica, that’s easy enough. I know several Sarumans and many more Sarumanlets — think of all the people from the occult community who ditched their ethics and are busy wallowing in evil magic these days. “Then he spoke, and his voice was shrill and cold. Pride and hate were conquering him.” As for the One Ring, for me, that’s conventional success — selling out to a decadent system in order to grasp at the illusion of power.
Slithy, that’s an excellent point!
Clarke, a fascinating question, and another good theme for meditation…
Slithy Toves # 249&250:
The continous Spectacle of USA foreign politics as imperial superpower is a hard fact which of course it has been, it has and it will have consequences: the Imperial karma is a very deep and heavy thing for your future. Well, past empires have had to deal with their own collective karma: look at the fallen imperial powers of Europe, between them my own country cough cough…The US modus operandi has been indeed different from open blunt European colloniallism, but the results in the present and future of last “color revolutions”(aka shameful coups d’etat) in countries like Ukraine aren’t glorious…
Hard to see that anything is “there” when one squints and tilts a certain way. Much can be learned from a transformer hologram sticker.
Then (let’s just assume the parenthesis for “there’s” and “i’s”) I have to see what this is. Then am I this, in this, voluntarily, or was I pushed into existence as a spoke is pushed into existence and placed within a wheel to do work by some other this. Very hard to know, and of what use.
Often it becomes obvious to some unknown knower that I, and the cat, and the bird my cat is hunting are cookies. Only cut with different cutters of the same dough.
Some even have sparkles. Some have walnuts.
Can’t get past the suspicion that all is god alone. Words become quickly inadequate now.
The sadness seems superfluous. An unnecessary topping perhaps. Understanding becomes quickly inadequate now.
I see a very old man and I am envious. I am happy for him. His sentence is almost served. He didn’t choose suicide at any point. Unlike many Brahmans who just become a bit too aware.
Well…back to work I go. I go. I go. E go..
And of course thank you again for putting it and yourself out there for us lowly infidels.
Hope my comments aren’t too off topic of what you’re attempting.
Be well
Mr.Greer, Hah! I see you point.. and raise you a mead. ‘;]
JMG, I could ask you the same thing about “evil magic”. I don’t because I don’t know enough about the topic to express an opinion. Howsomever, if, as I have read here and other places, it is true that what a person does for or to someone else reflects back threefold, I would say your question answers itself.
I think my basic point, that what one might have thought, given available resources such as fertile soil, timber, lengthy growing season, and good harbors, would become the most prosperous part of our nation has been, in fact, among the poorest for two centuries stands.
There are certain things I don’t want to see happen in my country. Legalized slavery is one of them. The buying and selling of human beings is another.
@BeardTree # 223 – I agree with your thought of how priorities will change as the Long Descent continues, but like JMG mentioned there will always be a subset of humans that engage in discussions, rituals and practices outside of the immediate needs of food, shelter and clothing. It’s difficult to maintain an upbeat attitude about how things are going though, as the vast majority of humans have been led astray by the cultural influences of the times.
So, we all have to ask ourselves do we try to improve things as best we can, or…do we root for Giant Meteor 2026 to hasten the end? It’s not an easy choice for many.
@JMG
Ha! After reading Lady Pixie’s advice I have to say I was quite tempted to update my name to “Squatting Buffalo Firewater” but for the sake of continuity I suppose I’ll just have to restrain myself 🙂 Thanks for that, I needed a good laugh. It’s true that there’s no accounting for taste, and I can’t honestly say if I’m any better in that respect. At the end of the day, any approach has tradeoffs, including perhaps coming off like a complete nebbish.
JMG #252:
Martinez ideas of ego as “necessary fiction” and a “real ego” maybe are his personal interpretation of Hindu philosophies (even I can guess if he read some non-dualistic Advaitic doctrine so he expressed his approach to that in
his own way). Another explanation of his ideas about ego (real or not) could be I didn’t understand well his books, which it’s quite difficult to understand in some paragraphs. And a third possibility to explain Martinez darkness could be (maybe) he was trying to communicate to the reader his personal mystic experiences with not too much luck…Indeed in his books he used to tell the readers he had lived several mystic experiences. I don’t know which one of these hypothesis could explain such an obscure writing, so I can’t help you more in this aspect…
********************************
Of course, John, ego is a flexible “thing”, so when I finish meditation in the “witness” mode and I return to everyday life, my usual ego returns in its misery and glory…
Dear JMG, this was a deeply profound and moving essay to which I returned several times since you published it. I would like to have participated more in the discussion, but sometimes a few days is not long enough to process what has been articulated. So, please, let me just say thank you and wish you well. Yours kindly as ever, Boy
PS I would also like to thank the person who recommended Robert Johnson’s Inner Work book, after the Jung essay of a month or two ago – and which also took rather a long time to process. The book (and essay) were very helpful indeed, and I think somehow intersects with points of this essay.
OT: After getting another Wokey-Pokey gimme in the mail, I finally sat down and hit the voter registration site and have now changed from Democrat to “No Party Affiliation.” Which should free me from left-wing spam after the first flood of “Waaah! Sniffle. Why did you desert us?” Or, of curse, open me up to spam from every party in the Know World. . I feel as if I’d broken a pair of handcuffs I didn’t even know were there.
@JMG: About Mary Renault – I’d start with “The Praise Singer,” about Simonides of Keos – first person narration, and a good look at Greece at the start of the Greek Renaissance. Though Thomas Cahill in “Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea” has better, pithier translations of his verse. Frex: Cahill’s rendition of Simonides’ most famous epigram reads:
“Go tell the Spartans, passers-by
That here, obedient to their words, we lie.”
The second thing is that, in “Mask of Apollo,” her actor-narrator is deeply, favorable impressed by both Plato and Alexander. som beware bias.
And the third thing, if you’re going to wind it up with the death of Alexander and its results, is the 4th book in that sequence, “The Persian Boy,” who was the sole survivor of Alexander’s inner circle, and I’m going to say, his sole surviving widow. Which is how Bagoas, the Persian Boy, would see it.
As untitled mentioned, the rise and risk of cancel culture is a reason to use pseudonyms. As they also said, the canceling can happen irrespective of whatever wing is currently dominating the flight trajectory of the mass minded bird brain.
The internet too was built by hacker geeks and nerdboys. Hacker handles have often been a part of that culture. Since hackers are governed by Mercury, I see no need to quibble with the inevitable tricksterish tergiversations that follow adopting schizo-culture split personality dissociative multiple identities.
Speaking of which this dude named Poor Richard used all kinds of different pseudonyms that he sent in to his own paper, and then replied back to himself as the editor of his anagrammatic almanac of whack.
So sometimes a pseudonym can just be a way of adopting the printer devils advocate. A fine American tradition in other words and names…. as the authirs of the Constitution papers also employed.
Patricia Mathews @ 262
Good on yah! I, a former Democrat, took the plunge .. and swan-dived into a more ‘independent’ level of uhh… how shall we say, NON-CRAYCRAY…..
Once Ol’ Barrybama got the brass ring, did a 180° on his nope-n-chains bs, I then and
there said: No more of this blu hood-winking – I’m done! Now, don’t get me wrong .. I don’t give team red a pass. In fact, I think that All but a teensy-weensy few have NOT my interests … and that of a majority of American CITIZENRY at heart; figured as chumps to be rendered .. to be had!
And, to be frank, Trump’s endorsement of Sen. Massie’s Rino opponent, ENDORSED by non other that that reckless neocon poser – LINDSEY GRAHAM – has me uh, stumped..
Still, having said that, I will NEVER vote blu, EVER!
Thinking about the individuality as a hand at the end of a vast brain and body difficult for a hand to conceive of but guiding it nonetheless is so helpful in getting past the Abrahamic and I guess other traditions too tension about pride and humility and trying to do what you’re here to do the best that you can but not getting the small and puffed up kind of ego about it… I made another part to the substack thing I was working on. Maybe it needs editing to reach its potential or maybe I’ll just keep going forward but it has had some nice resonances with things presented to me in the days since. I link to your man with the mustache in that one. Thanks for this piece, its helpful.
Point well taken, John. Thanks for the info. I need to dive in to Newton’s alchemical works.
Also, I had an experience today that reminded me of this post. In my relaxation/meditation routine I was caught up in a bunch of worries and other concerns, when an image came to mind of removing a mask of my everyday self and slipping on a Wizard mask… Upon imagining this, my worries faded into the background a bit and the exercises went much better than before.
Patricia Mathews #159
OMG. I do believe I remember reference to🌚The Grey Badger🤩. Druid sites, roughly 1995-2005. Well hello, grey — how is it going?
💨💨💨🥸“Northwind” “Grandma”
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
P.S. The north wind will come for me but once numb from cold, I won’t feel a thing; so I hear tell. The living will find my husk after spring thaw, I just don’t know what year.
@Mary Bennet
Slavery primarily benefitted the plantation owners (while doubtless racking up negative karma for tgem that they’d have to pay back in later lives.
Slavery has little to no chance of being legalized in America for the forseeable future, beyond the prison labor exception. The populace is overwhelmingly against it. I hope that future generations of Americans will continue to be against it…but I have no power to make the government(s) of 23rd century America do what I want.
@Polecat – Obama’s State of the Union message was when I stopped taking notes on on said speeches and threw up my hands: there was no content to be pinned down. Just a flood of vague generalities and buzzwords. I did put up a “Vote for Cthulu – why settle for the lesser of two evils?” sign on my door.
I used to have a list of organizations I thought would always be worth backing, such as the ACLU, because it stood for free speech, even to defending the rights of neo-Nazis to march. Now I have a list headed “Jumped the Shark” and the ACLU heads the list, along with the League of Women Voters, which used to stand for voting rights impartially. Who was it who said “I didn’t leave my party; my party left me.”
P.S. From Trump paving the Rose Garden, to tearing down the East Wing to build a ballroom, and talking about wanting an arc de triomphe on the Mall, it’s plain to see he has an Edifice Complex.
it’s so funny: i tell Papa to delete a bunch of my riffs and responses because I’m writing furiously over here on my legal stuff and am only making things worse for myself, here with you all now or later at Adocentyn.
so my water heater just got replaced by the kid i’ve taken on as my nephew. he’s a brand new plumber like 21 years old, going it alone, and i’m so proud of him, i put up with him messing up and making my life difficult. i LOVE it!
anyhow, so i’m taking a break, feeling good, a moment in the sun with the kitty. and i said to myself, “no, don’t just go away… explain. this is an investment, invisible people or not.”
so i’m back to make my lot with you all even worse:
while Jazeel and Jordan were here in the kitchen with the water heater, i caught up on some of the anonymousy responses i’d skipped. untitled-1 i only read you AFTER you referred to me and i have NO idea what you mean and i actually INVITE you to be presumptuous.
it’d be more of you WHO are behind “untitled.”
that’s what i want.
so i realized as i finished on Scotlyn’s comment, obliquely (verrrry female, Scotlyn!!!) so i have to go into what little of my “female brain” i have because to tell you the TRUTH, i had to pass Scotlyn’s responses about SIX times until i got what she was saying, regarding, let me find the quote i FINALLY get and i laugh because once again i’m the stupid husband in the sitcom! “Still, I respect the DIFFERENT choices people make as to what they will wear on different occasions… not everyone chooses nudity for all seasons, and in a panopticon, perhaps some will want to opt for the camouflage option, of the kind that has a long and storied history in every ecosystem…”
that was to ME! i get it. even if not DIRECTLY (feminine). i’m blunt direct UGLY. these are traits that are “bad” even HERE. that’s what i’m calling out. the guys who were defensive were also doing the equivalent of cleaning the kitchen while we’re at work. and THAT’s what i’m calling out even and ESPECIALLY HERE. if we’re mages magicians witches creatives artists philosophers we must also play with the motes in OUR OWN EYES because they’re infinitely FUNNIER when we give our EGOS a wedgie.
that’s MY JOB. and Lenny Bruce is my “father” in poltical comedy as life turned tragedy, he’s also a warning to me not to let this stuff make me insane. i’m on the other side of Lenny Bruce. “progress” to me is LEARNING FROM HIM and trying a different way because i believe that the answers are in the ecstasy of love. and wanting to be practice for my baby plumber and calling him my nephew and he hugs and kisses ME when he leaves. He’s from El Salvador. a scrapper and already a father with a kid and a bitchy ex wife who makes his life hell. he makes the creepy workmen i’ve banned from my apartment for hitting me up for money when i won’t kiss them on the lips or give them whiskey to calm their shakes as they use power tools, he makes almost twenty years of the moral decay of living in San Francisco, he makes it LOVELY again.
you all are presuming i’m saying there are only binary choices with alpha beta and then some female throws in sigma. when my friend explained sigma nowadays, i winced. it’s pride in being… blah.
that’s MY job. to make audacity and being WRONG and too much and DARING and obnoxious and pushy and challenging, i have to PITCH THAT TO THE WORLD AGAIN. and i smile that i’m fought here by the softer, yes even WISER ones here, christophe and random and scotlyn and more… and i SMILE because this is so classically FEMALE:
females wanna belong be liked by EVERYONE and don’t want to offend but INCLUDE. i was doing the sin of EXCLUDING by seeming to value alpha over beta. hardly. like acting teacher Cliff Osmond told us, film actors are usually mentally unhinged because unlike stage actors who have TIME to get into character and live it, film actors are yelled “ACTION!” and expected to emote on CUE in an instant or it’s millions of dollars and do it AGAIN AND AGAIN and AGAIN.
that’s what i’m talking about. all this is theatre here and even gato. and how i come at gato. if i need everyone i read or listen to, to be EVERYTHING, then i lose out of the magic moments. yes: LIKE READING ANONYMOUS NON DE PLUME PEOPLE HERE.
however, gato is trying to STEER the culture. the reason i think he’s a double agent is because his personal life NEVER shines through unless it’s just a prompt to riff on the culture and steer it, or it’s to make him like every gen x, or that he’s wealthy in a beach front condo with Eames chairs just sitting in the corner as decoration. that’s SO double agent spook because I KNOW FROM BEING ALPHA BLACK SHEEP THAT IT DOES NOT PAY.
even inheritances of black sheep get taken away.
so gato’s theatre. but he’s onto something even as he’s all about HIDING so he’s not alpha, just capturing and putting out the essence and trying to MAKE HIS READERS FEEL LIKE OTHER ALPHAS.
but alpha here are like the manic depressive film stars used to emote on cue then go be quiet. it unhinges you. i get it. and that’s me now and who i’m talking to BECAUSE:
part 2:
i also just read the introduction to Charles Hugh Smith’s new book, INVESTING IN REVOLUTION. it blew my cotton picking MIND because it is EXACTLY what i believe and what i am working towards in my little project-based existence.
i absolutely believe that i, along with others like me (insane film actors), are meant to push and challenge the quicksand of the CURRENT culture. if i am a 220volt person in a 110 world, i have to find SOMETHING that electrifies me or i wither.
i’m not alone. so call it alpha leo blacksheep scapegoat adventurer or azzzzzhole, but me reaching out to such people doesn’t make us better and the anonymouses or betas or the camouflaged, i said PLAY YOUR POSITION AND THE BEST YOU CAN. i’m an artist think like orchestras… everyone even the grip, is essential.
don’t get it twisted and think that we should dilute the power of the manic pointed in a positive goal oriented direction that’s not based on acquistion but CHANGE. it is a skill to shake people up and out of their complacency. i do a disservice to the ones waking up out of their shells if i let you all oversimplify what i’m trying to DO. and when i’m among other mages? nah. that’s not right.
so let us be “too much” and learn how to best use it with these techniques and theories and lessons that Papa IS TEACHING because he IS ALPHA, make no mistake. he does things HIS WAY. i wanna know more about THAT. that is power. going your own way, not caring, because you’ve already DIED./or you both died when your child died. it’s amazing they stayed together and turned that into…all THIS. she breathed life back into HIM and he took care of HER. it was this essential balance that’s missing.
i want more of THAT. i had it with James. i said my books my writing on ENDCAT, his username except as Thor here, i think. anyhow, so to have more of THAT, i have to be it spread it not hide it… come back HERE and try to explain.
i’m not even really taking time away from my legal case because it FEEDS it. i cannot win in their courts the way they use the bureaucracy to overwhelm you and make you lose. i’m too slow for that in their system. it’s not based on logic or humanity, but tricks for little sister who have nothing better to do, but memorize such things.
that’s the Devouring Mother system (bureaucracy) that Simon Sheridan writes about AND Dagnarus speaks of taking over the culture as a religion, that i have to Lenny Bruce and call out in ALL OF US. it’s ubiquitous.
so let the girly “we all belong” shtick go the way side and i’m not negating i’m charging up the dead because we NEED to laugh at extremes in YOU and ourselves.
this is a perfect topic for ego because where’s the sense of humor except in christophe being snide and also coming at me obliquely (verrrry female). untitled-1, you too. i missed all you meant because it was too … oblique.
speak TO me, call ME out. i can TAKE IT! in fact i’d love for you to practice on me. not to turn the chill controlled brujas y brujos here into spastic film actors, but … maybe trying it out would be interesting, good for you, and teach you something. because as a lover who’s never had to shtup everyone or even anyone to “make love” and pull the best of them out of themselves, EVERYONE has 220volts in themselves. EVERYONE.
in fact, it is because i pull it out of them that they fear me. that’s why Temporary Reality and i are over: i made her FEEL anger. i’m comfortable with her anger at me! in fact i invited it. but in California you politely look away and move on to whatever’s more comfortable.
NO! LENNY BRUCE TIME!
so i don’t ever take it personally as i’ve had toooo many former friends return to me, tell me they get it now and love me and best of all: thank you. so i don’t NEED your approval or LIKE. this internet has TRAINED us all to be liked followers and thumbs up comments.. it’s the oPPOSITE of where we need to go because mixed with the practice from daily lessons from any of Papa’s teachings, coupled with an outline of an UNDERGROUND HUMAN JOHNNY APPLESEED game plan— which is EXACTLY what Charles Hugh Smith’s new book, INVESTING IN REVOLUTIOIN is about.
i only recently started looking at him and kunstler because James used to read them and a lot of writers i dig just have quit writing, as i have, so i revisted charles hugh smith and while my plumber beloveds were working in the kitchen, i read the intro and BAM! 220volts EVERYWHERE!!!!
because see, this “legal” writing is turning out to BE “ENDCAT.” Lenny Bruce lost his mind as a comic by just reading court docs on stage. it was too much for the crowd i think. so i cannot win with tricks. i have to appeal to whatever humanity is left on the judge AND the judge is likely …well, i’m in SAN FRANCISCO. if i sound like Alex Jones again, i’m going down.
so i have to go BEYOND… i have to go underneath the alpha omega AND beta, to what is HUMAN so that INDIVIDUALLY PEOPLE BECOME THEMSELVES (Johnny Appleseed) because that’s the only thing that will jam up the machine as it’s going NOW. and if we MAGES creatives magicians brujas y brujos don’t stop with the abstract safe chattering and not try to challenge in the real instead of letting out frustrations here, then we’re going down.
it’s not about judging and saying we ALL have to be alphas. hardly! you are thinking you need to belong or understand or be a part of EVERYTHING and ALL MAGICS! no! let the weirdo freaky insane “alphas” who’re that way because WE’VE NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE… so no, if you have a decent job and a mortgage and wanna get along at family dinners, FINE. play YOUR POSITION and support us when we insane twitchy 220v loner weirdo alphas need HELP.
so YOU judge. i’m not trying to CHANGE anyone. be who YOU are. let us half dead who have a chance to blow ourselves up for the cause on the proverbial camera, LET US SHINE FOR YOU.
it’s balance. not either or. this got too “feminine” for me and too many dude-types got quiet and i KNOW they’re out there. i taught a class and the girls killed the boys coming alive and feeling themselves for a change. SAME THING HERE.
let us be twitchy and insane and alive.
you all have the jobs to be had, the respectable lives you don’t wanna upend. we’re already UP ENDED. i ask YOU to let US BE ourselves. don’t flip it to the other way around. no! i’m calling YOU out Random AND Scotlyn in particular.
people, CREATIVES, have to be FIRST in messing around and testing things out in the real world. don’t try to keep us all feeling safe and accepted. i don’t feel accepted. i need the WILD ones to also challenge ME. Papa is a wild one.
wanting to be Gandalf as a kid? LOVE IT! and then it happens and he can say what he wants because he has his own business model and a zillion different publishers and no one can shut him down because of it.
THAT’s Johnny Appleseed. it takes a lot of “fxck you” imagination to get his life, make no mistake. THIS is what i’m trying to help instigate. i was begging you all not to just talk talk talk and make these incredible teachings and ideas NEUTERED because if you get even 20 “gandalfs” running around the world?… i get mad chills thinking about it.
i want to see the dead come back and make something new because Charles Hugh Smith’s intro is another one of these synchronicities of ideas thought and writing that’s happening COLLECTIVELY.
i’m trying to slap awake the ones who can take a punch because they already HAVE for a lifetime.
i’m not speaking to the employed comfortable because you’re not “dead” yet when you’re worried about ANYONE finding you. you’re like “find me… whatever happens will be hella interesting because i don’t give a fxck anymore…” and thus they AVOID you!
the not giving a fxck IS the trick. but you can’t play chicken when you’ve got young kids a mortgage and a job where you’re hiding who you voted for and keeping up with the small talk.
TylerA went mad because he couldn’t be 110volts ANY MORE.
good!
i’ve always had people be themselves with me at 3am then avoid me after the sun comes up. like the movie The Breakfast Club. but my job now is to learn to midwife the one who dares, past the morning into luchtime and hold it through dinnertime… and then again tomorrow.
it’s messy ugly being born again not as a floaty Jesus freak, but as a complicated human being who can be evil and angelic.
you all indulged in a ton of ego here: you don’t HAVE to feel included or even BE included or WANNA be included and it doesn’t negate who i am the kind of weirdo i am, nor does it negate what i aim to do. it’s an actual THING that IS going to happen whether i instigate it or you all here usher it along or demean it because you don’t feel included because you’re not a freak.
good! let us push and you be there when we’re falling apart after we escape the carnage.
we get to be different AND valued. i’m not putting any of you down, betas or not. i AM calling you out so you decide what and who you wanna be and be HONEST about it.
if you’re not you will speak into abstractions and distract the ones who want to act, with the heaviness of your insistence on clean squeaky talk. Gandalf here sounds all showered and clean, but he tells the truth of crying and screaming into pillows and feeling like 20 years of his life was wasted or that he was a loser.
THOSE ARE AGONIZING DEADLY POSITIONS. just because Papa Gandalf (it works with the G) seems put together, i’m heartened that He went THERE: to hell.
and back.
that’s why He’s a prophet. he’s been there. don’t waste it. avoid the rush to madness and all his lessons tell you how to right yourself again.
please don’t feminize this process, and i mean that in the Devouring Mother “AIR WE BREATHE” way. the online chat thing favors that. i’m not “trolling.” i hate that word because challenging or disagreeing get lumped in with their and kill good conversations or interesting directions.
so again: i speak to the dead.
if you’re making it in this world and have ANY face at all left to save, bully for YOU. some of us just aren’t making it and i want to do good for myself and not have to depend on the kindness of strangers. let me please try to make that happen because i think more artists come back to life and throw out some new and interesting ideas…
why this is what Papa’s entire oeuvre is about! it’s not just TALK. He’s LIVING it. don’t waste this if you’ve nothing to lose.
alpha beta omega sigma… i don’t care. this isn’t a popularity contest.
but artists push the culture and you might consider that a GOOD thing. there are the freaks the ones who’re mad… like ME. i can barely be made to care about money. USE ME. push me. challenge me. save me.
you don’t have to BE like me. in fact, i don’t recommend it. not at all. it just …HAPPENS.
if you’re camouflage… do you wanna be camouflage ONLY? i doubt it. i just want some to ask if it’s just easier or what they really want?
i’m hardly leading except if you count by example. if i were young, i’d want one of me as elders or an example. THAT’s why i’m so loud. because so many have come back. i trust if someone who needs it doesn’t get it now, maybe something will click years from now or lifetimes from now.
i do this to find myself in the future. i’ve always thought that. handprints on cave walls or notes under stones for a future lifetime.
but i also MUST MUST MUST write for now and my legal pitch is me trying to appeal beyond the binary choices given so that i may go below to our common blood guts and write like it’s 3am but under the fluorescent lights of a federal building and braid it all together so that i may reach the HUMAN under the robe and make them laugh or understand and see who i am where i’m coming from because i can’t win with form CH-100 or an ambush of MC-10s.
i don’t even have a job. i’m unemployable. you don’t have to be like me and i don’t have to be like you. you can hide keep it calm. i can’t. they FIND ME. i’m screaming now because …it’s a GOOD thing.
you don’t have to be like me. i want you to BE you and your scary 220 moments because everyone has ’em.
that’s what will jam up spam up the machine. don’t you GET it? stop focusing on whether you’re using last names or defending why you have 50 avatars. i don’t CARE. i’m only saying: i’m at the edge financially, could become homeless with what i’m doing. i HAVE to go here to survive.
if i were a depressed 220 faking i’m 110, i’d want someone like me to say “GO ON!” because as we’ve seen here over and over… sometimes it just takes ONE person.
i’m not for everybody and for the love of all that is good and holy, please please pleeease, don’t bring out the female tendency for everyone to be flat the same and just get along and no one feels less than. if YOU do, it’s on YOU.
that’s this EGO stuff.
i’m challenging the dead to pay attention to Papa G’s teaching in REAL LIFE and don’t fall for the safe chatty abstractions. this way is BLOODY. many snot filled pillow cases damp with tears. it’s NOT pretty no matter how casually Papa Gandalf flips these black dog admissions out like burgers.
this is about TURNING AWAY. the weirdos and dead with nothing to lose will and can devise new ingenious ideas like Papa’s own business model. PAY ATTENTION FOR YOURSELF. if you’ve already got a job, maybe pay attention for LATER. but don’t try to fart on my head, beloveds.
thank you.
(smile)
sincerely yours,
Kitten
x
Erika
For me the names i use are masks, they reveal part of me and obscure part of me.
My legal name James Moore is a mask
My nom de plum Mo Ore is a mask.
My nom de gar jim banyon is a mask
My nom de amore dobbs is a mask.
Dobbs is my favorite mask, and that is the main reason i use it.
And as far as ALPHAs and BETAs go, I have been in technical conversations where i have been the total ALPHA (explaining things) and in other conversations i have been the total BETA (ignorant of any path forward) so….what am i?
an alpha ?
a beta ?
maybe i am a zeta??
But i prefer to think of myself as an i, (you know the irrational number defined as the square root of negative 1.) Its meaning is undefined but hilariously enough it is still a very useful concept.
@ erika lopez #272
I see, I’m being too “oblique”. That’s fair. Yeah, I guess if I think about it, there’s something I’m trying to say to you that is perhaps better communicated directly, if I can just put it into words. I’ll do my best and you can let me know if it resonates or not.
It seems to me like you’re carrying this assumption that the only reason someone would keep a fake name on the internet is out of this fear that kind of permeates their life, and not only do I disagree, I think it weakens the point you’re trying to make. If you want proof of that, take a look at all of the comments who are not responding to your point, but instead trying to address this claim you made about anonymity and fear. What I’m trying to say is, I think you shot yourself in the foot this time. To borrow a turn of phrase from Zen Buddhism, you’ve got everyone looking at your finger when you’re pointing at the moon.
I think your latest post goes a long way towards clarifying what you’re going for, but you’re spending a lot of it untangling this talk about “alphas” and “betas” and ultimately your point is that none of that matters and we should be taking the things that JMG is teaching and making it real, in our own lives, in our own way, and in that I wholeheartedly agree! So instead of calling out things that even you agree are irrelevant (usernames, alphas and betas, and so on), why not **invite** people to share, together, the changes they are making in their own lives to apply JMG’s teachings in reality? You don’t need to have a real name or a username, or to be an alpha or a beta to do that. And who knows, some people may just surprise you?
I’ll start. I am here. I probably fit your definition of a “beta” (to be clear, this doesn’t bother me). I happily engage in abstract discussions, I watch my words, and I use a username instead of my real name. Contrary to what you might assume, my real life isn’t particularly respectable, nor do I have an interest in making it that way. I did the tech worker thing for over half a decade, and I got sick of the garbage, the grift, and the corporate fakeness of everybody around me, so I left. The only reason I put up with it for that long is because my mom was up to her eyeballs in debt through no fault of her own, and there was no way she was ever going to stop working unless I helped her pay that down. Tech was the fastest way available to me to get that done, so that’s what I did.
As of now, I’m unemployed. I’m physically disabled. I live with my mom. I’ve spent most of this year dealing with health issues that prevent me from even going outside. Even getting back into the system would be hard going at this point, but I have no interest in doing that. Right now, my goals are reducing my dependence on said system (collapsing now!), reconnecting with my art, getting myself healthy again, and using my skills to make a living for myself where nobody has any say in what I do or how I do it but me. That is, successfully self-employed. Once I get all that figured out, I can think about what comes next. It’s a long and hard process, but step-by-step, I’m doing my best to get there.
I talk about abstracts and select my words carefully because I enjoy it, that’s just who I am, for better or worse. I use fake names online not because I don’t trust you, or because I want to hide who I am, but because I don’t trust the internet, and because exposing my personal information doesn’t only put me in danger, but those around me as well, and that is much more important to me than what other people think of me. None of that stops me from trying to find a life outside of this system.
I’ll say it as directly as I can: I think your writing is powerful, but it needs more focus, or people are going to get lost. They’re going to miss your point. They won’t see your forest for your trees. You’ll point at the moon and they’ll stare at your hand, and you’ll find yourself wondering why you try at all.
You said you’re only interested in addressing the already-dead, the “alphas”. I’m trying to tell you that, you have allies outside of that group too, and they’d be willing to listen to you, if you stopped painting them with so broad a brush and tried to see where they were coming from, instead. Pushing against the machinery of a collapsing world comes in many forms, even if it doesn’t fit the mold you’re expecting. If nothing else, I hope my example helps you to see that?
So there you go. I tried to be more direct. Let me know how that hits, or if it still feels too oblique to you.
Oh, and for the record, I know you’ve stated over and over that you don’t need to be liked, and I get that, but I do like you, and what you’re saying. I see it, and I think it’s lovely. For whatever that happens to be worth 🙂
All the best.