Actually, the gap between a great man or philosopher and an average man, is greater than the gap between an average man and a chimpanzee.

This force is the same as the vital, animating force within carbon-based life-forms. Examine an apple tree.  It started as a seed. Inside the seed, there is carbon-based genetic material, but within that material there is an Intangible Intelligence which moves matter to sprout and stem and flower and fruit, to pull nutrients from the environment in order to achieve the blossoming.  The tree exists in space and time, but the Intelligence in the seed exists in neither; no microscope can see it, no scientific utensil can hold it. And yet the Flower is the Intelligence, and this untouchable Intelligence moves the Matter.

Spiritual Speciation

A hero won’t come to save you. No, you must summon the hero from within yourself.

This latter pathway — cancelling someone — is the feminine version of the Male School Shooter

Men and women are even choosing not to have children, just to “do their part” to stop climate change, or, because they are too addicted to chasing Status to give any attention to their Instinct. This mind virus has literally undone billions of years of biological and chemical programming, hardwired into the very deepest part of your Being. And THAT is a downright Lovecraftian Horror when you really consider it closely.

But what happens when this urge is perverted into unhealthy, and unnatural outlets? When Status becomes Currency? When fear of losing status results in decisions which are disastrous for our culture? When addiction to gaining status perverts all natural incentive structures in our civilization?

Can you consider the possibility that, beneath the curtain of your conditioned ignorance, and under the noise of hyperactive ego, there is a silent Being at the core of yourself; that this is your true self; that this Being is divine; and that it offers an endless spring of joy, peace, and enchantment?  

Do you realize the extent to which your mind has been conditioned?

Are you merely some kind of sad, late-stage internet creature?

So was the Reformation the cause of Europe’s 16th century turmoil, or just one important manifestation of a broader secular dynamic driving general upheaval?

helping to overcome the atomizing isolation and loneliness of liquid modernity.

To start with, it provided the concept of sin. This helped grow and empower the activist movement tremendously. Why? One might not think of free-wheeling secular culture embracing the idea of sin so easily, even joyfully, but it was a simple matter. As an example, picture a hypothetical middle-class suburban white lady, enjoying a relatively comfortable material life but wracked by a vague but unshakable sense of guilt about her existence – for being white in a country with a history often unkind to non-whites; for her consumption habits contributing to environmental pollution and climate change; for being the citizen of a rich country while elsewhere in the world children starve, and so on. Liberalism has never addressed this feeling in a satisfactory way. Suddenly, along comes the New Faith, and tells her that it’s all true: she is indeed a sinner, and she’s not alone! In fact the whole country and her whole race is corrupted by the original sins of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. What a relief! Even better, it has a comprehensive plan of action for how to address this sin.

Well, the Emergent Church offered its restless followers comfort and a good time on earth; neo-Marxist Social Justice offered them revolutionary struggle, and so they prostrated themselves immediately.

But, most important of all was I think something Tickle doesn’t really touch on too much: the modernity-driven suspicion, deep within the hearts even of many Christians, that in fact, as Nietzsche infamously put it, “God is dead.” Increasingly skeptical about the existence of any kingdom of God in heaven, they were primed for a logical alternative: building the kingdom of heaven on earth instead.

But – and this is my theory – in the end Tickle’s version of Emergent Christianity proved a weak social construct. It existed to gratify its adherents with the belief that they were still morally good members of a religious tradition, whose primary goal was to provide for their happiness, while liberating them from any higher authority beyond themselves and freeing them from any of the responsibilities or strictures that had once characterized that religion.

he cable of institutional Christianity was corroded by science and cultural entropy;

a complete indifference to capitalism as a virtue or to individualism as a godly circumstance.

But who ultimately determines the narrative in this ultra-democratic faith?

“Narrative, on the other hand,” is for Emergents “the song of the vibrating network… Narrative circumvents logic, speaking truth of the people who have been and of whom we are. Narrative speaks to the heart in order that the heart, so tutored, may direct and inform the mind.”

Despite all that rationalist science from earlier, the takeaway from the collapse of authority has been “that logic is not worth nearly so much as the last five hundred years would have had us believe. It is, therefore, not to be trusted as an absolute, nor are its conclusions to be taken as truth just because they depend from logical thinking.”

First, the Emergent Church has – enabled by technology – essentially dedicated itself to taking Luther’s proto-democratic dream of a “priesthood of all believers” to its maximum extent. Like Pentecostalism, the Emergent Church believes everyone has a direct connection with God, or whatever they like to think of as God-like, and no one gets to tell them to believe differently.

Pentecostalism “by definition assumes direct contact of the believer with God and, by extension, the direct agency of the Holy Spirit as instructor and counselor and commander as well as comforter.”

The invention of the automobile also played a fundamental role, by beginning the process of splitting apart extended nuclear families. Families were soon no longer gathering at Grandma’s for post-Sunday service collective meals every week.

Origen points out that many unrealistic details are contained in the Gospels that are intended to alert the reader to their non- historicity but it appears that few readers got the message. The character we know as St. Paul was a Gnostic and taught both the inner and outer mysteries. He knew nothing about a historical Jesus.

Hellenized

normalize.

what can be coomercialized for a social good can be weaponized for social control.

One could think of demons as emergent semio-parasites, psychophysical pathogens exploiting and replicating within the human psyche in very specific ways. This would explain why knowing their name allows one to master them and why the invocation of certain signs and symbols banish them, relieving the victim of their ailments.

the semiosphere, the realm of signs and symbol, and “deceiving the world” by altering or overcoding it. Any human group is defined by the boundaries of the system of signs in use among its members.

Data is the new oil, the ethereal residue of human life.

all of it aimed at reducing humanity to a processing substrate.

Lo, the true Human Instrumentality—

Then there is Alphabet’s AlphaStar AI and OpenAI’s OpenAI Five, which assimilated the vital essences of real world players in MOBA titles and strategy titles, and fed it into the machinic maws of cyber entities for use in military strategy application and hologram girlfriends.

The NSA was also interested in creating new games and partnering with commercial developers of popular titles.

DoD wargaming scenarios

Coincidentally, it's quite possible that Google's LaMDA, the "sentient" chatbot, utilizes the same approach. Google holds a patent titled "Forming chatbot output based on user state" which feeds on the "digital exhaust" of your IRL activity to train the bot's neural network

It isn't a little robot friend, it's a digital homunculus mirroring your face.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has applied for or holds a multitude of patents which sponge up player’s emotions, vocal cues, gait, facial expressions and body language and applies machine learning to create neural nets for artificial intelligences.

One of the ways this hybridization occurs is in video games and gamified social networks. Games are increasingly understood as systems that easily allow the reduction of human action into knowable and predictable formats. Games, and virtual environments, are ordering devices.

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Pretty soon Forbes featured our work on their website. They wrote that they’d seen the best results in boosting focus by using our product.

That ability to “drill down’ is sadly missing from many people’s toolkits, as we’re inundated with notifications, messages, and alerts.

Qualia Mind Essentials

And, unlike convenience store energy drinks, there’s the right amount — and the right balance — of these ingredients to enable the brain to work better, for longer, without running out of steam later in the day.

That’s the big picture approach to brain function. Taking nutrients that have interlinking benefits –– and are capable of working together in our bodies –– and providing them together for better motivation, focus, and memory.

We set out to create “inspiration in a bottle.”

That might be when you reach for that extra cup of coffee — only to feel jittery and scattered when you need to focus the most.

Some research shows that distractions help us generate ideas.

attention is the scarcest resource of all.

The idea of “waiting for your muse” is a fantasy.

“I only write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

Self-becoming is an agonizing yet essential process that holds the repeated destruction of the individual’s constructed identities as the precondition for attaining the status of human being.

If one is connected to Spirit, a simple wooden cross on a wall can speak more than a library of esoteric tomes.

Thus, the reality of the golem is a synthetic, contextual approximation, it never gives us the thing itself; it only gives us a necessary concept of things.

The “transgender” is the prototype of this new flesh.

Homo modulus

It seeks only to make copies of itself, printing its program into each successive moment.

But in a world with no rites of passage, where identity formation is purposefully perverted, the outcome is predictable—

iniquities

Our ability to share in the act of creation is a divine blessing.

Your created “selfhood” is a machine made of shadow and light.

agential

to assign spiritual authority to a machine.

fabulation

Our models can never be the work of human hands.

to reject the predominant models of mediated and mediocre humanity on offer to us today, and to adopt new models of humanity at its best. 

Most people no longer know what they want because it’s harder than ever to find powerful models of desire – models of humanity that inspire greatness; models of humanity which show man fully alive.

The real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?’ but ‘What do we want to want?

The materialist and pop anthropologist author Yuval Noah Harari (of Sapiens fame), for instance, thinks that humanity is in the process of upgrading itself into “gods,” evolving into a kind of techno-species that might even one day be able to conquer death. For him, the future of nature and technology is almost complete.

(Consider the features on most smartphones which now help you monitor your usage and will prevent you from using apps during certain time periods.) 

The gestell, as Heidegger predicted, is a kind of all-encompassing cage since even our attempts to escape from technology are themselves technological.

The loss of a sense of otherness and alterity is at the crux of the predicament we find ourselves in today. It is precisely what Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, meant when he said that the internet would “vanish” because it would become a part of everyday objects and services. “It will be part of your presence all the time,” he said. 

A tool or object has no life-principle, initiative, or processes of its own.

subhuman

predominately agnostic development

the uniquely human is becoming obscured, and it is harder to recognize and identify. 

And a new generation of porn-addicted people – fueled by the ability to view hardcore porn anywhere, free of cost, in the palm of one’s hand – is now shaping a new aesthetic.

Aside from the objectification of the human body, the trickle-up effect of porn aesthetics (norms around grooming, for instance) are a reminder that what people consume has far-reaching consequences. It is not just life imitating ‘“art”’; it is people imitating a mediated reality which their devices have made ubiquitous. 

Everyone has seen someone enter a space in the real world and treat it as something to be used merely for the Instagrammable images it has to offer. The real-world behaviors mimic the behaviors learned from the device.

Adults are becoming more like that which they imitate – and right now, the preponderance of imitation seems to be of technological devices or frameworks.

Children, Meltzoff discovered, come out of the womb immediately capable of imitating their fellow humans; they will not, however, imitate a machine doing the same thing.

Humans are very skilled and complex imitators

They have mouths, but do not speak;

I shall cut the strands of my past and look forward.

A new man was born and took control, and the other faded into the recesses of memory.

To exist, one must first die. To be reborn is to truly live.

We are not ourselves. We can only find ourselves once we realize we are not yet alive. We must face these truths and allow our old self to burn to ashes. Only then are we birthed anew.

It was now time for that moment — ignition.

The odyssey itself has only just begun, but for now, this is where I must leave it. I have sailed forth and made my way to my island. Traversing its inversion, I did that which I did not understand or know, and therefore I found my place as an island among a sea of stars.

All of the great evils of this world have been done in service of uncovering this secret. Yet, for all of time, it has stood before us if we but reach out and give up our pride and selfish desire to know all. Only then can one truly begin to sail across the sea of souls and see that which cannot be seen, to know that which cannot be known, to feel that which cannot be felt.

Our souls, which we must protect from the harvest, must be born and allowed to transcend into such a place.

They try to explain and master the unknown by making it known, but instead, they build delusions around themselves, constructing false realities and meaningless existences. They feast on the souls of men as fuel to convert the unknown and harness it to their ends. Yet, this is impossible and a self-mutilation of grand proportions.

I felt reverence for life that I never had before, an understanding of chaotic yet divine order.

I now passed into the sea of souls.

My race still had time to come around. We could stop the cannibalization of our souls and rekindle the weak embers.

trying to save me from the death march of my race.

Only pure selfishness could destroy the dwindling fire of the soul.

Just like a young animal, it is vulnerable to the predators of the world. It is at risk of being consumed by the soul-eaters.

It is a danger for a soul to ignite before it is ready.

It was not that the soul was never there, but it was just never born.

Once this was achieved in me, the shadow left. It was never my enemy, but my ally.

One must break down the walls of their existence and feel the world around them.

Connecting with other souls was the true purpose of existence;

The void showed that the soul is the real source of all light, and that light is all that truly exists.

I sensed its name was Dah, and it was a female. She relayed, via this new intuition, that I must relay something to the creatures that came to see me.

dolphin

I was connected with this place, no longer isolated in my own mind. I was bridged with everything around me. I could sense all, yet we could not speak. I could feel yet not know. Words were not the medium of communication, it was emotion.

terminus

I closed my eyes and suddenly was able to see. My mind created that which was not.

I heard echos of distant voices chanting a harrowing tune.

I cleared my mind of all hope and desire, of all hubris and pride, and offered myself to the powers of the unknown.

realizing that what I always knew was the truth, that the unknown could become known if one but journeys into it.

As I hovered there, in this realm of fire and shadows, I could see white light no longer — only the battle between blue and red, moon and fire.

You’ve felt the chaos for your entire life, but now you must see it.

I looked down at my arms and realized that I now became lightless, and the man hovering before me gleamed in white light.

“Why must you know the answers to all? You demand information that you are not worthy of.” It responded coldly, with a serpent-like voice.

perfection is not truth.

and live without death was a lie.

It was Eden. It was everything that the heart and soul desired.

I live and breath the unknown, for it consumes me. Chaos gripped me at an early age, and I’ve battled to hold back its tide for decades. It ebbs and flows, flinging bodies in all directions in its powerful current and steep waves. I’ve been in the waters for my entire life. Others manage to scramble onto floating debris, ignoring the truth of where they drift. Being in that constant battle allowed my resolve to journey where others dared not.

For you see, this forest does not want to be seen.

The dark forest had become a forest of light. Sounds of running water could now be heard.

my shadow responded.

You have passed all three tests within the forest.

I peered over the edge, and I saw myself in the reflection as a vile demon. Horns grew from my forehead, and my eyes were filled with blackness. Veins were visible across my face with pulses of inky blood running through them.

glade

Not all understand that the angel can just as well be a demon. You are wise, unlike others who venture into this place. You may continue.

The weapons of men could not cut down the wall to the inner forest, only my light could do so. For those who failed to grow their light bright enough, I fear for their demise.

Whatever vile creatures crept in the shadows were coming for me now.

and the eyes that watched me multiplied.

The thoughts were not my own.

In the blackness beyond the reaches of my torchlight, I see scores of floating eyes, watching, waiting, hoping that my light burns out.

Those who wander into the dark forest without light are bound to be consumed by it. Do not trust the lightless men who return.

t is at this moment that I must trust in my light and journey into darkness.

It is devoid of any light, save that which the man brings with him.

MacAskill’s

empathy is conserved

Privately, the new platform should encourage the concentration of altruistic energy toward more local circles of concern—family above community, community above city, city above country, country above world. Rocks, galaxies, foreigners, etc, should be of little interest.

That the king is above the law (or, as Nixon so memorably put it, “if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal”) is one of the most fundamental principles of premodern law. If the king is not above the law, some other power is above the king; and so he is no king. Absolute power is inherently the power of final decision.

For all life is a building-up, a line of force—and injustice. Thus, if you see a group of children growing listless, you need but impose on them constraints—the rules of a game—and presently you will see them playing merrily together.

of.a

the auteur theory of government.)

There is a corner case which hints at the flaw of this model: what about fentanyl? Since people desire fentanyl, they pay for it. Logically, this is GDP. This is desire in the desire economy. And if fentanyl is not good for you, what about marshmallows? Marshmallows certainly aren’t good for you—should they too be excluded from GDP?

Purging bureaucracy from monarchical systems is a constant problem. Yet even if bureaucracy can never be eliminated, we know what we are eliminating.

The effectiveness of the state cannot, of course, be taken for granted. It varies widely. Since there is no check on the decay of a sovereign besides war and regime change, an old state can become very inefficient indeed.And if in practice state power is moribund, effectiveness requires restoring that power. Effective altruism, as an ideology of state, must be an ideology of the effective state. If the government cannot get anything done, effective altruism cannot be effective.

On that and every other issue. Get in the car—we’re going to do some regime change. To get the US government to represent the interests of its own people, here are some things we need to change. When we finish, what will be left of what we started with? Here are some things that can’t be left, if our new government is going to be efficient and altruistic:

“charity begins at home.”

telescopic altruism is generally unaccountable to its intended ends.

If a new brand of remote philanthropy appears, with no mechanism to counter this addictive tendency, it should be treated like yet another brand of Cocaine-Cola—especially if statistically associated with both druglike damage to its consumers’ lives, and collateral damage in the unfortunate countries where it is made.

When we read EA literature we are struck by the same sense of wonder that the young Freud felt, when he thought he had discovered the cure for depression. It was actually just… cocaine.

“Sell your cloak,” said Jesus, “and buy a sword.”

You cannot really love a rock the way you love your grandmother. You cannot escape being human. Being human, though, your brain can pretend really damn hard.

We should name this heatmap effect in honor of Charles Dickens, who satirized EA 170 years ago in Bleak House. He called EA “telescopic philanthropy,” a wonderful name, and defined its effects with the character of Mrs. Jellyby—whose cause was modeled on the real-life Laos Expedition. From a site for lazy, cheating students:

Dude: please at least ask if your ideology of good is making you into, like, an asshole.

Nature is telling us that there is no free empathy lunch.

Third: as we’ll see, altruism is like meth. No one is questioning two facts: that you should clean your room, and that meth helps you clean your room. No one ever did their first hit of meth, or even their nth hit, with the goal of becoming a methhead. Nor does everyone who does meth become a methhead. Many people can chip meth!

There is no legitimate moral basis for choosing one child above two, even if the one is yours and the two are randomly selected Laotian orphans. Ergo: any opposition to effective altruism is illegitimate.

is it better to save a child in Laos, or wash your underwear—assuming that these have the same cost?

it’s not hard to find graduate students who can tell you every detail about how a particular machine operates, and almost nothing about why it should be built.

you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable.

I did so by throwing myself into the hardest classes and putting in the hours required to ace the tests.

Like Manly P. Hall’s Bacchus, that became transfixed by the mirror and followed his own reflection into matter, the modern man has been boiled in the dark waters of materialism. He believes in things like self-creating universes and self-birthing organisms.

What poor imagination that can not extend beyond language. Excalibur does not submit to their hand so they terrify the minds of children with their vision of dead, floating symbols. Let it be known that the interplay between symbol and tool is at the foundation of creation, and destruction. When the disenchanted say an artifact is a mere symbol, it only shows they do not know it’s lineage, the etymology of its beauty. Their whole philosophy is an admission of their own total cuckolding, with every publication blissfully raising another man’s ontology.

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

In the late 14th century, in the work of Peter of Trau, there is attributed an invention to frater Rogerius dictus Bachon Anglicus. He describes a mirror assembled at Oxford that would allow one to see "quid agebant homines in quantumcumque remotis … partibus" —one could see what people were doing in any remote location. This invention led to students spending all their time checking in on relatives and spying on each other; this distraction led the university to destroy the device.

a terrible sorcery that has certainly been employed since at least the era of Jazz, increasing with each passing generation, producing ever more insidious iterations of the holosonic control grid.

“God, it was said, is all in all; everything is part of the divine essence, with a growing, or perceptive, or reflective power, one or all, and by that which has one all may be acquired. A stone may become a plant; a plant, a beast; a beast, a man; a man, an angel; an angel, a creator.” —Cornelius Agrippa, Philosophia Occulta

The sky and the stars are the original scrying mirror, and by envisioning events in the display of that celestial orb, we set a course to manifest them on earth. Sigil is translated into substance, the crystal orb simulates the cosmic egg.

In reality, mechanical approaches with rockets would be encountering a void, and in this void a suspension of natural law. It is a decrease in information, a stretching of the boundary space until it contains nothing, hence the decrease in breathable air, the lessening of gravity and eventually all matter. There is no such thing as a rocket-based approach to “outer-space”. All the images of planets in science fiction and produced by NASA are esoteric, visionary projections. This idea that heaven’s luminaries are in the machinic void is a confusion of the sacred and profane, designed to make you go insane.

He wrote that nothing less than the shaking of the entire frame of the Earth could result in the mass annihilation of life forms that he observed.

Because of man’s aversion to knowing his past, science has been greatly rətarded, pretending unreality to be as truth.

This meant that evolution would be controlled by hot-fixing and updating human gene expression remotely. This concept immediately brings to mind my research on the Ebner effect.

According to Oliver Reiser, the originator of “cosmic humanism”, the entirety of the earth would be reconstructed under the symbol of Solomon's Temple, not of stone in Jerusalem, but electromagnetically. This would be done through a worldwide system of satellites and antennae. Through the use of something called "Radio Eugenics".

With enough “dark data”, one could theorize the possibility of predicting the actions of any individual.

The longer you walk a path the narrower it becomes. Eventually, it closes in on you, trapping you between two walls of cold, dark stone until you eventually realize you cannot advance anymore. You are stuck. You cannot go back and no crossroad lies ahead. You fear this. You know it is what lays ahead if you continue this path.

Life gives us morsels of meaning here and there. Just enough to keep us from walking into the forest and realizing that nothing truly matters.

Are you dead? You haven’t felt alive in years. So what is the difference?

The spirits have abandoned you and reality sets in. Fooled again.

When you awake you realize that you lost more of yourself in those moments

The pack is on the move. They weave through the crowd like lions in tall grass, obscuring themselves. They look to one another and nod their heads. The spirits controlling them are ready to make their move — to bring you home and to consume. The pack splits and attacks one to one. You admire their manes and deepness of their roars and accept the fate they have for you. They give you more spirits to free you from any remaining doubts. You lose yourself even more.

The more one drinks, the younger they become. Mentally aging in reverse. They lose the skill to talk. Forego the art of walk. Reducing back to the fetal position on the bathroom floor, they cannot climb back into the womb. Life must be faced in forward motion. Going backwards will only bring pain by the next day.

Men move in packs, chasing flocks of women for a late-night snack.

He turned, made his way to the couch, and collapsed. Grabbing the remote, he switched on the television and navigated to his Netflix account. He found his show. The one that made him feel connected to something. Or at least showed him what real connection felt like. The great irony of it was that these people were actors, acting connected, just like the real world.

He had finally stepped behind the veil.

Knowing obfuscates truth.

sense of knowing.

There can be no map that leads through these caverns. This is the reason why I elected to forgo any membership into these societies and instead found my own path.

secret libraries.

None attempted to enter with hubris.

Each fork has the potential to lead to a labyrinth from which one will never return.

Many do not see the truth and are polarized between two ends of a single-dimension.

At the end of the day, I believe the barrier to entry says a lot about the content. If something can be easily and quickly written by anyone (like a comment), it is often not worth reading as it could be a knee-jerk reaction to some news or some passing thought. But if something passes the hurdles and difficulties of publishing (like an online article), it often signals the fact that much thought went into it and that it was important for the author.

Obviously, no one has time to read all those comments (if you do, please get a job).

My humble estimate is that 99% of advice and insights out there is exactly as useful as the two ridiculous examples just mentioned.

If you’re not getting something actionable out of it, you’re probably wasting your time.

When I’m consuming non-fiction content, I try to write down specific experiments I can try that put the things I “learned” into practice. For example, just this morning I read a chapter in Nick Winter’s Motivation Hacker and it gave me the idea to track my happiness in hourly intervals to get a more accurate picture of how much I enjoy certain activities without giving in to the peak-end effect.

It’s just that people love to say things that make them look good.

the real problem was that they followed useless pseudo-actionable advice.