Decoding the Mind

The book The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology, and Modern Living is a collection of quotes and excerpts from Jung on this topic. I read it last Summer when I had a lot of time to mull things over and absorb its contents. It turned out to be a very impactful book, and here are some thoughts (rant) that arose later on.

We look down on the primitive inner humans that we are because we’ve adopted a superiority complex over the “lower” life forms. There is a feeling underneath the surface of Mother Culture that evolution marches forward towards ever greater improvement, and that the more civilized and sophisticated we become, the more intrinsic authority we deserve to hold over the animals and land. This superiority complex can clearly be observed if we disengage from it, at least momentarily, and observe the operations of an industrial farm.

After having worked on a farm for two months, an observation began to slowly creep into awareness for me: the treatment of humans by the higher powers in which we are embedded and bow down to (such as our technological overlords, the weather, …, all the way up to God) is a pure reflection of our treatment of what we consider “lower” life forms—animals and plants. Any illusion that we might have of our playing one side of the master–servant dynamic is broken when we come into awareness of how our unconscious manifests the other side of that dualistic relationship, as a form of compensation. I have no proof for this, other than to say find out for yourself.

As in Jung’s multiple-story dream (scroll to the bottom to read), the psyche is constructed layer by layer, similar to the way in which the brain has been constructed layer by layer, slowly over a period of many generations. The more ancient, the more fundamental. Our primitive aspects deal with the most fundamental questions, and our modern aspects deal with the most recent questions.

When we are conscious of reality from a large-scale, industrial/governmental/economic lens, we are participating in a shared imaginal reality. The sacrifices and rewards associated with that shared imaginal reality are the unconsciously agreed-upon contracts we’ve signed. Part of this means that we, as humans, place less emphasis on the primitive aspects of the psyche, and more on the later-developed, modern aspects of the psyche. This imaginal reality only exists while it is supported by its participants. We must understand what we’ve sacrificed and how quickly we’ve made the sacrifice of our primitive selves for the comforts of modernity (which our souls rebel against), and run a cost–benefit analysis (which we can’t do while in the grips of the contract because then part of the “cost” associated with whichever “side” we’re on, is leaving).

We are extremely dependent on symbolic form, specifically language, to communicate values and ethics—a prerequisite for participating in modernity. Our view and interpretation of reality are reflective of the values and progress of the English-speaking world during the existence of the English-speaking world and its recent predecessors, roughly speaking. The split between the imaginal and the embodied life is substantial, and for me, was nearly fully unconscious. It took several years of returning consciousness to its roots—the body—to realize how disconnected and uprooted consciousness had become. Perhaps the price I paid for this is a reduction in modern measures of intelligence, a direct consequence of restructuring the mind and remembering a more fundamental mode of operation, something I’ve swallowed with some difficulty.

We’re walking through an invisible, toxic sludge. An analogy to our present situation is the years just before microbes were discovered, when people were already living in close proximity to one another, actively trading and exchanging microbes, pissing and shitting in their own drinking water, unaware of the risks. We look back at them as stupid, primitive people, but I highly doubt that their noses and taste buds are any worse than ours; I’m sure their primitive selves revolted against the medieval conditions just as we would, except on top of that, was layered a blanket of ignorance of the situation, warmly placed there by Mother Culture who saw nothing wrong with the close and unhygienic living conditions. Our “violent and tribal” past was slowly being reigned in and civilized—it needed to be if humans from one part of the world were to trade and live peacefully alongside those from another part of the world. Mother Culture’s values are such that the prerequisite for incorporating hygienic practices depended on the verbal and intellectual understanding of such things; until then, there was nothing wrong with the medieval lifestyle. It was your problem if you happened to suffer the consequences.

The same thing is happening now, but instead of hygiene, it’s psychological; although when I say psychological I really mean it as a proxy for spiritual. We’ve advanced our materialistic understanding of the world so substantially over the past several hundred years, but it seems that the further we advance, the more we start to face outbursts of the psyche which seem to make absolutely no sense.

Impulsive, compensatory outbursts such as school shootings, reveal a slow inner torment festering deep in the unconscious, just out of view. In my eyes, the indescribably prevalent manifestation of unexplained and seemingly useless psychological suffering is just a natural exchange of energy. There’s nothing out of place about it, it just requires brave vision to see with clarity. It’s all part of it all; the forever chemicals in our food and water, the meaningless sell-your-soul corporate jobs, the total disregard for the Human Animal; and the constant validation and self-righteousness we require to inflate our egos to ever higher heights, which are inevitably be compensated for with the lowest of lows.

Meaning is always either experienced or just out of view. We seem to know exactly where it is but won’t accept it because we’re too afraid of experiencing it. We don’t think we can handle it, but we can. The fear is justified—but we’re stronger than we think we are. We can actually face it. And we don’t have to face it all at once. We can allow ourselves to see just as much as we can handle in that instant. Certain situations, however, require our immediate and unwavering attention to The Horrors (the most reliable source of meaning). At some point in our lives, we may find ourselves having fallen through the thin ice we didn’t know we walked on, and suddenly in the water. It’s cold and dark, we don’t know how to swim, and we have absolutely no choice but to learn right then and there. The consequence of failure is death. The meaningful life is no joke, and our easily-confused, easily-seduced, naïve herd-animal selves are constantly being advertised everything but reality, towards an ever-more-schizophrenic, disintegrated imaginal amusement park.

Jung’s House Dream:

I was in a house I did not know, which had two storeys. It was "my house". I found myself in the upper storey, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in Rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings. I wondered that this should be my house and thought "not bad". But then it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor. There everything was much older. I realised that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The furnishings were mediaeval, the floors were of red brick. Everywhere it was rather dark. I went from one room to another thinking "now I really must explore the whole house." I came upon a heavy door and opened it. Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway that led down into a cellar. Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient. Examining the walls, I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I saw this, I knew that the walls dated from Roman times. My interest by now was intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone slabs and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down to the depths. These, too, I descended and entered a low cave cut into rock. Thick dust lay on the floor and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old, and half disintegrated. Then I awoke.

Listen to this album while reading the essay for MAXIMUM THRUST:

On June 13, 2021, I was sitting on the grass at a park near my house, reading ‘Jung on Active Imagination’. I smoked a quarter of a joint of marijuana and continued to read the book. As I read the description of encounters with elements in the unconscious, I began to see visions of my own.

In the first vision, I was inside a large cylindrical well with stone walls. The Well extended down into darkness, and up not too far above me was a circular opening with a bright light shining down into the Well. Lining the walls were about 20–30 pillars, one of which I was standing on. The pillars were also made of stone, and on each pillar stood a humanoid being. In this scene, I saw each being’s pillar drop straight down toward the darkness, and after some time, straight back up. I got the feeling that each being had the goal of reaching the light. Again and again, each being would go down into the darkness, then come back up and try to reach the light.

It felt during the experience that each being represents elements in my psyche going into the subconscious and extracting something of value. In the first part of the vision, the excitement of each being determined whether their pillar would reach the light. If a being reached the light, their contribution would reach consciousness. The enlightened being would then shine with an aura and begin to help the others reach consciousness, encouraging them. The feeling I got was that enlightened beings were not obligated to help others, but chose to do so voluntarily. The scene was simultaneously competitive and supportive.

After witnessing this process for a few iterations, it changed. All the elements were the same visually, but the process became more democratic. Instead of going down into the subconscious and rising on their own time, the beings would rise to a certain height and wait for the others. Once all pillars were at the same height, the beings would telepathically communicate (I could not understand them) and share their findings with one another. An instantaneous vote was taken, and if someone was deemed to have a good enough contribution to consciousness, their pillar would rise to the light. I cannot remember if the enlightened being would stay in consciousness, but the rest would then go back down and repeat the process.

The sharing process meant every being saw what a good contribution was. I then followed one of these beings down to the subconscious, where I saw it digging tunnels like a miner. It was looking for something of value in the tunnels.

The second vision, which occurred just after the first one, took place in a room that looked like a court of law. I was standing in front of a curved table, where three elders sat. Like a court of law, there were people sitting around the elders, watching the process, and keeping the council accountable to the collective. I had an implicit understanding that the elders were the previous generation of successful beings that have contributed greatly to the self. A being would step in front of the council and present its hypothesis in a careful, dry, deliberate manner. The council would then judge each being’s contribution, deciding whether it was worthy of being presented to consciousness. The council was judging by how good the idea’s effect on the collective would be. If the idea presented was contradictory to the established consensus, but clearly better, then the council had to accept it. Each generation of elders needed to eventually be replaced by beings with new contributions.

To generate new ideas, each being needed to be separated from the established order and given creative freedom to see new patterns in new ways. Each being could experiment with far-fetched ideas to the degree that the structure was not rigid and conservative. The established consensus was weary of paradigm-shifting ideas and for good reason. There is danger in ideas that fundamentally change the structure of the process by which ideas are evaluated. For this reason, the council was conservative in its assessment and judged new ideas against previous successes.

At the same time, however, there was a recognition that the established must continually give way to the new and be updated. The audience was making sure the council did not become unbalanced: too conservative (not allowing new ideas to take over), or too progressive (letting new ideas replace old ideas without sufficient cause).

Extrapolating from these experiences, I’d like to explore if these visions could be the narrative representation of subconscious psychic processes. I attempt to make this connection because it was implicitly understood during the visions that I was observing processes involved in my own cognition. The three different methods I saw represented some of the ways in which patterns in the subconscious can be understood by consciousness. For the psyche to generate new ideas, separation and dissociation between different parts of the psyche must occur. These visions hint that we have in the psyche exploratory elements whose job is to explore the subconscious and synthesize patterns into coherent ideas that consciousness can decode.

The first part of the Well vision is analogous to social structures where the person with the loudest voice and most exciting ideas is heard. This is the least-structured option and is how humans may have interacted with one another before complex social structures were put into place. In the second half of the Well vision, I saw a democratic method analogous to the ancient Greek political system. All voices were heard on equal standing, and ideas were shared freely and then voted on. The council of elders vision is analogous to some of the modern Western processes, such as a court of law, and the method by which PhDs are assessed. These are highly structured, well-defined processes that try to incentivize the renewal of Western society according to its values.

There are two non-trivial explanations for the parallels between these visions and known social structures. The first option is that these psychic processes are universal (archetypal), and consciously or unconsciously inform the formation of social structures. The second option is that I adopted (as analogies) into my own psyche processes in the external world by which ideas are developed. By understanding the processes in the external world, neuronal circuits in my brain were created that represent them. Ideas are then unconsciously routed through my internal representations to approximate the process by which these ideas would go through in the external world to reach the awareness of broader society. One reason could be simply because modelling social structures is a good way to generate useful ideas. Another reason could be that the ideas generated by modelling the social structures are less likely to be rejected socially. If so, modelling acts as a simulation in the psyche for society’s reaction to ideas.

More hints can be found in the order of events. Consider this proposition: the transitions between visions represents the evolution of the idea-generating process on the individual level (as a Westerner grows up and becomes part of society), as well as the evolution of social institutions over the past several thousand years.

On the individual front, a child begins by acting out whatever impulses it experiences. As it grows, the elements of the psyche begin to communicate with each other and vote. We can call these elements subpersonalities. No longer is each idea allowed to reach consciousness if it’s explosive enough. It first must be approved by the other subpersonalities. In the next stage, the individual matures to conform to a more conservative, specialized system where ideas are critically assessed prior to their acceptance.

To be a part of that system, the individual must predict society’s response to their ideas. This is done by understanding the social structures, consciously. Then routing internal cognitive processes through the mapped representation of the external social structures. Over time this becomes a hard-coded process and is therefore delegated (or moved down) to the subconscious. More neuronal circuitry can then develop on top of this structure—meaning it acts as a foundation for complex thought.

On the societal front, if we go back in time, primitive cultures had simpler social structures than we do today. It is natural to assume that in tribal times the relative homogeneity in values and the low number of members in any given tribe meant a less structured approach was perhaps the most efficient.

The next big jump in the evolution of the Western psyche happened in ancient Greece, where a democratic system was developed. There was a time and place where individuals would openly discuss, debate, and vote on ideas.

Finally, for the last several hundred years in the West, we’ve had specialized judicial and scientific systems. These systems allow a society of hundreds of millions of people to solve problems relatively peacefully. Instead of decisions being made democratically, a small number of individuals are chosen as the arbiters of Western values. These individuals are usually highly regarded, older people who have proven their commitment to Western values. To ensure their commitment to Western values, they are openly judged by the collective.

Recently I discovered the power of MANIFESTATION. See below:

On a serious note tho, with every idea, there is a useful interpretation and a ridiculous interpretation. Think about the job of debunkers: it’s to stay grounded in a particular framework. There is an infinite supply of evidence supporting the universe you choose to identify with (out of the infinite multiverse), and there is also an infinite number of ways to discourage new ideas and disqualify other interpretations. Instead of identifying with one interpretation which seeks domination over all other interpretations, seek the Point Of Infinite Intersection. There you can find the alignment of an indescribable multiplicity of universes into a unity that I call The Good Creation.

Alternatively, you can get stuck in the fringe of one particular universe from which any other deviation is strictly prohibited. The tendency towards an authoritarian and rigid constraining of reality is probably a core human tendency, learned through many iterations of things getting a little too wild and having to put the brakes on.

I think this particular instance of constraints we are in the grip of may have initially begun to emerge with the scientific worldview. At this point of our scientific understanding (which has matured significantly since the dull 1800s), the cracks in the “matrix” are all over the place. There is a huge number of possible ways in which reality can “hide” and fit more than what we conventionally see it as, as can be seen in the absolutely unbelievable physics experiments and subsequent theories that continually split reality into more and more wild theories. These battle one another on the collective stages, but also on the individual stage that each one of us has. The choice is yours: which one do you want?

Reality is so flexible that you can observe its changes in real time. There’s one creator who I find particularly straightforward and helpful in putting this way of being into practice, and his name is Joseph Rodrigues on YouTube.

You go from watching a movie to playing a game to creating the game. And if your game isn’t amazing, the only developer to whom’stdve you need to send a complaint is yourself. This isn’t meant to be offensive to the belief in God, either, because part of humanity’s contract with God (from my perspective of the biblical narrative) is the freedom to co-create reality as we see fit. Then, enjoy (or suffer) the consequences of the heaven (or hell) that we actively participate in the creation of.

For that reason, I’d like to leave an encouraging message. If you had a traumatic brain injury, don’t let it take you down. Use it as an advantage. You are now special. You have superpowers. If you see other kids who are different and you laugh at them and ridicule them for thinking they have superpowers, then you are deciding at that moment your flavour of reality—who’s the winner, who’s the loser, and what the rules are. Just know that every constraint you place on others is applied to you also, either directly or indirectly.

My recommendation is to participate in the co-creation of beautiful stories. It’s better than condemning and rejecting the stories others tell bla bla bla ANYWAYS…

TLDR; Every part of the game is either a feature or a bug—depending on how you interact with it.

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When you look out at the world, you might think you are observing something outside of yourself. However, you can see nothing but your state reflected onto the external world. Notice how when you’re happy or sad, the same exact situation could mean completely different things. If your identity and experience are relatively stable over time, you might begin to think that the world is objective. In a sense, it is, for as long as you hold the objective worldview.

And perhaps that is what objectivity means - stability of the inner state. However, once you go through some extreme highs and lows, especially in a short period of time, you can begin to notice: what seems to be an independent and objective external reality is really just your interpretation of the inner creation.

If you don’t like what you see, you are the problem—Not someone else, not some external situation. This is what it means to take on the ultimate responsibility.

Jordan Peterson introduced me to this quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky:

“There is only one way to salvation, and that is to make yourself responsible for all men's sins. As soon as you make yourself responsible in all sincerity for everything and for everyone, you will see at once that this is really so, and that you are in fact to blame for everyone and for all things.”

There is nothing more worth living for than the adoption of the ultimate responsibility. The responsibility begins with the acceptance of all the contents of experience. When I wake up in the morning, that half-asleep/half-awake state is one in which consciousness is coming into contact with the real world, all over again, and it’s a painful process. Especially if I had peaceful dreams and woke up to pains, anxieties, difficult thoughts, and so on. The temptation for me, each day, is to avoid facing the totality of that experience all over again. To spend as long as possible in the warmth of my bed and remain in a state of small awareness.

As it turns out, my responsibility to interface with the real world always comes knocking. At first, gently. Then louder and louder, until eventually, it’s a deafening insistence on my participation in life. Often times that comes with powerful negative thoughts that wrap me up in a bundle of self-defeat. I’ve never found a way to avoid this process, except to go straight into it voluntarily. If I don’t choose my challenges courageously, they choose me.

It has also come to my attention, relatively recently, that in facing what I might consider “undesirable” about my experience, the depth of its meaning can be revealed through a new narrative, one that more closely resembles those I find deeply meaningful in books and movies. Everything can make sense from one point of view, but that doesn’t take away from it making sense from another point of view.

“I’m depressed and can’t get out of bed” isn’t nearly as inspiring of a story as the one where I am a part of the divine drama (and each individual needs to discover this for themselves). My story is the center of the universe in the same way as our solar system is in the center of the observable universe, and any other point in the infinite universe is just as centred. So stop orbiting and align with the central narrative.

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Okay, dragons.

Some say that the entrepreneurial spirit in America is dead. But in this short pitch, I will argue that it is alive and well. For the first time in history, my team and I have fixed the global problem facing millions of men: porn.

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Picture this. A subject is strapped to a chair. There’s something strapped to their head connected to a computer. There is nothing in the room except for a huge screen in front of them that’s playing a constant stream of porn. But not just any porn—AI-generated porn. Using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), a clever machine-learning algorithm, the subject’s brain activity and dopamine levels are measured and used as inputs to the neural network whose only purpose is to modify the porn in such a way that it gets the subject’s dopamine levels to rise higher and higher.

By effectively utilizing the latest technology, we’re finally turning your deepest desires into reality. You no longer need to explore different genres of porn to see what you’re into. Now, all you need to do is tune in and enjoy the show.

Of course, this will eventually come with a dopamine crash. But by that point, we’ll have already managed to quietly download sponsored content into the subject’s subconscious mind. For example, if the scene is two black guys Eiffel-towering a big-titty goth anime gf, then in the background they might see the Walmart logo appear now and then. Or the words “PFIZER IS GOOD” flashed just long enough to later exhibit an unconscious preference towards the content in question.

Another use case could be protecting our neighbourhoods from dangerous criminals. For example. if the subject exhibits a dopamine preference towards increasingly younger AI-generated actors, young enough that they’d clearly be underage (if real), then the FBI would immediately be informed. To avoid the possibility of the subject acting out on their reprehensible predatory desires towards children, they will be henceforth tracked and monitored 24/7.

So, sharks, are you ready to invest in the future to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, while keeping our communities safe?

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Paradoxes are the rulers of reality, from the point of view of rationality.

Bla bla bla. Every word that comes out of my mouth makes no sense. Everything I write makes no sense. It’s so interesting how everything makes sense when nothing makes sense. And that which is true forever is false now. That which is false now is forever untrue. I just made that up.

What you’re seeing is 4 years down the road of giving over the authority of consciousness to the lower elements of the spyche (no, not psyche). Your thoughts just get dragged out all over the place. It’s basically just chaos, but there’s freedom in the chaos! That is the cost of freedom.

Chaos.

Now that I’ve seen order, chaos, and it seems every other possible state in between, I have come to the realization that there is no longer anything to search for, experientially. There is nothing to find. Only to become aware of.

Wow, Sam. Look at you, such a smartass.

He says to himself.

I literally can’t tell the difference between good and bad thoughts anymore, can I? That’s what happens when you give up good and evil. Everything is just a big soup of ideas that are all equally neutral. Neutrality shouldn’t be the pursuit of humanity. Neither should the separation of good and evil into that duality, because that is how that reality continues. It’s an obsession! Hey, let’s play a game in which every possible experience must be analyzed according to one question: is it good or is it bad?

“Perpetuate” is a word I hate since the “age of misinformation”. That, and “unprecedented”, which I hate since the age of Coooovid. Makes me want to puke. If you use the word “unprecedented” unironically you should ____ ________.

Whoa whoa. I didn’t actually mean that. I just… wanted you to wake up!

It’s so fun to discover what kind of thoughts have life within me. It’s such a mess in there.

This is the (jester archetype) part of me that rebels against being forced to write for a certain period of time because it feels that there is nothing needed to write. So it’s just playing around with me until I start to pay attention to what it’s trying to say (joker archetype).

(this part has been edited later; after the joker comes out to the table, the adults can finally start to talk. Otherwise, they can’t get along.)

Every shiver. Every pain. Every experience you could possibly have is infinitely filled with meaning if you just had the BALLS to see it. If you weren’t so afraid of experiencing its meaning. Hell is meaningless suffering. Trust me, I’ve been there. I think suffering is meaningless, and meaninglessness is suffering. They are synonymous. From the biological point of view, it means a confused organism. It doesn’t know what it’s experiencing, what any of it means, why it’s happening to it, and how to make it better. Does that sound familiar? It’s worse than blindness - it’s ignorance. What a wonderful skill humanity picked up along the way! Definitely, this skill we should ALL be spending our time trying to get AI to understand :)

We, as forms of life, have requested freedom, and what we asked for we received. Now humanity is so free to create reality, that we can even create barriers within ourselves that alienate one part of ourselves from another, neighboring part. Boring! We can then identify with one part and cast the light of consciousness on it, reject the other part, thus casting it down into THE SHADOW. Oooo spooky!

But what happens when the light and darkness meet? War? Why would you want it to be war? It’s just neutralization. Death. Life. Regeneration. It’s the soil from which new realities can grow. Rule of thumb: If you hate your experience, KILL IT.

But not in the way you think of killing. Just gently tell it to die because it doesn’t want to live. And if it refuses to die, ask why. If your experience is bad, and you don’t like it, why not change it? The ego gets in the way. THE EGO IS BAD THE EGO IS BAD THE EGO IS BAD AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Sound familiar?

Big Ego is the big daddy of problems.

Ego is the new devil in the spiritual circles. No matter how hard humans try, as long as we think, we can find the devil somewhere. It’s just that we’re getting closer and closer to understanding The Grand Absurdity as the devil is projected first, far away. Then, closer. Eventually we identify the ego with the devil, something that is the source of suffering. HUH???? Think about how stupid you were to fall for that one.

Why haven’t I been writing like this before? It’s because I come off as ABSOLUTELY bananas. Yes, I am banans. I love bananas. Just had one earlier. It was long and soft. Delicious.

Descent into madness. Descent into madness. He’s going crazy. These are the early stages of schizophrenia.

Great. If you believe it, then let it be so. Do you want to believe it? No? Then stop saying it and making it come true!!!

We become what we fixate on. We are what we eat.

Fixate on the darkness, and become the darkness. Fixate on the light, and become the light.

Fixate on your assumptions and beliefs about what “light” and “darkness” mean to you, and you will become those assumptions and beliefs. You see what I mean? It’s impossible to say anything without creating the reality associated with it.

To live a good life is to be a force of good in an endless swarm of evil. It means walking through a blizzard, or a sandstorm of energetic pull towards the co-creation of a reality that inflicts suffering onto itself and others. It means accepting the suffering of the world because we are the world. Everything you’ve ever heard is true. Assume there has never been evil of any sort, only confusion and ignorance. Assume it! See what happens. Allow yourself, for five minutes, to see the world in a new way. In this new world, there is no evil. And whenever it sneaks in, it does so because you allow it to. You want it to. And therefore, it’s all up to you. You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, but only if you choose to! In the final analysis, consent is a two-sided coin. If you do not give consent to the ultimate good to embody through you, then… that’s your loss. But if you are not given consent at all, you aren’t the co-creator of reality. Just an NPC. That’s a choice also! With its positive and negative connotations, of course. But who’s NPC are you? Are we all SOMEBODY’S NPCs?

Accept your place in the universe! Accept your place as a monkey!
Do you see the double implications? On the one hand, you could read this as “Submit! Submit!” as seen on the big screen in 1984. On the other hand, you could see it as the Buddha standing right in front of you and screaming at you, so that you may hear “Stop trying to change things! Accept your experience!”

Which one do you prefer? And, do you think they’re separate? Do you think they’re independent of one another? Do you think you can have one without the other? What do you believe, and why?

Question your beliefs. Why? Because you have another belief somewhere deep down there that by questioning your beliefs somehow you can improve your experience. And why do you think this? Because you think that your experience needs improving. Why do you think this? Because you’re unhappy. You are unhappy! You are unhappy! But what’s the solution to unhappiness? Well, let’s see. The shallow answer is buying things or experiencing worldly desires. The DEEP answer is ENLIGHTENMENT, or something like that. Or maybe it’s to have our souls saved by Jesus. Either way, YOU ARE UNHAPPY. AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT. As long as you don’t have what you think you need, you will always be needy.

What separates the fulfilled from the needy? It’s that the needy NEED something they don’t have. The fulfilled already know they have it. What do you already know you have? Suffering? Pain? Hardship? Oh, you don’t like those? Why? It turns out that the rich people who are happy are those who put themselves in extremely cold water, in stressful situations, in physical pain, etc. So… That which the poor and needy are trying to escape, the ability to not have to experience that—turns out the rich seek it out. If they don’t, they’re just as miserable as you. And if they do, they’re still just as miserable as you.

The poor people HATE the rich. Right? And the rich HATE the poor. Right? Is that right? We all hate one another, right? That’s the duality we are all choosing because we LIKE it. It makes us feel GOOD about ourselves, to hate one another. Right? Is that true? Does it feel good to identify with one side and hate the other side? Question every thought, every assumption, everything. Because if you latch onto the right thought (or, the wrong one, I guess) you might discover something that will finally make things click and all of a sudden—enlightenment.

Wow! Permanent happiness. Permanent peace. Wow! Maybe it’ll be this thought! Maybe the next one! I’m going to continue pulling the thought lever over and over, maybe one of these days I’ll get a better thought than the one I currently have. Doesn’t this sound like a gambling addiction? It does, because the tendencies which we condemn in others are simply the same ones within us just expressed with variables which we’ve cast out of our identity, thus allowing us to condemn them and feel justified doing it. But what’s the consequence? It’s that the inner life within us, which represents and mirrors the world around us, suffers. It’s hated by YOU. You dumb fuck!

I like being called a dumb fuck. It makes me feel nice. Is there something wrong with me? Oh no, something is wrong with me. Let me waddle around in that little piss pool for a while and get all nice and warm.

I feel better now. Don’t you?

A good society cannot be built through misery. A long-running and wrong assumption is that the state of the creator and the essence of the created are disconnected. When in reality, there is a one-to-one relationship between the spiritual state of the artist and the art. And in the same way, between the engineer and the machine produced. Not necessarily contained within the physical object, as there are many steps between the design and production of a machine, but in the essence of that machine.

How can we claim that the experience of the creators of culture is secondary to their productivity? The obsession with metrics has driven us into the dirt.

There are many ways by which evil and misery take hold of a society, and we may only find hints in the past - but not its present grasp. Because as human life develops ever more sophistication, the manifestations of evil that create suffering become very subtle and must continually be rediscovered. And when we have “figured out” as a society how to not commit the sins of our ancestors, by “identifying” and “recognizing” where we were wrong in the past, evil slithers elsewhere and finds expression in ways that are not yet culturally discouraged.

For that reason, the multiplicity of today’s technologically driven advances is the breeding ground for new manifestations of misery. Largely undiscovered, and continually developed by hoards of engineers and programmers, many of whom I know personally, who create through a dutiful misery, a self-maintained mental slavery, which operates continually once the creator is calibrated through the soul-crushing educational systems - which reward cold, calculated performance and punish sensitivity to emotion, feeling itself.

Even war should be fought peacefully.

Yesterday I began reading the Tao Te Ching. Inspired by Verse 18:

When the great Tao is forgotten,

Kindness and morality arise.

When wisdom and intelligence are born,

The great pretense begins.

When there is no peace within the family,

Filial piety and devotion arise.

When the country is confused and in chaos,

Loyal ministers appear.

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I am somewhere in America as it’s being colonized, at the Age of Discovery. My consciousness is floating in a small body of water, resting for a few moments. Then I move into a Native woman swimming in the water. As I become the woman, I sense something in the water behind me, where my consciousness was earlier. I swim to the rock in front of me to a dozen or so members of my tribe. They pull up to the shore the body of a white man in military uniform. A European. He is unconscious, but it is unclear whether he is alive or not. As the tribe gathers around to look at this strange appearance, on the other side of the water, perhaps 30 meters away, out comes a company of at least 50 soldiers. They see us and raise their rifles, pointing them at us. I watched myself, as the Native woman, mirror their movements, picking up the drowned soldier’s rifle, not knowing what it was. I could feel the tension in the air, but it didn’t feel wrong. Although I did not know what the trigger was, looking at the men in front of me, I felt my finger moving towards it. They were thinking about it, but I did it. As I pulled the trigger, the gun fired hitting one of the soldiers.

Chaos erupted, and the soldiers opened fire at me and my tribe, quickly scattering to hide behind rocks. Nothing seemed wrong about this, I was just mirroring their actions and hiding behind a rock myself. I was playing a game of “peekaboo” with one of the soldiers, moving to the left, then the right, then the left again. But when I saw the members of my tribe dying, I realized something was terribly wrong. So I rushed at the soldier in front of me. When I got close enough, I recognized the lack of playfulness on his face. His face was a mixture of bewildered expressions, which I found confusing. In a flash, the scene changed and my consciousness entered a group of four Europeans sitting in a wooden carriage.

We were accelerating down a big hill in a two-compartment carriage with no horse. My consciousness hovered over the four Europeans, who were sitting in the rear compartment arguing with each other. They were unhappy with me, the spirit that hovered over them. I felt unwelcome. One of them addressed me and excitedly pointed towards the front of the carriage as if there was something there that I should really check out. I moved to the front carriage and looked inside - empty. I glanced back at the rear carriage, then realized I had been tricked. They had this smirk on their faces as they disconnected the front compartment from the rear. The rear carriage slowed down but I continued to accelerate down the big hill into a dark valley.

I somehow survived the way down, finding myself in a forest area. It felt oppressive and hostile - I had to get out somehow. But the only way up was by climbing a steep and slippery slope that was covered in mud. I began climbing, making little progress. Then I heard something large move in the bushes behind me. Filled with fear, I began to frantically climb. A tiger emerged from the bushes but instead of running towards me, it ran beside me - with me. We made eye contact and I saw its body shimmering with an aura that exuded grace and power. It seemed to be sharing its aura with me, which gave me the power to climb up the muddy slope. As we were running together, I saw the shadowy silhouette of a coyote join to the right of the tiger. As I approached the top of the hill, the tiger turned around and went back down the hill. It’s unclear what happened to the coyote.

I emerged into the light of day to see streets filled with buildings and people walking about - civilization. I don’t quite understand how or why, but I knew that in the process of climbing I had been split into two - light and shadow. My consciousness was of the light half, and I saw my shadow half calmly walking down a different, wider hill, descending into a dark forest. Standing at the top of that hill were either the same 4 men who were in the carriage with us or their analogues. They were standing at the top of the hill, displeasingly glaring as if looking for something. They seemed to sense the presence of my shadow half, but it was invisible to their eyes. Then their heads turned to me, and I started running away. I was trying to divert their attention away from my shadow, something in me wished for the shadow to be left in peace. I knew I was going to be caught, so I climbed up a building, running up the stairs. One of the Europeans was filled with fury and started rabidly chasing me up the building. I felt intense hostility from him, and my response was the wish for death. The man was faster than I, and 3 or 4 stories up he caught me. I was hanging onto some scaffolding high above the ground, and as he lept to grab me, I released my hands, sending us both to our deaths.

I woke up in a sweat and immediately began writing down the dream. I’ll include my interpretation, but first, let’s look at a related work of art.

A few weeks before this dream I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario. I stopped and stared at this beautiful painting by Norval Morrisseau called The Great Flood.

As I stood there, two young women came up beside me to look at it. I wanted to start a conversation but wasn’t sure where to start. But then one of them read the words near the bottom right corner, and I couldn’t help but turn in astonishment at the strange language and inquire about her ability to read it. As it turns out, she belongs to the same tribe as the artist, learned to read the language at the University of Toronto, and even attended Norval Morrisseau’s funeral in 2007. What lucky timing for me! I then tried to put into words what the painting meant to me but stumbled over myself incoherently. After sitting with this painting for some time, this is my attempt:

It’s like a cross-section view of the spirits of nature. Everything seems to be connected to everything else, but indirectly. The inner workings of a creature are not confined by its outline, they blend harmoniously into one another. The way every shape fits in with every other shape gives the feeling that boundaries are permeable, and one cannot look at any one of the creatures in isolation because their Being extends past their biological body.

The distinction between self and other melts away to reveal a commonality, it’s only the organization of the basic elements that varies. This way of seeing the world is very difficult for us modern people. In normal waking consciousness, we’re settled firmly in the subject-object duality that is the prerequisite for categorization. If we’re not careful, over-reliance on categorization dulls our ability to perceive that which transcends category. This painting and others by Norval Morrisseau, if we treat them with the appropriate respect, are portals into a pre-ego-consciousness state. In such a state, conflict is not some uncomfortable state to be avoided, but a dance to be enthusiastically participated in. The creatures aren’t enemies to one another, they willingly participate in a grand game of birth and death.

One final detail that struck me from this painting is that all creatures have the same eyes. It’s akin to a certain psychedelic visual where eyes appear everywhere and look back at you. As if there is one consciousness experiencing from different POVs. Nature split itself off into different creatures with some level of autonomy, and when they compete against each other and eat one another, separation can be transcended and the scene can be seen as Nature in a state of pre-ego oneness.

My POV is of the Spirit of Death.

I begin in the water, formless, self-less. I move from the body of the dead European seamlessly into the Native woman. That’s because she is identified with nature, one with nature. Her spiritual boundaries are far more permeable than a European’s boundaries. The European condemned certain spirits, but the Natives participated more freely with the spirits of nature. In the initial contact, these two fundamentally different realities were found to be incompatible.

Not unlike the transmission of biological viruses leading to the deaths of many Native Americans, the transmission of spiritual viruses played a major role in the destruction of Native culture. The Native American’s “psychological immune system” had never encountered the “spiritual viruses” that the Europeans had been contending with for thousands of years. The Europeans had a repressed, unconscious desire for death and destruction, and it was projected onto the Native Americans who couldn’t help but be “infected” - that is, mirror the European’s desire and act on it.

The European’s desire for death was given permission to embody in consciousness when one of the soldiers was shot, and like a caged tiger finally, let loose, all the pent-up destructive energy was finally released through the expression of war.

The beurocratic Christianity that (I think) dominated Europe at the time insisted on the purification of its inhabitants of “evil spirits”, which the Spirit of Death would fall under (unless God willed it, such as in a crusade). But Christianity as a beurocracy failed to permeate the individual’s psyche to a sufficient degree to create the unified Christian individual. Before the liberal values of the modern West, there was no room for disagreement: you are either Christian and with us, or against us. In every situation where a European became aware of an element of evil within but lacked the grace of Jesus to redeem them of that evil, the European was left with a difficult choice:

Option 1: Face the evil alone. Contend with it, and if you win, you have authority over it. If you lose, it has authority over you. Risk becoming that which you obsess over.

Option 2: Turn away from the evil within - by othering it and sending it down into the unconscious. That’s not me, it’s something other than I because it has no place in my ego.

This is the unacknowledged consequence of mandated Christianity - Many are not intrinsically driven towards inviting Jesus into their hearts but do it from fear of social repercussions. What are they to do when they encounter evil within their own hearts? Face it alone or hide from it. The act of hiding is literally the inner separation of one element of yourself from the other elements. And in the framework of duality, of subject-object, of self and other, that separation is the generation of psychic structures which are then capable of being embodied by that spirit. In other words, the spirit now has a life of its own. It’s no longer you, it’s in you, which, in a strange way frees you from direct identification with it.

And so the European imprisoned undesirable spirits within himself until the European became nothing but the unconscious agent of a legion of spirits acting through his unconscious. But the European made a big mistake in assuming that by moving the spirits out of awareness, the spirits would leave. Instead, the European’s shadow gradually filled up with more and more condemned spirits, which operate within him unconsciously unless given conscious permission to come out into the light of consciousness.

Jesus says:

“But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7:14)

And also

“Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” (Matthew 12:30)

The only way the grace of Jesus really works is through a true and full commitment to following Jesus as a disciple. Constituents of the state can either love Jesus and follow him as disciples from their own hearts, or out of fear of social repercussions (fake Christianity). It’s better to not believe at all rather than half-ass it. What does half-belief look like? Inability to contend with one’s evil, the increasing filling up of the shadow with “bad spirits” which the Europeans were presented with in the dream. Is the Spirit of Death a bad spirit? My POV had no ill intent. I found resonance within the Native and the European, but the stories constructed about that resonance differed greatly. I was not evil for the Native but I was for the European.

The carriage scene represents the shared state of consciousness inhabited by the Europeans after the group violence. The front and rear compartments are both in consciousness initially. I hover above them as a spirit threatening the peace. That’s why they are arguing with each other and are generally aggressive towards each other.

The reason why I, the spirit, went into the front carriage was that the European tricked me into believing there was something interesting for me to inhabit. The roll down the hill represents a descent into the European’s shadow following the slaughter they just participated in. But they resisted that descent and did not know how else to deal with me but to trick me into entering the front compartment, then disconnecting it from their consciousness. Their refusal to go down into their own shadow along with the spirit that drives them down is why my descent was violent and dangerous.

The valley, the shadow of the European, was a dark and desolate place. It was a wild forest area that reeked of malevolence. It was eerily quiet. There was nowhere for the spirit to inhabit, and it became restless, realizing its only hope was to escape up the steep, slippery mud slope. The difficulty of ascension up from the shadow (unconscious) to the light (consciousness) of the European represents the psychic chasm that exists between them. In other words, the unconscious is treated as we’ve been treating our oceans - throw your shit down there and forget about it. But there’s a problem - shit floats.

The help of the tiger represents a will to live, a ferocious re-surfacing of unconscious psychic material. The inner tiger of mankind is unwelcome in the conscious light of society. However, it is resourceful and survives the harsh conditions of an untamed shadow represented by the valley. The tiger itself cannot fully protrude up into the light of consciousness, because it will immediately be hunted down, so it acts as a support to elements that do decide to ascend into consciousness. In other words, just because you’re tame and civilized, doesn’t mean there isn’t a tiger within the desolate place that is your shadow. You can’t see it because it won’t come out, knowing you will hunt it down. So it acts through your unconscious by giving its energy to other elements that do reach your consciousness. So instead of having the power of the tiger on your side, it has a will of its own and acts, to some degree, out of spite towards your consciousness because you condemn its nature (which is your own nature).

I still don’t understand the meaning of the coyote in this dream. The coyote was seen only as a silhouette, its features indistinct. A few days after this dream I was sitting outside on the phone with a close friend late in the evening. I had been contending with my own shadow for several days. One of the items on our itinerary was to talk about this dream, and I tried to bring it up several times but each time felt somewhat off. Then as I was about to bring it up again, I saw movement to my left. Turning I saw the silhouette of a coyote! The shadowy figure’s movements perfectly mimicked the coyote in my dream, the difference is it ran down a small hill to where I was sitting and stopped around ten meters to my left. It just stood there, and I stared at it. It was aware of my presence but seemed unbothered. I had only seen a coyote once before in the city, I was very quiet and it ran away as soon as it heard me. This event felt significant to me.

I don’t quite know why, but my intuition tells me the coyote merged with me during the ascension. We then split into light and shadow when entering the city. The splitting into twins of light and shadow is still a mystery to me.

Civilized life is a big part of the European’s consciousness, and the spirit of death is especially unwelcome in the collective consciousness of modernity. The valley from which I came may have represented the European colonizer’s personal unconscious, but once ascended into the light of consciousness, I, the spirit, found myself no longer in the personal unconscious of a particular European but in the collective consciousness of the society in which that European is embedded.

My shadow twin, disconnected from my will, descended down a hill. That second, voluntary descent may have been into the social collective unconscious - overlooked by the members of the developing American society. In other words, the Spirit of Death never left the European culture, it just entered the collective unconscious where it has been living since.

But I, the visible half of the “evil” spirit in the light of the collective consciousness was an enemy that needed to be immediately expelled. The European was so bent on my destruction that he hardly recognized that in looking for me the European identifies with me, giving me an embodied reality to manifest in the European psyche. The separation between the European and the “evil spirit” which inhabits him is a synthetic barrier created by the consciousness of the European. This means when the European searches for the evil spirit, it finds it not outside the ego but as an aspect of the ego. The subject-object construct falls apart, and the European would rather die than live in identification with the “evil spirit”. And so the desire for the destruction of the Spirit of Death is literally, simultaneously the desire for the physical death of the European himself, if he allows himself to recognize that he and it are one.

As long as the European lives, I live as spirit. Either in his consciousness or unconsciousness. I had been condemned and denied free movement in and out of living beings in the natural world. And simultaneously, having no will of my own, I served as a mirror to the European bent on my destruction - by wishing for my death I wished him death also. The spirit of death haunts us today because of our condemnation of it, and the harder we repress it the more forcefully it will manifest its will within our unconscious. Perhaps through homicide. In Canada and other self-conscious, individualistic cultures, more likely through suicide. The more we hate the desire for death and destruction within us, the more it hates us in return. The harder we try to kill it, the harder it will try to kill us.

The West cannot return to a Native identification with nature, and the reconciliation efforts happening today must take this into account. The Native spiritual immune system lived in harmony with nature for a very long time but came into sudden contact with evil so sophisticated that there was simply no opportunity to develop the necessary immunity. With globalization, the biological viruses of one corner of the earth are the problem of another corner, as we’ve seen with COVID. But what I don’t hear being spoken about nearly as often is Jung’s concern for what he called “psychological epidemics” - which he considered a far greater threat to humanity. I would venture to say that what Jung meant by psychological epidemics is what in my dream presented itself as a spiritual epidemic.

If we open ourselves up to the free movement of spirit in the presence of evil hiding in the shadows of others, we will quickly find ourselves acting as vessels of spiritual viruses. The development of a shadow in the European psyche must be mirrored by the development of our own shadow, which is capable of contending with other shadows. I don’t like it one bit, I’d trade it all to live peacefully in nature. But even the most secure walled garden eventually finds itself penetrated by a snake. The question is, what to do about the fact of snakes in the garden?

I’m open to hearing about others’ interpretations of this dream, so leave a comment if you have any thoughts.

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