I am also a vague panpsychist. I think our individual consciousnesses are just the brief permutations of a pervasive mental substance, that all of reality is in some sense charged with mentation, that when we die our individuality is extinguished but the stuff of our being rejoins that ocean of thought, and that one perfectly reasonable name for this mental substance would be God. I really do think we are all one person and that person is God. I just also believe that if God has chosen to divide himself into billions of subjective beings he must have had some reason for doing so, and it’s kinda jumping the gun to try to rejoin the absolute consciousness. Plenty of time for that when we’re dead.
Clipping
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clippings > It's jumping the gun to try to rejoin absolute consciousness
[https://samkriss.substack.com/p/numb-at-burning-man]
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books > The Last Wish (Andrzej Sapkowski)
“Don’t you think”—he smiled—“that my lack of faith makes such a trance pointless?” “No, I don’t. And do you know why?” “No.” Nenneke leaned over and looked him in the eyes with a strange smile on her pale lips. “Because it would be the first proof I’ve ever heard of that a lack of faith has any kind of power at all.”
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clippings > How boomers ruined the blues
[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1t6akz8SYuI]
Here’s a great question. Why do boomers love the blues so much? Is it because it’s soulful? Because it speaks to the human condition? Hell no. It’s because human beings always crave the one thing they do not have. And what boomers collectively missed out on is, of course, struggle. Now, individually, sure, I get it. Everybody’s got their shit. People die, love fades, marriages fail, bills pile up, bodies get old. I’m not saying they didn’t have problems, but as a generation, nobody in the history of our species ever had it any fucking easier. We’re talking about the golden age of unearned comfort. You could graduate high school, get a job at the post office, and overtime pay off a mortgage on a house on a lake in a vacation place in the Keys. Kindergarten teachers, waitresses, secretaries, all homeowners. You could support a family on one income. Take vacations, have a pension, and still have time to bitch about your neighbor’s dog and your teen losing. Boomers trusted everything. The government, the church, the schools. They fed their kids junk food. McDonald’s was a part of the food pyramid and they thought it was genuinely good for you, that it was healthy. They used the TV as a babysitter and call it educational programming and never lost a wink of sleep over it ever. And at the end of a perfect suburban day, they’d crack open a beer, light up a joint with the weakest weed imaginable, sink into a lazy boy that they bought off of the home shopping network, and start grooving to some old black guy whose dad picked cotton for a living that grew up in a shed singing about pain, poverty, and despair. And instead of thinking, “Damn, I’m so lucky.” It’s amazing how this music helps this man carry an impossible burden through the power of catharsis. They thought, “I need a Fender.” They felt inspired to buy a guitar and start bending strings like they had this well of deep pain inside of them, too. And after learning one A minor pentatonic box, they got online and started preaching about minimalism, soul, and feel. Do you know how fucking crazy this is? They had everything. And they were jealous of people who suffered because the way that they cried about it sounded beautiful to them. And so a new form of blues was born. Boomer blues, a grotesque fusion of Mississippi Delta style pain and central air conditioning. They turned the blues into a hobby, into a vibe, a weekend activity like barbecue and golf. in this mountain, mountains of disposable income that they poured on to real blues artists, transformed the whole genre from this exotic wilderness where people go to find connection and solitude into this misery meets Disneyland type place where people go to a safe emotional vacation and consume gear and ribs. And it’s all very, very poetic because what the boomers really gave us is the peak of human absurdity without ever acknowledging how funny it all is. Namaste.
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clippings > AI can't do the job of teaching
What A.I. can’t do is feel the shape of silence after someone says something so honest we forget we’re here to learn. What it can’t do is pause mid-sentence because it remembered the smell of its father’s old chair. What it can’t do is sit in a room full of people who are trying—and failing—to make sense of something that maybe can’t be made sense of.
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clippings > Psychedelic therapy and the pretense of value neutrality
[https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/tripping-alone]
By promoting solo trips under non-directive supervision as the default approach, the Western Model structures psychedelic experience around a core set of values: individualism and autonomy. There’s nothing unusual about containers for the psychedelic experience being made to reflect or even instill pre-existing cultural values. But what makes the Western Model unique is its pretense of value neutrality.
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clippings > Consciousness is not our advanced cognitive functions
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089245]
I believe the strong association we often make between the most advanced cognitive functions and consciousness are misleading us into believing that consciousness is somehow the result of those functions, while I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, “from the outside”. It’s of course the most amazing part of the show, but should not be confused for it. Consciousness is not made of thinking but of observing, we just spend a lot of time observing how we think.
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clippings > Persistent failure pushed me off social media
[https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-delusion-machine]
Of late, I am steeped in failure—professional, spiritual, personal, and creative. I lie about it, but my persistent failure pushed me off social media, with the shameful exception of the aforementioned LinkedIn, the definition of the necessary evil I need in order to find employment in my dying industry. I cannot stand even accidental exposure to other people’s success—their vacations, their promotions, their Whole30—so I pretend that my bitterness and envy is a principled stance.
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clippings > The secret of mysticism
[https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/34/index.html]
“The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid” - Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton (1908)
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clippings > Trump symbolizes the rejection of non-dualism as viable mechanism for governing a civilization
[https://apxhard.substack.com/p/wokism-was-a-collective-mushroom]
What psychedelic mushrooms do is destroy the top-down priors that constrain cognition. We see the world through our beliefs. Mushrooms destroy those beliefs temporarily, allowing you to “see your senses” directly, which present a picture that is vivid, vibrant, unstable and chaotic.
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clippings > Cyber-gnosticism
[https://bananapeel.substack.com/p/japan-ile-ife-and-technological-nationalism]
Not to mix similes involving ancient civilizations, but I wonder if the greatest legacy of America’s apogee as an imperial power won’t be, as it was with Rome, the entrenchment of a religion that it adopted fairly late in its lifetime: cyber-gnosticism.
From the cyber-gnostic perspective, the unmediated world of people and things is gross, dissatisfying, and too frequently indifferent to the feelings and wants of the individual—and therefore it is more sensible to value digital artifacts, entities, and experiences over their physical analogues. Owing to this, cyber-gnosticism holds that one’s online persona (or personae) is one’s true self (or selves), and that the release of dopamine in and of itself matters more than the activities that actuate it (so that flirting with a potential mate over dinner and conversing with a virtual boy-/girlfriend are fungible experiences, provided the one feels as rewarding as the other).
Our alien visitors might well conclude that at some point in the early twenty-first century, for some inexplicable reason, we completely lost interest in our world and in each other.