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The voice of the wilderness (6) – the enemies of the spirit
June 30th, 2008 | 
Author:
That was the last time I ever saw S. For some reason I never bothered to check how she was faring after that. I had destroyed her worldview in 10 minutes and sent her out tripping. The event taught me that beliefs and other sorts of fake mental constructs serve as some sort of stabilizer for these kind of people and that if you destroy their ideas of the world they quickly turn into hallucinating, imbalanced idiots. For this reason alone getting rid of religions is probably not a very good idea. Frankly, I do not understand this need of having to live in self-constructed mental houses – its as if reality is not good enough for them, somehow – but its clear that most religious, dogmatic, dull, forgettable or otherwise mentally impaired people would change into raving lunatics if you chopped the basis of their stability away. I have a better view now on the mechanics behind the process being older now and more experienced: in my view these people are people who have never managed to beat the first enemy on the path of enlightment: fear.
They need these mental constructs because it is a protection against that monster of chaos lurking outside of it, whose real name is of course Fear. Thus, the god or ideology or other bullshit they believe in serves, they think, as a protection but in reality of course these mental houses are rather mental institutions they have locked themselves in, fearing the boogeyman outside and burning candles to him inside to worship his name.
In the end these sort of people are really dangerous, since whatever they do and whatever they believe in is ultimately a product of fear.
There are in fact very few people who manage to beat the first enemy. It is not an easy task at all. Whoever beats it can be recognized by a great mental clarity and a freedom from having to live in mental/dogmatic constructs. These sort of people rather see reality in a direct and transcient sort of way. I have been fortunate enough to meet a number of them but they are pretty rare. People who advance further than that are even more rare: the next enemy is clarity, and I have met maybe 2 or 3 people who seemed to have beat that one.
They need these mental constructs because it is a protection against that monster of chaos lurking outside of it, whose real name is of course Fear. Thus, the god or ideology or other bullshit they believe in serves, they think, as a protection but in reality of course these mental houses are rather mental institutions they have locked themselves in, fearing the boogeyman outside and burning candles to him inside to worship his name.
In the end these sort of people are really dangerous, since whatever they do and whatever they believe in is ultimately a product of fear.
There are in fact very few people who manage to beat the first enemy. It is not an easy task at all. Whoever beats it can be recognized by a great mental clarity and a freedom from having to live in mental/dogmatic constructs. These sort of people rather see reality in a direct and transcient sort of way. I have been fortunate enough to meet a number of them but they are pretty rare. People who advance further than that are even more rare: the next enemy is clarity, and I have met maybe 2 or 3 people who seemed to have beat that one.
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The idea is taken from the Yaqui system of magick as written down by Castaneda but it’s present in several other systems as well. I will get to that point later.
Let’s first examine the basic ideas: That is that there are four basic enemies on the path to completion, the first of which is Fear.
One who overcomes fear in its totality gains clarity. This clarity, however, no matter how pleasant and illuminating it is is also the new guardian, the very thing that blocks further progress. It’s easy to see why: here we have a person who is no longer afraid of anything, who sees reality directly and judges everything with great clarity. A person who has truly gained this position will never lose this mental clarity, but the clarity prevents him from advancing to the next level, the level of Power.
A person who manages to overcome the guardian clarity is a man of power. That’s the third enemy on the path: Power.
If you are interested in methods to overcome clarity
i recommend you read the entire Castaneda series. There are several techniques described and I could do it no better here.
On the Tree of life there are also essentially 4 layers as described: Malkuth-Yesod (Fear) – Tiphareth (Clarity) – Daath (Power) – Kether (Age)
It’s a very fundamental but useful way of measuring progress. As to what people I met that seemed successful in overcoming clarity, they were powerful people who looked and felt different than the (already rare) clarity variant.
Because I’m in that sort of mood, I’m going to go with:
“Because that way, they can convince themselves that more of the universe is within their understanding than there actually is.”
If you believe something, you know it, and that’s that. It simply doesn’t matter whether or not it’s correct; that’s just the way it is. It’s easier to think that you’re successfully dealing with the world, that way.
Erwin
This is why people who believe in God or Jesus hardly ever claim to have actual communication with these abstractions. They don’t need to, because these abstractions serve as extensions of themselves: God, Jesus, or whatever else prophet you may imagine is forever bound to have a fixed set of opinions that can never change. Anyone who would ‘communicate’ with Jesus and claim he had a different opinion than written down in the Bible would be a heretic.
So it’s clear what the whole thing is: a framework for a fixed set of moralistic opinions. This set of opinions work as a tranquilizer: it short-circuits the brain to operate within very limited parameters which in turn results in the sort of ‘highs’ a dog would experience when he runs after his own tail for an hour. Which is sort of exactly the impression I get from religious sermons.
Not only that, but if they did make such a claim, it would become painfully clear that the “fixed set of opinions” that X believes Jesus to hold is a remarkably different “fixed set of opinions” to that which Y believes Jesus to hold, and the game would be up.
Nobody actually believes that the “set of moralistic” opinions in the Bible is the actual set held by God and Jesus – nobody thinks Jesus would be angry at people for wearing multicoloured cloth, for instance. So, as long as nobody actually tries to make these things concrete, the gaping inconsistencies will never come to the fore, and people can go on pretending that this bizarrely silly shit is real and that they all agree on the major points.
Erwin
It’s a form of dispensed collective belief, simular to the Iraq situation: no one actually believes that that war is any good, not even its promoters. I’m convinced that if anyone in the Bush administration actually started believing the superficial shite they’re venting he’d be expelled immediately. The same is true about the Nazi’s: none of them really believed ‘jews are evil’ it was just a propaganda technique for them, a way of achieving an end.
The end is always same: population control, the reason religion was invented.