There have been a couple people who’ve expressed to me an idea that, roughly, “it’s all the same, all the wisdom traditions point to the same thing, blah blah.” This is a PSA that while the weird way may share some or even a lot of commonality with some or many spiritual traditions, it is not in fact exactly the same. Please don’t hamstring the weird way by overly identifying it with Buddhism or Hinduism or Thelema or Gnostic Christianity or what have you.

So what makes the weird way different from most traditions?

I would put it as follows:

1. The weird way is not a creed, but an area of study. You don’t follow it. The weird way isn’t a path to follow. It’s an area of study. You study it. Of course studying it has some implication to life. So in a sense you may also be following some path, but everyone follows their own path.

It’s like everyone is using mathematics at the cash register, but they’re not all buying the same things. The weird way is like mathematics. You can study it and when you study it, you’ll of course be more likely to read and enact your experience in weird ways, but what exactly that ends up meaning will not be exactly and precisely identical for everyone. Some people want to swallow the blue bill.

The blue pill is expressed in Buddhism as “chop wood, carry water.” It means post-enlightenment you have the same shit life as before, but now you can be proud and happy about it, like a moron. The modern version of this would be “Q: What’s after enlightenment? A: Wage slavery!” Hahahaha.

Others want a radical change. And everything in between. It’s like some people go lucid in a dream only to follow the dream without changing anything. To me it’s a waste of lucidity, but if they’re enjoying it, they can still be lucid while allowing deep habits to roll onward as status quo.

So unlike with religion, where everyone pretends to strive toward the same exact teleology, I like to think we don’t do that. We do not all head toward the formless realm or nirvana or heaven or the jade palace or parallel Earth #529304. However, what I think we should have in common is that we’re aware of our personal teleology. We dream with awareness, with purpose, with courage or even fearlessness, not mindlessly like zombies. There is no prescribed or thought-to-be-ideal routine and no conventional and weird-approved lifestyle. That’s quite different from most religions where you have to show up certain days and do certain things, and where they do make rather specific demands on your lifestyle, such as do this, and don’t do this, etc. We don’t do that. So here there are no 10 commandments and no 5 precepts like in Buddhism, not formally anyhow, etc.

So again, it’s like in mathematics. You learn how the numbers relate, but what should you calculate? How many calculations per day should you do? Should you start your mornings with 5 minutes of 1+1=2? Right? It’s nonsense. Mathematicians understand the abstract nature of their discipline, and so do we.

And abstract doesn’t mean “unreal” btw, to any crypto-physicalists who might by chance be reading this. Abstract is the only reality, whereas all that’s concrete is illusory. In fact partial and incomplete abstractions are still somewhat concretized and are somewhat illusory. Only the ultimate abstraction is actually real and not any lesser ones.

This brings me to my second point.

2. The weird way is based on an unapologetic and thoroughgoing subjective idealism. Subjective means personal perspective is fundamental to everything we study and do. In this we’re different from just about 99% of all the world’s traditions who attempt to prescribe a standard and thought to be “correct” set of the experiences you “ought” to have.

We’re even in some cases different from Buddhism, which is supposed to be subjective but isn’t always sure that it is, so most Buddhists are quite confused about it, and the Buddha was never explicit about it that I know of. I can’t remember a Pali Canon Sutta where Buddha expounds the thoroughly subjective nature of experience and knowledge and action, and I’ve read a lot of them in translation. The Buddha was effectively talking about subjectivity and perspectivalism, but never directly and by name as we do it here. And he created a dogmatic and religious structure, with good intentions, no doubt, but it all went south as you can see if you look at Western Zen where most so-called “masters” are physicalists, which in Buddhist lingo means they’re Ucchedavadins, which means they’re actually anti-Buddhist, since Buddhism doctrinally flatly rejects Ucchedavada. But I digress.

So religion is basically a flawed way to try to force people to do the right thing, and it doesn’t work. Even when the best person and a genius such as Buddha starts a religion, invariably it turns to absolute shit. Hell, even Buddha knew that in advance! That’s why the Buddha has predicted the eventual downfall of his dispensation, lol. No shit. So over here we don’t even bother trying that. It’s not worth it. Dogmas stultify the mind, and to study the weird way you need a brutally sincere mind and an agile mind, which are qualities dogmas destroy.

So we’re unapologetically subjective in our mind-is-all approach. Our mind-is-all approach is not just of epistemological variety, which is weak. It’s both epistemological and ontological. It’s a very strong, assertive, and frankly, dangerous approach. It’s dangerous because it’s capable of producing great changes quickly. It’s like you’re being handed live katanas here, and if you don’t watch it, there go your ears and nose, oops. Watch where you swing that thing! This thing is a real live weapon folks. It’s not just effective. It’s fucking effective. It’s that effective. You can dissolve your human body into a rainbow or land in a psychiatric ward, or both at the same time. And that’s how it should be. If it wasn’t like this, it would be weak sauce.

So, as it happens, once you realize all is fundamentally epistemologically and ontologically mind, and here I mean mind as a primordial tri-capacity to know, to experience, and to will, there is a lot you can do with it. It’s like in mathematics. Once you realize what quantification is, there is so much diverse and different stuff you can do with a numerical approach. Some people use numbers to study the commonly observed visual shapes. Other people use quantification to study spaces that don’t even exist conventionally and I do mean spaces and not any specific shapes that could occur in such spaces. Some people use math at the cash register. And for some people maths is a way to commune with the divine, and nothing less. So some have a very mundane and low-brow way to use math, and I personally do not respect such people. But as far as the weird way is concerned, we can’t fault them because numbers are numbers, and if you’re correctly using “all-is-mind” and “subjectivity is fundamental” approach at the cash register, you’re some kind of a user of the weird way, perhaps a shitty one that I don’t want to hang with personally, but still.

So please check your proclivity toward objectification at the door! We’re not like that other tradition X, where some neutral common ground is acknowledged. Stop comparing us in a naive and blind way.

I like to imagine there is some room for intelligent comparisons that do justice to both sides of whatever is being compared. You can compare Gnostic Christianity to the weird way in a way that respects both, without reducing one to the other and without the pretense that all humans throughout history have pointed out the same truth and we’re all going to sing kumbaya together, going to the same happy place together. Stop that dumb bullshit here please. You can do that bullshit somewhere else. Take it to your favorite religious or spirituality oriented sub and tell them how all traditions are the same, if they want to hear of it. But please don’t bring it here. I like occasional intelligent comparisons but not bullshit “everything is the same” attitude of ignorance.

But Zen master X said ego is bad and needs to be dissolved. No. Fuck Zen master X. We don’t give the slightest of fucks about what Zen master X said. Get it? We don’t care. We study subjective idealism and the implications of that on cognition. Which is to say, we dream. We dream. We dream. We’re not afraid to dream. We’re not ashamed to dream. We’re dreamers here.