I have a bad habit of logging into this account every twelve months or so, usually when I’m at a low ebb and need to get re-energised, writing a long post which tries and fails to encapsulate everything I’ve thought, discovered or struggled with since my last post, and then neglecting to respond to any replies.
(I’m sorry. I do read and highly value the replies, I promise.)
I’m sorry to have seen valuable members drift away, and to have watched this sub, and r/oneirosophy, become so quiet - but I fully recognise I am part of the problem. I notice that u/AesirAnatman posted a little while back about returning to r/oneirosophy, or starting a new sub/blog. I think that would be great and Aesir, if you get that up and running, please let me know, I’d be keen to contribute. I think we inadvertently made this sub a little too rigid and it stifled conversation - something more casual might be better? (Casual but not low-effort, if you get me. Gods save us from a sub where every second post is a newcomer asking “Just found this sub, is this real/what is this all about?” But equally, maybe every post doesn’t need to be an essay of publishable quality. I’d be keen just to read a paragraph about the walk in the park you took where you experienced a cool moment of synchronicity, etc, if you don’t have anything “big” to say.)
I gather we’re a fairly rule-averse group of people, so I don’t think there’s much use in trying to lay down the law about how often people need to post, but I think it might be valuable if those of us who are still flogging this horse made a loose commitment, whether here, at r/oneirosophy, or somewhere new entirely, to try to post and interact once or twice a week. There are posts in both of these subs which have been life changing for me, and while I know we’ve said a lot, repetition has its value, and I still don’t think we’ve said all there is to say anyway.
If we had, we wouldn’t still fucking be in this capitalist hellhole world, would we?
So, in summary, I’m in if you lot are in.
And to throw in some commentary on the work while I’m at it, I’ve been thinking a lot about humility, arrogance and the trap of needing to feel worthy.
Back when I was in my early twenties I entered a pretty severe depressive slump because it suddenly occurred to me that I was surrounded by people who were, from my perspective, more deserving of my dreams and aspirations than I was. What right had I to be fit when there were people who rose earlier, trained harder, ate healthier? What right had I to happiness when there were people who were more generous and proactive?
In my head, before I had the right to have whatever I wanted, it was necessary that I should work as hard as the hardest working person who also wanted what I wanted, or suffer as badly as the suffering-est person who also wanted what I wanted.
And the resultant depression was no doubt from the impossibility of achieving this, even if I threw everything I had at it.
For one thing, the world is, as we know, extremely uneven when it comes to giving people “what they deserve.”
Let’s say you want to be thin and fit. All other things being equal then yes, the person who works out and watches what they eat is likely to be thinner and fitter than the person who does not.
But the person who is “earning” the desirable physique could find themselves the victim of some catastrophe outside of their control - an earthquake, say - which could instantaneously, permanently and negatively alter their bodies, irrespective of how much work they’ve put in or how much they have “earned” a body that fits their desires.
Then, too, there are all the other factors outside your control which eliminate the possibility of a level playing field; genetics, socio-economic position, geographical location, etc, etc, etc.
So, while there is a degree to which you can kind of, maybe, almost, sort of earn what you want in this world, worthiness carries far less weight than a multitude of other factors in determining what you get/what you experience.
It’s why child rapists can be elected president or spend their lives drifting around the world in private jets, while genuinely wonderful, decent people live in poverty and agony.
Maybe there is even a degree to which we enjoy this paradigm, though I am personally well-tired of a system which so consistently rewards awfulness. But I also struggle to picture a world in which everyone gets only and exactly what they deserve - that might be tiresome in a different way.
So. We’ve determined the world is unfair. We’ve determined that even if you do all the conventional things that are theoretically necessary to “earn” what you desire, you’re still not guaranteed to get it.
Of course, magic is the province of those who wish to change the world. Maybe our insistence (I say our, because I suspect others struggle with this too) that we meet some intangible, poorly-defined standard before we are “allowed” to have what we desire - in our cases, power beyond that of conventional humans - is a response to the injustice of the world.
Are we possibly inflicting a standard upon ourselves that doesn’t exist in the world because we resent the lack of such a standard in the world?
And can anyone hope for success under such a mental construct?
If you have mental commitments to the paradigm of an unfair world, and you also have a commitment to the notion that you will be able to transcend the unfair world once you’ve finally met your internal criteria, which of those two clashing mental constructs is going to win? What’s to stop the unfair world/reality from saying “bruh – I’m unfair, remember? No.” when you approach it with your hard-won worthiness/magical powers voucher in hand.
You’re trying to beat an unfair system by first pandering to it and then expecting it to behave completely at odds with its internal logic just this one time. It’s a paradox that won’t work - or will only work if you’re very, very lucky.
Clearly another approach is demanded.
Worthiness is inherent. It is inherent, or it is non-existent, depending on how you want to frame it. And that, for me, mentally addled as I am by this ridiculous existence, is a dill of a pickle to get my head around.
The “you must work x hard to be y worthy to earn the right to z results” is a toxic, conventional human mindset which yields limited results in the conventional world and even fewer results in the magical world. You need to start re-conceptualising things in your head and train yourself to realise you are outside and above this construct.
How?
- 1: don’t confuse morality and worthiness.
I’m not saying be a dick. I’d actively encourage you not to be a dick, in fact, but that’s because I believe that kindness and compassion have inherent value. But it is possible to be an absolute raging fuckcunt and to achieve the kind of magical control we’re pursuing. If you’re going to be committed to kindness and justice, be committed to these things for their own sake, or for the sake of the good things that come along with them (i.e. a more pleasant existence) rather than because you think that being kind will allow you to manifest a winning lottery ticket. Trying to perform magic by acting like the human idea of a saint is like trying to fill your car up with apple juice instead of fuel. Apple juice is great, but it won’t make your car go. Compassion is great, but it isn’t a magic wand.
- 2: Cultivate arrogance.
I’m stealing/paraphrasing from an old nefandi post here, but basically you need to set yourself up as ultimate and everything else up as penultimate.
This isn’t easy. It isn’t easy to be arrogant when you stumble getting onto an escalator and everyone laughs. It isn’t easy to be arrogant when you need to go to a job you hate five days a week just to survive.
It’s hard work to remind yourself that you are not what you experience and to distance yourself, and your idea of yourself, from the things that happen to you and even from your own actions. It’s hard but it’s what you must do.
A little mental trick I’m employing at the moment - if your idea of worthiness is still snagged on how hard you work and how much you suffer, you can feed the amount of work and suffering you’re experiencing in your quest for arrogance back into your worthiness, making you even more arrogant.
This isn’t entirely skilful in that you’re still feeding that notion that worthiness is a pre-requisite of magic, but sometimes it’s easier to chip away at bad habits slowly than to try to toss them out in one go.
So that’s where I’m at. If you have any better tricks to get around that whole “prove yourself to yourself” circle that gets you nowhere, I’d be glad to hear them.
“Where are we at?”
Originally posted by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2021-12-02 23:31:33 (r76gh8).
I’ll keep my input brief. The same way appearances can be framed as suggestive rather than informative, identification with experience need not be required to take responsibility for it. Getting lost in the idea that “you” have to be the one overcoming obstacles and challenges in order to “have the experience ‘you’ desire” can itself be seen as a trap.
“I am” can be seen as a mistake in light of “am.” Conceit can be found in any identity, reframing experiences as “this seems to be happening to me” instead of “this seems to be happening.” The former has a much narrower range of responses as opposed to the latter. Getting stuck in the wet-works of a meatsuit gets claustrophobic at times. On the other hand, the action of “being human” can be very beautiful. Depends on what side of the aggression you find yourself.
As far as your points, I personally would adjust “cultivate arrogance” to “cultivate.” Then, however your will be done; you’re on the right path.
Originally commented by u/Scew on 2021-12-15 01:58:03 (hoimal6)
> I notice that u/AesirAnatman posted a little while back about returning to r/oneirosophy, or starting a new sub/blog. I think that would be great and Aesir, if you get that up and running, please let me know, I’d be keen to contribute.
Sure – for now I haven’t made any commitments. At present, I’m rethinking the role I placed for earning money in my life as it has been negatively impacting my personal/private life (including here) so I haven’t had much time to sink into that for now, but perhaps in the near future once I work some things out in the work world offline.
> I think we inadvertently made this sub a little too rigid and it stifled conversation - something more casual might be better?
Perhaps. I get the rules Nefandi set though, to make a counterpoint. We don’t want this place to get muddled into a free-for-all like r/awakened or something (otherwise we could just go to r/awakened). We want to be sure we remain focused, but still allow flexibility within that context. It’s possible the topic is just too narrow for its own subreddit right now? I’m not sure.
> I think it might be valuable if those of us who are still flogging this horse made a loose commitment, whether here, at r/oneirosophy, or somewhere new entirely, to try to post and interact once or twice a week. There are posts in both of these subs which have been life changing for me, and while I know we’ve said a lot, repetition has its value, and I still don’t think we’ve said all there is to say anyway.
Well…I can’t make any commitments right now. My personal life is pretty hectic and stressful right now and I’m working through several obstacles, but I jump on when I feel like it, which has been more often lately.
>Of course, magic is the province of those who wish to change the world. Maybe our insistence (I say our, because I suspect others struggle with this too) that we meet some intangible, poorly-defined standard before we are “allowed” to have what we desire - in our cases, power beyond that of conventional humans - is a response to the injustice of the world. Are we possibly inflicting a standard upon ourselves that doesn’t exist in the world because we resent the lack of such a standard in the world?
My first thought to what you wrote up to this point is that there are no real standards of deserts and we don’t have to hold ourselves to such standards. I think rigid systems of personal control are a recipe for misery. My view on this is that we all have our feelings and desires (and beliefs/realities) many of which are unconscious, and we are manifesting situations and conflicting desires because we have complex, non-linear personalities typically filled with conflict and unconsciousness, but even with greater internal cooperation and consciousness, we are multivalent beings.
I also think you’re exactly right with your last sentence. Many of us retain a model of right-and-wrong for other people and for ourselves. I think this way of thinking is really destructive personally – it’s usually strongly related to splitting in most people I’ve been seeing it in, myself included.
> And can anyone hope for success under such a mental construct?
Bitter success predicated on immense self-discipline and control at best
> Worthiness is inherent. It is inherent, or it is non-existent, depending on how you want to frame it. And that, for me, mentally addled as I am by this ridiculous existence, is a dill of a pickle to get my head around.
Precisely. Your feelings are worthy of being listened to, understood, and fed, and you don’t have to do anything to get to a place where they are worthy. Said another way, we’re all worthy of happiness intrinsically, to ourselves. The real pickle to me is dealing with all the internal conflict and unconsciousness, the multivalence.
> The “you must work x hard to be y worthy to earn the right to z results” is a toxic, conventional human mindset which yields limited results in the conventional world and even fewer results in the magical world.
Yes. It’s not just toxic magically. Even in the ordinary human context this kind of self-and-other-controlling mentality is toxic. But it is absolutely a problem magically as well.
> I’m not saying be a dick. I’d actively encourage you not to be a dick, in fact, but that’s because I believe that kindness and compassion have inherent value. But it is possible to be an absolute raging fuckcunt and to achieve the kind of magical control we’re pursuing. If you’re going to be committed to kindness and justice, be committed to these things for their own sake, or for the sake of the good things that come along with them (i.e. a more pleasant existence) rather than because you think that being kind will allow you to manifest a winning lottery ticket. Trying to perform magic by acting like the human idea of a saint is like trying to fill your car up with apple juice instead of fuel. Apple juice is great, but it won’t make your car go. Compassion is great, but it isn’t a magic wand.
Agreed. I’d go further and say act kind when you feel like it. Do what you feel like and listen to your own heart. Nothing other than listening to your feelings and reflecting and practicing unconditional self-kindness will ever help you achieve happiness or anything else.
> I’m stealing/paraphrasing from an old nefandi post here, but basically you need to set yourself up as ultimate and everything else up as penultimate.
Hmm, I don’t agree with this ‘cultivate arrogance’ idea, at least in the way I conventionally conceive of arrogance. Arrogance is part and parcel of black-and-white split thinking and is usually deeply deluded. Meaning (a) lacking in awareness of our own not-so-savory aspects and (b) major unconsciousness and internal denial and conflict.
> It’s hard work to remind yourself that you are not what you experience and to distance yourself, and your idea of yourself, from the things that happen to you and even from your own actions. It’s hard but it’s what you must do.
I wouldn’t call that arrogance. I would call that wisdom or awareness.
Instead of arrogance, I personally teach infinite understanding/love/kindness of your own heart, which extends out into everything your heart cares about. Only someone who wanted to subjugate you would call such an attitude arrogance in my mind – what I mean is that it’s often used like ‘selfish’ as a pejorative for people who resist being someone else’s desires. So maybe there’s an attempt here to sort of ‘own’ the persecutory label? Instead, to my mind, I conceive of arrogance as related to the trait of binary thinking and splitting, of thinking of people as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (based on whatever model you carry around) and then working hard to force yourself to behave ‘good’ and condemning yourself and others when ‘bad’.
I don’t think that’s what you are advocating, but that is the connotation it brings to my mind. Instead of something that connotes thinking you are better than other people, I like ‘self-love’ or ‘self-kindness’ meaning total openness and support for your own heart as your guide instead of any rules or principles or people.
As a final note, I don’t teach or advocate love or kindness in general absolute terms because that usually is understood to mean you are beholden to caring about everyone the same (like Christian universal love), which I don’t agree with. You care for yourself, with great gentle kindness, and then whatever care emerges within you naturally is the only love that you are beholden to.
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2021-12-11 05:48:43 (ho0pprk)
Achually I wrote something about this in a document, on this topic but with a slightly other angle. I am not savvy with technology so I dont have an idea how to send it. Is there a good place to put it?
See I dont want it on the internet and I am hesitant to share it anyway because to me it truly is a soulful writing that ALMOST NOBODY deserves to read (despite this, yes I am still willing to send it, but only in exchange for something.)
(feedback)
im a sloppy messy kinda lazy guy but the document itself is in neat order. dont mind my haphazard presentation here.
P.s. I admire this idea that worthiness doesn’t exist because I hadn’t considered it that way. There isn’t a single being who is worthy or unworthy.
but the thing is, there is still some kind of rules and procedures of the world, criteria of certain pre-requisites for things to happen.
in folk science this is called “Causality” which is a nice made up concept to make a more orderly world.
however in magic it is super-causal, or beyond causal, or acausal (perhaps). There are no prereqs? Or are there…
I think it’s a tricky trick question because there CAN be. and perhaps there should be.
And so here comes the end of my thinking on “worth”. It is a comparison of values. “Is this worth that?” Meaning if you exchange this for that, transmute this into that…and so on.
If it takes 2 drops of water to create a 1 particle of ice (bear with this bullshit for the demonstration, I really dont want to exert my brain) Then Water is worth 0.5 an Ice, or Ice is worth 2 Waters.
Makes sense?
What I have found useful in the mental things is that it is not so simple to “destroy” something or get rid of it. But you transmute it into something else, more useful. “Worth” and “worthiness” of a being made irrelevant - I say it’s to re-define the boundaries of the definitions of the meanings of symbols and patterns which structure the language of thought.
and beyond this
all power
forever, and since forever ago
muwahahahahahaha (and yeah I’m broke as hell, no moneyz, but im hella smart and I created this whole illusion of existence mofuckas)
Originally commented by u/[deleted] on 2021-12-03 14:56:07 (hn0xoz6)
I just had an idea of a potential answer to your query.
For a casual complementary component to WeirdWay, what if one of the mods or those more in touch with the spirit of the subreddit create a server on a chatting platform?
I can think of two simple options: Discord and Telegram.
Both of these offer free server hosting with no restrictions to creating a server besides having an account. (E-mail or phone number perhaps)
I’d surely join. I wonder if others might be interested in such a thing.
Originally commented by u/[deleted] on 2021-12-03 21:06:13 (hn1uv6k)
I’m in if you lot are in
Yes sir!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, I share the same views you expressed.
While I do see a great deal of awfulness around I’ve been finding ways to enjoy the game and change the game. Yes I am caught up in it all to some degree (hence my late reply) but I am enjoying it because I chose to commit to something that I’m passionate about. I also enjoy watching the world transform out of this slaving mess as I’ve foreseen it. The state of the world is after all in my perspective and I take responsibility for it, and with time it drifts into my line of intent.
Worthiness is inherent.
This isn’t entirely skilful in that you’re still feeding that notion that worthiness is a pre-requisite of magic, but sometimes it’s easier to chip away at bad habits slowly than to try to toss them out in one go.
I very much agree.
You should always be aware of your desires and be committed to them. Not the survival/biological driven cravings, and not the fear driven impulses that arise from your commitment to being a human within a dumb system, but the desires that only exist to satisfy their existence.
Originally commented by u/syncretik on 2021-12-08 13:11:06 (hno3qkc)