My Beautiful Dark Twisted Enlightenment

Enlightenment is funny!

You know, I’ve been really sneaky and shifty on here. In The Real and Final Enlightenment, I mentioned something about an “esoteric Gnosis”, and then I write Enlightenment Is Obvious, which is a sustained attempt to get the reader to enlightenment, but I never clarified just what is this Gnosis, and why I think I can enlighten my readers.

Well, it’s time to come out of that closet: I AM one of those lunatics running around out there claiming to have attained enlightenment, like Daniel Ingram, and I know it sounds crazy, but if it’s crazy, then I have been crazy non-stop for 9 months now and I still have my job, and that sure doesn’t fit the definition of crazy. Besides, I recently read a lama say that if you met a bodhisattva, you would think he’s a lunatic, so there’s that to consider. Having seen Ingram on video, I definitely think there is some insanity there.

Wait, why should anyone listen to me? Perhaps this is just the ramblings of a delusional madman: having spent time interned in psych wards and working with the homeless, I can tell you the ramblings of madmen are universally interesting, and perhaps, that can entice you. Though perhaps, I find them interesting for the same reason I find the Bhagavad Gita fascinating, just a quirk of my psyche, a yen for what resists reason: perhaps both are just impenetrable confusion to you, and if so, this is a waste of your time.

Regardless, I think this is the truth, and if Jesus taught me anything, it is that the truth owes nothing to anyone, and that it desperately wants to get out. So here is something I call truth.

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How I got enlightened

Twice in my life I have had psychotic breaks that ended with me in a psych ward. And both times, they felt like transcendent, ecstatic, mystical states. But I was staying on my meds after that, because everything pointed to it being just insanity in the end. Then a truly stunning serendipity hit me over the head: someone from the publisher of this book shows up in the Astral Codex Ten comments section promoting it. Psychosis, Psychiatry and Psychospiritual Considerations: Engaging and Better Understanding the Madness and Spiritual Emergence Nexus. Psychospiritual? Madness and spiritual emergence? What is this? I immediately bought it. It was written by an Australian psychiatrist, who is arguing that it is in fact impossible to distinguish psychosis from a spiritual state and that therefore the condition psychiatry knows as psychosis can be handled in entirely different ways than suppressing it with medication. Interesting anecdotes are relayed, of a guy in New Zealand whose psychotic visions didn’t go away in spite of being on the max dosage of 4 different antipsychotics, and who eventually got a handle on it by relying on the shamans of his people, becoming something of a shaman himself. Of a defunct institute called Diabasis House, that dealt with psychotic patients without using medications. I got some pretty interesting synchronicities¹ too: I was rereading the graphic novel The Invisibles, and in one of its panels, there is a book in the background titled The Killing Moon. Shortly after, I see an episode of the Netflix series 1899, which is about a world where things are not what they seem, that ends with a song called The Killing Moon playing, which contains these lyrics:

Fate

Up against your will

Through the thick and thin

He will wait until

You give yourself to him

Which lyrics the guy who wrote this song says he just woke up with in his head one day, so they appear to be rather significant. To me the interpretation is, or was, clear: I am being called to toss caution to the wind and reach to the Infinite, the truth behind the veil, which I can only reach by going off my meds.

Of course, now I see this as brainfart worship, inauthentic spirituality, but that was the headspace I was in back then. I very badly wanted that ecstatic, psychotic state again.

So I tell my psychiatrist about this. She’s against it, but says that if I insist, I should have a plan for how I’m going to handle being psychotic again. I don’t go off my meds immediately due to this, but I do tell my mom I am planning to do this, to her horror. And then I tell my brother.

And that turned into a 6 hour discussion of him insisting that I should not do this, and me insisting that I can do this without causing a catastrophe like I did the previous two times. Early on, I suddenly exclaimed the following:

Spirituality is not a fart in the brain!

Once said though, I was immediately doubtful. It isn’t? How would I know that? As the night wore on, I realized something important: how can I say it will be different this time, if right now, I am acting as selfishly as I did both of those times? When I was psychotic, I cared for nothing other than the crazy impulses running through my head, and I trampled all over my family in the process. I am doing it yet again, so how on earth will it be different this time? And I eventually decided that in spite of my intense desire and certainty that I need to go off my meds, I needed to put my family’s wishes above my own, for once, and stay on them. Even if this would sever any possible connection I could have with spirituality, which is what I genuinely believed then.

And this did something weird to my mind. It’s like by reading all those scriptures and metaphysical texts, I had assembled a nuclear bomb in my head, and reaching that decision detonated it.

My mind became an extremely lively place. I started making connections between all kinds of disparate things. The Real and Final Enlightenment came to me and it was like it was burning a hole in my brain.

I did not call it enlightenment back then, because I took Daniel Ingram very seriously. In Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, he lays out this extremely detailed map to enlightenment, and whatever was happening to me did not match that map at all. Hell, I never experienced a jhana. I didn’t even have a meditation practice going when this happened. But it was great nevertheless, and why do we pretend like enlightenment is the highest spiritual attainment? Perhaps there are other strange lands one can go to, and I was ready to stake my claim to one such land. I was going to call it the Gnosis, not taking this name from Gnosticism or Plato, but from The Second Apocalypse series of fantasy books, where the Gnosis is the esoteric mystery at the heart of the most powerful school of magic in the setting. I was also going to call it the Neverending Party: the starting of this Neverending Party for all mankind is what the Invisibles define as their ultimate goal. And it really does feel like that, a Neverending Party in my head. It hasn’t slowed down since this happened back in January. If anything, it has become more intense in some ways: I have this incredible thirst for spending time with people now, which is appropriate given I wasted my twenties being functionally a hermit, and not even a cool mystical hermit, just a boring STEM atheist nerd.

Is this just hypomania though? Here are the DSM-5 criteria for it:

A distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood and abnormally and persistently increased activity or energy, lasting at least 4 consecutive days and present most of the day, nearly every day.

During the period of mood disturbance and increased energy and activity, 3 (or more) of the above symptoms (4 if the mood is only irritable) have persisted, represent a noticeable change from usual behavior, and have been present to a significant degree.

The episode is associated with an unequivocal change in functioning that is uncharacteristic of the individual when not symptomatic.

The disturbance in mood and the change in functioning are observable by others.

The episode is not severe enough to cause marked impairment in social or occupational functioning or to necessitate hospitalization. If there are psychotic features, the episode is, by definition, manic.

The episode is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication, or other treatment).

I sure am hitting items 1 through 5 (minus irritability), and potentially 6 too, as I had changed my medication about 3 months before this happened, but my psychiatrist, back when I still saw her, had something pretty interesting to say about hypomania:

If there were a pill that gave me hypomania, I would take it.

So methinks this isn’t much of a problem. I am stable, I experience the full range of emotions, including negative ones, which is very unlike previous spiritual ecstasies I had felt (those simply ended when the good vibes evaporated), my family is happy to see me making the changes I am making, and I engage in general altruistic acts, which is the true litmus test of spiritual development. I still remember the first time I seriously doubted whether this state represented a significant spiritual development: doubt became sheer terror for a bit. Then it all evaporated, leaving me with my enlightenment.

The doubt really is important, the fact I can go "This is just hypomania!". It just bounces off of me, but I made the attempt: in a psychotic state, you never second guess yourself. And you know, something in me really wants to keep prodding at this, really make me think this is just hypomania, but then I realize I am just trying to deconstruct happiness for some sick reason.

Besides what would making myself believe this even accomplish? Maybe I could make myself feel that terror again, but it would just evaporate, again, so what was the point? Happiness really is the natural state of the mind: it’s the stuff that isn’t happiness that has to justify itself, conditional on your happiness not coming at anyone else’s expense.

But ultimately, I did not call it enlightenment because of Daniel Ingram and his maps. But due to the way my mind works now, I suddenly recalled the episode of Huineng tearing the sutras, realized the full import of that, which is that if you’re twisting yourself into pretzels thinking you need to fit someone else’s definition of what the goal of life is, you are missing the point very hard, and also realized all the cryptic descriptions of enlightenment that now make sense to me.

Enlightenment is like the sky turns into a blue pancake and drops on your head

Slightly paraphrased from lama Chögyam Trungpa, and yes, it really do be that way. To elaborate: when I reached the decision to stay on my meds, it’s like reality itself became this massively oppressive force that crushed me. The world of the senses became thicker, much thicker, for a few moments. It felt like dying. I once read in a book on Kabbalah that God is pressure: I fancy that perhaps, that is the pressure that I experienced.

Enlightenment is the ultimate and final disappointment

Chögyam Trungpa again, and extremely true. You build up all these expectations around enlightenment, that it is this elevated state, you are gonna see through the damn Matrix, but the moment it happens it’s just this sodden disappointment: this is it? There’s nothing else? Just this? But then the world starts feeling like this goddamn miracle, a continuous revelation, and suddenly it is believable that a God who is Love made all of this. Truly a huge disappointment, but the very last one!

Enlightenment is ordinary life, but you’re floating three feet off the ground

Can’t figure out where I heard this from, or source it², but indeed it is, emphasis on ordinary. The state “which all the Devas from Indra down yearn for disconsolately”³, is in fact, ordinary mind, which is said to be “the Way” in Zen.

But didn’t I say something weird happened to me, and actually described some weird stuff too? Well, that’s part of the “floating three feet off the ground” bit. It is ordinary mind because all the elements of enlightened mind were already there, and were always there, but now they fly around freely, kinda like one of the theories of mind Plato puts forward in the Theaetetus, the Aviary, in which the contents of mind, thoughts, beliefs, and so on, are seen as a bunch of birds flying around. Enlightened mind is not made of different stuff than ordinary mind, it’s just that the stuff in ordinary mind starts behaving differently.

In Dzogchen, they call this self-liberation: stuff in your mind arises and is instantaneously self-liberated, that is, it comes and goes, blows around, whereas in an unenlightened mind, there is always an element of grasping and manipulation with the contents of the mind. “Oh, this is me, I have to pay attention to it, I have to process this, I have to do something with it”. Not so.

You emotions, your thoughts, and so on, are like a movie. But you are not this movie, you are the screen the movie is playing on.

This is something a woman I met as I was leaving a radical honesty workshop about 8 years ago told me, and honestly, if I had internalized this, I would have been enlightened right then and there, as that is pretty much all there is to get regarding enlightenment. In fact, I must insist:

You emotions, your thoughts, and so on, are like a movie. But you are not this movie, you are the screen the movie is playing on.

This is all there is to get regarding enlightenment. There is nothing else to it.

Unenlightened mind is always trying to manipulate this movie, whereas enlightened mind mostly just lets the movie play, and when it manipulates, it does it not because it needs to, but because it’s fun.

I am pure consciousness, and the world is like a magician’s show. How could I imagine there is anything there to take up or reject?

Same concept, but from the Ashtavakra Gita. I again insist, that is literally all there is to get. Perhaps you read that, and you get a niggling doubt, a craving for more, a dissatisfaction. That is just more movie. The presence of such things does not mean you are not enlightened. Because:

you have been enlightened from beginninglessness

This is something I learned from the Aro gTér⁴. That screen has always been there, and the movie is always just a movie. The first time I was in a psych ward, it was because of suicidal depression. And now I can say that even when I was in there, there was enlightenment. The screen was still there, even if the movie sucked at the time. Of course, I was really absorbed in the movie then, but that doesn’t mean I stopped being the screen!

Ashtavakra Gita:

Equal in pain and in pleasure, equal in hope and in disappointment, equal in life and in death, and complete as you are, you can find peace.

Tao Te Ching:

He who knows how to live can walk abroad

Without fear of rhinoceros or tiger.

He will not be wounded in battle.

For in him rhinoceroses can find no place to thrust their horn,

Tigers no place to use their claws,

And weapons no place to pierce.

Why is this so?

Because he has no place for death to enter.

In enlightenment it’s not that there is no pain, it’s just that it doesn’t bother you. Can’t be wounded in battle. No place to use their claws. “Safe as the mighty eye”, a song that is the very essence of Advaita Vedanta!

And no place for death to enter, for death is just the end of a movie: the screen is unharmed.

Speaking of death: on here, I attempt to undermine science and even reason as I prosecute my case against reality, but you know what? Materialism may well be true, and death may be an irrecoverable annihilation, and I just do not care. Gate gate pāragate bitch!⁵ Sure, sure, you typical secular believes this, but the only reason they are not bothered by it is that they don’t think about it very often, and when they think about it, they only grasp it intellectually, they don’t feel what a catastrophe that would be. I do feel it, but it just evaporates. And even further on death: it really is very funny to me how there is all this material out there selling people on enlightenment, and it makes them think:

That sounds great, I want to get enlightened too!

Knowing what I now know, here’s what that really means:

That sounds great, I want reality to kill me too!

Godspeed, my friend! Godspeed. I wasn’t looking for it when it happened to me, as I said. But who knows, perhaps Tröma Nakmo:

...shall one day sport with your carcass also and then "togethaaa, we will devour the very godsssss!".

...

Wait, what? Dearie me, I’m getting too big for my britches here, that’s a good three or four blasphemy levels above what I was planning in this article.

But before we move on to the scheduled blasphemy, it is true that in spite of enlightenment being really very simple, it is also really hard, because:

samsara is nirvana

Some schools of Buddhism take this position, and it means that in their essence, samsara and nirvana are the same thing. The essence of samsara is desire and you are definitely not getting nirvana without a strong desire. Scriptures and practices are just wood for your funeral pyre in the end, but the fire that incinerates all that and you is the fire of desire. Buddha demonstrated this himself quite thoroughly with the example of his own life prior to Buddhahood, this lunatic fire impelling him to study under various gurus, practicing extreme austerities, and finally to sit under the Bodhi tree and not move until he worked everything out, and now we’ve come to the planned blasphemy because it’s time for:

My beef with the Buddha

I should be grateful to the guy, and I really am, because I definitely was not going to work this stuff out without him and his successors, but man, this guy was not perfect, his doctrine was not perfect, and it really is very tragic that one of the most philosophical spiritual traditions is also aggressively anti-human, at least as Buddha sold it.

We see it right from the start, when Buddha ditches his wife and child so he can go be spiritual⁶, but he would go on to double down on that shit:

I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Sāvatthī at Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s monastery. And on that occasion Ven. Saṅgāmaji had arrived in Sāvatthī to see the Blessed One. His former wife heard, “Master Saṅgāmaji, they say, has arrived in Sāvatthī.” Taking her small child, she went to Jeta’s Grove. On that occasion Ven. Saṅgāmaji was sitting at the root of a tree for the day’s abiding. His former wife went to him and, on arrival, said to him, “Look after me, contemplative — (a woman) with a little son.” When this was said, Ven. Saṅgāmaji remained silent. A second time… A third time, his former wife said to him, “Look after me, contemplative — (a woman) with a little son.” A third time, Ven. Saṅgāmaji remained silent.

Then his former wife, taking the baby and leaving him in front of Ven. Saṅgāmaji, went away, saying, “That’s your son, contemplative. Look after him.”

Then Ven. Saṅgāmaji neither looked at the child nor spoke to him. His wife, after going not far away, was looking back and saw Ven. Saṅgāmaji neither looking at the child nor speaking to him. On seeing this, the thought occurred to her, “The contemplative doesn’t even care about his son.” Returning from there and taking the child, she left.

Then Buddha shows up and he’s like "Now we’re cookin'!"⁷, and I’m like :/, no wait, I’m like:

but this shit is totally fucked!!!

What the hell Buddha, isn’t compassion a big part of your schtick, isn’t it massively self-indulgent to ditch your wife and young child so you can be terminally chill, and basically, someone, probably Frithjof Schuon, taught me somewhere that authentic spiritual development is done for the benefit of others, and this crap is very much not for the benefit of that woman and kid.

In fairness, due to Buddhism being so sophisticated, in time some of the successors low-key realized the founder of their religion was insane (aren’t they always?), and they came up with tantric practices and the notion that householders like me and Daniel Ingram can get enlightened, that everyone has buddhahood in them, basically patching out the initial bugs.

But still, you know what? The first thing I would do with a time machine would be getting the Buddha drunk so I can hear his drunken Dharma, which I am sure would be most enlightening and likely funny. “But how can Buddha be drunk, what happened to standing aloof from the movie?” Well, whatever comes out of Buddha’s mouth is technically movie also, and that can be very much affected by intoxicants, and this is why I stuck with the movie analogy instead of using a video game one, because perhaps all the screen can do with regards to the movie is get out of its way and let it play.

And now we move on to:

My beef with Jesus

Jesus! Truly the most KISS of the Messiahs, a nice change of pace from the Buddha’s esoteric nonsense. This simplicity is probably a big part of the reason his religion is the biggest one (at least, I want to think it’s that and not colonialism). And he truly is great, just look at the damn Sermon on the Mount, that shit was improvised, blurted out on the spurt of the moment, a true blast from the Infinite.

But then he says this:

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

John 14:6. And Jesus! Come on man, I love you, but you are really fucking me here!⁸ You make it so hard for us perennialists to sell our bullshit about the transcendent unity of all religions when you say shit like this!

And how do the perennialists work around this? They do not actually, René Guénon will say something like:

The different religions are the same God speaking in different languages

but this is quite a few, no, quite a lot of steps removed from actually working out how this doesn’t decisively contradict perennialism.

But you know, the perennialists, to a man, did not have my spiritual attainments (yeah, I went there), so I can do things they never dared do or even considered, and I’m really emboldened by this comment I saw on 4chan once⁹:

The problem with appealing to tradition is that every tradition got started by a heretic.

That anon is so right if you think about it for a few seconds, and I worked out a way to deal with this pesky comment from Jesus, which sadly does not leave him intact, and is heretical, but it’s the Truth, about which Meister Eckhart said:

Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go. ¹⁰

And perhaps it is not time to let Jesus go, but it is time to realize that:

Jesus was not perfect

Sure, non-Christians believe this already, but one path forward for Christianity (which is desperately needed, I’m 35, yet I’m the youngest person at my church) is to stop seeing him as flawless.

There is scriptural support for this:

Why do you call me good?

Mark 10:18. Why indeed? Has any Christian attempted to catalogue the ways in which Jesus was not good? Shouldn’t there be an obligation to do that, given Jesus himself stated this? I know of two:

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

This is textbook ego inflation. As the Liber Null & Psychonaut says:

the strongest, most obsessive egos belong to the least complete beings.

And that sure is an insanely, insanely strong ego, to think you are so damn special that you are truth and life, the only way to the Creator.

Yet, least complete beings? I can believe Jesus was flawed, but least complete? As Jesus said:

You will know them by their fruits.

Matthew 7:16. Perhaps some would like to say you could hoist Jesus by his own petard with this, but I think a dispassionate analysis of the situation would lead to something more like you could singe Jesus a bit with his own petard, or a lot, but not blow him away completely. I have heard serious academics argue that it gets likelier that slavery would have persisted to the present day if Christianity had never happened, as abolitionism was a decidedly Christian movement, and have you ever thought if we’re the sort of people who could abolish slavery? The abolitionists sure were annoying and persistent: the BLM protesters of recent times do not seem to be of their kind. And it has been pointed out that Christian moral intuitions are in the water supply: the entire notion that you should care about the weak was pretty much nonexistent in the pagan world.

But this sentence is the second way in which you know Jesus was flawed, because Christianity sure has yielded some fucked up fruit: persecutions, Crusades, inquisitions, hiding the Bible from the people, and purely from Jesus' words, you can see how they would lead to this, and it’s that intransigent first comment, making believers think "This is it! This is the entire truth!", no need to hesitate, just let the truth incinerate the world!

I think the Christian on the street could one day accept Jesus the flawed God-man, it just takes the non-dual insight that just because something is not perfect it doesn’t mean there is literally nothing there, and you know, when you’ve downloaded Yahweh into your head, I’m not really sure it’s possible to do better. Really, Yahweh is Love? Jesus was trying really hard here to play a really shitty hand, and I don’t envy his position.

In the end, the second thing I would do with a time machine is get Socrates in front of Jesus, I want to see how the Messiah holds up under Socratic questioning. I am betting some really great parables and pith sayings would have come from the encounter.

And there is an extra spicy fruit of Jesus that we shall now address.

My tentative views on Muhammad

Ah! Muhammad! *nervously looks both left and right* The real crazy diamond of spirituality! *ducks*

You know, I’m going to be deanonymizing myself soon¹¹, so I have to tread carefully here. Perhaps its time for apophatic heresy.

The Quran as a scripture is fascinating. The site in which I read it actually allows you to hear it recited which is absolutely critical. Because when you hear it, you just know this stuff came from God.

But the actual content! It’s thin… René Guénon says every spiritual tradition is a different fragment of something he calls the Primordial Tradition, and the Quran definitely sounds like something that comes from it, but I’m guessing that in the Primordial Tradition, the Quran analogue, which is also meant to be heard more than read, contains some kind of mish-mash of Buddhism with Advaita Vedanta, a long flowing meditation between anattā and Ātman, an audible yin-yang, instead of a stick and a carrot.

And Muhammad himself got up to some questionable shit. Such as ordering quite a few killings, including of 13 poets for attacking him or making fun of him through poetry¹² (never mind the general warring). Given the stuff I was ragging on Buddha and Jesus for, well, let’s say I’m not pleased about this.

And the Ummah itself, well, they in many ways are not living up to the true goal of spirituality, which is to become a doorway through which compassion enters the world.

But I read the Sufi Idries Shah’s Learning How to Learn, and Shah told me lots of FUNNY stories of Mullah Nasruddin, and I made a LOT of highlights, and I LEARNED a lot (about how to learn), and it was an important turning point in my spiritual quest, because he cited the Fihi Ma Fihi a lot and when I go buy it, it was over $80 bucks, so I was forced to really ask myself if this shit is just entertainment to me or something more serious. I did buy it!

And who can forget al-Hallaj, who ran down the streets screaming:

I am the Truth!

Which is but one example of a Sufi shath, an outrageous ecstatic utterance¹³, this one in particular being hugely significant, being, I daresay, spiritual E = mc^2.

And without Muhammad, the Sufis never happen.

I guess what I am trying to say here is that those poets had it coming.

Killing those poets was wrong? What are you really saying here? Plato used poets as the paradigmatic example of how art is a lie. The novel Augustus says Julius Caesar said:

"...read the poets, to love them, and to use them—but never to trust them.”

That is totally something Julius Caesar would have said, and even if he never said it, it makes perfect sense. Of course, we have a big-shot poet (Shelley) claiming that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, which is transparently hilarious: “Oh! The poet! His rhythmical brain-farts literally rule the world!” Like come the fuck on buddy, Plato was right, you don’t know anything! And you tell me one of these jackasses should get away with contradicting the Seal of the Prophets? And Muhammad really was that, there really have not been any Messiahs since him¹⁴. If it was wrong for Muhammad to behead those poets, that means it is wrong for Truth to vanquish a Lie, and this just will not do. “The ending of a life is the ending of an entire universe”. The Bhagavad Gita says:

Nay, but as when one layeth

His worn-out robes away,

And, taking new ones, sayeth,

“These will I wear to-day!”

So putteth by the spirit

Lightly its garb of flesh,

And passeth to inherit

A residence afresh.

Giving those poets a change of clothes is ultimately insignificant. “Human rights!” Human rights? I am already blaspheming against spirituality, you think I can’t blaspheme against your absurd liberal pieties all day too? "They are not pieties, they are…". What are they? “...philosophy” So the philosophers can tell you how to live? “...” What the philosophers have actually learned is that a string of words can prove anything, anything at all. Write 208, no, 1,905 pages on why you should kill yourself and then kill yourself. Go insane because a horse got beaten then get quoted by Beyoncé. Meaningless quibbling over language. The final word on philosophy! “Democracy is not grounded in philosophy!” Then on what is it grounded? “The will of the people” The “people” are something the Ashtavakra Gita calls “samsara’s bewildered beasts of burden”, that the Gnostics call the hylics, the beings who could never understand spiritual truth. And you say these are the beings who should rule the world and veto Muhammad? Democracy is purely and simply the reign of darkness. “I understand truth”. Yeah, good luck convincing anyone of that. You are in a cult where one of the rules is that no one can say what is true. We all have to get along after all! Politeness is the One True God! But Muhammad showed that spirituality is above that. The Spirit can behead you if you are in its way. For spirituality is about Truth, and the Truth wants to murder anything that isn’t Truth. You don’t get it if you have not seen this.

Which is why it’s so important to be funny about all this, God literally wants to kill us, that is the meaning of all those apocalyptic prophecies, and I love God, but there has to be another way! This is probably why Jesus said Yahweh is Love: an act of God-taming.

And yes, that was all very funny to me, my sense of humor is extremely dark, I find the story behind my suicidal depression to be incredibly hilarious these days! And if you didn’t find that funny, then it seems secular humanism is your One True God and you have not grasped the true meaning of the Buddhist concept of emptiness yet.

As Idries Shah said:

If you cannot laugh frequently and genuinely, you have no soul.

This is very true! And yet: what a humorless thing to say about humor! I wonder if he said this to anyone who didn’t laugh at his jokes:

Shah: Mulla Nasrudin objected to the captain of a ship making fast the sails aloft, when as he said: “Can’t you see that the trouble is at sea-level!”

Audience: ...sensible chuckle

Shah: You have no soul.

You see Muslims, you see! He IS one of you! If you’re going to SUBMIT to something, SUBMIT to the Sufis! That is, in fact, my solution to all the trouble in Islam:

SUBMIT TO THE SUFIS

They will take you down some strange and funny esoteric head trips that will give you some crucial insights into the nature of Allah and the long dream we are all on.

---

At last, the beefing is over, but as it turns out, all these beefs are the same beef:

My beef with words

Really, this is an issue with words, because none of these guys have their skin on anymore. The words are all that is left, and in fairness, Jesus did say:

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

Matthew 24:35. But really, with a statement like that, you have to wonder what happens if Jesus met a Zen master, because that is a very full teacup Jesus was carrying around in his crackpot head.

Zen and Taoism are right in being leery about words. In fact, I think every tradition develops a skepticism of words in the end, because it’s all nonsense. We have this phrase in Spanish that has no equivalent in English, which I find very interesting:

El papel aguanta

That is:

The paper can take it

It can take anything you put in it. Anything at all. We saw those philosophical suicide notes, but there is more. Atheism. Nihilism. Materialism. It’s all just a string of words in the end, and all a string of words can do is give you a sensation at their end, "This feels true! This feels false! This feels ambivalent!", but lots of things give a sensation like that and the sensation is fundamentally empty, it arises and passes away, is just a bit of movie.

Coming back to my strongest mystical experience, the time I exploded out of my body and reality dissolved into a Death Star trench run made of letters, well, that vision has legs to it, a Death Star made of letters. Isn’t that nihilism pretty much? In the vision, I didn’t figure out how to fire the photon torpedoes, but I think I now know: it’s humor. As Mark Twain said:

Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand

Humor is the death of words.¹⁵ Zen and the Sufis know this, and this is why they will use humor in their spirituality. How about we fire the photon torpedoes at nihilism?

The philosophers, they shat out a TRULY MIGHTY BRAINFART, and now, life is meaningless!

Life’s answer is trivial:

Ok, then I guess it is philosophy that is meaningless.

The sheer hubris of mere words thinking they could dull the brilliance of life by even a single lumen. But there are good words, that enhance the brilliance of life and are therefore true, for truth shines¹⁶. And this is why we have spirituality. But as the Sufis say:

Words have to die if humans are to live.

And it is time to live.

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That concludes the essay, but I have two announcements to make. The first, and boy, I am sure coming out of closets in a major way today, is this: I AM an INCEL!

This is the pose I struck as I literally just said that

I wasn’t kidding when I said I was a boring STEM hermit, because the fact is am now a 35 year old virgin, and I never took a vow of celibacy, and this makes me an incel. No, I never bought into incel ideology, but I would like to have sex, yeah.

I’m saying this now, because I am so confident that I will finally have sex now that I already started writing my own triumphal parade about it that I will post on here, and to enhance it, I want it to be a called shot: I said this was happening, and I made it happen. Preregistering my hypothesis, as the rationalists say!

How did this happen? I was always weird. And shy. And fat. I am none of those things now. Ok, I’m still weird, but I’m plugging away at being socially calibrated. And something else I recently noticed: post-enlightenment, I didn’t immediately set about fixing my sexlessness, because, well, it’s not something I think about very often, which is probably a really BIG part of the reason I am a 35 year old virgin.

But I am out there, learning a lot, even kissed a girl a little the other day, for the first time in EIGHT FUCKING YEARS, I might add, then she friendzoned me, but still, progress! I will have things to say about the esoteric mysteries of the salsa, what the Corpus Hermeticum has to say about dating, and a truly tremendous piece of life and spiritual advice I got from my Nintendo Switch, but I have to actually get laid to make that happen, and so, I will be going to mass tonight and then hitting the bars. Square Circle! Tantra! Yin-yang! The collision of opposites! Give life its fullest brilliance, like the Elden Ring!

About that piece, in it I will share the very funny list of things I did before ever having sex, but I want to share one very juicy item from it now:

Got women subscribing to my blog

Seriously, what a WAY to discover there are women into your shit! You have to hit me up on Notes or on X/twitter, you lovely desert blooms you, if nothing else, so you can give me ideas about where I can meet your very exotic kind IRL, and who knows, perhaps I am even down for some Computer Love¹⁷:

“If you’re enlightened, shouldn’t you be without desire?”

Well, I don’t think I could convince Buddha I am enlightened, but ordinary mind is enlightened mind as they teach in Zen and Dzogchen, and it is purely because I understand why they said that that I claim enlightenment. There are even lamas that will speak about their desires being endless. Tantra is weird like that.

“Shouldn’t you be utterly fearless now with women, never hesitating to talk to them? It’s all a movie right?”

W-w-ell, ordinary mind, ORDINARY, I say, but, yes, I am doing things I never in my life dared do before, even if I am not at the point I am willing to just talk to women in the street, like some dating gurus teach.

“So you do hesitate? What happened to three feet off the ground?”

MAN!

SO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND SUBMIT TO MY SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY!!!

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Lastly, this blog will be going on something of a hiatus as I redirect my creative energies to another project. It is called The Question, and The Question is:

What do you wish that everybody knew?

The idea is to collect lots of answers to this question from as many people as possible, anonymously. And it’s not asking for a personal secret, or personal anything (answers like that will be rejected), but rather, something you have understood that you feel is rather important. So important, that everyone should know it.

There are many ways to look at this thing, but the elevator pitch is:

Wikipedia, but for wisdom

Another angle is spiritual, for I have noticed that spiritual knowledge is both:

1. Highly certain of itself

2. Needs to share itself with the world

So anyone who can answer that question is, in fact, in possession of something spiritual, their very own shard of the Absolute!

I have a lot more to say on it, including the story of its entirely mystical origin, but that will have to wait for the post I write when I finally launch the thing.

That is finally it, now the words can die. Go live and manifest some compassion straight out of your Buddha-nature!

1. A synchronicity is simply a meaningful coincidence. It's a concept Carl Jung invented (or discovered if you prefer).

2. This is happening with some frequency. Moving forward, if I can't source a quote, I'm totally stealing it. It's not plagiarism if the original is gone!

3. From the Ashtavakra Gita

4. That’s a fun rabbit hole to go down into. It’s this English guy who got so deep into Tibetan Buddhism that he ended up becoming a lama, taking a Tibetan name, and founding a sect. It’s where David Chapman learned most of his Buddhism from and it was my introduction to Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, which is truly worthy of the name. And that guy though: when I see him on video, he terrifies me. I feel like he has the eyes of a tiger. I wonder if anyone else sees that?

5. How’s that for a sentence you never expected to read?

6. Of course, I trampled all over my family in my own spiritual quest, even though I finally backed off. This sort of thing is tragically par for the course in spirituality. I knew a guy whose father got deep into New Age, took an alien name, and ditched him and his mother. And there are many like me, who decide to go off their meds so they can be spiritual ending up cut off from their families because their families can’t deal with the insanity, or sometimes, in extreme cases, living in the street.

7. No, that’s not what he said, what he said was:

At her coming,

he didn’t delight;

at her leaving,

he didn’t grieve.

A victor in battle, freed from the tie:

He’s what I call a brahman.

But this is, however, spiritualese for "Now we’re cookin'!"

8. #fuckedbyjesus

9. “Yes! This is a wise decision!”

10. Compare with Dostoevsky’s:

If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

It is clear that the true mystic is of the party of the Truth, and not of muddle-headed romanticism, which is a bit painful for me to admit given how much I like Dostoevsky.

11. I was only anonymous because that’s how Scott Alexander did it, I didn’t have any particular reason to do it.

12. Which is really interesting as Muhammad is in many ways the ultimate poet: it makes sense that he would feel especially threatened by enemy poets.

13. I fancy this essay is pretty shathy. Perhaps I shath something out?

14. This was pointed out to me by, of all things, the manga Shaman King as a teenager. In Shaman King a tribe of Native Americans holds a big tournament every 600 years to decide who is going to be the Shaman King, the spiritual leader, of all mankind. 600 years is pretty close to the spacing between Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, and it points out that there hasn’t been a winner to the tournament since Muhammad. And this is very true! Islam is the youngest world religion: there hasn’t been anyone on that level since, which lends a lot of credence to Muhammad’s claim of being the Seal of the Prophets, the last prophet of God.

Interestingly René Guénon says in The King of the World that Jesus was a priest-king, who united the royal and sacerdotal functions into one person. Sounds like a dead ringer for a Shaman King, but Shaman King sounds cooler. I still entertain fantasies of being a Shaman King myself, though I have not fully taken leave of my senses: the proper function of a legitimate Shaman King is to turn everyone into a Shaman King. Do you think you are a Shaman King? Why not?

15. There I go saying humorless things about humor…

16. Lifted shamelessly out of The Second Apocalypse series

17. “Yes! Hit on your female readers! That is a neat trick that is sure to keep them around!”