A Short Intro

Humanities professor Andrew Hui defines an aphorism as "a short saying that requires interpretation".

He notes, that aphorisms arrive before, after, or in response to systemic philosophic arguments.

In a sense, an aphorism is the 'first variation or sketch' on an idea that will only grow and become deeper.

 

Aphorisms have their role solidified in the canon of Western philosophy.

Many of my most-beloved thinkers -- the Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus my dear friend), Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, Emil Cioran, Nietzsche, and of course, Marcus Aurelius -- they loved their aphorisms.

 

So, dear readers, the first part of this small book is a series of aphorisms roughly divided into the categories of art and consciousness, and the second part of this book is a collection of essays from my website.

The purpose of these words is not yet to provide a systematic philosophy, but rather to communicate some general truths, ruminations, sketches of concepts, with the purpose of raising questioning, provoking thought, and hopefully leaving the reader with a slightly better impression of the world, and perhaps even some inspiration for another reader's own work.

 

 

 

 

Art

 

1

 

 

Nihil novi sub sole: There is nothing new under the sun - Ecclesiastes 1:9

 

Art is cyclical: What is new and exciting today is a restatement of ancient truths in a modern context

Marvel movies are Greek tragedies in disguise; the modern corpus of literature invariably builds off Shakespeare, who in turn brings an English perspective to the Greeks and to the Bible

 

The expression of every great Truth begins banal and develops lavishly into mythological symbolism

The artist signifies, to their own work and feelings, in acts of creative inspiration, the mythology of the greats

They create anew what had become ancient, eternity restored, the natural process of rejuvenation and revitalisation

Great Art, in the purest sense, is an expression of simple truth, made beautiful

 

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different  - T.S. Eliot

 

 

2

 

 

A poet is a transcriber of the Soul: Just as the journalist details political events and an economist details economic events, so too does the poet detail and transcribe the voyages and journeys of the ship of the Soul, as it braves the waters of psychic conflict

 

When an artist creates, they bring into the Art all the meaning and knowledge they have within themselves

Knowingly or unknowingly, an Art's fabric is intertwined with the soul of the artist

Every art piece contains with it layers of meaning, a unique and irreproducible carving of the world as seen through the eyes of the artist

As soon as the artist creates the piece, the meaning of it is beyond them

Often, it is only in retrospect that the artist will realise what they were expressing

As such, the ability to find and analyse meaning in a piece of art is as much a process of art as the art itself

 

The artist is influenced by every facet of their social, political and philosophical context

Each artist captures with their art an image and model of the world, layered in the art are levels of meaning and the interplay of historic ideas

It follows, that there are infinite ways to represent an idea or experience, and that each representation carries with it layers of meaning and context

as such, there are many ways in which Art (as a generality) and (as an individual piece), can be understood

 

 

3

 

 

Battle of the Artist

For the artist, the magic of the feeling is in being unable to capture it

The artist can only live, experience, feel uniqueness, when they can subjugate to their art the quality of whatever experiences previously caught them

Just as soon as the artist is able to capture the feeling of the experience, they can discard it, feel free from it, feel free to live again

Ready to be caught by another hook

 

The eternal paradox of creation is the struggle of the artist to create the art they wish to enjoy

The paradox is such that the artist simply wishes to connect, to express, to be unshackled and to

float down to the depths of their emotion, even if only for a second

And yet, through this desire to feel, the artist subjects himself to the domain of eternal alienation

The more the artist creates the art they wish to see, the more they have more art they wish to see, a never-ending rabbit chase

The artist is always disconnected and outside of the real world in that they can only view the real world as a means to an end -- their art

And yet, the artist is always alienated from other artworks, in seeing only from it what they can do better or what they wish to steal

And finally, the artist is alienated from their own artwork, seeing in their own art only all the potentialities left unexpressed

That is the artists battle

 

A continual revolt against Sartre's Nausée: Art is the continual process of self-over-coming

 

There is always an endless pain to artistic creation

It is never enough, there is no completion, the flames are inextinguishable

Artistic creation is the unerring breeding ground of productive intellectual realisations

The fertile birthplace of symbolic understanding; synchronicities and multiplicities

Artistic creation is a devotion to the mystical oneness, to the incomprehensible silence

To make art, one must come face to face with the Absolute

 

 

4

 

 

Silence: A quiet mind

Oneness: A feeling of profound connection with all of nature and humanity

These are the companions an artist requires

 

When making art, you don't start with language, sounds, structure, a full understanding

Rather, you must be able to simply stand and see and most importantly, feel

To embody the creative spirit you must be ready to feel everything within yourself in full essence and therefore full force

To withstand the blows of the greatest tragedies allows you to sing sad songs from the bottom of your heart, with a light voice

We don't learn out of comfort and knowledge, rather, we learn from the need for comfort and knowledge

It is in the face of the Absolute (that which is total, beyond understanding) that the logical mind must bow down, lending itself to the birth of Art, a tribute to Silence and Oneness

Purposeless wonder is a respite for artistry

 

 

5

 

 

"The more these speculations depart from our common conceptions and consequently from nature or practical applications, the better they show us the working of the human mind which constructs them when it becomes freed from the tyranny of the external world, and the better, in consequence, it comes to know itself." - Henri Poincare, 'The Future of Mathematics' . 23rd December 1908.

 

Art for Art Sake

Nietzsche believed that without art, life itself would not be worth living, a sentiment that Robin Williams evokes in Dead Poets Society: Without art, all you have are statements-of-facts and their relations

The world is relegated to a wholly material nature --

without art, much of what we do are abstractions of survival mechanisms, we eat and sleep and work so that we can keep eating and sleeping

Economy, science, business, this keeps us alive

Art, religion, philosophy, this gives us a reason to live

Consequently, if we value life itself, consuming and producing art is good in and of itself

 

The influence and pressure of modern economic systems relegates the consumption of art as secondary to economic need & utility

Historically, prosperous societies would value art as a good unto itself; the ability to view and understand art would be socially rewarded, inculcating upon people a pressure and desire to be well-read and educated

The artist is seen only through the groups he represents, and more fundamentally, how much money the art can generate: Classical music, as an example, was not judged from a financial viewpoint but from an artistic viewpoint, in modern economic systems, almost all art is assessed and 'understood' through 'viewership figures' and profit

Increasingly, the artist is incentivised to only make the art that is financially viable; therefore, the intrinsic sense of motivation that creates art itself is slowly being eroded

 

When art is socially encouraged for its own sake, artists thrive, as do all those that get to enjoy the art or be involved with it in any way

When art flourishes for its own sake, so does the culture and richness of the people the art touches

 

 

6

 

 

The historic role of the shaman, the mystic, the religious sage -- is being embodied through the modern artist -- artists are akin to those brave psychonauts, ancient explorers and shamans -- in that they venture deep into unknown territory whether external or internal, bringing back with them whatever wonders and wisdom they can glean from desolate and dark places

 

Mikhail Bakhtin's Carnival is 'the totality of popular festivities, rituals and other carnival forms', allowing for:

1. Familiar and free interactions: The Carnival often brought the unlikeliest of people together

2. Eccentricity: With the dissolution of hierarchical relationships, ordinarily unacceptable behaviour became acceptable

3. Carnivalistic mésalliance: The familiar and free format of Carnival allows all dualistic separations of hierarchical worldview to reunite in living relationship with one another

4. Profanation: In Carnival, the strict rules of piety and respect for official notions of the 'sacred' are stripped of their power (1)

(1) - Wikipedia entry on 'Carnivalesque'

 

The Carnival, the thousand tales of a thousand villages, are layered deep within the fabric of your soul, to take the essence and infuse it into a modern context is its own form of artistry

 

Art started off as a self-aware way of communication within tribes, a way to capture the shared experiences of the tribe

As tribes evolved into complex hierarchies, art became a way to communicate across levels of the hierarchy, and eventually art developed to contain a form of mythology

Art began to present a closed-off, idealised view: No longer self-aware but rather seeking to encapsulate an ideal, an ethos, an understanding

As such it became a form of aspiration for all members in the hierarchy -- most commonly represented through myths in which low-class members, against all odds, reach the top of the hierarchy

Art goes in cycles: From the idealised views of the Renaissance, Art regresses back into a form of self-aware expressionism in the form of the Polyphonic Novel and Impressionist schools of art

This modern cycle is represented through the transition from idealised forms of Cinema in the 1940s and 50s (the drama! Film noir!), to the self-aware, form-defying, meta-cinema of the 1960s (Godard and all those he influenced)

The modern iteration of this trend is best represented through sitcoms such as The Simpsons and Rick and Morty: In being gleefully self-aware, these shows deconstruct and parody ideals in a way that leads to the construction of new ideals, which are really just modern appropriations of ancient truths, resetting the cycle

 

Meaning, we started making art knowing that the observer was viewing and actively participating in the creation of art's meaning, to viewing them as fixed and apart, to once again returning to self-referential art

 

 

7

 

 

The creative spirit's ancestral birth home is the inner child, whereas the Hero we all see within ourselves, is the egoic manifestation of the creative spirit against it's real world opposition

 

The inner world of the artist is entirely feeling based: We are, through our inner child, rendering an entirely emotional picture of the world

This 'picture' is essentially an impressionistic feeling of the world as opposed to an intellectualisation or perception of the world

This 'picture' is not realistic at all, and yet, it is how our inner child interprets and experiences the world

Impressionist and Expressionist painters, Nietzschean philosophers, the Symbolist poets, stream-of-consciousness literature (Faulkner and Pynchon), these artists are rendering a feeling-based emotional picture of the world through their art

 

When you engage in the creative process, you enter a timeless state you can enter at any time where you see a dancing, judgement-less array of the contents of your emotional inner world

The artistic process feeds off your emotional content: Whatever you feel, in the truest sense, gets projected onto your canvas, your job is to capture it as clearly as you can

As such, the great artists discover themselves and are brave in honestly sharing their discoveries with others

An artist indirectly educates and liberates others, but primarily, the artist is attempting to liberate themselves from the tyranny of their emotions by representing and capturing them

Art doesn’t care about your lovers, but that you have lovers, and that you love them deeply and grieve them deeply such that you can make art about it — live your life to create Art, is the desire of Art itself

 

The tragedy and pain at the root of all great stories and beings, is ultimately the clearest form of influence on great art

 

 

8

 

 

The Privileged Responsibility of the Artist

If you have the ability to go deep enough into any experience, that experiences becomes a source of infinite inspiration

The flames of artistry are inexhaustible; your cup overflows with prophecies and visions

As such, the Artist is eternally chained to an internal command to do right by their own gifts; it's a curse to find out that you are an Artist, because from that moment forward, you have a responsibility

Not to yourself, nor to others, but to whatever it is that allows you to create Art; call it consciousness, the light within, divinity, when you come face-to-face with it, you know it -- that you owe it to that to share with others what is uniquely yours to see

An idea is a pebble on a desolate beach: You pick it up, and you can see the beauty of the pebble, but unless you bring it back to civilisation, it could remain untouched for a thousand years

 

 

9

 

 

Creating is inherently more valuable than thinking about creativity or handling creativity

Creativity itself finds its roots in decadent madness; in the Dionysian spirit

As William Faulkner well knew, all great art is amoral, or as Nietzsche would put it, things done from love are beyond good and evil

 

Most of the time, when we engage in 'creative work' we are thinking about how nice it would be to 'be creative', what we would do with creativity if we had it, or in imagining the windfalls associated with creativity

True creativity is itself unconcerned; Van Gogh can't paint with the goal of money, he can only paint with the goal of capturing what is on his heart

As the great Decadents knew, to make something worthy of oneself you must be ready to be transgressive, to push the boundaries of what is conventionally accepted, to risk ridicule and to forego results, art itself exists as a form of rebellion, and so the best artists are those that can live out that rebellion in the truest sense

As Bukowski said, be ready to go all the way for it

 

The process of creativity is itself wild, uncontrolled, spontaneous, but infinitely more valuable than thinking about creativity or handling the results from creativity.

 

 

10

 

 

There is a reason why 'Fall of the Roman Empire' has become common nomenclature; it is the 'Twilight of the Idols' or 'the death of metaphysics' as Nietzsche and Heidegger proclaimed; philosophy is a dying disciple, and there is an overarching crisis of meaning in the Western world

 

In highly individualistic and commodified cultures, art is relegated to economic utility; there is more great art and an explosion of style occurring like we've never seen before, and yet only art which appeals to the lowest common denominator can survive and proliferate, leading to more bad, imitative art than ever -- the traditional structures to appraise art have slowly been replaced with the box office

 

An artist today has more tools than ever and far more potential viewers, and yet paradoxically a far lower change of being recognised!

With money culture and glorification of doing whatever you want if you're rich enough, art suffers a tremendous blow, but whoever makes great art today, will be recognised by future generations, for the wheel always turns over, and art is always cyclical

 

 

11

 

 

Reflecting on how William Faulkner dismissively responded to critics in a way similar as Stanley Kubrick did, it's apparent that great art is always held down by convention, standards, art criticism as a whole

Artistic modes -- whether Carnivalesque in literature, or Impressionist in the visual arts -- represent a particular way of appraising and representing the world that becomes commonplace; all great art is therefore like a fire that burns away current convention

The genius of Godardian cinema was in deconstructing the traditional formats of cinema to allow new forms of cinema to emerge

Great artists don't just steal, they destroy

 

In fighting, the most effective technique is the one your opponent doesn't expect;

Similarly, the art we are waiting for is the art we haven't seen yet

Traditional ways of making art will all stem from forms of imitation of what we have already seen

So new, revolutionary, exciting art, it has to transgress and break norms

 

All great art comes first to the heart, and then to the head

Whenever a truly novel artistic development occurs, it is by definition new and therefore not-understood, undefined according to any standard of 'technique' or 'form', new and great art in other words flagrantly violates the expected standards of art, it captures by feeling and not standards

There is always an instinctive desire to worry that your art isn't 'good enough': Good enough by whose standards? Art critics, established art theories? Those standards exist to be eclipsed!

They can define what we've already seen but we are all unprepared for what we haven't seen yet

Great art first and fore-mostly makes you feel -- if your art does that, however you did that is 'great technique and mastery'

 

Whenever we see the greats, we attempt to imitate them, committing a logical fallacy in failing to see that what defined their greatness is that they didn't imitate; the song only that you can sing is the one most valuable for you to sing

 

 

12

 

 

The role of hedonism in art

The rich emotional inner world that art draws from, the 'impressionist mode' of appraising the world the inner child functions in, is fundamentally amoral and illogical;

Logical thinking as a whole 'cancels out' artistic inspiration; Arthur Rimbaud's derangement of the senses is a way to escape from the mind into the depths of feeling

Think of Jimi Hendrix passionately strumming, or Jim Morrison incoherently chanting, totally strung out;

Hedonism is the expression of Dionysus, who in turn leads to the birth of theatre and tragedy

The 'shamanic influence' on history plays out through the hedonistic artists;

Through the Bacchanal orgies of Dionysus, Dionysus' followers would find an ecstatic sense of oneness that would be the creative inspiration for their art;

Similarly, the modern artist finds creative inspiration through deranging the senses, through disconnecting with the mind and thought and logic and rules and morals, and escaping into the world of feeling

The standard prevailing logic and moral is obviously that this is all a terribly wrong sentiment to express, and society needs to do that, when a society exclusively praises the individual artist it does so to its own detriment, and yet great artists always find themselves constrained, restricted and somewhat alienated from the standards of their time

 

 

13

 

 

 

The Neoliberal Dream is that you get ‘your worth’, ironically Marx was aiming at the same sort of end state as the Neoliberals; a world in which everyone gets what they are worth

 

We can never really conclusively define worth and in fact we see opposite valuations of the same thing everywhere

 

So to assume that great art will be rewarded, that if you are capable or talented enough you will receive what your art is worth, as an entire generation was taught, is wholly unsubstantiated

 

In fact we have great reason to think that the best art is precisely the art which runs the highest risk of being unpopular, controversial and initially ignored; inversely, lots of financially successful art builds off of various forms of imitation and reproduction

So the artist has a conundrum: Do they wish to make great art? Or do they wish to make money?

 

If you are dedicated, if you care deeply about art, if you know you have your own unique vision, then I would argue the greatest immorality possible is to discount that; to pick yourself over your art is in essence demonstrating that you care more about remaining comfortable and happy, than you do about impacting the world

 

If you care enough, you can always make art that is ‘great’ or ‘important’ or ‘impactful’; the art critics have lots to say about this, but they lose all say when you realise that these same art critics discounted most of the films in Sight and Sound's top 10, when you realise these people gave Vincent Van Gogh, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, no props whatsoever, you realise, they don't define shit, great art that makes an impact defines itself when it captures people by the heart, all art forms and techniques and theories come afterwards, we've been tricked into thinking otherwise

 

So, now, you can make great art;

I'd say

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise

If at least you can see the greatness, then it is greatness

But;

Don't think that this will get you paid

in fact, chances say, it won't

And the Faustian bargain will always be tempting

To make what is likeable, acceptable, financial

But true artists must resist at all costs --

As long as there is at least one of us to self-sacrificingly make great, honest art

Art itself survives

 

The night time, the unknown, the unheard of and the obscure, wherever order itself melts down -- that burning, cutting edge of progress -- is the mystic zone in which the artist lives: Symbolised with the mythology of the night itself

Whoever wishes to find their own artistic cry, should go deep into the night, waiting patiently until everything is quiet, so that you can transform, alchemise, the quiet murmurings of your own soul into a powerful roar;

​

Consciousness Itself

If these conclusions seem young, undeveloped, bold, new, fundamentally unheard of, revolutionary, insightful -- they are; if indeed you perceive these words to hold power, it's because they do; wait and see, or better yet, try and prove me wrong yourself, we will see these concepts dominate intellectual discourse in the years to come

 

In the 21st Century, we've made tremendous advances in respect to freeing ourselves from various forms of class warfare, and yet new forms of warfare and division emerge, not as much along geographic, racial, political, social or economic lines but rather on ideological lines; the new ruling classes, rule us mentally, creating prescriptive mental structures that dominate the nature of thought, expression and discourse, the modern peasants are those that can't think for themselves, and the project of the humanitarian is to break us from our ideological binds, to wake us up from our dogmatic slumbers, to unveil the world beyond the doors of perception

 

 

1

 

 

The inner child is that which within us is run by pure subjectivity; feeling, desire, instinct, intuition, 'unstructured Being'

The inner child guards itself with the creation of the ego; the ego seeks to deal with the presence and vitality of force

The logical is always profane and painful to the creative; the intellect hurts the inner child

 

Children always posit themselves against authority and rulesets, children are inherently wild

Meaning, children can only live and survive in the presence of adults and ruleset and structures, but the nature of the child is they just wish to play

Similarly, we as adults can only function in reference to a mental ruleset, a mental system of 'delineating experiences', though what we really want is to be free of those rulesets, to simply play

We act as the adults of our own mind: We safeguard the keys to our own happiness, but it is a a self-created illusion

Pleasure reductively means 'please' 'you'

The brain arbitrarily limits the release of pleasure in the form of neurobiological correlates, off of the basis of this mental ruleset

 

The 'Faustian bargain', the eternal temptation, is always to forego the needs and desires of the inner child in obedience or favour to the material world and the philosophies we construct from it

 

The inner child's expressive desires are a double-edged sword; uncontrolled and they lead to chaos, they leads to addictive tendencies and the desire to control and be god, but through it's proper maturation and expression, it creates the experience of beauty, healthy sexual and psychoactive adventures, wealth, knowledge and growth in the ways of the world

We developed and philosophy and language to be able to protect ourselves; when we encounter force, consciousness itself delineates into modes of thought predicated upon finding ways to survive

 

Society is structured to 'control' the inner child; hence why tradition and authority are viewed adversely by artists and mystics alike

So much of what we see today in terms of political, social, philosophical debate -- is the inner child's conflict with rationalistic ways of appraising the world

As if being hit by the bright sun, the inner child's emotional sensitivity can't handle the blinding truths of logic and reason

This is the view we get from Jung, Campbell, comparative history: Shamans and mystics were living in mental states we would construe as 'psychotic'; for them, it was a way of living entirely within feeling, their philosophy would view us as the sickness, the Eastern Way as lived by figures such as Jiddu Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi represents this perfectly

This conflict between 'thinking' and 'feeling' people playing out on a radical level in every arena of debate; the deep mistrust people have of science and technology, especially as it was reflected in the Pandemic, is a facet of people not trusting logic, thinking itself

We started in states of primordial awareness; oneness; no separation between the thinker and the thought, 'living in experience'

As we had to deal with force, violence, disaster, we developed thought and individuality to seperate one another and to protect ourselves

We are now going back and forth in those cycles of Individuation and Oneness; this is the Nietzschean conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian

 

'First there were women and children obeying the moon

Then daylight brought wisdom and fever and sickness too soon' - Jim Morrison

 

 

2

 

 

The Eastern Mystics, living in the mountains, living purely as they were, would through the proliferation of their teachings create the delineated view that all of life can be understood as the conflict between the thought and the thinker, the observed and the observer;

 

The great Enlightenment spiritualists; UG and Jiddu Krishnamurti, both suddenly experiencing a change and turn into pure consciousness, and therefore living without a continuity of constant thought, being clear, like Ramana Maharshi

These people 'accidentally' encountered enlightenment (Samadhi), and valiantly sought not to teach others or set up any sort of system

 

Through this perspective, every form of emotional conflict and struggle would be understood as the thinking mind over-expressing itself, every form of worry, fear or negative emotion understood as the *needless* activity of the mind (because of course, they know what you *need*);

 

The Eastern spiritualists found ways to shut their brains off and exist as a form of pure awareness, hanging onto existence by a thread, ephermally expressing the grand truth as the sustained perpetuation of that existence;

their instincts and impulses guided them towards a state of thoughtless bliss and tranquil;

The state of thinking, identifying with the 'ego', is what Maharshi calls the self-referential 'i'-thought, the illusion of Maya

The Eastern spiritualists went as far as to say that all of phenomena is without any imperfection, it is pure and natural, the only 'problem' is 'thoughts', the activities of the illusion of Maya

 

The involvement of the self-referential 'i'-thought is a checking mechanism to ensure that the mechanism is functioning; the constancy of the checking mechanism is what we construe as the self

 

Implicit to the assumptions and experiences of the Mystics is the viewpoint that enlightenment, Self-awareness, Silence is inherently good

I am not doubting their experience but rather the prescriptions they apply from them

 

 

3

 

 

Think of Krishnamurti's outlining of the mind as the trap; a trap from what? Into what?

Think of the spiritual definition of 'illusion': 'Illusion' against what standard of real? The standards of their daily, lived experiences?

Did Maharshi choose to enter Samadhi, or did it just happen? Was he perhaps driven to it, unconsciously looking for it, seeking it out unknowingly according to the whims of his own body and spirit? What about U.G Krishnamurti? What about the Buddha -- was it his own effort that granted him Enlightenment?

 

 

Their philosophy is really their story, their way of self-recognising their own experience -- in the realms of their own experience they are unparalleled, and yet where they fall apart totally is where they prescribe to others what worked for them -- ironically, they themselves would agree with that, and yet their thoughts and words have been constructed into temples and shrines

 

So what purpose do the Hindu and Buddhist temples serve, if the Buddha and Maharshi would turn away their own followers?

The Western version of this: What purpose do international systems of churches serve, when Jesus said that a church exists where there are three of you?

By what logic is thinking itself regarded as a problem -- except for by living out the experience of thoughtlessness?

 

Implicit in their teachings are contradictions and dualities they themselves were trying to avoid; in phrasing advice to begin with, they are presupposing that there is a problem, and yet if all of phenomena is without imperfection, any claim to advice is itself contradictory and self-defeating; there can be no solutions if there are no problems

 

Yet, from their words we see that they instinctively and intuitively, without reason or claim to evidence, claim and view their perspective (for it is a perspective, even if the perspective is that of nonperspective);

as moral, good, superior --

they experienced something, and from the joy of that experience do they claim that anything contrary is negative; and we have all unconsciously bought into this claim

 

This perspective is itself life-denying: Denies thought the power to change the world, 'creates' guilt for thinking in the first, presupposes a problem alongside the presupposition that every other problem is irrelevant, demonises thought, praises what but nothingness itself;

Nothingness, Silence, the quieting of the mind, is a blessing; it is where the wellsprings of joy find root, a sanctum for the inner child

It is Death, though; Consciousness hanging on by a thread, a colourful awareness of awareness, that is inherently meaningless

 

The Spiritual conception constrains and restricts life in viewing the mind as an enemy or an obstacle to be overcome, rather than as another part of existence to be affirmed and embraced

The great spiritual masters, as great as they were, were masters of overriding and destroying thought; they perpetuated an ideal view they themselves were unconsciously following

 

Under the self-reinforcing belief and feedback loop of 'simply being' and 'existing in Awareness', they were obliterating and negating the structures of the mind, positing themselves as opposite to the goals and desires of the human brain and body, denigrating what makes us human

 

The great Gurus would themselves tell you that there is nothing to do, no path to walk, yet in the same breath they create the contradictory viewpoint that the advice is to follow their path in not following their path;

fundamentally this is a game of intrigue yet impossibility;

All that you can do, is off the back of your own experience, the great Gurus themselves did not understand the why of their experience, they simply lived it

 

It is in taking them seriously, in assuming that their experiences are representative of anything more than their experiences, that we err

 

 

4

 

 

Every philosophical system is inherently flawed;

 

we all unconsciously think we are secretly right and everyone else is secretly wrong

And yet we can admit that we were guided by circumstances, experience etc in defining why we think what we do

We just don't like to assume that this holds for other people as well, that where they say we are wrong, they have their own reason for why they think like that which may paradoxically be just as valid in their context

The human brain can't really comprehend multiple contrasting perspectives that all hold value, it is far easier to delineate everything into categories of 'true' and 'false', simplistic definitions of 'right' and 'wrong'

 

The Marxist and Postmodern perspectives have predictive power, and view individuals as amalgamations of fundamentally social and economic factors, a materialist interpretation in which no sense of spiritual Self can substantially exist;

Abrahamic-monotheistic traditions on the other hand, would view the Self as the individual Soul capable of exercising free will to choose between good and evil;

Scientific-materialistic perspectives would view the Self as the resultant complexity of biological and physical interactions, defined by deterministic physical laws;

Finally, in a sort of weird congruence with scientific-materialist perspectives, the Eastern perspective would view conscious Awareness as the only substantial reality, viewing concepts of 'good and evil', 'the individual self' and 'social and economic forces' as fundamentally illusory

 

So, say the Buddhists, let go of all ideas and all words, whereas, says Moses, use the language and the words to create the most beautiful illusion possible, all of life seen through a grain of sand

 

The great irony is that many of these perspectives exist in dualities, presupposing the exact opposite of the opposing philosophy, and yet reaching highly similar end results; the diametrically opposite views of the Self in Abrahamic and Eastern traditions is one way of representing this, and now, think, how similar are their ethical systems?

 

Self-referential thinking is a technological and scientific advantage whereas spiritual states of mind foster love and creativity;

Humanity 'mentally specialised' in different ways, adopting different perspectives to fulfil different needs;

As such philosophies are conventions used to describe shared aspects of the human psyche, a mental mode for stages of ideas and stages of cognition, but those stages of cognition are inherently unknowable because cognition is building itself up, expanding;

 

This is the Doppler Effect of ideas: The great intellectuals and theologians started man's walk towards statements of truth and orienting of goals and tasks in relationship to markers of truth, and on the other side the mystics and artists, they started a journey inwards into the roots of awareness from which we spring, a discipline of quieting the mind -- as such they both view history in diametrically opposite ways, seeing the great catastrophe in the world to come from the presence of subjective daydreaming elements OR in our thinking minds and tendency to rationalise and come up with goals -- are both not sides of the same coin ??

 

Neither mentality survives on its own accord !!!

Each can only know itself in relation to competing philosophies !!!

The very nature and structure of modern philosophical dialogue is flawed !!!

 

 

5

 

 

Wherever we have defined and delineated perceptive matrices (ways of interpreting and analysing the world) is where we find reason and logic and certainty, whereas the 'unknown factor' is the spiritual / divine

 

The contradiction that currently exists, is to view older philosophical traditions either as eternal truths, or to reject them altogether;

Neither view is tenable long-term, for they are not actually statements of truth, but rather they are the influences from which our civilisation grew;

Each perspective is inherently limited but a way of delineating experience; each method of looking can be adopted endlessly and as such there is endless room for higher forms of self-expression in that philosophy;

What each perspective fails to self-referentially realise is its own limits -- that is the role of philosophy;

debates such as the one between the Christian doctrine or the materialist philosophy is not a problem to solved but rather a reflection of two different 'aspects of human cognition', both are applicable in respective contexts;

Similarly, The buddhist notion of self applies in one level but makes no linguistic sense in another, the self is just another way for consciousness to express itself

 

What if each perspective holds in its respective context; every logical system is a system of deductions from starting principles, so within the confines of the conditions of the starting principles, every philosophical system that can survive holds some level of efficacy

Such to say that: You are a uniquely indivisible SOUL, and you are the backdrop of awareness without identity or the 'i' thought, and you are an amalgamation of social and political forces

 

What creates the conflict is fundamentally what Ludwig Wittgenstein recognised: Language issues

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6

 

 

To verify religious statements through a scientific lens is a language miscommunication in which subjectively-defined ideas are needlessly given the structure of scientific claims;

The structure of religious dialogue is inadequate in logically deducing the commands of religion and is therefore totally unequipped to deal with the demands and desires of logical inquiry and falsification;

Philosophical system can only be understood as closed-loop systems; the function and structure of the philosophy can only be understood internally;

All philosophical questions and inquiries are defined by the context of the language in which the question is asked, leading to an infinite recursion of underlying assumptions;

Given the infinity multiplicity of all questions that could be asked, it is always factors outside of the claims of the philosophy itself, that in part determine which question do get asked and which assumptions are taken as a starting point;

It is the biological, creative imperative of consciousness itself that substantiates and distinguishes philosophies; leaving an element of philosophy eternally reserved to the subjective realm;

Religious experiences are always built off of highly personal and subjective experiences which can't, fundamentally, be built off the back of logic;

The theists and religious zealots undermine their own philosophy in attempting to scientifically define it, starting with Thomas Aquinas

 

You should understand God, thought, truth, science etc -- these are language commands that structure the flow of experience, delineating everything in to that which is useful or not according to the existing philosophy and the assumptions presupposed in the definitions of the word

 

Right now, ideologies designed to handle a reality that doesn’t exist anymore are used to construct ALL of our minds, this is the truest nature of what they all refer to as ‘The Matrix’

(but the irony of that movie and it’s subsequent ‘expositions’ is that the Matrix isn’t representing one advancement per say but rather the whole advancing process itself)

 

All language structures in turn inhibit consciousness itself in propagating its own repression

The structural paradigm of having a question to answer, or the underlying assumption of a normative ethics that defines you, or the underlying assumption of authority itself, are learned and experientially-derived mechanisms that structures consciousness itself

The Materialist way of assuming that Truth is definable and knowable, and that we should try to find the Truth, is itself a way of structuring and delineating experience according to some underlying, implicit philosophy that is itself unknown and undefined

Cultures and civilisations are not built merely from technological and survival needs, but also from the philosophical structures that act as the hidden sets of assumptions, premises and derivations that function as the 'code' of that civilisation

 

 

7

 

 

The differences in scientific, emotional, and spiritual processing centers

Competitive Ancient Greek schools of thought were subsumed into Platonic and Aristotelian world-views, which in turn led to the birth of Judaic and Christian philosophies;

In a similar fashion, the competing world-views of disparate shamanistic tribes led to the birth of Hindu and Buddhist perspectives

We are seeing similar trends of competition and conflict play out now, but none of the perspectives are wrong, rather, they are aiming differently

 

All the competing structural paradigms prove redundant at a point, each structurally enforces difference, insecurity, alienation, conflict;

The vantage point of 'man as fallen and corrupt and sinful' presupposes those moral conditions and hence is perpetually trying to fix something unfixable

Similarly, neoliberal philosophies that presuppose economic utility as good similarly discard any view in which anything that is not economic is good

Scientific-materialist perspectives in which meaning and spiritual truths need to be proved similarly attempt to find that which cannot be found

Finally, the spiritual viewpoints themselves deny life and deny the entirety of the material and thinking world of holding any meaning or intrinsic value, yet paradoxically they can only express this through the mechanism they deny

 

We are ascribing religious meaning to emotional events and applying scientific language to religious claims, the structures and modes of dialogue as such are so far apart that no common line can be drawn without the mental structure of a philosophy, philosophy itself is lost and confused right now, the modern animus has no certainty, the zeitgeist is that of reckless abandon and a constant, fleeting search for the next ideal, the next philosophy, Twilight of the Idols

 

Just as the king commands the people, so too do philosophical and religious kings command the minds and thoughts of all those they affect

Many kings are currently claiming the role of the throne

 

 

8

 

 

The Problem of Consciousness

“as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself […] It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the Will to Power, the will to ‘creation of the world,’ the will to the causa prima.” - Nietzsche

 

 

Consciousness itself is finding itself a new predicament, one that is totally new to its own unique structure;

With a rapidly industrialising and globally interconnected world, we are exposed to endless amounts of ideas and variation, the more freedom we have to express ourselves in different fields, the more we experience this, and as such there is a crisis of meaning;

We don't know who's right, and in fact, nobody is, and there's no formal authority left to define the authority of any philosophic system;

This is the crisis of meaning Nietzsche predicted, which the Existentialists responded to in affirming the Nietzschean emphasis on aesthetics

 

 

One example of this is technology:

For the vast majority of human existence, we lived among nature, without an overarching technological infrastructure

So we would always be directly engaging with our environment, responding directly to what we see see and feel

IF something was wrong -- you saw danger, troubles, pain -- you could respond directly to your environment

Those instincts of responding directly, they still exist within us, but cannot be applied under the influence of modern technology

Imagine you are sitting on a train, running late for something: You are, in constantly checking to see what stop you are at, attempting to directly change the functioning of the technology by looking at it, just as you would when you yell at traffic or hit your computer in frustration, the instinct of direct control coming against an infrastructure so large and overarching, that it is rendered redundant

Nobody knows how to understand and adapt to technology, it is a novel obstacle, modern philosophy and the resolution to the crisis of meaning we face will be defined by how we respond

 

 

The real reason the great Mystics of history, whether Buddha, Lao Tzu or Alan Watts, would hesitantly give out advice (and hence, hesitantly take on the role of Philosopher King -- I mean come on, they could have stayed quiet, meditating in the mountains, right? They knew what they were doing..) is in that they knew that their particular construction of truth would become the prescriptive norm; that it would become the creative building blocks of the minds that encounter them, and as such that it would be necessarily wrong and limited, like training wheels on a bike

 

 

Every person seeks to eagerly run forward and establish their Theory of the Universe and their way to explain and understand all of existence

Yet paradoxically

We glorify and idealise 'the natural state' and living within nature because it represents living without inhibition, when every person would have to meet themselves anew every day, but not only that, we would have nobody to force their ideas on to us, we would view the world as we would wish to and as we need to

The curious irony of every religious system is that at its root it begins with defiance and transgression, but culminates and establishes itself as a form of obedience and authority

All the major philosophic and religious traditions, whether wittingly or not, establish forms of universal truths that negate anything to their contrary, all such traditions are in a game of perpetually evolving, seeking to supplant their own world-view onto the whole world

 

The problem, then, is that none of these philosophies hold real authority outside of the metaperspective from which they are evaluated; the viewpoint is not that Good doesn't exist, but that no one man, institution or philosophy can claim 'Good'

All such viewpoints evolved out of biological and geographic-based needs, in essence, they are the ways in which we respond to our own biology

They have no real right to 'educate' or 'control' anyone

The problem then, is that the primitive building blocks of thoughts and perception, are inherently survival based, and on their own act as authoritative restrictions on consciousness itself, prohibiting consciousness' own growth

 

 

9

 

 

One of the core facets of the human experience is the ability to break down previous models of thought; Carl Jung relates that Enlightenment is not in imagining figures of light but rather in illuminating the darkness; where we are unconsciously drawn to questioning, that is where previous modes of thought break down

 

Just as art reimagines fundamental truths in a beautiful way, so too does philosophy reimagine fundamental truths in a moral way

Any philosophy or moral is itself evaluated morally: how else could we recognise Jesus as good? It is a reflection of a philosophy already contained within you

 

Both the Western mechanisms of thought, and the Buddhist mechanisms of non-thought, are evolutionary adaptations, mental heuristics, organising towards an eternal, unknown Good; both are temporary constructs useful for organising information aiming to reach some sort of goal, which itself is a biologically-instilled universal goal of Goodness

 

Science, as well as art, as well as cultural practices, speak to a shared reality but cannot define it, a philosophy can define a personal philosophy but it cannot define philosophy for something outside itself (the individual) so it cannot speak to another person's life, there is no objective way to verify a philosophy -- we took Hume's fork to mean that therefore we shouldn't make metaphysical claims not realising just how insane and self-contradictory this was, all it means is we cannot define a philosophy as a feature of everyone's reality and that how your philosophy will be defined will invariably stem from you

 

Language structures that became outdated became 'evil'; we view a man as evil, but rather, it is the objective he is unconsciously following, the goal-system he is fulfilling, that is evil

When people get lost, it is within thought structures and systems that function like the neurobiology of cocaine; self-reinforcing feedback loops that seek to propagate themselves, the blind leading the blind in circles

 

We often remark on how perfect young children are and how beautifully thrive, how men will take decades to learn what children already know, how the child's way of sorting out issues on the playground is perfect and beautiful; young children are without the imposition of force, force as applied by others is where all of consciousness itself delineates itself into thought-based procedures intended to ensure survival, this is where the human spirit kind of dies a death, from which point onwards it is always stuck to goals, objects, tasks

-- as such the great wisdoms always come from negation of popular established truths; the question carries the implicit assumptions and framework in its very form, it presupposes the need for answer and a desire for a structure, continuity and rhyme to thought, which the wisdom of Consciousness negates

 

 

As such, free Consciousness exists without force and imposition, the purest philosophy is the one you choose

 

 

10

 

 

We all work together to one end, some knowingly and consciously, others unknowingly -- So Heraclitus, I think, says that even those asleep are workers and fellow workers in the events of the world -- Aurelius, Meditations VI 42.1

 

Taking Consciousness itself as an a priori Good (of course I don't have a good logical reason for this, though I doubt anyone has a reason against it either..), what Consciousness itself needs is uninhibited expression;

 

Man needs to have the openness to allow all lifeforms to thrive, man needs to allow itself to express itself in all of its wonderful intricacies, to let every branch of experience, perception and way of thinking be its own tree that sprouts branches full of new ideas, the proliferation of life itself in any ecosystem is inherently healthy;

 

As such, religious, spiritual and philosophical schools need to proliferate and grow even more; people should be concerned with the pursuit of spirituality, growth, knowledge, life

People should partake once again in the Carnival, consciousness itself deserves a sandpit where man can just play, new metaphysical ways of being, new ways of constructing and appraising the world

 

In all forms of unique experience and thought, Consciousness itself is adding another entry to the great Log of Life -- the expressions of Consciousness are all unique, irreplaceable and precious

Consciousness is the burning embers of a fire that could fan out into a great flame, if we let it

 

Whatever, then, helps us to allow the fullest expression of consciousness is goodness itself

Drugs are not bad, being fat is not bad, neither is taking risks or having sex, your health isn’t inherently good, your money isn’t inherently good, your status and what you achieve in your little world truly does not matter at all, what matters is life itself

 

There must be a meta-study to morality itself; all moralities and valuations presuppose a drive towards goodness itself -- a morality is perpetually evaluated against some higher, unheard of and undefined standard of morality -- we are always designing new systems of construing 'right' and 'wrong' in line with some fundamentally obscure eternal Good not in mind but presupposing any concept of mind

No morality is truly infinite or all encompassing; and yet, as an an approximation towards goodness itself, every morality advances

 

Each philosophy is a journey of that person's mind; look deep enough into a person's circumstances and an all-inclusive view of good and evil simply won't work

What will work for them will work for nobody else

This extends down to every level whether moral, social, or psychological

Each statement of reality is a statement on that person's reality

Every language is fundamentally tautological; every language is a closed-loop, being evaluated, but by what?

 

The best philosophies and religions are approximations of the truth

Bad is to go against the truth and against the growth and spread of goodness

Good does not lie in the religious books, in any organised religion, in any name or word or thought or idea

Good is the culmination of all such concepts, the full expansive potential of mankind itself, of humanity itself, our legacy, the beauty we create, the beauty of the lives we touch, the very things of goodness themselves, are the manner in which we manifest our goodness

 

Good and evil, our conception of it as such, is always flawed and out of proportion to what is truly good and bad for us

Most moral developments themselves are considered evil by the standards of the people that first encounter those ideas

Jesus always gets crucified, Buddha is always a recluse, Muhammad always has to go to war

if it wasn't controversial -- e.g that the new valuation wasn't opposite to the old valuation, it wouldn't be a true moral development

 

 

11

 

 

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society - Jiddu Krishnamurti

Consider that the basis of any mental health diagnosis is adjustment, and that the prevalence of various diagnoses depends heavily upon cultural context and economic circumstances; that outlines the pernicious fault in the health and medical sciences today -- the issue of normativity

 

Normative claims, claims off of some normative ethical system, permeate and define the fields of psychology and medicine

Normative claims, grounded on what philosophy? This part is defined partially for doctors through the Hippocratic Oath, and partially defined through various committees and review boards, but in a substantial way, it remains undefined

And yet, our treatment is predicated upon these normative claims; because of the crisis of meaning in philosophy, there is no sense of ethical definition to our normative claims except for measures of adjustment, desirable behaviour, various standards of perceived 'normalcy'

 

Did nobody stop to realise how insane this is? --

That we would medicate an entire population, off of how well they can adjust to us, without first defining if it is actually GOOD for them?

The scientific process itself may be sound, but what is it being used for?

If we define sickness as a lack of adjustment to society, we may be very efficient at measuring and defining 'lack of adjustment' (in various terminologies stemming to do with 'interfering with daily functions'), but that can't define what we should do, and yet, modern psychological and health authorities confer to themselves the authority to define how people should be off of measures of how most people are

Hume's Is/Ought Fallacy: You cannot derive an 'ought' statement from an 'Is' statement

Psychological and Health Sciences can measure what is, but, cannot define how we ought to be, and yet they are...

 

The moral language inherent to every level of the system is such that psychological schools of thoughts are seeking to inculcate modern economic ways of life and stamping out anything different

By the current logic, most of our historic tribesmen and so-called 'great men' would be consider psychotic or sociopathic; in a modern environment, we would construe their behaviour as something defined by the labels 'psychotic' or 'sociopathic', is this bad though? To assume it is, is that not a naturalistic fallacy? That to assume that the ways we changed are inherently good? Would it not be an inductive leap to assume that what constitutes 'desirable' or 'well-adjusted' is 'good'?

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12

 

 

Nietzsche believed our philosophies came from our gut; as an addition to that sentiment, whatever happens in the gut, starts with the breath

Perhaps that is why the Buddhists focused exclusively on their breath

As the Navy SEALs well-know, breathing controls the nervous system; sympathetic activation itself controls the body in a fundamental way

The same serotonergic circuits that are activated by breathing, are also in the gut

As oxygen powers up and exits the brain, the entire range and possibility of human thought is calibrated, within the split of a second;

Consciousness 'hanging on by a thread' in the form of oxygen flooding the brain is the penultimate representation of spiritual states whereas logical and focused states are characterised by restricted, calm breathing;

What does this mean? We don’t know yet

 

Philosophies, thinking patterns, they grow as unique and disparate forms of cognition — designed to encapsulate a different array of biological, geographic and social factors — and that these forms of cognition in turn are mediated by breathing and are represented through the major religious and philosophic traditions

 

The next conscious evolution would be learning to use and learning to create philosophies, rather than living through them, perhaps that is the success of the various militaries, their perfect ability to instil specific forms of thinking

 

Most people are dictated by their philosophies, those philosophies themselves are cheap hand-me-downs, designed to fit a different set of needs but enforced biologically and psychologically onto everyone that it controls, resulting in us living out not our own demands but rather the demands of the philosophy; when most people criticise, it is not them that is criticising, but rather, it is the philosophy they follow that stands in contrast to you; we rarely see people for who they are but for the philosophies they represent, so we live out lives as pawns in various forms of ideological warfare​

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13

 

 

 

The divide between continental and analytic philosophy itself is a reflection of disparate forms of cognition mistakenly, through silly language issues and divides, attempting to falsify each other in preferentially utilising one form of philosophy rather than viewing philosophy as a whole

 

Bertrand Russell, famed analytic and materialist philosopher, on Heidegger: "As with much else in Existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic" -- by what standard should psychological observations be logical? Should philosophy itself necessarily be logical? Would philosophy not itself presuppose logic?

It is deeply ironic that Bertrand Russell's fundamental mathematical and scientific theory; the premise that all of knowledge could be reduced to a fundamental set of axioms and deductions, fell apart with the failure of the Principia Mathematica (this project was devastated further when Alfred North Whitehead, the co-author of Principia Mathematica, would in turn disregard Russell's worldview in favour of 'mystical metaphysics')

It is also ironic that the logic of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that was used to support Russell's positivist stance was later disavowed by Wittgenstein, and that finally, despite Russell's virulently anti-religious stance, his ethical system itself eventually boiled down to a sense of good feeling no more sophisticated or in depth or more conclusively grounded than any of the Judaic or Christian moralities!

So we have Bertrand Russell, positing forward the basis of positivist thought: The logical underpinning of relying only on empirical data itself breaks down when you consider that invalidates all of subjectivity, including the subjectivity that gives rise to the objectivity Russell highly values;

We also have Russell, coming up with the theory of logical atomism: that gets dismantled by the very person that came up with it, and effectively replaced with Wittgenstein's exposition on language games in Philosophical Investigations

Finally, you have Russell's view of an objective basis to knowledge, a view that extends to mathematics, logic and science; the mathematical component proven incorrect by Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the logical component proven incorrect by Tarski's Undefinability Theorems, finally the scientific basis (e.g verificationism) has no rebuttal and yet no proof either​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​