Life is so much easier when you realise you're not real

Dion Fortune came up with a line which as most of you know has been misused the hell out of by fluffy-bunny wannabe-pagans since Gerald Gardner was a cowboy; All gods are one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess, and there is only one Initiator. Now from a CM viewpoint I don't think we can agree with that. Gods and goddesses are individual memetic/cultural entities which are all subtly different from one another - even from one group of believers to another. (I doubt that the Christ worshipped by Quakers is the same as that worshipped by the snake-handling churches, for example.) Dion's statement is, I fear, almost the kind of thing that the phrase "monotheism is imperialism in religion" was made for - like when the Romans went around translating "Woden" as "Mercury", etc.

But, on the other hand, I think Chaos Marxism can safely say: All mysticism is one Transpersonal Practice. Let's face facts - if it works, it must be founded on some material principle, reproducible in practice, and therefore all those different words and concept systems must point to the same essential technology. For exactly the same reason that when Edison and Swann both invented the lightbulb, it was not possible that the two bulbs could have worked in fundamentally different ways. The laws of the Universe are the same whereever you stand, thank you Einstein.

We distinguish between, on one hand, scientific study of what actually works in practice, drawing commonalities of technology between all the different ways of "changing consciousness at will"; and religious/sectarian warfare. The latter is nothing but arguing about what words and pictures you use to describe something. It's not science, it's a territorial pissing contest, in which the piss is different pet symbol systems. A prime example of this in leftist political discourse is the people who have rendered the words "fascist" and "socialist" almost inoperative by indiscriminately apply them to Stuff We Don't Like. One of the aims of this blog's practice is to work out a kind of neutral, scientific vocabulary - but also to point out that the place where the rubber hits the road is the place where language breaks down altogether.

The Zen guys know this very well, as does Terry Pratchett (your best wishes for his continued health, please), and of course Uncle Karl. Things are what they are, not symbols for something else. Destroy all words, destroy all symbols, only direct apprehension of material reality irrespective of any abstractions leads to a sustainable practice. "What's real, what's not real, and what's the difference", to quote Esmeralda Weatherwax, is the content of enlightenment.

Oh, and by the way: you are one of those things which is not real. "You" are a series of habits, associations between things, and behavioural patterns. You're probably less real than a computer program, because at least a computer program is designed to have some internal consistency. Sorry, but once you grasp that, you can actually realise how little of "everyday reality" is actually real.

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PS. Philip K Dick and similar gnostics talk about the Good Divine Principle infiltrating and subverting the material world of the Demiurge. Marx talked about the spread of rational working-class consciousness - Gramsci called it "good sense" - overthrowing the illusory reality of capitalism - Gramsci called it "common sense". Freud said "where id was, ego should be". All the same things.

I feel I owe you guys an explanation.

The last month or two I've been desperately (and I belive that's the correct adverb here) engaging in the Greater Work, attempting to strip away whole layers of my personality, so as to facilitate the merging with the emerging implicate order of the New Aeon which I keep talking about here.

It's extremely difficult. I am actually trapped, at the moment, by massive feelings of shame and personal inadequacy, based on experiences in my past which will be of no interest to you. Oh, and I've been reading a lot of Phil Dick. That never does wonders for one's grasp of reality.

But, the upshot is that I don't think I have anything to say I ain't said before ("I've bled all I can, I won't bleed no more...") It may well be that my work right here is done. It may well be that this blog now contains all the information which is going to come out of the Chaos Marxist meme - or rather, out of my consciousness on the basis of that meme. I wonder whether any other "social gnostic" activist will pick up the ball and run with it. And I wonder whether I will ever find ways to turn these ideas into action.

I've said previously that all the best stuff on this blog comes from "somewhere else" - that is, it is inspired literature, written in the voice of someone or something far more powerful and wise than Doloras. No, I haven't seen any pink light, and no, my cats haven't died of brain tumours.

In a sense, the essential problem (as the Muslims know well) is forgetfulness. Once you're up to your ass in alligators, it's difficult to remember that you were going to drain the swamp. Once you're in the Black Iron Prison, the MACHINE, the inferior creation of the Demiurge, exploitative class society, the Real World of Horrible Jobs, it seems that everything that you've ever experienced which suggests that this is not, in fact, real was just a happy dream of some sort.

I STILL ATEN'T DEAD

A new aphorism for you:

Any group, religious or political, which puts its internal workings higher in priority than its intervention in the Real World of Horrible Jobs is a sect going-on-cult.

Predecessors

And there I was thinking I was all unique and cool because I realised that the "activist lifestyle" was the enemy. Some French libcoms got there already 40 years ago:

One cannot help being struck by the innumerable resemblance's which bring together militancy and religious activity. The same psychological attitudes can be found : the spirit of sacrifice but also the intransigence, the will to convert yet also the spirit of submissiveness. These resemblance's extend to the domain of rituals and ceremonies : sermons on unemployment, processions for Vietnam, references to the sacred texts of marxism-leninism, the cult of emblems (red flags). Don't the political churches also have their prophets, their great priests, their converts, their heresies, their schisms, their practising militants and their non- practising sympathisers! But revolutionary militancy is only a parody of religion. The richness, the insanity, the excesses of religious projects are beyond it; militancy aspires to seriousness, it wants to be reasonable, it believes that in exchange for this it can win a paradise here below. It doesn't even achieve this much. Jesus Christ is resurrected and ascends into heaven. Lenin decomposes in Red Square.

Although the authors hilariously demolish the pomoposities of the activist culture of the time, both Leninist and anarchist, the problem was that their organisation (the OJTR) never actually managed to perpetuate itself or play a role in the class struggle. So let that be a warning - here's an aphorism for you, the only valid criticism is constructive criticism. Anyone who offers criticism without offering a practical alternative is working for the forces of inertia and despair.

Here's some other anarchists talking about the problem with the "activist lifestyle". I am particularly intrigued by an argument that "radical activist" is an identity produced by capitalist society, just like being a cop or a priest or a teacher. I suppose "Magus" or "witch" is as well - the counter-culture is always-already implicated in the dominant culture, which of course could be seen as a source of strength and connected, if "activists" and "magickians" weren't too busy trying to persuade everyone that they were speshul li'l snowflakes.

Video killed the socialist movement?

The Marxist critique of capitalism would not have been able to spread, it seems, had industrial capitalism already annexed the sphere of symbolic goods. Marx profited from the backwardness of cultural circuits in relation to those of market production. A hundred years later, he would have missed his chance. All things being equal on other fronts, within the logic of image and markets (literary talkshows, weekly top-tens), Das Kapital would have remained what it was when it first appeared: a scholarly extravagance for book-lovers, not the source of a mass political current.

Old-school Guevarist Régis Debray argues that the shift from print culture to audiovisual culture has pretty much wrecked the way in which socialist memes used to grow and be reproduced. He seems pessimistic about whether socialism has a future in digital-Internet culture, for that reason. Your thoughts?

Chanology: the state of play

Chanology may turn out to be the sort of thing that can't be duplicated. It's unlikely that Anonymous will ever face an opponent more exquisitely matched than Scientology—a strictly disciplined, hierarchical organization founded on the exact reproduction of relentlessly earnest, fiercely copyright-protected words. Here the assclowns of Anonymous found the perfect antithesis of their own radically authorless, furiously remixed, compulsively unserious culture. Scientology was a target so ideal that there is now almost no point in looking for another. Perhaps this, then, is how Project Chanology will be remembered: not as the first of a new breed of online protest movements, but as the last of the epic trolls.

(source)

A Marxism - Memetics glossary, first few entries

Ideology: memetic entity
Personal consciousness: ego
Class consciousness: group mind
"Common sense": memes which shield the consciousness from reality
"Good sense": memes which enable the consciousness to change reality