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This Religion Will Self-Destruct In 30 Seconds!
Jennifer said something interesting a while ago…
What’s really funny about all this is that Crowley wanted a new Aeon of initiated self-awareness, an end to religions and followers, but in the end was more or less directly responsible for not just Thelemites, but Wicca, Scientology, Western Zen, LaVeyan Satanism (and its spawn), AMORC, and half a dozen new age streams to boot.
Funny not only because he spawned those religions, but also because of how dogmatic many of their followers have become. And then there’s Jesus. He never seemed to have wanted to start a new religion. He was a Jew through-and-through. And he certainly never meant to start a religion where people would worship him and missiles. Crowley and Jesus of course are just two examples out of many many possible ones, where people took some teachings and a few basic ideas and then twisted it all around into a pile of craziness that barely resembles the original source.
Besides just people who (accidentally) start a religion though, it’s also really easy to get caught in your own game when you’re doing something spiritual on an individual level. You put so much time into something that it eventually gets the better of you. You live an idea instead of your life. For that reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about how do you build a self-destructing religion or ideology. And just to clarify, I’m not talking about an ideology that’s going to destroy you, because we already have plenty of those. I’m talking about one which destroys itself and leaves you free to move on.
I was talking about this recently with my family member who’s involved in the Landmark Forum. If your goal is to get people to wake up or to think for themselves, or to examine their lives, you have to be careful not to make them reliant on you in the process. When you get yourself in the position of removing blinders for people, they may start to see you as the cause, instead of themselves. Then they become dependent on the guru or the group, instead of moving on and becoming autonomous, moving beyond all gurus and groups.
I had a similar challenge as a teacher several years ago. My company re-trained people who’d lost their jobs to become web developers. In 14 weeks, we’d take them from basic computer skills to complex dynamic database-driven web applications, and then send them off to job sites. A lot to master in this short of a period. The training worked more often than not, but this same problem arose if the teachers weren’t careful. The student would become reliant on them to help answer questions and solve problems. One of the things I worked on a lot in that company’s curriculum and in my classes was figuring out how to get people to become self-directed learners and independent thinkers. The system we worked out went in stages. In the first stage, there was a lot of hand-holding. People were able to ask for any kind of help on any question, and I’d spend as much time teaching them as possible. As the training continued though, I’d begin to remove the scaffolding. After a while, they were no longer able to ask me for help in certain things. By the end of the curriculum, they couldn’t ask me technical questions at all. They could only come to me to bounce off ideas. If they had a problem I would basically ask them what they’d already done and what they needed to do, and help them walk through other ways to get there.
It was mostly successful. But it wasn’t quite a religious or spiritual experience. But it taught me that the best kind of teacher is really no different from just being an advanced student. After a while, you’ve got to realize when just to get the hell out of somebody’s way and let them run past you. I had a couple good art teachers like that back in my day. I remember very vividly when they realized it was time to just say: “Go! Go! Go!”
I guess in a lot of ways, this is what I’m looking for out of a religion or other story-system. One that somehow has it built into itself that you should move beyond it, that you should set it down. One that removes the scaffolding as you get higher and higher in it. One that self-destructs on you, leaving you by yourself again, but richer for the experience. I think Philip K. Dick’s books are a great example of how this can work, and I’d wager that he sensed something similar in Gnosticism; perhaps that’s what drew him to it.
A while ago, JK said something about a criminal being somebody who “elucidates a flaw in the system,” which I think is kind of brilliant. Fell also said something a while back about building a “zen archon” which would fold up on itself and disappear, which is also a really cool idea. I guess what I’m looking for though is a practical application of this idea. How to use structure to overcome structure. Any ideas?
July 8th, 2005 at 2:59 am
This may sound totally glib, but it’s the best I can come up with.
You have to build or allow for the natural networking to catch up with a structure that mentally supercedes anything else anybody hears. In other words you have to invent a cult. Depending on how readily the meme spreads will it be deemed dangerous or benign. Even though all it is is simple idea seeding and broadcasting, it always awaits the judgement of the system.
We’re tirelessly asking questions, but the day will come when our questions and quests must come to an end. So what else is there to do but keep on keepin’ on?
July 8th, 2005 at 3:45 am
This is one of the most important things in my life currently, Tim. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve taken on a role of guest-lecturing at a university in their Religious Studies department, in a class called Witchcraft & Occult Studies. Also, because I’ve been adamently involved in the esoteric since I was about 15 it’s become something of a stigma attached to me that I’ve come to, over time, learn to embrace.
In doing so, I’ve garnered a hanful of what I would consider friendly acquaintances that look to me for teachings. I use the term “teachings” because I make sure it’s not guidance, per se. In no way can I offer answers to direct their own personal myths, all the little and gigantic tales that will become the extent of their lives. If anything, I promote chaos where there is order, and where order reigns I try to inspire chaos.
I don’t mean to make myself out to be a guru, trust me when I say I am not, nor do I wish to pursue that as part of my personal “brand.” But it does feel good when those I consider loved ones and friends come to me out of a respect for the wisdom I’ve garnered in my years in this life.
The best strucures I’ve come across for building a hierarchy upon which you can structure a ladder of myth and symbolism. This is one of the fundamental beauties I got out of chaos magic. But it didn’t just come from chaos magic, it came from Frank Herbert, Clive Barker, and a host of other writers and idea smiths.
As a designer, my job entails information hierarchies. Layers upon layers of information in a process in which we can communicate the most important messages the fastest and move effectively. Then we move on to subtler meanings, tertiary and subsequent matters. Design has served me well in that it crosses information structure with my artistic side.
I then managed to merge this with what I consider to be the most important aspect of the occult: myth and the Hero’s Journey. I studied screenwriting in the National Screen Institute and creative writing in college. What I got out of it was that, by comparison, C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell were on the money: myth is parallelled in fucking everything! This took me through a journey of exploration, and into Robert McKee’s phenomenal Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting (if anyone has seen the film Adaptation, McKee is the writer that Kaufman encounters giving a lecture and despises, then ends up going out to the bar for a drink with). Within, McKee focuses on myth in life, and even explores the anti-myth (using the David Lynch film Lost Highway as his study), by illustrating three sorts of strife that allow the human drama to unfold: man vs world or man vs nature; inter-social, which is man vs man, or any interesting relationship; and introspective, you and your mirror, or, more accurately, you and an sensory-deprivation tank… and maybe some ketamine.
So let’s take the mythic structure, of which we can see the real important element being the journey into the so-called “underworld” of experience — the shitty parts of life, the hells — which was referred to as the Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross. I know Buddhists have terms for it, too, and I’ve come across references to it in countless other cultural formats.
Taking a brief look at any of our lives from the standpoint of those three personal intersecting points of possible conflict, we find that there are levels of fear and a natural tendency to push away from the more difficult, alien, or frightening journeys being offered us, really, at any given point in our lives. Here is where free will comes in.
Let’s use a video game metaphor here. We start out weak, naïve, and ultimately a baby. We’re offered a little quest to get our feet wet. Like in life, we go through a flurry of misadventures in our teen years and into our twenties. Things start to slow down, and then many get stuck in their ways. Free will is the allowance granted us to break that pattern. To get from one level to another. And the only way to do it is through wisdom. Wisdom = Knowledge + Experience.
There are three ways to enjoy the Game of Life, what I like to refer to as the Cult of the Self™, is to arm oneself with the scholarly knowledge that all of us here share an interest in. But don’t stop there, explore other fields and cross-compare them, how they work, their innate fundamentals, the “spiritual” side of whatever it is you get into, from the Wayne Gretzky to the Wassily Kandinsky to the Mahatma Gandhi to the GG Allin. This takes away the power of the one label many trap themselves in, it offers variables to meanings, interpretations, et cetera. It flusters your own semiotic experience.
Then pursue everyone one level at a time. I like to rank things out of a 1–10 scale on mythic difficulty in my life: a 1 is something I wouldn’t even think about doing, it just comes naturally due to past experiences with it and developing it to become part of who I now am. A 10 is something I know I am definitely not ready for yet, and it would probably ruin me. It’s not unobtainable, it’s just not within my capacity to achieve as of yet. Ready for the key on how to play the game? Here it is:
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
When I was younger, I had a relatively rough childhood and I was outspoken, but impudent (nothing has really changed except my experience and charm). In my college years I was in and out of relationships and, over time, decided to make a practical and conscious approach to flirting with girls. Over the past years, I’d like to think I am not bad it. This is my jumping into many situations I would’ve ranked a 7 or 8 long ago, and after some successes, some failures, and some indescribable humilations and doings things I’d never do again, all those 7s and 8s are now 2s and 3s. I see everything about love, sex, women, men, myself, in a totally different light now. Because of my strife and push to continue learning, to keep fucking, licking, warping emotions (my own and others’), fighting, seducing, and making conversations. Now I am at a level where the very notion of Love is something I ponder in a heavily philosophic sense today, a little personal, mythic journey of my own that I can only share with a small handful of people.
Things that I ponder, that are 9s and 10s to me now, are things that were unimaginable to me earlier: taking and giving life; random acts of destruction; social manipulation on a massive scale. A personal task I am undertaking this year that represents about a 6 or 7 to me will be my first demonic evocation to physical manifestation. It scares the living fux0rz out of me, but I am predisposed to accomplish it.
Pick and choose your fears.
And some quotes to follow this up with:—
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
—Frank Herbert, Dune, “The Litany Against Fear”
“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Having recognised the pleasure and the suffering as equal, the gain and the loss, the victory and the defeat, prepare for the combat; thus you will not commit any sin.”
—Bhagavad-Gîtâ, II-38
“Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind.”
—J. Krishnamurti
“You shall suffer all things and again suffer : until you have sufficient sufferance to accept all things.”
—Austin Osman Spare
July 8th, 2005 at 9:33 am
how about expecting initiates or students to immediately begin to teach/ i tell my clients to discuss what they have realised and experienced in session with me, with friends, family, etc and i find that those who can reproduce some of our session material are better at thier own transitions.
not that anyone would want to start a cult in the jim jones sense, but we all want to externalise our nevous systems/consciusness if, for no other reason, but to look at it in a different way.
July 8th, 2005 at 11:14 am
it’s a difficult issue. In my experience every student, be it of buddha dharma, or martial arts need some kind of shorthand to hand their hats on to get started.
But on the other hand, if you can’t release it at the proper time, it stunts you something fierce. Part of the role of teacher is to finish the training by kicking the student out of the nest as it were, to force them to fly.
This kind of thing is particularly relevant in modern spirutual practice, when the outer forms are so fucked up that nobody wants to touch them with a ten foot pole, as they are so rife with power mad guru’s, pederasts, frauds and flakes.
What it seems to do is diminish people’s expectations of a path to the point that it’s the ‘whatever feels good and doesn’t fuck you over’ as the only real criteria. Which explains why there are so many solo-initiates out there. It’s slow, but no one is gonna screw you over.
It’s seems like we’re so worried about the scaffold being rickety that we not only never step onto it, but we don’t let people build them for us in the first place
July 8th, 2005 at 11:34 am
actually now that i think about it, the self destructing feature is built into a lot of secret society type intitatory organisations.
when you join they give you one framework to understand the teachings in, and once you get to certain point, they kidnap you or drug you, or ritually blind you or something and they tell you all that stuff was lies and it’s time to get the ‘real’ mysteries or whatever.
in some cases they repeat this several times. If it’s done in such a way to free you up to learn more it’s good, but sometimes it’s L-Ron telling you he’s the antichrist.
July 8th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
i think zen and gnosticism to a certain extent already have this built into ‘em, by placing such emphasis on the individual experience. it seems to me that in zen, the basic role of the teacher/master (and this is a generalization– there are bad & good teachers) is to teach one the methodology/assign koans/whatnot and then basically to go away. when you believe you’ve met your goals, you go to the teacher and indicate as much, and the teacher says ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ gives you a little advice or prodding, and then sends you off on your own again.
w/gnosticism, there’s always been the idea of not relying on jesus so much. hell, the apocryphon of james even has jesus telling his disciples “Hasten to be saved without being urged! Instead, be eager of your own accord, and, if possible, arrive even before me; for thus the Father will love you.”
all i know is that the people to whom i’ve always looked up have been people who have led & taught by example, & that the true masters never seem to advertise themselves as such.
July 8th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
This is why I dropped out of college, because I believed that I could find the “hidden teachers” in life better by striking out on my own. Who knows how successful that’s been…
July 8th, 2005 at 12:37 pm
GREAT TOPIC !!
i just did a big old post in response to this.
http://laurajane.blogs.com/rhipidon/2005/07/allowing_the_co.html#comments
July 8th, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Good call on college. I have concluded that the only reason to go to college is to learn a specific marketable skill (e.g. engineering, CompSci, business, etc). Colleges don’t really provide a genuine liberal arts education. They are only good as trade schools, which is all the corporate machine wants.
July 8th, 2005 at 1:38 pm
i’m going to go ahead and come to the defense of education for a minute here. i think you guys both make good points, and a lot of schools are full of BS, but i for one feel like i’m getting a LOT out of my education, and i’ve had a handful of teachers who’ve made a tremendous positive impact on my mind/the way i approach ideas. of the 3 most enlightening teachers in my undergrad career, one taught a drawing workshop, one taught a media criticism class, and one taught a fantasy literature class.
not saying you can’t get just as much out of being self-taught, i’m just saying that i do think there’s something to be said for the classroom environment when you have a gifted teacher leading the discussion.
July 8th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Perhaps the key here is that they are ‘masters’ of themselves. They feel no responsibility for you. “It’s everyone’s own individual quest, so get on it!”
I know there is a Buddhist koan where a disciple asks his master how to find the Buddha. After instruction and years of study, the disciple returns to the master and asks him what to do once he does find the Buddha.
The master replies, Kill him.
July 8th, 2005 at 2:27 pm
heh there’s also the one where the disciple asks the master, “what is the buddha?” and the master replies “the buddha is a shit-stick” (think medieval toilet paper).
there’s also the gnostic tradition that the individual seeker has to be the one to crucify christ.
July 8th, 2005 at 3:35 pm
oz never did give anything to the tin man that he didn`t already have……….
July 8th, 2005 at 4:04 pm
That was part of my original goals for enemies.com was to create something that would destroy itself, like the reader would destroy it by reading it, like a magic book where the words appear as you turn the page but yoy can’t turn them backwards - its only meant to be read once
In a sense a lot of writing is like a magic spell, a book itself can be a spell, that spreads an infection, nd then when the reader is done reading the book self-destructs and the reader (now changed) has become a mutant who now spreads the infecton to someone else, although by now the infection itself has mutated too
I really feel like the archons are necessary, they represent the selection of the fittest.. And us gnostics are mutants, evolving in response to the control mechanisms. So anything that wants to be successful can’t cling to anything but needs to be in a state of constant flux
I was in my martial arts class the other day and my teacher was having us practice defenses against choke attacks. And he asked “what do you do if this part of the defense doesn’t work? If the attacker is bald and so no hair grb is possible?”
The students stood there dumbly.
“OPEN YOUR MIND GUYS! There are no rules. NO RULES! Hook the mouth, crank the neck, gouge the eye - NO RULES!”
It really made me laugh to think of eye-gouging and mind-opening being linked together in this way but there you have it.'’
Continual constant motion in an open system = LIFE
rigidity rote learning insulation isolation stagnation = DEATH
July 8th, 2005 at 4:13 pm
“Continual constant motion in an open system = LIFE
rigidity rote learning insulation isolation stagnation = DEATH”
amen to that.
July 8th, 2005 at 5:53 pm
This may not be a “practical” application, or even close to what you have in mind, but I found myself thinking about the various accounts of the drug DMT that I‘ve read about. From what I understand it’s like *BAM* you’re in another world completely, and quite lucid from what I understand, and then it’s gone, like it never happened. This was a big topic of discussion with McKenna, along with the indigenous use of Ayahuasca as I’m sure you’re aware.
July 8th, 2005 at 6:07 pm
If anyone gets the chance to try DMT, do it. It hits fast like a freight train and draws you to a point of awareness (at least, for me) beyond yourself. You’re aware, but relative to absolutely no-thing — not blackness, it wasn’t shadow, nor a void… it was just no-damn-thing. As I pondered what I was, quite lucidly, I might add, and what to do, I found myself exploring ideas of points of reference, not unlike creating a mental line in which you can begin to compare “here” with “there,” and then a third reference point of thought to ascertain dimension. Ultimately, this led me to explore other sensations until I was floating down through a multitude of experiences, some audible, visual, a blending of all as pure energy and colour and mass mutating in on itself. Found one of the famous cerbernetic elves, called her a figment of my imagination, and she smiled motherly at me. Parachuted back into an awareness of my body in the room where I had started my endless journey. An eternity that had, in fact, only taken about eleven minutes.
It’s truly like experiencing the creation of the universe from God’s point of view, from the very “beginning” to the very now. I found many similarities in my experience with Donald Tyson’s description of the universe in the beginning of his book, New Millennium Magic.
July 17th, 2005 at 11:32 pm
[…] rest.]” Skepticism, when taken to it’s absolute extreme, I think satisfies my quest for an ideology that intentionally destroys itself […]