20 Reader Responses

1. Tim Boucher Says:
   March 30th, 2006 at 3:04 am

   For anyone interested, this is a related post in a similar vein: Spiritual Bungee Jumping

2. Jacob Says:
   March 30th, 2006 at 4:25 am

   This is exactly what I’ve been doing.

   I’m ravenous in devouring any information even vaguely appealing to me, but I’ve always held that this information was connected to some basic truth. Though I can’t pin-point it, I know once I see it. If I found a single seductive idea that drove straight to the heart of that… I would be a slave to it, but I’m beginning to doubt any idea can give me that. No formulation of words in my mind, regardless of how potent the triggers they set off in my brain, is going to really free me from… well, whatever it is in my mind that keeps me from feeling free.

   I’m thinking that there has to be a practice. This is why Robert Anton Wilson included practices in Prometheus Rising and many of his other books, it’s because there has to be something going on experientially to really cull the truth hidden in the ideas. The body needs to feel it. You only get so much (and it might seem like a lot) from simply processing ideas in your mind and meditating on them, but a sustained practice that bridges the ideas into the realm of physical reality sends any notions of spiritual progress into hyperdrive.

3. Zeno Izen Says:
   March 30th, 2006 at 6:43 am

   Hey! That goes right to my idea of Agnostic Jihad. Which means total devotion to the idea that there is no true and final idea that will satisfy the mind of the true seeker. Agnosticism, not knowing, and an ongoing, progressive journey toward “truths” are the only True Knowledge.

   The Agnostic Jihad is the struggle to live the life of not knowing, and to teach the truth of not knowing and to fight for a world where not knowing is seen as healthy, rational and sane.

   … speaking of which, they just set Jill Carroll free. Yay!

4. pete Says:
   March 30th, 2006 at 9:36 am

   I love how you have such seemingly accurate self-awareness. Very few people even know what level of understanding they’re presently occupying, let alone would admit it publicly.

   And I don’t see what’s bad about being an idea slut. It keeps things fresh and original. Beliefs never grow stale, or tired, because you don’t cling to them long enough for that razmataz.

   I, however, have been in a steady relationship with a particular belief system for around 7 years now, and we’re incredibly happy together. Wait, that’s not exactly true. I find a sense of comfort in keeping this idea with me, and I feel that ~eventually~ it will bring me the joy, peace, and edification I so desire….but until then, I guess it’s just there as a reminder of all the things I don’t have right now. Argh, seven years of my life just to ensure happiness in some distant future scenario that may or may not ever come to fruition!? What was I THINKING?

   Yeah, I think we’re gonna have to go to relationship counselling.

5. jlhart7 Says:
   March 30th, 2006 at 12:19 pm

   Oh, great. Now I have something else to feel evil about. I’m never going back into the arms of fundamentalist Christianity, but I guess idea-wise, I’ve been commitment-phobic. The thing is, the metaphor with relationships only goes so far. Ideas are just things humans think up. None of them can possibly hold enough of the truth of the universe (which I believe is out there) to actually be the only idea or ideology we’ll ever need. Plus, how do you tell where one belief system ends and another begins, if it’s internally consistent in your mind. Nevertheless, I predict I’ll probably end up worrying about being too ideologically promiscuous now. I have narrowed it down to (a) I like labor unions and the working class, and (b) I like altruism. Everything else I explore and dabble with is pretty much centered around the need to be ethical in an altruistic sense. Maybe this means I won’t worry about it, but I’ll probably read something else that will set me to worrying about it instead. Damn I’m so evil. Why can’t I just be a good person? Why do I have to be such an evil UN hippie?

6. - Says:
   March 30th, 2006 at 1:21 pm

   Zen and Tao are possibilities. My friend said “Zen is seeing into the fundamental reality of the Tao”. And I was like what is that suppose to mean? And she told me about Thomas Cleary who has translanted many ancient and modern eastern texts.
   SO I read one Taoist text and I was hooked. And then i began meditating going from 15 minutes a day to three hours a day in about 6 months. I dropped 40 pounds, became less stressful, dropped my job in an office and became a baker. I feel open to smallest beauties such as a bird flying or the shades of light reflected on the grass. “Eternity is now” is such a cliched statement but it is true. I threw my ambitions away and in doing so I found an inner richness I never thought possible. But “clearing your vision” so you can “remain open to life” does require hardwork.
   I say don’t worry about a conceptual framework. I have a feeling that you were probably inspired by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung who encouraged spiritual openess in approaching the great mystery of being.

7. Rev max Says:
   March 30th, 2006 at 1:28 pm

   LOL. I have the same problem. I’m intellectually promiscuous as welll, constantly worshipping false idols and lusting after the vain illusions of the heathens. Gnosticism, voodoo, sufism, tantra… I can’t decide - I love them all. That said, there are only so many paradigms you can actually WORK in, thus the need to keep them separate - not to mix up the practices.

   I still find that the gnostic myths provide a valuable meta-framework for understanding all this stuff in, as do Jung, Bataille, Campbell, Eliade and similar writers. Peter Carrol’s Liber Null & Psychonaut influenced me a lot too - the idea that myths are themselves tools for acheiving certain goals.

8. scott rassbach Says:
   March 30th, 2006 at 1:33 pm

   I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

   What is twisted cannot be straightened;
   what is lacking cannot be counted.

   I thought to myself, “Look, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” 17 Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.

   For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
   the more knowledge, the more grief.

   Ecc 1:13-18

   And:

   I saw that wisdom is better than folly,
   just as light is better than darkness.

   The wise man has eyes in his head,
   while the fool walks in the darkness;
   but I came to realize
   that the same fate overtakes them both.

   Then I thought in my heart,
   “The fate of the fool will overtake me also.
   What then do I gain by being wise?”
   I said in my heart,
   “This too is meaningless.”

   For the wise man, like the fool, will not be long remembered;
   in days to come both will be forgotten.
   Like the fool, the wise man too must die!

   Ecc 2:13-16

   And finally:

   A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work.

   Ecc 2:24

9. Rev max Says:
   March 30th, 2006 at 1:44 pm

   Just remembered the phrase I was looking for: “spiritual adultery” - a practice much condemned in the OT. Chasing after foreign gods, being involved in more than one system.

   Well I guess whether that is good or bad depends on your view of the human psyche. Is it

   A) a rigid, singular, unchanging, monolithic, self-contained block? Or is it

   B) a flexible, multifaceted, evolving, interpenetrating field phenomenon?

   Strenuous commitment to authoritarian montheism or one of its many derivatives certainly makes sense if your choice is “A” methinks.

   Personally I think polytheism and open systems are a more accurate reflection of what the human soul actually is though.

   The great hindu saint Sri Ramprasad has a poem about how he found God through tantric pratcice. So he decided to convert to Islam and see if he could encounter God that way as well, and he did. Then he converte dto Chroistianity with the same result. His conclusion was that it doesn’t matter WHAT you do so much as HOW you doit, what spirit you do it in.

   There is actually a very similar story about a sufi saint whose name I can’t remember, I’ll post it idf I find it.

   Job interview today, wish me luck!

10. Rev max Says:
    March 30th, 2006 at 1:57 pm

    Spiritual Adultery

    God uses sexual imagery to describe our desire to “whore” after the latest religious fads, to believe sophistries, to embrace the world. What is obviously witchcraft, idolatry, carnal, false, or demonically enhanced is readily embraced as long as it is popular. Deviant “ministries” jostle to feed our lust to be hip & trendy. Do we recognize how intense the desire is within us to “cruise” for spiritual thrills? God has a few things to say concerning this.

    Sign me up for that shee-it baby, I wanna spiritual orgy! Or a least a 3-way…

11. Rev max Says:
    March 30th, 2006 at 2:00 pm

    http://ashejournal.com/index.php?id=32
    

    Consider the One God Universe: OGU. The spirit recoils in horror from such a deadly impasse. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. Because He can do everything, He can do nothing, since the act of doing demands opposition. He knows everything, so there is nothing for him to learn. He can’t go anywhere, since He is already fucking everywhere, like cowshit in Calcutta.

    The OGU is a pre-recorded universe of which He is the recorder. It’s a flat, thermodynamic universe, since it has no friction by definition. So He invents friction and conflict, pain, fear, sickness, famine, war, old age and Death.(38)

    For Burroughs, the notion of One God is simply a method employed by Control. It is akin to the Mayan calendric system in which each moment was predictable as it was pre-recorded. No matter the holy book or the messenger, the notion of One God proves little more than a palliative film shown to prisoners on Death Row. In such a system, resistance is a dangerous move:

    So the One God, backed by secular power, is forced on the masses in the name of Islam Christianity, the state, for all secular leaders want to be the One. To be intelligent or observant under such a blanket of oppression is to be ‘subversive.’(39)

    While describing his concept of the One God Universe, Burroughs outlines his contrasting view of a Magical Universe. “The most basic concept of my writing,” he writes, “is a belief in the magical universe, a universe of many gods, often in conflict. The paradox of an all-powerful, all-seeing God who nonetheless allows suffering, evil, and death, does not arise.”(40) Like the Gnostics, Burroughs held the belief that through contact with this magical universe, one could break free of the confines of the One God Universe, thus moving outside the grasp of Control. Burroughs image of the Garden of Alamout is analogous to the way the Gnostics employed the vision of the Kingdom. A glimpse of either is transformative—a Gnostic vision taking one above the realm of the evil creator god, the Demiurge or Control. For Burroughs, through dream visions, one becomes a god:

    You need your dreams, they are a biologic necessity and your lifeline to space, that is, to the state of God. To be one of the Shining Ones. The inference is that Gods are a biologic necessity. They are an integral part of Man.(41)

12. Tim Boucher Says:
    March 30th, 2006 at 2:06 pm

    God uses sexual imagery to describe our desire to “whore” after the latest religious fads, to believe sophistries, to embrace the world. What is obviously witchcraft, idolatry, carnal, false, or demonically enhanced is readily embraced as long as it is popular. Deviant “ministries” jostle to feed our lust to be hip & trendy. Do we recognize how intense the desire is within us to “cruise” for spiritual thrills? God has a few things to say concerning this.

    Wow that sounds like a marketing statement for my website!

13. Rev max Says:
    March 30th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

    dude you should use it

    my personal fave was 101 signs of a reprobate an old article by hugh d ross that used to be floating around usenet

    1.will not listen to wisdom
    2.calls evil good
    3.mocks that which is godly

    etc…

14. nico Says:
    March 30th, 2006 at 4:23 pm

    yeah - all those sex tropes in the book of revelation - babylon the great, the harlot, the fornicator, drunk on the blood of all the innocents…..riding the wild beast!

    i confess, i’m a spiritual whore too. i’m proud of it! if god strikes me down, so be it…i’m having way too much fun fornicating spiritually (and otherwise)…..

15. james Says:
    March 30th, 2006 at 9:28 pm

    The problem with being ‘intellectually promiscuous’ (or an ‘idea slut’ or a ’spiritual whore’) is that you get a lot of ‘ideological STDs’ that way.

    Ideas are very much like viruses in the way they spread– you’ve covered that. But also, ideas can cripple and damage a person if they are infected by them without any proper treatment.

    I know you’re being metaphorical, but in a self-flattering sense. Think of the analogy of the player that you use. Now, think of some of the people you may know in real life who are players in the bedroom. What are they afraid of? What drives them to promiscuity? What keeps them from being intimate with others for very long? What happened in their lives that caused them to adopt a dilletante-ish code of conduct?

16. Avi Solomon Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 6:40 am

    For me THE idea that grounds me always is:
    “To be a Man is to be present in the Body, just there and not in thought and emotion”

17. scott rassbach Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 10:32 am

    The Eighth Sermon to the Dead: Intellectual Promiscuity

18. St Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 11:57 am

    I hadn’t thought about it before but if you see your life more as a journey than anything else then ideas are not without weight. There is a limied amount of them you can carry around at any one time. They either have to become a part of you or be dropped. Guess you can always leave them some place and come back for them if you need them again. Good discusion; thanks.

19. Tim Boucher Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 1:02 pm

    The problem with being ‘intellectually promiscuous’ (or an ‘idea slut’ or a ’spiritual whore’) is that you get a lot of ‘ideological STDs’ that way.

    Ideas are very much like viruses in the way they spread– you’ve covered that. But also, ideas can cripple and damage a person if they are infected by them without any proper treatment.

    Really good points… I guess that’s one of the things I’m often criticizing people for when it comes to conspiracy theory, is contracting the STD of paranoia and hopelessness.

    think of some of the people you may know in real life who are players in the bedroom. What are they afraid of? What drives them to promiscuity? What keeps them from being intimate with others for very long? What happened in their lives that caused them to adopt a dilletante-ish code of conduct?

    Hm, also really good questions. I’m going to have to work on all this more.

20. james Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 10:13 pm

    The best way to help prevent ideological STDs is to use contraception.

    What would ideological contraception be? In my case, I would say it is emotional detachment, as well as a striving to be objective. Like the condom, which is not 100% effective, I know that there is always the risk of being infected by negative viruses, but if you’re intellectually promiscuous then using a rubber is better than not using one at all.