What Does Spiritual Mean?

luka

Well-known member
It's a funny case Pynchon's. I think I'm glad I read Gravity's Rainbow. It's left enough residue to make it feel it was worth it. But I am fairly sure there's no cosmic vision beyond paranoia, which you can find in more lurid, far reaching and hysterical forms all over the Internet.

What's maybe interesting is an idea about how history happens, that it's not a team sport of nation vs nation. I think this is useful today especially.

These people these factions in these various different places collude and conspire to unbind this demon, this technology, this ideology, birth this monstrosity- and you won't understand history, or today's politics, until you forsake this idea of nation vs nation team sport.
 

luka

Well-known member
I hope that makes sense. It's not very lucid but I feel quite groggy and foggy in my head.

I was trying to talk about the same thing here. https://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=11522&page=11


Now one of the many reasons Soros is fascinating is that he reminds us (and this is one of the lessons of gravity's rainbow as version will explain when he wAkes up this afternoon) that nation states are not the only players at the table. There are transnational factions, ideological groupings, corporations, cartels, NGOs, secret societies and there are individuals with the financial resources of a nation state.

These also trying to shape reality to their own ends.
 
If you can tolerate a little corny californian you might get something from it

It’s not just a matter of delving deeper in time, but also into the underlying structures of human cognition: the entire set of processes, conscious and unconscious, that we rely on to know our world and respond to it. In recent decades, cognitive scientists have made important discoveries into how we learn, as infants, to make sense of the reality around us. They’ve shown that our worldview is based on root metaphors that we use to frame other aspects of meaning, without even realizing we’re doing so. These core metaphors, which arise from our embodied existence, structure how we conceptualize our world. High is better than low; light is better than dark; our life is a journey along a path. Throughout this book, we’ll see how root metaphors have played a crucial role in structuring the worldviews of different cultures.

What causes us to create these root metaphors in the first place? As we dig deeper into the archaeology of the mind, we find that, unlike other mammals, we humans possess an insatiable appetite to find meaning in the world around us.

As far as we know, asking why is something only humans do, so if we want to know why we ask why, it helps to look to the source of what makes us uniquely human. Fortunately, in recent decades, cognitive neuroscientists have come a long way in their efforts to answer this. They’ve identified the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as the part of our brain primarily responsible for our thinking and acting in ways that differentiate us from other animals. It mediates our ability to plan, conceptualize, symbolize, make rules, and impose meaning on things. It controls our physiological drives and turns our basic feelings into complex emotions. It enables us to be aware of ourselves and others as separate beings, and to turn the past and the future into one coherent narrative.
 

luka

Well-known member
Tell me this is a misplaced fear or an irrational prejudice but I always get freaked out when I hear this

Why did the scientific revolution take place in Europe, and not in Chinese or Islamic civilization?​
 

luka

Well-known member
When I did a poetry workshop for the psychedelic society it ended up being partly about root metaphors.

The notes I made for it are in that DMT blog under my posts. There's a very very good book of Prynne and olspns correspondence and they get into this stuff a bit too, embodied root metaphors, with the next stage being metaphors of landscape. Rock hill sea etc
 

luka

Well-known member
One of the best and most interesting and unanswerable questions is why do events happen? What makes history happen? But with that question, that jaded diamond thing I do get freaked out cos you always get this suspicious sense that it's a way to ask? Why are we whites special? How come we're the winners? And I know these people don't set out to ask that but it maybe can't help but play into that mentality
 

luka

Well-known member
And there's a huge amount of that about at the moment. 'western Chauvinism' Judeo Christian values. This kind of stuff. I find it icky and gross. So I get squeamish. I don't mind the other thing so much though. You know, white people are an evil scientists hideous experiment gone wrong or white people are cave troglodytes Neanderthal miscegenation not even properly human or are the mutants of a radioactive disaster etc. Maybe I should be against that too but I sort of like it tbh.
 
Yes. It’s absolutely one of those world explainer books but I like that ambition sometimes. If anything this guy has an Eastern-bias on an ethical and philosophical front. And it probably fails from a materialist perspective. Marxist guy I know unfairly dismissed it outright as hippie bullshit
 

luka

Well-known member
image.jpg

This is from a note on metal by Prynne.

"Stone is already the abstraction of standing, of balance."
 

luka

Well-known member
Have you ever had this thing on psychedelics?

That we are reaching back and excavating a history which is at once the history of the individual and the species. And we get blocked at trauma sites. So progress is made each time we are able to see what these traumas are and process them. Then we can go on to the next bit of the story. Always a tracing back
 

luka

Well-known member
there is this sense of trying to track a story back to origin,
past each point of bifurcation and mapping each trauma
as you go. these pain points in the map.
these great mythic tragedies which are encountered as you
try to retrace the steps in reverse.
 
Have you ever had this thing on psychedelics?

That we are reaching back and excavating a history which is at once the history of the individual and the species. And we get blocked at trauma sites. So progress is made each time we are able to see what these traumas are and process them. Then we can go on to the next bit of the story. Always a tracing back

Ibogaine is reported to be very much like that. Re-experiencing personal episodes until they're resolved, re-experiencing from the perspective of others if necessary. Powerful gear.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Have you ever had this thing on psychedelics?

That we are reaching back and excavating a history which is at once the history of the individual and the species. And we get blocked at trauma sites. So progress is made each time we are able to see what these traumas are and process them. Then we can go on to the next bit of the story. Always a tracing back

Scientology has a similar narrative of course. Clear your thetans, your trauma-ghosts. Eventually you will reach the crash site at the origin of history.
 
When I did a poetry workshop for the psychedelic society it ended up being partly about root metaphors.

Nice. I would have gone along to that if I had known, are you doing any more? I’ve been to a few psychedelic society events. Their first meet and then a talk at earth hackney with the founder and robin harris which was good. But I also find the community off-putting in some ways. I have hippie tendencies. But there’s an anti-hippie gremlin in me that clenches his fist reading about events like ‘slow dating’

I liked the idea of that thread on psychedelia and the avant-garde. It’s sad we didn’t get to see Mark Fisher expand on the acid communism stuff. It was an interesting turn. In terms of aesthetics, a lot of psychedelic art is too nostalgic, channeling 60s counterculture (maybe this is because of a circling around the first trauma) But i’d like to see psychedelic tropes: beautiful patterns, dissolving boundaries, strange and sacred geometry, amorphous states but executed in future focused art that leans toward being potentially odd or uncomfortable rather than familiar. The experience can be terrifying and some of the most interesting visions and insights are dark and unsettling, this isn’t always reflected in how psychedelic art looks and feels. There was a thread on this too.

Something about taking direction from psychedelic effects rather than pre-packaged culture, people or substances. How did you see not what did you see. Which ways of thinking, perceiving, organising and acting does the psychedelic experience modulate or enable? How can these effects be applied in other medium and contexts? How to use this de-personalisation as a means to investigate collectivity over authorship and ‘personal brands’. Much of the value of the psychedelic experience comes from ego transendence, a spike in suggestibility , deindividuation...

A lot of these ‘spiritual people’ and wellness influencers / practitioners can take themselves very seriously too. Spiritual Instagram influencers are the modern day David Brents. But one of the most valuable insights from psychedelic experience (for me) is the hilarious triviality of your personal concerns. Proper surrealist/ absurdist humour should be at the core of new psychedelic art imo, and this sanctimonious and self-absorbed spirituality should be deflated with it. Another useful insight is that everything is connected, we are nature. So how do we go beyond self care and self development to community care, collective care

There’s a need for caution with all this hippie shit. There’s plenty of woo woo flying around that needs to be challenged. And the strongest tool in destigmatising psychedelics is scientific research and clinical trials, but this has its obvious limits, and the vast majority of experiences and viewpoints take place well outside this world. So we need the scientific approach while embracing the weird subjectivity, spirituality and hedonistic aspects too. It’s an interesting time.
 

luka

Well-known member
Scientology has a similar narrative of course. Clear your thetans, your trauma-ghosts. Eventually you will reach the crash site at the origin of history.

Trauma as a barrier to the truth is Freudian. But there it is limited to the individual personality.
 

luka

Well-known member
I take part in some 'scientific studies' and let me tell you they are not very scientific. It's the biggest load of bollocks you can imagine.

I did the workshop but tbh, like you, they give me the willies. I'm not a hippy. I just like drugs.so yeah, very much in sympathy with you on all those points.
 
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