Livin Your Best Life

First topic message reminder :

“Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”

—Robert Frost

Elon don’t give a fuck

Not a people pleaser

He’s Promethean

High IQ

High emotional intelligence

High self awareness

Creative

Producer

You just don’t like him cause he’s not a libtard

But Twitter is way more buggy since he took over

Quality control has gone down I will say that

I’m not a liberal or conservative.

Haven’t been on Twitter in years.

There be morons.

Partisans are all muppets.

But conservatives are especially evil muppets who hate their neighbor.

I’m just awareness.

Elon is an l’enfant terrible.

Just another confused ego.

Like you.

So you get some Noam.

[quote="Smelly El

So you get some Noam.



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A fate worse than death

Kurt Vonnegut wrote:For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. 'Blessed are the merciful' in a courtroom? 'Blessed are the peacemakers' in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Verse 3)
Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land. (Verse 4)
Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted. (Verse 5)
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill. (Verse 6)
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. (Verse 7)
Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God. (Verse
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. (Verse 9)
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Verse 10)

Correction

Libtards are especially evil muppets who hate their neighbors

*muah*

Love your neighbor as yourself.

There are so called Christians on the left and right and for them, there is no clearer guide how to live than this.

Throw in the beatitudes and fruits of the spirit and we can see most people are just making up their own materialistic religion.

Christians are materialists.

Don’t get me started on the looney Mormons.

Biggest materialists on earth.

All these muppets have made capitalism their god.

The secret societies worship capitalism.

This is Moloch.

The world is full of some crazy muppets.

Straight on.

You're a good man Eric Garza.

I don't care what they say about ya!

I only said liberals are especially evil muppets to balance out the lie

None is more or less evil than the other

The fact remains

With enough individual liberty one can make their own security

The opposite is not true

Is it really so loving to take away individual liberty in the interest of false security?

No

The virtue signaling left haven’t a clue

93

My pointless point was there are no real liberals or conservatives.

But conservatives are the most evil and definitely the dumbest apes on earth.

They are despicable horrible human beings.

The hateful fucks want to hate their neighbor and love money.

They can go to hell.

All make believe.

Wrong

Neither side is more evil than the other

Blindness

No cure

Every second counts.

You should all be this skeptical.

I have said to aaron that the conservatives are the most evil muppets on earth and I stand firmly behind that view. When I say evil, I mean farthest distance from truth. They worship capital, not god. The liberal loves their neighbor far more than the illiberal right. We are all dependent on each other.

David Bentley Hart does a great job clarifying this rise of Christian illiberalism.

https://open.substack.com/pub/davidbentleyhart/p/the-politics-of-the-dead?r=1y53bx&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

David Bentley Hart wrote:Now, however, we are being reminded daily of the still more terrible possibilities that lie beneath and all around the liberal order, threatening to take its place if it should finally fail. As we have learned in the past, but are prone to forget in periods of relative apparent stability, even the vestigial Christian humanism preserved within the liberal tradition, and historically often better expressed by it than by the church—a real solicitude for human dignity, for instance, or a belief in the spiritual equality of all persons, or an abhorrence of unjust coercion, as well as a great many of those delicate and endangered moral verities and conventions we try to shelter under the names of “human rights” and “social democracy”—are actually terrifically fragile things when supported by no fuller metaphysical or spiritual rationale, or by no cultural grammar richer than the bare relations of power that today define the interactions of the individual, the market, and the sovereign state. It seems obvious, moreover, that for reasons as obscure as they are irresistible we have arrived at a period of extreme cultural crisis, one that may in a sense be the inevitable terminus of a certain phase of late modernity. That is not to say we cannot identify the various material conditions that have brought us to this point, many of which are mere historical contingencies; and certainly it requires no great insight to recognize capitalism’s power to fragment all of culture into a chaos of contending individual wills and appetites, and then perversely to destroy its own material basis by creating an economy composed entirely of persons who are either investors or debtors. Even so, this explains only so much; the anger, the violence, the cruelty, and the brutish ignorance of the political and cultural forces rising up around us today, in their sheer exorbitance, seem to exceed anyone’s powers of explanation. All at once, a truly authoritarian future has become again a live option even for the developed nations, and one inextricably intertwined with nationalist, racialist, and tribalist factionalism; disenchantment with the failed promises of the liberal order has bred a newly militant illiberalism, one that seeks not to break with the voluntarist notion of freedom, but instead to bring it to one of its possible consummations, by concentrating all arbitrary sovereignty in the state.

I would resist a Christian or religious state 1000x more than this current world order of liberal humanism.

The real Gospel of Christ is dangerous to central power. So they have subverted it in America and now this church can support a Trump an anti-Christ. The Catholic Church has put themselves in the role of God. Christianity is a total failure politically. What lives today is some sick infected version of the early church that supported each other like the Amish do today. Individual wealth was obscene and destructive. An apocalyptic prosperity cult now has control of many state institutions that keeps their flock in line with threats of hell and sells the nightmare of a Christian totalitarian state with their borders shut.

So Jesus like The cults subvert knowing thyself and say, follow the elders, they know better. You are not worthy to face reality.

Ha!

Follow those pied pipers into their hellish nightmare if you like.

No thanks.

No one can mediate what can only be realized “face to face.”

Great channel.

Interesting.




…

The divine presence was localized to temples in ancient times.

Neoplatonist mysticism developed from these.

Our Jewish friends cultivated this contact internally, as the Neoplatonists did.

Philosophy use to be a mystagogic rite of initiation.

Plotinus sought a personal connection and experience of the eternal.

This was the height of pagan spirituality before its Christianization.

The warmth of the good touches you and clears away all the clouds instantly.

You become winged.

It strengthens and awakens you.

But who can know what manifested in the temple.

Statues spoke.

These could have been angels or messengers I suppose.

Or daimons.

It takes more power to build than to burn.

Change is terrifying to those in power.

“The goal of the Plotinian self is to raise itself to the level of divine intellect, to participate in the presence of Spirit. But this presence, this Spirit, is itself founded in a beyond, in the Plotinian One or the Good, which manifests itself as love and grace. It is at the level of the Good or the One that the most intense mystical experience is located, an experience that is as central as it is exceptional in the philosophy of Plotinus. Hadot insists that we should not take these levels of reality—from matter to Soul to Spirit to the One—as metaphysical abstractions, but rather as exhibiting stages of ascent, of spiritual or inner transformation.”

—Pierre Hadot, “Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision”

Metaphysics cannot be separated from spiritual experience.

Mystical experience is transitory.

Our souls do not remain above, but return to everyday life.

We may experience fleeting states of divine union.

We must ultimately look after our body and people in our life, think rationally, make provisions for the future.

Virtue connects the ecstatic and everyday.

We should be gentle and patient with each other.

“The true self—the self in God—is within ourselves. During certain privileged experiences, which raise the level of our inner tension, we can identify ourselves with it. We then become this eternal self; we are moved by its unutterable beauty, and when we identify ourselves with this self, we identify ourselves with Divine Thought itself, within which it is contained. Such privileged experiences make us realize that we never ceased, and have never ceased, to be in contact with our true selves.”

“Presence to the self can thus be identical with presence to others on the condition that one has reached a degree of inwardness sufficient for discovering that the self, the true self, is not situated in corporeal individuality, but the spiritual world, where all beings are within each other, where each is the whole yet remains himself.”

—Pierre Hadot, “Plotinus and Porphry”

We should not ignore the dimensions of human experience.

“For Plotinus, the great problem is to learn how to live our day-to-day life. We must learn to live, after contemplation, in such a way that we are once again prepared for contemplation. We must concentrate ourselves within, gathering ourselves together to the point, that we can always be ready to receive the divine presence, when it manifests itself again. We must detach ourselves from life down here to such an extent that contemplation can become a continuous state. Nevertheless, we still have to learn how to put up with day-to-day life; better still, we must learn to illuminate it with the clear light that comes from contemplation. For this, in turn, a lot of work is required: interior purification, simplification, unification.”

“The philosopher was less a professor than a spiritual guide: he exorted his charges to conversion, and then directed his new converts—often adults, as well as young people—to the paths of wisdom. He was a spiritual advisor.”

Counter to the Gnostics, Plotinus did not believe that sensible matter is evil in itself; rather, it is the concern for such things that distracts our attention.

“We allow ourselves to be absorbed by vain preoccupations and exaggerated worries, which prevents us from paying attention to the spiritual life which we unconsciously live.”

Our world distracts us from ourselves at every turn, tempts us to sink into conspiracy theory and worry.

If we wish to be conscious of those transcendent things already present in the summit of the soul, we must turn inward and orient our attention towards the transcendent.

The transcendent is present within us.

“To find God, it is not necessary to go to the temple he is supposed to inhabit. We do not have to budge to attain his presence. Rather, we must ourselves become a living temple, in which the divine presence can manifest itself.”

Here I am exploring the mind on Open Minds.

I was contemplating the experience of the Neoplatonists today.

I see how Plotinus did one better than ole Plato.

And Plotinus’ students did him quite a few better.

He simplified things, as his students did.

There is a whole corpus of writing lost to us between Plato and Plotinus due to their burning in Alexandria at the hands of the Christians.

You can’t burn the Logos up, god knows many have tried.

You can’t stomp the light or good out.

You cannot destroy beauty.

The Neos really pissed those early church fathers off.

The Neoplatonists were eventually cast to the winds and boy did their seeds go far and grow.

Their school was closed by Emperor Justinian in 529 C.E.

They provided the mystical foundation for Sufism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

They are the Fathers of the non-duality and Transcendentalist movements in more recent times.

They have connections to Egyptian religion, Magick, The Mysteries, Stoicism, Hermeticism, and more.

They did their work well.

You can’t pass them up.

They were rediscovered by the world again during the Renaissance.

I tell you, having read several of them now, they were really something.

They touched that part of themselves that somehow I did.

It revealed itself really.

But I had to jump down the hole.

That’s why I am so drawn to them.

I have the strongest feeling of familiarity.

It occurred to me that nothing Plato or they created is lost.

They were translating the unseen.

They sought to merge with the One.

Now that is an on incredible thing is it not.

They made statues speak.

Now I’m not particularly looking to talk to statues, but the Neoplatonists provide a template.

They are part of a golden chain I have been following.

One can raise themselves up through contemplation and virtue.

Living virtuously leads to wisdom.

They only felt or experienced the One momentarily in their lives.

But they were set aflame.

Take all their language and words away.

This is part of what Humans can do.

We have some powerful brains.

Their spiritual exercises yield profound results if one can learn to focus.

They enacted ancient rituals.

There is value going through the motions.

They set a stage.

One has to prepare themselves.

Do not occultists use the world today as a stage for their games and invocations?

The elite are cultists.

The lies they tell the people are not so noble any longer.

They are corrupt.

But what rises from the lake right when needed?

A golden sword.

It whispers to you.

It flashes the brightest light into your depths, vibrating the world and revealing the hidden parts.

The Stoics had a saying, Memento Mori, remember you will die.

Well…don’t forget to live Goethe reminds us.

We live best I think making life and our movement within space through time sacred.

Life takes hard work.

Talent will help, but doing the work is what makes this real.

To not connect with our inner self leaves us hollow shells.

To lose our connection to spirit is true death.

Can we really lose it?

I don’t think so.

If one has caught a glimpse, you would be a fool not to sell all you have and dive into this, into your self.

Making the unconscious conscious is an important part of the ritual.

Like Yoda raising the X-Wing.

Without a body, this goes on.

We can end our fear of nothing.

I concur on Neoplatonism.

I was listening to this with my wife this morning and she said, of all the weird things you watch and listen to, I like this the best.

I hear him.

Haha.

Good girl.



This is who Jordan Peterson could have been.

They are both Canadian scholars who have spoken several times.

They know each other well.

Jordan decided to go for the money and play to the lunatics.

John is staying true to his heart.

Funny thing about the trumpists/maga republicans, they follow liars and frauds.

They can’t see reality or the quality of those close to it.

The blind leading the blind.

Priceless.

…

I have been reading about Harold Bloom, a hero of mine. He is a very very interesting fellow.

He lost his faith and ended his life in despair.

I feel his pain.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/30/the-prophet-of-decline

New York Times wrote:As he was losing his faith in Blake, Bloom was undergoing a conversion of sorts, to the ancient heretical creed of Gnosticism. The Gnostic—whether of the Jewish, the Christian, or the Sufi variety—believes that, as the result of a primal, catastrophic splitting, the universe is utterly alienated from God. All of nature, the world as we know it, was created by an evil demiurge, and is man’s prison. Man himself—his body, his mind, what he calls his soul—is also wholly fallen. All that remains of God on earth is a spark, or pneuma—a fragment of the divine that resides in humans but to which they have no access without Gnostic revelation. Salvation can be achieved only by gaining “knowledge” of this spark and thus reuniting with the alien God. (Bloom even wrote a “Gnostic novel,” titled “The Flight to Lucifer.”

What if our creation was an evil act?

Why the spark of light in us?

Grace.

I moved beyond my childhood as an Evangelical and awoke to a much bigger world.

I made my way down many paths until I came to a wilderness with no more path.

I made my way into the wilderness whistling.

I saw through the story of myself.

Stories are fine.

One certainly can return from such a journey.

I’m living proof.

I was fortunate.

I saw the light and shadows.

I enjoyed my dialogues here with Dan until I went beyond the limits of his thought.

From my view from here, the limits and strange feel of thought became clear.

There was a wrestling match between myself and the One that left me bruised and weak.

I was allowed to wrestle, to a point.

Then I saw myself as just a petulant child demanding answers where none could be given.

This caused a profound cognitive dissonance.

The seeker gave way to an old man.

I met my older self or bigger self.

My original self.

It was beyond all belief and faith even.

Then something else showed up.

Of course there is a lot I can’t explain.

Knowing yourself is really what wisdom is.

To say I was enraptured by the gold would be an understatement.

The drive for knowledge is even undercut.

What are we if not this drive?

Minus all the names.

What did I think would change?

All I found was how the world is just an image of reality.

I am just an image of reality.

The ego is a programmed interface.

So I’m not that either.

So you become acutely aware of your limits.

You learn to see your desires clearly behind your actions.

So get to know what it is you desire.

All parts of you.

You see you are supported by many parts, most unconscious to us.

We are a unity of cells.

You strip them all away and what is left?

A soul?

A spirit?

At this point one has to nod to the old names, but let them go ultimately.

We just don’t really know all the details, nor do we need to.

And if we think we understand, surely we don’t.

Paradox.

Humility.

Humility is the key.

Then it’s Christmas everyday.

There a lot of benefits learning to feel the flow and letting it take you with the least amount of resistance.

I think that’s the best any of us can really do.

Stay flexible, stay open minded, don’t join.

Don’t join.

Live free as you were made to.

Play your parts best you can knowing they are parts.

We have social contracts that we can ignore at our peril.

But if you can keep the balancing act up, you can do pretty good.

If you have a good balance of empathy, knowledge, and intelligence, you may do very very well.

If you learn that all is well in spite of circumstances, perhaps this is the best we can do.

Things can become very simple after all the fuss.

I think we each have to make our case, wrestle parts of it out, until we can stop fighting this and learn to get along with this.

Follow as long as you need to, listen, when the time comes, make your move.

Don’t take anyone else’s word for who you are.

That’s a journey and discovery only you can make.

If someone offers to be your teacher, go the other way.

If you can find good dialogues, have them while you can.

You never know how much time you have with anyone or how much time you have to be here, aware of this.

Learning to face your death is maybe the biggest part of life.

If you are always ready, it can’t surprise you.

If you learn things are temporary, they won’t dominate you.

Your thoughts can relax to the point of silence.

The storm most live in can end if they can find the center.

You can stay fragmented or live your best life integrated.

The return to reality is truly waking up, not sleeping.

What is the beauty of beautiful things, that they are real.



Clark himself is beautiful, as Plato and Plotinus are to me.

I say, they are golden.

I have many of Clark’s books, he remembers himself better than maybe most humans alive.

He is one of my guides into Plotinus, into reality.





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