Monday, 11 October 2010
The Thunder And The Sunshine
This is the story of how I almost died. Forgive me for such a cheap opening line, but it's really true. And I've never almost died before, so I'm somewhat unnerved by this turn of events.
To really get your head around what happened to me and why, we'll have to go back a bit, but believe me, it will be worth it.
It all started at 15 when I began looking into philosophy, and not really knowing where to start, I thought a good place to begin was to look at good and evil.
Good didn't seem that weird. If you're kind to people, that's good. Seemed pretty straightforward.
Evil on the other hand, was an unholy mess. As soon as I started even poking around in evil, I was suddenly confronted with this crazy wall of rationalisation, of people telling themselves stories that justified the nasty things they were doing.
These stories were often extremely complex, obviously taking effort to invent and sustain, and it just struck me as really weird that this should be so. "Why bother?" was one question that leapt into my head. Another one, even more interesting, was "How?"
How can a person lie to themselves? I mean - that immediately caught me as this massive contradiction sitting front and centre in human nature. Just really weird. How? What, does one part of a person invent the story? Another part nods in agreement? What's the wall separating them? How can the agreeing bit be kept separate from the bit that's just making stuff up?
And it's even weirder, because the part of you that accepts a false idea must do so for a reason - so even the part that's agreeing cannot be wholly honest. It must be in some way partial.
In the words of a 14-year old girl, WTF?
The other thing is that I read a book called The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis, which is an allegory of heaven and hell. Lots of people go to heaven, and have conversations with angels who want them to be saved. The dead themselves are the ones who keep themselves out of heaven, because of their own unwillingness to let go of their rationalisations for who they've been and how they've lived.
It is a really good book and I do recommend it. What made it have such an impact on me is that Lewis gives an account of the process of rationalisation and self-deception with an incredibly clear eye. He can see and he shows very effectively that these are not simple untruths, but deep fundamental structures of deception in which people have trapped themselves.
This was, to the mind of 15-year-old Ciaran, a big piece of the puzzle. I started looking for these processes, and I didn't have to look far. They were everywhere, in everyone. People literally lived through them. And then I turned my gaze inward and found that I did also.
As my 15-year-old self would say, mental.
So I just set to it. Picking these things apart, getting cocky, getting slapped down by people around me who didn't like my cockiness.
But it became rapidly apparent that the reasons that no-one would engage with my philosophical investigation is that because I was punching into a web of lies that everyone was trapped in, they rejected my work because it threatened those lies.
I was also very bad at explaining it, I was very pompous about it and I didn't really help my case. But none of these things fully explained the total blanket refusal of people to even engage in any serious way with what I was saying.
This came to a head when I went to Durham University (rejected from Oxford, arf arf) and began trying to get my work across to my tutors. Something in the region of 'Epic Fail' occurred. It was just a big old mess. I left after two terms despising them, and I don't think they missed me.
That said, I did meet a guy in Durham called Paul. He was in the same year as me, studying Theology, I think. It was a long time ago, but I do remember that he was the first of an extremely small number of people who listened to what I said and saw it's scale.
He was stunned – and indeed, I was stunned to have someone hear this. At this point at the age of 18, I'd already been working on it for three long years.
But he couldn't help me any further than that, and I couldn't help him. And we were friends, but sometimes I looked at him and caught him hating me in his eyes for what I'd shown him, a truth that might well hound him to death as I would be hounded.
There was something else though. I was feeling pretty foolish, pretty low. That's not true. I felt like the worst kind of idiot. And I felt like I was worth less than nothing. You see, these people were not random men and women, but really, and in real life, some of the most highly respected philosophers in the world. Durham is not the world's best philosophy department, but it's in that kind of league.
If I couldn't even get through to these people, what did that mean? What did that say about me?
It is testament to how much, even at this early stage, vanity was driving my actions that the only reason I could see that I wasn't getting through was that I wasn't good enough.
Then I picked up a book - I honestly don't even remember where I got it from - called Confessions Of A Philosopher by Bryan Magee.
I will never be able to fully express my feeling about how instrumental this book was on me. It was totally instrumental.
Magee's work is incredible. He did something no-one else did - he took Western Philosophy, the whole thing, completely seriously.
He saw it, and treated it, as a genuine attempt by a whole civilisation, to dig down to the real truth underlying the human condition.
What he did was to get his head inside the work - and I personally think that this is an incredible achievement - of all the great philosophers of the West, to such an degree that he could communicate the core of their work with a crystal clarity that I honestly have never encountered from any other man.
Only one other man has looked this deeply, and his name is Bertrand Russell. But whereas Russell saw logic as the end point of philosophy, for Magee his end point was always what I have seen as the end point of philosophy - an end point so ambitious as to be almost immediately dismissed as absurd - the final truth of the human condition.
And while he never found it - that inspired me. And I'll go further - Magee absolutely did isolate the area in which it is to be found. That area he marked out as the work of a philosopher called Schopenhauer. I won't go into too much detail here because Magee's work is so slick and clear and smooth and clean that I would not want you to think you had got even one drop of the ocean of his brilliance from me.
With that said, what makes his work the most impressive I have ever encountered from the entire Western Tradition is that he is so supremely versed in every aspect the philosophy of the West that he can reach deep into Schopenhauer and draw out the gold without getting lost in the (and I do respect Schopenhauer) the foul mood that accompanies it.
Schopenhauer is relentlessly pessimistic. It is almost total how his work has been dismissed by the upper echelons of modern philosophy on these grounds alone.
What he did was to get his head inside the work - and I personally think that this is an incredible achievement - of all the great philosophers of the West, to such an degree that he could communicate the core of their work with a crystal clarity that I honestly have never encountered from any other man.
Only one other man has looked this deeply, and his name is Bertrand Russell. But whereas Russell saw logic as the end point of philosophy, for Magee his end point was always what I have seen as the end point of philosophy - an end point so ambitious as to be almost immediately dismissed as absurd - the final truth of the human condition.
And while he never found it - that inspired me. And I'll go further - Magee absolutely did isolate the area in which it is to be found. That area he marked out as the work of a philosopher called Schopenhauer. I won't go into too much detail here because Magee's work is so slick and clear and smooth and clean that I would not want you to think you had got even one drop of the ocean of his brilliance from me.
With that said, what makes his work the most impressive I have ever encountered from the entire Western Tradition is that he is so supremely versed in every aspect the philosophy of the West that he can reach deep into Schopenhauer and draw out the gold without getting lost in the (and I do respect Schopenhauer) the foul mood that accompanies it.
Schopenhauer is relentlessly pessimistic. It is almost total how his work has been dismissed by the upper echelons of modern philosophy on these grounds alone.
But perhaps his single greatest insight that Magee had is that the mood and the content can, should, and must be separated.
Schopenhauer's pessimistic conclusions do not automatically follow from his work. They're just his take on it.
Once you strip those out, you find that Magee has done something that, actually does, in real life, mark Magee out as the genuine heir to and the highest watermark of the whole Western Philosophical Tradition.
Not Schopenhauer. Magee. Magee goes beyond Schopenhauer, and I would be delighted to back that up like a Spartan phalanx. But that's not what this piece of work is about. I will however, say this.
Magee's achievement is simply this: that in stripping Schopenhauer down to his intellectual core, Magee demonstrates that there is - or at least can be - a rock-solid bridge that connects the Western and the Eastern philosophical traditions.
This is actually, in real life, what Bryan Magee did, and all my work has been, essentially, an attempt to cross the bridge he built.
Once you strip those out, you find that Magee has done something that, actually does, in real life, mark Magee out as the genuine heir to and the highest watermark of the whole Western Philosophical Tradition.
Not Schopenhauer. Magee. Magee goes beyond Schopenhauer, and I would be delighted to back that up like a Spartan phalanx. But that's not what this piece of work is about. I will however, say this.
Magee's achievement is simply this: that in stripping Schopenhauer down to his intellectual core, Magee demonstrates that there is - or at least can be - a rock-solid bridge that connects the Western and the Eastern philosophical traditions.
This is actually, in real life, what Bryan Magee did, and all my work has been, essentially, an attempt to cross the bridge he built.
Bryan Magee is a Great Philosopher, in real life, in the finest traditions of British philosophy, and it's about time someone said that.
But at the time, all I knew was that I'd found this man no-one really even knew about let alone took seriously who's work was like a clear and bracing breeze of honesty and insight. He'd consumed all the nightmarishly complex ideas of the West and made them real and clean. I could see them, through his eyes. And in all the years from that till this, I have never found a single place in the Western tradition where he ever put a foot wrong.
It kept me going, softened the blow, and gave me a way forward.
But my failure to get through to any of the philosophers at Durham put me in a bind. The problem I was facing was not one (or so I thought) of philosophical depth. It was one of communication.
This took up my time for a long while. I think it comes across in the way that I write that my whole style of writing is geared toward the simple communication of weird things that make your head go 'nyaaa'.
The rejection at Durham though also engendered in me a siege mentality. I had something, I knew it. And looking back, yes I did. I was onto something, as recent events have, I feel, shown. But no-one would listen, and I couldn't explain it. I felt like the cards were constantly stacked against me. I felt that honesty in dealing with my work was wholly absent, and frankly, that made me angry.
These people, which is to say professional philosophers, were paid by the state to look at things such as what I'd found. I didn't expect a man in the street to immediately drop his stuff and pay close attention, but someone who called themselves a philosopher should. That's what I thought then. It's what I think now, to be honest, but now I'm not as bitter about it as I used to be.
I was very bitter. It really angered me that all the work I'd done had been so roundly ignored. I felt as if I were to blame, I beat myself up, and that just made my bitterness toward philosophers worse. You can really see it in the confrontation on this site with Steve, and in the confrontation with Ryan and Will in the book (which I will re-release soon, I promise).
Basically I grew up with this feeling. I was 18 when I went to Durham and only just 19 when I left. That was 11 years ago. That's a long time to stew in fury.
I didn't spend the full 11 years just working the problem. I would generally be stuck, at a loose end, no obvious leads to take me forward. If I did get one though, I would chase it down like a crazy man. This almost always resulted in some kind of emotional collapse. This isn't because philosophy is inherently dangerous, but because I am inherently irresponsible.
I also just hated being the only person who was into this. You have to realise that I spent my entire young adult life in a state of total isolation from people. I knew that if I tried to communicate what I was working on people would take it as an attack on them. It was a total constant. I just got used to not talking about it, not talking about the one thing that meant the most to me in my life.
That was pretty hard. I had whole relationships with women I cared about very deeply who never knew that this side of me existed. Long ones. And friendships too, friendships with great guys who I miss to this present day. And ultimately these people all tended to leave me because I would either blow my top and talk about this stuff and alienate them, or I would try something very risky (like using hallucinogenic drugs to advance the philosophy - unwise) and completely freak out. In a more prosaic way I'd often just be so lost in what was going on in my head I'd forget the outside world existed for months at a time, and neglect the people I cared about, and who were important to me.
Or, I'd just give up. I'd just shrug my shoulders at the totally barren life I was living, the sham of a life I was living. The lie of a life I was living, the lie of the person I'd invented so I could even interact with people and not talk about this stuff.
Again, the siege mentality was hammered deeper into me, deeper down.
When I got to the age of 27 I took a job working for a dating advice company. This was ridiculous, yes, but when you're unemployed and you get a call to attend a job interview in Hawaii, you say yes.
I had nothing else going on. Nothing. No leads with the philosophy, no way forward, I was just rotting. Just sitting there rotting. And as silly and sleazy as the dating advice thing was, it was for me a way out. So I took it.
I'm not going to bore you (you wouldn't be bored) with stories of that time, but the big relevant thing that happened was that one of the guys who ran the company introduced me to a writer called Eckhart Tolle.
Tolle is a kind of new-age thinker, very much in the Eastern philosophical tradition. But what marks him out as different is the astounding clarity of his writing. He spoke of an 'ego', a structure of delusion through which people live their lives and the ways in which they defend it, build it, fight for it.
But he also spoke of something else, something I'd never heard of before. I'd always (being a white person) discounted Eastern philosophy as mumbo jumbo. But Tolle explained it in a way so clear that it was quite obvious that beneath the layers of weird words and wild claims there was a rock solid intellectual core.
And this core seemed to be exactly the same as the core I had been working on since I was a teenager.
This riveted me. Finally, I had found someone who had actually done some productive work in my area - my secret area I had never been able to tell anyone about. It totally electrified me. It lit me up like a Christmas tree.
And what really hooked me was a word he used, and that word was 'Enlightenment'. I had never paid it any attention before, it seemed to me totally unconnected with what I was doing. If I thought of it at all I stuck it in the same bag as crude religious beliefs like 'Salvation' or 'Resurrection'. It just wasn't something I engaged with.
But as Tolle explained it, it became very apparent to me that what he was talking about, and by extension what Buddha and all the great Eastern thinkers had been talking about was a way that the web of lies and deceit in which we live trapped, could be permanently broken.
I had never seen a way out before. If I thought of a way out, it was simply to explain on a mass scale that this web of delusion existed so that people could somehow 'manage' it. I never thought that it could be cracked.
Now, I realised, it could. This was not a possibility to me, it was a certainty, and I was so certain about it for two reasons.
One, Tolle's deep philosophical work was extremely solid in a way that only I could check. Only I had done the legwork around the dynamics of delusion. I'd worked them over and over, I felt their ebb and flow, they were to me as familiar as an old friend. And Tolle has absolutely nailed them down. So right there, bam, he had full credibility with me.
The second thing was that Eckhart Tolle himself comes across through his writings, speeches and videos, exactly as you would expect a person who had totally transcended delusion to come across. His voice is incredibly rich and resonant. His writing conveys ideas with a stunning clarity that even I, for all my many years of work trying to communicate things like this, could never emulate. He is 60 years old (ish) and has perfectly clear skin, and basically looks like a 10-year-old with a goatee.
So yeah, hooked. A way out.
When the dating advice thing fell through (I was working in the marketing dept) there was only one thing, only one direction, in which I was ever going to move.
Enlightenment. I wanted in.
And more than that - actually, significantly more than that - I wanted it cracked. I didn't just want to be some random dude sitting atop a mountain saying 'om'. I wanted to break this thing wide open. I wanted to know how it functions, as a locksmith knows a lock, as a clockmaker knows a timepiece, inside and out.
I took my customary approach to leads in philosophy by completely sidelining everything in my life and just focusing on that one thing. It was a rich vein of insight, and although it was hard, I felt more than a few times that I was finally doing what I should be doing. That I had put my chips on the table, and was playing a hand I believed in. And I would play it to the finish, come what may.
And I did. I played it to the finish, and I did crack it. Philosophically. It's incredibly simple (it was always going to be) and it's just a case of stripping all mysticism and reverence from something like Buddhism, or Hinduism or Taoism or something like that. The work of the Islamic Sufis is immensely deep, and can also fill this void. In Christianity, only the original words of Jesus Christ and perhaps the work of a vanishing few condemned for heresy can be used in this way - but they can. They absolutely can.
In brief, the central lynchpin of the whole delusional structure that mankind is locked in is what the Buddhists call the 'delusion of self'. That's it. Nothing else. Nothing fancy. Nothing magical. Nothing complex. Just that.
We assume that there's this cause and effect thing woven into reality, but it's not really woven in. We just layer it on top. And when we think about the actual full experience of life as such, we think about it in cause and effect terms because we think about everything in cause and effect terms.
The thing is that the 'fullness of reality' in terms of what we experience isn't some kind of picture in our heads. It's actual reality. This moment that we experience, it is real. It is the only thing that is real. This single, continuous moment. It just flows. Nothing stands before it causing it, nothing sits after it being effected by it. All things are contained within it. The present. This moment now.
But of course we see things differently, we see them as cause and effect. And so when we think about life itself, this moment of living, we just assume something. Not because we're stupid, but because cause and effect is just how people see things.
And the thing is that the moment, the full moment of life that is happening right now - it doesn't really have a cause in any normal sense. In any sense of the word cause, there's nothing one second ago that made this second happen. They're the same thing, the same unified flow. I know it sounds a bit abstract, but stick with it, it's totally worth seeing what I'm trying to show you.
The upshot of this is that we assume a cause for life, we assume something is 'living' life. We don't need to be taught this, if a person were raised by wolves I assume they would also think this way. They would probably only be able to communicate it to other wolves, but nonetheless they probably would, and this is because this problem, this weird contradiction that messes all humans up, isn't taught. It arises from the interaction of this 'cause and effect' thing and actual life.
Put those two together, you're getting problems.
A 'liver' (not the organ) living life. A 'you'. A 'self'.
Nope.
It ain't there. Straight up. Nothing can exist that is not contained within the present. I mean, seriously - think about it. All that is is now. So this 'self' thing that stands outside of the experience of life 'living it' cannot actually be.
There's just life. There's no you. You are literally the imagination of yourself.
Now here's the thing. This isn't something you tell yourself, or convince yourself of. This isn't because it's magic, it's because you don't need to. You have to convince yourself of anything. It is real. This means you can question it, attack it, hit it from whatever angle, and it won't go away. The truth is the only thing that doesn't need our belief to sustain it. This is the truth. So you don't need to believe it. It's true whether you believe it or not.
If you see it, however, and it's pretty glaring if you look deeply at your life (it's not your life, it's just life), then the central problem of being human, this 'self' we have to service, maintain, fight for, improve, advance, heal, whatever - it simply isn't there. Think about how liberating that is. The idea of 'self' is totally fundamental to how we live. Are you good? Are you bad? Are you strong? Are you weak? Are you kind? Are you unkind?
And so on, and so on, and so on. Forever. That's how people live. And it sucks us down into this weird morass of blame and conflict and there's no need for any of it. There's no us. At all. This 'self' thing - it ain't real. In any way.
Look - you might be thinking "oh my God this sounds fantastic, how do I get this?"
You don't need to get it. It's already true. I know that sounds weird, but it's a big difference. We're so used to being stuck in a world of ideas about who we are and who other people are, that we have largely forgotten how to just see things. That's all, that's the only problem. The fact is, you don't need to believe this. It's just true. You don't need to convince yourself of it. It's just true.
What you need to do is this - see the possibility, and hit the possibility from any angle you can. You'll forget it, you'll think other things, you'll wander off and make some tea, but if you just keep looking at the possibility, and seeing how it fits with your life, you will not take long to pop.
And when I say pop, I really mean that. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Just like once you learn to recognise the letters in a sentence, you can't unrecognise the letters. You'll always see them with no effort, because that's just how the mind works with stable patterns - and this is a very, very stable pattern. So go look for it, it's right there. In front of you, behind you, above, below - there's no 'self'. There's just life. No you.
So anyway, this to me was big news. I hope you can see why. I think this is big news in general. It was bigger to me because it ended 15 years of brutally painful searching. And I'm not proud to say it, but I kind of lost it a little.
Now, when you see through the assumption of self, and you see it for real, you basically disrupt your ability to get stuck in emotionally destructive cycles. Now, because all the enlightened sages speak of enlightenment as this big one-time deal I assumed (d'oh) that I had ended the search part of my life. In fiction writing, this part of a novel is called "the reveal" where the machinations of the real baddie are exposed. It marks a transition in detective fiction between the investigation bit and the action bit.
Now before I go on, I don't want anyone to be confused. Enlightenment is irreversible. You can't go back. When I say 'stages of Enlightenment' it is very much a one-way journey, and it has a definite beginning (if not a definite end).
The beginning is the first real engagement with the possibility that you genuinely have no 'self'. That, in real life, there actually is no 'you'. That's the popping point, and if you just see that and never any more, you'll have a whale of a time. You won't get locked in misery, you won't get depression, you'll come across a lot better and clearer to other people, your thoughts will gain some serious clarity, you'll grow by six inches in all departments and learn how to fly - it's just generally good.
And I'm lying about the inches bit and the flying bit. But only those bits, the rest is true.
But no-one tells you this. No-one told me. I just suddenly gained this massive degree of clarity and freedom at this incredibly deep level, and I naturally assumed that I'd cracked it. There was no me. That was it, that was how simple it was.
I was circling the plughole for a few days trying to make it out, and when I did I was just stunned and delighted at the simplicity of the thing. I couldn't believe what a pig's ear the Eastern philosophers and the New Age crowd had made of it. It was just amazing to me.
So, I decided not to immediately talk about it. I decided to keep quiet for a while. This is simply because in the long search I'd had literally hundreds of extremely convincing false dawns. So many times I'd connected two wires, and pow - there it was. I had sworn to myself that no matter how convinced I was by any insight I would wait at least a month.
I waited two days. It was just enormously obvious that I'd popped, that I'd really gotten myself out. Transcended the karmic cycle, as the Hindus say. I started posting stuff on Facebook, and people started replying. It was all very exciting.
Someone mentioned the 'Cogito' to me. Real brief, the 'Cogito' is a short term for the philosophical insight that kick-started the modern Western philosophical tradition. You've heard it said, it's just part of our culture - I think therefore I am.
The problem with this is that it seems to fly in the face of the insight I had - that there was no self, no me, no you - and no I.
And yet Descartes (French dude, came up with the Cogito) had seemingly proven that there was a 'I'.
This is exactly the kind of thing I love. I am a massive, massive philosophy geek. It's pathetic, really. So I set myself to working the problem.
The problem is that Descartes' "I think therefore I am" idea is generally assumed in society to be absolutely airtight. The philosophical establishment of the day don't really like it, and have thrown a lot of criticisms at it, but then of course, they don't really like anything and they criticise everything they can. I don't think it's unfair to say that anyone has ever really blown this thing open.
It's very simple (the best ones are) and it's just this - that you can doubt the existence of everything around you (it might be a dream) and everything inside you (it might be a dream) but what you can't doubt is that there is something doubting.
That means, there's a you, a you that exists to doubt. You cannot logically doubt your own existence. This is the Cogito.
As you can see, it is literally the opposite of my position. Again, for me this is very exciting, so I set myself to resolve the contradiction.
It's not long in being resolved, it's very obvious. Descartes was right - you can doubt everything, but even the act of so doing proves there is something there to doubt.
But it doesn't prove that thing is you.
Doubt does indeed require (the official word is predicate) some level of existence in which to occur. But it doesn't require you. Doubt can simply be. And as we've seen before, when we look at reality as it really exists - the present moment - this idea of 'things causing things' is quite clearly something we just layer on top.
It's extremely useful in many situations (making tea, smoking cigarettes, writing this nonsense) but when you start thinking of this cause and effect stuff as actually being real in the same way as the present moment is real, you get tied in awful knots.
An absolutely weird coincidence (I thought this was weird) leading off this is that the 'Cogito' is often written in the Latin - "Cogito Ergo Sum" which people usually translate as "I think therefore I am."
But looking at "Cogito Ergo Sum", with my pitiful level of Latin, I noticed something. I know what the Latin for 'I' is. It's 'ego'.
Sadly, I was later informed that this incredible coincidence of Occam's Razor (check it on Wikipedia, quite a good rule of thumb actually) in this moment of convergence between the core of Eastern thought and the foundation of Western thought, was simply an illusion caused by my pitiful inability to know anything about how Latin works.
I thought that "I think therefore I am," in Latin, would actually look more like Ego Cogito Ergo Ego Sum.
So to my bad Latin mind, Cogito Ergo Sum actually translated, as "To think therefore to be" NOT "I think therefore I am." There's was no 'I' involved.
Everyone who knows even the most simple thing about Latin or the Cogito is wincing now, but tell you what. Humour me on this. Just imagine for a second if I were right. Just for a second. It's worth it, trust me.
The lack of "I" in the Cogito is what resolves the contradiction. Between the Cogito and the assumption of self. The Cogito does not prove self. It just proves existence of some kind.
In another way, you can wholly remove the idea of "I" from "I think therefore I am" and it still makes perfect sense - if not perfect grammar. What can I tell you - "Think therefore am?" My English is as bad as my Latin.
The weird thing about this, and to come back very briefly to Eckhart Tolle, is that his term, and indeed the standard accepted term in the Eastern tradition for the delusional structure of self is actually 'Ego.'
So you just take 'Ego' out of the Cogito, and pow - that's your answer. Simples.
Now, cracking something like the Cogito is big news for a philosophical geek. This had a lot of things thrown at it, and has indeed fallen out of favour and of fashion - but it has also stood through these, and survives today in the same form it took when Descartes wrote his book in 1641.
I felt like the cat that got the cream.
I post this up on Facebook as a status update, and immediately get two snotty responses from academic philosophers. Actually, students doing academic philosophy. The whole dismissive tone of their responses, how easily they just sweep it away, stick a label on it and pop it on a shelf - deja vu. That's all I can say, it was like being back in Durham. The exact same attitude, just bean counters of ideas snootily looking down on anyone uncool enough to actually care.
I just exploded. So many long years of being ignored, sidelined, mocked, derided - of blaming myself, losing friends, losing loved ones - let's just say it was pretty vicious.
I took my time ripping them to pieces. I really went to town. I goaded them over and over until they had written enough so their positions were completely exposed. Then I just took a chainsaw to their ideas and to them. It was savage, just savage. I have never brutalised people intellectually in anything like that way. Nowhere close, and I've never seen anyone do it to anyone else that intensely either.
I had the pure clarity of enlightenment, the depth of understanding of 15 years of digging, and the pent up rage of a life spent in total isolation.
Just crazy levels of rage exploded out of me. It was pretty messy.
And then something happened, something I didn't expect. Something that totally stunned me.
I cracked someone out. A guy called Dan who'd responded to the original Cogito post - I actually cracked him out.
Let me tell you why this is such big news. The problem of 'Enlightenment' has always been twofold. It's a hard thing to get to, and it's a hard thing to talk about. Buddha, Lao Tze (he did Taoism), Hui Neng (Zen) and all the rest of them had really struggled with getting it across. Sometimes people got it, but only if they were really serious about looking - and sometimes not even then.
I had no interest in being the 'wise dude'. I'd got into this in the first place because I saw the scale of the delusional structure (matrix) in which we're all stuck, and realised that if a person could crack that at it's heart, the results would be little short of spectacular.
That was what I was looking for, the big pay-off. Getting myself out of the assumption of self was, to be completely honest, something I treated like a kind of case study. I wanted to know, I wanted to crack it so that it could be communicated.
And here, after pouring the blackest fury out at these people, I had actually done it.
So I tried it again. Mixing the rage with the truth. And it worked again. And again. And again. And again.
Pop, pop, pop - I'm enlightening people like they're popcorn in a microwave, people are just popping out left, right and centre. I also addressed the Cogito response (which I referred to in my head as 'the first burn' because I am pretentious) to a guy called Raul. It was addressed to four people, Ryan, Will, Dan and Raul.
All four of them popped. Ryan took a little longer, and I wasn't sure about Raul for a little while - but all four of them popped. That's big news. Very big. Big news to Ciaran at least.
Because in this boiling torrent of fury, I had actually communicated enlightenment - the real thing - to four people, with a 100% conversion rate.
Except it wasn't just those guys. People started coming out of the woodwork. A woman called Ellen who I'd never even heard of (probably a Facebook add from my Eckhart Tolle hippie days) just pops up and she gets it. I have to jog her a little bit, but only a little bit.
Now, it is with great reticence that I will now quote this whole conversation in full.
My reticence comes from the terrible fear that people will read this and think that what I have done here is either appropriate or necessary.
It is not.
Events, as you will discover before the end of this piece, have demonstrated that fury of this scale and venom is not only inappropriate and unnecessary, but very dangerous.
In real life.
I quote it here simply so you can see the reality of what I did. I would like to take this moment to extend my fullest apologies to everyone involved in this who I insulted.
Regardless of whether or not they attained enlightenment through what I said here - and they did - there is no excuse for such viciousness between fellow human beings.
I simply wish I had the words to communicate this as forcefully as is necessary. I do not.
All I will say is this. Do not be fooled. This is the start of a very dark period for me, and if you read further do not leave this piece until you have read to the end, where you will discover the consequences of my rage.
So. Here it is.
A couple of times in this you'll hear some names mentioned. Various philosophers and such. Don't worry about it - if you want to dig around and find out a bit about them, go for it. If that's not your thing, you really don't need to worry. Oh, and sorry about all the swearing. And my shocking inability to speak Latin properly. Those three things.
.......................
Ciaran Healy
Just broke the Cogito. It's really obvious, you'll kick yourself.
I think therefore I am?
Bullshit. Why are you inserting 'I' into the mix? 'I' is not contained in the predicate 'think'.
Think therefore am, that works. Thinking does indeed predicate some existence - but it doesn't predicate you.
There's no you to think, and there's no you to be. Just thinking, and being.
In your face, Rene.
Ciaran Healy
In fact - you want to see how obvious this is? I just realised it, it's been staring us straight in the fucking face this whole time:
Cogito ergo sum. That's the Latin.
Cogito means think. Ergo means therefore. Sum means am.
Think therefore am.
What's the Latin translation of "I think therefore I am?"
This is a little spooky guys, get ready:
Ego cogito ergo ego sum.
Take the ego out of the mix.
So to fucking speak, motherfuckers.
Kevin
Consciousness is the ground of Being.
Raul
think therefore am
mind = blown
Daniel
I disagree, as ultimately we are all the same, the 'now', this is what is meant by I. Perhaps 'we' is a better word to use, but fundamentally I think it is the same.
Will
Didn't I tell you this? I at least remember saying that the cogito was flawed. Elizabeth Anscombe pointed out that the assumption that there is an "I" which we identify as doing the thinking is unwarranted. All you can be certain of is the proposition "thinking occurs."
But it's not thinking in the sense of words and concepts. In this case the term "thinking" is used in a wider sense referring to raw experience independent of time. You could call it "the Now." You could also say "Being is." which is the same thing as saying "Thinking occurs." and both are indubitably true but the problem with the latter is it sounds like a tautology even though it isn't.
Ryan
Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Williams. Lichtenberg
Ciaran Healy
Cheers Raul
@ Ryan - Only read Nietzsche of all those names. This wasn't in the Kierkegaard York notes, and Williams and Lichtenberg are clearly tools if you like them.
@ Will - Stop pretending to be clever, you said nothing like this to me.
@ Daniel - Shut up, you ridiculous hippie.
@ Kevin - No, they're the same thing, dumbass.
Ciaran Healy
Shit, almost missed it in the welter of self-important shite you cunts decided to spew all over my wall...
Raul - you've got it. If you are seeing the scale of this, you are literally teetering on the edge of liberation. Think therefore am - if you can see how this makes sense once you take the 'I' out of the equation, you are right on the edge. Like, right there, absolutely there.
See how all the equations, all the philosophical equations work flawlessly when you take yourself out of them. See how it's not a paradox to say that there's no you. Say it, say it several times and explore the thing.
See how the world makes sense without you in it. Look at that, see the truth of it. That's all liberation is, full stop.
Swear to God. Stay with it, look deeply into it. Check it the fuck out until you see how fucking real it is, then you are done.
You could end this shit for yourself in under an hour if you go for it.
Fucking go for it.
Ciaran Healy
Oh, come on you cowards. You were all so eager to shit your ridiculous, second hand opinions all over this - where are you now? Ryan? You think you have something to say? Well say it, man, and stop your insipid hiding.
Will? You seemed so confident, where are you now? Why don't you try feeding me some shit about how I'm not interested in having an honest debate if you can squeeze such hypocrisy past your shit-stained lips?
Kevin, come now. Surely your 'staggering insight' will protect you from my childish jibes? No? Come out of that hole you've dug yourself in and dare to stoop to my level. You will find yourself afraid, and look well to that fear - that fear is the only honest part of you left.
And Daniel? Ha! You seemed so confident in the value of your worthless opinion. Where's your confidence gone? Find it, weak and pallid though it may be, and dare back up the paper-thin ideas you've stolen from better men that you.
I'd have you all expose your stupidity further before I close the iron jaws of this trap. Grow some balls, the lot of you.
And Raul? What the fuck are you reading this for? Get to work.
Ryan
I know this all feels new and revolutionary to you Ciaran. But it's old hat to most philosophers. Your argument has been made a hundred times before by a hundred different philosophers. It's nothing new.
The point of the Cogito was for Descartes to find a starting point for what exists. Regardless of whether there is such a thing as the "self". He did. Case closed.
You're clever Ciaran. Very clever. Stop wasting you time arguing/trying to enlighten self-help fuckwads on facebook. I severely doubt you have any actual peers on your friends list. Man up and stop being a big fish in a little pond.
We cool.
Daniel
Wtf Ciaran? I wasn't attacking you at all. You say you're detatched from the ego and 'i' yet come back with such a persnal and ego filled responce as that.
I really don't have as much time as I'd like to think on ideas such as this, I'm working 10hour days in greece, but I didn't expect such an angry reply becuase I didnt have the time to immediately substanciate my argument.
I'm dissapointed in you to be honest
Ciaran Healy
So if two limp-wristed Englishmen can muster a further volley, where the fuck have your balls gone, Will?
So we see the truth we saw in both World Wars - that the American is only interested in fighting when we sees which side is going to win. You are a fucking coward, Will, and I consider your ridiculous bullshit quenched, and as little of note as the pitiful child's fantasy you refer to as your life. Cunt.
So busy today, but worry not, I'll be back for this one. I'm just waiting for a gust of the foulest mood to fill my sails.
Raul
Heh, I just read the whole things, went under my head. I have to get sometime to reflect and get to work. Haven't had time.
Ciaran Healy
Cool.
Raul
Scary
Ciaran Healy
Suck it up.
Will
Who is this Ryan character? He needs to take your dick out of his mouth. He insults your alleged fanboys right after revealing himself to be the biggest fanboy of all. What a tool.
That's an interesting revisionist history of the World Wars. In the states they insist that your lot was getting their ass kicked and America had to come in to save the day lol.
I really do want to listen to a lecture in the UK about what we call the Revolutionary War. I imagine it's taught very different, and the new perspective would shine light on bullshit on both sides of the pond.
Anyway you sound like a crackpot when you say "I do not exist" or "there is no me" since necessarily there is a you in SOME sense of the word.
I think it's all well and good to make the case that who we think we are and the way in which we think we exist is bullshit. But there's still a you in some sense, even if it's just an undifferentiated being with no self-concept.
I think it'd be more useful to elaborate the way in which we do exist, and how it differs from how we think we exist, than to just assert "i/you/we do not exist". If you can do that you're well beyond me since it's much easier to understand the difference than explain it.
And if I haven't convinced you that falsification-ism is utter nonsense because of Quinean under-determinism then debating with you is pointless.
Either I suck at it or my argument falls on deaf ears. Either way no progress is being made.
And lol@ everyone being so butthurt at Ciaran's seemingly harsh words. He's just dicking around. It would be funny if someone cool was doing it. I think that's why everyone is confused.
My Concluding Comment On The Matter, Unless One Of You Bitches Has Something More To Add...
Heh heh heh.
So yes, this answer is long, but that, as the laydeez will tell you, is kind of a theme with me. Truth is, I love depth, and they'll tell you that too. And if my wife ever finds out I've written this, she'll string me up by the very thing I'm bragging about.
I'm all about the forensic. I'm like the CSI of philosophy. I like getting right down in the mix, and before, that meant self-vivisection.
Luckily, now I'm done, I can turn my vivisection powers on you.
Ok, here goes then.
I think we've misunderstood the detachment of the sages. They're not sitting at the mountaintop because they appreciate the view in some special way, they're sitting at the mountaintop to get as far away from people as they can.
People are full of shit, and they cling to their shit like their shit is made of gold. It's not, it's made of shit, and it stinks.
Even talking to people about this - especially people who think they have anything to say when in fact they don't - is like wading chest deep in human effluent. It is disgusting, it is disgusting to watch your bleating posturing, all of you.
But let's just take a moment of introspective silence for Raul. He's probably going to wander off, get distracted, lose interest in honesty and die an old man, blaming everyone else for the shit in his pants and wondering what the fuck just happened.
But do you know what?
Just for this one moment, he was really there, really there on the doorstep of genuine freedom. The kind of freedom you just can't wrap your head around, a freedom that reaches inside you and breaks every single chain that was every put there by you or anyone else.
And do you know what - if he doesn't fall into the neon abyss of his civilisation, which, being America, is very distracting and shiny, he might actually make it, in real life.
It's a long shot - I just don't know if he has the courage - but it's not wacky. I would be surprised, but not shocked, if in the next few weeks he actually cracked it.
I would be surprised, but not shocked, if in the next few minutes he actually cracked it.
It is very simple, all you have to do is see the truth - that there's no you. I keep saying this, because it really is that simple, and at some point one of you surely will just look, and see that the seeing itself is all there is. No you to be the seer. Just the seeing.
I digress. Back to you guys.
There are two questions that I wanted to bring into clear focus.
Firstly, seeing as I agree substantively with Will, and seeing as how Ryan didn't in any sense disagree with what I said, and seeing as how even Daniel's comment wasn't devoid of truth, why have I come down on you like a bag of bricks?
If I'm so free, as I claim to be, why not just respond - at the very least - like a normal person? Why not look at the ideas put forward, ponder over them for a while in my zen-like brain, and give a straight answer? Or at least, an answer that is relevant, and not just me shrieking at you that I hate you?
On top of this, I've spent so much time working the philosophical issues that it's easier for me to talk clearly about these things than it is to write my shopping list. I'm not magic, I've just been hammering this area on and off for 15 years. You can't do that and not crack a few tricks on how to get shit across.
But I'm not doing that. Moreover, I'm not even trying. Why?
Why the cuntishness?
The second thing I wanted to bring out is also crucial, and it's the obvious question - or to be more precise, the obvious contradiction - in the way in which I've handled this, and indeed the way I've come across since I cracked liberation.
How can I credibly claim to be free, and yet spill such venom?
And to take it a step further, how can I possibly think that anyone would accept that I am free, when I call them a cunt?
At first glance, it seems as if the case against me is as solid as fifteen tons of reinforced granite.
I clearly am not beyond negativity - indeed, I'm far more negative now than I ever have been. I'm haemorrhaging friends faster than Gary Glitter's Myspace page. Worse, it's not just that I'm spiky, but much more vicious. It is as if my interest is far more focused on hurting the people who respond to me than helping them.
I can confirm for the benefit of the tape, that this is true. I am.
We asked 'why' earlier, and I will get to that - but how is the second question. How can I be free, and be so fucking nasty? So wilfully nasty? So openly and unashamedly negative?
You can see in my insults, I hope, that I'm not just throwing them out like confetti. They are intended as open challenges that cannot be ignored. You can leave, walk away in disgust, sure - but you can't stay and ignore what I've said.
So to clarify, why the cuntishness, and how the cuntishness.
There is of course, an extremely simple and direct answer that would neatly tie up all the loose ends.
It is this - that I am not free.
That I am lying, or more probably deluded, and that in my long quest for the truth I have stumbled across some petty insight which I so wish to believe makes an end of my journey that I would cast aside all evidence to the contrary and raise it as the final idol.
Perhaps.
And yet, perhaps you have discerned something in my speech which makes such a conclusion sit heavy and uncomfortable in you. Perhaps you have not, and you simply wait to see the madman fall, and fall I will, and soon, if this is madness. For no mania can long sustain itself if it is tested to extremes, and you must be aware I'm throwing all my weight on this one.
So to the second question first I will address myself, because, like all those who claim the title of Zen Master, and I do, it tickles me to turn things topsy-turvy, and show you how much sense the world makes when viewed in reverse.
So the 'how' first, and then the 'why'. How can I be so full of hate, and yet be free?
At first glance it seems that peace is the glory and the hallmark of the free man. The Prince of Peace, they called the Christ, and he is not the only one blessed with such an epithet.
The sage of Arundala never lifted a finger to kill so much as a worm, and the Great Buddha himself precluded damage to that worm also, lest it be a brother to you on the path of Karma.
Gandhi was a living Avatar of peace, and Nisargadatta Maharaj also. Hui Neng, founder of Zen, remained in peace even when attacked by an assassin. He just spaffed out a crazy ass Zen question and the assassin became his disciple. And you cannot imagine Lao Tze picking up a sword any more than we could imagine the sky itself stooping to take part in a street fight.
So how can I be so full of hate, and yet be free?
The truth is simple. I was always full of hate, as are you.
It burns within you, though you leash it for fear of what it might mean. If you once gave full vent to your pent-up fury, you would, after but a short time, find yourself standing in an abattoir of your own making. You know it, it is there in you, seething, tearing, sleeping at times but never dead, and never gone.
It is that hate that moves beyond the simple expedient of destruction, that goes further into cruelty for cruelty's own sake.
Those men and women in whom it has been stoked from childhood with damage are known to us from the crime pages of that carnival of voyeuristic horror we call our 'free press'.
But even in those who have been wrapped in rosepetals since the day of their birth are broken and destructive. The rich fill gossip columns with their fractured lives and never-ending damage.
Most of us fall between these poles, but it is a short spectrum, with variations in conditioning and control, but not, at the deep, in scale.
Why do we leash this? Why leash our hatred? It is as much a part of us as our feet and our hands, and yet we bind it, and more - we make a demon of it, and the old traditions say it was loosed from the very bowels of hell itself.
Again, I ask, why do we leash it? Why leash our hatred? For the sake of the victims? Perhaps, and perhaps not. We are content to watch an unjust war spill innocent life in our name, and raise a grumble, and perhaps, if we are keen to grumble, a bleating cry.
Our indolence and apathy in the face of human suffering show the lie of our high-minded excuses.
We leash it, because we define ourselves by the things we do, and the things we feel. We deny it is us, we push it away, we make merry, throw parties, smoke drugs, drink booze, dance like fools under flashing lights and tell ourselves that we are good.
We are not.
Hate pumps in our veins, and no act of denial or restraint can reduce it's toxic burning by one degree of heat.
Now, think for one second of the true nature of the free man's freedom.
What is it to be free? It is simple - so simple it can be easily stated in it's full completeness in a simple sentence such as this:
Enlightenment is the recognition that there is no you.
And it hinges on that word - recognition. We are so eager, us white-faced fools, to think ourselves good, that we would butcher truth itself on the altar of our vanity. Recognition is not belief. Recognition has no narrative structure. It is just recognition, and you cannot recognise something that is not already there.
The truth is that there is no you. The truth is that you assume there is. The truth is that all there is is one assumption that underlies every lie you tell, and every lie you swallow. That there is a you. There is not.
Look well to this, for if it takes you ten seconds to honestly see the truth of it, it takes ten seconds to shatter the chains that bind you.
So, there is no you. There is no me. The difference is that you have not seen this, and I have.
So what does that mean?
In our minds, the level of 'pattern recognition' is not one that we have direct access to.
We cannot unrecognise a pattern.
You cannot look at a letter or a word or a sentence whose patterns are known to you, and fail to read it, save of course for an exceptional and completely unsustainable act of will.
The pattern, once seen, is seen forever. And you cannot unsee it, you cannot ignore it, you cannot weave it into a different pattern. It is set.
This recognition is all that separates the free from the unfree. Not mystic experience, not holiness, not decency, not grace. Just this one recognition. Once. Then you're done.
What is the immediate and irrevocable result of this recognition?
Sweet, sweet freedom. Those were the words I spoke out loud as it fanned out in my head. Sweet, sweet freedom. A freedom much deeper than mere political liberty. A freedom as deep as freedom can be. True freedom. Real freedom.
Freedom from ever being capable of seeing anything I do or say or experience as a comment on me.
Freedom from all self doubt. Freedom, total freedom, from guilt. Freedom, complete and final, from regret. Complete liberation from vanity. Complete liberation from fear. Liberation from love, and hate. Liberation from good and evil.
This is not to say that these things are absent in me. As we have seen, hate and vanity seem rarely far from my lips these days.
But herein lies the very truest nature of free freedom. I cannot be trapped by them, because I cannot - ever - take for true that they are coming from me. That means I am free to talk with total directness about the scale of my liberation, of liberation itself. Of the distance between me and you. Of how you disgust me, and how I am right to be disgusted.
I cannot ever take for truth that I am vain, or hateful, or kind, or generous. I know that there is no me, I have seen it and seen the truth of it. I am therefore free to speak vainly, hatefully, kindly or generously, in a way that you are not.
I cannot be trapped by any feeling or thought.
This is the core advantage of the free. I cannot be trapped by thought, regardless of how potent it is - but this does not make me a eunuch when it comes to anger.
I cannot be trapped by hate, regardless of its power - but this does not mean I am a man void of hate, or denuded of weaponry.
I just cannot be trapped by my own weapons.
Enlightenment, the simple recognition of the truth that there is no you, is complete liberation from all self-destructive cycles of thought and emotion. They are permanently interrupted in me in a way I cannot change. Which is nice, because given the option I'd only fuck it up.
So...
Where does this leave the how? The how can I speak with hatred if I am free? Simple. An free person is not just a person capable of hate - they is the only person capable of sustaining hate.
Hate cannot be wielded without devouring the wielder. We all know that, we've seen it in others and ourselves. It is the classic Faustian dynamic of the human condition.
But what if you recognise that there is no wielder? What then can the hate consume?
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing of course, save its target. Which is the lie in others.
This is very interesting, and points to a truth about hatred which I've never really seen before. It's not a matter of personal dislike - there is no personal anything, there is no you. But it rises nonetheless, unbidden and unbound from the recesses of what we mistakenly think of as our minds.
It seems to be nothing more than the part of you that's real reacting violently against the part of anything that's fake.
Reality burns on contact with fiction.
Of course, when you are the lie, hate is your enemy. If you plunge too deeply into it, you'll unleash a force in yourself that will turn inward and cripple you. This is known. We have all seen it, and to a greater or lesser extent we have all experienced it. Hate turning to self-hate.
But what if you have no self? What then can it destroy if it turns inward? How can it turn inward when there is no inward? When there is just... nothing?
I do not like the term 'void' or the term 'consciousness.' The Buddhists and the Hippies broke each one in turn with their bleating, facile reverence. I offer two other terms, well knowing that they may also be castrated and made useless by fawning obeisance.
They are 'sight' and 'comprehension'.
Your sight has no cause. That's it, liberation, that one thing. Five words, a gateway. You are not asked to believe that it is true, but only to honestly ask yourself if it is plausible in your own life.
'How' the hate should be readily apparent. For me, the real question is why no-one's ever gotten free and done this.
Oh, of course. The ones that did were killed. As heretics. Obviously. Huh.
So there you have it. That's the how. You might also think that the why has also been explained, and I have mentioned some things which taken together might account for it, but none of them are really why I responded to the people on this thread in the way that I did.
I responded to you in this way because it was the right thing to do. That fury rose unbidden in me, and so sickened was I by your weakness and your arrogance, that I simply refused to leash it.
Ryan, you are a fucking child. An arrogant, spoilt child. It is stunning to me how you have developed such a lofty estimate of your own opinion, and don't compound your cowardice with a denial.
You think I care about you? You disgust me. You genuinely sicken me. Oh of course, you're a funny dude, but who gives a fuck about that? I don't care about someone's wit, I care about the courage of their heart and the honesty of their mind.
You have precious little of either. On this thread, you have demonstrated only how deep the rot has sunk in you. It has sunk right down into your very core.
You list, with a supercilious twinkle of your fingers, all the names of those you say have cracked this. You don't even tell me they have. You just leave it hanging, like a stink.
Here's my problem, Ryan - they didn't crack it. They didn't. They may have formulated the equation, but that makes them jugglers of concepts, entertainers who fling around words instead of juggling balls and wow the keening crowd of idiots into thinking them miracle-workers.
If you once see the lie of the Cogito I laid out above, you are free. As Buddha was, and Mohammed, and Christ. That's the level of this.
If you're throwing enough shit at a wall, some of it will stick, and Nietzsche threw a lot of shit. He was lost, and useless. The man's a fool. Mad = weak. That's the way it works. And any insights a madman can pull that are true are lost within the welter of faeces that spins his mind apart each moment of every day he is alive.
Kiekegaard was good, he was. I haven't read anything he wrote for a long time, I could never really digest it before, but I think I could now. Of all the major philosophers of the West, he is the one I would most hesitantly rule out as an free person. But his excellence only reinforces your folly, and I'll tell you why in just one second.
Before I do, as for your other names? I barely know them, and do not care to. I don't need a reading list from one as craven as you. I would fear to read them, lest they debase me, as you have been debased.
And here's the real fucking problem with you listing four people who you think have said this before.
You actually thought it to your credit that you had seen this spelt out four times before and still you are asleep.
You have seen this five times now, and you have never searchingly asked yourself "Could this be true?"
What does that say of you? If this is the very gateway to liberation, what does it say of you that you have missed it fivefold?
That even when reading it from me the fifth time, you found nothing worth saying other than to sneer out a reference list, as if demonstrating that in your erudition you are my superior.
There is no parity between us, Ryan. You could no more show yourself my superior with a reading list than you could pull the sun from the sky. In fact, reading list or no, I have faced and broken the central challenge of philosophy, while you collect names and call them wisdom. You are a ridiculous person, craven and lost. You toy with deep concepts and think it makes you deep. It does not, it just makes you a child, playing with toys.
Could this be the truth? Could it be truth of you? Could it be the truth behind all the knots and tangles you like to prod and poke like the abortive knitting of a palsied hag?
Because if it is, your life just got a lot more interesting, and if it's not, you can cast aside my attacks like so much confetti.
It's win-win.
Your second comment was even more ridiculous than your first.
@ Ryan - "I know this all feels new and revolutionary to you Ciaran. But it's old hat to most philosophers. Your argument has been made a hundred times before by a hundred different philosophers. It's nothing new."
Ha! That's funny. I hardly know where to begin, but I will say this - anyone who lacks the courage to genuinely seek the truth is no lover of wisdom, but of the appearance of wisdom. For those to whom this is 'old hat' I would say this: you are not philosophers. You have not earned that word.
Secondly, what is this thirst for novelty? Why so hungry for the 'original?' We do not seek novelty in our ideas of colour or balance. We seek accuracy because they have a use to us. Do we hunger and demand for the sun to change colour? For the grass to grow black? No. We just want the truth.
You don't want the truth. You want something 'original'. Why?
Because to you, the ideas of philosophy are like a glittering cloak you throw over your withered, weak, diseased body so you can look in the mirror and call yourself a king.
Thirdly, “Your argument has been made a hundred times before?” Then you have missed this shit a hundred times. And “my argument”? Argument?
Jesus. Fuck. I would no sooner argue with you about a philosophical concept than I would pick a fight with a five-year-old. No philosopher would. No true philosopher.
Argumentation is what charlatans do, vying and jostling for top position in a pile of vermin. You cannot argue the truth into being. You cannot argue yourself into awakening. You cannot argue yourself brave. You cannot argue yourself honest.
Those who argue, by definition, place the importance of their victory above the importance of their honesty. You do this, Ryan. You are no philosopher.
@ Ryan - "The point of the Cogito was for Descartes to find a starting point for what exists. Regardless of whether there is such a thing as the "self". He did. Case closed."
Are you mad, stupid, or just not interested in the actual content of the diarrhoea you insist on vomiting? What case? What case are you talking about, you insipid moron?
The only case I am interested in is the one which will free my species from it's chains.
If you can even credibly entertain the idea - not your idea, mind, but one you've hungrily suckled from some charlatan's teat - if you can even credibly entertain the idea that this is some 'contained philosophical problem' that has a 'specific solution', you are fucking lost, and I do not think I, or anyone else, can help you.
You have no honesty.
There are no contained philosophical problems. None. We are the philosophical problem. Us. Humans.
Rodney King said it best - "Why can't we all just get along?" And how the 'clever people' delighted in laughing at his 'naïve' question, but he's right - why? Why? Why?
It can't be random, nothing's random. There has to be some rhyme and reason for it, so what is that rhyme, what is that reason?
We talk about the impenetrability of the human psyche as if it is some vast and secret engine, but we do not say so because we have found it impenetrable. We say so because we are scared of the lie that we know we are, and we know that if we look too deep we will destroy that thin facade we call ourselves.
And we repeat this lie, this lie that we humans alone are the one uncrackable cypher – not because it corresponds to our reason – but because it corresponds to our vanity.
You are lost in your own arrogance.
The next bit I like especially. This is where you cease your challenge with an appeal to my own vanity. Oh Ciaran, you shout, you are so great. You are remarkable, and wasted on this page. I quote you here:
@ Ryan - "You're clever Ciaran. Very clever. Stop wasting you time arguing/trying to enlighten self-help fuckwads on facebook. I severely doubt you have any actual peers on your friends list. Man up and stop being a big fish in a little pond."
The level of foulness in your words here makes every stinking piece of shit you've said so far seem like a shining diamond.
I am clever?
Do you think this is what I want to hear?
Do you think this will please me?
Do you think I actually am clever?
Do you think that my being sharper than you, or deeper than you, has anything to do with my brainpower anymore?
Your flattery runs far wide of the mark, Ryan. And it runs further than you can imagine, not because you lack the brains, but because you lack the balls.
Stop wasting my time arguing? I'm not arguing, Ryan. I'm destroying. Destroying fools like you. Shining a light on your shit, and tearing your ridiculous falsehoods down to their foundations, and taking you with them.
What you do not know, because you have no spine and no stomach, is that what makes a man or a woman my peer is not the power of their mind, but the iron in their heart.
As for trying to enlighten self-help fuckwads? Riddle me this, . What do you think you are to me?
You doubt I have peers on my friends-list. How cute. You are wrong. There is a man on this very thread, his name is Raul. He is my peer. He is not yours. You are so far below him that if he were a mountain, you would be that mountain's strongest slug.
Almost at the end now:
@ Ryan - "Man up and stop being a big fish in a little pond."
How slickly you spin this, an insult that's a compliment. I've heard of something like this somewhere. Huh.
Ryan, there is no pond in which I would not be, not only the biggest fish, but also the apex predator.
And one last 'bro-esque' twitch.:
@ Ryan - "We cool."
No Ryan. We not.
Will. Will . How thick, like a cloud of stinking flies, your pomposity is. Your bluster and your arrogance precede and surround everything you say, and they are so thick I could slice them with a knife. So I will, Will.
I take it you have read what I have said to Ryan, and I am sure as you did you smiled a smile to watch a man so skewered.
I may not be able to skewer you so, Will. But do not count this as evidence of your intellect, nor of your integrity. Your lack of the latter has ruined whatever of the former you were blessed with by chance.
No, the reason I may be unable to cut you to the quick as I feel I can and have cut Ryan, is that I do not think you have a quick to cut to. Of course, I may be wrong about Ryan. He may fail, and retreat from the onslaught, and belittle it to all who will listen, and run like a shadow from the harsh light I shine.
Perhaps he will, and if he does, I will let him go. If he runs, he never had the strength to stand and do what needs be done anyway, so he was always useless to me.
I cannot change a man, but I can force a man to show himself for what he is.
He must now choose between a dishonest flight into the peace and comfort of wounded pride, or to standing in the path of a truth so brutal it will tear the lies from him if he can but stand it.
With you I have no such hope. I will be honest - I expect Ryan to fail. I expect him to run, and bleat, and rage in his own tiny way, and throw himself into lies and forgetting. But if he does not, I will be pleasantly surprised, but not shocked.
Were you, Will, to dredge one morsel of courage from the empty thing you call your heart and face even for a moment as an honest man one single sentence of what I have written, I would be stunned. Stunned. It would blow my mind that one as lost as you could be as easily reached. It would be like watching someone levitate. There is no truth in you, no courage in you, no manliness in you that I can discern. None. None whatsoever.
Stun me. Stun me with courage, because nothing else of yours can stun me.
Before I go on, I wish to convey something to you all, you who read this. I have always felt, rising from my throat, a revulsion toward the twisting deceit of the modern philosopher. This has risen complete and from my first encounter with the work of that den of snakes, fully formed and total.
I hoped that liberation would cure me of it. I realise now, it is not a disease.
It is the reaction of that which is true against that which is not only false, but lost to falseness to such a degree as to be an evangelical engine of self-indulgent cowardice and wholly baseless pride.
This bile rises in me now. I hate modern philosophy. I despise this feeling, and that which causes it. It is a nausea of the soul, deeper than any sickness, and I am loathe to even speak my hatred to you because of it. It clogs my nostrils and chokes my every breath.
Nonetheless, it does not fall to the plague-doctor to enjoy the smell of plague, but to burn out the buboes and let the patient recover from that agony if he has the strength.
The problem with you, Will, is that unlike Ryan, you glory in the pus-filled swellings of what you think is thought with no sense at all of the lie you live, and so drunk are you on the delusions spewed from your ridiculous culture that you have no sense that there is such a thing as a plague-free man.
Still, I will cut what I can reach, and we'll see what we can clean out before I abandon you as a lost cause, and move on to those strong enough to live.
Let's begin. Your first comment I thought showed a true and strong grasp of the idea
But why are you grasping any idea, if not to honestly ask yourself if it is true? I mean, any idea, about anything ever, at any point, ever, in your life? Why would you bother to grasp a concept if you weren't interested in asking yourself if it were true?
It is true, I know this for certain, because I have asked myself if it is credible and by that question freed myself from the chains I've worn since I fled the womb.
Firstly, you said this:
@ Will - "Didn't I tell you this? I at least remember saying that the cogito was flawed. Elizabeth Anscombe pointed out that the assumption that there is an "I" which we identify as doing the thinking is unwarranted. All you can be certain of is the ...proposition "thinking occurs."
But it's not thinking in the sense of words and concepts. In this case the term "thinking" is used in a wider sense referring to raw experience independent of time. You could call it "the Now." You could also say "Being is." which is the same thing as saying "Thinking occurs." and both are indubitably true but the problem with the latter is it sounds like a tautology even though it isn't. "
This displays a remarkable subtlety of thought. You have truly looked at this, and understood.
And yet what?
What comes of your understanding?
A book reference. A name.
Awakening? Not one stir.
I find it near-incomprehensible how men like you (I use the term 'men' loosely) can hold fully formed in your hands the key to your freedom, feel it, see it, then slide it on your keyring as your eyes rove around for other, shinier, more sophisticated keys.
Have you never tried to turn it?
Have you never thought of seeing if there is some actual use for the things you fill your head with?
Why do you do what you do?
What is the point of the life you live?
You are a stamp-collector, Will, a train-spotter of thought.
Your angry response, when I goaded each one of you further, was the best of all. I was hoping to slide some iron under your skin and bring out the filth, but such a gout of stinking pus I did not expect.
You begin with this delightful gambit:
@ Will - “Who is this Ryan character? He needs to take your dick out of his mouth. He insults your alleged fanboys right after revealing himself to be the biggest fanboy of all. What a tool.”
And a tool he is, Will - but compared to him, you are a thousand times the moron. Well, maybe five hundred. But still a lot.
You see, he senses something you do not sense. He senses that he is wrong. He's not free, he's still trapped, still feeding his bullshit - but he knows that something is amiss with it. He knows that there is another level here, that I am not merely shooting words into cyberspace for the sake of so doing, as you are.
That small gap is the only gateway he can move through as an honest man, and I will force his hand in this, for I have no time to guide it. Perhaps he will walk away from this, but I'll rate his chances for finding courage in that heart of his as better than zero, and I would not say the same of you.
Anyway, after some banter on the war, which I will let slide in my haste to get to the meat of the issue, you vomit forth this abortion:
@ Will - "Anyway you sound like a crackpot when you say "I do not exist" or "there is no me" since necessarily there is a you in SOME sense of the word."
Hang on a second. Let's backtrack to your first comment. I won't quote it here, but in fact you see exactly the point I make which is that it is NOT necessary for there to be a you.
It is necessary that there is some being, and this you seem initially to have understood. You then proceed to abandon this as a curious bauble, and move back to picking a fight about the necessity of something that you have yourself said is unnecessary.
I mean, you just said it. Fuck it, I will quote you.
@ Will - “the assumption that there is an "I" which we identify as doing the thinking is unwarranted.”
And now let's see your second comment.
@ Will - "Anyway you sound like a crackpot when you say "I do not exist" or "there is no me" since necessarily there is a you in SOME sense of the word."
Again the first:
@ Will - “the assumption that there is an "I" which we identify as doing the thinking is unwarranted.”
And again the second:
@ Will - "Anyway you sound like a crackpot when you say "I do not exist" or "there is no me" since necessarily there is a you in SOME sense of the word."
You did this, with no trace of irony, or even it seems any level of awareness that you were doing it, within the space of one response. Does this bother you in any way? Does this interest you in any way?
Is there even any part of you that thinks of this as pointing to something you might, on your own time and for your own benefit, actually want to look at? Are you interested in being coherent? Does it matter to you? Do you care?
I mean, can you see anything of what I'm saying here other than an argument, a case, which you will attack because to you, this is not about honesty, but about winning?
But let me be clear about this, Will. The one thing you cannot do against me, is win.
So let's get back to the rub of the matter.
The idea that there is a 'you' is completely without backing.
It has nothing behind it, save our day to day assumptions. And as our day-to-day life is one of constant absurdity, useless strivings, broken dreams and Faustian damage, I think it is not controversial to say that at some deep level, we humans are operating on some kind of false assumption.
I mean – pause for a second. Is it in any way controversial, when you see how relentlessly dysfunctional human beings are, to put forward the idea that they hold an assumption about the world that is fucking up the way they interact with it?
Is it? Is it absurd?
You didn't think it was absurd in your first comment, but in your second, you do. What has changed?
No. You just don't care whether or not what you're saying is true. You're just trying to beat me.
But I like how you start, because it is revealing of what you are. I sound like a crackpot?
I sound like a crackpot?
You know, you cannot honestly train in any skill of any kind without looking like a fool. The person who pushes himself beyond his reach is the only one who extends it. This looks sloppy. It looks messy. It works, though, and really, really well at that.
The entire edifice of modern philosophy is so peopled with hyenas looking for an easy kill that the illusion of strength becomes paramount. Weakness is leapt upon by the carrion feeders you think of as your peers and masters, and the appearance of strength is all that stops them, cowards as they are, from descending. You you take that appearance as the fact.
You think that appearance is philosophy.
How hard is it then to understand the philosophical obsession with bickering and argument, as you all secretly in your hearts know that you are not seekers, but jousters tilting at each other in some merry game.
No, that's not a good metaphor, for a jouster takes his life in his hands to play. You are less than this, massively less, as you wallow in your safety while you spin your shit that you are massively more.
There is no truth in what you do, but only a conspiracy of cowards, stroking each other's bloated arrogance in one almighty circle-jerk.
You then proceed to equivocate, and lose the clarity of the insight in a welter of caveats:
@ Will - "I think it's all well and good to make the case that who we think we are and the way in which we think we exist is bullshit."
I'm not making a case. There actually is no you. And of course you think it's 'well and good' to make the case. That's what you like, isn't it. Cases. Systems. Safety.
Keep it at arms-length, Will, you'll do well to keep it always at arms-length. God forbid you should ever open the box of yourself and peek inside. You are too terrified. You are too weak.
@ Will - "But there's still a you in some sense, even if it's just an undifferentiated being with no self-concept."
In what possible fucking sense is “an undifferentiated being with no self-concept” what people actually, or even theoretically can mean by what they refer to as 'I'?
None.
The answer is none. Just thought I'd spell it out for you there, although I am keenly aware that in feeding you the answers I might as well be throwing pennies down a wishing well.
@ Will - “I think it'd be more useful to elaborate the way in which we do exist, and how it differs from how we think we exist, than to just assert "i/you/we do not exist".
Useful how?
USEFUL HOW?
What possible fucking use could this have?
The only use it could have, is to free you.
This is the only fucking game in town, Will, and you're not playing it.
It is the prize and sole target of all your thoughts, whether you know it or not, if your thoughts are honest.
It is not your prize, and not your target.. And that does not mean that you do not credit liberation with reality. It means that you are not honest.
All honest paths lead in one direction. The truth.
And the truth is that there is no you.
It is actually true.
And it is, therefore, as philosophically solid as anything ever can be.
You ask me to elaborate the way in which we do exist, I tell you it needs no elaboration. We do not.
You continue:
@ Will - And if I haven't convinced you that falsification-ism is utter nonsense because of Quinean under-determinism then debating with you is pointless.
Firstly, debating with me is pointless, because I do not debate. Debating is a ludicrous contrivance of the overeducated and the vain. Debating is not honest. It is not honest.
It is a fucking competition between preconceived ideas.
It is about victory.
That is the point of it, and as such, the point of it is not truth.
The fetishising of debate, discourse (*retches*), argumentation - these are all just ways to put on a show for those who fund the departments who run the debates. Well, not just that, of course. They are a show for the people who take part in them to a much greater extent, sordid, partisan and cheap things as they are.
You love the theatre of it, don't you? Argumentation is not a crucible of truth, it is an arena for games more pointless and sickening than the most debauched spectacle of ancient Rome.
A man does not find treasure by debating treasure hunting with others, but by finding a map by any means he can, and a spade, and a ship, and getting his hands dirty, and his brow sticky, and his heart broken over and over. This does not make him a 'better' treasure hunter than those who debate it. It just makes him an actual treasure hunter.
My work in philosophy, all the many sacrifices I have made, risks I have run, failures I have taken, blind alleys I have followed and truth I have found do not make me a better philosopher than you.
You are not a philosopher. I am. That is the difference.
As for your Quine? Nobel laureates crowd the stage with talk of Popper, but you cast this aside with a wave of your hand. No discovery of any kind, at any stage, in any way, in any science has ever been in any degree attributed to Quine's influence.
Of course, Quine has an answer for this. I do not care to hear it though. The man is a maggot, and a coward, and a charlatan, and you, as the one who sucks his dick... God alone knows what you are.
So don't be too harsh on Ryan. He's a far clip free of your degraded position.
Let me sum up the central insight of Popper in one sentence, for the benefit of others reading this, for it is utterly lost on you:
Certainties are fragile and possibilities are bulletproof.
This is what you disagree with. I don't know why, and I don't care. This is crystal clear and self-evident. As is this: you are scum.
At the same time, the next three things you say you get right in a row:
@ Will - Either I suck at it
You do.
@ Will - or my argument falls on deaf ears.
It does.
@ Will - Either way no progress is being made.
It isn't.
@ Will - "And lol@ everyone being so butthurt at Ciaran's seemingly harsh words. He's just dicking around. It would be funny if someone cool was doing it. I think that's why everyone is confused."
Ahahahaha! I see I have stung you, fool, deeper than any other on this thread. It was you who posted last, you who waited and seethed in anger at my words for a full week before posting, you who debated in your head whether silence would come across as aloof or as surrender.
Oh and believe that my words are not seemingly harsh, they are harsh, as harsh as I have wit to make them.
And if you are unstung by them, that is no token of their lacking in intent, nor evidence of your strong fortitude, but only of the fact there is precious little of the man in you to sting.
And as for your final, oblique jibe? You think I'm not cool? Are you serious?
Your insults, like your thoughts, are the mewlings of a eunuch.
Daniel. Daniel James Gillen.
Perhaps it is only my vanity, (or to be more specific, just vanity itself) which makes me think this, but after watching two public flayings, I sense that you may be afraid of what I am about to say.
You may not, but I hope you are, it means that you are paying attention, and I salute that courage.
You can relax a little. The venom I have for the lies of the New Age are a small shadow of that great hate I feel toward those charlatans who have stolen the word 'philosopher'. Philosophy was my first love, and I love it more with each passing day, although it is at times cruel, heartless, brutal and cold.
Still, the disgust I have for it has recently expanded to include thought from the New Age stream of thought. Bad luck.
Before I go on, do not think I confuse you with some doe-eyed hippie, I do not. You are clearly a man of thought in the best sense of that term, and your engagement with the ideas you have encountered is not as easily dismissed as those who, like Christians, sift works of great insight for the pieces that comfort them and justify them only.
No, you are working this as a man might work a lock, and that is precisely what you have found, and so your approach is entirely appropriate.
In a way, you were caught in the backdraft of my bile for those whose comments proceeded yours, but only partially.
My contempt for you, as I am about to explain, is both coherent and apt.
You said this, to start:
@ Daniel - "I disagree, as ultimately we are all the same, the 'now', this is what is meant by I."
No, it isn't. Beneath this seemingly innocent remark move great currents of fiction that you have allowed yourself to be seduced by.
What you mean by 'I' is that cause you assume exists for the experience of life that you have.
I'll say that again - that cause you assume exists for the experience of life that you have.
The cause of it. The thing life happens to, the thing that initiates the experience you have.
Before you start denying, think of this: it makes perfect sense to look at the world in this way.
It is weird, to say the least, to think anything else. There is experience, therefore there must be some experiencer. Thought, therefore some thinker. Sight, therefore some see-er.
Let us pause now, for a moment, and think how mad it might seem to ever question this most simple and basic of things.
Mad, yes? Yes. Mad. All things have a cause, so there must be some cause for that sliver of reality you call the present moment, as you experience it. Of course there must be! What else could possibly explain the fact that there is feeling in my hand, save that I feel it? That there is thought in my head save that I think it? That there is pain in my heart, but I suffer it? What?
There seems nothing wrong with this simple picture.
Now pay very close attention to what I am about to say.
You do not choose what you mean by the word 'I'.
It is not even that your culture has 'programmed' you to think in a certain way, this is ridiculously facile. Cultural differences simply do not sink to the depth we are examining - the origin of identity.
Whatever noise or sigil a man might slap to this thing, this 'I', the thing remains identical - that there is a feeler to do the feeling, a believer to do the believing, and, in this instance, a reader to do the reading.
But churn this round in that head you call your own: it is entirely credible that there is not.
I'm not saying that it's true - not yet. It is true, but that's not the point. The point is that it is something more than true, something more than certain. It is genuinely credible.
In what sense, I hear the world scream at me, can what you say be anything other than idiocy?
Well I ask you this - you already know, I take it, that in it's rawness the truth of the universe is not divided? That our chopping and slicing, defining and demarcation - that these are conceits of the mind alone, and not characteristics of the world in itself?
There is no division in reality, because if there were, reality would collapse.
What level of pressure would lay along that seam, that would have all the stars and great gulfs of the heavens weighing upon it?
But if there is no division in reality itself, if division is something we bring to the table that is not originally set there, what of this division between you and the life you experience?
There is no division. If you could be said to exist in any way, you are the life you experience - this is the closest you can set it down in letters.
But far, far closer to the truth is to say that there is only the life you experience, and no you at all.
This hits the matter foresquare in the face. There is no you to live your life, but only life. There is no you to comprehend, but only comprehension. There is no you to think, but only thought. There is no you to feel, but only feelings. There is no you to love, but only love. No you to hate, but only hate. No you to die, but only death. No you to understand, but only understanding.
This simplicity is liberation. Look how strong it is, and how credible! It is no weak and oddball philosophical curio, but the very truth of your every waking moment. And of course - it's not your moment. It's just a moment.
Enlightenment does not mean convincing yourself this is true. Just seeing that it is credible, really credible, in your own life. It is quite surprising how credible it is, when you look at it.
Look at it.
Credibility trumps certainty every time.
So let us pause now.
Go off, have a coffee. Smoke if you've got 'em.
Just look how credible it is, and that is all you will ever need to see.
Seriously guys, put this shit down now. Turn off the computer. If this is a print out, put it the fuck down. Fucking do it. Do it now. Walk away, and consider how credible this is.
You would not fucking believe how fast you will awaken if you do this.
Are you guys done yet? Are you awakened? You must be awakened because if you considered the credibility of there being no you, and genuinely considered it, just once, you will be free. Fully free. End of fucking story. Free. Done.
Get the fuck out of here if you're not. Go right now. Go consider it. Be honest. Weigh it. Go.
Now.
Anyway Daniel, that wasn't so nasty, was it? Back to what you said next:
@ Daniel - "Perhaps 'we' is a better word to use, but fundamentally I think it is the same."
Actually, you don't think it's the same, for reasons previously discussed, but I'll let that shit slide.
When you say 'we is a better word to use', what do you mean? In what sense better? Better for what? Technically accurate?
As I said earlier to Will, there is just one goal, and that is awakening. I spread it out clear and clean for you in the last segment, so go back there and re-read it if you're not done yet.
And it's not 'fundamentally the same,' Daniel. Lies are not the same as reality. There is no division in reality, and lies are nothing but division. That is why you can rest on the real, but the false will suck you in like quicksand.
@ Daniel - " Wtf Ciaran? I wasn't attacking you at all. You say you're detatched from the ego and 'i' yet come back with such a persnal and ego filled responce as that."
Ok, two things. Firstly, spelling. Response has 2 's's, not a 'c'. And detachment only has 1 't'. And personal has more vowels than you have used.
Secondly, I never said I was detached from the ego. I said I was free. Calling liberation 'detachment from the ego' is simplistic and useless. Simplistic because, although I suppose it is true in a certain way, it is perhaps the least subtle way you can talk about this stuff meaningfully, and this is subtle.
Enlightenment is subtle. It's not some grand work you do after great straining and overcoming of pain. It actually doesn't overcome pain at all. And it doesn't detach you from it. All liberation is is when you see how credible it is that there was never a you to be attached to it in the first place.
It's subtle. Not unimaginable subtle, but finnicky. It's like picking a lock, not kicking a door in. Small movements count. The difference between credibility - genuinely asking yourself if it is credible - and certainty - convincing yourself that it is ironclad - is quite subtle, but no less crucial and no less real.
It is the difference between never cracking this and cracking this instantly.
I've spoken at length about the how and the why of free douchebaggery. But one last thing, to address your question directly.
If I, being free, have genuinely attained the freedom of which political freedom is a weak and feeble shadow – if I could not cunt someone out, I would not be free.
If liberation precluded anything, it would not be liberation.
If liberation prohibited anything, it would not be liberation.
If liberation bound my actions, thoughts or feelings in any way, it would not be liberation.
Which means that, being free, I am more than able to be a total cock about it, which I am doing, as you may have noticed.
I thought the spelling thing was especially obnoxious. Heh heh.
@ Daniel - "I really don't have as much time as I'd like to think on ideas such as this, I'm working 10hour days in greece, but I didn't expect such an angry reply becuase I didnt have the time to immediately substanciate my argument."
You don't have enough time? It takes one second to get free. Really, it takes one second to set the ball forever in motion, and after 10 minutes of truly testing the credibility of the statement 'there is no you', you are so fucking done that nothing in this universe, not Satan himself, could ever pull you back.
I assume you get lunch breaks, right?
Do it on your lunch break.
@ Daniel - "I'm dissapointed in you to be honest"
What are you, my mum? Pff. I scoff at your disappointment.
*scoffs at disappointment*
Oh, and disappointed has one 's', 2 'p's.
And you cannot be honest, because there is no you. But we've been through this.
Look people, and I say this to everyone reading now.
Gordian times call for Gordian measures.
I'm not here to untangle each and every knot your delusion has trapped you in. I don't care to, I don't have time, and frankly, you don't deserve it. But I would have you free. And not because I am a liberator, but because reality hates the lie that has you, and that is all I am now.
There's something else I want to say.
I didn't crack liberation by sitting on a mountain and considering the lily. I did it because I saw a lie at the heart of the world, and I smashed my fists against it until I broke every bone in both my hands. Then I patched them up, waited for them to heal into some kind of useful shape, and kept on battering.
Rinse, repeat.
Lao Tze's "seek and you will not find" may be a profound insight into the often self-inhibiting nature of the search, but it cannot be absolute, or he would have never found the Tao. Christ had the right of it. Seek, and you will find. It is there. It's not magic, it's not fiction, it's not rocket science and it is real.
Seek. Find. And if I may be so bold as to add one word to that pair, and make it a triumvirate - Use.
Seek. Find. Use.
So many sages throughout history, and so very, very few of them had the courage to plunge into hate.
Hate is a filter, hate is a test.
Hate filters out the weak, and the weakness in the weak. Those too prissy or too petty to cherish the truth above their fragile and fabricated 'certainties' will run squealing like possessed swine over a cliff. Those with a spark of courage in their hearts, will find that courage fanned to a blaze, or snuffed out forever if they try to build a wall of shit to keep it burning.
I see now the virtue of cruelty. It challenges, jars, pinions, galvanises. It demands response. It cannot be ignored. It cannot be endured.
Hate is a test. It is a test of your strength, and your courage, but more than that, and interestingly enough, it is a test of me.
Am I certain I am free?
Certainly.
Do I trust certainty?
Of course not.
It is, to me at least, credible that I am free. But to put a possibility into the realm of the solid and the strong, it must be tested.
And here's the real core of this hate, for me at least, and for now at least.
That hatred consumes the hater in exact proportion to its scale and power is such an obvious truth as to be a platitude. We know this truth, we see it always and in ourselves. In every act of hatred that a man has ever unleashed, that man has been by it consumed.
Hatred is the ultimate poison. It cannot be used without killing the wielder at a level so much deeper than the death of the body that all the tortures of Byzantium would seem blessed relief to a man so poisoned.
This makes it the ultimate test of what I am.
It is the crucible in which I will burn my liberation, for if I am free, I am untouchable by all the workings of divine justice.
If I am free, I cannot be brought low, no matter how low I stoop.
If I am not free, I need to stop thinking I am fast, and get back to work. And being consumed to the very core and destroyed entirely by hate is just the kind of thing that will snap me back to the path, and the chase, and the lock. As long, of course, as I don't kill myself.
And if I am not free, and I survive the backlash from my rage, I will crack liberation, or I will die with my hands locked around it fucking neck.
Of course, all this is moot, because I have cracked it. But from your point of view what this means is that if I'm still stable in two month's time, you have to fucking take this shit seriously, because by all the rules of reality that is impossible unless I have been saved.
I am well aware that the kind of destruction I am inviting by stoking the furnaces of my anger is very real, very potent, and utterly merciless.
Fuck it. I'm just some fucking dude, and the most extreme agonies I can suffer, set against the delusion of the world, are hardly worth the mention. Which makes me sound very brave and noble, until you realise that if I feel this way about my own suffering, and I'm the one who has to suffer that – there'll be no mercy for you from this quarter.
Hatred is the perfect hammer under which to test this thing. You should be free now, if you had the honesty to genuinely consider what I asked you to consider. Test it. Test it in hate.
It is the most destructive substance, philosophically speaking, of which I am aware. So bathe in it with me and if we are charlatans, let us be glad to burn there too.
But what if we're not charlatans?
Heh heh heh.
You'll find out soon enough.
Hate is the highest and the only gift I have to give, that, and a key, and a route to the door.
Perhaps I will fail in this, but it is my hope that I will open the gate so wide that only the craven will not pass through. Which is good, because I hate the craven.
Looking at this now, there is a possibility which doesn't seem ridiculous. I think I can force you wake, if you can force yourself to open up and be honest, if just for a moment.
Enlightenment is fireproofing for the soul. I cannot scorch myself with hate, but only others now, and that which I burn needs burning, for in the deep truth behind the lie of you, there is no tinder.
So yes, if I wanted to, I could remain a man of peace in a world of lies, and remain comfortable as that man for all time and ever after. Many sages have done this. Many have watched the world sicken and twist under the dark and phantom hand of delusion, and lifted not a finger - they cared not, and cared not that they didn't care.
And yes, this option presents itself to me. And perhaps I would take it, if I were less clear about the result of that path, or if I had gained liberation out of idle curiosity, or stumbled upon it in a merry, introspective jaunt. But I didn't.
That, and I'm a not a fucking coward.
Where other, lesser men hold back from fighting monsters for fear they may become one, I know that I can no more be a monster than I can walk to the moon. I have seen the truth of life, my life - that simple, instantaneous and crystal recognition that my life is not mine, for there is no me. There is only life, and the lie that hides it.
There are no existential consequences for my actions. This frees me to be evil in a way that has never been exploited by any sage. It also frees me to free others to be evil. And not in some petty and weak act of clumsy physical violence. The damage wrought on a man's body was always the lesser kind. I'm talking about launching a campaign of intellectual brutality that is without precedent in the history of the world.
Is that original enough for you, Ryan?
The situation does not call for explanation, nor for insight, nor peace, nor hope. The situation calls for war, and war calls for bodies. I would press you into my service, and will if I can. A war needs fighting, and I need soldiers, not lame and timid acolytes, nor meek and obedient disciples, nor blind and unthinking fanatics.
I need warriors, warriors by the million, men and women of all creeds and nations who have broken the chains set upon them by those nations and those creeds.
I need warriors whose minds are honed to an edge of slicing sharpness, with hardened hearts and strong stomachs.
Now I know the answer, I see that there have been others who have known what I now know.
And they spoke in gentle terms of grace and peace and hope. And they spoke the truth, and their paradises would have come to pass if we had but the courage to listen.
We had not the courage. Two thousand long years of mercy our race has squandered since Christ proved forever with his death that we did not deserve it. That his mercy would be twisted into a mockery of vanity and lies. Now, those mighty structures of falseness and delusion that have held us pinioned against them like they were the great Cross itself, are falling, rotting, splitting and decayed.
Let us kick them down then, and all those new and petty modern usurpers who have raised themselves up in sneering complacency over the corpses of the great fictions of the past.
The time for mercy is over. The day of hate has come. I am not here to rock the boat, but I'll sink it if I can, and let those with the courage to swim to shore swim there, and let those who have not that courage make a raft of all their lies and see how well it floats.
Those small smatterings of mercy in me that yet remain I will burn out at the root, and I will do my utmost to let loose a fury in my fellow man that will awaken this world whether it wants to awaken or not.
Motherfuckers.
.......................
And there you have it. 15 years of pent up fury. That's what it looks like. So yeah.
Perhaps it is time to take a break from reading this, and come back later. Perhaps not. I know it is a big chunk of venom that I have laid in front of you. I would not have done so if it was not a crucial piece of the puzzle. It is.
And it is because after everyone who's name you've seen mentioned here popped out, real enlightenment in the truest and deepest sense of the world, something struck me with the force of a thunderbolt.
No-one in history has ever actually combined deep philosophy with rage. They seem so totally at odds with each other, people think of wisdom as being peaceful - but when faced with deceit and lies, wisdom itself can get very riled up.
And that was it. That was the next lead. Where's this going to go? This is extremely promising. I actually popped out seven people in the very first month I was enlightened. Crazy. Absolutely crazy numbers. Never heard of anything like this. Not from anyone, not even the greats like Buddha or Hui Neng (the Zen guy). This was my first month, my very first. Seven. In one month. Amazing.
I took the second month off, and built a website. It had a blog and a forum. I knew I wouldn't have to wait long for the forum to fill. My past life in the dating industry had seen me become something of a minor celebrity in that world, many who posted on internet forums knew my name, some even were following my work, such as it was.
I did not build the forum as a final answer, because I knew that I did not fully understand the dynamics of how I was transmitting the truth I had seen. This to me was always the prize, a global awakening that could be spread rapidly. I needed to experiment, to test, to dig. I needed to dig. Because anger is not magic, and neither is truth, and if by placing them both together I was cracking people out on a scale never before seen, there had to be a reason for that.
I built the forum because I realised that in my anger I had discovered something more important than enlightenment. I had found a major lead in cracking it's transmission from person to person.
I named my website "Ruthless Truth." I was as excited as a schoolboy when I found that domain name was as yet untaken.
I toyed with Sadistic Mystic, but that site had been taken, and the owner refused to sell at a price my pitiful finances could afford. It would have been silly anyway, but I did like the name.
So I built ruthlesstruth.com, and opened it up on the day of the end of the second month of my freedom.
They came.
Many who I had insulted, or who had harboured grudges against me came. Many who were simply up for some recreational trolling came. They came into my forum thinking they would show me up as a pretentious and fragile philosopher. They did not know that I had not built it as a discussion group, but a meat grinder.
They found out soon enough.
I laid down fire as I have never done, passing even the rage I had felt in my first burn. Focusing it with all the accuracy of my newfound clarity of thought, the exhaustive understanding of a 15 year obsession and the mad, wild freedom of a savage revenge.
The first line of opposition fell, and were freed. Some left. Some joined me and began to do what I was doing by my side, as soldiers in a phalanx. I had never had a man put his shoulder to my back and push before, never had wingmen or brothers in arms. Some fell away, but some emerged into freedom as I had emerged - furious, hungry and basking in the bloody glow of the intellectual carnage that we wrought.
Much fun was had by all. I got into a duel with a man I know only as 'Steve'. This battle became epic, the centrepiece confrontation of the forum. A man trained in academic philosophy he threw intellect and logic at my brutal honesty and came undone over and over. Shattering blow after shattering blow I rained down upon him, and he reeled away each time only to emerge again with more and more shrill and weak objections.
I slid knives of insult into his soul, tripped his fury into a full explosion. He poured all he had at me, and I took it all and took it down. In the end, he was spent, and then, as if like sunlight from behind the clouds, honesty shone forth from him. He was looking, seeing, engaging. I dropped the hate, and engaged with him. I took him right down the rabbithole and showed him the world through my eyes and he called me half-genius and half-god.
I assured him I was simply a geek who had struck lucky - which is (sadly) the truth.
From that point all it took was a few more strikes and he popped. And he was free.
I realised that there was no depth of lostness a man could sink in that I could not find him with hatred and rage.
But all this time, one objection surfaced over and over. How can I be enlightened, and full of such bile? How can a man who has transcended suffering bring such suffering with his gaze?
I knocked the question aside as irrelevant. The common understanding of enlightenment is a shallow and weak thing. The richness and depth of freedom are exquisite and extreme, and include the freedom to hate as well as the freedom to love.
There were times in my early moments of freedom where the beauty of things was so potent in my eyes that I felt myself slipping into becoming the one thing I had always feared enlightenment would turn me into - a recreational buddha. A sage, peaceful and serene who uses his freedom to free himself of caring about the suffering of his world.
Enlightenment to me was never anaesthetic. I did not seek freedom so I could be free of guilt or horror over the fate of my race, but so I could stand in the path of that fate, and shatter it like glass.
Perhaps this, more than anything, is what drove me to plumb new extremes of human fury. And they were indeed new. Fury is a profoundly corrosive feeling, it consumes the person who feels it. We all know this, we know of people who have let fury take them.
But I was free. Fury could not take me. I could stoke my wrath to a nuclear fire and remain untouched. This was what I did with my enlightenment.
I did not restrain my anger to the forum. I had the truth, and the path ahead seemed one of conflict and war. I had to know that those closest to me were free, and strong. When the storm came it would use any chink in my armour to destroy me.
But I was weak, and I could not bring myself to intellectually brutalise the woman I loved, my wife. Instead I tried to ease it across to her, start her off slowly. I tried shouting at myself to be stronger, to be harsher, but I could not. I simply was not that strong.
I bought her a copy of C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. She comes from a Christian background, so I felt it was the perfect way to start.
She didn't read it. I asked her again and again to read it, and she wouldn't. She was all smiles and evasion. I did everything I could until my patience ran out and I set down a challenge. Though it would break my heart, I would leave her if she refused to start looking at my work.
She refused. Then she looked me in the eye and told me I had lost my mind.
This is a very intense thing to say to me. The truth is that I did at one point in my life, lose my mind completely. It was in the spring of 2003. I was in university in Aberystwyth in Wales, and I had (as one does in university) started 'experimenting' with drugs.
More specifically, hallucinogens. Mind-expanders. The effects of mescaline and psilocybin on the human mind are not quite as facile as the newspapers would suggest. They do not simply immerse you in some nonsensical cartoon. If I could describe their effects in one word, that word would be acceleration.
Hallucinogens accelerate the mind to phenomenal speeds. Thought does not move from one idea to the next, but explodes from one epiphany to the next, each one magnificent and complete. To me, it was like fitting a nitro-injection canister to the engine of my mind. After a long time of stasis, I experienced a kind of philosophical renaissance. I was convinced.
But again, my desire was never to be a philosopher, but to end philosophy itself. I wanted it finished, done, complete - and from that completeness a new philosophy could be born that was not dry or complex, but simple, beautiful, potent and clean.
I won't bore you with the details, but I drugged myself with psilocibin mushrooms, and opened a door in my mind that no person should open.
I am the only man I have ever heard of who intentionally triggered a psychotic episode. This is literally, to my understanding, the most stupid thing a person can actually do, ever. There is no higher damage a human can sustain than the total obliteration of their personality.
This may, to some, sound like enlightenment itself. The death of self. It is not.
I think I had a sense of the catastrophe that was about to happen, because I went to a tattoo parlour, and got a tattoo on my left shoulder. It was a circle of stone, and within it a stylised line drawn representation of the Parthenon in Athens, birthplace of philosophy.
I did this at the time telling myself it was simply because I wanted a tattoo. But it was more than that. It was, to be appallingly pretentious about it, like Theseus tying a cord to the start of the Labyrinth before he went to face the Minotaur.
I think I knew something horrific and shattering was about to happen. I had my skin marked so I would always know the direction in which I needed to face.
It is not the illusion of self that dies. That survives. But it is torn and twisted, wrenched into horrific cathedrals of nightmare beyond the capacity of the sane to comprehend. I do not wish this to become some kind of violin solo for the damage I have sustained. As I said, no-one did this to me, I did it to myself. And I clawed my way out of that madness myself, though it took me a year and plunged me into a howling pit of depression that I do not like to remember.
And the only thing that stayed with me, the only crutch I had to lean on as I trudged brokenly out of hell was that I had seen something that the world needed to see. That was the only thing that pulled me back from stepping onto train tracks or sliding a noose around my neck. That alone. Only that.
Suffice it to say, my wife knows these things, and when she looks me in the eye and tells me I have lost my mind, I am stunned at how low she is prepared to stoop instead of even reading a single thing I have written.
I had given an ultimatum and it had been broken. But I still couldn't leave her. I asked her again to just read one thing I had written, just one thing once. She tells me she will pray, and if God tells her not to read my work, she won't. I ask her if she'd place my shopping list on the bonfire of heresies, and she relents.
Grudgingly, finally, she read that piece of writing I refer to as the first burn.
She comes to me annoyed that I have used crass humour, and tells me she's very impressed that I am able to communicate my madness with such clarity, although to be honest, there was nothing in it but insults.
I am at a loss. So I told her that I would give her until December the 1st to start taking my work seriously. I have to know that the person who was closest to me in the world at least had some level of understanding as to why I was calling down such fury upon us both from broken world of lies and cruelty. And it would come, of that at least I was totally certain.
She persists in calling me mad. This angers me. She comes in one night, and I am just not in the mood, so I go for a walk. On the way out I notice that my shoelace is broken, so I change shoes with the boots I have in the hallway, and go on my way.
I return later in the evening and my wife is on the phone to my little sister. My wife moves to hang up, and I ask to speak with my sister. We have been friends since childhood, and I love her very much. My wife puts on her coat and leaves the house.
"How's it going Ciaran?" my sister asks.
"Actually good. I've finally cracked the philosophy thing I've been working on for fifteen years."
"No you haven't, Ciaran. You've gone mad again."
I am silent. She continues.
"I know you're disappointed, but I've been following your stuff on Facebook, and you're just not well. You need help."
I am still silent.
"Ciaran? Are you there?"
I decide I'm not and hang up the phone. My wife comes back into the house. She has two police officers with her. I am somewhat taken aback.
The police enter my bedroom where I am sitting on the bed. My wife is behind them, her face a mask of worried concern.
They tell me that those who love me are troubled. That my behaviour has been erratic (in all fairness, it has). That I should go with them to the police station and get a psychiatric evaluation, and that I should go now. As evidence, they point to the fact that earlier that day I had gone for a long walk with no shoes.
A long walk with no shoes.
I look at my boots, and look at my wife. She looks away.
"I did not go barefoot. As you can see, I am wearing boots."
The police seem perplexed for a second, shrug it away then return to the central thrust of their message. I need to go immediately to see a psychiatrist.
I think about this for a moment. Then I refuse.
For half and hour the police speak with me, telling me that a psychiatric evaluation is nothing to fear if I am not mad. I tell them, in a clear and level tone that for me my sanity is not in doubt, but my anger is very real. They finally agree to go after warning me against taking my anger out on my wife with a beating. I tell them that there is nothing on this earth that would make me hit my wife. They leave.
I do not hit my wife.
The next day I call my mother to tell her I am leaving this woman. I ask for a loan of £500 to cover the cost of moving to a new flat.
She answers by diagnosing me with bipolar depression. I hang up.
The next day I have calmed down sufficiently to think. If a doctor's examination is what my wife needs to see to know I am sane, and that my work is worth looking at, I will do this. I will do this for her, suffer this insult to the bone to save my marriage.
I make the appointment and go to the doctor. The meeting quickly descends into farce as it becomes apparent I am exhibiting none of the symptoms of any known mental illness. I ask him to call my wife to tell her and he agrees.
I go home, and announce the good news. My wife looks - how to put this? - annoyed.
I ask her why she's annoyed that her husband is sane and she responds saying that if I'm not mad, then I've been very rude to her, and I should apologise or face the consequences.
I wander off.
A wall of silence now surrounds me. The portcullis has dropped. I have not gotten as far as I have without defences. Once I see that a person cannot be trusted to be let in to my heart, I drop latticed steel around it, and I do not raise that gate again without a reason as ironclad as my emotional core now is.
I go back to the forum and still that one objection was there. Why anger? Could there be a better way to transmit this? Could there be a better way forward?
I tell people that we do not need the best way forward, only a way forward that works.
People came to me with books they had found from people who had freed themselves. A man posted a link to a piece by the great sage Jiddu Krishnamurti, and I tore into him for a coward and a traitor, told him there was no room in this for enlightened navel gazing and posted up another link to a different book which I suggested all new free people should read. It was Guerilla Warfare, by Che Guevara.
I am many things, but I am not a subtle man.
But hatred cannot exist in a vacuum, and my hatred had no intention of being so coy as to focus itself only on human cowardice or intellectual dishonesty.
The lie. It was the lie. That was my nemesis, the lie of self that held my people chained. This single, one assumption from which sprung whole menageries of deceit and damage. It was to me the devil, and in my eyes it was only our mercy which kept it alive. I would become a devil to kill one. That was what I did with my freedom.
I call it the "assumption of self" now for a reason. "Lie" isn't completely wrong, but it carries with it a host of moral implications, none of them good. You cannot hate an assumption, but you can hate a lie. A lie, a living lie, a parasite of thought and hunger that feeds upon goodness itself like a fat, diseased worm. Not mystical, not supernatural, a pattern of thought only, but a living pattern of thought with a dark and alien agenda.
This is not as crazy as it may initially seem.
I will quote now from a section of the duel with Steve. This is the part where I account for my wild claim that the lie of self is not inert. That it possesses some kind of agency, and some kind of life. Do forgive my coarse language in places, and believe me, this is extremely mild for the kind of things I was saying.
"I mean, this is the level of subtlety that we're dealing with when we confront what I call the 'parasitic lie'. It acts like a kind of animal made of thought. It moves to infect, to defend, it reacts it attacks, it reproduces, it competes with other lies.
It seems madness to say that there is any level of agency to a lie. How can there be? How? It's not alive.
Ok - how about this.
Daniel Dennett (who is highly respected but timid thinker) wrote something once about the preconditions needed for evolutionary process.
1 - Replication. An organism needs to be able to reproduce itself.
2 - Mutation. An organism needs to have an element of change in each act of reproduction.
3 - Competition. Organisms need to compete with each other for resources within the same substrate
Now, the interesting thing about this is that he doesn't just say that if you have these things, evolution can happen.
He says, if you have these things, evolution is locked.
It HAS to happen, it CANNOT not occur. If these three elements are in place in any substrate, you get the evolution of complex organisms.
That's from Dennett, he's a personal friend of Richard Dawkins, and one of the highest authorities in the land on evolution.
When I read that an absolutely weird as fuck thought occurred to me.
What about a belief?
Can a belief replicate? Well yes. Obviously yes. Through language, and persuasion and what have you.
Can a belief mutate? Well yes. Obviously yes. Each person who shares a belief can be said to believe the same thing, but there'll always be some level of individual spin on it.
Can a belief compete with another belief? Well yes. Again, obviously yes. In a way, that's kind of all they do. It's only since the discovery of the scientific method that mankind has actually been able to systematically apply it's ability to think. One might almost be persuaded that the ability to think is wholly secondary to the real purpose of the mind, which is the replication, defence and dissemination of belief.
And then I thought - hang on a second. Is this true of ideas? Of emotions? Of theories? Of thoughts?
And then I thought, hang on another fucking second - this is true of every single piece of content in the human mind, with the single exception of ACTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS itself. That's the only thing in the human mind that is not subject to evolutionary process.
And I looked at this idea, and the thing that hit me like a fucking hammer was how weird it wasn't.
How much sense it makes to look at self-destructive human behaviour through this lens?
And then all of a sudden a massive chunk of the puzzle just dropped into my lap - humans are NOT self-destructive. NO self-destructive organism could POSSIBLY have evolved. EVOLUTION does not REWARD the SUICIDAL.
And yet we ARE transparently TEEMING with self-destructive traits.
But they are not self-destructive. It's not us. It's the lie. And the lie isn't even evil - it's just a parasite. It has a parasitic life cycle. In fact - it's probably closer to the truth to say that (this might be too abstract, sorry) the initial delusion of self creates the substrate in which feedback processes of thought and emotion have evolved into a kind of life.
It is the delusion of self that creates the gap, the substrate. Close that gap, kill the parasite.
And it's not even really aware that we're here. When I first started thinking about a kind of semi-aware lie that is composed of though and feeds on human drama, the first word that came to my mind to describe this thing was "Demon."
It is eerie how closely this tallies with spiritual accounts of the Demonic. It feeds on pain. It is invisible, it exists only inside your consciousness, it is pure selfishness, it is a lie and a liar and the father of lies. It really is this, really. It seethes and writhes and weasels it's way out of things, sowing mistrust and paranoia. It is the foundation of all racist hate, all genocidal wars, all acts of rape and butchery.
It is, essentially, the Devil.
Except it's not just one Devil. It's a whole teeming fucking horde of Demons, a Demonic ecosystem. And looking at it like an ecosystem, while an incredibly weird perspective to hold, makes eerie sense of massive swathes of otherwise incomprehensible human behaviour.
But I don't call it them Demons anymore. I refer to them as lies, because I think the time for being scared of these fucking parasites has been and gone. They are not magic. They are not unbeatable spiritual entities. They have no reality, they are not like us. They exist only as phantoms, thoughts in the head based on a false assumption... and I know what that false assumption is.
I found it. It's what I traded the last 15 years of my life for and frankly, I feel I got it cheap. This is big news, dude. Big news.
Oh - and one other thing. I don't think we should call these things Demons because that makes us think of them like 'invisible evil people'. Invisible evil people who are red, and have horns, but anthropomorphic nonetheless.
I don't think that whatever this lie is it can have any more understanding of humans in their reality than a worm in Da Vinci's gut would be able to appreciate the Mona Lisa. And as evidence for this, I put this website, my book - my continuing life.
If the lie was aware, or could process content in anything like the way we do, it would have understood the threat I represent to it, and I would already be dead.
Which means that, for the first time in history, I think we've actually identified a single, concrete advantage that we have over the lie. The lie can sense and react against attacks - but it cannot understand them. The truth itself is, from the perspective of every part of the ecosystem of parasitic lies - invisible.
I honestly believe that it is credible for me to state that I have actually discovered a new domain of life. Not a species of life, or even a kingdom, but a domain, in the strict biological sense of that word.
Which is, I think you'll agree, pretty mental."
It seems madness to say that there is any level of agency to a lie. How can there be? How? It's not alive.
Ok - how about this.
Daniel Dennett (who is highly respected but timid thinker) wrote something once about the preconditions needed for evolutionary process.
1 - Replication. An organism needs to be able to reproduce itself.
2 - Mutation. An organism needs to have an element of change in each act of reproduction.
3 - Competition. Organisms need to compete with each other for resources within the same substrate
Now, the interesting thing about this is that he doesn't just say that if you have these things, evolution can happen.
He says, if you have these things, evolution is locked.
It HAS to happen, it CANNOT not occur. If these three elements are in place in any substrate, you get the evolution of complex organisms.
That's from Dennett, he's a personal friend of Richard Dawkins, and one of the highest authorities in the land on evolution.
When I read that an absolutely weird as fuck thought occurred to me.
What about a belief?
Can a belief replicate? Well yes. Obviously yes. Through language, and persuasion and what have you.
Can a belief mutate? Well yes. Obviously yes. Each person who shares a belief can be said to believe the same thing, but there'll always be some level of individual spin on it.
Can a belief compete with another belief? Well yes. Again, obviously yes. In a way, that's kind of all they do. It's only since the discovery of the scientific method that mankind has actually been able to systematically apply it's ability to think. One might almost be persuaded that the ability to think is wholly secondary to the real purpose of the mind, which is the replication, defence and dissemination of belief.
And then I thought - hang on a second. Is this true of ideas? Of emotions? Of theories? Of thoughts?
And then I thought, hang on another fucking second - this is true of every single piece of content in the human mind, with the single exception of ACTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS itself. That's the only thing in the human mind that is not subject to evolutionary process.
And I looked at this idea, and the thing that hit me like a fucking hammer was how weird it wasn't.
How much sense it makes to look at self-destructive human behaviour through this lens?
And then all of a sudden a massive chunk of the puzzle just dropped into my lap - humans are NOT self-destructive. NO self-destructive organism could POSSIBLY have evolved. EVOLUTION does not REWARD the SUICIDAL.
And yet we ARE transparently TEEMING with self-destructive traits.
But they are not self-destructive. It's not us. It's the lie. And the lie isn't even evil - it's just a parasite. It has a parasitic life cycle. In fact - it's probably closer to the truth to say that (this might be too abstract, sorry) the initial delusion of self creates the substrate in which feedback processes of thought and emotion have evolved into a kind of life.
It is the delusion of self that creates the gap, the substrate. Close that gap, kill the parasite.
And it's not even really aware that we're here. When I first started thinking about a kind of semi-aware lie that is composed of though and feeds on human drama, the first word that came to my mind to describe this thing was "Demon."
It is eerie how closely this tallies with spiritual accounts of the Demonic. It feeds on pain. It is invisible, it exists only inside your consciousness, it is pure selfishness, it is a lie and a liar and the father of lies. It really is this, really. It seethes and writhes and weasels it's way out of things, sowing mistrust and paranoia. It is the foundation of all racist hate, all genocidal wars, all acts of rape and butchery.
It is, essentially, the Devil.
Except it's not just one Devil. It's a whole teeming fucking horde of Demons, a Demonic ecosystem. And looking at it like an ecosystem, while an incredibly weird perspective to hold, makes eerie sense of massive swathes of otherwise incomprehensible human behaviour.
But I don't call it them Demons anymore. I refer to them as lies, because I think the time for being scared of these fucking parasites has been and gone. They are not magic. They are not unbeatable spiritual entities. They have no reality, they are not like us. They exist only as phantoms, thoughts in the head based on a false assumption... and I know what that false assumption is.
I found it. It's what I traded the last 15 years of my life for and frankly, I feel I got it cheap. This is big news, dude. Big news.
Oh - and one other thing. I don't think we should call these things Demons because that makes us think of them like 'invisible evil people'. Invisible evil people who are red, and have horns, but anthropomorphic nonetheless.
I don't think that whatever this lie is it can have any more understanding of humans in their reality than a worm in Da Vinci's gut would be able to appreciate the Mona Lisa. And as evidence for this, I put this website, my book - my continuing life.
If the lie was aware, or could process content in anything like the way we do, it would have understood the threat I represent to it, and I would already be dead.
Which means that, for the first time in history, I think we've actually identified a single, concrete advantage that we have over the lie. The lie can sense and react against attacks - but it cannot understand them. The truth itself is, from the perspective of every part of the ecosystem of parasitic lies - invisible.
I honestly believe that it is credible for me to state that I have actually discovered a new domain of life. Not a species of life, or even a kingdom, but a domain, in the strict biological sense of that word.
Which is, I think you'll agree, pretty mental."
There's a lot in this piece, and I think I've done some interesting work (this is part of the response that generated Steve's "half-genius, half-god" comment) - but the thing I want you to realise is that to me the lie I was fighting was alive in a sense. Not some supernatural sense, but it could react, attack, evade, multiply, like a simple, but very effective parasitic organism.
That said, my main evidence for it's being dull and unable to comprehend things in the way humans can was that I was still alive, physically unharmed.
Last Friday I began to have stomach pains, like indigestion but sharper. They continued throughout the weekend, and after chomping through a bunch of antacid tablets I realised I probably had an ulcer.
At 5:30am on Monday morning of this week, I was lying in bed. I couldn't sleep because my stomach was full. I felt bloated, as if I'd eaten way too much even though I hadn't eaten since early evening.
I realised I was going to vomit, and stood up, just making it to the toilet in time. I vomited a stream of jet black liquid. It was black, not brown, black. There was a lot of it. I realised I should probably call a doctor.
I flushed the toilet, stood, and walked to the phone, but my legs gave out and I crashed to the floor, hitting my chest and my left hand on some boxes that were in the way. My vision tunnelled, and I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness.
I focused hard. I was alone in the house, and it was my day off from work. If I didn't call that number, it wasn't going to get called. I would be alone with my black vomit and my unconsciousness for days to come.
After a minute or so I regained control. I realised I was going to shit myself. I made it to the toilet, for a bout of what I thought was diarrhoea. It wasn't diarrhoea. The same black liquid I was vomiting filled the toilet again.
When I flushed the toilet, in the splash I saw what it was. It's blackness was in truth extremely dark red. It was blood.
There wasn't 'blood in my faeces'. There was no faeces. There was just blood. Blood burned black, I later learned, from passing through the acid in my stomach and the enzymes in my gut.
I called the ambulance. I managed to get the woman on the other end to repeat my address back to me before I stumbled away from the phone and fell onto the bed.
After 15 minutes a paramedic arrived, and just stood there looking at me. I looked in the mirror and saw why. My face was pure white, and my lips were as white as my face. I looked like a dead person.
Every now and then I would vomit more black blood into a cooking pan I'd lazily and luckily left by the bed. There was a lot of black blood. It just kept coming.
The guy took my blood pressure, and radioed for an ambulance. They eventually came. I was happy to be in someone else's hands.
When I arrived at hospital I had regained some cheer. Lying down in the ambulance, and the oxygen mask had helped. I thanked the paramedics and they left. They stripped me of my clothes and put them in a clear plastic bag, and I lay back down.
Then I started to slip away.
The feeling of falling into shock is very different from the feeling of falling asleep. It is not comfortable, it isn't pleasant. It feels like you're falling, falling down a slippery mud-soaked slope toward a cliff-face and you know that it ain't roses at the bottom but rocks and darkness.
The doctors rushed me, rushed around me. One female doctor was desperately trying to get a drip feed into a vein in my arm. She was having trouble because no veins were visible. It was just white. She eventually guessed, stuck it in hard and hit the right place. A drip feed was put in, and then another in my other arm.
I started to stabilise. As the plasma raised my blood pressure that horrible feeling of losing grip started to recede, and then it was gone leaving me feeling weak, just really weak.
They moved me to Intensive Care, and I assume I was considered to be in a critical condition because the nurse who was looking after me had a namebadge that declared she was a critical care nurse.
If you don't know how the British medical system classifies injuries, 'critical' means you're on the verge of death.
I had my own room with a window open to the main reception desk of the Intensive Care Unit. If anyone knows anything about the NHS you'll also know that you don't get that kind of royal treatment without a very good reason. There were cancer patients screaming in the ward outside who didn't have their own room. I had my own room. They didn't.
Heart monitors were placed on my chest, and a vast bank of medical machinery stood to my side, monitoring heartbeat, blood pressure, haemoglobin count, everything.
One of the two drip feeds contained some special drug, something advanced and new - I know this because the doctor who operated on me was very impressed that anyone had thought of it. It began with a 'p' and worked to rapidly strengthen the lining of my stomach. It stabilises the bleeding, and gives me some time to think.
I was informed that I might need surgery, to open my stomach up so they can find the bleed and stop it. I dig out my phone and tap out a Facebook message. I don't want to die without people knowing this is a strange as fuck coincidence. I know what I blame for this shit. I know in my fucking bones. The lie did this to me.
The lie did this to me.
I didn't know how, I didn't know how it had managed it, but this was too much of a coincidence. A freak bleed from nowhere - out of the clear blue sky? When I was doing this? Really? When I'd just cracked Steve out and launched into a furious and open challenge to the lie?
No. No, this was something else. This was Bill Hick's pancreatic cancer, Bruce Lee's fatal reaction to aspirin, John Lennon's high-powered rifle shot.
Imagine all the people sharing all the world. Bang.
This was murder. My own murder. I had stood openly against the lie, and it had slid a knife into my belly.
There was one other message I had to write. The battery in my phone was failing, just one bar left, but I had to make it good. Critical care ward? Going into surgery? I knew what might be about to happen. And I knew what I had to do. Pass the torch to the best guy I could think of, and swear him to take a bloody vengeance on the lie for my death. Carve my name in agony across it's face - that was the phrase I used. I am nothing if not melodramatic. Forgive me my weakness, I was in something of an extreme state of mind at the time.
I poured into the message all the plans I had, the best plans, the half-formed whispers of plans. I told him where he was weak and where he was strong. I gave him all the passwords to the places on the internet where I store my work, and told him to publish it all for free, that he could make a profit from any print publication of my work as long as it was free to read online.
In my vanity I imagined myself Maximus from the film Gladiator, swaying in the Colosseum, giving instructions to Quintus for the salvation of Rome even at the moment of death.
I do things like this sometimes.
In order to staunch the bleeding, before they go to surgery they do what's called an endoscopy. I am led to believe this is an uncomfortable but ultimately pain-low procedure, and that I will be sedated. If they can use the endoscope to find and cauterise the ulcer, they can avoid surgery. If they cannot, I will go straight to theatre, and the chopping block.
I am quickly to learn that the difference between sedated and anaesthetised is that when you are sedated you are conscious. Fully conscious. Weak, disoriented, confused - but awake.
That's when they get three people to hold me down and slide a camera on a tube down my throat while someone with a suction stick sucks up the spit I'm choking on.
Once inside, they dig around in the black blood filling my stomach. When they found the ulcer it was in my duodenum, which is the part of the intestine that leads away at the bottom of the stomach.
I never got a clear answer as to how big the ulcer was. One of the doctors said it was very big, two said it was very small. The NHS is not always entirely clear on these things.
But what I did find out is that the reason I had haemorrhaged internally was that the ulcer had 'eroded' into one of the main blood vessels to my gut.
A big blood vessel was opened and it had filled my entire stomach, and my gut, with my own blood.
At this stage of course, the Doctor is still digging around inside and beneath my stomach. He finds the ulcer, injects it with adrenaline, uses the 'heat probe' to cauterise (which is to say burn shut) the blood vessel beneath the ulcer. He then slices a chunk off it for a biopsy (a battery of tests on removed tissue) and only then does he pull the fucking thing out of me.
It takes 30 minutes. I am fully conscious the entire time.
Yes. Yes it hurt.
I slip into unconsciousness.
I awake later on, shaking with trauma. I could feel myself retreating into my head in a manner very similar to that described by rape victims. I decide that instead of so doing, I will give the hospital a piece of my mind and spend the next four days in a specialist bleed unit pouring hatred onto anyone who will listen.
I am nothing if not ungrateful.
A night goes by in observation as I shit blood into bedpads and piss into bottles. I feel so weak, I have never felt weakness like this. The next day dawns and they tell me I've stabilised and I'll be moved out of the ICU. I am wheeled out past ranks of the diseased and the dying and up into the hospital's specialist bleed unit.
There, I have access to the internet. Above my bed there is a screen suspended on a large mechanical arm. A phone is on one side, a remote control with a fold-out keyboard is on the other. I dig my credit card from the clear plastic bag of my clothes that sits by the bed. I take the phone, buy some credit for the internet and pull up Facebook.
There are responses from well-wishers. A couple of sarcastic comments from people happy to see me die, a couple of comments flippant about the danger I was in, a couple of comments are people jumping on the excitement to get attention for their own philosophical ideas. Mainly well-wishers though.
Nothing from my mother.
Nothing from my sister.
Nothing from my wife.
I check the messages. Nothing. I check my email account. Nothing. Secondary email. Nothing.
I begin to become annoyed.
I know the kind of man I am. I am a crazy person. I have used myself over and over as the test subject for my philosophical theories, and each theory I had I tested to collapse. That meant I have lived the last 15 years of my life in a state of enforced, intentional bipolar disorder.
To me it wasn't a disorder. To me, it was plan A.
I have caused great damage to those around me. I have no close friends - I have had many, but none for very long. I collapse in some way, and I damage everything around me. They leave. They have to.
I do not begrudge this. I wish it were not necessary, and if someone could show me a better path to tread that gave the results this path gives, I would delight in walking it.
But there is no such path. A man can follow the work of others, and by moving through the motions they have walked in as a robot, achieve the results they have achieved. But he will never truly understand the journey he has completed, will not have gained anything other than its end.
Only this way, only the hard way - this alone means that all your many failures are, once seen in the proper light from the end of the road, like pearls on a string, and your glory.
I know I walk this path. I have chosen to with open eyes. Even after the catastrophic failure of my sanity itself in 2003, I continued on the path - although it took me a long time to learn (in metaphorical terms of course) how to walk again.
I do not ask much from life. I know I will be hit and hurt and damaged and all those around me will curse my name and leave me to rot. I know all this and though it breaks my heart I accept it, for my reward is that even when failing, I never live the life of a coward, and I never live the life of a charlatan.
I do not ask for money for what I do. I would like to earn enough of a living to do it professionally, but there is no way I will ever place a price tag on which I've found. It simply does not belong to me. Because of this, I swear this now, that all of my work until the day I die will always be available complete and free online in it's electronic form.
And frankly, in total honesty, I doubt that money can buy the level of adventure which seems to follow me wherever I walk. The best I could hope for is probably some kind of extravagant hat.
But one thing I do ask of life, one thing I believe that I have earned in being the man I am, is that I will have a woman at my bedside when I die to hold my hand and tell me I am loved.
The three women closest to me in all the world, my sister, my mother and my beautiful wife. They had been so keen and eager to strike me down in the moment of my triumph. With such worried voices and such concerned eyes they have formed a phalanx to stop me, called police into my house. Batted aside proof of my sanity with a shrug. And oh - how they had watched my Facebook like a hawk while I was updating it with all the new things I was seeing.
And here I was, two days after posting my condition on that very website, and I lay in that bed alone. Visitors came and went for all the other men in the ward, old men with cancer and diseased livers. They were all very wonderful, very kind and friendly. They asked where my wife was. I told them she was in France, and laughed it off.
But no, I didn't really find it funny.
I am not saying these things to curry your pity. Please, spare me. I do not like pity, I don't think anyone does.
I'm saying them so you know that what I've done isn't magic. That I'm not just a 'really clever guy'. I'm clever enough, but I'm not that clever. The things I've seen, the truths I have uncovered - this is how I've done them. Not through analysis or equations, but through iron and fire. Through breaking my heart over and over until it becomes conditioned to the break, and although it still hurts me all the way down, I know the flow of it, and I know the ebb. I can surf my own misery like a wave on a beach with as much nonchalance. Although it never stops hurting every time I do. Dear God, listen to me. I am such a whiny little woman.
I am not a robot, nor a hero of legend. I am a man with all the weaknesses inherent in that. One of them is that I feel emotional pain.
And I do not ignore it and move onward because I am so strong, but because so many times have I crashed out that I have conditioned myself to have an autopilot that takes over in moments of crisis, closes the doors that need closing, and keeps my mind focused and my feet moving.
I was in hospital for four days. I arrived alone, and left alone.
I got home. The computer was still on, still logged into Ruthless Truth.
If I had been brutal before, now I was an avatar of great and bloody Shiva himself. My cruelty was no longer extended rants of torture, but lightning fast stabs to the root of the soul.
It is a cheesy thing to say, but I suppose it is a cliche for a reason - facing death eye to eye had made me realise something. The vibrancy and glorious magnificence of life is not something to be easily discarded.
I had a job to do. Enlightenment I had work for, it took me years. But the transmission of enlightenment was a fluke. I literally fluked it. If I hadn't lost my temper, if I'd have blissed out or started a new study of the great sages there are something in the region of 40 people who would not be free today.
But I didn't. I lost my temper, and in doing so discovered that the transmission of true enlightenment on a mass scale was not only possible, but lay somewhere in the intersection of anger and truth.
You know me. I took it to the wire.
No mercy, no restraint, no honour. Cold, chittering, low. I plunged into the fire again, this time deeper, this time faster and further. I knew that in that boiling furnace there was an answer to be found. Even if it was that anger could be sustained long enough for the truth to be transmitted before the backlash killed me, and those who took the truth approached it the same way I did, that was the world free, right there.
I didn't want a body count.
I was prepared to have one. And I would be the very first corpse on that pyre. We would spill no blood, save the blood of the lie, but if it was lashing out at us, yes, we would each of us who carried the torch burn out in turn. And only when the fire had scorched the world of sin, only then could humanity know peace.
I am not a strong man. I've just conditioned myself to take the decisions I believe someone should take. I see no-one else approaching life in this way, and although at many times and places the damage has been more than I can bear, the thought that this world had no-one truly fighting for it always seemed to me the greater horror.
I didn't want it to be me. But I needed to know that such people existed, and so I became one so that I could sleep at night after watching the news.
My wife came home from France. I stormed out of the house telling her I did not want to see her. This was unwise in my weakened state, but I am nothing if not impulsive. I wandered the streets of Edinburgh smoking cigarettes and spitting bile.
I felt woozy, tired. I realised I had over-exerted myself and allowed myself the luxury of a bus-ride home. My wife had gone, she had left a note saying she was staying with friends to give me space, and that she loved me, and that she was sorry.
I crashed out on the bed. I knew I wasn't in danger, because all I felt was tired and I now know what falling into shock feels like. It didn't feel like this, this felt like sleep. I slept.