Sinister Enlightenment
I was going to name this “Satanic Enlightenment,” but I don’t like the word “Satanic” because it makes the “enlightenment” part seem bound to a specific “Satanic” philosophy or world view. Sinister Enlightenment as a title is not really any better. But the descriptor gives the type of “enlightenment” the “correct” feel, as I will explain later.
This essay came up due in part to several currents of thoughts and events that merged in my head and got me thinking. The first event was an argument my friends and I had at a get together. It was a usual friendly argument we usually get into after the party dies out and everyone goes home, except for the few usuals. In that atmosphere of a cool chilly night and sobering from our drinking we’ll talk about stuff, which turns into a usual exchange of ideas and argumentation.
In real life I am not the life of the party. I am the type to sit near the back of the room and just absorb everything everybody says quietly without interjecting. Just to get everybody’s point of view to measure it with my own. If asked to participate I usually say I have no opinions or ideas on the subject. But I say that so often, and my friends know me so well, they know better, but they leave me out of their drama debates. It’s only the next day or the day after the next, when the one or two people who are actually interested in understanding the subject from my perspective has come to ask me for my opinions that I share my ideas. This gives me time to actually put my thoughts together to understand my own current position better.
God & Enlightenment
The topic of the argument that night was a usual subject which pops up for other people: God. Except I have a motley crew of friends from different weltanschauungs. My atheist friends said the usual as one would expect from atheists: there is no god. My theist friends said the usual: there was a god. My pantheist friend said god exists but it is not what we think it is. My Satanist friends said the predictable, which I found boring. My Buddhist friends said the predictable which I also found stale.
But my Five Percenter friends being their own camp set the ball rolling down a very interesting course. They believe in something they call “Allah,” which is not the Islamic Allah. Allah to them is the “All in All,” as in all life in toto – wholistically – which includes the universe is “Allah.”
This led the others to agree with the basic underlying idea: that whatever exists “out there” – which we are a microcosmic part and aspect of – is a unified system of some sort. This idea brought the atheist guys into agreement who said something like, therefore science is a great way to gain an understanding of this universal system. But the Buddhist friends and my Hindu friend took the talk in a predictably distasteful turn, bringing up “Enlightenment.”
All of a sudden “enlightenment” was a penicillin: the answer and cure all agreeable to everybody. To understand Purusha – the universal soul – or the living system one had to be “enlightened” to grasp this universal thing. It was like some spiritual honey coated quest garnished with a heavy load of spiritual word patterns and ideas. And the atheist camp went off on this philosophical pseudo-spiritual quasi-quantum-physical rant and higher intelligence and how awesome the universe as a system worked.
From all this I saw in my mind a delusional upwards flow of some kind, regarding the type of “enlightenment” they were talking about. Upwards flow as in trying to paint the picture that the more philosophical everybody got, and the more about enlightenment everybody talked about, the further away from the real actual world they were.
Dellumination
The next day one of our friends hung out with me and asked me what I thought about the other day’s topic of discussion. I told him that I do agree that whatever this all is, it is one whole thing. Whether we call it Allah or Purusha, or God, is besides the point and irrelevant to the actual issue and character/nature/condition of this thing. What issue?
The issue of why the universe is inherently destructive in character. Not just in the cosmic level of giant burning suns, supernovas, huge plasma filaments, etc. But more importantly – on a real and human level – on the Earth.
Every living creature this all creative god or universe has “made” KILLS. Everything rapes and plunders. Even trees. Trees in the Amazon forest will grow upwards to hog the sun light up in the canopy and starve the smaller plants of vital light. Why? The most primitive life forms – and perhaps the most earliest – [viruses] are agents of disease. In fact viruses still kills and plagues our species today. Why? I mean if we really, really observe living organisms and their natural behaviour, without bias, we will eventually get to the point where we understand that the natural living “world” is a violent and dangerous system.
Yet there exists an incongruity between that natural “world” and what we believe to be God, Brahma, Purusha, Allah, the Oversoul, etc. By incongruity I mean it in the real geometric sense. I took geometry four times in school because I sucked at it, so after 4 rounds of geometry class, I use many concepts and words from geometry, such as Theorem, Postulate, Congruent, etc. When two angles are equal in measurement we say that they are Congruent Angles. If Angle <A is 90 degrees, and Angle <B is 89 degrees, <A & <B are Incongruent. Incongruent doesn’t capture the difference between Nature as a living system, and the Universe of God right. Chasm or grand canyon is more like it. But what do I mean?
I mean, if you take a white carnation flower, and put it into a vase, then put blue food coloring into the water, something can be seen to result. The result is that after a while the tips of the white carnation will turn baby blue. How did that happened we ask. Where did that blue color come from we ask. From the fucking food dye in the water. We know there is a connection because the white petals are connected to the blue colored water by a god damn stem, and we know how the stem’s capillary action works. It’s not a mystery.
Then why is it a big mystery when we are dealing with life and the nature of what life springs from? All of life seems to be dependent on a single working system which each organism and species is a part of. The characteristic or inherent “quality” of this system is not “nice.” Most organisms that are not plants seem to have evolved to kill and use the parts of other organisms to sustain itself. And so, we when see this, we must ask ourselves what is the characteristic or quality of the Source of this living system?
It seems as though that in general the more a mundane talks about enlightenment and philosophy the less the mundanes know about the actuality of causal things. The more these mundanes talk about enlightenment and philosophy, the more stupid shit they end up talking about. Shit that has no real connexion to the actualness of reality.
If I were to pursue a course to enlightenment, it would thus be backwards. Rather then move upwards and know more about ideas and stupid shit up in the clouds somewhere, I’d like to know more about the causal world and how it works. Why? Because I like zoology and material science? No. Gaining an understanding of causal organisms, causal phenomena, and the causal world we all have our existence in, is only a means to a deeper end. The deeper end is the understanding of that ultimate Thing “all of this” has its being in. That Thing from which all of this around us, and which we are springs from. Even the understanding of this Thing is not the end in itself. The ultimate end is an understanding of what we are.
Self & Dualism
I don’t know what other people out there know of and understand of the word “Dualism” and its antonym “Nondualism,” but to me I see understand that dichotomy from a Theravada angle, which is complicated and yet simple at the same time.
What do I essentially mean when I say “Dualism?” I mean let Dualism = “This & That.” That is the basic formula. As I understand it, if you think dichotomies are factual and real, you are a dualist: this and that. If in your paradigm an internal and an external exists then you are a dualist: this and that. If in your weltanschauung you exist as one vector and God, Cosmos, Macrocosm exists as a second vector “somewhere” you are a dualist. You and Macrocosm makes TWO. This and That. Nondualism, as I understand it means only One Single Whole exists and there is no division. No This and That.
That concept of the nondual nature of reality is to the idea of Anatta [non-self] what the idea of understanding the topography of a landscape is to the understanding that most rivers should flow down hill. Why can we say that most rivers should flow down hill and be quiet confident in our assessment? Because we assume we understand the topography of a given place. So if reality is nondual, thus there can exist no “self,” therefore the self and reality are the same exact thing. By “reality” I would thus mean the Spectrum – Santana – Continuum/Field of Phenomena.
By Phenomena I simply mean shit that happens. That’s for you asswipe philosophical type that need to spilt hairs and play word games. Phenomena means the fucking sea of shit that is fucking happening to which you yourself are just a piece of shit happening also. Why don’t I give a flying fuck how we experience phenomena [“qualia”], or what phenomena are “beyond” our perception? Because I am a nondulaist. The perceiver and that which is being perceived is the same thing. What experiences or conscious selection is taking place occurs inside the matrix of conscious perception and cannot exist independent of perception/apprehension or consciousness/reality. Meaning like, when I look at a red ball of yarn and a green ball of yarn, the differentiation I perceive between the red and green happens entirely as a process of data apprehension and interpretation. The information goes into my eyes and is turned into electric pulses. That goes to my visual cortex and is translated into “pictures” somehow. I become consciously aware of the picture. Then I recognize and discern what I see and say: “Oh look, red and green.” At no point in that entire process is anything outside the mechanism of data apprehension changed or altered. The balls of yarn are not even there on a finer quantum level, and neither am I or my neurons processing the data.
But again, I’m coming from a Theravada Buddhist weltanschauung. Or rather, at least from my own speculative understanding of the world after understanding certain Theravada concepts. Like any religion, Theravada Buddhism is steeped/lost in word games. To be fair, Theravada does not teach nonduality or dualism implicitly or explicitly in its canons. What concepts of dualism or nondualism a Theravadin gains personally is based on extrapolation of text and reality. That being said, the Buddha himself encourages the Upasika/Upasaka to challenge and question his words and teachings. It’s a given to any thinking person to not accept another person’s words at face value because of some title or because of special regard. There is a difference between Self-Enlightenment, and following someone who is supposedly enlightened, or believing his word at face value.
In this respect, if I had to choose between Sambuddhi [self-enlightenment] and Buddhism; I would choose self-enlightenment and abandon Theravada. But if I had to choose speculative thinking about shit I will never be able to confirm and the Practical essence of Theravada, I would choose Theravada. The main point is that Theravada likes to be Practical and Pragmatic -such as giving practical advice regarding life, action, and perception – with its canonical teachings and it dislikes going off the deep end and being speculative, philosophical, or metaphysical. Usually its Mahayana and Vedanta that teaches some species of dualism or non-dualism. And again, concerning Theravada, it’s all canonical word games or idea-dramas which I have no interest in. But I do understand I am speculating.
So the whole issue in regard to canonical Theravada is the meaning of the word “Self/Atma,” and goofy philosophical speculations. When I say “Self” and “Mind” or “Consciousness” I mean what the Buddha referred to as “Citta-santana” or Mind-Stream; which is a completely different animal and bug altogether. I have to explain this because there are some really stupid people out there who are so spellbounded by word games that they will have an asscow over the words and superficial ideas I use to try to intimate or approximate something deeper then those words and ideas. Don’t let your memeplex think for you, think for yourself. I don’t understand there to be separation. I understand that differentiation happens only as a byproduct of conscious prehension. I don’t expect others to be coming from the vantage point I have. If there is a separation of differentiation of “things” in the fabric of reality, it exists as the act of conscious prehension/selection or as merely an intellectual mental parsing of reality by the focus and selective perception of consciousness. You don’t have to see thing like I do or agree with me. You can keep your Western dualistic interpretation of the world. And you can keep all the problems and trouble such ways of seeing the world causes to arise too.
My way is more peaceful. I have no god out there to need to follow and worship, or deny, because nondualism is beyond this primitive theism-atheism thing. Because there is no god out there and there is no me here. There is just everything as One-Thing. I have no need for goofy, spiritual, religious, philosophical myths and metanarratives. I have no need to worry about the “reality” of morals and divine retribution for acting unethically. Because how I am by Nature, how Nature is by Nature, and how the Universe is by Nature is Naturally the way the One-Thing is by its very Nature. I am “perfect” the way it is. It is “perfect” the way I am. But things can be better for “us,” and in Time, it will evolve and get better. It’s all just one thing. And what we call consciousness is merely a pin pointer, that focuses on specific areas of this one thing. As we can say that the data on our hard drive is just a big messy continuous one-thing. But to make “sense” of this big mess, there needs to be a record pin or a laser beam which is designed to simply “look” at tiny spots on this big one-thing. What this record pin “sees” or picks up in its tiny spot and how it translates what it is picking up is not the big one-thing. Does this mean the rest of the big one-thing does not exist? No. It just means you are not aware of it. Radio waves existed before we were aware of the, and so did dinosaurs, and the rest of the causal universe.
The nondual concept of reality is very much akin to a vinyl record. So on the record you have Unexpressed/Potential coherent information sequences in the form of groves in this case. To express that Potential you need a tiny needle. The tip of that tiny needle hits the grooves and does what? Expresses or Manifests or Presences the Unexpressed music. Not all at once. The needle’s Expression of the Unexpressed Potential happens causally in the flow of Time or in sequential order one spot at a time.
And so from this vinyl record illustration we percieve or apprehend 3 supposed phenomena: 1) the record; 2) the Needle; 3) the music. So we can ask ourselves: “What is the music we hear, is it an actual “thing” separate from the other things?” No. Without the record or the needle doing it’s job giving expression or unfolding the unexpressed potential, the “music” we hear does not exist. In other words, the music exists only in causal relation to the record and the needle. The record is reality. The needle is consciousness or fixation of reality on itself. What we “experience” is that consciousness unfolding or unraveling unexpressed potential.
But people can argue: “Well, gee Chloe, if I am everywhere and all things why come I can’t feel me being everywhere.” What do you think the word focus, concentration, and fixation tries to convey? Even regarding your own physical body: Where do you Feel your consciousness to be? Everywhere enveloping your body? No. Usually we feel ourselves to be around the eyes or in between the brow. Why don’t you feel your consciousness to be in your liver? Why aren’t you consciously aware of you being a gal bladder? You got billions of neurons in your head, yet you are unconscious of their existence. Why is consciousness so fixated on a single spot on the body itself? It’s actually a habit we have. We can unlearn this habit and place our conscious awareness on other points or spots on our body or outside our body even with practice. We do it all the time when we dream and day dream.
Consciousness is just a tool – the needle – to the record which reality is. Not a tool. That gives the wrong idea. Consciousness is a function or act of focus on spots. The focusing gives rise to or expresses the unexpressed which is contained in the form of unfolded potential. Think Pi when I say “unfolded potential.” The infinite number sequence exists as unfolded potential. It requires you or a machine to unravel the sequence. The very act of conscious touching – unfolding – gives rise or expresses the unexpressed sequence of numbers for you to SEE: to Experience. The very act/function/fixation of consciousness touching something gives expression to its unexpressed potential. We focus consciousness on the pulsation of blood in our neck, and all of a sudden that blood comes into conscious focus/experience/expression. We eat an apple, and the unexpressed taste of the apple comes into being/expression. We touch a rock with our finger, and the texture comes to life for us as an experience which is the expression of unexpressed potential. We bounce a ball and its Potential Energy is expressed as Kinetic Energy, with our acting upon that ball being the defining catalyst/nexion of unfoldment/expression of potential.
Dualism and Nondualism is like the electromagnetic spectrum. As a dualist you will say something like: “I believe or perceive gamma wave, the light, and microwaves are three Things.” As a nondualist you will say something like: “I believe or perceive the spectrum to be one whole Thing, and what we refer to as gamma wave, light, and microwave IS that spectrum or continuum or field.” And so from a nondualist point of view, we can clearly understand that the memes “gamma wave,” “light,” and “microwave,” are just Words and Ideas inside our own heads which we create and use and affix to things to better understand what we are apprehending. Those Words and Ideations have absolutely nothing to do with the actual electromagnetic spectrum. Just because we name or ideate an arbitrary point in a potentially infinite vector “gamma ray,” does not physically or atomically or quantumly alter or change that actual point into anything different than what it was before we existed.
But what does all this mean? We’ve all heard this before in some way, this nondualism shit. What am I trying to say? I’m trying to bridge the chasm between nature and what we feebly understand as “God.” That chasm we all wish was there, because the connexion makes us – if we are mundane – afraid and uneasy.
From the first part of this article we are aware that Life forms in Nature are not very “friendly.” Living organisms, since the earliest moments of causal life seem to have been nasty fuckers. There is a lot of killing, eating each other, consuming other creature’s life force and body parts, etc. There is struggle in life. Struggle to survive, and struggle to reproduce, and struggle to evolve. If that is the general “Way” of living things, and as nondualists we understand reality/nature to be One-Thing, then what is the Nature, Quality, and inherent Condition of this One-Thing? Angelic? Puritanical? Saintly? Jesus-like? Blissful? Ananda? Peaceful? I doubt it. At the risk of sounding anthropocentric, I’d say that One-Thing is pretty adversarial and sinister in “nature.”
Or at least it calls into mind the thought of the Amazon River struggling to get to the ocean: it’s not going to be a tranquil ride, and there is an inherent “need-to-get-somewhere” Flow/Progression/Evolution to this One-Thing. It’s almost as if the Cosmos is saying to every one of its parts and pieces or to itself: “You piece of shits either evolve and move with me, or you’re ass is dead like the dinosaurs. I got not time for your drama. Got places to go.” That is if reality or the Field we interpret as reality is indeed fractal. If we see the design and pattern of the tiny portion of a fractal pattern, we can generally hypothesize to a certain region of precision that the bigger pattern resembles or is the same as its smaller patterns.
Sulfur & Self
All this got me thinking about the notion of self and anatta. As I was thinking about anatta I was thinking about the Star Game of the ONA. Because causal reality to me reminds me of board games like the Star Game and Go [Chinese game].
So in the Star Game, of the three pieces, you have one which is the Sulfur Piece which represents the Self. Except in the Star Game, this “Self” does not exist as a constant single thing. Because when the Star Game is played and in motion, that Self Piece changes. But at the end of a game, we come to realize that the chain or flow that piece “aeonically” moved into from beginning to end, IS a single stream-thing. That what we momentarily see as a piece on a board is only a “snap shot” of a fluid event inside the framework of time. Or more precisely, what we see as a piece on a board is the faulty perception of our own consciousness not seeing the Star Game as it should be understood or as it is: a fluid whole dynamic system in causal motion. There is in fact no self piece as a separate “phenomenon” from the Star Game itself. The entire Star Game itself gives “definition” to it’s parts. In the sense that each piece has an identity only in relation to other pieces, where it is at on a board, and in relation to the Game itself. Without the Other stuff, the self piece has no “definition,” differentiation, or “identity.” Both the Game as a fluid system and the piece is in fact one fluid indivisible Thing.
I thought to myself, what better symbol and way to represent this concept of a “self!” And the Sulfur designation of that piece adds to it all. First sulfur is associated with fire and flames, which is Promethean in quality. Second fire is the closest natural thing we have to an actual substance that “alchemically” – or rather Chemically – Transmutes things, in a cooking kind of way. You put water on it, and the fire transmutes the water into steam. You put a marshmallow on it long enough and the fire will transmute it into carbon. You add the heat of the fire to certain substances and the substance changes. With enough heat solids can become liquids, liquids can become gas, and gas can become plasma. That fire sort of reveals the “transcendental” nature, “property,” and essence of the substance it is transmuting.
Matter isn’t just solid, it transcends that state. That solid state is only one mere possible expression/manifestation of that “transcendental” thing. I don’t mean anything spooky and metaphysical here. Ice is only a mere possible manifestation of something that transcends that solid state we perceive. Water and vapour are the other two mere state or conditions this same “transcendental” substance can take. What is that transcendental substance in question? H^2O. The H^2O molecule itself is only the expression or manifestation of finer “transcendental” “elements.” Electrons, Protons, and Neutrons. These in turn are expressions of more finer, more transcendental elements: quarks. And so on, until we get to the point where we are at that quantum foam level of things where everything is a strange mess of blobby waves inside Fields. Or the waves and fields are the same things. In that level, we come to a refined understanding that everything – not just H^2O – is an expression or manifestation or presencing of that same strange foam. It’s all just the same One-Thing interacting with itself. And from that interaction of this One-Thing arise the property of Life. That Life can be observed on earth, which comes with a certain essence of quality we’d rather deny is there. We’d rather live in a reality that is moralistic in nature so we feel safe.
What better symbol to associate the notion of the Self with but with Sulfur. For the idea or notion of the Self must be burned, for there to be genuine illumination: the understanding of things as they are beyond the self-focused narcissism of the illusion of Self. Burning the Self alchemically into what it really is reminded me of the ONA’s Self Immolation Rite. To burn oneself INTO existence. If consciousness was fixated on it’s own illusion of self – a pin point in a sea of infinite eternity – was that consciousness [self] ever really aware of its existence?
The Point
I think the point to all of this is simple. I believe that mundanes when they pursue this nebulous thing called enlightenment, move in the wrong direction. A direction of denial or rejection of causal suchness. Rather than work to better understand the actual world they exist in, themselves, and how they fit into everything, they abandon Life and work only with mental abstractions, ideas, words, definitions, etc. Which leads them further and further away from what is real. Disconnected from the real, they lose understanding of the actual world, and become experts of words and ideas that exist only in their own mind and thought patterns.
I think, if one is to pursue any quest of better understanding of the world, one must go the other way. Away from the clouds and back to reality. By first honestly trying to understand our own human Nature sans emotive opinions and moralist apprehension. Then secondly one must try to gain a better understanding of how Nature – and Natural Life forms – actually works sans moralistic interpretation and emotive bias. If animals kill, say they kill. Then thirdly we try to ponder the common inherent quality that the Source of Nature and Life has. In other words, the direction of reality based “enlightenment” should be causal oriented, carnal oriented. In doing so we may eventually see that Nature and that which Nature arises from has a very “sinister” quality to it. It is definitely not Godlike and all-caring. There is a saying in Buddhism that goes: “The wheel of Dhamma ever turns. And if you don’t keep up with it, it will run you over.”
I rarely like using the word “Satanism.” But because of how I see enlightenment, or the direction it must take for any genuine understanding of Nature and Reality to come into Mind, I would say that the Satanist has his/her feet in the right direction. All they must consider is take care not to do is what the Hindus did: Go up into a goofy direction. The second group of people I say may come to a realistic organic prehension of reality are grounded Theravada Buddhists. But the average Buddhist of any school has a bad habit of mentally being blind to the Sinister or the actual carnal/causal quality of things. What I mean here is that when they see “evil” they usually translate that into suffering and thus a product of karma. As if to say that 200,000 humans deserved to die in the Indonesian tsunami. As if all those people in Haiti and Japan died horrible deaths because of bad karma. How do 10,000 in the same city or area have the same bad karma that would result in such mass death? There is a quality to Life and Nature that just is “sinister” and adversarial to life.
There are pros and cons to all memeplexes. The way for us as Sinister or Traditional or Progressive Satanists is to evolve our Satanism by weeding out what cons we come across. Getting too metaphysical, spiritual, and philosophical is a con in the long term. Because we entrap ourselves inside a maze of our own words and ideas. Being entrapped, we are disconnected from the Real. We must also learn to do as DM and experience other cultures and religions to discover what pros they might have to offer each of us personally. At the end of the day, all this philosophy and religion and ideology are mind games we play on ourselves. What is Real is our causal life which is an aspect of the causal world of experience. The mind games should be tools we use to better understand that causal life we are and the causal cosmos we exist inside of. If the tools serve only to sever you from Life, the Real in its Rawness, and the Cosmos, it should be discarded for the delusional trash that it is. So that is the meaning of Sinister Enlightenment. To work backwards from the mundane way of enlightenment to gain a more refined understanding of causal/carnal Nature/Reality.
Chloe 352
Order of Nine Angles
122 yf
