serhii.net

In the middle of the desert you can say anything you want

15 Jan 2022

CATB dancing with the Gods

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/dancing.html

As the Buddha said from his deathbed to his favorite disciple Ananda, “Have no fixed beliefs, and find your own light.”

Beautiful, initially found on LW (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnWN6v4wHQwmYQCLX/mythic-mode), fascinating in its entirety.

On mysticism and direct experience, won’t attempt to summarise or to decide if I agree it not, like it or not.

Lastly, interesting other side of the coin to the usually-negative connotations of “double-think”

If my language is too “religious” for you, feel free to transpose it all into the key of psychology. Speak of archetypes and semi-independent complexes. Feel free to hypothesize that I’ve merely learned how to enter some non-ordinary mental states that change my body language, disable a few mental censors, and have me putting out signals that other people interpret in terms of certain material in their own unconscious minds.

Fine. You’ve explained it. Correctly, even. But you can’t do it!

And as long as you stick with the sterile denotative language of psychology, and the logical mode of the waking mind, you won’t be able to — because you can’t reach and program the unconscious mind that way. It takes music, symbolism, sex, hypnosis, wine and strange drugs, firelight and chanting, ritual and magic. Super-stimuli that reach past the conscious mind and neocortex, in and back to the primate and mammal and reptile brains curled up inside.

Nel mezzo del deserto posso dire tutto quello che voglio.