/lit/ - Literature

>>22625334
intentionally obscure. won't make sense without actual initiation and direction from a living tradition.

>>22625334
Read this instead

>>22625361
Initiation and direction means sodomy with a guru btw

>>22625334
the oblivion questline was fun

It's weird to me how modern esoterica is so much about its ancient roots and yet is so incredibly different from earlier eras. It's denuded of most of the religious content, which was the beating heart of the older works.

>>22625494
Allegedly

>>22625361
"secret history of the world" deserves its disclaimer but it explains the initiation process and tradition logically, at least in an outline
>you thought you were going to die lol
>but you weren't a total bitch about it
>so you're cool now
that explains all the "get into the coffin" stuff but idk about homosex. maybe if you sign up for homosex kiddie diddle secret society you get that

>>22625361
>Won't make sense without actual initiation and direction from a living tradition.

Guénon, who wrote extensively on initiation and living tradition, did not consider Golden Dawn a mere pseudo-initiatiatory organization, but something much more dangerous: counter-initiation

Guénon makes a difference between counter-initiation and pseudo-initiation. He writes:
>“Counter-initiation,” we must say, cannot be considered a purely human invention,which would be no different from “pseudo-initiation.”

For example. Guénon considered the Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn as a pseudo-initiatory organization in his letters at the beginning:

Guénon writes:
>The Golden Dawn was a self-styled Hermetic organization that fundamentally did not seem to have a very serious character, because it was from its beginnings an authentic mystification. It is true that this could serve to conceal some rather suspect things. Internally, the principle role was developed by MacGregor and his wife (Bergson’s sister). Only much later was Crowley introduced to it, as he also did in many other things. Even when it was not about rather insignificant pseudo-initiations (perhaps that was not at all the case for the Golden Dawn), his involvement introduced truly sinister influences into it, if only making of it something much more dangerous.

But, to Guénon, even a pseudo-initiatory organization can develop into much more sinister, that is, counter-initiation. It was Aleister Crowley who introduced Typhonic, or counter-initiatic elements to it. That ultimately led to the disintegration of Golden Dawn to different off-shoots.

In the case of Crowley, he "attacked" the Golden Dawn inner sanctum under the personage of Ommo Satan: the “Evil Triad” of Satan-Typhon, Apophras, and Besz and thus adopted the monicker "666". At least Guénon considered that Crowley brought some sort of actual counter-initiatory forces into an organization, that before, was a pseudo-initiatory aestheticism.

The Aeon of Horus of Crowley comes from Golden Dawn ritualism of pic related.

In the Golden Dawn Temple of the Neophyte the Hierophant is Osiris. The Hiereus is Horus. And the Hegemon is Maat. During the Ceremony of the Equinox the officer representing the Hierophant vacated the Throne of the East and was replaced by the officer representing the Hiereus. Likewise the officer representing the Hegemon became the new Hiereus. During this game of musical chairs only the officers rotate. The stations of the Gods remain as they are.

The Equinox of the Gods follows the same pattern, but in this case the actual Gods rotate around the temple. Osiris vacates the Throne of the East and is replaced by the new Hierophant, Horus. It is related to Crowley and Mathers schism with The Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn that was ultimately destroyed. However, it did have macrocosmical implications according to Crowley ie. real effect on the world affairs (WWI & WWII).

LARPy bullshit.
>>22626244
Guenon is also LARPy bullshit.

>>22626246
The overuse of LARP on /lit/ is a sign of these posters being NPCs or approaching it. Everything is a “LARP” in some sense. Perhaps all of higher civilization, language, thought, poetry, art, literature, even science, comes about from people “LARPing,” in the sense of taking on some identity or social role that goes beyond the mere biological mechanisms of being a sapient bipedal primate, and conforming to the institutions that support these outpourings of culture. (I “am” a mathematician, I “am” a scientist, I “am” a writer, an attorney, or a scholar … all LARPing). Little of this is automatic, innate to us, or “completely authentic” in the practically impossible sense that posters like you who overuse the word “LARP” seem to suggest authenticity is (impossible to attain, according to the Last-Man-type figures, because seriously caring about or researching any unorthodox topics, being engaged in a culture or subculture, or seriously thinking, is always “LARPing” according to such bugmen). These are all complex social roles and niches that we’ve been socialized to fit into, unless we’re isolated Sentinelese tribesmen. You LARP every second of your day, I LARP every second of my day, we all LARP every second of our day, except perhaps for the rare moments or occasions when we’re not “LARPing” and actually fully, authentically engaged with the question of our own being and its possibilities.

A person who can seriously “LARP” — whether it’s taking on the role of Indian kundalini yoga guru, Thelemite ceremonial magician and scholar, or Bohemian iconoclastic poet like Rimbaud, or any other number of “LARPs” available to us besides — they at least have the potential to be more interesting, fully engaged and authentic beings, paradoxical as that sounds, because they have seized an identity to fashion for themselves out of the detritus of the world’s cultures, of their own choice. The serious LARPer, ironically, becomes the actually existentially authentic, engaged, resolute, and even more interesting person, whereas the cynical bystander in the audience who jeers from the outside of the stadium that all this is “LARPing,” themselves simply takes on the socially-constructed-realities and identities foisted onto them mechanically by the abstraction of “society” (society is everyone and no one — in a sense I am society, you are society, without us society would not exist, whether we rebel against or are supporting it, but “society” is also none of us individually), wearing it as a mask they did not make and did not even consciously quite choose to wear, they just found themselves wearing it one day.

The eccentric roleplayer may indeed be eccentric, an “oddity,” conventionally “useless,” considered as “deluded,” they can even considered as amoral or immoral by much of society, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that they’re at least on the journey towards becoming real and interesting people.

>>22625334
I find it suspect how all old mystical and esoteric work is about being humble and loving, and in awe of God, and how 20th century "traditions," suddenly happened to discover a much more egoistic ancient tradition that somehow conveniently drops religion in a way that nicely meshes with 20th century secularism while also getting to tell people their are empowered elites simply for reading the material.

And instead of "be humble and open," and debate, you get a lot of "if you don't agree you simply cannot possibly have understood it because you are not a true member of the elite."

>>22626244
All the big voices hated all the other ones. I get a very grifter vibe from it. "There is a secret science, but everyone else is doing it wrong. Listen to me, for I have the true wisdom."

I mean, scholars on mysticism, Shankara, etc. disagree all the time, but they don't have to suppose that they disagree because the other person hasn't understood "the true depths," out of some sort of failing. In the Hindu tradition, people coming directly from Shankara's school had no problem later saying "yeah, I think he's just wrong about this."

But esoterica in general seems very into authority and "old is good." This is particularly perplexing when late 19th and early 20th century esoterica is completely unlike the earlier eras.

>>22626319
>Everything is a “LARP” in some sense.

Well coming back to Golden Dawn and the system, first of all, the initiaties and Neophytes etc. adopt magical mottoes, identities. For example, Aleister Crowley was known as Frater Perdurabo. W. B. Yeats was known as Frater Demon est Deus inversus.

They kept Magical Diaries to keep record of their progress, practices. They wore Magical garb, robes... And did adopt other mottos, when they achieved higher levels of initiation or ranks within the system. And clearly, there was a divide between their "material", everyday personages and their magical mottos. Like Crowley writes:
>And yet who knoweth which is Crowley, and which is FRATER PERDURABO?

>>22625334
My only thought is that I'm grateful W.B. Yeats grew out of it.

>>22626319
>NPCs or approaching
If you have to pretend that a significant if not majority of the population s not actually conscious to make your spiritual toying seem serious a and special, what you're doing is very much LARPy bullshit.

>>22626319
what happens when you get tired of LARPing and stop then?

>>22625366
The equivalent would be Liber ABA and the Equinox

Eh, I sort of feel like pic related sums it up nicely. You can't say Merton was close minded or didn't take contemplation seriously. He spent his entire adult life as a monk, even living as a hermit in a shack without any power or plumbing for a while.

He was open minded though, carrying on correspondence with New Age, Islamic, and Buddhist mystics throughout his life and studying Sufi and Zen texts in depth, even traveling to study them.

But what he's critiquing seems to show up withing religion but also in various types of esoterica or "new age," even more often .

>>22626380
He didn’t though

>>22626321
>all old mystical and esoteric work is about being humble and loving, and in awe of God
I'm pretty sure that's what Franz Bardon is about and he is a modern occultist. Or did I misread him?

>>22626522
Who is the author?

>>22626514
Thomas Merton, a Cistercian who wrote a lot about contemplation, the mystical tradition, Sufism, and Zen, as well as social commentary, in the 40s-60s.

He was the first Cisterican in ages to be a hermit; that order had largely abandoned the hermitic lifestyle as an option, since communal physical labor is such a large part of the lifestyle. Plus, it does seem a little redundant when they don't speak anyhow.

>>22626686
Talking about political "satisfactory," pseudo-spirtual catharsis here. Reads even truer today.

>>22626473
>>22626490
You always have to LARP to some extent while incarnate in a body on Earth and not a hermit. When you get tired of LARPing (at least to yourself) and stop it, then I guess you become a Zen master or something. Or, even better, to put it without the cultural baggage of Orientalism, you just become a totally down-to-earth, natural, and aware person. But you still have to put on a persona for society.

>>22626473
You’ll find this an infuriatingly presumptuous question, but why? Why do you assume you’re right and I’m wrong? Maybe it’s actually the case that most people (you and I included) are something like biologically determined and culturally programmed robots (this is, after all, what the consensus of modern leading scientists is — there’s no soul because we can’t see it, all that exists is matter in varying kinds, and our own freewill and sense of selfhood is an illusion, a mere epiphenomenon of the workings of the material brain ignobly extinguished upon death, cf. Daniel Dennett).

Second, why don’t you do something worthy with your time and read Kierkegaard and Heidegger, or even Sartre and Nietzsche? My whole post was just an overwritten purple exposition of some of their ideas. “NPC” is a shorthand, an exaggeration, admittedly cribbed from a shallow Internet culture, but just a little bit of phenomenological investigation and philosophical inquiry can show you the truth that most people most of the time, you and I included, are aware, but not aware of being aware.

This isn’t even solely an edgy modern Gnostic or terminally-online-imageboard-user meme. It’s in the Gospels. Christ talks about people being “asleep,” “blind,” and how “seeing, they see not,” as well as his famous saying of “They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch” (which, weird coincidence, this exact same metaphor of the blind leading the blind is in the Katha Upanishad and Pali Canon of hundreds to thousands of years before Christ’s time …)

Here’s Quran 2:7: “Allah has sealed their hearts and their hearing, and a covering has fallen over their eyes …”

Do I even need to quote one of fucking Heraclitus’s fragments for you about the NPCs? As if this were just some arrogant thing that I alone and other edgy youth came up with, and hasn’t been talked about for thousands of years? Here is his wonderful Fragment 1:

(1) “Though this Logos is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem as if they had no experience of it, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it truly is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.”

We go along in a sort of passive and mechanical trance state much of the time, except precisely when making efforts not to do that, or when some event shocks us from our comfortable stupor, or even a new thought does that, and this comfortable stupor is induced and encouraged by socialization (by culture, by Das Man or “The They” of Heidegger, also the process that Kierkegaard called leveling).

I’m not even a Thelemite, and in fact agree there’s something a little deranged and besides the point in dressing up in weird costumes, muttering so-called magical words in so-called magical rituals, hoping something cool can happen like one meets some discarnate entity just for the hell of it (from where …. ? is it angelic? demonic? extraterrestrial? hyperdimensional? a manifestation of one’s mind, an hallucination deliberately called up by a meticulous program of yogic/magical neurological-self-reprogramming Crowley fucking insanely came up with at much of his own expense and effort over decades and taught to others just because he could or because it was the manifestation of his “True Will” to teach this? Who cares … “I just want to experience something crazy,” thinks the Thelemite to himself), as well as using a mystical society as an excuse to have orgies with the other members (which is “sex magic”, of course, according to them) as well as to take drugs (which can also help with “Magick”, apparently).

No! I’m not a Thelemite. The only thing that grabs my goat is people‘s obsession with calling everything a “LARP.” Well, what I’m saying is it’s very difficult not to LARP in the first place at all, modern religions are also LARPs when compared to their original forms, every social role we play is a LARP, and, finally, if a person is LARPing devotedly and dedicatedly to something strange and outside the byways of what’s socially acceptable, then they’re at least furnishing material for becoming a more interesting, awake, and aware person, instead of just being another run-of-the-mill Nowhere Man.

Why do we read anything? There’s no clear benefit to reading Moby Dick. In the same way, some esotericism is fascinating just because what the fuck, someone actually wrote this, spent a whole lifetime on it, got other people in on it, and was even astoundingly erudite and intelligent behind the deranged veneer. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

>>22625334
It's an intentional larp to satisfy its members human need for ritual

>>22625334
My approach to occultism is when something is obtuse and obfuscated it should be avoided.
Read the works of Hermes 'himself' and take your own conclusions.
>told me who you are with i will tell who you are
I also dislike most people associated with this particular iteration of an hermetic order, evil and wisdom are incompatible

>>22626778
This isn't what "most scientists," advance. The most common position is some sort of Popperian shrug about falsification and how questions of metaphysics cannot be answered by science. (I think this is wrong BTW, scientists can't help but do metaphysics or ask ontological questions like "are species real or is the idea a concept we created?" Popular science and theory work is chock full of metaphysical claims.

The reason Harris, Dawkins, Skinner, etc. felt the need to advance their sort of scientist vision of values is because their view isn't mainstream; they're just a vocal minority.

If you look at most scientists publishing big picture theory where this is relevant, especially in physics, reductive materialism is out. It's out because, in its corpsucular, smallist forms ("everything is caused by how little bits of stuff move,") it has essentially been falsified. Less and less do people think the balls are fundemental. They are abstractions. You generally see the argument that bits are fundemental, the classical yes/no or quantum in between , matter and energy emerging from information, or that the parts, particles, only exist in the form of the whole. In this view, everything is fields. Space-time is itself a field, confirmed by "vacuum" being a seething sea of virtual particles and interactions.

And this is true in biology and the quest to understand consciousness too, although here semiotics is more popular than information theory.

A guy named Jaegeon Kim basically showed that strong emergence is impossible to account for in a reductive substance metaphysics. Wide agreement on that. But here we are, conciousness. So the options have been to either deny we really exist, eliminitivism, adopt an informational or process view of reality (field thinking works well here too), go for ideals (Katsrupt, this view is unpopular), or go for panpsychism (also unpopular).

Eliminitivism only seems popular because people think it "is good enough and decomplicates." Basically, no one is satisfied with any one new solution enough for it to be the paradigm, but there is wide agreement that mechanistic reductive materialism is so shot through with problems that it definetly isn't the answer. The problem is that pretending it's "good enough," tends to make it hard to break out of thinking "like it was true."

Total aside, but polling wise I always find it interesting that what is considered "mainstream orthodoxy," is actually fairly dead in physics itself and relevant philosophy. Ethics guys will talk about little balls. Philosophy of physics guys don't.

>>22626876
>the cartesian system and bifurcation and its consequences where a disaster for the human race

>>22626778
>you still have to put on a persona for society.
so the only way to be yourself is to leave society? What happens if you stop LARPing while in society? Would that freak the LARPers out and then they kill you?

>>22626790
great post anon but why bother? They are swine.

>[hoi polloi] "...do not know how to listen [to Logos] or how to speak [the truth]"

>>22626876
>go for ideals (Katsrupt, this view is unpopular), or go for panpsychism (also unpopular).
and why is this? Why is it so hard for them to accept what the greatest philosophers and religions have said over and over again throughout history? But let's be honest: the real answer is prejudice.

>Absolute idealism, however, though it is far in advance of vulgar realism, is by no means merely restricted to philosophy. It lies at the root of all religion; for religion too believes the actual world we see, the sum total of existence, to be created and governed by God.

>>22627006
People understand Hegel and Plato in many different ways. But I think a few things are clear in the:

First, the scientific project is, in part, exactly what we should be doing. It just isn't all of it.

Second, people make a mistake of thinking "idealism vs physicalism," must be about substance. And here is the legacy of Decades, and Katsrupt falls into this too. His whole argument is about the universe being "mental substance," vs physical.

Consider this though. If there is only one substance, then everything that we care about is the result of changes in that substance. If there is only one substance, as most physicalist now believe, then substance loses all explanatory power. It's an outmoded way of thinking, harking back to systems that thought differences were the result of fundemental substances like Empedoclean air, water, earth, and fire.

But what's the difference between physical process and mental process if there is just one universal process? I don't think there is one.

But Plato and Hegel aren't talking about a dualism of substances. When they talk about forms or the concept being "more real," they mean it is more self determining and necessary. More itself. A rock is less itself because it is a mere summation of causes.

This, Hegel ends up sinking up pretty well with Saint Paul in many ways. We become more free in going beyond ourselves, in not being determined. Parts of the Philosophy of Right read like abstract versions of Romans 7, with Christ as abstract reason ressurecting the person dead in sin, slave to desire and circumstance.

In this way, the objective idealism of Hegel and Plato don't seem to have any problem with science.

And yet Kantian subjective idealism, arguments about "the map vs the territory," various forms of humoncular "indirect idealism," remain the norm. You hear stuff like "color isn't real, there are just light waves."

It gets pretty frustrating once you've found your way out of the maze to see it, Descartes misstep haunting us to this day.

>>22626956
sounds like the reign of quantity and the sign of the times

>>22626963
Social conditioning (or “LARPing”) isn’t entirely “bad”, it’s a question of degree … potty training isn’t entirely natural to us but it’s a good thing to keep.

You’re always yourself anyway, it’s just that this can be obscured, forgotten, or covered up, like the sun behind clouds (unless you’re a Buddhist, in which case you’ve decided there is no self, so there’s that). You can’t do away with conditioning entirely — even things like speaking languages and the fine motor skills to write and type are conditioning. But you can investigate what is behind all the conditioning, and see if your conscious connection with the inmost source of your being can exist in tandem with your outer persona you use to get along in society (unless, again, as a Buddhist you’ve decided it’s all voidness and there’s no “deeper self” to look for, but it still ends up surprisingly similar in practice).

>>22626876
I am humbly BTFO, and you are much more learned in many of these topics than I am (I’m more of a “loosely read around in a lot of humanities, literature and religions & do drugs” type guy, if it wasn’t sadly obvious) — and, yes, the reductive caricature I was making was more of these pop scientists and the, hmm, I guess you could call it the underlying “Reddit” worldview (it’s sad how much the Internet has colonized bits of my brain) that’s seeped down into much of global culture, Western particularly, and doesn’t seem to have caught up with these advancements or recent trends in philosophy and science, by and large. There are certainly many more intelligent scientists, philosophers, and philosophers-of-science who are more on the cutting-edge of ideas like these and moving beyond the old reductionism or ideas like eliminative materialism.

>>22625334
Syncretistic Teutonic pablum with marginal utility over Masonry.

>>22627039
>If there is only one substance, as most physicalist now believe, then substance loses all explanatory power.
So physics is worthless then (energy is one substance)? All empirical evidence shows that our intuition is hard-coded to perceive a single a priori substratum to reality. I think you haven't looked deeply into monist metaphysical systems.

>>22628185
The point isn't that monist metaphysics don't work, it's that in a monist metaphysics where there are not suis generis substances, where there is only one substance, substance stops explaining anything.

This isn't a rebuttal to monism. It's a rebuttal the substance based metaphysics that has tended to be common throughout history. But process metaphysics is as old as Parmenides and is has always been around.

Heat, combustion, life, etc. are all now thought of in terms of process, not substance. We no longer think of atoms or subatomic particles as fundemental. These have a begining and end. They are stabilities in process, but the field is fundemental. "Particles" can come from instabilities in over all process, e.g. the emergence of quark condensates in "vacuum."

That's what I mean by physics moving away from substance. There isn't fundementally different types of stuff.

Monist substance metaphysics might be able to be consistent but it is no longer consistent with leading scientific theories. Further, if Kim is right, it's impossible for it to explain mind through strong emergence. And yet if anything shows strong emergence, it is life (barring a resort to panpsychism).

>>22628762
So, Heraclitus would be the original process philosopher. Parmenides with his arguments against change the original substance philosopher.

In the empirical sciences, the story has generally been the march of process explanations replacing the substance explanations offered up by philosophy.

There is no distinct "life force," no distinct "hear substance," no unique "fire substance," that resides in flammable materials, etc. It all appears to be due to variances in a single unified thing.

To be sure, we still talk about multiple fields, but the goal of physics, a grand unification, is to reduce these to one thing. If this is successful, then there are no suis generis substances. Only process in one substance.

>>22625334
protocols of the learned elders of zion is a more accurate version