"Delusion is the mind's tendency to seek premature closure about something. It is the quality of mind that imposes a definition on things and then mistakes the definition for the actual experience."
-Mark Epstein, M.D.
"Paranoia: A condition in which patients show persistent persecutory delusions or delusional jealousy. The disorder must be persistent, lasting at least 1 week...This disorder...often includes resentment and anger that may lead to violence. Paranoid people rarely seek medical attention..."
"Paranoid Ideation: Suspicious thinking that is persecutory, accompanied by feelings that one is being harassed, treated wrongly, or being judged critically."
-(Both above definitions from) Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary Edition 20.
"We are supposed to know exactly who we are and what we believe and are supposed to be able to defend that identity. The more strongly we identify with something, the more strongly we must reject its opposite. Thus, the strongest, most obsessive egos belong to the least complete beings....Developing an ego is like building a castle against reality. Because our beliefs imply a rejection of their opposites, they severely restrict our freedom."
-Peter Carroll (Liber Null & Psychonaut)
The mechanism of your obedience and slavery to authority is in the incessant chattering of your mind. You are not good enough. You are more than good enough. You deserve better. You deserve worse. Your body is too little, big, fat, skinny, small, tall, short, unshapely, perfect, ugly, attractive, wrong or right. You have too much of this or that. You have too little of this or that. You need that. You hate this. You want it. You avoid it. You did it yourself. You can't do anything with out help. You have slacked off. You have not relaxed enough. You are needy. You are independent. You are rich, You are poor. You are comfortable. You are uncomfortable. Your life sucks. Your life is great. No one understands you. Far too many people understand you.
If only the government would be better. If only you had this or that. If only you could escape this or that. If only you didn't have to grow old, get sick, or die. If only you could wait until you get security. If only others would see the real you. If only others wouldn't notice you. If only you were married. If only you had the right job. If only you could take a weekend off and go on vacation. If only more people would agree with you. If only taxes weren't so high. If only products would be better in quality. If only the cravings could go away. If only life would stop and wait. If only you could hold onto things forever. If only you could stop the bugs from crawling all over you. If only you could get the circus in your mind to take a break. And while you are wasting away on this trail of attachments and wishes, you never see that these are the grooves carved into your mind and your habits by the sickening pall of authority...whether religious, political, or commercial. Since the days before you were fully self-conscious, these sentiments have been repeated over and over, training you more thoroughly than a North Korean concentration camp.
Some Discordians call some of this internal habitual chatter "Greyface" and personify it as a source of seriousness that gets in the way of living life. (Though there is a lot more to the Greyface metaphor than this.) Various Post-Crowley ceremonial magicians call this entire complex of feeling and thinking (the whole ego) by the name Choronzon, which is an old word for the Devil. Whether or not they actually believe that Choronzon is an external being or an internal state, many would tend to agree that Choronzon's apocalypse of authority gains entrance into our world and our lives from inside our innermost mental chatter. This chatter distracts us from what we could be and keeps us in a false sense of security even as we grow more anxious. Thus all sorts of mental and emotional problems may manifest. This was the original meaning and metaphor of various things known as "evil" or "malice" and of various beings known as "the Devil" or "Satan" or "Choronzon" or "Ahriman." Whether or not they really ever existed (or exist) or not is important only to those who argue about ontology. The point is that crap like this comes from within, as the vast majority of human spiritual teachers, psychotherapists, and mystics (the ones who haven't gone crazy through masochistic practices) have said in their own various styles of expression.
Delusion is another word for it. We latch onto certain aspects of this internal chatter and then act as if the world is correctly perceived through this underlying background noise. The means by which we can get free from this chatter are so simple that they are overlooked by most people. They are simply whatever keeps you aware of the chatter. And once you become aware of it, you can manage it, diminish it, or get rid of it at least for a time. Authorities are half aware of this and seek to keep the chatter going by bombarding you with all sorts of ideas, beliefs, and inculcated emotional responses (the so-called proper responses) in an effort to keep you on a treadmill. You push this away so often that you eventually build up a tower of remembered experiences to cover it over with. Instead of peeling away the layers of ego and looking at the whole process, your distractions and attachments become a sort of system of walls to keep your sense of who you are inside and the sense of everything else on the outside. You begin to fear that the walls are brittle and could crumble at anytime and your denial of that fear grows.
Illusions solidify and become the basis by which you feel about yourself, the world, and others around you. Likewise, others around you sense your withdrawal and act accordingly. Thus we become each other's enablers. Your own life, your self and others, becomes lost beyond all the mental chattering, fear, anxiety, and desire. You become an imago, inexplicable even to yourself, that bends back upon itself and confirms the reigning delusions in your life. Thus you believe yourself to be real. But it is all just another series of traps that could lead to an infinite regress of further traps that give you the idea of constant motion.
Chatter is the judge, jury, congress, of your deepest mind; sometimes even the executioner in those who are suicidal. The ego is hypertrophied either on assumed grandeur or on negativity turned inward. You think you can do anything in the universe or you think you can't do anything. You think because you have accomplished something that you are a better person or you think that because you failed at something that it makes you a failure. Being judgmental is nothing more than delusion in this case. We have become obsessed with our own thoughts, our own judgments, our own creations, our own expressions, whether we admit to it or not. Whether our obsession makes us feel happy or sad. We believe in the products of our own genius and confuse them with genius itself and thus get further trapped in our self-feeding loop of perceptual creation. All messages and signals from the environment and from within the mind get interpreted according to the predetermined tracks worn into your life by habit. You may even make the mistake of attributing fantastic sources of origin for many of them. You may even go so far as to attribute to the "gods" "demons" or other beings the products of your own spinning delusion. One of the worst pitfalls is the belief in the illusion of freedom which gets you to follow another set of habits and repetitive thinking under the misperception that you are free and all of what happens in your mind and in your life is an expression of that freedom. Without evidence, you choose to believe. Paradoxically, one way of getting free is to act as if you are already free, but throughout it you must remain aware of your own mind's tricks; possibly even having a little fun at their expense. Perhaps even learning how to mold and shape those tricks into tools to be use in gaining freedom.
To cure ourselves or to get past the obstacles and the chatter, we must simply go around them. Not around them over and over in a circle while complaining about them. We can learn to see the real amazing facets of our existence in and of themselves without the judgmental chatter, the obsessions, the attempts to prove you are either worthy or unworthy. There is much more meaning (and its attendant meaninglessness) in the idea and practice of SLACK than it seems. As long as SLACK is not used as simply another technique for avoiding or denying the mental bullshit that accumulates and passes itself off as not only your "self" but as "gods" or other beings. Choronzon can only block you if you have forgotten your most essential tool: laughter. And paradoxically, through all of the chatter and bullshit and delusion, you are free. Before rushing to premature understanding, think about what it means to you or how it applies to your own life. It may be that there is no escape and the only facet of "freedom" that is real is the act of being aware of that. When a student asked a Tibetan teacher about reincarnation, the teacher responded with "Buddhists say that there is no eternal soul." The student responded with "What gets reincarnated, then?" The answer... "Our neuroses." This metaphor has more than one meaning, if you choose to look.
-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
(Under the influence of Dzogchen, Hermeticism, coffee and rain.)
August 13th, 2005
Rant 115
Rants Vol. 2 Index