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Underground > Temple >

Changing Human Conciousness

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22:44 / 13.05.04

Gah! That was me making that last post. Ghadis had logged into my computer and I forgot to log out and sign in as myself. Thought I'd better clarify, as if the references to occult wrestling weren't obvious enough.

06:48 / 14.05.04

Y'know, there's an image that comes to mind as I read this thread. A photo I saw years ago of a line of Tibetan monks meditating as Chinese soldiers walk among them and smash their heads in with rifle butts.

Well if there's one thing that ever proved to me that meditation was an over-intellectualized waste of time bandied about as a reasonable course of action by pimply nerds too scared to go outdoors, it's this horriffic bit of violent fascist imagery!

Of course if you didn't mean to imply that the photo in some way proved that meditation is devoid of any inherent value, but simply that not paying attention to your surroundings when something urgent is going on is a bad idea, then I'm not sure who in this thread said otherwise.

I understand that people only have so much altruistic energy to expend. But some people keep saying "it's much harder (and thus more valuable) to do real work with your bare hands", and others are saying "I wish they'd spend their energy better". But since the whole point of magical means is to make the most of the least energy possible, the raw altruism being channelled into these "helpful" workings may not translate into enough physical wherewithall to even look up something to volunteer for. And in that case I say it's great that at least people are doing something.

And anyway whoever said that meditation makes the practitioner a nicer person which will have a ripple effect on everyone around him was right. What makes people want to attack meditation? It sounds, to me, like a much nicer idea than, for instance, getting drunk and looking for a fight, which is how some people would choose to use the same energy. But then, I guess those people are so far outside the situation and motives we're discussing that I'm just being ridiculous! ^-^

It's really, really time for bed.

07:01 / 14.05.04

Call the fucker out. Tables, ladders and pentacles, mate. Tables, ladders and cosmic chaos cocks.

Yeah! RAAAHHHH!!! BRING IT!!!

Cast, cast, da cock of chaos, rasp!

Well if there's one thing that ever proved to me that meditation was an over-intellectualized waste of time bandied about as a reasonable course of action by pimply nerds too scared to go outdoors, it's this horriffic bit of violent fascist imagery!

Tears in my eyes again!

07:44 / 14.05.04

Well if there's one thing that ever proved to me that meditation was an over-intellectualized waste of time bandied about as a reasonable course of action by pimply nerds too scared to go outdoors, it's this horriffic bit of violent fascist imagery!

Spend some time on the UK occult scene.

08:43 / 14.05.04

Unless he's got his laptop set up in a club in which he's snorting coke off a seventeen year old model's tits while getting a blow job to fire his sigil, I believe he's spending time on the UK occult scene right now. And therein lies the problem.

08:55 / 14.05.04

Well if there's one thing that ever proved to me that meditation was an over-intellectualized waste of time bandied about as a reasonable course of action by pimply nerds too scared to go outdoors, it's this horriffic bit of violent fascist imagery!

I think that there is one thing to be pointed out here. The reason that the monks allowed their heads to be bashed in wasn't due to meditation, but due to certain buddhist sect's, (I say CERTAIN), insistence on non-interference and non-violence. Meditation essentially is a tool to still the mind and increase it's ability to perceive and focus. Said buddhists use it to be able to become non-attached. It can also help you to become a crack shot, kill with your bare hands and feet, and I believe, do strong magick. The reason why is that a stilled mind can focus and has more control over itself in relation to it's surroundings. I was on another message board where a discussion came up about magick. The skeptic asked, "If you where grabbed by a whale, would your magick help you?" A poster replied, "A person who had never trained their minds would probably crap their pants and die. The individual with a trained, calm mind would be more in a position to think of possible solutions." Tickle it's mouth, maybe? That's what I would probably do.... but then again, I'd probably die......In the states there was a famous activist who worked for the homeless. He got so burnt out that he committed suicide. Perhaps if he had meditated, he might have been able to carry on that fight longer.

trouser the trouserian

09:21 / 14.05.04

I've practised varying forms of meditation pretty much on a daily basis, since my late teens (I'm now in my early 40s). I do feel it has positive health benefits (I was once involved in a project teaching meditation techniques to patients recovering from heart disease). However, I do feel that it is overly simplistic (as others have argued on this thread) to view it as a panacea for the world's ills.

It's interesting that Gophers, in the first post on this thread, mentioned Karl Marx. Many new age/occult beliefs regarding the so-called 'evolution of consciousness' - ideas such as the dawning 'age of Aquarius, Aeon of Thelema, or "World Peace" for that matter all follow a similar structure - that condition 'y' (what "we" want to happen) can only occurr when 'x' number of people all believe/do the same thing. A prime example of this sort of thinking is the Maharishi Effect:

"The Maharishi Effect is a phase transition to a more orderly and harmonious state of life in society as measured by decreased crime, violence, accidents, and illness, and improvements in economic conditions and other sociological indicators. The scientists who discovered this effect named it in honour of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who predicted it thirty years ago. Maharishi had predicted that when a critical sub-population of individuals - 1% - experienced and stimulated the field of pure consciousness through the Transcendental Meditation Programme, a type of macroscopic field effect of coherence would occur in the society and the quality of life would improve. This would manifest in more orderly and harmonious individual behaviour and a measurable improvement in the various social indices which characterise the quality of life in society."

If this theory were valid, one might expect that, in countries where lots of people meditated on a routine basis, there'd be less war and so forth, which put me in mind of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Can one really look at countries where there are a high proportion of Buddhists (some of whom presumably meditate) and say that they are more 'harmonious' - countries like Tibet, Sri Lanka, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia? Maybe they weren't doing the right kind of meditation, or maybe its a whole lot more complicated than that.

14:22 / 14.05.04

The reason that the monks allowed their heads to be bashed in wasn't due to meditation, but due to certain buddhist sect's, (I say CERTAIN), insistence on non-interference and non-violence.

Of course! Meditation doesn't turn you into an idiot, or switch off your perception of the outside world to the extent that you wouldn't notice your friend's brains landing in your hair. Which was what made Absence's comment, to me, just nasty: it didn't advance the debate for either side, but it gave us all a strongly unpleasant anti-meditation mental image. What Absence expressed was a sentiment, and a nasty one.

trouser the trouserian

15:11 / 14.05.04

Just for the record, it was not my intention to give anyone a strongly unpleasant anti-meditation mental image, or to imply that meditation in any way "turns people into idiots" or leads them to ignore the outside world. If I have offended anyone, then please accept my apologies.

16:00 / 14.05.04

Illmatic: Related to this, I have met several people over the years and who managed to seriously fuck themselves up by doing magick - all of these people, without exception, focused on the astral plane, spiritual matters, to the exclusion of all else. I couldn't help but feel they were using magick as a way of avoiding and escaping from the world around them.

Meditation, it seems to me, has always come in two flavours. The first aims at transcendance, at overcoming material reality through concentration. This includes things like astral travel, TM, and anything else with that Gnostic tendancy to trivialise the real material world. Eyes-closed meditation, the desired direction being way up into the heavens - at the expense of the material world.

The other sort aims at integration with the real world. The point is to determine your nature, to see the world as it is, rather than how you think it is or want it to be. This is the kind of meditation that can also relax and center you, in preparation for effective activity.

This is way more than sitting on your ass with your head in the clouds! To those who would spend time "directly engaging" and changing the world rather than sitting in meditation, I might ask the question: what's so wrong with the world anyway? I'm pretty pissed off with the current political climate, but perhaps the problem is not the state of the world, but my reaction to it. Meditation lets me investigate this reaction, it's causes, etc, and see myself and the world in a clear light.

In any case, the answer isn't necessarily the ultra-activist approach that refuses any passivity. Passivity (or wu-wei: non-doing) can put you in to a space of possibility, from which truly effective action comes.

Remember, some of the worst crimes in history were done by people who wanted to change the world. I say: fix yourself. The rest will follow.

Errm... I don't know where this puts me in relation to the first post! Yes, I agree that questions of human nature are central, but I think that the hippy-liberal notion of changing world consciousness (in line with your own outlook, of course

) is missing the point.

Alan Watts is, like, my favourite author ever and has plenty to say about this topic, and also the "activism vs passivity" polarity in general. I'll look up some quotes.

19:12 / 14.05.04

I too apologize, and of course didn't mean to offend; I was just taking the piss where I saw it could be taken. Not sure why. To be Big, I guess. :<

I guess I wasn't sure if you were simply sharing a relevant mental image the thread had conjured up for you, or if you were saying something like "this reminds me of this time a bunch of hippies got killed, like you hippies should be, you hippies!"

I'm sorry!

10:44 / 15.05.04

The other sort aims at integration with the real world. The point is to determine your nature, to see the world as it is, rather than how you think it is or want it to be. This is the kind of meditation that can also relax and center you, in preparation for effective activity.

A good point. One thing that I learned about meditation over the years is that it requires other disciplines to be done in conjunction with it in order to effectively increase ones connection to reality. Disciplines like relaxing and connecting into the moment through the senses, as well as contemplation and focus exercises. I've found that meditating eyes open and focusing on the moment in general helps to avoid what I consider the transcendence trap. IMO, the problem with transcendence is it's never really occurs. Instead what occurs is a separation of mind from reality. That sort of thing can lead to one becoming disconnected to the point where damn near any philosophy can be loaded into the mind. Personally, I think that disconnection like that is how many new age cults keep their members.

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