The Poetic Terrorist

A new song of mine features bits and pieces of Alan Watts speaking. It’s entitled ‘Watts Going On‘.

“Westerners start to fidget, they find it very boring to sit for a long time. But the reason they find it boring is because they’re still thinking. If you weren’t thinking, you wouldn’t notice the passage of time and as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world, when looked at without chatter, becomes amazingly interesting.

Depends how you define yourself.

They myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical to the universe….”

And so on.

They did not understand what they were taking away, what they were curing. An ability to see heaven as it manifests in the present moment upon earth. I was not aggressive, or violent, though the painful sensations I experienced outwardly made me look as if I were being buffeted by a most violent force indeed.

But all sensation is painful, it’s just a matter of degree. Each one of our senses is the result of something ‘out there’ hitting some kind of membrane or cell structure. All my senses sharpened, that is all. Sharpened to the point that I could no longer make sense of the inputs.

If I could have taken away the seeming necessity to PRESUME what was ‘out there’, the seeming necessity to form theories or thoughts about it, to draw conclusions, to talk nonsense as I tried (vainly) to put this heavenly place into words, I might have gone undetected for quite some time… perhaps even been completely admitted into this secret world. But I was a blabbermouth, a rat, and I got what rats get when they break the secrecy — picked up by psychiatrists, stuffed into locked wards under constant observation and admitted heavy doses of routine anti-psychotics and other thought-disrupting drugs until I could hardly remember my experiences at all.

But I do remember, and the delusion is persistent. The universe is good, heaven is already available for entry here on earth and there can be no true end to life merely because we have some vague perception of what we call death – delivered to us only by these same senses we so diligently numb as soon as they cause discomfort to us, or to our family and friends or society at large.

All I can hope to do is to find my way back there and this time keep it under wraps, share only with the initiated. No wonder the divine eludes so many – it is a personal journey. The way is riddled with dangers and setbacks. What an adventure, though! Paranoid am I?

I knew such unmitigated bliss then. Could I not have kept it AND been cured?

I am happy, and anyone would agree that I am no longer delusional.

But it’s that very agreement that scares me now. At what price, such agreement?

“Music is the Cult of Listening.” — you can quote me on that. No one else seems to have said it, so far as I can tell.

Look on it with Truth
Nobody’s Home

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” — Nietzsche

You are not truly part of humankind until you are both human and kind.

**

Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders’ webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.

-Nietzsche, On Truth And Lies In A Non-Moral Sense

Superior Forces

A basic theme for the anarch is how man, left to his own devices, can defy superior forces – whether state, society, or the elements – by making use of their rules without submitting to them. ‘It is strange,’ Sir William Parry wrote when describing the igloos on Winter Island, ‘ it is strange to think that all these measure are taken against the cold – and in houses of ice.’

Anarchist and Anarch

“If I were an anarchist and nothing further, they would have easily exposed me. They are particularly geared towards detecting anyone who tries to approach the powerful with mischievous intent, ‘with a dagger in his cloak.’ The anarch can lead a lonesome existence; the anarchist is sociable and must get together with peers.”

Monarch and Anarch

“The monarch wants to rule many, nay, all people; the anarch, only himself. This gives him an attitude both objective and skeptical towards the powers that be; he has their figures go past him – and he is untouched, no doubt, yet inwardly not unmoved.”

Politics

“It is no coincidence that precisely when things started going downhill with the gods, politics gained its bliss-making character. There would be no reason for objecting to this, since the gods, too were not exactly fair. But at least people saw temples instead of termite architecture. Bliss is drawing closer; it is no longer in the afterlife, it will come, though not momentarily, sooner or later in the here and now – in time.

Happiness

The anarch thinks more primitively; he refuses to give up any of his happiness. “Make thyself happy” is his basic law. It is his response to the “Know thyself” at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. These two maxims complement each other; we must know our happiness and our measure.” Eumeswil, page 192.

Freedom

“Freedom as a species identifier – this is to be understood as a mark of prestige. It is the mark of the chieftain, it belongs to those dignities that the few carry for the many, for all. Just as the few carry sexuality for all in state-building insects, so the few have freedom for the many in the human category. Socrates was not free for himself alone; his freedom functioned for the many, and functions until today.

Man as a species moves within the invisible mass of the iceberg, determined and instinctive; in this context of determination, intelligence, even in its sharpest expressions, can also be counted as an instinct. To bring this paradox to expression, Dostoevsky chose the “Idiot” to portray the higher type of person. Intelligence cannot create freedom, which inhabits a deeper and a higher strata; it can however fill its arsenal.

Spiritual freedom distinguishes the human species. It is found only there. Political being and state-building in contrast are not reserved to Man alone. Man lived long without states and will perhaps be capable thereof again. The state-building capacity was given to man at a certain point in his development as a formative principle, as happened also to other species.

Once connected with life, the formative principles repeat themselves. They float as germs, as possibilities in life’s undifferentiated stream. This explains the constantly repeated attempts at state-building in the coelenterates, all the way from the primeval animals. Freedom in the spiritual sense first entered into the stream of life with man. From now on freedom also cannot be lost. In this respect we can concur with Hegel.

The preservation of freedom on the other hand is man’s task. Since freedom distinguishes the human more distinctly than state-building, it must take precedence over the preservation of the state. The state cannot therefore guarantee freedom, but only man himself. This does not exclude that he might need the state for this goal.”

Life is too short to play by somebody else’s rules.

That’s what anarchism really boils down to, for me. But to be an ‘Anarchist’ and practice ‘Anarchism’..? No, I am not one of these lunatics. They would take leadership from one group and give it to another form of group. The very idea of leadership, of illegitimate authority, the very ideas of control, conditioning, dogma, these bother me to no end.

1530s, from M.L. anarchia, from Gk. anarkhia “lack of a leader,” noun of state from anarkhos “rulerless,” from an- “without” + arkhos “leader” (see archon). Anarch (n.) “leader of leaderlessness,” a deliciously paradoxical word, was used by Milton, Pope, Byron.

Anarch? Now there’s an idea.

The Anarch is the positive counterpart of the anarchist.

I am an anarch – not because I despise authority, but because I need it. Likewise, I am not a nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing in.

The anarch sticks to facts, not ideas. He suffers not for facts but because of them, and usually through his own fault, as in a traffic accident. Certainly, there are unforeseeable things – maltreatments. However, I believe I have attained a certain degree of self-distancing that allows me to regard this as an accident.

As I have said, I have nothing to do with the partisans. I wish to defy society not in order to improve it, but to hold it at bay no matter what. I suspend my achievements – but also my demands.

Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

The Anarch is to the anarchist, what the monarch is to the monarchist.

—Ernst Jünger

Even this may be to idealistic. Too abstract.

Really, I want to see. I want to see the truth in one total, authentic act of observation. I want to be free, not only of these external bonds but the ones that are more actual, more restrictive, more ‘real’ — what I call internal ones. The conditioning, the unexamined assumptions, the cognitive biases. The truth I am trying to grasp is the grasp that is trying to grasp it.

An Anarch? An Individual?

?

I have no knowledge of when my death will occur, or how, or why. I have no evidence that there is anything at all after that last breath. Why should we live in someone else’s mold? According to their baseless ideas.

Mathematics requires 8 fundamental axioms (educated guesses, assumptions) in order to work at all, and yet we consider two + two a fact. It is not.

All physics requires a ‘made up’ number of duration, that is basically measured against something arbitrary and insubstantial. There is no ‘proof’ for time, no ‘proof’ for duration. Ultimately, all physics is based on the assumption that there is a past and a future, and an arrow of time.

We accept the proof because we have to. Other people agree with it, so we fall in line. Rules. Other people’s rules.

Should we work hard? Strive for something? Be something, impress our friends or the world? Accumulate? And where will that land us, as individuals and as a people.

It is suggested that modern ‘work’ is slavery, by these so called anarchists. They call the other side sheep, zombies, brainwashed. That freedom they strive to defend depending on a change in the society. The people who work, call the non-workers lazy. Bums, or thieves.

I’m sorry, I just don’t have the evidence to side with either. It all seems like such a colossal waste of LIFE. Not time, not money, not ‘potential’. A waste of life, an escape from the Here and Now… how good it feels. How wonderful to just be… to find an end to time: our ultimate tyrant.

If I’d won the lottery… I couldn’t be more fortunate than I am now. If I were a prince and was living off an inheritance, I would be revered — but not more fortunate.

My job is to see past all your bullshit. My hours are inflexible. This is a 24 hour on-call 7-days a week job with no chance of retirement or vacation. For this I am paid very modestly, but the benefits are outstanding.

It’s okay though.

I was born for this.

Don’t Worry, I’m Yours (Jason Mraz vs. Bobby McFerrin vs. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole) by DJ Dain

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

*

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

*

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

*

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

*

Hakim Bey / PLW: (I love this idea about writing)

According to a late syncretistic Greco-Egyptian myth, when Hermes-Toth invents writing he boasts to his father Zeus that humans never need forget anything ever again. Zeus replies, “On the contrary my son, now they’ll forget everything.” Zeus discerned the occult purpose of the text, the forgetfulness of the oral/aural, the false memory of the text, indeed the lost text. He sensed a void where others saw only a plenum of information. But this void is the telos of writing.

Regarding the mythical origins of money:

Exactly the same story can be seen acted out in every honest ethnographic report on the introduction of money into some pre-monetary tribal economy. Even without the usual means of force, terror, oppression, colonialist imperialism or missionary zeal, money alone destroys every normal culture it touches.

Including Internet-Culture. Where has the internet gone? Where are the Forerunners?

I just dislike that website too much. Its ethics, attitudes on privacy, the (bad) social habits it helps cultivate, the dependency, addiction.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, I’ll give it that. But I think it has the same brain-rotting effects on me as watching TV or reading the news 2 or 3 hours a day.

As I discussed with D.P., I think it’s time to revert to the Old Ways. And by that I mean pre-Facebook

Haven’t gone caveman yet.