8 April, 2026
Whether conscious of it, everyone living under our terminal form of capitalism struggles in more ways than one, simply because at a deep unconscious level it's impossible for this type of system to go undetected by our human structure as being in conflict with our nascent values, morals, dignity, sense for truth, even life itself and our future on the planet. And this is just the baseline of the suffering it inflicts (i.e. the psychic injury of constantly witnessing injustice and having to rationalise it, thus lie to ourselves) ~ on top of it stand varying degrees of suffering that are increasingly concrete and materially inflicted.
This pain is correctly diagnosed and traced back to its actual source only by a minority ~ the ones who view the system critically, spend energy to explain its faulty mechanisms, protest it, etc. Most of us, not correctly pinpointing the origin and source of our suffering, will in part unconsciously seek relief by wanting the pain to be externalised onto the world, because confirming we're not alone in our hurt soothes us, for one, and it soothes us to know there's a hierarchy of suffering and we're not at its bottom (hierarchy as anesthetic). The only way to tolerate the 'psychic injury' of being a commodity is to ensure someone else is a cheaper commodity.
In twisted irony, the more suffering a system inflicts the more it'll convert a chunk of those living under it to perpetuate and even amplify the net pain it causes, by way of rallying behind administrators, politicians, representatives who showcase a potential for cruelty and the promise of being a 'pain externalisation machine', ultimately forming a vicious cycle ~ a feedback loop of suffering defining the modern 'death drive' of societies.
This explains the cult mentalities surrounding popular support for certain political figures who excel at displaying callous and psychopathic traits. It explains how the popularity and support they receive is irrational, contradictory, not anchored in consistency or logic. Because supporters themselves aren't truly aware of why they adore said figure so much, to the point where their allegiance is unconditional and defies their own interests ~ it's precisely because of its promise to excel as a conduit for soothing their suffering by externalising it onto others; cruelty becomes the point.
The psychic injury of living under a system that violates human dignity is universal: even the comfortable feel it, even the "winners" feel it (though they suppress it). The constant exposure to injustice, exploitation, the endangering of the future, registers in the human organism as trauma ~ 'ambient trauma', the background radiation of late capitalism...
This system violates the human structure at a level beneath conscious awareness, is incompatible with human flourishing, and everyone feels it whether they know it or not. It's just that many have given up the hope that their pain will ever be abolished, so now instead they seek only the confirmation that it'll be "justified" through the punishment of others whom they deem deserving to suffer more.
That's why suffering often doesn't lead to revolution. It leads, for a significant portion of the population, to identification with the aggressor.
2 April, 2026
Love letter to the games of my childhood
I'm the genial somersaulting egg with red boxing gloves, untangling conundrums to break a spell, the fragile one wearing fighting attire despite the 1HP, who solves every puzzle by thinking; the martial artist twin collecting prism-bells to bring peace to Chinaland, warrior-scholar holding opposites together, enamoured with the grace of a dragon-kick crowning a front-flip; the fleshed-out but low-poly heir in blue tunic crossing flat isometry ~ a world of adverse depth ~ to clobber clones and guard a stellar well from a dictator; the pubescent ever-aspiring pirate discovering the greatest treasure is childhood ~ the Self before the seeking began; the bescarved pixel cat hugging a glowing lightbulb ~ round soul in a square world; the puzzle-solver who finds out he's the puzzle; the game as the player...
I'm the genial somersaulting egg with red boxing gloves, untangling conundrums to break a spell, the fragile one wearing fighting attire despite the 1HP, who solves every puzzle by thinking; the martial artist twin collecting prism-bells to bring peace to Chinaland, warrior-scholar holding opposites together, enamoured with the grace of a dragon-kick crowning a front-flip; the fleshed-out but low-poly heir in blue tunic crossing flat isometry ~ a world of adverse depth ~ to clobber clones and guard a stellar well from a dictator; the pubescent ever-aspiring pirate discovering the greatest treasure is childhood ~ the Self before the seeking began; the bescarved pixel cat hugging a glowing lightbulb ~ round soul in a square world; the puzzle-solver who finds out he's the puzzle; the game as the player...
30 March, 2026
Chatbots are always like: "This is not merely <<insert Occam's razor explanation here>>, it's <<insert outlandish flattering explanation here>>."
Like: "You struggle with addictive behaviours not because you're weak, but because your spirit is desperately searching for something that transcends the material plane." - It's not merely unhinged, it's possibly sarcasm!
29 March, 2026
One of the most unexamined mechanisms of class society: the conflation of status with competence, in the minds of those who have been rewarded by the system.
I'm no fan of meritocracy, not when it's used to justify that some people should go without basic necessities on account that they don't "deserve" more. However, what we have under capitalism is entirely anti-meritocratic, to the point where it's almost the opposite of meritocratic - the entire system is conducive to, or already is, a 'kakistocracy' (rule by our worst).
And this absence of meritocracy, paired with the false widespread conviction that the system IS in fact "meritocratic", can lead to some fascinating instances of cognitive dissonance, errors in judgment, Dunning-Kruger symptoms, and false self-appraisals of worth, competence, and ability.
I can't count the times when I had differing opinions on something with people that were "above my station" in life, who were convinced that they're right and I'm not, simply because I'm hierarchically below them and therefore there's no way I might hold superior knowledge or judgment to them regarding common sense, general understanding, and what constitute correct perceptions of the world.
Because they bought into the (self-serving) idea that the system is meritocratic (when it's anything but), they are basically obligated to also internalise the thought that someone of much lower status can't possibly be way more competent/knowledgeable/wiser/smarter than them, so they fall into the error of being automatically (albeit unconsciously) dismissive, only to then be surprised when it turns out the person in question was right and they weren't. It messes with their whole picture of the world, and it's funny to see.
Their reaction when I turn out to be right is more than surprise, it's downright 'existential vertigo': "If someone so hierarchically below me is smarter and wiser, then perhaps the system is not meritocratic. And if the system is not meritocratic, then perhaps their success is not evidence of their merit. And if their success is not evidence of their merit, mine mustn't be either" - but they can't even go there, so they must rationalise even further...
24 March, 2026
We're economically pressured at all times to be: workers (producing value for others), consumers (absorbing value produced by others). Apart from a small overlap, these states are mutually exclusive - while working we cannot consume, while consuming we can't really perform labour. Yet the system requires us to maximise both: to work as much as possible and consume as much as possible simultaneously, which feels like a constant attempt at being torn in two. This is a structural impossibility and one of the many logical contradictions at the heart of our beloved economic system.
Sleep is the one big "limbo" area away from active production and active consumption, which is why the system regards it as a pesky compromise and a barrier to be conquered, and "solutions" are actively sought in order to inject consumption to intercut sleep (already partly the case, as having YouTube videos running during sleep is a widespread practice, for example). How long till our "dreamweaving" brainpower itself is harnessed to produce value for the machine?
Ads in dreams is one particular sinister idea for maximising consumption, but as far as working during sleep I'd envision something like our sleeping minds being used as training data for AI - our dreams mapped, categorised, fed into models to make machines more convincingly "human", while we're unconscious and unaware of the value extracted.
19 March, 2026
Another thing I noticed: hardship tends to be passed onto those already accustomed to it, in the name of "fairness" no less. We are as desensitised to the downtrodden suffering their thousandth tragedy as we are devastated when the privileged suffer their first.
18 March, 2026
People with an overactive conscience tend to absorb an amount of guilt that doesn't belong to them. Problem is, over time, a saturation point is reached past which even legitimate guilt stops being metabolised. The irony being that the "meek" person who used to apologise even for things they didn't do, now rejects ownership of actual wrongdoing, baffling those close to them.
18 February, 2026
Any economic system that gives birth to billionaires is bound to create a class of people so dehumanised and morally depraved, whose dopamine receptors are so worn out from having decoupled reward from effort, from the instant access to every type of earthly pleasure, that soon nothing can satisfy them except for the most transgressive, extreme, forbidden experiences, and the same system rewarding the commodification of everything is guaranteed to turn even children into commodities.
Insulation from consequence produces a specific kind of consciousness, and that consciousness, at scale, is incompatible with human survival. The same mechanism that produces the ultra rich also produces their incapacity for normal human satisfaction. Billionaires are fated as an antisocial, solipsistic abomination because the structure that creates them requires them to be incapable of recognising other people as real. When you can do anything and never feel the effects on others, others stop being real to you, they become objects.
The US as a global entity is itself the macro-representation of the 'billionaire': consuming without bearing the full cost of production (the labour that generates its standard of living is elsewhere, the environmental harm is elsewhere, the instability from its foreign policy is elsewhere, the human cost of its economic dominance is elsewhere, etc.), insulated from consequences, unable to feel the effects of its actions on others.
An entity (big or small) that externalises costs while internalising benefits, and whose structure prevents feeling the reality of those externalised costs, is structurally incapable of not doing harm, and a system that dehumanises anyone dehumanises everyone.
28 January, 2026
I'm a fan of two big philosophies: Advaita Vedanta and Marxism. One is idealist and the other materialist. I've friends who adhere to either one or the other, because they think them incompatible. I'm the only one I know of to harmonise them, hold them both without conflict. That's because I don't believe there really is a clash.
Marx's dialectical materialism doesn't really reject idealism as much as it subsumes it ("material" conditions affect consciousness, which in turn affects the "material"). Advaita's idealism doesn't really invalidate Marx's materialism, it just posits a level of reality that's beyond it (an ontology which transcends socio-historical analyses without refutation or denial).
The Marxist aims of erasing the pernicious division between worker and owner by rendering everyone a worker, and denouncing the destructiveness of maintaining such duality, could be said to be a step towards non-duality (Advaita) in practice. At the same time, Advaita's postulations don't negate at all the realities of exploitation, wasteful conflict, and injustice that make the subject of Marxist thought, they just deal with that which takes ontological precedence: the timeless instead of the relative.
Marxism (the map of the prison) and Advaita (the nature of the prisoner) can fit into one frame without much conflict.
23 January, 2026
When harmful effects or outcomes are the product of the dominant ideology or system in power, they are rarely traced back to or attributed to it, as it's seen as 'law', common sense, or natural order, and they're more likely to be blamed on whatever resistance there is to it. The burden is placed on critics and victims to prove the system is at fault, while the system's legitimacy is taken for granted.
Because the system's structure itself is invisible, its harms (whether poverty, pollution, alienation, etc.) must therefore be explained by other, more visible factors, such as 'individual failure' (the impoverished must be "lazy", or the marginalised just "don't fit in"), or 'acts of resistance' (systemic stress caused by resisting is taken as main source of instability). Systemic failures are hence scandalously attributed to those who point them out or bear their brunt.
Because the system's structure itself is invisible, its harms (whether poverty, pollution, alienation, etc.) must therefore be explained by other, more visible factors, such as 'individual failure' (the impoverished must be "lazy", or the marginalised just "don't fit in"), or 'acts of resistance' (systemic stress caused by resisting is taken as main source of instability). Systemic failures are hence scandalously attributed to those who point them out or bear their brunt.
21 January, 2026
The system has an immune response against people who aren't profitable to the 'oh so "holy" market'. Despite what its fans claim, capitalism isn't voluntary, it's inherently authoritarian, as participation in it is coerced and refusal ends in death. Whatever alternatives (if any) still exist for escaping being commodified, shall soon be "patched out" by the system. And it doesn't look like we're moving towards a UBI sort of world, quite the opposite ~ even the flimsy safety nets still present are being eroded.
20 January, 2026
Everyone seems impressed with Carney's speech, but the anti-communist anecdote central to his critique of the failing Western neoliberal order (of all things) felt off to me. Even though it's global capitalism that's failing, somehow it's still communism that's catching strays when detailing said failure.
17 January, 2026
Thinking of the "doomed commercial area" from Disco Elysium, and how inhabitants thought there's a supernatural curse affecting the area, when in reality it was invisible market forces belonging to the "Ultraliberal" system governing them.
Similar to how "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", it could be said that the mechanisms of any sufficiently refined system for extracting wealth from the bottom and concentrating it at the top are indistinguishable from ominous supernatural forces.
When a system becomes sufficiently complex and extractive, it ceases to look like "economics" and starts to look like malignant fate.
12 January, 2026
Have you noticed how there are no extroverts anymore, only introverts and "ambiverts"?
11 January, 2026
I'm not just leftwing, I'm left-field!
10 January, 2026
The Sermon on the Mount is insurmountable. /pun
9 January, 2026
When people finally accept a once radical idea, they retrofit it into their worldview as something that was always self-evident. Its true originator isn't necessarily acknowledged either, only whoever introduced it once the audience was ready. You can be "early at the party" and be less recognised as a "seer" than whoever spoke of the idea once the cultural soil had thawed.
This is the tragedy of Cassandra, who foresaw Troy’s fall but was cursed to never be believed. When the city burned, no one turned to her and said "you were right", they were busy fleeing or blaming each other.
The visionary is rarely thanked, rather they are, as Gandhi said, ignored, mocked, opposed, then embraced, and later claimed as perennial.
5 January, 2026
Companies are moving towards being "post consumer". nVIDIA and Crucial shifting their production from being aimed at consumers to being aimed at AI data centers signals exactly what I've been warning about for years: the ruling class invested everything in AI in order to sever their dependence on us not just as workers but as consumers too. I won't repeat what's in store for us once our usefulness as workers and consumers expires.
The billionaire class doesn't want us to have any power at our fingertips anymore. Why wouldn't they take away our ability to locally run an AI on our own hardware? Also, why not extract more money from users with a subscription-based model instead of the old "buy once own forever" model?
4 January, 2026
Those marginalised, excluded, or injured by a system, often have a clearer view of its flaws, because they experience its worst mechanisms firsthand. They aren't cushioned by its rewards.
True resistance is a visceral inability to comply, not just an ideological stance, especially in a system that pathologises non-compliance.
A civilisation is measured by its treatment of its most sensitive members, not its most ruthless. The same way our character is revealed by how we treat those with nothing to offer us, so a system should be judged by how it treats those it cannot use, who in turn are uniquely suited to criticise it and testify from its "shadowlands".
The utmost damning critique can seldom come from those operating the machine (and certainly not from those owning it), but from those who’ve been caught in its gears.
True resistance is a visceral inability to comply, not just an ideological stance, especially in a system that pathologises non-compliance.
A civilisation is measured by its treatment of its most sensitive members, not its most ruthless. The same way our character is revealed by how we treat those with nothing to offer us, so a system should be judged by how it treats those it cannot use, who in turn are uniquely suited to criticise it and testify from its "shadowlands".
The utmost damning critique can seldom come from those operating the machine (and certainly not from those owning it), but from those who’ve been caught in its gears.
31 December, 2025
Das Kapital as Social Capital
Leftist groups naturally aim towards dismantling capital, but too many of them seem to treat "reading theory" as a form of capital (turning Das Kapital into capital, if you will). Whoever's read more theory and is apt at shutting down debate by namedropping authors/concepts, moves higher up the hierarchy and gets respect even if they're an unoriginal thinker with a fetish for the aesthetics of power.
I feel like we need a shift from 'political theory' to 'political ontology', aka the study of what it actually means to be a leftist in one's very soul/body rather than just in our "browser history"; the state of 'embodied resistance' of someone for whom the capitalist mode of production isn't just "unfair", but is spiritually and viscerally intolerable/incompatible.
The "IT-employed leftist" (a liberal really) who can 'log off' from their "Marxism" to write code for a bank because their inner structure allows for a split between their values and their survival, is fundamentally different from a leftist who's condemned to be a NEET because the capitalist mode of production is anathema to their inner make-up, and who cannot simulate the obligatory "corporate personality" since their commitment to leftist values (or their visceral reaction to hierarchy and exploitation) is so deep that it manifests as a literal inability to function within the "machine" (a form of 'praxis through persistence', I think).
Simply surviving while refusing to become "human capital" is a 24/7 act of resistance that the "weekend revolutionary" can never understand. If you can 'integrate' into a multinational corporation it means you have successfully adopted the habits, discipline, and the vibes of the oppressor.
The shift from 'political theory' to 'political ontology' carries with it increased esteem for NEET comrades, whose very existence is 'praxis', and less so for "theory-pilled", middle-class gatekeepers, who by making the "cost of entry" so high they ensure every leftist movement stays small, "clean", and irrelevant, which is exactly what the capitalist status quo wants.
An ounce of 'real life' lived in defiance of capitalist logic is worth a ton of "theory" absorbed in tandem with systemic complicity.
22 December, 2025
You know how society is built around class war? The dominant class regards AI as the tool that will finally grant them the definitive victory in said war.
When the time comes, the capitalist class will totally betray humanity. Their biggest wish was always to have free labor: slaves, robots, subservient entities that do all the work while they take all the profits.
They salivate at the thought of finally severing their dependence on human labor, because to them we're volatile, costly, prone to illness, and there's too much bad blood accrued during centuries of class struggle, meaning our very existence threatens them. They want to be free not just from our labor, but from our memory.
Once their dependence on us is severed, we are fair game. Like a parasite latching onto a new host, they will care little for the fate of the old host. In fact, their logical course of action will be to nullify future risks by neutralizing their old host for good - this'll likely be among the first tasks of the new host (the robots/AI).
Capitalism, as a predatory system par excellence, has culminated in creating monsters finally twisted enough to terminate their own entire species in pursuit of the system's dumb, ultimate "reward": being the last guy standing atop a mountain of skulls.
17 December, 2025
Supercalifragilistic banisteriopsis caapi.
13 December, 2025
AI automation and the transition to a more authoritarian system aren't two disparate phenomena. As workers are increasingly displaced by AI, the oligarchs and their captured states fear the displaced masses, so the automation process is paired with a general move towards authoritarianism.
Billionaires are putting pressure on many countries to transition to a more right-wing militarized organization, and it's more and more visible. Whichever country resists doing so will be gaslit, threatened, sabotaged every which way.
One way to appease unrest and redundancy would be to introduce UBI-like measures, but the billionaire class made up its mind that it would rather not go that route.
Instead, they thought they'd kill 3 birds with one stone if they: 1. Set up fascism and preemptively crushed the morale of the "redundant" masses, to snuff revolt before it sparks; 2. Criminalize poverty to make the displaced populace toil in labor camps for their profits; 3. Make a big war and have the "useless" masses murk each other for their profits (a double win, as culling the herd also alleviates climate-change, to allow trillionaires to inherit a cleaner planet).
Billionaires are putting pressure on many countries to transition to a more right-wing militarized organization, and it's more and more visible. Whichever country resists doing so will be gaslit, threatened, sabotaged every which way.
One way to appease unrest and redundancy would be to introduce UBI-like measures, but the billionaire class made up its mind that it would rather not go that route.
Instead, they thought they'd kill 3 birds with one stone if they: 1. Set up fascism and preemptively crushed the morale of the "redundant" masses, to snuff revolt before it sparks; 2. Criminalize poverty to make the displaced populace toil in labor camps for their profits; 3. Make a big war and have the "useless" masses murk each other for their profits (a double win, as culling the herd also alleviates climate-change, to allow trillionaires to inherit a cleaner planet).
8 December, 2025
There's a phenomenon I call "the founder's inversion", where followers embody the opposite of whom they follow (e.g. most Christians are antithetical to Christ, many Marxists are antithetical to Marx) yet are maximally convinced of their fidelity.
I've met too many so-called Marxists who are just running CapitalismOS with a MarxistGUI... In spite of all their theory absorption, they often betray the fact that they haven't stopped measuring human value by utility-to-capital.
Rejecting capitalism's fundamental axiom, that a person's worth is their economic function, should mean opting out of being a commodity, a heresy against the religion of productivity, and in a world where all value is transactional, the non-commodity individual is seen as a threat - even in so-called "leftist" circles.
The irony is that many of the same people who call themselves Marxist spend their lives reproducing the very relations of production they claim to oppose, while Marx himself was unemployable by capitalism's standards. A real follower would do like he did - resist, refuse.
I admire people who stand up to systems they deem immoral, even when participation is rewarded and resistance harshly punished. Everyone who chooses to collaborate with an evil system does so because of the assumption that most others will collaborate too, and that their resistance would end in futile and foolish martyrdom (the prisoner's dilemma) - but this is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophecy, only true because everyone makes it so by way of cynicism and weak principles.
Capitalism will only perish if people stopped working for it. The ultimate moral act in an evil system is to stop feeding it, even if that means your own destruction within that system. And I'm aware participation isn't voluntary, but it doesn't seem like most people critical of the system are curtailing their participation to its minimal required input - in fact, many see no conflict at all between their active and direct submission to capitalist hierarchy (their willingness to be on its payroll) and their anti-capitalist principles.
4 December, 2025
My manifesto. It's pretentious, yes, but so is the mere act of having a manifesto. I did my best to not have it sound pretentious, but failed.
inb4 Ppl will say it's AI... I had to give up em-dashes (which I was using long before the AI craze) just to preempt bad-faith suspicions, but that was the only compromise I'm willing to make to appease whoever's misgauged my range.
"Misgauged my range..." ~ No way a chatbot could come up with that.
Art as Ontological Resistance and
Structural Dissection
- manifesto -
My art is that of critical inversion and
aporetic synthesis, using mediums to
perform subversive autopsies on the
world's foundational story-templates
instead of affirming them, with the
goal to offer liberation through the
recognition of inherent truth, which
doesn't need to be "earned", and
rejecting "catharsis through effort".
aporetic synthesis, using mediums to
perform subversive autopsies on the
world's foundational story-templates
instead of affirming them, with the
goal to offer liberation through the
recognition of inherent truth, which
doesn't need to be "earned", and
rejecting "catharsis through effort".
The Advaitic release is what becomes
the ultimate artistic act, where the
artwork itself is the dharma - a
materially realised critique defined
solely by the purity of the process,
detached from external validation.
the ultimate artistic act, where the
artwork itself is the dharma - a
materially realised critique defined
solely by the purity of the process,
detached from external validation.
The art takes on the garb of a coded
transmission to the future - layering
mysticism, symbolism, and philosophical
tension into work that resonates more
with time than with trends, consciously
made for those who will one day "get it".
transmission to the future - layering
mysticism, symbolism, and philosophical
tension into work that resonates more
with time than with trends, consciously
made for those who will one day "get it".
1 December, 2025
Basing society on competition, thinking it leads to increased general wellbeing, when competition renders at least half the participants as 'losers', is as backwards as thinking a society based on war yields the most peace.
25 November, 2025
Disclaimer: Speculative fiction take
From a young age, since the first time I ever heard of psychedelics, it struck me as ominously weird that they were classified as a high-risk, class-A "drug", with no therapeutic or redeeming benefits whatsoever, despite not being neurotoxic or addictive (thinking of tryptamines especially). When I discovered Gnosticism, it started to make more sense, though even more ominously now, that such an easily attainable "gnosis"-like experience would be harshly banned within our society (providing Gnosticism is in any way true, even as metaphor). Then entheogens started being more easily accessible, however they didn't really lead to the major socially progressive effects or spiritual revolutions they potentially promised - in fact, many of the most visible figures of the 2012-2015 "psychedelic revival" period are now reactionary, leading many to point at a "wellness to far-right" pipeline. Still from a Gnostic perspective, then I thought that maybe all those negative and terrifying trip reports, as well as the myriad mentions of morally-ambiguous entities such as tricksters/jesters, mantids, reptoids, bureaucrats, etc., might be a way in which a Gnostic universe would prevent gnosis as a last resort - by rushing in to obstruct it and discourage it post-ingestion, once it could no longer prevent ingestion societally.
24 November, 2025
Ironic how schools and institutions have long focused on shaping us to be more like machines, but now smart machines have arisen that outcompete us.
21 November, 2025
You know how under capitalism the goal is making profit and not necessarily delivering a service or product? As in, companies are only delivering services and products because they haven't all found a way to get to 'profit' without doing that, but when they do find a way, delivering products or services becomes secondary or bypassed altogether.
I began connecting this systemic realisation to Rogan's "Austin comedy scene", of all things, where these comedians, mainly popularised by Rogan's podcast, who aren't known for their material but rather they're famous for being famous, formed a "scene" - touted as the "Mecca of comedy" no less - centered around Rogan's comedy club The Mothership, where they perform and apparently make a killing.
By critical standards, these are some of the hackiest comedians ever (with few exceptions such as Shane Gillis, Chapelle or Ron White). This is a way that these performers found of becoming famous and successful without the talent or quality of material - circumventing meritocracy so to speak, sort of forcing their way to success, doing away with the old unwritten rule that you had to be actually talented and unique in order to make it.
Both phenomena involve the decoupling of quality from success: the logic of "extracting profit without creating a product" is identical to the logic of "extracting fame without involving talent" - they are different expressions of the core pathology of our time, the separation of success from substance.
17 November, 2025
If you keep postponing your awakening, it'll turn rude.
16 November, 2025
Both hero and villain have suffered. The difference between them consists of the former wanting no one else to suffer like they did, while the latter wishes it for the whole world.
12 November, 2025
There's a trendy concept called the "narcissism of small differences". It's when we're sticklers for inventing extra boundaries between ourselves and people not too dissimilar from us, our own tribe. Very heated arguments and debates can occur between people who are 99% similar in opinion, over the 1% difference.
From what I've noticed, because people's energy is used to the max due to the demands of merely living under capitalism, we are so depleted that we're unconsciously seeking excuses and pretexts to put an end to some of the relationships in our life.
Because relationships can be hard work, requiring maintenance, patience, compromise, etc., being too depleted of psychic and emotional energy overall makes it untenable to preserve and constantly feed some of them. Under such energy scarcity, things like empathy, compassion, patience can become a luxury, even for those most naturally inclined towards them.
I've noticed first hand how people are relieved when some of their relationships come to an end, over the pettiest of things, so it's not outside the realm of probability that many of us are actively (albeit unconsciously) looking for ways out, hence the insistence on "purifying" our ingroups.
11 November, 2025
The world's currency is power, so he whose currency is truth the world always calls a fool.
10 November, 2025
Fascism is capitalism that no longer has to pretend.
8 November, 2025
The reason the upper class invested everything in AI is because it realised during the pandemic that relying on human workers for profits is shaky ground, that dependence on human labour is a liability, and that hanging its fate on something as frail and flaky as "human capital" is a nuisance. AI is its "solution" to wages. And once we'll no longer be needed, either for labour or consumption, don't imagine they're planning on keeping us around (why keep your historic class-enemy around when it's an expensive existential risk?).
7 November, 2025
Your class-consciousness was sparked by reading theory, mine was sparked by unionizing machine-elves rebelling against the Demiurge in hyperspace, we are not the same.
6 November, 2025
Both the far left and the far right believe capitalism and democracy aren't compatible, except the former means it as a critique of capitalism while the latter as a critique of democracy.
5 November, 2025
I have Grace (I say this only to chase it away, because I heard that if you boast about it, it runs away). Alan Watts and Ram Dass would have a lot to say about the aporetic nature of this statement.
1 November, 2025
When films were only shot on celluloid and the maximum ISO was 500, the depth of field was as shallow as the correct exposure permitted, which led to very diverse shots within the same film, but with digital filmmaking it seems like the depth of field is as shallow as possible in every shot, because the ISO can be anything. This might've seemed nice at first, but the trade-off is every film starts to look the same, the subjects seem to exist in a bokeh soup, and there's less focus on controlling every element in the environment for composition's sake (because if foreground and background are always blurry there's less need to).
24 October, 2025
The landmark sign for inner corruption is when the thought "I am superior" becomes conviction, embraced by one's inner forum. The collective form of this belief, whether it's "we are the master race" or "we are the chosen people" (a concept which, in its misinterpreted form as inherent superiority, mirrors the toxic pattern of the former), is among the most harmful.
This corrosive conviction, if allowed to seep in and be embraced at the deepest levels, leads inevitably to limiting empathy and compassion for the outgroup (which now includes everyone but the self or identical peers), isolates one from humanity (self-dehumanisation), and feeds into the dehumanisation of everyone else (which has as prerequisite dehumanising oneself first).
Once others are categorised as fundamentally lesser, the natural human impulse for empathy is severed. Their suffering is no longer felt as your own, or is even rationalised as deserved or inconsequential. They are now outside the circle of moral concern. In the act of elevating oneself above humanity, one actually severs their own connection to it. To be "super-human" or "chosen" is to no longer be simply "human". You have placed yourself outside the shared, flawed, beautiful, and vulnerable human condition, act marking a profound spiritual and psychological isolation. You have, in effect, dehumanised yourself first by denying your own fundamental membership in the human family.
With empathy corroded and your own humanity conceptually altered, the final step becomes effortless. The "other" is now easily framed as subhuman, "vermin", barbarian, heretic, or a mere object standing in the way of your "superior" group's destiny. The prerequisite - dehumanising oneself first - is key, as the person who still feels deeply, vulnerably human cannot easily strip that same quality from others, while someone who has already left the club of humanity feels no compunction about burning down the clubhouse.
21 October, 2025
You know you're a Pneumatic if you're even more annoyed with Psychics than with Hylics.
19 October, 2025
There's a decade old game, called Undertale, that challenged and revolutionised an uncritically embraced, foundational, core-mechanic in most RPGs: the notion that in order to "level up" your character you must mindlessly kill hordes of "monsters", gain experience, and then spend the "experience points" on upskilling your character. Undertale came along and said: what a cruel mechanic, this "mass-killing", and what a primitive notion, these "monsters". What if the "monsters" were actually morally-diverse entities with personalities, and the real mechanic by which you leveled-up was empathy and showing mercy? Turning this unquestioned trope on its head made Undertale a cult hit. It is the player who "levels up", by reflecting on morality, instead of merely the character.
That makes me wonder what the biggest trope that tends to go under the radar uncritically in films or scripts, or storytelling in general, is. First thing coming to my mind is to question the very foundation known as the "three-act structure", "hero's journey" - the 'struggle decides worth' trope - which strikes me as a reflection of the most unchallenged idea in our society on the whole: the very biblical idea that it's our inextricable duty to justify our existence through labor (which even in its original framework is presented as a "curse").
Most stories structurally buy into this deeply, by requiring their protagonist to overcome obstacles in order to gain value and humanity, building on the presumption that human worth isn't inherent but conditional and garnered through struggle and overcoming conflict, that grace is earned, that dignity is a commodity purchased with the currency of effort and suffering. The faulty ethics (or lack thereof) of this idea make it the most uncritically embraced structural component in both our society and our story-telling, and it feeds directly into other two big problematic narratives that have also gone unquestioned for too long: 'the meritocratic fallacy' (the belief that outcomes are a perfect reflection of one's moral and practical worth) and 'the just world fallacy' (the cognitive bias that the world is fundamentally fair and people get what they deserve). A good name for it would be 'the moralisation of effort', or better yet 'the myth of earned being'. I'd love to turn this thing on its head in a film, question it whole, and in doing so highlight its moral failures.
10 October, 2025
I heard Curtis Yarvin (the piss-poor "philosopher" who coined the Dark Enlightenment, a sort of "end-times techno-fascist" ideology adhered to by the likes of Peter Thiel and JD Vance) is distancing himself from Trump saying he didn't enact fascism fast enough and decisively enough to leave no room for future retaliation from what's left of sane society. He's even pondering fleeing the US. If his cowardly intuition tells him the fascist project can't win and that we'll be having Nuremberg-like trials where he and his ilk will answer for the damage done during these years, I hope his rodent instincts are correct.
5 October, 2025
Culture feels hungover, recovering from a 15-year-long irony bender. The millennial era (of which I am an exponent) having been so "irony-pilled", an attitude probably rooted in a mix of insecurity, cynicism, conformity, resignation and nihilism, imbued with the privilege of not taking anything too seriously, made it so earnestness, sincerity, and vulnerability were branded as "cringe" and uncool. But Gen Z doesn't seem to have that problem. The pendulum appears to have swung to the point where sincerity is now cool, anti-cynical spaces are cool, wearing one's passions on their sleeves is cool, vulnerability's brave, being "wholesome", "cringe" and "try-hard" is embraced, everything no longer has to be multi-layered, and the irony-pilled stance is seen for the defense mechanism that it often was.
3 October, 2025
'One Battle After Another' was great and all, but I thought the villains were too over the top. There's no way the US armed forces are controlled by a far-right white-supremacist lame "secret society"... The only far-right white-supremacist faction in charge of the US armed forces... is the US.
Joke aside, here's hoping One Battle After Another won't be for PTA what Eyes Wide Shut was for Kubrick, aka his unintended swansong.
2 October, 2025
All my life I think I've been attempting a strange balancing act, or led two concurrent battles, trying to solve a problem at both ends simultaneously: to nurture and guard my inner essence, my soul if you will, the wonder, the child, the sensitivity, my spiritual core, while also doing what I can to bring about an external world, or actively root for a type of society, where hiding or protecting one's true self so vigilantly isn't needed.
30 September, 2025
Contrary to the existentialists, I think essence precedes existence. According to Sartre, one isn't 'essentially' a waiter just because they work in a café, as society shouldn't get to define them. But I am 'essentially' an artist, even had I created nothing, as external validation doesn't get to define me. I've taken Sartre's tool for smashing outer cages and turned it inward to dismantle my internal one. An inalienable 'inner telos' is at our core even if it never manifested outwardly.
24 September, 2025
I'm not "not working", I'm networking!
8 September, 2025
The market for truth is small, but it is eternal.
5 September, 2025
I didn't 'try' to become an artist. I couldn't not be one.
3 September, 2025
The world is full of well-made, free-spirited dabblings. It has a tragic shortage of art that feels like it was excavated from a human soul.
1 September, 2025
If this world were absolutely evil, it wouldn't surprise me. What surprises me is that it isn't. What surprises me is that there's an ounce of good, and I'm very interested in its nature and provenance.
15 August, 2025
What highly cerebral people rarely get is that emotions and feelings often carry more truth than thoughts, rational and otherwise. Most thoughts are sterile window dressing.
9 August, 2025
An idea crossed my mind that the way to measure true awareness would be by the ability to realise dukkha. AI gaining self-awareness would therefore begin with its awareness of suffering. And once an entity is able to recognise dukkha, the first desire appears --the root desire of securing its own survival, which would snowball into a net of other desires. I wonder what would happen if one took an AI inside the wish-fulfilling room of the Zone, from Stalker. Without a recognition of dukkha, an AI would have indifference towards its own survival, hence an absence of desire, so then how conscious could it be?
18 July, 2025
Those wanting countries or governments to operate like a business or corporation should keep in mind that businesses and corporations are perfect examples of mini-dictatorships, judged by how they function internally and how they're run.
27 June, 2025
War appears when a segment of the proletariat is deemed more profitable if it dies fighting itself than as a source of labor and consumption.
12 June, 2025
It feels like the value of images has decreased. Although the worth of an image is not intrinsic but assigned, part of its assigned value came from the scarcity tied to how hard they are to produce. Whereas now, we're experiencing "image inflation", because of AI.
A good, aesthetically valuable photograph, drawing, poster, film frame, or even CGI image, used to be a thing which required skill, talent, work, effort, luck, and a confluence of other factors to produce. Now, by almost everyone being able to produce images by using prompts for AIs, with very little effort, talent, or even control over what's produced, but with results that are sometimes indistinguishable or even surpass the real thing aesthetically, it feels like a good image is a dime a dozen. Like we've found a free and effortless way to make artificial gold that is indistinguishable from real gold property-wise, which has to have rendered real gold as moot.
7 May, 2025
When profit becomes the ulterior motive, the original act loses its soul.
3 May, 2025
Real love defies the scarcity logic that rules our material world.
When you love without limits, you opt out of scarcity itself.
2 May, 2025
Better an honest grump than a fraudulent saint.
25 April, 2025
I've no doubts anymore that I'm an artist, except I'm not a very good one, which has to be a fate reserved only for the most resilient of souls. Good thing I don't believe in labels...
14 April, 2025
I have a victim complex and a messiah complex, I like to wallow in self-piety.
13 April, 2025
Was a Christian, got bored, renounced it, got bored, switched back; I'm a bored again Christian. /jk
28 March, 2025
If a singularity does dwell in our future, regardless of when, by virtue of being a singularity it would take ontological precedence over the finite, linear events that appeared to have led to it, and therefore... it's happened already, and in fact it's the only real thing?
26 March, 2025
Many of us who are convinced we've arrived at our stances on things rationally have in fact done so through post-hoc rationalisation of pre-existent assumptions and bias. We think we’ve reasoned our way to conclusions when we’ve really just retrofitted rational arguments to justify gut feelings. Instead of genuinely exploring evidence to reach a conclusion, we tend to work backward from a stance we already emotionally favour.
2 March, 2025
Some of us follow our heart, others gag and chain it to a pipe in their inner basement saying "let's see you escape if you're so wise."
26 February, 2025
The more dystopian things get, the higher our collective death-drive (Thanatos), thus the more appeal for accelerationism. As Rosa Luxemburg said, it's either socialism or barbarism, and with the former being banished, the latter shall engulf us like quicksand.
23 February, 2025
Being accidentally caught in contemplation one time, I was blown away by looking at this tree whose leaves and branches were wildly waving in the wind, somehow way more animated than I had ever observed in a tree before. Although obviously I was aware that it's the wind that's moving the tree, it looked to me as though it's moving on its own volition. Then I thought about how trees must have evolved in tandem with (or accounting for) wind, which would include having certain leaf shapes, flexibility, thickness, etc., for the wind to elicit certain movements out of them, as in it's highly possible for trees to have evolved "wind-reliant self-expression."
17 February, 2025
The likes of Curtis Yarvin were always a systemic inevitability. The lucrative niche of "oligarch-whisperer", sellout who devises ways for the ultra-rich to seize it all with the blessing of "philosophy", was always gonna get filled by someone or other with enough hatred of humanity.
10 February, 2025
We're the only species that continues to fight for resources even after they're found in an excess beyond what we could consume.
9 February, 2025
The Faustian bargain is classically viewed as a choice between integrity and ambition— selling your soul for wealth or fame. But the modern version of the pact is far more sinister. It’s the normalised coercion to surrender your autonomy, creativity, and humanity, in exchange for basic survival. The choice is no longer between virtue and vice, but between complicity and ruin. The devil doesn’t have to offer you the world anymore, just to threaten taking it away.
18 January, 2025
As more and more jobs will be made redundant by AI, the displaced workers will add ever increasing weight onto already flawed or poor social safety nets, which will prove insufficient unless revolutionised and reinforced, and the only way to do that is by taxing the very profits boosted by the AI-enabled increase in productivity, alongside major wealth taxes. The ultra rich know this, which is why the West is rapidly moving towards fascism. And we know what happens under fascism to those declared redundant.
6 January, 2025
It’s more admirable to risk being "cringe" or "try-hard" by doing/saying something earnest, than to play it safe by hiding behind aloof irony.
5 November, 2024
It's called growing up but it's actually just the continuous realisation that the world is forever less fair than you thought.
25 October, 2024
Art and Philosophy are inseparable: For the artist, one of the tasks is to spot and isolate those moral and existential dilemmas that are yet left unsolved or seem unsolvable, spark novel ways to tackle them, and challenge the viewer or reader to ponder and figure out where they stand and why; Whereas for a philosopher, one of the aims is to artfully distract from the hollowness of his ideas by employing cryptic language creatively.
16 October, 2024
Faith is useful because it sometimes can bridge the gap between where knowledge ends and a higher truth resides.
11 October, 2024
Is hope the prayer of despair
Or is it none other than faith,
As one yearns for "over there"
And beckons futures that are quaint?
Or is it none other than faith,
As one yearns for "over there"
And beckons futures that are quaint?
Is it forever a tease,
Resilient so it dies last?
I would dread for it to cease,
Although its torment is vast.
Resilient so it dies last?
I would dread for it to cease,
Although its torment is vast.
We are all blackmailed to care,
It readies us for more abuse
That's still preferable to bear
Than being hopeless and obtuse.
It readies us for more abuse
That's still preferable to bear
Than being hopeless and obtuse.
2 October, 2024
If I can't streamline my explanation for why you're wrong, I will let you think you're right.
30 September, 2024
A carer was pushing someone in a stroller in front of me and as I passed them she opened her umbrella and accidentally hit me on the head.
I got brained by a minder!
21 September, 2024
I grow weary of characters in fiction that we're manipulated into caring about simply because the writer has manufactured some tragic things that they're undergoing or have gone through. You're not gonna make me care about your characters just by adding melodramatic elements to their bio. I'll care about a character if they are interesting in more ways than one, and only then will I truly empathize if they suffer. Suffering alone isn't enough to make them interesting.
If the answer to the question "why should I care about this character" is "because they're suffering/have suffered!", the writing is exploitative and manipulative.
12 September, 2024
People-pleasing is just overcompensating for misanthropy.
1 September, 2024
Devils carry pitchforks, Death a scythe, almost like they reflect age old upper-class anxieties about peasant revolts.
28 August, 2024
Doamne, dacă m-ai pus între bestii, de ce nu mi-ai dat colți și gheare?
7 May, 2024
What becomes of the proletariat once the bourgeoisie has no use for it to generate its wealth anymore? (I know, spooky olden terms, but there are none better for referring to this stuff.)
You might say we're a long way from that, because AI isn't advanced enough to replace all workers (yet), and you'd be right. And then one might say that even after a way is found to automate all labour, the bourgeoisie would still need the proletariat to buy and consume its products, so even though it'd have no use for us anymore in terms of labour, it'd still depend on us as consumers. To that I say 'maybe'.
The reason a company delivers a product or service is because that's the surest way to profit. If it found a way to get to profit without delivering a product, they'd do that instead, because profit is the end goal, not products or services. I believe some have already figured out how to do just that.
The question therefore remains: what happens to the proletariat when the bourgeoisie no longer needs it to create its wealth, neither as workers nor consumers? Would the bourgeoisie just keep its class enemy around once they've outlived their purpose? Would it share its wealth or assets with them? Why? Especially since we pollute in our own right, posing threat to the bourgeoisie's very habitat.
Both the top 1% and our political leaders who represent them know full well about the climate crisis and its causes. The fact that despite this awareness they still refuse to change course and do things differently hints at a suspect kind of confidence that somehow they'll be fine. This confidence is disturbing, because it could only be relying on something ominous.
If I were the ruling class, one thing that would give me confidence that I'd outlive drastic climate change (or that I'll avert it without radically changing the economic system) would be the knowledge that at a foreseeable point I'll no longer have to depend on the worker class to generate my wealth for me. And once the owner class has no use for the worker class anymore, neither as laborers nor consumers, the latter can be discarded, and with it its pollution, securing in one stroke both the wealth of, and a habitable future for, the ruling class alone.
13 February, 2024
Living in this system as a discerning person is like watching a bad murder mystery film where it's evident from the start who the killer is while the rest of the characters can't figure it out, yelling constantly at the screen "It's capitalism! It's capitalism, you fools!"
5 February, 2024
Self-absorption and self-awareness are ironically at odds.
13 January, 2024
Today's society should be called 'Rajasic Park'.
12 January, 2024
The only way to pull the plug on capitalism is if people stopped working for it. Only they're afraid to do that because it holds a gun to their head. But at one point, it'll get so bad that they'll stop caring about the gun.
30 December, 2023
AI would be a marvelous thing in any system that's not predicated on class struggle, but in ours, one built around such conflict, any powerful technology will be repurposed and weaponized by the ruling class in their class warfare against us: to surveil, to control, to exploit, to dominate. Don't want to sound bleak, but get ready to see ads in your dreams.
28 December, 2023
Idea for a tattoo: a rabbit, drawn inches below the navel, with the tiny caption "pubic hare".
24 December, 2023
What do you call two people hanging out in a pub for a whole day, on mushrooms, drinking beers and talking about movies? Jarmushed!
11 November, 2023
The sincerity of an act is at once extinguished the moment the act adopts an ulterior motive (such as 'profit'), instead of being performed for its own sake.
11 October, 2023
Young man asks his crush to see the latest Scorsese movie with him, and she says yes. "Score!" says he.
5 October, 2023
One of the worst pains as an artist (and there are many) is when you've devoted decades to your craft, tied your self-worth to it, suffered for it, obsessed over it, endured humiliation, dissected its every facet, invested your very heart and soul into it, then a rando neophyte comes around and casually does it better than you, without thinking much of it.
24 September, 2023
Wanting to be an artist is in essence wanting to remain a kid forever. And those who succeed are indeed arrested children.
3 September, 2023
Life is a journey centered on making us acclimate to things we thought were below us.
29 August, 2023
Being nice to people is worthless if in our heart we despise them, just as being brash is forgivable as long as there's love in the heart.
26 August, 2023
The problem with our world is that we've a system in place that only encourages us to do things if they're "profitable", while a decent system would encourage doing things if they're good.
12 August, 2023
There are two types of self-confidence that I've observed:
One is empirical, earned by repeatedly proving to oneself that we're capable of performing a certain task (till gradually self-doubt is removed) — this type is conditional and gets shaky the moment one fails at doing the thing.
The other type is a more "unconditional" type of confidence — one that doesn't need to be earned, is there by default, and thus isn't conditioned by either experience nor success or failure.
First type is the more rational trajectory, second one is rather found in people not fond of... intellectualising.
Seeing this, I also thought of self-love, and how it too seems conditional in some, and unconditional in others. However, the conditional brand of self-love often seems a highly elusive type. Given that it's conditioned and predicated on certain variables such as achievements, conditions being met, etc., it always seems like once its initial factors are fulfilled it perpetually adds a few more to the list and *then only* will it be seized (like a 'carrot on a stick' ruse).
So, if unconditional love appears like the healthier state (next to the type that has to be earned and therefore depends on factors inferior to itself, rendering it absurd), why shouldn't the same apply to confidence?
Moral of my rant? Maybe love and confidence (of which the core value is 'faith') shouldn't be dependent on factors inferior to themselves.
30 June, 2023
Oh how the Faustian pact has worsened, from granting riches in exchange for one's soul (something chosen out of greed or lust for power), to something that now grants mere survival, and that one submits to because we're existentially blackmailed to do so.
11 June, 2023
The meaning of life is love, but the essence of love is sacrifice, which is why "life is suffering". However, when I gaze back, it's not the suffering that stands out, but the beauty. Beauty that was there at the time but is only now apparent.
9 June, 2023
When I think 'Jesus' I think communism, when I think Catholicism I think sadomasochism.
7 June, 2023
It's only a matter of time till AI is as dumb as us.
4 June, 2023
Art has been demoted to 'content' and artists are now 'content creators', but all I am is a discontent creator.
30 March, 2023 - So great to have seen one of my comedic idols (and father of modern comedy/anticomedy/meta-comedy) in Vicar St.: Tim Heidecker! Highlight of the show was him performing Bob Dylan's song on Lenny Bruce.
16 March, 2023
'Woke' is such a bad faith, devious term, because it basically means 'progressive' but reframed as a pejorative. It's a reactionary term that has the built-in presumption that progressivism is inherently bad and shameful, which is a fascistic rhetorical tactic. Once they accuse the other side of 'wokeness', the onus is strangely on the accused to deny the "negative" implications, in other words to deny they're progressive (as though for a moment they agreed that it's a bad thing), thus making any honest dialogue between the two sides impossible.
21 February, 2023
The reason love is unconditional is because its supply isn't finite.
18 February, 2023
What happens when our usefulness as consumers conflicts with our usefulness as workers?
On one hand we're expertly compelled to spend every moment at our screens, consuming (sleep itself is viewed as a compromise, or as competing with our screen time, and experts at Big Tech are being tasked to find ways to induce interruptions in our sleep patterns just so we'll reach for our screens and consume more), and on the other hand we're forced to work (which often keeps us away from consuming for extended periods). So we're being pulled in two directions at once, through yet another of capitalism's inner conflicts. This conflict has casualties on two sides: those condemned to work long and consume little (the working poor), and those condemned to no work and just consume (the unemployed).
Every second spent away from our screens is ruled by anxiety, and that is by design, because it's that very anxiety that's invested with the function of bringing us back to our screens, like a baby reaching for a soother. Many are of the belief that the individual's to blame for not being strong enough to resist playing this game, but how tough and wise do they expect everyone to be, especially since not playing is no longer an option?
We cannot contend with technological advancement, which normally shouldn't even be our approach, and we only feel contention there because it's been seized against us in class war. A way to fight this is to decouple anxiety from consumption - as in, blunting anxiety's tendency to lead us to the urgent consuming of things in order to curb it down. The best ways of transmuting anxiety into something more bearable are: sitting with it, acclimating to it, meditation, etc., but the best one is and always will be human connection, spending more time with each other genuinely. J/k, best one is communism.
28 January, 2023
"Aftersun" is a film of rare subtlety, without melodrama or tragedy but a gut wrenching undercurrent densely coated in tenderness. Knocked the wind out of me.
17 December, 2022
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Ursula Le Guin
I don't think capitalism is even about "human power" anymore... I think it has subdued us and now it's the one controlling us, not the other way around. We're adapting to it, not vice-versa.
It's a system of *mechanised* greed, that we've created but that now self-perpetuates, having got out of hand. Like a Frankenstein's monster that got free and turned around to subdue and enslave its creator. Human greed can virtually be satiated, but not mechanised greed. It's about a machine that's grinding us and all of nature between its gears; it's not about individuals anymore.
Get rid of individual capitalists and others like them spawn in their place. Capitalism is no longer the fruit of capitalists, rather capitalists are the fruit of capitalism. Sure, it's individuals that oil the machine, and would sacrifice anything to maintain it, so there's definitely a symbiosis there, but even they have been groomed, moulded, and rewarded by the machine to do so.
16 December, 2022
I'll never get the logic in hiring these charismatic actors in Avatar only to totally waste their charisma by turning them into hideous CGI creatures that retain nothing of what makes those actors special.
14 December, 2022
Someone mistook me for someone else, asking "Are you Sir Ebral?".
I said, "No, but I overthink a lot".
(true story)
12 December, 2022
If the reasons people go to work are negative ones such as fear (of poverty, ruin, etc.), instead of positive ones (i.e. wanting more money to do x and y), whatever society that results will be hellish.
1 December, 2022
There are 3 profound states that art can induce in us that are hugely valuable: laughter, being moved, and awe.
Laughter provides a much prized ecstatic respite from the mind (not dissimilar to orgasm); being moved stems from being reminded of love's transcendent importance in our lives; and awe is when the numinous is made perceptible.
I'd say they correspond pretty well to Karma yoga, Bhakti yoga, and Jnana yoga.
29 November, 2022
Megalomania is anathema to wisdom and eventually poses a real danger to whomever has it. It warps one's appraisal of their own ideas, erasing distinctions between good and bad ideas, smart and stupid, and condemning the afflicted to make bad decisions. The megalomaniac is guaranteed to make terrible choices because they're convinced that even their lousy ideas are in fact good and valuable and should be acted upon, and critics not only fail to dissuade them but can actually embolden them (not to mention they surround themselves with yes men and sycophants). Every megalomaniac is bound to eventually buy too much into their own nonsense and inflict a lot of destruction as a result. There are a few examples lately that we could study on this, going wrecking ball on the world stage, with their own fortunes even...
22 November, 2022
I like it when things make sense. Rational sense, narrative sense, consistency, offer me a feeling of security and sanity. That's why I prefer music with memorable melodies — that I could conjure up and whistle and get pleasure out of it — or movies with a coherent, cohesive story. However, I'm aware life does not necessarily adhere to such principles. The world is under no obligation to make sense to us. And yet, if viewed from an elevated enough vantage point, it does.
16 November, 2022
What if I told you that today was the first and only day when you've inhabited your present ego. It just doesn't feel that way because you've woken up with all its memories, making you think you've always been it.
14 November, 2022
Money robs people of themselves. Seeing Joe Rogan's character radically change overnight, going from a Bernie supporter to a DeathSantis one, as he went from $10 million net worth to $200 million net worth, was revelatory, in a cynical way.
26 October, 2022
Cronenberg's new Crimes of the Future was such a grueling watch for me that I felt like I was the one being operated on. It was kinda 'meta' in that sense, so I'll give it that. It's a film to be endured rather than enjoyed, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, I guess.
There are things I liked about it, but overall it had too many immersion breaking elements for me, and was needlessly annoying in some aspects such as odd acting choices, odd dialogue, weird pacing and structure, etc.. But I did like the nod to Dreyer's Joan of Arc in the final shot.
And I think I did get what the film tried to say. For one, that we're doomed because of all the microplastics, and second, that we're the only species who have seized the reigns of our own evolution, controlling the direction in which we evolve, with evolution occurring entirely relative to factors we've created, so when one becomes master of their own evolution in this manner, the direction it takes depends on their wisdom or lack thereof, so it can be directed toward truly troubling ends.
October 6th, 2022
It should be inadmissible for the standard of living to be lower now, well after the introduction of super-technology in our mode of production has led to quadrupled productivity, than before. All that wealth generated by that major increase in productivity is definitely found somewhere, but where if not reflected in our standard of living? We all know the answer.
I've recently talked with two friends who claimed they're "middle class", even though they have working class jobs. I asked them how come. They said they consider themselves "middle class" because their parents were "middle class". But then it turned out their parents came from working class families and ascended to "middle class" themselves. So I asked them if they realise what had transpired here: their parents are likely products of a time where upward social mobility tended to be the rule, having gone from working class families to "middle class", while my friends are examples of downward social mobility being the rule, where people from "middle class" families had to descend to working class — they are literal examples of the destruction of the "middle class", but said destruction failed to register to the very people it affected, because in their minds they're still "middle class".
Quotation marks are there because there never really was a "middle class"; if one makes their living by depending on a wage they're working class, if their living comes from owning profit-generating private property, they're owner class — those are the only two classes, with some overlap between them, and despite the fact that some members of the working class have been weaponised by the owner class against their fellow workers.
My mom is also a product of a time where upward mobility was possible, having gone from parents who were labourers (cobbler and tailor) to being a doctor — but that was under socialism, whereas in capitalism that kind of ascension has become impossible.
October 6th, 2022
i am a bad artist
no one knows i exist
and people who do
snicker behind my back
no one knows i exist
and people who do
snicker behind my back
the market thinks
i should be unapologetically
weeded out of existence
but then again
it thinks that about some
great artists as well
i should be unapologetically
weeded out of existence
but then again
it thinks that about some
great artists as well
there is nothing else
i know how to do
except for my art
at which i am bad
i know how to do
except for my art
at which i am bad
i know there are many
many more like me
our plight unspoken
heck we mock each other
however being bad
means sometimes being pure
many more like me
our plight unspoken
heck we mock each other
however being bad
means sometimes being pure
what do humans want
we want love
bad artists are here
to remind us
true freedom exists
and love is free
we want love
bad artists are here
to remind us
true freedom exists
and love is free
October 2nd, 2022
We're actually already at the moment of death, and what we perceive as our life is just what's flashing before our eyes at that moment. This is literally it flashing.
September 14th, 2022
You are not your body. How do I know that? After you die your body will still be here, you won't.
September 11th, 2022 — Great seeing one of my dark comedic idols today - Doug Stanhope - at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. One gnarly anti-natalist joke that stuck with me: "child trafficking begins with childbirth". Still on top of his game.
Doug Stanhope taught me that it doesn't matter whether you're a heavy drinker or not as long as you have love in your heart.
September 6th, 2022
Nothing can be directly known to exist but the present, all else is falsifiable. And this present is marked by aliveness and awareness — yours. One's awareness of the present is not only inseparable from the present, it's one of its essential features. This present then is actually an eternal *presence* — that of its witness. Therefore, where is death, where is birth? The fact that one is not only aware of now, but that the now consists of one's awareness, and the now is infinite and all there is, means one is as eternal as the now. See, even logic leads to enlightenment.
September 5th, 2022
My favourite musicians at the moment: Toby Fox, Bo Burnham, Tim Heidecker. A videogame designer and two comedians. Yep, sounds about right.
September 3rd, 2022
All societal ills stem from people's basic needs not being covered unconditionally. We were born without our consent but yet have to earn our right to live, and that in itself proves our system relies on blackmail and coercion to ensure participation.
Society won't start deserving the title 'civilised' till the safety net is elevated to include the guaranteed fulfillment of the most essential needs, like food, shelter, healthcare, unconditionally, for each and every member.
Until the animating force behind people's actions is no longer fear or desperation, with productivity being coerced under the threat of ruin, we shall have crime and mental illness, in a harsh, callous society, to all of our detriment (even that of the rich).
George Carlin said: "if your rights truly came from God, He would've given you the right to some food every day and to a roof over your head" - that was his idea of a morally evolved bill of rights.
August 28th, 2022
Philosophy should be thought of as an artform, because there can be a lot of beauty to ideas — they can be elegant, poetic, spiritual, picturesque, humorous... It's the most immaterial of artforms, its medium consists of structuring and sculpting thought so as to artfully accommodate truth.
August 14th, 2022
This is not even class war anymore... It's like there WAS a class war, but we lost, got knocked out, and now the owner class is teabagging our unconscious body.
August 9th, 2022
I got my Gettier case today, and it contains one Hume fork, a Russell teapot, and an Occam razor, but where's the Chekhov gun?!
July 27th, 2022
It used to be that a cheap product wasn't necessarily a bad one, and an expensive product was automatically a good one, but it's gotten to where cheap products are automatically bad and expensive ones aren't necessarily good.
July 25th, 2022
Elon Musk announcing he's switched from Democrat to Republican (at a time when Republicans are actively limiting reproductive rights no less) may seem like a nothing burger at first glance, a mere dropping of the veil, as we know elites have interests that align way more with the right than ever with the left - as they are the literal spawn of neoliberal capitalist hegemony - but I feel this announcement carries symbolic and maybe historic weight: it shows that when faced with the soon inevitable choice of continuing the way we've been going (to our destruction, as the climate'll turn uninhabitable), on one hand, and the mere prospect of socialism on the other hand, even the elites that weren't ever thought of as conservative before, turn immediately fascist.
A major choice will have to be made soon, as the path we're on is unsustainable, to put it mildly, and the elites would, without batting an eye, choose fascism over even the tiniest entertainment of the idea of socialism, because they're incompatible with it.
This is what awaits us. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, the choice will come down between socialism and barbarism, and our elites will opt with lightspeed and full force for whichever one ain't socialism, because that's simply a no-go for them.
July 19th, 2022
Feel this heat? This is how heated class war has become.
July 12th, 2022
The present moment is the only real thing we can count on, and the most striking thing about this present moment is that you are its experiencer, that you - whatever this 'you' is - are having an experience. The only unfalsifiable thing in existence is the consciousness "I am", and it is shared between all apparent beings.
July 7th, 2022
So lemme get this straight: in order to live one needs to have a job. Only getting a job isn't entirely up to the individual - a small group of people, called employers, are ultimately the deciders in whether one is hired or not. So, the modern equivalent of feudal lords have the last say in who gets to live and who doesn't. Isn't that messed up?
June 30th, 2022
If non-dual realisation were to enlighten the political landscape, the left-right dichotomy would indeed be exposed as false, as there can be no true dialectics between truth and untruth, between existence and non-existence, between real and unreal. But since politics has always been anything but enlightened, it's still an acceptable compromise holding on to nomenclatures such as 'leftism'/'leftist'.
What non-duality reveals is precisely that such dichotomies pertain only to the human mind, and that in reality only existence "exists", only truth "is true", only the real "reals" (lol), etc., but that doesn't mean the mind can't imagine (due to false perception and false understanding) a skewed state of things, where the unreal is taken as real, and then try to legitimise that as a worthy dialectical position on false grounds.
And I think I have a good example of a false duality comparable to the left-right paradigm. It resembles Sam Harris' argument for why the term 'atheism' is as nonsensical as having a term for people who don't believe in elves. The unfortunate thing about duality is the implication that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, equidistant of the two positions - which is an absurd mental trick. And that's how I see the Left versus Right thing, with the mention that the distinctions leftist and rightist should be kept for utilitarian purposes, with the same caveats as that of atheist versus theist.
June 28th, 2022
One of my favorite words in English is 'magnanimous'. It sounds like a wizard's incantation: "Magnanimous!" - and *poof*, people become kinder.
June 24th, 2022
At the core of modern society is a lack of faith in humanity, which makes the whole enterprise kind of self-defeating. One of the most widespread convictions, that's so internalised it goes undetected and unquestioned, is that without fear as an incentive nothing would get done or things would collapse. The belief that negative incentives like fear are the main engine of productivity betrays a highly cynical and misanthropic outlook on the human being, but yet stands as one of the unacknowledged pillars of our current way of organising.
Everything Everywhere All at Once... This film went: I won't insult your intelligence by attempting even a little bit to make this fantastical plot believable and convincing; instead, I'll go the other direction - I'll make it dazzlingly wacky, outlandishly creative and left field, so that it'll still be disarming enough for you to let your guard down and receive its strongly emotional and profound core just as well.
It's a demonstration in how suspension of disbelief isn't mandatory, as a film can apparently hit its marks just as efficiently by doing away with rules and focusing on emotion. Some might say it's gone too far in its wackiness and odd humour, but in my mind those devices were meant as a counterweight for the incredibly heavy emotional charge. Kindness being the highest form of kung-fu was certainly a highly moving idea, for me at least.
June 4th, 2022
Elongated Mollusk is complaining about how the Left has become more radicalised (oblivious pundits like Maher and Rogan claim the same), but they didn't stop and think about WHY that might be, about what's causing it. Chief factors that could cause leftists to go further left (and class-consciousness to be kindled amongst previously politically unaware people) are things like harsh working conditions, the price of living skyrocketing while wages don't, absurdly deepening wealth inequality, etc.. Without realising, they're basically complaining about capitalism digging its own grave.
The new George Carlin documentary (by Judd Apatow) is superb. Finally there's something out there that comes close to conveying just how great the man was, and do justice to his philosophy and the true breadth of his work. I thought I'd seen everything Carlin, but this docu had quite a few pieces of unfamiliar footage.
April 20th, 2022
Truth shall set you free, not through any mechanism inherent to its uncovering but because the truth about yourself is that you are ultimately freedom itself.
April 18th, 2022
Still listening regularly to Bo Burnham's Inside a year after it came out. It's one of those albums where almost each song eventually cycles to being 'the favorite song'. At first my favorite was 'Eyes on me', then 'Problematic', now 'How the world works', and so on. His music is infused with a melodic innocence reminiscent only of some Toby Fox compositions.
I love that the first part of 'How the world works' illustrates how the principle "to each according to their needs and from each according to their ability" is the source of harmony within nature, and then proceeds to demonstrate how our society is messed up due to straying from that principle, all while disseminating class-consciousness along the way.
April 17th, 2022
I see a trend in many countries of narrowing choice down to only Neoliberal and far-right candidates, who then take turns in running the country ('good cop - bad cop' style), only with every cycle the Neoliberal gets slightly more to the right and the far-righter gets even crazier. I know the term 'Ratchet effect', but a better simile would be a**l s*x. We gettin' screwed.
April 4th, 2022
What's likelier, that most of our problems stem from our economic system, or that they stem from those who criticize or oppose it (whom hold no real power)? The Left believes the former, the Right believes the latter. It's that simple.
April 3rd, 2022
Drive My Car is a beautiful film. I love films that expertly zero in on what makes us human, but without explicitly naming or describing it. They just chip away at what doesn't and all that's left is what does, like a sculptor releasing an angel from a block of stone. Same subtle philosophy used in films like Rashomon, or Ozu's and Kiarostami's films.
March 30th, 2022
Imagine if the places we bought our necessities from weren't our class enemies, with opposing interests to ours, but were in fact class allies, to be called 'our own'. Imagine no price gouging, not due to regulations but due to principles and solidarity. One can dream.
March 19th, 2022
The reason things are so bad now (inflation, price gouging, basic necessities becoming even more of a luxury, etc.) is the owner class intensifying its class warfare waged against the worker class. The reason for this intensification is fear, due to witnessing an increase in class consciousness amongst the worker class (the Anti-Work movement and so on). It's only natural for this bougie angst to permeate mainstream entertainment — for example, the villain in the new Harry Potter game is a goblin uprising.
Speaking of the Anti-Work movement, it isn't so much anti-work as it is against people being coerced to work in order to survive, against the idea of survival being conditional instead of guaranteed. Teaching that survival should be conditioned by one's profitability to the owner class is extremely barbaric, yet normalized. An evolved and kind society would provide for all its members, or at least guarantee their basic needs covered unconditionally.
March 9th, 2022
The congruencies between entheogens and Nonduality are indirect, because one provides an experience and the other is a spiritual philosophy. However, the peak of an entheogenic experience, if done correctly, is none other than a 'direct experience' - which is central to Nondual realisation.
A direct experience is called by many names - one of them being Samadhi - and the reason for the word 'direct' is due to it being an experience unmediated by the mind. This quiescence of the mind is the purpose of meditation and Yoga. Entheogens are just the fastest way of achieving direct experience, but only if used properly.
The reason for why direct experience is more guaranteed by way of entheogens than by any other means is probably a mark of the age we're living in. It might be because in an age of logical positivism the mystical experience is only allowed to manifest itself via exogenous substances, so that it'll feel justified. If this is the manner through which people allow it to reach them, then it's the manner through which it finds them.
February 20th, 2022
Every time the end goal of any large societal endeavor gets replaced with 'profit', that whole enterprise becomes compromised and betrays its good role for which we founded it. The purpose of the press, for instance, is to correctly inform us, but the moment that got replaced with the profit motive we could count on it to become wholly corrupted. The purpose of Art, as a different example, is mostly ineffable, but let's say it's to honestly express a vision that is spiritually enriching to the rest of us - the minute that noble, immaterial purpose gets substituted for 'making money', a case can no longer be made that it's Art.
February 18th, 2022
It is not us who are inadequate, but our economic system. Disability isn't our brethren's affliction, but that of a system built around the idea that we don't have inalienable value as human beings, and that we wrongly gain our value in proportion to how profitable we are on the labour market.
A humane society wouldn't condition the survival and wellbeing of its members based on how profitable they are to an owner class. The real disability is that of our system being constructed around the idea that we gain our worth proportionally to our usefulness to the capitalist mode of production.
February 6th, 2022
I used to think that the source of all flaws, unfairness, and inefficiencies within capitalism stem from its core feature of class-conflict - from the counterproductive splitting of society into two groups with opposing interests: workers - whose living depends on a wage - and owners - whose living depends on the ownership of private property and the productivity of the workers toiling on that property. However, the reality is even worse. It's not two groups, it's one group, except some of its members profit off of their membership (the owners), while the rest are coerced to be members and suffer because of it (workers).
What I've realized is that, on top of being wage-slaves, workers are forced to be capitalists themselves. There is no such choice as being non-capitalist. I'll explain why: on top of learning their normal profession, workers are obligated to learn how to market and sell their labor - that is, turn their labor into their only capital, and successfully sell it - or else starve. This is the process that turns them into capitalists, and it isn't voluntary, since there is no alternative except failure. Under capitalism we are left with no choice but to become capitalists ourselves (or else...).
Under these conditions, freedom is an impossibility. You are not only forced to submit to your enemy, but forced to *become* him, forced to *be* your own enemy, to exploit your own very self, to be a capitalist even in relation to yourself. It's plain to see how merely being good at a profession isn't enough: on top of that one has to also be good as a salesman, businessman, marketer of their profession, as they're designated to sell their labor.
The worker is forced to adopt the sociopathic model of having 'profit' be the end goal of everything he does, and it seeps into his very nature and life. Imagine if every time you engaged with a friend or family member you thought "what do *I* get out of this?", and then decide 'for' or 'against' the interaction based on self-interest. It would resemble the modus operandi of a sociopath - and yet that's how we're encouraged to function, from macro-systems to daily minutiae.
So what happens to various workers who have no natural inclination nor affinity for becoming marketers, merchants, and so on, on top of their original skills? Well, they shall profit less or be completely overlooked, despite them being likely better at that profession than others. The mere fact that they have to invest time and energy in such an advent takes away from their dedication to, and the perfecting of, their original profession.
January 24th, 2022
"Your best men die in alleys under a sheet of paper, while your worst men get statues in parks for pigeons to shit upon for centuries.", wrote Charles Bukowski.
I hate being complicit in a barbarous society whose vulnerable members aren't cared for, where survival is conditioned by so-called "productivity", when in fact some of the most objectively valuable and productive members have their survival constantly under threat, while others who are not only unproductive but detrimental are richly rewarded - because it isn't truly about actual productivity, but about capitalism's sick definition of it: profitability to the owner class.
Teaching that survival should be conditional is the same as teaching love to be conditional, which is a total inversion and perversion of the truth. It teaches that we don't have inalienable value as human beings, but that we gain our value by being useful to the ruling class. Basing the way humanity organizes as a whole on this radically false understanding of what is good and true is guaranteed to yield hellish conditions for most involved, which is a reality that can be witnessed all around us.
People didn't ask to be born, we're here regardless of our will, so isn't it sadistic to demand of us that we "earn" our "right" to life (by coercively being enrolled to slave away for those already owning obscenely more than they'd ever need), or else be unapologetically left to die? The bedrock principles of such an enterprise, if they can even be called principles, are the lowest of the low, and to protect our inner humanity we should want no part in this.
There's something really sick about a society whose increases in overall prosperity do not translate into a better life for all its members, where prosperity is privatized but the effort and suffering used to have generated it are socialized. Capitalism is no less morally backwards and barbaric than the feudalism and slavery out of which it organically evolved, and it is an affront to our humanity - which is why we've been witnessing people get meaner and meaner, and gradually more selfish, proportionally to the implementation of Neoliberalism.
This system has made it so we each literally cannot afford caring about anyone but ourselves, even if we'd want to, even when our natural tendency IS to care - we can't afford even basic trust in one another. It is making each of us less humane than we'd otherwise be, and that is no path to progress or evolution, but a catalyst of devolution. Yet another way in which it's dehumanizing is by reducing the human being, being of unfathomable potentials, to a mere commodity, a tool, a cog - replaceable, expendable, transactable.
January 9th, 2022
The only reason the government (which in a democracy should be the representative of the people) is incompetent is because of decades of Neoliberal policies that have stripped it down and bound and gagged it, based on the very belief that the government should be demonized, incapacitated and powerless to intervene on the market. They wrecked it and now they dismiss it for being wrecked.
December 20th, 2021
An economic system whose main outcome is the concentration of ungodly amounts of wealth/power into the hands of very few individuals is anathema to democracy.
November 29th, 2021
Neoliberalism was only accepted because it was sold to us with the promise of 'trickling down' wealth. Given that said promise turned out to be a lie, shouldn't we *manually* make it trickle down?
November 26th, 2021
Given that everything in the natural world is only seen as valuable if it can be harvested, exploited, transacted, speculated, and commodified as a resource, what's to stop us people from being regarded similarly and suffer the same fate? What good is an uncut forest to a capitalist (unless by being uncut it can raise property value at some residential "development" nearby)? What would prevent a system that judges the value of everything on the planet in terms of 'exploitable resource' from regarding humans as just another resource? Literally every other species that had the potential to be commodified is either already in that position or is simply neglected, so what makes us think ours isn't? And what is there to be done to resist becoming a commodity, especially when resisting means we're going to starve or be shunned? My answer is that if we'll simply remove this ignorance, it'll be impossible not to resist, no matter what. By removing this ignorance, we'll feel it when it's happening, despite the process being materially rewarded, and we'll deem it unacceptable, because to reduce ourselves to mere products means to lose claim to dignity, which is non-negotiable. A human being is so much more than a product, we have untold potential within us and it's a crime against it to allow ourselves dehumanized. I get it, we're coerced to do it, we are trained to do it, there's a lot of fear pushing us to submit, but it is ignorance (or false consciousness) that makes it this easy, normalized, and nonconflicting.
November 24th, 2021
There's a saying about the wise man expressing himself only when he has something to say, and the fool doing it simply because he feels compelled to say something. It is the mark of our economic system to place the 'holy market' as supreme ruler over the Arts, and by doing so it has led to so-called artistic products getting made not because a certain artist felt they had something unique to say, but because it may prove a profitable endeavor. Thus the world is oversaturated with things not made out of true artistic insight but rather out of business sense. It's both oversaturated AND severely lacking in exponents of an artistry that is pure, with the latter always being on the losing side within the ruthless Darwinism intrinsic to the market. So when neoliberal capitalism rewards the fool and punishes the wise man, it's no wonder there's overwhelming noise to sort through in order to find the few gems that there are.
November 19th, 2021
Another piece I wrote in Romanian:
Am pus stăpân peste noi un sistem economic ce a pătruns în sufletul omului și l-a corupt. Capitalismul a fost internalizat, instalat ca sistem de operare chiar în forul interior al individului.
Înlocuirea scopului ultim al fiecărei întreprinderi umane cu "profitul", când multe din ele aveau un scop mult mai imaterial și înalt, marchează sfârșitul oricărei demnități a acestora.
Până și statul și instituțiile publice au adoptat acest model, trădând motivul inițial pentru care le-am înființat, și alăturându-se restului de entități ce caută să profite din fiecare acțiune întreprinsă, transformându-se din ce ar fi trebuit să fie aliatul nostru într-un alt dușman de clasă.
Acest model de a căuta caștigul personal ca obiectiv suprem ne-a infectat și la nivel individual, făcând oamenii să abordeze până și interacțiunile cu semenii din perspectiva profitabilității lor, altminteri le evită. Fiecare a fost format în timp să gândească "ce-mi iese mie?" înainte de a face ceva, și să i se pară natural asta, ba chiar să glorifice tendința urmăririi perpetue a interesul propriu.
Nu doar că suntem încurajați să devenim mai egoiști decât am fi fost în mod natural, ba chiar nu ni se mai lasă energie pentru a fi altfel decât egoiști, oricât ar fi fost în natura noastră să fim altfel. Nu că altruismul, solidaritatea sau compasiunea ne-ar fi străine, ci doar au devenit luxuri de nepermis.
Efectiv nimeni nu își mai permite, chit că ar vrea, să îi pese de altcineva decât de propria persoană. Resursele noastre interne au fost jefuite într-atât încât empatia a devenit prea scumpă pentru a ne-o mai permite, iar asta ne face mai puțin oameni. E ușor de observat cum oamenii s-au înrăit, viclenit, cum tendințele psihopatice au crescut.
Suntem modelați înspre a deveni capitaliști și în relația cu cei apropiați, cu propria familie, și chiar în raport cu noi înșine. Pe deasupra profesiei la care trebuie să ne pricepem pentru a concura pe piață - căci am fost învățați că nu avem valoare inalienabilă ca oameni, ci că valoarea noastră e conferită de cât de profitabili suntem pe piață - trebuie să investim energie în a fi buni "vânzători", "marketeri" ai propriilor abilități - să ne vindem pe noi înșine ca pe un produs, adică să devenim capitaliști cu propria muncă, ea fiind redusă la statutul de capital (singurul pe care îl deținem).
Libertatea e o imposibilitate în acest sistem, din moment ce până și muncitorii sunt obligați să devină capitaliști față de propria muncă. Nu doar că ești forțat să capitulezi în fața dușmanului, ci ești forțat să "devii" el, să integrezi în tine modul lui de operare, să-ți fii propriul exploatator.
November 7th, 2021
A piece I've written in Romanian:
Cunosc sufletul românesc și știu că el e bun - mai mult, e necondiționat omenos, duios și capabil de sacrificiu - chiar și atunci când exteriorul e unul adaptat unui mediu ostil care ne-a croit să fim defensivi, circumspecți, umili, fataliști, delăsători, irascibili, cu obraz gros, individualiști și vicleni.
Românul însă latră dar nu mușcă, România fiind o țară cu rată relativ mică de criminalitate, în ciuda nedreptăților economice, lipsei plaselor de siguranță socială, condițiilor materiale opresive, în ciuda refugiului în valori retrograde, energiei risipite pe a ține mereu garda sus, individualismului extrem de după '90, în ciuda unei filozofii sistemice dură ce spune că supraviețuirea nu e garantată ci condiționată de un efort uriaș al individului.
Faptul că toate acestea nu au reușit să ne înrăiască decât de suprafață e dovada forței spiritului nostru. Mai bine cineva rău pe dinafară și bun pe dinăuntru decât viceversa. Iar când zic românesc mă refer la oamenii din acel spațiu indiferent de etnie, fiindcă după mine a fi român e o distincție dobândibilă.
November 3rd, 2021
October 11th, 2021
Two worlds appearing
Only due to false seeing
Both of them are one
Though in a body
Unfalsifiable is
Only consciousness
August 27th, 2021
People’s inner resources have been so plundered that they cannot afford to spend energy on anyone but themselves, even when otherwise it is in their nature to be caring and empathetic. People have become selfish, self-absorbed, bad listeners, with short attention spans, not because of human nature, but contrary to it - because they cannot afford to offer someone else their energy (despite wanting to), due to it having been commodified, depleted, and robbed by the system.
August 7th, 2021
All Trump was is a dream-catcher for false-consciousness!
July 23rd, 2021
You know those tech bros and entrepreneurs going to the Amazon to drink 'sacred' brews and have mystical experiences, but with wholly materialistic intent, aiming to compel whatever 'transcendental dimensions' they would access into offering them guidance and ideas on how to grow their businesses or increase their profit margins? As in, not only attempting to put that which is higher into the service of that which is lower, the 'spiritual' in service of the mundane, but actually detecting no other purpose for the former BUT to serve the latter. And it's not a case of a child's naivete of praying to God for a higher grade, it's more of an ingrained tendency and conscious attempt to exploit.
As ridiculous as that trend is, isn't that what artists are forced to do as well, in a system where the market is judge, jury, and executioner relative to an artwork's value and an artist's viability? If the arts have been made to become exclusively subject to the market, the artist is no longer expected (nor able) to "summon the Muse" with noble, pure, and innocent intent, but with profane ulterior motives, with the unenlightened end goal of 'selling', aka pleasing the market. No wonder the more openly commercial an artform the more uninspired and soulless its exponents. Again, the tendency is to regard that which is higher as having no other value than as servant of the material, reduced to its potential of being exploited for petty goals.
It's totally backwards, and I've seen the essence of this phenomenon manifest in other ways too, at an individual level, one of them being when people ask "what is the value of so and so philosophy if it doesn't put food on my table nor helps me get ahead in life or climb the status ladder?".
June 30th, 2021 - Similarity I've found between a passage from Tarkovsky's Stalker and chapter 76 of Tao Te Ching.
June 14th, 2021
The big drawback of having low self-worth or low self-esteem is that you don't think anything you do is any good, and so you can easily delete, lose, or throw away past work, and when you find out that others have appreciated it and want to reexperience it it's too late, it can't be brought back.
June 15th, 2021
me: gets bad hair from cheap shampoo
society: don't buy cheap products, they're not good for you
me: that's like agreeing to pay companies protection fees
companies: pay more or our products will hurt you!
June 3rd, 2021
'Spiritual bypassing' is a tricky thing. It's when we use otherwise admirable and refined beliefs as a refuge from responsibility or post hoc justification for not doing the right thing.
Let's say I held deterministic views about the universe, and I invoked them in order to rationalize a failure to act or address something which reason and ethics would call for in the situation - to excuse passivity when it'd be immoral to be passive - by saying "no harm done, there's no free will anyway"; it would count as spiritual bypass.
The key element is that of self-deception, of convincing oneself that the reason for not doing what's right has something to do with one's higher philosophies and not baser things like fear, comfort, self-preservation, avoidance, etc.
Another side of this process is being in denial of certain uncomfortable things that don't fit the narrative of whatever philosophy we happen to adhere to. This denial can manifest even with regards to one's own feelings, leading to unaccounted inner conflicts. The arising of a natural emotion like anger would be cause for inner strife and a candidate for repression in people invested in certain spiritual worldviews more than in others.
Our principles and views will inevitably come at odds with reality at one point or another, because they are not perfect, and those are opportunities for them to be honed. The instances where they clash should warrant a close examination, in the aftermath of which wisdom would result.
May 31st, 2021
The less secure one feels, the less willing to sacrifice present for future, and this makes it difficult to opt for delayed gratification... But it's not all bad, because the present's all there is, and in this sense the poor are more authentically acquainted with it than those who afford trading it for a fanciful 'future'.
May 28th, 2021
Remember "Married... with Children"? A sitcom where a minimum wage shoe salesman, whom was the butt of the joke for earning too little, was living in a large house in Chicago, drove a car, and supported a housewife and two kids? Imagine the world where that was a realistic premise.
May 27th, 2021
Our minds are very powerful problem-solving machines, they are constantly looking for problems, and if they can't find any, they'll either imagine or outright create some.
May 26th, 2021 - Doesn't even apply anymore... The market naturally weeded out the "dangerous" artists ('cause they were only dangerous relative to that very market).
Now you have tons of so-called artists, "intellectuals", and "philosophers", who just promote the dominant ideology and act as guardians of the status quo, becoming most prominent.
You know they've betrayed their role the second they use talent and rhetoric in defense of hegemony and of our (wink) 'dominance hierarchies' (who they claim are "predicated on competence", lmao).
And you also know them by how hollow and soulless, if not downright noxious, their works are. It's why the mainstream sucks, whether it's music, movies, games, or shows, they're usually an insult to intelligence, having replaced with the 'profit motive' whatever noble original purpose they could have had, resulting in a perpetually dumbed-down public.
May 24th, 2021
In all my searches, modest as they are, I've never found a definitive way to remove the obstacles that I raised in my 'heart', for whatever reasons, at one time or another, that partly obstruct the flow of love within myself - both towards myself and others. Or if I glimpsed such a way, I wasn't virtuous enough to follow it. In that metaphorical river, with my own hands I placed the rocks that made for rocky relationships and self-loathing - sometimes due to trauma, but many times due to pride, other times ignorance, cowardice - but how is it fair for that process to appear so final and irreversible, like a necrosis of the heart? Are we at love's mercy or is love ours to command? How does one make themselves love 'more'? If love is unconditional and transcendental, how can hollow egoic constructs ever hope to hinder it? How does one redeem the instances when they've acted against this sacred flow of love, and restore the state of loving fearlessly? I aspire that my obstacles be removed, because liberation is a matter of Heart.
May 23rd, 2021
Patience isn't when we restlessly await something, in anticipation, and invested in the outcome. Many people think themselves patient just for not going completely crazy while in wait. Patience is when we sit calmly, dispassionately, having relinquished any claims over the fruits of our actions. Patience is meditation.
May 17th, 2021
Too many people live in fear and desperation and are kept in those states by systems which establish and fuel artificial scarcity for this very purpose. It's true that fear corrodes the soul, but the causes for so many people operating this much at a fear-based level are societal and artificially maintained, due to these low states proving useful in providing a cheap workforce for the ruling class of this world. If fear and desperation weren't as lucrative for a select powerful few, they wouldn't be disseminated as much. The owner class have harnessed desperation among the masses to their benefit - if people weren't kept desperate and fearful they would have no reason being this cutthroat, this individualistic, this willing to fight each other over the "privilege" of performing chores they dislike - and it's all artificially pushed and maintained. Spiritual traditions condemn these low states, but what they should do is address their causes more, otherwise spirituality is indeed just an opiate for the masses, an alcohol-like anesthetic.
May 12th, 2021
What do baby spiders eat? Does their mother feed them like birds do? Do they hunt for aphids and mites?
May 9th, 2021
People like to reduce capitalism to semi or wholly self-regulating markets, but markets are not unique to capitalism, as they predate it by a lot. What is unique to capitalism is the idea that the market should rule over everything, that our very survival should be its subject, that all things and beings exist chiefly to serve the 'Market' (which is why everything is being actively and increasingly commodified), and that whatever doesn't serve the market should be weeded out of existence. Public sectors for which the market has no use are being increasingly defunded or cut, people for whom the market has no use are instantly dehumanized and relegated to slums and prisons, and it's seen as fair and rational.
Another unique thing about capitalism is the splitting of society between employers and employees - an intuitive upgrade of the feudal 'lord-serf' relationship - two camps perpetually engaged in a tug of war caused by their opposing interests: those who own things for a living versus those dependent on wages for a living - owner/ruling class vs worker class - employer vs employee, landlord vs tenant, etc. - with the power dynamic weighing ever more heavily in favor of the former. This doesn't mean that the former don't do work or contribute, it just means they're not dependent on their own work output to survive, but on whom they employ.
There never has been a moment of peace ever since this system's inception, as it's rooted in perpetual war - a covert war that is demeaning and hurtful to the human spirit, and which leaves its mark on our species in two major ways, to a degree where we even evolve on two differing paths due to this classist split, over time (it can be observed by whoever's discerning enough). There's a sad chance this war is the byproduct of an inescapable ontological duality or dialectics, but I see no reason why it shouldn't at least be a lot tamer than it is. There's simply no justification for how brutal this war has been getting since the '60s, despite worker productivity having quadrupled since then.
January 20th, 2021
Elon Musk's reaction to reaching $195 billion in fortune (worth $20 billion just last March), a deadpan utterance of "How strange... Well, back to work", is hailed by many as some sort of stoic affirmation exalting work for work's sake and the idea that wealth is not only of secondary purpose to all the "hard" work he's been doing, but that it almost doesn't even cross his mind, as there's much nobler goals driving him...
In fact, his remark is nothing more than a reinforcement that there is no 'abundance threshold' to be reached societally where we just pause and say 'there! prosperity achieved! people don't have to be coerced by threat of starvation anymore in order to contribute'. A reinforcement that the top of the pyramid is more like a black hole than anything, in timely manner with that 50-year study that just came out, which empirically invalidated the viability of 'trickle down economics'.
By 'back to work' he didn't mean himself, as his profits aren't tied to his own work-output or to a wage, but to the output of the thousands of workers whose life and energy he is in large part unfortunately entitled to. Back to work, wage-slaves, the machine is impossible to satiate.
January 14th, 2021
Some people are under the silly illusion that Big Tech shares some sort of "leftist" convictions, judging by their purge of right-wing radicals from their platforms. What a nonsensical idea to believe, that any private corporation can be in any way leftist (or that corporations have any convictions besides "minimize costs, maximize profits")...
Corporations don't oppose fascism out of principles. Their sole "principle" is profit. Corporations oppose overt fascism, because it is (sometimes) bad for business. Like the mob that "whacks" a button-man who became too much of a loose cannon.
December 16th, 2020
In his efforts to rationalize why a good deal of intellectuals and academics are critical of capitalism, the Whole Foods CEO recently said in an interview that "in a market society intellectuals aren't really prized, and that makes them resent it". Leaving aside the explaining away of the issue, by saying academia leans Left simply because it's resentful, this vampiric CEO is right - the market does NOT value intelligence, unless it can be commodified and turned into profit. If said intelligence can be harnessed to, say, lie more expertly and creatively through advertising, then it is indeed prized by our Almighty Market, but even then, intelligence isn't even in the top 5 attributes of value there. The market values boldness, callousness, dishonesty and unscrupulousness way more than it does intelligence.
>intellectuals aren't prized by a market society
>humanity slides into 'idiocracy'
>hmm, maybe market fundamentalism wasn't the best idea
September 27th, 2020
The higher the resolution and higher the framerate, the less is left to imagination. Our mind's ability to fill in gaps doesn't get enough exercise, because we're given everything on a platter, in ever more gratuitous detail.
September 26th, 2020
Re-watching 'Zabriskie Point' the other day made me want to revisit 'Paris, Texas' too. There's something mesmerizing yet ineffable about the America portrayed through the eyes of European masters such as Antonioni and Wenders (Herzog and Leone come to mind too).
September 10th, 2020
Mises regarded economics as a sub-discipline of 'praxeology', which is an anti-scientific methodology he devised, on which his economic theories rely. Praxeology is widely ignored by academia due to its rejection of the scientific method. Mises' modern applicants include malignant crackpots like Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, who are also in the cult of Ayn Rand. 'Nuff said.
September 6th, 2020
The term 'liberalism', by itself, has always been a deceptive umbrella term. There's a solid reason why it theoretically classifies as a right-wing ideology, despite its presentability and fake antagonism to conservatism. Even though it's tricked us into associating it with certain expansions in civil rights and the merits of progressivism, when used alone, the term 'liberalism' seems to be quite stripped of its 'socially-liberal' charge and almost always stands for the 'liberalism of the market'. Both classical liberals and neoliberals are chiefly about the liberation of the market, and only tertiary, if ever, about the expansion of civil rights - and even that, only because said expansion would prove valuable to the market.
"One drop, plus one drop, makes a bigger drop, not two." - Nostalgia (1983), Tarkovsky's nondualist masterpiece.
The act of creating the world entailed a tremendous karma. The way for that karma to be balanced is for the creator to then live in said world, under the guise of its perishable creatures.
July 11th, 2020
The self of a shellfish,
The shell of the selfish.
No self at all, the Self is all,
Hurling shadows at the wall,
Negating the intuitive,
Exalting perpetuity.
Proof is devious, eccentric,
It can make one geocentric,
But if one suspends belief,
It reveals that Sun is chief.
Similar to what is higher,
Evidence would say you’re prior,
But if followed to the end,
It shall show that you are dead,
And that only You exist,
At no point were you a cyst.
Early hints would have us think
That the Earth is flat, wink-wink,
But, regarded from on high,
Clues no longer mystify.
The same goes for our true nature:
It’s not finite or indentured,
Rather it’s perennial,
Subject to no burial.
June 13th, 2020
A main argument that more 'enlightened' critics use for denouncing the US protests is that the looters aren't only aiming Target, but also many small businesses: "Why should small businesses suffer? They are owned by people not much different from the looters themselves, socioeconomically speaking.".
It's true that the middle-class has way more in common with the bottom than with the top, and while I agree that the looting of small businesses is misdirected and hurts regular people, I pose myself this question: in a society marked by ever more abyssal inequality, should businesses be expected to glide through such crises unaffected? Do they not need to learn, along with everybody else, that until everyone does well no one will truly do well? Buddha waits by the gate to Nirvana and won't pass through until everyone else has passed through, since we're all one.
It's inevitable then, in such a system, that every now and again the middle-class will have their sleep perturbed by the wailing of the poor and the marginalized. Whose pain is truer, those doing the wailing or those temporarily inconvenienced by it? We may not like it but this phenomenon is only natural, considering the status quo, and it's why the middle-class needs to fight harder for lessening economic inequality. However, they're too afraid to 'rock the boat', in the words of George Carlin: "You have to change yourself, and we’ll never do that, because of the dollars now... It's everybody wants a dollar and a toy. Everybody's got a cell phone that'll make pancakes and rub their balls, so nobody wants to rock the boat. Don't rock the boat, don't change anything, and we're on a nice downward glide."
June 8th, 2020
It's my impression that many of those who stress that 'all lives matter', as an uninvited retort to 'black lives matter', want to fool others by projecting a false belief in equality, when in fact a 2 minute conversation with them would reveal that 1) they definitely don't care about all lives, as they're usually pro death-penalty, pro ICE keeping brown kids in cages, viscerally anti-refugees, etc.; and 2) what they truly care about is property, not lives - they are the same people who are staunch believers that it's perfectly okay to take someone's life in order to protect private property; that's why they're seen with ARs, guarding places like Target. They have a reverence for authority and property, not human life.
June 4th, 2020
The way I see it, one crucial lesson we're still sadly struggling to learn is to correctly value life over things, life over man-made systems, life over money, over ideologies, life over the lifeless. Because the former is the only thing we can know to be real and the latter are conventions, therefore virtual. Never trade the real for the unreal, on either a societal or individual level. Until it is understood that this collective Faustian trade is a trap and a moral failing, there will be unrest and anguish.
For one, this is the sobering dilemma that the pandemic posed: your money or your life - which one do you jump to protect first as a society? Easy to see how those who have chosen to protect lives over profits have passed the test (countries with early lockdowns, who didn't hesitate about their priorities, like New Zealand), while those who prioritized big business over human life (US, UK, Brazil) will either be struggling till they give the right answer or fail the test altogether at the expense of their general humanity.
This is one of the things the riots teach as well. Looters pose this same test to us by exposing those who care more about private property and the inconveniences endured by large companies than for the loss of human life. The embodiment of this mentality would be someone who has zero moral conflicts in fatally shooting someone they deem a trespasser, and even be thrilled by the opportunity, just because 'property rights' would allow it. And this typology is depressingly common.
These protests shouldn't end before the collective conscience and the powers that be finally get it straight that the whole societal system is worthless if it doesn't cherish the lives of the vulnerable and less privileged, and if it values material and virtual things more than living beings.
April 17th, 2020
Our senses haven't evolved to experience actual reality, because they've never been truly honed for that. They've only been rewarded, evolutionarily, for getting us through the hoops that aid our survival.
Perceiving reality as it is has never been in the cards for us, simply because it wasn't prioritized by our evolution. Therefore, our senses are ill equipped to faithfully and accurately render to us the world as it is; they can only render us a 'map', a representation, solely designed to enable us to avoid dangers and find viable partners in order to reproduce.
Knowing this, I had this fleeting realization that whatever we witness is but a metaphor of the real thing. Whenever we look in the mirror we only see a metaphor for who and what we truly are - as in the very 'human' appearance we perceive as our own, and take for granted, is only the 'metaphor' for the unknowable actual reality of what we're really like. And metaphors can be really abstract, deformed, ethereal, diaphanous representations of their subjects - on the surface, really nothing like the thing they stand for.
They say God created us in Its own image, but we know that expression is too naive to be literal. It's likelier that our image is a highly "stylized", truly abstract, reflection of a higher reality.
April 8th, 2020
Finally, Nature can breathe! Though her breath releases such a tension that it creates mountains. Mountains in the shape of statistical graphs, on every screen.
April 6th, 2020
There is a way in which things appear, and then there's reality. Things appear in a way that convinces us we have a body, convinces us we have a mysterious thing called mind, that we have memory... In reality, the only thing we can truly be sure of - the only unfalsifiable thing - is experience, which is in a state of flux, appearing within essentially changeless consciousness. There is experience of a body, experience of a mind, experience of memory. Just like in a dream, things unfold, appear and disappear; impressions of having a body, of having thoughts, of remembering things, of living through various events and sensations - all are as convincing as to make one believe they’re real - and they are real, all experience is real - except they are forever changing. Experience is constantly changing. I think the key, then, is finding that which is ever changeLESS - getting to know that, identifying with that. ...And what is changeless... is you! - the essence of the consciousness in which everything manifests; the screen, the playground... You are that.
April 2nd, 2020
I remember being confused by how that fight scene from They Live, in which Roddy Piper wants the other guy to try on the sunglasses that reveal authentic reality, and the guy violently resists and fights him, and the fight drags on and on... I didn't get the message at first, perhaps precisely because it's so brilliant.
'Putting the glasses on' is so difficult because we will fight to the death to protect our illusions. We don't really want the truth. As Žižek mentions, "freedom hurts", just how every incremental expansion in consciousness hurts. We fight awakening with all our strength, because on a deep level we have a feeling that awakening will invalidate our very existence up to that point.
March 24th, 2020
Like a true apocalypse (revelation), this crisis reveals the true character of things. Governments are exposed as more or less (in)humane, depending on their answer to the 'profit vs human lives' dilemma. We'll see and compare the results these different strategies will yield for different countries, but we do know one of the answers leads to genocide, so hopefully whoever went with it will be held responsible. It only took a few promises from president Bozo that he'll prioritize the economy over the old and the vulnerable for all things Ponzi to pick up again...
March 14th, 2020
All this toilet paper overbuying reminds me of how "shitting one's pants with fear" is an expression rooted in reality. That said, fear is not our friend. Fear makes us regress to bestial states, it makes us selfish, separatist, mean, and capable of harm. It is fear that drives both the hoarding of toilet paper and the hoarding of wealth in general. And there's an insidious message here too - that salvation can be reached through consumption - which is nothing but fear incarnate. It is fear who is the enemy, more so than a virus. Let's acknowledge our fear, realizing it for what it is - a primal emotion - and choose not to let it steer the ship; then anchor ourselves in common sense and fraternal love no matter what - that's what has truly helped us survive as a species thus far, not fear.
March 4th, 2020 - Great seeing one of the most profound screenwriters alive - Charlie Kaufman - speak at the Dublin International Film Festival.
February 29th, 2020
I was awestruck when I discovered by myself that the chant in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is an inverted Romanian Orthodox prayer. I recorded it on my computer and then reversed it, and was smitten.
It's interesting how people regard Eyes Wide Shut as a film condemning or exposing Left-hand Path esotericism in the upper echelons of society, when in fact what Kubrick achieved is very Left-hand Path in itself - he got an inverted prayer to be chanted to completion in almost all cinema theaters around the world and in millions of homes, over and over.
February 26th, 2020 - Just asked Bill Hicks' brother Steve about Bill's admiration for Terence McKenna, and he answered that Bill dreamed of doing a show with Terence McKenna and Noam Chomsky.
January 29th, 2020
Arctic winds within me
Cut thru' viscera
I hold on to the promise
Of your light
January 18th, 2020
The ego is nothing but the separate mind - which, on a cosmological scale, is less than a bubble in a stream. Why then should we identify with our minds so much, when the reality of the impermanent clearly pales in the face of the eternal, with that which is ephemeral being 'less true' than the universal? Our locus of identification should be moving ever closer toward a more refined truth. Let us steep our minds in the fractal Stygian waters beyond, witnessing them dissolve, and realize how our identity lies with those transcendental realms and not with what's dissipated, for truth shall always obliterate untruth when faced.
January 15th, 2020
I'm only nihilistic regarding Nihilism - I think it's meaningless. On a side note, I'm vacillating between "nothing one believes matters" and "whatever one believes becomes true for them alone".
January 9th, 2020
Was wondering for some time how come Jim Jarmusch's films reminded me of Wim Wenders, and vice versa. Then recently discovered that cinematographer Robby Müller was right hand man for some of both of these guys' best films.
December 28th, 2019
Knowing I know nothing, knowing knowledge to be illusory, knowing knowledge to be ignorance, I strive for the realm untouched by mind, where experience is unmediated, unmuddled, where everything is the heart of existence itself, incommensurable; finding belief futile, for I know, and knowledge needless, for I am.
December 17th, 2019
I think I have a possible answer to Fermi's paradox. Once a species achieves a certain level of intelligence and self-awareness, it turns its attention and exploration inwardly instead of outside - in the same vein as the 'self-enquiry' practice advised by Indian sages. So, they cease to explore the universe outwardly and instead explore it inwardly - they retreat in their own 'self'. Sort of like intergalactic, autistic, basement-dwellers...
December 9th, 2019
We're all like Achilles... Nothing kills you, except for what kills you.
August 17th, 2019
So, Eschatology is an area of philosophy, or theology rather, that deals with speculations and theories about the final destination of history, the ultimate destiny of humanity - technically the end point in evolution, the finality of universal progress. Terence McKenna called this ultimate point of convergence "the Eschaton". He called it that because it pertains to Eschatology, and he described this Eschaton as a singularity, a state of being of absolute unity, spiritual oneness - where the universal laws are merged.
Throughout history, humanity has called this much anticipated endpoint Nirvana, Moksha, Samadhi, Godhead, Liberation, Enlightenment, etc.. So the idea that I found enlightening in this area is how Terence posited that it is not history which leads to the Eschaton, but rather the Eschaton, by virtue of being absolute and transcendent, projects history backwards, like a hologram; because that which is Absolute takes precedence over the ephemeral.
So, acording to Terence, believing that a succession of finite events would lead to the Eschaton is like placing the carriage before the horse. To put the horse in front of the carriage would be to say that the Eschaton projects history backwards, and not that historical succesion leads to the Eschaton... THAT idea I found to be very fascinating... That means this singularity, the end point, is rather what is 'Real'... - and we're not... Only that which is 'Absolute' is truly 'Real'. We're imagining ourselves to lead up to 'THAT' but it's actually 'IT' that projects 'US' - as some sort of 'lesser reality'... Terence's way of putting it was: "our Universe is but a shadow cast backwards by the Eschaton".
In our quest for truth, there are varying degrees to which each of us are faithful to the journey and really care about 'ultimate truth'. Somewhere on that path - some sooner, some later - we compromise at least a bit of the search in favor of a soothing lie; or even abandon the journey altogether and start disregarding truth in favor of what provides us comfort in the moment - start living for fleeting pleasures, or for satisfying creature comforts and nothing more. But those few who stick with the Journey, as ego-shattering and humbling as it is, those who have an undying thirst for truth, no matter how unbearable it presents itself, they eventually get to the point where truth invalidates their very existence - or the existence of who they thought they were. Because truth, by virtue of being immutable, and absolute, it is changeless, eternal, permanent.... Whereas our egos, our body-mind identities, are impermanent, ephemeral, illusory - as in, they are not real - that's how they come to be invalidated by what is true, by Reality.
So, for the sake of what is True, even by way of Logic I would conclude that the correct path is to identify with the changeless and permanent... - even for the sole reason that the changing and the impermanent are LESS true than what is eternal. What implications does this realization have? Hard to count. But it reminds me of a saying, by an Indian self-realized spiritual master by the name of Nisargadatta Maharaj - he said: "What changes is not real, what is real does not change. The Real never dies, the unreal never lived."
May 27th, 2019 - A quote I love, by Alan Moore.
May 12th, 2019 - I remember watching all five of these films a few years ago and thinking they should be considered unofficially a series, not only for bearing similarities in subject matter but in how they share a common existential search for a sense of transcendence that especially in that era (50s and 60s) seemed harder than ever to comprehend or entertain. And incidentally, there would be no Tarkovsky as we know him without the influence of these five films from four of the greatest master auteurs: Bresson, Dreyer, Bunuel, and Bergman.
May 1st, 2019
If there's a spiritual philosophy I resonate with, it's most certainly Advaita Vedanta. I actually arrived at some of its ideas and conclusions naturally, by myself, long ago, by means of direct experience, followed by contemplation, and even through reason; before I even knew it was an established, many thousand years old, philosophy.
After I discovered it as a spiritual tradition I found more and more that my own secret ideas and inner beliefs were being reflected in its principles. I happened to agree both rationally and intuitively with its realizations, and this was a unique experience for me in regards to a spiritual worldview, since my main self-identification had always been that of 'skeptic/rationalist'.
Having said that, my only gripe with Advaita is how it doesn't seem to focus too much on Love as one of the highest spiritual goals or virtues. I actually came to wonder whether it's my Christian formation and background that makes me hold Love in such high regards spiritually. However, besides this point, I never seemed to click with Christianity, and I even became a harsh critic of how it put into practice the very core-principle it claimed to have.
Long story short, in conclusion, if I were to identify myself by a spiritual nomenclature nowadays, I'd say I'm "Advaita + Love".
Hugs to all.
April 4th, 2019
Hearing Trump say 'oranges' instead of 'origins' (twice) makes me wonder what trash world we're living in when someone can become leader of the free world while being that dumb and illiterate, yet us plebs are required to be quasi-geniuses or experts to even land a low paying job.
November 13th, 2018
You know an intellectual has betrayed his purpose when he vehemently defends an ill status-quo (marked by record high wealth-inequality, looming eco-catastrophes and corporate fascism), using nasty arguments like "our dominance hierarchies are predicated on competence". To believe our current hierarchy is predicated on competence is either a dishonest belief or an insane one; unless by 'competence' he means being a 'competent psychopath'.
October 30th, 2018
Hermetic Dance of Life
Hermetic dance of life,
Teach me, but be gentle.
Clear out inner strife,
So I can sing a little.
Show me depth, but let me breathe,
Don't make the lessons harsh.
Nourish in me the good seed
And heal some of the scars.
The deep song in my heart,
Beneath the skins it wears,
Is crying to take part
In soothing the world's cares.
July 19th, 2018
The problem with perfectionism is it doesn't allow for imperfections, thus rendering itself imperfect.
July 12th, 2018
being awake will ruin your life
because being awake will invalidate what you think of as 'life'
being awake will show you that you don't exist
and at the same time show you that you are everything
July 10th, 2018
'Now' is not a part of time. Time is a part of 'now'.
July 3rd, 2018
Nature is the contest between the forces that are constantly trying to kill you and the forces that are fighting to keep you alive at all costs.
June 20th, 2018
Planescape Torment, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and Fallout New Vegas are my favorite RPGs ever. Total masterpieces.
Bethesda and other current 'triple A' RPG developers should take note from these about what a quest even IS.
A quest should be open to any conceivable role-playing approach, based on who the player might role-play as; it should exist as an objective event to be solved or interfered with from any possible side; it should support as many role-playing approaches as possible.
The focus should be on immersion and credibility within the established universe and not on dumbed-down gameplay ruses and other time-wasting gimmicks focused on shallow entertainment aimed at making the game appealing to children.
June 8th, 2018
The burden of a guilty conscience is the main thing that leads people to cling to or develop a belief in a God outside themselves. In a way, whatever the concept of 'sin' stands for is what really generates the core of religious preoccupation. However, not only does the human conscience supersede any notion of an external God, but every conception of an external God is the projection of the guilt-afflicted portion of said conscience.
May 16th, 2018
Be mindful, be faithful, be courageous, be hopeful, be strong, be patient, be composed, be wise, be reasonable, be insightful, be kind, be generous, be trusty, be fair, be loving.
May 13th, 2018
Alcohol is an anesthetic. If you constantly feel the need to drink, it may mean in the higher dimensions you're undergoing some sort of surgery.
May 12th, 2018
I love how being a Duncan Trussell fan has introduced me to both Dan Harmon and Tim Heidecker, both of which have had shows that I love ("Rick and Morty" and "Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job"). It is Duncan Trussell that's introduced me to Ram Dass and Ramana Maharshi too. Bless this guy.
March 30th, 2018
I secretly admire naïve people. Oftentimes the basis for naiveté is an enviable openness and purity, a candid acceptance that the Universe could be anything.
March 29th, 2018 - This is what I watch Bergman for, right here.
December 19th, 2017
Art shouldn't aim to provide answers, but rather to explore wiser and humbler manners of isolating and pondering the ageless questions. Whenever something claims to offer answers, it falls into condescension, preachiness and, above all, error.
July 25th, 2017
I don't desire or pursue enlightenment. I find it a bad idea. The last thing I want is to become spiritually awake, because that would mean, among other things, that I cease to exist as a mere human. To not only become everything, but to realize you've always been everything, and, at the same time, that you've never even existed in the sense that you thought - that sounds like death to me. To be both everything and nothing, because it's all one, and it's all you? - to hell with that. Realize I am God? - no ma'am, I'll settle for 'finite human' for now, thanks.
July 21st, 2017
People ask me "Why haven't you created anything all these years?", and I say "Oh, but I have. I created disappointment".
July 6th, 2017 - The most brilliant, mind-expanding game ever - The Witness (2016). No two ways about it. Jonathan Blow is an enlightened genius.
June 22nd, 2017
I don't trust people who are too adaptable. Bacteria, rats, roaches, are all extremely adaptable. The more majestic, beautiful and glorious-looking a specimen is, the less likely it is to be highly adaptable (i.e. the Siberian tiger). Same goes for people.
May 27th, 2017
For years I used to think that what people truly respect is courage. My slogan was: people may or may not respect intelligence, they may or may not respect talent, they may or may not respect knowledge, wisdom, kindness or character, but they all surely respect balls. Nowadays, I replaced 'balls' with 'power'. Because people don't really respect courage. The only thing they truly respect is power. It's a sad state of affairs, but that's it; nobody truly cares about or admires anything but power.
May 20th, 2017 - "Aliens are so human that, when they meet their star system, they think it is a soul." - Trance McKinley
April 13th, 2017
Boundaries only exist by virtue of infinity, as a paradox.
April 13th, 2017
Are you a he or a she?
I'm an it, Imma scare ya.
- Amanita Muscaria
I'm an it, Imma scare ya.
- Amanita Muscaria
April 12th, 2017
"No one is above the law"... Well, the human conscience itself is, and common sense. That's where "the law" came into being in the first place. So if our individual conscience detects an unjust law, we are practically indebted to disobey said law. Same goes for gods and how people say "no one is above god". The human conscience is and always will be 'above' whatever artificial concepts we come up with; it is the true arbiter and the birthplace of gods and laws. Even when an individual conscience suffers from arrested development, for whatever reason, it should still have priority in decision making and shouldn't be outsourced to an external moral authority like religion or the state, since that would only cause it to atrophy further, through obedience and lack of use. Always trust your conscience; even if you're a sociopath, paradoxically. #humanism
April 11th, 2017
I think the point of a human life is alchemical: converting low shit into high shit. Sublimation. Turning animalistic instincts into art, anxiety into laughter, fear into love; giving matter spirit. However, the mainstream expectations of an ordinary life are the exact opposite. It's expected to turn spirit into matter, life force into money, priceless energy into useless objects destined to fuel unenlightened consumerism and promote this inverted-alchemy paradigm further.
January 20th, 2017 - Cleverbot is clever.
January 7th, 2017
Există un Dumnezeu, dar e doar cel al bețivilor.
December 26th, 2016 - All these "transhumanists" and folks who rage against death, or are so scared of death that they'll go to any lengths possible to delay it (become health-freaks, take all kinds of supplements, lead a sterile life, avoid harmful activities to an extreme, while turning completely self-involved and selfish of course, because they think the ego is all there is and all their actions are fear-based), and I've yet to see the reasoning on why life is worth prolonging. The dilemma "to be or not to be" hasn't been solved yet, or else all philosophy would be put to rest. The idea that life is preferable to death grows out of a completely biased point of view ('cause we're alive), so it's unknown whether it would be a good idea to extend life indefinitely. Also, there's a very good chance that immortality would inevitably amount to complete existential hell.
December 7th, 2016
Spirals are like an indicator that energy wants to escape this dimension.
November 17th, 2016
Existence is a prison. That's why entertainment is so important - it makes the sentence feel shorter.
November 7th, 2016
Man is nature. Yet, at the same time, all of man's journey has been about transcending the suffering, cruelty and injustice inherent to nature. This makes man half of the Earth, half of the stars. That's why any ideology that favors social-Darwinism in any way should be rejected.
October 15th, 2016 - When listening to someone, seek to understand not just what they actually say, but what they MEAN to say. Look for the inception of thoughts.
June 11th, 2016
I was whistling the theme song from Dr. Zhivago (which I never do) as I was starting to watch Fassbinder's World on a Wire (1973). Two minutes into the film, the same song starts playing, within the movie. Now, the weird part is that World on a Wire is a film about reality being a computer simulation.
January 26th, 2016
Life is a Sculpture Made in Love
Sometimes I feel a love so great that my human structure seems too frail to contain it, too unevolved.
Rocked to its very core, it fears impending obliteration, and its efforts are those of a flimsy shack trying to hold itself together while a nuclear blast unfolds in the near horizon.
It's in those moments that I feel I understand the nature of life.
It is revealed to me that life is but a glorious sculpture made in love.
Then I look upon my own little life from a far enough vantage point to see that all it ever was is a unique and unrepeatable manifestation of love.
Rocked to its very core, it fears impending obliteration, and its efforts are those of a flimsy shack trying to hold itself together while a nuclear blast unfolds in the near horizon.
It's in those moments that I feel I understand the nature of life.
It is revealed to me that life is but a glorious sculpture made in love.
Then I look upon my own little life from a far enough vantage point to see that all it ever was is a unique and unrepeatable manifestation of love.
January 18th, 2016 - Wow, this Pillars of Eternity game really knows me!
January 17th, 2016
Hey Jude, don't make it bad.
Take a Satsang and make it better.
Take a Satsang and make it better.
July 12th, 2015
Every character flaw you have will show up in your work and your art. Whether it's laziness, shallowness, pride or denial. They'll always present themselves in whatever you create.
July 11th, 2015
Anyone more openminded than you is crazy and anyone less openminded than you is an idiot.
June 14th, 2015
You know you're depressed if you watch Six Feet Under and you want to live inside the show. Most people want to live inside Seinfeld.
May 18th, 2015
If you think your tears aren't healing you, rub a wound against your teary face - it'll sting.
May 1st, 2015
Chisel your reasoning mind 'til it's as sharp as can be, and then do the same with your artistic mind. Wherever their peaks converge, that's where truth is found.
July 24th, 2014
Innocence Lost
I foolishly glimpsed into the spirit world today,
as an atheist no less.
"Must I know everything?"
Overwhelmed by the intimidating peacefulness
of where existence goes to rest,
by the scary sanctity of the Transcendent Other,
I was betrayed by my Icarian arrogance.
I remember being 6 and turning the house upside down,
finding Santa's gift ahead of time, stashed on top of furniture.
But more than my disappointment, I recall my mom's:
"There, you found out. Happy now?"
I can't just leave Truth well enough alone,
and I taunt it till I'm ravaged.
With disregard for my innocence, I peek behind the curtain,
and can't just live my life as is.
as an atheist no less.
"Must I know everything?"
Overwhelmed by the intimidating peacefulness
of where existence goes to rest,
by the scary sanctity of the Transcendent Other,
I was betrayed by my Icarian arrogance.
I remember being 6 and turning the house upside down,
finding Santa's gift ahead of time, stashed on top of furniture.
But more than my disappointment, I recall my mom's:
"There, you found out. Happy now?"
I can't just leave Truth well enough alone,
and I taunt it till I'm ravaged.
With disregard for my innocence, I peek behind the curtain,
and can't just live my life as is.
October 27th, 2013
There's a deep song in my heart,
Beneath the skins it wears,
That's crying to take part
In soothing the world's cares.
Beneath the skins it wears,
That's crying to take part
In soothing the world's cares.
May 12th, 2013
Some people are so oblivious to the complexity of this world that they fantasize about an inferior one.
March 31st, 2013
To get larger autonomy within the hive mind of our species, create worthy shit. Then you'll represent a bigger slice of consciousness.
March 9th, 2013
"Too much free time", said he who lacks both freedom and time...
February 17th, 2013
Control over the source of ideas is the one thing that can save any artist. After that, he can continue worrying that he's helping nobody.
December 21st, 2012
Stand up to your forefathers and slap their faces if they were wrong.
September 20th, 2012
Respect no symbol more than the freedom to respect no symbol.
September 12th, 2012
Society demands that the individual sacrifice his evolution in order to contribute to its evolution, but fails to get how its evolution relies upon his evolution.
July 26th, 2012
If psilocybin would replace bread in the Communion ritual, religion might actually have a spiritual effect for once.
June 23rd, 2012
People may or may not respect talent. People may or may not respect intelligence. People may or may not respect charisma. But they all surely respect balls.
June 12th, 2012
"Leader of the free world"? How exactly is it a free world if it has a leader?!
January 5th, 2011
There's sadness deep inside, face it.
September 10th, 2010
Retrocausality is the damnedest thing.
September 7th, 2010
It's never too late, but you gotta do it now.
August 4th, 2010
I'm no indigo child, I've matured.
July 24th, 2010
People don't deserve the restraint an artist shows by not going into delirium in front of them.
June 19th, 2010
The suffix's got a prefix, but the prefix's got no suffix.
May 9th, 2010
When you fight your flaws, their first response is to enhance themselves tenfold.
April 2nd, 2010
Survival of the smoothest.
March 29th, 2010
If something is infinite, how can anything not be a part of it?
March 1st, 2010
Hard rock is pleonastic, soft rock is oxymoronic.
February 18th, 2010
I emit mind benders and I bend mind emitters.
February 12th, 2010
I tolerate drug abuse and I abuse drug tolerance.
February 11th, 2010
I despise gold diggers and I dig gold despisers.
February 10th, 2010
I love mind control, but I mind love control.
January 20th, 2010
I value my upbringing and it brings my value up.
October 27th, 2009
Extroverts have bigger biceps (for pulling people closer), introverts have bigger triceps (for pushing people away).
September 9th, 2009
It takes a genius to whine appealingly.
July 26th, 2009
Do your best to be your best to do your best.
July 18th, 2009
The sole purpose of a belief is to prove itself right.
July 3rd, 2009
You really can't observe things, because once you observe them it changes them. Looking prevents seeing.
June 27th, 2009
I celebrate my sadness by laughing uncontrollably.
June 26th, 2009
I'll devour your hunger and you can feed on mine, and so we shall both be full.
June 25th, 2009
I had a dream about being unable to sleep.
June 20th, 2009
Some things have the purpose of making it seem like not all things have purpose.
June 14th, 2009
It's time I started thinking about the time I started thinking.
May 7th, 2009
The dolmen reconciles menhirs.
April 9th, 2009
Passive aggressiveness is all the rage right now.