A few more crumbs from the old loaf. As usual, half of the entries are for one and all and half for my benefactores amabiles.
A quick promotional note. Any book orders for Christmas will have to be done this week (and even then, there’s a good chance some won’t arrive) so I’m offering, for one week, a couple of discounts on my books. 50% off all digital books (with this code: ADigitalEggforChristmas2024) and 40% off all physical books if you order 2 or more (code: APhysicalEggforChristmas2024). Order through my bookshop here (let me know if there’s a problem with the codes).
Also, we’ll record part two of the podcast tomorrow evening (on the same theme, non-dualism), so if you have any questions about merging with the infinite, send them in before then.
City of the Full-Time Damned
If you walk around town with your third eye open you’ll notice, hanging around the entrances of shops, in the car-parks of institutions like hospitals and schools, in the lobbies of large corporate buildings and outside all places of work, clusters of spirit people, chatting sometimes, reading, but mostly just hanging around, at a loose end. These are the souls of people at work, left at the doorway, to be picked up again when they clock off. The boss doesn’t have to leave his soul behind, he hasn’t got one. Everyone else meets theirs again on the way out, but the problem is that the soul requires a body to do justice to it, and by the end of the day all the body is good for, is junk, which is why souls, sooner or later, don’t turn up, and drift away, and why those leaving work don’t even notice.
Talking of which…
You’ve Got Soul
I have a few of these in my pocket, the size of business cards. Occasionally I hand one out to a passers-by.
The Curiosity of the Irresponsible
Here’s a question. What do Stoicism, Buddhism, Marxism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Judaism, utilitarianism, nihilism, determinism, feminism, psychodynamic theories (Jung, Freud, etc.), anti-racism theory, queer theory, postmodernism, common-or-garden cynicism, democracy, nationalism, reductionism, conspiracy theories, critical theory, masochism, sadism and being a miserable old git all have in common? I’ll tell you shall I? They are all ideologies of irresponsibility. I am miserable because life is shit, because of karma or maya, because of my genes, because history has shaped me, because of the immigrants, because of the government, because unconscious forces have made me this way, because of my parents, my bad luck or because ‘that’s just the way it is’. Because of them, because of that, or because of an abstracted me.
Now, I’m certainly not saying that other people, or other forces, aren’t to blame for your pain, and for ours, nor that action isn’t required to deal with them, nor that the traditions1 that the above ideologies are part of are not, at least potentially, sublime. My point is that people who pin the ultimate cause of their suffering on something outside of themselves have no real interest in the truth. This is why they have no real difficulty swapping the ideological props they use to keep their false self standing. Some are serial ideologues, jumping from one to another every few months, others move more slowly, but nothing really changes. With restless intellectual curiosity and a superficial appetite for novelty (part of the job description of the bourgeois thinker) they may be interested in the truth, but such interest is a way of avoiding the truth, not of approaching it, and so it doesn’t last for long before the elastic of the ego draws the gadfly self back to its base state of boredom, ennui, melancholy, anxiety, anger or whatever other form of misery it is temperamentally given to.
In the end, just as it doesn’t really matter whether you are addicted to booze, drugs, sex, fame, social-media, pornography, power, prestige or consumption,2 just as long as the addicted self can keep on craving, so it really doesn’t matter if you’re a democrat, a fascist, a Catholic, a non-dualist, a feminist, a furry, a nihilist, a NEET, a yuppie, a hippie, a Marxist, a miserablist, a sentimentalist, a responsible professional or a red-pilled right-winger, just as long as you can continue being emotional, miserable, angry, lonely or sad, and just as long as you don’t ever have to take responsibility for your selfish emotionality. Your partner will suffer, your friends and family, everyone who ever gets really close to you, but no matter. Your irresponsibility suits the system and the self just fine.