I was visiting a local metaphysical bookstore, having inquired about the availability of adjustable pendulums for use with Radisthesia, I was met by the stores apparently quite knowledgeable owner (he knew what I was talking about). We had an interesting conversation, until he brought up the idea of the "ego death", then I became a little dismayed.
The ego death is an idea in what some would label as occultism, the idea being that until you destroy your sense of self you will not be in command of any of the 'higher' forces (such as in the case of the conversation with the bookshop's owner: radisthetic potential). I find this to be a rather flawed perception of something real: the existence of ego isn't the problem, it's the fact that most people have a dysfunctional ego. How the hell could people not understand this - it's akin to cutting off your tits to prevent breast cancer, as a certain "celebrity" has recently done, and then replacing them with cancer causing implants. So stupid as to baffle.
"Ow, my hip hurts because I haven't exercised since high school and spend 90% of my waking life sitting: better get it chopped off".
I'm amazed that these people can even do simple math let alone file their taxes.
Anyhow back to the sense of individuality: if people had developed selves they wouldn't need governments or even what we call police and it would be very difficult to have crimes as we understand them in 'society' because a healthy sense of self would preclude what we call immoral acts > one cannot harm another because they are actually harming themselves; and what healthy human would want to do that?
Let me give an example of a society: the Freemasons. People go to their societies meetings and are 'in' the Freemasons, in reality they are sitting in a room in a building with some other people dressed in silly clothes playing 'make believe'. Most of them know this because they aren't all total fools but their knowledge of the fictitious nature of their society shows that the Freemasons 'society' is in fact more advanced than yours. * I'm not saying all Masons understand the fallacious nature of their vestments and ceremony, just that some do and that they represent a greater percentage of the whole than in say national or hemispheric societies.
Anyhow the homogeneous, amoeba-like mass of the individual's psycho-sociological precepts aren't usually based on the observed actual, but rather the unobserved and over reported media approximation. This media version of the world in not true to reality, it is not only physically impossible but also mentally impossible due to how the brain interprets and facilitates information. I will not expound on this because I have in previous posts but suffice it say that you do not see events on television or on the internet as they are, all you experience is a flashing colored screen and an electromagnetically induced vibration of atmosphere. That is all.
Human: "I'm not sure if planes really crashed into the World Trade Centers"
Man: "They did, I watched it on TV as it happened"
Human: "But you weren't there?"
Man: "No I said I saw it on TV"
Human: "All that proves is that you saw a flickering light that seemed to show a plane crashing into the WTC"
Obama has apparently been using the slogan "we're all in this together". This is, obviously, untrue: "we" are all experiencing quite different realities from one another and it is absolutely foolish to assume anything other. People have a need to understand one another to facilitate complex interpersonal relationships and, since they have malfunctioning internal communication, any information they receive will A) be incomplete and B) be so distorted they have to 'fill in the gaps with frog DNA' to borrow an idea from Jurassic Park. Unlike in Jurassic Park, we are talking about understanding another's psycho-emotional self. Because of the information breakdown we don't really have any true cognition of the other and we paint them with the brush of own self understanding.
[A not shitty Jurassic Park meme...oh wait.]
This is dangerous. If we paint the other in the colors of our own world view and said other acts in ways that don't make sense to us, there becomes a tendency to dehumanize the 'other' and make things like war, hatred and oppression etc. possible. Look even at the cultural suppression of the left handed. Simply put: other people are not as we are, we are unique individuals with varying levels of certain attributes. All we have to do is look at art to see that concept clearly
Communism failed because it failed to account for people's varying attitudes toward things, the individual did not feel the way the state felt, hence problems. Another interrelated issue is that of social vs. personal responsibility. If, as in Communism, a persons job security is never in question, a door is opened for the person, if his values are different to that of the employer, take liberties that benefit him and are in opposition to the larger organization. Ergo the Soviet Unions massive alcohol problem and falsified production figures.
If we take the idea of personal responsibility to an extreme it could be argued that we shouldn't even have clothes unless we make them ourselves, or drive cars unless we can build them from scratch. There is merit to some of these ideas but this is only a slightly more psychologically functional paradigm and is non-functional en masse. Learning to provide basic services for one's self is an absolutely essential exercise to empower a sense of self worth, self-reliance and responsibility but it, like performing exercise, is only a simplistic approximation of much more complex and efficacious method of functioning
Right now we are individually dependent on society, like children, we should seek to empower ourselves through learning to become independent, like young adults, so we may move onto interdependence, in which we can take care of ourselves yet choose to have interdependent relationships that are empowering, as the interdependent functioning of self sustained individuals results in an overall net gain in positive attributes.
An example:
One nation invades the other: if the the aggressor does not encounter a standing army and instead is met with tens or hundreds of millions of well armed, intelligent and self reliant individual enemies they will be unable to defeat them by the shear facts of logistics. They are unconquerable*
Imagine if your body's cells we're all self sufficient and autonomous, you could have your legs blown off and simply regrow them. Like the zombies in Return of the Living Dead you would have no vital areas and hence could sustain huge volumes of damage and still be functional. If the cells could recognize malignancy they would easily be free of cancer and other disease due to the fact that every one of them would also be an immune cell. We could claim that such a creature would be the ultimate organism and I could go very much on about the multitude of biological similarities but I'd like to talk about the next obvious point.
The cells of such a body would need three primary capacities (remember this is behavioral analogy and not biology): the ability to self sustain, the ability to effectively communicate and self organize and the ability to dedifferentiate. In behavioral terms this means the ability to be self actualized, the ability to communicate effectively and organize information and the ability to revert to a more basic form to learn new tasks. This could be summed up as: strong, smart and plastic. As you should be.
Most of you are not, because you are still dependent from a psycho-emotional point of view, dependent on other people's views and ideas. I'm not saying don't consider other people but if you can function independently of them then you are actually in a position to choose to use them as opposed to being forced to because you have nothing else. This is why societies always seek to limit individual power: if people can be forced to depend on the society, that society gains purpose, otherwise it would be quite superfluous. The people representing the society need to feel as though what they are doing has meaning. This is, of course, because they are not providing their own personalized sense of meaning because they unable or unwilling to construct one.
The meaning we seek for or find in our lives is generated solely by humans and is one area wherein you should 'build your own car' so to speak. Only then will you become free of the enslavement to the other who has built it for you. If you build your own :anything: from scratch then no one may claim any ownership to it due to the fact that they have no equity and the new property can only be bequethed by contract. This is true in all realms of human experience with all types of properties. Can anyone claim to own Jimmi Hendrix's guitar skill? No one but the man himself unless he contracts to give some of his property to a recording studio in exchange for some type of valuable consideration.
The important point here is that Jimmi is the master of his own guitar skill domain and produces enough extra that he can afford to give some away. In a social system in which your :everything: is owned by the state/regent/warlord (because you have bequeathed it to them by unrefuted implied and sometimes literal contract) you have to play guitar because it is demanded, in that case, why bother to get anything for yourself if it just goes to someone else?
Humans, due to their ingrained pack/social behaviors, require an alpha to tell them what to do. This is fine, what I am suggesting is that the all that must be done is to recognize that your are you own master/slave dicotomy. One must play both parts to his advantage to gain independence and eventually interdependence. Some may argue that 'if you're happy with the way things are then who cares'? You do. I don't know anyone who considers their life perfect all the time; and if you had the opportunity to make more money, have the freedom to do things you want the way you want to do them, be more creative and expressive and have better relationships with people and make the world better through these things so that other people could have better lives too, that you wouldn't take it? You'd have to be quite insane not to.
So why don't we? Partly because most adults have the mentality of children and have been trained by each other to accept it as normal. Another reason is that from childhood we have been taught false concepts that have left many so hopelessly confused as to be rendered mentally inert. Ninety nine percent of you will be unable to recognize this because you are one of the confused.
Another example:
As a child, another child hits you. You hit him back and are scolded. You are told never to hit anyone, even when they hit you first, turn the other cheek so to speak.
This is child abuse. You have just disarmed the one of the prime biological functions that keeps humans safe and civil. If a man is attacked by an animal - 'turning the other cheek' results in death. Fighting gives him a chance to live free of the tyranny of the aggressor. By telling the child to give up his right to defense against unjust aggression you have not only castrated his sense of self worth but also created a false idea of how the world works that will continue to harm the child for the rest of his life and cause him to live in a fantasy world divorced from true reality.
If said child believes he has no right to defend himself he'll need someone else to do it for him and to this person he will bequeath, by contract, his right to defense because he didn't even know he had it. This is why the state regulates education, so that they can teach children - wrongfully, that they are powerless and should leave most matters to 'the adults'. Imagine if school kids had to run their school themselves...
But I am repeating myself.
The long and short is this: reliance on government/social systems requires you to shut off parts of yourself that allow you to be an actually complete human. This is the equivalent of a left handed person cutting off their left hand because it's socially unpopular. You would be a fool to do this.
Non-Sequitur Prologue:
You'd be like Russel Brand actually. Russel Brand: you are politically illiterate and should stick to comedy because you poison the worlds minds with your "revolutionary socialism" which is really just Nazism 2.0 - we all know about the Fabians so hang yourself and free up some space for more deserving people - also you are hideous to look at. Die.