Working My Way Through Madness

I feel like I'm losing my mind. So much rage, so much pain. Anger is just blazing inside me. I want to tear apart everything I see and throw it into an inferno. Whatever purpose anger is supposed to serve, it is twisted in me. It is all I can feel other than depression right now. I'm not saying that it is all there is to me, I know that's not true. Just a few days ago, I was feeling fine. But right now, nothing is in me except fury and hate and despair.

I want to run away from everything. Leave life behind. Take a couple of people with me and leave the world I know behind and never return. The world can get along just fine without me. I can't take life. The rage is tearing me apart. All I can do is grit my teeth until they scream in pain, pound on everything in reach with my fists, and shout curses at existence. I don't know why, I don't know what's causing it and, really, does it even matter? I have to cope with the way things actually are, rather than the way I'd like them to be.

I'm trying to call to mind some spiritual principle, some meditation practice, anything that can alleviate the torture. Nothing works. I feel like the powers that be are plotting ways to drive me completely mad. Maybe it's a test of some kind; if so, I think I'm failing miserably. So much in my life is going wrong and I can't manage the most basic coping mechanisms. Thoughts of death are hounding me. Perhaps it's Karma. Perhaps in another life, I did something truly awful. Whatever it is, I do not believe it is part of the loving plan of any deity. This has nothing to do with love or providence or some unearthly paradise. This is anguish and it is right here and right now. It is not sin, it is insanity.

I will try to survive this for my wife and father. I will try to continue to live even when I feel nothing but loathing for life. There has to be something worth living for; I've found it other times, I can find it again. Now that I have vented, I'm calmer. Maybe that's what I needed to do. Release the poison. Hopefully, it won't just build up again. To my wife and my new dear friend who will probably read this, don't mind me if I indulge a daydream about all of us running off to some obscure part of an obscure country and living the rest of our lives in some wilderness somewhere, being mad and joyful and magically ourselves, with no one to judge and no one to mock us. I know it will never happen, but it is a nice fantasy. It gives me a certain amount of peace.

The Transcendence of Despair

I find the strength to carry on, through a life that has often seemed committed to breaking me, in despair. This is not the self-pitying heartache of the love of your life breaking up with you or having failed some important task and feeling bad for yourself because you think you weren't good enough to succeed. This is a powerful philosophical concept that looks deep into the mystery of life and finds nothingness and finds its  triumph in that very nothingness.

We all get wounded by life. Someone we love dies. We lose an important job. Our closest friends betray us. We have moments of hopelessness, spiritual barrenness, times when nothing seems to make sense. There are remedies for this ranging from religion to the bottle. But few people seek the answer to the problem in the problem itself. Despair is its own victory, when it is taken in one's hands and heart and kept close and used as a guide through what comes after.

 When you suffer from severe depression, you learn very quickly that nothing, not the love of family and friends, not drugs (legal or otherwise), not the God or Gods that we all want to believe in, nothing will just take it away. So, if you want to transform the experience of that depression from something negative to something positive, you've got to work with the depression itself. Despair is more than just an emotion. It is a worldview, as comprehensive as Medieval Roman Catholicism or Marxism. Just ask Nietzsche or Cioran. It colors everything you experience. You go from cooing over how cute a young child is to knowing that someday it will die and sometime after that, unless it's one of the chosen few, will be forgotten, as we all end up forgotten (if, again, we're not of that chosen few) when those who loved us are also gone. This is all-pervasive. You begin to see death and life's powerlessness everywhere. You come to doubt and outright despise the idea of any spiritual agencies who would act to "save" you from the suffering in this world. You know that medicine can take away the edge but, once you've glimpsed into the abyss, you can never un-see what you saw. Hopelessness is something we merely cover up with hope, just as underneath our clothes, we're all naked. Take that away, and you become yourself, bare and defenseless, against the reality of a life that does not love you, does not care one way or another what becomes of you. This is where you find the power in despair.

When you've come to the point where you know for a certainty that life will never deliver what the cliches promise it will, you come to a point where the only thing you trust anymore is yourself. You are the one who survives the slings and arrows. Nothing divine or human survives them for you. And nothing in this life will give you peace; it can only be won, after long struggles, inside oneself. If you think marriage or children or your first home or a new car or some blessed spirituality GIVES you peace, you are underestimating your own power to be the one thing that can be truly relied upon from day one to day final of your existence. A wife or husband can die. So can children. They can decide they hate you, whoever may be at fault. Homes and cars... well... we all know how impermanent those are. And spirituality is only as useful as it applies to practical, everyday life. I have no time for a spirituality that teaches me how to live to be happy in a world after this one. THIS is the life I am living. THIS is the life I am concerned with. If there is anything beyond THIS life, then I blame it for making me so easily overcome by emotional agony. I have made many choices in my life. Depression was not one of them. I do, however, believe in the power of choice. And taking responsibility for oneself involves accepting oneself as the only savior there is. We are each responsible for what gets us through the day. It doesn't come from material things or on high.

Despair hates life because it sees life as either the architect or the idiot god ultimately responsible for suffering. If there were no life, there would be no suffering. That hatred for life contains the seed of strength. Because, if you hate life, you strive to overcome it. Make no mistake, life is a brutal affair. Every time someone speaks admiringly of someone else who rose to a higher state in life through their own efforts, they are tacitly acknowledging the fact that life is cruelly unfair and that success in life only comes by fighting against the odds. If you have everything handed to you, you haven't done a thing. If you never strive for anything better, you also haven't done anything. So, the secret is in not having and fighting for what you do not have. Fighting. Fighting against whom? Against life, of course. Against the life that did not give you what you seek. Fighting to attain that which you seek but do not yet possess.

Hatred for life sounds so negative to many people. They want to say they love life. But, if they have accomplished, truly accomplished, anything, they have done so in a struggle against the entropy and decay that is the end result of life. And, if they haven't accomplished anything, watch how quick they are to blame life. We all know life is the enemy when we're feeling broken.

Only in despair do these insights come. And yes, despair can result in things like suicide. But, a philosophical despair will ensure that one does not impulsively commit suicide based on emotional disturbances that may go away after a few hours, days, weeks, months. Philosophical despair will only permit suicide when one can rationally see that either the pain will not get better or that one's time is truly at an end, that one has accomplished and experienced all one can or wants to in life. I make no one any promises that I will never take my own life. But I will not do so rashly and I will not be unaware of the consequences of such an action. And, I will fight. I will fight for the best life possible for myself because I know that life itself will never give that to me. It must come from my own efforts. And, if I triumph or if I ultimately fall, I will do so as a sovereign being, truly free and truly filled with the unlimited power of despair.

Philosophy Instead Of Faith

In my last post, I ranted about nihilism. I'm still attached to certain ideas in nihilism, so what I'm going to write here is not a rejection utterly of that. But it is a different perspective. Not a completely new perspective for me. I've spent a lifetime dangling over this chasm between nihilism and faith. Sometimes I swing over to one and then back to the other after some time. I don't really know what is happening to me currently. It's hard to explain but I will try in the following paragraphs.

I have started to feel the need to pull my conflicting thoughts together and see what I can make of the whole, godawful mess. And I have been studying various religious and philosophical texts during this process. For years now, I have been aware of the Temple of Set. I won't go into their history or all their beliefs here but I own a Set statue and have spent many hours meditating on the mysteries of this Egyptian deity. I didn't know much about the Temple of Set except that they were a very exclusive organization and didn't accept just anyone who applied. So, in a very self-limiting fashion, I kind of ignored them and what they had to say because I felt they'd never accept me and therefore I didn't need to worry about what they had to say about things. This was a bad move and kind of a cop-out on my part. I should know by now that anything can be learned from.

However, in one of my swings between nihilism and faith, I got to thinking about Set quite a lot and just jumped from there to thinking of the Temple of Set. I decided to refresh my memory about what I'd read about them. And what I found seemed like the answer to my... I don't pray... so maybe my hopes. I found a school of thought that seems to make the act of thinking intelligently, long and hard on important matters, holy. Philosophy as a sacred rite. Art as a sacred rite. All the things I love are being called sacred in the writings of various folks associated with the Temple of Set. I don't know how I overlooked that before.

Before I go any further, I should say that I do not know if I will even attempt to join the Temple of Set. They are reluctant to accept people with mental illnesses, as some of what the Temple teaches can bring people face to face with inner "demons" that an unstable person may not be able to cope with. If I study more and really like what I find, I may request to be put in contact with a Priest or Priestess and discuss with them whether I'd really like to join the Temple and if I'd even be accepted if I tried. But, in one of the Temple's podcasts, the founder specifically says that many of their core beliefs are open to all of humanity just by virtue of being conscious beings. This struck a chord with me because even though I might never be a "Setian" in the sense of belonging to the Temple of Set, I could potentially be living a Setian life and, the more I read, the better that was starting to sound.

Philosophy and art and magick and not blind faith and countless rules about your behavior. Couldn't be more perfect. Morality as something you determine rationally. As one of the members said in a podcast, "The good is very often synonymous with the intelligent." Or something to that effect. Brilliant! So, I'm reading up on philosophy, both explicitly Setian and other things as well, reading as much as I can, meditating as much as I can, contemplating. This isn't a long, endless rant and rave blog. Much more concise than I am accustomed to writing. However, I wanted to get some feelings down about yet another journey I am embarking on. Don't know where it will lead, but I will profit from it. I know that.

The Freedom of Meaninglessness

In pure theory, nihilism should produce death, both actual and philosophical. Anything that attempts to answer "What does it all mean?" with the response "It doesn't mean anything" is a killing force. Life is meaningless, so why live? Philosophy is meaningless because it can't answer anything with certitude, so why think? And I, to an extent, subscribe to a kind of nihilism. I put on various religions and philosophies for a time and think within those terminologies and mindsets without ever completely subscribing to them. I live a life of mental and spiritual convenience. That sounds extremely meaningless. Why bother? Why even bother to continue in an existence that I don't feel has any point or any true worth? There have been gods, there has been God, there have been new gods of politics and humanism and ideas that are invested with all the power of the absolute. Those who live with or beneath these gods can't see what I am doing, don't understand. To them, even to Nietzsche, nihilism was the downfall of civilization as we know it. Nearly everyone elevates some principle or concept to a divine status. Nearly everyone exists with a certain perception of relativity but their relativity does not permit them to tear down their own deities and moral codes. I think mankind has a terrible fear of believing that their own thoughts might be wrong or, even worse, pointless. This may not be absolutely true but the way we live life is as a stream of thoughts and sensations and emotions. To cast those into doubt casts into doubt everything we believe about ourselves. Terrifying prospect.

There's the old song and dance about how if you say it is true that nothing is true, you've just contradicted yourself and what you said is a lie. That's an easy way to try to trip up relativists and nihilists and postmodernists and all sorts of nasty folk. But it doesn't hold water. It's a word game that people have been playing since the time of the ancient Greeks, possibly before. The fact is that underlying every statement about something not being "true" is the assumption that it is not absolutely true. We are born believing in the evidence of our senses and, as we grow, we come to trust completely the evidence of our thoughts about our senses. Part of what is so frightening about feeling you are going mad is that you have torn from you that security that you know and think about the world around you correctly. But one doesn't have to be slipping into psychosis to find evidence that the world around us is not what we think it is. Most people have experienced something along the lines of catching movement out of the corner of their eye and nothing being there or thinking their name was just called and turning around and no one did so. Just one such experience should be enough to cause us to discount the so-called "evidence" of our senses. And if we can't trust something as basic as our eyeballs seeing correctly, why are we supposed to put complete faith in an ancient holy book or some random philosophy or Marxism or Rush Limbaugh or anything else that we are expected to just accept as true? People talk about their various beliefs and frequently resort to attempting to prove its reality by claiming they experienced directly that it is true. God speaking to them, watching a town apply a new political philosophy and it works miracles, etc. I am not convinced by such arguments. It is the need for security and stability and trust in the world as we know it that causes us to give so much weight to what we experience. Because if we were to admit that we might be mistaken about the causes or our perception of our experiences, we might just become a little more nihilistic and that's not good. But, in spite of what Dr. Phil says about "Would you rather be right or happy?" I would rather be right than clutching to what makes me feel secure even if it is completely off-base. Many is the time in history that a general looked across the battlefield and saw a small force of enemies and rushed in to attack and found out that the rest of the opposing force was hidden somewhere and rushed in and flanked him and his soldiers and won the day. Our senses and experiences, no matter what our hearts may wish for, are like the crafty enemy general who knows how to divide his men and flank his foe and find victory.

So, I've just spent two run-on paragraphs demolishing what is, in my view, the grave error of clinging to the notion of absolute truth. We can try to deceive ourselves but, in the end, we will all reach the end of our sojourns in this world without the slightest clue what it was all about than we had when we showed up. So, what about my opening question about why do I carry on if I believe in a universe that is, as far as I can ever know, completely meaningless? Why do I read philosophers and why do I not put a bullet in my head or start running pedestrians down in my car? Simple. I do not know if freedom exists. I do not know if we are not predetermined to do everything we do by genetics and environment. So I don't claim to be preaching freedom. But, I have found that in a functionally meaningless existence, freedom is the greatest prize to be found. You are free to interpret the evidence of your senses and thoughts and emotions however you choose. If there is no overarching font of ultimate morality, then we are free to invent our own moral codes. Some people view that idea as a harbinger of the apocalypse. I'm fine with bringing about the end of the world as we know it. Because the world as we know it hasn't worked in eons. Those who see decadence and Babylon and Armageddon around every corner don't seem to realize that people have been saying that for thousands of years. It hasn't come yet, why do you think it will pop up tomorrow because some poor teenaged girl got an abortion or a dude got high or someone you didn't vote for got elected anyway? It's a kind of hubris to think that the end times have just been holding off until WE showed up to smash the wickedness of humankind.

This freedom we find in meaninglessness is the freedom to assign meaning as we see fit. Despite Nietzsche not being a nihilist, he did see the end of meaning foreshadowed in his day and, very wisely, set about constructing his own meanings. Whether we realize this or not, nihilist or devout Muslim, we all go about creating our own meanings anyway, in the unceasing stream of our thoughts and emotions. We won't stop finding meanings until we die and, despite anyone's evidence that their beliefs are true, we will never know how factual our beliefs are unless we die and suddenly find ourselves face to face with God and in his infinite wisdom, he deigns to tell us what we wish to know. I do not personally believe that but I use my freedom of choice to allow that I could be wrong to doubt it and I may show up at the foot of his throne one day, facing judgment or love or whatever other motivations could cause a divine being to create such a wonderful, flawed, dreadful and beautiful race as we humans. So, believe what you will but do not ask yourself or me why I think what I do and still keep on keeping on. It's abundantly clear that where I find my enlightenment is in the utterly free world of knowing I can think anything I wish and eventually, I may have thought everything there is to think and lived more lives than there are people on this earth.

Psychosis

This is a challenging blog post to write. In it, I will admit to some things that are either embarrassing or not at all flattering. I just told one of my adopted little sisters about some of this last night and breaking the barrier of not really telling anyone about it has sort of inspired me to really open up about it. I honestly don't know what my motives for writing this are. I think it has something to do with the fact that I want people to have a better idea of exactly what's wrong with me. I don't want to be completely defined by my illness but I also want people to really be aware of the fact that there's damned good reasons why I am on Disability and not being a normal, productive, independent, responsible adult. Most people don't understand at all how profoundly disturbed I am because I'm better than most at hiding it. No longer. This is to tear down the misconceptions that I'm just a regular guy who gets sad and anxious sometimes but is mostly okay other than that. It's time to be understood and see who accepts the real me and who doesn't want to have anything to do with me any longer.

I see a psychiatrist I believe on the 19th. I am not 100% positive I will make it that long. I may have to check myself into a hospital at some point before that. I don't feel that I badly need to right now. However, that could change at any time. I may need to change my meds in the near future. I don't think my old meds are doing the trick as well as they used to. Kind of sad, I had developed a great deal of loyalty to Risperdal. Maybe it's odd to have customer loyalty to a drug, but it probably saved my life. I need to talk to someone about something new because I think my body has adjusted too much to the meds I'm on now and they are no longer at optimal effectiveness. I have noticed some of my psychotic symptoms coming back. That is what this post is about.

I have always been paranoid. I have been afraid of people for as long as I can remember. I have thought that when someone laughs they are laughing at me for just about the same amount of time. I can be very nosy because I am always worried that people are trying to bring me down behind my back. My wife (yay that she's now my wife since my birthday!) has remarked on how nosy I am. I have a compulsion to look at her computer screen when she's using her computer. I am normally not paranoid about her but that is essentially the reason I do that. I also listen carefully whenever I hear conversations near me because I'm positive they are about me. At some point, years ago, these paranoid inclinations blossomed into full-blown psychotic delusions.

My mother used to get angry at God and scream at him to strike her dead whenever anything went wrong. I believe I inherited my inclination to paranoia from her but somehow learned from her the specifics. I don't even really believe in God, at least not in a monotheistic sense of one absolute all-powerful king of humanity. But I blame God for my misfortunes because the madness in my mind believes that only an omnipotent deity is capable of manufacturing the conspiracy that is operating against me. I also don't demand that God strike me dead when things go awry. Instead, I scream at him to come down from on high and, essentially, do battle with me so that either I can kill him or he can kill me and thus end the torment. Yes, when the insanity bursts through the dams of my mental defenses, I honestly believe I'd have a chance to kill the almighty Creator in one on one combat. I told you you wouldn't think I was normal after this. It gets worse.

So, I think God has it in for me. He has a plan too. He wants to drive me to suicide. I am convinced of this. I can't really explain why but I know it in my soul. God created me solely to (perhaps) get some kind of sick pleasure out of crushing me beneath his heel. Delightful. I am locked in a mortal struggle with the Divine. The Divine I only believe in when I am out of my gourd and convinced I am being persecuted unto death. So, how does God go about his evil plot? That's where it gets really nuts. See, God knows how much I want the stuff I order online. I buy myself stuff compulsively to make myself feel better when I am unhappy. That's a whole other post by itself. It's part of my whole sickness. But I digress. So, he knows I feel like I need those items I buy for myself to save my sanity. We've already established that he seeks to destroy my sanity. Thus, it makes perfect sense that he'd try to keep those packages from me. He goes about this by collaborating with African-Americans in the USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. to delay, damage or lose my shipments. Yes, blacks in the shipping industry take orders from God to not deliver me my stuff in a timely fashion in order to deny me the satisfaction I derive from it and to ultimately drive me to kill myself.

I told you I was embarrassed and not proud. I don't even know where to begin with this. I mean, first there's the plain insanity of this thought. I could also point out the racism involved, even though I fight against being that kind of person with all my might when I'm not in the grip of psychosis. It doesn't make me feel any better about myself when I remind myself that I did, after all, vote for a black man in the last Presidential election. That isn't enough proof that I'm not a racist to my disgusted self. I don't know why my brain picked blacks specifically to be afraid of in this instance. No clue. Anyway, it's a mad, racist, sick thought. And I can't get it out of my head lately. And this delusion goes back years. Medication made it go away for a long time but I'm slipping back into it lately. Maybe, as I said, it's my body adjusting to my drugs. Perhaps it's the fact that I've been under a lot of stress lately. Stress amplifies mental illness out of control. Whatever is the cause, I think it's quite understandable why I have been considering checking myself into the hospital. I get anxiety attacks when I check the mail in case something I'm expecting hasn't arrived yet. Definitely not sane.

That's not everything. I wish it was. Sunday night, I was convinced I wasn't real. I didn't think anything was real. That's a common symptom of psychosis. I also have been terrified of all of my friends conspiring behind my back to break me and then abandon me in my time of need. I can't just trust my friends, I'm always so very suspicious. This is one reason why many schizotypals, schizoaffectives and schizophrenics don't like to make close relationships with others. They are too paranoid and afraid of what will happen. I decided some time ago to force myself to take the risk and it has been good for me but I can't honestly say there aren't times I regret it. If you are reading this, odds are, at some time in the not-too-distant past, I have been deathly afraid of you and what you will someday do to me. Sorry.

If you hate me or are afraid of Crazy Chris now, don't worry, I was prepared for that. You're just confirming my fears of people. If you pity me, don't. I fight this shit with all my might and don't want to be your favorite victim. If you support me, bless your heart. That's what I need. I fear someday taking my own life or ending up as a permanent resident of a hospital or possibly being a madman living on the streets ranting to himself. But I haven't given up. I will have to lose my marbles completely so that I can't even contemplate fighting before I give up. If you read all of this, thanks. It's a sign you care. Or else you're morbidly curious. I would be too. Madness isn't pretty, but it sure as hell is interesting.

Music And Poetry And Luciferianism And My Desire To Create

Well, last night I was pretty distraught. I hope no one thinks I was being a drama queen. I was really fraying at the edges. This move is taking a major toll on me. But I'm not as nuts tonight as I was last night. So, tonight, I'm going to babble about some things that are important to me and are helping me through this process.

First, musically, it's been all about The Cure. Old Cure, new Cure, in-between Cure. Everything from despair to psychosis to giddiness to humor. I have loved them since Disintegration, which was already well into Robert Smith's career. But it's been 22 years, so I guess I can say I'm a real fan. I have every full length they ever released. I saw them in Nassau Coliseum on the Wish tour and it was one of the best shows I've ever seen in an arena. I generally prefer the more intimate settings of a club and, generally, the bands I listen to only play clubs because hardly anyone has ever heard of them. But Robert Smith and co. lit up that arena that night. It was magical. There is a lot of pain in many of the songs but listening to it can be so cathartic. No one has musical depression down like The Cure.

I've also gotten inspired to read poetry and stuff about poets again. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Georg Trakl, and, more recent poets, Louise Glück, Galway Kinnell. All geniuses. Of them all, my favorites are Sexton, Berryman and Glück. Anne Sexton wrote to tear your guts out. She usually succeeded. Very raw. The words are filled with the sense of agony and losing one's grip becoming an imminent threat. Berryman is less easy to understand. He wrote very obscure but emotionally powerful poems. He's probably one of the poets to blame for the fact that most modern people think poetry is completely inscrutable. But I love him. The puzzle, the reward of figuring out a line or two, the sheer ecstasy and anguish he went through in the writing. Brilliant. So, two insanely genius poets who took their own lives. Louise Glück is still among the living. I love her work just as much as the others. She's my favorite living poet. She has a more delicate style while still writing about powerfully emotional subjects. She also likes to use simple words to convey deep thoughts, something a lot of poets think is beneath them. I tend to find many possible meanings in her works. Her books tend to follow a theme. She has built a body of work that is highly esteemed by critics and regular readers of poetry alike.

Also reading (and practicing) Luciferian path stuff. I wrote last night about how it didn't seem to be helping but that's not entirely true. It didn't help last night. But I don't think I'd be getting through this whole move situation without it. I am generally stronger now than I was before I discovered it. Identifying with a God rather than kneeling and begging for forgiveness and mercy and love appeals to me a great deal. I think there is a chance that there are real spiritual entities in this universe but I do not believe in approaching them like a slave. I want to be more like them. That is the essence of the Adversarial path. Identifying with the beings who would not bend their knee before any God and thus were branded as enemies of goodness. Adversaries. Those who walk their own path at all costs, willing to go into the dark places and find the light within. The Gods do not demand faith or love. They don't demand anything. They simply wait and see if you are worthy of their respect. It's entirely up to you what you make of your life. Last night, I obviously wasn't doing too well with that. But I think I haven't squandered all my opportunities and one day, after much invocation and meditation, I will come to see myself as the living embodiment of those deities. It is the path for those who reject the idea that those who remain true to themselves over any other being are damned. Rather, they are the ones who are truly saved.

All of this ties into me feeling like I want to start writing again. Creative writing, not blogging. Blogging is helpful but I want to express my ideas either as poems or stories or poetic stories. I won't have the chance until the move is over but after that, I will have time. I am looking forward to it. In Thelema, Ceremonial Magick, Luciferianism, there is the concept of one's true will. It is what you are in this world to do. Without that will, you are less than fully yourself. For me, I feel that my true will is to write, to create. When I am not writing, I am miserable. When I am writing, I feel that kinship to the Gods. The act of forcing my will and heart upon a piece of paper or a document screen on a computer monitor and making it into whatever I desire it to be, that is divine for me. I need to get back to it, for the sake of my sanity.

Well, hopefully, this is a bit more cheerful than last night's wrist-slitting festival. I am focusing on growing and expanding my personal strength and beating down the depression with both fists. I *will* make my way through this life and I *will* become the person I want myself to be. I simply have to.

The End Of The Line

This isn't a suicide note. Which isn't to say I haven't been having suicidal thoughts because I have but I don't want anyone getting worried that I'll be checking out in the immediate future. What this is, I'm not entirely sure, except an outpouring of the fact that I am shrieking and tearing myself to pieces inside.

I wrote a post about how deep depression is true despair and not just sadness or "the blues." Well, there's a point beyond that, a point where you really start to lose your grip on reality. My diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder but I've also been labeled with "Major Depression with Psychotic Features." Depression can reach the level of a psychosis. Common symptoms are hallucinations, paranoia, feeling like the person responsible for bad things that have nothing to do with you at all. I am reaching that point. I do my best to hide it, I do not want my dad to see me falling apart in the midst of this move. I know he's probably going to read this but I have to write it. I have to get it out somehow.

One of my meds, Risperdal, is keeping me from a full blown psychotic break. It may be the most important medication I take. But my soul is being put through a shredder. I am so overwhelmed that it paralyzes me. I've been trying my best to work on this move and people have been telling me how proud they are of how I've been handling it but they don't all see that I feel like it's killing me. I blame myself for how much there is still to do. I blame myself for not being able to work and maybe find a way to keep the place. I blame myself for my dad's cancer, in an odd way. I don't know how that works, but the feeling is there. I have been reading up on this Luciferian path and trying to follow it and yet my old and seemingly eternal self-hatred arises in the midst of attempting to meditate on self-love. And having inner strength.... if I have any inner strength at all, it's completely used up in trying to keep my mind from just rending into dozens of pieces and leaving me shattered and even more useless than I feel.

This isn't the worst I've ever been. Not by a long shot. There was a time when this pressure would have probably resulted in me killing myself. Thanks to modern medicine and a lot of support from friends, family and Coco, I'm not that far gone. But I see the fractured edges of myself scraping together and the shards from the friction lodge in my heart and mind and leave gaping wounds. I am not the person I want myself to be. I am just a faint shadow of that person. A faint, extremely distorted shadow. I want to say that this won't break me... but I honestly don't know. The people I love seem to think I can make it. But I don't have the confidence in myself to fully accept that.

I am haunted. I am haunted by the ghosts of loved ones passed on and failures I've been responsible for and mistakes made and lessons learned too late and the specter of the child I once was, looking at me, sad and angry; sad that we share the same pain, angry that I let all that potential go to waste. Not only am I not the person I wish I was, I never have been the person I wanted to be. I have always been let down by myself. Some people think my expectations are too high. I always thought expectations should be high, aim high, don't aim low. But I've achieved low. I have people who care a great deal about me and that means a lot. But I so frequently have nothing to offer them. I don't feel like I bring anything to the table. While they talk about jobs and friends they have in real life and some of them about their own families that they've started, wives, husbands, children... I look at myself and think "What have I done with my (almost) 39 years?" I can think of a lot of stalled projects, plans given up on, people hurt, jobs I screwed up, possibilities squandered. All because I have this depression. Something that some people don't even consider a real medical condition.

I honestly don't know any other life than this. Whether it's a real medical condition or not, depression seems to be the core of my being. It has carved out a niche in my soul and taken up permanent residence. Either that or the depression actually IS my soul. That feels more likely. My spirit is a spirit of despair and hopelessness.

We have a few days before we have to move and leave this house behind. I can't get my mind around the enormity of that reality that is looming so close. What I'd really like to do is pack up my mind and move and leave Chris Ropes behind and just be someone, anyone, else.

Continuation Of The Self Or Dissolution In The Void?

The Luciferian books and articles I've been reading lately, mostly from The Order of Phosphorus, have caused me to face an interesting philosophical conundrum. The Order includes, as I have said before, both atheistic Luciferians and more spiritual, Theistic Luciferians. They take a very hard stance against the dissolution of the self, and that individuality and self-hood should be protected at any cost. They view the Christian doctrine of turning one's will over to God and entering an afterlife spent in devotion to that God as spiritual dissolution. The atheists want control over their selves and individuality while in this life and don't pay much heed to any life after. The theists want their spiritual life to extend their earthly individuality into whatever lies beyond. They want to maintain their uniqueness and personal paths.

The quandary for me is that I have speculated and put forth many opinions and educated guesses that we are all dissolved into the Void after this life. Is this the same as being dissolved into God? Does a reflecting pool of consciousness, when absorbed into an ocean, still retain any iota of individuality? If I keep to the atheistic principle, that of maintaining total individuality in this life, then it doesn't matter much what I think if I believe this little thing we call consciousness becomes absorbed into an eternal void and vanishes. But if I take a spiritual view... a theistic view... it matters a great deal. I have permitted myself to think that the Void contains a kind of mystical consciousness. Perhaps the reflecting pool dissolved in the ocean remembers and can still reflect the images it reflected before being swallowed by the ocean. Perhaps through strength of will and the proper meditative and magical practices, some notion of self survives outside the Void. In this case, my interpretation of the Void as Satan would be wrong. The Void would be God, who calls unto Himself an endless multitude of souls that are created in His image and gives them an eternity to worship Him. That, to me, would be a Void.

Perhaps I will find the answers to my questions in further meditation and ritual practice. I do not claim to have achieved the highest possible consciousness available to humanity. There is much that remains a mystery to me. All I offer are ideas and those ideas change as I discover new parts of myself and stumble upon new ideas. To want this self, this being I am, to survive death and not be dissolved in either a Void or a Divine Rapture, but to think and feel and act completely independently requires a great deal of self-love, something I have never been very good at. It requires wanting this being I am to survive into unforeseeable ages into the future. Perhaps my practices will bring me to the point of this self-love, where, seeing myself as the only God, I will wish to reign over my own personal Heavens and Hells for as long as time allows. It is an intriguing prospect. I must first conquer my depression and anxiety and my "Worship of Death" I wrote about in an earlier post. I must learn to love not just life... but life as me. And want that existence to go on and on. The journey continues and no one knows where it may lead.

Invocation Of Ahriman For Assistance of Az/Jeh/Lilith

Today, I meditated. As I have for the past few nights, I meditated on Set. The original Adversary. I am drawn to his story and his modification from great beloved God to Demon. It seems the God or Gods of an old religion invariably become the Devils and Demons of a new religion. Set took rather well to his role as Adversary and slew Osiris and battled Horus. My meditations have been quests for the rebellious and strong spirit inside, the self within me that can conquer all obstacles, pass any test the Adversary may put to me. I do not feel like I am that person yet, but I am striving for it.

In light of this, what I did after my meditation makes sense. In some strands of Persian Zoroastrianism, Ahriman, their Adversary, suffers a defeat at the hands of the God of "Goodness." He hides in darkness for 3000 years. Nothing his demons tell him can rouse him to action. Until Jeh, identified with Az and Lilith in Luciferian circles, promises him to spawn demons that will destroy the forces of Ahriman's foe. Ahriman rises from his deep despair and kisses Jeh, causing her to menstruate. This is apparently a "curse" that is invented at this point in time, although it is obviously the result of the theology of men who were terrified of women and their natural cycles.

I invoked Ahriman in the darkness, lit by one candle. In the Luciferian way, I invoked him as a part of myself, despite the fact that I believe the Adversary is a real spiritual force. I requested from this inner Ahriman that he send me a Jeh/Az/Lilith to awaken me and my strength and free me from the chains of depression and anxiety I have been held in so long. I felt stronger during the ritual and the rest of the night. I feel I will have to repeat this ritual, with greater and greater intensity, until I finally receive from within myself the gift that I seek. Many people have told me that after all I've gone through, that I am strong. I will admit, I have dealt with things that would break some people. But that's not enough. I don't just want to be strong enough to cope with difficulty. I want to be strong enough to forge my own fate, no matter what stands in my way. This ritual is my attempt to do just that. To awaken the Adversarial Light within myself in such a brilliant blaze, it burns away the darkness of crushed hopes and dead dreams. I will rise again from the darkness. I will wage my battle against the Sheep Gods and the forces aligned against me. I will become my true self. I will conquer and control both the light and the darkness within and be master of my domain, which is my mind and soul.

Meditating Again

I've been meditating regularly again. I've been trying to discover the Black Flame within myself, the Black Flame of the Left Hand Path, the Black Flame of the Adversarial Gods and Goddesses, the thing that can make all of us deities in our own right. The book I've been reading, The Bible of the Adversary, written by the founder of the Order of Phosporus and the Church of the Adversarial Light, describes Luciferian meditation as being focused on disunion rather than union with the universe, as in Buddhist meditation. Disunion with the cosmos signifies rebellion against the accepted, orthodox order of things, making oneself a being who carves out destiny despite the odds against it, who rules his or her domain absolutely without any mandates from God.

This has been an interesting path so far. I will pursue it further. I need to learn more. Meditation is good in and of itself but it can also be a springboard for magick. Meditation can lead one to a place where accessing higher levels of consciousness and higher states of being is possible. Gnosis, the point of absolute single-minded concentration on one object, the object of one's desires, is accessible through steady and determined mediation. In Luciferian meditation and gnosis, one is flowing against the stream of the universe, struggling to break free of personal, societal, religious and moral boundaries. It goes against everything we are brought up with and told as children to do. But there is great power in it. I personally believe there are adversarial spirits in this universe and that they respond to the soul who goes against the spiritual grain. Like the Luciferians, I do not believe in worshiping them, merely attaining what they have attained. Through meditation, I am coming to see that perhaps there is a way to carry on this void of consciousness into further life in the spirit. I hate the spirit/matter duality, so I will consider spirit as merely one manifestation of matter, but there is something animating the universe and living beings in particular. It might as well be called spirit.

I have a lot of research left to do, a lot of meditating and magick to practice, a lot of invocations and mantras and visualizations ahead of me. I still do not know if I will adopt this path and stick to it for any length of time. I change spiritual opinions more than most people change their socks. But it is helping me to deal with a very stressful time in my life and giving me an inner power that other people have sensed in me but it has taken quite a long time for me to sense in myself. I feel, at the moment, like I truly am the God of my life, the Set, the Ahriman, the Lucifer, walking my own road, doing what needs to be done, living life to the fullest, embracing darkness and reaching for light. I wish to use this lifetime to ascend to something higher, something greater, something divine. If I set my mind to it, nothing can stop me.

The Order Of Phosphorus And The Church Of Adversarial Light

In my spiritual studies, I've stumbled upon an organization that deeply interests me. They are The Order of Phosphorus and the affiliated Church of Adversarial Light. I can definitely see some aspects of this organization that deeply appeal to me and my current spiritual "vibe."

The Order and Church call themselves "Luciferian." They chose that name as it has some tradition behind it as a religious and magical practice devoted to Lucifer as the bringer of light to humanity, a Promethean figure, the Serpent in the Garden, giving mankind wisdom and knowledge against the orders of an unjust God. They identify with all such figures in the history of religion, whether it is Satan, Lilith, Set, Tiamat, Azazel, Ahriman, the list goes on.  Hence the Church being of the "Adversarial Light." The Adversary throughout religious history is their inspiration, being seen as the being or force inside humanity that drives mankind towards individuality, wisdom, rebelliousness against orthodoxy. It uses many Luciferian or Satanic symbols but calls people to learn about other religions and mythologies to gain insight into the Adversarial Light in all its guises. They believe also that this light can sometimes come cloaked in darkness, something I have experienced personally many many times.

The Order contains both atheists and theists. It does not direct you to believe in any God or Goddess as real or not, it lets you make up your own mind. I personally believe there is some kind of divine energy in the universe, in the Void I speak of, somewhere within us as well. But the Order is all about self-empowerment, whether you believe in a deity or not. The use of magic, frequently chaos styled magic (which suits me perfectly) is performed in the quest for this self-empowerment. I have not read much on their magical practices so I can't comment in depth on how I see that fitting into my own spiritual practices. You are charged with finding the divine within, the divine adversary, the divine non-conformist, the divine you that we all contain.

As this path is about improving the self and about being unrestricted by the moral codes of any God, it is considered a Left Hand Path. As opposed to a Right Hand Path, which generally thinks a great deal about doing good for others and frequently pays a great deal of heed to moral codes. I believe, however, that Left Hand Paths are mostly in agreement that one should not take the directive to focus on self-improvement as being a directive to be a jerk to your loved ones or treat people like garbage for no reason or act arrogant beyond one's abilities to back it up. It's more about self-confidence, building a better self. And a better self will better help your loved ones. And, since we're all inter-connected anyway, it will probably help other people as well.

It seems blasphemous or ridiculous to most people in Western Civilization to consider oneself on the path to becoming a God or Goddess.  Either they believe that there is a divine order in this universe and that we are subservient to it or they believe there is no divine order including within humans. A Luciferian would view it differently. While not believing in the exact details of the Judeo-Christian Creation story, they give some credence to the words of the serpent who promised that eating of the fruit of the tree would make one like to God Himself. And they believe that this adversarial spirit has kept this promise and given us all something of the Godly within and that it is our prerogative, actually, our DUTY, to discover this and grow it to its maximum potential. The atheistic in the Order still believe that they are themselves Earthly Gods and Goddesses. And the theists believe they are the equals of any Gods, Goddesses or Spirits they may believe in. There is no groveling before a Supreme Being. There is no threat of punishment. There is only freedom and living as yourself and the quest to gain more insight.

The Adversarial Light. I've felt it my whole life. It was with me when I was a child and had unlimited imagination and creativity. It was with me later when I began to doubt Christianity and every other form of major religion. Why so many rules? Why the demands for faith? Why the need to impress upon us a fear of suffering after this life unless we obeyed? The Serpent has long been hissing in my ear. I may not join The Order or the Church, but I will investigate further and I think it can only help me in the long run to becoming The Entity I wish to be.

Some Further Thoughts On The Mystical Void As Satan

I have been scouring the Internet lately and finding a ton of information on Theistic Satanism, Gnostic Satanism, Gnostic Luciferianism, non-Gnostic Luciferianism, various schools of regular Gnosticism.... I've come to the conclusion that there are people out there with far better qualifications to discuss this than I have. They must have spent literally hundreds of hours studying these subjects. I can't honestly say I agree with all their conclusions. But, one thing no one is more of an expert on than I am is my own personal take on spiritual matters.

In my last post, I referred to the Mystical Void as Satan in my worldview. For a Void to be Mystical, it would seem that it must not be a void as perceived by a normal human observer. To the average man or woman, a void would seem to be just emptiness. But I have postulated that the Void is the very substance of our consciousness. I have explained in detail my reasons for believing the consciousness of humankind to be of a Void nature. And for a Void to have a name, even just a name I fancy giving it, that's not in keeping with how we people view voids.

I briefly went into why I name the Void "Satan." Satan, as many of you know, literally means "Adversary." A true Void, a Mystical Void, a conscious Void would be an Adversary to all that we Westerners are taught to believe. It has some things in common with Eastern philosophy, to which I acknowledge a debt. God is seen to be the Eternal One and All. He is Fullness, not Voidness. This, despite the fact that his mystics always seem to describe him in negative terms: ineffable, found behind a cloud of unknowing, beyond the possibility of description in words. Yet, the Bible claims to have captured all He wanted us to know about Him in words. So, why this peering further in mystical contemplation? It's no surprise that many, many religious groups feel that mystics are misguided, potentially heretical, maybe even dangerous. They get a taste of pure consciousness, the Adversary to the Creator of the World and Heaven and Hell.

How does a Mystical Void oppose an allegedly all-loving, all-powerful Creator? First of all, it claims to be an even deeper foundation of existence than the One Who calls Himself God is. It suggests that whether this universe was created by God, burst out in a big bang, or always has and always will exist, that it lies behind it, always lurking in the pantheistic concept of every iota of matter having a trace of consciousness. Consciousness borrowed from the Void. A Void has no moral laws, no promises of salvation or reward or punishment. A Void calls nothing sin, it leaves defining that up to us and our polluted, not-pure-consciousness minds to decide. Like Satan, it is a tempter. A tempter to live a life of extremes, because in the end we will be absorbed into the Void we all came from. A tempter to see life as not a set of rules and What Would Jesus Do? moments but simply the stage on which our pure consciousness tastes and experiences the realm of non-Void. The Creator may give us life and form but it is the Adversary that gives us the awareness of life and form and the blank slate on which to record our impressions received from life and form. Whether one places a great deal of value on this life and regards it as the greatest of gifts or if one hates it and views it as a curse, the Void does not judge. It merely registers the sensations received on that sliver of itself, the individual consciousness. Does it know anything? Does it hear prayers? I do not know but I pray and contemplate anyway. It sometimes comes to me disguised as a Devil, whispering to me great heresies and blasphemies. I love it with all my heart because it is the one thing, no matter how mentally or physically infirm I may become, that I know I will never lose. The Satanic Void is my soul. It does not promise to save me for it does not presuppose any situations that require me being saved. My essence will be returned to it at the end of my earthly life. And it will lie beyond the universe of life and form and matter and watch Gods come and go and rest in complete tranquility for all eternity.

Theistic Satanism

A friend who is as close as family asked me what Theistic Satanism meant recently and I've been struggling to put it into words. She's a devout Christian and this is obviously not an easy subject to go into with someone who is that spiritually far away. But I'm going to try. I apologize in advance for any erroneous or incomplete information. I am far from an expert in this area and learn a lot as time goes on. I also do not intend to come up with an exhaustive list of every kind of Theistic Satanist on the planet. There's almost as many different beliefs as there are practitioners.

In it's absolute most basic form, Theistic Satanism believes in a power they call "Satan" as real, an existing being, a divinity of some sort. This differs from Non-Theistic Satanism which is essentially worship of the self. It is usually associated with the Church of Satan founded by Anton Szandor LaVey. He thought of Satan as a force or symbol of man's inner nature. Theistic Satanists view their Satan as real, outside themselves.

The most commonly thought of Satanists are the types seen in movies and in some metal bands that pretend to be Satanic to shock people. These are the people who claim that Satan really is a fallen angel, all that God calls evil is actually good, and that Satan will rise again and, despite being an angel created by this All-Powerful Lord will somehow actually defeat Him. The number of Theistic Satanists who fall into this category is allegedly rather small, done on the amount of research I've done into it. Most other Theistic Satanists, while believing in things that would be blasphemous to Christians don't give the Judeo-Christian God the importance to declare Him the actual "Creator" of Satan.

There are some who believe Satan and God are equal or nearly equal forces fighting some cosmic battle. I do not know much about this form of belief so I will not go heavily into it. I do not know what these people actually feel God and Satan represent.

Then there are the Satanists who believe Satan is a God or one of a number of Gods and Goddesses in a more pagan fashion. They may practice magic or perform other rituals. They may take him to be the horned God that predates most, if not all, other religions in Western Civilization. He represents sexuality and freedom and can give power to His disciples. He may be worshiped and prayed to and, in some cases, other Gods and/or Goddesses are also worshiped and prayed to.

Then there is one I have done some research on and have figured some things out about. The things I say here do not hold true for all followers of this branch. They may each have their own definitions. It is a Satanism based on Gnosticism. It was not uncommon for Gnostics, Christian and otherwise, to believe that the God of the Old Testament was a being called the Demiurge. Not a true God. A being who elevated Himself to the position of sole God and enslaved humanity and introduced all the horrors of life into the world. A Gnostic Satanist may see the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve as a bringer of knowledge and as freeing them from the ignorance the Demiurge intended to keep them in. Some believe serpent/Satan/what have you, is the true Son of or the actual manifestation of the True God who lies behind the Demiurge and wants freedom and insight and wisdom from humankind. To free us from the bonds of moral codes and servitude to a being who cursed us all to die someday and threatened us with the torments of the damned if we did not follow Him. This is not comprehensive. I'm sure every Gnostic Satanist would have a different spin on it. However, this is a taste of what some of them may believe. It is the area I find myself closest to in my personal life.

Another aspect of my own personal belief is that the Mystical Nihilist Void that contains some kind of Consciousness beyond the ken of any mortal is that the Void itself is Satan and that our consciousness dissolves in Him when we die. Why do I call it Satan? The negation of all the things we've been told through the centuries about God and what He wants and demands from us. Do I like to shock people? Partially. I like to shock people into thinking about why they believe what they do. I want to shock people into seeing things in a different light. But it's not all shock value. It's a purging. I was brought up in a very Catholic household, at least after my father left. My mom was in church every week, I was even an (unmolested) altar boy for a good long time. And I asked a lot of questions. And the answers to those questions stuck in my mind. And a few times over the years, I drifted back to various forms of Christianity and eventually the same doubts and questions and inconsistencies drove me away again. So, it is a catharsis. To use the name Satan, to brand an upside down cross into my left bicep, to reject, not God as such, but God as the Judeo-Christian tradition, followed by Islam, has portrayed Him, is a much-needed release of spiritual energy that would otherwise be spent in meaningless battles with Christians over their beliefs. Instead, I can believe things are very opposite from what a Christian believes but still be able to have Christian friends, because my utter rejection of their concept of God means that their beliefs are no longer a threat to me. I can listen to them, understand what they say, what they do, why they do it, love them as people, and not need to feel the burning desire to drag them kicking and screaming away from Christ. I am my own personal Antichrist. That's valid for my life and my life alone and that is enough for me. One spirit is enough for me to worry about.

I am still doing research. I asked a member of a black metal band, Infernus of Gorgoroth, what his take on Gnostic Satanism was. He hasn't responded yet, don't know if he will, but if he gives me any insights and I think they would add to this post and I get his permission to post them, I will update later. It may be quite a shock to some people to discover that someone who embraces Satanism can be a kind, friendly, loving person who tries his best to harm no one. Christians have long declared that good behavior can only come from their God. I believe what Christians term "morals" are just the wisdom implanted in humans either divinely or genetically or both to attempt to guide us away from completely destroying ourselves. They are guidelines. The guidelines change. Seek freedom, seek knowledge, seek to break free of your bonds. That is how I try to live my life.

Depression, Not As Sorrow Or Sadness, But As Despair

There seem to be many grades of what people like to call depression. Some people think it's just "the blues," a kind of down feeling, maybe makes you drink a bit too much or have trouble sleeping. Then there's the gloom of deep sorrow and sadness. Staring out windows. No energy. Physical pain. No joy in things that once used to be perceived as delightful. But there is a deeper level. There is a level of depression that confines you to your own personal Hell. It is the depression of absolute, monstrous despair.

Some theologians call despair the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. As if it were a choice. Despair is not a choice, it is a disease of the soul that no amount of prayer or kind words can heal. Some would say that despair is the opposite of hope. That is like saying a lion is the opposite of a zebra. Despair does not show up at the far pole of hope. Despair consumes hope. Rends it, tears it, rips bloody chunks from it. If one has not experienced despair, one cannot fathom despair. Despair even sometimes permits you some glimmer of hope just for the sake of snuffing it out. Despair is a disease with a thought process, a plan. Despair works tirelessly to wear you down and swallow the occasional flickers of hope that may alight. Hope is despair's food. When you have the disease, it is like a cancer and hope is like the healthy cells that get taken over. Despair's plan is one of ultimate self-destruction, for despair intends to destroy the being that carries it, thus wiping itself out.

To all the people who think despair is a sin, a failing, try to imagine how it feels like to be told you are loved and for the words to be swallowed up by an internal darkness that is beyond your control. Try to imagine what it is like to never know if you will be able to make it through the next day, hour, minute. Try to imagine that if you believe in any kind of Hell, that you think it would be preferable to the existence you have now. Try to imagine. But you've never experienced it. So you can't imagine it. You can only judge. Judging from beyond the reach of despair. This is where depression finds its purest expression. In the sin of cutting oneself from all imaginary help from beings divine and mortal; cutting oneself off against one's will, simply because one has had all that is good inside them served up as a feast for the beast despair.

If you either think you understand or think you are in a place to judge, think again. You do not understand, you are not in a place to judge. When all hope is gone and a person is simply waiting to die, beyond even praying for death, beyond even being able to bring about their own death, that is the Hell you seek in your lakes of fire and canonical texts. Despair is nearly the ultimate self-destruction. The only thing that subverts its plan is when the slightest hope that one would be better off dead arises and there is a suicide and the person and their disease both perish. Judge that only when you can say you have stared it in the face.

One Nihilist's Take On "The Meaning Of Life"

As most of my readers know, I suffer from severe depression. I frequently have thoughts of suicide. Dealing with thoughts of suicide, even if you don't plan on acting upon them, you just simply have the thoughts in your head, sort of inevitably forces you to ponder whether there's any meaning or purpose or point to life. It is the core question one faces. If a profoundly nihilistic individual was faced with thoughts of suicide and came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no hope of any meaning, there might very well be one less person walking around. But suicidally depressed people carry on all the time, as do nihilists, living life while in the midst of doubting that it is worth anything.

I was contemplating suicide, not actually doing it but having rather obsessive thoughts about it, last night. I came to the conclusion that I couldn't go through with it. This conclusion did not come from a fear of death. It did not come from concern over what it might do to those who love me. It arose, in the most bizarre fashion, from the fact that I simply felt I had to know what was going to happen in the future in Doctor Who. Yes. A nerdy sci-fi show is keeping me from ending it all. Trivial? Perhaps. But it points to something larger. Life has any meaning that you give it. The ultimate question of existence, "What is the meaning of life?" can be summed up quite simply as, "Whatever you find the meaning in." This accounts for the wide range of religions and politics and subcultures and national identities and people with mundane, hateful jobs that they go to day after day dreading. It accounts for every single person who has ever lived or ever will live. Even the suicide finds some glimmer of meaning in death. We don't have to examine the cosmos or 1000 page philosophical or theological tomes to discover the meaning of life. We just have to look at ourselves and our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. Those are the meaning of life for us.

The meaning of life is as unique and individual as a fingerprint. No two are exactly alike. And the meaning of life is not always something positive either. Since he's in the news so much lately, take Bin Laden as an example. His life had a meaning. It was a meaning that made it a good call on our part to kill him. But it was still a meaning. He believed in it. Other people's meanings were to cut short his meaning. They did so. And on it goes. One person's meaning may conflict with another person's. My meaning would conflict with someone's who was trying to convert me to be a Southern Baptist. But there are parts of my meaning that make it possible for me to be friends with people who are Southern Baptist and parts of their meaning allowing them to be friends with me.

Saying life has a meaning is not necessarily anti-nihilist. As a matter of fact, it is profoundly nihilist when one considers the fact that I consider the meaning of life to be an arbitrary conglomeration of loves and hates, pleasures and aversions, joys and sufferings in a person's life. It is outside the bounds of almost every orthodox religion and also beyond pure solipsism to say that we are the meaning of our lives. Religion would have it that some other being or beings are the meaning. Solipsism would lock that meaning up inside the individual's head. For me, my devotion to seeing more Doctor Who was an acknowledgement that there was something outside myself that had meaning. But that meaning belongs to me. So it is neither solipsistic or transcendent. For some people, God is the meaning of their life. This seems to make the meaning something transcendent. But really, the meaning for them is in the immanence. The relationship they cultivate with God. The mind can't grasp something eternally transcendent and beyond all human notions of being. So it relies instead of following a given deity's laws or prayer or worship. The meaning is still within the person. If it were an absolute meaning, everyone would find their meaning in that. But as I stated before, to a suicide, death can be a meaning. We may not agree with everyone's chosen meaning(s) but we should at least try to understand that for that individual, no matter how dreadful their actions may be, that person they are is the meaning of their life. It can be a terrible thing, this meaning of life. It can also be glorious. It can also be a nerdy sci-fi show. It is complex and ever changing. But it is our own, each of us owns our own meaning. Even if your meaning is like my nihilistic, severely depressed meaning, you will save yourself a lot of grief wondering "Why?" if you just embrace your meaning of life as simply the person you are.

Xasthur

Years ago, I met a friend online. We both shared an interest in Black Metal. He asked me if I'd ever heard a band called Xasthur. I said I had not heard the project but was familiar with Malefic (Scott C.) who pretty much did the project entirely on his own. I had read a fascinating interview with him and was looking forward to hearing the music. My friend sent me his impossible to find demo album in mp3s and had me listen to it. I was hooked. I immediately bought everything I could. The past few years, money has been a struggle, so I have fallen a bit behind on his releases. It saddens me as I think he offered the best US Black Metal we've yet heard and now he has broken up the band and will continue his musical endeavors under an as-yet undisclosed name. From the sound of it, the project will not be Black Metal. He seems to have tired of the genre.

I got the CD "Nocturnal Poisoning" when it was new. There was a contact e-mail address in the booklet. I decided to take a chance and write the man who was creating music that had such a powerful effect on me. It turns out, he's somewhat misanthropic and withdrawn, but can be very pleasant and friendly when you approach him in the right fashion.  I exchanged quite a few e-mails with him. One time, quite drunk, I had Janine carve "Xasthur" into my chest with a razor. We took photos of it, still bleeding, and sent him the pics. He seemed a bit bemused but not at all disapproving. He even asked my permission to use that photo in a retrospective album that was in the planning stages but never materialized. I was bummed the project never got off the ground but it was cool that he made the offer.

The music itself is the sound of despair. He does not sound like any other Black Metal band, past or present. You can detect influences but the final product is always uniquely Xasthur. I don't know if Scott suffered some kind of severe traumatic experiences in his life or, like me, was born with a dark, hopeless spirit. Perhaps some of both. The music is surreal, otherworldly, inhuman, twisted, incomprehensibly bleak. His vocals are distorted beyond recognition shrieks of agony rising from deep in the mix, adding to the otherworldly aspect. It is like a haunting. Each album has its own unique identity but is unmistakably Xasthur. No other artist could create what Malefic creates. It was very trendy for awhile to be a Black Metal fan and love Xasthur and then it became equally trendy to despise the band. I'm sure Malefic never cared about either trend and neither did I. I find a kindred spirit in the music and the lyrics, when those are made available. I will always cherish the connection I forged with the music and the artist. I am even thinking of finding out if that old e-mail address is still a viable contact option. I miss talking to him.

Lastly, the coolest thing of all. Janine loved to surprise me. One day I woke up and she said she had something for me. She brought it in and I unwrapped it and it was a copy of the impossible to find demo my friend had sent me the mp3's for long before. She'd gotten it off eBay for near $100. I was thrilled and she was happy to see how happy she'd made me. I wrote him to tell him about it. And he said he didn't like the version that he'd released, that he was releasing a new version of it. He asked me for my address so he could send me a copy of the new version for free. So, now I have a CD that was personally given to me by one of my favorite artists of all time. I think that says worlds about the kind of guy he is when he meets a real fan.

Scott, wherever your musical journeys take you, stay true to your inner vision. It led you to create some of my favorite music and, even if your next undertaking is completely different, if you are true to yourself it will be no less magnificent.

The Worship of Death

I live with Death. The eventual death of my friends and family. The death of those I have personally lost over the years. The death of every person I hear about who has passed. My own death. We all live with Death. However, I am obsessed with Death. In a very unhealthy way, I think. And I have been for most of my life. There is a Cathedral of Death in my heart and mind. Perpetual adoration and perpetual terror. I fear it in the way a Christian fears God, as the ultimate mystery and judge of our lives. I worship it in the same way, as the ultimate goal of life. I love my friends and family, I love my pets, I love Freya and my conception of the Void. But I prostrate myself before and pray to Death.

For most of the years that I can remember, I've felt at least a hint of being suicidal. Since I was quite young. Even before thoughts of taking my own life appeared, there was a longing for and a fear of Death. I've believed in many religions; I was brought up Catholic and have explored other kinds of Christianity as well as Buddhism, various pagan and heathen faiths, Hinduism, Theistic and Non-Theistic Satanism, the list goes on and on. The one constant was my intense fascination with and terror of and desire for Death. My denial of Life. Even at my most heathen, a very life-affirming religion that teaches you should enjoy and make the most of this life while you've got it and not live for the hereafter, I have pined for Death and something other than this existence, this life. Life is the Enemy, the source of all suffering, the one thing that must be rejected over and over again until finally it is gone. Where some see God (or Gods or Goddesses) I see Death. It intrigues me, because a big part of me thinks I will be gone after this life and, like most of us, I have a hard time imagining this universe without me in it. We can be so egocentric. It tempts me, because I hate the alternative. The parts of me that do believe in some kind of afterlife yearn for it. It is always there in my mind.

I honestly do not know what other people's experiences of Death are. Knowing they will die. Knowing everyone they love is either dead or will die. It is not something one can easily bring up in casual conversation. If there is an animal on this planet other than humanity that knows beforehand of Death, I would be interested to know what that creature's thoughts about it were. Is it possible there is a creature out there that understands Death's nature better than we do? I've seen footage of elephants doing something that absolutely looked to be some kind of funeral service for one of their fallen brethren. Do they know something we do not? We may never know.

If my fears, hopes, worries, neuroses, psychoses, what have you, are correct that we all just blink out, I can't help but ponder what non-existence is like. It scares me but it is also so alluring. If I look back to my earliest memory and then push my mind farther back than that, there is a comforting nothingness, that lack of Being, lack of Life, that I so crave. I can almost feel what it must be like to not exist. It is dreadful and yet seductive. If I imagine a life after this, I can't help but think it must be better. When you've experienced really bad and know of much worse, it's hard to imagine some other life offering up greater torments than this one. Certainly no visions of Hell are enough to make me walk the path of the people of God,  affirming Life in words while denying it in secret, living not for Life but for Heaven. The possibility of a paradise after this existence, in the bosom of Freya perhaps, is enough to make me celebrate and leap for joy and run to throw myself off the nearest cliff. The pinnacle of despair would be reached if I found out absolutely that reincarnation was true. This life again and again. No! It must not be. I would live to keep killing myself over and over again, down the eons, until my spirit and consciousness had exhausted every possibility for life and just collapsed from exhaustion into extinction. Give me my awful but lovely Mistress, Death. I keep teaming up adjectives in this post because my thoughts on Death are so opposed but complimentary. I can't seem to have one thought about Death without a bunch of other thoughts popping up too.

I'm sure the people who know me and are reading this are, by now, concerned that I will do myself in, possibly before I reach the conclusion of this blog post. Well, I have doubts it'll happen that soon. Because there is just enough fear of Death in me and because I have promised those I love to fight at all costs, I will most likely survive to see another day.  But my prayers to Death, those will continue. Services in my Cathedral will go on.

I think of how no matter how divided humanity is, we are all joined in this one thing, this thing that we all must experience someday, even if there is no "we" left at that moment any longer. We share Death with each other and yet it is so often unspoken. While my mania for Death is probably quite sick, I do not think it is any sicker than those who would do everything they can in order to hide Death away and pretend it doesn't exist. It is our common bond, the final journey we all must take. In my faith, this is celebrated, for it is the only way we can achieve any kind of unity. Whether we go away for good or pass into some glorious other world, we all will find that we are on the same road. The road to Death, always thick with traffic, enshrouded in mystery, a promise and a threat at the end of it all. Live if you must but die you will. Death - the perfect ending, no matter what your life may have been.

Freya

I may be nihilistic, but I also have a soft side. Specifically for Freya. How do I reconcile nihilism and Freya devotion? Good question. It's actually pretty easy. First of all, I don't force myself to reconcile them, I allow different aspects of my "self" to believe in them in different parts of my mind. It makes for less arguing among the selves if I don't try to force them all to stick to a party line. But there are some ways where it is possible to reconcile them if I care to.

Norse Gods and Goddesses are less absolute than the God of monotheist traditions. That doesn't mean their followers think they don't really exist. But they aren't some kind of litmus test for the truth. In the myths, the Gods and Goddesses are shown to be both fallible and mortal. That appeals to me. They make mistakes, they act on impulse, they can be slain, they know they don't have eternity. That makes them less black and white than a singular omnipotent, omniscient God, and this world has an awful lot of shades of gray. As I have implied in this blog many times, I am only in opposition to the idea of an absolute truth, not just the word "truth." They do not say, "Believe in me or be damned." They are friends and guides, not the only thing in the universe that means anything. There is much more to most heathens than that. Ways of living and behaving. Admittedly, I don't fit into a lot of these ways of living and behaving. I follow my own path. I think Freya understands. I try to avoid behaving in a way that would cause her to be ashamed of me calling her my patron deity. I just don't 100% fit into heathenry.

I have had a long relationship with Freya. I learned of the Norse myths when I was quite young and fell in love with her. For a long time, I thought about her and then would move on to other things. But she kept coming back into my life. She has given me a great deal of comfort in trying times. I honestly don't know whether I believe she is just a generic psychological archetype that I feel attracted to or if she's some kind of actual being. I don't worry about it too much. I have a lot of theories. But that's all they are, they're simply ideas. I don't know if I'll ever find out how valid any of them are. It really isn't important. What's important is the fact that I try to live a better life to do her name honor. That makes me a better person, even if I am not the best example of a heathen you could find.

So, yes, I deny absolute truth and still allow myself my subjective truths. Freya is one of those subjective truths I permit myself. I love her whether she exists in any way outside of stories and poems or not. I feel like she was somehow involved in getting Coco and me together, even if that simply means that an unconscious thought of her made me open my heart to love again. The only proof of her I need is the fact that she makes my life much better than it would be without it. What more proof could I want?

The Void Is True But Not Absolutely True, That's Why I Can Still Call Myself A Nihilist

I have written at length about the Void. What I think it is. Where it can be found. What it signifies. I believe it is true. I believe that in the sense that I think we all return to a state utterly devoid of being just like the one we arose from. But does that make it an absolute truth? I don't think so.

Is there a place where the Void exists? Yes, in a subjective human mind. That gleaming surface of consciousness that reflects back to us the objects presented to our awareness. We can experience something of it by emptying our mind of thoughts and sensations. We achieve something like it when we are sleeping dreamlessly. The act of trying to "remember" what happened before you were born is a thought similar to it. We all confront it at death. Even those of us with faith, for faith is always a leap into darkness. But even the most mystical experience of Void-ness does not give one the ability to pinpoint a location for the Void. We just know it's up here *points to head* somewhere and *waves arms around* out there in the sense that we can't ultimately know the true nature of anything. But "up here" and "out there" are filled with matter and energy, so they are not really a true representation of the Void.

If we can't measure it, dissect it, examine it, how can we say it absolutely exists? It just awaits us in moments of untainted consciousness and in death. The only way to truly experience it in an absolute sense is to die and that makes it something that can't be reported upon in an absolute sense. To not be anymore is an impossibility since the matter and energy that composed us will always exist in some form or another. And yet, the thing that makes us aware of that existence does the impossible: it goes completely away.

It is simple enough to understand that something that is impossible can't be absolutely true. It is less simple to understand that something that is impossible happens anyway despite it not being absolutely true. Our bodies arose from the same matter that made up the world of the dinosaurs and the same stuff that made up the bodies of the solar system before they had fully formed into their present shapes and sizes and energy levels. But we entered this world completely without prior experiences in our consciousness. And when we leave, all those experiences are no longer gazed upon by the faculties of our memory or our awareness. So those experiences as they subjectively happened to us and as we subjectively recalled them are lost forever. Something that is not matter, something that is not energy, something that appears from nothing, something that goes back to nothing, impossible truths that can't possibly be Absolute Truth.

R.I.P. Sarah Jane/Elisabeth Sladen

I found out today that the actress who played Sarah Jane, one of the greatest Doctor Who companions ever, died earlier from cancer. Elisabeth Sladen was my first ever nerd crush and I have wonderful memories over her dating back over 25 years. She was my first Doctor companion I ever saw. I'm heartbroken. At times like this, I find myself wishing I believed in something substantial after this life. I hate thinking of her basically just blinking out. But she will be remembered by many. I will miss you, Sarah Jane, I will miss you and your nutty adventures with all manner of nasty alien beings. You brought me great joy as a child and now great sorrow as an adult. It was all worth it, though. You are cherished in my memories.

Why Say Depressive Nihilism Is Wrong And Optimistic Idealism Is Right?

I just read a review of a book by E.M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided: Aphorisms, where the author of the criticism says that Cioran, because he was a depressive, projected his depression onto the world and saw it through a nihilistic but not true lens and that because he saw so much of himself in the world, his vision is skewed.

I take exception to this. It suggests that a depressive mindset lacks the lucidity for insight into the world.  Most depressives have been found to be very lucid. They are not only capable of deep insight, they are capable of insight that is TOO deep. They possess a deep knowledge of themselves and, as many psychological thinkers have pointed out, a deep awareness of one's own humanity is a deep awareness of humanity in general. The depressive shares many characteristics with the general mass of non-depressed mankind. I'd go so far as to say that even the most optimistic and positive person in the world has at least one closet depressive personality. Try to tell me that there are people who have never had a moment of vertigo when contemplating the absolute inevitability of death and the fact that all we have to comfort ourselves at those times is whatever beliefs about another life we may have.

Also, what exactly makes a more positive, less depressive outlook inherently more realistic? We have no proof that any of our views are objectively, concretely, absolutely correct. There is no voice from the Heavens in post-Biblical days saying, "Don't worry, be happy." What if the depressive is not "mistaken?" If Cioran were so off-base, why is it that many people find so much enlightening in what he has written? Truth is a jungle, you can find anything hiding in there. Just because a truth doesn't appeal to you because it is too negative doesn't make it untrue.

Cioran was a genius. In honor of his life of thoughts on decay, despair, art, the inescapable fact of personal death, culture, religion, I am going to change my picture on my blog to a picture of him. The depressive in me sees an entire, dizzying infinity of insight in his work. I learn more about myself and the universe every time I read him. Don't believe the hype that would have you believe a bleak nihilistic worldview is incorrect just because it isn't pleasing to contemplate. Eternity was not created with aesthetic pleasure as its goal.

One More Thought on Logic

In considering this further, one other accusation I level against logic is that logic always has an agenda. Supposedly "pure" logic derives from a set of circumstances ranging from brain chemistry to the last good book the individual read. The agenda is whatever "seems right" to the person based on what they've experienced and been taught to think. The other kind of logic is more insidious. It is the person who comes  up with a theory of some sort, philosophical, political, artistic, religious, whatever, and then proceeds to find logical reasons after the fact to justify their "breakthrough." Logic is happier than any big cat to jump through flaming hoops. So, next time you are confronted with a perfectly logical proposal, ask yourself, "What does this person want from me?"

On Dealing with the Suicide of a Loved One

This is going to be my most personal entry thus far. As some of you already know, I lost my girlfriend of almost five years to suicide in June of 2007. It has been no easy feat to regain any of the emotional ground I lost when that happened, there's still a lot of work to be done. I grieve every day, even though I have a beautiful fiancee who is firmly on my side. Thankfully, she does not feel threatened by Janine's ghost and, when I am troubled by thoughts of her, I can easily speak to Coco and she will understand. I need to do this on a fairly regular basis.

My first thoughts when I heard the news were simultaneously, "This can't be happening," and "Oh, my God, I knew this would happen." I think the cognitive dissonance with those two thoughts clashing added to the feeling of unreality that many people experience when they lose someone close to them. I was shocked, horrified, heartbroken, but not surprised. We had often in our years together discussed our mutual suicidal tendencies. If I'd really been courageous enough to think about it, I might have suspected from the beginning that it would end that way. She'd attempted multiple times before she'd met me. But, in the dopey way that love has, I figured somehow I could save her. Now, I am haunted by the fear that somehow, in some way, I might have contributed to her end.

When we got to Philadelphia for her memorial service, I was deeply moved by the anguish in the faces of her family. It mirrored what I felt inside but I don't know if they could read it in me. I tend to hide my emotions when they are that extreme. I came away with the conclusion that, despite my suicide attempt on the night of my 19th birthday, despite the fact that I'd always predicted that I would someday die by my own hands, despite my harrowing depressive bouts, that I could never do that to those I loved. I was not angry at her. Never have been. I understood all too well the pain that drove her that far. But I promised myself that I'd never hurt the people I cared about in that way, abandon them with all that agony.

But, something strange happens when people who have dealt with suicidal thoughts and feelings are confronted with the suicide of someone they love. And I've actually read about this in a book, so I know I'm not the only one this has happened to. Knowing someone who went through with it can make it seem like you now have permission to do it, it legitimizes the act. You feel that if they could do it, so can you. I began to forget my vow. Suicidal thoughts started creeping in again. Before I met Coco, I strongly considered doing whatever it took to rejoin Janine.

So, I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. I made a vow never to do that to people I care about, and yet, the pain I find in living has never gone away. I feel it just as acutely as I did before, perhaps even more so. The thoughts are my constant companions. I contemplate my own demise at length. I sometimes find myself hoping to be diagnosed with a terminal illness so that would take the responsibility out of my hands. Some people say it's the easy way out. But anyone who has lived with severe depression knows there's no easy ways at all. Nothing is easy. The decision to end one's life is not something people do because they think it's the easy way out, they do it because they feel it's the only way. All other options have vanished. Hope has miscarried and been buried in a shallow grave. You find yourself at the point of ground zero of your own destruction coming down from the sky. It's never the easy way out.

I am so sad that Janine is gone. I wish her pain could have been relieved in some other way. That said, I am glad she is no longer experiencing that pain. She did the only thing she thought she could have done. I will never stop hurting from that but I have made a certain amount of peace with the fact that she made her mind up, planned it all out thoroughly, and did what she did because her mental illness closed every single other door on her, as far as she could see from her perspective. I support the right, yes, the right, of any human being to terminate their own life at any time. Only they can say if their pain is too much to bear. I hope it never happens to me again but, if it did, I would mourn dreadfully again and I would understand again. Anyone reading this who knows me personally, you know I fight. You know I do everything in my power to keep the demons at bay. But I was rash when I made my vow. I can't predict my future. I don't know where the torment will take me. I can't promise it will never be me. But, I can say this: every single day I have managed to scrape through in my life has been because of the love of my family and friends. So, I will continue to fight. I won't give in easily. But, if I ever do find myself washed away by the despair, know that I only lived as long as I did because you all loved me and I loved you.

Thoughts Against Logic

This post is going to be a little unusual to me in that it will in a way justify what I consider the sometimes insane things people will believe in order to follow a religion. However, I have come to the conclusion that much of what I believe is equally irrational and unjustifiable by any means but having a gut feeling about it, so I'm going to attack the concept of logic being a dominant factor in human lives.

People like to think of themselves as logical. At least many people do. Even emotion-based people have this belief that their emotions are based on logical principles. The ancient Greeks fell all over themselves in an orgy of praising logic. (Here, I'd like to advise everyone to read some ancient Greek philosophers and find all the ridiculous conclusions their logic led them to. Yes, they were brilliant, just for the act of thinking alone, but they were far from always correct.) We like to rely on science and mathematics for evidence that things in this world follow a logical path. We're wrong.

Two words. Quantum mechanics. Okay, maybe that's simply because we don't understand whatever lies behind quantum mechanics but the fact is, nothing we have learned up to this point conclusively shows that what happens on the quantum level is in any way logical. And since everything is made up of those particles and waves and waves that behave as particles and particles that behave as waves, then even though on the large scale, we come up with equations and theories that seem to justify belief in logic, on the smallest scale, logic has yet to show itself.

Two more words. Human relationships. The most logical person in the world will do illogical things when it comes to people they love. The most logical person in the world will either maintain a healthy emotional distance from his loved ones so that he or she can remain objective about said relationships and, in the end, lose those people for lack of intimacy or else realize that people need love and care and affection and, at least on a surface level, show this for the sake of maintaining the relationship, even though their logic is telling them contradictory things: "Logically, my loved ones need this type of relationship with me and I must maintain it in order to keep their love" is one thing and the other is "Logically, it is best to remain impartial and objective but I cannot do that if I follow my other logical imperative to treat them with as much subjective affection as I can." Human relationships cannot live on objective logic. They thrive on tangled motives, conflicting emotions, mutual needs and shared likes and dislikes, the occasional good, old-fashioned argument just to keep things spicy, anything but a Vulcan-like logic.

It has been said many times before that emotions are not logical. They can be formed into words that make them seem justifiable but they never behave in the pattern of a satellite orbiting a solar body.

Another thing that I have not seen as much said about as the emotional thing is that logic is socially, religiously, culturally, educationally conditioned. It may seem logical for someone in a crime family to continue that criminal behavior because it has been lucrative for his or her kin over a long period of time. However, it would be illogical for a pampered suburban teenager to become a drug dealer and risk ruining their life because they want the most expensive pair of sneakers in the school. Every faith has its theology, every school has its bias, every culture has its identity. Things SEEM logical in those contexts. But only in those contexts. If you take the theology and look at it from a perspective of a different religion, it may be aesthetically pleasing if one is not openly hostile to the other religion, but one's own religion will always seem more logical. The most reactionary and the most revolutionary members of a society stand at opposite poles of that society but they are both acting on principles which their specific culture has told them are logical and they don't even see their kinship in that.

On a personal level.... being a mystical nihilistic Freya worshiping theistic Satanist who likes Fraggle songs is completely illogical. But the idea of many selves that can all be different things makes sense to me based, partially on my sense of logic, but also on just a gut level intuition. Faith. Some kind of faith burns in the heart of every truly alive human being. I do not agree with all faiths. Some I actively want to wipe from the face of the planet. But the alternative to these faiths, all of them equally illogical, is a world of non-sentient computers. I think even sentient computers would develop some forms of illogical behavior. Data kept a holographic image of Tasha Yar to remind himself of her after her death. What's logical about that, android? Certainly his memory banks had preserved her image in his head well-enough. Okay, it's a fictional example. But I think we can all see how bringing sentience into the equation with machines would make them behave in ways that would defy traditional logic.

So go forth and be logical in your own completely prejudiced and wearing blinders way. We can't be anything but the creatures of highly conditional logic that we are. Do not expect my logic to agree with your logic or your logic to agree with Aristotle's or Thomas Aquinas's or any other smartypants you want to mention. I will follow my logic because it is my faith and my passion. Faith and passion don't need to be true to be real. Faith and passion merely make us more human.

Judas Iscariot, the Band, Not the Guy in the Bible

Judas Iscariot, almost exclusively the work of a guy named Andrew Harris who used the pseudonym Akhenaten. If you don't know the origin of that name, Google it, it's an interesting story. Akhenaten was very inspired by people like Friederich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, William Blake, to form his essentially one man band with the idea of spreading nihilistic thought and anti-Christian sentiments around the Black Metal underground.

Frankly, I can't understand most of the lyrics and the booklets don't contain them, which I think is a shame. It does add to the mystery, but if he's so intent on his message, it would be nice to be able to know what it was. Nevertheless, I love his raspy/sometimes screamy vocals, despite the fact that they make the lyrics almost completely incomprehensible.

I have read some interviews with him and he came off as kind of surly and extremely intense. I guess that's par for the course in the Black Metal world. He takes his philosophy of nihilism and ridding the world of Christianity very seriously, that's for sure. I'm nihilistic myself, but I am guessing it is of a different breed than his. He clings tight to his Nietzsche and, while I do love reading Nietzsche, I'd have to say I don't really think a whole lot like him. I've been influenced by him in a lot of ways but I also don't agree with a lot of what he says, I just enjoy the fact that he inspires me to think for myself to figure out what exactly I do think. To me, that's the main job of a thinker as opposed to a philosopher, as described in the post "Against Systematic Thought" below. A thinker writes to make others think, a philosopher writes to be right.

Anyway, this is all drifting off from Judas Iscariot. The project definitely sounds nihilistic and angry. His rasps and the monotonous, hypnotic riffs cascade over you like sweet oblivion. When he is ranting against Christianity, he sounds truly possessed. Again, I wish I could read the lyrics and figure out exactly what he was thinking that is making him sound so furious. Having been furious with Christianity before (sorry to my Christian friends but it's true) I can certainly understand why he sounds the way he does. But his insights, if any, would be nice to have.

 One thing I haven't seen mentioned in most of the reviews of Judas Iscariot that I've read is the splendid artwork adorning almost all the album covers. He really took care with the packaging. Each album feels like its accompanying artwork, which I feel is an admirable thing to pay attention to. It adds to the whole experience. Apparently he put out a nihilism 'zine for a time, I can't remember what it was called, but I'd love to get a hold of some of the issues of that and see if I can get with his point of view on all the things he raves about. I'll have to find the name of the 'zine and type it into eBay I suppose.

But, if you are one of the few people who will be looking at this page with an interest in nihilistic Black Metal and you, for some unfathomable reason, haven't checked out Judas Iscariot, I'd recommend doing so. The playing is sloppy, but I find it endearingly sloppy and actually it adds to the atmosphere and intensity. Especially in the first part of his career when he was taking on the drumming duties himself. He was never a gifted drummer. But it never mattered to me. He was a gifted songwriter and vocalist and adept at setting a dark mood, that's all I ever asked for. If you're one of those Black Metal fans who avoid US Black Metal at all costs, well, that's not very smart because you're missing out on bands like Judas Iscariot, who compare quite well with much of the European Black Metal over the years. And, if you're not interested in Black Metal, well, you'll have to endure more posts on it in the future, because I love it. So, deal! :)