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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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.

What is the Nature of Consciousness?

I am currently reading The Gay Science by Nietzsche and I disagree with him about one of his points. It got me to thinking about how to put into words my personal take on the matter. This post is the result.

Basically, he states that consciousness in man or animal is a late development and that consciousness is crude and our instincts, rather than our consciousness, are what have preserved us as the human race. He discusses the need for further development of consciousness, to make of it something more useful. However, he never really mentions what he means by "consciousness." If it is self-consciousness, or consciousness of some specific thing or another, then perhaps he is right. Perhaps it is a late development and it has been so far underdeveloped and less useful than we might think.

I, personally, see consciousness in a different light. I don't see consciousness as the act of being aware of some particular object, be it self-hood or a tree frog or a leg cramp. I see it as essentially being the barest possible ability to become aware of something. I'm jumping into a huge philosophical warzone here and there are many opinions about it. Some would define consciousness in such a way that only humans and possibly the most evolved mammals on Earth are capable of possessing it. Others go the opposite direction and say that consciousness is somehow ascribable to anything in existence, down to the smallest particles of matter. I tend to lean more towards the latter. At the very least, I give lifeforms all the benefit of the doubt about matters of being conscious.

One of the big debates is whether something that is instinctive can be conscious or not. Is a plant or animal that runs entirely on genetic instincts conscious or is it not? If you say it is not, that instincts are not a form of consciousness, then you are saying that a creature that withdraws from something that damages its body is not actually aware in any way that its body is being damaged. I have my doubts about this. And it gets even crazier on the subatomic level, where particles seem to behave with a mysterious form of capability to be aware and "change their minds," among other tricks.

So, for me, when I discuss consciousness, I am not referring to any of the allegedly sacred things that people hold onto in order to make themselves feel superior to the rest of the animal kingdom. Not soul, not self-awareness, not a distinction between subject and object. I am referring simply to the absolute minimum capability to have any kind of awareness. Pure consciousness, as I see it, is like a movie screen. It is blank on its own, but it comes vividly alive when a film is shown upon it. That screen, it shows the projections of the various things we are aware of and makes them clear and perceptible to us. Without the screen, the image is a mess. But with the screen, which is not itself projecting anything, it becomes Casablanca or Dumb and Dumber. For me, the consciousness is that screen. People who have experienced states of pure consciousness often feel that time has elapsed very quickly without them noticing it. They may not be aware of any specific thing that might have occurred in their vicinity but they have reached that point where they are one with the blank screen and no film is being shown.

This, in a way, explains why I would never use a transporter on a Star Trek starship. It disassembles the body on a subatomic level and puts it back together again someplace else. But in my eyes, this is like showing a movie, burning the screen down, and showing it again on a different screen. The movie may look the same, but the original screen is gone. You have exchanged one piece of the ready-to-be-aware void of consciousness for a different one. The consciousness that is you will not continue since it is not a matter of particles.

And this is also why I subscribe a certain amount of consciousness to even the minutest particles in the universe. Because, it does not seem possible, unless you include some kind of divine intervention, which many people reading this will, for consciousness that is not innate to matter to suddenly manifest in certain specific arrangements of matter. It brings back the spirit/matter duality, which I personally want no part of. So, in a way, that means I give the potential for awareness of my fingers to the keyboard I am typing on. At least for the particles that make it up to become "aware" in their own way of changes in their temperature, speed, direction, etc. Just the possibility. I still do not believe that consciousness automatically implies an awareness of something, just the screen for the awareness to appear on.

This is our portion of Eternity. It suffuses the universe and is one with it while being completely unique and not susceptible to the laws of matter. The Christian mystics joining of immanence and transcendence again, only not of God, but of Void. The blank screen on which the movie of the universe is shown.

Against Systematic Knowledge

I would not contemplate putting myself into the same company as luminaries such as Nietzsche, Bataille and Cioran in terms of the quality and worthiness of my thought. However, I do believe I have one commonality with them. I'm more of a thinker than a philosopher, if we go by what (I believe) Cioran said about this subject. I do not have the exact quote but it was something along the lines of: A philosopher writes for professors, a thinker writes for writers. Thinkers tend to believe in philosophical undertakings as a sort of art form, with room for contradiction, internal inconsistency, soaring highs and gaping lows. They tend to write for other thinkers and inspire those other thinkers to write themselves. They have an innate distrust of philosophers who attempt to dream up a "system" of knowledge, in particular, a complete systematic knowledge of everything there is to know.

I can read Kant or Hegel and find much in it to stimulate my mind. But, in the final analysis, systematic knowledge has little, if anything at all, to do with how actual life is lived. Systematic philosophers construct elaborate edifices to show off their epistemological complexity and dexterity without it pertaining one whit to what happens when the love of one's life dies or one is overcome by rage, or the urge for suicide, or the urge to laugh. Systematic philosophy exists to pay the salaries of professors and earn money for universities. Such philosophies can come up with detailed arguments for or against the existence of God without telling the reader anything at all about the experience of God or the lack of God.

I would be hard pressed to write a book that was a systematic expression of my thought. First of all, I do not have a lot of little thoughts that are steps upwards climbing to one crowning thought. I have complicated snippets of thoughts and emotions that do not always agree and they range in subject from the (hopefully) quite deep to, here we go again, the aesthetics of Fraggle Rock. So, how am I to compose a tome that collects all these assorted impressions, impressions received through thinking, yes, but also, and most importantly, through living? This blog suits my purposes quite well. It allows me to rant at intervals about whatever is setting my mind and heart on fire. If that's an anime character or the absence of the Divine, it doesn't matter, it is important to me and I feel if it says something about me... perhaps it says something about life. And that's what thinkers do. They think, live and write about life. Their metaphysics pertain to the metaphysics of actual human experience, their epistemology pertains to the real life results of knowledge, their aesthetics do not dwell upon an ideal art so much as art as it is and as it could be. I feel more comfortable in the company of my thinkers than philosophers. When a systematic philosophers wonders what the meaning of life is, he sits down and composes an essay or, perhaps, a thousand page book on the subject. When a thinker wonders what the meaning of life is, he lives life and says, "I'll get around to jotting my thoughts down once the party is over." Life as seen through the window... or life as seen through the eyes of someone on the edge of erratic and unpredictable emotion and experience. The choice is yours. I know what I choose.

Proof That I Am Not Living The Void

In my post on the Void of my Mystical Nihilism, I pointed out that this Void exists within all of us. However, it is usually not the dominant aspect of our beings. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, everything from bliss to suffering to boredom and sleep lies in a non-Void realm. A person who had truly realized the Void could do one of two things: become the next Buddha, sit in silence, live in inner solitude, perhaps teach others how to quiet the tempest within themselves. Or, he could take a gun, place it in his mouth, and pull the trigger, without even sparing a moment to bid the world farewell. I sense the Void in me... but I am not myself Void.

Every day proves that to me. Today for example. I had an extremely stressful experience. It caused a great deal of anxiety and sparked some suicidal thoughts. I don't have a gun, but I could have gone out and laid down on the train tracks. I didn't. I agonized. And then I read and listened to music and had fleeting moments of a glorious feeling of kinship with the authors and musicians. The Void is kin to nothing. Kin implies both similarity and difference as well as separation. The Void is one, indivisible, like nothing but itself and different from everything that is not Void, yet the basis for all of it.

The extremes of human emotion are the most human emotions of all and they can give us glimpses of the Void, the most human state there is, since it is the one we will all eventually return to. But they are not the Void. They are like the viewing binoculars on a scenic outlook that lets you see the sites more closely. You can see the contours of the Void but you are not within it entirely.

The extremes of human emotion paralyze the meandering, mundane mind. Utter ecstasy and utter despair are both states of complete freedom from all that makes us less than sovereign beings. I am borrowing a little bit from Georges Bataille here. But the simple joys and agonies of daily life is a challenge existence.... those just mire us in the bland states of hope and faith and worry and sorrow. The images that dance on the reflective surface of the Void without even realizing it.

These smudges hovering near the Void do not contaminate it, nothing of our material world can actually touch  it. But they distract us. And I have proven myself as distracted as anyone else, despite my passion for submerging myself one day in the Void. I flit here, flit there, sometimes with a great deal of intensity, sometimes with a dreary, drowsy laziness. If I were to attempt to walk away to spend my life in contemplation or else put a gun in my mouth and achieve the only possible Oneness, either way, I'd be saying goodbye the entire time. My bird, my fiancee, my father, my brother, my friends, my books and CDs and DVDs, even the jottings in this blog. I could do neither without a long, aching look behind me. And it is very probable that I could not do either at all. So, I am left with a question, a question only I can answer. Do I devote myself with a rapacious thirst to achieve the Void I preach or do I accept the fact that, until I finally pass from this world, I am a broken, incomplete man? I take comfort in knowing I must have reached the scenic outlooks onto the Void a number of times, lived to the extremes a number of times, just to be asking myself this question. It is my solace.

The Void of My Own Mystical Nihilism

Mystical Nihilism is seemingly a war waged between two words. They do not belong together, do they? What can the experiences of the saints say about the impossibility of knowing or experiencing any ultimate truth? I have pondered this question for some time. Because I've always had a sense of a Void and I've always had a sense of there being something spiritual about that Void. It feels so very French of me. (Cioran, a Romanian who lived a long while in France, also seemed to feel it.)

I change belief systems more than most people change their clothes. It's all an effort to put something into that Void, or explain the Void, or humanize the Void. But still I sense the Void in all its Void-ness. I have beliefs that mean a great deal to some of my many personalities. I can swap them on a daily basis if I so choose. They remain, after being swapped, as lingering longings in the shadows of myself. They do not remove the Void. They appear like reflections on the rippling surface of the Void. Parts of myself staring back at me from something both more and less than oblivion.

The Void that I sense is the place where nothing that is matter can be known or conceived. It is the place where even the energies that animate us as living beings have their particles barred from entering. It is the place where Being is not even exterminated, it just never is, never was, never will be. Even in the dead of space, there are particles, particles of light, for example. But are there particles where the consciousness of a being is at the moment of death? The energy and matter that cause us to live have to go on somewhere, in some way, but the consciousness itself, not the thoughts, not the feelings, but the space inside us that recognizes those thoughts and feelings by contrasting them with its own emptiness, that consciousness, where does it go when we leave this world?

Some would argue that it's the soul. All rational thought is apparently eliminated when the saint directly encounters God. They write of their raptures and it is an experience they can not easily define with words. John of the Cross resorted to vague but beautiful poetry to explain it. St. Teresa of Avila was similarly too awestruck by her experiences to make any kind of description that would make complete sense to someone who hadn't experienced what she did themselves. And we can't forget the many Buddhist and Hindu and Sufi mystics who also had experiences with something so utterly alien to human existence, it defied being contained in words.

But these experiences, and the spiritual experiences of many other religions, magical traditions, occult systems, etc., do not prove any such thing as the existence of an immortal soul. All they prove is that, with time and effort and training and the grace of the incomprehensibility of the universe we live in, one can confront something with our material brains that is beyond the realm of matter. Since it is common to so many belief systems, it seems irrational to label it as truly belonging to any one of them. There must be something innate in existence that these experiences arise from.

This is where I married the words "Mystical" and "Nihilism." Nihilists have long talked of a Void, people of a spiritual nature have long talked of mysticism. But what is to prevent us from joining the two? Where the particles of energy and matter in this physical universe are no longer permitted, we confront with that so fragile and faint that it is hard to even say it exists consciousness of ours a Void that is immanent, transcendant, God-like in its Eternity, but with no characteristics to it that we mortals can even relate to except in those moments where we enter pure consciousness, the place that is not ruled by the physics and chemistry and biology of this world.

This is very close to what Buddhists have been saying for centuries. And they choose, generally, not to try to describe their Nirvana in words. The original Buddhism, before it became dressed up in the clothes of a ceremonial religion, was very much based on thoughts like these. But even there, they believed that some part of this consciousness went on into other lives, was reborn to suffer again and again until it finally escaped the Karmic wheel. And, to the extent that we are composed of matter and energy, neither of which is truly capable of being destroyed, this makes perfect logical sense. Parts of us are reborn in many many ways. Our energies disperse, our matter becomes fertilizer for other matter, so on and so forth. But scientists have yet to measure the existence of the plain fact that consciousness even exists. Is the fact that there is something within us aware of existence a simple trick of matter and energy? Is it proof that a God or Gods imbued us with souls? Or does it mean that we are flickering images playacting on a stage that, when we die, doesn't even vanish because it was nothing but Void to begin with?

I incline towards the Void explanation for two reasons. One, the mystical experiences that are beyond words all happen in people for whom a state of pure consciousness beyond thought and feeling has been achieved. And also because we can only define consciousness itself by what it is not. It is not our thoughts yet it is aware of our thoughts. It is not our feelings yet it is aware of our feelings. And no holy book or saintly experience or scientific experiment has ever proven that it is anything other than a gaping nothingness upon which images roam for a time and then disappear.

So, if we have a soul, perhaps it is a fragment of the impossible and yet only truly real thing in this existence: a never-ending, never-beginning Void. When we pass from this world, our physical existence will continue in a number of concrete, scientific ways. But in the spiritual realm, it might just be possible that we go to someplace where, not only do we no longer exist, but we never truly existed in the first place.

Blasphemy as a Declaration of Life

"I will not serve." These are the words I offer up to any all-powerful divinities in this universe of ours. These words explain most of the directions my spiritual life has taken. In Heathenry, one is friends with the Gods and Goddesses, not a slave. In theistic Satanism, there are many problems one runs into when it comes to service. On the one hand, there are people who believe that Satan is the bringer of complete freedom, in which case it is counterproductive to attempt to serve him. On the other hand, there are those who have a darker view of Satan and to serve him would be possible but it would only be a negation of itself, because in this view, in Satan lies the roots of all negation. In Chaos Magic, the Gods are often made to serve man, rather than the other way around. And in my own personal Mystical Nihilism, it's pointless to offer service to a nothingness with a barely comprehensible form of sentience.

"I will not serve." Why not? Why not bow down before God and confess my sins and dedicate my life to him? So many reasons. The primary reason is.... I am either choosing not to follow an arbitrary and unfair God or else I have no choice at all and my nature is simply to defy. Clarification now. No matter what the greatest theological minds tell you about free will and the human exercise of it, the fact remains that it is incompatible with any form of reason that an all-powerful and all-knowing God could possibly create a being that would not do what he already knew it was going to do. It is NOT POSSIBLE. There is no way anyone can be created without this almighty being knowing exactly every single move and decision they will make. So, he creates a Hell for those who do not do his will or have faith in his son or what have you. But he created them knowing they'd go to that Hell and then alleges that it is part of an overall plan of mercy and love. And couches it in insupportable "free will" theology.  If the extreme Calvinist view of God is the only possible way he could be omnipotent and omniscient, then he is a God I choose not to love because he is, as said above, unfair and arbitrary. On the other hand... if he exists at all and this is all going according to his will, since with him being all powerful, it can't possibly do anything against his will, it is according to his will that I be defiant and I have no choice in the matter because he predestined me to my eternal fate.

The vilest blasphemies and scorn are sometimes used by musical artists in an almost comic fashion, each attempting to outdo the others. But true blasphemy, "I will not serve," "I reject you," "You do not deserve my love," "You will never enslave me to your will," these are shouts of the truly alive. It doesn't even matter if this alleged God exists or not. To utterly and completely refute him is to utterly and completely refute the millions of people who will try to pressure you into obedience, sometimes bringing out the fire and brimstone, sometimes acting like a friend and then buttering you up and then out of nowhere dumping the evangelizing on you.

Liberal Christians frequently do not care if you follow their God or not. They do not take the missionary role quite so seriously. At least the ones I've known. They believe in things I find insane but they temper it with a certain amount of respect for opposing viewpoints. Or, at the very least, they pretend to. But Fundamentalists of all creeds will never be satisfied until their God is the only God left standing. So, blasphemously fall in love with a pagan God or Goddess, take every opportunity to offer your sins to Satan, reject any and all belief systems as hopeless dead ends. But do not serve. To serve is to sacrifice your soul to a being who apparently answers prayers for lost car keys and Super Bowl victories while millions of children go hungry and are afflicted with disease. Don't give me the "It is all part of the tapestry of salvation he is weaving" or any other cheap excuses. If he's there, I demand that he send me to Hell so I don't have to suffer the indignity of knowing I was in the presence of the  architect of so much agony. Satan gets all the bad P.R. but guess what.... God created him too in your theology and knew he'd fall and steal so many from The Lord's flock. Not a very good shepherd who helps nurse the wolf that he will unleash at adulthood on his sheep. "I will not serve."