On Darkness

My darkness is not easy to describe considering my eclectic and eccentric self.  It is rather ambiguous in that there is more than one interpretation.  You cannot take a cookie cutter and get the exact same shape.  Yet there is an essence to it, a certain core if you will that is at the center of it.  I am a chameleon, or in fantasy terms, a shape shifter.  As I shift and push further, the moments in-between yield to an understanding of this essence.

I am only beginning to finally understand it.  Yet my darkness is this quest for knowledge and to answer the why? Why this?  Why not that?  Or how did this become this way?  This quest is probably what makes me so dangerous in a way.  I ask the hard questions, to get to the purpose, the brutal “truth.”  But truth can be rather dubious even paradoxial at times.  I often subscribe to polyvalent logic.  To give the quickest overview of this the logic is as follows.  Are gods real? Yes.  Are they fake? Yes.  It is not so much a cop out for sticking up for beliefs, as the realization of many matters.  Does Gods matter to the atheist? Hell no, but to the polytheistic believer yes.  Is either one right or wrong? No, there is no evidence to support it, it is all rather unconfirmed and vague.  Just because we see a bunch of bunnies that are gray, does not mean they cannot be white either.  You can google it, but there was once a case where an animal people thought was extinct has come back incredibly.  Just because you do not see it, does not mean it cannot be true.  Which is normally the basis of our reality, our experiences, and even we philosopize about various subjects.

The truth is, my darkness, is like shutting off the lights.  Yet when I think about it, it is easy for our minds to play tricks on us when it is dark.  We are scared and frightened and often not at ease with it because of the creatures that go bump in the dark.  It’s a natural insticnt humans have, “light” i.e. fire, sunshine = good.  We love the world of light because we can “percieve” so easily.  Yet when the lights go off it is not.  It is harder to get at the truth but so much more valuable when you can.  There was once a video I watched about a blind man who could paint real objects and the paintings looked rather good.  He painted with just his fingers.  Interestingly enough he has never seen, but his paintings look like the real world. So we can “see” even when our eyes go out.

Another point to bring up is the concept of emptiness.  I often associated my emptiness with darkness but the more I have thought about it, the more I feel that is not quite true.  While the big bang theory might not be as accurate, there was not much at the beginning, but there was something.  So while we think that there is an “emptiness” to various concepts, there really is not.  There is substance to it all if you will.  While a room (house or apartment) is empty when you move in, it is not as empty as you think about.  There are walls, there is a door, windows, maybe curtains, and closet(s).  In a sense, you start from somewhere, you have a background from somewhere which is only a continuation of something else.  But you fill that room, that universe, with yourself, just it becomes more full.  On facebook there was this thing about a professor teaching a class, he filled first the jar with marbles, than pebbles, then sand, then water.  Yet if you fill the jar with just water or even sand at the beginning, you do not have much room for anything else.  Our lives are like that for better or for worse.

What does this mean for me as a student of the dark aspect? Nothing, everything.  The quote here applies, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”  Who knows what substance our reality is of?  Maybe there are several planes of the astral, maybe everything is made of strings, or maybe our universe is a hologram.  It does not make me despair that I may not have all the answers I want about everything, but that is okay. My intellect is sharp, I keep it sharp, and since I first started my journey it has become even sharper.  While this may all sound rather enigmatic, the truth is, life is unfathomable.  Life is not black and white, it’s all gray.  All rather abstract, but this is me, and my individual path of synthesis.

Faith & Acasual

Leap of Faith.

I love driving in the car for around half an hour.  It kind of makes me wish I had a little bit further to drive to work.  I recorded it but I have no place to upload it, haha.  This topic is obviously about faith, but interesting enough what started it off in my head was a discussion I had with a friend of mine of her reincarnations.  I knew a lot more information about certain subjects that I realize.  It’s weird that I recognize it as “truth” let alone reincarnation as fact.  It is amusing to think that I believe so strongly in reincarnation, afterlife, and other worlds, but I struggle with the belief of Gods.

One of the questions that has been pounding in my head since I was young is, Is there a God?  I have so many questions and I haven’t even arrived at an answer.  This is where my strange processes work through my head at certain times, even at the same time, I believe in gods, but there is also a suspension of this belief, with the question of possibilities.  It is really hard to describe other than I have not made a leap of faith believing in Gods.  It just had not been my experience though I have known others pagan and Semitic wise who do.  As I said my position is hard to describe and I have been trying to straighten out this issue.

One thing I brought up in my rant in the audio file is about quantum physics and string theory.  I was watching this show on the science channel and it was about the possibility of other worlds.  The theory that various physicists have surmised is that other worlds exist, possibly parallel to this one, but we cannot interact with them.  They may pull at the fabric of our universe but we can never interact with them.  There was also something about dark matter being locked in another universe too.  So this brought up the questions again, theory, and the lack of validating such theory.  There is no evidence to prove or disapprove.  We can scream and rage at God who doesn’t prove himself to us, but he doesn’t.  Does that mean he/she/it does not exist?

Let me break down arguments I have against belief in Gods, or what I have trouble with.

Suffering is the first problem I had and the one that does not bother me anymore.  A simple point is suffering is very important to life.  Suffering teaches us, it helps us in many ways.  One point I often like to bring up is if you never knew suffering then you can’t appreciate being happy.  I spent a lot of my life miserable due to familial circumstances that was not beneficial but it has made me appreciate being happy.  Without that suffering I wouldn’t be who I am today.  But I remember as a child demanding why?  Why must I suffer? Oh the ego of a child !  Suffering is natural is what we allow it to do and what we do with it that is important.

The second was the issue of omnipresence as I find in Semitic religions.  It seems a question of logistics for me, the world has long had a lot of people within it, but how can some so called deity/being know even 10million people?  It’s also being everywhere at once, that seems odd to me at least at the point of a deity.  I do not find it odd with the theory of a collective consciousness/unconsciousness that humans have.  I easily tap into it late at night which is sometimes where when I did homework, it was most effective.  Yet the potential is in every person to access this database, but some are more easily able to tune into it.  I am a big believer in that we are all one and inter-connected, I am connected to people I have not met yet, or may not me, the actions I choose today affect them too.  If I decide to slip a sugar into a diabetics coffee, that could affect countless people lives, thus I am connected by a choice sense of creating fate.  Though I believe in metaphysical connections where you can know when something is going on with another.  I have a good example of this within my own a life, a personal semantic.  My cousin had a heart problem that he was born with, I can’t remember what, but there was a surgery to fix this.  Well while they were doing this my cousin went into cardiac arrest and almost died, but my grandmother just knew this.  She was insisting to my mother that something was wrong with my cousin and you couldn’t tell her otherwise.  We couldn’t get in contact with my Aunt & Uncle till later that day.  I have this connection with friends, I know what they are feeling without them telling me what is going on.  I can’t always guess the situation what is going on, but sometimes I do.  You could say I am very perceptive and I can be when I am physically with someone (but very dense at times too).  However, that is not the case when I am 1000 miles away and know that one of my friends is in trouble.  But I think these connections exist even with people do not know because of this collective that humans have.

The fickleness and human like qualities that God and Gods have.  I think of God beings are super human.  I do not know why but when I think of t hem, I think of them very unattached, almost a sense of apathy. I think of Gods as they should be better than a human being.  They should not be so fickle, so jealous, so full of hatred towards themselves and others.  Story after story I find of this, but then again I wonder, is this because we as humans lack understanding?  Look at one of the topics in Dark Discussion (Isolated Stunted Growth), where it was pointed out how I related humans to wolves, but wolves don’t use humans as a teaching tool for wolves.  Wolves do not teach other wolves the koans of humans.  We are relating to the Gods being like us possibly.  The one problem is trying to understand the arise of various Gods because you can’t trace back the memeplex completely to the beginning.  You can have a dozen variations of various stories of one God, due to rural differences and the fact that it was all oral traditions.  It still bothers me though because as Gods, should they not be more advanced, more intelligent than the normal human having access most likely to the collective unconsciousness and consciousness?  Should they not be more in touch with the universe?  But if we are all capable of that what separates us from the Gods?

So the third issue I have to bring up is what separates us from the so-called Gods?  This is where my little inner satanist comes out and proclaims we are all Gods.  We can manipulate our reality in some fashion with manipulating others, and our perception.  The answer has not come to me about what separates us from mythological Gods.  They are considered to have certain say, aspects, like Athena is often considered a goddess of wisdom (and war), because that is what she is good at.  Artemis was a goddess of the hunt and that is something she was good at.  She was associated with the moon and being a virgin.  The last two are more associations than anything, but don’t we say, oh your eyes are like the stars, and such?  We have this constant association complex where we relate anything and everything we can, even with Gods.

So where does myth (theory) end and the beginnings of faith and logic twist together?  My friend told me he believes in his personal gods because of experience.  I once talked to a Norse Pagan who says that there must be a trickster God or spirit watching over me (due to the odd tricks that happen in life).  I’ve been told I am guarded/watched over by powerful forces and they have a huge play in my life due to psychics and tarot card readers.  I once had a near death experience with a car accident I shouldn’t have a) walked out alive or b) let alone unhurt as I did.  Who is to deny that there isn’t a possibility?  Yet through all of this questioning, this pondering I have come to one conclusion that it is time to jump off that metaphorical cliff and step into living an acasual existence.  I have lacked a confidence to jump off to fully start experiencing it all, but even brief glimpses is not enough.  I need to start trusting my intuition more, having more confidence in it, letting the “heart” guide and not let all my head do the thinking.

So jump.

Seeking Acceptance

My friend introduced me to this concept of when you compliment or complains towards another, it is a reflection of yourself. This is surely a blanket statement and not true 100% of the time, but often it is. Part of my experience this has been very much true in my life. When I have complained about others being messy, I too as messy. However if someone is trying on clothes, I am not sure how this would reflect upon myself. It is like color theory to me, or designs, I know what “looks” good. Yet still it is my personal opinion and not theirs. There is too many semantics for this abstraction though, but if we are seeking acceptance in others is it not because we want to accept ourselves?

We all crave acceptance in some way and we obviously fear the opposite which is rejection. How often do we give in to others for some acceptance? We mask ourselves, put on another skin, pretend to be who we are not, do activities which is not what we want so that we fit into some kind of social normal? In high school we have our jocks, our social elites, the artist, geeks, and the “outcasts.” There are other groups, but we align ourselves within those groups because there is some quality of us that they accept. Are gangs a certain grouping that we are accepted in? Yes, yes it is.

In psychology there is a concept called self-actualization. The most basic definition of this is, “realizing one’s full potential.” Part of this self-actualization is acceptance. It is about acceptance from others, but also acceptance towards the Self. This quality of acceptance for ourselves and towards others is extremely lacking within current USA society (though there is a lot lacking within white culture). I cannot speak for everyone though, just for my experience. Our modern society is no where near accepting individualism, contradictions, or flaws within the human condition.  My experience and an awareness of others within my life has been more about their lack of personal acceptance. They do not accept their Self and I for the longest time have not accepted my Self. We all want to “fit” in. We all want to be able to relate. A good example is a certain way of dress, which figures into acceptance. Within certain groups there is a standard dress code, you go to work and there is a dress code, you follow a religion and there is a dress code, goth/emo, “preppy”, feminine, male, etc. While I was never much of a follower or a leader, I would go into one group and try to fit myself within it. My difference is not something that was encouraged, being pagan my Christian family and friends would look down upon me, or the way I dress by various groups in high school. I used to dress in “guy” clothes and I was accused of being a dyke even though I only wore them because they felt comfortable.

We all want to be individuals, but Magian society is against that. Theirs is a culture of conformity, of generic mass-produced so called individualism that is obsessed with their iphone and pop culture stars. They want to suppress and have managed to do a wonderful job of it especially with the introduction of Christianity.  Hey, that science is making you think differently of the church, suppress! It is no different from modern society, when trying to implement arguments until one side or the other is exhausted.  Obviously certain subjects we will never agree upon, look at pro-life both sides are still arguing because they are not exhausted yet.  Another good semantic is evolution versus intelligent design, both sides cannot agree obviously because you either hold “faith” or “facts” to be of value.  Both are being taught in certain schools, but like yin and yang they are constantly fighting that what they hold as “truth” is what should be taught.  They are both trying to shove down each others throats their “Truth” to make every person conform.  There is no form of acceptance within these contradictions.  I remember on youtube there being this show that people could call and talk to these two atheists.  It reminded me of trolls, Christians would call and start arguments with these Atheists.  None of them could agree because and there was certainly lack of acceptance.  There is no let bygones be bygones, no you must argue till you drop.

There is a so called orthodox individual and a so-called unorthodox individual within every group. There is a difference between ONA and non-ONA people, a difference between mundane and sinister individuals. It reminds me of Yoda’s quote, “Do or do not, there is no try.” You either “are” or “are not.”  There is an alchemical stage, like that of the cocoon where you evolve from caterpillar to butterfly, a stage for becoming, but you either fail and do not, or complete and become.  It seems so black and white the way I have stated it, but in a way, it is not so dry cut and straight forward as we are constantly evolving.  The ONA’s seven fold way is a good example of this, you have the neophyte with your initiation and it continues through each grade.  Through each initiation there brings a certain character evolution within the individual, a “cultivation.”  That is the purpose of the initiation, rituals, codes, etc. to bring about a certain cultivation.  An interesting point to bring into this is the history of the word culture.  Culture comes from the Latin word cultūra (“cultivation; culture”), from cultus, perfect passive participle of colō (“till, cultivate, worship”).  Our culture is that of a gigantic memeplex that forms an entire broad culture and I am not going to break it down.  Yet when we follow our Tradition and our Culture our character is like a stamp marking us for what we are.  Homo Huberis is marked for what they are, a Niner is marked for who they are, an Artist, Atheist, etc.

While we all want acceptance from others, it really is not completely necessary.  What matters is the acceptance of ourselves.  As social creatures we desire this as it stems from ancient times and falling into tribes.  Of course our subcultures are not tribes and we cannot expect any form of loyalty from them.  Yet if we cannot accept ourselves how can we be comfortable for ourselves? In my time of being alive, I used to seek acceptance in different communities until I finally accepted myself for myself.  The moment I did that, I stopped seeking acceptance from others.  I am still a social creature and I will be found within different communities, I love raves, I am friends with those among the occult, artist, etc.  After accepting myself there is not such a drive for acceptance from others, not even from my friends.  I am loved yes, but this comes from self-actualization too, being comfortable solitude.  We cannot deny, as social creatures, our need for packs (and the acceptance within it), it is part of evolution.  It is part of what has made humanity survive, there is survival in numbers.  That is what ancient tribes managed to do, what wolf packs manage to do, survive with numbers, versus the lone wolf.