2/16/25 Paranoia and the peace of Christ   The last week for me has been a period of intense soul searching, primarily stirred on from reading David Bentley Hart's "Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth." The way it takes to task many of the narratives of the secular philosophical tradition on their own terms has challenged me in a very personal way. At an explicit level and at the deepest level of the heart, I espouse the Christian narrative, ie that of Christ's passion and resurrection. This is a narrative of hope, peace, love, and a denial of the meaning and effectiveness of violence. I do really believe God is present in the world, Christ died for all of our sins, victory over suffering and finitude are inevitable, and that Heaven will contain the best of all narratives and that there is no need to fear or cling to ego because Christ is restoring all things to their own highest truths. Yet, I have a long history of personal cynicism, misanthropy, pessimism, and paranoia. This is very hard to let go of, as it's of course tied in with a narrative of needing to have up a certain level of distrust in order to protect myself from abuse and disappointment as a result of things that have happened to me in the past. Further, around the same time as I reconverted to Christianity, I also dove headfirst into continental philosophy. Critical theory is incredibly important for understanding the mechanisms of power that shape our world, especially the forms of mind control that are very hard to articulate clearly without turning them into banalities that are easy to let rush right past you. Yet. The foundational metaphysics of critical theory are that of a universe composed, at base, of eternal strife, of woundedness as the truth of being, of sin without forgiveness, of the impossibility of any true communion. This fundamental narrative has effected me deeply and torn deeper open wounds of mine that already existed. As a result, it has increased certain aspects of my paranoia greatly. I see Ideology all around me, movements and plays of cynical power, contradictions and tensions. It terrifies me. It makes me feel small, puts me on guard. Makes me feel like it's me against the world and to be open to the mysterious showing of the world in its worlding and people in their peopling could only be to let myself fall prey to delusion. To give way in a constant battle against the tides of chaos. As a result, I've become lonelier, pricklier, harder to talk to despite having more to say than ever and, I do genuinely think, deeper insight into the world and myself. I want to be able to make friends who are intellectual collaborators and/or rivals. I want to be able to participate in communities where people are trying to think New Thoughts. I want to be able to be at ease amongst my friends for more than very short bursts and not start feeling panicked when they want to relax and watch some philistine anime just so we have an excuse to enjoy each other's presence. I want to not feel overwhelmed constantly with judgements and critiques and criticisms and fears such that it makes it hard to me to talk about anything, where I feel like I can only have a small part of me present among others and if I let the rest it I'll either say shit that makes people miserable or starts arguments or I'll just want to leave and return to my safe solitude. The constant influx of advertising makes me feel like I'm going insane. Everything is advertising. It keeps coming and coming and coming and coming. Leave me the fuck alone. Please. I want to be free in my own head. And it's the worst when I'm around my friends and in order to be around them I have to subject myself to the ads in a way I wouldn't if I was alone. I feel like they're harming me and it makes me want to be around them less. Anyway. This is mental illness. I do not need to be like this. Yes, ascesis is good. It's good to withdraw and have distance and reduce the noise and touch grass and pray and not give into the endless flow of ads and consumption. But my paranoia is pathological nonetheless. It's harming me. It's keeping me from communion with others and with the world. It makes me harder for me to enjoy beautiful things and beautiful moments if they aren't sufficiently broken away from ideological narratives. I don't want to be trapped in by fear and insecurity. I don't wanna be pushed to be alone and I don't wanna hurt the people around me. God really is everywhere in beauty. Christ has really set us free. The ultimate foundation of the world really is peace. Healing is coming and it's better than we could ever imagine. All is well, and I am safe.   Well. That's where I originally stopped this post, but I hated that ending. "All is well, and I am safe" is a mantra from a root chakra yoga flow that I like to do. It's quite silly and almost perverse, isn't it? It's quite obvious that all is not well. The cosmos is ailing deeply. Something has gone very wrong. I refuse any kind of non-dual reckoning of the world that refuses to confront the undeniable truth that suffering and evil in all their forms mar the real. I will never bow to any higher cosmic union that requires the suffering of innocents or the death of beautiful things. I worship Christ, whose resurrection is a confrontation and rejection of the order of sacrifice, power, and suffering. I think Christians are too ashamed and scandalized by Jesus's lack of political initiative in his post-resurrection actions to really contemplate how profoundly unique it is in the gospel narratives that he comes back from the dead in full divine glory in order to just hang out with his friends. I think constantly about the image from the epilogue of the John's gospel where Peter jumps out of his boat to swim to shore after realizing the risen Jesus has come for a visit, literally just to eat breakfast with them, especially in light of his betrayal of Jesus prior to his execution. (When explaining the gospel to people before, I've made the story of Peter more legible to people by comparing it to saying like Peter's denial of knowing Jesus was like your best friend, who was the first person you came out to, deadnaming you during your worst crisis. It's some youth pastor shit, I know, but it does seem to make it click for people.) This image bounces around in my mind constantly in reference to an ex of mine. Much of the trauma that drives me writing this post relates to the constant undermining of my sense of reality that happened in that relationship. I had to be constantly on high alert for signs that something was going wrong, that I needed to watch out and pick up on something that wasn't being said to protect myself. And I did horrible things too. I stifled their personal growth and made them feel more ashamed of who they were, I was often bitter and cold, I would give mixed signals and make promises I couldn't keep, I'd take advantage of their poor boundaries and put burdens on them that I should have known they didn't have the strength to bear. I think we both have nominally forgiven each other. We both know all too well why the other was so fucked up then and how genuinely hard they were trying. Yet still. I think if I saw them in person I'd probably vomit. Heaven for me would be a place where we could see each other again and look each other in the eye without fear, and say to each other "all is well, and you are safe" and it not feel so disgusting and offensive. "We all drop the facade We all drop the facade I admire the scars That you made on my arm That I earned in the name Of the turbulent Same" -Liturgy, Haelegen II   One of the big points of Christian theology is that creation, though fallen now, is a creation ex nihilo made out of pure delight from a God overflowingly replete in themselves. God does not need the world. The drama of the world with all its pain and suffering is not necessary for God's self realization. Suffering has no internal meaning. And, also, the world has no foundation other than God. We are really free because we are only difference, analogous to God who is Difference. However, God's Difference is not the difference of strife and violence and concealment, but the peace of analogy, of art, of play, of variations and dynamism. God's infinite, inexpressible depth of Difference is somehow perfectly expressed in Christ as Identity and reflection, shown in the loving, joyous light of the Spirit's infinite Actuality. It is possible to see real harmony in the world as it's foundation, spilling from every corning and live it, try to bring it out in each moment, however imperfectly. God is both immanent and transcendent and is always present, always rushing towards us. We are perpetually stretching out towards Them. I don't know how I can become more of this. My anxiety has been such a defining part of my experience for as long as I can remember. It's ebbed and flowed in intensity and form throughout the years, and in most ways it's better than it was 5 years ago. It certainly inhibits my life activity less. But I feel like I've tried everything. And putting that energy towards philosophical reflection and creative work is clearly the best approach yet. And truly there is something deeply connected to my true self about my critical, reflective, depth-focused side. But I have to trust and find a path whereby I can soothe out the knots that make that nexus of drives so hurtful and difficult and self defeating. "All this is full. All that is full. From fullness, fullness comes. When fullness is taken from fullness, fullness still remains OM shanti shanti shanti" -Isha Upanishad prelude hymn

4/26/24 Freedom of the Soul and the four Cardinals   There are four fundamental modes of freedom: freedom to be, freedom to resist being by critique and refinement, freedom to resist being through pure rejection, and freedom to become and establish new being. These are Ascesis, Catharsis, Fervor, and Majesty. Any freedom that doesn't involve all four of these is incomplete and will inevitably be captured and nullified. In Heaven, we will all be engaging each of these modes of freedom autopoietically, in a constant self transcending spiral. Most forms of freedom that are sold to you only cover one or two of these domains and ignore or reject the others, but an attempt (it can only be an attempt, as they are in contradiction with each other) to engage all four is absolutely necesscary.   Ascesis is pure repose. Repose in the God's love, in the beauty of existence, in peaceful void of your own soul as something outside of the world. It is also pure intensity. Disconnected from the world, circuits of desire increase in felt intensity. Ascetic freedom can be deepened through religious practice: prayer, meditation, ascetic acts of self control, and especially through participation in communal religious rituals. The highest of these is the Eucharist, which gives you an immediate, objective connection with God. But anything is better than nothing as long as you commit. Catharsis, instead of rising above the world, turns towards it and attempts to empty it out. It does this through catalog and critique of all that exists, establishing vast libraries of knowledge, networks of increasingly precise communication, and logistical hierarchies that gradually smooth out the functioning of all things. Cathartic freedom can deepened through learning about the world around you at the objective (i.e. science) and subjective (i.e. critique of ideology) levels, as well as practically applying that knowledge to increase the efficiency and organization of your life. Fervor is nihilistic disruption of the world and the self. To engage with Fervor is to give oneself over to irrational, amoral forces inside of you. It's to grasp at pure expression, pure eruption of sensation and force, and an attempt to establish a line of flight through the world to an unknowable future. Fervent freedom can be deepened by creative self development: learning to make art, music, or poetry for it's own sake; practicing being able to act on a pure whim even against social pressure; experimenting with new sensations, experiences, identities, and forms of self expression generally. Lastly, Majesty is a domain of pure power at the most grounded, quotidian level. Majesty establishes rules, routines, horizons of possibility. An increase in freedom in the domain of Majesty involves creating a synthesis of the other three domains in order to establish concrete change in your way of life, to catalyze others to become freer themselves, and form communities of freedom.

1/31/24 The Armistice of Varizen   I am forcing myself to write a second post in this series currently because I have not been focused on my attempts to think heaven as I've been distracted by my recent surge in creative output. In the calender of Transcendental Qabala, we are currently in the book of the Armistice, which is an account of the eras of the world history. A movement forward to heaven will have to go through the contradictions of our current armistice of Varizen. Notable (to my mind) features of our armistice include: dissolution, abstraction, and monetization of social ties of all kinds, and with this a move towards intense individual self regulation (often inscribed only unconsiously and disavowed publicly) in the name of atomized productivity; rejection of the necesscity and sincerity of religious practice and revelation, or else fundamentalist rejection of social progress and humanist self realization; a tendency of pulling all objects of expression (e.g. art, "posts", discourses) towards an infinite degree of reproducibility and transparent reiterability and thus flattening/amputating the unique constellation of universes that they sit within; the reign of global capital and the removal of true power from the political, and with this movement a loss of faith in democracy and a rise of culture war politics driven by resentment and spite stemming from impotence; widespread crises of mental health and libidinal/psychological enslavement ("mind viruses"); the seeming subsumption of critique and subversion into the system itself, and with this a sense of apathy and hopelessness. All of these ideas overlap and interpenetrate and I could expand a lot on each of them and their relation to each other, but I will not do that right now.

1/7/2024 Note 0 Towards a Personal Vision of Heaven   The is the first in a series I plan to write regularly called "Notes Towards a Personal Vision of Heaven". In the late fall of last year, I found Christ (again). Though it took a series of events converging to allow my heart to be open--I was a thoroughly wounded ex-Catholic--for this to happen, the primary actor in the process was the work of Haela Hunt-Hendrix, her band Liturgy, and her philosophy system of Transcendental Qabala. One of the central charges of Transcendental Qabala is that our highest calling in life is to develop a personal vision of a radically better world (i.e. the Kingdom of Heaven), and that, once developed, we ought to always hold it in the forefront of our minds so that we can devote ourselves fully to the project of bringing it about. She calls our capacity for, and practice of, this the arcanum of apocalypse, and associates it with the Christian virtue of hope (of the triad of faith, hope, and love), and the monastic vow of poverty (of the triad poverty, chastity, and obedience). In a future post I will reflect on her vision of heaven, Haelegen, which she formulates as the Sovreign Hiercho-Emancipatory Individuation Municipality (S.H.E.I.M.). For now, I'm going to ramble some about things that are not that.   My reconversion came at the same time as an intense anxiety about the future. Humanity is destroying itself currently. The worst part is, it seems that most of the levers of power have been diffused and abstracted away; internet age global capitalism is radically decentralized, and radically de-humanized. Furthermore, it is my opinion that the last 50 years have shown that even one of the most critical central sources of power, the United States government, is at this point beyond salvage as a point of control for the system. Mass politics proper is dead. The failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the election and anemic (that he was more than stupid and destructive enough to press all the buttons, and yet he accomplished barely anything, is quite telling) presidency of Donald Trump, the Coronavirus pandemic, and especially the absolute failure of the Black Lives Matter protests. I don't know what this means. (As an aside, please vote. It takes like five minutes, and while I'm asserting it can't change anything fundamental, the government doesn't (yet) do nothing.) I don't think it means abdicating any of those kinds of movements completely. I myself have been thinking about getting involved with climate activism. In any case, my first thought was a selfish one: I need to secure my own future for when things collapse. I started down a path of attempting to change careers and become a physician, though I abandoned this.   The thoughts didn't leave though. I changed my name to Eschaton, as a reflection of this (though it ended up symbolizing and encapsulating much more than that). One day, the week that I changed my name, I awoke at 4 in the morning in a state of intense fervor, and I wrote extensively to a friend detailing that I had stumbled upon my own vision for a Total Art practice in the vein of the ideas described in Transcendental Qabala. This vision centered around insights I thought I had acquired through the practice of kink and the enormous around of reflection I had done on the subject. I began writing a document that I sometimes described as a "manifesto" to serve as the starting point for articulating this. I kept running into walls, however. While a lot of my theoretical insights were intriguing and felt like they could bear fruit with more time and effort, my personal kink practice was a total shitshow: selfish, dissatisfying, confusing, self destructive; in short, sinful (note, I'm not meaning to condemn sex of any kind as such, although I do have critiques of queer hedonism that I eventually want to articulate. That it was sinful for me was due to my own psychology and drive). After reaching a breaking point, I decided to renounce relationships entirely, sexual, romantic, kinky, or otherwise. As of writing, this was around two weeks ago. Since then, I've been hyperfocused on creative self realization. This has been a wonderful and incredibly productive period of time, and my craving for apocalypse is showing in full force. So, this is what this little blog esque thing here is. Me beginning to work out my own vision. The Kingdom of Heaven has something to do with Communism. That is, all work will be artistic, in a broad sense. We will have [I did not finish this piece of writing]