🤯 How to Navigate “Reality” without Becoming Shipwrecked on the Desert Island of a CULT
Chapter 4 of THE WORLD CULT & YOU
Sol Luckman
“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” —Philip K. Dick
Don’t Just Keep Your Eyes Peeled, Keep Your Chin Up, Too
An astute comment I received on an earlier article in this series was this: “It seems to be part of the human condition to want to belong. Which likely means it is one of the soul’s lessons. Probably one of the fine line ones as I suspect we are also not meant to isolate ourselves either.”
To which I replied: “Yes, it would seem discernment must be balanced with ... balance.”
So today I’d like to discuss frameworks and concepts—for those of us opting not to be hermits and live in caves—for being in but not of this world composed basically of nested mind-control units, aka cults.
Faced with the nauseating ubiquity of cultists (all potentially Agent Smiths ready to go medieval on you pending the right MKUltra trigger) in this funhouse Matrix where nobody is what they seem and most people have no clue who they are, it’s extremely tempting to become a misanthrope, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a person who hates or distrusts humankind.”
We’re talking about the visceral, totally understandable temptation to write off the human species—with precious few exceptions—as mere variations on Jonathan Swift’s “militant Yahoos” (as described in GULLIVER’S TRAVELS), about whom he made this feel-good observation: “A soldier is a ‘Yahoo’ hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.”
For the record I address Swift’s dark satirical vision in the introduction to my own award-winning book of satire, THE ANGEL’S DICTIONARY, so I’ve given his sobering perspective a good deal of thought.
Here, however, in a rare moment of unfaithfulness to the greatest satirist in English literature, I must side with fellow satirist William Makepeace Thackeray of VANITY FAIR fame, who described Swift as “an immense genius” but also, given the latter’s ultimately self-defeating negativity, “an awful downfall and ruin.”
Thackeray might as well have been describing many of today’s “truthers” who have fallen for the Matrix’s uberclever psyop for those with would-be penetrating minds, a ninja-level tactic employed by the grand “AI” running this asylum elucidated in this famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche:
Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster ... for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
I put this sentiment slightly differently in the foregoing meme that has ruffled more than a few feathers among those resolute research-and-decode-oriented cultists committed to fighting tooth and nail against the Machine even if it means throwing the baby out with the bathwater (over and over).
So how do we avoid a Swiftian outcome when confronting so much of what appears to be pure evil?
How do we maintain a lighter, more Thackerayan approach to the veritable BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES raging apparently uncontrollably all around us?
Dispensing with the Problem of “Evil”
First, using a kind of classic aikido move of our own against our spiritual adversary, the Ninja Parasite who lords it over this place, we need to transcend the notion of “evil” once and for all.
As in: we must just let the idea of evil go.
“Evil” is arguably the single biggest psyop in the history of the world. Certainly, it’s the sexiest.
“Evil” is a psyop because it falsely places agency and free will outside ourselves, disempowering us in one fell swoop from the ground up.
It’s a psyop because it automatically forces those who buy into it into simultaneous, self-abnegating victim
consciousness and (social) justice warrior modes—a recipe for disaster.
It’s a psyop because it naturally separates people into warring camps of “right” versus “wrong.” See religion. See politics. See “science.” See conspiracy theories. See “truther” communities. See multi-level marketing companies. See cults of all stripes and persuasions.
Here’s the part where we check off the hard existential questions. (Diehard materialists, cynics and skeptics might want to find another, more palatable ebook to read ...)
√ What if what we call evil is merely part of the Gameboard designed to test us in this grand simulation, shamanic dreamscape or whatever you wish to call what we’re experiencing?
√ What if “evil” is simply the manifestation of the adversary archetype, the necessary opponent on our personal and collective Hero’s Journey as defined in the work of Joseph Campbell?
√ What if, as the English Romantic poet John Keats proposed, the ultimate purpose of this realm is to serve as a “vale of Soul-making,” a crucible filled with refiner’s fire for forging us into our highest and best expressions?
√ What if waking up to the true nature of “evil” as a tutelary guide on this wild ocean ride is a necessary threshold to pass through on our way sailing out of victim into genuine unity consciousness?
√ What if we’ll never be able tomanifest the life and world we desire if we perpetuate our inner as well as the outer duality in our thoughts, words, and deeds?
√ What if our belief in evil is precisely the power creating and sustaining it, the veritable wind in evil’s sails?
Consider for a moment that NEO, while fighting harder and harder, was losing bigtime to Agent Smith—and that it was only when he stopped fighting and became ONE with his adversary that he overcame him.
The “Truth” of the Matter
If we’ve managed to come to terms with “evil,” the next crucial step on our sea voyage to legitimate sovereignty in body, mind and spirit is to grasp that “truth” is the second biggest psyop in the history of the world.
The utterly useless and senseless idea that “the truth will set you free” is pure bunk, yet people quaff this kind of cult Kool-Aid constantly as if their very salvation depends on it.
Not a day goes by that I don’t encounter a meme about “truth” or the “true” nature of this (somehow real) reality in my (cringing) boat trips around that CULT of Cults that is the desert island of social media.
My response to all such memes (some of which I blush to admit I once created myself) might best be summarized by the following passages from my forthcoming novel, BEGINNER’S LUKE, which I plan to premiere on Substack:
DAMNIT, we must DO something! I, for one, am over RATIONALITY, done with ANSWERS, fed up not just with petty LIES but equally with pedestrian TRUTHS, athirst for more meaningful QUESTIONS, hungry for more genuine FEELINGS, chomping at the bit to push my IMAGINATIVE LIMITS beyond the tedious delineation of the QUOTIDIAN into a veritable LYRICAL RENAISSANCE. In short, I propose an alternative (and certainly unusual) STRATEGY for reinflating a SHRUNKEN UNIVERSE.
Materialists and other cult dupes downplaying the creative power of our consciousness while sailing on the Ship of Fools known as the Collective (which, by the way, includes vast numbers of folks firmly convinced they’re outside the Collective) loathe this way of looking at things.
They categorically refuse to seriously entertain the full implications of the idea that “truth” might be nothing but fool’s gold in a simulated, observer-generated construct such as our watery home.
They conveniently ignore the tacit admission from the Cult of Science itself that there’s no there there even when it comes to matter, which ends up endlessly receding into nothingness as it becomes mere whorls of energy.
They self-righteously ridicule anyone with the audacity to propose that Mandela and Heisenberg Effects are the rule, not the exception.
Truly, if I may even use this word in this context, our world is a well-oiled slope into the yawning maw of the unknown, and this drives control-freak rationalists and their ilk quite literally insane.
Such folks remind me of my greenhorn eponymous narrator, Luke (a self-described “wayward mariner”), in the following scene before he comes to terms with the fact that he’s actually imagining everything he’s experiencing—the good, the bad and the ugly of his “reality”:
Faced with so much knowledge, the long history of human accomplishment, I’d become obsessed with learning it ALL. I’d convinced myself that in order to write about my imaginary experience of the world, I had to know the world by rote, inside and out, front and back, like a sonnet or an ode I could memorize and store away for future reference.
As if truth, loyal to the expression, actually possessed a handle I could someday hold onto.
Vanity! When do we ever know THE TRUTH? It’s always changing. It evolves as we do: we cultivate different truths as we become different people.
I didn’t know this then. I didn’t understand that the plain and simple truth is, there is no plain and simple truth. I didn’t comprehend that what passes for empirical knowledge is at best a sincere fool’s delusion.
It hadn’t yet penetrated my thick skull that a temporal boundary dogs even the most inert of us like a shadow, six months or so behind, so that what we’ve experienced in the past six months belongs intimately to us, is part of who and what we are ... whereas the events beyond the line are somehow foreign, legendary if not mythical, as if belonging to someone else’s story.
I still hadn’t learned to live with the six-month line. I feared change. I longed for a classical universe, a finite world with immutable laws I could master with hard work ... and a little talent.
Here’s the rub with only doing things halfway:
Even after getting rid of the concept of “evil,” if you’re still wedded to the psyop of “truth,” you remain easily manipulable by the Gameboard.
The “AI” (more on this problematic term soon) will have no problem whatsoever whipsawing you and those other cultists who disagree with your “truth” into antagonistic camps in the name of “science” (or some other religion), and you’ll waste no time rendering each other wholly ineffectual to change anything that actually needs to be changed in this benighted sea kingdom, yourself included.
Build Your Inventories, Then Toss Them in the Sea
I’m NOT saying not to think—and think critically at that. I’m NOT saying not to “do the research.”
I’m NOT saying not to seek “truth.”
I’m NOT saying not to look “evil” in its red, lidless eye.
These are important stepping stones, islands for hopping across, if you will, on the path to liberating ourselves from the World Cult.
We all start out believing this shit is real. If we didn’t, well, what would be the point of the illusion?
The more we believe in it, the more real the delusion gets—until, at some point in the evolution of our consciousness (should we dare to go there) from the reptilian up to possibly the “angelic” level, it becomes surreal on its way to revealing itself as simply ... unreal.
It’s at this point that we can continue to build our theories around “truth,” so long as we’re willing to throw them overboard when they start weighing and slowing down the speedboat of our life.
This is essentially what Don Juan recommends to Carlos Castaneda when he tells him to feel free to build his truth inventories, so long as he promptly burns them and starts over.
Or better yet, we can simply leave the false dichotomy of “fact” and “fiction” behind altogether as we embrace our identity as Consciousness Artists imaginatively building the “realities” we observe.
We build them all the time anyway, even when we’re unaware of this phenomenon and end up constructing a prison planet on behalf of our manipulators. “Everyone secretly wants to be owned,” wrote Alicen Grey with cult-piercing pith.
So why not become conscious of how the Gameboard actually works and start using our awareness to our advantage for a change?
Henceforth, we can choose to operate in passionately dispassionate creator-observer mode, watching it all go down like a fantastic movie that we realize we’re simultaneously directing and starring in.
In short, we can reclaim our power from cults of all types and sizes by going in on our way out of here.
This is where the party really starts, where we put the FUN in the funhouse and pop some popcorn to enjoy the shitshow from our beach chairs while it lasts. Just don’t forget your sunscreen, preferably organic.
Copyright © Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
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😵💫 You Might NOT Be a Freethinker, But a CULT Member Instead, If ... https://solluckman.substack.com/p/you-might-not-be-a-freethinker-but-acc If you’re a member of Western society (or perhaps any society anytime, anywhere), you qualify—practically by definition—as a cult member, one who has been subjected to wave after wave of intensive indoctrination since birth.
“Reason can be said to be a type of group-based deductive logical scheme that relies on the mass power of the group in order to impose a perceptive orderliness on human consciousness and therefore the human world […] One could think of reason [as] the enforcement arm that helps bring about a certain slant to individual and mass consciousness, and I would dare to say that the evolution of reason throughout human history is really the refinement of a certain type of limited self-awareness and individuality.” —John Kreiter