Alchemy for the Braindamaged V: Structures and Ultrastructures

part I part II part III part IV part VI partVII part VIII part IX part X part XI Part XII Part XIII part XIV

If you don't think you're a genius, you probably aren't.
-Salvador Dali

Okay. Rather than try to shoehorn some cumbersome explanations into the body of the next segment, I though I'd take some time to discuss what we just did, since for some strange reason it seems to have thrown everyone into paroxysms of adulation or confusion.

I mean, how pitiful is it that almost nobody can just kind of sit with the feeling of being an autonomous authority? We all go through a phase of thinking we're the center of the universe, but rather than integrate it into a healthy psyche, while acknowledging the limitations of that view in functional terms, we instead are taught to recoil in horror at anyone who dares to ignore the consensus and social norms.

And all you so called 'non-conformists' can shut the fuck up right now. I can see you acting all smug about how liberal/anarchist/discordian and 'deprogrammed' you are, but chances are all you do is bounce off the programming other people have in utterly predictable fashion. You're perfectly willing to be hateful, narrow minded, exclusionary and prejudicial in your own ways, as long you get enough support from your peer group. Let me give you a hint: if you say you're 'against' anything, or you define your life in terms of changing something about the world around you, you're as robotic as the next idiot, so sit down and shut up. The door is always there if you're feeling the need to assert yourself a little bit.

But anyway. Regardless of your background, it's pretty likely the idea of being a law unto yourself is going to call forth stereotypical images of moralistic horror, like seeing yourself smeared in feces, sodomising homeless children over the kitchen table, whilst reading passages out of Mein Kampf.

If you really need to know what the intent behind my last rant was, then here ya go...
- to give you an particularly vigorous and confrontational variation on the banishing ritual.
- for those of you sufficiently able to roll with that, you may have caught a glimpse of an unconditioned and autonomous sense of will.
- for those of you who didn't, that perhaps gives you a nice look at how neurotic and inhibited you are. It's really hard to do all that stuff you're talking about, someone will actually dislike me, or fight against me ...

Yeah whatever man. When you look at all the major achievements in history, it's quite clear the hardest part in any of them was being willing to imagine and act on it. Suck it up.

You may recall that back in the first part of this series, I commented on how the 'ego', or the construct that we generally refer to as ego, may or may not have been the product of ancient alchemical development?

Well imagine this for a moment: you're back in prehistory, part of some tribe of hunter gatherers. You've got a fairly well formed mythology, some notion of the cosmos, an established social order.

But then something happens. Maybe you get lost, or there's a plague, or you eat something no one else has eaten before, or you're attacked by an animal and survive. Maybe you've broken the taboos and been exiled.

If you read any Howard Bloom, you might have noticed him talk about the self destruct mechanism in human beings. We have hormonal cellular features that are meant to debilitate and kill us if we become ostracised from our social group. So back in those days, and even now, being plugged into the group story was a matter of biological survival.

So, for whatever reason, you undergo a biological and social crisis. Now, certainly, this is starting to sound reminiscent of shamanic lore yes? Joseph Campbell, the heroic quest and alla that?

The upshot is, you get a glimpse of what lies outside the normal reality structure for your tribe, voluntarily or not. You start to see that maybe it's not as true as you formerly thought it was. In situations like that, tribes have a mechanism to incorporate you back into the society. You might become the shaman. Or to put it another way: the crazy guy who lives outside the village and answers questions that don't have solutions in the normal framework. That's your 'approved' role. It's better than nothing, after all. The alternative is to be cast out entirely, to risk starvation, death, and who knows what. You've stepped outside the framework, but you're still playing a role within it.

But maybe things play out another way: perhaps you start to see that you are not dependent on the story for your existence. You have the ability to reject that story altogether and write a new one. Maybe you're not content to be the tame freak on the edge of society. You wanna run the show. Yeah, you still need the support of others, but if you can get enough of them onboard your story, you could turn the whole thing upside down, and then you're the one in charge.

Pretty much every culture, particularly the oldest tribes, have a myth about their origins. Almost always, there's what can be called a 'culture-hero', the one who delivered all the old rules, the taboos, the stories about creation, who laid down the structures of the tribe in distant memory. In some cases that person is credited as progenitor of the whole human race. Almost always, this person has some sort of supernatural origin. After all, where else would that kind of radical break with the old order come from?

At first, this kind of social upheaval was relatively rare. Every few hundred years at most, but as time and history march on, this new structure in the human being starts to become more and more common. It becomes harder to keep everyone safely inside the confines of the story. The ego had gotten a foothold, and things would change forever. Where once there were shamans and chieftains, madmen and culture heroes, now there are God-Kings and High Priests. Anyone with a sword could potentially overturn the whole order of things, based on a personal vision.

So it's not suprising that around this time, people started trying to get a handle on what it was that drove all these bizarre mutations in the first place. Instead of waiting for a random accident to push someone outside the old structure, they began to develop ways to intentionally breach the structure from the inside.

So our previous installment in best understood in that vein: to try and shock you, challenge you, to push you into taking a small step into an unformed corner of the mind.

Is it a political manifesto? Is it a manual for functional skills? Is it a philosophical treatise? Yes and No. If you've never stepped into the realm of unconditioned will, trying to treat it as those things is futile and possibly dangerous. Once you've gotten outside the bubble, then those questions will answer themselves. In other words; " go banish some more and shut the fuck up." If you're just curious how I personally will answer those questions in particular, then it's forthcoming, but not just yet.

I'm willing to bet most of you have had an 'bubble busting' experience at some time. Like I said earlier, it's not that rare, and less so every day. Continuing the homework assignments, particularly the banishing practices, will help you establish a firm foundation there.

Homework: write yourself a little description of your perfect world. Go into as much detail as you like. What would things look like if you successfully conquered the earth, and called all the shots?

Once you've done that, pick out all the features of 'your' perfect world that are really just rebellion against the way things are now. How much of it is just a way to escape things you dislike? How much of your ideal reality is shaped by stuff you think you have no control over? Who are your 'enemies' and what would you do to them if you had the chance? Can you even do this exercise without going into spams of guilt, whining and fear of external rejection?

As always, revise and update your list of goals accordingly.

Next: How to build a ten inch cock that shoots fireballs in your spare time.