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I feel like a lot of people will believe anything to free themselves from responsibility for their actions. They’ll act like their brain is some distant commander full of unpliable mysteries dragging them through life like the wind drags a leaf; when in reality your emotions are your choice, your actions are your choice, and your words are your choice, and you can only change yourself by choosing them.
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@hidden > emotions your choice
???
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@snacks @hidden idk i can choose to name certain feelings different ways but the feelings themselves are not really up to me
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@snacks @hidden i was about to say this also
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@une @hidden you can indirectly influence them by choosing not to act on them and hoping they'll get weaker, but that's about it in many cases
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@cajax @hidden @une doesn't always work
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@snacks @hidden @une it's possible to exert a good deal more control than you'd think, the only thing is you can't dictate your emotions or control them through force. You have to reason with yourself.
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@snacks @hidden they are autistic
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@cajax @hidden @snacks you're still having emotions though that you have to reason with
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@snacks @hidden @une but it does most of the time. Usually when it doesn't it's because there's something you're not aware of (or don't want to be aware of) that you need to acknowledge. Only then can you negotiate with it.
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@J @hidden @une @snacks well Jung was influenced by nietzche, and nietzsche made a really good argument that the christian orthodoxy was kind of tainted at its foundation-- for example, that it glorified abstaining from the use of power, which most of its followers weren't in any position to indulge in anyway. It's a kind of a "cheap" religion that way.
Also, something that bothers me immensely about christianity is that it promulgates a kind of false unity, that the christian god is THE final embodiment of all the important, ultimate forces, and that there's nothing else. It does give SOME nods to jesus' human nature and his struggles with that, but overall, the story isn't exactly close to the lives of normal people. It's not easy to RELATE to. It kind of has a tendency to float away, and leave people utterly void of spiritual experience outside of the two hours every sunday. It leads people to completely exclude the sublime from any part of their day-to-day lives. As if they're thinking "yeah that's God shit, nothing to do with me!" when the reality is that everyone is meant to seek a connection with something like the divine.
It makes perfect sense for people to want to stay away from that rigid order, but yeah that's no excuse for most hippies and other "free thinkers" or wahtever not filling the resulting gaps with SOMETHING other than just primitive nature worship bs, or better yet updating christianity.
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@cajax @hidden @une @snacks I'm conflicted about the idea of Christianity having a corrupt root bc it embodies all the greatest and most retarded aspects of humanity at once.
It is stupid and unjust, unfathomably deep, and the best conventional model I know of for describing the world.
I have more thoughts, will reply after lunch.
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@cajax @hidden @une @snacks It's true of most post-Christian mystics, they lobotomize their worldview so that it can be severed from Christian orthodoxy.
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@cajax @hidden @une @snacks I see Jung as laying the groundwork for how lower principalities act through people very well, but not adequately accounting for the mechanism, or for the existence of higher principalities.
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@J @hidden @une @snacks ah, that sounds a little like evola
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@hidden @J @une @snacks I don't know it's possible for me to ever say you're right or wrong, Jung's way too complicated. I just think I see different things from you. When you get deep into Jung, at least for me, that "flexible ego" thing is exactly how I started seeing it.
Like, you can have a certain trait, like a short temper for example, but you realize that it's just an aspect of your internal mental world that you can identify with or regard as just a feature of your "landscape." It's something shared by many many other people, and in that way it's not really "you", but you can apply the wisdom of people who have had to deal with the same kind of thing before to your own problems.
He says a lot of things out of nowhere, like, "when you realize who you really are, all of this will be obvious." And these phrases stick out, and they're confusing. I think with passages like that he's hinting at something very deep with plausible deniability that he meant it as anything other than, in this example, "knowing who you really are" is just knowing your own internal landscape, and not... something else. I don't know, honestly, I just have a feeling there's a lot of other stuff there you can't really see unless you're ready for it.
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@hidden @J @une @snacks how do you think jung missed the mark?
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@cajax @J @une @snacks My understanding of Jung is that he views the end goal as being a life where you continuously have periods of personal revelation to sort of “update” and clean your identity and ego. I think a better approach is to have as flexible an ego as possible, and to identify with little, so that you can dynamically respond to every context that comes up. I believe this is how genuine enlightened people and sages live.
I admit that my interpretation of Jung could be wrong though. I like him a lot either way
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@hidden @cajax @snacks @une I think of them more like phenomena that arise. I can control them in the sense that I can dismiss them and act however I like as an adult, usually, but I can't control their arising or dissolution
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@J @cajax @snacks @une I find that my emotions arise because a part of me wants them to. Of course I want to get angry when I’m treated poorly. And of course I can choose to let that anger pass when it’s not useful. I think that’s healthy. An example of an emotion you would want to get rid of would be a fear that arises from intimacy for example, because maybe it cripples your closest friendships. In that case it’s possible to uproot it at the source over time, both in the moment and outside of it. It requires a great deal of humility and a flexible ego though, which imo is why hinduism and buddhism and daoism and other similar approaches can be such a significant way to change a person’s life, so long as they have the will. It’s also why modern shit like jungianism misses the mark. Flexibility is the most important aspect, and it requires non attachment or non desire or raw humility.
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@hidden @une @cajax @snacks Tfw having emotions and not having emotions is the same thing.
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@J @cajax @snacks @une I never mentioned not having emotions. Just that you choose them, which is true imo. They come from your body, they are your sensations, you can train yourself into them and out of them with a variety of techniques. You can detach from them or play with them or just let them come and go. A narrow interpretation of me meaning you can just choose to always have no emotions and always do the right thing is uncharitable, imo. Similar to people who argue free will doesn’t exist because they can’t literally control themselves like they control a video game character, it’s far more complex than that, but in the grand scheme of things we choose precisely what we are. Free will is a skill.
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@hidden @cajax @snacks ok, but you're still having emotions at that point, i fear
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@une @cajax @snacks I feel like that’s just semantics
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@une @cajax @snacks You can just let them go as they pop up, it’s thoroughly unsatisfactory though of course
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@J @cajax @hidden @snacks you can read any aspect of Christianity through the lens of tradition, but you're still making the choice to read it that way (historically) rather than another way (theologically, philosophically, poetically, etc.). i recognize my personal relationship with Christ is instantiated within the tradition of Christianity, but like, when I've had visions of Christ, I've derived no extra special meaning from comparing what I've heard to Christian history, or the gospels, or whatever. I personally just think Christ and God are real, that my visions can be understood as psychological historically-instantiated phenomena, but that they are also real encounters with an extra-historical existence, so on the one hand it's tradition, on the other hand it's other things
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@J @cajax @hidden @snacks idk tradition is only a part of what Christianity entails. i do not think it's possible to critique Christianity without being analytic about it which necessitates cutting it up into pieces, which is fine, I just find it's extremely common to uphold a critique of disparate parts of Christianity as though they're critiques of Christianity as a whole, and as something of a Christian, it bothers me
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@une @cajax @hidden @snacks What is there in Christianity that isn't encompassed by tradition?
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@cajax @J @hidden @snacks I don't really think this is true of Christianity, that it inherently steers people away from seeing the divine in their everyday life. Catholic mystics like Marguerite Porete or Therese de Lisieux try to inject God back into the everyday.
I think personally that Nietzsche tried too hard to define what Christianity is, but it isn't really anything. Or I should say no definition of it could encompass all of it
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@une @cajax @hidden @snacks It's an entire tradition, you can still make valid critiques. Most of Nietzsche's critiques are at least somewhat directionally true, but he's far more naive than people treat him. I think if he had lived to be an older man, he would've developed on it a lot more.
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@tiskaan @J @une @cajax @snacks Hilt shit Tiskaan is alive
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@J @hidden @une @cajax @snacks
then how would you know if the dogma cones from god? why is that god and just another way to worshio the god? how do we know which dogma is the right dogma?
maybe im neing too Hermetic if thats the right word for it idk
>There's no contradiction there. Things exist in hierarchies, you use low things to aim at high things.
i dont understnd could explain your motivation behnd this sorry.
i think what i meant bwyond all things was peobably beyond understansing, i assumed from " I think a God can break his own rules, " as such because we wouldnt understandthe motivation of why it would break its own rules but rather that it did so.
honealty i dont know why i joined this thread. i dont know what the poibt was i was suppsoed t( make. i dont know.
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@tiskaan @hidden @une @cajax @snacks The dogma comes from the God. You worship God according to the dogma. If you attribute a dogma to the creator, then you worship that God (and if you're wrong you wind up in hell.)
There's no contradiction there. Things exist in hierarchies, you use low things to aim at high things.
>if god is ... beyond all things...
What do you mean by beyond? If you mean he can't intersect with reality as we see it, then it's a useless conversation anyway. We're just guessing.
>...then do you worship god as a catholic hindu buddhist or an animist?
Again, it depends what God is. There's not a unified monotheistic theory, the principle at the top of existence is different in each case.
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@cajax @hidden @une @snacks It's fine.
To be more precise, I think a God can break his own rules, in the sense that the world exists in hierarchies, and goods can be expressed in different ways at different levels. A God shouldn't worship man, for example.
But a God shouldn't be able to break his own Goods. Yahweh is said to be inable to do this, but he does. In Hindu myth, Vishnu and Shiva are free to commit evils as they see fit bc India never developed the idea that good has an inherent property of existence, whereas evil can only be parasitic, so for Indian religions good and evil are seen as dependent and somewhat relative, though the problem is somewhat solved in Mahayana where good = clarity and evil = limitation
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@J @hidden @une @cajax @snacks at that point the god isnt what youre following but rather which dogma / constellation fo beleif you want to attrivute to the creator.
if god is god and beyond all things then do you worship god as a catholic hindu buddhist or an animist?
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@J @hidden @une @snacks well in order to literally "break [its] own rules" a god has to have contradictory, unpraiseworthy traits, or just be kind of stupid and unable to plan ahead-- i.e., not godlike. So it's kind of a self-contradictioin.
I think it comes down to the fact that we have a natural disdain for that kind of behavior. Leaders who commanded you to do one thing while they did the opposite are extremely dangerous to have over you. Maybe God is just a more intense projection of the normal roles we have such as 'leader' or 'father,' so we find those traits abhorrent in Him. Completely understandable to not like that about christianity IMO, I agree.
Sorry man I'm probably dragging this discussion way off topic. I'll fuck off until I'm sober.
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@cajax @hidden @une @snacks >god was basically allowed to break his own rules
This is the low IQ way of dismissing the supposed disparity. The actual explanations are more like "Good is univocal with the Divine Nature, God as Good (which is the only thing with ontological essence) can only do Good
Then for specific examples, you'll say something like "God can only be understood analogically, therefore when Scripture says 'Yahweh changed his mind' it's actually got nothing to do with changing his mind, but it's the closest thing to a motivation we can understand."
My problem with this, though, is that if there's infinite dissimilitude, on what basis can you make the analogy? Furthermore, how do you account for attributes like "mercy" especially as they're expressed in the Incarnation, something that isn't exclusively transcendental?
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@cajax @hidden @snacks @une A God who can break his own rules is more akin to what Hindus have.
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@cajax @hidden @une @snacks
>well Jung was influenced by nietzche, and nietzsche made a really good argument that the christian orthodoxy was kind of tainted at its foundation
I don't think Jung was particularly influenced on this point. He was resentful of the shallowness of his religious upbringing from childhood, if you trust his autobiographical account.
>for example, that it glorified abstaining from the use of power...
This is a very complicated issue because it seems rather clear from the primary sources that Christians were anticipating a new kingdom right away. "It's fine to submit and die because Jesus is coming to conquer the world and resurrect you, like, next week."
That didn't happen and Christians have been spending the past 1900 years or so coping; stuck in an impossible situation where if they don't take power, the world stays in chaos, and if they do, they're eaten by chaos. In the later tradition you have a strong idea of Christian statesmen, but well into the 3rd Century, you weren't even allowed inside a church if you were affiliated with the empire, and in an era where the past is being re-examined in an attempt to refine some kind of purity, that's not going to be good enough.
>it promulgates a kind of false unity, that the christian god is THE final embodiment of all the important, ultimate forces, and that there's nothing else
If nothing else, it's a good theory of hierarchy. The problem is when you get into the specifics of what that hierarchy entails, and when you turn the supposed goods emanating from Yahweh on the characterization of Yahweh in his Scriptures, because you'll find that he frequently doesn't meet his own criteria for good. The fact that Marcionism and similar successor theories never went away attests to this. If there is good, and an impression of that is written on the human heart from above, why can we find clear instances of Yahweh appearing to do evil deeds?
But if you depersonalize that hierarchy and remove Yahweh from the equation like the Neoplatonists do, you wind up straining to find a standard for what virtues actually entail. You can posit tentative theories and not much else.
>It's not easy to RELATE to. It kind of has a tendency to float away, and leave people utterly void of spiritual experience outside of the two hours every sunday. It leads people to completely exclude the sublime from any part of their day-to-day lives. As if they're thinking "yeah that's God shit, nothing to do with me!" when the reality is that everyone is meant to seek a connection with something like the divine.
I think this is an issue with your presuppositions. Who cares if it's easy to relate to? What bearing does that have on anything? "Spiritual experience" is narcissistic bullshit, just do a bunch of psychedelics.
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@J @hidden @une @snacks Very interesting shit. I had to go and get high in the mean time (had a productive day damnit it's earned) so I'm not in a great disposition to really argue about this but I'll be thinking about it and maybe I'll have something to say later.
But I do have a couple questions in the meantime...
>Christians have been spending the past 1900 years or so coping; stuck in an impossible situation
Are you saying that christianity, in the formulation passed down to us, was kind of intended as a stop-gap for a short period of time? That kind of... sheds a lot of light on problems I've had with this religion in the past.
>because you'll find that he frequently doesn't meet his own criteria for good
I was under the impression that under christian doctrine god was basically allowed to break his own rules. some people say it's because he's completely above our judgement entirely, others say the stuff he did was justified on moral grounds, or even that the people he punished were "predestined" to be damned (if you wanna give calvinists any creedence-- personally I find them absolutely disgusting).
?Hidden?
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Une of the Unmensch of Ash-Trees
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