Just as with the advent of Actual Freedom on the Dharma Overground (DhO) forum, I am once again astonished by the response of my peers to the latest ‘hardcore dharma’ fad, Ruthless Truth (RT).

The Hype

It seems that many are impressed by RT, calling it ‘hardcore pointing out’, enjoying the use of swearing as part of the method, digging the ‘death metal’ aesthetic, amused by the ‘arena’ style application, and excited by the prospect that Ciaran, the founder, and RT are producing enlightened people at a remarkable rate. In fact, Ciaran’s been forced to shut down the forum for a week as:

Our skills at liberating people are so intense that periodically, the Arena becomes saturated and fat with the newly-free. Our intake simply cannot match the speed at which we free people.

Rumour has it that Ciaran and RT have liberated 140+ people in a few months.

Over at the DhO they’re scratching their heads as to whether these people are all at 4th path (enlightenment in Theravada terms) or if some are at the Arising and Passing Event (an initial mystical experience that usually comes before any genuine insight).

Either way, there seems to be little doubt that RTers are getting enlightened, and that their approach is authentic. After all, the RT forum has three grades:

GREEN is for the ROOKIES. Everyone starts out a rookie. Rookies enter the Arena, and win the respect of those around them. But respect counts for nothing. To get into the next group up, you have to be...

ENLIGHTENED. Blue is someone who is ENLIGHTENED. To get into this group, we need to see you in action, preferable through a set piece description post, but also perhaps just as you try to free others. Because freeing others is the only thing that can get you into the...

LIBERATORS. Red is for the LIBERATORS. If you have liberated someone, you get to have a red name, and that means everyone knows that when you talk, they should listen.

I can see why people are excited: all we have to do is log on to a forum, enter into a debate where we call each other names for lolz, come to agree with Ciaran’s idea of ‘no self’, and then achieve the recognition from an online group that we are enlightened as a result of agreement.

Well that’s the hype, let’s check out the details.

The Method

The approach is to look for the self to see if you can find it. The forum is used by a ‘Liberator’ to help guide a ‘Rooky’ in this investigation.

The Enlightenment

When the ‘Rooky’ realises he/she cannot find the self, the ‘Rooky’ is ‘Enlightened’.

Hang on

Yes, it doesn’t look that impressive once you strip away the hilarious name calling, ‘hardcore’ and death metal references, extraordinary claims and Ciaran’s bravado, does it?

Pragmatic Dharma Objection #1: But the method is authentic!

Yes it is. Crucial difference between ‘not-self’ and ‘no-self’ aside (more on that below), this method of inquiring into the existence of the self is an entry level teaching in Buddhism, and is taught on countless retreats the world over. And yet do these retreats claim to churn out 140+ enlightened people in a few months?

Hmm, I wonder why not...(again, more below.)

Hardcore Truth Realiser Objection #2: But the realisation of No Self is enlightement!

No it isn’t. The idea that there is ‘no self’ is a corruption of anatta, or ‘not self’.

‘No self’ = the nonexistence of the self.

‘Not self’ = nothing that I experience is a permanent, unchanging essence. 

The concept of ‘no self’ has created an inordinate amount of confusion. Enlightenment is the direct recognition that the problems of both existence and nonexistence are invalid and always have been; ‘no self’ on the other hand claims everything exists except for the self, which does not exist. This is the polar opposite of what ‘not self’ means.

‘No self’ is at best a shoddy pointing out concept.

Raging Boner Enlightenment Facilitator Objection #3: But none of that means these people aren’t actually experiencing full-on enlightenment, does it? 

Based on Ciaran’s criteria for enlightenment as demonstrated on the forum, none of these people are genuinely enlightened by any stretch of the imagination. Here’s a case study, where Ciaran claims:

I used to use provocation and hatred to spike a person's beliefs, get them out into the open, get then focused, beat them down and get them looking at the truth.

Before you get all weird about it, it was incredibly effective at enlightening people. This duel, for instance, ends in Steve's enlightenment.

 The ‘duel’ begins with a lot of name calling, and ends 5 pages later with a weird messianic triumphant poem courtesy of Ciaran. On page 4, Steve says to Ciaran:

Your last big reply was fucking brilliant. I almost feel like I'm talking to a half genius-half god. Which is rare.

Yes, 'rare' indeed. However, Steve then has some doubts, before posting:

Okay, fine. I'll look. This better be worth it. If this fucks me up, I'm gonna let everyone on this forum know. If I suddenly stop posting on this forum, it means I've been banned. I'll post what happenned some time tomorrow probably or next time I get hold of a computer.

So we are on page 4 of a forum debate where Steve hasn’t even looked to see if there is a self yet. Then:

So, I've been doing my best since yesterday to look through the lense of 'there is no you'.

...

I tried to figure out what 'I' and 'you' is actually referring to. Then I realised that it is referring to nothing at all.

...

This whole thing hasn't been fully internalised yet but it's getting stronger all the time.

...

Ciaran, you're a fucking legend. Ridiculous.

...and there we have it: Ruthless Truth, with it's hardcore pointing out and relentless dedication to liberation, has produced someone ‘enlightened’.

This is a joke

The Buddhist retreats I mentioned don’t claim to churn out a million awakened individuals a year because pointing out the unfindable essence of self leads to nothing but an indirect recognition of this truth in the first instance, once someone has actually looked. This is akin to understanding the truth of light by seeing a shadow for the first time, but not seeing the light itself.

I’m a firm believer that persistence in observing the indirect knowledge of an unfindable essence can lead to direct knowledge; but it takes time and practice. After all, the acceptance and then observation of the Three Characteristics - which include ‘not self’ - are the very beginnings of Buddhist practice.

The ‘ruthless truth’ of RT is that it’s a teenage way of going about a pointing out exercise based on a degenerated understanding of ‘not self’ and all revolving around an egomaniac.

But I doubt this particular truth can compete with the hype.

PLEASE NOTE: Comments have been closed. Though I only wish for the comment thread to end, unfortunately Posterous only has a binary comments policy: there or not. So the comments have disappeared for now.

Permalink

Here's a little document I put together after conversation with some of my students over the possible pitfalls of working sigil magick correctly. Thought it might be helpful for others interested in this kind of magick. Enjoy!

BSR.pdf Download this file

Permalink

Permalink

And the entire world stands behind the embattled Egyptian pro-democracy protestors.

But what sparked off the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere?

For three decades the Egyptian people lived under the rule of Mubarak and his human rights abuses, well aware of the gap between peasant and wealthy-elite. And for that amount of time, we - the west - propped up the regime and its inequality, to the extent that Mubarak has a personal fortune conservatively estimated at $40 Billion. The Egyptians maintained their subjugation, and the rest of the World didn’t give a shit.

So what changed?

In January, for the seventh month in a row, food prices have sky-rocketed. They are currently the highest they have ever been since records began in 1990, and are only set to be exacerbated by the current major environmental upheavals in Australia, America, Africa and Asia.

And the driving force behind this growth in food prices?

With the global economic downturn, there has been a massive shift from investing in money to tangible commodities: gold, silver, minerals - but especially food. Having extracted all of the wealth in the financial market, the vampire squid is now looking to suck our resources dry. 

The icing on the vampire squid’s bloody cake is the impending but much predicted Peak Oil. As oil becomes scarce, infrastructure will break down, inflation will go interstellar, and the bankers will make an even greater fortune to hide in their fortresses as the world falls apart.

The truth is the Middle East may get its democracy, and the unacceptable human rights abuses might draw to a close (there are many acceptable human rights abuses perpetuated by the west which they might like to share, such as torture camps, rendition, invasion, etc), but the peasants will only get poorer and hungrier, even as they aspire to buy useless crap and vote for their favorite stooge peeking out of the pocket of colonial economics.

Viva la revolution?

We are not heading toward one world united in consumerism and democracy. Having the vote is incidental; we are all victims of the same insane global governance system, and the poor of the world might revolt first, as they already are, but at some point it will be our turn to live as the rest of the world does: impoverished and hungry.

Tell me: during our revolution, what political system will we demand?

Permalink

Tron marked the beginning of our head long rush into the digital revolution, an allegorical journey mirroring our own cultural descent into the digital world.

Tron: Legacy heralds our return, and just like a shaman who travels to another world to bring back knowledge and power, we have hopefully emerged wiser and a little less naive than when we dematerialised into our hard drives.

The shamanic vision always begins with what we want to see; it’s what spurs us on to leave the safety of what we know in exchange for the unfamiliar and new. So we were seduced by a digital utopia, spires of liberated information and the bright lights of democratic free expression. We would have the world’s collective knowledge available in the blink of a cybernetic eye; all the world would be our friend through connecting in ways prohibited by meatspace politics and geography. Soon there would be digital sex, virtual clubs, superhero avatars with fully customisable, predestined lives.

But just as a psychotic riding in his spaceship to Venus, our reality was actually playing with our feces in a collective sanatorium. Making a real life connection with someone half the world away was actually a throw away two minute exchange in a text box delivered with all the disconnected severity of an autistic; the multi-tasking hyper-digestion of terabytes of information was a shallow, quick succession of badly performed tasks and poorly retained trivial facts; the deeper connection with family and friends via social media was a silent dinner with illuminated faces, punctuated by beeps and vibrating cutlery.

The Great Empowerment is still a glassy-eyed dream for many businesses and artists. The vast majority of us only do with the internet what corporations allow us to do: to think otherwise is the delusion of a bum who believes he is the CEO of the multinational corporation whose doorway he sleeps in. We deliver the stats and figures to allow ourselves to be more efficiently targeted by advertising, all the while entertaining the illusion we are on the verge of realising the status of the mythic Internet Sensation.

But eventually comes the great satori: we’ve had our hopes pinned on an illusion, and what’s more, we were never hopeless anyway.

The definitive scene in Tron: Legacy sees Kevin Flynn (Geoff Bridges) turn to his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) to proclaim his folly for searching for perfection in the digital world, when it was right in front of him all along. Indeed, Flynn missed the best part of his son’s life as a result. 

It may appear as if we have simply returned to where we started; but all shamanic journeys end at the beginning, and yet the journey was necessary in order for us to return changed: with clear eyes to see how things really are, and how we might proceed as a tribe.

So what have we learned? Is the moral of the story to turn our backs on the digital world? Delete our Facebook and Twitter accounts, hurl our smartphones in the bin, sever our broadband connection and hit the ‘Off’ switch?

Although the social commentary found in Tron: Legacy is obvious, we should not miss the scope of its core message, which although might not have been intended by the scriptwriters, is most certainly a result of bringing Bernie Glassman onboard as a ‘Zen advisor’. The ‘perfection’ alluded to is not just the cliched, rosey vision of our offspring, but an intimate, existential perfection we miss each and every second because it is closer than close, and as a result we suffer by chasing after its reflection like a cat frantically pawing at a spot of light on the wall. The message is not just about losing contact with each other due to our digital fantasies or personal dreams, but about realising a truth big enough to contain all worlds, whether digital or not.

This message isn’t anything new, although its simple announcement at the heart of a major Hollywood film is certainly unprecedented; but as if to confirm the point that the truth of perfection is big enough to include all worlds, we see in Tron: Legacy the appearance of the ‘isomorphic algorithms’, a race of sentient programs who spontaneously emerged within the Grid: a genuine, digital life form. Flynn manages to save but one ‘Iso’, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), as Bridge’s deluded doppleganger, Clu, commits digital genocide by eradicating the race. 

Not only does Quorra become a disciple of the Zen Dude, but as the embodiment of all that is virtuous of the digital domain, her destiny is to be brought back into our world, with the promise of revolutionising science, religion and all that we know.

The Zen message tells us that nothing is bad by nature - in fact, quite the opposite - and Quorra’s story illustrates the fact that the virtue of the digital domain is really found in its liberation: By bringing the internet into our lives, instead of the other way round, the communications revolution can live up to its promise of genuinely augmenting our real relationships, keeping our families on different sides of the globe together, providing us with essential education and knowledge, and organising the like-minded into real world action.  

If we can learn to use digital technology and social media without it using us, it can help us to find what was here all along; and in its deepest sense, we can even begin to contemplate Transhumanist Zen, whether that takes the form of an enlightened human race genuinely enriched by the digital domain, or the possibility of sentient digital life realising its true nature alongside us. 

So the question is, can we live up to the wisdom we have brought back with us? 

Instead of disappearing into our hard drives, isn’t it time our hard drives disappeared into us? 

Permalink

Like most people, I bought into the myth of the internet in the same way the hippies swallowed their own stories about peace, free love and happiness: with a great deal of naivete and a wonderful ignorance of consequence.

Just as the hippies eventually sold out and became upwardly mobile middle-class consumers, so too has the optimistic, corporate-free landscape of the early internet slowly transformed into the digital extension of colonial economics.

And our lives have changed accordingly: welcome to Life 2.0, where we live on constant standby for the next ping/nudge/poke, where every whim to know/see/hear something is automatically indulged regardless of where we are, what we are doing and especially who we are with. We are so preoccupied with satisfying digital interruptions that we didn’t even notice when the promise of the web, those dreams we were sold as artists, writers, musicians and entrepreneurs, never materialized.

GospelLeaks

I didn’t really get online until my early twenties due to economic circumstances, and even then it was only at work. The web back then was a very different place with very little rich media content due to bandwidth restrictions and processing power; the main currency was text, and this text was accessed at set times, as an asynchronous medium should be.

My main interest was occultism, and the internet was a honey pot of hard to find books, secret histories and rare reports from other practicing magicians. Thanks to Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council, I downloaded and printed off the entire Nag Hammadi corpus and the Gnostic Gospels (all 44 of them), each day taking one with me to the local coffee shop to read at lunch time (note how the coffee shop was not an internet cafe, nor did it have wifi. I won’t even mention my mobile phone...). 

The internet was something very simple: someone somewhere would upload some very specialized content, and I would access it at certain times to read as I would a book. But perhaps due to the optimism of the nineties, somewhat embedded in the very idea of the internet, it also felt as if the web would allow us to do so much more with the impending accessibility of rich media. As a musician, I was about to discover how this exuberance over-promised.

The Worst Open Mic Night in History

Since the age of 16 I had flirted with music, and by the time I was 25 I decided to bite the bullet, record a demo and move to the Big Smoke to realize my destiny as a rich rock star. Of course, this was the old fashioned way of doing things; it was now possible to upload your tracks to a site called MySpace, have thousands of people hear your music and have record execs falling at your feet regardless of anyone’s physical location. Why migrate to the Big City, when a farm boy in the remote hills of Wales can become an overnight sensation by posting a scratchy recording on the web?

I was disappointed on two fronts. First of all, London is where every budding wannabe rock star goes to try and get signed. I would play 3 or 4 open mic nights a week, and at each venue I would only be playing to other musicians who would also take their turn that night. Second, MySpace was nothing but an online version of this same phenomenon, except instead of being regional or even national, it was a global gathering of all of the world’s musical hopefuls presenting their usually god-awful tracks to each other. MySpace was the Worst Open Mic Night in History. Unsurprisingly, I never did become an overnight sensation, and realizing this, moved on; sadly, most other musicians I met during this time are still desperately ignoring the obviousness of the truth: they wasted their twenties on a lie, one more mp3 upload isn’t going to make it happen, and no one is interested in a thirty-something wannabe pop star.  

Blog Off

Around this time a developer friend started a ‘new media’ company, and I became his first employee. I’m still unsure as to what my role actually was, but it involved sticking my finger in the online marketing pie, only to find my finger knuckle deep in shit.

Because that’s all online marketing is: excrement. 

Apparently, to be successful on the net, you need to structure your site a certain way, litter your copy with specific magical ‘key words’, go ‘viral’, develop your ‘brand’, ad nauseum. In order to do all of these wonderful things and become as successful and rich as the most successful and rich online marketers, just buy their books and attend their talks (of course, none of those books or talks will tell you the real secret: pretend you know the secret techniques of online marketing and sell them to an unwary public). Just as every musician can be a rock star, every entrepreneur can be a millionaire thanks to the power of the web!

I bought those books, I tried the techniques, I felt dirty. I tried to peddle the greasy spiel to clients, but if I couldn’t convince myself, who was I kidding? Later down the line with my own writing, I considered what I had learned about marketing and found that it was just a distraction from doing something of value. And guess what? After five years I’ve had a number of sites with a loyal following and a high hit rate without once looking for a ‘purple cow’ or worrying if my site is actually a ‘meatball sundae’. Here’s the unmarketable but realistic truth: I just wrote about what interested me to the best of my ability, and I’ve enjoyed a slow success in realistic proportion to the subject. Although I’m not close to being a millionaire, I am happy with what I do. 

So here’s a tip: if you need online marketing skills for a project, that project should be terminated now. Stop wasting your life baking yet one more Poo Pie; if it doesn’t sell itself, it’s bollocks.

The Great Yopping Gob

Perhaps the wooliest and most pernicious image of the net pushed by the Net Dreamers is The Great Conversation. ‘Get online, because that’s where the conversation is happening! Don’t you want to be a part of the revolution?!’. Cue anxiety over missing out: quickly set up a blog, get on Facebook and Twitter, and do whatever it takes to join in and get heard. 

I’ve met some friends through the internet and those rare people who share my interests with the same passion; but I’ve mostly spent my time talking as if I have Asperger’s to other similarly afflicted Great Conversationists. Every single forum I have taken part in, every debate in a comments thread, I have come to regret as a phenomenal waste of everyone’s time. I’ve spent hours fretting over long-winded and invariably pedantic discussions that mean nothing to no one; and every online environment I’ve facilitated for the Great Conversation to take place is always co-opted by someone’s issues (sometimes mine) given free reign behind an artificially distant avatar or anonymous account.

Furthermore, I think the majority of people don’t have anything to say at all. Not a sausage. I know that’s not nice, but then neither is the narcissism being promoted by thinking otherwise. And yet everyone is encouraged to say something, anything, just so long as we are all a part of the Great Revolutionary Collective Yopping Gob of Humanity.  

The only worthwhile conversations I have had thanks to the internet are those that have taken place between myself and a few people sharing similar interests, person to person, and usually over video call. If you want a great conversation, you’ll find them where they have always been: with people, face to face. The virtue of the internet can be found in it’s use as a tool to organize real life encounters; anything else is always pathological to some degree.

Twatter

My impetus to write this piece has come from a year spent on twitter. I shunned Facebook quite early as nothing illustrates the futility of online ‘friendships’ quite like a friend request from a racist mugger who vaguely knows you from school; but twitter promised concise, witty and snappy conversation between people with the same interests, so still holding on to the dream of the Great Conversation, I signed up.

At first, I used it mainly to announce a new blog post or video. But the more I used twitter, the more I found myself immediately tweeting any new idea that popped into my head. Before Twitter I would have an idea, and mull it over for a while: Sometimes it would progress into something else, sometimes it would turn out to be crap, sometimes it would tie in with other ideas in a novel and exciting way. The best ideas and connections would hopefully become well thought out, exploratory essays, books or blog posts.

My Twitter behaviour changed all that. Good, bad, poorly thought out, promising: every idea was simply jettisoned into the twittersphere, making room for the next tweet. My writing dried up.

Worst of all, I started to habitually check Twitter out of compulsion and with great excitement, and this regardless of what I found there. I would sometimes respond off the cuff, with whatever happened to be floating through my cranium at the time: I was essentially publishing the most shallow and meaningless thoughts I was capable of. I could see this in other people’s tweets too, and some were an obvious display of very strange neuroses. Is that where my behavior was heading? How many more times would I remind myself that it’s not possible to have a meaningful debate in 140 characters or less, and yet persist anyway?

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

The first detrimental effect I noticed due to my internet behaviour was my change in reading habit. I’ve always read a lot and I’ve always liked books; but my book buying slowly but surely over took my capacity to finish a tome, and I would find my self reading more and more volumes simultaneously. No doubt some people reading this will see this as evidence of increased data processing and multitasking; but I can assure you it is nothing but the entrained behaviour of someone who can satisfy the need to know something in a second, with the expectation that knowledge will be presented in a grossly oversimplified and easy to digest manner.

This is the bias of the internet: a quick and shallow knowledge fix (so well done for reading this far!). So applied to books, we end up buying (with one click!) any work that looks interesting, satisfy that interest in a superficially fast way - usually within a few pages, and flit to the next text. Before you know it, you are knee-deep in unfinished books, once again hovering over the big Amazon Buy button!

With Twitter, I began to notice this impulsivity in my Life 2.0. Regardless of what I might be doing, any question would immediately be indulged by interrupting my current activity in order to get a knowledge fix. This would happen without considering the comparative value of what I might already be doing, the question itself and the answer I would probably find.

What are the priorities in my life? Will I die unhappy I didn’t check twitter on Christmas day, or because I didn’t spend enough time with my family? It’s absurd to even point this out, and so our actions betray the nature of the Life 2.0 fix: we respond to it with no regard to the specific importance of the knowledge request; what matters is that the craving is satisfied, and right now.

What difference does absorbing the - at best quite interesting, at worst narcissistic and neurotic - online contributions of our internet friends really make in our lives? Would we be in a better or worse situation if we dropped all of our social media interactions now (how many irrational fears has that prompted)? What might we do with our time instead? 

Personally, there are many things of incredible importance I could be doing right now, and there is absolutely no chance 99% of my online activity could compete. The genuine friends I’ve made (and still make) thanks to the web I naturally see offline or face to face via video chat as a progression towards genuine human interaction. There is no way I can justify the amount of time I have spent (and many people do and will spend) indulging the many dreams and fantasies we have spun about the internet over the last digital decade.

The internet is neither good nor bad in itself; as a tool, it’s what we do with it that counts. As to be expected, it takes time to develop a degree of realism and responsibility with any new cultural development, and at least for me, my naivete and lack of mindfulness has finally become painfully obvious. I would rather lose myself in the fireworks than upload a video of an event I actually missed. 

It’s time I uninstalled Life 2.0.

Further Reading

Program of Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff

Permalink

As the year draws to a close, so too does the Baptist’s Head and Open Enlightenment. Both projects have been steep learning curves, and I’m proud of the incredible amount of work both Duncan and I have put into the sites.

These projects have functioned as training facilities for the real work: the development and offering of a Western approach to enlightenment. I’m happy the tempering phase is over, and the real work of establishing Deep Humanism can begin. That of course doesn’t mean Deep Humanism won’t bring it’s own tests and trials, but at least these will be within an arena less frustrating than an attempted resolution of complex, subtle issues within an open, public debate.

Not only are big shifts occurring with my work, but the arrival of a beautiful, gold Ganesha statue in the home has also heralded new magical developments pointing back to the Tempe Working (involving an Egyptian Stela in the British Museum); a change of career and a period of study for my wife (which feeds directly into our plans for a self-built, self-sustaining retreat centre); the likely relocation from north London to Brighton for a bigger flat with a garden; and intimations of further and more refined stages of enlightenment to explore in my personal practice. 

With all of this in mind, I’m hoping to make this winter something of a retreat, as I focus on my mahamudra practice (details to follow), teaching and the grunt work of designing the new site, writing the content, and developing a training program for students and teachers.

Om Gam!

Permalink