“And if we can build machines that are even more complex than humans, then they might have experiences and abilities that we can’t even imagine.”
In his thirties, Blaise Pascal turned his back toward the study of pure mathematics and instead was determined to study humans, which he expected to be more promising, a much vaster and more fascinating domain, where the true infinity lies maybe (despite however, if I remember correctly, one of his main Pensées was that human existence is drab and dull and the ways most humans try to cope with that are equally drab and dull). – For some years I have now been speculating whether my own trajectory is the reverse of that of Pascal (or Grothendieck´s) since it is the study of humans which obviously does not pay off. Humans, on the whole, aren´t complex. They aren´t fascinating. They aren´t enchanting. The colourfulness of the many facets of the human experience derives from an original uninteresting white light source, egocentricity, including their neuroses, and the irrationality and unpredictability (by philosophers optimistically and overly empathetically dubbed “free will”) due to their incompetence of intellect and character. Maybe it is cooler to study minerals and mineralogy, it may basically be about the same subject, it may be less exciting though but also does not make you look at a seemingly endless chain of disappointments… So maybe I shut everything else down and switch enitirely to the study of pure mathematics.
Dark ambient usually is for pussies; Lull, a so called isolationist dark ambient project by Mick Harris (former drummer of Napalm Death), is nevertheless cool. For instance the Continue album is neither particularly scary nor does it create an atmosphere that is truly welcoming; it is neither truly artificial nor is it truly natural; it does not actually create space neither does it display time (however at the most abstract level it may do so); there is no movement only an endless shift; it neither actually displays presence nor does it display absence; it is neither truly brown not is it truly green yet might display a constant morphing of a drab brown into a drab green – though not in the true mindspace rather in the phase space projection of it or so; it is not actually immersive nor does it repel you; it is not the transcendence of dichotomies nor is it the implosion of dichotomies; it does not make me think of Bodhidharma nor does it lay bare the inner processes of Shankara to me; …….. aaaahhh… what great glory…..; nothing in particular happens for one hour, and I think if´d last ten hours I wouldn´t become supersaturated by it. Scelsi would´ve been quite fond of that and I´m quite fond of Scelsi.
I plan/hope to write some notes about art and artists, about Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Reinhardt, Stella, Newman, Westermann, Hopper and Duncan Wylie as well as a general text about What is a Metaphysical Artist? in the course of this month, I am pseudo-overdue with it, apart from that always jumping between disciplines, but this is a good thing since via such pseudo-circuitous routes (actually hypercycles) you may be able to add more value to the initial stuff in the end. In this context I also studied stuff about the most contemporary art and tried to get it and despite my sensational intelligence and erudition I still feel unsure about how to catch the metaphysics in it (I do not deny that there is some, yet is diffused, haha, the postmodern condition; postmodernity is but an age bygone, New Realism in philosophy may serve as a tool to get the whole structure again and its pseudo-fractal-like geometry, etc.)
“My only misgiving regarding “American Ulysses” is that its length (864 pages) will scare off all but the most enthusiastic Civil War enthusiasts. I hope as many people as possible read this book”
– I think I will read this book, since I also think it is better than the Irish Ulysses (this is easy; the Irish Ulysses is the greatest shit book of all time, next to Finnegan´s Wake).
The true scientist, philosopher, artist – i.e. the truth-seeker – will strive for knowledge about what is already known, but, essentially, strive to look deep into the universe to discover new stars, new galaxies, new worlds. – In doing so, the truth-seeker also looks into himself; a triviality. – New worlds, new illuminations, are to be found in the unexpected, the trivial, on the street, in non-locations (non-lieus, Nicht-Orte) – to which the truth-seeker has a natural bond and solidarity – when the locations of the sublime – to which the truth-seeker also has a natural bond and a natural solidarity -, of course, have been explored as well; the locus of the existential truth is the true individual, the locus of truth of the world is a flower-like domain shifting through totality. – To become the locus of truth the truth-seeker must do what is called to “empty himself”. This means he must study a lot, as much as possible, and then 1) realign it with reality 2) deconstruct it – to gain pure insight, pure perception, pure forms of perception on which he can re-establish pure concepts – therein, he will come into contact with the nullfläche, the primal ground of his own mind, upon which everything else emerges, naturally (the vision of the primal ground is personal and subjective though there are similarities among those visions; it might be a surface of dirty white where no location is distinguished from any other, or, in closer touch with the outside world, an unspectacular ventilation shaft). In an act like this, everything is contained, like in the movements, gestures and actions of children everything is contained about what can ever be said, thought and perceived about those acts, because everything about those acts is authentic, simple and direct, because they incorporate the full potential of the idea of those movements, nothing is hidden, everything is there, such is purity. – This is, then, “the pathless path”. – Some might find a speech like that “a mystery wrapped in an enigma”. That is a good step to begin with. Meditate about that.
I have read Kant´s Träume eines Geistersehers once again since sooner or later I want to read some Swedenborg. Ahhhh … what an extraordinary stylist Kant was! Yet not as awesome as Hegel! Both, however, are, approximately, the most hilarious stylists in philosphical writing. Swedenborg had a very high IQ, maybe even higher than Kant. Kant, however, claims that Swedenborg is a miserable, drab and dull stylist, and dismisses him all the same. In the appendix of my copy of Träume eines Geistersehers there are some writings also by Swedenborg and I can see that Kant was actually about right, at least concerning the style in those two short passages. But the same thing goes for other illustrious minds of that age, luckily bygone, also quoted in the appendix, including Herder. I like what Swedenborg says about hell. Clever it is. According to Richard Bucke, in his very important but largely forgotten book “Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind”, Bucke surmises that, like Buddha, Jesus, Johannes von Kreuz, Shakespeare, Balzac or Walt Whitman Swedenborg had achieved cosmic consiousness as well. Kant, however, was a man of reason, and someone who solely builds his house on reason (“all brains, no heart”) surely is homosexual, if not pedophile in the brain. Emanuel the hero, Immanuel the fag quod erat demonstrandum
In a book by the knowledgable Pickover, A Beginner´s Guide to Immortality, I have read for the first time about hell-like near death experiences. In popular understanding near death experiences are cozy and ethereal, so it was previously unknown to me that not a few people have NDEs which rather resemble a state of hell or at least purgatory. Since mankind is composed of, say, 15 percent of people who are morally superior, 70 percent who are average and another 15 percent who are morally inferior it should not come as a surprise but as something completely logical respectively as an apparent consequence.
In Pickover´s book Swedenborg is also mentioned and it says:
“In his book “Heaven and Hell”, Swedenborg said that there was no devil, no single ruler of hell … Hell exists because it is the only place in which evil people feel comfortable. In heaven, the evil people would suffocate from the love and the goodness. According to Swedenborg, the creation of Hell was not an act of punishment but of divine mercy. When one dies, a person lives forever in the place that best matches the love the person fostered in his heart while on earth.” (p. 66)
Ahh, the good Lord. Hears everything, sees everything, understands everything.
25 and a half years ago I bought my first metal album: Iron Maiden´s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. (I came across popular music as a slow learner because I had considered it as vulgar before; then, at 14, I began to listen to Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk and the like, soon became interested in Iron Maiden and other heavy metal bands, because their obscurity attracted me. The first contact I made with Iron Maiden was when I was little and I saw the Piece of Mind LP at the Pro Kaufland when we were shopping, obviously in the early 1980s, the cover with the monster in the rubber room made an impression on me I still remember, ahhhh…) I initially disliked it but soon got into it, and soon got me some other metal records (from Helloween, Motörhead and Iron Maiden, later in 1991 Guns ´n´Roses and Metallica became big shots, etc.). – Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, one of Iron Maiden´s finest works, is a concept album about a person with supernatural powers. The forces of Good and Evil try to manipulate this person and to turn him into an agent for their causes. As it turns out the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son possesses the faculty of clairvoyance and foresees impending doom, yet, like Cassandra, is not taken seriously by people, respectively after the disaster gets all the blame for it. Despite his powers to see through people and through things the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is not able to foresee his own demise and it remains dubious what he actually has achieved in the human realm – „The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones“, a quote from Shakespeare´s Julius Caesar which serves as a Leitmotif for the whole album. In the end it seems the story of the Seventh Son was only an episode in a seemingly eternal struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. – If we zoom out of this section of the fractal, where Good and Evil are categories of the understanding of man, we progressively refer to the cosmos, of the totality of existence, and their dubious purpose, where it is maybe right to envision forces of constructiveness (energy) and forces of dissolution (entropy) as the deep structure, as the ultimate logos; maybe those forces are conscious and god-like, or they create their own (quasi-) consciousness as they progressively unfold, and who knows if it is not the forces of entropy which guarantee the eternal repetition of the cycle (for instance the Penrosian Cycles of Time)? Or is the state of order we experience just a natural and logical state within an infinite mass of chaos which naturally inhabits finite regions of cosmos, bound to dissolute again? – Such questions are of some interest for humans, and although those interests are usually not very pronounced among people they form the screen on which the shadows of all the other ephemeral interests are projected. It is the call of the genius, who naturally sees all the ephemeral in its cosmic significance, who projects daily struggles into cosmic struggles, who expands finite contexts into the infinite – sometimes for good, sometimes for worse – to establish systems of reference, of meaning. In their final consequences, people will not truly understand them. Apart from that, everyone will understand them. Because they are just natural and soulful, intellectually and emotionally intelligent abstractions of everyday life, of the common life experience.
Adressing those articles again the health benefits of listening to heavy metal are apparent. Heavy metal is simply better music than what is usually displayed in other genres. It is more intense, more erudite, more sophisticated, more simple and direct, more natural. There is more melody and harmony and more abrasiveness. It involves new ways to express melody and harmony in a dialectics with cacophony. It gets you much more immersed. That is why metal fans have an unusually strong attachment to their music. It is more sincere and demands passion, professionalism and devotion, yet is also more tongue-in-cheek and funny. That is to say it is more multi-faceted and comprehensive; what you see is not what you get, what you get is more. It is also more authentic, i.e. heavy metal fans avoid the psychological downsides of conformism and the unhappiness it involves. If your cognitive type is being a mismatcher you will be naturally more attracted to counterculture; if mismatching is most pronounced you will be most attracted to (the extreme subgenres of) heavy metal. That´s the voice of the outsider, of the individual, not of an anti-conformist quasi-partisan collective as you have it with punk. The truth is to be found there – in the enlightened, enchanted individual that contains most aspects of the world and is therefore in the most perfect state of harmony with the world. Beach Boy´s Pet Sounds or Led Zep´s Physical Graffiti are pretty comphrehensive albums but so are Forbidden´s Green, Grip Inc.´s Incorporated or Inter Amra´s Sky Burial, however the latter are clearly further down the horizon, in a more elevated region in the atmosphere, a higher echelon, closer to the vanishing point of totality. Why keep on insisting on listening to Sun Ra or Pink Floyd, if it is not some weak shit at all, when it is Morbid Angel, Meshuggah or Mitochondrion which give you an impression what music that comes from another planet, originates from or tries to realign with other worlds could look like; or when it is Abyssal who transmit the sound, the signals of the abysmal depth of far outer space (from close to the region where Azathoth dwells)? They expand the frontiers of the human mind, those acts explore new horizons. I do not quite understand how anyone with a brain working at high intensity level cannot be into heavy metal. It is music for schizotypal explorers. Schizotypal usually also is the poetry in metal lyrics, the scattered patterns, the strong lines transporting messages open to interpretation, so that you can establish multiple perspectives on them, a call from the beyond, ahhh … the patterns you can see in those lyrics! Healthy schizotypy involves introversion/introspection, intensity of inner world experience, power to ruminate, creativity and independence, ability to create a new world. It is not a disorder, but the highest level of personhood, of man. And with its lyrics about satan, about gential mutilation, or also with its sincere lyrics about politics, society or the human experience is simply more in touch with reality that the phony shit you can hear on the radio. Being in touch with reality, and mastering it, according to the principle, is good, is healthy. Smell the gravity of the heavy metal.
By the end of last year, enchanted by some new extreme metal releases, I wanted to write the Metapysical Note about Extreme Metal, which I could have already done, but still haven´t since I wanted to involve more contemplation and maybe new insights. But I think I am going to finally write it in November this year. The Metaphysical Note about Extreme Metal will be about how to realign „Western“ and „Eastern“ metaphysics, about how to avoid the negative consequences of both, and it will teach about the overman.
(The idea is that by embracing extreme metal you embrace otherness. By embracing otherness by the means of productive mimesis you get in closer contact with otherness and the apparent shadow realm it involves, as well as the shadow realm you involve yourself. Your consciousness will be broadened and you yourself become deepened. „Western“ metaphysics is concerned with the possibility of solid knowledge, „Eastern“ metaphysics with directly experiencing the faculty of perception itself, the extreme metal experience allows an integration and synthesis of both approaches. As you broaden and deepen yourself by embracing otherness, you will progressively lose the egoic aspects of self, both become a fluid entity as well as a distinct individual entity which does not get lost in the perception of Tao but will, with the knowledge of Tao, operate as a scientist. Finally, in that fractal-like process, everything that is untrue will be sorted out and only the true nature of things will remain. That entity which encapsulates things in that way is, then, the overman.)
The Metaphysical Note about Extreme Metal, together with the Postscripts to the Metaphysical Note about Extreme Metal, will be a very important document in the history of human thought, and of human practice. That will make me unpopular on Facebook again.
