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There's been so much mental news lately it's hard to keep up.

From what I can tell from the tax evasion stuff nobody's going to prison because a) they're rich and b) it's (in some cases) a bit of a non-story because it's all been done through hedge fund managers who are diversifying assets. Not like the Queen is personally picking all of her investments.

From the rapey politicians... also probably nobody unless some  way more severe and substantiated allegations come out.

So I finished The Attention Merchants. I think it was interesting and seemingly pretty comprehensive as a history of advertising right back from the first newspapers through radio, cinema, TV and up to the internet. It could have done with a bit more of a conclusion perhaps but I guess just knowledge about what's assaulting your brain is valuable enough.

I have started trying to read Cradle to Cradle, a book about the circular economy in manufacturing. So far it's been saying the current 'harm reduction' methods introduce too much guilt and not enough action and then spends pages going on about how everything we make is slowly killing us and the planet. Pretty depressing.

Taking a break from that i've started Three Dangerous Magi which I guess you could call a primer on Crowley, Gurdjieff and Osho.. it's well written and I didn't know much about the three men before I started so i've been enjoying it.

However I will say that violence begets violence - I don't see an end to the escalating tensions that seem to be occurring in right now. It's not like the Nazis are gonna take being punched lying down. Things are gonna get worse before they get better.

I guess the best that we can hope for is the next Nazi rally gets met with even more resistance from people who are, unlike Elvis, seeing that allowing poisonous ideology to be openly expressed isn't a path with a good ending.

shit-kicking Nazis is an effective and morally upstanding treatment for this "symptom."

Like taking heroin for a headache.

If the Nazis had been ignored in Charlottesville, nothing would have happened. They'd have gone home and the statues would eventually be taken down because the opinions of Nazis don't actually matter. But that's not what anyone actually wants. What everyone actually wants any excuse to act like an animal.

So someone makes a phone call and a few dollars get funneled into the AntiFa account and before you know it, people are getting run over by Mustangs.

Lovely, lovely chaos. Our work here is done, folks.

This is dumb on so many levels.

I'm sure a lot of folks in 1930s Germany supported your view. They were wrong then, as are you now.

[Consciousness can be increased through group work. (and conversely - a bad group can decrease it - like a predatory cult or religion)]

Man there's so much to unpack here and definitely a lot of things you refer to that I don't quite have the right handle on to conceptualize properly. I think I grok the BIP part of things and mostly get jailbreaking but then self-remembering starts to give me that feeling of trying to think about something slippery.

I do want to thank you though Cramulus for all the effort you are putting into exploring and translating these ideas. I'm gonna give this and a few related threads another read-or-two and see if I can come back with something a bit more tangible.

Sometimes reading the stuff you write gives me one of those flashes of understanding eg:

When I read your post, I am trying to hear it in your voice, to resonate with the place you're coming from. I'm trying to get a little of your essence into mine. This empathy helps both of us - it helps me understand you, and through it, it gives me another channel to understand myself and how I'm coming off. Consciousness can be increased through group work. (and conversely - a bad group can decrease it - like a predatory cult or religion)

that I try and grasp onto but more often than not the profundity becomes lost again with time and loss of context - maybe a parallel to escaping one cell to find oneself in another?

So some company called Pastdue Credit Solutions keeps sending me letters saying i've got outstanding debt with NPower for the student accomodation I lived in.

Hilariously they managed to get the dates, address and my name wrong on the letter which were my first clues that something wasn't right.

General consensus online agrees that this is a company just trying to scam people with scary letters.

Suggestions for amusing/effective methods of retaliation welcome.

His Wikipedia page paints him as someone who would probably see through the joke.

His Odditorium podcast has also hosted Daisy Campbell a couple of times. I'm gonna give it a listen if I can remember. Sounds like an interesting dude.

Someone on the BBC is writing about the Principia/Illuminatus:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170809-the-accidental-invention-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy

So if i have an English muffin and split it to stuff with egg, cheese, sausage, and a sweet asian chili sauce is it still a muffin? An English muffin sandwich might require two muffins or maybe the whole thing is an English breakfast calzone...

Here we go again.

Hi new person 

Oh yeah - Hi new person and welcome! Thanks for opening this kettle of worms up.
 

What are you sandwiching in an open faced sandwich?

That sucks dude I hope you get a chance soon. Sounds like you're wasted at that place.

Why are you still there?

Glad you're back! Sounds like you've had a helluva trip.

There's a "law" in behavioral psychology called the Melioration Principle. It says that an organism will engage in a behavior until a competing behavior offers a better reward. You can see this every day, in everything you do. When you make a choice, what you're doing is really just a quantitative weighing of rewards. And doesn't that sound mechanical? Does that seem like free will? It seems like free will is just solving this calculus equation.

Gurdjieff says there's a way out of this. That there are moments when you can escape this inner slavery. Moments when your actions aren't mechanically dictated by external circumstances. With work, with awareness of the internal world, with "conscious labor and intentional suffering", we can achieve brief moments of internal freedom.

And I say: I will believe it when I see it.

But I'm not dismissing it until I have walked down the path myself. If this kind of freedom is possible, I want to taste it.

I think application of the Melioration Principle to humans is a bit complicated by higher-order thinking (things like Morality). Except for cases of personality disorders, it's the tendency towards non-rewarding behavior that defines disordered thinking. Keeping this in mind, I would argue that there is a balance to aim for that lies between the addictive mindset that the Melioration Principle implies we, as animals, spend most of our time in, and the Wild West of complete and unhindered Will. And it sounds like Gurdjieff's implication that these periods of Free Will and Self should be "brief moments" hits the nail on the head. In seeing this connection, I recommend looking at the Melioration Principle as a tendency toward extrinsic reward and Free Will as a tendency toward that which fulfills you, intrinsically.

As someone who is engrossed in the addictive mindset of the Melioration Principle, I definitely see the opposite end of the scale. As someone whose attention is immediately grabbed by camera position shifts in a movie on a tiny TV screen in a room containing people in deep discussion, I exemplify the reward-based mindset that you're seeking to overturn, even for short periods of time. I've found that the moments in which this mindset is completely overturned is in those moments that require my unhindered attention in order to fulfill that which protects those who depend on me. Most of the time, it's situations like these that I find the intrinsic reward to be overpowering. It's also in these situations that I sacrifice the most of myself, extrinsically. I think this compromise, this law of give and take, is important.

This fact made me look at something you'd said earlier about the Master-Apprentice communicative relationship, and the limitation of literary communication, a bit differently. I think it's impossible to transfer the Secret, "Spiritual" information without that intrinsic connection to other people. A common theme among these ideas you and Gurdjieff present involve deep connections with other people; a sense of community.

I noticed throughout my life that the most dangerous I ever was, to myself and others, was when I was isolated. I made decisions that were borderline sociopathic, and I would say this time was when I was the least myself. All of my decisions were based on extrinsic reward, and disregarded any sense of community or personal connection. I was unwilling to sacrifice anything for anyone. I would argue that it's this isolation, or romanticization of this isolation in today's society that keeps us from seeing our Selves as often as we should. I think it's what keeps us from realizing the strength and potential in the unexplained power of connection.

And finally, I think I now know what you meant earlier about internet culture taking us back to the tribal communication structure. We're suddenly able to form these tight-knit groups which propagate more complex ideas on specific topics that are able to be expressed by the group from the various perspectives within. One member specializes in one area, and another specializes elsewhere. And the combination gives a broader picture, and that broader picture is the basis of a successful community. Economies are more successful when the community has a singular goal or unified interest. In the late 50s and 60s, it was space exploration and survival of the Cold War, for example. But the big take-away is that one's tribal identity in this internet age is the basis of modern politics. It can be used negatively, even if it was originally used to propagate and pass on Secret information. It's currently being used as a way of waging war on other "Tribes" on the basis that they are immoral. I think we can reach a communal unification and massive shift in tendency toward Free Will (In the more important moments) if we can end the tribal warfare.

I guess the question is, how has tribal warfare ceased, and tribal peace taken over in the past?

I apologize if I got a little off-topic. I was having many epiphanies over the course of reading your explanations, and this is one of the connections I made. If need be, we can make a new thread for this as a separate discussion so as not to derail yours.

Thanks for reviving the thread PoFP!

On the Melioration Principle and being able to 'escape' it: I get that a lot of decisions aren't necessarily made 'consciously' and maybe through conscious labour etc. one can learn to make better/more informed decisions but ultimately your actions are always going to be dictated by external circumstances right? I can't even comprehend what internal freedom means in this context. Maybe this is my limitation. Maybe the limitation of literary communication.

Re: tribal warfare, I don't think it has ever ceased. Just the tribes we identify with have changed. I don't know if it can cease.