Pushing open those carved wooden doors of all promise I wander once more into what is now defined as a ‘church’. But is it the Church? The one with that elusive capitalization I just used, because that one keeps eluding me and I end up, once again, here. Little posters everywhere. Stacks of coffee cups and plates, ready to go! A smell of old, damp varnish, overly-washed plastic trays, teabags, air freshener, old lady perfume, mothballs, subtle urine, thick dust, and an ever so slight underlying whiff of baked goods. A few gammon thumb-heads facing forward. A few grey mops. A single shaky old boy blowing his nose.
— Morning!
— Morning.
— Morning.
— Morning. With a nod.
— Keepin’ well?
— Yeah, you?
— Oh, you know how it is-
— Morning!
Fuck me! Yes, it is morning. … — Morning.
— Nice morning.
— Indeed.
— Is though, ain’t it?
— It’s a good one.
— Good one indeed. Morning.
— Morning.
Anyway, I’d best take my seat for ‘it’ is about to get started and I should be paying attention. I should be getting into the zone.
— Morning.
— Morning.
Before Mass, I should talk to God and after Mass, I should talk to others.
— Morning.
— Morning.
I probably won’t, though. As per usual I’ll give a few nods and swiftly walk out. I don’t want to talk to these people. The chair is tough and digs into my back. The kneelers are rarely used (I use them). I lean back and my trousers crumple up and my jacket flops all over the place and there’s just so much material what in the world. Does anyone wax their shoes anymore? I sit back and take a little breath. Tilting my head right back and side-to-side, rubbing the back of my neck with my hand. Settling in, settling in. Usually get a few moments before to get in it. I look around.
To my right is a man praying so violently I wonder if he’s going to prolapse his intestines. (What would we do if this happened?) He is two aisles over and I can literally see the veins popping out of his forehead. I guess he must really want what he’s praying for – all my best to him! What if he passed out? What if the inside of his head is just a big vein? Anyway, back to it, back to it. I kneel down quietly hoping other people notice that I have done so. Really there are only two options prior to the Priest entering: Sit down on a chair (pathetic, wretched, and sinful), or kneel down (pious, holy, and right). I peek out from behind my prayerful pushed-together palms and notice a woman shoot me a quick glance. She is sitting and I am kneeling. Try as hard as I might, I can’t help but slightly roll my eyes at her and return to God. Alas! I have allowed my hands to collapse into crossed fingers as opposed to flat palms! If only there were some Trad here to reprimand me, and yet I must admit it feels a little more natural. I wonder what the most efficient prayer stance is. Sometimes I feel like flat palms together are far too pious even, almost like one is firing a prayer to God. I imagine myself mimicking loading a prayer into an invisible M1 Garand and blasting it into the heavens! Yeah! Semper Fi!
Some people at the front are talking. A little chit-chat. Something about a new lawnmower one of them just bought. I desire to run over and tell them the only thing they should be worrying about is the New Jerusalem! And that if they aren’t quiet they’ll be mowing the lawns in hell! Are there lawns in hell? My knees are starting to hurt…that’s right Lord, I’m suffering for you right now, I hope you’re noticing. Oh! What’s this? The man who just sat down in front of me immediately pulled out his phone. Looks like it could be the readings for today, oh, nope, he’s now checking his texts. He’s not just sitting down either, he’s relaxing back into his chair. A little roll of boomer back fat is sitting on the top of the chair – Oh yeah, that’s right, scratch your head. What if I leaned over and gripped onto his back-fat-roll like a rollercoaster and shouted “You must be this fat to ride this chair!” He is bald and I wish to slam-dunk his head with a thick handful of spray cream. I am also bald and if someone did that to me I would be annoyed.
I take a deep breath in to still myself. Surely it can’t be much longer now? But that is how people know you are settled, that you are getting that grace, the deep, slightly-audible breath of internal peace. That’s right Ma’am, if you didn’t know I was in a state of grace when I walked in, you sure do now. I confessed just yesterday (wish I could tell them this). Sometimes when I’m in the confessional I feel like dropping an absolute blinder just to see what would happen. — Yes Father, pride, lustful thoughts, and gluttony…oh, and on Tuesday I drove my car into a roving pack of old farts. Four deaths and 18 casualties. Might need a bit more than an Our Father, ‘eh…Father? I’ve never done this, I’m usually too caught up with the fact I’ve yet to memorize the Prayer of Absolution and that my knees hurt. Sure, I’m fine to kneel, but I ain’t no Saint so get me some paddin’! Anyway, clean slate once more. The man in front is still looking at his phone. Scrolling through social media it looks like. Look at those fat, greasy fingerprints smearing down his screen. And of course, he’ll be handling the Eucharist. Despicable. Think I just heard the Priest’s car roll up just in time (I’ve been kneeling for like five minutes). I subtly check my watch. 9:04. I take it back, he isn’t just in time, but apparently God can wait…again.
My breath is getting flustered. But it’s not my fault because I can hear a few people jostling back and forward trying to get everything started. “Well perhaps if you’d placed more emphasis on God and less on your breakfast then we wouldn’t be in this mess!” Yes, that’s what I’d say. That is what I’d say if I wasn’t just so damn pious. Sometimes I feel like standing up and throwing my chair through the stained glass window just to see what would happen. To be honest, I assume if I did that then the chair would go through the window. Another fantasy ruined by reality. That man’s phone is more grease than screen, what in the world does he eat, deep-fried lard and spam? On my way here today I heard the sound of music at random and considered it a call to God. But I soon noticed an open window and the reflection of Coronation Street on the glass. Who watches soaps at this time in the morning?
Ah, yes, finally! I caught a little glimpse of the priest semi-jogging past the side window as to get around to the front for the procession. Thank God…literally. Ding ding ding. I am quickest to stand as per usual. Oh, but how that man loves to ring that bell as if each jolt from his hand is an indulgence of a thousand years! The priest is beginning his walk and once more I have made sure I am a few seats off to the right. See, try as hard as I might to keep everything sincere, I can’t help feeling that if I was close enough as he walked by I would simply tackle him to the floor, possibly even suplex him onto the donation table! What then though? Walk out? Sit back down? So I make sure I sit a little bit away.
Okay, he’s up there now, on the…raised bit, behind the altar. — Good morning everyone! Lovely as usual to see you all here again, and welcome to any visitors. In the name of the Father (I cross myself) and of the Son (I cross myself again because it didn’t feel right), and of the Holy Spirit (once more because it just didn’tfeel right) Amen. (I cross myself once more and make my own ‘Amen’ very apparent.) — The Lord be with you.
— And with your spirit. But He sure as hell ain’t with that guy and his greasy-ass phone. Okay, Penitential Act. — I confess to almighty God and to- There’s cake crumbs on the floor. Big ones. Look at the size of them. Big, fuck-off chunks of cake. I think that one still has cream on it. You could combine them all and construct a multi-generational sponge! Oh, they’re already striking their breasts. Forget it, I’ll just bow my head. A woman behind me, to the left, she’s whispering different prayers. Stick to the script! I take a deep breath. And another…oh, and another and another…I’m hyperventilating. I’m getting hot. My knuckles are even red and warm. I’m wiping my forehead with my hand. Little beads of visible sweat. Flustered flustered. When I breathe in I am shaking a little. Just have to focus and breathe. It’s getting faster. I can feel my own heart inside my own chest slamming away. My legs are hollow. I’m gonna flop to the ground. Why is the air so cold? What if I do miss that car payment? Why are there so many fucking cake crumbs? A woman two seats over tugs at my jacket. I look up and notice I’m the only one standing, we’re at the Word. — Sir, is everything okay? I quickly sit, but then I stand back up and then sit back down and then back up again.
— The Word of the Lord.
Why I am still standing up? Why I am about to speak? Why is my throat spasming?
— Father! How about this for a few words? I am shouting. — I cannot see Christ due to all these fucking cake crumbs! How do you expect me to get to Christ with all this baked detritus in the way? I cannot get to Christ for the fact of bloody cakey crumbs! Look at them! They’re fucking everywhere! They are huge! The floor is more cake than carpet!
It’s the man in front of me, he’s turning around. — Young man, I think you’d best get some air.
— Some air? Some air! How about you get hydrated lest you can no longer see your texts during Mass due to the viscosity of your hand-grease!
— Sorry, everyone I think-
— Oh, Father, do not fear for I have already planned my exit, but perhaps next time you should prepare your entrance a little more? Five minutes late…again! Forgive me if I am incorrect, but is it not the samefucking time every fucking Sunday?! And as for you Ma’am, I see you eyeing up the coffee cups in eager anticipation of refreshment! I see you Sir pretending to drop a note into the basket! I see none of you at Confession! I see you bemoan your neighbors and criticize and whine and covet and act jealously and build needless wealth and talk about utter worldly shit! What in the world is this? A club? A meeting? A group? Why are we even here?
— Young man!
— A dirty old atheist Frenchman once said that if he believed what we Christians supposedly do about the coming judgment and salvation and sin and damnation then he would crawl on his bare knees across crushed glass warning men to repent! And what do I see here? A loose gathering of fair-weather snoozers who wouldn’t even walk the five minutes to church if it was raining! It’s a good thing this building isn’t too long, otherwise, I doubt most of you would even bother walking up to collect the Eucharist!
— Young man! You need to leave!
I stand up violently. My chair rocks back awkwardly and comes back to hit me in the ass. I walk back towards the front doors but quickly detour upwards, to the first-floor choir section. Big, beautiful stain-glassed window. I line up a chair and turn back to address the crowd below. — Young man! Don’t you dare!
— Father! Forgive me, for I have sinned! My sin is smashing the absolute shit out of a stained glass window with my own head! And with that I run backward and leap head-first through the window, shattering it. The building is small. The first floor is only 12 or so feet up. I land in a pile of glass, blood, saliva, and urine (I really needed to go) outside the front doors. I quickly get up. Wet trousers, drooly mouth, a headache, and my ankle is sprained. I am slumping off through the bushes. A woman quickly runs out — Young man, are you ok? Come back in and we’ll get you a cup of tea!
~
Tap tap tap. I jolt awake. I am seated in my car and someone is tapping at my window. — Young man. Are you coming in? Mass is about to start. I look at the clock. It’s 9:15 am. I drive home.
As some may well know, I’m changing my name IRL, leading me to need an ‘author name’. I’m switching to the author/professional name of ‘James de Llis’ (pronounced ‘de lee’) for essentially practical reasons (though it admittedly has a ring to it).
It allows me to logically retain some emails, whilst also acting as a unique moniker for search/algos. I’ve decided I’m going to keep all works written up until now under my previous name, and – mentally – draw a line under that phase.
I’m not writing everything written up until now off as juvenalia, it’s just from a different part of my life. I’ll be (as far as I can) keeping my new surname private.
Writers/creators may sympathize with this, but certain moments, reading certain books, watching certain films, etc. can cause a noticeable internal shift, wherein one knows things shall be qualitatively different from hereon in. This is such an occasion.
Consider this the start of something new. Hopefully more consistent and refined.
Firstly, what is a ‘P-Zombie’? A ‘P-Zombie’ or philosophical-zombie, is an argument/thought experiment in philosophy of mind. The argument holds that it’s conceivable that a being without conscious experience, qualia, or sentience which is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a human being could exist. If, for instance, a P-Zombie was poked with a sharp stick, it would not inwardly feel pain, yet would outwardly act (mechanically) as if it did feel pain, externally emitting all the known expressions of what it is for a truly conscious being to feel pain. From this argument, it can equally be hypothesized that a P-Zombie world exists. Let’s look at some of the arguments for the conceivability of zombies from David Chalmers (the philosopher most well-known for his defense of P-Zombies):
“Consider: if it is logically possible that my functional isomorph might lack qualia entirely, it seems equally logically possible that there could be a qualia-free physical replica of me. We have already seen that there is no conceptual entailment relation from the functional properties of a system to the qualitative properties; it seems even clearer that there is no entailment relation from the non-functional implementational details to qualia. (What conceptual entailment could neurophysiological detail possibly provide that silicon, or even Chinese nations, could not?) So let’s consider Zombie Dave, my qualia-free physical replica. Zombie Dave is almost certainly not an empirical impossibility, but he is a conceptual possibility.
First, let us ask: Does Zombie Dave have beliefs? It seems to me that he does. If we ask him where his car is, he’ll tell us that it’s in the driveway. If we ask him whether he likes basketball, he tells us that he does. If we tell him that there’s a basketball game starting across town in half an hour, he’ll immediately head for the driveway, an action that seems to be best explained by the hypothesis that he wants to go to the basketball game, believes that his car will get him there, and believes that his car is in the driveway. All of the usual principles of psychological explanation sanction attributing beliefs to Zombie Dave; explaining his action without the attribution of beliefs would be a fearsomely complex task. (It might be objected that Zombie Dave lacks the external grounding required for belief contents, but we can avoid this problem by stipulating that his environment and history are physically indistinguishable from mine.)
Goldman argues in Section 8 that beliefs, like perceptual states, are typically accompanied by qualia; but much more would be required to conclude that qualia are essential to a state’s being a belief. (Searle (1990) has given an argument in this direction, but it does not seem to have been widely accepted.) Zombie Dave’s beliefs may not be colored by the usual phenomenological tinges, but it seems reasonable to say that they are nevertheless beliefs. Beliefs, unlike qualia, seem to be characterized primarily by the role that they play in the mind’s causal economy. (To illustrate the difference, note that it seems coherent to be an epiphenomenalist about qualia, whether or not one finds the position plausible; but there seems to be something conceptually wrong with the idea that beliefs could be epiphenomenal.) So qualia-free believers like Zombie Dave are quite conceptually coherent, and qualia don’t seem to be an essential part of our concept of belief.” (http://consc.net/papers/goldman.html)
Also, differentiation between types of P-Zombie:
The unifying idea of the zombie is that of a human completely lacking conscious experience. It is possible to distinguish various zombie sub-types used in different thought experiments as follows:
A behavioral zombie that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human.
A neurological zombie that has a human brain and is generally physiologically indistinguishable from a human.[17]
An imperfect zombie or imp-zombie that’s like p-zombie but has slightly different behavior than a regular human. They are important in the context of the theory of evolution.
A zombie universe that is identical to our world in all physical ways, except no being in that world has qualia.
In this short ‘paper’ I’ll mostly be focusing on the behavioral zombies and soulless zombies, and their synthesis. A zombie I will, in time, for certain reasons, name a ‘Descension-Zombie’, or D-Zombie. The first problem I ran into with this piece is the very same problem philosophers have been running into for decades, that is the hard problem of consciousness. However, not the problem in itself, of what it is, but how to define the abstraction of what it is. That is to say, in putting forth my argument of regarding D-Zombies who are void of consciousness, I need to attempt to define consciousness. The easiest and most practical way to do this is to begin with the dictionary:
awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact; intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one’s inner self
2. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact
3. concerned awareness; INTEREST, CONCERN—often used with an attributive noun [e.g. class consciousness]
4. the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought; mind in the broadest possible sense; something in nature that is distinguished from the physical
5. the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span—compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
6. waking life (as that to which one returns after sleep, trance, fever) wherein all one’s mental powers have returned . . .
7. the part of mental life or psychic content in psychoanalysis that is immediately available to the ego—compare PRECONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS
Almost immediately we, of course, run into the problem of the inner world made external, and how we can never qualify another’s internal experience. I need to find a pre-existing spectrum, or something quantifiable as a means to qualify my argument. That is, I need to utilize various signifiers of what is considered a ‘conscious life’ as a means to quantify the conscious life of another. This form of quantification brings me to an addition that is critically needed within the philosophical discussion of the ‘P-Zombie’. Namely, the addition of levels of being.
Let’s turn first to the Great Chain of Being. First theorized as to be decreed by God, it is a chain that descends through angels, humans, animals, plants, and finally minerals/rocks. Or:
Roughly speaking, as one descends the hierarchy of the ‘chain’, the ‘level’ of being – or consciousness – is lessened. Now, I’d like to turn to re-appropriation/re-adaptation of the Great Chain of Being called the Ray of Creation. Gurdjieff‘s Ray of Creation is understood in relation to the solfege do, re, me, fa, sol, la, si, do, which is a factor of 7, with 7 levels which are thus (first number relating to the level in the hierarchy, the second number is the number of ‘laws’ it’s under):
1 – 1 – Absolute
2 – 3 – All Worlds
3 – 6 – All Suns
4 – 12 – Sun
5 – 24 – All Planets
6 – 48 – Earth
7 – 96 – Moon
The Ray of Creation, much like the Great Chain of Being, begins with that which we can is a higher-body, or in the case of this essay we can under abstractly as that which has a higher-consciousness. This understanding of consciousness is taken in relation to the aforementioned ‘laws’, note the second number in the above hierarchy. The former number simply denotes the place of that ‘body’ within the ray itself, that is to say, The Absolute is 1 = first in the Ray of Creation. The second number is the number of laws the related body is under. The Absolute (God) is itself the entirety of the Ray, and thus only under the singular law of itself. Gurdjieff taught via the law of three (I don’t want to go too deep into Gurdjieffian cosmology here) that the Absolute held within it 3 holy laws, which thus created All Worlds, which thereby were under 3 laws. In turn, creating All Suns which are under 6 laws (three new ones and three from All Worlds), then descending 12, 24, 48 (Earth/us), and 96 (Moon).
Each level after the Absolute has a bigger number of laws that govern it. Therefore, the further the level is away from the Absolute, the more mechanical the living things in it are. By this comparison, it is claimed that there are 48 laws governing the life of living beings on Earth, thereby also claiming that life on Earth is quite mechanical. Or, we can state that the more laws one is under, the further one is away from the Absolute, and the lower their consciousness is, the weaker it is. The further from the Absolute one is, the less consciousness they have. As an aside (which allows for the development of the ‘D-Zombie) Gurdjieffian cosmology and practice begin with the understanding that no one is born with a soul, but that soul is something that is earned (via various means).
“You all don’t have souls. Unless you achieve a crystallization of your being, you will live and die just as a signature on the sand; winds will come and you will be forgotten. There will not be left a single trace of you.” – Gurdjieff
To draw everything together thus far, I am putting forth that the concept of a P-Zombie exists on the Great Chain of Being/Ray of Creation, it exists upon the spectrum of consciousness. A spectrum that is bilaterally inclusive of both the quantity and quality of consciousness on a single line. A line that looks like this:
Every being on this line/spectrum is indiscernible, indistinguishable from one another. That is, the ‘dead’ P-Zombie, the ‘normal person’, and the ‘Enlightened man’, if one were to meet all 3 at once, would all seem like normal, conscious people, despite their internal differences in quality, with one being entirely devoid of consciousness at all. Now, luckily for us (loosely), defined parameters have already been given with regard to the lower and higher regions of this spectrum. In fact, I mentioned them earlier in this piece:
awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact; intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one’s inner self
2. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact
3. concerned awareness; INTEREST, CONCERN—often used with an attributive noun [e.g. class consciousness]
4. the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought; mind in the broadest possible sense; something in nature that is distinguished from the physical
5. the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span—compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
6. waking life (as that to which one returns after sleep, trance, fever) wherein all one’s mental powers have returned . . .
7. the part of mental life or psychic content in psychoanalysis that is immediately available to the ego—compare PRECONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS
I will use these 7 defining traits as a means to define a qualitative relationship to our understanding of what it is to be conscious. That is to say, such traits can be utilized in their definition to understand where one stands on the spectrum. And thus, the argument of this piece is that, yes, ‘P-Zombie’s’, but they do on the aforementioned spectrum of consciousness, which thus posits that P-Zombies can be artificially created/’born’ by any such environment which actively deteriorates their consciousness. At a certain juncture on the spectrum, a ‘normal person’, becomes effectively ‘dead’ = a P-Zombie. However, the term ‘P-Zombie’ denotes a definite state and isn’t inclusive of the aforementioned spectrum. And so I am arguing that there can exist such a being (or, unbeing) as a ‘D-Zombie’ or ‘Descension-Zombie’. As I mentioned a D-Zombie, is a synthesis of both a ‘behavioral zombie’ (a zombie whose behavior is indistinguishable from a ‘normal’ human’s) and a ‘soulless zombie’ (a human-zombie that lacks a soul), both forms understood as synthesized amidst the spectrum of quality-of-consciousness. Thus stating that as much as a human-being can become Enlightened by way of increased quality of consciousness, or increased work towards the development of a soul (as per Gurdjieffian cosmology). So to can a ‘normal – middle-of-the-road – human’ equally allow their consciousness to devolve or ‘descend’ (hence Descension Zombie) into the state of a P-Zombie’s. In short, given the right societal circumstances, men can, quite literally, become the living dead. Now, I will put forth the fact that we are living (especially in the hedonic, moralistic-free-fall West) in exactly the right circumstances for this to happen.
To attempt to back up this statement I must prove 2 things. Firstly, certain circumstances devolve and degenerate man’s quality of consciousness, and secondly that those circumstances are prevalent in the world today. For the first, I will rely on the aforementioned 7 loosely defined parameters of consciousness.
awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact; intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one’s inner self
Immediately we are struck by the extreme looseness of discussions of consciousness, hence why the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is so hard. It is, for all practical purposes, impossible to quantify another’s perception regarding an internal fact. In attempting to prove the descension of another’s internal life, objectively speaking, we’d need access to that life – which is literally impossible. However, one notable example of a quantifiable way of assessing another’s internal perception is to ask about their faculties of internal perception themselves, beginning with their internal monologue. It is estimated that 2% to 5% of the population have a lifelong inability to generate any images within their mind’s eye. (link). But such oddly specific scientific examples of descension don’t exactly prove whether one knows themselves, with an intuitively perceived knowledge. So let us take a Gurdjieffian example as a mystical qualification:
You decide that you are going to walk to the store from your house, luckily for you, it is only a street-length walk of ten houses until you get to the store, a minute at most. – You believe, as all men do, that you have free-will. You believe, as all men do, that you have use of a faculty you don’t even possess. – You begin your walk, the first few seconds of which are focused solely on what it is you’re going to purchase from the store, but immediately a bird flies overhead and your attention is drawn to its movement, it goes out of sight just past a tree, that reminds you that you need to call the tree-surgeon to remove that annoying stump in your back-garden; you do wonder if your wife managed to get out in the sun today; you’re not sure if she’s enjoying her job at the moment; you think of whether or not you could do what she does for work; suddenly a car drives past and you remember you need to put air into your front-left tire; how much did it cost to replace them all last year; you need to move money from one account to the other…and before you’re even aware you’re entering into the store, all this ‘freedom’ in the space of just a minute, and all this from a man who believes himself to be free and yet cannot, for just a minute, be attentive of the most basic form of existence, walking. Nothing can be expected of this man but mechanical actions.
The so-called ‘spiritual facts’ of one’s internal life, are the only things we can never cling to for more than a second, despite our constant pronouncements of ‘free will’. Our internal knowledge of ourselves is indebted to a self-assumed ‘unity’ regarding the concept ‘our-self’, which is taken in the singular. But as one can see from the above, all-too-common example, we are not one, unified person, but many selves within a singular possibility of consciousness. A unified man would be able to focus his consciousness towards a singular aim, via the conscious-function of attention, which is all consciousness is in lesser or greater degrees. Attention, as the functional capacity of consciousness to enact itself as a living reality, arguably stands in for consciousness-in-practice, it is consciousness as much as we can utilize it. For instance, when we are asleep, that is, quite literally unable to pay attention to anything due to a drastically-lessened-conscious-state, are we not temporarily dead? And, as a counter-example, those moments of extreme danger whereby our lives are/were at risk, do we not say that the memory is extremely vivid? Why, because we paid greater attention, and thus increased (temporarily) our conscious state. Therefore, those who pay zero attention are P-Zombies. Those who are slowly paying less attention are D-Zombies.
In fact, when we look at drastic extremes that appear on the spectrum, for instance, someone in a coma at one end, and a conscious or ‘Enlightened’ person at the other, we are really witnessing a gargantuan discrepancy in personal attention. The person in the coma, is, unarguably alive, and yet entirely unable to pay attention to anything, and thus we would regard them to be as close to ‘dead’ as one can be whilst one is alive (in terms of the Ray of Creation, they would be closer to a rock, than to a human). However, on the other side of the spectrum, we have the ‘Enlightened’ person, whom, if various historical records hold weight, consistently is understood as someone who is terminally aware and attentive of their reality, their presence itself is pure attention.
2. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact
This second factor is much like the first, except it’s in relation to external states, as opposed to internal states. However, the definition overlooks the fact that the external and internal – unless one has reached Enlightenment – are always connected. If one is to once again re-read the previous example of how modern man attends to the modern world, that is, he is ‘away with the fairies’. One will realize that his internal state is intrinsically linked to external events, a single external event can lead his internal state to devolve into a sleep which can last hours. Of course, as we’re now talking about externalities, we can begin to rely on external statistics. Let us look at the statistics regarding attention:
the average human attention span shrunk by nearly a quarter between the year 2000 and 2015, and we’re now lagging behind the humble goldfish in terms of being able to focus on a task or object.
According to research, our attention span has markedly decreased in just 15 years. In 2000, it was 12 seconds. Now, 15 years later, it’s shrunk significantly to 8.25 seconds.
25% of teens forget major details of close friends and relatives. 7% of people forget their own birthday from time to time, and studies suggest that each week, 39% of Americans will forget one basic piece of information or lose one every day item.
On the average web page, users will read at most 28% of the words during a visit, with 20% a more likely expectation. The average page visit lasts less than a minute and users often leave web pages in just 10-20 seconds. (link)
Of course, one’s ability to pay attention to the entirety of an advert isn’t an acceptable test for the development of their consciousness, possibly quite the opposite. And yet, one’s ability to pay attention, in general, is a test of consciousness itself, the developmental capability of attention in itself is a factor of a higher-conscious. It’s not about the content that attention is paying attention to, but the act of attention itself which begets a strengthened form of consciousness.
3. concerned awareness; INTEREST, CONCERN—often used with an attributive noun [e.g. class consciousness]
Quite surprisingly, we can actually turn to external statistics to somewhat help us with this one, with Levels of empathy fell by 48% between 1979 and 2009 (link). But even if we’re to abstractly reduce the concept of ‘concern’ to a statistical variable, it’s undeniable that interest in the world has significantly reduced over the last century, a statement itself overlapping with the previous comments on attention.
4. the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought; mind in the broadest possible sense; something in nature that is distinguished from the physical
This is something that I dealt with majorly in my essay Avoiding the Global Lobotomy. But, in short, a lobotomy is understood as something which reduces the complexity of psychic life, from which I outline 5 clear ways to the complexity of our psychic life (also understood in relation to the above number 4 defining feature of what it is to be conscious).
Firstly, the entirety of our entertainment, education, and work systems are re-orientated around gamification and dopamine-reward-systems, eventually, we succumb to the mechanism itself and our reason for doing something isn’t for the sake of a qualitative experience, but for the increased quantification of personal dopamine (feel-good) rewards. Our lives become reduced to the experiential complexity of ejaculating, eating, and lounging around.
Secondly, Overton-Window-Compression: what social media and quantifiable discourse is doing is mentally limiting what we can say and do, not by way of oppression, but by way or ostracization, alienation and peer-pressure. If you don’t post X, Y or Z which are deemed the things to be posting right now, due to their greater dopamine feedback response, then what you’re posting must be weird or horrible. The Overton window then begins to be compressed into a tighter and tighter spectrum of acceptability, not due to any lack of original thought, but due to the majority of its actors, agents and big-players adhering to the compression itself, for if they venture outside the Overton window they risk losing it all, fame, status, popularity, wealth, all of these ride on remaining inside the window and therefor contributing to the positive feedback of acceptable-thought compression.
Thirdly, Normalcy-Compression: This largely thought and mental-based compression of the Overton window begins to infect corporal and material reality by way of self-panopticonic policing, that is, people begin to constantly check both themselves and others for any traits of weirdness or non-normality. They don’t do this consciously, because most people are largely unconscious, if not – for all practical purposes – asleep. What Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the little fascist in all of us’ begins to police and cross-reference everyone’s behaviors with the compressed mode of normalcy given in a single present. Thus, normalcy, normality, and what is considered to be normal is a perpetual process of tightening wherein the end-game is roughly 3 or 4 seemingly different thought loops that lead back to precisely the same reality, one wherein you are born, you go to work, you consume, you produce and you die, and you do not question whether or not you want to do this, whether you like to do this, or whether you even thought about any of this in the first place.
Fourthly, Limit-Compression: Limit-compression then is relatively simple, from all these forms and modes of compression combined and built up, we end up in a reality where everything is continually compressed for the sake of adhering to an increasingly tightening mode of normality. The project of atomization is the great illusory emancipatory freedom layered over an ever-constraining normality, atomization allows only for greater normality to be imposed on an individual level, away from families, groups, and communes which will potentially have a sturdy and stable enough leader to disrupt the process of modernity.
Finally, Time-Compression: The final bastion of modernity, the one it really doesn’t want you to break. Time-compression is all the previous modes of compression combined into an absolute chimera of control. Control via time-compression. Time becomes constrained to the point where one is not ‘living in the present’ in a Buddhist or Taoist sense, but merely existing at the whim of the latest dopamine feedback response, whatever spontaneous social-media based or dopamine-inducing masturbation session the user succumbs to that day is their nano-present; we are at the whims of a cybernetic master whose taken control of our most basic brain functions and is slowly performing a lobotomy by inducing various degrees of compression, limitation, and constraint, degrees which we accept, agree with and eventually, promote. – And if the primary function of consciousness is to experience time via our ability to be attentive (pay attention) to time, then time-compression is the disallowance of possibility for the growth of consciousness. Or, practically speaking, the modern world is arranged in such a way as to drastically reduce our quality of consciousness.
5. the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span—compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
6. waking life (as that to which one returns after sleep, trance, fever) wherein all one’s mental powers have returned . . .
Both 5 and 6 can be understood in relation to the extended points made under 2, 3 and 4.
7. the part of mental life or psychic content in psychoanalysis that is immediately available to the ego—compare PRECONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS
7 is a point specifically in relation to psychoanalysis, and not of interest to me here.
~
So, taking this all together we have what, exactly?
Firstly we have a man or woman full of great potential, the potential to grow, become, awake, live, experience, and be conscious and attentive. We have, in short, a person whose potentiality can go either way on the spectrum of attention/consciousness, all the way from P-Zombie (the living dead) to Enlightened individual. Due to certain societal, industrial, cultural (nihilism), and technological facets of the modern world, the malicious and coerced tendency is for all men to drift toward the existence of a P-Zombie. Note here the difference between the P-Zombie and the D-Zombie. The P-Zombie is simply born that way, the D-Zombie had the potential for both a greater or lesser consciousness and fell towards the latter. In short, we have a world that is actively seeking to push individuals toward the lower end of the chain of being, and thus make them willing, unconscious, living dead slaves. As they move towards the lower end of the chain of being, the soul either A. Withers (if a soul is presumed from birth), or B. is without the possibility of growth. Equally, their actions succumb to a greater number of laws (as per Gurdjieffian cosmology), or a lessened state of being (as per the Great Chain of Being), in either case, as they move towards the lower end of ‘being-potential’ they become not like machines but become machines. They don’t become like zombies but are zombies. Indiscernible from men, but still roaming around amongst us.
I finished Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel The Passenger just two nights ago. I’ve never had a book affect me like this. Still can’t exactly put my finger on what this feeling is, but it’s quite the solidification of some fragments which have been roaming around for a while now.
I adore McCarthy. In fact, if I had to pick such a thing, I would say he is my favorite author. But The Passenger landed differently. Many other of McCarthy’s books are filled to the brim with his exquisite, mythical prose. Served up with his acerbic and absurd humor with everything landing together in a balanced manner. The Passenger lands perfectly – as per usual – and, ironically, it’s full of jokes. I say ironically because none of the jokes are funny. They should be, but they aren’t. Nothing about the book is funny. I lost my sense of humor for a while, and I think it’s because McCarthy has done something quite unimaginable, something I wouldn’t dare state if it was any other author.
McCarthy has managed to go beyond Nietzsche. Not explicitly and not necessarily clearly or positively, but The Passenger addresses the death of God in a wholly new dim light. The death of God as that grand statement of philosophy. The ‘modern crisis’ as it’s known is usually tackled via its own language, narrative, and semiotics, tangling itself up back into the same structure the problem originally was built from. But McCarthy enters into the dialogue from the point of view of the crisis itself, the minutiae of modern existence cry out as the beyond of nihilism itself. What is beyond nihilism is simply what we have right now. Not a Sisyphean tragedy, not a vitalist soaring, not an acceleration, not an apocalypse or collapse, not a suicide, but simply a continuation into a world where any ongoing search for mystery has already been thwarted. Anyone who seeks to lean into the ‘mystery of life’ now is a priori not listening or looking.
There are plenty of passengers in The Passenger. The narrative itself is a passenger to its own already-impotent purpose. The tongue-in-cheek plotline is a passenger to the dead-comedy of its existence as a red herring. The conspiracy and absurdity are a passenger to nothingness. Everything is carried and yet ends up precisely nowhere. Nothing is figured out in The Passenger precisely because nothing was actually asked in the first place. The reader is a passenger of their own hopes for an extension of mortality, and the book simply takes in the same way post-Nietzschean life takes. Not with or without remorse, but solely because that’s the only thing this life can now do…take. The novel takes the common solutions to contemporary human meaning and purpose to court quickly and abruptly. God, quantum physics, materialism, consumerism, and family are brought up, not listened to, and fall away in a matter of pages and we’re left once again only with life itself and the words which seem to keep going.
McCarthy’s style is reduced to a razor-sharp edge which often lands which a horrid thud or creak, purged of all needless vitality and romance the words slide away into nihil as if coming from nihil. The book ain’t putting forward a question really, at least not one I can clearly see. I guess books come forward as if what they have to say is worth listening to. With The Passenger one enters into a discussion already underway, that you weren’t invited to and it doesn’t care to fill you in because it doesn’t really know you’re there. Reminds me of early John Barth, The Floating Opera, an opera which is happening on a barge that floats on by as you watch it from the riverside. At times you can hear it and not see it, sometimes you can see it and not hear it, and so when it passes you by you only have a certain amount of information and have to fill in the blanks. With McCarthy we aren’t asked to fill in the blanks, the blanks don’t care about us. Here you go, you decided to pick this up and read it, ain’t up to the book to help you.
I wrote something about LARPing some time ago, about how most modern people simply cannot believe and do not accept that some people do things for objective reasons. This I will get to, but for now, I need to outline some fairly blunt assumptions regarding modernity:
What Modernity Presumes:
God isn’t real
Truth is relative
Doesn’t look like much, but those two assumptions can destroy anything and everything they like in a matter of seconds. The problem, however, with those assumptions is that they can never build anything. If you believe the truth is relative, then anything you theorize can equally be washed away with the wave of a hand and some fancy wordplay. Likewise, if you don’t believe in God, then there is no objective structure from which to construct or understand reality. From these two assumptions, reality comes crumbling down, nothing has any meaning, and everyone is left scrambling for the smallest scrap of purpose they can find.
Ultimately, after some time looking for meaning, everyone realizes that if the truth is relative, then any ‘meaning’ they stumble upon can just as easily become…nothing at all. Pure, unalloyed nihilism. However, we all have to keep going, so there need to be some cornerstones from which we undertake most of our actions. We have found one, and we interact with it in the negative. The one open and discernible truth the modern world has yet to eradicate via its fancy footwork (though it is trying) is pain. We don’t necessarily find meaning from the pain itself, but from our increased attempts to keep pain at bay and increase the negative of pain, which we call pleasure. After God is dead, truth has been relativized, all modern man has left by way of actual purpose is pleasure seeking.
People have argued with me before about calling this ‘Nihilism’. I use this definition of nihilism:
rejecting all religious and moral principles in the belief that life is meaningless.
From this definition, nothing can be built. Anything which is built can just as easily be proclaimed as meaningless and destroyed. Any attempt to construct a politics of -ism from nihilism is already defeated. Anyone who seeks to do so is just reluctant to admit to the fact they’ve found some amount of Truth.
But what does this mean for those who do believe something? How are they seen in the eyes of others? If you believe in God, if you support some ‘archaic’ form of politics, even if you simply support not the ‘latest-thing’, it is not seen as if you have your own opinions, but simply that you are wrong. Your thoughts are not your own and are simply errors in the very fabric of relative reality. We saw this with Brexit and Trump, and we’ll be seeing it soon in Sweden. Roughly 50% of the population simply not accepting that other people may have different opinions which they’ve come to by themselves, based on the evidence and contexts they have, but simply that their thoughts are errors.
In the modern world, if you genuinely believe in God, the belief itself will never be taken for what it is – a sincere belief and connection with God – but simply as some-or-other variation on various materialist readings of belief that make the nihilists feel better. Nietzsche, perhaps, didn’t go far enough. His contention wasn’t necessarily that God didn’t exist, but that we live in a time where we can no longer believe in God. To push this to its limit, once it becomes accepted that we cannot believe in God (or adhere to various other things covertly proclaimed ‘dead’), then it follows that any such belief is either a form of madness or some form of roleplay as a way to cope with the world. Rituals, belief, worship, etc. are no longer what they are, but are solely socio-cultural relics of a past we have supposedly ‘progressed’ beyond.
There is much talk today about having opinions and tolerating others’ views etc. And yet, when it comes to it, the majority simply cannot mentally concede that other people truly believe the things which are anathema to their own opinions. In this way, contrary and cantankerous opinions, beliefs, and principles, become seen as errors. These readings of reality as either truthful or erroneous, as built atop a nihilistic foundation, lead only to reality being pulled around by the weight of spontaneous mimetic drifts. Because of course, how can the beliefs of other people be errors if there is no such thing as truth? This makes it clear that the condemnation of other people’s opinions as being errors or even glitches is itself a sophisticated form of censorship.
It’s difficult to censor something which is openly accepted as an option. If the discussion or argument is regarding A vs B, then it figures that within the inherent competition lies the idea that both could work as possible solutions for a singular problem. In this case, the task of censorship is twofold. For side A (in censoring B) has to both censor B and equally disprove their position as a means to justify their censorship. However, if A simply promote such behavior that regards positions B, C, D… as errors against their perfect logic, then it follows that censorship shouldn’t be a task, but a foregone conclusion. In a world without truth, however, it isn’t a matter of being able to use any discernible tools to arrive at the truth (for it no longer exists), so the means to attain the desired position are found within power and propaganda alone.
Sometimes a particular passage immediately changes a book from a textual object to an emotional ally.
“-the world, it has to be said, had never offered me a warm welcome; without necessarily being a victim or anything, I had always felt ill at ease, surplus to requirements, out of place.” (p16)
The author, Gilles Grelet, is a man who, ‘over a decade ago’ left the city to live permanently on the sea. The book, however, is always disconnected from any archaic sense of the hermit or recluse. Despite its angelic nature, it is hesitantly in conversation with the rotting thing it seeks to sail away from. But this isn’t an academic dialogue in the sense of attack and defense, for as Grelet makes clear “Do not think it is a matter of the sea against the world, quite the opposite: the sea comes before; it is the ante-world.” (p23) In this way, the sea isn’t viewed as an anthropocentric frontier to be conquered, but the void which outlines the world; the sea appears as that which we anxiously attempt to forget, the limitrophe of human reason. And even such borders we may seek to hastily throw beside and atop the sea are little more than absurdities, lifejackets for the academe.
When I think of the sailor, I think of Michel Serres, I think of the helmsman. He who understands that he may never go against the movements of the sea. Despite all his potential skill, one cannot sail against the void of the sea. And as for Serres “Voyaging begins when one burns one’s boats, adventures begin with a shipwreck.”, so for Grelet, “Freedom is a point of departure, not a horizon.” (p29) The sea can never be captured, its position as a void renders the sailor as a tyrant against striation. The beauty of Grelet’s writing (and therein, Mackay and Ireland’s translation), is that upon opening the text one is entered into a subtle, gentle touch of oceanic prose, and so topics and terms such as politics, world, and place are bereft of their usual possessive faculties, left at the shoreline, seen from the position of the solitary. We aren’t sneering at them or sailing away in a panic. No, such actions are looked upon as trinkets, pastimes that keep trying to make themselves present in the face of Grelet’s oceanic Gnosticism.
“Gnostic is the one who says: The world? Not for me. I am in the world, but not of it…I am only passing through. In fact, I’m leaving. See my wings.” (p47) From the position of Grelet, of the sailor, of the solitary itself, an angelism doesn’t necessarily arrive as much as it is revealed. The wings of Grelet’s angels, respective of materialism and gnosis, cooperate against philosophy by gently soaring above it before it has the chance to lay any roots, and where better to avoid such dull foundations than the ocean. The sea wears the gnostic’s search on its sleeve; eternity amidst the waters isn’t concealed, but is ever-present. The sea doesn’t affordbut is the infinite silence of gnosis .
I am reminded of another sailor, Donald Crowhurst, whose logbooks were found after disappearing on the sea. In them he stated “Man = [0] – [0]”, for Wouter Kusters “it means that all that man is from beginning to end adds up to nothing.” For Crowhurst the void was an adversary, his white whale; for Grelet the void – with its inherent anti-horizon (non)stance – is already beyond exit; as Grelet states “first of all, this sea itself sails” (p60). The sailor serves the boat and the boat serves the sea and the sea serves itself; to sail is to enter into the immanence of gnosis. And all these lighthouses, and ports, and borders, and constraints, we return to these in moments when things need to be done, when things need to be worked out. But after, and always in thought, is the void of the sea which was before all. We shouldn’t ask ourselves what causes erosion, but in truth, what causes civilization? The sea is; it isn’t taking anything back, for nothing was ever truly against such a void; all it has is time and rhythm.
“Anti-philosophy is not another philosophy, a philosophy that would be ‘human’…but radical independence from philosophy, that is to say sovereign traversal of all philosophy.” (p78)
“To navigate melancholy…” (p78) this could be the only ‘aim’ one could draw from this text, but within this vector is already its own avoidance. This is a book that doesn’t take sovereignty seriously in a human sense, but allows sovereignty to be sovereign. To navigate freedom, as a solitary sailor, well that’s a communication with the wind and sea and rain and sleet. Has this book left the world behind, I’m not sure; would it be welcome within the world? No, but only because it could never be translated to the land-dwellers of philosophy. If this text were to pass the doors of a university, I dare say it would crumble into pieces, and the academic holding it would feel themselves proven right. This book belongs only where it happens to end up.
I am still standing by my previous reading of the ongoing ‘energy crisis’, that in truth it’s a controlled demolition of our reliance on fossil fuels, without attending to a replacement. The State isn’t ignorant to climate change, it just doesn’t care. However, it equally isn’t ignorant to the fact we’re well beyond various fossil fuel peaks, and this is something it really doesn’t have the resources to address. Primarily because, no one has the resources to address this problem because it’s a…resource problem.
Anyway, it’s looking to be that consumer energy bills will – practically speaking – double, and business energy bills will multiply between 4-8x (dependent on one’s source). This is catabolic collapse. This isn’t some bump in the road before our next long march of progress, this isn’t a glitch, this isn’t some error. This is reaping what we’ve sown, and have to deal with the consequences brought about by our willfully ignorant actions.
The major problem – among many – is regarding business energy costs. It seems likely, if nothing is done to mitigate the current situation, that thousands, if not tens-of-thousands, of small businesses will go under. This would be the largest economic catastrophe in history. This would, in truth, be an absolute reset in many ways. It’s for those reasons I find it difficult to believe it will happen. Not because I don’t want it to, but because history rarely tends to work in large, exciting events, but moreso, slow, draw out closures.
The government are in a panic, because outside of simply increasing the debt, and offloading the problem on tax-payers via way of more tax, they have very few options. They could cut the 5% VAT, and achieve very little. The state could cover the ‘green levies’ themselves, which would likely end up in…higher tax. The state could target private company’s profits via a windfall tax, but as has already been reported, where government intervention gets in the way of private profit, the company tends to just stop supplying. The same problem arises if the government sets a price cap the private companies can’t go over, in which case, if it isn’t profitable for them to run, they obviously wont. And finally, they could increase our energy supplies, which is being attempted via the restoration of the Rough facility, and the development of a nuclear plant. But these things take years, so for now…we have a very British winter ahead of us.
Am I personally worried? No, I live the life of a hermit, and have very few material wants. Am I generally worried? Yes. Primarily in relation to the business energy bills. Such a drastic alteration of small stores could launch us into an even deeper corporate hegemony, reliant on maybe 5-10 major outlets for all of our needs.
As for advice: Buy some blankets and hot water bottles. Add more insulation to your home if you can. Learn how to cook a good stew. Find ways to minimize your needs. If, however, the business energy prices which are projected remain in place, the consequences will be so drastic, that it’s very difficult to see all which will be effected.
So the general consensus is that the Russian War in Ukraine is causing an energy crisis throughout Europe. In turn, Europe has done what it usually does and panicked beyond all measure and continued to shoot itself in the foot as much as it possibly can. The thing is, there’s only one energy crisis that matters, and it doesn’t seem to be upon us just yet. This turbulence could have acted as conscious-shock to test the waters for the coming 200 years, to see how we’re going to handle a lack of energy, but no, instead we’ve doubled-down on all the abstract modern supports we usually use to ignore the obvious.
At the moment, however, the ‘energy crisis’ doesn’t appear to be (though a reader may be able to correct me here) a crisis of energy, as much as it’s a crisis in relation to an already-determined future, a crisis-yet-to-come if you will. The reason I say this is because the EU initially panicked, believing it wouldn’t have enough energy to get it through this winter due to destabilization due to Russia pipeline cuts off. The EU’s target was to get to 80% storage capacity before October 1st, as it stands (here) the EU is already at 80.4% storage capacity. The UK is currently at 100% storage capacity (here).
The reason, then, that energy prices are going through the roof, and the price gaps are rising by the minute, isn’t actually to do with any empirical gas drought, or any actual crisis of energy, but to do with the abstraction which is the Futures Market. The Futures Market, as per its name, is market wherein buyers and sellers predict the price of certain goods, and lock-in the price in the ‘future’. Gas prices are currently up so high because of general perceived turbulence, but not actually in relation to any specific lack of supply (see the previous two links). The worry for many nations is that Russia will cut off gas entirely, and it’s far beyond my ability to predict whether or not this will happen. This energy crisis is, practically speaking, a small network of various events culminating into an economic panic.
The Covid-19 event was a historically anomalous two years in relation to the demand of various fuels and supplies. So much so that the production itself got effected. As demand has begun to slingshot back into full force, the supply-side appears to be worrying about keeping up. At the same time, supplies are seeing that consumers are more than happy (and able) to bear these extra costs, and so it of course isn’t in their interest to sell their goods for less than they possibly could. My thesis here would be that a large part of this panic on behalf of governments is a somewhat sneaky mitigation tactic. Scaring people into understanding that energy costs will be extremely high, thus getting people to start using less and purchasing alternative forms of heating, thereby avoiding the future possibility of a genuine energy crisis.
As for the the 5-fold increase in business energy bills, who’s to say what will happen? Pretty much everyone understands that such an increase in energy bills for any small, independent business means shutting down. The thing is, in relation to what I’ve already written, this energy crisis isn’t a crisis of energy itself (which will come as we continue down the descending side of Hubbert’s Peak), but simply a crisis of planning and dependence. It’s not that we have a current lack of energy – the tanks are full – it’s that this war has revealed the fragility of the system itself, thus spurring nations into restarting various efforts for energy independence (the Rough facility, for instance). The price of gas is back to what it was in May (here) and there’s no sign of it stopping its fall. Anyone who was attempting to profit off this trade has likely done so. No one gets beyond supply and demand. In short:
Covid-19 happened and caused various odd things to happen on the demand-side for both gas and fuel, the supply , in turn, decreased. As we came out the other side of Covid-19 and everyone wanted to get back to their McCruise mega holidays, the demand increased beyond its pre-Covid levels, and thus we find ourselves – with the addition of the war in Ukraine – in our current situation. However, the ongoing media panic around energy prices has led most consumers to begin to prepare for a hard winter, likely already causing a blow to the gas industry from the demand side.
If I was to dare to make a prediction, I would say that the energy-cap will decrease around mid-September to October to around £2500, up from its previous £1900, but down from the £3500 predicted. Much the same thing happened with fuel. Fuel was around £1.20 a liter, it went up to almost £2, and is now down to around £1.60. Basically a very basic tactic to make certain goods look affordable again, very much a ‘Ah, that’s not as bad as I thought!’ moment.
It’s public knowledge now that I’m undertaking my RCIA, The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults , or Ordo Initiationis Christianae Adultorum, the process for prospective converts to Catholicism to be confirmed and christened within the church. I’m not sure how long this series will be, but it aims to be an overview of my journey to Catholicism. I’m writing it both as a way to get my thoughts on this process onto ‘paper’, but also in the hope that others who are at the beginning or middle of their journey may find something to aid them on their way. One may ask, why is it that I have decided to write this prior to actually being confirmed and christened in the church, isn’t doing so a little assumptive of the outcome of the process? I would, in part, agree with such a criticism, and I do not take for granted my (God willing) confirmation and christening, however, as I understand it, such a process is a spiritual act of leaving one life behind, and beginning a new one. And so, much of what spiritually (or atheisticially) happened up until now I wish to leave in the past, and so I find now the best, and arguably only (whilst I still have an attachment) time to write of it in detail, for soon I shall not be the same person, and I shall hope to revisit this old life as little as possible. In part a beginning, in part a warning, in part a needed catharsis.
This first part will roughly detail my spiritual journey (or lack of) from birth until around the age of 15. For U.S. readers, of which I have many, the terms school, college etc. are of British usage.
~
I guess I’ll begin right at the beginning, at the part where I wasn’t christened. I grew up in a fairly quaint little town, it’s a lot bigger now and much of its charm has been lost due to excessive growth and the invasion of various chain superstores, but it still has its churches. Quite a few, in fact. By my count there are six, which for a town of its size – back then – was quite a lot. One of them is Catholic, the others are all some variation of Protestantism, I don’t really know enough of their history to know the difference, and it only concerns me in terms of the way it affected my understanding of Christianity, which was much, much, to my detriment.
The first school I attended was a Church of England school, with direct ties to the Church just a few hundred metres from its gates. By all accounts it was, and still is, an idyllic, lovely school. The kind of place parents nowadays would stress about getting a place for their child. Now, one might find it surprising that being ‘educated’ in a Church of England school eventually resulted in me drifting away from God for roughly 25 years, that is if we’re to count the years when I was an infant and child, but even then I had no real understanding of what faith is, so I think it best to count them. It has been said that the Church of England produces more atheists than it does believers.
See, the problem with this school, at least the way it taught the lessons of Christianity, was that it had subsumed them into the state curriculum, and they appeared to me – even at a very young age – as merely identical to the didactic repetitive lessons which a child only understands as controlling, of use to poorly skilled and uninspiring teachers. The morals and lessons taught in the Bible and by Jesus Christ, were placed synonymously alongside the rules and laws of school – keep quiet, put your hand up to go to the toilet, no running in the hallways etc. – they had no roots; and as far as myself, and I imagine many others could see, they had been plucked from thin air as a means to pacify our excessive energy and youthful spirit. Such an understanding of Christianity, that it is simply there to ‘stop you having fun’, is one of the most common misunderstandings of the Church.
But the strange thing is, it wasn’t only didactic, authoritative usage of scripture which was undertaken within the school. We said the Lord’s Prayer every morning (not that anyone there ever told us what it actually meant, including the Priest from the adjacent church), we had harvest festivals and the like, but these were all furniture of school life, fancy china which was brought out every now and again as to project some message. The problem, in retrospect, was that this ‘message’ – whatever it may have been – was entirely confused, and entirely insincere. No one, not students, teachers, parishioners, or even the priests knew exactly why it was we were even doing this stuff, it wasn’t clear as to why we needed to use the Bible to make these points, as opposed to just creating another school-rule.
Perhaps I shouldn’t judge the school too harshly on their inability to truly convey the Christian message, for I should add in here that this was the beginning of the post-modern era of education. You know the one? The one everyone of every single generation bemoans, and the one which no one is able to take responsibility for. The one whereby every child must have an award, everyone is your friend – often including your teacher – and everyone is equal, there is no such thing really as being right or wrong, and most importantly, there is no longer any form of hierarchal superiority. Most definitely, there is not that which is superior. Which, as far as I’m concerned, makes teaching Christianity practically impossible. The true message of Christ can never enter into relativism.
When I say that ‘there is no such thing really as being right or wrong’, which I imagine is quite literally true in some schools now, it wasn’t literally true then, but the abstractions of such an idea were on the rise. Of course, if you were to get a math problem wrong, 2+2=5, for instance, you would be corrected. However, the implications of being incorrect were never explained, we were always contained within the microcosm of individual efforts, no grander visions were allowed. So it was not that we could not be wrong, but it was that being incorrect meant absolutely nothing. You could be incorrect, wrong and mislead all day long, and nothing would come of it. We were not taught there would be repercussions for being wrong, only that – almost via osmosis – that it doesn’t matter anyway, because things just work out…
This first part is actually quite tough for me to write, not emotionally, but intellectually, because ultimately this early ‘education’ taught me that Christianity was quite literally that which it is not. As you’ll see in part two, this type of education, especially in relation to Christianity, carries through until college. The results of this ‘education’ in relation to belief and faith were sparse, transparent even. One received snippets of the Bible removed from their divine structure, the mystery of the trinity was mere justification for a festival, and prayer was only a part of the form of an assembly. From such an ‘education’ the results are what we commonly see from many current-day atheists in their rebuttals of those who believe – ‘Oh, you believe there’s a ‘big man’ in the sky!’ etc. And to a degree, these people can be forgiven for thinking this if they too were brought up in such a dire cultural atmosphere.
This is the reason why the title is ‘A-theist Conditioning’ and not ‘Atheist Conditioning’ (or even ‘New Atheist Conditioning’). Which leads to the question, what is the difference between ‘a-theism’ and ‘atheism’? Well, it’s a tricky subject. Because many contemporary atheists would state that all atheists are the same, much alike their old retort ‘Atheism is a religion like baldness is a hair style’, which is really quite nonsensical. Anyway, the difference – as I see it – is that the latter ‘atheism’ holds an inherent hostility against theism, that is to say, ‘atheism’ understands that from its position against theism it has to make efforts to replace the vacuum of ethics, morals, standards, metaphysics, epistemology, etiquette and possibly even worship which is left wide open once you remove a monotheistic religion. In short, atheists understand that from their claims, they have a responsibility to heal the rift of their position. Of course, being morally relativist, it is quite matter-of-factly impossible for them to take responsibility, because doing so no longer has any superior reasoning outside of individual subjective preference, but I’ll leave my atheist-bashing until part two. This leads me to ‘a-theism’. Now, as I understand it, a-theism is what atheism should be, but in practice, as I’ve stated, the latter becomes militant. And where the latter is militant, the former is placid, apathetic, nonchalant, complacent. Theism does not matter to a-theists. Whereas atheism, much like postmodernism, admits to that which it is tethered to and has to work against, a-theism is entirely dismissive, entirely ignorant, it cares not, its attitude towards theism is a complete absence, a ‘whatever’ in the face of beauty, order and tradition. Consider this controversial, but I actually consider a-theism far more destructive that atheism, though they are both equally poor, wretched, and most of all, heart wrenching.
But what exactly does this form of a-theistic teaching mean in terms of one’s upbringing? Spiritually, how does one grow? Well, quite simply, they don’t. In fact, they can’t, and that is the awful tyranny of much contemporary education. Whereas a devoutly atheistic or secular teaching would at least attempt to haphazardly construct a form of ethics and etiquette based around social teaching, education itself, and various values plucked from various places often termed ‘culturally Christian’, or ‘culturally X, Y or Z’. An a-theistic ‘teaching’ on the other hand simply doesn’t care, any theistic tradition which is assimilated into its mode of formative education is understood only as a historically material rule, which can be discouraged, ignored or mutated, and as we all know, once rules are ignored or altered to preference, they are no rules at all, and from that moment on, the task is only to find ways to justify overcoming our inhibitions and prohibitions. Such a teaching is not one of understanding why rules are good for you and your health, but of understanding how it may be possible to legitimize getting rid of them as a means to just ‘do what you want’. For once there is no transcendent Law – what C.S. Lewis calls Natural Law – there is no reason as to why one would simply not just seek pleasure, hedonism and to ‘do what thou wilt’. So when I state I was ‘brought up in a Christian school’, I should actually state ‘I grew up in a school which was Christian in name’, itself an utter tragedy.
This leads me back to the very first line of this piece, to the fact I simply wasn’t christened. I state ‘simply’ because it was just that, a simple oversight, I didn’t get ‘booked in’, and so it never happened. Such an attitude is a-theism in minutiae. It didn’t matter either way, because it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t have been a sincere decision in the first place, so the fact it didn’t happen was no big deal, and the fact it was no big deal, was itself, no big deal…and on and on. This of course begs the question, why would I, then, have been christened at all? The answer to this is very clear – because it is the ‘done thing’. Drawing on the theory of René Girard, we can consider the majority of contemporary Western christenings examples of mimetic desire. They are done because they are ‘the thing that is socially done’, our neighbours christened their children, and so we christen ours. And yet, there is equally something quite nefarious in this form of – as I understand it – Protestant (specifically Church of England) christening, it is an exemplary case of what is known as the ‘once-saved-forever-saved’ dynamic. Whereby many are christened in the belief that once they are christened they have ticked the box needed to enter heaven. I dare not say my feelings on such an idea, and they needn’t matter. What matters is the social implications, especially within a morally relative culture. For once that box has been ticked, it is thereby understood that whatever actions are undertaken by that christened person need not matter, for they are saved, and so for good or bad, nothing matters, the material world within such a process loses its connection to the divine, for nothing you do in the material world effects the outcome of your soul, the world becomes a playground for rampant, individualistic relativism.
But what comes of someone – of which there are many – who learns of Christ solely via an a-theistic education? In them there develops an inevitable scorn for these lessons, for why would one care at all for them if it has been silently made clear that no one truly believes them, and they are merely socio-cultural relics the purpose of which is to keep us in place, keep us down, and control us? And so very swiftly, in those who enjoy to question – as I very much did as a young man – there is born a divide, between the silent admittance of authority figures that none of this is true, and the fact that it is still used as a form of control. The entire a-theistic teaching leads the critically minded to understand Christianity as a merely a situation akin to The Emperor’s New Clothes, where the entire charade is upheld only as a means of telling us what we CAN’T do. Of course, to the Enlightened Western liberal materialist there is nothing worse that a prohibition unbroken, and so begins the process of justifying why this is all baloney. Or, in Truth, so begins the process of following Satan, and justifying why it is ok to sin.
For herein is found the deep sadness of such a-theism. In their apathy, in their modus operandi of ‘just getting by’, the importance of moral Christian teaching loses its divine zeal and transcendent truth. In connection to God, the transcendent divine and the afterlife, such lessons not only have consequences on this material world in terms of one’s wellbeing, but have greater effects upon one’s soul. But once such an understanding has been strewn to the wind there is no reason left as to why one shouldn’t be a glutton, be lustful, be adulterous, be hateful, be greedy, be self-centered; for within the material world what greater way to get ahead that to adhere to all these acts as if they were guides, and why not? And yet, a-theistic teaching loosely holds to what it has named a ‘culturally Christian’ teaching, whereby in abstract, it strips all lessons of their divine truth, and utilizes their material affects as a means to roughly guide ‘good behaviour’. But as I have made clear, without the transcendent structure of the divine, without their connection to God, Christ and heaven, these lessons are laws without repercussions, which in truth are no laws at all. For what could we say of a law against murder if in breaking it there was no punishment? What could we say of any law which upon being broken one finds only empty air?
And so, as a young man, what was I left with? A mass of rules, laws and guidance with I understood as only hindrances to a greater material experience of this earthly world, the only world I believed existed at that moment. And from this, as one can now hopefully reason as to why, is born a scorn towards religion in all forms. For once the a-theistic teaching has taken root, all religious traditions and customs are seen only as dated prohibitions from a superstitious time, they are quite frankly in the way. Towards those who held steadfast to them I directed my condescension, to the institutions which upheld them I directed my hatred, and towards those who attempted to guide me by them I directed my sarcasm. From that moment on, around the age of 13-15, religion, in its entirety, was for me nothing but an archaic control mechanism, seeking only to upset lives, control freedoms and prohibit fun.
And so what was I at this moment in time? In the eyes of atheists I have achieved a great feat of reason and rational at a young age; in the eyes of the a-theists I was living but a normal life; in the eyes of God I was completely lost; in the eyes of Satan I was doing very well. But also, in material terms, where was I, for there is correlation between this world and the transcendent. And as I was alienated from the divine, I was equally beginning to find alcohol, drugs, nihilism, violent media, resentment, greed, self-pity, whining, and depression as agreeable and understandable modes of existence. I was, quite sadly, the average Western young man. Everything was absolutely how it was meant to be, everything was fine, everything was normal, and yet, I was completely lost.
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