#zenarchy

"If organized religion is the opium of the masses...

...then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe."

"Organized religion preaches Order and Love but spawns Chaos and Fury. Why?"

"What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos."

"As for the Devil – that is somebody our religion tried to do without for a long time."

- Kerry Thornley on Discordianism

Robert Anton Wilson: (i^2) Intelligence Squared

"“Voltaire sort of summarized all thinking up until his time when he said: ‘that the only way to get an inkling of what mathematicians mean by infinity is to consider the extent of human stupidity’. But that’s because he was considering religious stupidity. If you look at political stupidity, you find that the stupidity doesn’t tend to be so long lasting. The general pattern is religious stupidity exists for milleniums, political stupidity exists for centuries, scientific stupidity exists only for generations before it gets cured.

So there are different rations for recovering from stupidity depending on what method you’re using: the theological method sort of guarantees that you can remain stupid indefinitely (or until a major calamity forces a change), the political method allows you to remain stupid for many generations until you’ve antagonized enough of the world that they come in and sack your city, scientific stupidity only lasts until a generation is born bright enough to start asking basic questions again and not just following what their teacher tells them”

"The possibility of changing consciousness was discovered in the Orient 2500 years ago, at least. Techniques were discovered to quiet the mind, pacify the mind, remove emotional compulsions. These were organized into the science of Yoga. As John Lilly says, “Yoga is the science of the East. Science is the Yoga of the West.”

Science is a yoga, too. Science is a way of trying to reach an objective level in which your emotional compulsions and prejudices aren’t twisting all the facts to fit in with your reality tunnel.

The scientific worldview grew up in the west between 1500 and 1750, largely due to mystics who were known as Hermeticists. This Hermetic scientific revolution saw theology as its enemy, and there was no conflict between Hermeticism and science. They were both based on experiment, find out what happens if you “do this,” and they were both opposed to the authority of the Church.

Shortly after 1600 this began to split, and this Hermetic tradition faded into the background, and we developed for the first time in history a science that had absolutely no connection to anything except pure reason. The hermetic tradition was that there is no such thing as pure reason, you have to first work on your own perceiving apparatus to correct your prejudices, and the scientist is not separate from what the scientist observes.

The general yogic attitude, “you are the master that makes the grass green,” –western science lost that insight, and from Newton onwards we have the idea that it doesn’t matter who you are, if you follow scientific procedure you’ll find the truth...

...Science began to have data to look at science itself critically. That’s how intelligence increases, when intelligence looks at intelligence and criticizes intelligence. So we got to the point where we could look at science and say, “science is the product of people!” People are doing this, and their prejudices are getting into it. It’s not just enough to say you will be objective, you’ve got to learn to change yourself from the inside out before you can even approximate towards objectivity...

...Nobody has made pranayama illegal yet because it would be impossible to enforce. Whether you just read a book on yoga and learn how to breathe through alternative nostrils and you find you're going to an entirely different consciousness state. Then you can go back to you ordinary consciousness think about that state then go back into that state and think about your ordinary consciousness and already you're in I squared.

By intelligence studying intelligence you finding out how the system works so with each decade since the 1960s we are moving to the place where we can change our nervous systems, change reality tunnels and make bigger and bigger reality tunnels once you look down at your reality tunnel whether your reality tunnel is: Ohio Methodist, or New York Jewish, or Marin County hippie, or Tokyo capitalist/Zen Buddhist, or Iranian Muslim fundamentalist.

titus toledo's "occupy your mind with empty thoughts of infinite nothingness"

*on canvas, artprints, shirts+sundry: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/8826577

ZENARCHY ON IMMEDIATISM PODCAST

ORIGINAL POST: https://anarchistnews.org/content/zenarchy-immediatism-podcast After a break in recording, Immediatism has finished a reading of the book Zenarchy, by Kerry Thornley. With frequent references to taoism, and a delightful sense of humor and lightness, this is a late 20th century classic, read by listener request. Episode 810 concludes with the Eight Principles of the No Politics of…

"occupy your mind with empty thoughts of infinite nothingness" ©2011 (november) by titus toledo

*on canvas, artprints, shirts+sundry: https://bit.ly/occupyurmind