shimmeringfire.bsky.social
you must rise above
the gloomy clouds
covering the mountaintop
otherwise, how will you
ever see the brightness?
Ch'an Daoist || godless mysticism
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He went vegan shortly afterward
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I guess it's pretty embarrassing to admit having been very into Wilson, but he spoke to my alienation in a way not much academic philosophy did. It's pretty clear he helped me articulate a lot of my central concerns.
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Illusion isn't delusion, but vision; salvation isn't escape from the world, but a richer engagement with it.
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The Gnostic perception of cosmic evil is a misperception, a mistake of perspective, a dulled petrification
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Unlike the gnostics, this is a nondual attitude that doesn't think the world is evil or illusory.
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To this day, I share his desire for a phenomenological revolt against (Gurdjieffian) automaticity and the desire to show that pessimism is a mistake of perspective
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Wilson is hardcore cringe but he was my introduction to mysticism and his figure of the outsider really did speak to my experience
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The society of stimulation by Guy de Bored
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Maybe this is more sophisticated non-engagement.
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Or maybe that's just an insufferably trite conclusion. Anyway, I'm going to stop posting about politics. I'm no good at it.
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Maybe I'm also saying that if we stop thinking we know what to do, the world will show us how to care.
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I also guess I want to say, be careful not to fool yourselves with your intelligence—most of you are much smarter than me and the risk is greater.
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It's hard to say what my point is in this thread.
I suppose it's therapeutic and diagnostic—both for myself and for anyone else caught in similar patterns of paralysis.
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For myself, i put my focus on the ethical realm, developing the capacity to respond to what's actually in front of me— the relational and contextual, an engagement with particular situations where my response might matter.
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I don't pretend to have an answer to all this, certainly not a universal one.
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In the political realm, this shows up as the endless quest for the perfect ideology, the right analysis, the candidate who will fix everything, one weird trick etc—anything to avoid sitting with the messy, ongoing reality.
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In either case, I've come to suspect experiential avoidance is the underlying psychological mechanism, redirected toward the political sphere.
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Others doube down on the same political strategies they've buried themselves in for years, or decades .
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Some people retreat into a kind of blackpilled political nihilism that they might frame as being "above it all" or "seeing through the illusions," but it is just protective dissociation.
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I bring this up because our moment is one defined by relentless chaos, a sense that nothing changes—or that it changes only ever for the worse—and a feeling of sheer overwhelm that pushes us into a kind of existential/ideological disorientation that often terminates in nihilistic detachment.
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But I mistook this for withdrawal from engagement rather than the most skillful form of engagement. Ultimately, then, my view represented sophisticated nihilistic aestheticism dressed in Buddhist robes.
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I think I got closest to it when discussing Dōgen's "purposeless, goalless" zazen as a form of active non-action. I saw that Dōgen's approach dissolves the need for "solutions" through complete acceptance of what's arising...an intimacy with total dynamic function of the universe
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For all that, I was still groping towards genuine Chan/Zhuangzian insights: the futility of forcing solutions, the wisdom of non-attachment to outcomes, the recognition that our very attempts to fix things often perpetuate the problems.
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Even worse, I leaned heavily on edgy material like Nick Land—not to endorse his reactionary views, but I guess to be seen as engaging with transgressive theory (my undergrad was in continental philosophy) and to position an advocacy of withdrawal not as hopelessness but radical critique.
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I misused the Zen framework to serve the function of transforming my learned helplessness in the face of cascading crises into a form of wisdom, making inaction feel like an enlightened choice rather than a symptom of paralysis.
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I think now that I was trying to create a cognitive space between myself, my despair, and genuinely terrifying realities—and none of this is intended to downplay the real catastrophies that we are witnessing and continue to anticipate
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The text's elaborate theoretical architecture functioned as a kind of metaphysical anesthesia: reframing political collapse as mystical awakening, societal failure as spiritual letting go, and powerlessness as enlightened renunciation.
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But I suspect that for me, collapse was always, first and foremost, a psychological symptom. That is, I think my primordial relation to it was a kind of objectivation of a deep psychic wound.
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I had been preoccupied with the idea of collapse, in one from or another, for years by this point, having written about it since 2014 —but id been thinking about it and anticipating it since I was a teenager.
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Ironically, as a disabled person married to a disabled person, parenting a disabled child, and as someone with many disabled friends, it isn't even a strategy that is actually open to me or the people I care about.
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It advocated for "exit" and non-participation, assuming the luxury of being unaffected by political decisions—making it inaccessible to immigrants, minorities, and the economically precarious who cannot afford such withdrawal.
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The whole thing was ultimately a form of spiritual bypassing using Zen and atheological concepts to justify political withdrawal from a position of relatively comfortable detachment.
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The whole thing was founded on a fundamental performative contradiction—spending thousands of words arguing against solutions while offering "renunciation"/"exit"/"exodus" as the ultimate solution.
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I once wrote an anti-politics essay that claimed there are no solutions to our problems, that system failure and collapse are now locked in, and that the desire for solutions drives our problems, accelerating them.
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Sure. I've got a masters in philosophy too, emphasis on ethics, but I don't think I'd ever consider that grounds for expertise.
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"I have a master's degree" is a weird flex
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I dream of an exodus, a great refusal, knowing even that is impossible
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Felt this for some time. The cruelty, indifference, lies, and elite self-interest has become so obvious it's not worth pointing out. Meanwhile, everything else keeps degrading, falling apart, so that everyone can plainly see where we're headed. Even so, inertia propels us onward, locked in
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Not specifically about replacement rate, but Ernest Becker’s body of work and Samuel Scheffler’s Afterlife seem pertinent. The former explores culture as an immortality project, while the latter emphasizes the expectation of future generations as the foundation of meaning for our current projects