Have you developed an existentialist mindset?

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The other thing I was going to mention about how my beliefs and outlooks changed; I think it was trading the Christian concept of God - one which seemed to be rapidly unraveling the value of Christ's death fast just by not offering any intercession on the facts of life - for what one might call the neoplatonist panentheistic idea of God, which is the same as Tarot Key 0: The Fool.

I made that change partly in that reading the bible a couple times through back in 2013 some things jumped out at me - mainly the sheer bulk of both Ptolemaic astrology and platonism/neoplatonism. I'd also back in 2012 started researching the NDE phenomena, psy phenomena, comparing narratives, and I think it's been drummed in well enough for me to accept factually - at least for what I'd consider justifiable evidence - that we are clumps of self-awareness in something of a unified field of consciousness that seems separate from us but is really the backdrop, ie. what we're always looking at when we peer through our five senses. It's what a lot of Jungians would call the collective unconscious, or others might call the group subconscious mind, the level at which all of this connects.

I'm spending a lot of my time retooling in respect to how I handle life events. One particular thing about this outlook is that it can be particularly grueling - when you're told that your thoughts create your reality, that at least the big You creates your life limitations to experience something for a reason, and you're going through times in your life where it feels like you're being thrown by the unchangeable headlong into adult failure in possibly all senses of the word. I think this is where a lot of new agers end up temporarily with their belief and then pull back in favor of something else - they'll take quite literally that they can completely change their lives simply by thinking happy thoughts and cutting out all negative, they detach, and for whatever was supposed to happen all too often the right thing happens when they're over extended, can't hold the platitude any longer, and they snap back. I realized that I'd need something with firmer roots and I think I'm finding that more in the western mysteries. The only thing that's a big challenge with the western mysteries is I can, in some orders, get a lot of neoplatonist platitude shoved at me hard and quick and it can trigger my gag reflexes when it's getting too asymmetric to what I'm experiencing - even if it's all true it's superficially counterintuitive and takes a good while to accept past the surface intellectual level of things.

MP Hall said something about the Buddha in one of his lectures saying, right off the top, that this isn't a playground - it's a classroom. I think that's the outlook I can actually make sense of and bring on board, mainly that the world seems to revolve around suffering even if trite alleviation abound. It's a bit like if a person is being thrown headlong at their own worst fears coming to life in the world around them and they have nothing to reach out and grab onto to avert the crisis - they're forced to actually face themselves, their beliefs, their views of themselves, and to survive they need to overcome them. Anymore, even if my life might be the life of someone who'll never be a functional adult in most performance-based standards, I'm learning that this - the grisly side of existence - is where I can do the most work to make sure that I don't come back to start this kind of life and suffering all over again next time around.

To me that structure isn't a God with sheep at the right and goats at the left, it's a God who'll force you to psychoanalyze yourself all the way through life, fix your mistakes, and if you don't fix them you'll find that incarnation is as certain for the dead as death for the living and at return to the world of the living all the unfinished business and unfixed mistakes greets you on your birthday. To me that also suggests that the worst thing a person can do is let themselves panic, to do so makes a mess in a situation where we're being compelled to hold extraordinary poise just to get through and overcome our present mistakes - reaction and self destruction just makes the weight grow.


No one has to agree with what I said above, obviously, but it's interesting to see how a shift from atheistic worldview to neoplatonist is presenting me with a lot of new challenges - challenges which I'm hoping to meet face on as best possible in the course of time.

The realisation that life has no intrinsic meaning is precisely why everything you do is meaningful. If your purpose was preordained, it would not be your purpose.

Man!!

I should have thought of that (the post immediately above)---it's so true!