Jason Heppenstall

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

I am not all that bright. My creativity and uniqueness are something to behold, but when it comes to raw candlepower, I am a mid at best. I don’t always make smart decisions and that is why I have six cats. There is no reason any person of my lower middle class income level should have six cats. To my credit, only three of the six live inside my diminutive home (three are friendly ferals), however, their food and litter cost more than our human groceries per week. Their care and feeding take up a good thirty percent of any given day. Taking on six cats was not a smart or logical idea… yet here I am. There is meowing in the background as I write this.

I am in plentiful company: humans are not very smart. Our level of intelligence is somewhere between unicellular slime and demigod. The notion that we are the smartest beings in the solar system just because we walk on two feet and build a bunch of junk is laughable. For one, we’re not intelligent enough to do spacetime travel because we don’t have mental bodies sufficient to understand that space and time are illusions. We aren’t smart enough to cooperate on a consistent basis: our systems are fraught with waste, entropy, and unnecessary bloodshed. Our doctors are so stupid, they treat their human patients as if they were cars with interchangeable parts. Our men and women of god are usually hypocrites, hebephiles, and pedophiles. Our politicians and celebrities are slaves to a depraved System that vampirizes children and babies for profit.

Humans are not only stupid, we are extremely lazy. Entire civilizations have checked out where meaningfulness and earnestness are concerned. Their citizens have all but reneged on human decency and diligence and have instead fully embraced mindless egotism and zombified compliance. Going the saner path would require actual work they are not willing to do. We begin to see why the old holy books routinely featured an angry god who wiped the Earth clean with a flood and told a few survivors to start over.

As I mentioned in my previous essay about banishing rituals, I was atheist until about ten years go. Atheists like to think of themselves as super smart and I was no exception. The new atheist movement named themselves “brights” around 2003. Richard Dawkins, who is someone I consider to be more idiot than savant, attended the 2003 Brights movement conference. The Brights, also known as the Godless, proudly flaunted their atheism on the world stage for a hot minute. If you’re cringeing, well, I’m cringeing harder because I actually used to consider myself one of them! At any rate, Dawkins is neither the first nor will he be the last retard to declare his truth to be the only legitimate one.

In my own case, one of the only saving graces I have ever possessed is that I have always known I could be wrong, and that is why I am slightly smarter than “brights” such as Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, as well as any given monotheist theologian or imam. I don’t stake my entire self-worth on being right. I am also at peace with being retarded. I’m comfortable with it. To this day, Dawkins and Harris do not even know they are retarded and poor Hitchens died before he could figure it out.

So long and so very hard LOL

I’m sad I have to say this, but becoming less retarded is one of the key reasons we are incarnated here on Meatworld. Some lessons can only be learned the long and hard way. Some alchemical processes take so long that only a billion or more illusory spacetime years can get them done, for instance evolving the soul of an amoeba into a pianist.

Long ago, a bunch of medieval Catholics refined the concept and practice of discursive meditation. It is an understatement that discursive meditation is one of the great traditions the West has given to the world. Discursive meditation is a procedural method of deliberately limiting thought until the singular subject of that thought has been treated to a thorough amount of expounding, unpacking, and illumination. Benedict of Nursia is credited with putting discursive meditation on the map and making all the monks of his order do it on the regular, but I am confident discursive meditation was practiced throughout the medieval Christian world before he put his stamp on it. Medieval Europeans were a great deal more intelligent than the Progress narrative insinuates. Not only did medieval peasants have vibrant intellectual lives, they were far more connected to the rhythms of the land and the beauty of existence than we are. Proof of their superiority lies in the Gothic cathedrals they left behind. Our peoples will leave islands of ocean plastic waste the size of Alaska, spent uranium, and janky concrete.

The medieval peasant was smarter, braver, and more conversant with the Divine than you because the thought leaders of his time were immersed in discursive meditation even if he personally was not. Limits are power, whether we are talking about the walls and pipes of a hydroelectric dam or the exclusion of inferior ingredients in a treasured soup recipe. Via limits, discursive meditation improves lives. It improved mine and it can improve yours. If everyone on Substack took up discursive meditation for 10-20 minutes a day for a year, we would be looking at a burgeoning revolution in addiction recovery and dramatic collapses in mainstream media far more pronounced than what we are seeing now. Positive infection happens.

Voice in your head

It’s not that NPCs lack voices in their heads or internal dialogues. We all have voices and internal dialogues. Every person has a unique spiritual ecosystem just as he or she has gut flora. The ecosystem is a mishmash of different selves and outsiders. Beings such as the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA), ghosts, egregores, fairies, demons, feeders, larvae, and a motley array of beings who pass through without interaction are par for the course. You are not alone and you have never been alone. You were conditioned into rootlessness after being born in a spiritual Dark Age of endemic metaphysical handicaps. You were shoehorned into dismissing the spiritual world, and if you were raised in monotheism, you likely had it worse because you were told most of the discernible spiritual world was evil and Satanic.

You are a blind leper in a vicious game of dodgeball, unaware that your nose and fingers have fallen off. You are dimly aware that you in constant pain and that something isn’t right. You need a banishing ritual or its traditional mass equivalent stat. You also need a way of preserving what is left of your own dwindling strength so you can stop wasting your magical energy, otherwise known as intention.

Most of us have problems with intention and again I am no exception. My Achilles’s heel is eclecticism, which is the urge to jam several lifetimes of accomplishment into a single human incarnation. Discursive meditation has been a godsend in discerning which activities I am best suited to spending my time on and which are better left behind. Limits are power.

Where does your mind go?

When I first started discursive meditation about ten years ago, I was still solidly atheist. That said, the skeptic in me had no problem with ten to twenty minutes a day of severely limited thought. My first meditations were deceptively simple. A pencil. A sandwich. The piano. The number five. My daily contemplations grew to include terms or phrases such as “cleanliness is next to godliness” and “middle age”. Only later did I build up the fortitude to tackle problematic subjects such as troubled relationships, my own shadow projection, and past lives. Once I had my sea legs, I was able to gain tremendous insight to most of my own problems. I became my own best shrink. I struck at the roots of my own stupidity, pride, and self-sabotage. There is nothing quite like isolating one’s own culpability in discursive meditation to put an end to one’s own bad behavior. Removing the bullcrap and sanctimony drives an iron pin through the heart of the pale, squirming grub of egotistical complacency. The phrase “everywhere you go, there you are” sums it up: instead of running away as most humans do from self-reflection, discursive meditation exposes you to your own inner workings. Confront the way you think; this is the key to much, to paraphrase Dion Fortune. As Apollo said, know thyself.

Stop waiting for the world to change and change yourself. Discursive meditation is a direct route to self-change. It is unfortunate that some who are reading this will find ways to dismiss what I have said here because I am a non-Christian occultist. Yes, I am both of those things, but I believe Jesus himself wants you to revive the tradition of discursive meditation. I believe He (or someone uncannily like him) popped into my ecosystem a couple of times and said “Hey you… tell them I said this!” He said that gratitude and generosity sublimate to the power of seven. He also said that discursive meditation, a.k.a. the old Catholic contemplation that made the West formidable and great, should be revived. In short, Jesus is no fan of whiners and whining. He would much prefer you use the ancient tradition of His church to clean up your own corner instead of crying about somebody else’s pigsty.

Make of that what you will… I could be wrong!

How to do a discursive meditation:

1. Choose a subject in the form of a physical object, word, or phrase. Do not choose more than one subject. Limits are power. Christians can use a phrase from the Bible, and you’ll observe the Bible’s verses are conveniently partitioned and numbered for contemplation purposes.

2. Get a notebook and pen and put it somewhere within reach.

3. Sit in a straight-backed chair with your feet on the ground and take a few deep breaths. A little discomfort is OK as long as it is not extreme.

4. Limit your thought to the subject alone. If you’re hungry, too freaking bad. If you’re thinking about a deadline or an annoying person, cancel those thoughts for ten minutes. Only think about the subject and all its aspects.

5. Once you have thought about the subject, isolate three aspects of it that crossed your mind. For instance, if I meditate on a pencil, I can think about its etymology (pencil means “little tail”), where it was made (likely China), and my own preference for mechanical pencils. Write those observations down in your book.

6. Quit after ten or twenty minutes. Don’t overdo discursive meditation. It’s actually heavier exercise than you would assume. Once you get good at it, you can go longer.