Satyrnalium

I always found Nietzsche's psychological insights much more profound and instructive than any of his "metaphysics", which were entirely derivative.
His "eternal return" a psychological employment of the Hindu cycles; his "Will to Power" an adaptation of Schopenhauer's "Will to Life", a psychographic insight into life, not applicable to non-living - perhaps a metaphorical literati vehicle, which was taken literally by generations of wanton souls, implying an anthropomorphic intent when none is justifiable; his ubermench, another symbolic tool, that was not only misunderstood by Nazi propagandists and generations of their victims, but to this day is the source of much speculative charlatanism.
Nietzsche was a student and teacher of literature, so I am forced to conclude that his use of linguistic imagery was entirely intentional.
If we simply study his use of "eternal return" as a method of gauging individual contentment with his own life, we can find another psychological insight, which we can only assume lies behind all his adaptations of pre-existing philosophy.
In his attitude towards Schopenhauer's "pessimistic" response to existence, altering the motive from "existing" to "self-empowering", we see another psychological insight.
And if he delve deeply into his Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomies, we may find  lurking in metaphorical form the conflicts between the masculine and the feminine, order and chaos.      

This is what one Nazi had to say, among other things, on the matter.

Rosenberg, Alfred wrote:

Thus Dionysus, while he appears in Greek paintings as Hellenic, is effeminate and is surrounded by near eastern satyrs, who also appear on grave monuments as screeching grotesqueness of the decadent world. Bachofen sums it up by saying that "Appollo invaded Asia, but returned as Dionysus". However, what he and others overlook is that Zeus Apollo represented the spiritual imperative of Nordic Greek blood, whereas the hetaira lifestyle is an expression of near eastern and African races. the Mixing of Myths and values was simultaneously of racial bastardization, and many of the legends of the Greeks are the poetic allegories of the struggle between different racially determined souls.
This near eastern African underworld is revealed most vividly in the historically attested figure of Pythagoras. He is said to have travelled throughout Babylonia and to India. He himself is described as a Pelasgian, and he did in fact practice his mysteries in Asia Minor, joined by ecstatic mystical women. He was unable to gain credence in Greece proper. Aristotelis and Heraclitos referred to him derogatorily, and were plainly resentful of his mathematical cabalism. Aristotelis said that Pythagores' fame was based on his "appropriation of alien spiritual values". This was also the opinion of Heraclitos, who said that Pythagoras had "woven together a false art and charlatanry from various writings". "A pretence at universal knowledge, " said the Hellenic sage, "does not instruct the spirit".
So Pythagoras moved to the west, to southern Italy, like some ancient blend of Rudolf Steiner and Anne Besant, he set up his school of mysteries complete with priestesses. He was regarded throughout the entire African littoral - whence came the collectivist sexual mysteries of the Egyptian Karpokrates to his aid - as the wisest of the wise. Universal equality is once again promoted in the form of democratic ecumenicalism. Women and property are held in common, although this had been the basis of non-Nordic Mediterranean ideas when Apollo first battled against them.  

Myth of the 20th Century

 

Dionysus as the Afro-Asiatic emasculation of the Aryan masculine spirituality.
The "struggle" between man and cosmos, is continuous. A struggle between human nobility and the cthonic; light and darkness; the underworld conflicting with the overworld. Consciousness and unconsciousness, merging in organic subconsciousness.
One has to only observe existence to distinguish which is more dominant.
The sequence exposes a relationship of mind, body, via the nervous system, with the body being the outer boundary - the skin/membrane separating life from non-life, the self from other. Through the body and its automatic, impulsive, reactivity to external stimuli, the brain receives data from the "external world", manifested as mind.
Reality, or world is mediated by body, before it is engaged by brain - belonging to the nervous system. In lower life-forms the body is entirely reactive, producing localized reactions that cascade throughout its physical form. But in higher-life-forms this localized automated reactivity, is also burdened by the transmission to a centralized processing hub where the cascading reactivity is processed as if it were occurring to another. The body has already reacted, plant-like - to an external stimulation before it is processed by the nervous system. In sophisticated life-forms, such as homo sapient, with advanced nervous systems, this processing acquires an emotional component, and an abstractive defensiveness. The brain defensively interpreting the body's reactions to an external stimulation.
A neurological defensive line, in addition to the physical skin/membrane differentiating self from other, accumulating knowledge/experience to manipulate - cultivate, i.e., selectively control and/or redirect - the body's automated reactivity. The mind can only construct intervening reactions - after-the-fact - in preparation and anticipation for the next encounter with a similar external stimulation.        

My own appreciation of Nietzsche is founded on his psychological insights rather than any of his metaphysics.
I am inclined to seriously consider metaphysical positions if the source has displayed a promiscuity in regards to the physical domains, just as I am to seriously consider the abstract art of an artist who has previously displayed talent in painting or sculpting physical reality, and am quick to dismiss all attempts to imply talent through obscurantism and such art forms as cubism and surrealism with nothing to show in realism.
Easier to pretend "deep wisdom" using nonsense, triggering the desires of the intended audience, than it is to actually present a deep understanding of experienced reality.
Recently I was reminded of Nietzsche's "talents" - which still inspire youthful and emasculated minds with their feminine sensitivities, given masculine clarity.
Here are a few from my favourite of his works, Human, all too Human:

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

512
Morality and quantity: One man's morality is higher compared with another's often only because its goals are quantitatively greater. the latter is drawn by his own narrowly bounded occupation with the petty.  

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

484
Upside down world - One criticizes a thinker more severely when he advances a proposition we find unpleasing, and yet it would be more reasonable to do so when his proposition pleases us

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

489
Not too deep - People who comprehend a thing to tis very depths rarely stay faithful to it for ever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day: and in the depths there si always much that is unpleasant to see.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

491
Self-observation - Man is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitred and besieged by himself, he is able to perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

506
Advocates of truth - Not when it is dangerous to tell the truth does truth lack adversaries, but when it is boring to do so.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

517
Fundamental insight - There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

Feeble conscience - People who speak of their won significance for humanity possess with regard to common, bourgeois integrity, in the keeping of compacts and promises, a feeble conscience.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

536
Value of tasteless opponents - Sometimes one stays faithful to a cause only because its opponents are unfailingly tasteless.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

Too great objective - He who has publicly set himself great objectives and afterwards realizes he is too weak for them is usually also too weak publicly to repudiate them, and then he unavoidably becomes a hypocrite.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

541
In the stream - Mighty waters draw much stone and rubble along with them, mighty spirits many stupid and bewildered heads.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

547
The "rich in spirit" - He has no spirit who seeks spirit.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

545
Self-enjoyment in vanity - The vain man wants not so much to predominate as to feel himself predominant, that is why he disdains no means of self-deception and self-outwitting. What he treasures is not the opinion of others but his own opinion of their opinion.

Beyond vanity - Why would I care if desperate degenerates adjust their degenerate views to accommodate my indisputable reasoning if they do not acknowledge me as the source of their adjustments?
What does it matter if one mind adapts its thinking because of some insignificant point I made, and cannot, for one reason or another, acknowledge me as the agency of their "insight"?
I am not immune to vanity, but in the bigger picture, the outcome is more important.
If one of them, becomes slightly more immune to charlatans, nihilistic hypocrites, and desperate degenerates, then my job is done.  

My solitude is far more precious....for I know what the price and risk of being on the front-line, as leader, or mentor.
I know how it corrupts and produces psychological attrition.
My anonymous solitude, as much as I've managed to preserve, is a necessary condition for the emergence of my empathy and my objectivity - to whatever degree I've inherited it, as a potential, and I've managed to cultivate it, over the years.

Hoffer, Eric wrote:

The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.

Hoffer, Eric wrote:

The craving to change the world is perhaps a reflection of the craving to change ourselves.

Hoffer, Eric wrote:

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

Should we not connect the three and conclude that the self-ascribed Messiah, offering empowerment, or salvation, by any other name, is secretly harbouring a resentment towards a self that does not easily yield to its desires.
Unable to "have their way" their creativity can be corrupted by an ideal that is unattainable.

Hoffer, Eric wrote:

There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They asked to be deceived.

What makes a saviour is a desire to save the go from itself, offers as a gift to others, as if it has already been accomplished by the act of offering - imitating overflowing generosity, when in fact there is only a penury of greed seeking in another a memento of a pretentious victory.

Many imbeciles believe that once a high status is achieved that it is there for eternity....
Imbeciles do not comprehend what produces superiority, because if they did they would realize that once the conditions for its emergence are gone, it reverts to a median state.

I've called this the 'paradox of power'.
It produces the conditions for its own obsolescence.

To put it in simpleton terms..."what goes up, must come down"...or to put it in terms the idiot will be pleased by..."genius lays the groundwork for the future production of idiocy".

All stereotypes are a real-world description and appreciation of a gene/meme synthesis.

Those who have always peddled superstition continue to do so, true to the stereotype.
Marxism has proven to be a secular superstition that had the naivete to believe in its own delusions.
It failed on all fronts. It failed to bring about its Utopia, it failed in its predictions of a world-wide uprising, it failed everywhere and every time it applied itself in accordance to its own principles, and only enjoyed some degree of success when it contradicted itself - see current China.
A superstition produces the most caricaturish stereotypes, and the most desperate degenerates.
Caricatures that must go "all in" when they've already placed so much on the table - hoping against all hope....on faith.
Desperation personified. The outcome is always a decline towards the ultimate bottom of degeneracy.

There's something about a repeating patten - such as a beat - which puts the brain in an inter-subjective loop - which it experiences as a relief...or a resting phase.
I think it has something to do with circularity and why cycles are so comforting to a organism, such as man. It's the womb, in another form.
A reversion to infancy....calming and certain, and, oh so pleasing.

The circle itself, the 0, is so complete and final...and whole.
Like an encompassing flexible, yet certain, placenta.

To reveal is to shed light into what is unclear, obscure, covered in shadows, bathed in darkness. It is to push back the occult.
A living being can only flourish with a reality fully revealed - good and bad, in relation it its desires/needs, must be exposed, revealed as what they are.
Language is a tool of revealing.
It is the method - logos - of uncovering, un-forgetting, un-concealing.
the negative does not disappear if we forget, ignore, or cover it up with positive rhetoric. It does not vanish; its power is not decreased by our words. Words may bolster our energies, but they do nothing to what confronts us.

This is clearest in Nihilistic spirituality and political - in pure ideology. It is entirely inconsistent - detached - from the experienced, to whatever degree we are aware of it.
It conceals in semiotics what is negative and inverts it into what seems positive, as a way of coping ; developing into a way of controlling, i.e., manipulating, seducing, exploiting.
It is always hyper-positive, because it has nothing to say about reality other than how to cope and endure it.

It's always best when the trap traps the trapper.

What does it matter what we know?
Some know more of this, others more of that; some are "experts" in this, others in that; some have learned and specialized in one area, one discipline, others in other kinds of knowledge.
What does it matter?
What makes the difference?

Not quantity, but quality.
Not knowledge - although this is also important - but understanding.
How do we process the data we come in contact with; how do we connect the data and validate it and evaluate it?
Do you know how many smart imbeciles I've come across?
Minds with vast amounts of data, and yet the understanding of idiots.
Emotion is the weakness - emotion rooted in need/desire. Fear, in particular. Anxiety.
Subjectivity, they call it. The cowardice of fearing to validate what you think you know, using an indifferent standard - an objective standard.
This is what differentiates the moron from the wise man.  
And it shows across the entire gamut of his judgements. From the most mundane to the most profound choices he makes and how he justifies them.

Destruction is much easier and faster than construction, because destruction has no end, no plan, no goal, whereas construction, creativity, procreativity, does.
Stress is how consistent advancement towards an objective is experienced.
Low stress indicates a absence of advancement; comfort is always an indication of stasis, and the start of atrophy. Easier to surrender to and faster to produce results.

How many generations of comfort does it take to erase centuries of stressful advancement?

Honest and true philosophy liberates the reader. It gradually makes the teacher unnecessary to the student.
Philosophical insights do not only teach particulars about reality, but with them they pass-on techniques for the production of one's own insights.

Dishonest and untrue philosophy does the opposite. It trains the student to be entirely dependent on an authority, accessible through text, because its theoretical insights cannot be corroborated independently, offering perspectives on a imaginary, occult, hidden reality which is hidden by experienced reality and is contradicted by it.

Why is the #3 such an important number, in a hunter's triangulation; the Hellenic/platonic triad of the human psyche reason/will/passion and/or logos/ethos/pathos; in Biblical/Christian triad of son/father/holy ghost?
Because the third is the beginning of the simplest pattern, i.e., when #1 repeats, and can be used to predict #4.
There is no pattern without a triad.

Why is #4 the number of consciousness – four dimensional space/time.
Because the forth is the completion of the simplest pattern, and so the beginning of consciousness; the fourth is the completion, the validation, of a pattern.
The third is but an insinuation, a projection, but the fourth is a confirmation of a simple repeating cycle.

A male mind wants to be cognizant of its own intent – it wants to know itself.
The degree that it does determines the degree to which it can recognize intent in others, or its absence, differentiating the living from the non-living.
A female mind cares not, focusing on the outcome, the effect. It does not overly concern itself with the cause. Its own intent is a universal; all has intent, ergo all is aware, or chooses, implying universal consciousness.
It projects into other itself, mistaking its own motives for universal truths, or its own consciousness as a universal cause.
The feminine focuses on pragmatic outcome – minimally caring about the source.
Even in its fantasies or nihilistic ideologies, it does not care if they are self-consistent, as long as they produce the desired effect; the desires sensation, emotion, feeling. For this reason women tend to go for reality based fantasies, where the self-consistency is in natural order, and do not much care about alternate realities and universes, such as those depicted for male consumption in movie theatres, where its self-cohesion may contradict or offer an alternative to natural order.


That's why they make terrible fantasy and sci-fi authors and directors. They cannot produce a fantasy product that would appeal to a masculine mind.

Change is what identifies human agency and what threatens it.
Power over change is man's highest ambition: how to turn it around, and slow it down; how to direct its course and cope with its inevitability; how to predict and adapt to its demands; change traces the fluctuating limits of man's will and constantly reminds him of his mortality.
And when man has lost all love and trust in himself, it is towards change where he abandons his final hopes.

With the help of Dr. McGilchrist's psychological insights we can now validate our suspicions that this dis-ease can be traced back to the Enlightenment' and how the ancients were re-discovered, through the Muslims, and adapted to the then dominant zeitgeist which was distinctly Christian.
This lead to the French Revolution, and from there to the Russian and to the American War of Independence and so on.
What could not be reinvigorated was the spirit of the ancients, and so Modern Europeans, of that time, only understood the reason - logos.

Perhaps I've not lost all hope, but I'm close to it.
And with every step towards hopelessness I gain clarity, because to have no hope is to have no fear, since fear is a reaction to a possible loss.
Ironically, it is hopelessness that increases the possibility for hope. Each step away from hope a step towards unseen possibilities, suddenly revealed when one clears the mind of its fears, rooted in its needs and desires.

It is the paradox of power.
The more you need power the more weak you are; the more you reach for what you desire the more you push it away; the less you want the more you get.
A paradox, like all paradoxes, produced by mind/body dissonance, expressed through semiotic codes; the uncanny.

Satyr wrote:

Perhaps I've not lost all hope, but I'm close to it.
And with every step towards hopelessness I gain clarity, because to have no hope is to have no fear, since fear is a reaction to a possible loss.
Ironically, it is hopelessness that increases the possibility for hope. Each step away from hope a step towards unseen possibilities, suddenly revealed when one clears the mind of its fears, rooted in its needs and desires.

It is the paradox of power.
The more you need power the more weak you are; the more you reach for what you desire the more you push it away; the less you want the more you get.
A paradox, like all paradoxes, produced by mind/body dissonance, expressed through semiotic codes; the uncanny.  

I understand this completely, due to recent events. Soberness. When I least want something, I'll likely acquire it - because I'll pursue it without concern for anything that'd go wrong and concentrate on what'd go correctly.

Edit: Just realized this was a previously locked thread. Apologies for the intrusion.

I'm fortunate. I've been practising social isolation for years.
In general, I avoid large communities of bovines. They can accidentally trample on you, out of unintentional foolishness.
In small groups bovines are manageable.
One on one, they are silly-putty.
All you do is pretend you are interested in what crap comes form their orifices - regurgitations or mind-farts.
You don't even have to lie and say you agree. They will misconstrue your feigned interest as agreement, and become bolder.
After a while they will have laid down their entire psychosis at your feet. At that point it's a matter of what you want to do with it, if anything, and how far you want to take it.

COVID-19 Crisis
The weakness of heterogeneous unities, like the U.S., that unify only because of an ideology, becomes increasingly obvious when it is threatened by an invisible or visible enemy. As long as the enemy is kept outside its borders it remains stable, but when it infiltrates within, the unity begins to fragment. There's nothing holding it together but an abstraction.
No shared genes – blood, heritage, culture. There’s only a concept, like 'liberty' and 'happiness' or the pursuit thereof. If there was a reason for the U.S. to fabricate external enemies and to position them at a safe distance, as an abstraction or as a foreign threat one had to deal with locally, it was because there was never anything holding it together but an ideology – a mere concept each had to independently – subjectively – define. Diversity does not make anything stronger. It makes it brittle. At the first hint of pressure upon its structure it begins to buckle.
The Trotskyite doctrine, adopted by neo-cons – neo-Marxists, neo-Abrahamics – advocated perpetual war 'over there' so that it never got close enough to expose the fissures of the "melting pot", over here.

Who could have predicted that the behaviour that was derided is now promoted and enforced.
Sitting on your arse, indoors, playing video-games or whatnot, is now going to save mankind rather than destroy it.

When life becomes arrogant, distracted by itself, death whispers in its ear reminding it of how fragile it is.

Life, when it reaches a certain level of awareness, prefers to measure itself against the absolute positive, when the absolute negative is just as useful, if not more honest.
Omnipotence as a measure of power/strength rather than of weakness; omniscience as a measure of knowledge and understanding rather than of ignorance and confusion; life as the measure of existence rather than death; order rather than chaos.
The psychology is obvious, but there is more to it - life experiences existence linearly.
It measures time/space using the near-absolute point of absolute oneness, i.e., Big Bang.
From this perspective existence is a slow and inevitable movement towards near-absolute chaos.
We call this time, viz. a constant increasing decrease in order (patterned energies interacting and with every interaction splintering and decreasing in power or losing their pattern altogether, contributing to the slow increase of chaos, i.e., random energies, or energies interacting with no consistent, repeating consistency (chaos).
The Greeks began with Chaos (ΧΑΩΣ), i.e. void, out of which order emerges, beginning the process back towards it.
Void is a metaphorical way of describing a state of near-absolute chaos, where insignificant levels of probability exists, i.e., no matter/energy as we know it. Matter/Energy refers to states of probability, or order.
Matter being that which in relation to the observer, in this case man, the pattern is slow, and Energy being that which is fast - with liquidity being an intermediate state.

From this near-absolute state of chaos that can also be described as expanding possibilities, the possibility that order (probability) will spontaneously and unpredictably emerge becomes increasingly inevitable, beginning the process anew.
Expanding space/time is another way of describing it.

A miser imitates generosity by sharing what he values least so as to have access to what he values the most.
Through this warped understanding of generosity he exposes himself as what he is.

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I have....and I called it
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From genes to memes, but also from physics to metaphysics. My metaphysics begins with what is fundamental in existence, dynamism, movement, and interactivity, encapsulated in the concept of ‘energy’ – patterned and non-patterned vibrations; more accurately described as oscillations, i.e., probability of interactivity across/within dimensions of possibility. Frequency, rhythms, sequences, all describing a kind of energy, interested as appearance if it displays patterns that can be interpreted, processed, by a conscious mind.

Mιden agan - ΜΗΔΕΝ ΑΓΑΝ - is the true path of a hyperborean.
He who finds his way upon it will reach the place where the black sun never sets.

Living organism's stand in distinct opposition to existence as participating, willful, agencies in a dynamic, determining, process.
With their every action - choice - they contribute to the multitude of interactions determining the future, in the present, but can only experience the consequences, of their own participation, through a determined past.
This makes precedent the foundation of consciousness
It also creates a temporal distance which is often confused as an external will, or an external agency.

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Hyperborea recedes from memory - mists of corrupting Afro-Asiatic revisionist attitudes and moral ideals, have pushed the land of the sun, forever into darkness.
Twilight settlers upon the children of Helios, promising a coming darkness...before sunrise, once more, returns, as it always has.
Who, among them will manage to endure and survive this coming mental plague? How many will survive and how much will be lost?
History speaks, and we must listen, though it speaks of things we do not wish to hear.  
With each cycle of man's rebirth, more is lost to chaos and darkness, within cosmological cycles, remaining unaffected by human hopes and desires.
Barbarian hordes dominate and stand as pretenders to the throne - unable to build, they adopt and claim what has been built, as their own - in the process they warp and turn it against itself, plunging it back into the chaos from which it emerged.

Collectives is where failed individuals find refuge - a last repository of naturally/socially selected victims of cosmic indifference; collectives become representations of universal rules - moral codes of conduct - offering the individual someone to accuse, someone that cares.
The larger and less discriminating the criteria of belonging to a collective, indicates the degree of the participating individuals sense of personal failure - disillusionment, producing desperation, can manifest as a cynical dismissal of the very idea of success.
Oftentimes, such individuals have been governed by a lifetime of super-natural, extraordinary, expectations, convictions and ambitions - hyperinflated, or hypo-deflated, self-asesments - that could not but had resulted in abject failure, necessitating the self-preserving reaction of accusing everything, and everyone, but itself and its own naïve gullibility.

When I say "failure" and "success", I do not mean in relation to a universal goal, or according to my ambitions, but I mean in accordance to their own. They fail in relation to their own standards and then seek fault in others, and not their own judgments and in their own goals.
They never look for the reasons for their own failures in themselves but try to escape responsibility by accusing the world they've failed to accurately interpret and understand - and because they never find fault in themselves they are doomed to repeat the same actions, make the same choices, and suffer the same failures - frustration builds and they begin to despise the world, wanting to nullify it out of existence.


Why is the 'nil' so powerful - its idea/ideal so potent?
Because unlike the 'one' - positive absolute - it requires no effort, no risks, no application, no creativity building self-referential inter-subjectivity....it simply negates. Destruction is easier than construction - at the very least, positive nihilism requires that the alternative remain self-consistent, whereas nihilism proper - pure nihilism - has no such requirements; it simply negates at will.

Life is founded on negation of otherness - affirmation being the negation of a negation - so this strategy is primal, and easy to take to its logical limit.

Most men are looking for a war to throw themselves in, and test their metal, but are quick to regret it when one looms on the horizon.

If you're not willing to lose it all then you're not worthy of keeping it.