What aren't you doing?

Will is the force of concentration. What does it concentrate? It concentrates instincts. More generally, it concentrates motion within our body.

Will does not overcome instincts. It overcomes their deformed expression, but not instincts themselves. It actually preserves them.

Instincts require adequate circumstances in order so that they can be expressed without losing their form. What do you do when such circumstances are lacking? You restrain yourself. This is because everything else would make them deformed.

Well, manipulation can target both. Will is still dependent on choices and choices can be manipulated. Modern day politics, and advertising in general, is a good example.

Not a fair comparison I think. Drugs are often used in war, and cocaine is heavily used by many businesspeople, increasingly so weed - and Joost may know what politicians are on.

Acid isnt like mushrooms. These will make you vulnerable. LSD is far cleaner, largely cognitive in effect.

Still, I wont deny that a broader consciousness possibly makes one less effective in this world. That is not wholly an argument against it.

Indoctrination can only work if ego can be bypassed. What makes it easy to bypass the ego? Inability to concentrate, or lack of will. Need too.

Will is by definition that which resists manipulation of any kind, unless we speak of centrifugal will, which isn’t proper will.

I was referring to hallucinogenic drugs, mainly, which directly alter a person’s perception of reality. I was not talking about nervous system stimulants, many of which put the nervous system in overdrive - although, generally, I am against these also. Thinking faster doesn’t always mean thinking better. A stupid person thinking faster, will only think stupid thoughts - only faster.
As far as effectiveness in the real world is concerned, the main danger in a person using hallucinogens, in my view, is that a person may come to give more validity to the hallucinatory world over the real one, eventually pushing him into a complete psychosis. When you tinker with your own brain with perception altering drugs, hallucinatory-real is still real to the person, and that’s what makes it dangerous.

Yes, that’s why most indoctrination happens in childhood, and most of the manipulated mobs are made up of young people - trying to be somebody, and prove something.

It does have a lasting impact on how the world is perceived.
One generally becomes more altruistic and patient with other types of creatures.
In some cases hallucinatory patterns emerge, and sometimes it goes really wrong. But not as regularly as with alcohol.
Still, I am in favor of drugs in general. I dont think humankind is worth much if it doesn investigate itself very rigorously from within.

To this end some of us must stay sober too. I will grant that but not more. I would rather that psychomauts are in principle lauded and somewhat protected by common ethics. In many cities this is increasingly the case. Such humans are hopefully taking over the role of the priests of the vanished god. LSD makes it very clear that there is no creator god, because it becomes evident that all that exists stands in perfect logical relation to all other things. It would simply not make sense if things werent permanently as they are.

Common Earthy knowledge predicates a much more somber view; in my view this is the real cause of drug users psychoses.

He who wills power must take a negative stance towards any kind of drugs, including alcohol, caffeine and nicotine, but also natural drugs such as meditation, sex, food, leisure activities and so on.

There is absolutely no room for them.

You are not investigating your true self when taking drugs. Rather, you are investigating your false self.

When you take a drug, your true self is dissolved and then randomly rearranged to create a false self. This gives pleasure but at the cost of power.

No one gives a shit about Nietzsche. You’re supposed to grow out of that by the time you’re in your 20s. Jesus man.

What is the real self and false self?

And food and sex is part of our real selves, it is part of Nature and the Natural way.
Personally, I think meditation is for silly and delusional hippies though.

True self is mature self, false self is immature self. I already explained this few posts ago.

Food and sex are okay, being addicted to them is not okay.

Fixed and his lover Saully are just too lax in their treatment of everything including drugs.

I don’t like them.

Rather than approvong drugs and looking down upon sober people (I don’t even do coffee) I’d rather see people being executed for smoking or drinking alcohol.

Here’s my two cents on this. Psychoses are natural products of excess stress experienced by an individual mind. How stress affects the mind, depends solely on the quality of mind. When a mind is subjected to more stress than it can handle it begins to employ defense mechanisms that reduce the impact of stress; and these are often automatic responses and are often employed without a person’s awareness. I classify psychosis as one of these. We actually willfully disengage from reality every time we read a good novel or watch an engaging movie (if you want to explore this view more in depth you can read Madness and Cinema, by Patrick Fuery). When you take drugs that permanently alter your perception of reality, you achieve a permanently split with reality and removal (in your mind) of a major cause of stress. This is the desired result you get, and unconsciously, it could even be the motive. So your life becomes easier to live. The problem with this that I see is also a response to this:

Which is also a symptom of a weakened sense of self, or sense of individuality, self-worth and self-respect. In the real world, all of the burden lies in the individual, the responsibility for creating meaning, making choices and accepting (often permanent) consequences for both right and wrong choices. There is no universal plan, no universal consciousness, no god, no karma, no afterlife, no test by god, no divine guidance, no second chances, etc. When this burden is taken off (at least partially), the person is free to assign some of the responsibility in his life to something other, usually bigger than he, and also to be free to shift the ‘blame’ to the other when something goes wrong, or not as planned. Shifting the burden, but also shifting the credit. (God knows better, God willing, thanks to God, etc. ) So you end up with a weak individual who’s not really living a life, but living by proxy.

True. Now, the question is: what is it that makes children gullible? A weak sense of self, sure. But what is it that makes their sense of self so weak? That is the question.

It is restraint, and nothing but restraint, that crystalizes self. What restraint achieves is it concentrates energy. It makes sure that less energy is dissipated than it is accumulated.

Those who surrender to instinct – the way children do – dissipate more energy than they accumulate. And when more energy is dissipated than it is accumulated, what is left to define the self? Nothing.

There are many complicated ways to explain how self becomes solidified, but I think that this explanation is not only the simplest one there is, but also the most accurate there is. I do really think that concentration of energy precedes everything. Thinking, for example, I take to be instinct concentrated. When you restrain yourself from acting in some manner, that action becomes thought (unless it ends up being repressed, of course.)

Growth is the period during which accumulation exceeds dissipation.
Maturity is the period during which accumulation is equal to dissipation.
Decline is the period during which dissipation exceeds accumulation.

This applies on all levels, from individual to societal.

This age of ours is the age of decline where everyone dissipates more than they accumulate. They may be gaining more money than they are losing but they are also losing more energy (strength) than they are gaining. Thus, in several generations, energy/strength will run out, so everyone will become weak and human species will go extinct. So now when you see older people complaining about how new generations are weaker than the old ones, you know what to tell them: it’s because they didn’t bother accumulating anything other than money.

Energy is accumulated through rest. People nowadays do not know how to rest. What they call rest is merely another form of energy dissipation (merely a pleasant form, unlike that of work, which they experience as unpleasant.)

I say it is experience in life, and goals. Self restraint, in itself, does not make a stronger self. Monks are masters of restraint and I don’t see it giving them a crystalized sense of self. Same thing with soldiers. With self restraint, I see their sense of self is diminished.

But that’s a part of natural learning process. First, you need to really know the object in order to control it, not just blindly control it (because somewhere in some book it says it’s bad). Excess energies can be consciously redirected to fulfill another goal, but they should be understood first, lest they already serving some unconscious purpose in some particular way (i.e. catharsis).

Right, there is a danger that one may just become a repressed individual who visualizes a stronger self by emphasizing restraint and thinking. Such individual strikes me as one who’d be eventually too afraid to make mistakes, which would only stunt his growth.

I don’t agree. Often, a loss leads to the greatest growth. Real growth, I mean, not just accumulation of information.

I tend to agree, but because life still keeps going and changing, growth should continue. What you’re referring to is a plateau phase, from which most go back into decline, although not always.

Yes, but life is also very cyclical, and a person may go through this process many times. I say, the more the better.

A lot of time is needlessly wasted, I agree, but I wouldn’t underestimate human specie to make them extinct, just yet. We are facing different challenges and different forms of stress today. We will have to adapt. As far as older generations being stronger, I’ll say this, they may have started working at an earlier age than us, but we will be working well into our (and past their) old age. And if human life span is extended, your children will be working well into their old age.

I don’t know what counts as good kind of rest for you. Most people consider distracting active rest as a good and effective form of rest.

I don’t know much about monks to be able to speak of them, but I can say, with some level of confidence, based on my limited and for the most part only Internet experience with Buddhists, that Buddhists, who are supposed to be masters of restraint, aren’t exactly so.

Buddhists are masters of pain. They can make it go away. But they aren’t masters of restraint.

They do not really restrain themselves. Rather, they merely make themself softer.

Impulsivity is a condition whereby instinct is escaping the control of one’s will.

There are impulsive people whose instinct is escaping the control of their will quite clearly and then there are Buddhists who are retarding, but not overcoming, their impulsivity and who thus appear to be in control of themselves.

I see restraint as life-affirming. It is that which opposes death. Death – and by death I mean more than just death in the way it is normally understood, I mean decline, whether it is slow or fast – death is what occurs naturally.

Things left on their own disintegrate.

In order to remain alive, you must restrain yourself. You must resist the natural course of disintegration.

Buddhists are not really opposed to death. They are actually aligned with it. They celebrate it. This is why they are nihilists.

And what is nihilism but position according to which death (decline) is more valuable than life (ascent)?

Few nihilists are honest about their death-wish. Most hide it behind some sort of idealism, usually involving some sort of afterlife, though this is not always the case (as Baudrillard noticed, the ideal world can also be immanent, taking place within this very world in the form of simulation, rather than transcendent, existing outside of this reality and accessible only after death.)

Nihilism is often defined as a feeling of being uncomfortable with the way reality is. I reject this definition on the ground that this is merely a symptom that may or may not be present. In other words, it is possible to be a nihilist and at the same time comfortable with the way reality is.

Buddhists are such an example. They are quite comfortable with the way reality is. Indeed, they are EXTREMELY comfortable with the way reality is, and it is precisely of this extreme comfort, ironically, that they are nihilists.

Life is a struggle against death.

In the absence of struggle, there is only death.

Buddhists are opposed to struggle against death.

They see struggle as something unnatural, and indeed, struggle is not natural. What is natural is death, not life. And so Buddhists, in a very real sense, are more natural than other people. But to be natural means to align with death. It’s not a good thing.

Nihilism, I define, as a physiological condition where body no longer fights against death but is aligned with it.

Repression is a negative, we agree on this one, but the relevant question is the nature of repression, and this is where I am not sure we are in agreement. Usually, it is said that repression is a consequence of excessive restraint. That’s not how I see it. Repression I understand to be a consequence of trying to do too many things at once. Indeed, repression is a consequence of a lack of meditation . . . This is why Buddhists, and also Osho, are experts at overcoming repression.

There is a difference between what we know we have to do (reason) and what we are inclined to do (instinct.) There is no problem following one’s instinct when instinct is aligned with one’s reason, but when it is not aligned, when reason demands a different kind of action, one has to shape one’s instinct to fit the situation. This means overcoming it to a degree and then using one’s creativity to try out new things. Repression occurs when instinct is not properly overcome before new action is initiated. There must be enough space before new activity can be introduced. You need to create this space by dissipating unnecessary activity (i.e. instinct.) This process of energy dissipation is what meditation is. If you simply tack one activity on top of another, you will become overwhelmed, and consequently, repressed.

In order to dissipate your instincts, you must register them consciously . . . without this registration, it is not possible to overcome them.

You need to be “the watcher” not “the doer”.

If you’re asking the guy, Jakob, depending on how long he’s been floating up there, he might not be considering that it’s time to open his parachute.

We all do that at times.Time to come back to Earth.

Magnus Anderson

So you’re defining true as all things positive and good?

Speaking only for myself here, Magnus, my so-called “true” or “real” self encompasses so much more than the positive and good.
My true self is also those things which others do not see, things which I don’t like to see in myself, things which I am unconscious of in myself, ad continuum.

The true self can be compared to that iceberg - what we see above the surface but ALSO in so much more of a panoramic and in-depth vision, what exists below that surface.

What you mean to say is that you gave your perspective of it.

I’m defining true as what exists in actuality…again, so much more than our good selves. Don’t forget, I am aware that I can be a mean, fierce dragon at times. That is also a part of my “true” self.
Why would you want to whittle a human being down to simply being mature or immature?