From Michael Hoffman (
http://www.egodeath.com):
Does saying that drug-free meditation is 'bunk' mean that there is no value
to the practice of meditating?
As a religious method, drug-free meditation is bunk in that it has no
*religious* efficacy, for all practical purposes.
The ultimate religious experience and most definitive religious dynamic is
triggering your personal control-system to hang, in the dissociative
cognitive state. This dynamic is not something other than the disappearance
of the self in nondual consciousness. This dynamic is the most forcefully
attracting and cognitively interesting hallmark aspect of experiencing the
disappearance of the self in nondual consciousness. The most simple model
of time is frozen timeless block-universe determinism, a model which acts as
a useful tool to most quickly trigger the hanging of one's personal
control-system.
If you want to trigger your personal control-system to hang (which is the
ultimate religious experience and most definitive religious dynamic), and to
discover interesting cognitive dynamics, you have to trigger them and probe
them. The popular Western version of Buddhism (or Western spiritual
contemplation) is based on a neutered system of meditation that's designed
to perpetually delay and avoid this triggering of the hanging of one's
personal control system: it pursues instead a vague and watered-down
conception of what it's like to experience and undergo Nonduality
consciousness -- amounting to, in practice, "Nonduality lite", which fails
to constitute an adequate exploration of the most interesting and most
characteristic religious dynamics potential, in terms of experiential
cognitive phenomenology.
What feedback loop is going to hang itself more effectively? The drug-free
version of meditation has less of a control-power 'hang' factor, a self-hang
self-loop, self-looping factor.
Don't catch yourself up in a control-feedback loop. Don't get caught in a
feedback loop. Don't get hung up in a mental loop about personal control
power.
Drug-free meditation is merely more of the same official-culture
authoritarian propaganda that is encouraged through filtering-mechanisms;
these mechanisms work through producing a popular but shallow consensus.
Official dogma and biased, self-serving propaganda coerces and persuades
people to "like" and buy-into a conception of religion, including the goals
and standards of religion and religious norms, which is designed to
perpetually delay and thereby avoid actual, primary religious experiencing.
Official religion in the modern era, whether Eastern, Western, or Shamanic,
is the devil's or the ego's religion: it is a neutered version of religion
that is specifically designed to omit that which would kill and
short-circuit the egoic delusion. Religion in the modern era is selectively
filtered so as to protect and preserve egoic delusion.
This strategic filtering and suppression of the one thing that has serious
potency and ability to short-circuit the ego, is found not only in the field
of "religion", but is an evil fog that has the same fishy smell that is
found across some 20 domains, including the modern fuzzy
conception of what mythology is about, and the modern-era fuzzy conception
of what New Testament Christianity meant in its cultural context, and the modern-era
fuzzy and uncritical, muddled conception of what drugs are about and what
their role was historically.
What is the relevance of the ahistoricity of Jesus to the ego-death theory?
It's as relevant as the maximal entheogen theory, and as relevant as Eastern
religious myth and Nonduality, and as relevant as Western Esotericism and
Gnosticism. All these fields and alternative interpretations and hypotheses
that are assembled to form the Egodeath theory are mutually reinforcing,
forming together a kind of Zion (real-world alternative) to the Matrix
(broadly false picture of reality).
Does the Egodeath theory (as a model of time and control, or as a broader
explanation spanning some 20 fields) stand or fall with the maximal
entheogen theory? or with the no-Jesus/no-Paul theory?
The core Egodeath theory is a modern, straightforward worldmodel of the
relations of personal control power and time and the part/whole relationship
in terms of subjectively experienced personal control agency -- that core
theory is immune to the historicity of Jesus, and is immune to Eastern
philosophy, and is immune to the maximal entheogen theory. The broader
Egodeath theory, including revisionist explanations that run across many
fields, also is not vulnerable to being wrong regarding any single field: if
you disproved its view on any one field, such as the maximal entheogen
theory of religion & culture, or the ahistoricity of Jesus & Paul, the
Egodeath theory would, to a proportionate extent, still remain a powerful,
useful, valid model and tool and research paradigm.
The official culture systemically convinces people that they can pay
attention only to revising a single domain, because the domains are
separate. Actually, the manner of thinking that's involved in the
assumption that Jesus existed as a historical individual, is just one more
instance of the false reality-tunnel of the Matrix. The assumption of
historicity of Jesus and Paul prevents people from thinking clearly about
the *meaning* of the mytheme of the 'king on the cross',
which concerns the mystic dissociative state revelation of nullity of personal control
power in relation to the Ground that produces oneself and all one's thoughts,
and which is a polemical rebuttal to Roman Imperial ideology.
Once you understand the latter, there's no need, in forming an explanation
of Christian origins and the original meaning of New Testament Christianity,
for Jesus as a historical, founding individual, and the lack of such
historical Jesus and Paul uniquely enables, for the first time, a ready,
simple explanation of many problems of Christian origins. Either you have
to believe all sorts of muddled and improbable and hazy propositions that
are involved in every variant of the historicity assumption-set, or, believe
(or, that is, utilize as an explanatory tool) the simple and
straightforward, clear and comprehensible model of ahistoricity per the
Egodeath theory.
