yeah, okay, here it is. right now the gun of the state is pointed at everyone and allows various things to be done. right? so we’re all under coercion. now, if you took away the gun’s defending the factories and capital of the hyper-rich, the people would just seize that property. and that would not be violence, that would be liberation.

so you can tell me that yeah, using the gun of the state to take taxes is exploitative of the rich, and i will agree. but since the gun of the state is backing up all the current property relations, the gun of the state is also pointed right at the poor person and says, “there is only one way to get food, and if you don’t go about it that way, you will be imprisoned.”

so sure, we never need to lose sight of the fact that the state in all its operations is a gun. we just need to point out also that the gun is saying a great many other things besides “give us your taxes, rich people.” it’s also standing there defending factories and shit. if the government gave the hyper-rich a bill for the police services they really received, pretty soon government’s funding problems would be over.

that is, it’s like the idea that we are all bearing coercion right now, and it’s not a question of originating new coercions where there quite simply were none, it’s about finding a way to rearrange society so that we’re all less coerced–or, barring that, so that some who are currently extremely coerced become much less coerced and some who are currently barely coerced at all (or who, currently, profit from the coercion of others so much more than they are coerced) become ever so slightly more coerced. so if your philosophy says to maximize liberty, i agree–let’s fucking do it, and let’s start at those people who are maximally coerced.

a few things

Consider the fearsome unknowable nightmare chainsaw vortex that is your own raw disembodied creativity. Consider the work of the thing improvising every thought that occurs to you on the fly. Consider that thing that tosses up/out your every impression. Consider the thing–because if you think about it you realize you don't think about what you're gonna think next, the thoughts just keep coming–the thing that actually does it, this blind smith in you doing totally sincere impressions of what you would do in this situation, on the fly, one for each and every slice of the perception tunnel that is our living-through-time. It is as perverse as the conscious mind will bear.
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Perhaps I can "hear"/experience all the rest of the consciousness that is part of the physical universe, but if so I am curious why "my 'own'" "thoughts" "occur" "at" "me" almost infinitely "louder."
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Does it make sense to abolish all private legal counsel/representation?
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There is only one thing, and it is love, but love is complicated.

So lately I’ve been thinking back to a feeling I had (or at least, I am telling myself I had) while getting my wisdom teeth out. Whatever anesthesia they gave me was not intended to make me unconscious so much as totally out of it and unconcerned. So, “I” (though I was pretty dissimilar to how I usually am) was able to watch and experience this procedure, and I was numbed, so I couldn’t feel the direct areas that were being cut and broken and yanked on, but I did experience this:

Watching the hands, the many hands moving above me and into me and around me, moving things around in me with no action on my part required–in fact, no action even possible on my part–doing things whose intention or purpose was unknown to me, things I could not sense with the actual affected area but by the pressure they generated in relatively distant areas that were not numbed. It is a feeling that makes me feel ever-so-slightly weird in my stomach.

To be honest with you, I kind of feel like that’s going on all the time. God’s or the universe’s or my subconscious’s hands moving over me and in me as I lie there–supine, attentive, but ultimately uncomprehending–pushing things into me and pulling things out of me and moving things around in me in ways I can only detect very indirectly.

So I just remembered, tying in with these . .

– Brahman is the silence that surrounds the Om, the sea of holy nothingness which has given rise to Being and on which Being dances

– the bright and clear void

– God is love

– that, per the very last line of the Comedy, God is “the love that moves the sun and other stars”

– Aristotle says it is love that makes fire rise and stone sink–that love is what drives all motion in the physical world

– I, a mind, formless, stare up out of my pupil, an emptiness, into your pupil, an emptiness, behind which you, a mind, formless, reside; and love is a resonance between I the formless pattern and you the formless pattern.

– that everything is one

– that there’s no difference between anything

– that the physical universe is one single “thing,” an infinitely complex wave of foam in which probability, matterenergy, and spacetime are all one

– “[I was told,] ‘Go ask the Holy Ghost,’ / so I took sacrament, and this He spoke: // ‘The possibility is you are Me, / a junkie with his nose all caked with grace; / that Nothingness shot maybe in his vein, / and then old nonexistence went insane, // and “One line more! One more!” began to pray.’” — that is, the fancy that we/God/cosmos was/were woken from the sleep of unbeing by the feeblest possibility of the existence of something, and having been drawn from that sleep by the craving for this possible thing, could not stop having indulged once.

– that matter is not real, and that on closer inspection matter is but part of the wave of energy/probability that has become knotted–or perhaps in some way given friction (“The whole process of creation and of spiritual unfoldment shows that the spirit, which is life and which in life represents the divine, has wrapped itself in numberless folds, and has thus so to speak descended from heaven to earth.”)

– that neither everything nor nothing are truly real or actual (and that neither actions nor things [re] are true), but that everything IS nothing; and all the different possible and actual things fit seamlessly together into a oneness that is not different from nothingness/the void and not different from the spirit/ghost/love that bends/stretches/twists/refracts the void into being

– that “the trick of intelligence is that there is no trick”–that “the power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle”

– a single structure (maybe this one or this one or this one or this one), as complicated as infinity, which, without moving and with no moving parts, using something like the Casimir effect, generates motion; and this structure as fractally/holographically self-similar from the infinitely small to the infinitely large

– that “If you are desirous for the truly immovable, / The immovable is in the moving itself, / And this immovable is the truly immovable one.”

– that “all that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. So with the Great Dance. Set your eyes on one movement and it will lead you through all patterns and it will seem to you the master movement. But the seeming will be true. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no center because it is all center.”

– that thou art that–that atman is Brahman

– that “love is a state of resonance between absence from and nearness to the beloved, a vibratory, harmonized resonance between being two and being one.”

– and especially that Dante’s physical universe is a sphere whose center is Hell and whose outer circumference, the Empyrean, consists of angels, flying at the very edge of it as fast as it is possible to go–as close as they can to God, whom they seek and love, beyond it; and that Dante sees, at the topmost of Heaven and deepest into God, the human form.

. . is potentially this:

Something about “where” each of us “are”: behind the pupil (which is empty-full), and how incredibly good we are at reading the tiny dilations and contractions of the pupil and following all the tiny muscle movements of the lids and brow, the whole face, and all the rest of the body to discern something about that, formless, which is at its center or root.

For me, ignosticism has become an untenable viewpoint in light of my understanding that God is love.

On the return of (the truth about and message of the historical) Jesus

We really have to extract Jesus from Christianity. I love the Jesus, but I do think, even from the first, that people began to pollute and reinterpret and alter his messages. Paul said some interesting stuff, but we shouldn’t trust him or anyone else when it comes to getting a theology out of Jesus’s message. All I want from Jesus–just as it can be said that all we ever GET from the Buddha–is praxis: how to be good, how to die to self/sin/pride/greed and be reborn in humility/love/Brahman.

All that other shit, God hating homosexuality and abortion and all that–that was not shit Jesus ever said. So I believe there’s room in mass culture for a revolutionary book that makes biblical criticism available to the masses with the suggestion that Christianity has betrayed Jesus, and offering Jesus’s simple, profound, and beautiful message to everyday Americans. I think that would break the back of one of the worst cultural phenomena in the world right now: the arrogant fearmongering of those who currently claim Christ’s heritage.

On the real and the actual

So David Graeber has made some very convincing arguments for toning down the Parmenidean thinking that the world consists of objects that move around and for adopting instead Heraclitean thinking that the entire world is a wave in flux. I think modern physics bears out Mr. Heraclitus, and so I propose now a potentially helpful linguistic distinction (that I’m sure someone has already drawn).

The way we usually talk about it, we call all-that-is “reality.” The word comes from Latin “re,” meaning thing. But if there are no things, then why talk about reality, “the sum of all the things”? Instead, I propose, we should speak about the actual. The actual has no such problem–there is no speaking of the actual without speaking of specific true events as they occurred in specific regions of spacetime.

When people speak about what’s “really” true, they sometimes are still thinking in terms of abstraction–“really” does not always specify a time and place when an event is supposed to have occurred. But “actually,” as in phrases like “actually existing capitalism,” captures the idea that we are indeed speaking about some specific event that did indeed occur in the world, instead of merely updating our abstract ideas about some eternal object based on how that object is said to have behaved.