Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)
Online Writing Strategy and Style
Contents
Unclear postings are out of scope
and subject to moderation
Specious, clueless, or garbled
posts will be ignored
Online discussion: challenges for
scholars
Against individual ownership of
postings
Need for Sustained Debate Comparing
Mystic Experiences
Postings are off-topic if not
tied-in to main topics
I frown
upon most of the name calling and other rhetoric, really only because they are
mostly worthless noise and posts should have high signal/noise ratio. The problem isn't name-calling, but lower
signal/noise in some spots. Insults
commonly are found in poor signal/noise passages. Keep your eye on maximizing signal/noise ratio, rather than on
noxiously repressive guidelines. Write
however you feel, but adhere to the requirement of high signal/noise ratio.
>A
truly brilliant gallery of sketches of the various character types to be found
on mail groups:
http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html
http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame01.html
Looking up
Philosopher, it fits me. http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame17.html
>Philosopher
differs from Profundus Maximus in that he actually does know something. While
somewhat humorless and slightly aloof, he is also slow to anger. When he does
deign to engage in battle he is considerate of other opinions, but his
ponderous and lengthy cogitations effectively smother the opposition.
Yes. A point by point rational refutation of a
flamer's spouting increases exponentially in length. The flamer responds by hurling ever more nonsense back, then all
that must be refuted calmly and reasonably, point by point. This is not feasible, and is solved by
accepting the principle of selective response, including letting the flamer's
nonsense be unrefuted.
I'm
surprised you know how much I'm interested in online communication styles. I'm looking forward to reading more of these
characterizations. I have written many
postings about the universally on-topic meta-topic of flaming and what it
really is and how to deal with it. It's
a fairly complex subject that hasn't been studied but is greatly needed. I was disappointed that Mark Dery's book
Flame Wars didn't cover it.
The #1
technique is selective response, at the level of a posting or within a
posting. It's also important to
recognize the great divide between information and social noise - discussion
online starts with mostly information, and quickly becomes mostly social
noise. Most flaming and chatting has
little information content, just social noise.
Flaming and chatting are equivalent: social noise. Information content is not rare, but it
normally loses out eventually to social noise unless the forum has something to
keep conversation secured to the goal of being info-driven.
I've seen
a lot of hosts make a lot of basic mistakes.
The entheogen host has a terrible Nanny streak -- his panties get in a
bunch every time anyone is impolite in conversation. I like hosts to be no-nonsense.
The hardest hosting job must be for the JesusMysteries discussion group,
debating whether or not Jesus existed -- they even have to try to deal with me,
a creative rule-bender set on contributing too much value to be casually kicked
off for severely criticizing the "scientifically" restricted scope of
the discussion group as being a dead end, as it fails to permit even
investigating the possible positive value of mysticism and esoteric
Christianity.
I have
strongly advocated an automatic 2-week mailing to help people remember the
stated goals for postings. Few hosts
listen to my advice, then they pay the price when chaos reigns and especially
when the most valuable contributors leave.
I fear
this group is already too big for me to commit to being a good host. I can see why Earl Doherty (JesusMysteries
group, Jesus Puzzle author) welcomes helper hosts, so he can go away often and
do research.
My standards for clear, effective postings:
Every posting must include *explicit* indication of how it is related to the group's charter. During the posting, every few short paragraphs should prove that the post is *directly* on-topic. Meta-discussion is permissible if one states every few paragraphs why such an analysis is important for the group's stated goals.
General points are on topic only *if* the writer explicitly connects them to the central topics in the group's charter. Analogies are helpful only if the point is also made directly, explaining how the analogy illustrates the direct point.
My postings in discussion groups try to adhere to being so driven to be on-topic and contribute useful, easy-to-apply points.
I think that some critical moderators in the Christ Conspiracy no-Jesus group don't actually have trouble with my communication clarity, but rather, with my position that religion is a more or less distorted expression of something legitimate. The moderator wants postings to either be *for* Christianity, in which case he can fire at them and block them, or *against* Christianity; anything else -- anything above such kindergarten black-and-white thinking, is labeled "unclear, confusing".
"Keep it simple", the author of the book told me in the group. Translation: adhere to our two-party politics of black-and-white, us-versus-them, "rational scientific atheists" versus "idiot junk Christians".
There are
228 postings I haven't read in the egodeath discussion group. There are 138 subscribed members (and anyone
can publicly read the group). I haven't
promoted the group or website at all, except by including my domain name at the
bottom of postings in various online forums, and by including my domain name in
my Amazon page. If my work becomes
popular, I will fall behind in reading people's postings at an even higher
rate.
Outlook
2000 doesn't permit me to sort by Read/Unread status -- damn, what a major
feature limitation -- otherwise I could print all unread postings and read them
like a book. I will see if Outlook 2003
permits this.
Similarly,
I expect that few people are able to, or interested in, keeping up with my
postings, which have about a 90% redundancy factor per posting.
I'm
considering a Web log but there are as many drawbacks as advantages. The worst thing about Yahoo groups is that
they aren't logged by the Google search engine.
I started
gathering all my postings, including prior to the egodeath discussion
group. There are thousands of postings
-- just gathering them into folders is a huge project. For example, my Sent mailbox has thousands
of emails from over the years, with guitar amp gear postings mixed with
egodeath, drug policy reform, and other postings.
I want to
gather all my postings, organize them and compile them into a full-featured
frameset, but the tools for doing so continue to be inefficient. It's a major project and I'm too impatient
to get on with the next insight; I've never liked spending time polishing and
presenting ideas neatly; I'm totally a frontier explorer, hungry only for the
next discovery.
A problem
is that even if I did collect all my writings, it would be such a huge
collection, the size might work against effective communication of the
basics. Also, the high redundancy from
one posting to the next is also somewhat of a problem.
I could
really use an assistant, like a graduate student, editing team, or ghost
writer, to organize my writings. I'm
doing some writing myself, which is like ghost writing, for a very busy famous
person.
…
Now I am
down to 40 unread postings in this discussion group. Signal/noise ratio was about 5%.
I can contribute more value per hour for readers of this discussion
group by reading books and articles than by reading and directly responding to
postings. Emails sent directly to me
generally are far more informative than those posted publically. Norma's recent emails to me have changed 180
degrees, after I posted about the group's commitment to being on-topic and
clear, and are as valuable as the best postings to the group. Did she intend to email me alone? Ironically, her most on-topic and
substantial writings weren't posted to the group.
There have
been regular complaints about postings that lack an effort to provide
comprehensible content, so I added the following to the posting rules.
Vague,
unclear, hazy postings are off-topic and out of scope and are subject to
moderation. Contributors must make the
effort for rational, clear, explicit, intellectual, articulate, and
comprehensible presentation of particular points.
There is
not the slightest need for me to refute worthless would-be criticisms, such as
the following. I can only spend time
responding to the most worthwhile postings, such as from people who actually
know what my theory entails.
Thanks
very much to colleagues in adeptly handling this particular case. (Not that any response is strictly
necessary; my Web pages and previous posts show the posting to be specious and
ignorant of (unclear on, confused about) what I clearly enough assert in the
first place.)
Dick
wrote:
>How
come you keep using the term 'of the intense mystic altered state'. as though
it were some kind of big deal when one
of your colleagues here keeps telling me that it is a common event and not an
advanced state at all? Are you people
who advocate deliberate sensory enhancement not in some kind of uniform
agreement with each other?
I need to
establish in my mind what my commitment is for this discussion group. This may help people understand. I have to throw off obligations to reply to
people. I owe you replies, yet I can't
commit to replying, because that would cost some time that I need to spend on
other approaches that are necessary in the long run to create a good Theory of
the ego death and rebirth phenomenon.
I think
this will be the type of approach Ken Wilber takes with regard to online
discussion of his work. Unlike Wilber,
it's hard for me to avoid online discussion, because I was born and grew up
online. Online is my world, my open
family.
Earl
Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle) is a truly online scholar. James Arthur seems at home online. Doherty is considering largely withdrawing from some public
online discussion.
A lot of
information-site webmasters are starting to ask whether they really want to
keep running and maintaining all their sites.
Broken link? <shrug>. That's way down on my to do list; don't see
how I'll *ever* get to it; can't justify ever taking the time to fix it. There are other things I want to do, need to
do, or have committed to doing.
The whole
Internet-based scholarship approach is getting old. It certainly requires huge commitment -- are the rewards there,
as much as for other things I could be doing?
What exactly is the opportunity cost?
I need to
work on a web site, a comic book to enlighten kids at the rave or between sets
at a Rock concert, and a scholarly book for a general educated audience. I do not promise to accomplish this any time
soon, if ever. It's rough at the
cutting edge and I can't afford to worry too much about writing clearly for the
uneducated and inexperienced. It's
enough of a challenge just to discover the core ideas.
It's
already an overwhelming challenge of a lifetime to explain this Theory to my
ideal audience: experienced researcher/scholars who have read several books
about entheogens, several books about determinism, and several books about the
mythic-only Christ and the origins of Christianity in the mystical mystery
initiations of late antiquity.
Keep in
mind that the postings in this Yahoo.com Egodeath discussion group do not
necessarily reflect how well the readers understand or agree with the
ideas. There are good reasons for
scholars not to post here, but only to lurk -- I fully encourage researchers
and scholars to lurk.
The people
who are reading this group now are not necessarily a high priority. It is important that I be able to experiment
in postings here. I have logged *many*
hours in online discussions of related subjects, over ten years. I have never, however, posted for
socializing reasons; I always posted in informal-article form.
If I have
to practically chase people away to continue moving forward, that fits with my
original picture of this group as a place to log my daily ideas, rather than a
place to be popular. I hate it when I
care about what people think. To be
innovative I have to sacrifice my credibility and dignity daily, and further
alienate myself. I hate the way I tend
to care how many people have "joined" this discussion group; I have
to wish that number to vanish.
That's a
paradox; to post innovative ideas worthy of a large audience, I feel I have to
mentally reject any concern about the audience. Only by wishing for a small audience can this Theory deserve a
bigger audience. The Theory is the
important thing, not the audience. My
goal happens in two steps: to first create (pull together) the Theory, and then
to "make it available" to those who care to see it. I am not driven by persuading other people;
I reject that. I'm trying to transcend
caring about what people think about what I write.
The main
way I plan to use this newsgroup is to register my progress in idea development
-- for myself, first of all.
Incidentally, anyone who is interested can see these postings and can
discuss the ideas or related ideas. I
am not committing to replying here. I
am not even committing to reading the replies -- that's the harsh reality of
limited time and of competition for attention.
I have stacks
of amazing books competing for my attention with the postings here -- that's
the scholarly reality. Life is
short. I have to disavow promising to
be a good host or conversationalist.
I'm not the only online scholar who is coming to this conclusion.
We're all
learning to do resource balancing of the Net, Web research, online discussion
groups, books, journals, conferences, phone conversations. Even if these merge, the issue of optimizing
time and quality remains: if I just read books, will I read the relatively bad
books, or spend time wisely on the most important books? If I write, do I spend my time covering the
minor, or the key subjects? Low
quality, time wasting, and online discussion normally go together. But I could as well say that reading lower
quality books is the norm. The problem
of selecting better quality of scholarly activity is certainly not solved by
picking the "right" medium.
Being
discriminating is always a difficult problem, an uncertain search-space
problem. I am no more committed to
carefully reading and replying to postings than I am to carefully reading every
book I come across.
It would
be wonderful if some people who understand the Theory I'm pulling together
would discuss the ideas here between themselves. However, there are reasons scholars might not want to post in
this very public forum.
Scholars,
info-age workers, and others know well by now that online discussion and email
can kill productivity. This Yahoo
discussion group framework is incredibly great. The basic challenge still remains, of how much time to devote to
online discussion.
I am
interested in the pros and cons of private discussion groups that have
requirements for admission. There are
some very good reasons, and benefits, of such an approach. I've always liked anarchic public discussion
areas; that's my origin, but the time-vs-quality realities loom.
I've long
been intensely interested in time management and cross-time planning -- not to
say that I've done it effectively. This
has helped my think about self-control cybernetics across time, or cross-time
self-management. That interest is what
drove me to enter the area of entheogens and philosophy: I wanted, above all
else, cross-time self-control. So to
say I'm fanatical or extremist about the subject of time usage may be an
understatement. Favorite
time-management book title: Creative Procrastination. It shows the numbers falling off a clock face.
I really
want, for the next 6 months, to keep using this group to incrementally develop
ideas about mystery-initiation original Christianity. (In the scholarly world, on the 20-year perspective, this topic
is really hot, a new up-and-coming area.)
Such incremental overlapping postings means that the people who read my
every posting will complain, as I complained about Wilber's books, that I'm
just saying the same thing over and over.
You have to go away, and come back in two years, if you want to perceive
the high rate of progress that results from sustained incremental development.
All the
explaining in the world that I do now for individual replies here is wasted if
I don't keep gathering in the important new connections that I'm finding from
outside this group. Maybe one day many
such connections will be presented by people *in* the discussion group, but I
can't count on that any time soon. You
should let me do less explaining and more rounding-up of further connections,
for now. There is a lot of work to do,
explaining the origin of Christianity, the nature of the ego death phenonmenon,
and the relevant aspects of the History of Ideas.
Another
obligation that's a high priority: some webmasters and scholars want my to
continue using my online resources to mutually support my work and theirs. I can't do that and also reply to people
here. Given the hard fact that I have
to limit my time in online discussion, I may continue to post here but rarely
do a direct reply. I may or may not
answer your questions. I sure would like
to see good answers provided by other people.
I also will at least do some sloppy moderating -- I make no promises of
being a good host. Even so, I'll
probably be better than many hosts.
I do not
favor thinking of this kind of discussion group as a
"community". There are plenty
such socializing-driven groups. I
envision this as a place to theorize. I
reject the motive of maximizing "members".
Quality
and relevance of content is what I'd like to maximize -- combined with
imaginative ideas, broadly informed.
Even so, I'm prepared to lose serious thinkers by the droves. The group is essentially experimental and
also an archival record of steps along the way to a clear, rational, systematic
model of the ego death phenomenon. I
give up on worries; let the insights manifest one way or another -- I'm not
going to try to control it and strive to attract the best thinkers here.
I guess
that translates to counting only on myself.
I am grateful for the notifications other people have given me online,
such as the guy who pointed out that I should get with the program and learn the
mythic-only Jesus idea. I note,
however, that I had already come across Allegro's book, and have seen the books
"The Jesus Mysteries" and "Deconstructing Jesus" at many
bookstores since then -- in other words, I wonder if logging on has given me
any major ideas I wouldn't have found anyway through bookstores, Amazon.com,
and the libraries. The gotcha here for
me is that I love the idea of publishing the Egodeath theory only online --
despite my love of ink on hemp paper, that is, printed books. I expect to provide an online presentation
first, and a printed book later."
Against
individual ownership of memes & sentences in posts
Personal
ownership of unique and distinctive sentence-sets in online postings hinders the
advance of knowledge.
When
someone posts statements about mystic enlightenment and ego death and I
"paraphrase" that posting to enhance it, the result is a synthesis of
writing from that person and me. I have
a major complaint about the convention of "owning one's
postings". It is more powerful if
we can manipulate writings without assigning them as being owned by that person
or owned by me.
My goal
and the charter of the discussion group is to move knowledge and ideas
forward. Assigning rigid, static,
entrenched ownership of the ideas has limiting drawbacks.
It would
be better to put an idea out there, not wholly owned by anyone, and work on the
idea together, as an idea out there that isn't owned by any one conversation
participant. On my own, I would not
write the sentences posted in my "paraphrased" postings that freely
rewrite the other person's posts, and neither would the other person.
The other
person didn't write exactly those sentences, and neither would I write those
exact sentences as though I would stand behind them as the best expression of
how things are.
Good
writing involves rewriting, and the best is from a community of collaborative
rewriters working on a set of expressions; like a co-authored book or paper, or
technical specification produced by a group, the ideas have no one author. By convention, online discussion always
consists of paragraphs which each have a single owner.
That
assumed model of online discussion has unacknowledged drawbacks and
limitations, and tends to egoic arguments and static, fixed statements: it is
hard to move knowledge forward collaboratively, when we assume that all online
discussion is about putting forth static statements and defending them as
statements owned each by a single individual.
The whole
concept of "Martha said the following, then James said the following, then
I responded with the following" doesn't always allow the *collaborative
rewriting* that is taken for granted as the best way to write a technical
specification.
I am
working on viable, effective techniques that break the conventions of static
individual ownership of posted sentences.
This is one reason I'm against including people's names when citing and
replying to their ideas. Also,
fascinating dysfunctional "egolessness wars" often break out that
couldn't happen if names were removed.
"James
said he is more spiritually enlightened and less egoic than me. This shows that James is actually under the
egoic delusion." That's an
egolessness war, and it would be impossible if we remove the reference to the
individual person -- the whole idea and assumption of individual ownership of
statements encourages such an egolessness war.
It isn't of primary importance *who* said what.
The ideas
are the important things, and keeping track of *who* said what is only a mere
incidental convenience. In most cases,
it would be quite enough to say "Someone wrote:" rather than saying
who wrote what, but even that introduces limitations compared to treating the
ideas purely on their own, aside from assigning them to any speaker.
I don't
really care *who* said something foolish about meditation, entheogens, and
daily life: what matters is that there is a set of ideas or memes going around,
that ought to be opposed by a different set of memes. What really matters is the meme war or debate or conversation,
rather than a disagreement between individuals who are assigned as owners of
the memes.
Often,
there is more to be gained by responding to ideas that are *similar* to what an
individual posted, than by responding to the exact ideas or words the
individual posted. And it's very often
easier and more profitable to freely rewrite what someone posted, leveraging it
efficiently as a starting point, rather than "responding" in the
artificial conventional form of "he posted these words, but I am
responding with these opposed words".
Yes, there
are some advantages in keeping track of who wrote what, but there are also
disadvantages. Conventions of posting
not only keep track of who wrote what, there are also many unconscious
assumptions. For example, you are not
supposed to copy and rewrite what someone wrote; it is (strangely) considered
impolite to improve what they wrote.
Instead,
it is strangely considered more polite to write a wholly new set of sentences
that are very different from what the person wrote. We could see things differently and consider it a great
compliment when someone takes out words as a worthy starting point and rewrites
them rather than throwing them away and starting from a blank slate.
I wrote
much in the past about the psychodynamics of flaming and the social-driven
aspects of unproductive online argumentiveness. I stated at some point that I was finished covering that subject. In some ways, this posting is a discovery
that there are related unconscious and unnecessary, broader limitations of the
conventions of online discussion.
The theory
and experience of ego death can be credited with much of this insight: think of
how for the writer in the altered state, all conventions of interpersonal
writing are thrown out the window.
There cannot be the usual unproductive egolessness wars or online
personal battles when the mind is schizophrenically dissolved or mystically
loosened to the point where the writer no longer pictures fixed, egoic entities
to battle on the other side of the computer screen.
No one
exists (so to speak), for me to have an egolessness war or other silly
combative argument against. And if no
one exists, then there is no need to worry about anything so silly and
artificial as "conventions of ownership of posted sentences and
memes/ideas". The loosened mind
naturally asks, "Why *shouldn't* I freely rewrite and de-attribute
anything posted here? The official
posting rules for this discussion group don't explicitly say that I must not
freely rewrite what others posted."
The
loosened mind is wonderfully emancipating because it effectively totally
forgets all conventions of all types, including the huge unconscious set of
conventions for online posting between "people", where writers
normally straightjacket themselves into narrow modes of writing and responding.
For such a
loosened mind, and the day-to-day ego-transcendent mind that has become
emancipated from slavish automatic adherence to all conventions, there are no
rules, there are no conventions, all onscreen text is mere materiel, mere
stuff, to be freely pushed this way and that.
It is
fully emancipating to be like a schizophrenic writer; the question is what is
the fullest potential we can borrow from the schizophrenics or from the intense
mystic altered state of highly loose cognition, to open up possibilities for
which keys we press, and what mode we write in in the "online discussion
groups"? Even the term we use
tends to artificially and often harmfully restrict the potential of these
online forums.
I've
always treated them *not* as social arenas where we banter and battle with
short argumentative posts back and forth, but rather, as wonderfully free-form
article-posting forums. When I sign my
name, it is always with some misgiving, and is done purely as a convenience in
case it is helpful to track which words are "owned by" me. The whole idea of "owning" an
article or book as the author is a curious convention, related to the topic of
memetics.
Who owns insights
about particular topics, particular connections and structures of ideas? The idea of owning a sentence, article,
book, or posting as "the author" is a curious convention. The loosened mystic mind that is intent on
improving expressions of sound ideas can hardly be bothered with anything so
wholly *irrelevant* as who wrote what, or who is the assigned "owner"
of each online sentence.
Who really
cares who wrote what word-combinations -- why does that really even matter at
all? What's the goal here: to be
credited with owning word-combinations, or to know truth and participate in
ever-improving word-combinations? Yes
there are some advantages in assigning individual ownership of posted
word-combinations, but these advantages are usually overinflated into extreme
and complete possessiveness.
"Hey,
you can't rewrite *my* sentence!"
We end up putting total emphasis on who owns which word-combinations and
ideas, when we should be putting first emphasis on laboring together to advance
and iteratively improve the word-combinations by any and all means.
Conventions
of conversation ought to be seen as a mere method, one of many
sometimes-helpful methods, oriented toward a goal of non-owned knowledge,
rather than taking these conventions of conversation as a fixed law of the
universe, to which the development of knowledge is subservient and which serves
as a limiting factor on our pursuit of knowledge.
I measure
online postings in terms of really just one measure: has knowledge been moved
forward as rapidly as possible? By that
measure, the problem with social-driven postings such as flaming and
egolessness battles as seen in many spirituality groups is not the presence of
noise or irrelevance, but the way such noise restricts the advancement of
knowledge.
>>I
agree with some others here that drug-free mystical experiences are
preferable-though not necessarily better.
Christianity
and other religions, in their most mystic layer, assert that drug-induced mystic
experiences are the ones by which to measure all spiritual experiences. The main and first and original meaning of
Eucharist, or Lord's Supper, manna, sacred meals, mixed wine, hermetic bowl of
mind, witch's potion, magic elixir, and holy grail, is visionary plants --
certainly not drug-free New Age American Buddhist meditation-type so-called
"spirituality".
>but I
myself have had a drug-induced mystical experience-or at least i think that it
was.but guess what?i am really going to rock the boat here,i am a christian!
That's
nothing but the standard norm, from the mystic point of view. The real Christians or mystics of any
religious brand are those who use the sacrament in its authentic original form:
visionary plants.
>I was
obsessed by hallucinogens for years, but then I had a realization -and a few
"devilish" trips, where I actually sincerely prayed,
True
prayer for rescue from thought-injection isn't going to come from today's
tepid, superficial, artificial, and invented faux-spirituality, but from
visionary plants -- psychotomimetics.
>because
at that time I KNEW that there is a God (because of the "godlessness"
quality of the trip-, a realization that maybe, just maybe that the authors of
the bible were just telling the TRUTH.
>and
anyway, I only have to ask myself if what I am reading in the bible is true,
All
religious scriptures are true mystically and false literally.
>I was
hoping to find a site where i could share/compare experiences,
Who is
preventing anyone from doing so? One
should not blame other people for one's own silence, to make one *appear* more
upstanding and constructive than others, while not *actually* contributing any
substance. Idle and empty complaints
about "argument" (complaints that imply that the argument has no
value and is purely worthless noise) take less effort than composing
substantial statements.
The common
debate-phobic attitude is completely misguided. Substantial conversation and spirituality has nothing at all to
do with avoiding debate; to assume they are related is already to adopt and
covertly profer a bogus conception of what spirituality is all about.
If you
have additional substantial things to say, then you can say them -- no one is
blocking the way, so it's senseless to blame them for doing so.
>and
maybe explain them,from different
perspectives,eg.jung,leary,spirtually,cognitively,etc.
One would
ideally read the archives before pronouncing on the restrictions of the group
based on careless sampling. I'm
thinking up a way to quickly migrate some archives to the Web, for much faster
access to some previous posts.
The
subject is defined in the mission statement of the discussion group. Unlike other groups, this one actually
adheres to the scope and boundaries it claims to set out -- though any
individual is likely to focus more on selected subtopics. This group has had an unusually high
percentage of on-topic postings, to the point where I am opening up the tight
guidelines. There is no problem with
each person posting a small percentage of off-topic postings.
Poetry is
off-topic and not allowed unless there is an *explicit*, comprehensible tie-in
to the stated topics. For example,
acid-rock lyrics without analysis are off-topic. Acid-rock lyrics *with* specific and clear commentary connecting
them to the forum topics are on-topic.
Poetry can
be included in postings, but in most cases, there needs to be accompanying
prose commentary.
A posting
is off-topic if it doesn't state what the tie-in it has to the in-scope
discussion topics. Postings must
clearly and comprehensibly state their relevance to ego death, personal
control, mystic experiencing, and the other intended topics.
This
discussion group was never intended for open-ended reflection on world events,
particularly not *unspecified* world events.
That would be a worst-case posting.
It would be better, though still probably off-topic, if such a posting
stated what events were intended, and preferably, included URLs for further
information.
Off-topic
postings are subject to deletion from the Web-based archives. Please tell me what I can possibly do to
make the posting rules any clearer. I
am not going to rigidly enforce the rules, that's not the first line of action
for guiding a discussion group. The
first thing moderators should do is be absolutely crystal clear, with no room
for misunderstanding, about the scope of the group and requirements for
postings.
The first
person to blame for off-topic postings is the moderator, for not making the
guidelines clear enough. I will make
the posting guidelines much clearer and more stringent -- rather that taking
action on moderating individual postings.
If
open-ended commentary on general world events were to be considered on-topic
here, the discussion group would lose too much focus, and I may as well post
all those drug policy reform postings I'm often tempted to post. I have to remind myself that this group I
started was never intended as an activist forum discussing drug policy reform
as a topic unto itself.
I'm
restricting what I post here, and everyone else should to, because that is the
founding vision for the group; otherwise, it will become just another social
hangout accomplishing no particular goal.
If people want to comment on world events independently of the ego-death
topics, they will find it more enjoyable in other discussion groups.
This is a
strictly on-topic discussion group. I
will make this *absolutely* clear in the posting rules, and may even go so far
as to moderate off-topic postings. It
should already be clear enough that any topic is allowed *if* it is
*explicitly* tied into the defined topics.
Every two weeks, this is stated in an automated posting: "It is possible to write on most any
topic and have it be relevant for this Egodeath discussion group if you show
how the posting is related to the in-scope topics for this discussion
group.
This group
is not formally moderated, but it is consistently focused on the defined
topics, including peripheral topics if the writer explicitly connects them to
the core topics."
I have now
reasonably clarified my vision for this group and the concomitant requirements
for posting. This issue does warrant
the serious reflection I have given it; online discussion is complex and it can
be a challenge to have *productive* discussion that advances knowledge and
understanding, rather than just having random discussion that goes to no
planned and focused and structured destination, or neglects to integrate with
the main goals of the discussion group.
I may
clarify the posted posting rules, but I'm not going to give this subject more
consideration. These are not difficult
posting requirements to meet. If you
don't care for the group's focused vision and the necessary, concomitant
posting rules, start your own group and post there instead -- I did, and I'm
glad I did. It is not time for me to be
impatient about these points; it is time for me to make up my mind about group
policy and vision and commit to upholding it.
I should
have foreseen this challenge and prevented it from arising -- discussion groups
related to mystic-state insight are, as a rule, dominated by unfocused activity
rather than structured, focused, goal-oriented activity.
I'm the king of slummin' in online discussion groups. I like to post material that aims to be serious substantial and extremely leading-edge into the midst of the usual newsgroups dreck. I must go on a diet from slummin' -- for higher quality, more value for everyone. Not that there was anything lacking in previous exchanges of postings. They were highly valuable, but it is time to use and try other approaches. Everyone should find interesting a change of approach. We can't know without actually trying it; mere speculation and conjecture is pretty worthless.
I don't like how my writing policies have made my writing style a narrow monostyle. I'm actually a very experimental person, but there is too much confusion and chaos already in religious theory, such that too much experimenting on my part may be detrimental. A great writer should be great at clear communication *and* at experimenting; neither being clear and dull like some word police would have it, nor being all goofy and wild and fun-loving -- without delivering substance. Erik Davis' TechGnosis group errs toward the latter: all fun, little effort at serious substance.
I chose to err toward the direction of all serious substance, no fun. A main key to decoding mystic metaphor is the attitude of "serious clever humor" designed to mislead and shock the literalists.
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