Home (ego death and self-control cybernetics)
From the Zen newsgroup: "Ego death is like going to trial, where all of our reality [our conventional mental model of self, control, spacetime, agency, responsibility] is cross-examined; we are found guilty and our ego is sentenced to death."
During the peak experience, Reason puts ego and its system of moral agency and accountability on trial and condemns it of being thoroughly wrong, thoroughly in error. Our supposed governing power is trespassing on God's sovereign realm; only God (or the Ground of Being) could be a genuine, logically valid controller-agent. Reason sentences all of egoic thinking to death (the only way I can secure Truth and be in alignment with Truth is to firmly transgress and kill and destroy my egoic self destructively, to sacrifice it), yet we can continue to live *if* we accept our deludedness and rely on it (because we *need* guidelines and stability and the sense of personal controllership), and continue to place "belief" in the false ego and love it... love "the enemy", where the enemy is your own delusion, your false sense of being a first-order, sovereign controller-agent. The wrong self must be sacrificed to reach the heaven of Cybernetic Truth, but the only way to do this practically and viably is to forgive and accept it and continue to utilize it and its thoroughly bogus scheme of moral agency. We must love and forgive and accept the lie we believe in, the lie of sovereignty of the egoic agent -- this means accepting the lie of metaphysical freedom and moral culpability.
Trip too hard on LSD, apprehend your own will threatening to turn against you, lose control, soar too high, bow down and pray to God to save you.
It's an old tune, a forgotten tune of the ancients, the ominous trumpet of doom that makes the Sabbath Black.
The ancients had such wisdom and understood the ramifications of the fatedness underlying every act of will.
Rush, especially, is lashed helpless to the mast, with no one there to steer the ship.
Metallica rides the lightning strapped in the electric chair.
now, Slayer has learned as well, as of the album "Divine
Intervention".
Devo knew of the divine power.
Blue Oyster Cult sang of the black blade (my master is my slave, the tool
laughs)
Kansas went to the point of know return.
Zeppelin, after the sex-obsessed first 3 albums, learned to fly too close to
the sun and fall down on their knees.
Queen has turned on the tv, let it drip right down in their eyes.
Before you learn to fly
you gotta learn how to kneel
on your knees, boy -- U2
[to do: link to ELO lyrics - showdown, the longest night]\
So when you take too much (that is, just enough) acid and blow your mind, and fear for your will turning against itself, will you kneel down and pray to some almighty God of Time and Fate, to help you regain self-control? This is a constant theme in heavily acid-inspired rock. If you can't depend on God to rescue you, then you must rescue yourself, and not pray. But explorers have reported being basically forced to pray. So anyway, you can trip too hard, and you can deal with this problem, in which case, it will be your problem. I don't know if Christianity is true, if God is good and compassionate.... but I know that I feel free and this freedom can backlash against me were I to trip too hard. In coping with this, one might feel that there is no choice but to submit and beg for rescue from the storm. This is the ancient tale of acid rock. Atheists, I invite you to master heroic doses without giving in to prayer to some God of Predetermination. LSD is the most fascinating thing in the universe, and being forced to pray is part of the fascination. No one else is saying what I am saying, but I know, as surely as the terror of the Eleusian mysteries and Fateful Tragedy, that many other people have confronted this and recognize this tune.
Sacrifice and moral agency are closely related. Making a sacrifice to compensate for and acknowledge one's moral imperfection is a common religious theme. In the midst of the self-control singularity, when self-control cancels itself out and one is tempted to prove this astonishing potential by sacrificial self-violation, a vision of Jesus on the cross can serve as a substitute sacrifice; an acknowledgement of the delusion of moral culpability.
One purpose of the sacrifice of Jesus may have been to acknowledge the nature of control agents who are subject to morality: he violated his own personal wishes in someperfect and complete way, acknowledging the truth about human nature as self-controlling, moral agents and compensating for the deceptive nature of moral agency and personal accountability. As his sacrifice was perfectly unjust, it reflected his awareness that the entire system of justice is distorted and invalid, because creatures can only do what the ground of being, fully defined by God's act of creation, force them to do; they can only perform their life-long stream of pre-set, created actions.
A truly merciful God might well have given his son as a sacrifice to provide sacrificial blood and a cosmic delusion of our guilt for killing Jesus. If God makes us feel so guilty, he reinforces our feeling of free moral agency.
This is such a rich theological vein, it's hard to know where to start gathering up the ore. This topic involves issues of whether morality is legitimate, the nature of moral agency, clear-headed evaluation of what is really just in the cosmic scheme, the judicial court of cosmic accusation, God's omnipotence, Calvinism, the precious delicacy of free will, the problem of evil, and so on.
We, humans or Jews, are moral agents guilty of rejecting Jesus, who was innocent and the savior we were waiting for. We punish this innocent man, which was a great moral injustice we did. But God is all-powerful, and chose to restrain himself, and chose to provide his son for a sacrifice. Almighty God deliberately provided his innocent son for us to punish and kill. Someone involved in this scenario is cosmically guilty of something, but it's confusing as to whom, and as to the nature of guilt itself.
If God consciously created this universe and knew everything about it, and knew that creating us in the form of free moral agents must go hand in hand with evil atrocities and injustices, would such a creation be inherently evil and unjust? Would God be guilty for all the evil in this system? If he is so guilty, should he be punished -- could he even be punished? Perhaps the crucifixion was such punishment.
But this punishment was largely a put-on, an act, a virtual death, if Jesus did not die on the cross. Would it be cosmically just in the court of God, if Jesus's death was faked? After all, since Jesus was innocent, he should not have payed with his life. But by appearing to have paid with his life, humanity is made to look like a guilty killer of an innocent man. Thus almighty God loads us down with the feeling of guilt and the sense of moral autonomy.
Who is really guilty, in the cosmic scheme? Who is the ultimate accuser, the ultimate judge of what is really just? What is the real nature of guilt -- is it an error to believe in the legitimacy of moral culpability on the part of any entity, whether a mortal, a spirit, an angel, or a god?
We're partly fake moral entities, so we can't commit real sin. You could say our sin is a lie; Satan is sin and Satan is a liar -- there are multiple ways to connect these ideas. God lies to us not directly, but through the lie that is Satan (and Satan is the template of our ghostly homunculus, the moral control agent living inside the head).
Perhaps the concept of justice is itself distorted, corrupt, and unjust, because all is Calvinistically predetermined and moral agency is illegitimate. Satan, the deciever and father of lies, is the accuser in this court. Satan is the father of all sinners, but God is the Father of all. An evil liar accuses us of being moral agents, centers of guilt cut off from God's omnipotence.
There is injustice, yet justice itself is a corrupt concept that contradicts God's omnipotence. The logic of guilt and sacrificial punishment goes around in a mystic spiral disappearing into the clouds.
>The penalty for sin is death, not fake death; graveyard death is the only type that qualifies for the payment.
We're partly fake moral entities, so we can't commit real sin. If freedom is only virtual, then all the world's sin is only virtual, and the only just punishment for this sin would be virtual death. If God is the only legitimate freely acting agent, and is ultimately responsible for all our actions in some deeply underlying way, then the only person who justly deserves punishment is God himself. But God cannot be a subject of morality, because He is the creator of morality. Therefore, God cannot be held guilty, though neither can deluded humanity.
Only God can ultimately be responsible and guilty, because ultimately, all power and all the universe is His, though he effectively seems to give the universe to individual, freely willing beings. If only God is ultimately responsible and guilty, then only He can be justly punished.
But Jesus, as a human, has no more true autonomy from God's power than we do. Jesus is not a moral agent, because his actions are directly willed by the Father. Jesus is not good, but rather, sinless -- he is not morally culpable; he is morally exempt because his will is not cut off from God as is ours. So it is unjust to punish Jesus, who is exempt from morality. Not only is he exempt, he also happens to be innocent of mundane types of wrongdoing. He deserves punishment neither for mundane wrongdoing, nor for believing the lie of self-power. So it is thoroughly unjust to punish Jesus, especially with death.
Jesus could have died on the cross. In fact, he might have. But it would be more morally interesting if his punishment by death was faked -- a gesture to delude us all the more into feeling guilty and responsible, to delude us into living as free entities capable of loving God as creatures independent from His all-mighty power.
I have studied fundmentalist Protestantism and have read all of Dave Hunt's books.
The enlightened mind is in a position to stand in judgement of the ego, the egoic mental model of self, personal power, and the world. The ego is recognized as a giant, primitive error, existing only under very particular, precarious conditions.
Home (ego death and self-control cybernetics)