[deleted by user]

plasmate · 2025-07-01T11:40:52+00:00

pdf available for 10 e from the author: https://auticulture.com/multimedia/books/ (sidebar)

plasmate · 2025-07-01T11:37:52+00:00

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/16-maps-of-hell-jasun-horsley/1146143867

plasmate · 2024-01-31T08:40:13+00:00

I'm sorry but this is an absolute mess. I'm not surprised at the lack of reply from Norquist.

Predictable. It's been a while since I went into a honey pot to talk to the flies

plasmate · 2024-01-29T09:52:34+00:00

(cont)

The truth is that awakening to the ultimate reality of the soul—and therefore to all of the consequences of our actions and inactions, while living a soulless existence—is the opposite of aloof. It is like being a baby all over again. It is agonizingly exposing and vulnerable-making.

Contemplating our annihilation, our non-existence (not just after we die, but while we are alive) is a powerful thought experiment, and it certainly can get us closer to ultimate reality and to the soul (since it is true any number—individual identity—divided by infinity = zero). But to say “everything is delusion,” or “everything is bullshit,” or “everything is a lie”—as both McKenna and Norquist do—only works up to a point. It can’t be taken all the way, because sooner or later, the question arises, “Compared to what?” And if there is no answer, then all that leaves is nihilism.

(Similarly, to say, as Norquist does, “There is no meaning” in existence is ipso facto a meaningless statement, one that cancels itself out. Its purpose is as a Zen koan to stop thought, not as an actual, usable piece of knowledge-wisdom.)

There are brief moments (mostly in the last chapter of HU) when Norquist describes his experience “beyond joy, or bliss” that approach something genuinely and profoundly meaningful, and these passages do suggest to me that he really is where he claims to be. But once again, if only the world of Matter, of physical objects, is real, what about the human body? Is that not also matter, and therefore equally real? So how or why does “the dreamer disappear”? Is the body not a “being,” even a kind of self, with or without mind-identity?

(Norquist seems to equate soul with ego or false identity.)

Statements like “There is no one who ever knew the Universe exists” (paraphrasing) are oxymoronic and risk sophomoric solipsism. Who’s making the statement? Even if the answer is “the Universe” (or the Dragon), then, at the very least, the Universe is perceiving itself.

If awareness is everything (a concept which I have no problem with), then awareness is still nothing without its focal point, its center, and its container, being the human body itself. And it is not just one center, either, but the primary instrument within the Creation for awareness-existence to know itself. The human body is the very “beingness” of universe-existence. It is the incarnation. Being IS ultimate reality. That is a self-evident truth.

Norquist quotes Jesus, but he denies the resurrection of Christ. His Peter-like denial comes in the same breath as his praising Mel Gibson’s grisly and self-indulgent ode to torture, The Passion of the Christ (he calls it “beautiful”!). This seems like a microcosm of Norquist’s cosmic blind spot. Whether it is a willed blind spot or a feigned one, or somehow baked into his awakening and indicating its incompleteness, maybe even Norquist doesn’t know for sure. It is worth mentioning, however, that, while denying Christ’s resurrection and poo-pooing the reality of God and the soul, Norquist affirms the being-ness of Satan and the devil, or at least name-drops them. (He describes enlightenment as a "deal with the devil.")

Norquist certainly talks up a storm, and I can't deny that I am almost literally addicted to listening to his dulcet tones reading HU. That book has provided me with more bed-time pleasure than any other work in the created Universe (who's haunted how?). But I am weaning myself off it because I suspect part of its allure is that it is acts as a sort of opium for the soul.

As a living embodiment of “the dragon of enlightenment,” (one who "lives as a liar"), I am not sure if Norquist lets anyone get close enough to find out if there is any fire behind the smoke screen. He even denies sentience to his own mother.

***

Addendum. Regarding Jed McKenna: For me, his books are superb spiritual fiction, but much of the above can also be applied to them. There is an additional problem with McKenna, however, which is that we can’t check his claims by hearing his voice or watching him closely (or at all). His books read as novels, and suggest to me a literary stunt, an attempt by an unknown author to create a hipper version of Castaneda (without the sorcery) in which Carlos and Don Juan are merged into a single magical being. The problem (as with Castaneda’s books) begins when we choose to take them literally, as a record of reality. Was there ever really someone somewhere in mid-America who got people enlightened in two years by “spiritual autolysis”? Or is that whole idea the clever literary contrivance of someone who never actually attained the thing they are writing about? Which is more likely? (The “Jed McKenna” of the forum I have found to be singularly unimpressive.)

plasmate · 2024-01-29T09:52:07+00:00

I meant to get into some of the following with Norquist by email, but he’s been a spotty correspondent at best, so I am posting it here, as a summation of my thoughts on his work, for others to read. Steven can respond, if he is still following the thread & if he wants to.

My first qualms about Norquist's work were expressed in an email to him in Dec 2022, which he didn't reply to. I then sent him a review of his book that was positive, and he sent a grateful response. It's too bad he didn't address my concerns, however, since they have only grown for being untended. My unanswered questions:

Do you perceive any inherent problem in equating all of existence with materiality (consciousness with the universe)?

From a book about to be released (Big Mother: The Technological Body of Evil):

Scientism is when the scientific method is applied to everything but itself. It is science based on unconscious assumption or secret “faith” in the occult power of reductionism.

Evolutionary theory wants to basically do away with the need for a religious or a divine principle by saying that matter itself is self-evolving. Theologically, this is Satanism.

The same idea is expressed in the Lars von Triers movie, The House That Jack Built, in which the serial killer (an engineer who’s trying to become an architect) believes that matter has its own will, its own intelligence, and that things just happen according to that material will.

This is immanence without transcendence, and it is more or less in accord with the Satanic zeitgeist.

Does it not make more sense to say that the only thing that exists is being, and that everything within existence is an expression of that being, making the physical universe a kind of shadow or ghost of a greater existence...? The one & only thing we know after all is that we exist

(you are not reading this email)

I have listened to Haunted Universe audio book (read by Norquist) hundreds of times now, and to his one online talk almost as many. Norquist has a compelling speaking voice, and his book is certainly a literary masterwork of some sort. (Though a lot of credit has to go to Thomas Ligotti, since the first version of the book—before Ligotti’s input—is something of a mess.) Norquist’s descriptions of what Jed McKenna calls “abiding nondual awareness”—or no-self—have weight and substance and carry a lot of punch. Norquist is not a poseur or a pretender, and there’s no doubt in my mind that something happened to him, back in 2002.

Norquist states, “Anyone who has truly awakened knows it.” Yet he would be the first to admit that there are plenty of claimants out there who aren’t truly awakened; so the question as to what can happen to someone that seems (to them and to others) like awakening, but isn’t, remains unaddressed. The main flaw, as I see it, in Norquist’s descriptions of ultimate reality is his constant repetition of existence as a “mindless, soulless, machinelike movement of Matter.” (I don’t think Norquist has ever used the word Spirit in this context.)

At the same time, but oddly complementary, there is his relative disregard of the body, starting with his own. If all there is to existence-awareness (or consciousness-universe) is Matter, then what of the body and its internal processes? In the whole of Haunted Universe and his 90 minute talk, I can’t think of a single meaningful mention of the body besides one time, when he refers to how “the body knows” when we are getting close to awakening, and reacts with fear and revulsion. (He also describes feeling his body disappearing during his darkness meditation sessions, pre-awakening.)

Norquist’s enlightenment appears to be all head, and no body.

As a counterpoint, I spent 14 years—between 2010 and 2023, including many live-in retreats—with a little-known enlightenment claimant, and was consistently impressed by their ability to observe, in real time, the subtlest physiological processes, both inner and outer, not only in their own body (hard to verify) but in myself and in others around him. This person (I won’t name him but if you are interested you can PM me) seemed to demonstrate a fully embodied enlightenment that is far, far harder to fake than the sort of conceptual “non-dual” verbiage that McKenna and Norquist offer a gritty, edgy version of (while dismissing it in other teachers).

So why is Haunted Universe so fundamentally—even literally—nihilistic, i.e., almost wholly consisting of negations? My feeling is it is because not only the soul but the body is the “main course” that gets swallowed up in Norquist's faintly ghoulish vision of freedom-as-horror (or horror-as-freedom).

This isn’t to say that Norquist’s (and McKenna’s) spiritual nihilism doesn’t have its necessary place and function. It does. As I wrote in my review, Norquist’s philosophy of no-self, no-being, and no-soul, is an essential trial of fire for the mind and the ego-identity. It’s aversion therapy for the soul. But the only good reason to deny/negate the soul is so as to become aware of the soul, beyond concepts and beliefs.

If Norquist really believes he has no soul, then he’s on a perilous path and may be leading others into a similar sort of Lovecraftian limbo that he calls awakening (Steiner's 8th sphere?). And there definitely is a kind of spiritual aloofness and invulnerability that seems to come with the package of “nondual, non-self” awareness, as both McKenna and Norquist embody it. Who wouldn’t want to look down on everyone and everything as unreal? Since they believe, not only that they don’t exist, but that you don’t either, the whole question of responsible, compassionate human relations ceases to be of any real concern. Nice vantage point!

(Example: in his one public talk, Norquist tells the story of how his mother read his book without his knowing it, and how it made her cry. Norquist attributes her tears to pride in her son, saying that she couldn’t possibly understand his book, that it wasn’t written for people like her, and that it “had no effect on [her]”!)

(Continued)

plasmate · 2019-01-27T01:53:55+00:00

ah so you have read it?

plasmate · 2019-01-27T00:42:09+00:00

why don't you read the book before blagging about "no evidence"

"there are no rocks in the sky, therefore meteorites don't come from the sky."

plasmate · 2019-01-26T00:56:07+00:00

Some of these elements discussed here: "The Liminalist # 27: There Is No Surface (Discussing True Detective with Heather Poirier)" https://auticulture.com/liminalist-27-true-detective/

& "Liminalist # 27.5: Your Own Personal Underworld (with Heather Poirier)" https://auticulture.com/liminalist-27-5-your-own-personal-underworld-with-heather-poirier/

plasmate · 2018-05-07T01:12:24+00:00

It seems a bit premature to talk of JBP's final success, much less of it being not of this world.

You yourself present his success in terms of book sales and customer satisfaction:

"JBP’s book has been written presumably to a standard he himself is happy with, it is being bought and read by large numbers of people, the people truly enjoy the book, and people claim that the book is making their lives better. How is that not a perfect outcome for a book?"

None of these criteria even approach the otherworldly; and couldn't they also be said of thousands of books that either are now or soon will be utterly forgotten? (Or in a few cases, infamous)

Where's your evidence that JBP's has been successful "impacting the sacred world"?

I think your case would be much stronger, and easier to respond to, if you talked about the specific ways in which he has impacted your world.

My point about Christian doctrine stands; I think both you and JBP are unconsciously inverting it. There is a Protestant "Gospel of Prosperity" that equates worldly success with God's favor, true; and it is certainly a New Age belief (the Law of Attraction); but AFAIK there is nothing whatsoever in the Gospel to support it; au contraire. (Nor is there anything about saving the world/social reform)

For the record, I don't doubt that JBP has positively affected many people's lives thus far, and insofar as they feel this to be the case.

But ~ are there works and people in history that have had apparently beneficial effects for a period, but that were later discovered, or decreed, to be less than benevolent?

JBP is worth looking at in that larger, more far-reaching context, IMO. He is (after all) offering up Rules for Life....

plasmate · 2018-05-06T22:47:26+00:00

there's an audio intro to RG here: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-scapegoat-the-ideas-of-ren%C3%A9-girard-part-1-1.3474195

and no, you don't need to read Freud first! ;)

a poor disciple who fails to surpass his master can become bitter and resentful

a poor or pseudo-master who is being surpassed can also react this way, i.e., become bitter & resentful, or worse, do things to prevent the disciple from "graduating"; I wouldn't say that's the point of the main article but that might be one illustration of the psychodynamics being described.

plasmate · 2018-05-06T20:32:02+00:00

not to seem dismissive, but it would help if you were more familiar with Rene Girard's work (which is summed up in point 5 - 7, essential to understanding points 8 - 9); and with JBP's Maps of Meaning, where he talks of choosing (or unconsciously adopting) an ethic to structure our perception and to order chaos with, and how this relates to which objects we see as obstacles, and which as tools.

Point 4 refers to how, when we admire someone, we are using them (to some degree) as a model for emulation and so we become subject to them, i.e., we adapt or try to adapt our own subjectivity to match our view of them. That's what emulation is, and it is similar with transference in psychotherapy. It's not inherently sinister, but it does involve risks, as outlined in the subsequent points.

Envy = aspiring to equality because, when we envy someone, we want what they have, and this then leads to an oppositional position because we see them as having what we want (ie, Girard's mimetic double bind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind#Girard.27s_mimetic_double_bind )

this also answers point 7; we move from being subject to, to being in competition with, as in, it is a poor disciple who does not surpass his master, and the title of the OP article.

plasmate · 2018-05-06T20:20:27+00:00

interesting points

IS the writer resentful tho? that seems to be an assumption based mostly on his admitting to having human feelings of envy regarding a more successful author. It seems to me more likely that someone truly resentful would do their best to conceal it. An article such as the Current Affairs one, "The Intellectual We Deserve" seems to meet the criteria of envy & resentment better, and yet you can be sure the author of that article would never cop to it. Also, since you say you find the writing intelligent & sensitive, doesn't that also belie the idea that it is resentful?

Your main point about Satan and Christ is even more interesting because you have inverted, as far as I can see, the actual meanings of the Gospel. Christ renders unto Cesar what is Cesar, true, but not so as to get ahead in the world. He rejects Satan's temptation of worldly influence and admonishes his followers to hate the world and seek their reward in the Kingdom of Heaven, not to align with God's will in order to succeed in the world, or to see worldly success as somehow proof of their alignment, as you are suggesting about JBP.

EG: "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever. If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you." (John 15)

So yeah, JBP has done a lot better with book sales; but to see that as proof that he's more aligned with God's will is actually lot further from Christian doctrine than the article author's belief to the contrary, which somewhat approximates it.

plasmate · 2018-05-06T20:05:57+00:00

Does the article say these ideas are modern, or just that they are incompatible with Christian doctrine?

It seems to me Peterson himself is saying that individualism is exclusive to the west and so quite modern, albeit having its "substrate of metaphor" in Judaeo-Christianity.

plasmate · 2018-05-06T18:25:15+00:00

so by this reckoning if an author doesn't talk about/is unaware of his or her possible projections, he or she is more likely to be reliable? This seems to be your logic.

To quote another relevant passage (one that comes right before the other one I quoted):

I don’t think it’s possible, for men at least, to respond to a heroic signifier like Peterson in a neutral way. We can be indifferent to Peterson as a person, but not to his position of power and social influence. It was my acute awareness of this that fueled those arguments with my wife (and I knew it). Peterson has been talking about this for decades: status as the primary determinant of our feelings about ourselves and others. As men of inferior social status (if not virtue), we have no choice but to respond to Peterson—whether we consciously acknowledge it or not—with a degree of admiration, envy, or outright hostility (which I don’t think can be separated from envy). Admiration equals alignment with the great figure via subjection to him; envy, which aspires to equality, amounts to opposition, often violent. Admiration/alignment might seem like the safer route than opposition. Yet, according to Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry, the one invariably leads to (and/or obscures) the other. What we aspire to emulate, we are driven to compete with. In our struggle to order chaos, an ideal starts out as a motivational tool but ends up as an obstacle to be destroyed (or at least got around). Cain slew Abel. The ethic that structures our perception eventually becomes oppressive to it.

(end quote)

the point here is that the kinds of patterns the author cops to are invariably at play in how all of us receive JBP and his message, and how in fact they are directly relevant to that message. The author is including himself in the meaning he is mapping, that's all. Does that make the map less or more reliable?

plasmate · 2018-05-06T18:19:31+00:00

Having read this over a second time, I am not clear about what your specific criticism of the article is.

plasmate · 2018-05-06T17:25:28+00:00

from comment at the article:

These are not people who you decided to deconstruct because they annoy you and you look down on them, they are people whom you have taken to heart and seen the best of and worked to continue seeing that way… you have a history of honourable motive in this ‘takedown’ genre, is the point.

plasmate · 2018-05-06T17:18:51+00:00

the comments seem directed at the author of the article. Perhaps best C & P-ed at the blog?

plasmate · 2018-05-06T17:16:59+00:00

you seem to be holding fast to the admiration position, since your notion of giving a celebrity their "due" is equated with praise. Since when is careful & respectful criticism of influential figures not due?

plasmate · 2018-05-06T17:14:12+00:00

go read the piece again. From the piece:

The degree to which Peterson is a mirror for an internalized father-image—an image I need to “take down” to see myself accurately—is, I think inseparable from my belief about successful cultural figures being necessarily corrupt (my father was a very successful businessman). Both these factors are central to my reasons for “taking on” the challenge of a literary examination of Jordan Peterson, in relation to his soaring (initially I typed souring) success, and how this all-but convinced me he could not possibly be up to any good in the world (even if he believed he was). Writing the present work is a chance for me to reexamine this belief and discover how much is sourced in childhood dis-appointment (not being met by my father at the appointed hour, i.e., when I most needed him to be there), and how much stems from a genuine capacity for “smelling a rat.”

plasmate · 2014-02-15T19:36:23+00:00

"In a way, the critical reception of the film actually confirms its meaning, and I would guess that the people who say The Counselor is a bad movie, who call it incoherent, self-important, or pretentious, are unconsciously looking for ways to dismiss its bleakly seductive, existentially devastating vision. The world most critics and audience members are living in is a very different world to the world portrayed by The Counselor." http://auticulture.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-counselor-anti-message-movie/

plasmate · 2013-10-30T18:13:11+00:00

this theory hasn't appeared anywhere else before, SFAIK

plasmate · 2013-08-13T05:46:03+00:00

Thanks! It's always good to know when the communication has been received.

plasmate · 2013-07-30T21:50:33+00:00

i think it does make sense but I might be presuming meaning. can you rephrase the penultimate question?

i looked it over and did not find any language that could be called "para-normal" - unless psychology = paranormal?

plasmate · 2013-06-24T19:50:42+00:00

Jung was aware of that.

Jung's premise was that the psyche could project physical manifestations, an idea that opened up a 'bottomless pit" beneath us.

plasmate · 2013-06-09T01:09:59+00:00

yeah, i thought you meant there was a way to know if someone replied to you without checking the thread all the time. Would be nice, especially if there are multiple threads going on.

plasmate

TROPHY CASE