Imagination

Control the Images that control you. Exercise your Generator and Processor.

What was the last thing you were day-dreaming about? How has it affected you, emotionally? Do you have a little energy knot in your gut because you were daydreaming about city subways? What do you think is the full weight, accumulated over the years, of all these images that run in and out and, like thieves, parasite energy from your body and soul? Are they worth surveilling, or governing?

Physically, chemically, organically, hormones drive all behavior. But psychologically, phenomenologically, Images drive our behavior. Lightning flashes from the deep, and the captain steers the ship, no thought required.

What I mean is: Images — sometimes vague and never deigning to rise up into consciousness, other times clear and center — rise on their own from the depths of Being to inform and counsel the human organism as it moves through the jungle to seek power and preservation.

Exempli Gratia: You walk downtown, alone at night, and see a man approach. What images flash through your mind? News stories? Tweets, perhaps? Maybe a memory from a movie you saw when you were twelve years-old returns for the first time in decades to light your neural network.

Sensory input, genetic programming, and personal experience guides your subconscious image Generator, and then your image Processor compels your feet to the other side of the street, to take hold of that knife in your pocket (or, if you’re a liberal, it compels your mind into a knot of cognitive dissonance and shame that you have not yet conditioned this bigoted fear out of your bleeding heart).

You may have some degree of consciousness with respect to this processing, or maybe emotion overwhelms and, upon reflection, you wouldn’t be able to recall any of these images which leapt up to guide you. The Eye is blind to the Generator and the Processor, among the unenlightened.

The Generator can be thought of psychologically as your subconscious, or neurobiologically as your lower brain (stem and cerebellum). The Processor is your Intellect, which works inside the lobes. The Eye is your Awareness — more on this later.

Images rise and fade, colors blend together here, or clear lines are drawn there; and this process is endless, until you die. I would venture to guess, for most of my friends, their images are mostly concerned with their occupation, or the news, or whatever book they’re reading. But the images never stop. You close your eyes, and images return, unbidden. You meditate perhaps to clear your mind, but then an image slowly takes solid form of your physical body in an empty room, of air entering and leaving your lungs (the concentration required for and developed by holding this image is a valuable thing — but it’s still an image).

The image of one’s social self — what most people simply call “Ego” — is the largest image on our internal, psychic canvas. Its roots are the most powerful, they reach out to some degree into most all other images; and its fruit is our demeanor and personality. You walk through an airport, and there’s an attractive woman. You desire that she gaze at you. You become aware of your posture, of your wandering eyes; you straighten your shoulders, raise your chin, redirect a stern gaze forward on your walking path. (Did she steal a glance? Your heart flutters imperceptibly). You see yourself, to a degree, don’t you, in your minds eye? You see an image? This image is the ego.

It is the great tragedy of our time that man has become over-socialized, and subsequently his white tree of ego has turned into a black weed. Desire for social status (or fear of losing it) has created images of self-hate, self-defeat, of the false nobility of complete self-sacrifice for an ill society. Queer or effeminate men are bent like aluminum foil under the weight of the world, a pulverized Atlas, by a pathological compulsion to be kind, yielding, subordinate to a homogenized and global herd, to adopt affinity for servility and aversion for wake in the water; bent by images of their social selves which have been allowed (encouraged, trained even) to grow like cancer in the economy of images and blot out all others — black ink, spilled and spreading over all other hues.

The liberal seeks complete homogenization of these images, in the minds of every man on earth. “Thought crimes,” we call them in jest, when you see a homeless man in the city at night, and your finger itches for your knife (“just in case”). To the liberal, the inegalitarian nature of this subconscious image which compelled your finger’s reflex is the root of all evil, and they will never stop their conquest until every last image of its kind is stamped out of every single mind in the world. They will encroach into schools, they will ferment toxic shame in children, they will permit any level of unspeakable atrocity on western shores to achieve their empire. Conquering Vikings destroyed statues of Roman gods; conquistadors razed temples of the Aztecs; liberals seek to replace old images with new ones. Yes, it is no less than a religious conviction of theirs, and a religious war: to control the images which control your mind.

“Imagination” takes new meaning in this context — or, rather, its meaning reaches fulfilment. To consciously form new images, to actively visualize, to co-create. Innovators, disruptors, visionaries … these are all men who had the strongest “imaginations”— i.e. the capacity to create new images — alongside their power of Will to bring the image into the world.

Is an NPC capable of imagination— REAL imagination? They might imagine: “what if Pam never married Jim?” But are they capable of creating truly NEW images, words, abstract thoughts? I think instead it is the case that the defining characteristic of an NPC is that he’s lost all capacity to form a novel image of his own; he’s a man whose light has gone out. And so, is he even truly a man anymore?

If we’ve identified a great tragedy of our modern times — the extinguishment of billions of lights beneath the black cloud of over-socialization — then let me celebrate the great hope of all ages: Man, by power of his own Will, is capable of raising himself up to mountains of strength and joy; of “drawing living water” out from an endless internal well of Spirit; of becoming a master, though he was once a slave.

How?

By learning to control the images which control him.

Do you want more success with women, maybe? Do you see average-looking men “pulling” beautiful women and wonder, why can’t you? He has very specific images in his head: images of himself, images of women, images of the images that run through women’s heads, images of successful and unsuccessful experience to draw from… You need the right images, the visual models which drive thought and action. You know this, but do you REALLY know?

Unenlightened, weak, childish is the man who lacks the ability to examine and moderate by conscious effort the images that rule him. You have a light, a consciousness, an Eye inside you that is part of your divine nature, and, leveraging it, you can ascend to superhuman strength and joy — or, rather, you become that light which applies leverage over the dark matter of your being. By power of Will and Eye, you can observe the images, moderate them, and reorient them from materialism and ego toward beauty, adventure, innovation, to wherever your happiness resides. You train yourself to control the forces that control your experience of life.

When we Jungians speak of gods as archetypes, we mean only this: there are historical images deep below, and well-trod neural pathways — patterns of light branded into the physical circuitry of your brain — that are tested, tried, and true. And they are available for download, an installed upgrade to your operating system. Mars, Archangel Michael, the Warrior: this archetypical image exists within you. You’ve inherited the collective memories of all your ancestors, and hundreds of thousands of years of imaging has created something that transcends man, that comes out of him but goes beyond him. Spirits, Gods, those anthropomorphic forces which exert complete control over the Mind… they are there, for you to find. They are waiting to be seen again. But man must first learn again how to open his Eye, and exercise his Will. To see the images that have been conditioned into him, and to moderate them.

But the download is not free. It takes great effort to find them and pay for them. So, what is the cost of entry? How do I achieve this power?

• First, sun and steel and proper nutrition and sleep. The vitality imparted by a healthy internal economy of hormones, of endocrinology, is a necessary precursor to all else. Your Generator is directly tied to your body. “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophies.” Your body has an intelligence that far exceeds your intellect, that knows if you are weak, dysgenic, fat, and so it will send nihilistic images of self-hate up to the control center, images which, if they could speak, would say: “This one is defective. He doesn’t deserve to propagate his genes.” The glutton hears this, he does, and adopts ideologies consistent with the images his weak mind generates. (Please forgive my mixed audio-visual metaphors).

• Meditate. If sun and steel strengthens the Generator, then Meditation strengthens the Processor. This part of the mind is a muscle that needs to be exercised. To be able to catch an image when it rises, and to let it go, all before it impacts your emotions… it is impossible to explain in writing the power that this discipline imparts. Teach yourself to fixate on deep physical relaxation that is accessible at all times. Ever get into an argument with a made-up enemy in your head, and find an energy knot in your chest? Let go, and focus on the feelings of completely letting go for ten minutes, let go more, experience deeper levels of relaxation, in silence, with no distractions. You will be very surprised how pleasurable this can be, and few revelations have lead to more enduring joy for me personally than this. You train power into your Processor in this way.

• Pray. Prayer is focused visualization. Active imagination, with fixation on sacred symbols. Your conscious mind might not comprehend the power, but you are planting seeds in the subconscious mind which does. Or, if it is not a strictly religious devotional prayer, taking time to direct intention and visualize pathways to goals is necessary to realizing them.

• Throughout the day, perform spot checks. Ask yourself: what have I been imagining? Why? Am I in fact dreaming right now? How would I know? “I was envisioning all the likes I’m going to get for tweeting this banger.” How many of you have ever formed an image, before pressing send, of a 100k-follower account smiling to receive your meme? Well, that is well and good, but how is that helping you get closer to self-mastery?

These are a few methods. There are more. Start here, you will find others.

This all must rise to the level of religious devotion. You must commit yourself as if the liberation of your Soul into power depends on it, because it does.

The goal is to train a demeanor of strength and joy until it is “second nature” (should it not be called first nature, though?). To that end, follow this “joyous science”: Be wary of bewitchment, but be not afraid. Observe, but do not grab tight hold of the lightning from the deep. Regularly let go of physical tension, because your body is yours to command. Visualize, focus on, IMAGINE the fire; let it consume and animate you.

You’ll soon then begin to see the different spirits animating all things, because spirit calls to spirit. First, you must cause your own spirit to bloom: you must remove weeds from the garden, you must shine light on your white tree, you must nourish it with holy water.

You can move from slave-mentality to master-mentality. You can achieve the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory. You can shake the slumber of disenchantment, and awaken to new realms of strength and joy.

To do so, you must learn to rule the images which rule you.