Nietzsche wrote in Joyous Science that consciousness is a relatively new function in humans: The quest for truth and knowledge became a form of life itself (“a continually growing power”); and now it even competes with basic instincts of life. The “Thinker”, the overly rational man, lives with a constant tension within himself. The overdevelopment of consciousness is dangerous. “The most conscious Europeans are diseased.”
Diseased.
Imagine a profession of psychologists, but different. Aliens from the far future who have mastered the Science of Mind. They’ve read and discarded everything you’d find in a 2023 Psychology Textbook because they have progressed so far in their understanding of Nature and Nature’s God that our psychologists today are but chimpanzees compared to these masters.
I wonder, if they could observe us today, how many tendencies of Modern Mind they would identify as pathologies which our own chimpanzee psychologists consider mere norms.
Diseased.
There is a dopamine-seeking part of our animal brain which has hijacked the rational part of our prefrontal cortex.
I posit in this article that this is a disease which man must cure with the medicine of willpower.
The dopamine-seeking part of the brain has caused our awareness to get trapped in a cage of images. The lizard part of the brain has, like a parasite, pirated the captain’s cabin.
The mind creates daydreams, spin cycles, rat-wheels thusly: The lizard asks, the Thinker obeys, and the lizard eats of the Thinker’s labor. Psychologically, the subconscious generates images while the conscious processes them, but this happens because Neurobiologically, the stem uses the cortex to reward the stem. The stem likes this. You like this. Free and easy dope.
Without Awareness of the disease, or Will to cut it out, your Light of Awareness recedes from the Now and into this feedback loop; minutes or hours pass in darkness.
You argue with political enemies; you slay orcs; you go back through that embarrassing moment in high-school, but differently this time; you hate-scroll twitter; you survive the flood and save the world; you are President of America and send them all back; you take the cute girl in the office into your car and she takes you into her; you argue some more with political enemies — they cower away ashamed and defeated and the ten onlookers have now decided to change their vote from Biden to Trump because of your superior logic.
Ope, phone call. From the boss. Better get this.
Are you “aware” while in this feedback loop? If pressed to recall your last three daydreams, you probably could. You saw the images. Some Seer was awake. But we know and feel that this is a depressed state of awareness. It’s like a zombie sees. Like a stop-light actuator “sees”. You are not fully awake. But boy, it feels good in the shade, doesn’t it?
What Nietzsche told us (in different words) was that never throughout the entire history of humankind has this process existed, and now, he observes, it grows and grows out of control into a pathology.
Well, this happened because never has such free and easy dopamine been available to the stem—never has the lizard ever been so fat on such easy food. The cortex developed and provided something that the brain quite enjoyed having around.
But at what point does the feedback loop become self destructive?
The point I want to make today is that you must break this feedback loop, or at least learn to exert some level of control over it. The Will-with-an-Eye must break the chains that the Lizard has over the Thinker; because the Thinker, though well-intentioned, by obeying the Lizard is holding back the Will. The Will must exert autonomy over its lower nature—or, rather, the Will must exert autonomy over its higher nature which, in its infancy, has allowed a part of itself to be abused by the lower nature.
Humankind has evolved new equipment but not only are we not using it correctly, we’re using it in a self-destructive way.
Fix it.
Why is this a problem needing fixed?— This feedback loop wastes your energy and prevents your Spirit from reaching its Sublimation.
(Do not be confused: this equipment is required for sublimation. It must be used correctly, though, and it
A man may be addicted to porn or video games, and won’t get off the couch to go find a mate, because he’s tricked his internal chemistry to think he doesn’t need it. He’s got all the dopamine he needs. We rightfully observe this behavior as disgusting and dysgenic and we shame it.
Well, guess what: the lizard in your skull is playing video games and masturbating all day, you just don’t realize it, and you rationalize it away as “oh it’s only day-dreaming”. But you’re feeding dopamine to the lizard in the same way as the weed-smoking, off-jerking schlub on the couch; you’re just drinking diet coke to his Monster Energy.
Realize that you’re smoking weed too, then stop smoking it, because only after the weed is uprooted can the flower and fruit of spirit freely bloom.
Return to the somatic nature-feeling. Enter the moment, the eternal now.
This isn’t mystical feel-good mumbo jumbo. But I guess it is self-help, in a way, because you won’t ever become a real man, a man of action, an individuated soul, a spiritually-realized man, if your internal chemistry remains in a permanently diseased state, a state of conditioned mental-masturbation.
If you stop feeding the lizard potato chips, he will go out and seek red meat.
Only from a connection to the moment can a feeling of enchantment, or religious intoxication arise, and from it ECSTASY — the feeling of strength and power and joy growing within and shining like an eternal light. From this ecstatic enchantment with the somatic now does CREATIVITY and ACTION flow — the generative divine force of spring that we worship.
The higher self — the conscious controller, the Will with an Eye — must observe the mouse as it runs on the wheel, and it must subjugate this process. It must see the images which rise to self-stimulate and replace them with Dreams and Ideals which, like magnets, spur the body and soul to higher action.
Starve this fake dopamine cycle by silencing all noise and regulating images internally.
Then, after this dopamine cycle is controlled by the Will-with-an-Eye (this divine aspect of self), the body’s chemistry returns to a natural healthy state, and your energy is redirected to higher action in this world.
You can be a conduit of God and bring forth the Kingdom into this world, if only you would let it be so; if only you could master yourself by first knowing yourself.
The medicine is meditation. This is the process by which the Higher Mind learns to claim control over the lower.
The lower mind has its uses, and Nietzsche wrote that it is good that some baser instincts rule over consciousness for quite some time. But the baser instinct has trapped itself and now the next phase of human evolution involves transferring autonomy from the Lower to the Higher—while never forgetting or leaving behind those parts of the Lower which propel the Will to Power higher.
The base dopamine-seeking part of your brain traps your higher self. The Will has been tricked and diverted. Our Archons see this and condition us all deeper into this internal trap.
Your Eye, which is the fruit of the Great Will which you possess, must come to see the trap it has caught itself in; then also come to see the benefit of rising up and out of it.
And oh, oh, how hard it is to free one’s self, when every waking moment in this modern world of ours calls upon this Thinker and rewards this dopamine-seeker for answering. 40-hours per week of prime waking consciousness is dedicated to accruing status for showing off how sharp of an axe you have formed of your prefrontal cortex. To leverage it as a trick in a circus, then to collect your bread, but then to put it back in its box, day after day … what a Great Work this is.
In Buddhism, the hyperactive stream of thoughts, memories, and images is dubbed the 'Monkey Mind'. If one can master it, one begins to extricate themselves from the grasp of Samsara.
In the west, although mostly suppressed by a certain dominant religion-or two, the discipline of quieting the mind has a long history. I will choose but one example, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
Here, the apostles weep and lament that the Savior is no longer with them. Mary instructs them that the Saviour is forever to be found, in the Silence.
Buddhism is old, and Gnosticism is ancient, but Nietzsche is available.
Good piece.