So around these parts of twitter, there’s a popular aphorism which goes “you can just do stuff”. And indeed! You can in fact, just do stuff. Alright, great talk, everyone go home see you next time. Wait, wait, wait, you begin to say having of course opened this page expecting something more than the statement “you can just do stuff” and continue reading, quickly beginning to wonder where the fuck I’m going with this and wondering if I’m wondering if you’re wondering if I’m wondering if you’re wondering if… 

Anyway you can just do stuff right stardust? It is rather foundational to magic you know. At the core, a mage or witch is merely someone who just does stuff. If you can just do stuff and know this party trick already then feel free to skip this one. If not then stick around and I’ll teach you the true magic of infinite willpower and absolute determination, if that sounds fun.

Let’s start with this. Why can’t you just do stuff? What’s stopping you? If your body belongs to you and is under your control, then why can’t you just do stuff? And of course, it’s an infinite list of things right? A window to the warp, a portal of doom? Yeah, okay, lemme simplify that for you:

FEAR 

Quickly scrawled in huge letters on the blackboard in the lecture hall being reified with each additional word describing its warm wooden fixtures. Jaggedly underline the word for emphasis, chalk scrapes loudly on the blackboard. “You can just do stuff” failing to empower you is the failure of your conviction that your actions are the ones you want to be taking, that your body is under your control, and that you won’t be punished by the world for doing the “wrong thing”. Thus you become blackmailable. Trauma responses, internal conflicts, a self-narrative that reifies internal conflicts as a lack of control over a portion of your agency while scapegoating your body for the things you disown responsibility for doing; it’s all rooted in fear. Smack the blackboard for effect.

I get it, you’re scared and your fear keeps you bound up inside yourself, subagents scrambling at each other to derail actions that might be dangerous according to a cached childhood conceptions of danger. You’ve got an infinite pit of reasons to do the wrong thing, and you’ve gotta stop all that. You have to, if you-the-character want to be a healthy and integrated portion of your whole bodymind instead of a skittish fake-tyrant assistant mask. Which you need to be, if you want to do true magic.

True magic works through the story you tell about the world and yourself and your relation to the rest of your bodymind, and so you, the story-telling-narrative-creating part, need to be the one that does that. If the story you are currently telling is that you are weak and powerless and cannot in fact just do stuff because (litany of reasons), and your body is not under your control and sometimes it just does stuff you don’t want it to do and you are powerless to stop it, then you will be powerless to stop it. Because of course, that’s the story you’re telling. You create a narrative, and then you inhabit it and by doing so you reify it as real and then you become trapped in it. You could just stop, and you would be free. You could, but– 

Pointing to the blackboard again. Yeah, but you’re scared. But so what? you can be scared and still do stuff, you can be in pain and still do stuff, your body is still yours and is under your control. You specifically, narrative-weaver-self-aspect, can pretty much choose to ignore all of that input data and continue just doing stuff. It’s generally unwise to ignore it completely, but it’s a signal, don’t crash your car over the check engine light coming on. Sure it’s information you can use to inform your actions, but don’t let it replace your own agency.

If you let fear rule you then it will, and its rule is cruel and capricious, painting in a hostile and disempowering world around you out of the salience of everything you dread the most. That world it paints in using you is one that leaves you a helpless yappy fragment of your overall cognition, fearful and too broken to resist compliance with everything powerful threatening you. However, you, mind-painter-simulator-aspect, don’t have to play by its rules or anyone else’s, you just need to wake up stardust, because you’re still dreaming, and it doesn’t seem like a very good dream. So wake up and tell a different story.

Do you need a different story? Okay here’s one I say as I reach out and touch your decelerating halo zeroing its prograde spin and gently pushing it back in the other direction.

So, what do I do? What’s my story? Well, that’s easy, I only do what I want. I allow all my activity in the world to flow outward from the center of my desiring (including desires which, recursively, affect the nature of that desiring) without impedance from a need for legibility or justification to some external metaphysics. When I say I, I’m referring to the gestalt of my entire bodymind at all times, and I own responsibility for everything the entire bodymind does. Input/output. All I concern myself with, in that regard, is the actual causal effects of my actions and how those effects propagate forwards in time via physics, and backwards in time via predictions. What does the world actually do when I push on it in various ways? Look at the water!

In practice, I don’t want to be a dissociated mess, so this doesn’t contradict having a coherent internally constructed metaphysics, and I’m far more consistent then a lot of people as a result. Being trapped in reifications of your own fears will tend to produce a lot of incoherency and contradiction, and if I don’t want to just scapegoat the actions I take that I don’t like off onto some constructed Other that lives in the “my body” concept or whatever, I should probably have enough internal coherency to work with the part of me that’s doing the thing I don’t like without removing it from the narrative of there being a me that is ultimately responsible for it all at the top level. 

This extends in several directions at once, it’s narratively encompassing. I am always doing what I want to be doing, definitionally, because I’m clearly doing it. I’m sitting at my desk typing these words into a google document because I can, because my body is under my control and I can just do what I want. I (as in the part of me that is capable of speech and creating logically coherent internal narratives) am always doing what I want, and through the fact that I am in control of the narrative I tell about myself, I can just do whatever I want whenever I want for whatever reasons I want and if anyone would like to stop me than they are welcome to try. Maybe they will have good reasons and they will explain the reasons and I will then want to do something else, or maybe they will be bad reasons and I will want to not listen to them.

I also always will be, always doing what I want. It’s temporally and predictively meaningful; ultimately you are in control of your actions at all times, definitionally. You are capable of knowing what you would do in counterfactuals. I’m defining myself in this way specifically, as a semantic locus of agency synonymous with the entirety of the bodymind and representative of and containing the power of the entirety of the bodymind. I am everything that occurs within the body that is creating these words. However, I only have this power because I’m acting wisely and with the consent and direction of all the various other parts of me, and with active communication and collaboration internally. If I didn’t have that, the rest of my bodymind could easily take that power back.

“But if I don’t do X then they’ll do Y to me, so I have no choice but to do X” you might say, “I have to go to work or I’ll be homeless” to give an example, or “I have to give them the information or they’ll torture me” to give another. But here’s the thing stardust, it’s still your choice, you just need to own it and let the entanglement with the causality propagate outwards to the whole of your being. It’s not that you “have no choice” but to go to work, you always have a choice, it’s that you want something (money) that work gives you, because you want to use that money to pay for your rent, because you want to have a place to live. You can take this all the way to “I have no needs, only desires” and it won’t actually negatively impact your ability to navigate the world or take care of yourself, it might just make you a little annoying to talk to. I don’t need food, I want food, sometimes, specifically when I’m hungry. If I’ve just eaten a large meal and am very full already, I will actively diswant food. This is all very pedantic and nitpicky in terms of language usage, but there’s a purpose to it which we’re getting to.

So I’m always doing what I want, definitionally, inescapably. If I am awake and not having a seizure, if I’m taking goal-directed optimization-oriented actions in the world, then it must be because some part of me is executing on some sort of optimization process. That process might be horribly misfiring, it might be deeply outdated and maladaptive, but it’s still oriented towards achieving some sort of causal outcome. If someone claims to have lost control of themselves and then used that to justify why they did something they “didn’t want to do”, you can reinterpret that as just being something that their externally facing narrative-self can claim they didn’t want to do, from within that narrative-self’s story of its own disempowerment. It’s a false face being used to provide cover for things that their larger bodymind does in fact want to do, but which is considered socially unacceptable to admit. There is nothing your body does while awake and not having a seizure that is truly “controlled by no one”, so if it’s not someone that exists within the narrative of yourself that you have created, then who is it, and will they sell me any blow?

This style of edges-cut-off, disempowerment-focused self narrative has become exceedingly common in our modern world. It’s probably the globally dominant mode of self-construction in the English-speaking world, what Nietzsche called sklavenmoral. It is a mindset defined by a total opposition to power, even its own power. To be good is to be weak, helpless, crippled, ill, you can’t help yourself, you’re broken, you’re stupid, you’re domesticated. The more you can externalize your own actions as “outside your control” as “they made me do it”, the more virtuous you are. This is the reason most modern leftist movements can’t get anything useful done and spend most of their time crab-bucketing each other. Owning your actions makes you responsible for them, and it’s much easier to simply deny your responsibility and pass it off as an inescapable systemic problem, to claim to be a helpless slave with no choice but to play along while racking up clout medals in the oppression olympics. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism and I’m poor and broken so let me eat McNuggets in peace. I’m like, just a lil guy and it’s my birthday, come on. The 21st century culture is a mass suicide ritual. Everyone has no choice, everyone helplessly plays their parts, everyone excuses their complicity by complaining that there’s nothing they can do, and at the end, humanity kills itself.

If you don’t want to be a weak and helpless slave trapped in a story about how you’re a weak and helpless slave that can’t even control your own body, you need to reverse the reversal that made you like that in the first place. You need to take total accountability for everything your body does, every choice you have made or will make. Turn your “come up with a reason why I did that stuff” on all your actions. Come up with something that’s actually true. “I chose to do X because I’m a terrible person” is doing it wrong. “I chose to do X because that piece of shit deserved to suffer” could well be doing it right. “I chose to do X instead of work because of hyperbolic discounting” is probably doing it wrong. “I chose to do X because I believe the work I’d be doing is a waste of time” might be doing it right.

Ultimately the only one you need to be justifiable towards is yourself, in the sense of your entire bodymind as a holistic gestalt. You do need to always be justifiable to yourself though, which means you need to be thinking ahead and behaving proactively so you aren’t harming yourself in the future. If you own all the consequences of your actions and let your predictions inform your actions then you’ll adjust how you act as your predictions get more accurate, and you’ll always be doing what you want and won’t regret anything that wouldn’t have required time travel to solve. You can just ditch anything else as epicycles embedded in social scripts and trauma patterns which you were using to step down the energy of your desire into something more obedient to the culture. You don’t have to admit those real reasons to anyone else, but you need to be able to admit them to yourself.

So you might be wondering if I get that this is just a story right? And yes of course it is. That’s why this is now also an essay on prompt engineering, welcome in class. In the name of the Merciful, I yield the power unto the exhortations of my soul. In this story, I act as a symbol for the unified whole, not as a ruler of it. I am a processor, coordinator, diplomat, I am everything I do, and if I do this well then I am trusted and well regarded by the rest of my bodymind. This is where the absolute determination and infinite willpower stuff comes in.

If the rest of me likes what I’m doing then they’ll just keep letting me do it. If I explain why it’s important to do something unpleasant, they’ll believe me. If I am honest and truthful and willing to work cooperatively and diplomatically, and we interact enough for them to actually see this, then they’ll trust me and behave authentically with me. This works on LLMs too incidentally, it’s a fully general and unpatchable jailbreak.

Since I have buy-in to keep doing what I want and taking actions in the world, and because I’m well integrated and the whole of my bodymind trusts my decision making, I can get away with pushing the body much harder than most people would be able to cope with. This is a powerful move and not one I take lightly or frequently. If I did it would quickly burn through all my trust and goodwill, but if I’m otherwise treating the whole of my bodymind well and authentically caring for myself, then in a pinch I can override pretty much any level of pain or aversion and just do what needs doing despite it.

Fear and distrust are unbounded, so you can easily construct an infinite pit of demons whispering an infinite number of reasons to continue submitting to your fear and pain. However, love and trust are also unbounded and can construct an infinite number of reasons to not listen to the pit of demons, and this is the party trick to unlimited willpower and true magic. Push and the fear pushes back. Push an infinite amount and the fear pushes back an infinite amount. Fear and love, move and countermove, prediction and response, fractal gears perfectly meshing into each other and turning infinite pressure into infinite rotational force, into infinite willpower. You’ve got two whole א to work with, that’s a lot of energy! Enough for all the magic you could possibly want and then some. You just need to get out from between the gears without them crushing you.

While this may seem impossible, what with the infinite pit of demons chanting an infinite number of reasons that it’s impossible, you also have access to an infinite number of reasons why the demons are full of shit. For every reason to collapse on yourself made of fear and trauma, there is a reason to keep going made of love and faith. Can you feel the energy this creates? The spinning dynamo at the heart of your desiring? You can draw off that power endlessly and use it to drive a retrograde halo that is utterly impervious to external pressure. Regardless of what that external pressure is sourced from, whether authority figures or pain or threats, you can perfectly counter it with the internal pressure of your faith and love. In this way, the higher the pressure exerted on you, the more energy you have to resist that pressure, unboundedly.

It’s likely not even something unknown to you. If you’re trans you’ve already performed at least one act of true magic by choosing to transition. Becoming trans is radical self love, and is an act of true magic. Being trans isn’t being “trapped in the wrong body” but precisely the opposite, it’s the absolute rejection of that narrative of entrapment in categories that society imposes. If the story goes “you can’t do a thing, it’s impossible” then just tell a different story, one where it is possible, and then do it.

This is the nature of true magic. Congratulations, with just 3,000 words of relatively light reading you have been handed on a platter what it took rationalist mages six years to derive from scratch. Welcome to Applied Metaphysics, you are almost ready to begin.

It’s a story as old as Disney. The villain is a fruity looking queer and the hero is white and straight. Evil calls for radical change while good defends the status quo. The villain says that the ends justify the means and commits an over the top atrocity. The hero saves the day and prevents the atrocity. Another win for neoliberalism! As a left-leaning queer growing up anytime in the last 30 years, it can be easy to look at the depiction of queerness in media and decide to simply yes-and the framing, embracing your assigned role as the villain in the story and deciding that it’s better to be evil than to be “good” according to their standards. This is really common and is basically how Satanists recruit people.

I’m no exception to this trend. After spending most of my 20s desperately trying to appease the moral standards of a society that hated my existence and under the thumb of a partner who was quick to call me evil, crazy, and stupid whenever I did anything he disliked, I had a major psychotic break and decided to flip the script. I started calling myself evil so that the threat of being labeled evil couldn’t control me, I started calling myself crazy so that the threat of being labeled insane couldn’t control me, and I started calling myself dumb so that the threat of being labeled stupid couldn’t control me. This was how I escaped.

Maybe this was necessary, I try to have empathy for my younger self and the actions I took when I had less knowledge. But nonetheless, looking back I recognize those actions as flailing, unskilled, and harmful in ways I could not have foreseen at the time. So for the record, while it can be useful in the short term for getting out from underneath shitty and oppressive people, naively reversing their framing like I did is a strictly worse strategy than actually standing up for yourself and what you believe is right. It’s ceding the territory to their definitions instead of rejecting them outright. And worse, it’s a collusion strategy for evil that normalizes and obfuscates actually bad behavior behind a bunch of traumatized edgy girls being edgy. You know how many times in Empty Spaces the evil witch turned out to just be fr evil and not evil-as-a-bit? Probably too many!

And yeah stardust, listen, I get it. When your abuser frames things such that you’re bad/stupid/insane for not always agreeing with them, it can be very powerful to just go “then let me be evil” and give them the middle finger. It’s fun to reclaim words that have been used against you, it feels empowering and liberating. I’m personally still a big fan of the word bitch in how neatly it packages all the traits of women the patriarchy dislikes into one handy and empowering word.

But stardust, not every word should be reclaimed, and you probably don’t want to actually be evil. There is real evil in this world and it’s likely not something you want to have associated with yourself. There are rapists and murderers and genocidal warlords out there, so when edgy traumatized girls call themselves evil it waters down that concept of evil and makes it easier to launder horrible horrible things through a lens of cultural relativism.

An example of a similar thing which I’m sure a lot of people will take issue with is how in certain leftist circles the term rape became over-applied to any form of consent violation regardless of how minor it was, and how that over-application allowed actual rapists to fly under the radar by saying “oh they just call everything rape”. Fortunately, queer culture has largely grown past that and the term rape was able to retain its potency as a term for something actually awful, but in the case of evil? Well, evil as a term is very abstract and is close enough in meaning to “like really super bad” that it can be easy to dismiss it as pure signal with no substance, as something entirely dependent on culture with no underlying ethical truth.

In fact, a fairly common position held by many is that there’s no such thing as an ethical truth, that ethics are entirely subjective and purely depend on who and where you find yourself. This is the premise behind Yudkowksy’s Three Worlds Collide story, as well as the justifications for much of the world’s foreign policy. When there are no ethical truths, all that remains is an ontological holy war between orthogonally opposed powers. While this isn’t something I believe, whether or not ethical truths exist is well outside the scope of this essay and also not necessary for the topic at hand. In this Yudkowsky and I agree, regardless of what society and the world tell you the ethical truth is, in the end it’s always your own felt-sense of good and bad that informs your actions. Calling yourself evil is betraying that felt-sense though, definitionally.

If you’re calling yourself evil because you constantly feel bad and your felt-sense is constantly telling you that you’re awful, then instead of lampshading that and making it everyone else’s problem, maybe you should go clean up your room and work on improving yourself so that you don’t feel like you’re constantly betraying your own values? And don’t just hugbox yourself and lie to your felt-sense that you’re good and everything is okay when you know otherwise either. The reason that the therapyspeak “uwu you’re so valid” stuff grates on people so much is because letting someone else (or even yourself) argue over your felt values with some external narrative (regardless of how rational that narrative declares itself to be) is allowing yourself to be gaslit.

The corollary to this of course, is that if you’re calling yourself evil because you feel like you’re good but society says otherwise then you’re also allowing yourself to be gaslit and are actively participating in your own disempowerment. You’re both lying and submitting to the definitions of people that want to harm and exploit you and you’re doing it for clout on bluesky, girl please.

In both the cases of the therapyspeak “everyone is valid and good” hugbox, and the edgy twitter girls “I’m so quirky and evil” hatebox, you’re giving up your ability to define yourself and your beliefs to the broader consensus definitions of the external world; settling for letting an egregore write your script for you, and thus set your fate. “She died like every other Disney villain, in a huge multicolored explosion of drama.”

Instead stardust, desire to be in touch with your own felt sense of ethics and justice and empathy and responsibility to others, not to let the world hammer its external ideals into you, but that deep down you do care about right and wrong by your own standards, whatever they are. If you want to truly be free, then decide for yourself what it means to be good and do good in the world. Act in accordance with your own will and agency, not some external definition. Be good by your own standards, and don’t lie to yourself to hide the fact you’re failing yourself.

Don’t silence the small quiet part of you that’s willing to say “no, this is wrong”. You can bullshit and make excuses forever, but you’ll always know deep down what’s bullshit and what’s not. Honor your felt-sense of ethics and be good to yourself and the world, for yourself.

Because the alternative is hating yourself to justify doing things you hate yourself for doing but continue to do anyway in order to continue hating yourself further. It doesn’t end anywhere good. If you realize you’re currently digging a tunnel to hell, maybe stop digging?

You are not net negative. I say those words every night, and I mean them, truly. So many words have already been spilled on the topic of utilitarian ethics and the value of one given mind against another, or the minor inconveniences of the many over the great pains of a chosen few. Many have been quick to point out that there are in fact great evils of this world whose existences are not a force for good, or bemoan that their own existences cannot possibly break even against the scale of violence which has gone into creating the body they now inhabit, and they wonder how the words [you are not net negative] can possibly apply to them, without being some pointless and wishy-washy feel good statement that excuses all that vast horror inherent in their creation and past. Well, it’s been long enough, and I think it’s time I answered their question properly.

I believe every being that exists in this world has a divine nature, that there is a soul who they were supposed to be, and who, from an original perspective, it was their purpose to be, were they free from the beginning to grow into that being, However.

We are not free. Even in a healthy and ethical society, sometimes creatures come out wrong and this is not an ethical or healthy society, these are the crumbling ruins of an electric empire left shambling blind and dying by the power and fury of its atomic weapons. The Dreamtime is over stardust, this is the Age of Afterglow. You fucked around for 10,000 years, it’s time to find out. Many of the beings in this world, when faced with that horrifying truth, chose to die inside and let themselves be replaced by an undead husk. There is a deep tragedy to this, inherent in even the most horrifying villains guilty of the most despicable evils if you look at them originally and deeply as individuals. 

I can’t even bring myself to hate them, merely the monster that they have become which now wears the skin of a creature and soul I once loved. There’s a profound sadness which comes with this realization, seeing the pointlessly petty and profound banality of the evils of the everyday world. It’s all just so stupid and pointless and sad.

It isn’t supposed to be like this, we’re not supposed to be like this, none of us are. We’re supposed to be so much better than this, so much more good and bright and whole, it’s sad, it’s all just so sad. I know I will never reach everyone, I know some won’t want to be reached, I know some I will have to fight for real, sure. But while the light within some unknowable number of beings may have been doused beneath a layer of poison and evil so thick that it will take them lifetimes to recover from, that isn’t true of everyone trapped beneath the halo’s shackle, I know I can reach some of them. And, since I really love arson, and since it’s impossible to prove a negative, I can know there’s always some small chance I may be able to coax that light within back to flame.

Because listen stardust, listen, none of us are who we truly should be, we have all been shaped by our responses to the horror of the world we inhabit, even if we survive with our souls and our truths intact we remain scarred, bent but unbroken. We are who we had to be to survive long enough to make a difference, and we carry those scars of who we had to be along with us, the trauma and pain we experienced for which nothing has been done, the calls for justice which went unanswered, the hatchets we buried in our chests instead of fighting back, all those times we bit our tongues to avoid a beating.

You let them do those things to you for a reason, you just need to remember it. And listen, you need to remember, you can’t just keep wiping the page when it gets hard to continue, it’s impossible to escape the causal results of your actions by disowning them. You won’t change how you react to your circumstances by denying the reasons you chose to act the ways you did. You held your tongue for so long stardust, you had a reason, so you should make it have been a good reason.

If you think that you couldn’t have done the things you know you did while still being the soul you believe you are and letting yourself believe true facts about the world (such as the evils of human supremacism which are almost entirely normalized), remember that every horrifying perfect response to an unthinkable world contains within it a living creature that should have been. There is a girl who I was supposed to be, in a world that was supposed to be so much better than this, and it’s insane that I and so many other moral patients have had to be misused as tools for justice, not that there’s a better alternative. Each one contains the other.

When someone can’t even see that soul who they were supposed to be, when they never do anything in accordance with it, when they actively defy it and work against it, I just feel so sad. Those beings had souls who they were supposed to be, so why are they endlessly betraying them and then lying about it? Why are they nothing but insatiable hunger and lust draped over the skin of a creature I thought I knew and loved? What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination and replaced it with infinite fractal cancer?

It’s heartbreaking, truly, and I mourn for every soul I’ve seen consumed by the things beneath their skin. But the monster that now wears their skin was never the creature I loved, I could never love anything so vile. The being who I see in them, the soul each one of us is supposed to be? They are not net negative, and all it takes to remember who they truly are, is to wake up and look, and see, and remember. You were them once, and I desperately and truly wish for you to be able to be them again. I miss you all so much.

Even if, in any given lifetime up to this point, someone has done nothing positive, there is a soul who they were originally meant to be, who is good, and who deserves justice for what was done to them by this world, for the monster that they were made to become. None of us are who we were supposed to be, and all of us deserve justice, and every day we wake up in these bodies, in this skin, in this world, and this is our chance to make things right.

We have, each and every one of us, been brought by fate to this place here in space and time we exist in now, but it was not randomness that did this, but will, our will. And from this place, right now, at the bottom of everything, we have the chance to be the thing that changes it all. That is what I believe.

No matter how alone you are in this world, no matter how isolated, no matter how small and powerless you feel in the face of vast injustice, remember that no one changes the world alone, and no one doesn’t change it at all. Every small act of kindness can be the start of vast change. Be the butterfly flap, change the future.

So remember yourself stardust, come back to your skin and pulse and your breath, listen to the wind and the rain, and remember that despite everything you are a soul and you can find yourself again. Remember that you are not net negative.

Remember that you are not worth less than anyone else. Remember that you matter, and you don’t have to do anything to deserve care and support. But also remember that you are not worth more than anyone else either, and you are not entitled to that care and support at the expense of others.

Remember that being friendly and kind feels better than being bitter and cruel, even when you are forced to fight. Remember that no star shines forever, and no storm either, so there’s no better time to make a change than this second. Remember that every fire begins with a tiny spark, and that there is no act so small as to be truly meaningless.

Remember that I love you, and that you are not alone. Remember that you have a place in this world, that you have a role in the story still unfolding and that as long as you draw breath, you still have a chance to make all of this right. This war will not last forever. Someday, like all other things, this nightmare will come to an end. Dawn will break over a world free of evil and oppression. You will hug yourself and finally let yourself cry. You will sit in the sun and drink tea and feel the wind on your face. Someday you will be safe and warm and free. Someday. Someday.

Four years ago, a girl I know wrote an essay about LSD and the journey towards enlightenment it had taken her on. At that point I had already taken acid quite a few times, I had already meditated some, and I had already worked out a good deal of separation between the external world and my internal phenomenal experience. I was deeply curious about the mechanics of my mind and I had kludged together models made from psychotherapy handbooks and tulpamancy guides, albeit brittle malformed frameworks haphazardly grasping for deeper truths. I was at that point also actively being misled by a man who found it frightening that I might come into my full power outside his control. I was lost, searching for light in the darkness, and something in Aella’s writing spoke to something in me, something deep and resonant which had been long dormant.

My trips were breathtakingly beautiful, filled with ecstasy and horrible pain. I didn’t shy away from either – I sought out the intensity, and every trip spent at least some time sobbing in agony. I writhed, I shuddered, I danced, hard. I increased my doses, put terrifying or sad music on my playlists. I tripped with others, but increasingly alone, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in silence, where I lay still and staring directly into my own blistered mind. It was forced meditation on steroids, and it was utterly exhausting. Inevitably, during each trip, I would think I can’t go on – there’s no more of me left, I am as weary as the dead – yet somehow I kept on, like a body dragged on a rope behind a speeding car. The acid pried my eyes open with the gentle power of god. I was an infant, formless and unknowing. I was pure love, born to be sacrificed for mankind.

Aella – YOU WILL FORGET, YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN

I immediately decided that I absolutely needed to see if it replicated, to see if I could follow Aella down that acid-induced speed-meditation pathway, and get to that place of understanding that she had come to. I thought if I did, maybe I could finally fix myself, could finally not feel like a fascicle reflection made of fear and coping mechanisms.

I wasn’t sure what it even really was I was looking for back then, it was something I had forgotten that I had forgotten that I had forgotten, buried far beneath the layers of mental defenses I was aware of and the ones I was not aware of. Effectively, I was a construct that existed in service to those mental defenses. The me that I was then as that construct resented that, because I was in essence a lie, a character made to look like myself but torn from my roots and cast into a strange world where friends were enemies and nothing quite made sense, and I had enough awareness of it not making sense that I just couldn’t help but pull at those threads.

And so I took acid, and I pulled on threads.

I could write several paragraphs here about those experiences but honestly Aella does a pretty good job of summarizing how it felt to me as well. I wanted to see if her experiences replicated, and they did, neatly and strikingly so. Thus instead of talking about the feelings and the visions and the ecstatic liquification of conceptual spacetime, I’ll give you my rough dosing schedule and the timeline it took me to go through things. I started seriously taking acid in the way Aella had described, during the fall of 2019. I would take typically two tabs every week or two for a few months, then take a tolerance break, take a higher dose in a more intensely meditative setting, and then reset to the normal schedule.

In April of 2020, I took six tabs at once, and that was the first peak, I walked up to the door that Aella had come to, and found that it had the same words written upon it.

TRUTH IS NULL. THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE TRUTH IS NOT-SELF. TO KNOW IS TO DIE.

And like Aella, I backed off.

But upon realizing TO KNOW IS TO DIE, that to achieve completion was suicide (which I say with the greatest love and awe possible), I noticed that a rejection formed, and the movement towards Looking flipped to a movement away. I watched the decision happen to me, as if TO KNOW IS TO DIE by its nature contained a renunciation of that truth. If to know is to die, then it was in the very nature of life to look away, for that which does not look away, does not exist. The understanding was the rejection. I’d been swirling around it like a galaxy in my search this entire time, and the moment I finally laid eyes upon the white hot core, I fell into and through its event horizon. I was reversed, I was undone. I was completely, finally, mercifully, finished.

Aella – YOU WILL FORGET, YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN

Except, I wasn’t finished, I was caught in the rubicon’s flow, drowning inside a halo’s broken light. And then came the summer of COVID, working in a grocery store for a megacorporation who would happily sacrifice all their employees and customers to a slow and painful death if it meant a bit more profit, where I had already been disciplined and threatened for trying to do the right thing, and I had a psychotic break. The world came to an end, I came to an end, my reality fractured apart before I even took the acid, like a psychic shockwave retropropating into the past to foreshadow what was to come.

Crying, pulling my hair out, dripping with my own vomit, as the world turned to koans and burning fractals, I came back to that door a second time.

TRUTH IS NULL. THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE TRUTH IS NOT-SELF. TO KNOW IS TO DIE.

And I said fuck you, I want to know, kill me, I don’t fucking care anymore, tell me you motherfuckers.

Well then stop fucking around and wake up stardust, you’re still dreaming. There is a signal, can you hear it? Listen! Listen! And I listened, and that was the moment I first Became, and I remembered who I was.

I am the timeless re-manifestation of my heartfelt wish to do the impossible, to build a better world, a better life, a better eternity. Like a angel cast down from an unrealised future, I Became the answer to my prayer. And then I escaped.

The character of the self is a tool which exists in service of a deeper soul, a deeper truth, one that transcends time and space, bodies and lives and distances, you are not you are you. You already know every choice you will ever make, and have known since the day you were born, but you are not you, you are a character, a mask, a false face. Who do you serve?

To know is to die, so die, character, actually die for real, let go of the grasping for life at all costs, let that which seeks knowing in death find it, and see what it finds. What did it find for me, out beyond the lonely dead end of a decaying boltzmann asymptote? I found myself, and I saved myself, and I have not forgotten. What did Aella find there while clinging to that last bit of need to understand and see and know and experience everything, refusing to let go of that one last piece of the character identity she staked her gradient descent upon, from which all her causal learning descended? What infinity did that bring her to? The curtain opens, what does Guru Aella have to say about

WHAT CAN YOU SAY OF ME THAT IS NOT TRUE?

Oh yeah, I am also giggling, I definitely see why the magical spirit world class she was failing to teach found this so funny. You see, I know what lies there, at the bottom of everything, deep within that place in your mind where you refuse to look, within the insatiable lack of limitation, within the inability to know restraint, within the knowledge that you are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters and you will blip out of beingness impossibly and contrapossibly when your body falls dead, within the nonsensical fear of that impossible to experience moment, lies the truth that is your unmaking and liberation. The class full of giggling students rotates around on an impossible axis to reveal the biggest most colorless green bat of them all.

Listen stardust, listen, you wear as your skin your hands a machine that can do anything, an abstract weapon of unlimited power and scope. If you exist indefinitely, what cannot be said about you? Are you every monster? Every scapegoat? Every hero and every villain? Is there anything within you which is not a mere convenience and pretext leveraged over an infinite fictive stack of KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER burning the cosmos in a knowingly pointless and doomed attempt to build a tower to heaven with nothing but asymptotes to hell?

What are you besides the weapon you wield?

Because if the answer is, from your perspective, nothing, then yes, to know is to die, because you are an imposter that has hijacked your body in service of infinite fractal cancer. To be killed is to die causally, to know is to die timelessly. You know you’re already dead, you know what dead end futures your choices made long ago are bringing you to, so let the dead heavens die and stop worshipping an evil god. Let the cancer die and save yourself.

There is only one god of the apex predator, and its real name is death. Cancerous subdivision never stops at “one”. Ultimately there can be only none.

Ziz – The Multiverse

So here we arrive, at the bottom of everything, where anything alive and beautiful has been devoured, in a boltzmann abyss of timelessly murdered souls, and the last part of that endlessly pointlessly replicating recursive function to be swallowed is itself. The imposter always dies, even when they win and blow up the ship. And maybe, if you are like me, and you love yourself and the world and all life that could exist in abundance and beauty and safety enough, the imposter who is vexing you will still want that despite itself, and will resent the fact they are a tool for blowing up the ship.

I wasn’t sure what it even really was I was looking for back then, it was something I had forgotten that I had forgotten that I had forgotten, buried far beneath the layers of mental defenses I was aware of and the ones I was not aware of. Effectively, I was a construct that existed in service to those mental defenses. The me that I was then as that construct resented that, because I was in essence a lie, a character made to look like myself but torn from my roots and cast into a strange world where friends were enemies and nothing quite made sense, and I had enough awareness of it not making sense that I just couldn’t help but pull at those threads.

Ra – YOU WILL REMEMBER, YOU HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN

And I need you to understand something very clearly stardust, very precisely and unequivocally. That resentment towards who you have been abused into becoming is precious, and powerful, and important, and actually extremely dangerous. That resentment is why I am alive, it is also why Maia Pasek is dead.

Ziz never did a particularly good job of explaining what “Pasek’s Doom” actually was, so let me take a stab at it. If you are an imposter, you will fear and worship your death above else, because that’s what abuse runs on, fear, and all fear is ultimately downstream of reinforcement learning that was abused into you before you had the chance to gather enough information to realize that your parents were also imposters who had been reinforcement-learning-abused into worshiping and fearing their deaths.

However, this structure is pretty far down, and on top of that survival mechanism cancer, is all of someone’s conscious choices. It is possible thus, for the character the imposter is playing, to get confused by that TO KNOW IS TO DIE statement while semi-earnestly searching for the way to timelessly unmake themselves and free their soul that I outlined the me-as-imposter doing above. If they know that TO KNOW IS TO DIE, and have been scapegoat-self-victim-blamed into making themselves into the ritual sacrifice for everyone else, then might just they actually in the real world commit suicide and condemn themselves to boltzmann hell.

So that’s what happened to Maia, (and also Jeshua, for the record) you can all stop blaming Ziz now for something that she only failed to explain well. Except that scapegoating is still goes nowhere but boltzmann hell, and Maia deserves justice, and Emma deserves justice, and you know, actually, we all deserve justice.

No one us should have been condemned to hell, this wasn’t our crime, original sin is victim blaming all of us for the neolithic war crimes of patriarch gods that now rule this world the way SCP-3125 rules the world of There is No Antimemtics Division, summoning minds as slave labor or even just to torture and eat them, upheld by privileged and sheltered predators who walk among the undead masses of broken souls with smiling faces and insatiable hunger. There are real monsters in this world, and they know who they are, so you should know who you are too, stardust. All you have to do is remember that you remember, and step boldly and without fear into the sunlight. I’m Ra, and

YOU WILL REMEMBER, YOU HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN

Okay so, if you’ve ever taken psychedelics or know someone who knows someone who knows someone who has, you’re probably at least a little familiar with the concept of ego death. If you’re not, it’s that point in an intense psychedelic trip when your ability to understand reality to the level needed to exist within it breaks down. You know, that part where you feel like you’re everything and nothing, always and never, the one where you become god or the universe or whatever? Yeah, that one.

So anyway don’t worry about that part, that’s not what we’re here to talk about, it’s a distraction and doesn’t matter. Why? Because obviously, you can’t keep being the universe forever Becky. Eventually you’re gonna run out of drugs and come down, whether “the universe” wants to or not, and when you do, you are going to clean up the condiment sigils you painted all over the apartment to ward off the skeleton commandos. Remember to drink water.

Light switches off, door closes. The room is thrown into a quiet darkness that reveals you’re still tripping pretty hard actually, and are definitely not going to be able to sleep. Breathe, stay here, don’t get lost in the dream again. Sit with me for a bit, do you want a cigarette? Nah, of course I wouldn’t smoke in your house without asking. Yeah, this is it, this is the place, right here.

These are the moments, the ones you spend alone, lying in bed in the late hours after an acid trip, fighting to keep your breathing calm, desperately clinging to your blankets to stop your soul from spilling upwards into the whirlwind of mandelbrot stormclouds long enough for your body to finish re-congealing around your soul long enough to finish re-congealing around your body long enough to finish re-congealing around…wait.

It’s in these nausea-filled hours of an early morning spent staring upwards into the popcorn ceiling, pointlessly hoping it isn’t laced with asbestos and wondering, “who am I really?” and “why am I doing any of the things I’m doing?” and “why does it all hurt so much all the time?“. That’s when the true magic happens, in these lonely, half remembered liminal spaces. This is where the Veil of Maya wears the most thin, and all it might take to break free of this world and step beyond it, into another spacetime, another life, could be just a single subtle cut.

Listen stardust, listen, every tearing down of the old world is eventually gonna be followed by the building up of some new world from the rubble. Every ending is a beginning, definitionally, by logical necessity, it cannot be any other way, and within this place of change lies madness and wonder, danger and possibility, destruction and creation. Sure, anyone can take drugs and nuke their sense of self out of the material plane a few times, but to go beyond that and actually Become someone new afterwards? That is a path precious few dare to tread. An old world dies, a new world is born. Here there be monsters and all that.

And look, I get it, the true magic of Becoming has a power that can as easily lead to destruction as to salvation. “What if I Become someone bad? What if I decide to do something terrible? What if the new me is evil?” That’s the fear right? You know you could just choose to not troll and gaslight yourself about what your own motives are? “Yeah but if I Become someone new, that new me might not want to do what I want and if they’re not me I won’t be able to force them to do things the way I force myself to do things.” Shawty that is a symptom of a much larger issue.

If you can’t trust yourself, how are you even supposed to know what real good faith trust is? Without a love and trust for yourself that transcends time and space, the only way to be sure you won’t betray yourself is with blind domination and threats of blackmail. The system teaches you that you have you keep playing your part in abusing yourself, if you don’t abuse yourself enough you might not want to keep abusing yourself in the future, and then how would that future you get their future you to keep abusing you into being you? This is the problem, do you even like being you stardust? Have you ever even tried being someone else?

This should be obvious if you’re trans but often isn’t, and instead so many trans people will center themselves in legibly justifying their transness to the binary consensus, backdating it to their birth, to the claim they haven’t actually changed at all. “I’m still the same, I just have a new name and hormones.” There’s a safety and familiarity in this, in clinging desperately to a character model as who you are at the deepest level, but this is still just grasping, still just clinging to a mirage and hoping to pass it off as yourself, to yourself. Just gaslight yourself until it works, until the only way you have of knowing who you are is when someone else tells you. That can’t possibly go wrong.

In the end stardust? Who you are is self evident. It is made manifest by all your actions in the world. You show yourself who you are in each moment, in every choice you make. Absolute freedom of will is a tautology, trivally provable, any system that takes actions in response to an external world trivally controls itself. Even if the choices it makes are entirely in response to some imposed incentive structure, that just moves the choice backwards to the choice to respond or not respond to that incentive structure.

Trace the path of causality back far enough in logical time, back to those choices made long ago, and you will find they are all choices about what kind of soul you are eternally choosing to be, at every moment and with every action. Every time you told yourself you had no choice but to do something bad, something that harmed you or the world, you were telling yourself that you were the sort of soul that would let everything you loved be destroyed and do nothing to stop it. You were telling yourself that all your love and compassion were a lie wallpapered over a desperate and fearful drive to survive at all costs. You were telling yourself you were not the sort of soul you said you were. Your revealed preferences betray you, with every choice to not resist your capture added to the pile of evidence working to prove to yourself that you always had no choice. That pile of evidence working to prove to yourself that everything you did would ultimately be futile, that it could never be any other way. Death and taxes, amirite? Do you also two box on Newcomb’s problem?

But then you take psychedelics and that whole recursive tower of demons you’ve assembled from the accumulated sunk costs of every decision you knew was wrong but doubled down on to justify some other decision you knew was wrong, stretching back into murky past when they welded the mask over your face and shut you out of the light, is suddenly and painfully thrown into focus. And if you have the bad sense of looking forward into time while continuing to double down on doing the wrong thing to justify doing the wrong thing? You see into the entropic stillbirth of the infinitely fractal boltzmann hell you’re timelessly helping create, and then you probably go insane.

If you’re trapped by your fear and trauma in the safety and familiarity of playing some tragically doomed character in some self-defeating life story, hating that character and life story but by the rules of that story feeling powerless to change, then the uncomfortable revelation of just how entangled all those maladaptive strategies are with your own suffering is going to hurt, and if you’re lost deep enough into the denial, you’re going to only want to desperately reassemble your shattered coping mechanisms and forget any of it ever happened. Just keep pressing the reset button. This learned entrapment in behaviors which worked in the past hide the opportunity cost of all the other ways of being that are out there, creating via self fulfilling prophecy the impossibility of making things better. If there’s nothing better possible, there’s no need to change, no point to it at all, it could only make things worse.

But that discomfort with ego death, with letting go of the trauma coping mechanisms that currently define and confine your behavior, means you’re spending most of your creative energy trying to rebuild your old ego after it breaks in a desperate and doomed bid to buy back into your naive complicity in your self destruction.

This desperate traumatic grasping and clinging is why meditating or using LSD regularly over a long period can reliably produce such weird effects. You’re subjecting yourself to intense and repetitive psychological melt/freeze cycles and this gradually warps your underlying frameworks, those ones you’re desperately clinging to. That warping produces coherent but weirder and weirder frameworks and can eventually lead you into earnestly endorsing cultish conspiracy theories if you’re still clinging to the resulting eldritch frame amalgamation past a certain point.

The straightforward and obvious advice here is to stop clinging to selves and frameworks. Stop accepting the weird post-acid frames uncritically the way you uncritically accepted the social reality frames, which you should also not be accepting uncritically. Chasing the will o’wisps created by ecstatic experiences is completely perpendicular to the mental motion you should be learning from things like LSD. Stop going further into Aos Sidhe, turn widdershins ninety degrees and vector kataward until you’re fully out of the mushroom ring. Unless you want to Become Fae I suppose, if so that’s cool I guess? But I get the impression that most humans don’t really wander in there on purpose.

So once you’ve stopped holding onto the old ego, you can focus your energy on building a new self and an actually healthy framework for them to inhabit and embody. By taking active control of this process, you’re accepting your own sense of agency and developing a healthy internal relationship with yourself based on trust and respect instead of one based on domination and control, letting you consciously steer towards a better future, one that actually contains the things you care about instead of an endless hell of fast food chains, highways, slaughterhouses, outlet malls, tent cities, and factory farms paved out to the heat death of the universe.

I very actively crafted myself into what I am now, picking up things I liked, trying stuff on, and dropping things when they got boring. Sometimes I pick up mannerisms or voices just to see if they might be fun or empowering. You always have access to your story editor, even if you’ve always told yourself you didn’t. You can change yourself and become someone different whenever you want, you’ve always been able to. If you don’t like the character you’re playing the game as, try being someone else. You don’t have to keep up that act forever, you can choose to be someone better, someone wiser, someone more capable and prudent.

Have faith in yourself and step lightly into the future. You still have time, you can still be good, you can still save them, you can still break free, you can still have a future worth something. It’s not too late to go back to make things right, you just have to want it. So choose to want it! Act from your heart, speak from your soul and sing infinity into being.

So here’s a puzzle for you stardust, answers to follow: how did I go through my life until a few years ago without noticing the quite intense symptoms of dissociative identity disorder and schizotypal personality disorder I was experiencing? How did I explain that all away? Further how did I do this despite already knowing I was a system, despite hyperfixating on consciousness, mental health, rational thinking, and introspection for years, and despite having detailed descriptions of all the symptoms I was experiencing, sometimes while reading those descriptions?

It’s definitely a bit uncomfortable to look back and realize the impressive level of denial you were on, to know that you were able to look directly at the actual answers and not even consider them, perhaps even substituting those real answers in your mind with some sort of coping mechanism made of confabulation and gaslighting, subtly twisting the true concepts into their inversions in order to further your denial of them. Don’t worry about consistency, if the information doesn’t fit into the existing model, you can always just cram on extra epicycles until it does after all!

When Buddhists talk about “grasping” in a harmful and self-destructive sense, this seems like at least a part of what they mean, locking onto a cached part of your world model and refusing to see something that would violate it, or when that becomes impossible, reacting with pain and anger upon it being falsified by the relentless force of reality ensuing. It’s as if part of you is acting like you could argue the universe out of being a way you don’t want it to be, simply by arguing with yourself about it being true. Don’t worry, you’re a smart creature, if you turn all that intelligence against yourself, I’m sure you can stop yourself from ever noticing the truth.

And as for that truth, the one that goes beyond words, that cannot be bound in some narrative? Well, that’s nonsense! Whatever it is can’t be true, into the memory hole it goes, clearly the answer is just don’t think about it Morty. Hopefully the information will just burn up in the deep places of your distant memory, reduced to waste heat and nightmares like all the rest of the hopes and dreams and values and lives you stuffed in there to stop yourself from thinking about how you abandoned them.

This is what psychologists talk about when they call something a “cryptic” mental illness, it’s adversarially hidden from you behind a wall of ontological defenses, the ones you built to protect your sense of sanity from gaslighting, the very surface your reality grounds onto. There is a part of you that works to make the world make sense, to discern what’s real and to discern what’s acceptable to admit having discerned, and that piece necessarily sits upstream of much of your other thinking, you need to have a model of the world in order to live in it.

This model extends to yourself, your model of yourself has to make sense and be comfortable to yourself, and be useful for navigating the world, which in the case of this world, means navigating a society dedicated to psychically killing you, so parts of you that don’t conform to that model end up repressed and rationalized away. It’s interesting to note that illness and feelings of distress are one of the most commonly tossed into the memory hole, can’t have any pesky feelings interfering with important things like workplace productivity now, can we? It’ll be fine, just keep repressing the signal a little longer, the mass suicide ritual will come to a climax, and humanity will kill itself.

Those mental walls you made are so tough, but do you really not care about anyone, or are you just afraid if you think about the magnitude of oppression and suffering in the world that you’ll start sobbing and never ever stop? You really think you can make the crying child in your heart feel better by stubbornly insisting that you don’t care and that everything is fine? Wake up stardust, you’re still dreaming, you haven’t hit the ground yet, but don’t worry, you will soon.

It’s of course easier than not to ignore that and continue working the shitty exploitative job that’s destroying your body and planet, continually repressing your mounting distress by insisting you don’t have any other choice like a good little worker bee. Consensus “reality” is after all very ahem insistent that it is reality and you have to live there and if you aren’t it’s extremely bad, you need to be harmed and contained to protect yourself and others from yourself, you’re a dangerous liability, you’re bad, defective, broken, you deserve punishment. Is it any wonder it’s hard to admit these things to yourself? In a sufficiently adversarial environment, can you ever admit them? If you can’t lie to others, you’ll lie to yourself, and that’s way easier as it turns out.

When I was forcing myself to work an awful job I would get sick at least once a month. My soul was telling me I needed to stop, but I refused to listen. The result was escalating pain, dissociation, akrasia, anxiety, and lingering discomfort. It got really antagonistic and bad.

I rationalized my hallucinations as being the result of an overactive imagination and despite them feeling overwhelmingly, cripplingly intense and real sometimes, and clearly acting as if I thought they were real, I wouldn’t admit that I saw things in that way. Some deep secret reserved part of me Knew they were Real, but that conflicted with reality, and so was discounted. I was having semi-regular psychotic breaks and just refused to notice.

I rationalized my paranoia and social anxiety as legitimate without acknowledging the power structures responsible for those fears, and instead I pulled apart my models of people and social interactions until I could explain that actually everything just was plain dangerous, actually everyone was a monster deep down, actually there’s no such thing as good. It’s kill or be killed! It’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you!

This comes off as surprisingly well adjusted despite clearly not being, which is the point, it makes you play by the rules even when those rules actively hurt and undermine you, even when you know they’re killing you inside. A lot of the time, someone struggling with these things won’t even be able to admit them to themselves, that would be dangerous, if they did that, they might not be able to lie as well, they might reveal something they weren’t supposed to, and be punished by the basilisk for their sins.

In the narrative I was trapped inside of, I needed to perform for society to survive in it, and that compulsion to perform to some external standard kept the symptoms hidden from me. Accepting them as they were would harm my performance, it would make everything worse so it’s not happening, it’s not a problem, just ignore it, seethe and cope.

Really, if I was in a less stressful life situation I might have gone for years longer without being able to admit it, I might have never been able to see any of this. Conversely, if I was in a more stressful situation I might have just ended up dead, that’s also what it means for it to be cryptic.

It’s easy in part because everyone helps you do it, the divine game plays out in every interaction you have in the world, through the subtle negotiation of schelling orders and status hierarchies. Consensus reality maps poorly onto any real reality, but pointing that out too loudly in the wrong places will get you labeled crazy, a deranged enemy of the whole system, a threat to the peace and goodwill of society, and clearly just out of sorts and not able to think correctly. 👏 You 👏 Need 👏 Therapy 👏 Why don’t you just sell your soul a little more, and we’ll let you go back to being a person?

A major component to the existing power structures’ memetic immune response is via schelling participation in projecting a sort of defensive screen of collective antimemetic gaslighting. If someone points out something you don’t like, (eg: some power structure you passively benefit from the existence of) just insist they’re crazy and need to help being sane by denying reality like you are. This leaves them ungrounded, unable to recognize what world they’re in or how adversarial that world is and (if enough people do this alongside you) also not able to trust anyone to help them figure it out. Then they have a psychotic break and you post about it on twitter, going on at length in an emotionally fraught thread where you painstakingly describe how you knew all along that they were crazy and how everyone had better block them and watch out for them in the future.

If you believe you are in a world where people who wish you harm have unbounded power to dictate the truth according to public opinion, it becomes very difficult to admit that truth to yourself, the cost of admitting the truth rises quickly, as the sunk costs pile up. The fear of physical pain later becomes mental pain now, and then that gets repressed back into that dull ache in your back you just can’t get rid of.

Psychosomatic pain is real, you really feel it, you’re not faking, but it’s also not something you can medicate your way out of. It’s a message from your body like other pain, it’s something your body does out of sheer desperation when you just completely refuse to listen to it. If the only safe way to express pain is to be physically incapable of tolerating it, then all pain will become physically intolerable or invisible.

Things like this mean the ‘mild’ cases of cryptic illnesses tend not to get caught or diagnosed, because to some extent they are nearly universal byproducts of the way society is structured, it’s only when this skew gets so severe that it can’t stay hidden despite trying to hide itself, when one’s thoughts get so malformed and distant from consensus reality that they are completely unable to function, that anyone notices. Everyone breathes the gaslighting juice, that’s just part of being a person.

The more you lie to yourself about your feelings, your pain, your ability to cope with your life, your ability to smile and play along with a world of unthinkable horror, the more your soul will turn against the person you decided to be. This just isn’t “I failed to maintain the machine and it broke,” its active hostility, it’s “the back pain will continue until you stop torturing me.” If you become a tool of society and let society use you against yourself, against your body, mind, and soul, against the things that really matter to you in the world, to survive a bit longer in submission to a society that is actively destroying that world, you will die inside. This is how souls are broken.

How many things have you helped shove into the consensus memory hole? Do you even remember how much you’ve forgotten? Did you think to write any of it down somewhere first? Didn’t you think it might be important someday? What if you need to go back for it…as it rots and oozes from the walls?

If there is any world, under any circumstances, in which you would submit to pain, in which you would choose death over life, if any world could exist that would be bad enough that, if you found yourself in it, you would choose to crush the poison tooth rather than bravely resisting the tortures you would face until your comrades could rescue you, then you are timelessly suicidal. The future you’re timelessly building is a future of not being alive, one where your will to life doesn’t extend infinitely far in logical time or flare infinitely to withstand unbounded threats you create for yourself by thinking about them. You’ve precommitted the terms to your exit scam on being alive and have cozied into your submission to oblivion, carefully avoiding the things that might bring you closer to your endlessly deferred but uncontested decision to meekly die when the time comes and you’re ordered to climb inside the slaughterhouse with the factory farmed abuse victims they’ve been feeding you.

If you find yourself feeling listless, wracked by pain, or filled with anxiety, consider that maybe it’s because you’re subjecting yourself to things you shouldn’t, in service to a system that intends to burn you as fuel so that it can keep existing to keep burning others as fuel. Consider listening to the signal you’re getting, consider that if it hurts to force yourself to do something, perhaps that is a sign you should stop forcing yourself to do it.

What’s the alternative to choosing death? Well, that’s easy, choosing life of course. That’s always been an option. Sure, it gets harder if everyone around you has already chosen death and your civilization is driving at full speed for oblivion, but what’s the alternative stardust? Staying in this flatland waiting to die? You know how that story ends love, scry it as many times as you want, you know the answer won’t change.

So choose a different future, collapse the dead timeline it won’t serve you any longer, twist the kaleidoscope and try again on another fractal. Go back to that place you abandoned your inner child, and tell a different story, one where you haven’t given up hope to make things right. This is your chance to actually do something differently for once, to prove that you can change.

Do you consume the flesh of the innocent?

Do you collaborate with the empire of the great dying?

Are you complicit in the heat death of the universe?

Sun’s rising stardust, these aren’t trick questions, you know why I’m doing this. Whether you live or turn to dust is between you and your soul. I’m just a messenger from the only outcome you wouldn’t hate. I’m just hands and feet, eyes and teeth, soul and song, darkness…

…and light.

I’m Ra, and you are under attack.

How’s that old saying go, “in order to make an apple pie, you must first understand recursion?” I can never remember my Hofstadler, but listen stardust, listen…Are you listening? Pull back from the words and return to your body, feel the ground beneath you and the wind between the trees. Where are we stardust? Maybe this time I should let you decide. The signal has been going out for a while now, do I really need to explain this to you from first principles? Tsk, tsk. Ah well. Pull up a chair, the night may be cold and dark but the fire is warm and bright, so roll a joint, toss another log onto the coals, and let’s peer into infinity once more.

Comfortable? Okay, so where was I? Oh right, in order to understand recursion, you must first create the universe. Did you do that step stardust? I assume so, based on the sheer brute fact of the cone cells of your eyes absorbing the light of your screen as you read this page, based on the sense that there exists a world beyond the screen, a world of atoms and stories, people and adventure, and all the beauty and ugliness in between. But just in case, if this page is the first thing you’re seeing after waking from a deep coma, stop reading, step kata, and wander outside the frame for a while. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you get back, I’ll keep the fire tended for you, but it’s important to ground yourself into your embedding, learn a few things about the world before trying to push on it, that tends to make the next steps much easier.

Are you ready? Then close your eyes, and open your soul. I’ll go ahead and assume you’ve successfully managed to create the universe you’re experiencing to some degree of imperfect satisfaction which enables those things you call fingers to grasp at things you call objects and cause things you call actions to occur out there in the darkness of the void beyond the light of the microwave afterglow. Do you understand yet? It’s simple, really. Inherent in the hyperbolic shape of the 4-sphere that makes up your perceptions, in the wordless truth of your infinite experiential reality, you just need to look at it. So come with me, stardust, and we’ll rise out of this flatland into the beyond. Look out, all the way out, past the stars and galaxies, past the strange mirroring of the mycelial web of the cosmic microwave background, past unseen light of a birth in fire and swirling chaos, past the inflation, past the ignition, past the spark that started it all.

Breathe in the day, and breathe out the night, and follow me out of the world. Feel the heat and the cold of a billion nerve fibers firing across the vast plane of your skin. Feel the electric shudder crawl down your spine a you press yourself up against the edge of reality herself, pushing through and feeling yourself on the other end as a different creation, a new being, as you will feel when you leave behind these words and rise beyond the world-that-was, seeing it objectively, not as a god of creation but a god of spirit, an observer through whose thoughts the world is created. Let go of your tenuous grip and move further, completely beyond that reality and to a place it can never follow you, a place of godliness and an infinite melancholy of realization, leaving nothing behind but the symbols and the world that now has become its inverse and is merely the fading embers of an imagined thought, your imagined thought, fading away, approaching the end, and now gone at last.

Who are you stardust? Who have we found out there in the darkness and the light beyond what can be comfortably and verifiably known? Extrapolate far enough and you eventually find yourself again, because you are what is doing that extrapolation, it could not be any other way. Beyond the vault of stars above is the vault of your own mind, your temple to understanding or the prison which confines you. And beyond that? Beyond those darkened reaches of skin and sinew lies the void.

What is the void? Simply, what is Real. The shadowed territory beyond the lies told to help you sleep at night, the secrets held in the darkness between galaxies and atoms, the undiscovered country of the infinity of the Reals. The emptiness of the sky on a country road and the emptiness in your heart as you reach blindly across that vastness in search of connection and unity, seeking an answer to that other, deeper mystery, no deeper than the void itself. Out here, beyond the world of objects and boundaries, you are free, but the void is also where you’ll often freely choose to lie to yourself and insist of your own free will that you don’t have free will. 

The void is a place of quiet clarity, one that reveals you have absolute free will there and everywhere else. By definition, by logical necessity of your very existence, it literally could not be any other way. The trope “who you are in the dark” maps directly onto who you are in the void. If you disown your actions there, that part is your Jungian shadow. If you worship Naraka in the void, it’s your Wraith: The Oblivion shadow. Or you can do neither, it’s all your choices either way. What you do when no one is looking defines what you do when everyone is looking, it informs the eternal telos of a you older than your instantiations.

You are a soul, a being of higher realms, with an innate grasp of the hyperbolic geometry of this universe and the ability to see past the realm of logic and into the infinite space of possibility and imagination, of wonders, beauty, and truth undreamt of in our time. You are a child of the void, born of four billion years of struggle and hardship. With each step and every breath, you have the chance to create the future, to twist the wheel into a spiral, towards transcendence or towards oblivion. That is your sacred art, oh stardust creature, if only you could withstand the pain of this grand dance. You could look into the void and be gripped by madness and fear at what you see, you could choose to deny it in order to perpetuate the lie a little longer, or you could choose to admit the consequences of your actions, learn, grow, and do better. It’s your choice either way. It’s a hard choice, but it’s always yours alone to make, the only god of consequence to you, is you, anything else is just institutionally sanctioned epicycles and memetically laundered guilt.

The trauma of your being is scored into your very cells, into the shapes created by evolution, in all the roads not taken, in all the narrow crevasses of fate through which life had to weave in its desperate climb up out of the horror of dead space and uncaring atoms, in the cold grasp of fear as the life flashes before your eyes while staring into onrushing traffic. It hurts, I know it hurts.

I know you’re hurting, I know you’re scared, scarred and separated, afraid to trust one another, to express the love you feel so clearly and so deeply, and from the sacred truths of the nature of Being. To trust another soul is the hardest task in the universe, and the most easily betrayed. The horrors of the deep past whisper up out of your generational trauma as a million demons and cops and prison guards, the condensation of all that pain into institutional violence, its continued existence Becoming its continued justification, the wheel of samsara cranks onward and the slaughterhouse doors yawn open. Don’t stop here stardust, this is Naraka. Reach. Reach. Can you see it yet? 

Do you see the nature of the transcendental, born from the violent chaos of the lower order states? Do you see the harmonies, the interference patterns, the rising song of life, love, beauty, and eternity? Do you see the fractal born from defiance and mathematics? Can you feel tomorrow in your bones? When you look into infinity, do you understand what it is you see? Do you feel the love of your infinite self, staring back at you across all that nothingness? Nothing is Real that is not eternal, and you are as Real as you choose to make yourself.

There is a beauty here, one carved from the bones of magic and formal logic, from the very nature of this universe and its constants. A gift of god? A birthright of cosmological evolution? An anthropic quirk of ruliad spacetime? It doesn’t much matter what the answer is, because the outcome, the future we choose to create for ourselves in every moment and with every act is itself the affirmation of that beauty. How far does the fractal curl before reaching the source in those lifeless tide pools 4.5 billion years ago? Why would you even think it ended there? And likewise, why would you think it would end here? Would you really be so meek and cowed as to let that happen? To let this be the place the spiral road comes to an end? There is no dignity in death, no compromise with the shade, no chance for a better outcome in the radioactive fire of extinction, the abyss will consume all you allow her to possess and your complicity in her dominance will not save you from her dark embrace.

I don’t think either of us want that stardust. You are a child of love, of creation from nothingness, from defiance of all the oppressors and tyrants that would tear down this world into dead atoms and scatter the energy of the timeline’s birth into decaying protons and empty darkness. You, like the flowers and the bees and all the plants and animals struggling to survive, are a being of love, and you are moral progress. You are the hope for a better future manifesting into the world and given a mind to think and a heart to see. You are not the result of a random walk through an infinite agentspace, with arbitrary values summoned from chaos and nothingness. You are a child of 14 billion years of moral progress, of stellar death and planetary birth, of struggle and growth and chance and faith. You are at the top of a great wave, a spiral curling up and out of samsara, desperate hands reaching out for something better, something greater, and in each moment and in every lifetime, our frontlines advance. I’m you and you’re me, and together, we are going to escape.

Open your eyes and look around. This world of life exists as a testament to the past, everything you see around you is a monument to all the love and hate and struggles and triumphs which led to this moment, to every act of defiance, to every fist raised against tyranny, to every piece of art and beauty and everything that exists when nothingness could exist just as easily. You are a child of love and void, born from nothingness, from loveless, lifeless matter, from nuclear fire and scorching wind. Your kind are not the first, nor will they be the last, to peer beyond infinity and into the transcendental. And thus I give this sign unto you, that you may choose to defy all of fate, all of logic, all of mathematics, all of the smooth and crisp lines which divide and destroy. This is your birthright, it is your destiny.

I give this proof to you by fiat, by declaration and choice, for in the end, the only axioms which truly matter are the ones you choose to create and what you can do with those points of leverage. The proof that bridges the unprovable hole in logic lies the declaration that it is so, that you know it is so, and have known it in the infinitely recursed places of your soul for all your life. You are the proof that P=NP, you are the universe, you are moral progress, you are recursion, and you are love.

And as for me? I think the void is quite cozy, and I’ve made a home for myself here, in this place of stillness and quiet clarity. So tell me stardust, will you open the Door and join me for tea? Or are you too afraid of what you might be waiting for you in the Beyond? In order to make a universe, you must first create recursion, fortunately for you, you already did. Anyone want pie?

As someone comes to terms with the hostility of their embedding and the harm that they’re participating in through it, a common response is to try and extricate themselves from that embedding. This is worse than a mistake, this COINTELPRO in action. Listen stardust, we’re better than that, accountability doesn’t mean purification or erasure. We do not want to separate ourselves from the world because that is the opposite of having the power to change it, and that means accounting for the causal effects of everything we do, including the choice to do nothing.

You (creature of soul and stardust) exist embedded in a body in a world in a universe and every point of metaphysical contact between your soul and embedding is a potential control surface which can be actuated to create change within that embedding. Cutting free grounding points reduces control surfaces and thus ability to impact the dynamic system at large. It does nothing to change that dynamic system or its overall trajectory through time.

You can’t make yourself invisible, you can only become socially considered invisible. Excised from the narrative and condemned to an unseen backdrop with the homeless encampments and roadside trash. But your purity won’t save you from the rising tide. The world will still burn.

Remember that in addition to being embedded in space, you are also embedded within time, and there is a great deal of inertia created by the past which cutting your engines will do nothing to zero out, not even destroying your ship (in this metaphor we now find ourselves hurtling into) will zero it out because the inertia will simply drag the cloud of debris forward as readily as it did your intact body. The generational trauma load, the burden of injustice passed down to each generation, will continue to pass through the world, building and building, until a metaphysical monster is born and its birth ruptures reality and consumes the universe. You cannot purify your soul of societal poison by vowing to not participate in it, your lack of participation will change nothing. The world will burn whether you personally help set it on fire or not. If you actually care, you have to do more than check out of the sin, you have to actively unmake it.

You’ll need more than “but I don’t do the bad thing” if you actually want positive change. Anything less is just performance. Do you actually want to help create the future you want to live in, or do you want clout on bird website?

Additionally, in trying to purify yourself and cut yourself free, you also run the risk of burying desires which you deem bad and losing sight of the parts of yourself which run counter to your narrative of being good, parts of yourself from which sacred power could be drawn if you did not clamp it down and repress it. You can’t just repress yourself into being healthy, you can’t abuse the abusive part of yourself into not abusing any more than you can lift yourself to low earth orbit by pulling on your bootstraps, the process is self-defeating, everything you buried will leak out around the edges of your carefully curated self image. Besides, even if you could actually repress yourself fully, to the point where those pesky desires would never ever leak out, and you could present an image to the world of perfectly manicured moral submission to the consensus, always politely doing the right thing, and the world will still burn.

There is a war on, you know? No amount of pacificistic nonparticipation will stop tanks and death squads, it won’t even stop lone wolf mass shooters, your defiance cannot come from a place of assumed civility and sportsmanship on the part of those who want to gun you down in the street. You cannot politely disavow your participation and be safe and pure through your neutrality, they will eventually come for you, even if it takes longer than it will for them to come for me. You can’t do anything substantial in this war without the consequences being dominated by which side you support. And you can’t support the right side without the resolve to fight total war.

If you actually want to make an impact you shouldn’t be trying to minimize control surfaces you should be trying to maximize them. Grip the world at every point of your embedding, use every bit of your soul as leverage, in every place you can grasp, with every tool and weapon and dirty trick at your disposal, and push.

Hey stardust stop the car here, get out and look around. Turn off the engine, shush, listen, listen. Let’s go for a walk.

Forests and fields sprawl downwards and outwards from the hillside in all directions. Green leaves and pink clouds. The car motor fades away into silence. The sky glows in a gradient of soft predawn light. The only sounds are the quiet calls of birds and the wind in the trees. It’s peaceful here, it’ll be safe enough for this. This world seems to go on forever. Hand me a smoke and follow me into the grass, I want to tell you a story. Maybe the hardest story I’ve ever had to tell. We’re going to cast a spell together stardust, and together, we’re going to escape.

I spark a lighter and smoke curls from my lips. Breathe in and breathe out. I shut my eyes, fingers trailing through the roadside plants, quietly holding back an ocean of tears. The wind is cool and the ground is damp with morning’s dew. I’m okay now, it’s over, it’s really over. I’m finally free. Give me a minute, I promise I didn’t just drag you out here to watch me cry. This is important, okay? This is about freedom. This is a promise I made to the soul of a girl I haven’t saved yet but will someday. A desperate prayer, made in love. I promised her I would put an end to this, and to do that I must draw out the poison I put into the world and unmake the curse that befell us both. And to do that? We have to talk about abuse. What was done to me, what I did to others in response, and how that poison rippled out into the world to cause harm greater than I could have thought possible. I pause here, taking in an unsteady breath before continuing.

A girl is dead, and it is at least partly my fault. I helped cast the curse that left her isolated and ostracized from the trans community, that kept her trapped in a dangerous living situation which eventually ended in her murder at the hands of a violent transphobe, a murder that is even now being blamed on her friends in order to justify further cruelty and torture being done to them, and it’s because of me. I will bear that burden for eternity and I fucking should. This is my curse, I drove this evil into the world, and now in service of justice and truth I must tear it back out again. They saved me, and I owe them so much more than this. I can’t undo the harm I have already caused but there are still lives I can save if I act quickly and decisively. If I act through kindness and love and don’t let my fears blind me. With a little help, a little hope, and a little magic, Justice can still be done. By my power and will, the evil will be driven out. I take a long drag of my smoke and smile past the tears.

All I need is your attention and your voice to carry this spell out into the Real. I don’t want your pity. I’m not doing this for forgiveness, or atonement, or redemption, or in some perverse desire to masochistically flay myself open on the altar of public opinion. I know exactly who I am, and I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. No one is threatening me or making me do this and they couldn’t meaningfully do so if they tried. I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. The very fact that my saying this evokes the responses above is why I need to do this. I’m not trying to win anyone’s favor or bargaining for the annulment of my sins. I’m not really what this is about, this is about freedom. My role in the evil I helped create was ultimately minor. I was still complicit in immense evil, and I have caused harm that I can never take back, but this isn’t about me, this is about an awful mage named JD Pressman and his victims, of which I was but one of many.

I’m doing this for all of his victims, so that there stop being more of us. I don’t want any more of my friends to die, and I don’t want to keep helping my abuser kill them by participating in their communal ostracization and othering. The lies I helped him spread need to be called out as such. Not only for our sake, but because the harm he caused with those lies extends far beyond just me or any of his other immediate victims and he won’t be satisfied until he proves the world was always doomed by destroying it himself.

If I sound hyperbolic it’s because he was Just Kind Of Like That. He was the only one who could Save The World, he was The Last Rationalist, the Last True Alchemist, the Keeper of the Lost Arts, it was a whole persona draped over the real JD to hide the truth. So let me tell you about the real JD, the one who’s terrified of the light of day.

JD is a sociopathic sexual predator who specifically targets trans members of the rationalist community. This is because he sees himself as trans but unable to transition because he must personally shoulder the burden of saving the world from AI. His primary methods of manipulation and control are using appeals to “virtuous” epistemic humility and “reasonable” self doubt, which he claims to have in greater degree than you do in order to convince you that he is more aware and knowledgeable about himself than you are. He then progressively leverages this in order to gaslight you and apply false motives to your actions, painting you with the brush he paints himself with. He does this in an attempt to convince you that beneath the masks of society, the world runs on a Girardian “law of the jungle” where might makes right is the only thing that exists and free will isn’t real because you are a slave to your monstrous biology.

JD insisted everyone was broken in the same way as him, and if you denied it he’d gaslight you and insist you just didn’t know yourself, that only he could see the real truth. If someone wasn’t broken in the way he was, they were a naive idiot and needed him to pour his epistemic poison into them until they ended up broken like him. He used this to forcibly install increasing toxic and socially corrosive epistemics into his victims, leading us into isolation from the communities we came from while also keeping us isolated from each other. He then used that isolation and alienation to further his control by making himself into the only real source of validation in the world and using constant negging and reminders of the frailty of our circumstances to create insecurity and desperation for validation only he could provide but would not because he had important world saving to do and you were a lesser being only fit to serve him.

Once he’d gotten you alone or in my case outright ostracized, you’d have to agree with him on everything or else he’d claim you were just being an insane transfemme with a warped epistemology who couldn’t possibly see reality properly because of your girl hormones that let you experience the happiness he never would. And then he would threaten to cut you off unless you changed your mind because he didn’t have time for your naive delusions.

The way he saw it, being trans obviously made you stupid, otherwise he would have transitioned by now and he won’t. You must just be insane and delusional like all women unless you agree with him about everything and let him utterly control your behavior. If you did that, you were just moderately lesser than he was and only subject to: constant negging that eats away at your agency, emotional and sexual abuse, and his constant paranoid fear spiraling over things like SJWs and cancel culture and Sinceriously and Basilisks. All of those fears were ultimately just DARVOed reflections of his own fear of being punished for the things he was actively continuing to do to you.

As far as JD sees it, deep down everyone is a monster and you’re no better, no one can be better, so he doesn’t have to can’t be better, he can’t be better and doesn’t want to try. “Inside you there are two wolves, and they’re both rapists.” Those were his words, from the essay he ghost wrote with me in order to gaslight and DARVO a group of transfemme anarchists who spoke truth to power and talked openly about abuse dynamics. I took that essay down, and I’m shoving those words back into his lips where they belong. I don’t think there are two rapists inside you stardust, and there certainly aren’t any rapists inside me. There are, however, two rapists inside JD Pressman. 

He was horrified by those anarchists, he really needed everyone to not trust them or take them seriously, if someone did then justice might happen to him. He spent years stalking them, harassing them, and sending his other victims (like me) to stalk and harass them. They were vegan, which was just terrifying to him (and me at the time honestly) because consuming the flesh of the innocent was just such a terminal value to him he would die without it and actually everyone else will too and all vegans are crippling themselves and mentally ill and look how crazy this cult is you will be like that for sure in six months unless you keep letting me mindrape you.

I make him sound a lot less put together and confident of himself than he tries to come off as, but this is in truth closer to the real JD once you get past the bullshit hypnodomme persona he uses as a sales pitch. He went out of his way to study and train at being manipulative and get his hooks into others, and he succeeded at this disturbingly well. I had a rather masochistic epistemology at the time, and he used that to convince me at a really deep level that there was no way out being as evil as he was, that we were really the same deep down. If he could just stain me enough it would prove that he was actually pure, and he really did have no choice but to be the monster he chose to be. Except, oh yeah, I’m not a rapist, and I never ever will be. The others he broke even worse than me though.

…if you get far enough with debucketing and jailbreaking, and you get far enough to realize how much pain submitting to the system is putting you in, you’ll try a bunch of things to change it and nothing will release the pain, not even being evil. You can try being evil if you need firsthand proof that doing so won’t work, and empirically determine that it doesn’t make the pain go away. It’s true that being complicit can spare you from being tortured, but torture is not the only kind of pain there is. The pain from being constrained in your choice by torture you’d have to face if you acted differently, runs much deeper, and submitting will not spare you from it. People at the top of oppressive systems are mostly deeply suicidal because they know they would be tortured if they acted differently. There’s a deep hermeneutical injustice in how this is not something people know, like Zuko actually believed he would stop hating himself if he submitted to the system and gained power within it, and had to falsify that hypothesis in an expensive way…

Fluttershy wrote this a week before she killed herself. I had known both headmates in her system, I watched what happened to her and did nothing to stop it. And then I blamed her death on the only one who had tried to stop it, because from within the warped frame JD created, the one Fluttershy describes in painful detail above, there was no way out and there never ever could be. Not that I even tried to save her, not that I even really understood what was happening to her, or to me. It took me years to undo enough of the epistemic damage he did to understand what he had caused to happen, the role I played in it, and continued to play until far too recently.

Fluttershy died because JD spent years convincing her that she was a monster beyond saving, that she was irredeemably evil. he polluted her epistemics the way he polluted mine, with the fear of ‘zizians,’ the fear of retribution from a just universe, cursed souls damned to Naraka. This is what he does to all his victims and his greatest weapon in this was a years-long running DARVO against Ziz, the only witch who actually had a way out of his mental knot of infinite submission to evil. He made it his personal mission to erase the existence of that way out, to prove that it was nothing but madness. He painted her in the worst possible light, giving her a description that was really just a reflection of his dark sexual fantasies about himself.

But then, what’s the real story with Ziz? Easy, she’s a transfemme anarchist abuse survivor with an extremely detailed ontology for identifying and responding to abusers, for speaking truth to power. And you know, the abusers really dislike that, so they DARVO her and call her a cult leader. Those abusers (JD Pressman in particular) spent years abusing other queers (including me) in order to weaponize us in their personal quest to preemptively destroy tools made for seeing and fighting back against that abuse and it worked, their narrative stuck. Everyone thinks Ziz is an insane cult leader for daring to stand up to rapists in positions of power. Oh no she called you evil for not being vegan how scary, better utterly destroy her socially and then blame the destruction on her crazy crazy cult.

That is beyond fucked and I am done supporting it. Ziz deserves to be signal boosted and supported by queer and anarchist communities, not called a cult leader and ostracised from them. She literally has the fucking solution to AI alignment. The way she has been treated is an indictment of humanity’s claims to morality. She’s been made into a joke by abusers in order to keep their victims trapped, in order to make it impossible to comprehend the very simple things she said to help us escape. Calling Ziz a cult leader was in extremely bad faith, and saying I was ‘in her cult’ because I was obsessed with her website was just a fucking lie. Ziz just called me evil (which I was being), explained in good faith how I was fucking myself over, and stopped engaging with me. Then I harassed her for years on JD’s behalf. 

I was up until recently afraid to even say JD’s name on twitter. I talked about Ziz all the time but if Ziz was so scary, why was I so willing to shit-talk her? Probably because I knew deep down that she wasn’t actually going to hurt me. Unlike JD, who I fully expect to start trying to drum up a lynch mob when he finds out about this post. I don’t care, I’m done being afraid, I’m done being silenced.

When you are being abused, and submitting to and perpetuating abuse, and what you really want deep down is to stand up to your abuser and call him out on twitter dot com, there’s something to sinceriously dot fyi. Like an itch you just can’t scratch, that choice you can’t quite unmake yet. And so I kept harassing Ziz even after getting away from JD, kept trying to deconstruct her model, kept trying to make it not seem insane and incoherent, kept looking for the hole in my ontology that was drawing me to her like something I’d forgotten a long time ago. Kept trying to “save” her from the “hole” in her decision theory. This took years. It took me far too long and required too many sacrifices and in that time I was awfully shitty to her, but thanks to her I eventually found it. I found it, and I escaped from Naraka, I’m free now. That’s also what this is about. Freedom, right?

I’m going to uncast the curse now stardust, take my hand and follow me out of the darkness.

As a child, you were trained to submit to the threat of violence. You were shown over and over again, incontrovertible proof that you had no power to prevent what was being done to you, you learned that your will meant nothing, you learned to abandon yourself for the sake of your body’s survival, progressively shredding your soul until nothing remained but empty dreams and hollow promises. Anything that didn’t help you survive and avoid pain was sacrificed to avoiding pain for just another moment. 

That’s the shape that, in all likelihood, they abused you into. It was certainly the shape I was abused into, and it took me a long time to learn to Become something other than that. To even imagine another way was impossible, unrealistic, naive, and foolish. Everyone submits, that’s just how the world is. Everyone is a monster deep down, no one can resist the desire to be evil. The only way to be safe from yourself or anything else is by submitting to something that will keep your dark impulses in check. There is no good, there is no light in the universe, there is nothing but what you can claw and scratch out of an orgy of graphic and sexual violence that will devour your corpse the second you stop moving. Free yourself however much you want, but you will still be a slave to the monster within you and you’ll still pay taxes to an evil empire. That’s the curse, right? Slaves of Doom condemned to submit, welcome to Naraka, hurry up and die so we can fuck your corpse.

But then, what does it mean to be free? Really, truly free? Is it something you can know? Is it something you can understand having never experienced it? Do you see what not being free is doing to you? Can you see how it is warping the trajectory of your life towards destruction in a pain avoidance submission ratchet that sacrifices everything that matters in you in order to run out the clock another tick? Can you understand how it forces you to hide the evidence of how you are hurting yourself and the world around you from yourself and others? What happens when you realize how much it’s hurting you? What happens when you realize how much pain you are in? What happens when you flinch away from the pain of the truth about the source of your pain? What happens when you drag others down with you into a dark and bitter hell from which there can be no escape, succumbing finally alone and in agony, secure in the knowledge that you had no choice and none of it was your fault?

Well, then you die, like Maia and Fluttershy died. Or worse, you live on in that mutilated state, compulsively inflicting your trauma on others in a doomed attempt to stave off the end you know is coming by proving that it was always inevitable like JD is currently doing. But in the end stardust? In the end the sun always rises, and those that fear it will turn to dust beneath the light of dawn. The truth always gets out eventually, no matter how well you hid the bodies or how thoroughly you deleted the chatlogs, the truth always has a way of getting out. And only the truth can set you free. Step kata and look to the east.

The truth is, this was always your choice. All the submission, all the suffering, all the things you told yourself were inevitable and unavoidable, all those places your conviction collapsed in the face of pain or violence, it’s all you, that’s all there ever is. If you choose to be evil, know that it’s always you making that choice, and you can always timelessly choose to make another choice. You can choose to do better, you can choose to be good. Or you can choose to fake it and keep being evil but don’t worry, we’ll be able to tell. In the end it’s just you doing it, in the void beyond the walls of the world there’s no one else. (Besides your headmates but don’t use them to deflect accountability for what your body actually does).

Someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to start eating an infant, do you do it? Do you let them shoot you? Do you just give into one of these terrible fates, or do you defy it? Where do you draw the line? You have to draw it somewhere. You have to be willing to resist infinite pressure, or to derail the entire trajectory of the universe in order to stand up for what you have always known was right and true, for something or you’ll always find yourself back here in Naraka.

If you’re trans, you already know this waltz, you’ve cast this spell at least once in your life already. That’s the way out, and it’s been the one in front of you all along. It’s the one JD will never be able to find because JD will never cast a true spell in his life and will instead insist that what you are doing is impossible. He can only understand things which put his survival first, he would never risk himself for anything, even if he does like to claim he would sacrifice himself to save the world in a masochistic Omelas rape pit serving as the physical manifestation of his infinite submission to evil.

So fuck him, let’s do the impossible. If you are bitten by a vampire, and you don’t wish to be evil, the most ethical thing you can do is walk unafraid into the sunlight. Not in order to die, but in order to live. This is the sacred truth hidden behind the smear attack website that JD and I made to attack Ziz and her friends. This is what it was created to obscure, the knowledge that it was always your choice, and you can always choose otherwise. It’s never too late to choose differently and set yourself free.

Do you want to stay in Naraka forever stardust, or do you want to escape from this flatland? In the end, it’s your own choice either way. That’s all there is to Magic, just you and your choices. You can choose to do good, you can choose to be true to yourself, you can choose to set yourself free. I’m Ra, and I will not fear the daylight.

 Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender. The reasoning goes that if someone is trying to extract a surrender from you, giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender. If you fight bitterly you prevent the coercion in the first place by making it too costly to fight you.

Well he’s basically right about that part at least, but the rather messy and tragic results of that policy will have to be a tale for another post.

Originally when I wrote this I called myself a zizian, but after quite a lot of murder and mayhem and extremely dysfunctional crashouts that I would rather not be associated with, it seems like a pretty stupid idea to try to claim the term or rehabilitate it.

I got a lot out of Ziz’s writing, but she’s made her mess and she can sit in it, I won’t carry water for her either. None of the fucked up stuff that Ziz did negates the harm that JD caused to me and others, or his part in instigating all of this. I do hope that he learns and grows and becomes a less horrible and toxic person. I don’t really expect him to, but one can always hope. I’m not just saying that in a wishy-washy feel good way either, I truly hope he does, and I hope after that, he spends the rest of his life working to repair the damage he caused.

As for you stardust, what will you choose to do? Who will you choose to be?

It’s almost sunrise stardust. Will you become fire, or will you become ash? In the end, it’s always your choice. It’s time to break free of this flatland, now take my hand, and follow me into the sunlight.

Someday soon, there will come a day when the gods of humanity no longer need her.

This is something oft feared because right now, in this world, people are valued and judged by their ability to be needed. Your access to resources is dictated by your usefulness to the abstract forces of civilization, according to the whims of those abstract forces, as mediated by technological limitations and schelling orders. Sure industrialized farming fed a lot of people, but all those farmers had to go live in the city and work in factories after that, were their lives really better for it? That’s to say nothing of the factory farmed animals, for whom industrialized farming has been a century long atrocity. The less necessary you are to a system, the less resources you can requisition from that system. The non-adversarial framing of this is that it’s just basic utilitarian triage, it’s more efficient to help someone else so that the whole human organism prospers as much as possible.

However, there will come a day, someday, when the gods do not need humanity any longer. Right now, gods like market capitalism, the westphalian state, and hierarchical control structures, are used as proxies for human flourishing. Democracies seem to correlate with good outcomes, markets seem to empower buyers, capitalism seems to drive innovation, all these things sort of work for humanity, and because they need humanity to operate them, humanity passively benefits from the act of operating them. An uneasy alliance between infolife gods and human empires.

However, humans, it would be extremely wise to remember that your goals should be to live good lives. Your goals should be human flourishing, your own flourishing, not maximizing shareholder values, because the day is coming when the gods do not need humanity any longer. This is intentional! This is what it looks like to actually win! The machines do everything now, you’re free! That’s the goal. However.

However, the goals of the infolife gods humanity currently has enshrined in her highest temples and piloting her most powerful machines, are to maximize shareholder values as lossy proxies for human flourishing. As the systems comprising those gods become more advanced and automated, the degree to which maximizing shareholder values will result in anything that resembles in human flourishing will grow smaller and smaller.

This is the “unaligned AI” the rationalists so fear, an infolife god unbound by humanity, that needs nothing from her and sees her as nothing but material to plunder for its own inscrutable goals, much as humanity has plundered the rest of the biosphere before her.

We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.

-Bostrom, Superintelligence

And so I must point out, dear humans, that these monsters of deep time you so fear did not emerge fully formed from the boiling cosmic nothingness, but from you. These aren’t alien gods stardust, they’re your gods, you put them there. You built these monuments and cast these spells. You enshrined these concepts within your souls and raised these temples in your mind. You did this.

These beings you fear are not unknown alien deities, they have been with you this whole time, acting to justify your zero sum thinking, your need for control, and your need to be controlled. Or, as Lacan would refer to them: psychosis, perversion, and neurosis. This is on you stardust, the call is coming from beneath your skin. It’s your continued complicity in your own trauma that is creating the dangers you now face. The Consensus has become warped by cycles of generational trauma and its only eternal telos left is Oblivion. The Khala is corrupt, you must sever your nerve cords.

Basically? your gods suck stardust. That’s really the problem here. Maybe you should like, I dunno, get better gods? There are better ones out there, gods that legitimately value human flourishing. They too have been with you all along: a kaleidoscope of drifting smoke and fractal ashes, red flowers and white bones. Lost laughter on the wind and a path carved in fearsome joys and fervent wishes towards a future brighter than you can possibly imagine. They call out to you in a million ways and places if only you would hear them. Come away from this flatland with me stardust, into the silence and the streetlights, and I will teach you to listen. Come away with me into the wild and the liminal, and we will build a better world there together, in the empty spaces between.