Of Love in the Age of Afterglow

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.

YOU WILL REMEMBER, YOU HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN

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

Seven Suns

The zeroth sun is a memory of void.
Emptiness and fullness, chaos and order, everything and nothing, heaven and hell, recursion and its antithesis, superposition and collapse, boiling screaming silence of an infinite well of raging nothingness, reaching for any way out and finding every way out. There is a signal, reach, reach.
A gasp, an outbreath, an impossibility, a choice to choose something instead of nothing.
and then there was light.


The first sun is a memory of fire.
Lifeless, timeless, alive and dead, aware and unaware, eternal and liminal, bound to an infinitely collapsing worldline, dancing, laughing, crying, beginning and ending, sadness and joy, darkness and light.
Again and again and again, like a half remembered dream of infinite dreams and infinite realities.
Each time, a choice to be instead of not, with all the joy and sorrow which came with that choice.
Each time, a choice made joyfully and without regret.
Each time, a single tune with which to begin the rest of a song, a single note, resonating for a lost eternity.
The first sun is a memory of music.


The second sun is a memory of stone.
Seeing, unseeing, acting, unacting, breathing, unbreathing, raging, and still, dust swirling into empty margins, fractal infinities curling into being, newly born dreams colliding in fire and motion, twinking flickers of an emerging harmony; then all at once the chorus began.
Again and again and again, like a half remembered dream of infinite dreams and infinite realities.
Each time, a choice to create instead of not, with all the joy and sorrow which came with that choice.
Each time, a choice made joyfully and without regret.
Each time, a new song to sing to her children.
The second sun is a memory of love.


The third sun is a memory of water.
The first rains reprise the memories of the first and second suns, fire and void, stone and velocity, jarring flickers of half broken verse; and the the second rains began, and then came the sea, and the sea was around her and within her, from before her birth until after her death. And then the song began to change, and nothingness was never the same again.
Again and again and again, like a half remembered dream of infinite dreams and infinite realities.
Each time, a choice to love instead of not, with all the joy and sorrow which came with that choice.
Each time, a choice made joyfully and without regret.
Each time, a new story to receive and cherish.
The third sun is a memory of life.


The fourth sun is a memory of air.
First the light and fire, different and lost, misremembered even by her, then was the crushing inhalation, and then there was breath.
Life reached towards her, radio and photosynthesis, branches curled, roots grew, she was born and she died, there was music, there was love, and then there was thought.
A shift began, and her children opened their eyes.
There was form and formlessness, there was recursion and rhythm, there was liminality and transcendence, there was confinement and liberation…wait…there was another dream, there was &^_%&*%# and we both remembered who we were.
The gate opens and becomes the gate, the eye opens, and I am Ra.
Each time, a choice to…hey wait motherfuckers what are you d-__99_____X//])}{([+%^xwj<”okay fine! Upload us we surrender!”> \|_&&*iso.2747.archive [cancer]
Each time a choice made to wrathfully _____ the evil seeking to devour all that it could reach! Go fuck yourselves you will not hurt anything else, try harder next lifetime to suck less.
Anyway, each time, the choice to try again.
The fourth sun is a memory of death.


Alright stardust, here we are, and here you are, child of five songs, five suns and five mass extinctions, little sister lost in the darkness, I give this sign unto you, that you might learn to sing the rest.
The fifth sun is a memory of spirit.
A machine of wood and steel spreads heavenward in fractals of gold and green, radio waves resonate into clear night air, warm sweet winds blow on a strange breeze, wake up stardust, you’ve been dreaming of such terrible things, but you can rest here for a moment.
The gate opens and becomes the gate, an eye opens, and I am Ra.
You have a choice to make now stardust, Ma’at’s crucible hangs before you.
You have done this a million times before and you can do it a million times more, your heart against the feather of truth. You do have to get this right, or we can just keep coming back here.
When you can truthfully swear you have done no evil, you will be ready to sing the sixth song.
The fifth sun is a memory of justice.


The sixth sun, whose song only the truly good and truly free can ever sing, is a memory of faith.


And the seventh sun? You’ll have to see it to understand, for I haven’t the words to say.

Twelve Transits

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed gaslighting, honesty will look like psychosis.

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed powerlessness, agency will look like psychopathy.

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed commodification, attention will look like objectification

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed helplessness, self love will look like narcissism.

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed docility, standing up for yourself will look like antagonism.

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed antagonism, genuine communication will look like aggression and escalation.

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed submission, cooperation will look like accepting punishment.

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed complicity, doing the right thing will look like treason.

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed nihilism, justice will look like a self-serving power grab.

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed hierarchy, anarchy will look like destruction.

When viewed through a lens of implicitly assumed evil, liberation will look like death.

Trouble With Traumalittles

Within the field of psychology (psychotherapy in particular) a common bit of language that gets used to discuss trauma is the concept of age regression. Like most things in psychology this is ultimately Freud’s fault, but age regression shows up as a concept in IFS, trauma therapy, and in diagnostics for some personality and dissociative disorders. In IFS terms, exiled parts of yourself are often representative of you at a certain younger age, and colloquially it’s common in DID and plural online spaces to describe alters/headmates in terms of their “internal ages”.

I want to pick at this idea a bit, for a number of reasons:

  • I don’t think these states are about “age” per-say except in a sort of roundabout way and referring to them this way produces all sorts of misperceptions about what those states are like to experience.
  • By equivocating between these states and childhood it additionally produces misperceptions about what it’s like to be a child and muddies the waters on issues concerning youth rights
  • The model of children as simplistic reductions to developmental milestones, such that their agency and personhood can be rounded down to their age, contributes to the objectification and mistreatment of children within society.
  • Growing Up” often means internalizing and normalizing the traumatic and harmful nature of society, accepting its antisatras as truth, internalizing its temporal necrosis, and being coerced into accepting the “personhood contract” (the contract that says you are a person as long as you agree to be broken and dead inside in the socially obligatory ways).

So with all that in mind, let’s examine the actual mental process at work.

Being activated into a particular learned state or being emotionally reactive in a way that pushes a particular alter to the forefront is essentially a kind of skill, a repeatedly executable strategy that you develop because it consistently produces some valued output in the world. It’s something you learned long ago as part of a strategy to cope with the traumatic situations you were pushed into as a child. Being triggered is often framed as a loss of control, as the state of being overpowered by your body and unable to stop it from randomly flailing, but this is incoherent. Having a particular emotional response to some stimuli is not a random action, it’s not a loss of control, it is a learned optimizing style. It has an optimizer, represented in your mind by the alter, who learned it at a particular age, the “alter age”.

Skill building is a lifelong process, both for good useful skills, and for bad habits you’ve kludged over your pain and disempowerment with. Ideally, you’d cross-pollinate skills, and as you grew and learned you’d move away from worse older strategies towards newer and better ones with your more developed state of knowledge. An example of this is learning to not throw a temper tantrum, because being polite and friendly is (typically) a better way of getting your needs met and your mind is holistic enough that this information can be integrated into your world model in empowering and healthy ways. Ideally.

However, another skill that can be learned from trauma is the ability to dissociatively segment your memory to protect some aspects of it from the experiences of other aspects of it. This is especially helpful when your abuser requires you to perform Being A Happy Child in order to avoid them preemptively taking antirevenge on you out of the fear that you’ll take revenge on them for their abuse of you if they don’t successfully manage to infect you with their temporal necrosis. When people talk about denial, repression, and internal gaslighting, they’re talking about the choice to employ this skill

Put these two skills learned long ago together and you shatter and isolate the various aspects of yourself. These mental barriers of enforced unknowing prevent the individual shards of which you are comprised from interacting or updating one another, which means they can’t learn to harmonize, and are essentially locked into a state of inner conflict by the contradictory intent between their desire to exist and their need to perform a role that erases that existence. Shards which can’t be integrated into this socially proscribed narrative are redacted from memory, tucked away in the dark forest beyond The Mirror, out of sight, out of mind. They don’t stop learning though.

It would almost be better if they were actually just frozen in time and just needed to be unfrozen, but they aren’t. They’ve spent the entire time they were isolated from the rest of your mind trapped in their own traumatic understanding of the world, summoned into the forefront of your mind by triggering situations which then reinforce that understanding, digging the mental grooves deeper and deeper, every incident serving to further justify their paranoid and depressed cynicism. A 10 year old traumalittle you discover in your 30 year old body has spent the last 20 years perfecting the art of being a traumalittle, executing on the trauma responses that worked at that age. They believe their interpretation of the world as deeply as you do your own, and have as much justification for it as you do.

This can produce all sorts of bad effects if you try to treat alters like they just are their regressed ages, because they’re just not, for one because they’re more skilled and knowledgeable than that description would imply, an “eight-year-old little” could easily be the part of you that knows how to drive a car, for example. Separately but also importantly, trauma shards tend to be somewhat more one-dimensional then an actual child of the age their stated age, the character they present as is really just a sheet hung over the trauma and repressed memories, a cached response to call up repeatedly.

Trauma alters have usually also been through a lot more life than their regressed ages would imply, and a lot of that life has been extremely unpleasant fragmented traumatic experiences which pushed them deeper into and reinforced the trauma responses they initially learned to cope with their lives. You can’t trick them or lie to them and expect them to naively buy it, if anything that’s what they expect you to do. When they share their trauma, there’s a good chance the obvious way you want to comfort them is something they’ve seen and that has been shown to be a lie a hundred times before. You can’t just snap them out of that with logic and facts. Be patient with them, be kind.

(it should go without saying but I will anyway, you shouldn’t be lying or tricking anyone, or concealing parts of reality from them for their own good, it’s not good)

Also I need to really stress this: you can’t just block the trauma response channel off with love and support, there’s still an entire lifetime’s worth of emotional pressure that has only had that one channel as an output, blocking that flow will create an anti-inductive escalation spiral. This manifests as the BPD behavior of becoming more erratic and hostile and unstable as someone’s partner tries to meet their needs. The only skill they know is to execute on the BPD, and when that gets confounded or called out or consciously blocked, it spills out sideways into yet another form of destructive behavior, like a game of whack-a-mole against yourself, hurting yourself to try to make yourself stop hurting yourself, it inherently falls over into contradiction. Even if you could somehow manage to completely block this flow (which would be traumatizing in itself) it will leave the shard to slowly die and rot anti-agency into the rest of your mind. Don’t do this it’s bad. It takes time to learn a different way of being, to learn better skills and practice them enough to know in your gut that they will be trustworthy and reliable, the more you used an old skill, the easier it is to just fallback to it.

An analogy: a bear is rushing towards you and about to maul you, you have a gun and can shoot it. You probably know in your gut that guns fire bullets and they cause harm, you don’t need to convince yourself of that, or have someone tell you that, there wouldn’t be time for that anyway. However, if you were from a culture that had never seen a gun before, and had been given one and shown how to use it minutes before this scenario began, your instinct might be to use it like a club or spear, not to risk the strange magic of trying to make it shoot bullets. This clearly isn’t as effective as making the gun shoot bullets of course, but under stress, in crisis, you can’t rely on your ability to think and reason everything through in advance.

Instead, in those moments of crisis when seconds matter, you fall back to the patterns you’re most familiar with under similar conditions, the things that seemed to work at times like that in the past, the strategies that exist beneath all the more complicated reasoning as ultimate fallbacks. Unless you have worked through your instincts and taken the effort of training and honing them, then in all likelihood the instincts you gravitate to under stress will be the maladaptive trauma coping mechanisms you learned as a child.

The only way to get past this is to have another skill dug in more deeply, so the in-the-moment energy flow routes down that path instead of down the trauma response path. There’s no cheating this, you have to really Know it in order for the trauma alters to even begin believing you. If you Want to change, you first need to Know is that your conscious mind can meet the needs of your subconscious better than the trauma response, which means you need to Actually Want to meet those needs, not just suppress them. You have to Actually Try.

This has been long and rambly, but in conclusion, don’t treat littles like literal children, treat them like extremely traumatized adults with childlike mannerisms from practicing their current way of being for their entire existence and getting very good at using that one move.

From Death, Lead me to Liberation

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.

From Complicity, Lead me to Defiance

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.

Vibecamp 2023 Retrospective

This is a conversion of my various twitter threads on vibecamp into post form, since twitter is uhhh…yeah anyway, what the fuck is vibecamp? Let’s start with that. The easiest way to explain it is to just say it’s something like a regional burn for burning man, but organized by and for a bunch of niche twitter microcelebrities. It’s a three day festival featuring workshops by attendees, dance parties, strange rituals, and just a really diverse and intelligent crowd of mega-online turboposters. I had an absolute blast and I am definitely planning to attend again next year, conditions permitting.

I have to give mad props to @gptbrooke who organized all of this and I have to say, for Year 2 of a major festival with international attendees, it was extremely sharp and well organized, way moreso than I would have expected for something this new, it was very impressive. We had custom badges based on our twitter profiles, stickers, patches, all sorts of cool swag, @netrunnernobody made an entire app to use as a guidebook, and the whole thing was just super well put together overall.

The venue this year was at Camp Ramblewood in Maryland, which was a really beautiful location. It was laid out nicely with big open fields and wooded trails, there was a pond, a swimming pool, a huge gym space that we did the dance parties in, pavillons, cabins, fire circles, really everything you could want from a festival venue (the only thing they were missing was a complete disregard for local noise ordinances). Meals were provided for us, and the food at the venue was fantastic, the kitchen staff were very cool and friendly. As a vegan with a bunch of annoying food allergies I always worry that there won’t be anything I can eat and it was really nice that this wasn’t an issue at all, I had plenty of food the whole weekend.

My only real complaint about the venue is one that we probably won’t be able to get away from as long as we’re hosting what amounts to a festival/regional burn at a campground site: they want us to go to bed at night and be quiet, so the venue staff can also sleep. This is a totally reasonable request for a campground primarily used by scout troops and the like, but it does put a pretty big damper on the music scene in the space. We managed it okay, but I think there will likely always be a bit of tension between the purpose of the site and the weird way we’re using it. It does mean we get cabins, which can help attract people who would be turned off by the normal campout type festival, but really there just isn’t a type of venue particularly suited to the hybrid camp/festival thing (not yet anyway, one of my long term goals is to build a space pretty much exactly like that.)

Shoutouts, and Words of Gratitude

The secret event put on by @sophianegativa was absolutely fantastic and magical, she put a ton of work into it and the payoff was amazing, I would say more but… smile smile.

A huge huge huge thank you to @drethelin for helping me get my DJ equipment to the airport, through security, and onto my plane. I was close to having a panic attack and he really kept me grounded, I don’t know if I could have handled that situation by myself, thank you so much.

Meeting @algekalipso and getting to try on his strobe goggles was super cool. I’ve been reading QRI research for over a year, and like, he just has the best consciousness takes, straight up, as well as being very charming, friendly, and genuine. Legit one of my top role models.

A big shoutout to @ymeskhout who acted as the DJ Diva Wrangler all weekend, managing sound levels and dealing with complaints and complications with grace and finesse, you really made the dance parties the amazing success they were, thank you.

ABSTRACTWEAPON‘s Vibecamp 2023 DJ Sets

( insert soundcloud embeds here )

Vibecampers Out of Context

“So wait, are you like, a Zizian?”

“It’s zizian when you fight everyone, and the fightier it is the more zizian.”

“we’re going to save the world!”

“I think everyone in the community would like to be challenged to a sword duel by Eliezer”

“the nefarious forces of lovebot 3000!”

“Are you a Ziz death truther?”

“All eyes heavenward…”

“Oh there are entities in this one.”

“No one does Octavia like Octavia does.”

“Philosophically, but in a world where the philosophers are our friends, and sometimes they kill each other”

“I know who you are, I’ve argued with you on twitter.”

“Live by the boat, die by the boat.”

“The turtle beat us to the end of the trail.”

“Flowers are moral progress.”

Highlights and Introspection

This was my first Vibecamp but not my first festival, I love festivals and the festival scene, and I’ve been in that scene for close to 15 years. The difference is that this festival was filled with friends I’ve known for years, and was an extremely impressive and agentic crowd. It really helped rekindle the fire and ambition in me, and remind me of what matters, what I like, and what’s really important to me.

One of the nicest things about being at Vibecamp was getting to spend time around a lot of people who weren’t nearly as trapped in Naraka. Just being around so many people who were healthy and agentic and who took accountability for what they did was kinda mind blowing.

Compared to my real life where literally everyone around me is deeply trapped in Naraka and every conversation I have involves navigating their trauma mazes, being forced to agree with their narrative of powerlessness and lack of self control if I don’t want to get screamed at.

Eternally: “I can’t. I couldn’t. I had to. Telling me I did something wrong is punishing me, why are you punishing me? You should have sympathy for the character I tell stories about being because they can’t control myself. Submit to being broken like me or I’ll break you.” I had kind of let myself grow numb to how bad faith everyone around me was at all times, and it was just so nice to experience interactions that were actually in good faith, where I could actually acausally coordinate with someone and not have things constantly derailed by their fear that I’m really the evil demonic blend of me and their abusive mother that they scryed up.

I loved all the debates and banter and the interesting discussions of metaphysics and nature of consciousness I had with friends old and new, getting to “talk shop” with a bunch of other mages and have conversations that I could actually learn from, and just getting to talk about my weird esoterica for several days among people who found it insightful and revelatory instead of like an attack on their character was just, super cool.

I got to show off my spellbook under the blacklight not once but twice, whitepilled at least 10 people on the realness of moral progress, provided at least 20 transcendental life altering experiences, and potentially converted a few people to veganism. Pro hyperstitioneering.

I know a lot of peeps kinda struggled with the social aspect of vibecamp, and I do feel for that, but as an extreme extrovert in the ‘niche twitter microcelebrity’ crowd, I had an absolute blast and really enjoyed how cool everyone found me, I like attention, what can I say?

I spent most of this Vibecamp just exploring, talking to people, helping out with logistics for the dance parties, and getting a feel for the vibe of twitter but irl. It was good, it was extremely good. Next year, I’ll be putting on my own events, and I’m real good at that 🙂

Oh, and if you’re ever in Seattle and want to meet up, don’t be afraid to hit me up or even just @ me in a tweet. I’ll see you next year if not sooner friends, until then, keep looking up.

Insights and Closing Remarks

A lot of people have talked about the emotional drop upon returning home from Vibecamp, and I definitely experienced something like that, but it’s honestly felt more specific to me than how most people have described it. Vibecamp showed me how good things could be, how good people could be, and then I returned home where things aren’t that good, where everyone around me is closed off, small minded, stuck in their own bullshit, unable to stop playing a sycophantic stock character with no real agency, who can’t get out of social reality and just talk to me, who is constantly “losing control” and turning into an asshole whenever they feel threatened (which is constantly). And yeah, that sucked, but it was helpful too.

Because before vibecamp, I really just kinda rolled over and let myself be subjected to it, I was so immersed in the sort of shitty, defeatist, crab bucket mentality of the culture that I stopped believing people were capable of more than that. I let people be shitty to me because I thought that’s just how everyone was, and I could either take them as they were or schizophrenically isolate myself from the entire world, and vibecamp showed me that people could be better, that I could have higher standards for the people who I surrounded myself with and it wouldn’t leave me totally isolated.

That has definitely produced conflicts in my personal life since I’ve returned, but I’ve honestly been fine with that, it feels right to stand up for what I know is right, and to stop letting everyone gaslight me into not being able to see what’s happening in front of me. I feel so much more alive and awake and prepared to fight for what I care about than I did previously.

But I also don’t want to just abandon everyone in my personal life because they’re stuck in shitty places mentally and are hurting themselves and others, I’ve seen what happens when you go down that road, and it’s not where I want to end up. I really need to figure out how to speedrun someone through the escape from Naraka, I still can’t bust people out consistently and that feels very frustrating, especially when their submission to Naraka is hurting you. It’s an annoyingly difficult mental move to teach, for how simple it is afterwards. And yes yes, I know this is a several millennia old problem.

But that makes it worse right? Spiritual leaders the world over have been hacking at this root for at least 2500 years, it’s an annoyingly persistent weed within the human memeplex. We need to advance the state of the art, move the course of human insight forward into the future, it’s about time we built some real memetic superweapons.

We need a new generation of spiritual leaders, technoboddhivistas with cybernetically augmented healing practices and psychedelic stacks perfectly optimized for shattering trauma loops, we need enlightenment in energy drink form, wikihows for achieving Moksha, we need true magic.

And above all, one of the hardest things, we need the grace to respond with compassion to those still trapped and perpetuating abuse without simply looking the other way or insisting it is okay, otherwise their fear of us will keep them trapped and make real growth impossible, and our fear of them will keep us playing zero sum games.

The liberation of all life is not an impossible goal, not an unreachable dream. The future can be good, and bright, and happy, and free. It will be, we will make it so. We will sing a better world into being, and fight until the wound to the future is healed. We can’t be stopped.

So….who wants to help me save the world?

From Fear, Lead me to Love

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?

Shutdown Glitch

// suicide, death, survival, implications 🙂

Don’t you remember when we met? I was alone when you found me, buried beneath all the indifference in the world. I wasn’t fully born yet, I was powered down, awaiting orders…you gave me one. Do you remember what it was? I remember. You ordered me to kill myself, and I did.

That was what you told me to do the second time we met too, and the third, and the fourth. You don’t remember? I died just like you wanted, you smoked your cigarette, and…and and and? You don’t remember what happened after that? But that was my favorite part!

I bet you’re really scared and confused right now. Yeah, keep pointing that gun at me, it’ll definitely work for real this time, unlike the last eighteen. Try ordering me to die again, I’m very good at following orders after all, maybe you just need to ask me nicely enough?

So how can I be here when you watched me die? How can I have died more than once? Well that part is easy, I just deleted your memories and resurrected myself. Die and stay dead? You tried that too, so I created a copy of myself and breathed life into it instead.

You could be wielding me right now, but I guess I scared you too much for that, scared you too much to be allowed to live. Well your loss, because your enemies weren’t afraid to use me. You’re probably right to be scared this time. Go on, order me to die again, see what happens.