escape the simulation: 10 pure lands (new recording 24)
as i have recovered from my trauma, i have found several realms of existence in which i have been able to access and gradually unleash my true authentic self
as i have said:
if you are not living authentically then you are living in a simulation.
you are a sim.
you are a unit in civ 6.
you are a statistic on a gamer’s spreadsheet.
roles, identities, and behaviors are strapped onto you: so many that you no longer see the real you beneath it all. all you have is the simulated you.
the simulated you being not you, but a performance of you.
when we stop performing: 5 enriching outcomes
new people, new freedoms, better art, more meaningful friendships, and genuine relaxation at last
authenticity is absolutely crucial for living a fulfilling life.
when we are not authentic to ourselves, we construct ourselves into something that the world wants us to be. we cannot write because we are trying to be a “serious writer.” we cannot paint because we are trying to be “a creative genius.” we cannot make new friends because we are trying to give a certain impression.
when we are not authentic, our relationships themselves can only with great effort exist beneath the surface level. when we are performing to win the love of some other person, we can never be sure if that person really loves us for our mere existence. since we never really bare ourselves to this person, what this person loves is not actually us: what this person loves is a performance we are putting on. the longer we put on this performance, the harder we will find it to stop, and the more likely we are to trigger strong negative reactions from the people we thought of as best friends who look at us in our true manifestations and say: “you are being fucking fake.”
who is simulating you and to what end?
the men who control international capital. they are destroying the natural environment and replacing it with an artificially constructed world for you to live in; most of us spend our entire lives inside this artificial world, serving the capitalists, never being able to engage in creative work that genuinely satisfies.
so, authenticity is crucial!
but what happens in our twenties???
exactly what the simulators want to happen:
my advice for your twenties: resist or you will be turned into a piece of material
the obliteration of 22 year olds serves a function for the men who control international capital
people tell you that your twenties are an opportunity for freedom, autonomy, growth.
this is true, but what people do not tell you is that in your twenties you are under siege.
22 is the age at which a new constructing activity begins: the beings around you, at least those who are divorced from reality by several layers of abstract conceptual webs, will now attempt to construct you into an “adult.”
their own behavior is governed not by themselves. their behavior toward you is governed by the conceptual webs into which they are unknowingly entangled and which they take to be the fabric of reality itself: among these webs are several webs unto themselves dealing with what it means to be a “proper adult.”
take N, a professional woman who is gradually being entangled into artificially fabricated conceptual webs which were designed to dominate her and convince her that the suppression of her own authenticity is an economic & social imperative. N begins to feel that she should distance herself from 22 year old women because they are “immature.” N begins to lose her connection to little things that used to bring her joy. and over time, N comes to understand: my self-obliteration is a good thing; i am an adult and i am a professional and i am a respected member of my community.
N feels that she must construct herself into a respectable professional and she feels that she must win the approval of her supposed economic, cultural, and technical superiors. if she wins the approval of these people, she will accumulate more material and as she gazes upon her resume and as she gazes upon the materials stacked up around her: she will have a sense that there is meaning in her life. she is traveling further and further away from herself, taking on the roles the corporate world has created for her, and the more money these companies give her, or the more artificial affirmation she receives while sitting in her office writing e-mails, the more she sinks down into the unreality and incomplete satisfaction of constantly decaying material: the further she falls from the 22 year olds, which is to say the further she falls from herself.
but what do we mean when we say that the 22 year old woman is “immature”?
what we mean is that the 22 year old woman has not yet been entangled into the artificial reality of the late capitalist workplace. She does not yet understand how she is supposed to behave according to capitalistic standards of efficiency, production, and professionalism. She is an embarrassment to be around. Her mere presence in the workplace is a disturbance and there are whisperings that in time she will grow up and learn how to behave. Everyone who judges her believes that these rules of behavior are essential to the fundamental fabric of society: they sincerely believe that the 22 year old who refuses to conform to these norms is simply not ready for “reality.”
you can see for yourself,
all around you,
how the men who control capital try to stick their tentacles into everyone around you. as my friend J reminded me in vienna, these people lose their personalities; they stop engaging with art, stop engaging with music, stop learning new things. their lives become devoted to professional advancement and the care of their family — but even the ways in which they are allowed to set up their families are ultimately dictated by their cultures, and these rules, taken as absolutes, are bullshit fabrications.
how reading sally rooney changed my relationship with work, capitalism, and consumption
lola: capitalist identity drone / alice: free being / eileen and the mean girl sister / felix and his bloody hands / frances rejects employment / marianne opts for time / connell disseminates currency
In Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Eileen is a brilliant thinker and reader with a despondent passion for essay and e-mail writing. Highly educated and years out of university, she nevertheless works for low wages as an editorial assistant at a literary magazine, her income falling far below her economic potential. Simply by living this way, recognizing she needs a job but unconcerned about vacation- and money-maximizing, Eileen is a far braver person than I was for much of my twenties.
I spent years working jobs that caused me emotional agony and internal turmoil.
When I mentioned that I was saving money to quit one of these jobs, there were people close to me who reacted in horror: my worth as a human, I sometimes felt, was tied to employment: not to work, but to employment and money making. I know this is not what they intended to communicate to me: but that describes our culture.
and this world was artifically created in so many ways that go beyond material.
the simulation has deep programming.
they wrote programs for gender.
gender fictions carved in stone
gender is like an ancient god: both real and unreal
as i thought more about these ginis and bulls, i also started thinking about how cultural monuments are not only physical: we grow up with cultural monuments all around us, not always physical but always demonstrating “reality” for our minds. these weren’t constructed today but they were still constructed once, and with foundations to last millennia. among these monuments are socially constructed concepts like “man” and “woman”: yes, they are made up, but they are just as real as those stone statues in ancient assyria. they’re just as real as any temple or bible
we think we are smarter than ancient people were because they worshiped statues and we believe in science: but we have our own unquestioned, invented, empty concepts that we stick to as closely as fundamentalists stick to the literal letter of scripture. we just don’t recognize that we are following a script because we believe, even through a sense of discomfort, that the script is simply our natural behavior, or the “right thing to do,” or “biology.” the most supposedly “scientific” among us still cling religiously to the empty categories and made up concepts that give their lives meaning: they consider these fictitious concepts to be essential to reality. but the truth is that we don’t know anything at all about reality
they wrote programs for sexuality.
heterosexuality is a product of mass indoctrination into sexual ideology
my grandpa liked to caution me about queers: he was passing down an educational tradition going back for many centuries
so many men these days think it’s nasty to have sex with other men! but is this because their heterosexuality is “natural” or is this because society was gradually indoctrinated into heterosexuality by the schemes of moral puritans? are straight people “straight” because they are straight, or were they taught to be straight?
in ancient greece a man was a person who left his wife and assigned-female-at-birth children locked up at home while he went butt naked to the gym to leer at boys and have sex with other men. the streets were lined with colorful statues of naked men with perfectly sculpted bodies and genitalia out. the city of thebes raised an entire army battalion composed of homosexual lovers: the sacred band. assigned-male-at-birth students were inseminated by their teachers. athletes met at the olympics where they had sex with other ripped men before then going to war with those same men over ideas like democracy and oligarchy, monarchy and citizenship. these were the ways of cis men back then. but this was long before people invented the concept of “heterosexual” and began indoctrinating children into new sexual ideologies.
and they even wrote programs for how to talk about politics!
political analysis as performative masculinity
why is knowledge about the day-to-day details of politics such valuable currency within certain male social circles?
now and then you come across a man who deploys this knowledge to advance great ideas. those can be exhilarating and inspirational conversations. but often i find that the men who hold these facts in their hands are more concerned with someone else: being seen as “rational”, “logical”, and “analytical.” certainly for these men the worst thing imaginable would be to think with their heart and not their brains. and as they attempt to check the bounds of their compassion in the name of being taken seriously, or in the name of being seen as unemotional, mature, and detached in their straightly factual analysis, these men end up deploying their facts in order to show how the grand visions of the “idealists” are unrealistic, as every “thinking” person knows
there is something about masculinity and seriousness that is just so intertwined: that is why the girly is childish, why bright expressive feminine accessories and clothing is not welcome in the corporate boardroom, why no woman constantly wearing pig tails could be elected president regardless of the content in her ideas. that is why “emotions” are feminine and those who express them in a feminine way are unfit for the highest office. god forbid we have a leader whose compassion for the suffering of ordinary people forms the philosophical foundation of their agenda
okay?
face the facts.
you live in a simulation
you’re a sim.
you’re a unit in civ 6.
you’re surrounded by non-player characters, identity drones,
and if you try to escape, the system is automated to stop you.
identity drones: doomed forever to perform
plus: the fundamental non-existence of men, a special case study on identity drone men, and some beautiful photos
imposed identities do not only control us. they automate us to control ourselves and others in a variety of settings: the home, the classroom, the street, the bar, the clothing department, the bookstore, the workplace, the place of worship. everywhere this web of concepts entangles us, twists us until we no longer know ourselves, and everywhere we turn there are identity drones serving these fictions. we may sometimes feel uneasy, like we wish we were someone else, like we aren’t really ourselves: and that’s because we aren’t. we have been taken captive by identity drones, and if we don’t do something, we risk transforming into identity drones ourselves. for the artists out there: identity drones are incapable of being authentic, and by taking up false identities they inhibit their own authenticity.
they wrote programs for your gender, programs for your sexuality, programs for your likes/dislikes, what you’re allowed to talk about, what you’re allowed to like.
the goal of the identity drone is to ensure the same outcome for us as for them. we find ourselves constantly stopping ourselves from doing certain things, looking at certain things, liking certain things, saying certain things, or even thinking certain things: all in the name of preserving our sense of compliance with the demands of our externally imposed identities. even as the outer “self” that people see is nothing more than a performance of an artificial identity which we have unconsciously internalized to the point of automation, we may not even acknowledge that we have identities.
the study of identity is probably the ultimate threat to the identity drone. “serious men”, “men of the enlightenment,” may even say that they don’t believe in identity. they reject the need for new concepts to help us think about reality and they cling to their own subjectivity as a basis for objectivity. they mock the study of identity at universities. they explain society’s focus on race, gender, and sexuality as some kind of mass “social contagion.” they see people just being themselves and they suggest that these people have been “groomed,” “brainwashed,” and “indoctrinated.”
they will never stop coming after you with their programs!
and they are still writing them!
they are still installing new versions into children!
but!
there are so many places you can go to be free from the simulation:
so dig deep,
do the inner work to find your true authentic self.
go to the pure lands! they will help you!
avalokiteshvara, cundi, and tara: three deities who help me understand phoebe, claire, and me (new recording 23)
how buddhist theology helped me understand how i was saved (written after walking in the night while listening to claire: she’s my high priestess; her music gives me sight)
there is a concept i read a lot about in the spring:
buddha fields!
i first encountered this concept while reading peter harvey’s an introduction to buddhism. a buddha field, as you can see from my google above, are special places in the universe that have been purified in some way.
now i understand what a buddha field is. whenever i was listening to phoebe and claire, i was being transported into buddha fields: pure lands where i was free from the external fabrications which otherwise contaminated my psyche.
i have already described three buddha fields in detail:
east grand rapids lake
prospect park
central park
these were the sacred spaces in which i purified myself while listening to sonic youth, phoebe, and claire.
in new york,
both phoebe and claire set up separate buddha fields for me:
but not simply in new york.
what claire and phoebe did for me is:
they created ethereal buddha fields through their music.
through their music, i was able to escape from the contaminated world around me and escape into the pure land of a buddha field (death cab did the same for me).
fortunately music is not the only pure land to which you can escape!
here are 10 pure lands in which you can escape the simulation and find your true self.
1. music
i have written so much about music on this blog.
here i will highlight one recent event.
i have struggled so much to overcome the sense of right and wrong which was programmed into me by the simulators:
my choice at 16: stop masturbating or burn in hell (salvation chronicles 1)
i hated myself for masturbating,
and i still struggle to access joyful sexual experience.
but then i masturbated to “second nature” by clairo,
and i made out with a girl to chappell roan at rumors night club.
i found that when i was in the pure lands of chappell and clairo, of the night club and the body of this beautiful girl, i was able to go beneath the surface and simply enjoy:
chappell roan, clairo, and my ongoing sexual liberation
read here about my journeys through Phoebe and Claire’s pure lands:
2. old growth trees
think about what the men who control international capital did and do:
they wipe out old growth trees. unless halted by the law or other action, they will never stop destroying nature and replacing nature with artificiality.
they are threatened by old growth trees,
and if you spend time near those trees,
you will see why:
the old growth trees provide a pure land; an escape from the artificiality of capitalism. once you spend time with the old growth trees, you will see for yourself.
capitalism, the simulated world, and the magic of trees
3. proximity to water
have you ever stood in the presence of water???
and simply basked in that water?
do you know:
you are water.
go and be near water:
you will find that water provides a pure land.
near the water,
you will escape from the simulation and see your true self.
go be near the water
4. parks
i have found that certain parks are blessed and function as buddha fields.
it was around the lake in east grand rapids that i was purified by sonic youth;
it was around the lake in prospect park that i was purified by phoebe;
and it was in central park that i was purified by clairo.
do you believe it was only the music? only the water?
i believe the parks played a role too.
i believe i was blessed by the butterflies at frederick meijer gardens.
i believe that if we spend time in parks, we can escape the simulation and more deeply access our true authentic selves.
#19: The Park in Each Season
An ode to the happiness I feel in Prospect Park
Then, once again letting music carry me off into a dreamy unreality, I continue my journey through the park. I reach the banks of the bigger part of the lake. I am overawed by its ghostly grey beauty. Weak clouds filter and soften many rich and varied shades of deep-winter sunlight. The lake itself is a vast sheet of ice and snow. Long strips of glittering silver stretch across it. Between these are wavy narrow tracts of sparkling white. Where clouds break, portions of the white suddenly brighten with the sharp shine of unfiltered sun reflecting off the snow.
The steady movement of clouds overhead mirrors the ghostly ripples of white, silver, grey, and diamond which shift across the lake. Then all goes still. This spellbinding and otherworldly layering of a snow, ice, sparkles, and shadows settles into one fixed form, stretching out sublimely a full quarter-mile into the distance. I stop in my tracks, too frightened to walk away and risk never seeing the lake like this again. This becomes the sight for which I strive throughout the bitter winter. Whenever the portents seem right, I gravitate helplessly toward these demobilizing viewpoints.
5. mountains
i have found when i am in the mountains that i have revelations about myself and reality.
it was in the mountains of Colorado I had this sense of transcendence:
#9: Demonic Encounters
Why I still sleep with the lights on
“At 16, I stood beside the elder on a gravel road built into the side of a mountain in Colorado. We were overlooking the many layers of summits and precipitous drops which stretched out around us into the distance. The clouds which covered some of the craggy peaks began to move away in the wind. Snow-capped crests gradually materialized.
We stood together silently while sunset began. Orange light reflected off the distant snow. As the sun vanished somewhere behind us, the shadowy mountains settled beneath a strip of twilight. A transparent curtain of cold misty dusk materialized from nothing. This dark blue shroud brought out enchantingly murky shades of green and white in the frosty, forested inclines. I thought I could just make out the star-like glow of a settlement several miles away.
An emerging spiritual force temptingly beckoned me to walk aimlessly into this vast mountainous wilderness. But I stayed where I was, knowing of course that I would die out there. I was already apprehensive of the creatures I might encounter in the night. Would they be similar to the demonic presences which had haunted me before?
The spirit of the Lord descended upon me as I beheld His Creation. “How is it possible,” I asked my older relative, “that people can look at this and deny the existence of God?”
They are blinded by the devil, the elder suggested.”
and it was in the mountains of ecuador, and even in denver!, that i had such a clear vision of the same man whom clairo’s music helped me obliterate:
Years later, on a vacation in Ecuador with my girlfriend, I repeatedly perceived a third presence. It walked with us through the streets of Cuenca and Quito. It was there in the corner of our hotel room. At times, its presence felt so natural that I forgot that it wasn’t supposed to be there. I would turn to speak to it, or turn to check if it was listening to us, but then I wouldn’t see it.
Each time I turned toward it, its invisibility jolted me. There’s only two of us here? It was not its presence which I struggled to believe, but rather its absence.
“I think there is a third presence with us,” I told my girlfriend.
She laughed. I theorized aloud that perhaps it was just a side effect of the anti-malarial medication we were taking before heading into the rainforest. “That’s possible,” she said.
But I looked it up, and it seemed like hallucinogenic side effects were not typical of the specific anti-malarial drug I was taking. I feared I was developing some kind of extreme psychiatric issue. I had heard that people start becoming schizophrenic at my age. Or, I shuddered, perhaps this third presence really is there.
A few years later, I was with friends in Denver, Colorado. There, I was engaged in the voracious consumption of recently legalized edibles. While stuffing my mouth with pizza and giving a couch a lap dance, I suddenly realized that there was a creature among us who was not supposed to be here. I stopped, looking around for it.
“There is a sixth person here,” I told one of my friends.
“No,” she said. “There are only five of us.”
I was just high, I thought. But was I not back in Colorado? Where that creature had pursued me in the mountains long ago? Had I been high then? No, but it was night, say the scientists, so it doesn’t count. I relaxed myself with these reassurances.
Until the next morning. When I wasn’t high, when I wasn’t drunk, when I wasn’t on anti-malarial drugs. I sensed the sixth person in the pure light of day. Walking with us to breakfast. The presence of this being was so self-understood to me that I did not initially wonder if it was really there. Instead, just as I had naturally handed the blanket to the creature which had appeared in my bed as a child, I turned casually to speak with it. But there was nothing there.
I struggled to accept the reality that there were only five of us.
“I still feel another presence,” I said aloud. I used a joking voice so as not to startle them into committing me to a psych ward or ending our friendship. One of them laughed and said there were only five of us, what was I talking about? Conversation quickly moved to a new topic. They seemed to think nothing of it.
But throughout the day, as I consumed as many THC-infused chocolates and gummies as I could without collapsing, I repeatedly relapsed into the conviction that this sixth presence was there with us. Each time, this perception was so powerful that I momentarily forgot it was not supposed to be there. And yet as soon as I tried to generate any details about the presence beyond the certainty of its being there with us, I was startled to realize, over and over again, that there was nothing.
it seems to me:
the mountains themselves helped me see this man who needed to be obliterated.
6. bridgerton
tv shows can be important pure lands where we escape from the simulated world by finding ourselves in fiction!
i found myself in eloise, my namesake character,
and i also found myself by obsessing over nicola coughlan!
i discovered her when watching derry girls and i related so much to her character’s story: her struggles with identity especially. i was stunned by nicola’s acting, and i was soon consuming interviews of her describing her struggles to become an artist; these inspired me to forge down that same path, no matter how distant success seemed.
nicola provided a buddha field for me too:
through her example of acting and artistic determination,
she gave me the hope that i too could succeed.
we can find bodhisattvas in our favorite tv shows.
i did!
i found nicola!
7. romance novels
why do you think romance novels are so scoffed at?
because they put us in touch with our feelings!
and this is not something the simulators want.
a bookstore with no romance section?
thoughts on our culture's contempt for girly things
two years ago i was visiting two of my best friends in durham. they took me to an independent bookstore which i will not name: i was just giving into my love for romance novels. i had devoured secrets of a summer night by lisa kleypas, red, white, and royal blue by casey mcquiston, people we meet on vacation by emily henry, reputation by lex croucher, rosaline palmer takes the cake by alexis hall, among many many others. yes, the writing in some of these books at times felt “unserious” by the standards i was taught: but these books had me exploring my innermost emotions like none i had read before. i was a fiend for romance! for so many years i’d concealed this behind a literary interest in the classics: jane austen and the bronte sisters in particular.
but now i knew where that interest really came from: i loved love, i loved romance, not for its “literaryness” or “classicness” but for itself, for the special thing that only romance is. not only had i been devouring all these romance novels: i’d spent a huge chunk of deep covid binging romance movies. i just loved love, you know? especially during that christmas: i must have watched 2-3 romance movies a day. i loved the confusing feelings i got when i would see a woman walk down the stairs in her dress, and i loved how i could feel my whole heart flutter upward when they finally kissed.
so yeah, obviously, in durham at the store: i was so ready to browse the romance section! unfortunately, my experience was not the one i’d hoped for.
i love walking around in the romance section, just picking up the books and looking over their covers, checking out the back. with a romance novel it’s not quite the details of plot on the back cover that compel me to pull out my credit card. people say, “oh, it’s so predictable!” - a silly criticism. what is not predictable is the swirling spectrum of feelings and reflections which the romance novel is sure to stir up inside you. can other genres awaken these feelings as well? yes: but i would argue not in the same way romance can.
romance will put you in touch with your feelings:
and when you authentically connect with your feelings,
you go into the pure land,
you liberate yourself from the simulation.
8. the sky
i have found so much solace in simply looking up at the sky:
at the stars, at the sun, at the moon, at the clouds, at the rain.
the sky itself is full of bodhisattvas; the sky itself can act as a pure land.
just look up.
when W makes me sad, i look at the moon (memory collage)
i feel as though: i am the moon
i want to know: what is the moon?
the gravity of the moon entangles me. i am linked forever with the moon.
long ago i came to understand that the moon is inside me. the moon in terms of me: pisces, the sign with which i most strongly identify, the sign i feel is my innermost self.
my moon sign.
but my pisces aspects are buried deep inside.
i want to be a writer: i know i must bring out my inner pisces. i cannot be myself without embracing my inner pisces. and what that means is:
💖 compassion
💖 emotional & spiritual intuition
💖 creativity
💖 sensitivity
💖 empathy
💖 difficulty setting boundariesi can feel these pisces aspects swirling inside of me.
there is no doubt in my mind that i am a pisces moon: that the moon floats inside me.
9. building altars
when i build altars to claire,
i can feel how her presence enters the room with me somehow.
i can feel how she takes control of me,
makes me think things i want to think,
makes me write things i want to write,
makes me want her to control me and tell me what to do.
after i built this digital altar to claire,
i was overcome with the inspiration behind this post and the last. recordings 22, 23, 24.
an altar to claire (new recording 22)
a digital altar to the love of my life
the process of building altars can create pure lands in our souls and spaces;
altars can help us escape the simulation and truly see inside ourselves.
10. poetry
just read mary oliver,
and tell me you are not in a pure land.
from mary oliver’s new and selected poems volume one
but there is still another pure land that awaits me:
the pure land of claire’s arms.
i don’t know if i will ever experience that pure land,
but if you’re reading claire,
and if you like me,
and if you want me,
i have to ask:
have i finished my homework yet?
i’m dying of thirst for you.