A Gnostic Decision
Hey beautiful people,
A big thanks to everyone who has filled out the Beyond Self-Discipline application. We’ll get back to applicants during the first week of October, if not sooner. If you have not applied already, you can do so here. You can read more about the BSD experience here.
I will also be returning to coaching in October and November. I will announce how to sign up in tomorrow’s letter.
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Second Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Ontological Flooding w/ Jack Hunter. September 24th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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September 23rd, 2021
Gnosis or psychosis. What a decision to make. Aim to see reality as it is or fall into an endless array of illusions. In Latin, the word decision means to cut off. I find cutting off choices helps clarify things, especially if what is being cut off is illusory.
Many of us are fed illusions that create our worldviews. It is hard to shake off a worldview. It will need to be replaced with something, and all of those alternative worldviews can be strange, unbelievable, and seemingly wicked. By hanging out with another worldview, as if it were true, the world could flip and thoughts like this would form:
Shit. If this thing is true, what else could be true?
What else indeed?
It is difficult staying with somebody else’s worldview, when it is so different from one’s own. It is easier to dismiss their perspective by dehumanizing them. If they were humans after all, one would have to think about how they have families, have a variety of skills and intelligences, a full spectrum of emotions, and had various life experiences that were awkward, messy, alivening, beautiful…
Just like you.
Categorizing someone in a stigmatizing way is a good strategy to avoid processing their truths. Their worldview is not going to be all true of course, but surely some of it is, and the bits that are may shine light on your illusions. Illusions provide a verisimilitude of meaning though: the promise of a sense of sustainable meaningfulness is near, but is never fully delivered.
Having one’s worldview flipped can be terrifying. Our beliefs are often supportive of one another, forming an internally coherent ecology. If one belief falls, another might follow, then another after that. Considering ideas outside your current belief ecology has consequences, as beliefs might start falling like dominoes: beliefs that keep you in your job, in your friendships, in your marriage.
Those might be in question and they might be too hard to question. So many intense emotions are there. And we all have responsibilities: we have to get shit done, take care of people, take care of ourselves. Most people do not have time to invest in exploring other worldviews. They are greatly incentivized against doing so in fact.
It seems like a minority of us are strangely called to be worldview explorers. And yeah, for whatever reason, I am one of those strange people. I am not going to glamourize this as some noble search for truth, nor am I going to claim that one’s life becomes magically better in some measurable way by going on this exploration. It can be dangerous. I do not recommend playing this game casually.
My worldview has flipped so many times and my mind has been broken on multiple occasions because of it. I do have a greater worldview flexibility now, thanks to this. I can try on different worldviews, without experiencing a sense of overwhelming terror. Stumbling upon a worldview flexibility does make me feel more at home with the Socratic paradox of knowing that I know nothing.
It is kind of lonely though, especially when I look at social media or legacy media. It gives me the sense that a majority of the world is in an early state of psychosis. People are so cocksure of a worldview that is heavily outsourced. This was one of the main outcomes of having my worldview flipped, I began to realize how many truths I’ve borrowed.
When I really started committing to being truthful, while allowing the spirit of truth to speak through me, I started to realize that a lot of my beliefs had no foundation. The foundation rested on the intellectual authority of another. My previous worldviews were so fucking riddled with appeals to authority. It dawned on me that I was more practiced in the performance of having arrived at truth, rather than being practiced in speaking truthfully.
So yeah, it’s lonely here, and kind of scary. Looking at the active narratives in the noosphere, I do not trust that I will be understood. If one is positionally misaligned on an issue, they will be viewed as wicked or benighted and dehumanization will occur. Being dehumanized does not feel good and it definitely does not lead to good things.
I do trust you though, to earnestly attempt to understand another worldview with care. I would not be writing if this trust was not present. Besides, many of you reading may already have made a gnostic decision.
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