Occulted Fakecel Trivium

"Beauty no accident – Even the beauty of a race or of a family, the charm and perfection of all its movements, is attained with pains: like genius it is the final result of the accumulated work of generations. Great sacrifices must have been made on the altar of good taste, for its sake many things must have been done, and much must have been left undone—the seventeenth century in France is admirable for both of these things,—in this century there must have been a principle of selection in respect to company, locality, clothing, the gratification of the instinct of sex; beauty must have been preferred to profit, to habit, to opinion and to indolence. The first rule of all:—nobody must 'let himself go,' not even when he is alone. — Good things are exceedingly costly; and in all cases the law obtains that he who possesses them is a different person from him who is acquiring them. Everything good is an inheritance: that which is not inherited is imperfect, it is simply a beginning.” - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

We must strive to actually live, as one person, unite ourselves in a point. Know what we want and who we are, stop being distracted, fragmented. We must be like an actor playing a role of our life, make it coherent, live a story rather than living countless unrelated events, scattered everywhere. Take your attention and unite it in a single point. That doesn't mean you should limit yourself but you should find a way to unite everything you do and think about and make it one and the same.

Here’s what I had written so far for you - I’ll pick back up in a bit Okay, Porphyry asks Iamblichus a very pointed question - and remember, they’re both Neoplatonists (just called Platonists then) - and they do not ascribe to the traditional view of the Gods, but the philosophical deconstruction of the poetic Homeric Gods, to be replaced by the One, the Good - with the Gods being downstream intelligences of that perfect One. So, Porphyry asks Iamblichus a question - If the gods are perfect and transcendent, why would they care about sacrifices? Why should chanting particular words summon divine beings? Why would gods need incense, animals, stones, statues, or particular ritual actions. If reason makes us godlike, why bother with all this religious machinery? And Iamblichus tells Porphyry that it’s not the Gods who need our ritual, it is we who need the ritual. With Theurgy, there’s really no calling down and commanding Gods down from Heaven - instead, there’s an understanding that the Gods already exist and are interwoven in the symbols and fabric of reality all around you, they’re already descended. And so with proper ritual, one does not ascend to heaven, but merely participates in the heaven that has already descended. Therefore, it is the gods themselves, who makes Theurgy work - not the practitioner thereof. Interestingly, Iamblichus says that it’s for this reason - that we shouldn’t take our reason to be the principal cause of our ascent. So much so, that Iamblichus favored never translating the names of ancient Gods into their native tongue, even if they seemed to be meaningless gibberish. These are the voces magicae, “barbarous names” and they shouldn’t be changed, as it might mess up the ritual itself, and likewise might strip us of our ability to participate in the higher level with the God.

On the Tension of the Soul and Anatta Between Platonism and Buddhism The soul in Platonism is a mediating power, not a "puppeteer" substance-entity. It exists relatively, as the emanative unity—at once indivisible and divisible—of Nous and the One within Time. In union with the "One"—a deictic term for Hellenic philosophy to point to the "Not Two", the Non-Dual— the soul's self-identity is transcended. Master Proclus, following the hierophant Iamblichus, describes this median mode of existence by attributing to the soul opposing terms held simultaneously, terms characteristic of the intelligible and sense-perceptible realities that form the upper and lower limits of the soul's existence as a mean between them. The soul is thus indivisible and divisible, eternal and temporal, immortal and mortal, ungenerated (agennētos) and generated (genētos). This simultaneous inherence of contradictory attributes earns soul its designation as a "middle" being, an intermediary dynamic power—simultaneously changeable and unchangeable—between incorporeal intelligible realities and sense-perceptible things. As such, Platonic emantive soul-doctrines stands in no absolute conflict with the emanative Trikāya of Mahāyāna Buddhism and its descriptions on how individuality appears in the temporal realm. Platonism emphasizes ontology; Buddhism emphasizes the phenomenology of mind. The difference generates a productive comparative tension, one I find genuinely exciting. The Platonic doctrines of the soul are incompatible chiefly with Madhyamaka Emptiness-Only (Prāsaṅgika) and other anti-metaphysical Buddhist schools, where dependent origination is radicalized into ontological incoherence and reductionist metaphysical nihilism is reified as dogma. Nonetheless, the Prāsaṅgika approach, in turn, is incompatible with multiple other Buddhist schools as well, including but not limited to the "Buddha-Nature/Tathagathagarbha" sutric litertature, the Other-Emptiness Madyamikas, Yogachara, and Dzogchen, the crown pinnacle of Tibetan Buddhism. Most essentially, I argue, that the metaphysical nihilist branches of Buddhism sit uneasily with pre-Abhidharmic Pāli Buddhism—the canon closest in time, and therefore the most accurate source available to us, of Śākyamuni Buddha's actual teachings. Regardless whether one understands selfhood in terms of soul or in purely reductionist terms, The essential to our immediate felt experience is this: egohood is a living power—a creative, free, relational, conscious force mediating between the unmanifest and the manifest.

https://youtu.be/9c9B90XlMU0

https://youtu.be/R7RgHpPPwaU

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And worshiping the gods is not a one way street

A habit pattern becomes a frequency you can tune into. You are not limited from any frequency, but whether you can reach it in a given moment is variable. Can you turn into a berserker on command, an unstoppable frenzy of violence? Probably not, but if your family was being attacked in front of you, you damn well might reach beyond any capacity you’ve ever conceived of. Perhaps you can never train for that, but training and fighting will make it easier for you to reach a state approaching that on command.

Now true magic is bending oneself, using language to improve yourself, commanding and persuading yourself

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"Above all my boys, have courage. Have courage to do the things that you think are right. Never be afraid to fight for what you think is right." — Letter from a fox hole in Iwo Jima

“The wicked flee when no man pursueth, But the righteous are as bold as a lion.” - Proverbs 28:1

You do not have a concrete, eternal self. But you do have an interconnected knot of habit patterns that construct and mediate your experience of each moment. Some of these may be inherited from your lineage, others you may have consciously brought about, but at base these patterns themselves are also empty, ever-changing and temporary. Because of this emptiness, you are free to choose your own path, and you are also not capable of being “lost”. Our choices may be technically limited as mortals, but the freedom to construct yourself in whichever direction you choose is never lost.

Transform yourself through action. The best is yet to come.

“You say, good fortune used to meet you at every corner. But the fortunate person is the one who gives themselves a good fortune. And good fortunes are a well-tuned soul, good impulses and good actions.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 5.36