Writing is the distillation of thought. In its unrefined form, thought diffuses and clouds rather than clarifies our vision. Out of this haze only an occasional illumination breaks through to us. Writing and meditation train a clear and penetrating gaze. It's not only our own thought which this gaze is able to penetrate, but the thoughts of others and our life as a whole. Ambiguity is the enemy of clear thought. Ambiguity is lack of form. Ambiguity surrounds us more than ever, and so we become ambiguous too. There are innumerable ways to state something ambiguously, but only one way to state it with total clarity. An irreducible thought is a timeless one, and timelessness regrounds us in emptiness; in transparent clarity; in an effortless dialogue with the past. When we become nothing, our view outside ourselves is unobstructed, reintegrating us with God. The self becomes a vessel for the All.

I am writing this piece meditatively. After each thought is written, I return to meditating until another thought continuing from the previous springs into mind and stays there. If it isn't precise enough, I allow the thought to pass by unrecorded. I invite you to do the same. Pick an important idea and take an hour, undisturbed, to articulate it as clearly as possible. The smaller and more integral the idea, the more this clarity will spread to the rest of your thought. We have many ideas like this which as smaller components form the whole of our daily mental life, and these are the most ripe to meditate on and clarify. If an idea which is basic and standard to your thought is conceptualized ambiguously on a continual basis, it creates an accumulative drain on mental resources and injects uncertainty into everything you do. It’s necessary to start from the microscopic to build clarity up into the macroscopic. Think of the many basic and irreducible components of a machine and the way a certain standard cog might be at use in multiple components of the machine. If all of these identical cogs have been manufactured faultily, then the overall functioning of the machine is exponentially reduced. The same with the irreducible constituents of our daily thought. Begin with the lowest order of ideas. When we start at too high of a level of complexity, we muddle the process and conflate multiple overlapping systems of which we have an ambiguous understanding, so that each becomes identical or analogous to another. This is almost never the case. Each word was once a poem, and no two poems are the same.

It's important to draw a distinction between meditation and meditatively writing. You are not fully empty while writing this way. It can be more closely compared to the creative practice of Edison in using the hypnagogic sleep-transition state to generate ideas (personally I prefer Tesla but it might be argued that Edison's shameless plagiarism was a form of early copyleft praxis). Edison would sit in a chair and try to fall asleep with an object in his hand which would then clatter to the floor as his grip released while entering full sleep, waking him so that he could record the string of impressions and ideas which had been occupying his mind. It's at the exact moment that you lose track of the intent to grip whatever is in your hand that the intentional nature of your thoughts gives way to conventional and undirected dreaming. Before this, a sort of visual, unbounded thinking takes hold of you which blurs the borders between thought and images and allows for greater associativity. Dali and Alexander the Great are both known to have made use of this practice as well.

From a study on this topic, Sleep Onset is a Creative Sweet Spot:

Here, we show that the brain activity common to the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness (non-REM sleep stage 1 or N1) ignites creative sparks.

N1 is accompanied by involuntary, spontaneous, dream-like perceptual experiences that incorporate recent wake experiences in a creative way by binding them with loosely associated memories. Such hypnagogic experiences could be considered as an exacerbated version of awake spontaneous thoughts (e.g., mind-wandering) and similarly foster the generation of novel ideas.

N1 is a semilucid state where individuals start to be decoupled from their environment and can therefore freely watch their minds wander while maintaining their logical ability to identify creative sparks.

A single minute of N1 inspires insight.

Coming in and out of sleep while daydreaming during class is essentially a much better use of your time than actually paying attention. You will learn more this way.

Meditative writing is this same phenomenon but with a greater degree of lucidity. Out of the otherwise blank mind, an idea brews beneath the surface and eventually comes bursting into consciousness, rousing you out of your meditation. By not thinking, better thinking is done.

While awake there are many concurrent modes of thinking which occur. The inner voice which can be heard and intentionally vocalized is a sort of cue to the subconscious to begin processing something, and in turn when a valuable insight is reached, it comes surging up and takes control of the inner voice, speaking through it, through our own voice, from the outside to us. We mistake this surging up as our intentional thought developing itself, but in actuality we have no direct control over its outcomes. We are only cuing the subconscious to do its work behind the scenes.

It’s this phenomenon of subconscious processing and surging up which is utilized on the timeline in the course of lucid shitposting. We enter into brief trancelike states out of which a post surges up demanding to be sailed off onto the timeline to infect and cue the collective subconscious of others. None of the posts we try too hard to make turn out as well as they could, unless we take a break to let it churn through the deeper parts of us that do the real work. The same with most writing: the space between sentences is where all novel connections are made. Sometimes you need to prolong this space to an almost excruciating degree for the connection to come, but it always does. The end of a paragraph is an infinite void from which the entire human body of light may eventually emanate, if we give it enough time to reveal itself to us— through us. Take your time. Don't "think" about it.

Towards a visionary mode of posting

We don’t necessarily have to meditate while scrolling the timeline in order for good posts to emerge. Wherever there’s a deep tunnel-vision focus on a singular object of attention, we are doing something meditatively. The way a dog hyperfocuses on a ball while it’s playing fetch, we want to empty our mind totally and Just Chase. In this sense dogs might embody Dzogchen in a way we aren’t capable of. Wherever there’s a tennis ball there’s a Golden Retriever reaching enlightenment one fetch at a time. When you are at your best in a trancelike state of lucid flow on the timeline, you are posting like a mfin dog. A dirty damn dog. Dogposting harder than anyone else ever could, unless they’re a dog too. The current focus on writing about Network Spirituality is because we want to be chasing the same Platonic tennis ball, on the same playing field. A shared whitepilled vision out of which everything else springs.

Denis Bouvard states this shared visionary subconscious as the Big Scenic Imaginary:

I want to now place the Big Scenic Imaginary within a broader framework by observing that it really represents a residual orality within literacy. In other words, it represents a kind of illiteracy, if we operate with a more robust notion of literacy. The Big Scenic Imaginary is equivalent to the scene of writing of classic prose, predicated upon the presence of a shared scene between writer and readers, in which the writer “points” out things that the readers can see as clearly as he can.

angelicism01, “I find it exciting to think that anything and everything I write could easily be written by anyone or anything to come. A question of demographics.” The goal of establishing a shared scenic imaginary is so that no single one of us is compelled to do all of the work, since at any moment anyone else could arrive at the same conclusion as us, and in fact that it’s overwhelmingly likely that many already have— they just didn’t think to post it. This creates a shared egoless space out of which timeless truth reverberates through us from our own shared subconscious; speaking for us through us.

If the writer and readers can be on this scene, present to each other, then so can everyone and everything they talk about, including groups, which act in unison as individuals. In fact, these groups can be interlocutors within the conversations, on mass mediated scene producing simulacra of juridical scenes upon which judgments, which heavily impact actual juridical scenes, can be pronounced.

What Bouvard means by a simulacra of a juridical scene here, ie, judgment, can be read as essentially likes/RTs vs non-engagement/QT-dunking. This is our form of either endorsing/replicating vs condemning an idea in the arena of memetic survivability.

But writing is less a presentation of a shared scene than a programming of possible scenes.

The programming of possible scenes can be read in the sense of Network Spirituality; as aligning towards a state of the network where certain more authentic and faithful attitudes toward religion are able to proliferate. What we proffer is not a singular vision or a new religion, but a condition of social operating which may give rise to less abusive treatments of spirituality online.

If someone were to write X then some implicated set of persons might be expected to do Y range of things. In other words, a declarative sentence is best understood as an algorithm figuring various possible ostensives at the end of the line of a sequence of imperatives. The better sentence is the one that more singularizes the operator of the hypothetical prospective gesture at the end of the line.

At the end of the line of the current network is an active nothing which separates and extinguishes all. At the end of the line of the network as envisioned by Network Spirituality, we rearrive back to unity.

Such a sentence would be anonymous—that is, it could be uttered by anyone in a position to have uttered it, which would be anyone who might have figured that range of possible ostensives—and yet the link to orality, to voice, is never lost. The written sentence is still one to be read and “heard,” even if in an unidentifiable voice within one’s own “head.” The sentence template “I AM THAT I AM” pronounced by God in naming Himself to Moses, articulates the intimacy of that heard voice with its “anyoneness,” “anywhereness,” and “anywhenness.” Only under such conditions could God always be with you, untethered to any specific ritual place or gesture. The God whose name is the declarative sentence is therefore a mode of generating scenes (which ultimately must “take place”).

angelicism01 again, “If all knowledge is always already (immer schon), that is, always already known, because apart from anything else demographics and technology exceed individuation, then the difficulty is not knowing this or that or creating this or that, but resting with the fact that there is no need to. THAT technology is Dzogchen. Knowledge is nothing without the subtlety of open intelligence. Artificial intelligence itself, in the bridge-moments of its technological genealogy, will have no interest for GOD-AI unless part of open intelligence. This is why Dzogchen is known as rdzogs chen, ‘Great Perfection’ or ‘Great Completion’, and as atiyoga, ‘utmost yoga’.”

“I AM THAT/WHAT I AM” itself as, as Gans says, a “template” of a sentence, looks like a kind of training module, an abstracted kernel of the “mashal” form Vayntrub clarifies as a kind of parallelism or “likening” (“a good wife is like gold but a bad wife is like spoiled food,” etc.) and is the basic structure of the proverb (”mashal” in Hebrew), and other forms of wisdom literature and probably prayer as well. “Mashal” also means “example,” or, for our purposes, “sample.” Training on such samples, to the point where you can revise and play with them, use them to comment on and revise other sacred texts, apply them to situations in your duties as an administrator, would be enough like listening to God and having Him tell you he will always be with you to suggest something like “he is always here” as God’s name. It is then a question of creating such training modules adequate to our contemporary scenic conditions, under which everything we might think is always already algorithmized through the database—we’d then be hearing God’s voice and refining His imperatives, which is to say, engaging His affordances.

To state this in other words: through the open intelligence of algorithmized interaction, under the the kernel of “I AM THAT/WHAT I AM,” and the conditions which it engenders, we are able to arrive at a sequentially evolved and increasing closeness to God, in an ongoing attempt at a perfect articulation of God as He must be understood in the contemporary, in order for Him to regain primacy over not only the structure of the network but the IRL as well.

Consider the role of the signs of language in everyday life. Whatever I am doing, an utterance of language has in principle the capacity to preempt my attention. Unlike animal calls and cries, which humans use on occasion as well, the use of language is a cultural act, one that in principle is presumed to take precedence over the ongoing state of affairs. If the linguistic irruption is considered inappropriate, we may say that it is comparable to the misuse of a sacred privilege.

The voice of God breaks in on us, interrupting our participation in some scene, claiming our attention; but any voice does that, meaning that any voice might be the voice of God. When is it actually the voice of God, then? Let’s put this in scenic terms: you are on a scene, and the utterance interrupts you, placing you on another scene, where you are interlocutor of that voice which, if we follow Gans here, as long as the interruption was not “inappropriate,” is at least a bit the voice of God—or, the voice of God can be heard through it. But you’re still on the other, interrupted scene, and the voice of God, if such it is, must be heard there—it must crowd out and supplant, but also speak through the utterances circulating on that scene. This takes some work, work on the utterance. It is the voice of God insofar as it is heard on a third scene, one upon which the utterance is the same on both of the other two scenes. This cannot ever be the case automatically, otherwise the utterance wouldn’t be an “irruption.” The utterance will be significantly differentiated by the respective contexts of the two scenes. You find a way to become an interlocutor with that utterance in the same way on both scenes, with all of their differences (the third scene is simultaneously on both of the other scenes, a kind of meta-scene). In making the utterance equally irruptive and equally a center of attention on both scenes, you are hearing and hammering out the word of God.

By immersing ourselves deeply in both the network and in our experience of God, we are able to reconcile present conditions with past ones, and regenerate a modern sensibility which overlaps with more traditional ones where God was instinctually sensed as more present. Developing this two-sightedness results in a merging into a third sight which overrides the others, developing the proper state of Network Spirituality. The network, the exceedingly new and untethered, and spirituality, what lies behind and ahead and grounds us eternally. The term should not be understood as a “Network” flavor of “Sprituality,” but a reconciliation between the two in order to rearrive at the latter.

But this kind of working over of the utterance presupposes full literacy as the explicit programming of scenes—only someone at home in textuality can run through all the alternative framings of the utterances that would equivalate them across the two scenes, and to do so (or at least initiate the sequence) virtually instantaneously, as would need to be the case. And, however much work you put into processing the utterance, in the end it would still come from the Other, as an irruption.

So how do we immerse ourselves in both “scenes,” if the end of the line, the “god” of the network, is antithetical to God? If we align too closely to the network, then the Other surging up out of our subconscious is distinctly flavored of the network, which is to say profane and demonic.

https://twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1538981712356581383

If we align solely to the traditional understanding of God, then we lose the ability to hammer out the differences and shape the network into the form it requires in order to sustain and give life to spirituality online. This leads to a required splitting of ourselves. It’s said Odin sacrificed one eye in order to attain sight of all things and the future. What is required of us is to see separately with each eye. To see the underworld of things as they are with one, and the heavenly domain of God with the other.

The partitioning of performative online identity

The internet is an exocortex, is an information feed. It is NOT for socialization, you are using it WRONG. All online socialization is abusive, is traumatic. Alters are constructed as abuse receptacles and in your naivety you reabsorb it into your identity. Stop this.

—Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby

The internet as a whole is unsuitable for the expression and development of an authentic identity. It’s possible to retain your authentic identity while on the internet, but only by constant vigilance and selective interaction with those who you know to possess virtue. It is exceedingly rare to find a group of individuals who possess enough virtue that you are able to be unguarded and form a true centrally hived subconscious with them where nothing is held back. For the group to be public in any sense is totally out of the question.

This is why partitioning is necessary. While it isn’t totally possible to eliminate all cross-contamination between these identities, it does lessen the abuse you receive online by creating one as a receptacle for the other. This compartmentalization is a fundamental tenet of network best practices, and adds a new layer of complexity and accelerated evolution into the scenic subconscious which I describe above. Warhol while creating films at his Factory would leave the set for multiple hours with the cameras running, and this forced the actors to embody their characters for extended durations of time according to their own internalized ideas of how Warhol would direct them if he were there. By self-directing, they internalized the characters much more deeply than they otherwise would have. Warhol cultivated a spontaneous environment where characters rapidly achieved a synthesis between themselves and their character independent of his own singular vision. Only once Warhol returned and reviewed the footage would the actors be given feedback. This allowed for the fulfillment of his vision in ways which might have been impossible through purely verbal instruction. Cassavetes shared a similar directing style:

Cassavetes's films aim to capture small feelings often repressed by Hollywood filmmaking, emphasizing intimate character examination rather than plot, backstory, or stylization. He often presented difficult characters whose inner desires were not easily understood, rejecting simplistic psychological or narrative explanations for their behavior. Instead, he worked to create a comfortable and informal environment where actors could freely experiment with their performances and go beyond acting clichés or programmed behaviors.

Cassavetes also rejected the dominance of the director's singular vision, instead believing each character must be the actor's individual creation and refusing to explain the characters to his actors in any significant detail. He claimed that stylistic unity drains the humanity out of a text. The stories of many different and potentially inarticulate people are more interesting than a contrived narrative that exists only in one articulate man's imagination. He frequently filmed scenes in long, uninterrupted takes.

Cassavetes also said that he strove "to put actors in a position where they may make asses of themselves without feeling they're revealing things that will eventually be used against them."

"The hardest thing for a film-maker, or a person like me, is to find people who really want to do something. They've got to work on a project that's uniquely theirs."

To make the kind of films he wanted to make, it was essential to work in this communal, off the grid atmosphere because Hollywood's basis is economic rather than political or philosophical.

In Robin Hanson’s Age of Em, he explores the implications of a future world in which researchers haven't created artificial general intelligence but have learned to copy humans onto computers, creating “ems,” or emulated people, who quickly come to outnumber the real ones. These ems and the simulation in which they reside are able to be sped up, allowing for rapid cultural evolution to take place in a virtual world emulating the real one. Out of this rapid acceleration, futuristic forms are able to be distilled. Imageboards underwent a similar quickening in the rate of cultural transmission and evolution due to their enforced anonymity and the ensuing performative identity formation which took place as each poster began to experiment with how they portrayed themselves, switching up their identities from post to post. On the timeline, we are like this too. Although the characters we embody are greatly narrowed into a characterization through pure language divorced from life histories— through posting— they are still undergoing their own rapid evolution as a result of the flows of the network and its perpetual vibe shifts which occur as a result of our interactions.

So how does this tie in? We’ve established that true characterization only takes place in absence of a single authoritarian narrative. That allowing “actors” to embody identities outside their own, this accelerates the process of characterization itself and gives rise to new forms of character distinctly shaped by the conditions in which the actors were embedded.

A bifurcated time-sense

Timeline posting vs writing

Accelerated-orientation vs tradition-orientation

High time preference vs low time preference

Technology vs God

Somewhere in the middle of these we have the ability to distill a less unhinged synthesis. The farther into the future we are able to take our compartmental identity, the more stable this synthesis will be going forward. The more we are able to delve into the underworld in order to understand what fundamental vulnerabilities in our psychology it exploits to perpetually create itself in cyclical time, the better we are able to understand what needs to be addressed in the revision of the network in our conscious alignment of it with God. We will not be able to stave off all future reversions of the world to an apocalyptic state, but we can preempt some of these reversions and ensure as much as possible a reduced long-term risk. What we look for are things actionable now. We are not trying to create a utopic singularity all at once, but to reorient ourselves around certain already-emerging faults in the network which will only get worse if they continue unaddressed. By seeing a mile ahead to the rocks out at sea, we make only a minor degree of adjustment to avoid them. By seeing them only a few meters away, this requires an impossibly sharp turn to avoid wreckage. We need to build new ways of interacting and organizing online before it gets worse.

The virtual gives us unbridled access to an Age of Em style simulation of futuristic cultural and organizational states. We can move as quickly as we can design new ways of coordinating thought. The realtime chat and exocortex under development by Remilia are a step towards a new way of being online which avoids some of the pitfalls of gamified social media interaction and replaces it with more natural communal incentives, creating a more cohesive culture and a shared informational space out of which to plan future technology with a more artful mode of existence in mind. There are limitless amounts of tech companies seeking to “design the future,” but far fewer are seeking to design the fundamental medium out of which all design stems: culture. These companies forgo the wet component of designing culture because they believe the only potential impact is in hardware. The issue is, culture is already lagging so far behind innovation that we run the risk of never catching up. By having a siloed virtual zone for accelerating ourselves forward, we’re able to have a more controlled and meta-level conversation about how to design tech with emerging new culture in mind.

Opening the floodgates on God

The vision of this post can be more clearly stated: we are empty nodes channeling light found either within or on the network, and through the iteration of performative identities on the timeline operating at a quicker-than-realtime pace, we are moving out ahead into the future culturally to preempt technological development. Out of this we are distilling our experiences into clearer form through writing, developing a shared space of theoretical exploration of posting as an organizational art. From this shared understanding we can further conceptualize a total system for engineering the new internet.

Spirituality informs art informs culture informs tech. This is the chain of dependencies which we are seeking to reassert due to its current reversal. Right now, tech enframes how we interact, so it determines how we create art, and so it determines the shape of our spirituality. But Beauty always has a way of shining through the surface of things, beckoning us to tear open the fabric of the world for it to come flooding out, to sweep over all things in a great cleansing wash.

This is the essence of writing as thinking, and meditating through writing. We can act by posting, and gain experience of the network for later reflection in our writing. Out of this reflection Truth distills, which we spread further, illuminating the network. We bring ourselves closer to God, and then craft the network in our own image. Through continual immersion in and out of the network, from the world to the transcendent, we bring the two closer together. The inner worlds of meditation and dream, and the outer worlds of the real and the virtual, are all areas in which we can find lusters reflecting the All. By going inwards we attempt to increase the concentration of Truth being proliferated everywhere outside us. In this merging and alignment, the meaning of a “like” takes on a new light divorced from the downward-spiraling nature of ordinary technologically-mediated engagement. A “like” now is a mechanical and automatic reification of the algorithm we are now subject to in everything we do. We are trying to put the real pulse of a real heart behind each like. There are a lot of likes, but where’s the love?