I had the misfortune of watching styxhexenhammer666's vlog on being an ex-satanist and his attempted interpretation of Satanism as being a non-spiritual practical ideology of liberty.
Indeed it is. And the traditional view of God is also that he is a tyrant who seeks absolute obedience from his subjects and only the brave have the guts to rebel and seek freedom, as indeed did Lucifer the shining angel of light. So the religious view is in accordance with the secular view completely. Whether you want to believe in God/Devil or not does nothing to change the ideology: it is about personal freedom. And if you think that God/Devil are just metaphors then you can continue to think in terms of them without bringing in the whole irrelevant discussion on whether they "exist" or not. I will use God/Devil as metaphors without getting involved in any irrelevant questions of ontology... Lets stick to the point: liberty and evil.
So what is wrong with that? And here is the confusion. Remember the "Devil" has no power other than deception. People like to use mystical images of the devil, and associate him with various supernatural powers, and believe he can get you what you want, and he is associated with "Evil" and all manner of fantastical stuff. And this is in fact all true. But the whole point of spiritual power is that it doesn't come from the "deity" you worship, it comes from You. "gods" have no power themselves, it all comes from the Central Power of the Universe which is the same as You. If you worship a certain type of "god" you are simply strengthening your own resolve and power. In the secular world we see it all the time in "positive" thinking movements and being in the "zone", being focused and resolved to do things. When the Self is focused and resolved to do things its power is hugely magnified. If you really believe things then there are no limits. In Buddhism this is fully recognised and understood, which is one reason I respect Buddhism so much, it gives an extraordinarily full account of all these processes. Chanting, which even Jesus dismissed as the "pagans babbling" is, if done with sincere faith and belief, a way of generating mental focus and resolve. Meditation even more so. So whether you chant Guan Yin and seek to manifest her fearless love for all mankind within yourself to overcome obstacles and fears, or you chant the name of the Devil to generate strength to pursue your personal goals, or whether you pray to Jesus and ask the Holy Spirit to enter you so you can carry out God's destiny for you in fact they are all doing the exact same thing which is empowering You.
So all spiritual practice is about self-empowerment regardless what branch you follow. So how is Satanism different from the others? What is this Liberty that appealed to styxhexenhammer666? And how does Good/Bad fit into this.
SO the key difference between the types of Self Empowerment are whether they empower you to follow your own desires or whether they empower you to respond to other people's desires too. This appears to be the single source of confusion. Should we pay 100% attention to what we want only, or should we find time for other people.
Put like that lots of people will think. If I give 10% of my time to other people then I only have 90% for myself and who is going to give me that? I can only be sure of myself so I'll take 100% for myself and other people can do 100% themselves. It all works out. You can't go anywhere from here, 100% is taken by everyone and that's it.
But in reality this is not how things are. I go to a party and there are 5 friends there, and we all make an effort to find time to be together and we have a great time. This is impossible if we all stayed at home. When people get together the result is more than if they are separate. Indeed the Satanist knows this, being in a group of Satanists generates more power than if they did it alone. There is an extra bit. This in fact is why Satanists form groups. But how in a world where the self is 100% can there be more? Where does the extra "good time" when you get together come from? How when 5 people put there rents together to move into a big house, do they all get a share of a big house? When alone they would each have a small flat? There are obvious things going on in the world where the sum of parts is more than the parts. If you take a sacrificial human and break them apart into organs you have less than when you started, they for example cannot hold a conversation anymore - this is the most noticeable change possible seeing how the parts of the body in a dead person are not the same as the functioning whole.
So examining this way in which people actually fit together in a bigger entity, and how our lives are actually the result of this interconnection to other people is the way to better things than can be achieved by the I AM 100% view. This is the lowest possible view, the common denominator, where you descend when everything else fails. But the Devil being the ultimate Hoaxer makes this seem like a safe place to hide, where we think we have power. It is an illusion. This god is actually the only god who makes things worse off in the long run. You may initially feel you have self power and you embark on a I AM 100% road, but as the world around you starts to do this you realise how much you gained from parties and the interaction with other people.
Finally "desires" are real, regardless who they belong to. Examining this we see that there is actually no reason why "my" desires are more important than others. True if we don't attend to our own desires we will die, but we won't accidentally ignore our desires (tho a lot of us actually do - see below!) cos when we feel hungry that hunger often gets notified before other people. But in reality there is no difference between 2 hungry people. How do you chose who to feed? Well you work together to solve your mutual hunger. The key to solving desires is mutuality, and thoughts that think "I'll just do it myself" while successful are the least powerful thought. The Devil's goal is actually to crush us, it is always worth remembering this. He is 100% himself so why would he give even 1% for us?
Now there is Nietzsche, and there are negative emotions which some would say are actually the positive emotions and they would say we are brainwashed by Christianity and Slave Consciousness into denying ourselves our desires. The only problem with Nietzsche from a factual point of view is that the idea of denying yourself did not come from the Jews in Slavery. His idea here is that imprisoned by the Egyptians the Jews came to reject the freedom of their captor Pharaohs and instead justify and internalise their own lack of freedom. From this came the religion of subservience to an all powerful captor (God) and the virtue of being obedient slaves from which came Protestant Work Ethic and ultimately Capitalism where we live in a world completely subservient to paying off debt held with the rich and powerful.
Now don't think I am not 100% sympathetic to this view, but there is a problem. In India there is the exact same idea. And while India experienced the Aryan invasion which enslaved the Southern Indians it is the Aryan religion which speaks of self-mortification! (and which probably became Judaism anyway). Tapas is the energy gained from self-mortification which leads to all kinds of supernatural powers and mental abilities. The whole idea of spirituality in opposition the physical materialism has just as rich a history here as in the West. Altho it is important to make a point here. In the post Platonic West oppositions are seen as absolute: in the fight there can be only 1 winner. Before Plato and elsewhere in the world while one fight may end with a winner and loser, "Fighting" itself is endless and so it is not the winning/losing that matters but seeing the eternal struggle between opposites bound inseparably in the Battle - as Kierkegaard put it "try and separate the dancer from the dance" may as well have been separate the "spirit from the body" or "the winner from the loser" or the "capitalist from their possessions." So the Resistance of desires vs the Embracing of desires is an eternal battle with no winner of loser but the very nature of being a desiring being is wondering whether to obey our desires or reject them. So the matter of desire is not as Nietzsche put it in freedom to pursue ones desires, but in the battle to manage ones desires at all. I forget the film but someone says to a King "but you can have anything you desire" and the King says forlornly, "but who gets to choose what he desires?" We are all slaves to desire unless we can master them. Sanskrit literature points this out, "It takes a great man to command an army, and an even greater one to master themselves." The hardest person to be in charge of is our self, and this is the Tapas that the Hindus speak of. If I have decided to run a marathon, but in the morning I decide to sit in and watch TV it is hard to see whether we are doing what we want... however really we know full well we have let ourselves down and the watching TV was not what our true wish - we just did it to avoid stepping up to do the run. And that is it in fact, the goal of this blog entry: Our "True Wish" is the hardest thing to obey. We are always tempted away from our true wish, and the weak man is easily dissuaded from their true path, easy to distract, easy to weaken the resolve of, easy to manipulate, fickle and unfaithful to themselves. This is the whole point of Religion to give us icons and a focus for our True Wish so that we may find support in not being distracted.
But with all that said, who even knows their True Wish. It takes a special form of honesty to admit that we have failed our self, that we have not been true to our self, that we have not given our best. I think for Satanists what they gain from congregation with other Satanists is mutual hiding of this recognition that they have failed themselves. This type of freedom, the freedom to let oneself down--and I don't mean let other people down, and their expectations of you, which is just personal weakness also-- I mean inner-eye to inner-eye let oneself down and ones own True Wish.
There is no easy way to finish this blog, because in the end it is so personal. You cannot tell people their True Wishes. As Kierkegaard puts it, the Divine Madness is not the same as the Aesthete even while being a personal experience. It does not rely upon social justification and ethics, and it does not rely upon private motivation but is a hybrid of personal experience which never-the-less has universal significance. When the True God speaks to us (in whatever form you wish to see Him) he does so privately but what he says effects the Universe. To weak minds this might give a sense of megalomania, but it's complete mundane in fact. Seeing the True God in the simple drinking of a cup of tea is what makes us Our True Self. Doing so without distraction, in the full knowledge that this is what we have chosen to do, and it is our wish, not coerced by others, done simple and perfectly, without hidden motives, without desire to impress or hurt others or be showy or achieve some effect other than what it is: this is True Wish and True Action.
I wonder whether a suicide person ever gets taken over by a type of Divine Madness, where suddenly the road of their destiny opens up and they see it is as a fitting final page of their life. But I doubt this very much in fact. I think acts of destruction like this are always secretly motivated by wishing to hurt other people, and they are never a True Wish from our own Hearts. How ever things may seem today, we know that tomorrow is a completely different day, and if we are ready to step up onto our old selves and let them go admit not pursuing our True Wish, tomorrow is then a completely different Self also - indeed everything can be different tomorrow. But the problem with huge acts of destruction is that tomorrow is very likely to carry the impact of that act and be very hard to get away from so really we are simply making it even harder to move on. Dying is never the end, it is just the Start. When we die (or others die), sadly we do not leave ourselves behind, we only destroy the body, but the Wishes and the Destiny still spread out before us, and we just add problems to something we are only putting facing until the future. Like with God/Devil at the start lets not get into a ontological discussion of whether souls really exist or not and whether there is a real afterlife etc, it is irrelevant to understanding how things are: point is whether they exist or not has made no difference to whether i can live of not so it doesn't matter for everyday life of which I am talking. When I am confronted with people who say they want to hurt or kill me, I always accept it, but ask them a simple question "I can't stop you, but can you tell me how this will help you?" Acts of violence are never True Wish, negative wishes and emotions, abuses and hurt are never our Deepest Wish - they seek only to enact revenge, or make a huge display so others notice us, respect us or in some way get other people to do something for us. It is better not to expect from others, in this at least the Satanist is right: be 100% yourself, never expect others to help, support or make you feel good: this is not in our power no matter who we pray to. Think about it: if everyone is 100% themselves then we can't change them or expect anything different from them than what we get. This is correct. But where the Satanist is wrong is that this doesn't stop us from being better than that our self. Help others, support them and make them feel good is very much in our power! And if we think it through there is no reason not do this. And, while The Devil will say all manner of negative things like, why bother, they're not worth it, I deserve more than them, I like to hurt them more than make them feel good, they never did anything for me, I am hurting so why should they feel good - despite this onslaught of negative stuff our True Wish is to feel and be Good, and we know this is a universal wish shared by all, and so the True Wish is that everyone feels and is Good. If we pursue that purely selfishly and diligently we will gain the greatest power that exists in the Universe and which the Devil is trying his hardest to blind us to because he does not want us to Shine more than the angel of light.
