Love's Armor
Exiting "the Patrix" & Re-Centering the Inner Jesus via Brotherly Love
This week’s free post (audio here) takes a break from the current series on Hollywood as a counterfeit religion and Trump live-theater analysis. I was inspired by a comment or two from people who say they aren’t really interested in movies, one of whom expressed a preference for land stuff. This is also a more personal post that will directly address you, the reader, in the form of an invitation.
The Soul of Work and the Work of the Soul
My wife and I currently have seven goats, seven cats (including a stray that we feed), two chickens, a vineyard with hundreds of plants, and seven acres of land under our care (and this is only the living stuff).
Keeping all of these living things alive has proven to be quite the challenge in and of itself. Since we began this project, we have lost three goats to wolves, five chickens to foxes, and most of this year’s grape crop to fungus and pests.
The feeling of having bitten off more than I can chew with this back-to-the-land lark (not LARP) is one I have on a daily basis.
Probably the biggest, most recurring challenge/headache this year has been containing the goats, both to protect the vegetable garden from them, and to protect them from wolves. As a result, I have become something of an expert in fences and gates.
After turning forty in 2007, I met my wife. I moved to Canada nine months later. Two years after that, my mother and brother died, my marriage temporarily ended after I discovered that my guru (John De Ruiter) was a soul-sucking psychopath, and I moved to Guatemala, and then to Estonia, beginning a twelve-year collaboration with another spiritual teacher. In 2013 I moved back to Canada and took on a massive crack-house reno project. In 2016 we bought a failing thrift store and turned it into a local success story. We paid off the mortgage, sold the reno-ed house at 300% profit, and moved to Spain to begin this current project.
Over the past 16 years, I would say things have got steadily better at an inner level, in terms of acceptance and general peace of mind. On a sort of parallel trajectory, however, my life has also got progressively harder. Physical challenges, inconveniences, and the demands of living have all increased as I have aged.
Apparently, the more physical hardship I have taken on, the greater my peace of mind got, the more challenges I took on, and so on; a bit like spiritual weight-training.
Work will make you free, I heard somewhere. . . ?1
Freedom through toil points to a natural, universal interplay between soul, mind, and body. The soul thrives when the body works, and the mind suffers for its sins and is purged.
Maybe the hardest part of this sustained shift from mind-work to body-work has been to get my attention away from mind-stuff, back to the basics of the body. Slowly de-emphasizing the entertainments of “mapping Hell,” and even spiritual and philosophical seeking, when all the body (and the soul) seem to want and need is . . . physical engagement.
I dream of the day when watching goats graze is more entertaining to me than reading books by Rene Girard, and when I can enjoy pruning grapes even without listening to cultural engineering podcasts on my MP3 player. When all my dopamine hits come from nature, and not artifice.
Then I will know I have moved all the way from mind to matter.
Man the Plow
If work makes us free, how does that work?
Firstly it needs to be the right sort of work, to set us free from sloth, delusion, fantasy, and dependency, and give us sustained exposure to Truth, capital “T,” in the form of the natural laws which are also God’s laws (even if Satan does His admin).
The more things I have under my care, the more responsibility I have, especially when they are living things whose well-being depends on my care and attention.
Power = responsibility? A lesson I learned at a tender age via Marvel comics. Only it turns out that this doesn’t start (or end) with superpowers. Turns out that, to the dissociated, power-fantasy-hungry mind that seeks gratification of all its appetites, and distraction from anything that doesn’t gratify them, power and responsibility are a real drag.
Paradoxially, the responsibility of being beholden to, and only then empowered by, the Laws of Matter is a sustained experience of powerlessness. Well, incompetence anyway.
The freedom of work comes via two things:
1) Facing the challenges of Matter and slowly, gradually, and painfully gaining competence, as our ancestors had, only a few generations back, before the rot of an entertainment/entitlement-based culture took hold.
2) Discomfort, frustration, incompetence, and the sheer inconvenience of endless problems + a relatively retarded ability to solve them >> a Job-like surrender to the process of living and dying.
Power for the soul = powerlessness for the mind (and vice versa).
As plow is to man, man is to God.
(Man is the means to God’s ends.)
Man Vs Nature
This (above) sounds good, but it is a far cry from my current reality.
Currently, I am an over-civilized fool, chasing after goats and cursing, doing all I can not to punch them in the face for their wanton disobedience. I am the faux-farmer who stumbles over every stick and stone and curses every bramble.
You know the cliche about couples fighting over the toothpaste cap and the toilet seat? Cohabitation means things aren’t always arranged the way you want them to be. It means one’s living space starts turning into a minefield of little triggers, and having the feeling of being constantly out of control.
Cue powerlessness and compensatory rage. (Social organization, Rene Girard has argued, largely comes down to managing rage.)
Owning land and animals is like being married, cubed. I don’t think there has ever been a time in my life when I said “Fuck!” this much.
The more things you have under your care, the less control you have over your life.
Goats, chickens, kittens, brambles, they don’t care about your superficial comforts. They won’t cater to a peace of mind that is so precarious it needs “safe spaces” to maintain itself.
Matter is not subject to mind.
Unless you want to force it to submit, through violence and cruelty, and end up married to a resentful shrew, secretly plotting revenge.
We have to earn Matter’s respect; force alone won’t cut it.
Matter is subject only to Spirit, so until (my) mind submits to Spirit, it will never be able to handle responsibilities gracefully.
With seven acres to try to dominate, I have found out just how unruly and irrepressible a force of Nature Nature is. Turn your back for a minute, and all the work needs doing, all over again.
The pathological drive of our aggrandizer-overlords to pave over every last bit of nature, microchip every last grain of sand, and replace all of it with a virtual simulation that can be totally dominated, forever, all of this is now much easier for me to understand.
The war between Man and Nature is the war between Man and God, and Man can only ever be the loser. (Especially if he wins.)
The Patrix (Fake Father Figures)
“The human situation, at its most basic level, depends on there being no Fathers and all-wise kings to ensure the rule of justice for a humanity that continues in a state of eternal infancy.” —Rene Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (p. 232-33.)
In this week’s Jobcast, “Siddhi of the Damned,” I talk with Aaron Sheppard, and Aaron refers to (what I have termed) the Second Matrix as “the Patrix.”
There’s definitely been something in the air in the last week for me (or the ether, or the planetary alignments2), and it has to do with challenging what I see as other people’s illegitimate father figures.
That it has reached its apothesosis in recent bit of Trump live-theater (however “real”) suggests it’s not only me. Whatever this “something” is, it’s currently crystalizing in the air, and in the collective western psyche.
As far as I can tell, the something in the air has to do with the illegitimate installation of a paternalistic (or yes, patriarchal) program in the male psyche, what Aaron calls “the venerable other.”
False ceremony masters that illegitimately assume power on the world stage, and thence in our skulls, and who do so partially by being sold to us as victims of persecution, as well as saviors from it.
The scandal invariably involves an obsessional obstacle, raised up by mimetic desire with all its empty ambitions and ridiculous antagonisms. It is not an obstacle that just happens to be there and merely has to be got out of the way; it is the model exerting its special form of temptation, causing attraction to the extent that it is an obstacle and forming an obstacle to the extent that it can attract. The skandalon is the obstacle/model of mimetic rivalry; it is the model in so far as he works counter to the undertakings of the disciple and so becomes an inexhaustible source of morbid fascination. This is exactly opposite to how love in a Christian sense works (Girard, p. 397, then quotes 1 John 2, 10-11).
Fake father figures (FFF).3
JFK, RFK, MLK, JBP, RFK Jr., Alex Jones, Donald Trump. Does anyone still believe in these 2nd-matrix controlled-op figures of pseudo-salvation?
The answer is yes, many still do. Most of them (you?) are young (or not-so-young) men, desperate to believe in miracles, no matter how shoddy. To believe that the culture that oppresses them might somehow conjure up trustworthy leaders to lead them. The dads they never had.
Even before my Trump-post (which so far hasn’t received much kickback from the Patrix of Trump-lovers), I have been questioning the sort of doublethink that venerates celebrities who are supposedly miraculously self-made (or crowd-funded), both past and present, and being met with predictable resistance.
To me, it is tautological that there are no benign celebrities, because no “counter-cultural” celebrity becomes one without being enabled by the culture they are supposed to be countering, and because having a high body-count of fans means parasocial relationships are multiplying, and parasocial relationships are finally empty and without soul, because they are one-way connections. They are “exactly opposite to how love in a Christian sense works.”
(This may be why, after thirty+ years assembling and disassembling internet platforms, I basically never get past the 2000 number: because I don’t really encourage, or value, parasocial relating.)
No celebrity, indeed no “other,” is worthy of veneration.
This is clearly and starkly exemplified via the current apotheosis of TDS (Trump-Derangment Syndrome), as previously sane individuals start clamoring to get aboard a holographic, Orange-Beam Father Ship, held aloft by the (stupendously manufactured) belief that God performed a miracle on 7/13 by saving DJT’s life from an inept assassination attempt. Presumably, this was so King Donald could go on to do God’s work, help usher in the Kingdom of God, and restore his blessed son Alex J to former glories, etc, etc. But it is perhaps kindest not to follow delusions through to their logical denouement.
If you believe any of this, I will continue to love you, because Jesus tells me I must; but please don’t bring any flyers to my door or try to sell me a MAGA4 hat.
But what do I know? Opinions are like assholes, etc.
(For a fuller explanation of why I hold this one, go here.)
Men become autonomous and ensouled by working together as one community-body, with no fixed leader who is not also serving those he leads. Gathering parasocially around an idealized male figure is the satanic inversion of this natural arrangement.
There is only one “father figure” worth letting into our psyches. Only one man who can “father” us. All of these cultural surrogates are exploiting a lack of connection to that original man, in our own lives.
“The Word of the Father, which is identical with the Father, consists in telling mankind what the Father is, so that people may be able to imitate him: ‘Love thine enemies, pray for your persecutors; so shall you be sons of your Father’” (Girard, p. 258).
The past lack of a good father to have given us the tools to orientate ourselves towards the true Father, past, present, and future, who art in Heaven.
A Nation of Men
After my all-too-brief experience of working the land with Luke Dodson and Adam Ormes in June, I became more acutely aware than ever of how much my soul thrives on male companionship, in the form of natural collaboration. I would even say that male-teamwork is a close second, in terms of my soul’s needs, to getting right with Nature. Or maybe a first.
Why should men gathering where women aren’t (generally) invited be so nourishing to my soul? (On our mini-retreat, the women did the cooking and dishes, while the men worked.)5 And how or why is it the spiritual equivalent—or complement—to working with the laws of Matter (Mater, the mother)?
Maybe the answer is in that question? Men need to stick together if we are going to take on Big Mama.
Otherwise, emerging from the Matrix (mother-bondage) leads inevitably into the “Patrix.”
Men lost their way when they lost their sense of reality, beginning with the reality of sex and sexuality. The soul requires full embodiment to serve the Spirit, and bodily speaking, we are our sex. We are men.
Or were, before we were castrated and delegated (both men and women) to some sickly, dissociated in-between limbo realm.
Re-centering maleness means getting our sex back where it needs to be.
(There can be no good women until there are good men: Eve only tempted Adam because Adam wasn’t keeping Eve in check.)6
To develop trust and acceptance among one’s own sex means to let go of the social armor of “guyness” (as instilled by the culture of crap we imbibe) and to allow the life force to flow, out of the head and bollocks, back into the heart where it belongs.
Only a heart-centered body allows the soul to come home.
Last week, I woke from a dream with the words: “Love of Christ is your armor.”
And where men are embodied, where two or three are gathered for this purpose, God is not far behind. In fact, He is way ahead of us.
Entertainment, titillation, stimulation, distraction, dissociation, fantasy! All substitutes for religious meaning, which is the experience of the soul.
This latter can be facilitated by forms of so-called sacred art, that is, by divine revelation canned for preservation purposes.
But the soul’s primary means of embodiment, our salvation, is through a natural engagement with Matter (physical work with animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms), in combination with human community.
Body of Christ, whose only armor is love.
***
I invite my subscribers to contact me or comment below if you’re interested in any of the following: a live-streaming event; a mixed online meeting; or a men-only online meeting. Likely time would be either around 3 pm, UK Time (10 am Eastern Time), or 6 pm UK time.
Reply to this (if you received it by email), comment below, or email me directly to my first name @ protonmail.com. Say which of the three options you are interested in.
In case anyone doesn’t get it, a reference to the words embossed at the entrance to Auschwitz. Most likely, this wasn’t strictly true.
Planetarily, a current conjunction between Mars and Uranus corresponds with masculinity and sexuality (Mars), and awakening, freedom, and revolutions (overthrows of illegitimate power, Uranus). Uranus was castrated by his sons, in a revolt led by the youngest, Cronos (Saturn), in order to replace him.
For those who like syncs, FFF is the name of a Public Image song on their most celebrated Album, with the lyrics “Senseless reasoning/You believe what you want to believe/Farewell, my fair-weather friend/On you no one can depend/Bad times/Now they must end” and “The shutter-speed of your thinking process/Is small/Too small/Too full of pride/Lost in a storm”
Messiahs Always Get Annointed? Or Assassinated?
Luke Dodson provided this feedback: “It was interesting and refreshing to experience a gendered division of labour - many of my experiences volunteering have involved mixed teams of men and women. The leftist bias present in a lot of ‘alternative’ communities and land-based projects leads to an undifferentiated social mush which kind of dampens gender-polarisation, if that makes any sense. Makes me think of Ivan Illich’s Gender.”
There is a particular kind of non-competitive, non-distracted (siren-free) focus and interaction that allows for the discovery and development (developing by discovering) of virtue and goodness, which I am going to say are intrinsically male qualities, archetypally speaking. Men can best become embodied by working (and playing) together, without the ceaseless jingle-jangle effect of the woman’s gaze or their (often-unintentional) siren’s song.
let's have a men's zoom at 3pm your time (10 EST) sometime.
"Love of Christ is your armor" struck me as an inspiring and beautiful statement which seems original, in that I could not find that exact quote on Google. If you care to elaborate, can you recall anything else from that dream and the context in which it came, as well as what the words meant to you (apart from what you relate in the above text)?