The Previous Gods

The greek and norse mythology includes a concept of one or two prior "generations" of gods. For the greeks there were the Titans. For the norse, there were the Vanir who were later overthrown by the Aesir. This concept is even in the bible myths as "The Fallen Angels" who like the Titans are cast into Tartarus.

Some people think these stories encode a literal change of religion, so there was an older pantheon of gods that was supplanted by a new set of gods, maybe imposed via military conquest. Another interpretation is the changing of the gods represents various aspects of natural creation, like order replacing primordial chaos.

The conversion of european people to christianity offers some clues, potentially. There are some interesting hints that can be gleaned by comparing the extant norse mythology with the bible myths and the present day claims about the characters of the bible.

The norse myths are stories where the main characters like Odin or Thor are subject to the rules and forces of the universe, which are sometimes embodied in other characters like giant wolves or serpents. In fact, in the norse mythology the end of the gods, Ragnarok, is a prime feature of the tale. The characters like Odin are more like the main character of allegorical stories and represent aspects of human life, like the quest after wisdom and knowledge in his case. There's a separation between the "gods of forces", that is, the forces of the natural world like time, cold, heat, etc... The "gods", and then the human world.

I don't think anyone really knows what the pre-christian european "religious" practices were. There are a handful of clues left in history, but it was thoroughly wiped out. The extant mythology suggests it was a sort of shamanistic, maybe individual oriented religious practice, meaning, the people who had access to a shaman would maybe be coached in their life and spiritual journey via these stories, but who knows?

The set of beliefs people regard as "christian" is pretty interesting, because the core concepts of christianity are not found in the bible. In fact, it's sort of a mystery what purpose "the bible" served for "the church". The bible is a compilation of mediterranean world mythology that has a lot of similarities to the greek myths or even egyptian myths, including solar cycle characters like Dionysus or Osiris or Jesus who are "the sun on earth who turns into crops and dies and is reborn", plus the underworld character of Hades/Satan, the city founding twins, and so on.

The "religion" of christianity, though, is a mish-mash of greek philosophy and cliffs-notes and addenda to "the bible" mythology. Christianity was tied to various political attempts to reboot the Roman Empire, even within the ongoing eastern Roman Empire... So there's a "Tsar" (a Cesar) of Russia and an Eastern Orthodox Church, or various European Empires like the "Holy Roman" empire with an Emperor that's allied with the Catholic Church.

As an ingredient of a political project, then, the christian religion was meant to create a "roman" citizen out of europeans in the same way the school system, today, trains a person to be a member of the corporate/consumer society and the way the "media" blasts concepts into the brains of adults 24/7, or the way some clowns in an HR department send spam emails about pronouns or indigenous people's day or whatever.

The mythology of the chrisitian religion differs from the norse or greek myths on some key points. One of those is the god character names that were in the bible were stripped away. So in the norse religion there's Odin, Thor, Loki, Baldur, etc.... or the weekday names correspond to the prior era religions in most countries like Thursday is Thor's Day in the germanic countries and is Jueves (Jove/Jupiter) in Spain. In the christian relgious scheme, though, there is "god", and is regarded as a universal entity rather than a parochial "Yahweh" character or Zeus or Odin.

Also, along with this change in the prior era mythology, this generic "unnameable god" supplants the "gods of forces" and natural forces in the mythology of the norse or greek panetheons to whom the god characters are subject. This is an innovation of the christian religion and comes from greek philosophizing rather than anything found in the bible, which incorporates the mediterranean world's mythologies of creation. The nonsense concept of "the trinity" sums up the attempt to merge the god pantheon of the classical and ancient world with the "god of forces" characters, like the Titans or the Vanir of the norse myths. Some of the "reasoning" about god is still taught today in colleges in medieval philosophy courses. In retrospect as an advertising/propaganda talking point it is absurd. Their claim was basically "our god is the biggest and bestest" versus the prior brand of god.

Eventually, that propaganda invention killed the christian religion and its predecessors, and quite ironically, allowed the Titans to defeat the Olympians and effectively threw them into Tartarus. Now there's only a "god of forces", that is "nature".

"Last Year's Sun" Character

There are a handful of mythological characters from different cultures through history who represent the solar agricultural cycle. The egyptian characters provide a guide for the greek characters and the biblical characters. For example, the Osiris character is the sun on earth character who becomes crops and is then mutilated or cut up or otherwise horribly mistreated, which is a comical depiction of what happens to wheat. Similarly, wine gods are castrated (grapes cut off the vine), or torn to pieces by crazed (drunk) women, etc... Jesus is both a grain god and a wine god. He's flogged and beaten and put up on a trellis and pierced.

One of the really intriguing characters of the agricultural cycle is the "last year's sun" character. In the egyptian mythology it's Ra. Ra is also the underworld sun who goes through the underworld at night and fights Apep. In Greek mythology Ra turns into Hades/Pluto, the god of the dead, the underworld and wealth. The modern vampire character seems to be pressed out of the Hades mold. In the teen drama TV show "One Tree Hill", the character Dan is the Hades/Ra character. He's the rich father of the two main male characters. I can't remember the character names. One of those boys actually "dies" and is resurrected in a nod to the mythology. In the show he's a "harsh taskmaster" like Ra and he's wealthy like Hades.

"Wealth" is often just a version of stored or "last year's" sunlight. Even something like oil is just old solar energy. It's very likely the concept of a "loan" and interest originated with an ancient seed and grain monopoly. It's very interesting that "last years sun" turned into the concept of harshness and "evil". In the bible story of Cain and Abel, Cain is "cursed" to work and also ends up in the city and has become associated with "technology" (because he's Greek Prometheus). The "curse" is really to come under the thumb of Ra, or the last year's Sun character and all his bullshit, like contracts, which is really just a type of "curse".

Who's "Ra" in the bible myths? It's left somewhat ambiguous. In the egyptian myths "Ra" would match up with the God character of the bible, however in the greek myths, the Ra character is split into Zeus and Hades. Similarly in the bible there's the God character and the Satan character. Some commentators draw the conclusion they're the same, that is God=Satan. One of the interpretations is Satan is "the god of this world", that is the world of man. Like Hades or Ra, he's associated with "work" in that the curse of man is to "work" because Eve ate the apple, and the Satan character is also supposedly the secret father of Cain, which is even part of the story of One Tree Hill where the main solar hero character of the show is actually the illegitimate son of Dan, the Hades/Satan/Vampire figure.

I think what the Ra character ultimately represents, and the reason it becomes "evil" or scorned is that "wealth" is illusory. Take the concept of "stored work" as wealth like numbers in a bank account. Bitcoin fanbois imagine a bitcoin represents "stored work" in the hashing of the blockchain. This is a good representation of work in general. The blockchain is actually a representation of the increasing entropy of the universe--a bunch of burned fuel to make a pattern in computer memories, which are constantly eating energy, etc... Most of things people do to "create value" are mere transformations of an underlying substance, and in the case of agriculture, it "just happens" via nature.

In the mythology a character like Prometheus dies over and over because there's no "extracting value" or "storing value". The Hades/Ra character is a cheater or really a god of fraud in many cases because he can't provide the thing people really want.

Serious vs Play

The "Ant and the Grasshopper" fable is a great depiction of the "serious" mindset. In that fable, the ant is diligent, works, and is prepared for winter while the grasshopper messes around then starves. The "serious" mindset is really interesting to ponder. Where does it actually come from? What is it?

A variation on the "serious" mindset is the "security" mindset. One example of that is "coyote fear". In northeast Ohio most predators were extirpated by around 1900. Over the past 30 years or so, though, as the area transitioned from a rural/agricultural zone to suburbs and exurbs, coyotes moved in. Some cadre of people thinks they are very dangerous animals. A subset of those hysterical people think the presence of coyotes warrants wearing a sidearm when walking around in suburban or exurban parks. In reality, a coyote is a medium sized dog that avoids people. Other predators like eagles, possums, foxes are similarly dangerous to pets and farm animals, but the coyote gets weird fantastical status among local suburban retards.

"Folk concept" is another way of saying people rely on a prepackaged story based model for interpreting reality. A hysterical retard lady who sees a coyote when she's taking out her trash, for example, won't be able to ascertain it's a medium sized dog that poses no threat and runs away as soon as it sees a human, she'll only see the folk story version of a deadly predator. In some places and among some people that folk version of reality becomes the consensus view and when there is fear or some minor risk involved, it can foster a sort of mass hysteria.

In other cases, an individual's anxiety and phantasmagorical horror show understanding of reality doesn't extend beyond their inner world. I saw an interesting bodycam video a few days ago where a 74 year old man pulled a knife on an 11 year old. The old man was afraid of a kid riding a bike on the sidewalk so he threatened the boy with a knife. The old man was also carrying a loaded gun. In the old man's mind, he was maneuvering in a world of threats to his person and his fear justified his actions. This is the basis of the security mindset: fear and anxiety. However, in his case, his delusions were proprietary, rather than shared so he was arrested.

Anyway, I think the "serious" mindset is a variation on this same theme. It's a folk world view, or maybe a religious belief about the nature of reality. Essentially, if you don't "work hard", that is, be serious, god or reality will "punish" you. In some circumstances people believe this literally, that is, being frivolous is a sin which results in future punishment.

However, these same people also realize the converse scenario isn't a sure thing, that is "hard work" does not necessarily lead to success. In fact, it is often frustrated, so the folk concept of "man plans, god laughs" or the line "The best-laid plans of mice and men oft’ go awry” sums that folk view up.

I think those two concepts are fused together in the minds of many people, maybe especially european descended people. They believe in hard work, but know "luck" or good fortune or "god's favor" is actually the dominant force in the universe.

This topic takes me back to the "play" approach versus the serious mindset. Kids and young animals play to "develop". Their lack of experience makes them necessarily open minded, and often willing to experiment and push boundaries of what they think they can do. In the context of the adult world this can lead to innovation and new ways of understanding the world, or even just provides an individual with an opportunity to have their own experiences rather than living inside a folk model or religious delusion of reality.

An important element of these models of reality is it imposes a sorting process on the population. Let's take that 74 year old crazy man as an example. In his community, his delusion is personal, so he's jailed and forced to accept the nominal world view. However, in some scenario where everyone is equally a shithead about danger and every other man is packing a side arm because they think they might be attacked at any moment, he'd be right at home and the kid in that story and his family would move. In the "coyote fear" community, if you were a nature boy you'd leave so you could have a pet coyote, or hang out in peace with the critters.

Ironically, the "play" mindset seems like the big time winner for humans at least in terms of generating wealth, and it also seems to be associated with intelligence, while the serious people can be pretty stupid. A "folklore heavy" or religious community is often stifling and/or materially poor.

Status and Competitions

When I was a kid, there was a gradual transition in the organized activities kids participated in from "free form games" to structured competitions. I didn't really "get it" for a long time, that is, I was sort of stuck in the free form game mode when classmates were shifting into competition mode. I remember, for example, being kind of traumatized by the coaches and kids being "serious" about baseball when I was still in "game" mode when I was maybe 8 or 9.

At some point, even the tone of school changed similarly. In elementary school there weren't really grades. I think we got check marks or something like that, then in 6th grade/middle school there were "grades" and maybe even rankings of students. There were also myriad competitions in almost every activity, like in band there were rankings of players "1st chair", and so on, plus spelling bees, competitions in presentations, etc... Of course there were organized sports as well, so kids began training to be on the football team or whatever.

All the organized judging and rule based games are supposed to be training for "the real world", which is theoretically a bunch of similar competitions. I heard warnings from adults maybe 1,000 times that I'd be a loser if I didn't work hard, or that if I didn't buckle down and study I'd be a bum. As I noted in the previous post, "the loser" character is really the invisible fence of the boomer world, or the corporate/consumer society.

I guess the purpose, or maybe just a side effect of all the competitions in school is students internalize a phony model of reality, that is, there is a merit based hierarchy all throughout life that's determined by work and talent and judging. Maybe you suck at sports, but you can win the spelling bee, or maybe go to the chemistry olympics, or vice versa, you suck at chemistry class, but are a starter on the football team and so on. That is, there's always some "fair", real competition you can participate in.

One fairly useful observation is that almost every game is arbitrary and even the competitions are fraudulent or severely distorted in the sense that the rankings are really meaningless. For example, in high school football in the US, there are divisions of schools because some high schools only have 150 students and others have 3,000 so a kid who might be the quarterback on a Division IV football team might not even get on the varsity Division I football team. That's true in almost every type of organized sporting event I ever participated in as an adult. The competition is divvied up so people are participating against "peers" rather than the whole population of athletes, like in running races there are age groups, or in cycling races there are skill categories.

In professional sports, which is ostensibly the closest thing to the "real world" form of competition, that is an unlimited contest which reveals who is really the best, there are myriad arbitrary rules. In fact, in many pro sports the rules accumulate endlessly. In pro cycling, for example, there are all kinds of rules about how much your bicycle can weigh, what the geometry is, the position you can ride in, and on and on. Most pro or olympic level sports have all sorts of rules about the substances an athlete can take to eliminate the use of 'roids and HGH and such.

Another aspect of this competition internalization is people seek counterfeit representations of merit via "status" symbols like expensive cars and houses or sporting goods. In almost every case, a person gets their "status" object like a house with a giant pile of debt. Then they retain their status symbol by avoiding loser status, usually by grinding away at a shitty corporate job for their whole life. 

Anyway, quite ironically, it turns out that the elementary school view of games versus the high school competitions forever corresponds to the "real world". That is, there's no gamified reality except the shared hallucination of the general public who's been trained to participate in it.

"The Loser" is "The Wind Beneath My Wings"

I lived in two fairly distinct "worlds" through my life. I was born and raised and trained to live in the "boomer world", or corporate/consumer society, but I liked to be in "the woods". I think it's a really common story, especially when you add in all the other "worlds" people inhabit. For some people it's beach world, others it's boat world, or mountain world. That is, we'd all rather be in that other world than living the boomer world anxiety grind.

When I was in my 20s, I went on a vacation with my girlfriend at the time to the Allegheny National Forest. Her family had what they called a "camp" there. It was a small plot of land her father owned, which I think he inherited from his father, which had a trailer parked there. It was kind of a time capsule, because it was stocked with vintage stuff, like the prior generation of a radio, or a coffee maker, or whatever. It was all very basic, and it was obviously "fine" in fact it was a good place to live. Visiting that place demonstrated that the cost of living could be super low, and that life was very pleasant. I remember asking her why people like us would go "on vacation" away from the boomer world, but then repeatedly return to the boomer world. Neither of us had an answer. In fact, we both slowly transformed from granola/flannel/nature people to just another pair of yuppies. She went full yuppie and I was pretty reluctant and confused about that and really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life at the time.

When I was growing up my family went on vacation to a cabin in the Adirondacks a few times. The overall feel of the place was similar to "the camp". The cabin was setup in "lodge" style with pine furniture and similarly dated decor, probably from the early 1960s. (We were there in the 80s.) It was all pretty nice and relaxing. Inevitably we'd return to the boomer world, school, and my parents would go back to "the grind" and my sisters and I went to "kid grind" in school.

What actually keeps people in the boomer world instead of just slipping away to their version of the woods? I've been mulling this question over lately. One potential answer came to me via a very crude girl in a Midwest Safety Video. At some point in the video she (a drunk) becomes incredulous she's being arrested for DUI and she hilariously shrieks to her mom on the phone, "I'm not a nigger!" That video is a hall of famer bodycam edit.

That dumb moment shows one of the ways "it works". She doesn't mean "I'm not black", she really means "I'm not a low status person". People stay at the grind from "status anxiety".

There's a sort of generalized anxiety about maintaining status, meaning a social position, which is for the most part completely imaginary. I've been "out of work" a couple of times in my life. The first time I was laid off during the dot com implosion. I remember feeling sort of hollow and like a pretender once I wasn't working. I think that anxiety was due to my bad finances at the time. I needed to get a job to pay bills and keep my house and the like. I felt like a pretender because my boomer life really was a costume I was renting, including my house. If I were too long out of work, I'd end up homeless trash, that is, I'd lose my social status and fall out of what's essentially a club and it's not a very exclusive club.

Many retards who can barely do anything have fancy high paying jobs. When I was in college, I busted my ass in physics classes and was up late many nights a week studying and doing homework for several years. At the same time, shitloads of people in my school were just partying or taking dumb fuck business classes or whatever and as far as I know, none of those people ended up homeless.

When people have anxiety about losing health care coverage which is tied to their job, they really worry about bouncing down the status ladder into the poverty life because "the loser" is really the driving force in their existence, ironically.

Conversely when they have a job, the same people don't worry about their horrible diet, lack of exercise, totally sedentary life, etc... In fact, many people are sort of kept alive in spite of that unhealthy lifestyle by the medical system which gives them a pill for their ailments.

Anyway, ironically it's a sort of mythic "loser" which terrorizes the eternal boomer and keeps this shit show going. The "loser" is basically like an invisible fence for all the people who briefly escape on vacation.

Expert "How To" Videos

I've been watching youtube videos about cornering a mountain bike for a couple of weeks. I think the general category of expert "how to" videos is quite interesting and they show why the sci-fi nonsense sales pitch on "AI" is so dumb.

Many of the MTB cornering videos follow a "break down" approach, that is, they present cornering as a multi-phase, multi-step sequence. Step 1--look into the turn, step 2, lean the bike, step 3, position your body, etc... The concept is through repetition of the steps, a rider will become proficient at cornering.

That's not what happens at all though. What really happens is the riders brain and nervous system eventually encompass the bike so they can "feel" the tires on the ground and feel the orientation of their mass distribution on the bike. Once a person is an expert, they can ex post facto explain what their body is doing when they're cornering, or doing a hand stand, or whatever. To the novice, the word salad really isn't helpful. If anything it's kind of counterproductive.

I realize I don't have good feel for the bike's wheels. It's frustrating for me as a long time cyclist to throw away so much precious speed in a hundred corners by even feathering the brakes when I should be able to just rip through the corners. That said, I really do not want to crash and break the bike or my bones.

Anyway, it's obvious I will not learn anything from the videos; in fact there's really an obvious course toward improvement. Go to a free form loose ground area, like a big gravel parking lot, ideally with a slope, setup some "corners" by drawing them with a stick, then turn over and over and over and maybe take a video. The advantage of a parking lot is it's easier to repeat--more tries per unit time, plus a missed corner = rolling over a line instead of crashing into a tree.

The thing I'm really trying to do here is extend my nervous system to the contact patch of the tires and the ground. Currently, there's a big void there. Learning to ice skate or rollerblade is actually a very similar process. Prior to developing "feel" people are generally all "hands, head, and feet". If you watch a novice on rollerblades, they flail their arms around as their head and feet rotate around their center-of mass. They're generally oblivious to their center of mass, which is quite interesting.

Developing feel is a nonverbal process. Really words provide very little useful information for developing these skills. This is the severe limitation of so called "AI" because this concept of "feel" is pervasive in human endeavors.

In fact, it's possible to sort of flip this concept around entirely and see the effect of the dullard verbal mind model on the world. In general people dislike an irregular and even mildly challenging world where even the smallest obstacle is intolerable. They do not want to learn anything, ever. They don't want to condition their body for balance or strength or mobility. They don't even want to pay attention when they do something insipidly simple, like drive a car. It'd be good to understand what they really want. Like what's the goal of the average person when they're doing all the nonsense stuff they do?

The Willforce Delusion

It's quite common for people to imagine their "will force" somehow affects real world events. One example of that is focusing attention on a sporting event. People imagine they are "urging" a player to score a touchdown in a football game, for example, when they intently watch. This happens in all sorts of relationship scenarios as well, from the mundane work relationship to an intense romantic relationship.

It's all entirely, equally imaginary. There's no "will force", however, almost anybody reading this will understand what I'm writing about here. The fictional concept of "telekinesis" is the same thing. That is, in fiction, some character will be able to move an object with his or her "mind". It's often depicted as severe mental "exertion" to the point of causing a nose bleed, which is supposed to be blood leaking from the taxed brain,  I guess.

This is an interesting case of something that doesn't exist at all, that is "will force", turning into an idea that multitudes of people have. So where does the concept even come from?

All through life people "want" things. I can remember being a kid and fervently wanting some dumb toy or whatever, or as a young adult getting into messy romantic relationships and wanting some girl or young woman fervently or being wanted the same way by different women. The "want" existed as a sort of pressure. That pressure is almost certainly physical and hormonal and about procreation in the sex scenario. There are many examples of that same type of behavior among animals.

It seems plausible that the mental machinery of "want", which is actually an internal compulsion could lead to the idea that "wanting hard enough" will cause things to happen in the real world or even move. For some people this "willforce" delusion manifests as a desire for obsessive overall control and the idea that everything can and should be managed (by them).