Bit of a long one today so strap in.
Get a life! This is my life. One of them, to be accurate, which I inhabit in the gaps between my being my other lives. Sometimes doubt/guilt (self-hatred) will arise when I feel like doing this, but that is simply the external influences of others attempting to sour my experience. I just enjoy writing. It helps me practically and it gives me pleasure. I haven’t really thought too much about my writing in a meta way in quite a while, like how I structure phrases and stuff, but the content is still quite enjoyable for me to create.
Let’s start with some musings on the sex magick sigils. There are probably times in many people’s lives when you really do need as effective a practice as is possible to achieve what you want to achieve and get through a particular period of time, but mostly I wouldn’t be too concerned, and I just enjoy working out these sorts of things.
When you have a large number of active workings, there is the question of interleaving versus focus. These sigils do produce magickal effects, or perhaps we could say align with the intentional flow of reality, so I don’t think there is any rigid rule that should be always followed, but principles that can guide practice.
My approach is to fire sigils whenever it seems that a significant portion of time has elapsed. What this means is that significant events occurred, significant decisions were made, or additional significant information came to light. By “significant” I mean that there has been a distinctive change from how things were before to how they were after this period of time. This can be one day or it can be many weeks, depending on the situation.
I think this is a reasonable way to do things while you have a working going for a current situation that is dynamic and in the midst of significant developments. I have done workings before which were more like preludes to upcoming situations, to get myself into the proper mindset and to prepare the way with a proper plan.
I’ve also done sigils that were more intended as a way to achieve emotional security and to pave the way for relatively far future things. This would be like doing a sigil for a situation that’s already ongoing and is quite stable. You want to maintain that stability while being assured that when changes do come, you already have magick power directed at that. Not as exciting as a sigil that brings a major result very quickly, but still effects that I value.
I’ve spoken before about the possibility of stripping away most all magick practice aside from Loagaeth tables and Guardian Angel (personal connection to magick power) magick. I still think this could be an interesting thing to do, but on the other hand, I enjoy having some tools at my disposal to provide indications and guidance. For instance, I still reap many great benefits from when I studied Tarot more deeply. The cards are quite reliable and often surprisingly insightful, as if that needs to be said, and the same goes for lists of powers with spirits.
A bit of a topic change here now, as is indicated by my topic-changey sentence. Let us discuss learning and behavior in the context of dogs.
There are four things you should know - positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment. Reinforcement encourages a behavior, punishment discourages a behavior. Positive means introducing a stimulus, negative means removing a stimulus.
Positive Reinforcement - providing a pleasurable stimulus to reward a behavior
Negative Reinforcement - removing a displeasurable stimulus to reward a behavior (probably the least common, in non-toxic situations)
Positive Punishment - introducing a displeasurable stimulus to punish a behavior
Negative Punishment - removing a pleasurable stimulus to punish a behavior
For these to work, they need to be paired with the target behavior closely in time to create an association between the behavior with pleasure or displeasure, or the removal of pleasure or displeasure.
Dogs are behaviorally programmable entities. They seem to lack self-awareness, but may perhaps have a primitive, rudimentary consciousness. When puppers smiles at you, that is just the outward behavioral display of pleasure. When puppers barks angrily, that is a pre-programmed behavior which is “designed” to influence other behaviorally programmable entities. Such inherent programming is arrived at via the process of evolution, which encourages the passing on of genetic material, which is where the pre-programming comes from, which is maximally effective at continuing the passing on of genetic material via sexual reproduction. So essentially, pre-programmed behaviors which encourage maximal child birth and survival to reproduction are “encouraged” by biological evolution.
Puppers doesn’t give a shit about you because there is no “self” in the animal beyond self-survival instincts. That is not a concept which really makes any sense. The dog is behaviorally conditioned to expect survival necessities from you, and things like food are very pleasurable. The dog is also wired to be a social animal as social in-groups bring protection and improved conditions to the group, which increases offspring and survival rates.
Puppers also doesn’t fucking understand English. People do that dog-voice thing because they learned that behavior from other people and it conveys either neutral emotional content or pleasurable emotional content. There is perhaps arguably an in-built behavioral compulsion (if I recall) in people to do this to infants and small children as it creates a feeling of pleasure around the infant, which is otherwise an abundant source of displeasure and broken boundaries. If you had to change an adult’s diapers at 3am every day, listen to it crying constantly all the time, had to give up your entire life to ensure that it doesn’t die and gets what it needs, and had to clean its vomit off of you frequently, you would probably come to resent that adult, and the same would apply to babies if humans weren’t so strongly pre-programmed to feel “love” (some form of pleasure) towards their children and children in general. That’s why baby features, such as large eyes, are seen as “cute.” It’s harder to stab or neglect things that are “cute,” which leads to more frequent reproduction and higher survival rates.
What dogs do understand are pleasure and pain, as well as primitive body language things and the like. Saying “bad dog, bad” in a weird, stupid voice which conveys no rage or hatred does absolutely fucking nothing. It does not. Understand. ENGLISH. It is an ANIMAL, like a goddamn goldfish but with a marginally larger brain. If your voice conveys fear, oh fucking lord, the dog is the one in control.
Puppers is not out to get you, it is an entity which exhibits behavior according to its behavioral programming, which creates behavioral compulsions. If programmed to attack you, then it would be “out to get you” in that sense, but there is no concept of “ego” in dogs.
Dogs do seem to abide by similar emotional rules as humans do. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a depressed dog before, and how that dog got to that point was by large-scale removal of pleasures and frequent introduction of pain.
The reality for many dogs is that they spend by far most of their time isolated and alone inside a relatively small box, or a really small box. There is no pleasure in this time, and there is likely the introduction of displeasure. I’d be displeased too if I had to hold my shit in all day. When the owner of the dog returns to its presence, there is perhaps some pleasure shown towards the dog, but oftentimes, when the dog is “like,” “oh thank fuck this pleasure-giving-stimulus is back maybe now I can remove my displeasures and receive pleasure,” the human barks at the dog and thereby punishes it for seeking pleasure.
When this sort of thing happens often enough, the dog’s “experience” becomes almost entirely displeasure. How this displeasure manifests differs according to the situation.
If the dog is not really positively punished too often, just when it seeks pleasure but not at other times, it will probably become a yappy-ass awful little shit who rages all the time because it is usually alone and in pain because its owner treats it as a love slave toy to gain some amusement out of and the illusion of not being alone while not caring at all in the slightest for the animal beyond what they must do to keep it alive and prevent it from punishing them by shitting on the floor or bringing the wrath of the neighbors upon them.
Another possibility is that the dog will live in fear instead of rage. This is more likely to occur if behavioral exhibitions compelled by rage are punished. The dog will learn that its avaricious attempts to break out of the painful boundaries of its existence will only ever result in pain, and so fear overcomes the rage as the dog “experiences despair” (possibly) and comes to believe that it is bound to unchangeable circumstances, by which I mean that its behaviors compelled by rage become associated with pain, there are no introductions of pleasurable stimuli, and so there is only displeasure which is discouraged from evolving from fear into rage as pain is a stimulus which inherently triggers fear to cause the entity to avoid that painful and presumably damaging (detrimental to reproduction and survival) stimulus.
Have you ever been minding your own business, out on a walk, and as you pass by a residence you get aggressively barked at by a dog, and sense the human’s pathetic pleasure in feeling that it has dominated another? What, I wonder, would happen if you growled back at the dog, malice dripping from your breath. Oh, what a sight that would be, to hear the dog whimper in fear, to sense the human do the same, its illusion of dominance and mastery shattered. And what if that human was actually experiencing real pleasure, and not the illusion of pleasure created by weakness?
Well now that doesn’t sound very mature of you. So what you’re saying is that I’m supposed to just sit there and get screamed at by a voice tinged with rage? Yeah, I don’t think so. Unless, of course, that is the requirement to achieve my objective.
But it’s just a little pupper! Little pupper needs to shut the fuck up. Is it my problem that you can’t fucking handle being with yourself and so require the illusion of a presence to project anthropomorphism onto? Or a behaviorally programmable being that is easy to dominate or inflict sadism upon, and which you can do so with essentially no risk of punishment by law enforcement? Why yes, yes it is my problem, as I do not wish to be denied the right to peace, calm, and silence in my airspace, or to go about my life without being assaulted.
If you yourself enjoy dogs, that is your business. So long as your pleasure is not my problem, why would I give a fuck. I just so happen to not be the biggest fan of dogs, which is why I use them for this example, because I am allergic to these animals, and I was forced to live with one inside my active residence for many years, so not only was my mental and emotional environment toxic, the literal physical space in which I lived was toxic to me.
So many allegories! Aw, why do you have to be so mean to the puppers?
It is more than a small wonder that I am no longer absolutely misanthropic. As a helpful reminder, if you are normally surrounded by morons who are incapable of listening, just be sure to remember that when you interact with other people who do not resist the intake of or perhaps even already comprehend basic introductory level concepts.
It is what it is. The dogs do not understand English. They vomit out English from their behaviorally compelled, stupid faces, but there is no power of mind overcoming emotional compulsions. Let them whine, let them get all fucking butt-hurt about their delusions being questioned and your not allowing them to break your boundaries (but why do you have to be so meeeeeeaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn after I assaulted you, insulted you, and tried to make my problems your problems all while giving you absolutely nothing but condescension and trying to start dumb, petty little bullshit samsaric games? cause you’re toxic and crying crocodile tears you shit-fuck, don’t blame my awareness and foresight for your toxicity - I don’t want to fucking deal with you, that is a project I do not consent to, and my time and my peace of mind is far too valuable to poison it with such nonsense - other people’s ignorance, lack of self-awareness, and massive, impenetrable walls of egoicism are absolutely no more my problem than they absolutely have to be), and watch in amazement at the power of being educated.
I didn’t choose the StuG life, I was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Good thing what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right! Tell that to puppers. Nice basing of pride off your delusion of weakness, fuck face.
And by that I mean smile, placidly, patiently. Drip, drip, drip on my face, all nothing but empty stimuli, self-liberating in the clear light of rigpa.