.diminished discords (xv)

this week, on Laeth's mind

what we do now might be the history of the future.

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the internet is still a buffet if you know where to look. you don't have to keep to social media. that's the prison cafeteria. it is a sort of sin not to explore, not to learn. constantly.

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whatever seed of individuality there is in any man or woman, that's what God loves, and more so if it sprouts and grows and blossoms and fruits.

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if i love my country just because i am a part of it, it is not true love. and if i love my wife only because she is my wife, it is not true love. and thus, if i love God just because he is God, then i don't truly love him.

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the theologian is an integral and fundamental part of the theology. to be specific: the ideas of Joseph Smith are not just the ideas. they are Joseph Smith. his person, his style, his soul. this side of eternity you can't really say this theology is true and that one is false. it's a choice. a vibe. and the personality behind the ideas is key.

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thinking of calling my new collection of 'essays' King Folly Discourses, since so much of my theological thinking finds an anchor in the famous King Follet sermon. another option is: Philosophical Improvisations. it is etymologically correct, which is important to me.

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been watching luso tv from the nineties. people smoked and spoke in complete sentences. the two things are related. one is a roundtable in a bar, with writers, scientists, academics, artists, doctors, priests, lawyers, etc. there were episodes on the story of Jesus, on the eternal feminine, on national identity, another on genetic engineering, and on and on. one was about the turn of the millennium. they talked about theology, epistemology, occultism, alternative medicine and a bunch of other stuff, and of course, millenarism in its varied forms all across history. all while drinking whisky and smoking (most of them), with people playing pool in the back, and with some piano here and there. we used to be a real country.

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all the traditionalist occult mystical esoteric perennialist mumbo jumbo exists to prevent the west from carrying out its unique mission. spiritual communism.

it's very obvious that the hand of evil in our world nudges things in the direction of collectivism and of arrested development. all the while calling itself progressive, and having useful idiot opponents, who work towards the same uniformity proudly.

Jesus turned religion into an individual pursuit of a better future. inherently progressive in the true sense. and only the west took it. not merely worshiping, but looking into what made our god worthy in the first place.

the intransigent call for inherent morality without external law immediately highlights and separates those who are capable of it from those who are not. a community of moral excellence as the goal, not a legal order of artificial levelling.

but the fact is some people just have no desire to love God and their neighbor. won’t or can’t entertain either notion, the definitions of both utterly irrelevant and beside the point. now what.

moral freedom is not and cannot be the goal of religious structures. or structures of any kind. which means Jesus' aim was ultimately to destroy human society and establish a society of gods. (funnily enough, Schuon reached this conclusion, but then ofc dismissed it, and kept promoting orthodoxy, and pretending to be orthodox, while living in a wild islamic themed native american flavored polycule lol). Jesus didn’t care that resurrection was a metacosmic project, because he actually believed in it, and showed that it was possible.

anyway it was too wild, too far reaching. every source reveals him to be pessimistic, but also extremely impatient. which is maybe why he lived hard and died young. it's clear at some point he just decided to shock people enough to get arrested and killed. (as i’ve noted before in similar paragraphs, this applies to Jesus and also Joseph Smith.)

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not everyone writing today wants to destroy. some of us want to create. and we have things to say that our ancestors couldn't say. only we, living now, can.

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insane that SOS does not come from hellenic sos (safe, from which the word soter, savior, is made), but was just a technical choice for ease of remembrance. symbolism happens i guess.

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why would the esoteric mormon guy write a coming of age romance drama instead of, say, a treatise on the evolution of consciousness. it's a good question. it shows that online we're only slices of ourselves, and what people expect from you is less than your whole. but the truth is mormonism is actually a (cosmic) coming of age romance drama. so i'm totally on brand.

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memory is and indeed must be sensory, not intellectual. because memory is the future looking upon the past. it cannot exist independent of duration, time. pure thought, being as it is timeless, is the anthesis of memory.

since memory depends on the conscious experience of the flesh, that is, both intellect and body, neither reincarnation nor spirit existence work against loss of memory. thus the offer of resurrection, embodied continuation, not a restart, or a timeless permanence.

memory always concerns specifics, and is the building block of our personhood. it is not just abstract knowledge. an afterlife without memory (as pure spirit) is not without knowledge, but it is without memory, and thus without personhood.

who i am is more what i encounter and how i respond to it than some undisturbed core that exists by itself outside of time. it is relation, which can only exist within time, that makes us what we are. ironically enough, a self alone is less than a self.

knowledge is remembrance as the philosopher says. and this contradicts the idea of perfect forms, since by definition they cannot be experienced, and thus are outside the realm of memory.

senses are always internal, and always turned outward. what applies to physical hearing applies to all its more subtle manifestations. we have a lot more than five senses. plus, the very root of the word 'sense' means 'to go', underlining its procedural, not static, nature.

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decades are metric propaganda. seven and twelve (hebrew and christian) year spans are the real... uh... metrics. damn latins. were it not for them english could have been a reasonable language like german.

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i am, have always been, and will always be, a metaphysical atlanticist. the ocean water is in my blood.

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much like in the battle between Beatles and Rolling Stones, where i’m more a Caravan Zappa man, in the Plato Aristotle dispute, i’m more a Heraclitus Diogenes man. that means i'm unwelcome in polite society and nobody ever knows what the hell i'm talking about. also i like to make fun of platonists. they seem to be the least able to take a joke. it's clear for example that Aquinas was a riot. you could get good drunk and talk shit all night. now, say, Palamas. aiaiai. is it all down to playdoh versus aristotle. i think so.

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you know what is also pure spirit? farts. now, this is fundamental theology.

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my desire to know people as individuals makes me a terrible attendee at sporting events and church gatherings.

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although it's hard for me to believe sometimes, yes i am portuguese.

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everything is a thousand continuums

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it's tragic and comic that americans gave up on tobacco.

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on the one hand you lose your marbles. on the other, you're totally nuts. interesting testicular imagery in idioms about madness.

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my wife is now ruining her backripped jeans. by which i mean, she is mending them.

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on posthumous recognition: i am all for it, and conscious of it when i publish my creative endeavors, whatever they happen to be. i find such joy in exploring vast catalogues from multifaceted favorites i vibe with. and i want to give myself a chance to experience this from the other side, if someone from the future happens to vibe with me. the amount of energy and love that can flow from this world into the next (and of course vice versa) makes one’s chances much better, one’s experience fuller, and without any of the inconveniences of fame while in the same plane.

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it's fair and important to decry the lack of commitment in today's relationships, how easy it is for people to give up on each other. but, it's quite another to say that it was better when people, and especially women, didn't have any choice at all in the matter.

unfortunately, this does not mean that the current environment will not lead to enough despair, in this and other things, that there won't be a desire to go back on freedom, and regress as a civilization. but it's not guaranteed either. nothing is decided.

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revised this story from 2019. the only story i wrote during my long orthodox dark night of the soul. it’s about forty christian martyrs.

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musical portion today is the soundtrack for my upcoming book Powerless.

one song for each chapter, thematically chosen. it would be tedious and a bit pointless to explain the reasoning and tie ins, so you know, just enjoy:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLftoBoEgemk5-CieZ2kJ8p9_2zowgog-_&si=qhxuaqWNLapVg1Cs

also this:

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