Religion as a deliberate data-management strategy

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A few disclaimers I'm going to drop here:

Christians, particularly Revelations futurists, cover your ears - I don't mean to offend, alarm, or otherwise say things that would sound blasphemous bordering on Big Red (TM) promotion. If you're open minded proceed with caution, if you're faith is working wonderfully in your life take this as loosely as possible and if there's anything you can take from it that adds to your spiritual walk feel free to use it and throw out all the stuff that sounds utterly heterodox.

Antitheists - pour yourselves a drink because I'm about to play rather fast and loose with reality.


The topic of this thread, or perhaps mini-lecture, is religion or theism as a data management strategy. To define that a little better I mean taking the world, the natural laws of cause and effect, the laws of balance in psychology, etc.. and applying them to DYI approaches to faith which essentially work to enfranchise rather than disenfranchise the subconscious and subjective aspects of your mind and making something whole-up contiguous where your subjective life is more readily embracing situations as they are and finding ways to work with them rather than having particularly strong dissonance between subjective and objective life.

What has me wanting to talk about this is that, over the past several years of looking at pantheistic/panentheistic monism as well as the various ideas of minor gods and goddesses as something like Catholic saints in how they function, I'm seeing that what we have with the various temples of antiquity and initiation strategies is a use for employing certain kinds of very direct tools on one's subconscious pool of influences.

The model of the subconscious I'm considering at this point, if I try bringing it sharply to visual terms, think of it as a glass or pot of water with a lot of various ice cubes floating around at the surface. Those ice cubes are various floating pieces of personalities, or sub-personalities, that make up the whole and which a certain energy bringing the pot together in unity (ie. the hypothalamus of the brain) where, if things go generally well enough in life, you have that collective managed well enough to have a well-balanced individual being the additive result. I think back to a few of the Ted talks I've seen where some of the presenters joked for about 15 minutes before saying outright that there is no consciousness problem - that we're a colony of cells grouping their collective needs into something we come to perceive as an 'I' experience. That's probably enough to that point for now.

To expand on the ideas of panentheistic monism and the modular approach of treating the pool of ancient deities, my proposal is to treat them like a pool of well-built logical operators. They're ideas that seem to center on certain neural control mechanisms that group well together. In a way you could consider meditating on them, studying them, and gaining a relationship with them to be the equivalent of taking a pharmaceutical drug to counter-balance something in yourself that's out of whack (a bit like a software pharmacy for your brain) or if you wanted to anthropomorphize them further than that you could look at them the way you would look at medical specialists - one might be like a psychological ear, nose, and throat doctor, one more like a cardiologist, one closer to a pediatrist, etc. etc..

Going back to the ice cubes in the pot of water - this gives you the ability to add new ice cubes by building these modular concepts, taking them on board, and - as so desired, fundamentally changing the baseline of how your subconscious weighted-average works.

Hermetic Qabalah has been used since the late 19th century, particularly Golden Dawn and forward, as an attempt to really try balancing the usefulness of everything. In other cultures, particularly Hindu, they have a four-part Creator/Preserver/Redeemer/Destroyer and part of what's thrown us out of balance is our Zoroastrian/Babylonian idea of a God vs. a Devil. That cleaves off one of the four and moves a culture in a particular direction where they can run toward mercy and they spend their whole time running toward it but at the same time they have a very poor, immature, and often reckless grasp on severity (fundamentalist anything are a great example of this) and thus what destructive things they do they do under their own radar or seem to have it hermetically sealed from their religious endeavors. In a sense with the Qabalistic Tree of Life, if I were to really dumb this down for what I want to get across - you could view the traditionally 'good', daytime, light-deities as being those that draw people toward deeper understandings, compassions, and articulations of mercy, the darker, night-time, seemingly semi-demonic would be doing the same for severity. The deities of mercy are a psychological force of creation and preservation while the deities of darkness, while really having many traits, would focus more primarily on destruction. One of the areas where the later are particularly useful - we have a lot of clashing programs in our subconscious minds that sap a lot of energy out of us, from mix messages in our upbringings all the way to overly broad heuristics where trying to constantly true up the differences between those heuristics and reality is incredibly challenging. the destruction of really wasteful programming in that regard to be replaced with more efficient can free up an incredible amount of energy, RAM, ATP, however you want to look at it.

That's a direct challenge to the modern western notion of good vs evil so far - creation good, destruction bad, but that dichotomy is part of the problem. Depends on whether one is creating excess clutter or whether one is destroying undergrowth in a forest to build a path or road for travel. This is where I say it takes a very mature and nuanced outlook on the ideas of good and evil, creation and destruction, for a person to really want to bother with this stuff much and they have to have an equally strong intuition that they have enough of an analytical mindset to play with their own melons this deeply.

I'm not really worried about trying to run a historical debate about what sources people go to on what they believe the gods and goddesses of antiquity meant to the various believers, really I'm sure that they meant as many things to as many people as you had economic, educational, and cultural classes. What I would suggest however is that, as far as my own experiments are going, this stuff actually works in terms of getting down under your own foundation and putting new tiling or brickwork in if your life has you over the ropes enough that you'd feel the need. Clearly it's a very hot zone to be working with and you could just as easily play a country-record backwards and get your trailer, truck, wife, kids, and dog back again as you could end up in a psych ward. At the same time that's why I'd recommend people only looking at this if they're serious about psychedelic exploration without drugs or really seeing the ways that they can bend, massage, and expand their sense of what their own consciousness can do.

As always I know it's a controversial and risky subject, really it can be close to handing someone a gun and hoping they handle it with full respect of what it can do and not try looking down the barrel when they pull the trigger, but as far as it's IMHO an area that human innovation could make a lot of use of - not just for growth but really for writing your own software, having a handle on whether your adjustment to life makes you happy or sad, or even enhancing your cognition by cutting a lot of the crap out that you yourself can remove or simplify yourself (and strange as it may sound - well-vetted deities can be a much smoother approximation to the shape of a thing than a healthy-sized rule book).

I actually think Catholics could benefit a lot from this because if they really thought about the saints and what they mean they'd be in the quickest position to put this kind of thinking to use. Even to just take a three-part deity system and understand it in more pragmatic terms I'd think would be a lot more helpful for those who want to exercise their faith right and stay away from polythiesm (if that idea sounds like a great way to get possessed then yeah, clearly it would be a very dangerous strategy as this domain is the high-powered world of self-fulfilling prophecy).

Don't know if the thoughts above will be too far out to be accessible, I'd also admit that they're not really vetted to much by mainstream neurology/psychology yet however I don't see where they've been particularly explored that well - ie. this might just be too nascent for peer-review type studies just because our cultural taboos have kept a tight lid on it.


If anyone has any ideas on this shoot - I'd love to hear em.

Otherwise if this thread sinks to the bottom of the page like a rock in water I'm fine with that too - better a few people read it than have an ideologue food-fight.