In re-evaluating this post, I would add that learning to intuit what is genuine requires a high degree of self insight, the level of which is often very difficult to gauge for yourself. For years, the most common attribute people would use to describe me was “self-aware.” Yet I was full of contradictions and massive cognitive gaps. I had managed to rivet everyone (including myself) to my disavowing fantasies and manipulated Jung’s theories to strengthen these deceptions. There was only one (one!) individual in all my life who was not a trained professional, who was able to see through my ruse. He did so immediately in fact, a Scorpio ASC. More about him later; I once published a fun post on him (when it rains… aspects of a modern Casanova).

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Original Title: separate the subtle from the gross
Original Post Date: September 12, 2006 @ 1:33 pm

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian Yoga in all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.

– Carl Jung quoted by Robert Wang in his introduction the The Qabalistic Tarot

I would add that some modern people will do anything to escape their modernity, to escape the commodification of our labour, our time, our very bodies and to escape the meaninglessness of a culture built upon consumption and fetishes. You know, the psychoanalytic theorists of the 70s may now be pooh-poohed at, but they were hitting upon something very crucial about the modern condition. Modernity functions on the principle of fetishization. The principle of replacing what you really desire with something else because you fear what you really desire. But the fetish never truly satisfies and one must accrue more of the fetish, continually consuming, obscenely consuming, to disavow the Lack. It is wholly possible to cover up the emptiness w/processed spiritual bullshit.

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