United States of America: Homeland of the New Gurus

This post is based on a French documentary, I´ve just seen. It is called “The New American Gurus”. View trailer:

The Faust Syndrome and the End of the Time of Enlightened Masters

Franz Simm: Illustrationen zu Goethes

A phenomenon which I have returned to many times in my books, especially in my book, Lucifer Morningstar – a Philosophical Love Story, is the Faust-syndrome. It is a syndrome which characterizes most Westerners: it is the dangers of ego-inflation in combination with spiritual practice. Ego-inflation is at the same time based on a great denial of our own collective shadow, or painbody, which are rooted in original sin. It is a kind of compensation.

My Suggestion for a New Kind of Activism

Mystical, by Kevin Miles and Wendy Schaefer-Miles

We are slaves to the modern culture, we are the modern culture. I have suggested that this culture is characterized by a new mythology, which I have called, The Mythology of Authenticity. This mythology has two specific pedagogic methods: psychotherapy and coaching. These two methods are again rooted in the counterculture, which are inspired by philosophers such as Nietzsche, and occultists, such as Aleister Crowley. Quite central are concepts such as will and choice.

The will is the most destructive of all

Nietzsche believed that the will - that is to say: the defeating, the remodeling, the striving - is something creative.

No, the will is the most destructive of all, in spite of the fact that it constructs very many self-images and world-images.

The will rests on lust, on desire, and not on that joy in freedom that has to do with passion and creative emptiness.

The goal of the Life Artist is to go into an investigation of the turbulence of the mind

We try incessantly to become this or that, to achieve a special condition, to get one kind of realization and avoid another, and in this way the mind is eternally occupied by something, namely the Ego.

Constantly the mind is in action: thoughts, feelings, sensations, arrangements.

Always the consciousness has something in mind.

Always the mind is in progress with changing, making plans, commenting, remembering, creating images, and throwing out projects.

Both the German Idealists, Nietzsche, the Existentialists and the Marxists, took this restless, or ”creative” turbulence of the mind, as a presumption they didn´t investigate further.

The goal of the Life Artist is - in opposition to them – to go into an investigation of this turbulence of the mind, and find out what happens if it stops.