In relation to Satanism there are primarily two radically opposite views, whereby the one that states that Satan is the Self is obviously pseudo-Satanism - but I'm not intending to go into how offensive the obscenity started by LaVey is to any actual Satanist. (To bring it quickly to the point though, no one is obliged to believe in the existence of Satan, but those who don't simply must not call themselves "Satanists" then.)
On the other hand, among real Satanists I've often heard about the necessity of giving up one's self, a notion that reminds a lot of very different religions and philosophies such as most notably Buddhism or Hinduism and which appears pretty confusing since Satanism is supposed to liberate from all laws and is not exactly encouraging altruism or self-sacrifice for others. I found myself puzzled by it a good deal too, especially since elsewhere people are trying to find their self and are happy if they accomplish it. But I think the definition of the word "self" is key to the concept.
In other words, I think it's not really our Self which is meant to be given up here. The true Self is indeed something worth striving to discover but which many people fail to ever get really acquainted with. The thing to be given up, on the other hand, is not the self but an illusion, and this is a principle I've understood very well since my early childhood, even if for most of the time just intuitively (that is, subconsciously) rather than intellectually, and only in more recent years I came to rationalize it in order to understand my own actions and erratic behavior of my childhood.
I used to say that I was an alien from outer space. I knew it wasn't true; I did not really know why I maintained this story but only that I wished it to be true. I knew that people wouldn't believe me, but that didn't matter to me because there was nothing else they might possibly believe about me that I cared for. Because there was nothing in my life that I myself cared for, so let them as well believe I was crazy, it wouldn't matter anymore.
But although I felt myself forced by the circumstances of my miserable existence to behave in such ways, there was at least something right about the erratic things I did in order to cope: I rejected the things I was expected to accept, such as my family membership and the name I had been given, among other things. I was an alien who had accidentally ended up in the wrong body.
Of course, I no longer believe to be an alien from outer space, or rather, I'm no longer trying to believe it, since I was never able to successfully convince myself of my story back then, as stated above. The only thing I'm still convinced of is that no one but myself has the right to decide on a name to call me by, in particular none of the people who did, such as my abusive parents. But since I'm still in the lifelong process of discovering my true self I don't really know what to call myself; I've been through a couple of different names over time (although by far not with the ridiculous frequency at which certain other people I once knew used to change their names, such as "Zandor of the Many Names", a person I recently dreamed about, and this was never one of his real names but most likely a dream-hint at Anton Szandor LaVey whose preposterous ideas he came to accept), but by now I think it doesn't matter much and Diana isn't such a bad name even if millions of girls share the same name, and I'd never be able to come up with a name that really describes who I am anyway, and that might not even be desirable since only I myself really need to know that, if anyone. And after all, the sun shines just as bright no matter what you call it.
The lesson is rather to realize that it doesn't matter much, and to realize that as we are born into this world we are given a name, we are given a nationality, a citizenship, a cultural identity, and we are expected to assume a place within human society, and all this crap is then supposed to form our "identity". It is these things that we need to learn to give up - because they are not our "self", they are rather a sort of classification! What we need to learn is to become ourselves, to just be, without the above classifications - because these are things that are only temporary and that we are going to leave behind when our journey on Earth is over.
We all make mistakes in life, but all in all I'm happy with my choices. I tried to be a girl for a while, I mean to really live like one, but that was nothing for me. Then I tried to be a boy for a while - that also sucked completely. Both sucked completely! But for a teenager it's hard to disregard people's common views and to find a way of your own that no one offers to you. Nowadays I no longer try to be anything but myself, and if people have a problem with me being a girl who moves and acts much like a man then it's just like that: they have a problem. I don't, I solved the one I had.
I stumbled upon the quote lately that "we won't be happy if we achieve someone else's goals at someone else's terms." It's all too true!
I've disowned my family and the other "classifications", I'll never be what anyone else wants me to be! I chose to be a warrior.
Currently reading Journey to Ixtlan, I'm learning a lot from the old Indian shaman don Juan. A more complicated matter is the limits to understanding - and that is, to pretty much everything we regard under the term understanding. Don Juan mentioned that trying to understand is wrong in certain matters that go beyond our understanding. In order to make sense of the world, our first instance is feeling, then the next is understanding. He mentioned certain, unnamed, instances that go beyond understanding and that a person could possibly learn to handle.
I think this will have to do with the limitations of language, and for the purpose of understanding we invariably use language of some sort, even if in a wider sense, as to include mathematics or illustration. Even our dreams are filled with language and imagery.
Being extremely text-based in my own thinking - written text more so than spoken words since I've always used the former more than the latter throughout my life - I guess I'm having a hard time moving beyond this. Sometimes when I had trouble falling asleep I remembered how someone (in some dream forum?) advised to concentrate on images and block out words from one's mind in order to easier fall asleep - and then I'm lying there and finding myself unable to stop the words flooding through my mind. When I see a tree I think "tree" and so on, and can't help it...
In any case I'm very grateful for Castaneda's work, bringing me back on the right track in my life - and bringing life back into the world, into its rightful place, instead of denying its existence as the common, Western view tends to do.
I've often wondered about the quote that quantum physics is said to be so crazy or counterintuitive that "anyone who doesn't think it's totally crazy hasn't understood it." For years I had been secretly wondering if there was something I missed about quantum physics, and if I indeed hadn't really understood it. Because it never seemed crazy to me at all, I found it fascinating and mysterious, but never crazy. Apparently the "crazy" part is referring to the quantum superposition, as famously illustrated by the thought experiment of Schroedinger's Cat
which is simultaneously dead and alive until its state is observed, causing the wave function to collapse into either one state or the other, just as an individual photon in the double slit experiment is in the superposition of being both a wave and a particle until being either observed or not observed while passing through the slits - in the former case passing through only one of them just as a proper particle ought to do, yet appearing to mysteriously pass through both slits simultaneously like a wave in case no one is looking.I gather now that it must seem totally crazy when considered from a materialist perspective - and this is apparently the only bit I had missed: that most scientists, sadly, don't expect to discover anything completely new about the world - that is, when they do discover something new they will try to accommodate it in their same old idea of the world.
Just as don Juan said, "Why should the world be only the way you think it is? Who gave you the authority to say so?"
They expected matter to be ultimately made up of matter, because they're so ridiculously and tragically convinced that matter is all that exists.
I couldn't see the "craziness" of quantum physics because subconsciously I've always known that matter is not made of matter!
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