These are the sorts of things that bring suffering and make us sad. The great promise is that one of these SYSTEMS OF WORDS will supposedly make us feel good, make us feel secure and make our lives worth living — only they don’t.
Now, do you have a spiritual system say, that points to the ‘wordless’ — great. That has value. But the systems of words in and of themselves only bring suffering. There is all this ‘doing things right’ and ‘doing things wrong’. You can’t get away from it. It makes you feel trapped in time, on a hamster mill that you can’t escape.
Really, if you want to use Platonic Surrealism as a framework, the way it works is that you learn to enter the Trace state, and to otherwise heal yourself WITHOUT USING OR NEEDING WORDS. Then if you fall out of the Trace state, and you need words to comfort yourself, you remember what Platonic Surrealism says and know there is very little that you need to know, and you already know it. Then you can go back to the Trace state, or just hide, seek or play in any other way that you want to. But if that hide, seek or play involves words, then you risk suffering. Now suffering can be just fine; in fact, it’s it’s very own practice which is called Acceptance, and it is very valuable.
What is the Trace state? It’s the state you were in before you learned to understand words, and you let them imprison you in suffering.
All successful spiritual systems lead you to this state, and they all use words. The words are largely discardable, as ‘once the horse breaks out of the corral, pondering corral breaking methodologies are useless’. However, the words ARE important, as so many spiritual systems are full of landmines, that make it much more difficult to break through that gate than it needs to be.
Platonic Surrealism’s primary spiritual practice is stupid simple, and if you ‘fall out of Trace state’ you are not left in a bramble of spiritual and cognitive traps. You are deposited in a matrix of words that are truly life affirming and which put up NO BARRIERS between you and REALITY whatsoever. No good to attain. No evil to flee from or attack. No trying this or that to be ‘good enough’. No having to impress anybody to keep your social status.
You can just be content for fuck’s sake, as content as it’s possible to be in a world full of resource shortages and cruelty. Platonic Surrealism can’t help with those things, unless you find or build a community that supports each other. No ‘way of life’ framework is a magic wand, the best that it can do is teach you to not torment yourself, to stop damaging yourself (most world cultures break us, to keep us quiet and obedient tax payers) and to heal yourself; and with the act of healing yourself and others without even trying, you find purpose as well.
Documentation on the practices listed on the members tab is forthcoming; it’s being examined in a PS cohort (focus in this case) group.
Kevin Cann
10/21/2024