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when sleeping earlier (went to bed at 11 and I’m up at 130 sigh lol, classic) I was sorta visited with some thoughts about deities, theatre, drama, Santa Claus, even the WWE. Thinkin’ bout egragores, “the spirits”, “ancestors guide us” and so on
“lol Santa is made up”, “Santa is a lie”, etc – that class of utterance for me evokes a sort of tedious killjoy attitude, a desire to be superior to petty superstition. It can be trickster energy bordering on or bleeding into malice – gleeful meaning-destruction https://t.co/MgPToloou7
One of my favourite stories I saw on reddit was a parent who taught her child that the secret of Santa is that YOU get to be Santa, and you get to join the secret group of people who make the world a better place for other people. I find that very compelling and heartwarming https://t.co/DNNud2yXcc
the frustrating thing about putting yourself *above* your community’s parochial, provincial beliefs is that it’s also simultaneously self-alienation. when you deem yourself superior to everyone, you can’t learn from them either, which is a development-arresting trap https://t.co/Dk38h0sdEA
if you are able to “see the matrix” of your community, or of all of society, even, your task – in my obviously biased opinion – is not to desecrate it, or abdicate from it, but to reform it, contribute to it, make it better. You can’t Hakuna Matata indefinitely https://t.co/ef4PIqbr8r
above tweet is directed at shamanic types who might be 1% or less than 1% of the population. If none of this makes sense pls just ignore it and keep scrolling lol. But it’s the sort of guidance I was desperate for when I was a teenager
The Horizon video games do this really well with Aloy, where she has been gifted quite literally with a Second Sight to see what the tribal folks can’t. And beautifully she doesn’t use this to condescend to them, but to serve them, and both she and the world are better off for it https://t.co/gIOTLHI5u7
oh yeah egragore stuff. I was thinking about WWE as theatre, as a communal ritual of expression and meaning. At some level it’s completely absurd, but so is life, isn’t it? And people keep coming back to this because it’s entertaining and cathartic and it *resonates* https://t.co/K0oSZ8d5ZA
sports fulfils a similar function re: the drama of living, of struggle, of triumph and despair some people don’t get it, and I’ll admit I’m not a native sports enjoyer either – I have to do a bit of work to put myself in the right headspace to really get into it https://t.co/dqFQl69nIZ
but when you do, you can tap into a deeper, more primal energy, it’s very powerful stuff football hooligan culture otoh looks to me like this stuff gone off the rails into unhinged/addictive all-consuming territory but managed/wielded appropriately, this is Jedi force stuff https://t.co/MktRQSmmxq
and this is a bit of a leap but - can you see how this is it with all things? How *anything* can be a talisman, a narrative battery charged with meaning? “Lol why are they so obsessed with a trophy I can get one made at the shop for like a hundred bucks” misses the point https://t.co/KG7bdnSizF
say you hate sports, fine, is there some other domain that you care about where you can learn to see this? maybe you’re into movies? and you appreciate the history of filmmaking, and the debt current filmmakers owe to their predecessors, and so on? https://t.co/45JzZINrfS
humans can create talismans (meaningful objects) at will intuitive example of "humans charging a talisman" is a wedding ceremony → wedding ring you can similarly do ceremonies to imbue any object with meaning. trophies, medals. people compete very hard for some of these https://t.co/oUCkuDHU6w
when someone asks themselves “what would Arnold do” and then uses it to go lift, that’s a kind of proto-religion. It’s using images and ideas and to regulate one’s behavior. Understanding these patterns & rituals can help trigger a cascading realisation about much more than this https://t.co/sp4kZYv63P
somewhere in this you may start to see how, ideally, when someone asks the gods to watch over them, they’re not necessarily believing in a literal pantheon of magical sky people intervening on their behalf – (although it does seem like many people do end up believing this…) https://t.co/oeKIr0YZxg
but rather it’s an invocation of sets of ideas, vibes, emotions and so on. The ideas are people-shaped primarily because people are excellent at relating to other people, so a person-shaped box is the Trojan horse with the most amount of storage space for content https://t.co/kUL7ClqRB2
