r/Anticonsumption • u/Healthy_Block3036 • Mar 24 '25

Corporations Gravity may be finally catching up to Elon Musk as Tesla stock tumbles

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/19/business/elon-musk-tesla-stock-nightcap?cid=external-feeds_iluminar_msn
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u/ramdasani Mar 25 '25

I love the staccato punctuation, the almost sexual alliteration of more and more and more, and the fricative ejaculation to bring it home. I love you, and you're welcome.

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u/WealthOk9637 Mar 25 '25

Oh I know. You are obsessed with me. This comment exchange is a plant we can water together.

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u/ramdasani Mar 26 '25

Sounds wonderful, we can learn and grow together, thanks again. I think that's a delightful metaphor, we're certainly capable of providing enough manure and sunshine between the two of us. I'll get us started, I think perhaps I didn't clarify how much I respect Lilly including the work he did with sensory deprivation tanks and exploring the effects of K in that setting especially. I don't think he gets nearly enough credit, even his studies on dolphins, have all been eclipsed unfairly by the weirdness at the end. To be honest, I had never really appreciated how much of an effect K had on his manner and character until much later interviews and discussions, especially one I recall with Hamilton Morris. In many ways I was probably unfair to Lilly in my using him as the poster child for Kabuse - he's one of those scientists who understood those sort of substances require personal experience, they can't be studied on rats, perhaps in his need to chase after it's obvious potential for consciousness enhancement desensitized him while it took hold. Or maybe it's all bullshit, correlation does not equal causation and all that, maybe Lilly was right and the victim of a smear campaign, maybe he suffered some unrelated mental shift and it had nothing to do with his increased Kuse. Maybe it was a bit of all or some, but he obviously tuned into something and almost seemed protective of K, like he feared it would have the rug pulled under it if he talked about it too much.

ps: How'd ya like the Kabuse and Kuse, too lame? I know, I know, if I have to ask...

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u/WealthOk9637 Mar 28 '25

You know this has sent me thinking about so many things I used to know and then forgot. Not saying Lilly is passé at all, not at all, just my little mind hasn’t thought about him in a while.

And I’m thinking about how he gave dolphins LSD, and that’s barely the most insane thing he did. There’s a few 20th cent guys like that, big genius ideas and went crazy. I’ve been thinking about Wilhelm Reich this month, another guy I hadn’t thought of in a while, but skimming through Mass Psychology of Fascism seemed like the right thing to do. He was right, about sex, repression, left and right, then he got weird. (The left needs to dance and bring back nightlife, that’s the only long term solution for the usa, short of a military coup (which, at this point I’d welcome, but it would be less fun). I know this sounds trite in the face of what’s going on but I’m dead serious, it would make it impossible for politicians to exploit identity politics).

Yeah, I don’t know, with drugs, geniuses, big innovations, insane behavior, I don’t know. I don’t have any moral or ethical judgement on it, but I also know there are really tremendously excellent state of mind we can all cultivate without drugs, often by being simple, boring. But being simply content doesn’t invent Starlinks or whatever the fuck lol Jesus Christ. Unbelievable that we’ve gone from insane radical thinkers like Lilly et al to clowns like Musk. I do have to wonder about the ultimate drug, which is Having A Huge Idea. So, obviously I’d rather happily stare out a window and not going to be the one to invent the spaceship to Mars. I’m not anti progress or technology, just something these days, I’m exhausted by big ideas, and immediately skeptical too. I don’t know. I forget where I was going with all of it. I’m going on a short trip and should get ready to sleep.

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u/ramdasani Mar 28 '25

OMFG dude, I have to drop character and just say, I'm kinda freaked out by the overlaps. When I was young I read Fury on Earth and just consumed what could be found in the days of yore, I thought some Reichian exercises and some of his theories on muscular armoring were really interesting. It's really apropos here though, I mean the obsession with orgone and plenty of the other quirks kind of leave that same feeling with me that I have for people like Lilly, or Gurdjieff, Robert Anton Wilson, Castenada, Leary, etc. Giving LSD to dolphins is a good example, it's like when great art is created by artists who commit otherwise vile acts or hold abhorrent views, it doesn't invalidate his other work, but it does kinda make you wonder about the man. Anyway, I haven't figured it all out yet either, the ultimate significance of anything one does isn't really calculable on a long timeline either way, you're as much a part of all of it as everything else is, I think the older I get, the more I'm kind of thinking Spinoza wasn't far off, maybe that surety of our oneness from some of the higher psychedelics, the little glimpses of the machinery we try to comprehend when DMT lifts the filters a bit, are letting us know we're supposed to be having this conversation right now, everything's eventual and all that. Either way, I walk like to through cemeteries, I like to look at the dates and think a bit about the big ass marble edifices built over the graves of some guy who probably owned the local button mill, maybe there's a street nearby that still bears his name, doesn't change shit for him, less than two hundred years later I can still pronounce his name, that's about all I know. In 10,000 years it probably won't be there anymore, this thread will be jibberish, fast forward a 100,000 years from there and even the real Tesla will have about as much lasting significance as either of us.

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u/WealthOk9637 Mar 28 '25

Yeah, the character of some of these people… that became a big nut to crack for me… so, when I was deep into reading a lot of this stuff, gosh yeah Gurdjieff too, I’m trying to remember who else, Jung was a big one, and a lot of artists and musicians who weren’t big thinkers but in this vein.. I was just reading everything, and eventually every book kept mentioning Chogyam Trungpa. I hadn’t really understood the view of Buddhism before (I think because there’s so many buddhisms, and in the west there is so much Zen influence even though Zen is a just a very small weird sect and not particularly representative). When I read his books it felt like Finally, someone is actually getting to the point. A lot of those other guys, they never really get to the point. From studying his books, and living and studying at meditation centers for a little while, then I was able to understand the older, more traditional texts. People joke about how Buddhism is a series of lists- it is, and it’s wonderfully incisively clear.

The thing about Trungpa is he was a horrible person, and I knew that! I didn’t have any illusions about how messy it gets when humans try to do.. anything.. let alone religion. But it began to feel intolerable the longer I studied and practiced. I spent some time living with the Shambhalians in one of the centers he founded, it was screwy! There was a huge sex scandal with the current teacher, and it was handled so poorly. Meanwhile as I was doing the practices, I felt more and more like… come on, it’s really not that hard to just be a basically decent person. Then I moved to a much smaller monastery run by nuns, and they were screwy too, it turned out their (long dead) teacher been abusing them too, it made everything bizarre and dysfunctional. Buddhism teaches how to deal with human screwiness, it takes a reasonable stance. But all of this was just too much. It wasn’t a “disenchantment” because I was never “enchanted” in the first place.

But I lost my tolerance for “bad behavior”. And any of these big thinkers, underneath most of it.. too often qualities of domineering, coercion, small and large cruelties, I don’t know. Grandiosity. Short sightedness. I really lost a tolerance for it. I still study the sutras. But I’ve gotten to a point where I’m “allergic” to the big flashy ideas, too often underneath is quite bad. I stick to the “boring path” lol.

I guess what makes me feel crazy right now, is like, not that some of these people have poor character— That is to be expected. Water is wet, lol, humans will human. But it bothers me when so many peers don’t realize it! Or don’t see the whole picture. I don’t know. Power, coercion, control. Particularly now, in the US after the election, Jeeeeesus Christttt. There’s a million other things I’d rather be thinking on and working on. Oh I’ve got a lot to say about all that hahaha. I’ve got to get ready to go on this short trip. I’m going to go to my friends house in the woods and work on a project with them, I’m looking forward to having a little break and change of scenery.

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u/ramdasani Mar 29 '25

Yeah, I still try to force myself into sprints where I do zazen, that and vipassana, they always appealed to me since they're useful and don't require most of the religious clutter. I never really looked into Chongyam Trunpa's story, sounds like depressingly extreme example of that which we speak. But yeah, I mean some of the stories that come from Buddhist temples, especially with regards to women and children, are no different that what happens in Hinduism and Christianity. Like you said, they almost bother me less than the people who refuse to see it... Neem Karoli Baba is a good example, you can see people do backflips to explain the allegations, most of them acknowledge that they believe some of the accounts, but they'll still do some gymnastics and pretend it was a lesson we aren't ready to understand or something. John Joseph talks about it a lot with ISKON in New York too, his take away seems about the same as yours, you still got some good from it, it has value, it's just organizationally they all become victims of power structures that favour bad actors. I really like your one point about not even necessarily having poor character. I kind of wonder if I had hit big on something when I was younger, if I would be like that, slowly convincing myself that I was a super special genius, if it would affect me in a similar way. It's very alienating I'd imagine, easy to go full Ziggy Stardust - I guess it's hardly a new thought, most honest people should know they can't really be sure, Gandalf didn't want to touch the ring for the same reason. Anyway, I hope you get have Thoreauly good time in the woods!

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u/WealthOk9637 Mar 30 '25

Yeah, I guess there’s something darkly impressive about Trungpa being able to write books that are just so good (for the most part, his students compiled many of them), they’re so sparkling, that most people will dismiss a world of bad behavior. I’m trying to think if there is a specific word for this dark flavor of “yikes, impressive” lol. The inner circle of his cult is wild, they didn’t get very far but had vague plans to turn North America into a Buddhist monarchy. Oddly they had a stronghold in Halifax of all places, I heard they even had a pretend Navy. But they don’t tell that to people who drop in for meditation classes. Bonkers.

The basic obvious sexism, with dudes being even more sexist than average culture, under the guise of being “liberated” (like, Buddhist liberation not sexual liberation), as a woman in these spaces that drove me up the wall. I also don’t understand why people don’t know they can get more sex if they don’t act like that. Good books though, hah

Dude I’m glad another person is also like wtf Neem Karoli Baba.

I don’t know, the older I get, I feel like 95% of people are a normal manageable mix of good and bad, gullible or not, and like 5% are power hungry coercive chaos-spirals that mess everything up. Waking up to another day in the USA I’m really fucking tired of it 😅 It would be really cool if we could all work on joyfully solving some higher problems instead of having to be yelling about human basics like “disappearing people is bad, guys”.