New Frontiers

Hi folks, I know it has been a long time since I have posted, a year has gone by since we all walked away from Truth Strike permanently.

I have to say that I thought long and hard about whether to even resurrect this blog. I was very close to starting an entirely new project disconnected from the work I had done here, and abandon the pseudonym ghostvirus, such as the negativity associated with the name. 

However, my email inbox had various requests for chats and guidance after logging in after a year and it made me smile to see that there was a positive legacy from the work I did, even if this legacy was not entirely positive. For this reason, I decided not to start a new project from scratch, instead I am going to craft the materials I have here in to something up to date, forward thinking, and provide a resource for people who have a genuine curiosity in exploring human nature.

I have been getting many requests for help in seeing the false nature of the self. This insight is known to the Buddhists as Anatta and to us westerners as 'not self'. My blog was particularly geared around getting this insight and developing the tools to investigate this angle. 

I think that after all we had been through with the Ruthless Truth and Truth Strike shenanigans, it has taught me that the need to push this insight on to anyone was foolish at best. After all has been said and done all I can do is to try and give something positive back after creating such a cloud of negativity. 
My experience can be used to serve as a force for good now and, just as importantly, a stark warning to others of what can happen when you stride off in to the wilderness and turn your back on the correct path.

Things are going to be changing round here and I am taking this blog in a completely different direction from what it used to be. It is going to become a contemporary resource for investigating phenomena and it is going to be aimed at the layman. 
In this sense I am changing the style from obtuse philosophical ramblings, to something more clean and concise that is easily accessible. 

I am going to purge some of the old posts and I am also going to pencil in some commentary on others. This is in order to highlight the fallacies in my reasoning and also to highlight the faulty beliefs I held at that time. Others can learn from my mistakes in this way and perhaps I can shed some insight in to the delusion I was experiencing. 
In order to grow we must make many mistakes, the good thing is that these make us wiser over time and I am fortunate that I was able to see that I was stuck and needed to discard Anatta instead of clinging on to it.

As a result, I am no longer going to be available for one on one mentoring with this stuff. I have a few reasons for doing this which I will share with you, but firstly I want to tell you about the time I have spent away from working in this area. 

When we quit Truth Strike I remember being really happy about it. I felt a great sense of relief not having to deal with trolls and seekers, and this was the point when I realised that pushing this on people was no longer the right thing to do. If you want mentoring with this stuff you can go and visit 'www.liberationunleashed.com and the crew there will be more than happy to help you get this insight of Anatta. If you want to investigate I would encourage you to do so, however, I am not in the game of forcing my views upon people anymore.

The realisation hit me that I was simply on an ego trip at TS, I was identifying with playing the enforcer role. I was simply running rings around people as they were arguing from a position of delusion, and in all fairness it was easy to take apart their arguments. 
It was no longer about getting the critics to see Anatta, it was more about smashing their arguments to pieces and humiliating them. I shifted the focus on to the seekers to do the work in other threads, and I simply played the bad cop in a game of 'good cop, bad cop'. In this sense I was saving my energy to argue with critics and left the seekers to their own devices.

The meagre positive that came out of this was that I had a string of successful 'liberations' without much effort on my part. I say liberation as that was the terminology, however, I think realisation is a far better word that has no connotations other than seeing that something is real. 
What this really led me to think was that I could one day start to leave the tools for investigation out on display, so that people could pick them up and learn how to use them for themselves. This is going to be the fundamental ethos of this site from now on. I became sick to death of the word LOOK over that year and for this reason, I vow to never use the word capitalised from this point onwards.

The tool set we crafted is not the entire set though, there are far more tools that can be utilised for investigation. Autolysis, vipassana meditation, yoga, self enquiry, you name it, are all valid methodologies of investigating the phenomena that arises in our lives. 
I was naïve enough to think that Anatta was the fundamental insight of enlightenment in the days of RT, although by the time TS was started we had moved away from this idea. It took a while but it dawned on me that we had given too much importance to Anatta as an end itself and this had limited the potential for exploring other avenues. 

My ignorance knows no bounds, however, that makes me just as fallible as anyone else in the world and we all have much work to do in this area, or we would have no interest in the science of human nature.

There are more realisations to be had and Anatta is just one of many. I guess this is the main reason why I am no longer going to push it on anyone else. I stand by what I have always maintained about getting a handle on things, the potential to handle and even negate suffering is perhaps one of the best things about this insight. 
That is why I still recommend people do the work and why I will still continue to make the tools available. Just know that it is not a golden ticket that will solve all your problems in one foul swoop. As with everything in life, it is not about the destination, it is about the journey there, and this is one stop worth visiting briefly on the dusty road before you make haste again.

One thing that struck me about TS was that people accused us of being gurus that were deliberately misleading people. I did write a trial of truth strike part II a long time ago that rebutted this accusation. However, I have no need to post it because I no longer wish to mentor people to investigate Anatta. 
It is inevitable that if you have something you want to say then people will attribute this identity to you. I accept this. Whatever I did in that context can be construed as such, there is no need for me to explain it away, I accept your judgment whatever that may be. 

There are enough unscrupulous folk out there who claim to be in possession of the truth, or have fool prof systems you should follow. I will merely say you should be sceptical of everything and see if it tallies with your direct experience. Each version of the truth is merely a construction of language and can be interpreted in various ways, you need to investigate reality for yourself and build up your own knowledge from scratch.

In this new format I cannot be accused of posing as a teacher anymore, and the experiments and angles that I will cover will stand or fall on the solid grounds of experience. Whether the cumulative effect is enough to convince people that Anatta is capable of being realised is not my concern anymore and as such, I will no longer actively promote this avenue of reasoning. 
It is something that happened to me a few years ago and has a left a striking impression upon me. I can tell you that it is possible to realise this insight, as do Buddhist and Advaitan (albeit in a different way) philosophers. Investigate reality and get to know phenomena really, really well and see what you find is probably the only thing I will suggest to anyone. If you do that then it is inevitable that you will realise no self/ true self and the other characteristics of reality.

Each person has their own views and take on the world and it is here where I want to focus my efforts. TS and RT were never built on understanding and that is why they failed. I am just another bozo on the bus and anything I say should not be trusted or accepted without testing for yourself. 
I do not have all the answers but I have a limited understanding of some things that may help people, and I am keen to learn from others who are more knowledgeable than me. However, don't expect me to be giving you one to one mentoring as there are many other gurus out there and I do not want to be classified as such. 

I am a philosopher and psychologist primarily, and I have a curiosity and thirst for fair enquiry in to human nature, the mind, and reality. I am not qualified to dispense advice of a spiritual nature or on the mental phenomena that you experience. However, that does not mean I will not speculate my own ideas or refrain from critiquing and developing theories.

Personally, in the time I have spent away from TS I have been studying at university. I recently graduated with a first class degree and have been working in a career that is on the whole enjoyable. I have started meditating and am developing my skills in insight meditation and observing phenomena. 
I hope to make contact with others who are investigating reality like myself, and have seen Anatta and have experience with developing their insights after this point in their journey. I also hope to share some contemporary philosophical and psychological thinking and outline some of the core mechanisms of the human mind. 

I also want to focus on utilising phenomenological (looking at phenomena) investigations and mapping out some cast iron experiments that people can do to aid them in their quest for finding the truth.

I think that I can focus on the positive aspects of my past work and build on them to produce a resource that is informative, practical, and engages with contemporary scientific and philosophical theories. 

There is a lot of past crap to clear out on here but I think looking at the abject delusion I was mired with will be a testament to getting stuck on the path for two years! As for Anatta, it is water under the bridge for me now but I think it represents an important stepping stone for anyone who is really looking for the truth. 
You may take it or leave it as you wish, my efforts will be focussed on establishing concrete steps with recourse to your own experience, and focussing on gaining and sharing more insight through other investigative tools such as meditation. The site is undergoing a revamp currently to tart it up a bit and hopefully I will catch you in the new year to scratch beneath the surface of human nature.

Happy Yuletide!

Gh0$T xx

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float between vice and virtue. (Hume, 1748)