I reckon it’s time for a full explanation of the new version of Koanic Soul, which is a massive undertaking. So here goes.
This is the symbolic system, on paper:
![paper-web]()
This is the symbolic system, split onto my two hands:
![right-web]()
Now to explain how it works.
** The footing problem
There’s a psychological weight, an uncertainty, a desire for stable footing. This anxiety can lead to tumbling head over heels – placing and abandoning one unsuitable foothold after another. Sort of a self-questioning pattern. “Well I can put my psychological foundation on this – no wait on this – no wait…” What’s needed is a firm default resting point.
Why does my mind do this? Anxiety is common to man. My particular highly analytical and obsessive expression of it comes from my deep eye sockets.
My Neanderthal facial configuration makes me particularly susceptible to the shocks of toxic modernity. The absence of the close knit, warm tribe, and the presence of its opposite, is at the root of this maladaptive pattern.
However, whereas an occipital pure Neanderthal often devolves into apathetic neuroticism and depression, my parietal instead drives me to search out ultimate hierarchical and teleological status and meaning. Unlike a pure melonhead, I do this through a deep-socket mode of black and white analytical truth compulsion.
The resulting psychological behavior is maladaptive: it causes perfectionism, depressiveness, difficulty prioritizing, and extreme difficulty socializing naturally (due to extreme mental overactivity, both during and afterwards).
This maladaptive behavior is driven by an interplay of biological hardwiring and environment. Its most visible manifestations are conscious and behavioral, but the real iceberg is beneath the waves.
Thus, my SOLUTION needs to ANSWER the question posed by the ROOT of the maladaptive behavior, in LANGUAGE that it can UNDERSTAND.
** The alignment problem
Levin, in Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”, is a largely autobiographical projection of the pure Neanderthal Tolstoy. He is deeply concerned with forming a map of the world, but he rejects hierarchical ideology, instead developing a viewpoint organically, interweaving a fabric of holistic life experience with his Neanderthal emotional hardwiring.
Unlike his unfortunate brother Nikolai, Levin is largely insulated from the shocks of toxic modernity by rustic aristocratic life and later by matrimonial bliss with Kitty, his idealized love. Thus he has a reasonable approximation of the Neanderthal tribe around him most of the time, and this shapes his outlook according to the positive, healthy, non-suicidal version of the Neanderthal psyche. Although he is puzzled by many ideological questions of high import, he is able to put them aside and muddle through life until he eventually develops mature, independent views.
This is NOT an option for my psychological hardwiring.
As their monuments attest, the melonheads were obsessed with celestial alignment, the will of heaven. Where the parietal took its primary driving force from the small tribe, and could be envisioned as a closed circle, the parietal is a pyramid: man standing in hierarchical relationship with the supernatural, transmitting Heaven’s will and order to Earth. (And likewise rising in social status and spiritual attunement towards Heaven.)
In a pure melonhead, this is coupled with shallow eye sockets and facial humanity, creating social facility and flexible pragmatism ideal for the dynamic and charismatic management of larger hominid troupes. However, I have the Neanderthal face, which couples facial humanity with reduced aggression/assertiveness and the deep eyesocket truth-compulsion/naivete trait.
This obsessive truth drive instantly checks me when I deviate from, or doubt that I am in, alignment with Heaven’s will. Whatever I am doing grinds to a halt.
This poses a massive challenge. In order to function normally, I need to 1. know Heaven’s will and 2. align my actions with it. Neither is easy for mortal man, and doing both at once is difficult squared.
Although the problem is becoming more difficult, it is also better described. I now know that the ANSWER to the subconscious QUESTION must
1. Provide a stable psychological footing, by
2. clearly and satisfactorily defining my relationship towards both Earth and Heaven.
If I fail to do this, I may still muddle through life, but I will always be fundamentally broken and in pain. The wound, though suppressed, will threaten to rupture at any shock. Worse, I may hastily come to some incomplete conclusion, leading me down a fool’s path.
It is of course impossible to be perfect in my alignment and actions. But I MUST have at least the basic outlines of alignment settled, lest I forever be distracted from the particular tree by wondering whether I am in the wrong forest. And if I cannot be perfect in action, I MUST find a way to reduce the strength of the perfectionistic compulsion – to somehow satisfice – to find some humanly-possible optimum state which my demanding nature will accept.
** Symbols for Heaven and Earth
To the far left and far right of the Koanic Soul, there are vertical koan clusters dominated by a symbol.
![paper-web]()
The left, which shows a crescent moon, is mostly about Heaven. The right, dominated by a bone flute, is mostly about Earth. At least, that is one way to think about them. They are the product of practical iteration rather than one-off design, and thus defy easy categorization.
*** Heaven
The cross stands for Christianity and Jesus Christ, a universal symbol. It represents my absolute and sole alliegance to Yahweh, the Creator God. To know Father and Son better, see Iluvatar of the Silmarillion, the red-eyed GM of Vox Day’s Wrath trilogy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Then read the New Testament, with the benefit of the commentaries available in E-Sword. Otherwise, you will have no idea what I’m talking about.
Not that I mind or care – I just want to be crystal clear on what this symbol does and doesn’t mean. That is my compulsion, after all.
The cross has a second meaning – “T” as in talents, as in the parable of the talents. I’ve always struggled with motivation. On the one hand, I’m very motivated. On the other, to fix my motivation on attaining any particular Earthly thing seems profoundly empty and generates dissonance. Another deepsock parietal paradox – I want some Heavenly status ambition. The parable of the talents contains the answer – I am highly motivated to turn Earthly results into rule over Heavenly cities. Best of all, I have a perfect boss and judge.
It wasn’t just a problem of motivation, but of prioritization. My compulsive nature prefers to have one fixed, permanent aim. Yet every Earthly aim is partial, malleable, conditional. Neither can nonsense such as “love” be effectively elevated to that unconditional place, pace Tolstoy – the result is far too psychologically soft. No, what Jesus elevated was obedience to the will of the Father. He apparently had a direct line – unfortunately, I do not. However, I can deduce. “Talents” gives me the overarching, stable paradigm for prioritizing all subordinate objectives. As a deepsocket with the melon pyramidal spirit, that is exactly what I desperately need.
The crescent moon, mostly dark, represents the Dark Enlightenment. Shouldn’t be any confusion about what that term means. Human nature is a sliver of light in an ocean of darkness.
“Prey” stands for the inversion of my Neanderthal emotional hardwiring, which is to provide unlimited altruistic cooperation to everyone remotely in-group. I force myself to recognize the Dark Enlightenment truth that, outside the ingenopathic small Neanderthal tribe, cooperation is merely a special case of predation, wherein interests and betrayal disincentives temporarily align.
Unlike Tolstoy’s love-based utopianism, this predatory model is paradoxically utility-maximizing and fulfills the demands of true altruism. It destroys weak social structures, ala PUA/cad predation on feminism, and promotes stable formalist rule, ala the pirate capitalists of the early British Empire. Viewed in this light, Stalin and Mao were heroes for stoppering leftist singularities, as was Caesar for crushing a corrupted and tottering Roman Republic.
Likewise, a pedophile who psychologically scars a young relation is a traitor to his genetic code, because kinship is a permanent cooperative incentive, but a white serial murderer of little African immigrant girls in England is a race hero doing massive service for his kin-group’s genetic interest. Nature red in tooth and claw; enjoy the decline; etc. Thus even the hated parasites bloating on the corpse of America are as necessary as maggots are to the process of decomposition. Without them, that haggard corpulent crone would disfigure history all the longer, a thing not even God could abide.
(While the SWPLs get over their vapors, I point out that both Native American and African modes of warfare heavily feature atrocities against women and children. You aren’t a <i>racist</i>, are you? Just as civilized warfare is a Western European aberration and tribal terror/genocide the global norm, so cooperation is merely a special case of predation. An analogy pair you won’t find on the SAT, because it is too busy extolling the virtues of multiculturalism, thereby rendering inevitable the sort of gruesome racial conflict that policy based on a correct understanding of human nature would minimize and avoid.)
The last acronym, “cpi”, is a portmanteau of “confidence” and “kpi”, the latter standing for “key performance indicator”. This is a category buster, but somehow aggression fits with Heavenly alignment in my psychological makeup. Quelle surprise.
The meaning is as follows. Confidence is negative. Confident people lack unconfident body language tells. That is about the only thing they have in common. The best way to measure and enforce one’s confidence is to minimize unconfident body language. Any attempt at more positive or active control, at least for me, leads to introspection (which is unconfident) and/or incongruently overconfident and unnatural behavior. However, simply being occasionally aware of and avoiding unconfident body language gets the job done nicely.
*** Earth
The symbol stack is as follows:
![paper-web]()
A halo over a bone flute over “Home” over “OK”.
The “Earth” stack could also be thought of as “passive well-being”, whereas the “Heaven” stack is more about action, ideological orientation, and anti-ingenopathic antidotes of aggression and psychopathy. If it seems odd that I would call the latter “Heaven”, you probably don’t understand the title of CS Lewis’ book, “The Silent Planet”. Dirac Angestun Gesept, as they say at the strangling post (if they could).
The halo represents “justified by faith”, the Christian doctrine of unconditional redemption via Jesus’ blood sacrifice. This is critical for silencing my perfectionist drive for self-condemnation.
The bone flute represents Neanderthal culture, beauty and belonging. There is a video clip of a Basque orchestra and singer that represents this perfectly to me. A sad echo of what was lost, like Tolkein’s elves singing of the land beyond the sea. Yet a remnant remains. Due to my Neanderthal facial configuration, I need this hope or my soul withers up and dies. Before I stumbled upon Tex’s theories, I found false substitutes in Christian fellowship and a distant misty view of heaven, but the modern church is full of liberal heretics and Cro Magnon scum, and no true fellowship is possible for me within any four walls I found in America. Yet in the far flung anomalies self-selected into the NeanderHall, I found its echo, and in Tex’s anthropology, I found its source – and that was enough.
“Home” embodies the statement, “The Neanderthal longs for home.” If you have that elvish longing, you know what it means – much the same thing as the flute.
“OK” is the emotional conclusion to the stack. Pacific well being. Something I was hard-pressed to find for most of my historical inner life.
Put together, the “Earth” stack is the oil upon the waters that permits smooth adaptive functioning.
** Conclusion
That covers the two outer symbols. It’s getting late, so I’ll cover the inner symbol and the combined effect another day.