lol, thats not in the ruling class's interest, friend. sorry. we budgeted for more cops, though!

lol, lmao

"tribalism keeps cultures going"? really? really?

tell that to the Tutsis. tell it to the Kurds. or, hell, since you brought up the Japanese, tell that to the Ainu.

tribalism is the struggle of tribe against tribe. there's no unity in that theory at all.

if this is the level you're at, i'm not even gonna keep responding, sorry. read any book on cultures surviving through time, and the first thing you'll learn is that states are inevitably the death of endangered cultures, not their salvation.

you can (and we should) preserve and perpetuate everything that's unique and good about any culture without enshrining it with the powers of statehood. nation-states are not the keepers of cultural identities and heritages. if anything, the game of states destroys human diversity with its inevitable wars and mutations into tyranny.

yeah, it's absolutely true that something more universal needs to be instated, i'm not denying that part. the thing is, it's already right in front of us. there's never going to be something more humane and international than basic human compassion - it already crosses every state line and every artificial division. we simply need to do more of it, and encourage it in others.

the primary prevention of that solidarity is things like state power, nationalist identities, racism, etc.

by breaking those systems, we permit that compassion to resurface.

kinda not sad to see national identities fading away. humanity is a common identity that transcends these made-up borders. fewer hierarchies, fewer oligarchies, fewer states.

The creature is never late. Three-thirty-three AM, every single night, without fail for the last nine years, the 'demon' pours out of the broken grease trap at the back of the shop like the worst vodka-diarrhea you've ever heard. Bits and pieces, wet and chunky and impossible to even look directly at, a slurry of pseudopods and vomit and teeth and thousands of crushed human eyes that congeals together over five or ten nauseating minutes. It can't speak, because it doesn't have anything approaching a human mouth, but it can slop wetly across the floor and leave a glistening brown-red trail that more or less reads the same, even when we scream at it not to bother - we know what it's going to order.

The owner says this place used to be a pizzeria, and that a bunch of kids once performed some kind of bullshit seance or whatever in the bathroom during a birthday party, the kind of thing that happens when your birthday is on Halloween and you're nine years old and don't understand how the multiverse really works. If enough dumbass children do enough bullshit rituals at enough haunted pizzerias, one day they're going to annoy Something and it's going to slough through the hole in reality. They closed the place two months later, when they finally had to admit the stains were never coming out.

Why they turned it into a cafe, I'll never know. I started here two years ago and this nonsense was already tradition. The shitbarf-demon always spews out of the same broken grease trap, always writes 'Dirty Soy Chai Latte W/Vanilla' on the bottom of the old dish sink, and of course we make it, we pour it down the hole, and then the thing regurgitates a bunch of old coins that no one wants to touch. Morning crew's job is to use the scraper rake thingie hanging above the sink and shove them all back down the drain.

The thing never tips, but it also never complains, so I'd say that puts it a cut above our regular clientele.

I need to get out of this shithole town.

thank you. this was pure impulse off of my recent experiences with satori. looking back, i'd change a few word-repeats, but i'll leave it as-is. flaws are part of success.

--usand years, I have forgotten what it means to have a 'body.'

The mind is the Self attempting to individuate. Useful to do on Earth, during that beautiful, horrible eyeblink called "life." The mind inhabits the body, takes ownership of it, spreads out like an inflating balloon to fill every cell, every pore. The mind drives and directs, and it feels what the body does. It is impossible for most people to imagine themselves as anything other than their body, and the mind that suffuses it.

Ten thousand years of fire and suffering are the only cure for those who cannot extricate their Self from their body, their consciousness from their experiences. Hell, I have learned, is not for 'sinners.' It is merely the remedial class for enlightenment and ascension, the last divine attempt to save us from identifying with something as temporary, fallible, and ultimately boring as corporeal life.

I do not have a 'body' here. That which roasts on the demons' cooking spit is not screaming flesh as the humans imagine. The fires of hell are not the fires that burn down homes or melt flesh from the bones of the unlucky. No, these fires sear the soul, burning away the imperfections, the false hopes, the expectations both hopeful and despairing. I no longer dream of the ending to this torture. I dream of a day when I forget what it was like to be blissful, for torture is only awful to those who have something to compare it to.

I dream of no longer dreaming. I pray that I will one day cease to pray. I wish for nothing more than that I did not wish this was over, but I do. I still fervently do.

...and so I begin the next ten thousand years.