Spiritual counseling for cyborg mystics.

In the beginning was the Verb. And the Verb was God.

(I don't get to play this much in Skool, so I'm going to proceed to step onto the pulpit - Discordian Pope-style, of course!)

Our own self-discovered (interdiscovered, remixed, trialed-and-errored) RITUALS will connect us, not someone else's THEOLOGY. As young adults raised in secular environments and infected by the post-modern memeplex, we cannot assimilate a religious worldview from pre-existing religion. Utterly impossible from the standpoint of cognitive science (if you like, I can expand on this). But we CAN look into our own lives, our personal histories, and there we can find personal mythologies, complete with heros and villains, tricksters and intercessors... from which we can discover a rich ecosystem of meanings. This is the phenomenological scripture with which we can build our faith.

Oh yes, I dropped the F word. Don't worry! I have a plan. I'm actually going to use the word "belief", too. (Gosh, this is exciting - I feel like a vegetarian sneaking some bacon onto my plate!)

Faith is faith in ourselves; belief in ourselves - reached by knowing ourselves to the extent that ontological self-knowledge is possible (and it's important to be cognizant of that EDGE, because, if you don't mind, teleology is one of the most detrimental world-building tools ever invented). Faith is a verb in essence, an entelechia and not a object to be attained and stuffed in your Mary Poppins Bag. We build our "faith" by building our character. If this is too abstract sounding, think about it like I do - in terms of gaming. You build a certain class of character to specialize in certain abilities in gamespace, and to enable certain ways of game-play. So is the cyber[a]gnostic's design of the self, the discipline of training the self to particular ends (which is to say unparticular non-ends). Pardon my bluntness, but life IS like a massive-multiplayer role-playing game. And that's NOT a philosophical statement about "all human life" - it's a very deliberately culturally-contextualized anecdotal statement about life as it is currently-manifesting. (Please see Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark and interrelated works, like Essays on Algorithmic culture by Alexander Galloway).

The organizational and synergetic power of your brain has incredible intrinsic value! It is an extremely potent mana pool! (Along with sexual energy, of course... wouldn't want to leave Mr. Crowley out of all this!) ;D

The special thing about this game is that there is no endgame - the Devil is not some "boss" we get to battle in order to win. And neither will we "win" by emulating the lives of Jesus or Buddha - although SOME OF US MAY - but we need to be aware of the fact that these are simply the methodologies of SOME and NOT ALL classes in the game. Classes (in this case, the archetypes of Jesus, Buddha, Patanjali, etc.) are just starting templates - like mage, necromancer, or warrior - that will evolve into their spacial and temporal environment in particular ways. Such a template is intended to be personalized. We're in a complex system here, remember? Y'know what Heraclitus said...panta rhei, (everything flows) and y' can't step in the same damn river twice!

Moreover, the game is open-source and non-zero-sum.

What does that mean? To me... it means that our kind will always be on the drift - the drift of rivers, of glaciers and of tectonic plates. The drift of the Sufi Mystics (for I can't quite find any other historical religious phenomenon that better informs our path). It's not a curse - it's a blessing. You just have to keep re-membering it - that is the way you will refresh its spell-power and keep it from harming you. It would only harm if you allowed yourself to attempt assimilating it with an external consensus. That would cause the system to crash... so don't doo eet! Be strong, wolven children of the dog star!

I can't think my way to the divine; I can only act my way towards it. Towards becoming it. And by "towards" I mean backwards, upwards, inwards, outwards and allwards. Divine essence will not be found in the future. (That sounds like a simple statement, but meditate on it for a while - it's actually rather Escher-esque).

And I am now obligated to say: This is why [to-what and from-what] I dance. Boom shankar, freeqs!

That being said, I AM personally enriched by "other people's religions". But only insofar as I am able to be enriched by any story that is meaningful to any human being. Want a categorical statement? Here's one: We are mythmakers. Allegorithm-makers (to borrow Wark's kool wyrd). Game-builders. You can see the narrative occurring on almost every observable level. As long as we speak language and follow the rules of grammar and syntax, we are story-tellers, translators, transducers. The secular mind can't escape mythic thought. So perhaps we should stop wasting energy running from The Force, take a page from Permaculture's book and figure out the best way to harness that force for The Good.

*An Afterword on The Sacrosant Verb.
The verb TO BE is not a verb. It is something unspeakable cleverly disguised as language. It actually needs its own grammatical category. (Perhaps you can help me invent the name of this category?) To attempt a modification, it is less like BEING and much more like BECOMING. To borrow some advice from the freelance arch-gnostic Robert Anton Wilson, try to have a conversation during which you replace any potential-occurence of the verb "to be" with the subjunctive or optative form: "might be" or "may-be", respectively. To add my own twisty little passage to RAW's Maybe Logic, I'd say you could also experiment with replacing "to be" with "to become". Notably, in ancient greek, the verb "to stand" (histaimi) actually contended with the verb "to be" (eimi) and (it seems from my limited knowledge of attic texts) in fact threatened to DETHRONE "to be" -- maybe kind of like the Spartans threatened to beat Xerxes ass (which they didn't - but it's the thought that counts, y'know?)
Anyway, my point might be that the meaning and value of TO STAND just MAY BE more useful than the rather vacuous and philosophically greedy status of our beloved Verb.

In the beginning was the Verb. And the Verb was God.