This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm, Spotify, and other platforms
Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible. I’m back after a somewhat longer-than-expected break. Fortunately this one wasn’t the result of any sort of catastrophe in my personal life but rather from a confluence of factors: one, I’ve been focusing a lot of my research work on the collaboration with the Absences podcast. I know that I’ve been talking about that for a while now and nothing has come of it yet, but I think we’re onto something very exciting and all of us want to make sure we get it right. So that’ll happen when it happens, but it’ll be great when it does. Two, once I actually got some time off from my day job I realized that I mostly felt like spending all day writing mopey goth rock songs. I’m aiming to release an album or EP sometime this year, but for the time being, you can look up Cyrus Dark on Soundcloud and Audius to find what I’ve got so far. And whether or not you’re into goth rock, that project is in many ways expressing the same ideas that I’ve been talking about on this podcast for the last several years.
The last factor is one that I want to spend a little bit more time talking about, and that’s regarding a change of direction in this podcast, starting with this episode. I talked about this a bit on my patron feed on Patreon and some of that is just going to be copypasted into my script for this document. Just to allay any concerns, while this is certainly a radical and fundamental change to the content of this project, it is simultaneously a change that I doubt anyone would even have noticed if I hadn’t said anything. All the things you love about A Satanist Reads the Bible are here to stay: interpreting and analyzing sacred texts (with an emphasis on the original languages), drawing from philosophy both ancient and modern, and centering the work on my perspective as a Satanist. I’ve always been explicitly clear that I am not approaching A Satanist Reads the Bible from a standpoint of expertise in the subject of philosophy. I have been presenting what I learn, as well as my personal understanding and analysis of the material, largely as I learn it myself; the whole point has been (and will continue to be) the documentation of that journey. For that reason, much of my work has primarily involved collating, exploring, and explicating the ideas of others rather than presenting my own, at least in any final or authoritative sort of way. I’ve certainly been happy to present my own opinions, viewpoints, analyses, and so forth, especially wherever I’ve been able to inform them with those subject matters in which I am an expert (such as linguistic and propaganda analysis), but what I’ve done only very cautiously and infrequently is present and explicate my own ideas as the central topic of my essays. And that’s where the focus will be shifting starting with this episode. The new central focus of A Satanist Reads the Bible will be on my own ideas, with support from the thoughts and ideas of others.
The focus of today’s essay is on an idea I’m calling the sublation of mental illness. In many ways, this will be a follow up to an essay I published in January of 2020: “Satanism, Mental Health, and the Search for Happiness.” I consider that one of my best essays, and it took on a special meaning for me over the two years following its publication as my everyday struggle with mental illness transformed into a struggle with mental illness in the context of a catastrophic global pandemic.
Before I talk about the core idea of this essay, I’m going to contextualize it with some personal background, starting with some information that I think everyone that has followed this podcast for any length of time is already familiar with, but just to get everyone on the same page: In 2002, after a failed attempt to start a career in information technology, I joined the US Army, and not long afterward ended up deployed as a Psychological Operations Specialist in support of the Iraq War. My specific job was to write and distribute American propaganda, to analyze enemy propaganda, and to gather information from civilians in support of those objectives.
After approximately 16 months in Iraq, I returned home and started working to build a new life. I got a job as a manager for a private security company, and my initial optimism quickly faded as a brutal winter set in, during which I worked graveyard shifts in which I drove around the city to check on the various commercial buildings with whom my company had contracts. I was drinking heavily—sometimes on the job—and became delusional. On top of that, I began to develop some peculiar habits. First was the checking of doors and locks: car doors, my apartment door, my refrigerator door. If it was something capable of being closed, I was obsessed with confirming that it was indeed closed and, if applicable, locked. Before long, I was getting up an hour early to get to work and spending the time confirming that I had closed and locked my apartment door. On top of that, I felt compelled to write down or otherwise record everything that came to mind. As I drove around the city at night, I would make frequent stops in parking lots to jot down whatever was in my head. If I forgot something before I managed to write it down, the resulting anxiety attack could last for days.
At the end of each day, I would collect everything I had jotted down into various lists that I kept on my computer, and then spend some time organizing those lists, checking for redundancies, sorting tasks in order of perceived priority, that sort of thing. As the lists grew, the time I needed to spend organizing them inflated. At the peak of this problem, I would spend a minimum of three hours every day on this process, sometimes as many as eight, and that was on top of work, sleep, and making sure the various doors around me were closed and locked (which itself could take as much as two hours per day).
Years later, a psychiatrist diagnosed me with, among other things, obsessive-compulsive disorder. I had heard of this particular mental illness but had thought that it exclusively meant an obsession with contamination and cleanliness. The obsessive-compulsive neurotic I envisioned in my head was someone who washed their hands until they bled, not someone who took pages of notes every day and then spent hours organizing them. But OCD, as I learned, can encompass a wide variety of behaviors, and while mine are atypical, they are far from unheard of. The psychiatrist believed—and I think he was correct about this—that I had been born with a latent OCD that was exacerbated by the trauma of warfare.
I felt paralyzed as I watched my obsessive notetaking and door-checking consume my life. I had ideas for music I never acted on, ideas for stories I never wrote, lists of albums I never got around to listening to, all because the act of writing and organizing the items themselves consumed all of the time necessary for making use of any of it. And for years I was completely aware of this and at the same time felt helpless to do anything about it.
The change that transformed the problem came suddenly. After a double shift at work during which my brain had been particularly active, I returned home and spent the next eight hours on organization. Having been awake for a full twenty-four hours, I collapsed exhausted into bed, visited before sleep by one more idea.
I put the idea into practice the next day, creating a spreadsheet listing all of the various lists and inboxes I was tracking, how much time I spent organizing them, and how much progress I made in doing so. That in itself took more time but also gave me more information about what exactly I was doing and how much time I spent doing it. With this information in hand, over the next several months, I was able to implement a kind of meta-organization to my organization process. Over the course of about a year I was able to push the time required down to a single hour. I had, in effect, pulled a Thanos on my mental illness: I used the OCD to defeat the OCD.
Getting a handle on the door-checking was a somewhat different matter, but I found that just through the process of tracking how much time I spent doing it, I was able to gradually reduce that time: a little bit less every day, and anymore I typically don’t spend more than a few minutes on any one door.
To be clear, this episode does not constitute advice on how to treat OCD or mental illness in general. If you have or think you have a mental illness, please consult with a medical professional. If any of what I’m saying here can be thought of as advice in any way, it’s much more broad-spectrum than that. What I’m suggesting is an approach to ourselves and our relationships thereto based in the Hegelian concept of sublation, which I’ll be discussing a bit further on.
I’ve struggled with depression throughout my life as well, and I mentioned on my Patreon feed that I had been feeling depressed for much of December and indeed spent many days doing little more than sleeping. While I was initially frustrated that I wasn’t able to accomplish the things I wanted to do while I had the time available to do them, after a few days I started to think about the situation in terms of something that came up in a novel by Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (2010).
In the world of the novel, one of the main characters joins a religious sect, God’s Gardeners. When the protagonist observes one of the other members of the sect to be exhibiting signs of depression, the leader of the sect explains that the person in question is, in fact, Fallow.
If one is tending to a field in order to grow crops and grows the same crops in the same field every year, the crops will gradually deplete the soil of key nutrients and the field will, after sufficient time, become infertile. To avoid this, crops are rotated, and at times a given field is left fallow, left alone without being seeded so as to allow the nutrients to regenerate. For a person to be Fallow, then, under the model of God’s Gardeners, is to allow oneself a period of inactivity so as to rejuvenate one’s physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual self. Once I allowed myself this rest, I discovered that many of the unpleasant sensations I was experiencing were not a primary result of the depression but a secondary result of my feelings about the depression: I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, and I felt bad about it. Once I let this go, I fell into a state of numbness; not pleasant, but also not unpleasant. And once I started to come out of the malaise, I realized I had a great idea for my next episode.
Again, this should not in any way be taken as me telling you how to cure your depression. Depression is a serious and potentially deadly illness, often requiring treatment by a medical professional. If you ever feel suicidal or like you may harm yourself, please call a medical professional or an emergency help line. What I am suggesting here is, at most, a possible way of managing the symptoms of depression and of reframing how we think about mental illness and about ourselves in general, and actually the specific ways that I’ve approached my own depression and OCD are important to my overall point only as examples.
Moving on: any secondary literature you read on the philosophy of the German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel will likely contain some discussion of his usage of the German verb aufheben and its translation. The verb aufheben, and the related noun Aufhebung, are typically translated as “to sublate” and “sublation,” respectively, though other translations are often used. The Deutsch-Englisch-Wörterbuch, a popular online German-English dictionary, translates aufheben as: to rescind, suspend, repeal, override, reverse, revoke, nullify, or offset something, but also to keep, retain, preserve, mediate, raise, or uplift something. Understanding these simultaneous but contradictory meanings is key to understanding Hegel’s philosophy. I’m not going to attempt a full exposition of the concept here. Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, I’ll quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Hegel’s Dialectics:”
Hegel says that aufheben has a doubled meaning: it means both to cancel (or negate) and to preserve at the same time…. The moment of understanding sublates itself because its own character or nature—its one-sidedness or restrictedness—destabilizes its definition and leads it to pass into its opposite. The dialectical moment thus involves a process of self-sublation, or a process in which the determination from the moment of understanding sublates itself, or both cancels and preserves itself, as it pushes on to or passes into its opposite.
Maybee, 2020
The key thing to understand here for our purposes is the transformation of concepts into their opposites as a result of their own internal instability.
I’m going to shift gears here and will spend much of the remainder of this episode discussing this idea, the sublation of mental illness, through the work of the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, with some tie-ins to Satanism along the way. Chödrön was a disciple of the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, who came to the West after fleeing the Chinese occupation of Tibet and founded a new school of Buddhism, which he called Shambhala Buddhism, after Shambhala, a mythical spiritual kingdom within the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Through Shambhala Buddhism, Trungpa aimed to merge his Tibetan training with Japanese Zen Buddhism and Western philosophy. This was one of the two lineages of Buddhism in which I myself was trained (alongside the Japanese-American Zen Buddhist lineage of Sanbo Kyodan). I studied under some of Trungpa’s direct disciples and once met Pema Chödrön herself, though only briefly. Trungpa was a brilliant spiritual teacher and a deeply flawed human being, famous not only for his teachings but for his rampant alcoholism, sexual relationships with his students, and occasional abusive treatment towards his followers. My Zen teacher said of him, “The clearest waters of the dharma can flow from even the rustiest pipe, and Chögyam Trungpa was a very rusty pipe.”
Satanism has been described as a self-religion or a religion of the self (Dyrendal, 2009), and I hold to this myself, although, largely as a result of my Buddhist background, my take on the matter is quite heterodox as far as Satanism goes. A religion of the self was certainly the clear ideal of Anton LaVey, who, likely inspired by his otherwise poor reading of Nietzsche, denigrated Christian self-sacrifice in favor of indulgence of the ego and the development of personal strength (LaVey, 2005). But for all the centrality of the self and the ego to LaVey’s Satanism, he spends no time whatsoever exploring what these concepts actually mean, either in general or for the individual Satanist. He takes the atomistic, Cartesian self as a given and gives no concern to whether the model of the self he was socialized into is an accurate one.
A central matter of my own religion is the exploration and development of who and what I am: what it means for me to be a human, to be this specific human, and what I can do with that, and I find the works of Pema Chödrön to be excellent resources for exactly this exploration. This exploration of the self is a profoundly rebellious and revolutionary activity, as the acceptance of a particular and insidious understanding of who we are as individuals is critical to the operation of the established order.
It begins, Pema says, with discomfort. Our fear of discomfort is what prevents us from getting a good look at who and what we really are. In her book The Wisdom of No Escape (2001, originally published in 1991), she writes,
To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is.
p. 3
I see this as the heart of the Satanic virtue of personal strength: the willingness to endure pain and discomfort in the pursuit of understanding and becoming ourselves. Pleasure also—it’s important to note that Chödrön mentions enduring both pain and pleasure. But it’s not a matter of changing who we are—indeed, she describes this as being a counterproductive strategy: who is it exactly who is doing the changing? Rather, the point is to see clearly who we already are, which is not something fixed or static but rather a continual process of becoming which, once we see it clearly, we can exert some measure of control over. Many of the discomforts of life that we try to avoid—our boredom, our anger, our depression, our physical pain or discomfort—are parts of ourselves. We can learn from them. This is not to say that we should pursue an ascetic life of pain and suffering, but if we only ever run from our discomfort whenever it appears, we cut ourselves off from something intrinsic to our individual being and to our humanity.
Pema Chödrön recommends meditation as an ideal means of confronting our discomfort. It’s easy to think of meditation as something austere and demanding, but I’ve actually come to find that it is, in principle, far more Epicurean in nature. A famous Buddhist story tells of a person running away from a tiger. They reach a cliff, and as the tiger approaches, they jump down and grab hold of a protruding branch on the cliffside below. Looking down, they see another tiger looking up and waiting for them to fall. Just then, this person notices strawberries growing from a cliffside bush. They grab one and eat it, enjoying its sweet flavor deeply and immensely. This capacity to enjoy ourselves even in the midst of suffering is cultivated through meditation.
The world we live in provides many of us with access to realms of pleasure unimaginable to our ancestors: rich foods; drugs and alcohol; video games; a colossal variety of television shows, movies, and pornography; constant feeds of memes and social information; all of it narrowly individuated and catering to our particular tastes, predilections, and interests. Indulgence is no measure of strength or power in this world, and indeed, when we continually partake and indulge so as to numb or escape our pain, we become weaker. LaVey had the right of this, at least in principle: indulgence is fine, but when it ceases to be a choice, when it becomes compulsion, it becomes a problem (2005, p. 81). But did he really have a clear sense of what it was that he was choosing, and why? How many of us can indulge ourselves as deeply in the taste of an apple as in a five-course gourmet meal with wine pairings? As fully in a neighborhood walk as in a high-intensity video game? As much in a birdsong as in a studio-produced pop epic? When the high-intensity things become the only things we can indulge in, can we really say that those are the things we are freely choosing? Let’s not forget our Milton: Satan didn’t become Our Infernal Luminary by siding with God so as to continue to enjoy the eternal pleasures of Heaven; Satan defied the divine tyrant, landed in Hell, and had to work with that reality, “preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp” (II: 255-257).
Within the present capitalist structure of society, and in particular within what scholar Shoshana Zuboff refers to as surveillance capitalism, your unhappiness and dissatisfaction are incentivized. When’s the last time you saw an advertisement telling you that you don’t actually need the product in question to be happy or content? Again, I’m not advocating for austerity here: I derive much of my happiness in life from making music, and there are tools I need to be able to do that, as well as various toys that I don’t strictly need but which I enjoy using. But when it’s impossible for me to find satisfaction without those things, then there’s a problem, then the search for happiness becomes unbounded, limitless, unachievable. If the world, the ideological state apparatus, the global hegemony, are constantly telling you that you don’t have what you need to be happy and that only they can provide it, finding happiness by simply sitting and being is a profoundly revolutionary activity.
Don’t think that I’m saying any of this from a position of moral superiority. I largely stopped meditating after my disastrous trip to Nepal in 2013, thinking that I needed to be living my life rather than just sitting through it, and while that may be true to an extent, or may have been true at the time, my capacity for experiencing discomfort and boredom has certainly diminished. Not a day goes by that I don’t find myself at some point browsing reddit without even remembering when I opened up the tab in my browser or when I picked up my phone. I hate it and I want out, and that starts with the confrontation and acceptance of discomfort.
At the same time, I can point to any number of instances of problematic, unkind, or even toxic behavior on my part over the last year. Really over whatever timespan you want to consider. None of us are who we want to be all the time, but we have choices as to how we react when we notice this. Shame and anger towards ourselves are likely the most popular choices. Anger in particular is oppositional in nature: we are angry at ourselves, and this distances us from our own actions.
When I catch myself having behaved in a way that fails to meet my own standards for myself, my instinct is to look in the mirror and say, “Well, you see Todd, you’re a garbage human being. This is the kind of thing that garbage humans do, and you’re a garbage human, so that’s why you did the thing. Be better.” It’s the kind of attitude I internalized in the Army: abuse miscategorized as “tough love.” But it doesn’t explain or change anything; really all it accomplishes is to externalize a part of myself so that I have someone to yell at. It’s only a mere appearance of self-discipline; in reality, this approach is spurious, facile, comfortable, and safe—safe in that it doesn’t actually require me to change or to face what’s really going on. More difficult—more uncomfortable—is curiosity: “Why did I do these things? Why did I behave like this? What is it that made me want to do that? What can this teach me about myself?” Similarly, “Why am I feeling bored? What is it that I really want in this moment? Is mindlessly surfing social media really going to provide me with that?”
This kind of curiosity—not judging ourselves, not trying to justify or excuse ourselves, only trying to see ourselves clearly—can be uncomfortable or even painful. We find that we can’t ever truly escape from ourselves. We find that we have lessons that we need to learn.
We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness. This is what we are here to see for ourselves. Both the brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other.
Chödrön, 1991, p. 21
What I’m looking for in this process of self-curiosity is contradiction. I’m compelled to organize my thoughts, but I spend so much time doing it that I make them useless. I want meaningful connections with other humans, but hours spent scrolling through social media will only make me feel more isolated. Remember that German word Aufhebung, which we translated as “sublation;” in Hegelian philosophy, it is the inner instabilities and contradictions of concepts which drive this process. Pema Chödrön tells us that “[o]ur neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom” (ibid., p. 14).
Not all of us have OCD but I think that modernity forces a certain degree of neurosis on everyone. I suspect—and I’m speculating here but I don’t think this is much of a reach—that the reason that mental illness has become so prevalent in modern society is that modern society itself is pathenogenic in this way. I think that what we’ve described as diseases are, at least to some extent, in fact entirely natural reactions to modern society, reactions which could even be considered healthy if they didn’t threaten our abilities to perform our assigned roles in said society. I think that’s part of what Pema Chödrön is getting at when she says that “our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material.” Atomized and isolated, we are overwhelmed with information, with options and choice, with demands on our time, with needs to repress our instincts, with requirements to adhere to the myriad bureaucracies of the modern world. We’re all at risk of losing our freedoms to these bureaucracies and to various technologies and processes. Reclaiming ourselves from this onslaught requires, first and foremost, clear seeing: how we’re spending our time and what it’s doing for and to our minds.
I think there’s a great deal of wisdom in the adage fight fire with fire. That which makes fire dangerous—its rapid consumption of its fuel and transformation thereof into heat—is exactly what makes it useful, useful even for the purposes of destroying fuel sources that would otherwise feed uncontrolled fires. There is a contradiction within the essence of fire: it is powerful because of its rapid consumption of its fuel, and the exact same thing is its also its weakness. In many ways, this has been the central thesis of this project, to look inside Christianity so as to see and reveal its internal contradictions, rather than to take an oppositional stance against it and attack it from the outside. And my thesis in this essay is that it makes just as much sense, and that it is just as valuable, to approach ourselves in this way.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Atwood, M. (2010). The year of the flood (1st Anchor Books ed). Anchor Books.
Chödrön, P. (2001). The wisdom of no escape: And the path of loving-kindness. Shambhala Classics.
Dyrendal, A. Darkness within: Satanism as a self-religion. (2009). In Petersen, J. A. (Ed.). Contemporary Religious Satanism. (pp. 59-73). Routledge.
LaVey, A. S. (2005). The Satanic Bible. Avon Books.
Maybee, J. E. (2020). Hegel’s Dialectics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/hegel-dialectics/