The Rabbit Hole

2024-11-04 23:10:09

Key Takeaways:

1. The present essay is not animated by a desire to return to ritual. Rather, rituals serve as a background against which our present times may be seen to stand out more clearly. Avoiding nostalgia, I sketch a genealogy of their disappearance, a disappearance which, however, I do not interpret as an emancipatory process. Along the way, the pathologies of the present day will become visible, most of all the erosion of community. At the same time, I offer reflections on different forms of life that might be able to free our society from its collective narcissism.
2. Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.
3. We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home.
4. Rituals stabilize life.
5. The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit]: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life. Thus, despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, production is destroying life’s endurance.
6. The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states. Rituals evade narcissistic interiority. The ego-libido cannot attach itself to them. Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves.
7. While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention. Intensity is giving way everywhere to extensity. Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.
8. Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is a place of the highest degree of attention. According to Malebranche, attention is the natural prayer of the soul. Today, the soul does not pray. It is permanently producing itself.
9. Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention.
10. Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.
11. Chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition.
12. The compulsion to reject routines produces more routines.
13. The society of authenticity is a performance society. All members perform themselves. All produce themselves. Everyone pays homage to the cult of the self, the worship of self in which everyone is his or her own priest.
14. The creation of self, however, must not be self-centred; it has to take place against the backdrop of a social horizon of meaning that gives the act of self-creation a relevance that transcends the self.
15. The neoliberal imperative of optimization and performance does not allow for any completion. Everything is provisional and incomplete; nothing is final and conclusive. It is not only computer software that is subject to the compulsion of optimization. All areas of life are subordinated to its dictates, even education. Life-long learning does not involve completion. It amounts only to life-long production. The neoliberal regime abolishes all forms of closure and completion in the name of increased productivity.
16. Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure. Without them, we slip through. Thus, we age without growing old, or we remain infantile consumers who never become adults.
17. God blessed and sanctified the seventh day. The rest enjoyed on the Sabbath consecrates the work of creation. It is not mere idleness. Rather, it is an essential part of creation. In his commentary on the Book of Genesis, Rashi thus remarks: ‘After the six days of creation, what was still missing from the universe? Menuchah [inoperativity, rest]. The Sabbath came, the menuchah came, and the universe was complete.’1 Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion. Without it, the creation would be incomplete. God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. It is the essence of the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.
18. Exalted time [Hoch-Zeit] is also the temporality of schools of higher education [Hoch-Schule]. In ancient Greek, ‘school’ is scholé, that is, leisure. Schools of higher education would thus be schools of higher leisure. Today, they are no longer places of high leisure. They have become places of production, factories of human capital. They pursue professional training rather than formative education.
19. The glory of play goes along with sovereignty, where sovereignty simply means being free from necessity, from purpose and utility. Sovereignty reveals a soul ‘which stands aloof from caring about utility’. The compulsion of production destroys sovereignty as a form of life. Sovereignty gives way to a new kind of subordination which, however, masquerades as freedom. The neoliberal subject of performance is an absolute slave insofar as, in the absence of a master, it voluntarily exploits itself.
20. Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play. We only rarely make playful use of language; we only put it to work. It is obliged to communicate information or produce meaning. As a result, we have no access to forms of language that shine all by themselves. Language as a medium of information has no splendour. It does not seduce. Poems are structures with strict forms that shine all by themselves. Very often, they do not communicate a message. They are characterized by an excess of the signifier; they are luxurious.
21. The mistrust of play intensifies in the age of the Enlightenment. Kant subordinates play to work. His aesthetics, for instance, is characterized by the primacy of work. In the face of beauty, the cognitive faculties, namely imagination and understanding, are in play mode. The subject likes what is beautiful; the beautiful creates a feeling of pleasure by triggering a harmonious interplay of the cognitive faculties. The beautiful does not by itself produce knowledge, but it entertains the cognitive mechanisms and, by doing so, promotes the production of knowledge. Kant is deeply irritated by the idea of pure play as an end in itself. Music is to be avoided insofar as it is incapable of performing any thinking ‘business’, ‘because it merely plays with sensations’.7 Because music merely plays, it is incompatible with conceptual work.

What I got out of it:

1. It got me to rethink and reprioritize a lot of my routines. Trips with loved ones, day to day rituals, how we spend weekends. Very worthwhile read.

The post The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2024-10-09 00:43:47

Key Takeaways.

1. Finally, these two pieces coalesced—and evolved—into the present book, which explores the relationship between the technologies of the gambling industry and the experience of gambling addiction.
2. The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win.” Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing—to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”
3. The French sociologist Roger Caillois, author of Man, Play, and Games, believed that games carried clues to the basic character of a culture. “It is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there,” he wrote in 1958. Caillois argued that one could make a cultural diagnosis by examining games’ combination of the following four elements of play: agon, or competition; alea, or chance; mimesis, or simulation; and ilinx, or vertigo. Modern cultures, he claimed, were distinguished by games involving a tension between agon and alea—the former demanding an assertion of will, the latter demanding surrender to chance.
4. Goffman regarded gambling as the occasion for “character contests” in which players could demonstrate their courage, integrity, and composure in the face of contingency. By offering individuals the opportunity for heroic engagements with fate, gambling fulfilled an existential need for “action” or consequential activity in an increasingly bureaucratic society that deprived its citizens of the opportunity to express their character in public settings of risk. For Goffman, gambling was not so much an escape from everyday life as it was a bounded arena that mimicked “the structure of real-life,” thereby “immersing [players] in a demonstration of its possibilities.”
5. The less predictable the outcome of a match, he observed, the more financially and personally invested participants became and the “deeper” their play, in the sense that its stakes went far beyond material gain or loss.
6. machine gambling is not a symbolically profound, richly dimensional space whose “depth” can be plumbed to reveal an enactment of larger social and existential dramas. Instead, the solitary, absorptive activity can suspend time, space, monetary value, social roles, and sometimes even one’s very sense of existence. “You can erase it all at the machines—you can even erase yourself,” an electronics technician named Randall told me. Contradicting the popular understanding of gambling as an expression of the desire to get “something for nothing,” he claimed to be after nothingness itself. As Mollie put it earlier, the point is to stay in a zone “where nothing else matters.”
7. As machine gamblers tell it, neither control, nor chance, nor the tension between the two drives their play; their aim is not to win but simply to continue.
8. Although interactive consumer devices are typically associated with new choices, connections, and forms of self-expression, they can also function to narrow choices, disconnect, and gain exit from the self.
9. When addiction is regarded as a relationship that develops through “repeated interaction” between a subject and an object, rather than a property that belongs solely to one or the other, it becomes clear that objects matter as much as subjects.
10. While all forms of gambling involve random patterning of payouts, machine gambling is distinguished by its solitary, continuous, and rapid mode of wagering. Without waiting for “horses to run, a dealer to shuffle or deal, or a roulette wheel to stop spinning,” it is possible to complete a game every three to four seconds. To use the terminology of behavioral psychology, the activity involves the most intensive “event frequency” of any existing gambling activity. “It is the addiction delivery device,”
11. Drawing on his intimate familiarity with the zone of machine gambling, Friedman goes on to describe the play that gamblers seek as an “inward focus into their own private domain [that] makes them oblivious to everything around them.” He insists that “the designer, marketer, and operator who best caters to this personal, introspective experience will attract and hold the most business.”
12. From ceiling height to carpet pattern, lighting intensity to aisle width, acoustics to temperature regulation—all such elements, Freidman argues, should be engineered to facilitate the interior state of the machine zone.
13. The chief task of casino design, according to Friedman, is to arrange “the spatial relationships of surrounding areas, the shape and feel of the structural box that encloses the setting” in such a way as to encourage machine gamblers’ entry into “secluded, private playing worlds.”
14. Play itself Friedman describes as “open,” “undifferentiated,” “boundless,” “extensive,” and “never-ending”—precisely the phenomenological characteristics he strives to minimize within the gambling environment.
15. The key is to cultivate “structured chaos” rather than “inhospitable commotion.” “The maze,” Friedman promises, “is the antidote.”
16. Corridors draw people in not only by way of cues but also by way of curves. Casino patrons “resist perpendicular turning,” Friedman notes, for “commitment is required to slow down and turn 90 degrees into a slot aisle.”44 As a fellow industry member recalls, the reduction of “sharp lines” and the introduction of “very frequent curvature lines” became a strategic part of the casino’s design repertoire in the mid-1980s.45 “The role of the uninterrupted, curvilinear pathway couldn’t be more important,” commented an architect during a panel at the 2009 Global Gaming Expo.
17. The job of casino layout is to suspend walking patrons in a suggestible, affectively permeable state that renders them susceptible to environmental triggers, which are then supplied.
18. Calling to mind a Deleuzian conception of affect as dynamic states of sensing, energy, and attention outside of conscious awareness yet critical to action, atmospherics are understood to be most effective when they operate at a level that is not consciously detectible.
19. Another acoustic element that must be carefully regulated to encourage play is music. A company called Digigram provides background music that can be scheduled by time of day, depending on the shifting demographics of a property’s clientele.
20. The task of expediting “continuous gaming productivity,” as Cummings breaks it down, involves three interlinked operations, each of which this chapter will examine in turn: accelerating play, extending its duration, and increasing the total amount spent.
21. Speed is a critical element of the zone experience. “I play really fast,” a middle-aged tax accountant named Shelly told me. “I don’t like to wait, I want to know what’s gonna come out. If a machine is slow, I move to a faster one.”
22. “It was more about keeping the pace than making the right decisions.” “Keeping the pace” is critical to the zone experience, as gamblers articulate. “The speed is relaxing,” said Lola, a buffet waitress and mother of four. “It’s not exactly excitement; it’s calm, like a tranquilizer. It gets me into the zone.”
23. “The play should take no longer than three and a half seconds per game.”
24. Dematerializing money into an immediately available credit form not only disguised its actual cash value and thus encouraged wagering, it also mitigated the revenue-compromising limitations of human motor capacities by removing unwieldy coins from the gambling exchange.
25. much as repeat machine gamblers want speed, they want to play for as long as possible. Their desire for “time-on-device,” as the gambling industry terms it, moves in tandem with the industry’s desire for continuous productivity. “The key is duration of play,” a consultant told me. “I want to keep you there as long as humanly possible—that’s the whole trick, that’s what makes you lose.” “It’s basically a matter of getting them into the seat and keeping them there,” echoed a machine designer. “I’m trying to make the customer feel comfortable. Feel in that cocoon.”
26. Sound, when properly configured, “can actually energize the player, keep him there longer,”
27. Incredible Technologies’ ContinuPlay—“sound technology that rewards steady play.”
28. The Capacitive Touchscreen System (as Immersion’s system has been renamed) affirms play gestures as a way to “capacitate” continued gambling.
29. When it comes to the state of suspended animation that gamblers call the zone and the industry calls continuous gaming productivity, an uninterrupted flow of play funds is as important as the speed and duration of the play activity itself.
30. Purposive obfuscation, his comment suggests, is key to the seductive appeal of gambling machines.
31. “Henry Ford of slots,” increased the number of symbols or “stops” on each reel from ten to twenty, thereby decreasing players’ odds of winning a jackpot and allowing machines to offer larger prizes and still remain profitable.19 He also expanded the viewing window on the reels so that players could see rows of symbols above and below the payline, increasing the likelihood that they would experience a “near miss”—the sensation of nearly having won produced by the sight of winning symbols adjacent to the payline.
32. The degree of fascination that a given machine holds for its users, she argues, is directly related to the degree of unpredictability and aliveness that it conveys.
33. Behavioral-psychological explanations for why near misses are so compelling include the “frustration theory of persistence,” in which near misses “have an invigorating or potentiating effect on any behavior that immediately follows it,” and the related theory of “cognitive regret,” in which players circumvent regret at having almost won by immediately playing again. “Almost hitting the jackpot,” noted the behaviorist psychologist B.
34. As it happens, in 1953 Skinner had pointed in the other direction, using the slot machine to exemplify the most potent of reinforcement schedules—in which subjects never know when they will be rewarded, or how much.
35. “People were playing that bank of machines around the clock, standing in line,” a designer recalled. What drew players was precisely what most in the industry believed would keep them away: the introduction of skill to machine play—“an entirely new performance attribute,” as an industry historian has written.
36. Although the elements of choice making and skill might seem at odds with the dissociative flow of the zone, in fact they heighten players’ absorption by turning the passive expectancy of the traditional slot experience into a compelling, interactive involvement.
37. players valued time-on-device and saw a way to glean their own sort of value from it. “If you were to take $100 and play slots, you’d get about an hour of play, but video-poker was designed to give you two hours of play for that same $100,”
38. much money as three-reel slots per unit of time, they brought in twice as much revenue because gamblers played at them four times as long.
39. Increasing games’ hit frequency increased the rate at which play was reinforced, and players’ changed expectations were then accounted for in subsequent design innovations, further ratcheting up the rate of reinforcement.
40. With the introduction and development of a game whose mode of reinforcement—and thus profit—relied on minor but continuous rewards rather than on significant but sporadic rewards, a new gambler profile was taking center stage in the experience of gambling addiction. This profile embodied, in extreme form, the broader market’s gravitation from action to escape play, volatility to time-on-device—a trend that would grow in the next decade.
41. Multiline video slots’ subtle yet radical innovation is precisely their capacity to make losses appear to gamblers as wins, such that players experience the reinforcement of winning even as they steadily lose. “Positive reinforcement hides loss,” a designer at Silicon Gaming explained to me. Compounding this reinforcement are the ambient and sensory cues that accompany “winning,” such as lights, music, and visual graphics.
42. To illustrate the process, Katrina relates how one common feature of video slots, called “bonus rounds” or “free spins,” has affected her play. This type of feature randomly presents gamblers with an animated bonus game offering them a prize, a chance at a prize, or free spins on the machine—all of which grant more time-on-device.91 The “game-within-a-game” works in dynamic concert with the payout schedule of the base game, serving as a second layer of reinforcement.
43. The casino floor is like our own extended focus group. We sit and play, participate, ask players what they think about our machines, and about other machines. The whole team does this—it’s as important for the sound engineers to know the customer as anyone else; even the math guy spends some hours observing, asking questions. You have to experience it to understand what people really want.
44. Evoking the scene that Lola recounted at the start of this chapter, Adams told me of his own style in the field. “I go out there and sit down at a machine. I turn to the person next to me and say I design these things, that’s why I’ve been sitting here playing this machine next to you for twenty minutes, because this is what I do. Let me show you the storyboard for a new game—I want to know what you think. They’ll tell you everything.” In 1999, a veteran game designer spoke of such tactics with a mixture of pride and defensiveness. “The guys in the trenches—out there in casinos, on the floor—can run circles around the MBA guys who are starting to come in. The MBAs have been cubby-holed by their business training. I kick the hell out of ’em, and I don’t do it with metrics or pie charts.” Adams echoed this cowboy bravado: Other sorts of corporations come in and look at us guys with straws in our teeth and think they can take over, but the truth is, they can’t run this business using the typical MBA-type philosophy of business administration. A compartmentalized design process with focus groups and committees for each game feature, endless meetings over every color and sound, take a very, very long time to get the product to the field—it’s just too bureaucratic.
45. patron worth, recommending that casinos give each customer a “recency score” (how recently he has visited), a “frequency score” (how often he visits), and a “monetary score” (how much he spends), and then create a personalized marketing algorithm out of these variables.40 “We want to maximize every relationship,” Harrah’s Richard Mirman told a journalist.41 Harrah’s statistical models for determining player value, similar to those used for predicting stocks’ future worth, are the most advanced in the industry.
46. Inviting the player to voluntarily configure his own game and thereby giving him “complete control” would neutralize his fear of being controlled, Elsasser suggested. Instead of risking that the “rat people” become aware of the box, this logic goes, let the rats design their own Skinner box. Sylvie Linard, chief operating officer of Cyberview, reiterated the strategy: “Players are very intelligent, so why not be open and transparent and let them play with the [casino] operators, and add to the game with us? Some like free spins, some like interactive bonus rounds—so why not put players into the equation and ask them to build their own games, on demand?
47. asked directly, developers invariably claim that players want “entertainment” or “fun,” defining this as stimulating engagement that derives from risk, choice, and a sense of participation. “Entertainment is the common denominator,” Randy Adams told me. “People want entertainment.” Gardner Grout confidently stated the same at the start of his interview: “Entertainment is what people want.” Yet toward the end of our exchange he said precisely the opposite. “What we didn’t get at the beginning is that people don’t really want to be entertained. Our best customers are not interested in entertainment—they want to be totally absorbed, they want to get into a rhythm.”
48. People like to get into that particular zone.” “Gambling is not a movie,” echoed a casino operator in the course of a G2E panel, “it’s about continuing to play.”
49. Gamblers most readily enter the zone at the point where their own actions become indistinguishable from the functioning of the machine. They explain this point as a kind of coincidence between their intentions and the machine’s responses.
50. Noting a trend toward the design of games with “interactional and auditory special effects [that] serve to give the experience of being able to control and manipulate the production of the effect,” she observes that although such effects would seem to invite active rather than passive participation, in fact they tend to bring about states of absorptive automaticity rather than reflective decision making, blurring boundaries between players and the game. They do this, Ito argues, by way of their “unique responsiveness,” which “amplifies and embellishes the actions of the user in so compelling a way that it disconnects him from others and obliterates a sense of difference from the machine.” As Sherry Turkle writes in her landmark study of early video games, “the experience of a game that makes an instantaneous and exact response to your touch, or of a computer that is itself always consistent in its response, can take over.”
51. Immediacy, exactness, consistency of response: the near perfect matching of player stimulus and game response in machine gambling might be understood as an instance of “perfect contingency,” a concept developed in the literature on child development to describe a situation of complete alignment between a given action and the external response to that action, in which distinctions between the two collapse.
52. The tuning out of worldly choices, contingencies, and consequences in the zone of machine gambling depends on the exclusion of other people. “I don’t want to have a human interface” says Julie, a psychology student at the University of Nevada. “I can’t stand to have anybody within my zone.” Machine gamblers go to great lengths to ensure their isolation.
53. At the same time that machine gambling alters the nature of exchange to a point where it becomes disconnected from relationships, it alters the nature of money’s role in the social world. Money typically serves to facilitate exchanges with others and establish a social identity, yet in the asocial, insulated encounter with the gambling machine money becomes a currency of disconnection from others and even oneself. Contrary to Clifford Geertz’s interpretation of gambling as a publicly staged conversion of money value into social status and worldly meaning, the solitary transaction of machine gambling converts money into a means for suspending collective forms of value.21 Although money’s conventional value is important initially as a means of entry into play, “once in a game, it becomes instantly devalued,” observes the gambling scholar Gerda Reith.22 “You put a twenty dollar bill in the machine and it’s no longer a twenty dollar bill, it has no value in that sense,” Julie tells me of bill acceptors in the mid-1990s.
54. “It’s strange,” says Lola, “but winning can disappoint me, especially if I win right away.”23 As we have already seen, winning too much, too soon, or too often can interrupt the tempo of play and disturb the harmonious regularity of the zone.
55. It’s not about winning, it’s about continuing to play.”
56. The value of money reasserts itself precisely because money in its conventional, real-world state remains the underlying means of access to the zone.
57. Modifications to reduce speed of play would slow the rate at which video reels “spin,” pause reels between spins, and increase the time interval between a bet and its outcome. Modifications to reduce duration of play would mandate time-outs at certain intervals, display a permanent onscreen digital clock, and present periodic pop-up reminders alerting players to the time and money they have spent (stricter time-based measures would require a mandatory cash-out at 145 minutes of continuous play, following a five- or ten-minute warning). To reduce magnitude of wagering, modifications would decrease maximum bet size per spin, remove bill acceptors (or restrict them to small bills), show bet amounts in actual cash value rather than as play credits, and dispense all wins in the form of cash, check, or electronic bank transfer rather than tokens or tickets that might be easily regambled; multiline, multicoin games would be required to decrease the number of betting lines and to remove the “bet maximum coins” feature.55 Another set of modifications would address machines’ mathematical sleights of hand by eliminating near-miss effects, restricting losses disguised as wins, phasing out virtual reel mapping on nonvideo reel slots, and requiring video slots to “balance their reels” so that all contain the same symbols, in accordance with player intuition.      

What I got out of it.

1. Schüll’s deep dive on the gambling industry and how it gets people to keep playing (low stakes games, removing friction, near wins, etc.) was fascinating to learn about. The negative side of infinite games (playing for the sake of playing) didn’t occur to me before this book and is a helpful nuance to consider.

The post Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by: Natasha Dow Schüll appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2024-08-29 22:33:16

Key Takeaways

1. The entire theory of the book is diametrically opposed to the modern method of thinking, for it is concerned with subjects openly ridiculed by the sophists of the twentieth century. Its true purpose is to introduce the mind of the reader to a hypothesis of living wholly beyond the pale of materialistic theology, philosophy, or science.
2. The mission of philosophy a priori is to establish the relation of manifested things to their invisible ultimate cause or nature.
3. The ideal function of philosophy is to serve as the stabilizing influence in human thought.
4. John Reuchlin said of Pythagoras that he taught nothing to his disciples before the discipline of silence, silence being the first rudiment of contemplation.
5. He further declared philosophers to differ markedly from other men in that they alone would not change the order of their lives if all the laws of men were abolished. Among
6. The true subject of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy is the will; the object of his philosophy is the elevation of the mind to the point where it is capable of controlling the will.
7. Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries; in fact it is the language not only of mysticism and philosophy but of all Nature, for every law and power active in universal procedure is manifested to the limited sense perceptions of man through the medium of symbol. Every form existing in the diversified sphere of being is symbolic of the divine activity by which it is produced. By symbols men have ever sought to communicate to each other those thoughts which transcend the limitations of language. 
8. Rejecting man-conceived dialects as inadequate and unworthy to perpetuate divine ideas, the Mysteries thus chose symbolism as a far more ingenious and ideal method of preserving their transcendental knowledge. In a single figure a symbol may both reveal and conceal, for to the wise the subject of the symbol is obvious, while to the ignorant the figure remains inscrutable.
9. The ancient philosophers believed that no man could live intelligently who did not have a fundamental knowledge of Nature and her laws.
10. Carrying with them the sacred and secret doctrine, these Atlanteans established themselves in Egypt, where they became its first “divine” rulers. Nearly all the great cosmologic myths forming the foundation of the various sacred books of the world are based upon the Atlantean Mystery rituals.
11. A curious aspect of the dying-god myth is that of the Hanged Man. The most important example of this peculiar conception is found in the Odinic rituals where Odin hangs himself for nine nights from the branches of the World Tree and upon the same occasion also pierces his own side with the sacred spear. As the result of this great sacrifice, Odin, while suspended over the depths of Nifl-heim, discovered by meditation the runes or alphabets by which later the records of his people were preserved. Because of this remarkable experience, Odin is sometimes shown seated on a gallows tree and he became the patron deity of all who died by the noose. 
12. Esoterically, the Hanged Man is the human spirit which is suspended from heaven by a single thread. Wisdom, not death, is the reward for this voluntary sacrifice during which the human soul, suspended above the world of illusion, and meditating upon its unreality, is rewarded by the achievement of self-realization. From a consideration of all these ancient and secret rituals it becomes evident that the mystery of the dying god was universal among the illumined and venerated colleges of the sacred teaching. 
13. This mystery has been perpetuated in Christianity in the crucifixion and death of the God-man—Jesus the Christ. The secret import of this world tragedy and the Universal Martyr must be rediscovered if Christianity is to reach the heights attained by the pagans in the days of their philosophic supremacy. The myth of the dying god is the key to both universal and individual redemption and regeneration, and those who do not comprehend the true nature of this supreme allegory are not privileged to consider themselves either wise or truly religious.
14. Suffering is the result of the Immortal Man’s falling in love with His shadow and giving up Reality to dwell in the darkness of illusion.
15. Let him that is endued with Mind know himself to be immortal and that the cause of death is the love of the body; and let him learn all things that are, for he who has recognized himself enters into the state of Good.
16. By means of the Word, the world is saved. I, Thought (Thoth)—the Father of the Word, the Mind—come only unto men that are holy and good, pure and merciful, and that live piously and religiously, and my presence is an inspiration and a help to them, for when I come they immediately know all things and adore the Universal Father. Before such wise and philosophic ones die, they learn to renounce their senses, knowing that these are the enemies of their immortal souls.
17. The punishment of desire is the agony of unfulfillment.”
18. Finally no more blocks descended and the way was clear for the followers of the Prophet. But where were the treasures? From room to room the frantic workmen rushed, looking in vain for loot. The discontent of the Moslems reached such a height that Caliph al Mamoun—who had inherited much of the wisdom of his illustrious father, the Caliph al Raschid—sent to Bagdad for funds, which he caused to be secretly buried near the entrance of the Pyramid. He then ordered his men to dig at that spot and great was their rejoicing when the treasure was discovered, the workmen being deeply impressed by the wisdom of the antediluvian monarch who had carefully estimated their wages and thoughtfully caused the exact amount to be buried for their benefit!
19. The modern world knows little of these ancient rites. The scientist and the theologian alike gaze upon the sacred structure, wondering what fundamental urge inspired the herculean labor. If they would but think for a moment, they would realize that there is only one urge in the soul of man capable of supplying the required incentive—namely, the desire to know, to understand, and to exchange the narrowness of human mortality for the greater breadth and scope of divine enlightenment. So men say of the Great Pyramid that it is the most perfect building in the world, the source of weights and measures, the original Noah’s Ark, the origin of languages, alphabets, and scales of temperature and humidity. Few realize, however, that it is the gateway to the Eternal.
20. Though the modern world may know a million secrets, the ancient world knew one—and that one was greater than the million; for the million secrets breed death, disaster, sorrow, selfishness, lust, and avarice, but the one secret confers life, light, and truth. The time will come when the secret wisdom shall again be the dominating religious and philosophical urge of the world. The day is at hand when the doom of dogma shall be sounded. The great theological Tower of Babel, with its confusion of tongues, was built of bricks of mud and the mortar of slime. Out of the cold ashes of lifeless creeds, however, shall rise phoenixlike the ancient Mysteries.
21. Isis stands for knowledge and wisdom, and according to Plutarch the word Typhon means insolence and pride. Egotism, self-centeredness, and pride are the deadly enemies of understanding and truth. This part of the allegory is revealed.
22. The World Virgin is sometimes shown standing between two great pillars—the Jachin and Boaz of Freemasonry—symbolizing the fact that Nature attains productivity by means of polarity. As wisdom personified, Isis stands between the pillars of opposites, demonstrating that understanding is always found at the point of equilibrium and that truth is often crucified between the two thieves of apparent contradiction.
23. The adoration of the sun was one of the earliest and most natural forms of religious expression. Complex modern theologies are merely involvements and amplifications of this simple aboriginal belief.
24. Lucifer here represents the intellectual mind without the illumination of the spiritual mind; therefore it is “the false light.” The false light is finally overcome and redeemed by the true light of the soul, called the Second Logos or Christ. The secret processes by which the Luciferian intellect is transmuted into the Christly intellect constitute one of the great secrets of alchemy, and are symbolized by the process of transmuting base metals into gold.
25. The purpose of alchemy was not to make something out of nothing but rather to fertilize and nurture the seed which was already present. Its processes did not actually create gold but rather made the ever-present seed of gold grow and flourish.
26. I have made justice more powerful than silver and gold. I have caused truth to be considered beautiful.”
27. It is impossible to judge one civilization by comparing it with another widely separated from it in point of time. The modern world looks upon many ancient practices as cruel and barbarous, but is guilty every day of offenses which would have proved equally revolting to the sensibilities of ancient peoples!
28. He who understands thoroughly the Mystery of the Tabernacle needs no other religion, for he will be at one with the seers of all ages.
29. All men know what they want, but few know what they need.
30. Pythagoras taught that friendship was the truest and nearest perfect of all relationships. He declared that in Nature there was a friendship of all for all; of gods for men; of doctrines one for another; of the soul for the body; of the rational part for the irrational part; of philosophy for its theory; of men for one another; of countrymen for one another; that friendship also existed between strangers, between a man and his wife, his children, and his servants. All bonds without friendship were shackles, and there was no virtue in their maintenance.
31. Wisdom was the understanding of the source or cause of all things, and this could be secured only by raising the intellect to a point where it intuitively cognized the invisible manifesting outwardly through the visible, and thus became capable of bringing itself en rapport with the spirit of things rather than with their forms.
32. Declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths. By this it is to be understood that those who desire wisdom must seek it in solitude.
33. Receive not a swallow into your house. This warns the seeker after truth not to allow drifting thoughts to come into his mind nor shiftless persons to enter into his life. He must ever surround himself with rationally inspired thinkers and with conscientious workers.
34. The ancients did not believe that spirituality made men either righteous or rational, but rather that righteousness and rationality made men spiritual.
35. The trend of man’s evolutionary growth is ever toward his own essential Selfhood. At the point of deepest materialism, therefore, man is at the greatest distance from Himself.
36. This is at once the primary purpose and the consummate achievement of the Mysteries: that man shall become aware of and consciously be reunited with the divine source of himself without tasting of physical dissolution.
37. Beauty is essential to the natural unfoldment of the human soul.
38. When the mob governs, man is ruled by ignorance; when the church governs, he is ruled by superstition; and when the state governs, he is ruled by fear. Before men can live together in harmony and understanding, ignorance must be transmuted into wisdom, superstition into an illumined faith, and fear into love.
39. Harmony is a state recognized by great philosophers as the immediate prerequisite of beauty A compound is termed beautiful only when its parts are in harmonious combination.
40. The world is called beautiful and its Creator is designated the Good because good perforce must act in conformity with its own nature; and good acting according to its own nature is harmony, because the good which it accomplishes is harmonious with the good which it is. Beauty, therefore, is harmony manifesting its own intrinsic nature in the world of form.
41. Every element in Nature has its individual keynote. If these elements are combined in a composite structure the result is a chord that, if sounded, will disintegrate the compound into its integral parts.
42. Since light is the basic physical manifestation of life, bathing all creation in its radiance, it is highly important to realize, in part at least, the subtle nature of this divine substance. That which is called light is actually a rate of vibration causing certain reactions upon the optic nerve. 
43. Few realize how they are walled in by the limitations of the sense perceptions. Not only is there a great deal more to light than anyone has ever seen but there are also unknown forms of light which no optical equipment will ever register. There are unnumbered colors which cannot be seen, as well as sounds which cannot be heard, odors which cannot be smelt, flavors which cannot be tasted, and substances which cannot be felt. 
44. Man is thus surrounded by a supersensible universe of which he knows nothing because the centers of sense perception within himself have not been developed sufficiently to respond to the subtler rates of vibration of which that universe is composed.
45. The Egyptian scarab is one of the most remarkable symbolic figures ever conceived by the mind of man. It was evolved by the erudition of the priestcraft from a simple insect which, because of its peculiar habits and appearance, properly symbolized the strength of the body, the resurrection of the soul, and the Eternal and Incomprehensible Creator in His aspect as Lord of the Sun. E. A. Wallis Budge says, in effect, of the worship of the scarab by the Egyptians:
46. The scorpion is the symbol of both wisdom and self-destruction.
47. The bee was used as a symbol of royalty by the immortal Charlemagne, and it is probable that the fleur-de-lis. or lily of France, is merely a conventionalized bee and not a flower.
48. The beehive is found in Masonry as a reminder that in diligence and labor for a common good true happiness and prosperity are found. The bee is a symbol of wisdom, for as this tiny insect collects pollen from the flowers, so men may extract wisdom from the experiences of daily life. The bee is sacred to the goddess Venus and, according to mystics, it is one of several forms of life which came to the earth from the planet Venus millions of years ago. Wheat and bananas are said to be of similar origin. This is the reason why the origin of these three forms of life cannot be traced.
49. Gravitation, which is a law in the material world, is the impulse toward the center of materiality; levitation, which is a law in the spiritual world, is the impulse toward the center of spirituality.
50. The Mysteries were institutions elected for the transmutation of base ignorance into precious illumination. The dragon of ignorance was the terrible creature set to guard the Golden Fleece, and represents the darkness of the old year which battles with the sun at the time of its equinoctial passage.
51. The philosopher’s stone is really the philosophical stone, for philosophy is truly likened to a magic jewel whose touch transmutes base substances into priceless gems like itself. Wisdom is the alchemist’s powder of projection which transforms many thousand times its own weight of gross ignorance into the precious substance of enlightenment.
52. Among the ancients, philosophy, science, and religion were never considered as separate units: each was regarded as an integral part of the whole. Philosophy was scientific and religious; science was philosophic and religious; religion was philosophic and scientific. Perfect wisdom was considered unattainable save as the result of harmonizing all three of these expressions of mental and moral activity.
53. The sixth method—which was prevention rather than cure—was regulation of the diet and daily habits of life. The individual, by avoiding the things which caused illness, remained well. The ancients believed that health was the normal state of man; disease was the result of man’s disregard of the dictates of Nature.
54. The staff of the hermit is knowledge, which is man’s main and only enduring support.
55. Life is the great mystery, and only those who pass successfully through its tests and trials, interpreting them aright and extracting the essence of experience therefrom, achieve true understanding. Thus, the temples were built in the form of the world and their rituals were based upon life and its multitudinous problems.
56. After two years in Fez, C.R.C. sailed for Spain, carrying with him many treasures, among them rare plants and animals accumulated during his wanderings. He fondly hoped that the learned men of Europe would receive with gratitude the rare intellectual and material treasures which he had brought for their consideration. Instead he encountered only ridicule, for the so-called wise were afraid to admit their previous ignorance lest their prestige be impaired. At
57. Furthermore, those who receive this knowledge shall become masters of all arts and crafts; no secret shall be hidden from them; and all good works of the past, present, and future shall be accessible to them. The whole world shall become as one book and the contradictions of science and theology shall be reconciled. Rejoice, O humanity!
58. The right to receive spiritual truth cannot be inherited: it must be evolved within the soul of man himself.
59. The alchemist who attains to the art of transmuting base metals can do all manner of evil unless his understanding be as great as his self-created wealth. We therefore affirm that man must first gain knowledge, virtue, and understanding; then all other things may be added unto him.
60. Believe us, Truth is simple and unconcealed, while falsehood is complex, deeply hidden, proud, and its fictitious worldly knowledge, seemingly aglitter with godly luster, is often mistaken for divine wisdom. You that are wise will turn from these false teachings and come to us, who seek not your money but freely offer you our greater treasure. We desire not your goods, but that you should become partakers of our goods. We do not deride parables, but invite you to understand all parables and all secrets.
61. Ignorance is the worst form of disease, and that which heals ignorance is therefore the most potent of all medicines.
62. The wise have said that nothing is perfect until it has been dissolved, separated, and again united so that it becomes a body composed of twelve bodies, like the cube.
63. Wisdom cannot be imparted to an idiot because the seed of wisdom is not within him, but wisdom may be imparted to an ignorant person, however ignorant he may be, because the seed of wisdom exists in him and can be developed by art and culture. Hence a philosopher is only an ignorant man within whose nature a projection has taken place.
64. Through art (the process of learning) the whole mass of base metals (the mental body of ignorance) was transmuted into pure gold (wisdom), for it was tinctured with understanding.
65. Alchemy, therefore, should be regarded as the art of increasing and bringing into perfect flower with the greatest possible expedition. Nature may accomplish her desired end or, because of the destructiveness exercised by one element over another, she may not; but with the aid of the true art, Nature always accomplishes her end, for this art is not subject either to the wastings of time or to the vandalism of elemental reactions.

What I got out of it:

1. The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall offered me a deep appreciation for the interconnectedness of various ancient philosophies and mystical traditions. It emphasized the importance of seeking hidden wisdom and understanding the symbolic language that has shaped human spiritual evolution.

The post The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Haul appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2024-08-28 22:25:13

Key Takeaways

1. Cold Calling 2.0 – separate prospecting from closing and you’ll be less reliant on cold calling.
2. Specialized Sales Roles are key.  Market Response Representatives (MRRs) handle inbound leads, Outbound Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) generate new opportunities. Account Executives (AEs) close deals. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) manage post-sale relationships.
3. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)- these are the best potential customers to target. They’re more likely to pay, retain, share, and you’re solving a painful problem for them
4. Systematic Outbound Prospecting – Uses personalized, research-based email campaigns to initiate contact. Common KPIs include response rates, conversion rates, and pipeline velocity.
5. Time Management and Efficiency – leverage tech and automation where you can but sourcing high quality leads is your biggest lever.

What I got out of it

1. Design and build specialized sales roles, continuously target and refine the ICP, use compelling and personalized campaigns to reach ICPs, measure and optimize, scale the sales process as the business grows.

The post Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .

2024-08-27 23:58:26

Key Takeaways

1. A “Company of One” is a business that prioritizes autonomy, simplicity, and small-scale operations. The focus is on doing more with less, maximizing efficiency, and making deliberate choices about growth.
2. Being small allows flexibility, tight customer relationships, quality of life, focus, and efficiency and profitability
3. Make your first instinct to scale tech or automation before adding headcount. Overhead should be very carefully considered before being added

What I got out of it

1. A different perspective that highlights the merits of staying small, focused, and not simply growing for growth’s sake

The post Company of One by Paul Jarvis appeared first on The Rabbit Hole .