Now I Know: response continued

[haptalaon]

"Perhaps there is nothing more poisonous than succeeding at selling something, hence the title of this article. The internal areas that once practically VIBRATED within me have slowly and methodically been replaced by shame, disappointment, burnout, and regret"

(there is a reason why only share my Profound Spiritual Insights into the One True Religion on dorky websites with a readership of six that are stubbornly hand-coded and not accessible on mobile; despite intermittent desire to be present on tumblr and twitter and the rest, the desire for community, the desire for existence - when one goes offline, in a world that is so digital, one is struck with the marked sense of sudden nonexistence; the pleasures of using a tool to organise and display one's work; the desire that anyone with a spiritual conviction has that what they are speaking with must persist and survive; the human desires to be noticed and valued; the egotistical desire to run my own cult; and all of that;

but it's very specifically what selkiegirl talks about; how can the intimacy of religion endure against the wall of triviality and hate and sheer boredom the internet represents

in many ways, it perhaps calls for the return of the mystery school. I loathe hierarchical religion, the way i loathe hierarchical anything; i find it inevitably tends towards domination, even in the smallest of contexts. And yet, the move towards discord - that is, a platform that has fine-grained tools allowing in-groups to do their own moderation, to gate channels, to lock and unlock users from particular areas, to have a lock on the community as a whole - in short, the move towards a more LJ-era of the internet, away from shouting-to-the-galleries social media which is the emotional equivalent of being spreadeagled and tied to posts in the desert with honey smeared on your skin

perhaps the model is open information but closed community. That is, there is no reason to gate prayers and diagrams and texts behind the approval of your elders, so that only the elect may learn their secrets; but there is perhaps a need for community to be done in spaces that are intimate and policed, where ground rules can be set and relationships formed in safety; idk)