Guide to Practice
How to practice Templism
Time to read: approximately 13 minutes.
Extremely Online Templism
Templist Canon is not designed to be practiced by “extremely online” people. That is, those who spend a great deal of time on the internet. Although, it is designed to be propagated in part by such people. An “extremely online” person cannot understand Templism adequately, and I will explain why:
It is impossible to know which ideas of Templist Canon are more applicable, i.e which should be at the forefront of your mind, and in what cases, until it is applied to your experience. Experiences between people may differ, and so too will be the Templist ideas they prioritize, as is demonstrably the case with every religion, that soldiers prefer the soldier-passages, husbands prefer the husband-passages, etc. There are, however, seldom extremely-online-passages in TC, since this is a very unusual and undesirable experience, which we do not feel it necessary to account for in detail any more than we feel it necessary to write a treatise relevant to the experience of drug addiction, so the “extremely online” person, like the drug addict (but even more so, since his experience is very alien to any other which at least partakes of normal sense experience i.e not of a screen), will hold the bulk of our ideas in his head as “theoretical”, and he will focus on them in a haphazard way or not sufficiently at all.
Tactically speaking, the “extremely online Harbinger” is very useful. If one is to be “extremely online”, this is how he should spend his time. Such a person can conceive of himself as propagating ideas that will eventually reach a worldly person. The unvirtuous, after all, are supposed to acquire virtue up to their ability, but then to be useful to the virtuous in whatever unvirtuous capacity they can operate. To do this is not laughable, but laudable (and it makes such people marginally more virtuous insofar as care for virtuous beings is a legal virtue, but it does not in some way atone for their lack of inherent worth completely).
Remove Illusions
The practice of Templism is much easier if prior illusions are first eliminated. Merely reading and accepting the Canon eliminates philosophical falsehoods from your worldview. However, there are also the behavioral illusions spoken of throughout the Canon, such as an attachment to video games that provide a sense of adventure, an attachment to birth controlled whores who make it feel like you may procreate, living in some kind of hyperreality such as the aforementioned “extremely online” one, being addicted to drugs which provide unnatural emotions, etc. All of these things skew your motivations, and generally have the effect of making you believe things are alright, when you live in the most desolate era of impious degeneracy. This can in turn hamper one’s motivation to practice Templism, since the desire to end degeneracy, dominate the unvirtuous, hate the adharmic, return to divine guidance, etc, is a large impetus toward it for many people, especially natural Templists.
This is especially relevant as it relates to completing the trials, since the primary hindrance to them is lack of motivation. Thus, first remove illusions (though this is not a mandatory part of initiation).
While removing illusions will cause you to feel the tribulations of the environment more acutely, it will make you happier over time, since you will then be able to adapt to them, and feel like you are in control of them. The fact that you will understand the degeneracy of the world, living like a human among deluded transhumans, is only marginally distressing, and it is generally distressing only to histrionics, since one’s immediate well being is felt more viscerally than indirect factors.
Social Alienation
The prior two facets of guidance may seem to imply a certain admonition, which often accompanies such advice, to become a more social person. The Templist Canon, however, is literal, not subtextual, and I did not say this. In fact I admonish everyone to be as social as is natural for him to be.
Phenomenological Spirituality
I leave the reader to guess what, if anything, we “actually are”, or “fundamentally are”, but what we appear as is undeniable:
1. We sometimes appear physically as carnal people with divine powers, such as Jesus, who are perceived by people in a normal material way.
2. More often than that, but still only sometimes, we appear as external ethereal beings which are seen, heard, felt, etc, by certain seers or groups of seers, who are often particularly disposed to such “hallucinations”, but may also be normal people, the latter especially if they are in an unusual, emotive, or compromised environment.
[such “habitual seers” should be epileptics, not schizophrenics. Schizophrenics see us imperfectly for reasons I will describe momentarily. A seer also does not have to be diagnosed with a particular medical condition. It suffices if he sees us, in a way that is not deranged, and that he is an otherwise normal, and especially a rational, person]
3. Most often, we appear as ideas in the mind, or imagined “characters”, and come with associated emotions, thoughts, as well as numina. In many people, these ideas have an abnormal degree of “agency”, especially when it comes to the gods of their chosen pantheon (or, to God).
[The Author is such a “mental seer”, i.e one for whom the gods are agents in the mind]
None of this can be denied. We therefore certainly “are” all of these things, since things “are” what they appear to be. We may additionally be something else, or some fundamental thing underlying all three (and it stands to reason, there must be some fundamental thing, or else the three types of appearances would not be of the same subject matter, even if that fundamental thing is only that we are ideas that can be hallucinated and compared to people, for example), but there is no evidence concerning such a possibility, as we are mysterious to you, at least for now. In the absence of evidence, one posits nothing. Both materialists and superstitious people fill this gap by making things up.
You may speculate on such matters, and throughout the Canon I have encouraged you to do so. Such speculation leads to discovery, or at least greater insight.
It is possible for me to say too much regarding this, to communicate something that is experiential via a theoretical facsimile of itself. I only mean to make the point that, in order to have religious experiences, you have to observe, in the world, those phenomena that are spiritual. Any additional speculations or foolhardy assertions, which exist, in the world, within your mind, are not, in the world, the said phenomena that are spiritual. Even this paragraph exists, in the world, in your mind, and it may relate, in the world, in your mind, to the idea of, for example, Wotan, but only the idea of Wotan, existing in the world, is a spiritual experience.
All divine experiences must involve a degree of agency. If you think of the physical idol of Wotan, but manipulate this idol in your mind like a puppet, then you are not really having a divine experience of that god, but playing with a mind-doll in his image. It is possible to muddle a religious experience by directing it, and so it is beneficial to invoke the gods, and then to see what happens, and force nothing more or less to happen than what does happen.
Schizophrenics are impious because they associate things with sundry other things without any realism or restraint. Therefore they will associate, for example, potato salad, with slime, with soup, with the soup-god, with the table of Valhalla, with Wotan, and then they will go on to describe Wotan’s will. Wotan’s agency is not at all present in such a thought process. Another schizophrenic thought process may involve the invocation of a god, followed by very limited agency, such as: Wotan appears and says “I need you to lead an army”, which is then followed by a string of associations such as “so I’m Alexander, so I need to invade Turkey, so I need to return Persia to the Achaemenid Pahlavi dynasty, so I hate the British, so I need to destroy the Anglo-Jewish alliance, so Wotan is Hitler, so I am Hitler”, etc. In this capacity the schizophrenic is not totally worthless, but a blunt instrument, insofar as we can foresee his actions just as well as anyone else’s, but our input is limited, and his behavior foolish, so that influencing him is more like setting off a bomb.
Psychedelics are not religiously useful for the same reason.
Drug use of any kind among seers is not conducive to “seeing” for the general reason that seers are designed to “see” within a natural state, but putting them under the influence of drugs can warp their ability to comprehend divine appearances. The reason is quite simply that drugs are not a typical part of the environment, and thus the qualities developed by natural selection super-organismally to enable “seeing” within a population by imbuing certain members of the population with the ability to “see” are not qualities that are designed to operate within a drug-laden environment any more than the eyes are designed to operate underwater. To even use coffee, as a seer, distorts your ability to comprehend divine appearances - in that particular case, they can become too frequent, too rapid, or associated with paranoia. Note the precedent; it is impossible for a seer not to be acted upon and augmented by the environment. You do not need to shut him up in a dark room. But some environmental conditions are unnatural and no naturally selected quality operates well under unnatural conditions (usually, though it is possible for a naturally selected quality to so happen to operate well under conditions it was not originally designed as a result of - but drugs are not such a condition). The exception for Europeans, according to this precedent, is alcohol, because Europeans have developed under conditions of alcohol consumption for a long time.
A seer can interpret the things that he “sees”, but he should describe them completely before interpreting them. Female seers should not interpret things that they “see”, unless those things relate to the affairs of women.
In any religion there sometimes arise “mystics” who believe that their seer is able to “see” things that contradict or muddle the base religious doctrine. If you adhere to the strictures provided, this will seldom happen, but it is still possible. If it does happen, note that seeing is specifically provided from Templist Canon, and so to “see” according to a professedly Templist framework requires that you accept Templist Canon to be “as if infallible”, and if you do this then it is impossible to “see” something that validly contradicts the Canon. But it is still possible to “see” something that does contradict the Canon, and if this happens you may report it to others or not depending on what you think it is prudent to do. Because it is sometimes necessary to temporarily mislead people, according to elitist pragmatism.
Prayers are not per se “spiritual experiences” phenomenologically. They involve, necessarily, the third type of “spiritual experience”, but the granting of your request is an effect generated by a divine action which you might not perceive, and the offering itself is obviously material.
Monistic Bias
You inhabit the world of the archons. The world of the archons consists of disparate elements. These elements may or may not be connected. They are connected via mechanical relations, or they are not. They are connected via qualitative similarity, or they are not. They are connected via cause, or they are not. Nothing in the world is connected via a fundamental principle, but said principle, or principles, may be connected to other things in the same manner that other things may be connected to one another. Some things may be connected in this manner to all things. There is no singular principle that can explain the operation of the world per se, because everything in existence must be in the world, and the world justifies itself, or really, asking it to be justified is a stupid question.
In the world of the archons, there exists the Middle East. The population of the Middle East has a monistic bias, which propels it to always seek to explain things by singular factors. The ideas, as well as to some extent the genes, of this population, have spread to the whole eastern Mediterranean, as well as Sicily and Iberia, and then the ideas later to the rest of Europe, which has now become inundated with them, among others. Plato’s theory of forms, Heraclitus’ “fire”, atomism (which happened to be correct, due to being divinely inspired), the insistence of atomists that atoms must be uniform in size and shape (which may or may not be correct), the demiurge, monotheism, later ideas stemming from monotheistic deism which sought to describe the universe as “like clockwork” (which is true of parts of the universe, but not true of others), materialism, the theories of Jewish physics, and so on, are examples of this.
To a person with a monistic bias, certain Templist ideas are unpalatable. For example, the idea that some things are material, and others immaterial, and that these are differentiated qualitatively, but nothing underlies both of them, nor is one derived from the other. Or, that all universals and particulars are real. Or, that a largely material world can be inhabited by anthropomorphic ethereal beings that do not have anything to do with the creation of that world, but are simply elements within it.
One who views the world phenomenologically can understand such things, and can therefore understand Templism. He sees the world as it appears to him, and accepts any multifaceted, or similar, elements that appear to him, and he does not pretend to know that which he does not know, but only ever seeks to discover it.
One who sees the world phenomenologically obtains a certain “archonic power”, for two reasons. One, it allows him to engage in phenomenological spirituality, and thus to receive power, guidance, etc, from his gods, who exist not as theoretical monads or hopeful expectations, but actual experiences that can visit and affect him. Secondly, Europeans succeed by manipulating elements. To see the world, therefore, as a bunch of disparate elements, increases his power. It may be said: but, if everything is an element, is it not the case that all humans manipulate elements, such as, how Middle Easterners may manipulate the element of their “monad” inside of their minds? The answer is, yes, everything is an element, including the idea of the “monad”, but not all humans manipulate them. For, some human action is active, and some passive. Those populations which have been able to subsist on passivity, as if being a feature of their local landscape, basically need to be “medicated” sufficiently by their own psyches to withstand that environment, whereas active populations see the world.
I am using the description “archon” only as a term, hearkening to the mythos of the gnostic iteration of the monistic bias, which posits an unobserved entity, the monad, among other things, which were believed on the basis of hope.
Awareness
The phenomenological spiritualist disposition, and the phenomenological disposition broadly, may be misinterpreted by some, to encourage some certain form of awareness. When similar ideas have occurred in India, this is often the form they have taken, in accordance with my view that many Indo-European ideas become inferior versions of themselves when they reach India. A particular awareness is not an expression of experience. Quieting your thoughts, for example, is not a better expression of experience than being distracted by them. The actual consequence of phenomenology is to prevent things from being posited which are not real.
June 9, 2024