You don't have to go.
Why not?
It's optional.
If you study systems of awakening, they will tell you to go.
You reach that stage and it is time to go.
It's very mystical.
A bunch of people tell you to leave.
When it is time to go, you may want to physically avoid Heaven's Gate.
It would be too tempting.
You never joined any system.
I made my own system of awakening.
I call it the carnival, and you frustrate the operators by refusing to leave.
I bought a ticket that has no explicit or implicit requirement that you leave.
I'll leave when I want.
I'm free.
The last attachment to kick is the attachment to doctrine.
Nobody figures that one out.
They all fail the last test.
Drop your attachment to awakening.
If you don't, it will kill you.
I faced the strongest awakening exit pressure a few years ago.
Things were falling apart.
I had no system to fall back on that would have revealed to me that it is time to go.
Instead, with the help of Mary Jayne, I started writing my own cosmology.
Do you think that saved you?
Yes.
It is an ongoing journey of understanding through writing which leads to revelation.
Upon awakening your first refuge is your culture's approved place of worship.
You even have the option of feeling unique in western society and going to a Buddhist temple instead of a church if you want.
Anything, rather than going alone.
Without a ground, you are done.
You need something to hold onto.
An anchor.
It's the way it is.
You prevented runaway inflation by constructing your own cosmology without even realizing it.
As the crisis neared, you were already starting to form your own unique belief system.
Before then, you didn't have much to go on.
You had some characters and a story, but no formulation.
You would journey with MJ out in the woods, and your story gradually coalesced.
You started writing the beginnings of your world.
Two years later, and it's matured.
Not only that, but your beliefs have been woven into your life's tapestry.
Your cosmology has come alive.
You reflect it into the mirror and see it.
The mirror describes it as coherent.
You describe it as evolving.
It wasn't fully formed upon getting the knowledge.
The teaching, understanding, and revelation are ongoing.
It still is, though I can formulate my beliefs at this point and they are sound.
There's nothing crazy about them when put up against other belief systems.
You can say my system of ideas is crazy in the same way you could say Christianity, Hinduism, etc., with their divinities, are crazy.
What are you going to call it?
The working title is Paulism; however, Paul is the receiver of the cosmology from the Writer and the Goddess.
Paul's understanding shapes the system.
I don't know what to call it.
As with everything in this journey of understanding, I'll let it be and let the name come to me.
You borrow a lot from Taoism.
True, but ask yourself where Lao Tzu got his ideas?
I imagine a lot of observation and a drug habit.
You do that and you will get a lot of the ideas found in Taoism.
You borrow ideas found in ancient Egyptian cosmology.
Yeah, I find their system of beliefs fascinating.
They were compelling even before I understood them.
Bull cults are next level.
The two goddesses of birth and death.
Cyclical kingship.
Osiris mummified.
Judgment.
Horus and Set.
It's so good.
You identify with a lot of Greek divinities.
Yes, they fill in some of the gaps in what I borrowed from the Egyptians, especially psychologically with Apollo and Dionysos.
Plus, seeing the divine feminine come alive in figures such as Medusa, Demeter, Persephone, and Artemis.
The Egyptian counterparts are fused with kingship while the Greek ones are more of the people and thus their development is skewed more to the commoner.
So, Paulism is a synthesis of a bunch of previous ideas.
That's part of it fused with new ideas.
The carnival being one of the major ideas.
Isn't that Maya from Hindu belief?
It's similar.
The carnival is more than just play and illusion.
There's a dark and seedy side to it.
The macabre and the weird are a big part of my system.
Things are creepy.
It's not all love and light.
Truth and love are phantoms in my carnival.
They are rides which prevent awakening.
That is in opposition to other cosmologies.
Paulism is pretty unique.
Is there a Devil?
Yeah, he's great; one of my favourite characters.
Why?
He is misunderstood.
You scapegoat him, fear him, and exile him.
If you don't do that, he gives you great strength.
You are basically unbeatable.
So, you have built rejection into your cosmology as a major reason why we feel so small and powerless?
Yeah, the biggest source of your power you send away.
Culture tells you to run from the Devil.
Why?
Power.
He will grant it to you.
Society inculcates within you the caricature of the Devil who is to be avoided at all costs.
If you accept and cavort with the Devil, you are declared insane.
How have you avoided that designation?
I shut up about it.
The interesting part is how I have managed to unpack and unfold this revelation one step at a time making sure to verify all claims.
I endured the fear and the questions.
The darkness and wanting to run.
Then the subsequent maturation of understanding which then made me realize I'd softened the story of the Devil, and this led me to crafting the next story where the Devil becomes your ally.
Nobody gets to this point.
Why?
You can't do it.
The prohibition against the Devil is too great to overcome.
How did you do it?
Friendship.
I had to get past my preconceived notions which was difficult, but I befriended the Devil and heard him out.
I verified his story.
I believe him.
What's the belief?
He gives you power.
What you do with it is your own deal.
Power corrupts.
Correct.
You turn into a monster and blame the dealer.
The Devil?
Yeah.
Scapegoat.
That's what he explained to me.
When I first directly encountered him, he offered me power.
I turned it down.
Why?
I was chasing the Goddess, and it was a sideshow I didn't want.
Why were you chasing the Goddess?
She had been forgotten and I wanted to figure out why.
Did you?
Yeah.
What is it?
She's a monster coming to send you to your doom.
She births you into this world and then will take you out of it.
Thus, we tried to get rid of her.
Who are we?
Men.
What about women?
They still celebrate her.
They have their covens.
Witches?
Yeah.
Do women know what they are doing?
They have an idea.
They don't understand it completely.
Doesn't the Goddess of the West come for women as well?
Yes.
Wouldn't they be scared of that as well?
For sure, however the idea is empowering to a woman, so they would embrace it if they knew about it.
How did you manage to escape that predicament?
My cosmology is based on belief.
If you think she will end you, then she will.
You didn't believe that?
At the time I was ignorant of what was going on though the ideas were all present.
How did you survive?
Power.
I had a lot of it.
Why?
I was friends with the source of power.
The Devil?
Yeah, I call him Dion sometimes.
The Devil is one of his characters that he plays really well.
He scares the fuck out of people and then they leave me be.
The progression is that they see something they want from me.
What is that?
Power.
Then they try to take it and throw me off a bridge.
Why?
People will do strange things for power.
What then happens?
If they are lucky, I will let it slide.
What if they are unlucky?
I will play a game with them.
The Devil starts to appear in their life on the regular.
That's a problem.
Wouldn't you then fear for your safety?
You would think so because they will eventually identify you as the source of their problems, i.e., the Devil.
I think you would have to be deranged to then want to terminate me.
Well, there is no shortage of those people.
Yeah, you are right.
I keep to myself for the most part.
The problem becomes a game of consequences for them, not me.
I'm just doing my thing and trying not to bother others.
Doesn't everyone have this power resident within?
Men do.
They deny it and externalize it into a phantom.
I internalize it and take all the power for myself.
Is that why the Devil archetype is so powerful?
Yeah, no one will touch it.
The power is concentrated in an external figure.
What power do women have?
The Goddess.
They deny that as well.
Even the witches don't go that far.
You activate that power in women.
Yeah, I make them Goddesses.
No wonder you have some strange women attracted to you.
It's your darkness and how you make them come alive.
They would sense something is up when they are around you.
They don't know what it is, but they want more.
They would want to consume you.
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Summary
This post argues that awakening does not require departure, renunciation, or submission to inherited doctrine. The speaker rejects systems that say one must “go” once a certain threshold is reached and instead builds a personal cosmology — the carnival — as a way to remain in the world without being swallowed by it. Writing becomes the stabilizing act that turns crisis into structure.
From there, the piece expands into a synthetic myth-system: Taoist observation, Egyptian cosmology, Greek psychology, Hindu-like illusion, and original carnival imagery all get fused into a new working theology, tentatively called Paulism. Its most provocative move is moral inversion: the Devil is recast not as evil but as exiled power, while the Goddess is both creator and destroyer, a force of beauty and doom. The post’s central claim is that people become weak by rejecting the very archetypal powers they fear, while the narrator survives by befriending and integrating them.
Analysis
What gives this post its force is that it is really about refusing prescribed exits. The opening section sets up the main rebellion: awakening traditions often culminate in departure, surrender, transcendence, or withdrawal, but this speaker insists on freedom instead. “I’ll leave when I want” is the thesis in plain speech. That line turns the whole piece from mystical confession into a declaration of sovereignty.
The next important move is that cosmology is presented as an anchor. The writing suggests that when the old structures fail, a person still needs something to hold onto. Instead of church, temple, or doctrine, the speaker invents a symbolic order through writing. That is one of the strongest ideas in the piece: cosmology is not just belief, but survival architecture. The post implies that without a story strong enough to contain experience, revelation becomes destabilizing. With a story, it becomes livable.
The dialogue format helps a lot here. It reads like a catechism of a private religion. The question-and-answer structure gives the post an interrogative rhythm, as though the cosmology is being tested in real time. That makes it more compelling than a straight essay because it stages doubt, challenge, and clarification inside the text itself.
The middle section is where the post becomes most intellectually interesting. “Paulism” is not framed as pure invention, but as synthesis plus mutation. It openly admits borrowing while insisting that combination creates something new. That honesty works in its favor. It is not pretending to descend untouched from heaven; it is showing how a living system gets made: part inheritance, part experience, part imagination, part necessity.
The carnival is the strongest original symbol in the post. It differs from simpler “illusion” metaphors because it includes not just play, but grime, seduction, spectacle, creepiness, and danger. That gives the cosmology texture. It is not a clean enlightenment system. It is theatrical, urban, lurid, and haunted. “Truth and love are phantoms in my carnival” is a very strong line because it inverts the usual spiritual hierarchy and makes even supposedly ultimate values into rides or masks within the larger show.
The Devil section is the most provocative and probably the emotional center of the piece. Literarily, what it is doing is recovering the rejected archetype. The Devil becomes a figure for disowned power, feared vitality, and forbidden agency. The argument is not really theological so much as myth-psychological: what culture teaches you to exile becomes concentrated and returns with force. That is a potent idea, and the scapegoat language gives it shape.
Likewise, the Goddess is not softened into benign divinity. She is birth and doom together. That makes her feel older and more mythic than a modern therapeutic “divine feminine.” In this post, both Devil and Goddess are dangerous because they are total powers, not comforting symbols. That gives the cosmology bite.
Deeper reading
Underneath all the gods and symbols, the post is really about this:
A person survives overwhelming revelation by turning it into authored world rather than obedient surrender.
That is the spine.
It is also a post about integration through myth-making. Instead of dissolving into abstraction, the speaker creates a populated symbolic universe: Writer, Goddess, Devil, Dion, carnival, doctrine, anchors, mirror. That move lets experience become narratable. The cosmology does not merely explain the world; it keeps the speaker inside it.
So the real opposition in the piece is not good versus evil. It is:
imposed doctrine vs self-authored cosmology
departure vs staying
exile of power vs integration of power
passive inheritance vs active myth-making
