Were the Celts Tantrics? The Celtic Kali and Bhairava (Mythstream)

We look at the hags Irnan and Orddu and the fierce hero Goll mac Morna, identifying an archaic tantric pattern that spreads across Europe and must go back to Proto-Indo-European religion.

Thank you to Collin for coming on to discuss.

Watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pr4zH8w4uxE

- O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult

True Dharma always has only the practical sense of realization. That is, for example, the real realization of what is obscuration, is possible only by practically overcoming obscuration. Otherwise, it will be a wandering of the mind - and it doesn't matter whether it wanders according to the rules of philosophical treatises or ordinary, arbitrary wandering.

If you don't understand this directly, you continue to wander in matters of definition - instead of immersing your mind in this indeterminacy, surrendering to it, relaxing, and giving up the subtle fears about the lack of support for being. That would be the practical step.

In realizing the basis of existence, the key point of indeterminacy is fully revealed.

The true nature of phenomena is such that there is no “transition” to it or change in it; therefore, there is no question of what distracts and what does not distract your attention.

It is not an experience that can be expressed.

Longchenpa

"Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there." - Meister Eckhart

Gm

I bet everyone was telling him to "stop larping."

That feeling when pinning first thangka up

Notice how he meditates on the impermanence of his own actions

Really good video from the Youtube channel "Good to think with." No amount of theorizing, belief, faith, etc is going to give you the experience of the divine itself. Only direct insight can do that.

On God's Greatest Disappointment

Nietzsche once prophesied, “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star… Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.” That time is nearly upon us. Our civilization wasn’t gifted to us, but was paid for in blood and built on top of a mountain of corpses. Those sacrifices will mean nothing if we continue to lie down and rot.

Since the industrial revolution, we have grown stupid, inept, and sickly—not because of our greatness, but because we are too cowardly to wield it.

We worship stagnation as noble, call mediocrity virtuous, and sneer at ambition as hubris. But such weakness cannot continue forever. A long overdue slaughter is coming—trials and tribulations that will make every great war and pestilence look like a scraped knee. Humanity is not decaying from its progress, but from its failure to rise to the responsibility progress demands.

Growing up in the 2000s, I played countless video games where the villains were often mad scientists seeking immortality or men striving for godhood. These archetypes weren’t just tropes—they reflected a cultural fear of ambition and a deep-seated aversion to humanity's attempts at transcendence. Modern media continues this trend, demonizing mankind’s drive to overcome itself even more often than it preaches diversity and inclusion.

In a recent analog horror series, Greylock, one antagonist delivers a line that perfectly encapsulates this trend: “Humanity has fought tirelessly and passed through countless trials of intellectual fortitude to achieve but one singular goal. A goal that countless men have withered away and died in pursuit of, leaving their towers of work behind to be climbed upon by coming generations. Higher and higher they'll ascend, so we will at last reach the one called God. And there on His apex of infinite knowledge and power, we will approach Him and look Him in the eye as an equal.”

Commentators of the series interpreted this ambition not as noble, but as hubristic—a desire to best God at being God. This reflects the mind virus infecting our culture: the idea that striving for greatness is inherently wicked, while submission and stagnation are virtuous. This pervasive narrative doesn’t need religious dogma about the evils of playing God to thrive; it has become a secular commandment in our modern zeitgeist.

Humanity’s fear of greatness has led to the persecution of those willing to risk everything for our future. He Jiankui is a striking example. Imprisoned for genetically engineering embryos to be resistant to HIV, Dr. Jiankui was derided as a “mad genius” and labeled the “Chinese Dr. Frankenstein.”

Yet his work was not an act of hubris but a glimpse of what humanity could achieve if we embraced the responsibility of our potential. CRISPR technology like his holds the power to overcome some of our most pressing challenges—eradicating hereditary diseases, increasing resilience to pandemics, and enhancing human health. Yet rather than championing such advancements, the world bans them outright.

Even in rare places like Prospera, a city-state pioneering gene therapy, progress is stifled. Despite its contributions to surrounding communities and the broader world, Prospera’s existence has been declared illegal by its host country, Honduras. This hostility toward ambition is not unique. How much further might we have come if humanity hadn’t constrained its greatest minds and allowed fear to conquer so many hearts? The persecution of pioneers like Dr. Jiankui is not just an injustice; it is a tragedy for all mankind.

This trend is not merely stagnation; it is destruction. The industrial revolution brought us comfort, security, and luxury beyond what the kings of old could have ever imagined. However, much like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, there is always a price to pay when we leave the nest of God.

The price of embracing the role of the Father is taking on the responsibility that comes with it. Like lightning, we have fallen away from this responsibility.

Before the industrial revolution, a harsh Darwinian reality ensured that only the fittest survived, with the bottom third of the population dying off each generation. Since we took nature’s role from her we have refused to perform it ourselves thus have grown progressively weaker.

Our health and intellect have declined with each passing generation, and our only response has been to not only suppress efforts to reverse this trend but to actively hide from it. The internet, our greatest invention, has become a devouring mother—one we flee toward, only to be ensnared and consumed.

Instead of channeling our will into meaningful action, countless individuals squander their potential, lost in the fleeting pleasures of porn, video games, and social media. These distractions are digital opiates, lulling us into a stupor, where we pretend to live vibrant lives online while our real existence withers away. We have turned the creations of far greater men into anesthetics, dulling our senses so we no longer remember that we are the failed sons and daughters of God.

This is unsustainable. The rot has set in, and the grub is coming to do God’s work. Despite the illusion that the internet has made us more intelligent, we are farther from the truth than ever. Studies on per capita innovation and reaction times—the best measures of general intelligence—show that our IQ has dropped by an average of 14 points since the Victorian era.

Dr. Michael Woodley, in his research published in the Journal of Intelligence, states, “They actually indicate a pronounced decline in IQ since the Victorian era, three times bigger than previous theoretical estimates would have us believe... It should also be emphasized that while our value of a −14.1 IQ point decline is an estimate based on the best meta-analytical data available, a simple inspection of our figure shows there is a non-negligible amount of scatter around the regression line. The real magnitude of the effect might therefore be several IQ points lower or even higher.”

We need smart, healthy men to maintain the infrastructure we’ve built. None of our digital infrastructure, nation-states, or first-world standards can survive a sustained decline in intelligence and health. The damage has already been catastrophic. It would take the bottom third of the population not reproducing at all just to stabilize the decline, let alone recover. The world will break into smaller polities, and we will lose all we’ve gained—perhaps even forever. Our ancestors had to mine resources close to the surface to ignite our advancement, and those resources have largely been depleted.

We will once again face harsh Darwinian selection, and it will be one of the greatest calamities to ever befall mankind—a violence on a scale humanity has never before witnessed. Life on Earth may never recover from it.

While this collapse may seem inevitable, there is still hope for salvation. For those few who still aspire to live up to the example of their Father and embody the greatness He knows we are capable of, there is an opportunity to separate themselves from those who choose not to rise and perhaps, one day, redeem them.

The quote from Greylock about our ancestors was flawed in one crucial aspect: it wasn’t just intellectual fortitude or towers of work that they built. They gave their lives—everything they were—for us and for our future. They chose to construct a mountain from their own sacrifices, so that we might ascend and reach the Heavens.

I still believe that there are true heroes and martyrs among us, willing to risk being forgotten in the void, to be imprisoned for the sake of a stronger, healthier humanity. They love what mankind can be so profoundly that they are willing to endure suffering, even to be torn apart by those they seek to elevate. This is the essence of heroism and martyrdom in the modern world.