liminalmoonlight

[liminalmoonlight]

Not plural culture is - well, kind of; may be helpful for plurals generally:

In the server I'm on, Rings&Alexandrites, the catchphrase 'DOTS' was sort of coined. Standing for 'Depends On The System', it's now been used as an answer for a variety of questions or doubts on 'am I plural/still a system if this happens', or questioning certain ways in which one's system functions - whether it be 'is it possible for there to be no comms', or 'what if I have 500 headmates', or 'doesn't everyone get along with other members', a consistent - and generally relieving answer, even - is just 'DOTS'.

Given the differences between DID and OSSD clinically, the cultural variance of concepts of multiplicity, and the sheer number of ways in which one could have a plural experience or be plural, I have found DOTS to now be both amongst my frequently-used phrases, as well as generally useful for new systems/plurals/questioning ppl when it comes to doubt. One thing I also tend to now state for self-doubt/impostor syndrome is 'if it's happening to you, then it's clearly possible'.

Either way, I wanted to bring up DOTS on this blog bc I've followed for a while and seen many hesitant, fearful or even deprecating asks generally centered around not feeling 'plural enough', and feel as though it may prove similarly useful to add to ppl's vocabulary, as it has for mei. It is an easy disclaimer for a great many things, and from what I've seen the singlet version is essentially 'ymmv' lol ('your mileage may vary'). So I think DOTS is generally great on reiterating or reminding ppl of the 'everyone's experience is unique' and 'a community is not a monolith' sides of things.

I like that!

#plurality

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MH: Yep, this holds true for me...It can be hard, at times, to be gentle on myself for the elements of misfortune surrounding emotional neglect. It's better to be kind at the end of the day.

If someone you know experienced childhood neglect, they may not know things that you or other people consider “basic knowledge.”

Don’t shame them for not knowing. Making them feel bad because you had someone in your childhood who taught you things, while they didn’t, is not even a little bit helpful.

And yes, this post applies even if that person is you. Give yourself some patience and understanding. It’s not your fault.

#mh(she/her)

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Alternatives to “system” when choosing a collective name

There’s nothing wrong with keeping things simple and just calling yourself “The ___ System” when choosing a collective name! But some want something that represents themselves a little better. So here are some alternatives to the word system for y’all to try out! (I’ll add more if y’all have suggestions)!

General: 

- Group / Grouping

- Collective / Collection 

- Cluster

- Bunch, Bundle

- House (of) / Home (of)

- Band

- Club, Crew, Class, Clique

- Company

- Crowd 

- Party

- Ring

- Team, Unit

- Pack

- Caravan

Formal:

- Assembly

- Congregation

- Formation

- League, Division

- Sect, Sector

- Coalition 

- Convocation

- Court

Political (some of these may have negative connotations):

- Faction, Clan

- Gang, Bloc

- Squad / Squadron, Troop, Platoon, Posse, Fleet

Animals (names used for groups of animals): 

- Pod (of dolphins, whales)

- School (of fish)

- Flock (of birds)

- Murder (of crows)

- Sleuth (of bears)

- Parliament (of owls) 

- Parade (of elephants)

- Cackle (of hyenas)

- Conspiracy (of lemurs)

- Cauldron (of bats)

- Romp (of otters)

- Tower (of giraffes) 

- Flamboyance (of flamingos)

- And tons more! 

- Classification names: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species

Other:

- Constellation (a group of stars that forms an image in the sky)

- Asterism (a group of stars that is not a constellation) 

- Tributary (a river or stream flowing into a larger river)

- Confluence (where two bodies of water meet)

- Range (a group of mountains)

- Strata (a group of volcanos)

[liminalmoonlight]

I am begging people to use LibreOffice and personal storage devices like hard drives or USB sticks instead of relying 100% on Google Docs. LibreOffice is free and open-source, it saves files to your own computer, and it lets you save as many different file types. You can write in it, format ebooks in it, and do everything you might possibly need to do as a writer.

"Oh, but I'll lose my USB stick--" Fine, back things up in whatever cloud you use as a form of extra protection, but you should also try your absolute damnedest to also put them on some form of storage that isn't a cloud.

I know it's not accessible to everyone, but if you at all have the ability, don't rely on shit that lives on other people's computers. Especially with everything going on with AI theft and aggressive censorship of adult media. If you don't store your files on your own personal computer that you have control over, your files aren't fully yours, and they're at the whims of whoever owns the cloud.

Learn where your files are stored and how to access them. Get into the habit of backing up your files to your own personal storage. Even if you're not up for intense tech research and you don't care about how the computer actually works, please stop letting your art live in corporate clouds.

[liminalmoonlight]

MH: This is something which we& have been recently been doing, as masking our& plurality takes a lot of energy to sustain and frankly not good for our collective health. I tend towards being overly controlling at front and so at the present time, I'm sharing the fronting load with SY. It helps that we have the bedroom temporarily to ourselves, so working some of this out whilst we can is good. We'll eventually find more covert ways of sharing fronting to make it comfortable whilst out in public.

Something that's been brewing for a while about our system (and broadly mental health stuff, or broader still a bunch of our life):

We're being a system on purpose

No we didn't make our system. We aren't a created system. We've been this way for as long as any of us can figure, and it just seems like how our brain works.

But so much of what makes us better/healthier/happier has been intentional stuff. Switching on purpose to spread the load. Talking about where our headmates are from to distract from the bad thoughts. Working on undoing and challenging the internal rules. Accepting, inviting, and seeking out the strange because it's fun. Building a headspace because we wanted one.

And like, there's a lot of ways this shakes out in other places in our lives. Being trans on purpose. Autistic on purpose. Adhd on purpose. Ace on purpose.

It really blurs this line between identities chosen and ones embraced. There's goals that we work towards intentionally. Which makes it easier to drop the pretense of doing it the "right" way and doing it the way that works for us. Grasping (in the "embracing" sort of way) the why and how of what we're doing. Looking for the steady bits of improvement and inches towards those goals, and dropping or tweaking what isn't getting us that direction. Trusting that when the progress isn't coming that we'll be able to navigate from there; either giving it more time or finding a new strategy.

There's this emphasis Roki puts on doing that we've been applying here since before he showed up, that he's put into eccentric but apt words. Turning existing from a passive process to an active action.

Doing it on purpose.

#pluralgang #plurality #co-fronting

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SY: It's very important to not get caught up with ideas which seem plausible at first, especially when they reflect elements of one's experiences. This is important in the context where plurality is concerned, as we& have been at times quite close to getting sucked into dubious 'spiritual' groups, mostly out of a desire to connect with like-minded people.

MH: These days, our in-house policy is that we& determine how to make sense of our& experiences, not from people with 'good intent'. Because 'good intent' by itself is hollow. This applies also, unfortunately, to some mental health professionals and researchers who make assumptions about plurality experiences without actually listening to people who experience it in the first place.

On the topic of New Age beliefs and how so much of it is just repackaged Christianity:

We were almost sucked into the New Age cult a few years ago. We had only barely begun our journey of deconstructing from Christianity and were dabbling in New Age practices such as "raising vibrations" and studying starseeds. We had been desperately searching for a place to belong and didn't feel like we fit in at school or in our town. A large part of this was due to us being autistic and queer and just generally feeling like an outsider in our community, and let me tell you something: New Agers will absolutely prey on this vulnerability to drag you into their cult.

For a while we genuinely believed that we were a starseed, feeling as though we were from someplace outside of this world. Now, for a bit of background on us: we're a plural system, aka a bunch of people sharing one physical body and brain; it's stated in our bio on this blog and every other blog we run. Our plurality is heavily influenced by our spiritual beliefs, particularly the idea that we are a gateway system, meaning many of our headmates come from some sort of outside source rather than our brain itself. And we do believe that the folks who enter our system from outside are in fact from other worlds than this one, alternate timelines and such. This belief has had a positive impact on our acceptance of our system and made us more open to understanding the experiences of other people and beliefs.

Now, back to our point. While we understand how our spirituality affects our system, that doesn't make us as a whole, or the physical body we all inhabit, a "starseed". We also collectively share a few otherkin identities, primarily wolfkin, faekin, and fallen angelkin. But back when we were active in New Age circles, we didn't fully grasp any of these concepts. We fully believed that we were actually an alien from another world, sent to Earth for the divine purpose of aiding humanity and ushering in a new age of prosperity and love. We explained away our autistic and ADHD traits with starseed stuff, but something about it never felt... right.

One thing we were caught up in for a while, and what actually inspired us to write this post, was something called the "New Message from God." It's been a long time since we've actually taken a look at the website, but it's basically Christianity infused with New Age beliefs like ascending to a golden age of love and light, the idea that every so often humanity receives a new prophet to interpret messages from God/Source, blah blah blah. According to the website, our current prophet is a man named Marshall Vian Summers who started getting messages from God several years ago in order to warn humanity of a coming evil and to help put a stop to it. It's a whole bunch of doomsday Armageddon BS, but we genuinely believed it for a while just like the starseed mumbo jumbo.

We're very glad that we listened to our instincts and actually broke down what the New Message from God and similar communities are trying to sell to people, because otherwise we would have been sucked into it completely with little hope of getting out. It's really important to think critically about what you incorporate into your spiritual practices, especially if you're converting from Christianity and still hold onto some of the things the religion teaches. This stuff is absolutely a cult and especially preys on young people who feel like they don't belong anywhere, giving them a false sense of having a community full of people that love them. But as with every other cult out there, this love is conditional; these people don't actually care about you if you don't believe in the same things as them. They will love bomb you and dress up their beliefs in pretty packaging and ribbons in order to conceal how harmful it really is, so you never see the damage it's doing to you before it's too late for you to escape. -Dylan

#pluralgang #New Age cults #plural pagans #latent Christianity

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The plural experience of HEAD HURTY !!!!!!!! ALL THE TIIIME !!!!!!!!!!!!

#plurality #pluralgang

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lemon juice box 🍹

[liminalmoonlight]

SY: Although there's a lot of plural systems coming from the United States, it would be nice to see greater numbers from other places...And yes we're supportive of plurals from all kinds of circumstances, known or unknown.

Any other Australian Pro Endo/Endo supporters out there? We wanna follow more Aus based people!

#endo safe #plurality

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A new era in blogging...

[SY: Well, times have changed, with the garbage fire that is Twitter (bought out by a stereotypical capitalist), so here we& are again, posting stuff...]

#pluralgang #sy(they/them) #plurality

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MH: I sometimes feel that way, especially when I'm alone, which can feel scary due to the 'one-self-per-body' and 'total identification of self and body/physical appearance' assumptions in dominant western cultures.

plural culture is asking yourself, “am i faking it?” and a headmate immediately replying, “i’m real, dumbass”

#pluralgang #plurality

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Watermelons (they’re now in season (late spring), though this photo was taken last year).

#MH(She/Her) #fruit #watermelon #photos

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Marx time! Capital, section 1

MH (She/Her):

As a student of political economy (way back almost a decade ago), I was fortunate to have some exposure to Marx. It’s interesting just how much his name (socialism and communism) has become a swear-word in mainstream Western media. To help anyone else along, I’m providing our& own take on Marx’s great work Capital.

Chapter 1: Commodities 

Commodities possess use-value (practical) and exchange-value (’monetary’).

Labour can be understood as both concrete (to make stuff for use-value) and abstract (abstraction of actual work being done to make stuff for exchange-value).

Exchange-value is derived from the labour time socially necessary for the commodity to be made.

Money-form comes about from a process of increased abstraction of assigned value, such that the relative value is obscured by equivalent value. This enables commodities to be treated as if they’re all the same and thus equally exchangable via a common unit of measure.

From these series of abstractions, people can easily make the mistake of  equating all human labour when we equate the values of different products. This is what drives commodity fetishism.

Chapter 2: Exchange

Commodities are exchanged by representative persons under legal contract.

Commodities have non-use-values for their owners and use-value for their non-owners.

The money-form is the manifestation of the social process of exchange-value assignment to a variety of commodities. Money also serves as a commodity, as its quantitative value is determined relative to other commodities.

Chapter 3: Money, or the circulation of commodities

The roles of money is to serve as a universal measure of value, which is possible because all commodities are realised (homogeneous) human labour. It also sets as a standard of price.

Price is the money-name of the labour realised in a commodity. Because of the abstract nature of the price-form, it can conceal the non-existence of value, despite it having a price (eg uncultivated land) or even non-commodities treated as commodities (eg honour).

The movement of commodities and money in the exchange process can be summarised as the simple circuit of C-M-C, where two events occur (not necessarily at the same time): a sale (C-M) and a purchase (M-C).

The seller and purchaser are mirror images of each other - mutually antagonistic yet mutually dependent for the process to occur. These roles become interchangeable during the circulation of commodities. Both sale and purchase are mediated by money, so contrary to what is supposed, there isn’t a stable equilibrium in the process and so it’s prone to crises.

The movement of money is nothing more than its enabling of the C-M-C circuit, where the value-forms of commodities appears transiently and then disappears in the exchange. Money is a stand-in for this process and so can be easily replaced by a token.

Money can serve different roles in society: as hoarding (either for personal power (dangerous to society!) or for regulating its use in controlling the amount of circulating commodities and as a means of payment (which is particularly important in credit-debt transaction ‘relations’ and settling international trade transactions).

#MH(she/her) #Karl Marx #Capital #multiplicitymademedia #political economy #economics #Marx

[liminalmoonlight]

Musing on “Phenomenology of Spirit” part 4.6: Spirit

SY (They/Them):

And now, finally we enter the last part of the section on “Spirit”, where we encounter the tropes of “Conscience” and the “Beautiful Soul” and how, finally we get reconciliation, thus bringing forth mutual recognition in a rich cultural setting (rather than the various forms of abstractions that previous shapes of self-consciousness attempt to use to evade it). As a note - we& won’t be dealing with the section on religion as we& don’t find it relevant to our present situation (contrary to Hegel).

The formation of Conscience arises from the contradictory views of the Moral Consciousness - that of duty as an abstraction vs. duty as an actuality. What is common to both is that it is deemed a duty by itself. Simply put, what is a moral deed is legislated by the person issuing it.  It is simple action in accordance with duty, an action which does not fulfill just this or that duty but rather knows and does what is concretely right. The law now exists for the sake of the self and not the other way around, not the self existing for the sake of the law. To itself, the conviction it has about duty is all that matters, with its actualisation being stable and recognised as such. There is, as such, no idle talk about the underlying intentions to act, just the act itself suffices.

However, this conviction of duty is just as empty as that of pure duty itself, as there is no determinate content. But action, as it is, is indeed determinate and needs to be done by the individual. Conscience cognizes no content as absolute for it because conscience is the absolute negativity of everything determinate. In that regard, the Moral Consciousness has to take a stand upon its own convictions independently of everyone else in order to claim its duties and actions as its own. However, in the process of upholding such a standard, it is unable to communicate such concerns and desires to others. To do so would be a negation of its own self-sufficiency. Moral consciousness can’t even ask whether their duties or actions have been done truthfully as it reckons to be, let alone what counts as a duty.

To rectify this situation, a suitable kind of community would then be required for Moral Consciousness to communicate such concerns and desires. That would be the community of Beautiful Souls, who base their own self-being on their individual subjective experiences, convictions and the like. The language in which all of them mutually recognize each other as acting conscientiously, this universal equality, falls apart into the inequality of singular being-for-itself, and each consciousness is equally reflected out of its universality and utterly into itself. Such Beautiful Souls take duty as just words uttered for the sake of others, which is negated by its own determinate content. It knows itself as conscious in its singularity and is aware of the opposition between that which it is for itself and what it is for others, conscious of the opposition between universality, or duty, and consciousness of its being reflected from out of universality.

But then such a position leads itself to hypocrisy, as its supposed equality between individuals is in direct conflict with its singular existence as essentially different from others. Such a Beautiful Soul claims that they are acting out of universal duty or virtue, despite the fact that they are acting out of their individual take of duty or virtue. 

The breaking of the hard heart and its elevation to universality is the same movement which was expressed in the consciousness that confessed. The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind; it is not the deed which is imperishable, but rather the deed is repossessed by spirit into itself. In that regard, these individuals are finally being able to recognise each other in a deep, meaningful manner. By the realisation of each other as limited beings, their interactions connect each other to a greater whole.

#SY(They/Them) #Phenomenology of spirit #multiplicitymademedia

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Lentil As Anything van.

#MH(She/Her) #photos #van

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Musing on “Phenomenology of Spirit” part 4.5: Spirit

MH (She/Her):

We are now at the point where self-consciousness desires to reunite itself with the world. These exhausting moves in the struggle for it has led to alienation, upon which it still attempts to go at it alone in its singularity. Having had the experience of questioning the traditions of old, from the Ethical World to that of Absolute Freedom, it now attempts to hold its own in the moral sphere. Here we’ll discuss the perspective of “The Moral Worldview” and its problems in  “Dissemblance”.

The Moral Worldview

In this stance, consciousness takes the shape of Moral Consciousness, which operates with duty as its actuality. Nature, to it, stands independently, not allowing it to affect itself in demonstrating its unity with itself. This refusal of this arises from the non-security of happiness from Nature - it may or may not, thus Moral Consciousness is suspicious of it. Yet it can’t let go of this, lest duty’s fulfillment isn’t registered as such. The gratification of such duties is in itself a dispositional quality, which is the actualising of such duties itself. Duty fulfilled is supposed to be just as much a purely moral action as it is a realized individuality, and nature, as the aspect of singularity in contrast with abstract purpose, is supposed to be at one with this purpose.

So how does Moral Consciousness relate to its object of concern? It finds itself in a plurality of duties, a plurality of cases or laws by which it acts upon. Yet by acting upon them, it is forced to focus on just one of them for its actualisation. This drives the tension between the two contradictory demands of moral consciousness: the simple harmony of itself and Nature...and that of the sanctification of multiple duties. To maintain its simplicity of its stance, it finds itself needing to operate abstractly, as pure duty, in its attempts to evade the messiness of the contingent nature of moral actions.

Dissemblance

What are the problems faced by the Moral Consciousness as it now confronts its own stance, as outlined? There are several issues:

The supposed goal of harmony between itself and Nature isn’t satisfied with moral consciousness’ own conception of duty. For if pure duty is to be seen as the self-grounding of itself, then as soon as it is actualised into actions, it ceases to be ‘pure’ as such. Moral action is supposed to be not something contingent and restricted, but of pure duty as its sole end. If nature’s own laws is thereby opposed to pure duty, then the latter cannot be actualised as nature.

If we take the highest good as its own self-positing essence for moral consciousness, then it ceases to differ from nature per se. Moral acting thus becomes meaningless, indistinguishable from actuality itself.

Moral Consciousness puts forward the view that its purpose is pure purpose, independent of inclinations and impulses so that the pure purpose has eliminated within itself sensibility’s purposes. Yet these non-moral impulses are, according to Moral Consciousness, to be ignored in order to achieve its actualisation. These non-moral desires have their own laws of action, which are different to that of Moral Consciousness’ own posits. So this supposed harmony is just postulated, not actualised.

The notion of improving on own’s harmony with nature or with sensibility is unintelligible, for such moral laws are deemed absolute by Moral Consciousness. There is only one virtue, only one pure duty, only one morality.

The standard by which Moral Consciousness judges others is, contrary to its own stance, subjective (rather than universal or objective). When non-moral people experience good things, it reacts out of envy that such people experience it. Thus, Moral Consciousness becomes a moral judge, using its own yardstick of morality. Even if it were to treat such a moral law as ‘holy’, such judgements aren’t self-sufficient.

The validity of pure duty rests in another self-consciousness, as a consequence, not in Moral Consciousness‘ supposed self-sufficiency.

The result of these issues is that of hypocrisy - Moral Consciousness claims its own self-sufficiency of its grounding in pure duty, but requires non-duties to maintain its own stance.

#MH(she/her) #Phenomenology of spirit #multiplicitymademedia

[liminalmoonlight]

Musing on “Phenomenology of Spirit” part 4.4: Spirit

MH (She/Her):

Now that the Enlightenment has shaken off Faith’s stance, now it requires a way to demonstrate its own self-sufficiency. In this section “Absolute Freedom and Terror”, though, it falls apart.

Questioning initially faith’s stance on experience now transforms into the questioning of how society itself is to function. This questioning spirit of absolute freedom arises, whereupon the will of all singular individuals is universalised.  For the will is in itself the consciousness of personality, or of each of them, and it is supposed to be this genuine actual will as the self-conscious essence of each and every personality such that each, undivided from the whole, always does everything, and what emerges as a doing of the whole is the immediate and conscious doing on the part of each.

This is elevated to an unquestioned status, such that the meaningfulless of a particular person’s social status becomes negated. Thereby, all social classes are erased for its understanding. Furthermore, consciousness cannot arrive at a positive work, neither to universal works of language nor to those of actuality, nor to the laws and the universal institutions of conscious freedom, nor to the deeds and works of willing freedom. It cannot make intelligible the real deeds and individual actions of its supposed universal will.  Universal freedom can thus produce neither a positive work nor a positive deed, and there remains for it only the negative doing. It is only the fury of disappearing. 

As a consequence, the overbearing desire for universal freedom as individualistic falls apart, leading to the destruction of society. Suspicion of anyone who doesn’t follow these dictates of universal freedom is treated as guilty.

In absolute freedom, there was neither the consciousness which is immersed in the diversity of existence, nor the consciousness which sets itself determinate purposes and thoughts, nor the valid external world, even a world of actuality or thinking reciprocating with each other, but rather the world utterly in the form of consciousness as the universal will (and just as much self-consciousness) constricted into the simple self from out of all the expanse of existence or all the variety of ends and judgments.

All of these different previous modes of cultural formation are negated in this fruitless quest for self-conscious self-sufficiency. This universal will is just an abstract one.

#MH(she/her) #Phenomenology of spirit #multiplicitymademedia