Anyway, can you provide more information about the problem you want to solve?
Oh, I wasn’t trying to solve a problem (except for subconscious few). I think philosophizing has its own value, an end in itself and “random insights” are what makes it interesting. It’s rare when someone takes it seriously enough for it to be interesting. And it was interesting for me so far. Your brain is more sophisticated than mine but I will still try to entertain you, especially considering that I see many things differently.
a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography
I think he exaggerated a bit. As many philosophers reflect due to this very reason—to reflect oneself out of the system. To see oneself from the side as an object, as a stone. In order to get an insight and transcend it. And yes, for the attentive such thinking is the most intimate reflection of a person one can think of. For example, here is the first clause of Alexander Piatigorsky’s testament:
He must ceaselessly remain in fear that he will die having failed or not having had enough time to realize his thought of himself as an external object alien to this thought and realize this very thought as alien to all his past and present objects, primarily to himself. This is Noble Fear.
I also think that disabling the internal narrative might be bad for your subjective experience of life, since the story being written might stop feeling like a story.
No need to be afraid here. All-permeating tranquility takes its place and its very life-affirming and accepting, it’s like saying “yes” to everything. I can say so because I’ve experienced those moments when the narrative stops and they are freeing. It’s like you get a complete wonder out of things you previously deemed mundane. But the total shut down of the narrative is my goal and, yes, it’s possible (the post I mentioned above about nonduality discusses this in detail). You say “you need” to “feel meaning”. Who told you about the need? And the meaning-making changes when the brain turns to different modes of being. It’s not obliterated. Kegan invented five stages of development of the self and the meaning-making mechanism where each stage crushes before new begins. It’s a helpful map, when your mind is in a transitional stage.
I consider things like questioning the realness of reality to be a serious mistake.
That might mean two things. Either you deem the very question flawed because the concept of reality is like our belief in ghosts. Or you have to define what you mean by reality, or at least describe it the way you see it.
And to you, the experience would be real.
But it would be a compassionate thing to explain to me that demons don’t exist or direct me to seek a professional help. Not that anyone says someone has to be compassionate. It just would be such an act.
it exists precisely to create a friction which results in development
First, I call development everything that helps me to get rid of the self, to transcend it completely. Second, I disagree with that because suffering doesn’t lead to development in the usual sense as well, it only increases entropy of the situation. Some strong individuals may learn from it, but most won’t. It’s just an explosion, no free energy involved as it doesn’t have a structure.
I think consciousness and the moment itself is “foreground”.
That’s why in ancient Advaita texts they mention two types of consciousness: objectifying consciousness (or empiric) and Pure Consciousness, that which lights up the screen of the theatre (or the cave). From the standpoint of objectifying consciousness, Pure Consciousness is either a fiction or a concept. But from the standpoint of Pure Consciousness, objectifying consciousness is an illusion. Think of the moon that reflects in many waters in pots. Every reflection thinks it has light of its own independent of other pots and of the moon. Until the pot is broken and water drains. Only the moon remains.
because pain grounds them in the moment
But you are already 100% grounded at that point. Meaning when not even pain can distract you from pure being.
Why do you believe so?
I assess my coping strategies as subpar and the internal narrative as overly anxious. I rarely think in terms of society as such complexity is beyond my brains, but I tell you this: do you think it could have been otherwise? It’s a rhetorical question. On that note, I also don’t think we create things or that they are sloppy concepts or ours, we indeed discover them, nobody chose to be born with 10 fingers (which leads to decimal arithmetics) or bilateral vision (which basically gives you trigonometry), Theory of General Relativity or the Universal Turing Machine is practically inevitable for observers like us. ”… we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper” / Einstein.
I could make my happiness not depend on anything, at all. But…
First, one has to come to that place. Everything that needs fixing will be fixed. When you are happy you still tend to homeostasis, not only when you are in pain.
Conquering yourself and conquring reality is two different tasks.
Conquering oneself is tantamount to finding out the reality.
I don’t feel the need to solve it.
But you’ve said yourself, that the point is in playing the game not winning it, so the intention to avoid suffering is there, you accept it, it’s only that you don’t believe it can be done (or is healthy), so you play this game. That is which surprises me. As one thing can be generalized to living beings (and I’m very cautious with generalizations usually) and that’s tendency to be happy. But in your model you refuse to seek an antidote for the sore. I don’t say I don’t believe you, but find it surprising.
That which does not kill you makes you stronger
I don’t agree with Nietzsche here. I’ve already described the way I see it. It’s increase in entropy and the absence of free energy. The energy is there, it’s just cannot be used constructively (i.e. to lessen the entropy increase). So it leads to dissipation of heat (both metaphorically and not).
I’m afraid that’s why you’re not doing well in life
And what’s wrong with that? Or who has the choice over preset conditions of one’s makeup? You see you say you don’t want to win the game but tend to think in terms of conflict and power, as if you do.
It’s like saying “those who don’t understand, speak. Those who understand, remain silent”.
And I think understanding is not a guaranteed outcome even if one is intelligent (and more so if not), but that doesn’t mean you must necessarily remain silent, some will see it from another angle, some won’t. Every way to solve a Zen koan is an error, yet it is helpful in order to lead beyond the mind.
Something thinks, therefore something is.
A cartesian answer. But what about the deep dreamless sleep? You could not think there, but you know that you are somehow. You don’t doubt your being in your deep sleep, do you? If there were no thinking there, how so?..
You must have a reason for seeking enlightenment in the first place, some reason that suffering doesn’t work well. I think there’s good excitement (thrill) and bad excitement (anxiety). And that there’s good insanity (slight mania, vividness, charisma, stong engagement) and bad insanity (mental illness and the mind collapsing under its own generated strain). I hope to flip as many negatives into positives as possible, rather than to remove the mechanisms.
To reflect oneself out of the system
The meaning of the quote is that this is impossible. When a person says “Life is suffering”, what they mean is “My life is suffering”. It’s about them. Everything in life only exist in relation to other things. “Nothing exists but the whole”. How a picture looks depends as much on the thing being photographed as it depends on the camera. In this case, a camera is trying to say “the picture looks like this in itself. I, the camera, am unbiased”.
In order to remove all the bias, you must remove the entire person, including the thinking process. You will not be able to remove “error” any faster than “virtue”.
There are insights that you naturally come across if you suffer enough. Buddha came across them, as I did I. They’re not necessarily true, but most of them are the experience of a previous idea breaking apart, and the mind freeing itself from something which used to trouble it.
Is it really life-affirming if it doesn’t invest into the moment? i.e. if it’s without “skin in the game”. Saying yes to everything means that one seemingly lacks preference. Well, the brain can give a positive value to everything all at once, it’s has slightly different rules from mathematical systems. And it is indeed possible to destroy the narration. But I think that is strongly tied to the meaning-making circuit of the brain? I experience meaning as “weight” and “relevance”. Weight is strongly tied to “caring” as well. Here’s some examples:
In Dragon ball, the power levels scale exponentially every season, making the old numbers feel meaningless. In videogames, cheating ruins the value of resources because the value was given by scarcity. Also, leaving a game and coming back later makes it less meaningful because the relevance has decreased. A way to momentarily get rid of anxiety is to tell yourself “we’re just monkeys on a big rock hurling through space” or to otherwise zoom out to a bigger perspective. This is an outside-in perspective rather than an inside-out perspective, making the brain filter away the self which is suffering. The ratio of space that you occupy in the perspective is also about a billion times smaller when you reduce the earth to a rock in space. I think this is WHY the method works.
Finally, the “rat race” makes one fixate on productivity, which makes the brain assign less values to things which do not further the goal of productivity, so the value which things are assigned depends on ones current plans, which explains why people who don’t know what to do next also feel a sense of meaninglessness.
These examples are not exhaustive of how perception and meaning is tied together, but I find it difficult to come up with methods which lessen suffering without decreasing weight, caring and subjective relevance, and therefore meaning. And meditation seems to work by modifying perception directly. I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong or that my model is incomplete, but the model applies to myself.
Or you have to define what you mean by reality
Reality is that which exists physically. These words merely “point” at reality. Reality is not “ghosts”, I think you’re fixing the wrong side of the equation. The perspective from which reality appears unreal is a ghost.
It’s still ambiguous what I’m actually claiming, so I will be more direct: In order to live in reality, one must have no mental model of reality. When you see a car, you must see the car itself, as if you had never seen a car before. Your brain wants to pull up the concept of car that it’s already familiar with, and this is what would prevent you from experiencing the car as it is. I think one is the closest to reality when they have no preconceived notions, not even the knowledge of logic, nor of concepts.
But it would be a compassionate thing to explain to me that demons don’t exist
To the person experiencing demons, it would feel like that. But perhaps the person who has lost the ability to believe in anything except material reality would be jealous of such an experience. And find it cute in the same sense that it’s cute when a child believes in santa or the tooth fairy.
And fair. I used “development” to mean “adaptation to circumstances of life”.
Suffering leads to development when and only when one overcomes a problem. If one loses to the problem, it becomes a setback, and if the tension remains unresolved, then it’s just a passive energy sink.
Can you learn math without studying math? I think you need math problems to overcome in order to get better at math. The problem helps you find the solution, as the two are one. If you have math homework you just keep trying to ignore, then ignoring it will tire you out (energy sink). If the math is way above your level you become discouraged (lose momentum/energy). If you can do the math, successfully it feels good to the extent that it challenged you. If you were to design a video game and calculate the amount of experience points something would give, it would be a perfect fit to my analogy. And despite this all being subjective and mental, it seems to describe how physical growth in power works, too.
Are you sure challenges can’t improve a system? To grow stronger through conflict is almost the definition of life. The greatest growth results from the greatest suffering. Almost everything I write here I discovered on my own, because I refused the alternative, which was dying.
My entropy also increases when I read a new book, but then I chew on the information and integrate it into my worldview, again lowering the entropy. It’s similar to actual eating and digesting. And physical trainin and healing. If you want low mental entropy, I suggest you don’t learn anymore. Conflicting information reduce the coherence of your mind, increasing entropy until the conflicts (inconsistencies) are resolved. Even chatting with me leads to conflict (inconsistencies) which result in growth (stronger models). The feeling of mental clarity, and confidence, is likely just the minds certaincy about its own worldview. From self-esteem issues to confidence the only things which change are the certaincy of belief and the value assessment of oneself.
It’s a rhetorical question
If you think of things as “created” rather than “discovered”, then you won’t be bothered when you realize how arbitrary many things are. It also won’t bother you that different people have different worldviews. It also won’t bother you that some things are emergent, and that you can’t prove anything exists prior to the universe. It also allows you to create your own values and to believe in their legitimacy. About 80% of all existential issues disappear on the spot for anyone who adopts this view.
Tantamount to finding out the reality
I think integration is needed, not just self-tyranny. And I think one learns to know oneself, rather than reality. But the reality which is not tied to oneself is, in my opinion, irrelevant.
The reason I wrote that, by the way, is that one can focus so much on spiritual growth that everyday life is neglected. In that way, the type of victory does not transfer over.
The intention to avoid suffering is there
I avoid outcomes which are against my taste. Suffering can be beautiful, just likes movies which make us cry can be excellent movies. But why is this anymore surprising than people loving video games? Some even choose hard mode or hardcore mode, intentionally making the game difficult and frustrating.
Or who has the choice over preset conditions of one’s makeup?
Self-modification is doable. Meditation is self-modification too. And I need to know the mathematics of experience in order to create a richer experience. Imagine a fictional book character gaining self-awareness, and instead of breaking the fourth wall and invalidating the book, he chooses to remain a character and make the book even more thrilling to read.
I only need to show that I sometimes exist in order to show that existence is real. I don’t really care about the reality which I’m not around to experience, and if I was only alive 17 hours a day, that wouldn’t really bother me either.
I’m not sure what experiments will align the most with your quest for enlightenment. I can remain happy even when the ratio of suffering to pleasure is 85⁄15. I guess I can teach you one way of escaping yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. The brain can filter out background noise, right? You can treat your own suffering and thoughts like such noise. This would be a bit cruel to yourself, though, since you’d be ignoring their (your) suffering.
Most anxiety comes from not having things in order, and the best way to deal with it is to take life by the horns. Don’t ask for permission, and don’t merely hope. Cause what you want to happen, you have the ability. If you ask me “How will X go?” my first answer will be “I don’t know, I lack information”, but this is just an impulse, a lie. I know what my future will be, how my relationships will go, which of my goals will fail and succeed at this rate. I just have to look, and looking is scary, but if I open my eyes and also steer things in a good direction, then there’s no anxiety and worries about failure. I will know I won’t fail. I can even decide when to go to sleep and when to wake up (and I won’t need an alarm). I could lie and say “It’s unpredictable”, but I can feel my brain negotiating with itself, deciding before it falls asleep if it wants to wake up or sleep until it’s rested. I’ve just sometimes pretended I didn’t know. This is probably what is meant by “There is no try”.
Let me quote “EST, playing the game the new way”, for I just remembered where I’ve seen this idea before: “You have a remarkable ability which you never acknowledged before. It is, to look at a situation and know whether you can do it. And I mean really know the answer for you. And all I’m saying is that if you can see that you can do it, go on and do it”. This requires some level of alertness above that of self-deception and autopilot, but that’s not a very high level. It also requires you and your subconscious being somewhat on the same page (you will know!).
Regarding favorable states, they get easier as you have more control over yourself. Can you relax on command? What about hearing a spoiler and then intentionally choosing not to commit it to memory? Can you placebo yourself without a sugar pill? These things are all quite fun.
You exist continuously, otherwise you would loose the previous thread of experience and it would be incoherent. The thing is that being is pre-conceptual, not established based on thinking. How is it established? That’s a greatest koan for me. It’s like asking “Who am I, really?” If one is honest, one will acknowledge that all the mental chatter that the mind comes up with is not “I”. “I’m a human” is a thought. Which didn’t occur to one in the deep sleep. Yet, one didn’t cease being.
Reality is that which exists physically.
I find physicality is a weak description of reality as you omit the fact how do you know of such physicality. You first know it in your thinking which is a process in consciousness. I tend to think that reality has to possess a character of immutability and must be self-revealing without a break to be considered real. Something akin to Leibniz’ idea of a monad. But since nothing we observe has such property, everything is in perpetual flux of change, the question looms, is there a reality that is distinct from the observer of such reality?
To sum up, you cannot establish physicality unless you first aware of it. And the nature of such observer is also at best questionable. Therefore we operate through the principles of relativity. We establish a local pattern and induce that it has the universal character. That’s how we build “the reality”. But something that is dependent on such process is highly vulnerable in terms of calling it “the reality”. It is at best a consensus we reach through the experience of many observers and the principle of relativity. But can it be called “real”? I’m not so sure.
I hope to flip as many negatives into positives as possible, rather than to remove the mechanisms.
So you are essentially saying, “I have a frightful dream, but I don’t want to wake up, I just want to make it a beautiful dream.” That’s an option. I just personally consider it unacceptable.
The meaning of the quote is that this is impossible.
And I believe (that’s the word) that it is possible. Very-very hard but possible. The basic insight in awakening is exactly that person doesn’t exist. It’s simply a conglomeration of thoughts. It’s not removing all of thinking, but just self-referential part of it, the self-talk. Problem solving remains.
I experience meaning as “weight” and “relevance”. Weight is strongly tied to “caring” as well.
Weight and consequently meaning from the narrative is indeed removed, but that’s like removing the meaning from the dreaming apparatus, you stop believing in the dream. What takes its place is satisfaction from just being. No matter the circumstances. So meaning is derived from just being and being ok with it. The circuits of meaning-making are indeed changed. But I have to admit, I cannot understand that state before it’s reached. It’s like the blind who tries to imagine the colors. One has to first fix one’s vision. It’s not theoretical.
Are you sure challenges can’t improve a system?
Challenges can improve the system. Conflict cannot. Learning math is a challenge. Sparring partner is a challenge. Enemy is a conflict.
If you want low mental entropy, I suggest you don’t learn anymore.
That’s a structured challenge, which I can digest and which as a result helps me to lessen entropy. Not learning is not an option as the mind seeks for ways to come to safety constantly. And if one doesn’t learn, the seeking mechanism will just lead one to anxiety. So the dynamics is this: either learn or become restless. I have to admit, that’s the default behavior and it is changed after awakening, where one can remain peaceful without a structured challenge. But for now, learning is inevitable.
It also allows you to create your own values.
And how did you learn of those values? You don’t exist in a vacuum independently of relations. They are causes and conditions that lead you to accept those values. You as an agent, are not in control over it.
Imagine a fictional book character gaining self-awareness
You want a better dream. But you operate under the assumption that you have control over life. I don’t have such an assumption.
I know what my future will be
And I don’t have a clue. All predictions in my case are worrisome and not constructive. But the most importantly, you again assume a capacity of control. Who is the controller? Is it that a conglomeration of thoughts that is built from the past experiences “decides” what to do next? But then it’s not control, it’s fatalism. If that’s something else, one has first to find out what is meant by the word “I”. What is this “I” who decides and controls its own destiny? How is it built? Do you even have control over your thoughts? It’s like a parable, “take a medicine not thinking of a red monkey”, and it cannot be done. I’m skeptical of all prescriptions like you’ve mentioned from EST. As the controller is the controlled. I cannot spot for the sake of me any agent that is apart from life, that can change its course and trust me I’ve tried to spot it. It seems it all works on its own, without the “Mighty Controller”. It is all out of my hands.
I suppose that’s true. But aren’t questions and answers false? If I ask you how heavy a rock is, and you answer that it’s 7 kilo, isn’t our conversation happening entirely outside of the rock? Neither the question nor the answer really relates to the rock itself. So when you ask what something “really is”, neither the question or the answer is any more real than your experience of the thing, they’re both inferior. And a memory is, at best, a low quality imitation of an experience, it does the vividness of the experience no justice. The same goes for the re-telling of a story, one had to be there in order to experience the real thing.
For the same reason, I don’t think thoughts, models, theories, explanations and descriptions can get to the bottom of things. They’re all derivatives.
How do you know of such physicality
Through my senses. If you’re asking how I can prove that physical reality exists, that idea is really not something which bothers me. If you mean that it might be illusion or whatever, you’re right, but it’s even less likely that beings exist which have a shared illusion of something they call physical reality, and a whole lot of coherent information which just so happens to not break said illusion. It would be as if somebody faked an autograph by simulating an entire person neuron by neuron and then having them interact with somebody asking for an autograph and then compying it over from the simulation onto the paper. Intuitively, you only have more things to explain if the simple assumption is wrong.
Is there a reality that is distinct from the observer of such reality?
A changing thing can be constant. A stable orbit is something which is constant but also changes over time. And gravity is constant acceleration. The soluton to an equation can also be, for instance, a line. By “unchanging”, you’re actually asking for everything to be zero-dimensional (a single dot). I think we make a lot of unreasonable demands of reality. That reason itself makes wrong assumptions about things.
Therefore we operate through the principles of relativity
No, relativity is correct because absoluteness cannot exist! I meant this literally. Nothing is absolute, for there is no fixed neutral reference point. You might as well try looking for the middle of the surface of a sphere. It’s easy to think that ones own culture is reality until one meets other cultures. A person with a single watch always knows what time it is, but give him two different watches and he will have a problem on his hands. The problem can only be fixed by pointing to a new unique authority, like the clock on the church. But then you discover another church, and now the problem is back! Then you look in a bigger scope for the next unique thing. Similar problem to infinite regress and Infinite ascent.
Now, most people think that “universal truths” are “absolute truths”, but it’s really just that they made “the universe” the new authority. If you point our that, perhaps other universes exist, then they will say “well, math is objective! Laws of physics are objective”. But you can create different mathematics, they’re just axiomatic systems. And it’s possible that other universes have other laws of physics. Even if you arrived at a true upper layer, it would be finite and definite, and thus limited in a way, and thus exist as something specific and thus not universal.
No local patterns can have universal character. Things literally only exist in one place. Existence is uniqueness. If something is multiplicity (like the future), then it does not yet exist. And as soon as it comes into existence, it’s definite, precisely because every other possiblity is excluded at that moment in time. Every single atom is different. From this we arrive at the semi-famous quote: “All generalizations, except maybe this one, are false”.
I have a frightful dream
I experience both positive and negation emotions. Why do you decide to define the experience by the negative emotions? It’s not wrong, but the opposite is just as valid. For the same reason that these two statements are equivalent:
1: Every time I get up, I get knocked down again.
2: Every time I get knocked down, I get up again.
Both are a loop transitioning between two states forever, but one sounds negative and the other sounds positive. But it’s the one and same loop, mirrored.
Person doesn’t exist
I think this means “The (personality/ego/constructed sense of self) doesn’t exist”. Bu the generalization is true even for objects, and I meant the physical person. When I look at things, what I see is a function of my eyes. I cannot seperate what I see from eyes. What I taste depends on my taste buds, if taste buds do not exist then neither does taste. Beauty is also in the eye of the beholder. Thus, if a picture of a flower is ugly, it’s human to assume that there’s something wrong with the flower, but what if the problem is actually with the camera? When a person says “life is bad”, why do we assume that there’s something wrong with life, rather than the person who speaks such words?
Meaning is derived from just being and being ok with it
I don’t think mere being results in meaning. But I think that a person can endure a lack of meaning if he has a sense of beauty. In either case, I feel like enlightenment undermines itself. It cannot be a meaningful persuit if the persuit destroys its own meaning.
Challenges can improve the system
I just model it as two interacting forces with some incompatibility. Is two magnetic poles repulsing eachother challenge or conflict? What about the desire to be productive and the desire to relax? What about a guilty pleasure? I try to model things in such a way that I can trace a single principle from the laws of physics all the way to subjective things. This doesn’t always succeed, but it’s because the brain has different elemental operations than physics does. In real life, hot + cold is lukewarm. Your brain however, can experience the qualia of frost and burning at the same time, they don’t cancel out.
The mind seeks for ways to come to safety constantly
Yeah, but that’s like how an insecure person fishing for compliments. It’s an “error” stemming from a self-protective mechanism, and you can turn it off as long as you can believe it’s safe to do so. You could argue that one has to learn why, but I’m tempted to say “the answer is already within you, you can already do it, you just need to realize it”.
You don’t exist in a vacuum
I have access to my own nature. I can isolate myself and reflect on what I truly like. I can choose, but only because the brain is malleable.
You operate under the assumption that you have control over life
At least, I have control over myself. And I’m a part of life, so I have a little bit of power. And like you, I could make some good arguments that this power is an illusion. But if you look around the world, you will see individuals who singlehandedly seem to have a lot of influence on the world. It’s like those who are crazy enough to believe that they can make a difference are those who can.
Who is the controller?
I’m not sure it’s a “who”. It feels like some mutual understanding between the elephant and the rider, which is experienced as a mixture of agency and certainty. It’s not merely following a schematic created by memory, because if it were, one wouldn’t be able to turn their life around from one day to the next, and yet some people have managed this. The mechanism doesn’t question, it answers. It doesn’t ask “What is it?” It says “Thus it shall be”, it doesn’t follow, it leads.
One has first to find out what is meant by the word “I”
This feels like a limiting belief. It’s a bit like “In order to drive a car, you must first know how it works, and somebody will have to prove to you that it’s actually a car”, but any idiot can get in, turn the key and press the gas pedal, and off it goes.
And it cannot be done
You could say “Take a medicine, and think of yellow flowers”, and then no red monkeys would bother you. The reason that it doesn’t work, is that when you write “not X”, you’re also writing X. The reason it works in logic is because “not false” is evaluated to “true”. It changes into something which works. The brain does not seem to do this step, at least not in the same way.
That is apart from life
I don’t think anything which exists is apart from life. And since we exist, we’re part of life. I think your issue is that you deprive yourself of agency because you don’t trust yourself with it, and then you hide this fact from yourself.
Can you not remember any cases where you “woke up” and allowed yourself agency? This always happens to me when people I care about are in danger. If you ask me if I can get to the graveyard one night, I will tell you no, I don’t know where it is, and it’s basically impossible to navigate in the dark, and it’s cold and I’m too tired. But if you told me that my grandma had fallen at the graveyard and was lying on the ground waiting for me, I’d be there within about 15 minutes. And there are no if’s, it’s an assertion. It feels unconditional. Can you try similar thought experiments and capture this feeling of certainty? That’s probably the elephant you can feel. You allow yourself to use your own strength because circumstances legitimize it.
Now, these experiments might fail. You might feel like a victim instead, and wanting to call for help. That’s alright, it just means that your elephant considers it a better strategy to get the attention of other people who can help you. You might also just panic on the spot—in this case it would be because the elephant first panics, and then protects itself from the feeling of panic through a mental retreat, because it incorrectly believes that it’s the emotion, rather than the source of emotion, which is the danger.
If it works, I’d say focus on negotiating with yourself, and on creating mental framings which legitimize your agency. Fuse what you want to do, and what you know you ought to do, into one. Watch which objections occur, those are the limiting beliefs. E.g. “I want to believe the explanation I’m reading right now, but I want more proof first, as it may be wrong”. In this case, the elephant would be afraid of holding false beliefs, because it thinks it can be hurt by them. There’s an ocean of possible limiting beliefs, including “I don’t think I deserve success”, and “successful people tend to be bad people, and I’m a good person, therefore I must not be successful”. All self-defense, which is also self-sabotage.
I can explain more, but the solution doesn’t actually require understanding the solution. Neither is it the case that it will work if, and only if, I can prove that it will. Reality cares just as little about logical arguments as ideologues and religious fanatics do.
I tend to agree with everything that you wrote about the reality considering its content. And applying Occam’s razor to exclude the simulation hypothesis. The only thing which I don’t do, I don’t internally consider it real (except in the empirical sense and in everyday usage). One might say, I consider it quasi-real. Why is that? I tend to agree with Gaudapada, who said, “Something that isn’t real in the beginning and in the end, isn’t real even in the interval between the two.” For example, the dream comes out of nowhere and ends in the same place, therefore it’s not even real in-between. The body is born someday and will die some other day, therefore it cannot be considered real in-between. And so on.
The only thing that I have doubts about is pure consciousness itself. I’m not so sure it has a beginning and an end. For all I know, it may be a universal characteristic of existence. That is, not a quality of beings with a particular complexity of brains, but that which permeates all of existence. It seems like a religious belief, but I had this experience which proved to me that some “field” exists beyond the conceptual layer of thinking. And I could not say if it had a beginning or an end. It’s rather my thoughts about it that have a beginning and an end. My thoughts are not reliable indicator or reality as they are themselves come and go (as in deep sleep).
A changing thing can be constant.
It’s the observer who deems it constant. It’s constant with regard to the observer. But even the orbits wobble. As Heraclitus said, “A man cannot step into the same river twice, because it is not the same river, and he is not same man.” It’s the second part that is constantly missed: space-time changes but so is the observer of it. Orbits and gravity formed over time with the distribution of matter somehow. We still have no answer which goes beyond the mechanism of gravity. But we have no reason to assume that it’s constant all over. “Unchanging” thing would lead to a plethora of unresolvable contradictions (yes, I know that postulating pure consciousness is also such a thing, I have no answer to it yet, only a limited experience of it).
Why do you decide to define the experience by the negative emotions?
I meant it as an example. You seem to want a better dream (whatever “better” means to you). And I want to wake up from the dream altogether.
I don’t think mere being results in meaning.
When you experience it even once even in a glimpse you will know for certain, that that’s a preferable state. Theorizing doesn’t do it justice. And I’m not the right person to fully describe this experience as I don’t have it on a regular basis. I only know that it exists. In that state the search for meaning itself stops, but it doesn’t land you in void and despair, on the contrary, everything seems alright and as “it should be”.
Is two magnetic poles repulsing eachother challenge or conflict?
I tend to think that it only applies to complex macro systems. Conflict is something that leads to rapid increase of entropy and no free energy (i.e. no possibility to learn from it, to use the obtained knowledge later, no structure, etc.). Challenge is something constructive that has a structure, from which one may learn and apply knowledge later to reduce entropic growth. When challenge is too complex it turns into conflict.
and you can turn it off as long as you can believe it’s safe to do so
What I really meant there was that the mind is always “on”, always seeking for something to do and act, and if one is not involved with something constructive, it turns into restlessness. So one is almost certain to engage in some acquisition of knowledge or some other task that makes one less anxious. One cannot just sit for undefined period of time and be alright with it (until awakening). So the suggestion “not to learn” is not feasible.
I have access to my own nature. I can isolate myself and reflect on what I truly like. I can choose, but only because the brain is malleable.
You accept that there is some nature there beyond the facade of the “I” (which is just a post hoc construct for experience). And you allocate to it much trust if you confide the most important decisions to it. Are you sure it’s not a substitution to “I don’t know where my decisions and values are coming from”, to the unknown which you cannot accept?
At least, I have control over myself.
And the more I look the less I see that I have control over my mind. It’s all the elephant’s doing, over which I have no control. That’s the current model. But I have been observing my mind for a long time. And frankly I was always doubting the control that I have. I did few experiments that proved to me, that the control is a fiction. You cannot will what you will.
but any idiot can get in, turn the key and press the gas pedal, and off it goes
The only question is where it will go in such case? I consider this question the most important for the rider to figure out. As until it’s crystal clear, it’s not certain where are you going, with what speed and whose objective you perform.
I think your issue is that you deprive yourself of agency because you don’t trust yourself with it, and then you hide this fact from yourself.
Plausible assumption. But I have been observing my mind very carefully for a long time to come to this understanding. I cannot find any particular “doer” with certainty, that would have at least quasi-real character. Whenever I look, I only see intentions, thoughts that are coming out of nowhere really. I understand that all of them are of reflex nature, but I cannot spot the first member of such reflex.
That’s probably the elephant you can feel.
Yes, that’s the elephant. And the rider cannot trick it really into believing it’s a life and death situation. It’s much more intelligent than the rider. Why even this? The rider is a post hoc construct of the elephant for some secretarial tasks.
In this case, the elephant would be afraid of holding false beliefs, because it thinks it can be hurt by them.
I believe that it’s the rider who is afraid and has limiting beliefs. Self-referential internal narrative (SRIN) is an aspect of the rider. Self-negotiation and self-observation are always limited to the rider’s capacities and they only prolong its life. My goal is to get rid of the SRIN, i.e. to refactor the rider into a more friendly function or get rid of it completely (i.e. awakening). And to let the elephant do its thing.
I can explain more, but the solution doesn’t actually require understanding the solution.
Yeah, I’ve already got what you mean. You are still enthusiastic with regard to self-improvement. In my case I want more radical change than the change of the rider’s “mood” (function, etc.). Changing the rider’s “mood” may have its value, I don’t argue with that. It’s just I’m sick and tired of SRIN enormously and want to get rid of it. I know it’s possible so I tend in that direction.
I think everything empirical must be real, it just could be distorted. If you have a hallucination about something, the hallucination is real, and it’s content is real just like how a movie is real (that is, the movie exists, but its content did not necessarily take place in real life). The only problem with “I think, therefore I am” is that it supposes an “I”, and that is assumes we know what thinking is. The logic is sound in that, in order for something to be able to hallucinate, something must exist.
I don’t think we can claim that the dream came out of nowhere. It’s like a computer program claiming that the computer it runs on “came out of nowhere”. The computer existed prior to the program, and it will exist after the program finishes executing. The computer is in a higher scope, and the program cannot break outside of itself, nor can the program understand anything outside of its own grammar, for that’s the scope of its existence. A computer program is not a structure which is capable of calculating and holding information, the calculation IS the structure, the information IS the structure. There is only structure. We can only experience ourselves, and we can’t think of anything external because every thought takes place, exists internally. So just like how a thought in your mind cannot break outside of your mind, and a character in a book cannot leave the book, I think it’s arrogant of human beings when their brains decided that the structure they’re embedded inside is wrong or fake. There’s orders of inclusion, scope and chronology which are broken by such assumption.
I’m not so sure it has a beginning and an end
You assume thoughts have beginnings and ends, and that thoughts therefore aren’t real. But I think thoughts exist physically. A thought contains information, it takes up space, and information must be encoded in something and exist in some location (these are both one). So the only conclusion possible is that thoughts are real, but that we have no way to verify that our thoughts about things outside our thoughts are true. And I will agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a problem.
Also, you think that consciousness may still be real, even if thoughts have beginnings and ends, so you only require the upper layer to be real. This means that the universe may still be real even if human beings have beginnings and ends. You’re only afraid that the uppermost layer is illusion, right? And I suppose you main issue is regarding the agency of the self, and now its realness.
It’s constant with regard to the observer.
If you take a thing which changes through time, and you model time as a physical dimension, then you have one static four-dimensional object. A DVD is also a static, unchanging object, but you can use one to play a movie, and a movie is visual and auditory information over time. My point about the orbits came from the law “An object in motion stays in motion”, it says “Something which changes over time will change over time in the exact same way forever unless its disturbed from the outside”, and the uppermust layer of the universe is a whole, so there is no external force to disturb it.
Heraclitus is right, but it’s because the entire structure which is life must either never repeat, repeat forever in a huge loop which spans the age of the universe, or have a fractal-like structure. That’s the only possibilities which does not violate “Always changes but has no beginning nor end”. This seems in line with the poincare recurrence theorem and the conservation of energy.
So, that was a lot of words, but it solves all these topics without breaking any fundamental laws, it just requires you to accept that local truths aren’t necessarily global truths. And this should be fine, since I’ve also shown that this doesn’t make the local truth less real.
You seem to want a better dream
Yes. But not because I dislike the dream. I’d keep dreaming even if it didn’t improve, for I’d still consider it better than no dream. So to me, destroying the dream would be a loss, not a gain. And, by being both the creator of the dream and the dreamer, it will be my own fault when the dream sucks, and I will have nothing external to blame or complain to.
I’ve experienced the ideal state before, or something similar. But in that state, I didn’t even care if all my friends left me, for I wanted the best for them, and if the best for them was leaving me, I’d consider that good.
When you’re in the state, you do experience it as preferable. But angry people also want to be angry, and depressive thoughts feel correct when you’re depressed, and drunk people rarely think they’ve had too much. You can only really judge a state from the outside, so you need to exit the state in order to judge it. I know I’m doing the opposite when I say that immersion into the moment is good, but this is because I experience life as a work of art, and there’s no wrong or flawed art, so it cannot be judged, only experienced.
I don’t think it’s the dream which is painful, even. It’s the self-torture the brain engages with in order to keep itself alive. For instance, it predicts a large set of bad possible futures, and then feels pain for all of them at once. It doesn’t even map good futures to feel good about. It basically stabs itself in an internal simulation order to motivate itself to avoid being stabbed outside of the simulation.
No possibility to learn from it
I think one can learn to use most poisons as medicine, even if it takes time. Human beings, somehow, manage to fight entropy. I think even anxiety is entropy, which is why people relax with music, rocking back and forth, by cleaning, and with rituals. We’re soothed by all entropy-reducing actions. We love order as long as it doesn’t drop so low that we feel trapped and understimulated.
But I think your way of thinking allows for too high complexity. People with downs syndrome live in the same complex world as yourself, but their thoughts are more simple, and from what I can tell, they’re usually quite happy people. Animals, too, are simple, and this lack of complexity does not threaten their survival. How could low IQ, and false knowledge, be a problem? Sharks have literally been around for longer than the north star, and they never discovered rationality.
If one is not involved with something constructive, it turns into restlessness
I think this only happens if one conditions oneself into such a state. If you know without a doubt that relaxation is productive because hard work requires rest, then I don’t think your brain will protect you from wasting time, by protecting you from relaxation (that is, sending you warning signals every time you try to relax)
One cannot just sit for undefined period of time and be alright with it
I think you only need to sit and look at a wall for around 40 minutes before the brain gives up trying to fight again you. The impulses to do something else stops as the brain realizes it cannot force you. I think meditations work the same way, they can’t be too short, as it takes a bit of time for the brain to change the mode that it’s in. But yeah, it will feel very uncomfortable for a while, and 40 minutes is just a guess, it varies between people.
You accept that there is some nature there beyond the facade of the “I”
Yeah, thought I wouldn’t call the “I” a facade. It’s real, it’s just not everything. Just like pain is real, even though other emotions and sensations exist, and many other brain circuits exist outside of emotions and sensations. When the elephant and rider is in alignment, it still just feels like I’m in alignment with myself. But this ‘myself’ goes deeper than my identity, persona and ego. I consider my entire body to be me. It doesn’t matter that it’s not. Two seperate people can be on the same wavelength and thus understand eachother, so I can also be on wavelength with myself, even if the components I consider one are actually disconnected. And I have introspective access to the decisions which are made by the brain, so I can usually tell when I’m lying to myself or acting on impulse.
You cannot will what you will.
I struggled with this in the past. Then I modeled it as “Neurochemistry is stronger than psychology. You cannot simply think your way to more dopamine”. Then I realized that the release of neurotransmitters are triggered by thoughts and experiences, things that I have access to. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re in a room and everyone likes you—your brain will increase your confidence a little, as long as you don’t accidentally focus on the fact that you don’t believe in what you see. The brain doesn’t really differentiate between the subjective and objective, and between imagined scenarios and real ones. Your reframing will affect perceived reality, and if you make that less threatening, then you will have a more relaxed elephant.
The only question is where it will go in such case?
Look at the destination, and that’s where you will end up. The brain is good at navigation. But if you don’t want to act before succeess is guanteed, I suggest reading this phrase every day for a while:
“Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner. Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult. I will persist until I succeed.”
Whenever I look, I only see intentions
If you tell yourself “Everything is fine” your mind will object. It should also show you the counter-evidence which caused the objection. As you “argue against yourself”, you should feel the source of the counter-arguments, no? Something like “Here’s a memory where you thought was fine and it wasn’t. Here’s a bad situation which has 4% chance of occuring in the future. Here’s the cognitive dissonance between your statement and how your body feels. Here’s a weak unpleasant emotion associated with the phrase, because you disliked it last time you heard it. Here’s the memory of somebody being nice to you because you didn’t look fine, which taught you that not being fine is valuable”.
You cannot really trick the elephant, unless it believes that you’re tricking it in a way which leads to a better future. But you see, there’s no need to lie to it. For the most part, it just wants you to acknowledge the worries, and to listen to it without dismissing anything. Then you can tell it “I hear your worries, I know it’s hard, but I sincerely belive it’s best for both of us if we do X”
The elephant is intelligent, but the rider can see further. I think they work best as a team. Even if you don’t like my solutions, most of them should lower anxiety, and make it easier to reach enlightenment. Unlearning beliefs which block enlightenment is at least as important as learning more. If you want the conclusion of EST, it has a lot in common with Zen: “both the enlightened and the unenlightened man are totally moving in the world of stimulus-response, stimulus-response, the enlightened man seizes a single space after the stimulus to choose, say “yes” to the response. The response will occur in any case (what is, is), and the enlightened man differs from the unenlightened solely in choosing the response, in choosing what he gets… when he gets it.”
The logic is sound in that, in order for something to be able to hallucinate, something must exist.
Yes! We establish thinking based on being, not vice versa. Being is pre-conceptual. Everything else we might doubt, but that doubting happens in being. It’s like in a VR-world, we may question its content but not the fact of our being. All images may be unreal (I know you consider it real as long as immersion lasts, but I don’t), but the feeling of existence is fundamental to all that.
In Advaita tradition they call the reality Sat-Cit-Ananda. Sat is being. Cit is consciousness (awareness of being). Ananda is bliss (we are generally happy that we are, even in the depressed state or while assessing suicide, we value that we are, we might not like the pictures that are shown to us, be we like that fundamental substratum of being). Gaudapada actually said, “What is not Sat in the beginning and in the end, cannot be Sat in the middle”. So it means both reality and existence.
The computer existed prior to the program, and it will exist after the program finishes executing.
You see, I take here a phenomenological stance. I don’t know anything about the brain in a dream (except if it’s a part of the dream). Nor do I know anything about memory and neurotransmitters until I start thinking. That knowledge is not intrinsic to me as the knowledge of my being is. It may be called superimposed knowledge. In the deep sleep my thinking doesn’t function and I don’t know anything about the apparatus presumed to do such thinking, but I still am.
I take that knowledge of being as fundamental and primary to other knowledge that my senses tell me. If you will, that’s the only real thing that I have no doubt about. I may mistrust my senses or my thoughts and the world that they build, but not my being. To me it’s still mindblowing to think that all I know about the world and “myself” is mediated through the senses and thoughts! Therefore I tend to mistrust that “reality” as my senses and my thoughts are often lying to me, but I don’t mistrust the reality of being itself. So to me being and consciousness are fundamental to all other knowledge and information. Buddhists, btw, don’t agree with that. They consider consciousness as the product of nescience or primal ignorance. So they take it as a part of the spectacle. They say that the final state is neither consciousness nor its absence. Which is impossible to grasp intellectually. But they remain silent with regard to being.
that thoughts therefore aren’t real
Aren’t real in the sense mentioned. Thoughts are physical, but for me physicality is itself is not established as all processes are in interminable flux, each entity has a beginning and an end and therefore cannot be Sat. If you say that they are the continuation of interactions of the wider system which we assume in thinking, that is true, but the universe is itself under scrutiny as it’s subject to change, most likely have a beginning and an end, therefore not Sat.
Phenomenologically speaking, the only sure thing is being-consciousness (Sat-Cit), everything else is postulated with regard to available computational capacities of thinking, but which is inherently limited. The thing that we cannot process all the information that is going through us leads to ideas like space and time. It’s basically a lag in the computational process. To tell you the truth, I don’t care that much if the universe turns out to be real or not, all I care about is a projection of my mind and the way to fix it.
I suppose you main issue is regarding the agency of the self
The trouble is that intellectually I am almost sure I don’t have any agency, but I still operate as if I do. I believe that’s the problem as I’m not aligned with how things really are. My mind believes in a phantom which is not really there, i.e. the agency.
repeat forever in a huge loop which spans the age of the universe, or have a fractal-like structure.
I agree with that. You described it with intellectual rigor, it was a pleasure to read.
I’d still consider it better than no dream
Here I disagree. As waking up from the dream doesn’t mean you will end up in a void or blankness. It only means that two subnetworks of your brain that are building images of “self in time” and “self and other” are shut down. That means end to SRIN. But according to awakened individuals that’s where you experience things as they really are, i.e. without prejudice, anger, confusion, lust, etc. That is you abandon self-talk and self-subversive modes in thinking. But you will enjoy life in its fullest. It’s exactly “self-torture” that you awake from.
I think your way of thinking allows for too high complexity.
And I feel that I cannot properly process all the information that is thrown at me (meaning actions too). It’s the process of self-torture that leads to problems and doesn’t let me enjoy life. But on the other hand, it’s the same very process that pushes me in the direction of awakening. So I cannot complain because of that. It has its raison d’être.
I think you only need to sit and look at a wall for around 40 minutes before the brain gives up trying to fight again you.
Mine is keeping fighting all the way. I do 1-hour meditation sessions (self-inquiry or koan practice to be precise, as that’s the most helpful tool for me to come to rest) and it’s a fight all the way! Only occasionally it looses its grip and I turn out in the space of no-thoughts, which is a bliss beyond description. But you are right in the regard that that’s the best tool we have to fight restlessness. I meant all the other time, when one is not meditating (and meditation can and should be pursued during everyday actions, so really no problem here as turns out).
Yeah, thought I wouldn’t call the “I” a facade.
There are the states where it’s seen through. Those are the states without SRIN and are blissful. That’s why I call it a facade.
Close your eyes and imagine that you’re in a room
But you have to be willing to do so. And I agree with the rest. The exercises like that helped me in the past, but most helpful was just meditation. So I kept with meditation.
I suggest reading this phrase every day for a while
Thank you, it’s a beautiful reminder to keep going no matter the setbacks. I enjoy one parable which basically says the same thing, but it’s a tad too long to mention it here.
For the most part, it just wants you to acknowledge the worries, and to listen to it without dismissing anything.
Your rider is an uncompromising optimist! Thank you for writing this, your process itself reminds me of meditation. To let go of worries I do something else called the Sedona Method, which is basically four steps:
Load some worry into RAM, feel the texture.
Ask “Could I let go of it?”, answer with: “yes/no/I don’t know”.
Ask “Would I let go of it?”, answer with: “yes/no/I don’t know”.
Ask “When can I let go of it?”, answer with something, even if it is “never”.
The funny thing is that even if you answer “no/no/never” brain learns that that’s something one can let go of and starts restructuring! That’s one of the most helpful techniques I’ve encountered on the path.
Unlearning beliefs which block enlightenment is at least as important as learning more.
Yes, one of the most important things. I only disagree that the rider can see further. It only feigns that it can, that’s where all the worries are coming from. But when you let go and surrender to what is, something else starts happening and the elephant restructures the rider in accordance with its needs. But thank you for your kind words, your rider is irredeemable optimist and I think that is indeed helpful on the path, even if you are not looking for awakening directly. Just don’t think it’s blankness or void and that you will lose all oomph from life, the reverse is true, as one awakened man said you will realise that it’s “whole and complete” on the gut level, not just intellectually.
But there must still exist a physical location with bits of informaton which corresponds to your dream, and that is your physical brain. The contents of the dream is using prior knowledge (even if said knowledge isn’t true), you can’t see people in a dream unless the brain contains the pattern of information which resembles people. Human creativity can turn a shadow into a demon, but it cannot turn nothingness into a shadow (unless it already knows something from which the idea of shadow can be generated).
What’s important is not what neurotransmitters are, or if they’re real. Maybe what I’m saying is that “being” and “thinking” seem to be the same. This is why the boltzmann brain may exist as long as particles can appear. You can’t have thinking without physical matter, and thoughts are made of physical matter. This physical matter is also self-contained (that is, equal to itself). It exists, and its existence is the whole structure and nothing but the structure. Nothing exists universally, since existence is uniqueness, and nothing which is universal exists, for “existence” means physical matter at one and only one location, and all matter is self-contained so it cannot reach outside of itself. Thus, human beings can only ever learn information about ourselves, since learning occurs in the matter which we are made out of, and since information is made out of matter.
Here, I’m assuming that the universe follows something similar to rules of logic, and that quantum computers don’t actually allow “existence” and “multiplicity” to occur at the same time. Things get a bit more complicated if I’m wrong about this.
Now, it could be that we’re all a single consciousness, and that the self is an illusion (a sort of compartmentalization/tunnel vision), a false belief of being separated. Nothing I’ve said so far conflicts with that idea.
I’m basically saying “The map is within the territory, but the map models the territory as being within the map. The brain is wrong in assuming that the territory in the map is the same as the territory outside of the map”. Most people make this error when they think. They confuse the model inside their head for the thing outside their head. I’m claiming that it’s literally impossible to break such ‘containment’, and that there’s also no need to do so.
When you meditate, you can gain insight into yourself, but you can only get insight into “the nature of things” if this nature is contained within yourself. To the extent that you’re similar to the universe, learning about yourself can teach you about the universe. But if something outside is different, we will be forever unable to grasp it.
Senses and thoughts “lie” in that models of things are constructed from limiting information. The models are used to predict the consequences of actions, and at times, these predictions are wrong, and then the brain modifies the model such that the new information is taken into account. Over time, the brain confuses the model with reality and with the self. When the model is attacked, it feels like the self is attacked. If one lets go of the model, it feels like one lets go of the entire world. The model isn’t wrong about the environment it was created in (at least, it’s usually a good approximation), but as a being moves to a new environment (or the environment changes), the old model will be more of a hindrance than a help. This is how the ego traps the person, right? So perhaps it’s better to experience life without any models whatsoever, so that one remains as flexible as water. Actually, I think the models are important, but that one should not grow attached to them (more on this later).
What I don’t agree with, is the gloomy attitude that many people take towards life: “If I can’t predict the future then my knowledge isn’t real, and if I can predict the future then my agency isn’t real. I want a model which is perfect in every environment, and I want the environment to bend to my model! I want an easy life but to feel heroic, and I want to play forever but also to win. I want everyone to have freedom but also for them to be unable to hurt me, and I want to give into every impulse but also for others to respect me”.
I’m ranting a bit, but I think most people are unable to accept that one cannot have the good without the bad. That’s silly! Such a thing is only possible in our minds, which is why I’m a psychologist and not a rationalist. And being silly is fine, as long as one enjoys being silly, but a lot of people do not.
All processes are in interminable flux
If life is “becoming” then “being” is every moment of time in that becoming. Life requires change, which requires time. And the universe requires a series of states, and if a loop exists, it must contain every single state, for once it enters the loop it won’t be able to break out, as the markov property prevents it from having a high enough class in the chomsky hierarchy to have the “memory” required for this. But perhaps I didn’t counter this idea of yours well enough before, so I will try again below.
They are the continuation of interactions of the wider system
Yes, I believe so. And the universe cannot have a beginning and an end without breaking the laws of logic, and if the laws of logic aren’t true, then we can’t conclude anything, since “true” and “false” are nothing but logical symbols.
Actually, I will have to disagree with the quote you mentioned earlier. It would assume that exposions aren’t real (as they have beginnings and ends), which is silly. The idea that something has a start and an end also seems wrong. Everything since the big bang (at the very minimum) has been an effect, so there has been no causes since then. When we say “X resulted in Y” we’re just looking at a subset of this chain in isolation, and asserting X as a cause of Y when it’s just the previous state.
The universe follows many conservation laws but these are just symmetries and equivelences over some dimensions rather than others. A cube is equal under rotation, but is a rotating cube something constant or something which is in flux? A vector (1,2) has no location, so it’s equal to every other vector under relocation (translation), but not under rotation. If you scale the entire universe, laws of physics included, does the universe change or remain static? I’d tell you the answers to these questions, but as I think more deeply, all I get is more difficult questions, rather than answers. Category theory might hold the answer but it might also just be abstract nonsense. And already now, one needs a spatial IQ equal to that of Emmy Noether to be able to understand my explanation intuitively. By the time we arrive at the final truth, I fear neither of us will be able to understand any of it.
The only sure thing is being-consciousness
Lets assume you’re right. Being unsure still freaks out the elephant, because certaincy = feeling of power = confidence = perceived realness. Faith is confidence is belief is peace of mind. Without uncertaincy, I don’t think anxiety could exist (this seems to be supported by Lazarus’ research). So why doubt? Why value truth at all?
Perhaps this essay is about people similar to us? “There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principal needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an “overjoyed hero,” counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty”
And very well, you can end the SRIN. But I find it strange that you’re discussing philosophy and talking about life, when you’re trying to solve a psychological issue. Certain insights can shut down aspects in the brain, but rather than learning about the brain and the mechanisms for shutting down parts of it, you’re learning about life and the nature of being, is that not a lot harder? You seem to think you have no control over either reality nor yourself, but I think we at least have control over ourselves (after all, meditation works, and you’ve chosen it yourself, even if you didn’t choose that choice)
There are the states where it’s seen through
Everything can be seen through, at least everything which can be put into symbols or words. But if “being able to see through” assumes “false” then everything is false, and I can see through even this falsehood—therefore, “being able to see though” does not assume “false”. That’s my conclusion, anyway.
Your rider is an uncompromising optimist!
Doing a few years of depression, I had constant negative thoughts, and I reflected on them, only for them all to break apart (usually leaving behind positive conclusions or at least neutral ones). But after breaking everything apart, I had to build something anew, since I didn’t like the feeling of any interpretation being as valid as any other. I didn’t feel like a participant, and I didn’t have any opinions to share. Perhaps I broke the wrong part of my mind. I didn’t reach that state with classic meditation, after all—and my mind is flexible enough to break itself, seemingly lacking safe-guards which keep other people functioning.
You can’t have thinking without physical matter, and thoughts are made of physical matter.
But here you are assuming that we know what that physical matter is. And when you use the words like location, you’ve already assumed space and time. What I am hinting at is that the field in which it all arises may itself be conscious. Not our psychological understanding of consciousness but something like proto-consciousness. Perturbation of which leads to arising of matter, not a long stretch from the QFT. It’s back to turtles all the way down. Or what was first a particle or a field. I’m basically saying that the field is fundamental and a particle a temporary excitation of that field.
How does it relate to Gaudapada’s quote? It is basically saying that the particle is essentially a local derivative (not in a literal sense) of the field (which is fundamental), in order to detect it on the macro level some background information from the macro level has to be assumed like space and time. But unless it is observed it cannot said to be fully manifest in the field. It’s only during the interaction that the measurement process takes place (it’s most likely highly non-linear otherwise we would already have the explanation for the collapse of the WF). It’s basically Wheeler’s participatory universe interpretation.
That’s what I mean when I say the reality cannot be said to be real from the perspective of the underlying field. And I make an unsubstantiated claim that the field is self-revealing or self-luminous, i.e. conscious.
Apart from that it’s a psychological coping mechanism for me to think that everything that has a beginning and an end cannot be considered substantial in the end run. It helps me to let go of the psychological grip that otherwise tyrannizes me with its bars of “reality”. When in a nightmare I know I’m dreaming it makes the experience somewhat lighter, I know it’s not for real and sooner or later it will end. I regard this life in the same vein. I cannot say like you, that it’s better to be born and suffer than never to be born, because there are times when I wish I was not born. During such times the only relief I have is that I remember that it will end at some point. That’s why Gaudapada’s quote hits close to home for me.
But most importantly, when you start philosophizing about matter, you do it in thinking. And what I tried to express is that I don’t deny the processes that stand beyond thinking but I view thinking phenomenologically, i.e. when awake the world and the seer of it appears, when in the deep sleep they both disappear, phenomenologically, not scientifically. Very simply like for a kid. Something that appears at one time and disappears at another, I do not call real. If the world and the seer were real they would appear without disappearing. But they do disappear in the deep sleep. Why select the deep sleep? Because it’s the third state among waking, dreaming and sleeping. Waking shows me that dream is not real. Deep sleep shows me that waking is not real. Very simply, almost primitively. Phenomenologically thoughts do appear out of nowhere, and subside there, therefore they cannot torment me constantly. Take it as description of empirical experience, not as a theory and it becomes clear. You attempt to analyze everything, and what I attempted to express is primitively simple, almost childish.
I’m claiming that it’s literally impossible to break such ‘containment’
Yeah, I agree about that. When they say, “You will see things as they are after the awakening”, it means a slightly different thing. It doesn’t mean you will literally see what is. It means that self-rumination is turned off. A self-subversive commentary that we all run. And mountains will be just mountains. As sickness, or despair, or death. Without the on-going commentary, “What it all means?”
To the extent that you’re similar to the universe, learning about yourself can teach you about the universe.
Yes, I believe that some principle of equivalence takes place when we shut down the noise in the mind. But I cannot say anything about the nature of it as, first, I only experience it rarely to study it fully, and, second, I lack a proper capacities and preparation to dissect it and express in terms of good models. I think there are many brilliant people who have also experienced awakening are up for the task. My goal is to get an experience, and not to understand it in the scheme of things.
Actually, I think the models are important, but that one should not grow attached to them
Yes! But it’s easier said than done. Also I believe some models are (if not universal) then generalize to many environments. You probably know math better than I’d ever wish for. But the principles of relativity, symmetries, conservation laws and invariants hold the ground firmly even when we change the perspective.
If I can’t predict the future then my knowledge isn’t real, and if I can predict the future then my agency isn’t real.
In my case it’s slightly more complicated. The knowledge one uses in this reality is as real as the said reality and I don’t dismiss it as unhelpful. On the contrary, I believe it gives me free energy in overcoming many entropic pits, which I would otherwise fall into and would have a worse time. And the second part, I can predict the future with about 70-80% accuracy just because I don’t consider myself as an agent. It’s just I don’t like the predictions that much. But life so far had many surprises that I could not predict and that were coming my way unsolicited. When I thought I was in the very depth of depression and didn’t want anything (literally), I had experienced most profound experience of peace and tranquility in meditation. Since than I know that it is possible and try to repeat it. The new door opened where I didn’t expect it to open (namely, inside).
Life requires change, which requires time.
Here, I am not competent enough to answer you scientifically. But experientially psychologically when you experience that state of no-thoughts (and other mystical states, i.e. when the perception of the world shuts down) it feels like you are beyond time and it feels like the memory is wiped out. Do these insights transfer to stochastic processes or similar models I cannot tell. I think they do and I think there are people who are working on it.
Category theory might hold the answer but it might also just be abstract nonsense.
I think there are no useless knowledge, it will close the gaps and make the bridges in different fields. But it’s not a game for everyone as you’ve mentioned.
And very well, you can end the SRIN. But I find it strange that you’re discussing philosophy and talking about life, when you’re trying to solve a psychological issue.
You see, I don’t divide knowledge in categories, I indeed tend to learn what seems helpful to me on the path. But oftentimes (and earlier in life) I am just plain curious, and I cannot help it. I think most knowledge can be helpful and is transformative in a good way. Even if it is to show me how little do I know. But you are right in one regard, I have to be more practical and concentrate more on practice. I tend to philosophize when not engaged in practice and it may be detrimental in the long run. But some people like watching TVs, or read fiction books, I happen not to enjoy these things, but I enjoy (soft) philosophizing and it was a great conversation to be sure! And one more note, it’s not just a psychological issue, it’s a holistic existential issue, it relates to the very being, to “Who am I, really?” And that question is not answerable in logic or in thinking, but only existentially, holistically.
I had constant negative thoughts, and I reflected on them
You see what you did! You reflected the old “you” from the system! That’s philosophizing’s power. That’s exactly what Piatigorsky’s quote is all about. That’s also insight. It’s cool that it’s worked for you like that. I still catch many enthusiastic tones from your text, which I believe is on the level of BIOS of the mind of an individual. Perhaps it’s an echo of youth, as when one is young one is generally believes that things are more capable of change than they really are (I shamelessly generalize here). And as Lazarus suggested, “patients who engaged in denial about the seriousness of their situation did better than those who were more “realistic”″ So maybe you are right in believing that you can reach for the stars.
I don’t need to know what it is, I only need to know what properties it has or has to have.
Do you know Conway’s game of life? It’s turing complete, and the structure, life, calculations, and the information—are all the same thing. So you cannot remove information without removing life. You cannot do a calcuation with no squares. There is no distinction between a foreground and the background, or between a structure and its substance.
I think that human beings with thoughts are similar. Maybe not to the same extent. But you can’t really remove all the bias from a person without also removing some of the person. I can remove the noise from my computer, but it requires removing the fan, and most people don’t model these costs mentally. They think “optimization” means “improvement”, as if they could do an unequal trade. When people try to improve humanity, or society, they think they can remove just one aspect of something without removing others, and gain only benefits. SSRIs might help against depression, but is that really all?
This bias is so strong that Nietzsche argued that making society more evil would be less harmful than attempting to remove evil elements. The condept of Chesterton’s fence is only a first step towards realizing the consequences of naive attempts at improvement.
The field in which it all arises may itself be conscious
If consciousness is emergent, it’s very possible that it is. However, while we can describe something with math, which makes it feel as if things are made out of math, and as if math is some underlying reality, I think this feeling is misleading. I think it’s the brain confusing the map for reality. I think it’s more likely that there’s no distinction between foreground and background.
And since the human perception is literally made out of human, and occurs in human, we can’t be sure that the way we experience consciousness is how the universe would experience itself if it was conscious.
It helps me to let go of the psychological grip
Isn’t it enough to feel that it’s real and independent of yourself? You can let go and grasp again as you please, come and go whenever you want.
When my reality turns into a nightmare, I perceive it as real, but not as absolute. Being in a nightmare is a bit like a headache, it’s real but you know it’s temporary. It can also be considered a ‘bad place’, and one can move to a better place physically or psychologically. Bad places are real, but they’re local, so one is not trapped. In either case, the self is the creator of this nightmare, it can always be destroyed. It also helps knowing that, as long as your mind doesn’t break, it can’t actually hurt you. It’s also very unlikely that the mind gets stuck in a really bad state for extended periods of time. My worldview allows for “A reality” which is not “THE reality”.
Something that appears at one time and disappears at another
Makes sense. I still consider it real, just arbitrary rather than fundamental. It’s like.. The name of a folder on a computer. A folder needs a name, but it can be any name. No name is false, and yet, if you don’t like the name then you just give it another. Through this way of thinking, I can create the world that I myself experience, and consider it real, but also allow myself to switch out parts that I do not like. Each little piece is something that I can accept or reject, and with some effort I can change pieces or create new ones.
It means that self-rumination is turned off
I see! Enlightenment helps with that, but reducing anxiety to zero should be enough. And funnily enough, I no longer ask “what it all means”. Such a question does not point to a more real, underlying reality, but rather to a less real, derivative model of reality. In my hierarchy, experience comes first and theory comes second.
But it’s easier said than done
Your case is interesting, you dislike the dream so much that you sometimes wish you were never born, but you’re also really attached to it. I love the dream, but I think I might be less attached than you are, it’s pretty interesting. I’m not actually all that good at math, I just have a good spatial intuition and borrow concepts from it. And yeah, it does feel as if the world is made out of principles, but I think these principles are aspects of the human mind, after all, “duality” is one of said principles. Yin/yang, light and shadow, hot and cold. But when we meditate, we can collapse some of the usual dualities.
In my case it’s slightly more complicated
Yeah, most didn’t apply to you, I was ranting about how human beings tend to trip over their own legs. A lot of human behaviour ends up being the person hurting themselves. So we’re our own worst enemy, even when we blame other people and other things (like society, or reality). I suppose everyone does this, myself included, but that people do it less as they get older and attribute more things to themselves.
Profound experience of peace and tranquility
To really relax, one has to let go of everything that usually consumes energy, like judging if any sounds in the environment are usual or unusual, checking if one is being looked at, making sure one does not look silly from the outside, keeping track of time, etc. And these are usually difficult to turn off because they protect against danger. By wanting a break so much that one no longer cares to defend themselves, profound relaxation becomes possible.
But I’m more interested in perception changes. It would feel terrible if a male stranger, without permission, came over and started touching your inner thigh. But if that was a young woman, I assume it could feel nice (it doesn’t generalize to all people, but roll with the thought experiment for now). The physical touch is practically the same in both situations, but the perceived value and cleanliness of that which interacts with us, and the possible futures which may occur as a result of these, changes the experience entirely.
When I drink coca cola, it can feel refreshing, but only as long as I don’t remind myself that it’s actually synthetic, sugar water acid. Actually, my mind likes to remind itself, because it thinks that disliking what I’m drinking makes it less harmful, as if rejecting it mentally kept it from touching my physical body as well. Not only does realizing this allow you to ‘grasp’ less things, it also allows you to waste less cognitive resources, by defending yourself against less sensory inputs.
It feels like you are beyond time and it feels like the memory is wiped out.
I agree, but in a frozen simulation, nothing can be felt. Even feeling a sense of calmness requires small changes to occur in the brain over time.
I tend to philosophize
I’m guilty of it as well. Too much thought, too little action. I think it’s “need for cognition”. I don’t differentiate much between psychological issues and existential issues, since both occur in the mind. And the mind overwrite reality. A mentally ill person who thinks they’re the main character in the universe will get the benefits of that belief even if it’s false. As I write these messages, I also try to be truthful, correct and logical, but there’s technically no need for either constraint.
We just need to find a sequence of steps which get you from your current state to an enlightened state. An illogical path may be shorter than a logical one. I think “Who am I?” is a wrong question, since it assumes an underlying reality which is more real than the reality we’re experiencing. But you could also look within, and just see what resonates with you, and be true to that. That usually feels good. Throw away stuff which isn’t ‘you’, stuff you picked up because others did, because other people told you to, because you felt obligated, etc. But which always felt foreign in a sense. Perhaps the real you will appear once you let go of everything which isn’t you.
Perhaps it’s an echo of youth
It likely is, but I have more of it than I had 10 years ago. Even if you’re losing this yourself, there should be older models of yourself somewhere which have these qualities. Then you just reconnect with these aspects and reinforce their pathways. There are no real limits. I read a lot of self-help books, I might have internalized some of the positive attitudes over time. A sort of indoctrination of optimism.
There’s also methods out there for manipulating ones own core beliefs. This manipulation is dangerous, so I recommend at least having a notepad where you write down the “version history” of your own configuration. Maybe write ten sentences which make you feel in various ways, and track how these feelings change as you change yourself.
The brain has BIOS level access to itself. This is mainly testable through hypnosis and placebo, but technically you don’t need either. Sometimes, I can just “decide” that I’m not tired, and then feel more alert. And my brain knows how to cause changes that I wouldn’t be able to do myself, e.g. adjusting my level of empathy. You can also fight within the dream, you mentioned that you didn’t like your predictions of the future? If you take life by the horns, and improve yourself, that will make you feel much better too. If you have an issue that another person doesn’t suffer from, find out what they did and do the same. Almost all limitations are self-imposed
Yeah, I enjoy the concept of cellular automata and work that Wolfram is doing with his physics project is similar. I especially like what Jonathan Gorard does there and his thought experiments. Math there is beyond my head, I cannot read the papers straight (I tried), but intuitively I can follow his thought experiments which concerns the observer and its model of space and time as being the lag in computation. E.g. a great speculative video, Discussion About Alien Intelligence, a tad too long but very interesting.
But you can’t really remove all the bias from a person without also removing some of the person.
And I’m willing to risk it. Especially considering how humane awakened people generally are, they are more compassionate not less in the result of loosing biases. It shows that there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing of importance is lost. But what concerns society improvements I agree with you. Generally, sages didn’t directly attempt to change society, and said something like, “First change yourself, then see if society needs changing.”
If consciousness is emergent, it’s very possible that it is.
I’m saying something more radical there. Consciousness is not emergent from the field. The field itself is consciousness. What I meant by proto-consciousness is pure consciousness without content. Which has a potential to appear many. In that model we are not the bodies we identify ourselves with, we are indeed that field. The empirical consciousness of the mind is a reflection of that pure consciousness.
It’s back to analogy of the moon that reflects in many waters in the pots. Water in the pot that reflects the moon is the individual mind. The reflected image of the moon is empirical consciousness. The moon is pure consciousness. When we are entangled with the body we identify ourselves with it. But when we disentangle ourselves from the body as in deep sleep, meditation or awakening, we realise ourselves as being pure consciousness. After awakening we can perform actions in the empirical world while not loosing the insight of ourselves being that pure consciousness. It’s the identification with the body that we awake from.
...we can’t be sure that the way we experience consciousness is how the universe would experience itself if it was conscious.
That’s beautifully put dilemma, which as they say resolves itself on awakening. You exactly realise the non-separation from the universe as pure consciousness itself. But intellectually it is futile to understand it. I have some premonition which stems from my meditation experiences but it’s too weak to say more and not to distort it.
there’s no distinction between foreground and background
That’s the major insight if you experience it directly, not just intellectually. In Advaita they give an analogy of gold and ornaments made of gold. When you look at ornaments, you forget about gold. When you look at gold, you forget about ornaments. But in truth it’s all one and the same.
My worldview allows for “A reality” which is not “THE reality”.
We look at it similarly, your working hypothesis is that it is “locally real” and my working hypothesis—“unreal in the ultimate sense”. In the same sense that ornaments made of gold are “unreal”, while gold, their substratum, is “real”. Calling it locally real is fine by me also.
The name of a folder on a computer.
It’s exactly what Advaita also says. The full description of reality is Sat-Cit-Ananda-nama-rupa, which means Being-Consciousness-Bliss-name-form. It considers Being-Consciousness-Bliss as substratum (gold), and nama-rupa as superimposition on it (ornaments). Name and form is something that is subject to change, exactly as you’ve described with the folders. I also view it in a similar way.
Your case is interesting, you dislike the dream so much that you sometimes wish you were never born, but you’re also really attached to it.
Yeah, I cannot snap out of it. You might indeed be less attached than I am. But I think it’s not so special to be attached to the dream, it’s unfortunately rather a default state. Most likely your strong capacity for analysis helps you to disentangle from it. And yes, duality is an aspect of the mind, it is indeed can be transcended in meditation. That’s the aim.
people do it less as they get older and attribute more things to themselves
I agree that we are our own worst enemy. But this generalization of yours is way too generous. I would rather say it’s the people who think deeply about these matters understand it. It’s just for some thinking about it happens in older age. But some understand it even young.
Not only does realizing this allow you to ‘grasp’ less things, it also allows you to waste less cognitive resources, by defending yourself against less sensory inputs.
You are constantly making the move that Nāgārjuna also did—analyse something down to its very constituents and see it as ephemeral in the result (I know you would not frame it like that). But that doesn’t generalize well as one has to possess a certain complexity of the brain to perform such analysis. I do it myself at times, what concerns “big” things. But I don’t have enough bandwidth to do it with Coca-Cola or smoking, so I just drink Coca-Cola and smoke.
I don’t differentiate much between psychological issues and existential issues
Psychological relates to thinking, existential relates to being itself. Not both occur in the mind. Existential is on the holistic level, which concerns all of the organism (mind included). It’s rather felt that thought. It’s closer to the marrow of things.
I think “Who am I?” is a wrong question
It does engage me paradoxically as a koan should. I would say it’s not exactly presupposes the existence of underlying reality, it’s rather questions whether there is any “I” at all. Hands are moving, sounds are heard, thoughts are happening, who is the master of it all? I cannot spot for the sake of me any entity! I came up with this question myself before I encountered other people who were talking about it, and it led me to some mystical non-dual experiences. I tried many things myself, but the best is that simple question. Which my mind cannot grasp or give an intellectual answer for. It bugs me in a good way.
Throw away stuff which isn’t ‘you’, stuff you picked up because others did, because other people told you to, because you felt obligated, etc.
That’s another important aspect of the practice—letting go. I do that and it’s helpful and that’s exactly how the question works for me! It negates everything as not-”I”. Am I my problems? No. Am I my body? No. Am I my feelings? No. Am I my thoughts? No. What is left there? … [Silence] And that silence sometimes becomes more profound and envelops all else and peace is felt. When in that state, the brain goes through some restructuring, it likes it and as a rule I can take life easier after that.
Self-inquiry is the best tool that I’ve discovered among many-many other things (psychological, hacks, self-improvement techniques, and so on). So I know where I am going and the means to get there. The only thing which remains is doing the practice and perseverance. I already know on the gut level that’s the shortest path there. So here I have no doubts. I only doubt that it’s possible in my case, with my mind (it’s not neurotypical, which means that the DMN is overly active in my case, it’s more difficult to shut down self-rumination).
Almost all limitations are self-imposed
With that I wholeheartedly agree. Reverse-engineering of other people behavior helps to some extent and self-help books are also valuable help but in the end it all comes down to the question, “Who is it that tries to improve?”, “Who is is that suffers?” I just have to be more consistent with practice. I already do it in long sessions and introduced 2 minutes breaks to do it throughout the day. So I’m on the way. The rest is that quote of yours about setbacks and that success may be just around the corner so don’t stop halfway there.
Especially considering how humane awakened people generally are
I’m sure some kind of meditations make you more humane, but not all of them. The quote on the bottom of that page is rather long, but here’s the first bit:
“I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself–what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself–that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational.”
Reflecting too much on things doesn’t always make you wise. It causes things to disappear—sometimes meaning, sometimes morality, and sometimes the problem which was being reflected on.
That something appears false upon reflection does not mean that it is false. The self feels like an illusion if you think about it enough—but so does everything else. Reflect on the concept of illusion, and that too will lead to contradictions. There’s fundamental problems with searching for fundamental truths. Thinking, itself, undermines thinking, like how a fire burns what fuels it and destroys itself.
We are indeed that field
That is consistent with a lot of different theories, but I think our consciousness is too tied to our bodies for this to be true. Unless you restrict consciousness, so that the parts of us which feel qualia is part of the body instead of said consciousness.
Which as they say resolves itself on awakening
The awakening process itself happens in the brain, how do you know that you’re describing something external from the human brain at all? Enlightenment might feel how you describe, but feelings don’t leak information about reality.
Analogy of gold and ornaments made of gold
I’m already in a state where I’m aware of this difference most of the time. It’s a great example though, as average people can understand it. However, it takes a lot more insights to even start understanding how limiting language is. There’s no such thing as a chair—everything which can be used as a chair can be called a chair. It’s also not possible for men to be unmanly. Whatever a man does is, by definition, necessarily manly. Bad things don’t exist, as “bad” is a judgement and not a trait. I could keep going, but you probably know these already? There’s too many to write out, but the more you know, the easier it is to find even more.
Their substratum, is “real”
This seems accurate. But I previously wrote that only physical matter exists, so I agree that the matter which makes up gold exists, and that ornaments do not. But ornaments are not illusions in the sense that their substance is false. The gold does exist in reality, so I don’t want to deny reality.
By treating the gold as “ornaments”, I create a local story, which seen from the outside is a sort of overdramatization or perhaps decoration of reality. This decoration adds meaning. It’s not entirely wrong to call it “illusion” when one buys into this story and experiences it as real. However, delusion is only bad because it’s dangerous, and it’s only dangerous when it disrupts the ability to predict the future. Decorating reality doesn’t change the structure of reality, for the same reason that installing a HD texture pack into a video game doesn’t affect the physical meshes or the physics engine. It would indeed be dangerous to think that one could fly and then lean out the window, since this class of incorrect beliefs could lead to death. But I think rationalists reject even this decoration.
I also think it may be impossible to live in “the real world”, and that it would be very unhealthy in case it was possible. It’s often good to turn off the brain and live in the world of experience, but that is still a human experience from a human perspective, and thus decorated in a sense. One of these decorations is “morality”, and not even Ted Bundy is logically incorrect that the value of human beings isn’t an absolute truth. I’m not sure if these are nama or rupa, but I think you’re correct that some of these cause unnecessary suffering. But I think it’s a mistake to throw them all away. I throw away those which seem like a net negative to me.
Most likely your strong capacity for analysis helps you to disentangle from it
I agree. I also had a lot of suffering to reflect about. Half of that suffering was removed with psychological means, the other half was removed through self-improvement. I’m the kind of person who stops suffering when life is good, but I’m aware that some people always suffer even when their lives would be judged as good by everyone else. I’m not sure which situation you’re in, but the worries of your elephant might be rational (even if exaggerated). When a person judge themselves to be in the top 10% or so in social status, the elephant usually feels pretty good about itself. This is the case even for me who is naturally high in neuroticism.
As for understanding, I think it came to me because I had nobody to rely on except myself. It’s similar to the brain not having any escapism to grab onto doing meditation. Remove all alternatives and the brain will usually accept its situation and make the best of it. But learned limitations (e.g. learned helplessness) can also get in the way, so they should be dissolved once they’re not useful anymore.
I don’t model it as complexity. What I’m doing is ‘introspection’. But I don’t know why I’m better at it than most people, coule be experience or genetics. Deadlines close in time also feel like dangers close in space, so I can tell that the brain might use the same tokens for Soon (time) and Near (space). When many similar things become one, the calculations involved become much simpler. But some things cannot be calculated. I’m not sure how I taught myself to think in a way which can handle unsolvable problems, but I must say it’s nice.
What is experienced as an existential issue is actually a philosophical issue, which is actually a psychological issue. “The hard work I put into tasks does not result in a reward which makes the trade feel worth it”, this triggers a sort of reorganization, a reflection on the state of things. The brain then looks for something reliable to re-orient itself with. But a brain which is good at seeing through things will be unable to find anything reliable/absolute/fundamental to support itself. Forever.
People who are psychologically healthy do not have existential issues. They don’t have the answers, but that doesn’t bother them, because they also don’t have the questions which seek answers.
It’s rather questions whether there is any “I” at all
There is an I, but it might only be real in the same sense that ornaments are real. I keep my sense of self because I’ve judged that the positives outweight the negatives, not because I don’t agree that it might be an illusion.
Not identifying with ones problems is probably healthy, because otherwise the ego would feel shame about having problems. It would also feel bad every time its actions went against its identity. For instance, a person who identifies as strong and competent might prevent themselves from getting emotional because the ego protects the self from anything which would contradict and invalidate it. Hmm, that is probably also why being objectified feels bad. The brain protects itself from being devalued because that’s the same as being disrespected. This is because value is a social currency, and because people who are deemed more valuable enjoy better treatment. The broken window theory applies to people as well. I notice that some people are talked over (cut off) more than others in conversations, and that this correlates with their social standing in the group, even if nobody verbalizes or otherwise acknowledges this hierarchy. You can identify people with low self-esteem (self-assigned social ranking) because they let themselves get talked over more. They also take up less space, and avoid being in the middle of open spaces. I’m ranting again, but it’s extremely useful to be aware of just a few dynamics of this type, and once patterns like this are tracked subconsciously, it becomes effortless to do so.
I only doubt that it’s possible in my case
Your brain is probably going “Am I guaranteed the end of suffering? No, well, then I will only half-ass the effort”. You likely asked yourself about the probability of success because your elephant used that as an excuse to avoid acting on your advice. By the way, a thing which might stop rumination is attempting to do the opposite—ask your brain to complain as much as wants for a short while. Then write it all down, I suppose (it’s up to you what you do with it after). Remembering so many negative things at once might be painful, but it would give you a clear picture. You might feel better just by processing these things, but your elephant might also demand solutions. “Do the exact opposite of the naive solution” forms an entire category of solutions, though I only know a handful of its members.
I do think you’re on the way, too. A different path than mine, but it seems like a realistic goal
none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’
But he is far from being awakened. I think that his elephant is seriously sick which led him to his actions. If there is thinking that taking another being’s life is freedom, that means something is terribly wrong with the elephant. I believe that it all stems from the genetic make up of the brain. What he says about values is not necessarily wrong. But. If values are only ephemeral then why choose ‘wrong’ over ‘right’, why impinge on someone else’s freedom? This question has no answer. I tend to follow the principle of ahimsa and categorical imperative of Kant, that one behaves in the way that may be applied as a universal rule. It doesn’t mean you expect other people behave in the same way, that’s just my perspective and other people’s actions are up to them. That’s the same principle Jesus expressed with his Golden Rule.
I also would not call that intolerant to isolate such people from society, as they are fundamentally sick and pose a danger to other beings. One doesn’t think it’s intolerant to go away from the elephant in the rut. It’s a common sense to protect the organism. The same applies here. The same applies to myself. If I ever would pose a danger to other beings, I would like to be either isolated or liquidated. As none of us has a guarantee that won’t be the case, we can only hope that it will work out somehow.
In general such principles as ahimsa are needed for the seekers and not for the liberated. For the liberated there is no need of them, that doesn’t mean they will kill other people. As the metaphor goes, if you realise that everything you perceive is your own Self, how could you harm anyone? It would be tantamount of hurting your own Self. Therefore they say, what is experienced as truth for the liberated (e.g. ahimsa), is the means of practice for the rest. Which means while we are not liberated it is wise to listen to sages and correct one’s behavior in a certain way. What is truth for them, becomes means for us to reach to that state. It’s not imitation, it’s emulation.
Thinking, itself, undermines thinking
Thinking does undermine itself. But the insight is something beyond thinking it’s on the holistic level, it’s on the gut level (or what they call in spiritual traditions the Heart). The wise use of thinking is to breakthrough to that holistic level. And your analogy with fuel is indeed spot on. As Ramana Maharshi expressed in his work “Who am I?”: “The thought ‘Who am I?’ will destroy all other thoughts, and like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed.” So we might use thinking wisely, to go beyond it, to the pre-conceptual level.
how do you know that you’re describing something external from the human brain at all?
I cannot reply to this question pre-awakening. But it is described as the mind getting out of the way. What I experienced in those rare glimpses showed that “I” was not the body but the field of awareness itself. And there no question of external or internal arose. Questions and doubts stop bugging one there. It’s not like I can guarantee that that’s a reality, just there is no one to whom it matters how to call it. The doubter dissolves.
Bad things don’t exist, as “bad” is a judgement and not a trait.
Exactly. But that doesn’t make you want to hurt other people. Why would it? You don’t want to hurt one’s leg or arm. One might consider hurting other people if one identifies with one’s body and takes another as another body and derives pleasure from overpowering another. So it’s deeply entangled with the belief “I am the body”. If one looks at oneself as at the body, one takes another to be the body also. That belief is the root-belief and it’s most difficult to let go of. Awakening might be defined as the dissolution of the belief that you are (only) the body.
is still a human experience from a human perspective, and thus decorated in a sense
Decoration remains even after awakening. The difference is that identity shifts from name and form (the default mode) to being-consciousness-bliss, from ornaments to gold. It’s like one of these images that show a different picture depending how you look at it.
What is experienced as an existential issue is actually a philosophical issue, which is actually a psychological issue.
I don’t agree here. An existential threat is something that threatens the integrity of the organism is not a psychological issue, it’s an existential issue. It has a psychological aspect but is not limited to it.
What concerns that psychologically healthy people don’t have existential issues, they might not be aware of the underlying questions that direct their life, like “What is the meaning of it all?” or “Who am I?”.
Every person sane or insane comes to one of this questions and has a local answer to it. Why the answer is local? Because it generally changes throughout one’s life. It’s not static. But some answer is usually provided, even if unconsciously. For example, you gave your answer to the question “Who am I?” as “I am this body”. Some person might value the family or friends above everything else, so to him “What is the meaning of it all?” is the family and relations. And so on. The person might not be aware that he is asking these questions and answers them, but the answers can be deduced from his values and intentions. They generally change implicitly with age, situations, etc. and explicitly with reflection. They cannot be “right” or “wrong” and generalized to many. They are highly unique and intimate. They are always about you as you’ve yourself noted. That is, “What’s the meaning of life?” means, “What’s the meaning of my life?”
So I claim that your current answers to questions “Who am I?” and “What is the meaning of it all?” reflect your current experience of life. I can give you my current answers as an example. To “Who am I?” my brain just shuts up (for a moment), it is silent with regard to the answer, I already know that “body/mind/human” are just thoughts. That’s why this question is also the best therapy, as it quietens the compulsive thinking. To “What is the meaning of it all?” my answer is “Liberation” or “Freedom from thoughts”. Even an attempt to answer them (even to oneself) starts a reflection process. That’s why I believe they are important.
There is an I
And how do you know that, seriously? Did you see it? How do you spot it? Where in the body it is situated? What is that centre from which all actions seem to stem?
No, well, then I will only half-ass the effort
Ha-ha. Yes, there are times when I doubt I’m being sincere with the effort. However, the technique is universal, the question pops up, “Who doubts that he is sincere?” And it turns into a game. The pattern however is easy, when I reach a state of no-thoughts I feel elated afterwards and practice seems to click. The concentration is strong and so on. But when I cannot reach it, it feels dumb and not engaging. So I struggle with it willy-nilly. I cannot spot the pattern yet when the practice seems to work.
I tried to let brain do what it likes and it doesn’t go well, it’s constantly anxious with regards to the future. So in my case some process is necessary. “Do nothing” doesn’t work as a rule (sometimes it does though and it’s sweet), as the brain cannot shut up. I think everyone should come up with his own heuristics with regards to the mental make up. Among many therapeutic practices that I’ve tried self-inquiry turned out to be the best even in that regard (that was unexpected as I was not pursuing it from the therapeutic standpoint). I genuinely think it’s the best tool I’ve discovered in my whole life.
His conclusion isn’t incorrect, and he got there by the same kind of reflection which may lead to enlightenment. But he likely lacked empathy, which lead him to question the validity of empathy. If he had had empathy, even these realizations wouldn’t have been much of a danger, as the affective/emotional empathy is harder to destroy through thinking than the cognitive empathy is.
Being dangerous is not bad in itself, sometimes the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. The world has a tendency to degenerate unless one maintains it like a gardener removing weeds. But the unreasonable and ill are much more likely to default to violence, so the majority of the violence which occurs will be a net negative.
I think it’s true that “the dose makes the poison”, and this makes it so that good and bad things don’t exist in themselves. Nietzsche even wrote “Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. One must not make of them distinct principles or entities that fight over the living organism and turn it into their arena. That is silly nonsense and chatter that is no good any longer. In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state.”
I don’t like the framing that society needs to protect itself against those who harm it, but I do believe that the peoples of a society must protect themselves from elements which would harm their society (this subtle difference is important because society, considered as a super structure emergent from its parts, tends to not represent the interests of its parts).
I must also have benefited positively from thinking too much, since I’m basically devoid of malice by now. Even when I want enemies gone, it’s for practical reasons and not due to hate.
The wise use of thinking is to breakthrough to that holistic level
I feel like the east is really good at doing this by default, and that the west lacks this ability. The same is argued in the book The Master and His Emissary. this division can also be described as a lack of balance between the objective and the subjective, between machine-like efficiency and humanity, between qualia and replication, between materialism and meaning, and between rationalism and intuition. Perhaps “IQ vs EQ” as well. I’ve come to the conclusion that thinking itself might be pathelogical. Which reminds me, have you heard of the idea that language is a parasite? (I didn’t read that paper, it just seems like a good introduction to the idea). It’s a memetic entity with people as its host. I suppose I’m talking about language in the negative sense that people tend to talk about ego.
Anyway. I see what you mean about “the doubter dissolves”. I kind of did that to my own doubt. Just like how enlightenment tells you that it’s real, my experience of the world also considers itself real. It’s a reality, my reality. I don’t particularly care if other, conflicting realities may exist. You seem to rely a little more on the idea that enlightenment has to be true/real (your elephant seems to want this reassurance), whereas I’d be content with it being a state of mind. Your theory may be correct, I just happened to think of a counter-argument. But any belief and statement can be countered, attack is infinitely easier than defense, so my counter-argument doesn’t actually matter. My bad.
I don’t think “deriving pleasure from overpowering another” is sufficient for wanting to hurt someone. I like games because they make power dynamics possible. But we’re only enemies inside the ring, we’re friends playing the roles of enemies. But I do believe that evil mostly stems from weakness resulting in the mind employing self-defense tactics. Almost all psychological self-defence consists of hurting those around oneself by throwing ones own burden onto them, venting to them, draining their energy, fishing for compliments, using them as a means to achieve safety, manipulating them (e.g. guilt tripping), etc. (and this is why an abundance mindset leads to a large reduction in evil, and enlightenment seems like a state of abundance). And as you say, seeing the world as an extension of yourself means that benefiting oneself and benefiting others is the same thing. In a state of poverty, the framing is “self vs world”.
Decoration remains even after awakening
This might sound weird, but I consider the disillusioned eye to be perverted. The purpose of decoration is hiding that which is under, and that which is under is rather crude and unattractive compared to the surface. The underground world is ugly, the person below the mask is a mess, the face without makeup is imperfect, the “behind the scenes” of every performance is filled with problems. Now that I think about it, the state of enlightenment you’re describing is not disillusioning per se, but the process which results in enlightenment rubs me in the wrong way because it’s essentially the opposite of enlightenment (e.g. doubting everything to achieve the state of non-doubt)
An existential threat is something that threatens the integrity of the organism
I was wrong if you meant existential threat such as the emergence of superintelligence. I took it to mean “existential crisis” which I still believe is psychological. Most people might ask philosophical questions as they get older and reach higher states of awareness, but it’s only excessive anxiety (manifesting as doubt and the need for certaincy) which keeps one stuck with these questions. Many simply go “I am”, and this is an assertion, not the answer to a question, but an axiom which doesn’t bother to question itself. The immersion (grounding) is too strong, and the process which disrupts and disorients is weaker than the stimuli in the surroundings. It’s like when you’re about to wake up from a lucid dream and you rub your hands together, feeling the friction between them in high detail, and thus stabilize the dream.
I disagree that everyone thinks about questions relating to meaning. Meaning is a feeling, not a logical conclusion, so thinking about it analytically is a mistake. People justify effort to themselves, e.g. “Do it for your family”, or “work so that you can feed your dog”, or “If I improve, maybe somebody will love me”, but this internal conflict is emotional, it’s still attached to illusions of self and to subjectivity (the first-person view). The third-person view, and the analytical and detached nature of philosophy, is unable to find an answer because it’s detached. Meaning is a property of the first-person perspective, it dissolves when you look at life from the outside. Hence the importance of immersion.
Reflection only happens when something is wrong. Only anxious minds get stuck in reflection because they don’t achieve the feeling of resolution which is required to go back.
While I do have answers to questions, because I too have been anxious for most of my life, these are past conclusions and simple deductions. I no longer consider the questions meaningful nor the answers necessary. I simply am. Reality is what I can get away with. ‘Good’ is what I like, ‘Bad’ is what I dislike. If I want something to happen, I make it happen. Nobody is to blame for anything, everyone is fully responsible for everything which happens. I’m just a player who loves the game. When we play Minecraft, we don’t ask “What’s the meaning of zombies? And we don’t write long dramatic texts like “What’s the meaning of our struggles? We collect items only to lose them, the sun rises only to descend, we heal hitpoints only to get damaged once more”. In other words, the problem is that one thinks there’s a problem to begin with. The solution is to deny the problem, not to solve it. The existence of the problem is not a fact, it’s a perspective, an interpretation.
And how do you know that, seriously?
I experience it, just like I experience ornaments. And all information must come from the senses, right? So experience is the highest source of truth we have access to. Well, perhaps consciousness is first, experience second, senses third, and reasoning fourth, or something. I just don’t think that reflection is more correct than what is being reflected upon, as that is like putting the map before the territory.
Yes, there are times when I doubt I’m being sincere with the effort
I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t putting in effort, but my own motivational system tends to do what I just described (I solve my ADHD with coffee, which makes me more anxious. It’s not ideal). When I really want to do something, the feeling of effort does not even exist, because there’s no friction. I think the feeling of effort might come from internal conflict between desires.
It’s constantly anxious with regards to the future
You’re intelligent, so you should be able to make plans which secure a better future for yourself. You may have problems which make it harder for you than most, but you’ve probably found that, on days where you can be proud of what you’ve accomplished, your elephant lets you relax.
In short, when the brain judges “If I continue like I am now, everything will work out”, the elephant is happy. Jordan Peterson went as far as saying “The vast majority of positive emotion that you’re going to experience in your life is a consequence of pursuing meaningful goals.”, but the meaning is actually the substance which helps one believe in it and move towards it without doubt. It’s the absence of meaning, and not the existence of pain, which makes a goal feel not worth it. This is the default process, anyway. You can live accordingly, disrupt it, do neither or do both at once. Whatever works for you. You know yourself the best!
I am not beyond good and bad. Therefore my model is simple, everything that tends to ahimsa is good, everything that violates it is bad. It doesn’t mean I can 100% follow the ahimsa principle myself, in fact many times I realise that it’s an impossibility! But I still try my best to tend in that direction. In Buddhist Dhammapada it is implied that the intention is almost more important than action itself. Perhaps, it’s just the mechanism of calming myself down, when I realise that ahimsa is practically impossible. But I do what I can.
I think I don’t agree that the dose makes the poison. If the intention is to cause harm even a little, and the resultant harm is not so big, it is still the intention that matters. I think we feel that subconsciously, we are our own best judges what concerns ethical behavior. When we cultivate such intentions (even if no harm is actually done) sooner or later they will poison our life. The evil disposition is not only harmful to the recipient but it’s most harmful to the host of such disposition. As it leads to loosing the peace of mind and murky conscience.
Even the edge cases like the one mentioned above feel that they are doing something wrong. And would not like to live in society that would operate on their principles. They are only “enjoying their time” because most people follow the rules. One can say eventually it’s not about being good and bad, but about the optimal behavior in order for society to work. Society cannot operate without trust between its members. Trust is like a Proof of Work in human relations. It implies that certain work has been performed, even if it is work on ethos of the member.
Aristotle would agree to that as he basically defined ethos as the work done by individual to figure out the middle between edge cases. And it doesn’t mean it is something “mild”—not too hot, not too cold. The middle of the person with developed ethos might seem like an extreme from the perspective of the person of undeveloped ethos. That’s why ascetics, saints and sages are important even if their cases don’t generalize well. They really show where that “middle” really lies. Buddha was saying the same thing. The middle is not established by an average person’s standards (who didn’t go through the process of developing the strong ethos). But by those who are established on a different level of relation to the world (who developed their ethos). Their middle way is usually seems too harsh from an average person’s perspective, but it sets the plank right. And we can develop our ethos by just tending in that direction (even if imperfectly, as that develops devotion and right intention).
That was a rant, but trust is important. It is more so than the principles of good and bad. As it tends in the direction of equilibrium of society. It represents an optimal strategy of unfolding. If trust is lost, society as a rule deteriorates. The same goes for the person. If one is distrustful of everyone, one is dispersed to many unhelpful directions. Concentration on a single (and deep) task becomes difficult. But when one looses trust? When one starts wishing harm for another and is suspicious that it is mutual. So we are back to ahimsa, it is not simply “good” as in judgement about values, it is the mechanism that supports trust in society. So it’s really an optimal behavior that makes trust possible.
I must also have benefited positively from thinking too much, since I’m basically devoid of malice by now. Even when I want enemies gone, it’s for practical reasons and not due to hate.
That’s actually beautiful, as it shows that you’ve developed your ethos through computation of a certain complexity (reflection). That’s your PoW, that will allow you to reap benefits in healthy society build on trust. And for yourself not to spend time on ruminating how “someone might hurt you”. But whether the society is healthy or not that’s another topic. In any case you will reap internal benefits of not wanting to harm anyone. I’m sure of that.
your elephant seems to want this reassurance
Not necessarily. I would be more than content with a state of mind too. It’s only that it seems that it is also more real than my perception of this world in the default state. But what do I know?
why an abundance mindset leads to a large reduction in evil
Exactly! Magnanimity is a strong virtue.
that which is under is rather crude and unattractive
Why do you assume that? Granted I had only glimpses but they were in no way crude or unattractive. It was a total unconditional acceptance, all-permeating tranquility and glorious silence. Peace of mind is the greatest bliss in my perspective. The rest doesn’t disappear it just seems different, and more pronounced and complete, even the little things. Getting to that state even once a day would make life a beautiful journey even in difficult circumstances. Not even speaking of the permanent establishment in that state.
excessive anxiety
Or curiosity as in my case. I came to this question through curiosity. But then anxiety appeared on the scene. And it turned out that’s the best tool to deal with anxiety too.
Hence the importance of immersion.
You can be immersed in many things. In thoughts and feelings are the one edge case. That’s where you are immersed with “the movie”. In being is another. That’s where you are immersed with “the screen”. Your inclinations direct you in one of these ways. My intention is to shift attention from the movie to the screen on the permanent basis, i.e. from thoughts and feelings to simple being. But your inclinations will define what you want from life. As they say: when one sees a beautiful dream one doesn’t want to wake up, it’s only when the dream turns into a nightmare that one wants to wake up. In my view, it’s not necessary to wait for a nightmare, curiosity is enough to have the intention to wake up from even a beautiful dream.
In other words, the problem is that one thinks there’s a problem to begin with.
I think, that is correct and an insight. In my case it’s just not stable under any circumstances. I attempt to make it stable. Otherwise, beautifully put.
When I really want to do something, the feeling of effort does not even exist, because there’s no friction.
That’s beautiful too. In my case I do almost everything through resistance. ADHD means the DMN cannot shut up, so you’ve effectively found the way to shut it down with some autotelic process. That’s a win.
you should be able to make plans which secure a better future for yourself
Thank you for your kind words. In my case, all the futures I can predict are no go, except for awakening. So I’m practically forced to let go and surrender (random YouTube recommendation that popped up in my feed lately, spot on and beautiful). And that’s where the elephant lets me breathe, when I (the rider) realise I’m not in control. And there were some unexpected good outcomes that I couldn’t have planned beforehand. So letting go works for me. It’s also the most important aspect of the way. Letting go is not just giving up, it’s an active process which requires practice (e.g. the Sedona Method) and acceptance of what is. There is a beautiful verse of Ramana Maharshi that describes this:
Know that while the Lord is bearing the entire burden of all the beings of the world, the pseudo-self assuming to bear this burden is like the caryatid figure in a tower appearing to sustain the tower, a droll comedy of figurines provoking ridicule. If one, journeying in a carriage that can carry heavy loads, keeps his burden not in the carriage but on his own head and thereby suffers pain, who is to be blamed?
-- Reality in Forty Verses, Supplement #17
I simply am.
That’s actually beautiful and can be an insight too. Most people say, “I am this” or “I am that” and few just say “I simply am”. Why it can be an insight? When we stop identifying with “being this” or “being that”, we simply are established in being itself. Most folks create metaphysical entities out of everyday notions, the map’s view of the territory confused with the territory itself. Like someone is saying, “I am a simple man”, he creates “a simple man” class in his map and measures everyone else based on that notion, in most cases it means he is far from being “a simple man” and he further endows such class with subconscious virtue of “simplicity”, which is again not so simple but represents a metaphysical notion ascribed to the territory as it’s imagined in the map. Therefore, the most honest and sincere thing one can say, “I am”. Implying “I’m neither this nor that”, not defined by circumstances or other people. It can be a deep insight if that’s experienced fully.
I experience it, just like I experience ornaments.
You say “I experience it”? Are there two “I”s—one the experiencer and another experienced? Where is this experiencer? Is it somewhere in the body? Where is it situated? If that’s a single entity one should be able to spot it or its products. If it is a conglomeration of thoughts, how can it be termed single integrated unit? I ask because in my experience I cannot find any entity, yet actions are performed and thoughts are directed to someone. Who is this one? It’s like Bassui wrote in his Talk on One Mind, “It may be asserted that behind these actions there is no entity, yet it is obvious they are being performed spontaneously. Conversely, it may be maintained that these are the acts of some entity; still the entity is invisible.” So who is the experiencer? Where is he? In the head? Behind the eyes? In the body? etc. This inquiry will work only if you have the similar questions, otherwise it will not have sense. That’s also alright. Not everyone is attracted to the same koan.
Well, good and bad does not exist in an absolute sense, but they can be local truths, and ahimsa is a fine choice. The only bad systems are those that don’t work out. It’s a bit of a low hanging apple but I consider communism to be such a system. While we can create our own subjective reality, there are natural laws which restrict the set of workable realities.
Most ideals are impossible, we can only approach them, not reach them. It’s fine as long as we recognize this, but I find that unreachable ideals sometimes turn people bitter because they make reality seem flawed in a way which is impossible to solve. Comparison is the thief of joy, so it’s dangerous to compare to perfection (which, of course, is the reason perfectionists are less happy in general).
Truth is defined in a way which implies “one truth path”, but there’s no such thing. I’m really just explaining the pros and cons of various choices that I’ve made, so that you can know the consequences of integrating them into your worldview in advance.
I think anger is the easier ‘poison’ to defend, one often becomes angry about injustice, and so anger can be used for good. Malice is harder to defend, but at the very least, every poison is its own antidote. The more alcohol you drink, the higher your tolerance will be. If you grow up in a bad environment, you will be more equipped to deal with imperfection than somebody who did not. Even exercise is a poison which makes us more resistant to the consequences of even harder exercise. In this case, the tolerance you’re building is muscles. Traumatic events are poisons which strengthen the mind. Life has a quality in which it grows under that which threatens it, and all fatality occurs when the rate of adaptation is too low, or the threat is too sudden. So it’s a fight between “rate of adaptation” and “rate of change”.
You’re decribing mechanisms in which the damage accumulates—trauma which is never overcome, grudges which are kept forever, stress and cynicism which just slowly gets worse and worse until they destroy a person. I might have to concede here—let’s see. There’s poisons which one cannot build tolerance towards (a lack of sleep seems like one), and poisons which only some people can use for their benefit while others are destroyed. Finally, I mentioned earlier that natural laws prevent some things from succeeding, and we can call such things immoral. It’s very possible that malice is similar to communism in that natural laws prevent it from being used for good purposes, which makes it “objectively bad”. But I’m not yet convinced that this is the case.
You’re right that some things can only exist as exceptions to the rule, but this class of things are countless. Society wouldn’t work if every job was “baker”, or if every person alive was a child. So differences are absolutely vital, and we cannot prove the qualities of a person by their rarity, or by the ratio of such a person that society can tolerate before it collapses. I’m afraid this is another argument in favor of “the dose makes the poison”, or at least “Balance is good and evil is that which is out of balance”.
I agree that the average and the true middle are different. I agree about the importance of trust too. I’d put it like “The maximum stable size of a group is governed by its coherence, which is the cooperation and trust of its parts”. But since the need for coherence threaten the unique qualities of the individual, I think we should de-globalize and have more communities rather than bigger communities. Very bad things happen to social dynamics once the network density gets too high. It’s more pleasant to be in a group of 5 than a group of 50, and it’s more pleasant to be in a community with 1000 members than a community with a million, and I think there’s natural laws behind this as well.
That will allow you to reap benefits in healthy society
Yes. So the limit of how healthy I can get away with being depends on the health of my environment. It’s no good to be a naive person in a malicious environment, just like it’s no good to be a malicious person in a good environment. My self-improvement is being limited by society because I’m being “pulled” towards the average. The more out of alignment you are with society, the larger any “correction” will be. A naive person in a extremely hostile environment will undergo experiences which rapidly makes them less naive, but somebody who is 98% in alignment will have to work hard in order to find the tiny difference which puts them 99% in alignment. But I do reap rewards for my mental health, like those who do Yoga reap rewards from their physical health!
What protects things against changes? Against tending towards the average? I find that it’s isolation, gate-keeping, detachment, illegibility, hierarchies. Even shibboleths and such. A sort of entropic protection against updating towards a worse (or just different) state than one is currently in. How do you stay pure around perverts, sensitive to noise around people who yell, optimistic in the face of failure? Researching this is another hobby of mine.
Magnanimity is a strong virtue
Some would put it in the category of delusion, but I think that it’s often a self-fulfilling state. Sort of like how people who consider themselves lucky find more opportunities. This sounds a bit like spirituality, “belief can move mountains” and all that, but it seems true. A kind of placebo which actually affects physical reality.
All-permeating tranquility and glorious silence
I suppose that the lower only hurts through comparison. It can be freeing as well to update ones point of reference downwards because everything else seems better after. But the human sense of aesthetics does protect against that which is bad. If I lived in India, I’d have other standards of hygiene than I do now, but something inside me resists lowering these standards, and I think that’s for the better. About people, I’m conflicted. One should accept people precisely as they are, but on the other hand, I find it beautiful when people work hard for the same of appearance, be it grooming, having manners, remaining positive, or polishing their image. I’m influenced by Nietzsche who defined art as “deception with good intentions”. The quote I sent a few comments ago called rational people “inartistic” and I’m making the same criticism for the same reasons. Truth seeking and disillusionment conflicts with meaning-making and aesthetics. Aesthetics and meaning both add value to things, so they protect against nihilism and life-denying attitudes.
While I think it’s a shame to focus on the screen, you do you. The insights I share should still be helpful in reaching such a state, even if you sometimes have to do the opposite of what I’m recommending. I’ve used two means to get where I’m at, both with limited success. The first is tricking the elephant into wanting the thing that I also want. The other is considering life to be a video game (why can some people be in the top 0.1% in a video game and yet in the bottom 5% in life? If they experiencedf life as a game, wouldn’t they suddenly do well?). I don’t think I’ve shut down the DMN, but I’m slowly learning to live with ADHD, somehow.
I’m curious why no futures are good enough. I’d have to get out of my comfort zone to achieve my dreams, but there’s always a path. If somebody else took over your life, would they also fail at achieving any good ends? If no, I think you have self-imposed limitations you can remove.
When “I am” is followed by other words, it’s a self-imposed label. You could even call it a sort of roleplay. But the world does not work without roleplay. In the structure of a company, each person plays a role over which they are responsible (this also mirrors software engineering principles, and probably generalizes to other fields which I’m no familiar with). Even physically, in a car for instance, each component has a role and a protocol for how it interacts with other components. It’s the same biologically, each of our organs have a specialized purpose and is capable of signaling the components which are relevant for them to interact with. Thus, roleplaying is not merely social pretence or the ego investing too much into an idea, it’s a principle which apples to creations which get things done in reality.
You say “I experience it”?
Got me there. The lazy answer is that self-awareness allows me to experience myself. A proper answer is more complicated. Do you think a corporation is many things, or just one thing? What about a human body? A car? If they’re multiple—how do you decide the level of recursion at which you stop dividing? If they’re just one—what is the limit for seperation before the cohersion of the structure is so low that you consider it multiple?
You’re asking questions which makes one doubt the I. But you can ask these questions about anything, and make anything seem unreal. I don’t think it’s the ‘I’ which has to prove itself in front of these questions, I think these questions have to prove to the I that they have value at all, that questions have value, that theory is allowed to propose the idea that my experience of myself is wrong.
I know the purpose of asking me these questions, but I’d personally rather anchor my concept of self more strongly than reduce it. I’m trying not to be enlightened, as I enjoy being a fool
Well, good and bad does not exist in an absolute sense
I consider some processes like a festering wound. Is a festering wound good or bad? Ultimately it’s neutral, just a natural process at work, but we still would like to be free of it. Otherwise, it leads to dire consequences. So processes with intention to harm another is like festering wounds. If not taken care of, they escalate and lead to more serious consequences.
It’s only as a rule we solve such processes unskillfully by isolation and liquidation of the person who is making the harm. What would a skillful process look like? I don’t know, but it seems to me that prescribing psychedelics (psilocybin and DMT to be precise, as they were proven to shut down the DMN temporarily and proven to work on people with addictions to alcohol, e.g. a good read about psychedelics, Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt) in order to shift the perspective of the person would worth a try, also trying other anti-psychotic medicines, perhaps even experimental. As most issues of such kind are due to neural imbalances of sorts. So it’s not just about reprogramming the rider, it’s about rewiring the elephant. And we even have tools at our hands we just stubbornly avoid using them. But it’s a difficult topic to handle for a layman as one tends to generalize un-generalizable. The direction which seems to be promising is experimental medicine, not just plain old isolation.
Comparison is the thief of joy
Comparison is more evil than it seems as it involves division. And the divided mind is more confused not less so. What I meant by having examples who had different relations to the world was something akin to emulation, rather than imitation. What’s the difference? In imitation we compare and imitate behavior. In emulation, we reverse-engineer the processes down to the principles and then apply the principles in our life. Which may even lead to completely different behavior than that of the example, taking into account our conditions. A good example doesn’t come to mind. But I think one can deduce what I’m trying to express. It’s not comparison that works, but underlying principles behind the behavior. One can say that’s a way to initially gamify one’s experience and potentially transcend it.
Ok, here is a weak example, I don’t eat meat. Many sages didn’t eat meat as well and prescribed sattvik diet. Is is imitation? No. I don’t eat meat not because sages didn’t do it and I’m trying to imitate that behavior. I don’t eat meat because I cannot eat something from which I personally cannot take life. It’s a principle which I came upon in reflection and which feels right to me. As I don’t think anyone should follow this principle, but only those who resonate with it, I don’t expect people around me to follow the same rule. So I don’t compare people who eat meat with sages who didn’t eat it and allocate respective judgements. I believe it’s a personal business of an individual and it doesn’t by itself reflect “the level of malice” of individual. As a person may not have ill intentions towards living beings, yet follow the rules imposed to him by surrounding society and circumstances. So it’s not the comparison that works in that case but reverse-engineered principles. It matters that a person comes up with ahimsa out of personal reflection and not just parrots what sages did. So in my case it works only because I came up with it myself. And I don’t think it should be applied as a universal rule (about eating meat).
Traumatic events are poisons which strengthen the mind.
You see, I don’t think that traumatic events strengthen the mind at all. It’s true that strong mind will come through them more easily. But comparing them to exercising the muscles seems odd to me. First of all, exercise is a feasible controlled challenge, overcoming which gives one a pleasure. While traumatic events are unpredictable uncontrolled shocks that shutter the nervous system. They introduce an unsurmountable contradiction, “I love her, and she is gone.” Which starts up the cycle of self-rumination (in which the DMN is prevalent) which saps up all the energy from the constructive channels. It’s true that one has to learn to overcome that grief, and eventually some process will shift the network from the default self-ruminating mode to the tasking mode. But the shock divides the mind through contradiction and will in one way or another sap its energy (even when one seemingly shifted from the initial shock).
An example. Having a psychotic break after an existential shock doesn’t make you stronger by any means, it even makes you more prone to more psychotic breaks. That is like uncontrolled entropy growth. And one cannot reverse that process so the feedback-loop is degenerative. It makes one more vulnerable to vicissitudes of life and doesn’t teach anything of value. It’s a lose-lose situation. The only upside of such an event can be the understanding that one has no control over life and attempt to cut the dispersion to different directions of thinking, i.e. simplification. But whether it’s healthy or not in a highly complex environment it’s hard to tell.
How do you stay pure around perverts, sensitive to noise around people who yell, optimistic in the face of failure?
Yes, that’s a difficult topic. The only solution that I have found to work when you are in such conditions is turning inward instead of outward. That is, all the time it is possible to do it. That’s also why I believe spirituality works, as one’s odds of success are miniscule and one is basically operating on faith alone.
Aesthetics and meaning both add value to things, so they protect against nihilism and life-denying attitudes
It’s funny that I think that the very process of meaning-making (if meaning taken as intrinsic) leads eventually to nihilism. When one is thwarted and doesn’t get what one wants, the very meaning one was invested in turns against him and feeds life-denying attitudes. The only solution that I found to this is the Buddhist middle way, which basically denies intrinsic meaning, stating that all meaning only made up, i.e. relational, local. In that model I tend to de-emphasize the meaning making apparatus. But that’s not nihilistic, as relativized meaning is accepted. It’s like saying, it works, but don’t forget that it’s only local and not absolute.
If somebody else took over your life, would they also fail at achieving any good ends?
Positive here. But I don’t despair, because all the conditions and circumstances seem to direct me in the direction of liberation. Everything else will not suffice. In games’ jargon, only epic win will suffice, everything else is half-measures that would not hold ground. I’m certainly not guaranteed of that, but it creates a somewhat healthy dynamics.
But the world does not work without roleplay.
It’s not a problem if one takes it to be only a role. But deeply is not identified with that role. Some people used to call me a mathematician or a programmer, but those were just functions I performed, not what I am deep inside. I am neither limited nor defined by those functions. All I can say, I, indeed, simply am.
I think these questions have to prove to the I that they have value at all
You seem to want to build a theory of mind (a good read on the topic by Joscha Bach, Principles of Synthetic Intelligence). And it may serve a valid purpose. But what I try to share with those questions is deep inborn childlike curiosity (that I myself get from them). Granted those questions may not be “your” questions and you may resonate with different set altogether. It’s actually good that you don’t have such a theory of mind, as you feel unprepared for their rawness! They are not meant to be answered by the mind, they are to lead the mind into impasse from which it cannot move, where concepts cease and silence prevails. That silence (albeit temporary) is the goal. It’s the data-point that the mind learns after asking such questions. Once it gets enough data-points of silence, it starts to prefer that state over the default one. For some it may take few months, for others—years of practice. There is a good post by Gary Weber that uncovers this process, Self-inquiry vs the egos/Is—How it works—the neuroscience.
Actually, from the theory of mind perspective self-inquiry is meant to get rid of the SRIN. So if one is tired of incessant self-talk one will look for any means to stop it. But the “I” will never agree to that deal as that would mean its own dissolution… Therefore the process of self-inquiry is itself paradoxical. You are either attracted to it or not. That includes any koan, not just self-inquiry as the aim of koans is the same—to get rid of the SRIN (which is by some tantamount to awakening). Only a peculiar “I” will agree to that deal. But Gary in Myths about Nonduality and Science says that cognition in the result is much higher. He gives a comparison by Hood’s mysticism scale, where nonduality/liberation scores higher than sex and psychedelics. A worthy read/watch, if you are into hacking your perception.
I know the purpose of asking me these questions, but I’d personally rather anchor my concept of self more strongly than reduce it. I’m trying not to be enlightened, as I enjoy being a fool
Ha-ha-ha! In some way “it’s too late” as you’ve already started contemplating over those questions. But don’t worry about that, they say that awakening is not directly linked with anything we do with our minds. If you are destined to awaken—you will, whether you want it or not, whether you’ve heard something about it or not, whether you do some practices or not. Contemplating these questions (or other koans) just makes one “prone to accidents” more. I think your mind is too curious not to ponder over some unanswerable question or another so you are not liberationproof.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to solve a problem (except for subconscious few). I think philosophizing has its own value, an end in itself and “random insights” are what makes it interesting. It’s rare when someone takes it seriously enough for it to be interesting. And it was interesting for me so far. Your brain is more sophisticated than mine but I will still try to entertain you, especially considering that I see many things differently.
I think he exaggerated a bit. As many philosophers reflect due to this very reason—to reflect oneself out of the system. To see oneself from the side as an object, as a stone. In order to get an insight and transcend it. And yes, for the attentive such thinking is the most intimate reflection of a person one can think of. For example, here is the first clause of Alexander Piatigorsky’s testament:
No need to be afraid here. All-permeating tranquility takes its place and its very life-affirming and accepting, it’s like saying “yes” to everything. I can say so because I’ve experienced those moments when the narrative stops and they are freeing. It’s like you get a complete wonder out of things you previously deemed mundane. But the total shut down of the narrative is my goal and, yes, it’s possible (the post I mentioned above about nonduality discusses this in detail). You say “you need” to “feel meaning”. Who told you about the need? And the meaning-making changes when the brain turns to different modes of being. It’s not obliterated. Kegan invented five stages of development of the self and the meaning-making mechanism where each stage crushes before new begins. It’s a helpful map, when your mind is in a transitional stage.
That might mean two things. Either you deem the very question flawed because the concept of reality is like our belief in ghosts. Or you have to define what you mean by reality, or at least describe it the way you see it.
But it would be a compassionate thing to explain to me that demons don’t exist or direct me to seek a professional help. Not that anyone says someone has to be compassionate. It just would be such an act.
First, I call development everything that helps me to get rid of the self, to transcend it completely. Second, I disagree with that because suffering doesn’t lead to development in the usual sense as well, it only increases entropy of the situation. Some strong individuals may learn from it, but most won’t. It’s just an explosion, no free energy involved as it doesn’t have a structure.
That’s why in ancient Advaita texts they mention two types of consciousness: objectifying consciousness (or empiric) and Pure Consciousness, that which lights up the screen of the theatre (or the cave). From the standpoint of objectifying consciousness, Pure Consciousness is either a fiction or a concept. But from the standpoint of Pure Consciousness, objectifying consciousness is an illusion. Think of the moon that reflects in many waters in pots. Every reflection thinks it has light of its own independent of other pots and of the moon. Until the pot is broken and water drains. Only the moon remains.
But you are already 100% grounded at that point. Meaning when not even pain can distract you from pure being.
I assess my coping strategies as subpar and the internal narrative as overly anxious. I rarely think in terms of society as such complexity is beyond my brains, but I tell you this: do you think it could have been otherwise? It’s a rhetorical question. On that note, I also don’t think we create things or that they are sloppy concepts or ours, we indeed discover them, nobody chose to be born with 10 fingers (which leads to decimal arithmetics) or bilateral vision (which basically gives you trigonometry), Theory of General Relativity or the Universal Turing Machine is practically inevitable for observers like us. ”… we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper” / Einstein.
First, one has to come to that place. Everything that needs fixing will be fixed. When you are happy you still tend to homeostasis, not only when you are in pain.
Conquering oneself is tantamount to finding out the reality.
But you’ve said yourself, that the point is in playing the game not winning it, so the intention to avoid suffering is there, you accept it, it’s only that you don’t believe it can be done (or is healthy), so you play this game. That is which surprises me. As one thing can be generalized to living beings (and I’m very cautious with generalizations usually) and that’s tendency to be happy. But in your model you refuse to seek an antidote for the sore. I don’t say I don’t believe you, but find it surprising.
I don’t agree with Nietzsche here. I’ve already described the way I see it. It’s increase in entropy and the absence of free energy. The energy is there, it’s just cannot be used constructively (i.e. to lessen the entropy increase). So it leads to dissipation of heat (both metaphorically and not).
And what’s wrong with that? Or who has the choice over preset conditions of one’s makeup? You see you say you don’t want to win the game but tend to think in terms of conflict and power, as if you do.
And I think understanding is not a guaranteed outcome even if one is intelligent (and more so if not), but that doesn’t mean you must necessarily remain silent, some will see it from another angle, some won’t. Every way to solve a Zen koan is an error, yet it is helpful in order to lead beyond the mind.
A cartesian answer. But what about the deep dreamless sleep? You could not think there, but you know that you are somehow. You don’t doubt your being in your deep sleep, do you? If there were no thinking there, how so?..
You must have a reason for seeking enlightenment in the first place, some reason that suffering doesn’t work well. I think there’s good excitement (thrill) and bad excitement (anxiety). And that there’s good insanity (slight mania, vividness, charisma, stong engagement) and bad insanity (mental illness and the mind collapsing under its own generated strain). I hope to flip as many negatives into positives as possible, rather than to remove the mechanisms.
The meaning of the quote is that this is impossible. When a person says “Life is suffering”, what they mean is “My life is suffering”. It’s about them. Everything in life only exist in relation to other things. “Nothing exists but the whole”. How a picture looks depends as much on the thing being photographed as it depends on the camera. In this case, a camera is trying to say “the picture looks like this in itself. I, the camera, am unbiased”.
In order to remove all the bias, you must remove the entire person, including the thinking process. You will not be able to remove “error” any faster than “virtue”.
There are insights that you naturally come across if you suffer enough. Buddha came across them, as I did I. They’re not necessarily true, but most of them are the experience of a previous idea breaking apart, and the mind freeing itself from something which used to trouble it.
Is it really life-affirming if it doesn’t invest into the moment? i.e. if it’s without “skin in the game”. Saying yes to everything means that one seemingly lacks preference. Well, the brain can give a positive value to everything all at once, it’s has slightly different rules from mathematical systems. And it is indeed possible to destroy the narration. But I think that is strongly tied to the meaning-making circuit of the brain? I experience meaning as “weight” and “relevance”. Weight is strongly tied to “caring” as well. Here’s some examples:
In Dragon ball, the power levels scale exponentially every season, making the old numbers feel meaningless.
In videogames, cheating ruins the value of resources because the value was given by scarcity. Also, leaving a game and coming back later makes it less meaningful because the relevance has decreased.
A way to momentarily get rid of anxiety is to tell yourself “we’re just monkeys on a big rock hurling through space” or to otherwise zoom out to a bigger perspective. This is an outside-in perspective rather than an inside-out perspective, making the brain filter away the self which is suffering. The ratio of space that you occupy in the perspective is also about a billion times smaller when you reduce the earth to a rock in space. I think this is WHY the method works.
Finally, the “rat race” makes one fixate on productivity, which makes the brain assign less values to things which do not further the goal of productivity, so the value which things are assigned depends on ones current plans, which explains why people who don’t know what to do next also feel a sense of meaninglessness.
These examples are not exhaustive of how perception and meaning is tied together, but I find it difficult to come up with methods which lessen suffering without decreasing weight, caring and subjective relevance, and therefore meaning. And meditation seems to work by modifying perception directly. I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong or that my model is incomplete, but the model applies to myself.
Reality is that which exists physically. These words merely “point” at reality. Reality is not “ghosts”, I think you’re fixing the wrong side of the equation. The perspective from which reality appears unreal is a ghost.
It’s still ambiguous what I’m actually claiming, so I will be more direct: In order to live in reality, one must have no mental model of reality. When you see a car, you must see the car itself, as if you had never seen a car before. Your brain wants to pull up the concept of car that it’s already familiar with, and this is what would prevent you from experiencing the car as it is. I think one is the closest to reality when they have no preconceived notions, not even the knowledge of logic, nor of concepts.
To the person experiencing demons, it would feel like that. But perhaps the person who has lost the ability to believe in anything except material reality would be jealous of such an experience. And find it cute in the same sense that it’s cute when a child believes in santa or the tooth fairy.
And fair. I used “development” to mean “adaptation to circumstances of life”.
Suffering leads to development when and only when one overcomes a problem. If one loses to the problem, it becomes a setback, and if the tension remains unresolved, then it’s just a passive energy sink.
Can you learn math without studying math? I think you need math problems to overcome in order to get better at math. The problem helps you find the solution, as the two are one. If you have math homework you just keep trying to ignore, then ignoring it will tire you out (energy sink). If the math is way above your level you become discouraged (lose momentum/energy). If you can do the math, successfully it feels good to the extent that it challenged you. If you were to design a video game and calculate the amount of experience points something would give, it would be a perfect fit to my analogy. And despite this all being subjective and mental, it seems to describe how physical growth in power works, too.
Are you sure challenges can’t improve a system? To grow stronger through conflict is almost the definition of life. The greatest growth results from the greatest suffering. Almost everything I write here I discovered on my own, because I refused the alternative, which was dying.
My entropy also increases when I read a new book, but then I chew on the information and integrate it into my worldview, again lowering the entropy. It’s similar to actual eating and digesting. And physical trainin and healing. If you want low mental entropy, I suggest you don’t learn anymore. Conflicting information reduce the coherence of your mind, increasing entropy until the conflicts (inconsistencies) are resolved. Even chatting with me leads to conflict (inconsistencies) which result in growth (stronger models). The feeling of mental clarity, and confidence, is likely just the minds certaincy about its own worldview. From self-esteem issues to confidence the only things which change are the certaincy of belief and the value assessment of oneself.
If you think of things as “created” rather than “discovered”, then you won’t be bothered when you realize how arbitrary many things are. It also won’t bother you that different people have different worldviews. It also won’t bother you that some things are emergent, and that you can’t prove anything exists prior to the universe. It also allows you to create your own values and to believe in their legitimacy. About 80% of all existential issues disappear on the spot for anyone who adopts this view.
I think integration is needed, not just self-tyranny. And I think one learns to know oneself, rather than reality. But the reality which is not tied to oneself is, in my opinion, irrelevant.
The reason I wrote that, by the way, is that one can focus so much on spiritual growth that everyday life is neglected. In that way, the type of victory does not transfer over.
I avoid outcomes which are against my taste. Suffering can be beautiful, just likes movies which make us cry can be excellent movies. But why is this anymore surprising than people loving video games? Some even choose hard mode or hardcore mode, intentionally making the game difficult and frustrating.
Self-modification is doable. Meditation is self-modification too. And I need to know the mathematics of experience in order to create a richer experience. Imagine a fictional book character gaining self-awareness, and instead of breaking the fourth wall and invalidating the book, he chooses to remain a character and make the book even more thrilling to read.
Koans help one to get out of the car
I only need to show that I sometimes exist in order to show that existence is real. I don’t really care about the reality which I’m not around to experience, and if I was only alive 17 hours a day, that wouldn’t really bother me either.
I’m not sure what experiments will align the most with your quest for enlightenment. I can remain happy even when the ratio of suffering to pleasure is 85⁄15. I guess I can teach you one way of escaping yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. The brain can filter out background noise, right? You can treat your own suffering and thoughts like such noise. This would be a bit cruel to yourself, though, since you’d be ignoring their (your) suffering.
Most anxiety comes from not having things in order, and the best way to deal with it is to take life by the horns. Don’t ask for permission, and don’t merely hope. Cause what you want to happen, you have the ability. If you ask me “How will X go?” my first answer will be “I don’t know, I lack information”, but this is just an impulse, a lie. I know what my future will be, how my relationships will go, which of my goals will fail and succeed at this rate. I just have to look, and looking is scary, but if I open my eyes and also steer things in a good direction, then there’s no anxiety and worries about failure. I will know I won’t fail. I can even decide when to go to sleep and when to wake up (and I won’t need an alarm). I could lie and say “It’s unpredictable”, but I can feel my brain negotiating with itself, deciding before it falls asleep if it wants to wake up or sleep until it’s rested. I’ve just sometimes pretended I didn’t know. This is probably what is meant by “There is no try”.
Let me quote “EST, playing the game the new way”, for I just remembered where I’ve seen this idea before: “You have a remarkable ability which you never acknowledged before. It is, to look at a situation and know whether you can do it. And I mean really know the answer for you. And all I’m saying is that if you can see that you can do it, go on and do it”. This requires some level of alertness above that of self-deception and autopilot, but that’s not a very high level. It also requires you and your subconscious being somewhat on the same page (you will know!).
Regarding favorable states, they get easier as you have more control over yourself. Can you relax on command? What about hearing a spoiler and then intentionally choosing not to commit it to memory? Can you placebo yourself without a sugar pill? These things are all quite fun.
You exist continuously, otherwise you would loose the previous thread of experience and it would be incoherent. The thing is that being is pre-conceptual, not established based on thinking. How is it established? That’s a greatest koan for me. It’s like asking “Who am I, really?” If one is honest, one will acknowledge that all the mental chatter that the mind comes up with is not “I”. “I’m a human” is a thought. Which didn’t occur to one in the deep sleep. Yet, one didn’t cease being.
I find physicality is a weak description of reality as you omit the fact how do you know of such physicality. You first know it in your thinking which is a process in consciousness. I tend to think that reality has to possess a character of immutability and must be self-revealing without a break to be considered real. Something akin to Leibniz’ idea of a monad. But since nothing we observe has such property, everything is in perpetual flux of change, the question looms, is there a reality that is distinct from the observer of such reality?
To sum up, you cannot establish physicality unless you first aware of it. And the nature of such observer is also at best questionable. Therefore we operate through the principles of relativity. We establish a local pattern and induce that it has the universal character. That’s how we build “the reality”. But something that is dependent on such process is highly vulnerable in terms of calling it “the reality”. It is at best a consensus we reach through the experience of many observers and the principle of relativity. But can it be called “real”? I’m not so sure.
So you are essentially saying, “I have a frightful dream, but I don’t want to wake up, I just want to make it a beautiful dream.” That’s an option. I just personally consider it unacceptable.
And I believe (that’s the word) that it is possible. Very-very hard but possible. The basic insight in awakening is exactly that person doesn’t exist. It’s simply a conglomeration of thoughts. It’s not removing all of thinking, but just self-referential part of it, the self-talk. Problem solving remains.
Weight and consequently meaning from the narrative is indeed removed, but that’s like removing the meaning from the dreaming apparatus, you stop believing in the dream. What takes its place is satisfaction from just being. No matter the circumstances. So meaning is derived from just being and being ok with it. The circuits of meaning-making are indeed changed. But I have to admit, I cannot understand that state before it’s reached. It’s like the blind who tries to imagine the colors. One has to first fix one’s vision. It’s not theoretical.
Challenges can improve the system. Conflict cannot. Learning math is a challenge. Sparring partner is a challenge. Enemy is a conflict.
That’s a structured challenge, which I can digest and which as a result helps me to lessen entropy. Not learning is not an option as the mind seeks for ways to come to safety constantly. And if one doesn’t learn, the seeking mechanism will just lead one to anxiety. So the dynamics is this: either learn or become restless. I have to admit, that’s the default behavior and it is changed after awakening, where one can remain peaceful without a structured challenge. But for now, learning is inevitable.
And how did you learn of those values? You don’t exist in a vacuum independently of relations. They are causes and conditions that lead you to accept those values. You as an agent, are not in control over it.
You want a better dream. But you operate under the assumption that you have control over life. I don’t have such an assumption.
And I don’t have a clue. All predictions in my case are worrisome and not constructive. But the most importantly, you again assume a capacity of control. Who is the controller? Is it that a conglomeration of thoughts that is built from the past experiences “decides” what to do next? But then it’s not control, it’s fatalism. If that’s something else, one has first to find out what is meant by the word “I”. What is this “I” who decides and controls its own destiny? How is it built? Do you even have control over your thoughts? It’s like a parable, “take a medicine not thinking of a red monkey”, and it cannot be done. I’m skeptical of all prescriptions like you’ve mentioned from EST. As the controller is the controlled. I cannot spot for the sake of me any agent that is apart from life, that can change its course and trust me I’ve tried to spot it. It seems it all works on its own, without the “Mighty Controller”. It is all out of my hands.
I suppose that’s true. But aren’t questions and answers false? If I ask you how heavy a rock is, and you answer that it’s 7 kilo, isn’t our conversation happening entirely outside of the rock? Neither the question nor the answer really relates to the rock itself. So when you ask what something “really is”, neither the question or the answer is any more real than your experience of the thing, they’re both inferior. And a memory is, at best, a low quality imitation of an experience, it does the vividness of the experience no justice. The same goes for the re-telling of a story, one had to be there in order to experience the real thing.
For the same reason, I don’t think thoughts, models, theories, explanations and descriptions can get to the bottom of things. They’re all derivatives.
Through my senses. If you’re asking how I can prove that physical reality exists, that idea is really not something which bothers me. If you mean that it might be illusion or whatever, you’re right, but it’s even less likely that beings exist which have a shared illusion of something they call physical reality, and a whole lot of coherent information which just so happens to not break said illusion. It would be as if somebody faked an autograph by simulating an entire person neuron by neuron and then having them interact with somebody asking for an autograph and then compying it over from the simulation onto the paper. Intuitively, you only have more things to explain if the simple assumption is wrong.
A changing thing can be constant. A stable orbit is something which is constant but also changes over time. And gravity is constant acceleration. The soluton to an equation can also be, for instance, a line. By “unchanging”, you’re actually asking for everything to be zero-dimensional (a single dot). I think we make a lot of unreasonable demands of reality. That reason itself makes wrong assumptions about things.
No, relativity is correct because absoluteness cannot exist! I meant this literally. Nothing is absolute, for there is no fixed neutral reference point. You might as well try looking for the middle of the surface of a sphere. It’s easy to think that ones own culture is reality until one meets other cultures. A person with a single watch always knows what time it is, but give him two different watches and he will have a problem on his hands. The problem can only be fixed by pointing to a new unique authority, like the clock on the church. But then you discover another church, and now the problem is back! Then you look in a bigger scope for the next unique thing. Similar problem to infinite regress and Infinite ascent.
Now, most people think that “universal truths” are “absolute truths”, but it’s really just that they made “the universe” the new authority. If you point our that, perhaps other universes exist, then they will say “well, math is objective! Laws of physics are objective”. But you can create different mathematics, they’re just axiomatic systems. And it’s possible that other universes have other laws of physics. Even if you arrived at a true upper layer, it would be finite and definite, and thus limited in a way, and thus exist as something specific and thus not universal.
No local patterns can have universal character. Things literally only exist in one place. Existence is uniqueness. If something is multiplicity (like the future), then it does not yet exist. And as soon as it comes into existence, it’s definite, precisely because every other possiblity is excluded at that moment in time. Every single atom is different. From this we arrive at the semi-famous quote: “All generalizations, except maybe this one, are false”.
I experience both positive and negation emotions. Why do you decide to define the experience by the negative emotions? It’s not wrong, but the opposite is just as valid. For the same reason that these two statements are equivalent:
1: Every time I get up, I get knocked down again.
2: Every time I get knocked down, I get up again.
Both are a loop transitioning between two states forever, but one sounds negative and the other sounds positive. But it’s the one and same loop, mirrored.
I think this means “The (personality/ego/constructed sense of self) doesn’t exist”. Bu the generalization is true even for objects, and I meant the physical person. When I look at things, what I see is a function of my eyes. I cannot seperate what I see from eyes. What I taste depends on my taste buds, if taste buds do not exist then neither does taste. Beauty is also in the eye of the beholder. Thus, if a picture of a flower is ugly, it’s human to assume that there’s something wrong with the flower, but what if the problem is actually with the camera? When a person says “life is bad”, why do we assume that there’s something wrong with life, rather than the person who speaks such words?
I don’t think mere being results in meaning. But I think that a person can endure a lack of meaning if he has a sense of beauty. In either case, I feel like enlightenment undermines itself. It cannot be a meaningful persuit if the persuit destroys its own meaning.
I just model it as two interacting forces with some incompatibility. Is two magnetic poles repulsing eachother challenge or conflict? What about the desire to be productive and the desire to relax? What about a guilty pleasure? I try to model things in such a way that I can trace a single principle from the laws of physics all the way to subjective things. This doesn’t always succeed, but it’s because the brain has different elemental operations than physics does. In real life, hot + cold is lukewarm. Your brain however, can experience the qualia of frost and burning at the same time, they don’t cancel out.
Yeah, but that’s like how an insecure person fishing for compliments. It’s an “error” stemming from a self-protective mechanism, and you can turn it off as long as you can believe it’s safe to do so. You could argue that one has to learn why, but I’m tempted to say “the answer is already within you, you can already do it, you just need to realize it”.
I have access to my own nature. I can isolate myself and reflect on what I truly like. I can choose, but only because the brain is malleable.
At least, I have control over myself. And I’m a part of life, so I have a little bit of power. And like you, I could make some good arguments that this power is an illusion. But if you look around the world, you will see individuals who singlehandedly seem to have a lot of influence on the world. It’s like those who are crazy enough to believe that they can make a difference are those who can.
I’m not sure it’s a “who”. It feels like some mutual understanding between the elephant and the rider, which is experienced as a mixture of agency and certainty. It’s not merely following a schematic created by memory, because if it were, one wouldn’t be able to turn their life around from one day to the next, and yet some people have managed this. The mechanism doesn’t question, it answers. It doesn’t ask “What is it?” It says “Thus it shall be”, it doesn’t follow, it leads.
This feels like a limiting belief. It’s a bit like “In order to drive a car, you must first know how it works, and somebody will have to prove to you that it’s actually a car”, but any idiot can get in, turn the key and press the gas pedal, and off it goes.
You could say “Take a medicine, and think of yellow flowers”, and then no red monkeys would bother you. The reason that it doesn’t work, is that when you write “not X”, you’re also writing X. The reason it works in logic is because “not false” is evaluated to “true”. It changes into something which works. The brain does not seem to do this step, at least not in the same way.
I don’t think anything which exists is apart from life. And since we exist, we’re part of life. I think your issue is that you deprive yourself of agency because you don’t trust yourself with it, and then you hide this fact from yourself.
Can you not remember any cases where you “woke up” and allowed yourself agency? This always happens to me when people I care about are in danger. If you ask me if I can get to the graveyard one night, I will tell you no, I don’t know where it is, and it’s basically impossible to navigate in the dark, and it’s cold and I’m too tired. But if you told me that my grandma had fallen at the graveyard and was lying on the ground waiting for me, I’d be there within about 15 minutes. And there are no if’s, it’s an assertion. It feels unconditional. Can you try similar thought experiments and capture this feeling of certainty? That’s probably the elephant you can feel. You allow yourself to use your own strength because circumstances legitimize it.
Now, these experiments might fail. You might feel like a victim instead, and wanting to call for help. That’s alright, it just means that your elephant considers it a better strategy to get the attention of other people who can help you. You might also just panic on the spot—in this case it would be because the elephant first panics, and then protects itself from the feeling of panic through a mental retreat, because it incorrectly believes that it’s the emotion, rather than the source of emotion, which is the danger.
If it works, I’d say focus on negotiating with yourself, and on creating mental framings which legitimize your agency. Fuse what you want to do, and what you know you ought to do, into one. Watch which objections occur, those are the limiting beliefs. E.g. “I want to believe the explanation I’m reading right now, but I want more proof first, as it may be wrong”. In this case, the elephant would be afraid of holding false beliefs, because it thinks it can be hurt by them. There’s an ocean of possible limiting beliefs, including “I don’t think I deserve success”, and “successful people tend to be bad people, and I’m a good person, therefore I must not be successful”. All self-defense, which is also self-sabotage.
I can explain more, but the solution doesn’t actually require understanding the solution. Neither is it the case that it will work if, and only if, I can prove that it will. Reality cares just as little about logical arguments as ideologues and religious fanatics do.
I tend to agree with everything that you wrote about the reality considering its content. And applying Occam’s razor to exclude the simulation hypothesis. The only thing which I don’t do, I don’t internally consider it real (except in the empirical sense and in everyday usage). One might say, I consider it quasi-real. Why is that? I tend to agree with Gaudapada, who said, “Something that isn’t real in the beginning and in the end, isn’t real even in the interval between the two.” For example, the dream comes out of nowhere and ends in the same place, therefore it’s not even real in-between. The body is born someday and will die some other day, therefore it cannot be considered real in-between. And so on.
The only thing that I have doubts about is pure consciousness itself. I’m not so sure it has a beginning and an end. For all I know, it may be a universal characteristic of existence. That is, not a quality of beings with a particular complexity of brains, but that which permeates all of existence. It seems like a religious belief, but I had this experience which proved to me that some “field” exists beyond the conceptual layer of thinking. And I could not say if it had a beginning or an end. It’s rather my thoughts about it that have a beginning and an end. My thoughts are not reliable indicator or reality as they are themselves come and go (as in deep sleep).
It’s the observer who deems it constant. It’s constant with regard to the observer. But even the orbits wobble. As Heraclitus said, “A man cannot step into the same river twice, because it is not the same river, and he is not same man.” It’s the second part that is constantly missed: space-time changes but so is the observer of it. Orbits and gravity formed over time with the distribution of matter somehow. We still have no answer which goes beyond the mechanism of gravity. But we have no reason to assume that it’s constant all over. “Unchanging” thing would lead to a plethora of unresolvable contradictions (yes, I know that postulating pure consciousness is also such a thing, I have no answer to it yet, only a limited experience of it).
I meant it as an example. You seem to want a better dream (whatever “better” means to you). And I want to wake up from the dream altogether.
When you experience it even once even in a glimpse you will know for certain, that that’s a preferable state. Theorizing doesn’t do it justice. And I’m not the right person to fully describe this experience as I don’t have it on a regular basis. I only know that it exists. In that state the search for meaning itself stops, but it doesn’t land you in void and despair, on the contrary, everything seems alright and as “it should be”.
I tend to think that it only applies to complex macro systems. Conflict is something that leads to rapid increase of entropy and no free energy (i.e. no possibility to learn from it, to use the obtained knowledge later, no structure, etc.). Challenge is something constructive that has a structure, from which one may learn and apply knowledge later to reduce entropic growth. When challenge is too complex it turns into conflict.
What I really meant there was that the mind is always “on”, always seeking for something to do and act, and if one is not involved with something constructive, it turns into restlessness. So one is almost certain to engage in some acquisition of knowledge or some other task that makes one less anxious. One cannot just sit for undefined period of time and be alright with it (until awakening). So the suggestion “not to learn” is not feasible.
You accept that there is some nature there beyond the facade of the “I” (which is just a post hoc construct for experience). And you allocate to it much trust if you confide the most important decisions to it. Are you sure it’s not a substitution to “I don’t know where my decisions and values are coming from”, to the unknown which you cannot accept?
And the more I look the less I see that I have control over my mind. It’s all the elephant’s doing, over which I have no control. That’s the current model. But I have been observing my mind for a long time. And frankly I was always doubting the control that I have. I did few experiments that proved to me, that the control is a fiction. You cannot will what you will.
The only question is where it will go in such case? I consider this question the most important for the rider to figure out. As until it’s crystal clear, it’s not certain where are you going, with what speed and whose objective you perform.
Plausible assumption. But I have been observing my mind very carefully for a long time to come to this understanding. I cannot find any particular “doer” with certainty, that would have at least quasi-real character. Whenever I look, I only see intentions, thoughts that are coming out of nowhere really. I understand that all of them are of reflex nature, but I cannot spot the first member of such reflex.
Yes, that’s the elephant. And the rider cannot trick it really into believing it’s a life and death situation. It’s much more intelligent than the rider. Why even this? The rider is a post hoc construct of the elephant for some secretarial tasks.
I believe that it’s the rider who is afraid and has limiting beliefs. Self-referential internal narrative (SRIN) is an aspect of the rider. Self-negotiation and self-observation are always limited to the rider’s capacities and they only prolong its life. My goal is to get rid of the SRIN, i.e. to refactor the rider into a more friendly function or get rid of it completely (i.e. awakening). And to let the elephant do its thing.
Yeah, I’ve already got what you mean. You are still enthusiastic with regard to self-improvement. In my case I want more radical change than the change of the rider’s “mood” (function, etc.). Changing the rider’s “mood” may have its value, I don’t argue with that. It’s just I’m sick and tired of SRIN enormously and want to get rid of it. I know it’s possible so I tend in that direction.
I think everything empirical must be real, it just could be distorted. If you have a hallucination about something, the hallucination is real, and it’s content is real just like how a movie is real (that is, the movie exists, but its content did not necessarily take place in real life). The only problem with “I think, therefore I am” is that it supposes an “I”, and that is assumes we know what thinking is. The logic is sound in that, in order for something to be able to hallucinate, something must exist.
I don’t think we can claim that the dream came out of nowhere. It’s like a computer program claiming that the computer it runs on “came out of nowhere”. The computer existed prior to the program, and it will exist after the program finishes executing. The computer is in a higher scope, and the program cannot break outside of itself, nor can the program understand anything outside of its own grammar, for that’s the scope of its existence. A computer program is not a structure which is capable of calculating and holding information, the calculation IS the structure, the information IS the structure. There is only structure. We can only experience ourselves, and we can’t think of anything external because every thought takes place, exists internally. So just like how a thought in your mind cannot break outside of your mind, and a character in a book cannot leave the book, I think it’s arrogant of human beings when their brains decided that the structure they’re embedded inside is wrong or fake. There’s orders of inclusion, scope and chronology which are broken by such assumption.
You assume thoughts have beginnings and ends, and that thoughts therefore aren’t real. But I think thoughts exist physically. A thought contains information, it takes up space, and information must be encoded in something and exist in some location (these are both one). So the only conclusion possible is that thoughts are real, but that we have no way to verify that our thoughts about things outside our thoughts are true. And I will agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a problem.
Also, you think that consciousness may still be real, even if thoughts have beginnings and ends, so you only require the upper layer to be real. This means that the universe may still be real even if human beings have beginnings and ends. You’re only afraid that the uppermost layer is illusion, right? And I suppose you main issue is regarding the agency of the self, and now its realness.
If you take a thing which changes through time, and you model time as a physical dimension, then you have one static four-dimensional object. A DVD is also a static, unchanging object, but you can use one to play a movie, and a movie is visual and auditory information over time. My point about the orbits came from the law “An object in motion stays in motion”, it says “Something which changes over time will change over time in the exact same way forever unless its disturbed from the outside”, and the uppermust layer of the universe is a whole, so there is no external force to disturb it.
Heraclitus is right, but it’s because the entire structure which is life must either never repeat, repeat forever in a huge loop which spans the age of the universe, or have a fractal-like structure. That’s the only possibilities which does not violate “Always changes but has no beginning nor end”. This seems in line with the poincare recurrence theorem and the conservation of energy.
So, that was a lot of words, but it solves all these topics without breaking any fundamental laws, it just requires you to accept that local truths aren’t necessarily global truths. And this should be fine, since I’ve also shown that this doesn’t make the local truth less real.
Yes. But not because I dislike the dream. I’d keep dreaming even if it didn’t improve, for I’d still consider it better than no dream. So to me, destroying the dream would be a loss, not a gain. And, by being both the creator of the dream and the dreamer, it will be my own fault when the dream sucks, and I will have nothing external to blame or complain to.
I’ve experienced the ideal state before, or something similar. But in that state, I didn’t even care if all my friends left me, for I wanted the best for them, and if the best for them was leaving me, I’d consider that good.
When you’re in the state, you do experience it as preferable. But angry people also want to be angry, and depressive thoughts feel correct when you’re depressed, and drunk people rarely think they’ve had too much. You can only really judge a state from the outside, so you need to exit the state in order to judge it. I know I’m doing the opposite when I say that immersion into the moment is good, but this is because I experience life as a work of art, and there’s no wrong or flawed art, so it cannot be judged, only experienced.
I don’t think it’s the dream which is painful, even. It’s the self-torture the brain engages with in order to keep itself alive. For instance, it predicts a large set of bad possible futures, and then feels pain for all of them at once. It doesn’t even map good futures to feel good about. It basically stabs itself in an internal simulation order to motivate itself to avoid being stabbed outside of the simulation.
I think one can learn to use most poisons as medicine, even if it takes time. Human beings, somehow, manage to fight entropy. I think even anxiety is entropy, which is why people relax with music, rocking back and forth, by cleaning, and with rituals. We’re soothed by all entropy-reducing actions. We love order as long as it doesn’t drop so low that we feel trapped and understimulated.
But I think your way of thinking allows for too high complexity. People with downs syndrome live in the same complex world as yourself, but their thoughts are more simple, and from what I can tell, they’re usually quite happy people. Animals, too, are simple, and this lack of complexity does not threaten their survival. How could low IQ, and false knowledge, be a problem? Sharks have literally been around for longer than the north star, and they never discovered rationality.
I think this only happens if one conditions oneself into such a state. If you know without a doubt that relaxation is productive because hard work requires rest, then I don’t think your brain will protect you from wasting time, by protecting you from relaxation (that is, sending you warning signals every time you try to relax)
I think you only need to sit and look at a wall for around 40 minutes before the brain gives up trying to fight again you. The impulses to do something else stops as the brain realizes it cannot force you. I think meditations work the same way, they can’t be too short, as it takes a bit of time for the brain to change the mode that it’s in. But yeah, it will feel very uncomfortable for a while, and 40 minutes is just a guess, it varies between people.
Yeah, thought I wouldn’t call the “I” a facade. It’s real, it’s just not everything. Just like pain is real, even though other emotions and sensations exist, and many other brain circuits exist outside of emotions and sensations. When the elephant and rider is in alignment, it still just feels like I’m in alignment with myself. But this ‘myself’ goes deeper than my identity, persona and ego. I consider my entire body to be me. It doesn’t matter that it’s not. Two seperate people can be on the same wavelength and thus understand eachother, so I can also be on wavelength with myself, even if the components I consider one are actually disconnected. And I have introspective access to the decisions which are made by the brain, so I can usually tell when I’m lying to myself or acting on impulse.
I struggled with this in the past. Then I modeled it as “Neurochemistry is stronger than psychology. You cannot simply think your way to more dopamine”. Then I realized that the release of neurotransmitters are triggered by thoughts and experiences, things that I have access to. Close your eyes and imagine that you’re in a room and everyone likes you—your brain will increase your confidence a little, as long as you don’t accidentally focus on the fact that you don’t believe in what you see. The brain doesn’t really differentiate between the subjective and objective, and between imagined scenarios and real ones. Your reframing will affect perceived reality, and if you make that less threatening, then you will have a more relaxed elephant.
Look at the destination, and that’s where you will end up. The brain is good at navigation. But if you don’t want to act before succeess is guanteed, I suggest reading this phrase every day for a while:
“Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner. Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult. I will persist until I succeed.”
If you tell yourself “Everything is fine” your mind will object. It should also show you the counter-evidence which caused the objection. As you “argue against yourself”, you should feel the source of the counter-arguments, no? Something like “Here’s a memory where you thought was fine and it wasn’t. Here’s a bad situation which has 4% chance of occuring in the future. Here’s the cognitive dissonance between your statement and how your body feels. Here’s a weak unpleasant emotion associated with the phrase, because you disliked it last time you heard it. Here’s the memory of somebody being nice to you because you didn’t look fine, which taught you that not being fine is valuable”.
You cannot really trick the elephant, unless it believes that you’re tricking it in a way which leads to a better future. But you see, there’s no need to lie to it. For the most part, it just wants you to acknowledge the worries, and to listen to it without dismissing anything. Then you can tell it “I hear your worries, I know it’s hard, but I sincerely belive it’s best for both of us if we do X”
The elephant is intelligent, but the rider can see further. I think they work best as a team. Even if you don’t like my solutions, most of them should lower anxiety, and make it easier to reach enlightenment. Unlearning beliefs which block enlightenment is at least as important as learning more. If you want the conclusion of EST, it has a lot in common with Zen: “both the enlightened and the unenlightened man are totally moving in the world of stimulus-response, stimulus-response, the enlightened man seizes a single space after the stimulus to choose, say “yes” to the response. The response will occur in any case (what is, is), and the enlightened man differs from the unenlightened solely in choosing the response, in choosing what he gets… when he gets it.”
Yes! We establish thinking based on being, not vice versa. Being is pre-conceptual. Everything else we might doubt, but that doubting happens in being. It’s like in a VR-world, we may question its content but not the fact of our being. All images may be unreal (I know you consider it real as long as immersion lasts, but I don’t), but the feeling of existence is fundamental to all that.
In Advaita tradition they call the reality Sat-Cit-Ananda. Sat is being. Cit is consciousness (awareness of being). Ananda is bliss (we are generally happy that we are, even in the depressed state or while assessing suicide, we value that we are, we might not like the pictures that are shown to us, be we like that fundamental substratum of being). Gaudapada actually said, “What is not Sat in the beginning and in the end, cannot be Sat in the middle”. So it means both reality and existence.
You see, I take here a phenomenological stance. I don’t know anything about the brain in a dream (except if it’s a part of the dream). Nor do I know anything about memory and neurotransmitters until I start thinking. That knowledge is not intrinsic to me as the knowledge of my being is. It may be called superimposed knowledge. In the deep sleep my thinking doesn’t function and I don’t know anything about the apparatus presumed to do such thinking, but I still am.
I take that knowledge of being as fundamental and primary to other knowledge that my senses tell me. If you will, that’s the only real thing that I have no doubt about. I may mistrust my senses or my thoughts and the world that they build, but not my being. To me it’s still mindblowing to think that all I know about the world and “myself” is mediated through the senses and thoughts! Therefore I tend to mistrust that “reality” as my senses and my thoughts are often lying to me, but I don’t mistrust the reality of being itself. So to me being and consciousness are fundamental to all other knowledge and information. Buddhists, btw, don’t agree with that. They consider consciousness as the product of nescience or primal ignorance. So they take it as a part of the spectacle. They say that the final state is neither consciousness nor its absence. Which is impossible to grasp intellectually. But they remain silent with regard to being.
Aren’t real in the sense mentioned. Thoughts are physical, but for me physicality is itself is not established as all processes are in interminable flux, each entity has a beginning and an end and therefore cannot be Sat. If you say that they are the continuation of interactions of the wider system which we assume in thinking, that is true, but the universe is itself under scrutiny as it’s subject to change, most likely have a beginning and an end, therefore not Sat.
Phenomenologically speaking, the only sure thing is being-consciousness (Sat-Cit), everything else is postulated with regard to available computational capacities of thinking, but which is inherently limited. The thing that we cannot process all the information that is going through us leads to ideas like space and time. It’s basically a lag in the computational process. To tell you the truth, I don’t care that much if the universe turns out to be real or not, all I care about is a projection of my mind and the way to fix it.
The trouble is that intellectually I am almost sure I don’t have any agency, but I still operate as if I do. I believe that’s the problem as I’m not aligned with how things really are. My mind believes in a phantom which is not really there, i.e. the agency.
I agree with that. You described it with intellectual rigor, it was a pleasure to read.
Here I disagree. As waking up from the dream doesn’t mean you will end up in a void or blankness. It only means that two subnetworks of your brain that are building images of “self in time” and “self and other” are shut down. That means end to SRIN. But according to awakened individuals that’s where you experience things as they really are, i.e. without prejudice, anger, confusion, lust, etc. That is you abandon self-talk and self-subversive modes in thinking. But you will enjoy life in its fullest. It’s exactly “self-torture” that you awake from.
And I feel that I cannot properly process all the information that is thrown at me (meaning actions too). It’s the process of self-torture that leads to problems and doesn’t let me enjoy life. But on the other hand, it’s the same very process that pushes me in the direction of awakening. So I cannot complain because of that. It has its raison d’être.
Mine is keeping fighting all the way. I do 1-hour meditation sessions (self-inquiry or koan practice to be precise, as that’s the most helpful tool for me to come to rest) and it’s a fight all the way! Only occasionally it looses its grip and I turn out in the space of no-thoughts, which is a bliss beyond description. But you are right in the regard that that’s the best tool we have to fight restlessness. I meant all the other time, when one is not meditating (and meditation can and should be pursued during everyday actions, so really no problem here as turns out).
There are the states where it’s seen through. Those are the states without SRIN and are blissful. That’s why I call it a facade.
But you have to be willing to do so. And I agree with the rest. The exercises like that helped me in the past, but most helpful was just meditation. So I kept with meditation.
Thank you, it’s a beautiful reminder to keep going no matter the setbacks. I enjoy one parable which basically says the same thing, but it’s a tad too long to mention it here.
Your rider is an uncompromising optimist! Thank you for writing this, your process itself reminds me of meditation. To let go of worries I do something else called the Sedona Method, which is basically four steps:
Load some worry into RAM, feel the texture.
Ask “Could I let go of it?”, answer with: “yes/no/I don’t know”.
Ask “Would I let go of it?”, answer with: “yes/no/I don’t know”.
Ask “When can I let go of it?”, answer with something, even if it is “never”.
The funny thing is that even if you answer “no/no/never” brain learns that that’s something one can let go of and starts restructuring! That’s one of the most helpful techniques I’ve encountered on the path.
Yes, one of the most important things. I only disagree that the rider can see further. It only feigns that it can, that’s where all the worries are coming from. But when you let go and surrender to what is, something else starts happening and the elephant restructures the rider in accordance with its needs. But thank you for your kind words, your rider is irredeemable optimist and I think that is indeed helpful on the path, even if you are not looking for awakening directly. Just don’t think it’s blankness or void and that you will lose all oomph from life, the reverse is true, as one awakened man said you will realise that it’s “whole and complete” on the gut level, not just intellectually.
But there must still exist a physical location with bits of informaton which corresponds to your dream, and that is your physical brain. The contents of the dream is using prior knowledge (even if said knowledge isn’t true), you can’t see people in a dream unless the brain contains the pattern of information which resembles people. Human creativity can turn a shadow into a demon, but it cannot turn nothingness into a shadow (unless it already knows something from which the idea of shadow can be generated).
What’s important is not what neurotransmitters are, or if they’re real. Maybe what I’m saying is that “being” and “thinking” seem to be the same. This is why the boltzmann brain may exist as long as particles can appear. You can’t have thinking without physical matter, and thoughts are made of physical matter. This physical matter is also self-contained (that is, equal to itself). It exists, and its existence is the whole structure and nothing but the structure. Nothing exists universally, since existence is uniqueness, and nothing which is universal exists, for “existence” means physical matter at one and only one location, and all matter is self-contained so it cannot reach outside of itself. Thus, human beings can only ever learn information about ourselves, since learning occurs in the matter which we are made out of, and since information is made out of matter.
Here, I’m assuming that the universe follows something similar to rules of logic, and that quantum computers don’t actually allow “existence” and “multiplicity” to occur at the same time. Things get a bit more complicated if I’m wrong about this.
Now, it could be that we’re all a single consciousness, and that the self is an illusion (a sort of compartmentalization/tunnel vision), a false belief of being separated. Nothing I’ve said so far conflicts with that idea.
I’m basically saying “The map is within the territory, but the map models the territory as being within the map. The brain is wrong in assuming that the territory in the map is the same as the territory outside of the map”. Most people make this error when they think. They confuse the model inside their head for the thing outside their head. I’m claiming that it’s literally impossible to break such ‘containment’, and that there’s also no need to do so.
When you meditate, you can gain insight into yourself, but you can only get insight into “the nature of things” if this nature is contained within yourself. To the extent that you’re similar to the universe, learning about yourself can teach you about the universe. But if something outside is different, we will be forever unable to grasp it.
Senses and thoughts “lie” in that models of things are constructed from limiting information. The models are used to predict the consequences of actions, and at times, these predictions are wrong, and then the brain modifies the model such that the new information is taken into account. Over time, the brain confuses the model with reality and with the self. When the model is attacked, it feels like the self is attacked. If one lets go of the model, it feels like one lets go of the entire world. The model isn’t wrong about the environment it was created in (at least, it’s usually a good approximation), but as a being moves to a new environment (or the environment changes), the old model will be more of a hindrance than a help. This is how the ego traps the person, right? So perhaps it’s better to experience life without any models whatsoever, so that one remains as flexible as water. Actually, I think the models are important, but that one should not grow attached to them (more on this later).
What I don’t agree with, is the gloomy attitude that many people take towards life: “If I can’t predict the future then my knowledge isn’t real, and if I can predict the future then my agency isn’t real. I want a model which is perfect in every environment, and I want the environment to bend to my model! I want an easy life but to feel heroic, and I want to play forever but also to win. I want everyone to have freedom but also for them to be unable to hurt me, and I want to give into every impulse but also for others to respect me”.
I’m ranting a bit, but I think most people are unable to accept that one cannot have the good without the bad. That’s silly! Such a thing is only possible in our minds, which is why I’m a psychologist and not a rationalist. And being silly is fine, as long as one enjoys being silly, but a lot of people do not.
If life is “becoming” then “being” is every moment of time in that becoming. Life requires change, which requires time. And the universe requires a series of states, and if a loop exists, it must contain every single state, for once it enters the loop it won’t be able to break out, as the markov property prevents it from having a high enough class in the chomsky hierarchy to have the “memory” required for this. But perhaps I didn’t counter this idea of yours well enough before, so I will try again below.
Yes, I believe so. And the universe cannot have a beginning and an end without breaking the laws of logic, and if the laws of logic aren’t true, then we can’t conclude anything, since “true” and “false” are nothing but logical symbols.
Actually, I will have to disagree with the quote you mentioned earlier. It would assume that exposions aren’t real (as they have beginnings and ends), which is silly. The idea that something has a start and an end also seems wrong. Everything since the big bang (at the very minimum) has been an effect, so there has been no causes since then. When we say “X resulted in Y” we’re just looking at a subset of this chain in isolation, and asserting X as a cause of Y when it’s just the previous state.
The universe follows many conservation laws but these are just symmetries and equivelences over some dimensions rather than others. A cube is equal under rotation, but is a rotating cube something constant or something which is in flux? A vector (1,2) has no location, so it’s equal to every other vector under relocation (translation), but not under rotation. If you scale the entire universe, laws of physics included, does the universe change or remain static? I’d tell you the answers to these questions, but as I think more deeply, all I get is more difficult questions, rather than answers. Category theory might hold the answer but it might also just be abstract nonsense. And already now, one needs a spatial IQ equal to that of Emmy Noether to be able to understand my explanation intuitively. By the time we arrive at the final truth, I fear neither of us will be able to understand any of it.
Lets assume you’re right. Being unsure still freaks out the elephant, because certaincy = feeling of power = confidence = perceived realness. Faith is confidence is belief is peace of mind. Without uncertaincy, I don’t think anxiety could exist (this seems to be supported by Lazarus’ research). So why doubt? Why value truth at all?
Perhaps this essay is about people similar to us? “There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principal needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an “overjoyed hero,” counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty”
And very well, you can end the SRIN. But I find it strange that you’re discussing philosophy and talking about life, when you’re trying to solve a psychological issue. Certain insights can shut down aspects in the brain, but rather than learning about the brain and the mechanisms for shutting down parts of it, you’re learning about life and the nature of being, is that not a lot harder? You seem to think you have no control over either reality nor yourself, but I think we at least have control over ourselves (after all, meditation works, and you’ve chosen it yourself, even if you didn’t choose that choice)
Everything can be seen through, at least everything which can be put into symbols or words. But if “being able to see through” assumes “false” then everything is false, and I can see through even this falsehood—therefore, “being able to see though” does not assume “false”. That’s my conclusion, anyway.
Doing a few years of depression, I had constant negative thoughts, and I reflected on them, only for them all to break apart (usually leaving behind positive conclusions or at least neutral ones). But after breaking everything apart, I had to build something anew, since I didn’t like the feeling of any interpretation being as valid as any other. I didn’t feel like a participant, and I didn’t have any opinions to share. Perhaps I broke the wrong part of my mind. I didn’t reach that state with classic meditation, after all—and my mind is flexible enough to break itself, seemingly lacking safe-guards which keep other people functioning.
But here you are assuming that we know what that physical matter is. And when you use the words like location, you’ve already assumed space and time. What I am hinting at is that the field in which it all arises may itself be conscious. Not our psychological understanding of consciousness but something like proto-consciousness. Perturbation of which leads to arising of matter, not a long stretch from the QFT. It’s back to turtles all the way down. Or what was first a particle or a field. I’m basically saying that the field is fundamental and a particle a temporary excitation of that field.
How does it relate to Gaudapada’s quote? It is basically saying that the particle is essentially a local derivative (not in a literal sense) of the field (which is fundamental), in order to detect it on the macro level some background information from the macro level has to be assumed like space and time. But unless it is observed it cannot said to be fully manifest in the field. It’s only during the interaction that the measurement process takes place (it’s most likely highly non-linear otherwise we would already have the explanation for the collapse of the WF). It’s basically Wheeler’s participatory universe interpretation.
That’s what I mean when I say the reality cannot be said to be real from the perspective of the underlying field. And I make an unsubstantiated claim that the field is self-revealing or self-luminous, i.e. conscious.
Apart from that it’s a psychological coping mechanism for me to think that everything that has a beginning and an end cannot be considered substantial in the end run. It helps me to let go of the psychological grip that otherwise tyrannizes me with its bars of “reality”. When in a nightmare I know I’m dreaming it makes the experience somewhat lighter, I know it’s not for real and sooner or later it will end. I regard this life in the same vein. I cannot say like you, that it’s better to be born and suffer than never to be born, because there are times when I wish I was not born. During such times the only relief I have is that I remember that it will end at some point. That’s why Gaudapada’s quote hits close to home for me.
But most importantly, when you start philosophizing about matter, you do it in thinking. And what I tried to express is that I don’t deny the processes that stand beyond thinking but I view thinking phenomenologically, i.e. when awake the world and the seer of it appears, when in the deep sleep they both disappear, phenomenologically, not scientifically. Very simply like for a kid. Something that appears at one time and disappears at another, I do not call real. If the world and the seer were real they would appear without disappearing. But they do disappear in the deep sleep. Why select the deep sleep? Because it’s the third state among waking, dreaming and sleeping. Waking shows me that dream is not real. Deep sleep shows me that waking is not real. Very simply, almost primitively. Phenomenologically thoughts do appear out of nowhere, and subside there, therefore they cannot torment me constantly. Take it as description of empirical experience, not as a theory and it becomes clear. You attempt to analyze everything, and what I attempted to express is primitively simple, almost childish.
Yeah, I agree about that. When they say, “You will see things as they are after the awakening”, it means a slightly different thing. It doesn’t mean you will literally see what is. It means that self-rumination is turned off. A self-subversive commentary that we all run. And mountains will be just mountains. As sickness, or despair, or death. Without the on-going commentary, “What it all means?”
Yes, I believe that some principle of equivalence takes place when we shut down the noise in the mind. But I cannot say anything about the nature of it as, first, I only experience it rarely to study it fully, and, second, I lack a proper capacities and preparation to dissect it and express in terms of good models. I think there are many brilliant people who have also experienced awakening are up for the task. My goal is to get an experience, and not to understand it in the scheme of things.
Yes! But it’s easier said than done. Also I believe some models are (if not universal) then generalize to many environments. You probably know math better than I’d ever wish for. But the principles of relativity, symmetries, conservation laws and invariants hold the ground firmly even when we change the perspective.
In my case it’s slightly more complicated. The knowledge one uses in this reality is as real as the said reality and I don’t dismiss it as unhelpful. On the contrary, I believe it gives me free energy in overcoming many entropic pits, which I would otherwise fall into and would have a worse time. And the second part, I can predict the future with about 70-80% accuracy just because I don’t consider myself as an agent. It’s just I don’t like the predictions that much. But life so far had many surprises that I could not predict and that were coming my way unsolicited. When I thought I was in the very depth of depression and didn’t want anything (literally), I had experienced most profound experience of peace and tranquility in meditation. Since than I know that it is possible and try to repeat it. The new door opened where I didn’t expect it to open (namely, inside).
Here, I am not competent enough to answer you scientifically. But experientially psychologically when you experience that state of no-thoughts (and other mystical states, i.e. when the perception of the world shuts down) it feels like you are beyond time and it feels like the memory is wiped out. Do these insights transfer to stochastic processes or similar models I cannot tell. I think they do and I think there are people who are working on it.
I think there are no useless knowledge, it will close the gaps and make the bridges in different fields. But it’s not a game for everyone as you’ve mentioned.
You see, I don’t divide knowledge in categories, I indeed tend to learn what seems helpful to me on the path. But oftentimes (and earlier in life) I am just plain curious, and I cannot help it. I think most knowledge can be helpful and is transformative in a good way. Even if it is to show me how little do I know. But you are right in one regard, I have to be more practical and concentrate more on practice. I tend to philosophize when not engaged in practice and it may be detrimental in the long run. But some people like watching TVs, or read fiction books, I happen not to enjoy these things, but I enjoy (soft) philosophizing and it was a great conversation to be sure! And one more note, it’s not just a psychological issue, it’s a holistic existential issue, it relates to the very being, to “Who am I, really?” And that question is not answerable in logic or in thinking, but only existentially, holistically.
You see what you did! You reflected the old “you” from the system! That’s philosophizing’s power. That’s exactly what Piatigorsky’s quote is all about. That’s also insight. It’s cool that it’s worked for you like that. I still catch many enthusiastic tones from your text, which I believe is on the level of BIOS of the mind of an individual. Perhaps it’s an echo of youth, as when one is young one is generally believes that things are more capable of change than they really are (I shamelessly generalize here). And as Lazarus suggested, “patients who engaged in denial about the seriousness of their situation did better than those who were more “realistic”″ So maybe you are right in believing that you can reach for the stars.
I don’t need to know what it is, I only need to know what properties it has or has to have.
Do you know Conway’s game of life? It’s turing complete, and the structure, life, calculations, and the information—are all the same thing. So you cannot remove information without removing life. You cannot do a calcuation with no squares. There is no distinction between a foreground and the background, or between a structure and its substance.
I think that human beings with thoughts are similar. Maybe not to the same extent. But you can’t really remove all the bias from a person without also removing some of the person. I can remove the noise from my computer, but it requires removing the fan, and most people don’t model these costs mentally. They think “optimization” means “improvement”, as if they could do an unequal trade. When people try to improve humanity, or society, they think they can remove just one aspect of something without removing others, and gain only benefits. SSRIs might help against depression, but is that really all?
This bias is so strong that Nietzsche argued that making society more evil would be less harmful than attempting to remove evil elements. The condept of Chesterton’s fence is only a first step towards realizing the consequences of naive attempts at improvement.
If consciousness is emergent, it’s very possible that it is. However, while we can describe something with math, which makes it feel as if things are made out of math, and as if math is some underlying reality, I think this feeling is misleading. I think it’s the brain confusing the map for reality. I think it’s more likely that there’s no distinction between foreground and background.
And since the human perception is literally made out of human, and occurs in human, we can’t be sure that the way we experience consciousness is how the universe would experience itself if it was conscious.
Isn’t it enough to feel that it’s real and independent of yourself? You can let go and grasp again as you please, come and go whenever you want.
When my reality turns into a nightmare, I perceive it as real, but not as absolute. Being in a nightmare is a bit like a headache, it’s real but you know it’s temporary. It can also be considered a ‘bad place’, and one can move to a better place physically or psychologically. Bad places are real, but they’re local, so one is not trapped. In either case, the self is the creator of this nightmare, it can always be destroyed. It also helps knowing that, as long as your mind doesn’t break, it can’t actually hurt you. It’s also very unlikely that the mind gets stuck in a really bad state for extended periods of time. My worldview allows for “A reality” which is not “THE reality”.
Makes sense. I still consider it real, just arbitrary rather than fundamental. It’s like.. The name of a folder on a computer. A folder needs a name, but it can be any name. No name is false, and yet, if you don’t like the name then you just give it another. Through this way of thinking, I can create the world that I myself experience, and consider it real, but also allow myself to switch out parts that I do not like. Each little piece is something that I can accept or reject, and with some effort I can change pieces or create new ones.
I see! Enlightenment helps with that, but reducing anxiety to zero should be enough. And funnily enough, I no longer ask “what it all means”. Such a question does not point to a more real, underlying reality, but rather to a less real, derivative model of reality. In my hierarchy, experience comes first and theory comes second.
Your case is interesting, you dislike the dream so much that you sometimes wish you were never born, but you’re also really attached to it. I love the dream, but I think I might be less attached than you are, it’s pretty interesting. I’m not actually all that good at math, I just have a good spatial intuition and borrow concepts from it. And yeah, it does feel as if the world is made out of principles, but I think these principles are aspects of the human mind, after all, “duality” is one of said principles. Yin/yang, light and shadow, hot and cold. But when we meditate, we can collapse some of the usual dualities.
Yeah, most didn’t apply to you, I was ranting about how human beings tend to trip over their own legs. A lot of human behaviour ends up being the person hurting themselves. So we’re our own worst enemy, even when we blame other people and other things (like society, or reality). I suppose everyone does this, myself included, but that people do it less as they get older and attribute more things to themselves.
To really relax, one has to let go of everything that usually consumes energy, like judging if any sounds in the environment are usual or unusual, checking if one is being looked at, making sure one does not look silly from the outside, keeping track of time, etc. And these are usually difficult to turn off because they protect against danger. By wanting a break so much that one no longer cares to defend themselves, profound relaxation becomes possible.
But I’m more interested in perception changes. It would feel terrible if a male stranger, without permission, came over and started touching your inner thigh. But if that was a young woman, I assume it could feel nice (it doesn’t generalize to all people, but roll with the thought experiment for now). The physical touch is practically the same in both situations, but the perceived value and cleanliness of that which interacts with us, and the possible futures which may occur as a result of these, changes the experience entirely.
When I drink coca cola, it can feel refreshing, but only as long as I don’t remind myself that it’s actually synthetic, sugar water acid. Actually, my mind likes to remind itself, because it thinks that disliking what I’m drinking makes it less harmful, as if rejecting it mentally kept it from touching my physical body as well. Not only does realizing this allow you to ‘grasp’ less things, it also allows you to waste less cognitive resources, by defending yourself against less sensory inputs.
I agree, but in a frozen simulation, nothing can be felt. Even feeling a sense of calmness requires small changes to occur in the brain over time.
I’m guilty of it as well. Too much thought, too little action. I think it’s “need for cognition”. I don’t differentiate much between psychological issues and existential issues, since both occur in the mind. And the mind overwrite reality. A mentally ill person who thinks they’re the main character in the universe will get the benefits of that belief even if it’s false. As I write these messages, I also try to be truthful, correct and logical, but there’s technically no need for either constraint.
We just need to find a sequence of steps which get you from your current state to an enlightened state. An illogical path may be shorter than a logical one. I think “Who am I?” is a wrong question, since it assumes an underlying reality which is more real than the reality we’re experiencing. But you could also look within, and just see what resonates with you, and be true to that. That usually feels good. Throw away stuff which isn’t ‘you’, stuff you picked up because others did, because other people told you to, because you felt obligated, etc. But which always felt foreign in a sense. Perhaps the real you will appear once you let go of everything which isn’t you.
It likely is, but I have more of it than I had 10 years ago. Even if you’re losing this yourself, there should be older models of yourself somewhere which have these qualities. Then you just reconnect with these aspects and reinforce their pathways. There are no real limits. I read a lot of self-help books, I might have internalized some of the positive attitudes over time. A sort of indoctrination of optimism.
There’s also methods out there for manipulating ones own core beliefs. This manipulation is dangerous, so I recommend at least having a notepad where you write down the “version history” of your own configuration. Maybe write ten sentences which make you feel in various ways, and track how these feelings change as you change yourself.
The brain has BIOS level access to itself. This is mainly testable through hypnosis and placebo, but technically you don’t need either. Sometimes, I can just “decide” that I’m not tired, and then feel more alert. And my brain knows how to cause changes that I wouldn’t be able to do myself, e.g. adjusting my level of empathy. You can also fight within the dream, you mentioned that you didn’t like your predictions of the future? If you take life by the horns, and improve yourself, that will make you feel much better too. If you have an issue that another person doesn’t suffer from, find out what they did and do the same. Almost all limitations are self-imposed
Yeah, I enjoy the concept of cellular automata and work that Wolfram is doing with his physics project is similar. I especially like what Jonathan Gorard does there and his thought experiments. Math there is beyond my head, I cannot read the papers straight (I tried), but intuitively I can follow his thought experiments which concerns the observer and its model of space and time as being the lag in computation. E.g. a great speculative video, Discussion About Alien Intelligence, a tad too long but very interesting.
And I’m willing to risk it. Especially considering how humane awakened people generally are, they are more compassionate not less in the result of loosing biases. It shows that there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing of importance is lost. But what concerns society improvements I agree with you. Generally, sages didn’t directly attempt to change society, and said something like, “First change yourself, then see if society needs changing.”
I’m saying something more radical there. Consciousness is not emergent from the field. The field itself is consciousness. What I meant by proto-consciousness is pure consciousness without content. Which has a potential to appear many. In that model we are not the bodies we identify ourselves with, we are indeed that field. The empirical consciousness of the mind is a reflection of that pure consciousness.
It’s back to analogy of the moon that reflects in many waters in the pots. Water in the pot that reflects the moon is the individual mind. The reflected image of the moon is empirical consciousness. The moon is pure consciousness. When we are entangled with the body we identify ourselves with it. But when we disentangle ourselves from the body as in deep sleep, meditation or awakening, we realise ourselves as being pure consciousness. After awakening we can perform actions in the empirical world while not loosing the insight of ourselves being that pure consciousness. It’s the identification with the body that we awake from.
That’s beautifully put dilemma, which as they say resolves itself on awakening. You exactly realise the non-separation from the universe as pure consciousness itself. But intellectually it is futile to understand it. I have some premonition which stems from my meditation experiences but it’s too weak to say more and not to distort it.
That’s the major insight if you experience it directly, not just intellectually. In Advaita they give an analogy of gold and ornaments made of gold. When you look at ornaments, you forget about gold. When you look at gold, you forget about ornaments. But in truth it’s all one and the same.
We look at it similarly, your working hypothesis is that it is “locally real” and my working hypothesis—“unreal in the ultimate sense”. In the same sense that ornaments made of gold are “unreal”, while gold, their substratum, is “real”. Calling it locally real is fine by me also.
It’s exactly what Advaita also says. The full description of reality is Sat-Cit-Ananda-nama-rupa, which means Being-Consciousness-Bliss-name-form. It considers Being-Consciousness-Bliss as substratum (gold), and nama-rupa as superimposition on it (ornaments). Name and form is something that is subject to change, exactly as you’ve described with the folders. I also view it in a similar way.
Yeah, I cannot snap out of it. You might indeed be less attached than I am. But I think it’s not so special to be attached to the dream, it’s unfortunately rather a default state. Most likely your strong capacity for analysis helps you to disentangle from it. And yes, duality is an aspect of the mind, it is indeed can be transcended in meditation. That’s the aim.
I agree that we are our own worst enemy. But this generalization of yours is way too generous. I would rather say it’s the people who think deeply about these matters understand it. It’s just for some thinking about it happens in older age. But some understand it even young.
You are constantly making the move that Nāgārjuna also did—analyse something down to its very constituents and see it as ephemeral in the result (I know you would not frame it like that). But that doesn’t generalize well as one has to possess a certain complexity of the brain to perform such analysis. I do it myself at times, what concerns “big” things. But I don’t have enough bandwidth to do it with Coca-Cola or smoking, so I just drink Coca-Cola and smoke.
Psychological relates to thinking, existential relates to being itself. Not both occur in the mind. Existential is on the holistic level, which concerns all of the organism (mind included). It’s rather felt that thought. It’s closer to the marrow of things.
It does engage me paradoxically as a koan should. I would say it’s not exactly presupposes the existence of underlying reality, it’s rather questions whether there is any “I” at all. Hands are moving, sounds are heard, thoughts are happening, who is the master of it all? I cannot spot for the sake of me any entity! I came up with this question myself before I encountered other people who were talking about it, and it led me to some mystical non-dual experiences. I tried many things myself, but the best is that simple question. Which my mind cannot grasp or give an intellectual answer for. It bugs me in a good way.
That’s another important aspect of the practice—letting go. I do that and it’s helpful and that’s exactly how the question works for me! It negates everything as not-”I”. Am I my problems? No. Am I my body? No. Am I my feelings? No. Am I my thoughts? No. What is left there? … [Silence] And that silence sometimes becomes more profound and envelops all else and peace is felt. When in that state, the brain goes through some restructuring, it likes it and as a rule I can take life easier after that.
Self-inquiry is the best tool that I’ve discovered among many-many other things (psychological, hacks, self-improvement techniques, and so on). So I know where I am going and the means to get there. The only thing which remains is doing the practice and perseverance. I already know on the gut level that’s the shortest path there. So here I have no doubts. I only doubt that it’s possible in my case, with my mind (it’s not neurotypical, which means that the DMN is overly active in my case, it’s more difficult to shut down self-rumination).
With that I wholeheartedly agree. Reverse-engineering of other people behavior helps to some extent and self-help books are also valuable help but in the end it all comes down to the question, “Who is it that tries to improve?”, “Who is is that suffers?” I just have to be more consistent with practice. I already do it in long sessions and introduced 2 minutes breaks to do it throughout the day. So I’m on the way. The rest is that quote of yours about setbacks and that success may be just around the corner so don’t stop halfway there.
I’m sure some kind of meditations make you more humane, but not all of them. The quote on the bottom of that page is rather long, but here’s the first bit:
“I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself–what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself–that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational.”
Reflecting too much on things doesn’t always make you wise. It causes things to disappear—sometimes meaning, sometimes morality, and sometimes the problem which was being reflected on.
That something appears false upon reflection does not mean that it is false. The self feels like an illusion if you think about it enough—but so does everything else. Reflect on the concept of illusion, and that too will lead to contradictions. There’s fundamental problems with searching for fundamental truths. Thinking, itself, undermines thinking, like how a fire burns what fuels it and destroys itself.
That is consistent with a lot of different theories, but I think our consciousness is too tied to our bodies for this to be true. Unless you restrict consciousness, so that the parts of us which feel qualia is part of the body instead of said consciousness.
The awakening process itself happens in the brain, how do you know that you’re describing something external from the human brain at all? Enlightenment might feel how you describe, but feelings don’t leak information about reality.
I’m already in a state where I’m aware of this difference most of the time. It’s a great example though, as average people can understand it. However, it takes a lot more insights to even start understanding how limiting language is. There’s no such thing as a chair—everything which can be used as a chair can be called a chair. It’s also not possible for men to be unmanly. Whatever a man does is, by definition, necessarily manly. Bad things don’t exist, as “bad” is a judgement and not a trait. I could keep going, but you probably know these already? There’s too many to write out, but the more you know, the easier it is to find even more.
This seems accurate. But I previously wrote that only physical matter exists, so I agree that the matter which makes up gold exists, and that ornaments do not. But ornaments are not illusions in the sense that their substance is false. The gold does exist in reality, so I don’t want to deny reality.
By treating the gold as “ornaments”, I create a local story, which seen from the outside is a sort of overdramatization or perhaps decoration of reality. This decoration adds meaning. It’s not entirely wrong to call it “illusion” when one buys into this story and experiences it as real. However, delusion is only bad because it’s dangerous, and it’s only dangerous when it disrupts the ability to predict the future. Decorating reality doesn’t change the structure of reality, for the same reason that installing a HD texture pack into a video game doesn’t affect the physical meshes or the physics engine. It would indeed be dangerous to think that one could fly and then lean out the window, since this class of incorrect beliefs could lead to death. But I think rationalists reject even this decoration.
I also think it may be impossible to live in “the real world”, and that it would be very unhealthy in case it was possible. It’s often good to turn off the brain and live in the world of experience, but that is still a human experience from a human perspective, and thus decorated in a sense. One of these decorations is “morality”, and not even Ted Bundy is logically incorrect that the value of human beings isn’t an absolute truth. I’m not sure if these are nama or rupa, but I think you’re correct that some of these cause unnecessary suffering. But I think it’s a mistake to throw them all away. I throw away those which seem like a net negative to me.
I agree. I also had a lot of suffering to reflect about. Half of that suffering was removed with psychological means, the other half was removed through self-improvement. I’m the kind of person who stops suffering when life is good, but I’m aware that some people always suffer even when their lives would be judged as good by everyone else. I’m not sure which situation you’re in, but the worries of your elephant might be rational (even if exaggerated). When a person judge themselves to be in the top 10% or so in social status, the elephant usually feels pretty good about itself. This is the case even for me who is naturally high in neuroticism.
As for understanding, I think it came to me because I had nobody to rely on except myself. It’s similar to the brain not having any escapism to grab onto doing meditation. Remove all alternatives and the brain will usually accept its situation and make the best of it. But learned limitations (e.g. learned helplessness) can also get in the way, so they should be dissolved once they’re not useful anymore.
I don’t model it as complexity. What I’m doing is ‘introspection’. But I don’t know why I’m better at it than most people, coule be experience or genetics. Deadlines close in time also feel like dangers close in space, so I can tell that the brain might use the same tokens for Soon (time) and Near (space). When many similar things become one, the calculations involved become much simpler. But some things cannot be calculated. I’m not sure how I taught myself to think in a way which can handle unsolvable problems, but I must say it’s nice.
What is experienced as an existential issue is actually a philosophical issue, which is actually a psychological issue. “The hard work I put into tasks does not result in a reward which makes the trade feel worth it”, this triggers a sort of reorganization, a reflection on the state of things. The brain then looks for something reliable to re-orient itself with. But a brain which is good at seeing through things will be unable to find anything reliable/absolute/fundamental to support itself. Forever.
People who are psychologically healthy do not have existential issues. They don’t have the answers, but that doesn’t bother them, because they also don’t have the questions which seek answers.
There is an I, but it might only be real in the same sense that ornaments are real. I keep my sense of self because I’ve judged that the positives outweight the negatives, not because I don’t agree that it might be an illusion.
Not identifying with ones problems is probably healthy, because otherwise the ego would feel shame about having problems. It would also feel bad every time its actions went against its identity. For instance, a person who identifies as strong and competent might prevent themselves from getting emotional because the ego protects the self from anything which would contradict and invalidate it. Hmm, that is probably also why being objectified feels bad. The brain protects itself from being devalued because that’s the same as being disrespected. This is because value is a social currency, and because people who are deemed more valuable enjoy better treatment. The broken window theory applies to people as well. I notice that some people are talked over (cut off) more than others in conversations, and that this correlates with their social standing in the group, even if nobody verbalizes or otherwise acknowledges this hierarchy. You can identify people with low self-esteem (self-assigned social ranking) because they let themselves get talked over more. They also take up less space, and avoid being in the middle of open spaces. I’m ranting again, but it’s extremely useful to be aware of just a few dynamics of this type, and once patterns like this are tracked subconsciously, it becomes effortless to do so.
Your brain is probably going “Am I guaranteed the end of suffering? No, well, then I will only half-ass the effort”. You likely asked yourself about the probability of success because your elephant used that as an excuse to avoid acting on your advice. By the way, a thing which might stop rumination is attempting to do the opposite—ask your brain to complain as much as wants for a short while. Then write it all down, I suppose (it’s up to you what you do with it after). Remembering so many negative things at once might be painful, but it would give you a clear picture. You might feel better just by processing these things, but your elephant might also demand solutions. “Do the exact opposite of the naive solution” forms an entire category of solutions, though I only know a handful of its members.
I do think you’re on the way, too. A different path than mine, but it seems like a realistic goal
But he is far from being awakened. I think that his elephant is seriously sick which led him to his actions. If there is thinking that taking another being’s life is freedom, that means something is terribly wrong with the elephant. I believe that it all stems from the genetic make up of the brain. What he says about values is not necessarily wrong. But. If values are only ephemeral then why choose ‘wrong’ over ‘right’, why impinge on someone else’s freedom? This question has no answer. I tend to follow the principle of ahimsa and categorical imperative of Kant, that one behaves in the way that may be applied as a universal rule. It doesn’t mean you expect other people behave in the same way, that’s just my perspective and other people’s actions are up to them. That’s the same principle Jesus expressed with his Golden Rule.
I also would not call that intolerant to isolate such people from society, as they are fundamentally sick and pose a danger to other beings. One doesn’t think it’s intolerant to go away from the elephant in the rut. It’s a common sense to protect the organism. The same applies here. The same applies to myself. If I ever would pose a danger to other beings, I would like to be either isolated or liquidated. As none of us has a guarantee that won’t be the case, we can only hope that it will work out somehow.
In general such principles as ahimsa are needed for the seekers and not for the liberated. For the liberated there is no need of them, that doesn’t mean they will kill other people. As the metaphor goes, if you realise that everything you perceive is your own Self, how could you harm anyone? It would be tantamount of hurting your own Self. Therefore they say, what is experienced as truth for the liberated (e.g. ahimsa), is the means of practice for the rest. Which means while we are not liberated it is wise to listen to sages and correct one’s behavior in a certain way. What is truth for them, becomes means for us to reach to that state. It’s not imitation, it’s emulation.
Thinking does undermine itself. But the insight is something beyond thinking it’s on the holistic level, it’s on the gut level (or what they call in spiritual traditions the Heart). The wise use of thinking is to breakthrough to that holistic level. And your analogy with fuel is indeed spot on. As Ramana Maharshi expressed in his work “Who am I?”: “The thought ‘Who am I?’ will destroy all other thoughts, and like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed.” So we might use thinking wisely, to go beyond it, to the pre-conceptual level.
I cannot reply to this question pre-awakening. But it is described as the mind getting out of the way. What I experienced in those rare glimpses showed that “I” was not the body but the field of awareness itself. And there no question of external or internal arose. Questions and doubts stop bugging one there. It’s not like I can guarantee that that’s a reality, just there is no one to whom it matters how to call it. The doubter dissolves.
Exactly. But that doesn’t make you want to hurt other people. Why would it? You don’t want to hurt one’s leg or arm. One might consider hurting other people if one identifies with one’s body and takes another as another body and derives pleasure from overpowering another. So it’s deeply entangled with the belief “I am the body”. If one looks at oneself as at the body, one takes another to be the body also. That belief is the root-belief and it’s most difficult to let go of. Awakening might be defined as the dissolution of the belief that you are (only) the body.
Decoration remains even after awakening. The difference is that identity shifts from name and form (the default mode) to being-consciousness-bliss, from ornaments to gold. It’s like one of these images that show a different picture depending how you look at it.
I don’t agree here. An existential threat is something that threatens the integrity of the organism is not a psychological issue, it’s an existential issue. It has a psychological aspect but is not limited to it.
What concerns that psychologically healthy people don’t have existential issues, they might not be aware of the underlying questions that direct their life, like “What is the meaning of it all?” or “Who am I?”.
Every person sane or insane comes to one of this questions and has a local answer to it. Why the answer is local? Because it generally changes throughout one’s life. It’s not static. But some answer is usually provided, even if unconsciously. For example, you gave your answer to the question “Who am I?” as “I am this body”. Some person might value the family or friends above everything else, so to him “What is the meaning of it all?” is the family and relations. And so on. The person might not be aware that he is asking these questions and answers them, but the answers can be deduced from his values and intentions. They generally change implicitly with age, situations, etc. and explicitly with reflection. They cannot be “right” or “wrong” and generalized to many. They are highly unique and intimate. They are always about you as you’ve yourself noted. That is, “What’s the meaning of life?” means, “What’s the meaning of my life?”
So I claim that your current answers to questions “Who am I?” and “What is the meaning of it all?” reflect your current experience of life. I can give you my current answers as an example. To “Who am I?” my brain just shuts up (for a moment), it is silent with regard to the answer, I already know that “body/mind/human” are just thoughts. That’s why this question is also the best therapy, as it quietens the compulsive thinking. To “What is the meaning of it all?” my answer is “Liberation” or “Freedom from thoughts”. Even an attempt to answer them (even to oneself) starts a reflection process. That’s why I believe they are important.
And how do you know that, seriously? Did you see it? How do you spot it? Where in the body it is situated? What is that centre from which all actions seem to stem?
Ha-ha. Yes, there are times when I doubt I’m being sincere with the effort. However, the technique is universal, the question pops up, “Who doubts that he is sincere?” And it turns into a game. The pattern however is easy, when I reach a state of no-thoughts I feel elated afterwards and practice seems to click. The concentration is strong and so on. But when I cannot reach it, it feels dumb and not engaging. So I struggle with it willy-nilly. I cannot spot the pattern yet when the practice seems to work.
I tried to let brain do what it likes and it doesn’t go well, it’s constantly anxious with regards to the future. So in my case some process is necessary. “Do nothing” doesn’t work as a rule (sometimes it does though and it’s sweet), as the brain cannot shut up. I think everyone should come up with his own heuristics with regards to the mental make up. Among many therapeutic practices that I’ve tried self-inquiry turned out to be the best even in that regard (that was unexpected as I was not pursuing it from the therapeutic standpoint). I genuinely think it’s the best tool I’ve discovered in my whole life.
His conclusion isn’t incorrect, and he got there by the same kind of reflection which may lead to enlightenment. But he likely lacked empathy, which lead him to question the validity of empathy. If he had had empathy, even these realizations wouldn’t have been much of a danger, as the affective/emotional empathy is harder to destroy through thinking than the cognitive empathy is.
Being dangerous is not bad in itself, sometimes the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. The world has a tendency to degenerate unless one maintains it like a gardener removing weeds. But the unreasonable and ill are much more likely to default to violence, so the majority of the violence which occurs will be a net negative.
I think it’s true that “the dose makes the poison”, and this makes it so that good and bad things don’t exist in themselves. Nietzsche even wrote “Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. One must not make of them distinct principles or entities that fight over the living organism and turn it into their arena. That is silly nonsense and chatter that is no good any longer. In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state.”
I don’t like the framing that society needs to protect itself against those who harm it, but I do believe that the peoples of a society must protect themselves from elements which would harm their society (this subtle difference is important because society, considered as a super structure emergent from its parts, tends to not represent the interests of its parts).
I must also have benefited positively from thinking too much, since I’m basically devoid of malice by now. Even when I want enemies gone, it’s for practical reasons and not due to hate.
I feel like the east is really good at doing this by default, and that the west lacks this ability. The same is argued in the book The Master and His Emissary. this division can also be described as a lack of balance between the objective and the subjective, between machine-like efficiency and humanity, between qualia and replication, between materialism and meaning, and between rationalism and intuition. Perhaps “IQ vs EQ” as well. I’ve come to the conclusion that thinking itself might be pathelogical. Which reminds me, have you heard of the idea that language is a parasite? (I didn’t read that paper, it just seems like a good introduction to the idea). It’s a memetic entity with people as its host. I suppose I’m talking about language in the negative sense that people tend to talk about ego.
Anyway. I see what you mean about “the doubter dissolves”. I kind of did that to my own doubt. Just like how enlightenment tells you that it’s real, my experience of the world also considers itself real. It’s a reality, my reality. I don’t particularly care if other, conflicting realities may exist. You seem to rely a little more on the idea that enlightenment has to be true/real (your elephant seems to want this reassurance), whereas I’d be content with it being a state of mind. Your theory may be correct, I just happened to think of a counter-argument. But any belief and statement can be countered, attack is infinitely easier than defense, so my counter-argument doesn’t actually matter. My bad.
I don’t think “deriving pleasure from overpowering another” is sufficient for wanting to hurt someone. I like games because they make power dynamics possible. But we’re only enemies inside the ring, we’re friends playing the roles of enemies. But I do believe that evil mostly stems from weakness resulting in the mind employing self-defense tactics. Almost all psychological self-defence consists of hurting those around oneself by throwing ones own burden onto them, venting to them, draining their energy, fishing for compliments, using them as a means to achieve safety, manipulating them (e.g. guilt tripping), etc. (and this is why an abundance mindset leads to a large reduction in evil, and enlightenment seems like a state of abundance). And as you say, seeing the world as an extension of yourself means that benefiting oneself and benefiting others is the same thing. In a state of poverty, the framing is “self vs world”.
This might sound weird, but I consider the disillusioned eye to be perverted. The purpose of decoration is hiding that which is under, and that which is under is rather crude and unattractive compared to the surface. The underground world is ugly, the person below the mask is a mess, the face without makeup is imperfect, the “behind the scenes” of every performance is filled with problems. Now that I think about it, the state of enlightenment you’re describing is not disillusioning per se, but the process which results in enlightenment rubs me in the wrong way because it’s essentially the opposite of enlightenment (e.g. doubting everything to achieve the state of non-doubt)
I was wrong if you meant existential threat such as the emergence of superintelligence. I took it to mean “existential crisis” which I still believe is psychological. Most people might ask philosophical questions as they get older and reach higher states of awareness, but it’s only excessive anxiety (manifesting as doubt and the need for certaincy) which keeps one stuck with these questions. Many simply go “I am”, and this is an assertion, not the answer to a question, but an axiom which doesn’t bother to question itself. The immersion (grounding) is too strong, and the process which disrupts and disorients is weaker than the stimuli in the surroundings. It’s like when you’re about to wake up from a lucid dream and you rub your hands together, feeling the friction between them in high detail, and thus stabilize the dream.
I disagree that everyone thinks about questions relating to meaning. Meaning is a feeling, not a logical conclusion, so thinking about it analytically is a mistake. People justify effort to themselves, e.g. “Do it for your family”, or “work so that you can feed your dog”, or “If I improve, maybe somebody will love me”, but this internal conflict is emotional, it’s still attached to illusions of self and to subjectivity (the first-person view). The third-person view, and the analytical and detached nature of philosophy, is unable to find an answer because it’s detached. Meaning is a property of the first-person perspective, it dissolves when you look at life from the outside. Hence the importance of immersion.
Reflection only happens when something is wrong. Only anxious minds get stuck in reflection because they don’t achieve the feeling of resolution which is required to go back.
While I do have answers to questions, because I too have been anxious for most of my life, these are past conclusions and simple deductions. I no longer consider the questions meaningful nor the answers necessary. I simply am. Reality is what I can get away with. ‘Good’ is what I like, ‘Bad’ is what I dislike. If I want something to happen, I make it happen. Nobody is to blame for anything, everyone is fully responsible for everything which happens. I’m just a player who loves the game. When we play Minecraft, we don’t ask “What’s the meaning of zombies? And we don’t write long dramatic texts like “What’s the meaning of our struggles? We collect items only to lose them, the sun rises only to descend, we heal hitpoints only to get damaged once more”. In other words, the problem is that one thinks there’s a problem to begin with. The solution is to deny the problem, not to solve it. The existence of the problem is not a fact, it’s a perspective, an interpretation.
I experience it, just like I experience ornaments. And all information must come from the senses, right? So experience is the highest source of truth we have access to. Well, perhaps consciousness is first, experience second, senses third, and reasoning fourth, or something. I just don’t think that reflection is more correct than what is being reflected upon, as that is like putting the map before the territory.
I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t putting in effort, but my own motivational system tends to do what I just described (I solve my ADHD with coffee, which makes me more anxious. It’s not ideal). When I really want to do something, the feeling of effort does not even exist, because there’s no friction. I think the feeling of effort might come from internal conflict between desires.
You’re intelligent, so you should be able to make plans which secure a better future for yourself. You may have problems which make it harder for you than most, but you’ve probably found that, on days where you can be proud of what you’ve accomplished, your elephant lets you relax.
In short, when the brain judges “If I continue like I am now, everything will work out”, the elephant is happy. Jordan Peterson went as far as saying “The vast majority of positive emotion that you’re going to experience in your life is a consequence of pursuing meaningful goals.”, but the meaning is actually the substance which helps one believe in it and move towards it without doubt. It’s the absence of meaning, and not the existence of pain, which makes a goal feel not worth it. This is the default process, anyway. You can live accordingly, disrupt it, do neither or do both at once. Whatever works for you. You know yourself the best!
I am not beyond good and bad. Therefore my model is simple, everything that tends to ahimsa is good, everything that violates it is bad. It doesn’t mean I can 100% follow the ahimsa principle myself, in fact many times I realise that it’s an impossibility! But I still try my best to tend in that direction. In Buddhist Dhammapada it is implied that the intention is almost more important than action itself. Perhaps, it’s just the mechanism of calming myself down, when I realise that ahimsa is practically impossible. But I do what I can.
I think I don’t agree that the dose makes the poison. If the intention is to cause harm even a little, and the resultant harm is not so big, it is still the intention that matters. I think we feel that subconsciously, we are our own best judges what concerns ethical behavior. When we cultivate such intentions (even if no harm is actually done) sooner or later they will poison our life. The evil disposition is not only harmful to the recipient but it’s most harmful to the host of such disposition. As it leads to loosing the peace of mind and murky conscience.
Even the edge cases like the one mentioned above feel that they are doing something wrong. And would not like to live in society that would operate on their principles. They are only “enjoying their time” because most people follow the rules. One can say eventually it’s not about being good and bad, but about the optimal behavior in order for society to work. Society cannot operate without trust between its members. Trust is like a Proof of Work in human relations. It implies that certain work has been performed, even if it is work on ethos of the member.
Aristotle would agree to that as he basically defined ethos as the work done by individual to figure out the middle between edge cases. And it doesn’t mean it is something “mild”—not too hot, not too cold. The middle of the person with developed ethos might seem like an extreme from the perspective of the person of undeveloped ethos. That’s why ascetics, saints and sages are important even if their cases don’t generalize well. They really show where that “middle” really lies. Buddha was saying the same thing. The middle is not established by an average person’s standards (who didn’t go through the process of developing the strong ethos). But by those who are established on a different level of relation to the world (who developed their ethos). Their middle way is usually seems too harsh from an average person’s perspective, but it sets the plank right. And we can develop our ethos by just tending in that direction (even if imperfectly, as that develops devotion and right intention).
That was a rant, but trust is important. It is more so than the principles of good and bad. As it tends in the direction of equilibrium of society. It represents an optimal strategy of unfolding. If trust is lost, society as a rule deteriorates. The same goes for the person. If one is distrustful of everyone, one is dispersed to many unhelpful directions. Concentration on a single (and deep) task becomes difficult. But when one looses trust? When one starts wishing harm for another and is suspicious that it is mutual. So we are back to ahimsa, it is not simply “good” as in judgement about values, it is the mechanism that supports trust in society. So it’s really an optimal behavior that makes trust possible.
That’s actually beautiful, as it shows that you’ve developed your ethos through computation of a certain complexity (reflection). That’s your PoW, that will allow you to reap benefits in healthy society build on trust. And for yourself not to spend time on ruminating how “someone might hurt you”. But whether the society is healthy or not that’s another topic. In any case you will reap internal benefits of not wanting to harm anyone. I’m sure of that.
Not necessarily. I would be more than content with a state of mind too. It’s only that it seems that it is also more real than my perception of this world in the default state. But what do I know?
Exactly! Magnanimity is a strong virtue.
Why do you assume that? Granted I had only glimpses but they were in no way crude or unattractive. It was a total unconditional acceptance, all-permeating tranquility and glorious silence. Peace of mind is the greatest bliss in my perspective. The rest doesn’t disappear it just seems different, and more pronounced and complete, even the little things. Getting to that state even once a day would make life a beautiful journey even in difficult circumstances. Not even speaking of the permanent establishment in that state.
Or curiosity as in my case. I came to this question through curiosity. But then anxiety appeared on the scene. And it turned out that’s the best tool to deal with anxiety too.
You can be immersed in many things. In thoughts and feelings are the one edge case. That’s where you are immersed with “the movie”. In being is another. That’s where you are immersed with “the screen”. Your inclinations direct you in one of these ways. My intention is to shift attention from the movie to the screen on the permanent basis, i.e. from thoughts and feelings to simple being. But your inclinations will define what you want from life. As they say: when one sees a beautiful dream one doesn’t want to wake up, it’s only when the dream turns into a nightmare that one wants to wake up. In my view, it’s not necessary to wait for a nightmare, curiosity is enough to have the intention to wake up from even a beautiful dream.
I think, that is correct and an insight. In my case it’s just not stable under any circumstances. I attempt to make it stable. Otherwise, beautifully put.
That’s beautiful too. In my case I do almost everything through resistance. ADHD means the DMN cannot shut up, so you’ve effectively found the way to shut it down with some autotelic process. That’s a win.
Thank you for your kind words. In my case, all the futures I can predict are no go, except for awakening. So I’m practically forced to let go and surrender (random YouTube recommendation that popped up in my feed lately, spot on and beautiful). And that’s where the elephant lets me breathe, when I (the rider) realise I’m not in control. And there were some unexpected good outcomes that I couldn’t have planned beforehand. So letting go works for me. It’s also the most important aspect of the way. Letting go is not just giving up, it’s an active process which requires practice (e.g. the Sedona Method) and acceptance of what is. There is a beautiful verse of Ramana Maharshi that describes this:
-- Reality in Forty Verses, Supplement #17
That’s actually beautiful and can be an insight too. Most people say, “I am this” or “I am that” and few just say “I simply am”. Why it can be an insight? When we stop identifying with “being this” or “being that”, we simply are established in being itself. Most folks create metaphysical entities out of everyday notions, the map’s view of the territory confused with the territory itself. Like someone is saying, “I am a simple man”, he creates “a simple man” class in his map and measures everyone else based on that notion, in most cases it means he is far from being “a simple man” and he further endows such class with subconscious virtue of “simplicity”, which is again not so simple but represents a metaphysical notion ascribed to the territory as it’s imagined in the map. Therefore, the most honest and sincere thing one can say, “I am”. Implying “I’m neither this nor that”, not defined by circumstances or other people. It can be a deep insight if that’s experienced fully.
You say “I experience it”? Are there two “I”s—one the experiencer and another experienced? Where is this experiencer? Is it somewhere in the body? Where is it situated? If that’s a single entity one should be able to spot it or its products. If it is a conglomeration of thoughts, how can it be termed single integrated unit? I ask because in my experience I cannot find any entity, yet actions are performed and thoughts are directed to someone. Who is this one? It’s like Bassui wrote in his Talk on One Mind, “It may be asserted that behind these actions there is no entity, yet it is obvious they are being performed spontaneously. Conversely, it may be maintained that these are the acts of some entity; still the entity is invisible.” So who is the experiencer? Where is he? In the head? Behind the eyes? In the body? etc. This inquiry will work only if you have the similar questions, otherwise it will not have sense. That’s also alright. Not everyone is attracted to the same koan.
Well, good and bad does not exist in an absolute sense, but they can be local truths, and ahimsa is a fine choice. The only bad systems are those that don’t work out. It’s a bit of a low hanging apple but I consider communism to be such a system. While we can create our own subjective reality, there are natural laws which restrict the set of workable realities.
Most ideals are impossible, we can only approach them, not reach them. It’s fine as long as we recognize this, but I find that unreachable ideals sometimes turn people bitter because they make reality seem flawed in a way which is impossible to solve. Comparison is the thief of joy, so it’s dangerous to compare to perfection (which, of course, is the reason perfectionists are less happy in general).
Truth is defined in a way which implies “one truth path”, but there’s no such thing. I’m really just explaining the pros and cons of various choices that I’ve made, so that you can know the consequences of integrating them into your worldview in advance.
I think anger is the easier ‘poison’ to defend, one often becomes angry about injustice, and so anger can be used for good. Malice is harder to defend, but at the very least, every poison is its own antidote. The more alcohol you drink, the higher your tolerance will be. If you grow up in a bad environment, you will be more equipped to deal with imperfection than somebody who did not. Even exercise is a poison which makes us more resistant to the consequences of even harder exercise. In this case, the tolerance you’re building is muscles. Traumatic events are poisons which strengthen the mind. Life has a quality in which it grows under that which threatens it, and all fatality occurs when the rate of adaptation is too low, or the threat is too sudden. So it’s a fight between “rate of adaptation” and “rate of change”.
You’re decribing mechanisms in which the damage accumulates—trauma which is never overcome, grudges which are kept forever, stress and cynicism which just slowly gets worse and worse until they destroy a person. I might have to concede here—let’s see. There’s poisons which one cannot build tolerance towards (a lack of sleep seems like one), and poisons which only some people can use for their benefit while others are destroyed. Finally, I mentioned earlier that natural laws prevent some things from succeeding, and we can call such things immoral. It’s very possible that malice is similar to communism in that natural laws prevent it from being used for good purposes, which makes it “objectively bad”. But I’m not yet convinced that this is the case.
You’re right that some things can only exist as exceptions to the rule, but this class of things are countless. Society wouldn’t work if every job was “baker”, or if every person alive was a child. So differences are absolutely vital, and we cannot prove the qualities of a person by their rarity, or by the ratio of such a person that society can tolerate before it collapses. I’m afraid this is another argument in favor of “the dose makes the poison”, or at least “Balance is good and evil is that which is out of balance”.
I agree that the average and the true middle are different. I agree about the importance of trust too. I’d put it like “The maximum stable size of a group is governed by its coherence, which is the cooperation and trust of its parts”. But since the need for coherence threaten the unique qualities of the individual, I think we should de-globalize and have more communities rather than bigger communities. Very bad things happen to social dynamics once the network density gets too high. It’s more pleasant to be in a group of 5 than a group of 50, and it’s more pleasant to be in a community with 1000 members than a community with a million, and I think there’s natural laws behind this as well.
Yes. So the limit of how healthy I can get away with being depends on the health of my environment. It’s no good to be a naive person in a malicious environment, just like it’s no good to be a malicious person in a good environment. My self-improvement is being limited by society because I’m being “pulled” towards the average. The more out of alignment you are with society, the larger any “correction” will be. A naive person in a extremely hostile environment will undergo experiences which rapidly makes them less naive, but somebody who is 98% in alignment will have to work hard in order to find the tiny difference which puts them 99% in alignment. But I do reap rewards for my mental health, like those who do Yoga reap rewards from their physical health!
What protects things against changes? Against tending towards the average? I find that it’s isolation, gate-keeping, detachment, illegibility, hierarchies. Even shibboleths and such. A sort of entropic protection against updating towards a worse (or just different) state than one is currently in. How do you stay pure around perverts, sensitive to noise around people who yell, optimistic in the face of failure? Researching this is another hobby of mine.
Some would put it in the category of delusion, but I think that it’s often a self-fulfilling state. Sort of like how people who consider themselves lucky find more opportunities. This sounds a bit like spirituality, “belief can move mountains” and all that, but it seems true. A kind of placebo which actually affects physical reality.
I suppose that the lower only hurts through comparison. It can be freeing as well to update ones point of reference downwards because everything else seems better after. But the human sense of aesthetics does protect against that which is bad. If I lived in India, I’d have other standards of hygiene than I do now, but something inside me resists lowering these standards, and I think that’s for the better. About people, I’m conflicted. One should accept people precisely as they are, but on the other hand, I find it beautiful when people work hard for the same of appearance, be it grooming, having manners, remaining positive, or polishing their image. I’m influenced by Nietzsche who defined art as “deception with good intentions”. The quote I sent a few comments ago called rational people “inartistic” and I’m making the same criticism for the same reasons. Truth seeking and disillusionment conflicts with meaning-making and aesthetics. Aesthetics and meaning both add value to things, so they protect against nihilism and life-denying attitudes.
While I think it’s a shame to focus on the screen, you do you. The insights I share should still be helpful in reaching such a state, even if you sometimes have to do the opposite of what I’m recommending. I’ve used two means to get where I’m at, both with limited success. The first is tricking the elephant into wanting the thing that I also want. The other is considering life to be a video game (why can some people be in the top 0.1% in a video game and yet in the bottom 5% in life? If they experiencedf life as a game, wouldn’t they suddenly do well?). I don’t think I’ve shut down the DMN, but I’m slowly learning to live with ADHD, somehow.
I’m curious why no futures are good enough. I’d have to get out of my comfort zone to achieve my dreams, but there’s always a path. If somebody else took over your life, would they also fail at achieving any good ends? If no, I think you have self-imposed limitations you can remove.
When “I am” is followed by other words, it’s a self-imposed label. You could even call it a sort of roleplay. But the world does not work without roleplay. In the structure of a company, each person plays a role over which they are responsible (this also mirrors software engineering principles, and probably generalizes to other fields which I’m no familiar with). Even physically, in a car for instance, each component has a role and a protocol for how it interacts with other components. It’s the same biologically, each of our organs have a specialized purpose and is capable of signaling the components which are relevant for them to interact with. Thus, roleplaying is not merely social pretence or the ego investing too much into an idea, it’s a principle which apples to creations which get things done in reality.
Got me there. The lazy answer is that self-awareness allows me to experience myself. A proper answer is more complicated. Do you think a corporation is many things, or just one thing? What about a human body? A car? If they’re multiple—how do you decide the level of recursion at which you stop dividing? If they’re just one—what is the limit for seperation before the cohersion of the structure is so low that you consider it multiple?
You’re asking questions which makes one doubt the I. But you can ask these questions about anything, and make anything seem unreal. I don’t think it’s the ‘I’ which has to prove itself in front of these questions, I think these questions have to prove to the I that they have value at all, that questions have value, that theory is allowed to propose the idea that my experience of myself is wrong.
I know the purpose of asking me these questions, but I’d personally rather anchor my concept of self more strongly than reduce it. I’m trying not to be enlightened, as I enjoy being a fool
I consider some processes like a festering wound. Is a festering wound good or bad? Ultimately it’s neutral, just a natural process at work, but we still would like to be free of it. Otherwise, it leads to dire consequences. So processes with intention to harm another is like festering wounds. If not taken care of, they escalate and lead to more serious consequences.
It’s only as a rule we solve such processes unskillfully by isolation and liquidation of the person who is making the harm. What would a skillful process look like? I don’t know, but it seems to me that prescribing psychedelics (psilocybin and DMT to be precise, as they were proven to shut down the DMN temporarily and proven to work on people with addictions to alcohol, e.g. a good read about psychedelics, Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt) in order to shift the perspective of the person would worth a try, also trying other anti-psychotic medicines, perhaps even experimental. As most issues of such kind are due to neural imbalances of sorts. So it’s not just about reprogramming the rider, it’s about rewiring the elephant. And we even have tools at our hands we just stubbornly avoid using them. But it’s a difficult topic to handle for a layman as one tends to generalize un-generalizable. The direction which seems to be promising is experimental medicine, not just plain old isolation.
Comparison is more evil than it seems as it involves division. And the divided mind is more confused not less so. What I meant by having examples who had different relations to the world was something akin to emulation, rather than imitation. What’s the difference? In imitation we compare and imitate behavior. In emulation, we reverse-engineer the processes down to the principles and then apply the principles in our life. Which may even lead to completely different behavior than that of the example, taking into account our conditions. A good example doesn’t come to mind. But I think one can deduce what I’m trying to express. It’s not comparison that works, but underlying principles behind the behavior. One can say that’s a way to initially gamify one’s experience and potentially transcend it.
Ok, here is a weak example, I don’t eat meat. Many sages didn’t eat meat as well and prescribed sattvik diet. Is is imitation? No. I don’t eat meat not because sages didn’t do it and I’m trying to imitate that behavior. I don’t eat meat because I cannot eat something from which I personally cannot take life. It’s a principle which I came upon in reflection and which feels right to me. As I don’t think anyone should follow this principle, but only those who resonate with it, I don’t expect people around me to follow the same rule. So I don’t compare people who eat meat with sages who didn’t eat it and allocate respective judgements. I believe it’s a personal business of an individual and it doesn’t by itself reflect “the level of malice” of individual. As a person may not have ill intentions towards living beings, yet follow the rules imposed to him by surrounding society and circumstances. So it’s not the comparison that works in that case but reverse-engineered principles. It matters that a person comes up with ahimsa out of personal reflection and not just parrots what sages did. So in my case it works only because I came up with it myself. And I don’t think it should be applied as a universal rule (about eating meat).
You see, I don’t think that traumatic events strengthen the mind at all. It’s true that strong mind will come through them more easily. But comparing them to exercising the muscles seems odd to me. First of all, exercise is a feasible controlled challenge, overcoming which gives one a pleasure. While traumatic events are unpredictable uncontrolled shocks that shutter the nervous system. They introduce an unsurmountable contradiction, “I love her, and she is gone.” Which starts up the cycle of self-rumination (in which the DMN is prevalent) which saps up all the energy from the constructive channels. It’s true that one has to learn to overcome that grief, and eventually some process will shift the network from the default self-ruminating mode to the tasking mode. But the shock divides the mind through contradiction and will in one way or another sap its energy (even when one seemingly shifted from the initial shock).
An example. Having a psychotic break after an existential shock doesn’t make you stronger by any means, it even makes you more prone to more psychotic breaks. That is like uncontrolled entropy growth. And one cannot reverse that process so the feedback-loop is degenerative. It makes one more vulnerable to vicissitudes of life and doesn’t teach anything of value. It’s a lose-lose situation. The only upside of such an event can be the understanding that one has no control over life and attempt to cut the dispersion to different directions of thinking, i.e. simplification. But whether it’s healthy or not in a highly complex environment it’s hard to tell.
Yes, there is a nice paper on this, Hunter-gatherer networks accelerated human evolution. Which basically states that small interconnected groups solve puzzles more quickly than one big group would.
Yes, that’s a difficult topic. The only solution that I have found to work when you are in such conditions is turning inward instead of outward. That is, all the time it is possible to do it. That’s also why I believe spirituality works, as one’s odds of success are miniscule and one is basically operating on faith alone.
It’s funny that I think that the very process of meaning-making (if meaning taken as intrinsic) leads eventually to nihilism. When one is thwarted and doesn’t get what one wants, the very meaning one was invested in turns against him and feeds life-denying attitudes. The only solution that I found to this is the Buddhist middle way, which basically denies intrinsic meaning, stating that all meaning only made up, i.e. relational, local. In that model I tend to de-emphasize the meaning making apparatus. But that’s not nihilistic, as relativized meaning is accepted. It’s like saying, it works, but don’t forget that it’s only local and not absolute.
Positive here. But I don’t despair, because all the conditions and circumstances seem to direct me in the direction of liberation. Everything else will not suffice. In games’ jargon, only epic win will suffice, everything else is half-measures that would not hold ground. I’m certainly not guaranteed of that, but it creates a somewhat healthy dynamics.
It’s not a problem if one takes it to be only a role. But deeply is not identified with that role. Some people used to call me a mathematician or a programmer, but those were just functions I performed, not what I am deep inside. I am neither limited nor defined by those functions. All I can say, I, indeed, simply am.
You seem to want to build a theory of mind (a good read on the topic by Joscha Bach, Principles of Synthetic Intelligence). And it may serve a valid purpose. But what I try to share with those questions is deep inborn childlike curiosity (that I myself get from them). Granted those questions may not be “your” questions and you may resonate with different set altogether. It’s actually good that you don’t have such a theory of mind, as you feel unprepared for their rawness! They are not meant to be answered by the mind, they are to lead the mind into impasse from which it cannot move, where concepts cease and silence prevails. That silence (albeit temporary) is the goal. It’s the data-point that the mind learns after asking such questions. Once it gets enough data-points of silence, it starts to prefer that state over the default one. For some it may take few months, for others—years of practice. There is a good post by Gary Weber that uncovers this process, Self-inquiry vs the egos/Is—How it works—the neuroscience.
Actually, from the theory of mind perspective self-inquiry is meant to get rid of the SRIN. So if one is tired of incessant self-talk one will look for any means to stop it. But the “I” will never agree to that deal as that would mean its own dissolution… Therefore the process of self-inquiry is itself paradoxical. You are either attracted to it or not. That includes any koan, not just self-inquiry as the aim of koans is the same—to get rid of the SRIN (which is by some tantamount to awakening). Only a peculiar “I” will agree to that deal. But Gary in Myths about Nonduality and Science says that cognition in the result is much higher. He gives a comparison by Hood’s mysticism scale, where nonduality/liberation scores higher than sex and psychedelics. A worthy read/watch, if you are into hacking your perception.
Ha-ha-ha! In some way “it’s too late” as you’ve already started contemplating over those questions. But don’t worry about that, they say that awakening is not directly linked with anything we do with our minds. If you are destined to awaken—you will, whether you want it or not, whether you’ve heard something about it or not, whether you do some practices or not. Contemplating these questions (or other koans) just makes one “prone to accidents” more. I think your mind is too curious not to ponder over some unanswerable question or another so you are not liberationproof.