I’m in a pretty low mood today. Which is to say: it seems like I—a fairly neutral and normal and attuned creature—am living in a world that is small and surreal and leaves a bad taste in your mouth and your soul.
I’m in a good position to intellectually track the fact that this is a me thing, not a ‘the world’ thing, because the situation was entirely different two days ago, and if there’s one thing we know about the world, it takes more than two days to radically change it.
But this kind of intellectual fact is sometimes hard to properly believe in. Especially for longer periods. It’s easier to be viscerally confident that things were good two days ago than that they were good two months ago. And either way, perceptions of the world kind of feel like they are about the world, not the perceiver.
A consequence of only believing things intellectually is that you don’t fluidly act on their consequences. For instance in this kind of case, if it was a me thing—and in particular, a me-here-now thing—then there are probably lots of other places in mind space that are different and potentially good. Some of them are probably accessible to me: me-in-a-week, me-if-I-went-to-a-zoo-right-now, me-if-I-hung-out-with-different-people, me-if-I-took-different-drugs, etc. If I properly felt this was true, it might be pretty motivating to move around in the world and mind-space and try to find some. Whereas if I implicitly believe that the world is the problem, aka everything, then what’s the point in going anywhere else in it?
What to do here? I think it’s good to notice this, where it’s happening. And to manually notice the implications that don’t come naturally, and perhaps try to make them visceral: I think it can be helpful to actively try to imagine all the different little pockets of consciousness out there and how each one has its own image of the world it feels like it is looking out on, with different flavors and colors and brightnesses.
(Mod note: We have auto-crossposting from World Spirit Sockpuppet, which recently switched over from a Wordpress host to a Substack. This seems to have caused a bunch of crossposts to all happen at once, rather than be spaced at they normally would. I’ve left them up. I checked and I don’t think any of them are duplicates. Most of them probably won’t get much attention because of beign clustered like this, so feel free to draft-and-undraft them to bump their timestamp later.)
we should expect ourselves to spend most perceptual moments in states that see no other way to be.
(i feel negatively about this.)
by analogy, if we sample a random moment in the lifetime of a rock, or small pebble—even one that is prophesied to later lie at a lower energy state—we expect it not to be moving.
one trick may be to define ourselves as the process of change, rather than the resulting character. alas, it would seem that the characters we become have now—first, conveniently—forgotten exactly this commitment.