My preoccupation at the moment lies in trying to better understand the nature of the othered aspect of myself, the part which crafts the world/my experiences. The questions I'm working on at the moment are: is it self aware as I am self aware? Does it contemplate me as I contemplate it? Am I mysterious to it as it is mysterious to me - or does it "know" me? Is it emotional or indifferent? What is the nature of our current connection? Does it function as a series of algorithms might or is it more nuanced? If I managed to merge with it tomorrow - to what extent would "I" still be "me"? What would I care about if that occurred?
I'm not sure how much headway I'm making with these questions to be honest. Thinking about them, though, has made me realised that I have made assumptions about my othered self, and that these assumptions affect my capacity to manifest things.
One area where I have experienced occasional success lies in willing traffic to improve. When I examined my success in this area I realised two things that my success was always accompanied by:
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a deep conviction that bad traffic was valueless
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a sense that traffic, no traffic, the world wasn't going to be ground-shakingly altered
So why was this important, why would these factors need to be satisfied in order for me to will things different?
And then it hit me - it's because I lack trust in myself and my capacity to make a "good," impressive world. I have accorded my othered self a privileged position, whereby I consider it a better crafter of worlds than myself. Basically, in my mind, I'm the kid drawing stick figures and it's Van Gogh.
And the artist idea isn't just a metaphor - I am quite literally fairly meh at drawing or any other artistic venture and I struggle to visualise in detail. Things I imagine have a fuzziness to them. Meanwhile, my othered self produces this world with its dizzying degree of detail, blades of grass, swirling dust motes, light and shadow, etc.
And since, visually and artistically, I can't compete with that othered part of me - I guess I extrapolated from that that I can't compete with it in any area. If it was better than me at the visual stuff, wouldn't it be better than I at crafting every aspect of my experience? If I interfered - would it be like splattering a big red paint mark across The Starry Night?
Well, looking at it logically, I can see the potential flaws in my assumptions. Being good at one thing is never a guarantee that you'll be good at another. And whatever unconscious awe I've been regarding my subconscious with, there clearly are situations where I have decided that it's wrong - traffic being one of them. God I hate traffic.
So I suppose what I've taken from this is that as an awareness I'm currently saddled with an inferiority complex which hamstrings me when I try to change my experience. My success is usually accompanied by extreme irritation - something has to look really, really pointless and stupid in order for me to be able to magically alter it. And I have to feel like I'm not changing things too much, lest I'm making a big, clumsy mess. So perhaps achieving greater success, with less requisite-angst, lies in more critically querying the pedestal I've placed my othered self on.
Those are definitely good jumping-off points and I think they're flexible ones, too. Try applying them to other things. Also, try working when alone, and in interesting sensory environments. It's easier to work with things when you don't have to worry about other people's perspectives at all, and it's also easier to work with changing the way, say, things are colored in dim lighting, or the way things smell when you're in a new (as you'll have less already-cemented convictions) or highly odorous environment, and so on.
I wouldn't dismiss it as "just a metaphor" so quickly. Learning to visualize things in very clear detail is, itself, an extremely useful tool for manifesting things in clear detail. It's no coincidence that great artists are often wiser than your average Joe on the street. I'm not saying you should hone your art skills. Language is just as useful as art in the way I'm talking about it, and plenty of other things, too. But don't dismiss the artistic visualization as a mere metaphor either. There's something to that.
While I've in no way escaped this issue entirely, all I can really attest to is the fact that, after years of doing this kind of thing, that inferiority complex is definitely dissolving. I'm not going around squashing mortals like gnats and creating multidimensional pleasure-palaces for myself or anything, but I can sympathize a little more with the kind of being who does, y'know? :)
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2016-10-19 18:38:34 (d8ygygd)
Over the years my respect for the artists has only increased even though I don't consider myself much of an artist.
This might sound lame, but here goes anyway, I also got a bit of a boost after taking an art history and appreciation class at a community college once. I forget the exact title of the class, but I remember the contents, not in terms of the specifics, but in terms of how they impressed me. What I realized is that all this stuff I previously thought was just mindless choosing between thicker and thinner arms and noses, was not at all mindless, and that behind many seemingly insignificant details of the art there lay a very deep and sustained thought, not just of one person, but often thought that embeds itself into art history of the world. For example, our teacher was explaining to us that just as there was a secret movement to study cadavers for medical purposes (it had to be secret because the society looked down on 'desecrating' the remains), the artists also got to study them, and as a result there was a progression toward more and more realistic muscle tone depiction in the art. I thought that was interesting. So something in the art was also connected to our history of medicine, and even religion.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-10-20 15:54:10 (d8zxgqf)
This is good to hear! When I first started contemplating all this, maintaining "awake lucidity" for more than an instant seemed impossible. Now the stretches are getting longer, though physicalism still rears up and overwhelms me more often than I care for, particularly when life is busy/stressful.
That said, I've felt recently like there's a sweet spot between contemplation/no stress/minimal activity in your life (where I struggle to maintain lucidity) and overwhelming activity/stress/lack of contemplation (where I also struggle to maintain lucidity).
There sure are a lot of balls to keep in the air with subjective idealism.
Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2016-10-26 00:30:09 (d96z8xe)
Hah. That there are.
There's definitely a balance to be struck between going 'too internal', i.e. getting lost in thoughts, and 'too external', i.e. getting lost in experiences. Each requires a different approach to bring you back to a more useful place.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2016-10-29 20:36:58 (d9cl5sa)