syncretik

A place for more casual conversation about subjective idealism and its implications.

So this sub has been dead for a while so I figured I would try to breath a little life into it with the little experience I have in subjective idealism. That out of the way, I have been thinking recently about the the relation between the mind and the brain.

The Mind is you, or a better way of putting it, a being that perceives. If we were to define perception under a subjective Idealist lens then this includes thought, experience, and conscience in addition to the general understanding of it being the 5 senses (or more, however that is a whole nother post). Defining what the brain is is a little trickier however. Under subjective idealism the brain is really just a perception of our ability to perceive, same with the body. We apply "physical" mediums such as the brain or the eyes or our hands so that the mind can interact with the physical. if we can perceive the world but not interact with it then what is the use given the normal view of perception. With this in mind I want to dive a little deeper into what this means to the brain specifically.

First being a phrase coined by George Berkeley saying "esse est percipi" which is Latin for "to be is to be perceived". This doesn't just mean that our perceptions out dependent on us, it means that our ability to perceive is also dependent on us perceiving a way for us to perceive. I can see a field of flowers, however the "physical" substantiation of that is through the eyes, and from the eyes to the brain which is the physical substantiation of the mind. This isn't to say this is the only way or even the "right" to perceive how we perceive, however it is a way. It reminds me of the phrase "I think therefore I am" from Descartes, however "esse est percipi" is a much more powerful way to look at it. It helps me see that my existence is dependent on the self. It reveals a greater sense of control over the self than just the fact that "sense I think (which is just one way one can perceive) then I know that I exist". With subjective idealism, this changes into "I exist because I perceive myself."

This then leads me into my final thoughts on this. If I currently perceive the physical substantiation of my mind to be the brain, then isn't that limiting? In essence I am forcing a limitation on myself bc the brain is inherently a limiting factor to what we can think about, and how we perceive. Separating the the mind from the brain could mean a world of things. Such as having one mind but multiple bodies, all perceiving independently of each other but feeding into the same mind. Or we could look at it another way, Why am I limiting perception though the medium of the "physical". There are many other ways to perceive that I can't even describe because I haven't experienced them, and bc they are impossible to describe thought this "physical" medium.

Anyways I hope some of this made sense, Subjective idealism is one of the harder things to dive into or even describe. Hope to here some of yalls thoughts on this and maybe get this sub a little more active again.

The mind is a threefold capacity to know, to will and to experience.

I call it a "threefold capacity" because there is no knowing without willing and experiencing. No experiencing without knowing and willing. No willing without knowing and experiencing. In other words, the capacity is one indivisible whole, but for convenience we can identify three sides to it. There is a side of knowing. There is a side of willing. And a side of experiencing.

So from this it should be obvious that the mind as such is not any of the specific mental states, individually or in any combination.

So why don't I call it "consciousness" like some others? That's because we have a concept of subconsciousness, and there is even a concept of superconsciousness. Both sub- and super- are outside the range of customary awareness, but sub- is kind of dumb and it's best at following orders, whereas super- is more intelligent than your customary level of intelligence and is omniscient.

So because consciousness is bracketed by super- and sub- I find it best not to take consciousness as the ultimate ground. Instead I take mind as the ultimate ground. This avoids a mistake of taking the most obvious level of appearance as something ultimate. And this is consistent with a subjective idealist position of anti-realism, which is an idea that how things appear is not how they are. Another way to say this is that appearances are suggestive rather than informative. Appearances are subjective. They pertain to a certain commitment, to a certain manner of dreaming, and are not indications of anything "out there."

Also, knowledge with the most experience-defining power is tacit knowledge. The strongest and most influential knowledge is outside the customary range of consciousness, so drawing people's attention to consciousness will be bad form for the weird way. If you're going to want to play with your experience at the most profound level you will need to become reacquainted with the deepest and most implicit forms of knowledge. You'll have to make conscious what formerly was sub- and super- conscious so that you understand what's going on and why it's going that way. Once you understand it, you have the power to change it. You cannot change something you don't understand. If you don't understand yourself, you cannot change yourself. If you don't understand the world-appearance, you cannot manipulate it. You cannot manipulate a black box.

Or put another way, you're already always manipulating everything, but because of the narrowing of consciousness and because of being obsessive about certain narratives (primarily physicalism, but not limited to that), you lose awareness of the options that you still have and it then feels like things are beyond your control. In fact getting things to feel as though they are outside your control is one kind of magick in and of itself.

So then what is knowledge? What's the difference between thinking and knowing or believing and knowing?

Knowledge is an assertion you're willing to stand on without hesitation and without wavering. Because such assertions are ultimately not grounded in anything other than your own commitment to them, they're in a sense insane (depending on how we define insanity). So all knowledge, as my friend Aesir puts it can be regarded as a form of insanity:

If we start with the conventional idea that having confidence in a belief without justification is irrational and insane, then all beliefs, all possible perspectives, are insane. There are no objective, perspectiveless perspectives. All belief systems are fundamentally irrational and baseless. Because you must adopt some perspective to live, consider your present mode of insanity. Understand it, and find the ungrounded assumptions which guide your life. Is this the insanity you desire over all other possible insanities? Is your subjective reality working the way you want?

I am pretty fond of this paragraph.

So thinking is the most volatile mental activity, and believing is when some ideas begin to gain prominence in your mind as your commitment deepens. Beliefs affect behaviors and major life choices. And the strongest and most implicit form of commitment is knowledge. Compare "I believe the sun will rise tomorrow" to "I know the sun will rise tomorrow."

Probably most knowledge of the kind we'd be interested investigating is something habituated and tacit because once you refuse to waver on an assertion and begin living with it, it becomes more and more automatic, and once it becomes fully automatic it slides away from your consciousness, you don't notice it anymore per se, unless you remain vigilant. But when potential knowledge drops down to its tacit form and becomes actual lived knowledge, it's the most powerful! So for example, how much do you doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow? How often do you think about the sun rising tomorrow? I bet zero times on most days? Probably zero times in any given decade? If you ever doubted such a thing, it's probably just now. But probably not even now. Probably even me asking the question about the sun maybe not rising tomorrow is not enough to stir genuine doubt. This is the power of knowledge. You know the sun will rise tomorrow. That's the power of your subjectivity!

Subjectivity is not a gradient. It's not possible for you to be more subjective or less. It's not possible for anything else to be more or less subjective. For something to be subjective it must pertain to a point of view. What does it mean something pertains to a point of view? It means something only makes sense or only appears under certain mental conditions and at no other time. If something pertains to a point of view, it means outside of that specific point of view, it is inaccessible, unknowable. If you understand subjective idealism, you have to realize that all specific features of your experience from the subtlest to the grossest levels are private and unique to your point of view.

It's crucial to understand what a "point of view" really is. It's not the case that Nefandi has one point of view and Aesir another and so on for everyone of 7 billion people. No, no, no. That's not subjective idealism at all. In subjective idealism the understanding is that I have a point of view. From that singular point of view I experience Nefandi and all the other people. All these experiences pertain to this one singular point of view of mine. And because of that, once I begin dreaming, I usually don't know about Aesir, since it's not pertinent in most of my nighttime dreams. Of course the potential to restore the waking context exists in a typical nighttime dream, and thus subconsciously the notion of Aesir is still available as part of my commitment (overall mindset). But the point is, everything I know about any other person I only know because I have a point of view! In other words, I can't really know something that's not my point of view. I have no access to such!

So subjectivity is total and it doesn't come in degrees. Subjectivity doesn't increase or decrease. Instead the content of subjectivity can change. But the fact that all content is subjective is not going to change. The changes in content will fall along customary patterns most of the time, but if you change your commitment, the change in experiential pattern can be radical.

Generally the mind tends to operate in a certain style. It means certain themes are recurrent. Certain types of mental activity are habitual and recur regularly. A style of mental life can be called 'a mindset.' It is crucial to be able to distinguish the mind from a mindset.

The mind is a threefold capacity to know, to will and to experience. But a mindset is a specific style, a specific manner of using that capacity. That specific manner of using mental capacity can also be referred to as 'a commitment.' It's a commitment when you park on it and stay there. So you develop a certain style of mentation centered on certain postulates, and you park there. Once that's done, your postulates (gradually) acquire the weight of knowledge and drop away from your customary consciousness (unless you're doing something weird with your mind), and at that same time these postulates gain immense power, even to the point where people feel trapped by those postulates and begin seeking liberation.

If you understand anything I am talking about here you must immediately realize something like, "wait a second, so ultimately I am not even a human being." If you're thinking that way, you're probably really getting what I am talking about. If it never occurred to you to question your humanity or your membership on planet Earth, then you are reading what I am saying without any significant understanding.

In the context of subjective idealism all the various concrete experiences are unable to supply any kind of final meaning. Such experiences are hypothetical or suggestive, which means they fail to bring any kind of conclusiveness or finality to the narrative. And yet the narrative must flow subjectively. So what is it then that dots all the i's in one's own subjective sphere? That would be one's own volition.

And generally there are two major ways to structure one's volition, and we could provisionally call them 'source' and 'destination.' A 'source' is a set of some hypothetical principles one takes as one's axioms in life. This doesn't have to be conscious or enunciated to be effective. In fact some of the strongest possible axioms might function tacitly. Take for example an axiom that no two objects may occupy the same space. Did your mother and father ever have to teach you that? Axioms such as these are necessary volitional preconditions before one can attempt to have an experience of the conventional world as we now know it. If I thought that everything I know about in this room is also in the same exact space rather than scattered through space, I'd have a drastically different perception of phenomenal reality.

And a 'destination' is one's ideal vision, the best possible scenario, toward which one strives. As with the source this can fall at any point within the conscious-unconscious continuum. This too affects the state of one's volition. One's destination may take one's source axioms as acceptable or necessary, or it may seek to modify the source axioms. So a physicalist who strives to overcome one's own physicalism is in that latter category. In this case one's source axioms are that of physicalism, but one's ideal life lies beyond the confines of physicalism.

If one doesn't have a specific destination then one is an aimless drifter for whom the only constant are the voluntarily axiomatic principles of the source.

Generally the sorts of beings we meet have mentalities that overlap our own. So we know that generally the mentalities of others resemble our own because of the fact that when they express something through speech or the movements of the body, we can relate. We understand what they want to tell us. We can usually easily imagine ourselves saying similar things or expressing similar bodily forms. That's because we share all the same core assumptions, for the most part. There are some exceptions here, such as for example a profoundly autistic person who may live in a parallel dimension without the slightest way to communicate. In some cases I am fortunate to hear about people like Daniel Tammet who lives in a world significantly different from mine, but who can tell me about his world in a way I can sort of understand. Of course I can barely imagine what it's like to be Daniel even after reading his books.

It's important to realize when I talk in this way I don't mean to imply these dimensions are necessarily real. Once I can conceive of such dimensions, I can relate to them as real. Or I can relate to them as unreal. The choice is mine and subjective idealism respects that choice.

However, because destination is something that's not yet the case, precisely because it's a personal teleology, there is no strong pressure for that to be the same for everyone. Thus destination can be highly divergent for people and the world is not going to lose any of its seeming coherence because of that. Divergence in destination is something that's postponed and so doesn't need to be resolved and made coherent right now.

And this brings me to my first main point. For a subjective idealist such as myself the differences in bodies and mundane qualities are not all that interesting. Do you have two arms or one arm? Is your body's skin this or that color? Is your hair like this or like that? All such differences are boring, and because of that, do not form the most interesting element of one's personal identity for me. Instead the most interesting difference between all the people I encounter is their destination, their personal teleology. This is also expressed in a question: "What are your highest aspirations?" Or "What is your dream?" Or "What is your vision of ideal life?"

Paying attention to the differences in people's highest aspirations shines a very bright light on the non-obvious qualities of people. A person whose highest hope is to raise a family in the context of a life on Earth as understood from a physicalist framework is what I'd call an "ordinary person." This sort of person is not someone I regard as a peer. Someone whose personal aspirations are out of this world is someone who is eligible to deserve my special consideration and there is a chance I may consider such one a peer. Try to imagine yourself saying this in the 1st person POV instead of imagining someone saying it to you from a 2nd person POV.

Of course people generally don't go around announcing their highest aspirations, but this often becomes evident by paying careful attention to what they say and do, when, how, etc.

And finally I want to clarify an important point about what it means for an aspiration to be "highest."

One's highest aspiration may have its maturation "date" far in the vision of the future, but it weighs heavily and dominates every thought and deed right now. So it's essential not to be confused and deceived by someone who wants to become enlightened after 100 lives with a kind of "maybe later" procrastinating attitude. So "highest aspiration" does not mean an aspriation one is comfortable postponing the most!! Far from it! The opposite is the case. So a long visionary time frame can suggest a grandness of vision or it can suggest an immense degree of procrastination and postponing. There is a crucial difference between the first and the second quality!

The highest aspiration is one with a potentially extended maturation date (speaking of time in a visionary sense), but what makes it "highest" is that it is most pressing right now, one that guides and inspires the most right now. So a person for whom enlightenment is their highest aspiration is going to accept that they might not be fully enlightened in this lifetime but will think and behave as if this is the only chance they have to become enlightened and as if there will be no other chances later. In other words, there will be zero procrastination and the priorities will all fall in line in such a way that the highest aspiration becomes uppermost.

I was using "enlightenment" only as an example. I believe there are all sorts of excellent aspirations that transcend and surpass the human ideals in beautiful ways.

I was lurking on some old threads and something caught my attention on a previous discussion we had here. I seek more clarity around the subject. Copy pasting below :

mindseal: Those rules set up by the dream.

mindseal : Dreams do not set up any rules. The dreamers do. However, if the dreamer is not conscious of having set up any rules, they cannot deliberately change those rules either.

therewasguy: There is no reason for the world to be defined in anyway like sun having light properties or so. Imagine a world where even a rock has lighting properties or the water containing land like properties. Their's no reason why anything is the way it is

mindseal: There is no objective reason, but there is a reason. The reason is your will as the dreamer. It's your will as the dreamer of this dream that makes the water wet and land solid. If you're not conscious of this you cannot deliberately mess around with any such so-called "natural laws."

therewasguy: our very host of whatever we are in, makes us think we're separate from everything else

mindseal : No, it's not a host. It's you. Don't look up. Look within. You are not a human being. You're humaning, but aren't a human. At least from the POV of subjective idealism that's true, and that's what we are here to discuss.

Can the Law of attraction dream constant be broken and be changed to something else in this dream?

To me from my understanding, I feel as if the law of attraction has been very dominant into my life, I guess it's from how I've bridged my beliefs for it to be very true. I'm wondering if it's possible to turn it off and change/will it to work otherwise? I've tried to contemplate this for awhile but i seem to be stuck within myself. I would like some guidance aid. Thanks.

When I was first starting out in this big dream called "a span of human life" I had a spiritual mentor. He was a really amazing guy who inspired me and dared me every day. A big thing he was encouraging me to do at the time was to die. Needless to say, he was no conventional softie.

But one day he took to calling himself "Rama." And regardless that I had so many amazing experiences by that time, I was really upset. None of my "dying" experiences have prepared me for my mentor calling himself "Rama." I was really upset. And I couldn't tell him about my upset because I looked up to him. Instead I just stopped talking. I turned out OK in the end, but I learned a valuable lesson.

Firstly, I realized how much meaning I unconsciously attached to words. I mean "Rama" is just a word. But wait, it means something! It's not just a word! It's important! (Or is it?)

Secondly, I realized (eventually) how socially-dependent my self-image was. In my own mind I wasn't merely who I thought I was. In my own mind I was someone who was defined by my relation to other people as I knew them. So what other people said of me and to me and the way they related to me constituted my conventional identity as much as any of my own ideas about myself. The reason for that is because it was I, myself, who put so much importance on all that conventional information. I was unconsciously taking conventional appearances as informative. Once I realized that, I started taking more responsibility for how I assign meanings. I still get snagged here and there, but things are much better now. I am pretty confident that no amount of ambient Ramas can upset me now just by calling themselves "Rama."

Back then the biggest thought in my mind was, "Wait, if you are Rama, then what does that make me??" In principle I could have replied "And I am Rama's creator." But this was my mentor saying that to me. I was looking up to the dude in so many ways. How can I be the creator of my own mentor? That unreasonably daring thought just didn't fit into my tiny mindset at the time. So the only option left was the obvious one that reflected my insecurity, "If you're Rama then I must be some run of the mill bore." That was upsetting. I didn't want to think that way about myself.

These days I appreciate what happened then. Thank you Rama.

Talk more casually about SI here without having to make a formal post.

There is this popular conception that floats around, and I think it's often an incredibly damaging one. The idea is that whatever you are like on the inside somehow spreads out and infects the outside or it somehow gets mirrored in the external world.

So for example, if you're generous, that somehow infects other people with generosity and forces them to be generous to you back. Or if you're constantly fair when dealing with the others it in some way obliges others to be fair when dealing with you.

I don't think this is true in most cases. Why not? Because we generally emanate beings through the veil of othering. We generally will want those beings to appear truly unique and independent and therefore quite intentionally and on a very profoundly deep level we would not want those beings to be mere mirrors of our own conventional being. So we get a situation where not everyone is going to be generous even if you are. Not everyone is going to be fair even if you are.

The only way to make sure that people appear in some specific configuration, and mirroring is a very specific configuration, is to intend it directly from a very deep place in your being, without any hidden counter-desires messing things up (so this state of mind has to be very internally coherent). If you intend people to be mirrors and not to be free agents, then and only then will people begin being mirrors. I claim most people will not enjoy this style of emanation. Generally people want surprises, diversity and some degree of discord to make for a believable appearance of unique individuals as opposed to clones. Who wants to live in a sea of clones who copy every one of your "good" habits? On the other hand, we also wouldn't want to live in an environment where we're constantly brutalized no matter what.

This idea that what appears externally is a copy of what appears internally is potentially dangerous. In most cases it is a gross simplification, it's a distorted caricature of a greater truth. If people don't understand how gnarly and profound their own intentionality is and begin expecting a simplistic system of clones and mirrors when on some subconscious level they vehemently don't want to live among clones and mirrors, there is going to be a lot of unhappiness.

What's going to happen is, you'll be nice and you'll expect reciprocation. Any time someone fails to reciprocate you'll either get angry like "damn I was nice, now it's your turn, what the fuck?" Or you'll get depressed like "woa, I was nice and why isn't it working? Why isn't my niceness being cloned how I expect it to be? Why isn't everyone just a copy of my personality here? Damn it... nothing works.... it's all screwed." Or you'll begin to get very demanding and pushy with yourself like this "OK so I was nice but that wasn't cloned as I expected. So it means I must have been a dick on some subtle level. Damn, I suck. Why can't I be really nice??!!! If I am really nice, for sure that's going to become cloned all over the world. For sure. I need to try harder. I am not doing well enough. If I were, it would be visible externally." Etc.

So there are all these myriad of ways to get wrapped up and to hurt yourself and others because you misunderstand something very secret and deep inside yourself: you generally do NOT want to live in a sea of clones and do NOT want to live in a world of mere mirrors. You intend a complex world and you get a complex world. You're a Buddha but not everyone around you is a Buddha. You're nice but not everyone around you is nice. Etc. It's a complex world because generally in most cases that's what you'd want: a complex, gnarly, strange, twisted, surprising, living breathing world where you can get lost, where you don't know everything in advance, etc.

I say "generally" because for a trained and very wise practitioner it will indeed be possible to emanate a sea of clones and mirrors and anything else! You could emanate some truly bizarre and common-logic-defying worlds. You could emanate a deliberately simple and deliberately symmetrical world. You could emanate a world with 3 body types and 2 personality types. So the possibilities are there, but you have to check yourself: is this where your heart is at? Do you expect a gnarly complex unpredictable world? Do you expect beings to look and smell and walk and talk like they have free will? Don't fool yourself no matter what it is. Whatever your deepest intent is, you have to meet that intent face to face if you want to achieve mastery of emanation.

A typical person who hangs around here is not interested in a world of clones and doesn't have the intentionality or the wisdom to pull something like that off. No you cannot just pretend everyone is a Buddha and force everyone to become a Buddha that way. That's not going to work assuming on a much deeper and more hidden level you want to encounter genuinely unique and surprising beings who seem to have their own quirks and interests in mind, sometimes even conflicting interests to your own.

Generally when we want to get lost in a world, we want that world to seem complex and not too predictable. If everything was just a mirror image of your conventional human personality it would be a small and boring world and we wouldn't even find it believable or worth getting lost in. There might be some exceptions to this, but I think in most cases what I say holds. I know for sure I don't want people to just be clones of me. That doesn't mean I don't want people to reciprocate. That's not the point. I want to feel like reciprocation is an option and not a given. If I feel it's not automatic, that creates the illusion of free will in the othered space, which generally speaking is very desirable.

Plus, if I am only doing something nice because I expect it to bounce back on me, I am not really being nice, am I? I am being self-serving. And if I want to be self-serving, I have more honest and more direct ways of serving my interests as an aspirant. I don't have to get other people involved in my self-serving trickiness by demanding that the other people invariably bounce everything back to me like helpless clones.

The world is a reflection of one's fullest and deepest commitment but one's fullest commitment is generally very complex. If you don't respect that complexity you're going to get snagged. I described how one can get snagged above, but there are many ways to get snagged besides the ones I described. Only people who properly understand the true and full depth of their own intentionality are free from being snagged by their own tacit secret commitments.

Many people devote themselves to attaining perfect happiness, as a goal. They're tired of being unsatisfied, and they want to be satisfied. They want to be happy and not suffer, not experience things they don't like anymore.

The source of happiness and unhappiness is clear enough: you are a being with desires. You prefer certain experiences, beliefs, and ideas to others. You are happy when you manifest the things you desire. You enjoy those experiences and want to hold on to them. And, you are unhappy when you manifest the things you don't desire. You suffer those experiences and want to be rid of them.

Your desires can extend over all possible types of cognition, including desires themselves. So, you might desire to structure your personality and character a particular way, and so you might have preferences about what desires you want to manifest in your mind.

At root, though, all these desires sprout from having a vision of a future you prefer, which is contrasted from your vision of a future you do not prefer.

A problem that often develops is that people become confused. They begin to think that what they don't like is being dissatisfied, in abstract. They think they want to avoid suffering. They begin to think that what they do like is being satisfied, in abstract. They think they want to chase happiness. They start to run away from the fact that they're running away from things. They start chasing after the state of not chasing after things.

They start to think that if they just override their normal desiring tendencies, they can manifest eternal happiness in their mind. What this desire to be happy and avoid suffering amounts to is a desire to avoid desiring. It's a feedback loop of suffering.

What ends up happening is that the people pursuing this path gradually learn to adjust their desires. They become less and less concerned with the state of the world around them, eventually becoming unconcerned with even their own body. They exclusively develop tolerance to and disinterest in outer phenomena, because they learn to take more direct control of their own bliss. Taken further, they lose concern for wisdom v. ignorance. They lose concern for understanding their own condition. Eventually, if we imagine this process playing out over many lifetimes, such a being will enter a state of disembodied, timeless, stateless, inner bliss-button pushing. They'll have no concerns or interests other than experiencing and maintaining their psychic bliss-drug.

But, they've finally hit the wall here. Do you see it? They're still concerned with maintaining a state of psychic bliss and avoiding desires. But that itself is a desire! They're still maintaining a sense of desire and unhappiness because they have to constantly be on the watch over their own mind and intentions to make sure they don't go back to having desires anymore. Alas, they've finally come to see that their desire to be without desire is unquenchable.

At this point they have a few options:

• Either they accept a slight degree of unhappiness and desire, and realize that what they wanted was simplicity, nothingness, and dullness (and imo boringness, but maybe this is what some people are after). In that case, they will continue to live with the almost-bliss-drug in infinite nothingness.

• Or they try to attain true desirelessness by giving up their desire to be desireless and eternally blissed out. In doing so, they open themselves up to flippantly re-manifesting all sorts of possible desires, because they no longer prefer bliss to desire. Without a preference, the ever-present decision to manifest bliss v. desire will eventually recreate new desires. Thus, they unintentionally and ignorantly return to the sort of life they were running away from.

• Or, they realize that they're quest has been futile, and they understand the inherent desirousness, and unsatisfactory nature of cognition as a sentient being. They embrace having desires and preference and stop rejecting themselves and fighting themselves.

Pleasure (as in satisfaction/gratification) is not something to seek after. Pain (as in dissatisfaction/non-gratification) is not something to run away from. Seek that which you desire, and run from that to which you are averse. Don't knot your inner world up and get caught desiring not to desire. And then desiring not to desire not to desire. And desiring not to desire not to desire not to desire...etc. It's a huge source of confusion and anxiety if you try to fight desire itself, if you try to get happiness or avoid suffering in themselves.

Instead, embrace yourself. Don't fight yourself. Make your goal self-understanding. What are your desires, regarding all aspects of cognition? Is there anything about your apparent world, or about your psychic structure you desire to change? How can you most effectively manifest whatever it is that you desire? What is the path to attaining your desires? This is how you develop wisdom and, the natural byproduct of wisdom, power. Learn about your desires, and then respect your desires and practice taking responsibility for yourself by working to achieve your desires.

You'll never attain perfect, pure happiness. There is no state of unending bliss with no desires or preoccupations. And even when you achieve whatever you desire right now, your desires are not fixed. It's very likely that you will change your desires over the aeons, and then the new task of satisfying those desires will begin.

You cannot escape the desire-based cycle of happiness and suffering. Embrace desire. There is no escape. By embracing unhappiness and understanding it, you free yourself from the anxiety about being unhappy. You free yourself to infinitely explore your desires, to understand your desires, to accept yourself for who you are at the deepest level, rather than running from your desires, being ignorant of your desires, and rejecting who you are at the deepest level.

Sit in your unhappiness when it rises. Explore it. Don't always run from it. Pain is a beautiful teacher. Love yourself. Take care of yourself by understanding and taking responsibility for your desires. Don't be afraid to be in pain, and to admit you're in pain. When you acknowledge your own pain, you can acknowledge everyone's pain. You can acknowledge the fact that you don't like the way certain things are, and can acknowledge that others don't like the way certain things are.

Love your pain. Get to know it. Become friends with pain. Say "how are you, pain? Have I been neglecting you?" Love your suffering. Love your unhappiness. Love your sadness. Love your anger. Love your hatred. You'll only make things worse if you hate your pain.

You'll be comfortable with the fact that you're unhappy with certain things and want to change them (or want to keep happy things the same), and you'll be comfortable with the fact that others are unhappy with certain things and want to change them (or want to keep happy things the same). You won't have to demand that you are always happy, or that others are always happy. Of course, your desires and their desires are different. But, you all have desires nonetheless.

Understand your desires. Love your nature as a being who desires. Don't run from yourself. Love yourself. Take care of yourself. Focus on what you want. That's what you always do. Just realize it. Know thyself.

When developing an ability to assert arbitrary propositions as knowledge it's necessary to have at least extraordinary courage, if not fearlessness. It is well known that one way to develop courage is by deliberately subjecting oneself to difficult experiences. Asceticism is a practice in that vein, but challenges don't have to be in the form of body denial or conventional personality denial as in the typical ascentic practices. Anything that puts one outside the comfort zone is a challenge.

For a thoroughgoing subjective idealist such challenges can at times be really outlandish, unreasonable and mad in order to be effective, because a more "usual" sort of challenge is just not necessarily going to be felt as a meaingful or interesting challenge. Plus, in order for a challenge to be effective at liberating one from rigid conventional habits it has to be intimately conceived. If one seeks freedom one must only undertake challenges of one's own design and refuse all other challenges as meaningless. That way one can take conscious responsibility for the challenge as well as understand the ins and outs of why this or that area of personal sensitivity must be faced head on in some case that's particular to one's subjective state. That way a challenge will fit neatly into one's own unique manner of development and it will correspond to one's personality in a way that's authentic.

Plus, I don't hear about many spiritually liberated people who are good at hitting the boss' deadlines. So rising to other people's challenges is something I consider a total waste of one's time and I don't recommend it. If ever the word gets around, you might have a line of trolls coming your way with all kinds of challenges for you. Plus, rising to other people's challenges is generally done with the desire to satisfy those people's expectations rather than one's own. But it is yourself that you have to convince of your capability and no one else.

Consider how this or that challenge would fit into your plan to liberate yourself from convention.

But there is a problem with challenges. The problem is that challenges don't prove anything, even to yourself. After all, if you rise to the occasion once, maybe it was a fluke right? So maybe you have to do it twice. But then again, two times might have been a fluke, so three times is better. But wait, those three times don't count because you were young and strong. Now that you're older you have to do it again to see if you can still do it when older. And so on. In other words, if one wants to doubt oneself, the possibility for a doubting narrative is always there!

That's why challenging oneself can easily become a trap of perpetual insecurity where one constantly feels the need to overcome this, that, and the other, to repeatedly prove to oneself one's own greatness. One might even come up with a slogan for this hapless attitude, "I'm only as good as my last challenge!" Maybe it will sound familiar.

Someone wise in the way of subjective idealism will recognize this trap.

The goal then is not to prove anything. The goal is to learn how to rest in the knowledge of capability, no matter what. It is that state of knowing that's the goal. Because ultimately such knowing cannot be justified by anything, it is essentially madness. So trying to attain such a state through a means that's entirely reasonable is not likely to work.

What I find works best is to rise to this or that challenge on occasion, but to do so sparingly, and to know that one's state of confidence and capability cannot be earned or proven. It cannot be proven to others, and it cannot be proven even to oneself. Rather, the knowing of capability is simply assumed without anyone's approval or permission. Once assumed one then commits to living in line with that knowing. And that's all there is to it.

Of course one major reason why such a tactic can work is precisely because of subjective idealism. So if you understand what makes subjective idealism true, you're not going to be entirely unreasonable in your madness. Then you might only appear unreasonable from the POV of convention.

When I was first starting out in this big dream called "a span of human life" I had a spiritual mentor. He was a really amazing guy who inspired me and dared me every day. A big thing he was encouraging me to do at the time was to die. Needless to say, he was no conventional softie.

But one day he took to calling himself "Rama." And regardless that I had so many amazing experiences by that time, I was really upset. None of my "dying" experiences have prepared me for my mentor calling himself "Rama." I was really upset. And I couldn't tell him about my upset because I looked up to him. Instead I just stopped talking. I turned out OK in the end, but I learned a valuable lesson.

Firstly, I realized how much meaning I unconsciously attached to words. I mean "Rama" is just a word. But wait, it means something! It's not just a word! It's important! (Or is it?)

Secondly, I realized (eventually) how socially-dependent my self-image was. In my own mind I wasn't merely who I thought I was. In my own mind I was someone who was defined by my relation to other people as I knew them. So what other people said of me and to me and the way they related to me constituted my conventional identity as much as any of my own ideas about myself. The reason for that is because it was I, myself, who put so much importance on all that conventional information. I was unconsciously taking conventional appearances as informative. Once I realized that, I started taking more responsibility for how I assign meanings. I still get snagged here and there, but things are much better now. I am pretty confident that no amount of ambient Ramas can upset me now just by calling themselves "Rama."

Back then the biggest thought in my mind was, "Wait, if you are Rama, then what does that make me??" In principle I could have replied "And I am Rama's creator." But this was my mentor saying that to me. I was looking up to the dude in so many ways. How can I be the creator of my own mentor? That unreasonably daring thought just didn't fit into my tiny mindset at the time. So the only option left was the obvious one that reflected my insecurity, "If you're Rama then I must be some run of the mill bore." That was upsetting. I didn't want to think that way about myself.

These days I appreciate what happened then. Thank you Rama.

Look around you for a while. Really get a good sense of where you are and how you feel right now. Take a few minutes to do that.

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Good? Alright. Now, try creating a division between two distinct types of experience you’re having: “perceptions” and “attributions”. Notice the difference between the visual keyboard you're perceiving and your concept of “what a keyboard is”. To help you get a grasp of the difference between the perception and the attribution, try changing your attribution. Think about your keyboard as the instrument that it is. Then think about it for the block of atoms/matter that it is. Then think about it as the visual stimulation of 2d colors in your eyes that it is. Then think about it as the geometrical object in space that it is. Then think about it as the extension of yourself that it is. Note these different “ways of thinking about” the perception, and how they differ from the perception itself. Notice how much easier is it to play with these "ways of thinking about" than it is to play with the direct perception itself.

Try doing this with more complex, nuanced things. Look at your neighbor not as, for example, “Jeff the guy”, but as the hairless and upright homo Sapien, as the geometric object in space, as the sack of meat and flesh, as the conscious being with experiences and perceptions, as the child that grew up into an adult, as the background character in your solipsistic world, etc.

Now, take note that one of these was your “default”, while the others required an active consideration on your part. If you’d just stumbled out of bed and saw your keyboard, or saw your neighbor, you’d be “subconsciously” using one of these default attributions.** In fact, nearly everything you interact with is conceptualized in merely one way of many possible ways, and your current defaults can be changed if you’d like to change them.** If “Jeff the guy” is annoying to you, “Jeff the kid who grew up into a confused and sad man” might be less annoying, or if your keyboard seems crude and mechanical, thinking of it as a physical object of color and shape may make it less abrasive. This type of practice is not limited to just people or objects. This can be extended in any direction you like. If you can conceive of it, this practice is applicable to it. None of your defaults are inflexible.

Your “default” is not very different from the defaults of most people. Collectively, we share a lot of default ways of conceptualizing things. These are “cultures”. Cultures are collected, habitual, often subconscious ways of conceptualizing our perceptions. If you feel your default way of conceptualizing things is shitty or non-ideal, then you can break away from your cultural habits. Personally, I think my (our?) culture has a lot of shitty habits both minor and major. For example, minorly, I think our cultural attitude toward food is pretty lame, and that we could be handling food in a much better way. Majorly, I think each of us has a tremendous potential for power and influence over our own state of being, but our culture conceptualizes lots and lots of “external” things as having power of us, and by assuming they have that power, we grant them that power.

This is kind of like being Harry Potter, and the invitations to Hogwarts are arriving in the mail, but instead of bolting up the mailbox, Uncle Dursley has taught the whole family that envelopes will burn you if you touch them, and so nobody ever touches an envelope, and if they did, they probably would genuinely think they were being burned.

Alternatively, you can try to be “culturally open”. In other words, question your habits and tendencies and play with your habits and tendencies. See if you can’t change your defaults. See if you can’t start to love something you used to hate, or see if you can’t find depth to appreciate in something you’d only understood superficially. You can also do these things in the opposite way (e.g. hate something you once loved) and while it’s less fun and less encouraging, knowing that you can do that and being able to do that is important if you prioritize flexibility.

Of all the things one can shift one’s default attributions toward/about, the one I’ve found to be the most interesting is the way one relates to other living things. You’re currently experiencing reality/yourself as a being within a world. This is probably not a very unusual mode of experience. We can imagine experiencing merely a volitional being, and we can imagine experiencing merely a non-volitional world, but between those extremes there seems to be a “bigger infinity” of potential experiences that involve both a volitional entity and a non-volitional world. Taking the POV of a being or entity appears to be a common perspective (at least from where I stand).

While “you” are not a human, which is to say your capacity is not constricted to only being a human, you can (and, I think, should) dwell on the fact that you are currently experiencing a human point of view (POV). You’re currently “humaning”. And your spectrum of experience is that of the particular human you’re experiencing “yourself as”. So, while I’m =/= Utthana, the current perspective I’m taking is Utthana’s perspective (although I do sometimes take others). And just so, other living things are unique in that they exist within our perspective as other perspectives themselves. For example, TGeorge exists within my POV, but he exists as a potential POV himself within my POV.

This means that there’s “a way it’s like to be” TGeorge. You can meaningfully say, “This is what it’s like to be a cat,” whereas you can’t say, “this is what it’s like to be a chair”. We can readily imagine experiencing ourselves from the POV of a cat or from the POV of TGeorge, in a way that we can’t readily imagine ourselves as experiencing ourselves from the POV of a chair (as conventionally understood – we can imagine something that looks like a chair which could have a POV).

Being mindful of this, to me, is super useful and enjoyable. I like recognizing other POV's within my POV because my default is often to objectify people and the really inflate my own POV. I don't tend to see other beings as full and as nuanced as myself, but Utthana the human and TGeorge the human are both equal POV's that I could take. So I like taking this perspectives (sometimes, and not always), because it allows me to:

1) Empathize. All POV’s are POV’s that I could theoretically take. I’m the capacity to take perspectives, not a specific point of view myself. “That could be me,” is applicable to everyone I encounter. I like to play with my default conceptualization of other beings in such a way that I'm inclined to have empathy for them. I currently am interested in playing a role of someone who is relatively non-aggressive, non-competitive, helpful, and kind. To further my interest in playing that particular game, I make things easier for myself by changing the way I look at difficult people (some of the time).

2) Be aware of the glaring subjectivity of my own POV. By regularly acknowledging and appreciating other potential perspectives, you come to appreciate your own perspective in light of others. You become aware of all the possible perspectives you could take. I especially like dwelling on plants, because plants have a potential perspective and POV, but it’s radically different from that of animals and helps to demonstrate just how alien our perspectives can potentially be (which in turn highlights the potential weirdness and alienness of our current, default POV).

3) Change my attributions more easily. Seeing my default perspective as just one among many helps make it seem less “front and center”, less dominant, less immovable. For example, I currently look out my window and see trees, grass, etc. They look kind of dark and I conceptualize them in a slightly negative way. They don’t seem as positive as grass and trees in brighter lighting. Understanding that my default perspective is just one of many possible perspectives, I can decide to see the dim lighting as beautiful and cinematic, I can decide to see the grass and trees as miraculous shapes that grew from the ground, I can decide to see them as distinct entities with experiences and perspectives, or I can even decide to (and this is a step further, altering perception instead of attribution) see something entirely else outside of my window, like the Eiffel Tower. Asserting a new attribution or perception may, at first, feel like it’s “only happening in your mind” or “imaginary”. Further weakening your sense of your default POV as privileged (as well as further contemplating subjective idealism in general) will make “imaginary” seem a lot less imaginary and “only happening in your mind” seem like an arbitrary description.

I recommend you experiment with different conceptual attributions for your perceptions. Don't think that your perceptions can only be conceptualized in one way. You don't have to learn how to do magic and directly change the "physical" world around you in order to radically change your experience in ways that make you happier and help you do things you'd like to do. You have tons and tons and tons of default, subconscious attributions to your perceptions and every single one of them can be played with. This whole thing is malleable. And even the "anchor" of your attributions and perceptions, your particular "POV as a being", is merely one potential POV and you can play with that as well. Start small, work your way up, and try not to be discouraged by any tendencies to dismiss things as "imaginary" or "all in your head".