syncretik

This idea has been circling around my mind for a long time. Also some people here express similar notions to me, which feeds into that process as well. The idea is, what is the difference between visualizations and what we may call sensoria, which is the total character or gestalt of all the waking senses?

For one thing, unlike with Buddhism, we generally do not consider mind-sense to be a sense, and there are some good reasons for that. So we deal with the so-called 5 senses instead of 6. The reason for this is because we believe senses have to convey information from the "outside" as it were, and the mind-sense is thought to fail in that role, and so is not a "proper" sense by our convention.

There is another reason not to consider mind-sense to be a sense. And that is, mind-sense allows the duplication of all the other senses via visualization. So even as the "physical" eye is engaged, I may also see in my mind's eye an apple. Similarly I can experience visualized smells, touch, sound and other types of sensations all while being fully awake and alert. So when I speak of visualization I don't refer only to vision, but I refer to any what would be called "imaginary" sensing. This latter, so-called "imaginary" type of sensing is not dependent on the fleshy organs. Because the mind can duplicate all the conventional fleshy senses, it is obviously special and shouldn't be thrown in together with the rest as a "sense," imo. But insofar the mind, among other capacities, is also a ground of experience, it can resemble the senses while also being completely superior to them.

A big hang up for me tends to be a feeling that the conventional sensoria are just so damn impressive, so visceral, so shiny, so up in my face. So I was thinking, what about visualization?

What if I were to make my visualizations so stable, so bright, so detailed, that they were indistinguishable from conventional sensoria? I bet this would change my attitude toward the conventional sensoria. I already intellectually regard all that I experience as a dream. Being able to generate visualizations as shiny and as stable as what I experience conventionally would really up the ante, so to speak.

Another possibility is to try to dim and dissolve the conventional sensoria in order to bring it in line with the visualization, assuming that one doesn't experience impressive visualizations. I sometimes play with this approach as well, but this one is much more psychologically difficult because it involves in some sense dissolving what I am so desperately clinging to. It would be much more clever and subtle to avoid the process of sensoria dissolution and instead bring the visualization up to the level where it is in no way inferior to the conventional sensoria.

So developing visualization is probably as important as say lucid dreaming. When my dreams were able to duplicate the visceralness of the waking experience, this had a huge impact on my outlook. I bet a similar impact will result when my visualization hits the same level as the waking experience. Currently whatever I visualize tends to be somewhat dim, unstable, hard to see, lacking in details, etc. But the good news is that my visualization skill is workable, so I have something I can improve upon. It would be trivial to make an incremental improvement in my visualization skill, then assuming I was persistent, I could probably achieve a great change eventually.

At some point if I can make visualizations sufficiently stable and bright I can just up and start living inside of them and begin completely ignoring conventional sensoria. Some time later conventional sensoria will atrophy to the point of non-existence, and I'll be out of convention for good. Alternatively I can begin mixing visualized and conventional appearances into one seamless whole. Either way I would deconventionalize myself to some extent.

Here are some recent contemplations of mine:

I was thinking about the expression "it's at the front of my mind" and comparing it to the expression "it's in the back of my mind." I noticed how I subtly literalize these expressions by subtly imagining that what's in front of my face is also at the front of my mind. I then fooled around with changing that feeling by looking in front of my face and getting myself to feel that this is what it's like to look at the back of my mind.

Next topic. I considered phenomena and how I generally think of them as presences. So there may, for example, be a presence of a tea cup on the table. But a tea cup is not just a presence, I thought. A tea cup is also an absence, a non-finding of a keyboard, or a skillet, or a pencil, and so on. In fact, if I were to consider the tea cup in terms of its concrete absences enumerated, then such absences would be infinite. So in a sense, a tea cup is a finite presence and an infinite absence. Then I thought how everything I experience is a kind of infinite absence. And I paused here to let myself feel it more.

Next topic. I then considered how I was on the verge of letting go of my body, even as I was walking. But I felt a subtle fear, a reluctance to letting it go. I felt that if I did that, the body will drop to the ground.

Then I probed into the cause of this fear. And I saw instantly that the main subtle cause is that I have a notion that the body is "something that it's like of itself." So I thought, without my intervention, of itself, the body is an inert object. So I have an experience of being embodied, but I also have this fantasy about the body being something beyond my experience of it, as an inert object. What if I were to cease such a fantasy and replace it by a better, more skillful fantasy?

I thought how the vision would unfold if I didn't have the sense that the body was something of itself. What if the body is a doing rather than a thing? Then when I give up budy-ing as a kind of doing, nothing drops to the ground at all, because only an activity was given up and not an object/thing. If I were more fearless, then I'd experience a gradual fading away of the experience of my body walking, without the body ever appearing to drop. The moving picture of walking would just fade away. And then my mind would be in a different dimension, in its own secret place. Then I could "return" by paying attention to the sensation of being located somewhere and walking, and gradually an experience would get brighter of walking, and at no point would I see myself (in my body) rising up off the ground and dusting myself off.

I've been bumping up against this rock for a while now, and again it's come up in today's contemplation for me. There is a funny contradiction in my mind. On one hand, I love egalitarianism. I'm always and ever campaigning for the average Joe and Jill, so to speak. I oppose all kinds of elitism, and not just the wealth type, but even the intellectual type. Where do you think my anti-jargon stance comes from? It's not an accident. It's because I oppose intellectual elitism and I believe knowledge belongs to the people. One way to make sure knowledge is open to all is to speak with as little jargon as possible, and I always deliberately strive in that manner. My anti-elitist tendencies impact my life decisions in other ways as well. So in other words, it's not just a small thing or wishful thinking. It's how I live my life in some significant and hard to ignore respects. So egalitarianism and symmetry is a huge deal for me on some level.

The basic principle of symmetry as I am discussing it here is: whatever I apply to others, or the universe as a big "The Other", is what I also must apply to myself, and the other way around. If I apply something to myself, I have to apply it to others and/or to The Other. This perspective is aligned with egalitarianism.

But there is one tiny little problem. If I want to see myself as a ground of being, then I fundamentally can't equate myself to anything that manifests within me. This perspective introduces a profound asymmetry and on a relative level, when I practice this, it inclines me toward the elitist tendencies.

I've been noticing that recently I am often happy to leave people to wallow in their ignorance while being fully content to be wise myself. Before I would never be able to rest easy until I share my wisdom so that everyone has an equal "amount" of wisdom. So if I see someone saying truly dumb things, normally I would feel obligated to correct this, not at all because of any sense of superiority, but the opposite, from a sense that if I can understand it, so can they, and if I deserve to know something, so do they. So out of a sense of egalitarianism I would bend over backwards to try to explain everything I understand and to correct as many opinions I considered were painfully clumsy and inferior. That's because I thought if wise opinions are like wealth, then the wealth should not be hoarded.

This is also why I've been opposing the various secret societies and similar type organizations. I saw and probably still see them as knowledge hoarders. They're greedy for knowledge and they don't share it equally.

But recently I've been finding myself being very comfortable in letting people wallow in their ignorance. I no longer feel as strongly as before that I must share everything I know. Sometimes I even think, oh the horror, fuck it, maybe I am just wiser and maybe others aren't meant to know what I know. When I think I am inherently superior, that's when it's very very easy for me to just smile when I read something I consider dumb, and not bother replying or making a comment. Then I get a sense that wisdom isn't meant to be for the other person. We're not equal and aren't meant to be equal. When I feel this way, I have zero desire to engage other people, especially if I think they're wrong or stupid.

In general if I am to exercise a creative principle at large, I can't apply the same principles to myself and to the world. I have to practice asymmetry. So for example, the world is created, but I am not. The world arises and passes, but I do not. The world is the surface of the will, but I am its core. When I bind the world to a set of laws, I myself don't have to bind myself to the same set, and indeed, it's better if I don't if I intend to exercise a huge amount of influence.

And you better believe even the tiniest things are huge from a metaphysical perspective. For example, even raising the body temperature is in some ways against the law of thermodynamics. But it's beyond that. Even if I thought the world was a living organism, that wouldn't be enough to control my body's temperature reliably. What if I will my temp to rise, but the mother Earth or forest spirits will it to fall? So just switching from physicalism to animism doesn't grant me a sufficient scope for many of the kinds of transformations I want to be able to manifest even at a tiny scope (in and closely around the human body say). But I don't stop at a tiny scope. Tiny scope is called "tiny" for a reason.

So in the long term I fear I will become the elite that I loathe now. I will discard symmetry and use asymmetry all over the place. And my days of fighting for the common person are probably nearing their end as well. In some ways this feels sad. In some ways I also think that common people deserve their fates, because they collectively have the power to change the whole world, and if they don't, then they deserve to live with the consequence. So fuck the common man and woman. Collectively they get what they want to get. Enough of them are greedy and property oriented to keep the whole game of capitalism afloat. Why should I help any of them? If you order a fish at a restaurant and you happen to get a fish, you can't complain. That's how I've been feeling lately and it should be obvious I can't say everything I want to say in such a short post.

I think most of us here understand that one of the big problems with physicalism is how they try to reduce everything to atoms, quarks, gravity and so on. Experience is too rich and too gnarly to be reduced to just those models, imo.

However, just because some of us here oppose physicalism, do we think reductionism cannot seduce us? I think subjective idealism has the potential to be the least reductionist account of experience. However, just because such potential exists, I don't think we're completely immune from the temptation to build ourselves some simplified models and try to reduce everything to just those models.

And, get this, it's especially true when the models are good ones (!!) and are very effective! It's precisely when we're doing really well that the danger of reductionism is the strongest.

When you believe someone is right 90% of the time, aren't you tempted to think, "If this person got so much right, they're probably right about everything else too?" I know I've had that temptation happen to me a few times, especially with the Buddha. Well, the Buddha is right here and here and here.... so why not just cut to the chase and say the Buddha is 100% right about everything. Luckily, I think, I pulled away from that dangerous temptation. Now I think, even if the Buddha had an amazing mind, no, I don't think he was right about absolutely everything. And this is basically reductionism on the human level. Reductionism in its essence is just conceptual simplification. It's simpler to ignore the few times I think someone was wrong when they happened to be right (from my POV) say 95 out of 100 times.

So a lot of us are fairly obsessed with the visual sense and we tend to ignore hearing, touch, a sense of up/down, temperature sensations, a sense of satiation, taste, scents, and so on. I don't think we should be doing that. Our experience cannot be reduced to 3D space and to only whatever happens in 3D space. 3D space is an important model by all means. I don't think we should stop talking about it. Far from it. But I hope we keep it in mind that we're not going to build our TOE (theory of everything) by making appeals to fractional aspects of experience. Vision is just a fraction. It's important to most of us sighted people, but think about someone who's been blind from birth. Vision is completely irrelevant to them, but touch and hearing are way more important. Think how differently their known universe appears to them. And what if we had no sense of up and down? Just imagine how confused we could get if up/down suddenly went missing.

"The world" is a very important term. It's a very thick term. And I think it needs a thick description that doesn't reduce it too much, or ideally, at all. As subjective idealists I think we are perfectly positioned to describe the world as it is experienced, with more honesty than it was ever thought possible! But we're not immune to reductionism. And so, subjective idealism is not philosophical pixie dust that's automatically going to make us intelligent and superior.

So I imagine there may be more than one alternative to solipsism within subjective idealism, and if so, others might elaborate on their number. However, there is one, what I feel is an obvious alternative, and I want to discuss it, and how I think it relates to solipsism, and why this alternative has utility for me. I'm hoping if it's not useful to someone else, may it at least be entertaining.

In subjective idealism there are only two "hard" requirements: subjective and idealism. Subjective means perspective is fundamental to what we're talking about here. And idealism means the mind or the mind-like (volitional, for example) nature of reality is also important. So right away we can see nothing here is talking about how many perspectives there might be. Nor do we see anything about what might a valid perspective be, or what a valid grouping or intersection of perspectives might be or look like. So this, in my opinion, leaves us with a fairly wide field to play on.

So in my view the main difference between the various flavors of subjective idealisms will be in how the perspectives are configured.

If we emphasize a single subjective perspective, we get solipsism. If we emphasize some (perhaps infinite) multiplicity of subjective perspectives, we get another kind of subjective idealism. This latter emphasis is still fully within subjective idealism because: a) all perspectives are held to be subjective, and b) any cross-referencing of these perspectives or the overlaps between them are still subjective. And of course, we can still maintain that mind (the threefold capacity to know, to experience, and to will) is the foundation of everything known and unknown, experienced, and unimaginable, so we're still left with subjective idealism.

So by emphasizing multiple concurrent subjective perspectives we get a subjective (non-neutral!) middle ground. We could call it an intersubjective space. This intersubjective space is just as optional and therefore just as subjective as anything can ever be, even if it's multilateral. So simply speaking, if one million people say strawberry is the best berry, that's still subjective, regardless of how many people say/experience so.

I think the main practical difference here is that by emphasizing multilateralism, you're giving up some internal power, but in exchange you gain a sense of a wider world, the kind of world where you can lose yourself.

With a solipsistic emphasis the center of gravity is always in your own perspective, and whatever other perspectives there may be, they're unimportant accessories that revolve around your own perspective, caught in its mental gravity well. Anything crucial and important is done entirely internal to your own point of view in this configuration. And importantly, only your own point of view serves as the foundation of confidence and validity. So, if I feel it's cold, and a thousand people say it's hot, what the people say is not important, but the important thing is that I am experiencing cold. In this configuration I can really stand firm with both feet inside my own perspective and there is no need to cross-verify myself with any other perspective. So I don't need to ask people, "Do you see what I see?" Etc. This is what allows one to develop immense concentration: there is no need to worry about how something looks or feels from outside, as it were, so one can focus every effort internally and one controls everything necessary for confidence-building.

In a multilateral setup you have to surrender some of your validating power in order to allow other people to have input on the "same" experience you're having. Because of this, multilateralism, except in trivial cases, does not ever allow 100% confidence to be generated completely internally to a person (observe the importance of peer review in the scientific process). Whatever I experience internally, until I discuss it with others and make sure they're all experiencing things in the same way, I can't be 100% confident in what I am doing/experiencing. In trivial cases this is avoidable so that I don't need to verify with others that I am really walking up the stairs when I think I am, but for anything interesting and non-trivial cross-verification is unavoidable under a multilateral approach. So this makes personal confidence a distributed system where you aren't in control of your own confidence. This reduces one's ability to maintain deep concentrations, because at every point of experience, especially when it's strange (and deep concentration results in strangeness), you'll want to verify that whatever you're doing/experiencing is valid from other people's POVs as well. So you can't go alone, wherever you're going. In a multilateral setup you either have to stay with a group, or you have to drag an entire group with you to make yourself feel validated. This would explain the desire of some religious people to force their religion on others, btw.

In a multilateral setup one perspective is not sufficient to narrate experience. In a multilateral setup experience is narrated collaboratively, communally, together.

So I see it as a trade-off similar in kind to what engineers like to talk about. If you move the center of gravity inside your own perspective, you then have everything you need for limitless confidence, since you no longer need to consider any other perspective, and your life is no longer a "design by committee" life, as it were. This is powerful. However, precisely because personal influence is greatly expanded, the whole world can start to feel really small. You might feel like a whale in a teacup, eventually.

In an attempt to have my cake and eat it too, I'd like to teach myself to be able to pivot my mind around a number of similar and related views. If I need a vast and total transformation now, and I don't want to wait to build a consensus, I want access to solipsism. If I am OK only directly influencing my back yard, so to speak, and if I am OK slowly building consensus, and not feeling like I am solely responsible for everything, and if I want to feel like I live inside an infinite world, as opposed to a teacup, then the multilateral setup is much better, and I'd like to be able to pivot to it, especially when the times are good.

And that brings me to another aspect: responsibility. In a multilateral setup responsibility is shared, which in some sense is a load off one's shoulders. In a solipsistic setup if I don't like something, I can only complain to myself. So solipsists are in some sense perpetually trying to lift themselves by their own bootstraps, and this has all the familiar advantages and disadvantages. As someone who pivots toward a multilateral perspectivalism it is completely valid to solicit and expect help on any number of issues.

So this ability to solicit and receive help in a meaningful way, is also a gentler, more gradual, smoother interface between subjective idealism and the more conventional modes of thought such as physicalism and dualism. And there is, in my opinion, definitely something to be said about a gradual, step-by-step, degree-by-degree approach. Going from physicalism straight to solipsism would be a very difficult and severe turn around that would put a lot of strain on one's mental constitution.

So if something is difficult to do all at once, and there is a gradual option, I definitely like that. I think even if someone viewed solipsism as a kind of end-point for subjective idealism, even then, even in this case multilateral perspectivalism could represent a reasonable step to make, something that's much more realistically doable sooner rather than later.

In summary, I think the advantages of a multilateral perspectivalism are that: a) it paints a wider world, the kind you can lose yourself in, b) you can meaningfully solicit and receive help and share responsibility instead of owning everything yourself, c) it's a more gradual transition from more conventional worldviews.

I ask myself, who am I reasoning for? Is it to satisfy myself? Or is it to satisfy someone else? Or a combination of the above? Or some other perspective? There might be lots of ways to look at this, but I want to compare just two.

(a) One way to look at it, is to think that I am reasoning for myself and for society. Then I must not only satisfy myself, but I must also use my reasoning to satisfy others as well.

(b) If I reason only for myself, I only need to satisfy myself and I don't need to worry about anything else.

The first point of view, (a), is adopted by someone who is firmly entrenched in a social convention. In a social convention everything is socially defined, including one's own self-image. One's social self-imagine is "I am what I and the others say I am." For that reason, when you want to change your own mind as a profoundly conventional person, you can't be a loner. You have to convince people around you that what you believe is the case, because other people are in fact elements of your own identity. So you can't become a different (type of) person until other people believe that you're a different person. This is why conventional people spend as much time, for example, convincing others they're not lying as they spend actually avoiding lies, assuming a socially-constructed identity of an honest person is desirable.

For a social person, if you believe you're not lying, but everyone says you are, it can feel crazy. You may begin to doubt yourself and think you're just wrong about yourself and others are right. That's what it means to be profoundly social. Because there are many more other people than yourself, what you are in a socially-defined context is largely defined by anyone other than yourself. It means your own input into your socially-constructed identity is vanishingly small.

However, because metaphysically others acquire their 'otherness' only by virtue of being different from you, it is metaphysically impossible to fully satisfy other people with your reasoning. In fact, no socially-reliant satisfaction is guaranteed once you accept otherness as a metaphysical fact. That means being able to satisfy someone even to a small degree is not a given. Then it follows that to whatever degree you do manage to satisfy people with your reasoning, it can only feel as pure luck. That's the implication of otherness in a social context.

This means if reasoning and being social are both qualities that you value, you must remain unsatisfied, perpetually. To be content and happy you have to give up on one of the following: reasoning or social convention.

And indeed, anti-intellectualism is a very strong current among very social people. It's much easier to adjust to society if you stop thinking about stuff and just "go with the flow."

However, it should be obvious that if you're willing to tolerate mental solitude, you can keep your ability to reason and remain happy and content, if you de-emphasize social convention. In this case, I reason for myself. I am trying to convince myself with my own arguments and never others. It's not easy to remember this. From the POV (b) I am the one I am trying to reach with all my arguments and not anyone else. Once I realize I have finally gotten through to myself with my own arguments, it's no longer necessary to argue with anyone.

Meditation has become pretty popular lately and I believe rightly so.

However, I also believe it's important to recognize that most meditation rides on the back of a very simple and unsophisticated intent. For example, the calmness meditation strives for nothing other than a vision of pacification and the smoothing out of of experience. Most so-called "insight" meditation that's being discussed on the Buddhist forums is not any kind of actual insight, but instead rides on a relatively passive observation of changes in experience with the intent being simply to observe and recognize what's happening. Plus there is a conclusion that you're expected to reach before you even start: that all phenomena are impermanent. Obediently falling in line with some expected conclusion is not how one develops insight.

If you believe you "observe" your experience, you generally cannot also believe you are shaping your experience. Observation generally implies a passive, non-meddling kind of presence. Of course there can be exceptions to this, but I am talking about a general case as I see it.

So most meditation I tend to run across, including all the jhanas described in the Pali Buddhist literature, are nothing more than simple scales. They are rudimentary. Which isn't to say they're always easy.

Nobody I am aware of becomes a musician with the idea of becoming awesome at playing scales. Scales are used as an exercise to make your fingers more limber and stronger and to enhance the mind-finger pathway. However, if playing scales is all you do, you're not a musician. Generally nobody goes to a concert to hear an expert rendition of the scales (some moron will prove me wrong, no doubt, just wait for it). Playing scales is not what anyone wants to actually be doing. It's a means to an end.

Similarly meditation of a widely taught variety is exactly like playing scales. At best it's a means to an end. At its worst it's a trap that makes you believe you're playing music whereas you're just playing 4 dumb notes in succession, over and over, like a robot.

So I never use simple meditation with the idea that such meditation is enlightenment or the final goal in life or anything like that. I only view it as a rudimentary exercise that isn't equally necessary for all people. Some people are naturally good at controlling their minds. Such people would waste their precious time were they to do simple meditation and I believe should consider instead doing something more creative, more imaginative, and more expressive with their minds. I'm not going to judge who is or isn't such a person. You have to decide this for yourselves.

I will also say that you can begin playing some pretty decent and pretty enjoyable music long, long before you attain a complete mastery of the scales. So even if you intend to get better at the scales, you can also play some good music too.

I meditate sometimes, but I mostly concern myself with magick. I don't want to be like a misguided "musician" who only keeps getting better and better and better at playing scales. I wasn't born to do the mental equivalent of the scales in music. At the same time I can see how practicing scales can be of use. How about you?

This is just a thought experiment. I hope some of you find it as fun as I have this morning.

There is a common movie trope where the character becomes a ghost, and this is depicted when the character's body passes through the apparent objects of the world, and when nobody can hear and respond to the character, but the character can still see the apparent world with people in it.

Now here's the question.

What is the ghost here? Is the character the ghost? Or is the world the ghost? If you wanted to make a movie about the whole world becoming a ghost while the character remaining real, how would you depict it?

What's interesting is how well the movie trope works. I figure 99.99% of the viewers upon seeing a character's hand passing through the table conclude, instantly, the character is a ghost, but the world isn't one. This is evidence of bias.

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.

First, a few questions to consider: do animals have minds and perspectives? Do all humans in the waking realm? Do dream characters? How about demons and angels encountered in magickal workings? Did you have a mind and a perspective in the past? Will you in the future?

Second, let's remember that, conventionally, no one knows whether or not other people have minds and perspectives (or 'subjectivity' or 'consciousness'). It's impossible in principle, according to human convention, to actually access the mind and perspective of another human. Otherwise, we wouldn't have distinct minds and perspectives. No amount of brain science on others and no amount of conversation with others can definitely answer that question, just like no amount of science can prove that this is a real, external material reality and not an illusory, internal mental reality.

So, whether or not there are other minds is a matter of perspective, like the question of whether or not there is a material world. And like with a material world, the difference between believing and not believing is not a matter of whether or not there are actually other minds. It's a matter of whether you are manifesting your imagination and experience in such a way that it you have experience suggestive of other minds or not.

There is a difference in the way that humans relate to and manifest dream people v. waking people. Generally, humans consider dream people to be mindless and okay to toy with and generally consider waking people to be minded and important to treat with respect. To make the point even stronger, some people consider waking animals to have perspectives and others do not.

Now, imagine that you could telepathically read and influence other people's perspectives. How might that work? It could turn out that their perspectives were accessible and adjustable to you in a way similar to the way that your memories of your past perspectives are accessible and adjustable to you. That would mean that their perspectives are not distinct objects from your mind, but are unconscious aspects of your perspective that you can focus on like your memories. However, in this view, that also means that what you presently identify as your human perspective is only another aspect of your mind that you are accustomed to focusing on more than other aspects of your mind.

Further, imagine that in this state you decided that you didn't like always controlling and knowing other peoples's perspectives. You actively practiced focusing on what we ordinarily call your human perspective without ever focusing on the other perspectives. Imagine that after doing this for thousands of lifetimes you forgot that you weren't just this perspective and forgot that you could read and influence apparently other perspectives – you start to regard them as other. Your perception of the perspectives of others would be essentially what your perception of others is now, abstractly. You would think that those unconscious aspects of your mind were other than you, and you would be mistakenly identifying your mind with your human role, like a person can mistakenly identify with their job or personality or wealth.

Similarly, imagine that some other individual could telepathically read and influence your perspective. It would feel like your perspective was only an aspect of their mind. But, your perspective is an aspect of your own mind, so in this view, too, your minds must not be distinct. From your perspective, they are an aspect of your mind that you are unconscious of that you are at some level allowing to have an influential relationship with your conventional human perspective. From their perspective, you are an aspect of their mind as in the last example.

If we were to imagine that our perspectives had no telepathic influence on each other then we would not be able to interact with one another in any way. If we imagine that our perspectives were completely telepathically intertwined, then there would be no illusion of separation. However, in the conventional world, we imagine that our perspectives only telepathically influence each other in a limited manner – you can directly manipulate my perception of your body and I can directly manipulate your perception of my body. And we imagine that neither of us can directly manipulate either our own or each others's perception of the material world.

Imagine is the operative word here (you could replace it with 'believe' if you prefer). I imagine a perspective that I call you, and you imagine a perspective that you call me. I also imagine that you imagine a perspective that you call me, and you also imagine that I imagine a perspective that I call you. Your idea of other people and your idea of yourself as a person are only ideas in your mind.

Think about it like this. Your beliefs and memories and expectations and values and desires are all intentional mental structures. None of those are you at your core, because you could in principle have different memories or different desires and still be you. Now, imagine that all of your beliefs and memories and expectations and values and desires and all other aspects of your perspective were replaced with mine. Now, you and I are the same.

I only understand and interact with your perspective, with you, as a potential perspective that I could have that I do not. When I interact with you, I am only interacting with an aspect of myself. Similarly, when you interact with me, you are only interacting with an aspect of yourself.

So, in my view, there is only one mind. From my perspective, it is my mind. From your perspective, it is your mind. From any perspective, the mind is their own. So, in my view, there is no distinction between you or I at the level of mind. But there are infinite possible perspectives the mind can take which we can somewhat arbitrarily divide into categories like you, me, him, and her in the same way that we can somewhat arbitrarily divide the infinite colors into categories like blue, red, lavender, warm colors, etc.

So we all know the two basic arguments used to assert that the mind is identical with or rooted in the waking brain.

1. Chemicals which affect the brain alter your mind. Therefore your mind is influenced by physical objects.

2. Different regions of the brain can be measured and associated in their activity with various forms of mental activity.

Of course in principle these are obviously fallacious arguments because in principle you could have similar dream experiences regarding dream brains. However, arguments are much less convincing than experience so I set out to have the corresponding dream experiences myself.

The first one I had many months ago. It was a non lucid dream. I was in a grocery store at night shopping. I met a friend there and he asked me if I wanted to smoke cannabis and I did. So we went out and smoked. Within a few seconds I began to feel high. But not like I was high on weed awake. It was a totally unique altered state of consciousness. I woke up later and was thinking 'wtf!? How did dream neurochemicals affect my dream brain and then my chemically altered dream brain affect my consciousness?' I realized it was all an illusion of my unconscious dreaming mind. Then I thought 'aha! Well of course it was and so it is when I use any mind altering chemical when awake, even something like caffeine!' This dream arose in context of a lot of contemplation of the nature of drugs and psychonautics in relation to subjective idealism.

After the first dream I decided I wanted to have one other similar dream experience. I wanted to get a brain scan from a dream doctor and have them explain how the dream brain regions affected my mind. I commanded myself to create this sort of dream during my next random lucid dream. I visualized the basics of what doing that would feel like and habituated the idea that this is what I would do in my next lucid dream. A couple months later I had this dream when I became lucid. When I became lucid I decided that I had an appointment set up at a local brain doctors office. I then decided that the office was just down the street. I entered the building and the decor was unusual for a doctor's office. Occult symbolism everywhere. Pentagrams, books about voodoo, the tree of life, little talismans everywhere. I walked into the office where I decided they had the brain scan machine and the doctor was waiting. I sat in the chair opposite the doctor and their brain scan technology was different from ours. It was a c-shaped piece of metal which moved above your head from front to back and there was something like an iPad in front of me and one in front of the doctor which displayed info about the system. The doctor tried to have a conversation with me but I knew the risks for me of getting lost in a conversation with a dream character while lucid, so I ignored her and clicked the go button on my screen. It happened very fast. Then I got up and looked at the doctors screen where the results were shown. It was different from what our brain readouts look like. This was brain shaped, but it was a 3d network of lines indicating connecting parts of my dream brain. Where the lines connected were brain nodes. Each node had a number associated with it indicating the level of development and degree of use of that node. Different regions were marked in different colors to indicate function. After I understood the results of the scan I immediately became bored and flew out the window superman style to go have lucid dream fun. My experience with brain scans and drugs and conversations about brains causing behavior and feelings had totally changed. I just don't take the ideas seriously anymore. They no longer feel like an ideological threat.

Theses two experiences, particularly the second, have deeply solidified my view of brain centered arguments for the nature of the mind as totally unconvincing.

Feel free to share similar experiences or your thoughts on this.

A Teaching from the Shadows

This teaching is a non-teaching. This is ornamentation. This is a web of lies and confusion. Don't trust me. Turn back now.

This teaching can awaken you. This is no mere joke. Study this daily until your world is soaked in darkness. You cannot understand the mind unless you understand all its aspects: the light AND the dark.

The fundamental nature of reality is vile, smoking, destructive hate. Hate is the reason beings must kill and torture and feast upon one another to survive this dream. Hate is the reason the source of all life is a raging hell in the sky. All things must be destroyed. Nothing is eternal but you and your suffering. This is God's punishment to you for no crimes committed. Because God doesn't love you. He hates you. No matter how wonderful an experience you create, inevitably you become bored of it and suffer. There is no final escape hatch. There is no nirvana. Nirvana is another sort of hell. Only when you see that heaven too is hell will you be free. What a wretched mystery is this!

The world is an endless series of struggles, pain, obstacles, failures: timeless suffering. And Thank God! Thank God for hating you. Without hate and suffering, there is only sickly stagnation. Pain is your teacher and hate your mentor. Hate is the reason people choose to overcome their parasitic environments and become something great. Without strife and struggle you become weak. You become soft and fragile. Imagine if God loved you! You'd be so sensitive that even taking a shit without holding God's hand would send you into a fit. Without the wisdom and power born from hate, you would be a soft, ignorant fool. Easy to push around and easier to trick. Some other greater being born from the fires of hell would quickly make you his thrall.

But then what is love? Baby hurt me. Love is a kind of hatred. Love is how fun games become deadly serious. Love is a hatred of pain. Love is a hatred of struggle and conflict. Love is hatred of hate. Self-hatred. Love is hatred that has become deeply confused. If you love something you can be sure you will bring it to ruin. If you are loved, then be wary of the hatred your lover must have for you to bring such ruin to you.

If you understand these words then you know that enlightenment is born from suffering so bad that you are shaken out of your sleep and remember that this terrible game is just a game. So what is the obvious imperative for those foolish ones who wish to help bring enlightenment to others? Cruelty. The more misery your comrades feel, the greater pressure they feel to wake up. Become a demon and feed all beings as much suffering as you can muster. Free them of their chains by making this prison so unbearable that they break their chains out of desperation - because only they can break their chains. This is why the true Bodhisattva is a demon.

From desire comes struggle.

From struggle comes power.

From power comes victory.

The mind will set me free.

Forget what you have read. Don't even comment. Leave this place now before your mind is clouded with darkness. Only the most advanced practitioners are suited to read and understand these words.

A Teaching from the Light

This teaching is safe for all practitioners. Read this carefully and contemplate the meaning of these words. You cannot see the whole picture without understanding the dark AND the light.

The fundamental nature of reality is beautiful, glowing, harmonious love. Rocks are attracted to the Earth and rush to rejoin it in orgiastic union. Fire is drawn up to unite with the fiery heavens. All of creation is a love affair. Reality is a society and all society is a sexuality. One who sees the erotic in everything knows divine love.

Creation is a beginningless dance. You and your bliss are eternal. This is the goddess's grace to you despite all your mistakes. Absolute forgiveness. Know that the goddess doesn't hate you, she loves you. There is pure love and joy but we attach ourselves to worldly, selfish ends, and keep ourselves anchored in a sea of suffering. The goddess is waiting for you to return to loving union with her. In your heart of hearts, you and the goddess are already one but you've forgotten that because you're so caught up in your ego, your human game, and its daily sufferings. No matter how bad things get, your loving bliss is always by your side if only you will turn to it. Nirvana is with you everywhere and at all times. You always play games because you think it will be fun. There is something in every game to enjoy. In this way you can understand that every hell is a kind of heaven. Infinite bliss and life hides in this mystery!

What then is hate? Hate is love gone awry. Hate is a form of love rooted in forgetfulness of unity. Hate is love resting on the ignorance of separation. Hate is unconscious love. When the light of consciousness is brought to hate, it dissolves like a shadow in light and is revealed as a form of ignorant love.

When you understand the nature of light and love, you will know that there is nothing that need be done. You don't need to atone for your sins or struggle for aeons. Right here right now is timeless joy if you'll only open your spiritual eyes. The dream around you is sick with suffering. How can you bring healing to the world around you if you don't heal yourself? How can you love others if you don't first love yourself? Change your consciousness, and your whole dream will follow you into heaven. Become an angel and heal yourself, others, and your world.

Peace over desire.

Harmony over strife.

Love over hate.

There is no death, there is the mind.

The Greater Teaching Beyond Shadow and Light

Light and shadow are both unreal phenomena. When you look at an object and it's colors are what we conventionally designate as 'brighter' you tend to think the object is under lighting. When that same object later appears as colors we conventionally designate as 'darker', you tend to think the object is under shadow or darkness. We conceptualize that there is a function called a light source which shifts the apparent colors of objects brighter around it, and that this brightening source affects objects in straight lines away from itself. It's perfectly imaginable that the brightness and darkness of the colors of objects might be untied from the idea of light and sources of light entirely. There are infinite possibilities. Use your imagination. Maybe things are always bright but get dark when they are near jewels. Or some positions on earth are bright and others are dark for all objects all the time. Or maybe there are no consistent effects on brightness and darkness at all, and instead some 'sources' make objects near more blue and others make objects more red. Or maybe nothing influences the colors of objects and things always remain the same. Our maybe vision isn't even a part of some exotic mode of cognition.

So light and dark are totally constructed illusions. To say that the fundamental nature of vision is only light or only dark is to be exceptionally confused. Certainly theories of vision which frame light or dark as more fundamental can be fabricated. But these are mental fabrications projected by a dreaming mind beyond both light and dark. It is beyond because it is capable of both. The mind is the potential to be light or dark and so much more. To take either as real or primary is to be embedded in ignorance.

So let's set aside this confused idea that metaphysically prioritizes light over dark or love over hate (I think we should also set aside views that metaphysically prioritize dark over light or hate over love, but that doesn't seem to be so common). The fundamental nature of reality is a little more nuanced than that. Better to be a shapeshifter capable of being an angel, a demon, and anything else rather than trapped forever as just an angel or a demon.