syncretik

Looks like solipsism is a topic of the hour, so this inspired me to share some of my thoughts on it. I don't often speak about solipsism explicitly and now is as good a time as any.

Firstly I want to clarify the definition of solipsism. It's possible I use a somewhat non-standard definition of "solipsism" and so just in case, it's a good idea to define the term. Solipsism to me means a unified subjective point of view. So it's both unified, as in, non-dual, not excluding anything as "other" or "out there" and subjective, as in, personal, perspectival, something to which other alternatives do exist. So an experience is subjective if it's perspectival. All experiences are perspectival. And something is perspectival if other alternatives exist. So for example, if I think events happen in time, since I can imagine events not happening in time, at least the conventional variety of time is optional in my consideration. So time is perspectival and subjective.

So what solipsism does not mean is something like "Everything is only Nefandi." That would be nonsense. I can experience any sort of identity or body. Because nothing concrete (specific) in my experience of myself is non-optional, when I unify my point of view, I am not unifying it under my conventional identity. Insofar Nefandi appears to me, so do say TriumphantGeorge, Utthana, and so on, at least, in this specific configuration of experience I am in now. So my view is unified in myself, but I am not strictly speaking Nefandi. I am experiencing Nefandi and to some extent you can say I am Nefandi-ing, but that isn't accurate, because in addition to Nefandi-ing I am also TriumphantGeorge-ing, street-ing, car-ing, cloud-ing, time-ing, space-ing, universe-ing, and so on. But it would be accurate to say that Nefandi-ing right now is at the forefront of my awareness and it often blinds me to other activity I am performing right now.

In most cases I positively don't want to be aware of this other activity, because I want it to happen on autopilot, on its own, without my explicit guidance. Which is to say, I want a breathing living game world to be inside of, however, it is a world I want to be able to adjust, or even eliminate, if it doesn't suit me. But so long as it is suitable, there is really no desire for micromanagement, and indeed, some amount of surprise is enjoyable in and of itself. In this way it makes good sense for me to hide certain "things" from myself even if those things are still just myself.

So why would any of this be interesting or relevant to me? The main reason is the ability to perform complete transformations and the development of personal confidence that extends all the way to the level of concrete manifestations (as opposed to say only confidence in the abstract nature of things).

I recall the most basic and most enjoyable moment of my lucid dreaming career, and like for many lucid dreamers, it's learning to fly. And how was I able to fly? I was able to fly only after I realized, thanks to lucidity, that everything I am witnessing is a mind-made world of my own creation. So my view in a lucid dream has become unified subjectively in myself. And this is what gave me certainty and knowledge that I could manifest the experience of flying. And voila, I was able to fly. The enjoyment and a sense of mastery from this experience is unforgettable. I want to learn to fly in all kinds of ways.

Flying bodily through the sky is just one kind of flying. Flying is a metaphor for experiencing without limitations. Normally there is a limitation of gravity. When you fly you remove the limitation of gravity on experience. In lucid flying I have realized that ultimately gravity in all the ways I experience and know it is a self-imposed habit of my own mind. Because this is so, I have options with regard to that habit. If I like it the way it is, I can keep it. I can also modify it or make it adjustable or even make it inconsistent in some way. Options abound.

When the viewpoint becomes unified and subjective, this does create a source of personal power. This, above all else, grants the power to direct experience in any way one may desire.

Of course, like anything, this modality has potential pitfalls. In particular, if you always satisfy every desire, you may start to lose tolerance to adversity. As the tolerance to adversity decreases, smaller and smaller intensity is required to create a sense of the experience being undesirable. So supposing I have a huge tolerance of pain, but I take care never to deliberately injure myself, after say 100 or 10000 subjective years of this, I may find even a feather against the skin feels like intolerable pain. And I am not saying this is a set in stone eventuality, but personally I do see this as a very likely possibility, assuming no arcane mental activity that would prevent ordinary habituation from working as usual.

On the other hand, overfocusing on tolerance one becomes passive and inexpressive. If you can tolerate anything perfectly, why live? Why sing if you can tolerate silence perfectly? Why write articles if you can tolerate ignorance? Why caress someone if you can tolerate absence of touch of a sentient being? Perfect tolerance removes any reason for anything at all. At the extreme of tolerance one just exists, as a mere insensate thing.

So I always develop myself in both directions. I learn to tolerate pain and adversity. But I also learn (or re-remember) to be extraordinarily expressive. To me this is what freedom is like: I don't have to do anything, but I also don't have to avoid doing anything. In other words, I am free in both directions. I am free in the direction toward greater and greater passivity. And I am free in the direction toward greater and greater activity or influence.

I think that ultimately all control is self-control. As a random aside, hypnotists like to say "all hypnosis is self-hypnosis," and one of the consequences of such a view is that when you hypnotize an audience, you are actually hypnotizing yourself into experiencing that you're hypnotizing the audience. And so self-hypnosis is always the first step for any hypnotist. Since solipsism doesn't train you to control something other than your own mind, I regard solipsism as the reader's birthright. Why? Because it's your birthright to learn to control your own mind to an arbitrary degree, if that's what you want to be learning, or remembering (since secretly you already know all there is to know anyway). In a way solipsism is the most modest position, since it's all only and ever about self-knowledge and self-control. For a solipsist adept, luckily, self-control implies all possible forms of control that actually matter in one's experience, but that's just a nice aside. The main driver for a genuine and sincere solipsist is not other-control, but self-control.

Th, th, th, that's all folks! :) At least that's all I wanted to say of my view on solipsism at this time.

Everything that follows is meant to be a useful illusion to help you develop understanding. Do not take it or anything you read ever to be true or false. It is, at best, ornamentation in your dream-reality.

Magickally deciding what someone else will do is seen by many as a necessary metaphysical violation of their free will. Many magickal traditions hesitate to accept or even oppose tampering with the activities of others. One common fear is that everyone will become drones of your will and extensions of yourself if you change your perspective so that they can be controlled. Most people at some level want to keep seemingly autonomous others in their world, so this would be unwise for them.

However, it is metaphysically possible to directly control the activities of others as much or as little as you'd like without sacrificing their free will.

First, consider that even in a highly conventional perspective, you know very little about other people's motivations. You can try to figure out their motivations by watching them, but that gives you very little. Especially since people often hide their true thoughts and feelings from public perception. It can turn out, quite suddenly, that someone you never suspected was in love with you or was a serial killer or is a master of divination.

Now, begin to consider the infinite possible ways that anyone you know could turn out to have literally any set of motivations that you never suspected. I think it's pretty amazing when you really start to imagine that broadly.

In this context, consider the idea that every possible reality manifests for those who participate in it. Consider that there are realities where versions of everyone else exist who vary in a range from almost identical to extraordinarily different in terms of motivations.

Imagine then that in these infinite realities, the various versions of the individuals you know making different decisions and having different motivations are free.

What I suggest, in context of these ideas, is that the other-realities you encounter depend on you. That is, at some level, you are always manifesting one of the infinite possible sets of motivations for everyone you meet and you are choosing which free others you are living with in your reality (if you are choosing to live with free others at all).

By implication, you can force it to be the case that someone falls in love with you freely, or becomes lucid freely, or commits suicide freely. You can choose to shift into the reality where that is already happening in their intent and in the process of unfolding. Similarly, others can do the same to you. If the decisions they force aren't in line with the decisions you are making, then they will diverge into an alternate possible reality with an alternate version of you that does make those decisions, and you will have a different version of them that decided not to force you to make a decision different than the one you are making. There is, in this sense, nothing for others to fear from you, and nothing for you to fear from others. Yet, we are all tyrannical lords of our realms and of others in our realms.

If you view everyone as a god or goddess, then there is nothing you can do to them against their will, and yet you can do anything you please to them. Similarly they to you.

This divergence and convergence of the infinitely variant divine subjective minds in the infinitely variant realities can be called subjectivity divergence and convergence.

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 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.

My preoccupation at the moment lies in trying to better understand the nature of the othered aspect of myself, the part which crafts the world/my experiences. The questions I'm working on at the moment are: is it self aware as I am self aware? Does it contemplate me as I contemplate it? Am I mysterious to it as it is mysterious to me - or does it "know" me? Is it emotional or indifferent? What is the nature of our current connection? Does it function as a series of algorithms might or is it more nuanced? If I managed to merge with it tomorrow - to what extent would "I" still be "me"? What would I care about if that occurred?

I'm not sure how much headway I'm making with these questions to be honest. Thinking about them, though, has made me realised that I have made assumptions about my othered self, and that these assumptions affect my capacity to manifest things.

One area where I have experienced occasional success lies in willing traffic to improve. When I examined my success in this area I realised two things that my success was always accompanied by:

• a deep conviction that bad traffic was valueless

• a sense that traffic, no traffic, the world wasn't going to be ground-shakingly altered

So why was this important, why would these factors need to be satisfied in order for me to will things different?

And then it hit me - it's because I lack trust in myself and my capacity to make a "good," impressive world. I have accorded my othered self a privileged position, whereby I consider it a better crafter of worlds than myself. Basically, in my mind, I'm the kid drawing stick figures and it's Van Gogh.

And the artist idea isn't just a metaphor - I am quite literally fairly meh at drawing or any other artistic venture and I struggle to visualise in detail. Things I imagine have a fuzziness to them. Meanwhile, my othered self produces this world with its dizzying degree of detail, blades of grass, swirling dust motes, light and shadow, etc.

And since, visually and artistically, I can't compete with that othered part of me - I guess I extrapolated from that that I can't compete with it in any area. If it was better than me at the visual stuff, wouldn't it be better than I at crafting every aspect of my experience? If I interfered - would it be like splattering a big red paint mark across The Starry Night?

Well, looking at it logically, I can see the potential flaws in my assumptions. Being good at one thing is never a guarantee that you'll be good at another. And whatever unconscious awe I've been regarding my subconscious with, there clearly are situations where I have decided that it's wrong - traffic being one of them. God I hate traffic.

So I suppose what I've taken from this is that as an awareness I'm currently saddled with an inferiority complex which hamstrings me when I try to change my experience. My success is usually accompanied by extreme irritation - something has to look really, really pointless and stupid in order for me to be able to magically alter it. And I have to feel like I'm not changing things too much, lest I'm making a big, clumsy mess. So perhaps achieving greater success, with less requisite-angst, lies in more critically querying the pedestal I've placed my othered self on.

Why do lucid dreams at the height of their development seem so amazing? One big reason for this is that lucid dreams give many experienced lucid dreamers a preview of what it's like to be God. As you learn to bend reality in your dream, and as you get better and better at not only playing a role in your dream, but also at being an indisputable and tyrannical conductor of the entire dream, you approach Godliness.

The power of lucidity is not a democracy. It is absolute tyranny. This is why when I want to have sex in my dreams, when I am lucid, there is no discussion or debate about it. The first girl I see is hot, and that's no accident, and I take her hand, and she wants to fuck me as much as I want to fuck her. Why does this happen? Why is it so flawless? That's because I understand the meaning of true tyranny and in my dreams I allow myself to feel this in a way I don't yet allow myself to feel during waking.

True tyranny is divine. When it is exercised, the subjects don't feel oppressed. They feel like they want to do whatever it is you want to do. It feels voluntary through and through. There is no resistance. It is instant and flawless. There is no adjustment or fine-tuning. Things turn out to be magically always right the first time, seemingly beyond any reason.

The way to learn to feel this way in your dreams is to disregard all facts. Whatever dream situation appears to your mind, a typical, conventional attitude would be to take the apparent situation as fact, as evidence of something. This is why most dreamers who are accustomed to relating to their senses as avenues of evidence, they also fall prey to their dream environments and become victims of the circumstances in their own dreams. Then the dream monster as presented by the 5 senses is evidence of a real monster that really wants to get you. And then if people resist your advances or ideas, that's taken as evidence that your point of view is not absolute, and that you must contend with something besides yourself "out there." To overcome this victim trap, upon lucidity you have to instantly disregard everything you witness. You have to realize that nothing in the sphere of the 5 senses is a fact. You're witnessing only a one possibility out of an infinity of possibilities. To a lucid dreamer all configurations of sense bases are no longer factual or evidential. They're just accidental and they're subject to volition and to imagination. What is becomes subjugated by what could be.

This frame of mind is radically anti-conservative. A conservative frame of mind is to always preserve appearances and to always resist "what could be." That's why conservatives always look to history for inspiration. To a conservative mindset "what is" is also "how it always was" and also "how it always will be."

To take the lucid advantage to a waking consciousness you have to do something very much similar during waking. Stop relying on facts. Stop relying on evidence. Claim your divinity. Don't ask for permission. Just do it. Don't be reasonable about it. There is no one and nothing you would need to reason with. Reasoning is still a subtle act of asking for a permission. When we reason, we want the faculty of reason to agree before we engage in something. From the POV of a deity, the faculty of reason will become your slave. Your reason will be there to explain in ways that others will find impossible to argue with, why what you want to do is reasonable, when in truth you just do what you want to do, and that's that. Reason then becomes like a corrupt lawyer who is tirelessly working to keep your wishes safe and you entertained, and if you are resolute, then even an army of 100 million philosophers working together will not prove anything wrong.

When you try maintain an attitude and a frame of mind of a deity during waking, it may so happen that it will be overwhelming. That's because we have so much stuff in our past, and the past is not just "past." The past is present in our mind right now, and it is held there deliberately by intent, because it was valuable at least at one time, and if nothing else, it gives us a sense of continuity of identity, continuity to which we tend to cling. Who wants to become a being with no history? Not even personal history?

So when you move powerfully against convention, what happens is you might feel pain in your body. That's because your body is a shadow of your past. The correct attitude at this point is to regard such pain as helpful. This pain is not a "message from the universe to stop." It's the same thing as when you feel pain from lifting weights. When you lift weights, and you're not accustomed to it, your body will ache. That isn't a message that you're doing something wrong. It's only a signal that what you're doing is not something you are accustomed to.

Further, regard any possibility of injury on this path as wonderful. Convention can't grab hold of your mind or intent. They can strike out at your body and nothing else. Then tell your body, "If you, my arm, allow yourself to be taken by the others, you were never my ally to begin with. You are a traitor. You may go. You are a weakness. Losing you is nothing more than losing weakness. Losing you is nothing more than losing a disease. If others should take you, go, go, go." Accept only those parts of your being which are committed to your cause. And be ready and willing to let go of any parts that are not. Jesus was talking about this when he said something like "if your eye sins, rip it out." Basically, your ordinary bodies are traitorous to your deepest wishes if your wishes involve transcendence and divinity of any kind. Do not be fooled. Do not grieve.

There is nothing in the entire universe that keeps it going outside of your own constant and unremitting commitment. Once your commitment to the universe authentically and genuinely comes to an end, the universe will dissolve like an illusion that it always and ever was.

When a relatively normal person returns to a world of solidity after experiencing something amazing, what happens? Why the return? Is there something that forces such a return? Think about it. If you resolve to never return, what could possibly force you? It would have to be your own idea and your own commitment to the externality of the universe. It would have to be your own love and desire for the universe. It would have to be you.

People don't realize this, but they energize and power every little piece of garbage in their lives by their own love and life juice. Reawakening the memory that you really are God is all about restoring that love and life juice back to yourself. It's a universal reset. It's you, as God, saying, "Enough is enough, I will not play this game anymore. If the Universe wants to do it, it will need to find its own strength and energy to do it. I am out." And what do you know? Once you're out, you'll discover universe was empty and hollow and it has nothing in it that was powering it from the outside of your being.

When you maintain a deific attitude for even one month, you'll realize how much bullshit you used to believe that isn't really true. Conventional thinking will begin to stick out so vividly and obviously. Things you would take for granted will gradually begin to sound absurd. It's a period of great discovery.

There is much more that can be said about this. I could write a book about being a diety. But this is just a reddit post.

There are two polar complementary dimensions of experience: tolerance and expressiveness. When one's tolerance has been perfected there is no urgency to modify any experience to be something else, no matter what that experience may feel like. When one's expressiveness has been perfected, one regains the knowledge and the courage necessary to exercise intent along its full range of ultimate possibility, thus being able to manifest any experience that could be experienced even in principle. This second perfection we know as magick.

If you cultivate tolerance without expressiveness you'll be like a patient victim, able to endure but passive and lacking creativity. And if you cultivate expressiveness without tolerance, you'll be like a perpetually frightened maestro for whom magick is not a leisurely pleasure but a dire necessity at every turn in life.

May you all be twice perfect.

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.

I've been thinking a lot about death lately. I thought about death in the context of convention, but that didn't seem too relevant to this subreddit. I also thought about death in the context of freedom, which seemed totally relevant. Here's my mostly unedited thoughts. I welcome other thoughts and criticisms of my ideas.

What is it that dies? The body dies. What is it for a body to die? It is a change in state, from motion to non-motion, from sentient utility to uselessness. The conditions that are necessary to keep the body alive and able to move are no longer fulfilled.

Death is something that happens to bodies. A mind is not a body. Minds cognize bodies. Minds experience bodies. A body dying is an experience and cognition that a mind can have.

People worry that their mind is tied to their body, and that when their body dies, their mind will also die. Specifically, this is rooted today in a belief in the brain being the origin of the mind.

This belief arises largely from the fact that, in the conventional world, affecting a brain is related to changes in that person's mind. So, for example, brain damage is associated with changes in mental state. Similarly, chemical drugs that are believed to interact with the brain are associated with changes in mental state.

There are two reasons why this does not mean that the brain is the origin of the mind.

First, the eye is related to changes in a person's mind. If one or both eyes experience any sort of change of state or damage, then there will be an associated change in that person's mental state. Their visual experience and beliefs will be different. Similarly for the ears, the skin, the tongue, the nose. None of these are the origin of a person's mind although altering them can affect a person's way of cognizing.

They are all sense organs. They are objects which are believed to affect cognition, and thus they do. The brain is the same. It is another organ which is believed to affect cognition, and thus it does.

Secondly, in a dream it is possible for there to be a relationship between a dream brain and dream cognition. A person can have dreams where certain dream drugs affect their perception, for example. Thus, the ability of drugs to affect one's state of mind in the dream is rooted in one's state of mind. So it can also be during waking.

So, when the brain is thoroughly damaged and the body dies, what happens?

Despite the demonstrations above, one response might be, 'when the body dies, the mind stops manifesting and experiencing altogether. The mind will stop existing.' However, upon further consideration, this idea is nonsensical. The mind doesn't start existing or stop existing. The mind is the infinite capacity of possible experiences and manifestations. Experiencing nothing is one possible state of mind. Even when the perspective of nothingness is what is experienced and made manifest, there is always the potential for experiencing another perspective (a perspective of something).

So, a person might then say that when the brain and body die, a person's mind forever experiences nothingness. Since the mind believes that a brain and body in a physical world are necessary for perception of things, the absence of a functioning brain and body would result in the manifestation of nothingness.

There is a problem with this way of thinking.

An individual dreams every night and the dreamer can know that in this particular dreamworld their dream cognition depends upon the survival of their dream brain and body. And the dreamer will either create a new dream or wake up if their dream brain or body are destroyed. Similarly, when living and waking we believe that our living cognition depends upon the survival of our living brain and body. Thus, we cannot conclude that simply believing, in the context of the living, waking world, that our brains and bodies are necessary for living, waking cognition means that this living, waking brain and body are necessary for non-living, non-waking cognition. After all, there's no way to discern the difference between a dreaming experience and a waking experience using evidence – the only difference is in what you believe about experience. Similarly between living experience and dead experience.

So, we have no reason to conclude that our minds will manifest nothingness after our bodies die. At this point, we are left wondering what we might experience when we die. It is unclear. This is where we can start looking at intent and commitments.

What a mind believes and experiences is intentional. A mind's reality is a mind's will manifesting. So, having a given set of interests is intentional. Having a certain sort of personality is intentional. Having a specific job and living in a specific country is intentional. Having a human body and living among humans according to their norms is intentional. Living on Earth in this universe is intentional. The laws of physics in the universe are intentional.

Most humans are laser-focused on their ordinary human lives with their ordinary human concerns. They believe their experience definitely takes the form of waking and dreaming cycles (with specifics varying from individual to individual), and don't think about the broader nature of these things at all and are instead concerned with controlling events taking place within these states of mind.

As such, they habitually think about controlling the details and never look at the bigger picture. They don't pay attention to and have forgotten about the bigger picture. It may even feel totally outside of their control (even though it isn't). These people are deeply committed to the general intentional structures that make up a world like this that allow them to interact with the specific details of this world they like. Because of this, most people's dreams reflect these intentions as well.

We might consider an individual who is so focused on being successful in their career that they never think about the optionality of their career. Their career is voluntary and intentional and they are always free to disengage. Their identity is so caught up in living a lifestyle to impress their peers, sucking up to the boss, learning the things necessary to succeed in their industry, that they basically never think outside of this commitment.

Let's imagine that this person then loses their job. This person is now confronted with their freedom more directly. Here they are, unemployed, free to find a new career or remain unemployed and learn to live a whole new lifestyle. Assuming that this person maintains the same motivations that got them and kept them in the old career, and assuming that this person never considered or prepared for unemployment or other careers, it is probable that being unemployed is terrifying and embarrassing. This person will want to get a new career as soon as possible to continue pursuing their visions of wealth and success.

Depending on this person's skill and know-how regarding finding a new place of employment, they may end up in a terrible line of work like fast food (if they don't know what they're doing and are really scared and their last career was just luck), something moderate like low-level office work (if they at least remember or can discover the basics of job-finding and be patient), or maybe with skill and some nepotism they will end up in the same industry with another good career.

If we imagine that the living world is intentional in the same way as a career, only more abstract, then we can draw certain parallels. The more attached and focused a person is to the specifics of the living, material world of convention (with little thought of its unreality and intentionality and consideration of options), the more we can expect that person to in some way desperately seek to re-enter a living, waking, material world of convention – that is, to re-manifest a life in a world.

When a person dies, their entire perception is ripped out of its ordinary and conventional material context. Suddenly, such a person finds themselves confronted with the world of the dead – not a place where ghosts reside necessarily, but a world where manifestation and experience are wholly free of ordinary constraints. This is very similar to an individual losing their job and becoming unemployed. Yes, you can live this way and don't need to return to your old lifestyle, but it is probable that the individual had a reason to live within the constraints of the old lifestyle – something they were seeking, and thus a motivation to return to the life of working or a motivation to return to the life of living, waking, material convention.

It would make sense to conclude that individuals who enter this state (death) thoughtlessly and accidentally after being wholly focused on the living, waking world will be so panicked and confused that they may not make the best decision or use the most skill in selecting/manifesting a new life. Similarly, individuals who are more aware and have prepared and practiced are more likely to be able to deal with the situation and make a skillful and controlled decision. This is not a discrete situation, but is rather a continuum.

I find it hard to say much more specifically about the intermediate state between lives, the state of being dead.

What do you think?

Imagine you go to bed tonight, and each night after, and enter into the same, continuous, cohesive, coherent dream world. It remains as apparently constant, unchanging, and "objective" as our own waking world does. In other words, you're living in two consistent worlds which you alternate experiencing (as opposed to one consistent world + lots of less consistent, less predictable worlds).

In this dream world, you're aware that you're dreaming, and that when you go to bed in the dream world, you'll wake up in the "real" world. The other folks in the dream world, though, are exactly like the folks in the waking world. In fact, the so-called-"dream world" and the so-called-"waking world" are just about identical. You experience both as a fleshy being living on a planet, eating, sleeping, communicating, laboring, playing, etc. You're Bob the Human on Earth half the time and you're Flob the Fluman on Flearth the other half of the time. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that you didn't start dreaming about Flearth until now, you'd probably not know which one was "real"!

Question: What kind of lifestyle do you adopt on Flearth, where you know you're dreaming? Do you watch Flearth TV shows, go to a mundane Flearth job, pay your Flearth bills, fill up Flearth trash cans, buy Flearth products in Flearth Flal-Marts, eat Flearth animals, etc.? Do you spend your time on Flearth doing about 90% the same thing as everyone else on Flearth? Or, maybe, do you try to solve world hunger, end wars, spread peace, etc.? Or, maybe, do you become a genocidal warlord? Prime minister? Sports star? Ascetic? Billionaire?

I pose this hypothetical because I want to know to what degree you put your money where your mouth is. If you really do experience the Earth, with all its capitalism, warfare, environmental destruction, overpopulation, etc. as a dream world, how does that influence the way you interact with it? Are you more, or less, compelled to help other people/civilization and society as a whole? What does that do to your ambitions and aspirations? Because there certainly does seem to be -something of a contradiction (and that may be a strong word) in living a totally mundane and ordinary life, nearly entirely identical to that of any conventional physicalist, if you're awake to the fact that it's all a dream. (There are some metaphysical arguments against this which are perfectly valid, but I've got that gut feeling and I'm standing by it.)

We talk a lot about contemplating, metaphysics, and dealing with very specific situations on this sub, but very little about the things that we likely spend the vast majority of our human lives doing. How does subjective idealism influence your life choices? What obligations do you feel toward being a human, other humans, human society, etc.? Do you have animosity toward mainstream culture or do you enjoy it? Are you all logging out of Reddit and turning on reality TV, or are you sitting in fallout shelters in the dark all night?

It's not unlike that famous story from David Foster Wallace where the two fish are swimming along and an older, wiser swims by and says, "Hey boys, how's the water?" And after a while, one of the two younger fish turns to the other and asks, "What the hell' 'water'?" As oneirosophers, in theory, you're aware that THIS IS WATER. So, I'm literally asking you, "How is it?"

At the end of the day, this is your playground, right? I mean, this is basically here for you to play in (with the implications of play/fun not being limited to sheer pleasure). It's game-like in nature. Are you treating it that way? If not, why not? Are you having fun? Does this life feel playful? Is there any gap between what you "feel like you should be doing" and what you are doing, day in and day out? Are you happy with this current life experience?

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

I've been thinking a lot about Buddhism lately, because my early practice in this life was heavily characterized by Buddhism, and Buddhism is what's responsible for my interest in unraveling reality which eventually led me toward subjective idealism a few years ago. I'd be surprised if I was the only one on this sub for whom that was the case.

When I first encountered Buddhism, I encountered it with a very different understanding than I have now and many of the ideas were (as I think they generally are) very easily misunderstood. Buddhism deals with some very basic and fundamental concepts which are just bound to be understood incorrectly by someone operating in the wrong paradigm. I wrongly interpreted things that I encountered in Buddhism, I believe, because my understanding was poor and one with poor understanding misinterprets everything axiomatically.

So I've been interested in re-approaching some early Buddhism, some Pali canon fundamental type stuff, to see if investigating it at this point in my practice I'll find it much more useful than I did when I last contemplated it.

I spent some time with the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path today and wrote an interpretation of it "in my own words", for myself, as a practice of better understanding (I find things more accessible when I convey them than when they're conveyed to me). It is not explicitly canon and not directly in-line with Buddhism in a few places (the two most glaring ones I've pointed out with footnotes) but it, I think, carries on the spirit of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path into subjective idealist terms.

You are currently, consciously aware that you are undergoing certain experiences. That these experiences, also called phenomena, are presently occurring within your consciousness is one of the only things you can be certain of.

Amongst the phenomena that are arising within your conscious experience, one of them is called "suffering". Even when it is not apparent, as it may not be in this moment, suffering exists latently at a very high level, as an easily realized potential, just below the surface, which permeates your current type of experience. The potentiality of suffering arising is generally high at any given moment.

This phenomena of suffering does not arise independently within your conscious experience, of course. Many other phenomena arise, and suffering is but one among them. However, like each of them, suffering arises within the context of, in relation to, and causally interconnected with other phenomena. Suffering is but one segment of a vast web of experiences that you're currently undergoing.

The good news is that the causality which provokes suffering to arise within your conscious experience can be circumvented and the conscious experience can be transformed into one in which there is no suffering. The method to cultivating such a suffering-free experience is done by utilizing your will to change your conscious experience, your capacity to interact with reality intentionally.

You must be wise. You must have the right view, perspective, or understanding about the nature of reality. One cannot begin the path with a conventional understanding of the nature of reality. One can only begin the path to the release of suffering if one has first understood that reality is not as it appears, and does not exist as a physical and objective realm.^1 One must recognize the path before one can walk the path.

You must also have the right intention and the right aspiration to achieve this goal. According to one's right view or perspective, one must aspire to proceed in such a way that is progressive. One must walk toward the end of the path if one wishes to arrive at the end of the path. You must aspire in the direction of removing limitations, sufferings, and ignorance from yourself and from other beings. This intention must be a persistent feature of one's experience and reflecting often on the intention is important if one is to avoid straying from the path toward the release of suffering.

Proceeding with right intention, you must act in accordance with it. A path cannot be traveled if one will not walk it. One must act in such a way that moves along the path to the release of suffering. How does one do this? When you utilize your capacity to speak, to convey thought, do so rightly. When you utilize your capacity to act with the body, act only rightly. When you occupy the body in daily affairs, occupy it toward right ends. What is it to speak, to act, or to occupy the body only rightly? It is when speech, action, or occupation are done when the behavior is internally ethical and done with awareness. One who acts in such a way acts virtuously. One who acts in ways which are not internally ethical and not done with awareness does not act rightly. To act in such a way is synonymous with walking the path toward the release of suffering.^2

You must also have the right resolve, the right determination, the right will to pursue this goal. The process toward the release of suffering is not easy, simple, or brief for most people. Rather than a gradient of increased happiness, the path is dynamic and subjective, and the obstacles one faces can be extraordinarily difficult. Only with a great amount of effort can such a task be accomplished. One must be constantly vigilant about discarding wrong understanding, acquiring right understanding, and behaving ethically. Only one who proceeds by making such an effort can be rid of suffering.

You must also be sharp. You must be keenly aware of your current experience, without falling into assumptions, misunderstandings, or convention. You must be sincerely present to the actual conscious experience, the phenomena which presently exist. You must not slip into inattentiveness or forgetfulness lest you stray from acting in accordance with the path toward the release from suffering. Only one who remains ardently on the path, with a correct understanding of the nature of reality, with a correct intention toward that reality, who acts ethically, and who has the right determination can expect to progress on the path toward the cessation of suffering.

If one has done all of these things, one need only to concentrate rightly. One who, having done these things, concentrates rightly, achieving Samadhi and one-pointedness, has no barriers between themselves and ultimate understanding. They are truly virtuous and may become free of the experience of suffering.

^1. This is an intensification of traditional Buddhist rhetoric. Buddhism, being more welcoming than not to all levels of spiritual development, doesn't set the bar so high here and doesn't require one to drop physicalism to adopt Buddhist practices. For our purposes on this sub, I think physicalism being thrown out is fundamental to right view.

^2. 'Ethical conduct' has different implications depending on the way one interprets it. Being kind, talking kindly, and working at a job where you don't manufacture guns or slaughter livestock is the conventional interpretation, emphasis on "conventional". For this sub, consider the ethical obligation to the furthering of one's practice to be the ultimate obligation, with conventional morality and ethics being of secondary (but non-zero) importance. Being friendly rather than unfriendly is of benefit to you and other beings and removes the seeds of would-be hindrances and latent mental stress -- but of more glaring importance is that you remain devoted to your highest ideals, which have little to do with the dreaming world.

Thanks to mindseal for some well-advised clarifications on differences between my interpretation and Buddhist canon.