This is really a simple one I’ve been playing with lately. Mostly it’s obvious if you’ve been around here long. But all reality and all potential realities are imaginary aspects of your mind. Imaginary here means something like intentional and inside your mind.

Sometimes we talk about experiences feeling non-volitional - the sensory manifestations we associate with ‘the external world’. That feeling of not being under control is fundamentally confused though. It’s as if one were playing a game of Solitaire. In the game, there are certain rules that constrain your behavior to very specific actions. When you get to the bottom of the deck you shuffle the cards left and go through them again. OR. If a queen is moved onto a king in another stack, you must move all the cards that were on top of the queen with it. These are what we might call environmental rules. They are actions you must take under certain conditions in order to properly play the game of Solitaire. In contrast to these are what we might call bodily rules - the parts of the game over which you exercise free choice within the limits of the game to try to achieve your goal. You may either move an appropriate card from the bottom stacks or deck card to the suits stacks or you may flip another deck card or you may move cards on one bottom stack to another bottom stack. The analogy works best if you imagine that you’ve deeply habituated the rules of the game such that you pay very little attention to what you are doing with the ‘environmental rules’ and focus very much on the ‘bodily rules’ and the choices of action you limit yourself to in the game.

Using the same language we use about our sensory world we could say that the habituated environmental rules seem out of our power. But that’s not quite right because they are quite within your power. “But,” you might say, “I really want to get that buried card there into the proper suit stack so I might win the game. If I really had the power I could just move it there, but I can’t.” Of course you can though. You don’t really HAVE to follow the rules of Solitaire when you interact with the cards, you know? You CAN just put it there if you want to cheat. Or you could scrap the whole thing and play a totally different game. And deep down of course you know this.

The thing is you’re not sure. You kinda like this Solitaire game at some level even if you’re frustrated with it too. You’d have to be quite sure you didn’t want to try to salvage this game from this vantage point before cheating, and you’d have to be quite sure you were sick of Solitaire overall before switching to another game.

So what is it about humaning, even with all of its obstacles and frustrations, that you like so much? What keeps you doing it instead of anything else lifetime after lifetime? What have you considered doing instead? Are you just looking for a quick hack to have a better vantage point while humaning or do you want to play a different game altogether? Do you know?

I know these are questions I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.