Not particularly. But at the same time, I am all too aware of the hidden costs of friendship. I’ve had many hundreds of friends at one time and I’ve also had exceptionally deep and soulful one on one friendships as well. One could say I know all there is to know about friendship. I sure as hell appreciate it, but at the same time, friendship is like a disease. Once you have a friend you cannot be alone without offending your friend after some time. Furthermore, if you change too much from the person your friend has been accustomed to knowing, obviously they’re liable to get upset. So basically friendship is a trade off. It gives something and takes something away.
I still enjoy friendships but I also want the ability to be alone and even better, to just disappear from the world for a time into perhaps another dimension altogether.
I like people (at least some kinds of people/intelligent beings - not necessarily these humans on this planet as a whole for many lifetimes) and I don’t think I’m ready to totally sacrifice them to power. At least not right now.
I am of two minds about people. I can’t say that I straightforwardly just like them. I’ve known all kinds of people in my life. The very worst moments in my life have been facilitated by other people, but not the best. So the bias is toward the bad. Another person cannot get inside my mind to really help me on my terms, but another person can sure enough spoil my peace and plans. In other words, it’s easier for another person to hurt something in my life than to help something in my life. If all the people just vanished and left me to deal with nature, without intermediaries, I would do fine. I’d rather deal with an angry bear than an angry person. For the most part I see people as simply blocking my access to something that is rightfully mine anyway, and the pretext is that they’re somehow helping me is not really working in my mind. Everything other people do for me, I can do better on my own, save maybe just one: the company itself. Like if the only time I saw other people is if I went to a tea house, and at no other time, and I didn’t need to interact with people in order to live, maybe I would be unambiguously ecstatic about the presence of people in my life.
Within the human world, I guess the closest thing we see to that is hermits and loner travelers. One stays alone all the time. Another is always in new places with new people, and so can’t sustain long-term relationships, which is its own kind of all-the-time aloneness.
That’s what you see as an onlooker. That’s not the right picture. You have to be on the inside of this to see how it is. What you’re describing is another body as you observe it from your perspective. That isn’t how it would be for you if you were a hermit. Your own life isn’t just a body.
You just described the body of a hermit instead of their mentality.
What do you think about this stuff?
I want to be able to live on my own. When I don’t depend on anyone for basic functioning, then I can meet people without desperation, without the sense that I need them to live. Not only will I then have a lighter attitude, I also will not be abused either, because all the leverage would be gone.
I don’t mind friendships, but what I do mind is leverage. I don’t want anyone to have leverage over me. I don’t want people to be able to hold my access to food hostage and then impose conditions on me if I want said food, and so on. I don’t want to pay anyone just for a right to dwell (like with rent, or like when you have to buy out some previous owner for an insane cost, especially if you take a loan out, then you pay 5 prices of the house in the long run… I don’t want this at all).
This is why the magick I practice invariably will become rude and at some point I will just destroy any who oppose me. I don’t want to live as a slave and without power who will negotiate with me seriously? I have to be ready to die and to kill before people will give me good terms in negotiations, right? Or better yet, I should not allow my mind to produce other people of certain types and just regulate othering much more than I do now.
Just yesterday I had a dream where I was being choked by someone. Since it’s my dream, why should I dream like this? But that’s what this life is like. It’s a horrible dream. When dream characters choke me (or more accurately, my dream body), I don’t negotiate. I instead use dream power and mold the dream or wake up. In that case I just decided to wake up since I couldn’t be arsed to mold anything at the time. I don’t keep dreaming on dream’s given terms if those terms are bad enough.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-12 16:22:21 (dmw46du)
In other words, it’s easier for another person to hurt something in my life than to help something in my life.
Hmm, maybe so. I’m not sure I have quite as dark a view of other people as you do. I see people like the rest of the world. Something that can be pleasant and useful or painful and obstructive.
You just described the body of a hermit instead of their mentality.
I agree. Aloneness =/= loneliness. But aloneness is a mentality. It’s a mentality centered around doing your own thing and not being interested in sharing with or enjoying other sentient beings. Unless we’re going to bring up an unusual example of a hermit who is always talking to spirits, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
When I don’t depend on anyone for basic functioning, then I can meet people without desperation, without the sense that I need them to live.
I think you should consider homesteading. I know that you don’t like that you have to pay for the land and taxes, but there’s decent land in the midwest that’s pretty cheap and you could live off it and just isolate yourself. You could even get satellite internet if you have a little chunk of change saved up. I’ve visited several different places where people were doing this. Though honestly, most of them kept up a job on the side to pay for luxuries like store bought food and internet and propane and gasoline and cars because they didn’t want to really rough it 100%. They just wanted to be more independent.
Regarding friendship in general. I view other people like I view the world. They can be great or terrible. The more I’ve othered the world and given power to it, the more I can enjoy letting things happen on their own, but the more risk I take to have something I don’t like happen. So, it’s like you’ve said before, you have to cultivate expressiveness and tolerance.
Expressiveness is increasing your power over the things you really want to make sure you have in life and then ensuring you have them - stripping that power from the world (from others in this case). Tolerance is becoming more comfortable with not always having the things you don’t always have - especially the things you maintain as othered and outside your control (others’ free will and potential for being devious in this case). Taking more power over your relationships with people, and becoming more comfortable with the varieties of interactions and conditions those people might have with you.
But, IDK that’s just what I’m thinking right now.
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-09-14 13:18:37 (dmza095)
But that mentality only looks like a separate body from a 2nd person perspective. A person who is enjoying solitude is not just a single body to their own self. They are a world to themselves, not just something stripped of something else. Instead they are complete with all that was previously delegated, outsourced, lent out, recalled and returned back to the source. It’s not an impoverished or simplistic state.
Someone who hasn’t matured in solitude thinks of solitude as “I am here and everything else is over there, somewhere else.” But this kind of solitude is only a beginner’s solitude.
It’s a mentality centered around doing your own thing and not being interested in sharing with or enjoying other sentient beings.
It’s an attitude where all sentient beings are simply your own being, and then whether you display many bodies to your mind’s eye or not makes no real difference. It’s only an aesthetic difference.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-14 13:52:36 (dmzbcih)
I don’t agree. I think that we’re talking about separate things here. I think what I call the aloneness mentality is different than Unilateral Subjective Idealism, or from Subjective Idealism of any kind (such as S.I. Physicalism).
So, aloneness as a mentality, imo, is the disposition to strongly want to be entertained by yourself and not be interested in sharing with or being entertained by other apparent sentient beings. If others aren’t interesting to one as sources of pleasure and entertainment and companionship, then they are just obstacles, or at best neutral objects in the world that could be replaced by something more desirable, and one would want to just be alone all the time. One can have this aloneness mentality as a physicalist or a S.I. physicalist or as a S.I. Unilateralist. And of course, it is a continuum. One can be completely uninterested in others (or maybe even more extreme have a very strong distaste for others) and on the other side of the continuum one can be obsessively interested in others and completely bored and miserable without them around even for a few seconds.
On the other hand, understanding that the whole world and all sentient beings are ultimately within one’s own mind is just subjective idealism. A subjective idealist can be anywhere on that continuum of wanting apparent others in their mindstream or out of their mindstream. And they can also be anywhere on the continuum from heavy othering (e.g. S.I. Physicalism or S.I. Theism or S.I. Animism) to extremely limited othering and heavy self-ing (Unilateralism), which would determine how quickly they could magically change the state of the apparent others in their mindstream. That’s how I see it.
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-09-15 07:15:37 (dn0hxsx)
Let’s say I am lucidly dreaming and I meet a bunch of dream characters. What can these characters do for me? They could get together and build me a house. But I can make a better house and faster with just an intent. I could make a house that’s larger than a galaxy. They could dig a ditch, but I could split the Earth with just an intent. They could form a circle around my dream body and guard me from dream monsters. But I am a better guard of myself by simply staying lucid.
So is there anything they can do that I cannot do better myself? Well, yes. Being themselves! They’re better at being what they are.
So for example, if I wanted to create a sense of bodily company, I’d have to create appearances just like those other dream characters. In other words, I could not do something an order of magnitude better. Perhaps I could manifest funnier and more moral people-appearances, but fundamentally they’d be very similar kind of appearances that would function in roughly the same way. So even if I could improve that function, it wouldn’t be by a huge degree. It would be by a small but perhaps noticeable margin. And what about music? I could make heavenly music manifest, but it won’t be drastically better than anything Mozart or Bach wrote and so on.
So basically the aloneness of a fully developed subjective idealism is that while I can enjoy the appearance of people for reasons such as music and conversations, I don’t need them to feed me, build me houses and clothing, and guard me. Naturally they also cannot lay down any sort of law over me either. Like dream characters when I am lucid are completely helpless and naked in front of my gaze. In other words, I don’t need them in a functional sense and nor can they threaten anything.
And above all, I don’t need them to help me think. On the contrary, if I really want to think deeply, I have to make sure my own is the only voice that rings in my mind. I have to think with one voice and not 20 divergent ones that are all pulling in different directions.
So the appearance of people has some value regardless, but I would no longer live through the other people.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-15 10:13:13 (dn0qntz)
So, I agree with some of the suggestions in your last two comments, but not all of them.
I agree with the general idea that the more specific and demanding your desires are, and thus the more time and focus you need to spend on managing the apparent world to meet those desires, the less time and focus you have for introspection and contemplation, which reduces your wisdom (and thus your ability to serve yourself and your happiness) by making you less self-aware and pushing you to see things from a more narrow perspective. I think that being over-involved with people is one instance of this more general over-involvement with the world that can lead to and be a result of ignorance, but I don’t think people represent some problem to introspection over and above this. Do you?
I don’t think that just seeking solitude in the normal use of the expression is the always the same as the above. There’s seeking meditative, contemplative, introspective, imaginative, alone time to cultivate or maintain wisdom. And then there’s wanting to be alone because you think masturbating is more fun than sex or solitaire is more fun than poker. Just because you are alone doesn’t mean you are going to become any wiser or better at thinking for yourself if you’re not using that solitude in productive ways. So there’s solitude for fun, and there’s solitude for wisdom (and in some individuals these may have some overlap).
I do think that the logical conclusion of rational, critical, thought (thinking for yourself) is subjective idealism because it’s the ultimate result of asking the question ‘what beliefs benefit me the most, are “true”?’ as I see it. But a subjective idealist has the option to not “think for themselves” in the sense that they can maintain the appearance of a world in their subconscious and “seek out information” about that world from personal experience and other people.
I think that other people might have functional value as well as “intrinsic” value if you are manifesting a subconsciously maintained stable apparent world. Those people are parts of that world both to enjoy and use. In some cases those are separate and in some cases they are the same. If one likes the game that is this world then those ‘functional’ values start to look a lot more ‘intrinsic’ to such a person. I mean even their ability to produce music is pretty ‘functional’ from a certain POV. You could just manifest new music directly without potentially having to negotiate with unpleasant personalities in order to get their art from them. Or people’s independent use of their bodies is even an obstruction. What if they don’t consent to you doing to their body what you’d like to do to it? Then you have to negotiate with this obstructing other to get your way, and they may not consent to any negotiation to get what you want. So then the ideal scenario is to make them all very obviously just mind-slaves. Basically just extensions of your own body. You see, to me, there may just be something intrinsically desirable about maintaining a world and others with a sense of free-ness and other-ness. Sure, maybe things get a bit out of hand or I want to change them a bit, but I don’t think I’m 100% on board with total unilateral absorption of the world and other sentient beings into the conscious aspect of my mind right now. I guess the real question is if you find anything desirable about maintaining a stable apparent world with a stable environment and stable sentient beings, or if there is something more desirable about reabsorbing it all and maintaining 24/7 god-power (as opposed to temporarily becoming god and making some modifications and then returning to a worldly life). I don’t think there’s a right answer here or anything. It’s about personal taste. To me, right now I’m really unsure. I want more magical power, but I’m worried about the costs of too much power. Namely, I don’t know how much I want to destabilize my world and internalize it. Maybe there’s something about having a large stable environment populated with beings that’s good. Maybe I don’t want my ego/conscious to expand out and make my body encompass much more of or potentially all of the world? IDK what I want right now. I’m working on figuring that out. What do you want?
As an aside, could you discuss what you mean by no longer needing others to think and no longer living ‘through’ others? What does it mean to think for yourself, to you?
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-09-16 13:49:17 (dn2mcwy)
I don’t think that just seeking solitude in the normal use of the expression is the always the same as the above. There’s seeking meditative, contemplative, introspective, imaginative, alone time to cultivate or maintain wisdom. And then there’s wanting to be alone because you think masturbating is more fun than sex or solitaire is more fun than poker. Just because you are alone doesn’t mean you are going to become any wiser or better at thinking for yourself if you’re not using that solitude in productive ways. So there’s solitude for fun, and there’s solitude for wisdom (and in some individuals these may have some overlap).
But where does your idea of “wisdom” come from? Is it your own, or is it a social construct? Would you have the same idea of wisdom if you were left to think about it without the social pressure and social charm (using a magickal sense of the word “charm” here, as in, when you’re “charmed” you’re under someone’s spell, a thrall, in this case society’s thrall).
You should know what your own idea of wisdom would look like.
Secondly, wisdom and fun are not two different ends of the same spectrum. I frankly worry about people for whom wisdom and fun do not overlap. If anything, I think there is a strong positive correlation between fun and wisdom. I don’t think fun is the same thing as wisdom, but certainly fun is not an antagonistic quality to wisdom.
By “fun” I refer to any experience of enjoyment, joy, bliss, release, but also ongoing well-being, a sense of rightness and competency within your own life, etc.
You could just manifest new music directly without potentially having to negotiate with unpleasant personalities in order to get their art from them.
I’ve done that. My point was something else. I was saying even if I am left to generate my own music, I can make myself hear better music than Bach and Mozart but it’s not better by all that much. In other words, in some sense the best music of this plane is some ways already into the heavenly realm. Whereas other things are not so good. For example, I could teleport, or I could make a house that’s huge inside and tiny on the outside and so on. People cannot make such things for me. I have to be the one to allow such things in my mind. Indeed, whatever people “make” is whatever I have allowed that they could make. In other words, before other people can make something I have to make way for them in my own mind. So if I made way for people to be able to contort space, they’d be able to do so eventually. I have to be the one to open that door. If you notice how physics has evolved to a more perspectival and subjective science? It’s not an accident from my own POV. Of course physics cannot truly catch up to me, but it still follows me like a shadow. When I conceive of a new way of seeing things, physics follows along eventually.
So long time ago I have conceived that space can be pushed against. That’s going to happen too. There are already some signs of this happening, but I have conceived of this looong before any articles like that appeared. Why have I conceived that? Because I think that’s how we’ll travel to other stars. I realized that spewing gas is not the way to go. Instead energy must be extracted from space itself and be used to push against the space. Then you don’t have fuel constraints and you can accelerate endlessly. There will probably also be a need to phase into a different space, because you don’t want to be colliding with the various debris in conventional space at high speeds. But physicists think they’re just discovering whatever is “there” whereas I think I want this and that experience, now let’s make it happen, and then physics come in line with whatever I actually want to be doing. On top of that if I want to make myself an exception from physics, I can do that as well. The sky’s the limit.
As an aside, could you discuss what you mean by no longer needing others to think and no longer living ‘through’ others? What does it mean to think for yourself, to you?
Do you realize that any time you disagree with someone you don’t actually think for yourself? That’s because your disagreement is anchored to an idea someone else has expressed. So while you diverge from that idea, you’re still mentally centering on the idea you’re disagreeing with for so long as you’re considering it in disagreement.
On top of that, it’s not even that easy to move away from this even when the conditions are right. Let me explain. For example, I’ll hear something on reddit and I disagree with it, then I go for a walk. So ostensibly I am lone. Then the idea comes up again and I disagree again. I think it’s not even interesting and I should be thinking about something else entirely, and I do, when suddenly 5 minutes later that dumb ass idea comes up again, like it didn’t go very far to begin with. And bam, I am back to thinking how I disagree with that idea and while I think that, I am not thinking about what I really wanted to think about.
So other people inside a conventional mentality (like say one of a fairly recent ex-physicalist) have a huge amount of gravity. That gravity is very deceptive because it doesn’t look like much. People love to think they have figured stuff out on their own and that they think independently, but the reality is not like that. Even the so-called “independent” thinkers are hardly independent. At most they have some quasi-independent streak.
To really develop independent thinking it would help to isolate oneself at least mentally for say 6 months or better yet 5 years. 20 years is actually much better. In 20 years of reduced contact and reduced social obligations you’d start to see huge differences in how you think. You’d realize that there is absolutely no way you’d be able to think like that had you remained involved in conventional goings on. Of course I am only suggesting this to you. It’s true in my experience.
When I realize what is precious to me and what has set me back, I cannot help but think 90% of what’s precious to me came from my own mind, whereas 90% of what has set me back has come from someone else “out there.”
In particular you must watch out for people who are very confident. They’re the worst ones. And watch out for people who claim they used to be like you and then they “grew up” and whatnot. All that is poison. Naturally I even worry that even me speaking here like this is problematic for others. But at least you don’t have to read this space all that much, or at all.
If I raise a finger in the air, and people see it, whether they like it or not, agree or not, their minds will be anchored to my finger, unless one of those people is an unparalleled saint with superlative self-control and beyond-conventional wisdom in full bloom.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-16 15:04:46 (dn2oq9j)
There is a mysterious circle. Let’s suppose first you practice regular mundane aloneness. So you limit your contact with what would conventionally be understood as “other people.” This gives you some space to think. Then eventually you realize what you thought were “other people” were just manifestation of your own mind, and in a sense, this ability to manifest such appearances hasn’t really left anywhere. Thus, for example, when you go to sleep alone, you can dream up many many dream characters. Where do these characters come from? Of course they cannot come from anywhere. They’re your mind’s ability to generate that kind of appearance.
So there is a connection here, a circle. Mundane aloneness has a relationship to subjective idealism. It facilitates it. Because being very involved with the others is a hindrance to exploring your own perspective deeply and fully. You’d constantly be pulled out of your examinations and you’d forget what you wanted to think about because you’d have to go here and there and do this and that with the others, and so on.
So basically aloneness eventually ends up at allness, which is kind of where you (as an ex-physicalist) started but now minus the confusion. Because then when you’re back at allness from pure aloneness you’re not confused about the role of your own perspective in everything.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-15 09:46:52 (dn0pgla)
Not particularly. But at the same time, I am all too aware of the hidden costs of friendship. I’ve had many hundreds of friends at one time and I’ve also had exceptionally deep and soulful one on one friendships as well. One could say I know all there is to know about friendship. I sure as hell appreciate it, but at the same time, friendship is like a disease. Once you have a friend you cannot be alone without offending your friend after some time. Furthermore, if you change too much from the person your friend has been accustomed to knowing, obviously they’re liable to get upset. So basically friendship is a trade off. It gives something and takes something away.
I still enjoy friendships but I also want the ability to be alone and even better, to just disappear from the world for a time into perhaps another dimension altogether.
I am of two minds about people. I can’t say that I straightforwardly just like them. I’ve known all kinds of people in my life. The very worst moments in my life have been facilitated by other people, but not the best. So the bias is toward the bad. Another person cannot get inside my mind to really help me on my terms, but another person can sure enough spoil my peace and plans. In other words, it’s easier for another person to hurt something in my life than to help something in my life. If all the people just vanished and left me to deal with nature, without intermediaries, I would do fine. I’d rather deal with an angry bear than an angry person. For the most part I see people as simply blocking my access to something that is rightfully mine anyway, and the pretext is that they’re somehow helping me is not really working in my mind. Everything other people do for me, I can do better on my own, save maybe just one: the company itself. Like if the only time I saw other people is if I went to a tea house, and at no other time, and I didn’t need to interact with people in order to live, maybe I would be unambiguously ecstatic about the presence of people in my life.
That’s what you see as an onlooker. That’s not the right picture. You have to be on the inside of this to see how it is. What you’re describing is another body as you observe it from your perspective. That isn’t how it would be for you if you were a hermit. Your own life isn’t just a body.
You just described the body of a hermit instead of their mentality.
I want to be able to live on my own. When I don’t depend on anyone for basic functioning, then I can meet people without desperation, without the sense that I need them to live. Not only will I then have a lighter attitude, I also will not be abused either, because all the leverage would be gone.
I don’t mind friendships, but what I do mind is leverage. I don’t want anyone to have leverage over me. I don’t want people to be able to hold my access to food hostage and then impose conditions on me if I want said food, and so on. I don’t want to pay anyone just for a right to dwell (like with rent, or like when you have to buy out some previous owner for an insane cost, especially if you take a loan out, then you pay 5 prices of the house in the long run… I don’t want this at all).
This is why the magick I practice invariably will become rude and at some point I will just destroy any who oppose me. I don’t want to live as a slave and without power who will negotiate with me seriously? I have to be ready to die and to kill before people will give me good terms in negotiations, right? Or better yet, I should not allow my mind to produce other people of certain types and just regulate othering much more than I do now.
Just yesterday I had a dream where I was being choked by someone. Since it’s my dream, why should I dream like this? But that’s what this life is like. It’s a horrible dream. When dream characters choke me (or more accurately, my dream body), I don’t negotiate. I instead use dream power and mold the dream or wake up. In that case I just decided to wake up since I couldn’t be arsed to mold anything at the time. I don’t keep dreaming on dream’s given terms if those terms are bad enough.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-12 16:22:21 (dmw46du)
Hmm, maybe so. I’m not sure I have quite as dark a view of other people as you do. I see people like the rest of the world. Something that can be pleasant and useful or painful and obstructive.
I agree. Aloneness =/= loneliness. But aloneness is a mentality. It’s a mentality centered around doing your own thing and not being interested in sharing with or enjoying other sentient beings. Unless we’re going to bring up an unusual example of a hermit who is always talking to spirits, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
I think you should consider homesteading. I know that you don’t like that you have to pay for the land and taxes, but there’s decent land in the midwest that’s pretty cheap and you could live off it and just isolate yourself. You could even get satellite internet if you have a little chunk of change saved up. I’ve visited several different places where people were doing this. Though honestly, most of them kept up a job on the side to pay for luxuries like store bought food and internet and propane and gasoline and cars because they didn’t want to really rough it 100%. They just wanted to be more independent.
Regarding friendship in general. I view other people like I view the world. They can be great or terrible. The more I’ve othered the world and given power to it, the more I can enjoy letting things happen on their own, but the more risk I take to have something I don’t like happen. So, it’s like you’ve said before, you have to cultivate expressiveness and tolerance.
Expressiveness is increasing your power over the things you really want to make sure you have in life and then ensuring you have them - stripping that power from the world (from others in this case). Tolerance is becoming more comfortable with not always having the things you don’t always have - especially the things you maintain as othered and outside your control (others’ free will and potential for being devious in this case). Taking more power over your relationships with people, and becoming more comfortable with the varieties of interactions and conditions those people might have with you.
But, IDK that’s just what I’m thinking right now.
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-09-14 13:18:37 (dmza095)
But that mentality only looks like a separate body from a 2nd person perspective. A person who is enjoying solitude is not just a single body to their own self. They are a world to themselves, not just something stripped of something else. Instead they are complete with all that was previously delegated, outsourced, lent out, recalled and returned back to the source. It’s not an impoverished or simplistic state.
Someone who hasn’t matured in solitude thinks of solitude as “I am here and everything else is over there, somewhere else.” But this kind of solitude is only a beginner’s solitude.
It’s an attitude where all sentient beings are simply your own being, and then whether you display many bodies to your mind’s eye or not makes no real difference. It’s only an aesthetic difference.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-14 13:52:36 (dmzbcih)
I don’t agree. I think that we’re talking about separate things here. I think what I call the aloneness mentality is different than Unilateral Subjective Idealism, or from Subjective Idealism of any kind (such as S.I. Physicalism).
So, aloneness as a mentality, imo, is the disposition to strongly want to be entertained by yourself and not be interested in sharing with or being entertained by other apparent sentient beings. If others aren’t interesting to one as sources of pleasure and entertainment and companionship, then they are just obstacles, or at best neutral objects in the world that could be replaced by something more desirable, and one would want to just be alone all the time. One can have this aloneness mentality as a physicalist or a S.I. physicalist or as a S.I. Unilateralist. And of course, it is a continuum. One can be completely uninterested in others (or maybe even more extreme have a very strong distaste for others) and on the other side of the continuum one can be obsessively interested in others and completely bored and miserable without them around even for a few seconds.
On the other hand, understanding that the whole world and all sentient beings are ultimately within one’s own mind is just subjective idealism. A subjective idealist can be anywhere on that continuum of wanting apparent others in their mindstream or out of their mindstream. And they can also be anywhere on the continuum from heavy othering (e.g. S.I. Physicalism or S.I. Theism or S.I. Animism) to extremely limited othering and heavy self-ing (Unilateralism), which would determine how quickly they could magically change the state of the apparent others in their mindstream. That’s how I see it.
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-09-15 07:15:37 (dn0hxsx)
Here’s another way to think about it.
Let’s say I am lucidly dreaming and I meet a bunch of dream characters. What can these characters do for me? They could get together and build me a house. But I can make a better house and faster with just an intent. I could make a house that’s larger than a galaxy. They could dig a ditch, but I could split the Earth with just an intent. They could form a circle around my dream body and guard me from dream monsters. But I am a better guard of myself by simply staying lucid.
So is there anything they can do that I cannot do better myself? Well, yes. Being themselves! They’re better at being what they are.
So for example, if I wanted to create a sense of bodily company, I’d have to create appearances just like those other dream characters. In other words, I could not do something an order of magnitude better. Perhaps I could manifest funnier and more moral people-appearances, but fundamentally they’d be very similar kind of appearances that would function in roughly the same way. So even if I could improve that function, it wouldn’t be by a huge degree. It would be by a small but perhaps noticeable margin. And what about music? I could make heavenly music manifest, but it won’t be drastically better than anything Mozart or Bach wrote and so on.
So basically the aloneness of a fully developed subjective idealism is that while I can enjoy the appearance of people for reasons such as music and conversations, I don’t need them to feed me, build me houses and clothing, and guard me. Naturally they also cannot lay down any sort of law over me either. Like dream characters when I am lucid are completely helpless and naked in front of my gaze. In other words, I don’t need them in a functional sense and nor can they threaten anything.
And above all, I don’t need them to help me think. On the contrary, if I really want to think deeply, I have to make sure my own is the only voice that rings in my mind. I have to think with one voice and not 20 divergent ones that are all pulling in different directions.
So the appearance of people has some value regardless, but I would no longer live through the other people.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-15 10:13:13 (dn0qntz)
So, I agree with some of the suggestions in your last two comments, but not all of them.
I agree with the general idea that the more specific and demanding your desires are, and thus the more time and focus you need to spend on managing the apparent world to meet those desires, the less time and focus you have for introspection and contemplation, which reduces your wisdom (and thus your ability to serve yourself and your happiness) by making you less self-aware and pushing you to see things from a more narrow perspective. I think that being over-involved with people is one instance of this more general over-involvement with the world that can lead to and be a result of ignorance, but I don’t think people represent some problem to introspection over and above this. Do you?
I don’t think that just seeking solitude in the normal use of the expression is the always the same as the above. There’s seeking meditative, contemplative, introspective, imaginative, alone time to cultivate or maintain wisdom. And then there’s wanting to be alone because you think masturbating is more fun than sex or solitaire is more fun than poker. Just because you are alone doesn’t mean you are going to become any wiser or better at thinking for yourself if you’re not using that solitude in productive ways. So there’s solitude for fun, and there’s solitude for wisdom (and in some individuals these may have some overlap).
I do think that the logical conclusion of rational, critical, thought (thinking for yourself) is subjective idealism because it’s the ultimate result of asking the question ‘what beliefs benefit me the most, are “true”?’ as I see it. But a subjective idealist has the option to not “think for themselves” in the sense that they can maintain the appearance of a world in their subconscious and “seek out information” about that world from personal experience and other people.
I think that other people might have functional value as well as “intrinsic” value if you are manifesting a subconsciously maintained stable apparent world. Those people are parts of that world both to enjoy and use. In some cases those are separate and in some cases they are the same. If one likes the game that is this world then those ‘functional’ values start to look a lot more ‘intrinsic’ to such a person. I mean even their ability to produce music is pretty ‘functional’ from a certain POV. You could just manifest new music directly without potentially having to negotiate with unpleasant personalities in order to get their art from them. Or people’s independent use of their bodies is even an obstruction. What if they don’t consent to you doing to their body what you’d like to do to it? Then you have to negotiate with this obstructing other to get your way, and they may not consent to any negotiation to get what you want. So then the ideal scenario is to make them all very obviously just mind-slaves. Basically just extensions of your own body. You see, to me, there may just be something intrinsically desirable about maintaining a world and others with a sense of free-ness and other-ness. Sure, maybe things get a bit out of hand or I want to change them a bit, but I don’t think I’m 100% on board with total unilateral absorption of the world and other sentient beings into the conscious aspect of my mind right now. I guess the real question is if you find anything desirable about maintaining a stable apparent world with a stable environment and stable sentient beings, or if there is something more desirable about reabsorbing it all and maintaining 24/7 god-power (as opposed to temporarily becoming god and making some modifications and then returning to a worldly life). I don’t think there’s a right answer here or anything. It’s about personal taste. To me, right now I’m really unsure. I want more magical power, but I’m worried about the costs of too much power. Namely, I don’t know how much I want to destabilize my world and internalize it. Maybe there’s something about having a large stable environment populated with beings that’s good. Maybe I don’t want my ego/conscious to expand out and make my body encompass much more of or potentially all of the world? IDK what I want right now. I’m working on figuring that out. What do you want?
As an aside, could you discuss what you mean by no longer needing others to think and no longer living ‘through’ others? What does it mean to think for yourself, to you?
Originally commented by u/AesirAnatman on 2017-09-16 13:49:17 (dn2mcwy)
But where does your idea of “wisdom” come from? Is it your own, or is it a social construct? Would you have the same idea of wisdom if you were left to think about it without the social pressure and social charm (using a magickal sense of the word “charm” here, as in, when you’re “charmed” you’re under someone’s spell, a thrall, in this case society’s thrall).
You should know what your own idea of wisdom would look like.
Secondly, wisdom and fun are not two different ends of the same spectrum. I frankly worry about people for whom wisdom and fun do not overlap. If anything, I think there is a strong positive correlation between fun and wisdom. I don’t think fun is the same thing as wisdom, but certainly fun is not an antagonistic quality to wisdom.
By “fun” I refer to any experience of enjoyment, joy, bliss, release, but also ongoing well-being, a sense of rightness and competency within your own life, etc.
I’ve done that. My point was something else. I was saying even if I am left to generate my own music, I can make myself hear better music than Bach and Mozart but it’s not better by all that much. In other words, in some sense the best music of this plane is some ways already into the heavenly realm. Whereas other things are not so good. For example, I could teleport, or I could make a house that’s huge inside and tiny on the outside and so on. People cannot make such things for me. I have to be the one to allow such things in my mind. Indeed, whatever people “make” is whatever I have allowed that they could make. In other words, before other people can make something I have to make way for them in my own mind. So if I made way for people to be able to contort space, they’d be able to do so eventually. I have to be the one to open that door. If you notice how physics has evolved to a more perspectival and subjective science? It’s not an accident from my own POV. Of course physics cannot truly catch up to me, but it still follows me like a shadow. When I conceive of a new way of seeing things, physics follows along eventually.
So long time ago I have conceived that space can be pushed against. That’s going to happen too. There are already some signs of this happening, but I have conceived of this looong before any articles like that appeared. Why have I conceived that? Because I think that’s how we’ll travel to other stars. I realized that spewing gas is not the way to go. Instead energy must be extracted from space itself and be used to push against the space. Then you don’t have fuel constraints and you can accelerate endlessly. There will probably also be a need to phase into a different space, because you don’t want to be colliding with the various debris in conventional space at high speeds. But physicists think they’re just discovering whatever is “there” whereas I think I want this and that experience, now let’s make it happen, and then physics come in line with whatever I actually want to be doing. On top of that if I want to make myself an exception from physics, I can do that as well. The sky’s the limit.
Do you realize that any time you disagree with someone you don’t actually think for yourself? That’s because your disagreement is anchored to an idea someone else has expressed. So while you diverge from that idea, you’re still mentally centering on the idea you’re disagreeing with for so long as you’re considering it in disagreement.
On top of that, it’s not even that easy to move away from this even when the conditions are right. Let me explain. For example, I’ll hear something on reddit and I disagree with it, then I go for a walk. So ostensibly I am lone. Then the idea comes up again and I disagree again. I think it’s not even interesting and I should be thinking about something else entirely, and I do, when suddenly 5 minutes later that dumb ass idea comes up again, like it didn’t go very far to begin with. And bam, I am back to thinking how I disagree with that idea and while I think that, I am not thinking about what I really wanted to think about.
So other people inside a conventional mentality (like say one of a fairly recent ex-physicalist) have a huge amount of gravity. That gravity is very deceptive because it doesn’t look like much. People love to think they have figured stuff out on their own and that they think independently, but the reality is not like that. Even the so-called “independent” thinkers are hardly independent. At most they have some quasi-independent streak.
To really develop independent thinking it would help to isolate oneself at least mentally for say 6 months or better yet 5 years. 20 years is actually much better. In 20 years of reduced contact and reduced social obligations you’d start to see huge differences in how you think. You’d realize that there is absolutely no way you’d be able to think like that had you remained involved in conventional goings on. Of course I am only suggesting this to you. It’s true in my experience.
When I realize what is precious to me and what has set me back, I cannot help but think 90% of what’s precious to me came from my own mind, whereas 90% of what has set me back has come from someone else “out there.”
In particular you must watch out for people who are very confident. They’re the worst ones. And watch out for people who claim they used to be like you and then they “grew up” and whatnot. All that is poison. Naturally I even worry that even me speaking here like this is problematic for others. But at least you don’t have to read this space all that much, or at all.
If I raise a finger in the air, and people see it, whether they like it or not, agree or not, their minds will be anchored to my finger, unless one of those people is an unparalleled saint with superlative self-control and beyond-conventional wisdom in full bloom.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-16 15:04:46 (dn2oq9j)
Originally commented by u/ on 2023-06-29 12:54:30.059966 (_)
There is a mysterious circle. Let’s suppose first you practice regular mundane aloneness. So you limit your contact with what would conventionally be understood as “other people.” This gives you some space to think. Then eventually you realize what you thought were “other people” were just manifestation of your own mind, and in a sense, this ability to manifest such appearances hasn’t really left anywhere. Thus, for example, when you go to sleep alone, you can dream up many many dream characters. Where do these characters come from? Of course they cannot come from anywhere. They’re your mind’s ability to generate that kind of appearance.
So there is a connection here, a circle. Mundane aloneness has a relationship to subjective idealism. It facilitates it. Because being very involved with the others is a hindrance to exploring your own perspective deeply and fully. You’d constantly be pulled out of your examinations and you’d forget what you wanted to think about because you’d have to go here and there and do this and that with the others, and so on.
So basically aloneness eventually ends up at allness, which is kind of where you (as an ex-physicalist) started but now minus the confusion. Because then when you’re back at allness from pure aloneness you’re not confused about the role of your own perspective in everything.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-09-15 09:46:52 (dn0pgla)