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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.

  • @syncretikOPMEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Not that, in my opinion, we should have any particular disdain for othering. It’s extremely useful. I can imagine a thousand scenarios in which the absence of othering is a total drag. Othering is, to parallel other features of my reality, something I implemented because it’s an extremely useful tool for making things how I’d like them to be, and it’s gotten out of hand. And it’s a lot easier to implement it than the de-implement it.

    Of course I agree that othering is useful. My point is that othering is a double-edged sword. There is a price to pay. And the price is that things can go rogue. The very quality that sets a section of one’s mind loose to do its own thing automatically and quasi-independently is the same quality that (if not careful) can allow these apparent worlds to become arbitrarily subjectively bad.

    That’s really multiple challenges. There’s the doubt about solipsism being true, and there’s the fear of being perceived as insane. And those are different, and their difference is important if you want to address them. I address the former by contemplating things like whether the nature of reality (e.g. the truth of solipsism) is persistent or flexible. If you decide to use solipsism as a temporary tool, is solipsism temporarily “true”? Is it easier to make something temporarily “true” than permanently “true”, and if so, can you use this to make your doubts about the world temporarily vanish? I address the latter by contemplating being-othering, my ability to manipulate other people’s perceptions of me, contemplating the merits of sanity, etc. In other words, I think that’s a complex challenge that’s best attacked from multiple angles with multiple approaches.

    I agree fully. Except I don’t know if I would be talking about truth per se. I think what’s true is that the mind is a threefold capacity (to know, to will and to experience). After that we can have all sorts of modalities, which are different ways of using one’s mental capacity. Solipsism is one such modality. So this is like sitting down and walking are modalities of bodily behavior. We probably wouldn’t say walking is true and sitting down is false. I imagine we would realize that when we walk our ability to sit down isn’t destroyed, and when we sit, our ability to get up and walk isn’t destroyed.

    Similarly, solipsism in my way of thinking is a very useful and very powerful frame of mind. It’s a specific way of relating to one’s experience. One can use as little or as much of that way as one desires, at least in principle. In practice there might be all kinds of fears and misunderstandings that would prevent one from effectively using solipsism. Also I claim that if one were to confuse oneself with one’s body (or even one’s current personality), one would be unable to use a solipsistic frame of mind effectively.

    Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-10-19 21:59:01 (d8ykgd7)

    • @syncretikOPMEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Thank you, these are fantastic, comprehensive responses. I don’t want to give a rushed response, and I haven’t had a chance to write up a proper one yet. But I’ll just say now that I’ve been practicing this:

      What I have found very liberating, is putting a solipsism lens on. Normally I think my experience has to satisfy something objective, something that isn’t just me. So I imagine my experience has to satisfy, for example, the laws of physics, which stand outside me. And my experience must satisfy other observers, which I imagine are crawling all over the place “out there.” Because of this, I cannot have total leeway over my own experience, because in a sense my own experience isn’t just for me! It’s for the world!

      since you posted with really rewarding results. Solipsism is probably where a lot of my hang-ups are rooted (sorry for the mixed metaphors… it’s late here) and I’ve shied away from it in the past. Probing that sore spot has been illuminating and daunting at the same time.

      Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2016-10-26 00:23:11 (d96yzon)