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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

    Putting that solipsism lens on is no easy feat, though. As you’ve said, there’s the fear of embarrassing yourself if you’re wrong about all this - and also, your mind seems to jump through hoops to re-establish the status quo. Even when I manage to convince myself that the world only needs to satisfy me, I start worrying that I don’t know what I want/what is good for me. I get into a loop of thinking that maybe I need things to be hard, maybe it’s “good” for me if they are.

    Exactly. I think as you play with this mindset you’ll find out a lot about yourself. This is one of those things: hidden in the recesses of your subconscious mind was an idea that someone else knows what’s better for you than you. It’s the idea that you’re not the best person to direct your own life.

    I think a lot of this comes back to the fact that the human condition features a heavy loading of guilt.

    I don’t experience a lot of guilt myself. My own primary negative feeling is one of inadequacy. When I am at my worst, the feeling that tends to dominate my mind is that I am not meeting some sort of external standard of judgement, that I am not good enough, that I don’t deserve something, etc.

    In the past this was so bad that I’d often get this feeling when reading my own old essays (I’m talking about a time before reddit became popular). I’d find some old paper of mine, read it, and I’d start thinking whoever this brilliant person was that wrote it, couldn’t have been myself, it had to have been someone else. I mean I couldn’t even own the things I was doing even by conventional standards: my own writings, for example.

    I’ve started to remind myself of the infinite nature of existence to overcome this. Just telling myself straight out that struggle/strife doesn’t have intrinsic value isn’t enough to overcome a lifetime of conditioning telling me otherwise. But when I remind myself that there’s room in existence for everything, I can still intend the changes I want because, even if it turns out that suffering is somehow more noble than non-suffering, and I’m messing things up by removing it, there’s room for do-overs. Endless do-overs, if necessary.

    I like this approach because it’s subtle. It can be much easier to start a transformation in this way than to try to outright overturn a bad habit head on.

    Then I start telling myself, of course, that it could easily be coincidence and I have to start over again.

    That idea is always there for me too. Thing is, nothing “out there” forces us to narrate what happened one way or another. If I really want to think that everything good that happens is purely a coincidence, I can do that too. But it wouldn’t be good for me. It would demotivate me and make me think that the universe was just a casino, and I don’t like games of chance very much.

    As for the bleak and lonely aspect of solipsism - well, it’s still there to an extent, but there’s also an exhilarating side to that degree of mental aloneness. I’m also working on viewing solipsism as an option, not an absolute. This is tricky and I’m still trying to find my level, so to speak. But solipsism, when you really force yourself to come eye to eye with it, isn’t as bad as you think it’s going to be. I’d urge anyone else who’s flirting with the idea to give it a try and see where it leads you.

    Yea, and for me there is something else too. I feel this extraordinary peacefulness/silence often these days. It’s unnatural. It’s not just in my conventional mind, but like I would sit here and hear no car sounds, no people sounds coming from my neighbors, no aircraft sounds, nothing at all. It comes in periods. And when it comes it feels so thorough and thick. I feel like the gears of the universe have ground to a halt, or something like that. It’s actually a very nice feeling. It’s as though the peace I often feel is so deep that it’s affecting the way my surroundings manifest. And I get the opposite effect too. If I feel angry, it’s often accompanied by a lot of turbulence or other signs in the environment. When I feel very magickal sometimes my environment becomes unstable or weird/surreal. It’s all really interesting to watch.

    You’re absolutely right, and you’ve pointed out a trap that I’d fallen into. I’d come to view othering as a static thing - i.e. at this moment, from the point of view of this human experience, the othered self is in x state, and x state only. In my mind x might have equalled the Freudian subconscious, or a deity, or a matrix-style computer program - but it was one thing and it was the same for everyone. I think I fell into this trap because it would be nice and simple, if this were the case. But of course, it is much more fluid and complex than that, and understanding how it (you) works is a second-by-second struggle.

    And don’t forget that even after you climb out of this trap, that old way of relating to the othered aspect of your mind is still available, so you can always return to it, if you want to. And returning to it doesn’t have to imply forgetting that you have other options. So it no longer needs to be a trap, but it can be just one more available option.

    Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-12-01 07:31:26 (damjp1b)