A lot of people may not suspect the profound depth and seriousness of the implications that subjective idealism opens up. Most people live as human beings who embrace either completely or nearly completely the conventional standards of thought, belief, behavior, expectations both private and social. There is nothing inherently or objectively wrong with that. It is what it is. Some beings love the idea of seeing their destiny play out completely in the familiar human realm that they know and love. This is a serious commitment on the part of the proverbial “average” person. Of course strictly speaking there is no such thing as “average” but the phrase still has some meaning that I think most of us can appreciate. Buddhist Pali Suttas often mention “an untrained, run of the mill person” with the same intent. I am talking about people who want to have a stable, settled, comfortable life as a human being surrounded by the company of human beings, in an atmosphere of familiar stability, neutrality, and at least nominal decorum.

Usually this kind of average person will hold a materialistic frame of mind. This means such a person typically believes that the world is a neutral objective ground, an actual place to which people can belong and which people can abandon. They believe such a place is governed by unbending and eternal laws of physics which are completely decoupled from anyone’s mind. They believe the brain is at minimum the location of the mind, and possibly even mind’s generator, as it were.

From a psychological perspective sanity is a very important quality for such a person. Sanity is essential to be functional in the world of convention and to be well liked and accepted by typical human beings who themselves prize sanity. A normal human being exists in a state of complete and utter reliance and dependence on the broader humanity and can neither function nor see oneself outside of such a context. To such a person insanity of any kind would be a disaster that threatens everything they hold dear in life and fitting in is essential to not just survival, but even to basic day to day well-being.

Well, subjective idealism when taken seriously at minimum threatens and maximally completely dismantles everything I just mentioned.

Firstly, the whole enterprise when taken up in earnest is profoundly anti-materialistic. The absence of materialistic assumptions leads to the absence of a reliance on some neutral standard of judgement as would be implied by an objective domain of any kind. This absence of a neutral standard and the weakening of conventional reliances leads people to embrace their wilder, less civilized, less inhibited side. This implies almost necessarily that decorum is not nearly as important to such people as it is to most human beings. But personal integrity and honest expression become drastically more important. This means at the minimum you may run into some conversations which seem rude or offensive to you even if a weird way participant whom you perceive as rude actually has no intention whatsoever to hurt or harm you, but is simply struggling to maintain personal integrity at all costs.

When we look deeper into this we realize that sanity in general is now more like an obstacle that must be overcome than a reliance. Knowledgeable people here understand that while the possibility exists to come out of this endeavor unscathed, the completely open and completely unconventional frame of mind that’s maintained during waking can easily, trivially lead to some non-standard behaviors which can have serious implications on one’s status in convention, with all that’s implied by this.

So if you accept that this is an interesting place, please understand that if you take the ideas expressed here as seriously as some of us do, you may endanger your conventional standing, health, and sanity, and at minimum you may expose yourself to discussions which seem off-putting.

By all means all interested parties are welcome to stay. However, this is an environment for adults and not for babies. You’ll need a skin slightly thicker than usual and you’ll need at least a nominal tolerance for insanity to really enjoy this subreddit. But ideally you will see sanity as an undesirable tumor that must be excised in the course of time.

People here do not concern themselves with what’s acceptable, what’s normal, what’s sane, what’s polite, and the like. If you understand the risks and if you understand what you may potentially be getting yourself into, please grab a bowl of popcorn, grab a drink, pull up a chair, and seriously enjoy your stay.