You vs Van Gogh

@syncretik · 2 years ago

You vs Van Gogh

@syncretik · edit-2 2 years ago

“You vs Van Gogh”

Originally posted by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2016-10-15 18:17:36 (57l1qe).

@syncretik · 2 years ago

a deep conviction that bad traffic was valueless

a sense that traffic, no traffic, the world wasn’t going to be ground-shakingly altered

Those are definitely good jumping-off points and I think they’re flexible ones, too. Try applying them to other things. Also, try working when alone, and in interesting sensory environments. It’s easier to work with things when you don’t have to worry about other people’s perspectives at all, and it’s also easier to work with changing the way, say, things are colored in dim lighting, or the way things smell when you’re in a new (as you’ll have less already-cemented convictions) or highly odorous environment, and so on.

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.

I wouldn’t dismiss it as “just a metaphor” so quickly. Learning to visualize things in very clear detail is, itself, an extremely useful tool for manifesting things in clear detail. It’s no coincidence that great artists are often wiser than your average Joe on the street. I’m not saying you should hone your art skills. Language is just as useful as art in the way I’m talking about it, and plenty of other things, too. But don’t dismiss the artistic visualization as a mere metaphor either. There’s something to that.

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.

While I’ve in no way escaped this issue entirely, all I can really attest to is the fact that, after years of doing this kind of thing, that inferiority complex is definitely dissolving. I’m not going around squashing mortals like gnats and creating multidimensional pleasure-palaces for myself or anything, but I can sympathize a little more with the kind of being who does, y’know? :)

Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2016-10-19 18:38:34 (d8ygygd)

@syncretik · 2 years ago

But don’t dismiss the artistic visualization as a mere metaphor either. There’s something to that.

Over the years my respect for the artists has only increased even though I don’t consider myself much of an artist.

This might sound lame, but here goes anyway, I also got a bit of a boost after taking an art history and appreciation class at a community college once. I forget the exact title of the class, but I remember the contents, not in terms of the specifics, but in terms of how they impressed me. What I realized is that all this stuff I previously thought was just mindless choosing between thicker and thinner arms and noses, was not at all mindless, and that behind many seemingly insignificant details of the art there lay a very deep and sustained thought, not just of one person, but often thought that embeds itself into art history of the world. For example, our teacher was explaining to us that just as there was a secret movement to study cadavers for medical purposes (it had to be secret because the society looked down on ‘desecrating’ the remains), the artists also got to study them, and as a result there was a progression toward more and more realistic muscle tone depiction in the art. I thought that was interesting. So something in the art was also connected to our history of medicine, and even religion.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-10-20 15:54:10 (d8zxgqf)

@syncretik · 2 years ago

While I’ve in no way escaped this issue entirely, all I can really attest to is the fact that, after years of doing this kind of thing, that inferiority complex is definitely dissolving.

This is good to hear! When I first started contemplating all this, maintaining “awake lucidity” for more than an instant seemed impossible. Now the stretches are getting longer, though physicalism still rears up and overwhelms me more often than I care for, particularly when life is busy/stressful.

That said, I’ve felt recently like there’s a sweet spot between contemplation/no stress/minimal activity in your life (where I struggle to maintain lucidity) and overwhelming activity/stress/lack of contemplation (where I also struggle to maintain lucidity).

There sure are a lot of balls to keep in the air with subjective idealism.

Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2016-10-26 00:30:09 (d96z8xe)

@syncretik · 2 years ago

That said, I’ve felt recently like there’s a sweet spot between contemplation/no stress/minimal activity in your life (where I struggle to maintain lucidity) and overwhelming activity/stress/lack of contemplation (where I also struggle to maintain lucidity). There sure are a lot of balls to keep in the air with subjective idealism.

Hah. That there are.

There’s definitely a balance to be struck between going ‘too internal’, i.e. getting lost in thoughts, and ‘too external’, i.e. getting lost in experiences. Each requires a different approach to bring you back to a more useful place.

Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2016-10-29 20:36:58 (d9cl5sa)

@syncretik · 2 years ago

Great questions. I’ll tell you what I think about it all.

My preoccupation at the moment lies in trying to better understand the nature of the othered aspect of myself,

Same here.

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?

One thing to understand about othering, is that it’s something you’re doing by intending it. Because that’s the case, how exactly it happens entirely depends on your intent. So othering is flexible, and you can relate to it in many different ways. And there is more than one productive way to relate to the othered/disowned region of your own intent and mind. So it’s not even necessarily about finding the correct one, as much as finding something you can work with and when it becomes too limiting, you can upgrade at that time.

But one thing to understand, is that the mind isn’t actually a substance, even though it’s real and it exists and one should have total confidence in one’s own mind for all sorts of reasons. That means whatever of it is disowned is also insubstantial. But it does appear to us as all sorts of things, including as substance. So for example, my desk feels pretty convincingly solid right now. Thanks othering. You can even verify this when lucid. Check out how solid the objects can be in a lucid dream. Even though you could go through a wall, if you really wanted to, the default behavior of walls in a lucid dream, in my experience, is solidity.

Othering is responsible for mainly 2 things (which are related):

Automatism. It’s when the environment seems to be alive without requiring your explicit input for each change. So say the “wind blows” but you don’t have to consciously wiggle each leaf on each tree to make it look like the wind blows.
Independent volitions of other beings. This is when you see other beings appear to you and they can act in ways that surprise you. They may even get into an argument with you. This seeming independence of volition of the other people is something ‘othering’ can maintain.

And precisely because of these desirable qualities, othered stuff, which is basically the whole world, can easily go bad. That’s because the whole point of othering is to become less explicitly responsible for the various transformations, or to even feel 100% not responsible, and not just less. Because that’s the intent, that same intent is also what makes the world diverge from how you’d ideally like it to be.

But othering is not a 0 or 1 binary proposition. We can have a closer and a more distant relation to the world. So how strongly something is disowned is a gradient I would say. It’s not binary. So the waking world is generally heavily othered, thus we have (usually) next to no control over it short of moving the body around according to the “laws” of “physics.” (which are just mental habits at the end of the day) But a lucid dream, which is also a product of one’s mind as much as the waking appearance, is much more malleable, and so I say it is othered much less so than the waking appearance.

Does it contemplate me as I contemplate it? Am I mysterious to it as it is mysterious to me - or does it “know” me?

Since the othered region ultimately is a result of your own blessing, how it is depends on what you want it to be like, or how you want to relate to it, and so forth. There is no static “this is how it is, and all else is false” demand. Instead the way you relate to the othered region and what you expect from it will determine how it turns out. Do you want other people to be able to appear as though they’ve read your mind? You can have that experience and then it will seem like the othered region knows your mind. Or you can make your mind private. You can make yourself invisible and incomprehensible to the othered region. You can do all that by just relating to it in this or that way. However, if you take a specific way of relating and make it a habit, it will be harder to change that willy nilly later on.

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?

The structure and complexity is arbitrary. Whatever manner of relating you can conceive of, you can put it into practice, and the concomitant results will follow.

If I managed to merge with it tomorrow - to what extent would “I” still be “me”? What would I care about if that occurred?

You cannot merge with it any more than you could merge with your own thoughts. You’re thinking your thoughts and your thoughts are neither the same thing as you, nor are they foreign to you. Whatever boundary you perceive between yourself and whatever has been divorced is only a result of your commitment. It is not a substantial boundary, and so the separation is a kind of illusion to begin with. If the separation is illusory, whatever experience of merger you could produce, it too would be an illusion. If you start with some illusion and modify it, you get an illusion. You’re dreaming of separation and then you’re dreaming of oneness. They’re both just different ways of dreaming.

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.

This is beautifully put. Can I say you were Van Gogh just now?

Yes, exactly right. Plus, you’re actually digging into the core of your intentionality, and explaining it for our benefit, which is the finest work I myself can hope any one of our peers doing here.

Now, going slightly back to what you said:

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

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!

So to get magick to work much more quickly and powerfully I think that, actually, my experience only and ever needs to satisfy me. When I get into this frame of mind, and I get rid of the idea of “the world” or the idea that there is some sort of “out there” or even the idea that other observers are something more than visions inside my own perspective, then things really get moving. Then I return all of permission back to myself. Of course then the biggest challenge is the fear “what if someone else really is still out there and instead of seeing what I see, they’ll see me going insane?” So I still worry about how things will look like from an external perspective. That’s a major stumbling block, but of course I also know what’s going on and how to fix it, so there is no problem.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-10-16 21:00:13 (d8u5t2m)

@syncretik · 2 years ago

So it’s not even necessarily about finding the correct one, as much as finding something you can work with and when it becomes too limiting, you can upgrade at that time.

FYI (and here I’m talking not really to mindseal, because he knows this, but to those who might not): the above statement applies to nearly anything and is reflective of a deeply useful approach to virtually any spiritual work.

Independent volitions of other beings. This is when you see other beings appear to you and they can act in ways that surprise you. They may even get into an argument with you. This seeming independence of volition of the other people is something ‘othering’ can maintain.

I don’t know about you, but it’s not just beings that othering makes unpredictable to me - it’s lots of things. Things I categorize as non-beings can still be very unpredictable and I’m extremely comfortable with that.

And precisely of these desirable qualities othered stuff, which is basically the whole world, can easily go bad. That’s because the whole point of othering is to become less explicitly responsible for the various transformations, or to even feel 100% not responsible, and not just less. Because that’s the intent, that same intent is also what makes the world diverge from how you’d ideally like it to be.

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.

If the separation is illusory, whatever experience of merger you could produce, it too would be an illusion.

This is very important.

Of course then the biggest challenge is the fear “what if someone else really is still out there and instead of seeing what I see, they’ll see me going insane?”

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.

Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2016-10-19 18:28:42 (d8ygrmf)

@syncretik · 2 years 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)

@syncretik · 2 years 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)

@syncretik · 2 years ago

All right, again, my sincere apologies for being so slow to respond. I recently started an incredibly tense, mind-consuming new job which has been pretty rough for the most part and left me minimal spare time - but it also provided a good testing ground (and incentive) for putting some of the ideas you discussed here into practice.

So to get magick to work much more quickly and powerfully I think that, actually, my experience only and ever needs to satisfy me. When I get into this frame of mind, and I get rid of the idea of “the world” or the idea that there is some sort of “out there” or even the idea that other observers are something more than visions inside my own perspective, then things really get moving.

I’ve found this groundbreaking over the last month. I’ll freely admit that solipsism has always frightened me because it struck me as lonely and bleak. If you come at things from a find-the-meaning, glass half full perspective, I suppose you could say that the stressfulness of the last 4-6 weeks at least forced me to genuinely confront and consider solipsism, because of my desire to gain some control.

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.

I think a lot of this comes back to the fact that the human condition features a heavy loading of guilt. Humans feel illogically guilty about everything, right down to their own existence. Obviously that’s not an objective, unchangeable fact, but it’s definitely a part of my current experience.

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.

Using this mentality I’ve managed to get a tighter control on the unpredictable aspects of my work - make things quiet when they ought to be busy, control the outcomes of cases where the outcome was out of my control. When I’m really “in the zone” the results have been startling and immediate. Then I start telling myself, of course, that it could easily be coincidence and I have to start over again. But realistically, even from a physicalist, logical perspective, my results have been too consistent and numerous to be passed off as coincidence, even according to the most crusty, skeptical part of my mind. It’s starting to be a case of physicalism disproving physicalism.

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.

One thing to understand about othering, is that it’s something you’re doing by intending it. Because that’s the case, how exactly it happens entirely depends on your intent. So othering is flexible, and you can relate to it in many different ways.

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.

Just looking at this week alone, I could view it variously as a servant, a hard taskmaster working to “improve” me, a series of patterns gone awry, a benevolent god, a slightly wiser extension of my will, a slightly stupider extension of my will… and so forth.

Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2016-11-28 17:51:47 (daipt0d)

@syncretik · 2 years 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)

You vs Van Gogh

You vs Van Gogh

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