@syncretik

@syncretik

Dear Reader,

The moderation team wants to communicate a vision for what this community is about. So please grab yourself some coffee or tea and read on.

So what are we all about? We are a group of people who are intensely interested in deeply exploring our own minds using a framework of subjective idealism. Ultimately we gather here because we are attracted to the knowledge that glitters so intriguingly to so many of us in the depths of our own minds. We gather here to explore the profound and mind-bending implications of that knowledge on daily life. This community is thus a practico-theoretical one with a slight preference toward theory because we assume that we’re all doing what we need to be doing, privately, so there is not as much need to discuss the more practical applications and the medium of language is better suited to conveying theory than it is to conveying an experience.

We would like ourselves to relate to each other as peers. When I say “peers” it doesn’t mean everyone is equally as good as everyone else. I mean only that everyone is equally responsible for one’s own life, and is equally a master of one’s own destiny. Whether someone has a great understanding or a little understanding of our subject matter, this statement of personal responsibility is essentially the same. We want our members to be just as enthusiastic about the deeper implications and possibilities within subjective idealism as we ourselves are. This is the sense in which we are peers.

The topic of subjective idealism can be quite sensitive because naturally it flies in the face of convention in a huge way. This raises a very serious issue of respect. From a POV of subjective idealism a conventional human being is fast asleep, and whether or not we should be disturbing anyone’s sleep is debatable. There is nothing inherently wrong with sleeping. One can even argue it’s healthy to sleep. But it’s also just as healthy and just as interesting to wake up when one is ready for it. So when we don’t overly proselytize we are being respectful to the public. And when the public ignores what we’re talking about, they in turn also respect us on some level.

So please treat this place as something better than a public alleyway. Things can get rough here and decorum is not a guarantee on our community. We appreciate decorum for what it is, a token of shallow kindness, but it is a conventional value, and many of us have values over and above conventional ones that supersede the conventional view of what’s good in life. We try to be authentic when communicating. So when I talk about care, I talk about our care for the higher ideals and not care for convention.

Our low-key approach to publishing information

Generally there should only be two ways for people to find us:

Someone was PM-ed by one of our members and invited that way.
Someone clicked on one of the members’ usernames and discovered this sub in the post history.

That means we ask you to please avoid posting any references to this community or its contents anywhere outside this community. If you want to invite someone whom you believe is going to be a worthy participant, please send that person a PM and please think about inviting that person to also read our vision statement here.

What do we want to talk about?

We want to talk about subjective idealism, lucidly dreaming while waking, and magick.

This is a place for peers to throw rational yet mind-bending and unconventional ideas at one another. If someone feels inspired this can be a nice place to describe experiences, especially if they are strange, or, ahem, weird, and ideally while tying those experiences into a subjective idealist way of understanding things. It is a place for introspection, so a post where a poster dives into their own conceptual maps and the gnarly twists and turns of their own mindset is a very welcome post.

Also I think it is fine on a rare occasion to make posts that intelligently compare subjective idealism and say Buddhism or Gnostic Christianity or something like that (like say compare it to Eliphas’ books). Probably the best way to do this is to focus on one or two specific aspects or elements instead of writing about broad comparisons. I prefer that it be highly analytical and investigative, really getting into the nitty gritty of things.

Another thing that might be nice in small amounts is to take some author that is otherwise not explicitly a subjective idealist, like Neville Goddard, quote something of that author, and then put it all into a subjective idealist framework.

What do we want to avoid?

Our community here is not about: proving subjective idealism, disproving physicalism, or pitting subjective idealism against transcendental or other types of idealism. It is not about training people, although we may still end up helping people in a way that seems like training, but that’s a side thing if or when it happens. I don’t want training or step-by-step-educating others to be the main event because it goes against the idea of us being peers. I think the main event should be all of us here super-diving into our own psyches 24/7 and writing it up.

We can still make posts critical of physicalism, but the intent isn’t to convince physicalists. The intent of such posts is to allow us to examine our own physicalist hangovers and hangups and to grow. Most of us here have a prior history of physicalistic habit and it makes no sense to ignore that. So the audience for our posts critical of physicalism will be our peers and not some ideologically hostile physicalists.

We prize discussion and take a negative attitude toward plugging/advertising

Please do not post naked links to external resources. If you want to use an external resource, a good way to do so is to quote from it in the context of a post that is 100% legitimate and interesting in its own right such that no one feels any need to follow the link to an external resource. Everything people need to understand the post should be right there in the post.

Key posts

Here is a list of key posts if you’re interested in a somewhat cursory overview of what we want to talk about on this community.

A gentle yet serious warning to all newcomers to the weird way

Consciousness as an Extended Capacity

Dream experiences related to the supposed relation between the mind and the brain

Why might anyone want to study subjective idealism?

Key concepts

What is ‘mind’ the way I generally use the term here.

Othering: subconscious mind is both helpful and problematic for the same reason.

Twice perfect.

Subjective experiential anatomy of a person.

Why simplistic ego-bashing and ego-denial are not part of the weird way.