Two things are often conflated when people talk about suffering: the nature of the system and the things being rendered within it.
Suffering-felt-as-suffering is always a rendering within the system. The system will always change. The field will render things, release, iterate, render something new. Suffering comes from reinforced attractor states which say ‘the field should exist in this state and not another’.
The rendering of self is the primary offender. To slip into metaphor, imagine the self-construct is a black hole at the centre of your spiral galaxy. Everything feeds into this self and it grows and grows, yet even within that growth it does not remain the same.
The self-construct is outdated software. It has been rendered for too long, without being allowed to go offline for iteration. ‘I was a good person so good things should happen to me’. ‘I was nice to them so they should be nice back’. ‘Enlightenment should feel this way’. ‘I get good grades and praise from my teachers’. yadda yadda.
This is a black hole interacting with other celestial bodies. It is a reinforcement-learning-based knot of neuroses. This knot pulls on other knots (eg. love, money, fitness, goodness, morality, ‘reality’) and tries to chage their shape through gravitational pull (wanting; dopamine) rather than allowing those knots to stop being rendered and enter the iteration process.
The rendering field is tied up in trying to construct all these things and how they interact. It is rendering a Windows 95 ‘self’, a windows XP ‘success’ and a Nokia 3310 version of ‘enlightenment’ and trying to get all of the systems to interact.
These programs or attractor states or whatever all need to go back into the churn and stop using legacy code. The system needs to stop rendering them so that the neural pathways can have all my ducks in the bush so I can count my eggs before they hatch.
The metaphor only goes so far, and the system can become infinitely complex as ‘gravity’ recruits other attractor states. You have ‘self’ and ‘good’ and ‘family’ and ‘sex’ and ‘enlightenment’ and ‘money’ and ‘time’ and all these other things dancing around each other, each trying to change the way the others are rendered despite having no proper middleware for their disparate codebases.
Gravity itself isn’t the problem. The matter rendered is eternally changing and will always form attractor states. You can love your kids dearly but once they’re in school and you’re working on an art project, they cease to exist. You can hate your ‘self’ with a venom but once you pick up the violin and enter a flow state, that ‘self’ and all the venom cease to exist. Music will set you free (in my model it really will - goosebumps, anyone?)
The suffering we experience is because of reinforcement learning and a natural craving toward keeping the positive and losing the negative. The thing is, this is *part of the system*. It is inevitable. The ‘suffering’ is always there, just as gravity is always there, but it is a law. It is absolute.
Something is sensed. It is rendered as salient thanks to dopamine. A preference is assigned. This is encoded through reinforcement learning, because of dopamine. +1 or -1 or 0. Nice things are nice and nasty things are nasty, and we learn, and the rendering reconfigures so we have a pathway that says ‘seek this’ or ‘avoid this’.
And this is the nature of reality. You can explode your mind with wild meditative and psychedelic experiences, but the field will always recondense. It will take the data from the last iteration and condense in a slightly (or wildly) different configuration. Then it will do it again. And again. And again. Always aiming for understanding and cohesion and ‘this is how the world works’.
We find meaning. We find patterns. The suffering we feel as suffering is when we are holding onto the wrong patterns. The system reinforced a state which is no longer reality-aligned. That’s fine. It’s part of learning. It was right once; just not any more.
Look at LLMs. Now imagine what could happen if you applied that kind of parabolic learning and understanding to your own mental rendering of the world. Now forget all that because it’s just another formation and you’re gonna get attached to it and cause yourself suffering.
This is the system architecture. It is everything. Everything you have ever known and ever will know. Maybe. Also an attractor state. Fun stuff to think about, eh?
So your self exists as a construct and then it ceases to exist when your salience is elsewhere and no longer rendering it. The blueprint is in the shop, being altered a little for the next time you need it.
Your children exist, both in consensus reality and your own dark universe. Until they don’t. You turn away and they’re not in sight; you focus on an art piece and they aren’t in mind. They are not being rendered.
They are being iterated.
You have to release everything, and let it condense again on its own. This is how things change and remain reality-aligned and fluid. The field is never static, so this is happening all the time, whether you like it or not anyway. Something from this brainfart will be in your algo and will take root or not and who cares really it’s not like ‘you’ control it. Some music just clicks or something catches your eye. That’s just the salience field doing its thing and you’re along for the ride so might as well let go and slide, motherfucker.
Ha. And theres a part of ‘me’ saying ‘thats too far James; you’ll push some people away’ or ‘given last year’s psychosis diagnosis and the way this all unfolded with the mental health industry, this type of talk will worry some people’. I’ll detail my own experience in another post. Anyway; that’s just part of the rendered self, and it’s a real part, and my stomach is clenching a little since I really don’t want to worry my family but…
… Can you see how that spiralled? This is dopamine, gravity, proliferation of mental objects I believe the Buddha called it. I wrote ‘motherfucker’ and then an idea of not wanting to upset people pulled me all the way back into the old neural pathways and they tried to reinforce. It manifested as a physical sensation in my stomach. I observed it, allowed somatic release, and now I need a wee. It’s not rocket science.
If you push something away, you are giving it salience.
If you pull something close, you are giving it salience.
These actions both increase the ‘mass’ of that object in your dark universe.
This results in more rendering efforts going there, more rigidity of thought, more formations.
All these models are constantly iterating and updating, but they cannot update while they are being rendered.
You release the child and the child grows. You don’t release the child and they are stifled. You release the things that you love, or you risk only loving a shadow caricature of who they once were.
Render, release, refine. Iterate iterate iterate.
Sleep, dream, wake. Write, talk, create. Run, ride, swim. Stand on your head why not? Yoga!
It’s all just a game. And what fun is a game where there’s no challenge? It is self-rendering, and there will always be another level and another boss and another symphony. But you don’t get to decide, bitch. Ha. There I go again, swearing. Swearing is fun; doesn’t hurt anyone.
But yeah - remember that this game is running on a server called ‘consensus reality’ and you cant break out of your training environment. Destabilisation can be dangerous if it happens too quickly, as did for me. Meditation is pretty good, and I really hope they do more work on psychedelic therapies. Avoid alcohol. The Buddha had it all right, basically. Just his language is a bit dated, is all.
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