elastic mind and rigid world

Maybe this is it for now. My worlds are delineated again, with the other world being back in the dreamscape. The snow is thickening and the slopes are welcoming. I will be spending a lot of the coming months on my snowboard, doing what I do.

Yesterday I did an onsen-cold-plunge and then had a nap; in 90 minutes I saw about 12 hours worth of dreams, all very coherent as usual, but all with me being some kind of modern day ethical force for good. I woke up feeling like a week had passed, and then did another hot-bath-cold-exposure meditation before bed.

The first 3 hours of my sleep had about a months-worth of hyper-real dreams. I was in the sandbox and they were semi-lucid; almost like my satoshi-nakamoto phase but in the safe container of REM sleep. I was exposed to various stressors and stimuli and deconditioned myself by staying calm and compassionate. This is how it is supposed to work, when the changes are incremental.

Over the last few months I have embodied various messianic forces in my waking hours. I managed to reprogram myself to complete satisfaction and passivity, but then I decided that this wasn’t what I wanted and went a step further so I would be active again. Looking into the reports, this final step of being active once more is more ‘arahant-adjacent’ than the ultra-calm state I experienced before it. The ability to be your self without second-guessing or clinging.

But the reprogramming is ongoing and yesterday’s dreams felt like epiphanies. I am utterly convinced that we are nothing more than a pair of duelling perceptual frameworks in a lump of meat. One is rigid and resists change: the realworld. The other is elastic and resists solidity: the scaffold.

Last night I felt certain that matter itself only exists because of the mutual interaction of perceptual frameworks and physical forces. Matter and energy are the same, and in my dreams I have always been able to feel things as solid. I would fall off a building and feel the impact of the bones crushing through my flesh. I could pinch myself and feel it without waking. Yet at the same time, part of me always knew that I was dreaming.

The sense organs are all we know, and the framework is all we see. There is absolutely no way to know that we are not in a simulation, or indeed that we exist at all. However I believe that the only real things are the other people; the other perceptual frameworks. The framework can be polished like a mirror and the world will reflect that back at you, or it can be smeared with oily shit and the world will follow suit.

I watch my children making cutout Pokémon and playing together, one on one. These aren’t pretend to them. The Pokémon they have made, the kapigon-cookies and the play onigiri they are feeding them, are totally real. And this is what I call EMPATHY. A one-on-one process of reprogramming the framework through which ‘reality’ is filtered.

When I was locked in detention by the police in that scam I read a book called Bee Season, which I would never have touched otherwise. I didn’t even see the words; I saw images and movement and the world being described. When I was reading Excession I *was* the Sleeper Service and everyone inside. This is empathy, between an author and a reader. This is one-on-one empathy, just like Grimes somehow having made a tune called ‘Player of Games’ which popped up on my list right after I had finished the book ‘Player of Games’ in the first half of this journey. I was Gurgeh, and my strategy was taking form.

EMPATHY is not possible in a group. The second you have a third perceptual framework, EMPATHY ceases to exist. You have three stars in the equation, and the centre never rests on any of them unless you employ some contraption like a talking-stick. Worse - one of these perceptual frameworks can be an unmoving, unempathetic item like a clock or a camera, which will automatically dominate the flexible frameworks of the two individuals trying to share worlds. Come on - hurry up - we are running out of time. No - that’s not how you play. Read the rules - you’re doing it wrong.

And then - gone. No more empathy. No more magic.

So I think we have our own world, of which we are master. But we have these things like clocks and schedules and lists and group meetings which make us forget that we are master of our own reality. We take these proto-frameworks for perception and we place them on a pedestal and we say ‘this is right and I am wrong’ and then we lose the magic of our lives.

Those eternal summer days when you were a child; they are bled dry once you give the child a watch or a phone or a helicopter parent who is saying ‘hurry up we need to go’. And then we go and work in a society which says ‘do this and do that and here’s a meeting you need to sit in on for no reason other than to fill an hour’. We look at money and status and we say ‘that is what is worth pursuing’ and put down our homemade Pokémon and our dreams and our magical world and turn around 30 years later and break down and cry. We go to a doctor who says ‘your world is not the same as the average’ and gives us drugs which fracture our mind and pull us toward the centre of the universe, not realising that the universe has no centre apart from our own self.

What the world needs is more empathy. A father and a son. A mother and a daughter. But conscientious empathy. Not like the dogman, entraining his daughter with fear. Not like the two boys who want to play together but need to sit still in a class for 50 minutes before having 10 minutes to exchange information packets in the form of physical violence. 

Anyway. Time to take the kids to school. It’s good to be back. The altered states of the last 6 months were insane, but they were commensurate to the damage which the world had done to my psyche, which was compounded by the drugs and narrative from those doctors. The badly-set femur of my mind which I needed to break and break again in order to have it wind up in the right position.

Anyhow. I should use the unbroken femur of my leg to get these kids to school. It’s good to be myself again, minus the suffering that defined life to date. Good to be able to tell the dogman what I really think, but without the internal turmoil and hatred that would have defined such an action beforehand. Hopefully he will stay away from us, and as a stretch goal he might even try to fix his brain so he stops entraining his family with fear. But I’ll not hold my breath.

That letter is empathy. It’s skilful means. It’s one-on-one communication in a way that only I could do. Whether it works or not is out of my hands.

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