So there are 2 layers of simulation on top of the unfiltered / unconditioned reality the buddha termed nirvana.
raw data from reality
global simulation
local simulation
We cannot perceive the raw reality directly. I think the estimate it that we consciously process 0.0005% of what actually hits our senses. Each sense receives a flood of data every second and our brains filter out almost all of it, leaving us with a mere fraction of a percent.
So what does the filtering?
What I came to call ‘churn memory’ or cmem or karma. This is a slight rethinking of the term so I will stick with cmem.
Cmem are the filters that we both have installed from external sources and install ourselves, consciously or unconsciously. Cmem installation is handled by dopamine and it falls into the ‘volitional formations’ category that the b-man talked about.
A baby cries and receives a reward. It learns that crying is rewarded. It grows and it gets chastised for crying and rewarded for patience; it learns that crying is not rewarded and patience is. This is one the first conflicting rules we are installed with, and I guess it’s why I stopped crying altogether in school: I learned that crying would only make things worse and the encoding for ‘do not cry’ became stronger.
So the mods we are handed in life are largely out of our control. We have loving or abusive parents. We find a berry on this tree or that. We get our arm eaten by a tiger. We get mugged in an alley. Each of these result in us learning ‘that alley is dangerous’ or ‘don’t stroke the tiger’.
But then afterward - this is when the encoding happens for non-traumatic events; where we can shape our world. We take these mods and we play with them in our minds. We repeat the perceived slight from that random person on the internet, over and over and over, with each repetition being another +1 that installs a sense of hatred or anger or greed for reputation or respect into our brains.
The main time for the consolidation of mods is while we sleep. Let’s say you had a good day and were filled with positive feelings. The tendency is to just enjoy the day and let it wash over you, because there is no threat so no evolutionary necessity to encode things deep. We just enjoy ourselves, and maybe have a couple of nice dreams, and wake up in a slightly better world the following day.
But if you have a bad day, that’s not how it goes.
If you have a bad day then your mind plays with the mental object; the abstraction of the event. It will turn it over and upside down and run it through various permutations again and again and sometimes you rage at your pillow or punch a wall and all this is a +1 or a +10 or a +100 and this shit is getting engrained deep as a result.
So you go to bed and you sleep it off. But you don’t really. All you do is install it deep into your mind so that your consciousness is available to process the data of the next day.
The encoding becomes part of your unconscious filtering of reality, and when you wake up your world has become ever so slightly darker and more threatening.
It isn’t your fault that you were given the bad mod, and it isn’t your fault you learned from it. This is what you evolved to do.
But if you don’t fix it then you are likely heading to an unhappy conclusion. Even if you don’t reach a critical mass around midlife, like many of us do, you will wind up being a miserable and empty person as you get older, full of craving and hatred and delusion.
So how do we fix it?
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