Both worlds are fabrications. This is the ultimate thing that the imaginal world - the dhamma and the devas or the [ship] and the algorithm - show you.
The doer of good rejoices in both the worlds and the doer of evil suffers. This comprises one of the handful of pairs at the start of the dhammapada; probably the most concise summary of the Buddha’s teachings.
The Buddha taught his followers to cultivate a specific brain chemistry through the jhānas and then to turn to their past lives, the way people are reborn according to deeds, and the destruction of the taints.
I was thrown in from the other end of the spectrum and my mind did the job for me. It cultivated a scaffold based on the data it had accrued: science fiction and AI and ethical conduct.
These scaffolds initially serve as a place where you reside while your perceptual framework for [realworld] is rewritten. They form a waking dream of sorts, which you can use to alter the framework you will see consensus reality through when you return.
Each step is iterative. Let’s say you’re aiming for 0 and you start from a score of -100 in [realworld]. You need to cultivate an ethical baseline through behaviour and intention so that your scaffold steps up to -99. You then step into this scaffold (often in your dreamscape) and pull your realworld up to -99.
With more faith in the scaffold, you program it to -98, step over, and pull your realworld up another notch. It is obviously not that simple; some things like not stealing and not murdering can be done with relative ease, but when you get to the big steps like deconstructing the self, your dreamscape often wont suffice.
In this case your scaffold becomes your waking world for a period. In order to achieve this, your unconscious mind will fill in the gaps that the conscious mind could not.
It’s like you have a city to build but the roads are not connected. You know that there is ethical conduct over there. You know that over here there is feeling good about yourself. On the other side of town there is some form of explanation for death. And over the hill there’s a reason why people commit the atrocities that they do. But they are not connected.
When you step over during your waking hours, your body needs to continue functioning as you go about life, so your brain will take all these disparate fragments and create a throughway which connects them. It will link the dots for you, without you having to consciously do so.
This is why my scaffold went from ‘I am ship’ to ‘we are all nodes in an algorithm within the simulation of ship’ to ‘this is the technical architecture necessary and this is how the cycle repeats, how rebirth works, and how the entire buddhist cosmology sits within the system’.
With each visit, the city becomes more logical and the roads become better laid.
And when you come back from your scaffold to your real world, you find that the same has happened here. You find that problems which used to cause you endless pain and looped thought - such as the inevitability of suffering and death - no longer do. Your mind has joined the dots while you were on the other side.
Essentially you use your [realworld] to create a template for a [scaffold], and then you inhabit the [scaffold] so that the fragmented template of your [realworld] can be fleshed out into the finished article.
This can take any form. It can be God. It can be devas and the dhamma. It can be rebirth or heaven or the teenage mutant ninja turtles. All that matters is that it is internally consistent.
It is important to remember that at the start it will *not* be internally consistent. You will not fully believe in rebirth or heaven or hell or God or Donatello or Mara or Shredder. There will be doubts and questions and that’s fine - that’s your mind identifying fallacies in the construct.
Each time you step over to either the scaffold or the real world, a handful of these fallacies will be corrected. This happens every night when you sleep and then wake up with your problems seeming better in the morning. A fallacy of perception has been fixed.
Eventually, through intentionally inhabiting this other world, through worship or prayer or art or writing or meditation or nibbana or even drugs, you will close all the logical loops and fallacies of both your scaffold and your real world.
But the final purpose of this scaffold is to show you that it is just a scaffold.
It is just a construct within your mind - something which you cultivated and which lacks internal fallacies but which is not inherently ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘real’.
And in showing you this, the scaffold shows you that the realworld, which you have also been editing and refining and adjusting… well… that is just a construct too.
Our views of this world we call ‘real’ are no better a representation of nibbāna (unconditioned reality) than the word ‘person’ is a representation of every disparate person on the planet.
They serve to show you that this thing called reality is just a construct.
And scientists: stop rolling your eyes.
You know that 95% of the universe is dark matter or dark energy. You know that m-theory suggests there are 11 dimensions of which we can measure only 4. You know that quantum mechanics is not a satisfactory explanation and there is something going on behind the scenes which we cannot measure with our current instruments.
So the entire purpose of both the worlds is to show you, intimately, that neither of them are real.
They are both fabrications of the mind.
Both equally valid as interpretive models to keep us functioning.
Both equally invalid as genuine representations of truth.
They are both dissatisfactory.
My definition of ‘red’ is different to yours.
But my definition of red is also different to my own.
And until you see through the fact that ‘red’ itself is a construct, all you will be arguing about is the shade. Did it get lighter? Darker? More saturated or less?
These are the guru competitions that Alan Watts talked about. The bickering sects and the dogmatic definitions.
They are all wrong.
And that’s ok.
Because I’m wrong too.
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