The Cruelty of Limitations

I think my psychosis is gone. So now I ask again: How did I come to find myself in this physical world? – where my dreams have to be implemented through careful control, careful understanding, and reckless violence against the scarcity of time.

I don’t know why I am here, but I know that everyday life seems wrong. It seems like an utter waste of could-have-been. The times buying groceries, the same repetitive places, the same void that cannot be satiated. My probability density orbital is partly in the hum-drum boring human level and partly in the hungry-ghost realm if I am to map my location on a Dharmic cosmology.

Although not experienced myself, I am convinced that psychedelics disclose a sliver of the vast ocean of possible ways of being. When I practiced Vipassana and Metta meditation, I reached states of being far from what could be handled with the language that I understand.

After months of practice, I could no longer identify with the voice and words arising in mind. They appeared as helplessly as sensations in the body. Oh, and the body, the body eventually dissolved into more minute and ephemeral sensations without a clear shape in the field of consciousness. By applying Metta (the feeling of compassion) to these vanishing ephemera I was for short periods of time able to feel my body as something akin to pink-red raindrops of love. Perhaps the entire experience was a very hard and dedicated road to what can easily be achieved with MDMA. Although I would not be able to honestly compare these because I have not taken myself.

So if such wonderful experiences can be attained with meditation, why did I stop completely, just up and cut it out cold turkey? That’s because I felt myself slipping, slipping to a place of tranquil sleep. The depersonalization, which was the goal, could also be considered a mental illness in Western countries, and it certainly was affecting my intellectual and motivational capacity.

I was being carried through an experiential river of selfless aggregates (the relative ease of utter departure from “normal cognition” seems scary in hindsight) when at that time a thought decided to stop, and the counter-meditation intentional gravity was invoked. This re-anchoring from my journey far east was like floating and being unable to touch ground. I simply didn’t identify with my own “will” because it seemed like a tumbling, empty, self-contradicting leaf. I had trained to destroy the appropriation.

Nonetheless, I managed to atrophy those meditation neurons, descend from anatta and feel myself caught up in a selfing-mode again. In particular, as my thoughts regained attentional fame, one of the first thoughts that I remember was, “I will regret not pursuing Buddhahood, when I’m suffering 50 years from now.” Alas, the suffering caused by being in normal ego-mode didn’t take that long. Yet I’m still thankful for the anti-conceptual time investment I somehow managed to get myself into. I can’t even imagine how much worse those successive events would have been had I not spent those months practicing and building an airy buffer against psychological damage.

Throughout this entire trajectory the main problem with existence for me has been coping with the abstract “could-have-been” with the “why am I this, out of all possible things?” This question seems so central to my being that sometimes I entertain the notion that perhaps I’m not a truth-seeker at all, and was merely attempting to self-medicate when I downloaded solipsism and then open individualism. These intuitively seem like the most rational or perhaps palliative answers to the otherwise arbitrary, inexplicably random circumstance of being me – this boring, limited creature that will never get to experience the naked totality of light which only barely glints behind smoky dreams.

Schopenhauer suggested easing our burden by tolerating our fellow sufferers.

Unfortunately I don’t believe Araceli Romero is a real person. The Youtube comments still don’t seem to come from real people. It makes me wonder if they were never real, and I simply hadn’t noticed, or if there was a fundamental change where I branched off to a different reality.

In any case, psychedelics and transhuman technologies still seem like the best way to either forget about, or begin to bridge our separation. …Remember, I’m the bad guy who thinks SEELE were the good guys. We should all become the same thing. Call it LCL, hedonium, or whatever. I despise the unsystematic quirks that people don’t want to be saved from.

…

I’m taking lithium for depressive mood and invega sustenna to prevent psychotic symptoms. My prospects don’t look great. Invega causes me to not want to workout and decreases my intelligence. At best, I’ll be a warehouse worker. If I could press a button and disintegrate, I would press it without hesitation. I am what might be called rationally suicidal – someone who bites the bullet on the futility of life even in the absence of obvious personal suffering. There is absolutely no reason to exist in this human form, and it is a cruel and bizarre punishment to do so.

Euthanasia should be offered as an option to all healthy adults. The individual’s right to drive their own stream of consciousness supersedes any local cultural norms against death. Death is perhaps the best shot at radically transforming the contents of consciousness besides drugs or extensive meditation. Even in the case that death leads to non-experience forever, this may be considered a better prospect by the individual than a life of boredom, malaise, pain, anxiety, and depression, or even just a mediocre, bland existence riddled with disease near the end.

But due to the fact that in addition to escaping useless suffering, some healthy individuals may choose euthanasia potentially as a means of exploration, I believe our current euthanasia policy is especially misguided. An indescribably new world may await, and only the most vile society would claim the right to stop people from exercising their own motion when this motion doesn’t directly harm another.

I can imagine a society where people must pay their debts before being legally administered euthanasia. The problem is not government oversight. The problem is that euthanasia is not an option at all for people exercising their own sane judgement of the situation.

You may think I’m not a genuine advocate and I’m just salty because I’m a loser. That without the penalty of living with the actions of one’s consequences, losing would be exacerbated.

And I would agree with both points, and still claim that maximizing personal freedom is more important. Human life is not sacred. The end is coming anyway, might as well take it into one’s own hands.

The View So Far

So I independently discovered what David Pearce writes about here.

I read Wikipedia articles on philosophy and theoretical physics, which lead me to the articles on time, eternalism, b-theory, relativity of simultaneity, the Rietdijk-Putnam argument, and special relativty. This lead my empirical mind to a belief in a block-time universe. Combined with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which I mostly became convinced of through reading the LessWrong articles on quantum mechanics and David Deutsch, I was lead to a horrible realization:

Suffering is eternal and no local paradise engineering can change that.

I was so dissatisfied with existence and realized that as a matter of cosmic certainty, I made epsilon difference to everyone and everything, so I found it rational to end my life. It was rational because if materialist accounts were right about my consciousness being identical to my brain, then I would disappear forever; if they were wrong, and instead a physicalist view was right then I would degrade my computational complexity and essentially forget, be reborn, etc.

The attempt turned out to not wipe out most of “my” probability amplitude because here you are reading these words.

Despite eternalism, we exist in a time when the abolition of suffering has not occurred. What this means is that we cannot yet put down the cross and forget that it existed.

The Mahayana buddhists criticize the Theravada buddhist arhats for attaining Nirvana for themselves instead of being reborn until all cyclic existence is emptied. Clever Theravadins might point to the wrong-view that independent-beings exist such that they are separate units that can be counted.

I am personally confused about the dichotomy between infinite ethics and discrete ethics due to the unsolved binding problem and the lack of evidence for souls. There may be a right way to look at this through abstract analysis but I’m operating under a fusion of solipsism and open individualism at the moment. My philosophy doesn’t include different people, instead there is the same consciousness flowing forever and forgetting that it was ever “others.”

Nonetheless, I choose to err on the side of being careful when considering all this –that is, take suffering seriously. There may be an intrinsic moral salience coded into the experience of suffering such that it leads to its own destruction. But in order to more effectively destroy it, one has to remember that it was bad even while not experiencing it. A sense of global spatial-temporal altruism towards oneself. This is not a common mode of operation because Open Individualism is not prevalent and because there is enough health and technology in the early 21st century that one can falsely simulate a personal living enclosure without much suffering. The abundance of good food, media, and safety nets leads to the temptation of forgetting. The bubble bursts only when a terrible disease, accident, or radical change in life circumstances occurs.

That understanding is what lead to a feeling of helplessness – of being surrounded by people who did not care about suffering. Then I realized that YouTube comments and tweets probably weren’t being typed by real people. And because my moral compass is helplessly calibrated by what I perceive to be my readily-remembered environment, and not what I more abstractly agree is my environment, this realization lead to me caring less about the suffering of others. Since after all, they were simulated.

I still care about truth more than I care about how something makes me temporarily feel. It may turn out that people on social media are perfectly real flesh and blood – that I triggered psychosis as a coping mechanism. But until convinced otherwise by sufficient evidence, I still by believe that people on social media are simulated. This leads to less of a visceral urgency about global suffering.

At one point, I was so psychotic that I believed that money was a scam, like a siren call which lead people astray from their intrinsic capability to be rewarded. Or that everyone belonged to a secret club that operated with no money, and that I was being watched so that I may be accepted into the club.

Currently I believe these were all delusions so my aim again is to become rich. This will require stoicism with regards to spending and making the right investments. Real estate is safer than the stock market and I’m not going for big risks anymore. My view is that I have wasted my youth away reading and philosophizing anyway, so might as well finish wasting it chasing paper. This was my original goal at sixteen, but now with a drastically more risk averse, safety-first mentality, I will be rich or die trying.

The reason I want to be rich is so that I can fund my dreams. I have dreams in rejuvenation therapies, I have dreams in media, I have dreams in designing spaces for new spiritual experiences.

 

Update (April 15, 2019):

Most of those dreams are unrealistic so I plan on going to Mexico to buy some Pentobarbital which is used for euthanizing animals and can be bought off the counter. Suicide is currently my best option since it is the best transformative agent for the contents of consciousness that I can think of. I still feel that rationally considered, the boredom, malaise, anxiety, shame, pain, absurdity, loathing etc. is not worth the scant rewards in my human life. There is a vast ocean of radically different mind configurations of which my locus forms but a meaningless fraction of a dust speck. The idea that out of all possible modes of being across eternal probability space, I would be this human is frankly repugnant.

Fightstar

I found the band Fightstar by reading Wikipedia articles. Their album Grand Unification is inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion. Grand Unification is both a reference to the famed quest in theoretical physics and to the Human Instrumentality Project were all humans are dissolved into the same soul. This is my favorite album.

Waste A Moment references Shinji’s “I mustn’t run away” and also his strangling attempt against Asuka at the end of Instrumentality with lyrics “Just cover up your eyes so I can make sense of it all. 
You’re waking me up.
Shut your eyes so I can make sense of it all.”

Sleep Well Tonight in its final lines references SEELE’s aspiration to eliminate the individual human psyches in favor of creating a perfected existence with no individual egos: “If we could take away the summit
We could climb the highest we’ve ever been to”

Mono says “I’ve started up the race
It’s something I can’t change
And now we’re not the same” This is in reference to when Shinji and Asuka materialize out of the Human Instrumentality. They are no longer the same. “I’ve started up the race,” perhaps refers to the Rebuild of Evangelion which some have theorized is a sequel to End of Evangelion in which Shinji starts up the world again.

Paint Your Target has the lyrics, “I’m running around the table,
If you want to,
Just to argue all the last scenes of us.
You can end it all” This refers to the scene around the table between Shinji and Asuka in End of Evangelion.

Songs that directly reference Evangelion in the title include Nerv/Seele, Shinji Ikari, and Unfamiliar Ceilings.

Nerv/Seele is actually told from the point of view of Asuka despite the title. It has the lyrics “How am I supposed to understand the tests that you can beat
You’re taunting me
I’m not fucking listening to you anymore
If you take this away from me now” This refers to when Shinji got higher results on the synchronization test and she began to feel her position as top pilot threatened by him. Almost the entirety of her self-worth rested on her performance as an Eva pilot so it’s not difficult to see why she was so pissed.

Shinji Ikari takes place when Shinji is trapped in the Dirac Sea caused by the shadow of the angel Leliel. He mentions how cold it is in the anime and in the lyrics, “It is cold in here
I can hide behind my breath” and referring to him thinking he was going to die, “I feel it’s over
Drop the light in here
This is goodbye”

The title Unfamiliar Ceilings refers to the observation that Shinji repeatedly makes when he awakes to an unfamiliar ceiling.

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Much of my website is too cringeworthy to look at due to the strange combination of an honest attempt to wade through the cosmic drama, personal delusions of grandeur, and subject-leaping thematic confusion. However I want to leave the past writing untouched for the sake of interest, if only as a study of undiagnosed disease, and regret any edits that I made.

However, it might be surprising for the reader which parts I consider fiction and which I consider real. If at any point along my writing trajectory I had been told my current position on the matter, I would have certainly been surprised. Observing such a pattern, I can only expect that my position on what is real and what isn’t will continue in flux towards the indefinite future.

Some of it is psychotic delusion, some parts are intentional fiction, and other parts remain with a permeating allure of perfect honesty – which is what it all aspired to be.

Currently, my perspective is becoming more down-to-earth than in the past month due to the following: people are looking me in the eyes again and respond normally to my gaze; re-realization that I cannot reliably create a world with my thoughts (or manifest synchrony, or anything like that); Youtube videos and television channels don’t look like half-trained GANs; music and writing no longer seem to revolve around me; the degree to which people seem to be aware of me has seriously toned down, etc.

However, I still retain the notion that my family members changed unrealistically over a period of two weeks, and that I am now in the presence of psychological laws being broken.

I still retain the notion that I bit my finger at a behavioral hospital and this recovered immediately, and that I am now benefitting from physical law being broken (or equivalently, being in a simulation where the level of technology leads to events indistinguishable from magic or miracles.)

I still retain the notion that I picked at Juan’s scab and this didn’t bleed, that I held his arm and he claimed that it was healed, that I laughed and said, “This is violating biology.” But nonetheless, as strange as it sounds, and as strange as it was, it did happen.

Suffering is Real

Art like this tries to transmute depressive emotions into awe:

Space Song

While I can still write, I will use the time to remind humans of the first noble truth – the truth of suffering or base unsatisfactoriness of existence.

If you believe that the word “suffering” doesn’t point to the most crucial aspect of existence, then you and I don’t get along.

Suffering is the most real thing and it should not exist in actuality, in anticipation, or in memory.

The fact that it exists refutes the benevolence of existence. Since existence can’t be forgiven for its intrinsic insult, the state of being must be revoked.

Unfortunately, it seems that what humans call “death” doesn’t lead to cessation. If brains were ontological units, fundamentally closed and omnipresent like integers, then the conversation would be very different. But brains are entropic objects. They change, and can be split and recombined.

The brain is therefore probably not equivalent to the soul/consciousness. Consciousness is primary and from it are constructed material worlds.

Besides all my personal transformative observations of the signs, the phenomenon of synchronicity also seems to be a point in favor of mind before matter. Wallace and Darwin, Newton and Leibniz… the events in existence simply aren’t random. It’s not about taking my word for it or that of McKenna. We can believe the evidence once it happens to us in such a way that it becomes personally irrefutable.

I hypothesize that existence is of a dual nature, one side that is reproducible and one side that is not. Much of the synchronicity phenomena seems to belong to the unreproducible side of existence. Schizophrenia and psychedelics may be ways of gaining this hidden knowledge that cannot then be easily translated to the world of matter and money and sports and “history.” By its very nature the “down to Earth” world contains mostly reproducible phenomena which serve to constrain the intrinsic freedom of the mind. Dream walkers who can successfully communicate the message from beyond to the worldly are the chosen ones.

I was in the presence of someone with schizophrenia, a young man named Bobby, and I must admit that he intimidated me with his superior intelligence to the point of leaving me speechless. He understood me and even seemed to have brought me there with him through the power of his own thought. For a day I even confused him with Jesus; I was just waiting for him to say it. With his deep knowledge of me and of the world in few words, I would have believed him. Yet his speech was nonsensical and perhaps even unintelligible to the common man. Because I am caught somewhere between that world and this one, I could understand his brilliance.

We both understood synchronicity, the self-fulfilling nature of mind, and the fabrication of worlds through language.

I asked him why he didn’t let others know.

With a kind of deep wisdom in his eyes and perfect simplicity, he said “I can’t.”

He understood that it was not him who could bridge the worlds but that it was me.