raining-mushrooms

Sometimes I take notice of someone for some reason — and the next moment I get lost in a flashflood of hazy daydreams wondering about how it's like to be them: what do they see through their eyes, what are they feeling or focusing on, what are they thinking about, how do they think? I can see their body shape is different, so that must feel different. I think I extrapolate how that might feel like, my body shape changed throughout the years. Perhaps I can also summon a hazy impression of what others see, their perspective, and what lies within their field of view. I can imagine the weight they feel on their feet, maybe even the refreshing breeze they can feel on parts of their skin. I make the assumption that how those people experience sensations is similar to mine. My (and hopefully yours?) tactile sensations anchor me, providing a spatial awareness of my body — I can 'feel' the support my chair is providing to my back and butt, although 'support' just seems to be the wrong word. But what about your internal thinking world? Is the hopeless attempt to experience 'being someone else' as hopeless of an endeavor as trying to learn a sport by watching it on TV and reading books about it? (Fun fact: practicing by imagining yourself playing a sport make you better)

If you ever recorded yourself on a video and heard yourself talk, you (me?) are eventually faced with the grim surprise that you sound and act very different to how you thought you sounded and acted. Turns out, you don't even know what you look like, what you sound like, what your gestures are, what you'll do or what you'll say or how it would be perceived. And if you don't even know thyself (maybe Socrates did?), then how can you even start to know the experience of others where the amounts of unknowns is unknowably much larger, and there is no way to check if you're ever correct in your perception or imagination.

Here's another terrible thought: whatever you think in your head is completely different from what words come out of your mouth or get written down. The 'perfect' communication system would be telekinesis by which a person can essentially become another person and experience exactly what they experience for a period of some time. The universe does not allow this: for some reason me, I, my other I's, and you are different things. One cannot even communicate properly with oneself. One can write something down, but when it is read later it will not re-create your mood, what your thoughts were and your exact state of mind at the time of writing. Art can take us closer to perfect communication, but if you take something like the average poem or painting then not only is it subjective and open to interpretation but you're really unsure of what they mean half the time without biasing yourself with others' explanations in your search for meaning of the art. However one can't deny that art conveys some 'feeling' and communicates the the indescribable — this is the paradoxical reality we live in. It is why modern art is a thing whether you like it or not (I still can't decide whether I like it or not). If you can't communicate with yourself, and you can't communicate with others, then are you different than the others? You can't control them anymore than you can control yourself. I can't control myself, most of the times we don't do the things we think we should do. You've been lazy, anxious, depressed, even a little bit crazy before and you definitely didn't act how you wanted to act. So this begs the question: who are you?

Focus and awareness feel like integral parts of your consciousness and mind. You are aware of something and therefore you exist. If you're not aware of anything, you don't exist. You might be thinking then “are you suggesting I don't exist any time I go to sleep then?”. Ask yourself: did you feel like you existed when you slept? Suppose you didn't dream at all, in that case you went to sleep (and you didn't notice falling asleep or losing 'consciousness') and then you woke up the next moment but time suddenly skipped. Perhaps your memory or 'ego' did not exist in that moment for you, you were not aware of it. However, you didn't disappear, you still woke up as you and not as somebody else. Let's try a little fun Buddhist experiment — let's try to (at least a little) dissolve your ego without a heroic amount of mushrooms. The experiment is very simple: you simply reject who you are. In practice all we need to do is think of who we are, and reject it. Try saying this out-loud or in your head: I am NOT , I am NOT a , I am NOT , I am NOT , I am NOT , I like strawberries (but this is not who I actually am) — and so on and so forth. Keep chipping away at your ego little by little, until you run out of things to stop identifying with. At the end, you will notice that you have no more thoughts about your ego self. You will notice there is a quiet stillness, and you will notice that you are aware of the quiet stillness. You just dissolved everything there is about you, and yet the only thing left is the 'awareness' that is aware of the stillness. You cannot dissolve that part away, no matter how hard you try. You can't even know where this feeling comes from, or where it spatially is. If you do this multiple times, you notice that you always arrive at the same awareness or feeling of observing and stillness. Is this then, you? Are you the awareness of experiencing something? Who are you?

Are you the translation function between awareness and actions? But it doesn't feel like you control many of your actions, or your emotions, or even thinking (Thoughts don't stop, and you largely don't control the content if at all.) But control is everything in today's society. But if we're so terrible at control, why does human nature strive for control? Control in your personal life, over your mind, body, emotions and even other people. This desire to control reality to fit your expectations is the cause of suffering. I have felt the terrible tsunami of dread that envelops your whole reality and seconds after you wake up, precisely at the moment that you start remembering who you are and where you are and regain your sense of 'self'. Schizophrenics identify seemingly random events and tie them to their sense of self, that is why they are paranoid. The black van in the driveway becomes a police spy van that is spying on me, not just a random van. Is this any different from yourself — imagine someone not liking you for some reason, your immediate reaction is to look for faults within your inner self (which is completely different from your external self that the other person sees, so why do we get so upset at the internal self and trying to find faults in there)? Who is wrong and who is right here? Why have expectations at all, then?

What is the common opposite of desire, expectations and control? Desire and expectations are two words that mean precisely the same thing, but what about control? Control is fantasy. Control is the measure of your ability to mold reality in order to arrive at your desire and expectations. Control is measuring the gap between your expected outcome and the actual outcome. But if control is derived from these two things, then how is it possible that we can try and control our expectations? I can say to myself “My expectation is to not expect anything, or to only expect things that WILL happen so I can feel a high degree of control.” I think you can see the issue here — you can't expect that you're not going to expect anything because that is an expectation in itself. Hey, this is starting to sound a lot like confidence.

What is fantasy anyway? I spend a lot of time there, and I want to know. Fantasy is bootleg control, and I'd like to note that any control is good control in our minds. We're all addicted to some kind of fantasy, be it scrolling the totally awesome and fantastic lives of others on social media, playing and winning at competitive video games, or really, and I mean really wanting someone to pee on you. You, or perhaps more accurately your ego doesn't live in reality, instead it lives in your mind, and I mean in the literal sense. For example your mood changes every day, from bad to good, one day you feel like your job is good, then the other day you feel like it's bad. Same with your relationships, including the relationship with yourself (how can a singular object have a relationship with itself?), you feel confident one hour and the next you don't and your whole reality changes. However, reality in the physical world doesn't really change. You're still the same person, working the same job, earning the same amount of money, you look the same physically, you live in the same place and sleep in the same bed etc.) This is why the ego can get immersed in a fantasy world, or enter a flow state, for example when you're really into a movie and time passes by seamlessly, or you're watching in pornography etc. The moment you're done watching porn, or the game is over, reality sets in — just like waking up in the morning from a surreal dream and regaining your sense of self. Your ego did was satisfied for the moment because you were in control. Since we live in our ego, and the ego doesn't live in reality, the substitution works because we really do live out a part of our dream by fantasizing about it. Your ego identifies with the fantasy world, and in the fantasy world you're the one in control (it feels good to win, it feels good to wear diapers and baby roleplay). Of course, this doesn't last long and you will snap back to the reality world eventually, and that world can suck.

When I go camp in the isolated woods, without any distractions, I regain my sense of control (in other words, confidence) after a couple of days. Some variation of this happens to me every single time I go on vacation, it's a clear pattern. Why do I regain my sense of control? Because my expectations start to match my reality. I do not consciously recognize how this happens, but I somehow start losing expectations that aren't perceivable in my immediate environment. When I am camping, my expectations are that I feed myself, sleep, make it to the next day, try to explore around or hike a bit and just relax, and nothing else. These expectations are easy to meet, because that's exactly what I'm doing and I feel alive and like a fully normal human being. The obvious question is then, why do I lose this feeling of confidence when I come back from vacation (or a psychedelic trip) (also over the period of a few days/weeks)? Well let's look at my immediate ego environment — I wake up and check social media, chats, reddit. I always sustain some sort of addiction or vice whether to a game, drug, unhealthy food, porn, or some other sort of fantasy. Some other lucky people have healthy addictions, like going to the gym and making steady progress or rock climbing and feeling the satisfaction of a successful climb etc. The unfortunate flaw of healthy addictions is they always require a healthy amount of effort to exert control and bridge your expectations (for example, beating your personal record on a lift) with reality. Whereas jerking off to porn, takes no effort or discomfort whatsoever. The saying “It's not the destination, it's the journey.” or “If you expect disappointment, then you can never really get disappointed.” or even “ignorance is bliss” comes to mind. In the context of our discussion, the sayings would translate to expecting that the journey will be hard, since if we expect the journey is hard (and it will be hard) our expectations will match reality.

RRRIIING RRRRRIIING Oh it's the ego calling us, and it's got this to say: You're smart (or strong, or handsome, or funny... pick your poison) and the best :) “These things should be easy, they're only hard because you're stupid not because they're just hard.” Ok, thanks ego. It was kind of my fault I guess anyway, I shouldn't have expected myself to be smart (but I am, I am smarter and I do some things better than other people!) We're only human, we're basically born to make mistakes, that is the default of our existence. Why do I think I'm smart in the first place? Why do I have any kind of expectations? Why do I have any kind of desires at all? Why do I have certain fetishes, or like certain people? Is it just in our nature, inseparable, we want to sleep/eat/fuck and there's nothing we can do about it? Or is it the external environment molding our behaviors, telling us what to desire? After all, fantasy is about telling us how to desire. The perfect body shape/sex appeal/clothing etc. changes throughout decades. Our fantasies don't come from nowhere, we are largely programmed by our culture to know what is desirable and to know what to and how to desire. This leads us to the ultimate question of why things are good or bad, or why they exist at all.

How do we take a step back? Do we try to to rewrite your expectations or do we try to exert effort and exercise control to bend reality? Why the hell do I have these pesky expectations anyway? I didn't sign up for this. Desires are controlled by your state of existence, your personality, physicality, environment, and largely the subconscious ego that holds all of your expectations, baggage, trauma etc. We can try and change some of these factors, but we can't predict where our actions are going to take us and how our desires might change. On top of that, you can't change your memory, past, unconscious framework, you're not an enlightened guru who might be able to do those. You have a job and each Monday there are artificial and useless expectations of you to do something and deliver something on time, and that feeds into your expectation that you need to work and survive, which in turn is why you're putting up with the bullshit job in the first place. The truth is, I don't know the answer and I'm just as lost as you are. Maybe you can manifest change, or escape to temporal fantasy, or work hard, or meditate your expectations out, or become a detached observed, or just constantly reassure yourself 'it is what it is'.

Learning is simply rewriting your expectations. You expect you can do something. You try doing it. You can't do it. You learn why you can't do it. Now you expect to not be able to do it unless you do that particular thing you just learned to do. The subconscious is a bundle of expectations that you've learned at one point in life but then forgot, however the expectation is still there you're just not aware of it. Maybe they are ingrained in us, maybe you just forgot them from when you were a child or new born. After all, we know for sure that the environment you grow up in has a drastic effect (and the way your body turns out also counts as the environment) on who you are (or in fact, it is everything that your ego is). Why do I expect the world to be just and good? Why do I expect to be charming and smart? Why do I expect to be good at what I do? Well, on one hand, if I didn't expect to be driven towards what I believe is 'good', then jumping off a roof would be a totally cool idea since one has no expectations whatsoever. The problem here again is that the bundle of what we consider 'good' is also just a bunch of expectations.

What does a worm expect? Neverminded, I can't even imagine where to begin with that one. What does a cat expect instead? Not much for many ordinary cats: food, play, a place to rest, having control of their territory, exploring around etc. and they'll generally be happy. Okay, cats have less and more simple expectations than us, what's the big deal? You lose all your expectation in your dreams because you don't identify with your expectations anymore, then you wake up and remember them and become depressed. Also because you forget your expectations, dreams aren't as scary as they are in real life. I got stabbed, chased by maniacs, saw monsters and horrors, walked in dark labyrinths and experienced jump scares in my dreams, got sexually assaulted by a cardboard box full of dirty grey socks — all this to say that I didn't woke up with shit in my pants. I would have definitely shit my pants in real life, or worse! Maybe I forgot to expect what is scary or how to react to fear in my dreams. But you also lose the ability to think in your dreams, you're observing but the ego part of you is not “online”. Interestingly enough, thoughts are still happening, you have opinions etc. but the thoughts kind of just flow by and you don't identify or attach to them like you would when you're awake. This is similar to meditation. In our dreams we do lose the ability to control ourselves, unless we regain our awareness and identify/focus in on the stream of thoughts. At that point we would enter a lucid dream, and you are able to control the world without its physical expectations like gravity etc. The moment we wake up, our expectation network and external sensations (meaning the expectation network is also external) comes online and starts imposing itself onto your world.

Where do we go from here? I don't know. I'm not sure how to end this. Perhaps the only effective tool I have discovered it to try and change your immediate environment — but what if you cant? Then you have to change your expectations — but what if you also can't? Keep going.