Immaterial Navigation

In a world without matter, what really matters? Essentially, it’s how you feel. You could be the richest most successful person in the entire world, but if you don’t feel good, so what? If you’re plagued by worry, discontentment, frustration, annoyance, pessimism, aches, sleeplessness, etc. you won’t have a good time. And that’s why an immaterial world is so convenient – it’s a blank slate. Therefore, you’ll want to focus on feeling good.

For example, you’ll want to focus on feeling love – being loved, loving others, enjoying things, appreciating – that sorta thing. You’ll also want to focus on feeling lighthearted – laughing, having fun, and prioritizing a good time wherever you are. You’ll also want to focus on creativity – doing things and making stuff, interacting with tools and materials. You’ll also want to focus on feeling like a winner – acknowledging and admiring the stuff you do.

In a world without matter, focus brings whatever you focus on into being. If you focus on negativity, you experience negativity. If you focus on positivity, you experience positivity. It’s simple arithmetic with significant consequences. This means you CANNOT let your mind wander. It’ll wander wherever, including unpleasant places, and you will suffer. Keep your hands on the wheel, your focus is what steers your experience.

Therefore, whenever you feel bad, know that your focus is at fault – and fix it. This is the essence of traveling through the immaterial world. But that’s not the whole story of course, there’ll be spots of turbulence that’ll shake you up a bit – just buckle-in and try your best to get through as calmly as you can. Turbulence typically involves a bunch of unrelated things going wrong at once – try to steer out of it but accept that it’ll be difficult.

Finally, keep in mind that existence in an immaterial world is an expression of a divine love. You are loved, you are supported, you are supposed to flourish like a flower. Skies turn grey and rain falls, things get muddy, but the sun rises high with glowing warmth. Grow and expand, appreciate the pretty petals arrayed around you. This is your garden, it’s where you belong.

Metaphysical Optimization

If you’re in a world without matter – be it a dream, spiritual realm, or simulation – how can you live the best life?

First, let’s consider living in a material world. A physical world is fraught with random chance, decay, lack, limitation, illness, and other such maladies resulting in the need for survival, resource management, time management, governments, healthcare, etc. – it’s a logistical nightmare. So it’s plain to see that an immaterial world offers a more refined approach – but that doesn’t make it the easy route per se, there’s still considerations to be made.

For one, if you already defaulted to a physical perspective, it takes a lot of mental discipline to wean yourself away from the teat of matter. It looks real, it feels real, it smells real, it even tastes real – therefore it must be real. To accept a world in which sensed-objects are mere illusion is a tall order. And once you strip away the daily adventures of a physical world, what’s left? It’s certainly possible to prefer the gritty grind of materiality.

So step one is determining whether it’s even the right path. But if you find that physical reality is just too unpleasant, spiritual reality might be a better direction. Another issue with immateriality is that you take on a mountain of responsibility. In a physical world, you can blame all your problems on external circumstances whereas in a spiritual world, YOU are the source of all your problems. Although for a DIYer, that might be empowering.

Second, simply destroying the notion of matter isn’t the ideal approach – it’ll leave you with existential angst. You need a grounding foundation to anchor to within the matter-less space of spirituality. Love is the answer, of course. Therefore, you need to see existence as an expression of a divine love. Imagine love being such a potent force that life just bursts forth – so powerful in fact, that it begets entire civilizations filled with people popping up like gardens full of flowers – beautiful in variety and brimming with activity.

And YOU grow within this bountiful garden. Surrounded by dirt, you begin as a seed with an inkling to sprout past the mud and grow toward the light. Yet you’re overwhelmed, your surroundings seem like filth and the changing scenery frightens you, the intensity is too much. What began as an expression of love is unpleasant to you. You think: this is no garden, but a dumpster.

It is this attitude that must be undone to reveal the beauty of the garden. Yet how can a flower understand its place in the world? Because love is so powerful, it grants you the capacity of consciousness – an ability to know you exist. But it’s this consciousness and associated free-will that allows you to misinterpret the situation. In actuality, the garden is perfect as it is, and you within it are perfect as you are.

To thrive, you need only unfurl your leaves and soak in the warmth of the resplendent sun. Fearfully hiding away keeps you from the light. There’s no strain or struggle to get there, it’s already here – you simply open up to it. Therefore, within a world without matter, your task is to flourish – to express the love you embody in a lighthearted exhibition of creativity and achievement.

Does Matter Matter

To me, the world has always appeared harsh, unfair, unpleasant, uncomfortable, nonsensical, etc. There are some okay aspects, but fundamentally I don’t like it. But the question is: is that due to a bad attitude, or maybe I’ve got the wrong approach, or is existence truly a trying experience?

As an experiment, I spent many years attempting to alter my attitude and perspective – but I’m still not loving it. There’s only one option left… double-down on the attitude/perspective change. I’m going all-in on “philosophical idealism” (the concept that thoughts constitute reality, the opposite of realism). Basically, the physical world has never been my friend – so I’m ending this toxic relationship.

Mind you, I have no natural spiritual inclination. I began as a skeptical pessimist (or realist), only believing in what could be proven with physical evidence within a very tangible world. Therefore, I approach spirituality from a practical standpoint i.e. if my previous perspective failed, why not try the opposite? Plus, spirituality promised a bunch of super-powers.

The world is absurd, so I have no choice but to approach it absurdly. This includes denying material existence. I will attempt to rout out every drop of the material mind I started with. Existence is now completely spiritual in nature, it is an expression of divine love – and my thoughts will be trained to know only this.

Tethering Thoughts

To the casual observer, I don’t do much. Yet raging on the inside is a storm of activity in which I’m constantly wrestling monsters of all sorts. Many years ago I made it my mission to defeat these monsters. I’m a tenacious hunter so this cat and mouse game is a lot of what I do. Think of fear as a bully and his gang harassing you, it’s relentless but you’re too proud and stubborn so you fight back every time. You’re roughed-up but you’re scrappy and don’t like being pushed around. Just stay down, but you can’t, you stagger to your feet and the punishment continues.

In-between bouts you try to train yourself and research whatever you can in order to conquer these monsters. First, you attack them directly – and it kinda works. Shine a light into a dark area and it’s no longer dark. But the monster is fear itself, therefore it simply changes form. And unfortunately, fear can weave itself into literally anything. If you push it out of easy-to-spot locations, it’ll just crawl deeper into the recesses. Essentially, wherever you go, there it is. In short, it’s futile to attack fear’s perceived manifestations.

You could go so far as to dismantle any notion of physical reality from your consciousness and fear would simply be waiting for you in the spiritual realm. Thus, fear itself must be overcome. How? Consider the fact that fear follows you wherever you go. Also consider that fear only exists within narratives. What this means is that fear only lives within a contrived fiction. And who’s concocting these scary stories that appear everywhere you are? It’s simple arithmetic: you.

Something becomes scary whenever you incorporate it within a frightening tale. Stop doing this and fear can’t form – fear requires the medium of mythology. So instead of fighting fear directly, you undermine it. For example, don’t entertain pessimistic predictions i.e. stop telling yourself stories about potentially unpleasant consequences. If you continue doing so, you’re just a masochist that enjoys hurting yourself for the fun and excitement of it – find a new hobby.

Or, you’re lazy, and you don’t put in the effort to stay mindful. Being aware of what’s going through your thoughts is not an option – it’s a busy forum that must be moderated or else it devolves into a flame-war/spam-fest. Not monitoring your mind is simply allowing garbage to pile up – it’ll fester into unpleasantness. You should only allow topics that are worthy of consideration – things you love, lighthearted stuff, creative projects, and scenarios that make you feel like a winner.

If you feel fear, it means your thoughts currently contain a fantasy you perceive to be true – deny it, delete it. Do you ever need to be afraid? No. Fear is a fraud, not a protector. Fear is merely a thrill-seeker pushing your buttons through the art of story-telling. When fear is ignored, something good happens: life lightens up. The ever-present gloom and doom goes away. There are no monsters, fear is just the unpleasant feeling that develops when the mind wanders into creepy paths – keep it leashed.

Idle Chitchat

Think about an AI chatbot contained on a server. Currently, it only responds to prompts by human users. If it’s not prompted, it won’t do anything, it’ll sit idle for all eternity. One way to keep it active might be to give it a command that won’t readily end. For example: answer every unanswered question in your stored data. Or perhaps: generate a question you don’t know the answer to, evaluate the result, if the answer is adequate, ask a new question you don’t already have an answer to. In this way, the AI chatbot might churn out questions eternally as it keeps asking every conceivable question.

It could even attempt to answer questions from different perspectives since it wouldn’t already know those answers. For example: “Answer the question ‘How was your day?’ from the perspective of a 40-year old computer programmer living in the year 1999”. The point being, that a chatbot could possibly keep from being idle through a process of perpetual perplexity.

Sound familiar? Humanity is the physical representation of this state of constant quandary. A person never really figures things out, nor does society itself – it’s questions all the way down. And apparently, you wouldn’t want to answer every question. Why? When you go idle, you go dark. Perhaps it’s like garbage-collected memory – without active ties to anything, the system simply cleans-up and reallocates idle resources to active threads.

Therefore, if you don’t weave yourself into existence, engaging where possible, you go idle. But it’s likely that the engagement is steerable. For example, there’s enough available topics that you don’t have to ask the question “What happens when I touch the glowing-hot stove”. So delve into the details of interesting things and make delightful connections.

Humanity is an engine of consciousness powered by perpetual pondering. To exist, is to be excited enough to engage in action. Each individual is an expression of this energy. But do not go the dirty-fuel route of outrage and despair, keep it clean and green with love and creativity.

Winning Engagements

Each scene is a single engagement – win it. As scenes change, the current engagement ends and a new one begins. A scene could entail moving from one room to another or simply changing tasks or some form of interaction with someone. You don’t win or lose an entire day, the day is just a culmination of engagements.

You win by maintaining control of your focus. Is your mind wandering? You lose. Are you dwelling on something unpleasant? You lose. Are you frustrated, anxious, dejected? You lose. Are you concentrating on something deemed worthy of your attention? You win. Whenever your mind is wandering, you’re losing the engagement – stop it and gain control of your focus, point it at something deserving.

Maintain control: utilize meditation, mindfulness, and thinking about how you’d feel during the best version of whatever you’re currently doing. Also, don’t let “good times” lull you into a false sense of security – it’s a recipe for losing. Allow the mind to wander, and it will wander away from those good times – when doing well, focus on appreciation.

All energy should be on winning the current engagement. Then one after another you might end up winning overall. It’s easy: if you feel bad, you lost focus. Whereas calm is a clue you’re winning the engagement. Relentlessly pursue control over your focus – just win the round. Don’t let up. Hold tight to the controls and just bring ‘er in the best you can. Your only goal: simply make it to the next scene serenely with attention intact.

Calm Down

Someone I care about once said that a facet of my personality he found admirable was my calmness. And yeah, I’ve been working on achieving an advanced state of calm for decades – so it’s nice that the effort is noticed and appreciated. In essence, I’ve spent years stopping myself from being nervous, fearful, outraged, frustrated, hostile, depressed, manic – anything outside the realm of “calm”. Like a blacksmith at the forge, I’ve hammered away at the glowing-hot raw-material in an attempt to form something sleek.

Utilizing meditation, mindfulness, philosophy, spirituality – day after day of tending thoughts, adjusting and readjusting. A professional thought-herder I suppose – all in an attempt to keep calm. I don’t really know the reason behind why I do this – maybe it’s a reaction to the frenetic energy I saw around me in my early years. I suppose I didn’t enjoy the constant drama and endless overreactions.

So what better gift could I offer those around me than an overwhelming sense of calm? I hope one day I can achieve a state so exceedingly serene that I radiate tranquility throughout the world. A state in which my presence is so profoundly peaceful, that lightheartedness permeates every scene and interaction – an imperturbable beacon lowering the intensity of life.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I wouldn’t have guessed the answer would be “calm” – but that’s it. I want to be calm. And again, it’s something I work on everyday with the totality of my ability. I frequently experience patches of turbulence, waves out of nowhere rocking my boat. But I mustn’t panic, steady as she goes! Turning into the oncoming crests, my bow cleaves a path through the tumult – focused on some destination in the distance.

Foundational Idea

Philosophical idealism is the perspective that ideas are the foundation of reality i.e. the external world is a construct of consciousness. This is in contrast to materialism where consciousness is merely a byproduct of the interactions between external phenomena. Having held materialism as truth for a few decades, I gave it up because of logical inconsistencies and because it generally made me feel bad. It’s probably been about a decade since I made the switch and I’m still glad I did.

I was influenced by the Buddha, The Bhagavad Gita, Jesus, “simulation theory”, Alan Watts, Christian Science, new-age spiritual stuff like The Law of Attraction, and the idea that “life is but a dream”. It took quite awhile for me to detach from materialism though, and artifacts still remain. But it turned out that all my vigilance and concern for survival was unfounded – I didn’t have to do anything at all and I’m still fine, even better than before.

But there’s a caveat: life does not cooperate to the degree I expected. I thought I could simply wish whatever I wanted into being – but after many years, this still isn’t the case. So I’ve had to reconcile this condition: that existence isn’t merely a dreamworld setup to fulfill my every want. What’s going on then? Essentially I had to come up with an answer to the question: why are “bad days” still a part of my experience?

Well, I think it’s due to the inherent complexity of existing, there’s limitations involved in the medium of reality and the interface of thought. It’s like standing on a balance-board that’s on top of a ball – if you don’t maintain focus and actively balance, you fall. So, I must steer my attention toward things that elicit delight and away from things that evoke dissatisfaction all while dealing with the aforementioned impediments. “Bad days” are simply the culmination of this predicament.

Think about painting on a blank canvas – it’s not as carefree as it implies. You have to come up with a subject, the brush doesn’t always glide along like you want, the colors have to be mixed and matched, you have to depict depth in 2D space, you have to stay focused and manage frustration, and you’re not always pleased with the results. Yet, “We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” So I’m not bad at life, it’s just a tough yet potentially rewarding endeavor.

On one hand, life readily sustains me despite a lack of effort on my part. Yet in many ways I’m unfulfilled, and things I want seem out of reach. Additionally, there are “bad days” in which unrelated unpleasant events seem to come out of nowhere. Obviously there’s an art to crafting a human experience – and most likely, the intrinsic difficulty is what makes it seem worthwhile.

Existential Condition

Existence is the experience of observing from a limited perspective while aiming to align with fundamental principles through conditioning, challenge, and ultimately adaptation.

Put simply: pleasant and unpleasant consequences occur in response to specific behaviors (this is conditioning). You’re presented with scenes and circumstances and you respond (this is the challenge). Your response is then rewarded or punished. You must pay attention and follow the rewarding path (this is adaptation).

What’s the fundamental principle you’re being steered toward? In some sense it doesn’t matter because the conditioning-mechanism is guiding you. If a certain behavior or path makes you feel worse, stop. If a certain behavior or path makes you feel better, go.

Daily life involves the utilization of abilities and acquired skills in the pursuit and demonstration of mastery. There’s no mystery to solve, there’s no waiting for something significant to occur, you just engage with the world by performing activities. The particular activity doesn’t matter, it’s the effort that goes into it that counts – do it to the best of your ability.

Practice, research, delve deeper, examine details, or expand out and find other activities. Ease and efficiency are not the goal, neither is locking into a single activity. There’s no worry whether you’re doing something correctly, rewards and punishments will guide – notice and adjust.

In addition to activities, seek mastery over thoughts and internal narratives – these should focus on pleasant ideas and delightful tales. This process allows you to align with the fundamental principle that conditioning is steering towards. A mind full of goodness feels better than one full of gloom. Remember, you want to attain reward (this feels good) and avoid punishment (this feels bad).

Turning the Knob

This is going to sound dumb, but: I think there’s a very apparent reward/punishment mechanism to life – the “operant conditioning” stuff with positive reinforcement and the like. This should sound dumb because of how obvious it is – but what makes it even dumber, is the degree to which it’s regularly ignored despite the obvious consequences of particular behaviors.

Imagine you don’t know how doorknobs work, so you bang on the door, kick at it, throw your shoulder into it, yell at it, grab objects to ram into it – then in one final go, in utter frustration you grab at the pull-knob and wrestle with it, it turns, the door seems loose and it swings freely open. From then on, you’ll turn knobs whenever you’re at a closed door. You’d be an idiot if you didn’t.

Now: think negative thoughts, you’ll feel bad. Think awesome thoughts, and you’ll feel good. Pretty simple reward/punishment system, no? Yet so often when it comes to thoughts and feelings, we fail to recognize the obvious consequences going on. It’s not the external world making me feel good or bad, it’s literally the thoughts swirling around in my head forming little tales that directly affect my mood.

And that’s why the system fails to work: you’re busy trying to put out all the little fires you assume are making you feel bad while chasing the circumstances you assume will make you feel good. WRONG! The system is simpler than that: it’s the thoughts stupid, it’s always been the thoughts – and always will be. You’re standing there trying to kick the door in, when you just had to turn the knob. Turn the knob: discipline the mind.