The first attempt at “Solipsism” didn’t make it. I didn’t allow the thing to take its natural shape. I overstepped. I intruded on the transmission, so to speak.
Now it’s done. (Sometimes it’s like a broadcast I can’t quite hear over the radio. My own internal noise (my own broadcast booth) drowns out the signal. When that noise finally quiets, then the broadcast gets clearer. And this is the improved transcript.
Just posting this for a day or so to notify anyone who read the first one to please wash your brain with detergent and try this one instead. Thanks.
In writing the story “Jackal“, I was finally able to describe the solipsistic trap into which I fell as a 13-year-old. It’s odd that I was unable to ever explain or describe the terror of that predicament until I finally let a “character” who is not me embody it for himself.
I don’t want to make this about a supposedly real “me” and draw all that attention into this false face, this red herring (this personal story.) I don’t want to take this drama of myself too seriously. It’s just a story, one of billions.
I mean, I didn’t suffer more than you. Much less, perhaps. But we’re all in some portion of Hell, as far as I can tell. But my understanding of hell is that it’s a mirage of deceptive thoughts obscuring an inconceivable and (therefore) sacred mystery, which exceeds the goody two shoes moralities of every imaginary heaven.
But any report exposing the delusional landscapes of hell is (from my point of view) helpful to everyone else who is stranded there.
We’re differently the same, I suppose. Not isolated at least. Not from totally separate worlds, for the world gave birth to all of us. But we embody nuanced vantage points of that undefinable unity. We obtain a creedless faith in what exceeds us. Our own ignorance is a palpable proof, in that sense, of the sacred and profound.
But this somewhat different and somewhat peculiar behavior (writing) is the only way I found to extricate this ganglion of thoughts from this peculiar spot in hell. Or, you could say, the only way to get my head out of my ass was to write. It’s not for everybody. Other people have other methods applicable to other locations in hell. The shape of their own escape from hell is their own requirement.
But that’s why I’m writing about it. I can’t help it. It’s what the slow unfoldment of sanity requires of me.
And, until now, I’ve been hesitant to attempt anything that comes this close to the actual terror itself. When I was 13, I briefly tried to describe the solipsistic predicament to my mother and older siblings. But I could feel them dissolving into distance as I spoke, because their own empathy prevented them from confronting such an unreachable (and ludicrous sounding) pain in someone they cared for.
But it was also partially that I myself withdrew from them, because I could not want anyone (especially them) to feel a horror of that sort. So, all I could feel in trying to reach for help, was a widening cavern in our relationship.
And what good would it do them or me? It would only ruin them too. It was impossible to want anyone to feel such terrorizing isolation. And I couldn’t make sense of it anyways.
But now, I have an incentive to share it more vividly, because the trap is sprung. I got through the terror part of it (like you did, or you probably wouldn’t be reading). And we can see from our different perches that this solipsistic problem — which can be dismissed easily as an absurdly selfish perspective — is also the secret terror underlying the whole human culture, at least as seen from a certain slant of light. But that slant (like all honest slants) provides valid information. This information goes unnoticed in other slants of light (which have their own peculiar channels of information, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum).
This implies that we’re learning to see past the need to compete, because you I and everybody else (when we’re not lying to ourselves) add unique vantage points to the human vantage point as a whole. An honest person (even if only honest at this moment) is inevitably idiosyncratically weird and insightful, as far as I can tell. And whatever they do will carry that stamp of a genuinely authentic and good human being, who is inevitably — helplessly — helpful. That’s all that anything of quality really amounts to, a virtue-spreading action.
Skills are less profound than a genuine human being in action, whatever that happens to be, even if it’s only writing.
After all, this isn’t actually showbusiness. This isn’t about writing. Or making something that others should admire and applaud. You can keep your thumbs to yourself. It’s about facing my own (our own) pretense (from a certain slant), which is my Self as a mere drama, not as something real. Every self-image is unreal in that sense. We’re weirder and more unique than these static, repetitive habitual dramas of ourselves, these surrogates of reality, these strawmen, these avatars, these Egregores, who we mistake for ourselves, these original Bots gone rogue, these false fronts. These identities are confinements of whatever it is we really are.
And this is the very half-insight I half-glimpsed as a kid but couldn’t understand until now. It scared the shit out of me.
Yes, in fact, I am not real just like I feared (and no longer fear). The others I picture (you all, for instance) are also unreal. I’m sorry to break the news. All these beliefs about myself are not the reality of myself, nor of you. There are no ultimate boundaries to our existence that allow real definitions to form. And we merge with one another if thought isn’t imagining itself in isolation. Without that thought we merge. And this means no summaries of us can stand as anything but transient (and therefore useful and helpful) fictions.
Therefore, being “unreal” is freedom from any finality of form, or any known limits, with their dull routines of perception. We exceed these small certainties of self. Our roots are inseparable from the whole mystery of the universe itself.
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And as we learn to distinguish between a false or virtual “self” and this undefinable and infinite authenticity, we’re also discovering a similar problem in trying to distinguish the limited infinities of AI virtuality from unlimited infinity of reality itself (whatever that may be).
And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the cultural impacts from a shared solipsism (a universal tendency towards the particular). Culturally expressed solipsism is a corrosive force that doesn’t necessarily lead to social terror (but fascism or any autocracy would be one example of that). More often, it leads to this familiar numbing disinterest in our own survival — a depersonalization and derealization crisis, which severs our trust in reality, and our love for the earth and its creatures, which includes ourselves. From here, it looks like the human mind (the general flow of meaning, its fashions and changes in tacit beliefs) is suffering a mad indifference to its own survival. And I feel this is a direct symptom of a “shared solipsism.”
I’m not trying to be an activist, exactly, and I don’t think my Messianic delusion is the problem. I think you and I are merely beginning to emerge from a virus of the mind (or perhaps we’re finally being forced to grow up). So, we’re starting to recognize the symptoms of his virus in one another, or at least in the broader culture. And it’s a natural empathetic necessity that arises when we realize we’re not separate. We can’t help offering one another whatever assistance we can provide.
Not assistance, exactly. But maybe it’s like a mating call or something. We start bellering essays and songs and poems and gardens and carpentry and good neighborliness and whatnot into the world, into circulation. Every virus-free moment of human life is a healing frequency, is a call of unity (not for unity, because it already exists). Or, it’s a reminder. A siren call reminding us to wake up from our illusions of self-importance and rejoin the dance.
The honest life plays in the sandbox of this material world; flinging futile offerings or unrequited love letters (controlled follies, as Castaneda might say) to a world emerging from its coccon.
I’d like to rummage around in the entrails of the story “The Jackal“, because what the Jackal in the story “says” is my own turning point, and one which I’ve not yet managed to complete. Any comments on this perspective would be helpful. I’ll leave it here in case it collects some thoughts.
Here is what the jackal in the forest said to the soldier:
He knows now that there are also are demonic forces in the world, but they are weak by themselves, and can only build on what we start. They take sustenance from our energy of resistance, which is always a resistance to a broader perspective, or a truth that undermines a sanctuary of self-enclosed illusion. He notices that every time he speaks to himself in his head – every thought – creates an artificial division in his consciousness, a kind of militarized border within him, which makes an enemy of his own rejected wisdom.
And demonic forces, weak though they are, encourage the formation of stronger and stronger borders within us, strengthening resistance by the perpetual whisper of what might happen, of what needs to be done, or who we need to become – compulsions that are unconscious panic.
And yet, the demonic forces are so weak they can only barely emit a whisper of memory, or a glimpse of imaginary danger. And then we supply the added energy and build the solid structures according to a demonic plan. Eventually, we are even convinced to give these demons a solid form of their own, by lending them our own bodies and dissolving into the whispering minds of the demons themselves.
And he recognizes the whole military chain of command, the whole enflamed world, its systems of government, its economics, even its institutionalized charities, its schooling, the way we make our living, the roads and housing we build, so much of it has been heedlessly and ravenously built by demonic plan, driven by the stolen, hypnotized energy of human beings, who have mistaken themselves for the reflections of their own small demons. These forces have possessed the world through a whisper campaign, which has no power in itself.
But they have whispered for countless generations that we are inherently evil and that nothing can change. And it is this small-minded message which has blinded us to ourselves. They have made a tapestry of small arguments in our minds, which wrap us into confusing patterns of argument and counter-argument. But it is a tapestry of illusion.
Despite its success, it remains utterly powerless to stop any single human being from doing what it could. Anyone, anyone at all – not special people, not geniuses, not experts, but anyone — who sees the illusion as an illusion, and recognizes the weakness of evil, and its ludicrous plans for the world, dissolves this illusion.
A human rebellion from this ancient enslavement to hell amounts to nothing more than walking away from every hand that clutches at your sleeve with appeals to honor, duty and decency. And you will see the fear and suffering, anger and panic in the eyes of the human souls bedeviled into trying to keep you chained.
But these are the last fragmenting strands in the tapestry of illusion. Because it’s the devil’s decency we are preserving, the devil’s duty and honor we are promoting. You feel the devil’s cries of pain and fear that he is losing you. And the poor, betrayed souls of human beings possessed by these demonic values will accuse YOU of betrayal.
Ignore them, ignore them for the sake of life itself, no matter what happens. You can’t save anyone. But in saving yourself, you’re not saving a separate human being. It’s humanity itself that awakens in you. It’s the dissolution of who you thought you were. And your example – though ridiculed and condemned – sends shock waves through the whole ocean of being. It is the only way to save the prisoners themselves. Walk away from prison for their own good, not yours. They won’t thank you, but you are breaking a chain around their necks, which they don’t see.
Leave, and bear the ignominy of desertion. There is no compromise with the devil. Betray this world fully, or humanity itself will remain trapped in hell. Only the dissolved individual, the anonymous human being, can free the world. They will not be known, even to themselves. But they will be an unprecedented agent of rebellion.
My First Commandment [here] is “write to live, don’t live to write.”
This is a self-inquiry, not a lecture, although I attempt to organize what I am discovering so that you can understand what is otherwise – without this form-finding work – an interior chaos. I share this so that you and I will know we’re not alone. We are fellow prisoners, cutting free our chained minds.
We don’t trust our children to unfold as they will. The society wants consistent shapes that can serve as cogs in the inorganic machine. We are trained to serve the machine, not vice versa.
Education at its best teaches us self-knowledge, while education at its worst teaches us who we are.
Instead of focusing solely on building technologies to save us from disease, couldn’t we have primarily focused on altering our poisoned way of living so that disease was less common?
I hear in my own brain (and from what I derive from others’ brains) something similar to government propaganda in the way it defends and justifies itself by referencing selectively edited memories (or fake news), in order to preserve the illusion of a stable and presidential “me” who does no wrong.
I need an image of myself. I have to be aware of whether or not my behavior is suited to the moment. And this naturally inspires the brain to summarize how I’m behaving (or other people are behaving) in some short-hand form. But these images perform coherently only when they remain provisional mirrors of behavior – lighting up along the periphery of attention as proprioceptive reflections and refractions, which keep the organism tethered to some portion of reality. Even Buddha had a self-image of that sort.
The “small” self (or “me” sensation) is an estimation of how “I” look in someone else’s eyes. Other people serve mainly as mirrors for perceiving this self. This self can’t exist if it’s not imagined from the perspective of an Other.
The “I” is merely a rehearsal of how others should see me. It’s chained to others’ opinions. So, this “I” is always a social construct, and is not “who we really are.” We always exceed our own expectations if given half a chance.
In focusing too much on trying to unfold a new identity, all we end up doing is shifting from one combination of socially imposed definitions to another, and then calling that shift from the old prison to the new prison, freedom.
Where I expect to find a real character within (or within another person), I find only a stream of language describing one.
We’d like the other people in our social web to stop trying so desperately to free themselves. Our own entangled stability depends on it.
This sense of “self” is not a soul but only the body’s imaginations of itself as if from the outside. It is a secular conception of soul, minus the traditional soul’s connection to a nested hierarchy.
Everywhere in this culture, the small Self and its waking dreams have been given permission to supersede the reality of earthly life (biology and planet). It’s a general permission slip to discount reality in favor of a pretense of soul.
A “soul” was not originally conceived as the atomic essence of a separate self, but as an idiosyncratic expression of a universal being that can’t be identified in any positive sense, except through metaphor and myth. This humbling sense of a soul is lost when it’s converted into a separate Self, who doesn’t have to answer to anything but its own imagination.
This capacity to imagine ourselves outside our bodies is less real than the body, because imagination is only a derivation of the body and is in no position to tell the body who or what it is.
The entrapment implied in “the past constantly determining the future” is broken by realizing that the so-called future (this new Now) can even more freely and open-endedly determine (or utterly abolish) the past and all its pains and sorrows.
Take war, for instance (please). It’s nothing but a delusional chain of cause and effect (aggression and counter-aggression), each claiming the other started the chain.
But a chain of events has no real beginning or end, because it starts and stops in the present imagination. We can always imagine a new cause. But what we haven’t tried to do very often is stop re-imagining an outdated and deadly past. That’s because we’re afraid of the quiet absence of our dramas (and our Selves) more than war and misery itself.
In other words, a chain of events is based on the belief that the past causes the future — some ill deed by another person or group “forces us” to act in retaliation. And this retaliatory act justifies the righteousness and vengefulness of the ones retaliated upon, and vice-versa, ad infinitum. Therefore, we chain ourselves to the past and then measure our progress by how much effort we put into pulling on the chain.
But if we understand that “the future determines the past”, then we see that what we do now (in the so-called “present”) forms the chain (or breaks the chain). The past has nothing to do with it, because the past and future don’t really exist except in our imagination of them in the “present”. So, every retaliation is in fact the originating aggression.
And if we wanted to break the chain of aggression, we can only do it now, by refusing to do the bidding of the past and walking away from the chains of aggression. But we don’t want to change the past, because it preserves the mirror enemy which gives us our illusion of identity. So “the future determines the past” is a very under-used human potential for immediate and drastic change.
And this applies even to the smaller, mind-forged chains of our personal history and self-images. Whatever we did in the past that makes us feel compelled or trapped into being a certain kind of person or perceiving ourselves as a victim or noble sufferer, or wretch, or mundane same old, same old, it is the past that is “causing” us to be this way. And at every single mundane moment of the day and night, we pick up those chains from the past and reattach them to ourselves and then yank in misery.
We want to believe that only the past can determine the future, because it gives us an excuse to wallow in a familiar old Self and keep the empty spaciousness of life itself — the infinite freedom — as far away as possible.
All of it is a dream world reasserting itself over and over again without cause, because it’s all happening Now.
The solution to human misery has always been close at hand. But we reject it simply because the past is a comforting illusion to those who are afraid of the emptiness and silence and peace of not being anybody in particular — losing all that history of misery we’ve come to cherish.
The next sentence took 40 hears to write, but casual readers may only find it long-winded and incomprehensible (even this very “I” itself may feel this way after all is said and done): The human brain’s eye can perform its own double-slit experiment, as the undifferentiated light of a lively and unlocatable universal intelligence hits the receiver of the brain, causing it to quiver and hum in resonance, and produce the reflected light of awareness, which shines out through these two holes in the head, landing on this white page as small particles of “me” consciousness (each sense of “me” a separate thought or projection or dream), each of which define themselves by contrast to all the other dots of “me”; while simultaneously landing on the page as a continuous wave of identity, (yet another thought , projection or dream), but this one forming a narrative line of an imaginary “I” which connects as many of the imaginary dots of “me” as possible, so that this “I” appears to speak as if it were gazing at itself from a third person’s perch, as if it were a real soul, and not merely a virtual reality.
In this culture, the human voice is obliged to speak as if it were real. It has to claim this wavelike “I” as if it were real. Therefore, I become the center of this little world and all these little “me’s” orbit the “I” as different qualities of itself. And in this way, a philosophy of life has been formed, which nobody recognizes as a philosophy because they think it is only reality itself.
What if one wanted to cut through this crapola and speak as a real human being?
Well, the first step would be to recognize the fictional nature of oneself and not be bothered by it. It would mean not feeling lost or frightened by the immensity of our own emptiness, the bottomless pit of oneself and others. It would mean recognizing the waves and particles of “oneself” as a play of the universe itself. Not that one can identify with the universe and call oneself God. That would be another dotty illusion of a wavey gravy hallucination. But merely come to terms with the truer reality of not being able to pin down a gosh darn thing and finding a sense of humor in all this. Free to play in these particles and waves like a dolphin. Free, also, to be “someone” for a moment — anyone, which is the gift of empathy. Or even free to play a role now and then, but only to the extent that they are practical and circumstantial necessities, not confining definitions. And otherwise relaxing into the sustained and expansive mystery of our surroundings. And finding it all downright miraculous, astonishing, infinitely inviting, creative and beautiful. And stop hallucinating a hellhole and living out this preposterous nightmare of personal and cultural drama.
To stick with the theme of “jumping“, what if we jumped free even from ourselves? Nothing would befuddle the demons of the world more than a human rebellion of this sort at this time and place. They’d fade into nothingness themselves.
If anything, maybe we ARE that nothingness. Let’s stop trying to be someone. We’re emptiness itself. (That’s a negative enough definition to leave us open-ended). Emptiness is good. It’s our domain, not the domain of demons. Demons live in confined spaces. That’s not who we are, that’s only who they fooled us into being.
I go into this far more deeply and soberly in the essay “What Is Self-Knowledge” (one of my best)
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Post-Script: Found this snippet from Tilopa’s “Mahamudra Teaching to Naropa” – Kagyu Lineage:
Although space has been designated empty, in reality it is inexpressible. Although the nature of mind is called clear light, it’s every description is baseless verbal fiction. The mind’s original nature is like space — it pervades and embraces all things
I’ve vaguely heard in passing the phrase, “the future determines the past.” I believe it came from Youtube titles referencing something from the theoretical edge of physics. But on Youtube, the phrase sometimes serves as esoteric click-bait, producing the mild effect of psychedelic incense, as if it were a wisdom too lofty for daily life.
“Esoteric” essentially means knowledge reserved for a select few. So, it’s a snobby concept. In reality (let’s call it), the “esoteric” is usually just a framework wider than the familiar, until it becomes familiar.
There’s nothing esoteric about the phrase, “the future determines the past.”
This is merely the reverse side of a more familiar illusion of “time.” The past determines the future as much as the future determines the past. Because both past and future are illusory, and both lose their meaning in a timeless awareness, which can’t even be called “the present” (because even “the present moment” is only an illusion of time passing).
So, while it’s easy and familiar to imagine that our actions in the fleeting present (which immediately becomes the past) determine our situation in the future (which means the past determines the future), it’s also possible to see that the future (a later “present moment”) redefines the significance of past events.
For instance, if I’m behaving like a miserable, selfish idiot and someone comes up to me and says, “you’re behaving like a selfish, miserable jerk!” what is the significance of this encounter?
Well, if I go on to live a life brooding with rage at that person, and drink myself into an even more miserable state of selfishness, then the encounter will be significant only as an excuse for becoming even more miserable.
But if I go on to live a life brooding with rage at that person and then wake up one morning and realize that he or she was right, and sober up and face myself squarely, changing my life, then that encounter is significant as a turning point.
What I do in the so-called “future” therefore determines the past.
And this is true at every moment, because there is no real past, present or future, but only an open-ended timelessness that includes all three as abstract derivations.
O Partha (Arjuna), happy are the Kshatriyas who gain such a battle that comes of its own accord, opening for them the doors to heaven.) — Chapter 2, Verse 32, Bhagavad Gita
He slept poorly and awoke early in anticipation of the mission that night. Then he threw up several times. It was a familiar dread, pre-jump jitters. Not just performance anxiety, or the fear of death, nor the heavy regret of knowing he placed himself in this extreme, and insane predicament voluntarily, nor the envy he feels at breakfast, seeing the carefree jocularity of the ground crew, and the meteorologists, who would never directly enter battle, let alone fly to the roof of the atmosphere itself, and leap into almost pure, frozen space, a half-assed astronaut, a momentary falling spacewalker, until the double-bag static line finishes unfolding, and holds him in a tug-of-war between the canopy pulling up, and the heavy load of his equipment, pulling down.
And then of course, what follows.
But something else was weighing him down now, and had been for quite some time, slowing his every step, as if he were sinking in sand. And it was preventing the boost of adrenaline he’d soon need.
A few hours prior to rigging up, he was hanging out with his “stick” (his paratrooper team) and they were ribbing each other and shooting the shit. Their last moments of relaxation.
But he could never banter very well. He sat on the floor with his back against a door-jam, enjoying the mild grinding pain of the spine against the edge of the jam.
This was his first serious combat jump, a HAHO deep into enemy territory to take out a relay post, and then bushwack back to safe ground, in what’s called an overland exfiltration. In about an hour, they’d start the elaborate procedures and checks and rechecks that took up the better part of 3 hours, prior and during the flight, which was going to be a long one.
Then they’d ride the canopy for a long way this time, about 30 miles, to a drop zone (DZ) in a narrow clearing in the fairly dense coastal forests and then make their way to their objective.
For Walter Cybulski, exceptional poet and humorist bar none
[The Introduction will make this story a little clearer, maybe]
His Father’s Circus
As a very young boy, his father ran a gas station. He was a mechanic and always carried a gigantic wrench, that was nearly 3 feet long and twice as heavy.
And when he wasn’t working on cars or trucks or busses or tanks, he would swing his wrench, and throw it high in the air and catch it, like a heavy metal drum major. And people would drive long distances just to have him fill up their tanks with gas, so they could watch him perform. And he would do somersaults out to the tanks and backflips all the way back to his office. And when he wasn’t working on cars or tanks or trucks, and the lines at the gas tanks had thinned, he’d finally close shop for the day and wander into the bar across the street and ham it up with his friends.
And the small boy would tag along, at first attached to his mother’s bosom, then to her hand, and finally alone, behind his dad, just large enough to be hoisted on the bar stool by a rough hand, and then given a little boost, and finally able to climb the bar stool by himself and drink coca-cola dribbled over huge tankards of ice, chewing the ice, absent-mindedly, while his father laughed and whistled and wagered fortunes on how many pushups he could do in an hour, or whether he could withstand a sledge hammer to his stomach.
Once, a dancing bear happened to be in the bar, and challenged his father to an arm-wrestling match, and the bear won two out of three, but never came back to challenge anyone again.
When the boy was 8 years old, he quit school to become a soda jerk, and got a job next door to his father’s garage. And over the years, as the garage business grew, all the other businesses in town grew by proximity, and profits skyrocketed all around. You could hear the sonic boom for miles.
“Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. … The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales…” (Vladimir Nabokov, “Lectures on Literature”, page 2)
First, this is a strange story. It combines tall tale, fairy tale, absurdly narrow-lensed realism, realism itself, surrealism and mysticism (in that order).
Hitching a ride to this story would mean climbing aboard a vehicle with a real Mack Truck cab, 18 oversized cartoon tires and a trailer made of wispy dreams. It might not engender confidence in the driver of this tale.
So, here’s some help in finding an order behind the chaos.
One of the more simplistic questions this story asks is: “What would happen if a paratrooper became “enlightened” (let’s call it that) while falling into a war zone?”
But more completely, it’s the story of a person’s life told in vignettes, and short stories that “jump” from one stage to another, from childhood to deathbed. And each vignette is composed in a style characteristic of the character’s point of view at that moment.
So, for instance, the first one’s in the style of a tall tale, for the boy saw his father as a kind of Giant, as many kids tend to do.
The details of these tellings are nevertheless significant. The events we recall from earlier times are always a little tall in the telling, stretching real experiences into lopsided renderings that might as well be called fairy tales.
