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 mirageof 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. But we embody nuanced vantage points of the same, unified undivided whole. It grants us 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.

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