Cloudscape

A Monistic Universe?

+01:00

On the hypothesis of an ideal universe.

"Imagination is the greatest creative force"
— Albert Einstein

A Monistic Universe?

In the previous entry, I stated that it appears to be impossible for matter to cause consciousness. Rather than matter causing consciousness, consciousness would instead cause matter. After all, consciousness is what makes matter matter, and without consciousness matter could not exist at all. In a way, we create matter by perceiving it.

With this, I do not mean that an external reality flows arises from our minds, but that there is no external reality at all. Even matter, then, is but thought. That is to say, matter exists because we think it does.

Something subjective can, after all, become objective if it is subjective to all of us. That roses are red is said to be an objective truth, even though the photons reflected from their petals have no color at all: the color red merely arises in our photoreceptors (although even that, I believe, is just something we perceive to be so). Indeed, to people who are colorblind or have hallucinations they might not be red at all. This is the true meaning of objective reality.

There is no reason at all why we should be inclined to think matter causes consciousness instead of vice versa, after all. You might say that in this case the question remains where that consciousness came from, but on the other hand, if consciousness is instead caused by matter it also remains the question where that matter came from.

The idea that there is strictly speaking nothing outside of perception has some counterintuitive implications. For one thing, if the universe has no material existence, it must be atemporal and alocal. That is to say, it knows neither time nor space. Nothing in the universe can have a point in space or time because space and time are merely concepts. That doesn't mean we have to dispense with these concepts in how we view the world, of course, as they are as concepts still part of our ideal world.

I admit, however, that when one first considers an immaterial reality, there appears to be obvious problems with it: an immaterial reality would basically be a kind of dream. Yet, our reality isn't like a dream at all. For one thing, things make sense in our reality, and for another, we aren't alone. We share this world, be it material or ideal, with countless living beings. The existence of beings other than ourselves can be denied, a theory called solipsism, but there are some problems with this theory.

This can all be explained with a single principle. It seems to be a simple principle when one first hears about it, and yet the more one thinks about it the more complicated it becomes, until one realizes that the entire universe could spring from it, much like in a fractal.

Cogito, ergo sum

That's right. The famous quote by Descartes, I think therefore I am. But although this appears to be a very straightforward statement, seemingly the most straightforward there could be in the universe, even so we can raise questions about what it really means.

In fact, according to Buddhism the second word in the Latin sentence "I" is meaningless. It certainly is a very vague term: what are "you"? Your body? Your brain? Or are we just what we think? If so, Descartes famous quote is almost tautological: I think therefore I am; but I am because I think; so what it is really saying is: "I think therefore I think."

We are ourselves - I am I and you are you - because we perceive ourselves. We are, then, who or what we perceive. We are, therefore, just as much the world we perceive as our minds we perceive. Mind and matter are but two parts of our perception. Matter, therefore, even if it has a discrete existence on its own, is at the same time part of our own mind.

If we see our lives, or, said another way, our world of perceptions as what we really are, then essentially, this means that not only "I think therefore I am," but also "I think therefore my world is."

I am now going to introduce an even more controversial idea. Let us, for a moment, just suppose it could be true, much like I have in the previous entry supposed a lot of things to be true while I did not think they were: I have explored a lot of thought experiments, and how now finally come to this one. I have learned that even if you do not believe in an idea, it is interesting to learn about it, even if it is just to think of arguments against it, and if you do not favor this particular hypothesis, then you might find an argument against it or in favor of another hypothesis.

Suppose that everyone would program their own internal world. Perhaps we create our own world just by imagining it. We'd create our lives like a painter creates a canvas or a writer creates a novel. But we'd always have done so subconsiously, much like we dream subconsiously.

I am quite sure that if this is indeed so, it is better that way. Suppose that you would have to consciously choose everything that would happen to you, you would go mad. You would want to make everything perfect, and once everything would be perfect you would realize that it was not perfect at all in that it lacked imperfection to be perfect. We all need to dream and set goals and strive to achieve them… it is the most valuable thing we have in our lives: it is progress. It is being able to look at one horizon and once you'd have reached it look at the next.

I will henceforth omit dubifiers such as "would," "perhaps" or "possibly," for the sake of convenience, even though I want it to be clear that it all remains a hypothesis, even to myself. If you do not agree with the hypothesis, forgive me, but in the next few pages I will assume it to be true; that is, after all, what a hypothesis is for. Once we've fully explored the implications of the hypothesis, we can judge if it really could be true or not.

This subconscious need often battles with our conscious, and a good thing too. We cannot consciously make every choice in our life. This would necessitate that we would choose every single thing that happens in our life, as otherwise nothing at all would happen. To some extent we need to automatize our choices, and that is what we invented the subconscious for. It allows us instead to program our world and then sit tight and see how it works by itself.

Everyone is born omnipotent over their own lives; but that omnipotence is as great a burden as anyone can have. It puts us before an infinite number of choices which are often difficult to make.

The irony is that we solve this problem by choosing not to always have to choose. Instead of having to decide everything for ourselves, we leave some of the decisions to something, outside ourselves: the entire universe. We settled ourselves somewhere where we feel safe.

So we've delegated part of the task of choosing to something which is outside our own choice: we made an "outside world" which would make choices in our place so that we would not have to do so ourselves. We programmed rules in our world like an informaticist programs rules in an application.

We aren't very good informaticists, however, and our system is full of bugs. We want a lot of things at the same time, and these things conflict with each other in our subconscious. We are in disharmony with ourselves: often we want something with half a mind, and with half a mind we don't want it, and may even be afraid of it. In this way, the rules we've programmed in our mind often cause an infinite loop, meaning that they neutralize each other. In order to overcome this, one would have to find out what one really wants and stick to it, without looking back or concentrating on the negative side of it.
An example of this may be seen in some autistics, who often feel lonely yet at the same time feel afraid of social interaction, with the result that they can be very isolated.

It is sometimes said that you should "be careful what you wish for," and this is very applicable here. We often get bored when we don't have a problem, so that we are then inclined to think of one so that we can solve it again. Perhaps all our problems are but what we wish for.

The rules of our universe were but written by our own minds: they are nothing but the habits of our own thoughts. They are but there because we choose them to be there: because deep down in our subconscious, we want them to be there.

And although we might see them as an impediment, they are indispensable in our lives: they are the mortar of our qualia, and keep them in balance. Without them, everything would be somewhat like in our nightly dreams: nothing would make any sense. We choose to live in a world of logic because we want things to make sense. We want there to be a causality in the world outside the causality of our own imagination.

One look at our civilization shows that we surely like structure. We have our daily routines, our rules and laws, our customs; they make us feel safe. If nothing ever changes, there is nothing fear. And believe me, in a world where we make our own choices, we have ourselves more to fear than the outside world: without rules to stabilize it, the mind is a very unstable thing. It is susceptible to vicious circles, as is often seen in mental illness. People who suffer from mental illness are often people who have in some way become detached from the outside world, which is especially the case in psychosis. Lack of structure in one's life leads to lack of structure in one's mind.

The rules we impose on ourselves may make our lives difficult, as they impede our power over our lives, but they make them stable. They divest us of an immense responsibility, the responsibility to be the God in our own lives. We abdicated as gods because we could not bear not to have something above ourselves in our lives. Above all, we do not want to be omnipotent because then there would be no more challenge in doing anything.

There is another very important reason why we cannot be omnipotent.

We cause connections between our own consciousness and other consciousnesses because we do not want to be alone. If we would live altogether in a world of our own, we would be all alone. We could imagine other people, but they wouldn't be real: they would merely be part of our own subconscious. But if we want to live along with an entire world of other people, then we must accept that we do not have full control over that entire world, but that we must share that control with it. We cannot control others lives; only our own. At most, we can influence others lives because they choose us to do so.

One can therefore have influence upon others, but never truly have power over them, except on people who choose to live in a world where people can have power over one another; even so, however, they themselves choose to be in that world and can any moment choose to go to another world where everyone is free. However, people do not always want to be free. It makes them feel afraid because even this puts them before a greater responsibility.

So we each determine our own causality rather than actually causing it. We want other people and other things to have an existence on our existence, because we want to have a reality. We don't want to be alone, and therefore our entities connect to others so that we lose our omnipotence. We choose to not always have to choose.

The reason we aren't influenced only by those things and people we love, at least not usually, is that we may get to know other things and people we may come to love. The more open one is, the more one connects to other entities and so the less one solely controls one's reality: because we choose to let it be partly controlled by a world outside of ourselves. It would be quite scary, after all, if there were no world outside of ourselves. Not only would this mean that we would be all alone, but also that we would be meaningless to others.

In addition, we are often uninspired in creating our own reality and let others influence is, much like we do in any other creative field. People take over other's ideas in pretty much everything: it is in our nature. Not only in fashion or culture or in art, not only in language or conduct or science, but even in reality, we copy each other.

It's not hard to see why we could have created our entire lives ourselves: no doubt the common man could not have invented all the science and art of the past millennia, for instance, all the more because they often don't even understand it. We lack the imagination and intelligence to create an entire universe as complex and beautiful as our own.

Moreover, even in a world where we choose our own reality we must assume that in the end everything that is finite has a cause, even ourselves and our own consciousness; only if something is infinite, and therefore eternal, is it possible that it has no cause at all. This is so for existence itself, for instance. Existence cannot have a cause because that cause itself would be part of existence: a cause always precedes its consequence, but there can have been nothing before existence because it would per definition have been nonexistent.

However, we are not eternal. At least, one thing we can assume is that our past was not eternal. After all, we each have a limited age. There is, of course, the hypothesis of reincarnation. But even if we've reincarnated, there must have been a beginning unless all our incarnations would somehow form a circle: an infinite line is, after all, also an infinite circle, because in an infinite line every possible state is achieved, again and again and again.

However, any system must either grow over time or die. This is a very fundamental rule to which anything must obey, even the universe as a whole. It's evolution. There's only two ways something can go: totality or nullity. That is to say, infinity or nihility. Since we have achieved neither we cannot have lasted for an infinitely long time. A system that lasts for an infinitely long time must therefore, since it does not die, eventually achieve infinity. Something that is infinite in age must have infinite dimensions. If our consciousness had already somehow existed for an infinitely long time through a cycle of reincarnations, it would itself have achieved infinity. Infinite consciousness would mean omniscience, so that we would essentially be God.

In a few words: our existence must have had a beginning because if it hadn't, it would otherwise have achieved an end. If we had existed forever, we would have become God.

To reinforce this argument, think of how every reincarnation would have a different consciousness. One would have the consciousness of a slug, virtually nonexistent, another of an animal, another of a human -- if you think about it, any amount of consciousness between zero and infinity would be possible, so that if there were an infinite number of reincarnations, eventually one would have to be infinite, that is to say, one would have to be God. There is, after all, no reason why there should be an upper limit to the consciousness one could have. So what if it could be almost godlike, is there a reason it could not be altogether godlike? If you happen to be a fundamentalist you may think this is blasphemy -- and if you're a scientist you may think it is psychosis. But however hard it is to follow, it is nothing but logic.

One could argue that once an entity would have achieved infinite consciousness it would also eventually for some reason decide forgo it. Perhaps this would be because it would be too unbearable, as is stated in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. From the Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley:

"Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality—anything!"

However, if one is omniscient, how could one not know how one can be at peace with one's own omniscience? Omniscience means infinite consciousness, and so too infinite wisdom. It is through wisdom that we deal with our emotions, and so infinite wisdom would make one invulnerable even to the emotions of infinite consciousness.

Should an animal attain the consciousness of a human from one moment to the next, it as well would be overwhelmed by it, even though we ourselves can usually deal with our consciousness pretty well.

It follows that infinite consciousness would have to entail infinite love, as it would otherwise be unbearable; love not only for everyone, but for everything. Such unconditional love to us is impossible to fully imagine. This would mean not only loving your torturer but even the pain of being tortured. No-one can turn the pain of torture into bliss; but one can let it be as it is. It is possible, with the strongest will in the universe, to realize that even the worst pain is still better than nothing at all, better than oblivion. Even that pain is valuable, and it deserves to be loved like everything in existence.

In fact, humans are very good in loving pain.

Since this ability to love is not an absolute quality, even this would have to grow over time throughout every reincarnation. Even if every incarnation at the end of their life would choose to forget that terrible blinding light they saw at the end of the tunnel, they would choose the body they would return to, and therefore also the consciousness they would have in their next life. Since every incarnation would then adapt to its own consciousness, its ability to deal with its consciousness would grow over time throughout every incarnation.

Since this is a self-perpetuating process, in time the entity's consciousness would reach infinity. If one had learned to conquer all resistance, one would unite with God.

If, on the other hand, every incarnation would be random, it would also have a random lifetime. The longer the lifespan of the incarnation, the more stable it would be, which is logical. However, because no matter how high a value is it is still zero when it is divided by infinity, in an infinite cycle of incarnations this value would eventually have to achieve infinity, which means that we would eventually be immortal so that the cycle of reincarnations would have the end.

We must conclude that a cycle of reincarnations which is infinite is apparently impossible. If a cycle reincarnation is possible at all, it cannot be infinite.

If you are unable to follow the above reasoning, don't worry. I am barely able to myself. I don't think the counter-argument of reincarnation is very relevant. If you believe in reincarnation and have thought about it, it's more likely you've been able to understand the above. What I mostly wanted to prove was that since our consciousness must have an end, it must also have had a beginning (otherwise we'd already have reached the end), and therefore it must have been caused by something else. Thus, there must be something outside of ourselves.

You might think this is trivial, but this has been an issue in philosophy. After all, it seems impossible for you to know if anyone else at all is conscious. There have been philosophers who espoused the belief that there was no-one else outside themselves, and this belief is known as solipsism. Life could be but an invention of our own mind, after all: we could have invented other people, as imaginary friends or imaginary enemies. This happens sometimes, after all, most of all to psychotics.

But what the above means is that the universe cannot be of a solipsistic nature, at least if the universe follows any logic as is described above. Therefore, we must be part of a greater whole, and we must have arisen from it. We arose from a shard of consciousness that somehow separated from the whole and began to grow until it became us, with all our beliefs and feelings. We are nothing but thought, and we arose from the thoughts of the Universe, the thought the universe is made of: in a way, we are the thoughts of God, as God is the Universe.

If we are part of a greater whole, then, there must a kind of reality after all. A reality in which we could never haven chosen to be born in because there was no "we" before we were born, at least not before we were born for the first time (if there is indeed such a thing as reincarnation) as is explained above. Our reality therefore already existed before we were born - just not from our own viewpoint.

Still, I believe that reality was created through imagination, and not the other way around. However, the imagination that created it is the collective imagination of the entire universe. The universe invented itself, and still invents itself from moment to moment. It invents its own future.

However, the universe is nothing but an infinite collection of consciousnesses. It is made of them. How can one consciousness control an entire universe of consciousnesses?

It doesn't.

After all, we cannot control others' worlds any more than they want us to, and since this world is one which we share with very many other entities, we have only a limited control over the whole of it. However, this does not have to mean that we have only a limited control over our own lives.

This is best explained in the many-world's principle, which has been mentioned in the previous entry:

"If the universe is infinite, this means that anything that is possible at all will happen (see entry Modal Realism) because any probability, being dependant on time and space, will become 100% if time and space become infinite. This effectively means that any universe one can think of is real: and if we think of these universes, in our minds we are partly inside it.

This also means that there are an infinite number of universes identical or almost identical to our own, and that every moment infinitely many of those will diverge (while another infinitely many of them will still remain identical). Infinitely many of these universes will each have a different destiny: in one of them, you died a second ago, in another you a celebrity, in one you decided to travel around the world, in one you survived an earthquake with a broken neck, in another woke up to find yourself inexplicably in alien surroundings, in another you were brought to the mental hospital for acute psychosis, and in yet another you are reading this text. According to the many-worlds principle, this is an explanation for quantum chaos."

If, as I postulated, there is no material universe, then what determines which universe we end up in? What can it be in this case but our own thought? This is different from saying that we control the universe: it means that we control which universe we go to. In this way, it is possible for anyone to have full control over their own reality without having to detach from the reality of other people: in an infinite universe there are an infinite number of identical replicas of every entity in the universe, each of which has had the same history but infinitely many of which will have a different future, and that is so for ourselves as well as for the people we know or could know in our world.

Because each replica of every entity will go another way and have a different destiny, they will every moment split up into infinitely many possibilities of what you could have become. For every possible path you could take through the universe, there is a version of you which has chosen to follow it, but you follow only one of those possibilities because that as well is your choice.

What this also means, however, is that as we choose to, we will remain connected to other people in our world despite the fact that we each choose our own universe; one of the replicas of the people we know will always follow us wherever we are. These are still the same people we used to know because their history remains the same. In this way, no matter where we go, we never have to be alone, because there will always be some versions of the people in our world who will choose to go there too. In this way, existence is like an infinitely branching tree.

A universe in which everything is caused only by thought is in fact infinitely simpler than a universe in which everything is caused by matter. In an ideal universe, anything at all can spring from our minds; but could the same be said about anything at all in a material universe? If there is only mind and no matter, than our thought could be said to be the "primary causality" of all things. With "primary causality," what I mean to say is the original cause of everything in the universe.

If there is both mind and matter, however, then there can be no such primary causality: we are trapped in an infinite chain of cause and consequence. Every question we solve raises many more questions, like the heads of the Hydra. In the end, the universe only becomes more and more complicated as we find out more about it. Every cause must itself have a cause, which must itself have a cause, and so forth. In this way we are facing an ultimate cause paradox.

This also means that inevitably, we could never discover the smallest particles in the universe, because even their existence should have some underlying cause. Some scientists say the behavior of elementary particles "just is how the universe works," and that there is no real explanation for them. I am sure the same was said about atoms, and about everything we ever knew, before we found out how it seemed to work.

On the other hand, if there does not come an end to this chain of causes and consequences, then the universe is of infinite complexity. What's more, if there is no original cause which lies at the base of all other causes and consequences, then none of our questions can really be answered. If the answer to every question is just another question, then there is no real answer at all. And if there is no answer to any of our questions, then the material universe doesn't make much sense. Yet, if there is an original cause of everything in the universe and this original cause has itself no cause, we are dealing with the same problem because this means that it is per definition acausal.

It is said that physics could at some point find a single theory which would somehow explain every phenomenon in the universe, the "Theory of Everything," but if you think about it this appears to be impossible. There would always have to be four "laws" at the basis of a material world for it to exist: the first would be the existence of something material, which we'll just call matter; the second would be the movement of its components; the third would be a kind of interaction between its components; the third would be the existence of consciousness. Think about it as long as you will, it is impossible to find a simpler model, as these three rules would always be necessary for matter to form a structural whole. Without the first law, well, there would nothing to shape the material world from; without the second law, it would be static; without the third law, the whole would remain a homogeneous soup, without the fourth law, there would be no-one to think about this anyway.

You might say that the same counts in a monistic idealist universe, albeit in another form. If there is no material world, then causality must instead lie within the ideal world. The only difference, then, is that instead of material movement there would be ideal movement, movement within our thoughts.

Again, this would elicit the necessity of three laws. The first law would be the existence of conscious entities, the second of the possibility of change of that consciousness, and the third is the interaction between the entities. That's one law less than in a material universe, but in this way there's still three laws which seem inexplicable. However, the whole argument I have been trying to prove in this treatise is that everything is as we choose to think it is, and this would be the one rule of the universe, which would unify each of the three above. Whatever we think our world to be, it will be.

This is the true meaning of the sentence "I think therefore I am." This one sentence is the primary causality of the entire universe. Cogito ergo sum is, in a way, the Theory of Everything.

This elegant simplicity is why I have come to prefer the hypothesis of an ideal universe. As Occam's razor says, if all solutions have an equal outcome, then the simplest solution is usually the best.

Occam's razor is actually a controversial argument. After all, the sun does not turn around the earth, for instance, even though it would appear to be simpler. I say appear, because upon closer inspection this appears not to be so. For one thing, the mechanics of the celestial bodies are a lot more complicated, and for another, if the sun is just a star then this unifies the two concepts. The idea is not that we are to reason in the simplest way, but that the universe tends to take the simplest route.

There is another reason why a monistic universe is simpler than a dualistic universe, and it can be deduced from their names: in a dualistic universe there is both matter and consciousness, in a monistic universe there is only one, consciousness. If it can be shown an ideal universe could work, that is to say, if a reality like our own could spring from consciousness alone, then Occam's razor therefore tells us we would prefer such universe above one in which there is both mind and matter.

In a monistic universe, mind and matter are one and the same. The only way in which we can explain these concepts is by unifying them to one. Matter exists, but only in our minds; it is part of our minds, the part of it that behaves according to laws. Thus, what matter really means to us is reality, even if reality is actually but in our minds. Materiality can be perceived as a degree, the degree of consciousness in which it behaves as though material.

Put another way, in a dualistic universe matter causes consciousness, in a monistic universe matter is an element of consciousness.

Even if there is no real matter in our world, it does have physical laws. But this is simply because we have invented this world with all its laws. We are creatures who need an explanation for everything, and therefore we invented an explanation for everything - and invented scientific proof for them. But the only thing we're really doing is to create puzzles for ourselves to then solve them: there are no such puzzles outside of ourselves. But they give us a stronger feeling of reality. We are the universe, and therefore the laws of the universe are our laws. The laws of the material world were written not by the material world itself, but by science. We are constructing science much like we could construct a tower. That is beautiful, immensely beautiful. But it is not truth any more than anything else you might want to hold true; something is true because it is true for us. In this way, we create our own truth, the truth of our own world. We are each the Gods of our own world; we don't simply discover the laws of our own universe, we create them.

Earlier I mentioned the many-worlds principle, and how apparently identical universes may split up into infinitely many others. The reason that apparently identical universes can split up into infinitely diverse others is a phenomenon known as chaos. The universe is so complex that the tiniest change in it can have very far-reaching consequences.
In fact, this change could be infinitely small, for instance a particle which is an infinitely small distance from its original position. This change will still spread throughout the whole system it is part of to affect it in a way which can be quite dramatic.

Thus, the concept of "identical" universes is actually inaccurate; I should say, instead, that there are quasi-identical universes, even though they might not stay quasi-identical for long. In an infinite universe, there only be an infinite approximation of similarity between two universes, but even that infinitesimal difference may cause everything to change because the universe is infinitely complex. The chaos of a system is proportional to the complexity of the system, thus, if the universe is infinitely complex, even an infinitesimal change can cause a difference.

Indirectly, we always choose our own world; but our choice of the world we live in is based upon the rules we want it to have, rules that are essentially merely rules of our own mind. We want to have an external reality, a world outside of us we do not only influence but are also influenced by.

Then again, we might not always like how that world influences us, so that we still want to have some control over that world. This leaves us to choose between reality and fantasy; that is to say, between our outside and our inner worlds. Thus, we try to strike a balance.

People who have a lot of imagination attach less importance too reality, and some people choose to detach from it almost altogether, which leads to psychosis. These people create their own reality in a world of "hallucinations" and "delusions," although for them they are just as real as our own reality is to us. Psychosis usually occurs because of severe stress because this makes reality so unendurable that the patient may wish to disconnect from it - often this is counterproductive because they are then confronted with their own subconscious. Because of the stres they've gone through, they might have come to hate themselves, and this self-hatred might cause one's inner world (in the form of hallucinations) to turn against oneself. The same holds true in reality.
In fact, the same may happen in healthy nighttime dreams, and this illustrates how, if we choose our own reality, a lot can go wrong in it.

Sometimes, psychosis is episodic, as sometimes occurs in schizophrenia: when a psychotic recovers from an episode, this is because they have decided to return to the real world. To do this, however, they have to find a connection of their psychosis with the real world, and this connection is made in psychiatry: they convince themselves that their psychosis wasn't real, and the only way they can do this is to dismiss it as a neurochemical imbalance. Yet, for a psychotic, his hallucinations certainly are real enough; only for the outside world they can not be real, but this is because psychotics have subconsciously decided to detach from the outside world.

See also:

A Dualistic Universe?

Law of Attraction

The Innerverse

Modal Realism

Consciousness, the Greatest Mystery of the Universe

The God Theory - Part I, Analytical

The God Theory - Part II, Holistic

The infinity Principle

The Meaning of I

The God Theory - Part II, Holistic

The infinity Principle

The Meaning of I

A Dualistic Universe?

+01:00

On the hypothesis of a dualistic universe, in which there is both mind and matter.

According to multiverse theory, our own universe is but one of many, and the totality of universes is infinite. While perhaps counterintuitive, it is most logical for the universe to be infinite because there should otherwise be something to impose limitations upon it. Suppose, for instance, that there is only a certain and constant amount of energy in the Universe, then something must have somehow determined this amount: since there is nothing outside of the Universe, however, this is impossible. Other objections are raised in the article "Modal Realism" and The Infinity Principle."

If the universe is infinite, this means that anything that is possible at all will happen (see entry Modal Realism) because any probability, being dependant on time and space, will become 100% if time and space become infinite. This effectively means that any universe one can think of is real: and if we think of these universes, in our minds we are partly inside it.

This also means that there are an infinite number of universes identical or almost identical to our own, and that every moment infinitely many of those will diverge (while another infinitely many of them will still remain identical). Infinitely many of these universes will each have a different destiny: in one of them, you died a second ago, in another you a celebrity, in one you decided to travel around the world, in one you survived an earthquake with a broken neck, in another woke up to find yourself inexplicably in alien surroundings, in another you were brought to the mental hospital for acute psychosis, and in yet another you are reading this text. According to the many-worlds principle, this is an explanation for quantum chaos.

Now here is the paradox: if there is an infinite number of identical universes, what determines in which of these universes we end up?

After all, if consciousness is caused by matter, there are only two possibilities: either it is caused by the quality or quantity of matter. The former means that consciousness is caused by patterns, that is, the arrangement of particles; therefore, consciousness lies in information. The latter means that consciousness is caused by energy itself, that is, it is in the particles themselves; therefore, consciousness lies within matter.

Actually, these two possibilities are but two variations of the same, as even energy is but information: if our consciousness lies in the particles that compose us, after all, this basically means that it lies in the information of which particle or particles is us. Even this would be a pattern, since it would be an association between consciousness and particles.

In the latter case, however, our lives would be very short, as the particles our brain comprises are replaced every so often, upon which other particles would take their place and live our lives in our stead. Our lives would be so short, in fact, that is would be improbably at any given time that we would be alive, since the vast majority of the matter in the universe is, after all, unconscious.

However, eventually our particles or particle would once more become part of another brain, and we could, in principle, be alive again - if the theory that matter causes consciousness in this way is true. However, this "dormant" phase between two lives could appear to pass instantaneously because we would not be conscious at all, much as like sleep: even if it would last billions of years before our particles would become part of another brain, it would appear to take no time at all. On the other hand, since our consciousness would last for such a short time it would remain extremely improbable that we'd happen to be human at any given time, as the majority of conscious creatures are still much smaller and therefore more numerous than ourselves, even if their consciousness is only very limited.

If consciousness would bound to a single elementary particle, however, this statistic improbability would largely fall away because there are far more elementary particles in a human brain than in an animal brain. However, this hypothesis comes to seem quite illogical when one takes into consideration that this one elementary particle, while having no real connection with the other particles of the brain it is part of, would be conscious of the thoughts of the entire brain.

So there should be a connection between the particles with each other in order for them to be conscious of each other, that is, to form one single consciousness. Now the crucial thing is that this connection between this particles is in itself is a pattern.

Thus, in order for particles to form any consciousness at all, there would have to be pattern in them. Patterns in mind can only be brought about if there are patterns in matter -- at least, if and only if the mind is produced by matter.

It appears, then, that like many other hypotheses we have explored, the hypothesis that consciousness is caused by energy meets a dead end, as it clearly seems to clash with logic. That leaves the theory that consciousness resides within the patterns of energy - a theory coined "patternism" by Raymond Kurzweil.

There are, however, a few problems with this theory, as well, even though it is the most plausible dualist theory (involving both mind and matter). One of these is the translation of material into mental patterns. How does this translation happen? What performs this translation? How can something objective turn into something subjective?

After all, in a material world causality occurs outside of the ideal world. Yet somehow, the material world should cause the ideal world to arise. Thus ideality is somehow involved in a causal process even though it is not part of the material world. This is obviously a paradox.

Everything must have an explanation: this is the base of logic, and if there is no logic in the universe then I am just wasting my time here trying to find one. But this also means that there must be an explanation for what causes consciousness, and if consciousness is caused by matter, then there must be an explanation for how matter causes consciousness, that is, in what way. There must be a mechanism through which a particular configuration of nervous impulses produces a particular configuration of qualia, just like there is a mechanism through which a particular code of DNA produces a particular configuration of amino acids into protein. And yet, this mechanism itself would be part of the material, causal world.

Should there be any reason at all why one configuration of energy should lead to one configuration of consciousness and another to another? How is it that one brain thinks of what it's going to do tonight and another, say, about the nature of consciousness? Why should a brain be more conscious than a computer, or even a vat of chemicals? In everything in the material world, there is a logical explanation why one thing leads to another, but this does not seem to apply for consciousness. I say this not because I cannot find an answer, but because it seems illogical that there could be an answer at all. Somehow, consciousness and matter seem irreconcilable.

Clearly, it's not enough for there to be a chemical reaction in the brain for it to produce consciousness, as we are unconscious of many of those chemical reactions. Our memories are comprised of such chemical reactions too, after all, and yet we're not conscious of them all the time. So in what part of our brain is our consciousness?

Should there be any reason at all why one configuration of energy should lead to one configuration of consciousness and another to another? How is it that one brain thinks of what it's going to do tonight and another, say, about the nature of consciousness? Why should a brain be more conscious than a computer, or even a vat of chemicals? In everything in the material world, there is a logical explanation why one thing leads to another, but this does not seem to apply for consciousness. I say this not because I cannot find an answer, but because it seems illogical that there could be an answer at all. Somehow, consciousness and matter seem irreconcilable.

To put it more intuitively, think of it in the following way: no matter what scientists will ever do, it is per definition impossible to find out what makes us conscious. Hypothetically, we could use humans as test subjects, cause changes in their neurochemistry and ask them how they experience them -- but we can never find out why these changes cause these experiences. We'll still discover a lot about how our neurochemistry works, but never about how the transition to actual consciousness happens because that is impossible. We can know how consciousness works, in a way, which is what neurology and psychology are about, but we can never know why consciousness exists, which is what philosophy is about.

Neurology could go on and on in looking for an explanation for consciousness, but it's a quest that would never end. Our first attempt in doing so was in our discovery that thought is produced by the brain. The inevitable question arose, then, how the brain produces consciousness. We then discovered that the brain is made of a web of nerves, and that the signals they transfer within produce consciousness. This, in turn, only raised the question how these signals produced consciousness, and so on. Some neurologists are starting to suspect quantum effects play part in the whole process. In the end, the question will keep following us throughout the advance of science, ever going deeper and deeper into its realms, becoming increasingly abstract as it does, all the way down to quantum physics and beyond!

But doesn't it strike you that the question remained the same throughout history? It's been posed in increasingly complicated variations of the theme "What causes consciousness?" but it's always basically remained the same question. Attributing consciousness to chemical reactions in our brain isn't any more of an answer to that question than attributing it to things that happen in the world around us. If you come to think of it, there is no difference with regards to the question of consciousness: both the things that happen in our environment and the things that happen in our brain must be subject to an interpretation, that is to say, something that translates it into consciousness. If this event is just chemical reaction in the brain or a change in our environment doesn't matter.

So we can either choose to avoid the question unto infinity through scientific method ("the cause is caused by a cause which is caused by a cause which is caused by a cause" and so forth ad infinitum) or treat the question as it is supposed to be, philosophically.

Plain logic seems to show us that there is no way out here. Something objective cannot become subjective because subjectivity and objectivity cannot be reconciled. Whatever objective reality there would be would have to be perceived in a subjective reality; this means that subjective reality always stand above objective reality, looking upon it, and can therefore not be part of it. What this means is that consciousness is something greater than matter and cannot be caused by it.

These objections left aside, there is another problem with patternism. Many futurists, including Raymond Kurzweil, argue that we might in future somehow be able to transfer our consciousness form our brain to an electronic brain. And this is where the metaphysical confusion about consciousness really becomes evident (see entry Consciousness, the Greatest Mystery of the Universe).

It's baffled every futurist who believed in it how such "uploading" could be performed. Suppose that one would build a computer which contains all the information in your brain and kill you at the moment one deactivated it? Or that one would just gradually replace your neurons one by one with nanoscale computers which would connect to your own brain, until every neuron in your brain would be replaced?

The answer to the last questions seems more intuitive, but this is misleading. An analogous example shows that it is not at all as obvious as it seems. Suppose that the process would occur in another way: instead of having your neurons gradually replaced by nanocomputers inside of your brain, the nanocomputers would instead remain outside of your body, connected not through direct contact but via nanorobots in your brain which would transfer the information at light speed. Eventually, every of your neurons would be replaced and the last nanorobots in your now empty skull would shut down. Meanwhile, all information that was once part of your brain would now be transferred to a computer or network somewhere else. All the while you were conscious of this information as it was steadily transferred into your new brain. The only difference between this and the former scenario is the physical distance between the brain and the nanocomputers.

There are many other objections here which make the principle uploading seem all the more mysterious. Suppose there were a slight delay in the transference of information from the neurons to the nanocomputers as the latter replaced the former, for instance, how long could this delay be before it would be too late and the brain would no longer be conscious of the information stored in the nanocomputers? Suppose the information were just slightly different, how different could it be? And most important of all, if the brain and the nanocomputers would keep communicating throughout the process of replacement, so that the brain would remain conscious of the nanocomputers' information, at which point would the consciousness be transfered to the nanocomputers? If the nanocomputers and the brain would disconnect when the replacement process is halfway, would the consciousness somehow have half transfered and the individual be conscious both of the information in the brain and in the nanocomputers? Could one dispense with what is left of the brain safely at this point, and assume that the consciousness had already transfered to the nanocomputers anyway?

You might say computers would be unable either how to produce consciousness. Well, then, let's instead use a brain in our hypothesis. Suppose a mad scientist stole your brain and put it in a vat; in another vat, there is another brain which is exactly the same down to subatomic level. Admittedly, this is practically impossible, but since it is still theoretically possible, let us just assume it to be so. This second brain contains exactly the same information as your own: it has exactly the same neural circuitry with all the same nervous impulses. If consciousness is indeed caused by patterns, then in principle at this point you should be both brains at the same time because there is no difference between the two, much like a quantum particle can be at two places at the same time. What happens to your consciousness, then, when the two brains stop being identical, for instance randomly, or just because the mad scientist decided to destroy your original brain?

As a better example, let's say there are three identical brains, one being your original brain. If your consciousness would cease, this would apparently mean that it is bound to the particles of your brain, which we have already explained seems to be impossible. If your consciousness would be transferred, then consciousness is indeed bound to patterns. But now you see why I've put in three brains: there is still the question which brain you'd be transferred into.

If a second of the three brains was destroyed, would you still be alive?

One may be inclined to say this would be mere coincidence, and I know that there is little I can say against such final argument. After all, it does seem to be coincidental that we ended up to be us when we were born, but that can also be said about the fact that today as I am writing this is the fifth of October. This is no allusion to reincarnation, but with this I mean to say that it is coincidental that that which is, is. That we are now instead of sometime in the past or future is a coincidence, and so, as a result is where we are; and, since our body can be interpreted as a place, so in a way is who we are

However, this is only so for that which already is in the here and now as independent of the past and future; the relation between now, past and future cannot be coincidental. In other words, while both the occurrence of a cause and the occurrence of a consequence are coincidental, the relation between cause and consequence can not be coincidental. Put in a plainer way, causality cannot be coincidental because in that case it would be no causality at all. Causality is the opposite of coincidence. If something is "coincidental," it means it has no reason in particular for being what it is rather than something else. Upon a closer look, however, the underlying system which caused it was not in itself coincidental, and only nonspecific cases can have several outcomes.

Even quantum chaos is only the appearance of coincidence caused by its unpredictability, a more complicated variant of classical chaos theory, famously formulated with the example that a butterfly can cause a hurricane by beating its wings. However, to predict the behavior of a quantum system we would have to know both the position and speed of every particle it contains, and since the Heisenberg principle makes this impossible to us, it is also impossible to observe any predictability there might be in a quantum system; since it cannot be observed, it is irrelevant to us. The same approach is used in the Planck length: since it is impossible to us to observe a distance smallest than the Planck length, it is meaningless to us and we say that "the Planck length is the smallest distance in the universe."

Only if something has no particular cause except for chaos do we say that it is coincidental. Or the other way around, for something to be coincidental it must have no cause except for chaos.

We could assume that this is the case for consciousness, but we already stated that if consciousness is caused by the material world it must be caused by patterns. However, if consciousness were random. Again, we could then state that, since our consciousness would every moment switch to another entity, it would be extremely unlikely for us to be human at any given moment: the average "me" would be an insect.

Thus, finally even patternism appears to meet a dead end, that is, unless one resorts to acausality. If one attributes consciousness to coincidence, however, one may as well stop thinking about it altogether, as doing so one is dispensing with all logic. As said before, logic is to search for a relation between cause and consequence, and if one affirms that there is no cause at all for something, then one is no longer dealing with logic.

With regards to our brain replica hypothesis, the only thing one could object as far as I can see is that the location of the brain would be a piece of information which is included in the patterns which comprise our mind. This issue is quickly resolved, however, as the mad scientist could simply exchange one brain for the other. One could then argue that it is the continuity in the location of the brain which plays a role: that is, that consciousness can't "teleport" from one location to another, and therefore neither from one brain to another.

I admit it seems a far-fetched argument, but I want to explore every possible hypothesis to explore their probability. Another similar, ostensibly less far-fetched argument is that rather than the continuity of space, it is the continuity of time which determines who we are.

After all, like the matter it is made of, the patterns of our mind change continuously, so that it would appear that the theory that our consciousness is determined by patterns is incomplete. Raymond Kurzweil argues, however, that it is the continuity of our brain patterns which makes us conscious, which is an important nuance. This may be compared to a chronometer session: as long as the session goes, it's still the same session; when a new session is started, it's still a session on the same chronometer and going at the same speed, but it's no longer the same session. Basically, this continuity argument ascribes who we are now to who we used to be in the past.

Still, I have an objection against both arguments - both the argument of space continuity and the argument of time continuity - which I will explain in the following thought experiment.

Suppose that every neuron in our brain were engineered to regain their possibility of mitosis, that is, cell division (most brain cells normally do not divide), and that every neuron divided at once. Imagine that once they have divided, all neurons would have the same connections the neurons of the original brain had. Basically, you'd have two brains intertwined in each other, because each of the neurons of the original brain split up and remained connected. Now imagine that these two brains would somehow be separated.

Like the previous hypothesis, this is practically impossible because neurons are mechanically interlocked into a complex skein, but theoretically, it certainly is possible, so that for the sake of argument we assume it is possible. We could assume that, while the neurons are separated from each other into two separate brains, their membranes could somehow temporarily coalesce and then separate again as they collide with each other during their separation, so that they would go through each other as if they never were there.

Or, we could just assume that although the two brains are intertwined, they function separately from each other because there is no connection between their neurons anyway. Or we could simplify the hypothesis by using a single neuron instead of a whole brain, and assume that this one neuron had a limited but existant consciousness, and suppose that it would split up.

The idea, either how, is that a system which gives rise to consciousness is split in two. We have thus created a hypothesis in which everything about the two brains is initially exactly the same: the two brains came from a single brain and therefore once shared the same energy, the same location, and share the same patterns; they even share the same history, which decisively deals with the continuity argument as well. They are as identical as anything can be, with the exception that they are made of different energies. This is the ultimate thought experiment in our attempts to find an answer to the question: what is consciousness?

There are only two objections which can still be made to this thought experiment, and they have both been discussed above: one is that consciousness is bound to a single elementary particle, and the other that the transfer of consciousness would be coincidental. Both to me seem to clash with logic, as I have already explained above. I believe, however, that most people will like to dismiss my thought experiments by attributing mind transfer to coincidence because it is easiest.

The thought experiments I've just expounded are very similar to the issue we've touched upon earlier when we were talking about the many-worlds principle. After all, if our consciousness is determined by patterns in our brain then mind transfer should occur should we die: there's an infinity of copies of ourself out there in an infinite universe, so we'd have an infinite number of possible universes to go to, which you'll agree sounds bizarre. Again, we face the issue: what determines in which universe "I" end up if there are an infinite number of me's?

I will treat this issue in the next chapter.

See also:

A Monistic Universe?

Law of Attraction

The Innerverse

Modal Realism

Consciousness, the Greatest Mystery of the Universe

The God Theory - Part I, Analytical

The God Theory - Part II, Holistic

The infinity Principle

The Meaning of I

The God Theory - Part II, Holistic

The infinity Principle

The Meaning of I

Mancini and Wright - Or the Idiocy of Forethought

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Mancini was thoughtfully holding a glass of wine, seeming lost in thought as he somberly stared through it with that look of calculation that was so typical of the man. Wright, on the other side of the table, was sipping from the same wine with delight, but he could not help noticing the expression on his friend's face.
"Is something wrong?" he asked. "It's nothing with the wine, I hope?" he added, when he saw how fixedly he was staring at his own glass. "I personally think the wine is delicious."
"It is, it is," Mancini said gloomily. "That's what I was just thinking. If I drink it, it's gone."

Love is Immortal

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Love is immortal. It is the driving force of all life. Once the need for love sets a heart on fire it will last forever, for it cannot forget itself. Whatever may happen to it, everything will always seek for love until it finally finds it in everything. Longing for love can grow, but it can never die. Even when a heart is embittered, it will still need love as much as ever, in some form or other; but it will not always find it until it is soothed again. Love is an ever growing light that shines from the end of our tunnel as we walk through it, onward to infinity.

Acceptance

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To have a positive attitude towards life does not mean that one concentrates on that which one sees as positive in life, but to see life itself as positive, positive and negative things alike. If one truly loves someone, one will accept them as they are, and the same counts for everything. One's love for something can never be consummate until one loves the whole of it, and therefore every facet of its existence.

Love Life

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If you do not love life, life will not love you; if you do not love yourself you will not love life. For life is you.

The meaning of I

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We are ourselves - I am I and you are you - because we perceive ourselves. We are, then, who or what we perceive. We are, therefore, just as much the world we perceive as our minds we perceive. Mind and matter are but two parts of our perception. Matter, therefore, even if it has a discrete existence on its own, is at the same time part of our own mind.
But the world around us - within us - does things we do not choose to do. This is because we are not conscious of doing them, just like we do not choose anything that happens in our mind - addictions, complexes, phobia… The first step to gaining control over our subconscious is to become conscious of it rather than, as we often do, repressing it.

Transhuman Olympics

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As and when self-improvement, which has already been part of our society for thousands of years, will become more and more advanced, there will eventually arise competitive sports in which the use of supplements ("dope") is no longer secretly done by some of the athletes but openly by all of them, as well as other forms of enhancement such as genetic and robotic. The use of these supplements will be supervised by doctors, however, and supplements which could be harmful to the athlete could be either forbidden (so that, unfortunately, there would still be illegal dope) or advised against. This supervision would have to be very strict, much like the dope tests today, so that there would be no risk of an overenthusiastic athlete experiment recklessly with the wrong enhancements, that is to say, enhancements known or unknown to be dangerous.

This would also be interesting in that it would allow researchers to find the best way of improving the human body's performance. That doesn't mean the athletes would be used as test animals for new enhancements, but that once was known that they are safe, they could try to find the ideal combination of enhancements. The doctors would place a limit on the number of enhancements, so that they would not harm their health, depending strongly on the nature of the enhancements.

Because this enhancement is a complicated process, the sports would be as much a cognitive sport to the doctors (or the athletes, in case they also occupy them with this), as a physical sport to the athletes.

The Garden Maze

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Think of life as a beautiful garden maze. In the maze every passage has its own beauty: here there is a fountain, there there a flowerbed, somewhere further a statue or sculpture or a pond a tree or just a tirelessly singing bird…
Perhaps you are just passing them by as you are running through each passage to go to the next, around the next corner, always looking around the corner to find the exit in the maze. Perhaps you are trying to find a destination in the maze, but there isn't really one.

Don't seek, and you will find.

Resisting

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Accepting is not something one does. Resisting is. To accept all one has to do is to stop resisting.

Loss of Time

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One can only lose time by considering whatever one is doing a loss of time.

Catharsis of Despair

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The mind is made of many layers of perception and meta-perception, and this is so too for the heart. We don't feel only because of things, but also because of what we feel. In this way every emotion intensifies itself and escalates. We have not only emotions but also meta-emotions: emotions about emotions, and emotions about those emotions and so forth. If there is resistance in us, it might be that that resistance is far greater than the original resistance was, because it is resistance of that resistance. Thus, much can be done about it by just allowing yourself to resist life for a while, that is to say, to give up, to despair. Despair is a functional emotion meant to purify our minds.
The only negative thing about despair is that people see it as negative, so that people in despair will usually also see it as negative and resist it. The reason people see it as negative is because people who are in despair do not function properly. But despair is a means for the heart to get rest, much like sleep.

Chased by a Goblin

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You can either accept or resist an experience, and if you resist, then that too is an experience, and there is nothing wrong with that. The point is, you can either run from an experience or stand before it and look it in the eyes, and like the monsters in our dreams, the more we'll run from them the more frightening they'll seem, but look closely and you'll find that they're just baby goblins with toy clubs.
You can either accept or resist an experience, and if you resist, then that too is an experience, and there is nothing wrong with that, either. The point is, you can either run from an experience or stand before it and look it in the eyes, and like the monsters in o ur dreams, the more we'll run from them the more frightening they'll seem, but look closely and you'll find that they're just baby goblins with toy clubs.There is nothing to be afraid of, not even fear itself.
The only difference it makes if one is afraid is that one is no longer conscious of the real nature of one's experiences. Like when one is running from a monster, one faces away from it and so no longer sees what it really is, let alone see it for what it really is; likewise, if one is afraid of something, one tries to become unconscious of it - and it works, but not with the desired effect. Suffering is, in effect, is ignorance.
And that's what people just won't get.
If you face your fears, they'll disappear. But what does that mean, facing your fears? It means you accept them, and whatever it is you fear, not resisting. Usually, people are incapable of both accepting their fears and at the same time enjoying. It is in our nature.
When we enjoy life, we try as hard as we can to forget our fears because those might interfere with our happiness. We cannot accept our happiness and at the same time that it might disappear. This brings us into a perpetual cycle of joy and suffering and hope and despair, and the only way we can break free from this cycle is to dispense with the illusion that there is any such thing as good and bad. This liberation is a painstaking process that can only be achieved by suffering - that is, in the sense enduring - those things we cannot accept, and learning to love those things and seeing their beauty.
If we drop the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we will regain Paradise. That does not mean we must cease to distinguish light from darkness, but that we should condemn neither. Do that which is most beautiful, and it will create more beauty. But let us see what is most beautiful with our hearts, and not with our minds. Only the mind knows such duality between good and bad because only the mind sees in black and white.

Pearls

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Thinking is like diving for pearls: dive straight to the oyster, and when you've found it come straight back to the surface. Don't stay under water too long, or you'll drown.

The Life Shop

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After another look at the showcase, I came in. Glancing at the pale golden words "Life Shop" painted on the door, I reminisced on when I first saw them - I was too little then to know what they meant, let alone what secrets I'd find beyond that door. I dared to come in, and since then I'd come back every day for more. I got addicted to its merchandise, so much so that I felt it'd kill me if I didn't get any more for even a single day. There were all sorts of things, and I'm quite sure that even if I'd live to be a hundred years I could never try everything there was.
The shopkeeper was a little strange, though. I'd never actually seen him. And since he never showed himself in the shop, and everything was for free anyway, I do wonder if one could call him the shopkeeper at all. It's just what I call him since, well, I wouldn't know what else I should call him.
"Ah, Eligio!" said a voice from nowhere. "Same as always, El, you know the drill."
"Right. Self-service." I looked around. My eyes skimmed over the thousands of potions in the room. Every potion had another effect. There was joy and hope and fear and love and sadness… I looked longingly at happiness, a potion which was tantalizingly outside my reach on one of the higher shelves: it was too high. Every time I made this objection Eligio laughed and said: "Why, there's ladders!"
I then replied that I was afraid of heights. This made his laugh even more merrily, and he said, "Well, you can remain down here all your life if you want to, but that's not going to get you anywhere. You've been in here often enough to know all the more interesting things are up there."
He pointed and looked up, and I followed suit. It was, indeed, a long, long way up. The strange shop was actually so high that he could not see the roof, and he wondered if there actually was any at all, even though at the outside the shop seemed small. An endless series of ledges and ledges and stairs led up.
Oh, he'd been up there, and actually far higher than most people here cared to go. Every level actually had the same potions, but they were somehow different. At least, they were given the same name. But the "happiness" you could drink at level five was nothing compared to the happiness down at the ground level: richer, warmer, and strangely more complicated. In fact, once I'd drunk the happiness in the higher levels I was quite tired of the happiness at the ground level: it tasted cloying in comparison.
Yes, it's true that I've often fallen down when I climbed higher, and it did make me more cautious about how high I'd go. When he'd find I'd broken nothing, Theo, the shopkeeper, would merely laugh and say that if I fell, it was my own doing. This would make me so angry that I'd fly into a rage. My doing? Couldn't the bastard at least build a safer shop for his customers? To my irritation, as usual he would just laugh at this, and say that this was just a quicker way down for people who wanted it. He'd then ask me how it happened that I'd fallen, and with extreme vexation I'd admit that as usual I'd looked down. He'd told me not to look down, but it wasn't easy when you knew there the only thing that kept you from falling down hundreds of feet were a few inches of floor at your side. Yet I'd found that I would fall only when I did look down. I'd feel my body being sucked into those vertiginous depths as soon as the fear of falling down came over me.
I'd be convinced I'd broken every bone in my body even when I'd go home, but to my surprise, I'd never broken anything at all, at least, except for some vials and potions in the shop.
Strange to say it often felt safer in the dark cellar, and when I'd fall from the higher levels the first thing I'd do would be too rush down into them. There, at least there were safe balusters, and if you'd go down at least you knew you could get up again, at least if you wouldn't get lost in the dark.
And when his accursed shop had just been responsible for another of my falls, there was no way I wanted to hear or see that freak Theo then - or that's how I thought of him then, even though he could be a nice guy, at least, in his own ways. Strange to say, I had never even actually seen him, which had made me make the joke to ask if he wasn't just some kind of cassette player - it was meant as a joke then, but I'd actually wondered for some time if it wasn't close to the truth.
Either how, when he'd just been responsible for another of my frequent falls I liked not to see him for a while, and besides, well, if I may whisper something in your ear, there are actually many, well, noteworthy potions in the cellar, too. But don't tell that to anyone, because most people will think we a psycho to say that. And yet, people keep coming down here and drinking the potions in the racks here. I wonder why. But when I ask why they do it, they just say that they are meant to be here.
But somehow, I find the potions here have something strangely, and perhaps deceptively addictive - like the songs of the Lorelei. Once you'd get down here, you were almost sure to come back someday. Strangely, the potions here were almost always bitter or acrid, or ice-cold or very hot. Sometimes, they would burn in your throat or in your stomach, and more than once I've actually vomited from them. I'd then try to get back up as fast as possible, but then I sometimes realized that wasn't always easy, finding your way back. And there were always those horribly tempting smells of those strange potions. Why ever the shopkeeper held these potions here, I don't know. I asked him, but all he'd say was that there were very many tastes, and he wanted to satisfy everyone's.
It was very dreary here. But above, when you'd look straight up in the shop you'd look into a blinding light like that of the sun. Some supposed there just had to be a very bright lamp there, and others thought it was a window to the sun, and wondered what it would be like on the roof. But I thought there was no roof, and there was no window up there either: I believe the shop was so high that it went all the way up to the sun.
Indeed, once when I'd gone up to the nine-hundred seventy-sixth floor, when I came down, panting all the way, I asked Theo: "Where is the roof of this thing?"
"You know there is no roof, El," he'd say with his usual laugh, "What do you take me for, an ordinary junk shopper? This is a real place, y'know: it goes up into infinity."

Law of Attraction

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I am still wondering. And I wonder if ever in my life I will find answers. I know that there are no certainties and that most of the things we believe to know are just guesses, and with guesses we'll have to do. Am I to guess, then, that consciousness arose from matter or matter from consciousness, or both? Is this a dream or reality, or both?

I can't make sense of this puzzle. But it still seems to me like the only explanation is that, as everything is just how we perceive it to be, everything will also be as we perceive it will be. If there are an infinity of identical universes which each have a different fate, just what determines in which universe we are?

The law of attraction does not seem to make much sense at first: things too often go wrong for us. But the mind is a strange, strange thing. Our subconscious is always stronger than our conscious, as is shown when we try to stop smoking, for instance. Maybe, while our conscious decides one thing, our subconscious has thought of something altogether different. Perhaps it is our subconscious which is the God in each of us, which decides how our lives will be from moment to moment.

Perhaps, deep down inside of each of us there is a writer of our own lives. And writers can give their characters a tough time. Why? After all, people read a book to experience in the place of the characters -- why would they want to go through a tough time in their place?

The answer is, of course, simple. Because that's just part of what makes their adventures appealing. Perhaps if we are in suffering that means we just need suffering.

And perhaps part of us doesn't want to believe that we are the masters in our own game, and thus leave part of what happens in our lives to coincidence. We want things to make sense. It would be very frightening if we could cause reality itself to break down simply with our thoughts.

But it is complicated. And the inner writer within us is hard to understand. Because it understands things we do not. Unlike us, it knows what it is doing, and looks at our own lives from a distance.

The Process of Healing

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See depression as a tunnel: usually it is healed by going back out of the tunnel the way one came in - but one may also heal by going all the way through it. The former may be the case when the person does not fully lose, the latter when he or she has lost all hope. The strange thing is that depression may heal itself: the chronic stress of depression causes a process of desensitization which eventually may cause it to destroy itself.

Depression usually starts with fear or stress. Fear is often still prominent through later stages, but it is usually worse in the beginning. Later, the chronic stress of this fear causes a desensitization, and the person becomes resigned to his situation. At this point fear turns into despair. Despair is actually less distressing than fear, so that the person will often try to remain in despair, leading to unreasonable negativism. This negativism is a subconscious method of the person to blunt his own emotionality further and further, as it makes them stop caring: they give up.
Eventually, if their depression lasts long enough, the person's affect will become even more blunted so that the person feels empty. Emptiness may in itself be quite distressing: it may be compared to feeling as if one can't breathe. If this distress is severe enough, the person may become totally numb so that even the distress about "not feeling anything" (except for feeling that one doesn't feel anything) falls away.
Here the person comes to a crossroads. If his condition is severe enough and he has a diathesis for it, the chronic stress he has suffered may cause the person to become schizoid. However, this is rare; there is a second possibility.
Because the person at this point no longer feels any distress, it may have made place for positive emotions, just as the ice in spring makes place for flowers to grow. At this point the person may heal, and the numbness then turns into a kind of peace: the person is relieved to no longer feel anything, and becomes content with it.

Small and Large

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We study the small to control the large.

Yin and Yang

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Yang mostly protects one from negative feelings, Yin mostly increases one positive feelings.

Dream vs Hope

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Is is better to dream than to hope: hope implies that you will not be fulfilled until you have achieved something, while a dream does not. You enjoy the dream even when it isn't yet reality.

The Solution

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The solution to all your problems is to see that you have no problems.

If you're not worried about your worries you don't really have any worries. Sorrow is an artifice. When you try to feel bad, you no longer will. If you are afraid to be unhappy, TRY to be unhappy, and you no longer will be.

Harmony

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Any control an entity has over itself or another is determined by their harmony with itself or the other entity, be it a person, thing, or group.

Choices

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You may inspire others' choices, but never make their choices.

Creative Selection

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In creativity, we should apply the same principle nature does, that of natural selection. Quantity should come first, quality afterwards.

Unconditional Love for Life

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One must not demand anything at all of life. It is given from us and it can be taken from us, but always and in all circumstances, there are untold wonders to enjoy, and each is a reason to be happy. If you can lose whatever ou have, you are free.

Beauty of Ugliness

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Ugliness is just a kind of beauty that is too overwhelming to oneself.

Creation of Emotions

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One creates one's own emotions, and to create feelings one doesn't want is pointless. The only thing one has to do to become free of them is gaining a distance from them.

Profundity

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Anything that stirs the depths of the soul can be painful in its intensity, and that is why most people do not seek these things.

Believe

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If you can't trust in God, who or what can be trusted? And if you can trust God you can trust everything, for God is everything. And if God has allowed everything to just be as it is, so should we. Faith is not about believing in God, but about believing in what God believes: that everything is in perfect harmony.

Joy's Half-Brother

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Sadness is joy in disguise.

Evolution

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Many people lost their faith in God because of the Theory of Evolution. How ironic that this very same theory would indicate the existence of a God. Bacteria, animals, men, gods, God. It's only a next step. Everything grows over time, and in the Universe has existed for an infinitely long time; thus, it is only natural that the Universe itself must be perfect - we only do not see it.

Preferences

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A personality is made of its own choices; it is a set of inclinations and preferences.

Sorrow for Beauty, Beauty in Sorrow

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Sorrow can make a man passionate about beauty, and passion for beaut can make a man sorrowful.