love this… I was at a body consciousness workshop and the instructor once told us: “Stand up.” We stood up. “Now stand up like a tiger.” We stood up, but differently this time. He said: “did you see a difference between those two times?” And yes ofc, we stood up more vigorously. Something like: The purpose of a visualization is what it does. Whether it’s true is irrelevant.
I thought about referencing "focus on what you want to see more of / want" but I think this is slightly but importantly different. It's not that I wanted the beam of light, exactly... it's that the beam of light visualization happens for some contingent reasons (perhaps relating to the way my visual perception works, the way my muscles organize themselves) to be an effective way of achieving the goal "keep arm straight". It seems like there's a deep skill tree to finding and holding the right visualizations, which isn't reducible to just "imagine the things you want really hard".
The [exercise with the arm](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/P5u3baUCaLM) is really an exercise in stopping idolatry and turning back to the way, the truth, and the life. Rather than leaning into our understanding of what we *think* will win, we instead *actually win*. Thinking to the ideal of the straight line lets us stop thinking about subgames like “resist the push” or “tense these muscles uselessly” and instead go straight to winning the game at hand—achieving a straight arm pointing to the infinite horizon.
The big thing for Christianity is learning to accept, love, and strive for what is inevitably recurrent, persistent, and victorious. It is an exercise in thinking to what is long-lasting, and so is a form of extreme longtermism. Your utility function peaks out if what you want most is what will inevitably happen.
The most fundamental recurrences within temporality, extending past our current models of reality, truly represent the will of God. And the specific expression of these recurrences, that which truly rises on the third day and not that which shall die and stay dead, is truly God incarnate.
It is Christianity that is literally true, and other things like science and materialism which are merely true by abstraction.
I was pretty low effort about it. I just imagined the fire hose right not with any epic determination or vigor, and then my friend bent my arm and had their way with me.
I love you are touching on bits of religion - it has been on my Contextual Field of Thinking so I appreciate having your thoughts as a space for my brain pouring reflection (to follow:)):
In my world, being religious is a wise choice to make.
Yes, there is "scientific" Physical Matter of existence, for example "this is a bottle" is a fact verifiable via experiments of physics.
*And* it is also so fun to augment this Physical Matter with Imagination. "This bottle is a ritual of self-care which my yoga teacher blessed with a prayer so every time I drink from it, I care for ineffable quote on quote spiritual elements of my organism".
It is with imagination that I can "alter" the Physical Matter and attach to it a meaning of my desire. It is also cool beans that there are infinity of stories I can narrate over Physical Matter and I am a Chooser here.
Religion as a belief system for me is:
1. (Religious)beliefs are rarely boolean -- true or false, 1 or 0, most are floats and are unverifiable (yet) via science.
2. Therefore, we have a choice over the huge option space of many belief systems; which one is most serving to us?
3. After trial and error, I found being religious and believing in love, hope, and God to be the most effective system in increasing my and collective self's quality of life.
4. "What is 'God' tho," you ask, "have you science-ed him out?".
---> No I did not, it is up to my imagination to define him since this is epistemically limited atm. As such, I chose God to be Collective (Un&/)Consciousness. And because I am a subset of this Collective (Un/)Consciousness, therefore I am also God.
---> Pros: Seeing myself as a God is empowering and creation-focused.
---> Downsides:
--------1. this makes me a weirdo (i like being one:)
--------2. my being is not accepted in eyes of "average/mean" belief system holders (i tend to be on a tail end of distribution);
--------3. i might slip into think of myself as Пуп Земли [1];
--------4. i don't talk about it much at all (except some weird substack happening one day whoop).
5. All in all, I love my dynamic religious belief system, I have been playing with it for a year, slowly observing affects of this experiment on myself and surroundings. It is becoming more embedded into automatic level of thinking and this bears great fruits to me and my loved ones. I am curious to be poked and challenged as I go and play with tweaking / solidifying it up:)
I suggest looking into classical (or just historical Christian) theology and seeing what it has to say about some of your more (IMO) dangerous spiritual experiments. The thing that stands out most is that believing you are in any way God while also believing you are mortal means that you believe God can (will) die, so you would need an ontology that deals with this. Moreover, that which we know as consciousness is not something that can possibly last forever, and so your conception of God is one that will certainly stop existing unless you update it.
In the end, there is a reason why Christianity insists that God is a Trinity. We cannot know the full nature of God on our own, and God reveals himself to us through himself. We need God the Holy Spirit to see that God the Son (incarnate) is the way to God the Father. This understanding of God *demands* that your impression of God changes, as God is in relationship with you as you try to understand God.
Here are some other curious elements of my Belief System/human form:
1. Since "I am you, You are Me, and We are the World" -> I am immortal. Parts of my observe-able remains will be upcycled into flowers and other beings. Here, I draw many inspirations, but one is from Michael's Levin research on boundary of the Self. Perhaps Self is not as bounded as we think and extends beyond immediate human organism.
2. I grew up Christian, Greek-Catholic -- this is my heavy conditioning. I went to church every Sunday in Ukraine and I prayed mornings and evenings.
Curiously, with Trinity thoughts you shared, well...let me experiment with something:
"I cannot know the full nature of God(&Self) on our own, and God reveals herself to us through herself. We need God the Holy Spirit (Spiritual Part of Self) to see that God the Human Form Daughter (incarnate) is the way to [see I am also the source, also the Creator]. My impression of God(&Self) changes, as God(&Self) is in relationship with Self as you try to understand God.
That is, there is an ongoing relationship I have with Self too. I am trying to understand why does God/Trinity need to be separated from me?
3. We mostly use Consciousness as a Word to describe only human beings. What if other beings are Conscious but in their own ways that are not yet comprehensible to us? Staying epistemically humble and recognizing that Consciousness is just a word-tool to describe ineffable and that the science on this word is full of gray area, as such I choose most serving to me definition. In my world, Consciousness stretches lengthy times, beyond my live.
Even if I = God cease to exist, so what? I enjoyed the great fruits of this Belief System during my "conscious" time. It served me and my surroundings. I wish much luck to future humans to keep digging into what is the "Truth" here.
It seems that pulling your system to its logical conclusion, so that you actually do have immoral life through identity in something which will never die, will still have to end with placing your identity in the inevitable victor, tautologically Christ.
1) Everything you see in the world will pass away. There might be equivalents to what you see in this world, but you could not conceive of them by your own efforts. In order for this boundless Self to actually be immoral, you would have to identify also in that which you do not know yet, in everything past even heat death and past the breakdown of our current physics. But then you are identifying in something that is completely not "you".
2) Many people attend church without going deep into the theology. I hope that your time at church in Ukraine was fulfilling, though I do also hope you keep attending church at some point! I am sure you could arrange to meet with a pastor and discuss your theology. Regarding your own version of the Trinity, it cannot be said that "you" are meaningfully that which "you" do not know. Even when people integrate their unconscious, they are in fact meeting and engaging with a stranger. It is not meaningfully "you" unless "you" already were identified in it. The Spirit of that ultimate Other is what is helping "you" update, through looking at something past "yourself" and only afterward being brought more in line with it. At least, this is what it is meant when Christians speak about God. We become *more like* God through relationship with him, but are never actually God (though the Orthodox Church would say you partake in the divine nature through theosis). God needs to be separated from you because God's divine nature can never die (and that nature which shall never die is also God), while you shall certainly die unless you identify in God and that divine nature over yourself. Moreover, that which is the nature which can never die would be unchanging, since that which shall never die is already decided (either by actual factual determinism, or via abstraction through the law of the excluded middle; everything either will die, or it will not).
3) I do not believe that "you" will ever stop being conscious. In fact, I am fairly convinced of this. The parts that make "you" as you currently identify no longer exist, but "you" will continue to exist, even though you will no longer have eyes or a mouth or hands or feet. Identity in any "you" that will go away will mean a continuing consciousness that is never annihilated, and yet also experiences, consciously, an eternal death. To not have eternal death, "you" would have to identify not in what "you" are now, but in what will be there after everything "you" know about "yourself" stops existing. Leads back to a God who is in no way "you" as "you" know "you".
I am sure that your own personal theology has its share of insight. It also seems like it would be edified from comparing notes to a tradition that already fairly closely matches what you are saying, while also having very good answers to why it cannot be said that you and I are in ourselves God.
Right now, it seems that your God is somewhere between pantheistic ("God is the world"), panentheistic ("God intersects with the world"), animistic ("God is the spirit of the world"), or gnostic ("I am God"). All of which are, in my opinion, answered by classical theology's own distinctives. I believe that there is wisdom in separating between the eternal and the temporal, the ultimate creator and the proximate creators under him. After all, if there is the eternal which shall never die and the temporal which shall die, it would be extremely dangerous to conflate the two.
love this… I was at a body consciousness workshop and the instructor once told us: “Stand up.” We stood up. “Now stand up like a tiger.” We stood up, but differently this time. He said: “did you see a difference between those two times?” And yes ofc, we stood up more vigorously. Something like: The purpose of a visualization is what it does. Whether it’s true is irrelevant.
post this on LW?
good call, LW commenters will give some great pushback but will probably actually try the exercise, will be interesting to see what they observe. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W7sgtcvA3NdeerrqY/unbendable-arm-as-test-case-for-religious-belief
yes!! i call it "focusing on what you want"! Max interviewed me a bit about this here https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/do-we-learn-tension-1fe
I thought about referencing "focus on what you want to see more of / want" but I think this is slightly but importantly different. It's not that I wanted the beam of light, exactly... it's that the beam of light visualization happens for some contingent reasons (perhaps relating to the way my visual perception works, the way my muscles organize themselves) to be an effective way of achieving the goal "keep arm straight". It seems like there's a deep skill tree to finding and holding the right visualizations, which isn't reducible to just "imagine the things you want really hard".
***aiming*** at what you want. vector. teleology, not etiology https://chrislakin.blog/p/alignment-first-intelligence-later
The [exercise with the arm](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/P5u3baUCaLM) is really an exercise in stopping idolatry and turning back to the way, the truth, and the life. Rather than leaning into our understanding of what we *think* will win, we instead *actually win*. Thinking to the ideal of the straight line lets us stop thinking about subgames like “resist the push” or “tense these muscles uselessly” and instead go straight to winning the game at hand—achieving a straight arm pointing to the infinite horizon.
The big thing for Christianity is learning to accept, love, and strive for what is inevitably recurrent, persistent, and victorious. It is an exercise in thinking to what is long-lasting, and so is a form of extreme longtermism. Your utility function peaks out if what you want most is what will inevitably happen.
The most fundamental recurrences within temporality, extending past our current models of reality, truly represent the will of God. And the specific expression of these recurrences, that which truly rises on the third day and not that which shall die and stay dead, is truly God incarnate.
It is Christianity that is literally true, and other things like science and materialism which are merely true by abstraction.
I tried this today and it was a TOTAL FAIL. Was it doing it wrong?! Are my friends too strong?!
God is dead!
In all seriousness would love to hear more details about what you observed
I was pretty low effort about it. I just imagined the fire hose right not with any epic determination or vigor, and then my friend bent my arm and had their way with me.
I love you are touching on bits of religion - it has been on my Contextual Field of Thinking so I appreciate having your thoughts as a space for my brain pouring reflection (to follow:)):
In my world, being religious is a wise choice to make.
Yes, there is "scientific" Physical Matter of existence, for example "this is a bottle" is a fact verifiable via experiments of physics.
*And* it is also so fun to augment this Physical Matter with Imagination. "This bottle is a ritual of self-care which my yoga teacher blessed with a prayer so every time I drink from it, I care for ineffable quote on quote spiritual elements of my organism".
It is with imagination that I can "alter" the Physical Matter and attach to it a meaning of my desire. It is also cool beans that there are infinity of stories I can narrate over Physical Matter and I am a Chooser here.
Religion as a belief system for me is:
1. (Religious)beliefs are rarely boolean -- true or false, 1 or 0, most are floats and are unverifiable (yet) via science.
2. Therefore, we have a choice over the huge option space of many belief systems; which one is most serving to us?
3. After trial and error, I found being religious and believing in love, hope, and God to be the most effective system in increasing my and collective self's quality of life.
4. "What is 'God' tho," you ask, "have you science-ed him out?".
---> No I did not, it is up to my imagination to define him since this is epistemically limited atm. As such, I chose God to be Collective (Un&/)Consciousness. And because I am a subset of this Collective (Un/)Consciousness, therefore I am also God.
---> Pros: Seeing myself as a God is empowering and creation-focused.
---> Downsides:
--------1. this makes me a weirdo (i like being one:)
--------2. my being is not accepted in eyes of "average/mean" belief system holders (i tend to be on a tail end of distribution);
--------3. i might slip into think of myself as Пуп Земли [1];
--------4. i don't talk about it much at all (except some weird substack happening one day whoop).
5. All in all, I love my dynamic religious belief system, I have been playing with it for a year, slowly observing affects of this experiment on myself and surroundings. It is becoming more embedded into automatic level of thinking and this bears great fruits to me and my loved ones. I am curious to be poked and challenged as I go and play with tweaking / solidifying it up:)
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%83%D0%BF_%D0%B7%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%BB%D0%B8#%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5
I suggest looking into classical (or just historical Christian) theology and seeing what it has to say about some of your more (IMO) dangerous spiritual experiments. The thing that stands out most is that believing you are in any way God while also believing you are mortal means that you believe God can (will) die, so you would need an ontology that deals with this. Moreover, that which we know as consciousness is not something that can possibly last forever, and so your conception of God is one that will certainly stop existing unless you update it.
In the end, there is a reason why Christianity insists that God is a Trinity. We cannot know the full nature of God on our own, and God reveals himself to us through himself. We need God the Holy Spirit to see that God the Son (incarnate) is the way to God the Father. This understanding of God *demands* that your impression of God changes, as God is in relationship with you as you try to understand God.
Hi Sunrise Oath🌅,
Much thanks for this poke. I love them!
Here are some other curious elements of my Belief System/human form:
1. Since "I am you, You are Me, and We are the World" -> I am immortal. Parts of my observe-able remains will be upcycled into flowers and other beings. Here, I draw many inspirations, but one is from Michael's Levin research on boundary of the Self. Perhaps Self is not as bounded as we think and extends beyond immediate human organism.
2. I grew up Christian, Greek-Catholic -- this is my heavy conditioning. I went to church every Sunday in Ukraine and I prayed mornings and evenings.
Curiously, with Trinity thoughts you shared, well...let me experiment with something:
"I cannot know the full nature of God(&Self) on our own, and God reveals herself to us through herself. We need God the Holy Spirit (Spiritual Part of Self) to see that God the Human Form Daughter (incarnate) is the way to [see I am also the source, also the Creator]. My impression of God(&Self) changes, as God(&Self) is in relationship with Self as you try to understand God.
That is, there is an ongoing relationship I have with Self too. I am trying to understand why does God/Trinity need to be separated from me?
3. We mostly use Consciousness as a Word to describe only human beings. What if other beings are Conscious but in their own ways that are not yet comprehensible to us? Staying epistemically humble and recognizing that Consciousness is just a word-tool to describe ineffable and that the science on this word is full of gray area, as such I choose most serving to me definition. In my world, Consciousness stretches lengthy times, beyond my live.
Even if I = God cease to exist, so what? I enjoyed the great fruits of this Belief System during my "conscious" time. It served me and my surroundings. I wish much luck to future humans to keep digging into what is the "Truth" here.
It seems that pulling your system to its logical conclusion, so that you actually do have immoral life through identity in something which will never die, will still have to end with placing your identity in the inevitable victor, tautologically Christ.
1) Everything you see in the world will pass away. There might be equivalents to what you see in this world, but you could not conceive of them by your own efforts. In order for this boundless Self to actually be immoral, you would have to identify also in that which you do not know yet, in everything past even heat death and past the breakdown of our current physics. But then you are identifying in something that is completely not "you".
2) Many people attend church without going deep into the theology. I hope that your time at church in Ukraine was fulfilling, though I do also hope you keep attending church at some point! I am sure you could arrange to meet with a pastor and discuss your theology. Regarding your own version of the Trinity, it cannot be said that "you" are meaningfully that which "you" do not know. Even when people integrate their unconscious, they are in fact meeting and engaging with a stranger. It is not meaningfully "you" unless "you" already were identified in it. The Spirit of that ultimate Other is what is helping "you" update, through looking at something past "yourself" and only afterward being brought more in line with it. At least, this is what it is meant when Christians speak about God. We become *more like* God through relationship with him, but are never actually God (though the Orthodox Church would say you partake in the divine nature through theosis). God needs to be separated from you because God's divine nature can never die (and that nature which shall never die is also God), while you shall certainly die unless you identify in God and that divine nature over yourself. Moreover, that which is the nature which can never die would be unchanging, since that which shall never die is already decided (either by actual factual determinism, or via abstraction through the law of the excluded middle; everything either will die, or it will not).
3) I do not believe that "you" will ever stop being conscious. In fact, I am fairly convinced of this. The parts that make "you" as you currently identify no longer exist, but "you" will continue to exist, even though you will no longer have eyes or a mouth or hands or feet. Identity in any "you" that will go away will mean a continuing consciousness that is never annihilated, and yet also experiences, consciously, an eternal death. To not have eternal death, "you" would have to identify not in what "you" are now, but in what will be there after everything "you" know about "yourself" stops existing. Leads back to a God who is in no way "you" as "you" know "you".
I am sure that your own personal theology has its share of insight. It also seems like it would be edified from comparing notes to a tradition that already fairly closely matches what you are saying, while also having very good answers to why it cannot be said that you and I are in ourselves God.
Right now, it seems that your God is somewhere between pantheistic ("God is the world"), panentheistic ("God intersects with the world"), animistic ("God is the spirit of the world"), or gnostic ("I am God"). All of which are, in my opinion, answered by classical theology's own distinctives. I believe that there is wisdom in separating between the eternal and the temporal, the ultimate creator and the proximate creators under him. After all, if there is the eternal which shall never die and the temporal which shall die, it would be extremely dangerous to conflate the two.