I’ve decided to sit down and finally put down my worldview on paper. I highly recommend doing so yourself - things become much clearer. How my world works is about how I relate to the world and the meaning I construct about the life that works for me.
I don’t think of any of it as truth. I can’t take myself seriously half the time and I giggle when someone tries to convince me that they know how everything works.
I wrote this for two reasons:
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To clarify my own thoughts (which is ridiculously hard I tell you. You think you know what you think until you need to write it down).
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Entertainment value. I love reading about how other people see the world.
The beauty of Life is that it’s inherently mysterious and no one really knows what it is. Fun!
I went through a period of destabilization in the last 6 months - I reached a point where I learned so many psychological and spiritual ways of looking/understanding the World that it made me overwhelmed and confused. I asked myself what is true? what should I do? how do I proceed? I was stuck and could not take action because if everything was true, nothing was true.
This piece has been brewing in my mind for a while and I finally decided to materialise it.
This is part 1, the big picture stuff. Part 2 will be about the personal level: how the mind works, psychology, the everyday experience.
Now let’s begin 👇
Spiritual Realm
The saying that we’re spiritual beings having a human experience is true in my world. But not in a way that most people relate to, which is some Greater Force (God, Universe) put a part of itself in human form.
I think there’s a Life Force, like the thing that makes the trees grow and the world spin but it’s not an entity per se. Honestly, I don’t really care because that feels like minutia rather than something that greatly affects my day-to-day experience.
I am consciousness as can easily be verified through meditation and from a first-person experience, the world is appearing within me. So the same energy that’s infused in plants, the sky, and other people is within me too. Michael Singer talks about it a lot in The Surrender Experiment and it resonates.
The bottom line in the spiritual realm for me is that there’s more than meets the eye. I remember very clearly since I was little, looking at the world knowing that it isn’t what it appears to be. The material world is a curtain that hides the backstage and the spiritual path is having the courage to peek behind the curtain.
The Universe
Manifestation, the universe, crystals, divine guidance, everything happens for a reason… the lingo of modern religion.
I don’t think everything happens for a reason but we come up with an explanation of what happened and make ourselves feel better by declaring so. Again, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not as long as it works for the person, but I believe that 👇
Not everything happens for a reason, most of the time things just happen. But I choose to believe there's a reason behind it. It's a stance I cultivated to keep growing and learning against all odds.
But onto manifestation. In my experience, it’s real and it’s pretty simple: clarity of intent/desire + emotional state you will experience having that desire + visualize yourself being that + do the effing work (take action). It’s called priming your brain, which pilots, entrepreneurs, and other high-level professionals engage in before starting a big task.
The mind has an effect on the matter but it’s too metaphysical for me to get into here. The problem with the mind though is that is full of garbage we picked up from our childhood, society, and culture. Sometimes the things that mask what we want, are what we were taught to want aka it’s not authentic desire.
Into The Material Realm: How The World Order Is Shaped
I view the material world as a game, like a simulation. If I’m in a video game, there are certain ways the game is built and I can play within those parameters.
Economic crisis, politics, international affairs, human rights, and history is humans playing a game without realizing they’re in a game.
There are ‘rational’ explanations for everything. Economic collapse happens when a country spends more than they earn when its currency is weakening, inflation is through the roof, etc. I’m not Ray Dalio, so I can’t explain it well, but the systems in place are predictable and play out accordingly.
Take capitalism. Unfortunately, it’s built on “stronger” takes from the weak (we still exploit 3rd world countries by mining cobalt, having our clothes made there, etc). Accumulation of capital is part of the game too and the more assets I have, the more assets I can have vs I’m poor and have to think about survival, not assets, so I continue being assetless and poor.
That’s the system. No, it’s not fair but it’s what it is. I think it’s idealistic trying to change the system because, in the fight of system vs individual, the system wins. So you either learn the rules of the game or fight the game. Which is fair enough, many people create meaning in their lives that way.
That doesn’t mean I love it though. I think traditional marketing and endless encouragement of consumption is fucking disgusting and I’m shocked people don’t see through that but I’m not naive enough to think I might change that. My interest lies in figuring out the game and then playing it in a way that my morals and values don’t get so compromised I can’t look myself in the eye.
You might be wondering but what about the times in history when the systems did change? Like going from agriculture to feudalism to the industrial revolution and beyond. I view it as the people who created the game invented a new level. I guess this suggests that I’m a proponent of simulation theory. And I think I might be. Again, I realized this a while back but trying to determine and find “the truth” in how the world “actually” works is a losing battle. I don’t engage in it.
I believe in the simulation theory in as much as it appears the most likely explanation to me. I don’t need to make sure it’s true. (I’ve another theory that there’s only one thing in the world that can be proven to be true which is I AM and everything else is a second-hand experience but I shall reserve that for another newsletter where I talk about how crazy I am 😉).
The Meaning of Life
There is no meaning. It’s a construct that we need to create to convince ourselves that this crazy ass human experience is worth bearing.
God, kids, atheism, saving transgender people, fighting climate change, hating on rich people… pick your poison. It’s all a meaningless experience disguised as meaning. I 100% think that it’s better to have meaning than experience meaninglessness. So as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter what meaning someone constructs in their life. As long as they’re happy.
I used to think and say sometimes that there's no single truth and everyone has their own. But it was for either consoling myself that sb else disagreed with me or I didn't want to get into it with another person. Right now, I think that the Truth exists but it's not my truth. I don't need to know I've got the Truth to live my life. I take what works for me and move forward.
That’s all for now, part 2 is coming out soon.
Also published here.