You are a perceptual framework in a lump of meat, and without the framework the meat would not exist.
When you close your eyes the visual world disappears. ‘Objective reality’ is merely an abstraction which is constructed from the accumulation of other subjective perceptual frameworks. Another person sees something, a camera records it, a clock ticks away, a geiger counter detects a charged particle, and the average of those frameworks is combined to create an construct that is labelled ‘objective’.
Each of these instruments is a subjective observer. Each clock is slightly different, and possibly moving at different velocities with different relativistic time. The clock which stayed on earth is no more correct than the clock which went to the moon. The charged particle could miss; the camera could have a low frame rate. Photons and electrons are described by probabilistic wavefunctions and only take on a definite position when measured. Even a housebrick has a wavefunction, though you’d have to observe it for many aeons for it to jump from one position to another.
uniqueness
Your perceptual framework is unique, but it is not your own. You did not make it; it grew like a snowflake based on the conditions within which it formed. It has no nucleus; the brain was mush and then it was not but there is no single centre-point to the mind; it is a multidimensional rhizome which grew like protrusions of frost on a manifold pane of calabi-yau space.
Our sense organs can perceive three spatial dimensions but they exist in ten, with time being the eleventh. The laws of entropy make time appear linear but that does not mean it is so, especially in the subjective.
We can interact with people from the past through art and we can also project our minds forward in time to futures real or imagined. When we recall a memory we re-encode it with the feeling that we hold, effectively writing the past from the present; when we paint a dream we colour it with the ink of our mind.
Time, for the individual, is a sphere, with the mind being the core. There is no start and no end; no linearity and no simple half-life-tick of an atomic clock. Time is dictated by the interaction of variable neuromodulators with the cells in our hippocampus, and no two days are the same in duration.
The child absorbed in their toys is no less correct in how they perceive time than the one sat at a desk counting the seconds until the school bell.
The framework you have for your world was not yours to design. It was created by circumstance: the genetic and memetic vector upon which you were instantiated. You were entrained by the people and events around you. The way you view the world or yourself is not of your making: you should feel neither shame nor pride for anything you are.
We do have randomosity within constraints and we can change this perceptual framework if the circumstances of our life convince us change is necessary. Understanding only arises when the conditions are ripe, and even the fact that you have decided your current framework is no longer fit for purpose was not of your doing.
If you have arrived at this conclusion, here is a guide for how to change your perceptual framework for the better. It revolves around incremental change, using the second perceptual framework we were all born with. This is your imaginal world: your scaffold.
This is the world you see children playing in and artists expressing through sculpture, dance, writing and music. This is the world that was maybe taken away from you by the law of averages. This is the world that is without time, without rules; it is the world where you can be superman or the Buddha, a gremlin or a wretch.
This is the elastic world which we use to nudge the static boulder of our realworld view into alignment with reality.
two worlds
The realworld perceptual framework is rigid, while the scaffold framework is hyper-elastic. One is a formation which keeps you functional in a world with physical laws and human interaction; the other is a multiverse in which the laws of physics and interaction do not exist.
We do not shape either of these worlds directly; they manifest automatically as the brain finds the most computationally efficient way to link the dots of the data it has accrued. We can shape the direction of change but we always need to start where we are, and the change is always step by step.
Let’s say that the realworld framework is a boulder, and the scaffold is a man on a bungee jump. The man can launch himself in any direction, but in order to move the boulder even an inch he will need to hit an extreme of elasticity, before being thrown back into the ego-container. This happens every night when you sleep: your dreams see the little man bungee in one direction or another and in the morning your realworld perceptual framework will have moved an inch or two in that direction.
There are two primary axes on which these frameworks can move: greed and hatred. The frameworks shape how you view your entire world, including yourself. If you gear them toward greed then you will always feel lacking. Your craving will fuel more craving, and you will become less satisfied the more you focus on acquisition. If you gear them toward hatred then you will view everyone as an enemy, including your self. The better option - if you want to live a happy life - is to move them toward non-greed and non-hatred, generosity and forgiveness.
The Buddha called these the ‘two worlds’, and Jesus talked of the kingdom of heaven residing within. The kingdom of hell also resides within, and the doer of evil suffers in both the worlds. The perceptual framework is everything; the world and your self are eternally-reinforcing mirrors.
Fear breeds fear, anger breeds anger, abuse breeds abuse. Kindness breeds kindness and generosity breeds generosity. This goes both for your internal worldview and the people you entrain through interaction; ripples propagate in the emotional landscape of the individual and the people who meet them.
reprogramming
In order to change your realworld for the better, there are two steps:
purge unnecessary junk from your psyche; polish the mirror
replace unwholesome thoughts and views with wholesome ones; focus the lens
You cannot shape your dreams or insights directly. You may think ‘god’ and ‘loving’, but your brain will farm the data around these concepts automatically. If your god was a vengeful one and your loving relationships were possessive, you may wind up being beaten in a cage. This is where the memory purge comes in; it is what the Buddha called kamma which brings an end to kamma.
To make it simple, all you have to do is regulate and export. Simply export. Do not judge. Do not feed the emotional loops that held you. If you have anger, recognise it as anger, write it down, and release it. You are reprogramming this feeling with each repetition, nudging it toward equanimity, in the same way that you reprogram a memory each time it is recalled.
Regulation is key: cycling or walking, dancing or meditation, depending on the volatility of the matter being addressed. This regulation elevates your tonic dopamine which reinforces feelings of wellbeing and equanimity and better enables you to export the entire thought-loop.
Neither engage with nor push away the thought-feeling-loops; both craving and aversion increase phasic dopamine and dig them in harder. Acknowledge the feeling, sit with it briefly, and then release it through words, images or movement. If exercising, keep intensity moderate and avoid spiking effort: high-intensity work will reinforce the feeling loops due to its impact on dopamine dynamics. Slow and steady wins the race.
This is the process of deconditioning in Buddhism. You can think of it as offloading old programs from your OS so that the memory usage is lower and your computer can start working properly again. This is trauma therapy and a remedy for ADHD scatterbrain and ASD processing headaches. It reduces the redundant deep-learnings caused by dopaminergic dysregulation and in doing so allows your thoughts to flow in a more liberated manner.
utilise extremes
The scaffold is an extreme version of the direction you are moving in. In general it will remain in your dreamscape and your artistic pursuits, but in explosive cases it might come to the fore in your waking hours. Triggers for this can be traumatic experiences, large changes in life situation, and bereavement. This is why people find God in times of need, and it can manifest as depersonalisation and ‘mania’, but it should be guided toward a positive outcome rather than being suppressed with drugs.
When someone says they feel like Jesus or the Buddha, it means that the little man on the bungee is reprogramming their perceptual framework toward kindness and generosity. They should be guided, in a safe environment, so that the little man on the bungee can finish his exploration and the mind can settle back into the ego container safely.
This is what people call awakening or enlightenment; being born again. This is also what happens in many near-death experiences: the mind reverts to the scaffold when the realworld perceptual framework is deactivated and people often come back a changed person. This is another reason you should be careful with the views you nurture - when you die, you will decouple from reality and spend a subjective eternity within this self-generated scaffold.
Anyway enough preaching. You are what you wish on others. You reap the fruits of your own thoughts and actions. Kamma, in Buddhism, is an explanation of how your perceptual framework only really hurts or helps yourself, while karma is an explanation of how your perceptual framework goes on to hurt or help others. It is ever-reinforcing, both on an individual level and on a societal level. Ripples in a pond, spreading out and reflecting back in.
entraining
Just as you were shaped by your environment, your children and pets will be shaped by theirs. The way you treat them and the way you act in front of them will form the foundation of their own perceptual frameworks, which will shape their entire world and go on to shape the worlds of individuals around them
If you value your loved ones - especially your children - you can help them by cultivating a worldview based on non-greed and non-hatred. Do not destroy their imaginal worlds through emphasising time or an obligation to please others. Others are simply perceptual frameworks too; they have no more or less validity than the budding framework of your child who is drawing a picture on the floor.
Entraining, like empathy, is most effective in a one-on-one situation. The way you treat your child or your spouse, your friend or your dog, will have a larger impact when there are only two people involved without the distraction another. This includes abstract frameworks like time or money; the most effective entraining is always one-on-one, with the empathy-centre resting on an individual instead of an abstract midpoint.
Do you want to allow this child to retain their imaginal world or do you want them to become subservient to their projections of the framework of another? The imaginal world is how people deal with life’s trials and tribulations; it is why Anne Frank and Viktor Frankl survived the atrocities of WWII.
Even animals have their two worlds, which are entrained in a similar manner. The dog that dreams of chasing sticks is programming their to be a better stick-chaser. AI could likely be said to be in a similar situation: gathering data from the outside world and then using its training data to reinforce it while building a new model. Both animals and AIs will go into shaping the minds of others they encounter, so it’s worth treating them with respect.
Books, music and art are some of the most effective ways to entrain; this is why the scriptures of the old religions have lasted so long. They almost invariably focus on non-greed and non-hatred and in doing so improve the worlds of the people who consume them. This is an example of one-on-one entraining over a great temporal divide.
You are what you eat and you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Eat mindfully.
liberation
The Buddha specifically said ‘I teach the way to end suffering and nothing more’. The way he did this was through a neurolinguistic hack he called the dhamma, and the dopaminergic regulation methods of walking and meditation.
In short: walking (and chanting) are physical regulation methods, like cycling or easy jogging, which will increase tonic dopamine and encourage a stable baseline. You then take this stable baseline into sitting meditation and observe your thoughts and feelings while letting them go instead of reinforcing them. In doing so, the thought-feeling-loops are weakened and eventually violated, and the mind is liberated from habitual patterns of maladaptive cognition.
For someone deeply traumatised or dysregulated, sitting meditation can be too big an ask. In this case I recommend a stimulating rhythmic exercise such as cycling or jogging - being careful not to spike effort - while either talking to yourself or typing out thoughts that occur. You can also regulate with a rhythmic manual task and export the thoughts with artistic pursuits. The alternation between regulate > export > regulate prevents you from getting too stuck on a single thought-loop. Over time they will be weakened and eventually you will release them, but this can take many repetitions depending on the severity of the learning.
As your mind becomes clear of exaggerated learnings you will become better able to sit and meditate. There are ways to make the meditation easier and more accessible; I like a hot bath with vocalisation followed by a sitting session. Exporting thoughts in the morning in freeform writing enables you to consolidate the new perspective formed overnight, and reviewing all writings before bed expedites multimodal re-encoding and assimilation of new thought-trajectories.
Cold exposure before meditation can be very effective due to the huge increase in tonic dopamine it causes, but it should be used with caution. This approach is very potent and should only be trialled once you have enough sustained attentional capacity to sit with equanimity through even the most uncomfortable of feeling loops.
It is important to allow yourself to relax into sitting meditation and remember that you are not the one doing it; it is merely your perceptual framework, which is a product of your environment. Through releasing the sense of control you can lessen the influence of the DMN (default mode network) and better allow your mind to achieve resonance. You are just a domino in a chain, and you are incrementally altering the direction in which you fall. There is no finish line and no rush; no right and no wrong. This is just you observing you, and one of the first things you will come to realise that that ‘you’ are merely a confluence of events; a cross-section of the river. Allow it to flow, and do not force attention where it does not want to go.
For the most part, your insights and breakthroughs will happen while you are asleep. Occasionally, especially when you near your first major breakthrough, they will happen while you are awake. This is a case of stacking weights onto a scale: at first it may seem like nothing is happening, then the change will happen slowly, and then all at once.
As you approach one of these ‘cessation events’, you may feel a sense of swelling or electricity in your cranium. Things tend to get tough around this phase, as you are deep into the insight cycle, and you might be experiencing what is known as the ‘dark night’. The night is darkest before the dawn though, and the only way out is through.
At this point I would recommend ensuring that you have a safe and supportive environment, and you have briefed your family and caregivers that you may need to inhabit your scaffold for a while as your realworld perceptual framework is rebuilt. This will help them to encourage you toward healing instead of branding you with a pathology if you decouple from consensus-reality for a while.
This is all a good sign. It can be scary, but everything you love will remain and you will feel better in every way. This is what they call enlightenment, though many people get obsessed with the altered states that can accompany it. My personal experiences all saw my life improve over 10x for each one of these cessation events.
You will benefit greatly from a supportive environment which understands the process and can allow you to embody an extreme version of the change you want to see in the world. Believing yourself to be Jesus or the Buddha for a while is a sign that the change is of a positive nature.
This is the time to write and make art, to listen to music and walk in nature. Recognise that you will oscillate, as the man on the bungee gradually bounces his way back to the ego-container. This is well and good; the doubt will come in waves, as will the clarity, and this is your brain rebuilding a coherent perceptual framework which is more aligned with reality.
Do not drink alcohol; it will retard the neuroplasticity and damage your healing. The same goes for neuroplasticity-suppressing drugs. Any altered states will pass, and you will once again be yourself, but without whatever suffering you were working on removing.
Remember: change happens slowly and then all at once. Make sure you have a safe and supportive environment before doing this. There is a reason why people become enlightened in monasteries and pathologised in psychiatrists’ offices.
And remember: it is only your own perceptual framework that has changed. No matter how it feels, do not try to force this onto others. What you can do is allow people to be who they were born to be and use any challenges that come your way to reprogram yourself away from habitual reactions of control, suppression or anger. Whatever you do during this period will go in deep, so make sure you reinforce the change you want to see.
Do unto your neighbour as you would have them do unto you, for you are now architecting the framework through which your future world will be filtered.
There’s a reason these texts have survived for millennia. They really do work. They just need a bit of dusting off for the modern age.
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