Flickering
Bluelighter
Solipsism, believing you are the only thing that really exists and that everyone else is your imagination, can be a neat thought experiment, or a philosophical stance, or a despot's assumption, or a psychotic's nightmare. Solipsism is as part of a duality. You may believe it, or you may not. If you are not a solpsist, you believe other people exist. In other words, you perceive them to exist. You feel as though they exist, that you are, in some sense, not alone. It would be a very different life if you walked around truly thinking these people around you were just meat puppets, part of a clever program in the depths of your own mind but ultimately blank, unfeeling, unimportant, fakes. If you felt that there was nothing - nowhere - anywhere - ever - but you, that would be a very different feeling, a very different approach to life, indeed.
The living nightmare of my first psychedelic trip revolved around this. The switch in my brain that processed the perception of other selves was switched off completely. I could not feel them at all. This led to the crushing realisation that I was the only thing that was real, and that my entire life had been a distraction. But also that I must not be aware yet of the full power of my mind; massive parts of it must still be in my unconscious, because I am unable to change this scene around me, I have become a prisoner inside my own imagination. These thoughts were madness itself.
For a less intense version of that, do a quick exercise. Imagine... you began life in a void of others, a place beyond the duality of self and not-self entirely. No inside, no outside, just what was.
And then, you grew senses with which to perceive an outside. Warmth. Sound. Light. Therefore there was an external, and so, there must have been an internal to receive the input. A duality was born from what once had been whole - but, as ever, a duality only in perception. You will also see that for this duality to seem to exist in the first place, the observer is necessary to the equation. The duality between seeing and seen would not be there if there was nothing doing the seeing. At this point, the concept of 'other beings' had yet to enter your mind in even in the most basic sublinguistic sense. Then you were born.
In the same way unity became inside-and-outside, unity now became self-and-other. You developed an awareness of your own self IN CONTRAST TO everyone else. Even now, you affirm your identity as a unique, separate individual BY ACKOWNLEDGING that others exist - by perceiving your SELF relative to them, and by perceiving THEM relative to your self. Again, the two cannot exist without each other. If other people did not exist, neither would you. There would be no 'you' to define 'not-you' against.
The breaking of each duality is a further initiation into life, under which one's attunement with the whole is buried. You could think of your enter lifetime as a dream that absolute unity is having. You are that unity, and you are hallucinating that you split into light and dark, warmth and cold, bliss and misery, togetherness and loneliness. When the processes making this all possible cease - when you die - you wake up again to absolute unity. Who knows what dualities you will dream of the next time?
But until then. While you are here, in this dream-of-sorts right now, you can focus your attention on the fact of this duality between self and others. By meditating on it, you will discover that solipsism casts a shadow. That is: the very fact it is possible to entertain the idea that no one else exists, reveals to you that you BELIEVE THEY DO. And that this belief must be a sort of perception, i.e. you perceive others to exist. And that perception is a feeling. These are concepts in your mind, but yet you are so sure they are perceptions of something real that they can comfort you, allow you to feel an identity, let you feel guilty about hurting them, be remorseful when they castigate you... etc. And isn't that interesting?
Because I find that if you keep focusing on that, something starts to surface that's kind of like a memory. It's of a different world, before any notion of that separation entered it at all. I think it must be the leftover imprints of some very early childhood dreams. But my God, the feeling they evoke is so... connected. So real. As though for the first time in my life I'm finally seeing through the veil of societal constructs, into the reality of human experience. The reality that we, like everything else, are one. And that the perception of there being more than one is JUST a perception. A way of interpreting it. Of understanding it. The reality that is being perceived is not, in fact, a reality of separations. That's all in our minds. And at one point at the very beginning of our lives, each of us knew that so implicitly that we simply took it for granted. No, more than that. We had never been exposed to any other way of looking at things.
What is it like to not have a self? Ask a cat.
The living nightmare of my first psychedelic trip revolved around this. The switch in my brain that processed the perception of other selves was switched off completely. I could not feel them at all. This led to the crushing realisation that I was the only thing that was real, and that my entire life had been a distraction. But also that I must not be aware yet of the full power of my mind; massive parts of it must still be in my unconscious, because I am unable to change this scene around me, I have become a prisoner inside my own imagination. These thoughts were madness itself.
For a less intense version of that, do a quick exercise. Imagine... you began life in a void of others, a place beyond the duality of self and not-self entirely. No inside, no outside, just what was.
And then, you grew senses with which to perceive an outside. Warmth. Sound. Light. Therefore there was an external, and so, there must have been an internal to receive the input. A duality was born from what once had been whole - but, as ever, a duality only in perception. You will also see that for this duality to seem to exist in the first place, the observer is necessary to the equation. The duality between seeing and seen would not be there if there was nothing doing the seeing. At this point, the concept of 'other beings' had yet to enter your mind in even in the most basic sublinguistic sense. Then you were born.
In the same way unity became inside-and-outside, unity now became self-and-other. You developed an awareness of your own self IN CONTRAST TO everyone else. Even now, you affirm your identity as a unique, separate individual BY ACKOWNLEDGING that others exist - by perceiving your SELF relative to them, and by perceiving THEM relative to your self. Again, the two cannot exist without each other. If other people did not exist, neither would you. There would be no 'you' to define 'not-you' against.
The breaking of each duality is a further initiation into life, under which one's attunement with the whole is buried. You could think of your enter lifetime as a dream that absolute unity is having. You are that unity, and you are hallucinating that you split into light and dark, warmth and cold, bliss and misery, togetherness and loneliness. When the processes making this all possible cease - when you die - you wake up again to absolute unity. Who knows what dualities you will dream of the next time?
But until then. While you are here, in this dream-of-sorts right now, you can focus your attention on the fact of this duality between self and others. By meditating on it, you will discover that solipsism casts a shadow. That is: the very fact it is possible to entertain the idea that no one else exists, reveals to you that you BELIEVE THEY DO. And that this belief must be a sort of perception, i.e. you perceive others to exist. And that perception is a feeling. These are concepts in your mind, but yet you are so sure they are perceptions of something real that they can comfort you, allow you to feel an identity, let you feel guilty about hurting them, be remorseful when they castigate you... etc. And isn't that interesting?
Because I find that if you keep focusing on that, something starts to surface that's kind of like a memory. It's of a different world, before any notion of that separation entered it at all. I think it must be the leftover imprints of some very early childhood dreams. But my God, the feeling they evoke is so... connected. So real. As though for the first time in my life I'm finally seeing through the veil of societal constructs, into the reality of human experience. The reality that we, like everything else, are one. And that the perception of there being more than one is JUST a perception. A way of interpreting it. Of understanding it. The reality that is being perceived is not, in fact, a reality of separations. That's all in our minds. And at one point at the very beginning of our lives, each of us knew that so implicitly that we simply took it for granted. No, more than that. We had never been exposed to any other way of looking at things.
What is it like to not have a self? Ask a cat.
Last edited:
