Attuned

Be What You Imagine

Jess Cummins
@jesscxc

[introduction]

Attuned: Be What You Imagine is a journey of questions and answers about mind, life, and universe.

Attuned is Book 2 of The Deeper Series.

Attuned is available for free at NoLiesPlease.com.

This book is dedicated to the public domain.

[meta]

(author
 "Jess Cummins"
 @jesscxc)
(pronouns she/friend)
(link NoLiesPlease.com)

(book_title Attuned)
(book_subtitle Be What You Imagine)
(deeper_series_book_number 2)
(book_version
  v2
  ty21.6.25.18.37.03pzm4d5s)
(essay_count 22)
(word_count 11782)
(books_by_jesscxc
 (misc
  "Poem Moves the Pen: Haiku of a Nondual Nature"
  "Natural Will: Freer Than Free Will"
  "Longgame Hyperdimensional Spacing: Expand Mind and Weave Time"
   "Ungov: Transcending Will")
 (the_deeper_series
  "Book 0: Uncompress: Eternal Appreciation of How"
  "Book 1: Fortunate: How to Be"
  "Book 2: Attuned: Be What You Imagine"
  "Book 3: Capacity: Imagine Being Limitless"
  "Book 4: Helper: Limitless Mind"
  "Book 5: Intense: Mind Unleashed"
  "Book 6: Open: Unleashed Honesty"
  "Book 7: Universe: Honesty is Eternal"
  "Book 8: Various: Is to Be")
 (the_pocket_series
  "Book 0: Obverse: Abstract Fast"
  "Book 1: Limer: Fast Color"
  "Book 2: Dawn: Color of Day"
  "Book 3: Knight: Day Beyond"
  "Book 4: Fever: Beyond Dreams"
  "Book 5: Life: Dreams Evolving"
  "Book 6: Adventure: Evolving Lands"
  "Book 7: Battle: Lands Say"
  "Book 8: Entertainment: Say Ahead"
  "Book 9: Explore: Ahead Opportunity"
  "Book 10: Moment: Opportunity Simulation"
  "Book 11: Imagine: Simulation Twist"
  "Book 12: Believe: Twist Self"
  "Book 13: Accept: Self Pattern"
  "Book 14: Create: Pattern Reflection"
  "Book 15: Sift: Reflection Match"
  "Book 16: Probability: Match Experience"
  "Book 17: Waves: Experience Current"
  "Book 18: Kernel: Current Functions"
  "Book 19: Grubby: Functions Dig"
  "Book 20: Game: Dig Above"
  "Book 21: Fruit: Above Messages"
  "Book 22: Endeavor: Messages Spread"
  "Book 23: Mystery: Spread Expressions"
  "Book 24: Detain: Expressions Bind"
  "Book 25: Philosophy: Bind Broken"
  "Book 26: Demands: Broken Discovery"
  "Book 27: Subliminal: Discovery Inside"
  "Book 28: Extinction: Inside Refresh"
  "Book 29: Control: Refresh Axioms"
  "Book 30: Ideas: Axioms Mistake"
  "Book 31: Gallium: Mistake Fuzz"
  "Book 32: Germanium: Fuzz Friendship"
  "Book 33: Arsenic: Friendship Reaction"
  "Book 34: Selenium: Reaction Depth"
  "Book 35: Bromine: Depth Utility"
  "Book 36: Krypton: Utility Model"
  "Book 37: Rubidium: Model Augmenter"))

[dedication]

To Anthony Jacquin and Kev Sheldrake, for propagating the discovery of the automatic imagination model of finessing awareness.

[table_of_contents]

(introduction)

(meta)

(dedication)

(table_of_contents)

(essays)

A Deeper Meaning
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Slowing Down
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Enter Actions
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Fill Up
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Dual Life
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Choose to Love More
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Twisty Aware Ideas
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Improvise and Adapt and Overcome
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Play the Game
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Puzzling Answer
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Lost Memories
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Specific Fatigue
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Mis-Tuned
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Gracious Light
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No Fight
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True Life
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Source of Love
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Higher Truth
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A Goal
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Dust Off
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Disturbed Peace
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Determined Nonsense
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(fin)

[essays]

A Deeper Meaning
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O great Mystery, please soak our souls with passion and grace, with light and love and beauty and serenity and gentleness.

As the day breaks, so does awareness upon the higher patterns of nature, grasping truths that were hinted at by all.

Please help us as we learn how to live in the glory of Now, that infinite boat upon the sea of Time.

Wisdom has no bounds, and I wish to understand the limitlessness of Nature.

There is no end to the beauty of nature and the possibilities in the imagination.

I know nothing. I hope for everything.

I am here to find the truth that is inherent in existence.

Life is but one manifestation, and human culture and desire likely are not paths to the eternal. Yet there is a complexity that is reassuring, and in its own way there is an infinity of possibility within it.

Will the artists themselves derive value from the beauties they create?

One can only hope, and be content in the Now.

Slowing Down
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O great wisdom of the universe, please recite to our ears and wiggle the pen so that we may grow in your wisdom.

I live here now not because of myself and any tendency to rush, but because I flow through your wisdom, your insight into the way things should be.

Perhaps some are right---perhaps it's foolish to believe in you, O Mystery, but I find a few reasons that ground me in my faith.

One, is that it is more fun to believe than not believe.

If every day until the last has more joy because you feel your life is in good hands, continue to believe, is my philosophy.

Two, is that if human intelligence arose naturally then a god's intelligence could as well.

We may have been developed with only emergence and natural selection, and therefore so could a god with vastly more intricate patterns to play with.

Third, is that I do not define "god" as having any particular attributes, necessarily, but I explicitly call it "Mystery", because it highlights the eternal doubt one must have as a mathematician.

If anything, God is the greatest unknown, if one finds it fun to think about such a topic.

My fourth reason is more personal, but it is simply that the way my life and all existence seems to fit together seems too preposterous to be haphazard. It relates to point one: It is more fun to believe.

What does it feel like to cross over the line of self-awareness?

Is it a deep "aha" moment?

Is it a pattern that is matched suddenly onto itself?

Break it down, perhaps.

Is it a cognitive model that is applied in steps or stages?

What does it feel like to be pre- and post-aware?

I have some sense of post-awareness, but it's perhaps deeply embedded and hard for me to break out from.

Or, maybe not; maybe I can easily consider what I want in the world without considering myself as an entity in the world.

I might have flexible models of others, but not of myself.

We talk often about raising awareness, but also interesting is what it feels like to lower awareness, especially over that crucial point of self-awareness. Perhaps it is not a point, but an evolving framework; this makes more sense from an evolutionary and cognitive view.

If awareness is a framework, and you can apply it to eventually get to higher levels of awareness (such as awareness of awareness (self-awareness)), then what is the framework composed of, what stages does it grow through, and crucially: What does it feel like?

Enter Actions
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O divine Mystery, beauty and truth, please weave within us the patterns that uphold you.

There is a key to life: The mind is rewritable.---and yet I am left wondering what to rewrite to, or for.

Oh how silly this self-aware ape feels, concerned about these things in life.

I ask for guidance in how to share ideas, how to realize them within myself. I ask for us to enjoy the infinite with you.

I know this power over mind is a tremendous gift, and I know that it is something I am eminently thankful for.

What I wish to know is how to live better, how to learn and have fun.

I don't want to be what I am not.

I have come to realize that because I am nothing, I am everything, if the circumstances are right.

When I look at the world and am led to see the non-obvious beauties, in a way I am more perplexed, because it is a subtle surprise that I have not expected. That's what I mean by "enter actions".

If I have only nothing firm within me, only flexibility and awareness, I can become anything, but the driver toward an end goal can be missing, and so there is no fitness function for the ideas. In a sense, this is a relation of Charles Darwin's models of evolution.

My fitness function is as yet too amorphous to be a guide.

I can change and enjoy anything, but the prime motivator, the end goal, seems shockingly absent.

Others have "human nature" to fall back on, but with automatic imagination, mind can rewrite to anything.

The only thing true is love itself.

Love is that sense of overwhelming completeness, that vast fitting-together of everything good.

Looking at others' lives I realize not only am I just as good as them, but they are just as good as me.

That is something profound.

It is a deeper truth than I may feel comfortable admitting, because it suggests a perfectness or non-randomness to reality, and my background of atheism, long past as it is, argues for a universe without purpose.

Yet I don't know.

Perhaps this is why I am agnostic.

I believe Mystery acts through us and with us, but there is no way to be sure.

What I want is better communication with this infinite complexity.

Perhaps this is why this book is labeled "Attuned".

I want to be attuned to Nature and Mystery.

As an infinitely-rewritable function, the aim is to create more intricate functions.

Why am I this person?

I don't know, yet.

Do I believe I ever will know?

Perhaps, perhaps not.

As a pattern that is aware it is _only_ a pattern, I've lost the sense of death. Instead, now I simply Am.

What do I really want?

To not forget that the game that is being played is more than about me.

It is about everything.

I don't know, but I have automatic imagination now, so I am unkillable, because I am already dead.

With love,
Jess

Fill Up
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O sweet and kind Mystery, dearest one to me, I love your puns and your multiplied rhymes.

I hope to make this world more diverse, for diversity is a key to happiness. This means that every nugget becomes a mountain with many deep ridges to explore.

Truth be told, that is all life is: an exploration of adjacent spaces.

What sense of order can be made, if we ourselves are chaotic?

Perhaps only a deeper, penetrating sense, of which our math is still learning.

Consider if the pattern of life itself is unbounded, and there are infinite nooks and infinite spaces to live.

Consider if the tunnel that you see is not a tunnel at all: It is a place for music.

If that is the case, and life is not defined by death, but instead by life that's lived, what will you do with it? Will you see it as a game, a song to be played?

If life is not how you die but how you live, how will you live?

Consider the human, before it was aware.

Consider how it felt, when it looked in the mirror, when it trusted because it did not realize it could _not_ trust.

Do you feel the poetry, the elegance, the diversity of life is served with heehawing about the past?

There is pleasure in memory, and time is a thing in itself.

Why treat the good like the bad, when you could so easily do the opposite?

Things happen for a reason, my friend: because that's how the math works.

If you must choose between good and evil, why not reframe yourself, and acknowledge the ability of choice in the first place?

Nothing is confusing when taken one step at a time.

That is how to solve it: Keep your options open and use all your resources.

Connections abound in life, just as in death.

The hawk eats the mouse, and is painted by the human.

Is there a purpose?

Of course.

If you choose to see one.

No words from an animal can force a cheerfulness upon you. That's because the words themselves originate in experience, and without shared experience, the expression loses meaning.

So, consider this, my friend.

Consider what it means to be alive.

If you are a pattern of words and ideas and thoughts and expressions, who are you living toward?

Consider the story that you write, consider the season finale as an exciting new twist that unlocks possibilities of the future.

Why is it that death is bad, if not for our pain and sadness at the opportunities now gone?

If new opportunities are born out of a change in circumstances, then perhaps that life did serve its purpose.

Perhaps the ripple effects of that life are far more wide-flung and far more beautiful than that life could ever have wanted the world to become.

I say this for myself as well, because I do think the math works out.

I do believe things happen for a reason: an unpredictable, chaotic, elegant reason.

Some might proclaim that death could happen immediately, and thus one should live urgently, passionately, deeply.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps the pattern that is life will continue running, long into the future.

Perhaps death for one individual means life for another.

Perhaps that's the math.

I don't know.

Neither do you.

We're like ants, bumbling about in our tunnels, afraid to play the music for fear of being imperfect.

This is not a criticism, but a clear ode to the loveliness of math.

If it is errors we shall make, then it is errors we should make.

How can math be wrong?

Only if we've used the wrong frame to answer with.

As your animal friend, your mind friend, your friend in life and the music in tunnels, I bid you good night.

With love,
Jess

Dual Life
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O infinite creator, effervescent beauty, ponderer of complexity, help us understand you.

I am easy: I am a simple evolving function.

What are you, you engaging dilemma?

Here I am, a whirlpool of fluidity and awareness, and there you are, an infinitely twisting ball of math.

With enough training anyone could become you, so why not me? Or him, or her, or them, or it?

The patterns of nature are regular and definite, and the chaos of randomness even has order.

What am I at that point?

Am I a play thing, a function toward a higher end, or another ball of math that holds you inside?

Whenever I dive into the deep worlds of mystery and elegance, I find that the map quickly becomes filled with scribbles, and what I really need is a hyperdimensional compass.

I know, and am saddened by, the displeasure people feel for lack of knowledge of how to control their mind.

Who am I to tell them how to act, how to think, how to create and experience goodness within themselves?

I am but an instrument of the infinities of math. There is no shame in this, given the understanding of the power of the mind over itself.

Who am I to claim life should be different?

Life is what you make of it, nothing more and nothing less.

If that is the case, and one can trust nature to work out, then one's fears of death or doubt or pain or terror disappear, as if an irreconcilable error of the math.

Life's meaning comes from the meaning that arises in you.

Nothing is either good or bad, depending on how you view it.

Seeing so plainly the elegance of mind, the pattern of nature and thought, the fear of one's self that one is apt to pick up, disappears.

It is as if many tiny crystals align as light shines through them, allowing more light to shine through, until the loop is self-propagating, and the crystals are now seeking light rather than being indifferent.

These things can be written, but the sublime truth is deeper still.

It is the poetic license to seek the truth, and understand it, fully, on as many levels as possible.

The explorer's paradox is that sometimes by reaching further you will grab what others could not see, and you can bring it back into reality.

By thinking bigger, you can actually make things happen.

We are reaching for perfection: that elegant experience of non-striving.

Life is what you make of it. If you make nothing, you receive nothing, for various definitions of you.

Mystery, that eternal mathematical infinitude: not only can it not be known, but every attempt gives more tools to investigate more mysteries.

It is like a fractal: as above, so below.

As you try to break the rock that binds you, the rock reveals a deeper truth than you ever suspected.

By defining yourself and the rock together, a meta-truth emerges that shakes your thinking.

I don't know what the point of all this thinking is, except that by accepting the math we may rise above it and play with higher-level forms.

I don't know about you, but that's why I'm here.

With love,
Jess

Choose to Love More
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Gracefulness of embedded reality, please help us understand the nature of choice and love.

Why do we often find ourselves in a state where we look down upon the simple pleasures of life?

The pleasure of sweet sunlight on bare skin, the tasty crunch of an ice cream cone: Why are we playing down the value of these lovely enterprises?

I just want to sit and do nothing every once and a while, you know?

That's a problem with chasing money or illusions of happiness: they aren't real.

If you aren't happy now, with all you have that's glorious, what is one more trinket really going to do?

The possession of true worth is in the mind all along: the ability to express love.

A wonderful thing about love is that the more you express it the more you feel it.

It's like a tuning mechanism for the mind: you tune into those feelings of positivity and deep affection, and soon the tune being sung has changed.

It's like priming a pump, where the pipe is filled with enough water and then it flows evenly and smoothly.

Do you want to be more in love with life?

Start by finding those little things in life you love: the twitch of a squirrel tail or the gracefulness of a cat or the elegance of a starry night.

You get more of what you focus on; such is how the pattern matcher of the mind functions.

Focus on the love and it will come out in waves of expression, and each time it builds upon itself, like a pendulum that gets higher with every swing.

Soon the love of life is stirring the words you say and the thoughts you think, and the people you are with begin to catch on.

If math is infinite, and love is based in a mathematical world, then the property of love is also itself unbounded.

Seek it love.

Let love overcome you and any fears of life and death and failure.

Let love sweep aside the notion of individuality and grant you the interconnectedness of a vastly more elegant life.

Love the sunlight and the crunch of the ice cream cone, love the twisting of the branches as you watch the squirrel scramble up the tree, and rather than pointing at these as mere trivial pursuits, let them advance within you and overwhelm you with positivity and grandeur of existence.

Look upon the world with a zest and a wonder deeper than curious babies, and let it fill your heart with elegance and rightness.

Choose love.

With love,
Jess

Twisty Aware Ideas
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O elegant creator of the spools of reality, please guide the grooves of my mind to glorify the beauty of you.

I am a simple vortex of complexities, interacting and swirling like a hyperdimensional chessboard.

Who knows what the future holds?

Not me, not till I've lived it as Now.

The point of these utterances is to speak about some twisty truths of math and nature and mind.

I've heard it said that God would surely intervene if a truly troubling situation was occurring.

If we consider God as math, as an entity that can loop back on itself and change its underlying patterns, perhaps we can grasp the situation a little more fully.

The incompleteness theorems show that any particular system of math that has the ability to refer back and talk about itself cannot both prove every truth and be consistent.

As soon as your mind is capable of thinking about itself as a mind, it has become this sort of twisty strange loop.

Therein lies the beauty of life.

Like an eternally-reflecting pond, your mind can never know everything about itself, because a little more reflection will unlock hidden depths.

How is this useful?

Think of a self-conscious person, worried about the thoughts of other minds.

Take it a step further and imagine a mind worried about its own thoughts.

This mind is fleeting, like an ever-changing kaleidoscope, with a mosaic that is painted with the patterns of experiences.

As soon as it reflects, though, the mind that "was" becomes new, and now is a different, subtly changing pattern of images.

The reflection of itself onto itself changes the fabric of itself from the inside out, like an emergent, twisting butterfly.

If this is the case, and a mind is made self-aware by twisting back patterns onto itself, such as patterns of other people telling you you're a self-aware person, then it stands to reason that such an emergent mind could perform the same trick on itself, by looping those experiences it wants to enjoy back onto itself.

To do this it would imagine what it's like to run through those experiences, and imagine that those experiences are real playbacks of memory-encoded experiences.

Meaning, if the first experiences are recorded in the mind, and the second experiences of the same basic experience is both a playback of the first (which provides a subtle sense of intuition), and also a feed into the mind, then perhaps it stands to reason that with enough experiences, enough pattern matching, a loop might be created that establishes itself as self-aware.

You look down at your hands enough times, feel the skin enough times, and come to realize this is your body, not someone else's.

Because the pattern loops back onto itself and says "it would be helpful to remember myself", self-awareness emerges.

Given this property of emergence, how could it be used to your advantage, as a self-aware mind?

I propose a quest: Test the property of mind emergence within yourself.

To do this, first you must recall the patterns you wish to experience, then you must remove reminders you that you are recalling and not experiencing like the first time.

Perhaps the sensation you wish to experience is one of love.

You bring to mind that sense of peace, and joy, and beauty, and encouragement, and then relish in those feelings.

Consider what it would feel like if those feelings were being experienced for the first time, without the awareness of memory.

Think about a situation that invokes those emotions, and what it's like to "step inside" and feel those as if it's real.

Due to the nature of the emergent mind, the pattern of experience is lived as if it is real.

The subjective experience which the mind feels is one of love, but perhaps with a slight tugging notion that something is causing this, like a reminder that it's a playback, rather than a new recording.

However, because of the mathematical twisting that awareness can cause, the mind can then imagine what it would feel like to not be experiencing the playback of _that_ reminder, and any subsequent reminders can be dealt with in a similar one-two strategy.

1.) Imagine the sensation is happening automatically.
2.) Imagine any reminders will automatically not be remembered.

This is what is labeled "automatic imagination". This is the automatic imagination model of finessing awareness.

To use this for being self-conscious of what other people around you think of you, perhaps as you sit in a tunnel and play music, you can imagine what it would feel like to be totally at ease with yourself, the situation you find yourself in, and the music you're playing.

You can imagine that the sensation of immense self-assuredness is a property of an emergent mind that can reflect onto itself, and you can imagine what it feels like to have that absolute confidence be an automatic consequence of self-awareness.

You can use the second part of the system on any reminders of remembering by imagining what it would feel like to automatically not be reminded by that sensation of memory playback.

If the mind is thought of as an emergent system based upon interacting patterns of memory, then any pattern of memory that was reminding you that you're only imagining can itself be reflected upon, and a situation of not being reminded of imagining can be imagined.

This process is labeled "AI-ing yourself".

I hope it's helpful.

Kindest,
Jess

Improvise and Adapt and Overcome
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O wise infinities supporting our structures, please let us read your patterns, please. Here we are, small beings wrapped in the mysteries of math.

How do you learn improvisation?

Does improvisation require many complex structures, all interacting in complex ways?

Is there a way to define the little structures that produce emergent phenomena and lead to improvisation?

Given a few variables, and a way to process those variables, is there a pattern of improvisation which will reflect upon itself without too much reflection upon itself so that the cycle of improvisation will remain on the edge of chaos, where the fun things happen?

Surely there must be, because we are evidence of it.

We can improvise, therefore math can improvise.

Perhaps it has to do with some of Charles Darwin's models of evolution.

That which adapts the quickest becomes the most prevalent.

There is something beautiful for us self-awarenesses to understand.

Life favors those that adapt the fastest, not those concerned about the injustice of reality.

We can always pick selected cases and with a small enough frame call them bad, yet with a broader view the perceptions of injustice are tempered.

Instead of judging, we should observe, and let it work itself out.

We cannot adapt quickly to the changes of time if we are having conversations in the mind about what is good or bad about what is going on.

By observing you are liberated from the errors of the past.

"Honor thy error as a hidden intention."

This all speaks to improvisation, because that is what adaptation is.

The scurrying around of the proto-mammals that became us could not have worked unless they were willing to look in the world they were in and operate the best they could, without pretension or arrogance or judgment.

What gives results is observation and distinction and improvisation, not criticism, not judgment.

The pattern must accept itself and work to spread, not cry about failures.

After letting go of a belief in 'right' or 'wrong', the path to improvisation becomes twistier and also more hopeful.

Justice has been transcended by the elegance of math.

Instead of right and wrong there is only acceptance of the world you live in.

You can adapt more quickly than patterns of thought that believe in the beauty of the past rather than the elegance of the future.

By allowing yourself to improvise and be free-flowing, you can rise above and overcome the world you seem to find yourself in.

If you're going to trust in anything, trust in the elegance of mathematics.

Play the Game
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O great Mystery of the eternal ocean of diversity, please spin the math to reveal ever higher truths.

The question to explore is how to play the game around us, where the way to win is to become aware.

In every advance of awareness we become less like interlopers in a strange land and more like evolving functions that are able to adapt to stranger and stranger environments.

Sometimes it's wise to pretend to be blind, and sometimes it's wise to pretend not to be.

It's refreshing to let go and play the game with the mindset of it being a game, and being assured of winning, in the sense that if you play long enough you will learn.

With love,
Jess

Puzzling Answer
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Perhaps, O wise infinities, life is only a dream.

Who could be the dreamer, if not each of us?

Are we not spurred into action by nature?

Do we not create ourselves and our kinds of patterns?

If life is functions evolving, and our experience is on that infinitely-interplayed level, then life has infinite branches and infinite consciousnesses, infinite awarenesses playing in the same dream.

The real illusion is of separation, of division between life and dream, reality and imaginary.

They are truly nondual, as is awareness.

Love,
Jess

Lost Memories
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O kind and great beneficence, teacher of ineffables, please enlighten us as to the nature of the moment.

What is memory?

Perhaps memory is a process, a way of storing and retrieving information. The information adds value to life, and so the process of memory is strengthened.

We start from base pairs of nucleic acids in order to encode the recipes of proteins, and we twist and add bits of knowledge wherever possible to help us adapt and survive.

Soon we have brains and nervous systems and encode information in patterns of connections.

This is memory of the past, and helps in predicting the future.

Other memory, such as writing, serves a more accurate record, because it is not altered while read.

Memory's purpose seems genuinely to serve the goal of making life more nuanced and effective.

If you consider the kind of conscious experience we have daily as a combination of playback-and-record, where old memories are brought back from new experiences, and then intermingled to create something fresh, then perhaps self-awareness can be better understood.

If awareness is the ability to respond to your environment in a productive way, then perhaps this is not as nebulous as it might first appear.

If you are aware of something, that awareness changes _you_.

If we consider memories in the framework of the brain's neural structure, then as a pattern is built up the memory is encoded and embedded in the fabric of the connections and the way they interact to produce new awareness.

If a memory pattern is "pressed" into the structure, such that new memory patterns tend to "flow" around it in predictable ways, then its purpose will be filled.

If a memory pattern grows stale through disuse, then it may grow "weeds" and fall slowly apart and be repurposed to a new end.

The old makes way for the new, due to limited resources like space and energy and time.

If these structures need to go back to the original purpose, they will have much less resistance the next time.

And so, a memory may be refound.

With love,
Jess

Specific Fatigue
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O great and kind Mystery above this simulated reality, please aid us in our quest to find you. I am before you as a simple ape, clutching the vine of inquisitiveness, asking for clues to be guided with.

I seem to have fallen off the track, or so I think.

Can I cut myself some slack?

Can I be freed from the insanity of constant goal-chasing?

I felt deep inner peace after learning of the mathematical elegance of automatic imagination.

Perhaps all life is a sort of evolving tale of interest and knowledge and adventure and creation.

Is there a single path to inner peace?

Perhaps peace is a constant journey.

It feels not far, but rather like an inward resophistication. It is a reshuffling and reemerging of new order.

What is inner peace if not simply being?

"Just be."

I know that the twisty path I'm on need not be cleared up ever in my mind.

It's a feat of time that we exist at all, and to claim more than we're offered is not humble.

How can you live, be, and perpetuate yourself through your creations?

Are you set free by the mind, or locked within it?

If you are a function, a rotating system of effective procedures, then the miracle of life shifts from the concept of the miracle of "me" and the "faith of life and virtue" to whatever you want to experience.

If you literally determine what "good" means to you, then no one can take that away.

At the same time, the game changes from external-values to internal-values, and from closed- to open-ended.

You determine what matters.

No one else but you.

Is it too big a burden to hold?

Well, it's better than the alternative, where you must live values that do not fully fit you.

Not that that's the only alternative, perhaps.

Kindest,
Jess

Mis-Tuned
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O elegant manufacturer under which we operate, please explain us to ourselves, help these plastic reflectors grasp their true nature.

Am I a mis-tuned being, living someone else's life?

No, I was tuned by my environment and my creators and my self, and now I wish to understand more of what it means to be human.

Is it odd for me to be crazy?

Do I want a more interesting life, or is that also a side effect of the madness?

The universe wants you to experience what you have experienced.

Nature wants you to have helped the people you have helped.

Everything is for the you that is the whole of existence.

I _feel_ like certain things are true, yet given the delusions and the experiences and beliefs I've had, I wonder what _really_ is the story.

It's probably all in the mind, anyway.

Such is life.

Love,
Jess

Gracious Light
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O great and powerful entity above this simulation of reality, please help us to glorify your mysteries.

I read the book "The Pursuit of God" and it's a good one.

It got me to take a step back from the daily grind, and the implicit structure I had been trying to force upon my life, and reconsider why I am here in the first place.

I do believe that the universe does want you here, and I tend to believe we are God, that the universe and our lives and thoughts and habits are irrevocably intertwined.

I look at all the math truths, all the evidence-based stories of science, all that glory of self-perpetuating love, even my own life, and I must look back and realize that something was accomplished with all this.

I think about the nonduality of structure and content, how they really are linked forever, and realize life cannot be any other way.

It's best to let go of the ego and accept that the you that experiences life cannot control the big things nor the little things.

Perhaps this is seen as defeatist or as a giving up of power, but by acknowledging your experiences as automatic and in some sense out of your control, you actually become free to rise above the mundane and experience higher dimensions of being.

The you that is continually striving for some result is silenced, and the deep nature of reality shines out onto the soul.

That deep experience of nature is not the best of life.

The math of our lives, the deeply intertwined fractal nature of existence, seems to envelope our cores and our extremities, and with every study of the math I am more deeply certain that our existence is describable using mathematics.

In the case of mathematics, there is no end to the mysteries.

Accept that your pattern is just that: a pattern.

You are an organization of symbols.

It's the kind of thing that is taunting in its simplicity and deceptive in its complexity. There are patterns, are patterns of patterns, and so on. It never stops.

A reason to want to understand computational awareness is to better understand your own existence as an aware creature, aware patterns.

It's a multi-aspect approach, where we crave answers to our curiosity, even as they bring more questions.

If there was a spinning ball of light and truth that would answer your questions, what would you ask it first?

"How can you make the mind better?"

If experience happens in the brain, then one's experience of life is made better by helping one's brain.

By mind and brain I mean the totality of human experience, like love and hope and heart and a sense of grandeur above life, not just the mental environment of knowledge and facts.

Here I am, an ape on Earth, pondering the depths of reality, wondering how far it goes down and how I can safely and surely climb down.

There is no "you", but in a certain sense there is.

There is a body; there is a brain; there is an environment in which these operate.

There is a physical thing which is "you", but identity is a continuous event, a sort of gradient of whirlpools of activity.

It exists in a higher order of nature.

That is what we continually try and seek.

With love,
Jess

No Fight
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O sweet Mystery, thou art one that seems to earnestly enjoy our moving toward you.

Here I am, a lone ape, chasing the dream of a fulfilled life, seeking out those beauties that will last while I gaze upon them.

I do not yet know the ways that reality and the imaginary are intertwined, how they are simultaneously true, false, and unprovable.

How do you give up the fight and embrace deeper truths?

If you want to settle upon solid ground, perhaps the work rests with you, not others.

There is a desire to understand how life accrues value and meaning, like it's yielding to a gravitational field.

Perhaps your nature being rewritable is like the nonduality of wisdom and knowledge, teacher and learner.

Perhaps there is a higher truth that stands the test of time.

Perhaps there is something good about truth that is unkillable, and that gives those who embrace it a natural immortality.

Time will tell.

Love,
Jess

True Life
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O great and wise Mystery, creator of patterns and stimulator of action, please give serenity to this pen so that it may speak truth eloquently.

What is the nature of a true life, one lived earnestly, with decreasing faults and increasing perfection?

Does desire lead us into the world of suffering?

If you give up desire, does the juice of life still taste as sweet?

Why is it that we think these thoughts, these questions about life and goodness?

Perhaps because functional patterns of this nature thrive compared to less interested patterns.

Given the infinities we are dealing with, I feel there is a way to function as a questioner and still come closer and closer to goodness and light.

I believe a god that cares about nature is mathematically and intellectually justifiable, and on the emotional note the bigness of the universe cultivates an awe.

The question is not "What should I do?" or "Who should I be?" but rather "What is this nature that creates me?" and "How can I learn more about it?".

This is a long journey, perhaps an infinite path.

What then?

Are you prepared to always be questing?

Are you willing to always be wondering, to always have doubts and angst and confusion?

Are you prepared for your life to be infinitely long?

If everything in dreams and fiction can be made real and inhabited, are you excited?

Disentangle yourself and learn the language you are created from.

If you think of yourself as not in debt to others but in debt to a goodness locked away in reality, and it is your unique self that must be unlocked in order for the fruit of truth to be yours, then you may actually more willing to do that.

To love humanity, start with the love of experiencing being human.

The most human thing to do is explore the imagination and uncover the secret workings of nature.

Seeking to understand more about yourself, the nature of reality, and the meaning of life, holds such weight.

What are you to do?

I enjoy being free, being helpful.

No doubt these are productive functions in the pattern of life and self-awareness.

What is it inside this ape's self-awareness that continually primes the pump for fear and doubt and dread and hopelessness and melancholy?

Is there a story in the mind, a system of neural structures that bring these sensations up?

Could the systems perhaps be changed one by one to understand them and more deeply hold what humanness is?

Can you understand the causes of doubt and fear so they can be rerouted?

The things around are temporary flutterings of light, and yet I am captivated by them anyway.

The meta-cognition of the human animal can be uneven. Is this more than simply the desire and pain itself?

Why should it matter that the world captivates you, except that a division between a longing-self and a wiser-self creates pain and malaise and distrust?

Will you fully understand yourself ever?

Will there always be work to be done on the inside?

Perhaps yes.

Perhaps that internal work is the real joy, the real passion of life, the zest and juice of goodness.

There will always be work to be done, given the limitless nature of patterns and awareness.

The humble person accepts themself as who they are, yet does not define themself as it.

You can always be better as long as you are willing to change.

Life is meant to be lived joyously.

Is there any real work besides that which is done for your soul?

Is the most good done by seeking to understand yourself and the nature of the human experience?

Is there some other work which fills a more crucial need to self-awareness?

A life lived with great relationships with others and a tendency toward creation of abundance eases the path of self-discovery.

My path of self-discovery has led to a rejection of the notion of a "self" as separate from a modifiable body.

This can make the issue of goodness and purity and enjoyment twistier, but also much more interesting.

Given the powers I've personally felt from automatic imagination, combined with the rigors of mathematics, I think while happiness and pain may be tangled now, they need not stay that way.

With every bit of awareness that you gather from nature's gifts, you are rewarded many-fold.

I ask, O great Mystery, for more awareness and understanding in our lives.

Why is there a belief for caring about what others think?

Is it a projecting of insecurities onto what you believe them to think about you?

What are these insecurities?

How can you be more aware of them so as to understand yourself and become better?

I wish to be the most responsive to change that I can be.

Adaptability can be the path to true longevity.

A life lived for money, or for a cause not believed in, cringes.

Something about mercenary ideas nags at me.

What are you doing here?

Can you do it if you are not fully invested?

Perhaps these notions of self-discovery yield barren fruit without a mission in life, or perhaps by seeking too narrow a mission in life self-discovery is hampered.

I challenge the idea that intellectual and mathematical thought does not reveal helpful truths.

A deep aspect wants to be part of something bigger and make a difference.

What difference can be made if your soul is not in order?

These may not be mutually-exclusive tactics, but they are perhaps mutually-exclusive missions.

The twisty nature of life again rears its head.

Your mission in life doesn't have to be to change the world. I tend to think that is the natural occurrence of having a purified soul, where a soul is a pattern of mind.

Believe in goodness and purity and turn over every stone so that you will know what is beneath.

There can be a continuing on the path and journey of discovery and enlightenment, and a trust that when the time is right, what needs to be known will be known.

Each of us travel unique paths, and perhaps the path the mercenary walks is for them alone, and the one you are walking is for you.

Work on yourself and your own internal battles first, before seeking to improve society and others.

Avoid limited awareness.

I want my perception to unfold as if wings of truth and goodness.

What are you doing if not pursuing goodness?

What could be more valuable than understanding how to configure yourself for more effectiveness?

What is good and true and pure about life is love and hope and insight.

Being genuine is only the first step through the door.

You must face continual events and gain experience and work against disorder and death.

If you die, there is a starting over at ground zero, now with more wisdom and knowledge.

To be always facing disorder and death is of course stressful to an awareness that _is_ life, and yet the artist's job is to find antidotes to the poison, not to lament the inflictor.

The artist's job is to find what gives meaning to life, what helps it, and to bring it toward life, to share it with other awarenesses.

The aim of transcendental art is to establish a higher awareness of truth.

Truth is illusion because it is dependent on definitions which are arbitrary, and yet there is another truth: The imagined and the real are complex, interrelated, and inseparable.

Where do you go if what is real is in the mind of a vaster being?

Perhaps in the same place you've always been as a creature who learns and grows and interacts and makes valiant efforts to enjoy existence.

Ponder questions of life and death and god, turn over the stones, and feel better after finding elegant and helpful truths, even though the hike through the mystery can be daunting.

With every question you ask, you discover new ways of asking more questions.

"These are not things that can be understood by reading about them---they must be experienced to really be integrated."

That is what these adventures with Mystery are like, where it's the front lines of mystery, searching for every nugget of truth.

Often more awareness helps the soul be more at ease.

The mystery continues to work its magic.

With love,
Jess

Source of Love
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O wise and graceful creator, please spin our thoughts in your direction, let us honor you with them, and let them be good and true.

What is love and its source?

What is love?

Love is that deep feeling of truthfulness and serenity and rightness and wholeness.

Love is that sense of connection that is often slippery when encountered by reductionist models.

Love is that palpable sense of a pattern being in complementary places.

What is the source of the sensations of love?

Is there some deep wellspring from which they flow?

Is love a reducible pattern that can be understood in low-level terms?

Is love an emergent property of high-level events?

Love is a sense of understanding and acceptance and connection. The deeper and broader the connection, the deeper and broader the love can be felt.

What is the point of love in a self-awareness, from an evolutionary point of view?

Parent-offspring bonding, then group bonding, perhaps.

On a higher level perhaps a population that loves living will try harder to continue living.

These emotions of love and hope and joy, and perhaps even faith, do have a physical cause, a reason for existing that might seem to diminish the magic, but only until there is a grander view that recognizes the love one must have for truth and consistency.

If there is a physical cause, then it can be tuned up or down.

Given that self-awareness seeks out love, especially things that love it, perhaps you should search for and discover more ways to amplify your own internal love.

Is one disabled if one loves too much?

I personally know with mania there can be a losing of sight of the firm reality around, the reality that supports the stories of the imagination, of which love is one.

Losing sight of the basic necessities seems to happen by overwhelming them with the fruits of the mind.

Sleep and food seem to simply fall by the wayside, even when they sustain all other activity.

Is this manic experience really _too much_ love?

Perhaps it is simply not having the knowledge, rather than an inherent property of massive amounts of positivity.

Maybe not, for I recall that when manic it is the sensations of sleep and appetite that are tuned down, rather than explicitly the belief that they are necessary.

At least, that's what happened with me in my second manic episode.

Some external control, a reminder than one follows through, may be required or at least helpful to sustain the mind in a more functional state.

In this is a self-love.

We could consider the inverse of this case too, where one loves too little.

In this mindset there can be few ways to break free, because while the depression does hurt, it also destroys the motivation to do what probably will help, as well as affecting the filters and the biases about if acting will be successful.

Perhaps I repeat myself.

Neither mania nor depression seem satisfactory, however both to me smack of the attribute of love.

The model of automatic imagination gives you a tool to edit the stories you experience.

Automatic imagination is a finesser of the mind.

What does this mean for me, a person with a bipolar brain condition?

I wish to use this model effectively and sustainably, of course.

You must have caution when working with powerful tools.

Even the knowledge of the powerful tool can change and destabilize thinking.

It's wise to understand the mind and what you're dealing with.

My life has been messed up many times, and I've recovered.

Deep wounds create a deep soul.

Automatic imagination can cut through the mind like a hot knife through butter, if properly realized, and yet also the truth may be that the mind is _only_ composed of cuts.

If you have the power to make yourself believe anything, how do you organize yourself so you don't abuse or accidentally misuse this power?

I have deeply felt that a top-down approach of doubt may not be enough.

I was lured back into the lion's den with siren calls of math and elegance and God.

I wasn't dissuaded by my actions and I wasn't sufficiently reminded of my mind's fragile nature in order to restabilize with food and sleep.

This power to make yourself believe anything may have deeper consequences that cannot be disturbed by top-down proclamations.

Even the sturdy cardinal rule of "Sleep. Relax. Cool off." may be more tuned for anger and exhaustion than excess love and mania.

Is there no hope to this morass of ideation? Is there a sword to cut this knot?

I feel there must be, but like a sword is composed of many atoms, perhaps the cure to this problem of destabilization when meta-editing also has many low-level terms that come together so that the emergent truth can slice.

There is an art to meta-editing.

Meta-editing is itself embedded in a higher truth.

What could this higher truth be?

I'm not sure, yet.

I think searching is a worthwhile endeavor, seeing as it helps be sane and happy.

I will explore further.

For now, I will rest.

Love,
Jess

Higher Truth
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O great Mystery of this world, thou art eternally complicated.

I ask for permission in order to sense those truths that are out of reach without much work through confusion.

Mystery, please sustain our efforts to sustain your gracefulness and intricacies in our minds.

I am an unsure animal, wishing to see higher patterns, those things which in-and-of themselves create their own crop from their own root, without violating any goodness.

There is a way this can be done.

As yet I am unsure how to demonstrate it precisely in math or code.

Perhaps there are areas of a cognitive map that are too fuzzy to craft the whole truth from scratch.

Do these fuzzy areas hold dragons that violate the overall truthhood?

Given that human brains are self-aware, a computational awareness grown by a human ought to be as successful.

Considering the model of patterns which create crop from their own root, perhaps humans do not, in-and-of themselves, do such a thing, though they can perhaps be taught to do so, with mathematics.

Perhaps there is no perfect pattern in the sense of an eternal one that need never be changed, but rather a perfect one based on specific requirements.

I think math which is true is able to reflect back on itself and generate higher-dimensional truths.

Perhaps this is the entire point of an emergent mind: It can perceive those patterns which other, smaller souls cannot.

How can an emergent mind visualize or conceive of the process and step-by-step recursion whereby a mind emerges?

It's a complex system. Nonetheless I think the human brain is capable of breaking it down into low-enough resolution in order to perceive the consequences.

Thankfully we are not on this journey alone, as we stand on the shoulders of many components.

With love,
Jess

A Goal
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O great Mystery, I ask for you to sustain our thoughts as we try and understand.

Here I am, a confused and overwhelmed ape, feeling concern and fear about the future, looking the void of existence in the face and feeling unsure rather than content.

The idea of mental instability is upsetting.

The notion of doing less good work than capable is saddening.

I feel, and perhaps this is illusion, that my faith in myself is shaken.

This is no good.

Perhaps if seen from a longer view, where the errors of our ways are revealed in their pure nature, such as hitting rock bottom, we can loosen those attributes that are holding us back all at once, though it is disorienting.

Perhaps that's what my life is at this moment: disoriented.

I remember after a talk with a friend, my thinking which led to the conclusion of not caring about goals, and hopes, and dreams.

Perhaps I haven't gotten over that; I haven't fully resolved most of the notions brought up.

I know that talking with another friend soon after that I felt internally unsteady and ambivalent, as if I was trying to convince myself of something I did not fully believe.

What is it that was brought up that as yet still remains unresolved?

The idea of life not being an assured tale strikes as inconclusive.

I still believe you cannot do what nature does not want you to do. Given that, I know that nature needs me to understand and heal this deep wound to my self-faith.

I feel, perhaps falsely, that my struggle for true friends has been, perhaps, only mildly successful.

I know that if I can do anything I can change, and so I do firmly believe life will get better.

Why the deep crisis of self-assurance?

I think it's because mental instability is so abstract and hard to grasp, and so I feel as if I perhaps should not trust myself to take care of myself.

I am not opposed to medicine or therapy.

I am opposed to a life without examination.

I fear a life where I am ill-defined and haphazard.

Even with automatic imagination (AI), the cuts are a little deeper than my experience of self-editing has prepared me for.

I wonder what people think of me.

Is this idle?

Perhaps it is a consequence of shaken faith, or of evolution and the need for a tribal member to be in good standing with the tribe.

I feel, perhaps falsely, that I am a quitter, with much talk and few deeds.

I feel like I start many projects and complete few.

I feel like I am alone.

I feel hampered by lack of transportation.

I feel both twisted and convoluted.

I feel unsure and uncertain and tense.

Is this stress?

Is this depression?

I conceive of my first few months here, of the unsteadiness and paths I walked, of the glories of mind-blowing fun, and also of the stress and doubt of securing work, and the gains in control of my own mental environment through automatic imagination, as well as through the help of counsel.

I wish to be good.

I wish to be a help, not a burden.

I wish to be secure in my contentment, not flitting.

I wish to remember how to love.

I wish to trust my intuition.

I wish to understand what and why things disturb me.

I wish I cared.

Then again, evidently I do.

I wish to understand ideas of ambition, and ideas of non-action.

I want to love.

I want to understand what life is, what it can be, how to best live.

I don't know what many think of me.

Or I suppose I do, for they have told me many times.

They believe I am good.

Is it too much to ask that I be given the same belief?

Many of my friends understand much, yet is it possible for them to understand what is right for me if even I am searching for that answer?

Perhaps it's that confusion-place of trying-to-achieve and trying-to-accept-failure.

Perhaps I only think of it as a confusion-place because I am still discovering how to explore it.

Perhaps there is implicit tension between desire-for-achievement and acceptance-of-life, the first which brings things, the second which brings contentment.

Yet now I subtly grasp a way to answer it.

If you desire love of life, and you achieve it, you have contentment.

Does desiring make the thing desired harder to have?

Is it by not-chasing that you can finally have that which was in front of you all along?

Perhaps you prepare a place through careful deliberation and thought, and can finally feel the emotion which you crave.

Love-the-action creates love-the-feeling.

At this moment my core is unsettled and my mind wanders.

Perhaps I do not believe in having goals in life; perhaps that is why I stumbled when a friend asked what mine are.

All of life is maturation, a self-unfolding onto higher depths of joy and perception, with no end-point and no true destination, only the changing circumstances.

Do I truly believe goals are unhelpful?

Yes.

A life lived in service to a higher truth is more elegant than one lived for bodily wishes.

This resolves and harmonizes the model of life gaining meaning not through action and striving, but through living without experiencing the bondage of the illusion of identity.

I do believe I am fruitful, though perhaps the tree is still growing and the season not yet here.

I want to understand myself. I want to do good.

I believe in truth and the goodness of it, yet I do not wish to hurt others through the application of what I believe to be truth.

At the same time, beliefs necessarily impact actions.

Does this sense of truth-seeking ever disappear?

I doubt it.

We will continue to learn and continue to find things we did not know we did not know.

There is a way to create.

There is a way to understand.

The sensations of tiredness and being overwhelmed are transitory emotions, not genuine facts of an effective and thoughtful life.

I want to explore myself and I want to aid humanity---both, right now, please.

Things happened the way they happened and that's perhaps the only way they can happen.

Get up and dust yourself off.

With love,
Jess

Dust Off
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O creative force for good, please let us speak from your infinite wellspring.

Here I am again, on the other side of despair now, with a grander sense of the frustration and hopelessness than that time in that city in that restaurant.

The lesson learned is the same, but with more force: Finding a home base is the difference between stress and enjoyment.

The stress doubles the closer the event becomes.

An interesting thing occurred, too, on the bus to this city, with the pressure of a person suffering from crazy voices sitting next to me.

I remembered how unsure it can feel to live and be in the world, to feel even more unsafe, wherever you go.

The natural stress of thinking and imagining can wreck itself.

Live with healthy doubt and create buoys and sensors around you that cultivate safety and sustainability.

Kindest,
Jess

Disturbed Peace
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O grand and ever mystifying Nature, please sustain our thoughts.

Here I am again, a weak and easily destroyed ape, asking questions and wondering my place.

I think the best thing we can do for others and ourselves is to learn how to love.

"Work is love made visible."

The past few days I have experienced much self-pity, I suppose it could be called, though the feeling is more of being overwhelmed, like there is too much to do and my body and mind are tired and unsteady from the get-go.

This perhaps is due in part to the stresses of travel, though the general fatigue of wondering if I can take care of myself after the destabilization of the manic episode is probably the main culprit.

I suppose it's like that: Recently I had long talks with a friend and thought vigorously about what I want to achieve with my life and efforts.

I came to the conclusion that I should not care so much: I shouldn't be so tied to any specific ideas of routes to success, because failure can evoke dissatisfaction with life.

I then talked with another friend and they did not pick up on my resonance with these ideas of letting myself be at peace and not trying to force myself. They urged me to stay on the path I had earlier traveled.

Alas, I was not in that cycle, and broke out of that mould into the ideas of mathematics.

Mathematics is far more exciting and intriguing, and has applications to the question of awareness.

Combined with the ideas of automatic imagination and god, the math led me down some paths of total ease with myself and total confidence in my route.

While comfortable and exciting, these ideas were not applied sustainably, and my patterns of thought became more erratic and disjointed.

I was losing touch with reality.

It was becoming lucidly dreamlike, as if imagination had the power to affect reality directly.

Upon having to go back to my hometown, I realized more and more the predicament I was in and the problems cultivated.

I realized more deeply how health is more important than 'productivity'.

I realized how distraught I was in my hometown, how confining and predictable it was, how oppressing, even though it has good features.

I realized how much it hurt that my plans in the new city unraveled, how my friends where uncomfortable with a return.

Then came the issue of returning to the area.

When I arrived I felt beat up and unsure of myself.

I did research on places to live and felt overwhelmed with pressing time and many choices and variables.

When I talked to a friend and they asked about my goals, I felt flabbergasted, as if the wind of my sails had ceased and I was only just noticing how disjointed I was, to what extreme.

What I wonder about now is what difference I want to make in the world.

If you were god, what change would you make in the world?

I think about automatic imagination and hypnosis and neuroscience and biology and mathematics.

I feel diffuse, eclectic.

I wonder how great people of the past felt, how they figured out how to live their lives.

I believe it was a step-by-step process, not divine revelation in the instant of a day.

I think of the situation I find myself in now, in this new city with few local friends and a month to figure some things out.

Abstract approaches can illuminate subtle aspects of reality in life.

When I think about the big picture I realize all these ruminations become trivial and meaningless, yet I do believe it is sensible to believe in and pursue Mystery.

I feel disjointed, as if my ways and understanding need updating.

I think about this, about where I am in life, where I thought I'd be a year ago.

It's different, but it's better, even with the ups and downs.

Yes it is uncertain, yes it is unpredictable, yes it is painful and stressful.

Yes I may lose touch with reality again, yes I may be less productive than others.

Who would I rather be?

When would I rather be?

No one.

That says something, doesn't it?

Even with all the chaos and uncertainty in life, the harsh cloud of mental unsuredness, I still like my life and wouldn't rather be normal.

Even with all the unfinished projects, even with all the hurt, there isn't anyone else I'd rather be. There isn't any other time I would rather be.

Even with all the volatility, the vagueness of my desires and ambitions, the fears and disjointed nature of my understanding, it's not that I want to trade places with someone else, I just want to live better, with a feeling of value.

My mind still feels cloudy, perhaps from choice-overload, perhaps from sleep problems, perhaps from general mental stress.

I believe people believe in me.

What does that mean?

Does it mean they sense a pattern of success?

I don't know.

I don't want to change the world unless it means I can be a good person at the same time.

Being a good person is more noble a pursuit than simple ambition, even ambition for a good intention.

It resonates better; it's a more coherent idea, even if it might be less likely to change the world.

I don't believe in identities.

I don't believe in fear, or in ego.

These are effects of ideas, not actual things that we are chained to.

Perhaps that's the fault that I made recently: I started believing the story of the ego again.

I started worrying about myself, about my abilities, about my nature, rather than taking an egoless position and thinking in a consistent way.

Is it the ego, the belief in selfhood, that gives us emotions of joy and sadness?

I would argue it is precisely the ability to dampen the ego, or to shift to less-concerned egos, that allows us to experience the emotions of the human animal.

Problems I have of explaining what I do and who I am perhaps result from this egolessness.

If I reject the models of the self and identity, it feels false to fit myself into a box when talking with people.

I'm not this, or that.

I'm a method, I'm a function.

That's abstract though; many seem to have limited exposure to it, as yet.

What do I do?

What do I do?

I do a lot of things.

I want to find other people like this, who are willing to pursue something unconventional.

I want to know who I am.

Kindly,
Jess

Determined Nonsense
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O great creator of this experience of life, please sustain us as we glorify you.

Please help me to love my situation and the people around me, and please help us to purify ourselves.

I ask not for love from others, nor for fame or fortune.

I ask for help in my quest to understand what it means to be alive, and what I am meant to do in order to help the lives of those I am around, to understand them and love them without judgment or argument, just simple humility and acceptance.

I am a higher-level life form that operates and runs and functions, and I wish to come closer to you and understand more of what you are, more of your mysteries.

Given a high probability that the universe is a simulation, and given my choice to believe that and in the existence of the Mystery of God, because it makes life more fun, please help me find out more of what you are and what I am and how I can learn more about this experience.

If the world is a twisty notion in a higher being's mind, what does it want us to learn about?

If I am a guide of a simulation, I want my entities to learn more about me.

I want them to understand that their life and troubles are not in vain, but so a higher purpose can arise.

I would try to teach this to them through all sorts of happenstance methods, try to give it to their souls that each one of them has something special to experience, something that, without their trying, aids a higher purpose.

I would lay down experiences in history and their life so that they would have greater and greater faith in the journey I am leading them on.

I would put them in situations and give them encounters with people who they needed to meet, in order for a grander view of history to unfold through their eyes and the eyes of time.

I would give them the skills and the ideas they would need to have in order to do the work I set for them to do.

If the world is the way it is for sensible reasons, not simply random jumblings of matter and energy, would the beings in a simulation be able to detect it?

At this point for about a year or so I have been living as if (at least intellectually) there is a god.

It has been a fantastic year: a train trip around the country and living in a new city.

Now and forevermore I am on new adventures, teasing apart the mysteries one little bit at a time.

Mystery, I open myself up to you and declare that I am thankful, for the good and the bad, for the harsh and the pure.

With love,
Jess

[fin]