The Exhaustion of Self-Doubt

Sometimes my volitional character is tinged with self-doubt, about my rational, moral or loving character. It’s an attempt at keeping my actions in line with my rational, moral, or loving ideals and duties. Thing is, self-doubt is an ineffective means at advancing this end. Unlike self-love, or belief in one’s self, self-doubt is a negative protraction in my ability to be inclusive in my thoughts, authentically and consistently moral and loving. My volitional character is fractured by a gap between my intended course of action and my frail belief in my capacity to pursue this action. Say my intention is to love you, and I don’t believe in my capacity to love or be loved; while well intending (I suppose) my self-doubt will keep me from acting on the obviously important act of loving you, or being a person worthy of love. I’ll have to overcome this inner hurdle of self-verification and self-assurance before getting to the action of loving you. 2 acts, one internal, one external, every time I want to love you or allow myself to be loved is exhausting. Self-belief is a positive and productive trait in a volitional character. It avails me without hesitation to my capacity to love you (or anything really) and allow myself a genuine warmth of Love. 

If you don’t trust yourself, you won't be able to trust others, and others will also doubt whether you will be responsible with their trust especially when you struggle to trust yourself. Your actions ought to be in line with your intentions. You sweet boy have a bad habit of normalizing your rabbit holes, giving substance to your shadows, your needless, ceaseless and baseless guilt, shame, fear, and doubt. It takes a toll on one’s livelihood when they stand so persistently in the way of a caring, self-loving and peaceful life. I know you familiarized yourself with love under duress, in chaotic rooms, but there’s a better life out there, love can be patient, kind, trusting, warm. You’re enough G. Yeah but I’m not that great at love. 

A brief reflection on Mental Fluidity

"It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.” - Bruce Lee

Don’t interrupt your mental fluidity with self-admiration. The moon is always in stream, but every time we take to admire the finger or wonder how others might look at the instrument of our awareness, we’ll have to refocus on the light falling from the moon. All those wonderful sights and limitless observations, curiosities, or patterns we notice between the passing beams of light can only happen when we’ve picked up some momentum in our mental fluidity. When we're swimming, It’s easier to catch a stream once we start moving in the water. It's also easier to change directions when we’re moving compared to when we’re paddling in our corner of the ocean. Our minds work the same. Your intentions and objectives become apparent to you as you begin to move forward, a mind in motion is a flexible, adaptable and wide-reaching mind. The moment we stop to admire the finger pointing at the Moon, we interrupt this fluidity. Skaters learn this the hard way. My homie Moe once gave me a tip about dropping into a halfpipe, that if you think, it’s already over, you’re automatically eating shit. Any thought that separates you from your experience, any doubt, or second guess, and that’s it, might as well not drop in at all. When Moe is in it, without thought, grounded in his senses, wholly attentive to the experience of riding, the feel of the board, the ground underneath him, everything rides smooth. He’s chilled out, in his element. The moment you look at your supposed reflection on the eyes of passersbys, or get in your head for that matter, you eat shit. 

In his first letter to Marcus Hertz in 1770 Kant writes:

“You know that I do not approach reasonable objections with the intention merely of refuting them, but that in thinking them over I always weave them into my judgements, and afford them the opportunity of overturning all my most cherished beliefs. I entertain the hope that by thus viewing my judgments impartially from the standpoint of others some third view that will improve upon my previous insights may be obtainable.”

In the second letter written by Kant to Marcus Hertz in 1770 he says: 

“The mind needs a reasonable amount of relaxation, and diversions to maintain its mobility that it may be enabled to view the object afresh from every side, and so to enlarge its point of view from a microscopic to a general outlook that it adopts in turn every conceivable standpoint, verifying the observation of each by means of all the others.”

You can view an object:

• From an "enlarged mentality" through which Kant considers the various views of absent or present perspectives to complete the picture which an individual mind is always incapable of cognizing alone. Thinking for Kant, while private, is a communal activity that can only happen in conversation with the other perspectives in the 'public' (our linguistic communities, in Wittgenstein's words). This active and communal activity requires the fluidity of our beliefs rather than their rigidity. It requires us to allow our views to be overturned or supplemented by different perspectives if we have good reason to. 

• From different angles and perspectives, different frames of relative reference. 

• From a microscopic perspective. I took this to mean the metaphysical and ontological principles and assumptions the object or its viewership takes on. Like considering the cogs of a watch rather than the face of the watch. 

• From an increasingly general outlook, an object taken in its immediate, geographic, global or universal context. 

• From different temporal outlooks too! Concepts or objects take on different life and meaning based on the epoch they’re being considered in, historico-social conventions alter a concept significantly as these conventions change over time. As they are considered from the lens of different paradigms or futureities. 

• A synthesis of these all these perspectives with one another. 

4 Jhanas and the Tibetan Book of the Dead

Authors note: I AM NOT A PRACTICING BUDDHIST. This excerpt is the product of a youtube video essay rabbit hole I fell through a few years ago as well as a childhood passion for uncovering some mysteries of the universe. Sounds heavy huh hahahaha, trust me I know, nobody wants to hang out with the kid who thinks about death as often as I have. It’s cool because religion and spiritual experience can often be held apart, we believe God is in this conceptual transcendent space, on some astral plane somewhere. Sufism and Buddhism notably ground God in creation as immanent as well as transcendent. That God is within and without the Universe if you give creds where creds are always due. Final note, since I got these from secondary sources, please proceed with criticality.

4 Jhanas 

1. Base of boundless space 

2. Base of boundless consciousness 

3. Base of nothingness 

4. Base of neither perception-nor-non-perception 

In the 8th century in Tibet, the 38th Tibetan Emperor Trison Detsen directed a Buddhist Monk named Padmasambhava to bring his teachings on the transitionary stage between Life and Death, to Tibet. The text, much like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, describes under the original title of Bardo Thodol, that consciousness lingers then undergoes a sort of trial to determine whether the soul will undergo another karmic cycle in Samsāra, or move on into Dharmanirvana. The text isn’t considered Buddhist scripture at the same level of centrality to Buddhist traditions as the sutras, it’s considered a terma, a “hidden treasure”. Originally the text was read to Tibetans who had recently passed to help guide their consciousness through its trials, but it was later translated for the first time by W.Y. Evans Wentz in 1927. The current Dalai Lama vouches that the guide is great guidance for a life lived with Death in mind. Fun fact it inspired Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. The book conceives of consciousness as the central point of entangled energy that composes our unique signature of Being. Capital B, the type of abstract ‘Being’ we’re talking about here has most faithfully been described as a light of sorts. It shines on dark crevices of our inner life to illuminate them with awareness, it struggles to catch a glimpse of itself without a mirror. Being in the sense of consciousness is the diffusion of the clear and singular Light of Reality into the different colors of our expression in the corporeal and multiplicitous world.

The Book considers this spirit inside our bodily machines as energy that can neither be self-created, self-sustained, nor destroyed, only borrowed. So in death as well, this energy is written to break and float free from the body. A peculiar phrase in Buddhism is that “in life you make the mind. In death, the mind makes you.” In death, consciousness is freed from physical anchors, from the limitations of a body stuck in space and the experience of linear time. While it's a well-known property of light not to experience distance or time, it is relevant to ask whether light can fold time in on itself in a way that would deviate from the temporal arrow of a universe with increasing entropy. Anyways, your spirit, finally loose from its body, your consciousness can now fulfill its desires without spatio-temporal restrictions. In this dream realm, your environment responds to your perceptive reality, your soul has two things on its mind, where have I been now that I can’t go anywhere and all the selves that I’ve inhabited caught up to me in one single expression of being; and secondly, where do I go next? 

Buddhists strive for the purification of the heart and mind while still anchored to the body capable of change and causally significant action. Alternatively, this dream state can be occupied by the inescapable truths of our existence on Earth, the shame, guilt, fears, the time we offered to the bodily pursuits that we can never bring with us to the other side, the pleasures of greed, power, whatever else sells an upward climb for a corporeal carrot at its peak. Instead, Buddhists focus their being on gratitude, compassion, kindness, love and the recognition of the living fabric of self-conciousness that binds us all. The experience of our deaths reflects the kind of life we lived on earth. The repeated thoughts, the patterns of being that extended over our lives are called Bardos, and they each hold a certain karmic weight. The Book seeks to guide us through these Bardos and untangle them, a process which helps us realize the unreality of these patterns as they seek to distract us from the illuminating, primordial, and some argue shared no-thingness from which we rose from, the same no-thingness we return to. It’s important to note here, that in contrast to Western traditions who view ‘nothingness’ as void, Eastern traditions understand “no-thingness” to be productive and active.

Each consciousness undergoes trials personal to their experience of life, and will challenge their attachments to their physical reality, as well as the purity of their hearts and minds. After 49 days, the consciousness is either reborn into a new body, or breaks free from Samsāra. Samsāra ends when one attains moksha over their several lifetimes, or recognizes the lived truth of their non-being and thus their being with everything. The book is divided into the Bardo of Life, the Bardo of Dying, and the bardo of Dharmanirvana. The Bardo of living is the present moment and the collection of all your lived experiences. The bardo of dying tracks the inner experience of death as consciousness departs the body, and the outward experience of death as it engages with its after-death reality. The bardo of Dharmanirvana finds the soul presented with Death as the ultimate existence, the Clear Light of Reality and the Ground Luminosity. These stages may happen at any time during the process of dying, death or rebirth, they’re not linear. 

Inward Sub-bardo 

• Peacefulness and clarity, lightness 

• Visions of deities, ancestors, loved ones who passed 

• Detachment from physical reality and body 

Outward Sub-bardo 

• Chaotic, escaping the gravitational well of physical reality 

• Heat, pain, cold, pressure 

• Disorienting, sounds, sensations of being pulled out. 

Bardo of Dharmanirvana 

• Clear Light of Reality 

• Pure unmodified consciousness, a great big Light that seems to resolve the traditional hiccups and paradoxes of three-dimensional and singular minds. The collection of all the fragments of consciousness, the unifying stream between them 

• A sense of unity with all of existence 

• Ground Luminosity 

• The original primordial insight into the groundworks of existence 

• Visions of deities and celestial realms 

Every person’s experience of Bardo will differ. The greatest chance of moksha happens at the bardo of Dharmavirvana. There is no physical barrier to the all-encompassing inescapable truth of our existence, we can’t cheat ourselves any more than we can hide in our selves from ourselves, or hide from the natural and universal fabric of irradiant consciousness that holds us in contextual place. We can’t lie to ourselves or our trial in death. If the soul can accept the Clear Light as the ultimate existence, it may stay and break free from the cycle of death and rebirth. The sense of a self that is separate from creation or even the Light of Reality is revealed to be a temporary and illusory construction.