Ran Prieur

September 6.

2023-09-06T18:40:31Z

September 6. Thanks Karthik for sending this video, The Art of Life. It's about Michael Behrens, who is basically the Unabomber's good twin. He was a math genius who took the position vacated by Ted Kaczynski at Berkeley, and later built a house on primitive land. He has lots of cool stuff to say, but don't romanticize his lifestyle too much -- if he got his food in any other way than driving into town, they would have shown it.

It's funny, for someone who talks about the value of doing nothing, he's very good at doing something, or he wouldn't have cleared that land and built that house. In my experience, western Buddhists are naturally busy people who are drawn to Buddhism to keep themselves in balance.

Some people think my values have changed because I no longer write about the critique of civilization or try to live outside it. Those were both spinoffs of my number one value, which has not changed since I was five years old: I love giant blocks of time with nothing I'm supposed to be doing. Some people are horrified by the thought that after death, it's just your consciousness floating in the void. I'd be like, free at last!

Seriously, my new favorite thing to do when I'm high, is silent darkness. The ringing in my ears, and the dim shapes on the backs of my eyelids, are so interesting that I keep forgetting to focus on my breathing. When I do, I've noticed a subtle catch in my throat at the top and bottom of every breath, and I've been working on cleaning it up, which is hard because it's halfway buried in involuntary.

I'm not claiming causality, but at the same time that I've been doing this, I've been getting better at being present in each moment. Buddhists talk about "craving", but I didn't really get it until I got down to the micro scale. I was watching soccer and noticed the difference between watching the player kick the ball, and hoping for some result of that kicking.

One of my favorite lyrics, from Camper Van Beethoven's Lulu Land, is "How can you lose when you choose what you feel?" That sounds like a magic power, but again, the key is the micro scale. When something happens, you have a habit of how it's supposed to make you feel, but if you can make yourself small enough in time, you can cut that habit off and do something different.

September 4.

2023-09-04T16:20:14Z

September 4. For Labor Day, a repost from exactly six years ago:

Imagine you live in a world where money is completely disconnected from work. Not only is there an unconditional minimum income, there's also a maximum income -- and they're the same! Corporate executives, sled dog racers, insurance agents, and people who just watch TV all day, all make the same amount of money.

In that world, what would you do with your time?

And how similar is that to what you actually do with your time?

To the extent that those things are the same, you're successful -- even if you're poor. To the extent that they're different, your quality of life is being constrained by cultural assumptions and economic rules that tie activity to money.

You've all seen that political grid, where one axis is social freedom and the other is economic freedom. That's always rubbed me the wrong way, and now I can say why: because it has economic freedom exactly backwards, defining it as the right to trade your labor for money, even if it's something you wouldn't do if not for the money, and then turn around and trade your money for the labor of others, even if they're only doing it for the money. That's not people being free -- it's money being free to control us.

In a value system that puts quality of life first, economic freedom is not freedom of money but freedom from money, and the more disconnected money is from activity, the more free we are.

September 1.

2023-09-01T13:50:29Z

September 1. Three trippy links for the weekend, starting with a scientific article. Insular Stimulation Produces Mental Clarity and Bliss:

For the first time, an ecstatic aura has been evoked through the electrical stimulation of the dorsal anterior insula during presurgical invasive intracerebral monitoring in a patient who did not suffer from an ecstatic form of epilepsy.
...
On the MEQ‐30 questionnaire, completed to describe the ecstatic symptoms experienced during the AI3‐4 stimulations, the patient had a total score of 130 of 150 points... which is considered a "complete" mystical experience.

From the Psychonaut subreddit, What's the most interesting thing to happen to you on a psychedelic? Of course selection bias is going to make psychedelics seem more reliably mind-blowing than they really are. This whole thread is better than my answer, which would be sensing the personalities of trees.

And from Ask Old People, What coincidence has occurred in your life that pretty much convinced you that we are living in the matrix? My explanation for all this stuff is simply that the fundamental unit of reality is the first person perspective. Each of us is dreaming the world on the fly, and we've dreamed up a physical universe as one way to be characters in each others' stories; but it's not seamless and it's not the only way.