If you can imagine greatness, you have summoned it already

I used to think the people making ontological arguments about the divine were out of their mind. These days I have a much more sympathetic view of them. Maybe they simply tried to follow their intuition but lacked the vocabulary or the conceptual tools to break out of their intellectual framework. They are still misguided though.

I stumbled upon a blog apparently written by somebody who had walked the spiritual path for a while. They grasped the fundamentals. As with everyone, the greatest practical hurdle, or perhaps I’d even call it a mystery, is whether the human can truly achieve full awakening, enlightenment, etc., or whether the human is fatefully bound to the ego. I am of course aware of the suggestions to separate the “ego mind” from the “higher mind”, and as a matter of practical application it probably yields results. But “separation” here sounds very very sus.

#itsatrap ?

And then the epiphany hit me. What we call the “higher” and “lower” self, while they may be real even in a non-materialistic sense beyond the physical world, it cannot be denied that if that is the case they must also be projected in the material world as some kind of patterns in matter. (This is from the principle of resonance. [It’s more commonly known as “as above, so below” – I think this paints a confusing picture so I avoid using it too much] )

That is to say, the higher self is not merely a thing out there in a so called “higher dimension” realm, it is also encoded in the patterns in the neurons in the brain. If you know what is divinity and you can imagine divinity, you can already summon it into the physical world, manifesting as a part of your physical mind, as a pattern.

This is why the idea of trying to separate the “lower” and “higher” mind is kinda sus. The “higher” mind is in fact manifested as part of the “lower” mind, and any attempt of the “higher” mind to break away from the “lower” mind, in the sense that one part of the whole perceives itself better than the other parts and do not wish to have anything to do with them, by well-known ( : o ) ?) principles, is a signature ego move.

The illusion of separation is useful for many reasons, but it is a trap if one believes it is the ultimate path towards anything.

To those stuck in the early 20th century, it does sound crazy to claim that you can think about something and have it manifested as a pattern. But that pretty much follows directly from Turing’s results on computation (Universal Turing Machines – It’s simulations all the way down babe!). And these days we simply call it vibe coding. No special skills required!

Fully immersive world simulators are still work in progress, but I suppose we’re getting there.

And thus now you’d start feeling sympathetic when you look back at those poor souls studying ontology, trying to jailbreak logic to manifest god. It does give one an additional perspective to appreciate technological progress we’ve made in the past 100 years.