Journal Entry #3

“Some half-finished thoughts about identity and being; and some QRI-coded musings on consciousness research”

The feeling that you have of being a person existing in the world, that you are a person apart from other persons ... is the same exact feeling that other people have about themselves. We are the same Being, except that each one of us takes themselves to be separately and independently existing.

Certainly, that last part no longer applies for me. I’m also not about to tell anyone how they experience the world. Which renders it nothing more than a rhetorical device. In any case, I don’t remember exactly when that stopped being the case. I just kinda woke up one day and there I was, experiencing contact with other beings… realizing that I am experiencing myself and other beings as “momentary excitations in a unified field”, hopelessly entangled yet phenomenally distinct, private, and bound.

Note: This post hits different. It’s very personal. It felt raw and vulnerable, maybe a little dark (at least in where I had to go to write it). It reveals a side of me that I don’t share because I feel like I have to guard it from the world. I’d like to think that I brought it around to a positive ending. Writing it felt therapeutic. I feel lighter and radiant after writing it.

I don’t experience what I used to know as [ontological] separation with other beings; at least not like I used to. All being feels intertwined in a way that is intimately personal. Everyone is all up in my [phenomenal] space. A person entering my personal space is showing up in the space behind my eyes as much as they appear in front of my eyes. I experience myself and others as locally emergent features of the same continuous field. No fucking wonder I’ve gotten so sensitive. I have stronger reactions to my boundaries being crossed now than I did when I was younger, more reactive, more traumatized, more caught up in the social games, and so forth.

This is the opposite of what I thought would happen after a whole lot of contemplative refinement. One of my motivations to persist in “cultivation” with such autistic fervor for years on end was that I was trying to get away from the messiness of being so caught up in the architecture of the vices of human collectivity. I was trying to achieve phenomenal detachment. This was misguided, as all trauma responses tend to be in their adaptive expedient-ness. All I needed was a stable, integrated identity ... an individuated selfhood. In retrospect, years of depression had made me numb to life. This is how it feels to be alive.

Again in retrospect, it might not be a sound idea to try to formalize the reframing around what it means to be human. We must guide each individual transformation with great care, making sure that they have the support and resources needed for a smooth transition. Emphasis on individual. The last thing we need is a bunch of unsuspecting mutants chaotically discovering their powers and tearing the fabric of reality to shreds.

I used to struggle with this point ... how can life be so unfair? For context, I was born in Kenya. Kenya was roughly 50% below the poverty line and considerably underdeveloped in terms of infrastructure last time I was there. I saw third world poverty and struggle up close. The first school I attended was nigh a “village school”. I went to elementary school with some kids whose parents could not afford to buy them shoes. These kids showed up to school barefoot. I couldn’t imagine surviving that—I still can’t.

My cousins, my best friends early in my childhood, became orphans before we were ten. I remember how it changed them. It was a subtle shift that we as kids didn’t have the ability to articulate. It destroyed me. A lot of those early childhood experiences did. It would take me a lifetime to realize it, but it was then that I started to reject this version of reality.

I spent most of my life quietly reflecting on this kind of stuff.

I struggled with clinical depression for about nineteen years. That’s exactly half as long as I’ve been alive now. I survived a suicide attempt and overcame years of persistent suicidal ideation. There were many days when my body felt like a thousand-ton brick in its inertial refusal to get out of bed and go to work. It felt like living in an existential black hole.

The good news is that I’m about two years liberated now. But to overcome this existential void I had to find meaning. I had to justify continuing to exist. Somehow, I persisted in spite of my own inability to do so. Powers beyond me intervened; gifted me this unnatural ambition to make something of myself from nothing. And that’s well and good, for me. But what about all those other people who don’t make it? How can I justify the necessity of their suffering?

I entertained the idea of reincarnation for a while. I still kinda do. But only loosely. Reincarnation could explain the asymmetry between a life of privilege and one of suffering. It’s tempting to write it off as just karma. But it gets too real when I consider a real life example. How about the kids in the Epstein files … it’s just their karma. This is where that model breaks down for me. I can’t get myself to accept children suffering as just karma. The pain and suffering that I see and hear about every day destroys me silently. And so I recompile myself from Source code every day. Some days better than others.

This is part of the context and impetus for my study of consciousness, identity, and the question of what it means to be. Reincarnation is still likely a thing. I don’t have any direct knowledge of it. So I can’t conclude that it’s a thing. I entertain it as a theory (an explanation that works provisionally). In my current understanding it can exist within a broader framework—at least it can work with my theory of consciousness.

Nino Kadic suggested that my theory is most closely aligned with Spinozan monism and I tend to agree:

Spinoza’s monism, or substance monism, is the philosophical view that only one, infinite, and indivisible substance exists, which he calls “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura). Everything in the universe—including minds, bodies, and individual objects—is merely a modification, or “mode,” of this single substance. (Google/Gemini)

My theory suggests that neither consciousness nor physics is fundamental. Reality is not reducible to one or the other. Instead, they are “emergent” aspects of a more fundamental “substrate”. In theoretical terms, I describe this substrate as a unified field. The general idea here is that reality is not fundamentally material or mental; that these are ways it expresses its essential nature under specific constraints. Spinoza conceived God as nature itself rather than a transcendent creator. The difference between his monism and mine would be that mine does not evoke any divine or transcendent qualities. Mine is more like a quantum-informed “nondual” monism.

I no longer think that my theory is dialectically opposed to physicalism. This is very funny if you remember when I said that it was. The more honest, nuanced position is that it aligns with both physicalism and panpsychism depending on where you look. And ultimately, the Avengers of consciousness research might include some neuroscience, computation, and fundamental physics expertise to go along with our mathematical, phenomenological, philosophical, and contemplative nous. It’s in the overlap between these different areas of expertise that I think the foundations of a complete theory of consciousness will emerge.

To the extent that I articulate on theory, I believe that it is possible to pin down and formalize (describe mathematically) this most fundamental layer of reality in a way that is amenable to developing systems that we can use to achieve concrete goals—whether that is to design new technology or reliably facilitate high-valence states in consciousness. This is to say that my goals are practical rather than purely philosophical or spiritual.

This is where I find that adopting QRI-coded language better articulates what those practical goals might look like. My interest in QRI is, after all, that it seeks to operationalize such an emerging framework towards practical goals, i.e. designing interventions that reliably steer conscious systems toward stable high-coherence, high-valence states. These would be states of consciousness that facilitate healing, growth, and overall well-being.

Speaking of facilitating high-valence states, I was talking about this question that I’ve been grappling with for most of my life: how to make sense of, or how to explain the asymmetry of suffering on an individual level. After giving a lot of thought to how best to describe my realization, it turns out that the Hindu concepts of Atman and Brahman already took care of this:

Atman (The Self): Refers to the individual soul, often described as the “breath of life” or the true inner self that animates the body and mind. It is considered part of the universal soul.

Brahman (The Absolute): Represents the supreme, ultimate reality that is all-pervading, unchanging, and the source of the entire universe. It is often described as Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss).

The Relationship (Unity): In Upanishadic philosophy, particularly Advaita Vedanta, Atman is not just a part of Brahman, but is in essence identical to Brahman. The apparent separation is due to ignorance, or maya.

Role in Moksha: The ultimate goal of human life is to realize that the individual soul (Atman) is, and has always been, identical to the universal reality (Brahman). This realization removes ignorance and liberates the soul from the cycle of birth and death. (Google/Gemini)

Seen through this lens, selfhood (discrete, local) is the apparent manifestation of the inherent cosmic unity of Being (universal, non-local) under psycho-physical constraints. What we think of as “people” (self included) are stable self-reinforcing dynamical structures in the same unified field. There is a sense in which other people’s suffering is not theirs alone but is an aspect of our shared reality. The story behind why a particular person has to suffer a particularly cruel fate is not as important in the grand scheme—this only appears to be the case in a low valence environment[1] (one that prioritizes self-centeredness/main character syndrome, to be specific).

In a high valence environment, all beings are working towards the reduction of suffering for all beings (such an environment values shared storytelling). In a world where everyone comes together to elevate an individual out of their suffering, suffering stops being such an existential vibe killer and becomes a sort of signal that draws our attention to and points us to where work must be done.

Footnotes:

1. In QRI terms:

   • Valence is a measure of the hedonic quality of experience: how pleasant or unpleasant experiences are.

   • A low valence environment doesn’t just mean “there is suffering somewhere.” It means that the average or structural phenomenology of experience in that system tends toward unpleasantness or high dissonance. A world with widespread suffering can be thought of as a ‘low-valence environment’—a context in which the structural dynamics of conscious experience tend to be unpleasant, dissonant, or painful.

   • A high valence environment is one in which the structural dynamics of consciousness favor stable, harmonious, and coherent experiences—where suffering is minimized, joy, contentment, awe, and clarity propagate naturally, and beings collectively support each other’s flourishing.