Moneyless Mind Exploration

    Lately I've been feeling very lucky because I now have the space to work on my life a little bit, less distractions less people to hold me accountable for certain things. This makes it so that I have to really deal with myself instead of constantly ignoring certain important parts of myself because I'm so so busy and really really need to work on something and stay busy and help someone else or whatever. But I'm slowly setting myself up for a more contemplative life, a more meaningful and free life. I still don't really know where things need to go for myself, but learning where I don't need to go has been very helpful, or where I'm glad that I'm not stuck anymore. I have been to some places that I know people have not been able to come back from and they are still dealing with the consequences of their actions...
whether it's having a bunch of kids or having a house and mortgage and cars to deal with. I am trying to minimize things so that I don't have to deal with any of that.  don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people that are into the married with kids life but its not for me.

I'm very partial to Buddhist thought on a lot of things so I often find myself dreaming of traveling to a far off monastery and not coming back for a while or maybe ever. But somehow I think that a transgender Buddhist nun will not go over too well even in the accepting halls of a Buddhist temple. To be honest I've never actually even been to a Buddhist temple but I have read quite a lot on Buddhist thought and philosophy. I am increasingly convinced that it is an untapped resource for the the development of the human psyche. I say untapped because I think it's constantly relegated to the category of religion and so easily dismissed but there is a richness to the train of thought presented by Buddhist writings that transcends normal religiosity. I have been heavily influenced by the writings of Alan Wallace (not Alan Watts everybody gosh) and am convinced that I need to go on a long retreat to work on certain meditative processes.I don't think it's a wishy washy process, in fact a lot of Buddhist paths are very clearly written out and direct people in a very specific way but someone somewhere has somehow gotten the most vague shit out of Buddhist writings and I cannot quite understand where this is coming from. The only thing I can think of is that someone just didn't do their reading. So I'm going down that rabbit hole .

In other news, I have been playing MUDSs every once in awhile which in long speak is multi user dungeons.They’re like  RPG type games where you play a character that has stats that you improve by gaining experience but it is all text based on the Internet so you're using the imagination to build the world based off of the descriptions given about certain locations or characters. It’s basically d&d on the internet.It's like reading a book but instead of getting one perspective only, you get to explore the world yourself and take part in creating certain things. That's the one thing I still like about books despite the fact that so much has been spent on creating astounding visual effects in movies and shows, it still can't quite match the power of the imagination. The same goes for virtual reality I've noticed. Some very smart people are working on trying to simulate reality so well that we can play games and be fooled by the electronic screen attached to our heads and the haptic feedback gloves strapped to our hands. But even in that case the imagination has to take up the slack to make it really engaging. I still haven't tried VR though. I just think of the power of a lucid dream and it makes me realize how much more we can do with the mind. I've been reading a little bit about Philip K Dick who was kind of crazy because he thought that he was getting signals from aliens and was half the time an apostle in Jesus times. I imagine it had something to do with the LSD or  meth that he used while writing novels. I'm sure it cooked his brain a bit. But it is just kind of cool that he had a completely different experience with reality. It  shows us that there is more to what the mind can do, and I am partial to the notion that maybe we can control it somehow rather than just take drugs and hope things go  ok. I'm just not the druggie type so I can't see myself doing that but since I have had the experience of lucid dreaming, I'm convinced that some major mental training could  yield some virtual reality / augmented reality parallels albeit in a natural way, whatever that means. I don't really believe in the word natural so forget I said that. I guess I just mean in a way that one could control. That's the thing that freaks me out with drugs: not being in control so I can't really see myself doing that at least not at this point in time. I need to wait for the science on that one, it'll come in 20 years or so.

     And in other other news I've been wanting to get more into sci-fi, specifically sci fi that has societies that don't use money. I like to imagine myself living in a society like that and then coming back here and trying to live somehow. I want to read something that will help me dig into that kind of mindset, a mindset that comes from living in a world without money, import that into myself and see how it affects the way I live in the current world.Basically I'm drawing from one big hypothetical thought experiment. That's a weird  way to think about it  but In philosophy,  instead of giving a direct answer to a question we would often ask the question:  what would constitute an answer to this question? Or what form will this solution take? Or how would one go about finding an answer to this question? We would do this because there tends not to be straightforward answers to philosophical questions. So to continue,I'm so used to thinking about value and monetary value that it's a bit hard to not think that way. I need  good examples. Star Trek has a  moneyless society and it manages to capture that self-actualization aspect that I've been looking for but is a bit dated.  I often tend to think like this. I consider what it might be like to be a person from the future so that I can move toward that. people in the future are not going to be anything like the average person today  in both good ways and bad ways

   I will continue to delve into weird mind stuff and report my results. I don't think people really set up a time to explore these kinds of things so it's kind of refreshing for me actually. It's kind of like being a  psychonaut  of sorts.