It is worthy to note that nearly all the observations, ideas, theorems, and even axioms in this book are a result of a decade of debate with my closest and most trusted friends. You know who you are and I thank you. I think it is important to recognize that all this didn’t happen by accident or by a sudden revelation. It was a slow process by the way of exchanging ideas and viewpoints. Data was analyzed and discussed; further refined and picked to pieces again. If there was a flaw in theory, it was ruthlessly dismissed.
This is a presentation of how I see those ideas. Sure, there is plenty of “my own” personal work here. There are things that have kept me awake in the soothing darkness and silence, but it is all connected. I cannot tell whether a singular idea or thought lifted from this book was entirely “my own” idea, because these discussions and debates have influenced everything that I do. No one writes or expresses thoughts and ideas from a bubble inside a vacuum. The easiest thing to do would be to rip off some self-appointed self-help guru and steal from Aristotle as much your conscience allows. The world is filled with these “Dr. Crackensteins” and their merry little friends. No, that will simply not do.
The term “Level-of-Participation-to-this-World” was not mine or from me, but the idea was something, which was discussed and debated long before a term was coined to portray the very essence of the idea, hence the way it is written here. The idea can be explained graphically by using the standard Gaussian dispersion bell-curve. In the middle we have majority of human population with your average level of participation. Over to the right we have individuals with higher participation, and to the left, those with less, both ends of the curve getting gradually closer to the x-axis. The x-axis has theoretical starting and ending points. Zero on the left and infinite on the right, but like stated before, the curve never reaches them with standard sampling. It is, however, theoretically possible for an individual with infinite participation to be born as well as someone with zero, but this is plain statistics and irrelevant.
When a human being wakes from good or bad night sleep and makes his or her way to the kitchen in search of coffee, tea, or vodka, the person inside has drastically changed during those waking seconds. By the time the person has taken a shower, we are dealing with a completely different individual. The alertness, mindfulness, and awareness of surroundings are completely different. The hormonal cocktail triggering signals in human brain coupled with other chemicals, such as caffeine and alcohol, can do wonders either to your social skills or state of alertness. By the time the said individual hits the workplace, we are dealing again with a different creature. The level of participation waxes and wanes based on the level of awareness, mental state, alertness, and who is behind the steering wheel. It is not the same personality going out on Friday nights as the person picking kids up from the school. Is it the same shy and awkward IT-intern with limited social skills who on a Friday night gets banned from the local bar for parading his dick around publicly after a half-a-tray of Jäger shots? The same personality? Really? There is no single “I” in an average human frame. There is a multitude of different personalities fighting over same mental space. It is very apparent that these different “I”s are intimately connected with the level of participation: the higher the participation, the fewer the “I”s. Have you ever met a zen master? Have you seen the way they carry themselves around? There is hardly any fluctuation in their participation. They simply are. Compare that to your average vaguely dissatisfied teenager and I think you get the point. By the way, I am not referring to Dissociative Identity Disorder a.k.a. Multiple Personality Disorder here, although it would be tempting to jump into conclusions, there are no viable grounds for that. Dissociative Identity Disorder is a mental disorder on the dissociative spectrum characterized by at least two distinct and relatively enduring identities or dissociated personality states that alternately control a a person’s behavior.
Here is another angle to this: it is completely wrong to argue that experiences in life change someone. It is how one perceives and understands the experiences that will change you, if at all. You can learn the lessons or choose to ignore them. The experiences are just data on the input side of the front-side bus. Experiences should not change who you are, but how you perceive things and react to them. One could argue that this is petty semantics. I think not. There is distinctive difference here. Provided that you are a responsible adult, if experiences change you, then you are a tourist in your own life, and yes, it proves the theory that you probably are a different being from one minute to the next. If your level of participation is high enough, you adjust your attitude, and your output, towards given arisings, not your personality. Human beings enter this world as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, and as id-driven beings. Then arises self-awareness. I distinctively remember the moment my son looked into mirror and understood that the reflection was his own image. He saw himself differently after that milestone and the way he explored his surroundings changed. He started to study himself and he started to build his first identities. My first childhood memory is probably from around the age of three. It is a warm summer day and I am driving a Kermit green tricycle. I remember being vaguely bored. I also remember the sense of self in a very rudimentary but clear way. In childhood everything is grand. Each new experience, taste, sensation, or milestone seems so much bigger and better and the disappointments harder. The new stimulus is intoxicating and wonderful.
By the time of sexual maturity the explosion of hormones impact individuals in a different way. This is the wonderful side effect of the animal inside a human being. You start to push back when pushed. You start to challenge, whether you recognize it or not, the alpha male or female. For our purposes something important happens around this age. Numerous statistics show that children usually inherit their parents social status in a society. The way of operating within a social construct, the rules and roles, which a child has been observing and learning are challenged, and eventually abandoned or accepted. Here the level of participation plays a role. You either identify yourself with the immediate surroundings or then you start building something completely different. Some are already wise enough, or participate enough, to make do with the suitable elements and discard the bad. I think you all have witnessed too many an unfortunate being whose mental state never left the teenage years. This marks the beginning of era in human development where the identification to human made metaphysical constructs is at its strongest. It might be a certain fashion trend, a style of music or art as a larger movement, spiritual or religious path, or even a political movement. Some people call them a way of life. I call it fucking nonsense. Don’t get me wrong here. There is art and music, which is beautiful and meaningful on some level. There are political movements trying to make the world a better place instead of the usual sociopathic and self-important mockery of democracy. They are still nothing but human made frameworks, which do not exist anywhere but in a limited social context. They do not have absolute value, and while they are entertaining at times, they are not to be associated with. They make poor building blocks. This is a direct continuation of the childhood delusion of every single personal experience being of uttermost importance. On subjective and personal level it might be, but to continue that delusion when reaching early adulthood and still onwards is really, really sad. These human made constructs usually come with a set of predefined values, which the associate can associate with. It’s so nice to hang out with “like-minded” people. But what are values? Milton Rokeach notes:
"...a value is a type of belief, centrally located within one's total belief system, about how one ought or ought not to behave, or about some end state of existence worth or not worth attaining. Thus, a value may be viewed both as a predisposition to act (attitude), and as an estimation of worth of an action..."
If we accept the aforementioned to be plausible, and keep in mind that every single action a human being manifests is selfish or has its origins in selfish motives, we find that any virtue as an example of moral excellence, and any value as a belief in virtue(s), are actually nothing but dogmas. They do not exist anywhere but in the metaphysical quasi-realities of men. If an attitude is a meta-reaction towards arisings depending on the given circumstances combined with the accumulated experience data, then a value is an attitude mirrored against a correspondent virtue.
Around early adulthood your average human has also already developed quite a few of different personalities, masks, layers, virtues, and roles: son, daughter, student, girl/boyfriend, friend, team member, class member, citizen, band member, activist, poet, writer, musician, hobbyist, and so on and so forth. Roles are interesting because they are always handed down from the outside. Very few roles are actively assumed. They also have a premise of an expectation from the outside of the individual. Peer pressure usually dictates the rules of the play or the game, and you fulfill or flunk your role. Early adulthood also witnesses the first attempts of finding out “who you are”, and no, I am not counting the teenage hormone-infused rebellion and rage to be a serious attempt. Parents trying to live their lost childhood through their children are really a nuisance at this point, not to mention the unrealistic expectations placed on a being who is barely learning how to live. There is still the craving for the excitement and joy for the childhood “first times”, when a day felt like a week, a week was a lifetime, and a month was an aeon. The roles, rules, frameworks and identities built thus far have started to take root. The longer a human being clings on to them and leaves them unchallenged, the harder they die, even more so, when and if they are socially acceptable. Humans are herd animals. The earliest herd, after climbing down from the tree, was a tribe. A tribe became a village. A village became a city. A city could become a city state. A city state could become a nation. Some nations became empires, but the basic stone-age dynamics stayed the same. You have the alpha male/female and his/her posse, you have the shaman(s), and then you have the rest who uphold the entire construct without even realizing that they are the ones holding the keys to the throne. It must be noted here that in our day and age the alpha is still usually a male thanks to certain oppressing, misogynist, and patriarchal bronze-age cults.
Most organized religions claim that a human being has a soul or spirit, which is a whole or can be seen as complete entity. While people are said to change by their experiences and data accumulated, the soul is seen as a non-divisible essence of a person. Usually the essence is supposed to continue its existence after clinical death. I am not going into the treacherous territory of near death experiences and the like. The topic might be of interest to some, but I really don’t give a shit. We all will eventually find out without exception. My only concern is that should the concept of reincarnation be actually valid, I don’t what to end up on this goddamn planet ever again. The scenery is somewhat nice, the food, beverage, and entertainment services are okay, but the bi-pedals horsing around this rock are, by and large, violent and stupid. I also have to respectfully disagree on a supposed human “soul” being a complete and whole entity. If human beings were complete and whole, this planet wouldn’t be such a mess. The theory of “Level-of-Participation-to-this-World” and the observations regarding multiple personalities inhabiting a single input/output matrix, a body, would somewhat explain the highly illogical, unreasonable, and irrational behavior of the species. The other valid explanation is that human beings are just, to quote Tim Minchin, “monkeys with shoes”. At the end of the day, I think that is just semantics.
