Labor in the future: humans or robots?

Posted on March 14, 2017 by PaoloDS

A fascinating question to reflect on is: who will work in the future, humans or robots?

Will robots take charge of almost all the jobs? And in this case, what else will humans do during the day, with all the free time available? Or the scenario will not change much: even if in a more robotized society, humans will continue to work most of the time anyway?

The two different scenarios correspond to the change, or the persistence, of the very concept of job that exists today, and of some structures, in particular the monetary system and the production of energy. Easy to understand that if the necessity to earn money vanishes, and if the necessity to pay the energy vanishes, more easily also the necessity to work vanishes.

I want to try to analyze the two possibilities. On the first one I can offer a personal point of view, considering that I’m living with it already: I don’t have a job and I have a lot of free time. In this case, it must be evaluated what will happen if the percentage of people that live like me, today a minority, will grow in the future. However I prefer to start from the scenario that is more familiar and therefore easy to imagine: the one in which humans will continue to work most of the time.

Humans will continue to work

It seems obvious to me that technology will keep on being developed, so inevitably the trend that has been going on for awhile now will continue: i.e. humans will continue to be gradually replaced by robots in their jobs, since the robots in most cases are more precise and efficient.

For many people that tried to predict the future, this argument meant automatically that will come the day when humanity will be freed from labor. But I’m not sure of sharing this optimism. To me instead, it seems better not to underestimate the possibility that, as human jobs will switch to robots, more and more fake jobs will be invented to keep the humans busy.

With fake jobs I mean unproductive jobs, that don’t generate concrete resources, or superfluous jobs, that generate resources in excess that later are thrown away. Actually many jobs of both types exist already now, and keep the humanity busy already now. So what I’m talking about is nothing else than a continuation of the phenomenon already in progress, that could survive and get amplified.

Today very evident examples of unproductive jobs are seen in the banking sector and in politics, while of the superflous jobs the evidence has become internet, that by now is definitely ultra-saturated, because it’s flooded every day with new contents created by armies of journalists and authors, contents that however reach an audience that is more and more microscopic. Even many of today’s schools are factories for superfluous jobs, dedicated to provide the students with a lot of knowledge that they will never use -so they’ll throw it away– in adult age.

It’s plausible that the future will present a picture in which, even if in the context of a great abundance of resources generated by robots even more advanced and efficient than the current ones, humans will continue to have very little free time, because they’ll be very busy with jobs invented… exactly with the purpose of keeping them busy.

Someone could ask: jobs invented by whom? A conspiracy theorist would probably answer “by the estabilishment”, and there’s definitely no doubt that the estabilishment gets benefits from having the majority of people busy working, with little free time. In this way there’s a more ignorant and tired mass, easy to manipulate. However I believe that in large part it’s people themselves that tend toward these useless jobs, with no much need of some “secret agenda” to push them.

To understand the reason it’s sufficient to observe how people behave when they have free time: the majority, actually, is not at all at ease with free time.

Free time is a trigger that can cause an increased level of consciousness, and a high level of consciousness often is hard to sustain: questions hard to be answered appear, a lot of uncertainties appear. It’s for this reason that often people, when they’re not working, do a systematic job to actually lower the level of consciousness: eating junk food, watching television, going shopping, drinking alcohol.

In addition to this spontanous tendency, as anticipated above, two determinant factors are money and energy. If a financial system similar to the current one persists, many humans will continue to find themselves in a situation with great abundance of resources (abundance that will probably become more extreme thanks to the robots), but they will be able to access those resources only through money, that they will try to earn by working. Similarly for energy: if it will not become abundant and easily accessible for everybody, humans will continue to work to pay for it.

Also, a whole series of new artificial needs could arise, to which many new artificial jobs would reply. Here a number of more or less distopyan scenarios can be imagined, for example a planet where despite robots will have solved the problem of producing the essential resources, humans will be absorbed anyway by a gigantic industry of entertainment, made of virtual realities and videogames, inside of which they will continue to work many hours per week.

The idea sounds rather disquieting, but actually it wouldn’t be anything else than the acutization of what happens today. In this sense we could say that the future is already now. The only difference would be that, if today the percentage real jobs vs artificial jobs is something like 30% vs 70%, in the future it could lean even more toward the artificial jobs, and become something like 5% vs 95%. Within the small percentage of real jobs that will survive in the future, probably there will only be jobs in which the “human factor” (imagination, creativity, emotions) is an advantage not challenge-able by robotic efficiency.

So as a quick recap, in this first scenario many humans would continue to work also in the future, either to escape from free time or because they would continue to believe that they have to work. This implies that they would continue to adopt the concept of job that exists now (it’s “job” if it’s compensated with money), and implies that they would continue not to realize that by working for money, in a financial system similar to the existing one, they basically play a poker game rigged to their disadvantage.

It’s the scenario I’m less attracted to, because it involves a very unaware future humanity, but it still holds some positive aspects, especially for that minority of people that will decide not to work. In fact, since everybody else will be busy with their jobs, for those who will have more free time there will be more opportunities available, less competition, less traffic, less lines, and so on.

Humans will stop working

The second possibility comes from a more radical transformation of consciousness, and I believe that it’s also the most likely scenario. In fact, I would tend to give for a fact that we will go toward this scenario in the future, if it wasn’t that the question “but then why it didn’t happen already?” makes me cautios. My impression is that a transformation will take place, but much more slowly than some people predict.

In this vision, people will abandon in mass the things that today are considered jobs. Willingly or not, unemployment will come for nearly everyone: some will abandon their jobs consciously and voluntarily, others instead will be pushed into unemployment by the robots, by profound changes in money (maybe from fiat to cryptocurrency), by entrepreneurs that will make energy abundant and accessible, by smaller and more efficient governments.

Those that will be pushed into unemployment, probably, will try more than the others to keep alive a market of fake jobs, that unlikely will disappear completely. The others however will have finally surrendered to the obviousness: in a world that is highly technological and abundant of goods and services, easily produced by the robots and accessible to everyone, the old concept of job doesn’t make sense anymore: its motivation to exist, simply, disappeared.

So all these people will find themselves in front of the same question that I faced already few years ago, when I quit my job: what do I do during the day? Until today, for many people this question would probably sound as threatening: they would associate it immediately to the question how would I avoid boredom? It’s from here, in fact, that begins the search for distractions, for activities that “keep us busy” (as many existing jobs are, at this point).

But what will happen in the future, if people will look inside this boredom, instead of trying to avoid it with entertainment? In fact, if fake jobs will have lost any credibility as option of partial time-fillers, extending the television fictions and the videogames to the whole time could feel as unsatisfactory for many people. Even traveling in the real world, an activity that many fantasize to do “if it wasn’t for the job”, if done constantly could not dissipate the feeling of a lack of purpose.

What do I do with my time? is a difficult question -even existential– since inevitably it originates other questions in chain: what do I do with my life? and so what is the meaning of life? In front of this last question a huge number of people could land in the future, a lot more than today. And from the great variety of answers that will come, the planet and the society could really be transformed in unpredictable ways.

It’s possible that, after several reflections, many people will reach a conclusion similar to the one that I reached: unless we decide to live life waiting for the manifestation of some “divinity” or “superior authority” to reveal to us a universal meaning of life, valid for the whole humanity (something that maybe, probably, will never happen) it makes sense that we assign it by ourselves, individually, a meaning to our life. The meaning we choose is exactly the meaning of life, the “right” one.

This choice will be crucial to decide if even in the future we humans will continue to do something during the day, rather than becoming an almost completely inactive species, fed by robots. Those who will take the time to decide how to use their life, will have the motivation to act.

But at this point, these actions will be part of a totally new concept of labor, profoundly different from the previous, just because the motivation that generates it will be profoundly different. The motivation will not be anymore obtaining the “old” goods and services, at this point redundant and not really interesting, but it will be an impulse coming mostly from the inside, and not anymore from the outside.

To such a substantial change in the motivation that will generate labor, probably a substantial change in the fields toward which labor will be addressed will follow. Hard to imagine, in fact, that in a scenario where labor will be highly optional and humans will decide to work following a process of introspection, the efforts will be employed to produce souvenirs or irrelevant education. Possibly those that will get a strong momentum will be new fields like genetic experimentation, space exploration, and in particular the research on how the mind works.

So, the one I’m describing here is a scenario in which humans would stop working -but for what is the old concept of work-. However many of them could stay active by adopting a new philosophy, and according to it they could more often start to feel to want to “work”.

My journey

I’ve been lucky enough to reach the question what do I do with my time? well prepared. Unemployment is something that I searched for and that I wanted strongly. The reason for my determination came in fact from having taken the time to decide what was the meaning of life, for what I wanted to use mine.

The answer that I found, that went through refinement with time anyway and that is still being refined, is that the meaning of life is love: the love that we give and the love that we receive. Secondly, the meaning of life consists also in exploring and understading better the universe, enjoying the beautiful things that exist, and producing new beautiful things.

This type of vision had effects in many areas of my life, and obviously also on my practical concept of job. The concept I had before became obsolete and not proposable anymore. Working has become adding something beautiful to the world, and having high quality. To me favoring quality over quantity seems necessary at this point, considering the degree of saturation reached by the human production in many many areas, both of material and immaterial products.

I find that for me it works well, to keep this general principle in mind: in fact whatever is the specific project I decide to work on (be it writing an article, producing a documentary, building a house…), it always reminds me why I’m doing it and how to do it. This doesn’t imply certainty of good results, but I find that it motivates me to act. It’s a principle that created and creates with ease activities to insert in my time, when I feel that I want to “work”. To be honest it’s difficult at this point to label it as working time or free time, as the boundary between the two has inevitably become very blurry.

Picking up a paper in the street is work? Taking care of the garden is work? Even when people ask me what is your job? I’m not really sure what to answer, even if lately I solve the doubt by using the quick and elegant answer “entrepreneur”.

About how much to work, in these latest years I felt like working on my projects just few hours per day, a small amount of time that anyway made me obtain several results that seem good to me. The reason why I didn’t work more are essentially two: the first one is that, actually, I don’t want to miss all the beautiful things “out there” in the universe (there are so many) working most of the time.

The second reason comes from one of my biggest internal conflicts, explained well by the famous allegory of the cave by Plato. In short, I have the impression that some of the most valuable things I have to give to the world (e.g. the useful information I found) often are not of any interest for the world, so spending many hours working on them maybe doesn’t make sense. At the same time, I’m not sure I want to work a lot on something for which there is more interest, but that I don’t “feel” is my strength. This is a doubt I haven’t solved yet, but anyway I believe that it belongs to many other people, so I don’t feel lonely in the conflict 🙂

Actually, I believe that is right through this type of internal “journeys” (introspection, as I wrote above) that the redefinition of labor could pass in the future. If jobs will survive taking a new form, abandoning the current one -often grotesque- of fake jobs, such form could be influenced by processes like the one of disidentification by humans with their job role. So here we’re talking of “reviewing” the relationship with the ego, a relationship not easy… at all.

Notes: While fascinating, this topic is to say the least theoretical and philosophical. The article could have some contradictions, however I believe that it contains several useful points.

Thoughts

Posted on July 19, 2016 by PaoloDS

I find that vicarious is a very interesting word, especially because it describes the behavior of a huge number of people.

Living life vicariously means living it not in person, directly, but in a participatory way: through someone else. To the life experiences of this “someone else” the vicarious participates by staying few steps behind -at safety distance- but still close enough to be able to observe his adventures.

A very widespread example are the parents who live life vicariously through their children. It’s very easy to identify them on the social networks because often as profile picture they use -instead of a picture of themselves- a picture of themselves with their children, or worse, of their children only. They don’t see themselves as separate entities anymore: they identify completely with the children. If in a conversation you ask them “how are you doing” or “is there anything new”, they rapidly switch to telling you how their children are doing, or what their children are doing. The joys, the worries, the more meaningful experiences of life are about the children, from whom all the satisfactions and the unsatisfactions are derived.

This behavior of transferring every project on the children as soon as they are born, and at the same time ceasing to try to realize any own project, is so widespread that it’s almost considered “normal”. But unfortunately this concept of parenting, as parasitizing the life of children, is the perfect recipe for unhappiness: both of the children and of the parents.

A second example of vicarious behavior which is extremely relevant are those who watch a lot of movies and tv series. Creating interesting situations in real life often requires a certain amount of work, so they prefer to feel the excitement of a treasure hunt from the comfort of a movie theater, or participate to the flirt between two attractive actors from the sofa at home, maybe without having to care too much about staying in shape.

The approach and the motivation are exactly the same of the previous case: the vicarious parents send the children ahead so then they can be spectators, in this case the actors are sent ahead and of these, even more properly, people become spectators.

It took me awhile to have clear why many people who are into personal development -both the “gurus” and the “practitioners”- don not convince me, and this despite the ideas that they discuss often are actually very valuable.

The reason is that in my view they focus too much on the methods, for example “how to stay in shape” or “how to generate passive income”, so much that they lose sight that these methods are only useful to create the means to reach a goal, but they’re not the goal themselves.

While many enthusiasts of personal development focus for ever on how to stay in shape, how to reach financial freedom, how to develop creativity, there are people that already apply in “autopilot” the methods for staying in shape, having financial freedom, developing creativity, without talking too much about it or almost without even remembering that they do, but then they also take the next step: they use the staying in shape, the financial freedom and the creativity to produce things in the job they do.

For example, browsing the Wikipedia page of many successful people, actors, athletes, musicians, entrepreneurs, often there is some recurrent information that comes out: they pay a lot of attention to the diet, they exercise regularly, they do yoga or meditation, they don’t spend 40 hours in an office for a salary but instead, even if they work in particular sectors (for example the actors), often they have entrepreneurial activities “beside”, and so on.

And yet in the interviews they rarely waste too much time discussing these practices, for them they only represent necessary routines, that they do to put themselves in the conditions to do a good job -in whatever sector they work-.

This to say that even if I appreciate a lot the attitude and the ideas of many people in the sector of personal development, more and more often I tend to take as reference not them, but directly those successful people who already channel the results of their personal development work in the job. So, not the guru who is expert of staying in shape, as much as the athlete who uses his shape in the sport. Not the guru who “talks” about creativity, as much as the director who puts the creativity in his movies. And so on.

I noticed that for many adult people learning insistently new things, without a precise project, represents an escape from doing.

I realized it for the first time at the end of the university, noticing among the other students -who like me just got their degree- the tendency to insist, of wanting to study more. PHD, MBA, various specialization courses. Some were even starting all over again, to take a second university degree. It seemed to me that only few of those guys were doing that following a precise strategy, to become academic teachers. The others simply seemed to want to maintain the status of “students” as long as possible, to delay the moment of doing.

Many years have passed, but I still see this tendency of wanting to stay “students” among many adults: same age as me (35), but even adults well over 40 and 50.

A very common case that I notice today, for example, is learning a foreign language. Several friends and acquaintances come to my mind who, in this period, are learning languages like french, spanish, chinese, german. Almost none of them has a concrete project related to that: “I study french because I want to export products in France”, but has the vague motivation “it’s a good additional knowledge” and “you never know it could be useful someday”.

This phylosophy doesn’t make any sense to me -since to study you spend resources (time and effort) why spending them on something that probably will never have practical effects on life?- but even more importantly it seems suspicious: I think that often people use the learning insistently new things, when adult, as an excuse to tell themselves that they’re making progress in life… while they’re actually stuck at the same place. Learning is an easy escape, because it’s an activity that has good reputation in the society, and it’s generally seen as important and commendable.

I think that there comes a moment in life, when we become adult, when it’s time to “reverse the flow”: to stop to focus on absorbing constantly new notions, decide what we want to do in life, and do it.

Doing it often means very different things that just having fun learning notions. It means to put in practice what we already know. It means finding the courage to leave the job we hate to start doing the other job we know is the right one. For a writer it can mean the discipline of staying every day at the computer writing for some hours, without being distracted by social networks. For an athlete it can mean the discipline of training in the gym every day, and repeat every day the choice of giving up the processed food in favor of the healthy food.

In fact maybe these are the only two things, that we should really learn when adult: courage and discipline.

It took me a long time to understand what meditation consist of, but finally I think I got it.

Actually I think that on this topic there is a lot of confusion, so many people “think” that they’re meditating, while they’re actually doing something else. After having made several unsuccessful attempts in the past myself, today I think I’ve understood enough to be able to provide my interpretation.

Meditating means being here and now, a concept that is rather famous today. The problem with the here and now is that it’s a damn difficult status to sustain. I used to see it in my attempts of meditation in the past. I used to free my mind from useless thoughts and finally I would start to absorb the reality around: the green of the plants, the buzz of the insect flying behind me, the noise of a distant car. But time few seconds and I was lost in thoughts again: what do I eat later for dinner? …tomorrow I have to write to the accountant… And so on.

Each time, when I returned to here and now realizing that I just got lost in my thoughts, I would take it as a defeat, and I would give up for the frustration. Until I realized that, instead, this is exactly the practical mechanism of meditation.

Getting lost in thoughts is inevitable for an untrained mind. And the mind is always at work projecting useless thoughts: ruminations of past events, anticipations of future events, putting labels to everything we see.

But the real game is, once we get lost in these thoughts, to awaken and return here and now. Get lost and return here and now. Get lost and return here and now. Get lost and return here and now. Many times, in a similar way to when we train our muscles at the gym. I heard the journalist Dan Harris make this comparison, and it seemed very appropriate to me.

At the gym we train the muscles, by doing several repetitions lifting weights. In meditation we train the mind, returning several times here and now after we get lost in thoughts. Today I see meditation this way, and this is how I practice it, with the same spirit I adopt when I go to the gym.

Again about the mind, some time ago I was discussing “spiritual” topics with a friend, and I asked him the following question: what do you think is the difference between consciousness and mind?

Even if in that period I was starting to be rather familiar with the two concepts, I had the tendency to confuse them, that’s why I asked his opinion. His answer was simple: he said that in his view the mind is a creation of consciousness. I reflected on these words several times later, and yes, now it seems obvious to me that this is exactly the difference.

So according to this view, consciousness is a “greater” concept and the mind a “smaller” concept. Consciousness created the mind as a tool and gave it us to use it, similarly to the physical body, but with the difference that the mind is impalpable.

Even if for many this revelation may be a banality, I think that for me it’s been very useful to see this triangular structure: cosciousness above, body and mind below as tools to be used.

It’s very useful especially in relation with the mind, since I’ve often forgot its presence in the past (and I still forget): for the fact that it’s impalpable, for the type of education I received, and for the type of society I live in.

Remembering that the mind is there made me want to study it and search for information about it, and this helped me reach interesting concepts, for example the idea that not only an individual mind exists, but also a collective mind. On a more practical level instead it made me want to train it, from here the interest in meditation.

Needless to say, after a certain amount of training, today my mind is still a mess (I suspect that it’s a mess for many people however), but I am confident that it will also get some abs sooner or later.

Notes: The book to read to understand the concept of here and now is The power of now by Eckhart Tolle. This article was originally published on July 7, 2016 in italian, this is its translation in english.

Dreams and riddles

Posted on February 29, 2016 by PaoloDS

Maybe you are already familiar with lucid dreams. It’s those dreams in which maybe you’re busy running away from a monster who is chasing you, or you are flying over a city, or maybe you’re simply traveling in the car with the family, but at a certain point you become aware that the situation is not real. Suddenly, a detail seems exaggerated to you, out of place, and that’s the trigger: you acquire lucidity and understand that you are inside a dream, instead of inside real life.

At this point two things can happen: the first is that you wake up immediately. And this is definitely the one that happens more frequently. In the moment you acquire lucidity the scenario crumbles and you leave the dream, returning to this world.

The second thing that can happen is that you don’t wake up, at least not immediately. Not waking up once you acquire lucidity is extremely difficult, but there is a huge prize for those who succeed: the possibility of exploring and especially manipulating the dream.

The nice thing about not waking up

I find it highly desirable not to wake up as soon as I acquire lucidity inside my dreams, and I definitely don’t think I’m the only one. In the world there is a number of people dedicated to oneironautics, who try to have lucid dreams more or less regularly, traveling inside of them and manipulating them at their will.

It’s not difficult to understand the motivation for this desire: inside a lucid dream you can make everything happen according to your will, really everything: from floating in the space, to chatting with a pharaoh of ancient Egypt, to casting lightnings from the hands. The limits of this world disappear, and yet at the same moment you “feel” things in an extremely vivid way: just like if they were real, even if you are aware that they’re not, since you are in a state of lucidity.

If as lucid you have flown in the sky, not constrained anymore by gravity that anchors you to the ground, or if you strolled freely under the seas, not forced anymore to have to breathe air, then you know well how wonderful the sensations that are felt are. And this is why probably you are enjoying it so much that the last thing you want to do is to wake up.

As for me, when I become lucid inside of a dream of mine I almost always rush to modify it and create a situation to have sex, which says a lot about how “highly spiritual” my deepest desires are. But when it happens, I always do it with some anxiety: I know that I could wake up in any second and lose all the fun.

I always tell myself: “keep calm, don’t agitate, don’t wake up”, but at the end I wake up typically within very few seconds, rather disappointed. The longest of my explorations/manipulations of dreams lasted maybe 10 or 15 seconds.

Having lucid dreams is difficult

The dimension of lucid dreams is extremely fascinating to explore, but still the problem of staying inside of them for more than just few seconds is already a successive problem. The main problem is having lucid dreams, in the first place. In fact usually only a minimal percentage of the dreams we have are lucid dreams.

In my case, I have good memories of the percentage of my dreams in which I acquired lucidity. For example, I remember clearly a dream I had some time ago in which I was running away chased by a monster, very scared, and there at a certain point I stopped thinking “ehi what the heck do I worry about? This monster can’t exist, this is clearly just a dream.”, so I relaxed and woke up, shortly after.

Unfortunately I rarely have this type of realization. Most of the times, inside my dreams, I’m so busy interacting with absurd characters or participating to the craziest adventures, that I really don’t notice that “something is wrong”. And when at the end of the sleep I wake up back in my bed, I am almost upset with myself: how couldn’t I notice that the situation was not credible!

What if dreams are meant to test us?

Many people, included me, wondered often why we dream.

It’s fascinating to think that dreams are a test that is given to us each night, that we pass only by realizing that we are dreaming, therefore entering in a different state of consciousness in which we have access to huge powers. And it’s fascinating to think that someone, or something, projects each night an illusion in our mind, leaving as clues some details out of place, and that it’s our task to notice those details to realize that we are being fooled.

It’s fascinating to think that dreams are not meant to make us sleep, but to make us wake up. But not necessarily wake up to return immediately to this world, but to wake up inside the dreams themselves, so that we can learn to use the power of creation that we have.

In fact, a possibility is that normal dreams, the non lucid ones, for us human beings are nothing else but the anteroom to a “training” field, the one of lucid dreams, in which we can practice our ability to create scenarios, people, creatures, situations according to our will.

Sounds familiar?

If you know what today is known as the law of attraction, maybe the parallel already came to your mind at this point. The law of attraction is the principle according to which we human beings create the reality that surrounds us with our thoughts. The world we have around is nothing else but the reflection of our inner world, and the job we have, the people we meet, the situations we encounter daily, they’re consequence of the thoughts that occupy our mind.

The law of attraction is very very popular, and today it has a huge number of fans, even if I have the impression that few people get results.

The reson in my opinion is that even if many say they believe it with words, almost trying to convince themselves, the truth is that deeply inside of them they don’t. And this is partially valid also for me: I believe in the law of attraction probably much more that the average of people, but still I am aware that I don’t believe it 100%, not yet at least.

For example, I believe to be strongly responsible for which people are present in my social life, and I believe that I have a huge decisional power on the amount of money I earn, and in general I believe that my life is in many ways wonderful exactly because I decided that I wanted it this way. But I still don’t believe that I can make matter apper with my thoughts. I could say that I believe it with words, and in a certain way I feel that “I’d better” believe it, but it would not correspond to what I feel inside. That are still some constraints in this world that seem to me still totally out of my control.

And yet I know well that inside my lucid dreams instead I can do everything, included materializing people and objects, and in fact I do it (having a lot of fun). So who knows, could lucid dreams actually be a demonstration? A demonstration that it’s possible to do practically everything, and that suggests the idea that we can follow a similar process also in this world, using the law of attraction.

What if also this world is meant to test us?

To the idea that two levels exist, the internal one of the dreams that we can successfully manipulate by becoming lucid, and the external one of this world that we can successfully manipulate by using our beliefs, naturally follows the idea to extend the structure and think that n levels could exist: others more internal to the one of dreams, and others more external to the one of this world.

That levels internal to the level of dreams exist, we actually already know this: they’re embedded dreams, those we experience when we wake up from a dream and we find ourselves still inside a dream. So we were dreaming of dreaming. Also of these, technically called false awakenings, I had experience. And this is also the theme around which the movie Inception is developed, which is based on a very original idea, even if in my opinion it has been realized in a very confusional way.

That levels external to the level of this world exist, instead, we don’t know it well. And yet the idea that this world could also be a dream, a sort of illusion, has already been suggested by many authors in many ways. The first ones that come to my mind: the book The little prince (what is essential is invisible to the eye), the books of Peter Kingsley (what isn’t there, in front of our eyes, is usually more real than what is), the movie The matrix (in which what many know are “reality” is instead a projection created by machines), the movie The Truman show (in which what the main character knows as “reality” is instead a projection created by other people).

If the idea with which these and many other works flirt is true, and therefore this world that we’re used to consider absolutely “real” instead is also just a sort of dream, the consequence is that the life we live inside of it can be seen in every aspect as a test, an enigma to solve, a riddle. And the first step to get to the solution is to see the illusion: to acquire lucidity here too.

Life as a riddle

Naturally, of the fact that life represents a giant riddle and that therefore our task is to solve it, this riddle, there is no evidence. And there is no evidence that this world that we perceive with our senses is only partial, and that there are external levels. It’s a fascinating speculation.

Choosing to believe that in life there is nothing to become aware of, or choosing to believe that in life there is something to become aware of: this is an absolutely personal decision, that all of us take more or less consciously, based exclusively on our intuition. No one will be able to give us a guarantee that we made the right or the wrong choice.

However take into account that this choice has an enormous impact on the life that we end up living. Because in the first case it will be a series of events, people, images, that follow one the other without any particular reason, until we die. In the second case we are collecting clues. When events or people enter our life, we tend to wonder if they entered it to make us realize something. Are they there to make us understand that we’re letting ourselves be distracted by illusions? Are they there because we materialized them?

When we decide that in life there is something to discover (that we can wake up, that we can strongly manipulate the external world) we change a lot. Antennas grow inside of ourselves and they make us more able to notice coincidences, the so called synchronicities, the deja vus. And we tend to question things more, without accepting as fact that reality “is reality” and that’s it.

My personal riddle

I tend to choose the second approach: I believe that I am alive because I have something to learn, something to do. And I feel that there’s something to understand in all this story, even if it’s not necessarily clear what thing.

The reason for this choice is simple: it’s my intuition that tells me so, and in addition it’s also the more exciting option.

Since no one can estabilish with certainty if it’s true or not that life is a sort of dream, in which we actually have to wake up from something, I decide that it is so. It seems to me that this is the decision that makes more sense since it fills life with a special magic, a magic that I’ve been lucky to experience several times already.

I woke up from a series of illusions that kept me distracted for years in the past, for example the importance of money, and this was the starting point from which magical things really started to appear -or multiply-. The sunsets of indescribable beauty, the travel adventures and the explorations in hidden places, all for me, the people who made me feel understood and loved, completely new scenarios and atmospheres, they entered my life only after I became lucid, after I freed myself from some ridiculous illusions inside of which I was moving and agitating before, unconscious.

I think I woke up from a certain number of illusions, and in some ways I think I’m living in this world in a state of lucidity, but probably this is a partial awakening. Probably there are still many other illusions that keep me distracted and asleep, but I still can’t see those. Who knows what they are and how many they are.

In fact, I wonder to what degree it is possible to wake up in this world. Is it possible to notice enough clues to reach a sort of full awakening? Is it possible to acquire such a level of lucidity to be able to effectively apply the law of attraction, and manipulate 100% matter and events?

It’s fascinating to wonder if someone ever succeeded at it in the course of history, and if yes how many. And what happened to them after? They are still in this level, busy modeling the universe, or they woke up in a successive level, busy with another bigger dream?

Who knows how many dreams there are in total in the onion structure? Who knows how many riddles there are to solve?

Notes: I wrote that in my lucid dreams “I can do everything”, and it’s true, but I want to add that often I experience a sort of inertia in manipulating my dreams. When I become lucid, if for example I try to materialize people, these usually don’t appear immediately well defined, but their shapes form slowly, with some labor, and in the effort of clarifying their looks often I wake up. I wonder if it depends on my little practice.

Important things I learned

Posted on June 26, 2015 by PaoloDS

These are some of the most important things that (I think) I learned, or that I am in the process of learning, in these last years of my life.

Spirituality

● The enormous power of the words thank you.

● The concept of consciousness. That there are different levels of consciousness at which people can live. That also music, movies, art, objects have their level of consciousness.

● It’s not consciousness that is created by matter, but exactly the opposite: matter is created by consciousness.

● Atheism has a fixed point of view, rather sterile. After graduating from the religious non-sense, a further graduation from atheism is possible, and necessary, to progress in the path of spiritual evolution.

● Chronic skepticism is a very counterproductive attitude. I used to be a chronic skeptic before, not believing “in anything”. These days I prefer to keep chronic skeptics at distance.

● I learned some great lessons from Eckhart Tolle’s books, in particular these three:

what being present means, the idea of being here and now. And I realized that only a fraction of the thoughts that flow in my mind are useful. The rest are useless, repetitive, distracting noise.
what the ego is. I realized that I do have an ego, and a terribly difficult one to tame.
the mechanism of drama that drives many human relationships. Most people tend to create unnecessary and avoidable drama, to feed a little “beast” they have inside, a beast that feeds on negative emotions.

Of these three concepts, I think I understand well the theory behind the first two, but I still suck at turning the theory into practice. There are still more unobserved thoughts and more pretense in me than I would like to have. With drama, instead, I think I do well both with theory and practice. I’ve never been a big drama queen.

● The best rule to apply with people who are trying to start drama is: do not engage. Let them scream, gesticulate, cry, while staying absolutely calm, composed, in silence, just replying things like “yes, you’re right”, until they turn off.

● Life is about finding balance in the middle of two types of awareness:

that we, human beings, have an enormous power and control over our lives, and we are able to realize wonderful, huge, sensational things.
that there are things in our lives that we don’t control at all, and those things could destroy everything we built, in any moment.

The trick is to recognize that both are true, but then decide to have faith, and work hard to realize the wonderful things.

● Healing doesn’t correspond to feeling relaxed and comfortable all the time. Healing, usually, happens through pain and struggle.

● The law of attraction makes great sense, however it seems like many people don’t get the part ~~attr~~action of it. After believing that something will happen, it is necessary to work -usually hard- to make it happen.

● Every person can be a hero. Even if most people today consider courage as a trait reserved for movie characters only, everyone can cultivate courage and apply it to real life, this life.

● Life tries to “talk” to us constantly, and tries to teach us lessons all of the time. The people we meet, the events that happen around us, they usually carry a message for us. We must stay receptive, like an antenna, to get the message.

● Dreams deserve much more attention than they’re commonly given: “normal” dreams that we have during sleep, lucid dreams in which we can manipulate the environment -they are a lot of fun-, and also daydreams. It is true that, as I read somewhere, dreams are not meant to make us sleep, but to make us wake up.

● Jesus Christ, probably, never existed as an historical figure. He is a fictional character that was invented by the ancient Romans, as a tool of propaganda to dominate the Jews of their times. I heard about this theory in the documentary “Caesar’s Messiah”, and I consider it not only very credible, but also a super huge revelation!

Love

● Love is much bigger than just romantic love, the “couple relationship” type of love that is extensively depicted in movies and books. That is just a part, but there’s also the love for friends, family, strangers, animals, plants, art, work, life.

● Jealousy doesn’t make sense. It’s basically a consequence of mistakenly assuming that the couple relationship type of love is all the love there is.

● If there is a meaning of life, it is love. At the end of the story, what really matters is the love we gave, and the love we received.

Myself

● The most important and difficult challenge in my life is learning to manage my emotions. I am aware now that if I want to succeed at achieving my biggest goals, this is a necessary skill to master. I have no other way.

● I won’t make meaningful progress in life by learning a lot of new notions. I will make it, instead, by learning some specific notions, and by cultivating virtues like courage, honesty and discipline.

● Practicing introspection, to discover what’s inside myself, is very difficult and painful. It’s also the most exciting adventure. And it’s sort of weird: I research, I study, I make efforts, all this without even knowing what it is that I am searching for. But I have a strong feeling that I have to continue digging.

● The inputs that I feed myself with (movies, books, music) impact directly the way I think, and the way I feel. As obvious as it seems now, I wasn’t aware about this connection some years ago. These days, I consciously avoid watching horror movies, or reading books about killers and psychopaths, for example. I prefer to feed my mind with happy topics.

● There are so many things that I don’t know. But the more new things I discover, the more grows in me a sense that there are others to discover…

People

● Having original thoughts is extremely rare. Most thoughts that circulate in people’s minds are someone else’s thoughts.

● A lot of people, when they talk, simply regurgitate what they have been taught as kids. They do this over and over, their entire life, without ever applying some critical thinking to decide if those teachings made sense or not.

● Just because someone speaks louder, or has a microphone in his hands, doesn’t mean that he deserves more attention.

● There’s a huge difference between education and wisdom. Many of the people I know are fairly well educated, but very few of them are wise.

● The world is full of corruption, hate, dishonesty, and still in the middle of this mess there are some people with super beautiful souls. They are so precious that they are worth the quest.

● It’s a great skill to be able to talk, and act, without being driven by emotions. And it’s important to recognize when other people, especially those who are close, like family and friends, give advice that is dictated by their fears and insecurities, so to discard it.

● Many people never change. As much as they’re exposed to clear, useful information that they could use to solve their problems, they will ignore that information and keep on struggling with the same problems, over and over, for their entire life. It’s better not to lose time insisting in helping them, but to focus instead on those who are ready to accept solutions.

● The best way to deal with depressed people is to stay away from them. Happiness is a choice, and most depressed people simply choose to be unhappy.

● There are things that the masses do, but no matter how many people do them: they still make absolutely no sense, so there’s no need to join them. Two great examples in this category are:

turning to politics to have the problems of the society fixed.
working at jobs where time is traded for money.

Money

● Money is an exciting topic, and not boring as I used to think. Money is very useful to understand people’s emotions, especially fear.

● Money is ultimately just a mental construct.

● Money favors those who produce and control it (banks and governments) and enslave those who have to use it (citizens).

● Having a regular job is not the only honest way to earn money, passive income systems are another option, and a much smarter one under many points of view.

● Economy and finance are two very different things. Economy is more about people, how they behave in the market to meet their desires. It’s a much more concrete, useful topic to study. Finance instead is about paper money, banks, graphs, titles: these things are part of a circus that adds no value to the life of people.

● Making the transition from employee to entrepreneur requires a huge shift in the mindset. An entrepreneur needs very different skills: for example it’s necessary to understand more the psychology of people.

● Understanding the law of supply and demand is super useful, and not just for an entrepreneur who runs a business, but for everybody, because it applies to many situations in daily life.

● You can’t do the right things, if you’re in the wrong place. For example, even if you work hard, diligently and efficiently, but you’re providing your labor to institutions that produce zero (or negative) value for the society -like banking corporations or cigarette producers- then you’re illuding yourself that you’re “doing a good job”.

● I think I understand money enough, now, to be able to become very wealthy if I want, in a honest way, and without even working too much. However, I haven’t decided yet if this is really what I want. Lots of money would allow me to develop some beautiful projects on a big scale (like building hospitals, schools, educational media), but on the other hand, it would inevitably attract the attention of the government. And I’m not sure I want to spend my time dealing with such a gigantic and predatory structure. I need to reflect more about this.

● One of the craziest things of the modern world is that most people spend an entire life working for money, without even understanding what the working is for. They never take some time to learn how money is produced, by who, how it works.

● Few things will put you in an uncommon position as becoming financially free. While everyone around talks, acts and moves driven by the desire of making money, you’re part of a very tiny minority that focuses on other topics.

Health

● Having a healthy diet requires essentially two things:

developing a knowledge about nutrition (in particular understanding the concept of density of nutrients of foods).
discipline.

● Products based on refined flour (like pasta and bread) are almost as unhealthy as white sugar. It doens’t make sense, as I was doing until some years ago, to avoid sugar as a fundamentalist, but then splurge on pasta and bread everyday.

● If there is one food that I always have to stay alert not to eat, it’s burnt food. The black spots under the pizza, toasted bread, and grilled meat are loaded with a disastrous amount of toxins.

● Most of the honey sold in the stores is as bad as white sugar, because it’s pastorized, heated at high temperature, that’s what makes it as transparent and fluid as syrup. Raw honey is the way to go.

● Dairy products with reduced amounts of fat, or completely fat-free, are actually less healthy than their whole counterparts. The fat in milk, yogurt and cheese is useful to digest fat-soluble vitamins. So it’s better to eat these foods whole.

● Diet impacts the overall health, and also the body figure, more than exercise does.

● Exercise is useful, but too much of it can stress the body and worn it out. I used to go to the gym 3/4 times per week, these days I prefer to go a couple times and pay more attention to the way I eat, instead.

● Despite being super popular, jogging is actually not so healthy. When a person jogs, tissues and organs of the body jump up and down, up and down, up and down, and that’s quite stressing, and pro-aging, for the organism. It’s much healthier in the long run to prefer activities like moderate weight lifting, yoga, gymnastics.

Notes: I expect that these insights will be valid for many years to come, so I wrote this post as a reminder for myself, with some useful indications to follow in the future. It will also be interesting to see if I’ll change my mind about some of them, and if I will feel like adding more.

10 Quotes about spirituality that are meaningful to me

Posted on November 5, 2014 by PaoloDS

These are 10 of my favorite definitions and ideas of spirituality. I like these quotes very much.Real spirituality is the greatest rebellion there is. It is risky, it is adventurous, it is dangerous. -Osho-

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who have already been there. -Vine Deloria-

Simplify your life. You don’t grow spiritual, you shrink spiritual. -Steve Maraboli-

Simplistic as it may seen, I feel that the underlying foundation of spiritual development is diet. -Loren Howe-The more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. -Eckhart Tolle-

There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty, it is not only a poverty of loneliness, but also of spirituality. -Mother Teresa-

Spirituality is what makes a man do the right thing when no one is looking. To know some is watching you when no one else is watching you, I think is an important thing to have. -Jon Jones-

The spiritual life does not remove us from the world, but leads us deeper into it. -Henry Nouwen–

Science is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound source of spirituality. -Carl Sagan-

Spiritual development is hard. Let’s drink spirit and see if it helps… -Me, in a moment of absolute sobriety-

PAOLO ds

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