Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
masturbate. Your travelling companions’ logics, which once seemed so grounded and common-sense may seem to slip, and you begin to step in to the pavilion of mirrors, and are seduced in to its pleasures and tribulations. You run the risk of what may be termed existential shock.17
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Whereas technological shock levels measure comfort with changes in your concept of the world, existential shock levels measure comfort with changes in your experience of what you are.
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ESL0: The same as technological SL0. The legendary average person is comfortable with their self concept, identifying with the group into which they were born and with their own personal past. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians. ESL1: Global perspective, not attached to a nationalistic/racial/religious identity. You don't wave the home team's flag because you realize you could have been born anywhere. Most progressive thinkers, singulatarians, transhumanists. ESL2: Lifestyle based on freedom from emotional/body boundary issues. Unrestricted gender identity (bisexual), identity not bound to one partner (open non-jealous relationships), comfortable with public nudity. Liberation counter-culture. ESL3: Self aware as a meme machine, not as one of the memes. Most ‘social’izing seen as ritual in a "church of the personality." One's own personal identity seen as an encountered program. Genuine critical thinkers, practicing contemplatives, people comfortable with deep existential uncertainty.
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Darling, Yes, Step into the Pavilion of Mirrors
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ESL4: Unrestricted awareness, unbound exploring of mind spaces, totally debugged of the personality program. Lifestyle fully reworked to favor ongoing flexible mind hacking. Open awareness practitioners and not much else.
Existential shock levels 0, 1 and 2 are fairly self-explanatory. ESL3 introduces a shift in moment-to-moment sense of identity. For example, someone @ ESL3 knows that @ this moment a stored memory of meeting a friend yesterday is accessed, but it doesn't feel like "I am the one who was there." The idea that "I" am a continuous being who "went through" all of those experiences is one of the many disregarded confusions. And the lifestyle of someone @ ESL3 reflects this understanding. They have little interest in personal mementos, reminiscing about "my story," egotistically pumping up that story, arranging for future emotional experiences, etc. Many people @ ESL1 and ESL2 proudly claim that they are finished with irrational religious belief. Yet from ESL3, it is clear that they still believe in the reality of the personality identity as intensely as others believe in the reality of a mythical god, and that their lives are steeped in daily rituals with others which serve to maintain this irrational belief - such as romantic fantasy, activities to escape boredom or loneliness and hope hyping. At ESL4, someone not only disidentifies with the flood of personality programs but their mind freely explores the thousands of other programs that the mind can run that have nothing to do with personality reinforcement. The ability to fully explore all the possibilities of the mind is only active when no "hook" is left open for re-invoking a personality program that needs to assert one of its self-protecting identity claims. Someone @ ESL4 has put a great deal of work into gracefully extricating themselves from situations, relationships, and institutions which require them to propagate these memes. A side effect is that they tend to help create a parallel civilization that is friendly to freely exploring all the possibilities of the mind, knowing that people @ lower existential shock levels who
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