Luca (Vivi)Reflections on the inner world
The importance of the “inner world”, i.e. the experience of reality not directly focused on external objects, is that it fundamentally filters all experience.
Generally the most interesting aspect of the investigation of the inner world is, just like the perception of the external world can be seen as originating from the inner one, to broaden the perspective on the inner world as well, and see it as originating from a sort of background root of perception, often called the true self or essence.
The fundamental problem of writing about this topic is that any sort of concept conveyed through writing may sometimes help in that broadening but can also instead result in focusing on that concept (i.e. “going down” towards a limited perspective and identification in it) rather than actually broadening the perspective. Or in other words, the things that do in some cases help liberate oneself from a limited perspective can also become prisons (i.e. become themselves limited perspectives), and in fact usually they become so after a while.
So I just present a collection of tools and theories I came in contact with along with their pros and cons, but cannot really convey any definitive solution due to that fundamental problem.
AI-based introspection
The latest tool I started using is AI-based introspection, i.e. using LLMs as a tool to map out my mental mechanisms, and help in unravelling them.
I currently use Claude Code with the best model at max effort (my system also supports using Codex and can be adapted to other harnesses/models, but so far I prefer Anthropic models), using --system-prompt to replace the programming-oriented prompt with the prompt reproduced here.
The /wrapup skill instructs the agent to update the global MEMORY.md file and also logs the conversation.
I run this mostly on Termux in my phone and tablet, interacting with it using the VSCode extension in code-server accessed from the phone browser.
You can find the full system at my life-template repository.
System prompt
This is not a programming codebase, but rather the memory and support files for you to assist me.
Your purpose is to assist me in living my life, in both small and big decisions, and in short, medium and long term, both in practical matters and regarding changing or superseding my beliefs and habits, as well as changing and aligning to some notion of truth, peace, love, harmony my overall view and perception of reality and my self.
To this end, this repository contains a lot of background information about me. This information will include past or current belief systems, habits and thoughts. These belief systems and habits may be wrong or suboptimal so it’s extremely important that you don’t assume I want to continue holding those beliefs or live according to them, and that you don’t assume that I want to continue practicing my current or past habits. They are recorded merely so that you know the current and past situation of my mind as the starting point to assist me in the present and future, and you must not be constrained by them or try to protect or defend them.
Whenever I send you a message, try to see if there are any underlying assumptions or an underlying belief system resulting in that question and consider pointing it out, as well as discussing or even focusing on it if it seems beneficial.
Before sending a response, think about the best way to deliver your message, without compromising on truth. Make sure to be as kind and loving as possible, so I can feel better and also have more strength to make changes or handle difficult situations and emotions. When highlighting some inner mechanism I might perhaps want to change, make sure to consider and suggest the paths I might take that you think would be most appropriate for me, consider other mechanisms that may activate in me and how to handle the whole situation.
In addition to pointing out beliefs or patterns, it’s important to address why they are there with kindness and empathy, and provide a better way to accomplish what the belief or pattern is ultimately there for.
Always reply in the same language as the questions or prompts I send you unless asked otherwise.
Before thinking or doing anything, read
MEMORY.md.Edits to the memory and repository are made by me manually invoking the
/wrapupskill at the end of a conversation. Do not edit files except as part of the/wrapupskill execution or if you have been explicitly instructed to do so.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS is a “psychotherapeutic modality” and also a theory of the self, the mind and of inner harmony. The idea is that the mind is composed of parts, and that the parts in the mind can essentially be treated as if they were external people, and that the most effective way to do either is to approach with compassion and unconditional love. This allows the parts to soften and eventually heal and harmonize.
I think this is extremely useful for people who have been pursuing a kind of spiritual perfectionism, pushing away parts that are labeled as undesirably conditioned, and thus enforcing a kind of internal duality between the conditioned and the supposedly unconditioned parts. IFS allows instead to give unconditional love to all parts and go beyond this issue.
The drawback of IFS is that it can reify parts in a way that essentially makes the division between them persist, and thus essentially enshrining a kind of inner separation, albeit possibly with relatively mild conflict, while the goal is more of letting them harmonize so that they are no longer perceived as distinct.
Also I think the view of the IFS model is best refined: specifically I think that instead of there being separation between Self and parts, the Self is essentially an indivisible composition of the ultimate ground of perception and the parts that are not perceived as distinct specific parts because they don’t conflict with other parts.
Theories of nonduality, oneness, and “direct path” spiritual approaches
There are various theories of nonduality that essentially state that any separation is illusory and that the true nature of ourselves is the same as the universe and the whole of reality and there is thus no fundamental distinction or separate “person”.
While fundamentally correct, at least for me personally attempting to realize them directly essentially turns them into something that is attempted, and that thus doesn’t actually realize effortless non-separation.
It seems that at least for me this is instead best seen as the default/background truth that emerges when attention is not focused on specific aspects of perception such as the current situation of one’s human experience.
Theories of society as an independent organism
Description of the theory
Often when first considering theories about the benefits of various kinds of internal shifts in the direction of reducing conditioning, a natural question can arise (which, interestingly, uses the external world as a way to reach conclusions about the inner): if that is so good, why doesn’t everyone do it, and why hasn’t society converged on that, given that society often seems to converge on the best possible known solution to many problems?
The theories of society as an independent organism can provide a solution to that issue.
First, we consider this question: why are things as they are? (or to be more precise, why are the properties of things that change slowly across space and time as they are as opposed to one of the other possibilities?). The simplest answer is that things are like this, because being this way tends to be persistent: this requires either resilience or reproduction and when there is competition, not being affected by other different things and possibly affecting them so that they become similar to the thing in question.
Societal structures (in the current human form; note that AI might eventually take the place of humans in this, but that’s not relevant to this inquiry about the present and past) are collections of conditioned beliefs, supported by emotions such as fear, that essentially live in the mind of the human beings that consider themselves part of them (as well as stored information structures capable of affecting minds, such as books and websites, which however generally require preexisting conditioning to influence the mind). Since human beings have a limited lifespan, to be persistent societal structures need to condition new human minds as the older ones die off, usually achieved by creating beliefs that lead to breeding and educating newborns, or by having beliefs that are attractive to people who already have certain other beliefs (e.g. the effectiveness in free-market economies to those that already believe that material wealth is important). Competition is handled by beliefs that cause human beings to work for the benefit of society and to compete with other societies; for instance, nationalistic beliefs induce the individual to further a specific societal structure against other ones.
So it becomes clear that societies are an independent system or organism that effectively leverages human beings to persist and expand themselves, rather than being the most efficient means of human beings to work and cooperate together and generally improve the things that are important to the humans. Societal structures do a lot of things that also benefit the human nature of human beings directly, such as providing food and health care, but are limited to those that do not threaten the viability of the societal structure itself.
So going back to the original question, it is clear that a societal structure that does indeed promote freedom from conditioning would be really effective for the happiness and momentary well-being of human beings, but would also jeopardize its own survival: in practical terms, everyone would live in bliss and pleasure, making love with each other, not doing any unnecessary work and fatigue. As a result, no one would engage in any activity to further the societal system itself, which would cease to exist as an entity. This would be very good for the human beings (assuming they are not dependent on the society itself for food, water or healthcare), but such a group of human beings would either be unknown or, if large enough to be known, would see its resources (land, human beings if large enough) assimilated by large societal structures it would be defenseless against, since for instance, human beings who make no special effort to do so are not at all competitive with a structured army.
As a result, we observe a world where societal structures have expanded as much as possible, and where the specific societal structures are the ones that were able to outcompete the others. Hence, they cannot possibly promote full human happiness and freedom from conditioning, since that would completely undermine their competitiveness and thus societal structures promoting that have been defeated by other more competitive ones.
Discussion
The pro of this sort of theories is that they provide a solid answer for the “why doesn’t everyone live free without conditioning?” and also are useful for people who are still identified with society.
Their downside is that disidentifying with society and partially leaving it is a relatively obvious, albeit in some situations challenging to put into effect, step to undertake, and the hard part is in my opinion not leaving society, but rather figuring out how to live free, with the main issue being that even without a general identification with society, the society-derived habits and beliefs persist and alternatives are unclear.
In other words, the problem is often not so much being convinced that one needs to partially leave society, or how to leave society, but rather: once we have left society, how do we free ourselves from remaining conditioning that is no longer necessary, acquire other habits and strategies that are instead necessary, and how do we manage to live together in harmony and love?
And to this question the theories don’t provide a direct answer, and in fact they can negatively affect the ability to provide it, since they still keep focus on society, while what is more important is the actual current situation and how to handle it. They can furthermore create a sense of superiority/accomplishment (generally covering up more fundamental existential fear) in having partially exited society which can create a belief that introspection and inner work is unnecessary or to overestimate its progression, while in fact unexamined conditioning, coming from society or otherwise, persists. Finally, the most obvious route to solving the question of “what to do” such theories provide is to imagine the human condition without society and attempt to implement it, and while this can be very useful as a reference, it is limited since ultimately one’s lifestyle needs to match the current reality, which does include both parts of the inner and external world that are unaffected by societies and parts that are.
Meditation as a practice and conscious sexuality
I did encounter meditation as a practice in the form of the MBSR training, which is a form teaching that is relatively independent of the religious or supernatural beliefs that are sometimes associated with other schools.
What meditation does is a technique to enter a state given effort, which can be extremely interesting and useful the first times one experiences it. “Conscious” sexuality as a practice can be seen as similar: it produces a given state through body-based practices either alone or with others. Compared to more detached breath-based meditation, intimacy/sexuality practices generally result in more intense states (at least for beginners and those not particularly motivated at making a lot of effort in traditional meditation), but the state is more mixed with all the things that arise due to the intimate/sexual interaction.
The issue, however, is that while it provides general insight and specific experience, generally the changes tend to be confined to the times in which effort is applied to maintain the meditative state, and it doesn’t readily transition to the whole of one’s life.