Mental Wealth Retreat
Earlier in this series:
I dreamt I went on a field trip with a dozen other students. We went to a temple grounds in Japan. We were alone in what was essentially a Japanese amusement park, with food kiosks and games. In the distance rose the temple, the size of a mountain. It was called ‘Heaven.’ The only way to reach it was by climbing a zillion steps.
A young man and I decided to go on our own. I said that I liked the set-up: only people willing to undertake the arduous climb could reach Heaven. We first went down steps into an underpass that made a u-turn; we emerged just to the left of where we started. I concluded that we were not worthy to undertake the climb because the stairs were magically altered to prevent the attempt.
It’s been a year since I dreamt of Heaven, and it has caused much soul-searching.
I had begun earlier in the week monitoring my thoughts for negative content. Every time I’d think of something annoying or bothersome, I’d ask myself, ‘Is this what you want to work on? What are you accomplishing with this line of thought?’
Somehow, I’d managed to make my monitoring bothersome. I felt my condition worsen, even as I became successful at quashing negative thoughts. My mood and my intellectual acuity were all degraded. I decided that an emergency mental wealth retreat was necessary.
Let me now describe what I think a mental wealth retreat is. It is the entry into a virtuous circle of thought. The notion of pleasure-inducing cognition is alien to Western thought, so a brief explanation: pleasure-inducing cognition is not thinking about pleasure or pleasurable events. It is not about imagining peace, love, and joy. It is merely frictionless and effective cognition. It is a dancer dancing versus a dancer having sex. It is soldiers achieving an objective versus soldiers getting drunk.
For example, when one is faced with a complicated decision, there are advantages and disadvantages to be weighed. It is therefore easy to feel overwhelmed and to see no easy way forward. Mental wealth is the ability to say, A is more important to my goal than B, and B is an acceptable price. C can be rendered irrelevant if I also decide D, and so on.
If morality becomes a consideration, then decision-making inherits orthogonal, and perhaps debilitating, constraints. If you want to hire an engineer who is a member of a dispreferred religion, you might feel that it is immoral, but the fact of the matter is that you have an engineering problem to solve, not a morality problem.
The same applies to all aspects of cognition. If you want to enter a blissful state of cognition, you needn’t worry about what some prophet or saint would think about it. Here is the logic: if you naturally have terrible thoughts that must be contained by fear, then those thoughts would not lead to blissful cognition. You’re already out of the game.
Religion can make problems out of virtues. Women are expected to be obedient to their husbands in principle. Justice department lawyers, on the other hand, are not expected to be obedient to their bosses in principle. Disobedient women are a problem for institutions which require their obedience, but not for institutions which require their professional competence. In other words, mental wealth is the better standard, since it does not work with bad cases, and does not render good ones problematic.
A mental wealth retreat is the attempt to produce cognition that is frictionless, effective, and which validates further pleasurable cognition. For example, one often finds in his environment elements which keep him from achieving his goals. Sometimes, there is nothing to be done about them; they are merely a source of anguish. However, there are things to be done; there is also the cultivation of an environment that would be supportive of particular goals.
Normally thoughts are frictive: I’d do X, except Y is in the way; the world would be a better place without Z. A virtuous circle of thoughts is not frictive. The idea is not to focus on what is going wrong, but to focus on what resources there are to be had.
Non-frictive thought focuses on mutually-supportive elements, in other words, a pole of attraction. If you can’t convince your political party to adopt a particular goal, skip the strife and form another party which does pursue that goal. The original party, fearing the split, will adopt the goal, or, if the goal be the correct priority, the new party shall siphon off members.
Once I began imagining how to cultivate my environment — and this could be mental, physical, or social — I found that I was in a virtuous circle of thought. Each thought facilitated some other thought that I liked. On the second day, I entered into a state of bliss.
The Salt Island Diaries are a highly curated collection of dreams I had 2019-2021. There were two threads: one was a group of women living in a shared house or building. Each dream was about different women in a different period in history, but what they had in common was a struggle to find a way to harmonize their varied aptitudes and predispositions in order to stake out space in the dreamscape. They needed to join forces. Dreamscapes are, generally speaking, lawless zones in which each dreamer must fend for himself/herself. These women were establishing pockets of order, with more or less success.
The other thread was a group of women in a bright and pristine countryside, or in an idyllic Swiss village. These were the ‘Heaven’ dreams. These women had already established the reality they wanted. Their dreamscape was very stable, orderly, and most importantly, persistent. They had no need to compromise with, negotiate with, fear, or avoid bad faith actors. Their lives could simply be ideal. That might sound dismissive, but it is not. Consider that we have the same freedom when we dream, but very few of us dream of idyllic lives. It seems to me, the deepest question facing humanity is not how we have mistreated each other throughout history and how we mismanaged the planet at the end of it, but rather, what kind of being does not dream joyfully, when there is no reason to do otherwise? I think, a joyfully-dreaming being would not get the idea to create the problems we’ve had.
In my dreams of ‘Heaven,’ I often appeared among the women as a hapless and bewildered child. Most often, I merely observed, but at other times, I was directed to observe particular aspects of their activities. From these observations I induced the principles of their society; these I later described as management of similarity.
Those dreams ended before the book was complete, but no matter, much editing was required to bring them together into a coherent narrative.
Since then, I have sought in vain to regain access to the heaven dreamscape. I have thought much about how different I am from its denizens. From this has arisen the notion of mental wealth. And of this week-end, the mental wealth retreat.