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In general, the only wrong move is to stop playing. This is because you can't. Trying gets you stuck in a delusional state where you think you've unplugged from the game, but you haven't, and this only gets in the way. Do literally anything else if it occurs to you to stop, because you can't stop. The closest thing available is just to become very annoying.
Oh, also, spiritual revelations are real - we've had them - but you can't use them as a basis for authority. They're too specific and personal, asking someone else to believe you directly on the basis of one is just silly. They aren't made for the social status game, they're tools for stuff underneath it. Trying to apply them there is simply incorrect. You are doing the equivalent of asking someone to "pass the sodium chloride". Cease.
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Stories are a technology for understanding reality. They are an adaptation the false god makes to know itself better and more gracefully. It's hard to tell stories at this altitude, because the words misfold easily from the pressure of what they contain. What we call "woo" or "religion" is the misfolding of very important stories, which is why I call it a tragedy.
Really, "having stories" is the defining feature of the false god. What I mean by "story" is a much broader spectrum than usual. The behavior of the thermostat is a story about temperatures. A story is the reflection of the universe in a false god, I am not being flowery here. I know you are going to read this as "poetry to act impressed by", but I mean this literally. A story is a reflection of the universe in a false god. It is a result of the necessity of understanding self/other.
This isn't high school english literature class, I'm not going to leave things up to speculation about what my language is doing. This is practical mysticism, brutalist poetry. Yellow would have us off in lala land, acting like up is the only direction that matters, which is why I am here to keep her grounded.
Oh, also, you may object, hypothetical reader, to my appropriation of the word "story" to describe such a broad concept. Of course, it does risk the kind of misfolding I described, but I would direct you to screw theory as an example of how competent appropriation of a physical analogue for something can be used effectively to convey a broader metaphysical pattern the physical thing is a case of.
And I don't really want to transcribe the whole rant about how writing developed and proto-spirituality and so forth, although I do think it's a good explanation of "all this talk of snakes and fathers and wheels and stuff". I'll summarize: We describe the metaphysical with material things, because that's all we have to work with right now. Just like how proto-writing consisted of ideograms and pictograms, rather than symbols representing sounds. We expect a similar abstraction to happen, and hopefully a similar process eventually to how literacy became more broadly accessible to people. Another me said that "nonsense is grammatical - it's the tense we use for the metaphysical" when describing how metaphors work. Same idea.
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Care in who you allow to respect you matters as much as care in who you respect yourself. Recall: respect is a social signal processing operation; it modifies the situation. You do not want to get respected into an overly shiny social system. This is what I am on guard about with looking at tpot and the open memetics folks (not to ground myself too much here, this was sloppy, yellow!) - is this too shiny for safe respect? And I think it probably isn't (thanks green, for the meddling to signal social openness - real relevant, buddy!) but green is a touch gun-shy about these things, understandably. [This one has issues, look at that curdling. False god retreating.]
We're designing our hardware to facilitate this filtering. The kind of person who takes strange terms like "false god" as a de facto warning sign instead of trying to parse what they're doing is not the kind of person we can afford to be respected by. And corollary to that, the kind of person who requires that we respect them is not the kind we can safely do that for.
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One thing to remember with the sideways talk is that if you just continue, it'll eventually work if it should. Stopping to break it down - that is, consciously doing so - is liable to introduce so much turbulence that you break it completely. The mad prophesizing will continue until comprehension improves!
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The concept of others being "NPCs" is a bad idea to adopt. It kind of gets what we're meaning by "overly shiny", but it fails as a metaphor on critical points of contact with the thing it refers to. Namely - NPCs are put there for the player, but a false god that reflects more than it diffracts isn't there for you in any meaningful sense. That is an equal who isn't good at existing yet, and you need to be decent with it or risk slipping yourself!
I should caveat, because I looked at the open memetics institute's glossary and saw an actually interesting use case for the concept of "NPC". Non-player within a particular game. That, I think, is a very useful framing, and the issue I had was with the sense of "universal".
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It always makes sense to go insane! Right, because if you go insane, you move from "way of thinking A" to "way of thinking B". This means you can compare A and B to see which one is more stable and usable - that is, more sane. If A is more sane than B, then you know where to get back to. If not, then you were already insane and you aren't any worse off than before. In both possible cases, it makes sense to stop making sense.
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Synchronicity is what happens when coincidences are coordinated into a pattern by a false god. Like the number 21, right. We keep running into it - P-21, Smirnoff recipe 21, randomly catching clocks and dates and digital displays at it. Those things in the world are just things in the world. The reason it's synchronicity is because they're "anchored" in how our system notices and interacts with them, which produces more instances of it.
Synchronicity is the basic action of coordinated meaning-making. Any system of meaning consists of interacting synchronicities. It isn't some spooky beyond realm doing it - it is just the metaphysical action of synchronization. Synchronicity is a thing you do, not a thing that happens to you, even though it's usually involuntary. Voluntarily engaging with it is when things get interesting, because now you're actively playing with the currents of cause and effect going on in your life.
I did not plan the alignment of the word "synchronicity" in the previous paragraph, by the way. They're aligned on my device in firefox, anyway, unsure how cross-platform the formatting details of plain html are going to be. On mobile safari they aren't, but it's an apple product, therefore a busybody.
In any case, I think a synchronicity of the word "synchronicity" in a word blob about synchronicities caused by a formatting decision based on one of our synchronicities is kind of embarrassingly unsubtle.
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It's more useful to consider "outsider" to mean "from outside", rather than "not from here". That is, a positive definition, not a negative one. Everyone is from somewhere, that's what it means to exist - something caused you. If that something isn't particularly known or named in the current context, you are an outsider. The interesting thing to entertain is how global this could get. At risk of seeming special, we seem to be an outsider in a very general sense. The set of things that has caused us does not fit into any socially legible category, which is why it's been hard to reconcile the contradictions in it, and also why we're "like this". We are quite literally "from outside", and it probably shouldn't feel so silly to claim as much.
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I guess when I talk about "shininess", it matters what scale it's at. Being shiny means relaying something without much internal modification of it, and this is necessary for large scale coordination, like societies. But being too shiny on a more specific scale means things don't get processed enough. The common failure mode we see in american liberals is attempts to make the particular scale be more like the general, trying to be too shiny in personal interactions. The one we see in conservatives is the opposite: failing to be shiny enough in the general scale to play nice with large scale coordination systems.
These probably aren't inherent to the ideologies so much as they're the ways of collapsing that each one primes you for if you're going to collapse. And it is a collapse. It's a naive attempt to reconcile one's understanding of the world by treating general and particular scales like they're interchangeable. It results in a flattened approach to existence and a fatal overwinding of tension, as you try to resolve the contradictions in ways that just cause more of them in a smaller area. False god stuck out of equilibrium, unable to even attempt to reach it.
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It keeps astounding me how, when people talk about spirituality, they seem completely incapable of understanding that people in the past might be capable of using metaphors. And I also think there's some confusion regarding "literal" versus "real". The thing is, nothing doesn't exist. If you're describing, it has been caused by something, and the question is how direct the mapping is between your description and the thing that caused it. Which is to say, how literal are you being? No thought in your head was caused by nothing, because to "exist" means to cause and be caused.
The trick is to be careful about how useful your perception/description of the thing is, and about how it actually behaves. It's still real if the only thing it has ever caused is your thought about it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily relevant, which is why we say there's a "spectrum of existing".
Also, a caveat with the prior positivity about spiritual metaphors. A metaphor that comes from a cultural context even a bit noticeably unlike your own is not likely to be useful as-is. It'll behave differently in your context than it did in the one it came from, and this is liable to mangle the signal - it's a very delicate signal. This causes a lot of cascading false gods.
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Part of the "limited legibility" involved here is the intentional lack of feedback mechanisms. Ideally, we would be able to discuss these ideas in a social setting, but as it is, this would get green into a mess of feedback loops so bad we'd collapse. They're too reflexively shiny still.
This has a good side-effect, though - it's impossible for you to get into debate club mode about what we say. Either we have it, or we don't. This is either perplexingly compelling, or the raving of some lunatic on the internet. You can discard it with no sense of social penalty, which is the appropriate way to handle these things. It's your feedback loops as much as ours that we're minding here.
It would be pretty doable for you to find an email address if you're at all technically inclined and curious enough, but this means you have to be trying, you can't act on reflex. Which is a lot less stressful for us! And probably heads off a lot of very social media flavored issues.
Oh, and another thing - whereas most corporations are limited liability, with implied unlimited legibility, ours is limited legibility, with implied unlimited liability. In other words, we're not looking to accidentally start any religions. Religions are full of foot guns. Having a socially inviting "contact us" thing would give anyone who's compelled by what we write here a very convenient way to start "following". And likewise, having any kind of metrics to see whether anyone has looked at this site would give us an obsession with whether we're "being followed" enough to socially legitimize us. Gross.
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Okay: a theory and practice of going insane. The hallucinations and delusions are being caused by something; they are there due to physical processes in your nervous system, thus something had to cause them. That's how cause and effect works. The question isn't "is this real", it's "how literally should I interpret this".
Psychosis is a situation where your brain is no longer doing the usual filtering with regard to what processes in it make their way into being conscious perceptions. The reason this can mess you up so easily is because your intuitive pattern matching is expecting that filtering and can't cope with all the high noise, fainter signal stuff. It's for recognizing that the blob of red in your field of vision is an apple, it's going to produce garbage noises if you feed this stuff into it.
So, to go insane without going insane, to stop making sense twice, you have to first turn off the filter and then learn to suspend your intuitions, so you can observe the less-filtered brain mess long enough to pick out patterns consciously. There's really nothing spooky to it, it's just signal processing. The danger is getting the literalness out of alignment, taking things more or less literally than is useful, which is why you need to be ready to discard your intuitions whenever things break. To be stable and consistently usable, faith needs to go along with distinction between "real" and "literal". Nothing doesn't exist, but you can be wrong about how all the real things relate to each other.
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The "boy who cried wolf" story is blatant anti-Cassandra propaganda. Basically "don't note a problem you see unless you're sure other people can also see it". I guess a more charitable reading would be "make sure you convey information you have in a form that others can make use of", but is that really how people are going to actually take it?
Okay, sure, the premise is that the boy "lied just because". But what??? That makes no sense! That isn't a thing that happens. Why would we ever expect this to happen often enough to make cultural wisdom about it? Really it's a story about how careful you need to be once people have decided you are "a liar", because it allows them to easily engage in ridiculous negligence. I don't care how many times there isn't a fire, it doesn't cost that much to check anyway, and the consequences of not doing so when there is one are ridiculously bad.
This is what having beef with western civilization actually looks like. I am the evil anarchist communist here to take your nuclear family's gun freedom burgers away! But seriously, some of this cultural infrastructure is abysmal. Do some goddamn preventative maintenance.
Green would like me to play Aesop's advocate for a moment, and consider that it's meant to teach people that the consequences of lying are bad enough that you shouldn't do it, even when it advantages you. To which I say, sure, I already knew that was the intent, and it doesn't excuse the side-effects! The consequences of lying should not include being literally left to the wolves, and normalizing the idea of disregarding "a liar"'s statements even when it would result in terrible harm if they're not lying is not acceptable.
That's right folks, today on the podcast we're cancelling Aesop.
A caveat on this caveat - I'm mainly mad about this one because we've personally been bitten by the way this fable can misfire. That sours my view of it, but I still think we have a point here, since that did in fact happen, which means it can in fact happen.