No Opinion

When we have an opinion about things out in the world, we overlay a reality on top of reality, which means that we don't see, experience, or become intimate with actual reality. 

When we go around having opinions about what is right and wrong we isolate ourselves from the emerging moment, which is neither right or wrong. We can't see a person because we see only our opinion of their conceptualizations. 

This happens more online than in what might be called actual physical reality. Though people do this in actual physical reality as well with their minds. It is intensified online. 

The reason this is intensified online is because life on life is almost exclusively filtered through conceptualizations - Instagram and TikTok might be visual platforms but they're still inherently conceptual - what we're seeing here is not reality as reality, but curated reality, and thus a conceptualization.

Language is more corrosive online than in actual physical reality in the mere sense that it dominates digital/online environments - comments, tweets, replies, articles, text on photos, text attached to photos, are all layerings upon reality, and the online world is already a layer upon reality, which means we're several times removed from reality when online. Spontaneous body language and other forms of communication are not present.

Online is also just online from a certain point of view - it's also just an aspect of what might be called physical reality. No one treats it like that though because no one sees it like that. 

Everyone projects who they want to be, their opinion of themself and others, into the digital world, which compartmentalizes the self. 

There's nothing right or wrong with the online world: there's only delusion or lack of delusion. This is the same for what might be called physical reality. The online world is a world of delusion manifested in its highest form: it's like a super-samsara, where everyone believes they are individual entities, avatars, that are speaking to other individual entities, avatars, but in reality all that's happening is one mind is spinning and spinning and spinning, turning over and over, ideas and opinions making and re-making, and protecting, and reinforcing the self. This is the wheel. 

To get off the wheel, a good starting point is not having any opinions, about oneself or others. Then life online begins to seem dumb. There's no self to make, no self to protect, nothing to spin with.

But it takes a long time, and a willingness to make the wheel stop. It's the first step toward intimacy with something beyond conceptualization.