Our world views are like our operating system to go through life. A change in a world view changes everything, changes every aspect of life. It has a bearing everywhere.
So a transition from materialism to idealism. has a bearing on everything, every aspect of life. So, for example, a topic I already touched upon, the meaning of life. We live in a society in which there is an epidemic of depression, an epidemic of anxiety associated with the inability people have to discern meaning in the movements of life, particularly the sufferings that are intrinsic to life. That changes.
That changes completely under analytic idealism. We are no longer driven by superficial and ultimately untenable narratives that have to do with external success. We tend to think today that the meaning of life is associated with some form of material success or success in achieving influence, achieving control and power. phenomena that are outside our individual minds.
That's how we are driven today. And of course, almost inevitably, we fail, particularly when we think we are about to succeed. Because when you're chasing ghosts, it's the catching of the ghost when you run your fingers through the ghost and realize there is nothing there.
That is the moment when you lose. It's the moment when you think you're about to succeed, to win. And our lives are driven by communities of ghosts today. That being the reason why there are great, many rich, successful, famous people who are addicted or commit suicide.
So that whole thing, that whole dynamics would change. Instead of collecting pairs of shoes, you set out to collect insights. Instead of seeing suffering as pointless agony, You see suffering as a means to an end, as the thing that will force you to confront the great questions and evolve as a human being, as a mind, a more mature, wiser mind that will never disappear, that will just eventually be made available to the universe as a whole.
Life becomes intrinsically meaningful. Whatever happens to you, whether you are, quote, a success or, quote, a failure, both conditions are... permeated by meaning, interwoven with meaning.
The greatest success of living is the success of being able to pay attention, as opposed to the success of becoming the boss, or winning the election, or scoring the girl, or buying the next car. So that alone changes everything, but there are more implications. Health care, for instance.
Under analytic idealism, the body, the whole body, is what our inner meditation looks like. Even those processes in our minds that we cannot explicitly access through introspection, because they are beyond the range of metacognition experiences that we have, but we don't know that we have them. The image of all those experiences is our body.
Therefore, physical health ultimately is mental health, and that doesn't invalidate the current main avenues of medicine we have today, which are surgery and drugs. They are still valid. Even though the body is a representation on a dashboard, you can do something via the dashboard.
Surgeries work. Medicines work. When you ingest a pill, you're ingesting a transpersonal mental process, bringing it into your altar, so to say. And that will have a causative effect in your mental inner life that may be very positive.
I take medicines regularly for allergy and other things. But in addition to drugs and surgery, the understanding that the body is what the mind, including the deepest inaccessible layers of the mind, look like, what it leads us to understand is that psychological therapy, too, is a means to very, very physical health. Today we get confused, for instance, by the placebo phenomenon.
We know placebo happens. It's a very big problem for the pharmaceutical industry because the law requires a drug to be more effective than placebo in order to be approved. And placebo, we know now, is getting more and more and more effective.
So it's becoming more and more difficult for drugs to be approved because the sugar pills work just as well. And instead of being all discombobulated and confused by how is this possible, we may embrace it and start researching it and start leveraging the mechanism explicitly. And not only by chance, we may engineer around the placebo effect, which other cultures have always done.
When you see the shaman in the Amazon puffing smoke from his cigarette with bird feathers on his head, dancing around like a maniac, what do you think he's doing? What he's doing is convincing a mind that something is being done for its benefit and it will get better afterwards. And if he succeeds in convincing that mind that that's what's going to happen, something is changing in that mind. And therefore something changes in the body because the body is the image of the deeply internalized mind.
So instead of being upset about the economic impact of the growing effectiveness of the placebo, an implication of analytic idealism is that we would actively leverage and engineer it without putting artificial constraints on research, because of certain things that materialism decrees are implausible or impossible a priori. While we have plenty of empirical evidence that this stuff happens. I'll give only two examples.
In the Annals of Medicine, we know that hypnotherapy can cure warts, skin warts, caused by a viral infection, can be cured by hypnosis, a purely mental therapy. We know that knee pain, knee pain, a very physical thing related to the wear and tear, of the cartilage and tendons of the knees. Knee pain can be cured with placebo surgery, in which no surgery is performed. They just use the scalpel to make three little holes to give you a scar and they tell you you had surgery and people walk around happily ever after.
We see these things happen happening. We don't know how or why they happen because we live under a worldview that tells us that this shouldn't be possible. So we get all confused. And we talk about it, but we don't leverage it. We don't explore and exploit that avenue that nature is laying open for us to leverage.
Because of, essentially, metaphysical prejudices that are not based on logic and not based on empirical fact. So that would change too. Another very big thing that would change, and it has changed for me, is empathy.
Empathy. grows very quickly once one internalizes analytic idealism. In other words, after one not only conceptually buys into it, rationally, but lives through its lens.
It's definitely a functional feeling for society. If we are not empathic, then we are no longer social animals, and our civilization collapses. Our ability to cooperate is largely founded on our ability to place ourselves in another's shoes.
In other words, to have empathy. At the same time, to live with tremendous empathy is very, very difficult. I was dysfunctional for three weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine.
So I have to teach myself again how to be a jerk. And you need to have a room in the palace of your mind where you give yourself the moral right to be a jerk for a little while. Because it will not help you or the Ukrainians or anybody on earth. that you are dysfunctional because of empathy all the time. Nobody gets helped by it.
So that too is a consequence of internalizing analytic idealism and you have to relearn how to deal with empathy. You need the room of empathy in the palace of your mind, otherwise you lose your humanity, which is the most valuable thing you can lose. If you are not empathic at all, you are no longer human.
So you need to visit that room regularly and to feed the plants inside. So you preserve your humanity, but you need to learn how to manage it as well. I could go on and on.
The implications are myriads. They are everywhere.