This piece provides practical guidance to integrating the principles of descentism into one’s life. Given that the author is the first and only “descentist”, this page will continue to be a work-in-progress as new challenges and solutions emerge in his life that are relevant to this topic. Note that this was never completed.
The desire for existential transformation
To the descentist, life is a problem in need of a solution. The problem is that we find ourselves here, in life, without understanding why while experiencing all manners of pain and suffering.
The solution is meaningful change through existential transformation. For me it was prompted by a growing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Not for a shortage of ideas; the spiritual marketplace is loud with every type of voice. But I only found answers without action, and action without results. Though it took two decades before I could explain exactly why, for all their variety, they felt the same. The Existential Framework is the result of my decades-long search for actionable answers.
The state of existence, or existential model, is the collection of beliefs, behaviors and practices that define the general character of our life experience. According to the Existential Framework, there are two such categories: ascentism and descentism. Ascentism is the traditional existential model formed over long years of indoctrination, while descentism is an opposing construct arrived at through contemplation and practice.
Unilateral instruction from parents, educators, authorities, and ambient channels form the boundaries of the ascentist reality, so that by the time we have questions, we are lost in a conceptual maze built and reinforced over decades. This isn’t accidental; the ascentist worldview is a deliberate and systematic effort to restrict the narrative of our existence to keep us in servitude to two principles:
- Principle of Submission. We are small observers of an external world that exists without us.
- Principle of Replication. Life must be preserved and extended.
These two ascentist principles permeate every aspect of the ascentist worldview and are the reason we lead meaningless lives of toil, consumption, and proliferation while ignoring our inner longing for escape and peace. Decades of indoctrination have created sturdy mental and physical walls, and, Like a prison, everything seems designed to keep us locked into a cycle of submission, desire, and procreation.
Descentism challenges this perspective by exposing our suppressed desire for permanent peace, and a practical path for achieving meaningful transformation to that end.
The decision to descend
Descentism will appeal to those who understand that there is something deeply wrong with life itself. Those who feel they are constantly fighting a sadness that threatens to break through the surface of their lives. They reject the answers they have been given, or suspect the answers they do have are incomplete. The decision to descend, is the decision to examine this sadness by rediscovering the preeminent purpose of life.
Descentism is a practical philosophy with the explicit goal of existential transformation. Through the application of a handful of principles, the aspiring descentist can deconstruct the dominant Observer Model to reveal the Creator Model of reality within. The transition requires a high level of persistence and actual life change or its propositions will remain abstract convictions disjointed from reality.
Ascentism cannot accept the alternative to the painful life of submission and procreation, so it must destroy any ideology that threatens it. Consequently, the descentist will be misunderstood, mischaracterized, shunned, mocked, ridiculed, and belittled. Critics, with no intention of understanding the motive, premise, or intention of the philosophy, will seek out every contradiction, their voices amplified by the largest voices.
One thing to keep in mind: descentism is not about positive affirmation and drawing wealth and success to an ascentist life. Descentism is an unflinching look at life as it is, stripped of quixotic platitudes and romantic certainties which underpin the ascentist life perspective. It will be very dark for those who cannot grasp the underlying freedom that comes from the destruction of the Observer Model of existence.
Understanding the Principles of the Existential Framework
The Existential Framework relies on X practical principles for re-framing the life experience.
The principles outline the differences between descentism and ascentism in a simple format across a handful of significant, related dimensions. It is important to keep in mind that there is more variation across ascentist perspectives than can be summarized here. Arguably, ascentism includes most if not all religious, spiritual, secular, and mixed perspectives, so if I summarize an ascentist perspective I will be highlighting common themes rather than precision.
All of us are lost and in pain here in life. But we have forgotten, and instead set about defining everything and staking out a safe place.
Principles of Condition
The foundation of descentism is a series of direct observations we can reach through introspection that reveal our actual circumstances in life.
Principle of Pain
To the descentist, the default state of life is pain because without dedicated effort we inevitably experience one of its many forms such as hunger, thirst, illness, desire, boredom, isolation, poverty, shame, depression, sorrow, or more. We spend our lives suppressing or distracting away from the multi-dimensional suffering of life but the pain always returns.
Principle of Orientation
The descentist takes the variety of contradictory answers to the meaning of life as a consensus of confusion. He reasons that if we do not know where we are or why we’re in this place, then we are, by definition, lost. To the descentist, life is the painful state of being lost.
Principle of Purpose
To the descentist, the preeminent purpose is to escape this painful state of being lost. Therefore, he repudiates a life of toil to acquire the fruits of others’ toils because it does not further his purpose.
In summary, the descentist’s purpose in life is to overcome this painful condition of being lost.
Principles of Action
Once we understand our condition in life, we can examine how to actually overcome it. The principles of action articulate how we will accomplish our goal of escaping the painful condition we are in.
Principle of Perspective
We possess a model of existence based on our beliefs and experience. This model will either entrap us here, or enable us to find our way out.
Principle of Agency
We possess the free will to believe whatever we want. It can either be a tool for comprehending some minute part of a greater pre-existing truth, or a tool for fabricating our reality.
Principle of Solutions
All the solutions we need to escape are before us at the very moment of asking the question. Though some answers may not be readily apparent, with the right perspective they can be seen and directly validated.
Principle of Conviction
The more completely we believe in something, the more thoroughly we will manifest it in our lives. To the descentist, existential transformation requires deep conviction to overcome the stultifying effects of familiarity.
Principle of Validation
The descentist understands that indirect knowledge from external experts, authorities, and groups dis-empowers him, rendering him dependent on exogenous forces for answers and purpose. Consequently, the ascentist endeavors to root out and replace these dependencies with his own native experiences he can directly validate.
Principle of Alignment
Existential alignment is the state when our worldview and actions in life are synchronized. The path will open once we are existentially aligned and see life for what it is.
Principle of Everything is Here Now
Everything that is, is here right now for you. Everything that exist. We each have 100 units of conceptual and perceptual matter, and the decision about how to use that, what kind of world to mold.
We all have everything right now. As long as we want more than we appear to have, we will be dissatisfied.
Our never-ending wants and desires, and attachments, reluctance to work – these are things that keep us going.
Principle of Force
In life there are two major types of forces — expansionary, and contractionary. Expansionary forces are those conceptual and perceptual experiences which increase the surface area of our existence. Contractionary forces are those which decrease the net surface area of our existence.
Engagement is the exposure to and integration of conceptual phenomena into our reality. As we engage we literally expand our existence. Disengagement is the deliberate withdrawal from expansionary conceptual and perceptual activities.
To the descentist, existence expands through engagement.
In life there are activities that lead me toward and those that lead me away from my preeminent purpose. Once we accept that we are lost and our preeminent purpose is to get out, then a 60-hour workweek to support a life full of consumer goods and services does not further that purpose. Some activities are mere distractions from pain, while others actively promote entanglement. A deeper conviction of our own state of being lost will aid in discerning the practicality of an action.
To the descentist, conceptual and perceptual activities are understood in terms of their promotion of my primary purpose.
Principle of Revelation
Descentism is a process that depends on contemplation and revelation to reinforce conviction and manifestation. Our existence was built over years, and it will take years to effect real change. The validity of later descentist propositions can be difficult to grasp without the earlier principles in place. Revelations propel us through the process and manifest alongside both conceptual and behavioral changes. In the Existential Framework this is called graduated revelation.
The Principle of Replication
We arrived in this life through the process or replication. To the ascentist, life is something to preserve and continue, while death is something to fear and avoid. To the descentist, we are lost and imprisoned in this life, taught to fear our preeminent desire while toiling and replicating endlessly.
The disengagement
The first set of observations lays the foundation for practical disengagement. It validates the pain we feel and explains everything at a high level. Let these first observations serve to get a toehold into your worldview. With time and additional examination, the toehold will grow into a tight great you can use to chip away at the greater illusion.
In descentism, our existence is divided into two states: the non-productive and productive. The non-productive occurs at two points – before birth, and after death. The productive is everything in between – all the time that we are alive.
Productions are the constellations of our lives; they fragment our reality into the conceptual and perceptual building blocks we experience. We spend most of our lives acting out various roles that inform our behavior and experience. Productions are the various relationships that we enter into in our lives. Every relationship has a set of goals, shared interests, and roles. These relationships can be as small as two, or as large as the entire human species. At their essence, productions are the groups we belong to, the rules we abide by in those groups, the interests and values we share, the obligations we have to the group and the members within it, the hierarchy, and ultimately the role that we play and the rules we play that role by. When we join a production, it can have a deep impact on our existence, or it can be as inconsequential as walking into a fast food restaurant as a guest, which ends once we leave the physical space.
Some productions persist and evolve our entire lives, while others come into existence and just as quickly disappear when they’re no longer needed. The first production we join is that of life. We are alive. We keep building this production as we age, while adding others. But the essential role of “being alive” is our first and most enduring. Productions are learned and acquired patterns of behavior and expectations. If we’ve joined one, we can transfer the learnings to another that is similar.
Productivity refers to the acquisition and engagement in productions and the conceptual and perceptual activity associated with them. In the diagram below I show how productivity increases steadily until a certain age is reached, and then one’s productivity would decline as one participates less until finally they pass away. This is an idealized situation. In the event of an unexpected death of a middle-aged man, the loss of productivity would be immediate and abrupt.
According to the Creator Model, our existence can be imagined as the interplay between our conceptual and perceptual experiences. We perceive something, then we conceive it. We conceive something, then we perceive it.
… Notes
- Why is this important? Productivity is a great way to conceptualize the structure of our existence.
- Every time we accept a new role in life, our productivity would increase.
- How many times have we read the message that we can do anything and be anyone?
- Replication: grow, procreate, proliferate, reproduce, enrich, aspire, ascend, improve,
- Existential tranformation requires that we change. The one
- Subversive philosophies do exist in that they tell us that the answer is from within. And for $10 they can tell us how to find it. The profiteering is annoying, but the real problem with these philosophies is that they all contain the one lethal ingredient: the misunderstanding of life.
- The descentist frequently expresses his desire to get home. Everything is viewed from the perspective of permanent peace. What once was an expression of hopelessness and self loathing, is now an expression of good news: we get to go home.
- The Existential Creator Model (ECM) as a framework for change provides us with a powerful lens for viewing our lives and the world around us. When we grasp the initial principles of descentism, the lessons become self-evident.
- The disengagement is the willful transition from any state into the state of being purposefully lost.
- Every person is capable of existential transformation, but the person least likely to find it is the spiritual consumer. The spiritual consumer is shopping around for the best
- We all retain some rebelliousness in the form of our opinions. But the most important
- He must systematically dismantle the chains of the ascentist Observer Model, replacing them with the Creator Model.
- The ascentist views, no matter their spiritual caliber or proclaimed pedigree, render us powerless.
- the promotion of life, procreation, and self-preservation; and to a lesser degree, the subservience to an external values. The descentist contends that these are the only two tenets which matter to true existential transformation.
- This is the process of disengaging:
- Acknowledge we are lost.
- Understand how we are trapped in the Observer Model of existence.
- Disarm the extessential perspective.
- Grow the intessential perspective to become a Creator.
- Do not promote replication.
The Observer vs the Creator Model
How to Proceed
Ascentism is large and pervasive. It has answers for everything so long as you’re willing to look. It works by overwhelming our defenses. That is why the disengagement must focus on chipping away at the ascentist edifice piece by piece. With time and momentum, larger chunks will fall away, revealing the scam of it all.
There is a need to suspend your disbelief for some time. It will take time for your comprehension and conviction to catch up with the answers. The idea that everything is created withing you, for example, may be the final lesson, but your relationship to that lesson will change as you grow and embrace descentism. What that means to the ascentist just exposed to the descentist philosophy will be very different from what it means to the seasoned descentist in the throes of disengagement.
Do not attempt to make sense of all of it at one time. Ascentism will overwhelm with answers and examples. All hypotheticals. Remember the principle of priority.
The Path
Exit the Conceptual World. Deconstruct your conceptual world by exiting those conceptual engagements which you can neither directly experience or validate.
Don’t defer to exogenous authorities. Stop
Don’t talk about people who will never talk about you.
Stop saying “I don’t know”.
Don’t ask someone what they do. Don’t show interest beyond your present engagement. This often means there isn’t much to say.
Don’t entertain hypotheticals.
Don’t seek approval of people you don’t know.
Not interested in other people.
Does not consistently want children or a family.
The Plan
The descentist should work to get his affairs in order as he starts his descent. This includes outlining all debts and obligations. Everything that one aspires to accomplish before his demise should be laid out and planned.
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