TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 5)

POST: Has anyone noticed BIG changes? Changes that can't really be explained away because they are too BIG?

Perhaps the trick with so-called dimensional jumping is to retain your memory after a particular jump?

Keeping one bit of the world fixed, while the rest changes. Really, we never experience "the past", right? Rather, we just have observations (discoveries and thoughts) which are "about" the past, which imply a history but are not a history. Basically, anything other than what we directly observe is a fictional narrative that connects the dots. The past exists as a story, not as a place as such.

There's a lot of established science and common sense saying that this is "all in our heads".

Although they don't go far enough, perhaps. It really is in our heads - all of it, not just any quirky observations that don't match. Plot Twist - Our heads are in our heads too. But at same time we, don't really have a head, so much as a "head" - i.e. all of our heads are conceptual.

Funny, that; you've just described my concept of God and the universe.

Well, that's pretty much where we get to, isn't it? Quite excitingly, I think. Right this very moment, you can easily notice that what you actually experience yourself being, is a "big open unbounded space that is aware". Within this space, sensations and perceptions arise: your body and the world. Meanwhile, all possible experiences are "dissolve into the background" of this space: the universe. So "the universe" becomes all the content dissolved inside you. You-as-the-space are "God". It just so happens that right now you are "taking on the shape of" a particular experience, which is being-a-person-in-the-world. (More accurately: being-a-universe-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.)

The main step forward, I say, is to stop confusing the current content of experience with the true nature of experiencing. Does that fit in with your take on things?

Q1: Had a vision, once. Pretty ordinary circumstances: hanging out in my then-apartment with a friend, smoked about half a joint which to me was about the equivalent of drinking a Pepsi in terms of effect, and suddenly saw Everything. Needless to say, I can't "remember" it, couldn't even at the time, because what I perceived was way too "big" to be contained in the handful of meat I use as a brain. But I had the sense of infinite conduits, pathways, going in infinite directions and tangling in exquisite chaos, and things zipping along those pathways in seemingly no order whatsoever, all of it forming a great pattern that, regardless of the apparent chaos, made absolute sense (from a Different Point Of View) and, just generally speaking, held the connotation of positive intent. And I could sit around all day and analyze and dissect this, but in the end, the underlying impression - that there is a Reason and a Purpose, and that it is generally Good - is really all I need to be going on with, until whatever time I hit level cap and head on Home. As close as I can figure it, the Meaning Of Life is simply to live, and to write the best story I can with my life, to play the best possible game according to whatever rules I choose to play by, to learn something from it all and have the best time I can. S'good enough for me.

And I could sit around all day and analyze and dissect this, but...

That's the thing with direct knowledge, right enough. All that I'd add is that purpose (with a small "p") is pretty adjustable; Purpose (capital "p") is a bit different, but it's a matter of perspective. We are not any particular thing, I think, but we can be, for a while, and we can go with that or not - curiosity would tend to dictate going along with it, mostly.

But that's sort of the point. We all have goals, objectives, rules we live by and things we want to accomplish... that's part of the point of being human. But from that different perspective - from the outside looking in - the things we think of as rules and the things we think of as important are meaningless. The true Purpose is one we can't know or understand from the perspective of meat-bodies.

Well, the real issue is that you can't tell whether the apparent "True Purpose" is just another bit of patterning, right?

If you "surrender" you'll soon find that your body, mind and world move spontaneously by themselves, as if along a pre-made path. However, it is not necessarily true that this is purposeful in some greater sense. It tends to give you situations that result in an unwinding of accumulate baggage, but if you tackle that directly then you circumvent this, and it changes. If you change yourself (re-pattern the world), or specifically intend some experiences, your direction and "Purpose" shifts also. I think it would be a mistake for people to (for instance) live their life according to "God's Plan" as if it were given to them from, or defined from, outside. "God's Plan" seems to me to be the spontaneous unfolding of the current condition you are in, towards a state of resolution, within the boundaries of certain restrictions - the very restrictions that this subreddit discusses temporarily suspending to allow for faster change, in fact. To say we can't understand or know our current path, is just to say that we don't experience moments that we are not currently experiencing within a 3D-immersive perspective. That doesn't mean it is "special" or fixed, it just means it is not habitually seen (although as you point out, it can be perceived metaphorically sometimes). It is not "destined" in the same way as being our true fate; it is just the path that deterministically follows from our current state. That sense of "it's so perfect" that we get when you perceive this, is the perception of total logical coherence, not of "the way". Change the state, change the path - perfection will persist, the experience of it will shift. "The Way" is the manner in which we follow the path, not the path itself, which is totally arbitrary and flexible. But (except for what I just said) if someone feels they are on a mission or have a greater purpose, I wouldn't dissuade them of it; it's probably not a bad way to live out your days.

Yeah, see, you're... not getting what I'm saying. Which is fine, of course. Everyone has a different perspective on the universe, and all are equally accurate. But, see, even mentioning "God's Plan" as a point of reference is a null term, because we are God, and "the Plan" is both non-singular and as sensible to the human meat brain as two plus four equals watermelon.

Maybe not! Let's try though. Rip this apart:

Okay, I used "God's Plan" in quotes because, yes, we are God in any meaningful sense of the term. What I was trying to say is that there's nothing special about a particular plan, and that even if I don't consciously know the path, it is nevertheless a result of all the intentions I have had, knowingly and unknowably, gradually unwinding. Forgetting about brains for the moment, this is simply a matter of perspective, wouldn't you agree?

As I walk over to the fridge to grab a beer, my attention is on the music playing in the other room - I even forget that I'm going to the kitchen to get a drink. Soon enough, the song ends, and I find I'm back in my chair, looking at this screen. The intention to have a beer in my hand at the computer was fulfilled, even though I forgot the plan. Even though I wasn't aware of the movements happening; even though I never have known the details of how some of those movements work. So, if the universe is your body, then its movement is like that. It shifts towards fulfilling your intentions, like a pattern shifting between states. Usually my attention is only on one 3D slice of it (this particular body and a region around it), but that is just a matter of focused attention rather than not being able to sense it potentially. If I widen my attention out, I see more of my "body", perhaps 4D and the "current plan" becomes clear. But the plan changes every time I create a deliberate intention. The so-called plan is really just "the 4D pattern as it is right now". It's no plan at all, really, because it was never "planned".

TL;DR: The plan isn't a plan; we are not humans; it's all about 3D vs 4D attention and experience.

Q1: I guess that falls into what I'm saying... sorta...
Then again, we're trying to discuss concepts with a language wholly unsuited for it, so "approximate" agreement is pretty noteworthy in itself.
But the whole Plan/Purpose thing that I've talked about... the Purpose isn't even anything we can know or follow. It's beyond/outside any and all human beings, so there's no way our perspective can expand enough to make it make sense. I guess it'd be closer to say "the underlying mechanics of how the universe works", because the "how" and the "why" are all part of the same thing.
But yeah, everything, everything is a matter of perspective. It's one of those Profound Universal Truths that manifests itself in such little mundane ways that the human mind doesn't quite snap to the fact that yo, dude, this is Important Shit right here. Funny, that: we can literally trick ourselves into seeing wizards and hobbits in normal-sized men using a bit of trickery of perspective, and yet overall we humans still don't get the importance of perspective. See a thing from one perspective and it's an inexplicable tangle; change your perspective, and it all falls into place.
Meanwhile, we're still bound to this universe by the languages we speak, all of which discuss being "next" to something, or above it, beside it, around it, looking up from below, looking down from above, all different perspectives, but so limiting that we - translating the universe through the languages we speak - never see that there are other perspectives as well, that go outside what we think of as "spatial awareness".

Yes indeed, verbal language is problematic - in fact, anything that results in thoughts about a topic (i.e. any sort of communication) is problematic. You can never really describe an experience, mostly you trigger a conceptual structure, occasionally you can use language to lead someone to a subjective immersive experience, but you can only do it in person, responding to cues.

...the Purpose isn't even anything we can know or follow.

Then in what way can it be said to exist? ;-)

Although I imagine I know what you're getting at, since you used the phrase "the underlying mechanics of how the universe works". The main problem is that the universe doesn't really "work" or "happen" in any particular way. There is no "process" or "mechanism" involved. As I occasionally say: thinking so leads us to focus on the content of experience, rather than the nature of experiencing. I suggest: We can examine content all we want, looking for secrets or explanation or purpose, and we might even find things that satisfy us for a while, until eventually we realise that it's just... more dream.

The fundamental reality is "what dreams are made from" rather than any one dream itself. The word "purpose" tends to imply an end-state, an ultimate goal - but there isn't one. We might say that the goal is to realise (not understand) the nature of content - and then probably forget about it. Have some adventures. Then remember again. It doesn't matter whether you take the 3D or 4D or the dimensionless background as your perspective; the content itself doesn't matter. If you have the "dimensionless" experience, you do directly sense that everything is static and eternal - and that daily life is like exploring a pre-existing memory block, recalling it moment by moment - so I suppose there is a benefit to that. The benefit it is: the search for enlightenment via experiencing ceases, and you realise the "purpose" is simply being. Resolution and progress is just the gradual dissolving of division, and there is no meaning in that, just as there is no meaning to the settling of the surface of a pool of water after it has been disturbed by a child throwing stones at a duck...

From the perspective of the Power outside "all of this", which our human meat-brains cannot understand.

Well, I'd put aside the meat-brain thing; you've never experienced one of those either. But what you're talking about, really, is faith that there is a Power external to you, right? One that has an independent intelligence and does things? I would disagree with this. (Because I don't think anything "happens" other than attention, in a specific sense of the term.)

...this could not have occurred in any universe I know or understand.

Uh-huh, but (and of course I don't know the details here) these things tend to only be a problem or amazing if you are holding onto the idea that there is stable world, sitting on a solid persistent substrate, that is external to your experience. This is not the case.

this is the universe's way of telling me that I'm on the right track.

The universe can't tell you anything. I say: it is a mistake to interpret the universe as "sending you signs" of being on the right path or whatever. All your experiences simply conform to your current "patterning". Correlations between the thoughts you have and what you sensorily encounter are common but seem amazing; but they arise from the same place and space. You can easily prove this to yourself by adopting a different frame of mind or narrative, and noticing how the world quickly seems to adopt the form of the "game" you have chosen. People who adopt the worldview of 'secret spies are everywhere and out to get me" will literally encounter a higher frequency dark-suited men happening to look in their direction while talking to their lapels. Others who adopt that of "there is an independent God who is looking out for me and sends me messages" encounter the corresponding thing. You have to actually experiment with this to truly realise it, but very quickly you discover the complete arbitrariness of the content of experience. The "patterns" you adopt shape the experiences you have. That's why I say there's no particular purpose.

(If you haven't already checked out the Kirby Surprise - appropriate name - interview on synchronicity which is linked in the sticky, you might find it interesting: here it is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-iMw9KA93U]. I disagree with his M-brane theory, but other than that, it's pretty much how it works in practical terms.)

Q1: Okay, let's stick with the software/game analogy and try different terminology. "The universe telling me I'm on the right track" can also be defined as programming feedback, debugging and error messages. If $x != 0 return error(). If $x == 0 return "OK". Any & every programmer in the universe has written statements like these.
The purpose of such a debugging statement is to let the programmer know what the program is doing, and alert the programmer in a way that's easy to spot & interpret. Weirdness and coincidences might in fact serve the same purpose.
I personally find it very interesting that at a time when I have been seriously investigating both relocating on a physical level to a new place and dimensional shifting, I'm now suddenly experiencing odd and unlikely events that happen to ding both of these items in sensitive spots. I'm not particularly surprised, because this has always been the way my life has worked: weird coincidences, random strokes of luck, dramatic foreshadowing as precisely drawn as in a book - this is my "normal", and always has been. Other people's lives clearly work differently, but this is mine.
ETA: one more twist on that analogy: That programming statement I wrote 3 paragraphs up?
if $x != 0 {return error();}
if $x == 0 {return "OK";}
In the language I'm pseudo-using, there is another possible case: in which $x is null. In which case it would be interpreted as equalling zero (and return "OK") but in fact not be equal to zero (and should have returned an error).
That's sloppy programming.
That's a glitch in the matrix.
:D

Man, I absolutely hate the software/game metaphor! (I speak as an ex-programmer. Perhaps it just gives me flashbacks of tedium!)

Of course, I agree that "The Power" is Me, but you are still talking as if this power (which is me) is too big to fit inside... me. Which makes it sound like you suggesting something along the lines that "you" programmed the game deliberately, took on a character role as a meat-brain within the game, and are now being "guided" by the programming you previously set up?

I tend towards a simpler notion which doesn't involve any activity at all. Namely: that all experience appears in the mind, that any ideas and narrative structures you have in mind are "overlaid" upon experience, and that this "dumb" setup inevitably leads to coincidence, foreshadowing, luck, corresponding to this. If, dissolved within our "conscious perceptual space" (what we truly are), is an Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments, then the patterns we are holding in mind "filter" that grid by association, such that only the moments that fit the those patterns are active. This inevitably means that what we have "in mind" will appear in both thoughts and events. You could certainly reinterpret that as form of "programming" I suppose - defining a pattern - although it's static so there's no sense of the universe being "run". But the essence I guess is: change the narrative, change the experience... which means that:

the only power we have, is the power to think/imagine.

But, y'know, it's all one metaphor vs another - and the devious trick of this setup is that whatever metaphor you hold in mind, you will have experiences which correspond to it. (Hence the notion of "active metaphors" in the sidebar.) If you look at the world as software, try to insert some new subroutines, it will literally start behaving like that's how things work. If you spend a lot of time contemplating an Entity God, he'll probably start helping you out.

The Power is me. I am the Power. But I can't have actual awareness of that...

I'd say you can, but you can't do it at the same time that you are aware of bodily sensations and a room around you. But then, neither can you be stood up whilst also being sat down. It's just about not being able to be in two states at the same time. That's not really a meat-brain restriction as such. Even if you can't directly experience it in an ongoing way in everyday life directly, at least we can infer it from your own intentional results, and know it intellectually as a result - and operate from that.

Level 49 hobbit wanderer, seeking fellowship, please send /tell.

Haha, good. As far as the universe being pre-programmed, I'd say the world started off more in the way a dream begins: hypnagogia fragments, gradually coalescing into a scene, and then a 3D-immersive environment. There's no "plan" or design, it unfolds according to whatever is implied by previous experiences - unless you deliberately intend a redirection.

Your idea of a "simpler notion" makes my head hurt. :)

Yeah, I do realise that my "simpler notion" isn't as immediately accessible, although it is very simplifying and makes it far clearer how to create change. (The edited basic version is here: The Patterning of Experience.) It involves throwing away notions of the world being a "place" and of you being in any sense a "person", but it gets more directly to your actual experience as it is right now, using the most basic intelligible metaphor, and let you interact at that level.

The changes I'm trying to prompt are both necessary, proper, and working. Even though not quite in a way I would expect or want.

Yes. Really, everything is taken into account. It's inherently the case that you can't "pre-experience" an experience in order to know it in advance - because if you do, then that's actually the experience. You can get what you want, but unless you complete go back to void and re-seed the world, you can't pre-know or define the path.

Every single one of us experiences the universe differently, and it's a mistake for any of us to assume another person can or should share our own experience.

Agreed. Kinda my overall view, that: there is no built in division or structure to the world ("all possible patterns are available"), but by our intentional mental and physical acts we gradually define such arrangements. The world then behaves "as if" whatever we think is actually the case. Your "big ME, little me" experience is one of the available options. No option is "right" or fundamentally true, they are just different. The only thing that is fundamentally true is: there is a me of some sort (which I can never see), and it is having an experience. Everything else is up for grabs. Or even not up for grabs, if that's the way you think!

But instead we just dance around in circles with imperfect and contradictory metaphors . . .

Very well put. Although I'd emphasise the stinger which is: the metaphors we pursue tend to be reflected in our personal experience, which means that we always seem to be right. I think that's the ingredient which makes agreement about specific content challenging; but we can agree "that there is an experience" and "that we are aware". And if we know that content behaves in that subjectively flexible way, we can avoid falling into the trap of arguing about the "right way" to describe things.

The problem with thinking: just obviously, a thought is an object which appears inside experience, and made from consciousness. So it can never capture or describe experiencing, or consciousness - in the same way that (metaphor reuse alert), although you can make shapes out of sand which duplicate to other shapes made out of sand, you can never make a sand-shape which captures sand itself, or the sandbox as a whole. Sand just "is" sand; the sandbox "is" all the shapes made of sand.

Q1: Of course we always seem to be right; that's because all the possible answers are equally correct. Which makes no sense within the established confines of the sensible universe, but is nevertheless true... once you get outside the confines of consciousness to the perspective from which you can describe it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need some Advil and coffee; as always, discussing this topic has caused me to imagine myself into the actualization of the metaphor of a literal headache.

Enjoy your imaginary medication/beverage combo! I hope it has the desired imaginary effect. I imagine that it will. Cheers for now...

...

Maybe we only notice the little things because they are little things, because they're small enough to be "possible" . . . Maybe the big shit happens all the time.

That's a great comment and I forgot to respond to it at the time. Retaining a "personal memory pattern" that persists when the "world pattern" shifts is a key challenge. After all, they are both part of the same larger overall pattern of "everything"; the whole thing shifts as one usually, as a coherent whole. So, you might say that performing a change deliberately is more than anything an assertion to remember. The act we perform is almost like a marker to which we attach the "how it was before" memory, so that it remains accessible via association.

In fact, the total pattern might be sloshing about constantly, but so long as it does so self-consistently, the apparent world and the apparent personal past tend to stay in alignment. Only if you are "holding onto" a particular aspect of this, does it get held steady, despite other changes. In "jumping", then, we try to detach from the world but not from the seed to which is attached our conceptual self and all tis memories. Probably all jumps are successful to some extent, it's just a case of the extent to which the old state remains. Total shift: only new-state memory so no apparent change. No shift: only old-state memory and so no apparent change.

(pre-coffee mumble-mumble-mumble) but then the things we hold on to, especially old grudges and so forth, doesn't that then just keep the stuff we dislike actively with us no matter where we jump? So "forgive and forget" isn't just a hoary old maxim, it's actively an instruction on how to maximize dimensional leaping.

Agreed. In older times (interpretations of the Bible even) the notion of "forgiveness" means to wipe the slate clean in a deeper sense, to literally "release it and delete it" such that it no longer exists. In this sense it's really: "forgive equals forget". Forget it or amend it in terms of the world's memory, not our personal historical memory of "stuff what I experienced".

POST: Did the two glasses experiment. Nothing happened.

Uh-huh, nice. So the glasses technique = "plausible if very unlikely" routes, rather than immediate discontinuity, in general. And the level of plausibility depends, really, on your own patterning to date. But if you've done it with intention, you'll always get results of some sort. See what happens over the next week or so.

So, which techniques are capable of producing immediate discontinuity? I'd find it much more convincing if I could experience that rather than something that might have happened even if I did nothing.

What, exactly, are you wanting to be convinced of? (Bearing in mind that nobody's particularly interested in convincing you of anything, although everyone's happy to help you towards any specific goal you might have.)

The problem is, "wanting to be convinced" isn't a very good goal - because it's nonspecific, and it's not really a goal at all. It's like "wanting to be convinced that I can run a Marathon" rather than "wanting to complete a Marathon". You best become convinced by targeting experiencing-the-goal, not by targeting being-convinced. "Techniques", of course, aren't capable of anything. Only you are. Techniques are just a path for your intention to be directed along. Which means a certain focus and commitment. It's relatively easy to get what you want through apparently "plausible if very unlikely" routes. But if what you are desiring to do is break your plausibility level, as it were, then you can work on that, but you'll either have to dedicate yourself to it (rather than "want to be convinced") or let yourself got insane for a while. Again, it's not the technique that does it for you, it's you that does it, so you have to actually commit. The universe isn't like a simulation running on a computer; it doesn't do anything of you. It's more like a static list of entangled facts or a complex diagram that you are scanning your attention across, and you have the ability to edit it.

Me, World, Experience

I want to know what kind of world I live in.

This is the crux of it, then. Really, I would suggest starting there, and working outwards from that. And I'd say it's better to phrase it something like this though, since it assumes less:

• What, exactly, is the nature of my current experience?
• By extension, what is the nature of "me" and "the world"?

That's something that can be established by direct attention. You can fairly straightforwardly satisfy yourself that everything you experience appears in your "mind" (although that's not really a very good word for it since it's not a personal mind), including any thoughts about a supposed external world. You can't think your way to this though, since you'll just keep going round the same conceptual frameworks; you have to directly perceive it to be the case, in the moment.

Cause, Effect, Experiment

I learn nothing via a "plausible if very unlikely" route.

It can be a slight Catch-22, this, because there's an element of having to soften up your own patterning in order to have more unusual intentional experiences - which in turn is effectively a widening of what counts as "plausible if very unlikely". And this applies to perceiving your actual experience too: you have to assert it in order to have the corresponding experience. It's a little like being a shape-shifter:

• If you were a shape-shifter, how would you describe the process of shape-shifting? You would just "become" the new shape; it's all you, so there's no one part causing the other part. Continuing with this: how would you work out you were a shape-shifter? The only way would be... to shift your shape. There would be no evidence of you being a shape-shifter between shiftings. Intention and deciding and all that, have similar problems: you reveal them by becoming them.

In other words, the more rule-breaking you want your experiences to be, the more you have to break yourself, or (and this is where detachment comes in) you temporarily suspend yourself in terms of patterning. The traditional way to prove the flexibility of experience it the same way as is used for all experimentation: repetition. Performing an intentional act and having corresponding results is the only way to establish a causal link.

Raise your arm now. How do you know that your arm wouldn't have lifted up in any case? How, exactly, do you go about raising your arm anyway? Do you really cause it in a particular way that you can detect, other than just "wanting" it to happen?

Maybe your arm is just part of the external world and you just assume it is "yours" and under your control because it is apparently nearer to where you think of yourself as being centred. Actually, your arm and the rest of your body are moving by themselves beyond your control, and the same applies to the thought that you do it. How could you tell the difference?

You get the idea: you can't answer these questions, except by repeating the experiment again and noticing a correlation between "asking" for the movement and "receiving" it subsequently.

Plan of Attack

So, unless you want to dedicate yourself to a bit of a blind reformatting (which you can do: it's essentially like meditation but with persistent intention) I'd suggest a plan of attack of this form:

• Spend time directly investigating the nature of your experience, to establish that it is entirely within "a" mind, and that you are "a" mind and not any of the content which appears within it.
• Perform the owl exercise for different subjects, allowing intervals between each experiment, see what appears in your experience subsequently. Repeat.
• Perform the two glasses exercises for different personal situations, allowing intervals between each experiment, see what appears in your experience subsequently. Repeat.

In other words, treat it as a proper study and conduct a structured investigation. Otherwise, through a lack of understanding, you can end up asking the philosophical idealism equivalent of:

• "If everything is really made from atoms, that means the world is mostly empty space, so how come I can't walk through walls?"

Maybe they've been encountering pictures of owls on the Web and elsewhere regularly all along.

I can't help but notice that you're thinking about this, rather than actually doing it. Either do the experiment, or don't bother. Without the experiment, you are completely uninformed. You're just sloshing about in your own thoughts. When the owl exercise kicks in, it becomes pretty obvious that it goes beyond confirmation bias. The reason it's dubbed The Owls Of Eternity™ is as a bit of fun, but it's relevant because the persuasiveness of it is that owls apparently come to you as events, and as encounters which suggest retroactive change. The progression of plausibility develops something like this:

• conf. bias => coincidence => synchronicity => "manifestation" => shifting => "jumping"

And the apparent location of the encounters like this:

• internal => external => eternal

The extended pattern thing, that's just what seems to happen, but anyone doing the exercise is perfectly able to be more specific in their intention and to decide what counts and what doesn't. Remember, the point of that exercise is simply a bit of fun to demonstrate (without having to put any effort in) the pattern-based nature of experience in a way that shows it's not simply selection from pre-existing scenes. Or at least, not pre-existing scenes in 3D; you could describe it as selection from a 4D environment. With that experience under your belt, you've got a flavour of the thing, and it's easy enough for you to design your own rigorous experiment if you like. Again though, nobody can prove anything to you in this area, just as, for instance, nobody can prove to you that you can be awake in your dreams ("lucid dreaming"), or that there's such a thing as experiencing oneness ("enlightenment"). Or that it's possible for you to train up and run the marathon. If you want to explore how your world works, then you'll have to conduct the investigation yourself. Nobody can do it for you.

In other words: Do it, or don't do it, but if you don't do it, there's no point in discussing it.

...

That doesn't sound like jumping to another dimension to me. It sounds more like The Secret.

Well, it's not that. It more like an umbrella term for "applied philosophical idealism" to force 'glitches' via pattern-shifting. I guess: read the links in the sticky post.

[This] revolve[s] around the notion that physical reality can be manipulated by the mind because it is a construct of the mind.

Pretty much - although exactly what we mean by those terms matters; strictly speaking there is no physical reality as usually thought of, and the word "construct" implies a separation that isn't there. You might see "patterning" as the generalised idea behind all experience. From moving your arm to changing the world, it's all the same. It's a ground-up account. For instance, here, the idea that the world is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" is pretty much thrown away. Space and time arise with experience and not outside of it. In this sense, this is a bit like "magick" but rooted in the philosophy of, say, George Berkeley's Three Dialogues, Kant's transcendental idealism, and the non-duality traditions. An applied metaphysics that deals with a personal subjective slice of the world, a private copy within you. Meanwhile, the Law of Attraction (attracted from where, how?) and The Secret (worse) are basically crap magick, poorly applied and without a properly defined worldview. They do have the advantage that you don't need to flip your world around to think about them; but they have the disadvantage of not really making sense or working very well as described.

POST: Has anyone experienced this?

[POST]

Detaching, meditating, reflecting have been regular events in my awareness these past weeks.
These past days, something interesting showed up. I've been losing my sense of 'location' during random times throughout the day and night.
It is not lethargy or anything, I eat well and work out. During those few seconds of this phenomenon, it is like everything feels automatic. I apologize if this sounds pretty vague, but since it is so unique, I've nothing to compare it too. Please feel free to ask questions, to help me better gauge this.

[END OF POST]

The feeling of being everywhere in the current experience while being nowhere in particular?

Q1: Well it's not like that 'infinite conciousness-nirvana-Buddha' thing. At least, it doesn't match up with what I imagine infinite conciousness to be.
But like. . .you know how you get your feedback that your body is like this - that your hand is resting there (hoping this doesn't sound confusing); I've been losing my 'location' when I'm not feeling the usual feedback. The '3D hologram experience' becomes a unified location. Like one thing. As if there's no divident between the cloud in the sky and my smallest toes. Rather than being the avatar of my body, it's like being an avatar of experience itself, but this avatar has only had seconds of it at 3-4 times every 24hrs frequency.
EDIT: Wow, this shit is weirder than I realized. But that's the best I can describe it to be.

What you describe is what I mean, I think. It is like you used to be located, say "here, behind my eyes" while your hand was "over there", but now the whole thing is "you, here"?

The sense of location you usually have is just that: a sense of location. You are always the whole experience even when you have that. What's happened is, that sensation is occasionally fading out. It's a little like having had a tense neck for your whole life, and so always being more aware of that location and seeing other things as relative to that. One day, your neck relaxes, and that artificial set of relations falls away.

Assuming that's what you are describing...

Basically, I'd forget all esoteric descriptions of this; they add another level of abstraction and complication I think, usually written by people who haven't had the experience. I see it pretty simply: if you allow your experience to relax, you attention naturally opens out (or dissolves) and you become, or recognise that you always were, "the full imagination room".

POST: Both methods

Remember, you are not meant to be "making it happen". That part happens automatically. It's a "dumb" patterning mechanism. So doing multiple method simultaneously, and suggesting different possible paths - that's beyond your remit. Your job is simply to make a firm decision about what your target state is, perform an exercise (which activates that target pattern so it's overlaid on subsequent experiences), and then don't interfere. Because the moment you do the exercise is the moment the change is made - your new deterministic trajectory is laid out before you - and then it's just a matter of waiting for the corresponding experiences to be encountered.

...Okay, firstly remember that what matters is here is that you know what it is you want - you are not "sending a message to the universe" or anything like that. What you are doing is, finding the target state (which already exists) and connecting to it and shifting to it. Which gives you an idea of how to word things: "I would like a better job" is the description of a state where you would like a better job (i.e. don't have one). "I have a great job" is the name of a state where you have that job. What is important though, is that you pause and actually do access that state. This isn't difficult, mostly people do it automatically, but it's worth being conscious of it. Just pause now and think of something or someone you desire, but think of them being with you and what that would be like. When I say "think of", I mean in the sense of pausing and waiting for the feeling-sensation that would go with having them.

Now, this is something that comes to you, not something that you create. Typically this felt-sense appears in the mid-area of your body. Having this is the difference between just making images in your had, and actually having connected to the target state. All techniques are really based on accessing the target state in this way, and then manipulating it into being the dominant contributor to you experience going forward. So for the Two Glasses Exercise, if someone was unemployed but wanted their dream job, their labels might say something like "unemployed" and "dream job". Or if it were a specific job, then: "journalist". The "contemplation" part of the exercise is meant to encourage you to pause and connect to how those situations feel, to the states they represent. This is why you don't need to write out a big description; the words are merely handles which you attach to the actual states.

Hopefully you can see that it doesn't matter how other people feel about you, or even where things supposedly are in the world. This is all about states which lead to experiences. In the same way as there are no people, places or objects behind the screen of your TV, there are no external people, places or objects behind the 3D-immersive sensory experience you are currently having about being-a-person-in-a-world.

In and of itself, I don't think passing doubt or belief are important, except in the sense that you attend to them and end up embracing the doubtful view (but that is what people tend to do). For the duration of an exercise, you have to - if not believe, then commit. Just like, I dunno, if you were lifting weights but didn't really think it was possible, you would even really dedicate yourself to it - you wouldn't fully intend the result.

The glasses exercise to some extent misdirects you with its form obviously being unrelated to the situation and outcome, so that you neither believe nor disbelieve, you just do it without really thinking it through, and probably don't give it much thought. That's why it's a good demo. Once you have given it critical thought, however, you likely need to persuade yourself of a model that goes with the exercise, or go for a 'surrender' approach (accept that "the act is the fact"), so that you can commit again. Although I'd say: I've you've read Goddard and stuff on patterning, it should be easier now to see it as "state anchoring and triggering" in an "imagination space", perhaps?

If you can take all that on board, think of this moment as your super-flexible staring point, then take it from there - that's probably the way around this.

This is probably a dumb questions, but what about weed and doing the exercises? If only for the complete forgetfulness, it's hard to interfere when you can't remember even doing it :P

Haha, well I've never tried it, so feel free to experiment! You don't really need to forget; you just need to not interfere and so end up re-intending things. It's actually pretty robust if you do the exercise with full commitment; after all, it is an actual state change.

POST: The question every newbie asks

Dimensions are really a metaphor for changing your state. A radically changed state results in an experience like that of changing worlds: facts shift. Your experiences are the structure of mind (there is nothing beyond mind: try and find something that is!) and so all changes are a restructuring of the mind really, it's just a matter of how deep and fundamental the changes are.

Ah so that's why you can't go back.

Right. If you really did return to the precisely the original state, it wouldn't be much use to you - things would play out in exactly the same way (because the subsequent experiential path is the state). Plus it would be a sort of suicide, in a way.

The true original state is the perfect universe.
All imperfect worlds are "holographic projections" (metaphorically speaking, from the perfect world or universe.
Hence the true goal IS a return to the original state.
One may ask why did we ever choose to leave the original state.

Surely the universe is always perfect? There's nothing necessarily special about the resolved state where no patterns are activated - the state of undivided wholeness. "Eventually" it has to become divided again - in quotes because this is all "before" time and therefore eternal. And in truth, it is never really divided, because it is always one thing "taking on the shape of" an experience of division. So I'd tend to say that "goals" are human concepts, and the universe (or, consciousness + patterns) has no goal really, not in the sense of a considered aim, other than the tendency to resolve itself, and then become unresolved, and so on, from a strictly personal perspective.

POST: What if

I think: the simulation concept is just how modern-day folk get their heads around the fact that there is no solid world behind the images, sounds, and textures of everyday life - and that intention is global rather than local. (It does more than just move your arms.)

It's all imagination. The concept behind "jumping" is pretty much that you are changing the "world-pattern" to a desired state - which is similar to the concept of "changing a line of code" or "updating a data structure". It all amounts to: updating facts, and subsequent experiences being in line with the new facts. The problem with the simulation metaphor, though, is that it tends to encourage you to think that there is something "running" the simulation, that you are "in" something, and that other events are "happening" other than your present experience.

Are the people arround me are just philosophical zombies or are they experiencing life like me?

They're just images, but then so is the person you assume yourself to be. No person ever experienced anything - just as no sound ever experienced music - although as consciousness you might have "person-formatted" experiences.

It goes something like this -

What you are is an "open conscious space" which has "taken on the shape of" an experience, the experience of being-a-world-from-the-perpective-of-a-person, as a strand of thought. This means that the world is not to be viewed as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", but rather a "resource", a toy box of available patterns from which you-as-conscious-space select facts, and therefore experiences. In effect, you have a private copy of the world. This gives us: that you are not a person either, that all apparent people are a continuous part of the environment or world-pattern, and that you are experiencing being everyone right now, in a sense. Which leads us to: Are there no other consciousnesses, and if so do they share worlds? Well, there is only one consciousness (because it is "before" division, location and time), but for convenience we might think of there being '"parallel-simultaneous" experiences, each a copy of the world, not sharing a space but sharing a resource. A sort of contextual overlap.

If that seems to dodge the question, then I suppose it does: it's one of those "does not apply" things. You could always experiment with adopting the concept of "all people are aspects of me" for a while, then adopting "all people are separate individuals" for a while, and noticing how that shapes your experiences. It's more informative than trying to work through it in thought, since we hit the hurdle with it: since time and space are part of experiences rather than the context in which they arise, and thoughts are experiences, it is not possible to think beyond your own conscious space in its current format.

Thanks for this detailed reply, I tried to observe if people behave autonomous and came to the conclusion that they do, only didn't I take into account that my beliefs format my observation. I also paid attention to (inanimate) little details, and even the smallest things like stains or bits of dust seem to be filled in the moment I step into a room, which is quite astonishing it's somehow hard to put into words but sometimes I think if everything is just in mind how come that even the littlest changes get "saved"?

Well, I wouldn't say "just" in mind really, that sounds a bit dismissive! ;-)

The mind has no resolution; things aren't stored as data, like in a computer. If you think of each "fact" of as an unbounded pattern, then the current state of the world is the combination of all patterns. What resolution do patterns have? None. It doesn't matter how closely you look, you always see... more pattern. Because there is no resolution, there is no limit to how much complexity can be "stored" or "dissolved into" the same space. Is there a limit to how many of those patterns I could stack up? No, because the result is always one pattern. As for "saved" it's better maybe to say that things become "fixed" by observation; they become "defined". The whole landscape of patterns is already there, the relative contributions shifting around somewhat as you intend and change your views, but when you make an observation then that particular aspect becomes a "fact" and does not shift so easily anymore; its intensity and its relative contribution is heightened.

So, we have that:

• There is no resolution limit; there is no granularity involved.
• There is no "saving" in the sense of adding a piece of data into a storage facility; the entire world-pattern always exists and is eternal.
• What does happen is that the relative contributions of the component patterns varies (the relative intensity of "facts").
• When an observation is made, that "defines" or "fixes" that pattern, such that it becomes an observed fact or certainty; it has a very bright relative contribution as a fact.
• Intense patterns are not necessarily irrevocably factual; their intensity can be reduced again however it rarely occurs to people to try, since they seem so certain.
• The beliefs you have adopted are also effectively high-contributing patterns - "minor facts" - and so shape your experience accordingly.
• Whenever you adopt a new view of the world, the patterns associated with that view become more dominant, and your subsequent experience falls into alignment with that.
• You can create "fake observations" within the mind and have them contribute as facts just as much as a "real" observation would.

It's relatively easy to explore these ideas and test them out for yourself, to see if they are accurate or not. Spend a week "pretending" that things are a different way from how you think you know them to be, and see if things don't line up to provide you with evidence of your new approach.

Thanks again, this is a really good framework. I will think of some ideas to investigate this for me further, people seem often talk to much and philosophize about this instead of actually investigating their experience. At the moment I try to get rid of is my tinnitus, so annoying :(

Agreed absolutely. These things that are difficult to put into words and concepts are actually remarkably simple in experience. To be honest, if everyone just ran with the metaphor of the Imagination Room and explored it thoroughly, the rest of it would be self-evident. Meanwhile, your comment reminded me of this thread [POST: [META] Tinnitus and the Mandela Effect - who here has experienced both?]. Never had tinnitus but I imagine it must be very frustrating.

I now seem to understand why van Gogh cut his ear off, but it should be fixable, maybe I'll go with the two glass method since it's hard to imagine quietness when your ears are ringing the whole time.

Go for it. (Maybe knock out a couple of canvases before you do, though - just in case.)

Ear is still there :D But the tone switched from the left to the right ear and is now much more subtle, feels like it's fading.

Well, that would be a different sort of masterpiece, I suppose - and priceless in its own way!

...

Q3: it is not possible to think beyond your own conscious space in its current format.
Any links or suggestions on how I can reformat?

You can overwrite formatting, but of course you'll never get outside of your space, because: a) it has no boundaries anyway, and: b) you are it. But it's all about what can arise within it. So, you change your formatting by ceasing to continually assert the current patterns, and by imagination (which really means: to bring forth a particular pattern and have it contribute).

Helpful as ever, just one more quicky. What led you to this path?

Long-term interest in mind, perception, reality, thought, philosophy, magick, science, art and creativity. The attempt to understand them all at the same time, leads to: a) confusion, and then: b) maybe this. Hopefully some use comes of it - only you can be the judge! ;-)

POST: How to share information with alternate selves?

Not literally of course - since there is no other "you" as such - but as with anything, you can use the "as if" concept as a route to an experience, which includes the acquisition of information and skills. People have done this in different guises for a long time, I think - whether that be via "higher selves" or other apparent externalities.

I agree, I believe my "Holy Guardian Angel"/Higher Self/Spirit Guide/Silent Self is a timeless, dimensionless, all encompassing version of me

Yes - I'd clarify it by saying that, intellectually, we tend to confuse the content of our sensory experience with "us", when of course we are the larger context in which, and of which, that content appears. Which is a bit like saying that the part of the room you are looking at right now is "the room" while the room in its entirety is "the higher room".

Or better: that you are an like an origami paper fortune teller - you shape-shift yourself in order to prioritise a subset of potential content, then unfold yourself to reveal certain aspects explicitly into the senses. You are always the entirety, it's just that only one "slice" is expanded as a sensory-space experience at any one moment. That's why there's no point in looking for higher selves to "do" things for you as such; your higher self is more like the extended pattern of the world (as your present state), rather than an intelligence which can operate independently of your intelligence. You-as-context is the only intelligence.

POST: Does telling other people interfere with jumping?

Keep to a subjective perspective here, I'd say. What does telling them imply about your view of the approach, and how will you receive their responses? There's really no benefit to telling anyone, because there's no sense in which they can contribute to your effort - however, seeking confirmation or taking external comments seriously can reflect an underlying view, and affect your ability to commit fully to the intention (which is what really matters).

I kind of get this; I've discussed the possibilities with my roommates (my girlfriend, and our roommate who is pagan and who commented that the two glasses feels like a spell to him). I've told them that I am planning on trying it, but I likely won't tell them when I do.

Well, a "spell" is just an action you take where you deliberately use the fact that: although sensory experiences are apparently local, all intentions are actually global. It's better to keep things to yourself, because the extended associations that are triggered as/with your intention include whatever worldview elements you have adopted. Better to make up your own mind, and proceed from there, therefore (in my view).

Yeah. I briefly considered actually doing it with them present, but I thought quibbling over word choice might limit the results.

Right. Also, the word choices should arise naturally from your own contemplation of the two situations or states. Which is not to say that you can't 'jump together' with people - but really it is a "single-user model" (although not a personal model) and is best approached that way I think.

It does raise the question if bigger changes could be achieved with more minds agreeing as one, though. For instance, a group of people all doing the two glasses together with the intent of swaying an election?

This is not a consensus reality. (Unless you really want it to behave like one, of course, in which case you might have the corresponding "as if" experiences. I would say it's a 'personal preference', but that would probably just be confusing...)

I get that, but if several people all jump for the same (outside-of-themselves) thing, would they not end up in the same dimension? I suppose they could each jump separately as well, and end up in the same dimension. Just wondering if the jump would be easier to achieve if they were all reinforcing each others' beliefs.

Maybe if we reformat it this way...

Okay, so there is nothing outside of you; you never go anywhere, you just change state. A "dimension" is a metaphor for a more discontinuous change of state (moreso that a "shift" or "manifestation"). And to speak of "each others' beliefs" doesn't really make sense...

However - Generating for yourself the experience of gathering with a group of people, and performing an act, may provide a "plausible excuse" for you to allow changes to happen. You are creating an unusual act to which you can attach extraordinary meaning or causal power. So it can definitely be beneficial in that way. After all, what does staring into a mirror really do? Or pouring some water? An occasion to focus, to intend deliberately, knowingly.

From a comment I made earlier today:

• Act + Intention + Detachment = Shift
• Assigning a meaning to an act is what gives it causal power.
• Assigning a meaning to any experience can give it causal power.
• Habitually observed cause-effect relationships are the outcomes of previous assignments or associations.

Where an "act" can be a mental or physical act (since of course they are both the same thing: experience in the mind), and any object is also an aspect of experience. So experiencing "a group of people doing something" is as valid an "enabling act" as any other.

Something to ponder:

• How can you tell whether you have "jumped dimensions" with other people vs you have "jumped to a dimension" where the versions of those people are just very similar vs you have changed state but have left those people's patterns intact?

And: does it matter to you?

Q1: As someone who feels more sure of herself when other people agree, the validating force from outside could make the difference in whether or not a jump is successful. So it "matters" in that sense, though I suppose the argument could be made that if I need the validation from other people, I don't have a strong enough will, or can't detach enough, to jump at all. =/
(For the record, I'm trying the Owls-but-with-a-creature-that-is-not-an-owl, and haven't tried the Glasses yet.)

Actually, my underlying point is that it's all you so it doesn't matter how you go about it. What you truly are is the "container" within which all your (apparently) personal experiences appear. You have infinite will, as it were, although you have whatever "formatting" you have accumulated so far. Which is to say, we work within our own preferences and according to our dispositions.

So, gather a group of people if you want to - but preselect them according to their enthusiasm and alignment with your intentions. No point gather together aspects of yourself that are antagonists in your story of change (oh my god, what phrasing, heh, sorry). But the glasses technique doesn't depend on your belief. (In any case, belief doesn't make things happen or not, it just influences whether you actually commit and do something properly in the first place, or whether you later undo it by rewriting it.) Just follow the instructions properly, including the last point, and let it take care of itself.

The hardest part of all this is actually being okay with the fact that the change occurs in the moment you do the exercise, and that there's nothing more to be done after that. The results will come to you (or rather: you will encounter the results) without further deliberate action.

POST: Need Advice About Jumping.

Okay, so the "no effort demonstration" method is the Two Glasses Exercise which, typically, results in "plausible if unlikely" events taking place leading to your goal. That's a good way to experiment and prove to yourself that there's "something to this". One of the key ideas in this subreddit is that we don't believe anything unless we have demonstrated it to ourselves.

Going beyond that...

You should view so-called "jumping" as a change in the state, like you've updated the facts of your personal copy of the world. You aren't going anywhere, you are changing the content of your ongoing experience. There's inevitably some collateral shifting for big things, but you are not going to have to worry about overnight discontinuous changes of everyday things - parental disappearance, bad boyfriend reappearance - because you are unlikely to seek to push past the "plausibility" boundary. You might think of this as a way of "speeding up" changes in the direction of your intention. The most direct approach is to directly engage with the concept of The Imagination Room but really, for the sorts of things you are likely to want to explore you can keep it simpler - and you should treat this as an exploration, of the nature of experience, as much as a quest for results.

So, try out the glasses technique for anxiety and depression first, follow the instructions properly - including the last one (which says you should carry on with life afterwards, and let things take care of themselves, because the results will come to you). Once that has settled, perhaps repeat the exercise with your weight loss in mind. Again, this approach is for "plausible but very unlikely routes" to the change happening. Feel free to try out the mirror or patterning approaches, but I think it's better to start off with something less obviously daunting and disruptive first.

Off topic - It's amazing to me that people sometimes approach this whole thing without consideration. Imagine if there was a computer program that you could just type new facts into and they would become instantly true. Would people just start bashing away at the keyboard without having experimented to find out what the correct command syntax was? Um, yeah - me too. :-)

POST: Does Dimensional Jumping actually really work?

Why does it seem impossible?

My guess: you are thinking that the world "out there" is of the same format as your current experience, that it is all laid out in space and unfolding in time and you are exploring it. In other words, that spatial extent and unfolding change are independent properties of the world, rather than properties of experiencing. If you glance around the room now, shifting your attention around it and taking in different parts one at a time, you might say that you are selecting a "2D slice" from a 3D environment. What if the overall experience of the room was like selecting a "3D slice" from a 4D environment? And what if that 4D environment was itself a "slice" taken from an "infinite gloop"?

But none of that matters, really, if you don't try out the demo exercises and find out directly (see sidebar).

POST: The 2 Glasses Experiment failed to work for me.

Be more informative?

The 2 glasses experiment is apparently a big lie and can't deliver something specific.

Oh well, it didn't work out for you - at least you did the experiment. Now, you can either investigate why it didn't work, if you feel it might be worthwhile doing so, or you can just dismiss it and carry on with your life.

I'm dismissing the whole subreddit, boy-o.

Not quite yet, it seems! ;-)

Q1: Dude, today I did the two glasses and my desire manifested in two hours. I got exactly what I wanted. You should gotta chill out after, and know it's done!

Q2: I was very chill after the experiment... I think the main problem was I was asking for something very specific and not the usual vague stuff that can coincidentally get noticed later on unrelated to anything at all...

Well of course, all results are coincidental - in the sense that you perform an act with the intention for a specific result, and a short time later that result you wanted "coincidentally" happens, in this case by apparently acausal means. (By which I mean it is not logically causal in terms of the world's apparent structure.)

The only way you rule out "just" coincidence, is to do the exercise multiple times, such that the "unlikeliness" builds up to such an extent that you have to think it's starting to look more like causality, than just blind numerical overlap. If I were you, I'd give it another go. The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate something about "the nature of things" really, rather than to be a tool, although it is that also. It's a zero-effort, zero-commitment demo of what might be possible. So I wouldn't be too dismissive of the whole thing based on one try-out. In other words, if you are doing a "one and done with it" approach here, then that's fine if that satisfies you there is nothing to this, but personally I'd give it another spin (perhaps for something you're not too invested in, not too reality-breaking, but is still very unlikely), given that there are a reasonable number of people reporting positive results here. More than think New Zealand has moved, even.

Q3: what you resists persists. you obviously were worrying about it failing thus feeding that option energetically.

Q2: No, I was the exact opposite. I really believed when the mod wrote 'it really works!', it would really work. Talk about hitching the wrong wagon to the wrong star, etc.

Oh Roril, really! Why would you hitch to anything or anyone? It's an exercise designed to demonstrate something without requiring anything on the part of the participant, which happens to double up as a tool. More often than not, because of its construction, people get a result. If they overthink it and so don't get the full result, they still usually get "patterning" in their experience relating to it. If there's nothing - then the next step is to give details and 'debug' the process. (Everyone here is here to help.) Or if someone's not interested in doing that, they can just move on. Rather than, say, seeming to take some sort of personal offence at it all...

The sidebar is pretty clear on the correct attitude to take.

POST: [deleted by user]

Quick answers -

Although the state change occurs at the time of the exercise, and you may experience a "felt shift" at that time, it's not required or to be expected. You can think of it as having updated a single fact in the world, with that now incorporated into your subsequent experiences over the coming hours, days, weeks. I'd say the most important thing is to be 'allowing' of the shift - which is to say to not be obsessed with the change (which tends to reassert the problem, hence "carry on with your life") and to be okay with whatever happens (why it's harder for things which really matter, unless you have reached a point of surrender). In particular, you have to be open to things moving as a whole, because everything has to move a little in order to have one thing change. Hence the joke imagery of an extra tin of peaches appearing in your kitchen cupboard, as a "collateral shift".

Meanwhile, because you've outsourced the change to an operation on external "handles", I'd say things like strength of will and desire should not matter. You might contemplate what "will" and "desire" actually are. Are they things that you can experience? If you are experiencing them, what is the detail of that experience? Certainly, a sense of effort is not an relevant to making change. Are those things a sign of resistance to shifting? Is a "desire" perhaps just a difference of location in your perceptual space - a pattern which is localised "over here" rather than arising "over there"?

Let's explore -

For the fun of it, let's maybe do a ground-up exploration. First of all, what words did you choose and how did you go about choosing them?

Looking at it from the other end of desire -- Can boredom hinder the shift? I find myself getting somewhat indifferent to some of the stuff that I have 2-glassed eventhough I don't have them yet, eventhough I believe they will make my life better in the longer run. Won't being too pleased with the status quo prevent me from grabbing the right opportunities that present themselves?

If you've already done the exercise, it won't affect it I'd say - the update has happened. Unless you actually spend time deliberately thinking about being bored about those things. The indifference may actually be related: you can't desire something you already have... so just carry on, let experiences come to you.

I'd like to explore the meaning and the nature of experience.

Well, that's really what the subreddit is about, I'd say - the rest of it is the icing on the cake. And it's a nice cake; it's not a Battenberg one.

As for your current intention, two thoughts. The first is just that it might be taking a while, as in the results are in place but a while away, because logically for it there's (literally and figuratively) a lot of distance to cover. The second is that if you might take a pause and, sitting quietly, "ask" your inside what the best word for each situation is, what words really belong to the situation. The more your view of experience shifts toward it being a "patterned space" rather than being a body in a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", the less barriers there are to things happening very quickly - after all, it's just a matter of overlaying or triggering a desired pattern on top of your awareness.

POST: Reducing to one word? (two cup method)

My recommendation - You contemplate the situations, and let the word arise from them. You just "sit with the situation" (in the belly, as it were) until it forms in to the most appropriate word. This is what makes the word a "handle" onto the situation or state, rather than simply a disconnected term. If people create the word unthinkingly, it generally is such a handle. When people instead work it out intellectually, it's much less so, and you're more likely to get results which are just the extended pattern of the word, rather than the specific situation. (The instructions are written in a way that's intended to encourage that "just follow the bullet points" attitude which means you don't overthink things.)

So ideally, then, "the word comes to you"; you do not construct it.

POST: Is it possible to be forcibly shifted by another you? Is it possible to shift to a universe that is worse than this one?

There is no "other you", so those questions don't apply (see text and links in sidebar). Certainly, it's possible for your state - for that is what is meant by a "dimension", albeit with a specific meaning of "your" - to shift to one from which a less pleasant ongoing experience arises. However, from this perspective there is nothing "out there" to "force" anything at all.

My thoughts are a bit abstract on this topic

Well, that's part of the point of the subreddit: to explore how we think about this stuff, test what is true by attention and experimentation. The question to ask is: what exactly are "you" right now? Only when you've answered that clearly can you work out what it would mean to "jump". You also need to ask yourself, what is "the world"? Is it a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time"? A place in which you wander about, as a body? Or is it more like a "set of facts" which constitute a state, from which our experiences arise?

Suggestion: We never actually experience ourselves as a body walking about in a place; we never have that "outside view" of ourselves. That's just something we think. Our actual experience is subjective; we never experience anything at all outside of our minds. Even our thoughts about a world outside of our minds - they also appear inside our minds. Our minds have no outside?

Anyway -

So, imagine if what you were truly was a sort of "open aware perceptual space" with no content in it. Then, a "3D-multisensory image" appeared within it: this moment. This includes your body sensations, the visual image in front of you, the sounds dotted about at various positions. You are not any particular part of that multisensory image, although you identify perhaps with a particular location (a dot behind the eyes, perhaps). From this point of view, your ongoing experience is like a series of "3D frames" appearing in your perception. Each frame is pretty much consistent with the last, as if there was a set of stable underlying facts behind it.. If suddenly your experience changed such that it seemed as if those facts were now different, that would be a "dimensional jump".

Related metaphor: The Imagination Room

POST: Tried the Two glasses

Q1: Great to hear they're feeling better!
I experimented a little the other day without actually using the glasses. My dad hurt his knee and he's a UPS driver (doesn't work out well for him) I summed up the current and the intended states, and visualized the changing over and the next day he said he hadn't had to take any pain medicine since the afternoon before.
I just smiled and told him I was glad and the rest he's been getting must be helping. :)

Nice. The next experiment would be: don't even bother with the visualisation, "just decide" how things are.

Have you used this technique? Just deciding, I mean. I'm also glad that both of you guys had success. TG, one more question, have you ever tried the 2 glasses technique for more than one intention at a time?

See: The original Just Decide call to arms and the related posts, Overwriting Yourself and The Patterning of Experience. The issue is to not interfere with the subsequent unfolding of ongoing experience, and in effect counter-intend the state you have "decided" into place, once you've done it. (Which is why the final instruction in the two glasses exercise is written as it is.) The original idea was for body movement, then extend it to everything.

EDIT: Your edit. So, I wouldn't go for two unrelated changes within a single exercise. Do one, wait a while, do the other. Remembering that the true purpose of this is experimentation and exploration, rather than just a quest for results. And if we're going with the patterning model, you're going to make all sorts entangled overlaps, and you'll struggle to come up with composite words to capture two situations. Seems too much hassle!

I wasn't clear on my second question. When I said intention, I meant can you perform the technique once, per intention, but for multiple intentions. Example: I have 5 intentions, so I do the 2G five times, each time with a different problem/outcome in mind.

Oh I see - doing each intention from a fresh, separate setup. Yes, that's fine. Leave some settling time between each one though I'd say - ideally at least a week, definitely more than a day.

Thx, TG. Funny that your screen name initials are the same as the "Two Glasses (Technique)."

Yeah, I have to admit I was temporarily a bit confused by a couple of posts when people first started using that abbreviation for the exercise!

POST: Change your beliefs change your world

But what exactly is a "belief"? I don't think it's necessarily a straightforward thing to answer, at least not in a way that leads immediately to a strategy for changing one's experience.

Q1: For me, there exists an interaction between the concept of "intention" and that of "belief". Intention is a specific action that I am capable of performing, through the application of my capacity to will. Belief seems to be then a word used to explain my expectations that I carry around my reality, which in this model would be intentions without active, aware participation. It seems to me that my current expectations about my reality, which are the only practical applications of my beliefs, are limitations upon my ability to intend. In this sense, without active and aware participation, beliefs serve as a proxy for intentions that are created unknowingly, or ignorantly.
In the concept that you can "change your beliefs and change your reality", I would say it is more accurate to claim that becoming aware of, and taking responsibility for, all of your "beliefs" would reveal that your current reality has been created by those intentions that have been occurring without volition behind them, or with an ignorant volition. The true creative power is the intention, or volition.
Looking back at this, and OP's reply above also, it seems the word belief is another name for past intentions. When you view it that way, and with the goal of most effectively causally affecting reality, to me the most constructive method would be to willfully create new intentions now without regard for "beliefs", rather than attempting to change those patterns of past intentions. In fact, the very act of acknowledging those past intentions as a pattern called a belief, it is essentially the creation of yet another intention, reaffirming the power of those past intentions.

I broadly agree with this. I do think that "belief" is probably a word best avoided (see comment above) unless we narrow its intended meaning. If we instead just go straight for "the patterning of experience" - as an accumulation of intentions, as you say - then we have an actual model to base our approach on, and a line of investigation to explore. Then, we can reserve "belief" for what we think is possible, when we are thinking about what is possible. The belief itself does not dictate what is possible, only what range of experiences we are likely to intend. Obviously, there is some overlap here, since to think about the possibility of something will to some extent intensify that pattern and make it likely to arise - it is a minor intention all of its own, as you say - but that is not what most people mean when talking about the effect of beliefs.

It seems to me that all though all deliberate thought has a state-shfiting effect, there is a useful distinction to be drawn between simply thinking something (e.g. thinking "owls" for a while) versus asserting that something is true (e.g. thinking the fact "owls are filling up my life" until it is fully intensified). Although the process is the same - a pattern is strengthened relatively via attending to it - it's the additional context of the latter which I think deserves the title of intention (asserting a fact of the world), as opposed to simply thinking (dumb pattern activation).

So, pretty much as you say - except that I'm keeping "belief" as something that refers to the conceptual structure one has about the world, and not necessarily part of the factual "world-pattern" itself, because sometimes those two get conflated, leading to a misunderstanding of what is being done. (Which is perhaps why people sometimes wonder why what they believed was going to happen, didn't. They were looking at the wrong "strand of thought", a parallel construction about the world, rather than the world itself as their dissolved state.)

But it is definitely an open question for me, one that I would love more opinions on!

I think this is the point where we realise that one of the hurdles we have, and one of the mistakes we can make, is the initial tendency to confuse the auditory or visual imagery of a thought with being the intention rather than simply a sensory handle onto it. The intention itself is a felt-meaning-context and not necessarily even much of that - a very subtle knowingness-pattern. But not that either! It's a dimensionless fact, I suppose. The experiential aspect depends on the intention itself, and more.

We might think of it as a sort of a reverse insight, perhaps?

By this, I mean that sometimes we encounter a situation and suddenly we just know the full extent of it. It doesn't come in the form of words and images, and you'd struggle to call it even a feeling as such - it is just knowing. When we intend something, what we want to do is sort of create such a knowing and intensify it. Of course, we don't actually have to do this directly - it's probably much easier to perform a physical or mental act which simply implies it - but if we are serious about our experiments, that's where we're heading. Anyway, the more that we release our hold on body tensions and other held patterns which result in ongoing sensory noise - via daily releasing and exploring "just-decide" and so on - and the more we settle out into a nonattached allowing, the more this background felt-sense becomes clearer in general and moves into relatively greater prominence.

This is what I was trying to reach for in my early outline post: The Patterning of Experience

In the end, the difficulty with defining what "an intention" is and what "intending" is, is that it is not actually one thing. If we called it "changing the landscape" then the experience of doing this would depend on the current and final states of the landscape, and whether and in what way we were looking at the part of the landscape we were changing. Changing "flat" to "hilly" would likely have a sensory feeling of "hilliness", for example. If we were standing on the part we were changing, we might have a massive experience of vertigo... but if it were some more distant contour, it might be a much more subtle experience. And so on. One of my earlier metaphors: If you were a shape-shifter, what would "shape-shifting" be like? And what would be the difference between thinking about your target shape, and actually shifting to it and becoming it? Suggestion: the experience would be one of change. What we experience when intending is the experience of shifting, not of the actual intention/intending itself as such, since these terms do not refer to specific things at all.

TL;DR: An intention is not an object, and intending is not the creation of an object.

EDIT: Re-reading this comment, it comes over as a little unfocused, I may do a re-edit if I get a moment to make it clearer.

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Interesting ideas.

My first point on this:

If we intend for something to happen but our belief structure won't allow that to happen were letting our past dictate our future.

is that to me, there is no retrocausality with intentions. Instead, I would see the situation you've described as an intention for something to happen, but before the actual realization of that intention, another interfering intention is caused by you, and ultimately the more recent of the two intentions is actualized.

Another interesting thing to look into is your idea:

it seems like beliefs are one step below intention, it like we create our intentions from our beliefs.

I can see this being true from the perspective that up until this point, we have experienced a certain set of things that create in us credible possibilities for experiences. Intentions that I put out, in this context, must be drawn from within this set of possibilities, otherwise I wouldn't properly create the intention, and the failure would reaffirm my over-arching intention to sustain my context of possible experiences.

A question this brings up would be: is it possible to change your beliefs with intentions? If beliefs are truly one step below intention, then that seems impossible. What do you think?

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I'm going to disagree completely.

I'm not sure that you are disagreeing?

My question to ponder was, what is a belief, meaning what is its nature? Is it a structural pattern of our subjective world? Or is it a concept, an abstraction we use when we think about our world? Do we sometimes use the latter to refer to the former, but then focus on trying to change the latter? That's what I mean by, without nailing exactly what we mean by "belief", it's not necessarily obvious what it is or how it shapes experience. For example, if a "belief" is a thought about the world that we have, which leads us to take some actions and not others, that is one thing. Altering our beliefs would alter our behaviour, perhaps, but would not in and of themselves alter our "reality" except indirectly. For instance, we "believe that" we are unattractive and so we don't choose to approach that attractive person, or avoid situations where we feel being unattractive will embarrass us.

On the other hand, if a "belief" was bound up with the actual factual structure of the world, then to alter our beliefs would be to shift reality itself (using those terms loosely). In this case, it is about more than our beliefs shaping our action choices. We are reshaping the world itself.

How we approach changing our beliefs - or if we even bother to spend time trying to do so - depends on what we think they "are", in this sense. Personally, I think the word "belief" is near to useless, since it is poorly defined and tends to conflate these two things - and more. It is better to avoid it completely and go for a metaphor that is cleaner and has less baggage, and derive our own targeted language from that.

If we think of ourselves as a lense that views the world our beliefs could be the mud or dirt on the lens.

That's not a bad metaphor, and points to the distinction I was making, perhaps. Dirt on the lens doesn't prevent you taking a particular action in principle. However it affects the likelihood of you conceiving of and then taking that action.

If we believe that we are 'unattractive' then we are. Simple.

Now, this is where I think that, practically speaking, it's useful to separate out those two things. It may be possible for the world-fact to be that you are beautiful, but the thought-fact to be that you are not. The two do not necessarily line up. Dimensional jumping, as usually outlined, could involve changing the thought-fact or changing the world-fact. The former would change your behaviour, but not necessarily the reaction. The process is the same, however the intention (the "pattern" that is intensified) is different. However, there is some overlap, because people often approach doing one or the other by using an intentional pattern or image which actually represents part of the other. (Again, why I'm keen to make the distinction.)

We 'jump' realities all the time, by simply choosing something. Usually our beliefs keep us in a certain pattern of choosing so we stay within the same reality.

See, for me, this is where things break down or getting confusing. Having the experience of choosing isn't the same as shifting state - which is what I would call "changing your reality" - so choosing alone isn't what we're after. What we actually want is to intend a change of fact. Sometimes we accidentally link a change of fact to an action (assignment of meaning, "doing this means-that that is now true") but mostly our actions arise without any such link, and therefore do not change anything. This is why sometimes changing a belief (your thought about the world) simply changes the fact of your thought and perhaps your likely actions, and why other times it changes the fact of the world. Only when we alter a belief while having, perhaps without realising it, decided that doing so means-that the world will change, does a change in "reality" occur.

I don't think I've said this very clearly at all, so I'm going to try and summarise what might be a streamlined view:

• The world is a pattern, a list of facts of the world, which arises as sensory experience.
• Beliefs are a pattern, a list of facts about the world, a parallel construction, arising as a strand of thought.
• Changing a pattern is done by intending the change:
  • a) Changing a fact of belief will alter what thoughts arise in your awareness as your ideas about the world, and hence guide what you think is possible, hence what you might subsequently intend.
  • b) Changing a fact of the world, meanwhile, will alter what sensory experiences arise in your awareness as the world itself - what events will apparently occur around you including your spontaneous body actions.
• Since we can do b, then there's actually no need for a. At worst, we should spend some time intensifying the fact of "believing that b is possible" as some sort of broad meta-belief, and then we don't need to worry about any other beliefs at all.

TL;DR: Beliefs don't actually affect what is possible, so perhaps we don't need to worry about them at all?

your trying to change your physical world in hopes that it will change your inner world

Really, I am starting from the viewpoint that there is no inner or outer. In other words, everything arises in "mind", which has no boundary. (It's fairly easy to confirm this directly.)

From this, what we might call the "physical world" is just one particular strand of experience arising in that mind. We might consider this as a "3D-immersive strand of thought" that fills up our awareness. In parallel, also arising in mind, we might have a stand of experience which is our "thoughts about the world". Two strands, both internal and accessible, one arising from the world-state, one arising from the person-state. If changing our beliefs corresponds to a change in the person-state, then it might lead to a change in what we are likely to intend as a change in the main experience - because we have changed the structure of the "person" part of our experience. However, alternatively, we can simply intend directly onto the main experience itself - the "world" part of our experience.

Basically, I'm suggesting that playing with beliefs, while it can be ultimately beneficial, might be somewhat of a distraction, since it operates in a roundabout way and the meaning of "beliefs" isn't clearly linked to the structure of experience. If it's all internal, then we can simply assert facts directly. Don't "believe" that you are attractive, instead directly access the fact and make it true via intention. Again: operate on the world directly. There is overlap here, since if someone works on their belief of attractiveness then they might actually end up using an intention which asserts the fact - but not necessarily. You can end up having lots of thoughts about being amazing, but not actually being amazing, because you intended new beliefs, not new facts.

Related idea: Why aren't you a precog? When you think about what's going to happen tomorrow, what you believe is going to happen tomorrow, why does it tend not to correspond to what actually happens tomorrow?

If you don't believe something will happen then it most likely won't.

Why, though? How exactly do beliefs change what is likely to happen? It seems that there is a missing step in that description?

What is a precog?

Typically in science fiction, someone who has "precognitive abilities" - they can see into the future. I was suggesting (just as a playful idea to explore) that if it was our beliefs that defined the world, then surely we would be able to access the future, since it would simply follow from our beliefs. This suggests that beliefs are just ideas about the world. To be a precog, we would want to access the facts of the world, the current world-state.

if you don't have a belief that you are a certain way then you can't intent for it to happen.

I don't agree. If you can think of something, then you can intend it, since "an intention" is the thought of something being true, and "intending" is the intensification of that thought. Believing that you are a certain way doesn't limit your ability to intend otherwise, although believing that you are a certain way and that it cannot be changed might mean you don't end up trying. Beliefs are like a model of the world - a parallel construction in thought. Sure, if you use the model to judge what is possible and act/intend only according to what it says, then you'll be limited. Alternatively, you can just ignore it and intend what you want anyway, because the model itself has no causal or restrictive power!

Spending time changing beliefs is just time misspent - all you're doing is using the same intention process that you'll use later to change the world, to just change how you feel, so that you then feel confident enough to intend changing the world. You don't need that stepping stone, though. In the end, the only thing that really changes a belief is the generation of and experience which contradicts your model. So why not go straight for intending a change in contradiction to the model? (That's kinda what the two glasses exercise, etc, are about.)

This is where "faith" comes in. Faith to intend something contrary to your ideas about the world - and faith to not interfere with that intention subsequently, and to see where it leads. Faith being perhaps the only way to get to the meta-belief to rule them all...

Where that leads to is, I suggest: that intention is the only process that there is, the only operation that ever occurs. Beliefs aren't the "core operating system" of your mind - they're just another static pattern. The world is a patterned landscape of static facts which gives rise to experience; intention is how you change the landscape; there's nothing else.

I see what your saying. An intention creates action, where a belief is more static. So if you want to change your world then intend for it to be so and the beliefs will follow.

Yes. So I'd phrase it more generally perhaps, and say: intention creates experiences, of body movements but also of events. (Remembering that all of your sensory experiences arise in your "mind space", so the car horn "over there" is just as much a part of you-the-experiencer as your foot tapping "over here".)

A change in your beliefs then follows naturally from those experiences. You do not need to believe something in order to intend it and have it happen - however, you must at least have the confidence or detachment to resist interfering, since that will be a re-intention. You can think of each deliberate intention as shifting you onto a new deterministic path, a new sequence of experiences, which then unfold "by themselves" in your awareness, until you re-intend again. Between intentions, the world is "static" in the sense of being like a fixed logical landscape of experiences that you are scanning your attention across. So, "dimensional jumping" is a metaphor for an intentional change of this landscape, one which shifts it so dramatically that your subsequent experiences are "as if" you had changed to a different universe.

...

And then it would take a tremendous amount of energy on your part to stretch your energetic field and body that much.

These are some beliefs worth examining, of instance. What is this "energy" stuff, what's my "energetic field" exactly, and how does it relate to my body? In fact, that is my "body" - is it an object, or a collection of sensations which arise in my experience plus a conceptual framework that I've attached to them? And so on.

POST: The Mirror method is a trick of your mind

That is, I would say, sort of missing the point? That mirror-staring can be used to shift consciousness state is well-known and is an old technique. It's what you do with that, is what's interesting, I would imagine. (Whether it has to do with "dimensional jumping" or not probably depends on what you think "dimensional jumping" actually is.)

For further reading to add to those links, see also this post and links: Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams

(Not advocating the mirror thing here, but) the point would be that entering an altered state of consciousness would not itself be "jumping" anyway. That would just be an experience you had while looking in a mirror. "Jumping" would involve witnessing a subsequent change in the world in line with the intention you had while entering that altered state of consciousness. The link was to suggest that our ongoing experience is a "mind trick" anyway, and that the content of that experience isn't necessarily important when it comes to a technique (other than perhaps confirming you had entered an altered state, if that's what you wanted to do).

We might ask, I suppose: what is an "altered state of consciousness", anyway? The phrase doesn't really explain anything, other than saying "this experience = that name".

Science is great. But we have to remember what science actually is: a catalogue of a certain subset of apparently intersubjective experiences, plus conceptual frameworks - "connective fictions" - which are used to link together certain elements of those experiences. So long as we don't confuse those descriptions with being "what is true", so long as we don't reify our abstractions, then it's an incredibly useful approach. However, if we forget that and confuse a particular set of concepts with "science" and with "what is", then we will start to think that the our invented concepts define what it is possible to observe, rather than our observations acting as inspiration for useful concepts.

Many people who aren't in the business (and some who are) claim to "love science" when what they really mean is that they are enamoured of certain ideas some people have come up with - sort of "science fiction" in a more literal sense - and incorrectly treat them as being true "out there", causing things to happen. Perhaps they really mean they "love the illusion of certainty that misunderstanding or self-deception can bring". (EDIT: "Dogma" would probably be a better term to use.)

and thus make a "dimensional jump", which really is nothing but a metaphor that describes the experience, perhaps not the physical rules themselves.

All descriptions are metaphors - experience is primary - so it's really a case of what's useful.

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I love how TG completed dominated this discussion 😊

He does go on a bit though, that TG guy, I've noticed. He needs to hire an editor or something. ;-)

POST: Question, Opinions?

The reason I hate this subreddit is it doesn't treat the concept with respect...

I think the sidebar and related posts are pretty clear on what the deal is? People actually have to read them, of course.

The problem with "magic and the occult" is that, plainly put, it's full of its own set - actually multiple sets - of accumulated bullshit. Now, there's loads of useful stuff for inspiration, but a lot of it does lead people to take concepts and rituals as literally true. Even chaos magick suffers from taking its meta-approach as affecting something that is independently real. Basically, there's a lack of an underlying philosophy and this leads to confusion and superstition, especially for the everyday reader who just wants to find out what's really going on (ahem!), or how to solve a problem. This subreddit, meanwhile, takes direct experience as its starting point, and treats everything else as "active metaphors" or "patterning" - not even that, in fact. Not only are "dimensions" not treated as fundamentally true, neither is "the world". You are conscious, you have experiences that appear within you - that's it. There isn't "literal" anything.

confuses people who are "role-playing".

Who's role-playing? And why would they be confused?

Q1: Not only are "dimensions" not treated as fundamentally true, neither is "the world". You are conscious, you have experiences that appear within you - that's it. There isn't "literal" anything.
This is the foundation from which to begin. It's too "slippery", too security-challenging to deal with at the very beginning. It can even be a very off-putting, scary or sacreligious idea - "Nothing out there?? What?!" It's necessary to work one's way to this in steps. Then, suddenly, the light shines. (You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.) !! <3 Five million hearts to TG. (My cats maintain their changes, by the way.) :)

Cats are the pioneers!

POST: It feels like jumping doesn't work anymore

Q1: I've never been a fan of the Owl technique as that's basically Baader-Meinhof/frequency illusion. With owls it's especially effective as it seems to be a pervading decor/design influence these days. If I tell you to make a note of the number 18, for example, you'll start seeing it a few times a day.

Well, you can choose anything, it's only by repetition that the point is there, and choosing something more unlikely perhaps. The idea is that eventually you notice that, it's not exactly pattern searching from a pre-existing environment as such. They are called the Owls of Eternity for a reason. But of course, people's milage may vary and it's how things play out for you. At the time "owls" were chosen as the pattern, they were not a particularly pervasive decor/design influence - they were chosen for their relative lack of presence in daily life.

Q1: You can certainly choose anything however I'd be willing to bet money that should the element you pay attention be say, wombats vs. owls, you wouldn't notice as many. Owls are and have been a mainstay of hipster culture for a while now (I remember them over 5 yrs back) to the point where people get ironic tattoos of them. Heck. even Justin Bieber has a tat of one.

Ah, but has it always been true that they have been a mainstay of hipster culture for 5 years??

Joking aside, since it's ideally about something that isn't dominating your life currently, then if owls are common for someone, it makes sense to pick something else. You can never really separate it out from the idea of noticing things that are there anyway, but that's really part of the contemplation aspect - a call to consider that very thing - and perhaps discover that the experience of doing so pushes it somewhat "unreasonably". Again, it's really about leading yourself to think about the question: "Experiences are a pattern selection from what, exactly?"

Q2: yes. Also called "selective awareness".

For sure. Although we might ask ourselves: selective awareness from what?

Q2: ...from all the other input the pattern-recognition software doesn't pick up and filters out.
If you connotate "meaning" to anything - it will pop up more often in your daily life. That's also how propaganda in the news works: See that guy that looks middle-eastern? Probably a terrorist - since your brain links terrorist with this sort of appearance. That's why you shouldn't watch TV.
If you want to see owls, you'll see owls.

The propaganda example is slightly different, I'd say. I'd call that associative triggering of an "internal" extended pattern of meaning by an element, rather than pattern selection of an element from a pre-existing "external" environment. It's a step further along.

So, if you'd been brought up to think of owls and related birds as terrorists (for example), then you might report "seeing more terrorists", but that's not the same as "seeing more owls". When I asked "selective awareness from what?", I was thinking about the fact that we only ever have a post-selection experience in the senses, we never experience the pre-selection environment. This might lead us to wonder, what is the nature of that "source" environment?

We might assume, as is common, that it is a stable "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". However, aren't we then ignoring the possibility that 3D-space is itself a selection pattern, filtering from a larger environment? Perhaps the environment from which we select our experiences is more like an "infinite gloop" than a place. In other words, perhaps all of experience is "selective awareness". In which case, we see owls not because we are selecting pre-existing owls from our spatial environment, but because we are selecting pre-existing owl-experiences from a set of all possible experiences.

feel the space around you <> feel the air around your body

This is a good example, and speaks to the underlying question, which is about the nature of experiencing, rather than the content of experiencing. Although you don't need to meditate to notice this, some sort of pause-and-contemplate is helpful in realising that your experience of yourself is something like an "open aware perceptual space" in which sensory experiences arise. As in, directly know this to be true, rather than just think about it. And from there, as you point out, one is better able to make an informed choice about things, to deliberately select their own patterning, rather than simply have experiences unfold in alignment with whatever state you've accidentally ended up in. As for the "raw experience", which would correspond to no particular "sensory slice" being selected from the "infinite gloop", I quite like this account for giving a sense of it: Victor C: Other NDE Type Experiences [https://web.archive.org/web/20120606184332/http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/victor_c_other.htm]

As to the objective reality thing, it comes down to where the line is drawn between "my patterning" and "the world":

• At one end, "the world" is a three dimensional place and is of the same formatting as my sensory experience, and I'm just noticing some stuff and not other stuff.
• At the other end, "the world" is an "infinite gloop" of all possible patterns, and there is no solid underlying limit at all to what I can experience. In that case, my patterning effectively is the definition of the world, and it's not that my formatting happens to coincide with the world's formatting - rather, they are identical and the same thing.

The tricky bit, of course, is that it's impossible to tell the difference between the two by simple inspection, because we will only ever experience our own patterning, the world filtered through it. However, we might perhaps work to reshape our filter and see at what point doing so no longer brings about changes in experience. That would be the solid underlying substrate, the "objective world". Exploring this is what this subreddit is really about. Experience is primary. If we actively test our assumptions about how the world really is beyond the format of the senses, do they hold up? Or can we in fact push through them?

Meanwhile, in another conversation, we wondered whether it would be possible to intend into existence a can of Ubik™, a product which itself dispenses existence...

Finally, I'd suggest that consciousness can't be measured, because "measurement" is something that arises within consciousness, is "made from" it. Current favourite metaphor: You can never make a sandcastle which captures the meaning of "sand" not of "the beach". You can only make sandcastles which correspond to other sandcastles, and even then only in certain respects. Consciousness, in this metaphor, is both the sand and the beach.

Finally #2, science and physics correspond to a catalogue of sensory observations (sandcastles), those with regular and repeatable aspects, and a collection of conceptual frameworks (parallel-constructed sandcastles in thought) which describe those aspects via "connective fictions". Science comes after observation, and hence after creation. It's a formal method of describing what has been seen, rather than establishing what is true.

Snappy summary:

• Observations dictate the valid or possible models.
• Models do not dictate the valid or possible observations.

Q2: Exploring this is what this subreddit is really about. Experience is primary. If we actively test our assumptions about how the world really is beyond the format of the senses, do they hold up? Or can we in fact push through them?
To me this is the essence of occult studies. Or atleast what I find attractive about it. Dimensional Jumping is just a "system" or syntax one can use to help bring about these changes in our filters and therefor reality.
I love the sand metaphor. Good stuff.

Agreed. Unfortunately, the term "occult" has become somewhat damaged I think, with all sorts of unhelpful associations. In its raw meaning - "hidden" - it makes sense: we are dealing with the non-sensory aspect of things, the background "state" that is what we are and from which sensory experiences arise. Hidden as in literally "not seen". So I prefer to think of this exploration as, I dunno, an active exploration of metaphysics with regards to the shaping of experience. Hence the idea of "active metaphors", whose adoption patterns one's state in alignment with their structure, so that subsequent experiences arise "as if" they were true. In other words: The Patterning of Experience.

Q2: All the different systems that are exploring "the hidden" (Eastern & Western Magic, Religions, Parts of Psychology) are bringing their own synthax. I sometimes wonder if there are actual whitepapers on this subject matter - but I don't even know which syntax I would use to write OR describe the study.
Very interesting thought on the "adoption of patterns" and truenes. One can chew through a book and "feel" it's effects. One starts to adapt the ideas and patterns learned from the book and projects them into the own reality tunnel. Exploring metaphysics is therefore something highly subjective when it comes to the left-brain, analytical explanation of the matter. Many texts describe the same stuff. The stuff that makes up everything outside of a fixed and unified syntax or coherent pattern - but still connects everything.
This raises the question for me if it's even possible to do so or if it is needed at all. The answers in the end have to be felt and experienced by oneself.

Yes, so there are many ways of saying the same thing, but they are not necessarily compatible. The ultimate truth of the matter itself has no syntax because it is "before" division. So I'd say that it cannot be thought, the fundamental truth, in the sense of being thought about, because of course the "state" is a single continuous pattern. It is your actual experience right now, which is "one". And to think about it would involve separating from it and surrounding it, which is not possible. To think about something (construct sandcastles) requires that it be divided into parts, or building blocks, and then have those parts related to one another in mental space. Therefore it's not possible to think about that which thought is made from, but neither is it possible to think about one structure of thought using another, if they use different building blocks. Particular building blocks allow you to build some sorts of sandcastle, but not others. And to someone who grew up in one sandcastle, with one sort of building block, other sandcastles made from other types of block would be complete nonsense, totally insane, even though they were just as coherent and self-consistent and "true" within themselves and true ultimately.

So, we end up with a situation where we cannot understand other sandcastles from the perspective of this one - the only way is to expose ourselves to that structure and allow ourselves to be patterned by it, and thereby establish the forms that allow it to make sense. We must become it. And that we cannot understand the ultimate nature because it is "before" understanding - we can only be it. The great secret, of course, is that we always are it anyway. We are always "that which is and which takes on the shape of experiences", regardless of the particular shape or state we have adopted. This again speaks to our point: you cannot get outside of yourself in order to observe this truth, you can only deduce it by adopting lots of different shapes and realising there is no limit - in the same way you can only establish that there is no limit to experiencing by intending lots of different experiences. The only way to prove that you can be anything (because you are not anything in particular) - i.e. you consist of an infinite set - is to challenge your boundary assumptions by attempting to push through them.

And to push through them, there is no path or technique as such - you have to simply assert a new pattern, in order to deliberately re-pattern yourself, and thereby make that new pattern "true". Hence the benefit faith and commitment when it comes to this stuff, even when the present sensory experience seems to conflict with what you are intending.

I feel like it's already pretty interesting by simply committing to observe what is happening to yourself every day or make it a habit to reflect on how you changed [https://youtu.be/d1UgUEbBmDE] in regards to your environment, current emotions, stuff that bothers you etc...

Yes, I think just "being the background" and observing things rise and fall is important, and the starting point for everything else. If you can't "cease and stop generating interference" then you are likely going to be lost in reaction to content, rather than recognise yourself as the context.

POST: Like a Balloon - Become lighter than your 'surroundings'

[POST]

Balloon :

A Balloon being Lighter than the air around it is a good symbol for Reality Shifting. It has the ability to move up the dimensions.
Become lighter in order to ascend quicker. Drop the baggage that doesn't belong to you, drop that weight, and things will speed up for you. Lighten-Up to get Enlightened. Reality is only a reflection of what you are 'holding on to'. Also, to extend the metaphor, when you fly in a plane, you are charged for excess baggage'. (So Like the Balloon play with the idea of Becoming Lighter than your 'Surroundings' and thus slipstreaming yourself up through realities closer and closer to your highest Joy, symbolized by the yellow Sun.) Which as a spiritual journey is a direction more than a destination.

[END OF POST]

Q1: I don't think what we do with the 2 glasses and mirror is truly dimensional jumping. believe dimensional jumps happen - I've seen it happen collectively ...
but what we do with the 2 glasses and mirror is what people call magick .. it's "work" ... intention... manifestation ...
I think most of it happens and is outside of dimensional shifting.

Well, as someone else pointed out, it all amounts to the same thing: a change or a discontinuity in your ongoing experience. It's the degree of discontinuity that dictates which label or metaphor we tend to apply. There is no "outside view" from which to assess it (and that includes experiences which are "as if" viewed from an outside, since that experience is also inside). Wake up one day and you see owls everywhere after intending them? Patterning. Wake up one day and that girl you like calls you for a date after you did an exercise? Magick. Wake up one day and your house has changed colour? Reality shifting. Wake up one day and you're in a different house in a different city with a different wife? Dimensional jumping. Really, it's all just the "patterning" of experience.

So I say: use whatever concepts are useful to you, but don't get hung up on "what is really happening", because the more you experiment, the more it seems that there is no fundamental "what is really happening" other than: you are something-which-has-experiences and those experiences are "as if" some things are true (until they are not). Right now you just happen to be having the experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

Q2: Thanks, dude. You're awesome and I love your subs and posts and stuff, but sometimes you lose me with all your big words and heady concepts-- and I'm not that stupid a person. Have actually been wishing lately that you'd use a little more lay-speak, and boom here you are. Two thumbs up.

Yeah, it's definitely good to reign in the vocabulary now and again. What tends to happen is that it ebbs and flows - you start off with the "flabby" version of an idea and then a dozen conversations later you've streamlined it and made it more understandable. But then you bolt something else onto that, and the whole thing starts again...

...

"Inflate himself, just like a balloon" - apparently [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcP91tQ4ZSM].

POST: Would anyone be willing to talk about their dimension jumping experience(s) on a radio show?

A good starting point before agreeing to an interview about this, is to ask the potential interviewer:

• "What is your understanding of 'dimensional jumping' at the moment?"

Based on that answer, you can tell whether you are in good hands or not. In other words, whether it's a "check out this crazy shit" type of a deal, or if it's going to be a more considered, philosophical exchange which has had a bit of thought put into it. Not that everyone needs to have read George Berkeley's Three Dialogues or Immanuel Kant's musings in order to have a good discussion, but it's probably a waste of time having a conversation about this unless there is some prior background or interest in pondering "the nature and formatting of experiencing" - because without a proper context all this stuff seems apparently nonsensical. But, y'know, it's for everyone to decide for themselves whether this would be an appropriate channel for all your dimensional jumping conversational needs; it might still be fun maybe possibly.

Just to interject quickly:

I suppose any opposition to the approaches discussed on this subreddit would be a key talking point, but obviously this would depend on the answer to my first question.

To my mind, this is immediately an error (in this context). To anticipate building a show around opposing viewpoints - basically, to construct a controversy - prior to there being any viewpoints, surely highlights that this is the wrong approach here? "We'll find out what these guys think and then find someone who thinks the opposite."

It's a well-worn and uninspiring format, I tend to think, when the topic is one that needs background, rather than being an argument about a social issue or whatever. I generally much prefer shows and podcasts which are more collaborative and therefore informative - "We've got these people on, let's find out all about their topic and their view of the world, being sure to pick up on anything which seems unclear or incoherent". This is particularly true of subjects like this one, which isn't really about holding a belief or opinion. Primarily, it's about investigating your experience without completely aligning to any particular view. So there is no position to defend, necessarily, as such. However, it would be interesting to get a selection of people on who have different angles on the central concept - the nature of reality and how to explore it and conceive of it - as opposed to, um, trying to select opposing viewpoints without having an advance understanding of those viewpoints. Anyway, here are a few underlying ideas off the top of my head (others might disagree):

• Our descriptions of the world are not the world-as-it-is. They are parallel constructions in thought.
• The experiences you have dictate the descriptions which are valid or possible, but the descriptions you adopt do not dictate the experiences which are valid or possible. (However there may be an exception to this.)
• There is a distinction to be made between fundamental truth (the nature or context of experience) and relative truth (the content of experience).
• By performing experiments we can differentiate between these categories, and apply the results in useful ways.

So basically: investigating the nature of your personal experience, and as a byproduct perhaps generating useful results in addition to information. Which aspect of that people are attracted to more, is up to them. A "dimension" in this context, is the current state that you are in (at least, according to one of a number of different metaphorical descriptions of the nature of experience). However, this doesn't mean that you are a person in a world that is in a particular state; it means that you-as-experiencer are in a particular state, which is prior to your actual sensory experiences of being-a-person-in-a-world.

Yeah, I know. So it's probably worth reading the sidebar and the stuff linked from there, and actually playing with this a bit, I would say. I mean, you can just play around with the demo exercises and see what happens instead, but those are just the starting point for exploration and contemplation really.

I appreciate your preference in media and share a similar enjoyment for informative content but feel that just because a forum contains two differing viewpoints it does not mean it can't offer the listener an opportunity to learn.

My point was more that you were looking to set up a for-against dynamic for your show, without really knowing what the "for" would be! How are you going to have two differing viewpoints, when the topic isn't viewpoint- or belief-based as such? Of course, it could be reframed in the sense of "who's the most useful philosopher?" or "is such-and-such possible?", but my gut feeling is that it doesn't apply. Note that it wasn't really a criticism or concern as such, more a personal perspective on what I think works better with certain topics. (I tend to think that the now-default adoption of the "report the controversy" or "set up an objective frame" approaches, independent of the nature of the topic, has rendered a lot of topic-based mainstream journalism and interviews largely worthless.)

So - not a direct criticism of your take, I hope you realise.

Perhaps the uninitiated person might disagree with your viewpoints which would result in a compelling discussion.

Certainly that's a more promising starting point. How to pitch it though? Since the focus is on attending to your personal experience as it is, and trying something out and judging the results for yourself, the underlying viewpoint is sort of a "meta-viewpoint". In effect, the attitude is that there is no fundamental "how things work". I suppose that in itself is something that can be discussed. But even that is no more than a potentially useful viewpoint; it is not claimed to be "true". (You might just end up with people arguing that they experienced something vs they didn't experience something.)

So essentially (and please correct my mistakes) 'dimensional jumping' is a mindset that assists you in viewing the world in a less 'traditional' sense and therefore brings you closer to attaining your goals. Would that be fair to say?

I would rephrase it perhaps: that "dimensional jumping" is a mindset whereby you do not take for granted that the 'traditional' or common description of the world is true - although one does not have to reject it either - and are thus free to examine approaches and descriptions on usefulness alone. Something like that.

Perhaps I'm taking posts too literally but when users such as this talk about aspects of their life changing after 'jumping' are they speaking metaphorically or are they suggesting they 'jumped' and they now exist in another 'dimension'?

It's captured in the sidebar really. There's the exercises, and there's the general notion of using metaphors to conceive of and to describe change. So a "dimension" is a metaphor, but only in the sense that "the world" or "youtalktv" is a metaphor. We infer our current situation in terms of concepts, based on our experiences. If something dramatic changed in your experience, something which was akin to an underlying fact-of-the-world changing without your direct intervention, you might conceptualise that as being "as if" you had changed worlds or jumped dimensions.

In other words, it's a descriptive framework. What actually "happened" is: you were experiencing "this" and then you experienced "that". Everything else is metaphor and narrative. That applies not just to this example, though; everything that isn't direct sensory experience is in effect a connective fiction to some extent. Leading to...

The real question is: what is the relationship between our connective fictions and how-things-are-really (even though that is itself a concept)?

Having said all that - for sure, most people just try out the exercises and, perhaps, find that they get results. If they get results, and they are interested in investigating further, they might try repeating this and more ambitiously, to confirm there is something to it rather than mere coincidence - and perhaps contemplate what that means. Regardless, the description of "what happened" will be secondary to the experience, and is not "what really happened".

Putting all that aside for the moment, if I were doing a show where I was just talking to people who had tried experimenting with this stuff, while trying to avoid getting too abstract, I might separate it into:

• The experiences people report having had.
• How people "explain" the experiences people have had.

You could then have the usual discussions about coincidence, confirmation bias and so on (the first stops for accounting for unusual experiences), then if that followed through, something about the nature of experience and of how we account for its content using descriptions. The difficulty would be to avoid getting trapped in a "he said, she said" argument about the meaning of the experiences themselves, particularly if it's not possible to spend a little bit of time discussing some philosophical points. It can be like trying to discuss "sandcastles" without having first explained "beaches" and "sand". (And even then, without the direct experience those concepts have little value in and of themselves.)

EDIT: Added some headings to make this less of a block of text.

"Are the experiences literal?"

I think my key question is, putting all mindset approaches other than the physical techniques listed, are the experiences accounted in this subreddit literal?

The experiences themselves are literal, as in the person had the experience of those events happening. But any account in terms of a "state" or a "dimension" is just part of a conceptual framework, a descriptive narrative. This is fundamental:

The content of the experience is primary; the narrative is secondary.

The narrative provides a way of thinking about the experience, and perhaps acts as a source of creative inspiration too for possible approaches - but it is not "what really happened". But that's not new, of course. This is, not quite, in much the same way as "gravity" does not cause things to fall down - rather, "gravity" is the name of a description about things falling down (loosely speaking). Similarly, "the subconscious" is not really the source of mental events, it is a concept we use to form a connective narrative about mental events. And so on. The difference here (with the topic of this subreddit), is that the number of "observational touch-points" associated with descriptions of these experiences description is vastly reduced, since we are dealing with one-off events often, and the experience is a certain subset of the subjective rather than being pseudo-objective.

Experiences, Results & Explorations

For example, the use of the numbered hex headers is to confirm that a user has indeed altered their worldly 'state' to one where identifiable aspects differ to the 'state' they were 'in' previously?

Well, not really. The number is a bit of fun. For sure, if someone had the experience of the number changing then they'd definitely know something was up! But as the sidebar says, it's an "emblem of change" and potential.

This is a very interesting point. So you would argue that the majority of users find the practice of these methods more attractive than the end result?

In my personal view, the purpose of playing with this is to widen one's thinking about the nature of the world, and so on. If you get a result that seems, well, unlikely, then hopefully that might trigger a bit of thought as to how, exactly that result came about. Of course, that's down to the person themselves. They could quite equally just do it for a result. However, the framing of the subreddit is very much of this being an exploration rather than a set of techniques or a singular worldview.

'Beliefs' & Analogies

I like the sandcastle analogy and strongly agree that it would be necessary to provide a foundation of these 'beliefs' before delving into a person's experiences.

I think that's key, definitely. Although again, I'd emphasise that the only "belief" would be one that arose from having had personal experiences - i.e. the belief would be that there was something interesting going on. Otherwise (another analogy incoming) it would be like having two people have a discussion about "the nature of the night sky", one of whom had spent their evenings looking through one of those new-fangled telescopes, and one who hadn't. You can discuss the meaning of observations, for sure, but only if you have actually made the observations - looked through the telescope. To mix it up further: it's always fun to discuss a carefully-drawn map, but there's not much point in discussion the accuracy of maps if you haven't done some walking in the area depicted - or worse, if one person is referring to an shipping map while another is referring to a flight map.

He Said, She Said & Beyond Common Sense

Unfortunately the discussion would almost certainly fall into some sense of "he said/she said" simply due to the nature of said experience.

Which could be a bit pointless, potentially, because nobody is suggesting here that a particular set of facts are true - there is no position to defend. As the sidebar emphasises, it's about trying out a couple of things and seeing what the results are, to see if there is "anything going on". There is no belief system being advocated; merely useful or interesting ways to think about experience.

As you say, it'd be important not to get bogged down with this and certainly to take each instance on face value and analyse it with a fair and common-sense approach...

The stumbling block is that face value and common-sense might themselves be a problem, I suppose. There is no independently-existing "face value" or "common-sense" that is separate from an implied philosophical stance, and it is not always possible to translate something from one to the other. Sometimes you need to build from the foundation up, and make an independent self-consistent "sandcastle", albeit on the same beach and still made from sand.

To expand:

Really, this is just about pushing against our assumptions about the world and ourselves, to see if they are accurate. More than that, it's about pushing against our background assumption that our usual thoughts-about the world - or indeed any such thinking - is equivalent to the-world-as-it-is. How much of the stability and structure of my ongoing experience is due to "the world" and how much due to "my mind"?

So. We do some exercises to explore these assumptions, by perhaps blindly trying to do obtain some results that would not logically follow from our habitual narrative, and we play with constructing alternative coherent narratives and seeing if actions based upon those yield results.

For example:

Kant suggested long ago that the world-as-it-is is not formatted in terms of spatial extent and unfolding change (space and time), rather it is our human perception that is formatted this way. Furthermore, our thoughts-about the world really have very little to do with the world itself - they are "parallel constructions" in awareness - and are therefore not causal or limiting, except to the extent that they limit what we might choose as our intentions. It's not easy to have a discussion about these sorts of things in a "he said/she said" format, because one side won't be arguing about "facts" at all - they will be discussing the nature of facts, perhaps, and discussing experiences without really promoting any particular view of "what really happened"!

Disentangling Topics

I'm genuinely interested in how unusual topics which require niche background knowledge to fully explore, can be properly discussed in a way that's accessible to a wider audience, and is entertaining, without misrepresenting it. With something as experiential as this, though - with ideas that, although not entirely novel, are slightly counter to common-sense - it really is a challenge.

...

Good response.

I can't guarantee that your views won't be questioned or discussed with you.

Well, it would probably be a fairly boring show without that! :-)

To be clear, my comment wasn't intended to suggest that people should only go on shows where their views won't be explored and challenged - because those two things are what makes a discussion interesting and worthwhile. Rather, I was underlining that, because "dimensional jumping" is a bit of a loaded term, it's worth checking what someone understands by it, so that they know what to expect from the discussion. For example, if someone thinks that it's about "physically teleporting your body between multiverses that are all happening simultaneously", then that's probably not a good starting point. ("Dimensions" aren't places, as such.) Setting up a "skeptic vs believer" type show that presumes this as the underlying concept likely wouldn't work. In fact, the core of this subreddit probably involves being a non-believer in any particular conception of the world vs personal observation. Which does tend to make a discussion about it a little abstract and philosophical, if you go deeper. Perhaps not what you are looking for, depending on who you were anticipating using for the "skeptic" role.

Anyway, those are my thoughts!

POST: Question regarding manifestation

since there's really no way that I can think of for me to solve it

Be wary of straying towards specifying the "apparent how" of the desired outcome here, perhaps. You don't actually "solve" the situation at all; you assert the fact of how you want things to be, and the solution arises from that as a spontaneous extended pattern. The idea of imagining the immersive scene is really to assert that that "moment" will be a fact. If that moment is a fact, then the property of continuity of the world implies that all the other moments must fall into line with that new fact. In other words, you yourself are not trying to come up with a story that you believe might happen; that takes care of itself.

The classic example being, you want a particular car. You imagine a scene of you being in such a car, feeling the feeling of being there and it being yours, thus intensifying that pattern as a contributor to your ongoing experience - making the fact of the existence of that moment true. You do not make up a little story about how you came to have the car, or any other circumstances surrounding it. You simply assert that the moment is true, and that pattern will be overlaid upon your world, in addition to the intentions and implications that you've already accumulated (with some being relatively diminished if they are contrary to your asserted outcome). You can prepare for worst-case scenarios if you feel you must - even though, in fact, you are best to simply deal with such things as they arise, since they won't ever quite correspond to your thinking of them - but do it briefly and don't dwell on it. Deliberate rumination is literally the intensification of the things you are thinking about, increasing the relative contribution of their patterns and implied facts upon your ongoing experience. While you shouldn't feel you have to battle passing thoughts (just let them pass), your deliberate, purposeful thinking should in general be focused on facts and scenes that you are happy to become more prominent in your life.

Again, to emphasise: You do not solve problems; you select and assert outcomes and the apparent path from here to there is spontaneously implied as an extended pattern, based on your accumulated intentions (and their implications) to date.

POST: Jumping for remission of mental illnesses

Good comments. For OP:

Just to emphasise: What you write down is not necessarily important, it's the assigned meaning - the linked pattern - that is important. We are not "sending messages to the universe". So it is fine to write "rich" provided that this is the word you are using to encapsulate something fairly specific.

There can be a tendency to avoid being too specific, actually, maybe out of a background fear that we might actually get exactly what we want. In the back of our minds, we are not sure we really do want the world to be revealed as malleable, perhaps? But since the underlying aim of the exercise is to experiment - to demonstrate that there is "something going on" - then there's not much point in it if the outcome is so vague that we won't be able to tell whether it happened or not!

Meanwhile, I like to avoid using the phrase "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon" [1] because it is usually employed in ways which imply that it is a "trick of the mind", without saying how exactly that works. In other words, it tends to assume that you are noticing things that were already there, and it's just that your attention was drawn to them (somehow). Now, it can be thought of in terms of pattern selection from a pre-existing environment, but the selection that occurs isn't necessarily like picking out "owls" from the 3D room you are (apparently) in - it might be more like picking out "owl-experiences" from an "infinite gloop". In fact, as we experiment with this, the latter seems like the more accurate characterisation.

__
[1] Our favourite topic. :-)

Q1: I don't know how relevant this is to this thread, but I wanted to give a recent example of how the "playful" YOU-niverse can work in our favor. In this case, I wasn't even trying to do anything. I was just "having fun" in my imagination.
I'll start by saying I try to keep my "vibe" up as much as I can, but sometimes I don't do well at this, finding I've had days on end of mostly sad/negative focus. However, in my world I've found that the "faith as big as a mustard seed" concept is true, and that if I keep VERY positive even, say 10% of the time, my Inner Being does take notice and respond.
"Playful" story: I was experiencing a general lack of funds, and trying to keep my spirits up. One day as I was walking, I thought about the saying, "Money doesn't grow on trees!!" I thought (playfully), "That's a lie. Money DOES grow on trees!" and had fun in my imagination walking up to small trees and just plucking off a $10 bill and a 5$ bill. I thought, there's no need to be greedy since I can walk up to ANY tree ANY time and just take what I need! I had HUGE FUN imagining this, and probably did it for at least 5 minutes. The next day, the thought came back to me - and I did it again....:) Then, I forgot about it.
Within a week, I discovered I could buy many of the food items I need at a little store called...DOLLAR TREE that is near my home. Every item, no matter what it is, is $1. I have purchased bagels, bread, cheese, pie, batteries(!) and even headache medicine there. I save so much money that the EFFECT is as if I have gone up to a "money tree" and plucked off $30-40 every time I shop there.
One could certainly say "Baader-Meinhof" since the store had already been there and I finally (I don't even recall how!) became aware that it had things I needed. I personally say I "made/took hold of" the Magic that is around us all the time. I wish I could stay in playful mode much, much more than I currently do.

Ha, that's nice, a little "money tree" pattern almost literally and in a fun playful way. And I do think that "playful imagination" is a very beneficial attitude, not just for generating outcomes, but simply for having a pleasant time in the moment.

Q1: I agree! I had no idea of generating anything but was just, frankly, giving myself a bit if fun and relief from my concerns. It became a terrific lesson for me. It illustrates, to me, anyway, one way what we call "detachment" can feel or present itself in that moment when the real "shift/creation" is occurring outside our conscious awareness. :)

It also points to the "dumb patterning system" that forms the basis of experience. If you intensify a pattern by deliberately attending to it, you will increase its contribution to your ongoing experience - regardless of your original purpose in doing so. (For sure, we use the term "intention" when referring to a more fully-specified pattern related to a desire, but its nature is identical.) There is no intelligence to it; there is no "universe" doing stuff on your behalf. It really is as basic as drawing N-dimensional scribbles on the "TV screen" of perception-awareness, and then encountering those scribbles overlaid upon subsequent moments.

...

A1: You missed the last step, which is carry on with your life!

POST: Jumping for remission of mental illnesses

Q: Can you elaborate more on how you connect depression (and anxiety?) To the body as unfolded experience. I tend to link depression and anxiety more to psychological factors than bodily. Also how come we can feel exposed and vulnerable with the initial changes of a jump (for depression and anxiety) when in fact every time I hit a clear state I feel such an emotional stability. It's messed up and understanding it maybe will help.

I wouldn't separate out bodily and psychological - everything you experience arises in your "aware space". Although you think of your body as being one "thing", your actual experience of it is a collection of disconnected sensations floating in "aware space", along with the visual image of the room your are "in", the sounds and textures, and so on. Your experience of "being anxious" and "being depressed" are also with that space. The "imagination room" is almost a literal description of how our ongoing moment is structured. When depressed and anxious, I'd guess, you probably feel that "you" are contracted, like a small ball of attention in which your whole self tries to cram its way in, and highly constrained. This might be in the head area, perhaps towards the back, and you might feel on high alert and not properly stable on your feet - or you might feel more detached and your body feel separate and very heavy. There's no single experience.

However, the common thread is being "localised" rather than "expanded", and that making you feel, as you say, both exposed (a small dot in a large world) and vulnerable (no boundary vs the world). And when change starts to happen, we often feel even more exposed as your attentional boundary releases and opens up. Once that's happened, though, then we are the most stable we can be: open in all directions, self-balancing and stable, the world within us rather than against us. Hard to describe, obviously, but hopefully something in that description makes sense when it comes to your own experience of it.

From your other comment:

Lying on the floor definitely works wonders over time - particularly if you remember that you don't only "cease" limiting your body and thoughts, but also your attentional focus. You let all of them roam where they may, allowing them to unwind and complete and dissolve and open themselves out. This prevents any accumulation of restrictive focus or intention over time. Which leads us to:

What leads to tension and depression and anxiety in the first place?

I suggest that there is a common bad habit that may contribute to these (and which the daily releasing involved in lying down helps alleviate). That is: when performing tasks or participating in social interactions, rather than simply "intending" the outcome and allowing ourselves to respond spontaneously, we intend the manual control of attentional focus and bodily movement. This has the effect of both intending the outcome and intending tension and constriction of space. For example, while reading these words, have you narrowed your spatial focus down onto the the screen, like a little ray of focus, to "make" the reading happen? Similarly, when you get up from your chair, do you grab onto the sensations of your legs and then move them by operating the muscles? Both of those are sure-fire ways to build up tension, and if you end up with a very narrow focus over the long term, anxiety and depression type feelings are likely to follow.

Instead, one could sit back and "intend" being an open relaxed space, filling the room. Then "intend" to read the words on the screen without deliberately controlling your body or attentional focus at all. Just "let the reading happen". You'll find you can stay open and relaxed and the reading will occur. Then, when you stand up, once again allow your attention to remain open and, instead of moving your muscles by focusing on them, instead intend being stood up and stay with that intention, without refocusing on your sitting position. Stay open as your body gets up. Notice how much more relaxed and effortless that is.

So - that probably needs a bit of experimentation and exploration, but it is a way you can change your way of "being" on an ongoing basis, to great benefit. And if you do feel anxiety coming up, do not defend against it, rather think of it like a wave of sensation rippling across the pond of your awareness. Perhaps not pleasant, but by remaining open and not trying to control it, you allow it to pass across you and fade away. You may even find that it never reaches full intensity, since by remaining open it is never trapped within a small boundary - so it's like a ripple in an ocean rather than a splash in a glass of water. (Again, something to experiment with, to discover how it is for you, in particular.)

POST: Tell me your two-glass approach success stories, please.

Well, as you've probably noticed by now, the whole world seems to be able to fit inside your mind quite happily, so as long as the thing isn't bigger than the whole world, you're probably okay! ;-)

Or being even more to the point: all outcomes take the form of multi-sensory experiences in our perception, and no moment of experience is bigger than any other moment. Meanwhile, the "space" in which those experiences arise doesn't seem to have any edges, and therefore doesn't seem to have any "size". In other words, although a change might seem to be big from the viewpoint of content and its meaning, from the "meta" perspective of context it doesn't matter. No TV image is bigger than any other, and switching channels doesn't become more difficult just because the programmes on each are different genres. I wonder whether it would be useful to contemplate exactly what makes one thing "big" and another thing "small"?

I think it's definitely helpful to spend some time contemplating different "underlying formats" that experience could take, since they all imply different possibilities and probabilities (while still fitting in with your current sensory moment). That's where the notion of "active metaphors" comes in (see sidebar).

POST: Altering your reality questions/thoughts

For instance when I jump I take into account how my intended reality has imprinted on all possible observers.

So, to be clear maybe: Are you suggesting that you having the idea of there being other observers might make it difficult, because we conceive of some things as being "shared facts" rather than "personal facts", and imagine that this makes them harder to change? Or are you suggesting that there actually are other observers whose participation in the world makes it difficult?

The supporting question to ponder would be: Have you ever witnessed anything that wasn't your own observation, including the experience of seeing apparent other observers? Do we have any evidence that having the experience of perceiving "other people" can limit us in other aspects of our experience?

It's quite a common thing, the idea that we are in a consensual reality, a "shared place" where we all contribute to the overall set of facts. Can we be sure, though, that this isn't just something that our experience behaves "as if" it is true, because it's an idea we hold on to firmly (perhaps worried that the alternative is to let go of the notion of "other people" altogether)?

(Note: I'm answering this without having read the other replies - and I'm taking a slightly different angle than I might usually, to offer an alternative approach, which might seem a little oblique at first. Let's see where it leads. Added headings to make it clearer. Ran out of time for proof-reading, so apologies in advance.)

Other People Problem

The hardest thing I've come to terms with 'shifting reality' is how do the other people fit in?

It pretty much is the hardest thing, I think, but perhaps not for the reasons you suggest. Your language still, in effect, assumes the world to be a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" as your starting point. The best starting point is probably to recognise the nature of our direct experience. Exercises such as the one described in this comment can help. That is what it is fundamentally true. Loosely, you are "that which is aware and takes on the shape of states and experiences". However, by experiences we mean "sensations, perceptions and thoughts", we don't mean that there is a world all laid out in space going on and on; rather, the world is more "dimensionlessly dissolved within you". So, that is what is fundamentally true. What you truly are, cannot be described in words, because it is "before" division and change and other formatting structures, but it is "aware" and it is what becomes other things. For convenience, we might described it as an "open aware space" which has no boundary.

Now, we move onto what we're currently engaged in: trying to reach an understanding, by describing things in worlds and thoughts. But we have to realise that all our thoughts about the world and ourselves are also within that "open aware space". The world is already a structure in awareness, any thoughts we have about the world are parallel structures. What we are is what everything is made from, so any thoughts about that are it but cannot describe it.

The Beach

A metaphor I quite like is of making sandcastles on an infinite beach. If one sandcastle is the world, as a pre-existing sandcastle, then trying to think about the world is to make a parallel sandcastle which is superficially similar in certain respects, but is not it. Then, thinking about the nature of the world and self is like trying to build a sandcastle which accurately represents both "the beach" and "sand. It cannot be done! However, ironically, the failed representation is both "the beach" and "sand". In this metaphor, your true nature is the beach. Now, in that model, where is the "external world"? It only exists as a constructed sandcastle. It might be a self-consistent sandcastle, but no matter how intricate and convincingly detailed that sandcastle is, it never represents the actual reality of the beach and of sand. One can only be beach/sand, once cannot think it nor can one observe it.

So, summarising: what we truly seem to be - by direct observation - is an "open aware unbounded space" within which experiences arise as "sensations, perceptions and thoughts". The world, then, is like a strand of experience, like a thought you are having, albeit a very bright, stable and 3D-immersive one. Thoughts about the world are parallel, and do not actually describe the world or the nature of experience. They are, in effect, separate worlds of their own.

All in the Mind

So are you implying that essentially the world we live in is actually all in our minds and that you, in fact, do not exist in my world?

It is not your mind; it is simply "mind". Mind taking on the shape of a particular state or world-pattern, hence taking on the shape of an experience. This means that "you", fundamentally speaking, aren't actually a person. You are just taking on a "person-shaped experience" at this moment - you are adopting the perceptive of an apparent person, but that includes taking on the shape of all other apparent people too. A bit like selecting frames from a stack of all possible movie frames. However, this sounds a bit "dead", but actually the entire thing is alive with the aliveness that is you; it's just not a personal aliveness because it comes "before" the experience of people. That aliveness is unbounded awareness, and since that is "before" division and change, there is only one awareness (which right now is taking on the shape of an experience of being-a-person-in-a-world). "Reality" in this view is static and eternal, the only thing that shifts is awareness itself as it adopts new shapes for experiences, from the field of all possible simultaneously-existing experiences.

But the table must physically exist, right?

What does that mean, though? What does it mean for something to be "physical"? Refer to what you are actually experiencing, rather than what you are thinking about the experience (because there are many different ways to do that). The table might be said to exist, but only in the sense that it is a "fact" or "pattern" that is persisting. It has no solidity other than that. (The feeling of solidity is just a sensation floating unmoored in awareness.)

Limited to Speculation

ultimately we can only ever speculate and form theories and metaphors to explain this universe.

It's not even that, though. It's that the truth of the matter is that the nature of things is "before" theories and metaphors. Our metaphors are just parallel constructions. You never get to a deep understanding through thought, because thought itself is "made from" the thing you are trying to understand. Only by considering the nature of your thinking and experiencing, can you realise how things actually are. It's like an extra "meta-level" that comes before everything else. Fundamental truth with everything else just being relative, self-referencing truth.

do you think that, including our perception, every other physical object in this universe is all in our heads?

Well, not in our "heads", because our "heads" are within our experiencing. But everything is within our awareness, sort of dissolved within it, I'd say, like a list of facts or patterns (fact-patterns). That is just a metaphor though, of course.

The Possibility of Limitations

Do you believe that all limitations are in our mind when it comes to shifting reality?

There's no underlying structure supporting our experience so - yes, in effect. Although there is no solid underlying substrate to experience, there is obviously structure to it - it is patterned. So changing your experience involves shifting the relative intensities of those fact-patterns. Since those fact-patterns are made from you-as-awareness, the only way to do that is to shift shape - that is, to shift our state or "jump dimensions" in the main metaphor. How do we do this? The only way is intention. Between intentions, we are merely experiencing the unfolding of a deterministic path inherent in our current state. If we want to change it, we must change the relative intensity of (that is, "intend") a pattern (the "intention"). There is no other power.

If I was truly devoid of any and all limitations, to the point that I was "barely human" and that I knew...

Well, your "human" aspect is part of the patterning of your current experience. You are not a human, fundamentally, but you are having a being-a-human experience. So long as you don't dissolve that patterning, then you will continue to have that perspective even as the world itself apparently changes. (Note also: people tend to worry that their "humanity" is what makes them good and moral, and that if they lost that they would become evil. Actually, the pattern is overlaid on top of awareness, and awareness is fundamentally a sort of good aliveness. Hence all the stuff about the universe being "love" and all that.)

...could I live in a fantasy world, the same way I am living now? It's bordering on psychosis at this point.

You already are living as a person in a fantasy world. To change to another fantasy world involves, essentially, changing the patterning of your current experience. Adopting a formatting or an active metaphor, one might conceive of this as switching from one 3D-immersive strand of thought about a world, to another one.

Summary

• Fundamentally, what you truly are is an "open awareness" whose only inherent property is being-aware, which has taken on the shape of a particular state and experience.
• You can directly experience this to be true. It is the only thing that is certain and fundamentally true.
• Your current experience is of being-a-person-in-a-world. Or more strictly speaking, being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.
• The world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", although we might have experiences "as if" that were true. It is perhaps best described as a "world-pattern" which consists of a relative distribution of intensities of facts. These are relatively true.
• This "world-pattern" can be updated via intention. Only experimentation can prove this to yourself.
• The "world" overall might be better considered as a shared resource of possible experiential patterns rather than a shared place.
• There are other people, but they are part of the world-pattern. The person you are experiencing is also part of the world-pattern. The only intelligence or awareness is the one you are right now, taking on the shape of apparently being one of those people, but in effect being all of them.

To kick off, I absolutely agree that this is a difficult area to discuss. Basically, it just doesn't fit into language very well; we always end up circling the topic, pointing at it. As soon as you think or talk about it, you are in fact thinking or talking about something else - but as it. See the sandcastle metaphor, with its castles on and as "the beach" and also "sand", for example.

EDIT: This turned out to be a bit long, so I've divided it into two blocks. It meanders a little, but it means well. ;-)

PART ONE: Awareness & People

I realise that the only awareness you can prove the existence of is your own - but does it follow that the other people you experience in the world lack awareness?

The thing is, though, it's not your awareness. It's just "awareness", which is taking on the shape of an experience, the experience of being a person in a world, "as if" it were a person. So the awareness doesn't belong to the person; it's better to say that the "idea" of all people is within awareness - the "idea of a world" - and at this moment it has taken on, or unfolded, the sensory aspect of one part of that idea. So it wouldn't be that other people lack awareness; even you-as-person lacks awareness and is just a pattern. The only awareness, the only intelligence and causal agent, is you-as-awareness. If the content of experience shifted and took on the shape of some other person's perspective, it would still be the same you-as-awareness, but experiencing the sensory content from a different you-as-person perspective. At all times, though, you-as-awareness is in a state which corresponds to the implied pattern of the whole world, all people, laid out over all time, deterministically (until a shift occurs via intention, that is).

Are you saying that we merely can't prove other people have awareness or are you saying that we can be definitively certain that the only awareness in the world is our own...

I'm saying that the suggestion that any person "has awareness" is effectively meaningless - and that includes the person you are having an experience of being right now. Directly attending to your actual experience right now, you can observe immediately that "you" are everywhere, the entire experience is made from "you", that you are "awareness" - and that "you" have no edges and no outside. Furthermore, any thoughts you have about being a person or there being an outside also arise within that awareness, and that the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world is effectively a strand of thought too. In other words, it turns out that you have to take a step back from content, and contemplate the context of that content. It turns out that one must reconsider what "you" are, and what "people" and "other people" are. In particular, we must note that there is no perspective other than a 1st-person perspective. As soon as we starting thinking about things from a 3rd-person perspective - employing a "view from nowhere" - then we are immediately wrong.

Additionally, all thoughts about experience are themselves experience. When we think about "the world", that is in effect another world, and not the world of our main experience. We confuse our thinking about the world with our thinking of the world.

...and that the capacity to alter the world/other people through consciously intending changes in the pattern proves/indicates this? Which would make you, from my perspective, a sort of automaton?

Better to say "a pattern laid out in time" or something like that. This is just because "automation", to me, implies a sort of programmed "happening", whereas it's probably better to use the metaphor of a landscape of 3D-immersive snapshots that is laid out before us, and which we traverse with out attention, moment by moment. The only thing "happening" is awareness unfolding moments in and out of sensory form, and even that can be viewed as static, since we can conceive of "time passing" as a static pattern overlaid just as any other.

It's an uncomfortable notion for me, not that that precludes it from being true, obviously. But it does seem to make things seem sadder and less... consequential.

It's a common feeling. One interpretation of quantum physics, called QBism, returns to the notion of a subjective perspective. The implications of this are clear: that the subjective perspective in effect has a "private copy" of the world, and our experiences are in effect a traversal of memories not bound to an independent notion of time.

Excerpt:

"But could the problem of the Now lie in relating the present moments of several different people? When you and I are communicating face-to-face I cannot imagine that a live encounter for me could be only a memory for you, or vice versa. When two people are together at an event, if the event is Now for one of them, then it is Now for both. Although this is only an inference for each person, I take it to be as fundamental a feature of two perceiving subjects as the Now is for a single subject."
--- N David Mermin, Nature, 26 March 2014

The author chooses to believe that a so-called live encounter involves the overlap of two conscious frames, and at the same time. There is no reason to do so in the theory, except that he finds it preferable. Why would he prefer to do this?

Because abstract ideas are cold and lonely - whereas the direct experience of such an open, single awareness is vibrant and alive and pleasant. As we cease to grasp onto our apparent individuality as a "person", and by extension our status as an independent entity amongst many separate entities, our attention opens out. Instead of feeling like a Lonely God, we know that we are all people and the entire world, because we are the one and only awareness, which has taken on the shape or state of all of that. The release from this sense of separation - which is what "other people" implies - turns out to not involve being "one" thing at all, but rather no-things because "one thing with no edges" isn't one thing or any thing at all; it is "before" division and multiplicity and change.

So, looping back for a moment -

How to approach this is to consider that there is awareness or being-aware and that is what you are, but that have taken on the shape of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person. And the way to make this meaningful, is to pause and investigate your direct experience right now. Finally, we note that the only thing that is fundamentally true is that which never changes; anything that apparently changes is content, the only thing that persists throughout is the context, and that is what you are.

The person you think you are, and other people, can be said to be that, but it is more understandable to say that there is that, and then that patterns itself "as if" there were such things as people.

(Continues)

PART TWO: Intention & Mechanism

The nature of intending and how, exactly, you do that.

This is a really difficult topic, because it goes right to the heart of what we are, and the problems in describing that. Inherently, "intending" involves no mechanism, no division or parts, and hence no cause and effect; there is no action involved and therefore no technique. Which starts to sound uselessly mystical very quickly. I still think we can describe it with metaphors - however practically speaking, as with the recognition of the nature of experiencing, we can only really be it. Describing it in words never leads to the thing itself, although ironically it is the thing itself. One possible approach: If "awareness" is "being", perhaps "intending" could be best described as "becoming".

thoughts cannot alter the thing we're trying to understand any more than they can describe it.

Right. Because thoughts themselves are an effect; they are not a cause. If you deliberately think of something right now - how did you produce that thought? You just "did". Meanwhile, if you think the thought "move my arm" and then you experience your arm moving, the thought did not cause the movement; rather, you intended something and the pattern you intended was both the thought and the movement. The content of experience is always a result; it is the intention that is the only cause. But what is an intention? Well really, it is not one thing, any more than there is such a thing as a "movement" independent of there being a specific movement. Also, a movement is moving, it is the change in arrangement. So there isn't a "we" who causes a "movement" - rather, a change in arrangement occurs, and in language we say that "we" caused a "movement".

Thus, you can't just think to yourself, if you're white and you want to experience being a black person "I want to be a black person" and have it happen.

If you merely create the thought "I want to be a black person", then you've just summoned a set of words and perhaps some extended imagery into prominence. You have not thought change into the world, as the world. You have created a sort of parallel strand. (The Two Glasses approach is designed to avoid this - more later.)

However, there is an extra element to that - that is, because you are awareness, when you deliberately intensify any pattern by thinking it, then you'll likely see it overlaid upon subsequent experience to some extent. If you simply think "an owl" then you get a general overlay of owls incorporated into your existing landscape, with its extended pattern "shining through" wherever there is a plausible gap for it to do so. The implicit intention is "the owl pattern will become more dominant in my experience". What makes the difference between this sort of general patterning - which leads to synchronicity but not to what we'd usually call results - is to include spatial and temporal context, and to specifically include within the intention that this pattern applies to "the world". Sometimes this is explicit, sometimes implicit. It is enough that you simply know what you mean; there is no extra thing that needs to be done.

Note: I tend to use the word "intending" to mean the act of intensifying a particular pattern, and "the intention" to refer to the pattern being intensified. This means that, loosely speaking, an intention can always be described in the from "it is true now that ____", because all intending occurs now, regardless of the sensory moment being experienced. The entire state of the world is present here, now, all time and space, and every intention is a pattern overlaid upon the entire world-pattern, a shifting of the whole state. "Experience is apparently local; intention is actively global." Phrasing things in that form can help us be clear about what is happening: "It is true now that owls will dominate my experience from this moment onwards"; "It is true now that I will succeed at the meeting in November"; "It is true now that name-of-world-fact is new-value-of-world-fact"; and so on.

So to successfully intend something you'd need to access (back to the metaphor) the loom in order to change the pattern. And the loom isn't thought, it's the fundamental truth that "pre-dates" thought.

Yes, you might say that the loom is "before" thought, but you don't need to access it as such, because you are it. It is perhaps better to dispense with the "loom" metaphor, and say that all there is, is the material, and the material has the property of being able to fold itself under its own power. So, no fold in the blanket of material ever causes the appearance of another fold; it is the material itself which reshapes itself as the folds. It may do so in a way that produces a pattern whereby there is a "thought-shaped fold" and then an "event-shaped fold" side by side, but the first did not cause the second - that is an illusion brought about by our viewing one fold and then the other, and by our ignorance of our own nature.

Would it be fair to say that techniques like Two Glasses are intended as stepping stones or bridges between thought and the "fundamental truth" which creates the pattern you are experiencing?

The Two Glasses, specifically, misdirects you into doing something mundane while distracting you from what you have associated with it. Earlier, I mentioned the difference between thinking a thought about the world, in parallel, and thinking the world itself. The Two Glasses basically has you link two patterns to the glasses, and then uses our everyday intuitions about levels to diminish the intensity of contribution of one pattern, in favour of another. The reason the instructions indicate that you should use a single word, is that this forces the person to "feel out" for a word that best captures the sense of that situation - and this leads to them to actually connect with that pattern, having the word arise from that pattern, giving you a "handle" onto it which then becomes associated with the water level in the glass. The pouring of the water from one glass to the other (rather than just emptying one glass and then filling the other separately), leads to a transformation of state rather than simply a disconnected change in levels.

If you simply write a description on the labels without doing then, then you tend to get a more general patterning effect, as with the "owls". You have not really connected your situations to the exercise. Now, often the results can be the same, in cases where you (I dunno) just want to see more red cars and less blue, or something - but if you do that, you are working more at the level of pattern overlays rather than world-pattern adjustment.

Aside: One should really view awareness as containing all possible patterns, all possible facts. All patterns are pre-existing and are always contributing to experience to some extent - just at different relative intensities. In other words, all facts are true all the time, and all that changes is "how true" they are at any moment. Intending is the way we change the relative truth of different fact-patterns. Your current state, and hence world-pattern, is the result of all your intentions up until this moment.

Is there a clearer way to express "intending" and how it's achieved?

Well, I've had a go at it! :-)

Also, just feel I should mention that I enjoy your posts a great deal. It's a profound and fun topic to kick around - but god it's a frustrating one too, and you seem to have endless patience with johnny-come-lateleys to the subject.

Thanks. Yeah, I think it's a lot of fun to explore. Everyone's a johnny-come-lateley at some point, and every time we have a conversation about this stuff, it's always a little bit different, because everyone's coming to it from a slightly different history - new metaphors or ideas emerge - so I like to engage when I've got time. It's not like I've got the best and final description, after all; this is just me experimenting with how to formulate the same old thing in a modern way that makes sense to me.

(I do aim to write all this up as a proper essay post at some point soon, in a structure that builds up piece by piece, but for now let me continue along this thread.)

Meaning

So, most of these questions are actually "meaningless". I don't mean that in a dismissive way - the sense in which they are "meaningless" is in the same sense that it is meaningless to ask how many corners a circle has, or what colour "length" is, or what the radius of infinity might be. Another way of saying this, is that there are numerous "castles in the sky": self-consistent pieces of architecture with unique layouts. Many of these questions are like asking navigational information for one castle, based on the blueprints of another. In order to answer the question, you have to take a step back and look at the context of the question and not just its content.

Which is exactly how we have to proceed when it comes to understanding "dimensional jumping" and the overall understanding that it leads to. We find ourselves dealing with situations where it's not a case of not knowing something, and it's not a case of there being something but we can never know it; it's more like there is no "something" to know or not know. It is logically excluded from the architecture of the "castle" you are actually living in, versus the floor plan you have been looking at.

Solipsism

Let us take "solipsism" as an example. There are many definitions, but let's go with this one: "my experience is the only experience that is happening".

To make sense of this statement, we are going to look closely at what we mean by the terms "my", "experience" and "happening". If we were to discover that the statement is in fact presupposing entities or occurrences which we can not actually find in our experience, we would have to reconsider the meaning of our position - for example, if it turned out that "I" didn't have experiences at all, because I couldn't find an "I". Taking this further, when I examined what I truly meant by "experience", I might find that it is not as I had assumed - perhaps even to the extent that talking about "other people" was nonsensical from a fundamental perspective, because there were no people, at least in the way I had originally conceived of them.

More specifically relevant to your questions, though, is the idea of there being multiple experiences, and those experiences overlapping with one another. Now, we can think about this - but we immediately have a problem when we do that. Which is, that thinking about something inherently requires experience to have already been divided. If we then look at the "thought about experiencing" and assume that it has similar properties to actual experiencing, we will lead ourselves astray - because the properties of a thought are not the properties of experiencing, which "takes on the shape of" thought by dividing itself, but is not itself inherently divided. So, when we are talking about "multiple experiences happening and overlapping", we are looking at the content of thought when we need to be looking at the context or source of thought, to understand the true situation.

Exercises

There are two little exercises I can think of which might help with this. They are intended to generate an experience, an answer you feel-know rather than a verbal description:

1. "The End of the World"

Imagine a sphere floating in front of you. Now, contemplate the idea of being the surface of that sphere. When you first imagined the sphere, it was from a "view from nowhere". When you switched perspective, that first view would make no sense within the logic of "being the surface of a where". The surface of the sphere would not be able to think about its own context as a ball within a larger space. However, the "experiencing awareness" in the first instance is identical to that in the second - it has merely taken on the shape of a different perspective. Currently, now, you might consider yourself as having taken on the shape of the experience "being the surface of the sphere". Someone starts talking to you about what it is like to take on the shape of "viewing the sphere from space". You cannot understand it. You keep asking what the curvature of that space is, and how you get there, and so on, trying to understand your surface in terms of that space. However, this cannot be done. There is no curvature, and there is no way to get there via an action as the surface. Only by shifting and becoming the other view, can you comprehend it - and this must be done directly.

2. "The Place You Are Looking Out From"

You are currently looking at these words on this screen. Your attention is on this screen. Now, pause for a moment, and also direct your attention to the "place you are looking out from"; the direction that is opposite to the direction the screen is in. What do you find there? What does this mean in terms of the rest of the experience you are having right now? Does this have implications for the content of experience versus the context of experience?

Answers

I realise I'm not answering your questions directly, but hopefully you can see that: a) this is not really possible, because the answer is actually an experience rather than a verbal description; b) the process of looking for the answer is how you get the experience, so there's not much point in me just trying to say it. Make sense? Once the experience is shared, of course, then we are talking from the same understanding, and the same words take on a different meaning (and sound less obscure and koan-like). Can maybe go through the actual questions next time.