TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 9)

POST: Perfect method to check if a jump was successful.

Hmm. This process is surely essentially just like checking for changes versus the header ID, with some extra activity and assumptions but essentially the same outcome, which as emphasised in the sidebar: Header No. 982 - Please note that a shift in your experience does not require a change in the header number, which should be treated as an emblem of change and a symbol of potential rather than an ID.

The problem is, basically, that using an ID or a hash or whatever (to check for an intentional jump) is making an assumption that there is some connective process that links changing your altered fact to other facts. This is not necessarily the case. If you observe the hash changing, then it is not necessarily connected to an intentional "jump"; you can just be observing a general looseness to your ongoing experience versus your memory. And: We also have to remember that the "dimensions" referred to here are metaphorical, in the sense that they are not actually "places". Rather, they are a way of conceiving of and structuring change; they are more like experiential states. So it's a bit of a tautology to say "check for a hash value change, that is a sign you have changed dimensions" - because "change dimensions" is really just a synonym for "change of fact" or "state" in the first place.

I think ultimately, as per this recent comment:

You know it really worked when the outcome you targeted arises within your experience. That's it.

Having said all that, this sort of thing is fun to play with anyway, since it encourages us to be on the lookout for a certain flexibility to our experience, and to contemplate the implications.

...

As evidenced by the famous quantum double slit experiment, merely observing something collapses it from a probable state into a determined state.

Although, to chime in, the idea of there being a "collapse" is an interpretation. There is no actual probable state really; there is no collapse; those things are part of a narrative. What you actually have, is a description which lists possible observations (and in QM it's really a mathematical structure with no inherent meaning as such), and an observation that takes place. The idea that those possible observations "exist" prior to the observation, is a bit of an interpretative leap that many choose not to make - there are lots of different interpretations and none of them are, or can be, "correct" - since we're really just dealing with conceptual frameworks here rather than "things" (and almost not even that, in the case of QM). It's really a philosophical argument, there, rather than a scientific one. Aside - See for example: N David Mermin's What's bad about this habit? article and Richard Conn Henry's The mental universe piece. Also, the fun survey Surveying the Attitudes of Physicists Concerning Foundational Issues of Quantum Mechanics. EDIT: For completeness, since I'm linking away anyway, a nice accessible chapter providing A Brief Survey of Main Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.

Being aware of something means we have a quantum connection to it.

I'm not sure that saying we have a "quantum connection" is meaningful. What we do have, though, is an experiential relationship. That is, that everything we experience, we experience as "awareness" - both in the sense of us being "awareness", and in the sense of our experiences being "awareness" also. We are not separate from our observations, because they arise as and within us. However, we should probably make a distinction here between "observations" in the sense of a direct experience, and "observations" as abstracted conclusions about direct experience. Failing to recognise the difference can get us in a bit of a tangle. Descriptions are experiences, too: the experience of "thinking about experiences". We can never get "behind" our experiences or explain them, therefore. We just have further experiences.

Which leads us to: our ongoing experience of the world doesn't work according to "QM" as such; that is just one possible description after the fact. Such descriptions come after or in parallel to your experience, as thought; it doesn't cause your experience. In the case of "dimensional jumping" we are actually dealing with the domain "before" descriptions like quantum mechanics, so they can't actually help us make decisions for actions in terms of them being a "how things work". At the level of "experiencing", we might actually say that there is no "how things work" as such.

Having said that, we might use such models as a way of intentionally structuring or patterning our experience "as if" they were true, as "active metaphors". But this is a reversal of the usual assumptions we have about such descriptions. Here, intention would be the cause (via adoption of a certain pattern or formatting implicit in the defining of the outcome) and the correspondence to a particular description is an aspect of the result. All this is, of course, stuff to experiment with. But it is why this is all best viewed as an experiment or investigation, rather than a "technique" or "method".

(Added some headings to break it up a bit.)

Observations, Realms, Experiences

You can directly observe what happens and start to figure out something about our realm from it.

Yes - but one must be careful how one approaches this "something" in our case. You aren't talking about just observing (as in experiencing) here; you are talking about observing with reference to certain concepts and then drawing conclusions in terms of them, and the assumptions underlying them. And that's maybe a bit of a problem for us in this topic, because those assumptions are what we're examining. In particular, the conclusion that quantum physics tells us something about our realm being in the format of quantum physics is problematic. This is particularly so versus other types of theory, because quantum physics is a codification of a set of observations, it is not "what is really happening" and has no description of that sort. It is not meaningful in and of itself. While things like "atoms" are also really a conceptual framework which is useful rather than "true" (the world isn't really made from "atoms"), the component concepts at last have a discernible meaning, because the concepts came first. With QM, the equation came first, and was kind of ad-hoc dragged into being, rather than derived from a worldview.

From the Richard Conn Henry article in Nature, for example:

Likewise, Newton called light “particles”, knowing the concept to be an ‘effective theory’ — useful, not true... Newton knew of Newton’s rings and was untroubled by what is shallowly called ‘wave/particle duality’...
Discussing the play, John H. Marburger III, President George W. Bush's science adviser, observes that "in the Copenhagen interpretation of microscopic nature, there are neither waves nor particles", but then frames his remarks in terms of a non-existent "underlying stuff". He points out that it is not true that matter "sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle...
The wave is not in the underlying stuff; it is in the spatial pattern of detector clicks... We cannot help but think of the clicks as caused by little localized pieces of stuff that we might as well call particles. This is where the particle language comes from. It does not come from the underlying stuff, but from our psychological predisposition to associate localized phenomena with particles."

My actual point: this means we can't really extend it for our purposes, in terms of describing the nature of experience itself. People who do take QM to be literal are perhaps the same sort of people who say that the universe is mathematical. Which is like a painter saying that the universe is made from paint. I'd add that the QBism interpretation does try to tackle some of these issues head on rather than handwave them away, though, and is worth a read if you haven't already: here and here. It ends up covering some of the same philosophical ground that we confront here (it's interesting, in the Nature article, to note where N David Mermin balks at following through on the implications of his idea: it's the bit about non-overlapping moment-memories).

Consciousness, Links, Measurements, Descriptions

I think the main takeaway from all of it for me, is just that there is something that links human conscious awareness with what is being watched that cannot be physically measured.

I'd say that the double slit experiment tells us more about the nature of descriptions than experiences.

• First, going back to that comment about "atoms", light isn't waves or particles - rather it's simply that with one experimental arrangement we see one result (and the conceptual framework of "particles" is useful to capture it), with another arrangement we see another ("waves" is useful to capture it).
• Second, the idea that the observation "collapses the wavefunction", or similar, is already an assumption. No such collapse is ever observed; the concept is really just an artefact of attempting to assign an interpretation to a theory - really, a type of calculation - that was never built to be "understood" in that way. Wavefunction collapse, and therefore the idea that "human conscious awareness" is linked to something, is effectively a ghost!

Instead, we might be better to note: what exactly do we actually experience? In what way do we experience "human consciousness". I'd suggest that, in a very real way, we don't. Not as a thing, not as an object. Go looking for "human consciousness" in your actual experience right now. Can you find it? This is the starting point, I think, and it re-contextualises quite a lot of what we're talking about here. We cannot measure human conscious awareness "physically" because it is not a thing - and also the term "physically" refers to a concept which is part of a particular description of a certain idea of a world, and we are dealing with something "before" such descriptions. Which leads us nicely to:

Jumping, Self, Maps, Truth

And in the realm of dimensional jumping, it is not the self that shifts...

Or it is only the self which shifts. This of course depends on what we mean by "the self".

And sure, we are all one, in the words of the mystics - but for the purposes of this realm, we are evidently not.

It depends on what was mean by "we are one". I'll bet your actual experience right now is not divided up into "parts", for example. The only "parts" are in your description of, your story about, what you are experiencing. The mystics might not have been talking about "being one" in the sense of a place with objects that are all undivided. Rather, it is that you-as-awareness are undivided and "takes on the shape of" states and experiences. In other words, you are a not a person-object located within a world-place; you are a sort of non-material "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware and which adopts states. That is the "self" that shifts, and it is all there is. It is, however, not a personal self, and it is not an object, so there is neither "one self" nor "many selves".

[Robert Anton Wilson] The map isn't the territory, and the map may or may not be completely accurate.

We could even extend this, perhaps: The very idea that any map is of the same "format" as the territory is in error. And the idea that there is "territory" somehow independent of ongoing experience is also in error, because that notion is itself an example of the map-territory mistake. A map is another type of experience, and the "thinking about a the universe" experience is alongside the "apparently being a person in a world" experience, at the same "level", and never gets "behind" it.

In other words, the whole idea of "explaining" experience or the world in terms of parts and relationships is flawed. The patterns we generate for our descriptions may be useful, but they are not true. The world as we are exploring it here is not something to be worked out - remember, we are not trying to make calculations or model trajectories here - and we have to make a clearer distinction between the-world (really, the ongoing moment of unbroken experience*) and "the world" (a fiction to which various conceptual structures are attached) than those doing science to. Although, we would all be helped greatly if some vocal scientists did a bit more philosophy and so didn't take interpretations literally.

I don't get it, what are you exactly saying?

Well, that comment you're replying to is part of an extended thread. Which bit isn't clear, and I'll try to explain?

Or did you mean just, why the hash-result idea doesn't get you anywhere in terms of deciding whether you have successfully "jumped" or not?

Mainly, that's because it assumes some things about our ongoing experience of the world that are actually being tested by the exercise. The hash is no better than the header ID, which itself, if it changes, tells you only that you are having an experience of "the header seemingly changing". Anything beyond that is just a story about "worlds" or "dimensions" or "hashes". For example, you can't have one part of the story break integrity - "the hash has changed" - with the others assumed not to - "the hash still corresponds to underlying facts". You are using the target of the experiment as its own reference. All you really end up with is: you had an experience where content changed.

The whole explanation is very complicated, please explain it in simpler terms, but the most important thing I want to know, is this: could this hashing method work? and if not, then why?

It's more that doing it isn't meaningful. That if you accept "jumping" then you also lose the ability to rely on proxies for indicating change between "jumps". I'll reply later with a bare bones explanation.

POST: REQ: Triumphant George's bio

Most flattering! But I'm afraid that this subreddit doesn't encourage AMA type posts. ;-)

More seriously, some background: Although I moderate here, really I'm just a contributor who occasionally helps out with some tidying up; the subreddit pre-dates my involvement. The Two Glasses exercise was originally a response to a "can we generate glitches deliberately?" thread on the Glitch subreddit, and the exercise was based on the "patterning" model I first outlined in simplified form at another subreddit (links are in the intro post). And the real purpose of all of that was to encourage people to identify hidden (and incorrect) assumptions by generating thought-provoking experiences that contradicted them. Now, some might call those experiences "results", but in the longer term the point is to go beyond that and change one's perspective on "the nature of experiencing" at a basic level. Hence, this subreddit tries to encourage thinking about the implications, what they mean for the "formatting" as well as the content of our experiences, as much as obtaining outcomes - all the while not really pushing a particular view on things one way or the other. Everyone has to check it out for themselves (for quite fundamental reasons which become clear later). We're not trying to convince anyone of anything here; it's a shared adventure. ;-)

Having said that, who knows? Perhaps with the search function, you still might be able to find something...

POST: [AMA Request] TriumphantGeorge

Ha, well that's very flattering! And yeah, it does seem that if I have a spare moment and there's a keyboard in the room, something "happens". I won't do a general AMA - because I'm not here as a 'person', I'm just contributing to the exploring and experimenting, and of course I'm not the originator here - but those questions are good jumping off points (excuse pun) for group discussion, so I'll pop back when I get a moment and reply properly.

EDIT: This will be tomorrow.

Q1: This may sound extremely odd (to put it mildly ;) ), but I was just finishing some work related to a course that I'm taking on Udemy, and I found myself thinking about how incredibly amazing it would be for someone to create and post a course [on Udemy, or on any other online learning site] about dimensional jumping...
...and, since you've shown yourself to be quite the expert on this subject, I couldn't help but also think of you and your highly informative posts. I know that you must be extraordinarily busy, but do you think you might ever consider doing such a thing, at some point in time?
(Currently, people have posted courses that involve subjects like clairvoyance, dowsing, remote viewing, telekinesis, energy healing, and lucid dreaming, so a course that covers the topic of dimensional jumping -- including, perhaps, the ideas, theories, techniques, and pertinent background information related to it -- would seem to fit in quite well, and appeal to many people.)
I do apologize for asking such a strange question, though, and I hope you don't mind. :)

Interesting! Well, it's not such a bad idea for something in the future. The overall subject (applied metaphors, the nature of experience, etc) can be hard to convey in language alone - and a visual aspect can definitely help. It's something I played with briefly when describing the Infinite Grid concept. The idea of giving the viewer some sort of version of the experience is quite appealing. I'll keep the notion in the back of my mind!

Q1: Thank you so very much for your response! I know that it must have seemed like a rather peculiar question to ask, so I really appreciate that you took the time to answer. :)

Not peculiar - you thought of something that you think would be good, and you asked about it! Seems like a sensible approach to me!

...

[Going to take each of these separately, posting the responses whenever I get time. This will make it easier to follow any discussion anyway.]

1) I see you are also a moderator of Oneirosophy and Glitch In The Matrix. What sparked your interest in dreams, reality and consciousness?

When I was studying at school I decided to look up memory techniques. In the library I found books by Tony Buzan and Edward de Bono about memory and creativity, but also an old book about “journeys into consciousness” in which a group of psychologists did basically the doors to the mind ritual, and Oliver Fox’s book on astral projection. There was also a de Bono book called The Mechanism of Mind[1] which got me thinking about generalised pattern formation. So these, combined with my interests in physics and art, kind of dictated my direction from then on.[2]

In terms of those subreddits, I never really aimed to get involved (the reason I ended up here is because the approach seemed “undirected” and I figured few concepts might help people avoid discomfort). I just found myself contributing too regularly. ;-) But it’s interesting that they do cover what I see as the three aspects of this area:

• /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix collects anecdotes about subjective experience and how it differs from our expectations and assumptions of how everyday-mode reality works, our “objective” notions of the universe. Reports of the spontaneous behaviour of the subjective experience.
• /r/Oneirosophy explores the metaphysics of the subjective experience, hammering out the perspective in detail by furthering the language and playing with different concepts. Metaphors to help us better describe the subjective experience.
• /r/DimensionalJumping is about directly experimenting with the subjective experience. The application of those metaphors to deliberately influence the behaviour of the subjective experience.

So: observation > metaphor > application

If there’s a “project” here, then it’s the project to bring knowledge that has become clouded by years of language abuse, strip it right down to the basics, and make it accessible - all based on the key insight that metaphors (“patterned thought”) shape experience, and experience is metaphorical.

Notes

[1] The book The Mechanism of Mind is out of print now although there's a copy on Scribd. There is a copy of the Oliver Fox book there too.

[2] Another book that was very useful was David Fontana's The Meditator's Handbook. It has a nice section on visualisation which concludes that (as we all know) the way to do it is to "allow it to happen". I thought it was out of print but there is a version available. Look up chapter 7 in the preview here [missing].

2) You have many great posts, would it be possible to somehow index them all so we could easily read through them?

Eventually it would be nice to gather all our insights and organise them in the wiki, but it’s a bit early for that probably. And it’s not a small task: these things need edited into some sort of shape so that they aren’t confusing and conflicting. And maybe separated out into metaphors, exercises, perspectives, etc. One idea would be to at least have a couple of pages for now: one for recommended reading material, and another an index for the main posts. That way, the information-based posts wouldn’t be so vulnerable to getting lost in the stream, obscured by our general questions and chat. And it would allow there to be a “read this first” list so that newcomers don’t have to ask the same stuff.

It’s tempting to think an FAQ would be a good move, but I feel the nature of this stuff is such that there’s no definitive worldview to offer. Rather, there are lots of different, equally valid, ways to describe and apply what amounts to the same “ineffable” knowledge. Maybe a page indicating “what your mindset should be” might be appropriate though.

3) What changes have you seen in your life when putting to practice your techniques, methods and philosophy?

Probably the best way to answer this is to discuss the underlying motivation, even though it might not have seemed this way to me at the time.

Unwitting Deformation

One of the reasons I think I was driven to investigate this, apart from just curiosity about the nature of things, was because I struggled with certain aspects of living sometimes. I would vary between being relaxed and spontaneous, and at other times not ‘getting’ what was going on, accumulating tension without realising it, and so on. Everyone has elements of this, but it was annoying to be alternately relaxed and present, then useless and unaware. Why was this? It wasn't obvious that I was actively doing something particularly wrong. The reason turned out to be: attention and control. By having the wrong concept of the structure of my experience, but being keen to perform, I was directing my experience incorrectly and so constantly deforming my perceptual space. I’d be open and spontaneous and then narrowly located and locked-in, all by trying to “do” things via action. And because attention is 'invisible', it really corresponds to a shaping of perception, it's difficult to realise what is happening. You are changing your own shape without realising it.

Detaching & Triggering

So the major change is actually simple and everyday: my ongoing experience is more “open and spacious”, and movement and thought don’t involve effort and strain. You realise you have experiences of moving and thinking; you don’t do moving and thinking, and so your point of interaction alters. The next major change is that, having realised you “insert experience” into the world, or activate patterns, you change your approach to getting what you want. If world is a single pattern coherent and you acquire experiences by “inserting a new future frame into the film” or “activating a pattern so that it later appears in sensory space”, then what use is thrashing about it trying to make things happen by constant fiddling? I used to do that, and it made for a very rollercoaster life. So, additional actions here don’t produce results there. Instead, your job becomes to occasionally assert things and otherwise allow experience to flow, knowing that the flow now has your desires incorporated into it. This flowing includes allowing body and thoughts to move of course - being, as they are, just parts of the extended world-pattern, and an aspect of your experience.

The short answer is: "Adopting new metaphors for more fun and less fight"

4) Have you got any tips for a beginner such as myself to start seeing real, positive changes in my life?

Okay, I’m just going to throw out some random ideas here and maybe something will be useful. For general things:

• Daily Releasing Exercise - I’ve mentioned this before but I think the single most important thing is to allow your attentional focus to relax out. So do a daily releasing exercise where, for 10 minute maybe twice a day, you lie on the floor (feet flat, knees up, couple of book supporting the head) and “play dead”. Give up completely - to gravity, surrender to God, abandon yourself to open space, whatever. Allow your body and mind and attentional focus to move and shift as it wants. Think of it as allowing your nervous system, or your perceptual space, time to unwind and cool down. The trick is that releasing of attentional focus. If you notice yourself fixed on something, just release again.

• Be The Background Space - When you have spare moments, close your eyes and “feel out” with your mind, go looking for the background space in which all experience arises. Feel yourself to be that peaceful aware background and stretches out forever. When going about your day, switch your perspective to being that background. Since the space goes on forever, you can realise that there is nothing beyond that. There is no world outside that is “happening” while you’re not looking at it. All there is, is the immersive “world-thought” that is appearing in your mind right now.

  An expanded version of the above ideas can be found in Overwriting Yourself.

• Fun With Imagination - You should always treat imagining as if it is a direct interaction with your private world. You are literally adjusting the relative strengths of various patterns by doing it. You don’t need to worry about passing thoughts; they’re just telling you the relative states of the world-pattern as it is. However, you should only deliberately imagine/say things which you would be happy making a more dominant contribution to your ongoing experience. This shouldn’t be seen as a task though - it’s fun to imagine things you’d like to happen, to make vivid your desires! Do so regularly for both what you’d like to happen and also to revise previous experiences into the desired version.

The last bunch of posts, including All Thoughts Are Facts and The Imagination Room, expand on this.

Meanwhile, for general body and mind use without too much esoteric flavour, I really recommend this book by Missy Vineyard. It’s based around the Alexander Technique (an approach to body movement) but she inadvertently goes further than this and gets the whole expansion of spatial awareness / non-doing flow and intention thing down pat. For other stuff, you just have to experiment. Play with the idea that the world you see around you is an immersive 3D sensory thought, and that you could “declare” that is going to happen, assert new facts, or assign properties and meanings to objects and events. Mostly, try to view it as a 3D pattern which has no depth - in other words there is no deeper world behind it, supporting it.

The What's it all about? post was an attempt to get some of the background perspective down, with relevant reading material so that people can form their own ideas.

5) What is the best book you've ever read and why?

I really can't think of an answer to this one! In terms of non-fiction for this the subreddit's topic, everything you read just becomes an interconnected web of different ideas here and there which eventually form into your own blended understanding, so I can't think of anything specific. My favourite fiction authors are probably Philip K Dick (for the concepts rather than the writing quality) and JG Ballard (exploration of society). Today, anyway.

...

Insanity and Functionality

Any fear of becoming completely unhinged or insane?

My thinking has been: If experiences are just that, it pays to not take them too seriously. People can get obsessed with certain notions and their experience reflects that back at them as the patterns become more established. There's only one thing to realise, and that's the relationship between consciousness and world in subjective experience. People messing around with magick and psychology often create unfortunate experiences for themselves, and then by viewing them as external make them behave "as if" they were external. I've always been super-cautious of that sort of thing, and indeed any content. The world may be an illusion, but it's an illusion in the sense that it's not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time"; it is still your experience regardless. I think an understanding of experiential reality as being "super-basic" - by which I mean that it's the activation of patterns in a 3D space - helps avoid delusion and maintain perspective, since it brings you back to experience, now without interpreting things as external forces or understandings. Of course, this doesn't mean that you have a great explanation for the patterns you experience in terms of "the narrative" of the content - but it does mean you're clearer about their nature.

World-Sharing and The Objective

Also, do you have any advice for people struggling with the idea of an objective or consensus reality?

Well, it's just an idea isn't it? It's a trick of language more than anything. The "sharing-model" of the world is one of the most challenging things to think about - and that's because it's inaccessible, it in effect doesn't exist, and by its nature it would be "before time and space" and therefore literally unthinkable. Which is why recent philosophy and physics efforts are often tending towards the "private view" notion (see P2P and QBism) with a handwaving promise to hopefully fill in the blanks on the objective (the nature of "world-sharing") later. For a convenient working model, it's handy to think of it as private copies of the world, built from a shared toy box of all possible patterns (objects, relationships). In stead of the world being a shared environment, it becomes a shared resource. In this view, "people" are patterns too just like any other object - collections of possible perceptions of a certain related form. This includes "you" as well; it's just that your experience has taken on the perspective viewpoint of this particular "person". You might think of people's full pattern of possible representations as them being "Extended Persons", of which you see a particular aspect at any moment.

...

Hey, thanks for that.

Do you know if there were/are any other schools or thought...

I actually think most "religious" traditions have their seeds in this sort of worldview, even if the organised versions of the religion lost touch with, or intentionally corrupted, that knowledge. Christianity itself seems to be rooted in these views, with the Bible's parables being metaphors-for-metaphors, and instructional manual for understanding reality and creating change. Over time, though, all groups seem to lose their way as the message is diluted, misunderstood, or suppressed. And I guess various magickal groups also fall into this category of "communities bound by worldview with the purpose of making change"?

I read a book called the Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self Mastery...

I'm not very aware of Toltec, although I've read Carlos Castaneda's books and they seemingly have some relation to it. Browsing the wiki page it's pretty interesting how their recorded history seems to be myth and metaphor, much to the pain of archeologists and historians who want the "real" story. But of course, the myth is the real story. (See: Toltecs as myth.)

Reading through the "agreements", they would seem to be on the core idea:

Maintaining purity of observation.

Which is a pretty decent approach I'd say. Although without an underlying metaphysics to ground it I wonder how much benefit it brings (perhaps the books explain more?). The All Thoughts Are Facts post is pretty much a description of maintaining a world by realigning "inner" observations appropriately.

I thought The Art of Dreaming was pretty interesting, it had good quotes on will and intention; I don't really remember much about the rest of the books though. Yeah, it's more of a meandering narrative than a direct discussion of a worldview though. Neville Goddard is quite interesting on the "taking the bible as instruction manual" view, but it crops up in different ways quite a few places.

POST: TriumphantGeorge - do you jump?

he says he "isn't here as a person"

Heh, well, I think when I said that, I meant it in the sense of my activities as a moderator and as a contributor to the subreddit aren't about me as a person; they're about facilitating exploration of the topic. Which, in turn, is about everyone examining their own experience and experimentation, without believing or following anyone else. On the other hand, the underlying idea of the subreddit is to explore the "nature of experience" and the "nature of descriptions", and one of the conclusions we draw is that we aren't a "person" as such, and we view our stories differently. In particular, a distinction is made between the content of experience versus the context, etc. Lots of comments going into that elsewhere, of course, so I won't repeat it here. It's not really mysterious, except in the literal sense of "mystery": a truth that one can know only by revelation (experience!) and cannot fully understand (describe!) in conceptual terms.

He's so enigmatic, almost overly so.

Ha. That has probably got more to do with my excessively comma-and-quote-heavy circular writing style, and my terrible habit of not doing enough proof-reading, rather than anything exotic!

So you are saying you did not 'transcend the human experience'? :-D

Heheh! I'm not particularly sure what they mean, to be honest. If you consider, say, playing with adopting being a "space within which a scene arises" - or more dramatically if you have a "void experience" [http://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1victor_c_other.html], or even just do the Feeling Out exercise to attend to your direct experience as it is. Then, I dunno, the "human experience" seems more like a thought about experience than something you ever really have, as such. At least, unless it is defined far more strictly. Like a lot of questions relating to this topic, it perhaps ends up falling into the "actually, the answer is that the question does not really apply" bucket. A bit like asking about the "other you" after a "jump".

I'd like to know if you had one (or more) of the spiritual (salvation history related) experiences described by Neville Goddard in his books. You know, meeting David, or holding the child wrapped in swaddling clothes, Kundalini rising etc.

No, none of those sorts of things. Plenty of symbolic lucid dreams and occasional waking life encounters with interesting people, but nothing overtly "standard" in terms of symbols. I don't have a religious background at all, though, and so those representations don't (or did not) have that meaning for me. And "meaning" is, I think, the driver for a lot of the content we experience.

POST: This shit actually works

Its just the vocabulary some people use to describe this experience.

True enough. The potential issue with it, though, is that it can be unintentionally misleading, since it implies there is an external agent involved in this. While lots of people say things like "signs from the universe" as just a fun turn of phrase, our language has a tendency to imply an active causal entity behind things (because it forces things to be described in terms of "parts" with one affecting the other). Unexamined, this can lead to some confusion. That is, we can end up treating "the universe" is a separate actual thing - to be appeased, convinced, negotiated or communicated with, and so on - rather than a concept which acts as a placeholder for "the current patterned state of everything" or similar. This results in the endless questions that crop up which are based on the idea of some sort of independent intelligence or mechanism that must be negotiate with, and ever more convoluted descriptive schemes to account for this never-really-experienced entity. So, it's probably worth clarifying these things periodically, to save people going on self-perpetuating wild goose chases, even though to many it's just obvious what is meant. Particularly because pursuing this in terms of such a view can generate "as if" experiences, the patterns of which become more and more pronounced, but ultimately distract from what is actually going on at a "meta" level.

It doesn't even need to happen on an Inner-world/Outer-world level, it can simply be in an internal dialogue.

Indeed. Ultimately, though, we don't even need an inner dialogue, because such dialogue is itself an intentional result - a piece of "sensory theatre". Intention itself has no particular experience associated with it, unless the intention (the pattern/fact being brought into play) has a sensory aspect within the current moment. And of course, nobody ever actually experienced an inner-world/outer-world anyway, although they may occasionally have had thoughts about such things: If the world is a patterning of you-as-experiencer (there is no "you" as such at all really other than the occasional thought about it) then simply asserting the fact that something is true is all that is needed. And really, that's all one ever actually does in any case: all apparent acts resolve to this. It's not even an act! It's a self-shaping. Non-verbally (since the assertion isn't a localised object, it literally is the outcome pattern, being "intensified") we might consider its essential form to be "it is true now that this happens then". (Better yet, replace "happens" with "is experienced".)

The whole idea of "delegation", then, is itself part of an intentional pattern. This is because an intentional pattern is not a "doing", it is "what is being brought into prominence" and that includes any apparent "causation" aspect. Of course, in terms of getting a specific result - if one is pursuing techniques - then there's a bit of "anything goes" about this! However, for the other part (the other focus of the subreddit) we don't just stop at "useful" and we dig a little deeper, even though initially that can seem pedantic and like empty wordplay. But eventually this bears fruit, I think, because that's how we're freed from the assumption that there is any particular mechanism or technique (they themselves are directly or implicitly aspects of an intention; there is no fundamental "how things work" involved), or that a "you-object" that is operating upon a separate "world-object" (any apparent experience of that is, again, an intentional result: a piece of "sensory theatre" and/or just a thought about "what is happening").

a technique such as Delegation is very useful for complex Intending if one wishes to continue as Person.

I would say, though, that one never is a person anyway. Although once can structure an intention using the formulation of "a person doing this", it never actually is that. The intention is always a shifting of you-as-experiencer rather than the (fictional) you-as-person. Basically, I don't think there is any essential difference between intending "it is true that the universe is going to obtain this-result on my behalf" versus "it is true that this-result will occur". However, it can be fun to pretend, to intend "as if" this or that were true. Really - this may be where you are coming from overall, especially with your next statement - we always do that to some extent. Even the idea of "making something true" is essentially an "as if" approach, of course. The only thing that is fundamentally true is the fact of the property being-aware; everything else is relatively true only. (And it is impossible to pack that into concepts, because it is "before" objects and relationships.)

I think calling a conceptual framework "useful" already implies certain things about How Things Are(n't).

Of course: it (re-)implies the idea of being in a situation, the possibility of another situation, and that there is a sense of purpose involved it translating between them, plus the very idea of such a translation. But: I think, though, here we've been making a distinction here between "getting results" (that is, targeting certain experiential content) and "knowing the nature of things" (that is, recognising the context of all experiences). So long as we don't mix up one with the other, it's okay if things are being implied. When we're focused on "getting results", we're fully embracing those implications. We're okay with "useful" not being fundamental. We are, after all, not in a "void" state: we start this investigation with a certain patterning already in place. So we leverage it. When we're focused on "the nature of experiences", we again accept our current patterning as a starting point, but now we expand our approach to include that starting point also.

POST: Jumped and now seeing things

In the spirit of pushing back on unexamined assumptions, I'm duty bound to interject just to say say that this is not really an "asking the universe" or "connecting" type of deal, by design. Although one can certainly conceive of it as such and have experiences "as if" that is the case - if one intends in terms of those perspectives - the two glasses exercise is actually specifically structured in a much more direct way. There is deliberately no suggestion of an intermediary, or indeed any mechanism or process at all. Ultimately, the results might (should?) lead one to reconsider notions of what "you" and "the world" are, and what the relationship between them is - if any. This usually happens in a way that allows us to recognise that there is no "request/entity" structure, or even "you/world" structure, fundamentally.

See this previous thread, for example [POST: This shit actually works].

I think that the main issue with "universe", as it's commonly used anyway, is that it implies a separation between "you" and "world", as you suggest. But even when that is resolved, it still tends to be interpreted as indicated that the world is a sort of extended "place" with you as an object in it, albeit an object not inherently divided from that world. Specifically tackling that notion is what can give us a more intuitive, and direct, understanding or experience of what is meant by "oneness" and "intention". Yeah, it's always worth chipping away at what is meant by words, to reveal any hidden assumptions. In particular: assumptions that only one side of the discussion might hold, as with the meaning of "universe". It can come over as pedantic initially, but it's actually the things we haven't noticed about our thinking that make us stumble, like that, so that's where progress is made.

POST: Correlation Between Beliefs/Perception and Experience?

One issue is that people tend to mean different things by "beliefs" - so it's worth considering what exactly they are, in the sense of their form of existence, and how it is expected that they have a causal role. I suggest that if what is meant is roughly "stuff that I think is true when I think about something", then they are not particularly causal. If what is meant is something more like "the relative facts contained within my state", then maybe. The problem here is that when you dig into the nature of experience, the perspective on these things tends to shift such that the original meaning of "belief" might not really be coherent anymore. However: I'd say that where "belief" comes in is that if you believe something (in the sense of feeling that "it is the case" when you ponder it), then you are less likely to relentlessly tinker with things and second-guess yourself. It's in that way that it corresponds to "detachment". Which is really to say, not constantly re-intending or counter-intending something you've already asserted. The final instruction in the Two Glasses is, "just carry on with your life". Which is a (deliberately indirect) way of saying, it is already done so leave it be. The change occurred at the moment of the exercise, and so "it is true now that this happened then", with all subsequent moments being defined by that intention. All subsequent moments are a result of the intention, aspects of a state which now incorporates your outcome.

If you "believe" that or at least don't bother about it, then those moments will arise spontaneously (including moments of you apparently doing things, etc) and eventually you'll encounter the moment which contains your outcome. If on the other hand you have doubts and fiddle - doing additional intentions to try and "make" it happen, or spend time deeply concentrating on the possibilities of it not happening - then you are effectively doing a new intention, or at least a counter-patterning, thus shifting your state again. Note that we aren't talking about passing thoughts here and occasional loss of confidence, but about getting focused, deliberately or not, upon counter-patterns. The important bit is, though: Those subsequent moments might contain feelings of doubt or even unpleasant events.

If you resist those feelings and events or try to manipulate them away, then you are intentionally shifting state again, possibly to one that no longer contains your outcome. (Although I'd say that it's probably quite forgiving if you have a successful intention, unless you resist things like spontaneous physical acts that you are "meant" to perform.)

Another consideration is that when performing intentional acts, we tend to imply the extended pattern associated with that act, which gives the idea of the act meaning. So if you react (which is intentional/resistant, rather than respond, which is spontaneous) to something in terms of an expectation associated with your old situation, you are in effect strengthening that pattern again, to some extent anyway. Ultimately, then, the answer is perhaps: forget about beliefs, because the concept isn't that meaningful in the end, and also the course of action would be to do nothing about them and just treat ongoing experience as a "dumb patterning system" which you interact with in a direct fashion (that is, you are shifting yourself in order to adopt a new state; there are no intermediary mechanisms or entities involved).

...had waned in the past few hours and I thought I'd f'd up.

Yeah, I understand the concern! But, no. I think it's fairly ridiculous to expect some sort of permanent joyous experience [as a sign of success or as an ultimate ambition]; that's not the promise that is made. In truth, no promise is made, really. What you do get is, to notice the fact that - loosely speaking - what you truly are is "awareness" which is "patterned" into an experiential state, from which all moments follow. And so, subject to one's own experimentation, what you have is the possibility that you can re-pattern yourself.

From this, if you were to insert a particular fact into your state - a future event, say, such that it is "true now that this happens then" - then the only guaranteed thing is that fact. The rest of your state will have accommodated that fact such that the moments from now to then are continuous, but besides that there is no guarantee regards the content of your experience. Your assumptions about what "should" happen between now and then are irrelevant; they're just little ideas you are thinking, nothing more. You might even feel massively depressed for weeks until, one day, some event happens which completely transforms your viewpoint, and then your intention seems to come to pass, as if the event caused it. However, actually the entire sequence of moments was the result of the intention, not just the moment of that event. The intention was the cause of the whole thing, not the event.

This doesn't mean you have to simply accept feeling crappy, of course! You can intend adjustments or whatever. The point is, though, that the idea that you have to constantly control every moment in order to maintain yourself and get an outcome, is flawed. That view assumes your are like a boat sailing on choppy waters heading for an island, and you have to keep re-asserting your course. Really, though, you are the boat and the waters and the island, and your (accumulated) intention defines all three. Now, for sure, if you find you have intended against your outcome, then it's fine to re-assert it. But it shouldn't be viewed as an ongoing battle against the psychological weather; the passing waves and winds are actually part of the course you have implicitly defined for yourself.

I've read through your reply a few times to try and fully get it

The final paragraph is meant to suggest that whatever feelings that arise within you don't indicate that an intention has "worked" or "not worked". When you intend something, it's like you've inserted a fact into the world directly - and the "world-pattern" shifts at that moment to incorporate it. That insertion is the only thing that ever really "happens"; everything else, all feelings or whatever, are you experiencing the resulting state. As I said, though, you don't need to simply accept feeling crappy. As a separate item, you could address that. You might like to play with the exercises in The Michael Chekhov Handbook: For The Actor (Chapter 4) for this. You'll probably note the connection between the perspective adopted for those exercises, and the expanded viewpoint implied by, say, the Feeling Out Exercise in the link at the end of this comment. The focus being: experiencing and the "directness" of it.

At the back of this, really, is a reappraisal of what you consider to be "you" and what you consider to be "the world". For some previous discussion on this, see the exercise in this comment [POST: In what way are other people real?] and the metaphors in this comment [POST: [THEORY] The Nature of Consciousness].

A couple of quick comments for now [actually they weren't quick after all]:

But these "feelings" you get after intending something are a lot different from wandering thoughts and ideas about the intention.

The wandering thoughts, emotions and so on are pretty much what I'm referring to here, because that seemed to be what OP was talking about rather than a direct apprehension. The "deep intuitive feeling" - what I've tended to call things like the felt-sense rather than "feeling" to try and make them distinct - is something else. That is different to "feeling bad about things", including having passing bad emotional thoughts and feelings (thought which are just feelings, for example) about the situation. There's a difficult-to-articulate difference between a sense "about" the situation and a sense "of" the situation, too.

[When you intend something, it's like you've inserted a fact into the world directly...] I cannot agree that it's as simple as inserting a fact into the future and having it happen.

Perhaps I should rephrase this as: When you successfully intend something then that is identical with inserting a fact into the world directly. It is as simple as that, but only if that is what you do. If you do something else instead, then you don't get that outcome. If you don't intend the actual pattern but something else, or if you subsequently counter-intend, then you've not actually intended the update. If you want to draw a shape on a piece of paper, you have to actually draw the shape you want - and not another shape, or a drawing about the shape, or a drawing of drawing a shape - and then not subsequently draw on top of it. Intention is "direct" in that sense; there is no interpretation for you, and no gap (although there are additional concerns such as what is being brought in by association or whatever). If you don't get an outcome, then it's because you were doing something else instead. Working out what that something else is or was, is part of the experiment and fun.

You have to be willing to give up your life, your personality, your goals, everything you have in order to detach.

A brief way to say this is perhaps: you want to simply "cease" to intend in reaction to moments which appear, and only intend for occasional updates. So your default is to "be okay with whatever happens" (including things like your body positioning and movements; it's not just the big things) which is identical to simply leaving one's state alone between shifts. But there's some granularity to this. While our state is a single unbroken pattern, and so we might say that all intentional change is a change of everything to an extent, including reactive intention - it's not the case that one has to let go completely of everything, and always, to get any outcome incorporated into oneself. (But one has to not be stepping on the rug that one is trying to move, at the moment of movement.)

The Two Glasses exercise is really intended as something of a demonstration of that, and a starting point for exploration (which is why it and the Owls exercise are referred to as "demo exercises" of course). As one experiments more, then subtleties are noticed, but I think you really have to actually conduct the exploration, essentially of the condition of your own patterned state, to get further. Because lots of descriptions - involving "detachment" - don't make much sense until you do. Things that seem like they will an "action" involving "objects" upon reading, turn out not to be that in experience. I think that often ideas like "detachment" tend to suggest to people something that they have to do. And so they try to find the best way, method, technique, and understanding that will lead them to this. But, and the same applies to the idea of "intention" itself, that can become part of the problem. How can you detach when you aren't really attached to anything (because you aren't separate from anything)? How can you intend when there is no separation between you, the intention, and the thing being manipulated (and not even a "you" as such)?

So I agree with you in much of what you say, but I'm inclined to think those issues are sort of collateral ones, that it doesn't necessarily pay to try to address directly, because to some extent they turn out to be mirages later. Perhaps similar to saying (reasonably) that to move one's arm efficiently what you want to do is both relax and move at the same time - but when you get to grips with that through experience, it turns out to be more like a direct unbroken shifting of the whole rather than two acts on an part of the body. The description only makes sense from that perspective, afterwards, because only then does it gain meaning - and it can actually get in the way beforehand. And so, perhaps, with advocating "detachment" as an aim to work towards, rather than something which comes from, is a way of trying to describe, a more direct understanding after the fact.

We're mostly on the same page here (half the discussions on this topic are basically working out that people agree, just in different words, it sometimes seems!), except for the last section. Again, though, this might be somewhat a matter of terminology and perspective.

I suppose when I say detachment, I'm talking about a state of nothingness, a void. Technically we shouldn't need to detach from anything because there is no separation.

That's an indication that "detachment" invokes a mental image which is unhelpful, I think. It suggest something spatial, to do with contact, and that is misleading (another reason I'm not sure it's a helpful term except as a shorthand in retrospect).

It is like a blank slate. This is the state that monks are aiming for. This is the state that people often call "enlightenment".

"Enlightenment" is such a misused and mistranslated word, I'd say. For me: I would not say the void state, or the adoption of the void state, is equivalent to "enlightenment". It is another experience just like any other. There is generally a sense of "having-being an experience" even though it is not spatially or temporally structured; it is not entirely blank. That is possible too, but not completely, because otherwise you'd not come back from it. So, we should probably distinguish between a "void experience" and a "void state". The ultimate void "state" would be one where the particular distribution of relative "intensities of contribution" of all patterns would be completely flat, near-zero contributions. There would be no re-remembering a world experience afterwards. Here, then, we are talking about a "void experience".

The sense in which that is associated with "enlightenment", is that having such an experience can tip you off that the only thing is fundamentally true is being-aware or "awareness" - because you have experienced everything other than the pattern of being-observing, all object content, disappear. But the actual experience is not special in some sort of hierarchy. It is only special in that it might nudge some insight. But you can have that insight right now, simply by attending to your present experience and realising that you are "everywhere but nowhere" within it (and that what you think of as "you" is just the perspective-structuring of the moment) and it is all "made from you", thereby recognising that all boundaries are "imaginings of boundaries". That recognition is enlightenment, I would say. Which is why it is such a problem to articulate: it is not content-based and it can't be described, since it is "before" division and multiplicity and objects, and conceptualisation and language depend upon dividing things into parts and then re-relating them in a metaphorical mental space.

Looping back:

If someone wants to get real, meaningful, consistent change with their jumps, they have to detach until they reach this state of nothingness.

Your other point does still stand, though I wouldn't describe it that way. That is, that if you "cease" reacting and maintaining completely, the experience of doing (not doing!) that can be like becoming a void - then you are no longer preventing a shift simply by having held content. When in this position there is (almost) no opposition to intention since there is no conflict between the patterns corresponding to the content of the moment and the pattern you want to bring into prominence (because you have a void moment). But you don't need to do that. That's like deleting your whole street temporarily in order to reposition your sofa. You only need to avoid holding onto a pattern which conflict with the intentional pattern. Just like when you move you arm, you don't need to go all floppy or lie down first - you simply intend arm movement without also intending or implying anything counter to arm movement.

Aside - It is genuinely instructive, for those who haven't done so, to experiment with effortless intentional movement. After all, there is essentially no difference between modifying "the fact of my arm's position" and any other fact; but feedback is instant and within one's perspective.

That's why the results on this sub are usually 'tame' or rather inconsistent. Someone may do two glasses. And it works with amazing results. But when they try to replicate it or do something bigger, it fails.

That's really because it is not intended for that; it's a demonstration of a very particular thing. The two exercises (Owls and Glasses) demonstrate two specific aspects of experience - although ultimately they are the same thing of course. Owls is demonstration of direct re-shaping via intention; Glasses is a demonstration of indirect re-shaping via implication.

One of the benefits of the Glasses is that it reminds us that this experience right now is a pre-patterned image; it uses patterns of meaning already present to structure an intention, and it works even if you don't understand it conceptually. That's a valuable lesson in itself. But, inherently, it is not going to bring about discontinuities, because it is itself part of a continuous experience. Often I say that results will be in the form of events which are "plausible if seemingly very unlikely to have occurred". The Owls exercise is completely free from, and if you experiment with that, using different intentional patterns, there's much to learn about the "directness" of intention and experience. We move from abstract "owl" type patterns to more specific patterns involving spatial and temporal aspects, and then we realise that the visual (say) is an aspect of the pattern, and that you are operating with patterns directly. That helps us towards comprehending that "you are the whole scene" of your ongoing experience.

Anyway, I wrote out a bit more than was required there, just for the general benefit.

Full scale detachment is the only real way to make any use of DJ consistently and regularly.

Since "DJ" is not just about results - because there is an inherent problem with the overall concept of "results" I think - then I'd say that a full investigation of one's ongoing experience and patterning is the way to make full use of it. That is the way the exercises are set up: they are called "exercises" because they are no "methods" or "techniques"; the reason for this is that ultimately there is no "mechanism" or "how things work", and no "act" which can be formed upon the world. Unpicking that fully is the only real option eventually; everything else turns out to be just another pattern or experience which brings with it a new set of implications and hurdles, on an endless "seeker's journey". Of course, aiming for results is the perfect motivation for this! I'm not criticising that at all, just the notion that any particular piece of experiential content or conceptualisation or any apparent act is the "solution" if only we can find it. That's the idea that we should really want to take as step back from, and consider from a "meta" perspective.

I still quite like the term "imagine-that" from one of the sidebar posts - short for "imagine the fact of something being true" - as a handy term to encapsulate the nature of sensory experience and how it is shaped. If you were to, right now, "imagine-that" something in your current world experience was different, how would you go about it? Or more to the point: is there a "how to go about it"?

Q1: "DJ" is not just about results - because there is an inherent problem with the overall concept of "results" I think - then I'd say that a full investigation of one's ongoing experience and patterning is the way to make full use of it.
Since the meta-context is ultimately inaccessible and there is no "waking up" from the "dream", what is the purpose of this investigation if not to learn how to improve the content of our experience, getting the results we want?

There is no waking up in the sense of getting "outside" of experience, of course. However, there is a waking up to the fact of the dream, and the nature of the experience in terms of "you" and "the world" - and this changes the meaning of the content of your experience. Of course, we might say that this is a change in content too - but generally when people are talking about getting "results" they are talking about still having exactly the same structure of experience (apparently a person-object in a world-place) just with improved person-world circumstances. We can go further than this, though. And to not do so, when there is a possibility of digging further, is to remain wilfully ignorant, surely? It's good to be at least aware there is a choice, anyway. This change in meaning is the "meta" aspect, and is itself a change in circumstances, but not of the world.

It might be useful to distinguish, then, between the "formatting" of experience and the "sensory content" of experience. If someone is just seeking an improvement in circumstances, then they are just looking to change the "sensory content". But without pushing and investigating beyond the basic - potentially incorrect - assumptions (about the nature of experience and the nature of descriptions; our usual picture of the world; etc) and addressing the "formatting", any improvements are going to be pretty limited, I'd suggest. The underlying concept of this subreddit, ultimately, is based around an investigation via the quest for results, without necessarily making assumptions about how things are or what will be discovered. This makes it a little bit different from a "how to make my life better!" subreddit (see comment contrasting with others, here [POST: This sub feels like what /r/lawofattraction is trying to be], for example). If we judge our experiments by binary success or failure of outcomes, as if we were talking about a "method" or "technique" connected to a specific "mechanism" or "how things work", we're probably missing the true value of the whole endeavour.

We might also consider, too, what the value of getting "results" is, if they are in the end just a distraction, to pass the time as it were, until we die, in much the same overall state as we were when we began.

Q1: be okay with whatever happens
Doesn't this lead to a paradox?
When dealing with something really unpleasant, for example, should we be okay also with the fact of not being okay with that?

It's really meant in the sense of "do not resist the sensory moment that is arising". Because to do so is a counter-intention which, in any case, usually isn't properly directed at a considered outcome. It doesn't mean you have to like what comes up, nor that you can't choose to intend a change in your situation. So it's not "be okay" in the sense of "be happy with", it's more "be okay" in the sense of being okay with the fact of the experience as an experience, not react to it blindly. Other ways to describe the same idea may be more useful - for example, talking in terms of an open focus, etc. It depends on the context of the conversation really.

Q2: That is all very interesting stuff, thanks for typing it all out; I will reread it several more times. Do you think there are any good ways of clarifying further for myself the reality of life? Sure I can read what other people say, but that is what a lot of people do in regards to spiritual teachers (parroting another person's words, when they aren't living from the truth) and if I feel as though I have to remember the truth from someone else' words, then I obviously haven't seen it clearly enough for myself. Sitting here, I can see that I am aware of a "person" typing on a screen, but I can't know if the website, computer, couch, family, etc. exist independently of my awareness. I've had derealization/depersonalization for several years, so things have already felt dream-like for a long time, but now my view has changed from "I feel so detached from the world, this is hell" to wondering if what I called the world was ever really there. I guess the uncertainty doesn't really lay with wondering if the world is real, but rather with how much influence I have over what I experience, which I suppose can only come with seeing how things play out for the next little while.

Try the Feeling Out Exercise in one of those links, as a starting point! As you say, if you have to "remember" (conceptually reconstruct) other peoples words or ideas, then that's not really what you are after. Actually, you simply want to directly notice how things are. Something to keep in mind, though, is that the the truth is always true. There is no "higher" experience; all experiences are of the same nature. For example, the experience of "apparently being a person sat at a computer" and the experience of "apparently being an infinite void" are both equal, both made from "experiencing" or "awarness". It's recognising that - the sort of "meta" realisation about the content versus the context of experiences - that is what you are after. And so seeking a particular special experience, including the experience of thinking an insightful thought, is an error.

Your final sentence is spot on: The search for "what is true" is the search for "what never changes". This requires experimentation and attending to experience. I would suggest that the eventual conclusion is perhaps that the only thing that is fundamentally true is the fact of the property of being-aware (and so you conclude that what you are is "awareness"), with everything else (all content and patterning) being relatively true only. In other words, all experiences are on an "as if" basis only ("as if" something was true), and the only thing that is always true is that fact that there is an experience at all.

POST: [THEORY] The Nature of Consciousness

Nice and thought-provoking post. Some musings -

Firstly, how do we go about defining what exactly consciousness is?

I think it's perhaps useful to distinguish between "consciousness" (simply the property of awareness or being), "consciousness-of" (awareness, the context, taking on the shape of an experience, of content), and "self-consciousness" (the identification with a part of that content as "me"). In discussions, these often get muddled up, with people arguing about identification with a "me" as ("being conscious"), when really the core of it all is the fact of the property "awareness" (being-awareness). In that sense, then "awareness" isn't anything. That is, it is not an object, rather it is the subject to all experiential states. You can't define it as such, because it is "before" definitions - since definitions are based on the division of experience and the relation of one part to another. However, for convenience, we can talk of this property of awareness, so long as we recognise that the concept cannot capture it - since awareness cannot be thought about (it is that which thoughts are "made from") - and that there is no fundamental experience that corresponds to it (all experiences are it). In other words, there is no use looking for awareness within the content of experience, because it is "that which takes on the shape of experiences", including thoughts about experiences (which are themselves experiences: the experience of thinking about things).

Consciousness is, in simplest terms, the ability to recognize that you are a living being having an experience. The experience itself does not matter.

So this is almost it, except that "recognition" is an experience, and so it would fall into the category of content, of "consciousness-of" and maybe even "self-consciousness". But to some extent this is just an issue with words. To avoid the implication that there's an action, relation or a separation involved, we might rephrase as consciousness is the property of awareness or "knowingness" or "I am" or "experiencing" (as opposed to an experience).

This begs the question, though; where does your consciousness come from?

It doesn't come from anywhere, it is eternal (as in "before" or "outside" of time, rather than "forever"). It is not an object, and so it has no beginning nor end, nor any boundaries of any sort, nor any location (it is also "before" division and multiplicity). Basically, what it is, is "isness" - it is the fact or property of existence, without any existence itself as such.

If it arose only from the matter in this reality, how would it be possible to shift into a different frame of reference...

What we have to be careful of here, is the tendency to think about things in a 3rd-person "view from nowhere" that is never actually experienced. When we say "arose from matter in this reality", we are again imagining that consciousness is an "object" which can emerge or be created from something (has a beginning and end, and has boundaries and a location). As we've seen, though, this isn't the case. And what's more, that imagining (of consciousness being an object), is itself occurring within and as consciousness or awareness. I feel it's really important to keep coming back to your actual 1st-person experience (see this comment's exercise, for example), because that keeps you straight when you find yourself trying to think about consciousness. It's important to remind yourself that you are thinking in metaphors, and whereas with other areas a metaphor would exist as a "parallel construction in thought" at the same level as the thing you were describing, pointing to something alongside it, in this specific case the metaphor cannot do this, it points nowhere and everywhere - because we are talking about that which is the nature of the experience of metaphors themselves. The library is a nice metaphor for the "infinite gloop" of all possible patterns, eternally available in the background to be accessed, a subset of which are formatted into sensory experiences. If you haven't already, you should read The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Several of his short essays and stories are metaphors for reality, experience and identity.

Other metaphors:

• The Blanket: What you truly are is the "non-material material" whose only inherent property is awareness or being-aware, and which "takes on the shape of" experiences. Right now, you-as-awareness have "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world. This can be conceived of as a non-dimensional blanket, within which there are folds (fact-patterns) which represent the world (world-pattern or current state).
• The Beach: The metaphor of the beach - about metaphors. It is not possible to build a sandcastle which captures within its form both "the beach" and "sand". However, the sandcastle is both the beach and sand. You can certainly label one part of the sandcastle "the beach" and another "sand", but the properties of those parts, being of form, will not capture the properties of the beach and sand themselves, which are "before" form. If you forget this, and start building ("thinking") further sandcastles based on those labelled parts, all further constructions and their conclusions are immediately "wrong", fundamentally, even though they may be coherent structures ("make sense") on their own terms.
• Patterned States: All possible patterns exist eternally with and as awareness, and all patterns always contribute to ongoing experience. However, they differ in their relative intensity, their relative level of contribution. Note that patterns are not located; they are unbounded and everywhere-nowhere, "dissolved" into awareness. The current experiential state, then, is equivalent to a particular distribution of pattern intensities, which you might think of as a set of "facts" which fully define a world or scenario (although those "facts" might be quite abstract, sort of meta-facts). One of those fact-patterns is that of "time passing". That is, a particular state fully defines a sequence of moments which unfold deterministically unless the state is shifted again. In order to shift one's state, one must change the relative intensity of patterns, which is done by intending. In this metaphor, "an intention" is a fact-pattern which is to have its relative contribution to experience increased, and "intending" is the intensification of that pattern. There is no method to intending, no mechanism or act involved, and no cause and effect. It is akin to shape-shifting. One simply "intends". Intending is the only cause; all apparent causes are in fact results of intending, in the form of patterns within a state.

And so on.

Is there only one consciousness... or are there many minds...

From the above, we see that this question is actually meaningless. Not in a dismissive way; this just follows from the nature of awareness not being an object. There are not "many awarenesses" and nor is there "an* awareness"; there is simply "awareness". The only fundamental fact, the only thing that is always true, is the fact of the property of being-aware. Absolutely everything else is relatively, temporarily, true only. This includes any apparent division or change in time. Again, we must constantly bring ourselves back to our 1st-person experience, because truly it is the only thing "happening" right now, and check the properties of awareness directly, noticing whether we are imagining a "view from nowhere", and where that imagining is taking place.

This question bothers me the most simply because it is the hardest to answer, as it would require looking beyond the metaphorical library.

Or, one flips things around? Instead of awareness being in the library, we have that the entire library is dissolved, eternally, within and as awareness - and awareness simply associatively traverses the content, unfolding different pages into the senses, as it were. The Infinite Grid, Hall of Records and Imagination Room metaphors linked in the sidebar try to indicate this shift in perspective (awareness as the context to all experiential content) too. The nature of awareness is such that it can't travel anywhere nor change in time, however it can select the content of its ongoing Now, by shape-shifting itself via its infinite potential, into any experience, "as if" this or that were true, even thought the only thing that is actually true is awareness itself.

Note: Don't make the mistake of then thinking that awareness "takes on the shape of" multiple people as beings, as if they were formed and arranged within some sort of place, who then go about doing things. You-as-awareness is the only being, the only intelligence. Everything else is patterns within awareness, which ripple across its metaphorical sensory screen, "as if" there were other people (and you-as-person) doing things. All that is actually happening, though, is awareness itself.

Short version: Consciousness doesn't have an inherent nature other than the property of "awareness" - and, as infinite potential, the ability to "take on the shape of" any other apparent nature.

...

Well, I probably do a "constructive rest position" lying down whenever I feel like it, a couple of times a day (lie down on the floor with feet flat and books supporting the head, let go of body and thought and also attentional focus, let things move as they will, 10 minutes). See also the Overwriting Yourself post linked in the introduction for some background. Mostly, though, it's just switching attention to an open state, and enjoying experience, whenever in the mood. I don't do a particular formal meditation or anything like that. And: yes, you should participate more often!

POST: I want a serious answer to what happens to other people after a "jump"

There are no "other people". In a sense, there is no you-as-person either, so there are no "people". There is just you-as-experiencer, having "taken on the shape of" an experience, "as if" you were a person-object in a world-place. Note, though, that you-as-experiencer is not a "thing" or an "object" or even a "perspective", which means there is not an experiencer, nor many experiencers. Really, there is just "experiencing". Another way to phrase this is that there is only you-as-awareness, or that the only fundamental truth is the fact of the property of "being-aware" or "awareness". Everything else is a relative, secondary, temporary truth only (hence we say we have an experience "as if" something is true). Although at first glance it might seem "ridiculous and morbid", that's usually because you are viewing it as a concept, which involves relating mental objects within a conceptual space. This is "before" that sort of division and explanation. Hence, the subreddit ends up being about exploring both the "nature of experiencing" and also the nature of descriptions. This - experiencing - cannot be conceptualised, because it is not made from "parts", and conceptual thinking is in fact an experience of or as it (metaphorically: "within" it, but it has no "outside" so that can be a bit misleading). It is not "morbid" because the "aliveness" of any experience is essentially sort of borrowed from this, directly, although it is not located anywhere. All of which is why the answers given to these sort of questions tend to be abstract, and irritating. (See also the metaphors given in the sidebar, as other ways into this.)

Q1: Well, you can frame anything any which way. But the reality is - and the one I hope everyone is working on - certain people experience sadness, pain, etc. and we feel sympathy with them, because they are the ones affected, not us. People can choose to cause this sadness and pain in others, or not choose that. That's how we judge someone's character. Emotions are real, and so is causing them, and separation from them.

Well, you can look at it that way if you want, for sure, but it's not especially supported by direct experience once you start attending to it and digging into things. Now, to be clear: it's not so much that I'm saying that "people" aren't "real" in any sense, but rather that the concept of "people" as commonly understood in the default view is incorrect. (Here, the default view being that you are a person-object in a world-place, where "the world" is assumed to be a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'".)

The outcome isn't that you perceive other people as just "stuff" to not care about - that "ridiculous and morbid" conclusion you refer to. Quite the opposite, in fact. All "people", including the apparent you-as-person, are structures within you. They are not "people" as in "separate beings", but it's actually more intimate than that: they are are all aspects of you-as-being or you-as-awareness (or "beingness", if you like). You might say (although again this can be slightly misleading), that the choice to "cause this sadness and pain in others" would be a choice to cause sadness and pain within yourself, even though you might not experience it in a direct "unpacked" form. You would still be modifying the world (as enfolded within "awareness") such that it was patterned with "sadness" and "pain" - and quite possibly in a way that would then later unfold within unpacked sensory experience, from the perspective of apparently being a person. It's not (intended to be) just "framing", this, I should stress. It is directly observable to be the case that you are not a person in the usual sense, and nor is "anyone else". It follows from direct experience, and the philosophical discussion follows from that.

Q1: default view being that you are a person-object in a world-place, where "the world" is assumed to be a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time"
I don't really hold that view either, but some combination of that and what you're saying. So if I choose to embark of a journey of large jumps, I could not feel at ease that "I've always been jumping infinitely". There would be something fundamentally different about doing it with a type of intent I never tried to use before. People can call it Magic, Playing God, whatever.

Well, the "I've always been jumping infinitely" view has problems in any case, and would not in fact ease your mind if you went into it more deeply. Luckily, though, the "meta" view circumvents this anyway - the "meta" view being the recognition that all experiences are "shapings" from, or states of, this "experiencing" (or "awareness"). And so, again, all experiences are on an "as if" basis only. That is, they are "patternings" of you-as-awareness. Which means there is only one type of intent! "Intending" is equivalent to "increasing the prominence of a particular pattern within your state", where your "state" corresponds to the full definition of the world within you and the fully-determined sequence of sensory moments which follow from that. If you intend the outcome of "it is true now that my arm will move now" then that is the same in type as the outcome "it is true now that I will ace my exam then".

Aside - Note that you are not - necessarily - intending or shifting "all the time", in this description. Only when you redirect unfolding experience, or deliberately assert or imply something, are you doing that. This can be tricky to articulate, because of course intention is "outside of" time, since time is itself a patterning within and a formatting of state. In particular, "intending" is not the same as the experience of apparently "doing something". The experience of "doing" is itself a result, a sensory experience that is an aspect of the current state. (Which of course means you never actually experience "causing" anything.)

Calling things "magic" or "playing god" is merely an artefact of a particular intentional outcome being exceptional in the context of the standard description, rather than it being exceptional in the context of experience-as-it-is. There is no "magic", there only just "patterning" (your current state) and "intention" (the intensification of a pattern and therefore a reshaping of your state). Ultimately, though, none of this matters. If you recognise that there are only experiences, and descriptions of and thoughts about experiences are themselves just more experiences (at the same "level"), then you are left with merely: a) attending to the nature of the current moment directly, b) experimenting to see the extent to which you can alter it. And stories you come up with about that are actually not particularly relevant or true - other than as formattings that you can use to formulate your intentions, and therefore the extended patterns associated with your target outcomes.

(For some previous discussion on this, perhaps see the exercise in this comment [POST: In what way are other people real?] and the metaphors in this comment [POST: [THEORY] The Nature of Consciousness].)

There are people who devote their whole lives to occult and insist on performing unethical rituals in their practice.

Because they seem to be true. Why?

In short: "patterning".

Now, although "patterning" is itself a metaphor, it is meant to offer an example of the most minimal description that captures the fact of "experience is apparently structured". The implication of "patterning" and "intention is the increasing of one pattern's contribution to your ongoing experience" is that:

• Whatever you intend in terms of, will seem to be true, because it will result in experiences "as if" that were true.

And now:

Why not just choose another way to intend?

There is only ever one way to intend - or actually it is not even a "way", because intending is actually not a "doing" or "technique" or "mechanism" at all. It might be better describe as a "self-shaping" (of you-as-awareness). But you can intend any pattern, and any pattern you intend also includes its extended associations. Any intention is, sort of, a shift of the entire world-pattern, in terms of the larger meanings associated with the intention. But you might not know this, particularly if you only pay attention to the content of particular experiences and don't notice the context of all experiences - and if you think that your apparent actions are "causal" rather than also being "results" (of intention, which is the only cause). Now, I realise the above might sound a bit abstract, so:

More specifically, then: if you intend an outcome in terms of "the Norse gods", then in addition to your outcome you will also tend to bring about an increase in the pattern "the Norse gods exist", because it was implied by your intention. If you aren't aware that there is this "meta" perspective of viewing such things - and perhaps you haven't also intended in terms of other things - you will likely become convinced that "the Norse gods" are real in an independent way, and the evidence will stack up more and more as you intend in terms of them. After all, you are literally experiencing the truth of their existence! Furthermore, if you are performing certain rituals, then you might think that they, too, exist as real mechanisms, because you are having experiences "as if" they are true (even though in actual fact "performing a ritual" is just yet another experience, an aspect of your current patterned state, as is any seeming outcome).

"Anything goes", but it only "goes" if you intend accordingly - and until you intend in terms of something, there might be zero evidence of that something! Although having said that, it tends to be the case that intentional thinking about a thing tends to lightly pattern your ongoing experience with that thing - see synchronicities, for example, or the Owls of Eternity exercise linked in the sidebar.

...

Q2: Nice to see you back, Gorgeous (not a typo).
I was wondering what your views were on one thing that I have pondered about a lot, but haven't really come to a conclusion or even much of an idea about.
When talking about other people, since the concept of "person" isn't really real, are we just interacting with different versions/patterns of someone and the version we get is just our own projection? Trying to put this in words makes it convoluted, because I have to talk in terms of separation to try and get my question across. For example, could you experience as if someone only existed to please you? I wonder stuff like that because despite seeing that "I as person" is not real, I only have guesses as to if what looks like other people still have any sort of sentience or will of "their own" because if you were to intend for something like a relationship that lasts forever, you may assume that the other person could dump you because they are "an external person who can make their own choices" unless that is just a projection.
Hopefully you get what I'm talking about.

Heh!

Yes, it's really hard to put into language, so we end up going at it from multiple angles and, we hope, the combination of all of those then points to the thing we actually mean. I think it's perhaps helpful do away with the whole idea of "projection", though, since that still implies there's an activity taking place, from one object onto another. So, two possible approaches that occur for talking around the subject:

First, stick to what you actually experience and make a distinction between that and what you infer.

One observation along those lines: your ideas about "other people" to some extent are due to what you see in the mirror, and "other people" also being that shape and with those movements and so on. Since you experience yourself as having thoughts and ideas, you might map that onto other people. However, your thoughts are not actually experienced as being in the world. There is the person-in-world image, and there is thoughts. Your you-as-person experience isn't what is thinking, really; that's just content. Rather, the thoughts are appearing in the you-as-awareness experience alongside the person-in-world experience. Another: going back to that mirror experience, perhaps consider what you actually look like, your actual experience. Is that the image in the mirror? If you think so, why do you think so? If it isn't, what do you look like really?

Second, and following on from that, consider that the world is a single continuous pattern, a "world-pattern", one that is static but fully defines the world and all possible experiences associated with it, in a given state (until it is shifted via intention to a new state, occasionally). The sensory experience you have, then, is the "sensory aspect" of that world-pattern, unfolded from a particular perspective, for a particular series of moments. ("Time passing" is also a static pattern, in this description.)

This pattern is not a projection, then, and is more like a "shape" you have adopted. The full definintion is "enfolded" within you, with sensory moments "unfolded" within you in sequence. It follows that all "people", including the "person" you are apparently experiencing being, are patterns which are aspects of this world-pattern. They are all "alive" in the sense of being "made from" awareness; but they are not themselves aware. They are not experiencing. Rather, awareness is aware of them, as them, since awareness is the pattern including all the people-patterns. Only "awareness" is experiencing (and "awareness" is itself really a synonym for "experiencing" or the fact of experiencing).

Here we must be careful not to conflate "experience of" with "expanded as a sensory moment". Right now, you-as-awareness is experiencing being the entire world-pattern, even though only this particular person-in-a-world moment is unfolded as a spatially-extended sensory aspect. The language we use to describe a particular everyday experience can be a bit misleading here, because it's all quite course-grained and in terms of particular objects. If you actually attend to your ongoing experience directly, it's much more subtle than that: you experience "meaning", and I'd say the sense in which you experience being the world-pattern is like experiencing "meaning".

Anyway, those are a couple of avenues worth exploring. As always, though, we're invoking metaphors or arranging concepts in order to describe something which is actually super-simple: experience just is, with nothing behind it. Although: we must also consider the observation that adopting particular concept tends to shape experience accordingly. Which loops back to, say, the idea that adopting directly or implicitly the concept of "an external person who can make their own choices" is effectively a patterning of your own experience (your world-pattern or state) such that it is shaped "as if" that were true.

[Split this into two parts because it got a bit long.]

Part One

there aren't many "people" on here who enjoy exchanging several paragraph long posts.

It's tricky sometimes. To discuss this topic properly usually requires a bit of back and forth before we even get going - since we need to work out what exactly one commenter means by a particular phrase versus another, and there's a need to provide context for most things, rather than snappy one-liners. I personally try to encourage deeper thinking and discussion throughout the sub, but it's very time-consuming for people to have that sort of conversation, particularly when a lot of time has to be spent describing, for example, "why what you say isn't wrong, but is meaningless from a different perspective, and here is the other perspective", and so on. Anyway -

Yes, the term projection can be convoluted, though the way I use it has changed from the past, so when I use it now I mean "you're seeing your own choice", basically.

Right. The issue with "projection" is that it tends to imply a sort of mechanism which occurs within time and space. But what you mean is clear enough. Using a different metaphor, then, we might say that "seeing your own choice" is the "sensory aspect" of your current state - which one might consider as the total sum of all deliberate and non-deliberate intentional patterns and their implications to date, and which fully defines all moments. Your state or world-pattern is itself non-local and non-temporal, implicitly specifies all locations and moments. In this scheme, "projection" would be "intentional change of your state and subsequently encountering the effects in your ongoing experience".

I've been paying extra attention in my dealings with "other people" lately and I have been able to really see the lack of separation between experiencing and the seeming appearance of others, so I now view these interactions as less real which helps to examine exactly what I'm patterning.

I wouldn't say that they are "less real" though. The only thing that was ever real was your ongoing patterned experience, and the only way in which you ever encountered people was as a part of that experience. It's simply that your story about that experience has changed. The description has changed, but the nature of the experience is unchanged from what it was before. However, by attending to your experience you can directly notice that it is all "made from you" - that is, that you are and always were the entire moment of any particular scene or encounter. And although the scene is structured as apparently being from a certain perspective - you-as-person are apparently "over here" and your friend is "over there" - you notice that the whole thing, both "over here" and "over there" and everywhere else, is in fact "made from" you. So you are everywhere and nowhere; it is all actually you-as-awareness in the "shape" of the scene.

I have a twin brother and it's harder to see his lack of independent existence due to our history...

That experience of identity and history - that meaningful felt-sense - that accompanies experiences of your twin, is itself experiential content. You can actually locate it somewhat within experience usually (it may be in your lower abdomen area, or in your chest). It's something to play with, anyway, the meaning that comes with the other aspects of a scene or moment.

When I look in the mirror lately, it is more like I am looking at a dream, so whatever I'm looking at isn't as solid as I thought before.

The key here, I think, is to notice that the image is "over there", and then to direct your attention to "the place your are looking out from" and see what's there. Ultimately, you probably first get the sense that the mirror isn't a reflection of you, it's part of the visual scene, and that in the other direction is a sort of void (not a space, usually). Then - as with the Feeling Out Exercise in another link - you notice that the whole scene is sort of floating within perception, and you can explore beyond the boundaries of that. Your body is a bunch of sensations floating and phasing in and out; you do not experience "being a body" as such at all. (Although occasionally you may think it.) Really pay attention to the boundary between "your body" and "the room". Is there, in fact, actually a boundary? In what way are you "inside" your body at all? And so on. As you point out, one might ask whether there is a "literal person who is angry" when dealing with others. But similarly, it is worth asking if there is a "literal person who is angry" when you are having the experience of being angry. There may be a bunch of sensations, and thoughts, and so on - but if you try and locate a "you" who is angry, you'll struggle to find one.

Some people may say that if you're just experiencing your own patterns/ideas of the world, then certainly you could just go around abusing people without consequences - how accurate would you say that is?

There are always consequences, just because making a change involves corresponding consistent changes simply as part of shifting a pattern (in this metaphor). However, you could then address any unwanted outcomes as they arose, so in that sense you could do it "without consequences". Even outside of this topic, it's true you can do all sorts of bad things without suffering later, even if you do it in the everyday sense. But it's a bit like punching yourself in the face and then using magic healing cream. Why do it?

It's not something I want, I'm just curious as to if there's any limitation.

No limitation, structurally.

My view on it is that it's not possible, only because if you talk in terms of "abuse" or needing to steal from other people, then you're implying that you couldn't be given those things or you're implying that there are other people or resources outside yourself.

I think you can always handle and circumvent these implications though - that is, intentions which imply a world in which you don't get your outcome - by stepping back from them and changing the context.

Instead of stealing money and getting away with it, you would just be given money or acquire it through some other means, for example.

That does seem a better route.

Part Two

In regards to world patterns, I can see now that my previous idea of thinking that there ... is just a pattern and not something primordial; certainly having a perspective of life being amazing and jumping out of bed everyday in ecstasy isn't anything more special other than just being a different pattern.

It's "patterns all the way down", then!

Which, I we discussed earlier I think, is simply a way of saying that the only thing that is fundamentally true is the fact of "awareness" or being-aware, and absolutely everything else is relatively and temporarily true only. This doesn't just apply to facts of the world, but to the formatting of experience more generally (even "spatial extent" and "things change" and "objects" and "seeing" are patterns, just more abstract). Generally, then, one should consider that all possible patterns exist eternally, always present now in the background, and what changes is their relative prominence or intensity of contribution to ongoing experience (with a particular distribution of intensities being your "state"). So no experience is more special or fundamental than any other experience, because the fundamental aspect is common to all experiences. Being depressed is an experience, as is ecstasy. And you don't need any reason to experience one or the other, because there is no cause within experience. You experience something because it has been patterned in; that is all. Intention is the only cause, and all experiences and apparent events are results, as aspects of your current patterned state. For example, you could simply decide right now to feel joyously happy and, if you don't interfere, it'll happen. In fact, try that right now: just decide that you are going to feel really bright and happy - and then allow whatever happens to happen.

[if I am formless awareness] where does the "personal view of the universe" idea come in? For example, if I'm talking to my neighbor, is there no experience as if my neighbor is talking to me?

You could rephrase it, perhaps. If you-as-awareness has taken on the shape of a world-pattern, and in addition adopted the fact of being-this-person, then your experience will be consistent with that. Now, if you-as-awareness modified that and instead adopted the fact of being-this-neighbour, then your experience would change accordingly. What would such an experience be like? Have you already had that experience, perhaps? Or, taking this further, if all possible patterns exist eternally, what does it mean to ask whether you "have had" or "will have" the experience of apparently being-this-neighbour?

Since I never experience anyone else' perception of me, I guess this is all theory and speculation, so perhaps it isn't important, so long as "I am the one in control of everything I experience" is seen and understood clearly.

As you say, wording get tricky. Because of course, the "me" you are referring to there doesn't experience anything at all; it's just a pattern. Only you-as-awareness ever has an experience, because it is "experiencing", and so "me" is a experience, not something that experiences. So the "you in control of everything" is also, strictly speaking, an experience. You could have an experience "as if" there is a "you" who controls everything, or not. However - and this is really what you are going for here I think - the experience of apparently being "you who controls everything" is always available, potentially.

I have started to adopt the pattern of "I'm the only one in control" a lot more and it has taken a lot of responsibility that I had put outside of myself, so I suppose the pattern will continue to get stronger and I can explore more how far I can take it.

Right, it's a pattern, and the more you intend in terms of it, the more prominent it will become. And as you imply, there is no "outside of yourself" anyway, because there is no "outside" or "behind" to experiencing. If awareness is metaphorically "rippled" with patterns and there is no "granularity" to awareness, then there are no theoretical limits to what can be adopted. While one can directly notice the fact that the fundamental nature of experiencing - and of descriptions about experiencing, which are themselves just experiences - is "awareness", and even have experiences of "void" which feel like infinite potential directly, ultimately these limits (or lack thereof) are left as a matter for "personal" exploration.

Really, I'd suggest, that actually becomes an investigation of your current patterning, as every intention implies its extended pattern and results in a shift in terms of your current state - presenting a new landscape to explore. This, in fact, is why a "seeker" can never find "enlightenment" via knowledge and experiences; because the experiences never end, and they have implicitly intended by "looking" to always end up "finding" - forever. But if we consider the stuff we've been talking about about, the "meta" of all experiences, this has already been removed as an issue, and now we're just having fun.

POST: Does the number not changing mean that the jump failed?

As per the sidebar text:

Header No. 982 - Please note that a shift in your experience does not require a change in the header number, which should be treated as an emblem of change and a symbol of potential rather than an ID.

Because of course, different states of your experience aren't actually independently numbered in the form of individual dimensions each with a unique ID - so there is no necessary connection between a change in any particular fact in your ongoing experience and a change in the fact called "the number on the subreddit header".

I believe we are jumping every second anyway.

From previous discussions: I'm not sure that's a very useful way to think about it, since it seems to conflate apparent change in sensory experience (the observed seeming transition between already-determined moments which are aspects of the present state) with "jumping". It is more conceptually helpful, surely, to reserve "jumping" as a term for deliberate shifts in state, corresponding to the imposition of a particular fact or outcome. Otherwise the metaphor of "dimensions" no longer has any meaning.

Q1: The only problem I have with reserving jumping for deliberate shifts is that I think it is easier for people new to altering their experience to transition from believing that things are always shifting to making intentional jumps. It is harder to go from a completely solid reality to making big intentional changes, than to go from an ephemeral reality that is changing all the time to making intentional changes.
I don't think the metaphor of dimensions loses meaning because I conceive of dimensions as configurations of consciousness. To go from one moment to the next, from one room to another, or from one thought to the next, is to change the configuration of your consciousness. Once you realize you are consciousness that is always shifting, it is easier to conceive of making "bigger" changes. The changes are only bigger because of our belief systems, but perhaps it could be as easy to make those shifts as to shift from one mental state to another.

I do see the reasoning behind the statement - it conveys this idea that things are fluid and therefore it is easier to make changes. "Hey, you are 'jumping' all the time anyway!"

The problem, I feel, is that it makes it harder to reintroduce the idea of deliberate intention coherently later (and to talk about implications). Having used up "jumping" as term for any configuration change, we've lost its use as a term when specifying a particular target outcome configuration and intending it. So I'm generally inclined to separate out the following things, to help make things clearer:

• "Moment by moment apparent change in sensory experience". These are not changes of state. They are aspects of the same static state, within which the full sequence of moments is defined.
• "Shifts in state brought about non-deliberately." This would be when we intend a change in the everyday sense, intervening to redirect of our current experience thus unwittingly implying a new set of moments. Perhaps just "going to the shop", but also "resisting the content of the current moment". We don't really intend to change the facts of the world in this case, but the worldview assumptions with which we formulate our intention, and its implications, bring about a state change. (We aren't really aware that we are intending here, as such.)
• "Shifts in state brought about deliberately." This is when we conceive of a change we'd like in our ongoing experience - facts of the world, target outcomes, whatever - and knowingly intend that change. This would be "jumping". (This is full awareness of making a change, and deliberately using the formulation of "dimensions" when specifying that change, knowingly going beyond the usual assumptions.)

I would then tend to reserve "jumping dimensions" for the final example, where we are making a deliberate change, and we are changing the actual apparent "facts of the world" - such that the results are, just as the name suggests, "as if" we had "switched into a different dimension". So instead of saying we are "jumping all the time", I would say that: our ongoing experience is in fact not as stable as we assume it to be; that this instability points to the possibility of making deliberate change; and that the concept of "dimensions" is one concept that can be used to harness this.

Q1: Those definitions make sense. I don't think that deliberate vs non-deliberate change is hard enought to understand that the word 'jumping' needs to be reserved for deliberate changes. I see the reasoning, but sometimes I just want to say "hey, you are jumping all the time!" It has a little more emphasis than shifting or instability. And it helps introduce the idea that big deliberate changes aren't necessarilly harder than what is already happening. Jumping sounds like it takes more effort than shifting or flowing, which is an idea that I don't want to introduce by reserving jumping for intentional changes. This is all pretty pedantic though.

It is pedantic, sure, but also I do think the wording we use makes a difference, and we kind of evolve the descriptions over time. So it's good to have this sort of discussion to bash it out, take on different experiences people have had when talking about this stuff. For example, linking to what you've just said, it is quite hard to convey the idea that "intending" is not actually a doing. That is, it really involves no effort or action at all, and it's not like pushing or manipulating something. In fact, any attempt to "do" an intention is really an intention of something else, and tends to conflict with the main intention (or at least place limits on the ways it can be incorporated into one's ongoing experience). This tends to be something that comes up later, though. At first, we're concentrating on the basic idea that experience is flexible, and there is a special type of "deciding" that is the true cause of change. But, then, do we sort of plan ahead for that later part of the discussion, by avoiding saying things earlier which will conflict with it, or do we just go with the approach of "oh, that was to just get you started, it's really like this"?

Realistically, it's a muddle of both. When it's a one-to-one discussion, it doesn't much matter because you are dynamically correcting things as you go along in the conversation. For one-off comments, though, I'm maybe inclined to be a bit more cautious, because we may never actually get the opportunity to make the later correction, once they've gone off to begin experiments by themselves.

Q1: Good points, I see a lot of posts where people don't really seem to understand the fluid nature of experience. "Did I jump or didn't I?", "Did it work", "I did x and nothing changed". I want to make a one-off comment to get them to consider that they are shifting all the time regardless of the outcome. I don't want anyone to walk away thinking that "dimensional jumping" doesn't work because they didn't get the outcome they wanted. I would rather have them think that they did jump, they just didn't achieve the outcome they wanted, because these things can be complicated. For better or worse, our belief systems are very complicated. Maybe I should take a little care to explain how I see things in more depth, and maybe not use the word jumping.

Yes, true about the fluidity. Beyond that, I find the main background issues that come up in posts, are:

a) not recognising the "meta" position of "experiencing" in general as distinct from any particular experience and the possibility of identifying with that (context vs content);
b) not recognising the "metaphorical" aspect of all descriptions as being "parallel experiences" (parallel constructions in thought), rather than true explanations that actually correspond to something "behind" experience;
c) not recognising that the ultimate purpose of this subreddit, being framed as an "investigation" into "the nature of experience", means that "beliefs" are something to be examined and unpacked to see how they correspond to direct experience, rather than something to simply be "respected" and applauded;
d) not recognising that just because the content of an experience corresponds to a particular description or belief, it does not mean that the description or belief is "true". Experiences are on an "as if" basis, and many different type of description will correspond, but none of them are "behind" the experience.

Each of these tends to limit the possibility of realising (just noticing, really) how flexible one's experience might be, or limit the possibility of having collaborative discussions which might unpack hidden assumptions and help with that (while avoiding exchanges getting emotionally charged due to identification with a particular description, and so on).

POST: Not exactly sure about D jumping..

Please don't refer me to the main home posts about D jumping.

Why not? It's all there, in the linked posts from the sidebar text and sticky posts, and of course a search in the history will turn up plenty of identical questions. Anyway, /u/NomadExile has already covered the basics of the appropriate attitude below, but:

This previous comment [POST: This sub feels like what /r/lawofattraction is trying to be] highlights the difference between the /r/lawofattraction subreddit and this one, and by extension the underlying concept. See this recent reference too [POST: PSA: There is no other version of you that you're "swapping places" with - you're only changing your perception of your current reality to deal with it more effectively. Please stop worrying about some other entity being forced to live in your unwanted situation if you jump.] and some other comments around it. As implied there, the question "what exactly is it?" is in fact the investigation that the subreddit is all about. Strictly speaking, it can't be answered in words. Neither, in fact, can "what is the nature of my ongoing experience"? Which of course you'd need to answer first, before you could answer the question "what is dimensional jumping?".

Aside - If you don't know what "sticky posts" and "a sidebar" is, then you've got some work to do before posting in the subreddit. I'd generally recommend using the browser version of Reddit rather than the app for anything other than media-based subreddits, really; the app really doesn't work so well for discussion-based subreddits. If you do, you'll see the "sidebar" to the right, and the "sticky posts" clearly at the top. If you are using the app, though, there's an "info" icon somewhere in the menu which will show you the sidebar text for the subreddit you are looking at. Regardless of that, not taking the time to read the main posts before then asking questions in terms of them is a waste of everyone's time (the sidebar specifically highlights this). Basically, you really can't expect people to take time out to do the absolute basics of due diligence for you.

Q1: Hey, I got a mention!
All silliness aside, to further expand on a point, the app is ok, as long as your willing to hunt (and hunt... and hunt). I always think of using the app as exploring the dungeons in those old turn based rpgs (think Dragon Quest). There are goodies to be found, but if you use the app, it's like going in with a torch.

Not even a torch. I think it's more like:

It is dark.

inv

You have: a match.

light match

You light the match. You briefly find yourself surrounded by
shadowy shapes moving in disturbing ways. The match goes out.

inv

You have: a used match; a sense of doom.

The app is okay for browsing links or brief comments and the like. It's unfortunately detrimental from a moderator perspective, though, when it comes to maintaining a subreddit based on anything more sophisticated, because casual users are left with only the subreddit name and a few recent posts to go on, with effort and luck required to get any proper context. All these sorts of subreddits now get lots more in the way of low-effort, off-topic and repeat posts as a result (a sort of relentless "intro spam") because quite a lot of users think Reddit is an app, and haven't seen the desktop/browser layout. It's not necessarily their fault, really - but it would be silly for every subreddit to also take on the role of providing Reddit 101 info.

POST: PSA: There is no other version of you that you're "swapping places" with - you're only changing your perception of your current reality to deal with it more effectively. Please stop worrying about some other entity being forced to live in your unwanted situation if you jump.

It's right there in the sidebar text, and also in the sticky post:

Active Metaphors - Try out the Hall of Records and Infinite Grid metaphors which illustrate why there is no "other you" involved in a jump. You are radically changing your experience, not swapping physical bodies. For a different perspective on subjective experience overall see The Imagination Room.

Also something that always need to be re-iterated here, relates to the "we jump all the time" concept in its various forms, as explored in a previous thread [POST: Does the number not changing mean that the jump failed?]:

From previous discussions: I'm not sure that's a very useful way to think about it, since it seems to conflate apparent change in sensory experience (the observed seeming transition between already-determined moments which are aspects of the present state) with "jumping". It is more conceptually helpful, surely, to reserve "jumping" as a term for deliberate shifts in state, corresponding to the imposition of a particular fact or outcome. Otherwise the metaphor of "dimensions" no longer has any meaning. [The thread then continues and expands on this]

That is, we shouldn't use the term "jumping" to apply to apparent changes in ongoing experience, including the experience of apparently performing actions or making everyday sorts of decisions (since in a "patterning" type model these are just aspects of one's current state; they do not "happen"). Similarly, the use of "subconsciously" is problematic, potentially, but I understand what you are trying to suggest. Ultimately, if people don't actually read the existing material linked in the sticky posts or do a search of the historical posts, there's not much we can do. Except remove repetitive posts, which we do go through phases of doing, but the larger problem is posters not pausing to think more deeply about the concepts being used, perhaps. It really is all there, stated directly or implied. Sometimes, of course, people really just want to make a post in order to participate in the conversation. And there's not necessarily anything wrong with that.

Q1: That is, we shouldn't use the term "jumping" to apply to apparent changes in ongoing experience, including the experience of apparently performing actions or making everyday sorts of decisions (since in a "patterning" type model these are just aspects of one's current state; they do not "happen"). Similarly, the use of "subconsciously" is problematic, potentially, but I understand what you are trying to suggest.
This strongly reminds me of a clip from a show I used to watch in my child hood [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beOgc86jXO8] ("Kung Fu" with David Carradine). It illustrates beautifully the difference between "doing" as opposed to just "seeing" or "witnessing."

Ha, that's very good. I'm aware of the show, but I didn't realise it went quite so deeply into that sort of thing. (David Carradine was a bit less Zen in Kill Bill, I think!)

Yes, intend the outcome - thereby defining it as a fact in a future moment, and so implicitly determining the moments between now and then - and then allow experience to unfold within you without interference. It is already "true now that this happens then", and since the world is a "single, self-consistent, continuous landscape", that means that the sequence of any apparent acts is already taken care of. (We might note, here, that there is no difference between "my arms moving over here" and "the leaves rustling over there": both arise spontaneously within our sensory experience, it's just that we have a different story about the meaning of one versus the other.)

You should check out The Zen of Archery if you haven't already, too [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_in_the_Art_of_Archery].

POST: Did the cup method last week

So, don't expect any particular "experience" at the time of performing the exercise. After all, unless your target outcome overlaps with this moment, there is no necessary sensory aspect to it at the moment of the exercise - we might say it becomes "true now that this happens then". Note that you don't have to do anything in terms of effort; literally follow the instructions as written. Any outcomes will be noticed over the course of, say, a week. In this case, typically outcomes will apparently arise by "plausible, if very unlikely, routes". That is, they will not be directly "reality-breaking". Outcomes are not always the same as "results", too. And so:

Generally, treat this as an experiment - part of an investigation, into the nature of your ongoing experience - rather than a method (there are "philosophical" reasons for this). If you aren't having any results, you might consider choosing another target outcome to start with, and working your way through to your original idea later.

You say "a week". Do you think after a week we should re do it? My first jump worked so well. My second has been well over a week ago. I just want to make some sales.

I'd tend to think a week is a good amount of time for "unlikely but plausible" events to appear, for most reasonable things. Treating this in the spirit of conducting an experiment on "the nature of experience", it makes sense to do the exercise and then give it a good amount of time to see results or effect - it's really down to personal judgement when you think an appropriate amount of time has passed. However: There's no inherent amount of time involved at all, though. At the moment of performing the exercise, it becomes "true now that this happens then", and the "then" could be any appropriate moment in the future. A bit like with the owls exercise, the intentional pattern (the experiential pattern of "the outcome event") will "shine through" an appropriate gap and context. Sometimes you will see the patterning crop up again unexpectedly, depending on how broad the target, how tightly defined its scenario or whatever.

Anyway, no need to bother about that: No harm in repeating now, I'd say.

it's fine to treat it as an experiment, but at some point you conclude the experiment worked or not. This is where the time frame comes in. You wouldn't do an experiment and think maybe 10 years later it will happen at the appropriate time, right? You would make a conclusion if the experiment worked or not?

Yep, hence suggesting waiting about a week. If other things arise later, then they can be taken on board at that time, but there's no benefit in waiting around for decades in anticipation of course! I mention it only because it's worth being aware, for when such an example crops up.

POST: 13:30 is the best time to jump!

PsycheHoSocial: If "jumping" is just you changing your own experience yourself, then there shouldn't be anything ESP related about it, right?
Although I'm sure someone can read "13:30 is the best time to do it" and then get results as if that were true, but it would only happen because they've patterned "Doing it at this time means I'll get better results", but not because of the time itself.

That's not necessarily relevant to the topic of the subreddit as such, as per the comment by /u/PsycheHoSocial. That is, while one might adopt that description and intend in terms of it, any successful results would not in fact be because of it. The description of "sidereal time" would not be independently true, as some sort of external framework that is causal. (I also think a lot of time can be wasted looking for "facts" and "techniques" in this way. Aside from the false assumption underlying that activity, it can sometimes create confusion because simply engaging in that search tends to give us some patterned results "as if" they were true - when really it is the fact of looking itself that made them appear so.)

POST: Convince me.

As per the sidebar:

It is for readers to decide for themselves through personal investigation and introspection whether jumping is appropriate for them or not. Never believe something without personal evidence; never dismiss something without personal evidence.

If you find no evidence to support the idea that your ongoing experience is inconsistent with the usual assumptions (that is, you are a person-object in a world-place that is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in time"), then you can draw the appropriate conclusions of course. Or continue to experiment in other ways, or not. Nobody's here to convince you of anything, other than to experiment a little and see what happens.

Putting aside the whole changing "reality" thing for now, I'd say there is still value in examining your ongoing experience as it is actually directly encountered, and considering the implications of that, in terms of what is assumed (in the descriptions we habitually use) versus what is directly known. For example:

Feeling Out Exercise

... a little exercise can help give us a direct experience of what it means to be the subject to all experience, to recognise that we are not an object and that we are "unlocated". We might close our eyes and try to:

a) find the "edges" of your current experience.
b) find where "you" are in your current experience. and:
c) investigate what your current is experience is "made from". finally:
d) think about yourself, and then note the location of that thought and what it is "made from".

The conclusions of this are the direct facts of your experience - the only actual facts, really; everything else is transitory. Whatever you think about your experience is also another experience within this context. You can never get "behind" or "outside" of this, because it has not edges or boundaries; there is no behind or outside. (If you think otherwise, then pause and notice that your thought about this is also "within" and "inside".)

POST: Why around 12-3am?

Certainly, you don't have to do the glasses exercise at 12-3am. If it doesn't say something in the instructions, then it's not an inherent part of the experiment. However, early morning is definitely a "quiet time" with its own sense of occasion. It feels separate from the usual habits and patterns of the day and is low on distractions, and that alone can make it useful or appealing. It is not necessary, though; there is no special reason beyond those benefits. And you don't have to be sleepy to perform either exercise.

POST: "I am not getting results!" Or why meditation is of vital importance.

Others commenters have brought up the "causal" aspect. I suppose with this topic, though, it's worth exploring making a distinction between two related things which can get muddled up with the term "meditation", and how that follows from it:

The first is "letting go", which is really a name for "not interfering" with the ongoing sensory experience - letting it happen "by itself" without counter-intending in reaction to it, and therefore accidentally perhaps accidentally re-implying a previous state. The second is "direct intention" (for want of a better term; all intention is direct really, but you might not intend for what you want directly). By which I mean, if you want to feel quiet and spacious and relaxed without chatter, then what to do is: intend to have the experience of feeling quiet and spacious and relaxed and without chatter.

The latter point is really about actually choosing and actually intending what you've chosen. If you spend time sitting and doing this sort of meditation, you are really just setting aside time to intend a certain background experience. It's "intending time!". For example, you might want to reformat your experience away from the sense of "being an object located within a place", and more towards "being an open space within which a 3D multi-sensory image is spontaneously unfolding". [1] Or spend time directly intending that your experience "soften" and become more dreamlike-associative, rather than stuff-in-boxes (that is, reduce the influence of the pattern "experiential inertia").

But the important thing is that "meditation" as usually understood isn't causal. Only the intention is. That is, any other bits and pieces of theatre you might do besides might imply something, an extended pattern, but just "meditation" doesn't clearly link to an outcome, if you spend all your time looking at breath or saying a mantra or whatever. Doing that, you'll certainly generate an interesting experience or two. And narrowing your attention onto your breath can be pleasant, plus you'll no doubt get a "patterning" effect akin to the owl experiment but for spatial focus: you'll retain some calm afterwards which might stick, because you are implicitly reshaping your spatial attentional focus relative to your apparent surroundings. Implicitly intensifying the pattern "attentional focus includes central body area" just as the owl exercise increases the pattern "owl". However, it may be more beneficial to intend for your actual desired outcome directly.

(Beyond that aspect with other styles of mediation I think you're in effect just exploring your own current patterning, not necessarily "achieving" anything. Which is fine, of course. But there is an expectation sometimes of achievement, and experiential content is interpreted accordingly. However, even if you have an "enlightenment experience", that would just be yet another experience. The only enlightenment is to recognise that all experiences are of the same nature. Now, a "void" experience might lead to that insight, but even then someone might not make the connection between being-the-void and also being-the-content.)

The reason we often have these discussions is, I suppose, because "intention", like "experiencing", isn't describable - since it involves no parts and therefore cannot be conceptualised. [2] We inevitably keep looking for something to "do" and something to "understand", because we make our plans and decisions by thinking. We can't think this, though. Ultimately, then, all experiential content and any apparent actions and thoughts about those are all just "sensory theatre" - they are results. (Results in the sense of being aspects of a state, and the state is patterned awareness, and that patterning corresponds to all "shifts" today, which includes deliberate intentions and their implications. A state is always in a sense a "result", with "shifting" the only cause of changes in state. Which is to say, changes are self-caused.)

__
[1] Of course, neither of those is the ultimate perspective either. There is no ultimate perspective or experience, or type of experience. The only thing that is fundamentally true is the fact of being-aware or "awareness"; any thing else, not just experiential sensory content but the patterning and more abstract formatting of experience, is relatively and temporarily true only.

[2] There are loads of metaphors we can use to try and illustrate why this is the case, some of which can be found towards the end of this comment.

Words really are a poor way to describe this, aren't they?

They are!

As you point out, it seems so tricky. But really it is just the thinking about it that is tricky - impossible, in fact - because thinking is itself an experience. So you can't truly think your way to any ultimate answer about "experiencing". (It's like trying to make a sandcastle which explains "sand" and "the beach", as in the metaphor described in one of the links). The thing itself is super-simple, and that's exactly the problem!

Zen emphasises that words and descriptions point to experiences, but they are not those experiences. For everyday content, that's not too much of a problem: our conceptual thoughts about things are of the same (experiential) form as those things; our thoughts are little "shadow-sensory objects". But for this topic, we're talking about something that is "before" objects, before division, and so we can't use thoughts in that way. You can't make a non-object conceptual thought! All you can do is make a thought-object (such as the concept "awareness") and declare that it points to something that is a non-object.

Anyway, that's why this subreddit focuses on providing a couple of exercises to try - the main ones in the sidebar, the Feeling Out Exercise, and so on - and metaphors to use, so that you generate an experience that you can then point to, while having metaphors to help you articulate it subsequently (while already knowing that the descriptions are now "how it works", even thought they might be useful for "patterning"). From the start, the very idea of "explaining" in words and concepts is suggested to be problematic. So, if it's like high school, then at least it's more like a research trip to the zoo with interesting shapes and patterns and behaviours to see, rather than a calculus class in a stuffy classroom on a hot summers' day. (Hopefully!)

POST: The Mandela Effect is <maybe> unintentional dimensional jumping into a "created" reality

Where would all these parallel worlds be? And what would their relationship be relative to one another, and to time? Would it not be easier to conceive of there being different states of experience instead? (With concepts like "universe" just being an idea used to form a useful description of experience, rather than an actual independent thing or place. In other words, a thinking framework and not a "reality" as such.)

POST: So, basically everything is fake?

Another is jumping to a reality where you already own a home, this means that you physically or mentally swap places with another you where you own a home. One catch is that you don't know the history of this other world and it might be different to your reality in other ways. That is what this Reddit is about.

Not quite, though. Because it is not, in fact, based upon there being "another you" or "another world".

A description based upon those concepts is one which takes ideas like "timelines" and "physical worlds" as literal external things, rather than as useful abstractions. Within the experience itself, there is no sense of another you or world. In fact, within experience itself, there is no sense of "you" being a person, rather than a that-which-experiences (although our descriptions often do assume there is an object-based you involved). That is why the subreddit is not just about the "nature of experiencing" and changes to experiences, but also about the nature of descriptions. In other words, if we are going to take a step back from the everyday description of the world and embed it within a larger context (e.g. "parallel universes"), the next obvious thing is to take a step back from that and view that within a larger context. Ultimately, we cast a wary eye on the fact of descriptions themselves, and perhaps realise that with regard to this topic they often create more confusion than anything else, if taken to be literally "what is happening".

We might say that all that is literally happening, is your exact experience as it appears. Everything else we claim to be "behind" that, implied as being causal of it, are in fact just more experiences too (the experience of: "thinking about experiences"). They might be useful for conceiving of change, but that are not themselves explanations or causes of change.

7Kek7: We are experience or awareness. The fact that we ourselves create and influence the experience does not make it "fake", though it is certainly not "rigid" in the way that is generally thought.

POST: PSA:Please stop posting "I did X experiment" if you haven't verified your outcome. "physical feelings" after you did any method are all placebo.

100% agree, thank you for posting this. It's the same thing that happens in the lucid dream subreddit where every other post is, "did I just lucid dream???? ? ?"

Yeah, /r/luciddreaming is a very good example of this.

One big problem is simply that subreddits like that get stuck at a certain level of knowledge, because there's only so much to discuss about an experiential topic, while new arrivals begin with zero experience and don't "get it" conceptually until they do. If those with a bit of experience or who have given the topic a lot of thought grow weary of repeating themselves, the balance goes off. However, because the topic can't be encapsulated in one authoritative essay - since it requires a dialogue format which takes into account the present "mental formatting" of both the new arrival and the experienced contributor, and their overlap, in order to properly communicate it - it can be tricky to avoid this happening periodically.

For a topic like this one, I guess one way might be to force people to write a bit more when they post. In your example, if someone is going to write "did I just lucid dream?" (here: "did I jump?") but has to write two paragraphs about it before they can hit submit, then they at least have to give it some proper thought - about their experience, and what it means to ask the question. That is, extended to include commentary on "why do I think this experience indicates a lucid dream, or not?". That way, even though posts might be repeats on a surface level, each post can trigger a discussion that approaches a familiar topic from a different angle, perhaps leading to new places.

Q1: I agree with this point. However, looking at a "hot" post after I posted this one, I sometimes wonder if only a minority in the sub have some sense.
Link to said hot post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/6u2p47/2_glasses_of_water_just_tried_it_out/]
The fact that its on the hot list, despite being utterly pointless, shows that there is something wrong here somewhere and that many people here truly don't know what they are doing when they "upvote" posts. To upvote is to bring to attention that it is a post that should be viewed, to recommend it, or to laud the post.
Let's say the community fully supports these posts , and instead of ones that have discussion, the entire hot post list is filled with such posts, with absolutely no purpose other than a cry for selfish attention. The sub would pretty much go downhill. You might as well introduce a gang of 3-4 bots here and have them act as encouragement bots with a default message of "have fun! Please keep us updated as to how everything goes! :D" , because thats pretty much all there is to comment to these.
While I am not at all opposed to the sub being friendly and nice, it will become some kind of depressionhelp sub where the only purpose of people being here is to cheer others and vastly deviates from the philosophical/introspective sub it was created to be (I assume). If they really need attention, there are other subs to obtain encouragement.

I largely agree with where you're coming from. Also:

Reddit and its upvote system is itself a bit of a problem when it comes to more discussion or introspection based subreddits - particularly because people sign up for this sub casually, based on a general notion of it, and then posts appear in their front pages without the additional context, and get upvotes accordingly (as if it were an LOA type deal). This wasn't such a issue when we had a small subscriber base, with contributors who were mostly there from the start plus a smattering of occasional newcomers. It didn't take much to steer things in the right direction without having to be too explicit or harsh with moderation. As we've expanded, it's easy for the balance to get shifted. I'm think I'm going to look at introducing some additional content filtering and, perhaps, add some more specific guidelines as to what is appropriate and what is not, to help people make better decisions as regards posting before they actually write their post. It's something we've held back on, but we want to ensure we are the /r/TrueFilm of this subject area, rather than the /r/Movies. (Both have their place, of course, but there are dozens of /r/Movies already available.)

I would add that some subjects such as suicide and depression can be appropriate topics, if the discussion that results is an exploration of these areas from a "nature of experience/descriptions" perspective. If it devolves into just feel-good phrasings as responses, then less so.

POST: For my media studies class I have to make a 5 minute film. Could anyone please tell me their experience with this?

This comment [POST: This sub feels like what /r/lawofattraction is trying to be ], originally intended to highlight the difference between this subreddit and /r/lawofattraction, is probably a good starter to read. (In addition to the sidebar text and its links, of course.) The other response below also captures the essence of it. Ultimately, the subreddit is about investigating the "nature of experience" and the nature of descriptions about experience - by way of personal experiments and contemplation of metaphors, and generally adopting a "meta" perspective.

In terms of experiences, you should really conduct your own experiments (see demo exercises in sidebar) and form your own conclusions! There may be (philosophical) reasons why just listening to "other people's" experiences is not particularly helpful.

I'd perhaps suggest that this topic probably isn't the ideal candidate for an easy 5 minute media studies film, since to do it justice you're going to have to do a bit of experimenting, reading and thinking to properly get it - and even then, it's likely more the start of something than the end! (The common initial impression that it is either about "magickal rituals" or about science fiction-type parallel universes or multiverses is incorrect.)

Q1: I'm new too. In my opinion, this pretty much is witchcraft. They use visualisations, tools, rituals, even chanting to change something about their lives. Witches have been doing these techniques for years. Seems like Someone just connected magick with the scientific theory of multiple dimensions. This is how they explained the Changes one can force upon their life. They must have "jumped dimensions"

That's not the intention really. The techniques are largely irrelevant in a sense (and they are deliberately called "exercises" or "experiments" because the whole idea of methods can turn out to be an issue). The setup is one step more "meta" than repurposing theories - the very idea of the validity of descriptions as explanations ls also under scrutiny, be that for unusual changes or for ongoing experience more generally.

(There is no chanting and all that.)

Q1: Oops I thought i read somewhere there was chanting (or something similar)
But other than that I don't follow your reply. Sounds like jibber jabber.
Witchcraft techniques are irrelevant as well. Tools an fancy shit isn't needed to practice. Seems like you guys have the same goals as a witch, but just go about it a different way, and call it something different.
What is a "repurposing theory" I couldn't even find that on Google search
and "one step more meta"??? I never heard that before, Google search turned up "Scream 2", "Ironman" and other movie stuff. I thought it was from a video game haha
"the validity of descriptions as explanations "
WTF? LoL

"Jibber jabber", eh? Possibly so! As you say, though: you're "new too" and your opinion might, at the moment, be a bit uninformed. (Which is fine of course. That's why it's a discussion-focused subreddit.)

The sidebar pretty much lays it out really, but the background idea is that the "tools" are a starting point for investigating the nature of your experience. So it's half an experimental thing, half a philosophy thing. And then: Yeah, so we can make "rule-breaking" changes to our experiences, but what is the meaning of that? And what does it mean to describe it, for example, in terms of the concept of "dimensional jumping" - can that be taken literally? And so on.

• The "validity of descriptions as explanations" part was about how descriptions don't really get "behind" our experiences and tell us what is actually happening; they are essentially just further experiences (the experience of: "thinking about experiences"). So describing experiences in either scientific or magickal (or whatever) terms can be problematic - or at least shouldn't be taken too seriously.
• The "repurposing theory" part was because you'd suggested that this was about mashing together two theories - scientific multiverses and magickal theory - for another purpose. It isn't. Those two ways of understanding things are just taken as one of any number of descriptions, with none of them being "true".
• The "one step more meta" was pointing to that: we don't take any description of "what is happening" as being correct, because we are also looking at what descriptions themselves are too. In fact, even the idea that there is a "what is happening" might be in doubt!

So - although it's not exactly this - the subreddit topic might be better thought of in terms of non-duality or subjective idealism as its starting point, rather than witchcraft. Not so much about getting results, but about asking: what does the fact that you got results at all imply about what "you" are, what "the world" is, and how those are related?

7Kek7: TG your patience in explaining what is almost unexplainable is quite impressive

Ha, yes: I really should get this pathological optimism looked at sometime! But I do feel that although we can't explain these things in the normal manner, we can definitely circle around them in a way that's helpful, in dialogue, at a slightly different angle each time - and so the "thing in the gap" can be implied, even if not articulated directly.

A1: What he's saying here is the changes you can effect into your life aren't the point. The point is what the changes reveal about reality.
The methods don't matter because results aren't the point.

Q1: Oooic thank u

Yeah, that is indeed the edited version of my "jibber jabber"!

POST: I went to a complete different reality for sometime

[POST]

Ok I don't know whether u will believe me or not but I believe that I went or kinda saw an alternate universe . Though I still want your opinion on this..
I have always been an admirer of alternate realities stuff but I didn't knew that there are some methods of jumping realities . Then i found this subreddit about a month ago.( Since then ive been following this subreddit everyday). I kinda understood that mirror method and 2 cups are the two best methods of leaping .Honestly I was kind of scared doing the mirror method so I did the 2 cups . It was really easy to do it but I didn't notice much changes after it.
I thought that I should try some new method then I saw this really easy new method 'The Vaccum Method '. After I researched a bit more about it, I started to practice it every night before sleep and then meditated about it.
Ok shit got real today. I really woke up early today and during afternoon time I really felt sleepy and decided to take a nap. I lay on my bed and started 'Vaccum method' excersize again. After doing it I kind of started thinking about my crush and started having a lucid dream. But then kinda my sleep broke after an hour or so. But after I opened my eyes , I saw I was in some different house , I got fucking scared and closed my eyes again , I thought to myself that I might have changed reality but why am I in a house worse than my own house ? Did i come come to a worse reality ? I opened my eyes again and saw that same house and closed my eyes again. Now I started sweating and panting. Here I understood that this was real not a dream cause I felt my sweat . Then I opened my eyes and saw my own house , I really felt happy and relieved
All I want is that u guys give your opinion on this. I believe I shifted for sometime ,do u agree or have some different thoughts
Sorry for typing mistakes and bad grammar

[END OF POST]

Just as an aside, it's worth pushing back a little on the idea that there is some amazing method - the method - out there to uncover.

Much as it's tempting for newcomers to want to jump on a "fool-proof method", it is important to consider how any "method" relates to your actual experience, to the nature of it. Otherwise there's a risk of just engaging in yet more "sensory theatre" without really digging into the underlying situation - and going through the loop, once again, of finding something new, getting a sorta-result, then it not working, and then moving onto something else (because you never really knew what was working about it in the first place).

If ultimately what you're doing is lying down for a bit and imagining some crap for ten minutes, or saying some words for a while, it's worth pausing to consider how precisely that would make any difference to your experience. If that question isn't answered, if you don't dig deeper into it, then it's really just a superstitious activity, with no idea of the "causal" element of any change - and (interestingly, tellingly) you often find the reliability of a "method" fades out pretty quickly.

This is why the two exercises in the sidebar are really intended as illustrations of something, rather than methods as such. (Although of course the subreddit is built out from an original idea that there might be a "technique". But then deconstructing that notion to gain insight.)

It isn't exactly explained why the exercises work either.

The exercises may or may not work: they aren't promises, they are experiments.

If they do work (or more broadly: if experiences arise subsequently which seem related to doing the exercise) then that's a starting point for contemplation. A starting point for considering what those outcomes imply about the nature of your experience (of "you" and "the world"), perhaps leading to an insight or at least a revision of your description of things, or even of your attitude towards descriptions in general. This may even include revisiting the whole idea of there being a "how things work" at all, in the usual sense.

Anyway:

What the exercises are, though, is the stripped-down essence of an approach for investigating this. So just making up variations of them with extra stuff on top - saying this or that, imagining this or that - in the hope that some "secret sauce" will be discovered that gives "results", without having a clear reason for the additions, probably isn't very useful.

Doesn't change happen because you want it to happen?

That's an interesting hypothesis. How could it be tested? What exactly is the nature of "wanting", and why would it be relevant or causal in terms of generating subsequent experiences? How does "wanting" relate to "me" and "the world"? And how, precisely does one go about "wanting" anyway?

So, perhaps the question isn't so much "why wouldn't it work?", but rather: "why do I think it would work, what is the basis for the choices and additions I am making, and how to I test those assumptions specifically?"

With all the proof out there from this Reddit and Glitches Reddit combined there has to be something to this.

The idea behind the exercises is that one can actually check for oneself whether there is something to it, or not, rather than just reading stories about it. And then, because they focus on two particular facets of experience related to this, dig deeper into the nature of it by targeting different aspects of experience in turn. (There may also be a philosophical problem with "other people's stories", that isn't even just about believing them or not.)

So, you are saying the exercises may work but not because of the exercises but something we don't quite understand yet?

Ultimately, I'd end up suggesting that what one might end up discovering is: it's more fundamental than any of those ideas you list would suggest. It is "before" them. All of those ideas still have, as an assumption, that you are some sort of person-object located within a world-place. And ultimately, they are all essentially little "stories" about the content of experience, rather than the nature of experience itself. That is, the context of all experiences.

This is why we keep coming back to this notion that, when we come up with "explanations" for things, we must also bear in mind what a "description" actually is. Does it get "behind" our experiences? Or is it, instead, just another experience also (the experience of: "thinking about experiences"), at the same level. Saying that something is magick or witchcraft or virtual reality or whatever, doesn't really add anything necessarily. (See also this comment about the literal "parallel universes" or quantum physics type explanations.) Particularly when we are dealing with an experience of world-facts or the "formatting" of experience changing. Descriptions might be useful ways of thinking about such things, but they don't really - cannot really - encapsulate their nature or the cause of them.

If we go one step more "meta" in this way, it's like we take a step back from both our main strand of experience and the descriptions we make up about them. The problem we end up with, though, is that we're now dealing with something that is "before" concepts. How can you describe that which descriptions are "made from"? And so on. But maybe you don't have to describe something, or be able to communicate it, in order to know it. And perhaps demanding that something be conceptualised or restricting oneself to explanations - requiring that something "makes sense" or that it can be "understood" - is a barrier to a more direct realisation of the true situation. In other words, I might end up suggesting that it's not that there is an explanation for how the exercises work (or any other methods in fact), in a fundamental way anyway, but that the attempt to construct one, or the willingness to put our experiences and assumptions under the microscope in this way, might lead somewhere useful regardless. Even thought it perhaps can't be articulated.

Extra bit: If making changes is simply about thinking (of? about?) what we want, then we must still consider what exactly we'd think - because there are many ways to think a thing of course - and also consider how that relates to the world (is the world itself a thought, if so in what way?) and what we are (if we are the thinker of thoughts, where and what are we and what are thoughts made from?), etc.

POST: Has anyone had success with the "Vacuum Method"

[POST]

Hi Everyone, Recently I've been keeping up with this forum in hopes of changing a decision that I made in the past. I have read of this new method from TheFirstGlitcher, I would like to use it prevent myself from making this decision or shifting into a reality with a new past in which I had never made this decision. I created this forum to find out if anyone besides TheFirstGlitcher has had success and their opinion if I would be able to switch to an alternate past or someday miraculously wake up in the past in which I can stop myself and this will all be part of a distant memory that was unreal. If it's not possible, I understand, but I would like to hear your opinions. Thank you so much! Please let me know what you think, any response is welcome! Also I'm not sure if I have done it correctly, this is probably why nothing has changed, but I also wonder if the shift that I want is even possible?

[END OF POST]

A: You could take a random carrot, declare that carrot as blessed and eat it and get results..

Q: lol I see your analogy, but why is it that these methods work for some and some it doesn't work. Most people claim that it is possible for anyone to jump for anything. I'm asking if there is a full proof method to make it work or if it is even possible to cause a shift in reality because if I wash my hands in hot water I'll still burn my hands, the world is very real to everyone so why is it that some experience these shifts and some do not and if it isn't possible to revert the past or a past decision doesn't this limit the ability of a dimensional shift. It's not so much I'm skeptical, I want to learn more about it as I wish to revert a decision I made and the people of this sub Reddit such as yourself seem to have more exposure to this type of information. Thanks!

The idea isn't that that your experience of the world isn't real - after all, in a dream you can kick a stone and hurt your foot and refute nothing about the dreamlike nature of it. The experience is always very real, because it's the only thing that is real. Whether it is consistent, and what the nature of your experience is, that is what you are pushing against I suppose. So rather than the world not being "real", it's that your standard description may not be an accurate accounting of it. That is, that the idea that you are a person-object located within a world-place may not be a good description of your actual experience (where "the world" is typically assumed to be a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'"). The world is real, but it may not be "real" in the way you have been thinking that it is "real".

As for "methods", maybe see my other comment below. The very concept of "methods" and "techniques" (fool-proof or otherwise) can be a distraction here.

...

The "Vaccum Method" is a post someone did a while back.

It's worth pointing out, though, that the two exercises highlighted in the sidebar - and they are deliberately named "exercises" rather than "methods" or "techniques", because those terms tend to imply something about our experiences that might not actually turn out to be true - are intended to illustrate two aspects of experience (which turn out to be the same thing actually). That is, they are not simply self-help style techniques for bringing about change.

In other words, it's not the change that's important, necessarily, it's the fact that there was apparent change at all that is key. Other (so-called) methods and techniques tend to just add extra "sensory theatre" on top of these key aspects. This can end up obscuring the genuine insights that should follow from a proper "experiment and contemplate" type investigatory attitude.

So, when encountering a new "method", it's worth asking the author how, exactly it is meant to work, and what the thinking behind it is, and then probing the assumptions that lie behind the concepts used in that thinking. Otherwise we risk simply, almost superstitiously, doing various actions and hoping, somehow, that change will occur, with really understanding the "secret sauce". Otherwise, in fact, people are at risk of taking a "cargo cult" approach to the subject (that is, emulating the visible actions only, while never grasping the "motive").

Hence the (intentend, anyway) strong "philosophical" component of the subreddit: unpacking assumptions rather than just trying out tricks.

POST: My perspective on dimensional jumping (Introduction to creating reality with your thoughts)

[DELETED POST]

EDIT: The point of this comment was to try and explore in more detail what, exactly, the concept of "thoughts create reality" means, from a particular perspective on the nature of "you", "thought" and "reality". However, it's a bit muddled in the execution, oh well. It might be worth explicitly distinguishing between passing thought and deliberate, intentional thought. This potentially allows us to clarify that it's not the thought as such that does anything; thoughts could be viewed as simply pseudo-sensory aspects of your current "state", really. (Where a "state" is the current set of fact-patterns contributing to, and fully defined the future moments of, your ongoing experience.)

Rather, it's the intentional content - or the "direct meaning" - that makes the difference. Here, by "an intention" we mean the fact or pattern that we seek to increase the relative contribution of, and by "intending" we mean the increasing of that contribution (whereby shifting the "shape" of one's state, of oneself). There is no act involved in this, though - there's no mechanism or technique. One simply intends. Meanwhile, the sensory thought aspect is itself a result of intention, not a cause; it's a bit of theatre. Now, for sure, you can get synchronicity arising if you visualise something - a bit like having deformed a surface and the contours being overlaid upon experience from then on, or drawing upon a television screen and the pattern "shining through" the gaps to be incorporated in every image to some extent (see: the owls exercise, for example).

However, a fact is itself an experience of "meaning" - it has no spatial or temporal component itself. It is unbounded and sort of "dissolved" into the background of your experience, with only its sensory aspects arising occasionally. So when you want to intend a fact, just conjuring an image or saying a phrase isn't necessarily what you want to do. Certainly, it may trigger the fact-pattern by association, but really what you want to do is intend the fact-pattern directly. This can't be described in words, but you "know" when you are doing it. You do it whenever you shift yourself in mundane ways. (Ponder: do you conjure an image when you change your destination when walking along the street? No, you feel-know-intend the change, directly.)

There is not a "you" and "the world"; there is just you-as-awareness which has "taken on the shape of" the experience of being-a-person-in-a-world. Whereas the construction of language forces us to talk of a "doer" and an "act" and a "thing done to", in our actual experience this is not the case. Attempts to enact "doing" tend to complicate things or lead to failure, because we assume a separate mechanism that we are trying to harness. In fact, there is no mechanism: we shape-shift our experience, our state, via intention, which is self-caused change.

All of this suggests a very fundamental reason why we can encounter difficulties:

• Intention is literal and direct.

Thinking doesn't create your reality, your state. A thought actually is a pattern within your state. A passing thought is a view of your current state; a deliberate thought is the intensification of that pattern in your state. It's almost claustrophobic to think about: there is no separation between you and your state, you and your thought, you and your sensory experience, you and your intention. There is no gap between thinking, intending and experiencing.

The point of this, is that the thought "I am happy" literally is the fact-pattern of "I am happy", and increasing its relative "intensity" of via intention will increase its contribution to your ongoing experience. However, to be clear, it's not the words "I am happy" that you want to intend - that is a mistake easily made (leading to all sorts of synchronicity about happiness or the phrase "I am happy"). Those words are part of the extended pattern of being-happy and can be used to trigger it to an extent, perhaps. However, it's really the fact-pattern of which those words are a sensory aspect that you want to intend.

This literal nature means that you need to be aware of what, exactly, you are intending, because the mechanism here (if it can really be called a mechanism) is that of a "dumb patterning system", a direct deformation of your present state. There is no intelligence between you and intention and the change of state. If you conjure up "this visual image", then that visual image will be more prevalent in your experience. If you conjure up "this visual image which means that fact will be true", then that fact will be more prevalent in your experience (and probably the visual image too).

Essentially, then, it's like you are drawing patterns directly upon awareness - sometimes in 3D, sometimes "non-dimensionally" and abstractly; sometimes sensory images, sometimes "facts" or "formatting" - thereby increasing their prominence in the unfolding world-experience from that point onwards.

Can you give examples highlighting the difference between "this visual image" and "this visual image which means that fact will be true". Like if I imagine myself holding 2 million dollars in cash, is that belonging to the first or the second category?

It's probably better to experiment with something more abstract. So, first imagine a sphere in front of you - say, a blue sphere with no particular detail, just floating there. Okay, now imagine a sphere in front of you, identical in every way to the first, except also imagine that this sphere is imbued with the special power to make the room filled with joy. But do not change the sensory aspect of the sphere in any way when you do this.

This is basically "imagining the fact of something being true" abstractly. That is, that an object, or your ongoing experience more generally, has a property, without actually visualising any sensory aspects to that property. Instead of doing all the "sensory theatre" of picturing stuff, in an effort to associatively trigger the fact or as an excuse to do so, you can just directly do intending-asserting of the fact into greater prominence.

Finally, after taking a pause to clear yourself out a little, instead of using the sphere image, simply directly intend that the room is filled with joy, and experience the result of that. That is, wordlessly intend the fact of: "it is true now that this room is filled with joy". And, um, enjoy. Aside - Note that there is no effort in doing so, and any "trying" will just distract you, amounting to an intending of the "feeling of trying" rather than the fact of "joyful room" being true.

I can see the differences between the two explanations.
"Imagining the fact of something being true" = Imagining the fact along with the emotions you will (expect to) feel from having it
Image = Yin
Emotions = Yang
Yin/Yang = Manifestation/Shifting
I think that some people would have to be at a point in their life to where they understand themselves better to really grasp this concept.
If someone has constant inner/outer distractions or conflicts then this maybe extremely difficult to conceptually grasp yet perform.
I'm fairly new to this but I would appreciate any feedback.
Thanks.

There can be a difficulty, sometimes, with elevating emotions and treating them as if they are special rather than just another sensation-perception within an experience (albeit a difficult one to put into concepts and language). I suggest that emotions would be best understood as a sensory aspect of the fact, arising as an object within experience.

Meanwhile, the fact itself is sort of "unbounded" or "timeless and spaceless". It is not experienced as an object, instead it's sort of just "known". You might call it a sense of "meaning".

So, while "imagining (intending, asserting) the fact of something being true" might result in an experience of an emotion, it is not necessarily required, and the emotion is not itself a cause. When we say "the feeling that something is true", we aren't referring to an emotion, we're referring to a felt-knowing, a global sense of a particular thing being true. The problem with some approaches (many LOA descriptions included) is they miss out this "secret sauce" and therefore just produce minimal intensification of some of the patterning associated with facts, rather than direct addressing the facts themselves. This can still produce "results", of course, as synchronicity (basic "patterning") but it can be frustrating to work with, because there's no real understanding of the cause ("intending").

Unfortunately, this activity of "intending" can't be described at all, really, only pointed at. Intending has no mechanism or method, and is before "things" so is non-conceptual. And so we hit the difficulty whereby people end up focussed on what can be talked about and thought about (basically: objects within experience, which are results) and miss out (when writing) or don't realise (when reading) that there is a specific actual cause of all change (which is not any one of those experiential objects). We then can end up with a "cargo cult" version of the topic:

The term "cargo cult" has been used metaphorically to describe an attempt to recreate successful outcomes by replicating circumstances associated with those outcomes, although those circumstances are either unrelated to the causes of outcomes or insufficient to produce them by themselves. In the former case, this is an instance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

(See: Richard Feynman's fun lecture also.)

That is, people try to generate the results by just intensifying part of the pattern associated with the target fact, perhaps getting some outcome by association, but not really going for their target directly. The distinction between doing the owl exercise (increasing the intensity of contribution of the "owl" extended pattern) and actually intending a specific outcome ("it is true now that [this fact about owls]"), basically. Or between imagining some objects (the blue sphere for example), as opposed to: imagining some objects while asserting-intending-knowing it means-that something is true or will happen.

In this context, isn't the cause (to create) and deliberate intending the same thing?

This is why all of this ultimately leads to an exploration of the "nature of experiencing" - that is, examining what "you" are, exactly, and what your actual relationship is to "the world".

Intending, then, is like "shape-shifting". You might say you are shifting your state, where by "state" we mean the set of relative contributions (or "intensity") of all possible facts or patterns, which means to shift yourself. There is no "you" and the "state" or "world" - instead, you sort of "take on the shape of" a particular situation or experience (in the broadest sense, not just the current sensory moment). Right now, you have "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently ("as if") being-this-person-in-this-world.

So there is, as you say, no difference between causing and intending. We might define "an intention" as the fact or pattern we wish to increase the contribution of, and "intending" as the intensifying of that pattern - shifting to a state where that fact-pattern is more prominent.

Although we often use the word "create" for this sort of thing, actually that's strictly speaking not ideal. The implication of the above is that all patterns exist, eternally. Patterns are "before" time (with time, or change, being an aspect of experience, a pattern like any other, rather than something fundamental). They cannot be created or destroyed; they just are. This means that every experience, at least implicitly, is always available, and that we simply "shift our posture" such that some are more prominent than the rest.

Now, returning to what "you" are, if you discount anything which changes in your ongoing experience (how can something be ultimately true, if it can shift?), the only permanent thing turns out to be the property of being-aware. Or at least, it is meaningless to talk of the absence of that. All other facts or patterns can be more or less "true", but not that.

Putting it all together, then:

We might say that what you truly are is "awareness" which is "taking on the shape of" states of experience. Between shifts, the sequence of moments you experience is fully determined by the facts within that state. The apparent change of sensory content moment to moment is actually static also in this description: "time passing" is just another pattern, albeit a more abstract formatting than most. The only true change that ever occurs - and hence the only cause of apparent change in ongoing sensory experience - is when we "intend", which is just word used to point to the act of us shifting ourselves to a different set of prominent facts.

...

I suspect we are probably talking at cross purposes a little, since we are using some words in different ways, and some underlying assumptions are perhaps different. The word "thought" is a problematic one anyway, I guess; it's too vague!

So, in your description, where (and what) are "you"? And where would "another consciousness" be, relative to that?

This is why I am having a hard time separating intention from other thoughts.

In type or nature they are identical, of course. However, there is a distinction to made made between thoughts which simply arise spontaneously, and those which arise from deliberate intention. In the first case, it's just a passing thought appearing in accordance with your current state (more later), in the latter you are reshaping your state by way of deliberate thinking.

There is no difference in sensory experience between the two. And in fact, there may be no sensory aspect to intending if there's no result component which overlaps with the current moment (although one "knows" one is intending.) The "how" cannot be described, because it is like "shape-shifting". But there is a difference in that one is an aspect of "how things are" and one is "changing how things are".

So, pondering -

"Intention", then, is simply a term used when referring to a "pattern" that one is increasing the contribution of ("intending"), which is done simply by "thinking it" or 'imagining it" or more accurately: "experiencing it" or "asserting as an experience". The fight with language here is because we want to avoid implying that there is a "thinker" who then "thinks the thought", with one being "over here" and another "over there" in any sense. Really, one "takes on the shape of" the fact, pattern, or experience. This last point is key.

Loosely, the outline of this description would be:

• The only fundamental fact is the property of being-aware - or "awareness".
• All other facts are relatively true only; they are temporary. They can be conceived of as "patterns" in awareness.
• All possible fact-patterns exist eternally, "dissolved" into the background. Your state is the current distribution of relative intensities of those facts.
• What you truly are, is "awareness", and this is always true, regardless of what "shape" you have taken on.
• Currently, then, you-as-awareness have "taken on the shape" of a particular state. This state consists of all the facts or patterns currently contributing to your ongoing experience. It fully defines your experience - as in, all subsequent moments are fully determined, between shifts of state.
• To alter your experience, you shift your state by changing the relative intensity of a particular fact or pattern. You do this simply by "intending" - that is, a sort of "thinking" but not a thinking about, rather a thinking as. Still better described as a "taking on the shape of" or "becoming of" a situation.
• Intending cannot be described (because it is "before" concepts) and is non-experiential (has no inherent sensory aspect), although sensory aspects may arise from doing it if the change in state involves an impact in the current "moment". However these are results of intending, not causes of outcomes.
• There is no "outside" to experience, and awareness is "before" division and multiplicity. The only thing that is "happening", is this exact experience, right now. And thoughts you have about an "outside" to experience, are also experiences (that is, the experience of thinking about experience) and are "inside".

And so on.

As the last point suggests, though, there's not all that much point in thinking about this relentlessly, because ultimately thinking is just another experience (although by doing so deliberately you are to an extent "patterning" yourself for future experiences: so we might choose our models carefully if we are going to focus on them a lot). Simple experiments and exercises show the way more clearly, once we have put "descriptions" in their proper place. For example, the Feeling Out exercise at the bottom of this comment is useful for bringing us back to our actual situation, rather than an idea about it.

POST: In what way are other people real?

Let me have a go here. It seems that you perhaps are still partly identifying as a person, and implying that this person is in a "place" of some sort with other people, and you're saying things like "my awareness". This can lead to an incorrect imagining of the situation, I think.

It is not your awareness, I'd suggest. It is just "awareness". What you are, is "awareness". That is, that which has as its only fundamental property the property of being-aware, and which "takes on the shape of" experiences - including aspects like "spatial extent" and "time passing" - playing out currently as a series of multi-sensory moments. Right now, you-as-awareness is "taking on the shape of" apparently being-a-person-in-a-world. All that is fundamentally true is being-aware, but you-as-awareness are having experiences "as if" other things are true.

Pause for a moment and check your actual experience as it is. I suggest it is something like being an "open aware space within which experiences arise" - like you are an unbounded mind, with a stable, bright, multi-sensory, 3-dimensional thought of being in a world floating within it. In what sense, then, are you a person? What does that being-a-person consist of? Surely, it is just sensations, perceptions and thoughts - with the idea of being a person occurring from time to time? You don't actually experience being a person at all. Other people, similarly, are made from that. Basically, visual, auditory, textural, and so on, aspects and a felt knowing. All of which arises as a 1st-person perspective. And that's important. That is, as soon as you find yourself thinking about this and imagining the situation from an imaginary 3rd-person "view from nowhere", then you are immediately "wrong". Because you are not inside the world; rather the world is inside you, with a particular sensory aspect of it being "unfolded" at any, or as any, particular moment.

You are then left with identifying the actual properties of this 1st-person mode - which is all there is. For example:

Feeling Out Exercise

... a little exercise can help give us a direct experience of what it means to be the subject to all experience, to recognise that we are not an object and that we are "unlocated". We might close our eyes and try to:

a) find the "edges" of your current experience.
b) find where "you" are in your current experience. and:
c) investigate what your current is experience is "made from". finally:
d) think about yourself, and then note the location of that thought and what it is "made from".

The conclusions of this are the direct facts of your experience - the only actual facts, really; everything else is transitory. Whatever you think about your experience is also another experience within this context. You can never get "behind" or "outside" of this, because it has not edges or boundaries; there is no behind or outside. (If you think otherwise, then pause and notice that your thought about this is also "within" and "inside".)

This final observation is important. Specifically, that "awareness" is "before" things like division and multiplicity, objects and change, and so it makes no sense to talk of "an awareness" or "other people's awareness" or any number regarding awareness at all. There is just "awareness"; uncountable. You can't relate different experiences or perspectives within a framework of time and space, because time and space are themselves aspects of an experience. (Although obviously not accurate, the Hall of Records metaphor tries to offer a easy way into envisaging that.)

it literally felt like I was somewhere in my head, so I had to stop the exercise.

Sometimes it helps, here, to then notice where, exactly, you are experiencing that location from.

Sometimes it is discovered that you are sort of "looking at" that felt location from outside of it. Sometimes it is noted that the "feeling of being in your head" is a feeling within a larger field of "feeling-space". Both of which mean, of course, that you are actually not just in that location, because otherwise you couldn't be aware of the location within a larger context! You must be the context, in order to be aware of a location within a context!

As you imply, though, it can be best to just leave things be if they are a struggle, and let it percolate for a while. Occasionally, doing these exercises can feel quite claustrophobic, as you try to "capture" yourself within your attention, and discover that this isn't possible (because your attention is within you, not the other way around). The trick, overall, is to eventually cease trying to effort it into getting a conclusion, because efforting is itself a deformation of your "shape", like rippling the water you are trying to see a reflection in. Anyway, it's good to return to this one now and again even after you've "got" it - it can be very pleasant and relaxing to remind oneself of it when it is noticed we've become "narrowed down".

Q: Sometimes it is discovered that you are sort of "looking at" that felt location from outside of it. Sometimes it is noted that the "feeling of being in your head" is a feeling within a larger field of "feeling-space". Both of which mean, of course, that you are actually not just in that location, because otherwise you couldn't be aware of the location within a larger context! You must be the context, in order to be aware of a location within a context!
Wow, this is really good; I didn't think of it that way. Perhaps I should have persisted with the exercise a bit longer. I'll definitely give it another go. What would you say for the first exercise, "feeling the edges" of your experience? Do you mean in the sense, that, when you close your eyes, you try to find the "edges" of the "blackness" that you see, or the "edges" in terms of the "mental space" of the mind?

For the first - words are problematic, I suppose, but I do mean feel out, mentally, or with attention, to see if there is a "boundary", an end, to your moment of experience in any direction, and if there are any "edges" to it. It's not a visual thing, particularly. Perhaps sensing is a better term to use. "Mental space" is a good enough term, although of course that does presume a result (that there is a mental space in the first place).

What is concluded - you can check for yourself, definitely don't take my word for it - is that "being" has no edges or limits, but also that it's not necessarily got spatial extent either. So perhaps "openness" or "void" ends up being the way to describe it, with your current spatially-extended sensory moment floating within that.

Ultimately, we're just noting that the idea of an "inside" or "outside" to experience is meaningless because, as we've just explored with the "where am I?" thing, any discovery of an "inside" already implies that you are the context of that "inside", and so you are the "outside" too, and that is also within/as you. This then helps us note, again, that "sensory experience" and "thoughts" are of the same nature, further emphasising that thoughts about an outside are themselves just more experiences within/as us ("inside").

You can see, here, how lots of the usual questions we might have asked earlier become nonsensical. By the time you get to the end of it, questions about "inside" and "outside" have resulted in answers which make those two words quite problematic to use! The answers actually destroy the questions!

Every time I read one of your posts lately I feel like we are on two opposite sides of a coin. I read something and my immediately reaction is "That's not right at all!" then two seconds later it says "Oh wait, no I see what you mean, your just looking at it from the other side". There have been a few of them like this lately, that I have difficulty reading and then suddenly have a flash of intuition of "I don't know what he's saying, but I know exactly what he means". It seems like your approach "pulls out while pushing in" while mine does the opposite. Instead of pulling out to find the edges of my awareness, I envision pulling inwards to a core identity. From there I ask what is the "he/she/they" that exists before my pattern is placed on top of it to filter it. In that sense another person is a core identity that my belief puts through a filter. As I see my core identity as multifaceted and capable of anything, so must the other person be. So in that sense if I go from a reality where a person dislikes me to one where they like me, I didn't change them because between my core/higher self and that persons we've established agreements on how to express all of those energies and let out awareness choose the ones we want.

It's sort of both, simultaneously, really, the "pulls out / pushes in". It's that thing of there being "no-thing" but also "all possible patterns, pre-existing and eternal", at the same time. And you could look at people that way, too: that the "larger person" is all possible versions of that person, and you're just seeing one "aspect". To some extent, though, we're just playing with descriptions there, but I think it gives an intuitive way of thinking about the sort of experiences it is possible to have.

POST: Successfully jumped to contact Future Self. Have evidence of success.

[POST]

Soon after contacting my Future Self, and asking for clear manifestations from him that would leave no doubt in my mind as to their source, the following video manifested in my reality:
Scientist have Evidence that our Future Decisions can change the Past Reality
A clear message: There is science to justify what you are doing.
X-Post from /r/DangmaDzyu

[END OF POST]

So, normally this would be removed because of rule 3. and it also seems a bit off topic with the link:

3 - Links to possibly useful material should include discussion as to its relevance, and a personal review if possible.

However, it's worth having the discussion.

First, I'd say that science does not justify what you are doing. (See previous comment elsewhere on that topic and also in this thread, to save me reproducing it. It references the simulation hypothesis, among other things). However, this is not a bad thing. This subject is inherently unscientific - it is philosophical or metaphysical. That doesn't mean that it doesn't involve things that are true, though. Science itself doesn't discern truth, merely whether a particular description is effective or not, so one shouldn't feel the need to have one's ideas confirmed by science as some sort of stamp of authority - but, that does not mean we shouldn't be rigorous about our own thinking about our experiences.

Second, following from that, I'm not sure why you would necessarily attribute any experiences you have to a "future self". It is important, here, to separate out the direct content of an experience we have, versus the description about that experience. This recent thread digs into this issue when it comes to the topic of "higher powers" - I think the same unpacking applies equally to "future selves". In short, one should be wary of the extent to which you are simply filling in the gaps with a bunch of ideas or assumptions, with no "touch-points" to the actual experience. It can be best to keep a "meta" perspective, where we don't commit to any description, merely find it useful or not (and bear in mind the nature of descriptions throughout).

POST: Suns of Eternity after Two Glasses, possible jump?

What "higher powers" would these be? More specifically, where would they be relative to you, and how exactly would they influence your experience? (We shouldn't just take these vague notions for granted without digging into them a little, or else we can end up accumulating stacks of semi-superstitions that are not in fact experienced. Just because you might have an experience "as if" something is true, doesn't mean that that description should be taken as "what is really happening". It's important to keep returning to what exactly was experienced, so we don't risk potentially getting distracted by little fluffy stories.)

...Okay, but: why? Why believe those things? As in, what in your direct experience has led you to believe them? And believe them in preference to other possible descriptions?

This might sound like I'm pushing back against your beliefs, but that's not quite my intention. Part of this subreddit is (meant to be) focused on examining the "nature of experience" and the nature of descriptions about experiences. And so, if we were going to talk about "higher powers" or "signs", we'd inevitably dig into why we might think there was something "separate" or "out there" that was doing things, and so on. And so: In such an investigation, first we might end up focussing on confirming (or dispelling) our everyday assumption that we are a person-object located within a world-place. (Where "the world" is described along the lines of being a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'".) That is, checking whether that is an accurate description of our ongoing experience or not. The demo exercises in the sidebar are one way to start playing with that, for instance. And then, if we move beyond those assumptions, we must then make sure we aren't just swapping one story for another - making the same mistake, in a different way. Even the notion of "dimensions" as places is potentially suspect, and so on (since at face value it still characterises us as an object in some sense, when we don't really experience ourselves as that, perhaps). None of which is to say those descriptions can't be useful, but that is different to saying they are fundamentally actual. The experiences might be actual, but the descriptions of them might be best viewed as metaphors or narratives - and this includes "dimensional jumping" itself. (For fun, do maybe check out the little exercise in that link, as a way for us to maybe get past the concepts here.)

Looping back to the idea of a "higher power", then, it is might potentially be viewed as a black box concept to fill in for the fact that only a minor aspect of our present state is seemingly unfolded "into the senses". In other words, the "higher power" idea is a side-effect of the error of conceiving of ourselves as an "object in a place": it is a problem with the description rather than an aspect of actual experience. The generalised version of this view is that our ongoing experience appears to be "patterned" in certain ways - that is, our experiences have content "as if" things were true. But are those things fundamentally true?

If something can be changed, it cannot be fundamentally true. Sometimes we might have experiences "as if" there are higher powers, other times not, and so on. What is the only unchanging property of our experience? Is it perhaps only the fact of "awareness" itself? What else is definitely always true? Etc. That is the challenge: to investigate what is true. And that's one reason we'd maybe push back on descriptions of "higher powers" and "signs" or indeed "dimensions" - to see if we can have experiences as if they are not true, or differently true, as well as apparently true. Again, that doesn't mean we can't find particular descriptions attractive and enjoy them; however, if we are being sincere then it's important to take account of the nature of descriptions themselves. You get the idea!

...I guess the key idea is that we don't let the content or context of our descriptions go unexamined. Or perhaps better to say: it's completely fine to use one description or another, but we choose to also recognise the nature of those descriptions. (Which are perhaps best considered as a sort of "parallel experience': the experience of "thinking [or feeling] about experiences", which doesn't get behind the experience.)

And so, please don't filter yourself when you post, because of course "beliefs" are themselves an aspect of experience - and what we're ultimately about here is an exploration of the nature of experience. However, have in mind that "meta" perspective where we are taking one step back from the descriptions we use. Importantly, even though descriptions might not be "true", that doesn't mean they're not useful. We may certainly have experiences "as if" they were true, and that is itself of interest: just because our descriptions and beliefs don't explain our experiences, doesn't necessarily mean they can't be used to pattern our experiences - a reversal of our usual way of thinking about them, and itself a reason to keep an eye on them.