TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 25)

POST: Forbidden knowledge erased

[POST]

Has anyone ever felt like they've had a thought that gives you a deep answer or key to life, only to forget it seconds later? I've had this happen a few times recently. It's like a thought will enter my head, or rather be "pushed" into my head, that leaves me in awe. Then, it just disappears from my head and I can't even remember what it was, or a trace of it, no matter how hard I try. All I'm left with is the feeling of awe, like I saw behind a veil to something incredible and someone whisked me away before I was able to fully see it. Anyone else?

[END OF POST]

It could be that the "thought" is actually the experience of the gap between thoughts - the raw openness - and so you can't re-member it. You can't remember it, because it can't be conceived of, and it leaves no trace because it's a lack of sensory content.

So a taste of death?

Hard to say. Some stories here and elsewhere would suggest that experiencing of some sort continues after experiencing "dying". Perhaps it's better to say something like: it's a taste of not-being-a-person.

...

"How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?" :-)

So - it's probably more accurate to say that there are light-as-wave observations and there are light-as-particle observations - but beyond this "light" doesn't exist in any particular state, other than as a concept in a fictional narrative, a story we use to connect the gaps between observations. Light doesn't "happen" except for the observing of it.

A1: Aha! So if this goes for light, this should go for everything else too, right? Nothing happens except for the observing of it? So the observing, done by an observer, creates(?) (renders?) everything as it's being observed/experienced? So there is no world except for the observer and what he observes - and how do you separate the two? Is it even possible to separate the two?

Yes, it goes for everything! So there is no separation between the observer and the observed. We might think of "the observer" as being an open aware space in which his experiences arise - we could say that an observer takes on the shape of their observations. This does leave us with a couple of questions though, which I'll have a stab at:

• How is it that the world appears to-have-happened though?: It does seem like things have been going on while my attention was elsewhere, hwo can this be? This might be explained by "creation-by-implication". When we direct our attention in a particular direction, an experience is triggered which is plausible given the observations thus far.
• If the world isn't out there then in what sense does it exist?: Maybe it exists only in the sense that all possible experiences are simultaneously available - like all the individual frames of all possible movies being stacked in the projector at once - and all that changes is the "brightness" of them, varying in their relative contributions to our current moment.

It only seems like there's a world happening "out there" because we've got into the habit of selecting our next-moment based on the contents of the now-moment plus our history. Except when we slip up and things seem to shift discontinuously and break the rules - a "glitch"!

A1: I think you nailed it right on the head! I would even take it a bit 'further'.
When we direct our attention in a particular direction, an experience is triggered which is plausible probable given the observations thus far.
My theory is that our experience of now is just a collapsed point of several probability lines. The past is a 'written' line, the now is the current focus, and the future is a string of probablity lines that are always in flux until you reach the next 'iteration of time' (aka. next delta-T) where it collapses and manifests as the most probable function. Each line of probability is continously moved towards or away from the collapse point (now) according to how previous collapse points have occured. In this model everything that can happen is possible, but everything that can happen has a different degree of probability of happening.

Yes, you can certainly describe it that way!

I've been trying not to use "probable" because (of course) we never actually experience probability - it's a tool, an abstraction, but some groups have taken to be objectively true lately. "Plausible" makes it sound more like what it is: a story we make up and make a judgement on. But "probability" is as good a metaphor as any!

Now the fun stuff. Given that all possible experiences are available, and it's our previous observations that define the contribution of possibilities (your "probabilities") towards future observations - is it possible to influence this?

All possible observations are "here, now" - even unlikely ones. Is there a way to make an unlikely one take priority? How can we force a glitch or discontinuous change?

A1: Well, learning from established physics and quantum mechanics, isn't it now a common understanding that whatever is observed becomes affected simply by being observed? So how to influence the possibilities could maybe be, at least first, to observe the possibilities in some way?
How to observe probabilities/possibilities when all you are is "aware space" or "consciousness"? Imagination!! Until we get a machine that is able to calculate and/or discern future possible probabilities, I think that is as close as we're gonna get to manipulate the outcomes. But merely observing something and therefore changing/affecting it is one thing - if we assume it is possible to at least influence the possibilities in this way, can we assume it is possible to influence the possibilities in a controlled way? In a directed way? In a way that intends one possibility to become manifest instead of another? Or as you said, is there a way to make an unlikely possibility take priority over a more likely one?
Here we would need experimental testing, re-testing and triple-testing. Let's set up the premises we would need:

• 1: Probabilities can be affected by observation
• 2: Imagination is a form of observation
• 3: Probabilities can therefore be affected by imagination
• 4: Imagination can be controlled
• Inference from previous premises: Probabilities can therefore be affected and controlled by imagination
  Then do rigorous testing to try to disprove any of these premises. First and most obvious flaw in this experimental setup is it would rely almost entirely on subjective reporting (but then again, as we've already covered, there can't be observation without observer - it's impossible to get around the subject). But maybe that wouldn't matter, because in any case we could set up imagined possibilities, then have a subject attempt to control the imagined possibilities into a certain desired 'state', then observe if the 'outside Universe' conformed to the controlled imagined possibility or not, or if it did so to any discernable degree.

An excellent summary and I completely agree. The only area I would pick at would be the idea of an "outside universe", since such a thing can never be experienced. Earlier we established that there is no observer-observed separation. This means that we don't affect things by observing them, we bring them into fact by doing so. This means that the world is our accumulated observations, and that includes the observations of (apparent) other people. So, we hit a problem. Although we have ignored the situation for 2000 years, we are forced to admit (to re-admit) that the world is subjective and we each have a "private copy" or view of it. And this means that the experience of "observing someone use imagination to influence the world" is also a part of the private copy.

In other words, we cannot prove this to someone else, because that proof is always really to ourselves and within ourselves!

A1: Absolutely! And that's why I wrote 'outside Universe' with apostrophes ;P
Formulating it as "bringing them into fact" is as succinctly as it can be put, I think, because as words are limiting at best, this description says a lot about the apparent mechanics of this process. And yes, finally, it's impossible to prove anything, and even to ourselves that proof would be dubious. Our private copy of existence is like a self-referential loop, or a mirror placed in front of a mirror, creating an endless fractal of self-referential data. Oh, and even if we can't get out of our own private copy and therefore never know anything about any fictitious/non-existant 'outside' world, for practical purposes, the experiment could still be attempted in the subject-in-object reality view that today's science use, and would likely produce entertaining data no matter what the results were :) It would actually be interesting to test, if only on a very small scale!

Sorry, mere apostrophes just weren't sufficient there - it needed to have full quotation marks! ;-)

Because the looping/mirroring metaphor can get a bit tangled and implies two parts where there is really only one - I find it easier to describe in terms of the activating of already-existing patterns. This lets us dodge infinite regression and maintain the idea of an ongoing "now" - but different metaphors are good for different contexts anyway. As you indicate, we can't get out of our own private copy, because we aren't actually in it. Rather, the private copy is within us and it includes our bodies as part of the world! Even the latest interpretations of QM (such as QBism) are giving up on objective interconnected aspects, although they hand-wavingly say that maybe some sort of objective explanation might come in the future. (Nope!)

However, if for fun we at least allow there to be multiple "perspectives", then there's still value in doing the experiment. We can think of the world as being a shared set of patterns (rather than a shared environment). By contributing new connections or activations from our private copy, we are making those available to other copies - albeit indirectly - thus spreading the magic for everyone else! :-)

A1: Hehe. Yep. And on that note we conclude this circle jerk ;)
PS. Even "within us" brings up a separation problem, but all words would eventually be insufficient to describe anything. They work like approximations, always beating around the bush, indicating or pointing to that which it is beating around :P
PPS. This has been a riveting discourse to have after being awake for more than 36 hours!

Well done us for solving reality! ;-)

PS. Yeah, true, there's really no way to say it because all words and metaphors imply separation into parts and then a relationship in space.

PPS. Haha, well, I have a sneaking suspicion that lack of sleep helps rather than hinders these sorts of conversations.

Catch you next time!

POST: The silent, faceless fifth housemate in The Young Ones TV show

Really one for the /r/MandelaEffect subreddit. I suspect Ben Elton is just being playful here, and doesn't want to get into all the legal issues for having invented and used the character from the movie Ringu 15 years before he sold it to the Japanese...

Q1: Hi, TriumphantGeorge, always enjoy your posts. It was x-posted /r/MandelaEffect and the GITM Mandela effect thread shortly after here. It's unfortunate that the "glitch" and "Mandela Effect" terms became standard. The former implies a temporary error, the latter doesn't mean anything at all. "Reality shift" is a better term for most of the stories. The changing-histories type of shift was the first type recorded at Cynthia Sue Larson's RealityShifters site in 1999, Sun Dial Rality Shift. The "Alive Again" type of shift, later called the "Mandela Effect" is another sub-type of time-shift, specifically involving people, which has been stretched to mean all kinds of discrepancies between memory and evidence, but M.E. is a less descriptive term than "time-shift" or even better "history-shift". A full taxonomy of shifts would have at least a dozen types, but it's difficult to make one without assuming that similar effects are similar in origin, and that dissimilar effects have dissimilar causes, which may not be the case.

I agree, the categorisation is a bit arbitrary when we start to think about what such experiences might mean "fundamentally". While we want to avoid presuming that various shifts have a common cause, or have uncommon causes, we're still left with the practical requirement of organising things somehow so we don't end up with one big gloop. The reason that "glitches" and "Mandela Effects" are handled separately is partly historical - how the two subreddits arose - and partly because the "Mandela Effect" is a much more general category, usually not a direct experience, and is somewhat difficult to define, so it tends to dominate a subreddit unless it is kept separate. Of course, the dividing line is fuzzy, which is why your post, for example, and others aren't just removed. To some extent, this depends on the amount of effort put into the post, and the quality of discussion it generates. I'm still duty bound to point out that "there is a place for this" even if it's left to stand though!

Yeah, I think Cynthia Sue Larson's site was probably the first to log "shift" experiences in an organised way. Being a fully "curated" site, she avoids encountering many of the issues we do in a public forum type environment, partly because her site is in effect pre-moderated, but also because she holds to a particular perspective on what constitutes a shift and what is behind it (to some extent). We don't really have that luxury here - which is why we try to define "glitches" and "Mandela Effects" in terms of the experience rather than the explanation, even avoiding saying that change happens in "the world" rather than "in our ongoing experience". For example, even the idea that the concept "the world" corresponds to something actual - e.g. that the-world-as-it-is really is a "shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time", or any other worldview- rather than being a convenient "parallel construction in thought", is potentially somewhat suspect. Even simple categorisation schemes contain hidden assumptions! Having said that, I'm working on an idea for sort of linked tagging for the other subreddit, which might apply to this one also, to try and counter the "memory hole" issue of subreddits, where knowledge isn't accumulated (the rudimentary search function really doesn't help much).

What does "parallel construction in thought" mean?

Very simply put, it's the recognition that you never get "behind" your experience of the world, that your thoughts-about the world are at the same level as your experience-of the world - and, if you attend to your actual 1st-person experience, both are made from the same "stuff". Loosely speaking, they are both bubbles of "sensations" within your space of perception; your ideas about the world are actually like a little simplistic mini-world of their own, with only a small overlap with your main strand of experience. Keeping this in mind (excuse pun) helps us avoid making "map is not the territory" type mistakes, and realise that: observations dictate the possible models; models do not dictate the possible observations. For this subreddit, where one might easily dismiss someone's experience (as in, what arose as sensory patterns in their main strand of experience), it helps us be clear about the distinction between the experience vs the explanation, and recognise that this is typically a one-to-many relationship (even though we typically default to the very simplistic "spatial world" metaphor without noticing).

POST: Question for people who have been (or know) about parallel universes?

Can you repost with a "[THEORY]" tag at the front of your title? Thanks.

But since I'm typing anyway... My first thought: If we go with the "parallel universes", you are not physically moving there (what would that even mean?) you are changing your perspective so that you are now experiencing that point of view. You inherently would never switch to a state that had no point of view for you; it would be meaningless. My second thought: Such parallel universes should therefore not be thought of as "places", they are more like potential experiences.

Q1: Sure. Does that mean some were there is a body sitting ther Your second point: but if there is a universe absoloutly everything there must be a universe that someone breaks out of there universde and coem s into one that they are not.

Well, "universe" is just a concept, not a place. It's a name we give to an idea about a set of possible facts we might experience. So you can have the subjective experience of, say, the scene of the current room fading away and being replaced by a scene of a purple bubblegum landscape - and you might call that "moving to a parallel universe" - but that is a shift of your experience, not a movement into another place. Because you can't really talk objectively about that shift, it's not meaningful to say you went anywhere - and even other people apparently going somewhere, is really a change in your state. Anything beyond that is a fiction really. To go further, you really need to nail down: a) whether the world is shared and, b) if so, in what way exactly it is shared. It is not necessarily true that the world is shared in the sense of an overlapping 3D-space.

Word in the senses of unvierse not planet? If not then I am lost. I am not sure if I get it sorry.

Sorry, yes: "world" in the sense of "shared realm" or "universe", rather than "Planet Earth".

Q1: But I don't exactly see how if every posible thing happens in some universe that there isn't a universe were some enteres that they aren't meant to be. You have to remeber that this defention is made by this universe. There should be (if the theroy is correct (which you probably can guess I am a skpetic) ) a universe with my defention (not that I have really stated one) which would make what I am saying feasble.

What I am suggesting can't happen is: you can't have the experience of going to a universe where you are not, because you are not there; if you try to go there, you will by definition experience a universe in which you are there. It becomes logically impossible for something to exist which "isn't meant to be", because the fact of it existing means it is meant to be.

But that means not every possible thing Happens. Because thats a posiblity

It is a logical impossibility. The hypothesis doesn't say that "for anything you can say, there will be a corresponding universe". It says that, implicitly, all logically coherent universes exist. So, just as there will be no universe where "red=blue", or "north and east are the same direction", there will be no universe where "things which do not exist in that universe, also exist". There may be a universe where somebody suddenly appears, and there is no record at all of them existing until that point, since that doesn't break logic, because both before and after the appearance, the universe remains internally consistent. However, that's not the same as "a person being in a universe where they don't exist" - because, as of that moment, they do exist there.

Q1: But Isn't logic a contract/ opinion? In Asia a common way to wipe instead of Toilet paper after is to use your hand and a built in water gun ( bad description) then wash it afterwards. That comes over as ilogical to the western community (or me when I first heard of it) logic isn't clear. Relgion is an example of that.

This is a different sort of logic. This is isn't the everyday version ("doesn't make sense!") it is the specific version ("these two things can't be true at the same time!").

[COMMENT]

Q1: What about schrodinger's cat? It feels that the definition is based off our universe (fair enough) but the assuption is that it is the same when you go into another universe. Well whats the cause? We are confied to the logic of our universe. Say the statment " the world is spinning". From this we logicly know

• the sun/moon/stars rotate above us in a pattern (pretty much consistently)
• Gravity has the same (noticeable) strength anywhere on the planet
• Newtons laws of motion
• We have seasons
• we have days
• All statments about time
  All of these are logical statements right
  Now Imagine if the world didn't spin
  I have to assume that everything elses stays the same (which it couldn't/wouldn't/can't (one of those))
• 180 "days" of the year we are in the dark
• we would not have seasons.
• friction would change
  there are probably loads more changes. But do you see what I mean
  Last point Logic of what can't and can't be is a construct based on what we know.
  Defention of Logic
  Key word validity
  definition of Validity
  Key words : Logical (sort of circular I just realised) and Factual
  defention of factual
  Key word: situation
  Defention of situation
  a set of circumstances in which one finds oneself; a state of affairs.
  A long way of saying it but our circumstances have lead us to build/come to these logical conlusions
  Sorry for spelling as I am in a rush for a psych exam
  Looking forward to your reesponse

[END OF COMMENT]

I do follow what you are saying - but what this comes down to though is what is meaningful. Specifically, what is meaningful to discuss. So, I can say that "there is a universe where things exist and don't exist at the same time", but the statement itself is not meaningful, unless I can clarify it further and resolve the contradiction in some way. I am bound to try to say in what sense does something exist and not-exist simultaneously. If I can't state what I mean, then I'm not saying anything. Which isn't to say that other universe have to be intelligible to us or correspond at all to ours - however, the most honest thing is to say that we can say nothing about such places because they don't make sense in our terms, surely?

(Good luck in your exam!)

POST: I'm a God and so are you

Maybe posting to /r/psychonaut for this? Thanks.

• "A personal, everyday-mode experience for which you have no explanation."

How do you know that I don't do acid everyday?

Heh. On the topic though: basically I think you are right, just not in the way you might assume. Your current experience is like an "imagination space" in which both inner and outer experiences (thoughts, sensations, perceptions) arise - there is no outside. The space = consciousness = god = you.

Q1: =you to:)

Yes! Although that's where it gets tricky, right? - Because it means the world can't be a "spatially-extended place unfolding time". It's more like a bunch of ideas that we can pick and choose from... where "we" are conscious spaces that are somehow separate but also the same space, overlapping but not simultaneous, happening but eternal - n'stuff.

Q1: This is where the illusion part comes in handy haha. From my hippy bullshit perspective, it seems to me that consciousness is the fundamental truth of the human experience, but we are interconnected with this web of consciousness. It also has a source that seems to come from a separate entity/dimension and we confuse what we normally view as reality to something that isn't reality. Consciousness gets super crazy when you go down rabbit holes like I have gone down, but even Buddha at one point said that the world we observe is an illusion. Which is something that is now being posited as Hologram Theory in Quantum Physics, but people have interpreted what Buddha meant differently as time went on. Maybe he really meant that the universe is a hologram, but maybe he only meant that "We see what we want to see in the world." Does that kind of make sense? I'm trying to get better at explaining things, but in my 25 years of this life I spent the first 19 of them in a cave of anti-intellectualism, then like the next 4.5 thinking I was a genius because I read articles on the internet, and just in like the last year and a half have I realized that I don't know shit about anything but if I do have something figured out I need to be able to explain it better.

It make sense, yes. There's also the idea of the "two truths", which is pretty handy for finding a balance between the hippy and the theorist:

• There is the relative truth of the world as it appears, the content of our experience.
• There is the fundamental truth of the world as it is, the nature of our experience.

In a metaphor I quite like, we can think of (our) consciousness as a blanket of material, whose only property is awareness. There are folds in the blanket. The shapes of the folds correspond to our experiences. Those shapes are real experiences, however if we assume them to be real objects that are separate from us, we are mistaken: they are folds in the blanket, they are the "relative" truth. The "fundamental" truth is the blanket itself, taking on shapes. So:

• Relative truth = the shapes. (You can intellectualise about this, just as you can make shapes in a sandbox which are like other shapes in a sandbox.)
• Fundamental truth = the blanket. (You can't intellectualise about this, just as you can't make shapes in a sandbox which capture "sand" or "the sandbox" itself.)

You can get a feel for this right now, if you look around the room you are in right now: View the visual image of the room as "floating in a vast open aware space". Now think about the room next door. Is that room really "next door" right now? Is it "over there"? Or is it actually "dissolved" into the background awareness, waiting to be unfolded into the senses when you "go there"?

I think of this as: you are not actually a person in a world, you are an open space which is "taking on the shape of" a being-a-person-in-a-world experience. (Recent approaches like QBism seem to me to be getting closer to these views.)

The most important thing though, I reckon, is to realise that all descriptions are metaphors, stories, when it comes to describing content. This is pretty important, because if you start playing with stuff, you find that the metaphors you adopt actually shape the experiences you have. (Hence the infinite rabbit-hole issue, usually leading to massive synchronicities, where everything goes exponential.)

Anyway, you get the idea. Although the main idea seems to be that I have to use loads of quotation marks whenever I talk about this sort of stuff! :-)

That's a really cool way of explaining it, and one of the biggest things I've learned thus far in life is to doubt what I think I know, because I keep looking back on myself and saying "Goddamn, you were an idiot." But I think I will do this my whole life until one day I'll be like, Goddamn, for an idiot you figured out a lot of things.

Yeah, that's the thing: you never reach a final understanding of content, because whenever you go looking, you get another experience in response - you find more detail. There's always... more dream. So it's probably best to treat it like an adventure, an exploration, an associative traversal of all the possible experiential moments. Or that's what I'm thinking this week, anyway!

Q1: That's actually a really good way of looking at things. It's truly been a pleasure exchanging ideas with you. How about this one. What if time travel was developed at the beginning of the universe? Now we just have to obey the laws that the first time travelers made, and that includes seemingly not being able to time travel despite the fact that every moment of every day we are traveling through time? Rabbit holes man. Goddamn Rabbit holes.

Likewise! What if the universe never had a beginning, because time is an aspect of experiencing, and not a fundamental part of the universe? What if the so-called universe was actually an unbounded collection of eternal states, a sort of Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments...

Q1: Dude, I am really glad I keep throwing ideas at you right now. Are you writing a book or something? You seem to have some very interesting ideas about the nature of reality and such. The Infinite Grid of Moments is a mind-blowing idea.

Ha, no book, just all for conversational fun, and it's just new ways of rethinking and connecting older ideas really. Although I do think adopting alternative descriptions can help us experience the world differently, sometimes dramatically so.

(For instance, the idea that we "select out" our experiences from a pre-existing structure suggests that it's as if we are exploring a "memory block", and that living is an act of recall - a mode of thinking. Can I apply the behaviours I notice occurring in thinking, to living?)

Q1: Hmm, that's an interesting thought. I'm actually attempting to begin writing a fictional book about my life where I describe myself in the third person. I've been at this for about a few days, but my memories have gotten a lot more crystal clear after I started doing that. It's almost as if I was experiencing a mental block prior to undertaking this project.

Actually, here's a post I did a while back which is another way to look at it: The Hall of Records. It's related to viewing experience as 3D-immersive imagining: A Line Of Thought. I think it's quite a powerful way to view the world: the world becomes a "shared resource of experiential patterns" that are dissolved into the background of your awareness, rather than a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Interesting to play with.

...

A1: Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.

* * *

TG Comments: /r/occult/

POST: Do Sigils really work?

Like everything else, it's a kind of "dreaming". I think of it as an "active metaphor". Play it out, play by the rules, you'll get results. You're playing out a little bit of theatre: creating an intention, wrapping it up in something, launching it like a rock into a pond, with the assumption-knowledge that ripples will result. Since ripples always result from rocks being thrown, you can leave things alone after the throw - safe in the knowledge that your "results" will, after a time, inevitably arrive at the shore. So long as you are "with" the model, it'll work.

POST: [deleted by user]

A1: Since time is an artificial construct built by the mind to split up unmanageable concepts (like infinity) into chunks that it can process, and as such, doesn't really exist outside the mind, yes, once proper control of the mind is gained, anything in it can be manipulated at will to one's heart's content.
Go tell Kant that time is an artificial construct
I would if I knew who that was, maybe.
????
First off, I am not an asshole. I have one, but I am not one. No need to resort to profanity. That is only an attempt by a weak mind to express itself forcefully. Secondly, I understood the question just fine, and I answered it in the best way I knew how, according to what I believe. If that happens to differ from what you believe, then that is your problem, and not mine. I do not have to get upset, offensive and resort to profanities when someone else believes differently than I do, as my belief system does not require either other people to think the same way I do or defend it. Go eat a Xanax, or have a bong rip, or a beer, or meditate, or whatever it is you do to chill out before you pop a gasket or something .......
A question was asked, a response was given. They asked if it could be done, and I said yes, and explained why I though so, no more, no less. Nobody is forcing anything on anyone. And a user can be well respected and still have a weak mind, or be a complete jerk, especially when it comes to being provocative and/or insulting, so that is no surprise at all, to me. Just because you or yer opinions are popular doesn't make you or them right .......
Time for an end of discussion, (EOD) here, I think, so have a nice day and enjoy whatever it is that you find pleasure in, and thanks for chatting. Goodbye.

...

DD, you're a right cock sometimes but I did laugh out loud at your examples!

Q1: I'm a right cock, but I make OK points? Funny how only one of those things is ever emphasized. It's almost as if people here don't actually separate moral judgements from insights, as they claim we should. It's almost like we will always be judged as normal people while certain other people are put on a pedestal and any negative thing being dismissed as brilliant satire.

Well, you know your tone rubs up people the wrong way, right? You've got wit and things to say, but it comes over a bit fighty often. ALL CAPS is one of the greatest evils there is! ;-) Strong language is a barrier to communication, it just is. If someone is verbally punching your head, it can be hard to discern their well-reasoned arguments through the ringing in your ears. Maybe people ignore it because it's off-topic? Most people aren't thinking of the things you are, or seeing the world in terms of injustice everywhere. They're not thinking about excluding rapists and murderers, fir instance. Particularly not in a quirky wee post about (what if?) time travel. If you wanna talk about the other stuff, though, we can.

Harsh. :-) Y'know, PM me if you do want to talk about this properly. I totally agree about autocorrect - it's ruining my life now that it looks at the whole context.

...Got ya. Offer stands though for future.

Q1: It always does, and it never really helps. Everyone wants to calm down the retard after they make him snap. Everyone was the nerds friend after he shot himself, nobody would be seen with him beforehand. I'm only treated like a person when I stop acting like one. Until then I'm just some stereotype or label.

You're a passionate person who feels the world in a way that other people don't. Basically, other people simply don't feel the underlying emotional world situation that you do. This means that they don't understand the world you describe, and therefore why you are upset. What at first seems like aggression and ignorance, is finally revealed to be empathy and distress, and that where irritation turns into compassion. Unfortunately, inevitably, people have usually stopped reading what *seems * to them like abuse, before they get to that revealing point. For sure, there have been horrors, and the planet hasn't shown itself to be a very considerate place (mostly due to ignorance, but a lot due to greed and maliciousness). I've long admitted this to myself, and figure that we can only work our corner (although that can actually have far-reaching effects).

Well, by "corner" I don't mean geographically, I mean in our areas of knowledge, expertise and influence. So if I have ideas, I contribute them; if actions occur, I take them; a helpful word, I give it. There's no point in me fantasising about transforming despotic regimes in Africa, but I can keep an eye on oppressive movements closer to home - and so on.

I need to delete all this stuff now, and stop posting for a while. Sorry. My bad. Again.

No worries. Leave all the time discussion stuff though, yeah? I think that was useful and we were getting somewhere exploring it. Take it easy.

...

Q2: 'mentally' yes. 'physically' I don't know.

If you do it "mentally" and don't come back... is that not the same as doing it "physically"? As if you entered a lucid dream and then never resumed this waking dream.

Q3: there is no space in 'mental' unless you will it to, so you can come back.

Hmm. Is there even a space in "physical" though? Surely it's just the same as dreaming: space is part of the experiencing, not necessarily the world.

EDIT: What I'm getting at is that there's no difference between mental and physical time travel, until you experience "coming back". Just like you only know that you were dreaming (rather than being transported to another reality), when you wake up.

...maybe if you imagine hard enough/obe/astral project/whatevs that you can experience alternate realities or "time travel."

Because what would "time travel" be, I suppose, except an "experience that seemed like time travel". Interesting on your intro. The exercise you describe is one of the first types of things I did too - found some old 1970's psychology book where people (unknowingly) did a variation of Doors of the Mind and explored strange new lands and reported back, bringing knowledge with them. Having experimented a little with metaphors such as [the Imagination Room] and doing lucid dreaming and the like, it's pretty hard to ever say what is possible and not, purely in terms of what we've experienced. If we follow George Berkeley and the like, then there is no solid substrate underneath our experiences - our worlds are basically a matter of habit... I do wonder sometimes: Where do the ideas for fiction come from? If our experience is basically "imagined" anyway, then what is the barrier between conceiving of something and experiencing something - is it just a matter of it persisting?

Q4: Regarding where ideas for fiction come from, a few summer's back I started experimenting again (post partying stage) with psychedelics but in a more controlled environment. One night during this period I started thinking about how much of my life I've lived emulating characters and lifestyles that my favorite authors had created. It was kind of intense to think about how much of my life was spent following some imagined life of someone that doesn't exist. From there I fell into Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces]
It made me start thinking about how it seems like we may just fall into this archetypal roles, but how we identify with them is beyond me. Which led me to start actually using the idea of the hero's quest to start controlling my life and trying to do things that would make an interesting story. I forget that it's a continuous experiment all the time and fall back down into my animal behaviors, but it's fun when I remember what's actually going on. The idea of reality being habit is interesting. As in matter existing due to energy taking the path of least resistance then even society being as such because people found or were trained to acquire certain habits. I need to read up on George Berkeley.

[QUOTE]

The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949) is a non-fiction book, and seminal work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell. In this publication, Campbell discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies. Since publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theory has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. The best known is perhaps George Lucas, who has acknowledged a debt to Campbell regarding the stories of the Star Wars films. The Joseph Campbell Foundation and New World Library issued a new edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in July 2008 as part of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series of books, audio and video recordings. In 2011, Time placed the book in its list of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since the magazine was founded in 1923.

[END OF QUOTE]

Ah, that's interesting, playing roles. We completely do this. A book I read fairly recently - Synchronicity by Kirby Surprise (check out a good interview here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-iMw9KA93U]) - had a fun section about how your life "takes on" the style of the character or storyline you have adopted, in a synchronistic way. You trigger patterns corresponding to that worldview. I've definitely done this unwittingly before, and more consciously more recently - adopting a "character" appropriate to the task at hand. (I've also played with the Michael Chekhov acting technique for this, fun.)

Yeah, Three Dialogues is the Berkeley text to read; it's quite approachable. Only caveats: Replace "soul" and "God" with "mind" and "extended mind" when reading the last dialogue, and focus on the point of the creation part rather than the Biblical reference. It basically nails the whole experience-of-reality thing; the only thing it doesn't quite touch is magickal-type influence (but then you realise you are the extended mind, filtered through a localised mind, and it becomes clear).

Q5: Without you the world stops eh?

Yeah, the buck stops here! So you better watch your mouth! ;-)

No, the world revolves around nobody. The point would be that "the world" is less like a spatially-extended place in which events happen, and more like a whole stack of dimensionless "facts". It is the perception of the world (by a "consciousness") which is formatted in terms of time, space and so on. A bit like Immanuel Kant and friends. Dreams sure feel like spatially-extended environments when you are having them, but they are not. So what makes us think that waking life is spatially-extended any more than a dream is? The fact that other people report the same experience? That just means that "human formatting" involves space and time as basic perceptual structures.

EDIT: Added the word "dimensionless", which I'd missed out and is sorta important here.

[QUOTE]

Transcendental idealism:
Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's doctrine maintains that human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us—implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things as they are in themselves.

[END OF QUOTE]

Sure every occurrence can be simplified to a bland statement of fact.

Ha, I missed the key word, and I apologise: dimensionless facts, as in they are not inherently organised in terms of space and time. We might call it "information" but even that is to frame it conceptually in a misleading way.

Time and space proven mathematical and historical realities. They are independent of humanity and will persist even with humanity's extinction.

That's plainly not true. They are experiences that people have, and the theories are also experiences that people have. Our theories describe the formatting and regularities of human minds and experiences, not of external worlds. I don't think any of our ideas predates human existence or will continue afterwards.

These perceptual structures are greater then humanity.

So, you are suggesting that human perceptual structures are greater than humanity, and exist even without humans? That's like saying that human bodies are greater than humanity, and will exist even if there are no humans. We have a Plato in the house! ;-)

Hey, this is an interesting topic...

Could you elaborate and give an example?

Perhaps it's better to say it this way: That the world as it is "in itself" is not necessarily of the form we experience it. It is our minds that format the-world-as-it-is in our immediate perception - in terms of objects, and in terms of space and time. Beyond our immediate perception, we tend to imagine that the universe is laid out in a way that naively corresponds to our experience of, say, this room. But it is just that: us imagining the universe as something, as a "shadow sensory experience".

So without humans to bear witness unstable molecules decay instantly? Riverbeds are formed and dried? Our universe created and destroyed?

All those things may be true simultaneously, in the same way that if I see a tail and then shift my attention and see a trunk, I don't have to conclude that a tail transformed into a trunk over time. I could take the bold step of suggesting that something - let's call it "an elephant" - existed throughout this experience, as a persistent and complete structure.

Your position is ridiculous and indefensible.

What is ridiculous about it? It seems more ridiculous to suppose that our mind-formatted experience corresponds to how the universe is in itself. That our concepts (and this is important: we perceive concepts, we do not perceive directly) are fundamental and are the "concepts of the universe".

Time, and the mechanisms the universe known and unknown continue to function with or Without a human to bear witness.

We cannot take the step of supposing that reality is organised in terms of dimensions, objects, and the like. We cannot study this. We can only study the regularities of the human experience - and even then, we can only make models of those regularities that can be conceptualised and communicated in language. Things like "time" and "mechanisms" are human concepts. The idea that the universe "functions" itself presupposes time! The universe doesn't necessarily function at all; perhaps it simply "is".

Note, I'm not saying we should do away with the scientific method or logical thought. I'm just saying we must be clear about what we are actually studying. We are not uncovering the secrets of the universe, as popular science articles would have you believe. (This was not controversial among early 20th century physicists. Models were not confused with "truth".)

TL;DR: Theories and models are thoughts about human experiencing, and subject to the formatting and the restrictions of human experiencing. They are not thoughts about the universe as it truly is.

...

We need to define what we're talking about in order to have an opinion on what's possible. If we're not clear on what the experience of time actually is, then how can we comment? We don't know what exactly we're trying to do!

I have a glass. I break it. It is now broken, but further back in time it's a glass. I can't see it, but I can remember it. My memories can be wrong, but the glass could still have existed.

Exactly. What do you mean by "further back in time" in this example? Or "existed", in what sense can the past glass exist other than in memory?

Q6: We don't understand why gravity works, we can still discuss it without just insisting that it doesn't exist. The glass did exist outside of memory. If it didnt, there would be no broken glass in the present. That's not the point. We are not discussing how to prove the past happened or what it was. Now you are really double talking. If there is no time" then the glass was and is always there in that point, as is the broken glass. If time doesn't exist, the glass must be as it always was. If you actually believed that nothing ever changes, you wouldn't be on this sub I take it. A catapillar becomes a butterfly, it wasn't born a butterfly. If there was no time, there would be no change, there wouldn't even be a birth. We age. You were not born an adult. You changed OVER TIME and it's likely been recorded in photographs and video. Not just memory. If a thing can become something else, that means it is now something it didn't use to be. That implies change or at least entropy which is the thing we call time. Again, the word time is man made and an illusion, not time itself. People are an illusion, but they also still exist. My clock doesn't stay static, it changes as a tool to mark and measure the flow of time. I'm sure you've heard about the research with atomic clocks, one in orbit and one in earth, proving that the speed of time cchanges based on the speed you travel. That wouldn't be possible if it was an arbitrarily invented concept.

So, skipping along: Is it the object that changes or is it our experience that changes? Does the glass break or does our experience move from seeing-intact-glass to seeing-broken-glass? If the second one, how do we shift from one to the other? And where is seeing-intact-glass stored when not being experienced?

We need to know this in order to work out whether we can jump or not. How are we moving forward in time anyway?

Q6: Did that mean anything to you? No, it's a broken glass. I'm not imagining and seeing that it's broken. I can take it to another person who can see the broken glass. If it was just perception, someone should be capable of filling it and drinking from it. Where it's being stored is memory. That doesn't mean it only exists in memory, Mr semantics. You only exist in my imagination foe me, that doesn't mean you don't actually exist outside of my mind. We are moving forward in time because we are in time. Time is change. You age, gravity affects you, objects can hit you, this is only possible because of time. You can't age if there's no passage of time to alter your body. Gravity cannot work if an object can't be in different locations at different times. 3 minutes till I can post. the glass hit the floor and shattered. What possible reason does your brain have to make a broken glass hallucination if you have never seen something break for real? You can't say "tto make it seem real" when it only helps make it real because it's how the real world works otherwise since you are implying that it's always that way.

What I'm getting at:

• Does the "moment of experience" before the glass broke still exist in the background? And:
• Does time pass or do we (our conscious attention) pass over moments?

Q6: Either way implies that time exists. Your consciousness can't pass over a moment if there is no time and all moments are the same. 9 minutes. Funkcveryone. Funk google. Funk autocorrsct. FUCK FUCK1FUCK. Five minutes. If it's just us moving consciousness through time, memory would be peffect. It's not, sI I think it needs rethinking. 4 minutes. if we got rid of all the christians, muslims, and jews, our country would be so much better. 3 minutes. Jewish people destroy the economy by hoarding money, that's why they were marked for extermination. They still use that as a defense for anything while continuing to lie, cheat and steal. They use to own slaves, but they live to tell a version of history where they were slaves who had to free themselves.

The difference is that time is an activity rather than an occurrence. This holds out hope for time travel.

Q6: Possibly, but that would imply that we would have some lighter version to practice and strengthen. As is, we seem unable to do more than remember parts of the past. I hope I'm wrong. I would love for it to be real. Maybe we can alter the speed that we experience it in the very least.

My feeling is that it is certainly possible to open our attentional focus and loosen our binding to time a little (as in, the rapid passing of the particular path we are on). If we believe in some ideas previously suggested by philosophers and religious texts - that the world is "eternal" and "all creation is done" - then it may be the case that we can jump from one time-based experience to another. Although done to illustrate something else, I posted this visualisation a while back to illustrate the idea of a consciousness + a moment of experience [The Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments]. But, y'know, this isn't time travel in the Back to the Future sense; it's about connecting to different parts of a (excuse the phrasing) universal memory-block.

I think equating time with memory is a bit of an issue.

Not personal memory in this case. Loosely, I'm suggesting that everyday moments might be compared to browsing the 'experiential records" in the "universe's memory". So time becomes the experience of change, of switching from one moment to another - which doesn't itself take place in time. (Yeah, I get that this sounds tricksy. It's hard to describe; it implies another level of "time" in which attention moves from one moment to another, but we don't need to go there I don't think.)

And I conceive of this to be very similar to what you've said here:

. . . list of details that our imagination makes real and fills in any blank spots . . .

In other words, each "moment" would be like a list of "facts" which our imagination (minds) expand into a 3D sensory "experiential moment".

Maybe time travel would involve the "multiverse" of infinite branching possibilities" in which case you could probably find a reality to match any even false memory but I'm not sure if that's what you meant.

Right. Well, if all possibilities are available then in theory you could have any experience you could conceive of. Time travel becomes just switching from one "moment" to another one, as usual, but one that is dissimilar to the previous one. Also, phenomena like personal time dilation and expansion are easily explained - you are simply transitioning more slowly between moments, or even skipping moments. And it takes care of this "jumping universes" or "magick" stuff by saying: What you are doing is intending to switch to a moment where your desire is being experienced.

I do find your model of "time" to be pretty fascinating.

I think it might (hopefully) help make it easier to be able to think of some of this stuff. It's basically saying "look, you are a consciousness having a being-a-person-in-this-situation experience", and then it let's you focus on: How do we select experiences ("moments") we want?

I wish it was that easy. I have tried. I don't think any amount of meditation and belief will just take me to a better place. Sometimes your just an animal in a trap.

There's hope. But you gotta stop pushing. And start small. We were just talking about the exercise to do in the comments here [Super-Simplified Models of Reality]. Do it. Every day. Give up completely twice a day. There's not much point in doing other stuff until you've let your nervous system settle out a bit like this.

Q6: I still have a lot of work to do today, and I'm behind. It's getting harder to find time. It looks like an exercise I can do while working so I'll try it out. I just need a fucking break and nobody cares, nobody believes me. They seem to think overworking me will magically make me normal. I'm going to fucking die like this. I just want it to hapoen. I want to collapse from heat exhaustion and die. But I never do, and it just keeps going. Thankd, I'll try out the exercise later when I can read it.

It's literally lying on the floor for 10 minutes, but with a certain idea. Do it first thing in the morning, do it when you get home at night, any other time you need a break. Trust me: it seems like nothing, but it'll make a massive difference. But you have to stick to it, and when you do it you have to "give up". Always make time for it. 10 minutes stopping for it, your whole day will be improved and more efficient. To me you sound super-stressed!

Q6: I am super stressed. I'll try, but I already do meditation. I can only do so much. Over stimulation creates more mental noise.

Give up the meditation. You are probably trying to "do" it. (I speak from experience.) Just do this for a week. Literally, lie down and let go of yourself, twice a day. It's the opposite of stimulation. Here's the comment.

[COMMENT]

I couldn't find the exact link but I had it saved in a word document (that's how good it is people!)

Daily Releasing Exercise

• Twice a day, 10 minutes, lie down in the constructive rest position.
• Completely let go to gravity. Give up totally, play dead.
• If your body moves or thoughts come up, let them be. Just let them release without interference.
• If you find your attention becomes focused on something, the same: just let go of your attention. Give up, again.
• At the end of the session (don't worry about exact timing), decide to get up, but don't make any movement. Wait until your body moves by itself. This won't happen for a while, but during one session, it will.
• In general, resist the urge to interfere with your body and mind, to push it along. Settle back and let it run at its own pace.

[END OF COMMENT]

Q6: That sounds like exactly what I need. That's an interesting practice. I'll make it my night and morning ritual for a while. Thanks!

Great! :-)

POST: What are your experiences that have validated your belief that "holy shit this stuff works?"

Q3: Made a sigil for a free bike. Got a free bike. Made a deal with an entity for money in exchange for harming an acquaintance. Friend lost his left arm while I made a fortune at work. Various successful "love" spells. It's not a question of whether it "works" for me at this point as it is a matter of using it responsibly in a way that makes me grow spiritually instead of getting caught up in material bullshit.

Q4: Made a deal with an entity for money in exchange for harming an acquaintance.
That will come back to bite you.

Q3: Yeah, it did. The money I made went to immediately repairing some mysterious car troubles.
Also, did I mention a friend lost their arm?

Q4: Yes you did. I hope multiple lessons were learned :)

Sounds like he did:

• On the one hand, his friend lost an arm.
• On the other hand... oh.

It just goes to show that all this stuff does work, without moral filter. I don't believe in the "comes back to bite you" as an independent law though; I think it's something you do to yourself. Interested in other opinions/tales though.

Q4: It just goes to show that all this stuff does work, without moral filter. I don't believe in the "comes back to bite you" as an independent law though; I think it's something you do to yourself. Interested in other opinions/tales though.
Yeah, there are many "theories" about this, some as simple as Karma, some as simple as we are all connected and what we do to others we do to ourselves...my general comment was around the preponderance of evidence that what we "put out there" tends to come back to us.

I still file it under the "make your own mind up" heading. I think belief probably plays a part here as much as with any of it.

...

Q1: I let my hood down, exposing my head to the pouring rain, not in hopes that the rain would stop, but because I knew it would stop. Within roughly two minutes, the rain stops.
Be careful with this. It usually only rains in 15 minute bouts. Anyway, today I decided to meditate and set a timer for 30 minutes. I wasn't doing much specifically, but I was experiencing fractals and vortexes of light. More intensity than usual. I gave up on the timer eventually and noticed only 10 minutes had passed. Time dilation much? In my usual daily routine, time passes quickly. And afterwards I could think so much clearer. I should also point out that I haven't really used any drugs in the past few months, so that's not related.

Q2: STOP DENYING HIS MAJIK YOU MEANIE

Q1: HE CAN'T CONTROL THE WEATHER BECAUSE I CONTROL THE WEATHER, AND I SAY IT RAINS OFF AND ON IN 15 MINUTE BOUTS

I was gonna say that you better watch out, because I control ALL THE CAPS LOCKS IN THE WORLD! Too late.

Q1: Too late?! You're going to have to convince me time is real. Checkmate, dream reality

Damn you, Eternal Block Universe, scuppering my smartitude!

POST: Would anyone be interested in a more serious forum?

I think... people generally don't want to talk personally and in detail, once they get going. Because the experiences are personal, and the beliefs that arise from it are sometimes best kept quiet. Also... I can't take you with me, as it were, once certain paths are followed. Trying to, would prevent the process.

POST: Does it matter if it's real?

Well, what is "real" is shaped by what you accept. Basically, asserting a fact makes it so in experience. You might say that facts-of-the-world constitute a formatting of the mind - and that this formatting is what shapes and filters infinity down to the present moment you perceive. When you accept that "doing this means that will happen", you are inserting a new one-off fact - resulting in a future experience - into your mind-world. More generalised facts work in the same way, such as charging an object, changing a person, etc. The world is just facts dissolved into the background awareness, from which then unfolds sensory moments as our attention moves. We can each choose our own facts/habits as we please: The Experiential World = The Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments, filtered through Belief, Expectation and Knowledge, and selected via Intention = Your personal Timeline Trajectory (amendable) = The Ongoing Sensory Now

The difficult bit is describing the apparent interaction between these personal dreams. For simplicity, it's easier to assume "it's all taken care of" and you only have to worry about defining the rules of your own personal "hologram".

...

A1: A matterialist would say that if something is real then that matters, but if it's not real then that doesn't matter.

A2: hahaha, gravity is real, but we haven't seen matter so far.

Have you seen gravity?

A2: The movie? Yes, I have. What about it?

I was going to catch that in advance, but...

A2: Never saw the real thing, but for some reason I know it is real, in a way.

You've seen objects moving. That's it.

POST: What am I seeing???

[POST]

(This is my first time putting anything on reddit, so...be gentle?) I am somewhat new to the occult. I have something that I physically see sometimes that no one has been able to explain thus far. History: It began in my earliest childhood memories, when I was about 3 years old. When it got dark, at night, I started seeing a dancing, moving squiggle of "static", made up of tiny, tiny white circles with dark in the center. The longer I concentrated on them, the bigger and more refined/clear the squiggle grew. It goes away when I turn my attention away from it. Not knowing wtf was up, & being a 3-year old, I decided it was a harmless imaginary friend to play with when bored. At night, when I was alone, I'd "conjure them up" & distract myself from being scared of the dark. However, on multiple nights around when I was doing this, a Shade started visiting my room. My mother ended up seeing the same Shade walk thru the hallway on it's way to my room, before I screamed for her. They (my father was a Christian minister) did an exorcism on the house & I didn't see the Shade after that. More recently, I have acquired several friends in the Occult. I've brought up my "static squiggles" with some of them. They say they can feel it when i am doing it. They've been able to guess what part of their body it's on when I "project" it on them with their eyes shut. I also see it a lot when I try focusing on my third eye when meditating. One friend says they have a certain animal show up that is connected to me in their mind's eye when I do it. The same friend says I may be unintentionally doing something that attracts things from the spirit realm or that makes me "show up/stand out" to other entities, which could explain the Shade that would show-up the same nights I was doing it when I was little. Has anyone else here seen these "static squiggles" or read about something similar? Any ideas for what it might be? (Before anyone says I'm seeing "floaters" or "floaties", this is completely different. I also have floaters, just like most people & it looks nothing like that. I can turn the static on & off & see it in the dark & light. Completely unrelated.)

[END OF POST]

Like hypnogogic sparkles/fragments, more obvious pre-sleep but actually always there and available (just obscured but the brightness of the senses, like stars/sun)? Literally "the stuff that dreams are made from".

Related article I found interesting [https://web.archive.org/web/20060511053653/https://cref.tripod.com/wakingsleep.pdf].

POST: How to find something that was hidden from me by another?

Try this:

• Sit down. Quietly.
• Decide that your body is a "shell". You are simply an observer of its movements.
• In other words, you do not interfere. You simply allow your body-shell to move by itself.
• Command it thus: "shell, go to where <object> is"
• Wait for the shell to move by itself, to wherever it wants to go.
• Enjoy being reunited with <object>

EDIT: Additional point: Send Triumphant George a share of the treasure! ;-)

What is the word that even in plain sight remains hidden?

• Answer: Hidden

POST: The importance of belief is undeniable, what is a single line of belief that can change a life forever?

A1: “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.”

(It's never not good.)

Q1: Nothing really matters.

Q2: Too meeeee....

Mama?

POST: Any well known people/celebrities/public figures that have admitted to practicing the Occult who you might not necessarily have thought would be interested in it?

Ashton kurcher and Milan kunis both study Kabbalist teachings and Ashton was seen wearing a free mason hat

"free mason" or Freemason?

Probably he's got a pal in jail, called Mason.

POST: Tapping Into The Collective Unconscious

Just... stop interfering. Let the ripples dissipate.

POST: Where to start regarding the occult?

Ask yourself what your purpose is in doing this. Don't worry about beliefs: they are all correct, as far as they go. Read lots to get ideas, but don't necessarily get hung up on one approach being 'the truth'.

POST: Freestyle Ritual

It's the meaning you give things, not the act itself - kinda thing?

Q1: Yes! You subconsciously know the ritualistic actions that will work best for you. Crowley knew the ones that would work best for him. I've never been too great at explaining myself but I feel like this will either turn out to be a good post or people will get pissed and think i'm an idiot.

Or it will be a good post filled with pissed idiots, because everything is permitted! ;-) Doesn't it really mean that, in the end, you don't need to perform any rituals or do anything much, except to 'decide that something is going to happen', and let it? The reason for ritual is because you feel that something must be done to 'earn' it, before you will allow it to appear in experience? After all, people might want power but the idea that you could literally just say something or think and it would happen, is quite disturbing...

Q1: "The flesh exists only to verify one's own existence" applies here.

Or as I was just saying elsewhere:

TL;DR: We are dreaming.
As there is no solid substrate behind the scenes, we can dream anything - including being confused, or experiencing an 'illusion', or dissolving into non-dual awareness, or uncovering the Super-Real Truth Behind It All, which includes maybe even identifying a solid substrate behind the scenes...
But all of those are just more experiences; there is no real truth to be discovered, except to realise the arbitrariness of it.

Q1: I feel like we would have some great acid talks.

Y'know, I've never partaken of the like. Which I suppose is quite worrying really: it means my mind is naturally full of this shit! :-)

Q2: This book is incredible. Could you please tell me more similar titles and/or point in the right direction to find more?
Many thanks for posting it!

Welcome! My main recommendation is SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic by Ramsay Dukes. Also - it may seem non-magickal at first glance, but the core sequence in this book by Missy Vineyard where she learns how to "allow movement to arise" is a great way into a larger world. You might also fancy experimenting with this to help "clear the desks" for freestyling intentions. Finally, Neville Goddard's The Power of Awareness is worth a look. That's what I'm playing with at the moment, anyway.

Q3: Same with medicine. It was all created and built upon by other people, probably people you've never met. I say make up your own ideas about medical care. What you're presenting as a logic argument is just plain wrong. I'm not saying that blindly following other's rituals is a good idea, and that coming up with your own is bad. Just saying that your argument is weak.

I think this is wrong. Magick works "the other way around" from science and medicine. Whereas those approaches assume a world of fact which we discover and utilise to find routes by which we can get what we want, magick involves creating such routes. Magick involves creating new facts-of-the-world. Which isn't to say that we can't reuse traditional rituals, but the reason they worked was because of the meaning attached to those rituals at the time. As that fades, the simple acts themselves have no inherent power. What are your reasons for suggesting that coming up with our own rituals is bad? Do you think that those who came before have some secret nature that we don't/can't access?

Q3: Yeah, you're missing the point.

Y'know, I did mistake what you said, because I was reading new posts having forgotten what OP actually said. My valid point is a valid response to... a point you probably weren't actually making.

POST: [discussion] mental illness and spirituality

Q1: I'm going to voice an alternative, controversial persepective. Maybe I'm full of shit... The "you" isn't pointed at anyone. I'm passionate about this topic and admittedly (melo)dramatic. Mental health, or any type of health, is something you have. It is not something you are. While everyone has different raw materials (experiences, genetics, etc.) we are constantly building our health. Nothing about health implies a stable and perpetual condition. Health is a dynamic and multifaceted system embedded in the larger system that is you. Does a lifetime smoker choose cancer? He probably didn't choose to smoke. His parents and friends smoked, and he only meant to smoke at parties initially. I'm calling bullshit. Read some stories about cancer survivors. How dare they rise above illness. How dare they choose to beat cancer and find happiness despite chemo or radiotherapy. Does a person choose mental illness? Honestly, it would be absurd to deny genetic tendencies are traumatic experiences, but who chooses what they do with these raw materials? How can a girl who was born to abusive and bipolar parents (who's parents were abusive and bipolar) break the chain? How does a rich kid with golden parents and golden and prime genetics end up paranoid and homeless after living the good life for 40 years? People know there depressed because they're sleeping all day or not sleeping at all. They're eating too much or not eating at all. They don't have a job or friends. They never exersise. But does this correlation imply causation? Or are they depressed because they don't have their shit together? They just need Prozac because because it's not their fault. How many people have been sold this lie? You don't know what's best for you because you don't have fancy letters infront of your name. If you aren't taking care of you body or your life, you're supposed to feel depressed. Ifyou go trough bouts of complaining, laziness, and bottling up your life you're supposed to explode with reciprocal mania. Are you going to be a victim? Life happens to you and there's nothing you can do about it? Or are you going to be a magician? You activavly participate in life and your own unfoldment? Just don't neglect the mundane stuff. Work. Family. Friends. Sleep. Diet. Self expression. Clean enviornment. It's all important.

Q2: I don´t see why this perspective could be controversial. In fact I mostly agree. The only thing I can slightly disagree is that, I my opinion, you don´t "choose" an illness but you "allow it".

Ah. Expand on "allowing"...?

Q2: Just as we allow things that are not entirely beneficial to us in our everyday life. There´s always someone or something that want´s something from us, who doesn´t have our best interests in mind. The first analogy that comes to my mind is being mugged. You could probably have avoided it by not walking into that dangerous neighborhood or by taking a cab or something, probably, maybe not. Once this person is demanding your money you can always run or do something. But you don´t, so you allow it to happen. Of course it´s harder to avoid as it escalates. This is related to illness that have episodes. A similar analogy for continuous illness could be blackmail. Don´t get me wrong, I don´t think it´s easy to avoid, or not allow, something like this. It´s just that things happen all the time, not doing something about it can have detrimental consequences to us. There´s always something to learn either way :)

Interesting. I was thinking you might mean "allowing" in the sense of perceiving that there was a possibility of something and, in addition, not taking the intuitive action to avoid that possibility. Combined, that would be creating (indirectly "selecting") the path by releasing into it. You make a good point about this also being true in a more grounded way. Not adjusting the pattern (habit, belief, trajectory) to avoid what you have realised the trajectory is heading towards.

Everything has to be true in a more grounded way...

Well, quite. There is only one "nature of things", otherwise it isn't the nature of things...

...

Commenter has maybe been round the studies-theories-claims-fade cycle a few times, correlation + simplistic model. Not to disparage the work, it's just the grand final claims. Remember when DNA was a "blueprint" and there was going to be a gene corresponding to every disease and personality trait and vulnerability? Ah, not quite so simple, it's more of a "platform" than a blueprint. Phrenology was once called "the only true science of mind" in the 1800s; in the early 1900s eugenics was seen as a medically and ethically sound approach to population management until the association with Nazi Germany scuppered it after WWII; Egan Moniz won the Nobel prize in 1949 for inventing the lobotomy; now we have "chemical imbalances"... Each was groundbreaking and a triumph of understanding at the time, and the result of thorough research and persuasive studies and theorising. These were not stupid people. We are not stupid people. But we are not any cleverer, and we are just as in love with our own Thinking Of The Day, on the lookout for a new "simple certainty", seeing the world through our Shiny New Metaphors. In 100 years time, this will all look ridiculous.

(But - if it's useful, we should use it of course. I'm just saying that historical evidence suggests we should keep it in perspective, particularly with no integrated model, more of a "promise".)

Rant over! :-)

POST: Astrology on other planets?

If the basis of astrology is the accessing of inner knowledge, then it wouldn't matter what approach he took, so long as it had some sort of formal structure and he arrived at it by contemplation?

Q: But what if inner knowledge is predicated on real relationships to the planets. All of my ancestors and relatives back to the origin of life on this planet lived and died under our moon and sun and neighbors. Fungi and plant amd other apes and bacteria and all. If we leave our home, do we lose the support of our cosmic family? I have no idea how to test this without blasting myself out of the solar system, but its a fascinating thought. What if our consciousness is dependent our system, and we will have to find new sources to derive our inner life from upon relocating?

An interesting thought. I'm inclined to say, though, that for the "inner knowledge" aspect the system of the planets is within consciousness - at all times. The entire universe is dissolved into the background of your awareness right now, in this room. The reason you think you are in the room is just because that particular aspect has been unfolded into sensory experience. All knowledge is present, now. That's a different thing to bodily support and experience, though, and physical dependence. It's easy to imagine that the state of the whole universe contributes to the events of a particular moment. Would we become... different... when out of our localised, consensus region? Hmm!

POST: Have you ever asked yourselves

Q1: No one ever did, I think: what a strange question, if you let me say so.
Look at the Baal Shem Tov (all my love & gratitude upon his name): he knew that he knew a lot, and he knew he could perform wonders. And he was humble, knowing that he knew a lot... and then one day his dear wife died... ow, and you have to read that... Martin Buber. Go read it.
EDIT: of course, I agree with the other comments too. I just wanted to express my surprise...
You see a man who could do wonderful things & was absolutely enlightened & was taken aback when his wife died: he never knew he was going to feel what he felt.

Synchronistically, I came across this yesterday:

[POST]

DaVE's BaSeMeNT
There is a Zen story about a Zen Master and his Wife... Sometimes it happens: Masters achieve Samadhi after already committing themselves to life as a householder; some have married and fathered children before Attaining... This is the Story of the Master whose Wife became his Number One Disciple.
The Master had become famous for the Depth of his Enlightenment in his 40s, after his children had grown and he and his Wife opened their home to any and all who would devote themselves to the Dharma. The Master taught while his Wife cooked and fed all who would come.
For many years, students from many miles away came to study and be with this Dharma Master who espoused the Zen values of Emptiness and the Doctrine of Nothingness and the Ultimate Illusion of Temporal Reality. Over the long years an entire community developed around the Master and his Wife until he had 100s of disciples...
One day after teaching for many many years, his Wife suddenly sickened. For a week the Master attended to her in her illness, forgoing his teaching and ignoring his disciples. His disciples began to whisper and speculate among themselves... "How will the Master cope with this? What if she dies? Will he hold to his Serenity? Will be keep the Dharma?" And then after a week of nursing her and caring for her, his Wife died quietly during the full moon in the middle of the night.
The next morning the community was roused by a terrible racket and ruckus! All the disciples came running in great concern... And there, at the doorstep of his home, they found their Master--drunk!--sitting in the dirt, his clothes rent, his hair wild and loose, tears streaming down his face... He was banging with a ladle against an old iron pot and crying and wailing like a lost child. He was inconsolable. They knew that his Wife had died in the night...
His disciples were shocked to see their Master displaying such emotion! Never had they seen him like this before!
Some began to question the Master and even to berate him:
"But Master! Did you not teach us that Life is an Illusion?" "Yes!" The Master continued to wail and beat his pot.
"But Master! Did you not teach us that there is no Death?" "Yes!" He cried harder, still beating his pot.
"But Master, did you not teach us that one day we all awaken in the Pure Land and dwell in Eternal Bliss?" "Yes!" Wailed the Master again, beating his pot even louder!
His disciples were stunned... They shouted at him: "Then if what you have taught us is True why are you now drunk and crying and carrying on so?"
The Master stopped long enough to look out among the disciples gathered round him. Through his disheveled hair he met the eyes of those nearest him... He said, still sobbing: "Because my Wife was my Number One Disciple. She taught by my side these many many years. I loved her! And now my Wife has died. And I shall miss her!"
Contrary to the popular Myth, Zen does not spare us from Suffering. Zen does not eliminate difficult Emotions. In fact, Zen brings our Suffering and our Emotions into sharper clarity. You will feel them more immediately, without buffer. They will feel stronger! Despite the portrayals of Zen in Films and Television, Zen is not a tranquilizer! It is not a Pacifier. SO, if you have been attracted to Zen in the hopes of finding an end to Suffering then you should begin looking elsewhere. Zen will not save you...
Zen makes your Life more Real; more Immediate, more Authentic. When you suffer you will be MORE aware of Suffering. When you are Compassionate you will suffer not only for yourself, but also for everyone you meet! YES, Zen will actually increase your Suffering. There is no doubt of that. But Zen will also help you survive it. And it is equally true that in time, Zen will also increase your Joy. With Zen you will cry harder and faster and you will laugh longer and deeper. Isn't that worth it?
Enough for today...
--Pahka Dave

[END OF POST]

Q1: Would you recommend me a book about this philosophy? Zen is my first layer of knowledge. On it I go from one master to the other. Castaneda & Baal Shem Tov being the main 2.

Cop-Out Response

Hmm. I'm not quite sure what to recommend these days, because my own take is a mix, and therefore what I'm about to say probably won't be quite what you are asking for! So I've added that below. :-)

The response of the students is that of our secrete hope that the world is magical and we can somehow avoid experience, in some mysterious way we will be spared. But that's not what Zen promises - Zen promises (apart from nothing at all) that we can see things clearly and directly. [1] Any philosophising that a tradition does is then patterns on top of that clear seeing, basically a vain attempt to convert it into ideas and language that can become guidance. Zen is, I think, the closest tradition to admitting that the experience is what counts, and that stopping interfering long enough to see the true nature of experience is the only lesson.

As I see it:

• Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences.
• Thinking is an experience also, and produced in-form-ation which affects subsequent experiences.
• You need to take time to let your attention open out into the background space in order to see what is behind/beyond the patterns.
• Only with this foundation can philosophies for living make sense and not be castles in the sky that are confused with cityscapes of a solid reality.

Reading Recommendations

So... I'm inclined to say we should put aside the thinking and go for two specific experiences, because otherwise we read and read and think-about and conceptualise forever - when this actually conceals our basic experience. Having had these, our personal philosophy will naturally follow.

• The first, is to have the experience of your body moving by itself, and allowing it to respond (not react) spontaneously. I recommend Missy Vineyard's How You Stand, You How Move, How You Live for this. It's says it's based on Alexander Technique, but actually she's had an insight[2] which leads to a different way of viewing it.
• The second experience is to directly experience yourself as the background awareness in which experience arises. For this, Rupert Spira's books Presence Vol I & II (sample here) and Greg Goode's Standing As Awareness (sample here) are excellent. This interview may also be of interest, as might this approach to dissolving yourself (do the non-assertive version daily).

Once we're on your way with those, we can mess about with any metaphors that take your fancy, while realising that they are just metaphors ("mind-formatting") - but that adopting metaphors affects (or "in-forms") the pattern of experience within our awareness.

[1] I personally think we can have a little more influence than that, as illustrated in the diagram and bullet points a little further down. We can... re-format. But if you do this without being stabilised as the background, you can get lost.

[2] The insight she has comes from realising the trick to direct, "allowing" perception is spatial awareness, and that this involves either detaching from or completely becoming the space in which your experience arises.

Zen is practice. Above all is practice. There's no knowledge, it's practice. I love it. There's nowhere to hide, ha!

Yes! Well, how can you escape from what you are made of? :-)

I'd say the English language isn't great on it - there is actually knowledge in Zen but it is direct knowing by being rather than the thinking-about knowledge that comes from conceptualising. Direct truth (you are this, this is how things are) vs conceptual truth (something that feels coherent). In Zen, we put aside the conceptualising and let the mind settle to reveal that, amongst other things, the world is not made of "parts". There is extra stuff though which can subsequently be gleaned from philosophy and experimentation: Zen is based on this world as it is and our ideal state for responding to it. If it is possible to tinker beyond this however you cannot experience yourself doing so because it is out-with the senses / behind your viewport. That's where the magick (literally) happens - that's where intention is.

EDIT: Although I'll say - it's practice as in, stopping interfering regularly. It's not something you get better at, so it's not practice in the sense of a skill. Although you can be more pro-active about resetting your experience if you choose to be of course.

You have to 'be' it. Incarnate it.

Although even that... you already are it. What you are is the "open aware space" which takes on the shape of experience. Doing some quiet sitting or an equivalent allows the transient conceptual noise to settle such that you are left with the longer-term patterns and habits. Gradually, those too settle, and you are left with something more direct. The background becomes clearer as you are no longer filtering experience with attention. And you see how things were all along. You can't get better at being what you are. If you are feeling confident, you can simple assert this to be true and get to the experience immediately. You really do have to step boldly and confidently though! I guess that's where talk of "faith" comes in. It's a fun dilemma!

Do you know Japanese, Chinese or Indian?

Unfortunately not. I've been to Japan and got some language going but these days all I can recall is "Hai" and "Oishii desu"...

POST: So I've been doing the first exercise in Undoing Yourself and got some unexpected results.

Also recommend the (free) Jack Willis book, Reichian Therapy: For Home Use [https://autonomousterrace.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/jack-willis-reichian-therapy-the-technique-for-home-use/]. Willis worked with Hyatt and his book is basically a more efficient and structured version of the Hyatt approach, without all the nonsense (fun though that is to read). I think there was some disagreement between Hyatt and Willis about ownership of the material at one point, circa New Falcon Press early days. But anyway, the book is worth checking out for 'another take' that is a bit less cavalier. It's also much clearer on the caution and staging one should take.

Q1: TrimphantGeorge that link is fantastic. Would you by any chance know of a counterpart for Feldenkrais- or Hanna-style body work?

Glad it's of use! :-)

On the bodywork front, after being through the various kinds, I'm down to recommending How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live by Missy Vineyard, because I think it (almost accidentally) gets to the heart of what it's actually all about - it's not quite the usual Alexander Technique really. When she discusses waiting and allowing movement to happen, she's basically writing the book I will never write. :-)

There are also a few good articles over at [learningmethods.com] (an offshoot of Alexander Technique), particularly one called Confessions of a Do-er. You might also find this post what I wrote interesting [Overwriting Yourself], if you read it bearing in mind that throughout it I am referring to our "perceptual, experiential space" and I've just adjusted the language for the theme of the subreddit. I really believe that overwriting yourself with open, attentive space (or switching perspective to "become the surrounding space" and "allowing"), then not interfering subsequently, is the way forward for The Big Results for a wide audience. Bodywork is really mind-work; the transformation or dissolution of persistent perceptual patterns in the space you perceive around and within you. In short: The trick is to realise that you are basically only ever experiencing your 'mind-space' and your body responds to that; clearing out that space is the secret to improvement.

EDIT: I also really like Andre Bernard's book, Ideokinesis. It's the one that made me think about body and movement in a different way. There, that's all that off my chest.

...

Journal over your week break, like when ever you can and esp when you don't feel like it.

Did you really just suggest he uses ESP when he doesn't feel like journaling? People here are more advanced than I thought! ;-)

POST: People who have prescient dreams: have you ever been able to change what actually ends up happening?

You might be interested in reading Ian Wilson's Theory of Precognitive Dreams [https://web.archive.org/web/20160213215851/http://www.youaredreaming.org/assets/pdf/Theory_Of_Precognitive_Dreams.pdf]. In it, as well as theorising, he has examples of having had lucid precognitive dreams and making changes in the dream that later came true. It seems to me that he edited the moment before it arose. My theory, then:

• Your timeline is already set out. You are simply traversing it, unfolding it into sensory experience moment by moment.
• However, that doesn't mean it can't be changed.
• Any moment we are experiencing, we can interfere with via action. However, present moment actions don't necessarily affect the future very much unless they are accompanied by the intention to do so. Doing this - an action accompanied by an intention towards a result - you should be able to have some effect.
• In a precognitive dream though, you are actually directly experiencing that moment as it will arise in the future. Therefore, you can interact with the moment and change it, while in the dream! This direct interaction with the moment will be far more effective than performing actions in days prior to this moment.

Which suggests an powerful approach for derailing the outcome once you've had the dream, because if you don't happen to be lucid during the precognitive dream, you could still access it later. Settling down and relaxingdeeply, disconnect from the surrounding time, and "ask/summon" (not deliberately generate) the moment in question back into awareness...

All time is available here and now; it is dissolved into the background of the experience you are having as you read this.

POST: How does one eat a servitor/egregore/sigil?

A1: With some fava beans and a nice chianti?

I wonder how many other people had that as their first thought when they saw the title? You should have added "First!"

POST: Trying the quarter experiment from Prometheus Rising with no success. Help!

This is highly dependent on people dropping change (and not bothering to pick it up).

From a "magickal" worldview, the people dropping stuff is part of the intention and takes care of itself (the plausible story for why the coin is there doesn't matter). From a "perception and attention" worldview, all you're doing is programming your attention to be on the lookout and spot what is already there. Thing is, you can't tell the difference between the two.

While living in England I had no luck with this experiment either. Never found a single quarter...

Sure you did...

...it's just that things don't always play out literally with magick on da street.

What is your visualization technique? How are you charging the sigils?

Curious: When you visualise yourself walking down the street, are you seeing you from outside, or are you looking out of your eyes? Do you imagine that you are feeling happy, or do you actually feel the happiness? When you are later walking about, are you deliberately keeping an eye out, checking if it's working, or have you let go and are allowing the world to "come to you"?

Q1: I visualize myself from a third-person point of view. I try to actually feel the happiness to the best of my ability. I also am on the look out. I've been going on walks specifically for this experiment. You know, the whole "buy the ticket, take the ride" thing. I walk through parking lots to get various buildings, but other than that I very rarely walk on paved roads. And for the first part of the experiment RAW instructs to continue to visualize yourself finding quarter as you walk. So, that's what I've been trying to do.

What you did is the natural instinct and you're spot on about generating the feeling. But you will have much better success if you think of it a bit differently: think of it as "programming an experience into the world". Like you were inserting future moments into the timeline of the universe. So, what experience are you wanting? Well, of walking along a path and seeing a coin and feeling excited and picking it up and enjoying the event. This experience will take place in the 1st person, so imagine it in the 1st person as if you were actually having the experience. Another good practice is to summon the feeling of knowing-for-certain that something is going to happen. Doing this, you can let the experience come to you. It's a bit like the Neville Goddard approach of "summoning the feeling of the wish fulfilled" - producing the experience you're going to have internally so that it emerges externally. Focusing on producing the feeling in the 1st person is the important bit.

...

So if a person is raped, it's because they believed it would happen?

He didn't say that, surely you know this? There's a difference between believing something will happen and believing that something is possible (or having beliefs that leave the door open to it happening). OP is supposedly intending to find the quarter. If that intention doesn't work out, then according to the perspective of magick thaat's because didn't truly believe and expect - ie. feel-know - it would happen. Meanwhile, nobody (hopefully) intends to get raped. It is within the range of possible events of course - otherwise it would not happen at all, by definition - but it is not an actively-selected event. In other words, it is not the victim's fault. What the commenter is getting at is that magick is about creating specific facts. So if something you are specifically targeting doesn't work out, it's because you failed to create the fact. It is always the mage's fault (if you go with this). The opposite of the situation in science:

In Science the theories are imperfect, and are constantly being revised. In Magic, however, they are perfect and untouchable.
On the other hand, in Science it is assumed that the operator (ie the Scientist) is perfect whereas in Magic the operator is imperfect and himself in need of improvement.
-- SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic, Ramsay Dukes

Sorry for the mini-rant but the whole "bad things happen because you made them happen" comes up now and again... :-)

His point was more subtle, I think. And if it wasn't, then it should have been - because the underlying idea doesn't say what you are suggesting it does: people are responsible for the bad things that happen to them. I'm sure you wouldn't disagree, though, that people can - within the bounds of their knowledge - take action to minimise the probability of a bad thing happening?

Fine let me rephrase. If you get raped it's because you didn't believe you were rape proof. Believe hard enough and you are completely safe.

Is it your fault if you get shot by a gunman in the street, because you didn't wear a bullet proof vest?

Perhaps there are magickal approaches which can insulate you from particular events. Is it your "fault" if you don't know about them, or if you do don't enact them "just in case"? No. "Fault" implies a direct causality between an action and inaction and a future event. That doesn't apply here. Not wearing a bullet-proof vest does not cause you to get shot; not adopting a particular belief does not cause you to get physically abused.

Btw science does not involve assuming a scientist is perfect, it's cute that you think that.

That's not what the quote is getting at. It's contrasting the two worldviews:

• Science is about refining a theory to match observations which are assumed to be observer-independent. In other words the operator is not, by his disposition, affecting the observation. If the results aren't as expected, it is the theory that is at fault (and needs to be amended). It's in this sense that the operator, the scientist, is "perfect". His internal commitment is not seen as affecting the outcome.
• Magick, in contrast, is all about the operator and the extent to which he has adopted, aligned himself with, a particular theory. If the results aren't as expected, it is the operator's alignment that is at fault (and needs to be amended). His internal commitment does affect the outcome.

If the theories of magic were perfect, they would never change or have different methods.

That's like saying that if the theory of Newtonian mechanics was perfect, every sports player would hit his target, 100% of the time. Now potentially, if a sportsman could align his mind perfectly to the structure of his body, then perhaps he could. Magick is like aligning your mind to a structure, a conceptual framework, you have arbitrarily chosen. You get to "choose your body" and then try and align with it. In other words: The basis of magick is that it doesn't really have a particular causal framework underlying it, but if you are working with a specific framework, then you have to commit to it and abide by its (arbitrary) rules.

You are just arrogant if you believe your way of thinking is perfect, and even more arrogant for assigning your attitude to science when science isn't the system claiming to be perfect.

I think I've cleared up the science thing, right?

And thinking, or a conceptual framework, just is what it is. Perfect relative to what? If it gets results, then it is "right" within its context. It's not a personal thing; you can't be arrogant about such a self-evident principle - i.e. that what works, works, and if something doesn't work, you make a change. The difference between magick and science is, they have a different view about where that change needs to be made.

People doing things to change their odds is not the same as saying that believing you are safe makes you safe.

"Changing your odds" is only a particular type of magick, one using a conceptual framework based on the idea of probabilities. This is quite a recent thing, when people tried to make it more "science-y" and minimise the "miraculous". Other forms of magick don't bind themselves to that sort of structure.

It's not required or even recommended that you assume a person is perfect or that you are not affecting the experiment.

You don't seem to have understood what I said: here, "perfect" is meant in the sense of being a "perfect observer", whose attitudes don't interfere with the results. And physics, for instance, does indeed assume that the attitudes and beliefs of the operator has no effect on the outcome of an experiment. They are "perfect" in the same way we assume that a sphere is a "perfect sphere" and so on - "theoretically ideal".

(Of course, we factor in the possibility of cognitive bias and so on, and are careful with our statistical methods, but that's a different issue. That's not direct influence via imagination, say.)

That's what I mean by you running your ignorant fucking mouth like every other leach who bashes science because they think it's evil skepticism.

I'm not bashing science at all (I used to be in the business). It's a great way to build up observations of the most common stable habits of the world and connect them with concepts, to build theories which let us make reliable predictions and develop technologies. I'm just describing its approach and contrasting it with the approach magick takes. The two things aren't in opposition; there's no competition. Physics, say, deals with "observable regularities", magick deals with the other stuff, both are a subset of human perception and thought (however that works).

Keep defending him. You have proven that you run your mouth about shit you don't understand like every other brain dead privileged piece of shit.

That's not a very nice way to talk. Is that how you usually approach getting your point across? You've basically read into the comment what you wanted to read, so that you could go all emotional on some straw-man argument that nobody was making, revealing your ignorance of science, magick, logic and humanity along the way. A reasonable person, in your position, would PM him and apologise for their behaviour, and admit you were just venting. The alternative is that you really are like the person you are coming across as - which would be horrific if true, so I'm sure it isn't the case, right?

"Physics" doesn't assume anything.

Of course it does. It has some fundamental assumptions - the main ones being "the world is made of parts" and "change occurs via direct interaction between parts" - and then layers of the stuff behind every experiment.

Are you just going to make shit up to defend a guy who has a holocaust pun as a username?

I"m not defending the guy really, although I think your language is well out of order. This started because you trotted out the old "this viewpoint means that rape victims are to blame for their abuse" trope, when it really doesn't. There is definitely a good discussion to be had on the underlying idea of "to what extent does belief influence experience, and in what way", but by jumping to an emotive and extreme position, you make that impossible.

Yes this is who I am. Horrible I know. It's your fault for believing I would say those things.

That's a nice line! But it's more accurate to say: My worldview allows for the possibility of aggressive, sweary redditors to wind me up using straw-men arguments and confused reasoning. ;-)

Anyway, I gotta say that I think the word "belief" is misleading and pretty useless when talking about this stuff. The word "belief" in everyday life is used as if it means "when I think about it I kinda think this is true", whereas in magick it's more like "I feel-know this actually is true". It's a total certainty, a definite expectation, not an opinion or a viewpoint.

Q2: That's an assumption possibly made by physicists and even then it's an over simplification. Physics itself makes no assumptions just like my shoe makes n-

Hi, I don't think this is going anywhere useful, although I think it could have (because you brought up a couple of interesting angles along the way, in among the abuse). I wasn't defending the guy really, it was the position I was defending. I see it's all got very messy while I've been away though! Let's just wrap it up now, yeah? Take it easy.

Q2: Saying you didn't defend him doesn't mak-

I guess it's just my tough gig, always seeing the best in everyone! ;-)

Should we blame people when the placebo effect doesn't... have an effect?

No, we shouldn't. That was my point, remember?

My take on our commenter was that he was being flippant and jokey while you went straight into serious reactive mode with a pretty sweeping statement that misrepresents the idea behind this. Which quickly turned into some big exchange. After all, OP was about finding coins...

Anyway - how do you think it works? The relationship between belief and magick?

I didn't believe my first sigils would work yet I got some bizarre effects. Doesn't seem like that should happen if it was purely belief.

Right, that's why maybe "belief" isn't a great word for this. In this usage, it's actually more like "not getting in the way". It's probably become a bit confused because, if you really believe something then you won't obstruct it, and that is necessary for magick. But it isn't the belief that's causing the magick; it's just that believing means you don't interfere with the process by blocking it. But this is where another confusion comes in - because again, "believing" and "knowing" get mixed up as the name for that sensation. A further twist is that people confuse "believing" with their "intending".

If I had to guess why magic works, I think a trance state brings the person to a place where they can project a pure mental concept for the aether to latch onto or fall into the form of.

Yeah. I think of it as accessing the facts-of-the-world, which are always available if you quieten down, and making changes by intention. When you do that fully, you know that it's a fact. Magick is better described, maybe:

• Intending an outcome = adjusting the "future facts" of the world = "knowing" the event will occur

(This being achieved while being in a state where your attention is deeper and expanded into the background of experience, rather than focussed on the present moment sensory experience.)

I always tried putting myself in the present rather than the past or future...

I've been experimenting thinking about it a particular way, just as a metaphor to work with. (Actually there's two, this and another one based on updating "facts", but they're kinda the same.) See what you think:

Think of your whole timeline, all moments, as already existing. It is always there, sort of dissolved into the background of the experience you're having now. The current experience is just one moment, sort of "unpacked into your senses". If you don't interfere at all, you'll experience one moment after the other, just as it is on the timeline. However, by applying intention you can change the contents of a particular moment. If you make a change to the moment you are experiencing, you call it just "doing stuff". If you make a change to another moment, that's "magick". When you quieten down, you are getting more in touch with the full timeline. All intentions always have an effect on the entire timeline, but the more connected you are to the background timeline in the same way you experience the present, the stronger the effect will be, and the easier change will come. Beliefs which oppose the change, or any attempt to force an update, will get in the way of you intentions re-shaping the timeline contents.

Does that makes sense? The conclusion is then:

• The world is like a memory, a world timeline containing all moments.
• An experience is like accessing a particular moment with the attention and the senses.
• Magick is about updating a particular moment, at which point the whole world timeline falls into line.
• Importantly: Your personal memory can be different from the world timeline, because the world timeline cannot "remember" what it used to be like before it was updated.

Q2: That's an interesting way to see it. Our perceptions seem just as flawed as our memories so it makes sense to kind of rework the time line to adjust things. Your practice sounds similar to how Dr . Manhattan perceives time. The future is in a sense already happening or happened but there are an infinite number of futures for every possible change made here in the present. Change the course of the puck slightly from the other end of the field rather than having to change it's path massively right before it hits the goal. I've been thinking of the future in a new way. I imagine a constantly changing potential future being massively effected by any choice made in the present. If you want to imagine yourself big and strong in the future, take working out seriously in the present. So many of us do the opposite. We lazily do the bare minimum at a job we hare while imagining a better future instead of working hard to make that future more likely.

Interesting comparison with the Dr Manhattan view! And you're right it's similar (all possibilities are available). Hopefully doing this won't affect my skin colour...

I'm taking the approach these days that any metaphor can be used, because there is no genuine underlying solidity to experience, just patterns (albeit stable patterns that let us exist). So apart from "editing moments of a timeline", I also view it as editing more general facts of the world. There's an old Philip K Dick short story called The Electric Ant where - SPOILERS - a guy discovers he has a 'reality tape' inside him which controls his experience. He edits the tape to see what happens. Which is a way of visualising what we are trying to do when using magick: edit the facts of experience.

I imagine a constantly changing potential future being massively effected by any choice made in the present.

Right, like holding onto the end of a stick and making a slight movement, the other end swing widely; time's passage is a multiplier.

So many of us do the opposite.

Yes, I think we fail to fully commit! You can't just do nothing. At the very least, you have to be focused. The focus can be more important than the actual action. (Even in general life, without intention activity doesn't built up to produce results.)

It's possible to generate amazing results which are just incredibly unlikely and without struggle, but you have to create a "reason" for them to happen. It is usually very hard for people to get strong effects if they haven't provided some route for the result to be "explained away". That's where "coincidences" come in.

... the easiest path may involve tragedy.

Good point - I think you can have almost anything happen, but if you don't specify the route you can't tell the impact. Looping back: it can take any route you would accept as plausible. Which is why people add a "no harm" bit to their workings I guess.

Fire is like a time virus that spreads through the physical world.

That's a really nice bit of imagery! It has time as a "thing" - an element and a pattern in its own right, rather than just a dimension - and so other "elements" can affect it. It's amazing how imagery like that is so much more vivid than most concepts or theories. There's something "alive" about seeing the world in those ways. (Which I think makes it quite a powerful thing in magick.)

Q2: I agree. Saying "time is relative" held no meaning for me until I got a visual representation of time and space. I wonder about tempature. If fire is extreme time, does heat and cold affect time? Silly question I know, a cold clock probably moves like a warm one but cold tends to slow down particles while heat speeds them up and allows change to happen more quickly.

Well, it's not so daft when you put it like that. If time is change, and change is identified by comparing one movement to another, then a hot clock really is faster than a slow one. What matters is which one you choose as your "standard time measure". Just like how the standard kilogram measure is defined as the mass of the international prototype [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#International_prototype_kilogram]. It's the relative mass as compared with this that matters in measurement, rather than the absolute mass of this object.

[QUOTE]

Kilogram
The kilogram (also spelled kilogramme) is the base unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI), equal to one thousand grams. It has the unit symbol kg. The word "kilogram" is formed from the combination of the metric prefix kilo- (meaning one thousand) and gram; it is colloquially shortened to "kilo" (plural "kilos").

[END OF QUOTE]

Q2: I didn't know that about the kilogram, that's pretty weird. I guess I never tried sticking a clock in the freezer and leaving another one in the sun or anything but now I am curious. Who knows, I'm sure whoever first thought to try putting an atomic clock in space and keeping one on the ground was a completely nutty idea. If anything mine is less nuts because it doesn't require massive amounts of money and risk of human life. I would need an atomic clock though, or whatever it was.

I think probably an atomic clock wouldn't be changed, because the effect it relies upon is below the level of "particles" - it depends on atoms decaying from one state to another, whereas temperature is (loosely) movement of atoms as a whole. But as a way of illustrating the point, having two mechanical clocks or watches, synchronising them, and putting one in a (dry) freezer and the other somewhere warm - and then the are different times one hour later, is its own type of crazy. If someone from "olden times" saw that, they would think it was magic and that one had lost time or whatever. Like the (probably) urban myth about people rioting when Britain did its calendar switch in the 1700s. I suppose a broader point is that you are your standard measure of things that happen. You experience things by comparing them to yourself (your own sense of time, hot, cold, all that - even moods or emotions). Which is a bit like George Berkeley's idealism where everything appears in your mind and so is relative to it.

Q2: That's an interesting point. The whole idea of personal perception of time is a whole new field of possibility.

Right, we think about time theoretically and discuss it, but we tend to not really ponder it as an experience. I actually think that the 'little theories' we adopt about things, intentionally or not, do directly influence our perception. Which is really a form of magick of course - adopting a new way of thinking about things, and then seeing that it changes your daily life.

Q2: That's like what Jadon Louv said on the Duncan Trussel show. Don't try to change the waterdrops, change the fountainhead. By changing ourselves we change our perceptions, actions, then reality. It starts with a trance, kind of like the word transformation (phonetically) which seems to have the steps to performing the act within the word. Enter a trance, put your thoughts, beliefs, or whatever is "you" into a new formation.

That's a nice observation, on "transformation". Reminds me of this good book with a terrible cover.

Trance-Formations: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis

Q2: I may have to check that out. I love the neuro linguistics stuff.

Right, if you are then that's probably worth your while. The later stuff is pretty compromised, being pseudo-marketing after the originators, Bandler and Grinder, split and Bandler took over the NLP name. The best is the early stuff on Milton Erickson's hypnosis techniques. Check out Patterns Vol I. (They never did make a Patterns II as far as I know.)

Q2: Oh wow, thanks. Love the free ebooks right now since I'm broke.

This one's really good.

Q2: Can't wait. Still need to finish liber null and initiation into hermetics.

Good also. Final recommendation since I've just been rereading it: SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic by Ramsay Dukes. It predates the Chaos Magick stuff, and is basically the foundation that kick-started the late-20th wave of magick.

POST: [deleted by user]

The format of your mind dictates, shapes or is, the format of your experiences. If you just accept "reality" then what you're really doing is accepting the current state of your mind. Is the current state of your mind particularly special, holy, is it the ultimate state to be left as it is? Surely not. It's accidental. You didn't consciously choose it; you bumbled into it most likely. The two ways to reformat your mind are (kinda the same thing):

• Indirect - Perform actions which result in experiences which leave traces in your mind, leading got more of the same form of experiences (events, actions and thoughts).
• Direct - Use your imagination to leave traces in your mind, leading to more of the same form of experiences (events, actions and thoughts).

So to a minor extent, you are always using magick anyway, because that's how mind-world works. Your choice isn't whether to use it or not, your choice is whether to do so knowingly. Beliefs, meanwhile, are just ingrained patterns or channels in mind. They are not an "illusion" they are just not independently true of the present format of mind.

POST: OK I'm a Cliche, but how to find "it", that "proof" of the occult whether physical, mental, spiritual!

You know, I'm still actually not sure what you're after here?

...Well, it doesn't work like that. This isn't physics - where you look for observed regularities and construct a theory. It's the mind, observed by the mind, as formed by the mind. Any viewpoint that you commit to will start to shape your experience into that form, passively. It'll just happen. If you don't commit to any one outlook, that won't happen. You'll get glimmers of "alignment" wherever you seek. If you start thinking of the world in a certain way and fully absorb that, you'll start to experience the world in that way. And it will be impossible to say whether that is how the world "really, really works" because: a) you have no access to an external, causal reality, meaning: b) there is effectively no such thing. Your "world" is the regularities of your experience. Your experience is made from mind. The format of your mind therefore in-forms your experiences. Looking for proof is like looking for your eyes. There is no external to your experience.

TL;DR: You will be wandering aimlessly until you commit to a particular worldview - i.e. adopt a particular mind format - kinda by definition.

POST: Help with Visualization

I think...

For most magick, it doesn't necessarily matter that you literally 'see' something; visualisation is more about summoning the 'experience' = the feeling of it. Maybe you're just not that visual; it won't necessarily inhibit your success.

• Visualisation =/= literally seeing

Conceptualising with feeling will work, so long as it's the conceptualisation of something being present, now. If you do want to see things though, try switching from trying to make the image happen, to asking and receiving. Just as you 'receive' the image of the room around you, 'receive' the pink elephant. It's also worth noting where you are letting your attention sit - where you are 'looking out from'. Being too far back or forward in your head space can mean you tend to think-about or force more than you should. (See here [http://www.reptilianagenda.com/brain/br121804d.shtml].) That'll help you go into 'receiving mode'.

That link is really interesting being that I have poor eyesight for things far away (I think it's called myopia) and I also have double vision (although I can sorta control it). I think I'm pretty much mostly in my head so I'll work on changing that. Thanks for the advice!

Great. It does work - you'll find you kinda feel yourself "expand out" into the world again, like a perspective change. You might resist it a little at first though (sometimes there's a reason you went 'into your head' in the first place) but then it's okay. Good luck!

POST: Stuart Hameroff explains his position on consciousness.

My best-attempt transcript:

But let's talk about Freud's drives, id, dreams, all that stuff. I think all that's embedded in memory and manifests as quantum information.
In fact I think dreams are quantum information - and I've written a paper about that. You know, dreams: time is all screwed up, there's really no flow of time. You have multiple coexisting possibilities; the logic is backwards. There's all kinds of bizarre things in dreams, which match very much quantum information.
So I think the subconscious in the Freudian sense is quantum information that hasn't reached collapse. If it reaches collapse you have a conscious moment. So there's all this stuff going on at the quantum level in the brain that may not reach consciousness but is still actually influencing our actions in ways that we don't appreciate or are very subtle.

It's actually pretty hard to extract a transcript that keeps the sense of meaning and tone while skipping out the "blurs" and mis-vocalisations, but I think that captures it. I think you pretty much nailed the meaning in your little edit?

I appreciate this thread of conversation, but I'm not sure why it's necessary to delve into this one statement so deeply.

Actually, I just transcribed that as an exercise in a bored moment. The point about traces informing the direction of experience is key though, archetypes on olden-speak, and joins dream-like and waking-type experience. Occult partitioners needn't rely on repeatable science, but I think that metaphysics can be fundamentally useful + personal investigation (such as this [https://batgap.com/rupert-spira-2nd-interview/], for a good recent example). Anything that can help built the 3rd-person to 1st-person bridge is a good development, I think.

EDIT: I'll add that it seems obvious to me that the brain/mind (3rd person/1st person view) does not compute. It is entirely memory-based. Experiences arise, traces are left, patterns are activated, deepening those patterns, in-forming the shape of subsequent experiences, and so on. Furthermore, I don't believe consciousness "arises" from anything. Patterns of experience or "self" awareness (awareness-of) may take the form of folds and ripples, say, but awareness itself is fundamental.

POST: Does reading other people's theory matter when working on chaos magick?

No, unless you have absorbed and believed them. Your assumptions will limit the routes by which your results can occur. Use anything you like for inspiration, but they don't "matter" in a more general sense.

Art is theft.

While thieving is an art. Oh, conundrum!

POST: Why should I give a damn?

Q1: Why are you interested in occult topics?

Q2: Simply put I wish to create my own utopia. I want a world unto myself where I can live in omnipitence and freedom. I dont want to be absorbed into a collective Hive mind where I am merely a cog in the machine. Im interested in iccult because it seems to be the best way to achieve my ends.

Sounds more like a job for lucid dreaming universes [http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-control/46571-infinite-universes-lucid-dreaming.html].

But I don't think you are a cog in a machine, part of a hive mind. That's not where this ends up. Where it goes is: You realise you're not really a person, you are just experiencing through a particular perspective. Your thoughts and body sensations aren't yours, you are beyond that. Basically, a confusion gets cleared up. You don't kill the ego, you just realise that it amounts to a bunch of thoughts and nothing much else. You're still "you", but now you know what "you" really is. You don't get absorbed and dissolved; you just "get it". It' like you've been looking at a photograph of someone, mistaking the image for yourself. Suddenly you realise that it's just a picture, and that you're not that person after all! The photograph doesn't dissolve or burn, it's still there whenever you want it.

TL;DR: You don't have a choice. You already are this "higher self" or whatever you want to call it. Just like watching a film about WW2 tank commanders doesn't mean you stop being some bloke in a movie theatre, no matter how absorbed and lost in the story you become.

Q2: Im ok with being A god but not so much being God. If all I am is a part of one beings clockwork then id rather not exist. As for infinite power last I checked I couldnt shoot lightning from my fingers.

OP wants to become a cancer in God's infinite body.

Q2: Nay i wish to be entirely seprate from god. I do not seek to fight it or killit i seek to exist outside of it.

That's gonna be tricky, if it turns out to be you or inside you. God is not a "thing".

Q2: Lets break this down simply. I have a one complete and total purpose in life. To be free and independent. God is an obstacle to that goal. I seek a way to overcome that obstacle. If I cannot then my purpose is meaningless therefore I am meaningless. My only true goal is freedom and lndependence. Having nothing control me except me and I will attempt to do this by any means. If this means becoming a cancer then i will become a cancer. If it means I have to kill god then thats what I will do. I would rather.not exist than be a mere part of something else. I have no interest in my "true self" for I am my ego. The Ego is me. If the Ego dies so do I.

To be free and independent.

Of what? To do what?

Your "Ego" is just a bunch of thoughts which appear from time to time. You are no more "the Ego" than you are the memory of last night's dinner. So no need to worry about that. This whole "God" thing is nothing to worry about either - assuming you don't really believe in a "Sky Fairy" that can wield some sort of influence over you, or some other entity that's sort-of-like-a-person but more powerful than everyone else.

Having nothing control me except me and I will attempt to do this by any means.

Sounds good. So, the "Ego" and "God" aren't a problem. Which means that, provided you're happy operating within the confines of the character traits you've arbitrarily (but transparently) inherited by birth, upbringing, culture, the larger environment and the human experience - you're all set!

Q2: its not a matter of I wish to rule this world. That isnt my wish at all. I want nothing to do with God I find him to be an asshole from what I have read. I want my own place. A place where I have omnipotence not to rule people but to be blissfully independent.

The problem is, you can't get away from "him", because it's not the Biblical God (as an "entity") you have to deal with. What you're stuck with, is realising you can never be independent because you are a fragment of the world: you are from it and made of it. To ask to be independent from it is like saying you want to be independent form oxygen and food and sunlight. It's what you're made from. In fact, it's worse than being a fragment of the world - eventually you realise that the world is sort of "inside you". Wanting to be independent of it is like wanting to scoop out your own lungs so you don't have to put up with that annoying "inhalation" sound anymore. Overall, you might find that it's better to examine your breathing technique instead.

...

Once you've projected swinehood onto someone, your furious attempts to get them to appreciate your oh so pretty pearls of wisdom are both vain and self debasing.

Saved!

POST: Ask r/occult: What are your powers/ gifts/ talents when it comes to the occult. What is your area of expertise?

Q1: I have none, does that make me weak? Doubtless the spiritual lightning bolts you can probably shoot from your hands would overwhelm me.

Q2: No it makes you realistic. You don't have to summon "demons" to be an occultist; you just have to slowly but surely be finding your own code of honor and living by it, hard as that might be.

Okay, but getting stuff done, or direct understanding, is surely the driver?

Q3: I am 5 years into advanced spirituality and one of the most important lessons which has been given to me is not to brag in public about my gifts. I certainly thought this was a universal understanding after the trials and tribulations one faces through the narrow road to freedom and liberation. If you can talk about it with no backlash; cool.

The law of silence. There is an issue with "conceptual momentum", where being in the company of people who actively doubt you seems to have an effect (but perhaps simply by seeding doubt within yourself).

Q4: I think it also has a lot to do with Irony.

Want to expand on that?

Q4: Not really. :)

Oh the irony. ;-)

...

...only to come back with an answer that transcends what I understand about the subject.

That's completely how it seems to work. Pose the question, set the goal, let the mind (and world) get on with it on your behalf - the answer comes back to you when it's ready. The more you try and force a route by which the solution appears - say, by making the answer come to you step by step via logical thinking, or demanding that it has to be a voice in your head rather than a rare TV show repeat you come across while channel-surfing - the longer the timeframe or more limited the return.

POST: Stories of Sexual Conquest via Magick

A1: I've used a glamour before. It works very well, and doesn't require conscious will. How long it lasts seems arbitrary though. I had one last a day, and then I've had the current one on for. . . I don't even remember. Point is, even if the spell doesn't work, it doesn't backfire. Total confidence booster.
Edit: To be clear, I didn't use this to get laid. I just used it to talk to girls when I was younger, because I was impossibly shy, and it was a massive confidence boost. Now, it's just kind a fun to work with this kind of magick.

Q1: Never heard of this can you elaborate/share more info?

A1: Never heard of a glamour? It's a spell to change, or hide your appearance. It's one of the oldest techniques out there, and "Galmour" is one of the oldest words for it. It's where we get the word Glamor, and Glamorous, in modern English. There are a few videos on youtube about them, and I'm sure you can find articles about it. Basically anything calling itself a "beauty spell," is probably a glamour. It makes you appear more attractive to people.

Hmm. Are you summoning the 'feeling of being attractive' and radiating it out, expanding yourself out - or is it something else more specific (as in, actually projecting an image). Does it require maintenance?

Not that I need it of course! ;-)

Actually, I think I've probably unwittingly harnessed something like this my whole life. Being deliberately present and expanding to become the background space/structure of the room in all directions.

A1: Sort of imagine it as. . . You know the feeling you get when you're wearing a really nice set of clothes? You get that feeling, and the confidence that goes with it, but more than that, you sort of generate this aura that makes you appear like someone who would be fun, and awesome to hang out with. You generate the subconscious signals that you might not normally put off.

Nice phrasing. "Summon the feeling", maybe? Something that's used in other approaches for other things.

A2: Cast to have sex with a specific girl. We had sex twice. Then she moved to another state and decided to adopt a male gender identity. Cast for a specific girl to fall in love with me. She did. Hard. I felt bad and cast for her to be free to make up her own mind. The next day she texted me and apologized saying she just met someone she thought she was going to marry and that we were only going to be friends. There are a few others, but those are the most noteworthy.

I love that: AesirAnatman, the love he has is so strong it turns girls into men!

Seduction is a game. Magick is violating free will so I would consider it like cheating, having an unfair advantage.

Is it violating free will? Is there not implied consent?

If someone cast a love spell on you and you hooked up with that person and then later you realized that you hate that person does that make your consent implied?

It was a question rather than an assertion. Basically, can you make me attracted to someone when I'm really not and never would be? If it works is it not by my implicit agreement by "me" or "my subconscious"? Can you really make me do something against my will?

I would say yes to that

I guess the core of my thinking is in that word: "receptive". If it's "receptive" as in being open to the suggestions that are being made (not having a problem with it) then it isn't a violation. It might be against your "will" but not against your "True Will". If it's "receptive" as in being vulnerable, then it's a problem. Practically speaking I suppose it's easy to dodge all this and include an "only if it is appropriate for the target" type clause in your spell. Because it's never going to turn out well otherwise anyway.

Well I worded it the way I did because I do know how to wipe memory and that opens up all kinds of horrible possibilities. I only tried it as proof of concept. The better I got at hypnosis the more it scared me how powerful it is.

Ah, got you. Well, I suppose it reveals how "imaginary" our worlds are. There maybe isn't a solid underlying behind anyone's experience, it's really all hypnosis and self-hypnosis. Autohypnosis was the first "magickal" thing I experimented with. It's only fairly recently that it occurred to me that it (along with dreams) is really fundamental rather than just a curiosity or a means to an end.

I believe magick to be mostly hypnosis.

Agreed. Or "whatever magick is and whatever hypnosis is have the same root", perhaps. My current little model - (indulge me! it's coffee-and-typing time on a Friday afternoon! other views appreciated!) - is that experiences leave traces, and traces inform subsequent experiences. Traces are "archetypes" or "enfolded forms" which structure the "unfolded objects" of our ongoing experience. Hypnosis and magick are the means by which we can change the "enfolded forms" directly. Our subsequent unfolded experience will then be aligned to the change.

You might call it "inserting new facts" into your world. We all have the power to do this, to ourselves and others, but most of us spend our time pissing around, looking at and trying to interact with the transparent mirages of passing unfolded objects, and never actually intend change at the level of traces/habits/beliefs. In fact, it's not a "power". Just making a decision that something is true, while getting out the way and not resisting the update, is enough. A hypnotic trace is simply a state of "not resisting the update". As is gnosis. As is faith. Amazing things can be done. But the further you want to deviate from the 'habits of the world', the more you have to let go of it - which, counterintuitively, means putting less and less effort into getting the result. Also, retaining a memory of what's happened can be a challenge - "narrative coherence" is Rule No. 1.

who or what demans narrative coherence

I think that - the story should be consistent - and persistence of the environment are the two structural foundations of perception. We basically build up habits, and focus on things that correspond to those habits. Anything else makes us feel uncomfortable - or maybe more, the mind strives to slot our experiences into those familiar channels. Probably by dissolving some of the habitual structure, or at least preparing the way for a discontinuity, it could be made easier. Or something like that! :-)

Q2: the story should be consistent
Says who? :)

Says "habits of mind"!

It needn't be, other than that. Although a bit of Reich sounds appealing.

Q2: It's more the bodily-emotional system that is easy to condition. The mind often entertains possibilities, but the somato-affective apparatus has great inertia.

I've quite liked Alexander Lowen's take on his stuff, and the Jack Willis book was interesting, but I've really not done much with it. I've been more "direct overwriting" as an approach.

...

Q3: Thanks but it's too late for me. I'm 23, never had sex (or even a kiss) and I'm extremely paranoid, partly because of people like that.
I know it's not fair, but I don't trust women after the shit I have seen some do and the kind of stuff many of them say even in front of their kids. It sickens me and really put me off of the whole relationship thing. I don't just mean magic, a woman who was still married bragging about how she "caught her man" by getting him drunk and using him to get pregnant. If it was a guy, it would be called rape but because it's a woman he must have wanted it (even passed out) and it's for his own good because men need women. Thinking about it pisses me off. Knowing that people think I'm crazy for feeling that way pisses me off even more.

Man, there are lots of people in the world, and they're all different. There's good folks too. Good folks who will like you and who you will like. A good relationship is a wonderful thing. Other people are what life's about, it turns out [1] - the rest is just a pretty backdrop. Ignore all that crap stuff, it's just news and filler, nothing to do with you.

[1] This is another way of saying, life is about consciousness, really.

...the whole ducking point here that you pricks have been teaching me is that empathy is bad and morals are bad...

Is that really true? I thought a lot of this stuff (although not this particular post maybe) is about empathy and connection and all that stuff. In fact, it the comments in this post say anything, it's that manipulation never works for happiness, there are good people, and we should find our moral compass and stick to it. (Or we'll be made to, eventually, by circumstances - in my opinion.)

Q3: Yes we all like morals, but then defend the lady bragging about making a man who left her a slave for 20 years. Again, nobody will try to touch that fact. Nobody has tried to explain how what I did is worse than that. I'm done. You people made it very clear that morals will just get me in trouble here.

Hmm, I see where you're coming from - but it's a fact that everyone makes mistakes. And it's also a fact that it's really not clear quite what's happening in these cases. No excuses, of course: the intention is what matters I'd say. Remind me what you did again?

There are no "you people"; there's just a lot of individual people (well, "we are all one" of course, but you know what I mean). So don't look at all of /r/occult the same way - more importantly, don't treat the world that way. High horses are pretty nasty things to fall from.

Q3: What I did was get mad at a woman bragging that she made a mental slave. Then she ends bby complaining that after 20 years he is now only blindly obeying half the things she says. Then another freak asked her for advice on doing the same. I know not all users are that, but a lot are. They proved that yesterday when I was hounded for saying what I said.

Ah, got ya. Things started getting lots in the comment-storm. I guess the trick is, to just skip over those ones.

...

It's just so funny when a person has an emotional re[s]ponse.

Someone get a Voight-Kampff test on this guy. Just don't ask him about his mother.

Joking aside - why so fighty? Pretty much everyone here is up for a pretty relaxed discussion, even when our opinions are totally opposite. It's about exploring ideas, rather than winning arguments or persuading others. No problem with someone thinking that something they've done in the past is morally dubious, for instance, but it needn't be so personal. Most people already know that they've "done bad" and have learned from it. Most people are just trying to find their way. Everyone goes through a control-the-world phase. Gets bitten by it. Then tries being-the-world, hopefully. Which is nicer.

Hardy har har

Yeah, sorry, you used that phrase so I couldn't resist! :-)

...

What's amusing is: you wrote your post as a bit of a troll for a laugh - but actually some of the replies are some of the most thoughtful there've been here in a while. Except for your replies. ;-)

POST: Realization about dream and reality.

I was never on fire to begin with. Guess your superpowers must not be working. Try flying yet?

The flying is easy...

In a dream certianly. He claimed it works the same in the physical reality, I just want to see that work.

...then, it's the landing that's going to be "impressive".

Ah just got that. Funny. Reminds me of that line "it ain't the fall that kills ya, it's the sudden stop on the way down

Ah, just remembered where it's from originally, for me anyway: this [http://www.extremelysmart.com/humor/howtofly.php].

POST: Something with the third eye

[POST]

So, last week I was talking to a friend and he started to talk about magick and stuff. After a few minutes of conversation he started to talk about his girlfriend. He told me that in her whole house there's many empty bottles, and that the sister of her girlfriend who's 13, washes her naked dolls everyday, like a ritual. Then, he told me that the child also see dead people, like ghosts and talk to them, help them. According him she can see the destiny and the aurea of people too and the whole family practices magick. My fear is that the girlfriend who's very depressed and a bit maniac causes anything againts him in any point of their relationship. For now her intentions are good but the future's uncertain. Anyway, does anybody knows why there's bottles, or why the child washes her naked dolls or even if all of this make sense.

[END OF POST]

Q1: Witches bottles?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_bottle]
edit
OK, so that doesn't cover why there are so MANY of them in the open and empty. But bottle based spells of a similar kind could be part of the family's practice. I have a friend who imprisoned a nasty spirit in a bottle and threw it into the sea.

[QUOTE]

Witch bottle:
Witch bottles are countermagical devices used as protection against witchcraft and conjure. They are described in historical sources in England and the United States. The first mention of a witch bottle appears in the 17th century. One of the earliest descriptions of a witch bottle in Suffolk, England, appears in 1681 in Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus, or Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions:

[END OF QUOTE]

I'd never heard of that - fascinating.

POST: Something with the third eye

You maybe used to leave your centre of attention too close to your eyes? (How is you vision generally, by the way?) Touching your nose/forehead is encouraging you to change 'where you are looking out of' - not your focus or target of attention, but rather 'where you sit' inside yourself. This came up in another thread, but you might find it interesting: the idea of "seeing from the core" [http://www.reptilianagenda.com/brain/br121804d.shtml]. Basically, you don't see with your eyes; you see with your mind. You actually don't want to be focussed on the sensations of the eye area in general life, and definitely not when meditating or trying "other stuff".

POST: what's the most profound statement or inference you heard from someone who has no occult experience?

A1: The wisest thing that anyone can say is, "I don't know."

S'good. Basically, "if you make every act be magickal act towards your desire, your desire will surely manifest".

...

...it's almost like we form an expectation in our minds of how it's supposed to happen, or what we need to achieve it, and that sometimes this expectation is a hindrance.

The hidden structure of our minds - belief/expectation - restricts the apparent routes things can seem to take to get to us. No sudden materialisations or discontinuities! Breaking yourself down into clear openness is probably the way to get things more directly (vs the traditional route of trying to forget it so your structure doesn't get a chance to influence things).

POST: Is there any ideology/religion that you find "wrong"?

Religious organisations tend to want complete control over their followers (christianity too), but that's a matter of the nature of people, and the power that privileged positions and promoting certain 'interpretations' gives, and capitalising on the fear of the times, which then gets perpetuated. Religions themselves, the original teachings, that's a different thing.

Q: original teachings
Are a hard thing to 'prove' to people :|

Yes. You have to 'prove' it to yourself, by experimentation.

POST: Why do you believe the way you do and how do you know you're right? Seeking truth....

All content is 'illusory', in the sense that all objects are mind-based, shaped from a background enfolded structure, corresponding to habitual forms which feed back on themselves, unfolding as "things". The more you go seeking in the world of objects - patterns in experience - the more detail you will discover, the more levels of granularity you will uncover. For as long as you attach yourself to the objects, you are bound to them I'd say. Identify with the background awareness, then you are free? Step back in to the space in which experiential content arises - and so recognise your experience is like a "mental dream-space".

No content (the structure, objects of experience) can ever by truth. No belief (the enfolded forms which lead to the spatial and temporal structuring of content) can ever be truth either.

POST: Magic Room(From Prometheus raising)+Questions

[...] what is it you don't get?

Q: the way to astral project and create the room and the computer

In this example, you're not meant to actually astral project, necessarily. Doing the thought experiment is enough. Just imagine yourself leaving your body and finding yourself in a room - and do the exercise in your mind.

To play this game you simply “astrally project” into the Magic Room. Do not ask what “astral projection” means, and do not assume it is metaphysical. Just assume this is a gedankenexperiment, a “mind-game.” Project yourself, in imagination, into this Magic Room and visualize vividly the Omniscient Computer, using the details you need to make such a super-information-processor real to your fantasy.

In truth, you don't even need to do any of this. You can just directly do the magick here - getting information, adjusting yourself, adjusting reality - by "wishing" or "deciding". More here [missing]. The rest of the imagery is just to provide you with a technique that is fun and accessible. Sometimes it helps if people feel themselves "doing something". As you can see with the Douglas Harding version above, that's all theatre and window-dressing; the details don't actually matter! :-)

(For actually astrally projecting though, see link I posted later. EDIT: this [https://www.oniros.fr/A1417.pdf].)

Q: AND I HAVE BEEN SUFFERING AND BUILDING AN ASTRAL TEMPLE ALL THIS TIME
GOSH
though I tried asking it question of my fourth grade teacher and it didn't answer

Hey, just trying to be helpful eh.

POST: Even if necromancers could talk to the dead for divination, why would they think that the dead would know the future?

They may not in fact be talking to the dead, but rather their idea of the dead - their anticipation and belief in future-knowing is sufficient to extract the information from the universe.

POST: What are some good techniques to remember one's dreams or dream more vividly?

Before you go to sleep, just really, really make the decision to remember them - "I will remember my dreams / I always remember my dreams" - and know it to be true. Most other techniques are in fact a variation of this: they are 'magickal' acts that you've decided will help, that say you are serious.

POST: Nous the cause of existence?

Nous is not a thing, but can take on the shape of things. Like an infinite blanket, which folds itself and therefore creates contours relative to itself. The contours/folds "exist", these are your objects. Nous itself does not "exist" in this sense. It's tempting got try to imagine Nous as a 'space', but even this is wrong, because Nous has no structure whatsoever. Space is a structured 3-dimensional object with implied boundaries and locations. Nous has no properties whatsoever. Nous is not, and does not, but becomes, and is.

POST: Do you find yourself "siding" with Chronos or Fotamecus? Neither? Both?

On backlash, it's not personally inevitable:

Even though we killed 45 minutes at a rest stop afterwards, when we re-entered the freeway we met right up with the other car even though they had never stopped. We thought the magick had worked very well until we received the backlash later that day.
For time compressed, an equal amount of time was expanded. The balance was kept. Travelling at sixty miles an hour, a fifteen mile stretch of desert highway took nearly an hour to cross. If we had already reached our destination, the expansion would have been fine, but Fotamecus was only able to hold off the backlash from the initial compression for so long.
After several similar events we mulled over various ideas to correct the problem of backlash and hit upon the idea of viral servitors--- the key to a process of mutation that would allow Fotamecus to eventually grow beyond our control. We worked several rituals in which we altered the sigil to make it possible for Fotamecus to make copies of itself. These copies wired themselves into a network that made them incredibly effective at preventing unwanted side effects. If one of them needed to compress time and another to expand it they would pass it off to each other through the viral network, maintaining balance and reducing the possibility of backlash.
-- from Don't Blame Me, Blame My Servitor

If Chronos just needs to be satisfied and balanced overall, then there is plenty of flexibility on offer. Potentially, taking the larger picture on board - targeted offsets - we can save all the time we want, provided we don't mind the planet Neptune's rotational velocity gradually slowing to a complete halt, say. What matter the integrity of the solar system, if it helps me get to work on time? :-) Meanwhile, if you work it right, it can be fine personally too: Compress that workday into an hour, expand that evening into a day. Time is balanced, but we get more of what we want.

Q1: Absolutely. If you don't give Fotamecus some direction, he'll do things as he sees fit. That often means you end up paying, but there's no reason you can't shuffle the bill around a bit instead.

This is generally true of magick, I guess. If you aren't specific, the easiest route is taken, the path that breaks the minimum number of "rules". If you are, then you can push things a bit further.

POST: The Idea that Materialism and Occultism are Mutually Exclusive Is Bullshit.

Results separate True Occultism from mere Philosophy.

Quite so.

Q1: You seem like a snake, because You are still very attached to Duality. I can sense you, but you're being cool at the moment, so I'll give you a 'pass.' Just don't act like a dipshit (like the Others) after the Consciousness Shift, and you too will flourish in the New World.
000, 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, 999, 00011000.

Thanks for the 'pass'. I shall keep it safe. See you "after", then.

POST: Stupid question: practical magick?

Check out Phil Hine's Oven Ready Chaos and Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners. They get straight to it: the magickal act is what you intend it to be, the rest is just so much theatre (potentially). Also, find a daily relaxation/letting-go exercise that works for you. Even just lying on the floor for 10 minutes twice a day and "giving up to gravity" can reset you and help keep you 'grounded'. The most effective power is... you.

POST: Is it dangerous?

Watch for obsession, as another poster suggests. Also, keep in mind a purpose, and make that purpose definite and real-world based. Getting lost in infinite reading and fantasising and ritualising won't help your life. However, finding out about how the world works and using it - for self-improvement and understanding, and enhancement of circumstances - is all to the good. Just make sure to live your everyday life; keep grounded. With OCD/anxiety, it can be tempting to reduce your focus to a distraction (which is really all OCD is) to avoid whatever-it-is-that-you-are-avoiding. Some kind of mediation may help.

POST: Myth buster: who here personally has gone temporarily insane from magick?

I just feel like the dangers are massively overstated. My consciousness, for good or ill, is extremely tenacious.

The danger is one of focus and perspective. You can end up locked into a worldview at the expense of daily practicality. Hence needing to stay grounded. Magick works with normal life, in face normal life works by magick. There's nothing "special" going on, it's just the practising magick brings about more extreme versions of what's already happening - and that can be very disorientating if you let it consume you.

POST: I have a question about a very popular type of "magic".

Q1: I know a very powerful witch that told me once the key to working love spells successfully is to love yourself. He said you should indulge in your beauty and masturbate like crazy. You don't want to WANT love. You want to BE loved.

Yeah, classic approach: Summon the feeling of the situation that you want to have, as the key thing.

POST: Anyone else feel like this when first beginning?

RAW got me started: Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising. You can really overthink this though: it, of course, is actually super, super simple. The more you think about it, the more you will obscure it. You "are the dream, are consciousness" right now - you are just obscuring it by looking and thinking. There is no theory to this, it is not made of concepts and cannot be understood in that sense. It can be talked about, but really it is something you experience. Do a daily practice like this:

• 10 minutes, twice a day.
• Lie down on the floor, feet flat with knees bent, head supported by books, arms by your side or hands resting on abdomen.
• Decide to give up completely to gravity: to "play dead".
• Let go of your body and mind, let them move as will. Allow them to unwind.
• Don't even "pay attention"; just let it be open and wide. If it focuses on some thought or pain briefly, let that happen, and let it open out again.
• After 10 minutes, decide to get up, but don't do anything about it. Wait until your body moves by itself. (Thus won't happen first time, but eventually it will happen.)

Basically, you are letting the "stuck thoughts" and "uncompleted movements" you have amassed unwind and dissolve themselves. You do not need to do anything for this to occur. Gradually, your perception will become clearer and clearer. Note: Any effort to focus or do anything will get in the way. There is a method of accelerating this by "overwriting yourself", but it's nicer this way.

...

Q1: I feel like the objective truth is Inifity itself (the All-That-Is, God, etc). But, if this is the case, then it become a giant paradox due to spawning paradoxes all over the place. Infinity would say that nothing is true and that everything is true (or CHAOS and ORDER coexisting at 100% for both of them), but in our limited ability to understand the duality of this, we see that the two currently cannot exist at the same time, but they have to. We just don't know how, but we can make some damn good guesses, yet they will never really be 100%, because they will always be a part of the whole and not the whole itself. Hopefully you understand what I am trying to say :)

Perhaps chaos is enfolded into order, or vice versa?

Q1: How many you's ARE there?
As I understand it, it can be an infinite amount. Depends on how far down the rabbit hole I want to take it.
How can an ego dissolve itself?
Not quite sure, but I feel it comes about from not having a need to protect the Self or a need to identify and separate the Self from the Whole. It dissolves from knowing that it is Infinity, but it is hard if not impossible to do when you are seeing all this from your individual conscious perspective. How can you describe infinity in its wholeness when you can only work from within it, never all of it unless you become all of it, and never from outside of it because there is nothing outside of it.
Some of the most basic thoughts are the 'craziest'...
And also some of the most True.

My thoughts:

The ego is just a mental thought that you (that is, consciousness) are having. You are infinite - you can "feel out" into space forever, right now, you will find - but you do have a perspective. There is no way to conceptualise this or intersubjectivity. You basically have to give up trying to work that out. The best way is to think of yourself as being All That Is, on a "time-share" basis. In moments when it is your turn, you are the whole thing. Or for convenience, just treat this as a dream, where you are the dream. The bunch of body sensations in the middle you have tended to think of as "you", but they are within the larger consciousness (the actual you, the dream and the dreamer and the dreaming, same thing), you just got in the habit of misidentifying with that part of the dream experience. You are an infinite self-aware blanket, which forms itself into the shapes of experiences, thereby experiencing itself. The blanket truth! [https://youtu.be/XfIiRKLMjDY]

Dunno what you've been reading, but I found certain things keep my sense of reality "loose". Read Rupert Spira and Greg Goode on non-duality. Read Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman. Check out idealism, and lucid dreaming (Robert Waggoner's book is great). Shake up your direct experience! :-)

Magick is just committed intention, and it always works in some way or other (even if it just results in a dream of your desire). If you can get into the mindset of expanding your a Will and Presence into the whole dream, you will find that helps.

POST: how i think sigals work

A desire, almost by definition, is something you're holding on to. Nobody ever held onto a fulfilled desire. Magick (sigils, whatever) is a method of letting go of desire, releasing it psychologically, so that rather than being within you, it appears in the external world. Which is also you. It's a simple change of location, really.

POST: What is magick?

New fun definition for today: A desire, almost by definition, is something you're holding on to. Nobody ever held onto a fulfilled desire. Magick (sigils, whatever) is a method of letting go of desire, releasing it psychologically, so that rather than being within you, it appears in the external world. Which is also you. It's a simple change of location, really.

Everything works by magick. Intention => result. It's just that some results seem more linked - spatially or temporally - than others. The more distant the link, the more amazed we are (also, the more unlikely we are to intend such a result). The trick is, though, that experience is structured according to the concepts you have accepted. This applies to both the more advanced esoteric efforts, and to the everyday movements of your body and mind. Once you've tried some more exotic "requests" and had them answered, it'll mangle your notion of your sphere of influence, and perhaps what "you" are.

Q: Once you've tried some more exotic "requests" and had them answered, it'll mangle your notion of your sphere of influence, and perhaps what "you" are.
This is interesting. When you mean exotic "requests" you mean something slightly past that threshold of believably right?

Right. Something that pushes the temporal, spatial limits.

POST: Any Artists experienced in Sigil Magik?

Q1: There's an easy way to do it yourself. Just write out what you want the sigil to do, remove all vowels and letters that repeat, rework the remaining letters into a pattern that looks good enough, then charge it. Since you're doing it for a band, I'd suggest finding a musical or vocal way to charge it.

Q2: That is actually a really cool Idea!

Or - write out the purpose of the sigil. Remove all letters that don't correspond to those associated with musical notes. Maybe designate capital letters as 'sharps', lower case as unmodified. Then rearrange into a melody, or use as the basis of a chord progression - to create a sigilised song. Work that represents your work!

Very meta! :-)

POST: help name suggestion for a new music label that will attract goodgood fortune

Hmm. How about something like: 'Just My Luck!' Records.

And here is your logo:

• It's a vinyl record because you're a music label.
• It's slightly amended to be shaped like the outline of a fortune cookie, because you want to attract good fortune.
• It's purple because that's one of the lucky colors for the Year of the Horse, which is what 2014 is.
• And, of course, the record player needle is formed into a 'J', the initial of the label name - but also a 'smile'.
• The label name appears underneath in the style of a fortune cookie slip. (Alternate, cleaner version without the outlining here.)
• The font used throughout is PT Sans, which falls under the open user licence for commercial and non-commercial use.

Basically a sigil and a logo and name and good fortune, all wrapped into one handy package. ;-)

Yours to do with as you please.

POST: I have an honest question for people who practice occult things.

Most "Spells" are handed down by to person to person and books etc. What is stopping anyone from creating new spells or occultic practices that are unique to that person or that persons circle of friends?

Look up chaos magick or Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners. People invent new approaches all the time, if they're into that sort of thing. They might not easily be called "spells" though. That's a bit 'Harry Potter' / cheesy websites [https://www.spellsofmagic.com/spells.html].

Q1: [http://www.spellsofmagic.com/spells/love_spells/commitment_spells/14662/page.html]
I call naivety! Look at this piece of.... Gold I found

Call naivety at me? (As in, you do realise I included that link as a joke, yeah?)

I didn't mean at you (I just woke up!). I mean at the website!!

Aha, just checking! :-)

There are some classics! Thing is, a couple of them almost correspond to genuine spells in older literature. (One of the 'invisibility' ones is the classic 'quiet yourself down' approach to be less conspicuous, so someone is doing a bit of reading sometimes.) Most, however, are - um - not!

Gonna do me some teleporting/time travelling, definitely - - -

...

But... but... it tells me how to time travel! Come on! I want me some 'flying ointment' too.

Actually in comparison to the first-mentioned website, it's not that bad.

POST: I just had a strong experience while meditating gazing into a mirror.

Q1: Any advice on what the hell happened?
This is a common question. People have experiences and they're trying to fit them into a conventional framework of some kind, so they ask peers to help categorize the experiences. If you understand why it's good to have some things stay outside convention, then the need for this will be reduced.

But, y'know, it's fun! ;-)

POST: How do you attain Buddha nature with a roof tile?

Simply sitting in meditation "exclusively" does not change anything, and by doing so you are not "polishing your character" to make it clear, you are simply being-as-you-are, unchangingly without investigation or examination. The tile remains the same old tile after Nangaku's efforts; Baso remains the same old Baso after his unexamined sitting.

POST: How reliable are the spells listed on this website?

That is a "fun" website really. Having said that, you can potentially use anything, with the backing of proper intention, to get what you want, so it could be used for inspiration to spice things up once you know more about what you are doing. Some people use "spells", others less so. Depends on your taste. Pretty much, you should invent your own approach in the end, once you've become accustomed to the ideas. For 'traditional' stuff, read Aleister Crowley. For chaos magick, a more relaxed approach, try Phil Hine's Oven Ready Chaos. For an even more free-form approach (anything goes, any act is magickal with intention) but which covers most areas, I recommend Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners. (Follow links or Google in each case, pretty much everything is out there somewhere or is reviewed and discussed by someone.)

Then you might decide you love ritual and potion, or something more direct, or come up with your own crazy mix. There is much fun to be had.

P.S. If you ever manage to create yourself a time travel watch using that website, I want one!

POST: I'm asleep all the time

Where about 'in your body' do you experience yourself to be 'looking out from' - if at all?

Yes, I see things "from my body".

So, you might imagine/feel that "you" look out from a location just behind your eyes, or in your chest even. Where it is can change how the world seems, so maybe play with that: centre your attention in your abdomen, or your forehead, and see if that makes a difference? Being on the centre line can make things clearer, vision and perception wise - see here [http://www.reptilianagenda.com/brain/br121804d.shtml] for instance.

POST: It's been fun but I've failed

Don't give up; I know where you're at.

There are lots of types of "magick", some of which may not fall obviously under that banner. For pain, for instance, try John Sarno's The Divided Mind (just reading the book helps some people) and Les Fehmi's Dissolving Pain (awareness-based techniques, opening out and relaxing).

For depression though, keep busy! Stop thinking. Completely. Life can't be worked out, it's not something that can be "solved", and depression doubly-not. Wash the dishes, clean the bathroom, make tasty meals for yourself, make yourself socialise no matter what. Decide to get on with life no matter how you're feeling (easier said than done, but you can't solve the depression and then live, it works the other way around). Physical pain often comes hand-in-hand with depression; the ongoing "compression" feeling can be the problem itself. Do a daily relaxation exercise (lie on the floor, head supported, and "give up completely" for 10 minutes) to let yourself settle out at least once a day. Main thing is to be good and compassionate to yourself, and forgiving! I was always super-harsh on myself when I wasn't "happening", and that was the worst thing to do.

Good luck! :-)

(Meanwhile, Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners helped get me back into it in a post-chaos way, if you are looking to rekindle your interest more generally. Anything done with intention is magick.)

POST: A request for help with Astral Projection

As has been mentioned elsewhere, the trick is to ignore the sensations and continue to focus on what you want to achieve. In the hypnogogia approach (which seems to be what you are trying to do?), let the sensations alone and continue to attend to letting the fragments and images form, and then crossing over (better description here). You'll get all sorts of wobbles and vibrations and perhaps noises; leave them be. You are not trying to enhance that sensation, it's just a byproduct for what you are doing.

POST: Hi Occult. Who Am I and What Can I Do?

Q1: If an Object existed long enough to have all it's parts replaced, is it the same Object?
Didn't this happen to some axe in a museum somewhere? I think it may have been Abraham Lincoln's.
EDIT: Nevermind, apparently this is a hypothetical axe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Enlightenment_era]. Nevertheless, good question.

[QUOTE]

Ship of Theseus
The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, usually one after the other.

[END OF QUOTE]

Yes, you are basically "shiny and new" on a surprisingly regular basis, even your brain. Good article here. Your body is a pattern, not a thing.

...

*Q2: Hey like I said on a previous answer, professionals arent serious all the time. They fuck about more than regular folks. Ask any firefighter or military member. If you think doing something at a high level that you must be serious and "on" all the time, and start to think to that so many things are beneath you, that is the surest way to go insane, whatever field you take.
And if you havent caught on to the analogy, I am retired. I would like to enjoy wasting my time as much as possible.
And no it is not cleared up because it wasnt muddy to begin with. I wasnt asking clarification with what you were trying to do, I was calling out your lack of manners. Which I take special offense to because I was very generous with my answers to you.
Maybe I should try out whether Im a liar or not by fucking your shit up from all the way over here. Or you could just apologize for being rude. Up to you, Duke.

Hey, he was having a little joke - about himself really. As in, his idea of an enlightenment person would be some beyond such physical-world trivialities as reddit posting, so now he's (pretend) "disappointed" because it's not true, because you've posted on reddit!

Q2: Lol come on, I understand humor. Im a humorous fucking guy. But...
"better at language"
"more humble"
"reddit shitposting"
thats not humor, those are verbal jabs. especially after Ive tried to answer every question and comment he had respectfully, thats really asking for it.
good on you for trying to peacekeep though.

Aw well, it was worth a go. :-)

Q2: Nigga kept using "fount of consciousness", and he thinks Im bad at communication? Loool I can just smell the crease on his fedora. Fucking loser. IF YOU SEE THIS YOU LITTLE FAGGOT ILL BE WAITING ON THAT APOLOGY FOR 24 HOURS. AFTER THAT THE CONSEQUENCES BELONG TO YOU.
Anyways, you seem like a good dude. Whats your story?

Nowt wrong with a fedora. Unless you're Shia Lebeouf. Me? Enlightened, re-integrated Ruler Of All That Is. Y'know, usual everyday stuff. Dream-weaver, etc.

Q2: :) What do you mean by Ruler of All That Is?

Where do you think you are right now?

Q2: Do you ask that in the physical sense? The philosophical sense? Or the you know youre on reddit so nothing is serious sense?

Excellent response. The answer to all three, of course, is: in my mind. (You're lucky I keep it so nice and tidy and have maintained the air conditioning. Sorry about screwing up the world peace thing though.)

Q2: Ah ok.

More seriously, how does your experience compare with this, as in:

Awakening => Liberation => Enlightenment

As a stages model of development.

Q2: Like comparing going to fat camp vs being a pro athlete.

Nice. I say, jump straight to delete.

POST: Anyone else practice magick rather loosely?

I think the most important thing is that you feel a "fit" with your approach, or you won't commit yourself properly to the intention. At root, the acts don't necessarily matter in themselves. Check out Alan Chapman's Advanced Magick for Beginners for the most open version of this (basically, an act is what you decided it to mean; the rest of it is theatre).

Generally, the more you invest in something, the more results will take that form and the more your experience will adjust to match up with it. Getting yourself to invest can be the real trick - to "get out of your own way" - and that's where a lot of the extra bits and bobs appear. Also, philosophically speaking there are and have been lots of ways to "view the world"; it makes sense that peoples magickal viewpoint emerges from that. But what was 'obvious' even 100 years ago is less so now. This stuff has to be reinterpreted and reinvented regularly, to retain its meaning and utility.

POST: Serious inquiry. The occult has always been a big part of my life, but lately I've been experiencing quite a bit of negative happenings. Could I have done something wrong?

Were you... drinking, at the time of the accidents? Forget the occult, just start focusing on putting things back together. Depression is a spiral: events will arise consistent with that "vibe".

Learn some powering up is good though, as other poster suggested. Try lying down and visualising "golden energy" engulfing and liberating you, etc. Let go to it, abandon yourself to the image completely.

Also, decide to give up analytical thinking: do it today.

POST: Personal Perception of the Human Condition

Interesting. The purpose of life is... living!

Some questions:

• Is "Me" under my control?
• Is "Me" something I am, or something I am aware of or 'perceiving through', like a viewport onto the world?
• What is consciousness vs God? Are you a "fold in God's awareness" or are you a separate thing with it's own consciousness?

Q: Interesting how you're talking about Gnosis. I generally agree with you, except on one point: God is not the whole of humanity. It is tempting to think so, but in reality, we are all separate entities sharing the same world, or realm. There are different aspects of the realm that only a minority of humanity can reach or tap into, and it is up to the individual to discover that. God may exist, but humanity's conception of him is an egregore, used to shape and control the various societies and cultures. It exists in effect, but not in actuality. We are not one, as much as we love to think. In order to come to terms with oneself (which is basically the point of Gnosis), one has to see in fullness what he or she is, and what separates him or her from everyone else. This is critical.

Hmm. "God" exists as an egregore, but God is the name given to the ground of all existence, surely?

POST: Are Psychics real?

Real... what?

POST: Best Beginner Book?

I'd say Alan Chapman's book, which has been mentioned elsewhere, and Phil Hine. Also SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic, by Ramsay Dukes, the precursor to Chaos Magick but much more philosophically structured than most books. (Revised edition circa 2000.)

Q1: I don't think there is a "best book" for an absolute beginner. It depends where each individual is coming from, everyone has a scope of experience/perspective that they are going to fit information about the occult into. Say for example, you happen to study psychology best book to start with would be Jung's Red Book as it delves into the magickal mindset in a way that will speak to your knowledge base. English major? Try Poulet's Phenomenology of Reading for a primer on subject/object unification theory.
Best couple of books to start with might be: Modern Magick, Tao Te Ching, Chicken Qabalah, Upanisads (specifically Chandogya, Brhadaranyaka), Meditations on the Tarot by Anonymous, Garden of Pomegranates, Liber Psychonaut.
The thing is that there is no best book to begin with. You have to read a lot of books before you start to even get an idea of what this whole magick thing is about.
I suggest instead of worrying about a best book to start with you should start thinking about a list of books.

Totally agree with no best book, but it's definitely easier to start by reading something modern and perhaps not too steeped in ritual or wordplay.

Q1: Agreed. It's hard to tell what reading level people are coming from. With these "I'm a noob" posts I wish people would include. 1.) What got you interested in magick/occult and what would you like to get out of it. 2.) What are your preconceived notions about it. 3.) Do you prefer structure or flying by the seat of your pants. That would be helpful.

It's half the problem: They don't even know that stuff yet! It's just, hey I'd like to get into magick, whatever it is, then see what I can do, and see what styles there are. I guess that these days the wealth of material available is actually confusing. When it used to be there was just "whatever book was in the library, or your friend had" then there was no choice and so it was ironically easier to get started. I just say "the Chapman book" these days, because it touches on everything and is written in modern sarcastic language, then they can jump off and see what they like afterwards.

Q1: I'm a bit embarrassed to say I've never read Chapman but I guess I should.
I think you are right about an over-whelming amount of material. It doesn't help that half of it is tripe! It can be daunting to think, okay there is all this material, but everyone disagrees on it, who do I listen to? Everyone should get a good primer on sourcing and rhetoric in my opinion. Teaching people how to find reliable sources is way more important than finding a first book per se. I also think that instead of pointing out "theory" or "how to" manuals it's also important to direct them to biographies and letters. The history of people is important! I think we tend to forget that there are people behind those books, with their own flaws and motivations. I mean it's important to know about all the splits in factions and why. For example, people frequently ask about AA lineage and want to know what the "right" one is but they don't want to do the digging to find out why Achad was disowned, why Kenneth Grant's order was disparaged.
Instead of a best book to start with page I'd like to see suggestions for mindsets to incorporate. Like question sources and find primary documents, laugh at yourself, play games with your mind, break yourself once in a while, as you read keep a running dialogue in your brain about what you disagree/agree with and why, embarrass yourself, do a random act of kindness, do a random act of meanness, have enthusiasm, doubt yourself regularly.

And the disparity between people's theories and their actual lives. Someone once told me that, when in a particular job or whatever, you should look around and "see if you'd want to be any of those people". That applies to much of this.

Mindsets: That's a very good suggestion. And, slightly related, an awareness of the metaphysics behind (a) magick.

POST: How do you think magic works?

Random screed. Magick works...

By intention, limited only by the structure and habits caused by previous intentions. Magick is simply a self-conscious version of what's happening all the time anyway.

Focus on a 1st person perspective here: The experience you are having right now. Left to its own devices, your world will unfold and flow in the same direction, unless interrupted and redirected. (By 'your world', I include your thoughts and your bodily actions and the larger environment; none of these are "you", they are all 'effects' and 'results'.) Intention is the way we do that redirection. The acts you perform don't matter, the intention behind them is what causes change.

Every act always has an intention. For instance, when you grab a cup of coffee the intention associated with that act could be "to grab a cup of coffee". However, it can equally be "to win the lottery". The actual act is irrelevant. If we view magick as "the means by which we summon a desired experience", then intention is the 'seeding' of that desired experience, which then ripples out. Intention is 'setting a target' for your world, and your world then unfolds towards it.

There is no underlying "solid" reality beyond the dream-like experience of the senses, therefore any experience is possible. However, because your world has developed certain 'habits' and a certain 'stability', this generally happens according to "explainable routes". In other words, there is rarely a sudden discontinuity in your experience. (If there is, then your memories would fall into line with it anyway.)

You can work on yourself and your beliefs, to make results appear sooner and more 'miraculously'.

Q1: I believe that reality is constantly self-generating itself at the will of consciousness (I), so if we are able to alter our consciousness, then we are able to alter our reality. I feel that this is supported by the double-slit experiment, and in fact you could say it's the foundation of my personal theory, though I didn't consider the DSE when creating it.
Simple, I know, but it allows "magic" to be extremely accessible and armed with a LOT of potential. It basically labels reality as illusory, and when you see it this way you can do anything you want with it.
EDIT: Other posts have inspired me to go further...so existence is like a pyramid, right? As our consciousness ascends into higher places, we encounter concepts and archetypes that grow more and more distant from physical reality. These archetypes are within us humans, since we are both animal and divine, but our animal minds cannot fathom these archetypes and their scope; attempting to do so would render us mentally blinded. So we make these archetypes more easily accessible by humanizing them and associating them with things in the macrocosm; after all, it is all part of the same source, right?
When we do this, we create a path upon which our intentions and desires can travel to the top of the pyramid, like the path that a seed takes as it grows into a fruit-bearing plant. All we have to do then is pick the fruit when it is ready, or wait for it to drop into our hand. ;)
All of this takes place from within, because we have the whole universe inside us.

I believe that reality is constantly self-generating itself at the will of consciousness (I), so if we are able to alter our consciousness, then we are able to alter our reality.

How does this accommodate the different intentions of multiple magicians?

Q1: Could you elaborate a bit?

So, I agree with what you say. My own picture is that everything resides within consciousness, all possibilities are contained within it. What we do with intention is that we "seed" a new experience, enfolded into consciousness, which then unfolds, ripples out, until it is manifested as an experience we have. (Whether that is the "experience of owning and driving a Ferrari" or "the experience of meeting that nice girl" or "the experience of doing well in my exam.)

However, how do we account for "other people" here? Are they separate from us? And surely different people are intending for different, conflicting things? How is that resolved?

Q1: I think I see what you're saying...and it's actually a good observation to make.
I'm honestly having a really hard time answering this. There's a definite philosophical element to this...sort of like merging the gap between objectivity and subjectivity. We need to take this one step at a time...and I hope I explain my reasoning clearly.
The most difficult part of answering this seems to be the paradox that we are individual souls, even though we come from the same source. At the core, we may have different ideas of satisfaction, different images of the perfect fruit, but it all starts with the same principle: a seed. It is a universal principle.
So it's sort of like planting seeds in a garden. The soil nourishes all seeds just the same, even though in the end, the fruit that each seed bears will be very different from each other. What you're asking is like asking how the soil accommodates the growth of all plants.
When we see it like this, we reach a sort of understanding, a logical dead end, if you will, and we could technically use this analogy as an answer...but it can go further.
The real question here is not answered by asking "how," but by asking "why?" Why are we able to manifest our own intentions, even if they may be different from others'? Why are we able to live out our own subjective experiences when we derive from the same source?
You've opened up a philosophical Pandora's box, my friend...
EDIT: Object agreement

My suggestion is: "Maybe it is all taken into account, all the time."

When we 'seed' an intention, it applies to all time and space. The whole of reality is reformed with that taken into account, and everything else taken into account. So it doesn't matter if you ask for a limited edition Ferrari, and slightly later I do too. The narrative of the universe will accommodate this. If when I did it, there was one Ferrari, when you do it, there will be - and will always have been - two.

There is no timeline of history and events that we move along, fixed or otherwise. Intention is fact insertion at the root, essentially, and the universe/mind always tends towards a coherent narrative. (See the bottom of my post here [Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams], for an example in dreams.)

Something additional to contemplate: The reason we don't often experience discontinuities - say, when I 'magick' a taxi to be waiting round the corner, it doesn't seem to just materialise, the driver always has a story about how he came to be there - is because everything is reworked this way. If the taxi did materialise this second, our minds/memories would return a 'story' to explain it when we went looking for such a memory/explanation. (This happens a lot in hypnosis: Tell someone that John will now vanish in mid air, and they'll say he "must have left the room, out the door, when I was distracted".)

Meanwhile, we might imagine ourselves to be experiencing the world from different perspectives on a sort of "timeshare" rather than spatially and at the same time. We each get a mini-turn at being the whole universe. (This isn't exactly true: it can't be either spatial or temporal, but it provides an alternative way to conceptualise it.)

POST: At this point, wtf is the point?

7 principles, 42 laws? Sounds a bit much to me! I mean, surely it's just: relax/delete and intend/decide and get out of the way? Belief, or actually lack of unbelief, being key.

However, until you get materialisation sorted, you're going to go hungry. Do you have that sorted yet?

Q: And some, what really gets me, as i said before, is we aren't just moving away from the stress and just making the zone. That's what i want to discuss, what can we do so that it's based and no one feels like they are carrying anything and at the same time we can make shit happen for the other shit to experience, unless you just want to forget the rest of it and just see a small degree - there's so much more.

Hmm. I always thought the fun of this was using magick in amongst the muggles - to be super-cheesy. Making the maximum out of living in the city or wherever, making things happen. It we were all in a 'Special Delimited Zone' it would be a bit boring.

For instance, lucid dreams are a lot of fun. Everyone tends to begin by harnessing it and taking control. After a while, though, you usually stop doing that, and explore... tweaking things occasionally to make them more to your liking, but not radically redefining the reality.

POST: Do you guys ever get stumped when you are trying to decide just "what" to do your magick for?

Yep, sounds like depression. So - - -

Maybe just don't bother about wanting stuff; that might be the wrong approach. Instead, concern yourself with what needs done, and use magick to help you with that?

The approach: Ask yourself, "what needs doing now?". And then go and do it, no matter how you feel. After that task is complete, ask yourself again. Maybe the task will be "go wash the dishes", doesn't matter. You're being constructive.

As you go along, you might encounter things where magick will help: You need to get some paint of a particular colour, so you "do a magickal act" to make that available, etc. You don't always have to be working towards some "big goal"; being busy is enough. In fact, there are arguments against having goals [https://zenhabits.net/no-goal/].

Christopher Walken said once that he never planned his career, he just did what came up, and that he wished he could live his life by cue cards. Why not do that, using the method above? Who knows what may turn up!

Q: Why don't you do magic FOR Motivation? I often start with that when I just don't seem to get myself to do anything for months

He can't be arsed.

POST: Astral Travel clarification please...

Yes, it's a muddle. I think you can help select the "correct" version by choosing a method that's not too ambiguous. For instance, trying to OBE from a dream or during the night can lead to a dream-like experience, using visualisation you might just enter an image fragment which then expands into a dream.

If you do something more direct, like the "rope technique", then you remain conscious throughout and are actively choosing to "leave your body and stay here" rather than "explore the worlds within", so to speak?

The 'sparkles' technique from this [https://www.oniros.fr/A1417.pdf] is quite reliable, but leaves doubt as to whether you're just seeding a new world to experience. (It's a good read anyway though.)

Rope Technique

Forget visualisation, as in "picturing"; the rope technique is all about generating the feeling of the rope. You lie down, and feel your hands take hold of a rope that's dangling from above, end up at your chest level. Then you feel yourself pulling up on that rope, hand-over-hand, pulling yourself out of your body. You do this from the perspective of it actually happening, right now. It sounds like you might have fallen into the common trap of thinking-about or visualising-about (3rd person perspective or 'elsehwere') rather than trying to generate a direct experience (1st person perspective and 'here, now').

Does that make sense?

Buhlman's pretty enjoyable. You should read Oliver Fox and Robert Monroe too, if you haven't. Fox is good because he was an early pioneer, and his early diary-form is very much from the perspective of a personal experience.

POST: Help a soon-to-be Beginner?

Perhaps you need to realise that Christianity itself is a magickal tradition. Much of the New Thought movement of the early 20th Century was based around an interpretation of the Bible as a reality/magickal manual (e.g. Neville Goddard). This subreddit [https://old.reddit.com/r/ChristianOccultism/] might be of use. You can't push through things with willpower, rather you need to embrace them and include them within yourself, let them become part of your momentum. The reason you are so passionate about this is probably exactly because of this need to embrace and overcome your guilt.

...You just need to push through. It's just conflict/resistance. Don't take it too seriously. Any step forward into a new world or a different way of doing things has this associated with it.

On your other question, the meaning of the word "sin" is to "miss the mark" - it's not "evil", it just means to not be at your best. And those passages do not mean quite what you think. Each essentially says: there are behaviours which get in the way of getting in touch with your true path and nature (that is what "God" is), and because they obscure your deeper intuition (distracting your attention) you will not pick up on the directions and actions you should be following. There is the notion of "True Will" which is essentially Your Nature and what you should really be doing. The warnings against mediums and manipulations is that they can turn you away from looking within, to your deeper knowledge. "God" is your inner self, your true self, and the "Son" is that which arises in the world from this. That is why so much of magick is focused on inner exploration and clearing out perception. There's nothing wrong with doing magick, therefore, but you might find that as time goes on you do more 'inner magick' and find that your life flows better and you don't feel the urge to try to directly influence the world around you. 'Passive magick' where you are open and synchronicities arise to help you along, and what happens to you is what you "really, really want", arising spontaneously from within you.

TL;DR: If you feel drawn to this, then pursue that. This 'inner momentum' is what you should be trusting. The scriptures are not saying what you think they are saying. Go for it.

...Hey, that's great. The thing you did there, you'll find useful for dissolving all sorts of barriers. The world is now yours!

...Yep. So long as you are honest about how you feel before you push through it (faking yourself doesn't work). When you know what to do, sometimes you've just got to get a hold of yourself and the world, and make it move along! :-)

"Yeah, but..."

It depends a bit on belief and intention. If you believe that "what goes around, comes around" then wrapped in the intention associated with your magickal act will be the idea that you should get hit by it. You will be effectively "wishing for that". You get what you think you deserve!

There's that way of looking at it, and also the notion that "all of this is you", so by intending harm on an aspect of the world, you're basically directing harm towards yourself. Magick can be viewed as the skill of generating desired experiences. If that is so, then you should really only work on generating positive experiences for yourself. Blockages, barriers - whether situations or people - should be allowed to fade or dissolve, or be turned into benefits, not be destroyed.

...I wouldn't get too hung up on that. It's the intention behind the ritual that matters most, with filtering by your background beliefs / expectations of how things work. The world happily gives you what you want, good or bad, it doesn't care. You don't need to watch your individual thoughts so much as take care with the "posture" you adopt. That should be expansive and positive. And you should always question why your are trying to summon something. Note, there are other ways to approach stuff besides formal ritual. See Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman, SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic by Ramsay Dukes, or Oven-Ready Chaos by Phil Hine for example. Every intentional act is an act of magick: If you drink your cup of coffee while saying "every sip of this coffee means my day will be luckier", then that is magick. Of course, most people drink their cup of coffee while intending... to drink their coffee. Is there something specific you are trying to achieve?

...No don't worry. Recognise those thoughts and just let them pass, returning to what you are actually focusing on. Just keep coming back to your purpose. Stray thoughts, like anything, are only a problem if you divert your energy to them and let them carry you away. This is no different to, say, if you are studying and you let the thought of going to watch TV instead carry you away!