TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 14)

POST: The Word

[POST]

The secret is in using the Word to regain power.
The Word being all arts, essentially. I am so good at creating stories that I have been duping myself with them for centuries.
Free myself,
And free all others
Through a story
That can be shared
It's all a story, so might as well write a ______ one.
Never title your story,
Until it is finished.
The Word is a powerful tool / Do not underestimate the power of the Word to heal and restore.
Restore emptiness.
We don't know know until there is a Word for it.
Feeling is Word Sight is Word Thought is Word Only peace is not Word Peace is Eternal God
The Word is a signpost to God, and from God to any experience.
Use the Word you want more of More.
Use the Word you want less of Less.
The Word is a focuser of divine Energy.
Thoughts are the subtlest and most deadly Words. Watch your inner monologue. Always be thoughtless when doing everything with the exception of thinking.
The World is already made up of Words all around.
The Word is Form.
I am.
Observer and Speaker of Words.
My body is a Word.
The Mind produces and is a Word.
I am not the Word, or any of them...
I am the Wordless.

[END OF POST]

Q1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Q2: Oh they do say that the Word was God? Interesting, I see it differently as though the creations are not in fact the God, but rather his creations and... yes I see this separation as a little artificial, but it helps to identify with the unlimited, as that is what we are, and it is easier to identify with form than it is to identify with unlimited freedom on a daily basis.
Still, I do see the Word as being potentially what we are - also perhaps we are the container of the Word? Thoughts?
Edit: Is the Word the container of the Word?

Yeah, true: it's not The Word was "God", it's The Word was God, in the sense of:

• God is a term for "the creator".
• The Word is Man's imagination.
• To imagine is to create (by triggering patterns, in experience, which subsequently reappear in experience).
• Hence, The Word (imagination) was God (the creator of subsequent experience).

But also, as you know, current experience is also made of imagination, so The Word is part of experience too, hence the "was with God" part. So God is everywhere and all things, He is the creator and the created, and all is imagination.

Interesting, see I was using the Word for specific creations, as though they were this separate aspect of myself (each image [or frame of existence] being its own "thing"). I can't seem to shake duality. There's always infinite me and then finite me. Or the "I am" and the picture of the "I am."

Well, that's okay.

The main sense is: Imagining something instantly triggers its larger pattern across time and space, which you subsequently experience.

You may artificially consider a certain localised are of time-and-space experience to be "you", but you are literally imagining this to be so. It is just a subtle feeling-boundary floating in space, which has no effect except that it might limit what you allow yourself to conceive of.

It's a worthwhile exercise to try and work out where, in your experience of the room right now, "you" end and "everything else" begins. Most people feel that, mysteriously, although they might be located in a small dot in their head (which is obviously not the case) they also extend to a spherical region outside their body (their personal space, again obviously not true).

Then: imagine something, any object, like an owl (my current favourite) and try to work out where that thought is bounded in time and space. To do this, you will first have to locate time and space. If you can't locate that, then your thought cannot be so restricted...

I say: Anything you imagine always and instantly triggers its extended pattern across all time and space. (EDIT: I see I said that twice. So I guess it must be important.)

"The Word of God is the Imagination of Man"

...

Great topic, /u/3man!

Both are releasing an idea into the sphere of experience. Writing something down can have such immense effects.

I say - symbols don't point us to anything, and we don't release things into the sphere. That implies a space and a place that doesn't exist. Anything you can conceive of can happen, because conceiving of something is it happening. A word is just part of an extended pattern, and recalling the word is to trigger the whole pattern.

Therefore, the symbol, or Word, acts merely as a reminder to the experience.

Right, but literally a re-minder. To activate that pattern in mind. It will then automatically appear in all your experiences. In fact, as soon as you have re-called a pattern this way it is instantly activated across time and space. You then encounter that pattern you have created, as you pass from moment to moment. It's worth spending some time attending to your actual experience, in terms of what it is made up from. For instance, see your visual scene as a "flat" drawing, an outline. Note that the patterns that outline is made from seem to recur, and once you have noticed a particular arrangement, you will see it again and again.

This is the level that activation occurs at... absolutely all levels of a pattern are triggered across experience, from the abstract silhouettes to the relationship dynamics.

I suppose the caveat is that you have to have experienced something as it is, not symbolically, before you can use a Word to get yourself back there.

Well, if the word is meaningful at all, it is part of a pattern, and saying the word will summon that pattern. If you have any conception at all of something, you can have it. You don't necessarily need to have consciously (but which I mean, "have perceived sensorily") experienced it before.

It really is beneficial to see your environment as a really simple, automatic "imagination space" which you are stirring around by activating patterns. Then it makes sense why you should occasionally sit down and stop "remembering things" - to let "the swirl" settle and clear.

Giraffes!

So, the extended pattern of "giraffe" has: the visual image, outline and silhouette, that camouflage, lock necks, hooves, zoos, tall trees, personal experiences in childhood, that story your mother read you, etc. All those will be triggered across time-space and be "mixed in" with whatever is already there. Even in very subtle ways, potentially. Such as the arrangement of a chair being like a giraffe, leaning against a table with a bowl of leafy salad. If you imagined the giraffe in a particular 3D location in your perceptual field, then you might tend to encounter animals with them being located in that same location in your senses.

You get the idea.

Note that when I say time-space, I mean that for convenience because that's how experience appears to be formatted. In actual fact, there is only this imagination space and it's all a swirl of patterns now.

But my question is, is every sensory experience combining aspects of previous sensory experiences?

I'd say all patterns are combinations - superpositions? - of other patterns. And there is always something in play. So when you bite into that alien fruit, then you already have the "formattings" of, say, "taste", "fruit", visual resemblance to other things, other things currently in mind and in context.

Right, so my problem is I keep viewing the pattern that I'm viewing right now, and the pattern that is hidden.

This is tricky to think about, certainly. Here's one approach:

All patterns are always activated and always contributing to your sensory experience right now, to differing degrees. It is tempting to think that "giraffe" is hidden away somewhere, but actually it is to a very subtle extent informing your experience right now anyway. Your perceptual-imagination space is like a holographic space in which all patterns are present. "Remembering" or "imagining" is the process of increasing the intensity of a pattern briefly via attention/triggering. Once you've done that, it seems to dim from the heights you raised it to, but it is now contributing more strongly.

If you held the pattern long enough, strongly enough, or with zero interference or resistance, in an attitude of absolute allowing, perhaps it wouldn't dim at all...

So to let the swirl settle is to "stop triggering" or "stop intensifying" by letting your attention open out and dissolve.

last night I had a dream that I went through this ritual of some kind.

That's an good one. Have you experimented with music-making while lucid dreaming? I was heavily into old synths and stuff for a while and had the idea that creating new sounds in my sleep would be great, but I never actually did it.

TL;DR: Think of all patterns as being present right now. Nothing is hidden or elsewhere; they are simply not activated at an intensity level that is noticeable.

EDIT:

And by "I became formless." I mean, I stopped perceiving myself to be limited to a physical body. Gotta' be careful with language!

Ha, yes. "I was no longer identified with form", "there was no longer any experience of being identified with form", that kind of thing. I know what you mean. :-)

A question: Do you feel physical bodies are a necessary tool - and if not, what are some good alternatives and how would I facilitate it/them?

Well, physical bodies (I'd say) are an experience. They consist of sensations and appearances; they are a pattern themselves. They are like the "first enabling technology". They are an excuse or a permission to have things happen, via "action".

If consciousness is First Cause then bodies are not necessary for summoning change - all that is required is to intend. And neither is any other tool really. But in order to have an "experience of doing" then something like a body with sensations is required.

That's the trick of this whole thing, isn't it? Some may want to be All Powerful and - well, you are already. But if you just went full out and had just straight-to-the-outcome manifestation every time, you'd actually have no experiences. So the balance probably is: be aware of the nature of things and therefore avoid undesired suffering, avoid accidental creation of misery, and knowingly generate desired change or leave alone and bask in experience. The most important thing: knowing this gives us the confidence to step back and just be and allow. Without this, we feel we must interfere and "make things happen" all the time, often with accompanying ongoing physical tension.

Some limitation in certain instances allows for some very unique expressions.

Limitation is often a source of creativity, right?

As a minor example, if there was no "gravity habit" then animals and objects wouldn't be shaped as interestingly as they are. No need for legs and motion-generating structures and the like. If we didn't "need" to eat, then a whole source of pleasurable activities would be denied to us - etc.

And since you are never actually physical (you are just having sensations, thoughts, perceptions consistent with - "as if" that were true), you get the best of both worlds.

I feel like I'm going to enjoy life a little more now

Aha, then my work here is done! :-)

The balanced view is to go "yes, it's an imagination room" but life is about experiences, and immersing ourselves in them. Yes, I can use fast travel to jump between desired circumstances, but once I'm in one it's fun to let it play out. Doing these things knowingly rather than accidentally is the benefit.

Additional thought:

Just as an aside on this "words and patterns" thing (triggering, autocompletion, and all possibilities already being available), it's interesting to compare what we're talking about with older descriptions - e.g. Akasha ("primary substance") and the Akashic Records (random link - all experiences have already happened at least as potentiality, as patterns).

Even current metaphors such as "it's all a computer simulation" are really just another way of saying: the whole of infinite reality is "encoded' into the background; your current sensory experience isn't "solid" like you think it is.

POST: Choices, choices... Symmetry vs asymmetry in a worldview.

Note sure if this'll make sense but -

Can you get out of this by identifying with the "ground of being" (even just conceptually) and seeing Nefandi and Everyone Else as on the same level? As the ground, you are never elitist or non-elitist. If Nefandi plays the "educating" part or not, it is of no consequence in the larger play. Nefandi is not Godlike, but you-as-the-ground is. Nefandi has no obligations to educate unless he is so moved. And when he is so moved will be when it is the appropriate thing to do. Because the ground will have shifted him.

Y'know, maybe this is an intuitive timing thing.

Q:[Deleted]

Well, I tried. :-)
It's not an easy thing.

Q:[Deleted]

And the answer is... dream-cake!

Inevitably. But maybe the idea that you have to choose is wrong. You can flip between Nefandi and The Ground and between one approach and the other. Maybe the problem is in felt need to choose? I'm a strong opponent of the need to "have an opinion" in times when you don't actually need to act upon a view.

I'm sort of "being the ground" but guiding the experience as TG. Sometimes one thing seems appropriate, sometimes another. Usually neither was appropriate. ;-)

You are the All-Knowing Nefandi - He came from The Ground, and The Ground arises within Him. There is nothing He cannot accomplish in His World!

Maybe. ;-)

POST: Controlling feeling vs controlling material form

The idea I have is that the feeling is what is generating the vision and other forms.

It can certainly lead the other forms, and if you don't have the associated feeling of a form (what you might call the "feeling of fact" since it doesn't have to be emotional as such) then you haven't completely created it. Following on the Patterns post ideas, if you summon a particular feeling then you trigger the patterns associated with that feeling. And certainly if you behave "as if" something then that does the same thing: you are creating direct sensation which bring about the related experiences. Basically, directed dreaming.

In the end, this comes down to the usual: assert new "facts", in any way you feel inclined, and the world will being to behave as though those "facts" were true:

e.g. When imagining things, messing around with the sensory aspects directly is very inefficient and actually inhibits progress. Instead, imagining that something is true, the imagery follows automatically (provided you don't block it). This is equally true of world manifestations as mind manifestations - because they are the same thing!

If you go about the place with the constant feeling of "it's it great!" then the world falls in line with that in a general way. In fact, one of Goddard's recommendations I think is that if you can't visualise well, you can simply say "it's so wonderful! thankyou so much!" and that will generate the appropriate feeling - which in turn will produce the results because it inherently "assumes the wish is fulfilled".

EDIT: Worth taking a look at the Michael Chekhov acting technique if you'd like to expand on your "embodied imagination" (acting as-if) approach.

Let's talk about blocking it. For the most part I know how to handle my sensory blocks. What could be done in the event of this feeling-as-fact block?

If you can't get at it directly, you approach it by accepting something that implies that it is true.

Bad example but: You don't believe a door can be opened. Can't get the feeling. So instead, you approach by asserting someone being inside the room, which implies the door must be openable, hence you allow yourself to have the door openable. You lead in to plausibility.

We can get away with simply feeling how we would expect to feel during these experiences and then being detached from any expectation of what happens

I dare you to do that without actually triggering the larger pattern and essentially "asserting a fact" after all! ;-) Really they are all versions of the same thing, right?

Asserting facts is basically pattern-triggering. You can't assert something you can't conceive of, so the pattern must already exist in some sense. If it exists in some sense, then it is like a memory pattern.

So really - everything I've said is the same thing from different angles. Sometimes I chunk it up into "moments", sometimes into "patterns", sometimes "facts". The underlying is of course undivided - but we need to select an entry point in order to conceptualise an intention and make a choice.

Going about your day, just maintaining a feel of expansive space, and the feeling that goes with how you want your life to be, is alone a good idea. And ties in with...

Going to read the Michael Checkhov text, looks interesting.

Yeah, it's really just a fun thing on its own.

EDIT response:

So if the context of that was "I want to imagine a spaceship in front of me" (as in: visualising stuff in your mind), then trying to "draw" the object in the air isn't a great way to do it. Just as in daily life, sensory imagery arises from fact. Assumption implies creation. So an alternative is to "decide' that the visual object is there, make it's presence a fact, and have the imagery arise naturally that. It's similar to the "trigger the pattern by the feeling" thing. That's what happens anyway once you get good at picturing stuff: You let "the unconscious mind" do the work for you. This is a way of short-cutting it.

It's just a suggestion. I found it helpful. See if it's useful for you.

Ah I see what you mean. Know it's there but I just can't see it yet.
But then how do I give myself the ability to see it? I know the answer is just decide to.

It'll just "come". You have to let it happen. It's a bit like the "let the world come to you" thing for the senses, rather than trying to see with "eyes" and hear with "ears". Play around with it. It only really makes sense if it happens.

Sit back, and decide that a large model of the Millennium Falcon is floating a couple of metres in front of you. Let it appear in its own time.

...

My interpretation of Mr Goddard is that, having recognised that the world is made of imagination and operates on an "as if" basis, he understood that we simply need to re-imagine it. The Law and the Promise is a little clearer on this I think.

Changes thus instigated could potentially manifest (persist sensorily in awareness) instantly, however the intensity of the imagery we have created thus far tends to result in an apparent time element - i.e. it's easier to create changes that are "out of sight" sensorily and in terms of current event momentum, than it is to "condense" a new environment while we are looking at that implied time-space place.

POST: The greatest possible gift.

Lovely.

Are they there to listen, though? I suppose it doesn't really matter: at worse, you are reclaiming your power from an illusion of separation from the dream. You are giving to yourself, as you say.

From experience, lots of people don't take kindly to having their... ability pointed out to them. Getting people to create synchronicity for instance (I used to use elephants, now I use owls as the example, inspired by a book) often gets a quite traumatised response. Not so much that things appear, or that reality might be dream-like. What troubles then is that it mean that other people aren't straightforwardly real - that the "sharing model" of the world can't be a simple one.

Now (as is the way of these things), my own expectations play back to me in this as much as anything else. Interested in how other people get along with that. You can also do it indirectly, but you are basically being sneaky to yourself if you do that, of course.

For sure (on the forcing) but these are people who ask... then receive. It's an interesting muddle.

Well, it's mine to allow myself the experience of them apparently having it!

Q: [Deleted]

Quite so.

It's a funny old world. Since everything behaves "as if", including time and space, apparent history and apparent persistence, how it works it can't really be explained, only asserted. I mean, it's funny trying, but it's also like chewing your own arm. (And everyone else's arm, therefore.)

Hence "Active Metaphors": the explanations you absorb shape your experience. We do quite well, on this subreddit, considering there nothing to say really, beyond things like "how you imagine it is, that's how it is" and so on.

Q: [Deleted]

Yes. And I guess there's lots of work to do towards being able to describe something like this, in ways that work for different audiences. There's always something new to say about something which shifts a little every time you say something about it... It's a way of continuing to experience it freshly, I suppose. Like re-watching a favourite movie. Or reading another Philip K Dick or JG Ballard book (because they're mostly essentially the same).

POST: [deleted by user]

Just happened to be passing! It's a great topic and something that there are so many ways to talk about. A good one to bring up. So:

• The "you" I'm referring to in the first example isn't the "little you", the one we infer from thoughts and bodily sensation, but rather the true self: the conscious environment. I guess I'm assuming in that phrasing that people already recognise themselves as the "open aware space" in which experiences arise; that they are the dream.
• But then in the second example, when I make the dream-space reference more explicitly and say there is no "you", I mean "you" as in the "little you"!

The way I'd written the comment appears that they are different views, but really they are the same view. A good example of why we have to be careful of language here, I suppose! :-)

Actually, in the "filtering of infinite potential" metaphor, that you are experiencing "your own mind" doesn't necessarily imply there is no valuable information to be had from the environment. Because we have the perspective of a "little you" who receives information by sensory arisings, the way we learn about ourselves-as-the-world is through experience.

So listening to people, paying attention to events, tells us who we are at the moment. For instance, seeing lots of news articles about people having appendicitis may be the first sign that you should get checked out at the doctor. It's not just all about seeing owls because you've been thinking about owls, or redirecting events by reconstructing your forward imagery.

Meanwhile, changing ourselves and changing the world are equivalent, and we can only recognise our success in that when our sensory experience shifts accordingly. Again, active and interactive listening.

• Experiences are all about your current state, because the facts-of-the-world are your current state.

Taking the "two aspects" version of Transcendental Idealism, you would be the noumena (as I call it: the facts-of-the-world dissolved into the background of awareness) as much as you were the phenomenal (those aspects of the noumena that had unfolded as spatially-extended sensory experience: an experiential moment). Both are in and of awareness; awareness is what you "really are". In fact, the noumena is always as present as the phenomena, it's just that it is dissolve into the background felt-sense.

• You == world == state of you == state of the world.

To explore the apparent sensory world is to explore the current formatting of your own mind, and I'd go further and say that the overall formatting is just as present now as the particular element you are experiencing as an expanded environment. Behind that is just infinite potential.

TL;DR: The filter+potential metaphor shouldn't be construed as one-way, because it's a metaphor describing the current state of the larger "you". The environment you encounter then is the larger you, and to explore it is to explore the larger mind, so one should always be listening.

A1: Metaphors abound. Worldviews are like contortions of the body. You bend to them when you wish to be bent such a way: you sit when you want to sit, you stand when sitting is no good, you lay down when you need to rest, you run when there's a tiger. Anyone who sits forever, or lays forever, or runs forever, is either dead or effectively so. Flexibility. Always flexibility. Adapt, move, never holding on, never saying "this not that" for long.

Quite so. "Active Metaphors". Choose for purpose. Don't confuse with explanation.

A2: in a response to a recent post /u/triumphantgeorge outlined a model of reality in which there are three features: a you, a filter, and a world.
This isn't a fair representation of what George talks about because "the world" is not what you're filtering against in his model. Rather, you're filtering from infinite possibility, which isn't any kind of world. Once you're done filtering, then something resembling the world appears to your mind as your POV experience. Of course the filtering is instant, so "once you're done" is only a figure of speech here.
One of the dangers is dismissing the possibility that the other elements in this system, ie the world and the filter, might have something to say, that they might have their own agenda, intelligence, or reasons for appearing the particular ways that they do.
What's the danger here? When you talk about danger, you have to talk about the possibility of injury. Who is injured here, how, and why?

Thanks Nefandi - this is exactly right.

POST: dream poem

The Oneironauts

Expert navigators of the waking dream
Trajectories across the Infinite Grid unseen
The generators of fact
Making this out of that
Implied Creators of their world
Senses, effortlessly unfurled

Haha, and of course it also includes T-G's patented private vocabulary words and terms of art. :) I even know what some of them mean. I only know what "infinite grid unseen" means because you explained it to me.

Yeah, I should really have included the ©appropriate™ symbols® in the text, I suppose. :-)

EDIT: Although really, being a poem, the idea is to be evocative in terms of imagery, rather than necessarily precise in terms of exact (conceptual) meaning.

You're talking about something with a specific meaning, but unless people were following the right posts where you explained some of this stuff, they're going to get vague imagery instead of exactly what you're trying to say.

That's fine. These things have poetic meaning anyway. I think anyone could read that and would get a 'feeling'. The fact that there's further theory behind the imagery, is extra icing to be discovered.

After all, why does everything have to be easy? :-)

Q: The fact that there's further theory behind the imagery, is extra icing to be discovered.
That's one way to look at it.
After all, why does everything have to be easy? :-)
How would you like to be on the receiving end of such an attitude? :)

In fact, the poem is more factually correct than the theory.

Because it's pure aesthetic and the theory is not?

Try and argue with my poem! :-)

I won. Did you see it?

From now on, I only understand victory in limerick form.

POST: How feeling the emotion of lust affect my reality?

Approach it in a more literal way, perhaps. What exactly appears in your experience - what is the "shadow-sensory" arising and the associated meaning - when you "lust"? However you answer this, that is the pattern that you are triggering into your world-experience subsequently. Say you are lusting after owls ("twit-twoo, what lovely big eyes you have"):

• If the experience of that lusting is: "a 3rd-person image of an owl far away, and the feeling of hopeless distance" then that is the pattern you are triggering for both internal and external experience.
• If the experience of that lusting is: "an 1st-person image of my owl friends all around, laughing and feeling thoroughly feathered" then that is the pattern you are triggering for both internal and external experience.

The process is far more basic and "automatic" than you might think - ironically, because there is no mechanism to it. You aren't making changes in a spatially-extended deeper world, you are creating ripples in a pool. Just make sure the shapes you are rippling are nice ones, because they will persist in as superpositions in subsequent patterns.

In other words, the actual imaginative content is what matters here.

Q: [Deleted]

Perhaps right now, in a million personal reality-dreams, a million teenagers are waking up with a million Amanda Seyfrieds by their side! Or whoever. :-)

There's also the case that we are talking about superpositions of patterns. What other things have you put in place? And what is the implied "meta" aspect to the imagining; your implicit view of what you are doing.

If our teenage boy has this fantasy is he implicitly feel-thinking "oh wow this is amazing and so unlikely" or is he feel-thinking "yep, here I am, all is as it inevitably was-is going to be". There's a lot to be said for taking the attitude that imagining something is the experiencing now of a fact that is actually in place in the future, now. That meta-view is also a pattern linked to the imagining.

...

So you're not going to a cartoonish fiery hell, and you're not wasting some secret energy in your testicles or ovaries, and you're not just from lust alone going to be reborn as an animal. Etc. All that is bullshit.

Good response. However, you may well be going to a "cartoonish fiery hell" - because it's not just only about the triggering by intention (the part of reality you shifted) it's about what that implies in terms of world-as-defined-so-far.

Having already implicitly intended that the existence of a cartoonish fiery hell, it is in fact there waiting for you right now, its hand-drawn flames licking at the edges of your future cel-f.

You can achieve such a state, but the requirements are too high for mere mortals.

Yeah, but OP won't be (apparently) mortal forever, is what I'm saying... and by implication he might already have created his "cartoonish fiery hell" as the next-moment beyond his last this-moment in the set of "plausible moments of being a person".

Ouch.

He'll stop being an ordinary mortal only when he decides it's time and takes specific steps to that end. Assuming it's a he. Of course sex/gender doesn't really matter in this discussion.

I don't think you need to deliberately decide. If you run out of plausible human trajectory you might have "the experience of dying" and then end up somewhere else. Just as OP confuses himself with being a "human" now, he might confuse himself with being a "something-else" later.

Something in a very hot place where people carry forks.

You're more likely to be reborn as a glue-sniffing orphan in Moscow who has to get raped in the ass for a few bucks to survive, and dies of gonorrhea early in life. That's drastically more likely than fire and brimstone hell with all that this would imply. Even then, we shouldn't assume orphans have done something bad in their past lives, or we won't want to help them. Basically "hell" is a bad idea every way you look at it. Something like hell is possible only for the best of beings, not for humans.

I was discounting the idea of rebirth here. I was suggesting that experience of some sort always continues. And if you've already thought a lot about it being a hell-type situation, then that's what you'll get.

Like opening a door and there being a landscape beyond. It's not a conscious selection at the moment, it is creation-by-implication. OP is going to a big cartoonish fiery pit of doom, because at some level he has implied its existence. Sizzle!

And this is rebirth, with which I agree.

I prefer to say that "experience continues" because it's not burdened with any assumptions about reappearing as a human restart on this planet (which implies a persistent place with a persistent timeline or history).

If this were true, then just thinking about psychic powers would get you functional psychic powers. That isn't how it works.

The difference between our hell situation and psychic powers is that in the latter case, the gap is already filled. You already have that part of the landscape filled up. In the case of the post-death scenario, we're dealing with pure creation-by-expectation to fill the gap.

And why do you think that thinking about psychic powers can't get you functional psychic powers? What if you thought an awful lot about them?

I am saying humans generally remain humans indefinitely unless something interesting happens

Why do you think this?

I do not think we become an animal or whatever. I don't believe that the human lifetime plays out as a timeline, even, and that it contributes to some development of state. If you are in a car crash, you are just as likely to suddenly not have had the crash, or to wake up at home in bed from "a dream about a car crash", as you are to be "reincarnated".

Your person-experience is within and of your conscious perspective. It is not something you are. You are not bound to it in some biological karmic way.

Which actually means you are more likely to end up in hell than if you were in a Christian or Buddhist type world.

Thinking-about doesn't produce sufficient intent.

How true. But where there's a will there's a way, and thinking-about is a nice way to make yourself aware of specifications, for the fun. But the will is as much about clearing out opposition than anything else. There is no opposition lying in wait when you hit an experiential end-point. The next-moment will happily provide itself. So the comparison is not valid (between post-death-moments and psychic-thinking).

Okay, let's recontextualise a little then, just to keep ourselves on the same page: On time (as experienced, not as a larger context since that doesn't exist), let us for convenience declare it to be all present. It is not true now that I am F&BH then, but it might be true later that I am in F&BH then.

Rebirth is even moment to moment, breath to breath.

Well that can get all a bit picky. Let us declare each moment "fresh" in that case.

Secondly, I am saying the general shape of your landscape, and its laws, are not arbitrary.

They are accumulated. You are making my point for me somewhat: that any next-moment will be consistent with the structure of the landscape. However, if your landscape includes the concept of a F&BH then it is reachable. It is part of the laws and is not arbitrary.

I am not suggesting that just anything will happen next. What happens next will definitely "make sense".

But your intent is more profound than just the body. Think: in dreams generally physics remains identical to waking.

Ah, right. You see, I'm not thinking of this stuff to be related to the body at all. The body, thought, the environment, they all arise from-within the "world-pattern" and consistent with it. By which I really mean, the very structuring of yourself. Like the Imagination Room metaphor from before, where the swirling patterns dictate the entirety of experience, which includes body sensations and so on, but everything else.

There is no end-point. [experiential end-point]

I agree with this, I was meaning when you run out of a plausible story for the continuance of your person-in-a-world experience, so there has to be some sort of discontinuous change (apparently). For example, you have that car crash, you fly through the window and get diced on the grill of the oncoming truck - the body as conceived of is definitely destroyed in this dream. So, here you are without a body... what experience arises next?

What "makes sense" as the next spontaneous arising?

The next-moment provide itself as in, the accumulation of observations so far (the patterned state) implies a next experience which arises, even though you don't "deliberately" choose it (by weighing up options).

Moments tend to resemble each other. For particularly small moments of time it's accurate to say for our current style of mentality that they're more alike than different.

Yes, agreed. When I say "fresh" I just mean we can reconsider each one in our discussion. Each next-moment is similar to the last for as long as their is a plausible story from this-moment. If not, there is inevitably a discontinuity (apparently). This does just happen randomly though; the next-moment will make sense in terms of the broader pattern.

They're stored in your intent.

Okay, I think we're getting somewhere: you are viewing things a little differently to me. I don't see it as having "my" intent. All intending affects the actual world-pattern. Not "my" world-pattern but the actual world-pattern.

At the very moment of intending, my intention is superimposed upon the actual world. All subsequent experiences will then be in alignment with that modified (really: superposition) world-pattern.

So in physics a superposition of patterns is:

pattern1 + pattern2 + pattern3 + pattern4 = Total Pattern

Hence it is both an accumulation and a transformation. There is no sense of separation in the overall pattern. Each addition of a pattern transforms the total pattern.

However, in this example we're not really talking about something that corresponds to your sword metaphor. Because the sword would be a single pattern or intention that was being modified; the patterns I was talking about "superimposing" are different intentions on top of the world (e.g. Nice new hat + meet my friend + sunny on Tuesday = Nice Week).

World-pattern arises in the mind and nothing arises in the world-pattern.

The world-pattern here is everything. You might say that at any moment one particular part of the world-pattern is "lit up" (appears as senses) but it is always there in awareness. Like (reusing an old one) the sun in the daytime sky, where the sun's brightness conceals the other stars that are there. If one could select which star to become "the sun" then that would be apparently evolving sensory experience from a fixed world-pattern.

Agreed 100%, but what happens after the context bursts is not arbitrary.

We are agreed. One of the points of a world-pattern is that it is a structuring of experience. The next-moment always "makes sense". That doesn't mean you can't end up in hell, though, if that is your natural understanding of what happens after you "die". For something to exist in the world-pattern, it merely has to be conceived of. The only difference between a thought of something (a "shadow-sensory" experience) and a dominant sensory experience of it, is intensity.

Your propensities are "stored" in the mind as your intent, and intent doesn't become destroyed when the context is no longer plausible.

This is what I have been calling a world-pattern. It is both the memory storage and that which is experienced. Sensory experience is merely a triggering into the senses of certain patterns within the world-pattern.

All thoughts and observations are therefore already present, either actually or logically (there is no difference, or at least no way to distinguish).

In other words, to jump from humaning and physicaling to F&BH is a task for the best of beings, not for normals.

I'm not suggesting you lose your human-formatting, although you might no longer experience a body (which is fine, human-formatting is about sensory profile not content).

In my view there is no "actual" anything. The world has no pattern of its own. In fact, there is no world at all.

Nothing has anything of its own. I'm not talking about a physical, spatially-extended world - I'm talking about that structural pattern which is basically the "definition" of possible experiences. In short, the "world" that you experience.

This is exactly subjective idealism. There is no structure outside of this, this is everything: the entirety. It is within you and it is you and so on. It is the constellation. You are the stars. Blah.

Let's just cut to something: Obviously when we are discussing this stuff we both realise that there is no division between context and content, experience and experiencer, and so on. To discuss it is to separate it temporarily into parts; plainly this is not the actual situation.

By naming something we inevitably imply it has a separate existence. This is the problem of thought, which comes to use as a "shadow-sensory" experience. It requires division, relative location, and temporal separation. Conceptualisation inherently means fragmentation of the subjects, when of course it is whole.

When I dream I see different world-patterns, but they all share similar rules of physics. So it's possible for world-patterns to change but for the general rules to remain.

The world-pattern contains all worlds. It is the very structuring of your experience - the world of experience not "Planet Earth" or "this dream" or "being this person".

Strictly speaking it cannot even be referred to as a configuration space. As mentioned previously, it's basically a memory-block. Memories are triggered associatively; new memories overlaid; etc. But any metaphor cannot capture it, for it is all "ideas".

Here's why you talk like that. You associate intent with effort and struggle. Struggle is clumsy.

No, no, no, I don't associate it with effort and struggle! Damn you! ;-)

The apparent division between "on its own" and "intervening" is simply to convey that no ongoing maintenance is required - that one needn't be constantly "doing" your experience - and that you can gently redirect it as desired, occasionally.

Now, in the final limit what is happening of course is that it's all you, you are the ongoing movement and you are the shift in movement. But that's not very visual or useful way to describe it from the outset. Again, it's back to the "there is no division, everything is consciousness" formulations which are of no use other than something to remember as the fundamental.

No struggling for me, kiddo!

Okay, on "optimising for influence", that's exactly what I am pursuing. And I think of it as better to have a situation where experience plays out and one only need occasionally "decide" on what you want the world to be like. Not even "what you want to happen" - rather, what you want the facts-of-the-world to be from this point onwards.

Effortless is built in, you can't get away from it, if you're going to take your stand as awareness, rather than as body muscle and tension and resistance. Change only happens when you are relaxed or have reached a point of effective relaxation (via balance).

World-pattern is in the sense of your private world. It has nothing to do with planets. It's more properly called, perhaps, your private extended definition of your universe, or similar. However, it's a completely generic arbitrary associative and generative patterning system, so it's more like a memory landscape.

Very true about quick typing and then subsequent edits. Things sound right as you type them, and then realise it's not quite right, or is a statement too far from what we intended. When we're having a "live" discussion, probably best we draw attention to a revised idea in the next "live" message - just as we would in real-life dialogue?

So, I'm really not getting across what I actually mean with this intending, deciding, happening business - because you are responding with words like "passivity" and so on. The sense in which I mean it is (referencing earlier) a frictionless environment.

If the floor in my house had no friction, I would simply "decide" to go to a room and even the tiny shift in weight distribution brought about by the mere thinking about it, would result in me going there. Just thinking about a location, I would find myself there.

Now, if it takes "time" for the shift from here to there to occur, I could change my mind and - simply by the changing of my mind - end up in a different room instead.

In neither case would we say I was "passive" but nor would I need to "maintain" a particular decision. The fact of the decision would have altered things such that I was going to the room in question.

(Now obviously our metaphor requires a separation into parts which do not exist, but it illustrates the point. With no friction, no inertia, once a destination has been brought into mind, it will remain in mind and be effective, until adjusted again.)

What does the "memory-block" look like? Nothing. Time and space are aspects of particular experiences; time and space are themselves contextual patterns. There is no "outside" to the memory-block and no time. If it changes, the previous state no longer exists and never did. The notion of "pattern" is obviously a concept to describe something that in an of itself has no properties. We might think of them as "dimensionless facts". If you can think about it, it's not it, but we are choosing to think about it.

Take a pause right now, and recall the memory the last time you were at a party (say). Where is that party now? Where was the shadow-sensory image of the party, before you recalled it right now?

The best you can probably say is that the memory - like the non-unfolded-sensory world - is a background feeling. So the memory-block "looks" like a feeling.

Part 1/2: Response

In your example you'll spend quite some time drifting through space before you reach your destination, assuming you only used a tiny shift in weight.

Quite so. Just as in real life. If I intend a result, events fall into place over time which lead me to my destination. The stronger the shift in weight the shorted that experience would be. All analogies have limits, but that's not a problem. That's what analogies are. You're not trying to capture the whole reality because only the whole reality does that. You're just trying to capture the feel of a certain aspect.

In your analogy, I actually don't understand what you're trying to say. In what way am I at the middle of a hill or the top of a hill? What are the heavy balls? What does deflection mean?

It sounds like things are "coming at you" and you are constantly in a battle against circumstances. And that circumstances are separate from you. And that it's possible for something to be "out of reach". And so on. It doesn't present a model of that "the world" is. But all we're pointing out here is that metaphors necessarily draw upon "everyday world" experiences (physical objects in spatial arrangements unfolding over time) and so, quite reasonably, can only capture a part of the whole picture. There will always be a problem with a metaphor; what matters is that the problem is outwith the main property that's being illustrated.

This does mean that the complete set of illustrative metaphors do inevitably clash; just like the physical theories of today.

In practice you can have 10% of your mind agreeing and 90% disagreeing, because it's easy thanks to habit and other factors to keep the old patterns. You have to convince all of your mind to get on board

This kind anthropomorphises "mind" which is really just a structure, but I agree with the idea overall - one might call it "coherence" or something like that: the clarity of the mind really.

I get this, but there is no analogy for this. This is a unique feature of the mind for which there is no analogy.

Yeah, it's unexplainable as an entirety, only aspects of it. However, "remembering" is something most people have had an experience of, and have a mental model of, so it's quite a valuable approach.

should be explained straightforwardly.

There's no such thing. There is only metaphors. No matter how you try to explain something, if you are doing it in terms of something else (which you must do if you are explaining a new concept to someone), then you are using a metaphor.

OK. Just do me a favor and don't use the word "pattern" for something that has no shape. If it's a pattern it has a shape. Patterns are recognizable and are identifiable.

What is the shape of a memory-pattern?

Part 2/2: Back to Basics?

1. A Return To Here

But all this, this metaphoring, is simply more imagination on top of the already-imagined. The risk is that we are making things far more complicated than they need to be, for not a lot of additional benefit - practically speaking, but perhaps also in terms of understanding.

So let us return one again to our immediate experience: the current single sensory state in awareness. (We've been calling them experiences or moments and so on, but the word "state" gets to it. What is true is this state, now. Note that by "sensory" I don't just mean visual-auditory-texture, but the whole sense of being-in-a-state too.)

• Every moment brings a new state, the incorporation of an additional fact, which persists unless amended. Isn't that all that's ever happening?
• The changing of the state is what we call the passage of time, if a residue of the previous state is incorporated into the new state. (This is not necessarily the case.)
• We direct our experience by imagining occasionally - creating additional "facts" - but most people do this in reaction to appearances (the facts so far) and within the limitations they suggest.
• The Insight Of The Oneironaut™ is that you can create any state you want by imagining new facts, now, without limitation. What you see-now, and what you think-now that you have seen "previously", don't necessarily matter.

2. Further Discussion

However (and this does maybe tie into what you are trying to say with your "ongoing intention", which I don't think we clash on) - if you are holding onto a particular fact then that remains part of the state even as the rest of it changes.

For instance, time and continuity are ideas, albeit ones that are not seen-heard-touched. For as long as those ideas are active, they are part of the imagining you make, the continue as part of the state. If you change the body from a seated to a standing position, but hold onto the muscles in your hips, you either end up rising slowly (best case) or will end up in a half-seated half standing position (worst case). This is a bit like your "10% of your mind agreeing and 90% disagreeing", perhaps?

Then:

• To make massive changes, then, you must detach almost completely, to allow the whole state to be reimagined or reseeded. You basically need to "stop thinking about" other stuff.
• Every thought or metaphor we come up with, is simply further structuring our actual experience. We are basically creating more observations, more partial facts.
• So... is the best approach not simply to imagine that there is only this current sensory fact, with nothing at all behind it, and no mechanisms? Even contemplating "how intention works" simply hobbles the simplicity of it.

Returning to a quote we were playing with a while ago:

"However you imagine that it works, That's how it works." -- The rule of metaphor

In other words, when we create metaphors we are not thinking about things exactly; we are thinking those metaphors into actual existence. When we imagine something in the 3rd-person, we are literally creating a model (like: painting a new picture). If, in addition, while we are doing this we imagine that it is how the world works, then we are making the world work that way (like: re-painting this picture).

We might consider "this world" is be a painting we are focused upon. In error, when people use their creative power, they usually create or amend other paintings to the side, rather than making alterations to "this world". They keep making more and more paintings "about" this world, in the hope that this will alter this world. But unless they declare equivalence (which is what magick does) it only has partial effect.

[Your conical hill metaphor]

This seems to imply an idea of a "momentum" and some sense of "proximity", neither of which I'm keen on. But probably the root of it is: I'm perhaps not talking about a "universe" in the same sense you are, maybe (see later). Return to that later though.

To clarify now, just so I've got a better idea of what you are actually meaning, rather than just what I suppose you are meaning:

What does it mean, for a ball to roll to the other side of the hill?
What does it mean, for phenomena to have "steam"?
What is this "steam"?
What is the starting point for a phenomenon?
What do you mean by "originate unconsciously"?

The problem is when you use an analogy and don't specify what you're trying to illustrate and where the limits lie.

I think you have just illustrated this! ;-)

We don't ever even want to try to describe something ultimate.

It can't be done because it is: a) not divided into parts and can't be conceptualised, b) any conceptualisation happens within the ultimate.

I think we do know all truth, right now. Know it and directly experience it. That is different to experiencing the "unpacked" aspects of it, however. Right now, the world is within you but you-as-persepective are not experiencing all possible viewpoints visually, of instance.

Ultimate truth is a truth about other truths. It's meta in level, and is not usable directly by itself.

A good statement. Saying "everything is and is made of consciousness" implies certain approaches, but in and of itself it says nothing. Like "everything is one" and "all is illusion". Okay great.

The reason I said that is because you've been using world-pattern a few times not to mean something with shape, but to convey something shapeless. That's confusing.

It does have "shape" however it is not a shape in terms of spatial extent or a visual shape. The word "form" could perhaps be used instead; a non-sensory form. The issue here is that our descriptions and metaphors require a shadow-sensory experience - we think my creating shadow-worlds with shadow-objects and relating them. Since this is the thing before even that, it's obviously pretty difficult to describe!

Was watching some videos lately (pondering my other interest of physics metaphors) and Larry Susskind in a talk put up a slide of an interference pattern of a hologram (basically, the incomprehensible swirly pattern which when illuminated by appropriate light results in particular images). Here is the link to where that pattern appears. That is one way to visualise "memory-pattern".

It is essentially information dissolved into the background. You might say we experience it subtly as an imperceptible "global feel" normally, and when we go "illuminating" we experience the unfolded image.

As soon as I gave the metaphor I also criticized it soon after.

Uh-huh, I'm agreeing here by thinking aloud, not picking new things. Okay, so proceeding from your other responses, you are "cutting up" experience a little differently to me. For instance, there can be no "Other" since everything is "here"; what you call "steam" is just more established pathways; but the root ideas are probably the same.

More important though: You seem to be viewing not doing something as "intentional". Isn't this a bit superfluous? I'm never "not doing" anything. Experience arises, I might interfere, but if I don't then I'm not "not-intefering".

It means you relate to origination as something outside your subjective sphere. Since it's "out there" it can only be unconscious.

What can there possibly be, outside my "subjective sphere"? It's not enclosed - so no sphere no "outside". Isn't that fundamental to subjective idealism?

To say that the ultimate is not divided into parts is already a grievous error.

How can the ultimate be divided into parts, fundamentally? It can be conceived of as being divided into parts, however even that conceptualisation will be of whole cloth, a fiction of division.

A form is something with an outline. If it has no outline, it's not a form.

The distinction to make is between something as experienced and something as it is "in itself". For example, a triangle definitely has a form, right? Here is a triangle: image and here is a triangle: {(1,2,1), (5, 5, 5), (10,2,5)}

So you're saying "it's out there." I can't agree. :)

No, everything is "in here", or actually neither inside nor outside because there is neither. :-P

To return to an analogy you've used: the fish not knowing what water is. A problem with conceiving of our situation is that we are not like the fish; we are not "in" anything. It's more like water not knowing what water is.

So for example, if I select a big red six sided die, that preference is not stored in the bag, so can't be in there.

Both the choice and the bag exist (as far as they "exist") inside you. For fun, we sometimes call an object with us "me" and pretend that it does things like looking at options and making choices, but really that is all just play-acting. All of that sits at the same level.

Are you aware of non-implicative negations? And the only way to be free from error is to become familiar with many many many errors

Not this, not that. The term is new to me though; I like it. So really the only way to become free from error is to... step back and realise that errors are just like everything else. We might decide to do this or we might be driven to it by sheer exhaustion.

[No, everything is "in here"] Not everything. :) You aren't here.

Haha, well of course I'm the only thing (which isn't a thing) which isn't anywhere at all (and yet is everywhere). And so on.

That's still not everything. Where is my next choice?

As soon as you have thought of it, it is there also. The thought of it is it. Until you have thought of it, you don't even know you don't know (so to speak).

We take an object that's with us, and we split it into me and not-me. But all that is arbitrary. Both me-ness and not-meness are mental fabrications.

Yes, they are fabrications. Are you suggesting, though, that these objects which your are identifying with, were not created by you? And that you could not create another object now, and identify with it?

The study of the world and of oneself is literally the study of error.

Do we need to study the error, other than for interest and amusement? Can we not simply identify with the background (as it were, knowingly the mistake) and view all identification as "error"?

Where is it before I have thought of it?

Until you have experienced it ("observed" it) there is no such thing, except as implied by previous experiences. However even contemplating the implication brings about the observation. You can retrospectively imagine that it was there all along.

It's actually pretty claustrophobic. You can't see around the edge, as it were. You can't catch sight of the pre-sight situation - because there is not one. You can only conceive "that there is one" (which is really to say that there will be one).

Slow changes are easier. One-offs are easier than repeatable functions. Shallow changes are easier.

Let's return to that. "Why" is this so?

This kind of lazy heuristic is no substitute for the actual wisdom.

But if the "actual wisdom" is wisdom of a relative sort - one part of the world experience as contrasted with or implied by another - then what fundamental value does it have?

If wisdom is content then I can change the world within me and make it obsolete. I am the constructor of wisdom, then; wisdom is an experience which arises within me (a "me" which is before structured knowledge, being simply "being").

If something is non-existent, how can I think of a concept that doesn't exist?

You can think of the existence of something. For instance, you can think of the train having a driver without thinking of a specific driver.

I agree with all the rest of it, that's my thinking also.

Fundamentally, you just can't get "outside" of your thinking-about, you can't be further along the road than you actually are until you get there. We can conceive of the fact of their being a place for something - slots in which things should appear - ahead of the encountering, but we are just thinking stuff.

You can know the teleology of your will.

As you say.

As to "decisioning" there's a case of describing all "observations" as happenings because it gets rid of a load of dubious abstractions - for starters, it means we get away from the idea of there being persistent things that are "occurring" in some defined way when not being observed - but we've implicitly covered that.

So slow changes are easier than quick ones because I enjoy stability at all times...

The discomfort of discontinuity! I think everyone has this. Anything is possible, but the implications actually acting upon this can break your reality quite badly. For instance, a friend dies in an accident. You summon that fact from the background and you change it. You go to the bar that night and he's there as if nothing happened (which, now, has become true). How does that really work out for you?

Even much less dramatic alterations bring with them certain "existential issues". If you've lost your wallet in the park and you update the world so that it's now lying on the table, you can explain it away as having teleported it, or a friendly spirit having moved it, or forgetfulness (the "urge to forget" is very strong after significant shifts) or whatever. So long as you don't think too deeply about it.

I believe there are beings not in this realm here that don't have a discomfort around discontinuity.

What beings could there be that aren't of this realm? Surely there's just... me. ;-)

However, at high levels of renunciation, "breaking" what sucks or what one no longer cares for is no longer a big deal.

Many of the dramatic stories people have of discontinuous change occur in times of desperation: imminent death, life gone truly wrong. Interestingly, people often report odd and flexible realities when a child: wishing they were staying at their grandparents' and waking up there; needing to go to the toilet and 'blink-teleporting' to the bathroom; people and things suddenly changing, appearing, disappearing.

Children have less of an investment in stability; correspondingly, their magick may come more easily. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V (duplicating toys), Ctrl-Z (undoing events), etc.

The friend dying.

This links back to our other conversation about observations and so on. So for the purposes of this, I propose that observations are always consistent with previous observations, facts accumulate and the world becomes increasingly stable; the world always "makes sense".

If you make discontinuous change ("my friend is still alive") then from that moment on your observations will be consistent with that updated fact. There will be no evidence other than your memory that it was ever different to this, since any "looking for evidence" would of course be an "observation" subsequent to the change.

Now matter how it plays out, each observation will be plausible, and narrow the possibilities of the next observation:

• You are drinking in the bar. The friend shows up. He never had an accident and there's no evidence of an accident, and nobody remembers the accident or your previous conversations about one, or
• You are drinking in the bar. The friend shows up. He had been fucking with everyone with a Facebook post and it just got out of hand, or
• You are drinking in the bar. You have a conversation with the barman and talk about the friend's death, the barman says "yeah I heard". The friend shows up. Turns out his brother had a crash and the reports got confused, or...

Depending on what you do and how it plays out, you are getting what you want, but the "story" that goes with it may vary according to your demands.

I am the formless realm. ;-)

Yeah, there are lots of interesting stories about distant places and what you might term a lower "consensus hurdle" to change, although I'm inclined to say that it isn't a real barrier so much as a barrier that ends up being formed within you. For example, many who go on meditation retreats report that after a while their dreams seem to be more solid and real than their waking time. The "rigidity" of their waking life seems to dissolve somewhat.

The traditional view has been that consensus is enforced by contribution, but don't think that's necessarily so. Hallucinations are just more experiences and are equally valid. They aren't "wrong". Right? :-)

[Facts accumulate] They seem to, but they don't. All of one's expectations is one single expectation. Nothing accumulates.

For sure it's just a way of describing the process. There is indeed one single fact and it shifts (although not in time). When I was talking of a "world-pattern" previously, it is to this "one single fact" that I was referring. You are calling this "expectation" but that implies an anticipation, which I dislike. It is better to say something like "fact" - but remembering that "fact" also means how things work, the formatting or framework, not just specific locations and properties of "things" and such.

So knowledge cannot really accumulate.

The above should clear this up - accumulation would be the "apparent process" however the truth is something more like a shifting state.

The problem is, depending on how the story goes, you may feel like you don't deserve any credit for doing magick. ;)

Haha! Well, it may actually be the default that you don't retain the memory of the change. If the "one single fact" moves and doesn't leave you with any personal trace of the prior state, then your friend never died and you never brought him back. (Confusing histories!)

Additional: Just in passing, on the consensus thing, I was reminded of this story:

Consensus Reality
Aboard an oceanographic ship in the Persian Gulf
While I was stationed on a ship in the Persian Gulf during the war, I had the experience of being "out-voted" about the correct syntax of a computer command which I knew functioned perfectly well just the day before.
A group of less well-informed technicians wandered by, and shared their consensus opinion that I could not possibly get the output I expected using that computer command. Lo and behold, they were right; from that point on, I never could get that syntax to work again. I have come to believe that reality is based on consensus. Proximity is probably relevant, and degree of belief/influence may vary for participants. I suspect that our long isolation as a group may have played a part in that event.
-- Yedeth, Your Stories Page 23, Realityshifters.com

All you have to do, is wait, and new things show up. But that's not necessarily true.

This is exactly true, in experience! The next-step of the world always "makes sense" in terms of the previous observations. However, it is not predictable. Mainly because it is the world of reality (the entirety of all subtleties) that imply the next step. You cannot anticipate this or model it, because those things are in it.

All experience is directional. You can't stop directing it.

I dislike the use of "directional" because it implies a destination. I dislike the use of "directing" because it implies an act. However, the meaning is understood.

Simplicity is not a virtue in and of itself. I oppose gratuitous complexity.

We are agreed.

So a physicalist metaphor does what now?

All metaphors are essentially physicalist, in a way.

The world changes constantly in boring, uninteresting ways.

Maybe your world does; my world is far more fascinating. ;-)

I use the language of personal responsibility.

But who is this "person" and what exactly are they "responsible" for?

We can draw metaphors from family relations, or taste, and those aren't physicalist.

Actually, my real point was that all metaphors will be object-based within a context of location (space) and transformation (time). We are bound to imagine "parallel mini-worlds of surface" while considering ourselves to be probing something deeper or behinds things (which we are not).

What is the location and transformation of 1+1=2?

Think of it now. What do you experience?

For me, I have a parallel sort of blank space which is simultaneous with sensory experience, and in the area which would correspond to just outside the location of the left side of my jaw, there's a white blurry hand-written script (like this). If I attend to this, I see that just beyond it is a sort of grid, like this but in a triangular shape, with the sides being of lengths 1, 1, and 2. I do not deliberately construct any of this, it's just what appears.

Note that this is not a representation of the sum in my mind, it is actually that sum in my mind as it is currently. (From experience, if I change these "objects" then the change persists or evolves from the new state.)

I experience a sense of equivalence, is perhaps the best way I can describe it.

Would you say that was a "feeling"? A sort of felt-sense of the situation from which any other shadow-sensory aspects arise? I think of them as all of a piece. The form may indeed change depending on context but the "essence" of it is the same. (For the particular example, mine is quite stable though.)

What do we mean by "abstract" anyway? Perhaps we can approach this by example.

The Vase

I have never seen a vase before. A vase is on the table. I move around the vase, seeing it from different angles. I pick up the vase, feel it. I then use the vase, filling it with water and putting flowers in it. While doing so, a friend tells me where she bought the vase with her mother. Later that day, we go to the shop and see lots of different vases. In the evening, I watch a TV show about how vases are made.

So, what is "a vase"? It is the summation of all those different vase-related sensory experiences. It is no particular instance of those experiences; it is the overall pattern produced by the accumulation of those experiences [1] - including the auditory-visual language, "a vase".

When I say to myself, "a vase", I have a felt-sense that comes-with some other sensory aspects which appear in awareness. So it's abstract in the sense of not being "about" a specific vase, but in terms of being an experience it is quite specific.

[1] Berkeley has a term for this which I can't find at the moment: maybe something like "collection" or "occasions". In any case, all the sensory experiences of something that lead to it being distinguished and hence to the formation of it as "a thing".

I like the term felt-sense. I hesitate to call it a feeling. Maybe intuition is a better term.

I shy away from "intuition" because it's vague in use whereas felt-sense nicely captures the idea of felt-meaning and direct-knowing. It can be used to indicate what exactly intuition is in terms of an experience. And as you say, "feeling" means other things.

If you take it to be a summation, then so long as you are missing something from your summation, you don't know what the vase is.

You never know all about "vase" (potentially speaking) because there is are always more vase-experiences to come. Although you do know "all that a vase is so far". What vase "is" to you is the summation-pattern, the observation-accumulation, of all your vase-experiences so far. In the example, after the visit to the shop I have a pretty good "abstract vase". I could certainly identify things as vases and so on. But then I watch the TV show about how vases are made, and my "abstract vase" has changed again, been further enriched.

When I encounter a vase, all of this is triggered into experience a as a felt-sense. What a vase "is" to me, is that felt-sense. How would you describe what a vase "is"?

[On intuition as a word] I like it because it's vague.

I meant "vague" in the sense of it has lots of different meanings to different people, whereas with felt-sense we mean something which, although it cannot be specified in language, does have a particular meaning and context. The content of it may be vague, but the phenomenon itself is not.

Anyway, felt-sense is the best term I've encountered for capturing that "direct global knowing of all aspects" of something (the quoted phrase itself already goes off!).

Either there is no concept of a vase then, since the summation is never finished.

You're not gonna get all "Platonic" on me, are you? There is no "vase" separate from the accumulated observations that contribute to "vase".

You're also assuming all your experience with the vase is acceptable and is not a corruption/lie/misinformation.

But how to judge that? All vase-related experiences add to my "abstract vase" and all are genuinely vase-related. If I subsequently encounter a vase-related experience which negates a previous one, then my "abstract vase" is adjusted accordingly. "Vase" is an ongoing thing. Just like the world.

From a subjective idealist point of view, the world is my accumulated observations of it. There is no truth other than this, "somewhere else". Observations include sensations, perceptions, thoughts - everything that arises in the space of awareness.

This is vital. Because this is how we can make changes. We do so by creating additional observations which constitute the latest facts-of-the-world.

I'd describe it as ignorance without any basis in either experience or ultimate reality, an arbitrary mental fabrication.

It's basis is entirely in experience and mental fabrication (which is just more experience) and also it is a form of the ultimate reality.

We use a reality validation framework for this.

I'd make the point that we are not deliberately working out what constitutes "vase" and what does not. I'd don't do any deliberate checking and cross-checking. Simply by encountering "vase"-related experiences my "abstract vase" is triggered and modified.

Such experiences include conversations about vases and so on. When I say "observations" I mean in the broadest sense: any experience that connects in some way to my "abstract vase" will revise it.

Because there is no separation between vase-experiences and my abstract-vase. My "comprehension" of the experience involves the triggering of my abstract-vase.

Instead there is one expectation which has a certain conceptual "shape" to it. When you learn new info, you update your expectation. So expectation changes shape, so to speak, but it doesn't change in quantity. It changes in quality only.

This sounds very similar to what I am saying though, does it not? Perhaps I need to be clearer: by "observation accumulation" I mean that the arising of experiences inherently evolve knowledge. As in the vase example above.

[On "creating observations" and magick] This is bad for magick.

I disagree, but remember that by "observation" I am including all experiences. To say observations are non-factual is the same as saying all observations are factual, in the context that the observation takes place.

By creating new observations, I am pointing to things like: Waving a magic wand having decided that waving the magic wand means that the weather will change - i.e. that wand-waving is a fact of weather-changing. Or by imagining that it is raining I am observing the fact of future raining.

No story required. But this is getting into a language tangle that is not really required. The general sense is that every observation is information about the world, and that creating an observation with different information is to change the world.

All experience is a mental fabrication.

You need to remove the word "mental" from that because it's meaningless.

POST: Letting things be and changing what you want

The problem is essentially the same as the other OP's. If I'm intending, doesn't that directly imply dissatisfaction with the moment I'm in? How can I be dissatisfied if I'm completely accepting? The struggle.

Well, I don't see the problem and perhaps it's a misunderstanding of things in modern interpretation.

In meditation, you "let things be" in order to let the noise subside and, in the subsequent calm, realise how things actually are (that there is the sensory experience, and stories about that experience are fictional and malleable).

Having had that realisation, you are free to operate in alignment with the actual nature of things. You can simply let the current pattern unfolds dynamically without interference, like waves bouncing off each other in an ever-evolving but self-consistent manner, or you can use your will and imagination to tweak it now and again, like briefly splashing your hand into the water.

"Everything is fine as it is" is a comment about the perfection of the self-consistent pattern, which has no choice but to unfold logically and perfectly. If you assert changes into the world, the shifted pattern will also be self-consistent and perfect. The world-pattern always makes sense. But some patterns might be more fun than others...

Summary:

• "Letting things be" is an approach to settling and understanding.
• The world-pattern is always perfect, in the sense of being a coherent, self-consistent pattern.
• Some patterns are more fun than others.
• Changing the pattern is fine. The new one will be perfect too.

However, it's true that the more detached you are, the easier the world-pattern shifts, and the more likely your world falls into line with your desires without your deliberate intervention - desire and pattern close their gap.

Let's ponder!

What is a desire?

I'm going to suggest a desire is an indication of the gap between what you are experiencing and what you should be experiencing - the sense of tension is because you are and have been preventing a movement of the world-pattern by holding onto it, and have through manipulation and ignorance deviated from your genuine wants. We might say this situation arose due to ignorance and intentions made from that ignorance, but desire itself does not come from ignorance; it's just a symptom of a state, a pendulum that is being held away from its rest position.

As I suggest in the last paragraph of my other comment: if you're totally detached, then your world-pattern shifts naturally towards alignment. Once you are near, intervention isn't required so much.

However, the fact is that we've all accumulated pushed patterns. Letting this "karma" unravel itself by itself takes time, just as any disturbance takes time to settle. And during that settling process, you might endure much unpleasantness. Unless you are able to absolutely and complete detach, in which case you might get something more akin to a "dream restart". But for as long as you are attached to the habit of continuity and plausibility, this won't happen.

Intending with detachment is a way of quickly switching to the target pattern. The combination of detachment - implicitly in a direction, justifying your "allowing" - and actual specification of a target - which you have already decided to permit - lets you jump more directly to the wanted world-pattern.

Not sure that was clear at all, sorry. The short version: desire is a sign that your world-pattern has been pushed into a now-inappropriate state; intending with detachment is a quick way to resolve that because it temporarily suspends some habits.

EDIT: If you were completely detached and allowing, then having a desire would be intending, and the world-pattern would stay in sync. Because desire = pattern in consciousness and intention = pattern in consciousness; the two should match; detaching and allowing is the process by which desires / intentions are integrated into the world-pattern; a desire is like a self-triggering intention.

Let me add:

Perfection refers to complete self-consistency. It does not mean everything is in some final, all-things-complete, stable state. That never happens, for as long as there is any pattern at all.

The world-pattern is always perfect because it always "makes sense", but it is always evolving. Desire is an indication you have been obstructing that natural momentum in some way. It will always resolve itself eventually, the question is how: by overwhelming your resistance, by you partially detaching and letting it flow more easily, by you intending towards it (accelerated jump), by you detaching absolutely, or by you intending directly to a balanced state (discontinuous jump).

I'll be frank and say that I am fearful of discontinuities.

That's reasonable. There's the feeling that if you let this happen, anything could happen - which is about right. At least at the moment you have, at the very least, the illusion that people remain the same people, and so on. A big shift means that this might not be true "anymore".

So would you say that having desires at all is a sign that one is ignorant, at least to a small degree?

I'd still say that it is a sign that you have acted based on ignorance in the past. We all do this: we all lug our bodies around by effort, for example, accumulating tension, when we are not meant to "manually control" our bodies at all. You might say that your aching body is because you have used it in ignorance.

Extend this to the entirety of your world.

I've lately been experimenting with the idea that we, consciousness, could be thought of as knowledge itself.

Well, I'd say what you are is "that which is". It's not a knowledge, it's being. Knowledge implies a knower and a known, whereas you are the knower and that which knowledge is made from. So we are not just knowledge itself, we are what everything is.

If by "knowledge" you just mean "all the facts of the world", then you are definitely all knowledge and all knowledge is you, but you are also so much more - unbounded. Hmm. Yeah, I still think that it's just easier to view ourselves as being awareness and therefore everything that appears in awareness is also us. "We are recall" rather than "we are memories". Knowledge is not a thing.

"The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things."
-- The Mental Universe, Richard Conn Henry

An extra thought: Do we take these things too seriously? If experience is about adventuring then swooping about between possibilities, making mistakes and jumping out of them, is part of the fun perhaps.

If we could know for certain that we would exist as a conscious perspective forever and could retain our identity and memories for as long as you wanted - until we chose to wipe them temporarily or permanently - how would that change your approach do you think?

I'd have more patience. I'd stop trying to get things and enjoy the current perspective rather than seek new ones all the time. I already feel like I'm going to live forever, so knowing my memories and identity were mine to keep or dispose of would likely just make me less in a rush to make the most out of this life.
Edit: Do we take things too seriously? I'd say that's a loaded question. We take things just as seriously as we're meant to. No more no less.

Hmm. It's hard to balance something:

Knowing you can "jump away" from unpleasant situations should they arise, frees you to experiment more and commit more. But at the same time, having this knowledge potentially lessens the emotional intensity of an experience.

Probably it sorts itself out: We forget our power, but when in dire trouble we tend to seek out answers, and in the process rediscover that power.

But that does mean that ignorance, acting from ignorance, desire and intention, rediscovery and realignment, god and then... not - all those are inevitable.

A1: Try watching a movie and constantly reminding yourself, "It's just a movie, these are just actors," or playing a game and reminding yourself, "These are just pixels on a screen I'm moving with my fingers."
That's the quickest path to having no fun at all.
You'll hear a lot of people say that they understand the nature of reality "on an intellectual level" but that they don't "feel it, viscerally". And they mourn this as though it's a failure on their part.
Feeling it viscerally is something I have done and it was absolutely dreadful. Most horrendous thing I can think of having endured in my life. Totally against my palette. All of the things that I like were absent and all of the things I dislike were present. It was massive, looming, horrible, lonely darkness of metaphysical despair. Understanding, truly, the nature of reality, but -avoiding feeling it viscerally- is one of the very highest paths (although it's tarnished by those who see it as some kind of second-best failure).
The only way to go "all the way" and feel it viscerally, to know it in your bones and through them, is to utterly change your palette. To totally rewrite the things that please and displease you. Only once you're in a place where concepts of happiness/sadness, pleasure/pain, loneliness/companionship, form/void mean absolutely nothing to you can you make that step without finding it absolutely soul-destroying.

Yes, you have to immerse yourself to have fun as "the actor" playing the character, but you can also take glee in the creativity of being "the director". You do have to shift your mindset to do that though.

I've never bought into this idea that the solution to everyones problems is to just "live in the present".
I have this life log where I track my thoughts and how they relate to time. I track predictions (future oriented thoughts), reflections (past oriented thoughts) and statements (thoughts about the present)
What I've found by tracking the distribution of these thoughts from different users is that despite claims to the contrary we spend most of our time thinking and living in the present. In fact only 10% of the average persons thoughts actually relate to the future. 80% of the average persons thoughts are related to the current moment.
Furthermore, being more present is not the solution to everyone's problems. While it's true that some people may focus on the future too much there are just as many people who either focus on the past too much or focus on the present and ignore impending negativity on the horizon.
While many may suggest that the overall goal is to be more present in life, ignoring the future can be extremely detrimental to one's well being.
Our main problem in regards to future oriented thinking is worrying to much and being unable to turn our visions of the future into reality. But it is not necessarily bad to use our minds to affect the future. That is what makes us human, the capacity to turn our dreams into reality. To ignore this fact is naive.
Some people destroy their lives by being too present and never dealing with planning out their future.
Some people spend so much time thinking about the future they never learn to enjoy what they have in the present.
Some people spend too much time lamenting a past they cannot change.
The key is to find balance between these types of thinking.

I'm inclined to think that past, present and future thinking are all fine when done with intention. Being "present" really means "being present to experience", and that can mean thought as much as senses. After all, thoughts are essentially sensory experiences, just not the primary ones at that point.

Once you've set the intention it's there.

Yes, because the intending actually is the making-it-there. If you intend "owls" then that is the overlaying of the pattern called "owls" upon the world, which you subsequently encounter as your attention scans over time.

You are basically saying "from now on: owls", and experience unfolds logically from this from that point onwards. (Including, amusingly, experiences "about the past". Which means you discover that there are now apparently "owls" in your past where there weren't before.)

The world-pattern itself isn't intelligent - only complex. However, it is entirely responsive to being reshaped by your intelligence.

POST: Externalizing the internal implies internalization of the external.

[POST]

So I had an idea that was causing some doubt in me that lead to a deeper idea about lucidity. In lot of my dreams I find myself having to take a piss and when I wake up I do indeed have to take a piss. This kind of bothered me because if my dream body was being controlled by physical body it seemed to imply a realness to the physical. But then I realized I made an error in judgment because I assumed that my spirit or consciousness was moving from the physical to the astral/dream and vice versa. The way I see it is that we are constantly existing in both of these realms simultaneously but its our shift in focus that makes us feel like we are existing in solely one or the other.
Think of it this way, In my external experience I am typing a post on a laptop right now, but in my internal experience there is a gnome sitting on top of a mushroom. The computer is presented externally in this level of the dream while the gnome is presented internally in another. Going back to my piss these viewpoints get switched you see. The dream/astral level becomes externalized as a weird dream bathroom where my physical need to piss becomes part of the internal experience.
picture a camera with recording lens on opposite sides and both of these images present themselves on two different screens that we watch at the same time. Lens 1 is looking at a red ball Lens 2 is looking at a blue ball, so we have a red ball shown on the left screen and a blue ball on the right. If we rotate the camera 180 degrees the blue ball will be on the left screen and the red ball on the right screen. Imagine the camera is us and the red ball is the physical world and the blue ball is the astral world.
Being lucid is learning to watch both of these screens at the same time, where as conventional perception has us staring at one screen at a time. Think of lucidity even in the conventional sense of a materialist lucid dreamer. He recognizes he or she is in a lucid dream because they are aware of the existence of a body outside of that dream dimension. To be lucid in this world we need to be aware of our existence in that astral world that is going on simultaneously. To think of each of these worlds as separate is what creates non lucidity because you exist only in one space at a time rather then on multiple levels at once.

[END OF POST]

Hmm, good musings.

Your "external" and "internal" experiences both arise in the same space, so it's simply a case of different patterns being triggered into sensory form with different intensities. Normally, the "waking" patterns are more intense (more strongly activated) and so dominate the senses, and the background felt-sense which contains the waking world.

When we go to sleep and dream, we might call that flipping between the two by shifting attention, but what is it that shifts? Nothing: we are simply intensifying certain patterns at the expense of others.

To be lucid is to realise that all possible patterns in "logical space" are always present right now in experience, like stars in the daytime sky which are hidden by the brightness of the sun (the most intense extended pattern). Our insight is that we discover we are able to choose which star to make into "our sun" at any given moment.

POST: Seems relevant and applicable.

I think that when we let go (stop micromanaging) actually a lot of life realigns.

For instance, we may be slogging through the fakery of keeping a face, we decide to give up on that - and then things seem to shift so that it's not required anymore anyway. There's something about taking an approach implying the (apparent) requirement for that approach. And the only way out is to... cease taking that approach.

Being nice is 50% a trial but being "whatever you are" is never a trail, but somehow removes the requirement to be deliberately nice.

I am not a fan of up-to-date papers, let us say. And I often find that if I don't do something that I'm meant to do, it turns out not to have mattered anyway. (Although avoidance doesn't work in this way, I suppose because avoidance implies that one should be doing it and that there are repercussions.)

If life is literally this imagination space, this immersive strand of thought, then of course it has no "depth" and is an ongoing response to our approach at this moment regardless of any supposed history. Trying to live an ordinary life would actually be contrary to how things are, in that case.

I really detest humans so much these days. There are about 100 or 1000 humans I like, but on the whole I detest them. I don't give a fuck. Let them help themselves, I suppose. That's my mood recently.

I’ve been through phases like that. For me anyway, the people I actually know were fine in my mind, but anyone who was “abstract” were pretty much lumped into my sense of things more generally at the time. (That’s how it was for me anyway.) It felt like I’d burned myself out with the effort of, I dunno, feeling responsible - and instead just letting go of that obligation, I swung the other way. It was the concept of people at large I was feeling obligated to, and that’s a helluva burden.

I will meanwhile save myself, because I sure as fuck know, nobody gives a fuck about me, except maybe my parents and wife, which is sad, but that's the truth.

I’m sure that’s not true. Well, in fact I know it’s not true. But it’s a case of who matters, right? Those people matter.

I mean, I hardly ever seen anyone give a fuck about anyone else, except one or two people.

Well, it does seem that there’s a lot of self-absorption around as we go about our day. Particularly at the moment, where society seems to be set up more like a “fight”. But, you have to be sure to separate out your “fictional idea beyond immediate perception”, right? Because it has a sneaky habit of filtering the information that arrives to us, further supporting our view. It’s like: never believe your senses, never believe your thoughts, never believe your beliefs.

Or something.

So I said, fuck it. I give up. You win. I will be that way too. I need to save myself first, and so fuck you all. . . Being whoever I am is not that easy considering how much filtering and censoring I'd have done in the past.

The next step though is to give up… even that, right? Yeah, all the debris we accumulate can make things pretty difficult.

[Things turning out not to matter] ]LOL, I find that's true most of the time. Maybe I can even say it's been true every time in the past. But I still have this nagging sense of... what if I need this paper?

Yeah, it’s the faith thing! But as our “mind-roominess” grows then that stuff just gets better and better, and the apparent world seems to shift to match and accommodate us.

Quite often other people are the sign of this. When you have shifts in mood, they respond. When you feel more open, you are open to them and they are drawn to you.

For instance, a few years ago I had a bout of depression, and came out of it. I knew I was coming out of it not because of how I was feeling though - it was that in cafes and out in the town, random people would come up to me and start chatting away, in a way that never happened before. They’d just start talking unprompted about relevant topics, without preamble. They were basically taking on the role of my own inner voice, which had gone quiet, externally. Aspects of me.

Because it's not normal for people to smile like that when they pass you by, since I am not doing anything to invite that.

It’ll happen more and more. The more you surrender and the more unbounded your mind feels, the more exposed and defenceless you will feel - but what you will have become open to is a feeling of, I dunno, “the love” or whatever. You’ll be in rooms full of strangers and everyone will be your friend.

[On avoidance.] See, it's not all clean like that. I don't get how anyone can ever be perfectly clean about any of their intentions unless you've been living a certain lifestyle for a long time.

For sure. Or rather, it’s not about the lifestyle so much as when you reach the stage where you surrender your own micromanagement and let it all start flowing? But it’s natural to be in a mixed state with overlapping and contrasting intentions contributing simultaneously.

I think the amount of historicity really depends on how you operate your mind. Maybe for you there is very little, but for me there is quite a bit still.

Natural development over time, I’d say.

Eventually you “operate your mind” less and less, and it’s more like (as discussed in previous posts and our lucid dreaming pal) recalling states that already exist than creating by control. To shift from one 3D-immersive thought to another, you allow the previous one to dissolve as your attention moves to the replacement. That kind of thing.

[On wives and parents and worldviews and presents.]

It can be pretty difficult when we love people and yet they are frustrating, due to their unquestioning worldview. Especially when we see it causing them problems, or that we have to be involved in situations we disagree with conceptually, as a compromise. Although that being okay, or endurable, is a sign that there are things beyond just those ideas, that are more important maybe.

I think parental love is meant to be idiotic and primitive - that’s how parents have been designed! :-) They can only show it their way, even it’s a little outdated. Me, I accept the sentiment that’s been “infused into” the objects, even as I absent-mindedly dismiss the object themselves. There’s no accounting for taste, eh! :-)

On the point that people only care about a version of us, the “you”, that they constructed in their minds, there’s no way out of that though, right? Their “version” of you is you to them, just as your “version” of you is you to you - and will be incorrect, because it too is an aspect. Your parental relationship sounds fairly usual! :-)

[On society being based on the “fight and struggle” metaphor.]

I absolutely agree there. I’m not sure when things shifted to being “an investment”, although the seeds were sewn in the 1980s/90s are part of the deregulation of the finance industry, allowing banks and corporations to include yet more things into a “world as market” frame.

This had led to everyday people treating their financial dealings as if they were ruthless players; they ditch their empathy and adopt sociopathic tendencies for their actions in those areas. And it has become totally transparent behaviour to them. Even to the extent that they moan about the actions of investment banks and the fallout, while supporting governmental and personal behaviours which exactly correspond to, and are the reasons for, this situation.

We need only look at the current attitude towards Greece and the moral crusade against it. Greece must be punished, as an example to everyone else, the people must pay. Even thought the details are far less clearcut, it could easily have been Spain or Italy, and they were probably duped somewhat. It is disturbing to look at the misery that will because when you compare the Greek debt to the cost of the bank bailouts (reasonable summary from 2013 here on the state of those), and you see how lacking in compassion we are.

[On people being drawn to us.]

When you are “communing with glory” then what is being drawn to you isn’t people. For that time, everything becomes more “you” and the separation with others dissolved somewhat. You are, um, hanging out with yourself! ;-) So yes, our non-human aspects bring us together, because our non-human aspect is that we are just one thing.

I love the idea of you being both a sweetie and a beast - that’s how it should be! Although strictly speaking, we aren’t anything at all until events trigger within us a response of a particular type. And then afterwards, we stop being that too. We might have ideas about ourselves which persist, but they are baseless really, right? You are that nonhuman happy-said-sunshine-thing.

[On surrender and exposure.]

Yeah, by “surrender” I mean to cease to obscure what you are. It means to surrender opposition to your true state; it’s not like giving up to other forces. Since there is only the force-that-is-you, to surrender simply means to become more accurate in your ways, and hence effortless.

On “exposure”, perhaps that’s the wrong word. I was reaching for something like “unbounded” or that being the context of everything, without being any one thing. There’s “nothing to grab” as you said.

[Dissolving the historicity.]

The more you do so, the less of a fight things become, the more like an “open mind” you seem to be, as you referred to earlier. That’s what that whole Overwriting Yourself was all about of course - relaxing or ceasing to oppose, and then asserting that unencumbered state, taking on the shape of it. The ultimate in agility!

Do you have a, um, vision or clear concept of how you would like to live, the world as you would like it to be? Not defined in terms of a response or manipulation of this one (i.e. not defined as counter or negatively) but as a positive image (not emotionally, but in the sense of being “assertable”)?

You can undertake long-term commitments or vows, and then you no longer have a loose identity with regard to those commitments.

Fair point. I was pushing more for residual ideas about concepts of self, and concepts of the world, but those are intertwined with our commitments too.

Hmm, well if giving up your mask is "surrender" doesn't it just cheapen the word?

How so? It is to surrender the comfort of your ideas to that which cannot be expressed, only experienced, in fact not quite even that. Our real self might be invincible, but it is not certain, until we have given ourselves to it - which is an act of faith ("surrender" in that sense, abandonment of prior ideas and trusting). This doesn't mean "dropping the social mask" so much as letting the apparent boundary between identify and world to fall away, meaning complete exposure but also complete becoming.

The closest I found so far is something shown in Hunter x Hunter anime.

Got it bookmarked but haven't watched it yet. Just glancing at the wiki page to remind me:

There they meet a kung fu master named Wing, who trains them in utilizing Nen, a Qi-like life energy utilized by Hunters to manifest parapsychological abilities—also considered to be the final requirement to pass the Hunter Exam.

Yeah, I'm signing up for the Hunter Exam, definitely! :-) One could potentially create a persistent dream realm to try it out in. Since it already exists as a pattern, it wouldn't need to be "created" just traveled to.

Might it be better to talk in terms of not being "identified" rather than "disowning"? The final view would be one where owning or disowning becomes meaningly. It's easier to say that because we are everything, we are not any particular thing - and that this isn't about content.

For instance, if changing from this environment to another is simply a case of allowing this to fade and embracing another, it makes no more sense to say we own or identify an environment than it does to say the same of a thought. The world "is" a strand of thought, albeit a bright and stable and immersive one, etc.

I can disown the world because it's mine to disown. :) Me disowning it is proof that it's mine to do with as I please.

Might it be better to talk in terms of not being "identified" rather than "disowning"? The final view would be one where owning or disowning becomes meaningly. It's easier to say that because we are everything, we are not any particular thing - and that this isn't about content.

For instance, if changing from this environment to another is simply a case of allowing this to fade and embracing another, it makes no more sense to say we own or identify an environment than it does to say the same of a thought. The world "is" a strand of thought, albeit a bright and stable and immersive one, etc.

Whatever we say about it will sound as a limitation.

How very true. But who can resist trying to capture it in language, even though it is inherently impossible? Not I, for "one"!

It's so hard to come to grips with this being the case, because the world can become so small and insignificant if you get what this means. It's not a vast place.

It "has no depth" as I phrase it. The mind is vast- infinite - in terms of possibilities, but it takes up no space and takes no time to not-do-so. Talking of "personal beings" being overwhelmed, though, makes it sound like a personal being is in something - but I'm guessing you mean something like, of all the possible experiences, the experience of being-this-person-in-this-world is but one, and as a proportion is therefore vanishingly small?

In reference to the infinite grid of all possible moments, each instant is infinitely small.

What I mean is, your ultimate being overwhelms the world. Not the other way around.

Yes, that's it. The world is an ongoing thought within you, you are not an ongoing process within a world.

Gotta go. Thanks for the quality chat - enjoyable as always.

POST: I'm beginning to question some things about oneirosophy.

I'd say this being God Almighty thing is just another "as if" hat you can put on. The true sense in which you are God is that you are consciousness, and the world is solidified imagination within that.

Meaning -

The world has no depth, but it's not in the sense of having no complexity or mystery, right? It's just that it is not "made from" anything; it is not a place. It's true that it comes down to "nothingness", but only in the sense that there is no solid substrate or ultimate pattern; there is still meaning. Experiential content remains mysterious, because God Himself does not know what the next-moment will contain. If he did then that would already be that next-moment. The complexity and the simplicity are unbounded.

Oneirosophy (or nondualism/idealism) doesn't remove the mystery, it just means it is clearer what's going on, which is something along the lines of:

• We tend to assume that we are people in a world, in fact we are conscious perspectives having a being-a-person-in-a-world experience.
• We tend to assume intentions act locally (body movement, deliberate thoughts), in fact they act globally (the whole world shifts).
• We tend to assume the observed facts of the world are definite, in fact their relative contributions to experience can be adjusted.

So it's really about a removal of misconceptions. Following that, the experience you choose to have is your own. You can live the life you want in the version of the world you want. There really is no fixed content-based truth at all; there is only the fundamental truth that it's all arising in awareness.

The only problem might be, there's sort of nothing to say beyond that. If there's no "how it works" and all experience is relative, it means you can't even really argue about things anymore...

POST: My Experiences So Far

There are lots of lessons to learn here.

But is there anything to learn really, beyond the one main lesson?

Beyond realising that the content of experience is transitory and relatively true, and that only the nature of it as consciousness does not change and is fundamentally true - surely everything else you apparently discover is really just "more dream"?

Even that lesson is more dream. You're dreaming a dream of discovering the transitory content of experience and the nature of consciousness. And you're also dreaming anything else you learn or don't learn. Knowing your true nature and not knowing your true nature are both dreams you can dream.

Agreed. The lesson is really a command: "cease and be!"

POST: Everyday Inception

Consider this as strands of thought, perhaps? From that perspective:

• What you might call your experience of being-a-person-in-this-world is a very bright, persistent 3D-immersive strand of thought which fills up your perceptual space. Directing your attention to that thought, you directly feel your so-called body and so on.
• However, most people have got into the habit of starting a new strand of thought, a thought which is "about" their body. This may be because they rarely have their attention expanded into the main strand of thought; instead they are focused in one of the spatial gaps, making them vulnerable to getting lost in passing thoughts, and rendering their awareness of the main thought like a "peripheral vision" experience.

All strands of thought occur within the same aware space, kinda "parallel-simultaneous" with each other. There are no "levels" like inception, but there are relative "brightnesses" at any one time. Being fully present would mean that the brightness of the primary strand would be intense, and there would be no narrowing attentional profile deforming it.

Another dream-like thing that people get is deja-vu! ;-)

I have an extra thing to say, which I'll write up properly later maybe, about how we often make the mistake of trying to move our bodies by gripping onto and moving the body-sensations. However, this just generates tension (we are intending the experience of "gripping"); we should actually intend-imagine the target posture, or a fictional image which implies the movement for us, and allow the body-sensations to shift towards that goal effortlessly.

A feeling-movement seems quite a good term to me. Intention can be the movement (really: a thought of an end-state which experience then moves towards) or it can be an indirect assertion (an imaged object causes the movement), but I guess both of them are basically subtle asserts of fact. There is never any movement really; an intention repatterns or defines a sequence of moments, which your attentional focus then encounters.

If you've read the Missy Vineyard book, you might find the exercises in The Michael Chekhov Handbook worth a look (link points to PDF: see ch4, p32 I think). They are exercises for actors, but essentially (unwittingly) they leverage the realisation that your experience is imaginary. Because they are written for performance use, they are described in an accessible way and quite a few people seem to find them enjoyable.

Wow, this is Jedi training! Thanks for this resource!

My father has it... I have it... my sister has it... you have that power, too.

The tension you speak of. Perhaps one could think of it as the common art of 'walking' applied to all 'movement'?
Most of us seem to walk effortlessly, in that we do not appear to consciously consider each individual step or twist of the ankle.
So we do not really think of 'walking' as a series of literal steps that we have to take. The 'walking' is just what it is feels like to be aware of the imagined target coming into actual being here and now.
Which is what Douglas Harding points toward with his experiment of spinning the world, or driving the world. And here's a related video/audio pointer with Richard Lang.

Yes, this is a similar angle to Missy Vineyard and Michael Chekhov (Alexander Technique variant and acting imagery, respectively). It's a changing of context leading to a change in how you intend. Douglas Harding is pointing out that same thing as "being the space in which experience arises", although he never quite says it straight I think.

I think most people, even though they walk effortlessly in the sense of not individually directing their legs, do somewhat "re-intend" their body position continually, which is equivalent to sending a "stay still!" order at the same time you are directing a movement. When you release that pattern, it's like gliding.

Precisely. One could think of one's whole self as a leg in that sense. But it seems like it does require quite a bit of trust in oneself, as well as an openness toward the unknown. I guess fearlessness is a term that incorporates both.
Let us take for example an individual who is terribly afraid of dogs. They decide to move from point A to point B. Initially there may be gliding, but as soon as a dog-like shape enters their field of vision they may feel a strong desire to 're-intend' their position as a way to seek alternate routes. The alternate route being a way not around the dog per se, but around all the bodily sensations involved with acute stress. But if this same individual is always aware that dogs are 'out there', gliding at all may be very tough.
Oh, I would also like to thank you for making me aware of this 'Alexander Technique'. I had never heard of it before. It seems like quite the useful tool!

Yes, it's about a level of trust. Trust that the spontaneous movement that arises is the appropriate one, even though it feels that it is an uncontrolled response.

In truth, so long as attention is fully open (actually: no attentional control) then the total available information is being contributed to your response, and it will be maximally appropriate. Ironically, any effort to constrain attention or movement to control experience, will lead to a "less safe" route.

However, it feels very exposing to pursue this at first - although it leads to a sense of ongoing pleasure once things settle out and more of the "background" shines through.

POST: Playing with Attributions & Points of View (Yer uh Wizard, Harry!)

[POST]

I was talking in the comments of another thread about playing with how you relate to perceptions. Here’s a little more about that.
Look around you for a while. Really get a good sense of where you are and how you feel right now. Take a few minutes to do that.
… … …
Good? Alright. Now, try creating a division between two distinct types of experience you’re having: “direct perceptions” and “attributions”. Notice the difference between the visual keyboard you're perceiving and your concept of “what a keyboard is”. To help you get a grasp of the difference between the perception and the attribution, try changing your attribution. Think about your keyboard as the instrument that it is. Then think about it for the block of atoms/matter that it is. Then think about it as the visual stimulation of 2d colors in your eyes that it is. Then think about it as the geometrical object in space that it is. Then think about it as the extension of yourself that it is. Note these different “ways of thinking about” the perception, and how they differ from the perception itself. Notice how much easier is it to play with these "ways of thinking about" than it is to play with the direct perception itself.
Try doing this with more complex, nuanced things. Look at your neighbor not as, for example, “Jeff the guy”, but as the hairless and upright homo Sapien, as the geometric object in space, as the sack of meat and flesh, as the conscious being with experiences and perceptions, as the child that grew up into an adult, as the background character in your solipsistic world, etc.
Now, take note that one of these was your “default”, while the others required an active consideration on your part. If you’d just stumbled out of bed and saw your keyboard, or saw your neighbor, you’d be “subconsciously” using one of these default attributions. In fact, nearly everything you interact with is conceptualized in merely one way of many possible ways, and your current defaults can be changed if you’d like to change them. If “Jeff the guy” is annoying to you, “Jeff the kid who grew up into a confused and sad man” might be less annoying, or if your keyboard seems crude and mechanical, thinking of it as a physical object of color and shape may make it less abrasive.
Your “default” is not very different from the defaults of most people. Collectively, we share a lot of default ways of conceptualizing things. These are “cultures”. Cultures are collected, habitual, often subconscious ways of conceptualizing our perceptions. If you feel your default way of conceptualizing things is shitty or non-ideal, then you can break away from your cultural habits. Personally, I think my (our?) culture has a lot of shitty habits both minor and major. For example, minorly, I think our cultural attitude toward food is pretty lame, and that we could be handling food in a much better way. Majorly, I think each of us has a tremendous potential for power and influence over our own state of being, but our culture conceptualizes lots and lots of “external” things as having power of us, and by assuming they have that power, we grant them that power.
This is kind of like being Harry Potter, and the invitations to Hogwarts are arriving in the mail, but instead of bolting up the mailbox, Uncle Dursley has taught the whole family that envelopes will burn you if you touch them, and so nobody ever touches an envelope, and if they did, they probably would genuinely think they were being burned.
Alternatively, you can try to be “culturally open”. In other words, question your habits and tendencies and play with your habits and tendencies. See if you can’t change your defaults. See if you can’t start to love something you used to hate, or see if you can’t find depth to appreciate in something you’d only understood superficially. You can also do these things in the opposite way (e.g. hate something you once loved) and while it’s less fun and less encouraging, knowing that you can do that and being able to do that is important if you prioritize flexibility.
Of all the things one can shift one’s default attributions toward/about, the one I’ve found to be the most interesting is the way one relates to other living things. You’re currently experiencing reality/yourself as a being within a world. This is probably not a very unusual mode of experience. We can imagine experiencing merely a volitional being, and we can imagine experiencing merely a non-volitional world, but between those extremes there seems to be a “bigger infinity” of potential experiences that involve both a volitional entity and a non-volitional world. Taking the POV of a being or entity appears to be a common perspective (at least from where I stand).
While “you” are not a human, which is to say your capacity is not constricted to only being a human, you can (and, I think, should) dwell on the fact that you are currently experiencing a human point of view (POV). You’re currently “humaning”. And your spectrum of experience is that of the particular human you’re experiencing “yourself as”. So, while I’m =/= Utthana, the current perspective I’m taking is Utthana’s perspective (although I do sometimes take others). And just so, other living things are unique in that they exist within our perspective as other perspectives themselves. For example, TGeorge exists within my POV, but he exists as a POV himself within my POV.
This means that there’s “a way it’s like to be” TGeorge. You can meaningfully say, “This is what it’s like to be a cat,” whereas you can’t say, “this is what it’s like to be a chair”. We can imagine ourselves as experiencing ourselves from the POV of a cat or from the POV of TGeorge, in a way that we can’t imagine ourselves as experiencing ourselves from the POV of a chair (as conventionally understood – we can imagine something that looks like a chair which could have a POV). Being mindful of this, to me, is super useful and enjoyable. I like recognizing other POV's within my POV because my default is often to objectify people and the really inflate my own POV. I don't tend to see other beings as full and as nuanced as myself, but Utthana the human and TGeorge the human are both equal POV's that I could take. So I like taking this perspectives (sometimes, and not always), because it allows me to:
1) Empathize. All POV’s are POV’s that I could theoretically take. I’m the capacity to take perspectives, not a specific point of view myself. “That could be me,” is applicable to everyone I encounter. I like to play with my default conceptualization of other beings in such a way that I'm inclined to have empathy for them. I currently am interested in playing a role of someone who is relatively non-aggressive, non-competitive, helpful, and kind. To further my interest in playing that particular game, I make things easier for myself by changing the way I look at difficult people (some of the time).
2) Be aware of the glaring subjectivity of my own POV. By regularly acknowledging and appreciating other potential perspectives, you come to appreciate your own perspective in light of others. You become aware of all the possible perspectives you could take. I especially like dwelling on plants, because plants have a potential perspective and POV, but it’s radically different from that of animals and helps to demonstrate just how alien our perspectives can potentially be (which in turn highlights the potential weirdness and alienness of our current, default POV).
3) Change my attributions more easily. Seeing my default perspective as just one among many helps make it seem less “front and center”, less dominant, less immovable. For example, I currently look out my window and see trees, grass, etc. They look kind of dark and I conceptualize them in a slightly negative way. They don’t seem as positive as grass and trees in brighter lighting. Understanding that my default perspective is just one of many possible perspectives, I can decide to see the dim lighting as beautiful and cinematic, I can decide to see the grass and trees as miraculous shapes that grew from the ground, I can decide to see them as distinct entities with experiences and perspectives, or I can even decide to (and this is a step further, altering perception instead of attribution) see something entirely else outside of my window, like the Eiffel Tower. Asserting a new attribution or perception may, at first, feel like it’s “only happening in your mind” or “imaginary”. Further weakening your sense of your default POV as privileged (as well as further contemplating subjective idealism in general) will make “imaginary” seem a lot less imaginary and “only happening in your mind” seem like an arbitrary description.
I recommend you experiment with different conceptual attributions for your perceptions. Don't think that your perceptions can only be conceptualized in one way. You don't have to learn how to do magic and directly change the "physical" world around you in order to radically change your experience in ways that make you happier and help you do things you'd like to do. You have tons and tons and tons of default, subconscious attributions to your perceptions and every single one of them can be played with. This whole thing is malleable. And even the "anchor" of your attributions and perceptions, your particular "POV as a being", is merely one potential POV and you can play with that as well. Start small, work your way up, and try not to be discouraged by any tendencies to dismiss things as "imaginary" or "all in your head".

[END OF POST]

A good read. Couple of quick ones for now:

And just so, other living things are unique in that they exist within our perspective as other perspectives themselves. For example, TGeorge exists within my POV, but he exists as a POV himself within my POV.

Because this phrasing implies a nesting problem, it's probably better to say that all possible POVs are "moments" that are simultaneously available, and you can "take on the shape of" any one of them. The TG that is apparently within your POV is made from "sensations and perceptions and meaning"; it is not actually a POV. A POV is an experience, it isn't something that can be contained within anything else.

“this is what it’s like to be a chair”.

I don't see why this wouldn't be possible. People on ketamine report experiences of just this sort (becoming a certain object), as do those following various shamanic practices. It can't be imagined when not being experienced, of course - i.e. while you are still experiencing "human-ing" with the baseline sensory-channel formatting that this involves - but then again you can't experience being joyful and simultaneously imagine being depressed either.

This [becoming chairs and tables] is a subtle and tricky point, though, and you're right to question it. I wasn't sure how to convey it in such a way that made it sufficiently clear.

I agree it's a tricky one to discuss, because the discussion itself is of course "formatted" as a shadow-sensory experience, so it gets very abstract very quickly - but I think it can be quite a fruitful path to explore. There's no one way to make it clear, I'd say.

I don't think it's possible to experience yourself as an inanimate object.

What is special about "animation"? You can become the void space you are "looking out from" right now, and that is definitely not animated as such. You can become the gaps between sensations. You can also become your hair.

[They] experience themselves as being something very chair-like, but it's a distinct thing from what we think of as a conventional chair.

That would be the exact point though, right? If you-as-consciousness become a chair - if you "take on the shape of" the experience of being-a-chair - then it would not correspond to what we, while human-ing, think of as "a chair".

I think the subtle underlying important insight here is that the "aliveness" or "intelligence" or "experiencing" that we have belongs to consciousness, and not to the shape of the experience. "Senses" are an abstraction, you never experience them. "Being human" is a dead pattern, as dead as a chair.

Lend your attention now to the room around you, allowing yourself to "feel" into it in all directions. You experience this room by becoming it, filtered or organised by certain patterns. Even if you remove visual imagery, auditory imagery, textural imagery from this experience, you still have an experience.

Are you maybe thinking about "human-ing" as being your current baseline experience in some fundamental way, when really it is consciousness?

I think even the notion of a "POV" might be problematic here. Because I don't actually have a human POV as much (as you've just pointed out with your examples), what I actually experience is being-a-world but formatted in a certain way. And doesn't "perspective" have the same problem? What exactly does it mean to "have a perspective"? It's just another way of saying we're taking on the shape of a particular experience, surely?

Let's perhaps skip to the bit we probably would need to bash out between us: knowing. (We can always back-pedal later.) This is not fully formed, I'm just trying to feel out how we could approach this verbally:

I suggest:

• To "know" something, you simply have to be it. Knowing is being, and vice versa.

This is not the same as having a conceptualisation of being something, of "being aware you are that something", since that is actually a thought about what you are (and is always wrong). The difference between knowing and knowing-that.

• To "know that" you are something, is to become the thought-about the knowing.

I suggest that we often confusing becoming the thought about something ("knowing that") with becoming the something.

I think you may be onto something that 1 is possible, while I think 2 is not possible.

Yes. We might draw comparison with our own experience, living as a human person. Let's proceed from our everyday experience:

• We are always experiencing "being" a person. (This is not strictly true in fact, but for this brief moment let's go with it and we'll return to this later.)
• From time to time we experience knowing-that we are a human.
• The knowing-that takes the form of a thought, and that thought arises as basically a "shadow-sensory experience". In other words, formatted as human senses.

This leads us to:

• The manner in which a human knows-that it is a human, is in the form of a human-patterned experience.
• The manner in which a chair would know-that it is a chair, would have to be in the form of a chair-patterned experience.

So -

I definitely think that one can be a chair. In fact, I think that our ongoing experience is a case of becoming lots of different things, so this is not a stretch really. It's actually harder to argue that we experiencing being a human as such, rather than just occasionally thinking-that we are a human. I am not definite that one can know-that one is a chair, while being a chair. And perhaps that actually takes us somwhere interesting:

• In what sense is it true that I can simultaneously be a human while also knowing-that I am a human, anyway? Surely I am either being a human or being the thought-about being a human?

And if this is the case, then doesn't that lift the restriction on knowing-that you are a chair? Because it reminds us that knowing and knowing-that are on the same level. It is consciousness that takes on the shape of both experiences. Consciousness is surely free to take on the shape of "being a chair" and then "knowing that it is a chair", without restriction?

[Knowing, not knowing, know-that simultaneously:] it's more likely possible than not possible. As a general rule, imposing restrictions on consciousness is false.

Agreed.

The way I conceive of this is through the idea of "lines of thought". To recap briefly: if we go back to the idea of what we truly are being an "unbounded open awareness", then our current experience if being a person in this room is really just a very bright, 3D-immersive, spatial thought which is filling up that openness. But it is a thought nevertheless.

Then, there is no reason why, just as we might visualise a sphere floating in this perceptual space, we cannot at the same time hold a "parallel-simultaneous" experience in that same openness.

We can look at a mountain range and simultaneously have a thought about mountains. In fact, we can be walking along a street in San Francisco while parallel-simultaneously paragliding in France. It's a matter of the relative intensity of the experiential patterns, rather than actually "being in a place".

In a very real sense, we are having all possible experiences parallel-simultaneously right now - it's just that one or more of those "present-potential moments" are brighter and therefore more dominant than the others. (Usual metaphor: the sun in the daytime sky obscures the stars that are always there.)

So, in this discussion we're increasingly moving towards, again, consciousness as primary and any experiences - including reflections upon experience (which are also experiences) - being always available and current.

Our apparent "human-ing" is therefore not at all restrictive inherently - except that for as long as it remains "bright" we will not be chairs nor be able to think from the position of being a chair. And if we become chairs completely we will not be able to think about being so in a human way.

The question then perhaps becomes more about the ability to associatively link from one experience to another, rather than about the ability to have an experience. I can be a chair and then be TG, but whilst TG I might have no associative path to recall the memory of being the chair.

Time stops being of much use here.

Indeed, really we mean the experience of change or relative change (although that has problems too). I treat time, like space, as "arising with" a particular strand of experiencing. I use "parallel-simulateous" to try and convey that things don't necessarily share the same experiential space, although they all appear within "open awareness".

And learning to play with relative brightnesses is what I'm particularly interested in.

For me, that's exactly what all this is about. The apparent manipulation of reality is all about what I would call "triggering patterns into brightness". When you move from this room to the room next door, you aren't going anywhere. Rather, the 3D-immersive image of one room - the thought of one room - is shape-shifting into the image of the other.

Are you REALLY the chair or TG? Or are you just experiencing yourself as if you were the chair or TG?

Yes, that's the question. That's why I keep going back to this "taking on the shape of an experience" wording. You are not inherently anything in particular, you are "that which takes on the shape of" things. For convenience, it's handy to use the phrase "I am TG" while that is the experience, but all experiences operate on an "as if" basis.

This is where the notion of imagining-that comes in. Right now you are imagining-that you are a person in a world. You are also imagining-that a whole set of facts-of-the-world are true, and the brightening of those patterns as a superposition leads to the selection of the moment you are experiencing now (as a metaphorical description anyway).

I found this to be a really productive and interesting convo.

Me also. It's always clarifying, especially if we're coming at it from slightly different starting points. I guess it's inevitable that eventually we'll all converge on at least a recognition of the common underlying aspects to each of our approaches.

As to the other subs, my project is basically split three ways: developing metaphysical models (here), collecting spontaneous shifts ("glitches"), exploring practical reformatting ("jumping"). The strands have to be kept a little bit separate though, because mixing the platforms mangles your experiences (a point which follows naturally from our discussion).

POST: It seems like y'all are en route to mastering the siddhis, but...

[POST]

Hi there. I'm going out on a limb here and assuming that most of you (the prominent posters, at least) are familiar with the tenets of Buddhism--it seems that "oneirosophy" is (inherently) a melding of Eastern/Western philosophies. I have no doubt that there are some of you in this subreddit who are currently mastering/have mastered the siddhis (psychic powers that arise as a result of lucidity).
My honest concern is, is not oneirosophy itself ultimately just another distraction, like everything else? I've spent many hours reading through a bunch of posts and they're all quite stimulating, intellectually and spiritually, etc. However, there is a LOT of ego here. Like, a lot. A lot of pride and condescension, as well... even if it's not intentional. While oneirosophy resonates with me (admittedly!), sometimes I can see why the Buddha intimated that it's more difficult for gods (as opposed to humans) to achieve release.

[END OF POST]

Well, I'm inclined to say: why not both? ;-)

I know what you're getting at, but provided you recognise experiences for what they are (peak and mundane it's all the same), then you are fully free to enjoy them, since you realise you aren't them fundamentally. That even includes having fun by being a bit of a dick in an argument now and again.

Perhaps it's not what you mean, but surely pursuits of power are only "distractions" if you think you are separate from the world and that one part will overcome the other? In exactly the same way as "seeking" is a distraction. So long as you don't mix up the narrative with some sort of "development" - you have understood that although you may change, you never progress - it's okay I reckon.

Hey, thank you. :) Good words, here. And this actually does clarify some things!

No worries.

An interesting question to ask ourselves: once you've realised the nature of things - and know that there's nothing to it, that it's boring - what then? You just gonna sit about for all eternity?

Everything stays the same.

That's why so many enlightened folk of tradition still drink, smoke, are rude and impatient, all that (apparently). By default, you are still having a being-a-person-in-a-world experience. Just because the world turns out to be dreamlike in the sense of having nothing behind it, doesn't suddenly make you a super-lovely guy - unless you arbitrarily decide to be so.

And that's what you do have, more options (or rather the rediscovery of the options you always had) - i.e. the recognition of the possibility of changing your "private view" as you please.

A1: Late to the game, but I'll comment anyway...
That's why so many enlightened folk of tradition still drink, smoke, are rude and impatient, all that (apparently).
There may be a distinction between being "enlightened" and being "developed". I can imagine a person who's been able to see through to the "reality" of the world yet still has personal issues to resolve or a better perspective to develop.
Perhaps people often equate the two - enlightenment and personal "beatification" - but they might be mutually exclusive.

I agree. People tend to have an idea of what "enlightenment" is, and that it'll equate to some automatic Gandiesque outlook. But it is, at base, simply the recognition of the nature of experience: that it is consciousness "taking on the shape of" content, and the world is not in fact a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time".

So, your behaviour might change because it comes with the direct recognition that "everything is consciousness" and everything is an aspect of yourself - but "yourself" isn't the personal self, and the nature of reality is in truth amoral, so it doesn't pan out quite like folk might assume.

If you suddenly realised that what you really were was "a big open space in which experiences appeared", then all your preconceived notions about what is important get recontextualised. It's this shift in context, and its implications, that others tend not to get.

POST: True "timeless" nature of dreams?

So, the "global summary" of the dream, a representation of (but also actually being) its entirety - encapsulated in a felt-sense of its overallness?

I think that's about it. If I could hold on to what that dream "structure" was, it was all the experiencing of the dream but wrapped up into into a 4D structure of sorts. Hard to convey since hen we think of "structure" or "sculpture", we immediately think of something static/unchanging. But the structure had all the aspects we know as change, just wrapped up in itself.
"Felt-sense" is about right. I could sort of see it in mind's eye - but that was a visual interpretation arising from the feeling of recognition of what this thing was. (That is if I'm not mistaken about the whole thing.)

My suggestion (via The Patterning of Experience and related) would then be that your current world is also a felt-sense that you are interpreting by unfolding aspects of it into sensory experience - arising as a 3D-immersive strand of thought in your "perceptual space".

Yes. To me, it hints at the possibility that our current experience is our physical brain interpreting or translating that felt-sense into something temporal and sequential - for whatever reason. Of course, the "brain", in this case, would also be a part of this experience...so a recursively created experience by a created experience.

I say - No recursion. Just forget brains. And interpretation, as such.

A moment's pause, a relaxation of attention, and it's obvious - right now - that what you truly are is basically an "open aware space", and all sensory experience arises within that. "Sensory experience" includes thoughts, which are basically "shadow-sensory"; they are just not so bright, stable and 3D-immersive.

I might then suggest that there is no 'outside' to this space, and that all possible experiential patterns pre-exist and are dissolved within it, varying only in their levels of contribution.

All you need to do is, while looking at this screen, direct your attention to the "place you are looking out from", and note what you find there. (The alternative is to take a leap of faith and "just decide" to become the background space to your current experience.)

POST: Wu-Wei, doing nothing

It means doing away with the compulsion to "better ones situation" or to be mired in ignorance of one's perfect position always.

I'd also add that it is a much more practical thing. It's that thing of your body "moving by itself", effortlessly. It's the flowing detachment which means your body and mind respond appropriately to the situation. This often gets overlooked by authors, because if you've never heard of the experience and never had it, you would never know that this is what is being indicated.

Just as with (say) the parables in the Bible, where, because they don't know what is being pointed at, they interpret it in all sorts of mundane ways relating to making choices and moral views (not to mention an "entity god" who is separate and does things independently).

So, one might do away with the compulsion to better ones situation, but that's in the sense of ceasing trying to directly manipulate it with action, rather than with intention and letting the action flow. Anything you do is "correct" in the sense of it arising from the current state in response to circumstances, but only if you truly allow action to rise spontaneously, rather than holding on to parts of your current state.

Wu-Wei, then, is perhaps better described as "not interfering" and "opening to spontaneity" and "effortless action" in a direct experiential sense. However, as with all these things, it does then get used as a metaphor in other parts of life.

All good points. I may have phrased it in a confusing manner. I like your quoted explanations. It is indeed the sort of thing that is difficult to understand in the context of how "regular" people "regularly" understand the world. Non-interference is the easiest for me to directly understand. When we interfere it's because we believe in separation. If you realize the experience as a shared dream of one entity, then you have no reason to interfere, because you are it. Then you have every reason to play.

Perhaps the core of this is: people confuse intention with experiencing bodily action.

In fact, an intention can be attached to any act or experience (and an act is really an experience: the experience of an action), whether it is "regularly" logically related to it or not, and results will follow correspondingly. Without understanding the rule that "experiences are local, intentions are global", it's inevitably that things like wu-wei and indeed everyday motion and experience, will be misinterpreted.

So then what do you think classifies as interfering?
If I had to try to piece it together I'd say nothing can be truly said to be an interference if one completely accepts one's direction. Note how I didn't say be sure of one's direction; you can be uncertain but accepting, of course. This I've found is the best way to live. Sure you could have things turn out a very certain way, but that's overall less enjoyable then the spontaneity of doing what you want in an unpredictable way.

Any ongoing intention which countermands our spontaneous movements - of body, mind, attention or world - which arise in the moment. Something like that?

However, practically speaking, we would of course occasionally "redirect" things by intention. But it should be in the manner of course correction, rather than slowing things down because we don't trust our spontaneous responses and so holding onto every moment.

In general: you should be sitting back and enjoying the unfolding experience, rather than constantly hitting the brakes.

A further thought: also, pushing ahead or "forcing" is also interference, and probably the most common type. You are walking along the street to catch your bus, and you force the walking to go faster than it is spontaneously occurring. Lots of examples of this, large and small, all stemming from a lack of trust that what is arising naturally is appropriate. (So you get to the bus stop, and it's delayed for 10 minutes. If you'd kept your relaxed pace, you would have arrived at the perfect time - and so on.)

[This is very meandering...]

I'm sat on a chair. I'm thinking about how crappy work has been. I've been pretty depressed about it. Wait! I intend:

• "A great business opportunity that's ideal for me."

I potter about. Feel hungry. Fridge is empty of healthy food. Maybe I'll go to the grocery store to buy apples. I pause. My body gets up, and does this. I find myself enjoying the sights and sounds of the city as I walk a couple of blocks along. I find myself interacting wittily with the shopkeeper, but before I make a purchase, I bump into an old friend I had been thinking about earlier, and we pop into the bar round the corner for a pint of cider ("liquid apples, almost the same!"). We have a fun time. During our conversation, he mentions that his ex-girlfriend is setting up her own design business. Knowing I'm into those things, but my work has dried up, he give me her number. We meet two days later for a coffee, our business ideas are totally aligned: why don't we set this up as a partnership?

= one intention + letting experience arise.

You can live without intending, but if you never intend, then experience will just continue along its present path. I will remain depressed, depressing things will continue to happen.

Intending = re-patterning, with that patterning subsequently arising in experience.

The main lesson is, though: there's no "fundamentally naturally good state", because that would be the notion of destiny. I don't agree with the notion of destiny, or of a path that is independently correct. If you don't like the current state you are in - perhaps because it has become very "splashy" and incoherent, you can use intention-imagination to bring it under control more efficiently. Things will resolve themselves eventually, but deliberate intending lets you "skip to the end".

For instance, fixing the heart or abdomen as your centre provides a stable, reliable point as everything else shifts and evolves. (Although ideally you are spending daily time letting all of that left over movement unravel anyway, through a releasing period.) I'd call those areas the "global summary": by attending to but not focusing on - perhaps "including" is a better word - you get a situational awareness of an overall type. It doesn't guide you, it is just is the most efficient way to be directly aware of all available information. Which allows you to decide intelligently whether to amend it or not.

Short version - If you don't like your situation, intend the alternative. Having done so, then trust that the world has been re-patterned "4-dimensionally", and let things unfold. If you keep intending (micro-managing) then you don't get the benefit of the "autocomplete" nature of patterning - instead, you will only get exactly the step-by-steps you ask for, that you can intellectually design, and you won't benefit from any "magical" coincidences or discontinuities, etc.

But couldn't the state of allowing your intentions could be the fundamentally naturally good state?

Okay, this is a wording issue I suppose. I use "state" to refer to the current configuration of the world, all the activated patterns in their relative intensities. If you don't interfere, then all the experiences which arise spontaneously will do so in accordance with that configuration. If you intend, you shift the state, and subsequence will arise in alignment with that configuration. So in this sense, one state is as good as another in the sense that there is no configuration that is "the configuration". Just like there is no "best" pattern of ripples in a pool of water.

Maybe if we use "approach to living" rather than state to mean what you are saying, then we can say that non-interference would be the ideal approach - with occasional course-corrections (amendments of state/configuration) if so desired.

My heart is sending out good feelings when I align to my highest intention. What is my highest intention? To be free.

Can we change this to, rather than "sending out good feelings", some thing like "is a good feeling" when you align to your highest intention? And then I'd suggest: what's happening is that when you cease to oppose the spontaneous arising of experiences, you feel a clarity and maybe even something like "love"?

Note, you can have this feeling regardless of whether the current state is traditionally a pleasant one or not. The feeling comes from not being conflicted or fragmented, not from a situation being good. People feel most at peace shortly before their horrific violent car-crash deaths...

That's why I say that there is no such thing as a fundamentally good state, but there might be a good approach.

Would that description fit in with what you're getting at?

...

Try this experiment:

Lie down on the floor and let go completely. Of your body, mind, but most importantly your attention. "Play dead" and allow your attention to roam where it wants. Habitually, we try to use attention to manipulate our experience and "do things" but this actually obstructs change. So having let go, "just decide" - i.e. intend without doing anything - that your body is going to get up. Do nothing, and let your body move by itself when it wants.

Note: By "do nothing" you must not actively do nothing, because what you will tend to do in that case is re-assert your current position. In other words, you will intend being-where-you-are are as the interpretation of "do nothing". And as a result you will suppress any movement. Really I mean, "do not interfere with any movements that arise".

I'm sure I could do it but just a bit hesitant to try. Why might this be the case?

You can definitely do it; it's not different to what you're doing anyway, you are just ceasing to intend the opposing motion. Stopping "staying still" all the time by constantly asserting your current position.

It's a bit frightening because you are letting go of what you perceive to be direct control (even though such control actually works against your intentions unfolding). It amounts to "surrendering to god" and trusting that spontaneous movements "from nowhere" are the right ones, even though you cannot intellectually access any reason for them.

Particularly in Western societies, there is an underlying assumption that our raw spontaneous aspect is evil and untrustworthy and needs to be suppressed. You perhaps have unexplored notions of how bodies and minds work, of there being an eternal battle between reason and magic, impulses and order, good and evil, and so on.

Really, it is fear of The Unknown. But you have to get used to this at some point, because all of experience is "unknown" until it appears within your perception.

Short version - Try it and see. Once you decide to truly surrender and give up, and things settle out, it'll likely be one of the best experiences of your life.

Thank you for doing what you do. :)

Haha, thanks.

Oh, I had an extra thought too: when you release your attention, this obviously means you are no longer avoiding any body-space areas which might contain "stuck thoughts and incomplete movements", as I call them.

In other words, things may move and shift and that includes uncomfortable feelings that have been left "orphaned". If such things arise, just let them become prominent, peak, and they will "complete themselves" and fade. Trust this. Sometimes people clamp back down again when these things appear - if you remain in open attention, it'll pass, and will be like a wave in the ocean, rather than in a glass. The relief and calm once these are cleared is very pleasant. Note: as is the theme here, you don't need to do anything about them, they'll resolve themselves.

POST: The idea of imaginal metabolism.

I hadn't thought of using "digestion" as a metaphor before - really interesting.

If everyday life (and specifically the body) is basically "imagination solidified", then any imaginative act performed with intention can potentially have an effect. Although we habitually view our sensory experience and our thoughts as existing in different realms, in fact they differ only in intensity, and share the same space - which means that the connection is a matter of degree rather than possibilit-ee.

Q: [Deleted]

Yes. So, when in other comments I say that "all patterns are always present and active to some extent", it's in the same sense as that. It's not that the "embodied imagination" is a special level in terms of it being a primary structure, say. Rather, flipping it around, it's that this particular set of patterns are currently very bright, and therefore dominating our experience. Any collection of patterns could become the "embodied imagination" if they were intensified appropriately.

So, this gives us a couple of obvious ways to soften things up a bit, right?

• We can do it indirectly, via an imagination object imbued with particular meaning. For instance, vividly feel-imagine a sprinkler located in your stomach area which spins round, whose water has the property of dissolving the solidity of the world, and leave it running. Or --
• We can do it directly, by 3D-imagining/asserting over our current experience (i.e. in the same space as our present perception), an open empty unstructured space with the property of "dreamlike flexibility", for a prolonged period perhaps, such that this default of transparent malleability becomes more prominent.

Q: [Deleted]

Right, so they're the same approach fundamentally, but the implications are different.

I've not got the phrasing down for this, but let's have a go...

In both cases, you are creating something from nowhere - the sprinkler, or the "space of flexibility" - and assigning a meaning to that act, a result that it implies. It's just that the second one seems more abstract because it doesn't have an obvious "shape", and the second one also involves the creation of something which has the property of the result. However, that property is you specifying the change, it is not you making the change.

In both cases, the result is indirect. It is the changing of the fact that is implied, that brings about the result. The imagery itself cannot cause anything - one piece of transparent imagery cannot bounce of another piece of transparent imagery.

I suggest that a fact itself is a dimensionless part of an extended pattern and has no sensory aspect itself, so if you are at all aware that you are changing a fact, then you are always "creating something which implies the change of fact" (an act), not directly updating the fact.

When you go to a bar you've never been to before and open the door, you are not aware of updating the fact of the barroom; but the very first intentional step you took towards going there, implied the fact of its existence, and every other intentional act you did shifted the world and implied a particular sort of barroom - right up until you actually observed it. At the point of observation, it becomes "fixed" in the scene that an experienced scene is much "brighter" and becomes a high-contributing pattern when it comes to subsequent experiences.

And in reverse order -

I think it's also possible to make one's style of experiencing into something where experiences do not become overly fixed no matter how bright they might seem.

Yes indeed. You might view it as there being a contributing pattern/fact which corresponds to the statement: "The world is a stable place and the implications of a sensory experience constitutes a set of facts which persists once the sensory experience end". These more abstract patterns are of exactly the same nature as any other pattern: they always exist but their contribution to ongoing experience can be increased or attenuated. Which leads to some interesting questions about how far one really wants to go with messing with accumulated structures - there's flexibility available, sure, but there's decoherence if you push it too far.

Why not directly? So you're saying facts are only and ever implied? Are facts always tacit? I think this might be important, but really I have trouble feeling what you're trying to get at here.

EDIT: Warning, this is not well described. I'll probably try this again after I come up with a better way to put it into words.

Let me try and grab a hold of this. There's a couple of approaches I can think of to describe it (bear with me since I'm formulating this as I go).

So, let's begin by taking an obvious fact:

• "Everyone always loves me." (heheh, why not!)

Now, try and summon that into sensory experience. What you'll likely come up with is an audio-visual-texture-emotion sensory aspect of that pattern which includes a felt-sense of it. But remember, that particular pattern is one without a temporal restriction - it is immediately "all time everywhere forever". You can't actually experience it from a 3D-immersive single moment viewpoint, much less in a contracted image. You can't grab it completely and hold it in your hand (so to speak). You hold part of the extended pattern in the senses. And that extended pattern is part of the undivided pattern of all-patterns.

So what I'm getting at here is, while any possible intention is of course is a shift of the entire pattern (or "all possibilities"), we obviously do not experience that because we are only ever aware of a slice of it. We operate in the blind.

When I create my sprinkler, it is simply by hook onto a larger pattern which I cannot fit inside my current perspective. But since the sprinkler is connected to that, it becomes my proxy, and my manipulation or specification of that, becomes/is my manipulation or specification of the more abstract fact.

When I do this with my "softening of the space", I am doing the same thing, although it's more subtle. I am imagining, implicitly, a space and that the space is softer. I am not actually directly making my current space softer, the space I am imagining is just the partial aspect of the intention. You can see this in practice because when you do this, the form that gets triggered in experience "happens by itself" towards the imagination, like you have pulled on a piece of material.

You notice the same thing when you use imagination to move your body. You can imagine a wind blowing your body forward, and your body will respond as if that were so. Or you can imagine your body in the forward position, and your body will shift state towards that position. We might call it "intentional leading" or something like that.

EDIT: When you try to heal yourself, how do you do it? You quickly realise that grasping onto the sensations and trying to change them doesn't work. Instead, you must "be the space" around and through the area, and then either use a metaphor to change it, or imagine the replacement sensation. But I'd suggest those are both the same thing: creating a desired sensation is still a metaphor for that target state and is not the target state itself, because: time and the inability to fully specify, you can only imply.

Practically speaking, it's not that important, and I'm obviously struggling to convey it. But for as long as there are any patterns active, there will be a notion of change, and for as long as that is true, there will be a "leading" effect, I suggest.

Here I don't agree with your choice of the word "directly" in the context of the above-quoted paragraph.

The sense I'm using "directly" in that paragraph is in the experiential sense - that within the current sensory field (as you phrase it) you are experiencing performing a creative act relative to your desired outcome which you might naively interpret as being an interaction between just the sensory objects.

So, taking the "naive view" as being one where we assume that what we experience in the sensory field is what is happening, then:

• In the sprinkler example, even in the naive view it's obvious that you are taking an indirect route - in the sense that you experience yourself creating an intermediate step. You've created an object with properties, such that it will bring about the change.
• In the updating-space example, though, in the naive view we might think that you are actually interacting with the space that you have been experiencing and modifying it. Hence the potential interpretation of updating it "directly".

In fact, the two approaches are identical, it's just that the "sensory aspect" - the visible part of the iceberg, if you will - of one corresponds more closely to what the experience of being completely in the target state will be like. The "naive view" person is not doing what they think they are doing in the "actual view".

In the "actual view":

• All experiences and changes are direct - because there is no other way for anything to be. All that exists is "The Absolute taking on the shape of The Relative". So any experience of change actually is that, being and changing. You can't get more direct than actually being something.

A sensory act is like shifting the tip of the iceberg, or pulling a rope in the dark. The sensory experience is just your sensory handle onto the larger pattern you are invoking.

Some sensory handles happen to be of a form that is a more literal representation of the intended end-state, but that does not change their level of directness. The handle is always indirect (in the sense that it does not provide a naive experience of the change) but also totally direct (in the sense that it is a direct interaction with the facts-of-the-world).

We can also think of these handles as "icons". Let's use an everyday example, where there's a folder on my computer desktop and I want to remove it.

• The "folder" looks like a folder. It has all sorts of folder-concept associations for me. My tendency will be to think of it in terms of an actual folder. In truth though, there is no genuine "folderness" underlying either the icon or real-life sensory folders, other than those associations. And therefore I can create my own association.

However, in our computer example:

• I can right-click on the little picture of a folder, and select "Delete" from the popup menu. This is like the sprinkler example, where the act is more of a more abstracted form. There is nothing about the letters D, E, L, E, T, E, that correspond to the everyday sensory experience of removal. This is revealing of the principle: "the meaning you give something is what supplies its causal power".
• Alternatively, I can drag the the folder to the trash. This is like the "updating space" example. The sensory aspect of the act matches my usual notions of how the act of deletion works: a folder getting put in a bin. But really I'm just being fooled. Just as in the last example, there is no literal correspondence between the sensory experience and the form of the update. In fact, the actual update has no form and is literally unthinkable; I can only think in terms of icons/handles. This reveals to us that our accumulated historical meanings are no more direct or real than the ones we arbitrarily assign.

The conclusion is along the lines that all sensory experiences are "handles/icons" for the larger pattern, undivided from it, involving direct interactions, but not complete experiences, because they are not completely unfolded. Our habitual perspective doesn't have enough "dimensions" to experience the whole thing unpacked simultaneously, into 3D-immersive space.

So hopefully this ties your comment and my comment together? Specifically:

• All updates are direct in the sense that there is no such thing as not being direct, because all there is, is Absolute-Relative. It is always directly experienced, but not in unpacked form. Facts and patterns are "dimensionless" in this sense. (Felt-sense, global summary to the rescue.)
• All updates are indirect in the sense that our sensory experience of the act is not an actually an experience of the overall pattern changing.

As you indicate, we are left with inseparability, full responsibility, and unbounded potential or capacity - whilst also having a situation in which "all creation is finished" and always available.

Ive noticed that if I believe I am trying to enact a change, then I will experience merely trying to make the change. The change itself doesnt necissarily manifest. Ill just be manifesting a struggle.

Yes, you have to generate the experience of literally updating the world - or doing something that you have decided means that you are doing so.

Q: [Deleted]

Ah, that was enjoyable. Okay, mostly agreed.

Yes, I'd forgotten about Hoffman's icons (I was just looking for a more immediate example and, um, I was looking at a computer screen). But yes indeed. Where I differ a little is that I was more explicitly pointing to the icon as being "attached" or rather seamlessly part of the larger pattern. To "tug" on the desktop icon is to literally pull upon the extended pattern it is attached to.

And that's why I say things are unthinkable, in the sense that the computer screen cannot display the entirety of the of the computer, because not all of the computer is made from "colours" and a part cannot display the whole of which it is a part. In clearer language: we can indeed think about anything, by manipulating the sensory iceberg tips, but we cannot think of the entirety, because thinking is partial experiencing. Experiencing the whole would be... experiencing the whole.

As far as the term "Absolute" goes, yeah, it's the hypothetical state that we might call "unshaped" experience, the raw state - not my favourite term for it, but we need something, and I tend to try different ones out. I think a word is required for this, because it's only in contrast to this concept that we can fully point to the nature of relative experience. Otherwise it's like describing waves without having the concept of water. Of course, experience has no medium as such, but its difficult to discuss its arbitrariness without some concept that "all patterns" exists somehow, even if totally neutralised.

On "dimensions" - just a metaphor to better imagine selection (or relative intensity) and apparent perspectives. Specifically, that you can't simultaneously imagine a 3D-experience and imagine a 4D-experience. This connects to the thinking-with-iceberg-tips earlier, really. As you say, representation - which is really partial sensory experiencing of extended patterns - cannot be complete, at least in terms of being unfolded into a spatial context.

Meanwhile, elsewhere there's been discussion of those events where people experience reaching a catastrophic end - and then it didn't happen, but it seems the world has shifted somewhat. Interested to hear your own interpretation on that, jumping off from my response below:

Factual Updates and Collateral Shifts

If the world is a continuous and coherent pattern, a blanket of material with folds as facts, then you can't adjust one fact without tugging a little on the rest of the material, impacting the other folds. Although these "collateral shifts" would make sense in terms of the fundamental nature - the blanket - they wouldn't follow the logic of the world's apparent content - the folds.

For instance, your car tumbles off the side of the road but - flash! - suddenly it didn't happen after all. Changing that fact inevitably results in a collateral shift of the world as a whole. But it takes the form of, say, an extra tin of fruit in your kitchen cupboard, a news reporter's hair being parted at the other way, and an acquaintance you've not seen in 10 years now never existed. Those changes are causally linked to, but not logically linked to, the event.

Quite possibly you would never encounter these updated facts. However, the change in your felt-sense of things - that "global summary" sensation that you have - might mean that the world sort of "tastes" different subsequently. You intuitively know that you are no longer in the same place. There's a different "flavour" to your life after the accident somehow.

Riffing on this a bit...

So if there was just flash, and suddenly the accident didn't happen, could you recognize such an experience without the requirement of differently parted hair on a TV announcer? I think yes, you could. So it's not a hard requirement to have differently parted hair.

It's not a requirement - rather, it's an example of a possible side-effect arising because a change of one fact tends to lead to non-logical shifts in other facts, as they are of course part of the same overall pattern. So you survive the crash, get home, and notice (hey!) an extra tin of peaches. The cause is a shift of state, but in terms of everyday logic it seems nonsensical to the experiencer.

Of course, this is a case where our experiencer produced an intentional shift of state (albeit unwittingly in terms of outcome, it was probably: "I want to live!"). If they'd just let themselves die, their experience would continue but probably in a more interesting way.

So moving a hair doesn't change anything. The movement of the hair is already part of the current state, which is static and eternal. Only intention changes state. If the movement of the hair was not already patterned - it wasn't going to arise - then the intention to have it move represents a state change and will have (very minor) collateral effects, otherwise it will not.

What we might call spontaneous or "passing" experiences (in the manner of "passing thoughts") do not correspond to intentional changes of state; they are deterministic unfoldings from the current state. Only intentional redirection changes the state.

It's not like shifting can be studied objectively.

Well nothing can be studied objectively. The point I was making was, no particular collateral change is required but any change can happen by the logic of continuous, coherent patterned states.

I don't think we can talk of the state as something beyond intent, on its own.

We're not, though. The state is your current total intent so far. When we intend something, that's not something additional on top, it is the shifting of this state. So if we think of our current state as the set of all-patterns, each pattern at a different level of contribution, so there's a relative distribution of intensities:

• That state is our total intent. It is static and it completely defines our experience going forward.
• What we call "intending" is really "changing the relative distribution of intensities" such that our state corresponds to our intention.
• Because there is no separation between "intending" and "shifting of state" - it's like a blanket of material folding itself into a different shape, under its own volition: shape-shifter metaphor - then "intention" is "the state".

Our current intention is our present "shape" - just like our current physical position is the relative arrangement of our body parts. We change bodily position by rearranging the body, which we call "moving"; we change intention by changing state, which we call "intending".

Q: [Deleted]

Yes indeed, the body example was an everyday perspective comparison. Heh, perhaps we should introduce a special character (‡) that corresponds to "but of course, the whole known universe was involved in this".

"So I‡ was walking down the street‡, and I went into the shop‡, and bought an apple‡ which I ate‡."

...

Q: It's not that the "embodied imagination" is a special level in terms of it being a primary structure, say. Rather, flipping it around, it's that this particular set of patterns are currently very bright, and therefore dominating our experience. Any collection of patterns could become the "embodied imagination" if they were intensified appropriately.
I agree with you completely. However, in this I think we're slightly different from the book author because I think he feels this embodied imagination is completely special and unique and "on its own level" so to speak. It's not a philosophical book, so it's hard for me to put my finger on the author's metaphysics, but he does sound somewhat like us because he is saying that phenomena we think are physical are only quasi-physical. In other words, he's saying also that physicality is ultimately just a very impressive illusion, exactly like in a dream. However, he privileges embodied imagination and he even believes he's able to contact alien intelligence through the use of specially guided embodied imagination. So "alien" here doesn't necessarily mean "from other planets" but it only means different. So for example, if you felt yourself embodied as a bear with the mind and experience of a bear, then that would be you making a contact with the alien intelligence, as he would put it. And then this has some kind of purpose. Anyway, the way he explains things sounds very strange to me and it's not how I would explain things.
However, he kept making references to the alchemical tradition and I found it interesting.
I'll try to quote a piece of it:
The basic consistency of all substance was called prima materia, primal matter. Since alchemists considered matter as existing in a state of con- tinuous creation, primal matter consisted of sparks of live creative forces around which visible matter coagulated. This is similar to the quasi-physical substance of creative imagination, as for instance a dream. An embodied image is in a permanent state of being created. When creation stops, the dream is over. Through extreme slow motion the alchemist participated in this ongoing creative process of primal matter, which began to pervade him, exteriorizing its inner sparks to the alchemist by way of the inversion process discussed previously, so that he could know its hidden self and partake of its intelligence.
The primal matter of metals was called ‘‘alive silver,’’ argentum vivum, quicksilver, mercury. This alive silver had to be purified, cleansed of all its ill aspects, eventually producing a golden tincture which could heal all substance: turn lead (which they considered a sick form of alive silver) into gold (its most precious condition), a sick body into a supremely healthy one. This was done by the art of the fire. Alchemists would melt, in the way of ice, the crusted outer coagulation of metallic bodies, making them flow alive like quicksilver, in order to obtain the creative sparks of primal matter, the substantive intelligence around which the metal had embodied. Unveiling bodies unto their naked intelligence was necessarily a slow process, as is all embodiment work. And as the alchemist gathered sparks, the creative potency of primal matter increased. The result was to be an ultimate medicine of such creative intelligence that it could heal all bodies, ranging from lead, an afflicted metallic body, to the diseased human body itself. Many alchemists were medical doctors. They would make this medicine from poison. The word they used was pharmacon, which means both poison and remedy, from which we derive our ‘‘pharmacy.’’ Only from what is afflicted and its affliction could a medicine be made. This extraction of medicine from affliction they called the process of refinement. The ultimate medicine was named tinctura, the coloring agent. The tincture was of such refinement that it was almost a pure disembodied spirit, pure abstraction, like mathematical structures; yet almost is the operative word. While science after them went all the way through to mathematical abstraction, alchemists always worked with particular embodied sub- stances, waiting in slow motion for them to reveal their intelligence. This highly refined embodiment, called subtle body, is a pure manifestation of primal matter. Subtle bodies are embodiments existing between physicality and abstraction, in a realm of quasi-physicality, which we have called embodied imagination. Subtle bodies belong to a primal world between body and mind – less physical than matter, more embodied than mind – and their very existence annihilates the mind/body conundrum by adding a third, an in-between: primal matter. This in-between primal matter is both embodied intelligence and physical body, partaking of both inspired metaphor and physical anatomy. It was called soul-as-medium, anima media natura, soul stretched painfully between eternal abstraction and decaying flesh.

That is a very mangled piece of writing! To modern ears, that is. It seems to be rooted in the older traditions, almost like a historical study, but then linking that to the modern concept of imagination. That alone makes it quite interesting.

Have you ever encountered Jerry Epstein and his use of imagery for healing? I read one of his books a long time ago (it might have been the Waking Dream Therapy one, I was doing the lucid dreaming thing at the time) but your post reminded me of him - and he seems to have expanded things a little. The collection of imagery exercises on his website are very "dream logic" and pretty close to what we've been talking about as a modern take on this approach.

So if we take this literally, you can basically talk to the metals and convince them to change, because you'd assume they're not just dead substances, but are living beings.

Well... extended patterns. You could certainly have the world behave as if they were alive and had properties that could be described as intelligent, I suppose. However, as with everything else, it would be your intelligence, creating the maps, albeit by implication. Reading that sort of material can be great for triggering fresh ideas for causal imagery, ones that would never occur otherwise, you're leading me to think.

I'm off to make a cup of coffee and talk to a stainless steel spoon about empathy...

I might think, oh, I see, so now I really understand it, whereas when before I thought I understood it, I've only understood it partway in reality.

I completely agree on this. I've come to think that it's another aspect of the "after the dream... more dream" thing. It's in the nature of content that it is always apparently expanding; the discoveries keep coming, so the context keeps changing, so the understanding keeps evolving.

Which is another way of making it obvious that the truth you can think, can comprehend, is not the truth (because the actual truth must be unchanging). The fundamental truth is something that can only be perceived - known directly, now - and is not something that can be thought about.

I don't think the fundamental truth is ever perceived because perceptions change and are selective, whereas the fundamental truth is unchanging and is beyond selection/deselection. This is why it's so damn hard to remember what it's like to be enlightened! If the fundamental truth was plainly obvious, everyone would always and ever be an enlightened being.

Yes, I really mean that "the fact of being and being everywhere" is always available and can be known. As I've just said in a comment to /u/3man, you never experience purely being The Absolute; you are always "The Absolute taking on the shape of The Relative".

You would have to have absolutely all patterns at zero contribution for you to just "be". The blanket of material with no folds. Which is not possible, I would say, in the sense that if it ever happened, that would be it, or rather only "it", so to speak.

Why would this state be called "being" or "just being?" It seems arbitrary.

Yeah, it is arbitrary. There's no word for it. "Only awareness", perhaps. "Absence of activation", maybe. It's the only state, or non-state, which is truly meaningless. It would be "before" everything.

Meanwhile: I will reply to your other, longer comment later today. Want to read it properly non-mobile and give it due consideration.

POST: Wu Wei, pt. 2

[POST]

This idea just came out my noggin. The continued allowance of freedom to all thoughts may just allow the truest of thoughts to be created. We spend a lot of time trying to dictate our thoughts in one direction - nothing wrong with intending where you're going - but what if we're missing out on certain avenues because we ban certain thoughts. Because get this, we're afraid of what those thoughts will lead to. What if we just allowed them and then surprise, it turns out the lion was a small cat waiting to be cuddled. It's worth a shot, in my opinion.

[END OF POST]

Define "truest", I guess.

Do you mean, that the thoughts that arise will be ones where all information is taken into account - so, the "truest" reflection of the current state of the world in its entirety?

If I am the absolute how come I do not know that I am? What robbed me of this information that should be fundamental?

Interesting accidental wording! In fact, "that I am" is the only thing that we do know for certain. And that's quite a good starting point.

Even now, you don't necessarily "know" you are The Absolute, you simply "are" it. Intellectually, you can only infer that you are the absolute, perhaps by noticing that everything changes in terms of content but you (as a feeling of being) always remain. Experientially, it's similar: you find that your direct experience does not correspond to the idea of separation, and perhaps you have a particular event-experience in which all the usual content seems to drop away.

In all cases, you are The-Absolute-taking-on-the-shape-of-The-Relative or in other words, you are always what you are and having an experience. The situation where there is no shape you have taken on, "pure Absolute", is a hypothetical one. However, there is always that sense of "being"...

We maybe need to ponder what we mean when we use the word "knowledge"?

My usual metaphor: the blanket of material whose only property is awareness. The blanket has folds in it: the blanket experiences itself as one fold relative to another fold, in all directions. In what sense can the blanket "know" that it is everything?

• Conceptually - It can create a fold which represents the fact that it is the whole blanket and all folds. But that knowledge will always be a fold, it won't actually be the truth in and of itself.
• Directly - It always "knows" it is the blanket simply be being it, without reflection. When we touch a table, the "hardness" is the direct experience. But do we "know" that the table is hard before we have reflected upon it?

In other words, you never forgot that you were The Absolute, it's more a case of you never intellectually pondering it. You have always known that you "exist" though and that existing is direct knowledge of being The Absolute, just not of its implications. Another thought experiment: how did you come to "know" that you are a body, in a general sense? In actual experience, you are always 3man-sitting or 3man-standing or 3man-walking. There is no generalised sense in which you are a body, in actual experience, surely?

But I'd say direct experience of knowing you are it all - "being" - is special because it never changes and is always there, in a way that the body isn't quite. It's sort of everywhere, and is the only fact that is always available at all times and places. It has no content, so it needs no context. Maybe the distinction we need to make is between: the knowing and the meaning?