TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 6)

POST: Dimension jumping in the hands of the wrong people

The standard answer to this is that, in effect, everybody has a "private copy" of the world. There are no other people who can intend an experience for you - all experiences are explicitly or implicitly the outcome of intensions by yourself, deliberately or not. This doesn't not mean that you have specifically chosen everything that has happened to you; rather, it suggests that your experience consists of the patterns you have intensified, knowingly or unknowingly, plus their logical extensions. If, for the sake of argument, there were other people who could intend bad things as a part of your expeirence, surely you could solve this easily, by intending that they weren't bad anymore?

Firstly, just to emphasise generally (although you do pick up on this):

None of the things discussed in this subreddit should be just believed. There's no specific worldview that's being pushed, even - except the "meta" worldview that no thoughts-about the world capture the world-as-it-is. Everything else is up for debate. (For example: I, personally, don't really "believe" anything fundamentally, in principle, other than my own direct experience. Descriptions are useful, but they are parallel to the main experience. And so on.)

The idea, then, is that you put aside any assumptions you might have, pay attention to your direct experience as it is, contemplate it a bit more deeply than normal, draw your own conclusions. It's an exploration of "the nature of experiencing", albeit hopefully with some happy side-effects. But the getting of what you want isn't really the main purpose; it's more about the getting of why there was the experience of getting. But it always comes down to this, to reiterate:

• Never "trust" anyone in these matters, but don't "distrust" either; be a skeptic in the true sense. Take inspiration from others' ideas, then check them out for yourself. And if something doesn't work or make sense after you've given it a go, you put it aside. Or equally just don't bother in the first place, if it doesn't seem interesting or worthwhile; that's fine too. (Just don't draw any conclusion one way or the other based on not trying.)

I'm repeating that because the only way someone can cross the line between just fantasising about some concepts and actually experiencing something, is to actually do some experimenting. As I said earlier, concepts are just "parallel constructions" that give us a framework to think in - and that applies to both your everyday notion of the world and these alternative frameworks. They are not "true", the only thing that is "true" is direct experience. If you confirm things for yourself, though, you don't need to worry about that.

Let me say this, though: I am completely sincere about this topic and I wouldn't waste my time in discussions if I didn't feel others might find it interesting and beneficial too. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the language can start to get a bit abstract sometimes, especially at those times when the topic is based on an idea or observation that isn't being explicitly stated. The phrases get all "mystical" without any apparent grounding. And sometimes we're just pushing a philosophical line of inquiry to see where it goes, asking provocative questions that are a bit awkward. If stuff doesn't make sense, though, question it (like this). And if someone can't answer properly, then maybe they are talking bollocks! :-)

So, anyway -

But when you say things, like consciousness is eternal or I am the only one in existence, it gets me really trippy and I don't see how you or anyone could possibly 100% confirm that it is true.

To understand this, we need two things, I'd suggest:

1. The direct observation of what your ongoing experience is actually like, rather than what you think about it being like. This direct experience is what a lot of this is built on. Words simply point to experiences; if you've not had the experience of "a soft texture" then no description of it or idea based on it is going to be meaningful to you, for example.
2. To be clear about what we mean by something "existing". (Ponder this?)

It turns out that the first one leads us to think of the second one differently, since it adds a new context that is "before" our usual default understanding of the world. This in turn changes the type of metaphors we use to construct out descriptions. Specifically, we are confronted with the problem of pointing to something which is "before" our usual models. And that's where we start saying thing like "eternal", "undivided", and all the other things that it is not. Without the experience, though, and the philosophical line of questioning that follows from it, that seems like mystical nonsense that makes "zero "sense" - just as you say! :-)

One metaphor that helps us avoid being incorrect, even though it can't capture the actual situation, is to start talking about the world as a "shared resource of patterns" rather than a "shared place or environment". The more you experiment with things, the more you find yourself needing something akin to an "abstract patterning" and "private copy" framework in order to think about it. But that arises from the observations, created as a useful tool; it is still not something to ever believe in as being fundamentally true.

We all have layers inside us, and I always wonder about the hidden truths about other people, but I digress.

It's actually an interesting thing, forums like this, because I think most of the people we are having conversations with probably don't discuss this sort of thing with the people they know in real life. Even just the philosophical aspects. Not necessarily because it's secret; actually, few people are interested in pondering such things. This subreddit has about 7k subscribers - from the entire world. What are the chances of knowing another one of those people? And then, what are the chances you'd end up broaching this subject? Who knows what could be going on in the mind of passing strangers and random people in coffee shops! :-)

From my own experience, I know a couple of people, but not many are really interested in digging around. Most folk - and this is totally fine - are looking for some sort of technique to get a result, or are looking for enlightenment but think it is some sort of feel-good state, rather than a realisation of something.

You don't necessarily believe all these metaphors and other "truths" you speak of if you don't have any direct experience with it.

I find the whole idea of "belief" a bit of a distraction. It's in the same category as "existence". We assume we know what it means, until we actually look and check what it is that we mean!

The way I'd maybe separate it out is:

1. There is the fundamental truth of the "nature of experiencing". This is the context of experience. You can directly observe it because you always are it. This is "what experience is made from". It is always true and always the same. You can't really describe this in words, because it is "that which words and thought are made from"; you can only be it and know it directly. For convenience, sometimes it is described as the "open space of awareness".
2. There is the relative truth of what you are experiencing. This is the content of experience, arising in "open awareness". Typically, you might consider that there is:

• A "main strand" of experience, where you are experiencing being-a-person-in-a-world. This is a sort of 3D-immersive multi-sensory strand of thought which fills up your awareness.
• There is the occasional parallel strand of experience where you are thinking about the main experience. This tends to be sort of localised in a sub-region.

In both cases, these are coherent - they are self-consistent like a continuous pattern made from one piece of cloth - but because they have no inherent permanence, they change, they are not fundamentally true.

It makes no sense to talk of "believing" in something as such, because if you are thinking about something then it is a parallel strand. Meanwhile, if you are experiencing something then you know it. So there is a difference between knowing what you think about the world, and knowing the state of the world directly. You might say that every strand of content has its own "relative truth", and then there is the context which is "fundamentally true". Where it gets interesting, though, is that it suggests a certain potential: since the main strand is no different in nature to the parallel strand, then just as it is possible to use intention to pattern your thinking, it might be possible to pattern your main strand of experience in the same way. Your main strand, it could be suggested, is just a sort of unbounded thought unfolding in awareness, albeit a quite stable and intense one, and you can "think it" differently.

However, only personal experimentation could show whether that's a valid way of approaching it.

When I read these ideas and metaphors, I don't immediately take them as fact but I don't immediately disprove them either. I mull over them and sort of let them "float" around in my head. I never set anything in stone as a "fundamental truth" because as you said they are still only "parallel thoughts" about this world.

Right. That's how I treat these things. If you just view everything as "interesting ideas" that might come in handy, then you don't need to judge them in any fundamental way at all. In fact, it's sort of meaningless to do so. Their value is as a source of creativity and curiosity. After all, even concepts which appear to map directly to aspects of ongoing experience are not really "right", they are just "self-consistent" (although there often seems to be a tendency to treat them as being more deeply "correct").

I guess I jumped the wagon on this one and immediately thought about all the materialistic stuff I could get, when this is far more spiritual and about self discovery than anything else. I don't really know where to start though, do you meditate? If so, what are your techniques and how often?

I think it's totally fine to get excited about the possibilities! "Materialistic stuff" consists of experiences just like anything else, including spiritual stuff. Personally, I don't really meditate. I do a daily releasing exercise, that's about it. Lie down, let everything unravel as it wants without interfering. In terms of better perceiving our experiences, I think it's good to go for it directly: simply by attending to the experience you are having, and looking for that open space, you will shape yourself into it. So, spending time just closing your eyes, "feeling out" in to the space around you, and exploring the content of your experience - where "you" are, what sensations, perceptions and thoughts are floating in your experience, that sort of thing - is all good. The lesson we derive from that isn't that we find some ultimate state; rather we discover we are all states, and that we shift into any state by "taking on the shape of" that state. The fundamental truth is, funnily enough, always true!

You didn't answer the part of the question I was looking forward to lol, but I didn't expect you to either.

Well, you knew I was just going to tell you to explore things for yourself, right? ;-)

There's no confirmation of anything other than self-confirmation. You totally seem to get it: thinking about stuff is a different thing to actually exploring it. At the very least, I can promise you that it will be interesting and will add an extra layer to daily life that will make it more enjoyable; beyond that, you can extrapolate things and see how far you can take them, if you want to. The posts here and at subs like /r/glitch_in_the_matrix should act as a source of inspiration, perhaps.

Q1: Ahh, I'm surprised you don't meditate. I've been wanting to get into meditation for years but just never took the time to really delve into it and I couldn't find much time either. But I'm about to start practising a technique you mentioned in a post (I can't remember which post) where you told us to relax and turn off every sensation and just remain in that position for about 10 minutes before eventually trying to "will" your arm to move without actually moving your muscles. If I pull this off, I feel I'll have broken down a major barrier that's holding me back.
If you don't mind me asking, I'm curious to know if you'd feel comfortable sharing your "end game" that you'll hope to achieve, even if only vaguely.Sort of like in this thread which you may have already seen. If you don't want to then that's totally alright. But optic fibre is right, you're a unique individual and everyone on this sub seems to be entranced by your words and seemingly unbounded knowledge. There's a certain amount of mystery that draws me to you. I feel you'd be a real challenge to try and figure out in real life. I wonder what it would be like to know you in real life and I wish I did. Luckily we have this forum so we can all pool our ideas and experiences together to create a vast pool of knowledge. I find all the answers in that thread I linked, very interesting. It seems deeply personal to know one's deepest desires but it's inspiring and gives hope where it was initially perceived to never exist.

On meditation, well it sort of depends what you think it is and what you are trying to achieve - and there are many sorts. Lying down on the floor every day, sometimes sitting, and doing nothing - by which I mean ceasing to interfere with movement of body, thought and attention - is basically Zen meditation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza].

Generally, if someone is meditating in the hope of enlightenment, I'd say don't bother. (But I'd also say: don't pay too much attention to what I say!) Understanding the nature of experience is something you pretty much infer and then confirm. But it's worth doing something (daily releasing exercise) to get experience of allowing things to move spontaneously "by themselves", since that helps dissolves people's tendency to continually re-assert their current position, in opposition to the flow towards outcomes they have intended.

Ha, the phrase "end game" makes it all sounds like a nefarious plan for world domination! :-) Well, there isn't one. It's interesting in and of itself. Having these discussions can make it sound like it's the most important thing, but really it's not; your ongoing experience is what's most important. Having insight into our incorrect assumptions of how things are is great, but beyond that there's: living. I think we have to be careful we don't spend all our time contemplating and meditating, and forget to drink beer and go to art galleries (or whatever). :-)

There's a good book called Ideokinesis by Andre Bernard, a dance teacher who taught imagery and spontaneous motion approaches (it's related to this topic). At one point in a class, as Bernard is discussing his ideas, a guy asks "but what's this for?". And a girl responds: "It's for life!". And that is the end game and it's the only game, no matter forms it takes, I think. I have to agree, I think it's great that these communities can pop up, and people from all over the world can find overlap and exchange their thoughts and experiences. Even a decade ago, this wouldn't have been possible in quite the same way.

Q1: Ahh right.
Having these discussions can make it sound like it's the most important thing, but really it's not; your ongoing experience is what's most important. Having insight into our incorrect assumptions of how things are is great, but beyond that there's: living.
Yes I agree with you on this one. I must confess I think I might have let all this change my perspective a little too much. As of late, I feel like I've been thinking less and less about my future. I only ever vaguely think about my future but now it's like I'm neglecting it. Everything I experience in the current moment is almost like it's temporary or just for fun. Just another thing before I say good bye to everything. I'm not suicidal and I don't ever plan on committing suicide but I can't deny that I haven't thought about doing it just to see if there really is anything on the "other side" (haven't we all). For the last few years I felt like my future was this black cloud, it made me feel like I'd never experience it. Like I'd die or end up in some vegetable state. But that feeling eventually went away and now I find myself not thinking about my future at all. I can't help but let myself be absorbed by all this stuff, it's so intriguing. I know I mustn't let myself lose sight of the big picture, which is to essentially experience.
I've been over at /r/Oneirosophy for a bit and the stuff I read there just pulls me in, closer and closer. I think I'm letting myself get a little too carried away. I've planted these ideas in my head. I fear I want something I cannot have. I have my whole life ahead of me and I'm letting myself get carried away when I should really be focusing on enjoying life, instead of pondering how 'empty' and 'bleak' everything feels and asking myself can I really have something more than "this".
Regardless I know my perspective on life has changed radically over the past couple of years and my perspective will continue to change as I experience life. I wanted to ask you, what you think about the stuff they do over in /r/Oneirosophy. Why don't you think "enlightenment" is the way to go? When you die, do you simply wish to have the experiences you had in life and that's it? If I really wanted to go about, trying to find the cracks in reality and eventually pull it down, would I do that via meditation?
Thank you once again for your thoughtful answer, I'll be sure to check out that book when I have time :)

Everything you say is pretty normal, right? I think anybody who ponders the world and how things are, explores those thoughts. And it's even fine to get carried away with things - but keeping mind that thinking about stuff is also just another experience, a parallel construction, and the larger lesson is that there is no fundamental "how things are". It's if you find yourself dedicating too much time looking for "the final secret knowledge", when really the so-called mystery is just rooted in the fact of moving your arms and mundane everyday stuff like that, that you need to watch out. Experimenting, yes, because that is exploring experience. Just thinking about things, making up parallel fantasy worlds only, that's what we have to be wary of (unless we do it knowingly for fun, that's different; that's art).

As one of the originating mods of /r/oneirosophy, obviously I'm all for it! But it's important to keep it in perspective: those are philosophical discussions about the possibilities inherent in the subjective idealist view. Such things can be empowering, but only if they are used as creative inspiration for deliberate exploration. There is fun in just thinking things out too, but there's a reason that the sidebar here explicitly encourages trying out a couple of exercises, and underlines that explanation and descriptions are metaphors. Whether "enlightenment" is the way to go, kinda depends on what you think "enlightenment" is? It's becomes such a vague term I think. What do you think of when you read that word?

Definitely, I'd agree that having an understanding of "the nature of experiencing" is a good thing, but that's relative straightforward, albeit not easy to put into words: you are "that" whose only inherent property is being-aware and which "takes on the shape of" experiences. The real issue we face is, that we don't see the whole of our state unpacked into the spatially-extended senses all at once; this makes it harder to develop faith that intending = reshaping ourselves = shifting state = updating facts both now and then. In other words, that intending to move your arm (effectively: "it is true now that I will experience my arm moving then", where "then" is about half a second) is identical to intending any other experience ("it is true now that I will experience receiving my top grade then"). Again, only actual experimentation can reveal whether that is actually true or not. Thinking about it just produces yet more descriptive schemes (because that is what the implicit intention of thinking is).

...

those with good intentions and good deeds live in squalor...

All of this might be somewhat self-fulfilling, I suppose. However, it might be interesting to explore this bit: Which good intentions and good deeds, specifically? What counts as those? And how are those apparent people going about it? Also, what power would or could such people have over other people's circumstances?

If everything is in your experience, what are you doing about it? Wanting is fine, but that amounts to thinking-about the world - and often in ways that imply the current state rather than a target state. Note that, also, it might be the case that mere action doesn't help: the intention to experience acting is one thing, the intention to experience outcomes is another. And so on.

...Maybe if we take one strand of that and run with it? Specifically, the idea that "spirituality" is a good outcome for the world, in and of itself. (I dislike that term, it seems pretty much meaningless, but I can't think of another one that doesn't require lots of explanation.)

If one spends time studying the nature of things, what happens? One reaches a greater understanding of what ongoing experience actually consists of; hopefully, a clear and direct awareness of what you actually are as the context of experience as well as the content of experience is the result. But does this necessarily alter the content? Make the world better? Well, no, not inherently. Realising that, say, everything that arises in your perspective is made from "consciousness" doesn't change anything at all; it merely shifts your understanding of your nature and the nature of the world. There may be a bit of a shift due to relaxation and acceptance, but perhaps nothing substantial beyond that. Furthermore, you likely realise that content and consciousness itself contain no judgement about things being good or bad. It not only doesn't care, it doesn't even know what caring is. It doesn't actually know anything; it just is everything. Everything just "is"; one pattern is equivalent to another. Patterns are added to patterns, the world shifts, it has no intelligence in and of itself. You are the only intelligence and you are the only thing that "acts".

So at best, "spirituality" offers a new perspective on self and world. It doesn't necessarily lead to good or bad things; that's outside of its remit.

"Do you think there's too much suffering in the world?"
"I think there's just the right amount."

So a couple of thought-provokers:

• Having come to an understanding, after that is where the decision to do something or not, and what that something will be, becomes relevant. The understanding itself accomplishes nothing.
• If you want to be wealthy, maybe you just do have to become a banker or a lawyer? Because that's how you made this world! ;-)
• Perhaps trying to reformat this world is a mistake. You've already created this world as it is, unwittingly. Are you seriously going to completely disrupt the patterns of all these pre-existing people without their permission? That seems selfish.
• Equally, you could perhaps think about switching out of this experience and into another - but a moment's thought indicates that this amounts to the same thing: reformatting your experience is reformatting these people. Even more selfish! :-)
• Why does it matter so much to you, the way the world is, and your judgement of it? And are you not basically judging yourself anyway by doing so?

For convenience, I guess we should ditch the "soul" and "spirit" terminology, because I think it has clashing connotations, particularly in terms of being located in an independent space somehow, or within something, or whatever. "Nonlocal self" is a nice term, but I tend to go with something like "open awareness" simply because it has the feeling of being "before" arrangement in space; experiences arise within it, as spatially-extended senses, but it does not itself have a location nor extension nor boundaries. But anyway, I guess we're talking from the same idea really: that which experiences, and that which experiences are made from.

I suppose, first, we need to firmly recognise that if the world was the result of our cumulative intentions, then it was not done deliberately. Simply focusing on a pattern would intensify its contribution, and that in turn would intensify its extended pattern of logical implications. For example, if I focus on the existence of a tree, then that logically implies soil and water and sunlight and birds and an ecology: an entire world immediately springs from that thought, is implied by it. We wouldn't say that we meant to create that world; but nevertheless our act of increasing the contribution of one pattern did result in that world's (relative, apparent) creation.

So, now there's a world. For certain, you can't "escape" from that world - because you are not actually in that world. What can you do instead?

"if the world was the result of our cumulative intentions, then it was not done deliberately"
but it must be, mustn't it?

Hmm, I'll be clearer on that. I don't mind it's not originating from/as you; I was talking about whether you are doing it deliberately - having a conscious purpose in mind. So, if you are focusing on the image of a tree, but do not understand that doing so corresponds to intensifying a tree and triggering all the associations, then you have not deliberately created a world. When people talk about there being a "purpose" to the world they find themselves in, and the troubles they are going through, they are implying that there is a reason - a reason that was consciously chosen, to teach a lesson (or whatever). But that's not the case. The world you have ended up in, while a result of a series of intentions, was basically an accident, because you didn't know that you were intending or what the nature of the world is. The world is not intelligent - you are the only intelligence. So if you act out of ignorance, there is no correcting system that is managing things afterwards. The world itself amounts to a "dumb patterning system" that simply has its eternal patterns intensified or dissolved with no say in the matter.

in the same way that even if i died, why wouldn't i then 'respawn' in the same/similar world and carry on after the point at which i'd died beforehand.

No reason why not, necessarily. Although, if you have a firmly patterned idea of death being the end of life, then the logical implication of a death scenario for you might be that all memory of the current person is effectively lost to you, and the next thing that appears in your awareness is the experience of being born as another person. If your intention to live as your current person is strong, then perhaps instead of that you'd experience a discontinuity, such that the car crash suddenly didn't happen, or you survived after all, or whatever (perhaps with some collateral shift side-effects).

the only conclusion i've arrived at is to create the world with purpose

Right. And as you say, this is tied in with knowledge. The realisation that is required, to be purposeful rather than accidental (see above), is to understand the relationship between world, self and intention-implication. But having got that?

You are essentially talking about thinking new facts into the world, updating the relative balance of constituent patterns, or allowing this "world-pattern" to fade relative to another world-pattern which you seed with an intention.

...so i'd like to have the experience of creating portals and then the experience of overtly changing the world...

Which is where intending base formatting comes in, rather than just intending outcomes. The latter is simply overlaying a target pattern on pre-existing structures (giving "plausible results albeit by unlikely apparent routes"); the former would be a more "meta" targeting of the landscape of potential routes itself.

as in traveling: the motion itself is the structural 'route'; hence the 'portal' experience

I'd say you want to create a similar experience to an OBE, stripped of the "astral body leaving my physical body" concept, instead knowing-that everything is a movement of experience as a whole, and imagining-that going through a portal is a state transition. If you really spent time with it, I guess you could just choose a doorway and have that represent the state change (which is something that people do for minor facts anyway).

yes that's exactly what I think

Actually, the "Infinite Grid" animation was initially conceived of as a way to create a structured imagination object that could be used for changes via "translation" - it's not dissimilar to the "OBE you don't come back from" concept, if you think about it.

it's that switch from looking at something and then looking at something else
what do you mean by "translation"?

Yes, I meant "translation" in the mathematical sense rather than the language sense: shifting your location on the metaphorical grid of possibilities, while keeping your identity intact.

so how would you go about changing in to a new location? if I decided on a place where I went through and exited in a new location - how? changing base formatting so all I have to do is intend it
but that's easier said than done!

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? There is no how - it's just intention. You need to imagine-that it is happening until the relative intensity of that imagining is stronger than the things you have imagined (intended and implied) thus far.

...

Q3: I don't really believe in a "global conspiracy" (since such hypothetical people would be entirely selfish and could not work with others to rule all corners of the world together in a significant fashion, at least for very long), but about two years ago I'm pretty sure that Great Britain made it very difficult, if not impossible, to search for occult subjects online. It does make me a little suspicious about that.

Well, "esoteric material" was one of the "sensitive subjects" on the list for David Cameron's ISP-level filtering drive:

"As well as pornography, users may automatically be opted in to blocks on "violent material", "extremist related content", "anorexia and eating disorder websites" and "suicide related websites", "alcohol" and "smoking". But the list doesn't stop there. It even extends to blocking "web forums" and "esoteric material", whatever that is. "Web blocking circumvention tools" is also included, of course."
-- Cameron's internet filter goes far beyond porn - and that was always the plan, New Statesman, 23 December 2013

Now, supposedly those filters are opt-in, and there's been a lot of messing around in this are over the last couple of years which makes it hard to tell what exactly has happened, but at the very least the ability to select and block was probably but in place. Meanwhile, clauses in the current Draft Investigatory Powers Bill specifically deal with preventing companies from revealing that they have been ordered to interfere with equipment and data. Since it's accepted that this bill is an attempt to legalise behaviour that was already taking place - to normalise it so that it can be used more directly and openly - it wouldn't necessarily surprise me if blocking was already happening, silently.

So basically: it's not a conspiracy, it's a documented fact that the British Government has sought to create, and must already have put in place, filtering capability related to "esoteric material", which would include "the occult" and probably many other things which you and I wouldn't even consider that far from the mainstream. Whether it is active or not, and in what sense, is debatable.

Q3: I see. Thank you for this information. I figured that this was already happening on some level or another, and probably in many other places. Google is probably at least monitoring what information is being sought right now, and making trends and correlations with the data. Knowing that they also own sites such as Youtube, it would be really interesting to even look at a summary of their collected data. It is kind of scary, to be honest, and it is a vulnerability that most are not aware of, or don't care about. I'm slightly of the latter, but really only because I'm a nobody (at least right now).

It's a good idea to use Startpage anyway [https://www.startpage.com/], I'd suggest, just as a point of principle.

Of course, ISP-level monitoring of "internet connection records" and warrentless access to it by dozens of agencies, as mandated by the draft bill, is the important issue going forward. (Basically: that's everything, including location info and other data phones and apps send as part of their operation, any other bits and pieces, not just the things you specifically request as a user). See the summary on page 33. Note that terms like acquisition, interference, communication, transmission are not necessarily meant in the casual-use meaning of those words. Developments to keep an eye on at least, as a good citizen, I'd say. The ID cards project (really: ID database) was prevented a few years ago; same deal here. No point getting too paranoid, eh! :-)

Q3: Good idea. I actually make it a point for me to never own a smartphone; not only are they unnecessary, I just see it as a mistake/crisis waiting to happen. But oddly, so many people have them, and are oblivious to how vulnerable they are with them. I only know in real life two other people who don't have smartphones. It is just so weird to me, especially when I see everyone just having their eyes glued to them while I'm walking down the hall.

I've lost track of how many times I've had to dodge people walking down the sidewalk staring at their phones, not looking where they're going. Then there's this guy [https://www.nydailynews.com/2015/12/26/man-dies-after-walking-off-a-cliff-in-san-diego-while-distracted-by-electronic-device/]. The zombie apocalypse is already upon us.

Q4: That's incredible. I wonder what the official spin would be if Dodgy Dave was directly questioned about why society should be threatened by 'esoteric material'. It's all supposedly 'magical thinking' nonsense anyway so how could they justify this.

I think it's actually just part of a broader notion of anything that contradicts Conservative (the party variant rather than general conservatism) ideology. It's not specifically about being anti magical thinking - in fact, they are massively prone to engaging in it themselves, and not the "good" kind. It's not as if they are great followers of scientific evidence, after all; they regularly discard research and evidence and plough on with ideologically-driven legislation. They generally quite keen to silence all contrary narratives, even when from their own advisors, and scientific bodies generally.

Q4: I guess I should be glad that I now live in Canada but I wouldn't be surprised if the Canadian government already have (or are working on) something similar.
It's the mentality of separation that a certain kind of power often brings. The further removed from the 'common man' those in power become, the less they can truly identify with their wants and needs.
Instead they'd prefer a docile, easily controllable populace who think and therefore act within acceptable predictable parameters.
I remember a particular author - the name escapes me right now - who talks about the importance of being able to learn from within yourself (tapping into the infinite reservoir of information) as there may come a time when you might not have access to the 'outside' information required. I've always thought that the honing of this skill would prove exceedingly useful.

That's an interesting point about "learn from within yourself". I definitely think it's very important that a person knows how to reflect upon and explore their experiences and think through their meaning - rather than accept a conclusion given to them. Not that many people seem to want to do it, though.

It's definitely the viewpoint of this subreddit - try things out, ponder for yourself, don't take anyone else's word for anything (not because they might be misleading you, but because your own experience might differ or your own interpretation might lead to different conclusions). While it might be tempting to have others think on your behalf, in fact nobody can think on your behalf of your perspective. (So we shouldn't be too surprised when, say, power groups don't act in our interests: even if they aren't being selfish, at best they can operate on an simplified idea of who you are as a collective.)

POST: Is DJ basically about awareness 'De-patterning' and then its 'New-patterning'?

For clarity, we should probably emphasise that it isn't "one's awareness" - rather, it is just "awareness". This "awareness" is what you truly are, but it is not a personal awareness. It has no inherent properties other than being-aware. This is the only unchanging truth. Meanwhile, so-called personal awareness in its various forms - by which we mean states and experiences of apparently being you-as-observer or you-as-perspective or you-as-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person or whatever - are all actually just patterns/formatting of "awareness". This might seem pedantic, but it changes the level at which we consider things like "dimensional jumping". Which is to say, we must view it from the the level of context (the nature of experiencing as patterned awareness), which is "before" any content including formatting like "spatial extent" and "apparent unfolding". This means that absolutely all content is relatively true only, has no solid backing, and is subject to alteration.

(Of course, even the idea of "patterning" is a metaphor/formatting, but it is so abstract that it's probably the lowest level that corresponds to a sensible and self-consistent experience that can be talked about. Beyond that, you are probably not really dealing with experiencing a "world" anymore.)

I enjoy the way Nefandi explained it in one of their posts. Context being the stage, content being the play appearing to occur on the stage. So by formatting the stage, you set up the types of plays that can occur thereupon.

Yeah, that's a nice metaphor. Similarly: the landscape defines the available paths across which water may flow, and so on. (Although in both cases, there's an implication that events "happen". Perhaps better to conceive of a static form, across which attention "happens".)

At one point there was the idea of a "pattern stack" where the lower levels would be base patterns or formatting (like "spatial extent" and "unfolding change"), then perception patterns (sensory aspects like colour, sound, texture), the forms, then facts of the world, then movements, then outcomes - and so on. But then I saw that as too formal, and perhaps in danger of becoming a "how it really is" description. Far better to just fully embrace that you can pick any metaphor and render it "active" by intention/implication. Using a metaphor to formulate an intention also implies the metaphor, and you pattern experience accordingly simply by intending the outcome in those terms. Can you think of what you want to experience and see a logical connection, any connection, to your current circumstances? That's it, then. No real need to decorate it further. The world of patterns has no hierarchy or depth (those things being themselves just metaphors).

POST: found a new manifestation technique in a old reddit post in /r/lawofattraction

Hmm. It's seems like an awful lot of ritual for what it's doing, and a bit muddled too: "sending messages to the universe" mixed with "assignment of meaning to an object" mixed with "direct assertion of fact". I think you'd be as well just closing your eyes and asserting the fact of your desired outcome (in the general non-verbal format "it is true now that _____ then").

This is actually my problem with LOA generally: it lacks a structure because there's no underlying model, which makes it easy to end up doing things which have an apparent "structuriness" but are really more like superstition. The active ingredient ends up being incidental or even largely lost. Really, intention is the only power, and everything else is about structuring that intention. Without a clear structure or framework, you're potentially mangling your outcome, and you'd be better just asserting directly. In other words, despite the presence of a glass and some water, it's really more "owls" than "two glasses", and a compromised bird at that. The reason the Two Glasses exercise is structured as it is, is to acquire actual "handles" onto pre-existing patterns and then alter their relative intensity of contribution in a co-ordinated manner. Each step in the process is worded to allow that to happen, whilst distracting you from interfering or counter-intending. (Meanwhile, if you're curious, the original comment describing the Two Glasses exercise can be read here [POST: [EXPERIMENT] Glitch Generation Test, I Need Your Creative Ideas!].)

Which isn't to say the exercise mightn't be useful; but in terms of an exploration of the nature of experience, or even a straightforward seeking of results, I think it maybe obscures more than it provides, perhaps.

...Pretty much. I'd say it's more effective because the actions have a specific meaning, created implicitly via the way the exercise is structured, rather than just being a sequence of arbitrary movements. Remember: there's nothing inherently special about water, labels, drinking and pouring, for example. The key ingredient is the explicit or implicit assigning of meaning or intention to component objects and actions (these can be "physical" or "mental"). Unless your instructions lead you to do that, probably covertly, or you understand that specifically, then you're just moving some liquid around and writing some stuff.

Intention is the "secret" behind everything. Unfortunately, it can't be described or taught, since it's not really a method or a mechanism; it's just something you are and do. Ironically, it's how we always actually do everything that we assume we are doing by other means!

POST: Can you get stuck going in between or delayed?

Some metaphysics guys explained that I'm still coming through to the next dimension but idk

I like that. "Hey, who was that I saw you talking to yesterday?" "Oh, them? They were just, like, some metaphysics guys I bumped into between dimensions."

POST: On the 'acceptance' of facts via implying them

[POST]

Hello to all my fellow jumpers
I wanted to share with you all a simple but very effective technique that has given me some interesting results lately. As some of you may or may not have realized, accepting something as fact is a great way to make DJ work, but in many cases you might have found that wrestling with your beliefs to insert a new one can be as difficult as tearing down a concrete wall with your head.
Let me draw your attention to the following popular saying: "Dress for the job you want, not for the job that you have."
I've been a DJ-ing enthusiast for longer than I can remember, and let me tell you I must have wasted years walking in circles before it started to dawn on me how the subconscious works. In many occasions, by trying too hard and putting too much effort into trying to make my subconscious accept X as a fact, I ended up sending exactly the opposite message: that X was NOT a fact. If you are bullheaded like me and probably haven't been able to get DJ to work despite insisting, it's probably because you are falling in a similar pitfall.
So, what am I proposing here? Instead of working to insert a new belief, I invite you to experiment with the concept of working with them. What sort of clothing would imply that you have the job of your dreams? What sort of walking posture would imply to you that you have high self-stem? What sort of habit would imply that you are happy and fulfilled?
I invite you all to experiment a bit with this. Ask yourself the question: if you had what you want, what sort of little thing would change in your habits that you could do now to imply that you already have it?
If you have a similar method, please do share it with me in the comments. :)

[END OF POST]

A1: Acting as if is definitely something that's worked for me on a number of occasions. I've had experiences where I had no discernible way of logically getting something for a long period of time, and then by choosing to simply act as if I already had it, within a few days it presents itself to me, or something even greater. Sometimes it's met by a seeming negative occurrence, but the true outcome is that the negative seeming occurrence actually led to the greater outcome.

A2: Agreed. I'm going through a current life circumstance change. Under my old "little me" mind I'd be depressed and anxietized.. but this time feels different, there's a sense of unseen guided hand moving mountains. To my old single mind, this would be my life being destroyed.. but yet I know this to be the creative process opening "the ways" for water to flow and even greater experiences to be had.

Q1: Bonus: of particular interest is a dream that I had a few years ago in which I was looking for a computer component to install on my computer. I must have spent about 20 minutes on that dream searching for a store which sold the device without any success.
The more I searched and traveled across the dream city, the more it became like a maze and expanded & created more and more streets and buildings ad-infinitum. Until I stopped searching and materialized one in a question of seconds. My ceaseless searching kept implying that I had not found, and that in turn kept me running around like a dog chasing after it's own tail.

So true. It's the intention and its implications that matter, and intending outcomes is what's important. What we are really intending is always, at heart, an experience. If we intend looking for something, then that's what we get: the experience of lots of searching. If we intend something is found - or as you suggest, do it indirectly by intending something else that implies that it is found - we save ourselves a lot of traveling. This is also why in general life, we should intend where we are going, rather than intending the movements that theoretically should lead us there. The former directs experience towards the outcome, the latter simply guarantees some movements.

I'm going to riff on the topic a bit, and see if we can't get a bit clearer on the background context. Let's maybe wind back a little and be specific about what exactly we're doing, using our little patterning model:

Model Overview

• What you are is "awareness".
• Awareness is always in a particular state.
• That state contains - or rather implies - the full subjective definition of the world (the "world-pattern"), including all past and future moments, all of which are full determined between each intentional shift.
• A state actually consists of all possible patterns of facts simultaneously; patterns are eternal. What defines a particular state is the relative intensities of contribution of the patterns.
• The world-pattern also includes the base formatting of experience - for example, "spatial extent" and "time is passing" and so on. These structure the basic logic of the apparent world experience; they are by nature more intense, or deeper patterns, metaphorically speaking.
• When we "intend" a change, what we are doing is increasing the relative contribution ("intending") of a pattern of facts ("the intention") within the world-pattern.
• This re-patterning of experience is "dumb". There is no intelligence behind it; you are the only intelligence and the only cause.

This gives us a few things to consider:

Model Implications

• You literally get the pattern you intensify, overlaid upon experience, although this includes the felt-meaning of the pattern rather than just any sensory aspect you conjure up via visualisation or whatever.
• Direct intensification of an image, like an owl, will overlay the picture of an owl - and to a lesser extent its extended associated pattern - over all experience, without regard to spatial or temporal context. This is like drawing on a TV screen and the image shining through where there is a gap. This gives rise to what we would call synchronicity. The experience that arise tend to be "about" the target.
• Adding more contextual detail to the owl image will restrict the gaps in which it will appear; the more specific the image the more it tends towards corresponding to a particular event. This tends towards what we might call coincidental manifestation.
• Adding felt-meaning to the image - basically, conjuring the image while knowing that it means-that such and such will happen, makes the intention more specific still. This tallies more tightly with what we'd call generating actual outcomes.
• This is where the actual power is. It is problematic for people to think about, though, since this felt-meaning isn't really experienced as such, or at least not in an expanded way. It's a sort of background dissolved "knowing".
• Then, we have a variant where we imagine an intermediary object while considering that the object means-that a certain outcome will be generated. This is what the "sending messages to the universe" type rituals do.
• Finally, we can do a variant where we imagine or directly intend with the world-pattern itself (using mental, physical or even no objects). We summon up or imply an aspect of the world-pattern, and then imagine operating upon it.

All of these, despite the appearance of being different due to the differing experiences which accompany them, are actually the same thing: intending a change of state.

Model Considerations

So whatever approach we do, the question to ask ourselves is:

• What are we actually intending?

And sometimes it can be:

• Are we even intending at all? Simply performing mental or physical actions may achieve nothing at all, or at best the basic patterning that corresponds to the owl example (typically appearing as synchronicity). What is important is the intention which accompanies any action or non-action - and that intention actually is the outcome.

So, there is no inherent problem with updating the past or the future or the present, because it is all within the current state, now. [1] The difference between the owls and the Two Glasses, though, is that both of them simply overlay or shift the surface patterns without contradicting "plausibility" - plausibility being the base formatting of your experience (that of apparently being a person in a location in a world which is unfolding steadily). Now, one rule that emerges from this picture is that any particular state, between shifts, must be coherent: the world must always "make sense" because it is a single continuous pattern. This means that a shift of state must occur all at once; you can't be "standing on" one part of the pattern while trying to tug at another part, if those two aspects are logically dependent as a requirement for world coherence. In particular, since things that you "definitely know" - in the sense of having already experienced them or had them implied - are the most intense patterns of all, overcoming them requires a surrender of control of any aspect of experience which implies those things, as well as firm full intention of the new state. This, I suggest - perhaps coupled with incorrect structuring of intention - is why certain areas can be problematic.

Basically, then: full surrender of the current state, plus persistent but effortless intention (while avoiding implying any base formatting which would oppose the change), would be the avenue to explore.
__
[1] In fact, the reason the owls experiment is called The Owls of Eternity is because it often has the effect of producing experiences which apparently must have begun in the past, and even noticing things that "must have always been there" but you can't help but ponder.

...Good stuff.

People here are doing nothing but what other people are doing with LoA just with a cooler label

I'd perhaps disagree with that (although it depends on the "people" in question, of course). I'd probably say that the basic nature of experience is, obviously, exactly the same regardless of whatever subject we are talking about - be that LOA, magick, "dimensional jumping", all that. So in that sense, it's all the same. They are all different ways of structuring our thinking about it; and our ways of formulating our intentions. The world-as-it-is doesn't care about any of that, though, until we intend. But: some descriptions definitely lead to more productive pursuits than others.

So, basically the reality is not all that malleable as we so like to think and discuss or no one (that we heard of) has yet mastered the practical use of this world view.

Reality - or we could better call it "experience" - is in principle completely malleable because there is no external world or solid thing underlying it. However, if you, say, imagine-that there is a stable world which is persistent and has certain habits, then it's probably not sensible to assume that later a casual "wish" is going to overturn that. Rather, events are going to arise which are "plausible" although unlikely; the outcomes will be overlaid upon those existing stable patterns. The world will not break in response to your intention for a pay rise. So, you are going to have to do some unpicking of the "base formatting" to have completely discontinuous experiences, or completely release your attachment to that so you're not "standing on part of the rug while trying to move it". And you can totally do this. The problem is, it's a sort of not-doing and it can't be thought about, and ultimately you are destroying the coherence of your world experience if you push this. Even simple exercises like the owl exercise can really mess with your sense of structured reality if you push it a bit (because of apparent retro-causality and problems with separating out memories).

Additional aspect: People tend to keep their mouths shut if they get dramatic changes that go beyond "amazing coincidence", because it raises questions about what "you" and "other people" are, and the nature of the "sharing" of the world, and produces a sort of meta-world perspective that doesn't apply in-world. Only people who do things accidentally tend to pipe up. Have you listened to the Kirby Surprise interview linked in the introduction post? Worth a listen. (Also: his book has overlaps with the Anthony Peake stuff, so you might find that interesting.)

Sometimes I've got so tired of all this jazz that I wish I could have the experience of nothing having any experiences

This is quite a good description of that I think. If you've ever done lucid dreaming, you can switch to an experience of "just being" as "void", like that. Thing is, though, eternity is a long time - so to speak - so you will always switch back into a content-based experience "eventually".

Dying is "too boring"! :-)

I've read Anthony Peake also, the other book I think. I don't really go for his theory, but the overall notion of a "private copy" of the world and experiencing continuing regardless (albeit changing in terms of content) would fit in with the overall concept of this subreddit. Anyway - somehow, talking about this stuff makes it seem way more complicated and obscure than it actually is, right? Basically, it's just "the experience you are having right now" plus some direct attending and intending. Any moment can be designated "Moment Number 1" and we can begin from there, forget the previous stuff, the way I see it.

__

Oh yeah, picking up on something you said: I think there is a definite thing where people don't really want to push this stuff, even if there's something they supposedly really desire and they're really into the subject. And maybe that's sensible for some people: lots of folk get quite upset even with the owls or glasses exercises, and they're just about giving you a sense that there is "something going on" that doesn't match your usual description.

Perhaps being "overweight, bald, wear glasses" is, for some, better than having to deeply, truly confront that the world is imaginary in its fundamental nature, rather than just enjoy thinking about it and being an expert in the theory of flexibility? (Can't say I fancy that strategy myself, mind you!)

Q2: So, you are going to have to do some unpicking of the "base formatting" to have completely discontinuous experiences, or completely release your attachment to that so you're not "standing on part of the rug while trying to move it". And you can totally do this. The problem is, it's a sort of not-doing and it can't be thought about, and ultimately you are destroying the coherence of your world experience if you push this.
why would i make a reality where i am unaware of the nature of myself - unless i'm doing the 'discovering' now - but that seems silly to begin with
what's the point? i suppose when i become fully aware of the immediate nature of (self-created-)reality then i wouldn't ever again be nescient
but if i never was - why would i be now?!

Well, you are always your own nature, right? You are always what you are, taking on different shapes. What you are talking about, though, is having a representation of that nature, perhaps? Knowing about it rather than just knowing-being it. But that itself is just another experience!

Meanwhile, there being a "point" to something is an intellectual construct, an idea. Nothing actually has a point; it just is. This goes back to the assumption people sometimes have that the experience you are having now was deliberately, knowingly constructed - like, pondered and chosen and a self-aware manner: designed. But it wasn't. It evolved by intention-implication, basically. Every time you looked, you saw. Having a model, some self-reflection, now gives you the possibility of deliberately choosing, but even that is just more of the same. You don't really know any more about it beyond being; it's just that you've now got a "parallel model" from which to select patterns, also within awareness.

[But that itself is just another experience!] exactly - so why bother? why bother with the experience or the knowledge of the experience when it's so troublesome

It's not about the experience itself, though - after all, every experience is just a shape taken on by awareness. No experience is special, for sure. Why bother? Well...

What is special, is the understanding that an experience gives you. Having a pure "open awareness contentless" experience, or the experience of the facts of the world changing, tells you that your understanding of the nature of the world and of experiences is mistaken. And since your responses to any experiences arises from that understanding, the quality of the ongoing experience is changed. (For example, seeing yourself as a person "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" in markedly difference to seeing yourself as a patterned awareness within which sensations, perceptions and thoughts arise.)

So, the reason to bother in the first place: out of curiosity (since it's not really possible to anticipate the outcome of the investigation). Subsequent discoveries then retrospectively make it worthwhile, since knowing your nature and the nature of experiences makes everything inherently and directly more pleasant - and it's then not troublesome.

right - see - it's just utterly futile on this planet because the inhabitants are utterly devoid of any sense and just keep multiplying like locusts.

What inhabitants? Where? How?

the problem is nothing changes the fundamental pattern of the world.

Nothing changes it if you don't change it, for sure. Just having thoughts about it usually just generates synchronistic experiences about your ideas. You have to intend directly into/as the patterning of the world, to make changes in your experience of the world. You have to be mindful of whether you are increasing/decreasing/shifting the part of your state that is the actual world, rather than a parallel representation you've created about it.

i.e. no experience I'm having is pleasurable and the only planet I know is awful

Your thoughts about "the planet", perhaps. But your actual sensory experience of it? How is that as you describe? In what way, exactly, are you experiencing a world that's crap? Be careful that it's not mostly stories about a world that is crap. Do you need those stories to change in order to feel good? Why? And so on. Basically I'm saying: it would be a valuable exercise for you to pin down exactly what constitutes an experience of the world being crap, since that would your starting point for changing it.

is where lies the importance of that "accepting yourself" business, right?

Just to be clear, though, it's not "accepting yourself" in the sense of psychological acceptance. It's more about not counter-intending against the current sensory moment. To give a mundane example: say you intend to stand up and walk to the door, and this starts to happen spontaneously, but then you don't like the feeling of being automatic because you don't trust it, and so intend muscle tension in order to "control yourself" - you've basically counter-intended the state shift you intended earlier. Now, expand that idea to other changes in the world-pattern. Again, it's sort of "don't stand on the rug and try to move it at the same time".

the closest we've got at the moment as an actual method for doing so is the persistent realms concept, right?

Switch to a persistent realm and never come back? If you pause and think what radical discontinuous change would be like, that's pretty much it, right?

Although of course, you never actually go anywhere anyway - from one perspective, you aren't in the room you are experiencing now. You are never really anywhere; you just have experiences "as if" you are. And in that example, it's only a "lucid dream" because you later have the experience of waking up - it becomes a dream in retrospect (and because you did it knowingly of course and you've heard of "lucid dreams"). In fact, the idea that every morning we wake up and resume the experience we were having the previous day is really just a constructed narrative. The strand is triggered anew each morning - or rather, the morning is triggered anew within a strand. In all cases, then, the basic nature of the unfolding experience is identical, and we make up a story afterwards about its meaning, based on what we felt we experienced "causing". Perhaps the question, then, isn't so much how to generate an experience of an alternate version of the world, it's more what leads us to categorise it one way or another, and what causes us to revert to a previous experience?

I still can't see how something could come out of the "intending but not-doing and not-thinking-about and am-I-really-intending?" thing...

It's just a way of saying that all experiences are results, and intending is the only cause of change. So, right now, just decide that there is a sphere hovering across the room from you. Place your attention in the space where this spehre is. Now, just decide that this sphere has the power to make your body relax and your eyes see more clearly. See what happens. Did the sphere cause the result? Did you experience yourself cause the result? What caused the result?

...More later, but briefly putting aside the "condition of the world" stuff for a moment:

why bother in the first place?

You are personalising something that is not personal. Awareness doesn't "bother" or "make choices" - it isn't any-thing. That little description you linked to is just a metaphor, a little story, a way of poetically creating a sense of playfulness. It's not how it actually is. In fact, there just is no particular "how it actually is". The story of "God forgetting itself" doesn't mean forgetfulness in the sense of personal memory, necessarily.

it seems like a colossal waste of time to go about 'discovering' things i should already know! it's not even enjoyable

But awareness itself isn't discovering anything, as such, and is "before" time and experiences. Rather, it "takes on the shape of" the experience of discovering. The idea of something being enjoyable or not, a waste or not, and the whole notion of "discovering" - these are built upon the pattern of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world. Again, you attributing to awareness things which are actually just experiences made from awareness. In a standard physics description, would you say that an atom was responsible for choosing the shape of the objects of which is is a part? It's a similar argument.

You are like a "material" who which shape-shifts into states and experiences - and tugging on one part of yourself implies a movement of other parts. You wouldn't say that you choose those collateral movements. And in fact, you wouldn't say that you choose the main movement, because mostly you didn't realise what you were doing. Even when you do come to an understanding, that description is actually just a pointer to "that which cannot be described" - because descriptions are also just experiences, and so are choices.

...my comprehension of that turns into frustration at yet-again having to scratch around for something to do or know or experience to move on...

That's the tricky thing. Ultimately you discover that you can't describe yourself because you are the thing that the experience of "descriptions" is made from. But you always are yourself - and what you can do is discover all the things that you are not.

For example, one we come back to: if you close your eyes and "feel out" you discover that "you" are actually everywhere, in all directions. And if you pause and attend to the content of your experience, you find that although you are having an experience of "being here" and the world is "over there", actually they are both made from "you" and are inside "you".

So, if whenever we get lost in thoughts about experience, we can always come back to the actual fact of experience - now. And then we find that our descriptions are all floating as thoughts within that experience, rather than actually describing that experience. From this perspective, a lot of questions actually become meaningless. For instance, "why" questions only make sense relatively within with reference to particular content. In terms of the overall context, they are like "castles in the sky": they are self-consistent sets of thoughts, for sure, but they are just floating in the middle of nothingness, not pointing to anything outside of themselves. You are the sky, and those castles are made from you, and so you can never make a castle that captures you or explains you (you-as-awareness, that is).

If you explore that idea of "things having occurred (or not)" then you have to follow it to its logical conclusion, right down to the details of your personal experience, now, rather than just ideas about the world. Which gives us that the only thing "happening" is your sensory experience right now. There isn't a "past" or "future" other than the thought of it. There's isn't "a world" other than the thought of it. None of the things you are concerned about are happening right now "out there", in this sense. You don't need to get any fancier with the concept than that, I'd say.

One implication of this is, that wrestling with a particular aspect of experience persists it, because an interaction that doesn't have a transformative narrative to it simply implies that aspect all the more strongly. By basic patterning, even, if you spend your days thinking about things which irk you, you are increasing the "relative intensity" of those things, overlaying their patterns upon ongoing experience. In other words, there's a sense in which you have to forget it rather than fight it. You don't ever "solve" a problem - rather, you "forget" the problem and thereby shift to residing in the "solved" state?

Q1: Interestingly now that you mention it, in taking the "thing has occurred" to its logical conclusion, I discover that nothing implies it more than effortlessness, non-doing, and perhaps not even intending to change anything at all. I think in the mind of many of us there is deeply programmed the idea that life is like a steering wheel that we must constantly keep our hands on or it will derail.
My first connection with the ideas behind DJ was with this article [https://montalk.net/matrix/122/timeline-dynamics]. The article is from 2006 so I'm sure his views have evolved but nonetheless I think he hits close to the core idea with his "manifesting miracles" guide.
EDIT: I said hands off but meant hands on... witty mistake :P

Definitely agreed on steering wheels!

You're right there is a real problem with the assumption that ongoing experience needs "maintained" - which itself arises from the conflation of the "sphere of experience" with "sphere of intention", perhaps? That is, that the sensory experience I'm having right now is all I can influence and is all that is logged. Actually, it is maybe more accurate to say that my intentions apply "globally" and are overlaid over the entire world-pattern, and the current experience just being the part I am "looking at" right now. (Experiences are apparently local; intentions are actively global.) Because, in fact, you are experiencing the entire world-pattern right now, it's just that only one aspect of it is "unfolded" into 3D-sense, while the rest is "enfolded" or dissolved into the background and only experienced as a sort of "tone" or "global summary sense". Without that idea, we are doomed to continually "tinker" with any outcome that doesn't appear in our senses within a very small time frame, because we never come to understand that the world only shifts when we intend - and that our default should be hands off between intentions. The problem, we can't work this out in advance, because our descriptions have usually been built from just our local observations; we have to take a chance and experiment with intending wide.

Saved that article for later - thanks.

My early metaphor for time was that, implicitly, every possible moment was available, in a conceptual infinite grid (see: time travel version). That itself is related to the configuration/diagrammatic descriptions from Julian Barbour's The End Of Time and JW Dunne's The Serial Universe - although the idea appears in lots of places, including William Blake's "the bright sculptures of Los’s Hall". I think it's an old idea that keeps coming up in different ways. It seems that it is hard to make it stick, though, in people's minds?

Q1: I think it's an old idea that keeps coming up in different ways. It seems that it is hard to make it stick, though, in people's minds?
Truthfully, I find it quite amazing how certain ideas spread and take hold of large groups of people so fast and so easily (let's take for example, PSY's gangnam style) but some others barely manage to hold any traction. You could say well it's a song and it's catchy and whatever else, but I'm still inclined to think there may be more to it.

I'm inclined to think that also.

Q1: while the rest is "enfolded" or dissolved into the background and only experienced as a sort of "tone" or "global summary sense".
Follow up
This is an interesting concept. The "background felt-sense" perception that you talk about, that we constantly overlook. Tom(author of montalk.net) talks about it on an interview with Jason Demaskis, and even says that it is the most important aspect to reality creation/other things (at around 1:07:46 [https://youtu.be/X-HB1yc-HUk?t=1h7m46s], the full interview is worth listening to as well). How to go around changing the most basic/behind the scenes beliefs is a huge topic in itself. In my experience, I have noted how immersing yourself in a video game/film/book can for a time take your "background felt-sense" to another realm.
I noticed this effect when I watched the film Interstellar, because you are there in Earth with the main characters and then it slowly progresses to them leaving everything behind and even going to a higher dimensional space. Also after being immersed in a lucid dream for a while I tend to get a feeling of being some sort of indestructible deity which tends to go away after a while of being awake in the "real" world. Still, how you said, there's something that pulls you away from maintaining those "background felt-sense".

It also comes up in the philosophy and psychology aspects of Eugene Gendlin's work. He talks of a felt-sense for navigating one's current personal situation. However, as with the intending of outcomes more generally, if you approach this as the "dissolved state" of everything - the "global summary" of the entire state of you-as-awareness rather than you-as-person - it's actually much more that. It's both a huge topic, and not: in the sense that it's like having a pond with all the objects of the world in it "stored" in the same way, and therefore the same approach applies universally. The felt-sense actually is the world-state (all of it over all time), and your sensory experience merely corresponds to aspects of it that you have "unfolded" into perception. This means that you are literally experiencing the entirety of the world right now. Which is obvious, of course: since there is no "outside" to you, there's nowhere else for it to be, anyway. I actually think one of the things that defines a more "successful" film, is that it paces and leads the audience by creating a subtle felt-connection with them. It leads their felt-sense to become an ongoing global sense of the film as it unfolds. This is why there is a difference between films which are "designed" - a series of set pieces with connective filler in between - and those that are "woven" - a situation that evolves as the film progresses. It the former is like stamping an idea from nowhere onto the film; the latter is like drawing a thread from an idea and weaving it into imagery.

Note, both types of film can be enjoyable - but the "designed" film tends to like a fairground ride, where you're always aware you are watching a film, can feel the mechanics; you don't become so immersed in the story or characters. The "woven" film is an immersive world and leads you to be the film's world for the duration. For example: even if you enjoyed it, you can perceive that The Force Awakens was a "designed" film. It felt somehow shallow, like a sequence of scenes one after the other, and for a world-building franchise it somehow lacked "awe"; the making of the film was very evident in the final experience. Meanwhile, Interstellar definitely had its problems with characterisation and dialogue, but it absolutely absorbs you in a way that The Force Awakens does not.

Q1: I definitely feel what you mean in your example. While I don't read ASoIAF a friend once showed me a quote from the author which definitely resonated with me:
==It is true that I spend a lot of words in my books describing the meals my characters are eating. More than most writers, I suspect. This does draw a certain amount of criticism from those readers and reviewers who like a brisker pace. "Do we really need all that detailed description of food?" these critics will ask. "What does it matter how many courses were served, whether the capons were nicely crisped, what sort of sauce the wild boar was cooked in?" Whether it is a seventy-seven-course wedding banquet or some outlaws sharing salt beef and apples around a campfire, these critics don't want to hear about it unless it advances the plot. I bet they eat fast food while they're typing too. I have a different outlook on these matters. I write to tell a story, and telling a story is not at all the same as advancing the plot. If the plot was all that mattered, none of us would need to read novels at all. The CliffsNotes would suffice. All you'll miss is . . . well, everything. For me, the journey is what matters, not how quickly one can get to the final destination. When I read, as when I travel, I want to see the sights, smell the flowers, and, yes, taste the food. My goal as a writer has always been to create an immersive vicarious experience for my readers. When a reader puts down one of my novels, I want him to remember the events of the book as if he had lived them. And the way to do that is with sensory detail.
Now... the big question right now is, what effect does it have in one's immediate reality? If I read a lot of novels about civil wars and harsh survival conditions, enough that it alters my "felt-sense" of the world deep down, does that synchronistically nudge events in my life towards making me experience something like that? In some cases, I have noted a sort of "owls of eternity" type situation in which I run into more content relating to that particular felt-sense. The above question is important because it's a popular idea among "truthers" that movies & tv shows are used as a tool of "cultural modulation."

Great quote. Yes, I'd say that fictional content does result in a "patterning" of our ongoing experience too. And, this becomes ever more obvious if we relax our hold on our state and release our spatial attentional focus - because then our "thought strands" and "main strands" of experience are no longer so divided: to summon an image in strand is to overlay it upon strand. However, because of the nature of experience, I don't think it would be useful for "cultural modulation" by others onto you, since both the experience and the "modulation material" occur within you-as-awareness. You'd be doing it to yourself, really, in a fundamental sense anyway. For a classic read on patterning by fiction, check out Philip K Dick's essay: How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.

...

[Previous Edit] ...even there is no intelligence behind it, I - the character having this experience - am not acting fully consciously, or alone at all, as some people may understand this.

Well, you are never the character, you are always "awareness", but that doesn't mean you do what you do knowingly - by which I mean, having a parallel understanding in thought about what it is you are doing, or somehow pre-experiencing the results in detail beyond the specific intention. So, if you specify a particular outcome - say, intend an exact scene - then that is like you are defining the scene as fact by intensifying its contribution to the world. Now, because the world must "make sense", its pattern will simply by its nature shift to accommodate that coherently. You are the only intelligence, but that doesn't mean you have a thought-based knowledge of what it will be like to experience that world, beyond the intention, in advance. You won't know the details of the implications of that intention, until you encounter them subsequently. And if you don't even have an understanding of what "intending" is, you'll be even more confused. You are the only intelligence and the only power - but that doesn't necessarily mean you understand what's going on!

Which is what this subreddit is about, basically.

Dumb Patterning Aside: This is like if a mountain doubles its height in a landscape, the landscape doesn't have to "work out" or "know" how to incorporate the mountain, it is shaped as part of the change, just from being a continuous landscape. Now, imagine that you are a person on top of that mountain who "intends" it to double in height. Because you did the intending, you know the state of the mountain as it appears when unfolded into the senses. However, you don't necessarily know the state of the rest of the landscape, because it is not (yet) unfolded into the senses.

[Neville] didn't go all psychological about the past

Definitely I'm talking about actual world change rather than just psychological change - but: in this description of experience, it becomes hard to really say what "psychological change" means, and "the world" doesn't mean quite the same thing as it normally would. We're always talking about our ongoing experience, which arises within awareness, and there's no fundamental distinction in type between different aspects of experience. However, if we say that "the world" is our main bright 3D-immersive multi-sensory strand of experience, and "psychological experience" is the strand of thoughts and body sensations, then it's clear what we're wanting to change, and that we must intend appropriately - i.e. intend to the pattern of "the world" rather than any parallel thoughts about the world.

There's no trick to this, you simply make that your intention; it's like choosing to move your left hand rather than your right hand. There's no "way" to do one rather than the other. But as in that example, describing it in words makes it sound way more complicated than it is; it just is.

A1: I don't quite understand what is it that you're wanting to gain from this though?
On the one hand, it seems as though you're interested in the idea of changing your experience, but then as soon as you get that idea out there, you immediately shoot it down by condeming pretty much 99% of the people on the planet because you have some preconceived notion that the entire world has gone to shit...?
Remember that the way you're interpreting the world and people you know of directly impacts your experience within this life. What do you mean by fundamental pattern of the world? All changes tug at the strings of every thing else in existence, based simply on your changing of intention - so you have total impact over everything, as does everybody else. With that being said, some things are unlikely to change because something far-fetched would not make sense or serve you or those around you in any logical way... thus it is far-fetched. If you're wanting to experience a world that you feel better about, you need to choose reasons to feel better about it - your interpretations aren't something that happen to you, they happen from you, and they help mold your personal experience... regardless of how 99% of the rest of the human species behaves. Remember that humans are a minority of all the beings on the earth - and every single one of them has awareness, although their consciousness may be focused differently than a human's.

POST: [Two Glasses Method] How do you really know which words to choose?

The one that feels more right, perhaps? :-p

Really, it's not "right" as in "correct", it's "right" as in "appropriate" - feels like the situation, not feels like rightness. The purpose of the word is purely to provide a "handle" onto the situation. There are many different possibilities that could fulfil this criterion, but that doesn't matter. It's about what the word is pointing to, attached to, rather than the shape of the pointing.

TL;DR: Don't overthink this and fall into italicised "whataboutery" - after all, how can we really know whether our questions truly matter in actual experience, and which questions would be the right questions to ask?

Q1: Really, it's not "right" as in "correct", it's "right" as in "appropriate" - feels like the situation, not feels like rightness.
This reminds me of a scene in True Detective in which the character (Rust Cohle) talks about "smelling the psychosphere" and he comments how it feels like "aluminum and ashes", kind of exposing the way he "felt" about the world. Interestingly, if you've watched the show's first season, you'd notice the aluminum and ashes thing was pretty prominent during the season with several scenes in which the character(Rust Cohle) is shown drinking/using cans of beer (aluminum) and smoking (ashes). It's worth noting how he assigns this meaning to the world around him, but it really describes himself more than the world.
Found it! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3m30s&v=A8x73UW8Hjk&feature=youtu.be]

Ah yes, that's nice. I hadn't noticed the aluminium and ashes theme running throughout the show for Cohle's worldview (and world-sense) when watching it, but you're right. That stuff is why I much preferred the first season; while second season had other flaws, it really suffered from not having such a well thought out character perspective.

POST: If Dimensional jumping is real, how this subreddit works, then?

It is more accurate to say that we all are different dimensions, not that we are in them. A "dimension" can best be thought of as a particular "state", corresponding to a particular set of facts or patterns. As to what this means for "us all", that doesn't translate easily (or at all) into conceptual thinking, but the Hall of Records metaphor does provide one way to approach this.

Is there any experiences you created that were succeeded through the "hall of records"?

Well, the Hall of Records is intended primarily as a way to conceive of how experience is structured, as an alternative to the usual "independent people in a spatially-extended place unfolding in time" worldview (which is itself just a metaphor, of course). It does provide another way to conceive of experiences and outcomes, but it doesn't cause any as such - only intention does/is that. However, even just adopting it as a perspective does tend to loosen things up a bit, make everything much more dreamlike, particularly with "other people", but more generally you'll have experiences that are more like exploring "associative thinking" than a solid mechanistic place. Just try absorbing and intending the metaphor as "how things are", and see what happens?

To emphasise again: the exercises and techniques, if we want to call them that, never do anything in themselves - rather, they are a way of structuring intention, either directly or implicitly.

POST: What if someone I know does it? What happens to "my" them?

I care for my friend very much and I don't want to lose him. I know it isn't a physical body-switching thing, but if "he" goes to another dimension, what is left here? Does he vanish? Is what remains in his body a version of himself that didn't succeed in jumping? Does he switch with the version of himself in the dimension he jumped to?

So, in fact I'd say that your issue isn't really about what happens to him if a jump takes place - it's about what he (and you) are now. Basically, it doesn't work that way. You have to think of everything in terms of your own subjective experience. If you experience him doing a jump, then it is really your experience of him performing a jump - it is part of your "world-pattern" and is an outcome or implication of your own intention. Your friend doesn't go anywhere, because there is no "person" behind/inside your friend - he is made from "awareness", currently as images and sound and so on, patterned. Similarly, you are not a person either: there is no "person" behind your body, you are "awareness". Right now, "awareness" has taken on the shape of the perspective of you-as-person. You feel that you are you-as-person, but really you are always "awareness" and have "first cause" influence as a result.

It's like this is your "private copy" of the world - at this moment. There is no "outside" to awareness, and there is nothing "behind" the experiences you are having - except awareness. It's all you-as-awareness. Some other "time", "eventually", you-as-awareness might take on the shape of your friend's perspective, and have experiences from that point of view (and be mission controller in exactly the same way, but perhaps not realise it). But for now, you are effectively the god of your own copy of the world, and there is nothing else because it is made from you.

TL;DR: You can ponder a lot of metaphysics, or you can simply accept that it just doesn't work that way and so there's no need to worry.

Q1: Right now, "awareness" has taken on the shape of the perspective of you-as-person. You feel that you are you-as-person, but really you are always "awareness" and have "first cause" influence as a result.
this is why key exists in different 'places' at the same moment - it's just awareness condensing into certain forms

As soon as we start talking about multiple "moments" or "places" though, we are making an error. It's not that it's wrong as such - it's that it is meaningless, in the sense that this cannot be talked about conceptually. "Moments" and "places" only exist as an aspect of, part of the formatting of, an experience, and not outside of it. "Awareness" itself has no inherent properties other than being-aware - and so things like division, multiplicity, location, place, space, time are things that awareness can "take on the shape of", but it is incorrect to talk of those "shapes" being "in" a place or time, and so on. But so long as we keep in mind that we're talking metaphorically - and that although we might even pattern our experience with those metaphors ("active metaphors") such that we have experiences "as if" they were true, they are not fundmentally true - we get the best of all (ahem) worlds.

The main reason I bring this up in such a pedantic way, is that recognising this frees you from trying to wrestle to understand this - that is, create a parallel construction in thought which corresponds to it - because it is not actually possible. Again it's like trying to build a sandcastle which captures both "the beach" and "sand" - it is those two things, but it cannot contain them, and can never be identical with them. Descriptions and "understandings" need to be recognised for what they are: yet more experiences, on the same level, and not something which gets "behind" experiences.

couldn't that be all placed within one 'strand of thought' - i.e., a strand of thought that contains all the possible apparent multiplicity

I'd say that all the possible apparent multiplicity is within awareness, but of course you could have an experience "as if" all multiplicity is within a strand, perhaps even in some visual way - but that itself would be a selection from all possible patterns. We're really just tinkering with concepts here. There's only ever really "experience", and "strands" are just a nice way of talking about a certain type of overall experience where things seem "parallel".

yes, because there is no objective time in the universe - only relative time, which disappears as soon as i create a new 'experience'/'scenario'

I'd agree. "Time" is a concept, "change" is an aspect of an experience and doesn't "happen" outside of that experience, in the same way that a contour doesn't happen independently of the mountain, and a stream doesn't happen independently of flowing water, etc.

intending to eliminate all errors in perception

What counts as an error in perception? To me, I suppose an error in perception is to think that there is something "behind" experience. If one perceives an experience as being awareness and recognises that thoughts arising with that experience are also awareness, then one is not in error, since one recognises the true nature of the overall experience.

right, that is where one gets into an infinite loop of trying-to-apprehend that-which-cannot-be-apprehended and end up creating more and more fictitious scenarios without actually solving anything

Right - all at the same level, while incorrectly thinking that you are getting deeper into some hierarchy. Like seeing a coffee table and, examining it more closely, seeing wood, wood grain, molecules, atoms... but you are not getting deeper really, you aren't getting "behind" the table; you are just having different experiences at the same level.

...

We should bear in mind that "worldlines" and so on are just metaphors. You might have experiences "as if" there were such things, but there are not, in fact, lots of people in different threads. As soon as you envisage something in "diagrammatic" form in the 3rd-person (the "view from nowhere") you are immediately "wrong", in the sense that there no such underlying basis to experience - the though of it is itself just an experience, still within your perspective. You never get "outside" of you-as-awareness. Having said that, if these ideas are appealing and you absorb them, they can be useful for creating a worldview you like because it feels the most appealing and "understandable", or even to pattern your experience. And it does fill a placeholder when it comes to the unthinkable issue of "what are other people in terms of jumping". However, these descriptions are never "how things really are behind the scenes" (because there is no "behind the scenes"). Keeping this in mind helps us retain our flexibility of both thought and potential.

The Hall of Records metaphor tries to fulfil that purpose. A metaphor can't be right, but it can try to avoid or indicate the unavoidable error that results from trying to think about something that is "before" thought, is "before" the formatting of division and multiplicity (which are aspects of experiences, not aspects of the-world-as-it-is, necessarily).

...I guess it would be good here define what is meant by a "reality" and what is meant by a "you"? What do you mean by those terms? I think that's probably the root of our disagreement here (if there is one, and actually there might not be, fundamentally).

However, let's try -

However, you might be talking about the concept/pattern of which I was applying to reality. You'd be right in thinking its wrong (it probably is) but wrong in thinking theres no basis for this idea. Reality itself serves as the basis for all ideas.

Okay, so if by "reality" you mean "the main strand of experience", then what I would describe as "jumping" would be the imposition of a pattern onto that main strand. Essentially, "intensifying the relative contribution" of that fact/pattern in one's state, and there one's ongoing experience. Ideas for such patterns might arise in the main strand or in any parallel strands (by which I mean: thoughts). Basically, they come from experience in any of its aspects. I usually avoid the word "reality" because I think it's become quite a messy term that gets used for lots of different things, but I would say that perhaps: what is real is that which does not change. Following from this, the only thing that is "real" is "that which is aware" and "takes on the shape of experiences". The only facts that are always true and can be checked at any time by attending to direct experience:

• What I am is that which is aware - a sort of "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware, and which is not an object, and has no "edge" or "outside".
• I am having an experience, and I am aware of having an experience.
• Those experiences I have are "made from" me - I am that which "takes on the shape of" experiences.

These are really the same fact, of course, once you strip away the duality that language has introduced. So that leads to: reality == awareness.

No, because it [the senses] tells us there IS something outside our awareness.

Does it, though? Even your thought about an outside, is inside. We might say that not all of our experience is expanded out into a 3D multi-sensory format.

Your ideas on the nature of reality are simply an interchangeable metaphor just like mine is.

The important thing is, though, that it recognises itself as a metaphor - and that the-world-as-it-is can never be captured in a metaphor, because it at the same level as a metaphor. It seeks simply to be the most flexible way to describe patterns. It's not intended to be a theory of "how reality works" - but there is no "how reality works". The idea of there being a "how things work" exists in thought, not in the world.

It is a usefull patern used to trick your brain out of its own current patterns to test the boundaries of reality and cause changes.

What brain?

But you're right: the ultimate point of any metaphor is that it allows you to conceive of experiences that you could not formulate otherwise, and that having done so your intention will also intend that worldview by implication. World lines are good for that too - but we should be careful we don't start viewing them as "true" in some fundamental way. One might have experiences "as if" they exist one day, and then have experiences "as if" they don't another day. The way in which they exist, then, are as patterns of experience, not "out there" in some independent way.

The reason I go with the worldlines theory rather than your own is that their appears to currently be more data supporting the idea of mutliple realities...

What data? By which I mean, when pondering this sort of thing, what would or should count as data?

You're right: all we can prove (to ourselves) is the nature of our direct experience right now, plus infer from the experiences we produce what the limits are. Taking the two together, I suggest the is no stable truth in terms of objects or patterns. There is no solid underlying persistent substrate at all in that sense.

First Cause may be casued by awareness or it may not be. It may seem like First Cause is a concept that exists due to or awareness but since our perception of reality is flawed we can never say for sure if we were the ones behind the First Cause or if it was some other entity/pattern (or even that there isnt a First Cause).

First cause isn't "caused" by awareness, though: it is awareness. It's a phrase to describe that awareness is self-modifying - like a shape-shifter, you might say. Nothing "causes" awareness to change, and any apparent causes and effects you observe are in fact all "results" in that sense.

We could imagine this as being like a landscape of "moments" which can reform itself into a new pattern. A walker who explored the landscape subsequently would encounter one feature or moment, then another. To him, it might seem as if one feature "caused" the other feature - but in fact all features would be a result of the reshaping of the landscape: "first cause". (Note: the metaphorical landscape here would be a full static definition across all moments; and even "time passing" would be a static pattern, actually.)

I'd add that it makes no sense to talk of some other entity/pattern in this context. Those would be apparent interactions, but both the entity and the object it operated on would be aspects of the patterned landscape. The entity wouldn't cause anything; it's apparent actions would be a result. That's how I'm thinking of this, anyway.

EDIT: Quite a long reply but the first chunk is my main response to your points. The second chunk is an attempt to give a very loose outline of the "patterning" description. Thanks for the discussion!

Main Responses

Causes and Awareness

What I guess I'm getting at here is that if we are indeed aware there's something we have to be aware of that would cause this awareness.

I'd say that this is exactly where the "solution" lies, for want of a better term. What can cause awareness? Note that by "awareness" we have to be careful, and I deliberately don't use the world "consciousness" because that word has been kind of ruined. Different meanings of that word tend to get mixed up: namely "consciousness-of" (being aware of an experience), "self-consciousness" (identifying with a certain part of experience as "you"), and "consciousness" (a non-object material that just is). I'm referring to something like the last one here. So by "awareness" I mean a sort of non-material "material" - basically "that which is". It isn't "caused", it just "is". In fact "causation" is something at is "after" or "made from" awareness. Since awareness has no inherent properties other than being-aware, it makes no sense to talk of it in terms of spatial or temporal characteristics. Nothing can cause awareness, and nothing can cause experience.

Unfortunately, language and thought are themselves contents of experience, and although awareness itself is not an object, the contents of experience are. This is why we can't really formulate a description of awareness or think about it. It never "makes sense" in those terms. We can only be it and directly know/realise it. And that, actually, is how you come to adopt this view: not by working it out intellectually, but by attending to your direct experience as it is, and recognising its properties. Right now, you could pause a notice that - even thought you are having an experience of apparently being "over here" while this screen is "over there" - that in fact you are located "everywhere" within experience, and that your experience has no edges. For example, pause and direct your attention at these words. Now, direct your attention to "the place you are looking out from". What do you find there? Now keep going. What do you discover?

I also think that our definitions of "first cause" were somewhat different leading to some confusion...

Ah, right. I understand where you were coming from now.

Truth Behind Patterns

Altogether though I think it comes down to a fundamental disagreement: you believe there is no "truth behind the patterns" while I maintain there is. In the end I would argue that both methods are flexible enough to be perfectly valid. Let us just agree to disagree.

What I would say though, is that the patterns are the truth. Actually, what I'd say is that all that is true is "awareness" and the shape it has taken on. There is nothing else. If there was a "behind" to a particular pattern (made from awareness), then that "behind" would also be a pattern (made from awareness). It's a little like, no matter what thoughts you have about the world or about an "outside" to awareness, those thoughts are still themselves within and made from awareness. Thoughts about experiences are themselves experiences. Right - all at the same level, while incorrectly thinking that you are getting deeper into some hierarchy. Reusing an example: It's like seeing a coffee table and, examining it more closely, seeing wood, wood grain, molecules, atoms... but you are not getting deeper really, you aren't getting "behind" the table: you are just having different experiences at the same level. So we don't necessarily have to "agree to disagree" I think, because we are talking about slightly different things. Although I am saying that awareness has no inherent structure, that does not mean we do not at present have an accumulated structure from all the various intentions and their implications to date.

This description doesn't say there is no format or factual aspect to things - it simply says that all formatting and facts are open to amendment, and that this is possible because all current structure is you-as-awareness "shaped" into a particular, and the only true causal mechanism is the shape-shifting "first cause" ability of awareness to adopt a new state. If this were not the case, neither experience nor amendment would be possible (how could you interact across a boundary of type? how could you experience across a boundary of type?). So, we can absolutely adopt "world lines" as a pattern and have experiences "as if" they were true. And we can also adopt "a infinite gloop of all possible moments" and have experiences "as if" that is true. The default pattern for most people is: "independent people within a shared spatially-extended place unfolding in time", and so they have experiences "as if" that is true (and then think we are crazy for talking about all this stuff, fair enough!).

Outline of a Model

Anyway, I hope that's a bit clearer. The very loose bullet-point outline for the "patterning" description would be something like this, written as assertions for simplicity:

• What you truly are, is "awareness". Or for poetic purposes: an "open space of awareness which takes on the shape of states and experiences" and whose only inherent property is being-aware.
• Dissolved within this awareness are all possible facts, patterns and experiences - which exist eternally. All possible patterns are present and active within experience, always.
• Awareness is always in a particular "state" - even if that is a flat state where no patterns are dominant, corresponding to a "void" experience. A state includes all base formatting (including apparent time/space aspects), perceptual formatting, world facts, events and so on. This state defines the facts-of-the-world and hence your ongoing experience.
• A "state" can be said to correspond to a particular distribution of relative intensities of patterns. We might say that awareness "takes on the shape of" a particular state and hence a fully-defined state of experiences. This can be imagined as a sort of "landscape" which defines all moments across all time. "Time passing" is itself a static pattern, which can be likened to a fixed trajectory of attentional focus across a the landscape of moments.
• A "state", then, is fully defined and fully deterministic.
• However, the landscape can be "shifted" by altering the relative intensities of the constituent patterns. This amounts to awareness "taking on the shape of" a different distribution, hence a different state with a different deterministic set of moments. (This is where things like "dimensional jumping" fit in.)
• Such shifts are done by "intending". To "intend" is to increase the intensity of a particular pattern ("the intention"), either directly or by implication.
• "Intending" amounts to something like "thinking the fact of something being true", but it is not a thought with an object as its target - this is an unbounded "objectless, subjective" thought: one thinks it by "bringing it to mind" or "selecting the pattern" or "contemplating the fact". One is "adopting the shape of" a state that incorporates that pattern. There is no technique to intending; one simply intends. (It also can't really be described!)
• Practically speaking, one often tends to intend by implication, using misdirection. That is, one performs some mental or physical task (which is itself intention!) with the understanding that this means-that your target pattern is true. Examples can actually be as simple as simply "asserting", "declaring" or "commanding" that something is true. All it has to accomplish, is triggering into prominence that particular pattern by implying it - without obstruction.
• The world, then, is essentially a persistent or maintained thought of a world, shaped from awareness, which can be revised by thinking of a different world, again as awareness.

Again, note that the model isn't "true" - what it aims to do is be the most generalised description for structured experiences, the minimum model that "makes sense" can be thought in terms of. It captures the maximum scope of "as if" experiences and allows them to make sense, by going to a "meta" level that is "before" the world-pattern (but "after" awareness, of course).

To emphasise: what is inherently true is only ascertained by directly attending to experience as it is, now, and not by thinking about it. Which is why people meditate and stuff. But I think you can infer this understanding by repeatedly adopting a worldview, noting that your ongoing experience tends to fall in line with it "as if" it were true, until it becomes clear that there is no fundamental "how things are" or "how things work", other than the fact that you are 'that which is experiencing and experience'.

Whew. Okay, I think that covers my perspective as best it can be covered at present. It's nice to be pushed to clarify things anyway.

POST: You don't need a technique (and other patterns)

Soon enough this sub will abandon methods and rejoin the common use of the law of attraction.

...and then soon after that, someone will start a subreddit based on a metaphysical model again, because the attempt to follow "the law of attraction" quickly descends into near-superstition, in my experience. The law of attraction neither commits to a model, nor fully commits to the arbitrariness of all models. It's not the methods that matter generally, and that isn't what distinguishes what we discuss here. Rather, it's the clear and specific patterning of intention - and by extension any properly formed model or internally consistent technique - combined with an underlying focus on the broader nature of experiencing, and the ongoing exploration of those things.

I'm curious, were you the one that created the two glasses method and was it based on the law of attraction? Do you still use the two glasses method?

I did create it, as a response to a post over at /r/glitch_in_the_matrix asking for ways one might deliberately generate a "glitch". It wasn't based on the law of attraction - it was based on the pattern that underlies this description. But of course, everything, even moving your arms and legs, is based on (or rather is) structured intention and awareness, so there's a common root to all of this. The idea is that if you get familiar with the owls and glasses exercise, ponder them along with the metaphors given, then you have pretty much everything you need to be your own expert here.

POST: Another newbie, another "what is it all about?"

Still, it is not very clear what you are trying to do here.

If it's about anything, I'd say it's about putting aside assumptions and exploring things. The childish exercises, then, are simply ways of demonstrating to ourselves that our everyday assumptions are perhaps not particularly accurate, and triggering contemplation and further experimentation. So, basically, it's about having a questioning attitude, particularly about the default metaphor we use to describe the world (that it is a "shared spatially-extended place unfolding in time").

This all stuff is nothing at all special, this is just how our machinary of brains work.

Really? How does the "machinery of brains" work? (Please don't say it's an information processor!)

I have weird things happening to me from time to time. Doesn't mean anything special, everyone has their own share of weird stuff.

Well, it might mean something special. If you don't have a detailed description of how, exactly, "weird things happening" works, then who's to say, I suppose?

As far as science is concerned, all the experience we feel happens in our mind

What's a "mind"?

If you "jump" from this body, it shouldn't at all affect that body's brain, so it won't disappear from reddit.

The idea that you "jump" from a body is perhaps incorrect. That's not what is meant by a "jump". Even the idea that you are "in" a body is suspect, surely. And what would the "you" be that would be in it, anyway? I'm not sure what the link between this and "affecting the body's brain" is?

This reminded me of tulpamancy, except that tulpamancers know that it's all in their heads.

Didn't you just say that everything was just in our minds?

Come on, if you really dig deeper, you shouldn't even have a desire for a personal gain, since such a desire is also a mental construct you try so hard to eliminate.

Why shouldn't you have desire for personal gain? What is a "person", anyway? Why should you eliminate desire? And what's a "mental construct"? This sounds a bit superstitious, more than anything!

I'm interested in figuring out what consciousness is...

That does contain a hidden assumption that consciousness is a "thing"...

But immediately got frustrated by the amount of magical thinking.

...and actually, I'd say one of the things this subreddit does is explicitly try to avoid magical thinking, by unpacking it. It endeavours to take a step back, and instead of making assumptions about the content of experience, considers the context of it - that is, directly or indirectly explore questions about "the nature of experiencing" itself, and what the relationship is between experiences and narratives. In other words, to call into question not only "how things work", but also what it even means to talk of a "how things work" - as well as what you-as-experiencer is, and so on. Mostly, it's just people having some fun, though, of course, and not getting too arrogant about it! :-)

TL;DR: It's about exploring our experience, without presupposing anything, including the idea that we are exploring our experience...

Q1: Valid questions you ask and valud attitude you have. That's why I got excited once encountered this sub. Yeah, hard to say what is "mind", "consciousness" etc, this is why it is important to be open-minded. But what I see in the threads of this sub doesn't correspond to this spirit. You say you "unpack magical thinking" - I see people focusing on the procedure of techniques, not their essence. What struck me most is that some here apparently believe that they can travel in time or to parallel worlds if they focus hard enough. You are talking about being open minded and trying to understand things, while what I see is people believing they can achieve certain supernatural stuff and trying to do that. Yeah, supernatural stuff is unquestionably cool, but so many people already made the mistake of believing they can achieve it with none of them actually achieving it.

I think all of that is okay, though. Focusing on techniques, well that's the default approach for most people in life. In seeking to find a way to generate a result, they can find their way into a larger subject, as they contemplate the questions raised by the experiences they have. And things like "time travel" and "parallel worlds" - as ideas they are interesting things to take seriously, since they are like extreme versions of the concepts of "time" and "place" that we take for granted. We are led to cast a sharper eye on the nature of ongoing experience as it actually is, which can result in us seeing that many everyday assumptions don't really correspond very well with what we actually encounter in and as the world as it is lived.

The whole notion of "supernatural stuff", for example, might in the end be recognised as a bit of a meaningless category. You experience what you experience, the narrative that accompanies it is something else, and the idea of a "belief" might also collapse at the same time. Trying to achieve supernatural stuff, then, as a way of exploring the limits of experience, is as valid an approach as any other - provided it is pursued in a structured way. It can be quite revealing about what constitutes an "explanation" for an experience. So, yes - it is important to be open-minded, but for it to be worthwhile, you have to be completely open-minded. Now, this isn't about saying "hey, maybe magic is possible" or that sort of thing; it's about being able to accept that very fundamental concepts might be relatively true only. Perhaps even be willing to entertain the notion that there is no stable platform at all, no observer position from which the rest of experience can be considered at arms length.

Anyway, as the sidebar emphasises: we shouldn't accept something unless we have personal experience of it; we shouldn't dismiss something without personal experience of it; the "open verdict" or "null view" is the default. This guards against attaching oneself to the wrong answers, but also against committing oneself to the wrong questions.

Could be one of the ways to explore your experience, you're right. But...

Yeah, there is always a conflict when one is drawn to pursue a line of thinking because one is seeking a "non-standard outcome" with a strong emotional context, rather than "just" because one is interested in exploring "how things are". The two overlap, of course - however, it's not easy to balance saying that nothing is impossible in principle, but also emphasise that although investigations could lead to interesting discoveries, those discoveries might not lead to the desired outcome. The answer is, I think, to be completely sincere.

Endless stream of reports from people, most of these reports of no real value.

In what way are they of no real value? Generally, I'd say the value is in the discussion, not the posts themselves. This even applies to this conversation!

Shouldn't we at least try to categorize the experiences or filter them?

Categorise experiences on what basis, though? Categorisation implies a purpose. But a purpose implies a worldview. What worldview would the subreddit adopt?

Generally, the subreddit is quite careful not to advocate an official worldview, because a worldview suggests that there is a fundamental "how things are" and "how things work" that is there to be discovered (in the sense of there being a persistent underlying structure, that is). One of the essential ideas of the subreddit is that this is not necessarily true. (This is a sort of "meta" worldview though, of course.)

EDIT: See also this related comment [POST: What does r/occult think of r/dimensionaljumping], perhaps.

Q1: Generally, I'd say the value is in the discussion, not the post themselves.
I would make a thread but that seems egotistical to me and I see your discussion as reflective of my experience anyway because the world is my experience~

Yes, and that's fine. The submissions are there as a sort of host for an ongoing conversation, centred around the general topic as outlined in the sidebar, which continues across all posts. That's why it's okay that the same things come up again (the responses will be slightly different this time), and there's no "knowledge" that is being accumulated and fixed (which isn't as important as one might initially assume, as you know).

POST: Any help?

This is probably one for /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix, since it doesn't involve any deliberate attempt to make a change or experiment (the focus of this subreddit).

As a general thought, though, when we find ourselves asking what something "really is" - e.g. is a dream where you aren't looking out of a bodily perspective "astral projection" - I'd say that what is "really happening" is whatever we are experiencing: the sensory experience is what is happening, with no true explanation "behind" it. Any descriptions or explanations we come up with, are parallel to that. So, someone might say "that's astral projection", but when you push deeper, "astral projection" will turn out to be just "the experience of apparently not being in a body" + a little story we made up. Similarly, someone might say that right now you are "an individual person walking around a shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time", but that too would be a little story. This is the essence of the subreddit, perhaps. See: the "imagination room" metaphor, for example.

...Hey, I remember!

So, my issue with those explanations isn't that they aren't useful or can't fit, it's just that they are promoted as being "what is really happening" rather than a metaphor (in the same bag as the "brain is a processor" metaphor and so on). They're a starting point, and it's only a problem if people interpret them as a conclusion. (In fact, I contend that there is no "what is really happening" in that sense.)

For OP, we can create metaphors in terms of "databases" which are "calculated" (but what "time" would that calculation occur in, since it can't be the same "time" that experiences occur in?) or a selection mechanism from static patterns (no calculation required, but where does mechanism reside?) and so on. These are all useful ways of thinking about things - and they are fun to play with - but they don't really explain things beyond providing a little story which fills a gap. They can't be used to make a prediction, for example. They are not "true" in a deeper sense. That "true in a deeper sense" is what is interesting. So those metaphors are a starting point for exploration, but mainly, in the end, they are a starting point for recognising the nature of explanations vs the nature of experiencing. (In my view, of course!)

that happens when your consciousness accesses the "future probable database" as Campbell calls it.

That sort of thing is good for triggering questions, definitely. For example: What is "consciousness"? In what sense can consciousness be "yours"? What is a "future" exactly, and in what way can it exist? What does it mean for consciousness to "access" something? In what way, by what, and where and when, are patterns "calculated"? The attempt to answer those questions is what makes the description useful, I think, rather than the content of the description itself.

In the end, I anticipate that where people get to is that descriptions don't matter at all for living life, except as a way of formulating intentions.

You're right, it's just inherently impossible to correctly explain a reality by using patterns from the "sub-reality"

Yes. I'd emphasise, though, that it's even more basic than that might initially suggest. That is, even concepts such as "reality", "sub-reality", the idea that we are "in" anything, that there are "higher" or "lower" realities, "physical" or "non-physical" - all suffer from the same problem. Which can be summarised as: thinking is itself just another experience, at the same level as any other experience. Even thoughts about "an outside" are also "inside" experience, including the notion that anything is "happening" other than the current experience, or the assumption that the formatting of experience (spatial extension and unfolding in time) corresponds to the format of... that. Glancing at that post, yes I'd pretty much agree with it, as far as it goes, and I have gone through the book. (There wasn't that much in it for me in that "a-ha" way, but it's a thorough description of that sort of structuring approach, and I found his personal history interesting.) But then: does it actually go anywhere, really? This applies to my own descriptions also.

Consciousness can do whatever it's capable of.

We always end up with tautologies like this: it all just is, is the conclusion. [Pasting from a comment elsewhere:] We can think about this forever, but it's really something that is directly realised. For example, we might close our eyes and try to:

• a) find the "edges" of your current experience,
• b) find where "you" are in your current experience.

and:

• c) investigate what your current is experience is "made from".

Those observations are the facts. Everything else must adhere to those facts. The conclusion is super-simple, but it's not object-based and so can't be described at all, only pointed to. But we can try with something along the lines of:

• What you truly are is a non-material "material" whose only property is being-aware, which "takes on the shape of" experiences, and has all possible experiences "dissolved" eternally within it.

Or similar. Beyond this, we end up just trying to create the most minimal description that includes the fact that "experience is structured in some way", while avoiding including errors by referencing any material, spatial or temporal terms.

When you pick everything apart, it seems to come down to just that. Awareness being aware of things.

And perhaps more strictly speaking: Awareness being aware of itself as things. Or rather, as the experience of apparent things.

But it would also seem unproductive and unlikely for consciousness to have all this experience going on, without gaining anything from it.

Doesn't this envisage awareness as something "other", though, that has aims and purpose independent from the experience you are having right now? It paints awareness as a being, rather than just being. Awareness, though, isn't a thinking and doing thing - rather, it's what the experience of thinking and doing is "made from".

(Pondering:)

It is important, I think, to not imagine awareness as being what the world is made out of - in the sense of there being a 3-dimensional place and it's made from awareness, with us within that place. Even more abstract descriptive schemes often contain that hidden assumption. This isn't the case though. There is only subjective experiences. Awareness takes on the shape of experiences, not places. Bringing it right down to the immediate: The current "moment" of 3-dimensional experience right now is of apparently being "over here" with the screen "over there", but a brief pause to investigate reveals that "you" are actually "everywhere" in this "moment". And there's nothing else.

Consciousness can't evolve, because it is "before" time. Time exists only as an experience. This means that evolution and being productive and having a purpose - none of that belongs to consciousness. You can experience having thoughts and feelings of those things, but that is content, not context. We can have experiences "as if" such things are true, but they are only ever relatively true. The only thing that is fundamentally true, is being-aware ("awareness", not of anything specific). Awareness has no meaning as such. Meaning only exists in the accumulated patterns, relative to one another.

It is helpful, I think, to make a distinction between this fundamental aspect ("the truth") and what is meaningful in terms of "being patterned as a human experience". Meaning is to be found in our current state, and not in our recognition of the fundamental nature. That recognition merely gives us an insight into our true situation, and lifts the restrictions which only exists in our narratives about ourselves (including the metaphors me, you and Tom employ for the purposes of discussion).

...That's just a shifting of definitions, surely - because we lack decent words for this, "consciousness" having been used to mean all sorts of different things. Broadly speaking, people use it interchangeably for three different things:

• "Consciousness-of" - The experience of being conscious of content, as apparently separate objects.
• "Self-consciousness" - The experience of identifying oneself with a particular part of that content.
• "Consciousness" - The non-material "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware and is not an object or personal, otherwise known as "I AMness". It is "before" division, multiplicity, change, any structure.

The first two are best described as "patternings" or "states" of the the third. When I use the word "awareness", I mean that third definition. When you use the word "consciousness" in your example, you are referring to the first one, perhaps with a hint of the second. I use "awareness" for this, because the word typically has less connotations. Although it is lumbered with sometimes being used by people to mean "within one's attention", at least you can then suggest that if one ceased to focus one's attention at all, it would be without boundary or location, which is a reasonable metaphor all on its own. While awareness might taken on the shape of an experience of apparently thinking and doing, it does not actually think or do anything in and of itself. It becomes a state, it does not do anything (which would imply a subject and object relationship) fundamentally. It "takes on the shape of" other properties, but they are not inherent properties of consciousness. They are temporary, and there is nothing "behind" them, no persistent solid underlying substate supports them. They are "just" patterning, at the same level, non-hierarchical.

So, for sure, awareness might get formatted into the experience of "being an evolving digital system", but no aspect of that will be the "fundamental elements of consciousness" (as per the definition), although they might be considered the building blocks of a metaphor describing a particular pattern of "consciousness-of". Broadly speaking, if we separate things into content (the relative transient truth of structuring) and context (the fundamental unchanging truth of the nature of experiencing) we can keep things straight, though, I say.

Aside: We have to tread carefully here anyway. As soon as we talk about, for example, an "evolving, digital system", we should pay attention to how, exactly, we are imagining this - by which I mean, right now. Do we imagine it from a "view from nowhere"? Are we seeing little cellular automatons doing their stuff, as visual thoughts in our mental space? How, exactly, does this translate to something in reality?

If we are not thinking of something as a 1st-person experience, we must consider how that 3rd-person view makes sense. Does that "diagrammatic" view ever get experienced? And then in what sense does it ever "happen" or even exist? And so on. The implication is that, if we imagine something occurring in an "objective world", then we are "already wrong" in a way. Although all of that doesn't deny us the ability to create useful or interesting descriptions, it does mean that trying to be "right" with them is pointless. They are just more experiences, at the same level. "Awareness" or "I AMness" can be directly perceived or known, then - because you are it - but it can't be thought about. The conclusion here is that we must be clear about the purpose of our thinking, rather than just (as we all do now and again) hand-wavingly assume that we are investigating "the nature of reality" or whatever.

...There's a bit more to it than that, though. We need to take care to notice not just what we are thinking about, but how we are thinking about it. It's this one step back, "meta" approach, that indicates certain things to us.

Awareness, as described, isn't something that is comprehended; it's not an object. "Awareness" is a conceptual object, sure, but it's intended to point at something which cannot be conceptualised at all. It is "isness". There is no concept that can be "behind" Awareness. It is the direct "I AMness" that you know intimately right now. I'd say it is something you experience, rather than think about, but even the word experience implies a sort of subject/object divide. You don't "comprehend" or "understand" it. This is where all that "the Tao that is spoken is not the true Tao" type stuff comes from. It is the context, because without being-aware, this is nothing else. And remember, there is no "outside" to this (and no "inside") so it is actually meaningless (in the proper sense of the word) to talk of a "beyond". It has no location, no boundaries, no edges, no extent.

...that could be far outside the borders of our imagination.

Your imagination (and your experience more generally) has no borders. Go looking for borders in your experience, right now. Don't think about borders or beyonds, because all you'll do is imagine borders or beyonds inside experience. You'll be thinking a concept, rather than actually looking for borders. Actually "feel out" in your experience, as it is. There's an inherent problem, which is: thoughts are already divided and even the thought about "undivided" is a divided thought, an object in mental space which only makes sense when related to other objects.

It is not possible to think about a subject - it is immediately "too late". It's like trying to make a sandcastle which represents both "the beach" and "sand". The sandcastle, like every sandcastle, is both of those things, but it cannot capture those things. There is no sandcastle which could do so, simply due to the nature of sandcastles. All we can do, is point to the fact that what we are talking about is, "not this, not that" (while being all things and nothing). Build sandcastles, and then attempt to draw attention to that which the sandcastle is "of" rather than "about". The direct noticing of this, though, is super-simple, and actually the simplest thing there is (and of course it is).

So, when we think about there being "fragments of consciousness" or whatever, we must pause, and actually look at the structure of the thought we are thinking here. Does it appear in your mind like a little diagram, for example? What, exactly, is the imagery? And how, exactly, is that imagery meaningful in terms of the context of that experience? "Reality" is this, right now, 1st-person, and that is what must always be included into any picture. The subject of any conceptual object must be part of the consideration. Content without context is fantasy (albeit perhaps a useful one, and there's an argument that your main strand of experience is a fantasy also, just that it is a 3D-immersive multisensory strand of thought).

(It'd be good to do this from the ground up really, but lacking time, so let's just to-and-fro for now.)

I'd shy aware from calling it a "source" since that implies spatial and temporal aspects - but we have to be easy on ourselves here, since we can only talk around this, rather than capture it. So, I would be careful of the language perhaps, and give ourselves a pass!

Awareness "takes on the shape of" experiences, and so the context and the content are one, of course. Also, when you say "not-yet-conscious" what you surely mean is "not yet self-conscious" as in our earlier discussion - but it is inherently being, eternally. This "raw" state is a hypothetical state, though, because it is always in some "shape" or other. The reason to make the distinction between content and context in our description, is - as well as avoiding saying "all that is, is" - that it permits us to distinguish between what is always true and what is not. The reason why might choose to say that awareness is "outside" of content in a sense, is that it is not reliant upon it, it has no foundation. We're making a distinction based on property and persistence, rather than material construction. From this, we'd say that awareness doesn't evolve, because time is "within" it; it is not bound by time. Awareness is "eternal" (as distinct from "forever"). And all possible patterns and facts and experiences are also "eternal". There is no creation, "creation is already complete", only relative intensity of patterns changes, and even that doesn't not happen "in time". So, we might say that content evolves, because time is an aspect of that particular content - it would still be static from the point of view of awareness, though - but the property of being-aware never does. All content could dissolve right now, for no reason - reasons exist only relatively, as the structure of content, after all - but this context would remain.

To consider: When new molecules are formed, or when molecules are annihilated, do "atom" and "molecule" evolve?

And: If awareness and content are one, then what does this mean for your experience, this sensory moment, right now? (Again: if you start thinking about things in the 3rd-person to answer this, you will immediately be "wrong", surely.)

I can't bring myself to a solid conclusion about what awareness or consciousness is

There is no conclusion (in thought) to come to, about what awareness is - it simply is and can't directly known to be so, but it's in the manner of an insight, rather than a logical conclusion. It's a fact of this moment; one needs to switch to attending and intending, rather than thinking (which is just a deformation of your present moment really, rather than a revealing of it).

But one thing we should agree on is that humans are more aware than a bumblebee.

Human beings aren't aware at all. "Human being" is an experience that awareness can have. You are that awareness. The phrasing would go something like:

• "What you truly are is 'awareness', which is currently 'taking on the shape of' the experience of apparently being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person."

Now, we might be tempted to say that this experience is evolving, but actually I would say that it is not. It is static. What is apparently changing, is the sensory content, but from the perspective of an overall state, it is unchanging and deterministic unless shifted by intention. One might conceive of this as that there are all possible states, always present and active, but differing in their relative "brightness" at this moment (the eternal Now). The divisions we make between states, sensory moment, eternal patterns, and so on are essentially arbitrary though.

A couple of things, which are really the same thing:

• In my view, you must think about this from a 1st-person perspective, otherwise this is pointless fantasy. You must recognise that you are awareness, taking on the shape of this experience, meaning this shape of "moment". If you are thinking about it in an abstract, 3rd-person way, diagrammatic model kind of way rather than actually linking this to your current experience right now, then it doesn't lead anywhere, I would suggest...
• What is the purpose of this theorising?: We're basically just drawing pictures the mind, essentially in parallel to our main strand of experience. We never get to something "behind" that main strand, because: a) we are always working in parallel, at the same level, and: b) there is no behind. In what way do you think the two are connected?

My answer to that final question is: only by both being experiences in/as awareness. They are both made from "sensations, perceptions, and felt-knowing". One experience, the model, does not describe the other, the strand. Rather, the value of a model is that it may lead you to recognise something at a "meta" level: that thinking and perceiving are of the same nature. In effect, your main strand of experience is also a thought in and of awareness - albeit a 3D, unbounded, multi-sensory, particularly bright strand of thought. You are not in a world, you are having a thought of a world. All the time, as we consider this stuff, we must retain that "meta" step back and be aware of ourselves as context, notice what it is that is actually happening when we "think" or we "perceive": patterns in you-as-awareness. Otherwise we are getting lost in content and mistakenly consider experience to be something that can be "understood" or "solved"; it isn't.

EDIT: A question to ask yourself: do you feel that the world, or your experience of it in this current moment, is outside of you or inside of you? I don't mean what you think about this, I mean do you perceive that the current scene is inside of your perspective?

...Okay, so that's a nice description. It's seems fairly self consistent, it depicts a structured view that can be logically explored within its own terms; it's a coherent "castle". But -

• What is it a description of, exactly?

Pause for a moment, become aware of the room you are in, then think about your description. Then notice:

• Where is that description located within your experience?
• Where is the room located within your experience?
• How, exactly, are the two related?

Note: Don't think about those questions and construct an answer to them. Rather, directly observe the situation and report it - if you see what I mean.

...In all cases, though, I'd say you replied with explanations - referring to concepts - rather than your observations. I mean this much more simply: that you tell me what you are actually experiencing, rather than an interpretation using concepts (as far as possible).

• For the first question, I meant literally where in your experience is it - not a conceptual description.
• For the second, similarly.
• For the third, again, I mean literally, their actual observed relationship, rather than a description which you do not, in fact, perceive other than in the thinking of it.

Personally, I've never experienced a "being-level" or "being modified" or "experiences" being "generated" by "interactions". Do you see what I'm getting at? All that stuff falls within the first question, because once again we are engaged in "describing". With those answers, we are potentially answering all the questions in a way that obscured the answer to the first question, which would have made the answers to all the questions different.

...So we might say they're at the same level. One isn't "behind" the other one; they are both arising within the same "space" (using that term for convenience), "beside" or "parallel" with one another in that space (loosely). Now, to clarify things further - revisiting one and two: what are they "made from"? What is their nature? And do they differ? And if so, how do they differ? Again by observation, by directly attending to the experience of them, rather than theorising.

...And what is this "me", what is "me" made from? And where is "me"?

(Then we'll pick up those other bits.)

...Okay, so perhaps jumping ahead here (we can reel back if we've gone too far) -

So, although we use words like "consciousness" and "me" (or "awareness"), which objectify it for the purposes of discussion, it's really just isness or IAMness or "this/that" and so on. And "consciousness" and "me", being words or concepts, are also made from and within that, so we have to be careful to see them pointers to "nowhere-everywhere" - and not object-concepts which can be manipulated or used in models and descriptions. Now, remembering the "feeling out" exercise earlier in the thread, when we close our eyes and go looking, we find: that experience has no edges, no boundary, no outside; that "me" is not located anywhere, but is everywhere in that experience; that the present experience is entirely "made from" or "of" this "me".

So, looping back, we see that the relationship between the main strand of experience and our descriptions, the connection, is that they are essentially both experiences of the same nature. One is not "behind" the other, one does not "describe" the other; that idea is itself a concept. They are like parallel-simultaneous strands of sensory-formatted experience, like strands of thought, within you-as-awareness - although one of those strands is "unbounded" and "unlocated", making it the 1st-person strand which we end up identifying with as part of a "world". We conclude, then, that our experience of the world takes the form of sensations made from awareness, and there is nothing behind them at all - there is no outside, no levels, and no depth to our experiences. No world, as such. This is where I get that summary of: you-as-awareness "taking on the shape of" the apparent experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

So -

• Descriptions don't matter. We are effectively directly imagining-that we are a person in a world, we are having experiences "as if" this is true, but it is only true as a moment-shape we have taken on, a thought we are having-being. Descriptions are just another experience.
• Descriptions don't matter - except in one way, which flips around the everyday notion of what a description or explanation is about. But first -

Pause now, close your eyes. Now, raise your arm. What was the nature of that experience? What do you actually experience? And: how did it come about? Again, from observation.

...Remember, though: observations only. Describe the experience itself, not any conceptualisations (which are another experience, as we have noted in the discussion above).

• Did you actually experience "interpretation of data" or "receiving from a system" or "being integrated"?
• Did you actually experience "utilising free will" or "reality reacting" or "the logic of a ruleset"?

Don't go beyond what is actually experienced.

...Okay, good. So, I'll suggest a couple of things and see if they fit your experience:

1. What constitutes this "1st person perspective" - when left uninterrupted - is the experience of being like an open space, with various sensations floating in it, phasing in and out. You do not actually experience being a body, as such; it's a scattered bunch of sensations, with a visual image floating in one direction, and sounds distributed around, and so on. Everything seems to be both "over there" and "here". If you place your attention on these words on this screen, and then decide to direct your attention to "the place you are looking out from", you'll find a sort of structureless void. If you follow this direction, it goes on forever, and in fact goes on in all directions. You cannot find a "person" anywhere in this experience - except when you summon the thought of a person: an idea or concept, which is itself an experience of course (of thinking about "a person").
2. When, as you just did, you deliberately make a change such as raising your arm - you cannot find the cause of that change. You only experience the "result". Even if you were to have the sense of "about to do this" or a thought of "I'm going to raise my arm", you'd have same problem: those would be results too, with no detectable cause, and they certainly didn't cause the arm-raising, since there is no overlap between them; they are one-experience-then-another. As you attend to this, you recognise that there is no cause; the change is self-causing. You "know" you change it, but you cannot detect any mechanism or method or "doing" - only a shift in the content of experience. You eventually conclude it is as if you, as awareness, shape-shifted yourself into a different experience, simply by becoming it.

As usual, the wording makes this seem involved and complicated, when actually the direct observation or experience of it, is just that it is (with nothing "behind" it).

I do believe that this is a little picture way of looking at reality.

I would disagree with your points, somewhat inevitably. :-)
Let's see -

First, I'm not detaching the "awareness" part really, I am saying it is reality. Not integrated - is it. And you are that. More importantly, it's not "things just happen for no reason". It's true that things don't happen for an in-world reason, because all those reasons are, in fact, results. The reason for all of those, though, is the one reason: named "first cause" or "intention" or "direct imagination" "unbounded thinking-that" or "awareness shaping itself".

The second part is where it all leads, because (as promised earlier) it changes what a "description" is. A description is not an explanation or an understanding of an experience, it is its own pattern in parallel. However, if you intend an act in terms of a description, then you imply the extended pattern of that description in your experience. You are intending the description as well as the outcome. In other words, the use of descriptions causes us to have experiences corresponding to them; continued use of a description stabilises the patterning of our experience in accordance with the description. This is contrary to the usual view that descriptions are independent patterns which reflect a separate, structurally stable ongoing experience.

This has the fun side-effect that whatever worldview you are playing with, you will tend to experience encountering evidence which supports it. If you change your mind and commit to it, the evidence will change accordingly. If you are undecided, the world will seem messy. If you "go meta" and start experimenting with the idea that the "imagination room" metaphor is almost literally true, you will have super-flexible experiences which confirm for you that there is no "world" or "system" at all as such - at least, not one that can't be instantly dropped as just a strand of thinking. (The same applies to the other "Active Metaphors" listed in the sidebar.)

It does makes sense for awareness to evolve and grow within and along with its entire consciousness system.

That's just a story, though. You can have experiences "as if" that were true, for sure, but if your pursue this line of investigation you'll quite quickly realise that you can have experiences "as if" pretty much anything is true. This is because intention is the only cause, and if you intend a description into prominence - or more likely, intend and act which implies a description - you will tend to have experiences which correspond to that description. All narratives about "evolving and growing" and there being "systems" - definitely, you can live that. However, whenever you pause and stop thinking about it, stop implying it, you'll notice that, still, all you are actually experiencing is being "awareness" which has taken on the shape of an open space with sensations (both thoughts and perceptions) floating in it. You never get outside of that. Which is why some people use the "you are the dream dreaming itself, the content and the dreamer as one" metaphor (although I think that "dream" has a lot of associations which can get in the way really).

Note: I've tried to be clear, but this can be a hard point to get across: I'm not saying that "an open aware space in which sensations arise" is fundamental either. That too is just a shape awareness can take on. There is no inherent structure to you-as-awareness at all. The only fundamental, persistent truth is the dimensionless, locationless, eternal property of being-aware. Furthermore, as I tried to highlight previously, but it's worth emphasising: although I'm using the word "awareness", I'm not using the word in the usual sense of word-usage, and definitely not an object; the word doesn't point to anything at all, not even "everything". It's a placeholder for "not-nothing, not-something", the context that is also the content but isn't either, and so on. "The awareness that can be talked of is not the true awareness", you might say.

So. As a "way of looking at reality", then, this is not "a little picture" or indeed any other size of picture. Regarding "pictures", though, all pictures are arbitrary, and you can have experiences "as if" any picture is true. You may indeed be having experiences "as if" it makes sense for "awareness to evolve and grow within and along with its entire consciousness system", but that is just a relative experience; you've not got "behind" anything and it has nothing to do with the nature of experiencing itself, which is "reality". And, we should note, the "awareness" of that sentence is not the awareness I have been describing above, by that nature.

TL;DR: All that is ever "happening" is this 1st-person moment of experience. If we think about other things happening outside of that, if we pause we will notice that those thoughts are actually just happening within this 1st-person experience too. There is no outside cause to this 1st-person moment. The entire moment is you, and you are its only cause. You can have experiences "as if" outside things are happening, but closer inspection always reveals that it is only the 1st-person moment that is happening, with nothing solid "behind" it. Descriptions are best thought of as potential patterning rather than accounts of a stable persistent world-experience.

But even the experience of considering these concepts/ideas is just another pattern happening on the same level as all other patterns.

Indeed, the experience of considering these things, is itself an experience, with nothing "behind" it.

Patterns interacting with patterns, or rather: One big pattern interacting with itself.

Or actually: not interacting at all, because it is "before" time, and it is static between shifts (any apparent change due to the pattern of "time passing" is actually deterministic, fully defined in the state).

So what about this sensory pattern of human experience? This doesn't seem completely random and structureless to me...

Not random or structureless - a pattern. The pattern that corresponds to "apparently being a human being in a world".

they're having the experience of, and are having the experience of describing and conceptualizing.

The patterns aren't having an experience though. Rather, you-as-awareness has taken on the shape of a pattern. Awareness has - or really is - the experience.

Aside - Ultimately, we throw away even the "awareness" concept and just say that what we are is the experience that is happening. However, it is much easier to progress by "restating the observer" and withdrawing to that position gradually. Even afterwards, the notion of "awareness" is still useful for the purpose of discussion, but we recognise that it is empty, just a pointer to the fact that experiences are experienced - or better, simply: "there is experiencing". However, "awareness + patterns" is the minimum structured model that "makes sense" for formulating descriptions which can be used as intentions.

And the patterns can increase or decrease entropy (decrease randomness, organize, become structures, give birth to more structures).

Hmm, I don't think that any of those things happen. Again, you can have experiences "as if" they do, but fundamentally there is no time other than the experience of time. The "imagination room" provides a little story which allows you to conceive of your experiences as you-as-patterned-awareness, but of course even that is itself not fundamental. In fact, the idea of "fundamental" is probably finally better replaced by the notion of no-hierarchy. But I've drifted a little bit there.

if there ever was a "beginning", which is another can of worms

A can of worms, indeed!

There was no beginning, because there is no time other than the experiencing of it. Awareness or "the fact of experience" is eternal (as distinct from "being around forever"). It is "before" time. This does make things tricky, because the correct conclusion is that there is no evolution and no cause, although we can take on the shape of experiences which are "as if" there was evolution and cause.

Awareness at the early, primal stage of these patterns is barely aware, as there is barely any content to be aware of.

If we get rid of the idea of "primal stages" and just say that it is possible for awareness to be shaped such that it just is. You can produce that sort of experience yourself, in fact. This is a description which gets close to it.

Information/patterns originate awareness, eventually organizing into a "pattern of awareness" which evolves and grows along with the "patterns of experience/content", working together as a system.

I don't think you mean "awareness" here. Patterns cannot originate anything (what are the patterns "made from"?). Patterns are awareness / awareness takes on the shape of patterns / experiences are patterned awareness. Patterned awareness is like a "static landscape"; it is not something that "interacts" or "grows' or "works together as a system". It is more like a definition that fully defines a deterministic set of moments; a current state corresponding to a particular set of contours. The definition is not read or processes or whatever, though - it is simply experienced, directly.

But none of that matters too much, really, if we are clear about the purpose of our model. Our model isn't no explain how things are, because how things are simply is your current experience, nothing more. Rather it is not provide a way of conceiving, in the 3rd-person, of another experience which we might adopt in the 1st-person. Our thoughts-about an experience are identical in nature to our experience-of an experience. Having formulated a pattern we desire in the 3rd-person (via the direct imagining of it) we then adopt that pattern as our experience in the 1st-person (via the direct imagining of it). There is no "method" or "technique" or "how it works" or "how things are" to this - one simply does this, becomes it.

...We have to be careful with questions such as "why?", because one sort of "why?" implies a purpose, and purpose would be a relative truth only. But, here, I guess you mean the other sort of "why?", as in "how come this experience not another?", and really we are reaching for the answer to the question: "how can we change this experience to one we desire?"

For that, we return to: because it is the shape we have taken on. That is, that your current patterned experience consists of the accumulation of intentions and their implications. And the way to change the experience is to "shape-shift" ourselves, by "intending" (increasing the intensity of contribution of one pattern, "the intention", versus the others) which amounts to "thinking it" - but not of it or about it, more like "thinking the fact this-pattern-is-true". Meanwhile, the reason I wouldn't say "what is happening" is evolving, is because I'd suggest it is static between intentions, between shifts. If we shift to a new state, than that new state can have apparent evolution fully and deterministically defined into it, simply because it has a "time" pattern. It's completely fine to have "evolving" as part of the narrative we adopt, and to have experiences "as if" it were true - we just have to be cautious of seeing it as fundamentally true, because it implies a process, and the basic situation is "before" time and processes.

Okay, with all that said, we've come to the conclusions which can be partially summarised as:

• Reality = "awareness" = you = this whole experience
• Change = intending = shape-shifting = becoming

Which basically amounts to: "this".

In terms of a model, though, we can think of ourselves as a "shape-shifting material which can take on the shape of any experience/situation", knowing of course that this is an enabling metaphor and that actual situation has no inherent qualities at all other then being-aware.

Practically speaking, though?

To make changes, it really involves a sort of "direct thinking" or "direct imagination", where we "imagine the fact that something is true or happening" and this is equivalent to becoming that experience. As we've discovered in our discussions, theorising about it is really the adoption of another sort of experience - to actually grasp the truth of the matter, one must attend to it directly, play with intending/shifting, and grasp it with a sort of direct insight rather than by understanding. That's why this subreddit tries to encourage people to try out a couple of "childish" exercises, and have the experiences which might lead to reconsidering one's nature and destroy the notion of something "behind" things. Actually those "childish" non-techniques are it, really, since experiences are it!

...

Q1: I can have the experience of imagining a reality as though true.
i.e. 3rd person.
surely then it is simply a case of experiencing the imagining as though real - 1st person.
the trickiness comes from not getting caught up in the 3rd person and not accepting this reality as real

I'd agree. If we say that a 3rd-person thought (a thought about something) is a bounded, located thought, then a 1st-person thought (the experience of something) would be an unbounded, unlocated thought - a patterning of the subject as a whole. One might experiment, for example, with thinking wordlessly the thought "relaxed body" until it became true. That would be an example of patterning the 1st-person experience with the pattern "relaxed body". The result would be a shift in the content of experience towards a state where the pattern "relaxed body" was relatively dominant, without having "done" it.

Q1: yes
it's like wanting something - i feel a want in my 'body' until it comes true
i make it come true by either acting or it 'just happens', i suppose
where i am now is that i see something as real but i know it is not real so i want to experience something else - something qualitatively real in that it exists from a direct intention without me supposing that there is a subtle meaning
because anything that exists in regard to something else cannot be by itself true and must be an erroneous experience
and the only thing that i believe to be true is -
kṛṣṇakalā rādhā rādhākalā
i.e. my expansion radha then radha's expansion, this gopi, based on this. i use the thought-about a conversation between "key" and nam woo hyun with respect to me as a springboard to create a worldview.... :/

You-as-person are "Maya" too. All experiential content is "Maya". That's why this search for the "real" will never come to fruition. It's a recognition you have that applies to all experiences - that all experiences are you-as-awareness taking on the shape of an experience - rather than an experience in and of itself. For example, look around now and see that what your present moment is made from, is "sensations, perceptions and thoughts" in awareness with nothing "behind" them. Reality = this experience, this moment which contains everything, that is all. Any thoughts-about those experiences are themselves experiences, at the same level.

Standing outside, one looks out upon the scene before them. Beyond the house, a garden. Beyond the garden, a hillside. Beyond the hillside, the evening sky. Beyond the sky - "awareness". And then it is recognised, it was all awareness.

then i just have to have the experience of my choosing as all experiences are fictive in nature and the experience of everyone else being stupid is valid too

And equally: all experiences are direct experiences of the fundamental nature of reality (including experiences of apparently stupid people).

so in order to get a scenario that i want, wouldn't i just have to create the 'script' in-thought and then see it play out

You have to be careful of abstracting this, though; it's a matter of "direct imagination" or "direct thinking". By which I mean, you should consider this as a literal intensification of a pattern or fact or scene within your current "3D thought of being a person in a world.

So - and I know you'd didn't mean this, but it's a good example - you probably don't imagine writing a script, because you would then have experiences of seeing scripts being written (or elements of the extended imagery of that). It's possible to do it like this so long as you do so knowing-that it is a direct interaction with the world, but mostly I think people end up just having a parallel fantasy with isn't attached to the main strand of experience. Typically, then, what you do is, you intensify a desired "scene" (or "knowing of fact") as if it were actually happening (or true now) - and by doing so the fact of that scene happening is incorporated into your "3D world-thought". This doesn't necessarily mean you actually have to see and hear the scene; it's a sort of maximised felt-knowing of the pattern more than anything, from which visual imagery may or may not arise, as a side effect.

The word "incorporated" is important, I'd say: you should generally take the approach of intensifying into fact the desired final outcome, rather than any particular path towards it. Your strand of experience is already heavily patterned, and it will be naturally overlaid. If you focus on the means by which an outcome will arise, you often end up generating the experience of the means as your outcome, rather than the experience of the end. Of course, if you are feeling particularly adventurous you could aim to create a full discontinuity, without any apparent paths, jumping straight to the "scene" and having the world implied by the scene from that moment onwards, but that's something for you to choose to experiment with or not.

i had thought about that - like condensing my entire 'experience' of the 'the world' into one thought and then creating a new thought

Yes. And I'd say that this is the situation right now: the entire world is this moment, a single thought, static and fully deterministic between intentional shifts, and "time passing" is itself a static pattern as part of that thought's overall patterned state. A thought of a world. We tend to assume that our experience is just the "unfolded" visual, auditory, textural aspects, but actually we are experiencing the entire world in this moment, it's just that the "felt global summary definition" is a sort of background, dimmed, dissolved feeling, rather than chunked up into bright objects. It's all active now, though - as one single pattern. If this wasn't the case, there would be no meaning to the moment. (Simple illustration: when you see a car, you don't see a shape, you see "a car", and in fact a particular "car". The car is that felt-meaning rather than just the unfolded sensory aspects.)

So: if we summon a single 3D multi-sensory image, and that image has felt-meaning, then it actually contains a whole world implied within it. This could correspond to a revised version of this current world, or a completely new one. Pausing now, closing your eyes, imagine a man walking along a road. Don't draw the man and the road, just imagine-that there is a man walking on a road. A world has been created by this act, albeit not an immersive 1st-person one. Allow the scene to continue unfold without interference. Where does the man go? What do you find out about him? And so on. One might then ponder: what if I stepped into this world by allowing the scene to surround me? Or, what if I adopted the 1st-person viewpoint of the man?

(Not checked out Rupert Spira's activities for a while; thanks for the reminder link.)

one might ponder that...but that would be a ponderance ;)

Heh, a ponderance it would be, indeed! :-)

things only seem to change when i do something

Which is fine, an (apparent) mental or physical act which has an assigned meaning which is the outcome, is a perfectly legitimate (by which I mean an "unfolded" experience as the apparent act). The act itself is also a result, but having assigned causality to the experience of the act, the result is part of its pattern (the Two Glasses exercise uses this approach). The act doesn't need to be sensory - it can be simply an act of "knowing you are shifting" with no content in the moment at all - but I'd agree that it is generally helpful to have a sensory aspect or imagining that counts as the "theatre" of making a change.

the car is the subject and i am the object (of experience) but both are me

Actually, it's probably better to say that you are the subject and the car is the object - you can't find your edges, but you can find the edges of the (sensory aspect) of the car. But yes, it's all you anyway, so with that known the distinction doesn't matter.

since i just want one particular experience, i'll focus on that.

Good. Both from a desired outcome point of view, and also in terms of conducting an experiment and explore experiencing, that's good. You don't need a clear (visual) image; you just need a clear "knowing". Since we're talking about "direct imagination" or "direct thinking" here, the path doesn't really matter - just as if we draw a picture on a metaphorical flexible television screen, it doesn't matter what the story was that was being shown onscreen prior to it. We simply assert the new picture, and either that becomes the new starting point (extreme discontinuous case), or it becomes dissolved into the current programme and incorporated into it.

...By "knowing" I mean more that, for example, you "know" a fact even though you are not experiencing any sensory aspect of it, physically or mentally - sort of "objectless thinking". Not sure "order" or "timing" is necessary as such; but if you mean "fully summoning a scene as a fact" then, yes, that's definitely a possible approach, in the spirit of this "direct asserting" we've been talking about. Pursue that and see where it leads?

ultimately wouldn't all I have to do is to believe in something

What's a "belief", though? I'm not a fan of the term; its meaning it not clear. Ultimately, what you want to do is "think it until it is true", which is different than (as some people consider belief to be) "thinking that something is true".

Q1: Ultimately, what you want to do is "think it until it is true"
the problem I have is I constantly think it isn't true. so by believe I guess I mean I think that it is true and it will occur because I believe in it

Well, you really need to give up that bad habit, then! :-) Perhaps you could work on the meta-fact of "thinking things makes them true". That would capture the essence of it, the desired formatting of your experience, both in the form of a "belief" and the form of a "world-fact".

...In all of those, though, you are assuming you and other as separate, but this is not the case.

What you are is the aware thing that "takes on the shape of" this sensory moment, of apparently being "over here" and these words being "over there" - but a short pause, close your eyes, feeling out to try to find yourself, you find that you are "nowhere-everywhere".

What is real is: The current experience, specifically you-as-the-experience.

When you think about theories in attempt to describe reality, the experience of thinking the theories is true, but the theories themselves are not real (in the sense that the ideas don't correspond to anything "behind" experience; there is no "behind"). So, based on that perspective, let's try some quick snappy answers to those statements:

what is reality?

It is you-as-awareness having adopted the shape of whatever the current experience is.

what is true?

Only the fact of being-aware is unchangingly, fundamentally true. Everything else is relatively, temporarily, true only, for as long as it is the current experience.

what is real?

If we define real as "that which is always true", then the only thing that is truly real is the property of being-aware.

what is observed by me?

Being cute about this: yourself, as whatever the current experience is. You don't actually observe anything, rather you take on the shape of the experience of apparently observing something.

everything i see and feel is as a result of my environment

No, everything you see and feel is the result of you taking on the shape of experiencing "seeing" and "feeling". The environment is an experience you have adopted; meanwhile, "the environment" is a concept which does not represent anything outside of that.

i act and do things within my environment

You shape yourself into the experience of apparently being a body acting within an environment.

i sense things accordingly and act accordingly

You don't sense things, you take on the shape of the experience "sensing things", and then take on the shape of the experience of "taking action".

when did that occur?

Since time itself is part of an experience, and not inherently part of you-as-awareness, it never occurred in time. It is eternal (rather than "forever"). It is actually meaningless to talk of things occurring in time at a fundamental level. The "moment" you have currently taken on the shape of might have an apparent time aspect, or history, but that could shift right now leaving no trace, to a different "moment" with a different apparent history.

do I observe myself taking shape or am I actually the shape?

You are actually taking the shape. There is no "outside" to you, for you to observe yourself taking shape. I say that you take on the shape of an experience, to make it clear that you are not actually "over here" as a true external observer - rather, you are the whole experience, taking on the shape of apparently being "over here" and other stuff being "over there". As mentioned previously, if you close your eyes and pause and search for a moment - rather than thinking about this - you'll quickly discover that you are in fact everywhere and everything (which is also to so, no particular place and no particular thing).

so there is no difference between "me" and the ("my") environment

Right. There is no difference between "you" and "the environment". It is all you. To make the distinction clear, we sometimes say you-as-awareness (meaning the whole experience) and you-as-person or you-as-perspective (meaning that experience of apparently being "here").

then I can shape myself into the experience of apparently being a body who directly alters his environment
so no action really occurs beyond my belief in it - i.e. I only apparently act but I can also act without acting - receive the results of karma (action) without doing the work (कर्म करोति karma karoti - doing action)

I'd say that no action (or experience of an apparent action) occurs beyond your adoption of it as part of your current state or "shape", which is itself an accumulation of intentions and their implications. That - intentions-implications - could be interpreted as corresponding to the concept of "karma".

but things can also happen without my direct performance of an action-with-desired-outcomes - i.e. intention

Ultimately, you "think it" in the sense of "thinking that it is true" or "asserting it", and that's what increases its "brightness" or "truth". You are doing this anyway: if you perform a physical act with an outcome attached to it, then the physical act itself came from nowhere. The act was a "result" just as much as the outcome was; it was all one pattern, brought into experience. For example, if you pause now and think of a red car, the red car appears. How do you do that? Note that, even if you thought the words "red car" beforehand, that wasn't the cause, that too was a result, and so the question then becomes how did you think the words? Truly, you simply "became" them, or you might say you reshaped yourself such that those patterns, that experience, was brought into prominence.

performing an action thus sounds like duality in this context (because i would still like to do some actions but the result is not in any way directly derived from the action)

Not a duality, though, if you ponder it a little more. An action is an experience, you are experience, you are simply shape-shifting, causelessly. If the action and the outcome are not logically related in-world, that is okay - you simply adopt the notion that "this action" means-that "this outcome" happens, and that overall pattern is what is intended/asserted.

this is my stumbling block! i keep having competing thoughts - "there will be no red car" - and thus nothing changes :P

You really should give that up! ;-) So, you simply have to be more fully assertive. It's completely under your control, it is all you after all. You don't fight those competing thoughts, just as when you walk through a door in a room you don't spend time trying to fight the fact that you can see other doors. You simply purposefully attend to the door you want to go through, withdrawing yourself from, forgetting, the other doors.

POST: The 2 CUP method

If you just specify that a particular outcome will occur - e.g. that a particular sensory scene will happen which implies the circumstances you desire - then, in the basic "patterning" model of experience, the path will just be whatever is the most efficient between the two moments of truth, given your current patterning (which you might think of as the "list of facts" that are currently in play). By moments of truth, I mean: this moment, which is being observed now and so is definitely true, and that moment, which you have just fully asserted and so is now substantially true. All moments in between were less well-defined, less fully asserted, and so prone to shifting to accommodate other assertions. Note that "most efficient" doesn't mean that the path is calculated; it it is more like having two sticks connected by a loose elastic piece of string. If you plant the sticks at two specific locations on a landscape, the path of the piece of string will naturally fall and follow the contours of the landscape. And so...

If you wanted to more completely control the path between this moment and that moment (now and your outcome moment; the two sticks), you might consider introducing additional sticks which define some of the moments between now and then. This needn't be done separately - it could also be done by including aspects which imply a particular path in your outcome definition. For example, if you want a nice car but you want to receive it because your husband or wife bought it for you as a gift, you could include that in the "getting the car" moment. Generally, though, you have get comfortable with the fact that you can never "pre-know" everything that is going to happen - by which I mean, "unpack into the senses" in advance as a form of "pre-experiencing". Your life unfolding is that, really: the gradual unpacking of a pre-existing background patterned landscape. What "jumping" allows you to do, though, is assert the inclusion of certain points in that landscape, so that they are definitely incorporated. If someone feels the urge to over-specify, it's worth asking themselves why. Just by recognising it's possible to specify something at all, you are already in a better position than you would otherwise be. If you want to "pre-experience" your life, then you're basically saying you only want to live life after you've already lived it. Which is essentially death.

Aside - On the "dimensional inertia" concept and your mind "accepting" some things, it's worth remembering that patterning - and therefore "jumping" - doesn't just apply to the the events you are going to encounter, it also applies to the facts of the world more generally, and to your own sense of how things work. In other words, it is possible to work upon what feels acceptable, to work on the "how things work" itself - you can get very meta with this.

The intermediary steps follow from the assertion of the target moment + the truth of the current moment. So, they exist as a deterministic sequence between shifts. They become known when you experience them, in "unfolded" form, as you pass from this moment to that moment* - although you are always experiencing them in "enfolded" form really.

What, exactly, does it mean, to "assume" something? I suggest: it is a form of experiencing it, "then" as now, or rather "defining" or "asserting" it. It all reduces to basically "intensifying this pattern rather than that pattern".

Q1: It all reduces to basically "intensifying this pattern rather than that pattern".
yes that's right exactly. minimizing and eliminating ("forgetting") other patterns.

Right. There's no good way to describe it, because in describing it we immediately imply the thing that is meant to be fading - but, yes, it's fully switching to one pattern and "forgetting" (or "forgiving" really) all else.

If you want to "see something" then you just imagine-that it is present and use that as the basis for things. There's no difference in kind of the experience you have with mushrooms and without. "Consuming mushrooms and having an experience" could be considered a pattern like any other. Once you can leverage, certainly, but you could work on establishing alternative, more direct, patterns if you felt so inclined. Pure randomness is a concept, not a thing you ever perceive. The world-as-it-is doesn't have "pure randomness" in it; that is a parallel narrative. If what you are looking for is a causal connection between intention and experience, though, then repeated experimentation that pushes things to the limit is the way to demonstrate that. There's not much point in focusing on individual coincidences.

..."Prove" in what way? Of course, there is no place for "evidence" to be stored, but after observing a connection between the patterning of thought and the patterning of experience - and directly noticing they arise in the same space - then you're done. That's all you need. To prove it, you do it. There's no record that can be kept. By a more direct pattern (versus mushrooms), I mean that mushrooms themselves are just an experiential pattern with no cause "behind" them. You could perhaps directly assert a pattern to accomplish the same thing, with some dedication.

...The descriptive issue you're having is perhaps that, since the entirety of experience is "made from" you, you can never find the cause, because the cause is the whole thing, shifting. You will never find the cause within experience, because experience is self-caused - a shifting of shape. All you can do is note the intentions you make, and later recognise them appear as sensory moments. You can't manifest anything into "reality", because that implies a separation. The whole thing is "reality". Reality = experience = awareness = you. Right? Everything you experience, then, is a result, a result of intention, and since intending is just a shifting of experience, you never actually experience intending as such. So you only ever experience results, you never experience a cause. Cause and effect exist only as concepts. All there actually is, is taking on the shape of results.

If there's no difference from 10 years ago and today, then you should set up a business selling beauty products! ;-)

Well, of course, in the sense that you=awareness, your "true face" is completely unchanged in 10 years, or indeed eternity. Why didn't I think of it his before! The perfect business opportunity! :-)

As to the "why" question: it occurs to me that since there is no specific "how things are" or "how things work", then there is no particular answer to that question.

...

Q2: Hmm, so in this maner that would mean that "winning lottery" would eventually happen, on road ahead , even tho it could be after like 50 years or so. By this i mean, if i have made that kind of choice i have set "path" to it and it would eventually happen wright ?
And if we take in mind i chose to be "more lucky" it would eventually leading to winning of some sorts. Wouldnt it create like some sort of paradox in that way ?

What would the paradox be?

Q2: Damm you short term memory. Its a bit , but i will do my best to express my thoughts in English. If its impossible to understand please fell free to say that. Will try to explain. So let`s say i Wish for enormous success, so universe would start to turn things in a way i would achieve it. And in a same moment i would chose to win this jackpot, which also would be enormous success, giving chances that wining is slimmer than hair. So this would lead to success anyway, with 50/50 chance either building for example empire and gaining these (example: 20mil) or wining them after 20-30 years. Or getting both. In other words, if i wish and arrange universe for same outcomes with different paths would it make me land in completely different paradox , for example somewhere in middle ?

Oh, I see. Okay, let's go with this description: The "world" is a single continuous pattern, and by being single and continuous, it must always be "coherent" - that is, it will always "make sense". Right now, the world is in a particular "state", which means a particular collection of patterns are dominant. You might imagine this as being a landscape, with the contours being the current state. Your ongoing experience is like your attention gradually scanning across that landscape - like a landscape of "moments" defined by the current patterns which are active. Now, in addition to this we'll have the rule that:

• Experience is apparently local; intention is actively global.

Which means that although your attention may be on this particular moment of the landscape, if you intend something the intended pattern will apply to the entire landscape - it will shift to a new state, incorporating your pattern, and your experiences will be aligned with that new state from that point onwards, in a pre-determined way.

Returning to your point: If you wish for "enormous success" then that is a general pattern which is applied across the whole "world pattern"; the landscape is shifted right then such that subsequent moments will tend to have more of a "success" component. It becomes true now that you will have success then. Later, if you wish to "win the jackpot", then that pattern is applied across the whole "world pattern"; the landscape (which has already been shaped by the "enormous success" intention) is now shifted to incorporate "win the jackpot" also.

What is happening is, your world (this state, or landscape, or "world pattern") corresponds to the accumulation of intentions and their implications. Between shifts, the world is deterministic - the events you encounter are defined until you perform another shift. Every time you intend an outcome or a trend, the world shifts to a new state which incorporates that pattern, and a new deterministic path. If you intend something that is contrary to a previous intention, then the world is shifted such that the original intention is diminished. Avoid doing that, and it will remain.

So there is no paradox. The path of experience is never pointing in two different directions at once, just as a mountain in a landscape doesn't have two different shapes at once.

POST: I did the 2 glass method. Somebody explain why nothing happened.

The idea, really, is that you are the one who comes up with the theories (while keeping in mind the context of this, as described in the sidebar). But if nothing happened, then nothing happened - that's the result you got. If you want other people to chime in, though, then I guess you will "only" have to put a bit more effort into describing your target and process.

Q1: you are the one who comes up with the theories
but they're not, are they? they can't originate any theories since i create the possibilities of theories so all they are doing is selecting that which i have already created.... and even that selection is limited to what i want to see in others

From the perspective of OP, they are selecting them from what already exists, but everything already exists and was never created, by you or anyone else. From the perspective of you, now, then the experience of them apparently selecting, is a selection you are making (or have implied).

Q1: everything already exists and was never created, by you or anyone else
that's mayavadi philosophy that places Brahman ("infinite grid"), 'impersonal feature' as the highest existence
but I create that

How you gonna create that, begin that, when there is no time?

i create time - time is the means by which events occur but time doesn't exist any more than reality exists

Time is part of an experience. So, time would be part of the experiencing of an apparent infinite grid, but the infinite grid itself wouldn't exist "in" time; it exists as a potential experiential pattern, but not something that is "created" as an object. You might have the experience of apparent creation, but the object that is apparently being created already exists eternally as a pattern.

Q1: the infinite grid...exists as a potential experiential pattern
where?

Everywhere and nowhere. That's the eternal for ya! :-)

so you have no evidence that 'the infinite grid' exists :P

:-)

What do you mean by "exists", though?

If what you mean by "exists" is that exists "outside" of experience somewhere, other than as a pattern within it, then that is a meaningless statement: experience has no "outside". What I mean by exists is: one can have sensory experiences "as if" there is such a thing as the infinite grid. Can you have thoughts consistent with it? Then it exists as a thought. Can you have sensory experiences consistent with it? Then it exists as an experience. Thoughts and sensory experiences are both, in fact, experiences "made from" awareness. And in fact, the difference between a thought about something and an experience of something, is just the intensity, stability and perspective (1st vs 3rd person) of the experience. If you have thought about something, then at that moment you know that it exists. You cannot think about anything that does not exist. Because, essentially, the concept of existence makes no sense outside of that category.

How do you know that "existence" exists? Do you have any proof? :-p

Q1: one can have sensory experiences "as if" there is such a thing as the infinite grid.
but how can you prove that I did not create that concept?

Did you experience creating that concept? What exactly do you mean by "create"?

[did you experience creating] what difference would that make?

You are claiming to have created something. If you have never experienced creating it, then I'm unsure of what leads you to make the claim.

if i cease to exist - so does every other possibility of experience

How are you going to cease to exist? You are not an object, you are not content - you are subject, and context. If you never began, how can you end?

Have you experienced creation? How did you create something which, prior to that moment, did not exists and therefore could not be conceived of? The moment you conceived of it, experienced it as a thought, it already existed. The infinite grid is not superior to you-as-context, because it is that context, as are all and any other patterns. There are no levels here; there is no hierarchy. You exist and you are the existence of everything else. Being a subject doesn't mean that you don't exist, but it does mean you don't exist as an object, with a beginning and an end. You need to define "prove" really, but it is simple to demonstrate to yourself that you are the subject and the context, either by observing that you experiential content changes, demonstrating that you can produce experiences which show there is fixed content, or by simply attending to your direct experience: no edges, no location for "you", everything is made from "you". When you refer to your body having a form, surely you mean that you-as-experiencer has no particular form, other than being-aware, which is eternal?

i just want it

Want what, though? If by wanting you mean "thought of it", then did it not already exist?

so... 'the infinite grid' is a magical thing that has no creator and no cause and exists for the benefit of every being in existence?

As indeed does every pattern. It doesn't need a creator because it was never created - it is eternal - and it exists as the basis of a potential experience within and as awareness. I'm not sure I'd say "every being in existence", because being is not something that is "in existence" and there aren't many or even one being. But I suspect you are using the term in a common language way, so that's fine.

sure there is - me at the top, everyone else below me

Top... of what? What structure could there be, that you are on top of? Now, you might have experiences "as if" you were some sort of thing that was on the top of some sort of structure, but that thing and that structure would just all be patterns, at the same level, within awareness. No hierarchy fundamentally, only an apparent hierarchy relatively.

what content is fixed?

No content is fixed. I think I missed with the "no" - oops! :-)

i do have a form... otherwise i wouldn't have experiences - even if that form changes, the form is itself eternal

No. You don't have any inherent form at all; you "take on the form of experiences. Experiences == form. That is why it is actually better to say that you become experiences rather than have experiences. Again, you are not an object, so you can't think of yourself as a "thing". Only objects have form; subjects do not (inherently).

but when did it first exist?

There is no first, because that implies time as a container within which things are placed, at a fundamental level - but you are the only "container" (albeit without boundaries, and that doesn't just mean no "spatial" edges).

what is eternal? only i am eternal

You are eternal, but you are also potential for everything.

no form means no experience

No inherent form means all experiences are possible. Any particular form would be only one experience would be possible. You have no inherent form, but you are that which "takes on" forms (=experiences).

Q1: that implies time as a container within which things are placed
yes - brahman - 'infinite grid'

It's just one pattern of many (any!), though. You could equally have "infinite gloop" as a pattern, and have experiences consistent with that. The "infinite grid" is not a container in the sense of truly being a place where things are located, which is travelled; it is more like a "formatting" around which experiential content can be structured (and is itself content).

and it has no cause, is superior to everything and everyone, cannot be seen, cannot be defined and is the prime cause of everything including me... sorry, not buying it! ;)

Heh. :-) Except for it being the cause of you, perhaps, unless you mean "you", of course.

there are two 'me's?

Quoted indicates a reference to the concept of "you", unquoted indicates that-which-is-aware.

the concept is me
a part of me
but there is only one me

Yes. So in one sense it is not you (because it is just a pattern within you) but in another sense it is (since it is "made from" you). Realising the nature of things is about recognising the difference, or even that there is a difference. There is not even one you, though, because what you fundamentally are is "before" division and multiplicity (although you can "take on the shape of" an experience of apparent division). That's why we say that you are "awareness", rather than "an awareness" or "the awareness".

Q1: There is not even one you, though, because what you fundamentally are is "before" division and multiplicity
isn't that just me? कृष्ण kṛṣṇa

Me or "me"? :-) Yes, awareness = you = experiencing = . . .

Eventually, we just end up talking round in circles, because we're just using different words to point outside of descriptions, to "this / that". (Which, of course, is me doing the exact same thing yet again!)

...

Even then, I suppose we'd still have the problem of: what, precisely, is a placebo and how, exactly, does it work? (Just defining the term or categorising something as it, doesn't necessarily tell us anything about it.)

POST: Can keeping a journal help in Dimension Jumping?

Yes, it's a good thing to experiment with. Basically, by fully getting into a particular description while writing it, you are "patterning' yourself with it, just as with the owl exercise, with yourself as an "imagination space". People do this accidentally quite a lot. For example, they write a list of goals, then put it in a drawer and forget about it. A year later, the rediscover the list, and find all those things happened, even the unlikely ones in some way, although they didn't try to bring them about. And people who write fiction, who get really absorbed in the worlds and characters they create, can find that those situational patterns then turn up in everyday life.

...You could spend time writing about the grid, detailing how your experiences fit into it, and writing up a 1st-person experience of accessing childhood situations again. Really get into the 'feel' of it all. Then, sometimes, in a relaxed state, recall that and try to enact it.

...By "physically experience" do you really mean "1st person experience"? It just takes practice. You essentially dream your way into it, but it's as vivid as your present moment right now. See: lucid dreaming (Robert Waggoner's book is good), OBE (Don DeGracia's guide is decent), and also Neville Goddard for examples. In the end, it's all an imagining-that.

...You will have 1st-person immersive experiences! Before that, though, you will probably have sort of intermediate, detached experiences, as you get better at sort of surrendering and selecting. As referenced above, I'd pick up this book [Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner] and read this free guide [http://www.dondeg.com/metaphysics/do_obe.pdf]. Now, I don't necessarily agree with the interpretations of those, but the first one will get you into the topic (it's definitely the best non-basic book on lucid dreaming), and the second one has some useful exercises and perspectives (the "sparkles" technique is basically what you want to do).