TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 3)

Stanley Sobottka: A Course in Consciousness

This short dialogue [Deleted] provides a nice quick summary of how to get from "here" to "there" - a sort of "reality loosener" for times when all this stuff seems a bit too solid. The full course is quite interesting, a well put together survey of all the different aspects of science, metaphysics, and non-duality. I recommend it. It covers everything, even if you do not agree with its conclusions yourself, it will give your reference points for all the issues.

Valuable material, even if it doesn't quite embrace the "subjective idealism + magick" aim of this subreddit:

When we realize that "we" have no control, there is a sense of freedom and energy because control is bondage even if we think "we" are the ones in control. This freedom brings with it the awareness of a power that is mysterious and profound, the power of Consciousness (God). Ironically, if "we" try to use that power, it disappears. This is a twist on the saying, "use it or lose it". Instead, it becomes, "if you try to use it, you will lose it". If "we" toy with the power of God, "we" will get burned by disappointment and disillusion, but when we realize that "we" have no control, the power of God, even though subtle, becomes awesomely apparent.

...

I brought the topic up over here [Control vs Letting Go] - albeit not being so direct so as to encourage discussion - and there were some interesting responses worth a look.

I would love to see a discussion of this here. My intuition suspects that the apparent polarity of control vs no control is itself a misunderstanding of something fundamental that underlies both understandings. But I don't know enough about it myself

The short version from me, to have control is/requires a release of control. We release ourselves into a direction, rather than push ourselves into a direction. That we feel that effort is required is a misunderstanding. For instance, we tense up our muscles in order to move, to 'feel ourselves doing it', but actually the tensing up gets in the way of our movement!

The Arm-Wrestling Exercise

Get a pal, challenge him (or her!) to an arm wrestle. Now, you're going to try two methods:

• The first time, put lots of effort into it. Really and try to win that competition! Use all your power, all your muscle!
• The second time - don't. Once in position, simply decide that you are going to win, and then leave your arm, your muscles, completely alone. Direct your attention elsewhere (into the space around you, onto the place you want to end up, the space behind your forehead - just keep out of your arm), and simply wait until you've won.

This illustrates that the attempt to control actually gets in the way of getting what you want, in this case. Make the decision, let the path unfold by itself. See here [http://doorsausage.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-fetching-suit.html] for an interesting tensegrity-based description of this.

Imagining That

Imagining That

WHEN we talk of imagination and imagining something, we tend to think about a maintained ongoing visual or sensory experience. We are imagining a red car, we are imagining a tree in the forest. However, imagination is not so direct as that, and to conceive of it incorrectly is to present a barrier to success - and to the understanding that imagining and imagination is all that there is. We don’t actually imagine in the sense of maintaining a visual, rather we “imagine that”. We imagine that there is a red car and we are looking at it; we imagine that there is a tree in the forest and we can see it. In other words, we imagine or ‘assert’ that something is true - and the corresponding sensory experience follows.

It is in this sense that we imagine being a person in a world. You are currently imagining that you are a human, on a chair, in a room, on a planet, reading some text. We imagine facts and the corresponding experience follows, even if the fact itself is not directly perceived. Having imagined that there is a moon, the tides still seem to affect the shore even if it is a cloudy sky. And having imagined a fact thoroughly, having imagined that it is an eternal fact, your ongoing sensory experience will remain consistent with it forever. Until you decide that it isn't eternal after all.

Exercise: When attempting to visualise something, instead of trying to make the colours and textures vivid, try instead to fully accept the fact of its existence, and let the sensory experience follow spontaneously.

Next up: Teleporting for beginners.

...

There is no external. So, plot twist: there is no internal either!

Yes, everything is pretty good fun. :-)

...Got ya. Well, you'll probably already get a few more red cars in your life just as a result of reading that post. ;-)

The fun is in pushing to skip intermediate experiences.

Q: When attempting to visualise something, instead of trying to make the colours and textures vivid, try instead to fully accept the fact of its existence, and let the sensory experience follow spontaneously.
There is value in making the visions vivid as well. What your saying is orthogonal to making one's visions vivid and visceral.

I'm really saying it'll come for free. I'm saying that the way to experience a vivid object is to imagine that there is one, and let your experience fall into line. You can't "vivid" the image directly, because it has no substance. But obviously vividity is desired.

Q: I'm really saying it'll come for free.
Why? It doesn't have to. The mind is so flexible that anything you can imagine you can end up experiencing. So, can you imagine using your technique and not getting vividness for free? I can.
I'm saying that the way to experience a vivid object is to imagine that there is one, and let your experience fall into line.
I agree. Basically what you're saying is that the state of our senses and our conceptual-volitional framing are not two separate things, and I agree. But I don't think it's wrong to emphasize vividness first. It's gentler. What you suggest is a much stronger shift toward the crazy, which I like, but it's a tough pill to swallow right away. Especially with you talking about teleporting next.

But I don't think it's wrong to emphasize vividness first. It's gentler. What you suggest is a much stronger shift toward the crazy.

The exercise (as described) is for "mind" visualisation rather than external creation (let's not go there yet). I found taking that approach completely changed my results. Instead of trying to "draw" the image of a cube floating before me, I declared there to be one there - letting the "drawing" take care of itself. Because if something is there, of course I can see it. "Leading in", to make the desired result an obvious and inevitable conclusion. Harnessing the auto-complete function.

Especially with you talking about teleporting next.

It's a fun exercise. And if you are truly dedicated...

This wasn't obvious to me at all [mind level]...

They're the same. Sorry, I'm actually confusing things by typing away here on mobile (not least due to autocorrect). The post is about material-level visualisations (experiences) that you aren't even aware you've made via "imagining that". In short, your life as you (or "people") are living it now, usually without realising. "Imagining that" shows that we produce experiences by implying their inevitability according to facts we have accepted or allowed. The exercise deliberately doesn't differentiate; the process is identical. The only difference is... the immediacy of the change from an image to an experience, and the directness of the correspondence. Visualising will always lead to some result of some sort. What sort of fact are you creating?

"Imagine that" there is a cube in front of you. Does a cube intensify, materialise, condense, drop to the ground in front of you? Or do you walk into the next room to find that the TV is showing a program about 4D geometry and the history of the tesseract (thus giving you both the cube and the context).

How real does it have to get before it changes from being "triumph" to "terrifying"?

You're willing to take us as far as any of us dare to go, am I right? Or am I right?

What can I say? When you're right, you're right - and you're right. :-)

Q: "Imagine that" there is a cube in front of you. Does a cube intensify, materialise, condense, drop to the ground in front of you? Or do you walk into the next room to find that the TV is showing a program about 4D geometry and the history of the tesseract (thus giving you both the cube and the context).
The first happens, but the cube not only doesn't drop in front of me, it is quite faint unless I strain myself looking for it while making efforts to ignore everything else I am now experiencing.

Okay, I'm going to say: no effort at all. Relax, and quietly and continually assert the fact of its existence. Don't interfere at all with whatever arises in the senses. After all, when there is (say) an apple in front of you, do you try to make it more vivid? Of course not. The object is a fact, it's appearance is inherent - the images comes to you, you simply receive it. Let the world come to you. So again: focus on the fact of existence. Quietly assert the fact in a mood of expectation until it feels and becomes "true".

Q: After all, when there is (say) an apple in front of you, do you try to make it more vivid? Of course not.
That's not necessarily true. I sometimes do try to make it more vivid, which is why I have bad eyesight. ;)
Quietly assert the fact in a mood of expectation until it feels and becomes "true".
I do that all the time. I am smart enough to know the theory of manifestation, believe it or not.

Ha, I am of course not doubting the smartness of your manifestation, dear Nefandi! ;-)

Yeah, I used to mess with my eyesight/seeing all the time. A lot of this whole thing is because of that - realising that surely it is indirect, and sensory experience is spontaneous and effortless. Instant vision improvement. Because you don't see with your "eyes", unless you really try to. Anyway, you get idea. It comes back to what you were saying about still feeling that there is a difference between mind and physical. Well, it's really all imagination - images arising in correspondence with imagined facts. But if so, why does manifestation tend to occur via an intermediate sequence of experiences? Because we are highly resistant to sensorily experiencing a discontinuity. Continuity of experience is a very ingrained "fact". How to break down the barrier and realise that it's all just envisioned facts within your awareness?

One way is to explore direct creation and feeling the pushback. However, that does tackle an important assumption: that we assume that objects are in locations. Actually, a location is part of the property of an object. Including the object of "the person that is you". The facts of your location is an attribute of your apparent object. And that is why attempting teleportation is a good exercise. You don't go to a new location - rather, you change the location-fact of your bodily object and your sensory experience falls into alignment accordingly. The location comes to you.

we feel like everything in manifestation needs a "legitimate" history behind it.

Things usually need to be "plausible", even if it's a really shoddy surface version of plausibility that upon investigation involves crazy retroactive coincidences.

and the "pushback" shows you instantly what you're doing wrong.

Not that you are in the wrong direction though, but that you need to be with it for a while, let the resistance unravel and your world to resettle and remain coherent. Break through aggressively and you're at risk of... breaking yourself. Good points about motivation and so on.

Location is a relative property.

Maybe that was too precise. What I'm trying to say is that location is the fact of an object, not its environment or landscape. To move something, you assign the object a new place or indeed no place at all; you do not update the inventory list of a location.

Makes sense. But actually living with the consequences of having performed this is the hardest part.

Right. Even the smallest shift can be troublesome. This is a whole other level. Say you do the teleportation exercise and the image of this room fades from your awareness, to be replaced with the image of the room next door. What's next? An important outcome is, instead of just thinking about being an aware space and all that, you will actually know as a direct fact that you have no location.

Q: Break through aggressively and you're at risk of... breaking yourself.
Yes, and while this may not be my first choice, I don't worry too much if it happens, because there are benefits to be gained from that scenario as well.
An important outcome is, instead of just thinking about being an aware space and all that, you will actually know as a direct fact that you have no location.
At this point it becomes lived knowledge. This kind of knowledge is very hard to forget or to regress from. So it's very valuable.

Right, and I'd suggest that lived knowledge is the only true knowledge. All else is thinking-about. And of course, it's not just a matter of not being located; it's a matter of not being a person. We shall see who is up for dedicating themselves to the exercise.

Q: I'd suggest that lived knowledge is the only true knowledge.
That's definitely wrong. Aspirational knowledge before it is lived, when based on proper reasoning is also true. It's just not as strongly embedded in the mind yet and is not fully matured. It's wrong to say only oaks are true but acorns are false.

I'm going to revise my statement and say "lived from". You can live from knowledge and that is different to thinking-about. Aspirational knowledge is something you live from.

Q: Aspirational knowledge is something you live from.
T-G, people don't always drop onto the path fully baked, having made all the right beginnings in the right places. This can be (but doesn't have to be) a messy process. In some cases people don't actually correctly embrace their aspirational knowledge. They struggle with it. Sometimes they live from it for a second or two, sometimes they think-about it. But however anemic and pitiful their efforts at that stage are, that doesn't make the knowledge wrong.

Yeah - Things can sound a bit prescriptive and uncompromising in these conversations, but that's just an artefact of keeping things to the point. Of course, development is often muddled and confusing and evolving - this way and then that, feeling our way along - and sometimes scary. My thinking has historically been all over the place, for instance, and I have been mostly on the wrong track. But I think everyone finds what they are comfortable with and want to "live from" in their own time. But the extent that they live from it will dictate the extent to which it appears to be true in experience. They can adopt this or that, and this or that will then be there. There's no "what we should do". I mean, there's a healthy opinion that people should live their lives fully as given, and leave the underlying patterning well alone. Y'know, just enjoy the fruits! :-) Life doesn't actually necessarily require ongoing reality-maintenance; just some occasional fantasising and an open attitude can be sufficient for most. This stuff is for when we get curious about how much tinkering is possible.

Q: Life doesn't actually necessarily require ongoing reality-maintenance; just some occasional fantasising and an open attitude can be sufficient for most.
I agree with the first half, but the second half requires some kind of objective knowledge to make stipulations about statistics. Of course we may say things like that, but you're talking to me now. I say things like that to morons who are stuck in convention, all the while knowing that there is no such thing as objective common ground and statistics.

I think having the urge to explore things as we do on this subreddit is pretty rare. By "sufficient" I mean "happy not to go deeper". Y'know, without any morons there would be no geniuses! ;-)

Q: Sometimes I wonder if I would have rather been average among geniuses. But I am not going to artificially dumb myself down to achieve that. I'd rather magically raise everyone up. I tire of myself being nearly the only one who knows anything esoteric, along with say 5 or (generously) 10 friends. This is idiotic. I want there to be millions of people like me. I want to sometimes be challenged by stuff I haven't considered yet, instead of constantly reading about stuff I thought about 5, 10 years ago and 10 lifetimes ago, recycling everything for the n-th time. I don't want to burden people with being completely responsible for supplying fresh material for contemplation. I take responsibility for that. But it sure would be nice if I came across stuff more often that let me think, "Why didn't I think of that?" So basically I want to be a God surrounded by Gods in one limitless field of glory beyond glory. Instead of feeling small and lost, I will feel like this raging radiance of Godliness will be magnified beyond compare, where each God reflects each other God's Godliness and primordial perfections. To me this is superior to the second rate situation of me being the smart one surrounded by a bunch of 2-bit idiots, which is fun for 5 minutes but gets crushingly boring soon. Well, I am still pretty social, so I am projecting my personal desires onto my ideal social environment. Maybe it's a flaw.

Maybe it's like... everyone wants to be the cool, witty, smart, attractive popular guy. But if you actually become that guy, your life is pretty boring. Everyone laughs at your jokes, is amazed by your insights, wants to spend time with you, no achievement is required... but you're basically a broadcaster or a Presence for other people to enjoy!

Far better to be a wit amongst wits, and differently so. To know the most about music, and have a friend who knows the most about movies. Otherwise, there's sorta nothing to do or explore, no adventuring to be had. Like, the world is fun to explore together with a group of equals, supporting each other in different ways, being the other parts of you. If you're King Of The Monkeys and everyone is subordinate, all you have is people aping you.

Q: Otherwise, there's sorta nothing to do or explore
I wouldn't go that far. I can explore stuff right inside my own mind, indefinitely. I'm just saying, if you can be surrounded by brighter and more creative beings, why not? It's not that they're necessary for having fun or to have something to explore. It's just a nice option.

This is your own mind.

This can take time.

Absolutely. I'm not saying this will just happen. You might need to spend hours, days. But those hours must be spent without effort, keeping the assertion below the level of strain. And there might be all sorts of patterns criss-crossing in the way. Part of the process is that these will all appear uncovered and then fade. But you don't need to do any investigation and go looking; just by keeping focused these things will come up. You "sit with them" and acknowledge them, and they pass.

In general I have an unhealthy habit of confusing struggle with directedness that is pure intent.

I was really guilty of "efforting" and thinking that was how to make things happen. Still do sometimes of course. The whole "Just Decide" thing came from that. Unhurried patience and acceptance is the way, but it's not easy to stick to. It's much easier for things that you don't need to happen. If you can get curious about the experience that is happening along the way, that really helps for me.

"And there might be all sorts of patterns criss-crossing in the way."; I don't know what you mean by this.

Oh, just all sorts of intermingled assumptions and resistances.

On a related note, there are people who can't mentally visualize.

Very true. Although I'd add: at the moment, for everyday folks. I think lots of people only have 'felt' visualisation by default. That last link pretty much describes how it was for me. It took me a long time to be able to 'image'. I could feel-know the object in a location, but I didn't really see it there. I could feel its rotation and movement though. And trying to manually "draw" the image part didn't help. The approach of 'asserting' was what got me there really, although I conceived of it as a sort of autosuggestion. I got the idea partly from a NLP story where he basically just paced/led and told them that they could see pictures vividly in front of them when they desired. And then they could. (See Milton Erickson model for the general idea.)

I figured: Why need the hypnosis aspect? All that we're doing with that is accepting one suggestion which implies another fact. Creation by implication, like in lucid dreams. I can see the world around me, in both waking and dreaming life so nothing's wrong with the "mechanism" really. Why not assert that there is a bright mental object there, which of course means it would be vivid, and let the sensory aspect come? Start with the feeling of presence, and allow the evidence to appear. Of course, different for everyone. And that is basically hypnosis by another name. Thanks for those great links - there's probably a lot more we could explore here in this area. There's a whole thing about imagination and perception in general, and "letting the world come to you" rather than striving to manipulate and control the senses, graspingly.

By this do you mean allowing the manifestations occur in a way that is congruent, as in not a discontinuity?

No, not necessarily. I mean literally not straining to sense or see things. In my thinking: Change is an indirect thing: you update the facts-of-the-world and then your sensory experience falls in line with this. Sensory experience, being a sort of 'mirage' that is based upon those facts, is something you just let happen therefore; you can't actually interact with it. For the biggest changes, you need to withdraw yourself from the current patterns - particularly, withdraw your emotional involvement (because although it's just another sense, that maintains patterns more than anything). Withdraw yourself from requiring plausibility and continuity.

That's why you should go about being 'non-attached':

• There is no solidity to sensory experience anyway; it's the image that floats above the hologram, as it were.
• While you are emotionally engaged with the sensory experience, you are grasping onto and persisting the patterns that produce it. This prevents change.

Q: Thanks, it all seems so basic when you spell it out like this, and it is. I think I need a reminder that this stuff is not totally nightmarishly difficult. If anything it's rather humorous that we are in this amazingly magical world and some of us continually get stuck in our concepts and attachments, thankfully I feel that I am getting stuck for briefer and briefer moments as time goes on.

The problem is, any indecision you have is reflected in your sensory experience. If you 'kinda think' one thing but 'kinda think' another, that muddle will muddle your experience!

That is why looking for evidence doesn't work. The world (seems to) align with your approach to it, whatever it is. There is actually no "how it really is" behind the scenes to uncover, no secret structure except what has been accumulated as patterns over time. That's where the whole "faith" thing comes in - which really means that you should ignore what your senses are telling you, and continue to assert what you desire. Given this knowledge, what seems like a good idea is to assert the most flexible worldview possible. Stop thinking about stuff (that just muddies the waters) and declare things instead. There are lots of metaphors you can adopt for this - my favourite at the moment is The Imagination Room, where the transparent floor is patterned in such a way as to filter the 'creative light' shining from underneath, into a fully immersive sensory image; change the patterns=change the facts => change the image, but you are always in "the room" no matter where you seem to be. Set aside a half hour, sit somewhere quiet, and do nothing except assert silently and effortlessly that this is a dream world made entirely from your imagination and assumptions. Just focus lightly on this as a fact, and see what happens.

...instead I imagine the within is the unmanifest void of possibility and unlimited love.

Nice also, since it has an associated feel. The reason I use the room metaphor sometimes is that, unlike alternatives such as a 'holographic aware space in which images condense' (which might be more accurate), it has a sensory aspect which can be used as a reminder: We all feel the ground beneath our feet, and whenever we notice that it can be used as a trigger to remember - "ah, the floor through which the light shines, to create my experience". It brings us back to the understanding.

I do not wish to uproot the tree...

Which is exactly fine. Power is the ability to have the experiences you desire, and what you desire is your own business. Others may crave absolute freedom from all conventions and so on, but the real freedom is to choose the conventions you like, and within those explore the possibilities.

I mean, I made this system didn't I?

You made it, but you did it unknowingly. Now you can do it deliberately and with knowledge. Instead of trying to work out what's going on, changing your mind as you go between different metaphors, resulting in an erratic experience, you can now simply select the one you like and step into that one. Once things settle, it's likely you'll just want to enjoy it. Make occasional adjustments. Always 'skipping to the final result' means you don't have the intermediate experiences. Sometimes that's good; often those experience are where the living of life actually takes place.

Do we know that I did it unknowingly? Couldn't I have knowingly chosen to forgot in order to experience it in a novel way after having built it?

Quite right, in terms of the life you appeared in, at the point you appeared in it. Plan out the obstacle course, then deliberately forget the design!

I was thinking more that, having forgotten (perhaps deliberately) your own powers of creation, you have since then been making changes to your reality without knowing it. But now you know again, you can - um - be more careful with it. :-)

For me it's the same except I retreat inward to that interior space, sort of like where the observer of all this is, almost as though he is the one exhaling out forms and ideas into his television set.

That's good. Another I've used to remind myself is "two-way looking" - placing my attention both outward into the space in front of me and inwards into the space I'm "looking out from". This makes it easy to notice that it's all floating in a big infinite space. There's a literal gap where you normally assume "you" to be. (This approach originally comes from Douglas Harding.)

A Dream

Some Dream Reminders

"In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write."
-- A Dream, Jorge Luís Borges

We each dream alone.

"The world I perceive is entirely private, a dream. The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it. Is not the idea of a total world a part of your personal world? The universe does not come to tell you that you are a part of it. It is you who have invented a totality to contain you as a part. In fact all you know is your own private world, however well you have furnished it with your imaginations and expectations."
-- Excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj - Part Two - also: Part One

Wherever you go, whatever you discover, it is only... more dream.

Bonus Read

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, also by Jorge Luís Borges, is a short story depicting an unknown country where a conspiracy of idealism takes place. Excerpt:

"They cannot conceive that space can exist in time. The sight of a puff of smoke on the horizon and then of a burning field and then of a half-stubbed-out cigar that produced the blaze is deemed an example of the association of ideas."
-- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luís Borges

...

We might also ask how our dream is formed. Patterns arising and stabilising via hypnogogia is one way of describing this. Our ongoing reality may be thought of as no more than pattern triggering in noise, feeding back on itself.

Q: Right. I'm starting to view it like this too. The fact that the forms have evolved to be this vivid, this complex, it's rather... incredibly remarkable. Remarkable. Interesting. I like to take a deeper look at words sometimes and I feel that in this context the word remarkable is interesting indeed. The forms are so interesting perhaps, that we feel compelled to "re-mark" our world with them, to recreate new and novel forms to attempt to satiate our undying appetite for creation.

Thing is, the "re-mark" process kinds happens by itself, like water waves sloshing around a tank, bouncing off each other, leading to new overall surface patterns, always changing. The difference between many traditions and the oneirosophic approach is that, where others recognise this "self-happening illusion" as ourselves but encourage detachment and acceptance, we encourage detachment and occasional assertion: a "re-folding" of the material which constitutes us and our evolving experience.

Q: Nothing happens by itself precisely because of intent. And intent is ongoing, unlike what George says. In fact you can see if this is true or not by practice. Do some eyelid gazing until the images start to form. First don't try to control the images. Then control them. You'll see how "by itself" is actually an intentional state since you can intervene any time, so when you choose not to intervene, you're still involved, and what you witness is still partial to your way of looking at and for patterns. In fact controlling and not-controlling are ultimately identical states of volition that differ only in appearance but not in substance or function.

I cover this. It happens "by itself" as in it unfolds consistently with the present state. From below, I deliberately define terms:

On terminology: "intending" is the act of imposing a pattern onto consciousness; "the intention" is the form of the pattern being imposed. If you say "my intention is..." you are saying "the pattern I am imposing is..."

So the "intention" persists and has an ongoing effect, but you are not actively "intending" in an ongoing way to make the effect keep happening. Once you've made the deformation, it persists, provided any part of the extended pattern is active. This is important: superimposed patterns apparently evolve and unfold in time even though the patterns themselves (the accumulation of "intentions") do not change. This is why there is no effort in continuing to experience the world-pattern you have set up.

Q: I'll try to explain intent in words I think will make more sense to you. Take what you call "just decide" and stop limiting it to a single moment. That's intent. Of course you can intend to go for a walk and so on, and such intents seem like actions limited to specific periods of time. But it's wrong to confuse these for the metaphysical intent. These momentary intentions for this and that obscure the ongoing ever-living intent because they make it seem as though intent starts and stops, when it does no such thing ultimately. Intent is not entirely in-time.

Take what you call "just decide" and stop limiting it to a single moment. That's intent.

It's not limited to a single moment in "just decide", never has been. The act of activation takes place at a "moment" but the activation itself applies globally over all time and space (which also means the activation then didn't take place in a "moment", but there you go). It's a pattern which is overlaid upon the whole "world-pattern". There is no such thing as a momentary intent. All intention apples to all time. To the extent that your apparent past (i.e. future recall of memories) will change in alignment with your intent. Really, you are superimposing (or triggering) patterns upon patterns upon patterns. The superposition is what gives us the "world-pattern" and the apparent temporal segment of that (again a pattern) is what corresponds to the present experience. Like Moiré patterns.

My point is: there is no in-time act. There is an illusion of an act.=

We've already covered this before, I think, stemming from: We don't "do" things, rather we "have the experience of doing". You and I need a different word for intention. I use the word "act" and "activation" to indicate a self-shifting of the world-pattern which is subsequently experienced in the observations which follow. It happens as change but it does not happen in time (because time is actually a now-pattern upon which other now-patterns are hung; it is a flat thought-structure not an environment). All that stuff about starting, stopping, moments and so on are artefacts of thinking-about experience.

I am saying the initiation (cause) is not something in-time.

Of course. Forget time. The "act" is a shifting of the whole world-pattern, which consists of all time laid out flat (for visualisation's sake). The "act" is not experienced, only the experiences associated with the shift. The "act" leaves no trace and therefore is not in time. There is change but it does not occur in time, which is itself a structure of within the world-pattern. We are inevitably bound to talk about things using language and illustrations which imply to "parts", "location", "space" and "moments" in "time". This is simply because we think by using "shadow-senses". As soon as you have divided something into concepts, you are dealing with parts, and parts are distinguished by location relative to one another in conceptual space. "Act" is maybe the broadest word. "Intending" and "intention" are traditionally good because they can't be imagined very solidly, but (as you are indicating) they can all too often be associated with the "feeling of doing" localised in apparent time.

Q:We don't "do" things
We do. We just don't do them as conventionally imagined. I do things all the time. I move my hands. I walk. I stop walking. I DO things. Even when I don't do anything, that's a kind of doing. But, the source of my doing is not in-time.

I think you're pretty clear on what I mean, right? For clarity: When I put "do" in quotes it is to indicate that I'm referring to the conventional usage of the word "do". Implying that the causing of experiences is not as traditionally thought; there is no cause in experience.

Q:I think you're pretty clear on what I mean, right?
No clue. I never understood your opposition to doing. There is a reason why I choose to say things that I say. I don't say them randomly. I say I do things because I am saying: a) I make choices, and b) I take responsibility. I say my intent is not in-time, because I want to illustrate the following: what deforms convention is not itself a part of convention. So the structure of experience becomes deformed this and that way, but those deformations don't come from the structure that's being deformed. In other words, the experience is not self-deforming. Rather, intent, which isn't exactly experience, deforms experience. Intent isn't something separate from experience, but it isn't the same either. Like white on rice. White isn't rice but isn't separate from it either. In simple language, I am beyond convention. I transcend that which I manipulate.

Another tac: "Doing" implies a there is a thing doing and a thing done-to. "Intending", by contrast, is shape-shifting of reality "across all time and space". Some of that reality might be presently sensorily "bright" and therefore a change would be experienced, some of it not. If the world was a landscape, then our usual conception of "doing" would be getting a spade and digging around on the hill of the "present moment" to reshape it. However, the actuality of "intending" is that the landscape self-shifts to adopt a new topology as a whole, and any change of the hill of the present moment is a result of this. We tend to confuse this result with "doing".

I say that experience is inert, and has no own-power. So nothing experienced self-shifts. Whatever is experienced is shifted by something that is beyond experience and beyond convention altogether.

Exactly. Experience is a byproduct. Experience isn't doing anything, it is just the part of the landscape which happens to have sensory aspects. Only the landscape shifts and it shifts of its own self.

Ping-Pong Balls Metaphor

Imagine some ping-pong balls floating in a tank of water. (In this description, the water is already in a state of motion: ripples are moving along trajectories.) The ping-pong balls are all different colours. On one of them, a blue one, you write "me". The balls float about, bouncing off each other, due to the trajectories of the waves of the water. As the "me" ball bounces off other balls, you say to yourself "I did that". However, you did nothing. Now, you splash the water. The act of splashing in and of itself produces no change to balls, however it does modify the pattern of waves. The subsequent trajectory of all of the balls is therefore adjusted. At the point of splashing, the "me" ball might be moved ("I did this"), or it may not be moved for a while.

In this metaphor:

• The water is reality (or whatever you want to call it) or consciousness.
• The waves are the world-pattern as dissolved into consciousness.
• The balls are aspects of reality which have sensory aspects.
• The "me" ball is the misidentification with certain sensory aspects.
• The collisions between balls are "events" and the collision with the "me" ball are those events misconstrued as "things I do".
• The splashing of the water represents "intending", which is to change the landscape of reality, the facts-of-the-world.

Now obviously, we're having to use time and space here in the metaphor, whereas in fact the world-pattern is "static" and more akin to a set of superimposed patterns, dimensionless "facts" dissolved into the background. However, the purpose of the metaphor is to illustrate how the illusion of "doing" is brought about due to focusing on sensory aspects and identifying with part of that.

It doesn't shift of its own. Nothing does. Things shift when you shift. Or more specifically, your intentionality shifts.

Language tangle! The only thing there is, is you. The only shifting that happens, is you shifting. Hence the landscape metaphor earlier (the landscape changing its own topology).

In your metaphor there is own-power to the system that's independent of your involvement.

No, there isn't really: because the whole system is you. It is "the current shape of you". Which is what you've gone on to say. Bear in mind the metaphor is to illustrate a certain aspect! The reality has no moving parts, strictly, because it actually has no time element. But if you go all out then... you stop having a metaphor that illustrates anything.

Now both splashing and calm represent intending. In fact, in my version of your metaphor even the existence of the water tank, water, and the balls, represents intending.

Which... renders the word "intending" meaningless. That's why metaphors involve splitting things into parts for illustrative purposes. It's the whole "everything is consciousness" problem. The ultimate truth is basically worthless when it comes to discussion. The whole universe is, in the end, your "intention" overall, since it begins with the first pattern created up until the most "recent". That's not very helpful as an explanation though, given that we aren't at this beginning now. We could call each change an "additional modification" or "an update to the intention", but most people are more comfortable with "intention" referring to a change to the current pattern. We might talk about the "overall intention" of the system, though, to make this clearer.

Intending is ongoing instead of being limited to intermittent splashes.

I think it is better to say that intention is persistent, that its effect is ongoing, because intentions accumulate (superposition of patterns) and sum to the "overall intention". Intending is better reserved for the changing of the system to a new state. To avoid words like "acting" or "doing", which automatically imply subject and object, doer and done, to most people.

If the system was me, I couldn't be anything different from that water with ping pong balls.

I think you are just arguing against the structure of the metaphor, rather than what it represents. Strictly speaking, the whole of the metaphor is "you" and none of it has solidity it has simply "taken on the shape of" the patterns involved; the ping-pong balls merely indicate the current sensory aspects.

You even described it in your own words as "everything is on its own until you splash some water." I am saying, that never happens. There is no "until" in my view.

Again, you are arguing with the metaphor's structure rather than the meaning. Experience unfolds according to the world-pattern within consciousness until the world-pattern is updated. If your arms were frictionless and tireless and you windmilled them clockwise, they would continue "forever" in that direction until you intervened to reverse them (say). That intervention would be a change of state in the world-pattern; experience would unfold accordingly subsequently. The change would not occur in time, since the world-pattern retains no state in and of itself (although an apparent past may be a part of certain patterns). The metaphor necessarily uses division and space and time, because all thought requires those things. This is why we cannot speak of the whole situation, only aspects of it, depending on what particular thing we are talking about.

Intending means whatever you find is ultimately what you intended to find.

You cannot "find" anything. As soon as you intend something, it is done. Intending a change in the world-pattern, the intention is already found. I oppose your opposition! :-)

...Heheh, you're on form today. :-)

So, if all is consciousness which is me, and the shape of consciousness is the shape I adopt, which is the shape of the world - in its entirety and not just this present moment 3D sensory aspect; I am in effect experiencing the whole of reality right now - what else is there? There is no limit in terms of the possible experiences (including not-being-a-human) in this regard.

From the POV of metaphysics this is bad view.

I beg to differ (well I would wouldn't I?). Although of course the metaphor we're discussing is very much meant to offer a practical way of thinking, for usability, as you point out. You seem to be bound to some notion of an ongoing intending when the perspective inherently dictates there is no time, and therefore no "ongoingness" available. There is only state. Of course, we can adopt any position or standpoint, and experience things relatively, but fundamentally that's the deal. The "world-pattern" does not necessarily refer to "this planet" and "this body". The larger picture is one of associative patterning. More like a "memory block" of all possibilities (logically or actually, no difference essentially).

Consciousness is only the shiny property of mind, and consciousness displays only one single version of what all it could be displaying.

We're differing on our definition of consciousness then. I've been using it to be the "background awareness" rather than the particular content or structure. I agree on potential: all possibilities are implicit within that awareness. When I say you are experiencing the whole of reality, I don't mean that this sensory experience is all there is. I mean something more like the entire "logical space" is present and dissolved into awareness, of awareness, and is "being experienced" in that sense.

But there is a limit to what you can experience at one time.

I deny this - but only in the particular sense I mean above. This is why the "ping-pong balls" were the sensory aspect and "the water" was the entire structure. The point on "human formatting" vs "dolphin formatting" is good though. If they co-exist then you aren't aware of one and the other simultaneously; one does not "make sense" within the other.

Where your view is bad is it suggests inertia as something non-volitional.

There's no inertia at all, it's completely frictionless. Unfortunately there's a lack of physical-world things that can be used as a good metaphor! You are a "frictionless material" with no inherent boundaries or divisions which can change shape at any time. Think of a donkey! That was frictionless wasn't it? Your shape changed to be (partially) that of a donkey without any effort whatsoever. Think of a running donkey! Again there was no effort or resistance. The donkey changes direction! Did the thought-donkey encounter any inertia there? No. It's in this sense that I mean it. It's a completely non-physical change (as are all changes of course).

So intent is beyond time and ongoing, both.

Messy language. It'd prefer to say "has ongoing effect" rather than say it is ongoing. The intention is static but the effect is ongoing (even though that division is obviously arbitrary and language-based).

Configuration space is implicit in experience, but most beings don't realize it.

Foolish beings! :-) All agreed on that section, although there is an "extra bit" where I'd go into the world-pattern being the entirety, and being able to dice it according to certain configuration perspectives (e.g. divide it into "moments" or... whatever). But that's just getting metaphorically out of control.

Experience is mostly identical to formatting. It's not something that arrives through vision or hearing or touch. It's not a percept. Rather, the intuition of a configuration space is concommitant with the percepts when one is wise.

I say... we are always aware of the pattern. Just because it isn't experienced sensorily (image, sound, texture, etc) doesn't mean you are not experiencing it right now. "Felt-sense", baby. And as you indicate, another word for this is "knowledge".

[There's no inertia at all, it's completely frictionless.] Then go back to your older posts and reread them.

Bah, you're wanting each metaphor to be all things, and it cannot. Each metaphor illustrates only an aspect and is always accompanied by a "but". The ping-pong balls do not wait for input; the water is already sloshing (frictionlessly) and can be redirected.

Rather the material self-shifts into patterns, but in this metaphor, the patterns have no own-being.

Of course not, but (and remember there's a larger audience in some discussions) if we cut straight to the "not-even-holographic open aware space which is inherently non-spatial and non-temporal and is empty but also full of patterns" it's not very useful, is it? ;-)

We already agree on this area anyway. The only areas we disagree are: the patterning of the world and, the description for intention/intending.

Raise your body temperature by 20 degrees Celcius, NOW! Did it work? A bit more difficult than changing your thought pattern, isn't it?

No, it's perfectly easy. I can intend this no problem. And that intention (pattern) is instantly overlaid upon the world-pattern. However, it doesn't result in a particularly strong change in sensory experience, relative to the contribution of more established patterns (i.e. body is at body-temperature), habits of the world. If I were to "forget" some of those habits then the strength of the contribution would be subject to less cancelling out. All intending instantly creates the intentional pattern and it contributes from that point onwards. The extent to which the contribution results in a sensorily significant result is another issue.

[The intention is static but the effect is ongoing] I don't agree.

Intending instantly incorporates an additional pattern into the world-pattern. The experience you have is of the entire world-pattern. The apparent level of the intention in experience will depend on the world-pattern. Like Moire fringe patterning, the intentional pattern may apparently break through into sensory experience later as patterns align or open gaps:

Reused Owl & Screen Metaphor

You draw a picture of an owl on your TV screen. It is always there, but its visibility depends upon the rest of the imagery onscreen. When the dark scenes of the TV show switch to a bright white scene, suddenly the owl "appears" - it is "manifested". Now imagine an owl idea being dissolved "holographically" in the space around you, and replace the notion of dark/white scene with appropriate contexts. Having "drawn" the owl into the space, you go about your day.

Mostly the owl isn't anywhere to be seen, but wherever an appropriate context arises then aspects of the owl idea shine through and are manifest: A man has an owl image on a t-shirt, the woman in the shop has massive eyes and eyebrows like feathers, a friend sends you an email about a lecture at the zoo highlighting the owl enclosure, a newspaper review of Blade Runner talks extensively about the mechanical owl in the interrogation scene, and so on.

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Prelude

On dreaming, I think it's perfectly possible to have any experience whatsoever. Your disposition to be male is not a restriction, for instance. Nor do you have to experience a dimensional space, and so on. The threads between individual world-experiences can be narrow, and in reduced connections between patterns can make it difficult to navigate in memory between on and the other associatively. However, there is only one overall pattern and one felt-sense, because there is only one consciousness in which it all resides. The water sloshes "on its own" in the same way that if you set your arm swinging then (in the absence of friction) it would swing "on its own" from that point onwards, in experience. The experience would apparently oscillate (sensory: "arm movement") however the pattern itself would be static (dimensionless facts: "limit angle=45 degrees; period=2 seconds"). I do not associate intent with effort or bursts! How many times have I said "no effort is involved"? The shifting of a state or the incorporation of a pattern is a frictionless self-shifting which happens beyond time. There is no inertia.

Habits & Cravings

To me, habits are simply established patterns which contribute to experience. So in this regard, indeed your "maleness" may be a deeper pattern which tends to dominate your experience. Would you call "humaning" addictive, or merely established?

You description of next-step world-making, I agree with broadly speaking. When I talk of a "world-pattern" or similar, I exactly mean these established structures. Long ago (so to speak) these were shallow and malleable, but over time they have become more established. Some we recognise as obvious aspects of experience, others are more like "contexts" or "based formatting" - time and space themselves are such, as are shapes and colours, and so on. Later, we have "people" and the like. The established structures deepen and form the basis for yet more complexity. The "humanness" of experience is this formatting. The body itself isn't a part of this, but the sensory division of "a world" definitely is.

The world, the patterning or formatting of experience, is all in consciousness (what you call "the mind" but annoyingly for me that always suggests a container of some sort). A private memory-block of experience that we explore and evolve by that exploration. Observations implying facts implying observations, etc.

Intending is Easy - But

When I say that intending patterns is easy, I mean that the actual doing of it (excuse language) is easy. There's not trick to it as such. The trick is to choosing exactly what you want to happen so that pre-existing patterns don't result in, um, undesirable experiences. If you have deeply established habits (like being 38C) you're going to need to hold that pattern for quite a while and diminish the restriction. Unfortunately, breaking the habits that constitute the body might involve it dissolving before you get to your target. You're gonna need to re-conceive your body first, perhaps, as - say - a floating image with no content whatsoever. Tedious.

Yeah so - as you say - insane.

So those habits don't belong to the world, but to you. You aren't a feature of the world. The world, as it appears, is a feature of your private state, but your state isn't capable of change willy nilly. There are entrenched aspects that will not readily change until you work on them.

Completely agreed. Except that I'd say the habits are in the world and the world belongs to you. The "world" is the entire experiential environment which includes your body and all that also. All of which constitutes the private universe in you!

Don't think we need the "mindstreams" concept, do we?

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So where would you fit intention into this? Hand that initially splashes the water?

Since the water is you and your experience, "intending" would be when you intervene to deliberately reshape yourself to a greater or lesser extent. The waves then continue sloshing, consistent with the amendment made, as if it were always that way. For instance, if you "reshaped" the waves such that a past event or fact was erased (by which I mean, a persistent aspect of the pattern which is influencing the current sloshing) then from that point onwards it would never have existed; there would be no trace of the former state. If you were to completely calm the water, you would be restarting experience from scratch, a new universe emerging from minor random background fluctuations.

So in this metaphor, the surface of the water is consciousness - and there is nothing else except for that surface (no depth to the water below and no extent to the surface above). And we can see that there is no definite permanent "past" or "memory" of any previous state of the surface as a whole, because we can choose to deliberately amend or delete any residual patterns (echo ripples) from existence, via intention.

EDIT: On terminology: "intending" is the act of imposing a pattern onto consciousness; "the intention" is the form of the pattern being imposed. If you say "my intention is..." you are saying "the pattern I am imposing is..."

I suggest maybe:

The background of consciousness is never completely empty of patterns. It is eternal. So in fact, all patterns are present and "dissolved into awareness" awaiting triggering.

Babies aren't "new things" they are "new experiences", however the patterns which become layered and emergent for those experiences have always been there.

Drinking the Transcendental Idealism

I've been reading up on Immanuel Kant's concept of Transcendental Idealism and I'm finding it quite an appealing take on the "world as mind-formatting" view. The exact interpretation of Kant's philosophy is still debated even now. With the ideas of Oneirosophy in mind, though, I'd say it takes on a clearer shape than it might otherwise. The essentials are: We experience the formatting of our own minds; sensory experience is not what things are in themselves; even time and space, cause and effect, are something we bring to experience. That we apparently share a similarly ordered world - what Kant calls empirical realism - is down to our minds being similarly formatted (as "human beings").

Kant at the Bar: Transcendental Idealism in Daily Life over at Philosophy Now (see EDIT) is quite a nice overview of Immanuel Kant's metaphysics, in a breezy read. Although I'd say it makes an error by referring to "the physical data our senses receive" at one point, for instance, it's pretty good at covering the basics.

Meanwhile, from the Wikipedia entry:
The salient element here is that space and time, rather than being real things-in-themselves or empirically mediated appearances (German: Erscheinungen), are the very forms of intuition (German: Anschauung) by which we must perceive objects. They are hence neither to be considered properties that we may attribute to objects in perceiving them, nor substantial entities of themselves. They are in that sense subjective, yet necessary, preconditions of any given object insofar as this object is an appearance and not a thing-in-itself. Humans necessarily perceive objects as located in space and in time. This condition of experience is part of what it means for a human to cognize an object, to perceive and understand it as something both spatial and temporal. . .
. . .Kant's view is better characterized as a two-aspect theory, where noumena [world as it is] and phenomena [world as sensed] refer to complementary ways of considering an object.
-- Transcendental Idealism, Wikipedia

The Stanford Encyclopedia has more coverage in its Kant article here, however much of the discussion is based upon interpretations other than the "two aspects, epistemological" version which I'm inclined towards.

EDIT: Turns out the Philosophy Now article is for subscribers, but AdBlock suppresses the block rather transparently. If that doesn't work for you, see in the comments instead.

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Q: Kant was close to figuring shit out. He made a few strange steps that I'm fairly comfortable dismissing, but he was pretty close, and this is one of my favorites of his and something I referenced in that essay I wrote.
Space and time as a priori conditions for experience is really interesting to play with, and of course you'll find it's impossible to imagine anything non-spatial or non-temporal, so this conclusion comes fairly naturally to anyone inclined toward any variant on idealism. And the important implication is that space and time are neither properties -nor- substantial entities. So they're subjective, they're part of -you-, not anything apart from you.
And I think the idea of space and time being -you- is something which was kind of skipped over by... the thousands and thousands of Westerners who have studied Kant. Either because it wasn't processed fully, was ignored as crazy, or just found a niche in an otherwise mundane worldview they held.
Another thing to take away from this is the fact that there are some Western philosophers who actually do have some ideas to offer, and are worth considering. I've learned a lot from Western philosophers, even if I had to filter a lot out as well. /r/oneirosophy might benefit from a bit of a book club where we discussed some texts apart from those we compose ourselves. I've certainly arrived here only through the likes of Kant and Hanshan and the suttas. What reason do we have to think we all wouldn't benefit from discussing some texts like those?

Good points.

Kant was close to figuring shit out.

He may even actually have sussed it all out but been unable to convey it in the conceptual culture of his time. Definitely, I think many of the problems with Kant are problems of modern (and contemporary) interpretation. That time and space are basically part of the "senses" is a vital component. I can see how it got overlooked, because I think people never understood that this moment right now, in consciousness, is sensory, that there is no spatially-extended unfolding world beyond it that you are exploring. The facts-of-the-world are dimensionless. Instead, they tended to think of "this" spatially-extended world and then another world which was the source of that one. Getting that wrong leads to confusion about there being two things, or two aspects of one thing, and so on.

Another thing to take away from this is the fact that there are some Western philosophers who actually do have some ideas to offer, and are worth considering.

Things get lost to history too. In the early part of the 20th century, authors like E. Douglas Fawcett (The World As Imagination) and JW Dunne (The Serial Universe) were popular - particularly the latter, whose An Experiment With Time was well-known and influential. Such books are full of ideas of static time, collapsed space, and the observer as a consciousness who brings the dead world into 3D/4D life. Those ideas were the Brief History of Time of their, um, time. Really, insights just get rediscovered for modern times. Fashions of understanding come and go, based on power-struggles rather than correctness. Theories die and are forgotten because their proponents die and are forgotten. We not on a grand march of progress into the future. It may be that, since these metaphysical worldviews give power to every individual, they are naturally sidelined by parties who have certain economic interests at heart. Not in some sort of conspiracy, just that you pick the worldview that matches your desires, you then tend to promote that worldview, and when you become dominant in society then that is the worldview you will make dominant via education and law-making.

a bit of a book club

It's a nice idea. Maybe suggest it in a separate post. Historically, though, these things tend to lose momentum if too onerous (see /r/OccultStudyGroup for example) so would need to think of a good way.

Q:That time and space are basically part of the "senses" is a vital component. I can see how it got overlooked, because I think people never understood that this moment right now, in consciousness, is sensory, that there is no spatially-extended unfolding world beyond it that you are exploring. The facts-of-the-world are dimensionless.
This also jives with the "interface theory of perception" by Hoffman.
It's a nice idea. Maybe suggest it in a separate post. Historically, though, these things tend to lose momentum if too onerous (see /r/OccultStudyGroup for example) so would need to think of a good way.
I'm not a huge fan of those because you either need to have read the book in question, or take it as homework, which isn't always enjoyable. And some of the books people want to talk about are huge and difficult, and are no easy task to read. It's not like reading cheap science fiction when it comes to some of these books. They're mind-benders that sometimes make it slow to read them.
I think the best way to do those is informally, once in a while, impromptu. So if /u/Utthana feels like talking about a specific book, he should make a post about it, ideally with a link to a free copy of the book so that interested parties can read it, pick a quote from it and put the quote in, then type some kind of response or a reaction to the quote, and ideally say something that could inspire or provoke further discussion. Then I don't see a problem. Just don't expect everyone to join in, because not everyone has the time or energy to commit to every possible book. But in some cases you may meet people who've already read your book and are ready to talk about it, so then, why not talk about it? Seems fine.

Agreed on the book thing. Good observation about Hoffman connection - yes.

Q: Just for the record I want to mention that Kant's brand of idealism cannot be called "subjective." So Kant's idealism is not quite what I would call oneirosophy-grade. I think Kant believed that his mental constituents were in some sense given to him from on high.

Hmm. I think it's open to interpretation a little (there being at least three contrasting ones). In my reading: The phenomenal is subjective, however he then suggests our "formatting" is the same, hence we have similar experiences (an intersubjective "empiral realism"). Not because externality exists in that way, but because we are that way. This accounts for other people reporting similar experiences - but it doesn't necessarily need to imply that there are other people in the sense of multiple formattings. It can be one formatting, one experience, multiple perspectives. There doesn't need to be simultaneous distinct observers. But yeah - I think overall it's a nice description (because of its handling of space and time), but as always we take the useful bits and adapt them, put aside the rest.

Q: What I am saying here is that I don't think Kant believed his personal will had 100% scope over the experience. In subjective idealism will and experience are matched 1/1. In other idealisms will is adulterated by outside factors, even if it's all mental. In other words, subjective idealism is the only kind of idealism where your mind really is your own.

Right, the influence or connection between experiencer and formatting isn't really pursued, as I understand it. It might equate, but it doesn't recognise that we can manipulate (really: reshape).

Q: It might equate, but it doesn't recognise that we can manipulate (really: reshape).
The situation is far worse than this. It's not that we can manipulate. We can't avoid manipulating. Drastically stronger claim. And Kant is not pursuing this at all, because Kant is not a yogi or a tantrika or in western lingo, a wizard I suppose. As near as I can tell our choice is to manipulate unconsciously or to manipulate consciously. But non-manipulation is not on the menu.

Maybe say knowingly or not, rather than consciously? It's not that we are doing something we aren't aware we're doing, it's that we are doing something but aren't aware of its impact. (i.e. That all imagining establishes patterns which shape subsequent experiences,)

Q: Maybe say knowingly or not, rather than consciously?
Sure, that's fine.
It's not that we are doing something we aren't aware we're doing, it's that we are doing something but aren't aware of its impact.
What you say is I think somewhat right, but there is also a lot of non-awareness, so "unconsciously" is also a good word. Then once you're conscious you're doing it you can still underestimate the impact.

Also, many people don't realise that "feeling" is an imagining too, which triggers its associations. So for them that does seem "unconscious" - so perhaps there are two areas to highlight: doing stuff without realising the impact, and also not realising you are doing stuff.

True Will & Subjective Reality

In the magickal writings of Aleister Crowley and Thelema, the concept of True Will - appears - fundamental:

The ultimate goal of a Thelemite would be to understand and perform their True Will. The concept postulates that each individual has a unique and incommensurable inherent nature (which is identical to their “destiny”) that determines their proper course in life, that is the mode of action that unites their purest personal will with the postulated course that preexists for them in the universe.
The idea is that to the extent that one is pure in their will, one is carried along effortlessly by the momentum of the universe like an expert sailor allowing the current to carry the ship along its intended course with minimal effort.
In Crowley’s ethical treatise Duty, he identifies True Will with the Nature of the individual.

Could we call this "what we really, really want" vs what we think we want, perhaps? In his book Head Off Stress architect, author and mystic Douglas Harding put it:

In fact we can distinguish three areas of intention or will: (i) what you think you want, (ii) what you really want and (iii) all the rest, what you're up against, what the Universe wants. Now if it should turn out that this third and immensely larger area is what you really, really, want, and you not only contain the world but intend the world, that you want it all - (i), (ii) and (iii) - to be just as it is, why then you would be happy indeed. If you were wholeheartedly to choose the whole lot, all your stress would be laid to rest.

Unrestricted Freedom? Going With The Flow?

If waking life is an unbounded dream in the same sense as a lucid dream is, then our ability to create change in line with our ego is unrestricted. However, if there is some deeper structure to us - that what we might like to do isn't necessarily what we should do in a more fundamental sense - there may be limits, due to a pre-existing momentum. We might in anger want to tear up the world, say, but that desire is actually an indication of our sense of separation (not truly feeling at one with the rest of this 'dream') and so is not our True Will; we will not be successful in having strong results in that direction, results that persisted. Similarly we would only be able to resist certain actions and paths for so long, before we were "made" to follow them or do them. The universe would play nice with us initially, but eventually get impatient and nasty - - -

An analogy might be that we are whirlpools in the river who can by force push ourselves in any direction, but it's always going to be easier to follow the rivers path. Or waves in the ocean born with a momentum in a certain direction, with our power only being to tinker with the details of the path and the amount of suffering along that path.

A main concern would be one of listening and paying attention as well as directly manipulating, to try and pick up on this 'momentum' - because a with-momentum route would be the most efficient and most likely route to succeed.

True Will: True in Experience?

In your experiments with magick and subjective reality, have you found any problems getting what you "want" vs what you "should do", or a sense of a direction that things want to go in? Or do you see this as a completely flexible reality that the observer can potentially direct in any way they want? Have you come up against, or benefited by recognising, such a thing as 'True Will'? Or is it just a morality-based, human-centred concept with semi-religious origins?

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Q: good to see some thelema being brought up here, i was hoping we could get some western mysticism in here. And to your question i have noticed there is a kind of resistance from the universe to get what you want versus what you should do. But i have found that depends what part of the universe you ask for these things. If you are in tune with the more angelic energy it wont necessarily give you what you want but it will give you the essentials that you need because it wants to make sure you dont interfere with the aspirations of your higher self. If you are in tune with the demonic it will give you exactly what you want, but this is dangerous because the demonic doesn't care if your wish is actually harmful to yourself or detrimental to your bigger goals. For example if you ask angelic entities or energies to help you find a mate, they will first turn you into the kind of person who can have a healthy relationship before making it happen, where as demonic entities or energies will give you some one even if you are clearly not ready yet and it may mess up your life. So demons answer want you want where angelic entities give you what you truly need or should do. I dont know whether or not you guys like the idea of external deities, you can think of it as certain parts of yourself, but thats the best way i can frame it for now.

Interesting. I guess you could look at the "angelic" path as a request with the flow, and the "demonic" path as a forcing. And it does highlight the problem that, if you try to work out by surface thinking what you want and how to get it, then it's not possible to anticipate the subtleties. Only the larger universe can take that into account. So angelic=grounded/wide view, demonic=ego/localised?

How do you think of "external deities"? If we're talking subjective reality then "everything is mind", supposedly, however some things are perceivable within our 'phenomenal space' and others are not. External deities tend not to be (although this isn't hard-line). Hmm. And what does "bits of yourself" mean in subjective reality?

Q: im not really sure how i perceive these beings because although i am a subjective idealist, im not certain on solipsism or which degree in which to apply it. My experience with working with spirits is that they are higher dimensional beings in the literal sense, or as personifications of base energies in the deeper universe, hence why people have different experiences and interpretations of them. Of course maybe internal vs external is a duality altogether and even if you say everything is internal you still imply the existence of the opposite of external like up versus down. So i would say they are both external deities and internal aspects of our deep inner minds simultaneously.

Simultaneous, yes. My stab: We can follow subjective idealism without solipsism if we recognise that what "we" identify with as a person is a "dream character" and that is of no greater or lesser status than the other "dream characters" we encounter. In this sense, everyone is a part of our larger selves (the whole world). Then, spirits can be seen both as external beings and as aspects of ourselves - as can everything/everybody else.

I think paying attention is key in order to learn one's intentions.

That's what I was getting at with the "listening" idea and of a "momentum". If this is "all you", then maybe the whole thing is your True Will. Although you might try and fight against it (that momentum) out of ignorance if you aren't paying attention and don't recognise it. (So that would be about finding and eliminating resistance then, I suppose.)

Q: The way you formulate it is not good because it can easily make people think that the status quo is our True Will in some way that we can't do anything about. This universe of limitations is our True Will, but when we rid ourselves of the universe as it is known, that too will be our True Will! Now, if you say it like that, there is no chance of getting it wrong.

It's not an easy thing to formulate really. Essentially, we are talking about our Nature. There are things you want and things you don't want. There are things you don't realise you want or don't want, because you are not sufficiently aware of your true identity. As you become mindful of your thoughts, your body and the environment and its ground (of everything) then you know. The universe (the content) always moves in (or attempts to move in) the direction of this fuller knowledge, whether you yourself are aware of the knowledge or not. Which is why releasing blockages, etc, is part of the process, in addition to any magickal/intention techniques. You can always have whatever you choose, but do you really want it?

This universe of limitations is our True Will, but when we rid ourselves of the universe as it is known, that too will be our True Will! Now, if you say it like that, there is no chance of getting it wrong.

There's a whole debate on what 'True Will' means in Thelema, because 'will' can be thought of in different ways, but the conclusion is probably 'True Nature', which keeps it away from individual acts of will.

"which keeps it away from individual acts of will." Which is both sad, and imo, not Thelemic anyway.

It's an attempt to separate the vague notion of "free will" (that you can do anything you want, including go against your own desires) with your God-like Will. But then, if you act against your desires, that's still your God-like Will surely! I'm undecided on the best way to think/talk about it. Maybe it's just because two worldviews are being mixed together.

I tell you what I feel when I interact with you. I feel like lots of times you keep me down, you keep me ignorant. But first I have to knock four times.

Really? It's not intentional. Usually I'm just 'feeling out' the best way to write things that I know non-verbally. I let this stuff slide for a while, so I'm kind of rediscovering some aspects as I go, and converting it from how I used to describe them, and realising new stuff along the way. Also, I find that I'm often not clear initially what you mean because you think of things in quite different terms from me, until I get the "a-ha" moment: that corresponds to this, okay. For instance, the "enfolded/unfolded" stuff, and use of the word "universe", it just takes a few spins round to get us talking about the same thing, and then we make progress and things speed along.

Duh. :) Godlike will is not limited in any way.

Yeah, but you see what I'm getting at? Of course, everything we experience is because we create it, however we can deliberately will for things from ignorance, because we don't know our true selves well enough (beyond simply intellectually knowing it). Just because we are God, doesn't mean we are completely conscious of ourselves, due to limited attention. We can Will from the perspective of God, or Will from the perspective of an individual. That's why there's a point to doing exercises for awareness and so on, so that your perspective becomes more and more God, less individual, and so your intentional meddling becomes closer to "God's Will" rather than "ego/individual's Will".

Is it possible that in an effort to take my own assumptions as your starting point, you actually downgrade my view? As in, you think I hold assumptions which it turns out, I do not?

Hmm, perhaps. But I think it's more that it takes a while to understand what you're getting at, in my own terms. I could just write a screed in my own terminology I suppose.

Yes! But remember with that stuff, it turns out later that you understand that super-order is not possible ...

Well, there was a super-order, then a super-super-super... until infinite granularity.

But you were spoon feeding me assuming I am an idiot.

No, it's just how dialogue works. I talk about "implicate/explicate" as my basic explanation, we get on the same page, then it's like "wouldn't there be a super-order or not", well yes-but-no in the limit. Limitless potential, yes, but it matters that it's folded inside the current experience, and you only get that if you go through the steps (otherwise you have a need for an external 'observer' to keep everything existing, all that). Really I am just 'replaying' how I went through it myself, I suppose, prompted by the discussion. If was writing a post or essay, then that's different, because I'd think the whole explanation through first.

You assumed I was average, that's why.

Hardly. You seem to have a great handle on this stuff, and coming from another direction, so I get a new way of seeing it I wouldn't have thought up myself. You are also much more direct/ambitious with it than I would think to be, which is great. Pushes it along. If I've come across as condescending or something, I really apologise! I don't see this as explaining, I see it as exploring.

So we can make mistakes, but it's our sacred right to make mistakes.

Yep.

Only if you say "I am God" will you be right.

Agreed. It's like "you are the dream" vs the "dream figure" or even "all the dream figures" or even "all the things in the dream".

Only when you do it. I do better than you. I go faster and I am more direct. As a result I don't waste time and I tend to end up with amazing results.

Well, good for you then! ;-) Although from my perspective you jump to conclusions - or rather, attractive viewpoints - without building towards them. If we don't do the steps, then it can become more an act of faith. That's why we need to do some exercises/experiments. In truth, "waking life=lucid dreaming" is a hypothesis that needs testing. That's why I wrote the True Will post: what are people's actual experiences, separate from what I want it to be like?

Precisely. Why build? If someone is lost, they can ask a question.

That's easier in a one-on-one context, rather than over comment threads. Having said that, we approached real-time so it was probably less of an issue!

In your True Will post you were suggesting that the universe offers a pushback of some sort... suffocating fatalism...

Yeah, that post was a prompt. Regardless of what I think, what do people actually experience? And how does that correspond to their progress? In the post I included three links to different interpretations of 'True Will', to keep it broad. I didn't want to defend a position, I wanted people to tell me if they experience pushback, and what they attribute it to if they do. (Be that the 'universe', bits of 'themselves' that they haven't integrated, lack of confidence, misidentification.)

Yeah, I have what I think is how it all works. But we don't generally have complete freedom, because we are fragmented. That we can requires some work, some exercising. You'd agree, surely? Bold confidence and expectation can work wonders, but I still ain't teleporting about the place, y'know?

Listening is meddlesome. And manipulation is effortless.

Listening is a creative act (whether it is perceive something apparently persistent or not), but if the intention in listening is to hear what your 'larger self' has to say - by which I mean, the bits you've not yet expanded to include - then that's what you get, right?

Until we're actually fully expanded, and directly experience ourselves as everything on a constant basis (rather than just 'know' it) there is still going to be the sense of an apparent 'other' to our 'self'. Dunno about you, but I am not constantly identified as the "the background awareness" quite yet...

That post was a turd.

Heh.

Then why was there so much leading material?

Ya gotta frame it. I present the idea, the implied challenges, which is one of restriction, or at least one of optimal path. And really, I don't know if we are restricted or not. I have had some experiences where 'this' was the thing to do; I was told.

I wouldn't say "fragmented." In my lucid dreams I feel the world as just as external as I feel this world here. But I can still manipulate it freely.

That is a good point. But this is about knowing. When you truly know something, rather than think it, I find that I feel that truth. In fact, at the point of lucidity (assuming I didn't enter directly), that is the sensation that changes. And when I get those 'Dream Yoga' moments out and about, it's the same: the nature of the experience changes somehow. 'Feeling' isn't perhaps the best word, because I don't mean a bodily feeling or an emotion - it's a felt-sense or felt-knowing. It's the difference between definitely this is transparent like a dream to just seeing it that way mentally. That's what the expansion-type exercises are about; reaching out to that. (The 'looking inward' thing gives you the same flavour though, at least as a starter.)

Why did you frame it with so much fatalism?

It's not actually fatalism, it's presented (from sources) as a 'higher path', and an optimistic thing to strive for: alignment and effortlessness. But there is a negative aspect to it, if you just want a wide-open dream, if there is a pre-existing direction to things, which is what is implied.

Leaving suggestions only as suggestions I am supremely honest with my experience. I can't report a suggestion to be something other than a suggestion and remain honest. To report a suggestion to be something other than just a suggestion is a speculative act.

Yes. This is the essence of reflective experience, acknowledging the transparency.

We aren't restricted by anything substantial or external.

No, not substantial or external, there is no evidence for that. However, the restriction doesn't take the form of an underlying substance, if it exists, it takes the form of not being able to simply adjust your experience to match your intention. And for whatever reason, people report that you can't.

Felt-sense or felt-knowing... I agree.

I think this felt-sense in combination with knowing 'where to look' is fundamental to the endeavour. The idea of a felt-sense/knowing is pretty alien to most people, although some related work has been done in psychology that almost gets there by Eugene Gendlin, which has a philosophy based on 'implied steps' and unfolding.

It isn't likely to be transformative.

When people hit 'realisation', is it transforming or is it discovering? The effortlessness is that of following the path revealed once blockages are cleared, not just an 'avoidance of discomfort' path.

That wasn't clear to me in your post. While you weren't talking about substance explicitly, the wording you used was highly suggestive of it.

Hmm. I could have been clearer then.

In other words, you can't intend to be a well-adjusted member of society and also omnipotent. These are mutually contradictory intentions.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I just saw Lucy. But, I don't see why you can't flip between the two, or create two perspectives at once. In fact, you definitely can, if it's to mean anything at all.

From my POV, if you discover something, but it changes nothing about your experiencing and it doesn't introduce new capabilities into your life, then you didn't discover anything, or you discovered something in name only.

I'd say you discover more about your true self, which is transforming because your subsequent thoughts, actions, experiences and so on will now be informed by that expanded identity.

So what I am saying is, you can do anything, but it tends to have implications and consequences. If you're flipping here and there, it implies a lack of commitment.

Commitment is important, it's true. Maintaining parallel perspectives is probably not very meaningful other than a fun experiment to try.

... and be visible to others.

What others?? :-)

Q: What others?? :-)
I meant your ideas of them. Not genuine others. Like dream people or the people in your hallucinations.

Of course. ;-)

Super-Simplified Models of Reality

One of the outcomes of Oneirosophy is that, since all experience is effectively dreamlike and is you, we recognise that models of reality are pretty arbitrary and pattern-based. However, we do usually feel we need of some model or metaphor in order to contemplate and direct our experience. And indeed, it is discovered that a fully absorbed model itself behaves as an "active metaphor" which shapes our experience. I was briefly musing about what the most basic but useable version of my idea of reality would be, ending up with the text below. What are your own "super-simple" or "rule-of-thumb" models?

TG's Super-Simplified Reality Model™

Think of yourself as an open holographic conscious space.

• All patterns are present right now and active right now, dissolved into this space.
• Nothing is hidden or elsewhere; such patterns are simply not activated at an intensity level that is noticeable.
• Meanwhile, there is no time or space, other than as a formatting pattern.
• All content is ‘imagination’.

To bring something into experience, we imagine or recall that pattern. We do this simply by intending to do so. Everything else is then completely automatic.

• The first step is to decide to enter a state of detachment and absolute allowing. This is to cease the re-activation of current patterns and allow them to yield or subside.
• Optionally, one may also spend time imagining an open empty space, in order to clear oneself of residual experience.
• From then on, one does intending-imagining to trigger experiences you want to have.
• Our identification should be with the open space, rather than with any particular piece of content that appears within it.

...

I like that you put a trademark this time.

Haha, well Nefandi and I were joking about my particular turn-of-phrase, so I thought I'd make it official. ;-)

Your observations on language and socialising are spot on. The hurdle they produce is that the language implies and triggers a being-a-person pattern (felt boundary and location) but it also directs and narrows your attentional focus. A useful way around this is to adopt the idea of "letting the world come to you". Rather than focusing in on things with one sense or another - e.g. "concentrating on what someone is saying" - sit back a little and have perception arise by itself. This will feel different to your usual mode: rather than (say) grasping for seeing, and therefore seeing images, you will tend to perceive objects and meaning, without effort. This is great for eyesight improvement; a related article can be read here.

© 2015 TriumphantGeorge. All rights reserved.

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

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

That's the chap!

It's basically the passive version of Overwriting Yourself plus the experience of Just Decide. It's simple and effective. It feels good and it involves nothing more than not-interfering, so no excuses!

[POST BY Nefandi]

1. It's hard to say this is some kind of final version of what I use, but here it goes: Possibilities are limitless. All conceivable and a vast array of currently inconceivable states of experiencing are possible to attain and maintain indefinitely.
2. Manifestation = current intent - prior intent.
3. Intent (or will) is always effective, even if there are no currently visible effects.
4. Intent is structured conceptually. Conceptuality is neither evil nor something one could rid oneself of, but if one fails to understand the nature of conceptuality, there is a possible downfall there.
5. Everything matters because everything is effective, provided it's still supported by your will in some way. That tiny mundane memory from 30 years ago? It's still affecting who you are today and it even affects the quality of your meditation. If you don't like this, you have to transform your memories, or their meanings. If you leave things at status quo, expect their effects to last indefinitely. Thus, even stupid and mundane events from 10 lives back can be affecting you today. Good news: nothing is lost. Bad news: nothing is lost. Good news: everything can be transformed. Bad news: things don't necessarily transform of themselves, so passive waiting is often a waste of time if transformation is what you want.

And then I always reflect on my value ladder:

1. Wisdom.
2. Power.
3. Compassion.
4. Imagination.

In that order of importance.

[END OF POST]

That's a nice summary, especially the note about memory.

Outside: The Dreaming Game

BACKGROUND: A description of an exercise I originally came up with elsewhere, but I think it could be useful to folk here too. In subjective reality, we would be both the player and the creator for the content.

Inside Outside: The Game

If everyday life were an apparently massive multiplayer video-game, then dreams would describe how the mechanics of such a game, which is called Outside, operate. (See related subreddit which expands on this concept.)

You are not actually the character you play in Outside, rather you are an open "game-space" which connects to Outside and adopts a particular perspective in the Outside game environment. In periods of reduced activity, your "game-space" disconnects and either connects to another pre-existing game-world, or constructs one on its own, seeded by random data fluctuations. You can see this happening in the case of hypnogogia and fragmentary imagery. Generally these worlds are more flexible than Outside, because to save on processor and memory power, all games function on a co-creation, procedural expectation/recall-based engine - so the more players there are, the more stable a game world becomes. Because Outside is the main, default subscription for all current players there (part of the terms and conditions), you always reconnect to Outside whenever other connections collapse.

Outside Inside: An Exercise

You can prove this to yourself by trying to observe the disconnection/reconnection in progress, or illustrate it via a thought experiment, to be done '1st person', as if you are having the experience:

• Sit comfortably. Now imagine turning off your senses one by one:
• Turn off vision. Are you still there?
• Turn off sound. Still there?
• Turn off bodily sensations, such as the feeling of the chair beneath you. Uh-huh?
• Turn off thoughts. Where/what are you now?
• Some people are left with a fuzzy sense of being "located". This is just a residual thought. Turn that off too.

You're still there, you realise; you are a wide-open "aware space" in which those other experiences appeared. Outside is the generator of those experiences, including the body and many of the spontaneous thoughts and actions. Only a subset of change: intentional change, is actually your influence. The rest is just part of the game experience. There are rumours of players who have developed limited, dev-like "magickal" powers based on "intentional" procedures, but since these would also produce a revised game narrative to cover their tracks - 'narrative/experiential coherence' is enforced religiously by the game engine - this is hard to confirm. When you eventually complete Outside, after the final montage sequence, the connection is terminated and the 'world' within you disappears - followed by your next adventure, should you choose to accept it!

EDIT: See here also for a good article and a couple of comments which point out the "dream-like" nature of subjective experience.

...

Q: Intention is just the preprocessor for rendering

In a game-world defined by belief, expectation and accumulated knowledge.

There are as many people in dreams as in the waking experience, so that theory is wrong.

Some dreams. Some dreams are just you. Some dreams are lots of people. Stability seems to vary accordingly. But, y'know, it's all open to experimentation.

If that's true, you're a victim of the Outside.

Outside turns out to be your 'larger self', the dreamer, the dream - of course.

I think if the differences exist in how populated the environments appear, they are not big and they vary from person to person.

True. It varies. There's definitely some "conceptual momentum" in more populated dreams/realities.

So why keep it a secret until later?

Because that's what the world does.

Although to be clear, from evidence alone the world appears within you. The 'space' is your larger Self, the content isn't necessarily authored by your smaller self alone. It's co-authored.

From experiments: waking, lucid dreaming, OBE, it seems that there are persistent worlds that you are "tuning into", dreams where you are sole creator, and waking life... which is co-created more stably than most. In effect, there is only one creator (Big Self), but there are many apparent small contributors (small selves).

Q: Although to be clear, from evidence alone the world appears within you.
Only if you look very very carefully. :)
The 'space' is your larger Self, the content isn't necessarily authored by your smaller self alone.
The smaller self is authored by the same force that authors the so-called "outside." The smaller self doesn't actually author anything and has no independent motive force. This independence of will is falsely imputed onto the body and the smaller self. There is real free will, but it's not centered in the human body or around it.
In effect, there is only one creator (Big Self), but there are many apparent small contributors (small selves).
I agree with the first half but disagree with the second. There is only one creator, the big self, and you are ultimately that big self, end of story. You're not actually TriumphantGeorge, you only play one on TV.
From experiments: waking, lucid dreaming, OBE, it seems that there are persistent worlds that you are "tuning into", dreams where you are sole creator, and waking life... which is co-created more stably than most.
I think it's better to say we get tired of grasping onto this style of experiencing and detune. So it's not so much as tuning into other realms of being, as detuning from this coarse experience. Upon detuning some quite random and often nonsensical dream takes place. Dreams can be made less random, more meaningful and more sensical, but as I see it, that's not the norm. Dreams can eventually become acts of consciously tuning into different realms, but by default they're what happens when our white-knuckled grip can no longer hold this experience and we fall away from it exhausted.

Agreed with all. It's about levels of explaining.

You're saying the dreams where more people are present tend to also be heavier, more solid, harder to modify when lucid in them?

That's my experience - but it could be down to my own expectations and theories! :-) Just more stable in general, less fantastical and random. I can still overcome things, but the background is far less flaky.

Q: That's my experience - but it could be down to my own expectations and theories! :-)
Interesting. It's always fascinating to hear about how other people dream. I used to assume everyone's dream contents were roughly the same, but I've come to realize: not so.

Yes, me too: I think lots of hidden assumptions may subtly come into play. Perhaps that's why dreams are a good insight into underlying beliefs?

Q: In periods of reduced activity, your "game-space" disconnects and either connects to another pre-existing game-world
Is that pre-existing game-world another person's dream? Or a realm that multiple dreamers visit? Or none of the above?

That multiple dreamers visit, that was perhaps seeded by a single person at one point, but other came to occupy. Sometimes you might find yourself being a pre-existing character, looking through their "viewport", sometimes you might just appear as "yourself". Sometimes you might accidentally find yourself in a world like this, with a complete history, and be the only visitor with knowledge. Depends on the nature and flexibility of the environment. All worlds persist to some extent after creation, although they may gradually fall apart through lack of intention/expectation.

The First Tulpa

Introducing Tulpas

According to the definition at the /r/tulpas subreddit, a “tulpa” is an imaginary friend which has its own thoughts and emotions, and that you can interact with. It is an apparently independent consciousness existing within the creator’s mind. It has its own opinions, feelings, form and movement. It is an additional “person” within your consciousness. Tulpas are created deliberately, but can arise accidentally.

Deliberate Tulpas

Deliberate creation involves regular forcing, where the host deliberately visualises and interacts with the expectation of the presence of the tulpa - implicitly seeding it by giving it attention and expectation. At some point, the tulpa develops sentience and begins to act of its own volition. Another aspect of tulpa creation is the development of a mindscape or “wonderland” - basically, a persistent mental environment where the host and the tulpa can interact and explore together, without having to “overlay” the tulpa over the everyday world experience.

Accidental Tulpas

An accidental tulpa, such as a childhood imaginary friend which may persist into adulthood, does not arise by deliberate forcing. How does such a tulpa come to be? Perhaps by expectation and implication. The child's need for company and exploration of itself via another implies an additional consciousness with which to interact. Alternatively, it may be that the development of the child at an early stage involved the creation of multiple sentient aspects, of which one became primary.

The First Tulpa

As a child, we are passive and receptive. Over time the actions of others towards us implies that we have a sentient personality - that we are a "person" or have a person inside us. Responses are expected of us that align with this notion. In short, the world around us forces the empty mind to come up with a sentient personality in the same way as we might force a tulpa. In fact, oneironauts all know that the “person” they experience themselves to be is not who they really are. I am the awareness in which that “person” resides. The “person” itself is in fact nothing more than a tulpa: the first tulpa, which we confuse as being ourselves. [1]

And what of the world around me? It seems stable enough, a persistent environment where the person can interact and explore. Like a “wonderland” for the first tulpa, in fact:

A mindscape/wonderland can be imagined in such a way that large areas of it are undefined or lack clarity. Traveling within the environment outside of areas you've consciously defined can lead to a subconscious, dreamlike generation of environments and landscapes. This has been known to provide interesting and exciting activities for tulpa and their creators alike - it is quite literally letting your mind wander.
-— What does it mean to ‘explore’ a wonderland, Tulpa Subreddit FAQ

You are awareness, and you have passively created a wonderland and a tulpa with which to explore it. The person you think you are is just your first tulpa. With this knowledge, you might choose to create others, to delete your first tulpa and take your stand as the creator, and you might even consider amending your wonderland to a more pleasing layout, for a more flexible existence... [2]

[1] In fact, it could be said to be our-self, it's just not what we are; it's something we have.

[2] Check out the Tulpa Guides [https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/wiki/guides/]. I think many of the techniques referred to there could be adapted for oneirosophic endeavours.

...

If I am just awareness, why is it that i have a preference for certain types of tulpas, or is that the original tulpa creating tulpas of its own?

Thinking it's not awareness that has the preference. Other tulpas: I'm thinking it happens just by implication. The first tulpa implies further tulpas by expectation and implication, in the same way it was created. I don't see "ego" as central overall, in the larger picture. The ego is an idea that you have, and because you identify with it you end up with thoughts and actions that arise consistently with it, out of expectation. Other regions of awareness end up with the same thing: behaviour via expectation, clustered around an idea, from deliberate or accidental forcing. So it depends on where you "stand". If you are standing as /u/cosmicprankster420 then you experience a world that is implied by that tulpa, and that includes other tulpas. If you stand as awareness itself, then you no longer take the perspective of the first tulpa, and this no longer applies. But I'm not sure I've understood your idea of a "middle self" properly!

EDIT: Synchronicity alert: As I was typing that, the YouTube series WTF Moments from MoveClips.com I had in the background played the "there is no spoon" clip from The Matrix. Although this was immediately followed by a clip from Mr Bean. Make of that what you will.

Q: His middle self idea carries two constituent parts. First is like a Platonic Form. Using his example, his middle self carries a certain attribute that is transmitted to tulpa-selves, in this case Green. Second, it's almost like the HGA concept. A higher self that stands as an intermediary between the Ego and the All. Edit: I encourage any of my psychonautic friends to eat their preferred mushroom and read my post. I'm freaking myself out at this point.

Ah, I see it. Well, there can be endless subtleties of patterns within the awareness that we are; a pattern of predominant "green-ness" could indeed precede/seed subsequent manifestations. It wouldn't need to be a "conscious choice" as such, simply a bias in the pattern. (i.e. None of them are really "doing" anything.)

...I like the interpretation, although the tulpa is not meant to share the same form as the host. However, with the First Tulpa, who's to say a Second Tulpa can't have equal bidding, and perhaps take over? Maybe it's more like the recent BBC America TV Series, The Intruders.

Q: Alan Moore describes an interesting experience he had with someone else's tulpa that he was able to interact with here. Start at 1:03:15 and go until 1:13:00ish in order to get some context and then the experience.

Very interesting, thanks. It bridges the boundary between tulpas as practiced on that sub (create a sentient consciousness, spend time in a wonderland) and the Tibetan twist (actual materialisation, in this wonderland). The difference may of course just be one of limited beliefs, and hence constrained experience, today. In other words, the level of "solidity" required for most people to perceive a form may be much higher than it was previously.

Still, interesting they experienced her differently visually. Does "everyone" experience us the same, I wonder?

Q: Another thing I was thinking about as I've been mulling over your post is that other people are all indistinguishable from well-developed tulpas that are occupying a well-developed mindscape. Earth is just another mindscape in our imagination.

Yes, exactly!

This is what I'm saying with the final paragraph: You are the First Tulpa in your awareness, and all around you are the other tulpas you have created - some by request, some by implication, all unwittingly - to explore your mind together as this unfolding wonderland...

Q: Believers in tulpae are like dogs mistaking their own reflections as others. Only in this case it's a mental reflection. If you think that deluding yourself into thinking like a stupid dog is an accomplishment, you have my greatest sympathy.

The point is that people are already deluded, before they get involved in deliberate tulpa creation.

Q: Yes, one of the big things is that people will make a "tulpa" of other people, projecting their own thoughts etc into others when it's completely unwarranted (I was guilty of this in the past with extreme social anxiety, thankfully I was able to completely cure it.) Gods themselves are just "tulpae."
And of course method acting is just sort of like being your own tulpa.

"Stimulant" is a related concept = Your internal representation or simulation of other people that you use to understand the meaning of their actions, anticipate their responses to yours. Difference is the underlying assumptions about experience: One is your model vs an external world and person, the other is seeing people as an actual part of [the larger] you. Separating the two experiential would be challenging, since from your localised perspective the evidence is identical.

The Circular Ruins

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had exhausted the entire expanse of his mind; if someone had asked him his name or to relate some event of his former life, he would not have been able to give an answer. This uninhabited, ruined temple suited him, for it is contained a minimum of visible world; the proximity of the workmen also suited him, for they took it upon themselves to provide for his frugal needs. The rice and fruit they brought him were nourishment enough for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.
-- The Circular Ruins, Jorge Luís Borges

To know you are not a person, this can be done. Releasing your hold upon content and therefore attention, your focus loosens and expands, deepens: you re-identify as the world. To discover that you and all experiences are made of consciousness, the non-material material whose only property is awareness, that is easy. However, it is the patterns within this consciousness that constrain your perspective, not the nature of it.

What are you beyond the world? What is its context? How can you perceive outwith a container that has no boundary, escape from a room without walls?

A "first person" account of not-existing?

...

Obviously, "first person" is in quotes as a way to indicate that the idea of there being a perspective (1st or 3rd) or a person (localised view) are meaningless during those experiences. Reading the account, you can see how language just doesn't capture these experiences without being misleading.

On existence: Well, that's a blurry concept. Everything could be said to "exist" as potential [experiences], although most people think of "exist" as being actually sensorily perceived, but by that definition when we stop looking at something and things fade into the background, they are not "existing" anymore. The whole concept is a poor one. Better to talk about relative intensities in experience or something.

Everything is perspectival.

Perspective implies a here and a there. When all distinctions fall away, what is there to have a perspective on?

Perspective implies that there are alternative ways of experiencing to what's happening now.

In this context (which is about 1st-person, 3rd person, and so on), "perspective" exactly does mean location and distinction.

When all distinctions fall away, how do you distinguish lack of distinctions from their presence?

What would you need to do any distinguishing? The experience itself just "is". That's a problem, an artefact of language, of the subsequent description, not of experience. I don't think you actually read the account, or you wouldn't be saying these... ill-informed things. You are trapped by your own words, Nefandi, forever distinguished from the truth.

You're confused. Experience is language. Language is not something different from and alien to experience. All experiencing is symbolic. All experiencing exercises a mind's faculty of discernment in one or another way. All experiencing is perspectival.

This is not really true. Language is an experience and symbols are an experience. But experience is not language. (That would limit us to division.)

Anyway - the point is that language cannot describe the linked experience, because it is before division and relation. To think about something, to talk of it with language, it must be cut up into parts, and those parts related to one another (in mental space, so to speak). All of which occurs, within consciousness. When all of that fades away, those distinctions vanish. Until you try to think about it of course, in which case you immediately introduce a split. This is one of the points made in the account. You can't really describe an experience, you can only set up a parallel experience at the same level, and declare one equivalent to another.

That's because language cannot describe anything. Words cannot even describe other words. If you read thesaurus definitions, they don't actually describe anything. All definitions are circular and they all assume you already sort-of know what's going on. If you don't know what's going on, a thesaurus can't help you at all. The role of language is not to describe, but to structure. Does experience have structure? Of course. Is mystical the same as mundane? No, it isn't. Is language the same as non-language? No, it isn't. That's structure. That's the discriminating faculty at work. That's language.

Then you don't mean language, you simply mean distinction and reference. Saying everything is language is like saying everything is meaning - it's just abstracting away until there's nothing being said. You don't escape from discrimination by analysing it; you simply cease to attend to it. Otherwise (as you indicate) you keep getting apparent further divisions - albeit in thought.

Let's get back to it: if all content faded out now, would you still be a perspective?

Characters are symbolic, but what about space around, inside, and between characters? If you don't think space is symbolic, then mentally remove the space around and inside the characters, and what happens? Do you still have recognizable characters? Is letter "a" still the same letter if it has no outline that separates the inked part of the letter from the background canvas? If words are symbolic, everything is.

Oh really. What is space a symbol of?

Let's get back to it: if all content faded out now, would you still be a perspective? Of course I would be. I'd recognize there is no content because I know what content looks like and this isn't it. This would be a perspective.

I don't underestimate you, but I do think you mix up your uses. You are using "symbol" incorrectly here. The space inside your body is not a symbol for conventional identity and privacy, it may be associated with those concepts, and an illustration depicting a body-space may be used to represent those concepts in certain contexts. I think there is a better way to say what you are trying to convey.

"Let's get back to it: if all content faded out now, would you still be a perspective?"; Of course I would be. I'd recognize there is no content because I know what content looks like and this isn't it. This would be a perspective.

As soon as you did that, as soon as the recognition (the thought of your experience) appeared, you would indeed become a perspective again. As soon as you think about it or try to describe it or reflect upon it in any way, you stop being it. I maintain that if content faded you are not a perspective, or indeed anything. You have ceased to "take on the shape of" an experience, and simply "are".

You think symbols have own-meaning apart from space.

No. You are confusing two things: that space defines non-space (fine) and vice versa - and the meaning of the letter, it's association, it's mental pattern-triggering.

But how would you know it appeared? You'd have to recognize the old state as though it were distinct from the new.

No, there's no recognition, there is simply being. Recognition would break this, introduce relation. It's not even a "state" because it is before states, although the limitations of language mean we must label it like this or similarly. It actually cannot be talked about. If you really don't understand this, then you don't understand the basis of oneirosophy.

Symbolic means representation, one thing points to another. You mean something more like "implies" or "is of a piece with". I also think you are mangling the use of the word "meaning". Are you mixing one type of experience with another, perhaps?

...Right, I'm back, and I've had a coffee and a croissant, so I'm less antagonistic. Let's start, if way may, with a metaphor and then build to symbols and polarity and so on.

Desk, Paper, Origami, Fun

There's a piece of paper on my desk. I take my pen and try to draw a representation of the piece of paper, on the paper.

• What shape can I draw which will accurately do this?

Now the piece of paper itself has awareness. It tries to form a representation of itself in an attempt to experience itself. It tries to do this by folding itself, origami-style.

• What shape can it adopt that will actually do this?

Now, the piece of paper arbitrarily designates its left half as "internal" and its right half as "external". The right hand side had formed into a bump:

• Is that right-hand bump a symbol?
• Does it have inherent meaning?
• Is it symbolic of anything?

If the paper forms its left half into a bump and declares it to be representative of the right-hand bump:

• Is the left-hand bump symbolic of the right-hand bump?
• Does the meaning of the right-hand bump change?
• Does the left-hand bump have an inherent meaning?

Yup, but remember metaphors have limitations.

Well, quite. That was the point. That's where the metaphor becomes quite "meta" because it itself illustrates the problem with metaphors because that's what it is "about".

So the best way to represent itself is not to fold, but to remain flat.

Exactly. Or to be clearer: the paper finds that it cannot represent itself and to accurately capture itself it can only relax and be itself. That is the situation we find ourselves in when we try to talk about this non-experience experience (or whatever we want to call it).

We are not like the paper.

We are not "like" anything. Of course, the metaphor isn't intended to capture what we "are" (for this cannot be done) but to illustrate the futility of something trying to describe itself by using itself, or even describing part of itself using another part of itself.

If you relax you won't find yourself nor will you be most like yourself.

Well, there's nothing to find. If you were to completely relax then even the "presence" thing would be gone (whatever we want to call it). If all activation went completely...

There kind of is something to find. A

"Nothing" in the sense that you tend to find what you are not, if that makes sense. As you explore, you associatively discover more and more things that you "become". You find more experiences by looking; you find more shapes but you don't find the "paper" as it were.

Ordinary relaxation simply reinforces pre-existing habits.

Well, relaxation means ceasing triggering but that doesn't undo what has been done; detachment allows the current thread to fade out completely, potentially, but if you don't assert anything different then you just re-trigger the same patterns into experience again. Of course, you could always just start a fresh thread from a new "seed" thought and let it become 3D-immersive. I'd say that relaxation (ceasing to trigger) lets things settle to their current stable state and can offer some clarity depending on what sort of patterns you've been engaging thus far. Some people are lucky and they get an experience which reveals to them that, wait a minute, I'm not a body in a world, etc. Others, it's too noisy and the feeling of boundary as become too established. In any case, at some point faith is required. If you want to adopt a new state, you have to become it, you have to "take on the shape of" that new state. This is the active-assertive approach rather than the passive or investigative approach. You stop waiting or tinkering with what seems to be there, and just go for it. Since anything that changes, you cannot truly be fundamentally, then that is a good way to see, the nature of thee.

We agree overall, but:

It's not mechanical in the way you describe.

I think it is mechanical though - in the sense of being "stupid and basic", happening independent of context. In the sense that to change the balance on your sound system, you don't need to worry about which band is playing which song. The world has no depth and consists of inter-triggering patterns. It is has no intelligence apart from its creators. You don't necessarily need to solve Columbo's case before you can switch channel to watch Mr Robot.

So it's always the best strategy to assume the best and instantly go for the target state. You'll either succeed instantly or you'll learn what blocks the path by bumping up against the blockage.

A great point. It can be tempting to try to work out the state and solve it advance but - as our little metaphor form earlier shows - that "working out" is a parallel pattern and resolving it does not necessarily translate to resolving your state. Instead, it's best to simply assert the final state as your immersive experience, and immediately you'll get a response. Now, you don't necessarily need to deal with that response as such, but you need to accept it and incorporate it rather than avoid it or try to circumvent it.

[On "stupid and basic"] Relaxation is contextualized by your dominant narrative, habits, hopes and fears, etc.

I wasn't being specific to relaxation there, actually. This was about not having to deal with the details of something before asserting something else. Your narrative, habits, hopes and fears don't matter at all, unless you decide to wrestle with them. Let them go; there's nothing behind them. Assert, and your apparent world will blindly shift to the target state. (I'm not guaranteeing this will be a pleasant experience, however.)

Oh, no. You still need to work out your target state. You need to be able to envision your goal. If you don't know what the goal looks like, feels like, and intellects like.

That's not "working out". If you don't know what your goal looks-feels-intellects like, then you don't actually have a goal at all. To some extent this is what I mean about the "basic" nature of things. If you know what you want? Draw it in detail in the space of "your" consciousness. A result is guaranteed. However, any details you don't supply will be filled in by implication, so it pays to fully render the state.

So if you know you don't want the present state, but you can't envision a better state, you have to do what?

Then you'll roll along on your present logical trajectory. Fortunately, you can always conceive of a better state, and explore it fully. It does not need to be connected to the present one; in fact one should not seek the connection.

People are often so inured in convention they can't imagine something radically different as an immediate and readily available option.

We skip all that, surely? If you can imagine a moment you'd like to experience, that's all you need. You can explore the detail of that, great. It's hardly a challenge. Naturally, one must be aware of these ideas to bother doing so. But that's true of anything, so surely we aren't talking about the random citizen who does not yet understand that there is no depth, and he has power over his situation? You don't even need to imagine it as an immediate and readily available option. It's a dumb, automatic mechanism. In fact, working it out gets in the way - that's why faith pays. Do the thing and you'll get the thing.

No, it's got nothing to do with "fake". I use the word "parallel" to indicate they are of equal standing, it's simply that one is not the other and that needs to be borne in mind. There is no equivalence. Fake and parallel have quite different meaning, especially in this context, and especially when I was referring to a metaphor which explicitly supplies a context for what parallel patterns would be. It's you who have suggested that some patterns are "fake". So I should ask: fake in what sense?

What's the problem with a parallel conception in your view? Why did you bring it up as something that's problematic?

Obviously the worst problem is confusing a conception as "what you are". However, the daily issue is that you end up operating on the parallel rather than asserting directly. For instance, we might work out a theory about our bodies and how to cure certain problems thinking that this will resolve our difficulties. However, what's happening is that we are exploring a story about our problems which is independent of our actual symptoms - unless we are fortunate enough to have declared explicit equivalence (which is pretty rare; basically magickal assertion). The other more pertinent issue is something we see all around us today: people working through fictional descriptions of mind, brain and consciousness trying to solve things and derive insights from patterns which do not exist other than abstractions. In general the issue is: People are dealing with patterns parallel to the world-pattern, and are not affecting or interacting with that.

Anything that is not a direct experience is a story about experience (itself an experience). The trick is to know whether you are interacting with the world or a story about the world. It's the difference between actual change and fantasy about change. Obviously any discussion about these things is a story, a narrative. That's language for ya. But so long as the participants understand what is being pointed at, all is well. (The problem is the confusion or assumed equivalence, not the presence of parallel patterning in and of itself.)

All experience is a direct experience of what it is. The error is to mistake one thought-stream for another. The "world thought" just is. The parallel thought just is too - except if it becomes a thought about the world and take it as equivalent, and then you've got a story.

If you understand what is happening, that's fine. Then you won't mistake operating on one stream with operating on another. The story of our times is the reification of abstraction, the confusion between streams - e.g. taking scientific concepts as "factual" in the same way as world-experiences are inherently factual. Confusing "aboutness" with immediacy.

Whether any two phenomena are the same or different is ambiguous and is a matter of perspective/emphasis.

Two phenomena are always different. That is clear.

Hint: it's to do with the use of the word "two"...

...

Well, that was quite fun. I'm a big fan of "geometry going astray" to help illustrate stuff. Unfortunately my mind is now full of infinity - again. Waves in the blue ocean are located relative to one another, but where is "blue"?

Right next to red on the color wheel.

It that the one on top of the turtles? Perhaps I'll take it for a spin...

...

"I am unknown by death. Nor known by life." -Nefandi

MANAS & The Subjective Reader

I've been finding a few inspiring gems in the old MANAS journal editions, available free online. Some of them are about subjectivity and reality, others are more about society - e.g. issues of conformity and freedom. Lots to wade through, but people might find things that interest them re: the larger picture of world-creation.

MANAS is a journal of independent inquiry, concerned with the study of the principles which move world society on its present course, and with searching for contrasting principles- that may be capable of supporting intelligent idealism under the conditions of the twentieth century. MANAS is concerned, therefore, with philosophy and with practical psychology, in as direct and simple a manner as the editors and contributors can write. The word "manas" comes from a common root suggesting "man" or "the thinker." Editorial articles are unsigned, since MANAS wishes to present ideas and viewpoints, not personalities.
-- [http://www.manasjournal.org]

Here's an example of an article that's interesting on Theodore Roszak and linking objective vs subjective science. Sample quote:

I would like to help you gain an appreciation that came to me only slowly, painfully, and with much difficulty: how our intellectual concepts and beliefs limit our ability to perceive what is really happening in the world. When the world "was" flat, the heavens "had" to move around the earth. We see the world through the blinders of our own beliefs. When the world's behavior resists our expectations, as now seems to be the case in many areas of policy analysis, we need to question whether some of our important beliefs are in accord with reality. Unfortunately, our most basic beliefs are seldom accessible to our conscious mind: they appear to us as simple, unquestionable observations about reality. . . .
To truly see that one of your own beliefs is just an assumption can be liberating. This experience, though, is not amenable to precise programming. You must stretch your mind, envelop your beliefs with contrary thinking, and allow your imagination to roam in forbidden territory without automatically rejecting its perceptions as "absurdities." . . . By holding fast to certain beliefs, you may be denying a part of yourself that would come to the surface if you were willing to accept a somewhat different set of values or beliefs. . . . What I am suggesting derives from a belief in the indivisible unity of life and, therefore, in the importance of making work an integral part of the whole. . . .
To be able to integrate your life, however, you will first need to re-examine your unquestioning belief in the superiority of "objective" over "subjective" research, a belief apparent in your condemnation of what you consider subjectivity in my writing. Until you relinquish this belief, you will be afraid to approach work with feeling as well as intellect for fear of losing your much-valued objectivity. But, pure "objectivity" doesn't exist, since any observations, experiments, or analysis must always be done by a person, who inescapably must have values, emotions, and feelings that influence his or her work. . . .
You seem, however, to believe that because you desire to be objective you will be immune to those passions, prejudices, and dominating opinions which "are the abundant source of dangerous illusion." [Laplace.] What nonsense. I am sure that Laplace would agree with me that those most likely to be led into dangerous illusions by their emotions are those who would deny most vehemently that emotion played any role in shaping their opinions about "objective" truth. . . .
I have no desire to deny that my views of the world influence my work. You term this "subjectivity" and denounce it soundly. I term it "wisdom" and recommend it highly. By drawing on all of my perceptions of the world, I believe I obtain a more complete and coherent view of the world processes that are unfolding than would be possible if I limited myself to information that I process intellectually and analytically. In a sense, I work backwards from my overall view of the world to the specifics of a given problem, applying tests of logic and evidence to check the correctness of the perceptions derived initially as well as from thinking.
-- Vince Taylor quote, No Precise Programming, Manas Journal, Volume XXXII 1979

* * *

Glitch_in_the_Matrix Misc Posts

We Are But The Dream Puppets Of Picard

Now, this is more in the realms of /r/synchronicities but because it's part of a chain of events that relate to this sub, I'm going to post it.

In my downtime over the last month, I've finally been putting a bit of effort into philosophy stuff - reading things I've been meaning to catch up on, overdue film viewings and suchlike - all related to the nature of reality, thinking, perception, imagination, dreams, all that. In among the masses of comments recommending related film and TV to watch, someone recently mentioned an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that has parallels to one of my favourite stories on this sub. Forgot all about it; was never all that into Star Trek and haven't seen it in maybe 10 years. Browsing the web with cable TV on in the background yesterday (not usual, I always watch DVDs or downloads, not broadcast) getting bored of the sound of Ben Miller's voice in Death in Paradise, I flick the channel up - Friends - and again - Friends again - once more - it's Star Trek: TNG.

"Hey, I wonder if it's that one about Picard's dream? That would be amazing."

Channel starts, Picard's on the bridge and within a second gets knocked out by some mysterious energy ray. Wait for the end of the opening credits for the episode title. Sure enough, it's The Inner Light, the episode all about living a full parallel life in (effectively) a dream, packed with relevant messages. And an annoyingly persistent flute melody.

If this world suddenly evaporates later today, revealing all this to be part of a post-meal nap Patrick Stewart is having, I won't be all that surprised.

TL;DR: I watched TV yesterday. ;-)

...

Q1: Synchronicity is weird, and your case is even weirder, because the episode itself was of a glitchy nature!
I hope it won't look like I'm trying to one up you, but something very similar happened to me a few weeks ago and I don't feel like it's worth a separate post, so I'll use this opportunity to share my story: A few weeks ago I woke up with a song already stuck in my head (I suppose this happens to everyone sometimes), it was the so-called Sukiyaki song. While I was making breakfast with the song playing in my head I remembered reading that the singer, Kyuu Sakamoto, had died in a plane crash and there was huge controversy surrounding the accident, but I didn't know what it was about, I had been going to find some details about that, but I'd never gotten round to it (that was months before I woke up with that song in my head). So, as I was making breakfast, I made a mental note to check what this was about when I have a chance. Then I thought that I might as well watch some TV while I eat (not something I usually do). The first channel that wasn't playing commercials was one of these "air crash investigation" documentaries and I thought, just as you did, "It would be so weird if it was about that crash I was just thinking about!". And it turned out it was.
And in case someone was wondering what the controversy was, the US army stationing nearby was ready to start the rescue minutes after the impact, but the Japanese refused. A rescue team was then sent by land, spending the night in a neighbouring town because "eh, everyone is probably dead already". When they finally reached the crash site 14 hours later, most survivours have indeed already died of injuries and exposure.

Good story!

What I love about these experiences is, you can't really identify the start point. There's a complicated process of unlikeliness for everything to line up. One part can't really have "caused" the rest - it's like one complete pattern that must have come into being all at once; it's just that we experience it moment by moment.

Today's Random Theory
there's always one brewing, sorry

When we have a problem to solve, we usually think about the problem and its details, and generally try and "work it out" by effort. Sometimes we get to the answer by doing this, usually we have to stop and let it be. Quite often, the answer then just comes to us, pops into our heads, later. Curious!

There's a book called Autopilot by Andrew Smart which talks about how, when you stop consciously directing yourself, your brain is actually at its busiest. (fMRI research often ignores this "background" as distracting, but it's actually your default mode in life, or should be. You are right to be lazy.)

The best way to generate ideas and solutions, in other words, is to set up the problem and then leave it be: all your resources will work on it holistically, and you'll be alerted when this is done. Trying to solve it actually interferes with this process: you keep resetting the problem back to its starting point!

I think of this as: A problem isn't solved really, not by action - a problem is actually a thought which gradually and naturally unfolds and changes into its own solution. The solution is implied in the problem, or: the only difference between a problem and a solution is time. So, what if the whole world works like this? When you have a 'problem' or a 'question', it's not just your brain that is constantly busy moving from the 'question' to the 'answer' - it's the whole universe. Sometimes the answer will come as a thought in your head; sometimes as a television programme; sometimes as an overheard conversation on the street; sometimes as a spontaneous action you end up doing for no reason...

TL;DR: Left alone, the universe naturally moves from the problem to the solution, from the question to the answer. Does your life in fact constantly seek to solve itself, if you let it, by whatever route is available?

Q1: This autopilot thing seems to make a lot of sense, when I couldn't remember some word on an English vocabulary test I would move on to other questions and the word I was looking for would always "pop" into my head later. As for the universe theory, I know you didn't mean it in a religious way, but it's very similar to what a nun once told me, that when you have a problem and there's nothing you can do, just stop thinking and let God do his thing and a solution will appear. I've followed this advice for years and haven't been disappointed once :)

Good observation!

It's not really a religious thing, it's more a how-the-world-seems-to-work thing. Those prophet types just got their version in first!

Maybe all religions are based on fundamentally sound ideas about the world (or rather the mind) probably, trying to convey essential truths as seen at the time. The teachings just become corrupted in the service of the "business and power" aspect of mature religious organisations. Even the whole notion of "God" gets mutilated into a vengeful entity, rather than the "nature and inherent intelligence of existence" (your mind as it works if left alone) as originally intended.

The essence:

-- "Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you shall find"

Actually, the alternative translations say it even more clearly [https://biblehub.com/matthew/21-22.htm]. Neville Goddard, a New Thought thinker last century, built a whole approach to life based on interpreting the Bible as a "manual for the nature of reality, the mind, and living". Fascinating stuff.

Set up the pattern or define a problem, let the "universe" unfold and solve it! If that isn't an example of "faith", what is? (I'm not religious at all, I just find these connections interesting.)

...

Q2: I watched TV once... never again.

Well, I've definitely learned my lesson, that's for sure. I'm sticking to my etch-a-sketch from now on [https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/etch-a-sketch-pictures.htm].

Q3: I am watching it now on Netflix. I have never watched before, any star trek TV show, and I am well into my thirties.

I am watching it now on Netflix.

Did you start watching before coming across this story, by searching or whatever?
Or did you look it up on Netflix after reading this?

Q3: Yes, after reading this. I myself, as crazy as it sounds, fully believe that I am not living in the same life I was ten years ago. It's not a fully formed idea, and it's entirely conjecture...but it's a feeling I can't shake.

It's possible that none of... this was as it now "was". How do we tell whether it is us, our minds, that change - in a moment of epiphany say -or the world? We have a feeling, a tugging, so we investigate further, and find we cannot separate the two.

Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams

I was reading a blog post on how we represent the world to ourselves - a really great article, here at the Well of Galabes blog - and a couple of the comments underneath it seemed relevant to our Glitch explanation efforts so I've included them below. They emphasise how much our experience is at best 'inferred' and at worst 'created'. The comment on the narrative flexibility of dreams is interesting too. You can imagine both of these appearing in this subreddit in one form or another, as reports.

Darkroom Vision

"I realized I have a much more dramatic example of the pure subjectivity of perception in my personal experience. It's what I call my "darkroom vision."
When I was in college and taking photography classes, we were provided with a large community darkroom. The safelights were always on in the darkroom, of course, as there were often several people working in it side by side.
One day when I was working, the power went out and the safelights went off. A darkroom with no safelights is truly dark; even with full night vision adjustment human eyes will perceive no light. Those of us who were working in there fumbled our way out to wait for the power and lights to return. After a while it was apparent that power was not coming back anytime soon, and I had left some prints in the fixer bath. So I went back into the darkroom to retrieve those prints and move them to a water wash. When I got in the darkroom, I realized that I could very faintly see the big table in the middle of the room with all its individual tubs of developer, stop, and fixer. This disturbed me, since a darkroom is supposed to be absolutely dark. I reached for the corner of the table, and when my hand reached it, there was nothing there. The table immediately vanished from my sight. I fumbled around a bit, found the table by feel, and instantly it popped back into view in a new, and "correct" location. Though this image was faint, it was definitely a visual image, indistinguishable from what I would have seen had there been a very dim light in the room that was just barely above the threshold of perception. But, given the disappearing and reappearing act the table put on, it was also clearly coming from inside my mind, not from any "objective physical reality."
After this experience, I discovered that I can always see by this "darkroom vision" when I am in familiar places in total darkness, but (here is the key) ONLY if it is a place I know well in the light. It is very useful. The image includes things that I do not have a direct conscious memory of. If I have misplaced something, I can look around for it, and when I see it and reach for it, it usually is there. It's funny, when it is not there, to see it vanish. But it is usually not far from where I saw it, and it will pop back in to view when I do get my hand on it. In one darkroom I was even able to read the hands on a large timer clock, getting some idea of how much time was left before it would chime. The reading I saw on the clock was often not exact, but it was fairly close.
And of course the evolutionary biologist in me appreciates what a wonderfully clever adaptation this is, to present all this subconsciously stored information in a handy visual image, showing me all of my mind's best estimates of the position of everything in the room relative to where it judges me to be. I don't have to think about it at all, it is effortless on my part. I just look around. And it updates instantaneously in real-time based on new data."
-- Bill Pullium, comment [http://galabes.blogspot.com/2014/06/explaining-world.html]

Objects Revise Themselves

"I remember working in a kitchen, when a few of the cooks began to wear tall white paper hats like the chef had always worn. One of these cook's had a similar body-type as the chef, and sometimes when he'd enter the kitchen, from a distance and out the side of eye, in peripheral vision, I would actually "see" the chef enter the room, until he got closer and the image would shift back to the cook in question. This happened after I had started meditating and noticing the activity of my mind more. I was surprised, because it wasn't just that I was unsure of who this person and thought, "That might be the chef", it was the for a really brief moment, I actually had an image in mind of the chef entering the room, which was quickly altered as the cook came into better focus. Interesting also in that, from a social primate point-of-view, my mind was always scanning for the chef's presence, and how he might view my work.
I notice that phenomenon in the evening light as well, when I encounter an object that I can't quite make out what it is, but looks to be the size of an animal - it is very quick, but I can see my mind trying on various perceptions to the hazy figure: "Is it an animal? Is it a raccoon, or a dog?" until I can get a better view of the object, and the perception settles down to something more stable. I imagine these moments of perceptual uncertainty make conscious a process that is normally hidden from me, of how the mind decides what something "is", like a table, or chair, or person, etc., and then supplies an appropriate image, though it seems to me like I am simply "seeing" something that is "there".
Something else - in becoming aware of my dreams, I noticed that my mind has these moments of indecision, then decides on a narrative framework for things, then will alter past happenings to fit that framework. I'd always thought dreams were like movies playing from beginning to end in order, but on closer inspection, it seems more like streams of thinking, in which the mind will decide on a story, then go back and change what happened before to make that story coherent!"
-- Daniel Cowan, comment

EDIT: I also meant to include this link in there: we don't just see with our eyes [http://www.healthaim.com/brain-able-to-see-in-pitch-black], we see with our whole bodies. Absolutely all input acts as a source for our perceptions. Other interesting reading here.

EDIT2: Also this page on seeing through eyelids [http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/seeing-through-your-eyelids-spreading.html].

EDIT3: And this article on "visual loops" vs inputs [https://dondeg.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/the-beginning-and-the-end-of-consciousness-in-the-brain/], which would fit in with the idea of an ongoing, persistent 'dream environment' which is updated as new information becomes available from the senses.

EDIT4: The stranger in the mirror illusion [https://mindhacks.com/2010/09/18/the-strange-face-in-the-mirror-illusion/]. And this completes my collection of "subjective is not, or is what you think it is" round of links.

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I'll add another experience which is more accessible, that we've probably all had but perhaps not paid much attention to: When I misread a word, I actually do experience the wrong word - I literally see that incorrect word in front of me - and then it 'snaps' to the right word when I go back to check. This highlights how our experienced world is basically an inferred dream-space where the objects are a best guess, 'inspired' by sensory(?) input and historical context, and is continually updated as new information is received. This brings to mind Donald Hoffman's ideas on our experience being like a 'user interface' to help with our aims in the most efficient way, rather than an accurate representation. Anything could be going on behind the scenes. What we perceive may be directly related to our aims and goals, as things are filtered accordingly.

The dream thing really trips me the hell out.

Yep. Basically, each moment strives for 'coherence of narrative'. You're doing it right now. Actually, the process described of "trying on different interpretations" is an example of this. Normally we don't remember this; once the perception has settled, it was "aways that way" for most of us. We delete any inconvenient histories as we go, once we've reached a decision.

I've heard about the night vision thing before. A lot of people say that when that happens you're looking through your pineal gland, your third eye. Interestingly the pineal gland actually contains rods and cones like your eyes do.

Yes, I've had the experience of 'seeing through eyelids' and the accompanying feeling is that I'm centred and 'looking out from' somewhere near my prefrontal lobes. This is also a technique used by some vision improvement approaches, interestingly - to "find your centre for seeing".

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Not been there. I only heard about "gaslighting" recently on another thread (thought it was something to do with being Hitchcock-film-like, which it sort of is I suppose).

their pretend histories are totally real to them.

Probably don't even know they're pretending. I mean, it just is real and that's that, it seems. A universal tendency gone wrong? Will check it out.

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Q: Just discovered this today.
EDIT2: Also this page on seeing through eyelids.
That's easy. The eyelids don't block 100% of all light, just most of it. Even fingers don't block all light. Having a hand waved (even not your own) between your tightly closed eyes and a light, you should easily be able to tell whether the object is between your eyes and the light, or not. Alas, nothing about the objects form and/or color.
Edit: And telling the direction of movement of the object is not difficult, too, because it's not really the eye that "sees", it's the brain that interprets the optical signals, not in terms of something like pixels but in terms of characteristics: A finger can have the same characteristic "moving from left to right" as a ball and as a stick and as a car. So with closed eyes you can't tell much about an object but the characteristic "moving from left to right" can be deduced from the brighter light / lower light order anyway.

A good attempt, but you've already come up with the seed of a better answer:

it's not really the eye that "sees", it's the brain that interprets the optical signals

You can take it a step further. Your brain doesn't interpret optical signals and turn them into images directly. The signals from your eyes and other organs all just contribute information, to the extent they are available and 'online'. What we actually do is essentially imagine our surroundings, based on inputs from the senses and from memories. Not in a "processing way" and not through conscious effort; this is the passive activation of previous patterns.

Certainly, if there are little bits of movement detectable those will contribute - but even in complete darkness you can still see the room around you when relaxed (and if you allow it to happen), although often it'll be a little bit wrong. (This skill is very handy, because when you look at how eyes work, they are rubbish at seeing - you are mostly blind anyway.)

In fact, people who go blind later in life sometimes find that after a while they can "visually perceive" objects around them again, as other senses provide clues from which the presence of those objects can be inferred. In other words, what you apparently see around you right now is a hallucination "inspired by" whatever information is available. Which is why you can still see in dreams, even though you don't have any eyes!

The problem here is with the word "seeing" because in common usage it implies "eyes" or that you are somehow perceiving a thing that is definitely there. Perhaps it's better to keep it to the essentials: "Seeing" is having the experience of seeing something, whether or not there is a something actually there, in the form of an image.

Also, I don't believe that one can still "see" in complete darkness

You can. You don't need any light at all to experience a complete room around you (as described in the post). When you try to act on the basis of that image, it will update according to the cues provided by touch though - in the same way everyday seeing is updated by the little snippets of optical information your eyes periodically provide. Or more accurately, the content of attention as it scans. It is a relatively rare experience though, but if you relax enough you can have it. In fact, it might be the natural state of vision if we aren't interfering through effort.

But this works only once you know an object and/or have seen it before.

You can only see things you've seen before (when you see a new object, it is made up of raw shapes and colours, or other familiar elements in an arrangement; it takes a while for it to become its own complete pattern). If you have a misunderstanding of an object, you will "see" that misunderstanding, until a closer look reveals the contrary detail. It's a fun thing to experiment with.

Huh? Seeing without having eyes, in a dream? That never happened to me.

Of course you have. I mean, do you think that "dream eyes" take in "dream light" which is then processed in a "dream brain" so you can have some "dream seeing"?

Although your dreams do sound as though they could do with a bit of perking up! ;-)

An interesting observation though: Sometimes we have "knowing" dreams where we aren't actually experiencing. Almost like we're just getting narrated the content. And you are usefully highlighting that we don't all have the same experience!

(If you've ever had a lucid dream though, you'll realise that a dream environment can be more vivid than everyday life.)

Right. We can get right to it: How can you tell the difference between "full imagination" and not "full imagination"? After all, we only know we are "deceived" when our experience shifts in a "correction". I mean, have you really examined every part of the room you are in? And yet, you don't feel as thought there are "gaps" in your visual experience of it. There are most likely vast parts of your daily experience which you have never examined properly - and you are therefore just completely hallucinating, without knowing it. I think of it as "dreaming, inspired by the senses". Of course, I have no access to the information provided by the senses at all - only the final conclusions - but we tend to assume that what we are experiencing is in some way contributed to by such things.

If that would be the natural state of vision, it would be better to have no eyes - I just don't believe that.

No, that's not what I mean. I mean that, in a relaxed and open state, it is possible to have a visual experience of your surroundings even with eyes closed. When you go up and down stairs and use your keys with eyes closed, if you pay attention you'll find that you do it via a sort of "three-dimensional feeling-out". There's not much difference between this and a "three-dimensional visioning-out".

What about babies? Everything is new to them, they don't have names for anything, how could they learn to see?

Why do you think having names for things matters? (It's an interesting assumption!)

Babies learn to see slowly, and it happens passively. There are probably raw "archetypical" or building-blocl shapes which can be perceived immediately (it is thought). Exposure gradually clumps these together into trace patterns. Lines and circles become associated in certain configurations into whole patterns of increasing complexity, into what we term "objects". Simple exposure over time will result in this pattern formation.

What I see with dream-eyes is full imagination.

Right, you don't have functional dream eyes, do you? You just have the imagination. The dream eyes are inside the imagination. Your dream experience isn't "inspired by" the input of dream sensory organs.

Close your eyes and take it away: With eyes closed you can either image it still being there, or taken away.

A couple of questions to ponder:

• Why don't you go blind (or blurry) every time your eyes move?
• Isn't blinking and eye-shifting essentially closing your eyes?
• How can you tell the difference between a dream experience and a waking experience, apart from by memory and expectation of what is "usual". In other words, what about the direct perception of the moment is different?

I had some dreams where I could take control over what I did

Yep, if you knew you were dreaming while in the dream, that's lucid dreaming. Interesting that you don't have colours! Next time you have such a dream, just "ask" for it to be super-vibrant and in colours. And don't take "no" for an answer! :-)

Interestingly, in the 1950s/60s it was thought that dreams were black and white, and people nicely played along by having black and white dreams, and those people didn't believe it was possible to dream in colour because they'd never experienced it. But it was. The same thing happened with lucid dreams.

Repost: A Parallel Life / Awoken By A Lamp

One of my favourite glitches is this one posted by /u/temptotasssoon, who apparently lives an entire life in the moments after a head injury. He eventually awakes from this dream when he notices that something is strange about a lamp.

People are always asking for it, but because it's in a comment rather than a proper post, it's hard to search for. So, I'm reposting it here to give the story its proper place in glitch history...

NOTE - I am not OP. OP's account was a throwaway and the original comment is three years old. So don't expect any question-answering from he or me.

A Parallel Life / Awoken By A Lamp

throw away account cause this is really personal.
My last semester at a certain college I was assulted by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive (note he was 325lbs I was 120lbs), while unconscious on the ground I lived a different life. I met a wonderful young lady, she made my heart skip and my face red, I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over, after two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter.
I had a great job and my wife didn't have to work outside of the house, when my daughter was two she [my wife] bore me a son. My son was the joy of my life, I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter. One day while sitting on the couch I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D but... just.. wrong. (It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade). I was transfixed, I couldn't look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn't go to work, something was just not right about that lamp. I stopped eating, I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first, soon I stopped that too as I wasn't eating or drinking. I stared at the fucking lamp for 3 days before my wife got really worried, she had someone come and try to talk to me, by this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother's house just before I had my epiphany.... the lamp is not real.... the house is not real, my wife, my kids... none of that is real... the last 10 years of my life are not fucking real!
The lamp started to grow wider and deeper, it was still inverted dimensions, it took up my entire perspective and all I could see was red, I heard voices, screams, all kinds of weird noises and I became aware of pain.... a fucking shit ton of pain... the first words I said were "I'm missing teeth" and opened my eyes. I was laying on my back on the sidewalk surrounded by people that I didn't know, lots were freaking out, I was completely confused.
At some point a cop scooped me up, dragged/walked me across the sidewalk and grass and threw me face down in the back of a cop car, I was still confused.
I was taken to the hospital by the cop (seems he didn't want to wait for the ambulance to arrive) and give CT scans and shit..
I went through about 3 years of horrid depression, I was grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed, I was scared that I was going insane as I would cry myself to sleep hoping I would see her in my dreams. I never have, but sometimes I see my son, usually just a glimpse out of my peripheral vision, he is perpetually 5 years old and I can never hear what he says.
EDIT (24 hours after post): never though anyone would read this, I changed a line so that it no longer seems that my 2 year old daughter bore a child.
I have never seen Inception or the Star Trek episode so many have mentioned (but I will eventually)
I will not do an AMA
I've had many PM's describing similar experiences and 3 posters stating such experiences are impossible, I'd say more research needs to be done on brain functions. Pre-med students, don't assume you know everything.
A few have asked if they can write a book/screen play/stage play/rage comic etcetera, please consider this tale open source and have fun with it
-- /u/temptotosssoon

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/r/Psychonaut/ Misc Posts

The Girl Who Saw Through Illusions

A little story I liked:

The Girl Who Saw Through the Illusions By Leo Babauta
The girl was at work when one of her coworkers said something demeaning about her work, and she immediately got upset, felt defensive, and thought all day about how the coworker was wrong and how she could prove it to him. At home, her boyfriend left his dirty dishes in the sink and the trash was overflowing and she felt irritated by his lack of consideration. She thought about how wrong he was, and why couldn’t he just do these little things to be more considerate?
As she was stewing in her anger over these two people who had wronged her … she wondered what was going on. Why did she have to be so frustrated, angry, irritated, by these little comments and actions?
The next day, she went to work, and noticed other people also frustrated and stressed out and angry at different times in the day. She saw it in the faces of strangers on the street, then in the complaints of her friends when they went out for a bite to eat after work.
What was going on?
Then she began to see something strange.
What she saw was this: each person had a treasure they were protecting. A beautiful gem that no one else could see, but that they felt was really valuable and that needed guarding. An Inner Gem.
When one person would interact with the other, even if the actions or conversations had nothing to do with the Inner Gem … each person would worry that the other was trying to attack their Inner Gem. Everything became about guarding the gem, protecting it from attack, making sure it was safe.
The girl realized that the gems didn’t really exist. She realized that we just imagine them to be real, and don’t realize we’re doing it.
She realized that it’s all an illusion.
And it’s making us unhappy.
So that day, she stopped trying to protect an imaginary gem. She stopped trying to be right, to be seen as good and competent and smart and perfect, to see herself as a good person at all times. She stopped thinking that other people’s words and actions had anything to do with what she imagined herself to be. She stopped trying to protect her position and self-image.
And, gently letting go of these illusions, she became happier. She would smile when someone else would start protecting their imaginary gem, and realize that their frustration or rudeness had nothing to do with her, but everything to do with the gem they were protecting. She would go about her day, enjoying herself, and trying to make the world a better place.
-- Blog entry from Leo Babauta's Zen Habits

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Q: [Deleted]

That's the idea, although I'd broaden it to being any sense of localised identity, a space that you are defending against the larger environment.

Q1: I like this a lot.
Whenever I take a step back in my head and pay attention to how and why I'm reacting to things the way I am I usually feel a lot better.
However the ego always creeps back into play and when I realize I am getting unhappy again I have to make a mental note of it and work on once again detaching from the ego.
I hope to be able to detach for good one day!

A step back in your head - and this is kinda literally true isn't it? An easier and more persistent approach is (I find) so switch "context" to the background space that experience is arising in.
Of course, you then have to just let actions be spotaneous and not push or rush or interfere - as soon as you do, your attention narrows (because that's how direct action works: you don't do it, you squeeze your attention).
Great when you're in it though! :-)

Q2: Never take anything personally

Right - because there's no "person".

What matters? You decide.

Yes, quite so.

Q3: In my way of thinking, the gem is not ego or individuality, but rather free will. I think free will is an illusion - a bad one, which makes us think that people are "responsible" for their mistakes, that they "deserve" punishment, and so on... the false idea of free will is, I think, the root of all anthropogenic human suffering.

An interesting idea. I'm not entirely with it, maybe. I'd say that "free will" varies in terms of context - in terms of the "sphere of attention". Someone who is narrowed on the body or certain thoughts is limited. Meanwhile, someone whose attention has expanded to the "background awareness" has more flexibility, greater choice. After all, free will isn't about the ability to do just anything, surely - it's about being free to choose among the maximum number of possible options, to take the route most appropraite for you. However, this "maximum freedom" is in a sense spontaneous, potentially - the only choice you fully have is the ability to "say yes" to it, to cease resisting. And of course, to be able to switch to this larger context, you have to either have encountered the concept of it ("grace") or just randomly have it happen to you (also "grace").

Q3: I'm not against the idea of freedom, the capacity to act. My problem is with free will, the idea that there's some sort of magical essence which is making "choices" and is "responsible" for its actions. It is manifestly obvious that the mind is an emergent phenomenon resulting from the brain, thus all our choices are the result of the shape of our brain, which itself can be explained entirely in terms of genetics, past experience, present environment, and of course the ever present quantum randomness. How can you blame someone for doing something which was the inevitable result of things entirely out of their control, some deterministic (as with genetics), some chaotic (as with experience and environment) and some random? Nowhere in that mess of causes is there room for a magical "free will force". When you let go of that manifestly ignorant, superstitious idea and recognize that all events, including choices, are the inevitable result of the laws of physics, you become able to forgive, to have mercy, to love unconditionally, as you realize that the illusion of self control is just that - an illusion. You also can learn to forgive yourself. Your mistakes are not "your fault." They were inevitable imperfections in an imperfect world - but the self acceptance which results from this realization inevitably causes some of those imperfections to disappear, and through the butterfly effect, a great good is unleashed upon the world.

Okay, I'll probably disagree from the "obvious of emergence" part for consciousness, but we can certainly say that the content of consciousness has correlations with the brain. We do have free will in the sense of identifying with one part of experience vs the rest, and having the power to pause and select amongst options. We don't choose those options, and we don't choose what we want to choose, but within the parameters of the environment we can select and "disobey". So self control itself isn't an illusion, what is in debate is the basis of the control in terms of information. If we don't have free will in that sense, then we can't choose to let go, or to learn.

If anything is a "magical free will force" it is awareness itself, which then turns out to accept what arises - so the real deal is that to operate the best you could ever operate would be to let go and have your entire being contribute to your actions. Also, I think that we can pause and 'ask' for random creative inspiration, and then act on it or not. This makes us completely unpredictable. We can always ask for additional options, in effect.

JUST IN: It turns out that even worms have free will, apparently [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150313110402.htm].

I suggest you research chaos theory.

I know what you're getting at, but I would say that we can't extend chaos theory to brains quite yet.

Do you mean attention, which is a product of brain patterns and is thus chaotic?

Is it a product of brain patterns? Where is it?

Or do you mean consciousness, that which perceives, the inexpressible "essence" of mind which is aware of those brain patterns?

Consciousness. I use the term "awareness" because consciousness gets confused with conscious-of and self-consciousness. I'm not convinced that consciousness is "emergent" from the brain. I'm inclined to say that it is a fundamental property. But that's a separate discussion, and it does not necessarily matter for "free will".

Where in all this are you seeing a free will force?

I don't suggest there is a free will outside of experience, I suggest something more akin to (as another responder said) compatiblism: There is a part of us we identify with, and there are the options which appear. Furthermore, we can 'ask' for further options. We are "free" only to the extent we can choose amongst the options presented to us, using all the information at our disposal. In other words, we can make the best choice. That's "free enough".

Can I add, though, that brains are deterministic 'in principle' but really we are nowhere near understanding the brain, so I stay back from saying things "are" this or that. I try to stick to my own experience, as it arises subjectively, initially. The step between determinism and randomness may be something more structured, a probability pattern based on intention. There is also the issue of self-reinforcing "perceptual memory" which needs to be explored.

Maximum free will: To have all the information in the universe available to you, and to choose your actions based on this. Which would be deterministic of course; you would always choose the best option.

My problem is with the idea that there's this supernatural force beyond the brain capable of controlling it...

Well, brains are a problem because we really don't know anything about them and how the correspond to subjective experience (beyond certain content correlations, and even there much of it is the opposite of what is expected). So we put that aside. I say that "Free Will" is the ability to choose amongst options based on all the information available to you. That's all that is required and that definition will outlast any changing notions of what a "self" is and what consciousness is.

I do not understand what you mean by deterministic in principle.

We have to say "in principle" because we do not actually understand or have knowledge of the mechanisms in use, we are drawing conclusions from out concepts of determinism and randomness. For instance, in practice what we have called "randomness" might not be what it seems.

I don't know enough about neuroscience to give you details...

Right. Really, if you actually look into the neuroscience, although it is grand for helping patients who have suffered brain damage and so on, it is basically rubbish as regards investigating the properties of awareness and subjective experience. Because it is not intended to - it's not "science" in the same way as physics. Poorly designed fMRI-based experiments do not a good understanding make, alas. That's why I tend to put the brain aside, as it were. The theories change so frequently (e.g. for vision and perception, etc) as to be meaningless.

Yes, of course pure consciousness (that which perceives) is a self-existent, nonphysical phenomenon, however it is somehow interlinked to the brain...

There are correlations between experience and brain activity. Changes in the brain cause changes in the content of experience. This is different to consciousness. For clarity, it is good to separate out different types: there is the consciousness (which I call "awareness" or being-aware to keep it distinct), then conscious-of (the content) and self-consciousness (the identification with a certain subset of content). Here is a previous post which covers it [POST: Can we formulate panpsychism such that it doesn't sound completely ridiculous?].

There are all sorts of issues with correlation 'attention' and even 'memories' with direct brain regions, etc.

Anyway, I'm tempted along these lines:

• What you are, is "open unbounded awareness".
• Within this, experiences arise.
• From the outside (3rd person) the brain is seen as the "image" of this activity, in the world dream as it were.
• This means that brain imagery will show:
  • Some correspondence to the surrounding environment (if that is what is being experienced).
  • Some correspondence to the thinking going on (if that is what is being experienced)
  • And: triggering brain regions would be expected to result in experience in awareness, just as a passing train would.
• The brain is not causal; it something you are aware of It's like observing images in someone's eye, and noticing that if you poke the eye they report different experiences.

In other words, what's really happening is that there is correspondence between the unbroken continuum that is the world and one's subjective experiential content. There is much more that can be said about that (your awareness actually includes the whole extended world, it's just that the content is "brighter" in the brain area if you end up focussed there), but then we drift off-topic.

Returning to:

I say that "Free Will" is the ability to choose amongst options based on all the information available to you.

The key here is, what information is available to you? Is it just the information localised in the brain area?

And I daresay science knows a lot more about the brain than you seem to believe.

I keep a good eye on it. Brains and consciousness and metaphysics are main areas of interest for me. Neuroscience is as rigorous as physics as a discipline as far as it goes, however (and actually physics is inclined to this of late) it makes public promises it doesn't know it can keep. Consciousness is one of them.

(It reminds me of the early days of genetic research, where we were going to have a "gene for every characteristic" via its blueprint. Of course, the reality turned out to be something quite different.)

The fact that the theories change frequently is proof that progress is being made quickly, not that they're all meaningless.

Or it means that it's ungrounded and unfocussed, with a 'theory-of-the-week' approach, because it hasn't yet developed an overarching and coherent framework. Individual research results are interesting and thorough, the attempt to connect the parts, however, falters.

Your awareness does not extend throughout the world. That is a manifestly superstitious concept.

I think you are misinterpreting me. Briefly put: I suggest that consciousness is fundamental as a property, and this is how we can connect 3rd-person and 1st-person views. It is not "my" awareness that extends throughout the world in an external view, however everything that I experience of the world does arise in my awareness.

stick to pure materialism and rationalism

Sticking to pure materialism is a problem, because it doesn't work, unfortunately, for these areas. It's fine as an unexamined background idea for 'patterns and regularities' as observed in physics, but it's no use for consciousness, alas. This doesn't mean we go to "woo land", it simply means we incorporate consciousness as a property (a la neuroscientist Christoph Koch, perhaps). Note, this isn't self-consciousness! Rocks don't ponder their existence. However, sufficiently complex entities do have a "what it is like to be them". For humans, the brain is the image of that, but of course that reflects the complete nervous system, which in turn reflects the environment, so effectively the brain is an image of the world. That is what I mean by the world being unbroken in awareness. Where do you suggest consciousness "is" in the brain? And why does it have that location and not another? And what is the stage at which an area flips from being not-conscious to conscious?

Inserting consciousness at a fundamental level skips all of those problems. The entire brain becomes the experience that appears in and as consciousness. We keep all of our great neuroscience stuff (brain patterns == experiential content) but don't need to worry about 'how come it becomes aware of itself'.

Q3: I agree that it's fundamental. I've agreed with that all along. But it only exists in the presence of information processing. You know how supernovae generate neutrinos? Well, information processing produces consciousness. I see it as a kind of field, like an electric field, only generated by phenomena which process information, rather than by just any charged particle. It is a field in abstract space, rather than any concrete location. It's not "in" the brain, any more than an electric field is "in" an electron. It results from the brain, and exists in some dimension of reality which we cannot yet measure. Whenever anything - neuron, transistor, or otherwise - enacts an "if then" statement, compares a set of data to a threshold and outputs the result of that comparison, thought is happening, consciousness is happening. You know how mass bends spacetime? Information processing bends consciousness-space. No, better yet - information processing IS consciousness, the same way gravity IS the curvature of spacetime. And how do you know the amount of consciousness? It is proportional to the level of processing, the level of pattern recognition. Anything that discerns patterns is conscious. The more complex the discernable patterns, the higher the level of consciousness. The more connections among processing units, the more consciousness.
But NONE of this leads to free will.

We're not so far apart - for instance, I agree there is something that could be called a 'fundamental field', only it has no spatial or temporal properties. It's only property is being-aware and it comes before neutrinos and the like. And before information. Because it comes before patterns - patterns are formed within and of it. And that is what "consciousness" is.

Note, that being aware of things and being self conscious is a different level, and it misnamed because, indeed, it is a form of patterned experienced.

The more connections among processing units, the more consciousness.

There is never "more consciousness" in the way I say it. I think we're differing in our use of the term. In my take, you'd mean something like "an increased ability to be aware of things and manipulate them". Something like "greater awareness of things". All information processing does is transform one pattern into one or more different patterns. It does not change the 'stuff' that patterns are made of (which is "consciousness").

Free will is dependent on which perspective you are viewing things from. Someone standing in a 3-dimensional perspective would have free will in 2-dimensional world, although they would not be able to experience their 3-d will via their senses (they would only see the 2-d results and have to infer their intentions from those). From a 4-d perspective, the actions of the 3-d being would be predetermined. In the limit, it is a static universe and there is no free will because there is no movement. However, that's not how we live our lives; we take a trajectory across all possibilities, and if we can choose our trajectory based on our present position, that is sufficient.

The question is, what dimensionality are we?

Q3: I have no idea what you're talking about. Try to stick to falsifiability and scientific rigor instead of going off on New Age speculations. I respect your intellect, but pseudoscience bugs me. :3

Ha! It's not pseudoscience, honest. :-) Just trust me when I say that, even if I'm talking 'off plan', I'm trying to use metaphors to describe something I'm thinking, to explore the topic; I'm not saying it's a finished idea to be tested! :-)

Anyway, I think -

The problem is that we will never be able to come up with a falsifiable model for consciousness if it is the fundamental thing prior to space and time - because all our experiments will be in terms of it. It's a matter of metaphysics, rather than physics. If we don't introduce it at a fundamental level, then we are left with handling emergence. And by "fundamental" I mean it has to be introduce before any patterns - i.e. before any information. And in the end, it must join together scientific theories and personal direct experience, other wise it's just another nice diagram for the collection.

The dimensionality stuff: A bit of fun inspired by Flatland. But it probably is an important perspective to keep in mind when dealing with 'how we act'. We can only experience the result of our actions; we can't experience ourselves causing them. On a simple level, you can't experience yourself causing your arm to move. And no, describing 'brain signals' doesn't help - that's on the same level of explanation. (Why is why free will is discounted, of course.)

...Interesting how we differ! :-)

...experience of will and consciousness is actually equivalent to brain processes, arising from them and inextricably connected.

I don't believe this. I don't think we ever experience ourselves willing or (better to say) intending. We only experience the results. I don't think consciousness has a structure, although can be structured. I think intention shapes consciousness (non spatially, non temporally) and that shaping is reflected subsequently in the body. If we put aside "arising from" then perhaps we can get somewhere. The brain is the 'image' of the local experience, at that time. Intention is not an experience. Missing this point is why all those free will / response experiments are a misguided waste of time; the intention had already occurred, we do not operate ourselves manually and in detail.

I believe that within my lifetime the technology will become available to transfer my mind and consciousness to an artificial structure...

I don't believe this either - well, not on the current trajectory. And I think the problem will turn out to be, that your "conscious perspective" doesn't actually have a location, but it can have its attention focused on something. We might be able to create the structures, but at present science is completely ignorant on consciousness (rather than the content of consciousness). If you create another brain, you will have recreated the content of the experience, but you will not have transferred the experiencer. How to you transfer the experiencer (or transfer yourself), when it is not made from anything? Perhaps via an OBE?

That'll be the problem to solve.

It would be the ultimate medical advancement though - mixing the mechanical and the metaphysical, creating new vehicles and using 'spiritual practices' (I say smiling) to transfer yourself.

It's simple enough, to transfer one mind to another brain. First copy the structure. Then, via nanotech or some sort of neural implant, connect the two brains together, and keep them connected for a long period of time until the subject's every experience, thought, and emotion is reflected in both brains equivalently. Then put the original, flesh brain to sleep. The computer brain, however, will still be awake - one's mind and consciousness will have been transferred.

Um, I don't really see how that would work. Consciousness isn't ciphenable surely...

And if the brain is my "image" in the world, then creating a duplicate image at best just creates another perspective with the same formatting. If I am to switch myself into that perspective, it can't be physical so a connection wouldn't help.

...

Its all about relative perspective isnt it? Asking yourself does it REALLY matter?

Uh-huh, more specific? What really matters?

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/r/occult/ Misc Posts

Control vs Letting Go

What are our opinions on trying to control our world and environment by technique and will (direct approach), versus letting go and undoing ourselves to achieve greater clarify (indirect approach)?

In the end, both approaches seem to have the same aim (a mastery over experience, or an expansion of it), but they are quite a contrast in path.

Do we have particular ideas on one vs the other, and how to approach each path?

...

A1: To try and control the world [external reality] demands continuing and varying efforts, and leans on the ego and self. Say someone was bullying you. Calling you names and such. You could try to engage that specific incident of bullying via magic, and manipulate the external world to stop the bully. But odds are another bully could come along, and you'd have to start again from square one. By operating internally the bully is no matter. There could be 100 bullies and it wouldn't make a difference... because you've change yourself. Either in a way that you aren't bullied at all, or that you've moved beyond the external and you are no longer concerned with it. Same with financial troubles. Every time you have a money problem, you could try and focus on the external world to enact change for that specific, localized issue, and solve your problem, but money problems can come again. If you work internally, and let go of the external world, you find an everlasting solution so that any number of independent, localized issues could arise without concern.
I think that the ultimate solution is to achieve internal change. To work only on yourself. If you achieve that, there is no need to concern yourself with control.

Yes. This is actually what I've come to think: The "external" experiences, or unfolded objects, arise in alignment with your enfolded forms (beliefs, assumptions, expectations, character) just as your thoughts do. You can fight the unfolded objects, again and again, but they will just re-spawn, because you haven't tackled the "facts" of the world. Amend the "facts" (your enfolded beliefs and mental posture), amend the phenomena. Whether this results in no bullies arising, or simply that bullies don't bother you, depends on the nature of the "fact" and its new version?

If I suffer from headaches and neck pain, I can keep taking painkillers to change the experience (object to object), or I can notice my bad posture, and change myself > change the experience (form to object).

No need to control the objects, if the underlying forms have been tackled.

A2: As a witch, there are too many effective techniques to not try external change, and they're easy too. Granted, tons of witches get stuck here, called 'practical magic' and never use the craft to expand their own spirit or spirituality. Internal change is for those seeking enlightenment or betterment of the soul. But it is also really and truly effective for things you don't know how to externally modify. I've seen a lot of schools of thought, occult and religious, who think you should internalize only, but for some, and perhaps this happens with women most of all, we've already internalized the blame too often and too much and so going in is actually harmful. Change is always the goal and a good one, and not the seeking of blame, but sometimes, we have to trick the brain into seeing one source as the culprit that is healthy for us as well as effective in changing the whole situation. I like to look at it like a web of connections, where a situation is brought about by a number of circumstances and the craft usually makes you focus on one, inevitably changing the pattern and whole chain.

Thanks, that was a refreshing new angle for me.

A3: Speaking through a few years of martial arts experience:
Pure control is like the hard styles, karate, taikwondo, etc. An opponent/unwanted situation comes at you and you deal with it directly. Break his arm, get your way. This way is generally effective and has the advantage of not taking a long time to learn. However, you're at a disadvantage against a person/situation that can overpower you.
Pure letting go is like the internal health practices, like qigong or tai chi the way it's practiced in the west. It focuses on making you healthier and health translates into strength and general wellbeing, but by itself it's not going to be much use when shit gets real. It might help you deal emotionally with the consequences, assuming you're still alive.
In between you have a whole spectrum of arts that try to combine the two philosophies. Aikido, wing chun, krav maga, many others. Don't fight force with force. Get off the line of attack. Hit to weak targets.
In general: Adapt where you can in order to be more effective at getting what you want. Let go so that you can control.

In general: Adapt where you can in order to be more effective at getting what you want. Let go so that you can control.

Great. I've done some qigong, and found it very helpful. I still don't fancy my chances in a random bar brawl, however.

I guess, engage the flow of circumstances as much as possible; insert a 'controlling adjustment' where opportunity arises but only if required.

A4: I was taught that the external world could be changed only by changing your internal frame of mind. For example, your beliefs attract situations or experiences to you. By changing your ideas about a situation you can actually change the situation. By trying to resist a situation or fighting something, you can sometimes just create the opposite of what you want.

Interesting. Do you have any personal experiences where this happened?

A4: Look into thaumaturgy and theurgy. You are essentially asking what the difference is between the light side and dark side. Right hand path and left hand path. Of course there are other paths. I have found the right hand path always succeeds whereas attempting to manipulate circumstances may not always bear the expected fruit. However there are times when it makes sense.

Thanks for the tips. I really like that idea; the terms are new to me.

I'm likely mixing it up with both: one as a means to the other and back again. So it makes sense that there's the continuum. In actual fact, I'm probably of the view that editing "me" is how I make circumstantial changes anyway. (Because, fundamentally, what else is there?)

A good example I can share happened recently. I was very angry with someone because I felt they were treating me unfairly. Then I realized that this was just my idea about who they were, and it was just a belief. When I got rid of the belief I saw the person as a person just like me, and we were able to get along fine after that. When you really change those deep beliefs, magick happens. But only if you believe it will!

Did their behaviour "seem to change" afterwards as a result?

The two aren't contradictory, perhaps we could interchange control with will here? It could be one's will to engage his/her world and environment by technique and will. You don't have to choke every aspect of life to death to get what you want.

Control maybe better phrased as "holding on" in that case. With "will" just the occasional redirecting of yourself/the world.

That way it's a balance: Always having the open, "let go" attitude - with occasional "re-targeting" ?

A5: To paraphrase something I have read, "To take a step forwards in the outer world, take an inner step forward. To step forwards on the inner, take a step on the outer."
So for example if we wanted a payrise, maybe the work we have to do is not external but an internal attitude change. If we want to overcome an addiction or some other inner 'problem' maybe changing some aspect of our external life is the way forward.
I find as I let go and 'undo' as you put it everything falls into line for me. On the other hand as this happens I also am put in circumstances that cause me to grow and learn and let go further. Perhaps as I let go the blocks and tension are released also for me to work through. Maybe this is the cause of contraction into a state of 'control'.
I think as we let go we 'control' our world with a gentle touch, like seeing a master of his trade making his work look easy.
Technically the state of deliberate control is in opposition to almost every school of enlightenment and spiritual growth.
I mentioned this in a post a day or two ago, if you let young kids choose their day it would be a trainwreck after one or two days - they really don't know what is best for themselves.
Maybe think of it like a relationship, is a controlling partner ever an amazing partner? Be a good partner to life and the outer world. Give and take, nurture, forgive, teach and learn. Help, heal, sooth and discipline. Life has been around for billions of years, us as 'egos' a few decades... I'd say life knows what's what.
I'd also like to say thank you TriumphantGeorge, I love your posts and I click on your name whenever I see it to drink of your recently spilled wisdom. Thank you.

On the other hand as this happens I also am put in circumstances that cause me to grow and learn and let go further. Perhaps as I let go the blocks and tension are released also for me to work through.

"Put in circumstances", yes. There is an interplay between the inner and the outer, which I guess goes back to the idea of one being a reflection of the other.

Be a good partner to life and the outer world.

I love that metaphor: Working in partnership with life.

It's very tempting to constantly fiddle and manipulate yourself/the world, pushing yourself along, "end-gaining" - but that has the side effect of fogging your vision of who you are at that time, and to the way things are naturally flowing at that moment. Spending most of your time watching, listening, being, doing, with a small intervention here and there - itself coming from inspiration - is much more effective. I come to realise the hard way! :-)

Thanks for the compliment; much appreciated!

I think that "letting go" is more a means of altering self to more easily fit in with world, whereas "control" is altering world to more easily fit needs/wants/desires of self. Therefore I don't see "letting go" as attempted mastery over experience. But that's just what I've found to be true in my own life.

Hmm. And perhaps "letting go" as both a way to allow experience to flow more easily, and also to (ironically) make "control" easier, as you have reduced inner-conflict.