TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 7)

POST: The Game (book)

For people here wanting to jump, belief is critical. It's not enough to just want or "think you can" ...but with jumping it is more forceful, powerful.

Another way to consider this, is: If "you" are not actually a person-object and "the world" isn't place, but rather you are "that which takes on the shape of" experiences, then there is no separation between you-as-experiencer and your experience or state. This means that all change is direct - and this means you can't fool yourself, you have to actually hold in mind the specific pattern. That is, you can't simultaneously hold a "doubt" pattern in mind along with the "outcome" pattern, or you've intended a combination of both.

Intention & Fact Patterns

Basically, you have to intend the fact of something - rather than intend just the possibility of that fact, or intend the experience of just trying to have the fact become true, or intend maybe your act will make it come true. With no intermediary to this, the intention actually is the change to your state. Here, we have the term "intention" being the pattern you'd like to increase the contribution or "relative intensity" of in your ongoing experience; "intending" being the changing of that intensity, essentially by "becoming" the new state with that pattern incorporated. It's really just a deliberate increase of a pattern. If the intention-pattern is of the form of a "fact" or "outcome event", then that becomes "more true" in experience. If it is not of that form, then the pattern just becomes more prominent generally. In fact, this second type is a way of understanding what happens when we see whatever we are reading about somehow arise in "the world around us". Effectively, we have "patterned" ourselves, overlaid or incorporated those structures into our state as you-as-experiencer or you-as-awareness, by attending to them for a while. (The Owls of Eternity exercise is of course an example of doing this deliberately.) A classic example of this is described in Philip K Dick's essay, How to Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.

Belief & Intentional Patterns

The word "belief" doesn't really capture this adequately, I think, because it seems to have multiple and even slightly contradictory meanings in common usage. It doesn't lend itself easily to a more technical discussion. Anyway, so, as you indicate, it's not about "thinking that you can", because that isn't an actual change - it is just the experience of "thinking" with the content of "can do this". Or alternatively it is implicit intending of a state of something "being possible", with ones own interpretation of the concept of "possibility" coming into play. To actually make a change, you have to actually either intend something to the effect "it is true now that this happens then" or "it is true now that this fact is true" (the Owls of Eternity exercise is the non-specific version of that: it is essentially the fact "it is true now that the pattern 'owls' is prominent in my experience"). Alternatively, you intend something which implies that the desired fact is true, that leverages a pre-existing fact or pattern (like the Two Glasses does).

An illustration: If, right now, you intend "the image of a red car" in your imagination, you either have the image there clearly, or you don't. You can't half-commit and get a clear image appear in experience: either you make a clear image (actually get an image of a car) or you are making some other sort of image (a blur, a mangle, or nothing). The intention can be immediate (you assert it immediately as an experience) or implied (by assuming something does the work for you, a bridging pattern concept like "the subconscious" or whatever), but it is always direct in the sense that the actual pattern you end up intensifying is the one you get, not by something else working it out on your behalf nor the outcome you just hope for while not actually intending your outcome.

Books & Reality Patterns

Anyway, there's something special about this book.

It's interesting that, in particular, quite a lot of children's books seems to lay out ideas about reality, its nature and flexibility, and in ways which are detailed enough that they don't seem to be just general fantasy fun. One example pointed out to me a while back is the Children of the Lamp series, particularly the first book, The Akhenaten Adventure. I did have links to images of the relevant pages; I'll see if I can find them later. Also, the books of Philip K Dick, the essay author above, all have an underlying "reality is loose" theme that tends to bleed into everyday experience - particularly Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and Ubik. The upshot is, that reading extensively around a topic, whether that be in the form of fiction or non-fiction, can be a great way to adopt new frameworks and have the corresponding experiences arise in the "world around you". This, basically, is the whole idea of "active metaphors" - but with the notion that we can incorporate the intention that these patterns become prominent and therefore gain a stronger effect, rather than simply have it happen passively.

Extra bit: it is also interesting to consider that, since there is no "outside" to experience, the experience of apparently "encountering books which seem to speak about the nature of reality and then seeing their content become prominent in the world" is itself an example of a patterning of one's state.

Q1: And as soon as I replied and went back to my book, the main character encountered a large owl in a dream. Lol 😂
I had to hop back here and jot that down. As I said a noticeable spike in coincidences seems to be occurring. A ruse in novelty if you will...aka out of the background of the ordinary emerges the unique.

Hey, them owls, they do get everywhere! :-) I've had a very owl-based few days myself, in fact. Aside - Owl events rather than owl noticings. Which I think is an important distinction to make, because it marks the difference between "seeing things that were already there" and a more definite "patterning" of experience. Of course, if you play with this for a while, it in any case quite soon becomes obvious that this is not "confirmation bias" in the sense of selecting details from a static 3D environment.

I later discovered a post with some excerpts from that The Akhenaten Adventure book, here [Excerpts from 'The Akhenaten Adventure' by PB Kerr].

I get a vague sense that there is almost a "security measure" in place, preventing all of our thoughts from expressing themselves physically

Heh, funny how Star Trek TNG spends every other episode touching on these sorts of themes, eh? It's like a reference library of analogies for these conversations. Anyway, I see it not as a "security measure" - that interpretation could be seen as an example of survivor bias? - so much as an inevitable observation one would make when in a position to be able to make it. That is, that the only world-experience that would ever get to persist in the first place, would be one where there was an "inertia" pattern as a dominant property. That's why, in general, your main strand of experience is "this world" whilst other strands are "your passing thoughts". However, you can have multiple "worlds" that do operate with the same inertia (creating "persistent realms" in lucid dreams, for example). And I'm sure you could have the experience of running them simultaneously too. As you say, though, the stumbling block is modifying the main strand "world" to make it less (but not completely) inertial - assuming, that is, one isn't satisfied with having other worlds available for all that flexible fun and leaving this one as it is. But then, if we use the "patterning" model where the world is viewed as being defined as essentially a stack of contributing "fact-patterns", wouldn't there be a fact-pattern that was the equivalent of the statement "it is true now that this world is inertial"? Would the best approach perhaps be to attend to and assert directly a change in this pattern?

I AM jumping to such-and-such dimension. I AM a powerful co-creator of my experiences. I AM able to shape and mold my world.

Right - just as you are highlighting there, if we are metaphorically-speaking "increasing the intensity of contribution of a pattern in our experience", then the pattern has to be the actual fact you want to "make true". Now, this pattern isn't actually the words, of course. We might say that the words are a "verbal aspect" of the pattern, that they are a part of the extended pattern, or that they trigger the pattern by association. The actual experience of recalling the pattern itself, though, is just as sort of objectless "knowing". And we can intend that directly, without thinking the words or an symbol, just by finding it by "feeling-knowing", and then increasing it. We do this all the time, of course. When we deliberately lift our arm, we don't say little sentences to ourselves and then trigger the arm; we simply summon the (non-verbal) fact of "it is true now that my arm lifts up then", and then the result arises within sensory experience.

From there, we also have the topic of what you might call "clean" intention. That is, intending a fact or outcome only, without also intending some sort of additional result as part of producing a "doing" experience ends up re-implying our current state. Some recent comments on that, here. Essentially, intending involves no activity at all, because apparent activities are always results (subsequent experiences in "sensory theatre"); whereas intending is a name for self-shifting and is causeless. Even with the Two Glasses exercise, our physical body movements are basically movements from nowhere, but we are distracted from this by the narrative of ourselves as "brains as body controllers" - and this is used for advantage because it in turn distracts us from the fact that we are associatively triggering established patterns such as "levelstrength" and "relocationtransformation" and "labels==identity" and so on, to get an implied result.

I coined the phrase "is-ness" for me, reality, that place.

Yes, that all makes perfect sense. Other terms for the hypothetical "void" state might be "pure being", "clear awareness", and all that. Essentially, if all relatively true "facts" were to fade into the background so that none was more prominent in experience than another, then there's just a sort of non-spatial non-temporal openness. (I say "hypothetical" because the fact of still having some sense of observing means it is not entirely void. Similar description: here [http://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1victor_c_other.html], for example.)

POST: REALITY SHIFTING TO BRING BACK PET/LOVED ONE

From what I've learned here, the thing you would write on your second glass is more like "happiness" or "acceptance" or "fulfillment." And see how the universe helps you deal with that. You can't bring someone back from the dead unfortunately. I like to think about the "rules" like the way the Genie from Aladdin explains his wishes. You can't make anyone fall in love. You can't kill anyone. And you can't bring anyone back from the dead.

I dunno about some of that. From past reports, the love or harm of apparent others is perfectly doable, and the experience of one or other is sometimes the first realisation that there might be something to all this. That's why the instructions for the Two Glasses end with the comment "Please take this seriously and only choose a replacement situation that you will be happy to live with."

I suggest that there is no intermediary (a "universe", a "genie" type filter, or any other entity) acting as an active arbiter of what is appropriate and which prevents outcomes that aren't correct according to some independent moral code. Rather, the intentional change is conceived of as being more direct than that. The manner of obtaining results more like using a "dumb patterning system" than requesting help from an intelligence, say (you are the only intelligence). Of course, in all cases only personal experimentation can reveal the truth of the matter one way or the other. Descriptions or theories are not themselves causal; even if they seem logically self-consistent and persuasively coherent. But: I'm certainly in agreement with you that nobody should be encouraged to hope that they can, say, reintroduce the presence of someone who has died back into their ongoing experience, when there is no evidence for that in any past experiences. To encourage experimentation, even, seems likely to simply prolong the heartache and, as you suggest, you might be better pursuing a shift in the quality of life in the aftermath.

Q1: Some shamans say that is possible, they are skilled in manipulating reality, they also dont follow the common thinking (conditioning) that most peoples follow. I think that you can do theses things, because mind have not limitation, in internet you will see peoples being cautios about it because theses kind of creations are a great leap to most believe in. I exploring seeing reality like a literal dream, and i can understand why this is feared, you can do things that can make you nuts if you are not ready to see. About bring back the dead i dont know what to say, but i think is good know at least how heal yourself and others, its a good ability to have.

Right. As I say above, since the subreddit is based on confirming for oneself, nobody's going to say "you can do this" or "this is really how it is" in the manner of encouraging an unsupported belief. However, it is fine to talk about it in philosophical terms, or how one might go about it practically, and what the implications would be (basically along the lines of: the fact of the death is updated, it now never happened, the overall "landscape" of facts is pulled into accordance along with that). It's just not very sensible to give hope in desperate circumstances where, inevitably, a sure-fire-certain confirmation is being sought that something is possible. And the implication of the request is: possible, now. The honest answer is: theoretically possible in the sense that it is not contrary to some descriptions of experience, but really it can only be said to be possible if you do actually manage to create the experience. (This is of course true of all experiences really, since no experience is "pre-experienced" and confirmed ahead of time.)

Q1: I know, its a good way of thinking. What i can say is...few years ago i dont even did know that mind and reality are like the same, i did discover the secret, but i find it weak, then i start looking for another kind of possibilities, i tried Faith, i tried nond dualism etc. I then find some obscure posts in internet explaining how you and reality are the same, they are only talking hypothetically, i believed, then start trying crazy things, like trying make the weather change...and it Worked. I did tried with many thing, and it worked pratically every time, sometimes in a soft way, sometimes in Strong ways. So, i never did try make someone back to the the life, but every time i did try something new, like something that is impossible to happens, reality responded to me in some way. This is the reason why i like say that anything can be made. I i apologize if i sound rude, i am more interested in making reality maleable, and i forget sometimes that most peoples want simple things. I will talk less about that here from now:)
:)

Wasn't rude, please talk freely. It's only in response to this particular OP's request that I am (as moderator really) highlighting the usual "confirm for yourself, nobody can confirm what is possible for you" perspective, because it's a sensitive issue and it has come up a few times in the past and not always handled that well in the comments. In general, the subreddit is all about experimenting with the things you are talking about - that is, pushing against the assumptions implicit in the standard description of the world, to see if they are really true - and coming up with different ways of talking about experiences (and not accepting any description at face value). You make a good point: that mostly people have a desire, and really just want that desire to come true. They are not necessarily interested in coming to an understanding of the nature of experience, of descriptions, and so on. This subreddit does try to focus on exactly that, though, with "getting results" just being a gateway into it.

In most cases you discover that you desire a presence rather than their presence

I'm inclined to agree with this, and your suggestion that it applies to the "death" of a relationship as much as to the death of a person. It is the pattern of experience that is missed, then, in the abstract rather than the specifics of a particular instance of that pattern. And if nothing at all has changed, there will be a similar sort of outcome, perhaps.

...

A1: "I know death is no small event"
What if that is the greatest illusion of them all?

POST: Who are You?

On the broader subject of "you", check out some previous comments perhaps: here [POST: In what way are other people real?], here [POST: [THEORY] The Nature of Consciousness] and lately here [POST: People around us]. They contain various observations and metaphors and so on which might be useful.

Cherry-picking a couple of points for now: One might describe oneself as a sort of non-material "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware and which "takes on the shape of" states and experiential moments. There is no "outside" to this. Note the use of the phrase "shape of... moments" in this description. What this is emphasising, is that you are this whole moment of experience, including the apparent experience of seeming to be "over here" and the room "over there". And "the world" is not a place and you are not an object within it. The world is more like a fully-defined pattern that is "dissolved" into the background of experience - in the background of you - whose sensory aspects are unfolded and then refolded as moments. "Jumping", then, would be the amendment of that pattern, leading to a change in the content of the moments which were experienced subsequently. Meanwhile, because there is no "outside" to you, it doesn't necessarily matter how you conceive of jumping; it is the intentional change (or the implication of a change) to the pattern of experience that matters. There is no particular image or method (any method really) that is the correct one. Really, it is the assignment of meaning that counts, the accompanying intention of any act.

An exercise to try taken from one of those comments is:

Feeling Out Exercise

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

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

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

Which leads us to:

If you are the whole projection how do you create that state of mind of "I am everything and everyone" instead of I am me and outside things / people?

Well, ultimately that's just another experience, with nothing special about it particularly. So it's not necessary and it's not at a different level to any other experience. The only fundamental fact is the fact of being-aware, which means absolutely every other fact or experience exists on the level, the same level, of "as if it were true". So it's not something to get up about in terms of an enabler, I'd say. However, if you want the experience of that, here's my suggestion: you can simply sit down quietly, cease interfering with your experience (that is, allow body, thought and attention to move as they will spontaneously), and simply intend or hold the idea, nonverbally, of the pattern "it is true now that what I am is this entire sensory moment" (or your own formulation). Simply "sit with" this until a feeling of a shift happens by itself. No effort or forcing is required (and indeed this will work against you, re-implying your usual format).

Well let me tell you that in my multi-sensory experience there is a Superman who goes by the name of /u/TriumphantGeorge. Thank you... your answer is crystal clear.

Ah may I just ask... when intending and holding the idea of a pattern change, is it sufficient that you experience the new pattern as a 'feeling idea' because my mental vision is pretty much non-existent?

POST: Is it really possible to win a lottery using dimensional jumping?

Theories such as "universal balancing" and "growth potential of the whole universe" assume that there is one static "out-there" universe that everyone shares... Which I'm really starting to doubt as of late.

It also assumes that such a "universe" is organised according to what are actually fairly recent concepts, and it is implied that there is some sort of independent moral arbiter of what should happen. Another version of the "genie" entity concept, basically. Which is not to say you can't have experiences "as if" such things were true, but that is different to there being an independent structure based on them being fundamentally true.

I believe that however it is that the whole of "everything in existence" is organized (or lack thereof) at a fundamental level is doing what it does regardless of what and when humanity conceptualizes about any aspect of it.

The problem is that this is itself a conceptualisation, of course. Basically, what we're doing here is creating and exploring conceptual frameworks, and even the "meta" discussion about frameworks is also a framework (and therefore suffers from the same problem). Taking this further, that is actually happening is that in an effort to "understand" the nature of our experience, we are simply producing additional experiences which don't get "behind" anything, they are at the same "level". That is, we are generating the experience of: "thinking about experiences". Our so-called understandings are in fact "parallel constructions in thought". The upshot is, that all descriptions are to some extent "castles in the sky". They are extended metaphors with minimal observational touch-points, which need to be judged on their usefulness rather than their "truth" - because that's not what conceptual thinking produces. We must beware the "reification of abstraction", as physicist N David Mermin calls it. String theory and seeing "code" within it is a prime example of this, I'd say - I'm with George Ellis on this. Looping back to the start:

such that some underlying structure on which life is built is based on "something" fundamentally?

What we really mean here, ultimately, is: can we have experiences "as if" a particular idea is true? We almost certainly can. Does that mean that the idea is true? No. The ideas are not fundamentally true, except in the sense that it is true that there is an idea. This applies to our ongoing experience in general (the subject of this subreddit, ultimately). That is, what is true is the fact of experience. Any descriptions about experience are true as further experiences, but they are not true in terms of being "what experience really is". In fact, even the idea that there is a "how things are" and "how things work" is potentially problematic, once we dig deeper. What is reality, then? Well, this. This patterned moment right now, as experienced, with nothing "behind" it. (As an illustration of this, there's the exercise in this post to play with [Feeling Out Exercise].)

It's super-simple. Too simple in fact to be conceptualised, I'd say, because concepts inherently involve a starting with a particular property that ongoing experience does not have: that is, ongoing experience is undivided and is not "made from parts".

POST: 2 glasses method

Really, no belief is required. (What exactly is a "belief" anyway and why would it matter? We might ask.) It is in fact part of the design of the exercise that it demonstrates this isn't necessary. It's the avoidance of subsequent interference that matters. It's also not LOA, unless by that you simply mean that it operates in the same way as all experiences do, since of course all experiences have the same basic nature.

When you say, "this method is going to generally produce results by plausible if very unlikely means", how do you define/measure plausibility and likeliness?

I don't. :-)

We might ask, though. And the asking would probably lead to a different way of looking at things from the way that spawned the initial question (but define "probably" I guess). Anyway, to the actual point: I'd make a distinction here between the assessment of the "plausibility" or "likeliness" of something in advance - that is, the weighing up of possibility based on a particular description or model of "how things are" - versus how one might characterise it after the fact - that is, after one has had the experience and is reaching for a way of articulating it. In that statement, I'm using those terms in the latter sense.

POST: Can you expand your awareness after you jump and gain memories you otherwise wouldn't have?

I guess not. If you change a tv channel and you begin watching a show already half way, you are experiencing it now, but you don't know what happened previously.

Well, unless it's a marathon showing all the episodes, where you might get a "Previously, on neonledge" type segment. Or maybe there's a way to pause for a moment, introspect and check out the wiki for the show...

There's some debate on this - it probably "depends". From your own perspective, you have a history or trajectory which you remember, and may or may not agree with the observed "facts" of your present world. If you make a dramatic shift, that world starts there for you, but there is an implied history at least - which you should theoretically be able to access (or 'invent'). People who've experienced shifts spontaneously note varying degrees of urge-to-forget, conflict-of-memory, or no revised memory at all. This may be linked somewhat to intention.

My feeling is:

• If you do a shift deliberately then you will have your trajectory memories, and remain slightly separate from the world configuration you switch to.
• If you suffer an accidental large shift, you are more likely to suffer an urge-to-forget the event (if it was an experience) and 'lose yourself' in the resulting configuration.
• Minor shifts will lead to discrepancies like "Mandela Effects" but with personal relevance (e.g. people's hair a bit different, etc, not liking coffee when they used to, etc.)

There are lots on /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix which might give you some food for thought. Overall, I'm concluding that if you do a proper directed change, then this isn't too much of a problem.

POST: ITT: Theories

There are no other selves!

Previously answered here [POST: What happens to the other-dimensional you you switch places with?], here [POST: What happens to the other you when you jump?], here [POST: What happends with the other you?]. It's an understandable question though, perhaps it needs to be put in the sidebar or (oh no) we might need an FAQ. Read the Hall of Records metaphor, for a way of visualising why this is the case. The idea is that you are shifting your experience. You are a consciousness connecting to a 1st-person perspective.

What evidence is there that this is true, though? Where did we learn this? Basically, how do we know that we're just switching our perspective, and there isn't some Other Me on the receiving end of our old life?

The quick response: What makes you think there are millions of different "You"s? And would they be "You" if they were having a different experience? And why would there be only one of each type of experience - why wouldn't there be multiple identical worlds for you to experience?

The longer answer is: You need to do a bit of contemplation and meditation to realise this. A couple of things: to realise that you "having an experience" rather than "being a person" (that you are a "conscious space"), and that the world isn't spatially-extended other than in your experience of it (there are not literally multiple physical universes out there). For directly investigating the first, you might try out this little exercise to get a feel for it for fun. But after there, you might check out Rupert Spira and his book Presence, or Greg Goode's Standing As Awareness. For the latter, philosophers such as Berkeley and Kant are worth your time.

I am changing experiences other than my own through this practice.

I know exactly what you are referring to. You truly only change "your" own experience though - however that includes your experience of other people, and of yourself. The effect is indeed "as if" there were literal dimensions (hence the naming). The trick to understanding this is that you do not live in a "simply-shared world". It's more like parallel-simultaneous-timeless dreaming. The oft-used metaphor that consensus reality is like, say, a bunch of people in a room collectively choosing the decor is incorrect. The truth is everyone has their own room, and implicitly chooses aspects of other people as well as the decor. If I had to describe it overall, I'd say it was like a personal dream, with you as the dreamer - except eventually you dream every possible aspect of yourself and everyone else. You can choose whatever experience you want, but eventually you will (or rather: already have) experience the other side of it. In actuality, it's sort of "all-at-once". This means: other people are real, but they are all you, eventually.

The Hall of Records metaphor is a way to simplify all that, but keep the key ideas in place. But... the fact is that the apparent world and apparent people do seem to change, particularly if you do an undirected approach like the mirror method. That's why I advocate more focused methods.

there absolutely are other literal dimensions and other literal "me"s.

You can have experiences consistent with that - but they are just more experiences. When you are dreaming, no matter what secrets you uncover and what discoveries you make, all you are really ever finding is... more dream.

...but my personal experiences have lead me to believe

Fancy sharing your experiences?

Certainly! You can read about my most recent jump here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/37o40v/make_sure_no_one_changes_the_lights/]

Ah. I missed that! To make a broad point: The metaphor you adopt dictates the overall pattern of the experience you get, and: if you're doing something major it pays to be specific because the result will take the easiest route. Spent time beforehand forming the intention in detail via your imagination, envisaging it exactly as if it were true now.

does this create any time-travelesque paradox, where if you did not lose a loved one, you wouldn't have had the motive to shift? it seems safe, but i'm unsure.

The "time travel version" of the Infinite Grid metaphor explicitly dodges this. No paradox, because you are always "experiencing moments" rather than "intervening via action" - in everyday life as well as in more adventurous scenarios.

i agree that i think it's safe, because i don't think you're hopping around on a singular thread, so to speak, and it could break. but your response sounds like you're dismissing free will. this seems odd because DJing is intrinsically a willful act.

You select your experiential trajectory via will, of course, it's just that you do not ever "physically" do anything. You just have "experiences of doing". In fact, it's this that makes free will possible - since it means intention is a filtering of experiences, a selection of a world, rather than something that occurs within a world.

POST: Just discovered this place. I have some thoughts I'd like to voice.

A good read, that. Couple of points:

• Yeah, inherently you can only prove these things to yourself. Even if you convince others, that can just be part of the effect. One of the things this stuff reveals to you is that you do not live in a "simply-shared world". In some ways, you are totally alone. In another way, you are everywhere - but we're getting a bit metaphysical now.
• In terms of "multiverses", if you follow this through what you end up with is more like "all variations can be experienced in consciousness". The overall result in terms of personal experience is kinda the same, but it does mean the analogy is more like "a conscious being watching a particular TV channel" (in super-surround-sensory-3D) rather than "your consciousness shifting from inside one brain to inside another brain".

I find the Imagination Room metaphor quite a useful way to envisage this situation. (Although the more accurate metaphor would use something like "a holographic space in which all possible experiences are dissolved", imagining that there are patterns on the floor is a nice visual way to bring this to life.)

...If this stuff even just makes people explore their ideas more thoroughly, it's a good thing!

EDIT: Slight repetition below. Sorry: lost track of which thread I was replying to!

Something to ponder: things don't necessarily exist in the form that we experience them in the senses. For example, recall what you had for dinner yesterday. See it, smell it, taste it. Now, where was that recall experience before you brought it into your imagination? Was is stored somewhere in the same form (spatial, temporal and multi-sensory) as that experience? Consider: was it "dissolved into the background" of your current experience all along, just waiting to be triggered and intensified - like a holographic image, sort of everywhere and nowhere? Could all possible experiences be present in this way, awaiting "recall"?

Perhaps the present sensory experience is like the sun in the daytime sky. All the stars are there, but concealed by the sun's brightness. What if you could choose which of the "stars" would be "the sun" tomorrow?

POST: Second update, noticed a lot of small changes, even a few with this sub

basically there are no correct or wrong metaphors

Exactly. However, the metaphors you adopt implicitly or explicitly will format your experience; your experiences will start lining up with them. This is true of any pattern your trigger: they amount defining the facts that future observations will remain consistent with; they amount to a pattern which is "overlaid" over your life. I shy away from the word "belief" though, because that has a fuzzy meaning, including ideas like "opinion". If we stick to something like "formatting" we are closer to the truth. I mean, would you say you "believe" in time and space and colour and cause-effect?

I can now understand why man created the idea of god and why he worships it.

Because we cannot experience ourselves doing anything - in other words, if intending means to change the shape of ourselves, we can only see the results, and so cannot conceive of our willing - we in ignorance ascribe cause to parts of experience. We feel muscular tension and call that "doing" when body movements arise, or we associate "this thought" with "next thought" and label that as cause, but when other things happen that cannot be so obviously linked, we try to find somewhere else to hang it - hence the invention of an "entity god". Having a god becomes a metaphor you can call upon to be the "cause" of the changes you are doing.

Stable ground

Although what you are is all of the world, it's beneficial to declare one part of it "you" and therefore hold that part stable. Otherwise the whole thing can shift all over the place, and there will be no persistence, because the there will be nothing for the rest of the world to hang from. Traditionally, this is the "ego" concept coupled with a small physical sensation or tension which us maintained - but if you choose your identity as the "background space within which experience arises" then you get the best of all worlds. You are not letting everything collapse into void, but you are also not constraining the evolution of the world-pattern.

I feel we all need to be one with our subconscious.

We always are, really. Reusing a metaphor: the whole world-pattern is right here, being experienced by you right now. It's just that some parts are brighter than others at a given moment, like the daytime sun obscuring the other stars in the sky. What we call shifting our attention is actually different stars having their turn at being the brightest.

EDIT: Which is why we don't need to deliberately focus our attention; that makes us feel that we are one tiny part by over-intensifying one aspect - deforming it with intentional change. Your "being one with the subconscious" would translate as letting attention open and expand?

How do I change my formatting? How do I decide? Is it a sort of feeling?

That's what this stuff is all about really. Detaching totally (basically: release the patterns) and intend-will-decide-summoning how you want it to be. Unfortunately, because of its nature (changing the shape of oneself), we can't describe how to intend; we simply do so, as "first cause". In general, you want to get relaxed and "allowing" such that summoning an image, etc, is completely effortless. There should be no pushing or tension involved in intending; it's more of a "releasing" or "letting happen".

"To intend is to wish without wishing, to do without doing. There is no technique for intending. One intends through usage.”
–- Carlos Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming

Something to ponder: How we think about something is that something. For example, if you think about tomorrow, the pattern that appears is actually tomorrow. It doesn't represent tomorrow; it really is the idea-aspect of tomorrow. Same with anything else you pull up from the background into sensory experience. So long as you are "calling it up", rather than just messing with imagery without intention, you are actually pulling up the actual thing from the "world-pattern".

POST: Problem with the original story

The general answer is: because when changes happen to you, you can still remember how it was before, so you can tell the story. Otherwise of course nobody would ever know of changes happening, since the world and their memory would remain in step (which may actually be the case sometimes).

I don't know. It seems like there should only be 2 options: The kid doesn't remember his old dimension's father or he's contaminating the new dimension that doesn't have an abusive father with slander; In other words - we should be getting the story from the perspective of this dimension's story creator - not the kid who left the bad dimension!

That doesn't make sense. So, the summary is that a kid had an abusive father and he jumped to a dimension where his father is not abusive. Naturally, the only record of this is in the memories of the kid and anyone who experience the change with him. The kid who did the jump is the author of the change and the story is from his perspective. Are you saying that the story should not be told? And are you suggesting that saying "my Dad was abusive in another dimension, but he's a nice guy in this one" is slander? Because I don't think Other Dimension Dad will be suing anyone for defamation... interdimensional law sounds tricky! :-)

I'm assuming he never told the story to his current nice Dad. But maybe I'm misunderstanding. What do you mean by "contamination" here?

The story should be told from the perspective of the kid who had is body stolen about how the mirror took his body somehow. Any recollection of having a bad father wouldn't exist since this dimension's story teller only knows of a good father. Why would this dimension's story teller all of the sudden start saying his father used to be abusive when that never happened - hence why he left?! Any memory of the bad situation would be contamination in this dimension - the story would not be told from the perspective of the mirror version of the author.

Okay, I see what you are trying to say: That from your perspective some kid just suddenly says his Dad used to be abusive but isn't anymore. So for the moment let's put aside the "jumping" metaphor and approach this another way. Now, there is only one dimension/world:

• Imagine that I sat an exam last week, and got a low grade.
• I now decide to cast a "spell" so that I got a good grade. The world is "updated" so that I now did well in the exam. The world has been shifted so that in effect this has always been true; there is not trace of the old state of the world, except in my memory.
• If I tell people about this, it will be as if I suddenly say "hey I failed the exam but now I have passed". As far as they are concerned, I had always passed.

This is what was happening with the kid. But wait, what if someone else is wishing that I failed and the same time as I wished I passed? It doesn't matter, because:

• Everyone has their own copy of the world.

You can have any experience you want, including updating the world's facts and history. The "other people" you see are just images of other people, the versions of them that correspond to your current intentions (aspects of their Extended Person). Meanwhile, sensations and perceptions and thoughts of "yourself" are a version of "you" that corresponds to your current intentions. What you actually are, it turns out, is the "conscious space" in which your experiences appear - the experiences of yourself, other people, and the world. Our experiences do overlap with other spaces but in a non-simple way that can't be explained easily, because it is "before time and space" (and unfortunately we can only conceptualise in terms of moving parts arranged in mental space). I've copy-pasted a comment from elsewhere which tries to explain this a bit more, kinda based on the Imagination Room metaphor:

On The "Sharing Model" Of The World

You are not a person, you are a conscious space having a "person-perspective experience" - senses, perceptions, thoughts, floating in awareness. The "person" you are might be considered as The First Tulpa. Meanwhile, it is just not possible to conceive in thought of the way in which there is overlap between apparent perspectives. It is not a "simply-shared" world model. The other people in your experience are your aspects of those people - and the "you" you experience is similarly an aspect of that idea. Often people talk about a "consensus reality" as if it's a bunch of people in a room, choosing the decor together. In fact, it's more like everyone has their own room, choosing versions of the other people and the decor. In fact, it's even more like everyone is a room, and is choosing versions of themselves and other people and the decor. In fact again, not even a room because the room represents time and space, which are themselves "contextual formatting" within you... you get the idea...

And "idea" is the key word. People are "ideas" or patterns, and it is those ideas which appear in your experience. "You" are just an idea you have associated with yourself. However, even a little bit of self-examination reveals that you are more like the stuff that worlds are made of...

In the future, people should set up their dimension jumping stories like this:

That's not quite right though. It's all about perspectives. From the kid's perspective (who is telling the story) the story is actually:

• "I always had a problem with my father being abusive to me. Then one day I looked in the mirror and had a really weird experience. It felt like I was somehow swapping places with the reflection in the mirror. After that experience my father was a nice guy. But what's even more strange - it was as if the world had changed so that he had always been a nice guy. Nobody remembered him ever having been a bad guy! It was as if I'd shifted to a new dimension where my father had always been a good parent."

Dimensional jumping stories can only be told from the perspective of the person who makes the jump, or perhaps with people who deliberately jumped as a group (see the Multidimensional Magick post for a comment on this: it amounts to "deciding" that you will have the experience of sharing the jump results.)

Of course, the methods suggested in the sticky tell you to say "swap" to trade places with the mirror person so you're giving the person who once had a good father an abusive one. How interdimensionally selfish, right?!

Haha, yes. But the swapping places thing is a metaphor. There is no "other you" out there who is getting a bad deal. What you are doing is switching from one experience to another. If you have a green car and decide to paint it red, that doesn't mean that some other person is forced to paint his nice red car green!

EDIT: It occurs to me you might be thinking from the perspective of "a dimension" or a "god's-eye" perspective of all dimensions, but there is no such thing. There is only the perspectives of particular subjective consciousnesses. All experiences and all stories are 1st-person-view.

POST: Schrödinger's cat and a new way of looking at "Dimensional Jumping"

Good read!

So what if our own expectations were enough to "lock" the state in place. I.e. if we were in our minds completely sure that the cat had to be alive

This is pretty much the idea of "false observations" behind descriptions such as All Thoughts Are Facts: It makes no difference whether an "observation" is supposedly internal or external, since they arise in the same perceptual space. What matters is in the intensity of the contribution. And anything you can conceive of can potentially be "observed" in this way, so all possibilities are here, now - just like you say. Basically: we cheat. If the world is defined by a series of observations (Observation Accumulation) and all observations must be consistent with previous observations (Law of Coherence), then:

• The only rule is that the apparent world remains self-consistent as an entire pattern. [1]
• If you "force" an observation using deliberate imagination, it will have as much contribution as a "spontaneous" observation.
• If a forced observation is about the past then subsequent observations will contribute as if it were an observation in the past.

And "Jumping" is the allowing your experience to be shifted as a whole (detaching) by inserting an observation that corresponds to what you want, while allowing the whole pattern to shift to accommodate it.

I think many cases of "jumping" are merely an effect similar to hypnosis, NLP

NLP and hypnosis is pretty close to jumping in some ways? Manipulation of the contents of mind. It's just that in this case we are accessing the world-pattern in mind rather than the personal-pattern. Although the distinction is sometimes hard to make.

how people can come back here and claim to have jumped, without seeming to have left?

I think that jumps are on a continuum in terms of apparent localisation of effect and the extent to which we still seem to share the world. You can have quite drastic changes and still have a reddit conversation here, because it's not a complete shift to an entirely different state; it's a modification of your state to a greater or lesser extent. The whole "world-sharing" aspect of reality is pretty impenetrable anyway, though.

[1] If you fancy a relevant slog through some related comments to that, there's this post about the "delayed choice experiment" and this comment was an early attempt to describe pattern-shifting in that context.

...Hey, that's the trick though isn't it? :-)

We can think of lots of interesting ways that "overlap" might take place, but we can never experience the actual overlapping process, so it will always remain an abstract notion - with us imagining how overlapping might work. Which is a problem, because: If your imagination dictates the content of our experience (the basis of jumping), then it also dictates the types of overlapping which can occur. This means that we select which aspects of other "private views" to incorporate into our own. Which means we can't distinguished between allowing content overlap from other views, and just simply dictating content. Every model fudges the objective reality part (P2P networks, QBism, etc) of how subjective views might overlap, because inherently the overlap would occur outside of the concepts of space of time. This makes it literally unthinkable, and hence meaningless. So I tend to take my working model as the world being a shared resource (of patterns) rather than a shared environment (spatially-extended world). Of course, this still leaves us with the option to imagine that we are co-creating, and have an experience which corresponds to that. For the fun of it.

EDIT: There is a notion that when we are "in overlap" with other perspectives, then we share a trajectory together, and that is the experience of "love" and connection. That's what differentiates the background people (nothing is looking through those eyes) and the close people (other perspectives experiencing it). That still suffers from the same problem of differentiation though; it's just a commitment to a particular "knowing".

if we are consciously directing our experience, then maybe even our memories are tied in to what locks us in our current state

Yes, because if memories are parts of the current "world-pattern" then they are contributing, shaping present moment experience. They are "facts" which current observations must be consistent with. If you bring up a memory (which is to say, ask for one and then it appears in mind) and edit it, there is no trace other than that, and it would be "as if" true going forward. The trick, I'd say, is that you have to be careful whether you are editing "the world's memory" or a personal memory.

merge with the consciousness of the businessman you, bring it back here, and accept that your prior "inserted memories" are now no longer inserted memories but actual memories.

Sounds like an approach. In fact, I think the "keep a diary of how your ideal would be" has been used to switch mindset. A bit like Neville Goddard's The Pruning Shears of Revision plus a switch. I wonder whether it wouldn't be better to go straight for the desire though, without bothering with the updating, since what you want is a discontinuous switch anyway? But it could be a way to run in parallel or something.

I think it's part of the reason visualisation alone is so powerful, but beer . . .

Rule #1 of the universe: Beer is always more powerful than visualisation! :-)

Q1: I've used this framework for years, and it's extremely effective (look for retro psychokinesis in my post history). I think it's an idea which time has come. You got me thinking: I always thought that once you observed something, you set in stone whatever outcome you observed. It figures then that your reality had fewer and fewer options has time goes on. But jumpers say you can change what has already happened. Strangely, this fact just only hit me. And this is a total game changer.

Yeah, it's the total game changer!

Have you read Neville Goddard's essay on The Pruning Shears of Revision? Detach from the old observation, amend it or create a new observation to replace it, is the summary. Multiply that up and and you realise that the apparent past doesn't matter much. What matters is the observations you make now. The extreme version would be to detach completely from the current experience, kick off a new strand of thought, let it become immersive, and then never return to the old strand...

What happens is, it resolves itself. You don't focus on the sensation, you don't narrow your attention, you let it stay open and wide and just allow the fear to be there. After a while it becomes stronger (but really it always was that strength, it's just that you were averting yourself from it) and then at that point it kind of expands into being nothing. If you take a step forward and then try to stop the movement, then you are left there with tense muscles and maintaining an off-balance position. The more you aver your attention the worse it gets. The only way to solve it is to allow the postural pattern to "follow through" and complete itself. This will involve temporarily having a strong experience, but that's necessarily part of the movement and release.

Q3: Using what I mentioned above, I like to think of things as such: once we've observed/ascertained a thing to be so, the related things required for it to have happened, the event itself, etc, are all "set in place" and certain. However that doesn't mean they can't be set back to uncertainty, and I believe no matter how firmly in place it is, it can be changed with an equal amount of effort.
The reason this is important is you'll find that it's VERY easy to make something happen the way you want (whether via this or via other methods) if there's already some uncertainty about it. A lot of people assume that means that's all you can do, but the fact of the matter is you just need to work out those prior beliefs and dissolve your framework back into a state of uncertainty before proceeding with inserting a new outcome. :)
Just my 2c :)
Edit: Someone gave me a really nice way of looking at it a while back. They asked me to think back to all those silly cartoons you'd watch as a kid where say a statue would start moving and stop moving whenever the main character turned around to look at it. My friend said to think of the universe in a similar way, at its core, the universe contains all of the infinite possibilities of people, states, objects, interactions, occurring simultaneously forever, but when an observer of any kind looks at it from a limited perspective it takes on their beliefs and assumptions about how it must behave and "freezes" into place with all the variables required to fit what they expect to see. That'd fit why a state of non-duality/unity with the infinite only ever comes exactly when we stop seeking and lose all expectations about what we are to experience, and shed our observer perspective completely.

I love the statue analogy!

Going off track a bit, Jesus, I think the biblical notion of "forgiveness" means something closer to "forgetting and letting shift" than saying sorry, which means the parables are describing that exact thing: allowing your previous observations to sink back into the gloop so that they no longer limit your next observations. That previously-activated pattern fades away because it is no longer being re-triggered by association. It's basically saying: yeah, what I saw before was true then but that doesn't mean it has to be true now. Those statues could be anywhere; they needn't be permanent "pillars of salt" unless I constantly look back to check their state. Neville Goddard like his statues too, being a big fan of Blake's “Sculptures of Los’s Halls”, which is a metaphor for eternal states. So it's like "letting your statues move", but it's also like shifting to a state in which your shadows are arranged in accordance with a different blueprint.

POST: I have attempted dimensional jumping twice now.

I think you're trying to do something quite dramatic without having really done the groundwork. Have you checked out the "related posts" in the sticky post?

You're trying to do something like a "reset", it sounds like.

...Actually, replied to the wrong post, sorry. Although the sticky links still apply. See my other response!...Then skip the mirror approach, go for something like the Neville Goddard version with a specific aim in mind (literally!)...Completely relax and detach, summon the corresponding imagery, maintain immersive focus until it becomes the dominant part of experience. Like direct-entry lucid dreaming, with coming back being optional, perhaps.....Yeah, don't try that standing up. Lie down, eyes closed, enter a relaxed state, then relaxed-focus on your target, allowing imagery and sensations to arise. What you're really asking for here is for one 3D-immersive thought to supersede another.

Just quickly...

Another example of a change was that a scar on your friend's arm has disappeared, or new buildings have appeared. But really, your just noticing for the first time.

Yes, noticing is nice way to put it. But we must understand that the environment in which we do the noticing has (I hate to say this but let's go with it) "higher dimensionality" than we usually assume.

Definition:

To "notice" something is to bring into perception something that was already there, but had not yet been experienced in sensory space.

The way in which something is "there but not yet experienced" is the important part. Specifically, we are not dealing with a 3D spatially-extended world which we explore - even though that is how it usually appears, so quick are we to "fill in the gaps" as we go. If we suddenly notice a book on our bookshelf which we haven't seen before, was that book always there? Yes, in some way. However, in order to see it we had to adjust our angle to the world. So, the effect can be both mundane and continuous, or dramatic and discontinuous, depending. For your main post questions, you should check out the last couple of edit links in the Neville Goddard post. For "jumping back in time" there have been people who've reported experiences "resets" of a sort (/u/MemoryEchoes and various glitch reports), it's not something I've wanted to do myself so I can't comment. However, the principle is the same no matter what: you are seeking to allow one 3D-immersive strand of thought fade and another one brighten and take its place. In any case, you could do worse than start doing the exercises described in this comment [POST: [AMA Request] TriumphantGeorge].

Yeah, I've had to explain to three people so far that you can't literally change dimensions. People are saying to try jumping to a slightly better dimension, like for example one in which you have an extra $50 in your wallet. I don't understand how people think that you can really change dimensions just like that, but I guess if your superstitious you could fall for it since there's nothing to clarify the subreddit' purpose.

Indeed! There's no such thing as a "dimension" other than as a concept. Mind you, there's no such thing as "space" or "time" other than as concepts either (they are bad habits). You can't literally change dimension, but you can't literally move in (conceptual) time or space either. What you can do is leverage concepts to trigger a change in ongoing experience, in perhaps surprising ways. I don't think this subreddit actually has a purpose other than supporting personal experimentation into the limits of how experience can be changed. It doesn't even have a worldview other than maybe "experience = fact, results = truth". That's why the sidebar isn't prescriptive. So don't feel obligated to take on the burden of explaining things to people, I reckon; it's for them to explore the world on their own terms I think! In my own view, people shouldn't actually "believe" anything - including anything about themselves. Until we do an experiment, we don't know anything, we are just recycling thoughts.

POST: Need help with intended goal

As someone else said, Neville Goddard is full of good examples. Although unfortunately his language makes for obscure reading. Generally I'd concentrate on what you want rather than the mechanism. Do you actually want to go back in time, or do you want to join the armed forces without that incident being a problem? Surely it's the second!

Think: what's the actual experience you want to have, if it were happening around you now, that would mean you would have got what you wanted?

Random example:

Yesterday morning's mail brought me one, where, in San Francisco, this captain, a pilot, and he writes me that I saw him backstage after one of my meetings, and there he said, "But Neville, you are up against a stone wall. I am a trained pilot; I have gone all over the world, all over the seven seas; I'm a good pilot and I love the sea, not a thing in this world I want to do but go to sea; yet they restrict me to certain waters because of seniority. No matter what argument I give them the Union is adamant and they have closed the book on my request." I said, "I don't care what they have done, you are transferring the power that rightfully belongs to God, which is your own imagination, to the shadow you cast upon the screen of space.
"So here, we are in this room; need it remain a room? Can't you use your imagination to call this abridge. This is now a bridge and I am a guest on the bridge of your ship, and you are not in waters restricted by the Union; you are in waters that you desire to sail your ship. Now close your eyes and feel the rhythm of the ocean and feel with me and commune with me and tell me of your joy in first proving this principle. and secondly in being at sea where you want to be. He is now in Vancouver on a ship bringing a load of lumber down to Panama. He has a complete list that will take him through the year what this man has to do. He is going into waters legitimately that the Union said he could not go. This doesn't dispense with unions, but it does not put anyone in our place- -no one, kings, queens, presidents, generals, we take no one and enthrone him and put him beyond the power that rightfully belongs to God. So I will not violate the law but things will open that I will never devise.
-- Awakened Imagination, Neville Goddard

See the "letters example" in that document for what you might actually do, to focus your mind on what you want to achieve.

POST: Seriously, has anyone used this for romantic/hedonistic pursuits?

Oh look, is it...? Yes, it is...! It's that guy! ;-)

Well, the same applies to this as to everything else. Doing the Goddard type thing, the usual approach is that you come up with an experience (imagined 3d-immersively from a subjective point of view) that means things are working out well, and live from it. You could do that with celebrities and, taking it seriously, you could well end up with chance meetings and opportunities to get what you wanted (random job offer in LA, invited to a party, actress is there). Y'know, but most people don't really want those things, they wouldn't really commit to it, or follow through. Anyway, top tip because you don't want everyone to be your puppet: Think of everyone as if they are an "aspect of you" and so your ultimate aim is that everyone should be happy in the world. Because a world full of happy people is a happy world for you to be in. So when you, say, create "fake observations" in your mind that mean you and girl had a great time, the focus is on how great it is for both of you. (For instance, your "scene" might be talking to a friend at a cafe and talking about "what a great time she and I had together" rather than "I totally had that girl last night".)

Q1: Haha. Yeah I think it is about time I read on Mr. Goddard's books. Does the Power of Awareness suffice? Or is there more I could also expand on?
Ah I see. So it also helps that I help imagine a non-ego oriented imagining? Take it from her side of it too? Can one expand to what other people would observe, say those who would be watching us at the cafe?

There's nothing to it really, but yeah, check out that or the ones in the edit in the relevant post for a quick take. Just imagine it from your perspective, through your eyes, being there. What I was getting at is that the circumstances you are implying should be ones where everyone is happy and independently for the situation - i.e. that you and the girl were on the same wavelength, it's an equal situation, with no apparent manipulation or one-sidedness. Just as you'd like it to be, of course.

POST: Just stumbled accross this sub. Questions...

What proof is there of anything subjective except anecdotal? The only proof is to try something out, and satisfy yourself that either: a) there's something in it or, b) there isn't. A good comparison would be: lucid dreaming, or satori. They sound apparently unlikely, but if you actually pursue them you discover that apparent unlikeliness is no barrier to experience.

Well, dreams are probably not a very good example because almost everyone has dreams, we know that dreams are impulses in our brains, and we can control conscious thought so the stretch to controlling dreams isn't that far fetched. Satori seems like such a vague concept that trying to use it as an example doesn't strengthen the argument.

To be clear: I'm not making an argument, so I'm not intending to strengthen one. There is no argument that can be made for the existence of an experience.

However, lucid dreams are not a bad example, since it was argued very strongly for a long time that one could not be conscious within a dream. In retrospect we can say things like "we can control our thoughts so it makes sense we can control our dreams", but it was vehemently opposed at the time. Those who claimed the experience were dismissed, based on the theory of dreams at the time. (Although to this day we don't know what dreams are or indeed why we sleep at all. And "impulses in our brains" is not an explanation.)

Similarly, although satori is of course a vague concept, it is a concrete experience. It just cannot be captured in language; it cannot be described to someone who has not had the direct experience; it also cannot be anticipated from within a conceptual framework. So what I'm getting at here is: in general, you cannot use logic to make a judgement on the possibility of a novel subjective experience, you can only use it to explore a conceptual framework. Inevitably, without a novel intervention from outside of that framework, logic and argument lead you to the same actions, and hence to more of the same experiences. At best, you can use it to decide you don't care to know for certain one way or the other, that you aren't interested in exploring anything that has not already got a fully-developed narrative available for it.

From elsewhere:

My own guidelines are: experiences are real experiences; explanations are useful narratives. We must be careful not to treat the concepts we invent as actual things, even when they seem to work really well. Our observations are what define our stories, our stories don't define what it is possible to observe. That's why we should welcome different ideas, because fragments of them might be useful later on.

TriumphantGeorge, I think we have a negative nancy here. He is scared. It's cute. Do it or don't. What do you want? A perfect life? That is not this subreddit. If he finds one. We'll never know, now will we?

If we're being fair, his post does seem to present an open but skeptical mind, which is a good stance to take. And I think a lot of people, unknowingly, want to be sure there is an explanation in place for something before they allow themselves to try (not realising that science or any avenue of study has always been based on the idea that observations take priority over theories). So perhaps he should be scared - because absolutely anything could potentially happen! ;-)

Q1: No shunning here, friend. I'm just going to say that all "logic" is subjective and basically amounts to theory... that includes modern science (which is more a less an ever evolving belief system). And quite honestly, the more you really dig at the heart of any matter, you will find that damn near everything is anecdotal. Not sure what proof you're really looking for. The best way for you to prove it for yourself is to give it a heart-felt try and see if works for you. That's the only way you're going to know.

Q2: Glad to see level headed responses. Think this whole thing is a bit too philosophical for me but I agree, when it comes down to it everything 'known' is really just believed. I'll leave you guys be and who knows, maybe even see you on the other side. :)

Yeah, something like "applied philosophy/metaphysics" is probably not a bad summary of what this is about. Anyway, welcome anytime. Watch out for the owls...

POST: How my mother used the Just Decide Technique and got the result she wanted in 20 days.

Yeah, it's fun eh?

The more you do this stuff, the more you'll find that "other people" are telling you how they are doing it too...

It's not solipsism or co-creation though. Solipsism implies that you are the only person. But really you are not even a person. Co-creation implies that there are multiple contributors to your perspective, but this is not the case. Actually, you are the whole world (or at least: a version of the whole world is in you-as-consciousness) but are looking out from one apparent perspective. The "other people" and "you-as-person" are aspects of this world, parts of its continuous pattern, all arising within your consciousness. But what about multiplicity? Multiple conscious beings having their own experiences? Is there no overlap?

We tend to think that the world is shared in a simple way: like a spatial environment that is unfolding in time, such that we are all seeing the same place at the same time. But it's more like every being is a conscious space, selecting into themselves the patterns they like from a "toy box" which contains all the possible experiences of being-a-person-in-a-world. That way, every being can be having a different experience and be overlapping, albeit indirectly.

(In truth, when you follow this to the end, consciousness is indistinguishable so there's only one consciousness, with a multiplicity of experiences which cannot be described because it is "before" time and space. Unfortunately though, because our thinking is of a 'shadow-sensory' form, we end up having to use spatial and temporal metaphors to talk about it.)

Anyway, the final result is still that: you have control over your own "private copy" because you choose, explicitly or implicitly, what set of patterns you have triggered into brightness, what facts-of-the-world you are allowing to contribution to your ongoing experience.

EDIT: Fixed paragraphs, changed phrases, reformatted for clarity.

I've covered it a bit elsewhere - see the above comment as an example - but let's go with this, and see where you would agree and where you wouldn't.

It'll be a bit of a ramble but - onwards... EDIT: Sorry, it really was.

Parts and Relations

The truth is there is no way to talk about this in language. Immediately when we try to talk or think about this, we have to invoke a spatial metaphor, because to think of something we have to have a concept consisting of parts, and arrange those parts relative to one another. But consciousness doesn't have parts - or spatial extent or temporal relationship - those are aspects of an experience. So as soon as we conceptualise this situation, we're wrong. Because the thinking of it is a structured experience, and this is "before" experience. It is evident from direct introspection that consciousness has no properties of itself; there can be no "two" consciousness(es). We can come up with a label "consciousness" and imagine that there are parts which are related to one another, but they are not. That's just a diagram in our mind. No matter how we approach this, it's incorrect. Conscious spaces do not exist in anything since there is no outside, because it is "before" division; and there is only one or actually not even, because it is "before" multiplicity.

Again: it is literally not possible to think about this. It cannot be represented, because it is that which takes on the shape of experiences, and representations are just more experiences. However, we can use a metaphor which at least breaks some of the usual assumptions, and so...

Sharing without Space and Time

In an attempt to avoid using time and space as the framework in which we relate perspectives, I use this picture:

• The world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". We are not people sharing an environment.
• We are "that which has experiences", basically conscious spaces which take on the shape of the experience we are having.
• There is no temporal or spatial relationship between conscious spaces.
• Instead, the world can be thought of as a collection of all possible patterns. It is more like a shared resource than a place.
• So the sense in which we "overlap" is in the format of the experiences we have; the shared subset of patterns.
• This means that our ongoing experience is more like the associative traversal of a memory block. It's a strand of thought about being a person in a world - rather than actually being a person in a world.

When you tie this up with the fact there is only one consciousness, that the conscious space you are right now is the only one there is, that the has no boundaries and there is nothing else, you realise there is no outside of this. However, although there is no "outside", there can be a very detailed "inside". The relationship we can potentially talk about is shared patterns, even though we cannot talk about relations in a time or space context. Right now you are "God" of this copy of the world - and so is everyone else of their copies - and they don't clash! So this is not solipsism because it is not personal and "everyone else" is in the same situation (or one consciousness is in lots of situations, whatever).

Why Bother?

Why bother with all this? If it wasn't required we wouldn't bother, and most people can just ignore it. But...

If you experiment a little, the fact is that your world does not behave like a co-created place. You can wake up tomorrow and everything has shifted, including people you know, and it will "always have been that way". Facts can completely change and "always have been that way". Your world actually behaves as if it is one continuous pattern - your pattern, dissolved in consciousness - which includes the apparent properties of "you-as-person" and "other people", a pattern that responds to your intention in an unrestricted manner. So this gives us a way to conceptualise that, while avoiding misleading metaphors. It's not like "private views" are a new idea of course - QBism, as a recent example, uses it to describe the subjectivity of quantum physics. The tricky step is realising that there is no objective world - no CPU - that links or synchronises the subjective worlds, and that in effect there is just one subjective experiencer.

TL;DR: Solipsism is actually meaningless in this context. The world is best thought of as a resource, rather than a place.

Is it possible for there to be a concept such as 1+1=2, that exists before experience?

They exist purely within experience. You can use such abstractions to create a narrative about experience (within experience), but it is meaningless to say they exist "before" experience. (I use "before" in quotes because, of course, there is no such thing.)

What I mean by within experience -

It's tempting to think of the bright 3D-immersive sensory element (a "scene") in experience to be "the world" and somehow everything else is behind the scenes - but there is no behind the scenes. It's all present but dissolved, being experienced now. Metaphor: like the sun in the daytime sky, where the stars are still there but obscured; it's a matter of relative brightness. Layers of patterns, some of which are shining through into prominence. So we do end up with a situation where our experience is "formatted" and structured, depending on what level of prominance certain patterns have, and hence our narratives within experience will also be so-formatted. (The senses, objects separation, spatial extent, all arise-with particular scenes, for instance.) And at the limit, we might imagine that the format of narrative approaches the more simple patterns of experience. But that again is part of experience and it is only "about" partitioned experiencing; the narrative cannot accurately describe the formatting.

Meanwhile, things like the global background felt-sense, which could be said to be the direct experience of the current state, can't be given that narrative. And of course "unformatted consciousness" itself - which was what we were focusing on before - cannot be conceptualised at all. You can only be it.

To summarise -

• Mathematical concepts are within experience (being thoughts, this is so by definition), and any "formatting" to which it refers is part of experience too.
• It's the "sandbox" problem. You can make shapes in the sand which represent other shapes in the sand, but you cannot make a shape which represents sand or the sandbox itself.

EDIT: Relinking: I like this N. David Mermin article on reification of abstractions, although it's a bit physicsy for some. It's good at marking out the difference between (direct) experience and narrative, in the context of creating and using theories.

Q2: Every act of magic that get a result follows the same template:
Decide what result you want Equate an act, any act, with the result Perform the act Get result
You don't need to enter into any fancy state of mind. Forgetting about the working does help. It's so incredibly easy and simple that people usually tend to complicate it to no end.

It's true you don't need to enter a state of mind - any declaration of fact, explicit or implicit, has effect - but the more 'surrendered' you are, the more completely things can shift, and the more efficiently the result can appear. Which is why metaphors are useful; they provide "plausible paths" for things to arise that are beyond the norm. But yes, it's super-simple. Unfortunately it inherently doesn't "make sense" though (it's "before" conceptual frameworks), so people generally need some sort of outlook to hang it on. So long as you choose a very flexible and abstract one, it's okay.

The dimensional jumping idea in itself is extremely interesting because it breaks you out of causality even more, since things that already are can become different.

Yes, you’ve totally nailed this - that’s exactly the point of it.

Pretty much every other methodology makes the assumption that what I call Observation Accumulation is irreversible. In other words, that new observations must always be consistent with prior observations - so that the world always “makes sense”. That you can only shift parts of the world-pattern that you haven't "seen" yet, because the parts you have seen are now "defined". However, this is an overstatement of the Law of Coherence - which in fact only states that the world-pattern must be self-consistent at any particular moment (which follows because it is a single continuous pattern). It doesn’t say that the next moment-state necessarily needs to be consistent with all previous moment-states. So: the world-pattern can shift as a whole and coherence is still fufilled. Dimensional jumping and its metaphors say that there are no external laws enforcing the persistence of prior observations; the basic version of the Law of Coherence is the only law that applies. Established facts don't change because... you don't allow them to or you don't even make the attempt. Anyway, this means that we can assert things in order to:

• Effectively “re-observe” prior observations and correct the associated “facts”.
• Create new "fake" observations and have them count as “facts”.

And the world-pattern will shift coherently, meaning that all subsequent observations will be consistent with its new state. The main problem for people is that committing to this involves throwing away (or better: just not thinking about) their usual way of conceiving of the world: it is no longer a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" that we all share; it's a "shared resource" of possible patterns that we individually select and trigger into our conscious perspectives, as a "private view".

....

Can someone explain this method?

It's what's underneath everything: declaring that something is a fact, and the world unfolds "as if" that were true.

(Taking the mother's perspective:) In this case, his mother - believing in a "soul" - sends it out to do her work for her. Implicitly, she has decided that performing that act means-that her situation will be resolved. Her world shifts accordingly. This works in the same way as the Two Glasses Exercise works by implicitly deciding (asserting) that transferring the water shifts the state. By making that decision, you are literally connecting the situation to the water, and by pouring it you are literally updating your world.

...

What did that mean order your soul? What exactly did she do?

I imagine she just said, "soul, go out and sort things out for me!". Subsequently, she had an experience "as if" such a thing existed, and that it sorted things out.

POST: Relationship of D Jumping to the Law of Attraction

Well basically everything is based on the same thing. The law of attraction is pretty much just a very unstructured way of trying to use patterning to make changes; it doesn't have much of a metaphor or philosophy underlying it other than the vague concept of "attraction" (which I'd say actually gets in the way of a good description).

Like all things of that ilk it roughly boils down to:

• detachment
• mental/physical act + intention = state modification
• subsequent appearance in sensory experience

But the devil's in the details. The underlying concept of this subreddit is, it's recognised that the implicit or explicit adoption of a metaphor is itself a formatting of experience; metaphors are "active". And this is because all of experience arises from a patterning of consciousness (see: philosophical idealism, nondualism). Importantly, this means we can arbitrarily assign meaning to things and have experiences arise "as if" it were the case. None of this necessarily matters in order to use a technique to get some result, but formatting yourself with an appropriate metaphor in effect defines new "plausible paths" by which results an occur - and it also gives you the possibility of "knowing what you are doing". The confusion associated with LOA is because it has no solid framework. In /r/DimensionalJumping, we realise that frameworks are arbitrary. We take a super-flexible, low-level one ("patterning") as the basic foundation. Everything beyond that can be chosen according to usefulness and elegance, as the situation dictates.

See: The Patterning of Experience and the other key posts listed in the sticky.

POST: Musings about the nature of reality

EDIT: This is a bit meandering too. Still, why not eh? Be good to kick off some discussion. Usual caveat: add an imaginary "as I think of it..." in front of everything.

Making changes to our own 'reality' must affect 'source.'

That's a nice phrase. It points out something vital: you don't change your experience by messing around with it on its own terms. You don't move your arm by messing around with your body sensations; you do so by intending a new position. You don't change your circumstances by wrestling with your sensory imagery; you do so by asserting a change in some way.

On the other stuff...

Dimensions, Moments, 'Reality'

So, I think it's probably important to emphasise that you can use any model you want (and I like some of the imagery you used there), but it's also important to emphasise that none of them are "how it is really". Even in quite fundamental ways, such as the idea that there is a continuous space, that time unfolds, other than your experiencing of it. At least not in the way that you experience it. The fundamental truth it is: there is nothing "happening" other than the experience you're having now, in the way that you are having it. This is literally unthinkable though. However, realising this can save us wrestling with trying to "work it all out" - that is the equivalent of trying to see the bottom of a pool by splashing the water. Then we are free to use whatever attracts us.

Patterns like the Infinite Grid are useful because they break the notion that you are a body, in a world that is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", giving you a taste of the "true" situation, but still give you a fun structure to play with. But of course, you can just as well take on the idea that you are a body walking around in a 3D-world which behaves like a very flexible dream, responding to your intentions. It's a case of: whatever works, whatever you like. But none of it is "true" in a deep sense, at the "source". There are no dimensions, worlds, paranormal entities, all that, in a deeper sense. All experience is, in effect, "imagined" or recalled from a large resource of possible thoughts.

The true situation is, traditionally speaking:

• There is The Absolute, which has no divisions and never changes. Everything is in it and yet it is nothing (like all possible shapes are there, but presently balanced by their opposite, which are of course also there). It is All Creation. This is what is real about your experience: this is reality.
• There is The Relative, this is where one shape is emphasised relative to another, resulting in the apparent existence of objects and of change. This is what is illusory about your experience. This is often referred to as a "projection", to capture the idea of a movie projector (The Absolute, containing all frames) and a screen (The Relative, the display or emphasising one frame at a time).
• The two are one and the same thing. Nothing is ever created, it is only emphasised. All relative content is an illusion.

That's where things like The Imagination Room come from: an emphasis that there is nothing other than your "perceptual space" emphasising different shapes versus others. In a way, it's like the "world is a dream" metaphor but with a bit more structure. But practically speaking, and for enjoyment, just operating as (say) a conscious space with patterns dissolved in it is not particularly exciting. It's something to know, and flexibility is something to know, but that is meant to be freeing, rather than a new sort of burden.

But what does this say about manipulating reality?

Well, reality can't be manipulated; it's already been created in its entirety and it never changes. All we can do is select from it. But this is great, because it means if we can think something, then it already "exists", and it can be brought into experience in some way. I say "some way" because, inevitably, to transition from one state to another, requires you to let go of things as they are now. To get to a standing position you have to let go of being-sat-down. To get to other states, you might have to let go of your usual notions of time, or your ideas about cause and effect, other people, and so on. You might not always like the idea of doing that. That's the "price" you pay. In effect - if you ponder it - the more extreme the change, the more you have to let go of your humanity a little, and of the idea of your world being a "place" rather than just a series of images within consciousness.

Why is there not just always instant change? Why are there apparent collateral changes?

Because you are not completely 'fresh'. Metaphorically speaking, you have layers and layers of patterns activated right now, which are structuring your ongoing experience. None of the "facts" of your world-pattern (the selected aspects of The Absolute that are contributing to your Relative experience) stand alone; they only have meaning due to their entanglement with all their associations. Even your concept of "people" and of "memory", of the idea that there is a stable "past", all operate as drags on how your intentions eventually become visible in experience. They contribute from the moment you have them, but are immediately entangled with all that other stuff, and they only "shine though" when an appropriate context becomes available; when the clouds part briefly. Meditation and releasing and detachment are about letting the clouds dissipate, for faster results. But all this is a good thing. Would you really want to have an existence which literally consists of your thoughts immediately persisting as 3D-immersive environments, as your "reality"? Basically, a dream with absolutely no inertia?

The 'sluggishness' that we experience in certain directions is a benefit more than it is an obstacle. For example, our experience tends to be continuous and make logical sense, and the things we done so far tend to persist rather than need constantly reactivated.

POST: Philosophy and Dimensional Jumping

It's not a bad line of thought, that. Although the underlying philosophy is probably more based on Berkeley, Kant plus non-dualism, those lack a well-defined notion of choice and freedom which Sartre provides. If we take his "in-itself" and "of-itself" and see them as one and the same, and his "radical freedom" as therefore applying to experiencing itself rather than the given content, then that's definitely one way to look at it. (With apologies for rustiness and maybe slightly misusing terms.)

As a separate thing: I do think that philosophy can sometimes lead to complex ways to circle around "that which cannot be described" without ever getting there (fair enough: because we're trying to describe "the thing that experiences and descriptions are made from"), so although I love it, I've kind of stepped back from it more recently - thinking that in the end simpler models, ones which can be adopted as immersive metaphors and more easily tested out subjectively, are probably better for actually making progress "in real life".

EDIT: But of course, without the philosophy to start with, you can't make the models!

Q1: When you say "in-itself" and "of-itself" are you referring to Kant's "a-priori" and "a-posteriori" distinctions?
This always reminded me of the Platonic theory of forms (the reality of the form versus its mere appearance - very Brahma/Maya here IMHO). I'm sure that it is much more nuanced than I have articulated it.

That's Sartre-speak, but I pretty much believe that all of these strands of philosophy were an attempt to capture the same thing (which make sense right?). Mostly, wrestling with the idea that The Absolute takes on the shape of The Relative, and they are one and the same - like a blanket of material whose only property is "awareness" experiencing folds within itself. (The "patterning model" I use here sometimes is another version of the same: eternal patterns which vary only in their relative intensity, their "brightness" dictating how much each contributes to experience, the overall distribution constituting a "world".)

I like to think of it like Moire fringes. If all possible patterns are latent in the background (a blanket of material which can take on any shape), then triggering one pattern, "A" (a set of folds in the blanket), and then triggering another pattern, "B", doesn't take up any more space - you still end up with "a pattern", "C". You've still got exactly the same material shaped into a single pattern, just a more complex set of folds.

...

Good note. Hinduism is rich in stories which point to the fundamental (awareness/being/experiencing) vs relative truth (content/state/dimensions), and they're much clearer than the Christian parables. Favourite:

Narada, Vishnu and Maya
In Devi Bhagwata Purana, it is mentioned that once Narada asked Vishnu about the secret nature of Maya (Illusion).
“What is Maya?” asked Narada.
“The world is my Maya. He who accepts this, realizes me,” said Vishnu.
“Before I explain, will you fetch me some water?” requested the Lord pointing to a river.
Narada did as he was told. But on his way back, he saw a beautiful woman. Smitten by her beauty, he begged the woman to marry him. She agreed.
Narada built a house for his wife on the banks of the river. She bore him many children. Loved by his wife, adored by his sons and daughters, Narada forgot all about his mission to fetch water for Vishnu.
In time, Narada’s children had children of their own. Surrounded by his grandchildren, Narada felt happy and secure. Nothing could go wrong.
Suddenly, dark clouds enveloped the sky. There was thunder, lightning, and rain. The river overflowed, broke its banks and washed away Narada’s house, drowning everyone he loved, everything he possessed. Narada himself was swept away by the river.
“Help, help. Somebody please help me,” he cried. Vishnu immediately stretched out his hand and pulled Narada out of the water.
Back in Vaikuntha, Vishnu asked, “Where is my water?”
“How can you be so remorseless? How can you ask me for water when I have lost my entire family?”
Vishnu smiled. “Calm down, Narada. Tell me, where did your family come from? From Me. I am the only reality, the only entity in the cosmos that is eternal and unchanging. Everything else is an illusion – a mirage, constantly slipping out of one’s grasp.”
“You, my greatest devotee, knew that. Yet, enchanted by the pleasures of worldly life, you forgot all about me. You deluded yourself into believing that your world and your life were all that mattered and nothing else was of any consequence. As per your perspective, the material world was infallible, invulnerable, perfect. That is Maya.”
Thus Vishnu dispelled Narada’s illusion, bringing him back to the realm of reality and making him comprehend the power of Maya over man.

...Great eh? Now look around the room you are in, and realise your true situation at this very moment...

...

It's quite nice, isn't it? It brings you back to the simplicity of actual experience, rather than the tangle that thoughts about it can become. When it comes to searching esoteric texts for explanations, my general advice is: don't. You just end up in a synchronicity whirlwind, because every path you take apparently opens up a right seam of connections and evidence. But really: there are no deep underlying reasons for experiences. What I'd do if you've had a complicated experience - put it aside for a week, leave it alone. Then, after that, right down what you literally experienced, stripped of any interpretations or explanations. Literally: I saw this, then this happened, then that happened. And take it from there. Who knows what insights you might uncover for yourself? Please don't interpret me as being dismissive on that score. You will likely uncover things which are subjectively meaningful, within yourself. However, I think you can't go wrong with standing back and starting with a basic account of the observations, as it were, before doing the interpretation or model-building.

Random thoughts -

My own position is that experiential content is just that: content. It only has meaning relative to itself, and it has no fundamental meaning. The metaphysical truth is content-independent. And the fundamental truth is known only by direct experience, and cannot be conceptualised at all. Experiences are just experiences, no matter how amazing. Their benefit is that they point to the arbitrariness of the content of experience. If things shift and change a lot, eventually you twig that: hey, all that ever happens is more dream! It never ends, and I never really get any deeper into it. Every door opened generates a new landscape, every dig uncovers more fossils, every time I go looking for an explanation, I find one... plus more questions. It goes on forever, so The Answer can't be within the content of experience.

...Well, I keep good company apparently! But there's no good way to say it, really, although I do think modern metaphorical language can offer more streamlined descriptions because we've got access to a richer set of abstractions (or so it seems to us, anyway). Mathematics is the ultimate language for describing abstract relationships - i.e. patterns - for instance. Shapes without substrates, objects which don't take up any space and be simultaneously existent and non-existent, in perfect balance. Etc.

...Do it. The reason it got removed was because: a) it was very hard to follow and, b) it didn't seem to be about an intentional shift, which is what this subreddit is really about. (There are other subreddits for reporting spontaneous strange experiences.)

As I say in the other comment, if I were you I'd not bother with the research right now, not until you've settled out a bit - you'll just end up with a whole load of self-referencing synchronicities. Take some time out from it, then return to it with a fresh mind.

POST: Is it possible to jump without using any of the techniques?

All the "techniques" take the form of performing a mental or physical "act" with the intention that it means-that something is true (a fact, or a future situation). There actually is no technique for intending; one simply asserts, but that's impossible to describe and you can't "try" to do it, so the misdirection of an act is helpful. Practically speaking, there's probably always something that can be interpreted as an "act". Meanwhile, the majority of people are constantly re-asserting their current state. For instance, most people continually re-trigger their current physical position, which is why movement has a sense of effort or overcoming a hurdle: they are simultaneously intending being-sat-downl and being-stood-up, for example. This is why some trick which leads to "detachment" is included. So you can indeed apply the formula directly, without a technique:

• Act + Intention + Detachment = Shift
• Assigning a meaning to an act is what gives it causal power.
• Assigning a meaning to any experience can give it causal power.

In your case, the "focus on my belief system" will be the act, and the "change that I want" would be the intention. As with the owls exercise you will get some results simply by focusing on your belief system (the pattern activation will make it contribute to your experience more prominently), but having the deliberate intention with it will make the difference. And you have to complete the bargain (as it were) by surrendering to whatever shifts arise.

Basically: experiment.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean by detachment?

In general terms: ceasing to oppose spontaneous movements in the world / allowing shifts to occur without interference. To give you a direct example right now:

READ: If you're sat down, pause a moment, and let go of your attention, let yourself become aware of the background space in your body and in the room around you. Now, just "decide' that you are going to stand up, but don't do anything deliberate about it. Let whatever's going to happen, happen, and be okay with it.

NOW DO IT BEFORE CONTINUING.

What happened? Did your body stand up "by itself"? Or did you feel something happening and you halted it? Or did you feel yourself sitting "more intensely" than before, and no standing?

I felt something akin to the urge to stand up, or the expectation of me standing up shortly, but I never made it there. Is it possible this is what's holding me back? How might I get better at it?

It's not so much you get better at it - there's nothing to get better at in terms of the intending side - but you stop obstructing it. What you are probably doing is continually asserting and re-triggering your current state as the starting point for a movement. Take a moment to try this out and see if it make sense. Sit down somewhere again, and this time you are going to get up as you normally do, but paying attention to what actually happens. Stand up. Did you do this by shifting your mind to the state of being-stood-up and your body followed, or did you in fact begin by "finding your body" - basically, looking for the being-sat-down state - and then beginning from that point?

Two things to play with:

1. Taking this phrase in mind: "release into the movement", try intending standing again.
2. Centre your attention in your forehead, withdrawing your "presence" from the rest of your body (this prevents you triggering states). Try intending standing again.

Once you've had the experience, it all makes more sense, the whole "states" thing and so on.

Would a deprivation chamber be considered, in your opinion, lack of re-assertion of a current state? You wouldn't really have the Act+Intention+Detachment=Shift paradigm at work, though perhaps Detachment may be entailed. Or am I completely misunderstanding? Thanks.

It's a possible route, but having done floaty tanks ages ago (although before developing this view) I don't think it's necessarily any better than lying on the floor and giving up your attention. You can be in a tank and still be held onto, if not your body arrangement, then still the sensation of location and world. Isolation from input isn't the problem, it's an attentional thing. There's also an issue that you are not necessarily fully supported, in the sense that you are on the floor. The water accommodates your distribution of muscular tension, because it doesn't imposed any particular position on your. If you like down in the constructive rest position, then gravity imposes a release and your body, mind, attention feels more comfortable with releasing.

Having said that, floating is very pleasant and it's probably a great environment to experiment. I keep meaning to go back to it.

POST: i only just read about dimensional jumping. is this stuff real ?

Well, it's not the sci-fi type concept that you might be thinking about (although "other realms are available"). But let's just say that your apparent world is a little more "flexible" than you might have assumed, and isn't of the same form you have probably assumed. Maybe start off by creating some owls, then do the The Glasses Exercise, just to convince yourself there's "something going on", and take it from there.

I see it as occultism for people who don't actually want to put the mental effort into occultism.

I dunno, at its best I'd say it's more like the "Reality 101" lesson that nobody got given at school. It's how stuff works anyway; you're just noticing what you've been doing accidentally all along. Many occultists seem to have swapped one hardline worldview for another, too busy pissing around with the content of experience to have spent time getting to grips with what the nature of experience is. (Chaos magick looked interesting at one point, but it got bogged down in its own ideas about "beliefs", and never really fulfilled its initial promise I think.) I think the deeper ideas in this subreddit have the potential to connect these two things together, while avoiding the arrogance and snobbery that plagues the followers of other approaches.

I do however believe that alternate realities do exist and that eventually when technology permits, we might actually be able to jump and record events in other realities.

I have to say, I don't think that will ever happen, in an objective way, if you're imagining something like portals opening and people walking between places - unless you're thinking of Contact (you have an experience and come back, but physically you went nowhere and there's no trace in "this" reality). I don't think realities are "places" at all really, except (using the bad metaphor) in the sense that a video game environment is a "place".

Until an actual physicist comes out and proves or even explain how something like this could be possible...

That kinda misses the point though, maybe?

The whole underlying basis of this sort of thing is the nature of observation itself. It's more a metaphysical or philosophical issue (the nature of consciousness and our experiences of the world) than a scientific one (observing regularities in the content of our experiences of the world and building models). You can only do subjective experiments on the subjective experience, not objective ones. Science is "inside" subjective experience; you can't really do objective experiments on it. Although maybe theories like QBism might one day provide a framework to use to describe subjective viewpoints. (QBism says, in effect, we each have a "private view" of reality.)

[Excuse length, but I think it's worth spending time trying to clarity this, and see if we can reach an agreement in this area.]

Sciencing the Shit Out Of Reality

I agree with this, but then if something can't actually be recorded and measured, how do you know you are really experiencing it?

You are "really experiencing" everything that you experience - it's your interpretation of it that's up for grabs. But interpretations are essentially connective fictions anyway...

We have to be careful here: many popular science enthusiasts have reversed the idea in their thinking of what lies behind the process. In science, observations are primary; they are the only thing that is "real". The conceptual frameworks that we use to link those observations, are constructed narratives.

• Observations dictate what models are valid.
• Models do not dictate what observations are valid.

Science does not seek to find what is true. It's basically an endeavour to find useful descriptions which have predictive power. As a result, it limits itself to:

• Observed regularities - i.e. subjectively experienced patterns which noticeably repeat and are relatively easy to distinguish.
• Observations which leave a trace which can itself be repeatedly observed later, by multiple observers.
• Observations which can be captured as descriptions - in practice, this restricts us to visual observations as the end result.

And there is further filtering:

• Observations which can be defined in terms of presently available conceptual frameworks - this has narrowing effect, and can lead people to take the view that if something doesn't fall within the current framework, it is not "possible".
• Observations which be intersubjectively agreed upon - this has the effect of being lowest common denominator, in the sense that any observer-dependent aspects of reality are filtered out. By definition, only the most basic common aspects of the world experience can be included.

All together, this means that science does not deal with reality or the world as it is or that which is experienced - it's dealing with a very specific subset and for a very specific purpose. Science's purpose is calculation rather than understanding or meaning. It is very good at that - but it's important not to confuse it with "how things work or what things are".

Experiencing vs Really Experiencing

And so, returning to your question:

if something can't actually be recorded and measured, how do you know you are really experiencing it?

You know you are experiencing it, because you are experiencing it - it is directly and immediately true. In fact, observations are the only things that ever truly "happen". On the other hand, you cannot know if you have experienced something in the past. Mainly because there is no such thing as "the past". All you can ever do is have an experience, now, of a shadow-sensory object that you call "a memory". This applies even to what you see around you in the world. It is an act of "narrative faith" to assume the world is stable, and that external records are trustworthy as regards indicating a thing we call the past. That we tend to trust the "world's memory" more than our "personal memory" - even though both are merely present moment subjective experiences which arise in your mind which, upon investigation, basically come from "nowhere" - is a matter of convention and hope, and not much more.

The Mandela Effect & Friends

Well, let me be upfront and say I'm not a particular fan of the discussions which hang off that whole Berents#in Bears thing. As you rightly point out, practically speaking it would be very difficult to discern whether one's "personal memory" has shifted, or if the "world memory" has shifted. All you can be certain of, is that there is a discrepancy between the two. And since it's already happened, there's no much point in theorising about the cause. Nothing is "more likely" than another thing, if you can't test it. We are really just saying "seems more plausible to me", which is different. If you wanted to truly test for certain whether there is some sort of effect, you would have to attempt to bring it about deliberately, and observe the results. In short, you would have to perform an experiment.

Subjective Experimentation

I really don't think a human could DJ without some kind of technology involved, its all made up but its still neat to read.

So, the way to find out whether that was true or not, would be to conduct an experiment and see what effects arose, right?

However, the in-built problem with this would be that you might only ever be able to prove it to yourself. The very nature of an experiment where you attempt to shift your experience of reality, would be that it might not be open to intersubjective study. Of particular difficulty is that it's inherently the case that there is no mechanism to study. If the whole of reality shifts a little, then there is no "one part" which cab be observed pushing against "another part". The end result is always going to be of the form:

• Perform some mental or physical act.
• Observe whether the world as it is now, differs from the world as it was (as I recall it).

But such a change in the world takes the form:

• World Memory =/= Personal Memory

It is never possible to tell whether the World Memory changed state such that it's now as I desired it to be, or if my Personal Memory changed state such that it seems that the world shifted towards my desire. However... That doesn't matter, practically speaking.

Thinking More About Doing

In terms of not believing that thought (really: intention) can shift the world, you might try raising your arm. Then really pay attention to what you experiencing happening when you do this. How, exactly, do you change the position of your arm? (Really do this, it's quite informative.)

Do you feel yourself "using your brain" to do it? How did people lift their arms before brains were discovered?

In fact: aren't brains actually just a subjective observation? In other words, doesn't it seem that brains are inside experience, and they do not cause it? If I had a lucid dream where I was being operated on, and surgeons were prodding my brain and then my arm was moving - in what sense would my experience of seeing the surgeons' actions be linked to my subsequent experience of arm movement?

You get the idea.

POST: I think that it is possible to jump dimensions without knowing it for a long time, if ever.

If we were to take the view that our experiences consist entirely of "aspects of ourselves", this would mean that every time we had a change of state the (apparent) world would shift a little. "Jumping" is then just a knowingly deliberate and specific version of something that is in fact happening constantly, to some extent. Ponders: if we are always in effect exploring our own minds, what does it mean to "make our minds up"?

That is interesting. Do you then think that it is possible that we have the power to shape reality, albeit subconsciously? It seems unlikely, but perhaps it is possible.

It's an important question, and one that can't really be answered by thinking it out, I'd say. Since reality for us is our experiences - any theories we have are also experiences (of thinking) - it's not like we can ever get outside of it and do experiments on it; there is no "outside" to experience. So I think all you can do is conduct personal experiments, and see how your experience of the world changes as a result, and infer things from that. Really, that's what this subreddit is about. Other places discuss the philosophy of experience (/r/onierosophy) or report spontaneous unusual experiences (/r/glitch_in_the_matrix), here the idea is that you don't believe anything in particular, you explore things for yourself by deliberate, direct experimentation and see what happens. The overarching concept is that is that of "active metaphors", which is to say that the metaphors you adopt tend to shape your experiences "as if" they were true, and soften the paths of change in that direction. It is a "content agnostic" view, which says there is no fundamental truth, there is just experiences "as if" things were true. How far can that go? Well, finding that out is the source of the adventure!

That's where things like the Two Glasses Exercise come in: simple ways to check for yourself whether an apparently non-causal change can be made, by pattern shifting alone.

Q1: About a week ago I noticed that there was a path of bricks across a grass lawn at the local university that I don't think was there, but I very well could have just not noticed it until now.
Heh. That is what you are supposed to think. These things just sneak into reality. I have an entire city reshaping itself (or being reshaped) all around me. Land sort of just grows when you are not looking, but it comes with a history. Roads widen, shrubberies show up, etc. Campuses are especially suspect for me. Also look for roads which used to be straight but are now crooked and signs of places where the ground has risen.

It is true, things do apparently "sneak". However, I would recommend that people be reasonably mindful when it comes to this: when we step back and allow things to autofill with less direction, it does become more dreamlike, but with that there's a temptation people have to think that it is being done or managed externally. This becomes a self-fulfilling path, generating "as if" evidence for itself, that gets some people into trouble; they got lost in it for a while. Fortunately it doesn't take much experimentation to realise that it's a "dumb" patterning process, effectively an "autocomplete" using currently active elements, that can be directed by intention.

Some of it is automatic. Some of it is being intentionally manipulated.

Uh-huh, right. And recognising the intentional part, doing it knowingly, is what's important (and makes it clearer, though experience, the nature of the experience more generally). Oh, I did mean to say, that I like this wording very much:

Land sort of just grows when you are not looking, but it comes with a history.

I'd maybe tweak it up to say: "but it comes with an apparent history" - which is revealed in subsequent experiences "about" its past, although these experience take place in the ongoing present.

Yeah. That is actually really important. It turns out that the present is not caused by the past. Rather, whatever present you are in at any given moment causes its own past.

You might phrase it as: the story is discovered as you go along, at the moment of discovery, implied by the current patterns.

For example, (0) a new tree appears in my garden. (1) I go to examine it, it seems large and old. (2) I ask the neighbours about it, it's always been there, they say, and rumour has it the tree was planted by the guy who built the house. (3) I look up old photographs of the house, and there's one of the original owner planting it. It seems like I've moved to a "new reality" where a tree has been there for 100 years. In actual fact, this history is 'created', observation by observation, as I uncover it: observations 1, 2, 3. First, there was just one observation 0, the new tree. That was the only change. However, my subsequent observations must be coherent with what came before, hence the apparent history I uncover, as the observations accumulate. In other words, there was no defined history until I went looking for it.

...

...Well, if it that's a narrative that you enjoy and find meaningful, then you're right to pursue it. (And I'd apply that view to everyone. "There are no answers, only choices.")

Personally though - inevitably our perspectives will differ here, but that is of course part of the fun - I don't think "space-time" needs healed, because it is not a thing. There is an argument for helping people "heal" though, in terms of resolving difficulties and so on (from which improvements in "space-time" generally follow).

...

A1: What is reality? Is it a piece of paper? Fold it. What is reality? Is it clay? Shape it. You have the ability to form reality around you, you do it all the time. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every time you touch the water, a wave will form. Touch life with the intent to shape the wave you want to see.

"Go shape yourself!"

POST: Has anyone noticed BIG changes? Changes that can't really be explained away because they are too BIG?

Perhaps the trick with so-called dimensional jumping is to retain your memory after a particular jump?

Keeping one bit of the world fixed, while the rest changes. Really, we never experience "the past", right? Rather, we just have observations (discoveries and thoughts) which are "about" the past, which imply a history but are not a history. Basically, anything other than what we directly observe is a fictional narrative that connects the dots. The past exists as a story, not as a place as such.

There's a lot of established science and common sense saying that this is "all in our heads".

Although they don't go far enough, perhaps. It really is in our heads - all of it, not just any quirky observations that don't match. Plot Twist - Our heads are in our heads too. But at same time we, don't really have a head, so much as a "head" - i.e. all of our heads are conceptual.

Funny, that; you've just described my concept of God and the universe.

Well, that's pretty much where we get to, isn't it? Quite excitingly, I think. Right this very moment, you can easily notice that what you actually experience yourself being, is a "big open unbounded space that is aware". Within this space, sensations and perceptions arise: your body and the world. Meanwhile, all possible experiences are "dissolve into the background" of this space: the universe. So "the universe" becomes all the content dissolved inside you. You-as-the-space are "God". It just so happens that right now you are "taking on the shape of" a particular experience, which is being-a-person-in-the-world. (More accurately: being-a-universe-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.)

The main step forward, I say, is to stop confusing the current content of experience with the true nature of experiencing. Does that fit in with your take on things?

Q1: Had a vision, once. Pretty ordinary circumstances: hanging out in my then-apartment with a friend, smoked about half a joint which to me was about the equivalent of drinking a Pepsi in terms of effect, and suddenly saw Everything. Needless to say, I can't "remember" it, couldn't even at the time, because what I perceived was way too "big" to be contained in the handful of meat I use as a brain. But I had the sense of infinite conduits, pathways, going in infinite directions and tangling in exquisite chaos, and things zipping along those pathways in seemingly no order whatsoever, all of it forming a great pattern that, regardless of the apparent chaos, made absolute sense (from a Different Point Of View) and, just generally speaking, held the connotation of positive intent. And I could sit around all day and analyze and dissect this, but in the end, the underlying impression - that there is a Reason and a Purpose, and that it is generally Good - is really all I need to be going on with, until whatever time I hit level cap and head on Home. As close as I can figure it, the Meaning Of Life is simply to live, and to write the best story I can with my life, to play the best possible game according to whatever rules I choose to play by, to learn something from it all and have the best time I can. S'good enough for me.

And I could sit around all day and analyze and dissect this, but...

That's the thing with direct knowledge, right enough. All that I'd add is that purpose (with a small "p") is pretty adjustable; Purpose (capital "p") is a bit different, but it's a matter of perspective. We are not any particular thing, I think, but we can be, for a while, and we can go with that or not - curiosity would tend to dictate going along with it, mostly.

But that's sort of the point. We all have goals, objectives, rules we live by and things we want to accomplish... that's part of the point of being human. But from that different perspective - from the outside looking in - the things we think of as rules and the things we think of as important are meaningless. The true Purpose is one we can't know or understand from the perspective of meat-bodies.

Well, the real issue is that you can't tell whether the apparent "True Purpose" is just another bit of patterning, right?

If you "surrender" you'll soon find that your body, mind and world move spontaneously by themselves, as if along a pre-made path. However, it is not necessarily true that this is purposeful in some greater sense. It tends to give you situations that result in an unwinding of accumulate baggage, but if you tackle that directly then you circumvent this, and it changes. If you change yourself (re-pattern the world), or specifically intend some experiences, your direction and "Purpose" shifts also. I think it would be a mistake for people to (for instance) live their life according to "God's Plan" as if it were given to them from, or defined from, outside. "God's Plan" seems to me to be the spontaneous unfolding of the current condition you are in, towards a state of resolution, within the boundaries of certain restrictions - the very restrictions that this subreddit discusses temporarily suspending to allow for faster change, in fact. To say we can't understand or know our current path, is just to say that we don't experience moments that we are not currently experiencing within a 3D-immersive perspective. That doesn't mean it is "special" or fixed, it just means it is not habitually seen (although as you point out, it can be perceived metaphorically sometimes). It is not "destined" in the same way as being our true fate; it is just the path that deterministically follows from our current state. That sense of "it's so perfect" that we get when you perceive this, is the perception of total logical coherence, not of "the way". Change the state, change the path - perfection will persist, the experience of it will shift. "The Way" is the manner in which we follow the path, not the path itself, which is totally arbitrary and flexible. But (except for what I just said) if someone feels they are on a mission or have a greater purpose, I wouldn't dissuade them of it; it's probably not a bad way to live out your days.

Yeah, see, you're... not getting what I'm saying. Which is fine, of course. Everyone has a different perspective on the universe, and all are equally accurate. But, see, even mentioning "God's Plan" as a point of reference is a null term, because we are God, and "the Plan" is both non-singular and as sensible to the human meat brain as two plus four equals watermelon.

Maybe not! Let's try though. Rip this apart:

Okay, I used "God's Plan" in quotes because, yes, we are God in any meaningful sense of the term. What I was trying to say is that there's nothing special about a particular plan, and that even if I don't consciously know the path, it is nevertheless a result of all the intentions I have had, knowingly and unknowably, gradually unwinding. Forgetting about brains for the moment, this is simply a matter of perspective, wouldn't you agree?

As I walk over to the fridge to grab a beer, my attention is on the music playing in the other room - I even forget that I'm going to the kitchen to get a drink. Soon enough, the song ends, and I find I'm back in my chair, looking at this screen. The intention to have a beer in my hand at the computer was fulfilled, even though I forgot the plan. Even though I wasn't aware of the movements happening; even though I never have known the details of how some of those movements work. So, if the universe is your body, then its movement is like that. It shifts towards fulfilling your intentions, like a pattern shifting between states. Usually my attention is only on one 3D slice of it (this particular body and a region around it), but that is just a matter of focused attention rather than not being able to sense it potentially. If I widen my attention out, I see more of my "body", perhaps 4D and the "current plan" becomes clear. But the plan changes every time I create a deliberate intention. The so-called plan is really just "the 4D pattern as it is right now". It's no plan at all, really, because it was never "planned".

TL;DR: The plan isn't a plan; we are not humans; it's all about 3D vs 4D attention and experience.

Q1: I guess that falls into what I'm saying... sorta...
Then again, we're trying to discuss concepts with a language wholly unsuited for it, so "approximate" agreement is pretty noteworthy in itself.
But the whole Plan/Purpose thing that I've talked about... the Purpose isn't even anything we can know or follow. It's beyond/outside any and all human beings, so there's no way our perspective can expand enough to make it make sense. I guess it'd be closer to say "the underlying mechanics of how the universe works", because the "how" and the "why" are all part of the same thing.
But yeah, everything, everything is a matter of perspective. It's one of those Profound Universal Truths that manifests itself in such little mundane ways that the human mind doesn't quite snap to the fact that yo, dude, this is Important Shit right here. Funny, that: we can literally trick ourselves into seeing wizards and hobbits in normal-sized men using a bit of trickery of perspective, and yet overall we humans still don't get the importance of perspective. See a thing from one perspective and it's an inexplicable tangle; change your perspective, and it all falls into place.
Meanwhile, we're still bound to this universe by the languages we speak, all of which discuss being "next" to something, or above it, beside it, around it, looking up from below, looking down from above, all different perspectives, but so limiting that we - translating the universe through the languages we speak - never see that there are other perspectives as well, that go outside what we think of as "spatial awareness".

Yes indeed, verbal language is problematic - in fact, anything that results in thoughts about a topic (i.e. any sort of communication) is problematic. You can never really describe an experience, mostly you trigger a conceptual structure, occasionally you can use language to lead someone to a subjective immersive experience, but you can only do it in person, responding to cues.

...the Purpose isn't even anything we can know or follow.

Then in what way can it be said to exist? ;-)

Although I imagine I know what you're getting at, since you used the phrase "the underlying mechanics of how the universe works". The main problem is that the universe doesn't really "work" or "happen" in any particular way. There is no "process" or "mechanism" involved. As I occasionally say: thinking so leads us to focus on the content of experience, rather than the nature of experiencing. I suggest: We can examine content all we want, looking for secrets or explanation or purpose, and we might even find things that satisfy us for a while, until eventually we realise that it's just... more dream.

The fundamental reality is "what dreams are made from" rather than any one dream itself. The word "purpose" tends to imply an end-state, an ultimate goal - but there isn't one. We might say that the goal is to realise (not understand) the nature of content - and then probably forget about it. Have some adventures. Then remember again. It doesn't matter whether you take the 3D or 4D or the dimensionless background as your perspective; the content itself doesn't matter. If you have the "dimensionless" experience, you do directly sense that everything is static and eternal - and that daily life is like exploring a pre-existing memory block, recalling it moment by moment - so I suppose there is a benefit to that. The benefit it is: the search for enlightenment via experiencing ceases, and you realise the "purpose" is simply being. Resolution and progress is just the gradual dissolving of division, and there is no meaning in that, just as there is no meaning to the settling of the surface of a pool of water after it has been disturbed by a child throwing stones at a duck...

From the perspective of the Power outside "all of this", which our human meat-brains cannot understand.

Well, I'd put aside the meat-brain thing; you've never experienced one of those either. But what you're talking about, really, is faith that there is a Power external to you, right? One that has an independent intelligence and does things? I would disagree with this. (Because I don't think anything "happens" other than attention, in a specific sense of the term.)

...this could not have occurred in any universe I know or understand.

Uh-huh, but (and of course I don't know the details here) these things tend to only be a problem or amazing if you are holding onto the idea that there is stable world, sitting on a solid persistent substrate, that is external to your experience. This is not the case.

this is the universe's way of telling me that I'm on the right track.

The universe can't tell you anything. I say: it is a mistake to interpret the universe as "sending you signs" of being on the right path or whatever. All your experiences simply conform to your current "patterning". Correlations between the thoughts you have and what you sensorily encounter are common but seem amazing; but they arise from the same place and space. You can easily prove this to yourself by adopting a different frame of mind or narrative, and noticing how the world quickly seems to adopt the form of the "game" you have chosen. People who adopt the worldview of 'secret spies are everywhere and out to get me" will literally encounter a higher frequency dark-suited men happening to look in their direction while talking to their lapels. Others who adopt that of "there is an independent God who is looking out for me and sends me messages" encounter the corresponding thing. You have to actually experiment with this to truly realise it, but very quickly you discover the complete arbitrariness of the content of experience. The "patterns" you adopt shape the experiences you have. That's why I say there's no particular purpose.

(If you haven't already checked out the Kirby Surprise - appropriate name - interview on synchronicity which is linked in the sticky, you might find it interesting: here it is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-iMw9KA93U]. I disagree with his M-brane theory, but other than that, it's pretty much how it works in practical terms.)

Q1: Okay, let's stick with the software/game analogy and try different terminology. "The universe telling me I'm on the right track" can also be defined as programming feedback, debugging and error messages. If $x != 0 return error(). If $x == 0 return "OK". Any & every programmer in the universe has written statements like these.
The purpose of such a debugging statement is to let the programmer know what the program is doing, and alert the programmer in a way that's easy to spot & interpret. Weirdness and coincidences might in fact serve the same purpose.
I personally find it very interesting that at a time when I have been seriously investigating both relocating on a physical level to a new place and dimensional shifting, I'm now suddenly experiencing odd and unlikely events that happen to ding both of these items in sensitive spots. I'm not particularly surprised, because this has always been the way my life has worked: weird coincidences, random strokes of luck, dramatic foreshadowing as precisely drawn as in a book - this is my "normal", and always has been. Other people's lives clearly work differently, but this is mine.
ETA: one more twist on that analogy: That programming statement I wrote 3 paragraphs up?
if $x != 0 {return error();}
if $x == 0 {return "OK";}
In the language I'm pseudo-using, there is another possible case: in which $x is null. In which case it would be interpreted as equalling zero (and return "OK") but in fact not be equal to zero (and should have returned an error).
That's sloppy programming.
That's a glitch in the matrix.
:D

Man, I absolutely hate the software/game metaphor! (I speak as an ex-programmer. Perhaps it just gives me flashbacks of tedium!)

Of course, I agree that "The Power" is Me, but you are still talking as if this power (which is me) is too big to fit inside... me. Which makes it sound like you suggesting something along the lines that "you" programmed the game deliberately, took on a character role as a meat-brain within the game, and are now being "guided" by the programming you previously set up?

I tend towards a simpler notion which doesn't involve any activity at all. Namely: that all experience appears in the mind, that any ideas and narrative structures you have in mind are "overlaid" upon experience, and that this "dumb" setup inevitably leads to coincidence, foreshadowing, luck, corresponding to this. If, dissolved within our "conscious perceptual space" (what we truly are), is an Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments, then the patterns we are holding in mind "filter" that grid by association, such that only the moments that fit the those patterns are active. This inevitably means that what we have "in mind" will appear in both thoughts and events. You could certainly reinterpret that as form of "programming" I suppose - defining a pattern - although it's static so there's no sense of the universe being "run". But the essence I guess is: change the narrative, change the experience... which means that:

the only power we have, is the power to think/imagine.

But, y'know, it's all one metaphor vs another - and the devious trick of this setup is that whatever metaphor you hold in mind, you will have experiences which correspond to it. (Hence the notion of "active metaphors" in the sidebar.) If you look at the world as software, try to insert some new subroutines, it will literally start behaving like that's how things work. If you spend a lot of time contemplating an Entity God, he'll probably start helping you out.

The Power is me. I am the Power. But I can't have actual awareness of that...

I'd say you can, but you can't do it at the same time that you are aware of bodily sensations and a room around you. But then, neither can you be stood up whilst also being sat down. It's just about not being able to be in two states at the same time. That's not really a meat-brain restriction as such. Even if you can't directly experience it in an ongoing way in everyday life directly, at least we can infer it from your own intentional results, and know it intellectually as a result - and operate from that.

Level 49 hobbit wanderer, seeking fellowship, please send /tell.

Haha, good. As far as the universe being pre-programmed, I'd say the world started off more in the way a dream begins: hypnagogia fragments, gradually coalescing into a scene, and then a 3D-immersive environment. There's no "plan" or design, it unfolds according to whatever is implied by previous experiences - unless you deliberately intend a redirection.

Your idea of a "simpler notion" makes my head hurt. :)

Yeah, I do realise that my "simpler notion" isn't as immediately accessible, although it is very simplifying and makes it far clearer how to create change. (The edited basic version is here: The Patterning of Experience.) It involves throwing away notions of the world being a "place" and of you being in any sense a "person", but it gets more directly to your actual experience as it is right now, using the most basic intelligible metaphor, and let you interact at that level.

The changes I'm trying to prompt are both necessary, proper, and working. Even though not quite in a way I would expect or want.

Yes. Really, everything is taken into account. It's inherently the case that you can't "pre-experience" an experience in order to know it in advance - because if you do, then that's actually the experience. You can get what you want, but unless you complete go back to void and re-seed the world, you can't pre-know or define the path.

Every single one of us experiences the universe differently, and it's a mistake for any of us to assume another person can or should share our own experience.

Agreed. Kinda my overall view, that: there is no built in division or structure to the world ("all possible patterns are available"), but by our intentional mental and physical acts we gradually define such arrangements. The world then behaves "as if" whatever we think is actually the case. Your "big ME, little me" experience is one of the available options. No option is "right" or fundamentally true, they are just different. The only thing that is fundamentally true is: there is a me of some sort (which I can never see), and it is having an experience. Everything else is up for grabs. Or even not up for grabs, if that's the way you think!

But instead we just dance around in circles with imperfect and contradictory metaphors . . .

Very well put. Although I'd emphasise the stinger which is: the metaphors we pursue tend to be reflected in our personal experience, which means that we always seem to be right. I think that's the ingredient which makes agreement about specific content challenging; but we can agree "that there is an experience" and "that we are aware". And if we know that content behaves in that subjectively flexible way, we can avoid falling into the trap of arguing about the "right way" to describe things.

The problem with thinking: just obviously, a thought is an object which appears inside experience, and made from consciousness. So it can never capture or describe experiencing, or consciousness - in the same way that (metaphor reuse alert), although you can make shapes out of sand which duplicate to other shapes made out of sand, you can never make a sand-shape which captures sand itself, or the sandbox as a whole. Sand just "is" sand; the sandbox "is" all the shapes made of sand.

Q1: Of course we always seem to be right; that's because all the possible answers are equally correct. Which makes no sense within the established confines of the sensible universe, but is nevertheless true... once you get outside the confines of consciousness to the perspective from which you can describe it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need some Advil and coffee; as always, discussing this topic has caused me to imagine myself into the actualization of the metaphor of a literal headache.

Enjoy your imaginary medication/beverage combo! I hope it has the desired imaginary effect. I imagine that it will. Cheers for now...

...

Maybe we only notice the little things because they are little things, because they're small enough to be "possible" . . . Maybe the big shit happens all the time.

That's a great comment and I forgot to respond to it at the time. Retaining a "personal memory pattern" that persists when the "world pattern" shifts is a key challenge. After all, they are both part of the same larger overall pattern of "everything"; the whole thing shifts as one usually, as a coherent whole. So, you might say that performing a change deliberately is more than anything an assertion to remember. The act we perform is almost like a marker to which we attach the "how it was before" memory, so that it remains accessible via association.

In fact, the total pattern might be sloshing about constantly, but so long as it does so self-consistently, the apparent world and the apparent personal past tend to stay in alignment. Only if you are "holding onto" a particular aspect of this, does it get held steady, despite other changes. In "jumping", then, we try to detach from the world but not from the seed to which is attached our conceptual self and all tis memories. Probably all jumps are successful to some extent, it's just a case of the extent to which the old state remains. Total shift: only new-state memory so no apparent change. No shift: only old-state memory and so no apparent change.

(pre-coffee mumble-mumble-mumble) but then the things we hold on to, especially old grudges and so forth, doesn't that then just keep the stuff we dislike actively with us no matter where we jump? So "forgive and forget" isn't just a hoary old maxim, it's actively an instruction on how to maximize dimensional leaping.

Agreed. In older times (interpretations of the Bible even) the notion of "forgiveness" means to wipe the slate clean in a deeper sense, to literally "release it and delete it" such that it no longer exists. In this sense it's really: "forgive equals forget". Forget it or amend it in terms of the world's memory, not our personal historical memory of "stuff what I experienced".

POST: Did the two glasses experiment. Nothing happened.

Uh-huh, nice. So the glasses technique = "plausible if very unlikely" routes, rather than immediate discontinuity, in general. And the level of plausibility depends, really, on your own patterning to date. But if you've done it with intention, you'll always get results of some sort. See what happens over the next week or so.

So, which techniques are capable of producing immediate discontinuity? I'd find it much more convincing if I could experience that rather than something that might have happened even if I did nothing.

What, exactly, are you wanting to be convinced of? (Bearing in mind that nobody's particularly interested in convincing you of anything, although everyone's happy to help you towards any specific goal you might have.)

The problem is, "wanting to be convinced" isn't a very good goal - because it's nonspecific, and it's not really a goal at all. It's like "wanting to be convinced that I can run a Marathon" rather than "wanting to complete a Marathon". You best become convinced by targeting experiencing-the-goal, not by targeting being-convinced. "Techniques", of course, aren't capable of anything. Only you are. Techniques are just a path for your intention to be directed along. Which means a certain focus and commitment. It's relatively easy to get what you want through apparently "plausible if very unlikely" routes. But if what you are desiring to do is break your plausibility level, as it were, then you can work on that, but you'll either have to dedicate yourself to it (rather than "want to be convinced") or let yourself got insane for a while. Again, it's not the technique that does it for you, it's you that does it, so you have to actually commit. The universe isn't like a simulation running on a computer; it doesn't do anything of you. It's more like a static list of entangled facts or a complex diagram that you are scanning your attention across, and you have the ability to edit it.

Me, World, Experience

I want to know what kind of world I live in.

This is the crux of it, then. Really, I would suggest starting there, and working outwards from that. And I'd say it's better to phrase it something like this though, since it assumes less:

• What, exactly, is the nature of my current experience?
• By extension, what is the nature of "me" and "the world"?

That's something that can be established by direct attention. You can fairly straightforwardly satisfy yourself that everything you experience appears in your "mind" (although that's not really a very good word for it since it's not a personal mind), including any thoughts about a supposed external world. You can't think your way to this though, since you'll just keep going round the same conceptual frameworks; you have to directly perceive it to be the case, in the moment.

Cause, Effect, Experiment

I learn nothing via a "plausible if very unlikely" route.

It can be a slight Catch-22, this, because there's an element of having to soften up your own patterning in order to have more unusual intentional experiences - which in turn is effectively a widening of what counts as "plausible if very unlikely". And this applies to perceiving your actual experience too: you have to assert it in order to have the corresponding experience. It's a little like being a shape-shifter:

• If you were a shape-shifter, how would you describe the process of shape-shifting? You would just "become" the new shape; it's all you, so there's no one part causing the other part. Continuing with this: how would you work out you were a shape-shifter? The only way would be... to shift your shape. There would be no evidence of you being a shape-shifter between shiftings. Intention and deciding and all that, have similar problems: you reveal them by becoming them.

In other words, the more rule-breaking you want your experiences to be, the more you have to break yourself, or (and this is where detachment comes in) you temporarily suspend yourself in terms of patterning. The traditional way to prove the flexibility of experience it the same way as is used for all experimentation: repetition. Performing an intentional act and having corresponding results is the only way to establish a causal link.

Raise your arm now. How do you know that your arm wouldn't have lifted up in any case? How, exactly, do you go about raising your arm anyway? Do you really cause it in a particular way that you can detect, other than just "wanting" it to happen?

Maybe your arm is just part of the external world and you just assume it is "yours" and under your control because it is apparently nearer to where you think of yourself as being centred. Actually, your arm and the rest of your body are moving by themselves beyond your control, and the same applies to the thought that you do it. How could you tell the difference?

You get the idea: you can't answer these questions, except by repeating the experiment again and noticing a correlation between "asking" for the movement and "receiving" it subsequently.

Plan of Attack

So, unless you want to dedicate yourself to a bit of a blind reformatting (which you can do: it's essentially like meditation but with persistent intention) I'd suggest a plan of attack of this form:

• Spend time directly investigating the nature of your experience, to establish that it is entirely within "a" mind, and that you are "a" mind and not any of the content which appears within it.
• Perform the owl exercise for different subjects, allowing intervals between each experiment, see what appears in your experience subsequently. Repeat.
• Perform the two glasses exercises for different personal situations, allowing intervals between each experiment, see what appears in your experience subsequently. Repeat.

In other words, treat it as a proper study and conduct a structured investigation. Otherwise, through a lack of understanding, you can end up asking the philosophical idealism equivalent of:

• "If everything is really made from atoms, that means the world is mostly empty space, so how come I can't walk through walls?"

Maybe they've been encountering pictures of owls on the Web and elsewhere regularly all along.

I can't help but notice that you're thinking about this, rather than actually doing it. Either do the experiment, or don't bother. Without the experiment, you are completely uninformed. You're just sloshing about in your own thoughts. When the owl exercise kicks in, it becomes pretty obvious that it goes beyond confirmation bias. The reason it's dubbed The Owls Of Eternity™ is as a bit of fun, but it's relevant because the persuasiveness of it is that owls apparently come to you as events, and as encounters which suggest retroactive change. The progression of plausibility develops something like this:

• conf. bias => coincidence => synchronicity => "manifestation" => shifting => "jumping"

And the apparent location of the encounters like this:

• internal => external => eternal

The extended pattern thing, that's just what seems to happen, but anyone doing the exercise is perfectly able to be more specific in their intention and to decide what counts and what doesn't. Remember, the point of that exercise is simply a bit of fun to demonstrate (without having to put any effort in) the pattern-based nature of experience in a way that shows it's not simply selection from pre-existing scenes. Or at least, not pre-existing scenes in 3D; you could describe it as selection from a 4D environment. With that experience under your belt, you've got a flavour of the thing, and it's easy enough for you to design your own rigorous experiment if you like. Again though, nobody can prove anything to you in this area, just as, for instance, nobody can prove to you that you can be awake in your dreams ("lucid dreaming"), or that there's such a thing as experiencing oneness ("enlightenment"). Or that it's possible for you to train up and run the marathon. If you want to explore how your world works, then you'll have to conduct the investigation yourself. Nobody can do it for you.

In other words: Do it, or don't do it, but if you don't do it, there's no point in discussing it.

...

That doesn't sound like jumping to another dimension to me. It sounds more like The Secret.

Well, it's not that. It more like an umbrella term for "applied philosophical idealism" to force 'glitches' via pattern-shifting. I guess: read the links in the sticky post.

[This] revolve[s] around the notion that physical reality can be manipulated by the mind because it is a construct of the mind.

Pretty much - although exactly what we mean by those terms matters; strictly speaking there is no physical reality as usually thought of, and the word "construct" implies a separation that isn't there. You might see "patterning" as the generalised idea behind all experience. From moving your arm to changing the world, it's all the same. It's a ground-up account. For instance, here, the idea that the world is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" is pretty much thrown away. Space and time arise with experience and not outside of it. In this sense, this is a bit like "magick" but rooted in the philosophy of, say, George Berkeley's Three Dialogues, Kant's transcendental idealism, and the non-duality traditions. An applied metaphysics that deals with a personal subjective slice of the world, a private copy within you. Meanwhile, the Law of Attraction (attracted from where, how?) and The Secret (worse) are basically crap magick, poorly applied and without a properly defined worldview. They do have the advantage that you don't need to flip your world around to think about them; but they have the disadvantage of not really making sense or working very well as described.

POST: Has anyone experienced this?

[POST]

Detaching, meditating, reflecting have been regular events in my awareness these past weeks.
These past days, something interesting showed up. I've been losing my sense of 'location' during random times throughout the day and night.
It is not lethargy or anything, I eat well and work out. During those few seconds of this phenomenon, it is like everything feels automatic. I apologize if this sounds pretty vague, but since it is so unique, I've nothing to compare it too. Please feel free to ask questions, to help me better gauge this.

[END OF POST]

The feeling of being everywhere in the current experience while being nowhere in particular?

Q1: Well it's not like that 'infinite conciousness-nirvana-Buddha' thing. At least, it doesn't match up with what I imagine infinite conciousness to be.
But like. . .you know how you get your feedback that your body is like this - that your hand is resting there (hoping this doesn't sound confusing); I've been losing my 'location' when I'm not feeling the usual feedback. The '3D hologram experience' becomes a unified location. Like one thing. As if there's no divident between the cloud in the sky and my smallest toes. Rather than being the avatar of my body, it's like being an avatar of experience itself, but this avatar has only had seconds of it at 3-4 times every 24hrs frequency.
EDIT: Wow, this shit is weirder than I realized. But that's the best I can describe it to be.

What you describe is what I mean, I think. It is like you used to be located, say "here, behind my eyes" while your hand was "over there", but now the whole thing is "you, here"?

The sense of location you usually have is just that: a sense of location. You are always the whole experience even when you have that. What's happened is, that sensation is occasionally fading out. It's a little like having had a tense neck for your whole life, and so always being more aware of that location and seeing other things as relative to that. One day, your neck relaxes, and that artificial set of relations falls away.

Assuming that's what you are describing...

Basically, I'd forget all esoteric descriptions of this; they add another level of abstraction and complication I think, usually written by people who haven't had the experience. I see it pretty simply: if you allow your experience to relax, you attention naturally opens out (or dissolves) and you become, or recognise that you always were, "the full imagination room".

POST: Both methods

Remember, you are not meant to be "making it happen". That part happens automatically. It's a "dumb" patterning mechanism. So doing multiple method simultaneously, and suggesting different possible paths - that's beyond your remit. Your job is simply to make a firm decision about what your target state is, perform an exercise (which activates that target pattern so it's overlaid on subsequent experiences), and then don't interfere. Because the moment you do the exercise is the moment the change is made - your new deterministic trajectory is laid out before you - and then it's just a matter of waiting for the corresponding experiences to be encountered.

...Okay, firstly remember that what matters is here is that you know what it is you want - you are not "sending a message to the universe" or anything like that. What you are doing is, finding the target state (which already exists) and connecting to it and shifting to it. Which gives you an idea of how to word things: "I would like a better job" is the description of a state where you would like a better job (i.e. don't have one). "I have a great job" is the name of a state where you have that job. What is important though, is that you pause and actually do access that state. This isn't difficult, mostly people do it automatically, but it's worth being conscious of it. Just pause now and think of something or someone you desire, but think of them being with you and what that would be like. When I say "think of", I mean in the sense of pausing and waiting for the feeling-sensation that would go with having them.

Now, this is something that comes to you, not something that you create. Typically this felt-sense appears in the mid-area of your body. Having this is the difference between just making images in your had, and actually having connected to the target state. All techniques are really based on accessing the target state in this way, and then manipulating it into being the dominant contributor to you experience going forward. So for the Two Glasses Exercise, if someone was unemployed but wanted their dream job, their labels might say something like "unemployed" and "dream job". Or if it were a specific job, then: "journalist". The "contemplation" part of the exercise is meant to encourage you to pause and connect to how those situations feel, to the states they represent. This is why you don't need to write out a big description; the words are merely handles which you attach to the actual states.

Hopefully you can see that it doesn't matter how other people feel about you, or even where things supposedly are in the world. This is all about states which lead to experiences. In the same way as there are no people, places or objects behind the screen of your TV, there are no external people, places or objects behind the 3D-immersive sensory experience you are currently having about being-a-person-in-a-world.

In and of itself, I don't think passing doubt or belief are important, except in the sense that you attend to them and end up embracing the doubtful view (but that is what people tend to do). For the duration of an exercise, you have to - if not believe, then commit. Just like, I dunno, if you were lifting weights but didn't really think it was possible, you would even really dedicate yourself to it - you wouldn't fully intend the result.

The glasses exercise to some extent misdirects you with its form obviously being unrelated to the situation and outcome, so that you neither believe nor disbelieve, you just do it without really thinking it through, and probably don't give it much thought. That's why it's a good demo. Once you have given it critical thought, however, you likely need to persuade yourself of a model that goes with the exercise, or go for a 'surrender' approach (accept that "the act is the fact"), so that you can commit again. Although I'd say: I've you've read Goddard and stuff on patterning, it should be easier now to see it as "state anchoring and triggering" in an "imagination space", perhaps?

If you can take all that on board, think of this moment as your super-flexible staring point, then take it from there - that's probably the way around this.

This is probably a dumb questions, but what about weed and doing the exercises? If only for the complete forgetfulness, it's hard to interfere when you can't remember even doing it :P

Haha, well I've never tried it, so feel free to experiment! You don't really need to forget; you just need to not interfere and so end up re-intending things. It's actually pretty robust if you do the exercise with full commitment; after all, it is an actual state change.

POST: The question every newbie asks

Dimensions are really a metaphor for changing your state. A radically changed state results in an experience like that of changing worlds: facts shift. Your experiences are the structure of mind (there is nothing beyond mind: try and find something that is!) and so all changes are a restructuring of the mind really, it's just a matter of how deep and fundamental the changes are.

Ah so that's why you can't go back.

Right. If you really did return to the precisely the original state, it wouldn't be much use to you - things would play out in exactly the same way (because the subsequent experiential path is the state). Plus it would be a sort of suicide, in a way.

The true original state is the perfect universe.
All imperfect worlds are "holographic projections" (metaphorically speaking, from the perfect world or universe.
Hence the true goal IS a return to the original state.
One may ask why did we ever choose to leave the original state.

Surely the universe is always perfect? There's nothing necessarily special about the resolved state where no patterns are activated - the state of undivided wholeness. "Eventually" it has to become divided again - in quotes because this is all "before" time and therefore eternal. And in truth, it is never really divided, because it is always one thing "taking on the shape of" an experience of division. So I'd tend to say that "goals" are human concepts, and the universe (or, consciousness + patterns) has no goal really, not in the sense of a considered aim, other than the tendency to resolve itself, and then become unresolved, and so on, from a strictly personal perspective.

POST: What if

I think: the simulation concept is just how modern-day folk get their heads around the fact that there is no solid world behind the images, sounds, and textures of everyday life - and that intention is global rather than local. (It does more than just move your arms.)

It's all imagination. The concept behind "jumping" is pretty much that you are changing the "world-pattern" to a desired state - which is similar to the concept of "changing a line of code" or "updating a data structure". It all amounts to: updating facts, and subsequent experiences being in line with the new facts. The problem with the simulation metaphor, though, is that it tends to encourage you to think that there is something "running" the simulation, that you are "in" something, and that other events are "happening" other than your present experience.

Are the people arround me are just philosophical zombies or are they experiencing life like me?

They're just images, but then so is the person you assume yourself to be. No person ever experienced anything - just as no sound ever experienced music - although as consciousness you might have "person-formatted" experiences.

It goes something like this -

What you are is an "open conscious space" which has "taken on the shape of" an experience, the experience of being-a-world-from-the-perpective-of-a-person, as a strand of thought. This means that the world is not to be viewed as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", but rather a "resource", a toy box of available patterns from which you-as-conscious-space select facts, and therefore experiences. In effect, you have a private copy of the world. This gives us: that you are not a person either, that all apparent people are a continuous part of the environment or world-pattern, and that you are experiencing being everyone right now, in a sense. Which leads us to: Are there no other consciousnesses, and if so do they share worlds? Well, there is only one consciousness (because it is "before" division, location and time), but for convenience we might think of there being '"parallel-simultaneous" experiences, each a copy of the world, not sharing a space but sharing a resource. A sort of contextual overlap.

If that seems to dodge the question, then I suppose it does: it's one of those "does not apply" things. You could always experiment with adopting the concept of "all people are aspects of me" for a while, then adopting "all people are separate individuals" for a while, and noticing how that shapes your experiences. It's more informative than trying to work through it in thought, since we hit the hurdle with it: since time and space are part of experiences rather than the context in which they arise, and thoughts are experiences, it is not possible to think beyond your own conscious space in its current format.

Thanks for this detailed reply, I tried to observe if people behave autonomous and came to the conclusion that they do, only didn't I take into account that my beliefs format my observation. I also paid attention to (inanimate) little details, and even the smallest things like stains or bits of dust seem to be filled in the moment I step into a room, which is quite astonishing it's somehow hard to put into words but sometimes I think if everything is just in mind how come that even the littlest changes get "saved"?

Well, I wouldn't say "just" in mind really, that sounds a bit dismissive! ;-)

The mind has no resolution; things aren't stored as data, like in a computer. If you think of each "fact" of as an unbounded pattern, then the current state of the world is the combination of all patterns. What resolution do patterns have? None. It doesn't matter how closely you look, you always see... more pattern. Because there is no resolution, there is no limit to how much complexity can be "stored" or "dissolved into" the same space. Is there a limit to how many of those patterns I could stack up? No, because the result is always one pattern. As for "saved" it's better maybe to say that things become "fixed" by observation; they become "defined". The whole landscape of patterns is already there, the relative contributions shifting around somewhat as you intend and change your views, but when you make an observation then that particular aspect becomes a "fact" and does not shift so easily anymore; its intensity and its relative contribution is heightened.

So, we have that:

• There is no resolution limit; there is no granularity involved.
• There is no "saving" in the sense of adding a piece of data into a storage facility; the entire world-pattern always exists and is eternal.
• What does happen is that the relative contributions of the component patterns varies (the relative intensity of "facts").
• When an observation is made, that "defines" or "fixes" that pattern, such that it becomes an observed fact or certainty; it has a very bright relative contribution as a fact.
• Intense patterns are not necessarily irrevocably factual; their intensity can be reduced again however it rarely occurs to people to try, since they seem so certain.
• The beliefs you have adopted are also effectively high-contributing patterns - "minor facts" - and so shape your experience accordingly.
• Whenever you adopt a new view of the world, the patterns associated with that view become more dominant, and your subsequent experience falls into alignment with that.
• You can create "fake observations" within the mind and have them contribute as facts just as much as a "real" observation would.

It's relatively easy to explore these ideas and test them out for yourself, to see if they are accurate or not. Spend a week "pretending" that things are a different way from how you think you know them to be, and see if things don't line up to provide you with evidence of your new approach.

Thanks again, this is a really good framework. I will think of some ideas to investigate this for me further, people seem often talk to much and philosophize about this instead of actually investigating their experience. At the moment I try to get rid of is my tinnitus, so annoying :(

Agreed absolutely. These things that are difficult to put into words and concepts are actually remarkably simple in experience. To be honest, if everyone just ran with the metaphor of the Imagination Room and explored it thoroughly, the rest of it would be self-evident. Meanwhile, your comment reminded me of this thread [POST: [META] Tinnitus and the Mandela Effect - who here has experienced both?]. Never had tinnitus but I imagine it must be very frustrating.

I now seem to understand why van Gogh cut his ear off, but it should be fixable, maybe I'll go with the two glass method since it's hard to imagine quietness when your ears are ringing the whole time.

Go for it. (Maybe knock out a couple of canvases before you do, though - just in case.)

Ear is still there :D But the tone switched from the left to the right ear and is now much more subtle, feels like it's fading.

Well, that would be a different sort of masterpiece, I suppose - and priceless in its own way!

...

Q3: it is not possible to think beyond your own conscious space in its current format.
Any links or suggestions on how I can reformat?

You can overwrite formatting, but of course you'll never get outside of your space, because: a) it has no boundaries anyway, and: b) you are it. But it's all about what can arise within it. So, you change your formatting by ceasing to continually assert the current patterns, and by imagination (which really means: to bring forth a particular pattern and have it contribute).

Helpful as ever, just one more quicky. What led you to this path?

Long-term interest in mind, perception, reality, thought, philosophy, magick, science, art and creativity. The attempt to understand them all at the same time, leads to: a) confusion, and then: b) maybe this. Hopefully some use comes of it - only you can be the judge! ;-)

POST: How to share information with alternate selves?

Not literally of course - since there is no other "you" as such - but as with anything, you can use the "as if" concept as a route to an experience, which includes the acquisition of information and skills. People have done this in different guises for a long time, I think - whether that be via "higher selves" or other apparent externalities.

I agree, I believe my "Holy Guardian Angel"/Higher Self/Spirit Guide/Silent Self is a timeless, dimensionless, all encompassing version of me

Yes - I'd clarify it by saying that, intellectually, we tend to confuse the content of our sensory experience with "us", when of course we are the larger context in which, and of which, that content appears. Which is a bit like saying that the part of the room you are looking at right now is "the room" while the room in its entirety is "the higher room".

Or better: that you are an like an origami paper fortune teller - you shape-shift yourself in order to prioritise a subset of potential content, then unfold yourself to reveal certain aspects explicitly into the senses. You are always the entirety, it's just that only one "slice" is expanded as a sensory-space experience at any one moment. That's why there's no point in looking for higher selves to "do" things for you as such; your higher self is more like the extended pattern of the world (as your present state), rather than an intelligence which can operate independently of your intelligence. You-as-context is the only intelligence.

POST: Does telling other people interfere with jumping?

Keep to a subjective perspective here, I'd say. What does telling them imply about your view of the approach, and how will you receive their responses? There's really no benefit to telling anyone, because there's no sense in which they can contribute to your effort - however, seeking confirmation or taking external comments seriously can reflect an underlying view, and affect your ability to commit fully to the intention (which is what really matters).

I kind of get this; I've discussed the possibilities with my roommates (my girlfriend, and our roommate who is pagan and who commented that the two glasses feels like a spell to him). I've told them that I am planning on trying it, but I likely won't tell them when I do.

Well, a "spell" is just an action you take where you deliberately use the fact that: although sensory experiences are apparently local, all intentions are actually global. It's better to keep things to yourself, because the extended associations that are triggered as/with your intention include whatever worldview elements you have adopted. Better to make up your own mind, and proceed from there, therefore (in my view).

Yeah. I briefly considered actually doing it with them present, but I thought quibbling over word choice might limit the results.

Right. Also, the word choices should arise naturally from your own contemplation of the two situations or states. Which is not to say that you can't 'jump together' with people - but really it is a "single-user model" (although not a personal model) and is best approached that way I think.

It does raise the question if bigger changes could be achieved with more minds agreeing as one, though. For instance, a group of people all doing the two glasses together with the intent of swaying an election?

This is not a consensus reality. (Unless you really want it to behave like one, of course, in which case you might have the corresponding "as if" experiences. I would say it's a 'personal preference', but that would probably just be confusing...)

I get that, but if several people all jump for the same (outside-of-themselves) thing, would they not end up in the same dimension? I suppose they could each jump separately as well, and end up in the same dimension. Just wondering if the jump would be easier to achieve if they were all reinforcing each others' beliefs.

Maybe if we reformat it this way...

Okay, so there is nothing outside of you; you never go anywhere, you just change state. A "dimension" is a metaphor for a more discontinuous change of state (moreso that a "shift" or "manifestation"). And to speak of "each others' beliefs" doesn't really make sense...

However - Generating for yourself the experience of gathering with a group of people, and performing an act, may provide a "plausible excuse" for you to allow changes to happen. You are creating an unusual act to which you can attach extraordinary meaning or causal power. So it can definitely be beneficial in that way. After all, what does staring into a mirror really do? Or pouring some water? An occasion to focus, to intend deliberately, knowingly.

From a comment I made earlier today:

• Act + Intention + Detachment = Shift
• Assigning a meaning to an act is what gives it causal power.
• Assigning a meaning to any experience can give it causal power.
• Habitually observed cause-effect relationships are the outcomes of previous assignments or associations.

Where an "act" can be a mental or physical act (since of course they are both the same thing: experience in the mind), and any object is also an aspect of experience. So experiencing "a group of people doing something" is as valid an "enabling act" as any other.

Something to ponder:

• How can you tell whether you have "jumped dimensions" with other people vs you have "jumped to a dimension" where the versions of those people are just very similar vs you have changed state but have left those people's patterns intact?

And: does it matter to you?

Q1: As someone who feels more sure of herself when other people agree, the validating force from outside could make the difference in whether or not a jump is successful. So it "matters" in that sense, though I suppose the argument could be made that if I need the validation from other people, I don't have a strong enough will, or can't detach enough, to jump at all. =/
(For the record, I'm trying the Owls-but-with-a-creature-that-is-not-an-owl, and haven't tried the Glasses yet.)

Actually, my underlying point is that it's all you so it doesn't matter how you go about it. What you truly are is the "container" within which all your (apparently) personal experiences appear. You have infinite will, as it were, although you have whatever "formatting" you have accumulated so far. Which is to say, we work within our own preferences and according to our dispositions.

So, gather a group of people if you want to - but preselect them according to their enthusiasm and alignment with your intentions. No point gather together aspects of yourself that are antagonists in your story of change (oh my god, what phrasing, heh, sorry). But the glasses technique doesn't depend on your belief. (In any case, belief doesn't make things happen or not, it just influences whether you actually commit and do something properly in the first place, or whether you later undo it by rewriting it.) Just follow the instructions properly, including the last point, and let it take care of itself.

The hardest part of all this is actually being okay with the fact that the change occurs in the moment you do the exercise, and that there's nothing more to be done after that. The results will come to you (or rather: you will encounter the results) without further deliberate action.

POST: Need Advice About Jumping.

Okay, so the "no effort demonstration" method is the Two Glasses Exercise which, typically, results in "plausible if unlikely" events taking place leading to your goal. That's a good way to experiment and prove to yourself that there's "something to this". One of the key ideas in this subreddit is that we don't believe anything unless we have demonstrated it to ourselves.

Going beyond that...

You should view so-called "jumping" as a change in the state, like you've updated the facts of your personal copy of the world. You aren't going anywhere, you are changing the content of your ongoing experience. There's inevitably some collateral shifting for big things, but you are not going to have to worry about overnight discontinuous changes of everyday things - parental disappearance, bad boyfriend reappearance - because you are unlikely to seek to push past the "plausibility" boundary. You might think of this as a way of "speeding up" changes in the direction of your intention. The most direct approach is to directly engage with the concept of The Imagination Room but really, for the sorts of things you are likely to want to explore you can keep it simpler - and you should treat this as an exploration, of the nature of experience, as much as a quest for results.

So, try out the glasses technique for anxiety and depression first, follow the instructions properly - including the last one (which says you should carry on with life afterwards, and let things take care of themselves, because the results will come to you). Once that has settled, perhaps repeat the exercise with your weight loss in mind. Again, this approach is for "plausible but very unlikely routes" to the change happening. Feel free to try out the mirror or patterning approaches, but I think it's better to start off with something less obviously daunting and disruptive first.

Off topic - It's amazing to me that people sometimes approach this whole thing without consideration. Imagine if there was a computer program that you could just type new facts into and they would become instantly true. Would people just start bashing away at the keyboard without having experimented to find out what the correct command syntax was? Um, yeah - me too. :-)

POST: Does Dimensional Jumping actually really work?

Why does it seem impossible?

My guess: you are thinking that the world "out there" is of the same format as your current experience, that it is all laid out in space and unfolding in time and you are exploring it. In other words, that spatial extent and unfolding change are independent properties of the world, rather than properties of experiencing. If you glance around the room now, shifting your attention around it and taking in different parts one at a time, you might say that you are selecting a "2D slice" from a 3D environment. What if the overall experience of the room was like selecting a "3D slice" from a 4D environment? And what if that 4D environment was itself a "slice" taken from an "infinite gloop"?

But none of that matters, really, if you don't try out the demo exercises and find out directly (see sidebar).

POST: The 2 Glasses Experiment failed to work for me.

Be more informative?

The 2 glasses experiment is apparently a big lie and can't deliver something specific.

Oh well, it didn't work out for you - at least you did the experiment. Now, you can either investigate why it didn't work, if you feel it might be worthwhile doing so, or you can just dismiss it and carry on with your life.

I'm dismissing the whole subreddit, boy-o.

Not quite yet, it seems! ;-)

Q1: Dude, today I did the two glasses and my desire manifested in two hours. I got exactly what I wanted. You should gotta chill out after, and know it's done!

Q2: I was very chill after the experiment... I think the main problem was I was asking for something very specific and not the usual vague stuff that can coincidentally get noticed later on unrelated to anything at all...

Well of course, all results are coincidental - in the sense that you perform an act with the intention for a specific result, and a short time later that result you wanted "coincidentally" happens, in this case by apparently acausal means. (By which I mean it is not logically causal in terms of the world's apparent structure.)

The only way you rule out "just" coincidence, is to do the exercise multiple times, such that the "unlikeliness" builds up to such an extent that you have to think it's starting to look more like causality, than just blind numerical overlap. If I were you, I'd give it another go. The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate something about "the nature of things" really, rather than to be a tool, although it is that also. It's a zero-effort, zero-commitment demo of what might be possible. So I wouldn't be too dismissive of the whole thing based on one try-out. In other words, if you are doing a "one and done with it" approach here, then that's fine if that satisfies you there is nothing to this, but personally I'd give it another spin (perhaps for something you're not too invested in, not too reality-breaking, but is still very unlikely), given that there are a reasonable number of people reporting positive results here. More than think New Zealand has moved, even.

Q3: what you resists persists. you obviously were worrying about it failing thus feeding that option energetically.

Q2: No, I was the exact opposite. I really believed when the mod wrote 'it really works!', it would really work. Talk about hitching the wrong wagon to the wrong star, etc.

Oh Roril, really! Why would you hitch to anything or anyone? It's an exercise designed to demonstrate something without requiring anything on the part of the participant, which happens to double up as a tool. More often than not, because of its construction, people get a result. If they overthink it and so don't get the full result, they still usually get "patterning" in their experience relating to it. If there's nothing - then the next step is to give details and 'debug' the process. (Everyone here is here to help.) Or if someone's not interested in doing that, they can just move on. Rather than, say, seeming to take some sort of personal offence at it all...

The sidebar is pretty clear on the correct attitude to take.

POST: [deleted by user]

Quick answers -

Although the state change occurs at the time of the exercise, and you may experience a "felt shift" at that time, it's not required or to be expected. You can think of it as having updated a single fact in the world, with that now incorporated into your subsequent experiences over the coming hours, days, weeks. I'd say the most important thing is to be 'allowing' of the shift - which is to say to not be obsessed with the change (which tends to reassert the problem, hence "carry on with your life") and to be okay with whatever happens (why it's harder for things which really matter, unless you have reached a point of surrender). In particular, you have to be open to things moving as a whole, because everything has to move a little in order to have one thing change. Hence the joke imagery of an extra tin of peaches appearing in your kitchen cupboard, as a "collateral shift".

Meanwhile, because you've outsourced the change to an operation on external "handles", I'd say things like strength of will and desire should not matter. You might contemplate what "will" and "desire" actually are. Are they things that you can experience? If you are experiencing them, what is the detail of that experience? Certainly, a sense of effort is not an relevant to making change. Are those things a sign of resistance to shifting? Is a "desire" perhaps just a difference of location in your perceptual space - a pattern which is localised "over here" rather than arising "over there"?

Let's explore -

For the fun of it, let's maybe do a ground-up exploration. First of all, what words did you choose and how did you go about choosing them?

Looking at it from the other end of desire -- Can boredom hinder the shift? I find myself getting somewhat indifferent to some of the stuff that I have 2-glassed eventhough I don't have them yet, eventhough I believe they will make my life better in the longer run. Won't being too pleased with the status quo prevent me from grabbing the right opportunities that present themselves?

If you've already done the exercise, it won't affect it I'd say - the update has happened. Unless you actually spend time deliberately thinking about being bored about those things. The indifference may actually be related: you can't desire something you already have... so just carry on, let experiences come to you.

I'd like to explore the meaning and the nature of experience.

Well, that's really what the subreddit is about, I'd say - the rest of it is the icing on the cake. And it's a nice cake; it's not a Battenberg one.

As for your current intention, two thoughts. The first is just that it might be taking a while, as in the results are in place but a while away, because logically for it there's (literally and figuratively) a lot of distance to cover. The second is that if you might take a pause and, sitting quietly, "ask" your inside what the best word for each situation is, what words really belong to the situation. The more your view of experience shifts toward it being a "patterned space" rather than being a body in a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", the less barriers there are to things happening very quickly - after all, it's just a matter of overlaying or triggering a desired pattern on top of your awareness.

POST: Reducing to one word? (two cup method)

My recommendation - You contemplate the situations, and let the word arise from them. You just "sit with the situation" (in the belly, as it were) until it forms in to the most appropriate word. This is what makes the word a "handle" onto the situation or state, rather than simply a disconnected term. If people create the word unthinkingly, it generally is such a handle. When people instead work it out intellectually, it's much less so, and you're more likely to get results which are just the extended pattern of the word, rather than the specific situation. (The instructions are written in a way that's intended to encourage that "just follow the bullet points" attitude which means you don't overthink things.)

So ideally, then, "the word comes to you"; you do not construct it.

POST: Is it possible to be forcibly shifted by another you? Is it possible to shift to a universe that is worse than this one?

There is no "other you", so those questions don't apply (see text and links in sidebar). Certainly, it's possible for your state - for that is what is meant by a "dimension", albeit with a specific meaning of "your" - to shift to one from which a less pleasant ongoing experience arises. However, from this perspective there is nothing "out there" to "force" anything at all.

My thoughts are a bit abstract on this topic

Well, that's part of the point of the subreddit: to explore how we think about this stuff, test what is true by attention and experimentation. The question to ask is: what exactly are "you" right now? Only when you've answered that clearly can you work out what it would mean to "jump". You also need to ask yourself, what is "the world"? Is it a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time"? A place in which you wander about, as a body? Or is it more like a "set of facts" which constitute a state, from which our experiences arise?

Suggestion: We never actually experience ourselves as a body walking about in a place; we never have that "outside view" of ourselves. That's just something we think. Our actual experience is subjective; we never experience anything at all outside of our minds. Even our thoughts about a world outside of our minds - they also appear inside our minds. Our minds have no outside?

Anyway -

So, imagine if what you were truly was a sort of "open aware perceptual space" with no content in it. Then, a "3D-multisensory image" appeared within it: this moment. This includes your body sensations, the visual image in front of you, the sounds dotted about at various positions. You are not any particular part of that multisensory image, although you identify perhaps with a particular location (a dot behind the eyes, perhaps). From this point of view, your ongoing experience is like a series of "3D frames" appearing in your perception. Each frame is pretty much consistent with the last, as if there was a set of stable underlying facts behind it.. If suddenly your experience changed such that it seemed as if those facts were now different, that would be a "dimensional jump".

Related metaphor: The Imagination Room

POST: Tried the Two glasses

Q1: Great to hear they're feeling better!
I experimented a little the other day without actually using the glasses. My dad hurt his knee and he's a UPS driver (doesn't work out well for him) I summed up the current and the intended states, and visualized the changing over and the next day he said he hadn't had to take any pain medicine since the afternoon before.
I just smiled and told him I was glad and the rest he's been getting must be helping. :)

Nice. The next experiment would be: don't even bother with the visualisation, "just decide" how things are.

Have you used this technique? Just deciding, I mean. I'm also glad that both of you guys had success. TG, one more question, have you ever tried the 2 glasses technique for more than one intention at a time?

See: The original Just Decide call to arms and the related posts, Overwriting Yourself and The Patterning of Experience. The issue is to not interfere with the subsequent unfolding of ongoing experience, and in effect counter-intend the state you have "decided" into place, once you've done it. (Which is why the final instruction in the two glasses exercise is written as it is.) The original idea was for body movement, then extend it to everything.

EDIT: Your edit. So, I wouldn't go for two unrelated changes within a single exercise. Do one, wait a while, do the other. Remembering that the true purpose of this is experimentation and exploration, rather than just a quest for results. And if we're going with the patterning model, you're going to make all sorts entangled overlaps, and you'll struggle to come up with composite words to capture two situations. Seems too much hassle!

I wasn't clear on my second question. When I said intention, I meant can you perform the technique once, per intention, but for multiple intentions. Example: I have 5 intentions, so I do the 2G five times, each time with a different problem/outcome in mind.

Oh I see - doing each intention from a fresh, separate setup. Yes, that's fine. Leave some settling time between each one though I'd say - ideally at least a week, definitely more than a day.

Thx, TG. Funny that your screen name initials are the same as the "Two Glasses (Technique)."

Yeah, I have to admit I was temporarily a bit confused by a couple of posts when people first started using that abbreviation for the exercise!