TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 14

POST: Questions regarding DJ

So, for your first point, see previous answers about "dimensional jumping" and the "law of attraction": here [POST: Won $500 a few days ago ], here [POST: Speculative answers to Frequently asked questions.] and here [POST: A few questions.]. As for the story, it's just that: a /r/nosleep type story "inspired by" the topic of dimensional jumping (although really a misunderstanding of the topic as it is described in the sidebar).

Q1: Wow, thanks for the fast reply tho, would you be able to explain the difference beetwen DJ and LoA for dummy people please? Like I though it was something like: DJ (2 glasses) might "change everything" (might change your relationship with parents, close people etc) just for your wishes while Law of attraction you're just asking for one thing while it be the only thing changing or only things around it wil change.

Your timing was good!

So, the real answer is that "dimensional jumping" and "law of attraction" are both aspects or artefacts or leveragings of a deeper truth. The difference between them is, I'd say, that "dimensional jumping" is knowingly employing this and understands there is no solid underlying "how things really work", whereas the "law of attraction" tends to be based on a hand-waving sense of there being a "how things are really". (And often a poorly-defined one, leading to almost superstitious behaviour in search of "vibrations" and the like.)

At root, though, they both work because change arises due to intentions and their implications - and the world-descriptions those intentions are structured in terms of - rather than due to a technique or method based on the world being a certain way independently of those intentions.

Q1: Thanks for all your answers :) so after all there are no big changes if you do 2 glasses if you dont really want big changes around you due to whatever you asked for, right? Since you might make the shape of whatever you want.

Right, so the idea is that when you write the labels you contemplate the specific situation you are in, then contemplate the specific outcome you want, and in each case "feel out" the words that capture those situations (that is, you let the words come to you rather than logically working them out). There's no reason for anything more dramatic to happen, other than what makes sense in terms of "this" turning into "that". You're not going to some other drastically different place, you're just tweaking up your current experience a bit by "re-patterning" it (is the concept behind the exercise).

Q1: Alright, thanks :) It sounds better than dimensional jumping wich sounds kinda shady actually compared to what it really is. Since as far as i've understood there's no jumping to other dimension (thats why you are not ocupping any other body and yours its not ocuped either)

Yeah, well "dimensional jumping" is just one of many metaphors which, the idea goes, you can use to generate experiences "as if" they were true. So, if you want radical change in your life, something that breaks the rules a bit, then constructing intentions in terms of that metaphor allows you to "re-pattern" your experience in a way that actions based on the usual world description would not. (Although there is also some misdirection involved to ensure that you don't resist, or later counter-intend, the outcome.)

Fundamentally, you never occupy any body, you just have an experience "as if" you are "a body within a world". The deeper observation referred to earlier, is realising that the only fundamental truth is the fact that there is an experience happening - that is, the fact of being-aware. The actual content of experience, though, is impermanent and has no solid underlying substrate, and hence the possibility of shifting its condition without limitation. (All of which, of course, should be checked by personal experimentation; you're not meant to take anyone else's word on this.)

Q1: What breaks my brain is that then, the world is a place of shared experiences, right? Since, as an exemple, i've met you, and you're an human being more than something that i've created.

That's everyone's favourite topic, apparently! See recent discussion: here [POST: What happens to the other 'you's when you jump?], for example.

Q1: I feel like a freak but i find these "theorys" (for scepticks or however its written in english) interesting. But, what would happen if 2 same persons make the 2 glasses method to be attached to the same person, lets say "x" and "y" want to be with "l", what would happen?

At a fundamental level there are no people and you are not actually a person! Basically, don't worry about it - you can treat it like a "private copy" of the world where everything in your experience is an aspect of a larger you. As I say, the only thing that is always true is the fact of "awareness"; everything else is true on an "as if" temporary basis only. So there are no conflicts, because there is only ever this experience happening.

Q1: Thanks for all the answers btw :) That sounds totally awesome, is this connected to the astral projection/law of attraction philosophy, i mean, we're here to live, so just do it. Or does this go in other way that people who believe in karma and so would reject this, like if this woud be cheating?

Welcome! I don't think the idea of karma as in "judgement and payback" is valid. There are no inherent rules-based morality laws or an independent benchmark for appropriate behaviour.

There is karma in the sense of, if you "pattern" yourself with a particular outcome or a particular worldview - whether by intending it or doing something that implies it - then it will become prominent in your life. But that's not the same as "balance" or whatever. Rather, it's just what a "patterning" approach means by definition: you get what you assert plus the logical implications of that assertion - i.e. if you intend something then you are also intending a world in which that intention makes sense.

So, basically just do it. There is no morality or judgement outside of yourself, so it's up to you. The nature of "patterning" does imply a certain "do unto others (unto the world-as-experience) as you would have done to you", though, of course.

Q1: wow! This is a very interesting and good point of view, mother of god. So, what do you think about the infinite knowledge that is right now in the universe? Like, none of it "exists" as it trully is, or it is really something exist and we discover over our experiences?

You could consider that the world is not so much a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" as a "toy box of all possible patterns and experiences, from which we draw to create our 'private copy'". All possibilities, then, are present eternally (which means "outside of time" rather than "forever"), "dissolved" into the background. However, that too is basically a metaphor which you can experience "as if" it were true, albeit a metaphor which gets closer to being completely inclusive. Again, only being-aware - or "awareness" - is fundamentally true (exists), however it can "take on the shape of" any experience "as if" it were true (exists). To summarise this view:

What you truly are is "awareness", a sort of non-material "material" whose only property is being-aware, and which "takes on the shape of" experiences.
The experience you have taken on the shape of right now is one of apparently being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

The problem we have when thinking about it (this is covered in the last link) is that our thinking is already pre-formatted into a "shadow sensory" shape. We cannot think of things which are "before" experience, because thoughts are themselves are just experiences. We have to be careful and not make the mistake of assuming the-world-as-it-is is of the same format as our sensory moments, since they are just a particular patterning themselves. This tends to inform our idea of what "to exist" means.

Generally, I'd say that everything exists as potentiality (enfolded), and the current sensory moment exists as actuality (unfolded). However, right now you are actually experiencing absolutely everything, and this is true always - however, different pattern-facts are just "brighter" than other pattern-facts (their relative contribution to this sensory moment is stronger). We might call the current relative distribution of pattern intensities our present "state".

Basically:

Think of the situation now that you want to change. Pause and wait for a word to come up which feels like it fits as a summary of that situation.
Think of the situation as you want it to be. Pause and wait for a word to come up which feels like it fits for that.
Use those words for your labels.

Follow the instructions as they are written in: these instructions [The Act is The Fact - Part One: An Exercise]. That's it!

Q1: Hi again. Tried it about last week but literally: 0 changes. Not even around me. If done the two glasses but the glasses aren't transparent at all (they have like pictures). Does It matter? I'll try again soon, but I'd like to know how to do It perfectly when I just want to thing one change while maintaining my family bounds exactly the same.

The properties of the glasses don't really matter - although it's helpful if they are transparent to some extent so that you can see the water levels and so fully experience the pouring of the liquid. So don't worry too much about that. Other things to consider: remember to follow the last instruction; generally allow a week or so for anything to become obvious; later, if no luck, perhaps consider whether you are someone who "holds onto themselves" in everyday life, do you "control" yourself moment by moment?

Q1: What do we mean by "controlling", sorry for obvious questions but since english is not my main language (not even close to) somethings might be a little bit confusing to me.

It's not you - it's hard to put into words anyway! So, an example:

Sit in a chair. Now stand up.

Does it feel that the standing up experience just "arises" and your body "moves by itself", or do you feel that you are "doing" the standing up? If you feel that you are "doing" it, can you identify what it is you do? Are you tensing muscles? Thinking intensely? Narrowing your attention down? Do you begin by re-asserting the fact of "sitting down" before you being targeting "standing up"? None of that is required.

Now, instead of doing anything about standing up, just let your attention be open and expansive in all directions (don't narrow down onto your body parts), and just-decide that your body will stand up: simply think "being-standing-up". And then don't interfere. Allow the experience of "my body standing up" to just arise and unfold in your awareness, by itself.

Some people constantly "re-assert" their current body position and then use effort to overcome it, and they do the same with thinking, and in particular they "concentrate" their attention on the target of what they are doing. None of this is actually required (in particular, you don't need to narrow-focus on your target in order to intend it and have it happen), and what it tends to do is "fix" you in your current state, and prevent it shifting - in the example, like you are intending "being-sat-down" and "being-stood-up" at the same time!

Q1: alright, i think I got the point, so how do we transfer that to 2 glasses? And by the way, how was this method discovered? i've been looking on google but there's only reddit threads, no other websites so im curious :p

In two ways. Firstly, when performing the exercise, simply perform the acts as described in the instructions, and don't "concentrate" or "focus" or in some way try to make anything happen. Secondly, in your everyday life work towards staying "open and spacious" and go about your tasks by just-deciding rather than "manually" moving yourself (body, thoughts, attention). The exercise itself, I put it together when someone posted a question over at /r/glitch_in_the_matrix asking whether it was possible to deliberately create a "glitch" type experience.

Q1: Got it! Thanks!
Yeah, but my point of the question, is how would someone discover the method, since lot of people on this reddit say it works im just curious why it is not famous out of reddit itself

Oh, I see. Well, it's just one example of that sort of thing, I suppose, and it probably doesn't make much sense out of context?

It's probably best described as an experiment rather than a method. Its underlying purpose really is to trigger an experience that encourages a questioning of your assumptions, and perhaps thinking along a particular direction about the "nature of experiencing". Without that larger idea backing it, the ability to have conversations like this about it in a forum, it probably isn't very valuable.

Q1: Gotcha, thank you once again!
Could I ask you to share your own experiences that have worked with 2Glasses (if not very personal) as how was it before, what you wanted to change, and how it changed and what else changed due to it?

You're welcome. I'll leave you to conduct your own experiments and check it out for yourself, but if you're interested: here is the original comment [POST: [EXPERIMENT] Glitch Generation Test, I Need Your Creative Ideas!] describing the exercise, and the first responses!

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Q2: [There is no morality or judgement outside of yourself]
yes there is - me

Hmm, you are not outside of yourself!

Q2: other people are because they are not directly me and do things I despise... judgement, see

But you are not "directly you" either. To despise them is simply to despise aspects of yourself, and for as long as you despise them, it'll persist...

Q2: for as long as you despise them, it'll persist...
that's right, because by thinking about them, I am reinforcing that "pattern". so I have to "drop" them... but realistically, they're not going to just vanish; so there must be a need for a war or something
But you are not "directly you" either
this is still confusing to me [https://youtu.be/DyOxHTLE3EE]

Drop "realistically" too, then...

POST: What happens to the other 'you's when you jump?

The content and links in the sidebar cover this, I think, but -

Although it's fun (or disturbing!) to contemplate, there are not any "other yous" in the sense of physically (in a separate space), simultaneously (in a parallel time) "happening" (unfolding in time). I'd suggest that the only thing that is "happening" is your 1st-person ongoing experience right now.

"Dimensions", as an (active?) metaphor, provide a way of conceiving of a discontinuous change in the content of that ongoing experience that breaks your usual narrative of the world as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Other narratives might then seem more appropriate - for example, we might think of "the world" as a sort of toy box containing all possible patterns and facts and moments, from which we select our particular "private copy" experience of a world.

Q1: I rather like the "private copy" metaphor, it helps me grasp the whole idea of "patterning." The only thing I don't understand is how it can be "private" when our toolboxes seem so show the same pattern, and my patterns can influence your patterns. I'm sure you get this same question in its different forms very often, and I guess it can be boiled down to this: if objectivity doesn't exist, then why do our subjective experiences "sync up" so well?

There are a few ways to tackle this, but let's say: if objectivity doesn't exist, then subjectivity doesn't exist - there is just "experiencing". Therefore, our subjective experiences in fact don't "synch up" at all. Your current experience is the whole thing, you are being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person (and by "a world" we mean a particular shaping of the metaphorical eternal "infinite gloop").

The Hall of Records metaphor gives us one way to conceive of this. It essentially says: all perspectives exist, but the only thing that is ever "happening" is this experience, because "experiencing" == "happening". There is no "outside" to that. However, really, we have a problem here: that our thoughts about experience are themselves experiences, and so already formatted into pseudo-sensory object-based experience. We cannot therefore think about experience; it is already "too late". What we are talking about is "before" division and multiplicity. So, we might say that there is only one toolbox, not many, and only one experience, not many. Strictly speaking, given the above, we should say that there are not-many toolboxes, and not-many experiences. We literally can't conceive of this in the abstract, we only conceive of particular experiences, as experiences!

Although we can't think about it, we can directly attend to our experience and get an unmediated insight though. (Excuse some recycling here.) A silly little exercise illustrates this. 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 facts upon which all of experience is built. (Try it before reading the next paragraph!)

I anticipate what you discover is: there is no edge to your experience, and so there is just a sort of unbounded space of "awareness" rather than "an" or "the" awareness; you seem to be both everywhere and nowhere, you are unlocated and unbounded; the entire experience appears to be "made from" you, as in you-as-awareness rather than you-as-person; what you previously considered yourself to be is a thought of you, and that thought is located within you-as-awareness and is made from you-as-awareness.

Eventually - from this, the experiences you might generate from other exercises, and some contemplation - you conclude that the only inherent property of experience is being-aware, and that to talk of there being "other" subjective experiences or an objective world is not right or wrong, but meaningless. You can't "understand" this in terms of conceptualising it, but you can know it, directly.

I've spent my whole life using "subjectivity" basically as a synonym for "experience."

Me too, largely, which is why it's worth doing what we're doing now: just emphasising that it's a shorthand for "the subject" rather than it being a perspective that is embedded within an environment.

I'm imagining an Alex Grey painting with an infinite pattern of eyes embedded into the background, which alludes to the idea of awareness being an inherent property of all things.

A nice image. If the background is made completely from "eyes', then all objects which appear within it are also made from "eyes". Although, because that can suggest that one part of the background is "looking out" at another part, it's probably better so that it is made from "sensing" or "being". That way, we get the idea that the background doesn't go beyond itself, it simply experiences itself, in and as the shape that it has currently adopted. This is where we eventually come to the idea of calling it "awareness" and its only inherent property being being-aware.

However, it's really useful to come up with different visual images, like the one you suggest, for helping us grasp particular implications of this. So long as we bear in mind that the true situation is "non-dimensional", as it were, then we can't really go wrong.

At the core of reality I imagine a uniform, unbounded 3D grid ...

In some respects this is similar to The Infinite Grid metaphor, I suppose. These metaphors can be very useful for: a) conceiving of a structure which can be used to formulate intentions; b) providing a thinking framework to discuss certain experiences. It is important, though, to note that it is not "how things really are" - because there is no particular "now things really are" or "how things really work".

There is no stable underlying substrate within which we are operating, hence the "formatting" of your world experience at an abstract level is just as much a pattern as everything else. When we intend something, we not only intend that outcome, but we also implicitly intend the conceptual framework that was used to conceive of it. That is, that when you intend to go out into the garden, you are also implying the extended pattern of that intention, which involves apparent houses, gardens, a persistent environment, spatial extent, unfolding change, and so on.

So, every intention is a shift of the entire world! However, we tend to only intend things that are consistent with our current experience, and thus every time we go out into the garden, we further entrench this entire universe or dimension (that is: patterned state). What we are doing on this subreddit, what the exercises encourage, is intending an outcome which is not consistent with our current experience of "how things work", and thereby we reveal to ourselves that "how things work" is something we implicitly intend and which is within experience, rather than some stable independent landscape that we navigate across.

This node could be described by some as an "ego," a container for the awareness. Is this description compatible so far?

Well, the ego isn't a container for awareness. Awareness has no edges or boundaries, it is what everything else is "from", so it cannot be contained. What you think of as the ego is just a concept. In terms of what you actually experience, I'll be it's just an occasional thought that arises here and there, which you attribute to an ego. Again, what you are actually experiencing is being "awareness" with sensations, perceptions and thoughts arising within and as it.

The little four part investigation demonstrates to you this fact of experience. It is important, though, to actually do this, to attend to experience directly, rather than just think about it. Your thoughts about it won't get "behind" it, they will be just more experiences, deformations of your current experience - like rippling a pool of water that you are trying to perceive the surface of. Realising this, you discover the the "ego" is really a thought about an "ego", rather than an actual thing. It is a pattern of experience, nothing more. (I suggest.)

POST: A few questions.

I guess probably the best way to start, is to ponder:

How, exactly, does the "law of attraction" work? (And what is the model of the world upon which it's based?)
What are "you" and what is your relationship to "the world"?

As the sidebar says, "dimensions" are really just a concept or metaphor (as indeed is the concept of "reality"), one that is used to describe an experience and/or formulate an intention. It is not really "how things work" or "how things are". (In fact I'd suggest there is no "how things work", and "how things are" cannot be described because descriptions themselves are made from it.)

Ultimately, then, this is about generating experiences which lead one to contemplate the "nature of experiencing", and understand the relationship between experiences, intentions, and descriptions. And getting some desirable results along the way, for sure. The Two Glasses exercise, specifically, is really a structured approach to getting someone to shift state from one with "this" pattern as dominant, to one with "that" pattern as dominant - whilst making it relatively unlikely that they will counter-intend it afterwards, and in a way that naturally raises questions about causal relationships within experience.

POST: I've got a bit of a problem.

Q1: I am saddened that this subreddit seems so negative suddenly

Q2: It's the flood of all these new people. The whole "vibe" of the sub changed. There's no more teachers. And all the noobs are just relishing in their ignorance.

Q3: Imo "teacher" isn't the appropriate term.
Assuming that the core intentions of this sub are:
(a) to rise curiosity about the relationship between "I" and "the world" and subsequently between "experience" and "descriptions".
(b) Suggest tools to help individuals in their personal investigations.
What is lacking at this phase are more people willing to redirect "noob discussions" to the core theme. The modus operandi of /u/TriumphantGeorge is a good model.
My suggestion to make this task easier is to create a hypertext in the format of Question/Answer linking to previous discussions here. Maybe it could be done in a collaborative fashion utilizing a shared doc...

Indeed, those are the core themes - although they are usually best articulated as part of a dialogue, rather than a statement of intent I think, because the various terms tend to have different meanings for everyone. That's also why there isn't a basic Q&A/FAQ here. However, a wiki page linking to "historical discussions of note" may be a useful thing for us to introduce. Meanwhile, the number of subscribers and new interest probably now exceeds what is practical for a subreddit topic like this, and has for a while. In moderation terms, we've tended to let things breathe for a bit, then reel things back in. That is, allow some basic or repeat posts to stay for a while - because they often allow a strand of discussion to develop that is valuable even if the main post is not - and later remove ones that didn't flourish. But this does mean we suffer from waves of "incomer ignorance" dominating the sub sometimes, and perhaps we need to push back on that a bit more.

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A1: Grow a pair sissy.

A2: I agree with you. I was sitting in front of the mirror bored for 40 minutes straight. OP is just afraid of the dark.

POST: Can you change yourself physically when you jump?

I would also like to know if I can change myself physically when you jump, but this comment is pointless so think of it like a bump.

The likely range of bodily change is often asked in rhyme,
The key you seek to make it sleek will come to you in time.

Sooooooo, yes?

[Come on, you gotta keep in the spirit of it!]

Dramatic shifts and bosom lifts mean lowering your defences,
Parts are moved and others soothed while detaching from the senses.

I would like to have clear answers, because I really don't want various types of cancers.

[That's better!]

The theory's said that results are lead by the thoughts we hold in mind,
But the strength of these asks commitment, please, which is difficult to find.

Commitment is something I am not familiar with, but I could do it for this, now stop rhyming please and help me jump into the abyss.

[Very good.]

I've never had cause to dabble myself in this - except that I did accidentally 'keep things going in the right direction' when I was growing up, unwittingly. But the process is the same for all this stuff: Enter a state of detachment (so that you are not "holding onto" present patterns, and they fade) and will the desired change (triggering the desired pattern, to intensity) without using any effort. It's a bit more difficult, I think, to let go of the body, so it's easier to will it in the future - and if there's some 'token action' you could take in that direction, that can be helpful.

How can you will change without using any effort

I think of it like "remembering". Do you use effort to remember something? It's like that. Will is how you actually accomplish things; everything else is an effect. It's hard to describe. I mean, how do you see or hear? You just do it. But it's the difference between having a 'technique' and it working or not working. It's sort of a commitment to something being a fact. Here's a little experiment which can give you the experience: Get a friend and challenge them to an arm-wrestle. Do this twice.

On the first attempt, use all your muscle power to attempt to win the arm wrestle, as you normally would.
On the second attempt, withdraw your 'presence' from your arm and simply "strongly decide" that you are going to win the arm-wrestle. Now, resist the urge to interfere - leave your arm alone and simply let your arm do the winning for you.

That "strongly deciding" is the willing. It is that which brings about the result. In this example, you can will muscular movement or will the result. When doing these types of things we want to use the second sort. And so it is effortless.

what is a token action?

A 'token action' is just something which you can pass off as the 'cause'. For instance, if you wanted to lose weight you might, having willed, go jogging once a week and eat an extra apple. (In the arm-wrestling example, 'muscular trying' is a token action which actually gets in the way of the result.)

POST: So...could every person that you talk to in your life actually have their consciousness in a different dimension?

Today's Conundrum - Nobody is looking out of the eyes that look at you, except for you. If you pay close attention, you'll realise that even you are not looking out of your own eyes.

This has always been my assumption- we live in our own worlds

Yes, effectively we are each living in our own patterned "dream-space". When we "jump" we are letting go of some world-patterns, allowing them to shift according to our intention.

Aside - This sometimes leads people to worry about "other people", but the answer is that you are not a person either - you are a conscious perspective, in which the "dream-world" appears. And so is everyone else (if you need to believe in "elses"). It's best to just say "it all works out in the end; everyone experiences the version of themselves they choose to".

Thats seems pretty limited-Im also a person and youre a people. Its part of how this works.

Well, it's optional but - It's better to say you are experiencing being-a-person or a "person perspective". It seems like a detail, but things make a whole lot more sense if you take this approach. Not just "jumping". Search for the "person" you assume you are, and you won't find it. You will, however, find transient sensations, thoughts and perceptions in an "open aware space". The person you seem to be is as much the content of your world as the rest of the environment.

That's a lot of robot talk to skirt that it's People not- animals or robots or anything else that has the ability to surf the meta fiction as with jumping. It's the Person, human that bridges mortality & immortality - that's pretty fucking important. With heady robot talk about consciousness you miss the most important part

Hmm, so what is "the most important part"?

The Human.

Okay, interesting point. If you are experience something, you can't be that something, I suggest. But this depends on what you mean by "human". If you mean "human" as in, a particular formatting of mind but independent of the body and thought, then I might agree with you. Human experience is a filtering of potential experience. If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't be able to do "jumping" and the like. In fact, the whole jumping process is precisely about detaching from that formatting and letting it shift. You let go of "being human" to, briefly, be nearer to raw unformatted consciousness and more responsive to intention. You die and resurrect.

Without that there is no subjective experience to experience.

Very true. And if you pay super-close-attention, you might realise that your subjective experience is constantly disappearing and re-emerging, like the gap between frames in a movie. At best, we are half-human in our experience. But since time can't be measured against anything within those gaps, so each gap in a way lasts forever, maybe we are barely human at all... And who knows what you become in those unremembered experiences between your "human" moments...

Yikes. Rocks have consciousness. The universe is aware.

Nah, rocks don't have consciousness. Nothing "has" consciousness, I'd say. I wouldn't even say "the universe is aware".

Well there are plenty of people to disagree with you on that so I'll leave you there. We'l have to agree to disagree.

Just to be clear, lest I leave a confusion: I'm not saying you are not conscious. I'm saying that consciousness must be something you "are" rather than "have". What you then seem to be is the shape you have taken on, as consciousness. My "wouldn't say the universe is aware" statement is misleading in this way. Better to say "is awareness" and "has awareness of its form". Anyway, thanks for the exchange.

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Can a Mantra be a Metaphor?

Good question! Some thoughts: If we abstract these terms out into "patterns" then, effectively yes. To say a word is to trigger its associated patterns. Meanwhile, a metaphor is simply a named set of overlapping relationships (patterns), connected and associated with an unnamed set of overlapping relationships (patterns). To say the word "owl" is to trigger the associated patterns of "birds", "wings", "big eyes", 'tree branches", "Blade Runner Voight-Kampff Test", "Rachael", "night-time", etc. To think-about an owl is to do the same.

On archetypes

Gods and Goddesses, owls and archetypes, they are all just triggers for pre-existing extended patterns which cannot be encapsulated in a word or an image, but can be triggered or intensified by them. All possible patterns are here, now, in your experience - it's just that some are more intensely activated than others. To feel better (simplistically speaking) you want to allow the "bad feeling" to fade and a "good feeling" to become more intense. How to do? "Detach" from your current experience and "allow" it to shift; trigger a pattern which implies the desired state. Literally, you are a wide-open perceptual space with some experiential patterns more intense than others. You don't "heal" so much as "allow experience to apparently shift". More accurately: you can't change anything, you can only let the present pattern dim and intensify an alternative pattern by "recalling" it.

POST: What's the point of the Dimensional ID 982 if an infinite amount of other dimensions could have the same number on their sidebar? Why doesn't everyone pick the own ID for their original dimension?

The ID is there for fun really. It's part of the mythology.

Even if people were to pick their own personal ID, there's no reason why it would change just because other changes have occurred. There of course an infinite amount of different types of experiences in which the ID is still that number.

Really I'm referring to "mythology" in its looser sense:

"Mythology can refer to the collected myths of a group of people—their body of stories which they tell to explain nature, history, and customs"

The concept of using some sort of "Universe ID" or anchor to identify shifts was one of the early ideas in dimensional jumping, so it's part of the shared history of the subreddit. If you think about it though it doesn't really work as a reliable reference (why should that number necessarily change just because other things have changed?) so it's really just part of the fun rather than something inherent or useful in the approach. If it does change however, then you will know for sure that things have shifted, right?

POST: So can i jump without the whole "candle n mirror @ night"?

The point is to get yourself into a detached state, released from holding onto the current sensory experience. Check out the other methods post linked on the sidebar - e.g. Neville Goddard approach of entering deep relaxation, etc. You don't even need the timing, although there's something about the quietness of late night, and it feels "special" in a way that helps. The trick to letting go is to let go of your attention. People understand letting go of the body and thought, but they leave their attention narrowed. Free your attention also. Then, once you've settled out, you can begin, focusing your will. Check out the couple of (free) books referred to in the Neville Goddard post. His approach is probably the most accessible, next to the stripped down version. Here's a good exercise to begin doing (there's a more advanced one here):

Daily Releasing Exercise

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

POST: Has there been any thought given to the idea that you are consciously manipulating reality, rather than jumping to a different one? Is that question semantic?

A1: I think that quite rightly sums up the issue. The way I like to express it is that you do not exist in multiple dimensions but rather multiple dimensions exist in you. If you think of all possible worlds as a probability wave, it is a matter of conciousness "collapsing" the wave into multiple realities. Much like the old idea of our subjective reality being a dream and we have the ability to change the dream.

Right! I'm not quite so keen on "wavefunction collapsing" because it's maybe not a great interpretation even for physics (it implies an event), but the idea that you are a conscious space and all possible experiential/factual/logical patterns are by implication if not in fact latent within you, like memories waiting to be triggered, is pretty close as metaphors go.

Q: So do you think humans have 'incarnations' in lower and higher dimensions simultaneously? Could I dimensional jump my consciousness 'up' a dimension instead of 'left or right'?.

All there is, is experiences, and all experiences arise in your "perceptual space". In a dream of walking across a field, do you go anywhere? What if you had a dream about exploring other dimensions? No, in all cases what you get is... more dream. When you wake up in the morning, again... more dream. You might consider that you are only dreaming of waking up.

(To illustrate this, try out the little experiment in the middle of this post [Outside: The Dreaming Game].)

POST: Noob here. Am I too negative to try this DJ?

Right..the only reason I would want to DJ would be to fix the negativity, ha. So, if I were to get in the right mindset to do it, I wouldn't want to anyway. I will just have to figure something else out, but it was just a thought. Thanks for your reply.

Yeah, if you "defocus" yourself a bit, the rest of your mind is going to snap to the same thing! So messing around with mirrors seems like a bad idea.

Possible suggestions: You should concentrate on something more general: bringing into mind scenes of what you'd like to experience, vividly and with the feeling of how you would feel, as if you were experiencing it now, in the 1st-person. That alone will make a big difference to you. Even just because it's fun and feels good. Although outside random events might act to budge you out of negativity, the longer it goes on the more the world will have lost that random factor, and settled into your attitude along with you. You are going to have to "shape-shift" yourself!

Think of it as having ended up with a slouched, weeakposture. You can wait for something to bump into you, or pull you up, but that might be a long wait. The best solution is to shape-shift yourself, take on the form of upright posture and power. It might be worth reading the Neville Goddard version, described best in The Law and the Promise (see links in that post), for inspiration.

POST: trying tonight

Work on summoning the feeling of "how you would feel if you were as you want to be". This will help more generally.

POST: Too scared to jump.

Try other methods. They all amount to: entering a state of sensory detachment, and allowing a shift towards some intended state. No matter what you have to "let go" in some way, but some are a little more pleasant if you don't like the morning ritual bit!

Have you ever seen those isolation tanks? I wonder if those can be used in jumping. I don't see why not.

Floatation tanks? I've had a few sessions in those: very relaxing. It was before I started thinking about these things though. Potentially it could be ideal. The more you feel "totally supported" the more you feel comfortable in removing attention from your body sensations (that's why maybe lying on the floor is better than lying on the bed is better than standing up, for this).

POST: Seriously tripped out. I SWEAR there were at least 65,000 subscribers to this subreddit. I watched the number climb for quite a while too. WTF

A1: That is an improvement then, imagine 65,000 people posting this type of drama daily.

Hmm.

POST: Misunderstandings

/u/TriumphantGeorge states that "dimension jumping" is actually just a metaphor. It's all been a metaphor. I don't mean to shoot anyone down with this. If you believe you are actually jumping between dimensions and shifting the OBJECTIVE REALITY, go for it, I'm not going to stop you

However, to say it is "just" a metaphor is also misleading. That implies that metaphors are lessers things, that they are not "real" like other things which are "objective". The sense in which "dimensional jumping" is just a metaphor is the same sense in which "objective reality" is just a metaphor. To highlight:

It's a place to change your subjective perception of reality, meanwhile the objective one remains unchanged.

I have never encountered an "objective perception" of reality. In fact, strictly speaking, I'm not sure I can say that I have ever experienced a "reality" at all. The context of the statement would be all important. It is also worth considering whether there is truly a difference between having an experience that "really" happened and having one "as if" something happened. The experience certainly happened; the explanation of that experience is another thing. The explanation is in fact itself another experience: "the experience of thinking about an experience". Explanations are never "what really happened", you might say. Unless perhaps one thinks that the world is actually made from explanations! (Although: there is a sense in which that might be viewed as an accurate statement, but not by the straightforward interpretation of it.)

Anyway, you get the idea.

The sidebar text and the introduction already give the perspective to take (and there's no risk of posts or my comments being deleted; the idea behind the subreddit is that a lot of the content will be in the evolving discussion taking place within the comments). From there, the intention is that people do some exercises, contemplate the results and their ongoing experience more generally. There is, in fact, probably not much point trying to work out what this "really is" without engaging with that. It can lead to one simply creating more "castles in the sky" (self-consistent conceptual frameworks which "make sense" within themselves, but do not actually connect do the the topic of direct experience - that is, they are "conceptually true" only). Regardless, one needs to be really picky when it comes to how we use our familiar concepts and ideas here; because perhaps familiarity is the only thing making them seem valid. Some good and reasonably accessible reading related to that last point from the perspective of science and philosophy, again to be viewed as thought-provoking rather than prescriptive:

What's bad about this habit - N David Mermin, on the reification of abstractions.
The mental universe - Richard Conn Henry in Nature, covering similar ground.
Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics - George Ellis on, essentially, science vs conceptualising vs philosophy.
A Private View of Quantum Reality - Christopher Fuchs on interpretation, probability, the "objective world" container concept, and more. (See also the related Nature article, Physics: Qbism puts the scientist back into science, which is also interesting for the point at which the author resists the implications of his model.)

1] It's obviously worth asking what "dimensional jumping" and "objective reality" are metaphors of or for. One answer: they are metaphors for the patterning of our experience; they are possible "as if" perspectives on them. Of course, "patterning" is itself a metaphor! However, it perhaps benefits from having less in the way of hidden assumptions between the direct experience and the description - plus it self-declares as a metaphor rather than claiming to be "what is really happening".

I don't believe I'm being that much of a poison.

Hopefully, I never seemed to suggest that you were. That's not the spirit in which I responded, which was: to clarify what was meant when I said "it is a metaphor" (my "own words", just as you say) and to elucidate the underlying approach of the subreddit. Your post was a great seed for kicking off a discussion about exactly that.

I just wanted to highlight that for newer people to this sub, so they can decide for themselves if they believe it or not.

Indeed. But it's hopefully not a matter of people "believing" something (or not) based on what they read. As the sidebar tries to underline - and it really does give you all you need to get started - it's about conducting a personal investigation and then drawing your own conclusions. In fact, "belief" is probably too strong a word: people don't believe in an "objective world", they just never really examined the idea one way or another, nor paid much attention to the structure of their own perception. I'm not even sure that most people truly understand what is actually meant by a phrase like "objective reality", beyond the vague background assumption that what they supposedly are is a person-object located within some sort of place-environment. Most people, I would suggest, have never truly examined - intellectually or practically - their assumptions about their ongoing experience in any way. And then, if prompted to, they mostly go straight into thinking-about it at a surface level, rather than attending to it. Most don't even know what attending-to even is. This tends to result in wandering around the same ideas in a circle.

solipsism is by definition unfalsifiable

That's not necessarily the case, I'd suggest. It is true that there can be no content-based falsification of solipsism. But, it might be possible to notice something about your ongoing experience, its context, which suggests that ideas like solipsism are meaningless - that they do not apply. They are "not even wrong" as a description of one's situation. Similarly, the idea of an "objective world". That is not to say that they are not useful ideas, though. Recognising that these ideas (those, and "atoms", "particles", "waves", and so on) constitute "effective theories" rather than explanations in the sense of behind-the-scenes truth, is probably quite important. (People often pay lipservice to this, but not much more than that, especially over the last few decades where increasingly descriptions are taken as literally true, actual "things".) This is one of the senses in which the "objective world" and "dimensional jumping" are both metaphors.

To emphasise, though: this subreddit is not about believing anything. However, it might be about examining - everything.

And "belief" isn't that strong of a word to describe the situation.

I think I'm just keen to have a more specific use of the word "belief" when discussing this particular topic. Certainly, as you say, the everyday use covers all those situations you allude to. But here, when dealing with a deliberate examination of the nature of experience, it's useful to highlight when something is more of an unexamined "assumption" than an explicit "belief". It can seem nitpicky, but making distinctions like that can help when digging deeper, I feel.

When all is said and done, this boils down to solipsism vs. realism

I personally don't think that's the case, and for a reason: you can observe something about your direct experience which simultaneously re-contextualises "realism" and makes untenable the common version of "solipsism". Loosely speaking, we end up with: in the former case, there is no place for a "real world" to be; in the latter case, there is no place for a countable "object" to be and hence nothing for experience to "belong" to. Now, if one has no new information - no additional experiences to add to one's memories-to-date; no fresh container concept either - then certainly it seems that we are left with an intellectual choice between "realism" or "solipsism". This is why there is an encouragement to conduct certain experiments, and why the sidebar calls them "exercises" rather than, say, "methods". (And to really ponder what a "description" actually is.)

As a side note I'd like to applaud you for keeping this discussion civil and well-meaning

Likewise. Hopefully the subreddit is all about encouraging collaborative discussion, an ongoing conversation - albeit one guided by a certain approach. That "certain approach" though, is based on engaging with ideas and beliefs as ideas, rather than fighting to "win" exchanges. After all, who knows where the next interesting or useful angle may come from? Certainly, it's unlikely that it will arise from people just viewing everything in exactly the same way and nodding their heads in precise agreement! (Or fighting in such a way as nothing is gained by anyone.)

The exercises themselves, however, are biased in favor of confirming one side over the other.

I don't think so? There is no content within the exercises themselves. And they are definitely not intended to involve a selection between two viewpoints, as such. Instead, quite possibly the conclusion would be that both viewpoints belong to a certain "type", and that the "type" is itself something to be questioned.

They can be explained through other means that don't require this.

The issue, here, is that the exact nature of "explanations" is one of the things under examination.

But I do think that some more clarification was needed for people to decide if this really is the subreddit and ideology for them

Ultimately, although it doesn't explicitly state this, it's sort of about being anti-ideology. (Although not just for the sake of it, of course.) It not "selling" a viewpoint. Rather, it's pushing a critical view of all descriptions of experience, as a category, with an encouragement to do a couple of little exercises which highlight this, directly (because there's no point in just thinking about this within any particular conceptual framework; you just go round in circles). In other words, the clarification comes from the participation, via personal investigation. There's not really any other way to do so that sticks; it's just more thoughts otherwise. The final context of it is non-conceptual (it can't be resolved into mental objects related within a representation space), which obviously poses a problem. None of this is particularly new, though, of course. The idea of "believing in" concepts and reifying them versus direct experience is a relatively new thing, I'd say - and has been retro-fitted onto past figures who explicitly criticised such an approach. For example, the key physicists of the early 20th century, and so on. As philosophy's prominence in physics diminished, and science became more like piecewise engineering built on prior conceptual platforms, we're left in quite an odd moment when it comes to the idea of "the real". Which is an interesting thing to explore, I think - hence all this.

Since the subreddit is ultimately non-ideological, the main battle is to prevent any particular "understanding" from becoming dominant to the exclusion of others (I think /u/Hooded_Rat gave quite a nice response along these lines). That would be what would constitute a "poisoning of the well". You're right that the internet is tricky when it comes to this. Now, it is true that not all newcomers to the discussion arrive at the same "level" - but that is fine, I think. With a topic such as this, intellectual elitism is quickly exposed, whilst ignorance is revealed as opportunity. From experience, though, you can't really just tell people "this is how it is". You really have to engage with them on their own terms. Fortunately, as one of the moderators, I have some influence over that! Plus we take the approach of "moderation via contribution", which hopefully ensures anything that gains momentum does not continue for long without coming under appropriate scrutiny. As a subreddit somewhat built on being against taking things on faith, though, we are generally in a good position here - even if Tom Cruise does show up and jumps on the subreddit sofa...

(Probably the real enemy for us is the casual comment declaring that "I read somewhere that this or that is the answer to your question", followed by nonsense! Corrective responses are time-consuming.)

Anyway, it is good when people (such as yourself) from all different perspectives are willing to engage, since it's not really about being "right" so much as digging into the construction and implications of this or that view (and its relationship to experience).

POST: Questions for Mr. TriumphantGeorge about reality tunnels, non-dual doctrines, books and movies.

(Replying as recently requested!)

First, on the reading recommendations front, I'd probably point you to this reading list conversation we had quite a while back.

[TG COMMENT]

POST: Witch needs help re: unintended consequences

Can you please just help me understand why no one here promotes using safety clauses.

We have had discussions in the past about being specific, particularly when someone has come up with a "monkey paw" type hypothesis. Ultimately, the generalised version of how to view this here would probably be that it's best to view things as a "dumb patterning system". That is, there is no interpretation of your target outcome taking place, there is in intermediary entity or intelligence. Rather, you are literally and directly increasing the prominence of the fact/pattern that you are intending, and the rest of the "landscape" of your world-definition is simply being deformed as a side-effect.

And so, yes, being specific is generally helpful, or appending some sort of notion of "in a way that benefits everyone" or whatever. One strategy someone came up with for the Two Glasses exercise was to add an asterisk (" * ") beside the labels, as if indicating an internal footnote, and just-decide that doing so meant that the manner of the outcome would be beneficial in a broader sense. It's worth noting something else here: that is, that the way some of these exercises were designed, was that it's not so much about the actual words you write, rather it's the state they represent or are a handle on.

For example, in the Two Glasses, you are not writing a description of your outcome, you are summoning the outcome in your mind and then retrieving a "handle" onto that, which you then write onto the label, linking it to the state. If you are doing that with full attention, then you are inherently specifying your outcome state in a way that is more complete than simply words or other symbols. So, there's a bit more to consider here, potentially, than just the general notion of "safety clauses". And obviously there's a whole lot of stuff to unpack about concepts like "forces of the universe" and so on. The approach here is (amongst other things) aimed at unpacking and defusing such patterns, and in the process I'd say that there's less to worry about as regards unintended outcomes from assumptions, since intentions are more "direct". Of course, almost all of an outcome could be said to "unintended", strictly speaking. (As in: not specified. Because if you intend an outcome - say, passing an exam - then "passing an exam" is just one little fact, but the whole landscape of your state was deformed to accommodate it. In that way, almost all of the outcome or result, almost all of your landscape, was not deliberate.)

POST: Two Glasses - А Cautionary Tale

See recent discussion on "unintended consequences" [POST: Witch needs help re: unintended consequences], too, and the idea of "safety clauses". It's important to be careful to not get too hung up on any "monkey paw" type notions here - that is, the idea that there is some sort of payment extracted for having an intentional outcome arise. What you say here isn't a bad way to phrase it:

Cause it's all about the "path of least resistance".

However - it's not necessarily the "path of least resistance" in terms of how you yourself would narrate or conceive of your situation. The way in which your outcomes (seem to) arise isn't necessarily dictated by "story" type logic; it's more like dream or "patterning" type logic. The whole thing is more like a direct "dumb patterning system". Which is to say:

If you intend an outcome, then it's like you have asserted a particular fact to be true: the fact of this-outcome at that-moment. The two certainties, right then, are that this-moment is true (because you are experiencing it) and that that-moment is true (because you are "pseudo-experiencing" it by defining it). If we conceive of our state (the set of all facts and the sequence of "sensory moments" which are implied by them) as a sort of "landscape", then it's like you have defined two particular landscape features, - like mountains or valleys or trees or rocks - one "now" and one "then". And so, just from the fact that the landscape is continuous, the intermediary ground that is the moments between "now" and "then" are defined implicitly. This is "dumb", or happens "stupidly", since there is no calculation or intelligence involved, any more than pulling on one side of a blanket results in a calculation which reforms all the folds and creases in the material. And the way in which the blanket reshapes does not necessarily correspond to any narrative we have about the current set of folds. That is, the rules of "folds in blankets" do not necessarily match up with the rules of "stories about pictures made from folds".

All of which leads to: yes, we might say that outcomes arise by the "path of least resistance", but the sort of "path" we are talking about doesn't necessarily correspond to our conception of what a "path" would be. In fact, the rules of "folds in blankets" would be "before" conceptualisation; they are literally unthinkable. So there's not much point in worry about that (because you wouldn't actually be worry about the thing you should be worrying about, anyway). The "story path" of an outcome really only an observation you make in retrospect, when it's too late. Fortunately, though, all of this is easily solved. If our worry is that the "outcome fact" will bring with it circumstances which are unappealing to us, we can simply include within our definition of the "outcome fact" that it will be appealing to us. From the other discussion:

The takeaway of all of this, I'd say, is the realisation that there is no intermediary between you and the intention and the outcome. They are all identical: intending is basically a "reshaping" of yourself into a new state, by yourself. The more specific you are, the more specific your subsequent experience. If you are not specific, then the intention is effectively "auto-completed" via triggering of the extended pattern of your intention (that is, simply due to its "dumb" incorporation into features of the current state or landscape at the time). Importantly, there is no "universe" or other entity interpreting requests or whatever, or sending you messages. Although you could intend to have experiences "as if" that were true, of course - but you would still be doing so directly.

Additional thought - It's also worth noting that the correct attitude isn't really: "if I intend something, then what if a bad thing happens as an unintended consequence?". Because if you never intend anything, you are not actually avoiding unintended consequences. Rather, your entire experience is an "unintended consequence"! You are deciding to accept however the "landscape" happens to have ended up by this point. So I suppose it's really about a transition towards taking responsibility for your experience, rather than not. And part of that is to understand and accept the limitations of knowledge as regards experiential content. There is an inherent "mystery" here: you can't pre-experience your experiences, and they aren't really "experiences" until you have experienced them.

[“there is no intermediary between you and the intention and the outcome.”] If we all had our “houses in order”, I would agree.

I think it applies regardless, and that's actually partly what's being said by it. To muse on that for a bit:

What I mean here is, that there's never a structural or active intermediary; there are no levels. The lack of order in your "house", is just a part of your current state, at the same level as any other pattern. The only thing there is to change, is the patterning of your state, directly (with no intermediary), even when in terms of a particular conceptual model that pattern would be described "as if" it were some sort of boundary or entity. Someone might, say, describe their process as "sending a message to god", and have outcomes consistent with there being a god. What "really" happened was that they shifted their state such that "outcome" was overlaid onto their existing "fact-pattern landscape" - and "outcome" was structured in terms of the pattern "god" and "message" and "response". The intention for the outcome was also, implicitly an intention for a "god message" experience. The subsequent "outcome-experience" then arises with content "as if" these things existed as intermediaries. The "outcome" is incorporated into existing patterning; a deformation of the existing overall pattern, and the "outcome" itself is defined in terms of a particular patterning. So at the fundamental level of "you-as-awareness in a patterned state", there is no intermediary, simply because there are fundamentally no "parts", just one "landscape" (you, in a particular "shape"). The state of your "house" is identical with the state of you, and there's nothing outside of that, hence nowhere for intermediaries to be. Hence "dumb patterning system" and all change being "direct". Or: it's patterns all the way down, and there isn't a "down" really, because "down" is a pattern too...

However, I've noticed you don't really discuss belief systems and definitions.

Hmm. So, what would you say a "belief system" is?

I feel that as as concepts, "beliefs" and "belief systems" can be a bit tricky, they are sort of quite hand-waving notions. There's this lack of clarity between "believing" or "belief systems" as an experience, as content of thought for example, and as the "meta" structuring or context of one's experience, what we've been calling our "state". In the view we've been exploring about, I'm not sure that the concepts are needed. Would we just be including them again from familiarity, from habit? In what sense do we actually experience a "belief" as such? And is it perhaps a partial idea which arose from a different model, an idea which doesn't translate easily or usefully?

Yes, the patterning system is dumb and it's steered by an even dumber set of generally unchecked notions about "life, the universe and everything".

Following on from the last bit, I think we have to make a distinction, perhaps, between "notions" as something one experiences thinking or inferring are at the root of thinking, versus the actual structuring of our experience. There's a hidden assumption here, perhaps, which is: that the format of our thoughts corresponds in type to the format of our state. That is, that descriptions somehow get "behind" experience, when in fact descriptions are themselves just further experiences, at the same level: the experience of "thinking about [a concept called] experience". There is no "behind the scenes".

Am I saying one should be afraid to explore their own mind/dreamscape?

Only in the same sense that one would be scared to explore their own thoughts, I suppose!

I'm saying one should... have a decent grip on how their own mind works, why they want what they want...

I definitely agree that it's quite fundamental to explore one's current state, and from that proceed accordingly. No matter what, though, you can only do this by actually experiencing your state. That can be in thought ("feeling out" your landscape in direct contemplation) or in the main strand (your ongoing "sensory" experience). So it's a funny sort of thing, that there is no "outside" position one can take. There's no way to "do something and then experience selected patterns", because the way that you select the patterns is itself by implicitly selecting patterns. So you are always exploring your current state, in fact!

The choice you make, though, is whether to intensify (increase the relative contribution of) a particular pattern, once you have unpacked it in some form or other (as a thought or as a main strand). So, it's all a bit like a rippling of self? Unfolding and refolding different aspects, electing to keep some aspects unfolded and contributing after having encountered them in our investigations, others less so. The main thing being that we can't actually "pre-decide" that we want a particular pattern in advance - we have to experience it in some way before it is available to us to choose to persist it or not.

...

Well, we're basically in agreement throughout; it's mostly terminology. As with a lot of these conversations, half of what we're doing is digging into terms to make sure we mean the same things by them - so we can then confirm we were agreeing anyway. I'd only pick up on this bit:

[Hence "dumb patterning system" and all change being "direct"] I'm simply pointing out that it's something most people will never get to truly experience for themselves.

In terms of what the description is pointing to, though, all experiences are that experience, and all intentional change is that. The extent of change (how unusual it is in comparison with the everyday-world description) doesn't matter; that would be a difference in specific content, not in type. And:

For me, descriptions and definitions sort of generate and organize experiences while, indeed, being experiences (patterns) themselves.

I'd clarify this and say that if an intention is structured in terms of a description or conceptual framework, then it could be said that the description "generates and organises" experiences. That's the difference between a description as an "experience of thinking about something" and a description as "a shaper of experience". (Now, I would agree that there's some deformation that can occur just by thinking about a description, but it's relatively negligible, might lead to broad synchronicity.)

This is where we get into the idea of extended patterns and meaning, and the view that there really is only one continuous overall pattern or shape, consisting of all possible patterns; there are no "parts". Each intentional pattern, then, essentially implies a whole world, and intending is therefore a shift of the entire world-pattern. This doesn't involve explicit formulation. To be less vague, if you kneel down and pray, then that act already has a full meaning and implied structure beyond simply the request, which is then part of the extended pattern of the intention - regardless of what you think about it, or whether you have thought about it. Now, for that example there is some overlap with the idea of "belief systems" I suppose, but:

More abstractly, even just conceiving of a desire in terms of an object, already implies a certain structure to the "format" of the world (a "place", spatially-extended and unfolding in time, and so on) which in turn implies a certain structure to the resulting experience. And so, the intention for the object is also in effect an intention of a "place"-type world, and "place"-type experiences, since the "meaning" of the intentional pattern is its extended pattern in those terms.

POST: a question to Triumphant_George

How did this subreddit start? What were your first encounters with dimensional jumping and how did you discover your methods?

Korrin85 started the subreddit based on posts you can find linked in the introduction post. I'd been following the larger context of this sort of thing for quite a while, Reddit-wise with contributions over at /r/oneirosophy and /r/glitch_in_the_matrix and so on (some links to posts there in the introduction, too). I then did some posts here, and was invited to become mod, re-organised and styled things up a little. The concept for the subreddit, beyond its initial "mirrors and dimensions" seed, has become, loosely, to encourage experimentation with, and investigation and exploration of, the "meta" aspect of such things - the context to the content - perhaps by, somewhat ironically, using further abstraction to connect them to direct experience. And so on.

The Two Glasses Exercise was originally devised in response to a question asked at /r/glitch_in_the_matrix in summer last year about deliberately creating glitches in one's experience. This and subsequent material was based on the ideas of "patterning" and "active metaphors" and the notion of exploring "the nature of experience" and "the nature of descriptions".

...

Yeah, I quite like the idea that people's "here's my experience" posts are a starting point, and the value is then in the ongoing conversation that they provoke - rather than having declarative official posts or whatever. The sidebar text and the introduction are sufficient for that, I think, to provide a jumping off point. (After which I'm just a slightly verbose contributor who also happens to intervene occasionally to keep things civilised and on topic.)

Without a fairly solid "method" for substantially increasing the effectiveness of calling potentialities into actuality...

But this is itself the problem, perhaps. The continual search for a "the" method is a mistake. Anything that is in sensory experience - that is, a series of actions, the experience of performing a "technique" - is itself a result. Methods aren't causal, at least not directly; they are simply the leveraging of a pre-existing pattern or two. The actual cause is "intention" (and the avoidance of subsequent counter-intention), which is unfortunately something which cannot be articulated, since it is "pre-conceptual" and baked into the nature of experience itself. So, methods could be looked at as already-intensified connective structures, abstract patterns which can be leveraged be associating them with situations and outcomes, which are also structures. Things like the Two Glasses exercises are, then, a sort of cheat, because they leverage pre-existing meaning, and offer the possibility of getting results (at least sufficient to demonstrate there is "something going on") without having to fully "get" the intentional aspect. The focus on methods ends up with a focus on "doing", whereas to dig deeper is to recognise that doing is itself a result, and assigned meaning and assertion of fact is where to focus.

One has to go "meta" on the whole thing of experience, then. It's perhaps a bit like having used your body to manipulate the world for years, pondering the best way to use your body, and then realising "wait, how have I been manipulating my body?" The specific body movements weren't the key thing to wonder about, it was the very fact of the movements. And this is why the subject is best presented as an investigation, experimentation and contemplation into "the nature of experiencing", "the nature of descriptions", "you", "the world", and the relationship between these.

...then there must be such a way to amplify effectiveness.

To turn up the relative intensity of one pattern - or network of facts - versus another, if you will. Exactly. But there is no specific and particular "method" for this, there is only intending, and thereby the intensification of one pattern's contribution to ongoing experience with the reduction of contrary patterns.

I'm tired of long-winded theory that doesn't translate into stuff that actually works.

Yeah, that's where the focus on "the nature of descriptions" comes in. In my view, theories should be looked upon as "patterns to be used" rather than "explanations for how things are". And any long-windedness should involve collaborative deconstruction, targeting assumptions, rather than indulgent imagery (unless that imagery is specifically for creative use; see later). Theories are, after all, simply experiences themselves (the experience of "thinking about theories"), at the same level; they don't get "behind" experience. Theories in this context are "as if" patterns which might be adopted for use; there is no actual "how things are" or "how things work" beyond that. The only fundamental fact is the fact of experiencing - of the property of being-aware or "awareness". Everything else is relatively true only. And so the search for "the" theory or "the" method is immediately a lost cause. "Understanding" something, then, doesn't necessarily lead to any results. If one adopts the pattern of a model (via intention or implication) then once might have experiences "as if" it were true, but the model itself isn't pointing to anything fundamental. Hence the concept of "active metaphors" referenced in the side bar.

. . . . .

Anyway, the larger point, with which you'll probably agree, is we need to be very clear when it comes to 'theories' and 'methods' generally, and more specifically we need to focus on what theories and methods are, in relation to experience. I think it's that spirit of investigation, in the absence of a full commitment to direct intention, that is ultimately beneficial - which is why I regularly return to the idea of this being an exploration, rather than a sort of "technology" with a particular underlying structured 'material' (or 'spiritual') mechanism. Otherwise people are at risk of taking a "cargo cult" approach to the subject (that is, emulating the visible actions only, while never grasping the "motive"). The "demo" exercises, then, are just a starting point, giving you a sense that here is something to this, and a possible avenue of investigation: the Two Glasses and the Owls of Eternity exercises are based on the two basic types of structure one might use. There will never be "the" method, because methods are themselves expressions of the insights gained about "you" and "the world" during that investigation.

(With apologies for NYE mobile typing:)

Simply being told to "intend" or to understand myself in one or another variant as experientially transparent (and so on) isn't helping.

Quite so. In terms of discussion, with the causal aspect, it's like trying to explain someone (or to yourself) how you lift your arm (when you are deliberately redirecting away from the current path of movement, not just spontaneous steps along the way to another outcome). Or think about a red car. It's just there. You just... become the experience of it. And in experimenting, it's quite possible that you just end up generating lots of other experiences (like synchronicities) rather than the target experience. This is a better starting point for a conversation, perhaps: That is, with the "form" of an intention - the "idea" we seek to make more prominent in experience - we can make some headway. Key to this, I'd say, is the recognition that all intention is "direct". In other words, you are not "over here" intending something "over there". Treating it in that way, tends to work against us. Rather, you are pulling up a pattern by the bootstraps, everywhere. In a sense, you seek to literally "overwrite" the current experience with a differently-patterned one. Condense "this fact" from the background, in preference to "that fact".

At times I veer towards the belief that a profound deranger is the only thing powerful enough to shift some habitualized center of gravity in the deep mind

Well, in a sense, that is right. If everything, the whole current deterministic state or landscape, is "dissolved" into the background of this moment, available for update - and if the only causal power is "reshaping the landscape" via intention in exactly the same way as deciding to life your arm operates, then we might ask: what is it that is being missed, if there is no actual mechanism behind things (no "behind" at all), that means I struggle to shift facts?

The property of "directness" is one possible important aspect overlooked, I'd say. If you don't do, but only become, then all that matters is that one fully enters into a state. You can't "try" to do this, or you enter the state of "trying to enter a state". You can't be "over here" attempting to enter a state "over there", because that means you inherently remain separate from it, not entering or becoming. Ultimately, you are "taking on the shape of" a state or experience, and that must be done with "full intensity" (except when we're just talking about "plausible but unlikely", non-rule-breaking, occurrences, perhaps leveraging pre-existing patterns, such as Two Glasses brings about). Let's say that one of the "fact-patterns" of one's current state is "inertia" or "solidity". Let's say that the situation right now can be described as: you can move your arms simply by intending "it is true now that my arm moves then" (the "arm movement" pattern) and due to lack of conflict the relative intensity of even a minor holding of that pattern, because that gets it integrated into your state. If we want to do something more dramatic, though - something more like a shift in the facts-of-the-world, it will require "holding" for longer. But far would we go to check if it is possible?

Would we hold for an hour? A day? A week? Perhaps a month? Gradually the obstructing, contrary patterns would dissolve out as the held pattern became primary and conflicting patterns were implicitly removed from contributing. Or perhaps we might, instead of focusing on our outcome, we might focus on the "meta" patterns surrounding it. That is, for as long as the patterning of "the world is an extended place unfolding in time", that would tend to structure your ongoing experience against dreamlike, associative type apparent events. This would be the "weaker the rules" approach, you might say. The ultimate version of this might be patterning oneself with something like the "imagination room" metaphor listed in the sidebar, or the variations described in the "owls of eternity" exercise. So, that was a bit meandering, but the general notion is: We can't talk about the ultimate cause, because it's basically like "shape-shifting", however we might be able to talk about useful patterns (e.g. "active metaphors") to play with, since undoubtedly this (apparently) being-a-person-in-a-world experience consists of a certain set of patterns already - a common starting point for shared investigation. (Putting aside for the moment the issues we hit regarding "shared" worlds.)

...death, trauma, kidnap, the world's most powerful psychedelics, etc.

The apparent power of these, I suggest, in terms of their ability to crack open experience, lies in the fact that there is no particular logical next-step that follows from them?

The lifting your arm example is interesting, because while the core of it is mysterious, nature still has a whole bunch of specific patterns for achieving it

What is this "nature" of which you speak? For certain, lifting your arm is a pattern of experience - a patterning of experience, which one summons or becomes, by essentially recalling the "idea" of it, an idea which is incorporated into the overall sensory experience when one does so. (Whether it is brought fully into the senses or not, though, the idea still exists, and is experienced.)

It is not actually mysterious as such. You know perfectly well how your arm moves. The apparent mystery is when one confuses "knowing" with "creating a set of conceptual objects and forming a coherent description out of them". But that doesn't "explain" arm movement: it simply produces a parallel experience in thought (the experience of "thinking about some concepts I've called 'how arm movement works').

This is why I implied...perhaps it is more like a "knack" sort of like juggling or riding a bicycle.

I guess you're trying to articulate the idea that one can't conceptualise and communicate, as objects and words, certain experiences, but that doesn't necessarily matter from a personal perspective - one knows these things directly, because one is the doing. You don't need to have a description of seeing in order to see, for example. You just are the experience of seeing. Similarly, arm movement just is, and it is known by recalling the idea, as a sensory experience or a thought experience (these differ only in spatial location in experience, though). There is nothing behind it. And the same applies to the description, too. Adding more experiences at the same level doesn't get "behind" any experience - there is no "behind". Now, at this point you may say something like...

My overall concern is with practical outcome While the theory is interesting...

However, we need to specify what is meant by "theory" here. The above isn't "theory", for example. Rather, it's an attempt to capture in words the direct observation of experience, as it is experienced. Unlike talking about, say, "nature" as a thing behind the scenes whose mechanism is responsible for bringing about our experience, our talk here of "patterns" is simply to draw attention to the properties of structured experience itself and to emphasise there is no "behind". The distinction we're drawing here is between thinking-about experience, and recognising thinking-about as another experience, with the same properties, which never "explains" anything - but can still be used to construct patterns which can later be used as intentional contexts. That is, used "practically". Ultimately, the distinction between "theory" and "practical" falls away, as does the distinction between "literal" and "metaphorical", because they both turn out to be exactly the same thing. By way of this, of course, we find a link between the idea of "pathways" and "outcomes":

A pathway to lifting that spoon "directly with my mind" as we would say (i.e. without using an arm or a tool) does not seem to have any established pathway and is in a sense "rogue."

They are identical in nature. But if we don't spend time actually attending to experience, to establish that fully for ourselves, then none of that matters much perhaps. What sense is there in talking about "practical" is we don't know what "practical" is, or what an "outcome" really is?

(Intermission, from previous discussion:)

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:

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".)

Now, to tie the two strands together - the dissolving of the theory and the practical, and the description and the "knack" - we need to get a handle on what you might call "intentional context". Ultimately, this is simple: that if you attend to your direct experience, for sure there's the "object" bit, the localised stuff you can draw on paper or think about systematically, but also there's the "knowing" or "meaning" which is sort of non-located, "dissolved" everywhere, inseparable from it. The relevance to "outcomes" is that without the contextual aspect asserted, object-based activities are (literally) meaningless.

(Further intermission, from extended discussion elsewhere:)

Intentional Context Exercise

So, first imagine a sphere in front of you - say, a blue sphere with no particular detail, just floating there. Okay, now imagine a sphere in front of you, identical in every way to the first, except also imagine that this sphere is imbued with the special power to make the room filled with joy. But do not change the sensory aspect of the sphere in any way when you do this. This is basically "imagining the fact of something being true" abstractly. That is, that an object, or your ongoing experience more generally, has a property, without actually visualising any sensory aspects to that property. Instead of doing all the "sensory theatre" of picturing stuff, in an effort to associatively trigger the fact or as an excuse to do so, you can just directly do intending-asserting of the fact into greater prominence. Finally, after taking a pause to clear yourself out a little, instead of using the sphere image, simply directly intend that the room is filled with joy, and experience the result of that. That is, wordlessly intend the fact of: "it is true now that this room is filled with joy". And, um, enjoy.

The suggestion here is that since experience is direct - you are your experience, you are "that which takes on the shape of" experiences and there is no "outside" to you - then with any method you do, you are actually playing out the entire thing as a sort of "sensory theatre". And that's all outcomes actually are: desired moments of sensory theatre, with meaning. In effect, the only way to have something become fact, is to fully imagine-that (to "take on the shape of" the pattern or experience of) it being a fact. Imagining that you are "over here" trying to change something "over there" is like a little play; the entire experience is imaginative.

But it feels subjectively similar to trying to pick up a metal bar with an ultra ultra weak magnet?

Directly imagine being a strong magnet, then! :-)

. . . .

In short, then: "theory" is a type of "outcome", and talk of being practical is meaningless unless it is clearly seen that the "literal" and "metaphorical (that is, sensory experience and descriptions of sensory experience) are the same. However, one pseudo-practical route is to attend to one's direct experience as it is, in addition to experimenting with direct or indirect intentional strategies.

Aside - In terms of the "directness" of experience, the exercises in chapter four of The Michael Chekhov Handbook: For The Actor by Lenard Petit are worth a look, as far as it goes within its subject. You'll have to read between the lines a little when it comes to the "second body" idea (think: what is the first body, what is the whole experience) but the notion of directness, and the very specific sense in which "belief" is relevant, is in itself worthwhile.

(Quickly, for now:)

You do seem to have a fondness for these abstractions, TriumphantGeorge. I

Well, no, not at all really. What do you mean by an "abstraction" and what do you mean by "lingering in practicality" (one might ask)? Without clearly defining those things, we end up with not even abstraction - merely obfuscation (albeit not deliberate). And, you really cannot get more practical and direct than the two exercises I included in the last comment. Did you do them?

One has to actually perform them: in my experience, people tend to think-about such things rather than actually engage with them on their own terms (or at all), just as people rarely actually commit to any line of intentional focus in order to experiment. They tend to want a sort of conceptual coherence or pre-guarantee in thought, but of course that's rather part of the issue. Again: there is no method or "way it works", so the "abstractions" I might suggest are actually patterns to adopt, rather than concepts to think-about. The point is that if one want to have things, "solutions" or "outcomes", defined in the terms of one's current everyday assumptions, then one is already lost. Because those assumptions, that patterning, is exactly the problem we face. That is, if by "practical" what we mean it that we want something to "do" - like a sort of physical action that will make things happen, that still builds upon the notion of ourselves as some sort of "person object" that is in a "world" that is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time" - you'll eventually hit a barrier and realise that such actions are already "too late". Such actions are yet more "experiences" and have no causal power, and instead adopting abstractions as fact might be, in a sense, the way forward.

I'm guessing, I suppose, that you prefer talking about those than lingering in practicality.

One might note that "prefer talking" equates to "prefer typing" when it comes to online conversation. On evidence, it could seem to me that you "prefer typing"? Of course, it's not really a preference - it's what conversation is. Nobody can do another's exercises or insights for them. So this is all we have, here. Talking. Discussion. About insights, but not in themselves insights. "Pointing at the moon." It's like saying that a diarist "prefers writing" rather than living, simply because the record of his life, for others, exists only in text?

Some people do prefer reading, though. (Which is fine, of course.) But then, you didn't really engage with any of the content of my reply, at all?

there is an insufficient communication channel established between my waking or "surface" self and some much deeper substratum of my being

This is the ultimate in "theory" or abstraction. Have you ever encountered a "deeper substratum" of your being? Or indeed a "waking" self as distinct from some other self? Directly, I mean. Besides, that is, simply thinking-about such a thing. For me, this subject really comes down to one single insight, and realising the rest (all the rest) is, yes, in a sense talk. But that applies globally, perhaps, to everything that can be discussed at all. Al conversation stops, if we truly commit to that as purity.

(More later:)

Can pick this up tomorrow and address your points more clearly if you like. Really, the most fruitful avenue of discussion is probably on the relationship (if that is even the right concept) between "doing" and "experiencing". Noting along the way, of course, that the very fact of encoding stuff into "conversation" immediately removes us from what we're trying to discuss!

(More responses and musings, with apologies for length:)

Knacks & Doings

Again, it's my experience that some people have a "knack" for these things...meaning that a process is going on that is not identical across different "meditators" who follow identical instructions.

Hmm. Well, quite specifically these are not meditations or processes, but it's certainly true that there is a "knack" in the sense of trying to notice something that you haven't yet noticed or thought about. It is just "there", but it is in the manner of, say, noticing "redness" as distinct but also inherent to a red object. It's like a fact that is there, but you are "looking through it". I'm wary of using the word "knack" because it often implies a skill, in inherent talent. But there is no talent to this; it is always there, and is always a fact (actually the only fundamental fact). A further problem, of course, is that putting it into words (as with all putting-into-words), is unhelpful without the experience to accompany it, since the words are pointing to an experience, and absent the experience the descriptions seem abstract and meaningless (which they are, previously). This loops back to our comments on theory and "talk", earlier.

In other words, missing variables...as I implied earlier.

I'd disagree with that, or at least I'd say it's potentially a misleading idea, since it implies there is some sort of hidden structure to uncover, some secret set of facts or a mechanism. Instead, here, we are talking about the context to all such facts - the context or all content.

The verb in that suggests that people are actually doing something, are achieving that something, or at the very least that it is achievable in principle.

The sense in which one isn't "doing" something is in particular way. I don't mean that one isn't or cannot change one's experience. The point is that if one "jumps", then one is not truly translating one's body into literally pre-existing realities which are divided into "dimensions". It is not "the dimensions what did it". However, one can have an experience "as if" that is happening, just as right now one is having an experience "as if" one is a person in a world (one has "taken on the shape of" apparently being-a-person-in-a-world). And that is enough. That wasn't very clear, probably. What I'm trying to highlight is that all there is, is "experiencing", and regardless of the content of "an experience", there is nothing permanent behind it, other than the fact of "experiencing". (See: the Feeling Out Exercise earlier.)

Ultimately, then, we are noticing that experience is like a shape or pattern in liquid, which - even if it is of "a solid world" or of "jumping dimensions" - has no underlying supporting structure. It's cliche to say it, but "the water" (which is oneself, non-personal) is the only permanent fact, and the "ripple patterns" are just relative disturbances. Furthermore, any descriptions one comes up with about those patterns are just themselves patterns, more experiences. There is no depth to them; they are in parallel. Again, this sounds obscure or even wilfully opaque, but it's much clear if you take a moment to notice your experience, as per that exercise for instance. Without that, one is simply building "castles in the sky": descriptions which might be coherent and self-consistent, but have no foundation, being as they are merely unmoored thoughts within the things they would try to be about. This is why we might tend to resort to metaphors which try to be "meta" and about experience itself, rather than any content (for example: the beach, the blanket, patterned states, and so on). But let's get on to a perhaps more fruitful line of thought:

Dreams, Intentions & Meta

[Deeper substratum] Well...I would say that we encounter such a substratum every night when we dream.

Would you say that dreams are "deeper"? I think the actual experience of dreams doesn't involve any hierarchy or levels. The content is different certainly, but the experience is not different in its nature.

I think some kind of discussion of will is missing here. Intention is just a fancy word for will at the end of the day.

Actually, the word "intention" gets used over the word "will" deliberately, since the latter tends to imply one entity exerting influence over another. Meanwhile, "intention" is nearer to the desired meaning, that of a static idea or pattern which one would like to bring into play. There is no good word for this, though, because we are talking about something which is "before" objects and events. The way I tend to use the term, is this: "intending" is the increasing of the relative contribution of a particular pattern to one's ongoing experience; "an intention" is the pattern (fact or outcome or 'idea' or something more abstract) that one is increasing the relative contribution of. The is a little circular, but that is the nature of it: there is not "you" who is "doing" intending onto a "world"; instead it is a shaping of oneself as the experiencer, or "awareness", or "that which takes on the shape of states and experiences". The possible rejection of the term "will" comes from this requirement to avoid a sense of division and of objects operating on one another.

I just don't think that we know all the variables acting. But this should be seen as the beginning of an exploration and not the end of one.

I don't know about "variables", but it's true that exploration is ongoing, in the sense the one uncovers and perhaps amends the patterning of one's experience. However, the main insight as regards the context is one and done: there is nothing more to be done with that. Really, this is that experience is "imagined" and to change it one must "imagine-that" it is different, directly. Not everyone is interested in that, in what seems to be philosophical musings, though. However, without that, there are difficulties, I'd say, because there's a tendency to want to acquire a particular outcome while still defining it in terms of (implying within the intention) a "format" of the world as a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time". Rather than something more flexible, such as "a sequence of sensory moments recalled from a memory" or "an imagination space within which patterns are drawn", or whatever. This "meta" intending is where one really gets exploring: intending the structuring of experiential content, rather than just intending outcomes. But, again, I really think there's not much point to that if we are content-focused only. This is because then we're still looking for a "how it works, really" by attending to our experiences - and there's a big problem with that, since we tend to have experience which are implied by our own looking.

The results can be useful, of course. After all, if one has a dream of discovering a useful machine, and the machine works in the dream "as if" it can cause desired changes, then even though the machine doesn't really have any causal power (the experience of "the machine" and of "the machine working" are both just patterns; the state of the dreamer), it can still be utilised. The problem only arises if the machine is confused as being "how dreams work", when actually it is the fact of the dream itself - of "experience" more generally - that is the "how things work". Dreams are good to ponder though, I think!

What are dreams made from?
What is it that experiences a dream?
If one has a lucid dream and makes changes, what exactly is making the changes and what is it really changing?

And so on.

. . . .

This has probably drifted a little, I suppose. That's inevitable, though, when we're probably talking at slightly cross purposes, and part of our conversation is really about feeling out what we mean by various terms, and what our differing underlying assumptions might be. And we likely differ on the idea of the "nature of experience" more generally, I guess.

Now, I don't think anyone necessarily needs to think things through so deeply, though, but instead of that they need a certain bloody-mindedness and blind faith in order to commit and/or to persist without holding back. As in lucid dreams or visualising, it's not so much the doing as the full commitment to the outcome, without reservation?

...

[COMMENT]

/u/Redscale7: I've fully been where green-sleeves is, but I completely understand what Triumphant George is saying. I think I can be a good translator. What George is trying to say (and you can correct me George, but keep in mind most of us still speak English here :P) is that yes, you can certainly affect physical/sensory outcomes, and there is no theory or method behind it beyond "you get what you intend as true". The only thing that gets in the way is any patterning you throw on top of that fact (which is the only fact possible, because it's something that doesn't change). The problem (what you may be "missing") is that you are clinging to an extended systemic pattern that says "I am a separate individual trying to change a big complex world" and "I need tools to fix things" and, probably most importantly "the metaphysical act isn't actually real". George isn't saying that you have to be satisfied with just imagining something. It's that you have to take yourself to a point where you accept the metaphysical fact as being equal to a physical fact. Otherwise, you haven't fully commited your faith to your metaphysical acts, no matter what methods you used or how long you tried. You're putting more strength in your physical facts, so they are automatically dominating your attempts to use "tools" to "overcome" them. Additionally, you can only ever encounter experiences that confirm what you already "know". Currently you see other people accomplishing things that you cannot. This is in itself an outcome of experience based upon something you believe. There is no one "out there" in the world. There is no "world". There is only you, and the evidence you have created for yourself to sustain anything you currently believe. This is probably the most mind-bending thing to digest because it means you can't trust your physical world for absolutely anything. There are no true conclusions there, no methods, no supporting evidence of any kind to access. You won't find answers "out there", because out there doesn't exist. Only you exist, and so the only place to look for your "answers" is within yourself. Your world will reflect any conclusions you create and support anything you intend to see. George's "feeling out" exercise is pretty good to apply here. In that quiet space where there is only you as formless background awareness -- where then do all these rules and facts about your world come from? That is patterning. You can let go of that patterning in two ways:

Returning to "who you are" by accepting yourself as unpatterned background awareness. Everything else on top of that becomes superficial and therefor easier to drop or manipulate.
Actively training yourself into a set of new patterns through repetition, using any method of your choice, while under the firm knowledge that the method itself is not important.

Or you could simultaneously try both. The key is to remember that there are no rules and if you find yourself frustrated with a lack of physical outcomes, it's an indicator for showing you that you haven't yet accepted your metaphysical acts as powerful enough to affect physical facts. You're still too invested in the pre-existing patterns. Digging to find errors and new methods to fix them will only produce more errors and new methods of fixing them, but never the solution (because you'll only ever find what you're looking for), and meanwhile only reinforce your state of being stuck.

I hope this helps. :)

[END OF COMMENT]

It's that you have to take yourself to a point where you accept the metaphysical fact as being equal to a physical fact.

That'll do! Or, perhaps, just stop worrying about that completely, is another option, accepting things at face value (so that your worldview amounts to something like "I am an experiencer within which a series of sensory moments appears" and formulate intentions in terms of that, thus avoiding re-implying other patterns).

...

/u/Redscale7 essentially gives you my clarification below for most of that. Basically, we're talking about taking "one step back" from the discussion we're having right now. Even talking about "the subconscious" realm is already using or implying a pattern which is "too late" for what we're dealing with here. We're talking about patterning itself. To pick up on one point, though:

The sense in which there is no method, is that there is no particular method, in terms of an act one might take. This isn't to say there aren't currently present patterns that you might leverage, though. For example, we might say that the Two Glasses leverages the patterns of "translation and transformation" and "volumes and intensity", and moving your arm leverages a whole "body" postural pattern, and there are lots of more abstract patterns that we use, and so on. The pattern of "I am an object located in a world which like a 'place' which unfolds in time" is a more basic one, still. However, those patterns aren't fundamental. This includes the "world" one. And patterns don't cause anything, rather they are the current state of experience. The only cause of change is intention, which is to say, selecting a pattern into experience. As you note, in your wording, doesn't it seem that there "forces" operating against us?

The way forward, then, for major change isn't to leverage existing patterns (that is, intending the pattern "it is true now that my arm moves then" and the rest being just the existing postural pattern as the "auto-completed" extension of that), it is to amend patterns as well. But the "method" remains simply intention. It's just that the target (or better to say: the pattern being intended, intensified) is different, is more general.

To further clarify: For the sake of argument, we might say that all possible patterns exist eternally, are always "true" to some extent, we might say that patterns vary only in their relative intensity, or strength of contribution to experience. We might also say that at any moment, the world must "make sense" - that is, be an overall coherent pattern. If this is so, and we have a very strong pattern of "I am an object in a solid spatial, temporal world", then, like the arm-movement intention which is done in the context of the body posture, our intentions are structured by the context of that pattern. A synchronicity might arise here and there through the gaps and feel a bit dreamlike, but not much more than that. A reason to persist in that, though, is that the more one has synchroncity and recognises the meaning of that, the more one's intentions with will tend to intensify the pattern of "the world is dreamlike" as a byproduct, an implication. However, from what we're saying above, we could just go for intending the pattern "the world is dreamlike" directly. This is like changing our "posture" such that the manner of our "arm movement" changes, becomes more flexible. (And this is actually a way to change your bodily posture and movement - of course, because it's all the same thing, all just patterns of experience. That's why, for exploratory exercises, I quite recommend that Michael Chekhov book by Lenard Petit, and also the Alexander Technique book by Missy Vineyard.)

Putting it together: So we could summarise that with something like the following, jumping ahead a bit admittedly:

The only fundamental fact is the fact of being-aware or "awareness".
All other facts are temporary and relative, as patterns in awareness.
All possible patterns exist, eternally, and are available right now. (You can conceive of them as being "dissolved into the background" of this ongoing moment, now.)
What you actually are, is "awareness" which has "taken on the shape of" a set of patterns = a "state".
A "state" fully defines our experience, completely. That is, it defines all moments over all time, deterministically, between shifts.
To shift one's state, one simply "intends" a pattern, and that pattern then becomes more prominent in the state, and so in our ongoing sensory experience. This is like a "shape-shifting", a movement of oneself as "awareness". There is no way to describe this or explain it; it is a "becoming" rather than a "doing".
One can conceive of the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world as a single pattern, a "world-pattern", which is always self-consistent (between updates, that is).
If your world-pattern has a strong component of "I am an object in a solid stable world" then any additional minor patterns you intend such as "I will get healthy again" will be incorporated within that context (and, in some cases, will just arise as dreams plus a couple of synchronicities, rather than main outcomes).
To improve the quality of outcomes, one should consider intending the context directly, such as "the world is dreamlike, fluid, and symbolic".

Roughly, then: no facts are fundamental, intention is the only cause or method, conceiving of the world as a pattern of patterns is one of the most flexible positions to adopt - and the world is a "shape" that you take on, directly.

One further implication of the "directness" of all this, is that:

It is very important to fully decide and declare that it is a fact that your outcome is going to happen ("it is true now that this happens then"), either directly or by implying it in some way. [1]

Essentially, one must actually decide what is going to happen, and that it is going to happen, because it is this deciding or asserting which makes (is!) the change. Without that, any apparent method becomes simply an activity - in effect, an intention only to have the experience of performing a ritual, a bit of "sensory theatre". It's rather like the difference between intending to" tense your arm muscles against an object in order to move it", versus "intending to move the object into a new position". They are quite distinct things. (A good exercise for this, is to challenge a friend to an arm wrestle. First, proceed by intending to "use your muscles to move your arm". Then, instead proceed by "intending that it is true that you win the arm wrestle". Note the difference.)
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[1] It occurs to me to add, for clarity, that of course when we say things like "intend that 'it is true now that this happens then'", we don't mean that we should verbalise or think the words. Rather, we're referring to attending to the pattern that this statement would describe. Whilst saying words, or visualising images, does bring to mind that pattern just by association (which is the experience of having the "meaning" of the words or image), when we intend we just go for it directly - otherwise we are often just intensifying the experience of saying or thinking the words, rather than intensifying what the words mean or the fact-pattern they point to. There is no particular sensory experience associated with intending, we just "know" that we are doing so. The except to that is, of course, if the intention is something that would have an impact on our current moment, because then we will experience the result - for example, if we intend that "it is true now that my body is becoming completely relaxed", or in the case of the blue sphere exercise, that "the blue sphere means-that it is true now that I am feeling joyful". (Plainly, this is all much more complex in the description than in the doing: hence experimenting with the Feeling Out and Intentional Context exercises, say, is better than a discussion about it, since they are it.)

(This got quite long, perhaps we should pick one single point of contention and expand on it, but remembering that descriptions don't really matter much, because this isn't something for which one generates 'explanations'. It may be that "intention", for example, might be better termed "direct imagination", for you, and that it is better starting with exploring exactly how that relates to body movements, rather than jumping straight to discussion about "facts of the world" and so on. Meanwhile: have you ever actually taken the time to "intend that the Earth has two moons"? Closed your eyes, just intended the fact of that for just ten minutes? Worth doing, I'd say.)

"Nature" & Patterning

I think that nature has a “patterning”…a fullness as well as an emptiness

We return here to "what is nature?", though (it is a concept) and from there we see that the "fullness-emptiness" issue is an aspect of our description, not of things-as-they-are?

Is a better way to say this, perhaps, that "my ongoing experience has a level patterning of which seems stable and unchanging, a formatting which seems more resistant to change"?

Prominence, Descriptions, Hidden Variables

But what about when it is doesn’t become prominent?

It's a metaphor. There isn't really an "it" that is there when it isn't prominent. "Patterning" is just (I suggest) the most basic sort of description we can have of structured experience. But it is just a description. The description itself is just another experience you can have (the experience of "thinking about experience"). We can have experiences "as if" that experience is true, but you can't actually describe what is true at all - because it is just: the very fact of "experiencing". That's why I say it's not an explanation of experience, because it is inherently not possible to have an explanation of experience (since "experience" is that from which all explanations are "made", in a manner of speaking). It's also why I say we have to just put thinking aside (since thinking is object-based), and notice our experience as it is, directly - and realise that what we are is the subject to all experience.

When doing this, we also notice something important: that concepts of something outside of the current experience are themselves mental objects within experience. The idea of "all patterns dissolved in the background" is a matter of convenience, a bookmark. The direct experience is that "we never experience what we don't experience", and so it is meaningless to talk of non-prominence. Because even if you are just thinking about an object, that is also a prominent pattern, just not within the main strand of experience (the 1st-person "me in a world" strand). Both the thinking-about and the main strand are arising within and of you-as-awareness. They differ in location, not in kind. The thought of non-prominence is itself a prominence!

Your "hidden variables" are a bookmark of this type also. But any experience you have of "hidden variables" will just be another experience - and they will not be causal, therefore. They will be content, they will be a "result".

EDIT: It later occurred to me you might mean something of the form "where is a fact when I am not directly experiencing it?". But I would say, in this description, that you always are directly experiencing it, as a background that is always there, just not unfolded as a sensory aspect. In a similar way as you can "know" your current situation, even though you haven't unpacked the "knowing" into words, and pictures, and so on. The parts of the world you aren't experiencing in the senses, and the "infinite eternal gloop of all patterns" of the background, are both always there, and you are always experiencing them, as you-as-awareness having adopted a state which consists of you-as-awareness (empty!) as all possible patterns (full!) at relative contribution (empty and full!).

Simplicity & Problems

It’s just not that simple. If it were, everybody would be doing this successfully all the time.

That's good point, of course. But the way in which it is not simple (going with our little model for the moment) isn't in the causation, it's in the patterns or ideas we choose to intensify.

A few of thoughts:

First: Because everything is direct (because there is only you-as-awareness and no outside to that) then the full context of the intention matters. As we were discussing previously, just verbalising or visualising isn't sufficient, it is the assigned meaning of that which also matters. More accurately, the pattern you intend has to actually be the fact you wish to intensify. It can't be a pattern about the fact, it must be directly that target fact, or a fact which in turn implies the target fact.

Second, and related to the first: There is not "you-over-here" intending "pattern-over-there". Intending or implying any pattern which consist of a division of this sort, is problematic. This is really a restatement of the notion that you must actually intend the outcome you want as the outcome, and not a relationship with the outcome.

Finally, all intentions have a context, a sort of structure they are formulated in terms of, and they re-imply that context. So, in everyday life, if you intend to change direction walk "over there", then that intention is in terms of a certain idea of the world - as a "place" or whatever, that is solid, and so on. Or you interrupt yourself to intend taking a certain route because it is well-lit and "the world is a dangerous place". This can be an issue.

Aside - We should forget hypnotists and the like and "other" people, I suggest, except as a sort of in-experience narrative. This is best handled as a 1st-person perspective topic. We should be careful, really, about "people" and "everybody", because in a sense neither they nor you, as a "person", are causal agents. Apparently being-a-person-in-a-world is an experience you have, a formatting; it is not what you are. This brings us back to the impossibility of writing a full description, though, because there is not many or one "awarenesses" - there is just "awareness", which is "before" division and objects and change.

Patterns & Practicality

So, "getting practical", we have a couple of ways in which it is "not that simple", for sure. One is that the intention is incorporated into a pre-existing formatting, and we may need to intend modifications to the formatting (intending that the world is more dreamlike and flexible, or adopting a specific model such as the "moments of memory" model). Another is that really the intention, to get the structure and relationship right, should be formulated in terms of you being "the subject to all experience" - a sort of unbounded container within which a strand of sensory experience or thought is unfolding - rather as a person-object located within a world. The final problem is that we want to avoid implying the old situation when we are intending a new one, or after doing so. People try to get around this by going into a very relaxed state, or perhaps intending as they go to sleep, using those as times of "non-obstruction". Ideally, though, one goes beyond that "trance or sleeping" approach and adopts the attitude of "letting things be however they are" always (basically "non-doing"). Then, instead of reacting to the unfolding content of the moment - thereby perhaps counter-intending and therefore re-implying, say, a "solid limited world" concept or whatever - one has adopted a stance of spontaneous flow and "allowing". Then, we are ceasing to interfere except with very occasional, specific intentions as "updates". This means letting bodily movements and mental thoughts unfold by themselves also, of course - not just the surrounding environment - because those are part of the experience of "the world".

For this last bit, when we first do it, there's often a lot of odd "stuck movements and incomplete thoughts" which seems arise, so there's definitely room for some sort of daily releasing exercise where one practices this "letting go" approach. Not because one gets better at it, but because one's posture is likely coiled and held, and there's some crazy spasming (or more) until one lets them play out. Until then, it's quite possible that one is spending a lot of time counter-intending this "open attention" movement, and thereby (since body and world are one pattern) effectively opposing all movement of one's state of experience, by implication. (Such a daily releasing can either be passive, or you can intend being "open" to direct it. There's a link in the introduction post which mentions both.)

Aside - People often do "meditation" in the hope of either realising the nature of experience, or for stabilising or clearing their ongoing experience. My feeling is that, when it comes to the former there are better ways to do it than passive meditation (it's pure luck whether you accidentally have an experience which leads you to notice, a deliberate investigation is much better). Meanwhile, for the latter you need to be quite clear about the target formatting you are after rather than just concentrating on one sensation or idea or whatever - and if you're going to spend the rest of the day in resistance and scatter-gun intending and implying, you'd be better tackling that instead.

Let me emphasize: this is not about contention for me, but about practicality.

Well, the contention would be our differences in how we think things to be, or the way in which we think about them; that is what we are exploring.

Also, I’ll simply lift the points from your post that speak to me, so I wouldn’t worry about length.

This isn't often the best way to proceed, I'd say, since lifting the points that speak to us often aren't the points where progress is made, it's usually in the areas or assumptions being overlooked - this applies to my understanding of what you are saying, too. So it's often better to take a single strand, and pursue it thoroughly. Notably, there's a couple of points I definitely haven't got across properly in previous comments, based on your "manifestation" and "meaningless of non-prominence" responses, which tie back to what it means to describe an experience (or experience a description). And the points you have engaged with have tended not to be the ones that matter, I'd say - quite possibly due to the bloat of the conversation, and quite possibly because I have not successfully made them seem to matter!

So we need to take a step back, to continue.

To what end, though? I don’t particularly want the Earth to have two moons.

To test it! To see what happens with such an "ambitious" intention. Otherwise...

The former is indeed easier to realize, in my opinion, because it can slide between the gaps in much looser-habit patterns that mostly pertain only to the intending individual, and which do not impact others with paradox or a fundamental change in the experienced world applicable everywhere.

...otherwise this is meaningless. As you say, it's just an opinion, based on untested assumptions about "others", the nature of "the world". Even saying "the intending individual" is problematic (because it is not clear at all that "the individual" intends anything). Much of your comments appear to suffer from the same issue. You are stating things based on a description of the world which, I am suggesting, is not (necessarily) the case. More to the point, based on assumptions about ongoing experience which are fairly easily examined - if you were to choose to do so (as per exercises in previous comment, for example). The reason to try to "manifest" things you don't necessarily care about, is exactly to manifest things you don't necessarily care about - to experiment and investigate the properties of experience. Otherwise you're just talking about perceived likelihood, for example, while fulfilling the prophecy through selective action.

And to the best of my (conscious) ability I do indeed try to envision the world as more dream-like and malleable.

Perhaps we could use this as our seed, to clarify what we're actually talking about here, and from what position. (Assuming you want to continue.) So I'd kick off by asking:

How, exactly, have you gone about doing this? (To the extent one can articulate such a thing, of course.)
How would you describe what "you" are, what "the world" is, and what the relationship is between those?

And also I'd suggest you try the Feeling Out Exercise and the Intentional Context Exercise and offer your perspective on the experiences. Because without that (or something similar) there is no anchor to our discussion, since my descriptions are pointing to something you've never examined, and so for you they are just a bunch of words addressed to nowhere.

I’ve tried it with other things that haven’t worked, so it is not untested.

The point was to examine more closely the way one attempts to do it, and the way in which it doesn't work. In terms of a conceptual framework, we've already covered a way of understanding why, say, you don't just decide to turn a house into a mouse, and have it happen. Specifically, I went into one way of conceptualising the nature of that apparent "inertia" and how - if - we can address it.

Not really. I'm suggesting things based on empirical accountability.

You are suggesting things based on an interpretation of your experience (which is fine), and I was attempting to discuss the context of experiences more generally - how to examine that directly, and its implications for both understanding our everyday experience and the possibility of "unusual change", and then proceed to how we might tackle particular changes. So far (quite possibly due to my own style of writing of course), we've gained no momentum on the key points, largely because I've failed to engage you in the areas I think we need to explore in order to get a better perspective on the "why can't I just change a house into a mouse" factor. Your replies have tended to be restatements of a certain point omitting what I think were the important parts of my responses that address that point, for example. It's not clear, for instance, that what you mean by "intention" is what I am referring to by that term (it is not a the same as a "wanting" or "asking" or "willing"). And your suggestion that I was referring to, say, altering "perception" rather than "really" creating change means that I've not successfully conveyed what I mean by the directness of experience. I concluded the last comment with a possible path to opening out the conversation, by connecting it to some specific questions and activities. You've not responded to those, but that was a way to ground our discussion so we'd no longer be talking past one another. It may be that our conversational styles just not a good match when it comes to this topic. Or it may be that you've actually decided that "this doesn't work" and this is due to "hidden variables", and aren't interested in exploring an angle other than one based upon that idea. (Perhaps you find particularly unappealing a perspective based on a philosophy that sees these ideas as relatively useful for leveraging, but otherwise basically fundamentally meaningless.) Either is fine, of course, but it does mean we're not going to be getting anywhere with this!

Q1: I think he just wants to know what you personally can do. He wants to clarify if you have been able to experiece dimensional jumping in a way that cant possibly be explained by the solid world model. Its about the person,triumphantgeorge himself. Like are you basing this on personal experience or not, and if so, describe something which yiu experienced that couldn,t have been a a coincidence like willing a continent in existence.

Perhaps. What good would that do, though? I'm just some (apparent) bloke on the internet - strictly speaking, a bunch of words arising within his experience, an aspect of his own patterning! Another story for someone to read! :-)

Slight joking aside, it's very much a personal investigation of oneself, this; it doesn't really matter what other people seem to do. Hence, trying to return to a particular direct experience everyone can have immediately (feeling out; intentional context) so we've got something shared and immediate to talk about, then take it from there (especially since focusing on the "philosophical" aspect wasn't taking). As per the sidebar, the subreddit isn't really about convincing someone about something - more of a: try this, contemplate the implications, now push it further, and discuss. And if someone doesn't get anything out of it, if it seems to them that there is nothing to it then, of course, they should dismiss it and move on. (As a moderator, I try to be sort of agnostic and more of a prompter than anything else.) Although: There are two things to consider in all this: a) noticing the nature of experience as it is; b) investigating our ability to change it. The first, I think, is always accessible. (And in turn hopefully changes one's ideas and approach regarding the latter; but it does require that someone actually looks.)

...

I'm not convinced that you have an answer, and you know what... because I don't think anyone here or elsewhere (including me of course) really does.

I'd agree, in a sense. Where we differ, though, is that I see some questions as not being answerable because the particular questions are prompts for a change of context; those questions are often based on assumptions that we'd want to challenge in order to progress. Nobody can give us a fundamental "how it works" type response, describing a process or mechanism, for example, because the very idea of a process or mechanism is one of the things under examination - the idea of division, one object operating on another, causing something by overlap in location or time, and so on. So we end up with responses that seem to be trying to sidestep the whole thing, because they are trying essentially trying to undercut the assumptions. That, or the responses are of the sort that indicate one simply "does" it - e.g. there is no "method" to producing a mental image, one simply does so, and if one "attempts" to produce one, one produces the experience of "attempting" rather than "picturing", and so on. Better, I think, is to try to draw attention to the properties of direct experience (which I tend to thing provides that new context which changes how we approach things), to work on clarifying the meaning of terms, and the "personal exploration" factor which is involved. For example, Paul Linden's little summary of intention is quite good:

[QUOTE]

We can begin by trying an exercise which focuses on the difference between movement and the will to move (or, to say it another way, the difference between the physical body and its programming for action). Stand up with your eyes shut and imagine that you have come up to an elevator. You have a large package in your arms that you cannot put down so you can't push the elevator button with your finger. Imagine the elevator button floating in the air an inch or two to the side of one shoulder, and imagine that you have to lean over sideways and push the elevator button with your shoulder. Actually intend to push the button. Create a real desire to push the button and intend to do so. This does not mean voluntarily moving to lean over and push the button, nor does it mean becoming stiff to prevent any movement so as to keep the exercise purely “mental”. It also does not mean merely thinking about pushing the button since “thinking about” is a symbolic process which implies a separation between the thinker and the subject about which s/he thinks. In the same way, it does not mean going into a dissociated daze and picturing yourself pushing the button. It simply means to relax, be natural and create an authentic feeling in the mindbody of desire and intention to push the button. (Most people can create this feeling when they focus on it, though many need some guidance to home in on it.) Once you establish this feeling, you will feel yourself “involuntarily” tipping toward the imaginary button.
-- Being in Movement: Intention as Somatic Meditation

[END OF QUOTE]

The later case study is an example of the exploratory process which one goes through for changing movement patterns, but applies equally to the "patterning" of experience more generally, beginning:

Case Study: As I learned how to use this approach to movement on myself, I also began to use it in my teaching and teach it as a way of moving. The final section of this article describes one example of the application of the intentional approach in teaching.

This is similar to the Michael Chekhov acting book mentioned earlier, of course. Now, I get that this might seem to be unhelpful in terms of "answers", but if the answers are non-conceptual, perhaps, or otherwise cannot be communicated, or if they involve a reframing rather than an extension of our current ideas, then "communication by shared events" (exercises) is one way forward. So that's where I'm coming from, and if other people who've tried that are "I used to be where you are", they just mean they've explored that side of things and are thinking differently about things as a result - but, of course, not necessarily correctly, eh? Only you can decide!

POST: Death

I imagine you would experience a body dying. And it might be quite painful!

Afterwards, we might hypothesise: experiencing would continue because awareness is permanent (the context), however your personal experience might not and could be discontinuous (the content). In other words, there is no guarantee that the pattern of your personal identity, the felt-memory, would persist. This might depend on whether you are identified with particular aspects of the experience, the body area or the background, and so on. However, if we're using the "patterning" model of experience, then next-moment would have to make logical sense, in some way.

Q1: Near death experiences might be not just clouds and harps [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=near+death+experiences+hell], especially after suicide.

What a downer! Maybe it'll just be very void. (There are quite a few interesting reports gathered on that site [www.nderf.org]; it's fascinating how they differ in terms of imagery and narrative, and in what ways they are similar in their more abstract elements.)

Q2: similar in their more abstract elements
I wonder if this means that there is a special home/source dimension... But, speaking of hell, what's your take on pain? From a physicalist standpoint, pain is useful. It's tough love from our genes, teaching us how to survive. Instead, what is the role of pain in the context of the patterning model? Is it just one of the available qualia in the palette, without any real ultimate meaning?

My suggestion: Discomfort is the experience that corresponds to being in a state which is not logically coherent - and pain occurs when we resist the movement that would make it so. Examples might range from the mundane and everyday, to the implications arising from intending larger world facts. For instance, intending a held physical position beyond which the body would natural move out of it, or intending an external event and then resisting the experiential content of the implied moments leading to that event. As for home dimensions - I'm of the view that there is no "special" state. All states/experiences are simply awareness "taking on the shape of" a particular structure. The idea of "specialness" surely comes from a narrative about those structures, and doesn't reside in the states themselves as such? After all, the feeling of something being special, is just an experience. However, it's interesting that the more "open" and "undivided" an experience is, the more blissful it is. So in those terms, complete eternal void is a "special state" - but it's not special as in being an ultimate goal or end-point for our investigations. That is about coming to an understanding of the nature of experience in general, rather than about the content of any particular state. Aside: Actually, this is a good point: many "seekers", I think, confuse these unbounded experiences with "being enlightened" and seek them out. But being "enlightened" is about the conclusion you draw from these experiences; it's not about the experience itself. It probably doesn't help that the term "enlightened" is now completely mangled as regards its meaning; I usually avoid it as a result.

Is logical consistency an ordinary adjustable pattern like others or an ironclad meta-law ruling them all?

I'd say that logical consistency is simply inherent in patterning, since although any pattern is applied as an adjustment everywhere like an overlay, there is only one single pattern. I sometimes use the example of moire fringes to illustrate this: adding one pattern on top of another simply does result in the final pattern; the result isn't "calculated" or "generated" by anything. Note, though, that by "logic" I don't mean "corresponds to your narrative about experience". I mean more that the pattern is internally self-consistent. This has to be the case really, because a landscape can't conflict with itself, there can't be some parts which are 3D and some parts 2D, unless they are being held in some way.

Night dreams

So, night dreams are "logical" in the sense that the experience is fully consistent with the patterning of the dream - because the experience is the patterning of the dream. The less deeply patterned, though, the more your experience tends towards being as series of associated images with a sense of there being a "world" behind them. Like, a circle turns into a sphere turns into a planet turns into a beach-ball. That is internally consistent (the beachball isn't simultaneously a square) but it does not correspond to the narrative of our everyday worlds. It is logically coherent within its own domain.

Any sufficiently constrained idealism is indistinguishable from materialism...

Very well said!

It's understandable. Who likes to chop wood and carry water???

Well, after enlightenment, everyone likes to chop wood and carry water! One of the great concerns of our age, surely, is that maybe suddenly everyone will become enlightened, and we'll run out of forests and streams to service this new enthusiasm. ;-)

But that seems an intrinsic and fully deterministic process

So I guess the question here is really: "how does it ever occur to us to intend something outside of our experience?"

Pondering this: we aren't in the world-pattern, the world-pattern is within us - or more accurately, we have "taken on the shape of" the current state of the pattern (perhaps unwittingly). However, the pattern doesn't limit the possibilities for your intention at all, except in a round about way, which is:

Descriptions & Intentions

Descriptions tend to inform - that is, become the form of - your intentions, and so those intentions imply the larger descriptive framework of which they are a part. Descriptions are not how things are, but the intentions based on them create patterns of experience "as if" they were. Thus, we tend to encounter evidence which supports our explanations, which we then use as the basis of our intentions, which further entrenches those patterns by implying them, and so on.

It's only deterministic between shifts, and those shifts are dictated by intention and its logical implications within the pattern, which includes implications about there being a change in the base formatting of the pattern. Since that "how" does matter, only the "what" or the outcome, and that outcome can be partially defined (in fact it always is really), this opens up the possibility that simply wishing for something different is sufficient to create a different experience outside of the circle of observations to date. Now, this is difficult to put into words, but in truth we are always experiencing all possible patterns or facts all the time - it's just that some facts are "brighter" than others (selected relatively by intention or attention) - and we are always experiencing that are an "open space" in which the sensory experience is floating. This means that the possibility of relaxing into that open perspective is always available, and it's more a case of ceasing to counter that rather than intend for it. This is perhaps why times of pain and desperation are often the moments where one realises the fundamental nature of experiencing (and the non-fundamental nature of content). Although sometimes people get hung up on the experience rather than the implication, it must be said.

Q2: It's only deterministic between shifts, and those shifts are dictated by intention and its logical implications within the pattern, which includes implications about there being a change in the base formatting of the pattern.
Not sure how to unravel some intricate parts of your post without a couple of NZT pills, but I can take it as a valuable mental workout. Shifts are dictated by intention. Intentions are dictated by what? It seems to me that the infinite rube goldberg causal chain works in a circular way: our intentions create/update experiences... effects are not fully predictable... so there are always some unforeseen good and bad aspects... and we intend to increase good things and decrease bad things... our intentions create/update experiences... Even if we choose to surrender, to "relax into the open perspective", it's because we believe that this is the best thing to "do". Determinism, here, seems pervasive and inescapable. What are the alternatives? Partial randomness? Fractal chaos?

The thing is: it's only deterministic between shifts. If I intend something right now, I can't pre-calculate the resulting state or world-pattern in advance, and therefore any desire that might arise from that state, and so on. Furthermore, since there is no "outside" to my state, any thinking we are doing right now about this that involves "looking at it" is implying a view point that never, in fact, exists. This is similar to how my thoughts about experience are also themselves within experience. And if I imagine there being an "outside" to experience, that "outside" is also really just an imagining within it - since awareness has no boundary, and so any apparent inside or outside are actually experiential content of the overall context. So, it makes no sense to talk about free will outside of the state or pattern, and many discussions about determinism and free will are implying exactly that. Essentially: "ah, but you can't decide to do something that cannot be thought of, and you won't decide to do something that you don't want to do". That's pretty meaningless though, right?

(We could make some extra points about how strands of thought can, in effect, be their own shiftable worlds and used as a source of creativity outside of the main strand, being also unpredictable between shifts.)

Q2: If I intend something right now, I can't pre-calculate the resulting state or world-pattern in advance
True, we can't know things in advance, but the patterning model is not time-bound...You've said that time is just an ordinary pattern, adjustable and deactivable, overlaid on the others. Doesn't this imply that, behind the tick-tocks, everything is "already" pre-calculated? And I don't mean it in the fixed-timeline-predestination sense (because, of course, there is an infinite number of trajectories on the Grid of All Possible Moments), but in the automata-programming sense -- i.e. for each state, all the possible transitions to other states are fully predetermined by precise if-then rules.
it makes no sense to talk about free will outside of the state or pattern
Neither inside. Free will is nowhere to be found. So, in a deterministic model, subjective experiences like pain or sadness or disgust or fear give a sense of cosmic unfairness. Luckily, evolution appears to be headed in the direction of eternal betterment. At least, this is comforting.

The thing is, though: from what perspective is everything pre-calculated? That perspective you are imagining, never "is". It's another example of the "view from nowhere": looking at a mental diagram within the thing it is meant to be a diagram of. I get what you are going for, though, which can essentially boil down to:

Given a full set of information, surely we will always intend what we want, so isn't that intention "pre-ordained"?

The first response to this is as above: that the mental map we're referring to in this discussion never exists in actuality. After a shift, the old state simply doesn't exist anymore, there is no memory of it, so to talk of determinism between states doesn't make sense. The second response is that "free will" is the ability to be able to, in principle, choose any option. If it so happens that we always choose the most attractive option, then that is still a free choice. In actual fact, the "making the best choice" idea is just a theory of what will happen - and it is contentless, surely? Because cannot predict the options or our desires prior to encountering them; certainly we can't predict what they will be post-state-shift. And if we cannot actually predict our own choices in advance, then they are not deterministic, and the theory is simply a narrative. I can't help but feel that this sort of thing needs actual illustrations to point at. :-)

Q2: After a shift, the old state simply doesn't exist anymore, there is no memory of it, so to talk of determinism between states doesn't make sense.
I'm way off base. I was thinking in terms of eternalism, but that seems more akin to presentism. However, I don't understand how such thing could be dynamic and timeless at the same -uhm- time. Thank you for your help and your patience. I give up on the mind-screwing theoretical stuff for now...
I can't help but feel that this sort of thing needs actual illustrations to point at. :-)
Releasing "Act = Fact, Part 2" in comic strip form would be epic. Even better with some Kung-Fu Owls kicking physicalist asses!

Well, it's "eternal" in the sense that "all possible facts and patterns are present and true always, now", it's "presentism" in the sense that you-as-awareness are in a static state (between shifts), and that state corresponds those facts and patterns being at different levels of "truth" or "intensity of contribution". Even "time passing" is a static pattern within a particular state. But - it's just a description, albeit a description which aims to be the most abstract that makes logical sense, and therefore the most flexible that is consistent with our experience. That is, intentions based on it do not imply additional complications. It's a "clean" model. You don't really need the model, any model, in order to get along. After all, it's just another "parallel construction in thought" rather than the world-as-it-is. Recognising that the world-as-it-is isn't any particular way, is probably enough (although that takes a bit of faith and the admission of uncertainty). So, the "edited highlight" would be, I suppose: Intending is the only cause, however intentions based on a description also tend to imply the pattern of that description - and hence tend to trigger experiences "as if" that description were true. If you intend something which is formulated based on the assumption that "the world is a spatially-extended place", then your intention also contains that pattern as part of the outcome you are intending. If you intend help from the Norse Gods, for example, then you will be implying their existence by doing so, and will tend to have other experiences "as if" the Norse Gods were around. Heh, I rather like your idea for "Part 2". I do think the Owls of Eternity need a starring role; it's the obvious next step after the success of their very fashionable eyewear range! (8>)=

Q3: it's only deterministic between shifts
when i shift my attention to something else than the thing i'm concerned with, then synchronicities happen (which are based on other strands of thought). e.g. what i want or expect won't happen until i become engrossed in something else. this seems silly.

Possible explanation: This is because when you are focused on something, the "boundary" between that strand of thought and the main strand of experience is fairly strong. You keep thinking about it, which implies the pattern of that thought is separate from the rest of experience. When you let of of that and look elsewhere, you are ceasing to hold that image in a constrained bubble, and it becomes a more seamless part of the overall space of experience. The possible solution: to intend into and as the main strand from the outset. For example, rather than focusing on a little bubble of thought and intending there, instead begin by either becoming aware of the background space to your main experience, or focus on an imaginary object floating within the main strand - and use that as your intentional focus. (It doesn't matter if your attention is on a small area of the main experience; intention should apply "globally" anyway even if your attention is "local".)

Q4: I remember you saying that the head gap is the background space. So to put the above into practice to go from seated=>standing, would we begin by placing our attention into the area behind our forehead, and then imagine-that we are already stood up, not interfering?

It actually shouldn't matter where your attention is, because intention applies as a whole, across the entirety. Provided it's directed in the main strand, and is not narrowed-focused on some part of your body and preventing it changing, you should be able to attend anywhere, or completely openly, and your intention will work. You can think of intending as resulting in a sort dissolved pattern across the entire world, but whose sensory aspects are only experienced if a result of that intention overlaps with your current sensory moment. So, when you intend standing up, the pattern - "the intention" plus its implication - is really a static pattern laid out from this-moment running to that-moment, which you subsequently encounter as "time passes" across it. So, I when intend to "stand up" that means: the fact-of-being-stood up is placed a few moments away, which implies a set of moments between that-moment (being stood up) and the current this-moment (being sat down). Then, I start to experience "standing up" happening as I scan across the moments from this-moment to that-moment.

Q4: Ugh, I understand everything perfectly conceptually, but the bottleneck to using this stuff practically really is - how do you insert the fact itself into your future. And of course, the answer is - well, it can't be described in words! Also, from the perspective of being-a-human, it seems to be extremely challenging to insert facts that are not at all plausible. My classic example that I use is to decide that you will receive a text message from a certain person within 5 minutes. I'm consistently unable to do it even with the firmest of deciding!
EDIT: When I say "using this stuff practically", I don't mean misdirection or assignment of meaning exercises, those often work with minimal commitment. I mean having the ability to directly insert facts when you please.

Yeah, since it just is - it's identical to being - it's like trying to describe to someone how to think a thought, or how to hear sounds, or even more mundane: how would you describe to someone how to lift their arm? In all cases, you just "become" the outcome and then you have the experience of it happening. But that's not very easy (i.e. not possible) to describe, so we end up talking about pretty much everything else instead - sigh!

Q4: To me, the implications of this is that the only route to truly figuring it out is through constant testing in your own experience. If descriptions just can't capture intending, surely there is no point to asking your dream characters how to describe it! Even though we do it anyway at some point in our exploration. Although, I have to say that I'm not willing to accept that descriptions are completely meaningless compared to firsthand experience. I think descriptions can be useful to initially point us in the right direction, which is then followed by personal experimentation to solidify understanding. Lastly, I feel that there is a luck component to all of this. It could take you 10 tries or 1,000,000 tries to finally realize how to insert a fact.

I agree that descriptions aren't completely meaningless. I think they are useful in two ways:

They provide inspiration for intentions. Also, intending based on a description also implies the extended pattern of that description, so your ongoing experience starts behaving "as if" your description is true, even thought the description itself is parallel and non-causal.
They can be useful for pointing out gaps, and thereby encouraging us to direct attention towards those gaps. Although the description, or language more generally, cannot communicate those gaps, the realisation of the "fact of the absence" can lead to us attending to the thing that can't be described.

For example, say you've got a hand-waving notion of how you summon a thought or how you summon an arm movement, but you never examine it. Now, someone points out to you that there is a gap in your description of how your world unfolds. The attempt to describe this gap, and the failure of the attempt, leads you to recognise "intention" and "experiencing", and to investigate what it is you are doing (or not doing), even though is "before" words and cannot be codified. Now, I maybe wouldn't call it luck, exactly, but there is certainly an element of discovery involved. That is, you end up attending to your own patterning and your current state. So for sure, you can't get any better at intending as such - it's not a skill, just like you can't get better at being - but you can certainly get better at constructing intentions through better understanding what it is. Typically, ending up with something like "thinking the thought of something being true", or similar - something that points to it for you. I suppose there's a luck aspect in ever encountering a situation where the gap is pointed out to you in the first place.

Q3: becoming aware of the background space to your main experience
I felt like that out for a walk today - kind of like )( observing the 'bubble' of the universe being seen from the sphere of my awareness
instead of having minor reactions/experiences I need to have something big
It doesn't matter if your attention is on a small area of the main experience; intention should apply "globally" anyway even if your attention is "local".
like for example the portals or even just waking up in another country or in another set of 'life circumstances'. at present it seems like I'm supporting a world for the benefit of everyone but me! even if my 'everyday experiences' were to change around me that would be useful (i.e. they come to me rather than me seeking it out). surely I should get to a point where the difference between intention and actualisation doesn't exist because to desire is to come from a place of want.

Perhaps something to explore is that sense of relationship between "you" and "the world" (including other people). Do you perceive the world as being a place? Or a strand of thought? And so on. Taking on different stances like this changes our basic relationship, the "framing"of the content of experience. For example, if you see intention as being injected into a 3D world that extends out in all directions, then that is quite a different implicit pattern than seeing injection as being a reshaping of your own state from which sensory experiences are a part.

POST: Questions about reality

Higher Understanding

I'd say there is no "higher understanding" in terms of content of experience. The understanding you reach is about the context of experience. Which is: that you are always awareness "taking on the shape of" states and experiences. If you have an experience of "amazing understanding and enlightenment", it's still just another experience. Metaphorically, you are like a blanket of material which can shape-shift itself into any arrangement of folds. So, any apparent intellectual understanding you have, therefore, is also just an arrangement of folds. The deeper realisation is the meta-understanding that "everything is 'blanket' and everything is 'folds'", or that "all sandcastles are both 'the beach' and 'sand'". Note that this is something you can directly notice; these metaphors point to an actual experience of realising that you are a "big open awareness which takes on the shape of experience", with the understanding that even that is a shape you adopt. Basically, though, the fundamental truth is always the fundamental truth; it's not something you discover, it's something you realise you always are (which is obvious when you think about it).

The Ego & The Design of Experience

As regards "the ego" and "the experience you presumably created" - this implies that you deliberately created this experience, that you knowingly chose and designed it. This isn't (necessarily) the case. You've been accidentally patterning your experience all your life. Think of how many times you must have unwittingly done the equivalent of the Owls of Eternity exercise or the Two Glasses exercise!

Furthermore, you don't just get what you intend - you get what your intentions logically imply and you also get the extended associative pattern corresponding to your intentions. The whole world-pattern shifts with every intention, since intention is a reshaping of yourself-as-world. "The ego" is simply a concept, it is the idea that you are a "person", and having adopted this idea, you are having experiences "as if" it were true. The ego cannot assist you; it has no intelligence. It is simply a "dumb pattern" of thoughts and sensations that were implied by prior intentions, and have been overlaid upon your experience. You can't "kill" the ego - at least any more than you can "kill" any other idea by no longer thinking it.

You & Me & World

Yeah, this is always a tricky area. It is not possible to partition consciousness, because it is "before" division and "before" change. Consciousness has no properties other than "being-aware" and so cannot be differentiated, and does not change in terms of its own nature. It is actually meaningless to talk about "pieces" of consciousness and of there being more than one experience. This presents a problem, because of course language and concepts require division into "parts" and then a relation of parts in a mental space. All we can do, then, is avoid making an error - or at least recognise the limits of conceptualisation and know the type of error we are making. The two possible ways are to think of yourself as a consciousness that is sequentially going through every possible experience by traversing a memory block of all possible moments (the Hall of Records metaphor tries to convey this), or that there are multiple consciousness simultaneously experiencing all possible moments. Finally, both versions are identical once we remove the time and space component. The important thing to grasp, probably, is that you are not actually a "person" and the world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". You can have an experience "as if" that were true, but that is not the nature of things; there is nothing "behind" that experience and it has no outside to it. The metaphor of The Imagination Room tries to give a direct feel for this (if you contemplate it from a 1st-person perspective)

I'd say that you don't get better at intending, but you can certainly get better at choosing and specifying (being somewhat pedantic I know). There's nothing to stop you from attaching a sort of "global good outcomes" property to your intentions; lots of people include a "for the greater good" clause. Remember, "intending" is the intensification of a pattern (the "intention") that corresponds to a - is a - fact. That fact can be, implicitly, anything from "it is true that I am always lucky" to "it is true that my partner and I will get back together" to "it is true that the weather is improving" to "it is true that I am a vast open calm space in which sensory experiences arise". So, if you've intended-asserted the pattern-fact of being open and calm ("like a still picture frame"), then the next step is to experiment with asserting some future outcomes - that is, to assert the fact that "it is true now that I will have this experience then". This naturally implies the creation of momentum in your life. The question to ask yourself is: "what do I desire now?". The answer does not come from thinking it out intellectually; it is an observable truth that is present in your current state. If you ask the question, pause, you should get an answer. Proceed from there.

POST: Quantum Immortality Question

Basically saying you'll live forever.

It's basically saying that one of you will live forever - or rather of the many you-and-worlds one will persist even though all others fail - and that those who die have no experience of dying, because dying corresponds to the end of experiencing. In this scheme, the "you" that's conscious of reading this message right now might well die in a car crash tonight - and end at that point. Another parallel you might not crash and continue. "You-you", however, would still cease. To be honest, from a scientific point of view, I wouldn't take the "many worlds" interpretation, nor any of the other variants which treat the mathematical states in QM as literally existing, very seriously. They aren't actually scientific (there's no test you could perform to distinguish between the interpretations); they are a fun exercise in philosophy, an interesting thought experiment just like Schrodinger's cat, to illustrate a point rather than to indicate a truth. (The cat is not really alive and dead at the same time; the cat concept points out the ridiculousness of a certain interpretation.)

And from a philosophy of identify point of view, this notion of "quantum immortality" is problematic: lots of little worlds with lots of little bodies each with a drop of consciousness inside them, constantly proliferating at every decision point? In what sense are any of those "you"?

This is why approaches like philosophical idealism and dualism flip things round, and have consciousness as primary and experiential patterns as secondary. That way, there is only ever one you which never stops "being" - the context of experience - and never stops "happening" - the content of experience. The experience of being-Duriky_Quide-in-a-world might end, but experiencing itself will continue. Let's call that "context immortality" or persistence of consciousness.

eventually all fundamental particles will be too far away from each other to interact

I'm not sure about this but, surely the expansion of universes doesn't correspond to the separation between each fundamental particle - rather the space between particles? In other words, planet Earth is not expanding as we speak, such that it will one day disintegrate. (So I wouldn't worry about it. Any of it.)

Q1: You make a lot of good points, I don't personally subscribe to a lot of these beliefs but I really enjoy thinking about them. When I was talking about the fundamental particles I was referencing some kind of science article I read online. It was talking about trying to prove the existence of dark matter because expansion seems to be increasing and not slowing down like previously believed. That one day everything will be separated and increasing at speeds that nothing would be in its' visible part of the universe. Energy will bleed off and interactions will cease. Basically a heat death but caused by expansion. Thank you for answer it was really helpful and informative. I think I'll enjoy reading into a lot of philosophy.

I love thinking about these things too. Just always bear in mind that observations are primary, and our descriptions are narratives we invent to connect the dots. We should never think of those concepts as "true" - even though the more we think about them the more "real" they tend to seem - because that's not what science is about. Basically:

Observations dictate the permitted models.
Models do not dictate the permitted observations.
Models are "connective fictions" to link together observations.

Today's best story will be tomorrow's quaint idea that got thrown away for a better, more useful or more elegant one. Dark matter is quite probably the phlogiston or aether of this century, and even embedded theories like the big bang can disappear in a wave of the mathematics. Worrying about dark matter and the expanding universe is like worry about Darth Vader and the Expanded Universe. It's all good fun though.

Extra - On the many worlds thing, you might find this Philip Ball article worth a read [https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-many-worlds-hypothesis-just-a-fantasy].

POST: random theory about quantum immortality and deja vu [theory]

[POST]

ok so.. in the time I've been on this sub I've read numerous stories (both here and on glitch) about people dying and skipping over to alternate timelines. These stories fascinate me, and led me to think of a couple things; one being deja vu. If the theory of quantum immortality is indeed accurate, and every time you die in one timeline you hop over to the nearest one, let's think about this scenario. I'm 36yrs old and I die in a car accident, and the next thing I know I'm in another timeline. Things and are similar but somehow slightly different- or maybe a LOT different. This timeline goes on and let's say I don't "die" again until I'm 94, and I die of old age. What if.. what if when we die we are just repeating the same life over and over, but making different choices (or maybe some the same)- and this is why certain things and people are very familiar to us, and perhaps also why we get deja vu? Meaning, we get the feeling we've already had these experiences because we HAVE, in fact, been living the same life over and over on repeat? Until, maybe one day something changes or something else comes along and we're able to move on. Idunno, just was in my head the other day and I thought I'd share it here with some like-mindeds. :)

[END OF POST]

A guy called Anthony Peake promotes almost exactly the theory you've come up with [Is there Life After Death?: The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When we die, By Anthony Peake]. (But he has a higher-self concept in play. Still worth a read though, for some of the interesting stories.)

On the quantum suicide thing, the thought experiment itself doesn't suggest that you hop timelines - it simply says that given a multiplicity of potential outcomes, all outcomes "actually happen", each with a "you". In each death-related situation there's always a chance that you will survive. That "you" will continue on, and so quantum immortality says that no "you" will never experience a death. But some of "you" will die. Personally, I think it's philosophically problematic and it arises from a dubious interpretation (many-worlds) of quantum mechanics. However - if you flip the perspective and have world-experiences occurring within your consciousness, rather than your experiences occuring within a world, then you can formulate it without the multiplicity problems. No timelines, no hopping, no multiple "you"s. Simply stated: "consciousness never stops and experiencing always continues". So if you end up in a situation where your current story has no logical next-moment, then you might experience a sudden reset such that an accident didn't happen, or you might experience dying and going to "heaven", or you might indeed find yourself suddenly at the start of that life again - or at the start of another life - with or without any memories. The ultimate state-shift or dimensional jump, you might say. This seems closer to the varieties of glitch stories we actually see. (Sort of skipping a step as you traverse the grid; perhaps even resulting in some collateral shifts.)

For deja vu, I'm inclined to say that it's due to the current state of the world - all the experiential moments which logically follow from and constitute that state - being available at all times. The apparent passage of time is akin to scanning your attention across a landscape, piece by piece. Deja view is the ultimate peripheral vision, or blind-sight.

I've always been unable to accept that we ever stop existing. Even as a child I remember pondering death and thinking "how could people ever be talking about me while I'm NOT existing somewhere?". I believe these bodies sometimes give out, but some part of us definitely continues the journey.

The traditional approach to this, is to realise that "the body" is actually just a bunch of sensations that arise in the mind (or, because that word has developed muddled meanings, that arise within the "open perceptual space" you experience yourself being). Sensations come and go, but the mind remains. This puts a different slant on things like dreaming and death. So, we end up with something like: consciousness persists, like a blanket of material which has folds in it, where the folds may change shape or even be ironed out completely, but the blanket itself remains. The only thing you know for sure is being-ness, that feeling of existing. That is fundamental; everything else is relative content.

Q1: Its a cool idea to ponder with your buddies over some beer and a joint, but I read something that explained it. Don't quote me on this, but Deja Vu is somewhat of a memory lag. Your brain decides to put your current experience into your long term memory, which gives you the weird feeling that "this has already happened" because you're reading it from your long term memory at the same time that it happens. But idk man. I've had some weird deja vu before. Like when you somehow remember what someone said, as they're opening their mouth to say it. On a subjective level, it definitely seems like Deja Vu is something more.

I'd heard that too... but to accept it as an explanation, you really have to ask how, exactly, that process works. Otherwise it's another "cool idea" to ponder with buddies and beer. Not that that's a bad thing though. Any excuse, I say.

That's a good attitude. Lots of people just accept an explanation at face value without bothering to look into the mechanics of it.

Yeah, I'm often surprised at how flimsy is the evidence or reasoning behind commonly referenced ideas. In psychology, it often takes the form of applying an explanation to scenarios way beyond the context of the original studies. In science, it takes the form of taking interpretations as fact, or extrapolating greater certainties from small successes. I think: Why believe anything? Just keep to an "open verdict" if you can't confirm things for yourself. It'll all probably have changed again by the time you get around to reading up on it anyway. :-)

Nothing wrong with exchanging interesting ideas though - the more of that the better. It's just about avoiding feeling obligated to assert those ideas as true, rather than useful.

Q1: Read Prometheus Rising. It's barely related to what you're talking about but I can tell that you're the kind of person who would really enjoy it. Changed the way I think about everything. "When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented. We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxers playing a joke. Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints, the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all living in separate realities. That is why communication fails so often, and misunderstandings and resentments are so common. I say "meow" and you say "Bow-wow," and each of us is convinced the other is a bit dumb"

I've read it! That and, I think, his book Quantum Psychology were a couple of my favourite "what's this 'reality' thing all about?" type books. That's a great quote.

* * *

TG Comments: /r/Oneirosophy

POST: On the pretentious nature of consensus reality.

All wool, no sweater!

POST: Visualizations of a few concepts discussed here

[POST]

Recalling or experiencing part of a pattern in any way triggers the whole pattern (and to a lesser extent all associated patterns) via auto-completion.
[https://i.imgur.com/gGmwmQe.gifv]
Unfolding
[https://i.imgur.com/QB7IEAp.jpg]
Enfolded Possibilities
[https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WpGzXw4z05I/UysaV4CAyfI/AAAAAAAAukQ/OwY03iI0I2k/s1600/tumblr_m39qj6mK6v1qzt4vjo1_500.gif]
I may find some more in the future, but I felt these were fitting, at least for how I think of these concepts.

[END OF POST]

What a nice idea - evocative imagery. I kinda meant to pursue that avenue more after the Infinite Grid one, but animation takes time and I've not had the time - repurposing preexisting ones is a great idea. I like the first one particularly. Something which emphasises the notion of a redistribution of relative contribution of pre-existing patterns. This also reminds me I've been somewhat neglecting my Oneirosophic duties of late.

POST: Cities, civilization, and lucidity.

[POST]

So i've been on a two week vacation out in spain with my family, and while it was fun, i cant help but realize in those big city environments, not to mention not having much alone time, i had a very difficult time achieving lucidity. Like before i left i feel like i had things down but out in madrid and barcelona, all of the hundreds of people and noises seemed to scream for attention for my mind. I guess i could classify myself as a person who is prone to sensory overload at times. Also on the whole going beyond being human thing, as much as i love my parents being around them seemed to make me feel human by reminding me i'm their offspring.
What i have learned from this experience is that for one thing i now know why monks spend time in isolation, but also that there is incredible freedom in solitude. I've also realized that before i thought spending time alone in my room was limiting and imprisoning, but when i was out in those big cities i felt even more imprisoned and failed to realize how free i actually was before this experience. Say what you will about charles manson, but in ones of his interviews he said something along the lines of society being a bigger prison then the actual cell he was staying in, and now i totally get it. Mental prisons are much more insidious because not being in a physical prison creates an illusion of freedom, and mental prisons can be very detrimental to lucidity.

[END OF POST]

Madrid and Barcelona - amazing, I love those cities. But they are relentless. And that's a good thing! :-)

Surely one of the benefits of pursuing this approach is that you can find the 'space' in any situation. Even in a crowded street, elbows bumping against you, the rowdy crowds of Las Ramblas, there is quiet inside you - or should I say, that the scene is contained within a quiet. Monks are saps! ;-)

EDIT: Hint, these cities are much more fun with a bunch of pals, perhaps during a festival.

...my dad kind of follows a schedule...

Yeah, there's nothing worse than "organised fun".

i brought illuminatus trilogy on the plane to read and the person in the row next to me had the same book.

Of course they did! That's how it works. Also, your seat number was 23 and the air hostess was distributing free copies of Fnord magazine with the newspapers.

POST: TV astral projection, dimensional intersections, and reality as a dream labyrinth of dreams within dreams.

Yes, we do get "absorbed into worlds" (or rather, we absorb worlds into us?) and everyday life is just such a place. I suppose we become what we pay attention to, so we really do completely enter Mario's land. It's just a matter of directed attention.

A little related, I was just reading Francis Lucille’s The Perfume of Silence and I quite liked this passage (his version of a ‘grid of all moments’) which reminds me a bit of your TV scenario:

*We can only use metaphors up to a point. When stretched too far they don’t work. We use the metaphor of images on a television screen to understand the relationship of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions to consciousness. The screen stands for consciousness, and the images for the manifestations, the energies, the appearances.
If we want to understand the relationship between consciousness and the apparent multiplicity of minds, we can also use the image of a television screen, but in a different way. If innumerable television screens, each with their own image, represent innumerable minds, then in this case, consciousness is indicated by an observer who is watching all the television screens at the same time. Sometimes two images may have some connection because they share a common object. Sometimes they may not seem to have any connection, because their fields don’t intersect.
However, one single witness observes all screens. In this metaphor the witness stands for consciousness and each screen stands for each individual mind.

and

Objectively it is limited, but subjectively it is not. One television screen cannot see the other screens, but the observer has access to all of them. In the same way, your mind does not have access to other minds, but one consciousness sees all minds. The observer is not foreign to you because it is you. It is seeing and understanding these words right now. There is not a separate consciousness for each mind. There is only one hearer, one seer, one perceiver. The apparatus with which we see is by itself inert, unable to see. A telescope is useless without an astronomer behind it. It doesn’t see anything by itself. Likewise, the apparatus of mind doesn’t see anything by itself.

POST: Differences between Oneirosophy and New Age (by cosmicprankster420)

[POST]

You know I consider myself pretty open minded when it comes to forms of spirituality, but whenever I see something that is really new agey there is a part of me that cringes a bit. I mean I believe in the possibilities of things like spirits, energy, and alternate planes of existence and so do new agers, but where is the difference? What's different I realized is that new age can have a quasi materialistic bent to its working where as Oneirosophy is all about working with perception alone. For example things like fluoride in drinking water calcifying the pineal gland so you cant astraly project, needing to be a vegan in order to access higher states of consciousness, masturbating makes you lose your chi, or the idea of electronic devices interfering with ones perception. All 4 of these things have you believing your ability to transcend the illusion of physicality relies on other physical things. If that doesn't sound like it makes sense it shouldn't. If the world is truly a dream things like chemicals in the drinking water or having the right crystals in the room should not be an aid or a detriment unless you decide it so, all is perception. Now granted getting to mired in certain habits can make one less lucid like eating too much junkfood or any other habit, but that is only the focus of attention on the bad habit not necessarily things blocking your chi (unless that's how you want your reality to manifest).
Let me make it clear I'm not trying to attack new age, if you want to clutch crystals and eat only raw food that's your business in your spiritual path but I think the reason new age can be off putting at time is because it makes spiritual ascent based on physical diet, physical objects, and physical energies where as oneirosophy can be based on perception, attention, and thought forms alone. I mean im not a vegetarian by any means (though I am eating less and losing weight currently) and I think im pretty good at astral projection and visualization. You don't have to worry about adopting some ultra healthy hippy life style (though diet and exercise doesn't hurt), you always have the power within you to become lucid in this dream, just don't get too caught up in the side shows and you should be fine.

[END OF POST]

What's different I realized is that new age can have a quasi materialistic bent to its working...

Yes, there's like an acceptance of 'this' but not of 'that' - as if there's a requirement for some solidity to base the esoteric stuff on. Which isn't the case. Everything gets much simpler if you accept that everything is non-material and aware, and therefore infinitely flexible.

If the world is truly a dream things like chemicals in the drinking water or having the right crystals in the room should not be an aid or a detriment unless you decide it so, all is perception.

I was recently reading a book on "Ho'oponopono", quite new-agey (albeit describing a traditional Hawaiian approach apparently) but with some universal ideas buried in it. Anyway, at one point our main character in this asks to go to a burger bar. Our author is surprised - surely this unhealthy food is a bad idea? The response is that he 'sends it love before he eats it'. Now, that sounds ridiculous, but then you realise what he's really saying is that he is refusing to accept the idea that the burger is bad for him. He isn't cleansing it of bad energies or whatever; he is cleansing himself of his own causal opinion that this will do him harm.

Simultaneously, it is becoming apparent to me that much of what before I would feel very much a victim of, now I simply take in stride and learn from.

The larger idea is that we can cower and "be small" within our world-experience, or we can assert and become it - in which case it is within us. When the world is within us, it is not made of "things" but of "meaning", and events unfold according to their meaning. If burgers and coughing "mean" to us that health is affected, it will be. However, if we note that burgers and coughing are merely images in awareness then they don't inherently mean anything, and we can update any meaning those ideas have inherited from our past assumptions. I guess you could call this "Active Being". In many traditions we are taught non-attachment and acceptance. This alone reduced the effect of such things. However, we do have the ability to "reformat experience" and change the "rolling theory" we are living with - interjecting when we spot a tweak that needs to be made, and letting be at other times.

this is where the idea of gods or the hga becomes useful.

This is a good point - that if you can't quite persuade yourself that "little you" has all this power, then you can outsource it as a way of convincing yourself it's possible. But that is what you are doing: creating-adjusting by implication. It's pretty hard to convince yourself that: a) you can completely cheat the game and, b) that cheating the game is a 'good idea' or morally 'allowed'. And doing things by direct assertion (including 'overwriting yourself') maybe the most direct and it does work, but it involves at least temporarily leaving personhood behind, which is a pretty big emotional hurdle (it's "death"!)

POST: Pain doesn't hurt anymore

Do you feeling more generally detached and less present in your body? Do you feel more 'localised' in your head area?

Not saying this is you, but - - -

One reaction people can have to emotional trauma is that they withdraw their 'presence' from their body; they become remote from both emotional and physical sensation. Any distraction from the 'avoided area' can come across as having ambiguous meaning, anything intense that breaks through can seem pleasurable - e.g. Being forcibly hugged really intensely, etc. Mostly, it is that for such a deadened person, any intense sensation can give a feeling of 'aliveness' again. In other words, if that is you, then this isn't a good thing. Spiritual learning allows you to feel things fully and accept them as sensations; it doesn't literally reduce the sensation itself or deaden the natural response. 'Letting go' and 'mindfulness' exercises might assist, although you might find them initially unpleasant and make you feel vulnerable, because you will be opening yourself up to sensations you've not been with for a while.

I am not detached from my body. Also not deadened or less present in general. I experience primarily through my heart and root chakra zones. I made this post out of surprise that an incidence of physical pain didn't carry that repulsive feeling usually associated with pain. I thought maybe the recent emotional pain could have some bearing but I hope people don't take this post as a cry for help, because I'm actually feeling great.

Ah, well that's all good then! :-)

POST: Everything is real, everything is unreal, or everything simply is?

It depends on the perspective. Everything is unreal in the sense that it is not what we assume - no solid objects extended in space, actually patterns in dissolved awareness. But they are real in terms of being patterns. So perhaps it's better to dodge the question and just say that everything is transparent and dreamlike?

From there it follows that as there is no solid substrate, everything is temporary and flexible, and because to experience something you must be it, all experiences and therefore the world are contained within you. "Real" and "unreal" means the world experience is being separated into two categories. But really, all experience is made from patterns of the same thing (awareness). The distinction between the two is, on examination, usually down to stability and persistence, and perhaps location - that transient thoughts are "not real" (and over here)whereas the room around you hangs around and is therefore "real" (and over there).

If real = an independent physical material, then nothing is real.
If real = awareness, then everything is real.

From a /r/Psychonaut post:

Nefelibata
Definition: A cloud walker; One who lives in the cloud of their own imagination or dreams, or one who does not abide by the precepts of society, literature, or art; An unconventional, unorthodox person.
Pronunciation: ne-fe-LE-ba-ta

POST: Understanding Beta, alpha, theta, and delta mind states in an oneirosophic context.

Could we think of the brainwaves as the 3rd-person subjective image of a 1st-person subjective experience? Is the difference between states then a different between attentional styles?

Two general styles:

A diffuse, open attentional style is a detached one where you let the world experience come to you. You are settled into the broadest state. This is an acceptance of existing patterns though non-resistance.
In contrast, a highly focussed, narrow attention style involves a "gripping" onto a pattern. If this is a pattern of existing experience, this this increases the intensity of the pattern within focus, but also preventing its change.

However, either style can be used to effect change:

An open-detached style (non-clinging to existing pattern) can allow intentions to ripples into effect easily. You are not "holding onto" existing patterns, so they can reform without resistance.
A narrow-focussed style, when focussed on the desired pattern rather than an existing pattern, can also be a mechanism for change.

Implicitly, both approaches can amount to releasing a hold on present patterns and transferring experience to a desired pattern. The open approach is far less stressful though, and you can have a focussed experience within an open state.

Q1: ok this isn't a bad way to reinterpret it. I tend to find the open detached style is better for cultivating a state of lucidity then the narrow focused style. Maybe this is because you become open to the whole experience, and to be truly lucid in a dream you have to be aware that all of the experience is a dream, not just one small section of it.

Right. I'd say the open detached style is definitely the one to go for, because you can (potentially) live every moment this way. By "letting the world come to you" you can remain completely relaxed. If you don't even interfere with the shifts of your own attention (which eventually settle anyway), you naturally become aware of the background space including the place where "you" are meant to be. The narrow-focussed bang has been used in magickal techniques as a quick way of forcing temporary detachment while holding an intention, to "release" it. But surely it's far better to be completely open and "ask and receive" instead - for everyday body movement and thinking, not just "special efforts". I guess it's about resisting the urge to want to push and feel yourself doing things. There have been some studies into the correspondence between brainwaves and "open focus" and there is value in that - see Les Fehmi's work - but for individual experiments, I think you can just go for what feels right.

...

that is a good point you make, however i know in my own personal experience i still have a lot of deconditioning to do. I only say this because i have become lucid and then have become trapped in materialism before and know how hard it is to get a way from convention.

Can you instead put aside those thoughts and then, rather than de-conditioning, leave them alone and choose to assert your preferred metaphysics and live from that?

TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 14

POST: Questions regarding DJ

POST: What happens to the other 'you's when you jump?

POST: A few questions.

POST: I've got a bit of a problem.

POST: Can you change yourself physically when you jump?

POST: So...could every person that you talk to in your life actually have their consciousness in a different dimension?

POST: What's the point of the Dimensional ID 982 if an infinite amount of other dimensions could have the same number on their sidebar? Why doesn't everyone pick the own ID for their original dimension?

POST: So can i jump without the whole "candle n mirror @ night"?

POST: Has there been any thought given to the idea that you are consciously manipulating reality, rather than jumping to a different one? Is that question semantic?

POST: Noob here. Am I too negative to try this DJ?

POST: trying tonight

POST: Too scared to jump.

POST: Seriously tripped out. I SWEAR there were at least 65,000 subscribers to this subreddit. I watched the number climb for quite a while too. WTF

POST: Misunderstandings

POST: Questions for Mr. TriumphantGeorge about reality tunnels, non-dual doctrines, books and movies.

POST: Witch needs help re: unintended consequences

POST: Two Glasses - А Cautionary Tale

POST: a question to Triumphant_George

POST: Death

POST: Questions about reality

POST: Quantum Immortality Question

POST: random theory about quantum immortality and deja vu [theory]

* * *

TG Comments: /r/Oneirosophy

POST: On the pretentious nature of consensus reality.

POST: Visualizations of a few concepts discussed here

POST: Cities, civilization, and lucidity.

POST: TV astral projection, dimensional intersections, and reality as a dream labyrinth of dreams within dreams.

POST: Differences between Oneirosophy and New Age (by cosmicprankster420)

POST: Pain doesn't hurt anymore

POST: Everything is real, everything is unreal, or everything simply is?

POST: Understanding Beta, alpha, theta, and delta mind states in an oneirosophic context.

Warning