TriumphantGeorge Compendium - Part 8

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

Be more informative?

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

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

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

Not quite yet, it seems! ;-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: [deleted by user]

Quick answers -

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

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

Let's explore -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My thoughts are a bit abstract on this topic

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

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

Anyway -

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

Related metaphor: The Imagination Room

POST: Tried the Two glasses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Change your beliefs change your world

But what exactly is a "belief"? I don't think it's necessarily a straightforward thing to answer, at least not in a way that leads immediately to a strategy for changing one's experience.

Q1: For me, there exists an interaction between the concept of "intention" and that of "belief". Intention is a specific action that I am capable of performing, through the application of my capacity to will. Belief seems to be then a word used to explain my expectations that I carry around my reality, which in this model would be intentions without active, aware participation. It seems to me that my current expectations about my reality, which are the only practical applications of my beliefs, are limitations upon my ability to intend. In this sense, without active and aware participation, beliefs serve as a proxy for intentions that are created unknowingly, or ignorantly.
In the concept that you can "change your beliefs and change your reality", I would say it is more accurate to claim that becoming aware of, and taking responsibility for, all of your "beliefs" would reveal that your current reality has been created by those intentions that have been occurring without volition behind them, or with an ignorant volition. The true creative power is the intention, or volition.
Looking back at this, and OP's reply above also, it seems the word belief is another name for past intentions. When you view it that way, and with the goal of most effectively causally affecting reality, to me the most constructive method would be to willfully create new intentions now without regard for "beliefs", rather than attempting to change those patterns of past intentions. In fact, the very act of acknowledging those past intentions as a pattern called a belief, it is essentially the creation of yet another intention, reaffirming the power of those past intentions.

I broadly agree with this. I do think that "belief" is probably a word best avoided (see comment above) unless we narrow its intended meaning. If we instead just go straight for "the patterning of experience" - as an accumulation of intentions, as you say - then we have an actual model to base our approach on, and a line of investigation to explore. Then, we can reserve "belief" for what we think is possible, when we are thinking about what is possible. The belief itself does not dictate what is possible, only what range of experiences we are likely to intend. Obviously, there is some overlap here, since to think about the possibility of something will to some extent intensify that pattern and make it likely to arise - it is a minor intention all of its own, as you say - but that is not what most people mean when talking about the effect of beliefs.

It seems to me that all though all deliberate thought has a state-shfiting effect, there is a useful distinction to be drawn between simply thinking something (e.g. thinking "owls" for a while) versus asserting that something is true (e.g. thinking the fact "owls are filling up my life" until it is fully intensified). Although the process is the same - a pattern is strengthened relatively via attending to it - it's the additional context of the latter which I think deserves the title of intention (asserting a fact of the world), as opposed to simply thinking (dumb pattern activation).

So, pretty much as you say - except that I'm keeping "belief" as something that refers to the conceptual structure one has about the world, and not necessarily part of the factual "world-pattern" itself, because sometimes those two get conflated, leading to a misunderstanding of what is being done. (Which is perhaps why people sometimes wonder why what they believed was going to happen, didn't. They were looking at the wrong "strand of thought", a parallel construction about the world, rather than the world itself as their dissolved state.)

But it is definitely an open question for me, one that I would love more opinions on!

I think this is the point where we realise that one of the hurdles we have, and one of the mistakes we can make, is the initial tendency to confuse the auditory or visual imagery of a thought with being the intention rather than simply a sensory handle onto it. The intention itself is a felt-meaning-context and not necessarily even much of that - a very subtle knowingness-pattern. But not that either! It's a dimensionless fact, I suppose. The experiential aspect depends on the intention itself, and more.

We might think of it as a sort of a reverse insight, perhaps?

By this, I mean that sometimes we encounter a situation and suddenly we just know the full extent of it. It doesn't come in the form of words and images, and you'd struggle to call it even a feeling as such - it is just knowing. When we intend something, what we want to do is sort of create such a knowing and intensify it. Of course, we don't actually have to do this directly - it's probably much easier to perform a physical or mental act which simply implies it - but if we are serious about our experiments, that's where we're heading. Anyway, the more that we release our hold on body tensions and other held patterns which result in ongoing sensory noise - via daily releasing and exploring "just-decide" and so on - and the more we settle out into a nonattached allowing, the more this background felt-sense becomes clearer in general and moves into relatively greater prominence.

This is what I was trying to reach for in my early outline post: The Patterning of Experience

In the end, the difficulty with defining what "an intention" is and what "intending" is, is that it is not actually one thing. If we called it "changing the landscape" then the experience of doing this would depend on the current and final states of the landscape, and whether and in what way we were looking at the part of the landscape we were changing. Changing "flat" to "hilly" would likely have a sensory feeling of "hilliness", for example. If we were standing on the part we were changing, we might have a massive experience of vertigo... but if it were some more distant contour, it might be a much more subtle experience. And so on. One of my earlier metaphors: If you were a shape-shifter, what would "shape-shifting" be like? And what would be the difference between thinking about your target shape, and actually shifting to it and becoming it? Suggestion: the experience would be one of change. What we experience when intending is the experience of shifting, not of the actual intention/intending itself as such, since these terms do not refer to specific things at all.

TL;DR: An intention is not an object, and intending is not the creation of an object.

EDIT: Re-reading this comment, it comes over as a little unfocused, I may do a re-edit if I get a moment to make it clearer.

...

Interesting ideas.

My first point on this:

If we intend for something to happen but our belief structure won't allow that to happen were letting our past dictate our future.

is that to me, there is no retrocausality with intentions. Instead, I would see the situation you've described as an intention for something to happen, but before the actual realization of that intention, another interfering intention is caused by you, and ultimately the more recent of the two intentions is actualized.

Another interesting thing to look into is your idea:

it seems like beliefs are one step below intention, it like we create our intentions from our beliefs.

I can see this being true from the perspective that up until this point, we have experienced a certain set of things that create in us credible possibilities for experiences. Intentions that I put out, in this context, must be drawn from within this set of possibilities, otherwise I wouldn't properly create the intention, and the failure would reaffirm my over-arching intention to sustain my context of possible experiences.

A question this brings up would be: is it possible to change your beliefs with intentions? If beliefs are truly one step below intention, then that seems impossible. What do you think?

...

I'm going to disagree completely.

I'm not sure that you are disagreeing?

My question to ponder was, what is a belief, meaning what is its nature? Is it a structural pattern of our subjective world? Or is it a concept, an abstraction we use when we think about our world? Do we sometimes use the latter to refer to the former, but then focus on trying to change the latter? That's what I mean by, without nailing exactly what we mean by "belief", it's not necessarily obvious what it is or how it shapes experience. For example, if a "belief" is a thought about the world that we have, which leads us to take some actions and not others, that is one thing. Altering our beliefs would alter our behaviour, perhaps, but would not in and of themselves alter our "reality" except indirectly. For instance, we "believe that" we are unattractive and so we don't choose to approach that attractive person, or avoid situations where we feel being unattractive will embarrass us.

On the other hand, if a "belief" was bound up with the actual factual structure of the world, then to alter our beliefs would be to shift reality itself (using those terms loosely). In this case, it is about more than our beliefs shaping our action choices. We are reshaping the world itself.

How we approach changing our beliefs - or if we even bother to spend time trying to do so - depends on what we think they "are", in this sense. Personally, I think the word "belief" is near to useless, since it is poorly defined and tends to conflate these two things - and more. It is better to avoid it completely and go for a metaphor that is cleaner and has less baggage, and derive our own targeted language from that.

If we think of ourselves as a lense that views the world our beliefs could be the mud or dirt on the lens.

That's not a bad metaphor, and points to the distinction I was making, perhaps. Dirt on the lens doesn't prevent you taking a particular action in principle. However it affects the likelihood of you conceiving of and then taking that action.

If we believe that we are 'unattractive' then we are. Simple.

Now, this is where I think that, practically speaking, it's useful to separate out those two things. It may be possible for the world-fact to be that you are beautiful, but the thought-fact to be that you are not. The two do not necessarily line up. Dimensional jumping, as usually outlined, could involve changing the thought-fact or changing the world-fact. The former would change your behaviour, but not necessarily the reaction. The process is the same, however the intention (the "pattern" that is intensified) is different. However, there is some overlap, because people often approach doing one or the other by using an intentional pattern or image which actually represents part of the other. (Again, why I'm keen to make the distinction.)

We 'jump' realities all the time, by simply choosing something. Usually our beliefs keep us in a certain pattern of choosing so we stay within the same reality.

See, for me, this is where things break down or getting confusing. Having the experience of choosing isn't the same as shifting state - which is what I would call "changing your reality" - so choosing alone isn't what we're after. What we actually want is to intend a change of fact. Sometimes we accidentally link a change of fact to an action (assignment of meaning, "doing this means-that that is now true") but mostly our actions arise without any such link, and therefore do not change anything. This is why sometimes changing a belief (your thought about the world) simply changes the fact of your thought and perhaps your likely actions, and why other times it changes the fact of the world. Only when we alter a belief while having, perhaps without realising it, decided that doing so means-that the world will change, does a change in "reality" occur.

I don't think I've said this very clearly at all, so I'm going to try and summarise what might be a streamlined view:

• The world is a pattern, a list of facts of the world, which arises as sensory experience.
• Beliefs are a pattern, a list of facts about the world, a parallel construction, arising as a strand of thought.
• Changing a pattern is done by intending the change:
  • a) Changing a fact of belief will alter what thoughts arise in your awareness as your ideas about the world, and hence guide what you think is possible, hence what you might subsequently intend.
  • b) Changing a fact of the world, meanwhile, will alter what sensory experiences arise in your awareness as the world itself - what events will apparently occur around you including your spontaneous body actions.
• Since we can do b, then there's actually no need for a. At worst, we should spend some time intensifying the fact of "believing that b is possible" as some sort of broad meta-belief, and then we don't need to worry about any other beliefs at all.

TL;DR: Beliefs don't actually affect what is possible, so perhaps we don't need to worry about them at all?

your trying to change your physical world in hopes that it will change your inner world

Really, I am starting from the viewpoint that there is no inner or outer. In other words, everything arises in "mind", which has no boundary. (It's fairly easy to confirm this directly.)

From this, what we might call the "physical world" is just one particular strand of experience arising in that mind. We might consider this as a "3D-immersive strand of thought" that fills up our awareness. In parallel, also arising in mind, we might have a stand of experience which is our "thoughts about the world". Two strands, both internal and accessible, one arising from the world-state, one arising from the person-state. If changing our beliefs corresponds to a change in the person-state, then it might lead to a change in what we are likely to intend as a change in the main experience - because we have changed the structure of the "person" part of our experience. However, alternatively, we can simply intend directly onto the main experience itself - the "world" part of our experience.

Basically, I'm suggesting that playing with beliefs, while it can be ultimately beneficial, might be somewhat of a distraction, since it operates in a roundabout way and the meaning of "beliefs" isn't clearly linked to the structure of experience. If it's all internal, then we can simply assert facts directly. Don't "believe" that you are attractive, instead directly access the fact and make it true via intention. Again: operate on the world directly. There is overlap here, since if someone works on their belief of attractiveness then they might actually end up using an intention which asserts the fact - but not necessarily. You can end up having lots of thoughts about being amazing, but not actually being amazing, because you intended new beliefs, not new facts.

Related idea: Why aren't you a precog? When you think about what's going to happen tomorrow, what you believe is going to happen tomorrow, why does it tend not to correspond to what actually happens tomorrow?

If you don't believe something will happen then it most likely won't.

Why, though? How exactly do beliefs change what is likely to happen? It seems that there is a missing step in that description?

What is a precog?

Typically in science fiction, someone who has "precognitive abilities" - they can see into the future. I was suggesting (just as a playful idea to explore) that if it was our beliefs that defined the world, then surely we would be able to access the future, since it would simply follow from our beliefs. This suggests that beliefs are just ideas about the world. To be a precog, we would want to access the facts of the world, the current world-state.

if you don't have a belief that you are a certain way then you can't intent for it to happen.

I don't agree. If you can think of something, then you can intend it, since "an intention" is the thought of something being true, and "intending" is the intensification of that thought. Believing that you are a certain way doesn't limit your ability to intend otherwise, although believing that you are a certain way and that it cannot be changed might mean you don't end up trying. Beliefs are like a model of the world - a parallel construction in thought. Sure, if you use the model to judge what is possible and act/intend only according to what it says, then you'll be limited. Alternatively, you can just ignore it and intend what you want anyway, because the model itself has no causal or restrictive power!

Spending time changing beliefs is just time misspent - all you're doing is using the same intention process that you'll use later to change the world, to just change how you feel, so that you then feel confident enough to intend changing the world. You don't need that stepping stone, though. In the end, the only thing that really changes a belief is the generation of and experience which contradicts your model. So why not go straight for intending a change in contradiction to the model? (That's kinda what the two glasses exercise, etc, are about.)

This is where "faith" comes in. Faith to intend something contrary to your ideas about the world - and faith to not interfere with that intention subsequently, and to see where it leads. Faith being perhaps the only way to get to the meta-belief to rule them all...

Where that leads to is, I suggest: that intention is the only process that there is, the only operation that ever occurs. Beliefs aren't the "core operating system" of your mind - they're just another static pattern. The world is a patterned landscape of static facts which gives rise to experience; intention is how you change the landscape; there's nothing else.

I see what your saying. An intention creates action, where a belief is more static. So if you want to change your world then intend for it to be so and the beliefs will follow.

Yes. So I'd phrase it more generally perhaps, and say: intention creates experiences, of body movements but also of events. (Remembering that all of your sensory experiences arise in your "mind space", so the car horn "over there" is just as much a part of you-the-experiencer as your foot tapping "over here".)

A change in your beliefs then follows naturally from those experiences. You do not need to believe something in order to intend it and have it happen - however, you must at least have the confidence or detachment to resist interfering, since that will be a re-intention. You can think of each deliberate intention as shifting you onto a new deterministic path, a new sequence of experiences, which then unfold "by themselves" in your awareness, until you re-intend again. Between intentions, the world is "static" in the sense of being like a fixed logical landscape of experiences that you are scanning your attention across. So, "dimensional jumping" is a metaphor for an intentional change of this landscape, one which shifts it so dramatically that your subsequent experiences are "as if" you had changed to a different universe.

...

And then it would take a tremendous amount of energy on your part to stretch your energetic field and body that much.

These are some beliefs worth examining, of instance. What is this "energy" stuff, what's my "energetic field" exactly, and how does it relate to my body? In fact, that is my "body" - is it an object, or a collection of sensations which arise in my experience plus a conceptual framework that I've attached to them? And so on.

POST: The Mirror method is a trick of your mind

That is, I would say, sort of missing the point? That mirror-staring can be used to shift consciousness state is well-known and is an old technique. It's what you do with that, is what's interesting, I would imagine. (Whether it has to do with "dimensional jumping" or not probably depends on what you think "dimensional jumping" actually is.)

For further reading to add to those links, see also this post and links: Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams

(Not advocating the mirror thing here, but) the point would be that entering an altered state of consciousness would not itself be "jumping" anyway. That would just be an experience you had while looking in a mirror. "Jumping" would involve witnessing a subsequent change in the world in line with the intention you had while entering that altered state of consciousness. The link was to suggest that our ongoing experience is a "mind trick" anyway, and that the content of that experience isn't necessarily important when it comes to a technique (other than perhaps confirming you had entered an altered state, if that's what you wanted to do).

We might ask, I suppose: what is an "altered state of consciousness", anyway? The phrase doesn't really explain anything, other than saying "this experience = that name".

Science is great. But we have to remember what science actually is: a catalogue of a certain subset of apparently intersubjective experiences, plus conceptual frameworks - "connective fictions" - which are used to link together certain elements of those experiences. So long as we don't confuse those descriptions with being "what is true", so long as we don't reify our abstractions, then it's an incredibly useful approach. However, if we forget that and confuse a particular set of concepts with "science" and with "what is", then we will start to think that the our invented concepts define what it is possible to observe, rather than our observations acting as inspiration for useful concepts.

Many people who aren't in the business (and some who are) claim to "love science" when what they really mean is that they are enamoured of certain ideas some people have come up with - sort of "science fiction" in a more literal sense - and incorrectly treat them as being true "out there", causing things to happen. Perhaps they really mean they "love the illusion of certainty that misunderstanding or self-deception can bring". (EDIT: "Dogma" would probably be a better term to use.)

and thus make a "dimensional jump", which really is nothing but a metaphor that describes the experience, perhaps not the physical rules themselves.

All descriptions are metaphors - experience is primary - so it's really a case of what's useful.

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I love how TG completed dominated this discussion 😊

He does go on a bit though, that TG guy, I've noticed. He needs to hire an editor or something. ;-)

POST: Question, Opinions?

The reason I hate this subreddit is it doesn't treat the concept with respect...

I think the sidebar and related posts are pretty clear on what the deal is? People actually have to read them, of course.

The problem with "magic and the occult" is that, plainly put, it's full of its own set - actually multiple sets - of accumulated bullshit. Now, there's loads of useful stuff for inspiration, but a lot of it does lead people to take concepts and rituals as literally true. Even chaos magick suffers from taking its meta-approach as affecting something that is independently real. Basically, there's a lack of an underlying philosophy and this leads to confusion and superstition, especially for the everyday reader who just wants to find out what's really going on (ahem!), or how to solve a problem. This subreddit, meanwhile, takes direct experience as its starting point, and treats everything else as "active metaphors" or "patterning" - not even that, in fact. Not only are "dimensions" not treated as fundamentally true, neither is "the world". You are conscious, you have experiences that appear within you - that's it. There isn't "literal" anything.

confuses people who are "role-playing".

Who's role-playing? And why would they be confused?

Q1: Not only are "dimensions" not treated as fundamentally true, neither is "the world". You are conscious, you have experiences that appear within you - that's it. There isn't "literal" anything.
This is the foundation from which to begin. It's too "slippery", too security-challenging to deal with at the very beginning. It can even be a very off-putting, scary or sacreligious idea - "Nothing out there?? What?!" It's necessary to work one's way to this in steps. Then, suddenly, the light shines. (You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.) !! <3 Five million hearts to TG. (My cats maintain their changes, by the way.) :)

Cats are the pioneers!

POST: It feels like jumping doesn't work anymore

Q1: I've never been a fan of the Owl technique as that's basically Baader-Meinhof/frequency illusion. With owls it's especially effective as it seems to be a pervading decor/design influence these days. If I tell you to make a note of the number 18, for example, you'll start seeing it a few times a day.

Well, you can choose anything, it's only by repetition that the point is there, and choosing something more unlikely perhaps. The idea is that eventually you notice that, it's not exactly pattern searching from a pre-existing environment as such. They are called the Owls of Eternity for a reason. But of course, people's milage may vary and it's how things play out for you. At the time "owls" were chosen as the pattern, they were not a particularly pervasive decor/design influence - they were chosen for their relative lack of presence in daily life.

Q1: You can certainly choose anything however I'd be willing to bet money that should the element you pay attention be say, wombats vs. owls, you wouldn't notice as many. Owls are and have been a mainstay of hipster culture for a while now (I remember them over 5 yrs back) to the point where people get ironic tattoos of them. Heck. even Justin Bieber has a tat of one.

Ah, but has it always been true that they have been a mainstay of hipster culture for 5 years??

Joking aside, since it's ideally about something that isn't dominating your life currently, then if owls are common for someone, it makes sense to pick something else. You can never really separate it out from the idea of noticing things that are there anyway, but that's really part of the contemplation aspect - a call to consider that very thing - and perhaps discover that the experience of doing so pushes it somewhat "unreasonably". Again, it's really about leading yourself to think about the question: "Experiences are a pattern selection from what, exactly?"

Q2: yes. Also called "selective awareness".

For sure. Although we might ask ourselves: selective awareness from what?

Q2: ...from all the other input the pattern-recognition software doesn't pick up and filters out.
If you connotate "meaning" to anything - it will pop up more often in your daily life. That's also how propaganda in the news works: See that guy that looks middle-eastern? Probably a terrorist - since your brain links terrorist with this sort of appearance. That's why you shouldn't watch TV.
If you want to see owls, you'll see owls.

The propaganda example is slightly different, I'd say. I'd call that associative triggering of an "internal" extended pattern of meaning by an element, rather than pattern selection of an element from a pre-existing "external" environment. It's a step further along.

So, if you'd been brought up to think of owls and related birds as terrorists (for example), then you might report "seeing more terrorists", but that's not the same as "seeing more owls". When I asked "selective awareness from what?", I was thinking about the fact that we only ever have a post-selection experience in the senses, we never experience the pre-selection environment. This might lead us to wonder, what is the nature of that "source" environment?

We might assume, as is common, that it is a stable "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". However, aren't we then ignoring the possibility that 3D-space is itself a selection pattern, filtering from a larger environment? Perhaps the environment from which we select our experiences is more like an "infinite gloop" than a place. In other words, perhaps all of experience is "selective awareness". In which case, we see owls not because we are selecting pre-existing owls from our spatial environment, but because we are selecting pre-existing owl-experiences from a set of all possible experiences.

feel the space around you <> feel the air around your body

This is a good example, and speaks to the underlying question, which is about the nature of experiencing, rather than the content of experiencing. Although you don't need to meditate to notice this, some sort of pause-and-contemplate is helpful in realising that your experience of yourself is something like an "open aware perceptual space" in which sensory experiences arise. As in, directly know this to be true, rather than just think about it. And from there, as you point out, one is better able to make an informed choice about things, to deliberately select their own patterning, rather than simply have experiences unfold in alignment with whatever state you've accidentally ended up in. As for the "raw experience", which would correspond to no particular "sensory slice" being selected from the "infinite gloop", I quite like this account for giving a sense of it: Victor C: Other NDE Type Experiences [https://web.archive.org/web/20120606184332/http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/victor_c_other.htm]

As to the objective reality thing, it comes down to where the line is drawn between "my patterning" and "the world":

• At one end, "the world" is a three dimensional place and is of the same formatting as my sensory experience, and I'm just noticing some stuff and not other stuff.
• At the other end, "the world" is an "infinite gloop" of all possible patterns, and there is no solid underlying limit at all to what I can experience. In that case, my patterning effectively is the definition of the world, and it's not that my formatting happens to coincide with the world's formatting - rather, they are identical and the same thing.

The tricky bit, of course, is that it's impossible to tell the difference between the two by simple inspection, because we will only ever experience our own patterning, the world filtered through it. However, we might perhaps work to reshape our filter and see at what point doing so no longer brings about changes in experience. That would be the solid underlying substrate, the "objective world". Exploring this is what this subreddit is really about. Experience is primary. If we actively test our assumptions about how the world really is beyond the format of the senses, do they hold up? Or can we in fact push through them?

Meanwhile, in another conversation, we wondered whether it would be possible to intend into existence a can of Ubik™, a product which itself dispenses existence...

Finally, I'd suggest that consciousness can't be measured, because "measurement" is something that arises within consciousness, is "made from" it. Current favourite metaphor: You can never make a sandcastle which captures the meaning of "sand" not of "the beach". You can only make sandcastles which correspond to other sandcastles, and even then only in certain respects. Consciousness, in this metaphor, is both the sand and the beach.

Finally #2, science and physics correspond to a catalogue of sensory observations (sandcastles), those with regular and repeatable aspects, and a collection of conceptual frameworks (parallel-constructed sandcastles in thought) which describe those aspects via "connective fictions". Science comes after observation, and hence after creation. It's a formal method of describing what has been seen, rather than establishing what is true.

Snappy summary:

• Observations dictate the valid or possible models.
• Models do not dictate the valid or possible observations.

Q2: Exploring this is what this subreddit is really about. Experience is primary. If we actively test our assumptions about how the world really is beyond the format of the senses, do they hold up? Or can we in fact push through them?
To me this is the essence of occult studies. Or atleast what I find attractive about it. Dimensional Jumping is just a "system" or syntax one can use to help bring about these changes in our filters and therefor reality.
I love the sand metaphor. Good stuff.

Agreed. Unfortunately, the term "occult" has become somewhat damaged I think, with all sorts of unhelpful associations. In its raw meaning - "hidden" - it makes sense: we are dealing with the non-sensory aspect of things, the background "state" that is what we are and from which sensory experiences arise. Hidden as in literally "not seen". So I prefer to think of this exploration as, I dunno, an active exploration of metaphysics with regards to the shaping of experience. Hence the idea of "active metaphors", whose adoption patterns one's state in alignment with their structure, so that subsequent experiences arise "as if" they were true. In other words: The Patterning of Experience.

Q2: All the different systems that are exploring "the hidden" (Eastern & Western Magic, Religions, Parts of Psychology) are bringing their own synthax. I sometimes wonder if there are actual whitepapers on this subject matter - but I don't even know which syntax I would use to write OR describe the study.
Very interesting thought on the "adoption of patterns" and truenes. One can chew through a book and "feel" it's effects. One starts to adapt the ideas and patterns learned from the book and projects them into the own reality tunnel. Exploring metaphysics is therefore something highly subjective when it comes to the left-brain, analytical explanation of the matter. Many texts describe the same stuff. The stuff that makes up everything outside of a fixed and unified syntax or coherent pattern - but still connects everything.
This raises the question for me if it's even possible to do so or if it is needed at all. The answers in the end have to be felt and experienced by oneself.

Yes, so there are many ways of saying the same thing, but they are not necessarily compatible. The ultimate truth of the matter itself has no syntax because it is "before" division. So I'd say that it cannot be thought, the fundamental truth, in the sense of being thought about, because of course the "state" is a single continuous pattern. It is your actual experience right now, which is "one". And to think about it would involve separating from it and surrounding it, which is not possible. To think about something (construct sandcastles) requires that it be divided into parts, or building blocks, and then have those parts related to one another in mental space. Therefore it's not possible to think about that which thought is made from, but neither is it possible to think about one structure of thought using another, if they use different building blocks. Particular building blocks allow you to build some sorts of sandcastle, but not others. And to someone who grew up in one sandcastle, with one sort of building block, other sandcastles made from other types of block would be complete nonsense, totally insane, even though they were just as coherent and self-consistent and "true" within themselves and true ultimately.

So, we end up with a situation where we cannot understand other sandcastles from the perspective of this one - the only way is to expose ourselves to that structure and allow ourselves to be patterned by it, and thereby establish the forms that allow it to make sense. We must become it. And that we cannot understand the ultimate nature because it is "before" understanding - we can only be it. The great secret, of course, is that we always are it anyway. We are always "that which is and which takes on the shape of experiences", regardless of the particular shape or state we have adopted. This again speaks to our point: you cannot get outside of yourself in order to observe this truth, you can only deduce it by adopting lots of different shapes and realising there is no limit - in the same way you can only establish that there is no limit to experiencing by intending lots of different experiences. The only way to prove that you can be anything (because you are not anything in particular) - i.e. you consist of an infinite set - is to challenge your boundary assumptions by attempting to push through them.

And to push through them, there is no path or technique as such - you have to simply assert a new pattern, in order to deliberately re-pattern yourself, and thereby make that new pattern "true". Hence the benefit faith and commitment when it comes to this stuff, even when the present sensory experience seems to conflict with what you are intending.

I feel like it's already pretty interesting by simply committing to observe what is happening to yourself every day or make it a habit to reflect on how you changed [https://youtu.be/d1UgUEbBmDE] in regards to your environment, current emotions, stuff that bothers you etc...

Yes, I think just "being the background" and observing things rise and fall is important, and the starting point for everything else. If you can't "cease and stop generating interference" then you are likely going to be lost in reaction to content, rather than recognise yourself as the context.

POST: Like a Balloon - Become lighter than your 'surroundings'

[POST]

Balloon :

A Balloon being Lighter than the air around it is a good symbol for Reality Shifting. It has the ability to move up the dimensions.
Become lighter in order to ascend quicker. Drop the baggage that doesn't belong to you, drop that weight, and things will speed up for you. Lighten-Up to get Enlightened. Reality is only a reflection of what you are 'holding on to'. Also, to extend the metaphor, when you fly in a plane, you are charged for excess baggage'. (So Like the Balloon play with the idea of Becoming Lighter than your 'Surroundings' and thus slipstreaming yourself up through realities closer and closer to your highest Joy, symbolized by the yellow Sun.) Which as a spiritual journey is a direction more than a destination.

[END OF POST]

Q1: I don't think what we do with the 2 glasses and mirror is truly dimensional jumping. believe dimensional jumps happen - I've seen it happen collectively ...
but what we do with the 2 glasses and mirror is what people call magick .. it's "work" ... intention... manifestation ...
I think most of it happens and is outside of dimensional shifting.

Well, as someone else pointed out, it all amounts to the same thing: a change or a discontinuity in your ongoing experience. It's the degree of discontinuity that dictates which label or metaphor we tend to apply. There is no "outside view" from which to assess it (and that includes experiences which are "as if" viewed from an outside, since that experience is also inside). Wake up one day and you see owls everywhere after intending them? Patterning. Wake up one day and that girl you like calls you for a date after you did an exercise? Magick. Wake up one day and your house has changed colour? Reality shifting. Wake up one day and you're in a different house in a different city with a different wife? Dimensional jumping. Really, it's all just the "patterning" of experience.

So I say: use whatever concepts are useful to you, but don't get hung up on "what is really happening", because the more you experiment, the more it seems that there is no fundamental "what is really happening" other than: you are something-which-has-experiences and those experiences are "as if" some things are true (until they are not). Right now you just happen to be having the experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

Q2: Thanks, dude. You're awesome and I love your subs and posts and stuff, but sometimes you lose me with all your big words and heady concepts-- and I'm not that stupid a person. Have actually been wishing lately that you'd use a little more lay-speak, and boom here you are. Two thumbs up.

Yeah, it's definitely good to reign in the vocabulary now and again. What tends to happen is that it ebbs and flows - you start off with the "flabby" version of an idea and then a dozen conversations later you've streamlined it and made it more understandable. But then you bolt something else onto that, and the whole thing starts again...

...

"Inflate himself, just like a balloon" - apparently [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcP91tQ4ZSM].

POST: Would anyone be willing to talk about their dimension jumping experience(s) on a radio show?

A good starting point before agreeing to an interview about this, is to ask the potential interviewer:

• "What is your understanding of 'dimensional jumping' at the moment?"

Based on that answer, you can tell whether you are in good hands or not. In other words, whether it's a "check out this crazy shit" type of a deal, or if it's going to be a more considered, philosophical exchange which has had a bit of thought put into it. Not that everyone needs to have read George Berkeley's Three Dialogues or Immanuel Kant's musings in order to have a good discussion, but it's probably a waste of time having a conversation about this unless there is some prior background or interest in pondering "the nature and formatting of experiencing" - because without a proper context all this stuff seems apparently nonsensical. But, y'know, it's for everyone to decide for themselves whether this would be an appropriate channel for all your dimensional jumping conversational needs; it might still be fun maybe possibly.

Just to interject quickly:

I suppose any opposition to the approaches discussed on this subreddit would be a key talking point, but obviously this would depend on the answer to my first question.

To my mind, this is immediately an error (in this context). To anticipate building a show around opposing viewpoints - basically, to construct a controversy - prior to there being any viewpoints, surely highlights that this is the wrong approach here? "We'll find out what these guys think and then find someone who thinks the opposite."

It's a well-worn and uninspiring format, I tend to think, when the topic is one that needs background, rather than being an argument about a social issue or whatever. I generally much prefer shows and podcasts which are more collaborative and therefore informative - "We've got these people on, let's find out all about their topic and their view of the world, being sure to pick up on anything which seems unclear or incoherent". This is particularly true of subjects like this one, which isn't really about holding a belief or opinion. Primarily, it's about investigating your experience without completely aligning to any particular view. So there is no position to defend, necessarily, as such. However, it would be interesting to get a selection of people on who have different angles on the central concept - the nature of reality and how to explore it and conceive of it - as opposed to, um, trying to select opposing viewpoints without having an advance understanding of those viewpoints. Anyway, here are a few underlying ideas off the top of my head (others might disagree):

• Our descriptions of the world are not the world-as-it-is. They are parallel constructions in thought.
• The experiences you have dictate the descriptions which are valid or possible, but the descriptions you adopt do not dictate the experiences which are valid or possible. (However there may be an exception to this.)
• There is a distinction to be made between fundamental truth (the nature or context of experience) and relative truth (the content of experience).
• By performing experiments we can differentiate between these categories, and apply the results in useful ways.

So basically: investigating the nature of your personal experience, and as a byproduct perhaps generating useful results in addition to information. Which aspect of that people are attracted to more, is up to them. A "dimension" in this context, is the current state that you are in (at least, according to one of a number of different metaphorical descriptions of the nature of experience). However, this doesn't mean that you are a person in a world that is in a particular state; it means that you-as-experiencer are in a particular state, which is prior to your actual sensory experiences of being-a-person-in-a-world.

Yeah, I know. So it's probably worth reading the sidebar and the stuff linked from there, and actually playing with this a bit, I would say. I mean, you can just play around with the demo exercises and see what happens instead, but those are just the starting point for exploration and contemplation really.

I appreciate your preference in media and share a similar enjoyment for informative content but feel that just because a forum contains two differing viewpoints it does not mean it can't offer the listener an opportunity to learn.

My point was more that you were looking to set up a for-against dynamic for your show, without really knowing what the "for" would be! How are you going to have two differing viewpoints, when the topic isn't viewpoint- or belief-based as such? Of course, it could be reframed in the sense of "who's the most useful philosopher?" or "is such-and-such possible?", but my gut feeling is that it doesn't apply. Note that it wasn't really a criticism or concern as such, more a personal perspective on what I think works better with certain topics. (I tend to think that the now-default adoption of the "report the controversy" or "set up an objective frame" approaches, independent of the nature of the topic, has rendered a lot of topic-based mainstream journalism and interviews largely worthless.)

So - not a direct criticism of your take, I hope you realise.

Perhaps the uninitiated person might disagree with your viewpoints which would result in a compelling discussion.

Certainly that's a more promising starting point. How to pitch it though? Since the focus is on attending to your personal experience as it is, and trying something out and judging the results for yourself, the underlying viewpoint is sort of a "meta-viewpoint". In effect, the attitude is that there is no fundamental "how things work". I suppose that in itself is something that can be discussed. But even that is no more than a potentially useful viewpoint; it is not claimed to be "true". (You might just end up with people arguing that they experienced something vs they didn't experience something.)

So essentially (and please correct my mistakes) 'dimensional jumping' is a mindset that assists you in viewing the world in a less 'traditional' sense and therefore brings you closer to attaining your goals. Would that be fair to say?

I would rephrase it perhaps: that "dimensional jumping" is a mindset whereby you do not take for granted that the 'traditional' or common description of the world is true - although one does not have to reject it either - and are thus free to examine approaches and descriptions on usefulness alone. Something like that.

Perhaps I'm taking posts too literally but when users such as this talk about aspects of their life changing after 'jumping' are they speaking metaphorically or are they suggesting they 'jumped' and they now exist in another 'dimension'?

It's captured in the sidebar really. There's the exercises, and there's the general notion of using metaphors to conceive of and to describe change. So a "dimension" is a metaphor, but only in the sense that "the world" or "youtalktv" is a metaphor. We infer our current situation in terms of concepts, based on our experiences. If something dramatic changed in your experience, something which was akin to an underlying fact-of-the-world changing without your direct intervention, you might conceptualise that as being "as if" you had changed worlds or jumped dimensions.

In other words, it's a descriptive framework. What actually "happened" is: you were experiencing "this" and then you experienced "that". Everything else is metaphor and narrative. That applies not just to this example, though; everything that isn't direct sensory experience is in effect a connective fiction to some extent. Leading to...

The real question is: what is the relationship between our connective fictions and how-things-are-really (even though that is itself a concept)?

Having said all that - for sure, most people just try out the exercises and, perhaps, find that they get results. If they get results, and they are interested in investigating further, they might try repeating this and more ambitiously, to confirm there is something to it rather than mere coincidence - and perhaps contemplate what that means. Regardless, the description of "what happened" will be secondary to the experience, and is not "what really happened".

Putting all that aside for the moment, if I were doing a show where I was just talking to people who had tried experimenting with this stuff, while trying to avoid getting too abstract, I might separate it into:

• The experiences people report having had.
• How people "explain" the experiences people have had.

You could then have the usual discussions about coincidence, confirmation bias and so on (the first stops for accounting for unusual experiences), then if that followed through, something about the nature of experience and of how we account for its content using descriptions. The difficulty would be to avoid getting trapped in a "he said, she said" argument about the meaning of the experiences themselves, particularly if it's not possible to spend a little bit of time discussing some philosophical points. It can be like trying to discuss "sandcastles" without having first explained "beaches" and "sand". (And even then, without the direct experience those concepts have little value in and of themselves.)

EDIT: Added some headings to make this less of a block of text.

"Are the experiences literal?"

I think my key question is, putting all mindset approaches other than the physical techniques listed, are the experiences accounted in this subreddit literal?

The experiences themselves are literal, as in the person had the experience of those events happening. But any account in terms of a "state" or a "dimension" is just part of a conceptual framework, a descriptive narrative. This is fundamental:

The content of the experience is primary; the narrative is secondary.

The narrative provides a way of thinking about the experience, and perhaps acts as a source of creative inspiration too for possible approaches - but it is not "what really happened". But that's not new, of course. This is, not quite, in much the same way as "gravity" does not cause things to fall down - rather, "gravity" is the name of a description about things falling down (loosely speaking). Similarly, "the subconscious" is not really the source of mental events, it is a concept we use to form a connective narrative about mental events. And so on. The difference here (with the topic of this subreddit), is that the number of "observational touch-points" associated with descriptions of these experiences description is vastly reduced, since we are dealing with one-off events often, and the experience is a certain subset of the subjective rather than being pseudo-objective.

Experiences, Results & Explorations

For example, the use of the numbered hex headers is to confirm that a user has indeed altered their worldly 'state' to one where identifiable aspects differ to the 'state' they were 'in' previously?

Well, not really. The number is a bit of fun. For sure, if someone had the experience of the number changing then they'd definitely know something was up! But as the sidebar says, it's an "emblem of change" and potential.

This is a very interesting point. So you would argue that the majority of users find the practice of these methods more attractive than the end result?

In my personal view, the purpose of playing with this is to widen one's thinking about the nature of the world, and so on. If you get a result that seems, well, unlikely, then hopefully that might trigger a bit of thought as to how, exactly that result came about. Of course, that's down to the person themselves. They could quite equally just do it for a result. However, the framing of the subreddit is very much of this being an exploration rather than a set of techniques or a singular worldview.

'Beliefs' & Analogies

I like the sandcastle analogy and strongly agree that it would be necessary to provide a foundation of these 'beliefs' before delving into a person's experiences.

I think that's key, definitely. Although again, I'd emphasise that the only "belief" would be one that arose from having had personal experiences - i.e. the belief would be that there was something interesting going on. Otherwise (another analogy incoming) it would be like having two people have a discussion about "the nature of the night sky", one of whom had spent their evenings looking through one of those new-fangled telescopes, and one who hadn't. You can discuss the meaning of observations, for sure, but only if you have actually made the observations - looked through the telescope. To mix it up further: it's always fun to discuss a carefully-drawn map, but there's not much point in discussion the accuracy of maps if you haven't done some walking in the area depicted - or worse, if one person is referring to an shipping map while another is referring to a flight map.

He Said, She Said & Beyond Common Sense

Unfortunately the discussion would almost certainly fall into some sense of "he said/she said" simply due to the nature of said experience.

Which could be a bit pointless, potentially, because nobody is suggesting here that a particular set of facts are true - there is no position to defend. As the sidebar emphasises, it's about trying out a couple of things and seeing what the results are, to see if there is "anything going on". There is no belief system being advocated; merely useful or interesting ways to think about experience.

As you say, it'd be important not to get bogged down with this and certainly to take each instance on face value and analyse it with a fair and common-sense approach...

The stumbling block is that face value and common-sense might themselves be a problem, I suppose. There is no independently-existing "face value" or "common-sense" that is separate from an implied philosophical stance, and it is not always possible to translate something from one to the other. Sometimes you need to build from the foundation up, and make an independent self-consistent "sandcastle", albeit on the same beach and still made from sand.

To expand:

Really, this is just about pushing against our assumptions about the world and ourselves, to see if they are accurate. More than that, it's about pushing against our background assumption that our usual thoughts-about the world - or indeed any such thinking - is equivalent to the-world-as-it-is. How much of the stability and structure of my ongoing experience is due to "the world" and how much due to "my mind"?

So. We do some exercises to explore these assumptions, by perhaps blindly trying to do obtain some results that would not logically follow from our habitual narrative, and we play with constructing alternative coherent narratives and seeing if actions based upon those yield results.

For example:

Kant suggested long ago that the world-as-it-is is not formatted in terms of spatial extent and unfolding change (space and time), rather it is our human perception that is formatted this way. Furthermore, our thoughts-about the world really have very little to do with the world itself - they are "parallel constructions" in awareness - and are therefore not causal or limiting, except to the extent that they limit what we might choose as our intentions. It's not easy to have a discussion about these sorts of things in a "he said/she said" format, because one side won't be arguing about "facts" at all - they will be discussing the nature of facts, perhaps, and discussing experiences without really promoting any particular view of "what really happened"!

Disentangling Topics

I'm genuinely interested in how unusual topics which require niche background knowledge to fully explore, can be properly discussed in a way that's accessible to a wider audience, and is entertaining, without misrepresenting it. With something as experiential as this, though - with ideas that, although not entirely novel, are slightly counter to common-sense - it really is a challenge.

...

Good response.

I can't guarantee that your views won't be questioned or discussed with you.

Well, it would probably be a fairly boring show without that! :-)

To be clear, my comment wasn't intended to suggest that people should only go on shows where their views won't be explored and challenged - because those two things are what makes a discussion interesting and worthwhile. Rather, I was underlining that, because "dimensional jumping" is a bit of a loaded term, it's worth checking what someone understands by it, so that they know what to expect from the discussion. For example, if someone thinks that it's about "physically teleporting your body between multiverses that are all happening simultaneously", then that's probably not a good starting point. ("Dimensions" aren't places, as such.) Setting up a "skeptic vs believer" type show that presumes this as the underlying concept likely wouldn't work. In fact, the core of this subreddit probably involves being a non-believer in any particular conception of the world vs personal observation. Which does tend to make a discussion about it a little abstract and philosophical, if you go deeper. Perhaps not what you are looking for, depending on who you were anticipating using for the "skeptic" role.

Anyway, those are my thoughts!

POST: Question regarding manifestation

since there's really no way that I can think of for me to solve it

Be wary of straying towards specifying the "apparent how" of the desired outcome here, perhaps. You don't actually "solve" the situation at all; you assert the fact of how you want things to be, and the solution arises from that as a spontaneous extended pattern. The idea of imagining the immersive scene is really to assert that that "moment" will be a fact. If that moment is a fact, then the property of continuity of the world implies that all the other moments must fall into line with that new fact. In other words, you yourself are not trying to come up with a story that you believe might happen; that takes care of itself.

The classic example being, you want a particular car. You imagine a scene of you being in such a car, feeling the feeling of being there and it being yours, thus intensifying that pattern as a contributor to your ongoing experience - making the fact of the existence of that moment true. You do not make up a little story about how you came to have the car, or any other circumstances surrounding it. You simply assert that the moment is true, and that pattern will be overlaid upon your world, in addition to the intentions and implications that you've already accumulated (with some being relatively diminished if they are contrary to your asserted outcome). You can prepare for worst-case scenarios if you feel you must - even though, in fact, you are best to simply deal with such things as they arise, since they won't ever quite correspond to your thinking of them - but do it briefly and don't dwell on it. Deliberate rumination is literally the intensification of the things you are thinking about, increasing the relative contribution of their patterns and implied facts upon your ongoing experience. While you shouldn't feel you have to battle passing thoughts (just let them pass), your deliberate, purposeful thinking should in general be focused on facts and scenes that you are happy to become more prominent in your life.

Again, to emphasise: You do not solve problems; you select and assert outcomes and the apparent path from here to there is spontaneously implied as an extended pattern, based on your accumulated intentions (and their implications) to date.

POST: Jumping for remission of mental illnesses

Good comments. For OP:

Just to emphasise: What you write down is not necessarily important, it's the assigned meaning - the linked pattern - that is important. We are not "sending messages to the universe". So it is fine to write "rich" provided that this is the word you are using to encapsulate something fairly specific.

There can be a tendency to avoid being too specific, actually, maybe out of a background fear that we might actually get exactly what we want. In the back of our minds, we are not sure we really do want the world to be revealed as malleable, perhaps? But since the underlying aim of the exercise is to experiment - to demonstrate that there is "something going on" - then there's not much point in it if the outcome is so vague that we won't be able to tell whether it happened or not!

Meanwhile, I like to avoid using the phrase "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon" [1] because it is usually employed in ways which imply that it is a "trick of the mind", without saying how exactly that works. In other words, it tends to assume that you are noticing things that were already there, and it's just that your attention was drawn to them (somehow). Now, it can be thought of in terms of pattern selection from a pre-existing environment, but the selection that occurs isn't necessarily like picking out "owls" from the 3D room you are (apparently) in - it might be more like picking out "owl-experiences" from an "infinite gloop". In fact, as we experiment with this, the latter seems like the more accurate characterisation.

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[1] Our favourite topic. :-)

Q1: I don't know how relevant this is to this thread, but I wanted to give a recent example of how the "playful" YOU-niverse can work in our favor. In this case, I wasn't even trying to do anything. I was just "having fun" in my imagination.
I'll start by saying I try to keep my "vibe" up as much as I can, but sometimes I don't do well at this, finding I've had days on end of mostly sad/negative focus. However, in my world I've found that the "faith as big as a mustard seed" concept is true, and that if I keep VERY positive even, say 10% of the time, my Inner Being does take notice and respond.
"Playful" story: I was experiencing a general lack of funds, and trying to keep my spirits up. One day as I was walking, I thought about the saying, "Money doesn't grow on trees!!" I thought (playfully), "That's a lie. Money DOES grow on trees!" and had fun in my imagination walking up to small trees and just plucking off a $10 bill and a 5$ bill. I thought, there's no need to be greedy since I can walk up to ANY tree ANY time and just take what I need! I had HUGE FUN imagining this, and probably did it for at least 5 minutes. The next day, the thought came back to me - and I did it again....:) Then, I forgot about it.
Within a week, I discovered I could buy many of the food items I need at a little store called...DOLLAR TREE that is near my home. Every item, no matter what it is, is $1. I have purchased bagels, bread, cheese, pie, batteries(!) and even headache medicine there. I save so much money that the EFFECT is as if I have gone up to a "money tree" and plucked off $30-40 every time I shop there.
One could certainly say "Baader-Meinhof" since the store had already been there and I finally (I don't even recall how!) became aware that it had things I needed. I personally say I "made/took hold of" the Magic that is around us all the time. I wish I could stay in playful mode much, much more than I currently do.

Ha, that's nice, a little "money tree" pattern almost literally and in a fun playful way. And I do think that "playful imagination" is a very beneficial attitude, not just for generating outcomes, but simply for having a pleasant time in the moment.

Q1: I agree! I had no idea of generating anything but was just, frankly, giving myself a bit if fun and relief from my concerns. It became a terrific lesson for me. It illustrates, to me, anyway, one way what we call "detachment" can feel or present itself in that moment when the real "shift/creation" is occurring outside our conscious awareness. :)

It also points to the "dumb patterning system" that forms the basis of experience. If you intensify a pattern by deliberately attending to it, you will increase its contribution to your ongoing experience - regardless of your original purpose in doing so. (For sure, we use the term "intention" when referring to a more fully-specified pattern related to a desire, but its nature is identical.) There is no intelligence to it; there is no "universe" doing stuff on your behalf. It really is as basic as drawing N-dimensional scribbles on the "TV screen" of perception-awareness, and then encountering those scribbles overlaid upon subsequent moments.

...

A1: You missed the last step, which is carry on with your life!

POST: Jumping for remission of mental illnesses

Q: Can you elaborate more on how you connect depression (and anxiety?) To the body as unfolded experience. I tend to link depression and anxiety more to psychological factors than bodily. Also how come we can feel exposed and vulnerable with the initial changes of a jump (for depression and anxiety) when in fact every time I hit a clear state I feel such an emotional stability. It's messed up and understanding it maybe will help.

I wouldn't separate out bodily and psychological - everything you experience arises in your "aware space". Although you think of your body as being one "thing", your actual experience of it is a collection of disconnected sensations floating in "aware space", along with the visual image of the room your are "in", the sounds and textures, and so on. Your experience of "being anxious" and "being depressed" are also with that space. The "imagination room" is almost a literal description of how our ongoing moment is structured. When depressed and anxious, I'd guess, you probably feel that "you" are contracted, like a small ball of attention in which your whole self tries to cram its way in, and highly constrained. This might be in the head area, perhaps towards the back, and you might feel on high alert and not properly stable on your feet - or you might feel more detached and your body feel separate and very heavy. There's no single experience.

However, the common thread is being "localised" rather than "expanded", and that making you feel, as you say, both exposed (a small dot in a large world) and vulnerable (no boundary vs the world). And when change starts to happen, we often feel even more exposed as your attentional boundary releases and opens up. Once that's happened, though, then we are the most stable we can be: open in all directions, self-balancing and stable, the world within us rather than against us. Hard to describe, obviously, but hopefully something in that description makes sense when it comes to your own experience of it.

From your other comment:

Lying on the floor definitely works wonders over time - particularly if you remember that you don't only "cease" limiting your body and thoughts, but also your attentional focus. You let all of them roam where they may, allowing them to unwind and complete and dissolve and open themselves out. This prevents any accumulation of restrictive focus or intention over time. Which leads us to:

What leads to tension and depression and anxiety in the first place?

I suggest that there is a common bad habit that may contribute to these (and which the daily releasing involved in lying down helps alleviate). That is: when performing tasks or participating in social interactions, rather than simply "intending" the outcome and allowing ourselves to respond spontaneously, we intend the manual control of attentional focus and bodily movement. This has the effect of both intending the outcome and intending tension and constriction of space. For example, while reading these words, have you narrowed your spatial focus down onto the the screen, like a little ray of focus, to "make" the reading happen? Similarly, when you get up from your chair, do you grab onto the sensations of your legs and then move them by operating the muscles? Both of those are sure-fire ways to build up tension, and if you end up with a very narrow focus over the long term, anxiety and depression type feelings are likely to follow.

Instead, one could sit back and "intend" being an open relaxed space, filling the room. Then "intend" to read the words on the screen without deliberately controlling your body or attentional focus at all. Just "let the reading happen". You'll find you can stay open and relaxed and the reading will occur. Then, when you stand up, once again allow your attention to remain open and, instead of moving your muscles by focusing on them, instead intend being stood up and stay with that intention, without refocusing on your sitting position. Stay open as your body gets up. Notice how much more relaxed and effortless that is.

So - that probably needs a bit of experimentation and exploration, but it is a way you can change your way of "being" on an ongoing basis, to great benefit. And if you do feel anxiety coming up, do not defend against it, rather think of it like a wave of sensation rippling across the pond of your awareness. Perhaps not pleasant, but by remaining open and not trying to control it, you allow it to pass across you and fade away. You may even find that it never reaches full intensity, since by remaining open it is never trapped within a small boundary - so it's like a ripple in an ocean rather than a splash in a glass of water. (Again, something to experiment with, to discover how it is for you, in particular.)

POST: Tell me your two-glass approach success stories, please.

Well, as you've probably noticed by now, the whole world seems to be able to fit inside your mind quite happily, so as long as the thing isn't bigger than the whole world, you're probably okay! ;-)

Or being even more to the point: all outcomes take the form of multi-sensory experiences in our perception, and no moment of experience is bigger than any other moment. Meanwhile, the "space" in which those experiences arise doesn't seem to have any edges, and therefore doesn't seem to have any "size". In other words, although a change might seem to be big from the viewpoint of content and its meaning, from the "meta" perspective of context it doesn't matter. No TV image is bigger than any other, and switching channels doesn't become more difficult just because the programmes on each are different genres. I wonder whether it would be useful to contemplate exactly what makes one thing "big" and another thing "small"?

I think it's definitely helpful to spend some time contemplating different "underlying formats" that experience could take, since they all imply different possibilities and probabilities (while still fitting in with your current sensory moment). That's where the notion of "active metaphors" comes in (see sidebar).

POST: Altering your reality questions/thoughts

For instance when I jump I take into account how my intended reality has imprinted on all possible observers.

So, to be clear maybe: Are you suggesting that you having the idea of there being other observers might make it difficult, because we conceive of some things as being "shared facts" rather than "personal facts", and imagine that this makes them harder to change? Or are you suggesting that there actually are other observers whose participation in the world makes it difficult?

The supporting question to ponder would be: Have you ever witnessed anything that wasn't your own observation, including the experience of seeing apparent other observers? Do we have any evidence that having the experience of perceiving "other people" can limit us in other aspects of our experience?

It's quite a common thing, the idea that we are in a consensual reality, a "shared place" where we all contribute to the overall set of facts. Can we be sure, though, that this isn't just something that our experience behaves "as if" it is true, because it's an idea we hold on to firmly (perhaps worried that the alternative is to let go of the notion of "other people" altogether)?

(Note: I'm answering this without having read the other replies - and I'm taking a slightly different angle than I might usually, to offer an alternative approach, which might seem a little oblique at first. Let's see where it leads. Added headings to make it clearer. Ran out of time for proof-reading, so apologies in advance.)

Other People Problem

The hardest thing I've come to terms with 'shifting reality' is how do the other people fit in?

It pretty much is the hardest thing, I think, but perhaps not for the reasons you suggest. Your language still, in effect, assumes the world to be a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" as your starting point. The best starting point is probably to recognise the nature of our direct experience. Exercises such as the one described in this comment can help. That is what it is fundamentally true. Loosely, you are "that which is aware and takes on the shape of states and experiences". However, by experiences we mean "sensations, perceptions and thoughts", we don't mean that there is a world all laid out in space going on and on; rather, the world is more "dimensionlessly dissolved within you". So, that is what is fundamentally true. What you truly are, cannot be described in words, because it is "before" division and change and other formatting structures, but it is "aware" and it is what becomes other things. For convenience, we might described it as an "open aware space" which has no boundary.

Now, we move onto what we're currently engaged in: trying to reach an understanding, by describing things in worlds and thoughts. But we have to realise that all our thoughts about the world and ourselves are also within that "open aware space". The world is already a structure in awareness, any thoughts we have about the world are parallel structures. What we are is what everything is made from, so any thoughts about that are it but cannot describe it.

The Beach

A metaphor I quite like is of making sandcastles on an infinite beach. If one sandcastle is the world, as a pre-existing sandcastle, then trying to think about the world is to make a parallel sandcastle which is superficially similar in certain respects, but is not it. Then, thinking about the nature of the world and self is like trying to build a sandcastle which accurately represents both "the beach" and "sand. It cannot be done! However, ironically, the failed representation is both "the beach" and "sand". In this metaphor, your true nature is the beach. Now, in that model, where is the "external world"? It only exists as a constructed sandcastle. It might be a self-consistent sandcastle, but no matter how intricate and convincingly detailed that sandcastle is, it never represents the actual reality of the beach and of sand. One can only be beach/sand, once cannot think it nor can one observe it.

So, summarising: what we truly seem to be - by direct observation - is an "open aware unbounded space" within which experiences arise as "sensations, perceptions and thoughts". The world, then, is like a strand of experience, like a thought you are having, albeit a very bright, stable and 3D-immersive one. Thoughts about the world are parallel, and do not actually describe the world or the nature of experience. They are, in effect, separate worlds of their own.

All in the Mind

So are you implying that essentially the world we live in is actually all in our minds and that you, in fact, do not exist in my world?

It is not your mind; it is simply "mind". Mind taking on the shape of a particular state or world-pattern, hence taking on the shape of an experience. This means that "you", fundamentally speaking, aren't actually a person. You are just taking on a "person-shaped experience" at this moment - you are adopting the perceptive of an apparent person, but that includes taking on the shape of all other apparent people too. A bit like selecting frames from a stack of all possible movie frames. However, this sounds a bit "dead", but actually the entire thing is alive with the aliveness that is you; it's just not a personal aliveness because it comes "before" the experience of people. That aliveness is unbounded awareness, and since that is "before" division and change, there is only one awareness (which right now is taking on the shape of an experience of being-a-person-in-a-world). "Reality" in this view is static and eternal, the only thing that shifts is awareness itself as it adopts new shapes for experiences, from the field of all possible simultaneously-existing experiences.

But the table must physically exist, right?

What does that mean, though? What does it mean for something to be "physical"? Refer to what you are actually experiencing, rather than what you are thinking about the experience (because there are many different ways to do that). The table might be said to exist, but only in the sense that it is a "fact" or "pattern" that is persisting. It has no solidity other than that. (The feeling of solidity is just a sensation floating unmoored in awareness.)

Limited to Speculation

ultimately we can only ever speculate and form theories and metaphors to explain this universe.

It's not even that, though. It's that the truth of the matter is that the nature of things is "before" theories and metaphors. Our metaphors are just parallel constructions. You never get to a deep understanding through thought, because thought itself is "made from" the thing you are trying to understand. Only by considering the nature of your thinking and experiencing, can you realise how things actually are. It's like an extra "meta-level" that comes before everything else. Fundamental truth with everything else just being relative, self-referencing truth.

do you think that, including our perception, every other physical object in this universe is all in our heads?

Well, not in our "heads", because our "heads" are within our experiencing. But everything is within our awareness, sort of dissolved within it, I'd say, like a list of facts or patterns (fact-patterns). That is just a metaphor though, of course.

The Possibility of Limitations

Do you believe that all limitations are in our mind when it comes to shifting reality?

There's no underlying structure supporting our experience so - yes, in effect. Although there is no solid underlying substrate to experience, there is obviously structure to it - it is patterned. So changing your experience involves shifting the relative intensities of those fact-patterns. Since those fact-patterns are made from you-as-awareness, the only way to do that is to shift shape - that is, to shift our state or "jump dimensions" in the main metaphor. How do we do this? The only way is intention. Between intentions, we are merely experiencing the unfolding of a deterministic path inherent in our current state. If we want to change it, we must change the relative intensity of (that is, "intend") a pattern (the "intention"). There is no other power.

If I was truly devoid of any and all limitations, to the point that I was "barely human" and that I knew...

Well, your "human" aspect is part of the patterning of your current experience. You are not a human, fundamentally, but you are having a being-a-human experience. So long as you don't dissolve that patterning, then you will continue to have that perspective even as the world itself apparently changes. (Note also: people tend to worry that their "humanity" is what makes them good and moral, and that if they lost that they would become evil. Actually, the pattern is overlaid on top of awareness, and awareness is fundamentally a sort of good aliveness. Hence all the stuff about the universe being "love" and all that.)

...could I live in a fantasy world, the same way I am living now? It's bordering on psychosis at this point.

You already are living as a person in a fantasy world. To change to another fantasy world involves, essentially, changing the patterning of your current experience. Adopting a formatting or an active metaphor, one might conceive of this as switching from one 3D-immersive strand of thought about a world, to another one.

Summary

• Fundamentally, what you truly are is an "open awareness" whose only inherent property is being-aware, which has taken on the shape of a particular state and experience.
• You can directly experience this to be true. It is the only thing that is certain and fundamentally true.
• Your current experience is of being-a-person-in-a-world. Or more strictly speaking, being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.
• The world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", although we might have experiences "as if" that were true. It is perhaps best described as a "world-pattern" which consists of a relative distribution of intensities of facts. These are relatively true.
• This "world-pattern" can be updated via intention. Only experimentation can prove this to yourself.
• The "world" overall might be better considered as a shared resource of possible experiential patterns rather than a shared place.
• There are other people, but they are part of the world-pattern. The person you are experiencing is also part of the world-pattern. The only intelligence or awareness is the one you are right now, taking on the shape of apparently being one of those people, but in effect being all of them.

To kick off, I absolutely agree that this is a difficult area to discuss. Basically, it just doesn't fit into language very well; we always end up circling the topic, pointing at it. As soon as you think or talk about it, you are in fact thinking or talking about something else - but as it. See the sandcastle metaphor, with its castles on and as "the beach" and also "sand", for example.

EDIT: This turned out to be a bit long, so I've divided it into two blocks. It meanders a little, but it means well. ;-)

PART ONE: Awareness & People

I realise that the only awareness you can prove the existence of is your own - but does it follow that the other people you experience in the world lack awareness?

The thing is, though, it's not your awareness. It's just "awareness", which is taking on the shape of an experience, the experience of being a person in a world, "as if" it were a person. So the awareness doesn't belong to the person; it's better to say that the "idea" of all people is within awareness - the "idea of a world" - and at this moment it has taken on, or unfolded, the sensory aspect of one part of that idea. So it wouldn't be that other people lack awareness; even you-as-person lacks awareness and is just a pattern. The only awareness, the only intelligence and causal agent, is you-as-awareness. If the content of experience shifted and took on the shape of some other person's perspective, it would still be the same you-as-awareness, but experiencing the sensory content from a different you-as-person perspective. At all times, though, you-as-awareness is in a state which corresponds to the implied pattern of the whole world, all people, laid out over all time, deterministically (until a shift occurs via intention, that is).

Are you saying that we merely can't prove other people have awareness or are you saying that we can be definitively certain that the only awareness in the world is our own...

I'm saying that the suggestion that any person "has awareness" is effectively meaningless - and that includes the person you are having an experience of being right now. Directly attending to your actual experience right now, you can observe immediately that "you" are everywhere, the entire experience is made from "you", that you are "awareness" - and that "you" have no edges and no outside. Furthermore, any thoughts you have about being a person or there being an outside also arise within that awareness, and that the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world is effectively a strand of thought too. In other words, it turns out that you have to take a step back from content, and contemplate the context of that content. It turns out that one must reconsider what "you" are, and what "people" and "other people" are. In particular, we must note that there is no perspective other than a 1st-person perspective. As soon as we starting thinking about things from a 3rd-person perspective - employing a "view from nowhere" - then we are immediately wrong.

Additionally, all thoughts about experience are themselves experience. When we think about "the world", that is in effect another world, and not the world of our main experience. We confuse our thinking about the world with our thinking of the world.

...and that the capacity to alter the world/other people through consciously intending changes in the pattern proves/indicates this? Which would make you, from my perspective, a sort of automaton?

Better to say "a pattern laid out in time" or something like that. This is just because "automation", to me, implies a sort of programmed "happening", whereas it's probably better to use the metaphor of a landscape of 3D-immersive snapshots that is laid out before us, and which we traverse with out attention, moment by moment. The only thing "happening" is awareness unfolding moments in and out of sensory form, and even that can be viewed as static, since we can conceive of "time passing" as a static pattern overlaid just as any other.

It's an uncomfortable notion for me, not that that precludes it from being true, obviously. But it does seem to make things seem sadder and less... consequential.

It's a common feeling. One interpretation of quantum physics, called QBism, returns to the notion of a subjective perspective. The implications of this are clear: that the subjective perspective in effect has a "private copy" of the world, and our experiences are in effect a traversal of memories not bound to an independent notion of time.

Excerpt:

"But could the problem of the Now lie in relating the present moments of several different people? When you and I are communicating face-to-face I cannot imagine that a live encounter for me could be only a memory for you, or vice versa. When two people are together at an event, if the event is Now for one of them, then it is Now for both. Although this is only an inference for each person, I take it to be as fundamental a feature of two perceiving subjects as the Now is for a single subject."
--- N David Mermin, Nature, 26 March 2014

The author chooses to believe that a so-called live encounter involves the overlap of two conscious frames, and at the same time. There is no reason to do so in the theory, except that he finds it preferable. Why would he prefer to do this?

Because abstract ideas are cold and lonely - whereas the direct experience of such an open, single awareness is vibrant and alive and pleasant. As we cease to grasp onto our apparent individuality as a "person", and by extension our status as an independent entity amongst many separate entities, our attention opens out. Instead of feeling like a Lonely God, we know that we are all people and the entire world, because we are the one and only awareness, which has taken on the shape or state of all of that. The release from this sense of separation - which is what "other people" implies - turns out to not involve being "one" thing at all, but rather no-things because "one thing with no edges" isn't one thing or any thing at all; it is "before" division and multiplicity and change.

So, looping back for a moment -

How to approach this is to consider that there is awareness or being-aware and that is what you are, but that have taken on the shape of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person. And the way to make this meaningful, is to pause and investigate your direct experience right now. Finally, we note that the only thing that is fundamentally true is that which never changes; anything that apparently changes is content, the only thing that persists throughout is the context, and that is what you are.

The person you think you are, and other people, can be said to be that, but it is more understandable to say that there is that, and then that patterns itself "as if" there were such things as people.

(Continues)

PART TWO: Intention & Mechanism

The nature of intending and how, exactly, you do that.

This is a really difficult topic, because it goes right to the heart of what we are, and the problems in describing that. Inherently, "intending" involves no mechanism, no division or parts, and hence no cause and effect; there is no action involved and therefore no technique. Which starts to sound uselessly mystical very quickly. I still think we can describe it with metaphors - however practically speaking, as with the recognition of the nature of experiencing, we can only really be it. Describing it in words never leads to the thing itself, although ironically it is the thing itself. One possible approach: If "awareness" is "being", perhaps "intending" could be best described as "becoming".

thoughts cannot alter the thing we're trying to understand any more than they can describe it.

Right. Because thoughts themselves are an effect; they are not a cause. If you deliberately think of something right now - how did you produce that thought? You just "did". Meanwhile, if you think the thought "move my arm" and then you experience your arm moving, the thought did not cause the movement; rather, you intended something and the pattern you intended was both the thought and the movement. The content of experience is always a result; it is the intention that is the only cause. But what is an intention? Well really, it is not one thing, any more than there is such a thing as a "movement" independent of there being a specific movement. Also, a movement is moving, it is the change in arrangement. So there isn't a "we" who causes a "movement" - rather, a change in arrangement occurs, and in language we say that "we" caused a "movement".

Thus, you can't just think to yourself, if you're white and you want to experience being a black person "I want to be a black person" and have it happen.

If you merely create the thought "I want to be a black person", then you've just summoned a set of words and perhaps some extended imagery into prominence. You have not thought change into the world, as the world. You have created a sort of parallel strand. (The Two Glasses approach is designed to avoid this - more later.)

However, there is an extra element to that - that is, because you are awareness, when you deliberately intensify any pattern by thinking it, then you'll likely see it overlaid upon subsequent experience to some extent. If you simply think "an owl" then you get a general overlay of owls incorporated into your existing landscape, with its extended pattern "shining through" wherever there is a plausible gap for it to do so. The implicit intention is "the owl pattern will become more dominant in my experience". What makes the difference between this sort of general patterning - which leads to synchronicity but not to what we'd usually call results - is to include spatial and temporal context, and to specifically include within the intention that this pattern applies to "the world". Sometimes this is explicit, sometimes implicit. It is enough that you simply know what you mean; there is no extra thing that needs to be done.

Note: I tend to use the word "intending" to mean the act of intensifying a particular pattern, and "the intention" to refer to the pattern being intensified. This means that, loosely speaking, an intention can always be described in the from "it is true now that ____", because all intending occurs now, regardless of the sensory moment being experienced. The entire state of the world is present here, now, all time and space, and every intention is a pattern overlaid upon the entire world-pattern, a shifting of the whole state. "Experience is apparently local; intention is actively global." Phrasing things in that form can help us be clear about what is happening: "It is true now that owls will dominate my experience from this moment onwards"; "It is true now that I will succeed at the meeting in November"; "It is true now that name-of-world-fact is new-value-of-world-fact"; and so on.

So to successfully intend something you'd need to access (back to the metaphor) the loom in order to change the pattern. And the loom isn't thought, it's the fundamental truth that "pre-dates" thought.

Yes, you might say that the loom is "before" thought, but you don't need to access it as such, because you are it. It is perhaps better to dispense with the "loom" metaphor, and say that all there is, is the material, and the material has the property of being able to fold itself under its own power. So, no fold in the blanket of material ever causes the appearance of another fold; it is the material itself which reshapes itself as the folds. It may do so in a way that produces a pattern whereby there is a "thought-shaped fold" and then an "event-shaped fold" side by side, but the first did not cause the second - that is an illusion brought about by our viewing one fold and then the other, and by our ignorance of our own nature.

Would it be fair to say that techniques like Two Glasses are intended as stepping stones or bridges between thought and the "fundamental truth" which creates the pattern you are experiencing?

The Two Glasses, specifically, misdirects you into doing something mundane while distracting you from what you have associated with it. Earlier, I mentioned the difference between thinking a thought about the world, in parallel, and thinking the world itself. The Two Glasses basically has you link two patterns to the glasses, and then uses our everyday intuitions about levels to diminish the intensity of contribution of one pattern, in favour of another. The reason the instructions indicate that you should use a single word, is that this forces the person to "feel out" for a word that best captures the sense of that situation - and this leads to them to actually connect with that pattern, having the word arise from that pattern, giving you a "handle" onto it which then becomes associated with the water level in the glass. The pouring of the water from one glass to the other (rather than just emptying one glass and then filling the other separately), leads to a transformation of state rather than simply a disconnected change in levels.

If you simply write a description on the labels without doing then, then you tend to get a more general patterning effect, as with the "owls". You have not really connected your situations to the exercise. Now, often the results can be the same, in cases where you (I dunno) just want to see more red cars and less blue, or something - but if you do that, you are working more at the level of pattern overlays rather than world-pattern adjustment.

Aside: One should really view awareness as containing all possible patterns, all possible facts. All patterns are pre-existing and are always contributing to experience to some extent - just at different relative intensities. In other words, all facts are true all the time, and all that changes is "how true" they are at any moment. Intending is the way we change the relative truth of different fact-patterns. Your current state, and hence world-pattern, is the result of all your intentions up until this moment.

Is there a clearer way to express "intending" and how it's achieved?

Well, I've had a go at it! :-)

Also, just feel I should mention that I enjoy your posts a great deal. It's a profound and fun topic to kick around - but god it's a frustrating one too, and you seem to have endless patience with johnny-come-lateleys to the subject.

Thanks. Yeah, I think it's a lot of fun to explore. Everyone's a johnny-come-lateley at some point, and every time we have a conversation about this stuff, it's always a little bit different, because everyone's coming to it from a slightly different history - new metaphors or ideas emerge - so I like to engage when I've got time. It's not like I've got the best and final description, after all; this is just me experimenting with how to formulate the same old thing in a modern way that makes sense to me.

(I do aim to write all this up as a proper essay post at some point soon, in a structure that builds up piece by piece, but for now let me continue along this thread.)

Meaning

So, most of these questions are actually "meaningless". I don't mean that in a dismissive way - the sense in which they are "meaningless" is in the same sense that it is meaningless to ask how many corners a circle has, or what colour "length" is, or what the radius of infinity might be. Another way of saying this, is that there are numerous "castles in the sky": self-consistent pieces of architecture with unique layouts. Many of these questions are like asking navigational information for one castle, based on the blueprints of another. In order to answer the question, you have to take a step back and look at the context of the question and not just its content.

Which is exactly how we have to proceed when it comes to understanding "dimensional jumping" and the overall understanding that it leads to. We find ourselves dealing with situations where it's not a case of not knowing something, and it's not a case of there being something but we can never know it; it's more like there is no "something" to know or not know. It is logically excluded from the architecture of the "castle" you are actually living in, versus the floor plan you have been looking at.

Solipsism

Let us take "solipsism" as an example. There are many definitions, but let's go with this one: "my experience is the only experience that is happening".

To make sense of this statement, we are going to look closely at what we mean by the terms "my", "experience" and "happening". If we were to discover that the statement is in fact presupposing entities or occurrences which we can not actually find in our experience, we would have to reconsider the meaning of our position - for example, if it turned out that "I" didn't have experiences at all, because I couldn't find an "I". Taking this further, when I examined what I truly meant by "experience", I might find that it is not as I had assumed - perhaps even to the extent that talking about "other people" was nonsensical from a fundamental perspective, because there were no people, at least in the way I had originally conceived of them.

More specifically relevant to your questions, though, is the idea of there being multiple experiences, and those experiences overlapping with one another. Now, we can think about this - but we immediately have a problem when we do that. Which is, that thinking about something inherently requires experience to have already been divided. If we then look at the "thought about experiencing" and assume that it has similar properties to actual experiencing, we will lead ourselves astray - because the properties of a thought are not the properties of experiencing, which "takes on the shape of" thought by dividing itself, but is not itself inherently divided. So, when we are talking about "multiple experiences happening and overlapping", we are looking at the content of thought when we need to be looking at the context or source of thought, to understand the true situation.

Exercises

There are two little exercises I can think of which might help with this. They are intended to generate an experience, an answer you feel-know rather than a verbal description:

1. "The End of the World"

Imagine a sphere floating in front of you. Now, contemplate the idea of being the surface of that sphere. When you first imagined the sphere, it was from a "view from nowhere". When you switched perspective, that first view would make no sense within the logic of "being the surface of a where". The surface of the sphere would not be able to think about its own context as a ball within a larger space. However, the "experiencing awareness" in the first instance is identical to that in the second - it has merely taken on the shape of a different perspective. Currently, now, you might consider yourself as having taken on the shape of the experience "being the surface of the sphere". Someone starts talking to you about what it is like to take on the shape of "viewing the sphere from space". You cannot understand it. You keep asking what the curvature of that space is, and how you get there, and so on, trying to understand your surface in terms of that space. However, this cannot be done. There is no curvature, and there is no way to get there via an action as the surface. Only by shifting and becoming the other view, can you comprehend it - and this must be done directly.

2. "The Place You Are Looking Out From"

You are currently looking at these words on this screen. Your attention is on this screen. Now, pause for a moment, and also direct your attention to the "place you are looking out from"; the direction that is opposite to the direction the screen is in. What do you find there? What does this mean in terms of the rest of the experience you are having right now? Does this have implications for the content of experience versus the context of experience?

Answers

I realise I'm not answering your questions directly, but hopefully you can see that: a) this is not really possible, because the answer is actually an experience rather than a verbal description; b) the process of looking for the answer is how you get the experience, so there's not much point in me just trying to say it. Make sense? Once the experience is shared, of course, then we are talking from the same understanding, and the same words take on a different meaning (and sound less obscure and koan-like). Can maybe go through the actual questions next time.

POST: Dimension jumping in the hands of the wrong people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, anyway -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way I'd maybe separate it out is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So a couple of thought-provokers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

yes that's exactly what I think

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[POST]

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

Model Overview

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

This gives us a few things to consider:

Model Implications

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

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

Model Considerations

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

• What are we actually intending?

And sometimes it can be:

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

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

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

...Good stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dying is "too boring"! :-)

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

__

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What inhabitants? Where? How?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

why bother in the first place?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Definitely agreed on steering wheels!

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

Saved that article for later - thanks.

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

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

I'm inclined to think that also.

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

Which is what this subreddit is about, basically.

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

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

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

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

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