TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 4)

True Will & Subjective Reality

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

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

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

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

Unrestricted Freedom? Going With The Flow?

If waking life is an unbounded dream in the same sense as a lucid dream is, then our ability to create change in line with our ego is unrestricted. However, if there is some deeper structure to us - that what we might like to do isn't necessarily what we should do in a more fundamental sense - there may be limits, due to a pre-existing momentum.

We might in anger want to tear up the world, say, but that desire is actually an indication of our sense of separation (not truly feeling at one with the rest of this 'dream') and so is not our True Will; we will not be successful in having strong results in that direction, results that persisted. Similarly we would only be able to resist certain actions and paths for so long, before we were "made" to follow them or do them. The universe would play nice with us initially, but eventually get impatient and nasty - - -

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

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

True Will: True in Experience?

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

...

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

Interesting.

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

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

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

Simultaneous, yes. My stab:

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

Q: My opinion: You can't ever not do your True Will. You are always intending truly and honestly. A more important question is - are you conscious of your True Will? What are you doing? Why? Where are you taking yourself? Some people's True Will is to be unconscious of their True Will and struggle against themselves. Others seek to regain consciousness of it - to become LUCID. Everything is always your intention, since this whole reality is the result of you. You've just made 99.999% of yourself unconscious and habituated and call that aspect of yourself the external world/universe. I think paying attention is key in order to learn one's intentions. That's how we bring things unconscious back into the light - from there you can use what you are conscious of to, so to speak, lean on the rest of your commitments to manipulate reality.

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

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

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

It's not an easy thing to formulate really. Essentially, we are talking about our Nature.

There are things you want and things you don't want. There are things you don't realise you want or don't want, because you are not sufficiently aware of your true identity. As you become mindful of your thoughts, your body and the environment and its ground (of everything) then you know. The universe (the content) always moves in (or attempts to move in) the direction of this fuller knowledge, whether you yourself are aware of the knowledge or not.

Which is why releasing blockages, etc, is part of the process, in addition to any magickal/intention techniques. You can always have whatever you choose, but do you really want it?

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

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

Q:which keeps it away from individual acts of will.
Which is both sad, and imo, not Thelemic anyway.
I tell you what I feel when I interact with you. I feel like lots of times you keep me down, you keep me ignorant. You feed me shitty, limited, tiny conceptions. I have to say "no" like three or four times, reject your garbage conceptions, only to find what? You agree! It then turns out you do know better. And then you start telling me the real truth! But first I have to knock four times. I have to reject garbage four times before you bring out a tasty meal I actually want to eat.
Your reticence to bring out the best, instantly, is something I don't like. You think it's like I have to earn it or something. Like I don't deserve to hear a certain truth until I force it out of you. Wrong. I deserve more than you can tell me. If you're holding out on me, you're going to hell. I'm going to figure out whatever you keep secret from me no matter what you do, but when I figure it out and I realize you knew it and didn't tell me, I will really, really hurt you. Now, by contrast, I don't hold out on people. I always tell people my level best. I don't scale anything down. At least, not at first. I try to present the most challenging variant of what I know. Only when there is a problem do I begin scaling down. So I bring my tastiest dish first, and if you choke, I bring you something shittier. I work backwards. And if I don't explain something to people, it's because I myself don't know. It's highly unlikely because I am intentionally keeping some truths to myself.

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

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

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

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

Q:But then, if you act against your desires, that's still your God-like Will surely!
Duh. :) Godlike will is not limited in any way. God can impose limitations on its own experience for as long as God likes. That very freedom to impose arbitrary limitations in arbitrary configurations for arbitrarily long is freedom from limitations. That's because no single limitation is necessary as far as obvious phenomenal reality goes.
Really? It's not intentional.
In that case I will assume you're just confused and don't know better. But I always feel like you know a lot more than you let on, but it's like you don't want to say it, you just want to keep it to yourself or something. And it feels like I am pulling it out of you. Like you're not exactly forthcoming. Well, if you're confused, then fine. But I get really surprised when after a long conversation you finally agree with me. It makes me think, what the hell were you saying the earlier thing for then?
Are you assuming everyone needs to be kid-gloved? Is it possible that in an effort to take my own assumptions as your starting point, you actually downgrade my view? As in, you think I hold assumptions which it turns out, I do not?
Basically I hope you will blast me with the best version of what you know. If I scream or can't grok it, then fine, see if you can chew it for me. I hope you don't think I am an idiot who should be spoon fed like a tiny baby. Try to tell me the best thing you know and see how I react first.
For instance, the "enfolded/unfolded" stuff
Yes! But remember with that stuff, it turns out later that you understand that super-order is not possible. But you were spoon feeding me assuming I am an idiot. In other words, you were working from limited assumptions, very very slowly toward the less limited ones. But I was all the way at the end already! I was there before you even explained anything to me. Remember that?
Remember when I said "but there is a problem" and I proceeded to explain why there cannot be any kind of final order? And you said "Oh yes! That's where this other thing comes in... blah blah." Well, why didn't you start with that other thing to begin with?? You assumed I was average, that's why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If was writing a post or essay, then that's different, because I'd think the whole explanation through first.

You assumed I was average, that's why.

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

Q:Just because we are God, doesn't mean we are completely conscious of ourselves, due to limited attention. We can Will from the perspective of God, or Will from the perspective of an individual.
Yes, but even if you will from the perspective of an individual, you secretly engage in willing from the perspective of God anyway. So we can make mistakes, but it's our sacred right to make mistakes. Trying to prevent every mistake is wrong, in my opinion.
That's why there's a point to doing exercises for awareness and so on, so that your perspective becomes more and more God, less individual, and so your intentional meddling becomes closer to "God's Will" rather than "ego/individual's Will".
You should be careful not to create a sharp distinction between God and individual. God is the core of every individual, as that individual. In each individual God is complete. If you say "I am a part of God" you are wrong. If you say "we are God" you are wrong too. Only if you say "I am God" will you be right. Anyone who reads this should understand this the same way. We don't share Godliness. We are each the one and only God, complete. But how can this be? That's because we aren't substances and the restrictions of substances do not apply to us. God is not some fixed amount of stuff that needs to be shared out to some fixed number of individuals who are themselves made of stuff. God is limitless. Individuals are limitless.
No, it's just how dialogue works.
Only when you do it. I do better than you. I go faster and I am more direct. As a result I don't waste time and I tend to end up with amazing results.
I talk about "implicate/explicate" as my basic explanation
That's because you set the bar really low. REeeeeeaaallyyyy loooow.
You are also much more direct/ambitious with it
There! That's it. I don't like all this dancing around. There is no time. Anyone could die at any time. I might not be here tomorrow. What's the use of unnecessary delays?
If I've come across as condescending or something, I really apologise!
Not at all. You come across as someone who holds out the best for last. Not condescending per se.

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

Yep.

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

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

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

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

Q:Although from my perspective you jump to conclusions - or rather, attractive viewpoints - without building towards them.
Precisely. Why build? If someone is lost, they can ask a question. By not assuming the worst about my readers, I get to explain things at the edge of my understanding instead of re-explaining the ABC's for the Nth time.
That's why we need to do some exercises/experiments.
I strongly agree! This will be very helpful. I left a message in the moderation email. It seems like the mods are ignoring it, lol. It's not a problem. One way or another we'll get our wiki. :)
That's why I wrote the True Will post: what are people's actual experiences
I don't know about that. In your True Will post you were suggesting that the universe offers a pushback of some sort, and that your True Will is to realize that the dull state is exactly what you are willing, which is not a good thing to say because fatalism is a very immediate implication here. In general there were a lot of fatalistic-sounding, suffocating things:
However, if there is some deeper structure to us - that what we might like to do isn't necessarily what we should do in a more fundamental sense
This is suffocating. People don't come to a place like this to breathe this kind of fumes. People want fresh air. Not more of "how it is, is how it should be." Is=/=ought. Someone said that.
We might in anger want to tear up the world, say, but that desire is actually an indication of our sense of separation
No it isn't. I can tear up the world if it's mine. Where's the separation? I've torn up lucid dreams in the past precisely because I didn't think there was a separation. I can restructure the contents of my own mind and this has limitless implications. This means I can tear up this world if I want to, and I can do it out of anger, and that's OK too. I only have to answer to myself.
Similarly we would only be able to resist certain actions and paths for so long, before we were "made" to follow them or do them.
Suffocating fatalism. What the fuck?
A main concern would be one of listening and paying attention as well as directly manipulating
False dichotomy. Listening is meddlesome. And manipulation is effortless. Etc. Basically that post was waaaaaaayyyyy below your own capacity. I know, because I talk to you. I know you can do vastly better. You didn't give us your best in that post. That post was a turd.

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

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

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

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

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

Listening is meddlesome. And manipulation is effortless.

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

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

That post was a turd.

Heh.

Q:Regardless of what I think, what do people actually experience? And how does that correspond to their progress?
Then why was there so much leading material? Your post didn't come across as a genuine question. It came across to me as a statement of fact, with some few questions tossed at the end for fun and flavor.
I didn't want to defend a position
Then why is a significant portion of your post dedicated to promoting fatalism and limitation?
Yeah, I have what I think is how it all works. But we don't generally have complete freedom, because we are fragmented. That we can requires some work, some exercising. You'd agree, surely?
I wouldn't say "fragmented." We have prior commitments that are blocking the new commitments we want to undertake. We've been approaching experience from a certain point of view for so long, that to change how we see things now can feel somewhere between impossible to insane, plus or minus. This isn't a problem of fragmentation, imo. If you believe there is an external world, it isn't that you're fragmented. Consider. In my lucid dreams I feel the world as just as external as I feel this world here. But I can still manipulate it freely. This feeling of externality doesn't pose a problem. Why? Because in a dream I know that feeling means nothing. It has no implication. It isn't a fact! It's just a feeling and it's OK as a feeling.
If you say we are fragmented, you're saying the feeling of separation is something that should be transformed. But I would say we should transform our knowledge, and not our feelings per se. It's what we know about our feelings that should change.
Listening is a creative act (whether it is perceive something apparently persistent or not), but if the intention in listening is to hear what your 'larger self' has to say - by which I mean, the bits you've not yet expanded to include - then that's what you get, right?
Yes.

Then why was there so much leading material?

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

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

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

Q: Ya gotta frame it.
Why did you frame it with so much fatalism?
And really, I don't know if we are restricted or not.
We aren't restricted by anything substantial or external. I know this, even when I don't experience it. How so? Because I don't take suggestive appearances to be indicative of anything other than themselves. A suggestive appearance is just a suggestive appearance. I don't let my mind to fall into the suggestions.
When I see an appearance suggestive of distance, I don't think "oh my, it really is distant!"
When I see an appearance suggestive of wood, I don't think "oh my, this really is wood!"
When I feel an appearance suggestive of wind, I don't think "gosh, this really is wind!"
Leaving suggestions only as suggestions I am supremely honest with my experience. I can't report a suggestion to be something other than a suggestion and remain honest. To report a suggestion to be something other than just a suggestion is a speculative act.
But this is about knowing.
Yes.
In fact, at the point of lucidity (assuming I didn't enter directly), that is the sensation that changes.
Yes!
'Feeling' isn't perhaps the best word, because I don't mean a bodily feeling or an emotion - it's a felt-sense or felt-knowing. It's the difference between definitely this is transparent like a dream to just seeing it that way mentally.
I agree. :)

Why did you frame it with so much fatalism?

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

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

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

We aren't restricted by anything substantial or external.

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

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

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

Q: It's not actually fatalism, it's presented (from sources) as a 'higher path', and an optimistic thing to strive for: alignment and effortlessness.
Ordinary effortlessness, the path of the least resistance, that's just the status quo. It isn't likely to be transformative. Effortlessness in the context of knowing that everything you experience is an illusion -- that's transformative. That's not a status quo supporting attitude.
However, the restriction doesn't take the form of an underlying substance, if it exists
That wasn't clear to me in your post. While you weren't talking about substance explicitly, the wording you used was highly suggestive of it.
it takes the form of not being able to simply adjust your experience to match your intention.
Have these people given up the intention to remain a human, sane, etc? In other words, you can't intend to be a well-adjusted member of society and also omnipotent. These are mutually contradictory intentions.
When I exercise omnipotence in my lucid dreams, am I a member of the dream world in good standing? Abso-fucking-lutely not!! I laugh at everything I see in my dreams when I am lucid. I disregard everything.

It isn't likely to be transformative.

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

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

Hmm. I could have been clearer then.

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

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

Q: When people hit 'realisation', is it transforming or is it discovering?
From my POV, if you discover something, but it changes nothing about your experiencing and it doesn't introduce new capabilities into your life, then you didn't discover anything, or you discovered something in name only.
The effortlessness is that of following the path revealed once blockages are cleared
Doh! Well, that could take some effort and unpleasantness. :)
But, I don't see why you can't flip between the two
Because being a believable human being requires a firm commitment. If you're flipping here and there it implies a lack of commitment. This means humanity won't have the same weight to you as to a normal, or legitimate human. This will very likely come through and be visible to others.
I think actually if you want to hide yourself, instead of flipping back to human-mode, you should remain as God, and simply make the people in your vicinity ignorant of what you are. Make people blind to your genuine essence. But you'll need to use your full power to do this. You won't be able to produce this effect as a human being.
So what I am saying is, you can do anything, but it tends to have implications and consequences. If you're flipping here and there, it implies a lack of commitment. Being a noncommittal God you become a caricature of God, and being a noncommittal human you are a caricature of a human. You'll lack power in your God modality and you'll lack sincerity in your human modality.

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

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

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

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

... and be visible to others.

What others?? :-)

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

Of course. ;-)

Super-Simplified Models of Reality

One of the outcomes of Oneirosophy is that, since all experience is effectively dreamlike and is you, we recognise that models of reality are pretty arbitrary and pattern-based.

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

TG's Super-Simplified Reality Model™

Think of yourself as an open holographic conscious space.

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

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

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

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Q: I like that you put a trademark this time.
Our identification should be with the open space, rather than with any particular piece of content that appears within it.
I think this is the part that's hardest for most people. I want to highlight that so that maybe we can make it easier for everyone on a whole. The reason it's so tricky, I believe, is the language we use in daily convention is built around the notion that you are a physical body and the world is a physical place. If you're a particularly socially active person, you'll be very hard pressed to maintain the awareness that you are, in fact, the whole experience, and not the body of Joe Somebody talking to Susy Cuteface. You're experiencing that, sure, but because language is going to likely encourage you to use the words "I" referring to Joe Somebody, you will easily slip back into the notion that Joe Somebody is the all encompassing identity of who you are. It happens so quickly and is usually not noticed until you take a moment to reflect on who you actually are.
So a word of advice, if you are socially active or a regular member of society - whatever that means - take some time in isolation to work on this stuff. However much you've got, the more the better. If you can't go more than a few seconds being aware that you are everything (and nothing) and not just "a guy" or "a gal," then trying to figure that out while you're in the midst of the play of human society is going to drive you nuts.
TG has a pretty good releasing exercise I'll try to find, otherwise "regular" meditation works. Which by the way, is not the act of "concentrating really hard to make thoughts go away." That's someting else, still useful, but meditation should be thought of as a broadening of focus. Feel free to ask questions in your meditation as long as they are relevant to you. "Who am I?" Is the question that ultimately you're trying to answer when you meditate.

I like that you put a trademark this time.

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

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

© 2015 TriumphantGeorge. All rights reserved.

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

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

That's the chap!

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

[POST BY Nefandi]

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

And then I always reflect on my value ladder:

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

In that order of importance.

[END OF POST]

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

Outside: The Dreaming Game

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

Inside Outside: The Game

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

You are not actually the character you play in Outside, rather you are an open "game-space" which connects to Outside and adopts a particular perspective in the Outside game environment. In periods of reduced activity, your "game-space" disconnects and either connects to another pre-existing game-world, or constructs one on its own, seeded by random data fluctuations. You can see this happening in the case of hypnogogia and fragmentary imagery.

Generally these worlds are more flexible than Outside, because to save on processor and memory power, all games function on a co-creation, procedural expectation/recall-based engine - so the more players there are, the more stable a game world becomes. Because Outside is the main, default subscription for all current players there (part of the terms and conditions), you always reconnect to Outside whenever other connections collapse.

Outside Inside: An Exercise

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

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

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

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

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Q: Intention is just the preprocessor for rendering

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

Q: Generally these worlds are more flexible than Outside, because to save on processor and memory power, all games function on a co-creation, procedural expectation/recall-based engine - so the more players there are, the more stable a game world becomes.
There are as many people in dreams as in the waking experience, so that theory is wrong.
Outside is the generator of those experiences
If that's true, you're a victim of the Outside.

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

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

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

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

Q: Some dreams. Some dreams are just you.
And for some periods of time during the waking experience it's also just you. I think if the differences exist in how populated the environments appear, they are not big and they vary from person to person. Some people dream of other people a lot more than others.
Outside turns out to be your 'larger self', the dreamer, the dream - of course.
So why keep it a secret until later?

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

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

So why keep it a secret until later?

Because that's what the world does.

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

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

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

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

Q: There's definitely some "conceptual momentum" in more populated dreams/realities.
You're saying the dreams where more people are present tend to also be heavier, more solid, harder to modify when lucid in them? I'm not sure I agree, but I can't say I disagree either. I mean, is that your experience? I haven't noticed anything like that in my dreams. I have noticed that dreams do vary pretty greatly in how easy they can be to modify, but to me that variance has nothing to do with how populated they appear. But I haven't done a very thorough study of that.
Because that's what the world does.
So what?

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

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

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

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

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

That multiple dreamers visit, that was perhaps seeded by a single person at one point, but other came to occupy. Sometimes you might find yourself being a pre-existing character, looking through their "viewport", sometimes you might just appear as "yourself". Sometimes you might accidentally find yourself in a world like this, with a complete history, and be the only visitor with knowledge. Depends on the nature and flexibility of the environment.

All worlds persist to some extent after creation, although they may gradually fall apart through lack of intention/expectation.

The First Tulpa

Introducing Tulpas

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

Deliberate Tulpas

Deliberate creation involves regular forcing, where the host deliberately visualises and interacts with the expectation of the presence of the tulpa - implicitly seeding it by giving it attention and expectation. At some point, the tulpa develops sentience and begins to act of its own volition.

Another aspect of tulpa creation is the development of a mindscape or “wonderland” - basically, a persistent mental environment where the host and the tulpa can interact and explore together, without having to “overlay” the tulpa over the everyday world experience.

Accidental Tulpas

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

The First Tulpa

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

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

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

You are awareness, and you have passively created a wonderland and a tulpa with which to explore it. The person you think you are is just your first tulpa.

With this knowledge, you might choose to create others, to delete your first tulpa and take your stand as the creator, and you might even consider amending your wonderland to a more pleasing layout, for a more flexible existence... [2]

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

[2] Check out the Tulpa Guides. I think many of the techniques referred to there could be adapted for oneirosophic endeavours.

...

Q: i like the idea that we are are own tulpas. But this raises another question i've been toying with lately. If I am just awareness, why is it that i have a preference for certain types of tulpas, or is that the original tulpa creating tulpas of its own? Their is the idea of the individual ego and the All but i'm beginning to think their is an intermediary between these two, a middle self if you will. If one incarnates as a goblin, a cucumber, a parrot, a cactus, a lizard, a frog, and so on those are individual egos, the lower self, but the middle self would be the essence of greeness which all the things in that list have in common and the highest self is the entire rainbow in which the color green emanates from.

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

Thinking it's not awareness that has the preference. Other tulpas: I'm thinking it happens just by implication. The first tulpa implies further tulpas by expectation and implication, in the same way it was created.

I don't see "ego" as central overall, in the larger picture. The ego is an idea that you have, and because you identify with it you end up with thoughts and actions that arise consistently with it, out of expectation. Other regions of awareness end up with the same thing: behaviour via expectation, clustered around an idea, from deliberate or accidental forcing. So it depends on where you "stand". If you are standing as /u/cosmicprankster420 then you experience a world that is implied by that tulpa, and that includes other tulpas. If you stand as awareness itself, then you no longer take the perspective of the first tulpa, and this no longer applies.

But I'm not sure I've understood your idea of a "middle self" properly!

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

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

Ah, I see it.

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

Q: Deleted

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, exactly!

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

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

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

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

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

The Circular Ruins

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

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

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

* * *

Glitch_in_the_Matrix Misc Posts

We Are But The Dream Puppets Of Picard

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

In my downtime over the last month, I've finally been putting a bit of effort into philosophy stuff - reading things I've been meaning to catch up on, overdue film viewings and suchlike - all related to the nature of reality, thinking, perception, imagination, dreams, all that.

In among the masses of comments recommending related film and TV to watch, someone recently mentioned an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that has parallels to one of my favourite stories on this sub. Forgot all about it; was never all that into Star Trek and haven't seen it in maybe 10 years.

Browsing the web with cable TV on in the background yesterday (not usual, I always watch DVDs or downloads, not broadcast) getting bored of the sound of Ben Miller's voice in Death in Paradise, I flick the channel up - Friends - and again - Friends again - once more - it's Star Trek: TNG.

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

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

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

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

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

Good story!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good observation!

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

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

The essence:

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

I am watching it now on Netflix.

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

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

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

Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams

I was reading a blog post on how we represent the world to ourselves - a really great article, here at the Well of Galabes blog - and a couple of the comments underneath it seemed relevant to our Glitch explanation efforts so I've included them below. They emphasise how much our experience is at best 'inferred' and at worst 'created'. The comment on the narrative flexibility of dreams is interesting too.

You can imagine both of these appearing in this subreddit in one form or another, as reports.

Darkroom Vision

"I realized I have a much more dramatic example of the pure subjectivity of perception in my personal experience. It's what I call my "darkroom vision."

When I was in college and taking photography classes, we were provided with a large community darkroom. The safelights were always on in the darkroom, of course, as there were often several people working in it side by side.

One day when I was working, the power went out and the safelights went off. A darkroom with no safelights is truly dark; even with full night vision adjustment human eyes will perceive no light. Those of us who were working in there fumbled our way out to wait for the power and lights to return. After a while it was apparent that power was not coming back anytime soon, and I had left some prints in the fixer bath. So I went back into the darkroom to retrieve those prints and move them to a water wash.

When I got in the darkroom, I realized that I could very faintly see the big table in the middle of the room with all its individual tubs of developer, stop, and fixer. This disturbed me, since a darkroom is supposed to be absolutely dark. I reached for the corner of the table, and when my hand reached it, there was nothing there. The table immediately vanished from my sight. I fumbled around a bit, found the table by feel, and instantly it popped back into view in a new, and "correct" location.

Though this image was faint, it was definitely a visual image, indistinguishable from what I would have seen had there been a very dim light in the room that was just barely above the threshold of perception. But, given the disappearing and reappearing act the table put on, it was also clearly coming from inside my mind, not from any "objective physical reality."

After this experience, I discovered that I can always see by this "darkroom vision" when I am in familiar places in total darkness, but (here is the key) ONLY if it is a place I know well in the light. It is very useful. The image includes things that I do not have a direct conscious memory of. If I have misplaced something, I can look around for it, and when I see it and reach for it, it usually is there. It's funny, when it is not there, to see it vanish. But it is usually not far from where I saw it, and it will pop back in to view when I do get my hand on it. In one darkroom I was even able to read the hands on a large timer clock, getting some idea of how much time was left before it would chime. The reading I saw on the clock was often not exact, but it was fairly close.

And of course the evolutionary biologist in me appreciates what a wonderfully clever adaptation this is, to present all this subconsciously stored information in a handy visual image, showing me all of my mind's best estimates of the position of everything in the room relative to where it judges me to be. I don't have to think about it at all, it is effortless on my part. I just look around. And it updates instantaneously in real-time based on new data."

-- Bill Pullium, comment [http://galabes.blogspot.com/2014/06/explaining-world.html]

Objects Revise Themselves

"I remember working in a kitchen, when a few of the cooks began to wear tall white paper hats like the chef had always worn. One of these cook's had a similar body-type as the chef, and sometimes when he'd enter the kitchen, from a distance and out the side of eye, in peripheral vision, I would actually "see" the chef enter the room, until he got closer and the image would shift back to the cook in question.

This happened after I had started meditating and noticing the activity of my mind more. I was surprised, because it wasn't just that I was unsure of who this person and thought, "That might be the chef", it was the for a really brief moment, I actually had an image in mind of the chef entering the room, which was quickly altered as the cook came into better focus.

Interesting also in that, from a social primate point-of-view, my mind was always scanning for the chef's presence, and how he might view my work.

I notice that phenomenon in the evening light as well, when I encounter an object that I can't quite make out what it is, but looks to be the size of an animal - it is very quick, but I can see my mind trying on various perceptions to the hazy figure: "Is it an animal? Is it a raccoon, or a dog?" until I can get a better view of the object, and the perception settles down to something more stable.

I imagine these moments of perceptual uncertainty make conscious a process that is normally hidden from me, of how the mind decides what something "is", like a table, or chair, or person, etc., and then supplies an appropriate image, though it seems to me like I am simply "seeing" something that is "there".

Something else - in becoming aware of my dreams, I noticed that my mind has these moments of indecision, then decides on a narrative framework for things, then will alter past happenings to fit that framework. I'd always thought dreams were like movies playing from beginning to end in order, but on closer inspection, it seems more like streams of thinking, in which the mind will decide on a story, then go back and change what happened before to make that story coherent!"

-- Daniel Cowan, comment

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

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

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

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

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I'll add another experience which is more accessible, that we've probably all had but perhaps not paid much attention to: When I misread a word, I actually do experience the wrong word - I literally see that incorrect word in front of me - and then it 'snaps' to the right word when I go back to check.

This highlights how our experienced world is basically an inferred dream-space where the objects are a best guess, 'inspired' by sensory(?) input and historical context, and is continually updated as new information is received. This brings to mind Donald Hoffman's ideas on our experience being like a 'user interface' to help with our aims in the most efficient way, rather than an accurate representation.

Anything could be going on behind the scenes. What we perceive may be directly related to our aims and goals, as things are filtered accordingly.

The dream thing really trips me the hell out.

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

We delete any inconvenient histories as we go, once we've reached a decision.

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

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

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

their pretend histories are totally real to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, people who go blind later in life sometimes find that after a while they can "visually perceive" objects around them again, as other senses provide clues from which the presence of those objects can be inferred.

In other words, what you apparently see around you right now is a hallucination "inspired by" whatever information is available.

Which is why you can still see in dreams, even though you don't have any eyes!

The problem here is with the word "seeing" because in common usage it implies "eyes" or that you are somehow perceiving a thing that is definitely there.

Perhaps it's better to keep it to the essentials: "Seeing" is having the experience of seeing something, whether or not there is a something actually there, in the form of an image.

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

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

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

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

It's a fun thing to experiment with.

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

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

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

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

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

Right. We can get right to it: How can you tell the difference between "full imagination" and not "full imagination"? After all, we only know we are "deceived" when our experience shifts in a "correction".

I mean, have you really examined every part of the room you are in? And yet, you don't feel as thought there are "gaps" in your visual experience of it. There are most likely vast parts of your daily experience which you have never examined properly - and you are therefore just completely hallucinating, without knowing it.

I think of it as "dreaming, inspired by the senses". Of course, I have no access to the information provided by the senses at all - only the final conclusions - but we tend to assume that what we are experiencing is in some way contributed to by such things.

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

No, that's not what I mean. I mean that, in a relaxed and open state, it is possible to have a visual experience of your surroundings even with eyes closed.

When you go up and down stairs and use your keys with eyes closed, if you pay attention you'll find that you do it via a sort of "three-dimensional feeling-out". There's not much difference between this and a "three-dimensional visioning-out".

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

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

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

What I see with dream-eyes is full imagination.

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

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

A couple of questions to ponder:

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

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

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

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

Repost: A Parallel Life / Awoken By A Lamp

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

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

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

A Parallel Life / Awoken By A Lamp

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

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/r/Psychonaut/ Misc Posts

The Girl Who Saw Through Illusions

A little story I liked:

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

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Q: [Deleted]

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

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

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

Q2: Never take anything personally

Right - because there's no "person".

What matters? You decide.

Yes, quite so.

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

An interesting idea. I'm not entirely with it, maybe. I'd say that "free will" varies in terms of context - in terms of the "sphere of attention". Someone who is narrowed on the body or certain thoughts is limited. Meanwhile, someone whose attention has expanded to the "background awareness" has more flexibility, greater choice.

After all, free will isn't about the ability to do just anything, surely - it's about being free to choose among the maximum number of possible options, to take the route most appropraite for you.

However, this "maximum freedom" is in a sense spontaneous, potentially - the only choice you fully have is the ability to "say yes" to it, to cease resisting.

And of course, to be able to switch to this larger context, you have to either have encountered the concept of it ("grace") or just randomly have it happen to you (also "grace").

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

Okay, I'll probably disagree from the "obvious of emergence" part for consciousness, but we can certainly say that the content of consciousness has correlations with the brain.

We do have free will in the sense of identifying with one part of experience vs the rest, and having the power to pause and select amongst options. We don't choose those options, and we don't choose what we want to choose, but within the parameters of the environment we can select and "disobey". So self control itself isn't an illusion, what is in debate is the basis of the control in terms of information.

If we don't have free will in that sense, then we can't choose to let go, or to learn.

If anything is a "magical free will force" it is awareness itself, which then turns out to accept what arises - so the real deal is that to operate the best you could ever operate would be to let go and have your entire being contribute to your actions.

Also, I think that we can pause and 'ask' for random creative inspiration, and then act on it or not. This makes us completely unpredictable. We can always ask for additional options, in effect.

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

I suggest you research chaos theory.

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

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

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

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

Consciousness. I use the term "awareness" because consciousness gets confused with conscious-of and self-consciousness. I'm not convinced that consciousness is "emergent" from the brain. I'm inclined to say that it is a fundamental property.

But that's a separate discussion, and it does not necessarily matter for "free will".

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

I don't suggest there is a free will outside of experience, I suggest something more akin to (as another responder said) compatiblism: There is a part of us we identify with, and there are the options which appear. Furthermore, we can 'ask' for further options.

We are "free" only to the extent we can choose amongst the options presented to us, using all the information at our disposal. In other words, we can make the best choice. That's "free enough".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right. Really, if you actually look into the neuroscience, although it is grand for helping patients who have suffered brain damage and so on, it is basically rubbish as regards investigating the properties of awareness and subjective experience. Because it is not intended to - it's not "science" in the same way as physics. Poorly designed fMRI-based experiments do not a good understanding make, alas.

That's why I tend to put the brain aside, as it were. The theories change so frequently (e.g. for vision and perception, etc) as to be meaningless.

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

There are correlations between experience and brain activity. Changes in the brain cause changes in the content of experience. This is different to consciousness.

For clarity, it is good to separate out different types: there is the consciousness (which I call "awareness" or being-aware to keep it distinct), then conscious-of (the content) and self-consciousness (the identification with a certain subset of content).

Here is a previous post which covers it [POST: Can we formulate panpsychism such that it doesn't sound completely ridiculous?].

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

Anyway, I'm tempted along these lines:

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

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

Returning to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

stick to pure materialism and rationalism

Sticking to pure materialism is a problem, because it doesn't work, unfortunately, for these areas. It's fine as an unexamined background idea for 'patterns and regularities' as observed in physics, but it's no use for consciousness, alas.

This doesn't mean we go to "woo land", it simply means we incorporate consciousness as a property (a la neuroscientist Christoph Koch, perhaps). Note, this isn't self-consciousness! Rocks don't ponder their existence. However, sufficiently complex entities do have a "what it is like to be them".

For humans, the brain is the image of that, but of course that reflects the complete nervous system, which in turn reflects the environment, so effectively the brain is an image of the world. That is what I mean by the world being unbroken in awareness.

Where do you suggest consciousness "is" in the brain? And why does it have that location and not another? And what is the stage at which an area flips from being not-conscious to conscious?

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

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

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

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

The more connections among processing units, the more consciousness.

There is never "more consciousness" in the way I say it. I think we're differing in our use of the term. In my take, you'd mean something like "an increased ability to be aware of things and manipulate them". Something like "greater awareness of things".

All information processing does is transform one pattern into one or more different patterns. It does not change the 'stuff' that patterns are made of (which is "consciousness").

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

The question is, what dimensionality are we?

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

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

Anyway, I think -

The problem is that we will never be able to come up with a falsifiable model for consciousness if it is the fundamental thing prior to space and time - because all our experiments will be in terms of it. It's a matter of metaphysics, rather than physics.

If we don't introduce it at a fundamental level, then we are left with handling emergence. And by "fundamental" I mean it has to be introduce before any patterns - i.e. before any information.

And in the end, it must join together scientific theories and personal direct experience, other wise it's just another nice diagram for the collection.

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

Q3: I remember, as a young child I would often think about abstract philosophical questions that I didn't really realize were philosophical, and one question I often wondered about was, what force is it that causes my body to move when I wanted to? I couldn't figure it out. Later on I learned about neurology and the brain and so on, but it just seemed to move back a step - so what moves the brain? It took a long time for me to realize that our experience of will and consciousness is actually equivalent to brain processes, arising from them and inextricably connected.
As a fervent Transhumanist, I believe that within my lifetime the technology will become available to transfer my mind and consciousness to an artificial structure - I won't say "computer" because a classical computer probably cannot mimic the structure of the brain, but the neurosynaptic chips being designed currently by IBM might someday be able to. Thus understanding the nature of consciousness is of course very important to me.

Interesting how we differ! :-)

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

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

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

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

That'll be the problem to solve.

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

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

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

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

...

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

Uh-huh, more specific? What really matters?

* * *

/r/occult/ Misc Posts

Direct, Simple Magick

Has anybody had much experience with trying to simplify their approach right down to the basics - a sort of post-Chaos approach? Although there's much fun to be had chatting to entities and following rituals, is there a way of cutting this to the bone?

Alan Chapman in his book Advanced Magick for Beginners:

Could this mean that what we use to represent our desire is arbitrary? And what does this say about the sigilisation process, and therefore magick itself? It doesn't stop with glyphs; instead of a geometric doodle, you could use a number, or a combination of numbers. Or how about a word, nonsensical or otherwise? What if we decide that a gesture represents your desire instead, like a wave of the hand? Or some other physical movement, like a dance? What if we decide that a certain dance means it will rain?

In other words, our acts mean just what we decide they mean, magically speaking. Later, he suggests that altered states are just ways of circumventing doubt or poor intention (e.g. effectively unintentionally requesting "I will want a new car" rather than "I will have a new car") and are not essential.

Any experiences?

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Q1: Many of the zen masters caution against getting attached to Siddhi. Which are basically magic like powers that are obtained through meditation.
I can't think of anything stripped down further than Zen. However, it seems like even more work than traditional ritual.

I think the warning to remain unattached is so that you continue on to your final destination, that of enlightenment. A problem in all approaches. I don't think it means they're bad in and of themselves. Reminded me of this Douglas Harding interview, the 'headless way' guy:

KP: But you would not deny that certain disciplines, if practised arduously at great sacrifice, can lead to fairly extraordinary experiences, but they’re simply experiences, and we are over-looking the experiencer?
DH: Oh yes, indeed, and one of the traps, one of the side diversions of this whole thing, is at a certain stage to cultivate the siddhis, powers, that do come with the seeing of who one is— and they do come. And it’s different for different people. Some people get a good old helping, others don’t. But that’s one of the snags, one of the diversions, and it’s a very serious one.

But I see that as a little different to doing intentional magick, as we commonly think of it? I'm thinking of what 'act' we perform for our magick. How does one use the siddhis, once accessed?

Q2: I agree with Alan Chapman's quote 100%.
However, there is a difficulty there. In principle what Alan says is exactly right, and I say the same thing often too. But in practice our minds are more inclined to make some types of associations than other, and depending on what sort of results you want it may pay to work with the grain as opposed to against the grain.
If you want mental flexibility above all, working against the grain is the best practice. But if you want quick results at the cost of possibly habituating yourself even further into a narrow conception, then the fastest way is to go with the more intuitive associations.
So for example, the third eye is associated with paranormal sight. The natural place for it is between the eyes. So if you want results faster, working with the assumption that your third eye is located between and slightly above your two human eyes is easiest. However, if you want mental flexibility, you might locate your third eye in the back of your head on Monday, than on Tuesday you'd locate it in the palm of your right hand, and left on Wednesday, and so on, and then on Sunday you'll locate the third eye nowhere at all, and use it in its perfectly abstract and dissociated form. This way you don't have a steady location to work with. The results will probably be harder to achieve at least initially, because this will likely go against the grain of intuition at first. But for the sake of mental flexibility such approach is superior.
I myself strongly lean toward mental flexibility. For this reason I never work with traditional chakras or some well-defined third eye and other things of that nature. And if you notice, various systems of magick do not completely agree among themselves on the locations and the numbers of the so-called "energy centers" anyway. This isn't a coincidence. It's a reflection of the nature of mind. (Nor do they agree on the number and types of deities and so on.)
As far as experience goes, I never felt like I was lacking something or like I was shortchanging myself by following my path. I think people who stick to the dogmas are the ones losing out in the long run, although I can certainly see the short-term advantages of doing the obvious thing.

Really interesting. I tend towards thinking that your 'mental objects' are pretty flexible in terms of structure, purpose and location. You can Chapman-like just decide-and-gesture, but sometimes it's nice to create something repeatable - basically, create a 'new habit'.

In the end, it's 'whatever works', but if you want to accomplish more dramatic things, then you'll likely have to create some sort of 'mental format' to prove it with a route by which to take place, since the 'standard habits' don't lend themselves to it very directly.

Q2: Drama is in the eye of the beholder.
And habits to my mind involve tradeoff. On the plus side, habituated patterns become easily repeatable, and eventually repeatable even without conscious involvement, if needed. On the minus side, habits tend to slip out of the view. Habits tend to drift toward the unconscious regions where they can hide well past their expiration date, limiting experience well beyond their intended duration.

Good points all.

Q3: Everything is arbitrary. I know many people will disagree, but I believe all that any ritual does is convince your subconscious to place faith in your Will, which empowers your Will to change the world around you. I used to do lengthy traditional rituals to do what I now do in a short visualization bolstered by a short improvised action. The results are the same, if not better. If I don't have faith in something, I come up with something that feels powerful enough to overcome it and 90% of the time it does. I relate magick to my art training: at first you must trace things and fill in lines to learn how your hand works, then draw from life to learn how the world looks and how to recreate it, then you can draw absolutely anything you are capable of imagining. Magick is art that you create in the mind of the universe.

Magick is art that you create in the mind of the universe.

That's a nice turn of phrase.

what I now do in a short visualization bolstered by a short improvised action.

I think that gets to the heart of it. You can just declare to yourself that clicking your fingers means 'this', click 'em, and you're done. In fact, short processes leave less space for doubt and 'wishing for wishing' errors that can occur in longer, more involved approaches.

Our problem is often that we want to feel ourselves doing something to make things happen. This is a problem for daily life too: people tense up their muscles in order to feel that they are really putting effort into their work, even just walking and so on, when what they are in fact doing is blocking the natural flow by doing this - just intention is all that's required; the rest will 'do itself'.

“When you stop doing the wrong thing the right thing does itself.” - F. M. Alexander, inventor of the Alexander Technique for body movement

Q2: You can just declare to yourself that clicking your fingers means 'this', click 'em, and you're done.
From the point of view of getting the world to change according to your will, it's far more important not to have inhibiting, contradictory and blocking beliefs/commitments/expectations than how you focus your will. In the absence of inhibiting volitions every ounce of will is effortless and 100% effective.
For most people their volition is so strongly committed to ideas that inhibit magick, that they need some kind of trick to overcome the 90% of themselves (or more) that doesn't want magick to happen. People value stability and predictability that comes with solidity of experience. As long as that's the case, magick will remain difficult, and tricks like ritual and formal meditation will remain popular. Formal meditation is in principle unnecessary and neither is ritual. But we rely on those approaches because 99% of our being says that what we want to accomplish shouldn't be possible or is bad for us.

One thing I have been looking into is Dream Yoga, with the practice of gradually getting yourself to feel that this waking life is a dream (as opposed to just think it or something like it). I see this as maybe a nice way of dissolving those inhibitory boundaries: crack the experience open completely to all possibilities.

I find experiments and comparisons with lucid dreaming are often helpful, because of how 'intention' seems to work in that environment, it's the 'ideal version'.

Q4: A stable mind can get you anywhere you want. That's quite a challenge though - dropping everything and staying focused on a clear goal. But then the question comes - what should the goal be?

Q5: You just have to get focused for a bit until the spell is cast. Also not muddy the waters too much by obsessing on it afterwards -I think you end up kind off casting and recasting small spells when you do that- which is why forgetting about it helps a lot.
The hard part is definitely to know what to wish for. Many times you yourself get changed in the process, and you can also get a lot of stuff happening peripherally to finally get to the result.
Those days I mostly enjoy things as they are except if I'm in dire need, the upheaval a spell can set in motion just tires me. Or just ensure that there are easy ways of manifestation. Else it can gets way convoluted.

You make a good point. If you mostly let things alone - but pay attention - I think the things you actually want mostly come up 'by themselves'. The trick is to have the courage to follow through on any 'inspirations to act' you might have.

You and the rest of the universe will unfold as a single movement towards your goals - however you have to not hold back from your part in the movement. Often your involvement or role can be super-minimal, simply saying "yes" when offered something, but you must fulfil that role.

And on goals: Whether we write goals down or not, they are implied within us at any moment. (If you write down a goal or think it up, where did it come from? It was already within you, acting through you; you just made it conscious is all.) However, if we are conflicted then perhaps explicitly deciding via an act can help push aside any blocks we have.

TL;DR: If you stay clear-headed and allow spontaneity, then passive magick will likely give you most of what you really desire.

Q7: First, when it comes to physical result, every magick is an indirect approach to get the result.
However, the ritual with more physical element should give you more probability of getting a physical result.
Example 1;
If you strip the ritual down to just the desire alone, that's just daydreaming.
If you write your desire down on a piece of paper, that's motivational writing.
For example 2,
If your life is a mess, try tidying up around the house.
I love reverse-engineering rituals, stripping all the fluffs, leaving just the bare essential. It's intellectually enjoyable but it can be like taking protein pills when you want a filet mignon.

But... stripping things down and knowing this can be done then means your free to build it all back up again for pure enjoyment, knowing that the details are not actually essential. That can be quite freeing?

Q7: Yes and No, we can strip things down and (hopefully) go straight for god's G-spot every time. But sometime, we want the foreplay or role-play too. Freedom is to be able to do whatever ritual we want, whenever we want.

Yeah, I'm with that. There are also benefits to doing things in a group. There's sometimes a bit of an issue as to whether you 'take people with you' when you make a major change.

Q8: I do pretty much basics only (plus some specialized "tricks" every now and then, but they rely on the basics heavily as well).

What do you count as "the basics" for you?

Q8: Symbol creation and use (sigils), mantra creation and use, direct- or energetic visualization of something happening. Changing and holding the mental posture (as one website quite nicely put it). Sensing stuff with different senses (I use mostly touch and sight, sometimes sound... I've still yet to learn to completely trust that "gut feeling" type of intuition). And of course some breathing techniques, but they're more for my physical practice than for the occult side usually.
Those are pretty much all the building blocks I use to do my stuff. Even the different kinds meditation can be mostly classified under mental posture thing. I also use physical movement sometimes to enhance the visualization if I'm having a not-too-sensitive day.

"Holding the mental posture"... yes. Stealing things from other subjects, like acting for the idea of the 'Psychological Gesture', can be useful.

Q8: Actually, it seems to me like we're talking about different things; like this explanation has somewhere [https://web.archive.org/web/20111101072407/http://www.magickofthought.com/start/], holding your mind in some way is what I meant. Still, it was an interesting read with the hollywood occult. ;)

Ha, I love the idea that all those blockbuster movies with heavily choreographed action may in fact be Grand Workings. :-)

The gesture was an idea for reliably accessing a 'state' or 'posture' by associating it with a mental or physical motion, just as actors do for emotions. A bit like NLP anchoring I suppose.

I follow that blog occasionally. It's a pretty interesting approach, although I think it may be layering on the structures a bit heavily. And I don't agree that it aligns with 'materialist reductionism' as the author seems to think. Not that this matters really, if it works.

Q9: I don't get it, magick is so simple and yet people get so caught up. Taking a shit? It's causing change in accordance with will. Last time you got a date? Last time you filled up the gas tank? Last time you ate? Without simple magick you're dead, are you dead? Am I? There's your answer.

Sure, there's a sense in which you and the universe work by magick; it's just 'how it all is'. Your thoughts and actions arise spontaneously in the direction of your implied intentions, and the environment around you tends to conspire and adjust and bend accordingly also.

The point here is that lots of people put a load of effort into doing two things:

1. Deciding on what they think they 'want', on 'goals'.
2. Coming up with something to 'do' to attain those goals.

Really, though, these two points are about becoming conscious of things that are likely happening anyway.

First, just because you've not pondered and written out a goal doesn't mean it isn't "in you" already (otherwise, where would the though and the writing come from?). Second, if your goals are implicit in your character at each moment, then in fact all your actions will be aligned with your goals. And if we take the view that "you" are not separate from the rest of reality, then actually the whole universe is moving towards you experiencing your goals.

Unless you actively resist and get in the way.

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Q6: But that's so boooring.

Okay, tell you what: I'll still let you wear a silly hat. But only on Tuesdays.

Dramatic Effects

There has been some discussion here and elsewhere on the the influence of beliefs and expectations on the 'available routes for manifestation' for a magickal intention.

Meanwhile, some people quite dramatic random occurrences, appearances and disappearances and changes in their reality, and wonder how to harness this.

/r/occult people, what are the most dramatically direct results that you've had from an intentional working? And how do you think the situation differed to the more usual hum-drum 'roundabout coincidence' type of result?

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Q: [Deleted]

Thanks for that. Lots of people seem to report that their first efforts, and when they started taking it seriously, was when a "curse" worked (see here [Deleted] for a similar example that got me thinking about this, not my own). Suddenly you realise that with magick: a) It works, you get what you asked for and, b) It works whether or not it's a "good" thing you've asked for.

It's a harsh lesson to learn.

Did you try to undo it once it started to happen? (Most people report they couldn't bring back what's been sent out, only re-intend something else afterwards.)

Extra thought: Is it really possible to have something happen to someone if they don't let it/want it somehow?

I love the idea of "re-intending". I am a devoted fan of Neville Goddard, who often spoke & wrote about "revision". He taught that our world is created from our imaginations, and "whatever we can make, we can unmake".
I also tend toward the "there's nothing out there" school of thought, so it seems to be a matter of just controlling thought/feeling, and only that. Is it simple and easy to do IF we believe it is????

"The world is yourself pushed out", as he would say.

Well, for convenience of imagining this, I have a little diagram I quite like.

Think of the "ground" as containing enfolded structure - traces of previous experiences, basically. This evolves and updates automatically: as experiences arise they leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. Thinking also leaves traces, because it occurs in the same space. This leads to what we call "beliefs and expectations" or habits. Memories in the most direct sense.

Normally, people just get lumbered with whatever happens to form structurally as their "ground" or enfolded structure. Magick, however, is the realisation that you can re-form this ground directly via intention - and so doing, change the form of objects (spatial and temporal, things and narrative) that will subsequently arise as the "content" or unfolding structure of experience.

I also tend toward the "there's nothing out there" school of thought, so it seems to be a matter of just controlling thought/feeling, and only that. Is it simple and easy to do IF we believe it is????

So, yes, there's no-thing out there. What you are experiencing right now is basically a sequence of "mirages", the form of which is dictated by the profile of the dunes on the desert floor.

You don't need to control thought and feeling all the time, mostly just let passing thoughts go. Occasionally, you deliberately summon a particular experience in mind with intention, and thereby update your structure - i.e. insert new facts, draw new shapes in the sand. A fact may be now or it maybe a fact of the apparent future. It's not ongoing control, it's occasional updates, and completely letting go - not interfering at all- in between those updates.

This is great news: Mostly, you just sit back and enjoy the show in all its multi-sensory surround-world gorgeousness, unfolding spontaneously and automatically. Now and again you decide you don't like the direction this is going in, and you re-direct by inserting a new fact, setting a new target, and then let the unfolding head at that new angle.

EDIT: Neville Goddard's nightly "re-imagine the day as it should have been" exercise is exactly this. Restructure yourself each evening such that tomorrow begins from the ideal, enfolded starting point.

Q: Thanks so much. I love that. Also, just happy to see someone on this sub knows about him.
I actually had made a longer entry in reply to (and with great sympathy for) BarefootDorothy, but then deleted it. ()(See asterisks below. :)
We are so much more powerful than we realize, and when we begin to stir things up with things like meditation/focused intent, we'd better have some idea what we're doing. In my experience, any kind of "awakening" that occurs when negativity is allowed to abide can be a recipe for certain calamity, unless one changes one's course. I've created a-MAZ-ing circumstances, both desired and undesired. (Time warps, flabbergasting synchronicities, extreme changes, all that stuff.)
Two "kicks in the head" I can point to: "Instant Karma" (they weren't kidding!!) and "the boomerang effect".
I would tell you stories (one is even sort of funny, in retrospect,) but... one reason I'm beginning to think I will probably leave these sites behind (even GITM - we'll see how addicted I truly am or am not!) is that my most serious and delicious endeavor right now is ()divesting myself of my "stories" (). It's wonderful - but you probably know that!
Your posts have been really instructive and you've provided much food for thought! I thank you, Sir. (I assume you're a "Sir", but no tellin' on these sites! You could be someone's cat, for all I know!)*

You could be someone's cat, for all I know!

Quite probably. It would be worth it for the teleporting capabilities! I might look into it as a possible career move. :-)

As you point out, the speed with which things arise can be quite astounding. If you don't realise what you're doing, if you aren't making knowing decisions, it can get quite out of hand pretty quickly. You really gotta remember, "it's all you".

Yeah, you're right about those asterisks!

The reason to be in these forums is to explore your own thoughts and maybe in the process other people get something out of it too, which feeds back to your own thinking. Eventually, though, there's nothing more to be said!

Good that Neville G is getting a bit of exposure. He got the fundamental thing right (the 'felt sense' with intention) well before most people. Nothing wrong with a bit of theatre or visualisation, but it's good to recognise that it's just a means of indirectly adjusting your global felt structure of the world.

...

Anyway, I wished her fat.

I sniggered aloud at that phrasing! :-)

...

Q: Well, I've never tried to do anything outside of things that can affect my mind, but that's still had some amazing effects.
I have a habit of going off on tangents very easily. It's impossible for me to get out of it on my own, and it usually leads to me blowing up at someone. Well, one day, while walking home, I was in another tangent over some conversation at school.
Finally, I was tired of this shit; the constant bickering and damage in my head, so I mentally screamed "STOP!! At that moment, I got a strong vision of being surrounded in a whirlwind of fireflies. I'd never seen anything like it before, and it was beautiful. After they disappeared, I was calm, but tired. I felt like I had used an enormous amount of energy to get me out of that funk, but I still hold that memory clear.
There was another time with sleep paralysis. My second night of having it, I had woken up to me being held in place by shadow snakes. I was terrified, but again I called out the name of a servitor of mine that tried to recreate the whirlwind abilities. This time, fireflies came to my rescue and started consuming the shadow snakes in their bright lights. It was a beautiful sight to behold, but less draining then the firefly tornado.

Go fireflies! Great imagery.

EDIT: Since the fireflies came to you naturally, you should try to utilise them for other things. Send them out on missions on your behalf. Don't drain yourself though by over-intending; let them take the weight.

Q: Oh, I've actually done that before.
Looking back on it, the reason that the first time of making myself relax took so much energy out of me is probably because I had not created a servitor at that point. It's kind of the difference between breaking wood in half with your hands and with an ax.
Incidentally, I also used my servitor to save my grandmother's life. Fr about a week, she had been in the hospital on her last leg. What's worse; she had given up hope and seemed ready to die. Knowing how good I am with hope, I sent my servitor over to her to let his light shine on her, to give her some of my hope. The next day, I got a call from my mom saying that she had a renewed vigor for life.

That's a nice story!

Faith, Natural Law, Control

"People lost faith in natural law itself. Nothing seemed stable or fixed; the universe was a sliding flux. Nobody knew what came next. Nobody could count on anything. Statistical prediction became popular… People lost faith in the belief that they could control their environment; all that remained was probable sequence: good odds in a universe of random chance."
-- Solar Lottery, Philip K Dick

A picture of our day, perhaps.

Has our modern world lost faith in natural law? Lost faith in the belief they can control their environment? Forgotten how, or even that you could? Become subordinate to the rule of numbers and of chance? Nobody could count on anything - even themselves...

(More thought-provoking PKD metaphysical meanderings here [https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/metaphysical-quotations-from-the-novels-of-philip-k-dick/].)

...

It's not about controlling your environment. It's about living in harmony with it

Quite possibly! :-)

Many occultists, though, would say that they are interested in the subject because it offers the hope of having influence over their (personal) environment. Getting what they want, basically, or perhaps fashioning the world into a better place.

Do you disagree with that aim?

The quote can also be interpreted as meaning that people have forgotten that what they intend/think has power, and that by forgetting this they allow the world to become less structured, to drift.

If the environment actually depends on our individual and collective focus, if we let go - what is it we're living in harmony with?

Isn't that like letting go of the steering wheel of your car so that you can "live in harmony with the engine"? Or has the universe got cruise control enabled?

Wouldn't disagree, but controlling and influencing are quite different

Not a bad point, but where is the boundary? If I kick off a pattern and let it unfold - say - then occasionally make adjustments to it (influencing it), am I not effectively controlling it?

Just because it is not constantly within my grip - I don't need to do that because the initial creative process gave it a "momentum" - does not mean it is not entirely under my control. I create it, I tweak it occasionally to ensure it's still unfolding in a pleasing direction, in line with changing circumstances.

That's basically complete control, right? Is that a bad thing? Is there something special or particularly "good" about just letting the pattern run post-creation?

To nature, there is no structure.

No inherent structure, yes I would agree with this. The structure of our minds is the structure we experience as the "world", I might suggest?

"If the environment actually depends on our individual and collective focus, if we let go - what is it we're living in harmony with?"
Can you explain please? :)

But of course! :-)

Let's say that the world is a pattern (like a ripple in some water) that is gradually spreading out, unfolding, under its own initial momentum. If we simply leave it be completely, it will just continue uninterrupted.

But if some people unwittingly influence the pattern, it will become deformed and vague in its direction. The pattern will become less structured. The more disparate and unfocussed the unwitting intentions, the less coherent the pattern will become. It is surely inevitable that this will happen.

If everyone lets go and tries to "live in harmony" with that, the world as happens to and experienced by individuals will gradually fall apart, working in nobody's interests. As you said, "to nature there is no structure". So trying to just stand back and live in harmony with nature, let nature take care of things without actually directing it at all, would be a mistake. You cannot actually rely on the pattern of nature unfolding appropriately!

Therefore our participation should be active; we should all be consciously and deliberately shaping our environments, the structure of mind.

(Maybe. I'm just exploring ideas here to see where they go.)

...

Thought-provoking, thanks.

The thing I'd like to give you is that living in harmony is going with the nature of things. How things act, grow, speak, etc. It's not about resisting this flow, it's about choosing its many directions in which it flows and accept the consequences of those choices.

Well, that was particularly nicely put. :-)

I also liked the imagery you conjured in me of a family having to move house because a tree started growing in it. "Darned nature, at it again!", says Father, packing his bags for the third time in a decade. "This time, we're going to live on a barge!" ;-)

So, nature sees neither good nor bad, it just flows as it is flowing. We perceive good/bad, because we have preferences for how we'd like it to flow, from a limited partial perspective.

We are able to influence that flow directly - quite strongly in a local way (our bodies and thoughts), apparently less so in a wider sense of the apparent larger world (using magick or synchronicity). But to actively fight the larger flow as it is, is folly; it doesn't work anyway, except perhaps temporarily and as a delay mechanism, and leads to suffering. So we strike a balance, seek where to draw the line, as you pointed out...

Dominating in the sense of making something do against its nature or against its will. I agree, the line may be difficult to draw in some cases.

Some thoughts:

What we call "the flow of nature" or "the nature of something" is really just an accumulation of flowing patterns from the past. How did that flow began? How has it become what it has become? What contributions have been absorbed? Not questions that are answerable, but it is now as it is, and it is going in a particular (multi-dimensional) direction.

So, we cannot control but we can request - by submitting or contributing new patterns (intentions, wishes, prayers, rituals) to the flow - and they will be accommodate. How so? Because intentions change the shape of the mind, and so change the landscape of the world, and the landscape dictates the flow of experience. Nature flows through us, as us.

Finally, what dictates the extent of influence, the impact of our intention? Perhaps it is the extent to which we hold on to existing patterns, resisting change (basically, fighting ourselves when changing ourselves). Perhaps some patterns are simply too deeply ingrained to change within a lifetime, or are part of the body's life - such as the unfolding patterns of the body itself, or patterns such as "gravity".

There is also the view that our birth was the start of a pattern, and to let it simply unfold, to flow unimpeded, is to be the most authentic we can be to our own true nature. Our ideas about who we are and what we want cannot ever encapsulate this direct truth, which is acting to create our world at this very moment.

Still, it's fun trying. :-)

Unexpected things are totally natural and part of the infinite flow of the fundamental reality.

Unexpected things..

I guess the question would be: unexpected, by whom?
Not unexpected by nature itself, surely.

I understand and agree with your stance that nature "simply is," and does not pass judgement on itself. However, the fact that humans are able to make something like the periodic table clearly shows that nature has its own distinct dichotomies. In a solution of AgNO3 and NaBr, the two solutes will dissolve and form a precipitate of AgBr. Nature doesn't just say "do whatever you want," those two particular atoms will precipitate because of properties that make them unique. In a sense, nature cares greatly that these atoms will act in a particular way, separating them from other atoms that will act differently.

Nature doesn't "care" about this though, in a judgemental way, or even in a consistent way. Habits are formed, impersonally, and those habits persist, and those habitual patterns have subsequent impacts.

Perhaps that precipitate never formed until, one time, it did. And then a couple more times. And then it became an established habit, and mostly happened from then on.

What I'm getting at: Nature doesn't care-take, and it doesn't design or manage, it just kinda "ends up", perhaps? It looks like regularity and law now, but that's only from our perspective in the current state of ordering.

COMMENTS: Multidimensional Magick

Q: Some say that Tesseract jumping is a better version of suicide, and should only be undertaken in the same circumstances. Some say it is habit forming and leads to permanent tourist syndrome toward any universe one finds oneself in.
What do you say about that? Very intriguing concept - I've never heard of this

I'd probably offer some extra information: When "jumping" you are effectively allowing the structures and patterns of your experience to shift by letting go and allowing. This involves the enfolded "universe" of your mind, consisting of the environment but also the body and thoughts which appear to you. Any pattern that you don't "hold onto" can shift and realign!

This means:

• When you jump you are not just allowing the effective death of your original universe but also of the "person" you have been experiencing as "yourself" until this point. It is worth considering at what stage you are simply no longer "you" and have effectively committed suicide to be resurrected as someone else, because...
• Once you've jumped once, and seen changes, you will no longer be "home". Before, you accepted imperfections as just part of your solid external world. Having let things shift, you realise there is no such thing. Everything is up for grabs, and you can't go back now! "Tweaking for perfection" could become an obsession.

Sometimes, acceptance may be the better route since the balancing effects of narrowly focusing on one particular change after another might not lead to a beneficial result overall [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mdwAkWvWMw].

I'm reading it more like 'the patterns you willingly release can shift and realign'

That's an equally valid way to say it too. The reason I phrased it my way was to imply that the natural state is of letting go and that "holding on" is you resisting change unnaturally. Perhaps that's how you ended up in an undesirable universe in the first place, by blocking the direct manifestation of your desires?

...it turns the concept of faith, something that's often so difficult to get past, into a given and makes one focus instead on what their faith produces. thanks for posting

Yes. I think it captures a few solid ideas into one handy worldview/system, including resistance, identity and True Nature and all that stuff. Had the links for a while but only thought of them again when I spotted /r/DimensionalJumping. (I've been experimenting more with a direct "enfolding, unfolding dreamlike mind-space" type format of late, but actually that fits in quite well with the Multidimensional/Tesseract symbolism.)

Anyway, glad you found it interesting too.

No participation reddit?

New to me too! [https://old.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/] Seems like a domain-based way to restrict contributions to subscribers only.

words are the trouble, like usual.

Pesky words! Okay, I'm going to try and explain my choice better:

I'd say that you can only know what you are holding onto, not know what you are not holding onto - you can't make a list of all the things you you don't know you don't know - and that's the problem with this approach.

You might make a list of what you want to change. But those aren't the only things that will change. Anything that you aren't holding down will shift, subtly or dramatically depending on how extreme the main movements are.

Blanket Metaphor Time

Imagine the world was a blanket (yeah, I love the blanket metaphor) with loads of 'bumps' or 'folds' in it at different heights, representing the current objects of the world. You are one of the bumps, with a limited viewpoint. You've seen some of the other bumps, but not all. You decide to change the shape of two of the adjacent bumps you can see, while holding on to two of the other bumps. Great, yeah? Well, no.

When those two bumps change shape, say grow taller, they pull on the fabric of the blanket. Sure, the two bumps you are holding onto stay the same, and you get the changes you want, but everything else that falls outwith your scope in the world is subtly "pulled". Door handles may turn the other way now; the colour of Alfred's hair might be lighter; Nelson Mandela is alive yet again; Berenstoon Bears. No big deal?

Thing is, lots of other "folds" might have been teetering on the edge of more dramatic change. Several 'bumps' that were adjacent to each other are pulled into a single form, or one pushes into the other, collapsing it...

At the other end of the blanket to your bump/perspective, a chain reaction has started, the effects of which may not fall into your line-of-sight for days. All because you held onto (prevented the change of) one aspect of the world, keeping it static against the larger flow you have requested and so interfering with the normal self-consistency or "coherence" of the whole.

Summary

• We can list the things we are holding onto: that list is finite and within our perspective. We can't list the things we aren't holding onto: that list is infinite and beyond our scope.
• To make any change it is required that other things are allowed to change also, because each object is part of a seamless whole. Any changes that do occur "pull at" the rest of the world as part of the process.
• Artificially restricting change may destroy the previous narrative coherence and lead to more dramatic, unintended changes to compensate for it.
• It is therefore not possible to consciously control the details of the jumping process.

EDIT: Rejigged my description to make it flow better. Obviously, by making this change I may have inadvertently caused other aspects of the world to be altered. If the hair colour of your SO shifts overnight and they develop a hitherto-unlikely love of cornflakes & peanut butter for breakfast, you can blame me.

Q: that makes perfect sense - can't go wrong with the blanket metaphor.
BUT (you knew there was a 'but' coming) - how can you really 'hold on' to anything? As a made up example that hopefully illustrates what I'm thinking:
There's a boy named Tom, and Tom's life is shitty - objectively shitty. We're in an example here, so let's make it as bad as can be. He was born into a North Korean prison camp, and at that, for whatever reason, his position is as low as can be. He routinely gets beat, raped, starved, whatever you can imagine in such a horrible place. Everything is really, truly terrible, and trumps the worst that a 'normal' life dishes out.
Everything except for this certain bird that always lands on the barbed wire fence and sings beautiful songs. Tom gets lost in that bird's song, it's the only thing that gives him peace, or love, or hope or joy - maybe it's the only emotion that he feels, since pain and cold and hunger aren't really emotions. Imagine Andy in the Shawshank redemption with the opera song. Like that but worse, right?
For the sake of exposition, let's say that one day there's an older man dying and Tom happens to be around him while it's happening. He's pulls Tom close and tells him something similar to this [https://old.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/2ax00o/dimensional_jumping_for_dummies_revamped/].
Obviously Tom doesn't have much to lose, but he wants to hold on to that bird. What does he really know about it? Its song? The shape of its body? The way it makes him feel? How can any of these things be more than an 'imagining' and how to 'hold on' to such a wispy thing?
Even if he could - does he know where the bird lives? How and where it hatched? What it eats? If any of those things change - possibilities all of them, since no doubt he'll be wishing for a change of scenery to say the least - how can that bird still be there?
Example:
It's similar, in a way to Zeno's paradox - no matter how much you 'have' (there's an interesting wording) of something to 'hold on' to - the shape of the bird, it's song, the way it makes you feel, etc - you'll never have it all. There's always something missing, always something lost.
So - when you say 'you can only know what you are holding onto', and I think your argument for that was quite sufficient, what then? Tom knows that he's holding onto the bird, but how does Tom hold on to the bird?

Reply Part I

That was a nice piece of storytelling and a great point! Nice when a discussion teases out the issues like this.

To recap:

• What does it mean to hold onto something and how do we know what we are holding onto? And:
• If everything is continuous and whole then how can we hold onto a "part" of it? In other words, how do we define the perimeter of an object? Do we actually need to?

How does Tom "access" the bird and retain it in its current form when everything else is going to shift?

To answer this, we're going to have to push a little into the nature of the world. The blanket metaphor is handy for showing interconnectedness, but of course it implies a 'spatiality' that is not actually present. For this next part, we must dispense with it and realise that in actual fact the whole universe isn't out there, extended, but enfolded into the space right here - intended?

Have to go sort some stuff out. Part II later!

Reply Part II

(Readers: See Part I and the preceding discussion for context.)

Well, we’re going a bit deeper than I’d initially meant to, but let’s go with it and see where we end up, shall we?

Before we offer advice to Tom about his situation, I think we have to talk a little more about what the world is, how it appears to us and how we interact with it. Obviously, we’ll still be trapped within metaphor, but with some juggling we can work our way onwards - and arrive at a practical approach for him.

Beyond the Blanket: Into the Desert

Where is the world right now? It is not “out there”. I suggest that the world is enfolded into the space right here. We talk of the conscious and the subconscious, as if the subconscious was beyond our awareness, unavailable and secret, but it is not. We are simply being biased towards one form of experience versus another as being “real”. We attend to sights and sounds and textures while ignoring another sense that we have: the background and ever-present felt-sense.

This felt-sense contains - no is - the world enfolded. It has no spatial or temporal structure but all aspects are within it. And what we think of as the present moment experience is simply an aspect or perspective of the felt-sense, unfolded into images, sounds, sensations.

Literally, we have a sense of the world and it turns out that this actually is the world.

One can think of the experience around you as a mirage that is floating above the sand dunes of a desert floor. We confuse the mirage with the real world, when in fact the form of the world-mirage reflects the shape of the sand dunes below.

We cannot interact with the mirage directly, although we may be fooled into thinking so; in fact, we can only change the dunes and see those changes reflected in the mirage. Although we might experience single moments as unfolded sensory experience, in truth we simultaneously have access to all time and all space via the dunes.

So, in everyday life we actually make changes by intending alterations of the timeless dune landscape. We might intend our arm to move right now, and it will, and we will feel that we “did something”. However, we could equally intend that our arm move tomorrow, and when tomorrow comes it will seem to happen then. Strictly speaking though, it was always happening that day, from the moment we intended it.

In our metaphor, the mirage is the multi-sensory present moment experience, the sand dunes represents the felt-sense, and what we truly are is the entirety of the desert landscape. When we intend what we are actually doing is shifting our own shape; we become the world we subsequently hallucinate. The world, in other words, is ourselves.

This accounts for its occasionally dreamlike nature: the apparently external world is in fact symbolic of our current state. Or to be more accurate, our current state is symbolic in nature. We don’t need to delve into this to solve our current predicament. Suffice to say that the objects we encounter are in fact meanings.

To finish off, we note that just as all objects were actually continuous forms of a whole in the blanket metaphor, here all objects are dissolved non-spatially and non-temporally into the felt-sense. The difference now is that our metaphor suggests a way we can interact with the world practically.

A. Can Tom hold onto the bird?

So, armed with his new metaphor, how can Tom change his situation while holding onto the bird that has given him so much comfort?

First we must decide what it means to “hold on”. This is easy enough now: since the patterns of the world are the patterns of ourselves, we simply need to intend - basically, just decide - that a pattern is going to persist. We do this accidentally all the time, by implication. (For instance, identification with something implies a resistance to change because you 'stand as that thing'.) Here, we are simply doing it deliberately.

However, importantly, one can only make deliberate decisions about things that are unfolded as objects in awareness. Tom can easily unfold “the bird” from his background sense and intend it will persist - simply by recalling it and making the decision. He cannot do so to aspects which have not yet been object-ified, though.

So, Tom decides that the bird will persist and then relaxes completely. He ‘gives up to God’ as it were, and intends that his situation shifts to the best possible one. With the bird still present.

B. Should Tom hold onto the bird?

The thing is - if the whole world is shifting for his benefit, it’s not clear he should retain the bird. The bird fulfilled a particular purpose: it gave him comfort when the rest of his situation was dire.

Now that he has allowed his situation to flow towards a better one, the bird will no longer have the meaning it once had. In fact, it is likely that Tom’s feelings towards the bird will be quite different. He might have gratitude towards the bird, but he no longer has a requirement for it.

Which sounds harsh. The poor bird!

But what is the bird anyway? The bird was its meaning - of hope and escape. It was the aspect of him that knew there was another way. The bird was his pathway to changing the world and with the world changed, the bird has no place. The bird was actually an aspect of Tom all along, and can now be allowed to dissolve back into his awareness.

Conclusion

A key word here might be "realignment". Why would we want a world which was part changed and part not, a partial alignment to a new existence? An incoherent world means an incoherent self and experience.

In other words, it is not clear that Tom should hold onto anything. Perhaps he should actually let go completely of all patterns in awareness - let the winds of destiny shape his desert floor consistently and naturally - if what he really wants is “the best thing for Tom”.

Afterword

So, how does this apply to the specific workings in the original post? Well, it suggests that the details of the working are a symbolic representation of >3-dimensional space, and stepping from one part of the tesseract to another represents a 'releasing into' parallel possibilities. In other words, the important thing is the understanding and opening to this type of change, rather than the details of the diagrams and so on.

The felt-sense I have described has no dimensions and no limitations, except those placed upon it by the intentions enfolded into it. Recognition of this alone will improve your experience of the world - i.e. yourself.

...

Right, I'm back.

I'll begin by saying that my original posting doesn't necessarily recommend performing Multidimensional Magick; it just points out an interesting approach. For me, it's as much about how it illuminates the nature of experience. With that in mind, we're going to push it to the extreme.

Why Jump?

It may well be that "stoic acceptance" is a better approach to life rather than expose oneself to an unpredictable process that one cannot fully guide. However, what would it mean to guide, to know in advance, what was going to change? We wouldn't actually want to have to go through each aspect of the the world individually and adjust it. The key here is to ask what the nature of the change is going to be.

What's really happening?

• We're letting go of the world so that it can shift.
• We're intending certain changes.
• We're allowing the world to shift to accommodate those changes.
• In the process of that accommodation, the world rebalances as a whole.

So, potentially we get something we want and simultaneously everything becomes more harmonious at the same time. The more we try to control the details consciously, the less coherent and harmonious the result is.

To ponder: What if we just didn't do the intention, and simply let go completely? Might that perhaps give us not what we want - but what we really, really want? In other words, the question might be not so much about whether we jump, but whether we control the jump at all.

It's not Solipsism

Solipsism is when we think the "person" we are is the only person on the world. This is something different. In one sense we are saying that the whole world is the person. Taking it a step further, we realise there is no "person", there are no "people", there is only the world. You and I are both the world.

It can be hard to reconcile this mentally with an idea of a "you". One approach is to think of each of us as our own dreamworlds, which are connected at some higher dimensionality. In other words, an intersubjective idealism.

For practical purposes, you can just treat "all this" as your dream, with you being the dreamer, the dream and all its content. The "person" you seem to be is a dream character, just as the other people you encounter. Since "everything is you", you will not behave solipsistically, you will not be cruel to yourself.

Tom Falls into the Mirror

All your ideas about changing oneself, bettering oneself, escaping oneself - all of those ideas depend on what one thinks of as "oneself". Without having that clear first, we cannot really weigh up the pros and cons of apparent suffering vs transformation.

One of the problems with Tom's story and our interpretation at the moment is that we are talking about "Tom" as if he is separate from his world. We talk of meaning and what the world means to Tom. This isn't quite the correct wording though: The world is literally parts of what Tom really is. Tom is the world; "Tom-the-person", meanwhile, is just a perspective and a collection of thoughts within that world.

When Tom sees war and catastrophe, that is not just a representation of Tom's inner turmoil, it is literally part of Tom, unfolded into sensory experience.

...what now? he's not getting beaten or starved anymore, but surely his sanity must be in tatters? we can assume he lands in a 'real' place. His mom is gone. In fact, to the world he finds himself in, it's as though she never existed. The thing which made his life possible is irreparably lost.

But the thing that made Tom's life possible was not "his Mother", she was just an aspect of the experience. What would happen in this extreme case is that Tom would be confronted with his true nature: He is an "aware space" in which experience arises.

He is not any of the content of his experience. He is the background in which experiences appear. He had forgotten this, assuming an external world and that tone part of experience - his thoughts and body sensation - were "him".

Was the jump worth it? Would he be God?

Being God: Would ya?

One worry people might have is that, effectively, this sort of magick implies that one can be God. More worryingly, it implies that one already is God.

Before they've thought about the implications, people quite like the idea of Infinite Power. Actually it might not be so attractive - it could get boring pretty quick. It's cheating. It breaks down what we think is important in our lives.

• If you could change anything instantly, without going through an apparent process, it means you could do anything and have anything. It would just happen. (God.)
• Or you might change things to you liking, but choose to forget that it was different - i.e. you deliberately forget that you used your Godly Power to update the world and make it nice. Just so you could enjoy it all more. (God + Memory Wipe.)
• Alternatively, you might say it's okay to have what you want and remember asking for it, but you're going have those things arrive through seemingly normal channels. In fact, you will have updated the world to get what you want, but you will experience it as happening via coincidence and opportunity. (Magick in the World.)
• Another option is to hide from yourself the fact that you get what you want. You simply always get what you ask for, but never realise it. You live a life of struggle and triumph, terror and joy, and only at the end will you realise it was your own creation; you were chasing your own shadows in a fictional grand adventure. (Powerless Person.)

At any point, one might "realise" themselves from one situation to another via insight. The Powerless Person might notice that, hey, something is going on here -> Magick in the World. They might later realise they aren't a person at all, and are effectively the world itself! For a while, you become God. Then you get bored of that, and decide that you'll make everything ideal, but then forget that you did it (God + Memory Wipe).

Then you're back to Powerless Person...

Conclusion

Aurelius has it right. As he implies, the world is yourself pushed out. All change is to the self. Live from the perspective of a person, but understand this is not the case. Objects appear and disappear; they are patterns in experience. The universe is transient and it is made from meaning. But that meaning is you.

thanks so much for your response, and for taking the time to have this whole discussion with me and flesh out the bones of what this idea can mean. A proper reply later..

Well, it's a dialogue, so we're unfolding it together for the benefit of all!

Don't you think it's strange that there 'seems' to be a self-realization phenomenon on a global scale going on these days??
I decided to check this subreddit today after 2 months of constant synchronicities, "injected thoughts", visions and divinations and all too conveniently I ran into you and your posts!!
Eschaton? Noosphere? Universe reversing itself? Everyone 'awakening'?
What do you think is going on.

When you ponder it for a bit, it actually makes sense that there should be changes on a global scale. Although I always scoffed a bit at the optimism of this in my early days, think about it:

When you become clearer about things yourself, you effectively dissolve the boundaries between your personal self and the world (realising they are the same things). Meaning that the barriers between your own thoughts and intentions and everyone else are greatly reduced.

If you have "realised" how things are, you help everyone else (also you really) realise the same thing.

So you're saying that all those steps basically get boiled down to: allow the world to shift

Once you look at what you're actually doing: yes.

At first though, we might think we are going through various steps, thinking things through, deciding what we want (as if we don't already know deep down), choosing something then letting go, letting it happen. The four steps I listed.

But we only need to do that because we went off track at some point. In the end, what we're really aiming for is a state where we're balanced, and our desires and the world are aligned anyway. No resistance.

If we hadn't "fallen" at some point during our lives - started pushing and pulling instead of flowing - we wouldn't feel the need to do magick in the first place. Our world would be us, effortlessly, whereas currently its movement is busy fighting through our defences.

However, while we still feel we've got things to "work through", there will still be stuff to "be done".

correct me if I'm wrong - you're going down a sort of Alan Watts path of "God playing hide-go-seek with itself"

Well, I don't really like that angle because of its anthropomorphism and I don't quite see us as a part of anything. But I'm struggling to describe it at the moment.

Is there such a thing as transformation?

There's such a thing as a change in perspective and identification. Do you think one should have to work hard for the goodies? Might that not be like rippling the water in the hope of clearing view to the bottom of the stream?

Implicitly there are different levels to these conversations:

First, everything is as it is already, so let things be. You are already whatever you are, you don't need to do anything to get there. Life will forcibly unravel you and make you clear (since the world is you and it tends toward harmony).

Second, yes but... can I make it happen? Then there are two options: Accelerate the process by deliberately searching out and working through aspects of yourself, analytically or experientially. Or quicker: Just drop straight to the non-resistance level, including letting go of more structured beliefs, and deal with the massive shift.

The middle ground is intended shifts with the "collateral damage" of partial reharmonisation. (Or perhaps you could just intend to Be God Now, thanks.)

Which you choose depends on what you're aiming for and what results you want in the interim. Are you looking for harmony, a nice car, total annihilation and rebirth, or what - for instance.

a cover for not having the perseverance to really push through whatever it is...

But is the "pushing through" not just a bit of theatre? Something we just play at, which actually has nothing to do with seeing how things are or changing ourselves. You do all this stuff on the stage, getting your performance just right, so that you eventually allow yourself to exit stage right and go out into the street.

the narrative by-products of the system one chooses to live by.

That's very interesting. Is it that the basic truth is fashioned into a narrative, which implies a worldview which then impacts the behaviour of followers and therefore the world?

In other words, the end-point might be the same for all (originally) but the extra "prove you're worth it" path each organised religion sets its followers (rather than just saying let go and have faith) actually mutates the teachings and causes collateral damage. There's somethng in that (if I've followed you correctly).

if I'm a zen superhero and I can accept everything in my life with equanimity, what about the people around me and how it affects their lives? what about my kid who was depending on me to get food on the table?

Well, the position isn't so extreme. What you describe there is a "selfish solipsism", but most teach a compassionate stance. After all, you have worldly responsibilities ("chop wood, carry water") and Shiva looks out the eyes of all. It's not nihilism.

Tibetan Dream Yoga, for instance, is very specific that - yeah, it's all a dream, but you still have dream bills and dream gravity, and the dream bankruptcy or dream impact won't be any more pleasant for them being part of a dream!

Rambling's good.

And, just as a final aside, I don't mean any of this as an attack against you or what you're saying...

Of course not! And obviously I'm pushing things to the edge a bit to open out our discussion, and enjoying your responses and challenges. Will reply properly tomorrow.

right - just better to throw that little caveat out there. this is the internet after all.

I agree. Those pesky t'nets! How something is read can depend on the mood - better to state explicitly where one's coming from if it might not be clear! But yeah, ideas and discussions like this are either fun or useful or interesting or less so. What they aren't, though, is personal.

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Philip K Dick definitely felt the shifting, transparent nature of the present moment experience - but I think he did not cope with it very well, struggling to make sense of it. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Ubik, Eye in the Sky and The Man in the High Castle are all on my top list of novels which generate the "feeling" of this. You can detect him trying to make sense of his experiences within those books.

Good call on Waking Life. I think it's very smart in lots of ways and I think Richard Linklater is somewhat in-the-know (he also directed A Scanner Darkly, after all).

That part where Linkater himself tells the story of Philip K Dick's Flow My Tears synchronistic experience shows you what it's about. We all say "yes" in the end. (Transcript of that part is available here [Dead link] for other readers.)

I also love The Holy Moment chapter.

EDIT: There's also his How To Build A Universe essay [http://downlode.org/Etext/how_to_build.html]. Meanwhile, I thought I'd read Divine Invasions, but looking it up I'm not so sure!

How many countless people have been shown some sense of a way (and perhaps gained a willingness to take the first few steps as a result) becuase of Dick's burning to know the truth!

This is true of me, definitely. Just even to be led to suspect that there is "something else to all this" is a major step. The likes of Philip K Dick (and non-fictionaly people like Robert Anton Wilson) enabled the everyday reader to be opened up to these possibilities.

Agree with you about Linklater's PKD connection. I also think what his works communicate is probably a small fragment of whatever esoteric knowledge he possesses.

His film work drips with it, there is a lot going on there, especially relating to time and connection. If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy the short film On Cinema and Time at the BFI website. (Just re-watched and it actually includes the pinball scene and the holy moment scenes, coincidentally.)

I'd forgotten all about the rooftop guy who dissolves! You should check out this interview below; there's lot of interesting Waking Life stuff in it:

DAVIS: Tell me about the character who seems like an alien, the kid who speaks in a very detached monotone about human life?
LINKLATER: That scene has a funny lineage. My animation partners on this, Bob Savison and Tommy Palotta, had done a short film called Snack and Drink that I think's going to be on the DVD. And it's about that guy. His name is Ryan, and he was a 13-year-old autistic kid who they knew. They just shot some video of him walking up to a convenience store and getting a snack and a drink and talking about cartoons and music. He's kind of regurgitating a litany of things -- you know how autism works in the mind. So they were like, "Hey, you've got to get Ryan in here somewhere." I did have room for a teenager, but then I thought of another idea. I always had this idea as a kid, that you're in a science fiction sort of world and that you would encounter an alien who had been here a thousand years. He had kind of used Earth up and was departing, and you encounter him at that moment, on his last day.
-- Waking Dream, Technosis interview with Richard Linklater

I do think that Linklater has experimented a bit more than he necessarily lets on - other interviews suggest so anyway. I also think Matthew McConaughey might have asked him for some tips relatively recently. :-)

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It's The McConaissance!

For years, McConaughey embodied complacency; he was an actor who bought too heavily into his own allure and therefore stalled out early on. The fact that he has been able to unravel that perception in a few roles shows how wrong we were.
-- The McConaissance, The New Yorker

It triggered for me when I saw The Lincoln Lawyer. I thought: something's changed here; something's going on. True Will leads to True Detective?

Meanwhile, it turns out I do have the ebook of Divine Invasions on my desktop machine but I've never actually read it! So that's something for me to look forward to. Thanks for the nudge.

Me too!

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I'm sitting happily tethered to this projection of my life but I am aware of this concept because it is the polarized side of how I cast spells. I take parts from these other realities and bend them to my own will to shape my current one.
When I was first being initiated I used a moment of improbability and "jumped" my life track to this one but I have no idea how and can not do it again. After reading this I don't think I I'll try :3

Well, you have to give up everything if you want everything; relinquish all control to gain the ultimate control. Resistance is useless!

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...have you ever read the term "tesseract" used to describe journey work?

I was familiar with it as a mathematical shape - a 4-dimensional hypercube - and as a way of representing time diagrammatically (and in crap films!) before I came across this, but hadn't seen it used as a concept in other esoteric practices. But I think the overall approach is intimately linked with practices involving inner and outer.

Could changes be a subtle as a plant growing where it was not growing previously?

Exactly this. Let's explore!

The World is You

What if we look at the world as your extended self; in its entirety it is your true self. If you change one part of the world, there will be corresponding adjustments elsewhere, in two senses:

1. The sense of it being a continuous material. If you tug on one section of a blanket of material, other parts of it will get changed also. If you create a new fold in one area, other folds will be changed: they will be pulled to a new location, may combine with other folds, or even collapse completely into the flat background. Self-balancing.
2.The sense that all of the world is meaning, is an aspect of you. When when you change the form of yourself, the world will correspond to that (because it is that). For instance, having a clear sense of self you may notice that the skies literally have less clouds in them. When you have a clear idea of what you want in life, you might that the winding path into the village literally has less stones or pot-holes than it used to; it might even now be a straighter path. Self-presentation.

The essence of Multidimensional Magick is also that of changing the enfolded aspects of the "inner self" because the "outer world" is just an unfolded image of that. The limits of what can happen depend on the balance of intention and of letting go - "decisions and permissions".

But how?

Inner and Outer

This sounds a bit vague initially, because we are left with wondering what/where that "inner self' is. Actually, it's right here right now.

• The "outer world" is the present moment's sights, sounds, textures, thoughts - which all arise in one mind-space. These experiences are transparent, mirages, and cannot actually be changed directly.
• The "inner world" is the subtle background felt-sense you have. Everything is enfolded into that. This is what you change with magick.

The thoughts that arise to you and the objects you encounter are both just experiences and both come from the same place, unfolding from this felt-sense. So to change yourself is to change the world, and vice versa.

Attempt at illustrating that and the feedback-loop nature of experience in this diagram. The unfolded is experienced as sensory objects; the enfolded is experienced as the felt-sesne.

The Underlying Process

So really, I think all magickal processes involve releasing our hold on the mirage of the moment to better connect with the felt-sense. It is always there, just as the stars are in the sky even at noon, they are just obscured by the brightness of the sun.

At that point, any intention will shift the enfolded structure, subject to your beliefs and identifications. Basically, we "insert new facts" into the universe at the lowest level. The more you let go of holding onto any particular pattern the more the felt-sense, and therefore the world, can shift. Most people have quite a tight hold of their personal self and of certain basic rules of reality - not to mention that many basic rules have now become quite deeply entrenched as "habits of the world" - which limits what might happen.

Fundamentally though, there might be no true limit. And even minor changes could lead to instant changes. Perhaps this explains the stories in /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix, for instance. (The ones that aren't just dreams and forgetfulness, that is.)

Meanwhile...

...the 3d projection of a tesseract from the wiki...

I try not to look at it. It's so hypnotic. One can so easily get lost in time and space... :-)

TL;DR: All magick is changing your self-world. Any changes to your self changes the world; any change you see in the world is a change in your self. This includes plants growing in unusual locations.

I really enjoyed the blanket analogy. I think I like it so much because there is a homey facility with fitting sympathetic magic into it. Even if it is one person's blanket, the shifting could make someone else have cold feet.
Thanks for the thoughtfulness of your reply!

Haha, I really liked your comment - thanks :-)

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Q: [Deleted]

Yes, it's quite similar overall. In effect, it's another conceptualisation of possibility. In truth, it's just a scheme by which we might allow ourselves to intend over all time-and-space, across the entire enfolded world.

There are no actual dimensions and realities and many-worlds or whatever. Rather, there are inter-subjective minds. And the intersubjectivity is not a limited sort; it doesn't restrict possibiliites.

This happens to me randomly. People to whom I've spoken about it think I'm crazy and self-centered and a solipsist. I should figure out how to control it better, because to me it's currently just a curiosity and/or an annoyance (e.g. picture burning something because you turned on the wrong burner and ruining a nice dinner).

It's actually not solipsistic (something I'll pick up on in a later reply) but I think that in general for a stable world you need a stable posture, as it were. By which I mean that we are not fluctuating between detached relaxation and narrowed attention, mixing releasing and pushing.

Ctrl-Z Magick

People occasionally report "reset" events that occur when they are in danger (example [A Hiccup In Time], example [Discovered this sub and have two things I can't understand]) - such as time jumping back to before a crash, or an injury being reversed. These jumps seem to be spontaneous, and not willed.

Has anyone experimented or had experience with this "Ctrl-Z" undoing of events intentionally?

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Q: [Deleted]

Ah yes, I remember reading about that. Thanks! Pretty fascinating. It brought to mind Rupert Sheldrake's thoughts about morphogenic fields - rats learning a maze help the skills of subsequent, unrelated rats.

My thinking then was: If the universe is basically timeless, then - like our student friends - perhaps it needn't matter when the rats are trained; the fact of maze training would help all rats to some extent. In other words, just as the later rats benefit from the first rats knowledge, so the first rats might have been benefiting from the second rats' skills. (This would need to be tested for specifically, and I'm not even sure that the nature of such an effect would even be available for testing.)

However, that's not quite the same as being able to "take time back" [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/SapphireAndSteel] when one encounters a situation they don't like. It does demonstrate that time itself isn't a sequential set of isolated moments that can only unfold in one direction though. If we can take time back, then: how? And: does the whole universe get taken back? Just your locality gets warped? Is it a case of personal realities?

It's worth considering that the original event that gets undone might be an extremely realistic, full-spectrum premonition.

That's an interesting possibility: An intense premonition that leads you to automatically take action to avoid it while in a state of 'imagery'. It's hard to separate the two possibilities though, obviously. Quite a few reports (e.g. suddenly being a mile away from where you experienced the crash, and there being two people in the car who experience the jump, etc) don't fit that idea, which makes me think there's 'something' more to it than that.

Since magick (invoking our friend Fotamecus, for instance) is known to allow us to stretch or compress time, there could be some mix of time manipulation and premonition happening. But then, at what point does that get so complicated that a "magickal reset" becomes the simpler explanation?

Another explanation is just a shared 'drop out' into a dream, so that a stretch of the experience just didn't happen at all anyway.

The reason for asking the OP question was that, since it's hard to tell the difference between the above explanations when they're not deliberate, perhaps stories of intentional resets by people who are already knowledgeable about the occult/magick could be insightful.

I "reset" losing my watch one time. I still can't explain how it happened. I was at camp, at the pool, and took it off so it doesn't get wet. When we were already on the bus to go back to camp I realized I had left it there. My first thought, this was really weird, was "No! I didn't lose my watch! That didn't happen!" Completely denying that it happened, then I noticed my watch right there on the bus seat next to me.

Thanks for that, interesting. Various "stories" of types:

• Falling on a hill badly and "willing" it undone. Ankle still broken, but bones perfectly aligned for setting.
• "Willing" a reported fatal car crash undone. Going to the site, seeing an obviously bad tyre mark pattern.
• Lots of recovered objects, lost elsewhere but discovered at home or in unusual situations after "deciding" they aren't lost.

Individual stories to be taken with a pinch of salt, but all seem to have the common theme of "asserting" a positive alternative to the situation, or "asserting" the complete absence of the situation (but not focusing on the unfortunate situation and then trying to mentally changing it).

I don't think I ever encountered anyone claiming that experience before the 2000s, but that's entirely my personal experience, and not something I'm holding up as historical canon.

Me neither, but the nature of the experience to me seems like it would be less "special" - e.g. UFOs and spirits and so on - and more just bewildering and confusing. I can imagine not really talking about it except to a friend or two, who probably wouldn't be very interested in talking further. Because it's rare, there's not really been a community for these people - until the Internet became generally accessible and various websites meant they'd hear other, similar stories. Circa the start of the 2000s, funnily enough.

I think it's all storytelling, myself, and not even a misattributed experience resulting from a stressful incident. But I could be wrong.

In general with 'odd stuff', I'd agree - but these stories tend not to be very showy or looking for attention, compared to some of the others. I tend to think the experience is genuine; what the nature of that experience is, I don't know.

The suggestion of an intense premonition/mini-dream is a possibility. Like a minor, accidental DMT hit. Or simply the adrenaline hit of a near-miss messing with the memory. (Because of course, these incidents are reported from memory, so it's their memories they are reporting not the incident.)

PKD - Punched Paper Memory World

One of my favourite Philip K Dick short stories is The Electric Ant. Give it a read first...

SPOILERS

Anyway, it makes me think: Although we don't have a punched paper roll inside us, we do have an equivalent - the memory-surface of our minds. Any experiences we have leave traces, which are then activated by subsequent experiences. We don't really see the room around us directly, we get a couple of glances, and the visual and feeling memory of the room are activated. We experience our memories, rendered as senses in a "perceptual-experiential mind-space".

So, if we were able to edit our memories - like the electric ant amending his punched paper - would we be changing our apparent reality, in a direct experiential way, not just altering what we'd recall when thinking-about something?

When in magick we "declare something to be true" by assertion, act or ritual, is this what we are really doing?

And to what extent did our world of experience have an external starting point anyway; perhaps it began with random noise which slowly formed stable patterns via feedback. In that case, reality is only memory - albeit maybe not personal memory - and so is completely flexible...

What happens when the universe forgets something?

See also this preview book [http://youaredreaming.org/assets/pdf/YouAreDreaming_04252013.pdf] which describes quite well the dream-like nature of waking reality - as a mind theatre inspired by, but not dictated by, the "senses". Or noise and memories?

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Our punched paper is comprised of DNA

I don't think that's true. DNA may operate as a reactive surface for biological development, but it doesn't govern your experience of reality.

For instance, you learned to ride a bike - is that in your DNA now? You learned how to recognise particular objects as you went along, is that?

The "punched paper" you have now is, perhaps, patterns you've accumulated in your brain. Although I think it's better to use the word "mind" since it has less baggage (and we experience our minds; we don't experience our brains).