TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 2)

Overwriting Yourself

Overwriting Yourself

It is fun to contemplate reality from the perspective of idealism and subjectivity, and talk of consciousness as an undivided whole. Imagining the world as a dream-like experience which might be subject to one's will can trigger in us all sorts of exciting possibilities. However, it's one thing to dream about a dream in this way; it's quite another to knowingly dream the dream itself. Is it even truly possible, or is it just a fun and comforting idea?

How can we get there when our everyday experience doesn't quite correspond to this ideal? One approach is to attempt to directly alter our experience to conform to it.

The Experiential Dream-Space

If it is true at all that reality is dream-like then it must be true right now. In the room you are apparently in, at this very moment. So look around. Furthermore, your own body and thoughts must themselves be dreamed, along with every other experience you are having. All of this must be arising within an open "dream space" made of mind, of awareness. All of this experience is "you"! It doesn't usually feel that way though, does it? Why not?

Even if we understand intellectually that everything is consciousness and the world is undivided, we still usually feel that there is an inner and an outer to experience, that we are "located" and separate, except during certain peak experiences. What is the nature of this feeling? Can we tackle it directly? I say we can.

Stuck Thoughts, Incomplete Movements

I suggest this disconnect arises because over time we accumulate forms of "experiential debris" in our dream-space. The ideas we accept, the thoughts we have, the other encounters in the world whether passive or active - all leave traces which, when repeated and reactivated, gradually solidify. There are many implications of this, but the important ones at the moment are:

• Stuck Thoughts. These are basically thought structures that have solidified in your space rather than naturally dissolve. These may be located in your body area or beyond. This sense of division between body and world is one such thought.
• Incomplete Movements. These are intentions which were resisted or aborted before they followed through to completion. This might be a suppressed startle response, a decision to do something which you then halted by tension or a reverse intention, and so on.

Neither of these would arise or be a problem if we lived in open non-resistance. However, most of us are holding on to - identifying with - certain patterns in awareness, and this prevents the natural passing and dissolving of these structures. This leads to a sense of clutter and constraint (stuck thoughts) and tension (incomplete movements).

Subtle Identity, Subtle Boundary

Although all held structures interfere with our direct appreciation of the dream-like experience, there are two particular ones which being subtle are often overlooked:

• The first is the Subtle Identity. This is a sense of location, usually somewhere along the centre line of the body. It is a "stuck thought" which consists only of a felt-sense. It is where you feel "me" to be, even as you obviously experience it from outside - i.e. "me" is experiencing "it".
• The second is the Subtle Boundary. This often corresponds to what is perceived as one's "personal space". As with the identity, it is a subtle felt-sense, a three-dimensional structure felt as a subtle "wall" between one area of the dream-space and the rest. Again, it consists only of a located feeling.

The key to directly experiencing the undivided nature of your world is to at least recognise, and ideally dissolve, these two structures.

Releasing Held Structures

There are three general approaches to releasing these structures, ranging from passive to fully active:

• Passive. Simply lie on the floor each day for about 10 minutes. Completely let go to gravity, and allow your body and thoughts to move as they will. If you find your attention narrowed on some aspect of experience, simply let go of holding your attention. Let it roam as it will. Gradually, over quite a long period, your held patterns will unravel naturally. However, you will feel benefits of increased clarity almost immediately, as the most shallow structures evaporate rapidly.
• Investigative. In this approach, you actively sense out difficult areas and release them. Sometimes we know there is a particular problem that needs tackled, other times we might scan our bodies or larger space and seek them out. Either way, we approach this task with an open, relaxed attention. Having identified a particular stuck area, we "sit with it" and let it intensify and release into the background of its own accord.
• Active-Assertive. The more extreme version is to go straight for the desired result. Residual structures are accumulated over time, a deformation of the nature open, empty experience that we began with. Instead of gradually diffusing these structures, we can instead wilfully assert open space as our experience. To do this, we allow our attention to open out and be unbounded: expand into the whole body space, the room, and beyond. We take our stand as the background space in which patterns appear. We then simply assert - declare to ourselves as fact, summon the feeling of it being true - that we are experiencing complete open, structureless space. You will immediately feel the contrary to this: it is not yet true and so you will be very aware of the elements of experience which are not open and empty. Reality will offer its counter-assertion! Regardless, you simply stay with this posture of assertion and sit with it. Gradually, the resistance will soften. With regular practice, you will rapidly approach a clearer more, open experience - the subtle identity and boundary will become particularly obvious to you, and soften subsequently. However, a sense of expanded space and looser division will be almost immediate. Important: You are asserting the feeling of truth of this directly into the dream-space here, rather than merely thinking-about it.

Note that with the final approach, you are effectively overwriting yourself with empty space. As such, it is natural that you will encounter quite strong resistance and even a sense of existential fear. For this reason, it is probably better to start with one of the other methods, build up to this, and begin with only "light assertion" until you become acclimatised to the experience.

Afterword - This process is closely related to the interrelationship of arising experience, creativity and memory formation. See /u/ava_santana's post on a feedback model of experience and my comment here. Intend to do more on that and its connection to magick and "pattern transformation" later.

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What sort of exciting possibilities has this unlocked for you?

Puppeteer of the dream-space.

Q: Hi! I tried out the 'passive' model of what you suggested last night - I read quite a few other posts on this sub after reading yours, so this is not directly/only related to what you've written here. After lying still for a while, I felt like I was 'stuck' in my head. I've meditated before, although not a great deal, but enough to have some experience with thoughts arising and passing without identifying with them. I have some history with the 'fourth way' of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky as well which is also related. That to say, while I've played around with consciousness in the past, I've never connected it with space (or the lack of its concentration in space as you're talking about in this sub), which is probably why I've never had this experience of feeling 'stuck' before. What I mean by this 'stuck' feeling is that 'all' of my consciousness was sort of balled up there. Do you have any suggestions for moving it around? To the bottom of my feet, for example, or the corner of the room? Somewhat unrelated, have you read 'The Great Book of Amber' by Zelzany?

EDIT: Okay, you've bought up a great topic, so inevitably I just couldn't stop typing once I got started! :-) But it's useful to get some of these related points down in one place I think.

Stuck in your Head

After lying still for a while, I felt like I was 'stuck' in my head.

That's usually the first impression people seem to get, and it can be surprising. People meditate, work on letting their thoughts pass and so on, get some success - all the while not realising they have circumscribed their world into this little area. It doesn't really give any 'content' much room to arise and dissolve - no wonder people find themselves so "thinky". They are effectively "clenching their being" constantly. And tense, unmoving patterns spew out thoughts, no matter where they are in the body-space. Another side-effect is that they are living their lives in "blind-sight". You are not truly out there in the world, you are only seeing it through a peripheral view, actually experiencing your thoughts-about rather than your direct-sensing.

I have some history with the 'fourth way' of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky as well which is also related

Now, I've read a little of Gurdjieff, but never really pursued it. It was going to take a bit more dedication to it than I could muster at the time, although it seemed pretty fascinating (I was looking into the Alexander Technique at the time).

Attention is not a Torch

What I mean by this 'stuck' feeling is that 'all' of my consciousness was sort of balled up there. Do you have any suggestions for moving it around? To the bottom of my feet, for example, or the corner of the room?

I know exactly what you mean. To get clear - because your "consciousness" is actually always everywhere - let's call it "attention" for now. The problem you have is that your default "attentional profile", its extent in space, has become defaulted and constrained to a certain area. You can temporarily force it out, but it'll spring back for two reasons:

• You are trying to move it, when attention is not something that is to be moved - because it is not thing. The metaphor of the torch-light is incorrect, it is more like a 3-dimensional spatial filter, a "profile varying the intensity of experience across space".
• You have accumulated structure/habit in your world where your attentional profile always settles into that shape, that location, probably with a 'felt-sense' boundary. Basically, you've ended up with a little "valley" in this area of your world.

Okay, the three methods described in the post are pretty much for this. First of all, adopt this assumption: Your natural state is to be completely open, without even an attention boundary - no localisation. Following the passive approach regularly (in which you don't concentrate, simply let go), your tensions and division would eventually unfold by themselves, and your attention would become increasingly open. But this takes patience, and you have to do it every day, and you have to not mistreat yourself (by forcing and pushing) in between times, ideally. The secret to doing this more deliberately is: You do not move your attention to an area of experience, rather you expand it to include that experience in your area of attention. The area you include doesn't need to be adjacent - what you are effectively doing is "increasing the intensity of attention at that point" - but it's initially helpful if it is. So, next time you're lying down, discovering you are constrained into your head area, let it be. Then feel out the tips of your toes, and include them. Gradually, feel out your whole body, bit by bit, in this way. Then feel out the space around you body, and beyond. Remember, you are not really moving or expanding consciousness - that is already everywhere, what your experience is and is made of. You are basically including aspects of experience more fully in attention, and eventually dissolving the boundary of attention - the habitual valley - completely.

Switching Perspective

Now, this approach is focussed on the content. It is possible to short-cut this by switching perspective to the background space in and of which content arises. The exercise in the middle of this post tries to help with that. Also, Rupert Spira tries to lead someone to this in this interview. Once you know that you are really the whole space, you can just switch perspective to it. That doesn't mean all the debris disappears instantly, but it stops being troublesome, you are opened-out, and the debris will even be slightly loosening during daily activity while you are in this mode. The author Greg Goode has referred to this as Standing As Awareness, in the book of the same name. Another quick shortcut is to include in your attention an external sound, such as distant traffic. Sounds are more discrete that images, and so attending to a sound often draws you to, and releases you into, the silence surrounding it. Finally, including (not focussing, remember) the sensation of space just behind your forehead (where "your pre-frontal lobes would be"), can also help, since the thought-generation tends to occur nearer the back of your head-space. In general, then, we want to avoid deliberately narrowing our attention, and find ways to encourage and allow it to open up without force - since force tends to paradoxically fix the current pattern in place.

Further Reading

A martial artist called Peter Ralston has a nice phrase, "feeling-awareness", that he uses for this "sensing out" approach, and covers some nice exercises in his book. You might find it interesting. You might also be interested in the work of Les Fehmi on open/narrow focussed attention. And here is a nice illustration from a review of Marion Milner's book, A Life of One's Own, which captures it somewhat.

Somewhat unrelated, have you read 'The Great Book of Amber' by Zelzany?

No, not heard of it. Fancy giving me some highlights? I've been mostly re-reading old favourites from Philip K Dick, Haruki Murakami and JG Ballard lately to get me in the imaginative mood. (Latest: Eye in the Sky, a PKD I'd never even heard of, and quite relevant to the subjective idealist platform of this subreddit.)

wow, thanks for such a huge reply. I'll read into it and try tonight.

I had lots of bits of ideas I kept meaning to post about but haven't, so figured I might as well make a comment out of them!

Amber... 'shadow-walk'

Right, that sound interesting. I'm usually more sci-fi than fantasy, but I like anything with clever 'reality' ideas. In fact, that sounds a little bit familiar - someone might have recommended these to me before. Thanks!

quick update - i did what you suggested, and i had a feeling of 'largeness' - i'm not sure how else to describe it. like i was a big ship in the ocean instead of me in my bed. very interesting. thanks

There you go! Great. :-)

Imagine having that as a part of your daily experience. It's pretty hard to build up tension and fear and resistance, while also being so 'open'.

Just Decide.

Lie down on the floor, in the constructive rest position (feet flat, knees bent, head supported by books) or the recovery position (on your side, upper arm forward) and let go to gravity; just play dead. Let your thoughts and body alone, let them do what they will. Stay like this for 10 minutes. If you find yourself caught up in a thought of a body sensation, just let it go again. After the 10 minutes, you are going to get up. Without doing it. Just lie there and "decide" to get up. Then wait. Leave your muscles alone. Wait until your body moves by itself. This may take a few sessions before you get a result, perhaps many, but at some point your body will just get up by itself. Once that happens, avoid interfering with your muscles and let your body go where it will, spontaneously and without your intervention. This is how magick works. All you need to do is, decide. As Alan Chapman says, "the meaning of an act is what you decide it means". But you don't even need an act. You can just decide an outcome, a desired event, to insert a new fact into your world, without a ritual. Just decide what's going to happen. Just decide. Decide to be totally relaxed. Decide to feel calm. Decide to win at the game. Decide to meet that person you've dreamed of. Decide to be rich. Decide to triumph.

Because in this subjective idealistic reality, where the dream is you, what else is there to do?

EDIT: When doing the part of the exercise where you get up, you may find it helpful to centre your attention on the area just behind your forehead. This keeps "you" away from your body, and any attempt to "make" it happen. See Missy Vineyard's book How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live for similar approaches, without the discussion of the larger implications.

EDIT EDIT: Do report back your experiences if you try this.

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Q: Oh, I just remembered something. Long time ago I've heard of a similar exercise. In it you're supposed to stand upright and relax, and then as you say "decide" that your arms will begin raising, but don't actively raise your arms. At some point they should start lifting up as if on their own. I am pretty sure this exercise is related to hypnosis. I've heard it looooong time ago, almost like in a different lifetime.

Hypnosis is pretty much 'decision and allowing, or acceptance of direction, without muscular action'. You are actually doing hypnosis on yourself all the time, but you accompany it with excess muscular tension, to feel that "you" are doing it. I recommend Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will for those interested in more on this.

Will is not an illusion. It's crazy that you slip back into that again after you agreed that it isn't an illusion. Very irritating.

Erm, that's just the title of the book. The book is pointing out that people attribute their actions to themselves after the fact - e.g. the hypnosis thing - when it wasn't "them" that was doing it. However, the book's notion of "themselves" is in correct (it corresponds to the ego thought), and so although it is well written and full of good information, its final analysis is off base (it almost gets it right, then saps out in the last chapter!). My recommendation of the book is that it highlights that we associated "doing" with muscular tension and other false signals; in fact "we" are doing everything, and the notion of Will as commonly understood is incorrect.

Q:
The book is pointing out that people attribute their actions to themselves after the fact - e.g. the hypnosis thing - when it wasn't "them" that was doing it.
This is complete nonsense. It's always you that's doing everything. It can't be any other way.
However, it's not George that's doing it, but you were never George to begin with, see? You are just you! You are that which is open to all options, one of which is George-ing around and humaning around. That's one option of an infinity for you. But it is you. The you that's real, and yet beyond optional identities.
in fact "we" are doing everything
Not "we". Just you. It's not a democracy.

I'll just draw your attention to the phrasing I deliberately used: "People who are interested in this might like this book..."

It's a good read on the topic for those interested. All the rest of what you say, we've already covered and agreed on I think. I'll say this: That having an experience like the one I describe has more influence than any amount of thinking and philosophising or even accepting of a worldview. You can see it in people: Their body moves by itself, and suddenly causality doesn't work how they thought it did. It's suddenly easier to make the connection between how a person can change the world directly - it's "all you" and responsive.

Bah! The more you read around these things, as a person, the more you are able to deconstruct the assumptions you have been made. In my experience, all-or-nothing jumps to an alternative worldview just cannot be communicated to others. Now, that which is behind the person - Shiva! I see Him behind your eyes! - is always listening. Often you can talk to both at once, and one message and another message are received and acted upon in different ways.

I've had experiences words cannot describe, including uncreation and recreation of the known universe. However, I only had them because on some level I could conceive of them and knew how to open my heart to them.

Yes. Also, sometimes experiences lead to the ability to conceive of things that one couldn't previously. That's why there needs to be doing as well as thinking, in a manner of speaking.

That's rare. In fact, I can't think of a single time.

Really? So, you've spent your life assuming, say, that being in the world involves physical effort and trying. Someone demonstrates to you that this is not the case, that things can 'just happen' in line with your wishes. Are you saying that wouldn't result in a change of how you conceive the world and yourself?

(Yeah, I know, you're already there; but you see my point.)

Q:
So, you've spent your life assuming, say, that being in the world involves physical effort and trying. Someone demonstrates to you that this is not the case, that things can 'just happen' in line with your wishes. Are you saying that wouldn't result in a change of how you conceive the world and yourself?
How would someone demonstrate this to me when my prior commitment is not compatible with the demonstration?

In what sense?

Q: Well, suppose I am committed to the idea that I accomplish things by going up against external resistance. Now how would you demonstrate to me that "things can just happen?" (what the hell does that even mean? it sounds fatalistic)

If you are committed to that idea, then enjoy the struggle. I'd prefer to be committed to the idea that it can all be effortless, and that all I need do is make the choice that what I want to happen will happen, and it will.

Q: So I was right. Knowledge precedes experience, always. Contemplation is Lord.

Decision precedes experience. You don't need to deconstruct by contemplation.

And knowledge/understanding precedes decision.

It is not required. Only in the sense of it occurring to you that it is possible for 'such and such' to happen, that you would do the deciding, I suppose.

Q: You can't decide to florodimbare if you don't know what florodimbare is. You need understanding to decide.

I'm more of an interconfibulator, but there you go.

Q: You're just agreeing with me and conceding the point.

Nope, not really. To detail it out: You don't need to understand the details in order to get what you want, you just need to know what you want. That sorter of 'knowledge' doesn't seem very challenging, or much of a hurdle. Needing to understand in detail how the reality 'works' or its nature would be greater hurdle. This is optional though; all you need to do is have demonstrated to you that decision ──> result, and then accept this.

You still need some understanding of what you want.

You need to be able to specify the experience you want to have. That is not a very big leap to have to make.

Your mind is like a peanut in size. That's why I keep surprising you with my posts, like that one time with the tradeoffs.

Bah! My peanut is The Universal Peanut, encompassing all within its husk!

Of course, there is no 'how reality works', except for the patterns enfolded within experience. However, some of these are from [apparent] birth, so it takes a bit longer to dissolve them. While relaxing on your yacht. Eating steak.

Precisely. And you need to believe that such an experience is not just a fancy, but is one potential reality. This is impossible without contemplation if your starting point is one of an ordinary, untrained, conventional human being.

Really, not. The decision is enough, and getting out of the way. You can learn this 'gesture' by practicing the exercise, and you're off.

This is true for everyone at the ultimate level. When I said your mind is a peanut, I meant the capacity you're exercising right now, your ready capacity. I wasn't talking about your ultimate capacity. Ultimately you are Almighty, of course.

Uh-huh. So, you're wielding that Big Universe Power right now, are you? While eating jello sandwiches for dinner accompanied with a mug of water?

You're confirming a pattern and conforming to it. Not dissolving it.

Pattern confirmation is different to pattern leveraging. Ignorant pattern-use is self-reinforcing; understanding that it's enfolded patterns does not do this. In the same way as Dream Yoga leads to karma-free actions just through awareness.

I disagree. You can get started in the way you describe, but getting started will lead you toward the path of contemplation.

The knowledge required isn't very great though, is it? Just "this is a dream" is sufficient. Just decide to switch your perspective to containing space, and you're pretty much there. To stand as awareness. When you become the context rather than the context, you're free.

No. I have a bag of peanuts compared to your one peanut.

But... they're in a bag, all constrained and trapped. It's probably not even a transparent bag.

You can't leverage something that's been dissolved.

Dissolving just means something stops being mandatory. You can use any route or pattern you want. Or not. However, just recognising the existence of a pattern means you can skip it; you can leverage that pattern through choice, or not use it. Recognition of the arbitrariness of a pattern - that it is not actually a shape of the world - is sufficient. It's about giving yourself choices. You don't actually need to dissolve everything to nothing to give yourself that power.

Nonsense. Karma means intent, and Dream Yoga leads to mastery of intent instead of its absence.

Karma means accidental creation of non-transitory patterns through intentions/actions that aren't 'transparent'. Leave no trace.

The knowledge required to get started, to make the first step on a long journey, that's not very great.

The rest is just... patterns. I reckon 2-5 years to dissolve most of the back-up though. But you can still have yachts and steaks while you're doing this. (Actually, that's not strictly true, because everything can get quite unstable during the process.)

Hahaha... oh my. This isn't a knowledge for you yet, is it? . . . In other words, you should be able to put your body and social reputation at risk, or you're not serious. To lean on this knowledge means you can't lean on any competing form of knowledge and still be sure-footed.

I already did. That's why I am where I am now. You're right, in a way, about going "all in" to an approach - the bold step forward. But you can have daily reality-shifts for that, if you don't want to have to completely destabilise all the time. Thing is, I quite like having fun too, y'know?

"Dissolving just means something stops being mandatory." OK, so build something in the sky then. Having yachts is not that!!

Y'mean, like, a personal jet? :-)

That's not what karma means.

That's what not accumulating any karma means. Pattern accumulation, with a corresponding funneling/backlash effect. Feel free to return with your counter!

Q: I reckon 2-5 years to dissolve most of the back-up though.
You are utterly delirious. I can only laugh at this nonsense.
Thing is, I quite like having fun too, y'know?
You can't imagine having fun without a yacht.
Y'mean, like, a personal jet? :-)
No, not like that. Build something that never lands and something you can walk into through any door.
That's what not accumulating any karma means. Pattern accumulation, with a corresponding funneling/backlash effect. Feel free to return with your counter!
So freedom from patterns is a recognizable characteristic in this case. That's a pattern in its own right. A higher level pattern.

Why not? It took me 2 years to do the opposite, and I know what I did. In the space of 2 months I've deleted most of those mental objects. What's your problem with that timescale?

Not that I'll be flying under my own steam quite yet by then. I'll be in a steam-powered airplane though.

You can't imagine having fun without a yacht.

Yes, the yacht is required. Sorry. I must have been a sailor in a previous life. Or a jealous coastguard.

I look at the ideas you bandy around, how you slip into convention and fatalism.

I adhere to the most open view that it's possible to have. I'm just honest about my experiences. I work on the assumption of no-structure, but I also recognise there is apparent structure. I wouldn't want to zero that out over a shorter timescale. I don't want to delete things down to an empty space, actually.

You don't need a yacht to sail the ocean of your own mind.

But the yacht is on the ocean of my mind. In fact, it's the yacht of my mind, sailing the ocean of my mind. I don't see why you think that patterns of my mind (be they yacht-shaped, private-jet-shaped, or whatever) would somehow prevent other patterns taking shape or dissolving, as I see fit. They are non-causal; only I am causal, as the material of experience itself.

That isn't the point. The point is that the possibility of empty space without things shouldn't be a disturbing or frightening one for you. It should be a familiar and navigable space and not something you're running away from.

But that empty space - or rather, place - is already there, right now, in my experience. I can stretch out into it right now. It feels, frankly, very pleasant. You can't navigate it, because it comes before structured space. If I want to dissolve everything in it, of course I could just lie down and go to sleep at any time...

Oh no. The ocean that a yacht is on is like a spit in a thimble compared to the ocean of the mind.

Then I'm "gonna need a bigger boat"!

Q: If I want to dissolve everything in it, of course I could just lie down and go to sleep at any time...
Nope, that ain't it. Sleep doesn't affect the basic pattern. To wit, you still find yourself in a human body, doing human things, 99% of the time, right? Maybe for you, 100%. I don't know if you've ever dreamt yourself in a non-human body doing non-human things.

Yeah, I wasn't being serious actually. Just making the observation. Sure, I've often dreamt of being a 'perspective' or just being 'everything' or anything else. It's easily done, and one of the first fun things about lucid dreaming, once you've finished flying and having 'encounters' with pretty people. In terms of RL, I often just switch to the open space perspective now. No body, just an environment.

No, that ain't it. That's not what I had in mind. I was thinking of a more radical break with familiarity.

Such as? Changing the number of dimensions is fun, having more than one timeline simultaneously is interesting, experiencing multiple moments at once, all that. Feel free to offer suggestions!

What is the point of this?

Really? Switch to being the dream. Then insert facts directly into it.

Be a dragon and do dragon things. Have dragon's concerns, dragon's dreams. That's just a tiny example. Basically step away from humanity in some way.

Sure, that's all been done. Wolves, fish, clouds, just nothingness, all that.

So you're not a dream if you don't do this? Is that what you're saying?

You are always a dream, but sometimes you are dreaming of being a person. You need to dream of being a dream. You can 'inject facts' either way, but freed from human boundaries you have greater influence - or rather, it is more obvious how that influence can come about.

No you don't. It's the same dream with the difference being what you know about it.

Sure. That's just phrasing.

Aren't you confused?

I don't see the confusion. I enjoy both aspects of experience. It's being obligated to have one experience that I fight against. Delete your accumulated mental objects with empty space, then you're free to use whatever you like. It's fun having a human experience. Eventually this body will be dead and I'll be out of it anyway. There's no rush for that; it takes care of itself. In the meantime, it makes sense to maximise the power I have over this experience of course. As it is, I can spent 50% of my time in an alternate reality anyway, if I so choose.

It's fun having a human experience. For how long? Under what conditions?

Under the conditions I decide. :-)

"it takes care of itself" I strongly disagree.

Now, that is a decent point actually, for your everyday chap. But the point is not to be that, yeah?

Q: Sure, that's all been done. Wolves, fish, clouds, just nothingness, all that.
I don't buy it. I get a hunch you're speaking theoretically, as in, that's the principle of a thing. Not your remembered experience.

Well, what can I say? I've been lucid dreaming since I was a teenager, although I never really sussed it until my 20s, when I read about someone being two people at once in a dream and 'having fun with that', so I decided to recreate that for myself.

Q: So have you had dreams where you're not in a world as we know it? A wolf is a denizen of our world.

I have explored the universe! Isn't it one of the first things you did? Become a space probe and go exploring out into the solar system, check out the rings of Saturn? The experiences are slightly more OBE-like. This is what inspired me (I read Oliver Fox and Robert Munroe before I got to lucid dreams):

“You can move through space (and time) slowly or apparently somewhere beyond the speed of light. You can observe, participate in events, make willful decisions based upon what you perceive and do. You can move through physical matter such as walls, steel plates, concrete, earth, oceans, air, even atomic radiation without effort or effect. You can go into an adjoining room without bothering to open the door. You can visit a friend three thousand miles away. You can explore the moon, the solar system, and the galaxy if these interest you. Or you can enter other reality systems only dimly perceived and theorized by our time/space consciousness.” – Robert Monroe, Far Journeys

Go to planets where everyone is made of glass, etc?

Q: I have explored the universe!
But you're talking about our universe here, the known one, right?
Isn't it one of the first things you did?
It depends on what you mean by one of the first. It's probably not the first 3.
Become a space probe and go exploring out into the solar system, check out the rings of Saturn?
I've never done this at all. Nor do I have the slightest desire to do so. It bores me to tears just thinking about it.
Go to planets where everyone is made of glass, etc?
Never done it and it sounds excruciatingly boring to me.

Aw, you're no fun! Thing is, power itself is nothing, it's all in the experiences. There's no point in deleting everything and remaining in a state of deletion. Eventually you'll run out of Ubik. Thing is, you have already decided to have a human experience. That's why you are here, now. You can't remember it now, but don't you ever wonder how strongly you made that decision? Aren't you ever suspicious of yourself?

Of course. I don't think I made the decision strongly at all. . . . What I've decided in the past is only relevant insofar the obstacles I've created for myself. But as for the forward direction, what matters is, do I still want to be human right now? The past doesn't matter for this.

You. can't. remember. :-)

Who knows what you've set up for yourself? If you wipe out everything, take complete control of your dream, you'll probably end up back here again you know. Probably, you already did this. Perhaps more than once. Definitely more than once. You might spend a while being free from it, but you'll choose to go back in eventually. Or to dissolve completely. And then you'll reform, memoryless, back to the same state again.

Ubik - This substance, whose name is derived from the Latin word "ubique" (meaning "everywhere"), has the property of preserving people who are in half-life.

It's a metaphor for the persistence of you as an active force. It's a literary reference, not serious.

Q:
You. can't. remember. :-)
What do you mean?
Who knows what you've set up for yourself? If you wipe out everything, take complete control of your dream, you'll probably end up back here again you know. Probably, you already did this. Perhaps more than once. Definitely more than once. You might spend a while being free from it, but you'll choose to go back in eventually. Or to dissolve completely. And then you'll reform, memoryless, back to the same state again.
You're suggesting that this state has some kind of gravitational pull. I don't buy it. Why do you privilege this state such that it would seem you have to fall into it no matter what?
It's a metaphor for the persistence of you as an active force. It's a literary reference, not serious.
Well, I don't get it. I'm actually reading Ubik right now, and in the novel it is a spray or some other crap that can renovate degraded elements of experience. But I'd appreciate it if you didn't make references to Ubik, because so far I've been finding the whole novel pretty worthless. I'm almost forcing myself to finish it, since it's so short and I am almost done with it anyway.

I'm kind of playing. ;-)

As I just mentioned on the Death-Experience Thread, which is a great post actually, I think staying constantly 'present' is vital, otherwise we are doomed to be forgetful and sucked into a repeat of our present circumstances. It does have a gravitational pull, of course, for those who don't recognise the situation "they" are in (which they're not). But to recognise it for what it is, and remain identified with the background rather than the content, is the essence. You may have chosen this for yourself though. Why can't you remember what you did before Nefandi?

Ubik

Hmm, it's a bit more insightful than that. But each to their own. That and The Man in the High Castle have much to say. Meanwhile, much effort do you think is involved in changing your circumstances?

I agree. It's great and it's something you wouldn't have said. ;)

Ha, dick. ;-)

Isn't the real problem with this topic that there isn't much to say? Once you recognise your true nature, while avoiding making the non-dualists' error of then thinking you have no Will, all that's left is dissolving your discomforts, your boundaries, and ceasing to identify with any object.

EDIT: There is of course the 'bending experience' stuff on top of that, but the fundamental thing is the dissolving.

Don't forget that objects have meaning within convention. If you want to dissolve boundaries which define objects, you will need to dissolve the surrounding context as well.

Yes, but the context and the object are one, or rather they define each other as separate. The boundary joins the two. You dissolve the boundary, not the object or the context, and therefore dissolve both.

Just a second ago you were saying that dissolving is a waste of time because you can't live with a bunch of nothingness. Hehe...

:-)

Ooh, I forgot about these tail ends! :-)

Not abandon in the sense of hating on them, but in the sense of being untied from them and having an aloof, non-committal, weak relationship to them.

You can't have it both ways. If you are aloof, you are bound. Even being non-committal. The universe has to be inside you, in order for you to not be bound by it.

Q: I don't agree. Universe isn't a place. So being unbound from it is not the same as being free to leave some place.

The universe is a concept; that is what you are bound to, implicitly.

Q: You're talking out of your arse.

:-)

I'm in that kind of a mood, I'm afraid (although you do have to let go of your idea of the universe, I'm sure you won't argue with that). How you been getting on anyway? Any successes?

But it's not easy to actually do it in practice because it's like everything in my being is "wired" to treat the universe as a concrete place instead of as an idea with a set of associated experiences.

Yes, this is a problem. Do you do much reading on the subject? I find it helps to always have a book on the go on it, or glance at Berkeley now and again, etc. It was like that when I started lucid dreaming - if I kept reading on it, I could keep at it easier, otherwise I just 'forget' and end up asleep in 'real life' again.

Who knows? It's not often that I can recognize a success instantly.

Yeah, there's something to that. You don't know the impact until later. Never tried fasting. I've just been sticking to the daily exercise thing and keeping my dreams up, plus added magick (riding the "momentum" rather than being too dramatic though).

Q: Yes, this is a problem. Do you do much reading on the subject? I find it helps to always have a book on the go on it, or glance at Berkeley now and again, etc. It was like that when I started lucid dreaming - if I kept reading on it, I could keep at it easier, otherwise I just 'forget' and end up asleep in 'real life' again.
I don't really forget. My problem is one of habits. I don't really read about it that much these days. There is not much for me left to read, imo.

It's not really to remember, so much as 'recreate the mood' and help keep habits on track. Anyway, works for me. It's surprising how hard it can be to stay focused, on something you actually want.

Q: It's surprising how hard it can be to stay focused, on something you actually want.
This is a tricky one. You should look into the role of doubt here.
We have no trouble focusing on things we know will work as we expect and we want those things because we already had them in the past and know exactly what they are like. This is freedom from doubt.

Hmm, that's interesting, I think you're onto something there.

...

Q: Yes, but the context and the object are one, or rather they define each other as separate. The boundary joins the two. You dissolve the boundary, not the object or the context, and therefore dissolve both.
I don't agree. I think it's a bit more complex than that. There is more structure to it. If you dissolve the boundary around a tea cup you still have the keyboard, etc. left over. Even if you dissolve all that, you can still have a craving for all that to come back, or a fear of the resulting state, etc. So it's not so simple in practice.

For each particular object and its specific context which is what defines it, holds it in place, it applies. I see what you were getting at now, though: the larger notion of there being separate objects, yes?

Q: I see what you were getting at now, though: the larger notion of there being separate objects, yes?
Yes. When you examine the context of an object, that context has a further, deeper context, and so on. At some point you run out of context and then you hit the ultimate ground of being, ambiguity, chaos, will, whatever. However, before you hit that point there may be quite a bit of structure there and it can be pretty snarled and hard to untangle. There was some yogi who said something like "If the screw took 16 turns to put in, it will take 16 turns to take it out." I think this is pretty much bang on the point.

Right, I'm with you on this. Now, I do think you can circumvent it to some extent - stand back and see that these structures exist, floating in a spaceless place - so that you don't identify with any of the structures even though they are still intact. Until you dissolve them, they are still part of your experience. However, I think even the act of dis-identification itself leads to the gradual self-dissolving of structures. You can speed the process up by direct investigation and exploration of course.

Comparison: The 'dissolving of the Witness' after realisation. You can do this deliberately, or you can let it happen by itself. What tends to happen is that you keep accidentally recreating it though (me).

This generally fails to work, because the second you succeed even slightly, your cravings will flare up in terms of fear, uncertainty, doubt, a desire to return back to the familiar solidity and so on.

The fear is only initial - once you give yourself to it, it's incredibly peaceful! You have to break through that barrier eventually, even if you do it by persuading yourself step by step, as you describe. Why not just boldly step forward? Like the 'rope technique' for OOBE, there is an enormous fear barrier that kicks in - of course there is, because your body thinks it's going to die - but once you've passed that, you're good. It's not "you" that desires solidity, the larger you. It's the "small you". You have to abandon that to move forward anyway. For as long as you are giving in to the "small you" your progress will always be limited. In fact, even accepting the notion of "progress" may be problematic?

This is only true when you rest in the knowledge that you'll safely come back to the known world. It's not peaceful when you're getting ready to fly free 100%.

No, really. When you completely let go, you will feel peaceful. And to let go is to let go of the universe, not just the body; the universe is your body. If you truly identify with awareness, surely you know that you are not this transitory content? Fear will arise, and pass, just like any other object in consciousness! Furthermore, you should realise that the universe has been being destroyed and recreated again and again, every moment since you were 'born'?

Look, Nefandi, it's okay to feel afraid. You're going to have to commit fully to this at some point though, so why not now? You're just delaying the inevitable. And it doesn't actually involve any action to do this; you simply have to stop holding on. Holding on, I might add, to things you don't actually want anyway, according to you!

Why not, this weekend at some point, just lie down on the floor and give up completely?

That's a tautology. The point I was making is that generally no one can completely let go overnight or even in one lifetime. It's doable as a process that requires long-term application and unbreakable resolve.

Why not?

Awareness is the least important aspect of the mind. I identify with the mind, not awareness. Awareness is how all the delusive junk gets generated. Awareness is mostly the function of sense bases and its output is mostly garbage.

Awareness as a synonym for Consciousness is a synonym for Mind (large-'M'). The word is not important, it is the vastness that you really are that I am referring to; the context for all experience. You are confusing "Awareness" with "the content of Awareness, that your attention is drawn to". Even your use of the definite article - "the" mind - shows you are on the wrong track here. You are thinking of non-identification, while operating very much from an identified perspective. Like "enlightened" people who, upon investigation, are just relentlessly thinking about being enlightened, rather than actually being.

It's not inevitable. It's a choice. I am feeling the weight of the choice. Talking about inevitabilities and eventualities is the cop out of fatalism.

It's inevitable if you want to get anywhere with this.

Why not, this weekend at some point, just lie down on the floor and give up completely?

No, you didn't. Not really. You are afraid and you are holding back. You are not truly committed to this. You are attached to a perspective, gripping onto it with white knuckles.

It's also not obvious that knowledge is important if you speak of awareness.

Of course it is. Knowledge is to become. To have something within awareness is to know it. (Note, not be aware of, which would be dualistic.) But each to his own. Capital-'M' Mind works just as well.]

No it isn't. What is inevitable is the freedom of choice.

If you want to get anywhere, you will have to break through your fear. And you refuse to do this. You are making excuses. You are afraid of being separated from your body.

Knowledge is to become. That's too limited.

How so? It doesn't preclude changing things. And delusion is revealed by seeing the nature of the experience through this. There is a difference here that we're jarring against: There's a difference between the recognition of the state of things, of dissolving boundaries to experience this directly (basically, getting rid of the "snap-to-object" property of Mind/Awareness, getting rid of the power of your Platonic types), and of actually destroying the universe, the 'X'.

I am not. I am afraid of losing the universe as I know it, of having no future, etc.

Why are you afraid of this? You write as if this is what you're aiming for anyway (the destruction of the universe). If you destroy the universe, you won't destroy the fundamental "you".

Don't you have a yacht to manifest ;).

But I want to sail my yacht on the waves of infinity, the disconnected Nows of Platonia, to be both the ship and its wake, the Caused and the Uncaused! ;-)

Q: Is that so? I thought you just wanted an ordinary wooden yacht like this one.

At a minimum, this - just while I'm still messing with only four dimensions.

Q: I notice your story is changing wildly from time to time.

In what way? It's pretty simple, if convoluted, and I've gone backwards more than I've gone forwards, particularly in my representation of how it hangs together, but that's just how learning works. Happy to discuss anything. You, meanwhile, seem... to talk ahead of the game? ;-)

Of course, there is no time.

Q: You, meanwhile, seem... to talk ahead of the game? ;-)
Not at all. I keep my eye on the prize at all times, even as I address my current state. This does require a broad mind, sure. I can't just ignore my human condition and dream about the prize or vice versa, think about the now and ignore the prize. My contemplation must be wide enough to embrace convention and that which is beyond convention. It must embrace my current fears and the desired state beyond fear. This is how I train myself.

Well, that all sounds very nice. :-)

Being a little more serious... To be honest, I keep switching between whether to force change or to let it happen in its own time.

You can switch perspective instantly - detach from your perspective - and that takes care of identification in the obvious sense, but you're still left with, as it were "convention" in your experience. You can be 'enlightened' as in, see how things are, but then you are left with making changes to the structure of your experience. You don't need to do this, you can 'live from the knowledge' despite the content, but why wouldn't you?

'Overwriting' works and is powerful but has after-effects, and isn't necessarily pleasant initially (you know this). 'Deciding' and detaching lets things unravel in a spontaneous way, and is not unpleasant, but it does take "time". So I'd say, attachment to "yachts" is indeed my thing. I don't have fear, so much as I have attachment.

I think that knowledge has different levels of penetration, acceptance, and stability.

Yes, all true. I can reliably return to the 'right perspective' at any time, that's not a problem. And when I relax, or sit back, that's the default perspective now. In this way, you have the "mental objects" you've accumulated, but they don't affect you in the same way as someone who hasn't a) had the realisation and b) adopted the perspective. But in times of stress...?

And in an emergency, do I remain detached? Actually, I'm better in an emergency than in boring times at this. That's when I fade out, the 'tension of boredom'. Less and less so as I've been doing my exercises (because there's less to "fall into"), but that is definitely a thing. Although I can directly enter dreams if I commit to it, I don't have persistent awareness if I don't. I should be present at all times in the sense of carrying over, but I'm not. And that's the test, isn't it? Can you bring this out into the world?

So either fatalism or flippancy, and all this I find bad.

Well, flippancy I'll admit to. Hmm, I'm probably on the fence a little at the moment, because I do know what works, but I'm uncertain now on how active one should be. Until recently, I'd say the active approach always, but having experimented with reducing the level of action to its absolute minimum, in an attempt to get to the very root of 'Will' (as I thought of it at the time), I have dithered a little. In actual fact, the reason it has left me undecided is probably because they're both the same thing: actively dissolve barriers, or create the environment, thus increasing the efficiency of the second approach, due to the elimination of resistance. Make sense?

I don't mean just fading out. Fading out, detaching from the situation, that's nice.

By fading out there, I mean losing the perspective. So when I'm bored, lacking in energy it's like I'll get distracted, and fall into mental objects. Yes, this view should be one's first 'port of call'. Break your ankle? Your first thought should be to reverse it. Car crashes over the barrier? Just reset time.

Actually, you've unintentionally pointed out something that I do too: Your solutions are still inspired by the idea of being a body or in a solid environment - e.g. "levitating", "teleporting" - or that it wasn't under your control in the first place. In other words, ambitions could be much higher than this. I don't use it nearly enough. I go through phases of doing the 'nightly rewrite' (Goddard style), but then forget about it. Similarly, each day you should decide what's going to happen before you set out, but again I forget it. So I might have the perspective of 'being the space' - the correct identity - but not the perspective in its active form, that of directing the experience. That's what I'm trying to work on.

What do you mean by "create an environment?"

Not great phrasing. Two meanings: Firstly, there's dissolving barriers verses just overwriting your bodily space, etc (going directly for what you want). Then, more advanced, would be to directly change the scene around you, and within you, more completely.

Cause right now I do feel very narrow-banded with all that convention and solidity on all sides of me.

Do you experience that solidity as a 'felt thing'?

... then during a high emergency she'll pull off a miracle.

I've studied a bit of that for a while. Mostly they occur as 'reality shifts', not deliberate. Actually, probably deliberate in the sense of a reaction, but without understanding of what was being done. So more of the order of a 'prayer' that gets answered. Again, a motivation for my 'just decide' approach, since a prayer does not involve effort - but it does involve focus, mind you.

And I want to be more creative.

I'm pretty creative generally. Probably more creative than practical, actually, by a long way. This can be debilitating as well as empowering, because I do get sidetracked. I see this 'work' as a way to focus this more, hopefully.

Don't leave me hanging.

See later - - -

Those are all really cool exercises.

The point is, there seems to be a tendency to forget these things. 'Everyday life' has a sort of force to it, a gravitational pull against the unusual. Which of course is one of the motivation for dissolving, etc. Anyway, I figured that if I couldn't yet rely on operating actively from this perspective during spontaneous situation, then at least I could do the before/after and manage 'reality' that way. Just because you can't do it all yet, you can still leverage massively what you can do. As you said, it's all a bit easier when our lives are comfortable. Well, let's make use of that then. In those comfortable moments, we take advantage and set things up in anticipation of the uncomfortable moments when we won't be on the ball.

This is a pretty God-like level right there.

Yes, yes it is. It's a complete commitment to and leveraging of the power of subjective idealism + magick. Fast travel seems to be a good starting point. But then we think, well, that's still within the conceptual framework of a spatial environment that I am somehow 'traversing'. Do I need that? Except that it is an enjoyable experience or whatever, to mostly live that as your base level. Y'know, like sitting down on top of a mountain and enjoying the view, the experience. And the aim of this is to have enjoyable experiences (because there is nothing else, as I see it). If instead I view everything as a configuration space - that is, a set of all possible Nows (like the link I included on time), a Platonia, that I can navigate.

Solidity and the felt thing.

I still think the 'felt-sense' thing is the vital aspect to this. That sense is the way we get 'under the hood' of, say, the appearance of the senses, into the global sense of structured experience. That's where it arises from. Changing that is what changes apparent experience, because they are the same thing, through different perspectives/angles/senses.

For creativity, you just have to let loose and try stuff out. It's a "letting happen". I was going to recommend a couple of books, but then I realised that what happens is we just read about creativity then. Get a pad and a pen, and just start doodling and see what comes out. There's a "feel" to that which is the same "feel" for other creativity. Despite what I just said, Edward de Bono's books (Lateral Thinking and related) have some approaches for a more, deliberate and rules-based angle on generating new ideas though.

Ornamental

Yes, a great way of putting it, but it can miss something fundamental. Experiences aren't all just visual fancies, there is meaning involved too, felt meaning. That's what makes life worth living. Something occurred to me reading your response: I may be misreading, but I think you seem to be quite focused on the negatives of life, of being a human life that is, and seeking to overcome that? But there are positives too, and the purpose of pursuing this stuff should be towards a positive rather than escape from a negative, I think. Actually, I think that orientation is probably vital to success and speedy progress.

Right now the only reason I live is because I know I can rid myself of this heavy and sticky meaning I don't want.

No, no, change the meaning, or generate experiences with better meanings! Often the meaning isn't truly bound to the experience, as you might think. You are giving "humaning" a bad rep it doesn't necessarily deserve! ;-)

The 'overwriting' exercise is of course about stripping meaning, or rather habitual, historical meaning - but that doesn't mean there isn't going to be a 'felt-sense' associated with experiences in future. It's just going to be of a clearer, more direct quality.

Q: No, no, change the meaning, or generate experiences with better meanings!
I am doing this and it takes me away from humanity and Earth. My heart doesn't belong here friend. I am sincere. I think I will probably die soon and it doesn't bother me one bit. I won't miss anything and wouldn't want to be missed by anyone.

Aw, rubbish to that. You realise that, at a minimum, you can just become a different character in the meantime? It might take a long time to delete mental objects overall, but you can assume a 'posture' at any time.

Q: I already became a different character. I am no longer a human. That's what's different about me. Now that I am not a human I am also working on getting out of this place. I detest this planet and all that stands upon it. There are good aspects to everything, but for me the bad makes the good worthless. This is why I am so into regaining control over my own mind in the first place! Don't you get it? If I loved being a human, why the fuck would I want more mental power? Why would I want more personal power? For what? I need all that to get the fuck out of "here." Where "here" is this state of mind that produces humanity, Earth, and all this shiite.

I do get it. That's why I say what I say. But you are wrong about "the bad".

Q: I can't be wrong about it. My feelings can't be wrong.

You are wrong about feelings not being wrong, sorry. Stick with the overwriting, see how you do. The very idea that you would pursue this approach with the idea of escaping something - be that humanity, or a more local difficulty - shows you've got a couple of things to delete, before you can get what you want. You will have to go into these things anyway, in order to dissolve them, as I'm sure you've realised, because that's how it works.

(Overwriting can't occur at a distance, from "here" directed at "there"; it only works if you are present and co-located with the aspect you are overwriting as part of the larger space.)

Q: You are wrong about feelings not being wrong, sorry. Stick with the overwriting, see how you do.
I just deleted this line. My George never said this. How's that?

Deal! :-)

I guess that really, I meant that if everything can be adjusted, then feeling can be arbitrary and adjusted too. That make more sense, better worded? But then, I'm really talking about "feelings" rather than "felt-sense" there.

Q: I love hating humanity and Earth. I don't want to adjust that. It's the motivation behind all my efforts. That's what gets me up in the morning and that's why I don't slack off in contemplation and meditation.

Humanity appreciates your efforts! :-)

Q: I just recently (relatively) realized a bad habit I have. I get bored, so I look for entertainment. Ideally I should make use of my own mind as an entertainment source. Instead I tend to look for the products of convention such as books, games, watching cartoons or movies, etc.
I probably don't want to quit cold turkey. But it would be reasonable if I could entertain myself for 1 hour just by using my mind. And I specifically mean entertainment here and not contemplation. So this mind-entertainment time should be as close to playing a game as is possible, for example.

Have you read Nikola Tesla's biography? One of the things that inspired me to try and make 'mental machines'. Instead of making prototypes, he would create his inventions in his mind and set them going. He would then return to them, months later, and examine the components for wear and tear, then improve his design and set it going again. That's a level to aspire to. Anyway, I used to avoid taking an iPod with me, and instead generate music in my mind (I've always been into electronic music, used to write a lot) as an exercise. Or when travelling, close my eyes and replace the sense of my surroundings with a different location as vividly as possible. I never really made the leap to see the full possibilities, but there's no reason why that couldn't evolve into playing your own internal FPS, or No Man's Sky.

Nice... but then what kind of game should you play? I think it really needs to be a game. Observing a static image is not my idea of gaming. Being able to play an RPG or an FPS in my mind would be fucking amazing! And it's massively more immediately attainable than controlling "physical" reality, which is still my goal. ;)

:-)

Right, this is attainable. :-) The link I included was to No Man's Sky, which is a procedurally generated space exploration game. It's basically an infinitely explorable world, seeded randomly. So having all that appear "just in time" as you were exploring would be pretty powerful. However, I'd quite like do an internal Parkour game, because of all the physical sensations that this would involve. A nice challenge, beyond simply having something you were exploring 'visually'. Also, internal versions of adventures like this.

Interesting. I don't do parkour, so there is no reason to think I'd be any better at it inside a visualized space.

Are you serious with that response?! That's the whole point! You'll be great at it! And you'll be able to fully realise it, with dedication. Do you think Nikola Tesla knew what it was like to be a cog, or a component, or that he had direct experience of all aspects of his machines? You are drawing on a larger 'reservoir' of structures and knowledge than your own, personal ones. That's how you can lucid dream a whole world, and have that world surprise you.

Maybe I can invent a visualization game for each of the 6 senses. I think astral projection is almost like an RPG already, and so is lucid dreaming.

Indeedy! This is basically semi-lucid-dreaming, if you think about it, by being 'parallel-aware'. You start simply. How I started was, when I was studying, I used to drink juice out of this red plastic mug with a handle. So, when taking a break, I'd created this in my imagination visually, and then try to 'feel' it too. that, and I had this symbol, a circle held within a triangle, white line drawing on black background, which I'd flip and rotate whenever I was bored. It didn't take too long for those to be 'real'. Note, it helps if you, while doing a relaxing exercise or whatever, reinforce your abilities by 'deciding' them to exist.

In principle I should be able to reach some kind of divine inspiration that teaches me parkour, but I am not sure I want to invest energy into that specific type of imagination. I just don't want to parkour I guess.

You're right in that: If all this is you, then all the knowledge and the sensations are already enfolded within the space you are experiencing. You can be a master guitar player, speak French, parkour to your heart's content. Or... not, if you don't fancy it. But if you are serious about this, the abilities - which, remember, just correspond to summoning a particular experience - are all there, already.

Now how do we attach a score to this? :) hehehe I mean, you're talking to someone who still likes conventional video games.

Heh. Right, I'll set it up some trophies and unlockable content based on how vividly you render the cup! If you get to the top of the leaderboard, you get can upgrade to the cup of a carpenter.

Q: Lol, no sound in the video clip, so there was no point in putting it there, imo. Pay attention.

Darnit, wrong one. But I'm sure you get the reference. :-P

...

More the question: how many human years has he got to go? Answer: lots and lots... ;-)

Actually, we aborted this part of the thread and moved over to the other branch, if you are looking to continue reading.

...

Q: I'm filing this exercise under "interesting stuff I may want to try later." But I agree 100% with your "decide" message. The trick is to stop deciding small stuff, like money, house, sex partners. I have decided I no longer want to be a human. I am dreaming big. This planet is too small for me.

Well, the main "decide" is to "decide to be the awareness in which this experience arises". And it works, instantly. Then it's all yours.

EDIT: Also, why not decide the small stuff too? It's not like there's any effort involve. You just "get it" for free. And if things don't go your way, delete them and replace them. Another way of saying this is: inserting new facts into your world

...

A1: This post is super old and has less up votes, but bro if you are seeing this, you were right, literally just decide and have faith in that decision and it's all yours, everything, even the impossible

The Patterning of Experience

The Patterning of Experience

This is just a quick bullet-point summary of the memory-pattern-based view of experience, plus guidelines for selecting experiences. I have a more expanded description but I haven't written it up yet (and it's probably not required here). You might use it in conjunction with the Imagination Room metaphor and the Imagining That post to help provide context.

The Static

• What you really are is an open space of awareness.
• Dissolved into the background, implicitly, are all the patterns that ever were, although they are only very subtly present and barely activated.
• Your background felt-sense is the global sense of all the patterns you are holding on to (the facts-of-the-world).
• All sensory experience is the effortless and spontaneous arising of patterns in alignment with the felt-sense. The shifting of the felt-sense is how we actually select experience.

The Dynamic

• The content of the senses and your apparent history have no necessary impact on what happens next, if you are detached from them.
• All that matters is the patterns you are holding onto right now.
• If you trigger a pattern it will subsequently arise in your experience (both thoughts and senses).
• Recalling or experiencing part of a pattern in any way triggers the whole pattern (and to a lesser extent all associated patterns) via auto-completion.
• Every imagining is a 1st-person pattern and all bring about an experience:
  • If you imagine doing something from a 1st person perspective, you are imagining “me doing this” and you will later experience yourself doing it or something like it.
  • If you imagine doing something from a 3rd person perspective, you are imagining “seeing myself doing this” and you will later experience someone doing it or something like it.
  • If you imagine an owl in front of you, what you are doing is imagining "seeing an owl". You will subsequently see owls. Everyday people call this "synchronicity".
• The pattern will overlap with other patterns you are holding onto. This is why it does not immediately become your experience. It is immediately true but your other patterns fit it into a time framework.
• The more detached you are from sensory experience and the felt-sense, the more swiftly and completely the pattern becomes experience. If you had no time-pattern at all, it would be immediate.
• Note that an emotion is a sensory aspect. To hold onto an emotion is to trigger or retain all patterns which have that emotion as a part of them.

The Angle

• Define and assert yourself as the open space of awareness in which sensory experiences appear.
• Remembering that all imagining is in the 1st person and is the triggering of a memory-pattern which will come into experience - you should always imagine from your own perspective.
• Patterns are manifest immediately from the perspective of time. “It is true now that this happens then.”
• Ultimately you should aim to detach completely from the sensory experience round you (what seems to be going on) and from the felt-sense (which is a summary of the facts-of-the-world you have accumulated).
• The more detached you are, the more you can simply “just decide” on something (the partial imagining that is the “decision” will trigger the whole pattern via auto-completion).
• In the absence of complete detachment, allowing the decision pattern (which will typically just be the feeling of the decision) or an imagined situation (a sensory visualisation of the desired experience) to intensify before letting it go will prioritise it over other patterns.
• It is fine to re-decide or re-imagine a pattern provided your decision does not contain any temporal-but-non-specific details of the path of manifestation, even if just implied. Otherwise it will be essentially recreating your future pattern again.

...

Q: What do you mean exactly by "background felt-sense"? Do you mean this sort of "noise" that you can feel filling the gaps? And I'm very curious to know how you got to the conclusion that it's the global sense of all the patterns. Also, I don't know if you've posted it somewhere already, but I would really love to learn about your experiments with manifestation.

You can directly experiment with this. First I'm going to say: you are experiencing your entire world right here, now. All of it. You tend to thing of the big shining images, sounds and textures as it, and then emotions and feelings, but that's just the unpacked part of the whole thing, which is here too as a sensation. But it's obscured, like the sun hides the stars. You use it all the time. It's everywhere, but you find it by going to that feeling roughly in the centre of your body. Very subtle. Go to it, with a question in mind, the answer comes from there. Your intuition comes from there. Your whole body experience actually arises from this. It's the entire patterning of the Imagination Room, you might say. When something changes about your world or in your person, that's where the shift occurs.

Q: Yes, I know this. This doesn't answer my questions. Or perhaps I misinterpreted some parts of your post. When you're talking about the "background felt-sense", you mean a particular sensation (or a particular type of sensation), right? I've just never really experienced a collection of all of my reality-shaping habits. I've only experienced them one by one, as I caught them shaping my reality.

Actually, it was probably me that misinterpreted your question. And it's the area to be expanded in future.

I've just never really experienced a collection of all of my reality-shaping habits.

In truth it is always contextual in terms of what is clear, right? It is always responsive and unfolding. But everything seems to be in there if you go looking, vagueness comes into focus. I don't think you can experience all of your habits separately and all at once. That would be like trying to experience all colours separately but at once - you just get white.

Does that make sense?

In the post I was mainly trying to highlight that you can't make changes (personally or in your world) if you are restricting the movement of this - e.g. the feeling that comes up associated with an intention and you resist it or push it or whatever.

What is actually a habit?

A very good question!

I say, today: An experiential pattern, the whole pattern being triggered from part of it, just like with any memory pattern. Which is why the way to stop a habit is to disrupt the pattern by dissolving the emotional aspect of the trigger, or breaking the sequence (can do this via imagination, summoned from the felt-sense?). It's no different to, say, thinking of the start of a favourite song and it then continuing in your mind. Only this time the result is played out spontaneously in the main area of your imagination, as it were.

Is it an on-going intention?

In a way, it is right? But I think "intention" has become a difficult word since it gets used as something in mind that you're then going to "intend". Maybe we could say: An intention really is just a pattern of experience you've created, either a one-off (you create a temporal pattern which manifests something in the future) or something more general (you create a pattern which manifests in certain circumstances) or a "fact" (a static background pattern that filters everything else).

(If I'm understanding you correctly...)

What I'm trying to figure out is, why do habits make it seem like we've forgotten how to intend? Does this mean that intending is also part of the pattern?

I think it means that people never knew how to change their experience anyway. Sensory experience is arising and as it unfolds they are imagining nothing useful. People simply don't realise how the work. They try to "do" things by summoning up muscle tension patterns, or ineffective verbal thoughts patterns, or actually focusing on the troublesome pattern more.

Want to kill a habit? Activate that pattern and activate a neutral pattern (such as the experience of complete empty space) at the same time - or some other stronger pattern. If you generate a strong emotion then that can help. (The Overwriting Yourself process is about getting rid of residual perceptual patterns in this way.)

Intending is deliberately "deciding", but deciding is simply activating a part of a pattern and having it auto-complete. What makes out an "intending" from another memory pattern? It's: the temporal pattern. Activate a sensory event pattern and a temporal pattern at the same time, and you've effectively updated your "timeline" (whatever you want to call it) with that event.

And so on.

So, this is always about summoning a memory pattern or two in order to strengthen them so that they shape your subsequent sensory experience. Mixing patterns provides context and organisational structure. We've already got some pretty deep formatting - such as temporal, spatial location, all sorts of other abstract frameworks, our own body pattern - we can leverage. And there's all those accumulated facts-of-the-world too. The infinity aspect can get out of hand pretty quickly, so I always treat something like the Infinite Grid concept as my baseline. Experience works on an "as if" basis, so whatever metaphors you adopt, your experience will seem to fall in line. Using this knowingly keeps things in hand - rather than going on meta-adventures via synchronicity. Choose your fictions wisely!

Q: Can you rephrase the last bullet? I'm having a difficult time grasping that

On the felt-sense? To experiment, literally place your attention roughly in the centre of your body, perhaps nearer your lower abdomen. And wait quietly, to feel what is there. The feeling is what you might call the "global sense" of your whole situation. It's much easier to do than to describe! Give it a go and get back to me if you don't have any luck. Eugene Gendlin's Focusing technique is based on something along these lines; you might find it interesting to look that up.

Q: No I meant: "It is fine to re-decide or re-imagine a pattern provided your decision does not contain any temporal-but-non-specific details of the path of manifestation, even if just implied. Otherwise it will be essentially recreating your future pattern again."

Ah, right. The idea is that if you just think "I will see owls", without specifying any details, then "owls' is overlaid across time. If you keep thinking "I will see owls", or "owls are cool" and "I really like owls" that pattern doesn't get disrupted. However, if you thought "I will see an owl on Tuesday", and then start thinking "no, owls on Wednesday" or "will I see owls on Tuesday?" then you are mangling what you've already laid out. You are revising your pattern.

Q: I see, so consistency in your thoughts is preferable?

Yes. Passing thoughts are fine, let them rise and fall. With intended thoughts, though, you should stay consistent, because you are effectively rewriting yourself each time you do it, creating a muddle if you keep changing your mind!

Q: Thanks for this recap.
Your background felt-sense is the global sense of all the patterns you are holding on to (the facts-of-the-world)
So if I understand this correctly the background felt-sense is the knowledge of what your world consists of? Memory of places and people, senses, forms, etc?
All sensory experience is the effortless and spontaneous arising of patterns in alignment with the felt-sense.
So that which arises is limited to that which you perceive as possible. Is that what alignment with the felt-sense means?

The background felt-sense is (as I tell it) all the persistent facts-of-the-world you are holding onto. Obviously there are levels to this, patterns upon patterns. Something I've noticed is that even when there are stuck sensations elsewhere in the body, they are referred by this central sense. Which makes, um, sense really!

So that which arises is limited to that which you perceive as possible. Is that what alignment with the felt-sense means?

All experience arises from the felt-sense. If that is your world and you are navigating through it, then you are basically exploring the world as dissolved and summarised in your felts sense. You can do a little experiment. As you go about your day, exploring the world and exploring your thoughts, notice how you do it. Despite what you might assume, you actually seem to navigate by feeling your way along. In quiet moment, settle your attention in the centre of your body and explore the sensation. Ask it questions and see what you get. The entire state of your world is potentially available for exploration. If nothing else, it's free transformative therapy on tap! :-)

(Quick response, but this is "the" topic, although having a model of it is not entirely necessary for getting on in your world...)

I've begun to get more and more familiar with this sensation. I consider this to be the source of all of it, am I wrong in stating this?

This is how I view it. Everything is in there. It's an area that would benefit from some proper coverage! I've not really explored how best to describe it.

I'm calling them other sensations but perhaps "the sensation" is the amalgamation of all sensory experience.

It's all patterns, your entire state. When you go exploring through levels and such, that's where you are exploring. The perceptual sensations (images, sounds, textures) appear spontaneously as you unpack patterns-objects from there. For fun perhaps we could view it as our Global Lightbee which projects everything in our Imagination Room. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, especially how you feel we are perceiving ourselves at all? I view it currently as the Self created other (or perceived exterior) in order to have the necessary contrast to perceive itself. It depends on what you mean by "ourselves". If you mean the thoughts, bodily sensation, etc, we identify with, that's just a habitual pattern. Think: how do you work out which bits of experience are "you" and "other"? By spatial proximity, by whether there is a feeling within that spatial proximity, by the timeliness of response between you "asking" and "receiving" and the case of inner-outer distinction it's subtle things like whether "other people" seem to respond to them.

These are arbitrary.

As soon as you experiment with synchronicity and intention, you realise that it's just all imagery arising within you - the undivided open aware space - and you are categorising different images-objects-patterns according to their intensity and location. When you come to the idea of the floor of the Imagination Room, or the Global Centre of the felt-sense, you then view all of this as just spontaneous imagery from an exploration of that.

I'm more curious how we're able to perceive period?

I think on the one hand it's impossible to answer (EDIT: I offer no other hands, it turns out).

All we can say for certain is:

• We are a consciousness.
• Experiences arise within and of that consciousness.
• We cannot experience ourselves "doing" or "selecting", which implies that we "take on the shape" of experiences.

We can only think in terms of 3D sensory images, we use metaphors to extend that, but we can never truly think-about these things - such as what we "really" are, how did experience come to be formatted the way it is, and so on. Thinking about those things creates a self-patterning chase of one's tail that we can't get out of. The reason for that is that we think experience and think about things using the process that that experiencing and thinking follows. As I said elsewhere:

Even worse, the more you try to get a handle on the whole synchronicity thing itself, the more incoherent, confusing and "meta" they will become. It's like a dream trying to work out how "dreaming" really works behind the scenes, and just ending up with... more dream, only this time about the subject of "dreaming". - TG

Whatever you think, formats your experience. There is no "how it is", only what we assert. All we can do is choose a pattern which is stable but flexible, and use that as our base. Experience behaves "as if" there is a static wholeness that we are exploring. And it behaves "as if" we bring aspects of that wholeness into experience by "remembering" them. I think that's as far as we can go.

I feel that there is static wholeness, but how are we able to explore the wholeness as though it is separate and to form these wild patterns that vary and differ?

We let ourselves feel separate from experience by designating one part of it as "us" and hold onto it, letting the rest change. Even "being the background" is a subtle version of this, albeit the most flexible version there is, and the one I go with, because it effectively attaches identity to "the consciousness" rather than "the world".

TL;DR? Stop trying to work out how things supposedly are, instead just decide how you want them to be?

(Going to tag on a thought process in the next comment...)

(From elsewhere, but relevant perhaps when it comes to asking what we can truly say about our experiences, what is permanent and fundamental, and what is changing and so cannot be. Maybe other Oneironauts might find it a useful exercise.)

Exploring Direct Experience

Here's how I have proceeded before, from empirical evidence:

• It appears that am a conscious being of some sort. No matter what happens in terms of content, this persists. I seem to have no permanent structure. It is the one certainty that does not need interpretation.
• During waking hours this conscious being it seems to have the experience of being-a-person.
• Within my perspective there appears both thoughts and perceptions as a seamless experience. I don't perceive either to be external to my being, however I notice they are of two levels in terms of behaviour or impact and I make a distinction between "private/inner" and "public/outer" as a result.
• I notice that I am not simply a passive experiencer (although through experimentation I notice I can just let things happen "by themselves"), I can also "intend-imagine" changes in my experience.
• Having noticed that this waking experience seems to be associated with a body, and seeing other bodies, I infer that there may be conscious beings associated with them, having a similar experience. (However, having noticed how my own activities can occur spontaneously and without direction on my part, I quietly note that I can never be certain that activity equals an experiencer.)
• I notice that I am the occasional recipient of information that is beyond the context of my present experience. Sometimes intuitions about the current situation, but at other times knowledge which implies that situation I have not yet encountered are in fact already created in the background and awaiting my experiencing. This and various other things remind or suggest to me that I am not in fact a person so much as having a person-experience - I am not of this world but I have allowed this world to arise in me (or something like that).
• Exploration of phenomena such as synchronicity reveal that the inner/outer distinction I use for convenience is not as solid as I usually assume. They suggest that usual assumptions about the unfolding of events, coherence of narrative, and our simplistic "world-sharing model" are probably not solid either. However, since phenomena such as synchronicity get "meta" very fast, with an affect akin to exploring your own memory-patterns, it is best not to involve oneself too deeply.
• All experience I have seems to arise within and of and be made from the consciousness that I am.

Now, from this we are left with what I think are unanswerable questions or meanderings one has while exploring the above:

• What am I really, really? I can only know what I'm not. I seem to be just impersonal consciousness.
• I experience being a person or a mind, but I am not one.
• This "world" I connect to - does it exist only in this consciousness?
• Am I connecting to something or am I imagining something? Perhaps I am taking turns at being each of the people in that world, only I cannot remember being one when I am being the other.
• The previous point might explain why sometimes events "bend" in my direction in unlikely ways and even at the expense of others. I am that world's God having a person-experience, however so is everyone else in turn (and being-a-person limits one's "powers").
• The world might be structured so that every person-experience is responsive in this way, because its "sharing model" is not as simple as "people in a room, choosing the consensus decor together".
• If I have an OBE or NDE or (to a lesser extent) a lucid dream or (to a maximum extent) when I die, am I disconnecting from that world and connecting to another? Or is it revealing that I have basically been having a custom dream all along? Or is it revealing that there is always a next moment to experience, at the same level, and this never ends?

Of greatest interest to me is what the "world-sharing model" is, if indeed this is something that can be pinned down without encountering the synchronicity mind-formatting problem (that the metaphor you adopt tends to filter your experience). Are you and I both here at the same time, in the same place, in a straightforward manner?

Anyway, from there we end up with the Patterning of experience, the uses of metaphors such as the Infinite Grid to help us format ourselves better, and so on. Another version of that "patterns + eternalism" view which can be used for "as if" exploration:

The Hall of Records

Imagine that you are a conscious being exploring a Hall of Records for this world.

You are connecting to a vast memory bank containing all the possible events, from all the possible perspectives, that might have happened in a world like this. Like navigating through an experiential library. Each moment is an immersive 3D sensory image. And there may be any number of customers perusing the records. So this is not solipsism: Time being meaningless in such a structure, we might say that "eventually" all records will be looked-through, and so there is always consciousness experiencing the other perspectives in a scene. At the same time, this allows for a complex world-sharing model where influence is permitted, because "influencing events" simply means navigating from one 3D sensory record to another, in alignment with one's intention.

This process of navigation could be called remembering. Practically, this would involve summoning part of a record in consciousness and having it auto-complete by association. This would be called recall. You can observe something like this "patterned unfolding" occurring in your direct conscious experience right now.

Q: So let's say I imagined a desired experience in 1st person, and then I detached completely from it.
I then go about the following days acting on my intention (in alignment with my intention of experiencing the desired pattern) without any expectation whatsoever.
Would this interfere with my desired pattern manifesting itself? I'm asking this to find out if actively acting on something that i have already imagined will interfere with the pattern manifesting itself.
Hope you understand my question.
Cheers :)

So I think you're asking: if you intend something, and then later keep self-consciously acting to try and make it happen, will that work against you?

Generally, you do the intentional act (imaging here, water-pouring elsewhere) and, since the world is literally updated at that moment you just carry on with your life, knowing that the change has already been done. Since your body movement is as much a part of the world-pattern as everything else, you'll let that carry on as normal too. If you happen to feel the urge to go somewhere or say something, you let it happen; there's no purpose in trying to work out what to do. "Don't interfere", is the phrase to have in mind, because interference amounts to re-intending. However, since your main intention was probably a much more strongly activated pattens than your little interference, you tend to find you result really tries to push through into experience, whenever an appropriate gap or context arises.

Q: Quick question, what's a time-pattern?

It's the organising concept or pattern of "time", in the same way as "space" is an organising concept. The idea being that neither time nor space are existent "out there"; both are part of your "human experience formatting", in the same way as the senses are.

To expand -

Just as you might pass your attention across things (spatial objects) in a pattern of "3D-space"; so you pass your attention across the events (temporal objects) in a pattern of "time". The patterns are defined and format experience, like the colour spectrum is defined and formats experience - they place structure upon and as content. Unfortunately, the idea that a spatial scene exists and is defined even when we haven't fully viewed it, is ingrained in most people, whereas the idea that a temporal scene exists even though we haven't fully looked at it, is not. In both cases it's better to say that the formatting or environment-context is defined, but the content is not.

Multidimensional Magick

Introduction

This might be of interest. Several groups of people have tried "world jumping" in the past, using different systems of thought or concepts. Links below are about an approach called Tesseract or Multidimensional Magick. I've quoted some of the key paragraphs to save you wading through the whole lot. I'd suggest that the details of the process described in the main document aren't so important - it's just another version of the approach 'relax your hold on yourself and the world, allow it to change'. More interesting is the larger context.

Meanwhile, everyone should check out the movies Coherence, The One I Love and Safety Not Guaranteed for inspiration and 'the feel'. Further suggestions from comments elsewhere: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and the recent pilot for The Man in the High Castle based on the excellent Philip K Dick novel. Ari Folman's movie The Congress also captures the notion of alternative simultaneous worlds.

Ebony Anpu & Tesseract Magick

One approach to world-jumping was Ebony Anpu and the Hawk & Jackal system of Tesseract Magick. You can read some thoughts about him here. One Tesseract story comes from a personal recollection:
I know that I promised not to tell a tesseract story, but since tesseract magick was probably Ebony's greatest contribution to the technology of Thelema, and because (though a trivial incident in itself) it served to convince me of the evident power of magick to transform one's universe I will include it here after all. I had for some time been hearing incredible reports about the efficacy of Ebony's tesseract workings. Being rather skeptical by nature I was somewhat dubious and didn't at all credit the reports I'd heard.
One day in late 1987 or early 1988 I was visiting at 41st and Opal where I'd often go to rap with Ebony, listen to him play his magnificent, bluesy fuzz guitar, and share some sacrament. The conversation turned to what I'd recently heard about his tesseract workings. He laughed at the reports, but he didn't deny them, and he offered to take me through a tesseract ritual so I could see for myself.
"But you have to be ready for your universe to radically change.", he said. "Can I control how it will change?", I asked. "'fraid not", was his succinct reply. As I was rather satisfied with my universe at the time I declined his offer. "Well, let me just show you what it involves.", he said, and I agreed that just having it explained couldn't do any harm.
So he went over to his desk and brought back a slim calligraphic manuscript. As we sat on the sofa he showed me, step-by-step, how the Hebrew alphabet could be arranged to form the geometry of a tesseract (a "four-dimensional" cube; sort of to the cube what a cube is to the square). As he finished up the explanation he flashed his characteristic smile, devilish and angelic all at the same time, and said, "Oops, looks like I took you through it after all!". I wasn't upset by this, I didn't believe in it anyway, so I went home without expectations or anticipation about how my universe might change.
That night I set to making dinner, but when I turned the knob to light the burner under my pan of water for the pasta, the burner behind it went on instead. I had been living in this apartment for close on five years. The inner knobs had always lit the front burners and the outer knobs had always lit the back burners. I got one of my room-mates to come and see. "But that's the way it's always been.", he said. No one else remembered it the way I did.
Later that night I called Ebony. He laughed, but he seemed impressed, "You must really be doing your will if that's the only change your universe needed to balance it." Considering some of the horror stories I've heard related I'm grateful that a switch of the oven knobs was all it took to convince me of the reality of magick!
-- Some memories of Ebony, Frater Faustus

Multidimensional Magick

Later, the Tesseract approach was extended to become the rebranded flavour known as Multidimensional Magic, as described in this document. Some excerpts:

We used to call the Multidimensional Magick section Tesseract Magick, after the first of the major innovations in Magick developed by Hawk & Jackal. Since then we have begun doing work in dimensions beyond the fourth.

On the overall effect:

There are phenomenon that we should warn you of. Time will sometimes be perceived in a different way immediately before, during, or after a Tesseract.

The effect can be sudden shifts in time or space. Driving a hundred miles in less than 20 minutes. Going through the same stop twice in the same direction on a public transit system. Losing the entire day, someone once skipped their birthday. Distortions in space. Being able to perceive beyond a closed door to the extent that you walk into it. A universe where the sky is red and has green cracks in it. Universes where there is no radio or TV on the air, and there is a smell of ozone in the air (jump again immediately!) People can change eye color, hair color, height, weight, or personality.

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.

On jumping and other people:

Only those that jump with you can be counted on. Everyone around you and every social circumstance can change rather dramatically in the most highly vectored jumps.

On post-jump stabilisation:

Usually in a few minutes, though it may sometimes take a few weeks, your new universe begins to harden and become more cohesive. You quit being able to see through walls and time-space distortions become more manageable. Hey don’t try to drive until you get used to these effects. Cars have been wrecked. But again lives have been saved as well.

I remember an emergency jump when I was in a car wreck on a skyway, I must have fallen 5 or 6 stories before I felt the jump, and then instantly I was back on the roadway sliding upside down toward the opposite guard rail. I had a broken shoulder but was otherwise all right.

On over-specification:

Don’t try to manipulate your new universe too much. Micromanagement can really screw things up. Think about it, what if you tried to consciously control your adrenals or the production of endorphins, or every other hormone or drug made in your body, it can be fun but do you really understand how every thing about how you works.

When you are God, and you are when you create a universe, let the automatic systems function normally unless there is a abiding need to interfere, then be prepared for much more than you predicted.

-- Multidimensional Magick, Fra. 137 [http://chakraactivation.com/MultidimensionalMagick.pdf]

TL;DR: I provide links and excerpts from documents which describe an approach called Tesseract or Multidimensional magick for jumping universes.

...

Well, the tesseract process is super long, but it is basically symbolic anyway (of course) - by representing a 4d space to yourself and by intention 'summoning the experience or feeling' of traversing it, you are essentially just accepting that it is possible and allowing it to happen. Belief matters, unfortunately (where "belief"=entrenched habits of your world). The 'mirror technique' is really just an approach of detaching from the mirage of your current surroundings, and so letting the underlying patterns shift. You can be more efficient simply by practicing lying down and completely abandoning yourself and the world, and using assertion. You can choose a nice metaphor (for me it's blankets and folds, or mirages and dunes in the desert, or it can be tesseracts and hypercubes) to represent the 'jumping' to yourself, or you can simply intend new facts into the world. It's basically "releasing a hold on the patterns of the world, and intending-allowing".

EDIT: Of course, there is an effect by which established routes by "others" assist your own changes. So the fact that the tesseract system has been set up will assist your own efforts.

it's easy to see many similarities ...

Yes, it's all the same thing. It has to be, if you think about it. If what we do is based on the truth of the world, then all approaches that produce results must be based on the same principles. I suggest that the main principle could be described as: "decisions and permissions".

I'm inclined to wonder about the relationship here between manifestation and dimensional jumping. Are they really different? ... Prayer, 'The Secret', focused thought-energy...

In truth, I think you can just brush aside all the explanations. Explanations are routes to allowing change, but they are not actually the mechanism of change. Let's just focus instead on what you actually experience. You do a ritual - 'jumping' or 'focussed-thought' or whatever - and subsequently the apparent world seems to change. Say you want a ticket for an important game of Your Favourite Sport and you perform your favourite bit of magick. Two types of result may be possible:

• Maybe the something you want comes to you by an explainable route - a friend rings up and he has a spare ticket for the game because his wife has left him, great!
• Or maybe your world changes in narrative-breaking ways: an object (a ticket for the game!) simply appears out of nowhere; it's just suddenly there on the coffee table. Meanwhile, friends change eye colour and character; geography drifts; the world rebalances.

The only difference between the two is that the second one is an experience that doesn't fit into our usual story about the world. Really, it is simply a shifting of experience in the same way as the first. The latter simply makes it more obvious that there is no solid, fixed underlying to the world. An implication of this is more dramatic: That whatever physical or mental actions you seem to take don't actually matter and have no effect. All that ritual and visualisation means nothing - well, except what you take it to mean. And that's the key. All change occurs by simply deciding-and-allowing. Meanwhile, the apparent world is always seeking to return to a balanced state. Resistance (identification, beliefs, expectations) prevents this. Intending a change in one aspect will naturally result in a realignment of other aspects, because to get any result at all we need to loosen our hold. Actions simply provide an excuse for allowing; it is how you give yourself permission.

TL;DR: The ways things work is always by "decisions and permissions". You don't notice this because you rarely allow yourself to change radically, or decide ambitiously, in a way that will result in dramatic shifts.

Q: TriumphantGeorge, I read your description of Tesseract process: "... by representing a 4d space to yourself and by intention 'summoning the experience or feeling' of traversing it, you are essentially just accepting that it is possible and allowing it to happen. Belief matters, unfortunately (where "belief"=entrenched habits of your world)."
This sounds a lot like Neville Goddard's teachings, in which (among others) I've immersed myself over the last couple of years. Do you think? I'll look into this perspective on the technique. (Although there's a point at which all the studying must stop, and Faith must rule.) :)
For sheer inspiration, I recommend Kidest Om. Just putting that out there.

I think that, fundamentally, all successful 'magick' is of the "Neville Goddard style":

• Detach from the current facts and experience.
• Assert new facts (until the corresponding felt-sense arises...)
• Profit!

How you represent the change to yourself doesn't really matter, so long as it involves relaxed detachment and it generates the felt-sense of the new 'reality'.

Although there's a point at which all the studying must stop, and Faith must rule.

Right. Something that happens with those chasing 'the truth' and those chasing reality changes is that... they end up just talking about it. Putting off the doing. And you can understand: implicitly, everyone knows that realising the truth (dreamlike reality with no solid foundation) or changing experience (transforming the dreamform) corresponds to a sort of death. Everyone wants what the want - except most don't, not really.

Kidest Om: New to me, will check.

Q: Hey, I have a question. If I want to intend that, say, I enter a dimension where my favorite video game is finally released, could I also intend-allow that all of my friends have the same personality? I'm actually fine with my entire physical world changing, I just want to be able to have the same friends, and of course, the same me.
Edit: Could I also will that, say, a sentimental object stays the same, but allow everything else to change?

I think that making the firm decision (and fully accepting it) is enough. After all, this is what you are doing in daily life anyway. Holding onto some things, letting other things unravel and change. With this approach, you are just letting go of more. Perhaps to make it easier, you could try imagining it in a slightly different way. Rather than imaging jumping dimension via a leap into the void, imagine that right now there are two paths. The left-hand path, no game. The right-hand path, in a short while there will be some new information that shows all is well. The rest of the universe remains untouched. Get into the right frame of mind. Step onto the right-hand path. Meanwhile, I'll be so disappointed if The Last Guardian really is not happening. Because The Shadow of the Colossus is my favourite game of all time.

I'm making the firm decision that The Last Guardian is in fact coming out to store shelves in a month.

Yeah, but you know what'll happen don't you? Magick has a habit of taking your requests literally. So you better be very specific in your phrasing.

For example:

YOU: "I want The Last Guardian to be on store shelves in a month!"

UNIVERSE: In a shocking development, The Guardian newspaper goes into bankruptcy, publishing its last edition one month later.

Q: I wonder if I could make a servitor to automatically re-define the intent of my spells based around its context...

An intermediary usually solves the problem. Actually, what usually happens is that all relevant meanings arise!

* * *

DimensionalJumping Misc Posts

Relevant Experiment: Facts Are Now

Redditor /u/UniversalChairs has submitted a post elsewhere linking to a recent study of the Wheeler Delayed Choice experiment:

To put it very simply, a particle (in this case an atom that has the physical properties of weight and mass) can behave either as a discrete particle or as a wave ... this experiment proves that whether the atom behaved as either a particle or a wave can be decided after the fact.

What it really means is that, in effect, the atom didn't behave one way or the other at the time. However, the observations you make later decide if reality will behave "as if" it had. What's the relevance to dimension jumping?

Well, it highlights that what really matters here is what you experience as true, now. Directed jumping involves detaching from the current observation while intending, or "asserting", that a new situation is true. Asserting a new fact in this way is like creating a fake observation, such that subsequent experiences will be "as if" it were true. The insight that comes from this: imagined experiences are of the same form as sensory experiences and, if intense enough, have the same weight (create a memory in the universe as fact) as sensory experience. See the Imagination Room metaphor as an illustration. You can read my full take on this in my comment to the main post (it's worth reading the rest of the discussions also). The key observation I make:

The only rule is that the apparent world remains self-consistent as an entire pattern.

If an "observation" is made, the apparent world will appear consistent with the observation from that point onwards. In this subreddit, we suggest that both sensory experiences and imagined experiences count as "contributing observations", differing only in their intensity.

...

You could possibly send yourself into a hefty delusion if you dissociated successfully and heavily too many times.

I say we are mostly safe because the "world-pattern" remains a unified whole, it's just that tugging too hard on one part obviously involves indirectly shifting the rest of it. However, whatever you fully intend - or imply with your intention - is guaranteed to produce an experience of some sort, even if it's just lots of thoughts or a dream about it. You could end up with a half-magical, half mundane experience. After all, it's perfectly possible to dream that you are insane. So...

Do you think this is why people say not to jump too often or too "far"?

What's important is that you don't intend conflicting things - adopt a single metaphor and stick with it. If you view it as "swapping dimensions through a mirror", stick to that. If you view it as "updating your dream", stick to that. And then let it go. In my opinion, we want to stay with a really streamlined "technical" metaphor that doesn't imply much else. e.g. If you start thinking there are "other you's" that you swap places with, you might imply to yourself that these others really exist and might linger or cause problems, that you might not fully switch, etc. And you will have experiences that are consistent with these thoughts. So keep it simple, keep it focused, don't think about it too much: What you are doing is literally "giving yourself a new observation", one which implies facts of the world via the metaphor. I've linked this before, but the Dream Views article on persistent realms is worth a read, because it illustrates how creation-by-implication works (albeit in a more flexible starting environment.)

EDIT: Added some extra sentences because I was in writerly mood! :-)

Q: A summary please?

For the main takeaways, just read the quotes in the post - but for the experiment, it amounts to (very loosely speaking):

• Passing a helium atom through a "switch" and then to a detector.
• The "switch" is such that it can correspond to the helium atom being a wave, or a particle.
• But the switch is randomised after the the atom passes through it.
• This means that the "wave or particle?" result depends on the measurement, and not the switch.

In other words, "wave" or "particle" are properties which belong to the observation and not the atom. It's a bit like discovering that the brightness of the sun really is a property of which pair of sunglasses you are wearing, and not the sun itself.

TL;DR: The world is your accumulated observations of it. The world itself has no inherent properties.

Q: So the Fiction- is as real as we'd make it (ish), this sounds a lot like romance

Well, if I was blueprinting a universe, I'd definitely have a healthy dose of romance built-in!

The Buddha Makes A Jump

From an article over at Science and Nonduality

We may read about the “emptiness” of reality and be perplexed by what this means from a conventional perspective. However, in the context of an interdependent co-arising universe, the fullness of one moment vanishes completely only to be replaced by the fullness of the next instant of manifestation. All that existed in the preceding moment disappears completely so all things are truly empty of an enduring, physical existence. This is a subtle and foundational insight for a wise relationship with the complete dynamism of reality.
--The Buddha Awakening, Science and Nonduality

Okay, this is a bit of a different angle, but if you are interested in such things then Buddhism has quite a nice description of how "reality" dissolves and is recreated every moment. This provides a way of thinking how dramatic changes can occur in your experience almost instantly: the continuity of experience is something that you do; it's not a property of the universe itself necessarily. By letting go of that continuity, with an intention in mind, we can jump more directly to our desired situation than would otherwise be possible using a "stepwise" approach.

Recommend reading the article in full for the quotes, if this is your kinda thing.

Constantine Dimension Jumping

Last week's episode of Constantine - an excellent TV series based on the Hellblazer character John Constantine - had a storyline about alternative dimensions accessed by candles and reflective surfaces. And a great character called Ritchie who had certain inter-dimensional benefits, having studied the "principles of other planes"...

Spoiler-filled recap here. [https://collider.com/constantine-recap-season-1-episode-11/]

Hopefully your own jumps will be less... traumatic.

An Empty Dimension

It's gone rather quiet on this sub.

Is that because 974 subscribers have now successfully jumped to alternate dimensions? Only I am left.

Technically, there should be one final post from a subscriber in each destination dimension, documenting that subscriber's success after landing in that dimension. But there isn't one on this sub. Is that because this dimension isn't desirable to anyone, so nobody has jumped here?

I am sat alone, in the dimension all the other dimensions have nicknamed 'the Departure Lounge'...

* * *

Oneirosophy Misc Posts

Rick Archer interviews Rupert Spira

Buddha at the Gas Pump: Video/Podcast 259. Rupert Spira, 2nd Interview [http://batgap.com/rupert-spira-2nd-interview/]

I found this to be an interesting conversation over at Buddha at the Gas Pump (a series of podcasts and conversations on states of consciousness) between Rick Archer and Rupert Spira about direct experiencing of the nature of self and reality, full of hints and good guidance for directing your own investigation into 'how things are right now'. Archer continually drifts into conceptual or metaphysical areas, and Spira keeps bringing him back to what is being directly experienced right now, trying to make him actually see the situation rather than just talk about it. It's a fascinating illustration of how hard it can be to communicate this understanding, to get people to sense-directly rather than think-about.

I think this tendency to think-about is actually a distraction technique used by the skeptical mind, similar to what /u/cosmicprankster420 mentions here [ POST: The depths of the skeptical mind.]. Our natural instinct seems to be to fight against having our attention settle down to our true nature.

Overcoming this - or ceasing resisting this tendency to distraction - is needed if you are to truly settle and perceive the dream-like aspects of waking life and become free of the conceptual frameworks, the memory traces and forms that arbitrarily shape or in-form your moment by moment world in an ongoing loop.

His most important point as I see it is that letting go of thought and body isn't what it's about, it's letting go of controlling your attention that makes the difference. Since most people don't realise they are controlling their attention (and that attention, freed, will automatically do the appropriate thing without intervention) simply noticing this can mean a step change for their progress.

Also worth a read is the transcript of Spira's talk at the Science and Nonduality Conference 2014 [https://web.archive.org/web/20180312044814/http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/read/the_new_science_of_consciousness]. Rick Archer's earlier interview with Spira is here [http://batgap.com/rupert-spira/], but this is slightly more of an interview than a investigative conversation.

...

*Q: I think this tendency to think-about is actually a distraction technique used by the skeptical mind

This is exactly what I was and have been battling with this past year. Getting the skeptical mind (ego?) to stop worrying about things that don't matter and start allowing things to flow naturally. Whenever the flow starts my skeptical mind kicks in and blocks it immediately. Very frustrating. There's something you should try: Make sure your attention/focus/presence isn't centred on your head/neck area. That's where tension and resistance and fight-flight tends to kick in, plus the upper chest. Instead, try to start with a pretty open,wide attention, lightly centred on your abdomen. Then when you get a "reactive kick" it won't have quite so strong an effect. Another thing that can happen is that we keep "checking" or at least slightly holding on to ourselves. Working towards an attitude of full commitment/abandonment is the way forward.

Of course, all easier said than done, because it's a wee bit scary. :-)

I'll have to work on that. Moving my presence anywhere but in my head is pretty difficult.

Yeah, you can't do it. Rather than move it, maybe it's better to say expand it - to reach down further into your body. You'll be tempted initially to try and do this muscularly somehow but a bit of practice and you're good.

Sorry, hard to describe!

Makes perfect sense. My last two telekinesis sessions have lined up perfectly in the timing of your comment to emphasize your point. Interesting how the universe functions. I will expand on that idea. No pun intended. I have noticed that I have to do some muscular work before I can settle into a mind space that allows me to feel, sense, experience the sensation of physically making contact with my wheel and getting it to turn. It took me a full hour to get into that mind space most recently. About five or so months ago I could get int that space within the moment of sitting down to practice. I really had a bad time a couple months ago and it set me back. Now I'm working to rebuild what I once had though I do feel as though my progress is better than it was before though I need to regain the control.

Well, the universe moves all at once - it's sneaky like that. What prep do you do? Is it all concentrating, or do you a 'releasing' exercise beforehand to get rid of the day's debris?

I have begun doing a chakra prime and then grounding and aura charge before proceeding. The reason why is because I drained myself to the point of depression around October last year. I am trying to make sure that I am always filled with external energy. The chakra priming is done by expanding awareness and then absorbing energy and then pressurizing all the extra energy into a chakra. I do that twice per chakra because that tends to allow me greater sensitivity of my chakras. Then I sit for however long I feel I need and meditate until I start feeling a disconnect from my body and my focus can be at its greatest.

If it works for you, sounds good. I didn't really spend much time exploring that side. Perhaps just lack of dedication. :-) Although I have experimented with localised body areas (different areas of the "brain area", etc) not really anything more formal.

But also it felt like "effort" and, knowing I was already operating from a tense background, I figured I'd try and get to the most open, relaxed starting point I could. I began doing a 2 x 10 minute daily releasing exercise (lie down, let go completely and absolutely, let mind and body and attention move as they want) and then mixing that with something more active (latest post is on that [Overwriting Yourself]). The final idea being that, if I hit a base state, then intention would naturally call upon the appropriate approach; the routes of "manifestation" would be more flexible, as it were.

I feel that in the end all the same things get tackled no matter what the approach though. You'll usually get drawn to the next thing, the right thing, if you're paying attention to your progress.

...

Q: Has Spira realized he has a free will yet? Or is he still droning on and on about choicelessness?
and that attention, freed, will automatically do the appropriate thing without intervention
Not necessarily! If ordinary untrained people stop controlling their attention, their attention will simply drift toward the status quo, which will not be a good outcome. Effortlessness is only a workable option for highly realized beings. Everyone else has to uproot bad habits through some amount of effort, and yes, control of attention.

I disagree that untrained people's attention drifts to the status quo. What it actually does is constantly jump and attach itself to sources of pain that need resolved, so they wilfully choose distractions. It keeps moving! That's why people have to really concentrate on tasks, because they've got a backlog of things their attention wants to... attend to and release.

Precisely. That's what I meant by status quo. This kind of choppy experience is habituated into the mind and is effortless actually. So without effort, this choppy flighty back and forth is what you get as someone under the influence of materialism and its attendant concerns for the body, social acceptance, etc.

No, it is very effortful - the effort of avoidance. It's subtle, but always there. If you truly give up, then it settles out after your "stuck thoughts and incomplete movements" resolve themselves.

If what you say were true, then stopping would be easy and natural and then everyone could become liberated in one afternoon reliably, like a machine.

It's not easy, because it can be quite unpleasant, and it's also transparent - people don't realise they are compulsively forcing their attention (deliberately contracting and deforming themselves) or compulsively creating distractions, because the thing with avoidance is you often don't know you are avoiding. And the thing with effort is that if it's constant, your can be quite unaware of it - until you stop. "Seeing the nature of things", I can give you right now. Unravelling your accumulated patterns, wide open attention that never shifts? Longer. There's nothing to be done about it, but you do need the courage to do nothing. People will find any excuse to avoid doing, say, a daily releasing exercise that involves simply lying on the floor - because they know things will come up. And they'll feel fear. Letting go completely is required in order to retrieve your power, but everything you've ever run away from will be waiting for you when you do and will hit you if you hold back even a little bit.

If this deformation required effort, they'd notice! They don't notice it because it's effortless.

You're wrong. Habitual effort becomes the normal background. Clench your fist for an hour and you'll not longer notice it. Try to open your fist subsequently and you'll feel pain; it'll be easier to stay clenched. If you instead let your fist go, stop holding onto it, then it'll gradually release.

That's one way. I call that non-conceptual relaxation. The thing is to practice non-conceptual relaxation you need to be highly realized already and you have to understand how it's different from ordinary relaxation.

There's nothing to understand. Just stop messing with your attention (although realising you are controlling your attention is subtle; however, that is what 'realisation' actually is). Yes, minor movement is helpful - Tai Chi, for instance - mainly because it sneakily expands your attention to fill out the body space and beyond. It's actually a theraputic technique: drawing attention from the head-space and other locations, into the body. Lots of "character conditions" are effectively localised attention. (I found some good info and techniques in The Psychology of the Body, Elliot Greene, which is written for massage therapists. Worked well.)

However, still, these - like Alexander Technique "instructions" - are basically cheats for getting you or someone else to expand (or rather, cease contracting) your spatial awareness. Because for most people, telling them to do that directly wouldn't make any sense to them. It's a metaphorical fist, you get the idea: opposite action does not dissolve or undo the original action.

You don't really understand the nature of habit

Habits are memory traces in "mind", and persist unless you allow them to release via recognition and acceptance, or you overwrite them. You don't need effort, just intention. What form could effort possibly take? What is effort made from? Every object in this room is a habit.

This makes no sense. Volition isn't separate from my being and neither is attention which is a partial function of volition. I can't stop it anymore than the Space can stop allowing objects through it.

How does it make no sense? People interfere with their attention in an attempt to manipulate themselves instead of simply intending, just as they tense their muscles in order to move when they could simply direct themselves in a more general sense and let the correct movement happen.

To interfere with your attention you have to be as though outside your own attention. Attention must be alien to you. There must be a separation between you and attention.

Ah, this where we're going wrong. I'm assuming we're talking from the point of view of the background already, not a "person". Effort is imaginary, from my view. Or better: it is the experience of intending something contrary to the existing momentum. You don't do effort, it's a sensation you have.

It's much easier to just go to the doctor and fix a tooth

Easier still, the dentist! But why did you have the problem in the first place?

There is no separation between me and attention, or me and that table. Attention is a subtle object, a deformation.

For example, you walk at night and there is a scary noise. The easy thing to do is turn away and go the other way. What takes EFFORT is to NOT turn away, but keep going even though that's not what you'd rather do. So you push yourself into a situation that's unpleasant. That's the necessary effort. And even yet, even in the middle of all this, has there real effort been made? No! The whole process is effortless in just the manner you say. Effort is just a sensation. There is only effortless intent. You decided effortlessly not to be a coward and followed through, like a star flying through space, without effort. But on a human level this is known as effort.

An imaginary hammer might seem to hit an imaginary nail, but it builds towards nothing. "Effort is a sensation" - yes, it's actually the sensation of resistance, of existing established patterns, rather than the sensation of doing or overcoming. Attention is an object, it has shape and is relative. It is regularly removed, as in dissolves into the background. Most people fall asleep at that point.

...

He doesn't touch "first cause", but without it you can't release state into choiceless awareness in the first place. Initial understanding comes from a brief cessation of creation. At which point, interfering is optional, you can just let momentum roll, or create consciously.

This is maybe more your bag: [http://www.nonduality.com/dep.htm]

I prefer this: [http://lirs.ru/do/lanka_eng/lanka-nondiacritical.htm]

TL;DR? It's Friday night.

That won't do it justice. It's better to just ignore it, the same way I ignore your link. :)

Ha, you'd like that link; it's all about being God. With no tricky Indian words whatsoever! ;-)

I'm a little bit like Spira in that when talking about this I prefer that we both use our own words. The only time I use links is usually if a) I don't have the time to discuss it properly, or b) I am arguing with a dogmatic Buddhist who needs an authoritative source, and then I'll give them a link to the doctrine. But the best way to talk is directly, from our own person, based on our own understanding and experience.

Quite so. The limits of text, here, however can be a bit of a restriction. The interview highlights the battle involved and the value of in-person dialogue, the persistence of deep assumptions. Talking in person is always a "feeling out" which is quite difficult to replicate in other modes. Why when it is so obvious are people resistant to the truth? Because it is not obvious, and in fact plainly wrong, to them.

Q: You know, I think Spira does say a lot of really helpful things. But I'll never forgive him for talking about choicelessness, because he's actually ignoring a very important aspect of experience, which is volition. I am guessing he sees volition in purely negative terms and wants to eliminate it. He doesn't see that volition can also be liberative and skillful and be the cause of liberation rather than an obstacle on the way to it.
Talking in person is always a "feeling out" which is quite difficult to replicate in other modes.
Maybe. I like text almost as much as I like to talk in person. But I do like to talk in a format where we can quickly exchange information. So for example, if I really wanted to talk, I'd prefer IRC to this, because IRC is much more immediate in terms of my ability to respond.
Why when it is so obvious are people resistant to the truth? Because it is not obvious, and in fact plainly wrong, to them.
What's obvious to them is that they are a body, and that body must be kept alive, and to keep it alive, they need to remain in good social standing, among all other things.

I think you misunderstand the choiclessless awareness thing - or I place a limit on it. One or the other. Anyway, I see it as you can experience choosing and doing but you aren't actually controlling it (that's theatre), but we do have free will but at the very base level of being: we can change the shape of ourselves by ourselves, reform our experience directly at the root. That's not choosing or willing, that's becoming. Yeah, everyday people quite like breathing and stuff. But also, the concepts you inheret you tend to literally experience as true in your dream-world. It pre-informs the partitioning of experience into content. That's why magickal traditions focus on belief adoption or belief circumvention.

It's willing and choosing. You just don't get it. That deep level is always operative and is never absent.

It's momentum and occasional intervention. Our pal Neville had that susses: Deterministic paths occasionally re-directed by conscious overwriting.

You shouldn't talk about will as though it's distant from you or not at the very core of your being.

Not at the core. What we call "Will" just is your being changing shape. Willing implies there's a "you" and a "target", when that's not the case at all (except conceptually, when thinking-about).

Otherwise it may seem crazy to change your beliefs and unjustified.

But of course, our beliefs are all around us, so that (once understood) is justification enough.

Q: It's momentum and occasional intervention. Our pal Neville had that susses: Deterministic paths occasionally re-directed by conscious overwriting.
I don't buy it. That's not how my will functions at all. The closest I get to determinism is habit, but habit isn't 100% deterministic for one, and two, occasionally because volition is after all global, a huge shift happens that's not just a minor adjustment.
Willing implies there's a "you" and a "target",
Absolutely not! That's where you go wrong. It doesn't imply that at all. That's just how you conceptualize your will right now. Eventually you'll see that's not true, because volition completely transcends personal identity. That's why I keep saying you aren't really George, just play one on TV. And I do mean YOU, so in some sense there is a person, but it's not the kind of person you think. Not necessarily a human and not even necessarily a social person, but still a person with choices to make.

I think you are too focussed on Will as "continuous manipulation", or that's how it seems. How tiring and effortful! Take a step back and see the imagery of the moment unfold, and as the play proceeds, give occasional directorial instructions. The focus is on enjoyment, and occasional enhancement. (This is choicelessless + creation.) Kick off the domino sequence, put your finger in the way if you want it to topple elsewhere. A power that requires constant maintenance, moment by moment effortful re-creation, is no power at all. Will as you describe it does imply separation and strain. Grasping. Fighting. Desperation. Personal identity is an occasional thought plus a persistent sensation. Both are just "object content" within experience.

What do you mean by "too"? Like overly? Who is the judge? On what basis is such a judgement delivered?

I am the judge! :-)

My thinking about will is so different from yours that you should not make any assumptions about my will based on yours. So don't say my way is effortful.

That's how you make it sound! Exactly as if you are trying to overcome something. Destroy something and overcome something. But there are no such things. Perhaps it is just your phrasing. So, I don't see volition as effort at all, simply a decision, a seeding and a redirecting.

You're not powerful enough. You're like a flea on my back George. You telling me to stop or do this or that is lunacy. You can keep doing it if it pleases you, but I see all such effort on your part as something akin to spitting at the moon or batting at the space. It's pointless. You have no authority or charisma in my mind. So the only way you could get inside is through a good argument. If you don't have a good argument, you really don't have any other open pathway.

Hmm. I think you misunderstand the understanding that I am assuming. It is you who are speaking from a partial personal perspective.

Of course I am speaking from my perspective, which like all perspectives has to be partial due to its exclusionary quality. I never deny this.

The key word was "personal". That is your error. You are still identified, still fighting the world, keeping it separate, but not realising.

Making a distinction between personal or other kinds of perspectives is pointless.

It is vital in terms of communication, the context changes the meaning. How can you fight your own habits? They are you. You can change and become, but you can't fight yourself - that implies and persists the same patterns. Fighting recreates the foe. And if you are fighting yourself, you are fighting the world. The world is just a mirage arising from the contours of your own memory traces, your own habitual structure, as subtle patterns in awareness. Freedom is the ability to change one's shape, to shift one's contours, to temporary or ongoing effect; there is no other freedom.

For example...

Seems like rather a long way round. Why don't you just change the subtle underlying pattern directly

If you see the world as being an internal image that's true

Where is "internal"?

"Freedom is the ability to change one's shape, to shift one's contours, to temporary or ongoing effect; there is no other freedom." Of course.

This is fundamental. There is "what is the nature of experience" (patterns in and of awareness) and this (how the patterns and so the world can be changed). When changing one's shape, one might feel resistance and call this "effort", but that is a sign of the stability or depth of an existing pattern, coupled with your identification with it.

What's directly and what's indirectly? I don't know how to make a distinction like that. On the basis of what is such a distinction made?

You're talking about messing around with the mirage; just change the landscape! It's like trying to change the movie by drawing on the screen or talking over the soundtrack. Just update the script!

To create or amend habits by generating experiences, thereby leaving trace memories, is the long way round. Just change the traces. On effort: it's not a good thing, or not. One shouldn't aim to create the experience of effort particularly; it's just a byproduct.

The thing is I am the director and the actor. I can't just change the script. I have to then read the new script, memorize it, and learn to act it properly to my own satisfaction. This isn't a lazy process.

Nope, you are the whole production. You don't need to do any of that, just adopt the new form. Change your nature, see it unfold.

It's not long. In fact, being in a hurry is the long way around. Where's your patience? I am ready to do this for 10 aeons.

That's your choice, so that's what you'll get. You've chosen that story! Think I'll enjoy my more straight-for-the-goodies fun.

Nobody makes effort for effort's sake, jeez. But if you say effort is a byproduct, you're saying it's not important to focus on it in your attention at all, ever. That I disagree with.

People do exactly that all the time, thinking effort is causal. Why focus on effort at all? Attend to the desired form, that's it.

Because when one attends to the desired form, there is resistance in the form of fear, habit, etc.

So what? Just accept that and continue. If you want to remember things, insert that fact directly. It's a good example, and does work.

...

TriumphantGeorge, a question: in that article it is implored that we cease the will of creation for a moment. How does one do this?
Edit: Daily releasing exercise / meditation?
Edit again, nvm I feel like I've got it.

Yeah, just... stop.

Intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity is a key term used in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology to conceptualize the psychological relation between people. It is usually used in contrast to solipsistic individual experience, emphasizing our inherently social being.

In our own dreams, the whole dream is 'us' and our intentions manifest fairly directly (although there are cases where strange things do happen); we are 'sole creator'. The experience is of being a 'dream space' but identifying with a 'dream character' who acts as the perspective centre.

In waking life, although our personal experience is identical upon examination ('awareness space' with content arising in it and identifying with a perspective character), the world tends to be less obviously flexible and we assume that there are other 'people' sharing the world with us - who themselves are experiencing an 'awareness space' with content arising within it.

The only observable difference between waking and dreaming is really the sluggishness of the environment in response to our intentions, the rest is imagined. But I still find the 'multiple perspectives' thing quite tricky to get a handle on. Sure, I know that I am not a person, I'm a 'space with an imagined dream character', and in that sense on equal footing with the other people I encounter (avatars?), but I've yet to come up with a really satisfactory way of thinking about this.

Any ideas?

(Non-duality writer Greg Goode brings up this issue in a presentation on Common Stumbling Blocks to Non-Dual Realisation which is worth a read, here. [http://heartofnow.com/files/images/greg.talk.conference.pdf])

EDIT: The discussion below has also expanded into notions of intention and free will, and the implications of this for intersubjectivity.

...

Hmm, I'll need to think about that a little; seems interesting.

Our expectations are internal to our being, they're not something we can look at the way we look at chairs.

No, but the world we experience does reflect our internal expectations and biases - we live ourselves through our 'external' happenings?

Q: The only observable difference between waking and dreaming is really the sluggishness of the environment in response to our intentions, the rest is imagined.
I think that's true in general, but I've had lucid dreams where I was certain I was dreaming, but I still couldn't manipulate squat for the life of me. I haven't had many such dreams, but I've had at least two or three or so. The biggest difference between lucid dreams and ordinary waking is our expectations, I think. We expect different things from dreams. This isn't observable in the environment per se. Our expectations are internal to our being, they're not something we can look at the way we look at chairs.
But I still find the 'multiple perspectives' thing quite tricky to get a handle on. Sure, I know that I am not a person, I'm a 'space with an imagined dream character', and in that sense on equal footing with the other people I encounter (avatars?), but I've yet to come up with a really satisfactory way of thinking about this.
I explain this via subjective convergence and divergence. Because subjectivity is just a point of view, these points of views have the same flexibility that mathematical points do. They can converge and diverge arbitrarily. I want to note I am only comparing flexibility of relations here. I'm not saying subjectivity is a mathematical point.

Yes, that's why I included "although there are cases where strange things do happen". Sometimes you encounter other characters who seem stubbornly like 'other people' rather than part of your dream, for instance. One possibility is that, although in general your dreams are 'seeded from scratch' - they are fresh and borne in a new 'space' - this is not always the case. Sometimes you are joining as a perspective in a pre-existing environment. Like connecting to an online gaming experience. This raises the extra question: If we are a 'space', when we dream are we connecting to existing 'mind-realms' and sometimes seeding them, and why are we apparently by default connected to this particular 'waking' one?

(Robert Munroe, the OOBE guy, in later books starts connecting to other worlds - he thinks - to the extent where he revisits the same place and 'person perspective' later, and finds that their lives have moved on as if they were still playing out in his absence; the worlds are persistent and independent, apparently.)

But intent is a powerful thing. If you think you are connecting, it will manifest just that. So in effect, you might as well be connecting if you really believe you are. So there is that too.

There is that. That's the thing: expectation is pretty powerful, and hard to disentangle. And expectations often seem "obvious".

To me expectations are the most devious things ever. I often discover expectations when I didn't think I had any, at the least opportune moment usually. I certainly have hidden, subconscious or maybe even unconscious expectations that I haven't unearthed yet. I am pretty sure of that. They're sneaky as hell and they hide very well in the background of my mind where I can't find them easily.

They act as filters, sometimes dangerously so. Sometimes it just won't occur to you to do something important because of your expectation that it isn't possible, or it simply isn't included in your worldview. For instance, I am really interested in the 'making decisions' process, because I think I actually didn't really make decisions for the first chunk of my life; rather, I experienced sequences of thoughts. I wasn't intending to change course. This didn't matter, until 'environmental events' derailed one particular project because I didn't keep on track, and I didn't really know how to maintain it.

It's important to remember that relaxation is intentional too.

Yes, and this brings up another line of thought. I followed the Alexander Technique for a while (my can't-recommend-it-enough book here), and many teachers talk about "sending messages" to yourself to release your neck, and so on. Martial artists such as Peter Ralston similarly (although much more knowledgeably; that book is a guided exploration of what it is to be a person).

Basically by "send messages" they mean intend, but most people don't know how to intend. All they know is how to move their muscles, directly and clumsily. Hence all those tense-up-and-release relaxation approaches. Not needed: just lie down and intend to be completely relaxed until you unravel bit by bit and get there. You are just moving yourself from a universe where there is tension, to one where there isn't.

Q: Intent is very hard to understand because we tend to have misconceptions about it.
For example, we tend to speak of intentions as if they were separate little bits. In reality intent is one uninterrupted flow. Intent has no starting point in space or time, no ending point, no transition point, etc. All the changes in intent are imaginary and somewhat arbitrary, but as imagination they're also real. Intent is also multi-level sometimes (maybe often).
So for example I do a contemplation like this. I relax my arm on the table. Then I raise my arm. And I lower it. As I do this, I ask myself, when did I intend to raise it? My real answer is, "as I intend ongoingly so it is raised ongoingly." But my question demands some kind of singular atomic burst of decision, but that's not what happens. So my question almost wants me to say that I intended to raise my arm at 15 hours 15 seconds, and starting from 15.5 seconds to 20 seconds my arm was raised. This separates intent from action. This also atomizes, chunks intent into a single burst at 15 hours 15 seconds. But is that how I really intend?? NOOOO!!!! I don't do this!!! I can stop my arm at any point during raising it!! Intent is ever-ongoing!! It is ever-smooth! There is no burst! Intent doesn't precede anything. Intent is concomitant with action. In fact, intent is identical to action. Real intent is indistinct from the dynamics of experience. It isn't something that precedes or follows or exists on par but somehow separately from experience.
Also, there is no obvious point where I decide to raise my arm. Raising the arm looks like a clear distinction. First relaxed, now raising. Seems like there is a difference. But there is no point in time when I can say the arm is no longer resting and now it's only raising. There is some ambiguous interval where it's maybe both resting and raising or it's unclear? But the transition is smooth. There is no sudden jump. So no matter how suddenly intent appears to change, its real character as I see it is smooth and there is no single point when we can say now it stopped doing this and started that.
We don't know how to intend because we intend all the time, but we cover up the function of intent with our bogus ideas about how intent works.
Intent is always: perfect, effortless, spontaneous, smooth, beginningless, endless, flowing.
And now I want to mention the multi-levelness of intent. This one is simple.
For example, I decide to play a game of chess. As I sit at the chess board, that intent is ongoing. I also intend to move individual chess pieces one at a time. In truth this is all one smooth flowing intent. But conceptually we can say it has two levels: 1st I maintain ongoing commitment to a game of chess, and then 2nd, in the context of that commitment I move the chess pieces according to the rules to which I have committed myself to. All this is concomitant and ultimately it's impossible to strictly separate the intent to play chess from the "individual" intentions behind each move. However, it helps to talk about intending to play chess, and then to also separately talk about the individual chess moves. That's just one example of how intent can be multi-layered.

I'm with you and not. To some extent here you are inferring intention when what is really happening is the continuation of an existing motion as a complex momentum towards an intended goal. I'd simplify this by saying: intent cannot be experiences for experiences are results; intent is injecting a goal into experience. It can be ongoing, or a flash, or whatever. It can be an instance of "free won't" - just halting a direction experience is moving in - or setting a new target, immediate ("raise my arm"), short term ("off to the shops to buy milk"), or long term ("become King of the Monkeys").

It's like making a wave in water while being the water: rippling yourself. You can then adjust the ripple's propagation by rippling in the opposite direction, or adding more detail, or whatever. You might feel a sense of resistance when you change the direction, but other than that it's an effortless process with control of details unnecessary - wu-wei?

We're probably just arguing over language here. Momentum = ongoing influence = intention. I would have been better saying changing my intention or changing my goal to be clearer. And yes, experiences always flow towards your intention. (But one does or can infer one's intentions from the experiences that arise, because you can't actually experience the act of intending itself. That's how you discover you have hidden assumptions and so on.)

I guess I was trying to get away from the idea that the ongoing influence of intention would require some sort of continual maintenance or effort; it doesn't. Resistance and effort is only encountered when you are conflicted. Am I a bit clearer there? It's always "all you" so you're never uncontrolled or running wild and all over the place, in that way. However, it should be effortless if all is well.

Q: No, this would place intent somewhat ahead of experience. It's concomitant. The intent is not in the future. You may have a future state you want to arrive at, but the actual flow is always controlled ongoingly. This ongoingness requires intentional presence at all times. It means intent cannot be removed from action to be either before or after, or you'll get a situation where some action happens by itself without intent, and then it can't be controlled in that time. Well, nothing is ever "by itself." "By itself" is not a valid state of anything, ultimately, even if it appears so. Do a little thought experiment. Imagine that you arm is raised, but don't raise your arm. Now think that it will be good to raise your arm and that you should do so, but again, don't raise it yet. This gives you the end goal, but no action. Why not? Because even though you have conceptualized a goal, you haven't moved to it yet. So intent is not really the goal. Intent is deliberate and choosy movement, change. It's choosy because you can always choose something else at any time. You can abandon your goal. If actions had to move toward goals, once you had a goal, you'd be forced to complete it. Because you can also abandon goals, goals are not intent per se.

I revise my statement, and say "flows-with"!

By 'goal' or 'intent' I don't mean a conceptualisation of it, I mean an absorbing or becoming of it. It's not an aim, although that's how we might talk of it afterwards. Let's explore with perhaps more important examples: magick. A classic New Thought way is to "adopt the feeling associated with having attained your goal" and then wait for thoughts, actions and events and environmental changes to occur until that goal is your present experience. How does your notion of 'intent' fit in with that? As I see it, I could view this as having 'changed myself' into the person with that outcome and now it's just unfolding.

Would 'intent' be better phrased as a sort of 'mental posture'? Because it's not an action itself, but language forces us to frame it as such.

Intent is not physical action exclusively. Intent is mental action of any kind. Or you can think of it as mental orchestration of action instead of action. But orchestration happens concomitantly with action.

Hmm, interesting. So, taking my example, I would say that I only need to 'intend' adopting the feeling-state corresponding to my desire (the intention and the adopting are the same thing really, I just 'adopt the feeling state' really). Then I leave it alone, and the world lines up. (In a dream, the change might happen instantaneously, but in waking life, it doesn't.)

At any point I can 'intend' again and have my experiences flow differently. The core idea here is in this "feeling" - it's the "global sense' of yourself and the world. What would it feel like if this were your experience? It is the feeling of "your shape" at this moment. In this view, "intention" isn't action at all as such, but it is "with" action, it is the decision of what your action means. The action itself doesn't matter. Summoning a feeling is probably the simplest action you can take, non-physically and non-mentally. Hmm, I am not being as clear as I'd like.

Q: Yea, because look at the big pancakes of intent here. During dreaming, you let go of objectivity to a large extent and you no longer adjust your expectations toward what you might think is a neutral standard of some sort (this is what objectivity is). In your dream world you think there is just you, so there is no neutral standard that you commit to. "Commit" is an important word, keep it in mind. Since you have no commitment to constantly adjust your experience toward a neutral standard, it flows instantly or very quickly with your intent toward your goal. When you are awake, things are more complicated. When you're awake you then have an unshakeable and abiding commitment toward some seemingly external neutral standard. You no longer think it's just you. You think whatever changes happen now have to be witnessed and approved by, and be participated in by multiple observer-participants in addition to you. This is your commitment to convention. So whatever other commitments and intentions you try to generate during magick, they happen in the context of that prior commitment to convention. Guess what? That context is not magick-friendly. The whole point of that context is to make it look like experience isn't owned by you! If it's a neutral ground, you can bring some changes to it, but no huge change can be done by you without some cooperation of others. You can move your body around by yourself, and that's about it. Anything more fancy requires cooperation. In other words, the whole point of that commitment to convention is precisely to prevent magick. So if you try to use magick as an ordinary human with a commitment to convention, which most humans maintain unshakably, then it's likely to either fail or work super-feebly. What you really want to do is something crazy. You want to abandon your commitment to convention. No more neutral ground. You absorb all of this waking phenomenal reality into yourself as your dream. It's no longer a democracy. Now it's just you, just like in a dream. Now things are not fair anymore. Now you've made yourself a tyrant. Now you can use your magickal intent. And now without your commitment to humanity (convention) you can make things happen as quickly as in a dream. However, because all this is done in a kind of inhuman state, it would be scary as fuck, because as you do this, you wouldn't be doing this as a normal human. When you abandon convention you're basically at least temporarily leaving your "I am a human" card on the table. You're not acting with human limitations, but then you're kind of like a beast or a deity. You're not human. For most people this is too freaky to even contemplate, never mind actually experience.

I agree on the commitment thing. It's the, erm, magic ingredient. I used to use the phrase "fully intend", but there's no decent way to say it. Essentially, it just means step forward without a care for doubt and have it happen. Still, this loops us back to the intersubjectivity thing. Now, I know I can have other people behave differently, and for recent events to be effectively 'deleted' so I can have another go, and so on. And I know I am not a "person".

I am all people? Am am none, I am the people, the environment, the space in which the environment residues, and "that" in which the space appears. What are you? What happens when "we" both reshape ourselves (i.e. the universe)?

Let's say you perform a powerful spell where you take control of the world as your dream and you kill me. Poof. From your POV I am gone. But from my POV nothing happened to me. So I can't see the you that knows I am gone in my world anymore. So our subjectivities diverge. In my world I get a copy of you that never performed the spell. And in your world you get the world without me in it.

Yes, this. Taking this further, by making it less extreme, if you and I "intend" different things, do our subjectivities diverge so that we both have the experience we desire?

And the "you" that I am left with, what is that? It's a "you" without anybody looking through that "viewport"?

You want to settle your mind on what I am, right? But truth is, there are so many versions of me that whatever you settle on as me is also me. So if you decide no one is looking through this viewport, that's possible. That's within the continuum of what I could be. If you decide I am not a pzombie and I am looking through the viewport of this body, that's possible too.
We always try to eliminate ambiguity, don't we?

Yeah, this is the core of what I am getting at with the "intersubjectivity" topic. It also helps tackle some of the moral issues that players in the game might come up with. My previous approach to this was to think of ourselves (myself, yourself, whoeverself) as "extended beings" across all possibilities.

So, if we think of a (rather multi-dimensional) grid in which all possible moments, all possible experiences, are laid out, each from my 'viewport perspective' - well, I am extended across all of them, but I am only looking into one of the locations at a time. The history or 'timeline' of myself is the path I travel across that grid, moment by moment, choice by choice. I tried exploring this idea through the perspective of time travel a while back - taking this more extreme example of 'changing the moment' to try and bring out the issues and details - but actually I think it just confused the issue, because of course people wanted to discuss actual time travel mechanisms a la sci-fi.

Time is a very interesting topic. I see two types of time. Conventional time. That's something like today is September the 7th, 2014, 3 hours, 3 minutes. This kind of time we try to all agree on. This time pertains to the supposedly neutral common ground, the objective realm of the Earth and the "physical" cosmos, etc. And then there is subjective time. Subjective time can include things like your past lives, dream time dilation experiences, and other time dilation experiences, etc. Subjective time is your own time as you experience it and it can dive into and out of conventions of all sorts, loop back onto itself, etc.

I think 'time' gets to the heart of things, because what we often implicitly mean by magick and manipulation is a discontinuity in our experience. A jump from one moment to another moment that would not normally follow from it.

Conventional time is surely imaginary?

...

Let me put it this way. Goals don't set themselves by themselves. That's why intent isn't the same thing as a goal.

Yes, that's fair enough. Goals are a conceptualisation or representation of a desire. It has no 'motive force', just as simply owning a photograph of a nice fast car doesn't create any momentum towards you actually owning one.

Precisely

With this stuff, there's always a hurdle of developing a common language with which to discuss it. So let's have "goal = conceptualisation or image". So, can we say that "intention" is the meaning that is attached to a particular act, be that mental, physical, or something else? Or even more broadly, "intention" is the meaning we attach to a particular change. This means that intention itself can't be experienced alone; it is not a thing, it is almost an applied interpretation, live.

(We're returning a little to Alan Chapman's idea here, that it doesn't matter what you do as your magickal act, it's what you decide it means that counts.)

I agree that intention cannot be experienced alone. That's why I keep saying how intention is concomitant with change/action. Another word we can use for intention is permission. So if I intend to raise my arm, I permit myself to raise my arm. If I intend to relax, I permit myself to relax. So allowing, permitting can be thought of as intent. A synonym. Does that help?

I think we are essentially agreed. I don't really mean 'assigning' as a label attachment - that returns us to conceptualisation - so much as doing-with-purpose. It's simultaneous. The language is introducing a duality here where there is none. Another way I see this is a 'releasing into a direction'. When we walk forwards, we release ourselves in that direction, as an analogy. I believe intention is the fundamental thing. It's a muddied word. Are we better to just jump in and say it's free will and we have free will because we are the fabric of experience, and so can shape ourselves however we choose?

Excuse this extended quote, but it's from a decent recent book which tries to capture some of what we've been discussing, without me having to type too much (Bernardo: see this as promotional!):

==So, in the context of all these metaphors, what is it that makes mind move?
Notice that the answer to this question cannot be a phenomenon of experience, since experience is already mind in motion! Whatever the primary cause of the movement of mind is, it cannot itself be a movement of mind. Thus, we cannot find the primary cause in physics, biology, psychology, or any area of knowledge. The difficulty here is the same one behind the impossibility to describe the medium of mind itself: since all knowledge is a movement of the medium of mind, that which sets mind in motion cannot be known directly. But we can gain intuition about it indirectly, by observing its most immediate effects in experience and then trying to infer their invisible source. Our ordinary lives entail unfathomably complex chains of cause and effect: one thing leading to another, which in turn leads to another …and another, along the outlines of a blooming, unfolding pattern that we call the laws of nature. But at the very root of the chain of causality there seems to be something ineffable, tantalizingly close to experience, yet just beyond it: freewill. Whenever you make a decision, like choosing to close your hand into a fist, you have a strong sense that you were free to make the choice. But usually that sense comes only after the choice is made –immediately after – in the form of the heartfelt certainty that you could have made a different choice. The direct experience of freewill, however, remains ambiguous: before you make the choice it is not there; and then the very next experience seems to be already that of having made the choice. The experience of making the choice seems lost in a kind of vanishing in-between limbo, too elusive and slippery to catch at work. It is as though freewill were outside time, only its effects insinuating themselves into time. Yet, freewill can be so tantalizingly close to experience – perhaps arbitrarily close – that many people are convinced that they feel the actual choice being made. Personally, despite having paid careful attention, I have never managed to satisfactorily ‘catch’ this elusive experience in an unambiguous manner. I can’t prove it is not there, but I hope to have evoked enough doubt about it that you are open to the possibility that choice itself is outside experience. We only really experience the prelude and the immediate aftermath of choice, never the making of a choice. Though I am aware that this is the trickiest element of my entire argument – resting, as it does, more on introspection than logic –I contend that freewill proper is the primary cause of all movements of mind; the freewill of the one subject of all existence. Freewill can never be experienced directly: it is the driving force behind all experience and, thus, never an experience itself. But we can infer its existence from the retroactive sense of free choice that we have immediately after making a decision. This sense of free choice is, so to speak, the ‘echo’ of the primary cause reverberating within our psychic structures.

• From Why Materialism is Baloney - Bernardo Kastrup==

...

This is junk, sorry. Choices are not important. Never confuse volition with choices. I was talking about this before. Volition is not something that comes in atomic little localized bursts and I explained why not.

I would tend to just use "intention" for all of the above, with context adjusting the meaning. The reason is that it's the most vague version, which doesn't necessarily imply "doing" or "gripping", which to me gives the wrong sense. All of them just mean "directing the content our experience" in some implicit way, surely.

Whenever you make a decision, like choosing to close your hand into a fist...

To be fair, here I think he's just trying to point out that you can't experience the doing, the "first cause", so people retrospectively tell themselves a story to fill the gap. There are moments of redirection and interference, however, when we change course. Calling them "choices" or "decisions", those are just best-effort words to fill in an event that is ungraspable as an experience.

This is confused. I don't believe this at all. I already explained what problems I see with this narrative and I don't feel like repeating myself. His fault from my POV is that he's chunking intent. Intent should not be chunked.

Hmm. I agree there is no real "stopping-and-doing" but it's difficult to discuss this without isolating examples, even though that isolation is false. So I'm giving him a pass on this, for now. ;-)

I'll give it one more try. Every moment is a moment of choosing. They're not some rare and special moments that happen only once in a while. Now take all the moments and erase boundaries between them. Now you got what I call "intent" or "volition."

I know what you're getting at, that's why I said there's no "stopping-and-doing". Although conceptually this is fine, I find I don't really experience each moment as a moment of choosing, when I examine it. I think that I could if I were more attentive and present, but I don't. I seem to drift in and out of that over time.

But I do! :) I experience it! :)

I think this is part of the point of this sub, and of Dream Yoga. You have to examine your experience in order to change it. You can have that experience if you hold on to yourself. Really entering into a Dream Yoga view, though, surely you would have the opposite sensation? Just a thought. Funnily enough, arm experiments like that were something I did do when following that Peter Ralston book (Zen Body-Being), which is all about exploring how you work. There's a 'pre-feeling', then a movement, that is ongoing. But the key is my attention is on it. Meanwhile, my foot is tapping up and down and I haven't noticed, and I'm frowning with one eye slightly closed and I haven't noticed.

Think like this: if you think there is a unique and specific moment of choice, then what is this followed by? A choiceless moment? And then what? Another choiceless moment? At what point will your ability to make choices come back?

You can make choices at any time - i.e. interfere with what's happening. The ability never leaves, provided you are present to the moment. But you need not ever interfere. Zen Buddhism is much concerned with the arising of 'natural action' as a response to the environment, for instance, without 'doing' or 'choosing'. You are not required to manually control yourself each moment. You can do so at any time, but equally you can step back and let things happen. In fact, you probably live most of your life this way without noticing.

Then there's is Jiddu Krishnamurti's way of describing 'choiceness awareness':

==Krishnamurti held that outside of strictly practical, technical matters, the presence and action of choice indicates confusion and subtle bias: an individual who perceives a given situation in an unbiased manner, without distortion, and therefore with complete awareness, will immediately, naturally, act according to this awareness – the action will be the manifestation and result of this awareness, rather than the result of choice. Such action (and quality of mind) is inherently without conflict.

• Choiceless Awareness, Wikipedia==

...

The only way you can't be present is to choose not to be. In other words, you end up always winning here, no matter what.

Attention is a filter, not a torch-light. But, it can get stuck and localised, defaulted. A key practice is to dissolve that boundary, expand back out again, I have found.

When you don't interfere you are still choosing moment by moment to maintain a space where things can happen in a disowned context.

This isn't an ongoing choice though. Once you've 'stood back', you don't need to keep re-choosing it, maintaining that position, once you have practiced this for a while. At first you do need to maintain a space because your default attention might be highly localised; but this will loosen by itself eventually, quicker with encouragement.

Think about the state of the muscle in your tongue. When you move your tongue during speaking, do you interfere with it? And when you stop moving the tongue you stop the interference? This makes it sound like your tongue has its own mind and its own desires that you interfere with.

You don't interfere in such detail, or should I say "choose/direct". The choices you make tend to be broader than that, and everything falls in line. Just as when you stand up from sitting, your body coordinates itself, you don't have to manage all the muscular movements individually - or at all. By interfere, though, I'm not suggesting a separate 'interferer' and an 'interfered with', although you can artificially experience one.

Nonsense. Sorry. There is no independent reality. Because there is no independent reality, there is no free-of-bias anything.

There is the 'relaxed position' of things, however. What you get if you stop forcing your experience. This isn't about there being a 'real underlying reality' or whatever - just about 'mind' (or whatever you want to call it) being left to settle. Note though, a relaxed mind isn't necessarily an unmoving, unchanging mind - just as a pool of water will still have its original ripples once we stop disturbing it.

Besides, isn't a torch-light a filter of sorts too?

Attention is a filter in the sense of being a masking process. The key difference in the default state implied:

• With the torch-light metaphor, the implication is that the default state is nothing - no content - and we have to actively, with effort, shine our attention on things to gain information.
• With the filter/mask metaphor, the default would be wide-open awareness, and what we're doing is contracting that to have our attention limited. Furthermore, with a mask your attention needn't be a simple 'circle of light', it can be distributed at different intensities across experience - for instance, people have a tendency for their attention to jump to the objects in a room, and be unaware of the spaces between.

All choices are ongoing

Okay, this is our way out. I would agree that choices are ongoing, just not that they are necessarily continually, actively made or re-made. If that make sense. Meanwhile, we could rephrase relaxation as a release of attachment, if that's better for you.

Would your filter metaphor...

The filter metaphor of course also allows for a focusing and active constraint. It's "the win" because it gives you the benefits of the torch-light metaphor (narrow attention) with the benefits of open awareness and of structured attention over space. (It also corresponds nicely with some research on 'attentional styles' and perception etc.)

Wide open awareness means awareness that is open to possibilities. One such possibility is absolute nothingness.

There are two senses in which attention can be wide open. One is in the sense of right now, taking everything in as it is in 3D-space and more - including the underlying background awareness for everything. Then there is 'what is possible', also opened up. So, yes.

Filtering suggests that you aren't meddling with anything...

I see where you're coming from. It's the 'creative aspect'. The filter doesn't imply that what's outside the filter is safe from influence and manipulation. It is a filter of attention which overlays awareness. Awareness itself is unbounded. There is another thread to this of course: The creative aspect of attention. In a lucid dream, I open a door, and without fail there is something beyond it...

Then it's not so bad, but I'd wager you'd be dominated by the presently apparent phenomena in this mode.

Not if you have direct experience of the open unbounded space. The idea of the filter is that if you release it, you are unrestricted in that way. You would experience the phenomena in context - the context of a dream-space.

Filter metaphor suggests that objects of attention exist before the act of attention attends to them. That's how materialists think.

Not really (just). Berkeley's idealism, for instance, doesn't suggest that experiences don't exist in some way separate from an individual attending to them. He phrases it as everything being witnessed by "the mind of God", by which we really mean that there is an unbounded consciousness, of which each of us is a part, or a witness via a perspective.

I don't conceive of myself as filtering something...

If all possibilities exist, and you are only experiencing one, then you are filtering, not creating. But this is really just how one thinks of it. We've moved along here somewhat though, from what I initially meant.

Two sorts of filtering, then:

• Filtering of the 3D Present Moment Experience: Here I am, right now, experiencing this moment. I don't feel that "I am a vast open space", I feel more enclosed than that, more constrained. If I let go, however, I find that my "hold" on the experience loosens and opens out. If I keep doing this (over a long time) my 'attentional profile' gradually expands and opens. Alternatively, I can force this by actually stretching out evenly into space. This removes the distinction between "me" and "my environment", letting me feel the dreamlike nature directly. This is something I have deliberately experimented with.
• The Filtering Of Possibilities: Enfolded within every moment and every space is 'all possible moments'. Like a configuration space with all possible combinations; we are at one location in the space at any one time - we have filtered down all possibilities into a single current experience. The current experience is the 'unfolded' one. This is more a way of conceptualising possibility.

The latter might be better viewed as a creative act, an implicit or explicit one. The first one was really what I was referring to. I assume already that "anything is possible".

I'm not a part. I am the whole thing! And so are you.

Yes, it just seems we are a part, because we have a perspective. Just because I am not constantly experiencing all my memories all the time, for instance, doesn't mean they are not enfolded in me. (Not a great analogy.)

You see the need, though, for things to be 'enfolded' somehow? Because we both need creative access to 'the whole thing'? All time, all space, all at once?

Extra thought: we are not actually 'located'.

Creative access = opening the filter = dropping inhibitions / restrictions. It's always access to yourself, of course.

Additional Question: What's your problem with advaita/non-duality?

Now, there are some authors I think are pretty rubbish (Tony Parsons, for instance), and many of them don't get how free will can be incorporated, even though to me that just drops out of it naturally. However, it does seem to me that most are striving for a similar thing at root - i.e. to directly experience that there is no separation between you and your environment, you are "all this" and there is no underlying solidity beyond that. Meanwhile, most idealists are happy discussing it philosophically, while never actually living it.

I dislike Advaita teachers because they promote choicelessness and absence of free will.

I agree that will is paramount. In fact, one of my concerns about subjective idealism as commonly treated is that it doesn't adopt this fully, due to still holding onto the notion of 'objects' and encountering rather than being or making. Will forms perception, it is inseparable from awareness, because the Will is about changing awareness. I think it's the "Neo-Advaita" people that are particularly bad (that one can't say anything, basically!). We should probably separate Advaita from Non-duality; there are people in the latter camp who have a better grasp of things.

This isn't what I want at all.

If you and the environment are not separated, 'merged', then it's surely saying that it's all under your control - there's just experience under Will (or "ongoing choice" as we phrased it). Better to say: you don't merge, you just recognise that there was no separation. Of course, it's up to us whether we want to experience 'being a body with magical powers' or 'being this whole room and changing it how we want'. I want that cup of coffee over there to change into a glass of water? Well, I am that cup of coffee, so no problem.

The feeling love thing, so not what I mean. I mean something more like, bringing/recognising your surroundings are under your influence.

The experience can feel like merging when it happens, but in fact it is just realisation. Delocalised experiences can be a mix of exhilarating and terrifying. Which is not unexpected: it feels like a threat of death, and in a sense it is. It's a big hurdle for this stuff, which is why most people are happier with servitors and sigils and so on for magick - an obvious intermediary that you are "sending out in to the world". People are resistant to OOBE-type events for the same reason. Separation anxiety?? :-)

I am so fucking glad I invited Triumphant George instead of Pavlina. I know Pavlina would not think of this cool thought even in a million years, sorry. You are superior to the people you quote, imo.

Why, thank you, most kind.

The technique I started off with was the 'rope technique', of which there are a few variations [http://out-of-body-experience.info/best-techniques-out-of-body-experience/]. But basically, you just relax and try to 'feel a rope in your hands' as you pull yourself out. It takes a lot of courage to push through the initial vibrations, and other potential unpleasantness. (If you haven't played with this in a while, it's worth a punt, just to see what happens now...)

Ah, this is astral projection, which is also very interesting. But in my experience it felt like my actual physical body lifted up. It was no AP. I was alone in the room, and I am describing an experience here. I hope no one jumps to any conclusions.

Don't worry, I'm a total narcissist really.

But in my experience it felt like...

Interesting. The whole area of resistance is a curious one. For instance, if we lose our keys we are happy to look over at a nearby table and see them there, even though there's no way they could have got there. However, the other way round - we look at the table and then they appear in front of us - we're less happy about. Even if we think it might be cool. So we filter out those possibilities, those "reality shifts". And this is before we've even begun deliberately willing changes.

I take all stories with a pinch of salt, but people do seem to get quite thrown by fairly simple changes [https://realityshifters.com/pages/yourstories87.html] because it raises other questions: in that case, if my world changes, do I take my friends along with me, or do I now have different friends?

This adds an extra level of caution to intentional acts.

Back to continuum of being. They're not the same or different. There are levels of difference and levels of similarity, but the exact relationship is ambiguous I think. We can of course try to nail everything down in an attempt to gain conceptual clarity. So we can say they're different, for example. That's fine too. But really nothing can force us to think that. It's just a choice.

Yes, but from the person's perspective, not having a philosophical framework to refer to, and mostly never having even thought about this before, they get pretty spooked. Some deliberate efforts at world-changing, like the 'Tesseract Magick' experiments (pinch of salt but interesting), make a definite point about bringing people along. Better maybe to say that aspect of a person?

Some of the ones in /r/glitch_in_the_matrix are apparently absence seizures: here, here, here. Or... is that just what the experience seems like because you didn't take anyone else with you when you 'jumped'? (If you look for an explanation, surely you will find one, such is the creative nature of attention.)

Even having a solid philosophical framework is only a minor advantage, I think.

It might make the difference between "hey, cool!" and losing it. But as we've covered previously, there's a difference between having thought about something and knowing and feeling its truth. People dabble with magick, having read all the stuff, and it's all fun and joy until demons actually do turn up!

"Better maybe to say that aspect of a person?" Better for what purpose? Goodness of this or that is relative to some aim, right?

My aim in saying "aspect" was because it fitted in nicely with my concept of "extended persons". As you say, we often strive for clarity, but if I just say "extended person" then the nature of that extension - multiple copies, multifaceted, holographic - can stay nicely ambiguous while still conveying the notion of being more than just "this version, here", and "aspect" sits well within that. No metaphor I've played with really fits. Which is to be expected, in a world of infinite possibilities... ;-)

This area is why I was questioning your notion (as I read it at the time) of choices being continually actively made, although I like "ongoing choices" or "continually active choices" as an alternative.

Because this version of me, typing at my Mac, is the "viewport version" as I see it, the one I am experiencing in my "space-that-is-me", and from this perspective all the other parts of my "extended being" as seen by other people are philosophical zombies. They are unfolding in automatic fashion, choices unfolding in tune with their trajectory and character, but not being redirected.

So you see the real yourself, while when I look at you I see a pzombie? I am not sure I understand.

Yes, effectively the "extension" is infinite, but it's simpler to visualise. For instance, I think of all possible moments as being a grid of 'viewports', with each square in the grid being a 'picture' of the view into that moment. Of course, that grid is infinite, and the adjacent squares aren't spatially located so there's no 'adjacent', and they aren't squares, and the 'picture' is actually an entire world from a particular perspective. It's just about giving myself something handy to refer to, while understanding that it is just a partial representation of something that, essentially, cannot be represented by its nature.

Thinking in terms of continuums helps me to avoid thinking about people as if they were substances.

This is key, and that's where the 'viewport' idea comes in originally (as a first stab at this). You see, from your own perspective you aren't here at all, you're transparent, you are just 'tuned into' this perspective on this environment. You are only a person from others' perspective. Playing with this, what "you" really are is "that which looks through the grid" or the opportunities it represents. I filter my attention so that I am only experiencing one particular possibility, one grid square viewport at a time. What "I" am to you is a picture, an image, which may or may not have a consciousness looking through into this part of the grid. Of course, as an "extended person" all possibilities are playing out in character, it's just that I am not necessarily attending to that part. If I am not attending, it's like I am a philosophical zombie, that part of me.

Typical, conventional people will see my vivified body as a person. They won't see my subjectivity the way I experience it.

They don't perceive your subjectivity, just a picture of Nefandi, moving about, implying a subjectivity. Whether you are 'really there' or not is not detectable from their point of view. There is also the issue that the particular 'you' they are experiencing as a companion in their world is something they themselves select, implicitly or explicitly.

Every POV is ultimately possible. That's the secret.

Yes, that's right, that's the thrust of the 'grid/viewport' metaphor effectively. On deeper analysis, the pzombie problem actually disappears because of this, but it's a handy way of imagining at the earlier level.

Sure, but it's not my problem. ;) It's their problem. I am fine.

Heh, quite. And this is not a bad point to make: since you only actually experience one 'selected reality' at a time, the rest is basically imaginary thinking-about, just a way to keep the possibilities alive within you. Thing is, once you make a jump, you can't get back, because the history of the jump is now part of this moment. You can perhaps go to a new moment similar to the previous, but that moment-prior is inaccessible with the memory intact, sort of by definition. If we delete aspects of the world (Lathe of Heaven), fixing it won't take it back really, the best you can hope is to make it as indistinguishable as possible. But then, how much control of the details is really possible?

What you say is only true if you don't want to edit your own memory, but want to keep your memory "straight" as it were, without any funny business, while limiting all the weirdness to the external realm. So you keep your subjectivity neatly organized and ordered, which means your memory is stable, while all the crazy jumps and magickal events are affecting only things you think are "external" to your person.

Yes, as you traverse 'the grid' I think you would want to retain the memory of your path, wouldn't you? Of course, you could never know for sure that you had done so, because the memory is also part of the world associated with your the grid/viewport position. I can't think of a reason not to want to retain an 'internal' trail of the jumps/changes made.

Boredom! The almighty reason for everything.

Well, eventually. That's the old story about God though, isn't it? God gets bored and so deliberately forgets himself to make it all exciting. How far can I push it? Further, more adventurous, more apparently risky. Finally, what would you dream? You'd dream this dream, of powerlessness. (The Alan Watts angle on it.)

Precisely. You don't think I chose the word "almighty" in "almighty reason" by accident, do ya?

Heh, good.

I'll tell you a little secret. I am in the process of creating a number of very powerful lords. Overall this will increase chaos in the apparent world. And that's because I don't like our world, and I am bored besides.

They won't stand a chance against my machines.

I don't think you get my meaning. When I say "lords" what are you imagining?

Video game reference.

Heh, not even close. I guess I'll let you remain ignorant. Looks like my secret is safe even though I told you what it was.

Haha, sequence error on my part (was just reading something and it made sense). Serves me right for being flippant. My second guess (vague memory, had to look this up) is Michael Moorcock's Elric saga. It matters not, of course, because perhaps tonight I will mentally edit this exchange so that I was right all along. ;-)

And: What's wrong with our (apparent) world anyway?

You're not in an occult frame of mind when you make your guesses.

This is true. I'm parallel processing right now. You're lucky I wasn't anticipating an apocalypse of New Zealand singer-songwriters.

"And: What's wrong with our (apparent) world anyway?" What's right about it?

Hmm. If there's something wrong with it, that really means there's something wrong with me. Or rather, something wrong with you, depending on your perspective...

I vote you. Because the world seems alright to me.

My world is not a democracy. But you simply happen to be right anyway. I don't like this world and I will change it. In fact, I already have changed it and will change it some more. When I am done, I will like it again. Who knows how you will feel though, lol.

Subjective decoherence will see me right, of course. In fact it already has, naturally.

That's not what I will see. ;) But you already knew that.

Quite! :-) Oh, but I still want to know what it's wrong with it, that you would change. (Beyond simply destructive fun, of course.) Out of interest.

Rampant philosophical materialism. Religion. Dogmatism. Property ownership.

If you hang around long enough and are successful, subjective idealism will turn into a religion! Albeit with only One follower. ;-)

Well, materialism, religion and consumerism have become the assumed structures of our time I suppose. They're all under pressure though? Property ownership will become a vaguer notion, but not without a massive copyright fight. (Once digital copying => 3D printing => generalised object instantiation.) It's the rebalancing of money-power that's the real worry. "I drink your milkshake!"

Perhaps you can help it along?

P.S. If you ever get the chance to time travel then, you might want to pay a visit to Edward Bernays, the father of modern marketing and manipulation. (If you ever want to get all het up, I recommend reading his book.) Also check out Adam Curtis for further fury. I've been looking into this stuff recently.

There is no "perhaps" about it. I've already helped it along. I guess I can help it along some more, but I also have my own personal interests. There is a hard limit for how much I care about this conventional world and this world's destiny. I do care some but only so much. And after that I really don't give a shit if the moon falls from the sky and everything burns.

Fair enough!

...

Q: From the Tesseract Magick link:
There are phenomenon that we should warn you of. Time will sometimes be pe rceived in a different way immediately before, during, or after a Tesseract. This increases in the practice though the fear and uneasy feelings concerning it go away in time and experience, rather like fear of flying. Precursor effects on reality are usually balanced by after-Tesseract events, and are often symmetrical with them. The effect can be sudden shifts in time or space. Driving a hundred miles in less than 20 minutes. Going through the same stop twice in the same direction on a public transit system. Losing the entire day, someone once skipped their birthday. Distortionsin space. Being able to perceive beyond a closed door to the extent that you walk into it. A universe where the sky is red and has green cracks in it. Universes where there is no radio or TV on the air, and there is a smell of ozone in the air (jump again immediately!) People can change eye color, hair color, height, weight, or personality. Only those that jump with you can be counted on. Everyone around you and every social circumstance can change rather dramatically in the most highly vectored jumps.
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.
This is gnarly. :) Notice the psychological link to suicide too? Once again we're back to the warning post.

Quite. I thought it might appeal. I have experimented a little, but nothing so Philip K Dickian has resulted. (Incidentally, this is one reason why Flow My Tears... is included on the reading list, along with Ubik. Now, there's a guy who had some experiences; he kind of blended his reality with his writings.)

Only those that jump with you can be counted on.

Yeah.

When I was in college I missed an exam once, which is to say I was sure the date of the exam had passed, and then I unconsciously made it as though I still had a few days until the exam. This was interesting, but also the only reason I even remember this is because of this conversation. That experience drifted away from my conscious memory pretty quickly. I say "unconsciously" because I didn't perform any kind of magick working or anything.

The memory part is often a problem. But luckily not just yours.

My favourite New Thought friend, Neville Goddard, has a good "pruning" [https://realneville.com/txt/the_pruning_shears_of_revision.htm] exercise which I really should remember to do more often: Each night, replay the day you've just had and amend it to your liking. Change all the errors to what should have happened; delete those disagreements. Reset the situation for the new tomorrow.

Go into a shop, ask for something. They don't have it? Go take a browse, delete that conversation and reimagine it. Try again. Change your feeling of the world into one where it is there. If you do this wrong though, through being inattentive or casual, it can go really wrong pretty quick. It's much easier to do forward work though. For instance, have tomorrow's exam contain the two questions you actually studied for. That's more everyday magick of course, but its apparent retroactive component can be a challenge for some.

Meant to add: I think things like this happen all the time, we just don't notice it, because of an apparent rule of self-consistency. That is, memories and the moment seem to fall in line. Perhaps the world does indeed get recreated each moment, in line with our direction, amendments as required/desired...

Q: Go into a shop, ask for something. They don't have it? Go take a browse, delete that conversation and reimagine it. Try again. Change your feeling of the world into one where it is there. If you do this wrong though, through being inattentive or casual, it can go really wrong pretty quick.
This is how I break locks on the doors to my apartment building, lol. What I do is assume the door can't be locked and pull it. I hate having to open the front door, basically. It's a hassle. So I just pull it. Sometimes the door is locked and when I pull it nothing happens. But I don't give up. I have a habit of pulling the door while assuming it can't be locked. Then what happens is I find the lock is broken, or the door is slightly ajar, or the lock mechanism failed to engage, etc. I even surprised the fuck out of my wife a number of times by magically opening the front door that wifey was sure was locked. haha.

I like the locks thing, nice. What I'd like: deliberate fast travel [https://realityshifters.com/pages/yourstories98.html]. (Glitch 'n' shifts sites are good for inspiration I think.) There's also that whole siddhis teleportation thing [http://tomkenyon.com/siddhis] for one day. A little ambitious for now, though.

The revision exercise is a good one, and it helps practice what I think is vital: generating the feeling that summarises something as being true/real. His Power of Awareness book is worth a read; I should add that to the list. His lectures tend to emphasise his Bible-as-instruction-manual-to-reality mindset, but his books less so. And it's free.

Q: I like the locks thing, nice.
Yea, it's tame when it works, so anyone can try it. Things like fast travel can be stomach-turning for some people. I don't know if I want to be practicing fast travel personally. I want to find a gradual path to these things. So something slightly better than fiddling with locks maybe should be next. Maybe, or maybe not even better, but just more similar stuff until it becomes routine.

A small, repeatable change of some sort. Things like the "prune the day" exercise are a good place to start though, just for general use, because of the apparent indirectness, but the measurable effects, in terms of unlikely reversals.