TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 8)

POST: I want a serious answer to what happens to other people after a "jump"

There are no "other people". In a sense, there is no you-as-person either, so there are no "people". There is just you-as-experiencer, having "taken on the shape of" an experience, "as if" you were a person-object in a world-place. Note, though, that you-as-experiencer is not a "thing" or an "object" or even a "perspective", which means there is not an experiencer, nor many experiencers. Really, there is just "experiencing". Another way to phrase this is that there is only you-as-awareness, or that the only fundamental truth is the fact of the property of "being-aware" or "awareness". Everything else is a relative, secondary, temporary truth only (hence we say we have an experience "as if" something is true). Although at first glance it might seem "ridiculous and morbid", that's usually because you are viewing it as a concept, which involves relating mental objects within a conceptual space. This is "before" that sort of division and explanation. Hence, the subreddit ends up being about exploring both the "nature of experiencing" and also the nature of descriptions. This - experiencing - cannot be conceptualised, because it is not made from "parts", and conceptual thinking is in fact an experience of or as it (metaphorically: "within" it, but it has no "outside" so that can be a bit misleading). It is not "morbid" because the "aliveness" of any experience is essentially sort of borrowed from this, directly, although it is not located anywhere. All of which is why the answers given to these sort of questions tend to be abstract, and irritating. (See also the metaphors given in the sidebar, as other ways into this.)

Q1: Well, you can frame anything any which way. But the reality is - and the one I hope everyone is working on - certain people experience sadness, pain, etc. and we feel sympathy with them, because they are the ones affected, not us. People can choose to cause this sadness and pain in others, or not choose that. That's how we judge someone's character. Emotions are real, and so is causing them, and separation from them.

Well, you can look at it that way if you want, for sure, but it's not especially supported by direct experience once you start attending to it and digging into things. Now, to be clear: it's not so much that I'm saying that "people" aren't "real" in any sense, but rather that the concept of "people" as commonly understood in the default view is incorrect. (Here, the default view being that you are a person-object in a world-place, where "the world" is assumed to be a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'".)

The outcome isn't that you perceive other people as just "stuff" to not care about - that "ridiculous and morbid" conclusion you refer to. Quite the opposite, in fact. All "people", including the apparent you-as-person, are structures within you. They are not "people" as in "separate beings", but it's actually more intimate than that: they are are all aspects of you-as-being or you-as-awareness (or "beingness", if you like). You might say (although again this can be slightly misleading), that the choice to "cause this sadness and pain in others" would be a choice to cause sadness and pain within yourself, even though you might not experience it in a direct "unpacked" form. You would still be modifying the world (as enfolded within "awareness") such that it was patterned with "sadness" and "pain" - and quite possibly in a way that would then later unfold within unpacked sensory experience, from the perspective of apparently being a person. It's not (intended to be) just "framing", this, I should stress. It is directly observable to be the case that you are not a person in the usual sense, and nor is "anyone else". It follows from direct experience, and the philosophical discussion follows from that.

Q1: default view being that you are a person-object in a world-place, where "the world" is assumed to be a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time"
I don't really hold that view either, but some combination of that and what you're saying. So if I choose to embark of a journey of large jumps, I could not feel at ease that "I've always been jumping infinitely". There would be something fundamentally different about doing it with a type of intent I never tried to use before. People can call it Magic, Playing God, whatever.

Well, the "I've always been jumping infinitely" view has problems in any case, and would not in fact ease your mind if you went into it more deeply. Luckily, though, the "meta" view circumvents this anyway - the "meta" view being the recognition that all experiences are "shapings" from, or states of, this "experiencing" (or "awareness"). And so, again, all experiences are on an "as if" basis only. That is, they are "patternings" of you-as-awareness. Which means there is only one type of intent! "Intending" is equivalent to "increasing the prominence of a particular pattern within your state", where your "state" corresponds to the full definition of the world within you and the fully-determined sequence of sensory moments which follow from that. If you intend the outcome of "it is true now that my arm will move now" then that is the same in type as the outcome "it is true now that I will ace my exam then".

Aside - Note that you are not - necessarily - intending or shifting "all the time", in this description. Only when you redirect unfolding experience, or deliberately assert or imply something, are you doing that. This can be tricky to articulate, because of course intention is "outside of" time, since time is itself a patterning within and a formatting of state. In particular, "intending" is not the same as the experience of apparently "doing something". The experience of "doing" is itself a result, a sensory experience that is an aspect of the current state. (Which of course means you never actually experience "causing" anything.)

Calling things "magic" or "playing god" is merely an artefact of a particular intentional outcome being exceptional in the context of the standard description, rather than it being exceptional in the context of experience-as-it-is. There is no "magic", there only just "patterning" (your current state) and "intention" (the intensification of a pattern and therefore a reshaping of your state). Ultimately, though, none of this matters. If you recognise that there are only experiences, and descriptions of and thoughts about experiences are themselves just more experiences (at the same "level"), then you are left with merely: a) attending to the nature of the current moment directly, b) experimenting to see the extent to which you can alter it. And stories you come up with about that are actually not particularly relevant or true - other than as formattings that you can use to formulate your intentions, and therefore the extended patterns associated with your target outcomes.

(For some previous discussion on this, perhaps see the exercise in this comment [POST: In what way are other people real?] and the metaphors in this comment [POST: [THEORY] The Nature of Consciousness].)

There are people who devote their whole lives to occult and insist on performing unethical rituals in their practice.

Because they seem to be true. Why?

In short: "patterning".

Now, although "patterning" is itself a metaphor, it is meant to offer an example of the most minimal description that captures the fact of "experience is apparently structured". The implication of "patterning" and "intention is the increasing of one pattern's contribution to your ongoing experience" is that:

Whatever you intend in terms of, will seem to be true, because it will result in experiences "as if" that were true.

And now:

Why not just choose another way to intend?

There is only ever one way to intend - or actually it is not even a "way", because intending is actually not a "doing" or "technique" or "mechanism" at all. It might be better describe as a "self-shaping" (of you-as-awareness). But you can intend any pattern, and any pattern you intend also includes its extended associations. Any intention is, sort of, a shift of the entire world-pattern, in terms of the larger meanings associated with the intention. But you might not know this, particularly if you only pay attention to the content of particular experiences and don't notice the context of all experiences - and if you think that your apparent actions are "causal" rather than also being "results" (of intention, which is the only cause). Now, I realise the above might sound a bit abstract, so:

More specifically, then: if you intend an outcome in terms of "the Norse gods", then in addition to your outcome you will also tend to bring about an increase in the pattern "the Norse gods exist", because it was implied by your intention. If you aren't aware that there is this "meta" perspective of viewing such things - and perhaps you haven't also intended in terms of other things - you will likely become convinced that "the Norse gods" are real in an independent way, and the evidence will stack up more and more as you intend in terms of them. After all, you are literally experiencing the truth of their existence! Furthermore, if you are performing certain rituals, then you might think that they, too, exist as real mechanisms, because you are having experiences "as if" they are true (even though in actual fact "performing a ritual" is just yet another experience, an aspect of your current patterned state, as is any seeming outcome).

"Anything goes", but it only "goes" if you intend accordingly - and until you intend in terms of something, there might be zero evidence of that something! Although having said that, it tends to be the case that intentional thinking about a thing tends to lightly pattern your ongoing experience with that thing - see synchronicities, for example, or the Owls of Eternity exercise linked in the sidebar.

...

Q2: Nice to see you back, Gorgeous (not a typo).
I was wondering what your views were on one thing that I have pondered about a lot, but haven't really come to a conclusion or even much of an idea about.
When talking about other people, since the concept of "person" isn't really real, are we just interacting with different versions/patterns of someone and the version we get is just our own projection? Trying to put this in words makes it convoluted, because I have to talk in terms of separation to try and get my question across. For example, could you experience as if someone only existed to please you? I wonder stuff like that because despite seeing that "I as person" is not real, I only have guesses as to if what looks like other people still have any sort of sentience or will of "their own" because if you were to intend for something like a relationship that lasts forever, you may assume that the other person could dump you because they are "an external person who can make their own choices" unless that is just a projection.
Hopefully you get what I'm talking about.

Heh!

Yes, it's really hard to put into language, so we end up going at it from multiple angles and, we hope, the combination of all of those then points to the thing we actually mean. I think it's perhaps helpful do away with the whole idea of "projection", though, since that still implies there's an activity taking place, from one object onto another. So, two possible approaches that occur for talking around the subject:

First, stick to what you actually experience and make a distinction between that and what you infer.

One observation along those lines: your ideas about "other people" to some extent are due to what you see in the mirror, and "other people" also being that shape and with those movements and so on. Since you experience yourself as having thoughts and ideas, you might map that onto other people. However, your thoughts are not actually experienced as being in the world. There is the person-in-world image, and there is thoughts. Your you-as-person experience isn't what is thinking, really; that's just content. Rather, the thoughts are appearing in the you-as-awareness experience alongside the person-in-world experience. Another: going back to that mirror experience, perhaps consider what you actually look like, your actual experience. Is that the image in the mirror? If you think so, why do you think so? If it isn't, what do you look like really?

Second, and following on from that, consider that the world is a single continuous pattern, a "world-pattern", one that is static but fully defines the world and all possible experiences associated with it, in a given state (until it is shifted via intention to a new state, occasionally). The sensory experience you have, then, is the "sensory aspect" of that world-pattern, unfolded from a particular perspective, for a particular series of moments. ("Time passing" is also a static pattern, in this description.)

This pattern is not a projection, then, and is more like a "shape" you have adopted. The full definintion is "enfolded" within you, with sensory moments "unfolded" within you in sequence. It follows that all "people", including the "person" you are apparently experiencing being, are patterns which are aspects of this world-pattern. They are all "alive" in the sense of being "made from" awareness; but they are not themselves aware. They are not experiencing. Rather, awareness is aware of them, as them, since awareness is the pattern including all the people-patterns. Only "awareness" is experiencing (and "awareness" is itself really a synonym for "experiencing" or the fact of experiencing).

Here we must be careful not to conflate "experience of" with "expanded as a sensory moment". Right now, you-as-awareness is experiencing being the entire world-pattern, even though only this particular person-in-a-world moment is unfolded as a spatially-extended sensory aspect. The language we use to describe a particular everyday experience can be a bit misleading here, because it's all quite course-grained and in terms of particular objects. If you actually attend to your ongoing experience directly, it's much more subtle than that: you experience "meaning", and I'd say the sense in which you experience being the world-pattern is like experiencing "meaning".

Anyway, those are a couple of avenues worth exploring. As always, though, we're invoking metaphors or arranging concepts in order to describe something which is actually super-simple: experience just is, with nothing behind it. Although: we must also consider the observation that adopting particular concept tends to shape experience accordingly. Which loops back to, say, the idea that adopting directly or implicitly the concept of "an external person who can make their own choices" is effectively a patterning of your own experience (your world-pattern or state) such that it is shaped "as if" that were true.

[Split this into two parts because it got a bit long.]

Part One

there aren't many "people" on here who enjoy exchanging several paragraph long posts.

It's tricky sometimes. To discuss this topic properly usually requires a bit of back and forth before we even get going - since we need to work out what exactly one commenter means by a particular phrase versus another, and there's a need to provide context for most things, rather than snappy one-liners. I personally try to encourage deeper thinking and discussion throughout the sub, but it's very time-consuming for people to have that sort of conversation, particularly when a lot of time has to be spent describing, for example, "why what you say isn't wrong, but is meaningless from a different perspective, and here is the other perspective", and so on. Anyway -

Yes, the term projection can be convoluted, though the way I use it has changed from the past, so when I use it now I mean "you're seeing your own choice", basically.

Right. The issue with "projection" is that it tends to imply a sort of mechanism which occurs within time and space. But what you mean is clear enough. Using a different metaphor, then, we might say that "seeing your own choice" is the "sensory aspect" of your current state - which one might consider as the total sum of all deliberate and non-deliberate intentional patterns and their implications to date, and which fully defines all moments. Your state or world-pattern is itself non-local and non-temporal, implicitly specifies all locations and moments. In this scheme, "projection" would be "intentional change of your state and subsequently encountering the effects in your ongoing experience".

I've been paying extra attention in my dealings with "other people" lately and I have been able to really see the lack of separation between experiencing and the seeming appearance of others, so I now view these interactions as less real which helps to examine exactly what I'm patterning.

I wouldn't say that they are "less real" though. The only thing that was ever real was your ongoing patterned experience, and the only way in which you ever encountered people was as a part of that experience. It's simply that your story about that experience has changed. The description has changed, but the nature of the experience is unchanged from what it was before. However, by attending to your experience you can directly notice that it is all "made from you" - that is, that you are and always were the entire moment of any particular scene or encounter. And although the scene is structured as apparently being from a certain perspective - you-as-person are apparently "over here" and your friend is "over there" - you notice that the whole thing, both "over here" and "over there" and everywhere else, is in fact "made from" you. So you are everywhere and nowhere; it is all actually you-as-awareness in the "shape" of the scene.

I have a twin brother and it's harder to see his lack of independent existence due to our history...

That experience of identity and history - that meaningful felt-sense - that accompanies experiences of your twin, is itself experiential content. You can actually locate it somewhat within experience usually (it may be in your lower abdomen area, or in your chest). It's something to play with, anyway, the meaning that comes with the other aspects of a scene or moment.

When I look in the mirror lately, it is more like I am looking at a dream, so whatever I'm looking at isn't as solid as I thought before.

The key here, I think, is to notice that the image is "over there", and then to direct your attention to "the place your are looking out from" and see what's there. Ultimately, you probably first get the sense that the mirror isn't a reflection of you, it's part of the visual scene, and that in the other direction is a sort of void (not a space, usually). Then - as with the Feeling Out Exercise in another link - you notice that the whole scene is sort of floating within perception, and you can explore beyond the boundaries of that. Your body is a bunch of sensations floating and phasing in and out; you do not experience "being a body" as such at all. (Although occasionally you may think it.) Really pay attention to the boundary between "your body" and "the room". Is there, in fact, actually a boundary? In what way are you "inside" your body at all? And so on. As you point out, one might ask whether there is a "literal person who is angry" when dealing with others. But similarly, it is worth asking if there is a "literal person who is angry" when you are having the experience of being angry. There may be a bunch of sensations, and thoughts, and so on - but if you try and locate a "you" who is angry, you'll struggle to find one.

Some people may say that if you're just experiencing your own patterns/ideas of the world, then certainly you could just go around abusing people without consequences - how accurate would you say that is?

There are always consequences, just because making a change involves corresponding consistent changes simply as part of shifting a pattern (in this metaphor). However, you could then address any unwanted outcomes as they arose, so in that sense you could do it "without consequences". Even outside of this topic, it's true you can do all sorts of bad things without suffering later, even if you do it in the everyday sense. But it's a bit like punching yourself in the face and then using magic healing cream. Why do it?

It's not something I want, I'm just curious as to if there's any limitation.

No limitation, structurally.

My view on it is that it's not possible, only because if you talk in terms of "abuse" or needing to steal from other people, then you're implying that you couldn't be given those things or you're implying that there are other people or resources outside yourself.

I think you can always handle and circumvent these implications though - that is, intentions which imply a world in which you don't get your outcome - by stepping back from them and changing the context.

Instead of stealing money and getting away with it, you would just be given money or acquire it through some other means, for example.

That does seem a better route.

Part Two

In regards to world patterns, I can see now that my previous idea of thinking that there ... is just a pattern and not something primordial; certainly having a perspective of life being amazing and jumping out of bed everyday in ecstasy isn't anything more special other than just being a different pattern.

It's "patterns all the way down", then!

Which, I we discussed earlier I think, is simply a way of saying that the only thing that is fundamentally true is the fact of "awareness" or being-aware, and absolutely everything else is relatively and temporarily true only. This doesn't just apply to facts of the world, but to the formatting of experience more generally (even "spatial extent" and "things change" and "objects" and "seeing" are patterns, just more abstract). Generally, then, one should consider that all possible patterns exist eternally, always present now in the background, and what changes is their relative prominence or intensity of contribution to ongoing experience (with a particular distribution of intensities being your "state"). So no experience is more special or fundamental than any other experience, because the fundamental aspect is common to all experiences. Being depressed is an experience, as is ecstasy. And you don't need any reason to experience one or the other, because there is no cause within experience. You experience something because it has been patterned in; that is all. Intention is the only cause, and all experiences and apparent events are results, as aspects of your current patterned state. For example, you could simply decide right now to feel joyously happy and, if you don't interfere, it'll happen. In fact, try that right now: just decide that you are going to feel really bright and happy - and then allow whatever happens to happen.

[if I am formless awareness] where does the "personal view of the universe" idea come in? For example, if I'm talking to my neighbor, is there no experience as if my neighbor is talking to me?

You could rephrase it, perhaps. If you-as-awareness has taken on the shape of a world-pattern, and in addition adopted the fact of being-this-person, then your experience will be consistent with that. Now, if you-as-awareness modified that and instead adopted the fact of being-this-neighbour, then your experience would change accordingly. What would such an experience be like? Have you already had that experience, perhaps? Or, taking this further, if all possible patterns exist eternally, what does it mean to ask whether you "have had" or "will have" the experience of apparently being-this-neighbour?

Since I never experience anyone else' perception of me, I guess this is all theory and speculation, so perhaps it isn't important, so long as "I am the one in control of everything I experience" is seen and understood clearly.

As you say, wording get tricky. Because of course, the "me" you are referring to there doesn't experience anything at all; it's just a pattern. Only you-as-awareness ever has an experience, because it is "experiencing", and so "me" is a experience, not something that experiences. So the "you in control of everything" is also, strictly speaking, an experience. You could have an experience "as if" there is a "you" who controls everything, or not. However - and this is really what you are going for here I think - the experience of apparently being "you who controls everything" is always available, potentially.

I have started to adopt the pattern of "I'm the only one in control" a lot more and it has taken a lot of responsibility that I had put outside of myself, so I suppose the pattern will continue to get stronger and I can explore more how far I can take it.

Right, it's a pattern, and the more you intend in terms of it, the more prominent it will become. And as you imply, there is no "outside of yourself" anyway, because there is no "outside" or "behind" to experiencing. If awareness is metaphorically "rippled" with patterns and there is no "granularity" to awareness, then there are no theoretical limits to what can be adopted. While one can directly notice the fact that the fundamental nature of experiencing - and of descriptions about experiencing, which are themselves just experiences - is "awareness", and even have experiences of "void" which feel like infinite potential directly, ultimately these limits (or lack thereof) are left as a matter for "personal" exploration.

Really, I'd suggest, that actually becomes an investigation of your current patterning, as every intention implies its extended pattern and results in a shift in terms of your current state - presenting a new landscape to explore. This, in fact, is why a "seeker" can never find "enlightenment" via knowledge and experiences; because the experiences never end, and they have implicitly intended by "looking" to always end up "finding" - forever. But if we consider the stuff we've been talking about about, the "meta" of all experiences, this has already been removed as an issue, and now we're just having fun.

POST: Does the number not changing mean that the jump failed?

As per the sidebar text:

Header No. 982 - Please note that a shift in your experience does not require a change in the header number, which should be treated as an emblem of change and a symbol of potential rather than an ID.

Because of course, different states of your experience aren't actually independently numbered in the form of individual dimensions each with a unique ID - so there is no necessary connection between a change in any particular fact in your ongoing experience and a change in the fact called "the number on the subreddit header".

I believe we are jumping every second anyway.

From previous discussions: I'm not sure that's a very useful way to think about it, since it seems to conflate apparent change in sensory experience (the observed seeming transition between already-determined moments which are aspects of the present state) with "jumping". It is more conceptually helpful, surely, to reserve "jumping" as a term for deliberate shifts in state, corresponding to the imposition of a particular fact or outcome. Otherwise the metaphor of "dimensions" no longer has any meaning.

Q1: The only problem I have with reserving jumping for deliberate shifts is that I think it is easier for people new to altering their experience to transition from believing that things are always shifting to making intentional jumps. It is harder to go from a completely solid reality to making big intentional changes, than to go from an ephemeral reality that is changing all the time to making intentional changes.
I don't think the metaphor of dimensions loses meaning because I conceive of dimensions as configurations of consciousness. To go from one moment to the next, from one room to another, or from one thought to the next, is to change the configuration of your consciousness. Once you realize you are consciousness that is always shifting, it is easier to conceive of making "bigger" changes. The changes are only bigger because of our belief systems, but perhaps it could be as easy to make those shifts as to shift from one mental state to another.

I do see the reasoning behind the statement - it conveys this idea that things are fluid and therefore it is easier to make changes. "Hey, you are 'jumping' all the time anyway!"

The problem, I feel, is that it makes it harder to reintroduce the idea of deliberate intention coherently later (and to talk about implications). Having used up "jumping" as term for any configuration change, we've lost its use as a term when specifying a particular target outcome configuration and intending it. So I'm generally inclined to separate out the following things, to help make things clearer:

"Moment by moment apparent change in sensory experience". These are not changes of state. They are aspects of the same static state, within which the full sequence of moments is defined.
"Shifts in state brought about non-deliberately." This would be when we intend a change in the everyday sense, intervening to redirect of our current experience thus unwittingly implying a new set of moments. Perhaps just "going to the shop", but also "resisting the content of the current moment". We don't really intend to change the facts of the world in this case, but the worldview assumptions with which we formulate our intention, and its implications, bring about a state change. (We aren't really aware that we are intending here, as such.)
"Shifts in state brought about deliberately." This is when we conceive of a change we'd like in our ongoing experience - facts of the world, target outcomes, whatever - and knowingly intend that change. This would be "jumping". (This is full awareness of making a change, and deliberately using the formulation of "dimensions" when specifying that change, knowingly going beyond the usual assumptions.)

I would then tend to reserve "jumping dimensions" for the final example, where we are making a deliberate change, and we are changing the actual apparent "facts of the world" - such that the results are, just as the name suggests, "as if" we had "switched into a different dimension". So instead of saying we are "jumping all the time", I would say that: our ongoing experience is in fact not as stable as we assume it to be; that this instability points to the possibility of making deliberate change; and that the concept of "dimensions" is one concept that can be used to harness this.

Q1: Those definitions make sense. I don't think that deliberate vs non-deliberate change is hard enought to understand that the word 'jumping' needs to be reserved for deliberate changes. I see the reasoning, but sometimes I just want to say "hey, you are jumping all the time!" It has a little more emphasis than shifting or instability. And it helps introduce the idea that big deliberate changes aren't necessarilly harder than what is already happening. Jumping sounds like it takes more effort than shifting or flowing, which is an idea that I don't want to introduce by reserving jumping for intentional changes. This is all pretty pedantic though.

It is pedantic, sure, but also I do think the wording we use makes a difference, and we kind of evolve the descriptions over time. So it's good to have this sort of discussion to bash it out, take on different experiences people have had when talking about this stuff. For example, linking to what you've just said, it is quite hard to convey the idea that "intending" is not actually a doing. That is, it really involves no effort or action at all, and it's not like pushing or manipulating something. In fact, any attempt to "do" an intention is really an intention of something else, and tends to conflict with the main intention (or at least place limits on the ways it can be incorporated into one's ongoing experience). This tends to be something that comes up later, though. At first, we're concentrating on the basic idea that experience is flexible, and there is a special type of "deciding" that is the true cause of change. But, then, do we sort of plan ahead for that later part of the discussion, by avoiding saying things earlier which will conflict with it, or do we just go with the approach of "oh, that was to just get you started, it's really like this"?

Realistically, it's a muddle of both. When it's a one-to-one discussion, it doesn't much matter because you are dynamically correcting things as you go along in the conversation. For one-off comments, though, I'm maybe inclined to be a bit more cautious, because we may never actually get the opportunity to make the later correction, once they've gone off to begin experiments by themselves.

Q1: Good points, I see a lot of posts where people don't really seem to understand the fluid nature of experience. "Did I jump or didn't I?", "Did it work", "I did x and nothing changed". I want to make a one-off comment to get them to consider that they are shifting all the time regardless of the outcome. I don't want anyone to walk away thinking that "dimensional jumping" doesn't work because they didn't get the outcome they wanted. I would rather have them think that they did jump, they just didn't achieve the outcome they wanted, because these things can be complicated. For better or worse, our belief systems are very complicated. Maybe I should take a little care to explain how I see things in more depth, and maybe not use the word jumping.

Yes, true about the fluidity. Beyond that, I find the main background issues that come up in posts, are:

a) not recognising the "meta" position of "experiencing" in general as distinct from any particular experience and the possibility of identifying with that (context vs content);
b) not recognising the "metaphorical" aspect of all descriptions as being "parallel experiences" (parallel constructions in thought), rather than true explanations that actually correspond to something "behind" experience;
c) not recognising that the ultimate purpose of this subreddit, being framed as an "investigation" into "the nature of experience", means that "beliefs" are something to be examined and unpacked to see how they correspond to direct experience, rather than something to simply be "respected" and applauded;
d) not recognising that just because the content of an experience corresponds to a particular description or belief, it does not mean that the description or belief is "true". Experiences are on an "as if" basis, and many different type of description will correspond, but none of them are "behind" the experience.

Each of these tends to limit the possibility of realising (just noticing, really) how flexible one's experience might be, or limit the possibility of having collaborative discussions which might unpack hidden assumptions and help with that (while avoiding exchanges getting emotionally charged due to identification with a particular description, and so on).

POST: Not exactly sure about D jumping..

Please don't refer me to the main home posts about D jumping.

Why not? It's all there, in the linked posts from the sidebar text and sticky posts, and of course a search in the history will turn up plenty of identical questions. Anyway, /u/NomadExile has already covered the basics of the appropriate attitude below, but:

This previous comment [POST: This sub feels like what /r/lawofattraction is trying to be] highlights the difference between the /r/lawofattraction subreddit and this one, and by extension the underlying concept. See this recent reference too [POST: PSA: There is no other version of you that you're "swapping places" with - you're only changing your perception of your current reality to deal with it more effectively. Please stop worrying about some other entity being forced to live in your unwanted situation if you jump.] and some other comments around it. As implied there, the question "what exactly is it?" is in fact the investigation that the subreddit is all about. Strictly speaking, it can't be answered in words. Neither, in fact, can "what is the nature of my ongoing experience"? Which of course you'd need to answer first, before you could answer the question "what is dimensional jumping?".

Aside - If you don't know what "sticky posts" and "a sidebar" is, then you've got some work to do before posting in the subreddit. I'd generally recommend using the browser version of Reddit rather than the app for anything other than media-based subreddits, really; the app really doesn't work so well for discussion-based subreddits. If you do, you'll see the "sidebar" to the right, and the "sticky posts" clearly at the top. If you are using the app, though, there's an "info" icon somewhere in the menu which will show you the sidebar text for the subreddit you are looking at. Regardless of that, not taking the time to read the main posts before then asking questions in terms of them is a waste of everyone's time (the sidebar specifically highlights this). Basically, you really can't expect people to take time out to do the absolute basics of due diligence for you.

Q1: Hey, I got a mention!
All silliness aside, to further expand on a point, the app is ok, as long as your willing to hunt (and hunt... and hunt). I always think of using the app as exploring the dungeons in those old turn based rpgs (think Dragon Quest). There are goodies to be found, but if you use the app, it's like going in with a torch.

Not even a torch. I think it's more like:

It is dark.

inv

You have: a match.

light match

You light the match. You briefly find yourself surrounded by
shadowy shapes moving in disturbing ways. The match goes out.

inv

You have: a used match; a sense of doom.

The app is okay for browsing links or brief comments and the like. It's unfortunately detrimental from a moderator perspective, though, when it comes to maintaining a subreddit based on anything more sophisticated, because casual users are left with only the subreddit name and a few recent posts to go on, with effort and luck required to get any proper context. All these sorts of subreddits now get lots more in the way of low-effort, off-topic and repeat posts as a result (a sort of relentless "intro spam") because quite a lot of users think Reddit is an app, and haven't seen the desktop/browser layout. It's not necessarily their fault, really - but it would be silly for every subreddit to also take on the role of providing Reddit 101 info.

POST: PSA: There is no other version of you that you're "swapping places" with - you're only changing your perception of your current reality to deal with it more effectively. Please stop worrying about some other entity being forced to live in your unwanted situation if you jump.

It's right there in the sidebar text, and also in the sticky post:

Active Metaphors - Try out the Hall of Records and Infinite Grid metaphors which illustrate why there is no "other you" involved in a jump. You are radically changing your experience, not swapping physical bodies. For a different perspective on subjective experience overall see The Imagination Room.

Also something that always need to be re-iterated here, relates to the "we jump all the time" concept in its various forms, as explored in a previous thread [POST: Does the number not changing mean that the jump failed?]:

That is, we shouldn't use the term "jumping" to apply to apparent changes in ongoing experience, including the experience of apparently performing actions or making everyday sorts of decisions (since in a "patterning" type model these are just aspects of one's current state; they do not "happen"). Similarly, the use of "subconsciously" is problematic, potentially, but I understand what you are trying to suggest. Ultimately, if people don't actually read the existing material linked in the sticky posts or do a search of the historical posts, there's not much we can do. Except remove repetitive posts, which we do go through phases of doing, but the larger problem is posters not pausing to think more deeply about the concepts being used, perhaps. It really is all there, stated directly or implied. Sometimes, of course, people really just want to make a post in order to participate in the conversation. And there's not necessarily anything wrong with that.

Q1: That is, we shouldn't use the term "jumping" to apply to apparent changes in ongoing experience, including the experience of apparently performing actions or making everyday sorts of decisions (since in a "patterning" type model these are just aspects of one's current state; they do not "happen"). Similarly, the use of "subconsciously" is problematic, potentially, but I understand what you are trying to suggest.
This strongly reminds me of a clip from a show I used to watch in my child hood [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beOgc86jXO8] ("Kung Fu" with David Carradine). It illustrates beautifully the difference between "doing" as opposed to just "seeing" or "witnessing."

Ha, that's very good. I'm aware of the show, but I didn't realise it went quite so deeply into that sort of thing. (David Carradine was a bit less Zen in Kill Bill, I think!)

Yes, intend the outcome - thereby defining it as a fact in a future moment, and so implicitly determining the moments between now and then - and then allow experience to unfold within you without interference. It is already "true now that this happens then", and since the world is a "single, self-consistent, continuous landscape", that means that the sequence of any apparent acts is already taken care of. (We might note, here, that there is no difference between "my arms moving over here" and "the leaves rustling over there": both arise spontaneously within our sensory experience, it's just that we have a different story about the meaning of one versus the other.)

You should check out The Zen of Archery if you haven't already, too [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_in_the_Art_of_Archery].

POST: Did the cup method last week

So, don't expect any particular "experience" at the time of performing the exercise. After all, unless your target outcome overlaps with this moment, there is no necessary sensory aspect to it at the moment of the exercise - we might say it becomes "true now that this happens then". Note that you don't have to do anything in terms of effort; literally follow the instructions as written. Any outcomes will be noticed over the course of, say, a week. In this case, typically outcomes will apparently arise by "plausible, if very unlikely, routes". That is, they will not be directly "reality-breaking". Outcomes are not always the same as "results", too. And so:

Generally, treat this as an experiment - part of an investigation, into the nature of your ongoing experience - rather than a method (there are "philosophical" reasons for this). If you aren't having any results, you might consider choosing another target outcome to start with, and working your way through to your original idea later.

You say "a week". Do you think after a week we should re do it? My first jump worked so well. My second has been well over a week ago. I just want to make some sales.

I'd tend to think a week is a good amount of time for "unlikely but plausible" events to appear, for most reasonable things. Treating this in the spirit of conducting an experiment on "the nature of experience", it makes sense to do the exercise and then give it a good amount of time to see results or effect - it's really down to personal judgement when you think an appropriate amount of time has passed. However: There's no inherent amount of time involved at all, though. At the moment of performing the exercise, it becomes "true now that this happens then", and the "then" could be any appropriate moment in the future. A bit like with the owls exercise, the intentional pattern (the experiential pattern of "the outcome event") will "shine through" an appropriate gap and context. Sometimes you will see the patterning crop up again unexpectedly, depending on how broad the target, how tightly defined its scenario or whatever.

Anyway, no need to bother about that: No harm in repeating now, I'd say.

it's fine to treat it as an experiment, but at some point you conclude the experiment worked or not. This is where the time frame comes in. You wouldn't do an experiment and think maybe 10 years later it will happen at the appropriate time, right? You would make a conclusion if the experiment worked or not?

Yep, hence suggesting waiting about a week. If other things arise later, then they can be taken on board at that time, but there's no benefit in waiting around for decades in anticipation of course! I mention it only because it's worth being aware, for when such an example crops up.

POST: 13:30 is the best time to jump!

PsycheHoSocial: If "jumping" is just you changing your own experience yourself, then there shouldn't be anything ESP related about it, right?
Although I'm sure someone can read "13:30 is the best time to do it" and then get results as if that were true, but it would only happen because they've patterned "Doing it at this time means I'll get better results", but not because of the time itself.

That's not necessarily relevant to the topic of the subreddit as such, as per the comment by /u/PsycheHoSocial. That is, while one might adopt that description and intend in terms of it, any successful results would not in fact be because of it. The description of "sidereal time" would not be independently true, as some sort of external framework that is causal. (I also think a lot of time can be wasted looking for "facts" and "techniques" in this way. Aside from the false assumption underlying that activity, it can sometimes create confusion because simply engaging in that search tends to give us some patterned results "as if" they were true - when really it is the fact of looking itself that made them appear so.)

POST: Convince me.

As per the sidebar:

It is for readers to decide for themselves through personal investigation and introspection whether jumping is appropriate for them or not. Never believe something without personal evidence; never dismiss something without personal evidence.

If you find no evidence to support the idea that your ongoing experience is inconsistent with the usual assumptions (that is, you are a person-object in a world-place that is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in time"), then you can draw the appropriate conclusions of course. Or continue to experiment in other ways, or not. Nobody's here to convince you of anything, other than to experiment a little and see what happens.

Putting aside the whole changing "reality" thing for now, I'd say there is still value in examining your ongoing experience as it is actually directly encountered, and considering the implications of that, in terms of what is assumed (in the descriptions we habitually use) versus what is directly known. For example:

Feeling Out Exercise

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

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

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

POST: Why around 12-3am?

Certainly, you don't have to do the glasses exercise at 12-3am. If it doesn't say something in the instructions, then it's not an inherent part of the experiment. However, early morning is definitely a "quiet time" with its own sense of occasion. It feels separate from the usual habits and patterns of the day and is low on distractions, and that alone can make it useful or appealing. It is not necessary, though; there is no special reason beyond those benefits. And you don't have to be sleepy to perform either exercise.

POST: "I am not getting results!" Or why meditation is of vital importance.

Others commenters have brought up the "causal" aspect. I suppose with this topic, though, it's worth exploring making a distinction between two related things which can get muddled up with the term "meditation", and how that follows from it:

The first is "letting go", which is really a name for "not interfering" with the ongoing sensory experience - letting it happen "by itself" without counter-intending in reaction to it, and therefore accidentally perhaps accidentally re-implying a previous state. The second is "direct intention" (for want of a better term; all intention is direct really, but you might not intend for what you want directly). By which I mean, if you want to feel quiet and spacious and relaxed without chatter, then what to do is: intend to have the experience of feeling quiet and spacious and relaxed and without chatter.

The latter point is really about actually choosing and actually intending what you've chosen. If you spend time sitting and doing this sort of meditation, you are really just setting aside time to intend a certain background experience. It's "intending time!". For example, you might want to reformat your experience away from the sense of "being an object located within a place", and more towards "being an open space within which a 3D multi-sensory image is spontaneously unfolding". [1] Or spend time directly intending that your experience "soften" and become more dreamlike-associative, rather than stuff-in-boxes (that is, reduce the influence of the pattern "experiential inertia").

But the important thing is that "meditation" as usually understood isn't causal. Only the intention is. That is, any other bits and pieces of theatre you might do besides might imply something, an extended pattern, but just "meditation" doesn't clearly link to an outcome, if you spend all your time looking at breath or saying a mantra or whatever. Doing that, you'll certainly generate an interesting experience or two. And narrowing your attention onto your breath can be pleasant, plus you'll no doubt get a "patterning" effect akin to the owl experiment but for spatial focus: you'll retain some calm afterwards which might stick, because you are implicitly reshaping your spatial attentional focus relative to your apparent surroundings. Implicitly intensifying the pattern "attentional focus includes central body area" just as the owl exercise increases the pattern "owl". However, it may be more beneficial to intend for your actual desired outcome directly.

(Beyond that aspect with other styles of mediation I think you're in effect just exploring your own current patterning, not necessarily "achieving" anything. Which is fine, of course. But there is an expectation sometimes of achievement, and experiential content is interpreted accordingly. However, even if you have an "enlightenment experience", that would just be yet another experience. The only enlightenment is to recognise that all experiences are of the same nature. Now, a "void" experience might lead to that insight, but even then someone might not make the connection between being-the-void and also being-the-content.)

The reason we often have these discussions is, I suppose, because "intention", like "experiencing", isn't describable - since it involves no parts and therefore cannot be conceptualised. [2] We inevitably keep looking for something to "do" and something to "understand", because we make our plans and decisions by thinking. We can't think this, though. Ultimately, then, all experiential content and any apparent actions and thoughts about those are all just "sensory theatre" - they are results. (Results in the sense of being aspects of a state, and the state is patterned awareness, and that patterning corresponds to all "shifts" today, which includes deliberate intentions and their implications. A state is always in a sense a "result", with "shifting" the only cause of changes in state. Which is to say, changes are self-caused.)

__
[1] Of course, neither of those is the ultimate perspective either. There is no ultimate perspective or experience, or type of experience. The only thing that is fundamentally true is the fact of being-aware or "awareness"; any thing else, not just experiential sensory content but the patterning and more abstract formatting of experience, is relatively and temporarily true only.

[2] There are loads of metaphors we can use to try and illustrate why this is the case, some of which can be found towards the end of this comment.

Words really are a poor way to describe this, aren't they?

They are!

As you point out, it seems so tricky. But really it is just the thinking about it that is tricky - impossible, in fact - because thinking is itself an experience. So you can't truly think your way to any ultimate answer about "experiencing". (It's like trying to make a sandcastle which explains "sand" and "the beach", as in the metaphor described in one of the links). The thing itself is super-simple, and that's exactly the problem!

Zen emphasises that words and descriptions point to experiences, but they are not those experiences. For everyday content, that's not too much of a problem: our conceptual thoughts about things are of the same (experiential) form as those things; our thoughts are little "shadow-sensory objects". But for this topic, we're talking about something that is "before" objects, before division, and so we can't use thoughts in that way. You can't make a non-object conceptual thought! All you can do is make a thought-object (such as the concept "awareness") and declare that it points to something that is a non-object.

Anyway, that's why this subreddit focuses on providing a couple of exercises to try - the main ones in the sidebar, the Feeling Out Exercise, and so on - and metaphors to use, so that you generate an experience that you can then point to, while having metaphors to help you articulate it subsequently (while already knowing that the descriptions are now "how it works", even thought they might be useful for "patterning"). From the start, the very idea of "explaining" in words and concepts is suggested to be problematic. So, if it's like high school, then at least it's more like a research trip to the zoo with interesting shapes and patterns and behaviours to see, rather than a calculus class in a stuffy classroom on a hot summers' day. (Hopefully!)

POST: The Mandela Effect is <maybe> unintentional dimensional jumping into a "created" reality

Where would all these parallel worlds be? And what would their relationship be relative to one another, and to time? Would it not be easier to conceive of there being different states of experience instead? (With concepts like "universe" just being an idea used to form a useful description of experience, rather than an actual independent thing or place. In other words, a thinking framework and not a "reality" as such.)

POST: So, basically everything is fake?

Another is jumping to a reality where you already own a home, this means that you physically or mentally swap places with another you where you own a home. One catch is that you don't know the history of this other world and it might be different to your reality in other ways. That is what this Reddit is about.

Not quite, though. Because it is not, in fact, based upon there being "another you" or "another world".

A description based upon those concepts is one which takes ideas like "timelines" and "physical worlds" as literal external things, rather than as useful abstractions. Within the experience itself, there is no sense of another you or world. In fact, within experience itself, there is no sense of "you" being a person, rather than a that-which-experiences (although our descriptions often do assume there is an object-based you involved). That is why the subreddit is not just about the "nature of experiencing" and changes to experiences, but also about the nature of descriptions. In other words, if we are going to take a step back from the everyday description of the world and embed it within a larger context (e.g. "parallel universes"), the next obvious thing is to take a step back from that and view that within a larger context. Ultimately, we cast a wary eye on the fact of descriptions themselves, and perhaps realise that with regard to this topic they often create more confusion than anything else, if taken to be literally "what is happening".

We might say that all that is literally happening, is your exact experience as it appears. Everything else we claim to be "behind" that, implied as being causal of it, are in fact just more experiences too (the experience of: "thinking about experiences"). They might be useful for conceiving of change, but that are not themselves explanations or causes of change.

7Kek7: We are experience or awareness. The fact that we ourselves create and influence the experience does not make it "fake", though it is certainly not "rigid" in the way that is generally thought.

POST: PSA:Please stop posting "I did X experiment" if you haven't verified your outcome. "physical feelings" after you did any method are all placebo.

100% agree, thank you for posting this. It's the same thing that happens in the lucid dream subreddit where every other post is, "did I just lucid dream???? ? ?"

Yeah, /r/luciddreaming is a very good example of this.

One big problem is simply that subreddits like that get stuck at a certain level of knowledge, because there's only so much to discuss about an experiential topic, while new arrivals begin with zero experience and don't "get it" conceptually until they do. If those with a bit of experience or who have given the topic a lot of thought grow weary of repeating themselves, the balance goes off. However, because the topic can't be encapsulated in one authoritative essay - since it requires a dialogue format which takes into account the present "mental formatting" of both the new arrival and the experienced contributor, and their overlap, in order to properly communicate it - it can be tricky to avoid this happening periodically.

For a topic like this one, I guess one way might be to force people to write a bit more when they post. In your example, if someone is going to write "did I just lucid dream?" (here: "did I jump?") but has to write two paragraphs about it before they can hit submit, then they at least have to give it some proper thought - about their experience, and what it means to ask the question. That is, extended to include commentary on "why do I think this experience indicates a lucid dream, or not?". That way, even though posts might be repeats on a surface level, each post can trigger a discussion that approaches a familiar topic from a different angle, perhaps leading to new places.

Q1: I agree with this point. However, looking at a "hot" post after I posted this one, I sometimes wonder if only a minority in the sub have some sense.
Link to said hot post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/6u2p47/2_glasses_of_water_just_tried_it_out/]
The fact that its on the hot list, despite being utterly pointless, shows that there is something wrong here somewhere and that many people here truly don't know what they are doing when they "upvote" posts. To upvote is to bring to attention that it is a post that should be viewed, to recommend it, or to laud the post.
Let's say the community fully supports these posts , and instead of ones that have discussion, the entire hot post list is filled with such posts, with absolutely no purpose other than a cry for selfish attention. The sub would pretty much go downhill. You might as well introduce a gang of 3-4 bots here and have them act as encouragement bots with a default message of "have fun! Please keep us updated as to how everything goes! :D" , because thats pretty much all there is to comment to these.
While I am not at all opposed to the sub being friendly and nice, it will become some kind of depressionhelp sub where the only purpose of people being here is to cheer others and vastly deviates from the philosophical/introspective sub it was created to be (I assume). If they really need attention, there are other subs to obtain encouragement.

I largely agree with where you're coming from. Also:

Reddit and its upvote system is itself a bit of a problem when it comes to more discussion or introspection based subreddits - particularly because people sign up for this sub casually, based on a general notion of it, and then posts appear in their front pages without the additional context, and get upvotes accordingly (as if it were an LOA type deal). This wasn't such a issue when we had a small subscriber base, with contributors who were mostly there from the start plus a smattering of occasional newcomers. It didn't take much to steer things in the right direction without having to be too explicit or harsh with moderation. As we've expanded, it's easy for the balance to get shifted. I'm think I'm going to look at introducing some additional content filtering and, perhaps, add some more specific guidelines as to what is appropriate and what is not, to help people make better decisions as regards posting before they actually write their post. It's something we've held back on, but we want to ensure we are the /r/TrueFilm of this subject area, rather than the /r/Movies. (Both have their place, of course, but there are dozens of /r/Movies already available.)

I would add that some subjects such as suicide and depression can be appropriate topics, if the discussion that results is an exploration of these areas from a "nature of experience/descriptions" perspective. If it devolves into just feel-good phrasings as responses, then less so.

POST: For my media studies class I have to make a 5 minute film. Could anyone please tell me their experience with this?

This comment [POST: This sub feels like what /r/lawofattraction is trying to be ], originally intended to highlight the difference between this subreddit and /r/lawofattraction, is probably a good starter to read. (In addition to the sidebar text and its links, of course.) The other response below also captures the essence of it. Ultimately, the subreddit is about investigating the "nature of experience" and the nature of descriptions about experience - by way of personal experiments and contemplation of metaphors, and generally adopting a "meta" perspective.

In terms of experiences, you should really conduct your own experiments (see demo exercises in sidebar) and form your own conclusions! There may be (philosophical) reasons why just listening to "other people's" experiences is not particularly helpful.

I'd perhaps suggest that this topic probably isn't the ideal candidate for an easy 5 minute media studies film, since to do it justice you're going to have to do a bit of experimenting, reading and thinking to properly get it - and even then, it's likely more the start of something than the end! (The common initial impression that it is either about "magickal rituals" or about science fiction-type parallel universes or multiverses is incorrect.)

Q1: I'm new too. In my opinion, this pretty much is witchcraft. They use visualisations, tools, rituals, even chanting to change something about their lives. Witches have been doing these techniques for years. Seems like Someone just connected magick with the scientific theory of multiple dimensions. This is how they explained the Changes one can force upon their life. They must have "jumped dimensions"

That's not the intention really. The techniques are largely irrelevant in a sense (and they are deliberately called "exercises" or "experiments" because the whole idea of methods can turn out to be an issue). The setup is one step more "meta" than repurposing theories - the very idea of the validity of descriptions as explanations ls also under scrutiny, be that for unusual changes or for ongoing experience more generally.

(There is no chanting and all that.)

Q1: Oops I thought i read somewhere there was chanting (or something similar)
But other than that I don't follow your reply. Sounds like jibber jabber.
Witchcraft techniques are irrelevant as well. Tools an fancy shit isn't needed to practice. Seems like you guys have the same goals as a witch, but just go about it a different way, and call it something different.
What is a "repurposing theory" I couldn't even find that on Google search
and "one step more meta"??? I never heard that before, Google search turned up "Scream 2", "Ironman" and other movie stuff. I thought it was from a video game haha
"the validity of descriptions as explanations "
WTF? LoL

"Jibber jabber", eh? Possibly so! As you say, though: you're "new too" and your opinion might, at the moment, be a bit uninformed. (Which is fine of course. That's why it's a discussion-focused subreddit.)

The sidebar pretty much lays it out really, but the background idea is that the "tools" are a starting point for investigating the nature of your experience. So it's half an experimental thing, half a philosophy thing. And then: Yeah, so we can make "rule-breaking" changes to our experiences, but what is the meaning of that? And what does it mean to describe it, for example, in terms of the concept of "dimensional jumping" - can that be taken literally? And so on.

The "validity of descriptions as explanations" part was about how descriptions don't really get "behind" our experiences and tell us what is actually happening; they are essentially just further experiences (the experience of: "thinking about experiences"). So describing experiences in either scientific or magickal (or whatever) terms can be problematic - or at least shouldn't be taken too seriously.
The "repurposing theory" part was because you'd suggested that this was about mashing together two theories - scientific multiverses and magickal theory - for another purpose. It isn't. Those two ways of understanding things are just taken as one of any number of descriptions, with none of them being "true".
The "one step more meta" was pointing to that: we don't take any description of "what is happening" as being correct, because we are also looking at what descriptions themselves are too. In fact, even the idea that there is a "what is happening" might be in doubt!

So - although it's not exactly this - the subreddit topic might be better thought of in terms of non-duality or subjective idealism as its starting point, rather than witchcraft. Not so much about getting results, but about asking: what does the fact that you got results at all imply about what "you" are, what "the world" is, and how those are related?

7Kek7: TG your patience in explaining what is almost unexplainable is quite impressive

Ha, yes: I really should get this pathological optimism looked at sometime! But I do feel that although we can't explain these things in the normal manner, we can definitely circle around them in a way that's helpful, in dialogue, at a slightly different angle each time - and so the "thing in the gap" can be implied, even if not articulated directly.

A1: What he's saying here is the changes you can effect into your life aren't the point. The point is what the changes reveal about reality.
The methods don't matter because results aren't the point.

Q1: Oooic thank u

Yeah, that is indeed the edited version of my "jibber jabber"!

POST: I went to a complete different reality for sometime

[POST]

Ok I don't know whether u will believe me or not but I believe that I went or kinda saw an alternate universe . Though I still want your opinion on this..
I have always been an admirer of alternate realities stuff but I didn't knew that there are some methods of jumping realities . Then i found this subreddit about a month ago.( Since then ive been following this subreddit everyday). I kinda understood that mirror method and 2 cups are the two best methods of leaping .Honestly I was kind of scared doing the mirror method so I did the 2 cups . It was really easy to do it but I didn't notice much changes after it.
I thought that I should try some new method then I saw this really easy new method 'The Vaccum Method '. After I researched a bit more about it, I started to practice it every night before sleep and then meditated about it.
Ok shit got real today. I really woke up early today and during afternoon time I really felt sleepy and decided to take a nap. I lay on my bed and started 'Vaccum method' excersize again. After doing it I kind of started thinking about my crush and started having a lucid dream. But then kinda my sleep broke after an hour or so. But after I opened my eyes , I saw I was in some different house , I got fucking scared and closed my eyes again , I thought to myself that I might have changed reality but why am I in a house worse than my own house ? Did i come come to a worse reality ? I opened my eyes again and saw that same house and closed my eyes again. Now I started sweating and panting. Here I understood that this was real not a dream cause I felt my sweat . Then I opened my eyes and saw my own house , I really felt happy and relieved
All I want is that u guys give your opinion on this. I believe I shifted for sometime ,do u agree or have some different thoughts
Sorry for typing mistakes and bad grammar

[END OF POST]

Just as an aside, it's worth pushing back a little on the idea that there is some amazing method - the method - out there to uncover.

Much as it's tempting for newcomers to want to jump on a "fool-proof method", it is important to consider how any "method" relates to your actual experience, to the nature of it. Otherwise there's a risk of just engaging in yet more "sensory theatre" without really digging into the underlying situation - and going through the loop, once again, of finding something new, getting a sorta-result, then it not working, and then moving onto something else (because you never really knew what was working about it in the first place).

If ultimately what you're doing is lying down for a bit and imagining some crap for ten minutes, or saying some words for a while, it's worth pausing to consider how precisely that would make any difference to your experience. If that question isn't answered, if you don't dig deeper into it, then it's really just a superstitious activity, with no idea of the "causal" element of any change - and (interestingly, tellingly) you often find the reliability of a "method" fades out pretty quickly.

This is why the two exercises in the sidebar are really intended as illustrations of something, rather than methods as such. (Although of course the subreddit is built out from an original idea that there might be a "technique". But then deconstructing that notion to gain insight.)

It isn't exactly explained why the exercises work either.

The exercises may or may not work: they aren't promises, they are experiments.

If they do work (or more broadly: if experiences arise subsequently which seem related to doing the exercise) then that's a starting point for contemplation. A starting point for considering what those outcomes imply about the nature of your experience (of "you" and "the world"), perhaps leading to an insight or at least a revision of your description of things, or even of your attitude towards descriptions in general. This may even include revisiting the whole idea of there being a "how things work" at all, in the usual sense.

Anyway:

What the exercises are, though, is the stripped-down essence of an approach for investigating this. So just making up variations of them with extra stuff on top - saying this or that, imagining this or that - in the hope that some "secret sauce" will be discovered that gives "results", without having a clear reason for the additions, probably isn't very useful.

Doesn't change happen because you want it to happen?

That's an interesting hypothesis. How could it be tested? What exactly is the nature of "wanting", and why would it be relevant or causal in terms of generating subsequent experiences? How does "wanting" relate to "me" and "the world"? And how, precisely does one go about "wanting" anyway?

So, perhaps the question isn't so much "why wouldn't it work?", but rather: "why do I think it would work, what is the basis for the choices and additions I am making, and how to I test those assumptions specifically?"

With all the proof out there from this Reddit and Glitches Reddit combined there has to be something to this.

The idea behind the exercises is that one can actually check for oneself whether there is something to it, or not, rather than just reading stories about it. And then, because they focus on two particular facets of experience related to this, dig deeper into the nature of it by targeting different aspects of experience in turn. (There may also be a philosophical problem with "other people's stories", that isn't even just about believing them or not.)

So, you are saying the exercises may work but not because of the exercises but something we don't quite understand yet?

Ultimately, I'd end up suggesting that what one might end up discovering is: it's more fundamental than any of those ideas you list would suggest. It is "before" them. All of those ideas still have, as an assumption, that you are some sort of person-object located within a world-place. And ultimately, they are all essentially little "stories" about the content of experience, rather than the nature of experience itself. That is, the context of all experiences.

This is why we keep coming back to this notion that, when we come up with "explanations" for things, we must also bear in mind what a "description" actually is. Does it get "behind" our experiences? Or is it, instead, just another experience also (the experience of: "thinking about experiences"), at the same level. Saying that something is magick or witchcraft or virtual reality or whatever, doesn't really add anything necessarily. (See also this comment about the literal "parallel universes" or quantum physics type explanations.) Particularly when we are dealing with an experience of world-facts or the "formatting" of experience changing. Descriptions might be useful ways of thinking about such things, but they don't really - cannot really - encapsulate their nature or the cause of them.

If we go one step more "meta" in this way, it's like we take a step back from both our main strand of experience and the descriptions we make up about them. The problem we end up with, though, is that we're now dealing with something that is "before" concepts. How can you describe that which descriptions are "made from"? And so on. But maybe you don't have to describe something, or be able to communicate it, in order to know it. And perhaps demanding that something be conceptualised or restricting oneself to explanations - requiring that something "makes sense" or that it can be "understood" - is a barrier to a more direct realisation of the true situation. In other words, I might end up suggesting that it's not that there is an explanation for how the exercises work (or any other methods in fact), in a fundamental way anyway, but that the attempt to construct one, or the willingness to put our experiences and assumptions under the microscope in this way, might lead somewhere useful regardless. Even thought it perhaps can't be articulated.

Extra bit: If making changes is simply about thinking (of? about?) what we want, then we must still consider what exactly we'd think - because there are many ways to think a thing of course - and also consider how that relates to the world (is the world itself a thought, if so in what way?) and what we are (if we are the thinker of thoughts, where and what are we and what are thoughts made from?), etc.

POST: Has anyone had success with the "Vacuum Method"

[POST]

Hi Everyone, Recently I've been keeping up with this forum in hopes of changing a decision that I made in the past. I have read of this new method from TheFirstGlitcher, I would like to use it prevent myself from making this decision or shifting into a reality with a new past in which I had never made this decision. I created this forum to find out if anyone besides TheFirstGlitcher has had success and their opinion if I would be able to switch to an alternate past or someday miraculously wake up in the past in which I can stop myself and this will all be part of a distant memory that was unreal. If it's not possible, I understand, but I would like to hear your opinions. Thank you so much! Please let me know what you think, any response is welcome! Also I'm not sure if I have done it correctly, this is probably why nothing has changed, but I also wonder if the shift that I want is even possible?

[END OF POST]

A: You could take a random carrot, declare that carrot as blessed and eat it and get results..

Q: lol I see your analogy, but why is it that these methods work for some and some it doesn't work. Most people claim that it is possible for anyone to jump for anything. I'm asking if there is a full proof method to make it work or if it is even possible to cause a shift in reality because if I wash my hands in hot water I'll still burn my hands, the world is very real to everyone so why is it that some experience these shifts and some do not and if it isn't possible to revert the past or a past decision doesn't this limit the ability of a dimensional shift. It's not so much I'm skeptical, I want to learn more about it as I wish to revert a decision I made and the people of this sub Reddit such as yourself seem to have more exposure to this type of information. Thanks!

The idea isn't that that your experience of the world isn't real - after all, in a dream you can kick a stone and hurt your foot and refute nothing about the dreamlike nature of it. The experience is always very real, because it's the only thing that is real. Whether it is consistent, and what the nature of your experience is, that is what you are pushing against I suppose. So rather than the world not being "real", it's that your standard description may not be an accurate accounting of it. That is, that the idea that you are a person-object located within a world-place may not be a good description of your actual experience (where "the world" is typically assumed to be a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'"). The world is real, but it may not be "real" in the way you have been thinking that it is "real".

As for "methods", maybe see my other comment below. The very concept of "methods" and "techniques" (fool-proof or otherwise) can be a distraction here.

...

The "Vaccum Method" is a post someone did a while back.

It's worth pointing out, though, that the two exercises highlighted in the sidebar - and they are deliberately named "exercises" rather than "methods" or "techniques", because those terms tend to imply something about our experiences that might not actually turn out to be true - are intended to illustrate two aspects of experience (which turn out to be the same thing actually). That is, they are not simply self-help style techniques for bringing about change.

In other words, it's not the change that's important, necessarily, it's the fact that there was apparent change at all that is key. Other (so-called) methods and techniques tend to just add extra "sensory theatre" on top of these key aspects. This can end up obscuring the genuine insights that should follow from a proper "experiment and contemplate" type investigatory attitude.

So, when encountering a new "method", it's worth asking the author how, exactly it is meant to work, and what the thinking behind it is, and then probing the assumptions that lie behind the concepts used in that thinking. Otherwise we risk simply, almost superstitiously, doing various actions and hoping, somehow, that change will occur, with really understanding the "secret sauce". Otherwise, in fact, people are at risk of taking a "cargo cult" approach to the subject (that is, emulating the visible actions only, while never grasping the "motive").

Hence the (intentend, anyway) strong "philosophical" component of the subreddit: unpacking assumptions rather than just trying out tricks.

POST: My perspective on dimensional jumping (Introduction to creating reality with your thoughts)

[DELETED POST]

EDIT: The point of this comment was to try and explore in more detail what, exactly, the concept of "thoughts create reality" means, from a particular perspective on the nature of "you", "thought" and "reality". However, it's a bit muddled in the execution, oh well. It might be worth explicitly distinguishing between passing thought and deliberate, intentional thought. This potentially allows us to clarify that it's not the thought as such that does anything; thoughts could be viewed as simply pseudo-sensory aspects of your current "state", really. (Where a "state" is the current set of fact-patterns contributing to, and fully defined the future moments of, your ongoing experience.)

Rather, it's the intentional content - or the "direct meaning" - that makes the difference. Here, by "an intention" we mean the fact or pattern that we seek to increase the relative contribution of, and by "intending" we mean the increasing of that contribution (whereby shifting the "shape" of one's state, of oneself). There is no act involved in this, though - there's no mechanism or technique. One simply intends. Meanwhile, the sensory thought aspect is itself a result of intention, not a cause; it's a bit of theatre. Now, for sure, you can get synchronicity arising if you visualise something - a bit like having deformed a surface and the contours being overlaid upon experience from then on, or drawing upon a television screen and the pattern "shining through" the gaps to be incorporated in every image to some extent (see: the owls exercise, for example).

However, a fact is itself an experience of "meaning" - it has no spatial or temporal component itself. It is unbounded and sort of "dissolved" into the background of your experience, with only its sensory aspects arising occasionally. So when you want to intend a fact, just conjuring an image or saying a phrase isn't necessarily what you want to do. Certainly, it may trigger the fact-pattern by association, but really what you want to do is intend the fact-pattern directly. This can't be described in words, but you "know" when you are doing it. You do it whenever you shift yourself in mundane ways. (Ponder: do you conjure an image when you change your destination when walking along the street? No, you feel-know-intend the change, directly.)

There is not a "you" and "the world"; there is just you-as-awareness which has "taken on the shape of" the experience of being-a-person-in-a-world. Whereas the construction of language forces us to talk of a "doer" and an "act" and a "thing done to", in our actual experience this is not the case. Attempts to enact "doing" tend to complicate things or lead to failure, because we assume a separate mechanism that we are trying to harness. In fact, there is no mechanism: we shape-shift our experience, our state, via intention, which is self-caused change.

All of this suggests a very fundamental reason why we can encounter difficulties:

Intention is literal and direct.

Thinking doesn't create your reality, your state. A thought actually is a pattern within your state. A passing thought is a view of your current state; a deliberate thought is the intensification of that pattern in your state. It's almost claustrophobic to think about: there is no separation between you and your state, you and your thought, you and your sensory experience, you and your intention. There is no gap between thinking, intending and experiencing.

The point of this, is that the thought "I am happy" literally is the fact-pattern of "I am happy", and increasing its relative "intensity" of via intention will increase its contribution to your ongoing experience. However, to be clear, it's not the words "I am happy" that you want to intend - that is a mistake easily made (leading to all sorts of synchronicity about happiness or the phrase "I am happy"). Those words are part of the extended pattern of being-happy and can be used to trigger it to an extent, perhaps. However, it's really the fact-pattern of which those words are a sensory aspect that you want to intend.

This literal nature means that you need to be aware of what, exactly, you are intending, because the mechanism here (if it can really be called a mechanism) is that of a "dumb patterning system", a direct deformation of your present state. There is no intelligence between you and intention and the change of state. If you conjure up "this visual image", then that visual image will be more prevalent in your experience. If you conjure up "this visual image which means that fact will be true", then that fact will be more prevalent in your experience (and probably the visual image too).

Essentially, then, it's like you are drawing patterns directly upon awareness - sometimes in 3D, sometimes "non-dimensionally" and abstractly; sometimes sensory images, sometimes "facts" or "formatting" - thereby increasing their prominence in the unfolding world-experience from that point onwards.

Can you give examples highlighting the difference between "this visual image" and "this visual image which means that fact will be true". Like if I imagine myself holding 2 million dollars in cash, is that belonging to the first or the second category?

It's probably better to experiment with something more abstract. So, first imagine a sphere in front of you - say, a blue sphere with no particular detail, just floating there. Okay, now imagine a sphere in front of you, identical in every way to the first, except also imagine that this sphere is imbued with the special power to make the room filled with joy. But do not change the sensory aspect of the sphere in any way when you do this.

This is basically "imagining the fact of something being true" abstractly. That is, that an object, or your ongoing experience more generally, has a property, without actually visualising any sensory aspects to that property. Instead of doing all the "sensory theatre" of picturing stuff, in an effort to associatively trigger the fact or as an excuse to do so, you can just directly do intending-asserting of the fact into greater prominence.

Finally, after taking a pause to clear yourself out a little, instead of using the sphere image, simply directly intend that the room is filled with joy, and experience the result of that. That is, wordlessly intend the fact of: "it is true now that this room is filled with joy". And, um, enjoy. Aside - Note that there is no effort in doing so, and any "trying" will just distract you, amounting to an intending of the "feeling of trying" rather than the fact of "joyful room" being true.

I can see the differences between the two explanations.
"Imagining the fact of something being true" = Imagining the fact along with the emotions you will (expect to) feel from having it
Image = Yin
Emotions = Yang
Yin/Yang = Manifestation/Shifting
I think that some people would have to be at a point in their life to where they understand themselves better to really grasp this concept.
If someone has constant inner/outer distractions or conflicts then this maybe extremely difficult to conceptually grasp yet perform.
I'm fairly new to this but I would appreciate any feedback.
Thanks.

There can be a difficulty, sometimes, with elevating emotions and treating them as if they are special rather than just another sensation-perception within an experience (albeit a difficult one to put into concepts and language). I suggest that emotions would be best understood as a sensory aspect of the fact, arising as an object within experience.

Meanwhile, the fact itself is sort of "unbounded" or "timeless and spaceless". It is not experienced as an object, instead it's sort of just "known". You might call it a sense of "meaning".

So, while "imagining (intending, asserting) the fact of something being true" might result in an experience of an emotion, it is not necessarily required, and the emotion is not itself a cause. When we say "the feeling that something is true", we aren't referring to an emotion, we're referring to a felt-knowing, a global sense of a particular thing being true. The problem with some approaches (many LOA descriptions included) is they miss out this "secret sauce" and therefore just produce minimal intensification of some of the patterning associated with facts, rather than direct addressing the facts themselves. This can still produce "results", of course, as synchronicity (basic "patterning") but it can be frustrating to work with, because there's no real understanding of the cause ("intending").

Unfortunately, this activity of "intending" can't be described at all, really, only pointed at. Intending has no mechanism or method, and is before "things" so is non-conceptual. And so we hit the difficulty whereby people end up focussed on what can be talked about and thought about (basically: objects within experience, which are results) and miss out (when writing) or don't realise (when reading) that there is a specific actual cause of all change (which is not any one of those experiential objects). We then can end up with a "cargo cult" version of the topic:

The term "cargo cult" has been used metaphorically to describe an attempt to recreate successful outcomes by replicating circumstances associated with those outcomes, although those circumstances are either unrelated to the causes of outcomes or insufficient to produce them by themselves. In the former case, this is an instance of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

(See: Richard Feynman's fun lecture also.)

That is, people try to generate the results by just intensifying part of the pattern associated with the target fact, perhaps getting some outcome by association, but not really going for their target directly. The distinction between doing the owl exercise (increasing the intensity of contribution of the "owl" extended pattern) and actually intending a specific outcome ("it is true now that [this fact about owls]"), basically. Or between imagining some objects (the blue sphere for example), as opposed to: imagining some objects while asserting-intending-knowing it means-that something is true or will happen.

In this context, isn't the cause (to create) and deliberate intending the same thing?

This is why all of this ultimately leads to an exploration of the "nature of experiencing" - that is, examining what "you" are, exactly, and what your actual relationship is to "the world".

Intending, then, is like "shape-shifting". You might say you are shifting your state, where by "state" we mean the set of relative contributions (or "intensity") of all possible facts or patterns, which means to shift yourself. There is no "you" and the "state" or "world" - instead, you sort of "take on the shape of" a particular situation or experience (in the broadest sense, not just the current sensory moment). Right now, you have "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently ("as if") being-this-person-in-this-world.

So there is, as you say, no difference between causing and intending. We might define "an intention" as the fact or pattern we wish to increase the contribution of, and "intending" as the intensifying of that pattern - shifting to a state where that fact-pattern is more prominent.

Although we often use the word "create" for this sort of thing, actually that's strictly speaking not ideal. The implication of the above is that all patterns exist, eternally. Patterns are "before" time (with time, or change, being an aspect of experience, a pattern like any other, rather than something fundamental). They cannot be created or destroyed; they just are. This means that every experience, at least implicitly, is always available, and that we simply "shift our posture" such that some are more prominent than the rest.

Now, returning to what "you" are, if you discount anything which changes in your ongoing experience (how can something be ultimately true, if it can shift?), the only permanent thing turns out to be the property of being-aware. Or at least, it is meaningless to talk of the absence of that. All other facts or patterns can be more or less "true", but not that.

Putting it all together, then:

We might say that what you truly are is "awareness" which is "taking on the shape of" states of experience. Between shifts, the sequence of moments you experience is fully determined by the facts within that state. The apparent change of sensory content moment to moment is actually static also in this description: "time passing" is just another pattern, albeit a more abstract formatting than most. The only true change that ever occurs - and hence the only cause of apparent change in ongoing sensory experience - is when we "intend", which is just word used to point to the act of us shifting ourselves to a different set of prominent facts.

...

I suspect we are probably talking at cross purposes a little, since we are using some words in different ways, and some underlying assumptions are perhaps different. The word "thought" is a problematic one anyway, I guess; it's too vague!

So, in your description, where (and what) are "you"? And where would "another consciousness" be, relative to that?

This is why I am having a hard time separating intention from other thoughts.

In type or nature they are identical, of course. However, there is a distinction to made made between thoughts which simply arise spontaneously, and those which arise from deliberate intention. In the first case, it's just a passing thought appearing in accordance with your current state (more later), in the latter you are reshaping your state by way of deliberate thinking.

There is no difference in sensory experience between the two. And in fact, there may be no sensory aspect to intending if there's no result component which overlaps with the current moment (although one "knows" one is intending.) The "how" cannot be described, because it is like "shape-shifting". But there is a difference in that one is an aspect of "how things are" and one is "changing how things are".

So, pondering -

"Intention", then, is simply a term used when referring to a "pattern" that one is increasing the contribution of ("intending"), which is done simply by "thinking it" or 'imagining it" or more accurately: "experiencing it" or "asserting as an experience". The fight with language here is because we want to avoid implying that there is a "thinker" who then "thinks the thought", with one being "over here" and another "over there" in any sense. Really, one "takes on the shape of" the fact, pattern, or experience. This last point is key.

Loosely, the outline of this description would be:

The only fundamental fact is the property of being-aware - or "awareness".
All other facts are relatively true only; they are temporary. They can be conceived of as "patterns" in awareness.
All possible fact-patterns exist eternally, "dissolved" into the background. Your state is the current distribution of relative intensities of those facts.
What you truly are, is "awareness", and this is always true, regardless of what "shape" you have taken on.
Currently, then, you-as-awareness have "taken on the shape" of a particular state. This state consists of all the facts or patterns currently contributing to your ongoing experience. It fully defines your experience - as in, all subsequent moments are fully determined, between shifts of state.
To alter your experience, you shift your state by changing the relative intensity of a particular fact or pattern. You do this simply by "intending" - that is, a sort of "thinking" but not a thinking about, rather a thinking as. Still better described as a "taking on the shape of" or "becoming of" a situation.
Intending cannot be described (because it is "before" concepts) and is non-experiential (has no inherent sensory aspect), although sensory aspects may arise from doing it if the change in state involves an impact in the current "moment". However these are results of intending, not causes of outcomes.
There is no "outside" to experience, and awareness is "before" division and multiplicity. The only thing that is "happening", is this exact experience, right now. And thoughts you have about an "outside" to experience, are also experiences (that is, the experience of thinking about experience) and are "inside".

And so on.

As the last point suggests, though, there's not all that much point in thinking about this relentlessly, because ultimately thinking is just another experience (although by doing so deliberately you are to an extent "patterning" yourself for future experiences: so we might choose our models carefully if we are going to focus on them a lot). Simple experiments and exercises show the way more clearly, once we have put "descriptions" in their proper place. For example, the Feeling Out exercise at the bottom of this comment is useful for bringing us back to our actual situation, rather than an idea about it.

POST: In what way are other people real?

Let me have a go here. It seems that you perhaps are still partly identifying as a person, and implying that this person is in a "place" of some sort with other people, and you're saying things like "my awareness". This can lead to an incorrect imagining of the situation, I think.

It is not your awareness, I'd suggest. It is just "awareness". What you are, is "awareness". That is, that which has as its only fundamental property the property of being-aware, and which "takes on the shape of" experiences - including aspects like "spatial extent" and "time passing" - playing out currently as a series of multi-sensory moments. Right now, you-as-awareness is "taking on the shape of" apparently being-a-person-in-a-world. All that is fundamentally true is being-aware, but you-as-awareness are having experiences "as if" other things are true.

Pause for a moment and check your actual experience as it is. I suggest it is something like being an "open aware space within which experiences arise" - like you are an unbounded mind, with a stable, bright, multi-sensory, 3-dimensional thought of being in a world floating within it. In what sense, then, are you a person? What does that being-a-person consist of? Surely, it is just sensations, perceptions and thoughts - with the idea of being a person occurring from time to time? You don't actually experience being a person at all. Other people, similarly, are made from that. Basically, visual, auditory, textural, and so on, aspects and a felt knowing. All of which arises as a 1st-person perspective. And that's important. That is, as soon as you find yourself thinking about this and imagining the situation from an imaginary 3rd-person "view from nowhere", then you are immediately "wrong". Because you are not inside the world; rather the world is inside you, with a particular sensory aspect of it being "unfolded" at any, or as any, particular moment.

You are then left with identifying the actual properties of this 1st-person mode - which is all there is. For example:

Feeling Out Exercise

This final observation is important. Specifically, that "awareness" is "before" things like division and multiplicity, objects and change, and so it makes no sense to talk of "an awareness" or "other people's awareness" or any number regarding awareness at all. There is just "awareness"; uncountable. You can't relate different experiences or perspectives within a framework of time and space, because time and space are themselves aspects of an experience. (Although obviously not accurate, the Hall of Records metaphor tries to offer a easy way into envisaging that.)

it literally felt like I was somewhere in my head, so I had to stop the exercise.

Sometimes it helps, here, to then notice where, exactly, you are experiencing that location from.

Sometimes it is discovered that you are sort of "looking at" that felt location from outside of it. Sometimes it is noted that the "feeling of being in your head" is a feeling within a larger field of "feeling-space". Both of which mean, of course, that you are actually not just in that location, because otherwise you couldn't be aware of the location within a larger context! You must be the context, in order to be aware of a location within a context!

As you imply, though, it can be best to just leave things be if they are a struggle, and let it percolate for a while. Occasionally, doing these exercises can feel quite claustrophobic, as you try to "capture" yourself within your attention, and discover that this isn't possible (because your attention is within you, not the other way around). The trick, overall, is to eventually cease trying to effort it into getting a conclusion, because efforting is itself a deformation of your "shape", like rippling the water you are trying to see a reflection in. Anyway, it's good to return to this one now and again even after you've "got" it - it can be very pleasant and relaxing to remind oneself of it when it is noticed we've become "narrowed down".

Q: Sometimes it is discovered that you are sort of "looking at" that felt location from outside of it. Sometimes it is noted that the "feeling of being in your head" is a feeling within a larger field of "feeling-space". Both of which mean, of course, that you are actually not just in that location, because otherwise you couldn't be aware of the location within a larger context! You must be the context, in order to be aware of a location within a context!
Wow, this is really good; I didn't think of it that way. Perhaps I should have persisted with the exercise a bit longer. I'll definitely give it another go. What would you say for the first exercise, "feeling the edges" of your experience? Do you mean in the sense, that, when you close your eyes, you try to find the "edges" of the "blackness" that you see, or the "edges" in terms of the "mental space" of the mind?

For the first - words are problematic, I suppose, but I do mean feel out, mentally, or with attention, to see if there is a "boundary", an end, to your moment of experience in any direction, and if there are any "edges" to it. It's not a visual thing, particularly. Perhaps sensing is a better term to use. "Mental space" is a good enough term, although of course that does presume a result (that there is a mental space in the first place).

What is concluded - you can check for yourself, definitely don't take my word for it - is that "being" has no edges or limits, but also that it's not necessarily got spatial extent either. So perhaps "openness" or "void" ends up being the way to describe it, with your current spatially-extended sensory moment floating within that.

Ultimately, we're just noting that the idea of an "inside" or "outside" to experience is meaningless because, as we've just explored with the "where am I?" thing, any discovery of an "inside" already implies that you are the context of that "inside", and so you are the "outside" too, and that is also within/as you. This then helps us note, again, that "sensory experience" and "thoughts" are of the same nature, further emphasising that thoughts about an outside are themselves just more experiences within/as us ("inside").

You can see, here, how lots of the usual questions we might have asked earlier become nonsensical. By the time you get to the end of it, questions about "inside" and "outside" have resulted in answers which make those two words quite problematic to use! The answers actually destroy the questions!

Every time I read one of your posts lately I feel like we are on two opposite sides of a coin. I read something and my immediately reaction is "That's not right at all!" then two seconds later it says "Oh wait, no I see what you mean, your just looking at it from the other side". There have been a few of them like this lately, that I have difficulty reading and then suddenly have a flash of intuition of "I don't know what he's saying, but I know exactly what he means". It seems like your approach "pulls out while pushing in" while mine does the opposite. Instead of pulling out to find the edges of my awareness, I envision pulling inwards to a core identity. From there I ask what is the "he/she/they" that exists before my pattern is placed on top of it to filter it. In that sense another person is a core identity that my belief puts through a filter. As I see my core identity as multifaceted and capable of anything, so must the other person be. So in that sense if I go from a reality where a person dislikes me to one where they like me, I didn't change them because between my core/higher self and that persons we've established agreements on how to express all of those energies and let out awareness choose the ones we want.

It's sort of both, simultaneously, really, the "pulls out / pushes in". It's that thing of there being "no-thing" but also "all possible patterns, pre-existing and eternal", at the same time. And you could look at people that way, too: that the "larger person" is all possible versions of that person, and you're just seeing one "aspect". To some extent, though, we're just playing with descriptions there, but I think it gives an intuitive way of thinking about the sort of experiences it is possible to have.

POST: Successfully jumped to contact Future Self. Have evidence of success.

[POST]

Soon after contacting my Future Self, and asking for clear manifestations from him that would leave no doubt in my mind as to their source, the following video manifested in my reality:
Scientist have Evidence that our Future Decisions can change the Past Reality
A clear message: There is science to justify what you are doing.
X-Post from /r/DangmaDzyu

[END OF POST]

So, normally this would be removed because of rule 3. and it also seems a bit off topic with the link:

3 - Links to possibly useful material should include discussion as to its relevance, and a personal review if possible.

However, it's worth having the discussion.

First, I'd say that science does not justify what you are doing. (See previous comment elsewhere on that topic and also in this thread, to save me reproducing it. It references the simulation hypothesis, among other things). However, this is not a bad thing. This subject is inherently unscientific - it is philosophical or metaphysical. That doesn't mean that it doesn't involve things that are true, though. Science itself doesn't discern truth, merely whether a particular description is effective or not, so one shouldn't feel the need to have one's ideas confirmed by science as some sort of stamp of authority - but, that does not mean we shouldn't be rigorous about our own thinking about our experiences.

Second, following from that, I'm not sure why you would necessarily attribute any experiences you have to a "future self". It is important, here, to separate out the direct content of an experience we have, versus the description about that experience. This recent thread digs into this issue when it comes to the topic of "higher powers" - I think the same unpacking applies equally to "future selves". In short, one should be wary of the extent to which you are simply filling in the gaps with a bunch of ideas or assumptions, with no "touch-points" to the actual experience. It can be best to keep a "meta" perspective, where we don't commit to any description, merely find it useful or not (and bear in mind the nature of descriptions throughout).

POST: Suns of Eternity after Two Glasses, possible jump?

[Deleted post]

What "higher powers" would these be? More specifically, where would they be relative to you, and how exactly would they influence your experience? (We shouldn't just take these vague notions for granted without digging into them a little, or else we can end up accumulating stacks of semi-superstitions that are not in fact experienced. Just because you might have an experience "as if" something is true, doesn't mean that that description should be taken as "what is really happening". It's important to keep returning to what exactly was experienced, so we don't risk potentially getting distracted by little fluffy stories.)

Q: Deleted

Okay, but: why? Why believe those things? As in, what in your direct experience has led you to believe them? And believe them in preference to other possible descriptions?

This might sound like I'm pushing back against your beliefs, but that's not quite my intention. Part of this subreddit is (meant to be) focused on examining the "nature of experience" and the nature of descriptions about experiences. And so, if we were going to talk about "higher powers" or "signs", we'd inevitably dig into why we might think there was something "separate" or "out there" that was doing things, and so on.

And so:

In such an investigation, first we might end up focussing on confirming (or dispelling) our everyday assumption that we are a person-object located within a world-place. (Where "the world" is described along the lines of being a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'".) That is, checking whether that is an accurate description of our ongoing experience or not. The demo exercises in the sidebar are one way to start playing with that, for instance. And then, if we move beyond those assumptions, we must then make sure we aren't just swapping one story for another - making the same mistake, in a different way. Even the notion of "dimensions" as places is potentially suspect, and so on (since at face value it still characterises us as an object in some sense, when we don't really experience ourselves as that, perhaps).

None of which is to say those descriptions can't be useful, but that is different to saying they are fundamentally actual. The experiences might be actual, but the descriptions of them might be best viewed as metaphors or narratives - and this includes "dimensional jumping" itself. (For fun, do maybe check out the little exercise in that link, as a way for us to maybe get past the concepts here.)

Looping back to the idea of a "higher power", then, it is might potentially be viewed as a black box concept to fill in for the fact that only a minor aspect of our present state is seemingly unfolded "into the senses". In other words, the "higher power" idea is a side-effect of the error of conceiving of ourselves as an "object in a place": it is a problem with the description rather than an aspect of actual experience. The generalised version of this view is that our ongoing experience appears to be "patterned" in certain ways - that is, our experiences have content "as if" things were true. But are those things fundamentally true?

If something can be changed, it cannot be fundamentally true. Sometimes we might have experiences "as if" there are higher powers, other times not, and so on. What is the only unchanging property of our experience? Is it perhaps only the fact of "awareness" itself? What else is definitely always true? Etc.

That is the challenge: to investigate what is true. And that's one reason we'd maybe push back on descriptions of "higher powers" and "signs" or indeed "dimensions" - to see if we can have experiences as if they are not true, or differently true, as well as apparently true. Again, that doesn't mean we can't find particular descriptions attractive and enjoy them; however, if we are being sincere then it's important to take account of the nature of descriptions themselves. You get the idea!

Q: Deleted

I guess the key idea is that we don't let the content or context of our descriptions go unexamined. Or perhaps better to say: it's completely fine to use one description or another, but we choose to also recognise the nature of those descriptions. (Which are perhaps best considered as a sort of "parallel experience': the experience of "thinking [or feeling] about experiences", which doesn't get behind the experience.)

And so, please don't filter yourself when you post, because of course "beliefs" are themselves an aspect of experience - and what we're ultimately about here is an exploration of the nature of experience. However, have in mind that "meta" perspective where we are taking one step back from the descriptions we use.

Importantly, even though descriptions might not be "true", that doesn't mean they're not useful. We may certainly have experiences "as if" they were true, and that is itself of interest: just because our descriptions and beliefs don't explain our experiences, doesn't necessarily mean they can't be used to pattern our experiences - a reversal of our usual way of thinking about them, and itself a reason to keep an eye on them.

POST: Isn't this too good to be true?

[POST]

So you're telling me that I can just jump to another dimension whenever I want to change something. Isn't that sort of cheating? And how could it even be safe? I don't think we were supposed to be able to jump between different universes

[END OF POST]

Basically, the theory is that your subconscious mind is creating the universe that you perceive.

Well, not quite.

What exactly is a "subconscious" and why would it need to be convinced of anything - what power can it have to manifest things in your "reality"? I think it is worth considering that the idea of "the subconscious" is a needless conceptual filler: it is never actually observed, its introduction does not actually explain anything, and it has no link to our direct experience. It also presupposes some sort of division between "you" and "the world" and an intermediary or "mechanism" that operates in the background, unobserved. It's not clear that this is justified.

All of this is conjecture of course.

Yes, that's the theory - and nicely described, too! But then, to what extent does it connect to our actual experiences? Isn't it just a placeholder or conceptual connective tissue to join up what is experienced sensorily? That is, is it perhaps more of a "story" or a "language" than it is an accurate explanation of our actual experiences - particularly for our current topic of discussion: experiencing changes in the world which apparently break our standard description of it as a "place"?

The number of "observational touch-points" that connect the idea of the subconscious to our lived experience seem few, to the extent where it might be better not to invoke it at all, especially when it takes the form of a pseudo-computer-programming analogy (as it tends to do these days).

I guess I'm saying that I see no reason to believe in the concept as "true", although one might find it a useful way to talk about things (while remaining aware that it is not what is "really happening"). It's the crossing of that line that I find perhaps unhelpful - again, particularly in the current context, for various reasons. It all hinges on what exactly you think "you" are, and what the relationship between "you" and "the world" is, of course. For example, I'd suggest that we can't simultaneously invoke a psychologist's idea of "the subconscious" and also the law of attraction type idea of "the subconscious", since they would require different notions of "you" and "the world".

Sort of related: I quite enjoyed this article about Freud recently. An extract:

Freud believed that all cognitive processes are unconscious. What we call ‘conscious thought’ is just the brain’s way of displaying the output of unconscious cognitive processing to itself.

Now, from that I'd probably suggest deleting the notion of "the brain" or "processing" (these are never observed), and simply say that conscious thought is. All the rest of it comes about because we make the error of thinking that all experience must be expanded out into objects, or it isn't there. Unconscious thought - or "the subconscious" - isn't unconscious at all. It is here, now, in experience as an "awareness context": but you might say it is enfolded or "dissolved" into and as the background, rather than unfolded or "expanded" into the foreground. However, that means it doesn't "happen" or "process" anything or do any thinking - it is more like a static landscape or state with sensory experience an aspect of it, with nothing outside of that, and it is not personal.

POST: Did the Two Cups Intention Method Last Night... and Woke Up Today Filled With Negative Emotions and Hostility

You're overthinking this, I'd say. And "spiritual contracts" and "negative vibrations" have nothing to do with this - or, at least, you should very carefully consider what those concepts have to offer in terms of a useful accounting of your experiences, rather than simply accept such ideas at face value. If you've performed the two glasses exercise, then the only result that matters is whether, at some later time, the intended result arises within your experience (or not). It is problematic to attempt to attribute any other experience to the exercise: it can quickly lead to all sorts of superstitious type thinking, since any reasons you come up with are inevitably going to be completely ungrounded in actual experience. That is, you'll probably just be free-wheeling all sorts of vague ideas based on whatever you have previously read, but never actually experienced personally. For instance, do not assume that this exercise is based upon occult ideas or multiverses and the like.

My suggestion: follow the last instruction, let it go, and deal with any specific outcomes as they arise, and not before.

POST: Superhero Dimension

[POST]

Alright this is going to sound stupid. Is it actually possible to jump to a dimension where superhuman actually exists? If so, is it possible for me to gain Superspeed in that dimension?

[END OF POST]

Q: No, it's 99.99999999999999999999999999999% likely that it isn't possible.

How are you calculating "likeliness" here? What model are you using to obtain your result? Or do you really just mean "I really strongly feel that's not possible, but not for any specific reason"?

While I certainly appreciate you chiming in here and there, it's not much use to anyone if you are going simply be dismissive (and in some previous cases antagonistic), without going into why, exactly you believe what you do. One of the main points of the subreddit is to dig into the thinking behind views.

Anyway:

The standard answer to this question is that you can create "persistent realm" in a lucid dream, which can be returned and which to all intents and purposes behaves as if it is as "real" as this waking experience. In that sense, it is 100% possible to "jump to a dimension where superhuman actually exists" and to "gain Superspeed in that dimension".

What is the difference between this and apparently "really" jumping dimensions? I'd suggest that the only difference is that you "wake up" from a persistent realm, but do not "wake up" from daily life - yet, at least. If one switched one's experience to a persistent realm and then never resumed this experience, though...? That would be what OP is asking for. Although such an experience might not actually be much fun "in reality", I'd say.

Here you go again typing an entire paragraph of "words" in "quotes"... he wanted to REALLY jump somewhere fast

Haven't you heard? "Quotes" are the new CAPS!

Expanding on that:

The reason I put things in quotes - other than when literally quoting a comment or someone else's terminology - is to highlight that the word or phrase is not to be taken at face value, and that its usual meaning or underlying assumptions are perhaps one of the things under investigation. Your glib comment about being "realistic", for instance, would make a good example. Because how, exactly, are you defining or judging what is "realistic" versus what is not? What's the difference between "really" jumping somewhere fast and having an experience as if they are? Etc. As they stand, in the context of this discussion, your comments are basically meaningless.

One of the points of the subreddit is to engage in some philosophy and unpack these sorts of things. This seems to have gone over your head.

As suggested in a previous comment:

Ultimately, you are led to confront your assumption that you are a person-object located within a world-place. That is, whether the standard concept that "the world" is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'" is in fact a completely accurate description of your ongoing experience.

(With apologies for multiple levels of quotation marks.)

POST: This sub feels like what /r/lawofattraction is trying to be

I do think that, as things currently stand, the ultimate perspectives of the two subreddits are quite different, even though from a surface glance they seem similar - and that's why the content differs. They're both seemingly just about trying to change your experience. But here, that's not quite what the underlying purpose is.

Firstly, it's largely about investigating whether experience can be changed, by conducting experiments in order to check our usual assumptions. It just so happens that a good way to do this is to try and get desired results - and this has the happy benefit of you getting something you want, if the result is a positive one. Nothing is to be taken on blind faith. You do have to do the exercises, or there's no point! (Talking about how "likely" something is, for example, is a waste of time; you'll only know how likely something is if you check.)

This is the "practical" part.

Secondly, this subreddit is also careful about taking descriptions and explanations for granted. Specifically, it's cautious about the nature of "descriptions". In LOA-type forums, often we see lots of posts and links about "how the world really works" and various techniques and methods. These are sometimes greeted with enthusiasm as the next "truth". But there is an underlying assumption hidden that there even is a "how things really work", and that a description can get "behind" experience and capture that. That's not necessarily the case; descriptions can be seen as just yet more experiences at the same level (the experience of: "thinking about experiences"). Parallel constructions in thought. This also brings the idea of a "method" into question, and highlights the risk of conflating "conceptual truth" (a self-consistent description who's apparent truth is really structural coherence) and "direct truth" (a fact about experience that you can apprehend directly, such as finding location of "you" in this moment of experience).

This is the "philosophy" part.

Finally, we do have to make a distinction between people "talking within the framework" of the subreddit, and having blind faith about any particular aspect of it. If you are going to take a line of investigation, you do have to put aside caveats and pursue it fully for the duration. For example, "is this-idea-for-an-outcome possible?" is both a practical and a philosophical question. It doesn't necessarily means someone "believes" something in the manner of faith without proof; they are exploring possibilities and thinking through the implications.

Meanwhile, from a relevant thread yesterday:

Treat this as an investigation into the "nature of your experience" (and of "descriptions"), consisting of experiments and subsequent contemplation of the results. You're meant to reach your own conclusions, really... Ultimately, you are led to confront your assumption that you are a person-object located within a world-place. That is, whether the standard concept that "the world" is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'" is in fact a completely accurate description of your ongoing experience.

No matter what conclusions are drawn, at least from that point onwards the investigator will be living their lives based on an understanding of their experience that has been tested and confirmed, one way or the other.

I find that this sub has a large difference between what the sidebar says its about and what people make posts about. I read the sidebar when I first came and it resonated with what I had been doing, so I subscribed and check it frequently looking to find people into similar things. I rarely find posts here though that are, Imo, anything to do with what I interpret the sub as being about. It's a shame. Tbh I think the name of the sub is misleading and attracts people that believe they're Dr Samuel Beckett. Do you know of any other subs that may be more of what I'm into?

I think the main content of this sub happens in the comments really, as part of an ongoing discussion. The actual posts are mostly a starting point for that. And it's "moderation by contribution" here mostly, so other than the sidebar-linked posts and the overall perspective, there aren't any "official" posts or views. We think that works better for an open-exploration type format.

The subreddit name: Yeah, in a way it can be misleading if taken at face value, and to an extent it's a historical artefact, but it should really be taken as a provocation, I'd say - a challenge to investigate. Posts based on assumptions about the name sometimes lead to good unpacking-type conversations. If I were setting up a new subreddit, though, I'd choose a different name (although probably not one that was much more straightforward).

Like most public subreddits, it's inevitable that it doesn't get to stray too far from a certain introductory level because of new arrivals and the difficulty in developing a strand of thought over a prolonged period (see: /r/luciddreaming and so on, similarly). So this place is always likely to be a transition between one thing and another - but that's fine, I think.

There's also the issue that, in fact, after a certain point there's not really much more to say. To quote Alan Watts slightly out of context, there's an element of: "If you get the message, hang up the phone." The "posts as seeds" and the level of ambiguity here is actually one way of allowing the perspective to shift around, and different angles to be taken on the same underlying insights and concepts.

Anyway, as regards other subreddits to check out, depending on your angle, /r/oneirosophy is one possibility and, for a more curated experience, perhaps /r/weirdway. If it's a more formal philosophical discussion of this you're after, or something more about metaphors and mental processes in terms of perception, there's nothing I've found that's particularly great.

Care to expand on the themes of "what I interpret this sub as being about" and "what I had been doing"?

I don't want to call acceptance of these principles "blind faith," but I'd suggest that contemporary empiricists have acknowledged that accepting these principles largely uncritically allows us to ask more interesting, and more sophisticated questions, by standing on their shoulders.

Indeed.

It's not "blind faith" - or should not be - though, because one isn't really proceeding as if the principles were "true' so much as they are useful. If they stopped being useful, you could just ditch them. And there is no reason you can't simultaneously use other principles, even ones which directly conflict with the favoured set, if that works for a particular circumstance (drifting more into Paul Feyerabend here than Popper, I guess).

Conceptual frameworks might be said to be largely "castles in the sky" - more self-consistent than they are actually consistent with direct experience, other than a subset of somewhat artificial elements we call "observations". These "observational touchpoints" are the threads which link description to experience, but even the formatting of linkages is itself an abstraction, a set of hidden assumptions - ones which potentially pre-filter lines of enquiry, if we are not careful. And so:

Science is perhaps better viewed as a loosely overlapping collection of frameworks and strategies, rather than a single "knowledge" or "method" - even though it is rarely represented as such in everyday, even professional, discussion.

And, very loosely speaking, the sort of "meta-strategy" that this implies is the (ideal) overall angle of the subreddit, with perhaps one addition: that the nature of observations in terms of the direct experience be included. That is: "truth"?

POST: I'm so confused

I read that it's [dimensional jumping] some type of metaphor. So if you dimension jump from 'poor' to 'wealthy' would that just change your state of mind to work harder to get wealthy? Or would your whole reality change and you will automatically be getting more money?

It's a metaphor in the sense that it's a particular concept for describing an experience. That is, you might have experiences so discontinuous that they are "as if" you have "jumped dimensions". In that case, the experience is literally true, but the description is a metaphor - since you don't actually experience "dimensions" as such. It's just that the experience is consistent with such a concept; other descriptions could equally apply to those experiences too. In other words, descriptions are never "what is really happening". They are, in a way, also experiences: the experience of "thinking about experiences".

Anyway, the ultimate point is that the direct experience is primary; descriptions do not "cause" experiences and are not "how they work"; descriptions are secondary. However, it might be observed that intending something in terms of a particular description might "pattern" your experience to be consistent with that description. (This is still not the same as the description being "true", however.) This can only be explored through personal experimentation, though, so you must begin by doing the exercises in the sidebar, and see what experiences you have.

At this moment now, you might say that you are having an experience consistent with or "as if" you are a person-object located within a world-place. And you generally think of that "world" as being a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'". But also you might say that this is not actually what is happening.

What is happening - you might consider - is that you-as-experiencer has "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently being a person in a world - that you-as-awareness has taken on the shape of a 3-dimensional, multi-sensory "moment". The description of what that moment is and its content, that is in parallel or simultaneous with that sensory moment: it doesn't get behind it.

And so, again, the description is a metaphor, but the experience is literal. The description is a metaphor because it is a conceptual construction, as a parallel experience, which tries to replicate certain elements of the experience to make it thinkable, but that doesn't mean the description points to just a "state of mind" (in the way you mean it anyway). Part of the fun of the experiment is to explore how valid your everyday descriptions are, in the face of the direct experiences you can generate!

This includes your descriptive ideas of "your own perception", "other people" and even the broader concept of "reality". You may find that all of those terms have hidden assumptions which will need to be unpacked, as you progress. For example, you might consider in what way "other people's reality" is actually experienced by you. And, in fact, to what extent you truly experience "a reality", given that this concept sort of implies a "place" that is somehow external to you. Do you experience something external to you? If you think so, then in what way exactly? And so on.

Meanwhile, perhaps try out this little exercise for fun, to give a sense of what a shift in perspective would be like on this:

Feeling Out Exercise

Q: Do you experience something external to you? If you think so, then in what way exactly?
What attitude/mindset do you suggest as an alternative to the natural materialistic "modeling of things (to better predict their behavior (and profit from that))"?
When you can't control something (i.e. - when you observe a mismatch between parts of what you're experiencing and what you'd prefer to experience), what's your first thought? How is your perspective different from the classic "there are those things out there, beyond my fingertips, I can't directly govern" ?

So, the possibility of control is a secondary thing, really.

That is, that noticing that the entire moment of experience is "made from" you, is within and as you, is the primary thing, the basic aspect of your experience. It is the only fundamental property of it: the property of being-aware or "awareness", the context to all experiential content. This noticing can be direct (look and see that it is so) or can be approached indirectly (by participating in exercises and finding that your standard description, involving a "you" and "world" separation, is inaccurate, and following where that leads).

Now, this fact suggests that your experience is better thought of as "patterned awareness", because it is the case that there are no inherent parts to you-as-awareness, no inside or outside and so on. This is true regardless of whether you can effect change or not. Even if your current main strand of experience just continued "on rails" and could not by adjusted, it would still be true that it was not external to you. It's not "beyond your fingertips" because you don't have fingertips, you merely "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently having fingertips and there being things beyond those fingertips.

However, it is worth noting that the "you" we are talking about here is not the personal you. Following from the above, the personal you is actually a formatting of experience. You are not a person, you are that which takes on the shape of an ongoing moment of experience which is formatted "as if'" you were a person. Right now, you-as-awareness have "taken on the shape of" this 3D multi-sensory moment of apparently being "over here" and the room being "over there", but quickly you can perceive that it is all "you". So, when you move your arm, you are not a person moving an arm - rather, you are patterning you-as-awareness wth the fact of "my arm is lifting" and subsequently that is unfolding as a sensory experience, with the entire sensory moment being "you".

This leads to difficulty discussing "causing change", of course. Because you don't really cause change, so much as "become" a new state or pattern which consists of the desired experience as an aspect of it or implied fact within it. And there's no "outside" to you - no separation between you and result, no "doer" and "done to" - so you (as patterned awareness) either have changed, or you have not. (Note that this "state" isn't describing just the sensory moment, it's the entire set of facts within that moment, which imply all subsequent moments - until you shift state again.)

You can't try to change state, for instance, because that would just be patterning yourself with the experience of "trying". This might be taken as a suggestion that, if you don't experience the outcome that you wanted to experience, then you did not in fact intend for the outcome, but instead intended for something else. You might have thought that you were intending for your outcome, but further investigation will show that you did not.

A mundane example: you want to improve your posture, but instead of actually intending to "have relaxed ideal posture" you instead in fact intend to "tense my neck upwards and push my shoulders back" because that is your conception of what "good posture" was. Another: you are in an arm-wrestle, but instead of intending to "have my arm be over there in the winning position" you in fact intend "to tense my muscles and thus generate a feeling of power and effort", which actually opposes the movement towards the winning position.

So, getting to the conclusion at last: one way to think of apparently lack of ability to control is that you are tending towards intending or re-implying your misconception of the world - intending your inaccurate description of experience - rather than actually intending the outcome. Which is why there are no "methods" or "mechanisms" to suggest for this, and it's ultimately actually all about exploring and unpacking one's own patterning?

But, you're actually changing a situation in your own reality right?

It's a bit of a tautology, that. If you are changing your own ongoing experience, then you are changing "your own situation in your reality" - because what is a "situation" or "reality" or "experience" anyway? They are the same thing. It is only the use of particular concepts that introduces the idea of a separation between those things. You never actually experience a separation as such.

As for whether you are "actually" switching dimensions, the thing to consider is: how would you differentiate between having an experience "as if" you switched dimensions (that is, an experience consistent with a description using the concept of "dimensions") and an experience of "actually" switching dimensions?

This is why the subreddit ends up being an exploration of both the "nature of experiencing" and also the nature of descriptions about experiencing. We take a step back from it all, and consider what we truly mean by these things.

To an extent, the name "dimensional jumping" is somewhat of a provocation. It asserts the idea of "dimensional jumping" and challenges you to have experiences consistent with that idea. If you then do have experiences consistent with that idea, does it mean you "actually" jumped dimensions? Or does it mean something else, something more fundamental? Does it perhaps imply something about your everyday notions about what "you" are, what "the world" is, and the relationship between the two (and if there is two)?

Or would you be able to plan things to happen for yourself by doing dimensional jumping?

The short answer is: there are no answers, other than just doing it (in the spirit of exploration and experimentation).

POST: Two glasses - Tell me about your experiences...

In the spirit of digging into things for increased clarity:

I actually did not intend it to make me change universes, merely re-pattern me to be better an manifestation

What's the difference between "re-patterning" and "changing universes", though?

And: how do homeopathy and "vibrational medicine" work, and how is the two glasses exercise related to that? What is "energy/intention" stuff exactly, in that context?

There's a risk, here, of bouncing phrases around without connecting them properly to the actual experience, or perhaps reusing metaphors ("universes", "energy" and so on) that are sort of "too late" when it comes to accounting for these experience. That is, assuming that concepts which are foundational in the "standard" or even "new-age" descriptions, which are not in fact foundational to our actual ongoing experience, given fresh experiments and their results here.

For example, most of those descriptions do in some sense still assume the model of being a person-object located within a world-place (where "the world" is a "stable simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'). I'd say that one of the first assumptions to fall under suspicion should be the "I am an object located in as space" one, and with that removed, you have to approach everything not in terms of content, but in terms of overall context.

Triumphant George, may I ask you something... If you do not want to reply on list and just to myself, that's cool. But do you believe that things can be made to change? I am talking about can into dog or Nissan into Mercedes type change (and experienced by sane people not schizo's), and not in a forward looking "my cat will die, my Nissan will be stolen but I will be given a dog and a Mercedes" kind of way, but in a reality breaking/bending/rewriting kind of way, weather it is retroactive or a "poof" there it is?
Because if you are of the opinion, even covertly, that "jumping" is only good for soft or future changes, things that are not classed as paranormal and are at best unexpected, then we are talking at cross purposes. Because I can't really work out if you are so connected to conventional reality you don't think these paranormal changes are possible and your philosophy is more of an attempt to turn the practice into a therapy, or if you are totally the other way and are so disconnected from material reality that you think anything is possible. Maybe if I had read more of what you have written I could answer this clearly, except if you are being covert about it, maybe not. You have what seems like rationality that I would expect to find in a skeptic, but the view of a mystic.

Not therapy - although of course anything that clarifies might also be therapeutic as a side effect - and it's not about "believing" things. Rather, a rational investigation into the "nature of experiencing", and also the nature of descriptions about experiencing (or just "descriptions" in general). But pursued from the ground up. That is, all assumptions fall under the wary eye, be they "standard perspective" ones or "mystical" ones. Direct experience, then build out (but noting the context if experience not just face value content).

The notion that we are a person-object located within a world-place, for example, might fall under investigation sooner rather than later given some results, but it is not then replaced with another description of the same type: swapping "people and places" with "consciousness and energies", and taking them literally, is perhaps to repeat the same mistake - and so on.

The subreddit itself deliberately takes no official view. First, because it's all about personal investigation. Second, because that turns out to be a somewhat nonsensical phrase (an official view wouldn't have much to say, in a way). Instead, it adopts a "meta" perspective where nothing is taken to be fundamental - except, implicitly, the basic fact of experiencing (that there is experience). I'll try and reply to your other extended comment soon, but meanwhile: in terms of exploring the context of experience rather the content (this doesn't just mean "sensory content"), and considering where a "meta" perspective might fit in, this silly little exercise is worth playing with and then pondering. Note that actually doing it is different to thinking about it, though, and in fact that is part of the point.

Q: But how do you know it's a mistake? I appreciate it might be your philosophy, but how do you know your philosophy is correct?

But how do you know it's a mistake?

It's a mistake in a different sense than you probably mean here:

I appreciate it might be your philosophy, but how do you know your philosophy is correct?

It is not "correct". No description is.

Descriptions are merely useful. As a framework within which to discuss experiences, or they point the way to an insight or experience. Or they don't. Beware the "reification of abstraction" and all that. Descriptions aren't true. That is, beware taking concepts as external things, specifically assuming that descriptions or philosophies "get behind" experience, rather then themselves being experiences (the experience of: "thinking about experiences"). Implicitly, that would be equivalent to saying that the description "causes" the experience. For example, that "gravity" causes things to fall down, rather than being, loosely speaking, the name of a description of - a codification of observations of - "things falling down".

Now, even though it might be suggested (subject to experimentation) that adopting a description in a certain way may lead to experiences "as if" the description were true - something we might call "patterning" - those descriptions themselves never actually "explain" experiences. The description still wouldn't be "what is really happening".

I think the little exercise makes the distinction clear, as a starting point anyway. One thing that is important here is that we don't just get lost in little "castles in the sky" that lack many "observational touch-points" - that is, self-consistent thought structures which are coherent but don't actually connect to direct experience, except very minimally. We need to distinguish somewhat between models and things which are vague and therefore operate more like a narrative or language. (I'd suggest that, as generally used, concepts like "energies" falls into the latter category.)

=But you said mistake, I just asked how it was one? The point I want to make and which I would be interested to hear back from you about is that I believe that a group of people doing this together might, whether for energy/intention or psychological reasons (not feeling it is all on them alone) be more powerful than doing it alone. I also think that having the memory of when it was that way should make it easier to re-establish that pattern and shift much as I believe occurs with flip flops in the Mandela Effect where these are things that people tend to be dramatically more absolutely certain how things are and yet a shift back to how it used to be still takes place. So even in your understanding of how this works, shouldn't this be a novel and likely enhanced method?=

It's a mistake in the sense of taking a conceptual framework as being literally, independently, causally true - taking a description as being "what is really happening". (Unless I've lost the thread here. I interpreted your question as asking me why adopting "consciousness and energy" as a description would be the same mistake as adopting "objects and places". The mistake is to take either as being fundamentally actual or true.)

I agree that having a memory (or any conception really) of something can make it easier to establish or re-establish that pattern as prominent in subsequent experience. It's necessary, even - or at least, if it is no directly conceived of, it must be implicit in what is conceived of.

However, the problem with "a group of people doing this together" is that there aren't any people, and that you aren't a person either - in the sense of being a person-object having an experience. There is a person-formatted experience happening, but that is to say a different thing. Since there are no independent people in the sense of beings, and they have no separate power or intention of their own, then talking of a "group of people" doing anything - doing anything - is ultimately meaningless. Except in one sense:

It would be possible to have an experience "as if" you, as a person, get together with other people and do some sort of ritual and then experience an outcome that is much more intense than that which accompanied your experience "as if" you were a single person doing this alone.

Still, though, the entire experience of this group activity would in fact still be "awareness" just "taking on the shape of" the experience of apparently being a person in a world, with other people, doing this ritual and getting results. In actuality, the entire experience would be a "result", and all the doings and activities merely a sort of "sensory theatre".

Aside - The lesson from that exercise is that there is not "an awareness" or "the awareness" or "awarenesses". There is just "awareness" - unbounded and without inherent structure, which "takes on the shape of" situations and, therefore, moments of experience. (It is "before" division and multiplicity; those are also patterns taken on by awareness; this is why it is not solipsism.) You can notice right now, directly, that this entire moment is "made from you" and that there is no outside to it, or an inside for that matter. Furthermore, you can't find you-the-person anywhere within experience, and any thought you have about the experience or being-a-person are themselves simply further experiences, within-and-as "awareness". The ultimate point being, yes you-as-awareness might taken on the shape of being-a-person-in-a-world-with-other-people-and-doing-stuff-together, but it is a sort of "patterned image", with the all the content of the image being a "result" from the perspective of the context of it. This context is the only "cause", and even then it is more like a "self-shaping" than a cause-and-effect type cause.

But isn't that just your conceptual framework?

Not really.

First there is a direct noticing of what the fundamental fact of experiencing is - and that is primary. Everything else is just an attempt to convey the implications of that.

Which is why I take pains to say that conceptual frameworks are themselves just further experiences. Basically, you cannot think about this. It is literally unthinkable, because we are talking about "that which thinking is 'made from'" - or indeed, that which structures or patterns are "made from". You can't use conceptual structures to talk about pre-structure. However, conceptual structures can still be useful.

It is inherently the case that there are not experiencers (note the plural and the implication that there are objects having experiences). However, there are indeed experiences. There are just not simultaneous, or sequential, or parallel experiencers or experiencees. Hence ending up phrasing it as "experiencing", and so on.

Now, what difference does that make to the person-formatted experience? Mainly, it means that the patterning of that experience is not fundamental, that there is no world "out there" as such, but most importantly it means that nothing in the content of your experience is the cause of it.

And since you are trying to cause change, that may be relevant.

And what does a "persona formatted experience" really mean different to being a person? Wouldn't it be mostly the same thing?

In content terms, mostly yes. But it means that the concept of a "person", a thing located within a "world", is not an accurate representation of your actual situation, and so that ideas built upon that will also be inaccurate. You may make all sorts of "discoveries" as you have the experience adventuring about in the world, including "transformative" experiences with "other people", but you'll never be uncovering anything deep - just more experiences.

Note that I am not disparaging that! That is what it's all about!

However, since this subreddit isn't just a "self help" forum for generating happy experiences, and we tend to spend time unpacking descriptions and concepts to see how the relate to the nature of all experiences, I'm obviously going to spend some time unraveling our perspectives like this.

The whole last paragraph, you say what I can find, but honestly I have not found any of that, maybe I could, but none of it speaks to me as a self evident truth.

Well, you have to examine your experience, now, directly. Rather than either just think about it, or pay attention to the content of it. It's not an easy thing to convey, and I'm not really trying to persuade you of it - I'm just suggesting that this is something you can do and notice, and that the direct fact of your experience somewhat re-contextualises the content of it. Anyway, just put that on the back burner for now perhaps.

I am at a loss as to how any of this is proven, why it is necessary, or really why it is useful

It depends on what you're after, of course. The ultimate aim of it would be to cease to be delusional about one's circumstances. (That is not meant in a negative way!)

So while I find your ideas interesting, nothing really beats results, and there is one thing I know from fringe physics research, theories be damned when the experiments disagree!

Quite so. As mentioned regularly, success of a "jump" is to be judged by having the outcome you intended subsequently arise within your experience - nothing else counts.

However, that is the start and not the end, because typically (after some experimenting) the results seem to rather break the "standard world" model. And not just in a simple way that can be adjusted for easily - it breaks the model of there being a "you" and a "world" at all. And no fringe physics can save it.

Anyway, you'll notice that the subreddit itself doesn't really offer conclusions, it just sets up a couple of exercises to act as the starting point for personal investigation. The two exercises are designed to potentially offer (eventually, when considered and pushed) two insights into our experience (albeit ultimately two aspects of the same insight).

Let me emphasise though:

This discussion isn't meant to dissuade you from trying out "group experiments" or anything else. We're just spending some fun time unpacking the assumptions implied within that idea.

when I first arrived one guy who followed you for about a year gave up, and I have seen a few others who are frustrated.

Nobody's meant to be "following" anyone! Primarily, because this ends up being about unpacking your own experience, and noticing that the idea of independent "methods" and "techniques", or even a specific "how things work" or "mechanism", doesn't quite stack up. But that is to jump ahead: this is a forum for experimentation and discussion, the only extra bit is this tendency to be doubtful about descriptions vs experience - that "meta" perspective thing.

your philosophy is a total rewrite to reality and not just a fundamental plot twist

Everything stays exactly the same, except for a shift in context.

it says more about what it isn't than what it is

That in the nature of it. It's like:

There's a piece of paper. The paper can be folded in any shape. Now, what shape would you fold the paper into, to represent the piece of paper itself? Actually, the only way to point to the paper itself is to indicate how all the different folds one can make from the paper, are not the paper (while simultaneously they are all the paper, confusingly).

Similar metaphors include: trying to make a sandcastle which communicates the fact of both "the beach" and "sand".

It it wasn't like this, then everyone could just read a book or follow a step-by-step method and become "enlightened" (or whatever you want to call it).

it removes useful tool to talk about things and useful concepts.

No, it simply recognises those tools and concepts for what they actually are.

Side question: In your view, if someone wanted to, could they rewrite reality to the point of arbitrarily redefining the structure of the atom? Not just bending but rewriting physics to however they willed?

Well, physics is easy to rewrite: it's just a collection of descriptions, based on a subset of experiences which were abstracted into "observations". The world is not made from atoms - although "the world" (a particular idea) is made from "atoms" (a particular conceptual framework). Just have a few fresh observations, then make up some new descriptions! ;-)

You need to be more specific when you use the word "reality". It's probably laden with assumptions. Do you mean "the direct fact of this moment of experience and its content", or do you mean something like "this particular conceptual framework". Reality, I'd suggest, is this moment right now. Anything beyond that, is storytelling...

Anyway, it might be beneficial to separate out into strands: this sort of conversation and separately your own experiments and results. (Perhaps better to call them "outcomes", actually, since it's a less loaded term.) Because this stuff we're talking about can be a distraction, perhaps, if gone into too early.

Just bear in mind, though, that "getting results" doesn't necessarily confirm a "this is how things really work fundamentally". That is, the nature of the experience of the results. Always follow any apparent causal chain right down the line, right up to: "referring to my direct experience, how did I cause the raising of my hand in order to wave the magickal wand in this ritual". And keep in mind this notion of the context of all experiences.

After playing with that for a bit, this and the other conversations may not be so jarring, because there will be a better sense of where they are coming from (note: that doesn't mean you'll necessarily agree with them of course!).

POST: [THEORY] Why I think we REALLY aren't getting results

What, exactly, is the "will of nature" though?

Isn't it, ultimately, a fictional construct being used as a black box explainer for describing "why I didn't get my outcome according to my assumptions"? Isn't it essentially a replacement for the "will of God" concept. There, too, we'd end up by asking the question: what is "God"? Here, we might ask: what is "Nature" and how does it relate to "me"?

The risk, here, I guess, is that we end up proposing entities which do not exist fundamentally. We may have experiences consistent with the concepts, in a broad sense, but forget that the description itself is not existent or causal apart from that.

Similarly, what is "human intent"?

If the human experience is itself really just a particular structuring of "awareness" (or "experiencing"), then it makes no sense to talk of "human intent" - because "human" is a certain formatting of experience and a certain description of that experience. "Human" is not a being - and that which experiences and intends is itself not human. It loops back to questioning the more fundamental assumption of being a person-object located within a world-place, which the "will of nature" concept implies again.

Now, taking a step back, it is certainly true that our ongoing experience is structured. It's not just a random whirlwind of disconnected multi-sensory image fragments. What is the nature of that structure though, and to what extent is it fundamental? If one supposes that there is a thing called "Nature" and that it has a will independent of you-as-awareness, then one must consider what the nature of that "Nature" is. What it is "made from" and how it interacts. More importantly, what is the evidence of it in direct experience?

We risk swapping one (alleged) superstition with another, except labelling one description as "really what is happening" compared with the other (even though neither is more fundamental). The very idea that there is a "what is happening" behind the scenes at all, as it were, is potentially open to question. In which context I would add:

But the claim is made that we are outrageously free and in principle can have anything that we desire, that only our beliefs or the action of our subjective minds holds us back, that all possibilities are out there, and all you have to do is call them to you.

This seems more like a summary of the "law of attraction" concept and not what is being explored here, surely. That's the sort of thing that is being investigated, not claimed.

All the important questions are functional ones, having a bearing on shaping results.

The problem with sticking with functional questions, is that the very nature of "doing" is also under investigation.

So, in essence I'd still say that you are simply describing the fact that one's ongoing experience is structured, is "patterned". I would not disagree with that. That is certainly true in direct experience.

However, introducing the concept of the "Will of Nature" doesn't add anything further to that observation, I think. If the properties of the "Will of Nature" are simply identical to the observation that "experience is patterned", and that simply "wanting" something doesn't instantly modify those patterns, we aren't gaining anything in terms of insight. Except, because of the implications of the term "Will", the notion that there is an independent "power" or "purpose" which shapes our experience. This is something more than saying it is patterned.

What is the functional, the practical use of that description?

Note: I definitely agree that descriptions in and of themselves are not necessarily valuable. But it is not clear that the concept of the "Will of Nature" goes beyond that either.

I no longer think those are actually much useful as questions.

They are useful because they unpack the relationship between descriptions and the nature of (as distinct from the content of) our ongoing direct experience. More importantly, they force us to examine the relationship between ourselves and our experiences - if indeed there can be said to be a relationship, even.

You are still left with a particular structured description, implying the actual existence of something called the "Will of Nature". Now, it may not be your intention, but implied within you description is the concept of "you" being in some way embedded within some sort of a structure, a structure which is independent of you and imposes itself upon you.

Is that what is actually experienced?

In my opinion, the will of nature exists fundamentally... what I am calling the actions of nature.

In what sense, though does nature "act"? By saying the "Will of Nature" is fundamental, are you simply trying to convey the idea that some of our experiential patterning cannot be modified?

Therefore patterns act upon us which are not malleable simply by a change of notion in regular states of consciousness.

But - is this not just a restatement of the idea that you can't change the more abstract or factual patterning simply by "wanting" or "wishing" (whatever those are, exactly)?

We'd then ask: What is a "state of consciousness" in this regard and why would it make a difference? What is a "deep technique" or "remote state": deep relative to what, remote relative to what? How do these relate to the "Will of Nature"? Is it a battle of wills, a power wrestle between entities? Without asking those questions, then our concepts aren't functional, because they don't suggest anything to "do".

If you contest this, show me someone able to conduct a conversation without a heartbeat.

How does this connect to the idea of the "Will of Nature", though? That still suggests it is a black box explainer for "anything you cannot immediately do".

I think there is a false binary that we are free to change things or we are not. I think at a very deep level we may be free to do so, but I don’t think that level is trivially accessible.

So, I didn't see a false binary there, because that wasn't being asserted (that we are free to change things or we are not).

What you are saying - a useful insight though it might be - still seems to be little more than "we observe that experience is patterned and we also observe that we can't simply update the broader patterning by just wanting-wishing". I think the introduction of the "Will of Nature" and the other stuff simply clouds this. Why go beyond simply saying that there is a "patterning" to experience, and that some patterns seem more easily modifiable than others?

The questions would then be:

What is the nature of "patterns" and "patterning" (what does that concept point to)?
What is the relationship between "patterns" and "the world" and "you", and:
Why are some patterns seemingly more easily modified than others?

Ultimately, then, probably my main issue with your concept is that it doesn't actually explain why someone "really" doesn't get a (particular) result or finds they apparently can't change their experience instantly; it simply restates it in different language whilst potentially introducing something that implies additional entities and relationships that can't be tested (or more: aren't required or useful).

...

So, I'm struggling a little here. After all that, I still don't think you've added anything to the basic statement: "experience is apparently patterned and some patterns seem remarkably persistent". Except, perhaps, with the addition of the idea of a "cosmic agency" or "will of nature" that you must in some way be "aligned" with in order to make significant changes. But then, that itself would just seem to be a synonym for the patterning of oneself as "that which takes on the shape of states of experiences". (When I say "oneself", I of course don't mean human self, since "human" here would just mean a certain patterning of experience: "human" isn't a being, it is formatting of being, in such a description.)

Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes here, though. And so:

To try to get us on the same footing - because it may well be we are sort of talking about the same overall concepts, and I actually feel we almost are in one particular way, if I could get you to articulate it more concisely - in your description, or indeed in your experience:

What is "the world"? What are "you"? What is the relationship between the two? And:
What is the relationship between the "will of nature" or "cosmic agency" and that? What is the relationship between your direct experience right now and that?

Without this, to me, it feels as though there's a nice phrase, something somewhat attractively romantic even - the "will of nature" - without anything actually behind it, that we can connect usefully to direct experience.

Q: So, I'm struggling a little here. After all that, I still don't think you've added anything to the basic statement: "experience is apparently patterned and some patterns seem remarkably persistent". Except: Perhaps with the addition of an idea of a "cosmic agency" or "will of nature" that you must in some way be "aligned" with. Perhaps we are talking at cross purposes here, though.
Correct. The very reason that they are "remarkably persistent" is that they are extending from an agentic source that is not empirical "you."
To try to get us on the same footing - because it may well be we are sort of talking about the same overall concepts, and I actually feel we almost are in one particular way, if I could get you to articulate it more concisely - in your description, or indeed in your experience: What is "the world"? What are "you"? What is the relationship between the two? And: What is the relationship between the "will of nature" or "cosmic agency" and that? What is the relationship between your direct experience right now and that?
I really don't know why you would feel that asking and/or discussing questions like that are going to help you achieve results, given that I've already said that any actions we undertake from the waking state are likely to be minimally effective from the get-go. Discussing, defining, philosophizing etc are all "waking state centric" activities, and therefore, imo, the very things likely to have the least possible effect of all activities one could undertake. I sincerely believe you are likely to have more success dancing wild around a campfire at midnight dressed as a stag...and I mean this, especially if you are in an ecstatic trance. Indeed, this is not new of course. Practitioners of magick (who have been doing for hundreds of years what LOA practitioners etc appear to believe they invented recently) have said for ever and a day that altered states of consciousness are the key to the efficacy of magical action. So in OPERATIONAL or FUNCTIONAL terms (sorry to keep carping about it) your questions are literally not the right ones, or the important ones. The kind of questions that are the important ones shift register, and take on shapes such as these. Q: what can I do in a profoundly altered state to make sure that I can at least retain enough memory or control to remember my intent...without destroying the state itself and returning it towards the waking state? Q: How can I most effectively attain such a state in the first place? Q: How can I work with specificity in such a state if I appear to no longer have a "self" there"? And so on. THESE are the kind of questions that matter!

Okay, great - with that stripped down a bit, I'm now a little clearer on where you're coming from, and can probably articulate my perspective on it a little better, in way that will make more sense to you. (More later)

I'm not sure it's a case of "not making sense" to me. Many potential views about reality (or the lack of it) can "make sense" in a self-consistent way, but at the end of the day, I reckon some of them are just more likely than others. That 'empirical you' is the only source of agency is, for instance, extremely unlikely imo.

I agree about the self-consistency point, as regards descriptions. However, I really meant it more in the sense that some of your prior responses, particularly the more general responses, suggested to me that I hadn't gotten across what I had intended to. For when I pick up on this, could you clarify what you mean when you use the term "empirical you"?

Q: So I have a sense of myself as a limited being grounded in a world. That being has boundaries to its nature and its actions which I can't dispel just by wishing them dispelled. I can't point to the Empire State Building and have it take off like a rocket, for example. I can't grow another arm if I lose one in an accident. This inertia in the system is not explained if you are the only agency, and are entirely free. If I declare myself to be entirely free, and yet I still find myself NOT to be entirely free, then something acts upon me. Therefore there is something other than "me" and which might as well be called the World, or the will of nature.

So, let's pick this up again. At the outset, though, I'd suggest that your original post perhaps slightly misunderstands the nature of the subreddit and what is meant by "dimensional jumping" in this context. But that doesn't necessarily matter for digging into what we are discussing right now - we can come round to that later, since it'll follow (ahem) naturally.

In short, it is conceived of as an investigation rather than a method or literal description - which is why the demo "exercises" are labelled as such, rather than as "techniques". This is also why discussion like this are prevalent, rather than just "what is the best way" - because ultimately the very idea of there being "a way" or a "how things work" doesn't entirely hold up to scrutiny. And in fact, the very notion of a "description", and its relationship to one's experiences, falls under scrutiny too of course! (The link I included in one of the earlier responses was intended to clarify this: this isn't meant to be a "law of attraction" type of a deal.)

Anyway, on we go:

So I have a sense of myself as a limited being grounded in a world.

Can you describe that sense of yourself as a limited being more clearly? What leads you to draw the conclusion that you are a being (which I'm interpreting from your language as describing a sort aware observer or person-object located within a world that is like a place-environment)?

That being has boundaries to its nature and its actions which I can't dispel just by wishing them dispelled. I can't point to the Empire State Building and have it take off like a rocket, for example.

What do we mean by "wishing" in this context? I'm not sure that there's necessarily an expectation that "wishing" can bring about changes. Do we mean something like "wanting" or "willing"? And again we'll have to be clearer about what we mean by this. When one "wishes", what are we actually doing? (And there's the problem, too, that people tend to mean different things by words like "willing" and "intending" and so on. We'd benefit from clarifying this by articulating the actual experience of these.)

This might seem to return us to the idea of "functional" - this 'wishing" doesn't always work so what does? - but we'd have to be careful because it's not clear that any action is a cause of an experience. The experience of "wishing" - and indeed anything else that seems like an act or "altered state" experience, that you sense "me doing this" - might be just another result, another experience. While an act may or may not be followed by a desired outcome, it's not clear that the outcome and the act are causally related, other than within whatever description we have adopted. And: what causes the act, since the act is itself another outcome?

If I declare myself to be entirely free, and yet I still find myself NOT to be entirely free, then something acts upon me.

Not necessarily. That presumes that "declaring" (or what you mean by "declaring") has any causal attributes, rather than itself simply being a result, an experiential outcome, of... something.

Therefore there is something other than "me" and which might as well be called the World, or the will of nature.

My problem with this, is that when I go looking for a "me" in my actual experience, I don't really find one. For sure, there are various sensations and suchlike, and the occasional thought, and the sensations and thoughts that appear most regularly I might refer to as "me".

However, the only thing that actually persists is the fact of "experiencing" or "awareness", and not any of those sensations or thoughts. This "me" of experience seems to have no particular location, it's more like a sort of unbounded void-presence which "takes on the shape of" my experience - including the experience of a perspective, with some sensations apparently "over here" and the room apparently "over there", but all of it me-as-awareness. And so, in fact, "me" and "my" is essentially meaningless now, in this context.

And I don't find a "world" either, in the sense that it is normally conceived of, for the exact same reason. There is a "world" in the sense of a certain description or conceptual framework consisting of varies ideas about this main strand of experience, but it is itself an experience - the experience of "thinking about experience". And it is at the same level; it does not get "behind" my main strand of experience and explain it in some deeper sense.

In fact, it turns out there is no place for any "me" or "world" to be, as described in the usual standard description, because there is no "outside" to this experiencing.

Hence, to talk of an "empirical me" other than as a conceptualisation, and a "will of nature" acting upon it, whilst perhaps useful for conceiving of, say, intentional change, is not good for pointing at the nature of that change of of experience. Unless carefully understood as such (a useful pattern which might be overlaid but is not fundamental), it involves introducing fictional entities that not in fact experienced - although one might have experiences "as if" they are true. (This final point, in fact, is the real problem: adopting a certain description and intending in terms of it, tends to bring about experiences consistent with it.)

So, in case that got a little meandering, I'll bring out the key points as being:

Direct experience does not support the idea of a "me" located within a "world" or a "will of nature" imposing upon it.
The idea that "wishing" or "declaring" should bring about change - and that it not doing so is indicative of some external agent and/or a division in experience - is problematic unless we are clear about what "wishing" actually is, in the context of direct experience.
Introducing the concept of "will of nature" tends to obscure the nature of experience and change rather than clarify it - unless it is simply a romantic rephrasing of the observation "some patterns seem more persistent" and is recognised as such.

Aside - You brought up "altered states of consciousness" in a previous comment too, but I've set that aside for now because I think it fall into much the same format as the above, and unravelling will tend to give insight as to the other. While we might talk of "functional" approaches, if it turns out that there is no "me" or "world" in the sense of independent objects, then the idea of an "operation" that one can perform upon the world is already "too late", at least if we are viewing it in terms of so-called tools or techniques. The meaning of "functional" will not be the same after such a shift in context. Similarly, the idea that the phrase "you create the world" is meant in a personal deliberate way also changes - removing the requirement that there be some independent external being or entity deliberately creating things because "hey, I didn't do it". The situation is more like an eternal landscape that is "made from" being and which occasionally shape-shifts into different state-topologies (all metaphorically speaking), rather than a spatiotemporal environment where objects are explicitly invented by beings.

I've come to the conclusion that "reality" is closer to how those who follow Pantheism see it. Everything comes from, goes back to, is a part of/expression of one universal creative "is-ness". And as different as we all are, we're all just bits and pieces of it...having our own experiences, viewing reality from various vantage points. So, you aren't "God"...rather, "God" (if you even want to use such terms) is you. There is an actual fundamental difference between the two ways of thinking.

So, I'd take the general idea of Pantheism but push it a little further than is normally the case. There, one tends to conceive of it suggesting a world which is still 3-dimensional and extended, containing objects, and those objects are "parts of", what you might call "God", and they are having experiences. (I know this is a matter of debate often, but I still find it to be the default impression: a half-step been panpsychism and non-duality.)

I'd take this a step further and say that it is experiences that are "made from" God (or whatever). Not objects and spaces. Again, too, this isn't quite the same way of thinking.

And then:

"God" is you and you are "God", but only in a very particular meaning of "God". We are not talking about an entity God here, not a being. Rather, simply "being". The experience of apparently being a person is "made from" God, but there is no "you" that is an object, a being, that is God, nor is God a sort of being which has taken on the shape of an object. Rather, "God" is what experiences are "made from".

And so, we end up saying best-effort things like (excuse pasting from a previous comment for efficiency) describing "God" as a sort of "non-material material":

[We might say that the] only fundamental, permanent truth is the fact of being-aware - or "awareness" - with everything else temporary patterning on an "as if" basis. Rather than a person with a subconscious who is sending out requests into the world, you are more like a "non-material material whose only inherent property is being-aware or 'awareness', and which 'takes on the shape of' states of experience, states imply and define all subsequent sensory moments". Right now, for example, you have "taken on the shape of" apparently (on an "as if" basis) being-a-person-in-a-world. Meanwhile, this means that any so-called "magick" is, despite any theatrics that go along with it, a self-shaping of oneself into a new experiential state. All apparent entities or techniques or other causes that are experienced are just aspects of that state: moments as "results".

In this case, we don't have multiple "beings" having different experiences, and nor do we have a single being having multiple experiences (the idea of a "single being" is nonsensical here anyway). The only thing that is ever "happening" is this experience right now, and we can't really talk of simultaneous experiences or sequential experiences from different perspectives, because an experience does not occur in time (time is a patterned aspect of an experience).

Interestingly, we end up here trying to construct descriptions which avoid saying things that are incorrect, rather than trying to capture the truth of the matter as such (because "non-spatial" and "non-temporal" things can't actually be conceptualised).

POST: What does this sub think of DMT?

A1: Having a lot of experience with dmt and minimal experience with 'jumping' , I thoroughly believe it could be used as a powerful tool for this purpose. How? That I can't tell you. I've been doing a lot of work/play with mirrors and psychedelics lately and I can't help but think thead experiences are related.

A2: I think it relies on the theory that consciousness is the fundamental stuff of nature. This concept has been pointed to by ancient philosophies, such as taoism and buddhism, as well as certain interpretations of modern quantum mechanics. The idea that all is made up of waves, existing at certain frequencies, isn't new. We know certain patterns of vibrations compose atoms. Further, it seems 4% of the universe is made of our periodic elements - the rest is labeled as "dark energy" and "dark matter." Which we know nothing about. If all is vibrations, frequencies, and interactions, then it would make sense that the brain is a receiver of only a narrow range of frequencies. In fact, we know this to be true in some regards: we see only a narrow range of frequencies of light, giving us our visual spectrum. From this, could it not be possible that our brains can temporarily tune into different frequencies of consciousness? This is the idea, anyway.

I think it relies on the theory that consciousness is the fundamental stuff of nature.

I think we perhaps have to delve a little deeper than that, to make the necessary connections. We need to make a distinction between a "view from nowhere" description of the world (a fictional 3rd-person picture), versus one which links to direct experience. So:

It is not so much that "consciousness is the fundamental of nature", in the sense of it being a material from which three-dimensional worlds are made. Rather, it is more that there is consciousness (or "awareness") and that this consciousness "takes on the shape of" states of experience. A state of experience being a full definition of all contribution facts and patterns to ongoing experience, all implied moments, now. A "dimensional jump" is really a change of state, not a move to another place, and you are not an object, although you might take on experiences "as if" you were.

So, "brains" don't do anything, because there is no such object really; and things are not made up from vibrations, frequencies and interactions. We might have experiences which are consistent with descriptions constructed from those concepts, but the experiences themselves are simply "consciousness". (And in fact, descriptions are themselves just experiences: the experience of "thinking about experience".)

From a previous comment in response to a post about astral projection, magick and the subconscious:

Meanwhile, this means that any so-called "magick" is, despite any theatrics that go along with it, a self-shaping of oneself into a new experiential state. All apparent entities or techniques or other causes that are experienced are just aspects of that state: moments as "results".

A DMT experience, then, is simply another experience. The reason it seems noteworthy isn't to do with the experience itself as such, more that it clashes with the assumptions and properties of our usual description of "the world". That is, that we are a person-object located within a world-place, where "the world" is "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time". This, however, is never true; it's just that we are rarely drawn to notice the inadequacy of that formulation, or are dismissive of experiences that don't fit into it (because we treat the description as primary, and our experiences as secondary, even though the description is itself a sort of experience at the same level, as noted above).

None of this is intended to be dismissive of the DMT experience. It's simply to highlight that its value (other than enjoyment) is to draw attention to our flawed assumptions about everyday experience, rather than because it is, say, some sort of "higher consciousness" special experience. (It is not: consciousness doesn't have "levels".) The same can also be said of "void" experiences, "enlightenment" experiences, and the like.

Q: Off-topic but, what do you think about non-duality? let's say Advaita Zen and the like

So I'd say that most things, in some way, point to the same insight, even though the descriptions then tend to get mangled later. That is, everything is patterns of you-as-awareness, and although you might have an experience of division ("as if" there were division), experience itself is not divided. And "non-duality" is perhaps a better pointer than most, being somewhat more modern with less cultural baggage than some.

However, it sometimes seems that some strands tend to get bogged down in language contortions, particularly the "neo" stuff, in an attempt to avoid saying anything wrong. Personally, I think that embracing things like metaphor as a part of and shaping of experience, doing so knowingly, is a better approach than avoiding it. That is, as part of our investigation into the "nature of experiencing", to also tackle explicitly and head on the nature of descriptions. That frees us up, I think; it makes it more experimental and playful.

Ultimately, it's the case that there is no description or method or technique or even a "how it works", so it is in some ways pointless to feel around for the best approach, or compare approaches. I kind of like to think that the angle this subreddit takes admits this from the outset - and benefits from that by taking an explicit "meta" view on experiences and descriptions, so that no one experience or description is taken to be "it" (but rather, experiences within and as it).

But of course that, although perhaps not initially, easily becomes the very problem it is trying to avoid, if it is accepted unquestioningly.

POST: Astral projections meditation/ findings on my studies into the practice

Some brief thoughts:

the shortcuts have potential dire consequences as the forces you would be dealing with are often beyond your control.

Scare-mongering, surely? (Albeit perhaps self-scare-mongering.) What are these "forces"? If you aren't in precise control of every detail (as some sort of conscious deliberate architect of the minutia), why would that necessarily mean that the gaps filled in would be with "dire" content?

Also, your subconscious mind has to agree

What exactly is a "subconscious mind"? Where is it and what is it made from? Does it operate independently, make decisions and do things separately? I suggest it is a conceptual fiction only.

as well as rituals such as spirit cooking and concepts black vs white magick I have decided that these practices are not safe and without properly trained people in your presence can really put you in a bad spot.

More scare-mongering, surely?

This subreddit is not about "magick". Or at least, it's only about it in the sense that all such topics seek to capture something of the "nature of experiencing", aspects which our everyday assumptions and descriptions do not recognise, and draw attention to them. However, I feel that much of what you are saying is simply swapping one limited description (that the world of a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time") with another one (the world is a "place seething with hidden forces and dangers independent of you, and you need to try and persuade your subconscious to help you out"). I'd extend this view to any romantic notions about "higher selves" and "spiritual growing" too, really.

Here, then, we're not only investigating "the nature of experiencing" (with "results" a target and excuse to do so), we're also pushing back on the nature of descriptions about experiencing. Doing so leads to a "meta" perspective that somewhat recontextualises many of the things you are talking about. In essence, it is not just the specific content of your experience which is driven by "patterning" of yourself (yourself as you-as-awareness, that which "takes on the shape of experiences", rather than you-as-person, a particular "structuring" of experience), but the broader formatting also. All your entities and levels of mind and so on, then, are as much "results" as any event-based outcome; they are all just yet more experiences, at the same level as all other experiences, on an "as if" ("as if something were true") basis only.

The only fundamental, permanent truth is the fact of being-aware - or "awareness" - with everything else temporary patterning on an "as if" basis. Rather than a person with a subconscious who is sending out requests into the world, you are more like a "non-material material whose only inherent property is being-aware or 'awareness', and which 'takes on the shape of' states of experience, states imply and define all subsequent sensory moments". Right now, for example, you have "taken on the shape of" apparently (on an "as if" basis) being-a-person-in-a-world. Meanwhile, this means that any so-called "magick" is, despite any theatrics that go along with it, a self-shaping of oneself into a new experiential state. All apparent entities or techniques or other causes that are experienced are just aspects of that state: moments as "results".

As for the intention of the subreddit itself, this previous comment highlighting the difference between this and the LOA sub perhaps has some relevance.

Truth is that it seems much more plausible and even accurate that maybe actually we ALL (as everything else in that current moment of existence) are the state itself ?

Yes. I think you are assuming that when I say "awareness" that I'm meaning an awareness or the awareness, like it is an object or thing, or a personal awareness. That's not quite what I'm getting at. Nor am I saying that the world is "your" world, like a personal world.

Instead, it's more like "awareness" is a non-material material that is in a particular state, and that state fully defines the world. And that "world-pattern" also fully defines all the people in it. However, the people aren't beings, they are patterns. The only "being" is awareness, and that is the only thing that ever "happens" or has "experiences".

So, right now, the experience you are having isn't an experience of you-as-person. Rather, it is you-as-awareness which is experiencing being the entire eternal state or world-pattern, with one particular aspect of that unfolded, the you-as-this-person perspective. The "person" is a pattern, and when that pattern is unfolded, that corresponds to a "person experience".

But, as you say, "we are all the state" - in the sense that the state defines all of the people-patterns. However, what you truly are is always actually awareness, shaped into whatever experience you having at the moment.

So there are no "people" at all in the sense that it is usually meant: independent beings having independent experiences. However, there are of course "people" in the sense of their being experiential content that is apparently from the perspective of being-a-person. But a "person" is a patterned experience you might have, as awareness, and not something that you "are".

All the poetic phrasing tends to be required because we are usually starting from the idea that we are a person, and then trying to describe the actual situation relative to that. I think it's probably more efficient, and leads to a more coherent overall description, to step back from that from the outset, and assert the alternate perspective. Then we can avoid "higher selves" and "forces" and "entities", because we can view them in the correct context from the beginning, and see everything from the viewpoint of "awareness".

That is, there is being, but there are not beings or independent objects. When we think of the world, we shouldn't think of it as a spatially-extended place scattered with objects like a sort of sensory moment except out there somewhere - but rather as a sort of eternal non-spatial "pattern" dissolved into the background of awareness, from which we might unfold experiences, including person-perspective-formatted moments of experience, with only one experience happening at a "time".

TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 8)

POST: I want a serious answer to what happens to other people after a "jump"

POST: Does the number not changing mean that the jump failed?

POST: Not exactly sure about D jumping..

POST: PSA: There is no other version of you that you're "swapping places" with - you're only changing your perception of your current reality to deal with it more effectively. Please stop worrying about some other entity being forced to live in your unwanted situation if you jump.

POST: Did the cup method last week

POST: 13:30 is the best time to jump!

POST: Convince me.

POST: Why around 12-3am?

POST: "I am not getting results!" Or why meditation is of vital importance.

POST: The Mandela Effect is <maybe> unintentional dimensional jumping into a "created" reality

POST: So, basically everything is fake?

POST: PSA:Please stop posting "I did X experiment" if you haven't verified your outcome. "physical feelings" after you did any method are all placebo.

POST: For my media studies class I have to make a 5 minute film. Could anyone please tell me their experience with this?

POST: I went to a complete different reality for sometime

POST: Has anyone had success with the "Vacuum Method"

POST: My perspective on dimensional jumping (Introduction to creating reality with your thoughts)

POST: In what way are other people real?

POST: Successfully jumped to contact Future Self. Have evidence of success.

POST: Suns of Eternity after Two Glasses, possible jump?

POST: Isn't this too good to be true?

POST: Did the Two Cups Intention Method Last Night... and Woke Up Today Filled With Negative Emotions and Hostility

POST: Superhero Dimension

POST: This sub feels like what /r/lawofattraction is trying to be

POST: I'm so confused

POST: Two glasses - Tell me about your experiences...

POST: [THEORY] Why I think we REALLY aren't getting results

POST: What does this sub think of DMT?

POST: Astral projections meditation/ findings on my studies into the practice

Warning