TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 17)

POST: The mind is so complicated

Thoughts...

Any pattern you discover is just... another pattern you've discovered. The more you look, the more you create-discover. Whenever you adopt a particular outlook or conceptual framework, your world will appear to fall in line with it to a greater or lesser extent: "mind-formatting by metaphor". The form of the world as experienced = the form of your mind. You experience yourself. Trying to get to 'the bottom of it' is just creating more ripples in the pool of water, obscuring what is underneath. To truly understand something is to know it directly. If you want to know the texture of something, you don't think about it - you touch it, quietly. You have to let such knowledge come to you, arise within you.

POST: Why do people want to lucid dream? This seems just like an ego trip

A1: Because it's cool and stuff.

A2: Not everything is about ego vs no ego.

A3: What is ego?

Lucid dreaming means first and foremost that you are aware that you are dreaming while dreaming - the direct control aspect is optional. To argue against such awareness would be to argue against, say, meditation. What you are saying is really an argument for ignorance! ;-)

The dream is "all you" anyway, whether you direct it or not. If you choose to consciously change the dream, where do you think your ideas for changes come from? What is the source of those ideas? How does that differ from the source of the spontaneous dream content?

POST: Do you think we have free will?

Yes. And you are conscious(ness). However, neither can be described or accounted for or proved conceptually, because the logic/description itself occurs within experience, as a result of the thing you are trying to reason towards.

It's a "trying to see your own eyes" type of situation.

POST: Everything you could ever possibly imagine already exists in an implicate form. When you imagine it, you're basically finding a vision of a possible future - whether you want to pursue and manifest that vision is entirely your choice.

[POST]

You can then proceed to carve out a path through space-time and you may or may not reach that point in the sea of possibilities that is the universe.
I love this place.
To clarify:
Of course there's the obvious physically impossible visions, but you might create those visions through art or entertainment. And perhaps if we create VR so realistic we can't even tell anymore - that would mean infinite possibilities on top of the physical world. Go create your dreams in whatever way you see fit! Even if you don't reach exactly what you envisioned, that's okay, you're gonna have one hell of a ride anyway.
Side-thought: this is why sci-fi is such an interesting phenomenon, people imagine a concept which seems pretty far out, which in turn inspires people/scientists, which actually steers culture and progress towards those dreams, or inspires them. Early examples: 'I imagine what it would be like to be a bird' -> boom. some dudes make a goddamn airplane. And less than 70 years later we're on the moon. After thousands of years of people being stuck on the earth. That's nuts.
It's also interesting to note the similarities between biological evolution and our intelligence, if you consider memetic selection/mutation etc. So our mind is like this self-organizing expression of the universe at a higher level of consciousness, with a higher class of speed. I totally agree with McKenna's ideas on how the biosphere of the planet is like a 'slow-moving consciousness' - it has a sort of rudimentary intelligence of balancing systems out. And then you have people working towards digital intelligence, something which could lead towards the 'next level' of self-organization. We might live to see some seriously incredible stuff happen.
Okay and let's go even further - once you know everything that is possible to know (...this will take a while) and you have an intelligence whose 'level' approaches infinity - you can analyze every possible permutation of the universe and try to find 'the most basic ingredient of reality'. And then you can make your own universe! Or perhaps even somehow .... reverse engineer ours? But I guess there's insufficient data for a meaningful discussion about that for now.
Seems like I'm in a bit of a rambling mood.

[END OF POST]

How is the implicit made explicit?

Q1: That's asking how the universe came to be and how/why it unfolds. I don't know if we'll ever find a meaningful answer to that.
Think of the following analogy: a chessboard has 8x8 squares and, depending on the interaction of the pieces, reaches a different configuration every time. However, within the concept of the game of chess & its rules lies the seed for every possible permutation that could come forth out of it. This is the implicit order, it is implied through the ingredients of the system. The actual unfolding of a game, the route it carves out through its 'search-space', is the explicit order.
If the chess analogy doesn't really resonate, you can imagine the same analogy for the creation of images or pictures - read this [https://web.archive.org/web/20121024095654/http://barbariangroup.com/posts/1694-running_out_of_images]
Now, you have humans playing chessgames and making pictures, but for reality the driving force could simply be the universe, discovering and learning itself. So my only possible answer to your question is: the implicit is made explicit because the universe is the result of energy/raw consciousness trying to understand itself.

I like the chess analogy and "search space". What I wondered about the implicit in my pondering moments was: We say that it exists, but does it exist in terms of actually being there, enfolded, or is it rather that there are a number of "possible states" within the rules, that can therefore be made explicit. Really, the latter, as a configuration space. Not that we could tell the difference. But then, what does it mean to be "explicit" anyway - just experienced in the senses? An implicit option, attended to.

The universe has been busy, it seems!

Q1: I guess the most intuitive way of putting this is that the explicit can be equated to our subjective experience, our feeling of 'now', of what the implicit order has unfolded through time.

Yes. "Unfolded" into subjective experience. With the facts-of-the-world dissolved, timelessly and spacelessly, into the background, always present and available to be focused upon ("made explicit").

Which loops round to our beginning: what is the selection mechanism by which infinity is filtered down to a particular moment vs another? I guess, via the accumulated superposition of all patterns ("the rules" and archetypes) which definite possibilities, then by our intention.

Q1: My mind is not entirely clear on that process yet. There's the whole 'deterministic/mechanistic' thing, but on the other hand there's consciousness acting as a driving force. They're both true, in a sense, it just seems to be 'intention' being modulated at a different level of complexity. That's why I said I think biological evolution and our thinking process is essentially the same thing.

I think that paths can be deterministic overall, what matters is that you have choice at the level your are at, of the deterministic paths "below" you. Which pretty much ties in with what you just said.

I think of it as "filtering patterns", with some patterns (time) more established than others (belief, expectation, knowledge) and some much more flexible (intention). When we make a decision to have an experience, we are adjusting the "intention" pattern to allow the desired experience to unfold - whether that be "I want to experience my arm raising", or something more complex, maybe not directly associated with your action.

Q1: Interesting way of formulating it! I was just pondering how string theory would suggest that the explicit universe is essentially a heavily modulated signal. Everything is just vibrations. And it happens at different scales, over different levels of complexity. So it's funny how you mention filtering, since that's what signal processing is all about :) So the universe is a self-filtering signal and an infinitely recursive fractal .... this is some straight up M.C. Escher stuff

Right, good comparison... and the "self" and the signal is you.

POST: What is non-duality/headlessness?

Headlessness is Douglas Harding's approach to realising the actual nature of your experience - see here. I recommend Rupert Spira for exploring non-duality.

From what I understood, we don't experience non-duality because we see life in 1st person. If we try to imagine experiencing life in the 3rd person, we see that there is not really an observer.

No, it's the other way around really.

Our direct 1st person experience is non-dual - it consists only of consciousness. That is the insight. The problems we encounter in understanding experience are precisely due to our tendency to imagine it in the 3rd person. Basically, we tend to think-about our experience rather than directly-explore it.

You might like the Imagination Room metaphor as a way of helping you play with this.

The short version:

• Your actual experience is of being a "big open aware space" in which sensations, thoughts, and perceptions appear and disappear. When we think about our experience, we tend to imagine on top of this, that we are a brain and a body and a person. But actually we don't experience those things.
• You can realise this by directing your attention at "where you are looking out from". Simply point your finger at your face, and follow the direction it is pointing in. What is there? A big open space! There is no "you" there. Your body is empty! Then you notice that this "space" extends infinitely in all directions - you cannot feel a boundary in it anywhere.

TL;DR: It's all about realising that you experience yourself as unbounded consciousness with no "outside", and all the world appears "within" that, as you.

POST: There Is Growing Evidence that Our Universe Is a Giant Hologram - Vice

Saying "it is a hologram" is so unhelpful.

If it would be phrased: the universe seems to have properties which are similar to that of a hologram - specifically, that the sum of information seems to be present and accessible locally, as well as being experienced in spatially-extedned extended form. Then people might be more interested.

Although it's not very snappy, I'll admit.

POST: How do you define ego?

*Q1: I think Aldous Huxley's interpretation of it is the best.
=="Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that which is likely to be practically useful. According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large had to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system What comes out the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."

• from The Doors of Perception.==*

It's a good quote, but it reminds me of the problem I had with it at the time I read it:

If we are "Mind At Large", then in what sense are we funnelled through nervous systems and brains? Maybe we could say we "take on the experience of being" brains, take on that shape, but that's it. In other words, we are not people using brains as a filtering mechanism against Mind - we are Mind imagining ourselves to be people, with the brain a representation of our state.

Magick is then an approach by which we re-imagine our person-world. All states and experiences are always available for this process. It's a shifting of attention, therefore, rather than a transformation?

POST: Have any of you traveled to parallel universe? How? Got any tips for me?

Why are you interested?

You can't undo a reformatting. Maybe clean up first [Overwriting Yourself ].

Q1: [http://www.reddit.com/r/dimensionaljumping]
bunch of hokey if you ask me

Aw, you're no fun... ever tried it?

Q1: It seems obvious to me that the thoughts I think and the actions I execute are all the traveling to parallel universes that I need. I can see how dimensional jumping would work: you are looking into a mirror and with utmost focus you will something. Of course this changes your life! You are willing something sincerely! But to think you need to look into a mirror and that you are actually "dimension jumping" or that you don't need an actual change in your life style is silly. But hey what do I know.

To an extent you're right.

The mirror technique is a bit of a traditional hangover from scrying and whatever - a way to loosen your focus, detach, and reformat your mind (hence your experience). And "dimensions" are metaphorical in this context. Just a way to conceptualise a sudden shift. In fact, dimensions are conceptual anyway: if you examine your actual experience, you don't find any dimensions. However, it provides a way of formulating intention.

The interesting bit is that, if you play with it, it's a bit more than goal-setting and pattern-matching. The very flexible "active metaphors" being used do allow for pretty sudden shifts - extreme synchronicity, definitely, glitch-like experiences, certainly.

Like all these things, you need to experiment a little personally to really understand (or dismiss) it. There is an effect - the mechanism behind the effect, if there is a mechanism, is something to ponder though.

POST: How I believe time works

[POST]

The "Zipper" represents (you in) the present.

It binds all the possibilities to make one true reality.

It goes from bottom to top.

Adding perspective to it.

Looks like a book, doesnt it?

The book gets bigger and bigger every seconds.

It's huge.

Here's the book.

[END OF POST]

Q: [Deleted]

I agree, nicely put.

Thinking-about something requires that you turn it into conceptual objects and arrange them relative to one another in space. We end up with "moments" and "timelines" and "branches" and "dimensions" and so on. But those are mental diagrams of an idea called "time". If you check your actual experience, you cannot find that "time" at all, except when you think about it. In other words, it's only ever a concept. Time only exists upon reflection.

Time is a conceptual pattern (an idea about change) upon which we hang other conceptual patterns (ideas about events). We create pretend objects then put them in a pretend relationship. It's still fun to play with though, and I doodle with that sort of thing all the time (ahem [The Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments]).

POST: Besides drugs and meditation, what are good ways to learn more about yourself?

A1: Try to get out of your head. The purpose of "self-exploration" isn't just to sit and navel-gaze. It does you no good to have "found yourself" if you just sit and wallow in the metaphysics of your selfhood all day. Go do something. Pursue a passion. Live.
This is a lesson I've learned first-hand after half a year of derealization following tripping and serious "self-exploration".
My suggestion? Once a week, go out, leave your phone at home, and spend the whole day exploring. Go on adventures. That plot of woods down the road? That neighborhood you don't know too well? That nature preserve a few towns away? Go check it out. Bring some friends if you want. Get lost in your own backyard.
Forget about spirituality and metaphysics and philosophy. They're empty by themselves and all too often become escapism from the fact that we're afraid to actually go do something. Put intellectual/spiritual/mental issues on the backburner for a bit and embrace that animal side of you that wants to get up and do something for it's own sake. It's bursting with vitality if you let it come out.
Forgetting about your "spiritual self" and esoteric mumbo jumbo and just being human is spirituality in itself, and at this point is more likely to put you in touch with who you really are than dropping acid or meditating or thinking about philosophy all day.
I'm not trying to put down all that stuff, as it's great. But you can go to extremes in both direction, and extremes are never healthy. I say that from experience.
Good luck.
Peace :)

Fine words.

POST: I have 43,000 youtube subscribers. I just made a controversial video on shrooms. Curious your thoughts on the video?

Video content seems mostly fair enough. The number of subscribers you have and the "controversy" shouldn't really matter, if you are sincere about what you are saying. So don't worry about that. (Unless for you it's about always getting the nice feedback, for a bit of a boost, which is fine too but a whole other thing, with its own potential problems.)

On the "controversy" -

Probably your framing of it in terms of "religious" and "atheist" stirred things up a bit, because those terms mean different things to different people, just like "God" does. Like it or not, and no matter how you caveat it, the word "God" generally means an entity god to most people, which is why something like "pure awareness" often gets used to describe that "behind the scenes unity" instead. I doubt the the "athiests" subscribed to your videos are against the idea of a "larger field" of some sort, and have possibly already found their own ways of reaching that conclusion, mushroom-free. So maybe they found your recommendation condescending. Hence dislikes.

Q1: Great comment, I really appreciate your thoughts TGeorge! :)
I actually pride myself a bit on the fact that sometimes I make videos that gets lots of dislikes. I do my best to be my true self on youtube, rather than trying to make videos that get views / likes.
So when I make a video that gets lots of dislikes, I think it's a very healthy thing.
Completely agreed with your thoughts there and I think your perfectly articulated what the real controversy is about.
In the comments I added this:
"**I wish I used the term "spiritual" rather than "religious". My mouth didn't say the right word I guess. I can tell you from my experience, the spiritual world is real. There is something real there. Synchronicity is a real phenomenon for starters. Also, there is nothing wrong with atheism. I do not judge atheists at all. In this video I am just saying that if used responsibly and properly.. magic mushrooms are fun, and that shrooms may give you a spiritual insight or experience. :-)"
Yeah I completely agree about how all of those terms, especially the term "God", have lots of associations to them and can mean very different things to different people.
And I clearly see how someone could think I sound condescending, which yep I believe is the source of the dislikes
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Yeah, to be honest, I think it can take a while to get the language right when sharing our insights - especially when they're still evolving - so the occasional stumble is inevitable, and that's okay. Personally, I try and sidestep the whole religion/spiritual atheist/god set of concepts, because those words are mostly ruined now when it comes to describing "the nature of experiencing". The downside to that is, it means you're back to explaining yourself from the ground up. On the other hand, plenty of people are starting from the other end, and at some point it hopefully joins up in the middle. :-)

POST: Bill Murray gives a surprising and meaningful answer you might not expect.

What does it mean to be "here"? To focus on your visual experience? To focus on SOUND? To focus on the air on your nose? Is being "here" meaning NOT imagining things?

I'd say it's to be aware of yourself as the background context to whatever the content of experience is. By "background" I literally mean that "open aware space" or "perceptual space" that you are, in which your sensory experiences ("the world") and shadow-sensory experiences ("your thoughts") arise.

It's okay to have thoughts and imaginings, so long as you are not narrowed on them - thoughts are just as much "now" as anything else. Conversely, being narrowed on an aspect of sensory experience such that you find yourself 'waking up' when that attention releases - for instance, being spatially concentrated in your attention while reading this message - is also being lost.

In fact, I think a problem a lot of us suffer from, is that we've conflated intending something with narrowing our attention on it - perhaps because it gives us a sense of "doing" - and over time that narrowing becomes more entrenched and the subsequent release much slower. But we don't need to do this at all.

For example, to read the text on this screen, you do not have to deliberately focus or concentrate or manipulate your attention onto it, you can actually stay open and simply intend to read it, and then let the reading "happen" - allowing attention to shift by itself, in the most appropriate way.

A similar lesson applies to physical movements: you do not need to manipulate and control your muscles "manually" in order to stand up from seated position, for example; simply intending and allowing the body to move, is sufficient. (Although if you've built up a long term habit of starting a movement by "re-asserting your current position", it may take a little while to feel out what it's like to "allow" this to happen.)

EDIT: Fixed some mobile autocorrect nonsense plus formatting.

POST: This sub doesn't feel too grounded in reality to me.

I understand in a general sense that we are all one because we are experiencing the same moment (all existence) but fail to see how this colourful language helps beyond that.

Those ideas arise from direct experiences. The same ideas come up again and again in history from various independent traditions. Sure, they are interpretations - but the core experience isn't a general sense of a lack of division or a convergence, it is a direct knowing by experience of this.

In the same way as, say, touching a table surface you know that it is a hard surface. You don't know this generally or through building a conceptual model; it is simply true.

The poetic words and meanderings are then an attempt to put into language something that can't really be put into language. Without the experience behind you, those words don't have much meaning. Just as the word "red" or - better - the world "love" wouldn't mean anything if you had never had the corresponding experiences.

Yes, you assign language meaning through experience.. language is symbolic.

Now --

-- if I have an experience that you've not had, and it's not an experience that has a corresponding visual component so you can't "see me do it" (i.e. I'm not snowboarding), does that make it less "real"?

If there is one thing we can all agree on is that there is an objective reality, Solipsism isn't what we are discussing here (and I doubt someone who genuinely believes Solipsism would budge with their opinion on the truth of it).

[QUOTE]

Solipsism:
Solipsism (i/ˈsɒlɨpsɪzəm/; from Latin solus, meaning "alone", and ipse, meaning "self") is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist.

[END OF QUOTE]

No, not Solipsism but we want to be clear what we are counting as "real" and not and how the concept of "objective" is arrived at. (And it is a concept, albeit a good one which accurately describes much of our subjective experience.)

We have to admit that we infer what is objective via communication, and that there is a fuzzy area potentially. We discount certain experiences from the "shared" because we lack a way of conveying it.

What we count as "objective" becomes the lowest common denominator of subjective experience.

Yep! There is a lot of interesting aspects of life lost through language. This scene from waking life describes the problem of language in a very good way! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvnQu30kQ2c]

I am a big fan of that film, good reference!

Musing...

Actually, maybe that's a better angle. Rather than "oneness experience", the experience of lucid dreaming and even dreaming in colour are examples of areas which straddle the boundary between objective and subjective. They are subjective experiences but have objective acknowledgement. For a long time it was thought that people dreamed only in black and white - until they didn't. Similarly, our notions of consciousness precluded being awake in a dream, until they didn't.

Putting aside the content of lucid dreams, the fact of lucid dreams is becoming accepted - does this count as part of "objective reality"? Even though it requires practice and training to have the experience?

Of course, the content and meaning of dreams is a different issue. It doesn't help us say what a dream is. I suppose similarly, even if everyone had a "oneness" experience one night, and brain patterns correspondingly changed for the period, it would tell us that there was an experience, but not what it was.

EDIT: The problem with "oneness" is that it really doesn't have any correspondence to a physical act (e.g. in a lucid dreaming, people twitching their eyes by arrangement). It is simply knowledge. And not knowledge of events or relationships either; it makes no predictions. It suffers from the shared language problem, and the shared content problem.

I actually have had DMT many times and high dose mushrooms. The experiences have been reality and life changing but I understand it is brain chemistry being effected and don't feel the need to describe anything as mystical.

Do you understand that, or do you think-assume that? Certainly brain activation changes, but that doesn't explain the actual experience at all. For instance, if I reach an insight about my life during an experience, I cannot find that insight via fMRI, etc. I cannot find the experience in chemistry. So I think both sides - both angles of exploration and description - are valid, but they are "about" different things.

Q: I have never heard of someone 'think-assume'ing. I am sure you just mean 'assume' on its own.
If you think you can't track/analyse an experience down to certain levels scientifically you are very unaware of the breakthroughs in science in the last 15 years.
And even if we couldn't track an experience and measure its value it has on you with certain brain chemicals released such as dopamine that still nothing to do with whether the hallucinations from drug-related or sober experiences have any truth to the nature of our reality.

It was meant to be a "/".
Let's jump to it:

• Does anyone ever have an "objective experience"?
• How do we decide what is "objective" and what is "subjective"?
• How do we decide what is a hallucination and what is not? It's not easy.

EDIT: Just realised I've started two strands on this which kinda overlap. Let's let them both run for one more?

Q: Broadly we need to clarify what objective and subjective mean.
A proposition is generally considered objectively true (to have objective truth) when its truth conditions are met and are "bias-free"; that is, existing without biases caused by, feelings, ideas, etc. of a sentient subject.
So basically to answer all your questions; reality is objective by definition because it is what is real, we as sentient beings experience the world subjectively. There is no such thing as an objective reality and subjective reality working separately, the subjective reality feeds from the objective reality but runs it through the animalistic filter. Both are happening at once.

Yes, let's define!

Perhaps what you've done there is to define "the real" as:

• That which can be experienced subjectively, and
• Can be described to another and understood, and
• Seems to happen "over there" rather than "over here" (where my thoughts and feelings seem to be), and
• Has a stability or persistence to it over a reasonable timescale.

We suppose that it is fed by something we call "objective reality" (which is a concept we have), that this underlies our individual experiences, and that is why we can discuss experiences. However, all we are really establishing is that there is a commonality of descriptions which are a subset of our larger subjective experiences.

So, experiences we can shared descriptions of we call "real" and the rest not. The middle ground is that there are experience some people have had and others have not. Does this mean that their experiences are not "real"? What if having a particular experience requires training to have?

How many people need to have the experience before it is real - or are we only including over-there experiences?

What I'm getting at is, people who describe having a "oneness" experience can be describing an objective reality. We might detect the brain lighting up when someone meditates and they report that experience. How does this differ from the brain lighting up which someone is presented with visual stimulus, and later reports "seeing"

Subjective descriptive language has nothing to do with reality and truth.

Sorry to interject but - really?

It think that this is where you are going astray. Science is itself a subjective endeavour, which chooses to limit accepted findings to those that can be described in language and communicated easily between people. And it is very successful because of this. However, this means it deals with a subset of subjective experience; it does not mean it deals with an "objective" world.

Poetic language is an attempt to point to the aspects of subjective experience that cannot be easily described, and cannot be encapsulated in scientific conceptual frameworks. Typically, poetic language tries to capture the environment within which the subset of science operates. If there is a proposed fundamental truth to reality, if it cannot be subjectively directly perceived then it is simply an idea about reality, not reality itself.

Science never claims to find truth, only to connect "observed regularities" into a coherent description.

Q: I am not sure if we are talking about the same thing here. I am saying that language is merely a descriptive tool of reality.
Just because we can describe something with language doesn't mean it is or has to be true... or have anything to do with reality.
I can describe an amazing purple dragon in the sky above me but that has NOTHING to do with the reality that there is no dragon.

Right, perhaps we are slightly out of alignment. It's not about the dragons though. This isn't about thoughts, this is about direct experience. See if I can be clearer.

Better:

All language is surely an attempt to describe experience. All language describes a subject experience really. Science, implicitly, focussed on observed regular experiences that are seen, visual experiences. It is the most shareable aspect of experience.

Sound and texture too can be translated reasonably well into visual representations, which are then described and shared by language.

One aspect of experience that cannot be easily captured is that of feeling/sensing/direct knowing/direct intuition (we don't even have a proper word for it). Art is an attempt to render that visually. Poetic language is an attempt to invoke imagery to point towards it.

This aspect of experience is as much a part of reality as seeing, hearing, touch - all of which are actually subjective. However our inability to communicate about this particular aspect means it cannot be cleanly represented like the others.

The highlights:

• This isn't about thinking-about things.
• All experience is subjective.
• Some parts of subjective experience (seeing, hearing, touch) are more easy to create shareable representations of than others.
• Just because some aspects of subjective experience are not easy to share in this way does not mean they are not "part of reality". We call this subset "objective reality" but really we mean "easy to share via language".
• It is possible that key information about reality may come in the form of this felt-sense. Without having had the experience, other people will think the description of this as meaningless and poetic. Just as a man who has never seen colours might think descriptions of the world in terms of "vibrant red and blue" as poetic nonsense which isn't part of "reality".

POST: In your opinion, what entails being "awake", and conversely, being "asleep"?

Awakening is realising that you're not the protagonist character in the movie, you're the awareness in the cinema watching the entire drama unfold.

Or you are the screen on which the movie image is playing out. To say you're watching means you are separate. In fact you are both the experiencer and the material from which the experience is made.

This leads me to say:

• Being "asleep" means you've narrowed your attention onto the patterns of experience and are arbitrarily identifying with some of them (e.g. thoughts and body sensations, the concept or feeling thought of "me") and not others (e.g sights and sounds at a distance from body sensations).
• Being "awake" means your attention has opened out to include the context, the background space in which those patterns arise - identifying with that, with "consciousness", and realising that all patterns arise within that. In other words, "it's all you, the real you".

This is awake/asleep in the sense of direct perception, in the sense of understanding "what you really are". There's obviously political, character, and social-based awakenings that one can have too.

Depression, I'd suggest, can be a contraction of attention onto a particular pattern perhaps without knowing it - perhaps as a result of controlling and not releasing - leading to a "stuck thought" or "incomplete movement". For this, I like your analogy of getting tired of holding onto the controller. In truth, you shouldn't be holding onto the controller at all. You should be "directing from afar" by indirect request and with patience, rather than grabbing onto and forcibly pushing parts of your reality around.

POST: What is the most concise explanation of all your knowledge?

[POST]

I've had a number of profound realizations about the nature of the universe and consciousness that make it seem obvious that everything is wonderfully connected and unfolding beautifully. The problem I have though is that this requires being in a particularly high place (whether through substances or meditation) and requires being able to hold a large number of complex ideas in mind simultaneously to see how things are connected and get somewhat of a birds eye view of things. When I'm not in that state, I tend to disbelieve the realizations I had since I no longer have that perspective.

Whenever I come down from those places now I try to pack it all into a way that my normal consciousness can comprehend and believe, but I find that it's never quite enough. What is the most useful idea or ideas that you use to remind yourself of that place when you're not actually there? For example, one of the most concise things I've come across was this post on /r/DMT. I was amazed by how much it related to my own experiences in so few words . What has really summed it up for you?

THE DMT realization

• "Woah, I'm one with the universe."
• "Hold on, subjective universe/reality is a construction of my mind?"
• "Wait a second, the universe is God!"
• "I'm talking to God."
• "We are all a part of God."
• "We are God."
• "I AM GOD"

[END OF POST]

Good linked post.

"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image."
-– Alan Watts

But after the experience of being the net, you withdraw to being a dew drop again - looking out, unaware and unable to directly experience that you are still reflecting everything.

POST: Does my body and consciousness makes the complete me or their individual existence is sufficient to concur who I am?

I am changing every instant of time...

This means that what you are is neither the mind or the body? My favourite little exercise for this attached below. Whatever you really, really are, it can't be something that is changing nor can it be something you are aware of as an object. The eye can see images, but it cannot see an image of itself - only an image about itself, which is not the same thing.

The 'Switch Off Your Senses' Exercise

This little thought experiment is be done '1st person', as if you are having the experience, rather than thinking-about it:

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

You're still there, you realise; you are a wide-open "aware space" in which those other experiences appeared. This background awareness is the only thing that does not change over time.

POST: What is truth?

Two sorts of truth:

• Conceptual Truth: Systems of thought that are coherent, self-consistent. These "feel true" simply because their parts are true relative to the other parts. Conceptual truth may or may not correspond to reality - i.e. direct perception.
• Direct Truth: The truth of direct experience. I touch a table and discover that its surface is hard. That is directly true; it is my experience right now.

The complication: Adopting a conceptual framework actually deforms your direct experience according to its patterns. We can experience our conceptual truths (beliefs) as being directly true (as filtered). Fortunately, this "overlay" can be identified, dissolved or seen through.

Is there algorithm to the processes we use to identify Direct Truth as a species?

Well, as a personal endeavour one can shift away from thinking-about to direct-sensing. A movement from thinking to knowing. However, this cannot be communicated. The universe we experience is within ourselves. Language involves dividing that experience into "parts" and "narrative". Immediately, in the effort to communicate, we have destroyed the essence of the experience. All that can be done is to point to where that experience is to be found. It cannot be spoken, or conceptualised.

We can transfer conceptual frameworks between one another, and thereby infect others with the same "overlay" or "template" which we are using, but we cannot give someone the truly direct truth by this method. Obviously, if we throw away enough and only focus on the simplest, regular aspects of experience using the simplest concepts, we can get somewhere. For instance, if we say the world is made of up lines and corners and throw away almost everything else, then we can develop shared knowledge and even deterministic predictions of what lines and corners will do in the future.

That's universal language - eventually - but it doesn't seem like something worth shooting for other than for making, y'know, tables and chairs and stuff. (Nothing wrong with tables and chairs, or electron microscopes, but their creation isn't showing us "how things really, really work".)

truth: being in accord with fact or reality

The problem is, the facts change with the being.

Q: [Deleted]

It does - except "the truth": The background awareness that you are, because that is not an object or a structure and so it cannot change. It doesn't "exist" and so it is permanent.

This is the direct truth that is always accessible, always here, because it is that from which everything else arises and fades.

POST: When do you call bullshit?

Things are useful, or not. Or fun, or not. I'll happily enjoy any way of looking at things for a while, because often it can't make your world seem more interesting and exciting - dream kicks! - and just adopting a view does have effects. Nothing is completely bullshit, but nothing is really true either.

Fundamentally, the only thing you can be sure of it that you are experiencing what you are experiencing. Everything else is up for grabs. But if anyone talks of "the nature of reality" in terms of some sort of new "building block" or relationship, then that needs to be given a wide berth.

The hipster-hippie crowd usually know the best coffee shops though. Sometimes that's worth enduring a crystal conversation or two, surely. ;-)

Q1: I usually test people with the chemtrails concept. If they laugh, we're good.

Oh yeah, good.

POST: Do not play life like a chess game

[POST]

Or you may find yourself missing out on the point of life.

[END OF POST]

A1: Checkmate!

Q1: :)

Q2: Well, the beauty of chess is there are so many different ways to play it! You can play aggressively or defensively. You can play your own strategy or try to foil your opponent's strategy. You can calculate 10 moves ahead, or react to each move as a new situation or opportunity. I think you're missing the point of chess.

Q3: Yes. But which strategy of chess is simply to enjoy the playing of the game?

Q4: I think what should be asked is. Are the players aware they are playing chess?

Or... is chess playing the players?

Q5: What exactly is the point of life? I mean, it's really what you make it be. Hell, I might even go as far as to say that is just a big game.

Q6: I prefer to think of it as a dream, either way, I am going to appreciate the experience.

Who is this "I"...?

And so on. I guess we can waste our time working it out, instead of living it. Chess can be played as an adventure, or a problem to be solved. It can be felt and lived, or stale and stale-mate.

POST: Is it possible to dream awake?

You can do direct-entry dreaming. I first got tipped off on this from David Fontana's Meditator's Handbook. Forget about "brain chemistry", just practice creating multi-modal imagery with your imagination. Then work on stepping into the imagery.

After that, creating alternate stable worlds is quite doable - see here [http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-control/46571-infinite-universes-lucid-dreaming.html].

POST: David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness? (TED Talk)

Cross posting this comment from the /r/RationalPsychonaut thread in the "other discussions" tab, credit to /u/dalebewan:

There are essentially three 'ideas' for how to answer "What is consciousness?" presented in this video.

1. That consciousness is purely an emergent property of the action of our brains. This is actually something I've always been most comfortable with; that is to say, if we could perfectly replicate a brain, the consciousness within that brain would be identical to the original (until it diverged through different experiences).
2. That consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like "space", "time", and the base forces such as electromagnetism, the weak and strong nucleic forces, and gravity.
3. That consciousness is universal, in that it is in itself a description of information integration. The more something integrates information, the more conscious it is. A human brain is an excellent information integrator and thus 'very' conscious. A mouse less so, but still significant. A worm even less. A photon of light many many orders of magnitude less (but still non-zero). But nothing is without consciousness.

When watching the video and listening to these three ideas, what struck me is that it's quite reasonable to say they're all the exact same thing, just different ways of looking at it (primarily the first and the third; but the second still fits to a degree). Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain because consciousness is a universal property that describes information integration, and the brain is an excellent information integrator.

Agreed. Somewhat, though, they are distinct because of a confusion between consciousness and self-consciousness.

Consciousness is the "material" from which the universe is made. But without any patterns within it, it cannot experience itself. Only when the blanket of consciousness has folds within it, can it be conscious of itself. Like a sheet of eyes, it cannot see itself unless it adopts a shape, contours, that one part may "see" another part.

So:

• Consciousness is the fundamental "non-material material".
• Self-consciousness is when consciousness forms itself into a pattern, so one part of the pattern can experience itself relative to another part.
• The more structure, the more "folds" there are in the patterns, the more sophisticated and subtle this experience of content and self.

Does that join the three notions together?

POST: A paradigm shift: The Primacy of Consciousness

[POST]

Amit Goswami is a quantum physicist who is challenging the scientific community with his views on the primacy of consciousness as opposed to the unflinching scientific objectivity that is the dominant paradigm. The full documentary is incredible.

[END OF POST]

Idealism!

Q: hmm, a lot of flakes pretend to be quantum physicists to get cred in spiritual or metaphysics circles, but this guy seems to be the real deal.
I found this interview [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnQ63AOrs6s] where he's talking about awakening.
Interesting guy.

Interesting guy.

...with an interesting hat.

POST: Isn't our inability to recognize dreams from within, reason to question our beliefs of what is real?

[POST]

We all have evidence that we are inept at distinguishing dream from reality. We have all forgotten ourselves within a dream.

[END OF POST]

Yes! :-) [Outside: The Dreaming Game]

Q1: Are you suggesting that realities are interchangeable, like video games in a console? If so, why play this game? I can imagine a more enjoyable experience.

I'm suggesting, mainly, that your experience is that of being an open aware space, with content arising within it - including the dream character you call "you" - and that dreams and waking life therefore seem to be on the same level - rather than dreams being in the Russian Doll of waking life.

So, when this waking life experience fades out, another one might fade in.

Why this "game"? It seems part of the design of this game is that we don't get to remember what we were playing before, and why we chose it. I suspect that's because it makes it more exciting - to think that it's "really real". Of course, lots of us twig at some point during play that all is not as it seems. We never are in danger after all.

Q2: yes, it is. but the hard and more intersting question is, how should this realization change me and my actions?

Q3: If I suddenly found out that none of this was real I would just go sit somewhere until I "died." Refusal and all of that. I imagine if all of this wasn't real there would be some sort of being who is at a higher level. I'd basically just be saying "no" to them while hoping I persist through whatever long enough to meet them and ask "what the fuck were you thinking?"
EDIT: I should mention when I say "found out that none of this was real" I mean that I was told that it is not real. How else could you know for sure?

It is "real" - it just isn't "real" in the way you previously thought. For instance, thoughts are "real" thoughts, apparent objects are "real" apparent objects. It's just that they are only made of sensations; there's no "solid, external world" behind it. Your theory was wrong, that's all.

It is in this sense that this is a dream - and that the world around you (a dream environment) and your apparent self (a dream figure) are "dream objects", made only of "mind". You are actually the background to this experience, not the content.

Do you really only continue to live because you think this is real in some solid way? Can you not enjoy experiences for what they are, not for what you think they could be? Ever had a lucid dream? You realise you a dreaming while in a dream and now, free of fear and with the power to influence you dream more directly, you can explore it more fully...

Your comment:

I imagine if all of this wasn't real there would be some sort of being who is at a higher level. I'd basically just be saying "no" to them while hoping I persist through whatever long enough to meet them and ask "what the fuck were you thinking?"

Reminds me of this:

Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you want to, you know, be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?' And we're all saying, 'No thank you. Not just yet.'
And so time is actually just this constant saying 'No' to God's invitation. I mean that's what time is. I mean, and it's no more 50 A.D. than it's two thousand and one. And there's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in."
And then she [the woman I was talking to] tells me that actually this is the narrative of everyone's life. That, you know, behind the phenomenal difference, there is but one story, and that's the story of moving from the "no" to the "yes." All of life is like, "No thank you. No thank you. No thank you." then ultimately it's, "Yes, I give in. Yes, I accept. Yes, I embrace." I mean, that's the journey. I mean, everyone gets to the "yes" in the end, right?
-- Ch. 18. Trapped in a Dream, Waking Life Movie Transcript

EDIT: Just refreshed and saw the later replies.

If the experience of life is an illusion then no one is truly experiencing anything. It may feel real, but it is not real in this case.

Isn't the problem here what you mean by "real"? It's all "real". Not truly experiencing anything? Everyone is experiencing themselves, but not as a "person". Is the universe only valid if it was created by something external to us? Is there only a "point" to life in that case?

Seems a bit arrogant to go around telling people they are wrong about subjects such as this. Perhaps "I do not agree" would be better. Or do you have proof that you are right that can be verified?

Hmm. I wasn't saying you were wrong 'in real life'. The reply was in the context of the OP saying "this is a dream" and if that was the case, then our theory that there was a solid world behind it would be wrong, and you saying that "in that case, I'd just sit about". I wasn't meaning that you were wrong.

Again, please remember this was all originally about a hypothetical situation. You're talking to me like I actually believe these things and it's confusing.

Sorry, that's just for convenience - by being in the comments, I'm assuming we're "taking the OP proposal as the starting point" and so don't need to keep caveating. Assume "in this scenario" throughout.

Curiosity is the only thing that keeps me going. I feel a need to know how it all works.

That's the tricky bit. If it is a dream-like reality, then any explanation we encounter, any evidence that it was a "solid world made of matter" would also itself just be a dream experience. There is no way out of that. There turns out to be no "how it works", just "how it appears to work when we look at it today".

So instead of curiosity being the driver (it has been for me in the past), it would have to be creativity that became the driver?

Q3: How would it be wrong? If it's a dream then someone has to wake up eventually. If that's a dream too then someone else must too. My argument wasn't for a "solid world." It was talking about the highest level of existence that is being perceived whether whoever is perceiving knows it to be or not.
As far as my feelings go, I don't understand how I can make it any clearer other than saying that I will never be satisfied with existence. When awareness is dissolved I will be satisfied. That is what I consider truly being awake. That is the way out.
No, I do not agree that creativity is the driver. More like the opposite, whatever that is. I do think creativity has its place though. I say curiosity because if I were to suddenly discover proof that this wasn't the "top level capable of perception" then I would not want to go on creating anything adding to our collective awareness.

I think the idea of a "top level" implies a structured hierarchy, and I don't really believe in that - it seems to follow from the notion that we wake up from dreams, that dreams are somehow like a smaller Russian Doll contained within the Russian Doll of waking life.

The experience itself isn't like that though, surely?

I don't wake up "into reality". What seems to happen is that the dream world dissolves, and then "this" world appears - in the same space. One doesn't seem to be inside the other, or higher than the other. I can be 'lucid' inside a dream without switching levels in some sense; can I not be 'lucid' inside this 'waking dream'?

When you die, it might not be "you" that switches perspective to a higher level. If might just be that "you" remain, and the world dissolves. And something else forms in its place.

So, no, as it stands now you cannot be lucid within this "waking dream" if were in fact a dream. You can only delude yourself into believing you are.

Hmm. Thought-provoking.

In a lucid dream, we might realise that we are "dreaming" because we recall "another world" that we were in before sleeping - lucid by memory. However, the nature of our experience can be different to what we assumed, and that is a different path to lucidity.

In fact, I'd suggest that when I get lucid in a dream, it's not that I remember a larger world, rather that I recall the concept of dreaming and my experience fits that concept after that realisation. And this is something we can do in waking life - realise that our experience doesn't correspond to the "solid, mechanistic" theory that we hold of it. We don't need to wake up from the dream, we can just wake up to the dream.

For you to become truly lucid within this waking life it would first need to be proved a dream with science.

Which could never happen, because science is within the dream (following this idea along). However, I can notice that things aren't how they are meant to be. This can only be done by 1st person, personal experience though.

In a lucid dream, we awaken to the fact that we aren't just the dream character we seem to be, we are the entire context of the dream. To become lucid in waking life would to be realise something of the same thing: you are not a person, you are the background environment?

advancements in mathematics and physics

The problem with simulations is that you can always just say that the simulation is such that it looks like this. It depends on whether we mean "simulation" as in 3d mechanism (content matters), or "simulation" as in, we are each presented with a VR-like experience (content is arbitrary) - like Donald Hoffman's idea of a multimodal user interface. The first is just a different version of materialism - it just means the container is different - the latter is a version of the dream/video-game idea. Any content-based proof of a dream while within a dream is made of "dream" - even an apparent memory of there being an encompassing 'waking world' - until we actually wake up from it. So proof would have to be non content-based to wake up to it.

So I'm thinking the 3d lattice idea, for instance, isn't really a restriction that tests for the condition.

I agree that any one of us can only wake up to the dream. And, yes, this would mean knowing, with proof, that we are collectively the sum of all of all our existence. The same concept would apply even if you were to call it a simulation.

Yes, it doesn't matter what we call it, it all just means "we are not living in and as an atoms-and-structure mechanistic world after all". So, meditation and altered state and non-dual experiences, can they point to this? Because I can conceive of no 3rd person 'objective' evidence that can prove it, because that's just more "experiences" and can't really point to the nature of the experiences?

Any content-based proof of a dream while within the dream still proves that it is a dream. So I fail to see an issue with it being made of that dream.

Actually, "proof" is the wrong word, strictly speaking. My error. If a dream is truly a super-flexible space that contain any experience, then I was getting at that it would be impossible to prove with 3rd-person observation. All that can be proved is that other descriptions are incorrect in their correspondence to experience...

When you mention the memory you're talking about the dream as if it itself is the sentient being.

Memory doesn't necessarily mean this. A tray of jello has a "memory", in that if you pour warm water over it, it will "remember" the path of the water and subsequent pouring will tend to flow along previous paths. However, it the jello was "consciousness" it could be said to experience the pathways, the flow.

Note: not necessarily self consciousness, as in an ability to reflect on itself. Only the ability to experience what was within it. Of course, it might label one of those jello-impressions with the word "me" - and then get confused, thinking it was that particular jello-impression, rather than the whole jello tray.

It is a projection of a sentient being. The memory exists within you. You are the source of the dream. The dream isn't the source of you. There is no need to wake up from it to realize this.

Right, but. It depends on the "you". The character/person you seem to be in the dream - the thoughts, body sensations - that "you" is generated by the dream. The dream is the source of the "you" that you seem to be in the dream. The larger "you" is the whole of the dream, it turns out once you've woken up. You could realise this during the dream, if you could find some evidence that the "small you" was not in fact the real you, and that you were in fact the whole environment and the source of that environment. Leading us to...

I do not think meditation, or altered states, can bring anyone any closer to the nature of experiences than walking down the street. To understand the nature of experience we would need to first fully understand and be able to replicate consciousness. To say that anyone is truly experiencing anything right now is delusion. It is putting faith in unverifiable experience.

I disagree.

I'd say the way to understand the nature of experience is to fully investigate your personal experience directly. When in a night-time dream, the way (one way) to realise you are dreaming and become lucid is to note a difference between the dream and wake-time experience. However, the dream content can still be completely identical to waking life experience. How would you tell the difference if you couldn't remember a "waking level"? In most dream, in fact, we don't.

Examining dream character's brains and looking through electron microscopes in a dream wouldn't tell you that you were dreaming. Scientists have dreams like that all the time, and don't - in the dream - realise they are dreaming.

Perhaps waking life is one such dream?

If there is such a hypothetical approach - to identify we are dreaming when we don't remember a larger "waking life", or let's say "alternative world-experience to get rid of the layers metaphor - we could then apply that to this "waking level" to test, from a personal perspective, whether this daily life was dream-like in the same way. Again, the content of the dream is unreliable, it can only tell us that our in-dream theories are wrong as they apply to dream content. Examination of the content cannot tell us whether we are in a dream or not.

When I say "you" I don't mean who you see yourself as in everyday waking life. I mean whatever makes you fundamentally you, separate from everyone else.

Yeah, that's what the quotes are for, to emphasise that it's a constructed idea, a particular meaning rather than the general meaning, drawing attention to it.

A tray of jello does not have memories.

Jello has about as much memory as neurons, in the example. Y'know, it's a metaphor.

When I say "you" I don't mean who you see yourself as in everyday waking life. I mean whatever makes you fundamentally you, separate from everyone else. The dream does not create this. The dream can never create this.

And, what is it that makes you fundamentally you? If you don't know what that is, you can't comment on whether a dream can create it or not. If this is a dream, then it can obviously create everything you are experiencing.

Which scientist with electron microscopes have you been talking to? Working to figure out physics in a dream would be immensely harder due to the constantly changing environment.

I think we can agree that sleeping dreams are more flexible than waking life. It's not true that they can't be stable though: non-lucid dreams are usually more stable than lucid ones, and the variable nature of lucid dreams is down to the flaky expectations of the dreams; it's easy to have stable lucid dreams if you mentally commit to it.

And I'm pretty committed to waking life.

Are you saying if we discovered a philosophical zombie you would not begin to suspect that this is a dream?

You wouldn't know it was a philosophic zombie; you'd just think the person was a bit "strange". We meet people like that all the time. Perhaps they are p-zombies.

Examination of the content could tell us it's a dream if we collectively do in fact have a waking life we cannot remember now. It would just be a matter of locating the right information. So looking at the content for this purpose is not entirely useless.

What would the right information be?

See, I'm still not seeing how you plan to establish that this is or isn't a dream. We've put aside the ability to remember another waking life that's "higher up". So it's down to the content. Stability doesn't cut it, because some dreams are more stable than others; some are rock-solid. Any content we encounter in the dream is made of dream-stuff, it's self-referencing and so can't tell us about the nature of the background to the experience.

POST: pineal gland story/question.

[POST]

I hope this is the right place to ask, I feel like of any other subreddit I know of, my brothers and sisters could tell me. This requires some back story.
I first heard about "activating" your pineal gland threw a friend of mine, but she called it, "popping your front lobe" I've not been able to find anything on line referring to that practice. What I did find out on my own, and then afterwards some research is that you can make your pineal gland aware of its self.
I've been doing this in addition to meditation on and off for a few years. Pretty much when I reach the calm state of meditation, thoughts slow down or stop, and breathing is shallow and not forced. I begin "massaging" my brains pineal gland. I use to do this by imaging my hands coming up and reaching into my skull threw my eye sockets. Then by using my thumbs to rub part of my brain. Currently after enough practice I can do it with out meditating, and with out imagining my hands going into my skull, or holding my brain. It use to always just pulse. Just this pulsing feeling up and down threw that small part of my brain, never really did anything more than that, and I never felt that I got any benefit from it; yet, I kept doing it.
Last night something strange happened. Just thinking about it, typing it, and actively thinking; I can feel my brain cooling down. Like a cold chill, relaxing. Anyway, I was doing my normal thing while meditating. I begin to feel my brain more so that usual, like the pulsing of my pineal gland has begun to spread.
As more and more parts of my brain began to feel this it reached just over 50% and I felt this sudden chill on my brain. I could only chill about 85%. It also felt as if I was sitting further back in my mind than I normally do. Trying to explain this, my normal perception of my mind and body with my eyes closed, compared to during this "chilled brain" I felt almost disconnected from myself, but I wasn't, just sitting further back.
Afterwards I wanted to stop, I was unsure of this new territory and had already been at it for a while. My brain, with in 30 seconds had warmed up past a normal temperature and felt like I had a nice warm brain glow.... after about 5 minutes I felt normal.
No drugs were involved, and I'd like to find out more about what happened. Is this transcending into a higher state? Over activating my pineal gland to a dangerous level?
Thank you for your time.

[END OF POST]

Like seeing from the core [http://www.reptilianagenda.com/brain/br121804d.shtml]? (Ignore the nature of the website, the article itself is from a conference and it's the only copy I could find with free access.)

Q: Thanks. I'll give it a read, about to go into work so I'll get back to you. Thanks again!!
Edit. I have enough time to read and reply before I have to clock in. I was laying in a dark room with my eyes closed so I can't recall my vision improving. I do however have pretty good eye sight. 20/13 when I was in high school and has been better than 20/20 during my yearly eye exams for work. I'll see what I can do with this new information.

From my experience, it's something more than just "things being in focus", say. It's also somehow about being "home and relaxed" and the seeing being effortless - just there and laid out before you. "Vision and awareness" rather than eye-sight?

Shifting your centre of attention - where you "look out from"; don't actually concentrate your attention there, keep it open - to different regions of your head and body (behind forehead, central line, lower base of skull, jaw, central chest, lower abdomen) gives experience quite a different "quality" I find.

Be interested to hear what you get from playing with it.

POST: I know it has been said for a long time, but I'm really starting to notice that a trend towards society waking up

[POST]

If you look at the front page of reddit right now there are advancements in science that are for the benefit of the Earth as opposed to big business. Fewer than 18% of Americans smoke cigarettes. We're seeing a population that is starting to focus their attention on the injustices of world and call BS. Ferguson may not be our brightest hour as a species, but it is a sign that things are heading in the right direction. People are fed up with nonsense and MORE importantly, willing to take action for that which makes sense.
The internet is informing us at newer and faster rates than ever before, and yeah, we're using it to spread memes - but we're using it to educate ourselves too. Mainstream media is dying out. The revolution of self-governed media intake has begun. This is huge.
I really feel society is not a lost cause anymore. I think we can salvage the good bits, with the aid of technology and action, for a future that is free and peaceful. It's not something I'm taking for granted, but it's something I have the motivation and belief that it is no longer futile to work towards. I call upon you, Psychonauts, to keep being you, and doing it in as many ways as you can or want to! Our society is no longer a place where free-thinkers must hide-away in secret societies. Upload your thoughts to twitter, start blogs, tell your friends what you truly feel about the world! Together we might just wake up in a paradise...
The truth is no longer taboo. Spread it like semen. The facets of control will try to suppress us but like a teenager who sees cleavage we are unstoppable in our desire to undress truth from the restrictive bondage of censorship that has been imposed on us for far too long.
Even now I almost went to bed without posting this, out of fear it was too melodramatic, but fuck it. We vote with our voices and actions. Use this information as you will.

[END OF POST]

The truth is no longer taboo. Spread it like semen. The facets of control will try to suppress us but like a teenager who sees cleavage we are unstoppable in our desire to undress truth from the restrictive bondage of censorship that has been imposed on us for far too long.

So, who's going to set up /r/TruthFap? ;-)

Much of what you say is true, but not in terms of the history of the planet, really just this societal go-round. The free access to historical information is the big change, but societies have risen send fallen in this cycle of understanding-and-overthrow for centuries. It is rarely about transformation; it is usually about reset.

Q1: /r/TruthPorn sounds better IMO

Probably fits a bit better.

EDIT: Deleted my bad idea in the second sentence.

Q2: It is about consistency. The best analogy of it is that it is like driving a car. Just because the car couldn't always be at 60mph doesn't mean that you should stop driving the car, when you know that is only doing it again and again to always be in that state. So, it is matter of also not judging how you need to do it again and again, because even we do same things in our lives everyday. You always have to wake up from your bed, eat, take a shit, go to work, doing what you do everyday, rest, sleep, etc.
Why would having a peaceful and connected society be any different? For corruption, crimes, and so-called injustice acts that cause an effect to society, they must be repeatedly done to continue to exist.

Perhaps peace gives rise to violence, justice give rise to corruption, calm gives rise to the storm. A reset gives rise to a overshoot gives rise to a reset.

POST: Are we just biological computers with unconscious on/off switches? Is it possible we are all being run by a program called FreeWill.exe?

"The Eyes are the WindowsTM to the Soul."

If you look really closely in the mirror at your eyes, you'll see a small piece of lettering: "Version 3.1". It explains a lot.

POST: My limbo

I feel like I can gain no further insights about life.

Just give up on it. You'll never have any intellectual answers that satisfy; you'll just keep creating more complex thought-structures (stories) that are circular. Take a step back. If there is "an answer" or a "how things really are", then the answer must already be here, and how things are now must be how things really are.

Q: This is what I try to do, but it never goes away

Stop trying even to make it go away; that persists it. Just let it sit there - and go about your other business.

Q: Thanks, I'll try

Haha, no don't try!

Today's Ill-Conceived Metaphor

Think of it as, say, having a loose thread on your shirt. The thing to do is, leave the thread (nagging question) alone. Occasionally you might catch sight of the thread, and be tempted to get 'pulled in' to pulling at the thread. But you know that's just going to make your shirt (concentration, focus, balance, thoughts) unravel - you've done it before, it didn't help - so you let go of that idea and carry on with your work. You leave it be.

Then one day you realise it wasn't a loose thread at all, but part of the overall pattern of your shirt. Suddenly you see it! It's so obvious, it's just there without any effort!

The more you concentrated on the thread, the less you could see the whole pattern. You squinted your eyes to focus, you bent your vision out of shape, you got in too close. The more you pulled at the thread, you disrupted the pattern, ruined it.

Only when you gave up, and got on with other things, could your senses and perspective settle, and be ready for the insight.

POST: What is your theory of everything?

Q1: Everything is. Maybe.

Q2: Is is what is. Its all is.

All is Is.

POST: Rupert Spira discusses the nature of awareness

Yeah. Recommend his books, Presence Vol I & II. You can read a sample here. Greg Goode's book The Direct Path is similar.

the felt sense of separation being much more persistent than the intellectual view

Yes, this. Oddly, was just talking to someone about this very point, try to come up with the best way to describe it.

Because the "felt sense of separation" is basically a persistent tension or a "stuck, attached thought" in your direct, ongoing experience. Thoughts about being separate or whole come and go, as does all thinking-about. Meanwhile, direct-experiencing persists and is literally how the world is for you, right now.

You can only get rid of it by it happening to collapse, by attending to it while also attending to space (what Spira's work does), or more forcefully by deliberately overwriting it with open space via intention.

But since people don't really understand that they are experiencing a "sensory-mind-dream" in the first place, this doesn't make any sense to them. Spiral is by far the best at leading to this in modern language, I reckon. Although Francis Lucille is a good read too (related).

Glad to hear about the book and mediations. I'm always on the look out for new exercises for myself and others.

Q1: Well said! I've had to discover this in a groping-in-the-dark kind of way as clarifying the view and settling the mind chatter didn't bring the liberation I had expected. I think of the body as a sort of data compression for the long-term storage of thought, and exploring that is a sort of "down and through" process instead of the "up and out" (mental transcendence) that I was hoping for. I guess that's why everyone's talking about embodiment these days.
deliberately overwriting it with open space via intention.
I'm not totally sure I understand what you mean. Got an example?
I'm always on the look out for new exercises for myself and others.
Same here. Please share anything good you come across. I'm sure you know of Douglas Harding's brilliant experiments. I happened to notice your link to Gendlin's "felt sense", and I've found his focusing really useful. Tom Stone has some good techniques in a PDF called Pure Awareness (can't link from phone), but there's a bit of cheese factor too.

Embodiment

Yes, quite so! One of my first insights came from trying to improve my eyesight: I found an article about "seeing from the core", which basically amounted to shifting the location you are centred in and "looking out from". Then I encountered someone who suggested that rather than attending to the head area (third eye or whatever), one should go as "deep down as possible" - effectively, your lower core.

Effectively, what you're after is to centre yourself in a body-space location that doesn't suffer from accumulated tension and hence is a source of ongoing thought-generation, nor leads to the accumulation of tension.

I'm not totally sure I understand what you mean. Got an example?

Lie down (constructive rest position), get relaxed. Let go completely. Now expand your "presence" (whatever you want to call that, Peter Ralston calls it feeling-awareness, which I like) to fill the volume of your body, and then beyond into the room. Now intend that to be open empty space. You will experience push-back because - like with Gendlin's Focusing - you are asserting something (empty openness) that isn't true. Stay with it. Gradually your current experience will move towards the intended experience, the goal you've set it, of open space. Essentially, you are simply accelerating the natural release/dissolving process.

Same here. Please share anything good you come across.

This one is fun (turning off your senses and recognising you are still there, couched in this instance of the subreddit's "life is a video game" premise), and the "where is your real hand?" exercise is good for pointing out you are in a dream (you can't point to your real hand, it is "outwith the experiential space"; if you say "in my head" you try to find your "real head", so in what sense do you have a real hand or a real head?).

Yes, Douglas Harding is very good. Although I will say that it can lead to the sense of being absent in the head area without it necessarily expanding to the experience of being a complete background to all experience, and he doesn't really talk in that way. Not heard of Tom Stone; will give him a look. Greg Goode's The Direct Path, um, what else...

Anything that isn't the Tony Parsons "you-can't-do-anything", repeat-the-same-words approach!

Q1: Great stuff, TriumphantGeorge! I'm not familiar with Ralston, so I look forward to checking him out.
I really get the lowering, or balancing of the the centre of attention, cuz I've found the sense of being behind the eyes to be the source of a lot of unpleasant energy buildup in the head.
I just got back from a week of working one-on-one with a retired Direct Path/Daoist teacher, doing all kinds of embodiment exercises and learning about the different bodies (energy, astral etc.). I'm still sorting out what seems useful at the moment.
Nice to chat with you. You've clearly done a lot of exploring. Feel free to drop me a note if you come across anything inspiring. Cheers!
edit: Oh, and by the way, your game analogy and diction was stellar :)

cuz I've found the sense of being behind the eyes to be the source of a lot of unpleasant energy buildup in the head.

It can be. The head is a tricky area. There is a spot about halfway back, on the vertical centre line, which feels like "home", but most people go too far back or too far forward. It's easier to go further down that line, to the chest or abdomen. Why do it the hard way? :-)

Nice to chat with you. You've clearly done a lot of exploring. Feel free to drop me a note if you come across anything inspiring. Cheers!

And you - happy exploring!

POST: I have crippling social phobia.

Meditation, mindfulness, daily relaxation, contemplate the nature of what you are?

The longer it goes on, the more "stuck inside" you can get. Anxiety becomes a feeling that you, ironically, become comforted by or afraid to let go of, without knowing it.

You need to expand your "attention/presence out" into the world again. You are probably tightly localised inside, stuck at the back of your head, with your crazy amygdala just loving it! Just a daily relaxation where you lie on the floor, let go, and imagine-feel 'expanding into the room around you' can help loosen off the hold. (Note: this will feel a bit daunting/exposing at first, but then it will feel great.)

Some ideas to explore: This guy [http://www.anxietynomore.co.uk/] has some interesting things to say on anxiety. The Alexander Technique can help you regain control of your body and mind without tension and effort. Rupert Spira's books are good at exploring awareness, as is Douglas Harding.

POST: Having a hard time understanding Alan Watts.

Maybe read one of his more general easier books like What is Zen? to get a flavour of him first. Or try Rupert Spira's Presence Vol I & II and Douglas Harding's Head Off Stress for another approach to essentially the same fundamental insight. Then you can return to the 'world-level philosophy' stuff.

Remember also that Watts saw himself as a "philosophical entertainer" as much as anything, so often he is having fun and playing with us as well as offering insight. Sometimes, over time, that can obscure rather than help.

...

Q1: Give us an example of a paragraph that you don't understand.

Q2: In the second chapter The Game of Black and White he goes on about how there is an off for every on, an up/down, space/no space, good/bad, etc, etc. I understand that. But I completely blacked out when he started talking about our future as plastic being with inorganic body parts. I couldn't see the correlation between the two clearly.

Q1: There isn't an elegant way to really explain what he's trying to say fully in this chapter, but in my interpretation, he's trying to show all the ways we try to control ourselves and nature, and how futile it is when we don't really know the consequences of our attempts to control things (GMOs as an example).
He's also making the point that all this technological progress doesn't really move us anywhere, and that we're still as unhappy as ever.
Watts' style is to slowly build up his points through metaphors and what-ifs so that you can more deeply see the point he is trying to make. What I wrote up there may be simpler, but it's not nearly as rich. If you don't yet see the connections, just keep going. You'll either see it soon, usually the end of a chapter, or you'll get it later on the toilet or something. :)

Watts' point is that it doesn't really bring us fundamental happiness, if it's bound up with struggle to control. Which I think is fair. I don't think he's against, say, washing machines and computers as such.

It's not clear that the everyday life is much better, though, taken as a whole. Inequality is still massive, and in many respects people have less control over their lives than in earlier times. Every skyscraper that gets built needs a slum somewhere in the world to compensate for it, and that's a situation that only gets more extreme as resources require more effort to extract. Still: Fusion?

Watts' argues that progress is guaranteed or always beneficial. Our current optimistic science view says that "things always get better", we're always pushing history on, we're always on the up. But this isn't really true. Past civilisations were probably a lot nicer to be in than ours. We are ourselves probably hitting the end of a super-cycle, with multi-bump financial collapse on the way, and our global, just-in-time supply-chain dependencies could well be our undoing.

But: The Internet.

I wouldn't fancy going back in time to before The Nice Things!

Q3: Watts' point is that it doesn't really bring us fundamental happiness, if it's bound up with struggle to control. Which I think is fair.
Well, I don't want to get too in-depth about this conversation since we seem to be more in agreement than not. But, one thing:
More or less, I think that alleviating basic material suffering is largely a pre-requisite for achieving the sort of "fundamental happiness" you and Watts are talking about. It may not be possible to convert suffering directly to happiness, but alleviating suffering is an excellent first step towards that conversion.
Sort of like how you can't build a house without a having a foundation first.
As long as a people are still having to spend their days worrying primarily about where their next meal is coming from, any sort of higher enlightenment is all-but impossible. (See also: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.) Once people are comfortable enough to believe they have food, shelter, and clothing for the foreseeable future, their options for personal growth and mental progress become far greater.
And since those struggles for control are also based largely in day-to-day material needs, this suggests that further alleviation of such basic suffering should (hopefully) lead to fewer harmful struggles over control of those materials. ie, No one cares who "owns" a river, if everyone nearby still has access to it.
Just look at how, in the last 70 years, Europe has gone from 2,000+ years of effectively nonstop warfare to being a relatively stable, prosperous, and peaceful united community. And the defacto leader (or first-among-equals) of the EU today is the country that, 70 years ago, was considered among the most evil and harmful in all of history. Now that's karmic progress! :->
(OK, that was kinda in-depth after all...)

That was an enjoyable read! We pretty much do agree.

Although I'd perhaps add that before people started living to 80 years old, they were happy enough living to 40 years old. In that sense "happiness" is context-based.

Sure, we might also say that "enlightenment" is possible in all circumstances, because it's insight-led - but certainly being well-fed and having access to infinite informational resources makes it more likely. Not being afraid of "death at any moment" surely is beneficial overall for lots of things!

The quest for control moves its target as society changes. Before, it was about making people dig holes in fields for framing, by physical intimidation. Much later, it was about having them support the interest of the powerful (such as consumerism as a strategy for managing "overproduction") by psychological manipulation. Today, it's about the use of both, because the tide of recent progress is receding again. "Human resources" are the basic energy input to high society. In each case, everyone strives to have power over their own existence, and this always requires (even if implicitly) having power over others' existence in support of that. While resources are plentiful, only the lower level really sees suffering; everyone is given a practical level of freedom. In tighter times, the ladders are drawn up, and the illusion of progress for all is shattered.

Viewing "technology" not only as material but also psychological, then we might say that "technology" and "progress" doesn't lead to happiness or not - rather, the extent to which we are free to be ourselves and determine our lives does. And that has varied wildly over time.

(Ah. Went on a bit there...)

POST: "The universe gives you what you need, not necessarily what you want". Alot of questions regarding purpose of life, universe, reason.

You infer purpose and your character from the thoughts that appear in your mind, the actions you end up doing, and the circumstances that arise in your environment.

Your purpose is what you end up doing, if left to 'unfold' without interfering with yourself.

Everything else is theorising.

POST: [serious] Do you believe that free will exists?

The point is really that your decisions should be the best decisions possible. You don't want to be free to do just anything random, you want to be free to do "the best thing".

That involves having the most information, the most accurate and comprehensive information, feeding into your decisions. If you focus on the mind, you will make decisions based on theory. If you focus on the body, you will make decisions based on emotion. If you expand your awareness to "all that is", though, then your decisions will take into account everything: the universe.

So really the only decision you ever need to make is to say "yes" to letting go, releasing your narrow attention, and letting the universe act through you - because that is going to be the best decision, the ideal path anyway.

From the Richard Linklater film Waking Life (transcript here [Deleted]):

Actually, there's only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity. And it's an instant in which God is posing a question, and that question is basically, 'Do you want to, you know, be one with eternity? Do you want to be in heaven?' And we're all saying, 'No thank you. Not just yet.' And so time is actually just this constant saying 'No' to God's invitation. I mean that's what time is. I mean, and it's no more 50 A.D. than it's two thousand and one. And there's just this one instant, and that's what we're always in.
...actually this is the narrative of everyone's life. That, you know, behind the phenomenal difference, there is but one story, and that's the story of moving from the "no" to the "yes." All of life is like, "No thank you. No thank you. No thank you." then ultimately it's, "Yes, I give in. Yes, I accept. Yes, I embrace." I mean, that's the journey. I mean, everyone gets to the "yes" in the end, right?

TL;DR: Do I have a choice?

POST: Synchronicity and the forces of change.

Q: my parents are around the same age as yours. i've talked about synchronicity a few times with my mother before, more of just how it is a peculiar phenomenon. i was in england (which to me is a pretty magical place to being with) with her a few months ago and that whole vacation was like the most synchronicity i ever experienced. every single day we would talk about a topic and then boom we'd see it referenced all over the place. it was actually pretty crazy and mystical in it's own way. i went on that trip in june and it really did me a lot of good, got me out of a slump. i live in quebec and last winter was just a long rough cold shitty winter. i was really just bummed out by the end of it. not so much depressed, but just down. but after that vacation i felt rejuvenated. my thinking was more 'psychedelic'. i could see more possibilities, i was more positive.
but ya even before that my mom had said she most definitely experienced it. though i didn't really delve into discussing any deeper meaning about it with her. i'm still not totally convinced that most of the times i've experienced it that it was not just purely coincidence. funny thing is i've had the exact same thing happen while watching jeopardy too. i'd be talking with my mother and right there the topic we're discussing turns out to be in one of the questions. that is another layer of synchronicity between you and i now haha.
it's definitely an interesting thing when it happens. not sure what to make of the whole thing. to me surely everything is connected, i experienced that, but i don't know if one thing makes the other happen if you know what i mean.
my bad for the long drawn out post, i'm kind of just venting. but there's one more thing i'll say since it sort of falls into this topic of having a sort of 'epiphany' and trying to share it with people, and with me going on a vacation.. well, i think at this point it was two years ago, i had went on a 3 or 4 week long vacation with my best friend. we went through europe and it was just amazing. i had so much fun and i was seeing all sorts of interesting, new things. well anyway, by the end of that vacation it was like a fucking psychedelic trip! i don't know what the hell happened to me, but i have not been able to feel like that since. i honestly would say i hit the closest i have possibly come to being 'enlightened', without really using any drugs either. but as soon as i got back home and started interacting with 'normal' people again, had to go back to work, etc, it all faded! in a matter of weeks, i was back where i started. and then this past winter, i even hit new lows! what point does this have to do with your post? well, i guess i was trying to to share what i was experiencing and people would just brush it off. and eventually it got to the point that i no longer felt that way. so in a way maybe these experiences are so personal that it doesn't matter what other people think and trying to explain it actually takes the meaning out of it.

That was a good rant, got me thinking.

I don't think one thing causes the other, so much as "they are aspects of the same pattern", or something like that; it's all one thing.

I wonder if being with other people, in a clockwork daily life, just wipes out that sense of connectedness or wonder or whatever it is; it seems to close you back up and make you withdraw. Maybe because daily life tends not to be very stimulating, it's on repeat? The feeling of adventure and looking fades away.

POST: The thin line of self reflection

Why try to stop thoughts? They're just part of the environment. Let them be - unless it's a particularly useful one. They'll settle down by themselves, just as - say - muscular tension settles down if your stop fiddling with it. If you fight something, you imply an opponent, and a fighting-back. Better to accept the content of experience, release focus and settle perspective to the background awareness again.

Good point that thoughts imply character or the structure of ego, though. But is enough that the thought appears and you recognise it; you don't need to do anything about it.

POST: If we are all God...

Not having a belief system makes it incredibly hard to set up any meaningful goals and pursue them.

This is difficult. After much messing about, and playing with 'subjective idealism' (dream-world) stuff and so on, I figured that if almost everything is arbitrary than what matters is what I am experiencing. So goals should be able the experiences you want to have, rather than things and 'achievements'. And the way to set experiences as goals is to spend regular time imagining them from a 1st person perspective, summoning the feeling of already having the experience - a la the old Neville Goddard 'adopt the feeling of the wish fulfilled approach (retro here [http://www.prayertheartofbelieving.com/]).

EDIT: This conversation reminds me of an experiment blogger Steve Pavlina tried, where he adopted the belief of a 'subjective dreamworld' and tried it out, with various results [https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2010/09/hacking-reality-subjective-objectivity/]. There was a three part Q&A in response to readers [https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/subjective-reality-qa/] and related articles [https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/your-own-private-universe/] vs lucid dreaming [https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/09/subjective-reality-vs-solipsism/].

Q1: Watts said that if you were God, you would probably eventually end up losing yourself just for the thrill of it.

Q2: I would definitely like to believe this to be true. :)

Q3: Could God create a creature capable of forgetting that it is God?

Q2: No doubt he could, the question I want to know is why.

For the adventure! Because he knows he'll wake up afterwards, and remember it's an illusion, it doesn't matter what happens in the dream. "Whew! What a ride!", he'll exclaim. And dive in again.

...

Q4: Okay. No. Stop this bullshit where you pretend that thousands of people dying of starvation, people sawing off other people's heads and the millions of other horrors that make up this existence are somehow 'perfect'. That's just bullshit.
I think Bhuddist philosophy (this whole, life is suffering ergo suffering is a okay) is just as damaging as any Christan dogma ever was. The Spanish Inquisition was nasty, but this 'all is okay' clap trap explains that it doesn't even matter!
It's a philosophy for the intellectually lazy, the smug and the easily satisfied and I don't believe it's okay for one second. And I'm pretty sure you wouldn't either if you were to truly experience the horror of what some people's lives actually are.
The top post on this comment is a ridiculous dismissal of all that is by comparing the suffering of millions to 'god mode' on a video game. As I type this, there's the statistical likelihood that several hundred people are being raped and murdered. That's not fucking okay, and no amount of saying everything is perfect and humming a bit is going to change that.
The world is not a dream. The world is not perfect. The world is inhabited by fierce and perverted monkey creatures some of whom thrive on death and mayhem and pain and there's nothing 'perfect' about that.

Is that really what Buddhism says? I had to look it up, mind:

When we encounter phenomena, and have a feeling of dislike, worry or pain, we say that there is "suffering". This should not be generalised to "all life is suffering", because there is also a lot of happiness in life! Noises are disturbing but nice melodies bring happiness. When one is sick, poor, separated from loved ones, one has suffering. But when one is healthy, wealthy, together with one’s family, one is very happy. Suffering and happiness exist in all phenomena. Actually where there is happiness, there will be suffering. They are in contrast with each other. If’ we only say that life is suffering when things do not go according to our wish we are rather foolish.
The Buddha says, "Life is suffering". What does "suffering" mean? The sutras say: "Impermanence therefore suffering". Everything is impermanent and changeable. The Buddha says that life is suffering because it is impermanent and ever-changing. For example, a healthy body cannot last forever. It will gradually become weak, old. sick and die.
One who is wealthy cannot maintain one’s wealth forever. Sometimes one may become poor. Power and status do not last as well, one will lose them finally. From this condition of changing and instability, although there is happiness and joy, they are not ever lasting and ultimate. When changes come, suffering arises.

Seems more like, "life involves change, nothing is permanent, the experience of change is unpleasant".

The world is a dream, in the sense that we overlay our thoughts on top of our experience and so perceive our views rather than what is there. It is perfect in the sense that it is all in balance and working together in harmony (food chains, etc).

POST: Continuity

[POST]

O this post could be so long but I'm going to make it brief. How much value do you guys place on continuity in your experience? Would you trade continuity for super powers? How about bliss? Nirvana?

[END OF POST]

Discontinuity all the way.

Wow, a discussion on a 6 day old thread nice! I agree, discontinuity allows more freedom in a way, and in a sense the continuity we experience is kind of imagined. I mean, we are never the same as we were, we just think we are. Makes me feel a little less sad about losing one of my favourite notebooks (believe it or not the same notebook from my story on glitch_in_the_matrix, which I take it you read) where I wrote down a lot of my passions and dreams. They're bound to change anyway, but still it hurts.. I want it to show up. I guess that's me wanting continuity. I'm a conflicted soul in this way.

Was browsing and the title caught my attention (I love the idea of "discontinuities).
Anyway -

• We are always the same "background", but the content changes.

Discontinuities in the content would make life far more flexible. If you don't mind things appearing/disappearing, your circumstances changing dramatically, your environment shifting - you can have everything, potentially! But you can also lose everything, potentially. If you are willing to let your world be that ephemeral, then one moment may not lead to the next. All vision might fade...

Thing is, where was that notebook when it wasn't in your hands? It was just a thought in your head (or actually, a 'background feeling/knowing'). The thing itself wasn't anywhere. You never had it in the first place, much.

But, yeah, I know what you mean. Losing things hollows out a bit of your emotional self/content, and leaves a gap. A petit mort! Time for a magickal spell, perhaps, to have it re-materialise?

EDIT: Have you thought about how you might capitalise on/create discontinuities?

Isn't the world already that ephemeral, it's just I don't perceive it to be.. yet?

Yes, it is, I would say.

The Model

My general model for this is, quickly:

• Think of yourself as the background of experience, the 'awareness' in which it arises.
• Experiences arise, and leave traces.
• Those traces then structure subsequent experiences, leaving traces, deepening patterns, creating tendencies.
• Unfolded objects > enfolded forms > unfolded objects > . . .
• Experiences then tend towards stability -> objects and narrative.
• We could call these laws (apparent physical laws, cause and effect), habits (repeated actions) and beliefs (lighter patterns structuring our perception).
• But: There is no "real" underneath. Like hypnogogia before sleep, sparkles > fragments > images > objects > environments > dreams. Randomness becomes stability, unfolding both deterministically and creatively.

Anyway, with that out the way, the content of our experience is just that, it's just what we perceive and nothing more. Objects are made of "eyes and fingers", with no solid backing.

In a lucid dream, if you declare a new fact (state a new belief) and don't resist it, the experience comes to be. Content aligns with your beliefs. I think that waking life is very similar, albeit more stable and sluggish, because it has been around a lot longer than your dreams; it has solidified. But all that is preventing a complete discontinuity isn't the continuousness of content - that is illusory - it is the stability of the beliefs or 'enfolded forms' in awareness.

The Implication

If you start tinkering with your beliefs and expectations, your experiences tend to adjust. You get coincidences and synchronicities. It's as if your world tries its best to "line up" with what you've decided the facts should be. This is how "magickal traditions" all work at their root.

But the kicker: Adopting a new belief, or "inserting new facts", is easy: you simply declare the new truth. No effort required. However, you must completely let go of resistance to what happens, to the change, and to the new idea. (Fun free book by Alan Chapman which discusses similar ideas, here.)

That's quite frightening. Anything could happen.

Getting extreme and unlikely: Say something happened in the past and you'd like to change it. Say you could, by simply lying down, letting go completely, and declaring it so - say you could suddenly find yourself "reset" to that time. Would you do it? If I told you (I'm not, but as an emotional experiment) that this could be done. Would you? I reckon you'd find it hard to make yourself do it. The implications for the reality of your surroundings, what "people" really are, etc, are pretty disconcerting!

An Experiment

You should try an experiment, via the Alan Chapman book maybe. Simply declare: "My book will come to me this month" or "My book is coming to me this month" - it has to be worded as a present fact - and let that become true to you. ;-)

Note: It's about the feeling of it being true, rather than imagining it in pictures or whatever. Simply the statement, and the acceptance of the feeling. It's a fun experiment. Whether it works, who can tell - - -

I've experimented a bit with discontinuities, but you have to be careful. The truths you adopt really do have an effect: So, if you start thinking poorly of yourself, for instance, then things line up very quickly to prove you right! I've seen depressive people enter massive doom-spirals because of that.

So it's important to "think positive" - but not in the cheesy, "positive thinking" way - rather, in adopting a positive, desirable vision for your life as a feeling. (A bit like old Neville Goddard's idea.)

Thank you very, very much for this reply. I feel you've given me an outline to something huge and obviously life-changing. I'm interested in what you have said, and am going to probably study this comment for quite a while. If what you are claiming is true, I want to use it for love and light and the unification of awareness with the best possible experience for it, which I currently imagine to be a really kickass story. Perhaps I am naive in thinking this way, but it is how I feel, and normally I'd say I can't change that - but I suppose according to you I can. Still, there are facets of this narrative I'd like to explore. There is a woman... I have a feeling things will start to get really, well, unpredictable, when I finally encounter her again. I suppose I'm preparing myself for that. Again, thank you for taking the time to explain all this to me, I truly appreciate you sharing your knowledge. It's nice to be able to discuss concepts that most would deem insane or unrealistic. It makes me feel freer just by doing so.

Well, personal experience is the key - decide for yourself what is true for you. Take on other people's ideas and see what they add to your own understanding/knowing. Yeah, 'love and light', that's the way.

And remember you have to live the humdrum aspects of life as well as the more random/exciting/bizarre ones, while you are still in amongst it! :-)

Have fun - - -

POST: Just a reminder: There's nowhere to run.

[POST]

:D

[END OF...POST?]

:-/

A1: When you can fly, there is no need to run.

A2: When you can exist in all places at once, there is no need to fly.

A1: When you are both nothing and everything, there is no need to exist in all places at once.

A2: When you simply are, there is no need.

* * *

TG Comments: Misc Communities

POST: Ever heard of r/DimensionalJumping? (/r/threekings/)

Q1: The interesting thing about it is that if you read their methods, they are just standard magick to get you the things you want. That raises questions: are they interpreting simple magick working as "dimension jumping"? Does all magick work through dimension jumping and we don't realize it? Are they both doing normal magick AND dimension jumping in addition to that because that is the intent?
I'm leaning toward the lasst one, because I've never experienced other abnormalities (things being "different" after a ritual/spell), other than the purpose of the ritual/spell coming to fruition. Then again, I wasn't looking for them, so I don't know.

The underlying concept of that subreddit was, in fact, partly to encourage an exploration into whether the idea of "methods" (and related notions) was valid at all. And, from there, to seek to unpack the nature of "experiences" and the nature of descriptions about experiences.

Making a distinction between those two "natures" - and investigating the relationship between them - tends to highlight that taking concepts like "dimensional jumping" and "magick" or whatever as literal independent things might be an error. And so talking about "dimensional jumping" being a version (or not) of a "simple magick working" can be a bit meaningless, if all that is truly meant by "magick" is just a way of talking conceptually about certain sorts of experiences. The basic assumption that there is anything "behind" experiences, and the descriptions can somehow capture that "behind", might be... unsupported.

Which isn't to say that those descriptions aren't useful - for discussion and planning and designing and so on. But they are not "what is happening" (itself possibly a dubious idea). After all, the basic common everyday description of being a person-object located within a world-place (where "the world" is taken to be a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time' that is made from 'parts'") is certainly useful. But it is perhaps not really true as a direct experience, when we check.

That "checking" was really what the metaphor (?) of "dimension jumping" was intended to promote, as presented in the subreddit anyway. Note that "metaphor" doesn't mean you can't have experiences that are patterned exactly "as if" something is true; it's just that it is not fundamentally true. Descriptions might not capture experiences, but they might have utility in structuring them. And so on.

Q2: I'm just curious. Why make the subreddit a read only archive? It was an interesting sub until it closed down. The new r/DimensionJumping isn't that active.

That "new" subreddit isn't really even the new subreddit (it's not a continuation).

The thinking behind making it a read-only archive:

The original idea that developed was that the subreddit would be fairly unmoderated in terms of posts, but we'd bash things out in the comments section, via dialogue. So it was basically "moderation by contribution" (of moderators and regular participants who'd been around for a while). This worked well when there was only a few active contributors, slowly increasing. I personally spent a lot of time engaging in quite detailed conversations (in the sense of leading an investigation, not dictating conclusions) and so did many others.

However, eventually (as often happens for niche topics) the subreddit got swamped with users - often via indirect links - who didn't read any previous discussions or the intro material before posting, leading to repeated questions and/or a naive idea of the subreddit based just on its name. The volume meant that the old model just didn't work anymore. That number of pseudo-one-on-one couldn't happen in parallel.

The reason for "archiving" the subreddit rather than letting it just continue, is that letting it run on would dilute the material that had arisen within the subreddit. It would continue its march into a general sort of "new-agey/LOA/magick" hybrid and the residual value would be gone. Better, it was thought, to lock that down, and others could continue their more literal idea of "dimensional jumping" elsewhere - and, eventually, we'd continue the core thread in another forum, with a different approach to moderation and contribution.

POST: 2 cups method question (/r/DimensionShifting/)

If I recall correctly:

Given that the "two cups method" (originally: two glasses exercise) was intended as a demonstration exercise targeting the nature of experience and the nature of ideas about experience, the thinking behind suggesting that one should not do it too often would be that it's best to leave some space to more easily, more accurately, observe whether performing it has a link with subsequent changes in experience -- or not.

That's why it was an "exercise" rather than a "method": it can't really be a "method" until it's been proven to actually cause change. And if it does actually cause change (a view that may or may not be arrived at via repeated, distinct experiments) then there are probably more interesting conclusions to draw other than "let's pour more glasses of water to change the world" or similar. :-)

Q1: I don't think it was u/triumphantgeorge as they have a specific idea about dimension jumping that was more based on the importance of discussion not the reality or fixation on the dimension jumping. I don't recall the post you are mentioning, though I am sure someone wrote something along those lines.
Everyday you choose to do something different you are making a jump. Dimension jumping is just another tool. Action of one kind or another is required for you to grow, but the universe always responds to our action.

Yep, pretty much.

Q2: Now that I make you back into Reddit or maybe I just intentionally shifted to a version where you are already back, I wanted to ask you about this exercise of yours. Did you invented this exercise or you take it from somewhere else and explain it with your own words?

I made it up. It was originally written as a quick response in a GITM thread, later slightly tidied up for the DJ subreddit when I fully took that over. It's just an example of pattern-linking really, but it has the benefit of being easily performed plus extremely mundane -- and that's quite an effective combination in an exercise designed for exploring this area.

Q2: Ok, did you still keep that gitm thread, it will be nice to see how it was born, on other note is it connected to Wicca spells. Also I'm curious from what standpoint you are viewing this exercise, from scientific-skeptic approach or from Occultic one or maybe from New age one, I'm pretty much asking, are you believer or not, because you put the label "exercise" and not "technique/method".

Here it is [POST: [EXPERIMENT] Glitch Generation Test, I Need Your Creative Ideas!].

The notion underpinning the DJ subreddit was that it was an environment for facilitating the exploration (experimentation, conceptualisation, discussion) of (1) the nature of experience and (2) the nature of thoughts about experience. No assumptions were offered or encouraged. What is there to "believe" without actually having an experience and drawing conclusions yourself? (Is the idea.)

Also, it's worth noting that the nature of "believing" is another issue all on its own. It's a pretty loose term anyway, but when it is referring to something along the lines of "an idea which I think is true", then the nature nature of ideas comes into play. In particular, the extent to which ideas are (or the thinking of them is) somewhat like a parallel-simultaneous experience relative to the "main strand"; they don't "get behind" our experience or "explain" it in the sense of revealing the underpinnings of it.

Of course, the term "believing" might also, or instead, be used as a word to describe something along the lines of having "adopted a perspective" or "adopted a mental/experiential posture". In that case, one might wonder whether this is something that might be more intertwined with the main strand of experience; perhaps it might constitute a "patterning" of it?

However, these things must be considered and explored; they cannot just be taken for granted because they sound appealing, or because it would be nice if they were true.

(Again, this is the thinking behind the DJ subreddit, and therefore the viewpoint taken in any discussions with "TriumphantGeorge". And it was the underlying approach to the discussion of "glitches" back when I was the prominent moderator and participant of GITM, after having resurrected it from neglect and a lack of "philosophy". It's mostly reverted back to the old ways now I think, unfortunately. But inevitably: it's a lot of work to maintain or even articulate a consistent "perspective" in these subreddits.)

Q2: Hi, I wanted to ask you are labels really needed? Are they just for strengthening your intention or they have a special role in the ritual? Can I just hold the first cup and describe my current situation and for the second cup, hold and set my intention for the change in my mind, then just pour the water? I saw the original post finally and as I see it the original intention was this to be a 'glitch in the matrix generator' and you also said that you have other exercises under your sleeve, did you post them eventually?

For the purposes of this exercise, I would do everything as described. After all, it's only an exercise, not a method, until proven otherwise. If it so happens that you get some sort of interesting results that can be repeated, then you could experiment with changing aspects of it and see what matters and what doesn't. (If you get no results at all, then there's not much point in tinkering with it, no basis for making decisions on what to tinker with.)

Loosely, though, the metaphor to use when considering the relationships between the various parts is: "patterning".

Q3: Great to see you back man. You changed my whole perspective on things at a time when I was very set in my ways. Can't thank you enough!

You're very welcome -- glad I was helpful!

Q4: hey I wanted to ask you something. Is the dimension shifting stuff actually all real? I used to follow the original sub years ago and read all the things you wrote and was a hardcore believer.
After years with no results, I eventually stopped believing and thought the entire thing was a hoax and I still do but every now and then I wonder if it is actually real, were you telling the truth?

Not a hoax, but presented as an exploration rather than a declaration of things being a certain way. Which is to say, "dimensions" should not be taken as literal, but rather as one metaphor among many that could be used to explore "the nature of experience, and the nature of descriptions about experience".

The idea was that by experimenting directly you would find out for yourself; you weren't meant to "believe" anything one way or the other. Unpacking things through philosophical-type discussion would then work in tandem with that. (This was clearer if you followed the in-comments discussions, which is where the actual meat of the subreddit took place. Two Glasses was intended to be a "blank slate" starting point from which this investigatory-type approach could progress.)

The closest approximation to that approach now is probably /r/NevilleGoddard: taking a reference concept or text (in that case taking the stories in the Bible as metaphors about reality) and using it as inspiration for a very direct, active, experimental approach.

Q4: I always thought experiencing the "effortless movement" would be what helps with exploration, to show there is something to all this beyond a reasonable doubt. The most I ever got was moving my arm, it happened years ago and I've never been able to replicate it since. Any tips for getting effortless movement, how long should I stick with it before expecting results?
Also one time I did the two glasses on a situation and that very night it appeared to work which shocked me because the situation was unlikely to fix itself. Then I found out a few weeks later it actually didn't work. But then a few months later it ended up fixing itself and working. But all the other times I did the two glasses, it never worked.
But it is experiences like that which make me wonder if there is something to all this. But if most of the two glasses fail and one of them works, that just seems like coincidence.

On the first point, don't attempt to manipulate or interact with your arm at all. Instead, bring to mind the idea of your arm being in the raised position (it's fine if you need to use a phrase or an in-place image as a lead-in to this) while having ceased to hold onto your experience of the body (simply: leave your muscles and attention alone).

For the glasses exercise, having it "work" or not is perhaps not the right perspective, since it is more meant to indicate whether there is "something worth looking into, nor not". It's deliberately called an "exercise" rather than a "method" (the whole idea of "methods" is tricky; they are essentially experiences after all rather than causes, mostly anyway).

That it might "make me wonder whether there is something to all this" . . . was exactly the point. The only way to combat "coincidence" is to do something repeatedly and in different contexts. However, it's also worth contemplating what exactly is meant when we use words like "coincidence" or "explanation" or "reason" or "cause", and so on.

Or, indeed, what is meant by "me" and "doing", etc.

POST: Scientists believe Parallel Universes ARE interacting. Is this the cause of the 'Mandela Effect'? (/r/MandelaEffect/)

Sorry for the late reply, your comment was stuck in the spam filter until I happened to look back at this thread! Excuse any slight repetition due to vague recall.

I agree with your comment about "what if" contemplation. As per Paul Feyerabend, I tend to think physics (for example) proceeds by a somewhat "anything goes" process in reality, with post-hoc justifications afterwards to clean up the story. And that is just fine.

However, this makes it doubly important to adopt a "meta" perspective on the activity itself. Specifically, as I said above, the nature of descriptions themselves. I think the idea that our connecting concepts are "true" is somewhat recent, and has become prominent as philosophy has receded as a component in our scientific outlooks. (Even though the view that our descriptions are true is itself a hidden philosophical position.)

This is ultimately what George Ellis is pointing out in his essay, and why Stephen Hawking makes seemingly foolish grandiose statements occasionally, and why N David Mermin makes his comment about the "reification of abstraction". Not long ago, this wouldn't have need to be stated! The idea that the world was really made from "atoms" (rather that "the world", a concept, being constructed from "atoms", another concept); or that light really was a wave or a particle (two concepts) and that it having aspects of both ideas was a problem; or that "gravity" (loosely speaking, the name of a description) is what really causes things to fall down, would have seemed ridiculous. But that is how we talk, mostly, and it's at the root of a lot of the threads we see here and in more "scientific" publications: this weird muddle of the idea of what is "true" or "real" because there is no firm platform upon which the discussion is occurring.

Ideas, then, I'd suggest, are about being "effective": are they useful as a thinking tool, or as a predictive tool. Either is fine. Arguments (1) and (2) are both permitted, provided descriptions are viewed in this light, put in their proper context relative to our direct experience. That is, a blend of (1) a conceptual framework which acts as a useful template of relationships in order to facilitate thinking and (2) an abstraction and codification of repeatable observations, with a greater or lesser number of "observational touch-points" for direct experience, but still never getting "behind" direct experience.

POST: I have a theory about why these happen (/r/MandelaEffect/)

I think the same applies here as to quantum-physics-inspired multiple universes descriptions. From a previous comment which then goes into more depth:

I'm with George Ellis on this, as regards quantum theory, string theory and multiverses and so on. Although it might be interesting and fun to consider philosophically, it is essentially meaningless scientifically. Having said that, the Mandela Effect is a philosophical or metaphysical issue, really, and not a scientific one, so this is not necessarily a problem for the subject as a whole; it just means we need to be mindful of what we focus upon.

So, while it is fun to consider these narratives (and they are narratives) about our experiences, they are not testable theories. In fact, anything "outside of" our experience is not testable, and your description is mostly that. We might recognise that there are patterns which are consistent with the idea that something is happening - that are "as if" it were true - but that's not the same thing. Which is fine, of course, because scientific theories aren't about "what is really happening" anyway; they are useful abstractions. However, when a description as almost no "observational touch-points" at all (that is, the description has very few observable components relative to the complexity of its conceptual framework) then the sense in which it is a useful model, rather than an enjoyable story, is questionable.

I really don't agree that "actual scientists" are proposing that we are living in a simulation, although they might engage in such "gee-whiz" discussions for popular-science-type magazines and programmes, as part of their promotional activities. (Nick Bostrom is not a good example.) If anything, one's treatment of such a hypothesis is a good indicator as to what extent you are an "actual scientist"!

Q1: I like your comment, until the part where you claim you don't agree with the unarguable reality that scientists are actually working with this theory seriously and calculatedly. I mean, that's cool i guess, but it's the reality whether you believe it or not. And why the random disclaimer about how Bostrum doesn't count? Confusing.

Bah, I knew I should have expanded on that bit of wordplay! Apologies.

So, that was intended to be a shorthand for a few things implied by the comment and the linked comment. For example, that one shouldn't conflate "working in a scientific role" with "this being a scientific hypothesis". The phrasing of "actual cosmologists and other scientists" heavily implies that the simulation hypothesis is itself a scientific hypothesis. As per the George Ellis article (to take one view), in what sense is someone being an "actual scientist" if they are engaging in what amounts to observationally-untethered philosophical musings?

Meanwhile, when I suggested that Nick Bostrom was "not a good example" in this context, it's because his Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? [https://simulation-argument.com/simulation/] paper (hosted on his The Simulation Argument webpage [https://simulation-argument.com/]) is sort of, intentionally or not, the logic equivalent of a wordplay joke. The amount of coverage it has got in the media as a "scientific" idea is largely to do with the ease with which it can be fashioned into a fun, engaging, pop-culture story in mainstream publications (in articles such as this [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/simulated-world-elon-musk-the-matrix] and this [http://theantimedia.org/tech-billionaires-matrix/], for instance).

Moving past all that, though, I suggest the important question to ask would be: "what is the relationship between one's ongoing experience and any particular description of that experience?" and how the "simulation hypothesis" fits into whatever the answer is.

I think all of these "simulation" ideas can ultimately be reduced to the idea - the long-established and foundational idea - that descriptions don't explain "what is happening", rather they are codifications of regularities in observations (which are themselves an abstracted subset of experiences), by us. The end-point of the simulation hypothesis is, then, really just a rediscovery of the fact that the standard description is just that: a description, a useful abstraction, and isn't intended to be more than that (as per the N David Mermin article in the linked comment).

The "laws" of physics aren't like legal laws which the universe must "obey"; they are "observed regularities" we have woven into a conceptual framework. Any ideas about "breaking out of The Matrix", a la Musk, are a slightly mangled version of "recognising that your experience does not in fact arise within a conceptual framework", and then trying to do some things which are not "allowed". But they were never "forbidden" in the first place. The "simulation" stuff itself is just distracting fluff on top of this.

POST: Why did the devs implement dreams? (/r/outside/)

These aren't features, they are the mechanics of how Outside operates!

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

Generally these worlds are more flexible than Outside, because to save on processor and memory power, all games function on a co-creation, procedural expectation/recall-based engine - so the more players there are, the more stable a game world becomes.

Because Outside is the main, default subscription for all current players there (part of the terms and conditions), you always reconnect to Outside whenever other connections collapse. You can prove this to yourself by trying to observe the disconnection/reconnection in progress, or illustrate it via a thought experiment:

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

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

When you eventually complete Outside, after the final montage sequence, the connection is terminated and the 'world' within you disappears - followed by your next adventure, should you choose to accept it!

So what happens when the game builds a world withing my "dream world"?

It doesn't. You're actually connecting to another server group completely, which is running a different instance of the game engine that Outside runs on, perhaps one with no players except for you.

Since the game engine works by reflecting your expectations/recall back at you, a "dream world" is then spontaneously built for you to experience. Since your default subscription is to Outside, though, when that dream world fails, you are generally reconnected to Outside with the "waking up" intro.

holy shit! you really understand this. very well done.

Just seeing it how it is! ;-)

POST: Randomly stumbled on this guy's posts... (/r/DimensionJumping/)

The point is really that no particular experience is special; all experiences are at the same "level" because there is only one "level". ("You-as-awareness which 'takes on the shape of' states of experience" is one way to describe it, but really that is too fussy and, as mentioned below, there's inherently no positive way to describe this situation. Which is why people do the whole "not this, not that" thing.)

Even an "enlightenment experience", then, is just more content - it's just that the content is not formatted in the same way as the usual "everyday world" content. But it's still just content. Good for noting that the larger situation is "not this, not that", but not much more than that.

Analogy: imagine having spent your whole life thinking about people in cars driving roads, and not having any other thoughts, then one day you have a thought about a man climbing a hill in a vast open landscape. The new thought undercuts the formatting of your habitual thought, opens you up - but it's still another thought. (Note, though, that in this analogy I'm not saying that such experiences are "just a thought about something". I mean to indicate that experiences themselves are essentially "unfolding thoughts" in type.)

So, you can watch whatever you like, and conceptualise things however you want, and read this or that, and listen to this person or that, but all that will be just more content, all with the same context.

The purpose, then, of doing a particular exercise or unpacking a certain way of thinking about things, is to notice via direct experience and experimentation that ultimately there is no fundamental formatting. It's not really an experience (no particular content), so much as a deduction and/with an insight about all experiences, impersonally.

This is why when the DJ subreddit was running, we'd often say that it was about exploring "the nature of experience" and also "the nature of descriptions about experience". Noting the the latter is just an example of the former, helps dodge a lot of needless seeking around (which can be fun, but it's nice to have the choice to do it or not without misunderstanding what such a "seeking experience" is).

POST: You need to actually read or listen to Neville (/r/NevilleGoddard/)

It's not so much about "talking down" the Law of Attraction, though? It's more about highlighting that LoA employs a different set of metaphors as compared with Neville's writing, and how mixing those metaphors leads to confusion - or empty pronouncements that, while "inspirational", are essentially meaningless because they have no grounding beyond some sort of general optimism.

For sure, the truth of things is always the same - that's why it's "true"! - but that goes without saying, and is not the issue. There are different descriptive frameworks as a way into "the truth and how to use it", and talking about one (Neville) in terms of the other (LoA) tends to create an unhelpful muddle. Hence lots of questions that people are asking here essentially resolve into having Neville translated into LoA-speak, unhelpfully. Or worse: a question isn't asked, the LoA perspective is just assumed and then the contradictions argued about.

It's like walking into an impressionistic art class and asking everyone to explain their paintings purely in terms of optical physics (or vice versa), or assuming that they will. Ultimately they're still talking about "painting in practice and outcome", but there's a definite choice being made in how to approach it conceptually - “brush strokes” versus “light rays” - even if the desired result is similar. The experience of the final painting is the same, but we wouldn't say that the two perspectives are identical, nor that one perspective was "based on" the other.

Personally, I do think that LoA is a much more vague set of concepts, and that "attraction" is not a good metaphor for the basic fact of experience, since it implies a spatial and temporal aspect, a separation between "you" and "experience" and the notion of something "happening" in between.

In contrast, Neville's approach to this - that creation is already done, that what you are is the context of that creation, and that to change experience you change your (impersonal) state to make some facts more prominent than others - manages to avoid that, while providing a tighter framework less prone to "inspirational" thinking. The different way the two frameworks handle the nature and operation of "visualisation", for example, highlights how much more complete, and therefore useful, Neville's approach to description is.

Hence, maintaining the distinction between LoA and Neville as parallel ways of conceptualising the nature of experience (and the nature of descriptions about experience), is surely valid.

***

/r/Oneirosophy Highlights

SIDEBAR: OVERVIEW

Oneirosophy means "dream wisdom"

This is a place for idealists to further their lucidity by discussing techniques and anything else related to idealism. Techniques may include but are not limited to: contemplation of skillful ideas, meditation, magick, yoga, and lucid dreaming. Sympathetic individuals are encouraged to post their own ideas and practices to prompt discussion.

The foundations of Oneirosophy are:

• Lucidity - A state similar to gnosis or satori where one regains consciousness of the illusory nature of waking reality, just as one becomes lucid in a dream.
• Idealism All of waking reality is a mental structure, a dreamed reality. Note that a partial reading list is available for background and for inspiration.

Matter is an idea in the mind.

POST: Oneirosophy is not "the secret"

7Kek7: ts not a magic genie lamp that will grant you all of your material desires
I disagree, when I want it to be, it has literally been a genie lamp. Changing one's perspective on experience and letting go of materialism is great. But the real power is in then shaping that experience to one's desires.

Giello: Oneirosophy provides a model through which one might understand how or why the Law of Attraction/"The Secret" works. At least, that's how I see it.

POST: Some quotes from Tibetan Buddhist masters (By dharmadhatu)

When you start to dream, the dream begins as a thought, like one you would have in the daytime. But you’re asleep, so the thought intensifies and becomes something like talk or gossip, and then the gossip intensifies or solidifies into images, and then you really think that you’re seeing people, seeing places, going places, and so on. And that is how it works with conventional appearances as well.
-- Thrangu Rinpoche

At first when you pass into the dream state and images arise, you may not remember where they came from. Your awareness, however, will naturally develop until you will be able to see that you are dreaming. When you watch very carefully, you will be able to see the whole creation and evolution of the dream.
Through this practice, we can see another dimension of experience, and have access to another way of knowing how experience arises. This is important, for when we know this, we can shape our lives. The images which emerge from dream awareness will intensify our waking awareness, allowing us to see more of the nature of existence.
With continuing practice, we see less and less difference between the waking and the dream state. Our experiences in waking life become more vivid and varied, the result of a lighter and more refined awareness. We are no longer bound by conventional conceptions of time, space, [force], and energy. Within this vaster perspective we may also find that the so-called supernatural feats and legends of the great yogis and masters are not myths or miracles. When the consciousness unites the various poles of experience and moves beyond the limits of conventional thought, psychic powers or abilities are actually natural.
-- Tarthang Tulku

POST: Contemplation upon the Gospel of Thomas (By aconfusedseeker)

Hello, friends. This sub needs more discussion to get the wheels of contemplation going. Only through contemplation can we progress in the ideas presented to us by oneirosophy. As it would happen, I've stumlbed once again upon Gnosticisim during the uneventful hours in work, and I got to re-read the Gospel of Thomas in multiple translations. However, this time I tried to apply the idea of oneirosophy and subjective idealism upon the riddle of words that Jesus left us in this amazing Gospel. Particularly, I'll nitpick a few passages that struck me as possibly resonant with the dream reality. For this, I'll use the Lambdin translation

(2) Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."

This really struck a chord with me. When I first delved into non-dualism and oneirosophy, I was grasping at straws when it came to shattering the illusion of this reality. The materialist in me wept as the dogma of Christianity I have lived my not-so-long life and materialism based thinking slowly unraveled to the nature of our dream reality. I was a confused seeker that sought (as my name implies) and as I read more and more I became troubled. Now I am not so much, as I slowly lose fear of death, hell, and nothingness after death. I am astonished. The last words imply that just like subjective idealism proposes, we - every single on of us - could indeed rule over all (mayhap through Solipsism?) in the current reality. What do you think?

(3) Jesus said, "If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

The idea that indeed when you outsource the you that you have forgotten you are to somewhere else, you lose control of the dream. The kingdom of the father (Awareness, One) is within you, for you are the aspect of that Awareness that dreams all of realities in all of the time. As within, so without. Non-dualism. If you will not know yourself (as the awareness rather than the dream character), you will be trapped in the idea of materialism and self-inflict upon yourself misery as something that can't be changed, something that is outside of your control (poverty), but once you have known, you will stop being trapped in that (stop being the poverty and as such the source of it).

(4) Jesus said, "The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same."

This brings forth the idea that though we can see a seven old day child, the awareness behind that dream character is so much more than what is presented to us, and as such is presented also an idea of reconciliation into the One, for we come from the One.

(5) Jesus said "Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you . For there is nothing hidden which will not become manifest."
(18) The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us how our end will be." Jesus said, "Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death."
(36) Jesus said, "Do not be concerned from morning until evening and from evening until morning about what you will wear."

Recognize the dream for what it is - a dream, and nothing will be hidden from you, because you as awareness exist out side of time and space (you stand at the beginning and the end), and as such can mold the reality according to your will (manifest what you will). Thus, stop worrying.

(24) His disciples said to him, "Show us the place where you are, since it is necessary for us to seek it." He said to them, "Whoever has ears, let him hear. There is light within a man of light, and he lights up the whole world. If he does not shine, he is darkness."
(42) Jesus said, "Become passers-by."

Become passers-by. Detach yourself from the dream character you experience, even a bit, and observe the dream world for what it is.

(48) Jesus said, "If two make peace with each other in this one house, they will say to the mountain, 'Move Away,' and it will move away."

Perhaps this could be given the context of reconciliation between the dream character and the dreamer (awareness). When if you do, you will be able to change the dream (move mountains).

(77) Jesus said, "It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."

Maybe Jesus fancied himself a solipsist? :-)

Etc. There are many more passages that could be given the explanation of oneirosophy, while many seem incompatible with the ideas of it. I would love to hear your opinions. 'Tis but one perspective/way of experience of many, but perhaps we can glean something useful to us from it? Put your own spin on it, should you desire. We can learn much from each other.

...

What's the point of ruling over the All?

The better question I think is, "What's not the point?" Try to contemplate on this a bit more before reading on. In the end, you have to come to your own conclusions to any question you ever experience.

Truly, for everyone there will be many points as to why, but I want you to consider that once you achieve that state it is all the points. When you rule over the All, you in essence become the All (or rather, return to it), and every reason for becoming it. Unbound, limitless, like "(77) Jesus said, "It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." "

For example for you personally by your previous thread on this sub, I would say that it would mean liberation from the assumption of being created by the position of planets and instead becoming the creator of planets, so to speak. A flip in perspective and being. Reconciliation with your true self.

One could also assume that the whole proclamation Jesus made was an Ego trap. It is the Ego that drives you to power, which this phrase implies to promise. But when you strengthen the Ego, you solidify the dream character you play and thus solidify the dream instead of loosing it to achieve that state of true self.

POST: An Interesting Thought (By CriticalMission)

When we are awake, we know that we are due to internal and "external" factors. First off, our mind is at a heightened state of awareness, as we can logically reason about many complex ideas. Additionally, we "feel" that our environment is stable. Everything is as we remember it, in that we have an innate understanding that we are living in the world we've always know. On top of this, we have certain tests that we can conduct on our environment. These tests can be similar to those tests that lucid dreamers use, known as reality checks. For example, if we look at a clock, look away, and then look back we know that the time will either be the same or be different by one minute. Yet when we are dreaming, the clock will often show vastly different results each time that we look at it.

But what if we have it all wrong? What if our dreams are a more true reality than the physical? Think about it. When we are awake we are very limited by the world around us. There are rules that we must follow. It's almost like we're trapped in a certain state of existence. Yet when we're dreaming we become free; anything is possible. And the more we dream lucidly, the more stable our dream environment becomes. Eventually one can lucid dream so much that one can begin to blur the boundaries between one's dreams and reality. The more powerful a dreamer becomes, the more "real" their dreams seem to be. Some can even experience dreams that "feel" more real than reality itself.

When we dream we have the power to control everything with our minds. Does this not seem like the most powerful state of awareness anyone can be in? The ancient stories of enlightened thinkers discuss beings who can manipulate physical reality with their thoughts. For example, Jesus of Nazareth was said to have brought someone back from the dead, cured the terminally ill, and gave a blind man the gift of sight. Whether you believe that these events actually occurred, or if they are possible is beyond the point. What matters here is the fact that someone capable of these acts would be considered to exist within a higher state of existence.

When we dream, we exist within this higher state of existence. We are not bound by the laws of physics. We can fly, teleport, shape shift, manifest anything instantly, we're virtually limitless. We can still hear, taste, and touch. We can see and smell. We become untethered.

I once had a dream of myself just standing in the street. I was across from the home I grew up in. The crazy part is, everything was indistinguishable from my waking state. One moment I was lying in bed, eyes closed, everything black. The next, it felt as if my eyes were immediately opened. I could see the grass and the road. The mailboxes, the sky, the clouds; all from the point of view of … myself. I looked down and saw my palms. I turned them up and down to acknowledge I was truly there. And then I woke up. Back into the darkness.

Dreams are often not realized to be such until we awaken. But what if physical reality constitutes the real dream? We wouldn't know it until we wake up. Yet oftentimes when we sleep, we are not conscious. What if this is by design? We're not meant to be conscious when we dream because then we would wake up. We would realize that this physical reality is a construct build around us, not our true reality. We would realize that this world is more like a game than anything else. That the limitations around us are simply obstacles to be surpassed. That we play this game with ourselves because there's nothing else to do but to expand our consciousness, and this a means to that end. An organized, ordered world where we can think and interact in such a way that allows us to advance our understanding of the world around us.

May your dreams set you free.