TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 6)

POST: Just stumbled accross this sub. Questions...

What proof is there of anything subjective except anecdotal? The only proof is to try something out, and satisfy yourself that either: a) there's something in it or, b) there isn't. A good comparison would be: lucid dreaming, or satori. They sound apparently unlikely, but if you actually pursue them you discover that apparent unlikeliness is no barrier to experience.

Well, dreams are probably not a very good example because almost everyone has dreams, we know that dreams are impulses in our brains, and we can control conscious thought so the stretch to controlling dreams isn't that far fetched. Satori seems like such a vague concept that trying to use it as an example doesn't strengthen the argument.

To be clear: I'm not making an argument, so I'm not intending to strengthen one. There is no argument that can be made for the existence of an experience.

However, lucid dreams are not a bad example, since it was argued very strongly for a long time that one could not be conscious within a dream. In retrospect we can say things like "we can control our thoughts so it makes sense we can control our dreams", but it was vehemently opposed at the time. Those who claimed the experience were dismissed, based on the theory of dreams at the time. (Although to this day we don't know what dreams are or indeed why we sleep at all. And "impulses in our brains" is not an explanation.)

Similarly, although satori is of course a vague concept, it is a concrete experience. It just cannot be captured in language; it cannot be described to someone who has not had the direct experience; it also cannot be anticipated from within a conceptual framework. So what I'm getting at here is: in general, you cannot use logic to make a judgement on the possibility of a novel subjective experience, you can only use it to explore a conceptual framework. Inevitably, without a novel intervention from outside of that framework, logic and argument lead you to the same actions, and hence to more of the same experiences. At best, you can use it to decide you don't care to know for certain one way or the other, that you aren't interested in exploring anything that has not already got a fully-developed narrative available for it.

From elsewhere:

My own guidelines are: experiences are real experiences; explanations are useful narratives. We must be careful not to treat the concepts we invent as actual things, even when they seem to work really well. Our observations are what define our stories, our stories don't define what it is possible to observe. That's why we should welcome different ideas, because fragments of them might be useful later on.

TriumphantGeorge, I think we have a negative nancy here. He is scared. It's cute. Do it or don't. What do you want? A perfect life? That is not this subreddit. If he finds one. We'll never know, now will we?

If we're being fair, his post does seem to present an open but skeptical mind, which is a good stance to take. And I think a lot of people, unknowingly, want to be sure there is an explanation in place for something before they allow themselves to try (not realising that science or any avenue of study has always been based on the idea that observations take priority over theories). So perhaps he should be scared - because absolutely anything could potentially happen! ;-)

Q1: No shunning here, friend. I'm just going to say that all "logic" is subjective and basically amounts to theory... that includes modern science (which is more a less an ever evolving belief system). And quite honestly, the more you really dig at the heart of any matter, you will find that damn near everything is anecdotal. Not sure what proof you're really looking for. The best way for you to prove it for yourself is to give it a heart-felt try and see if works for you. That's the only way you're going to know.

Q2: Glad to see level headed responses. Think this whole thing is a bit too philosophical for me but I agree, when it comes down to it everything 'known' is really just believed. I'll leave you guys be and who knows, maybe even see you on the other side. :)

Yeah, something like "applied philosophy/metaphysics" is probably not a bad summary of what this is about. Anyway, welcome anytime. Watch out for the owls...

POST: How my mother used the Just Decide Technique and got the result she wanted in 20 days.

Yeah, it's fun eh?

The more you do this stuff, the more you'll find that "other people" are telling you how they are doing it too...

It's not solipsism or co-creation though. Solipsism implies that you are the only person. But really you are not even a person. Co-creation implies that there are multiple contributors to your perspective, but this is not the case. Actually, you are the whole world (or at least: a version of the whole world is in you-as-consciousness) but are looking out from one apparent perspective. The "other people" and "you-as-person" are aspects of this world, parts of its continuous pattern, all arising within your consciousness. But what about multiplicity? Multiple conscious beings having their own experiences? Is there no overlap?

We tend to think that the world is shared in a simple way: like a spatial environment that is unfolding in time, such that we are all seeing the same place at the same time. But it's more like every being is a conscious space, selecting into themselves the patterns they like from a "toy box" which contains all the possible experiences of being-a-person-in-a-world. That way, every being can be having a different experience and be overlapping, albeit indirectly.

(In truth, when you follow this to the end, consciousness is indistinguishable so there's only one consciousness, with a multiplicity of experiences which cannot be described because it is "before" time and space. Unfortunately though, because our thinking is of a 'shadow-sensory' form, we end up having to use spatial and temporal metaphors to talk about it.)

Anyway, the final result is still that: you have control over your own "private copy" because you choose, explicitly or implicitly, what set of patterns you have triggered into brightness, what facts-of-the-world you are allowing to contribution to your ongoing experience.

EDIT: Fixed paragraphs, changed phrases, reformatted for clarity.

I've covered it a bit elsewhere - see the above comment as an example - but let's go with this, and see where you would agree and where you wouldn't.

It'll be a bit of a ramble but - onwards... EDIT: Sorry, it really was.

Parts and Relations

The truth is there is no way to talk about this in language. Immediately when we try to talk or think about this, we have to invoke a spatial metaphor, because to think of something we have to have a concept consisting of parts, and arrange those parts relative to one another. But consciousness doesn't have parts - or spatial extent or temporal relationship - those are aspects of an experience. So as soon as we conceptualise this situation, we're wrong. Because the thinking of it is a structured experience, and this is "before" experience. It is evident from direct introspection that consciousness has no properties of itself; there can be no "two" consciousness(es). We can come up with a label "consciousness" and imagine that there are parts which are related to one another, but they are not. That's just a diagram in our mind. No matter how we approach this, it's incorrect. Conscious spaces do not exist in anything since there is no outside, because it is "before" division; and there is only one or actually not even, because it is "before" multiplicity.

Again: it is literally not possible to think about this. It cannot be represented, because it is that which takes on the shape of experiences, and representations are just more experiences. However, we can use a metaphor which at least breaks some of the usual assumptions, and so...

Sharing without Space and Time

In an attempt to avoid using time and space as the framework in which we relate perspectives, I use this picture:

• The world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". We are not people sharing an environment.
• We are "that which has experiences", basically conscious spaces which take on the shape of the experience we are having.
• There is no temporal or spatial relationship between conscious spaces.
• Instead, the world can be thought of as a collection of all possible patterns. It is more like a shared resource than a place.
• So the sense in which we "overlap" is in the format of the experiences we have; the shared subset of patterns.
• This means that our ongoing experience is more like the associative traversal of a memory block. It's a strand of thought about being a person in a world - rather than actually being a person in a world.

When you tie this up with the fact there is only one consciousness, that the conscious space you are right now is the only one there is, that the has no boundaries and there is nothing else, you realise there is no outside of this. However, although there is no "outside", there can be a very detailed "inside". The relationship we can potentially talk about is shared patterns, even though we cannot talk about relations in a time or space context. Right now you are "God" of this copy of the world - and so is everyone else of their copies - and they don't clash! So this is not solipsism because it is not personal and "everyone else" is in the same situation (or one consciousness is in lots of situations, whatever).

Why Bother?

Why bother with all this? If it wasn't required we wouldn't bother, and most people can just ignore it. But...

If you experiment a little, the fact is that your world does not behave like a co-created place. You can wake up tomorrow and everything has shifted, including people you know, and it will "always have been that way". Facts can completely change and "always have been that way". Your world actually behaves as if it is one continuous pattern - your pattern, dissolved in consciousness - which includes the apparent properties of "you-as-person" and "other people", a pattern that responds to your intention in an unrestricted manner. So this gives us a way to conceptualise that, while avoiding misleading metaphors. It's not like "private views" are a new idea of course - QBism, as a recent example, uses it to describe the subjectivity of quantum physics. The tricky step is realising that there is no objective world - no CPU - that links or synchronises the subjective worlds, and that in effect there is just one subjective experiencer.

TL;DR: Solipsism is actually meaningless in this context. The world is best thought of as a resource, rather than a place.

Is it possible for there to be a concept such as 1+1=2, that exists before experience?

They exist purely within experience. You can use such abstractions to create a narrative about experience (within experience), but it is meaningless to say they exist "before" experience. (I use "before" in quotes because, of course, there is no such thing.)

What I mean by within experience -

It's tempting to think of the bright 3D-immersive sensory element (a "scene") in experience to be "the world" and somehow everything else is behind the scenes - but there is no behind the scenes. It's all present but dissolved, being experienced now. Metaphor: like the sun in the daytime sky, where the stars are still there but obscured; it's a matter of relative brightness. Layers of patterns, some of which are shining through into prominence. So we do end up with a situation where our experience is "formatted" and structured, depending on what level of prominance certain patterns have, and hence our narratives within experience will also be so-formatted. (The senses, objects separation, spatial extent, all arise-with particular scenes, for instance.) And at the limit, we might imagine that the format of narrative approaches the more simple patterns of experience. But that again is part of experience and it is only "about" partitioned experiencing; the narrative cannot accurately describe the formatting.

Meanwhile, things like the global background felt-sense, which could be said to be the direct experience of the current state, can't be given that narrative. And of course "unformatted consciousness" itself - which was what we were focusing on before - cannot be conceptualised at all. You can only be it.

To summarise -

• Mathematical concepts are within experience (being thoughts, this is so by definition), and any "formatting" to which it refers is part of experience too.
• It's the "sandbox" problem. You can make shapes in the sand which represent other shapes in the sand, but you cannot make a shape which represents sand or the sandbox itself.

EDIT: Relinking: I like this N. David Mermin article on reification of abstractions, although it's a bit physicsy for some. It's good at marking out the difference between (direct) experience and narrative, in the context of creating and using theories.

Q2: Every act of magic that get a result follows the same template:
Decide what result you want Equate an act, any act, with the result Perform the act Get result
You don't need to enter into any fancy state of mind. Forgetting about the working does help. It's so incredibly easy and simple that people usually tend to complicate it to no end.

It's true you don't need to enter a state of mind - any declaration of fact, explicit or implicit, has effect - but the more 'surrendered' you are, the more completely things can shift, and the more efficiently the result can appear. Which is why metaphors are useful; they provide "plausible paths" for things to arise that are beyond the norm. But yes, it's super-simple. Unfortunately it inherently doesn't "make sense" though (it's "before" conceptual frameworks), so people generally need some sort of outlook to hang it on. So long as you choose a very flexible and abstract one, it's okay.

The dimensional jumping idea in itself is extremely interesting because it breaks you out of causality even more, since things that already are can become different.

Yes, you’ve totally nailed this - that’s exactly the point of it.

Pretty much every other methodology makes the assumption that what I call Observation Accumulation is irreversible. In other words, that new observations must always be consistent with prior observations - so that the world always “makes sense”. That you can only shift parts of the world-pattern that you haven't "seen" yet, because the parts you have seen are now "defined". However, this is an overstatement of the Law of Coherence - which in fact only states that the world-pattern must be self-consistent at any particular moment (which follows because it is a single continuous pattern). It doesn’t say that the next moment-state necessarily needs to be consistent with all previous moment-states. So: the world-pattern can shift as a whole and coherence is still fufilled. Dimensional jumping and its metaphors say that there are no external laws enforcing the persistence of prior observations; the basic version of the Law of Coherence is the only law that applies. Established facts don't change because... you don't allow them to or you don't even make the attempt. Anyway, this means that we can assert things in order to:

• Effectively “re-observe” prior observations and correct the associated “facts”.
• Create new "fake" observations and have them count as “facts”.

And the world-pattern will shift coherently, meaning that all subsequent observations will be consistent with its new state. The main problem for people is that committing to this involves throwing away (or better: just not thinking about) their usual way of conceiving of the world: it is no longer a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" that we all share; it's a "shared resource" of possible patterns that we individually select and trigger into our conscious perspectives, as a "private view".

....

Can someone explain this method?

It's what's underneath everything: declaring that something is a fact, and the world unfolds "as if" that were true.

(Taking the mother's perspective:) In this case, his mother - believing in a "soul" - sends it out to do her work for her. Implicitly, she has decided that performing that act means-that her situation will be resolved. Her world shifts accordingly. This works in the same way as the Two Glasses Exercise works by implicitly deciding (asserting) that transferring the water shifts the state. By making that decision, you are literally connecting the situation to the water, and by pouring it you are literally updating your world.

...

What did that mean order your soul? What exactly did she do?

I imagine she just said, "soul, go out and sort things out for me!". Subsequently, she had an experience "as if" such a thing existed, and that it sorted things out.

POST: Relationship of D Jumping to the Law of Attraction

Well basically everything is based on the same thing. The law of attraction is pretty much just a very unstructured way of trying to use patterning to make changes; it doesn't have much of a metaphor or philosophy underlying it other than the vague concept of "attraction" (which I'd say actually gets in the way of a good description).

Like all things of that ilk it roughly boils down to:

• detachment
• mental/physical act + intention = state modification
• subsequent appearance in sensory experience

But the devil's in the details. The underlying concept of this subreddit is, it's recognised that the implicit or explicit adoption of a metaphor is itself a formatting of experience; metaphors are "active". And this is because all of experience arises from a patterning of consciousness (see: philosophical idealism, nondualism). Importantly, this means we can arbitrarily assign meaning to things and have experiences arise "as if" it were the case. None of this necessarily matters in order to use a technique to get some result, but formatting yourself with an appropriate metaphor in effect defines new "plausible paths" by which results an occur - and it also gives you the possibility of "knowing what you are doing". The confusion associated with LOA is because it has no solid framework. In /r/DimensionalJumping, we realise that frameworks are arbitrary. We take a super-flexible, low-level one ("patterning") as the basic foundation. Everything beyond that can be chosen according to usefulness and elegance, as the situation dictates.

See: The Patterning of Experience and the other key posts listed in the sticky.

POST: Musings about the nature of reality

EDIT: This is a bit meandering too. Still, why not eh? Be good to kick off some discussion. Usual caveat: add an imaginary "as I think of it..." in front of everything.

Making changes to our own 'reality' must affect 'source.'

That's a nice phrase. It points out something vital: you don't change your experience by messing around with it on its own terms. You don't move your arm by messing around with your body sensations; you do so by intending a new position. You don't change your circumstances by wrestling with your sensory imagery; you do so by asserting a change in some way.

On the other stuff...

Dimensions, Moments, 'Reality'

So, I think it's probably important to emphasise that you can use any model you want (and I like some of the imagery you used there), but it's also important to emphasise that none of them are "how it is really". Even in quite fundamental ways, such as the idea that there is a continuous space, that time unfolds, other than your experiencing of it. At least not in the way that you experience it. The fundamental truth it is: there is nothing "happening" other than the experience you're having now, in the way that you are having it. This is literally unthinkable though. However, realising this can save us wrestling with trying to "work it all out" - that is the equivalent of trying to see the bottom of a pool by splashing the water. Then we are free to use whatever attracts us.

Patterns like the Infinite Grid are useful because they break the notion that you are a body, in a world that is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", giving you a taste of the "true" situation, but still give you a fun structure to play with. But of course, you can just as well take on the idea that you are a body walking around in a 3D-world which behaves like a very flexible dream, responding to your intentions. It's a case of: whatever works, whatever you like. But none of it is "true" in a deep sense, at the "source". There are no dimensions, worlds, paranormal entities, all that, in a deeper sense. All experience is, in effect, "imagined" or recalled from a large resource of possible thoughts.

The true situation is, traditionally speaking:

• There is The Absolute, which has no divisions and never changes. Everything is in it and yet it is nothing (like all possible shapes are there, but presently balanced by their opposite, which are of course also there). It is All Creation. This is what is real about your experience: this is reality.
• There is The Relative, this is where one shape is emphasised relative to another, resulting in the apparent existence of objects and of change. This is what is illusory about your experience. This is often referred to as a "projection", to capture the idea of a movie projector (The Absolute, containing all frames) and a screen (The Relative, the display or emphasising one frame at a time).
• The two are one and the same thing. Nothing is ever created, it is only emphasised. All relative content is an illusion.

That's where things like The Imagination Room come from: an emphasis that there is nothing other than your "perceptual space" emphasising different shapes versus others. In a way, it's like the "world is a dream" metaphor but with a bit more structure. But practically speaking, and for enjoyment, just operating as (say) a conscious space with patterns dissolved in it is not particularly exciting. It's something to know, and flexibility is something to know, but that is meant to be freeing, rather than a new sort of burden.

But what does this say about manipulating reality?

Well, reality can't be manipulated; it's already been created in its entirety and it never changes. All we can do is select from it. But this is great, because it means if we can think something, then it already "exists", and it can be brought into experience in some way. I say "some way" because, inevitably, to transition from one state to another, requires you to let go of things as they are now. To get to a standing position you have to let go of being-sat-down. To get to other states, you might have to let go of your usual notions of time, or your ideas about cause and effect, other people, and so on. You might not always like the idea of doing that. That's the "price" you pay. In effect - if you ponder it - the more extreme the change, the more you have to let go of your humanity a little, and of the idea of your world being a "place" rather than just a series of images within consciousness.

Why is there not just always instant change? Why are there apparent collateral changes?

Because you are not completely 'fresh'. Metaphorically speaking, you have layers and layers of patterns activated right now, which are structuring your ongoing experience. None of the "facts" of your world-pattern (the selected aspects of The Absolute that are contributing to your Relative experience) stand alone; they only have meaning due to their entanglement with all their associations. Even your concept of "people" and of "memory", of the idea that there is a stable "past", all operate as drags on how your intentions eventually become visible in experience. They contribute from the moment you have them, but are immediately entangled with all that other stuff, and they only "shine though" when an appropriate context becomes available; when the clouds part briefly. Meditation and releasing and detachment are about letting the clouds dissipate, for faster results. But all this is a good thing. Would you really want to have an existence which literally consists of your thoughts immediately persisting as 3D-immersive environments, as your "reality"? Basically, a dream with absolutely no inertia?

The 'sluggishness' that we experience in certain directions is a benefit more than it is an obstacle. For example, our experience tends to be continuous and make logical sense, and the things we done so far tend to persist rather than need constantly reactivated.

POST: Philosophy and Dimensional Jumping

It's not a bad line of thought, that. Although the underlying philosophy is probably more based on Berkeley, Kant plus non-dualism, those lack a well-defined notion of choice and freedom which Sartre provides. If we take his "in-itself" and "of-itself" and see them as one and the same, and his "radical freedom" as therefore applying to experiencing itself rather than the given content, then that's definitely one way to look at it. (With apologies for rustiness and maybe slightly misusing terms.)

As a separate thing: I do think that philosophy can sometimes lead to complex ways to circle around "that which cannot be described" without ever getting there (fair enough: because we're trying to describe "the thing that experiences and descriptions are made from"), so although I love it, I've kind of stepped back from it more recently - thinking that in the end simpler models, ones which can be adopted as immersive metaphors and more easily tested out subjectively, are probably better for actually making progress "in real life".

EDIT: But of course, without the philosophy to start with, you can't make the models!

Q1: When you say "in-itself" and "of-itself" are you referring to Kant's "a-priori" and "a-posteriori" distinctions?
This always reminded me of the Platonic theory of forms (the reality of the form versus its mere appearance - very Brahma/Maya here IMHO). I'm sure that it is much more nuanced than I have articulated it.

That's Sartre-speak, but I pretty much believe that all of these strands of philosophy were an attempt to capture the same thing (which make sense right?). Mostly, wrestling with the idea that The Absolute takes on the shape of The Relative, and they are one and the same - like a blanket of material whose only property is "awareness" experiencing folds within itself. (The "patterning model" I use here sometimes is another version of the same: eternal patterns which vary only in their relative intensity, their "brightness" dictating how much each contributes to experience, the overall distribution constituting a "world".)

I like to think of it like Moire fringes. If all possible patterns are latent in the background (a blanket of material which can take on any shape), then triggering one pattern, "A" (a set of folds in the blanket), and then triggering another pattern, "B", doesn't take up any more space - you still end up with "a pattern", "C". You've still got exactly the same material shaped into a single pattern, just a more complex set of folds.

...

Good note. Hinduism is rich in stories which point to the fundamental (awareness/being/experiencing) vs relative truth (content/state/dimensions), and they're much clearer than the Christian parables. Favourite:

Narada, Vishnu and Maya
In Devi Bhagwata Purana, it is mentioned that once Narada asked Vishnu about the secret nature of Maya (Illusion).
“What is Maya?” asked Narada.
“The world is my Maya. He who accepts this, realizes me,” said Vishnu.
“Before I explain, will you fetch me some water?” requested the Lord pointing to a river.
Narada did as he was told. But on his way back, he saw a beautiful woman. Smitten by her beauty, he begged the woman to marry him. She agreed.
Narada built a house for his wife on the banks of the river. She bore him many children. Loved by his wife, adored by his sons and daughters, Narada forgot all about his mission to fetch water for Vishnu.
In time, Narada’s children had children of their own. Surrounded by his grandchildren, Narada felt happy and secure. Nothing could go wrong.
Suddenly, dark clouds enveloped the sky. There was thunder, lightning, and rain. The river overflowed, broke its banks and washed away Narada’s house, drowning everyone he loved, everything he possessed. Narada himself was swept away by the river.
“Help, help. Somebody please help me,” he cried. Vishnu immediately stretched out his hand and pulled Narada out of the water.
Back in Vaikuntha, Vishnu asked, “Where is my water?”
“How can you be so remorseless? How can you ask me for water when I have lost my entire family?”
Vishnu smiled. “Calm down, Narada. Tell me, where did your family come from? From Me. I am the only reality, the only entity in the cosmos that is eternal and unchanging. Everything else is an illusion – a mirage, constantly slipping out of one’s grasp.”
“You, my greatest devotee, knew that. Yet, enchanted by the pleasures of worldly life, you forgot all about me. You deluded yourself into believing that your world and your life were all that mattered and nothing else was of any consequence. As per your perspective, the material world was infallible, invulnerable, perfect. That is Maya.”
Thus Vishnu dispelled Narada’s illusion, bringing him back to the realm of reality and making him comprehend the power of Maya over man.

...Great eh? Now look around the room you are in, and realise your true situation at this very moment...

...

It's quite nice, isn't it? It brings you back to the simplicity of actual experience, rather than the tangle that thoughts about it can become. When it comes to searching esoteric texts for explanations, my general advice is: don't. You just end up in a synchronicity whirlwind, because every path you take apparently opens up a right seam of connections and evidence. But really: there are no deep underlying reasons for experiences. What I'd do if you've had a complicated experience - put it aside for a week, leave it alone. Then, after that, right down what you literally experienced, stripped of any interpretations or explanations. Literally: I saw this, then this happened, then that happened. And take it from there. Who knows what insights you might uncover for yourself? Please don't interpret me as being dismissive on that score. You will likely uncover things which are subjectively meaningful, within yourself. However, I think you can't go wrong with standing back and starting with a basic account of the observations, as it were, before doing the interpretation or model-building.

Random thoughts -

My own position is that experiential content is just that: content. It only has meaning relative to itself, and it has no fundamental meaning. The metaphysical truth is content-independent. And the fundamental truth is known only by direct experience, and cannot be conceptualised at all. Experiences are just experiences, no matter how amazing. Their benefit is that they point to the arbitrariness of the content of experience. If things shift and change a lot, eventually you twig that: hey, all that ever happens is more dream! It never ends, and I never really get any deeper into it. Every door opened generates a new landscape, every dig uncovers more fossils, every time I go looking for an explanation, I find one... plus more questions. It goes on forever, so The Answer can't be within the content of experience.

...Well, I keep good company apparently! But there's no good way to say it, really, although I do think modern metaphorical language can offer more streamlined descriptions because we've got access to a richer set of abstractions (or so it seems to us, anyway). Mathematics is the ultimate language for describing abstract relationships - i.e. patterns - for instance. Shapes without substrates, objects which don't take up any space and be simultaneously existent and non-existent, in perfect balance. Etc.

...Do it. The reason it got removed was because: a) it was very hard to follow and, b) it didn't seem to be about an intentional shift, which is what this subreddit is really about. (There are other subreddits for reporting spontaneous strange experiences.)

As I say in the other comment, if I were you I'd not bother with the research right now, not until you've settled out a bit - you'll just end up with a whole load of self-referencing synchronicities. Take some time out from it, then return to it with a fresh mind.

POST: Is it possible to jump without using any of the techniques?

All the "techniques" take the form of performing a mental or physical "act" with the intention that it means-that something is true (a fact, or a future situation). There actually is no technique for intending; one simply asserts, but that's impossible to describe and you can't "try" to do it, so the misdirection of an act is helpful. Practically speaking, there's probably always something that can be interpreted as an "act". Meanwhile, the majority of people are constantly re-asserting their current state. For instance, most people continually re-trigger their current physical position, which is why movement has a sense of effort or overcoming a hurdle: they are simultaneously intending being-sat-downl and being-stood-up, for example. This is why some trick which leads to "detachment" is included. So you can indeed apply the formula directly, without a technique:

• Act + Intention + Detachment = Shift
• Assigning a meaning to an act is what gives it causal power.
• Assigning a meaning to any experience can give it causal power.

In your case, the "focus on my belief system" will be the act, and the "change that I want" would be the intention. As with the owls exercise you will get some results simply by focusing on your belief system (the pattern activation will make it contribute to your experience more prominently), but having the deliberate intention with it will make the difference. And you have to complete the bargain (as it were) by surrendering to whatever shifts arise.

Basically: experiment.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean by detachment?

In general terms: ceasing to oppose spontaneous movements in the world / allowing shifts to occur without interference. To give you a direct example right now:

READ: If you're sat down, pause a moment, and let go of your attention, let yourself become aware of the background space in your body and in the room around you. Now, just "decide' that you are going to stand up, but don't do anything deliberate about it. Let whatever's going to happen, happen, and be okay with it.

NOW DO IT BEFORE CONTINUING.

What happened? Did your body stand up "by itself"? Or did you feel something happening and you halted it? Or did you feel yourself sitting "more intensely" than before, and no standing?

I felt something akin to the urge to stand up, or the expectation of me standing up shortly, but I never made it there. Is it possible this is what's holding me back? How might I get better at it?

It's not so much you get better at it - there's nothing to get better at in terms of the intending side - but you stop obstructing it. What you are probably doing is continually asserting and re-triggering your current state as the starting point for a movement. Take a moment to try this out and see if it make sense. Sit down somewhere again, and this time you are going to get up as you normally do, but paying attention to what actually happens. Stand up. Did you do this by shifting your mind to the state of being-stood-up and your body followed, or did you in fact begin by "finding your body" - basically, looking for the being-sat-down state - and then beginning from that point?

Two things to play with:

1. Taking this phrase in mind: "release into the movement", try intending standing again.
2. Centre your attention in your forehead, withdrawing your "presence" from the rest of your body (this prevents you triggering states). Try intending standing again.

Once you've had the experience, it all makes more sense, the whole "states" thing and so on.

Would a deprivation chamber be considered, in your opinion, lack of re-assertion of a current state? You wouldn't really have the Act+Intention+Detachment=Shift paradigm at work, though perhaps Detachment may be entailed. Or am I completely misunderstanding? Thanks.

It's a possible route, but having done floaty tanks ages ago (although before developing this view) I don't think it's necessarily any better than lying on the floor and giving up your attention. You can be in a tank and still be held onto, if not your body arrangement, then still the sensation of location and world. Isolation from input isn't the problem, it's an attentional thing. There's also an issue that you are not necessarily fully supported, in the sense that you are on the floor. The water accommodates your distribution of muscular tension, because it doesn't imposed any particular position on your. If you like down in the constructive rest position, then gravity imposes a release and your body, mind, attention feels more comfortable with releasing.

Having said that, floating is very pleasant and it's probably a great environment to experiment. I keep meaning to go back to it.

POST: i only just read about dimensional jumping. is this stuff real ?

Well, it's not the sci-fi type concept that you might be thinking about (although "other realms are available"). But let's just say that your apparent world is a little more "flexible" than you might have assumed, and isn't of the same form you have probably assumed. Maybe start off by creating some owls, then do the The Glasses Exercise, just to convince yourself there's "something going on", and take it from there.

I see it as occultism for people who don't actually want to put the mental effort into occultism.

I dunno, at its best I'd say it's more like the "Reality 101" lesson that nobody got given at school. It's how stuff works anyway; you're just noticing what you've been doing accidentally all along. Many occultists seem to have swapped one hardline worldview for another, too busy pissing around with the content of experience to have spent time getting to grips with what the nature of experience is. (Chaos magick looked interesting at one point, but it got bogged down in its own ideas about "beliefs", and never really fulfilled its initial promise I think.) I think the deeper ideas in this subreddit have the potential to connect these two things together, while avoiding the arrogance and snobbery that plagues the followers of other approaches.

I do however believe that alternate realities do exist and that eventually when technology permits, we might actually be able to jump and record events in other realities.

I have to say, I don't think that will ever happen, in an objective way, if you're imagining something like portals opening and people walking between places - unless you're thinking of Contact (you have an experience and come back, but physically you went nowhere and there's no trace in "this" reality). I don't think realities are "places" at all really, except (using the bad metaphor) in the sense that a video game environment is a "place".

Until an actual physicist comes out and proves or even explain how something like this could be possible...

That kinda misses the point though, maybe?

The whole underlying basis of this sort of thing is the nature of observation itself. It's more a metaphysical or philosophical issue (the nature of consciousness and our experiences of the world) than a scientific one (observing regularities in the content of our experiences of the world and building models). You can only do subjective experiments on the subjective experience, not objective ones. Science is "inside" subjective experience; you can't really do objective experiments on it. Although maybe theories like QBism might one day provide a framework to use to describe subjective viewpoints. (QBism says, in effect, we each have a "private view" of reality.)

[Excuse length, but I think it's worth spending time trying to clarity this, and see if we can reach an agreement in this area.]

Sciencing the Shit Out Of Reality

I agree with this, but then if something can't actually be recorded and measured, how do you know you are really experiencing it?

You are "really experiencing" everything that you experience - it's your interpretation of it that's up for grabs. But interpretations are essentially connective fictions anyway...

We have to be careful here: many popular science enthusiasts have reversed the idea in their thinking of what lies behind the process. In science, observations are primary; they are the only thing that is "real". The conceptual frameworks that we use to link those observations, are constructed narratives.

• Observations dictate what models are valid.
• Models do not dictate what observations are valid.

Science does not seek to find what is true. It's basically an endeavour to find useful descriptions which have predictive power. As a result, it limits itself to:

• Observed regularities - i.e. subjectively experienced patterns which noticeably repeat and are relatively easy to distinguish.
• Observations which leave a trace which can itself be repeatedly observed later, by multiple observers.
• Observations which can be captured as descriptions - in practice, this restricts us to visual observations as the end result.

And there is further filtering:

• Observations which can be defined in terms of presently available conceptual frameworks - this has narrowing effect, and can lead people to take the view that if something doesn't fall within the current framework, it is not "possible".
• Observations which be intersubjectively agreed upon - this has the effect of being lowest common denominator, in the sense that any observer-dependent aspects of reality are filtered out. By definition, only the most basic common aspects of the world experience can be included.

All together, this means that science does not deal with reality or the world as it is or that which is experienced - it's dealing with a very specific subset and for a very specific purpose. Science's purpose is calculation rather than understanding or meaning. It is very good at that - but it's important not to confuse it with "how things work or what things are".

Experiencing vs Really Experiencing

And so, returning to your question:

if something can't actually be recorded and measured, how do you know you are really experiencing it?

You know you are experiencing it, because you are experiencing it - it is directly and immediately true. In fact, observations are the only things that ever truly "happen". On the other hand, you cannot know if you have experienced something in the past. Mainly because there is no such thing as "the past". All you can ever do is have an experience, now, of a shadow-sensory object that you call "a memory". This applies even to what you see around you in the world. It is an act of "narrative faith" to assume the world is stable, and that external records are trustworthy as regards indicating a thing we call the past. That we tend to trust the "world's memory" more than our "personal memory" - even though both are merely present moment subjective experiences which arise in your mind which, upon investigation, basically come from "nowhere" - is a matter of convention and hope, and not much more.

The Mandela Effect & Friends

Well, let me be upfront and say I'm not a particular fan of the discussions which hang off that whole Berents#in Bears thing. As you rightly point out, practically speaking it would be very difficult to discern whether one's "personal memory" has shifted, or if the "world memory" has shifted. All you can be certain of, is that there is a discrepancy between the two. And since it's already happened, there's no much point in theorising about the cause. Nothing is "more likely" than another thing, if you can't test it. We are really just saying "seems more plausible to me", which is different. If you wanted to truly test for certain whether there is some sort of effect, you would have to attempt to bring it about deliberately, and observe the results. In short, you would have to perform an experiment.

Subjective Experimentation

I really don't think a human could DJ without some kind of technology involved, its all made up but its still neat to read.

So, the way to find out whether that was true or not, would be to conduct an experiment and see what effects arose, right?

However, the in-built problem with this would be that you might only ever be able to prove it to yourself. The very nature of an experiment where you attempt to shift your experience of reality, would be that it might not be open to intersubjective study. Of particular difficulty is that it's inherently the case that there is no mechanism to study. If the whole of reality shifts a little, then there is no "one part" which cab be observed pushing against "another part". The end result is always going to be of the form:

• Perform some mental or physical act.
• Observe whether the world as it is now, differs from the world as it was (as I recall it).

But such a change in the world takes the form:

• World Memory =/= Personal Memory

It is never possible to tell whether the World Memory changed state such that it's now as I desired it to be, or if my Personal Memory changed state such that it seems that the world shifted towards my desire. However... That doesn't matter, practically speaking.

Thinking More About Doing

In terms of not believing that thought (really: intention) can shift the world, you might try raising your arm. Then really pay attention to what you experiencing happening when you do this. How, exactly, do you change the position of your arm? (Really do this, it's quite informative.)

Do you feel yourself "using your brain" to do it? How did people lift their arms before brains were discovered?

In fact: aren't brains actually just a subjective observation? In other words, doesn't it seem that brains are inside experience, and they do not cause it? If I had a lucid dream where I was being operated on, and surgeons were prodding my brain and then my arm was moving - in what sense would my experience of seeing the surgeons' actions be linked to my subsequent experience of arm movement?

You get the idea.

POST: I think that it is possible to jump dimensions without knowing it for a long time, if ever.

If we were to take the view that our experiences consist entirely of "aspects of ourselves", this would mean that every time we had a change of state the (apparent) world would shift a little. "Jumping" is then just a knowingly deliberate and specific version of something that is in fact happening constantly, to some extent. Ponders: if we are always in effect exploring our own minds, what does it mean to "make our minds up"?

That is interesting. Do you then think that it is possible that we have the power to shape reality, albeit subconsciously? It seems unlikely, but perhaps it is possible.

It's an important question, and one that can't really be answered by thinking it out, I'd say. Since reality for us is our experiences - any theories we have are also experiences (of thinking) - it's not like we can ever get outside of it and do experiments on it; there is no "outside" to experience. So I think all you can do is conduct personal experiments, and see how your experience of the world changes as a result, and infer things from that. Really, that's what this subreddit is about. Other places discuss the philosophy of experience (/r/onierosophy) or report spontaneous unusual experiences (/r/glitch_in_the_matrix), here the idea is that you don't believe anything in particular, you explore things for yourself by deliberate, direct experimentation and see what happens. The overarching concept is that is that of "active metaphors", which is to say that the metaphors you adopt tend to shape your experiences "as if" they were true, and soften the paths of change in that direction. It is a "content agnostic" view, which says there is no fundamental truth, there is just experiences "as if" things were true. How far can that go? Well, finding that out is the source of the adventure!

That's where things like the Two Glasses Exercise come in: simple ways to check for yourself whether an apparently non-causal change can be made, by pattern shifting alone.

Q1: About a week ago I noticed that there was a path of bricks across a grass lawn at the local university that I don't think was there, but I very well could have just not noticed it until now.
Heh. That is what you are supposed to think. These things just sneak into reality. I have an entire city reshaping itself (or being reshaped) all around me. Land sort of just grows when you are not looking, but it comes with a history. Roads widen, shrubberies show up, etc. Campuses are especially suspect for me. Also look for roads which used to be straight but are now crooked and signs of places where the ground has risen.

It is true, things do apparently "sneak". However, I would recommend that people be reasonably mindful when it comes to this: when we step back and allow things to autofill with less direction, it does become more dreamlike, but with that there's a temptation people have to think that it is being done or managed externally. This becomes a self-fulfilling path, generating "as if" evidence for itself, that gets some people into trouble; they got lost in it for a while. Fortunately it doesn't take much experimentation to realise that it's a "dumb" patterning process, effectively an "autocomplete" using currently active elements, that can be directed by intention.

Some of it is automatic. Some of it is being intentionally manipulated.

Uh-huh, right. And recognising the intentional part, doing it knowingly, is what's important (and makes it clearer, though experience, the nature of the experience more generally). Oh, I did mean to say, that I like this wording very much:

Land sort of just grows when you are not looking, but it comes with a history.

I'd maybe tweak it up to say: "but it comes with an apparent history" - which is revealed in subsequent experiences "about" its past, although these experience take place in the ongoing present.

Yeah. That is actually really important. It turns out that the present is not caused by the past. Rather, whatever present you are in at any given moment causes its own past.

You might phrase it as: the story is discovered as you go along, at the moment of discovery, implied by the current patterns.

For example, (0) a new tree appears in my garden. (1) I go to examine it, it seems large and old. (2) I ask the neighbours about it, it's always been there, they say, and rumour has it the tree was planted by the guy who built the house. (3) I look up old photographs of the house, and there's one of the original owner planting it. It seems like I've moved to a "new reality" where a tree has been there for 100 years. In actual fact, this history is 'created', observation by observation, as I uncover it: observations 1, 2, 3. First, there was just one observation 0, the new tree. That was the only change. However, my subsequent observations must be coherent with what came before, hence the apparent history I uncover, as the observations accumulate. In other words, there was no defined history until I went looking for it.

...

...Well, if it that's a narrative that you enjoy and find meaningful, then you're right to pursue it. (And I'd apply that view to everyone. "There are no answers, only choices.")

Personally though - inevitably our perspectives will differ here, but that is of course part of the fun - I don't think "space-time" needs healed, because it is not a thing. There is an argument for helping people "heal" though, in terms of resolving difficulties and so on (from which improvements in "space-time" generally follow).

...

A1: What is reality? Is it a piece of paper? Fold it. What is reality? Is it clay? Shape it. You have the ability to form reality around you, you do it all the time. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every time you touch the water, a wave will form. Touch life with the intent to shape the wave you want to see.

"Go shape yourself!"

POST: Has anyone noticed BIG changes? Changes that can't really be explained away because they are too BIG?

Perhaps the trick with so-called dimensional jumping is to retain your memory after a particular jump?

Keeping one bit of the world fixed, while the rest changes. Really, we never experience "the past", right? Rather, we just have observations (discoveries and thoughts) which are "about" the past, which imply a history but are not a history. Basically, anything other than what we directly observe is a fictional narrative that connects the dots. The past exists as a story, not as a place as such.

There's a lot of established science and common sense saying that this is "all in our heads".

Although they don't go far enough, perhaps. It really is in our heads - all of it, not just any quirky observations that don't match. Plot Twist - Our heads are in our heads too. But at same time we, don't really have a head, so much as a "head" - i.e. all of our heads are conceptual.

Funny, that; you've just described my concept of God and the universe.

Well, that's pretty much where we get to, isn't it? Quite excitingly, I think. Right this very moment, you can easily notice that what you actually experience yourself being, is a "big open unbounded space that is aware". Within this space, sensations and perceptions arise: your body and the world. Meanwhile, all possible experiences are "dissolve into the background" of this space: the universe. So "the universe" becomes all the content dissolved inside you. You-as-the-space are "God". It just so happens that right now you are "taking on the shape of" a particular experience, which is being-a-person-in-the-world. (More accurately: being-a-universe-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.)

The main step forward, I say, is to stop confusing the current content of experience with the true nature of experiencing. Does that fit in with your take on things?

Q1: Had a vision, once. Pretty ordinary circumstances: hanging out in my then-apartment with a friend, smoked about half a joint which to me was about the equivalent of drinking a Pepsi in terms of effect, and suddenly saw Everything. Needless to say, I can't "remember" it, couldn't even at the time, because what I perceived was way too "big" to be contained in the handful of meat I use as a brain. But I had the sense of infinite conduits, pathways, going in infinite directions and tangling in exquisite chaos, and things zipping along those pathways in seemingly no order whatsoever, all of it forming a great pattern that, regardless of the apparent chaos, made absolute sense (from a Different Point Of View) and, just generally speaking, held the connotation of positive intent. And I could sit around all day and analyze and dissect this, but in the end, the underlying impression - that there is a Reason and a Purpose, and that it is generally Good - is really all I need to be going on with, until whatever time I hit level cap and head on Home. As close as I can figure it, the Meaning Of Life is simply to live, and to write the best story I can with my life, to play the best possible game according to whatever rules I choose to play by, to learn something from it all and have the best time I can. S'good enough for me.

And I could sit around all day and analyze and dissect this, but...

That's the thing with direct knowledge, right enough. All that I'd add is that purpose (with a small "p") is pretty adjustable; Purpose (capital "p") is a bit different, but it's a matter of perspective. We are not any particular thing, I think, but we can be, for a while, and we can go with that or not - curiosity would tend to dictate going along with it, mostly.

But that's sort of the point. We all have goals, objectives, rules we live by and things we want to accomplish... that's part of the point of being human. But from that different perspective - from the outside looking in - the things we think of as rules and the things we think of as important are meaningless. The true Purpose is one we can't know or understand from the perspective of meat-bodies.

Well, the real issue is that you can't tell whether the apparent "True Purpose" is just another bit of patterning, right?

If you "surrender" you'll soon find that your body, mind and world move spontaneously by themselves, as if along a pre-made path. However, it is not necessarily true that this is purposeful in some greater sense. It tends to give you situations that result in an unwinding of accumulate baggage, but if you tackle that directly then you circumvent this, and it changes. If you change yourself (re-pattern the world), or specifically intend some experiences, your direction and "Purpose" shifts also. I think it would be a mistake for people to (for instance) live their life according to "God's Plan" as if it were given to them from, or defined from, outside. "God's Plan" seems to me to be the spontaneous unfolding of the current condition you are in, towards a state of resolution, within the boundaries of certain restrictions - the very restrictions that this subreddit discusses temporarily suspending to allow for faster change, in fact. To say we can't understand or know our current path, is just to say that we don't experience moments that we are not currently experiencing within a 3D-immersive perspective. That doesn't mean it is "special" or fixed, it just means it is not habitually seen (although as you point out, it can be perceived metaphorically sometimes). It is not "destined" in the same way as being our true fate; it is just the path that deterministically follows from our current state. That sense of "it's so perfect" that we get when you perceive this, is the perception of total logical coherence, not of "the way". Change the state, change the path - perfection will persist, the experience of it will shift. "The Way" is the manner in which we follow the path, not the path itself, which is totally arbitrary and flexible. But (except for what I just said) if someone feels they are on a mission or have a greater purpose, I wouldn't dissuade them of it; it's probably not a bad way to live out your days.

Yeah, see, you're... not getting what I'm saying. Which is fine, of course. Everyone has a different perspective on the universe, and all are equally accurate. But, see, even mentioning "God's Plan" as a point of reference is a null term, because we are God, and "the Plan" is both non-singular and as sensible to the human meat brain as two plus four equals watermelon.

Maybe not! Let's try though. Rip this apart:

Okay, I used "God's Plan" in quotes because, yes, we are God in any meaningful sense of the term. What I was trying to say is that there's nothing special about a particular plan, and that even if I don't consciously know the path, it is nevertheless a result of all the intentions I have had, knowingly and unknowably, gradually unwinding. Forgetting about brains for the moment, this is simply a matter of perspective, wouldn't you agree?

As I walk over to the fridge to grab a beer, my attention is on the music playing in the other room - I even forget that I'm going to the kitchen to get a drink. Soon enough, the song ends, and I find I'm back in my chair, looking at this screen. The intention to have a beer in my hand at the computer was fulfilled, even though I forgot the plan. Even though I wasn't aware of the movements happening; even though I never have known the details of how some of those movements work. So, if the universe is your body, then its movement is like that. It shifts towards fulfilling your intentions, like a pattern shifting between states. Usually my attention is only on one 3D slice of it (this particular body and a region around it), but that is just a matter of focused attention rather than not being able to sense it potentially. If I widen my attention out, I see more of my "body", perhaps 4D and the "current plan" becomes clear. But the plan changes every time I create a deliberate intention. The so-called plan is really just "the 4D pattern as it is right now". It's no plan at all, really, because it was never "planned".

TL;DR: The plan isn't a plan; we are not humans; it's all about 3D vs 4D attention and experience.

Q1: I guess that falls into what I'm saying... sorta...
Then again, we're trying to discuss concepts with a language wholly unsuited for it, so "approximate" agreement is pretty noteworthy in itself.
But the whole Plan/Purpose thing that I've talked about... the Purpose isn't even anything we can know or follow. It's beyond/outside any and all human beings, so there's no way our perspective can expand enough to make it make sense. I guess it'd be closer to say "the underlying mechanics of how the universe works", because the "how" and the "why" are all part of the same thing.
But yeah, everything, everything is a matter of perspective. It's one of those Profound Universal Truths that manifests itself in such little mundane ways that the human mind doesn't quite snap to the fact that yo, dude, this is Important Shit right here. Funny, that: we can literally trick ourselves into seeing wizards and hobbits in normal-sized men using a bit of trickery of perspective, and yet overall we humans still don't get the importance of perspective. See a thing from one perspective and it's an inexplicable tangle; change your perspective, and it all falls into place.
Meanwhile, we're still bound to this universe by the languages we speak, all of which discuss being "next" to something, or above it, beside it, around it, looking up from below, looking down from above, all different perspectives, but so limiting that we - translating the universe through the languages we speak - never see that there are other perspectives as well, that go outside what we think of as "spatial awareness".

Yes indeed, verbal language is problematic - in fact, anything that results in thoughts about a topic (i.e. any sort of communication) is problematic. You can never really describe an experience, mostly you trigger a conceptual structure, occasionally you can use language to lead someone to a subjective immersive experience, but you can only do it in person, responding to cues.

...the Purpose isn't even anything we can know or follow.

Then in what way can it be said to exist? ;-)

Although I imagine I know what you're getting at, since you used the phrase "the underlying mechanics of how the universe works". The main problem is that the universe doesn't really "work" or "happen" in any particular way. There is no "process" or "mechanism" involved. As I occasionally say: thinking so leads us to focus on the content of experience, rather than the nature of experiencing. I suggest: We can examine content all we want, looking for secrets or explanation or purpose, and we might even find things that satisfy us for a while, until eventually we realise that it's just... more dream.

The fundamental reality is "what dreams are made from" rather than any one dream itself. The word "purpose" tends to imply an end-state, an ultimate goal - but there isn't one. We might say that the goal is to realise (not understand) the nature of content - and then probably forget about it. Have some adventures. Then remember again. It doesn't matter whether you take the 3D or 4D or the dimensionless background as your perspective; the content itself doesn't matter. If you have the "dimensionless" experience, you do directly sense that everything is static and eternal - and that daily life is like exploring a pre-existing memory block, recalling it moment by moment - so I suppose there is a benefit to that. The benefit it is: the search for enlightenment via experiencing ceases, and you realise the "purpose" is simply being. Resolution and progress is just the gradual dissolving of division, and there is no meaning in that, just as there is no meaning to the settling of the surface of a pool of water after it has been disturbed by a child throwing stones at a duck...

From the perspective of the Power outside "all of this", which our human meat-brains cannot understand.

Well, I'd put aside the meat-brain thing; you've never experienced one of those either. But what you're talking about, really, is faith that there is a Power external to you, right? One that has an independent intelligence and does things? I would disagree with this. (Because I don't think anything "happens" other than attention, in a specific sense of the term.)

...this could not have occurred in any universe I know or understand.

Uh-huh, but (and of course I don't know the details here) these things tend to only be a problem or amazing if you are holding onto the idea that there is stable world, sitting on a solid persistent substrate, that is external to your experience. This is not the case.

this is the universe's way of telling me that I'm on the right track.

The universe can't tell you anything. I say: it is a mistake to interpret the universe as "sending you signs" of being on the right path or whatever. All your experiences simply conform to your current "patterning". Correlations between the thoughts you have and what you sensorily encounter are common but seem amazing; but they arise from the same place and space. You can easily prove this to yourself by adopting a different frame of mind or narrative, and noticing how the world quickly seems to adopt the form of the "game" you have chosen. People who adopt the worldview of 'secret spies are everywhere and out to get me" will literally encounter a higher frequency dark-suited men happening to look in their direction while talking to their lapels. Others who adopt that of "there is an independent God who is looking out for me and sends me messages" encounter the corresponding thing. You have to actually experiment with this to truly realise it, but very quickly you discover the complete arbitrariness of the content of experience. The "patterns" you adopt shape the experiences you have. That's why I say there's no particular purpose.

(If you haven't already checked out the Kirby Surprise - appropriate name - interview on synchronicity which is linked in the sticky, you might find it interesting: here it is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-iMw9KA93U]. I disagree with his M-brane theory, but other than that, it's pretty much how it works in practical terms.)

Q1: Okay, let's stick with the software/game analogy and try different terminology. "The universe telling me I'm on the right track" can also be defined as programming feedback, debugging and error messages. If $x != 0 return error(). If $x == 0 return "OK". Any & every programmer in the universe has written statements like these.
The purpose of such a debugging statement is to let the programmer know what the program is doing, and alert the programmer in a way that's easy to spot & interpret. Weirdness and coincidences might in fact serve the same purpose.
I personally find it very interesting that at a time when I have been seriously investigating both relocating on a physical level to a new place and dimensional shifting, I'm now suddenly experiencing odd and unlikely events that happen to ding both of these items in sensitive spots. I'm not particularly surprised, because this has always been the way my life has worked: weird coincidences, random strokes of luck, dramatic foreshadowing as precisely drawn as in a book - this is my "normal", and always has been. Other people's lives clearly work differently, but this is mine.
ETA: one more twist on that analogy: That programming statement I wrote 3 paragraphs up?
if $x != 0 {return error();}
if $x == 0 {return "OK";}
In the language I'm pseudo-using, there is another possible case: in which $x is null. In which case it would be interpreted as equalling zero (and return "OK") but in fact not be equal to zero (and should have returned an error).
That's sloppy programming.
That's a glitch in the matrix.
:D

Man, I absolutely hate the software/game metaphor! (I speak as an ex-programmer. Perhaps it just gives me flashbacks of tedium!)

Of course, I agree that "The Power" is Me, but you are still talking as if this power (which is me) is too big to fit inside... me. Which makes it sound like you suggesting something along the lines that "you" programmed the game deliberately, took on a character role as a meat-brain within the game, and are now being "guided" by the programming you previously set up?

I tend towards a simpler notion which doesn't involve any activity at all. Namely: that all experience appears in the mind, that any ideas and narrative structures you have in mind are "overlaid" upon experience, and that this "dumb" setup inevitably leads to coincidence, foreshadowing, luck, corresponding to this. If, dissolved within our "conscious perceptual space" (what we truly are), is an Infinite Grid of All Possible Moments, then the patterns we are holding in mind "filter" that grid by association, such that only the moments that fit the those patterns are active. This inevitably means that what we have "in mind" will appear in both thoughts and events. You could certainly reinterpret that as form of "programming" I suppose - defining a pattern - although it's static so there's no sense of the universe being "run". But the essence I guess is: change the narrative, change the experience... which means that:

the only power we have, is the power to think/imagine.

But, y'know, it's all one metaphor vs another - and the devious trick of this setup is that whatever metaphor you hold in mind, you will have experiences which correspond to it. (Hence the notion of "active metaphors" in the sidebar.) If you look at the world as software, try to insert some new subroutines, it will literally start behaving like that's how things work. If you spend a lot of time contemplating an Entity God, he'll probably start helping you out.

The Power is me. I am the Power. But I can't have actual awareness of that...

I'd say you can, but you can't do it at the same time that you are aware of bodily sensations and a room around you. But then, neither can you be stood up whilst also being sat down. It's just about not being able to be in two states at the same time. That's not really a meat-brain restriction as such. Even if you can't directly experience it in an ongoing way in everyday life directly, at least we can infer it from your own intentional results, and know it intellectually as a result - and operate from that.

Level 49 hobbit wanderer, seeking fellowship, please send /tell.

Haha, good. As far as the universe being pre-programmed, I'd say the world started off more in the way a dream begins: hypnagogia fragments, gradually coalescing into a scene, and then a 3D-immersive environment. There's no "plan" or design, it unfolds according to whatever is implied by previous experiences - unless you deliberately intend a redirection.

Your idea of a "simpler notion" makes my head hurt. :)

Yeah, I do realise that my "simpler notion" isn't as immediately accessible, although it is very simplifying and makes it far clearer how to create change. (The edited basic version is here: The Patterning of Experience.) It involves throwing away notions of the world being a "place" and of you being in any sense a "person", but it gets more directly to your actual experience as it is right now, using the most basic intelligible metaphor, and let you interact at that level.

The changes I'm trying to prompt are both necessary, proper, and working. Even though not quite in a way I would expect or want.

Yes. Really, everything is taken into account. It's inherently the case that you can't "pre-experience" an experience in order to know it in advance - because if you do, then that's actually the experience. You can get what you want, but unless you complete go back to void and re-seed the world, you can't pre-know or define the path.

Every single one of us experiences the universe differently, and it's a mistake for any of us to assume another person can or should share our own experience.

Agreed. Kinda my overall view, that: there is no built in division or structure to the world ("all possible patterns are available"), but by our intentional mental and physical acts we gradually define such arrangements. The world then behaves "as if" whatever we think is actually the case. Your "big ME, little me" experience is one of the available options. No option is "right" or fundamentally true, they are just different. The only thing that is fundamentally true is: there is a me of some sort (which I can never see), and it is having an experience. Everything else is up for grabs. Or even not up for grabs, if that's the way you think!

But instead we just dance around in circles with imperfect and contradictory metaphors . . .

Very well put. Although I'd emphasise the stinger which is: the metaphors we pursue tend to be reflected in our personal experience, which means that we always seem to be right. I think that's the ingredient which makes agreement about specific content challenging; but we can agree "that there is an experience" and "that we are aware". And if we know that content behaves in that subjectively flexible way, we can avoid falling into the trap of arguing about the "right way" to describe things.

The problem with thinking: just obviously, a thought is an object which appears inside experience, and made from consciousness. So it can never capture or describe experiencing, or consciousness - in the same way that (metaphor reuse alert), although you can make shapes out of sand which duplicate to other shapes made out of sand, you can never make a sand-shape which captures sand itself, or the sandbox as a whole. Sand just "is" sand; the sandbox "is" all the shapes made of sand.

Q1: Of course we always seem to be right; that's because all the possible answers are equally correct. Which makes no sense within the established confines of the sensible universe, but is nevertheless true... once you get outside the confines of consciousness to the perspective from which you can describe it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need some Advil and coffee; as always, discussing this topic has caused me to imagine myself into the actualization of the metaphor of a literal headache.

Enjoy your imaginary medication/beverage combo! I hope it has the desired imaginary effect. I imagine that it will. Cheers for now...

...

Maybe we only notice the little things because they are little things, because they're small enough to be "possible" . . . Maybe the big shit happens all the time.

That's a great comment and I forgot to respond to it at the time. Retaining a "personal memory pattern" that persists when the "world pattern" shifts is a key challenge. After all, they are both part of the same larger overall pattern of "everything"; the whole thing shifts as one usually, as a coherent whole. So, you might say that performing a change deliberately is more than anything an assertion to remember. The act we perform is almost like a marker to which we attach the "how it was before" memory, so that it remains accessible via association.

In fact, the total pattern might be sloshing about constantly, but so long as it does so self-consistently, the apparent world and the apparent personal past tend to stay in alignment. Only if you are "holding onto" a particular aspect of this, does it get held steady, despite other changes. In "jumping", then, we try to detach from the world but not from the seed to which is attached our conceptual self and all tis memories. Probably all jumps are successful to some extent, it's just a case of the extent to which the old state remains. Total shift: only new-state memory so no apparent change. No shift: only old-state memory and so no apparent change.

(pre-coffee mumble-mumble-mumble) but then the things we hold on to, especially old grudges and so forth, doesn't that then just keep the stuff we dislike actively with us no matter where we jump? So "forgive and forget" isn't just a hoary old maxim, it's actively an instruction on how to maximize dimensional leaping.

Agreed. In older times (interpretations of the Bible even) the notion of "forgiveness" means to wipe the slate clean in a deeper sense, to literally "release it and delete it" such that it no longer exists. In this sense it's really: "forgive equals forget". Forget it or amend it in terms of the world's memory, not our personal historical memory of "stuff what I experienced".

POST: Did the two glasses experiment. Nothing happened.

Uh-huh, nice. So the glasses technique = "plausible if very unlikely" routes, rather than immediate discontinuity, in general. And the level of plausibility depends, really, on your own patterning to date. But if you've done it with intention, you'll always get results of some sort. See what happens over the next week or so.

So, which techniques are capable of producing immediate discontinuity? I'd find it much more convincing if I could experience that rather than something that might have happened even if I did nothing.

What, exactly, are you wanting to be convinced of? (Bearing in mind that nobody's particularly interested in convincing you of anything, although everyone's happy to help you towards any specific goal you might have.)

The problem is, "wanting to be convinced" isn't a very good goal - because it's nonspecific, and it's not really a goal at all. It's like "wanting to be convinced that I can run a Marathon" rather than "wanting to complete a Marathon". You best become convinced by targeting experiencing-the-goal, not by targeting being-convinced. "Techniques", of course, aren't capable of anything. Only you are. Techniques are just a path for your intention to be directed along. Which means a certain focus and commitment. It's relatively easy to get what you want through apparently "plausible if very unlikely" routes. But if what you are desiring to do is break your plausibility level, as it were, then you can work on that, but you'll either have to dedicate yourself to it (rather than "want to be convinced") or let yourself got insane for a while. Again, it's not the technique that does it for you, it's you that does it, so you have to actually commit. The universe isn't like a simulation running on a computer; it doesn't do anything of you. It's more like a static list of entangled facts or a complex diagram that you are scanning your attention across, and you have the ability to edit it.

Me, World, Experience

I want to know what kind of world I live in.

This is the crux of it, then. Really, I would suggest starting there, and working outwards from that. And I'd say it's better to phrase it something like this though, since it assumes less:

• What, exactly, is the nature of my current experience?
• By extension, what is the nature of "me" and "the world"?

That's something that can be established by direct attention. You can fairly straightforwardly satisfy yourself that everything you experience appears in your "mind" (although that's not really a very good word for it since it's not a personal mind), including any thoughts about a supposed external world. You can't think your way to this though, since you'll just keep going round the same conceptual frameworks; you have to directly perceive it to be the case, in the moment.

Cause, Effect, Experiment

I learn nothing via a "plausible if very unlikely" route.

It can be a slight Catch-22, this, because there's an element of having to soften up your own patterning in order to have more unusual intentional experiences - which in turn is effectively a widening of what counts as "plausible if very unlikely". And this applies to perceiving your actual experience too: you have to assert it in order to have the corresponding experience. It's a little like being a shape-shifter:

• If you were a shape-shifter, how would you describe the process of shape-shifting? You would just "become" the new shape; it's all you, so there's no one part causing the other part. Continuing with this: how would you work out you were a shape-shifter? The only way would be... to shift your shape. There would be no evidence of you being a shape-shifter between shiftings. Intention and deciding and all that, have similar problems: you reveal them by becoming them.

In other words, the more rule-breaking you want your experiences to be, the more you have to break yourself, or (and this is where detachment comes in) you temporarily suspend yourself in terms of patterning. The traditional way to prove the flexibility of experience it the same way as is used for all experimentation: repetition. Performing an intentional act and having corresponding results is the only way to establish a causal link.

Raise your arm now. How do you know that your arm wouldn't have lifted up in any case? How, exactly, do you go about raising your arm anyway? Do you really cause it in a particular way that you can detect, other than just "wanting" it to happen?

Maybe your arm is just part of the external world and you just assume it is "yours" and under your control because it is apparently nearer to where you think of yourself as being centred. Actually, your arm and the rest of your body are moving by themselves beyond your control, and the same applies to the thought that you do it. How could you tell the difference?

You get the idea: you can't answer these questions, except by repeating the experiment again and noticing a correlation between "asking" for the movement and "receiving" it subsequently.

Plan of Attack

So, unless you want to dedicate yourself to a bit of a blind reformatting (which you can do: it's essentially like meditation but with persistent intention) I'd suggest a plan of attack of this form:

• Spend time directly investigating the nature of your experience, to establish that it is entirely within "a" mind, and that you are "a" mind and not any of the content which appears within it.
• Perform the owl exercise for different subjects, allowing intervals between each experiment, see what appears in your experience subsequently. Repeat.
• Perform the two glasses exercises for different personal situations, allowing intervals between each experiment, see what appears in your experience subsequently. Repeat.

In other words, treat it as a proper study and conduct a structured investigation. Otherwise, through a lack of understanding, you can end up asking the philosophical idealism equivalent of:

• "If everything is really made from atoms, that means the world is mostly empty space, so how come I can't walk through walls?"

Maybe they've been encountering pictures of owls on the Web and elsewhere regularly all along.

I can't help but notice that you're thinking about this, rather than actually doing it. Either do the experiment, or don't bother. Without the experiment, you are completely uninformed. You're just sloshing about in your own thoughts. When the owl exercise kicks in, it becomes pretty obvious that it goes beyond confirmation bias. The reason it's dubbed The Owls Of Eternity™ is as a bit of fun, but it's relevant because the persuasiveness of it is that owls apparently come to you as events, and as encounters which suggest retroactive change. The progression of plausibility develops something like this:

• conf. bias => coincidence => synchronicity => "manifestation" => shifting => "jumping"

And the apparent location of the encounters like this:

• internal => external => eternal

The extended pattern thing, that's just what seems to happen, but anyone doing the exercise is perfectly able to be more specific in their intention and to decide what counts and what doesn't. Remember, the point of that exercise is simply a bit of fun to demonstrate (without having to put any effort in) the pattern-based nature of experience in a way that shows it's not simply selection from pre-existing scenes. Or at least, not pre-existing scenes in 3D; you could describe it as selection from a 4D environment. With that experience under your belt, you've got a flavour of the thing, and it's easy enough for you to design your own rigorous experiment if you like. Again though, nobody can prove anything to you in this area, just as, for instance, nobody can prove to you that you can be awake in your dreams ("lucid dreaming"), or that there's such a thing as experiencing oneness ("enlightenment"). Or that it's possible for you to train up and run the marathon. If you want to explore how your world works, then you'll have to conduct the investigation yourself. Nobody can do it for you.

In other words: Do it, or don't do it, but if you don't do it, there's no point in discussing it.

...

That doesn't sound like jumping to another dimension to me. It sounds more like The Secret.

Well, it's not that. It more like an umbrella term for "applied philosophical idealism" to force 'glitches' via pattern-shifting. I guess: read the links in the sticky post.

[This] revolve[s] around the notion that physical reality can be manipulated by the mind because it is a construct of the mind.

Pretty much - although exactly what we mean by those terms matters; strictly speaking there is no physical reality as usually thought of, and the word "construct" implies a separation that isn't there. You might see "patterning" as the generalised idea behind all experience. From moving your arm to changing the world, it's all the same. It's a ground-up account. For instance, here, the idea that the world is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" is pretty much thrown away. Space and time arise with experience and not outside of it. In this sense, this is a bit like "magick" but rooted in the philosophy of, say, George Berkeley's Three Dialogues, Kant's transcendental idealism, and the non-duality traditions. An applied metaphysics that deals with a personal subjective slice of the world, a private copy within you. Meanwhile, the Law of Attraction (attracted from where, how?) and The Secret (worse) are basically crap magick, poorly applied and without a properly defined worldview. They do have the advantage that you don't need to flip your world around to think about them; but they have the disadvantage of not really making sense or working very well as described.

POST: Has anyone experienced this?

[POST]

Detaching, meditating, reflecting have been regular events in my awareness these past weeks.
These past days, something interesting showed up. I've been losing my sense of 'location' during random times throughout the day and night.
It is not lethargy or anything, I eat well and work out. During those few seconds of this phenomenon, it is like everything feels automatic. I apologize if this sounds pretty vague, but since it is so unique, I've nothing to compare it too. Please feel free to ask questions, to help me better gauge this.

[END OF POST]

The feeling of being everywhere in the current experience while being nowhere in particular?

Q1: Well it's not like that 'infinite conciousness-nirvana-Buddha' thing. At least, it doesn't match up with what I imagine infinite conciousness to be.
But like. . .you know how you get your feedback that your body is like this - that your hand is resting there (hoping this doesn't sound confusing); I've been losing my 'location' when I'm not feeling the usual feedback. The '3D hologram experience' becomes a unified location. Like one thing. As if there's no divident between the cloud in the sky and my smallest toes. Rather than being the avatar of my body, it's like being an avatar of experience itself, but this avatar has only had seconds of it at 3-4 times every 24hrs frequency.
EDIT: Wow, this shit is weirder than I realized. But that's the best I can describe it to be.

What you describe is what I mean, I think. It is like you used to be located, say "here, behind my eyes" while your hand was "over there", but now the whole thing is "you, here"?

The sense of location you usually have is just that: a sense of location. You are always the whole experience even when you have that. What's happened is, that sensation is occasionally fading out. It's a little like having had a tense neck for your whole life, and so always being more aware of that location and seeing other things as relative to that. One day, your neck relaxes, and that artificial set of relations falls away.

Assuming that's what you are describing...

Basically, I'd forget all esoteric descriptions of this; they add another level of abstraction and complication I think, usually written by people who haven't had the experience. I see it pretty simply: if you allow your experience to relax, you attention naturally opens out (or dissolves) and you become, or recognise that you always were, "the full imagination room".

POST: Both methods

Remember, you are not meant to be "making it happen". That part happens automatically. It's a "dumb" patterning mechanism. So doing multiple method simultaneously, and suggesting different possible paths - that's beyond your remit. Your job is simply to make a firm decision about what your target state is, perform an exercise (which activates that target pattern so it's overlaid on subsequent experiences), and then don't interfere. Because the moment you do the exercise is the moment the change is made - your new deterministic trajectory is laid out before you - and then it's just a matter of waiting for the corresponding experiences to be encountered.

...Okay, firstly remember that what matters is here is that you know what it is you want - you are not "sending a message to the universe" or anything like that. What you are doing is, finding the target state (which already exists) and connecting to it and shifting to it. Which gives you an idea of how to word things: "I would like a better job" is the description of a state where you would like a better job (i.e. don't have one). "I have a great job" is the name of a state where you have that job. What is important though, is that you pause and actually do access that state. This isn't difficult, mostly people do it automatically, but it's worth being conscious of it. Just pause now and think of something or someone you desire, but think of them being with you and what that would be like. When I say "think of", I mean in the sense of pausing and waiting for the feeling-sensation that would go with having them.

Now, this is something that comes to you, not something that you create. Typically this felt-sense appears in the mid-area of your body. Having this is the difference between just making images in your had, and actually having connected to the target state. All techniques are really based on accessing the target state in this way, and then manipulating it into being the dominant contributor to you experience going forward. So for the Two Glasses Exercise, if someone was unemployed but wanted their dream job, their labels might say something like "unemployed" and "dream job". Or if it were a specific job, then: "journalist". The "contemplation" part of the exercise is meant to encourage you to pause and connect to how those situations feel, to the states they represent. This is why you don't need to write out a big description; the words are merely handles which you attach to the actual states.

Hopefully you can see that it doesn't matter how other people feel about you, or even where things supposedly are in the world. This is all about states which lead to experiences. In the same way as there are no people, places or objects behind the screen of your TV, there are no external people, places or objects behind the 3D-immersive sensory experience you are currently having about being-a-person-in-a-world.

In and of itself, I don't think passing doubt or belief are important, except in the sense that you attend to them and end up embracing the doubtful view (but that is what people tend to do). For the duration of an exercise, you have to - if not believe, then commit. Just like, I dunno, if you were lifting weights but didn't really think it was possible, you would even really dedicate yourself to it - you wouldn't fully intend the result.

The glasses exercise to some extent misdirects you with its form obviously being unrelated to the situation and outcome, so that you neither believe nor disbelieve, you just do it without really thinking it through, and probably don't give it much thought. That's why it's a good demo. Once you have given it critical thought, however, you likely need to persuade yourself of a model that goes with the exercise, or go for a 'surrender' approach (accept that "the act is the fact"), so that you can commit again. Although I'd say: I've you've read Goddard and stuff on patterning, it should be easier now to see it as "state anchoring and triggering" in an "imagination space", perhaps?

If you can take all that on board, think of this moment as your super-flexible staring point, then take it from there - that's probably the way around this.

This is probably a dumb questions, but what about weed and doing the exercises? If only for the complete forgetfulness, it's hard to interfere when you can't remember even doing it :P

Haha, well I've never tried it, so feel free to experiment! You don't really need to forget; you just need to not interfere and so end up re-intending things. It's actually pretty robust if you do the exercise with full commitment; after all, it is an actual state change.

POST: The question every newbie asks

Dimensions are really a metaphor for changing your state. A radically changed state results in an experience like that of changing worlds: facts shift. Your experiences are the structure of mind (there is nothing beyond mind: try and find something that is!) and so all changes are a restructuring of the mind really, it's just a matter of how deep and fundamental the changes are.

Ah so that's why you can't go back.

Right. If you really did return to the precisely the original state, it wouldn't be much use to you - things would play out in exactly the same way (because the subsequent experiential path is the state). Plus it would be a sort of suicide, in a way.

The true original state is the perfect universe.
All imperfect worlds are "holographic projections" (metaphorically speaking, from the perfect world or universe.
Hence the true goal IS a return to the original state.
One may ask why did we ever choose to leave the original state.

Surely the universe is always perfect? There's nothing necessarily special about the resolved state where no patterns are activated - the state of undivided wholeness. "Eventually" it has to become divided again - in quotes because this is all "before" time and therefore eternal. And in truth, it is never really divided, because it is always one thing "taking on the shape of" an experience of division. So I'd tend to say that "goals" are human concepts, and the universe (or, consciousness + patterns) has no goal really, not in the sense of a considered aim, other than the tendency to resolve itself, and then become unresolved, and so on, from a strictly personal perspective.

POST: What if

I think: the simulation concept is just how modern-day folk get their heads around the fact that there is no solid world behind the images, sounds, and textures of everyday life - and that intention is global rather than local. (It does more than just move your arms.)

It's all imagination. The concept behind "jumping" is pretty much that you are changing the "world-pattern" to a desired state - which is similar to the concept of "changing a line of code" or "updating a data structure". It all amounts to: updating facts, and subsequent experiences being in line with the new facts. The problem with the simulation metaphor, though, is that it tends to encourage you to think that there is something "running" the simulation, that you are "in" something, and that other events are "happening" other than your present experience.

Are the people arround me are just philosophical zombies or are they experiencing life like me?

They're just images, but then so is the person you assume yourself to be. No person ever experienced anything - just as no sound ever experienced music - although as consciousness you might have "person-formatted" experiences.

It goes something like this -

What you are is an "open conscious space" which has "taken on the shape of" an experience, the experience of being-a-world-from-the-perpective-of-a-person, as a strand of thought. This means that the world is not to be viewed as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", but rather a "resource", a toy box of available patterns from which you-as-conscious-space select facts, and therefore experiences. In effect, you have a private copy of the world. This gives us: that you are not a person either, that all apparent people are a continuous part of the environment or world-pattern, and that you are experiencing being everyone right now, in a sense. Which leads us to: Are there no other consciousnesses, and if so do they share worlds? Well, there is only one consciousness (because it is "before" division, location and time), but for convenience we might think of there being '"parallel-simultaneous" experiences, each a copy of the world, not sharing a space but sharing a resource. A sort of contextual overlap.

If that seems to dodge the question, then I suppose it does: it's one of those "does not apply" things. You could always experiment with adopting the concept of "all people are aspects of me" for a while, then adopting "all people are separate individuals" for a while, and noticing how that shapes your experiences. It's more informative than trying to work through it in thought, since we hit the hurdle with it: since time and space are part of experiences rather than the context in which they arise, and thoughts are experiences, it is not possible to think beyond your own conscious space in its current format.

Thanks for this detailed reply, I tried to observe if people behave autonomous and came to the conclusion that they do, only didn't I take into account that my beliefs format my observation. I also paid attention to (inanimate) little details, and even the smallest things like stains or bits of dust seem to be filled in the moment I step into a room, which is quite astonishing it's somehow hard to put into words but sometimes I think if everything is just in mind how come that even the littlest changes get "saved"?

Well, I wouldn't say "just" in mind really, that sounds a bit dismissive! ;-)

The mind has no resolution; things aren't stored as data, like in a computer. If you think of each "fact" of as an unbounded pattern, then the current state of the world is the combination of all patterns. What resolution do patterns have? None. It doesn't matter how closely you look, you always see... more pattern. Because there is no resolution, there is no limit to how much complexity can be "stored" or "dissolved into" the same space. Is there a limit to how many of those patterns I could stack up? No, because the result is always one pattern. As for "saved" it's better maybe to say that things become "fixed" by observation; they become "defined". The whole landscape of patterns is already there, the relative contributions shifting around somewhat as you intend and change your views, but when you make an observation then that particular aspect becomes a "fact" and does not shift so easily anymore; its intensity and its relative contribution is heightened.

So, we have that:

• There is no resolution limit; there is no granularity involved.
• There is no "saving" in the sense of adding a piece of data into a storage facility; the entire world-pattern always exists and is eternal.
• What does happen is that the relative contributions of the component patterns varies (the relative intensity of "facts").
• When an observation is made, that "defines" or "fixes" that pattern, such that it becomes an observed fact or certainty; it has a very bright relative contribution as a fact.
• Intense patterns are not necessarily irrevocably factual; their intensity can be reduced again however it rarely occurs to people to try, since they seem so certain.
• The beliefs you have adopted are also effectively high-contributing patterns - "minor facts" - and so shape your experience accordingly.
• Whenever you adopt a new view of the world, the patterns associated with that view become more dominant, and your subsequent experience falls into alignment with that.
• You can create "fake observations" within the mind and have them contribute as facts just as much as a "real" observation would.

It's relatively easy to explore these ideas and test them out for yourself, to see if they are accurate or not. Spend a week "pretending" that things are a different way from how you think you know them to be, and see if things don't line up to provide you with evidence of your new approach.

Thanks again, this is a really good framework. I will think of some ideas to investigate this for me further, people seem often talk to much and philosophize about this instead of actually investigating their experience. At the moment I try to get rid of is my tinnitus, so annoying :(

Agreed absolutely. These things that are difficult to put into words and concepts are actually remarkably simple in experience. To be honest, if everyone just ran with the metaphor of the Imagination Room and explored it thoroughly, the rest of it would be self-evident. Meanwhile, your comment reminded me of this thread [POST: [META] Tinnitus and the Mandela Effect - who here has experienced both?]. Never had tinnitus but I imagine it must be very frustrating.

I now seem to understand why van Gogh cut his ear off, but it should be fixable, maybe I'll go with the two glass method since it's hard to imagine quietness when your ears are ringing the whole time.

Go for it. (Maybe knock out a couple of canvases before you do, though - just in case.)

Ear is still there :D But the tone switched from the left to the right ear and is now much more subtle, feels like it's fading.

Well, that would be a different sort of masterpiece, I suppose - and priceless in its own way!

...

Q3: it is not possible to think beyond your own conscious space in its current format.
Any links or suggestions on how I can reformat?

You can overwrite formatting, but of course you'll never get outside of your space, because: a) it has no boundaries anyway, and: b) you are it. But it's all about what can arise within it. So, you change your formatting by ceasing to continually assert the current patterns, and by imagination (which really means: to bring forth a particular pattern and have it contribute).

Helpful as ever, just one more quicky. What led you to this path?

Long-term interest in mind, perception, reality, thought, philosophy, magick, science, art and creativity. The attempt to understand them all at the same time, leads to: a) confusion, and then: b) maybe this. Hopefully some use comes of it - only you can be the judge! ;-)

POST: How to share information with alternate selves?

Not literally of course - since there is no other "you" as such - but as with anything, you can use the "as if" concept as a route to an experience, which includes the acquisition of information and skills. People have done this in different guises for a long time, I think - whether that be via "higher selves" or other apparent externalities.

I agree, I believe my "Holy Guardian Angel"/Higher Self/Spirit Guide/Silent Self is a timeless, dimensionless, all encompassing version of me

Yes - I'd clarify it by saying that, intellectually, we tend to confuse the content of our sensory experience with "us", when of course we are the larger context in which, and of which, that content appears. Which is a bit like saying that the part of the room you are looking at right now is "the room" while the room in its entirety is "the higher room".

Or better: that you are an like an origami paper fortune teller - you shape-shift yourself in order to prioritise a subset of potential content, then unfold yourself to reveal certain aspects explicitly into the senses. You are always the entirety, it's just that only one "slice" is expanded as a sensory-space experience at any one moment. That's why there's no point in looking for higher selves to "do" things for you as such; your higher self is more like the extended pattern of the world (as your present state), rather than an intelligence which can operate independently of your intelligence. You-as-context is the only intelligence.

POST: Does telling other people interfere with jumping?

Keep to a subjective perspective here, I'd say. What does telling them imply about your view of the approach, and how will you receive their responses? There's really no benefit to telling anyone, because there's no sense in which they can contribute to your effort - however, seeking confirmation or taking external comments seriously can reflect an underlying view, and affect your ability to commit fully to the intention (which is what really matters).

I kind of get this; I've discussed the possibilities with my roommates (my girlfriend, and our roommate who is pagan and who commented that the two glasses feels like a spell to him). I've told them that I am planning on trying it, but I likely won't tell them when I do.

Well, a "spell" is just an action you take where you deliberately use the fact that: although sensory experiences are apparently local, all intentions are actually global. It's better to keep things to yourself, because the extended associations that are triggered as/with your intention include whatever worldview elements you have adopted. Better to make up your own mind, and proceed from there, therefore (in my view).

Yeah. I briefly considered actually doing it with them present, but I thought quibbling over word choice might limit the results.

Right. Also, the word choices should arise naturally from your own contemplation of the two situations or states. Which is not to say that you can't 'jump together' with people - but really it is a "single-user model" (although not a personal model) and is best approached that way I think.

It does raise the question if bigger changes could be achieved with more minds agreeing as one, though. For instance, a group of people all doing the two glasses together with the intent of swaying an election?

This is not a consensus reality. (Unless you really want it to behave like one, of course, in which case you might have the corresponding "as if" experiences. I would say it's a 'personal preference', but that would probably just be confusing...)

I get that, but if several people all jump for the same (outside-of-themselves) thing, would they not end up in the same dimension? I suppose they could each jump separately as well, and end up in the same dimension. Just wondering if the jump would be easier to achieve if they were all reinforcing each others' beliefs.

Maybe if we reformat it this way...

Okay, so there is nothing outside of you; you never go anywhere, you just change state. A "dimension" is a metaphor for a more discontinuous change of state (moreso that a "shift" or "manifestation"). And to speak of "each others' beliefs" doesn't really make sense...

However - Generating for yourself the experience of gathering with a group of people, and performing an act, may provide a "plausible excuse" for you to allow changes to happen. You are creating an unusual act to which you can attach extraordinary meaning or causal power. So it can definitely be beneficial in that way. After all, what does staring into a mirror really do? Or pouring some water? An occasion to focus, to intend deliberately, knowingly.

From a comment I made earlier today:

• Act + Intention + Detachment = Shift
• Assigning a meaning to an act is what gives it causal power.
• Assigning a meaning to any experience can give it causal power.
• Habitually observed cause-effect relationships are the outcomes of previous assignments or associations.

Where an "act" can be a mental or physical act (since of course they are both the same thing: experience in the mind), and any object is also an aspect of experience. So experiencing "a group of people doing something" is as valid an "enabling act" as any other.

Something to ponder:

• How can you tell whether you have "jumped dimensions" with other people vs you have "jumped to a dimension" where the versions of those people are just very similar vs you have changed state but have left those people's patterns intact?

And: does it matter to you?

Q1: As someone who feels more sure of herself when other people agree, the validating force from outside could make the difference in whether or not a jump is successful. So it "matters" in that sense, though I suppose the argument could be made that if I need the validation from other people, I don't have a strong enough will, or can't detach enough, to jump at all. =/
(For the record, I'm trying the Owls-but-with-a-creature-that-is-not-an-owl, and haven't tried the Glasses yet.)

Actually, my underlying point is that it's all you so it doesn't matter how you go about it. What you truly are is the "container" within which all your (apparently) personal experiences appear. You have infinite will, as it were, although you have whatever "formatting" you have accumulated so far. Which is to say, we work within our own preferences and according to our dispositions.

So, gather a group of people if you want to - but preselect them according to their enthusiasm and alignment with your intentions. No point gather together aspects of yourself that are antagonists in your story of change (oh my god, what phrasing, heh, sorry). But the glasses technique doesn't depend on your belief. (In any case, belief doesn't make things happen or not, it just influences whether you actually commit and do something properly in the first place, or whether you later undo it by rewriting it.) Just follow the instructions properly, including the last point, and let it take care of itself.

The hardest part of all this is actually being okay with the fact that the change occurs in the moment you do the exercise, and that there's nothing more to be done after that. The results will come to you (or rather: you will encounter the results) without further deliberate action.

POST: Need Advice About Jumping.

Okay, so the "no effort demonstration" method is the Two Glasses Exercise which, typically, results in "plausible if unlikely" events taking place leading to your goal. That's a good way to experiment and prove to yourself that there's "something to this". One of the key ideas in this subreddit is that we don't believe anything unless we have demonstrated it to ourselves.

Going beyond that...

You should view so-called "jumping" as a change in the state, like you've updated the facts of your personal copy of the world. You aren't going anywhere, you are changing the content of your ongoing experience. There's inevitably some collateral shifting for big things, but you are not going to have to worry about overnight discontinuous changes of everyday things - parental disappearance, bad boyfriend reappearance - because you are unlikely to seek to push past the "plausibility" boundary. You might think of this as a way of "speeding up" changes in the direction of your intention. The most direct approach is to directly engage with the concept of The Imagination Room but really, for the sorts of things you are likely to want to explore you can keep it simpler - and you should treat this as an exploration, of the nature of experience, as much as a quest for results.

So, try out the glasses technique for anxiety and depression first, follow the instructions properly - including the last one (which says you should carry on with life afterwards, and let things take care of themselves, because the results will come to you). Once that has settled, perhaps repeat the exercise with your weight loss in mind. Again, this approach is for "plausible but very unlikely routes" to the change happening. Feel free to try out the mirror or patterning approaches, but I think it's better to start off with something less obviously daunting and disruptive first.

Off topic - It's amazing to me that people sometimes approach this whole thing without consideration. Imagine if there was a computer program that you could just type new facts into and they would become instantly true. Would people just start bashing away at the keyboard without having experimented to find out what the correct command syntax was? Um, yeah - me too. :-)

POST: Does Dimensional Jumping actually really work?

Why does it seem impossible?

My guess: you are thinking that the world "out there" is of the same format as your current experience, that it is all laid out in space and unfolding in time and you are exploring it. In other words, that spatial extent and unfolding change are independent properties of the world, rather than properties of experiencing. If you glance around the room now, shifting your attention around it and taking in different parts one at a time, you might say that you are selecting a "2D slice" from a 3D environment. What if the overall experience of the room was like selecting a "3D slice" from a 4D environment? And what if that 4D environment was itself a "slice" taken from an "infinite gloop"?

But none of that matters, really, if you don't try out the demo exercises and find out directly (see sidebar).

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

Be more informative?

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

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

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

Not quite yet, it seems! ;-)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: [deleted by user]

Quick answers -

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

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

Let's explore -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My thoughts are a bit abstract on this topic

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

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

Anyway -

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

Related metaphor: The Imagination Room

POST: Tried the Two glasses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Change your beliefs change your world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

Interesting ideas.

My first point on this:

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

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

Another interesting thing to look into is your idea:

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

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

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

...

I'm going to disagree completely.

I'm not sure that you are disagreeing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a precog?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

POST: The Mirror method is a trick of your mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

I love how TG completed dominated this discussion 😊

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

POST: Question, Opinions?

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

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

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

confuses people who are "role-playing".

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

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

Cats are the pioneers!

POST: It feels like jumping doesn't work anymore

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

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

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

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

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

Q2: yes. Also called "selective awareness".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snappy summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[POST]

Balloon :

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

[END OF POST]

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

Just to interject quickly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are the experiences literal?"

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

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

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

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

Experiences, Results & Explorations

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

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

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

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

'Beliefs' & Analogies

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

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

He Said, She Said & Beyond Common Sense

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

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

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

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

To expand:

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

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

For example:

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

Disentangling Topics

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

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Good response.

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

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

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

Anyway, those are my thoughts!

POST: Question regarding manifestation

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

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

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

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

POST: Jumping for remission of mental illnesses

Good comments. For OP:

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

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

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

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[1] Our favourite topic. :-)

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Jumping for remission of mental illnesses

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

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

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

From your other comment:

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

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

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

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

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