TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 9)

POST: Playing with Attributions & Points of View (Yer uh Wizard, Harry!)

[POST]

I was talking in the comments of another thread about playing with how you relate to perceptions. Here’s a little more about that.
Look around you for a while. Really get a good sense of where you are and how you feel right now. Take a few minutes to do that.
… … …
Good? Alright. Now, try creating a division between two distinct types of experience you’re having: “direct perceptions” and “attributions”. Notice the difference between the visual keyboard you're perceiving and your concept of “what a keyboard is”. To help you get a grasp of the difference between the perception and the attribution, try changing your attribution. Think about your keyboard as the instrument that it is. Then think about it for the block of atoms/matter that it is. Then think about it as the visual stimulation of 2d colors in your eyes that it is. Then think about it as the geometrical object in space that it is. Then think about it as the extension of yourself that it is. Note these different “ways of thinking about” the perception, and how they differ from the perception itself. Notice how much easier is it to play with these "ways of thinking about" than it is to play with the direct perception itself.
Try doing this with more complex, nuanced things. Look at your neighbor not as, for example, “Jeff the guy”, but as the hairless and upright homo Sapien, as the geometric object in space, as the sack of meat and flesh, as the conscious being with experiences and perceptions, as the child that grew up into an adult, as the background character in your solipsistic world, etc.
Now, take note that one of these was your “default”, while the others required an active consideration on your part. If you’d just stumbled out of bed and saw your keyboard, or saw your neighbor, you’d be “subconsciously” using one of these default attributions. In fact, nearly everything you interact with is conceptualized in merely one way of many possible ways, and your current defaults can be changed if you’d like to change them. If “Jeff the guy” is annoying to you, “Jeff the kid who grew up into a confused and sad man” might be less annoying, or if your keyboard seems crude and mechanical, thinking of it as a physical object of color and shape may make it less abrasive.
Your “default” is not very different from the defaults of most people. Collectively, we share a lot of default ways of conceptualizing things. These are “cultures”. Cultures are collected, habitual, often subconscious ways of conceptualizing our perceptions. If you feel your default way of conceptualizing things is shitty or non-ideal, then you can break away from your cultural habits. Personally, I think my (our?) culture has a lot of shitty habits both minor and major. For example, minorly, I think our cultural attitude toward food is pretty lame, and that we could be handling food in a much better way. Majorly, I think each of us has a tremendous potential for power and influence over our own state of being, but our culture conceptualizes lots and lots of “external” things as having power of us, and by assuming they have that power, we grant them that power.
This is kind of like being Harry Potter, and the invitations to Hogwarts are arriving in the mail, but instead of bolting up the mailbox, Uncle Dursley has taught the whole family that envelopes will burn you if you touch them, and so nobody ever touches an envelope, and if they did, they probably would genuinely think they were being burned.
Alternatively, you can try to be “culturally open”. In other words, question your habits and tendencies and play with your habits and tendencies. See if you can’t change your defaults. See if you can’t start to love something you used to hate, or see if you can’t find depth to appreciate in something you’d only understood superficially. You can also do these things in the opposite way (e.g. hate something you once loved) and while it’s less fun and less encouraging, knowing that you can do that and being able to do that is important if you prioritize flexibility.
Of all the things one can shift one’s default attributions toward/about, the one I’ve found to be the most interesting is the way one relates to other living things. You’re currently experiencing reality/yourself as a being within a world. This is probably not a very unusual mode of experience. We can imagine experiencing merely a volitional being, and we can imagine experiencing merely a non-volitional world, but between those extremes there seems to be a “bigger infinity” of potential experiences that involve both a volitional entity and a non-volitional world. Taking the POV of a being or entity appears to be a common perspective (at least from where I stand).
While “you” are not a human, which is to say your capacity is not constricted to only being a human, you can (and, I think, should) dwell on the fact that you are currently experiencing a human point of view (POV). You’re currently “humaning”. And your spectrum of experience is that of the particular human you’re experiencing “yourself as”. So, while I’m =/= Utthana, the current perspective I’m taking is Utthana’s perspective (although I do sometimes take others). And just so, other living things are unique in that they exist within our perspective as other perspectives themselves. For example, TGeorge exists within my POV, but he exists as a POV himself within my POV.
This means that there’s “a way it’s like to be” TGeorge. You can meaningfully say, “This is what it’s like to be a cat,” whereas you can’t say, “this is what it’s like to be a chair”. We can imagine ourselves as experiencing ourselves from the POV of a cat or from the POV of TGeorge, in a way that we can’t imagine ourselves as experiencing ourselves from the POV of a chair (as conventionally understood – we can imagine something that looks like a chair which could have a POV). Being mindful of this, to me, is super useful and enjoyable. I like recognizing other POV's within my POV because my default is often to objectify people and the really inflate my own POV. I don't tend to see other beings as full and as nuanced as myself, but Utthana the human and TGeorge the human are both equal POV's that I could take. So I like taking this perspectives (sometimes, and not always), because it allows me to:
1) Empathize. All POV’s are POV’s that I could theoretically take. I’m the capacity to take perspectives, not a specific point of view myself. “That could be me,” is applicable to everyone I encounter. I like to play with my default conceptualization of other beings in such a way that I'm inclined to have empathy for them. I currently am interested in playing a role of someone who is relatively non-aggressive, non-competitive, helpful, and kind. To further my interest in playing that particular game, I make things easier for myself by changing the way I look at difficult people (some of the time).
2) Be aware of the glaring subjectivity of my own POV. By regularly acknowledging and appreciating other potential perspectives, you come to appreciate your own perspective in light of others. You become aware of all the possible perspectives you could take. I especially like dwelling on plants, because plants have a potential perspective and POV, but it’s radically different from that of animals and helps to demonstrate just how alien our perspectives can potentially be (which in turn highlights the potential weirdness and alienness of our current, default POV).
3) Change my attributions more easily. Seeing my default perspective as just one among many helps make it seem less “front and center”, less dominant, less immovable. For example, I currently look out my window and see trees, grass, etc. They look kind of dark and I conceptualize them in a slightly negative way. They don’t seem as positive as grass and trees in brighter lighting. Understanding that my default perspective is just one of many possible perspectives, I can decide to see the dim lighting as beautiful and cinematic, I can decide to see the grass and trees as miraculous shapes that grew from the ground, I can decide to see them as distinct entities with experiences and perspectives, or I can even decide to (and this is a step further, altering perception instead of attribution) see something entirely else outside of my window, like the Eiffel Tower. Asserting a new attribution or perception may, at first, feel like it’s “only happening in your mind” or “imaginary”. Further weakening your sense of your default POV as privileged (as well as further contemplating subjective idealism in general) will make “imaginary” seem a lot less imaginary and “only happening in your mind” seem like an arbitrary description.
I recommend you experiment with different conceptual attributions for your perceptions. Don't think that your perceptions can only be conceptualized in one way. You don't have to learn how to do magic and directly change the "physical" world around you in order to radically change your experience in ways that make you happier and help you do things you'd like to do. You have tons and tons and tons of default, subconscious attributions to your perceptions and every single one of them can be played with. This whole thing is malleable. And even the "anchor" of your attributions and perceptions, your particular "POV as a being", is merely one potential POV and you can play with that as well. Start small, work your way up, and try not to be discouraged by any tendencies to dismiss things as "imaginary" or "all in your head".

[END OF POST]

A good read. Couple of quick ones for now:

And just so, other living things are unique in that they exist within our perspective as other perspectives themselves. For example, TGeorge exists within my POV, but he exists as a POV himself within my POV.

Because this phrasing implies a nesting problem, it's probably better to say that all possible POVs are "moments" that are simultaneously available, and you can "take on the shape of" any one of them. The TG that is apparently within your POV is made from "sensations and perceptions and meaning"; it is not actually a POV. A POV is an experience, it isn't something that can be contained within anything else.

“this is what it’s like to be a chair”.

I don't see why this wouldn't be possible. People on ketamine report experiences of just this sort (becoming a certain object), as do those following various shamanic practices. It can't be imagined when not being experienced, of course - i.e. while you are still experiencing "human-ing" with the baseline sensory-channel formatting that this involves - but then again you can't experience being joyful and simultaneously imagine being depressed either.

This [becoming chairs and tables] is a subtle and tricky point, though, and you're right to question it. I wasn't sure how to convey it in such a way that made it sufficiently clear.

I agree it's a tricky one to discuss, because the discussion itself is of course "formatted" as a shadow-sensory experience, so it gets very abstract very quickly - but I think it can be quite a fruitful path to explore. There's no one way to make it clear, I'd say.

I don't think it's possible to experience yourself as an inanimate object.

What is special about "animation"? You can become the void space you are "looking out from" right now, and that is definitely not animated as such. You can become the gaps between sensations. You can also become your hair.

[They] experience themselves as being something very chair-like, but it's a distinct thing from what we think of as a conventional chair.

That would be the exact point though, right? If you-as-consciousness become a chair - if you "take on the shape of" the experience of being-a-chair - then it would not correspond to what we, while human-ing, think of as "a chair".

I think the subtle underlying important insight here is that the "aliveness" or "intelligence" or "experiencing" that we have belongs to consciousness, and not to the shape of the experience. "Senses" are an abstraction, you never experience them. "Being human" is a dead pattern, as dead as a chair.

Lend your attention now to the room around you, allowing yourself to "feel" into it in all directions. You experience this room by becoming it, filtered or organised by certain patterns. Even if you remove visual imagery, auditory imagery, textural imagery from this experience, you still have an experience.

Are you maybe thinking about "human-ing" as being your current baseline experience in some fundamental way, when really it is consciousness?

I think even the notion of a "POV" might be problematic here. Because I don't actually have a human POV as much (as you've just pointed out with your examples), what I actually experience is being-a-world but formatted in a certain way. And doesn't "perspective" have the same problem? What exactly does it mean to "have a perspective"? It's just another way of saying we're taking on the shape of a particular experience, surely?

Let's perhaps skip to the bit we probably would need to bash out between us: knowing. (We can always back-pedal later.) This is not fully formed, I'm just trying to feel out how we could approach this verbally:

I suggest:

• To "know" something, you simply have to be it. Knowing is being, and vice versa.

This is not the same as having a conceptualisation of being something, of "being aware you are that something", since that is actually a thought about what you are (and is always wrong). The difference between knowing and knowing-that.

• To "know that" you are something, is to become the thought-about the knowing.

I suggest that we often confusing becoming the thought about something ("knowing that") with becoming the something.

I think you may be onto something that 1 is possible, while I think 2 is not possible.

Yes. We might draw comparison with our own experience, living as a human person. Let's proceed from our everyday experience:

• We are always experiencing "being" a person. (This is not strictly true in fact, but for this brief moment let's go with it and we'll return to this later.)
• From time to time we experience knowing-that we are a human.
• The knowing-that takes the form of a thought, and that thought arises as basically a "shadow-sensory experience". In other words, formatted as human senses.

This leads us to:

• The manner in which a human knows-that it is a human, is in the form of a human-patterned experience.
• The manner in which a chair would know-that it is a chair, would have to be in the form of a chair-patterned experience.

So -

I definitely think that one can be a chair. In fact, I think that our ongoing experience is a case of becoming lots of different things, so this is not a stretch really. It's actually harder to argue that we experiencing being a human as such, rather than just occasionally thinking-that we are a human. I am not definite that one can know-that one is a chair, while being a chair. And perhaps that actually takes us somwhere interesting:

• In what sense is it true that I can simultaneously be a human while also knowing-that I am a human, anyway? Surely I am either being a human or being the thought-about being a human?

And if this is the case, then doesn't that lift the restriction on knowing-that you are a chair? Because it reminds us that knowing and knowing-that are on the same level. It is consciousness that takes on the shape of both experiences. Consciousness is surely free to take on the shape of "being a chair" and then "knowing that it is a chair", without restriction?

[Knowing, not knowing, know-that simultaneously:] it's more likely possible than not possible. As a general rule, imposing restrictions on consciousness is false.

Agreed.

The way I conceive of this is through the idea of "lines of thought". To recap briefly: if we go back to the idea of what we truly are being an "unbounded open awareness", then our current experience if being a person in this room is really just a very bright, 3D-immersive, spatial thought which is filling up that openness. But it is a thought nevertheless.

Then, there is no reason why, just as we might visualise a sphere floating in this perceptual space, we cannot at the same time hold a "parallel-simultaneous" experience in that same openness.

We can look at a mountain range and simultaneously have a thought about mountains. In fact, we can be walking along a street in San Francisco while parallel-simultaneously paragliding in France. It's a matter of the relative intensity of the experiential patterns, rather than actually "being in a place".

In a very real sense, we are having all possible experiences parallel-simultaneously right now - it's just that one or more of those "present-potential moments" are brighter and therefore more dominant than the others. (Usual metaphor: the sun in the daytime sky obscures the stars that are always there.)

So, in this discussion we're increasingly moving towards, again, consciousness as primary and any experiences - including reflections upon experience (which are also experiences) - being always available and current.

Our apparent "human-ing" is therefore not at all restrictive inherently - except that for as long as it remains "bright" we will not be chairs nor be able to think from the position of being a chair. And if we become chairs completely we will not be able to think about being so in a human way.

The question then perhaps becomes more about the ability to associatively link from one experience to another, rather than about the ability to have an experience. I can be a chair and then be TG, but whilst TG I might have no associative path to recall the memory of being the chair.

Time stops being of much use here.

Indeed, really we mean the experience of change or relative change (although that has problems too). I treat time, like space, as "arising with" a particular strand of experiencing. I use "parallel-simulateous" to try and convey that things don't necessarily share the same experiential space, although they all appear within "open awareness".

And learning to play with relative brightnesses is what I'm particularly interested in.

For me, that's exactly what all this is about. The apparent manipulation of reality is all about what I would call "triggering patterns into brightness". When you move from this room to the room next door, you aren't going anywhere. Rather, the 3D-immersive image of one room - the thought of one room - is shape-shifting into the image of the other.

Are you REALLY the chair or TG? Or are you just experiencing yourself as if you were the chair or TG?

Yes, that's the question. That's why I keep going back to this "taking on the shape of an experience" wording. You are not inherently anything in particular, you are "that which takes on the shape of" things. For convenience, it's handy to use the phrase "I am TG" while that is the experience, but all experiences operate on an "as if" basis.

This is where the notion of imagining-that comes in. Right now you are imagining-that you are a person in a world. You are also imagining-that a whole set of facts-of-the-world are true, and the brightening of those patterns as a superposition leads to the selection of the moment you are experiencing now (as a metaphorical description anyway).

I found this to be a really productive and interesting convo.

Me also. It's always clarifying, especially if we're coming at it from slightly different starting points. I guess it's inevitable that eventually we'll all converge on at least a recognition of the common underlying aspects to each of our approaches.

As to the other subs, my project is basically split three ways: developing metaphysical models (here), collecting spontaneous shifts ("glitches"), exploring practical reformatting ("jumping"). The strands have to be kept a little bit separate though, because mixing the platforms mangles your experiences (a point which follows naturally from our discussion).

POST: It seems like y'all are en route to mastering the siddhis, but...

[POST]

Hi there. I'm going out on a limb here and assuming that most of you (the prominent posters, at least) are familiar with the tenets of Buddhism--it seems that "oneirosophy" is (inherently) a melding of Eastern/Western philosophies. I have no doubt that there are some of you in this subreddit who are currently mastering/have mastered the siddhis (psychic powers that arise as a result of lucidity).
My honest concern is, is not oneirosophy itself ultimately just another distraction, like everything else? I've spent many hours reading through a bunch of posts and they're all quite stimulating, intellectually and spiritually, etc. However, there is a LOT of ego here. Like, a lot. A lot of pride and condescension, as well... even if it's not intentional. While oneirosophy resonates with me (admittedly!), sometimes I can see why the Buddha intimated that it's more difficult for gods (as opposed to humans) to achieve release.

[END OF POST]

Well, I'm inclined to say: why not both? ;-)

I know what you're getting at, but provided you recognise experiences for what they are (peak and mundane it's all the same), then you are fully free to enjoy them, since you realise you aren't them fundamentally. That even includes having fun by being a bit of a dick in an argument now and again.

Perhaps it's not what you mean, but surely pursuits of power are only "distractions" if you think you are separate from the world and that one part will overcome the other? In exactly the same way as "seeking" is a distraction. So long as you don't mix up the narrative with some sort of "development" - you have understood that although you may change, you never progress - it's okay I reckon.

Hey, thank you. :) Good words, here. And this actually does clarify some things!

No worries.

An interesting question to ask ourselves: once you've realised the nature of things - and know that there's nothing to it, that it's boring - what then? You just gonna sit about for all eternity?

Everything stays the same.

That's why so many enlightened folk of tradition still drink, smoke, are rude and impatient, all that (apparently). By default, you are still having a being-a-person-in-a-world experience. Just because the world turns out to be dreamlike in the sense of having nothing behind it, doesn't suddenly make you a super-lovely guy - unless you arbitrarily decide to be so.

And that's what you do have, more options (or rather the rediscovery of the options you always had) - i.e. the recognition of the possibility of changing your "private view" as you please.

A1: Late to the game, but I'll comment anyway...
That's why so many enlightened folk of tradition still drink, smoke, are rude and impatient, all that (apparently).
There may be a distinction between being "enlightened" and being "developed". I can imagine a person who's been able to see through to the "reality" of the world yet still has personal issues to resolve or a better perspective to develop.
Perhaps people often equate the two - enlightenment and personal "beatification" - but they might be mutually exclusive.

I agree. People tend to have an idea of what "enlightenment" is, and that it'll equate to some automatic Gandiesque outlook. But it is, at base, simply the recognition of the nature of experience: that it is consciousness "taking on the shape of" content, and the world is not in fact a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time".

So, your behaviour might change because it comes with the direct recognition that "everything is consciousness" and everything is an aspect of yourself - but "yourself" isn't the personal self, and the nature of reality is in truth amoral, so it doesn't pan out quite like folk might assume.

If you suddenly realised that what you really were was "a big open space in which experiences appeared", then all your preconceived notions about what is important get recontextualised. It's this shift in context, and its implications, that others tend not to get.

POST: True "timeless" nature of dreams?

So, the "global summary" of the dream, a representation of (but also actually being) its entirety - encapsulated in a felt-sense of its overallness?

I think that's about it. If I could hold on to what that dream "structure" was, it was all the experiencing of the dream but wrapped up into into a 4D structure of sorts. Hard to convey since hen we think of "structure" or "sculpture", we immediately think of something static/unchanging. But the structure had all the aspects we know as change, just wrapped up in itself.
"Felt-sense" is about right. I could sort of see it in mind's eye - but that was a visual interpretation arising from the feeling of recognition of what this thing was. (That is if I'm not mistaken about the whole thing.)

My suggestion (via The Patterning of Experience and related) would then be that your current world is also a felt-sense that you are interpreting by unfolding aspects of it into sensory experience - arising as a 3D-immersive strand of thought in your "perceptual space".

Yes. To me, it hints at the possibility that our current experience is our physical brain interpreting or translating that felt-sense into something temporal and sequential - for whatever reason. Of course, the "brain", in this case, would also be a part of this experience...so a recursively created experience by a created experience.

I say - No recursion. Just forget brains. And interpretation, as such.

A moment's pause, a relaxation of attention, and it's obvious - right now - that what you truly are is basically an "open aware space", and all sensory experience arises within that. "Sensory experience" includes thoughts, which are basically "shadow-sensory"; they are just not so bright, stable and 3D-immersive.

I might then suggest that there is no 'outside' to this space, and that all possible experiential patterns pre-exist and are dissolved within it, varying only in their levels of contribution.

All you need to do is, while looking at this screen, direct your attention to the "place you are looking out from", and note what you find there. (The alternative is to take a leap of faith and "just decide" to become the background space to your current experience.)

POST: Wu-Wei, doing nothing

It means doing away with the compulsion to "better ones situation" or to be mired in ignorance of one's perfect position always.

I'd also add that it is a much more practical thing. It's that thing of your body "moving by itself", effortlessly. It's the flowing detachment which means your body and mind respond appropriately to the situation. This often gets overlooked by authors, because if you've never heard of the experience and never had it, you would never know that this is what is being indicated.

Just as with (say) the parables in the Bible, where, because they don't know what is being pointed at, they interpret it in all sorts of mundane ways relating to making choices and moral views (not to mention an "entity god" who is separate and does things independently).

So, one might do away with the compulsion to better ones situation, but that's in the sense of ceasing trying to directly manipulate it with action, rather than with intention and letting the action flow. Anything you do is "correct" in the sense of it arising from the current state in response to circumstances, but only if you truly allow action to rise spontaneously, rather than holding on to parts of your current state.

Wu-Wei, then, is perhaps better described as "not interfering" and "opening to spontaneity" and "effortless action" in a direct experiential sense. However, as with all these things, it does then get used as a metaphor in other parts of life.

All good points. I may have phrased it in a confusing manner. I like your quoted explanations. It is indeed the sort of thing that is difficult to understand in the context of how "regular" people "regularly" understand the world. Non-interference is the easiest for me to directly understand. When we interfere it's because we believe in separation. If you realize the experience as a shared dream of one entity, then you have no reason to interfere, because you are it. Then you have every reason to play.

Perhaps the core of this is: people confuse intention with experiencing bodily action.

In fact, an intention can be attached to any act or experience (and an act is really an experience: the experience of an action), whether it is "regularly" logically related to it or not, and results will follow correspondingly. Without understanding the rule that "experiences are local, intentions are global", it's inevitably that things like wu-wei and indeed everyday motion and experience, will be misinterpreted.

So then what do you think classifies as interfering?
If I had to try to piece it together I'd say nothing can be truly said to be an interference if one completely accepts one's direction. Note how I didn't say be sure of one's direction; you can be uncertain but accepting, of course. This I've found is the best way to live. Sure you could have things turn out a very certain way, but that's overall less enjoyable then the spontaneity of doing what you want in an unpredictable way.

Any ongoing intention which countermands our spontaneous movements - of body, mind, attention or world - which arise in the moment. Something like that?

However, practically speaking, we would of course occasionally "redirect" things by intention. But it should be in the manner of course correction, rather than slowing things down because we don't trust our spontaneous responses and so holding onto every moment.

In general: you should be sitting back and enjoying the unfolding experience, rather than constantly hitting the brakes.

A further thought: also, pushing ahead or "forcing" is also interference, and probably the most common type. You are walking along the street to catch your bus, and you force the walking to go faster than it is spontaneously occurring. Lots of examples of this, large and small, all stemming from a lack of trust that what is arising naturally is appropriate. (So you get to the bus stop, and it's delayed for 10 minutes. If you'd kept your relaxed pace, you would have arrived at the perfect time - and so on.)

[This is very meandering...]

I'm sat on a chair. I'm thinking about how crappy work has been. I've been pretty depressed about it. Wait! I intend:

• "A great business opportunity that's ideal for me."

I potter about. Feel hungry. Fridge is empty of healthy food. Maybe I'll go to the grocery store to buy apples. I pause. My body gets up, and does this. I find myself enjoying the sights and sounds of the city as I walk a couple of blocks along. I find myself interacting wittily with the shopkeeper, but before I make a purchase, I bump into an old friend I had been thinking about earlier, and we pop into the bar round the corner for a pint of cider ("liquid apples, almost the same!"). We have a fun time. During our conversation, he mentions that his ex-girlfriend is setting up her own design business. Knowing I'm into those things, but my work has dried up, he give me her number. We meet two days later for a coffee, our business ideas are totally aligned: why don't we set this up as a partnership?

= one intention + letting experience arise.

You can live without intending, but if you never intend, then experience will just continue along its present path. I will remain depressed, depressing things will continue to happen.

Intending = re-patterning, with that patterning subsequently arising in experience.

The main lesson is, though: there's no "fundamentally naturally good state", because that would be the notion of destiny. I don't agree with the notion of destiny, or of a path that is independently correct. If you don't like the current state you are in - perhaps because it has become very "splashy" and incoherent, you can use intention-imagination to bring it under control more efficiently. Things will resolve themselves eventually, but deliberate intending lets you "skip to the end".

For instance, fixing the heart or abdomen as your centre provides a stable, reliable point as everything else shifts and evolves. (Although ideally you are spending daily time letting all of that left over movement unravel anyway, through a releasing period.) I'd call those areas the "global summary": by attending to but not focusing on - perhaps "including" is a better word - you get a situational awareness of an overall type. It doesn't guide you, it is just is the most efficient way to be directly aware of all available information. Which allows you to decide intelligently whether to amend it or not.

Short version - If you don't like your situation, intend the alternative. Having done so, then trust that the world has been re-patterned "4-dimensionally", and let things unfold. If you keep intending (micro-managing) then you don't get the benefit of the "autocomplete" nature of patterning - instead, you will only get exactly the step-by-steps you ask for, that you can intellectually design, and you won't benefit from any "magical" coincidences or discontinuities, etc.

But couldn't the state of allowing your intentions could be the fundamentally naturally good state?

Okay, this is a wording issue I suppose. I use "state" to refer to the current configuration of the world, all the activated patterns in their relative intensities. If you don't interfere, then all the experiences which arise spontaneously will do so in accordance with that configuration. If you intend, you shift the state, and subsequence will arise in alignment with that configuration. So in this sense, one state is as good as another in the sense that there is no configuration that is "the configuration". Just like there is no "best" pattern of ripples in a pool of water.

Maybe if we use "approach to living" rather than state to mean what you are saying, then we can say that non-interference would be the ideal approach - with occasional course-corrections (amendments of state/configuration) if so desired.

My heart is sending out good feelings when I align to my highest intention. What is my highest intention? To be free.

Can we change this to, rather than "sending out good feelings", some thing like "is a good feeling" when you align to your highest intention? And then I'd suggest: what's happening is that when you cease to oppose the spontaneous arising of experiences, you feel a clarity and maybe even something like "love"?

Note, you can have this feeling regardless of whether the current state is traditionally a pleasant one or not. The feeling comes from not being conflicted or fragmented, not from a situation being good. People feel most at peace shortly before their horrific violent car-crash deaths...

That's why I say that there is no such thing as a fundamentally good state, but there might be a good approach.

Would that description fit in with what you're getting at?

...

Try this experiment:

Lie down on the floor and let go completely. Of your body, mind, but most importantly your attention. "Play dead" and allow your attention to roam where it wants. Habitually, we try to use attention to manipulate our experience and "do things" but this actually obstructs change. So having let go, "just decide" - i.e. intend without doing anything - that your body is going to get up. Do nothing, and let your body move by itself when it wants.

Note: By "do nothing" you must not actively do nothing, because what you will tend to do in that case is re-assert your current position. In other words, you will intend being-where-you-are are as the interpretation of "do nothing". And as a result you will suppress any movement. Really I mean, "do not interfere with any movements that arise".

I'm sure I could do it but just a bit hesitant to try. Why might this be the case?

You can definitely do it; it's not different to what you're doing anyway, you are just ceasing to intend the opposing motion. Stopping "staying still" all the time by constantly asserting your current position.

It's a bit frightening because you are letting go of what you perceive to be direct control (even though such control actually works against your intentions unfolding). It amounts to "surrendering to god" and trusting that spontaneous movements "from nowhere" are the right ones, even though you cannot intellectually access any reason for them.

Particularly in Western societies, there is an underlying assumption that our raw spontaneous aspect is evil and untrustworthy and needs to be suppressed. You perhaps have unexplored notions of how bodies and minds work, of there being an eternal battle between reason and magic, impulses and order, good and evil, and so on.

Really, it is fear of The Unknown. But you have to get used to this at some point, because all of experience is "unknown" until it appears within your perception.

Short version - Try it and see. Once you decide to truly surrender and give up, and things settle out, it'll likely be one of the best experiences of your life.

Thank you for doing what you do. :)

Haha, thanks.

Oh, I had an extra thought too: when you release your attention, this obviously means you are no longer avoiding any body-space areas which might contain "stuck thoughts and incomplete movements", as I call them.

In other words, things may move and shift and that includes uncomfortable feelings that have been left "orphaned". If such things arise, just let them become prominent, peak, and they will "complete themselves" and fade. Trust this. Sometimes people clamp back down again when these things appear - if you remain in open attention, it'll pass, and will be like a wave in the ocean, rather than in a glass. The relief and calm once these are cleared is very pleasant. Note: as is the theme here, you don't need to do anything about them, they'll resolve themselves.

POST: The idea of imaginal metabolism.

I hadn't thought of using "digestion" as a metaphor before - really interesting.

If everyday life (and specifically the body) is basically "imagination solidified", then any imaginative act performed with intention can potentially have an effect. Although we habitually view our sensory experience and our thoughts as existing in different realms, in fact they differ only in intensity, and share the same space - which means that the connection is a matter of degree rather than possibilit-ee.

Q: [Deleted]

Yes. So, when in other comments I say that "all patterns are always present and active to some extent", it's in the same sense as that. It's not that the "embodied imagination" is a special level in terms of it being a primary structure, say. Rather, flipping it around, it's that this particular set of patterns are currently very bright, and therefore dominating our experience. Any collection of patterns could become the "embodied imagination" if they were intensified appropriately.

So, this gives us a couple of obvious ways to soften things up a bit, right?

• We can do it indirectly, via an imagination object imbued with particular meaning. For instance, vividly feel-imagine a sprinkler located in your stomach area which spins round, whose water has the property of dissolving the solidity of the world, and leave it running. Or --
• We can do it directly, by 3D-imagining/asserting over our current experience (i.e. in the same space as our present perception), an open empty unstructured space with the property of "dreamlike flexibility", for a prolonged period perhaps, such that this default of transparent malleability becomes more prominent.

Q: [Deleted]

Right, so they're the same approach fundamentally, but the implications are different.

I've not got the phrasing down for this, but let's have a go...

In both cases, you are creating something from nowhere - the sprinkler, or the "space of flexibility" - and assigning a meaning to that act, a result that it implies. It's just that the second one seems more abstract because it doesn't have an obvious "shape", and the second one also involves the creation of something which has the property of the result. However, that property is you specifying the change, it is not you making the change.

In both cases, the result is indirect. It is the changing of the fact that is implied, that brings about the result. The imagery itself cannot cause anything - one piece of transparent imagery cannot bounce of another piece of transparent imagery.

I suggest that a fact itself is a dimensionless part of an extended pattern and has no sensory aspect itself, so if you are at all aware that you are changing a fact, then you are always "creating something which implies the change of fact" (an act), not directly updating the fact.

When you go to a bar you've never been to before and open the door, you are not aware of updating the fact of the barroom; but the very first intentional step you took towards going there, implied the fact of its existence, and every other intentional act you did shifted the world and implied a particular sort of barroom - right up until you actually observed it. At the point of observation, it becomes "fixed" in the scene that an experienced scene is much "brighter" and becomes a high-contributing pattern when it comes to subsequent experiences.

And in reverse order -

I think it's also possible to make one's style of experiencing into something where experiences do not become overly fixed no matter how bright they might seem.

Yes indeed. You might view it as there being a contributing pattern/fact which corresponds to the statement: "The world is a stable place and the implications of a sensory experience constitutes a set of facts which persists once the sensory experience end". These more abstract patterns are of exactly the same nature as any other pattern: they always exist but their contribution to ongoing experience can be increased or attenuated. Which leads to some interesting questions about how far one really wants to go with messing with accumulated structures - there's flexibility available, sure, but there's decoherence if you push it too far.

Why not directly? So you're saying facts are only and ever implied? Are facts always tacit? I think this might be important, but really I have trouble feeling what you're trying to get at here.

EDIT: Warning, this is not well described. I'll probably try this again after I come up with a better way to put it into words.

Let me try and grab a hold of this. There's a couple of approaches I can think of to describe it (bear with me since I'm formulating this as I go).

So, let's begin by taking an obvious fact:

• "Everyone always loves me." (heheh, why not!)

Now, try and summon that into sensory experience. What you'll likely come up with is an audio-visual-texture-emotion sensory aspect of that pattern which includes a felt-sense of it. But remember, that particular pattern is one without a temporal restriction - it is immediately "all time everywhere forever". You can't actually experience it from a 3D-immersive single moment viewpoint, much less in a contracted image. You can't grab it completely and hold it in your hand (so to speak). You hold part of the extended pattern in the senses. And that extended pattern is part of the undivided pattern of all-patterns.

So what I'm getting at here is, while any possible intention is of course is a shift of the entire pattern (or "all possibilities"), we obviously do not experience that because we are only ever aware of a slice of it. We operate in the blind.

When I create my sprinkler, it is simply by hook onto a larger pattern which I cannot fit inside my current perspective. But since the sprinkler is connected to that, it becomes my proxy, and my manipulation or specification of that, becomes/is my manipulation or specification of the more abstract fact.

When I do this with my "softening of the space", I am doing the same thing, although it's more subtle. I am imagining, implicitly, a space and that the space is softer. I am not actually directly making my current space softer, the space I am imagining is just the partial aspect of the intention. You can see this in practice because when you do this, the form that gets triggered in experience "happens by itself" towards the imagination, like you have pulled on a piece of material.

You notice the same thing when you use imagination to move your body. You can imagine a wind blowing your body forward, and your body will respond as if that were so. Or you can imagine your body in the forward position, and your body will shift state towards that position. We might call it "intentional leading" or something like that.

EDIT: When you try to heal yourself, how do you do it? You quickly realise that grasping onto the sensations and trying to change them doesn't work. Instead, you must "be the space" around and through the area, and then either use a metaphor to change it, or imagine the replacement sensation. But I'd suggest those are both the same thing: creating a desired sensation is still a metaphor for that target state and is not the target state itself, because: time and the inability to fully specify, you can only imply.

Practically speaking, it's not that important, and I'm obviously struggling to convey it. But for as long as there are any patterns active, there will be a notion of change, and for as long as that is true, there will be a "leading" effect, I suggest.

Here I don't agree with your choice of the word "directly" in the context of the above-quoted paragraph.

The sense I'm using "directly" in that paragraph is in the experiential sense - that within the current sensory field (as you phrase it) you are experiencing performing a creative act relative to your desired outcome which you might naively interpret as being an interaction between just the sensory objects.

So, taking the "naive view" as being one where we assume that what we experience in the sensory field is what is happening, then:

• In the sprinkler example, even in the naive view it's obvious that you are taking an indirect route - in the sense that you experience yourself creating an intermediate step. You've created an object with properties, such that it will bring about the change.
• In the updating-space example, though, in the naive view we might think that you are actually interacting with the space that you have been experiencing and modifying it. Hence the potential interpretation of updating it "directly".

In fact, the two approaches are identical, it's just that the "sensory aspect" - the visible part of the iceberg, if you will - of one corresponds more closely to what the experience of being completely in the target state will be like. The "naive view" person is not doing what they think they are doing in the "actual view".

In the "actual view":

• All experiences and changes are direct - because there is no other way for anything to be. All that exists is "The Absolute taking on the shape of The Relative". So any experience of change actually is that, being and changing. You can't get more direct than actually being something.

A sensory act is like shifting the tip of the iceberg, or pulling a rope in the dark. The sensory experience is just your sensory handle onto the larger pattern you are invoking.

Some sensory handles happen to be of a form that is a more literal representation of the intended end-state, but that does not change their level of directness. The handle is always indirect (in the sense that it does not provide a naive experience of the change) but also totally direct (in the sense that it is a direct interaction with the facts-of-the-world).

We can also think of these handles as "icons". Let's use an everyday example, where there's a folder on my computer desktop and I want to remove it.

• The "folder" looks like a folder. It has all sorts of folder-concept associations for me. My tendency will be to think of it in terms of an actual folder. In truth though, there is no genuine "folderness" underlying either the icon or real-life sensory folders, other than those associations. And therefore I can create my own association.

However, in our computer example:

• I can right-click on the little picture of a folder, and select "Delete" from the popup menu. This is like the sprinkler example, where the act is more of a more abstracted form. There is nothing about the letters D, E, L, E, T, E, that correspond to the everyday sensory experience of removal. This is revealing of the principle: "the meaning you give something is what supplies its causal power".
• Alternatively, I can drag the the folder to the trash. This is like the "updating space" example. The sensory aspect of the act matches my usual notions of how the act of deletion works: a folder getting put in a bin. But really I'm just being fooled. Just as in the last example, there is no literal correspondence between the sensory experience and the form of the update. In fact, the actual update has no form and is literally unthinkable; I can only think in terms of icons/handles. This reveals to us that our accumulated historical meanings are no more direct or real than the ones we arbitrarily assign.

The conclusion is along the lines that all sensory experiences are "handles/icons" for the larger pattern, undivided from it, involving direct interactions, but not complete experiences, because they are not completely unfolded. Our habitual perspective doesn't have enough "dimensions" to experience the whole thing unpacked simultaneously, into 3D-immersive space.

So hopefully this ties your comment and my comment together? Specifically:

• All updates are direct in the sense that there is no such thing as not being direct, because all there is, is Absolute-Relative. It is always directly experienced, but not in unpacked form. Facts and patterns are "dimensionless" in this sense. (Felt-sense, global summary to the rescue.)
• All updates are indirect in the sense that our sensory experience of the act is not an actually an experience of the overall pattern changing.

As you indicate, we are left with inseparability, full responsibility, and unbounded potential or capacity - whilst also having a situation in which "all creation is finished" and always available.

Ive noticed that if I believe I am trying to enact a change, then I will experience merely trying to make the change. The change itself doesnt necissarily manifest. Ill just be manifesting a struggle.

Yes, you have to generate the experience of literally updating the world - or doing something that you have decided means that you are doing so.

Q: [Deleted]

Ah, that was enjoyable. Okay, mostly agreed.

Yes, I'd forgotten about Hoffman's icons (I was just looking for a more immediate example and, um, I was looking at a computer screen). But yes indeed. Where I differ a little is that I was more explicitly pointing to the icon as being "attached" or rather seamlessly part of the larger pattern. To "tug" on the desktop icon is to literally pull upon the extended pattern it is attached to.

And that's why I say things are unthinkable, in the sense that the computer screen cannot display the entirety of the of the computer, because not all of the computer is made from "colours" and a part cannot display the whole of which it is a part. In clearer language: we can indeed think about anything, by manipulating the sensory iceberg tips, but we cannot think of the entirety, because thinking is partial experiencing. Experiencing the whole would be... experiencing the whole.

As far as the term "Absolute" goes, yeah, it's the hypothetical state that we might call "unshaped" experience, the raw state - not my favourite term for it, but we need something, and I tend to try different ones out. I think a word is required for this, because it's only in contrast to this concept that we can fully point to the nature of relative experience. Otherwise it's like describing waves without having the concept of water. Of course, experience has no medium as such, but its difficult to discuss its arbitrariness without some concept that "all patterns" exists somehow, even if totally neutralised.

On "dimensions" - just a metaphor to better imagine selection (or relative intensity) and apparent perspectives. Specifically, that you can't simultaneously imagine a 3D-experience and imagine a 4D-experience. This connects to the thinking-with-iceberg-tips earlier, really. As you say, representation - which is really partial sensory experiencing of extended patterns - cannot be complete, at least in terms of being unfolded into a spatial context.

Meanwhile, elsewhere there's been discussion of those events where people experience reaching a catastrophic end - and then it didn't happen, but it seems the world has shifted somewhat. Interested to hear your own interpretation on that, jumping off from my response below:

Factual Updates and Collateral Shifts

If the world is a continuous and coherent pattern, a blanket of material with folds as facts, then you can't adjust one fact without tugging a little on the rest of the material, impacting the other folds. Although these "collateral shifts" would make sense in terms of the fundamental nature - the blanket - they wouldn't follow the logic of the world's apparent content - the folds.

For instance, your car tumbles off the side of the road but - flash! - suddenly it didn't happen after all. Changing that fact inevitably results in a collateral shift of the world as a whole. But it takes the form of, say, an extra tin of fruit in your kitchen cupboard, a news reporter's hair being parted at the other way, and an acquaintance you've not seen in 10 years now never existed. Those changes are causally linked to, but not logically linked to, the event.

Quite possibly you would never encounter these updated facts. However, the change in your felt-sense of things - that "global summary" sensation that you have - might mean that the world sort of "tastes" different subsequently. You intuitively know that you are no longer in the same place. There's a different "flavour" to your life after the accident somehow.

Riffing on this a bit...

So if there was just flash, and suddenly the accident didn't happen, could you recognize such an experience without the requirement of differently parted hair on a TV announcer? I think yes, you could. So it's not a hard requirement to have differently parted hair.

It's not a requirement - rather, it's an example of a possible side-effect arising because a change of one fact tends to lead to non-logical shifts in other facts, as they are of course part of the same overall pattern. So you survive the crash, get home, and notice (hey!) an extra tin of peaches. The cause is a shift of state, but in terms of everyday logic it seems nonsensical to the experiencer.

Of course, this is a case where our experiencer produced an intentional shift of state (albeit unwittingly in terms of outcome, it was probably: "I want to live!"). If they'd just let themselves die, their experience would continue but probably in a more interesting way.

So moving a hair doesn't change anything. The movement of the hair is already part of the current state, which is static and eternal. Only intention changes state. If the movement of the hair was not already patterned - it wasn't going to arise - then the intention to have it move represents a state change and will have (very minor) collateral effects, otherwise it will not.

What we might call spontaneous or "passing" experiences (in the manner of "passing thoughts") do not correspond to intentional changes of state; they are deterministic unfoldings from the current state. Only intentional redirection changes the state.

It's not like shifting can be studied objectively.

Well nothing can be studied objectively. The point I was making was, no particular collateral change is required but any change can happen by the logic of continuous, coherent patterned states.

I don't think we can talk of the state as something beyond intent, on its own.

We're not, though. The state is your current total intent so far. When we intend something, that's not something additional on top, it is the shifting of this state. So if we think of our current state as the set of all-patterns, each pattern at a different level of contribution, so there's a relative distribution of intensities:

• That state is our total intent. It is static and it completely defines our experience going forward.
• What we call "intending" is really "changing the relative distribution of intensities" such that our state corresponds to our intention.
• Because there is no separation between "intending" and "shifting of state" - it's like a blanket of material folding itself into a different shape, under its own volition: shape-shifter metaphor - then "intention" is "the state".

Our current intention is our present "shape" - just like our current physical position is the relative arrangement of our body parts. We change bodily position by rearranging the body, which we call "moving"; we change intention by changing state, which we call "intending".

Q: [Deleted]

Yes indeed, the body example was an everyday perspective comparison. Heh, perhaps we should introduce a special character (‡) that corresponds to "but of course, the whole known universe was involved in this".

"So I‡ was walking down the street‡, and I went into the shop‡, and bought an apple‡ which I ate‡."

...

Q: It's not that the "embodied imagination" is a special level in terms of it being a primary structure, say. Rather, flipping it around, it's that this particular set of patterns are currently very bright, and therefore dominating our experience. Any collection of patterns could become the "embodied imagination" if they were intensified appropriately.
I agree with you completely. However, in this I think we're slightly different from the book author because I think he feels this embodied imagination is completely special and unique and "on its own level" so to speak. It's not a philosophical book, so it's hard for me to put my finger on the author's metaphysics, but he does sound somewhat like us because he is saying that phenomena we think are physical are only quasi-physical. In other words, he's saying also that physicality is ultimately just a very impressive illusion, exactly like in a dream. However, he privileges embodied imagination and he even believes he's able to contact alien intelligence through the use of specially guided embodied imagination. So "alien" here doesn't necessarily mean "from other planets" but it only means different. So for example, if you felt yourself embodied as a bear with the mind and experience of a bear, then that would be you making a contact with the alien intelligence, as he would put it. And then this has some kind of purpose. Anyway, the way he explains things sounds very strange to me and it's not how I would explain things.
However, he kept making references to the alchemical tradition and I found it interesting.
I'll try to quote a piece of it:
The basic consistency of all substance was called prima materia, primal matter. Since alchemists considered matter as existing in a state of con- tinuous creation, primal matter consisted of sparks of live creative forces around which visible matter coagulated. This is similar to the quasi-physical substance of creative imagination, as for instance a dream. An embodied image is in a permanent state of being created. When creation stops, the dream is over. Through extreme slow motion the alchemist participated in this ongoing creative process of primal matter, which began to pervade him, exteriorizing its inner sparks to the alchemist by way of the inversion process discussed previously, so that he could know its hidden self and partake of its intelligence.
The primal matter of metals was called ‘‘alive silver,’’ argentum vivum, quicksilver, mercury. This alive silver had to be purified, cleansed of all its ill aspects, eventually producing a golden tincture which could heal all substance: turn lead (which they considered a sick form of alive silver) into gold (its most precious condition), a sick body into a supremely healthy one. This was done by the art of the fire. Alchemists would melt, in the way of ice, the crusted outer coagulation of metallic bodies, making them flow alive like quicksilver, in order to obtain the creative sparks of primal matter, the substantive intelligence around which the metal had embodied. Unveiling bodies unto their naked intelligence was necessarily a slow process, as is all embodiment work. And as the alchemist gathered sparks, the creative potency of primal matter increased. The result was to be an ultimate medicine of such creative intelligence that it could heal all bodies, ranging from lead, an afflicted metallic body, to the diseased human body itself. Many alchemists were medical doctors. They would make this medicine from poison. The word they used was pharmacon, which means both poison and remedy, from which we derive our ‘‘pharmacy.’’ Only from what is afflicted and its affliction could a medicine be made. This extraction of medicine from affliction they called the process of refinement. The ultimate medicine was named tinctura, the coloring agent. The tincture was of such refinement that it was almost a pure disembodied spirit, pure abstraction, like mathematical structures; yet almost is the operative word. While science after them went all the way through to mathematical abstraction, alchemists always worked with particular embodied sub- stances, waiting in slow motion for them to reveal their intelligence. This highly refined embodiment, called subtle body, is a pure manifestation of primal matter. Subtle bodies are embodiments existing between physicality and abstraction, in a realm of quasi-physicality, which we have called embodied imagination. Subtle bodies belong to a primal world between body and mind – less physical than matter, more embodied than mind – and their very existence annihilates the mind/body conundrum by adding a third, an in-between: primal matter. This in-between primal matter is both embodied intelligence and physical body, partaking of both inspired metaphor and physical anatomy. It was called soul-as-medium, anima media natura, soul stretched painfully between eternal abstraction and decaying flesh.

That is a very mangled piece of writing! To modern ears, that is. It seems to be rooted in the older traditions, almost like a historical study, but then linking that to the modern concept of imagination. That alone makes it quite interesting.

Have you ever encountered Jerry Epstein and his use of imagery for healing? I read one of his books a long time ago (it might have been the Waking Dream Therapy one, I was doing the lucid dreaming thing at the time) but your post reminded me of him - and he seems to have expanded things a little. The collection of imagery exercises on his website are very "dream logic" and pretty close to what we've been talking about as a modern take on this approach.

So if we take this literally, you can basically talk to the metals and convince them to change, because you'd assume they're not just dead substances, but are living beings.

Well... extended patterns. You could certainly have the world behave as if they were alive and had properties that could be described as intelligent, I suppose. However, as with everything else, it would be your intelligence, creating the maps, albeit by implication. Reading that sort of material can be great for triggering fresh ideas for causal imagery, ones that would never occur otherwise, you're leading me to think.

I'm off to make a cup of coffee and talk to a stainless steel spoon about empathy...

I might think, oh, I see, so now I really understand it, whereas when before I thought I understood it, I've only understood it partway in reality.

I completely agree on this. I've come to think that it's another aspect of the "after the dream... more dream" thing. It's in the nature of content that it is always apparently expanding; the discoveries keep coming, so the context keeps changing, so the understanding keeps evolving.

Which is another way of making it obvious that the truth you can think, can comprehend, is not the truth (because the actual truth must be unchanging). The fundamental truth is something that can only be perceived - known directly, now - and is not something that can be thought about.

I don't think the fundamental truth is ever perceived because perceptions change and are selective, whereas the fundamental truth is unchanging and is beyond selection/deselection. This is why it's so damn hard to remember what it's like to be enlightened! If the fundamental truth was plainly obvious, everyone would always and ever be an enlightened being.

Yes, I really mean that "the fact of being and being everywhere" is always available and can be known. As I've just said in a comment to /u/3man, you never experience purely being The Absolute; you are always "The Absolute taking on the shape of The Relative".

You would have to have absolutely all patterns at zero contribution for you to just "be". The blanket of material with no folds. Which is not possible, I would say, in the sense that if it ever happened, that would be it, or rather only "it", so to speak.

Why would this state be called "being" or "just being?" It seems arbitrary.

Yeah, it is arbitrary. There's no word for it. "Only awareness", perhaps. "Absence of activation", maybe. It's the only state, or non-state, which is truly meaningless. It would be "before" everything.

Meanwhile: I will reply to your other, longer comment later today. Want to read it properly non-mobile and give it due consideration.

POST: Wu Wei, pt. 2

[POST]

This idea just came out my noggin. The continued allowance of freedom to all thoughts may just allow the truest of thoughts to be created. We spend a lot of time trying to dictate our thoughts in one direction - nothing wrong with intending where you're going - but what if we're missing out on certain avenues because we ban certain thoughts. Because get this, we're afraid of what those thoughts will lead to. What if we just allowed them and then surprise, it turns out the lion was a small cat waiting to be cuddled. It's worth a shot, in my opinion.

[END OF POST]

Define "truest", I guess.

Do you mean, that the thoughts that arise will be ones where all information is taken into account - so, the "truest" reflection of the current state of the world in its entirety?

If I am the absolute how come I do not know that I am? What robbed me of this information that should be fundamental?

Interesting accidental wording! In fact, "that I am" is the only thing that we do know for certain. And that's quite a good starting point.

Even now, you don't necessarily "know" you are The Absolute, you simply "are" it. Intellectually, you can only infer that you are the absolute, perhaps by noticing that everything changes in terms of content but you (as a feeling of being) always remain. Experientially, it's similar: you find that your direct experience does not correspond to the idea of separation, and perhaps you have a particular event-experience in which all the usual content seems to drop away.

In all cases, you are The-Absolute-taking-on-the-shape-of-The-Relative or in other words, you are always what you are and having an experience. The situation where there is no shape you have taken on, "pure Absolute", is a hypothetical one. However, there is always that sense of "being"...

We maybe need to ponder what we mean when we use the word "knowledge"?

My usual metaphor: the blanket of material whose only property is awareness. The blanket has folds in it: the blanket experiences itself as one fold relative to another fold, in all directions. In what sense can the blanket "know" that it is everything?

• Conceptually - It can create a fold which represents the fact that it is the whole blanket and all folds. But that knowledge will always be a fold, it won't actually be the truth in and of itself.
• Directly - It always "knows" it is the blanket simply be being it, without reflection. When we touch a table, the "hardness" is the direct experience. But do we "know" that the table is hard before we have reflected upon it?

In other words, you never forgot that you were The Absolute, it's more a case of you never intellectually pondering it. You have always known that you "exist" though and that existing is direct knowledge of being The Absolute, just not of its implications.

Another thought experiment: how did you come to "know" that you are a body, in a general sense? In actual experience, you are always 3man-sitting or 3man-standing or 3man-walking. There is no generalised sense in which you are a body, in actual experience, surely?

But I'd say direct experience of knowing you are it all - "being" - is special because it never changes and is always there, in a way that the body isn't quite. It's sort of everywhere, and is the only fact that is always available at all times and places. It has no content, so it needs no context.

Maybe the distinction we need to make is between: the knowing and the meaning?

POST: No-self and other minds?

One approach is:

• Instead of thinking of yourself as a person, think of yourself as an "open aware space".
• Instead of thinking of the world as a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", think of it as a toy-box of all possible patterns, dissolved into the background of that space.

Right now you are experiencing a particular combination of patterns. A particular combination of patterns = a "world". In other words, you have taken on the shape of being-this-world-from-the-perspective-of-this-person.

And the same is true of everyone else. We-as-consciousness share the same world in the sense of all accessing the same broad set of patterns. However, we are not doing this in the sense of sharing the same time or space, because time and space are part of the experience, not part of the larger context.

You can conceptualise this as each of us having a turn at being a world one after the other, or as existing at the same time but separate, or as one consciousness doing both parallel-simultanously. All of those are wrong, but it gives a way to imagine it. And you tend to find that the way you imagine it, becomes reflected in your experience - so it is "true enough".

Subjective idealism but not solipsism.

Q: Right now you are experiencing a particular combination of patterns.
To restate this in an interesting manner, a particular combination of patterns is creating the "you experience" within the whole

No.

He says sternly! ;-)

Patterns are not creating anything. Patterns don't "happen". The combination of patterns is the experience. And it's not just the "you experience", it's the whole thing always. It is better described as the being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person experience. You always experience the whole, it's just that, as the intensity of the sun in conceals the stars the daytime sky, some aspects are "brighter" than others.

So if I was going to be super-picky I'd revise my wording this way:

• Right now you are an "awareness" which has taken on the shape of an experience. This experience can be described metaphorically as a pattern which corresponds of the sum of all possible patterns, each of which is contributing at a different level of relative intensity.

I guess the important thing is the idea that we are the only things that ever "happen", and that "happening" corresponds to shifting our state = the relative contributions of patterns. Our ongoing experience is not such a shifting though; it is a revealing of the current state. A state fully defines the entirety of the world over all time.

The problem is that not everyone knows about the language of selectivity as emphasis, and why that can be important, so you can be sure you're losing a lot of folks who don't follow your every word when you say stuff like "each of which is contributing at a different level of relative intensity." The only people who will know what this means are the ones who've been reading your prior posts. Other than that, they'll just be shooting from the hip when replying.

What, people aren't following my every word? Then I have no sympathy whatsoever! They should get with the programme here! ;-)

This is a problem, though, with reddit and online discussion in general: how do you build up body of knowledge and refer to it? Without any accumulation of terms and imagery it's - well, not quite like having a memory reset every time there's a new post, but it probably is like having a reset every month or two.

And if nothing else, it gets boring providing context every time, and later it gets hard to distinguish what is the default view, and what's novel with your own view.

For instance, one of the first things we have to get to grips with is that the world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" beyond our sensory experiencing of an aspect of it. Perceiving this changes the context of everything, and without that foundation in place, discussions about subjective idealism are basically "structurally wrong". So, given that, do you start from the ground up every time?

Although having said that, I do try to make things progress fairly logically, albeit in abbreviated form. If something doesn't make sense but is interesting, people can ask. If it's not interesting, they can ignore.

I personally think an eclectic, mood-based approach probably works okay - because every comment isn't just a response to a post with a pre-made view, it's also an exploration of your own view, from an imposed perspective, leading to a spontaneous reshaping in real time. Sometimes this means we veer off the tracks a bit in our writing - our thinking might become a bit opaque to others, since it temporarily becomes that to ourselves - but this breaks through into improved clarity for everyone later.

Today's custom-concept-laden, insurmountable mountain of a selfish response is really the foundation for tomorrow's transparent, easily-shared, transformative insight.

I strongly agree. I don't think you're doing anything wrong at all. I hope that's not how I came across. My only point is to try to clue-in some stragglers who otherwise might be curious.

You raised a really good point though: over time, through our participation on this sub and others, we're building up a set of different perspectives that are quite powerful, but it's distributed across a few posts here, a few comments here, intertwined with discussions, and it's like we're keeping them alive by partially reposting them in responses. When we stop typing, it'll all disappear. (Apart from the sense in which it's always been there.)

Yea, it's true. Except it will not easily disappear from my heart, and probably not yours either. Of course inside all-potential everything is also available. But personally I don't want to see the ideas that I like get turned into a religion. Ugly things tend to happen when things become religions.

Agreed. What I want is for things to be useful. There is nothing to believe in. I think when "teachings" turn into "stagnant beliefs", that's when the troubling side of religion appears: it becomes all about the organisation, rather than power for the members. (The Quakers had it about right I think)

One possibility from a while back was to evolve the wiki from its current form (the "key posts" section is very recent, actually, it wasn't even that before) and expand it into something which amounted to a more thorough write-up. Particularly since many of the "goodies" are lost among the numerous discussions in the comments sections, which aren't always directly connected to the posts they appear under. This, in effect, means there's no real place to go to find the full picture from any of the authors.

We [moderating authors] probably diverge a bit on the details (e.g. my whole "patterning" thing is bit of a separate branch, I suppose, so I've tried not to go overboard on that in this sub) but I do think it would be nice, at some point, to have a more comprehensive overview of the subreddit's output, and even make a plus out of the contrasting aspects (which are really more about preferred metaphors of course).

So, good idea, thanks for the prompt.

== you'll very very likely find out how Nefandi and TriumphantGeorge were wrong too==

Yes, and I think that's an important thing: subjective idealism is, in a way, about "never having to say you're right". Because the content of experience, which includes ideas, is never correct or fundamental; it's shape is completely open for shifting. Which points us back to that whole thing of the only truth being that we are experiencing, not what we are experiencing.

If we've accomplished anything here, I think it's that we have reached ways of talking about things which are some of the most flexible available: they avoid saying anything is fundamental, while still offering a way of conceiving of things and so making changes, rather than just saying "not this, not that" or that you'll have to wait for "grace" to give you an experience of openness. We're saying: here are some ideas, and if you use them, you can have experiences which will reveal to you that things are not what you assumed, rather than just "hoping" that one day something will happen for you.

I think that's pretty good going for a little subreddit that's only being around for a year - probably because we happened to bring together in interesting mix of participants who have slightly different angles not the same thing, revealing each other's assumptions and producing a purer version of the total. Well done us! (Or should I say: well done me's!)

I guess I'd say that, being "true" means "being right for you" (which can change, obviously). Whereas we can go through periods of trying to be right for others, when all we can really be is helpful or useful, free with our insights.

Something that I notice heavily is that people want you to convince them that they can do something, or that something about their own experience is true. And you have to say really: look, only you can experiment with your own experience, only you can find out whether you can do something or not. Thinking about it, talking about it, won't do anything. It's like drawing pictures of the beach to in an attempt to see if the weather is warm at the coast, and refusing to actually go there until you've felt some heat from the crayons.

Thinking about it and talking about it can be helpful, but not in the way some people imagine.

Right, so to clarify a little: having a discussion about something does intensify within people the corresponding worldview, and they will have a little bit of the corresponding experiences as a result. But, if they never take the time to do that for themselves, then they haven't gained a whole lot. They can get addicted to thinking, talking about things because that's the only way they get a taste of the experience. They still want it to - as you say - be a "knowledge download". But it's always up to you to trigger the concepts within yourself; they don't persist otherwise, and you'll come complaining (meaning: the person will) that "it's not working". And the answer is: "because you aren't becoming".

True enough, a conversation doesn't necessarily trigger the worldview you are talking about, but it can at least trigger a variation of that, in the context of their own patterning. One might hope that this would be sufficient to pique curiosity and get people experiment for themselves; but it isn't very often the case. (Perhaps because most people don't really, deep down, want to "cheat" their accumulated patterning, even if it would transform their lives from misery.)

This might be a bit of a tangent, but I also discovered another possibility for why I might not want to cancel all the misery immediately. For me I think there is a hidden desire to be able to "reply" (as it were) to any state honestly and forthrightly. So in other words, I don't so much want to remove misery, as to be able to say freely, without reservation, without fear, "fuck you" to misery. It's like a desire to be someone other than a victim in the face of a bully. To prove that you can do this you still need someone or something to play the role of a bully so that you can blossom on the inside into someone fearless.

True, this isn't muffins, this is reformatting yourself. And once you know, although you might wish you didn't know, the fact that you know means that you will never choose to un-know, because that would be to deceive yourself, um, knowingly. Pretty much nobody wants to be the guy who likes his steak in The Matrix.

So, on the "reply" thing, that's interesting. Say I'm in a conflict situation. I know (that word again), that I could just "delete" the situation if I wanted. However, that tells me nothing about my courage to meet the situation on its own terms, and triumph. If all I ever do is delete uncomfortable situations, then I am not truly exploring my experience and all that it can be. Also - later - being certain that I am "secretly safe", I might conclude that life is all about such experiences anyway, and without them I might as well just "skip to the end" because I won't be having fun - or at least, not learning new things.

And that points to something: some people become concerned that by doing this stuff, life becomes a different sort of churn. But actually, the mystery never goes away, and in fact becomes more obvious due to its clarity: you never experience something prior to experiencing it; it's always a surprise, in the details, even if they are laid out before you, due to your intentions.

For any subjectivity that uses any non-trivial amount of othering, I agree, there must be some surprises, at least in the details. Thing is, I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want some degree of othering, because it's so damn useful. For one thing, that's how we automate the boring stuff.

Well, it really is mind surgery, you're right!

Agreed somewhat on the wanting to return to oblivion re: the syndrome syndromes, although might that not be due to the lack of understanding? Depersonalisation is, I'd say, another form of localisation, just shifted spatially somewhat (in terms of the experience). You've gained an insight, but without context you are powerless to use it.

So really what we're talking about, in that latter part, is freedom - the lack of a need to do any particular thing, and therefore the ability to choose to do anything. And mystery, really, is a contributor to freedom, and to adventure.

And ironically, the more that is "othered", the freer you become: intend what matters, let the details autocomplete!

Sort of! :) But 'othering' is not a freebie. The downside of 'othering' is that processes tend to then take on a "life of their own" as it were, and there is a risk they become renegade processes which no longer serve anyone's interest but "their own."
I view 'othering' as I do fire: very very useful, if you're careful not to set your house on fire.

That's all part of the fun, though! And of course there's no certainty that micromanagement makes you any safer; "manual" operation means you can't take into account the larger context, which you get for free when you let existing patterning fill it out for you. It's a matter of taste, but I think occasional course correction probably makes for a better life overall. Either way, it's still better than "normal" life, which is blind in action and understanding.

So it's a matter of perspective (adopted, literally). If you step outside the frame completely, you've got what amounts to an "eternal static pattern of perfection" - but basically no experience. With too narrow a frame, you're left with a sort of blindness with things thrashing at you from nowhere, a completely dynamic experience with no stable platform.

Once you've calmed yourself down though, played with this for a while, then things line up a bit and the (apparent) chaos subsides, and you can trust more, especially since your intuition tends to be clearer, so you do in effect see beyond the immediate 3D-frame.

Perspectives: I really did mean "literally" on the perspective thing - as in, viewing something from here... rather than here. Seeing the whole pattern laid out, versus being "inside the maze" and not being able to see around the next corner, only having faith that your intentions are always fulfilled. That kind of thing.

Tending the garden: Well, that sounded very Biblical Parable! And that's not necessarily a bad thing at all.

The Biblical reference wasn't judgemental there; I think that book was originally a perfectly decent attempt to codify a particular description of reality (namely: the apparent internal shapes the apparent external), which has become somewhat corrupted by poor and culturally-unaware interpretations. So it's not a bad source at all to pick from, I'd say.

A perspective doesn't necessarily mean visual; it's a relational thing. It really means the balance between the explicit and the implicit - the proportion of information which is unfolded into awareness vs that which is not. If the world is an eternal informational landscape, then one's perspective dictates the radius which falls within one's perception.

The problem is that the Bible never (please correct me if I am wrong) conveys that God is the innermost person inside the person...

It kinda does, via metaphor. God, Jesus, all meant to be aspects of you, in the early interpretations. All that stuff about fathers and sons, seedtime and harvest, forgiveness and non-judgement. Unfortunately the subsequent religions (as distinct from the early Christian movements) flipped that around so that God was something external to be worshipped and pleaded with, rather than internal and to be attended to.

To me the term "perspective" means that whatever you experience is a result of a specific manner of experiencing.

That still applies here. On the landscape and radius, yes it's metaphorical. The notion of "proximity" depends upon the particular aspect we discussing. In this case, I'm referring to the ability to perceive outcomes.

Talking more plainly: right now, I may have set various intentions, but all I am perceiving is this room around me (simplistically speaking). However, I may have a sense of the next-moment, of outcomes through intuition. If I could "step back", although not 3-dimensionally, then I would have access to a greater degree of temporal or event information. We could call this our present "knowledge horizon" or something; but what it's trying to convey is that you can't have both a dynamic experience and the experience of the full set of outcomes.

What can I say? The Bible is a product of its time! That's why we have to rewrite this stuff in modern language periodically, as the old descriptions stop being understood. If those parables had been written "straightforwardly" they would have made no sense to the readers of the time. For instance, the ideas of "reality" and even of "person" probably did not exist in the way they are used now. The concept of even an individual distinct identity is relatively recent.

The Bible as it is now (the official selection, as it were), is obviously compiled from the viewpoint of a hierarchical religion with a certain power dynamic, but that doesn't mean the message is gone, if people want to use it as their entry point. (Not something I'm recommending; I'm more indicating that those who are already dedicated to Biblical studies might find the true message is not what they are being taught in Sunday School.)

It is unlikely Jesus was a historical character - probably an amalgamation of various stories and parables. Y'know, and the Old Testament is fun, right?

But this "stepping back" is moving through a different from conventional dimensions. And a dimension is a narrative. That, by the way, is a recent insight I had: dimension is narrative.

For sure, yes! It's perhaps best to think of dimensions as, rather than spatial extents, rather as stories enfolded within stories, like an origami sculpture. I see the next level up from here by "folding" this room into itself spatially, and that's what leads me to the "higher" perspective.

So even if you take only the very old documents, I don't think the Bible fares very well.

Yeah, I'm not recommending the Bible as the go-to text for today, just saying that it was an attempt to codify this knowledge, rather than a bunch of little moral tales as it often seems to be presented as. On the historicity of Jesus, I mean that the stories themselves seem to be a patchwork of different characters; but then the Bible wasn't (I suggest) aiming to be a historical account so it doesn't matter much.

It's probably unfair to compare Buddhist texts with early Christian ones; I don't think they were on the same level. The Western texts don't seem to do abstraction very well; they don't really explain, rather they guide behaviour?

One of the nice things about idealism, of course, is that we can happily construct pseudo-spatial spaces consisting of meaning, and not have to suggest they are less "real" the "proper" dimensions - since we don't reify the physical concepts anyway.

I really like your description of orthogonal narratives - very evocative. We could also apply the notion in a more granular way: orthogonal facts. One could actually create mental structures for this, perhaps, and flip through them as part of a more general organising principle.

I agree, but the Bible was never meant to be a document about transcendence and thus, never about spiritual liberation. It's a document about law. What you can and cannot do as a human on Earth. The Bible is less a spiritual manual than it is an early codex of law. So the task of the Biblical authors is almost literally the opposite of someone who writes about liberative spirituatlity. The task of the Biblical author is to ground you in this here bad dream, and make sure you can't escape it. The point of the Bible is to clip your wings! It's to put you in a small cage.

I don't agree with your assessment of the Bible. I see it as an attempt at a "how-to" manual; and early example of self help. It doesn't make sense to compare it to deeper texts, because it was never meant to be that - in fact, it was probably never meant to be a single book in the first place. As you imply, it was a bunch of oral stories, which got written down sooner or later, and combined with some other material that fitted the purposes of the 'publisher' of the day. We probably have to make a distinction, I suggest, between the original material and its purpose and context, and the 'collected works' and intention of the later compilation.

Hmm, pondering this: it's interesting that while the West has become more adept at abstract thinking, it has at the same time I think (as a culture) grown more literal. The older civilisations basically communicated in metaphor, it seems (perhaps due to that oral tradition), and what's happened here is that we've stratified: high abstraction - gap - literal structures. What we do here in our discussions, is perhaps the filling in of that gap, using the full spectrum of thought to make connections.

But do you at least agree with me that law-giving and spiritual liberation are mutually contradictory concerns?

There is the possibility that, through the application of law, one might gain insight from the experience - but I do think that it's more likely you have the experience but don't get the broader meaning.

Yeah, I bet them desert fathers had a few more secret stories on the go...

I think the re-inclusion of subjectivity might turn into a broader trend. It's relatively recently that "objectivity" was jumped upon to provide a simplifying concept to make it easier to create explanations. But a couple of recent approaches in physics are flipping it round and saying, let's start with the subjective angle ("private views") and, um, we'll worry about connecting things up "objectively" later. We may yet see a resurgence of, and a reunification of knowledge by, subjective ideas - if not idealism, exactly.

For the subjective view stuff, check out Christopher Fuchs' work on QBism. It's a fairly readable introduction. An interesting development, and (at last) a move away from many-worlds and all that other nonsense.

I wasn't talking about any particular approach, just that a revisiting of the subjective frame will lend itself to a folding back of "objective" knowledge. What the theoretical context for that would be, I don't know - it might be idealism, but I figure there would be a few stepping stones before it got to that.

Have you ever seen Tom Campbell's videos on youtube?

Yeah, Tom's good, I just dislike the implication that something is "happening" in the background, and so on, other than experiencing - that the simulation is "running" somehow. As you say though, he is thought-provoking, and he is leading lots of people in a good direction, even if they have to throw the ladder away when they get there (which applies to most metaphors). He clearly delineates the parts of the model and connects them to the everyday world, and he even brings Robert Monroe back into awareness as an interesting guy, rather than as some bloke who just messed with OBEs.

Signing off for now - check out that Quanta article and tell me what you think. You can safely skim over the parts which are too physicsy and still get the gist, I think.

Q: I am reading this QBism grimoire by Fuchs, and here's a juicy quote from it:
QBism says that every quantum measurement is a moment of creation, and the formal apparatus of quantum theory is an aid for each agent’s thinking about those “creatia” she is involved with. But surely a Copernican principle applies just as much to QBism as to any other science. QBism’s solution starts by saying the last point just that much more clearly: “Quantum measurement represents those moments of creation an agent happens to seek out or notice.” It does not at all mean that there aren’t moments of creation going on all around, unnoticed, unparticipated in by the particular agent, all the time. The larger world of QBism is something aligned with James’s vision of a pluriverse where “being comes in local spots and patches which add themselves or stay away at random, independently of the rest.”
So, guess what? You probably wouldn't like QBism either, based on at least this one passage.

Well, I dislike aspects of it also - but that doesn't matter, because if I loved every aspect then it would be... me! We have to be careful about "moments of creation" and so on. Better perhaps to say "moments of definition" or "moments of fixing" or "moments of intensification of the contribution of a particular fact". There are no moments of creation, in that sense, other than something unfolding sensorily into consciousness plus in effect the facts implied by the content of that moment (since the world is always coherent between shifts).

Remember what happened when I was exposed for the first time to your style of thinking? How many questions I was asking? Things like "enfolded" and "unfolded" made absolutely no sense to me. Well, just how many people have been asking you about that stuff besides me?

With the "imagination space + patterning" type metaphors it's much more intuitive generally. Since I've got people actually using that to update perceptions and create changes, it's much easier for them to connect to direct experience (which is of course the aim).

POST: New here, and I have a question.

All experiences occur inside 'experiencing'. Even ideas about an "outside" of experiencing, occur inside of 'experiencing'.

We can fantasise all we want about what is going on "out there", but it will still just be a concept "in here" - with "in here" also being a concept. You never experience inside or outside really. All we ever encounter is our own mind, taking on the shape of a particular state, from which experiences apparently arise. In fact, you can easily demonstrate to yourself there is no outside - by trying to find it, right now!

Hint: First direct your attention towards "the place you are looking out from" as you read these words right now. Continue onwards as far as you can, see if you can find a boundary. Now do the same in all directions. Now try and find where "you" are. If you think you find yourself, ask why you are able to see yourself, from the outside. Realise that this means you are the outside too, which is therefore also inside.

...

"Materialism" is a conceptual framework, which arises subjectively in people's minds. "Materialism" is made from thoughts and is nothing other than that. It's a potentially useful way of thinking; it might lead to interesting ideas for creativity and behaviour, for instance. But it cannot "give rise to subjective consciousness", because it is itself dependent upon it.

For your example -

You are already in that position, of being "objective inside of your own mind". So, in what sense do you know everything or perfectly understand the system of your own mind? You'll notice: All you ever come to appreciate is relative truth within the content of your experiences. And it doesn't matter at what scale this operates at. This is separate from the nature of experiencing, which is fundamental (unchanging) truth.

So a way to get to the heart of it, right now, is to realise that the nature of your experience remains the same regardless of its content, and that since content amounts to patterns within the mind, it makes no sense to talk of the mind arising from content.

To reuse a metaphor: If your mind was a blanket of material, and the folds within the blanket were the content of your experience, is there any arrangement of folds which could fully capture the truth of the existence of the blanket?

POST: Morning Lucidity (new lucidity technique)

[POST]

So this morning after having a ton of weird dreams from unregular sleep i had some insight into a new lucidity technique. When i woke up this morning i was super groggy and slept in much longer then i usually do, yet when i was lying in bed still awake, it kind of still felt like i was dreaming because i was so out of it.
The morning seems to be a good time to work on lucidity insight mainly because you have just been dreaming and its fresh on your mind. So this technique for lucidity is rather simple. The second you wake up in the morning instead of telling yourself you woke up, you instead try to feel that this is yet another dream in the sequence. The closer you can do this upon the ending of the dream the more effective it should be. It would probably be most effective if its after a particularly vivid and memorable dream as well.

[END OF POST]

Q1: Its not really a new technique, its called DEILD, dream exit induced lucid dreaming. A fair few of my LDs have been induced this way

Q2: this technique is used to make waking reality seem more dream like, not to induce a lucid dream just to make that clear

Q3: Is there a difference? This is one thing I've been wondering about for a while. I've had a number of experiences that lead me to suspect that waking reality is really just a lucid dream where we are dreaming that we're not dreaming.
So there's a threshold of disbelief that, once breached, makes it obvious one is in a lucid dream and so one then treats reality as such and if shit gets weird one just wakes up in bed. But if on the other hand one wakes up into a lucid dream and nothing is weird, the belief tends to be, "ah this is waking reality" and so it is treated as such.
Is the point you're getting at with making waking reality more dreamlike vs inducing a full-on lucid dream one of stability so as to not wake up from the dream? I'm not sure if I'm following.

I think what he is getting at is simply using that moment upon waking to assert to oneself that the day that is about to commence is no different in essential quality to a dream (contrary to one's usual assumptions); to bring the "sense of dream" you still have upon waking on, into the day with you.

It is true there is no difference in type between waking and dreaming, but we do not normally act as though that is the case, even if we recognise it intellectually. I think his exercise is a suggestion for bringing it over, as a feeling, into actual experience via intervention.

(I'm reminded that Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep, on our reading list, has a similar idea where you assert that "this is a dream" throughout the day, and ongoing experience starts to fall into line with that assertion over time, such that it is sensed to be a dream.)

Ah ok. Yeah I've done some practice with reminding myself, "This is a dream" throughout the day, but without that felt sense, it's not very effective. This is a pretty good idea the more I think about it. Setting that intention to do it right away in the morning would be pretty powerful. Back to the felt sense, does one need to have to felt sense in order to experience waking reality as a dream or can one come from a place of not having that felt sense and start acting as-if anyway in order to obtain the feeling?

So, of course it's always true anyway, regardless of the feeling you have. The feeling is, after all, just another experience. Reality is always a waking dream, even when it's a waking dream of "feeling that this is a world based on a solid persistent substrate". This means that the power of direct intention is always available to you (because of course that's how the whole thing came about anyway, and it's how you are moving your arms and legs right now).

Therefore, if you do want to generate the feeling, then you can just-decide it directly - or you could intend something else that implies-that you have the feeling, as part of its larger pattern. As you say, performing acts which correspond to a dreamlike reality, thereby triggering the extended "life is dreamlike" pattern, would be one way to go about that.

Again, though, you can just "know" it without having the feeling, but I do agree that having the feeling within experience means you have a constant reminder, or presence, which can prevent you getting lost in the dream-as-solid-reality again.

it even makes sense if you logically think about it - thinking about reality can be condensed into one thought strand and set about as a construct upon itself or within others
but then what makes that so? is it you? is it every poster on reddit or the people on the street or the Jews or the government? it has to be me and there are hard limits on others on what they can do
even if their souls are unaffected, their actions are limited - otherwise I would not be able to accomplish anything except at the behest of others' desires: I would have to follow all laws of whoever is in government, I would be subject to arrest for any number of things I do or say, and their religions/beliefs would tower over mine.

Strands which are thoughts about the world, are basically parallel worlds all on their own.

There is only you, so you don't need to concern yourself about the limitations of others. However, this is you-as-awareness rather than you-as-person. There are in, fact, no "worlds" or "people" at all in the sense that we usually conceive of them - as external and independent objects and beings that are "happening". Rather, they are patterns in awareness, and you-as-awareness is the only thing that is ever "happening".

There are no souls beyond the concept "souls".

right, or parallel universes

Yes. So - when I say "world", I don't mean it in the sense of "planet". I mean it as a "self-consistent coherent realm or pattern" or something like that. We could equally use "reality" or "universe", depending on the associations of those terms for our target audience. What we don't mean, though, is something like a "place".

then who is another? i mean, there must be other existences of others not-perceptible within any universe

What "another"? Have you ever encountered "another"? And what does it mean to talk about something which is "not-perceptible". If you are talking about something, then it is perceivable in some form - even if that's in the form of an idea. Which loops back to what were were saying previously: aren't ideas basically patterns and worlds, and those "just" ideas?

then couldn't i have the idea of another existing in a separate place - i.e. an entirely different being separate to every universe that could exist within the range of my all-possible universes

You could. But that would just be an idea in your current moment of awareness. It would be a thought "about" something; it says nothing of its actually happening other than it is happening in thought, now.

who is the actor in, say, my parents? even if all bodies are controlled by me , the experiencer could be different

Hmm.

What "experiencer"? Pause now, and try to find boundaries or multiplicity in awareness. Try to find an experiencer. Where is it? There is not even one experiencer; there is just "experiencing". It makes no sense to talk of multiple experiencers - or experiences. Even the idea of "other experiencers" is... an experience, one of them, now.

Are you "in" you? Are you an actor "in" you? If you are thinking of answering yes, pause more, and try and identify where it is. Now, consider again what it means to talk of an actor "in" your parents.

There are no actors, I suggest. Nothing is happening, except this experience, now.

but that is a thought about me

How can you have a thought "about" you? What does that mean? Is any thought actually about you (in the sense of capturing what you are about)?

but could i not 'let' another have an experience within my experience?

What other? There aren't any others. Strictly speaking, it's not "my" experience; it's just experience. "My" is itself an experience.

No thought can capture the medium within which it resides and of which it is constructed, surely? You can't think about the actual you; you can only think other stuff and call it, incorrectly, "you".

Direct investigation reveals that experience has no boundary, and hence no "outside". Any idea you have about an outside, is just a thought of the idea of an outside - inside.

Who says that people are liberated? I suggest that people can't be liberated, because there are no people. However, "that which has and is experiences" can shape-shift such that it is no longer under the illusion that is a particular shape (in this case, the shape of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world).

In what sense does there have to be a "purpose" to experiences? The idea of "purpose" is itself an experience - of thinking about the concept "purpose".

why bother having an experience unless it is for a reason?

Experiences - in fact just-being - is its own reason. That isn't necessarily the same as a logical reason, though. It is important not to conflate thinking (e.g. mulling over concepts about life and experience, and ideas such as "reasons" and "purpose") with the main strand of experience.

Thinking about "a purpose" is an experience. A "sense of purpose" is itself just another experience. You might as well ask, "what is the purpose in having a sense of purpose?", and so on. You can do that, but none of those answers will matter in the slightest really; they are parallel, and say nothing about the fundamental situation.

If you need something to hold onto, though, one might say that the reason to experience anything is simply the feeling of wanting to. Any unpacked, narrative reason is just arbitrary story-making to justify that feeling, or desire.

isn't that a reason? the reason to be is to be

Yes, but with a small caveat. The difficulty is, the "reason" that can be described isn't the actual reason. "Logical" reasons and "direct" reasons both appear identically in written language - and so the two get confused. It's another aspect of that thing where, when you discuss "the nature of experience" most people immediately switch their attention onto some thinking-about experience in order to explore it, rather than attending to actual experience. Often, discussion don't emphasise the difference, and so people talk at cross purposes. Not us, though, eh? :-)

as i said before i mostly see deductive / thinking-about experiences peppered with the occasional insight. this is no good to me because i never have any actual experiences involving another but instead have thinking-about time-wasting exercises.

Yeah, I get you.

Well, you do have experiences involving "another" one one level - it's just that you-as-awareness are "taking on the shape" of the experience of being this-person interacting with that-person. They are both what-you-truly-are, but since that "you" is not a personal you - and is undivided and therefore not really an object at all - then it doesn't devalue the interaction.

As with the whole solipsism thing, the error arises with from the fact that all thinking presupposes division - objects and relationships in mental space - and assumes that experiences is of that nature also, when it is sort of neither that nor not that.

i'm just fed up with the running-around-in-circles!

Just give up thinking about it, is what it comes down to eventually. You can't "solve" this in thought anyway, because it's not a "problem". Only the concept of it is. The only way to have an experience of something being a certain way, is to start viewing it that way. Things are no way in particular, inherently. That's why you can't work it out.

However, as you indicate, you can have an "insight" - an intuitive direct knowing - that things are a certain way fundamentally (that is, undivided and unchanging and containing all possibilities and all you-as-awareness). You can never reach this by thinking about it though, or by performing actions to get to it, because those thoughts and actions already imply division; that is enfolded in the intention.

All you can do, is bear in mind that it is always true that, whether you are experiencing division and location or blending and expansion, you are an undivided that which is "taking on the shape of" the experience of apparent division, or apparent expansion, and so on.

then how did i have those "insights"? if i could just have that insight perpetually - is what i'm striving for

There isn't a "how" as such, but I'd suggest it's when you cease holding onto your attentional focus, cease subtly constraining and deforming experience.

When people do relaxation or contemplation or releasing, while they might "let go of" their body movements and thoughts, letting them be, they often still hold onto their attentional focus - in spatial or content terms - perhaps just very slightly. This can be likened to allowing a piece of material to relax into a loose state, while still holding onto the edges. For sure, you not shaping the content as such, but you are still holding it in an overall state which is a deformation of its unmodified state.

So - you might have let go of 3-dimensional sensory content, but you are still holding onto the experience of 3-dimensional space itself, which prevents you having that direct intuition or knowing of the void "everything everywhere all at once in every location" truth.

But are there not infinitely many perspectives of this experience, now? How is one able to assume that what is being experienced from one perspective applies to all other perspectives?

There are infinitely many possible experiences, but that doesn't mean that there are infinitely many experiences that are "happening".

You might say that all possible experiences are "enfolded" or "dissolved" into awareness, but only one is "unfolded" or "condensed/expanded" into sensory experiences, now. Or you could think of it as having a book in your hand with 100 pages "enfolded" into it, but only one page is current unfolded as the experience of "reading". In other words, the world is basically static and eternal, and the only thing that is "happening" is the current experience of it within, and as, "awareness".

Although it's tempting to imagine that there are many perspectives or "awarenesses" that are happening at once, this is incorrect - because awareness is not an object, and has no boundary; there is no outside to it. It is not "an awareness" it is just "awareness", which you might conceive of as a sort of "material whose only inherent property is being-aware and which takes on the shape of experiential states".

Furthermore, not being an object, it does not exist within time - rather, apparent change is something which is part of an experiential state. So it is meaningless to talk of "awarenesses" or experiences happening at "the same time"; spatial-extent and passage of time are part of an experience, not part of awareness. This also means that you are not a person, as such.

The current "shape" or state you-as-awareness has taken on, then, is that of apparently being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

To take what you're saying literally seems to imply that what I'm witnessing is not two people having a conversation on the internet via the use of human bodies but rather just my own mind communicating with itself with no existence of said bodies on computers somewhere else.

It's tricky to talk about because the "I'm" you refer to isn't you-as-person and when we say "witnessing" we have to be careful we don't imply that there is some sort of separation - this isn't a situation whereby there is an observer and then a thing that is being observed.

In your current moment right now, you can easily notice that although you are having an experience of apparently "being over here with the screen over there", in fact when you go looking for yourself you discover you are sort of "everywhere". (This is best done with eyes closed: attend to your body sensations, then attend to distant sounds, and try to identify where "you" are - in particular, try and find the "edges" to your experience.) In fact, you'll discover you don't really have a human body at all as such.

So, it's not a case of "my own mind communicating with itself": there is no communication happening; there's a sensory experience "as if" two people were talking. Fundamentally, though, there are no people as we usually conceive of it. There's just a particular total pattern in awareness = a state.

Now, written down like this, that sounds quite start and lonely, but that's where we return to our early points: awareness isn't a "thing" and also it isn't made from anything; it is undivided. This means that the entire situation is always one of fundamental "aliveness" and "oneness". Therefore, you-as-awareness is in fact the total aliveness of the world, taking on the shape of anything - albeit not in the way you might have originally thought. That is, the world is more like a dissolved pattern than it is a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time". However, that does not make it less "real" or "existing".

In fact, it makes it more real than you might have thought, because it means that the world is more than the basic model you might have confused it with. What you had previously considered to be "real people" and a "real world" are, upon inspection, just some thoughts you were having about the world - inferior, empty concepts, parallel constructions lacking in complexity and momentum. The world-as-it-is, although of the same nature (patterns in awareness), is so much more than that; it is everything, always.

Hence, perhaps, "the world in a grain of sand".

This I can grok. I visualize it similar to a Mandelbrot set zoom. All of the patterns inherently exist as potential but only one particular pattern is in frame at any given time.

Right, that's one way to imagine it. I've used things like an infinite grid, or an origami fortune teller or an ink droplet analogy in the past. Basically, any metaphor that conveys the idea that the entirety of all possible states exists eternally "dissolved" into the background, and that from that a state is selected and a sensory experience is unfolded - but all of the same "stuff", that is "awareness". What's important is, not to confuse these descriptions with "what is really happening", because even those descriptions are themselves just more experience - and all that is every "really happening" is this exact experience, now.

Does "awareness" and "consciousness" point to the same place for you or are they different in the way you use them?

They're both rather corrupted words, I'd say. The problem with "consciousness" is that it's now used in at least three distinct ways, and those ways are conflated such that the meaning in this context can get obscured. The three ways are: "consciousness-of" (that is, the content of consciousness), "self-consciousness" (the identification with one part of that content as "me") and "consciousness" (that is, the "stuff" of experience). Here, we mean something like the final definition. I think that using the word "awareness" can be a bit better because, although it's often used to mean "the thing we have our spatial attentional focus on", it is vague enough to fit our intended meaning of "the 'material' whose only property is being-aware and which 'takes on the shape of' states and experiences".

The way I've been picturing it lately is as if "The One" has all these countless fingers of awareness that it started diving into this static Mandelbrot-like hologram with.

That's fine as far as it goes, but you are still subtly distinguishing between a thing that is aware ("The One"), and the thing it is aware of ("this static... hologram"). We really want our metaphor to convey that there is "that", and "that" is adopts the shape of experiences - and that experiences actually consist of all possibilities at once, just with some possibilities being "brighter" than others, hence "take on the shape of".

All of which is a battle to avoid accidentally talking about "that" as if it is an object, as a result of language only being able to deal things in terms of objects.

Which seems to imply that there's no way to know whether any of the other people in my experience have any awareness behind their experience or if I'm just looking at empty images and assuming they do.

Well, if you follow the above reasoning, the question doesn't even arise. There is nothing "behind" anything; there is no awareness "behind" experience, because awareness is what "takes on the shape of" experience. The only thing that is happening right now, is the experience you-as-awareness have taken on the shape of, right now.

Right now, how would you describe your experience as your respond to this?

I feel like I am an open space with sensations floating in it, in the form of the experience of sitting at a computer screen typing a message with a very welcome cup of coffee to my right hand side (and therefore in danger of succumbing to any sudden mouse movements). But what matters is, what is your experience right now as you read this response?

If you are having an experience, how do you reconcile that I also am aware and having an experience?

Not at the same time though, eh? But also, not not at the same time. It is more accurate to say that this issue is about how experiences themselves are outside of time. Experiences have the shape of time (ongoing change) and space (physical extension) - experiences are formatted as space and time, space and time are aspects of an experience - but there is no space and time outside of the experience of them.

The "Hall of Records" metaphor tries to capture this point. I'll attach it below in a moment, as a reply to this comment.

I've thought a lot lately about the idea of there only being consciousness. And how I've come to think of it basically is that we are all the same thing but this thing is capable of being anything.

So, being careful there: the idea of there only being "consciousness", which is different from the idea of there only being "a consciousness". There's a big difference to that, because the latter would suggest there is only the sensory perspective you are having right now, with no other possibilities, whereas what we are saying is that all possibilities are here and now, and so you can have experiences "as if" pretty much anything is true (including all those nice metaphors you've come up with). Leading us to...

I've noticed that after hanging around conscious beings for a a day or a few that it's like their dream stuff seeps into mine. For a while after leaving them my reality will be brighter. I'll be seeing all sorts of new plants and such that I had never seen or even knew existed before.

Right, I find this also. We could think of it as, we allow our narrow attentional focus, or subset of the world-pattern, to open up, and our sphere of presence (the subset of the possibilities we allow to contribute to our ongoing experience) then incorporates all those fresh patterns and apparent interactions. When we loosen our hold on our experience this way, the world does often become more dreamlike, because we aren't gripping onto it with our habits and assumptions so much, we aren't intending in terms of our world views so much. Creativity in action! :-)

The Hall of Records

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

You are connecting to a vast memory bank containing all the possible events, from all the possible perspectives, that might have happened in a world like this. Like navigating through an experiential library. Each "experience" is a 3D sensory moment, from the perspective of being-a-person, in a particular situation.

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

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

So in terms of "oneirosophy" you don't need to worry about another "you". You are not even the person you are experiencing, you are simply looking at this particular series of event-memories, from this particular perspective. "Intending" changes in your experience means to decide to recall a memory that is not directly connected to this one.

Note that none of this metaphorical stuff is necessarily required though - all that matters is that you are willing to let go of the current experience, and believe that you can connect to another experience which is discontinuous with it. However, these "Active Metaphors" better allow you to format yourself.

you see my body is not illusion otherwise i couldn't exist, even though the cause is imaginative and the only solution i have is to manifest mushrooms - and by manifest i mean have success in growing

Well, your body is an illusion in the sense that it is not what you might have assumed it to be. Being an illusion doesn't mean something doesn't exist - it just means our description of its nature is incorrect. In this case, the body is realised to be an experience shaped from awareness, rather than an independent external object which is being observed by a separate conscious viewer. It's an illusion in the same way that a photograph of a crowd scene is not actually a bunch of people wandering about on a street.

Other people's bodies are of the same form as yours: sensations and perceptions arising within and as you-as-awareness. Your body is just a bunch of sensations plus an idea; you don't really have a body as such. And other people's bodies are basically just visual images, sounds, and textures, just like everything else.

Note: if when you think of other people's bodies, you are thinking about them as if you were "in" those bodies, or are viewing them from a 3d-person perspective (the "view from nowhere"), then you are immediately "wrong" - because what you are doing is imagining that you-as-awareness had taken on the shape of a different experience. On the other hand, upon recognising this, you are "right", since you realise that there are no "other people" as such, except as patterns of experience, and that is what "you-as-person" is also.

so it's their fact of them existing in my presence that i'm concerned about

I'm not sure what you mean by "existing in my presence"? Firstly, what do you mean by "my presence" and then what would it mean to "exist" in that?

Q: Firstly, what do you mean by "my presence"
anyone i see
what would it mean to "exist" in that?
be seen by me
but my presence itself is the totality of awareness localized to a particular experience, as in brahma [infinite grid], paramātmā [localized experience] and bhagavān ["my" experience as 'śrī kṛṣṇa']

I meant more what your presence actually is - but going along with that: when you see "someone" what is it, exactly, that you see? What exactly are you experiencing?

i'm experiencing an experience - albeit one i don't care for

...So, putting aside any interpretation based on mushrooms or contemplation or anything else, you end up with: you are having an experience of sight-sound-texture-feeling, with nothing "behind" that. You are experiencing an experience; you are experiencing being an experience.

Given this, what are "other people"?

other people must be myself

And what are you?

परावर parāvara - totality - the universe - everything

Even that, though, is perhaps a little grand and over-reaching, referencing ideas that are not themselves persistent (although I do get that they are metaphorical and trying to "point the way' rather than capture its essence). So -

I'd suggest keeping it simple and phrasing it as something like:

• "What you truly are is 'that which takes on the shape of experiences'."

Or just "that which experiences", but I think it's useful to go with the formulation above, since it emphasises that there are not two things - the experience and the experiencer - only one thing (really: no things). And that is the only thing that is always true: the only fundamental truth. Beyond that, things are changeable and are only relatively true.

how would you encapsulate that in a word?

I think I would probably deliberate not do so, since it that word and its conceptual associations would become yet another distraction. If I had to go with one, I'd opt for: "this".

Of course, this (ahem) only makes sense once you have already worked through everything, but that's fine. It's really a recognition that no word can mean what we are talking about here, since what we are talking about here is that from which all meaning is made. (And we're back to the metaphor of no sandcastle being able to capture "the beach" and "sand", while also being both of those things.)

POST: Rick Archer interviews Rupert Spira

[POST]

Buddha at the Gas Pump: Video/Podcast 259. Rupert Spira, 2nd Interview [http://batgap.com/rupert-spira-2nd-interview/]
I found this to be an interesting conversation over at Buddha at the Gas Pump (a series of podcasts and conversations on states of consciousness) between Rick Archer and Rupert Spira about direct experiencing of the nature of self and reality, full of hints and good guidance for directing your own investigation into 'how things are right now'.
Archer continually drifts into conceptual or metaphysical areas, and Spira keeps bringing him back to what is being directly experienced right now, trying to make him actually see the situation rather than just talk about it. It's a fascinating illustration of how hard it can be to communicate this understanding, to get people to sense-directly rather than think-about.
I think this tendency to think-about is actually a distraction technique used by the skeptical mind, similar to what /u/cosmicprankster420 mentions here [ POST: The depths of the skeptical mind.]. Our natural instinct seems to be to fight against having our attention settle down to our true nature.
Overcoming this - or ceasing resisting this tendency to distraction - is needed if you are to truly settle and perceive the dream-like aspects of waking life and become free of the conceptual frameworks, the memory traces and forms that arbitrarily shape or in-form your moment by moment world in an ongoing loop.
His most important point as I see it is that letting go of thought and body isn't what it's about, it's letting go of controlling your attention that makes the difference. Since most people don't realise they are controlling their attention (and that attention, freed, will automatically do the appropriate thing without intervention) simply noticing this can mean a step change for their progress.
Also worth a read is the transcript of Spira's talk at the Science and Nonduality Conference 2014 [https://web.archive.org/web/20180312044814/http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/read/the_new_science_of_consciousness]. Rick Archer's earlier interview with Spira is here [http://batgap.com/rupert-spira/], but this is slightly more of an interview than a investigative conversation.

[END OF POST]

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

This is exactly what I was and have been battling with this past year. Getting the skeptical mind (ego?) to stop worrying about things that don't matter and start allowing things to flow naturally. Whenever the flow starts my skeptical mind kicks in and blocks it immediately. Very frustrating.*

There's something you should try: Make sure your attention/focus/presence isn't centred on your head/neck area. That's where tension and resistance and fight-flight tends to kick in, plus the upper chest. Instead, try to start with a pretty open,wide attention, lightly centred on your abdomen. Then when you get a "reactive kick" it won't have quite so strong an effect. Another thing that can happen is that we keep "checking" or at least slightly holding on to ourselves. Working towards an attitude of full commitment/abandonment is the way forward.

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

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

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

Sorry, hard to describe!

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

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

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

If it works for you, sounds good.

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

It's not easy, because it can be quite unpleasant, and it's also transparent - people don't realise they are compulsively forcing their attention (deliberately contracting and deforming themselves) or compulsively creating distractions, because the thing with avoidance is you often don't know you are avoiding. And the thing with effort is that if it's constant, your can be quite unaware of it - until you stop.

"Seeing the nature of things", I can give you right now. Unravelling your accumulated patterns, wide open attention that never shifts? Longer. There's nothing to be done about it, but you do need the courage to do nothing.

People will find any excuse to avoid doing, say, a daily releasing exercise that involves simply lying on the floor - because they know things will come up. And they'll feel fear. Letting go completely is required in order to retrieve your power, but everything you've ever run away from will be waiting for you when you do and will hit you if you hold back even a little bit.

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

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

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

There's nothing to understand. Just stop messing with your attention (although realising you are controlling your attention is subtle; however, that is what 'realisation' actually is).

Yes, minor movement is helpful - Tai Chi, for instance - mainly because it sneakily expands your attention to fill out the body space and beyond. It's actually a theraputic technique: drawing attention from the head-space and other locations, into the body. Lots of "character conditions" are effectively localised attention. (I found some good info and techniques in The Psychology of the Body, Elliot Greene, which is written for massage therapists. Worked well.)

However, still, these - like Alexander Technique "instructions" - are basically cheats for getting you or someone else to expand (or rather, cease contracting) your spatial awareness. Because for most people, telling them to do that directly wouldn't make any sense to them.

It's a metaphorical fist, you get the idea: opposite action does not dissolve or undo the original action.

You don't really understand the nature of habit

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

Every object in this room is a habit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An imaginary hammer might seem to hit an imaginary nail, but it builds towards nothing.

"Effort is a sensation" - yes, it's actually the sensation of resistance, of existing established patterns, rather than the sensation of doing or overcoming.

Attention is an object, it has shape and is relative. It is regularly removed, as in dissolves into the background. Most people fall asleep at that point.

...

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

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

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

TL;DR? It's Friday night.

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

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

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

Quite so. The limits of text, here, however can be a bit of a restriction. The interview highlights the battle involved and the value of in-person dialogue, the persistence of deep assumptions. Talking in person is always a "feeling out" which is quite difficult to replicate in other modes.

Why when it is so obvious are people resistant to the truth? Because it is not obvious, and in fact plainly wrong, to them.

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

I think you misunderstand the choiclessless awareness thing - or I place a limit on it. One or the other. Anyway, I see it as you can experience choosing and doing but you aren't actually controlling it (that's theatre), but we do have free will but at the very base level of being: we can change the shape of ourselves by ourselves, reform our experience directly at the root. That's not choosing or willing, that's becoming.

Yeah, everyday people quite like breathing and stuff. But also, the concepts you inheret you tend to literally experience as true in your dream-world. It pre-informs the partitioning of experience into content. That's why magickal traditions focus on belief adoption or belief circumvention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think you are too focussed on Will as "continuous manipulation", or that's how it seems. How tiring and effortful! Take a step back and see the imagery of the moment unfold, and as the play proceeds, give occasional directorial instructions. The focus is on enjoyment, and occasional enhancement. (This is choicelessless + creation.) Kick off the domino sequence, put your finger in the way if you want it to topple elsewhere.

A power that requires constant maintenance, moment by moment effortful re-creation, is no power at all. Will as you describe it does imply separation and strain. Grasping. Fighting. Desperation.

Personal identity is an occasional thought plus a persistent sensation. Both are just "object content" within experience.

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

I am the judge! :-)

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

That's how you make it sound! Exactly as if you are trying to overcome something. Destroy something and overcome something. But there are no such things. Perhaps it is just your phrasing.

So, I don't see volition as effort at all, simply a decision, a seeding and a redirecting.

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

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

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

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

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

It is vital in terms of communication, the context changes the meaning.

How can you fight your own habits? They are you. You can change and become, but you can't fight yourself - that implies and persists the same patterns. Fighting recreates the foe.

And if you are fighting yourself, you are fighting the world. The world is just a mirage arising from the contours of your own memory traces, your own habitual structure, as subtle patterns in awareness. Freedom is the ability to change one's shape, to shift one's contours, to temporary or ongoing effect; there is no other freedom.

For example...

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

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

Where is "internal"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

Yeah, just... stop.

POST: The depths of the skeptical mind.

[POST]

I thought i would share this experience while it's still fresh in my head because i am still baffled by the oddness of it. I was having a dream that i was walking around my neighborhood, and i realized i don't remember how i got here. I thought to myself, is this is a dream? It feels pretty real right now. So i decided to see if i could levitate and sure enough i could. I levitated a good 20-50 feet or so up into a tree and decided to stay up there. On a nearby branch in like a birds nest or something there was a black flask nearby. Curious in this state i decided to see if this liquor would give me a buzz. But just before i began to drink this voice out of nowhere came into my head and was like "dont drink out of that it might be poison, you cant be totally sure whether or not we are awake right now". And i'm like REALLY MIND? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I just levitated 20 feet up into a tree and you are still doubtful as to whether or not this is a dream.
But i have had other occurrences like this as well, like if im pretty sure im in a lucid dream and i want to strip off my clothes, sometimes ill get this sense of "this might not be a dream, you don't want to get arrested". But there was still some legitimate doubt as i didn't do any levitating or nothing before hand, it was just a strong feeling that i was in a dream. But after levitating and having that voice go in, it really made me realize the lengths the skeptical mind will go to try to cling on to a materialist worldview. Maybe it has to do with the human part that wants to retain its survival, and maybe that has to do with that fear of dissolving boundaries and the comfort of consensus. This experience also shedded light on why materialists can take hard psychedelics and still remain materialists afterwards, the skeptical mind can always find excuses because skepticism can destroy any idea in ones mind because it is a kind of weapon, but the problem is that it can disprove truths as well as falsehoods if applied too liberally.
anyway, that's all i have to say for now.

[END OF POST]

This experience also shedded light on why materialists can take hard psychedelics and still remain materialists afterwards, the skeptical mind can always find excuses because skepticism can destroy any idea in ones mind because it is a kind of weapon, but the problem is that it can disprove truths as well as falsehoods if applied too liberally.

One of the major problems is that people literally and directly experience their viewpoints as true. The concepts and beliefs you hold actively shape your experiences, because they "snap to" the subtle structures of your/the mind, which then further embeds those viewpoints in a feedback loop (like this).

If you believe materialism (or just assume it, unwittingly - belief is not a choice usually) then you'll experience that as your truth. Things that don't fit in with it either won't be noticed, or will be explained away, or quickly forgotten. Only aspects which fit in with your established concepts seem to be clear and in focus.

On the upside, once you are introduced to new ideas and entertain them a little bit, those ideas will infect your experience and you will have confirmation of them. However, any doubt at all will revert you back to your previous, more established worldview - in much the way you describe. "Hey, I'm levitating! But, y'know, better watch out I don't get arrested for being too noisy in this quiet neighbourhood."

I cannot fully understand how you reached the conclusion about scepticism destroying any idea from materialists being materialists (and I see that as a bit of generalization, I mean do you know what's in their mind?). Also what I saw in your dream was a subconsciousness trying to protect you. Any connection with what's happening in you waking life?
Note: Thanks for sharing these thoughts. It means that it made a great impact to you. This is why the bigger the impact the bigger the "cruelty" of the other point of view it needs. Or I am just being a skeptic ;)

What is that subconsciousness do you think?

just his inner self

And where is that?

it's part of him. I feel a circle coming up.

Me too :-)

So, where is he?

I am afraid I don't know his address...

No. 1 Infinite Street, Everywhere City, Entirety NA.

Does that mean that I can visit him even from my sofa under my bed cover or does it mean that I am himself as well?

Yes and no.

Both he and you live at the same address, always, although you suffer from the illusion that you occupy different rooms.