TriumphantGeorge Compedium (Part 5)

POST: What does this sub think of DMT?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[We might say that the] only fundamental, permanent truth is the fact of being-aware - or "awareness" - with everything else temporary patterning on an "as if" basis. Rather than a person with a subconscious who is sending out requests into the world, you are more like a "non-material material whose only inherent property is being-aware or 'awareness', and which 'takes on the shape of' states of experience, states imply and define all subsequent sensory moments". Right now, for example, you have "taken on the shape of" apparently (on an "as if" basis) being-a-person-in-a-world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some brief thoughts:

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

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

Also, your subconscious mind has to agree

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

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

More scare-mongering, surely?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POST: Could this be a sign? Seeing owls everywhere again

[POST]

I recently tried jumping twice for 2 separate this and I have started to see owls everywhere again. Which is a common occurrence with me and others it seems. Well anyways I saw this on Facebook and it really stood out to me, and it's just an ad so it's pretty random. Do you think this could be a sign that's saying to like choose my awareness/consciousness wisely? Part of me feels that I'm just reaching but it's too much of a coincidence and way to clear of a message to be I think.

[END OF POST]

A1: Owls are just owls, they are not signs from the universe or anything like that. The Owls of Eternity exercise is more a demonstration of patterning than anything else.

As the other commenter says, they are best not interpreted as being "signs" from anything. What could they be signs from, even? Rather, you might more usefully view it as an insight into the nature of your experience.

Ultimately, you should consider that your usual description of yourself as a person-object located within a world-place is perhaps not entirely accurate. And "the world" is not in fact, as usually assumed, a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'". For example, that you-as-awareness has "taken on the shape of" an owl pattern - as if you were a landscape with "owl" scribbled all across it, with it becoming clearly visible when an appropriate context arises.

POST: The name of this subreddit annoys me.

Dimensions are a way of measuring space.

You are assuming that the specific "physics and mathematics" use of the word "dimension" supersedes other, more common and pre-existing usages. Poetic usages, you might say, which are actually more fitting for the subreddit's broader concept. Using terms like "realities" and "universes" brings baggage, a tendency towards certain specific literal interpretations, which wouldn't be as appropriate.

This is something that works both ways, of course. For example, people assuming that a "law" in physics is something like a legal law that must be "obeyed" by the universe, or that a "theory" is just an "idea" - or worse, that a physical description is an explanation of "what is really happening". This unpacking of terms and the nature of descriptions is in fact part of what this subreddit is about. So the subreddit name is in a sense a meta provocation in that regard.

POST: My final post

Well, certainly nobody should be getting obsessed with me! So I'm glad you got over that! :-)

As the sidebar emphasises, "Never believe something without personal evidence; never dismiss something without personal evidence". The main underlying idea here is, ultimately, to explore our assumptions about the "nature of experiencing" and the nature of descriptions about experiencing, and to draw our own conclusions. In particular, to be skeptical of narratives. But I'd hope that nobody approaches this as a "believer" - rather, as an investigator and philosopher.

I definitely agree with the attitude of, if you're not getting anything out of something, then explore something else instead. Particularly when it comes to this topic.

I probably disagree with quite a bit of what you've said in your post, though. Not because it is particularly "wrong" as such, on its own terms but because it perhaps - it seems to me - takes some concepts at face value that I would not, although mostly because it perhaps drifts away from the "meta" philosophical perspective that a lot of this subreddit is written from. Experience is what it is, but descriptions... less so!

Quite a few things seem to be implied responses to things that I don't think anyone has said, or at least not that I've encountered as being said, in the way you seem to be interpreting them.

For example, to pick a few, randomly:

I think "enlightenment" is an actual thing, not just an "experience."

I don't think it's been suggested that "enlightenment" is an experience. Mostly the opposite point is made, I think.

That is, that people often report having had amazing and unusual experiences, referring to them as "enlightenment" experiences - encouraging others to engage in practices in order to aim for such "transcendental" moments. But those amazing experiences are just more experiences. "Enlightenment" is not an experience; it is the recognition of the nature of all experiences. Meditation may or may not end up accidentally giving you that insight; and amazing experiences or a experience of "being a void" may trigger that; but enlightenment itself isn't any one experience. That's why it's often said that there's nothing you can really "do" to get it (and that it's not a thing you can have).

"Enlightenment" is not something one can have by just doing a two glasses exercise. It doesn't work that way.

I'm not sure anyone ever suggested that it was. However, pushing back against your assumptions, via exercises and contemplation, might lead you to an insight as to the nature of yourself and your experience. And so in that sense, it might. At the very least, doing this shines a light on your unexamined thinking up until that point, particularly if you produce experiences which conflict with your usual world picture. Again, it wouldn't be any particular experience that would be an "enlightenment" experience; it would be noticing something, perhaps as a result of breaking down an assumption.

But still, if you want to be an enlightened being, you probably do have to meditate 10+ hours a day

That kind of depends on what "enlightenment" is, and what "meditation" supposedly does. Without unpicking either, it's hard to say. What is it that doing more meditation gives us? Now, I wouldn't say that meditation is worthless in a general sense. For a start, it's not just one thing of course; there isn't a one activity called "meditation". More, the idea being challenged is that: meditation -> enlightenment.

I just don't think that this world is a subjective idealist universe that one can bend to his/her will.

I'd note that this is not necessarily the "recommended" conclusion. The framework of subjective idealism suffers from similar problems to the "person-object located within a world-place" framework, simply be being a framework. A lot of this is about pushing back against all frameworks, even the notion that there is a particular "how things are" (that can be conceptualised anyway).

If you had some technological device that dramatically improved the processing power of your brain, memory capacity, concentration capability, ability to visualize, etc that would probably dramatically improve your ability to manifest things...

Of course, one might then ask what the relationship between "brains" and experiential content actually is, and why the properties of brains would have any affect on the ability to change the world... and what is a "the world" and what is "powerful" and what is a "soul" and what is "you" and what is meant by "God". And so on.

Anyway:

I'd stress, I think, that what's important here isn't necessarily any particular result (even though I think most people get something, an inkling to start them off, despite the exercises basically being everyday actions).

The quest for results is really the entry point to challenging our assumptions, our descriptions - descriptions based on concepts like the ones you are using above. It's about being very picky and very clear about how such descriptions relate to direct experience (if indeed they do). And if that amounts to "dangerous ideas", then we'd have to say how, exactly they are dangerous. The "meta" perspective, you might say; the opposite of "belief".

But I still don't view this as enlightenment... Enlightenment is realizing what we truly are.

Basically, it amounts to the same thing, I'd say.

What is there, other than experiences? You might respond: that which has experiences! But when you look for that, you can't find it, and then perhaps starting thinking that "you" and "experiences" are identical...

We might say that this recognition is really a recognition that what we are is not a thing. It is "wondrous and mysterious", but we have to be careful that the poetic words don't get in the way of what we are after, since poetic words do tend to imply types of experiences, when what we are after is what is "beyond" any particular experience. The sense in which it is "mysterious" is that it cannot be conceptualised, therefore cannot be understood - it can only be known. And it's "wondrous" because it is not of any particular structure, while being all structures, etc.

But that there, that's getting caught up in a description about it, which is a distraction of the thing itself, of course! Anyway, I think you get the idea.

But I basically think that all of this is a simulation.

If the brain is the material manifestation of the mind, then what is "the brain" made from, and what is "the mind" made from? Where are they located relative to one another? And if they are of different types of material, how does one cause the other? Etc.

Now, we can dig away at the simulation-style approach for ages, picking apart its different aspects, but ultimately I suggest:

If you follow it all the way through, you'll eventually be forced into drawing the conclusion that: there is only one type of "stuff"; this that "stuff" is non-material and has no inherent structure; its only inherent property is being-aware or "awareness"; it "takes on the shape of" states of experience; it is self-shaping and self-causing; nothing ever "happens" other than this self-shifting; this "stuff" is what you actually are and you've just "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently "being a person-object located within a world-place".

That is, you'll end up throwing away the whole notion of a simulation, because after you realise there can't be any boundaries of type, it all collapses into one idea, the idea of "patterned awareness". Which isn't of course an entirely accurate concept either, however it is the description which has the "least wrong" about it. And, in fact, that's mostly what we end up doing here I suppose: removing what is "wrong" until we're left with the most basic, self-consistent, version.

I am still not convinced that we can do absolutely anything and everything we want in this reality just by intending it.

And that would be fine, right? You're not meant to be convinced by reading stuff other people write. Although, it's still worth digging into why, exactly we might not be convinced - and then picking apart that explanation too, until we get right back to the fundamentals (of the self, perhaps?). I would say that the devil's in the details here. For example, if for simplicity's sake we say that "the world is made from mind", does that mean we should expect to simply flap our arms and fly? Why so or why not? (Noting that, mostly, people who say things like "why can't I just fly?" have never actually attempted it when you ask.)

In your post, you mention things like "rules". We could rephrase that as, our experiences are certainly structured. In other words, we are not coming to this as a void; we are already "patterned". Otherwise, of course, all we'd be experiencing are random disconnected sensory image fragments or the like.

The real question, then, is: is that structure fundamental?

And from that: can pre-existing patterning be modified?

I'd suggest that it is "interesting" to pursue the answers as "no" and "yes", respectively.

Now, since "intending" is essentially just a synonym for "self-shaping" (following on from the description of the self above), we might want to be careful with phrasing like "just by intending", because it might be obscuring quite a bit of detail, I feel. For example, if you "intend" for your arm to be in the air, you'll typically have the experience unfold of your arm moving from down here to up there. Why doesn't it just "appear" up there? How does the "just" play into this?

But then, does this apply to situational outcomes successfully, which are not so obviously "reality-breaking"? If someone has had outcomes arise in that area - repeatedly, of course, to confirm there is "something going on" or not - then what's the difference? Having explored that, can one apply what was done there, now in a "meta" way, such that we can feed the experiment back in on itself?

Those are the sorts of things I'd tend to ponder, anyway. (And "pondering" and "investigating" are definitely the right words to describe the appropriate approach, I feel.)

As I said TG, I will not be spamming your sub with my skepticism. So I will contain all of my doubts in this thread.

It's a good thread. Unpacking this stuff is partly the point. I should add that it's not "my" sub in the sense of being intended to promote a particular worldview of which I'm a proponent; it's more meant to be a place where things are picked apart, with my contributions just being one particular angle, perhaps somewhat variably. The exception to this being, the general "meta" approach of it.

I think there are still rules, that can perhaps be overridden...

If they can be overridden, then they aren't rules in any meaningful sense; they are malleable patterns...

Surely we are meant to be continuously learning?

Learning what, exactly? And about what? (Putting aside the idea of being "meant" to be anything or doing anything.)

We are continuously having different experiences, and that includes different thoughts and ideas about experiences. That's endless. But the "meta" point would be that none of those experiences ever actually get any "deeper" into experience itself. Just like (cheesy metaphor incoming) how it doesn't matter how complex the ripple pattern, it doesn't really tell you anything more about the nature of "water" or "ripples" in general.

So you might have "in-world" learning, as experiences, but that doesn't apply to the "meta" insight, which you have been calling "enlightenment". Not getting this, is perhaps why people become endless seekers, looking for the experience or the understanding, but...

Surely the human mind/brain cannot understand all the answers to existence.

Setting aside the assumptions implicit in "human mind/brain", this also assumes that existence is structured in a question-answer format. Actually, "questions" and "answers" are "made from" existence. Existence, if you like, "is" mystery in that sense. There's nothing at all to understand about existence, because it's not a thing, and has no inherent structure, it can't be "explained". Mostly what you end up doing (what we've ended up doing) is picking apart how various understandings fail to capture existence, rather than how they explain it.

But more and more, you seem to be saying the same thing over and over again.

Bah, such is the way of things, really. Well, the metaphors change and evolve and suchlike, but ultimately we're all just saying the same things repeatedly in slightly different ways. I'm not sure what you expect. The answer is - the idea is, really - to make up your own stuff.

I'd stress again, though, if my angle on things isn't helpful, then don't waste your time with it. It's not remotely "special". There are plenty other ways of describing and exploring available; and I'm not even pushing my own approaches as particularly great! Remember, too, it's not about it being "true". Experience is true, but descriptions are like parallel experiences: they used to point at other experiences and provide ways to talk about them. If they're not doing that for you, then pick another one. You should be synthesising your own ones, of course - after all, the idea is that this is your own exploration of yourself.

It should also be noted that other people's anecdotes really don't matter. They might give you ideas for things to try, or different ways to think, but beyond that they're largely irrelevant.

but I am not sure if the results were mere coincidences and I have not been able to replicate them.

Replication is definitely the key, as you say. Repeated "coincidence", across different situations, with a particular approach (not quite the right word) being the common factor. "Results" may not always be quite the same as "successful outcomes" in the manner of a pass/fail format, though.

As I've linked before, there is a slightly difference in concept between the LOA sub versus this one. That is, this subreddit isn't focus around getting results as such. Not about leveraging any supposed "mechanism" or law, anyway.

But, definitely, the two exercises are intentionally structured to "encourage" experiences which illustrate two main principles (which actually turn out to be the same principle really), from which one can extend outwards. Definitely in terms of philosophy, and hopefully experientially. In either case, "doubts" shouldn't matter (if we're interpreting that as a form of passive "belief"). If, that is, there is "something going on".

What does matter, I think, is that the these things aren't viewed as "techniques" or "methods". Better as, perhaps, "exploratory strategies" structured around patterns. In terms of how far that goes, it's deliberately left open-ended, as is what constitutes "success". It kind of has to be that way, because (as we were saying), this really amounts to an exploration of the structure of self. Otherwise the sidebar and intro stuff would be written in a quite different way, of course. (It's quite specifically written how it is, to distinguish it from a LOA or magick or psychonaut type thing.)

All of which can sound a bit vague, but I think that comes with the territory a little. How do you even talk about the idea of reformatting your perspective, for example? You can't really describe "how" to play with "becoming the background space", for instance... because there isn't really a "how". You just have to get a couple of hints of a similar experience (e.g. owls type experiments), and then dig into it.

In your words, what do you think would the best and most efficient way to maximize the possibility of getting the specific result you are intending? It seems that too much of this stuff is being left to chance. We're all just hoping to get lucky. What is your success rate? Does 50% of the things you intend, come about? 70%? 100%?

When you say that stuff is being left to chance, what do you mean by that?

When I intend, it seems that whether or not the result I'm intending for actually happens is left to chance, like a lottery. You play and you have chances to win, but the chances are very low. It seems like that a lot of times.

So, as I said above, I think you have to be wary of thinking of things in terms of them being a "method" or "technique", and there being some sort of "mechanism" that you are tapping into. Although the structure of language can be a bit confusing on this sometimes, "intending" isn't an act, remember, it is not something that "you" are doing to "the world" - it is itself the change in state.

In that sense, then, there is no ultimate "way". The "ways" are themselves aspects of your state.

So, very specifically, the two exercises in the sidebar (for example) aren't described as methods, bar the occasional slip of the tongue. For that reason. There are always "results" from intention, but that's not necessarily the same as immediately "getting the exact outcome I planned for", because you are pre-patterned, and intention is an adjustment, not a reset. This means that the outcomes of intention shouldn't be viewed through the perspective of "pass/fail", but rather as information - feedback on your current state. You are probing your own shape. There's "luck" involved only in the sense of "mystery": that you don't know your previous condition, specifically and explicitly, except by how it adjusts with intention.

This prior condition (the fact that you are not in a void state) means that "owls" and "two glasses" don't lead you to suddenly appear on Mars or whatever. However, the principles involved in the structure of those two exercises, tell you all you need to know about intention (which is the only true cause). And they also tell you that "mechanisms" are themselves patterns which can be intended. So that's where you start in your investigation to "get better": you might say can go go "meta" and experiment with "voiding" patterning and/or intending "formatting", and also not re-implying patterns by intending outcomes that are based on them for their structure.

You can see, though, why this "meta" aspect means that nobody else can really tell someone what or "how" to do, because that's the exact thing that's being unpacked: your own condition. This isn't about a specific technique that's promoted or even a specific description to believe in. And that's why this isn't LOA or a subreddit of that type.

But of course, this is just my way of talking about it. The subreddit frames itself as a starting point for investigation, not as the result of that!

And lastly, what is "meta"?

Heh, that a completely fair question, right enough! Generally, something is considered to be "meta" if it is about the subject, one step removed. For example, "metadata" is additional data about the data: metadata within a photograph is data which describes aspects of the image. A "meta" reddit post in a subreddit is a post about the subreddit itself. In this conversation, if we were talking about "content patterns" of experience, then a "meta" perspective might be one which applies to all content patterns, a pattern about all patterns.

In the context of our discussions, keeping a "meta perspective" would mean that as we discuss the world and ourselves and so on, we remain aware of the nature of our discussion: that is, we are exploring "ideas" and remain mindful of what ideas are, what "discussion" actually is, and don't conflate ideas and discussion with somehow getting "behind" our experiences.

["mechanisms" are patterns too] Is that, for example, how things like rituals come about?

If you think about the Two Glasses exercise, its "mechanism" is basically an invoking of existing patterns of experience, such as "level", "intensity", "transition", "transformation", "translation", "identification", "association". They are abstract generalised patterns, to which one attaches other content, and thereby (or so the theory would do) alters it.

But this is really just a version of everyday life stuff, I'd say. When you intend to have your arm wave in the air, then you are bringing the extended pattern associated with "arm in the air", the meaning of that idea, into experience. When pouring water from one glass to another, you are similarly bringing into experience the entire meaning of "moving stuff". So we're basically talking about meaning and metaphor, realised. The distinction between literal and metaphorical collapses!

"voiding" patterning and/or intending "formatting"

Well, it's just the idea that - according to our little Patterning Model here - all that there is, is awareness in a particular "shape" or overall pattern or "state", which itself consists of all possible patterns eternally, just at different levels or "intensities" of contribution.

Now, it's patterns all the way down, but some patterns would be "facts" (like: the red ball is on the lawn) and others would be "formatting" (like: the senses, spatial extension, moment sequences, etc), and so on. Although these categories are just for convenience when discussing this, of course; they aren't organised that way particularly.

The idea of "voiding" a pattern would be reducing its intensity of contribution to an effective zero. The idea of intending "formatting" would be to change the apparent structure or perspective of moments, rather than just the factual content. It's "meta" all over again!

For example, right now you probably feel as if you are sort of located in an area somewhere in your head, looking out. This moment of experience has a formatting of apparently being "over here" and the room being "over there". Note that this is different from the perspective of the experience; I'm talking about the sense of "being this part of the experience, not that part".

However, you could instead adopt a change in the formatting of this, such that you are the "background space within which the whole scene arises". If you do this, you feel that you are "everywhere", as a sort of observer-container, rather than being identified with just that one sensation in your head area. (The next step one could take would be to identify with "experiencing", that is you would be "that which the experience is made from": identifying with awareness. That is a change from "observing" to "being".)

As always, of course, these descriptions are just alternative thinking-structures, in parallel to the main strand of experience. Experience remains what it is: experience, not "patterns" or "formatting" or whatever. The fact of experience is true; the descriptions themselves are only true as that: descriptions (or: the experience of thinking descriptions). However, by seeking the most fundamental description that can capture the basic structure of a "1st-person" experience, we're freed up creatively in terms of what can be conceived of and discussed, and what can be experimented with.

...

Life can easily pass one by while waiting for miracles to happen.

Definitely, I think one should never do this. Particularly if one is prone to:

I am thinking that serious meditation is one way one can improve's one life. So it's a win-win situation, assuming one meditates correctly, and seriously.

That sort of thinking, if not done cautiously.

Which is, thinking that if you are just "logical" or do something "correctly" or "seriously", it'll work out. That can be a version of "hoping", just with with some broader more plausible sounding words swapped in. It can be a bit like, "this next thing sounds good, particularly while I don't know much about it yet and can project my hopes upon it - all I need to do, is do it 'right'".

That's how people spend their whole lives being "seekers". Putting their hope into the unknown, checking it out superficially and perhaps being disappointed that it's ultimately a bit boring and a slog after the initial excitement - too much like homework, surely not what they real things would be like! - and moving on. So that's the second thing to never do, I suppose: waste life by always just looking to the horizon.

serious meditation is one way one can improve's one life.

Perhaps it might (there are certainly nice effects, depending on what exact meditation and so on, and the possibility of insight), but it's important to be more specific in the doing, otherwise it'll just be making the same error again. If the aim is to "improve life", it might, but actually if done "properly" it might also result in some grim experiences as things unfold, just as even the "daily releasing exercise" does (where you are lying on the floor in the constructive rest position, letting go). That is, that looking for the "magic action" that'll make everything great, rather than treating things as an experiment, usually leads to superficial experiences and possible endless seeking. If the outcome is judged simply on whether it feels good that time, or a "pass/fail" outcome, then one never really changes. Particularly because, the ideal outcome being sought is, I'd say, not a particular experience or feeling or whatever (although those can be good), but a change of perspective. That improves life most, I reckon. So it comes back to that thing of approaching things as an "investigation", without really having a fixed expectation as to the outcomes, or even the type of outcome. You might then find out useful things for improving life, but that's unproven until you've really dug in - so in the meantime, it's important to improve life using the tools you've already got, rather than waiting for some new amazing-super-tools which you may or may not get a grasp on.

Six months meditating (in a specific way, etc) does sound like an interesting experiment to try.

...

One can also meditate for decades with no results at all, or, can even go psychotic during the process, so I agree with you that this mode of thinking can also be dangerous if not approached carefully. This is why I'd only be willing to try it for six months to a few years. But, really, what do you think of the Jhanas and the Siddhis u/triumphantgeorge. I have done loads of research on this, spoken to many people with actual attainments. They've showered me with love, and some have even read my mind (although somehow, they manage to leave room for "plausible deniability.") But it was very impressive nonetheless! And they no longer need to sleep or eat, because they have advanced through the various jhanas, which provide joy and bliss that is thousands of times more pleasurable than one can experience through orgasms or drugs like heroin-----all through meditation. Of course, one can meditate for decades without experiencing the first Jhana. This is why I am approaching this in a logical, result based manner. One guy I've communicated with also strongly hinted to me that he has recollected his past life memories, and possess all kinds of abilities that one would consider as supernatural. He just never go into detail about them because he asserts the most important thing is enlightenment and transcending the human realm of existence. So to me, right now, it seems that the serious meditators have more "clout." I don't think anyone has attained these abilities through dimensionaljumping or lawofattraction. Most people don't know if they can experience a bliss 1000x more pleasurable than heroin/sex just by sitting somewhere. And more and more, it seems to me that existence is hierarchical. I started to believe that there were no such thing as higher beings, and higher realities, but I'm starting to think this is just untrue. The angels, demons, gods, extraterrastials, etc all exist. The universe teems with life. These beings aren't illusory. Just as humans will probably this century, create conscious artificial computers that are vastly smarter than humans, it makes sense that perhaps in our own universe or a higher reality, there are beings that are vastly smarter than us. And some of the accomplished meditators have had genuine communication with these entities. There was even a redditor here on reddit, u/absolutus, who seemed to have attained some of the Jhanas. He would probably be very confused to know that all of the hard work he spent meditating and working hard was entirely unnecessary. All he had to do to have the life he has right now was merely intend it, if what this subreddit is about, is true. So, I'm really curious on your thoughts on all this. Have you experienced the Jhanas? Do you think they aren't worthwhile? If you cannot read my mind in this very moment, why not? And why can another guy read my mind and not you? One person has told me things about myself, that I didn't know. Do you still sleep at nightt? Why do you do so, when another guy doesn't need to sleep? Why eat? I know you don't like talking about your personal life, but you will find a lot of people on youtube describing how they no longer need to eat or drink water. And they have their face and voice on camera. I am not trying to put you down u/triumphantgeorge. I am just curious.

So, this sounds like you're somewhat falling into the "gurus and teachings" narrative template (or "pattern"). And the way you use the term "intention" - or "just" intention and its use in contrast to "hard work"- suggests that we're not referring to the same ideas here (intention is not an "act" and it is not in-world). I feel that this applies also to many of the concepts in your original post, and to the way you are using the term "universe" - and "existence" and "entities" and "meditation" - in this post. That is, you are talking from a position that is already "too late" in the discussion, so we are talking at cross purposes. Meanwhile, you might consider that there is a reason why, in your research, you'll have heard the siddhis referred to as a "distraction". This reason is to do with the context within which all of these concepts and experiences reside - that is, the "meta" perspective for all of this stuff.

Ultimately, it's the same reason that the subreddit isn't about a "teaching", but an unpacking of "teachings" and descriptions - and it's not about any particular experience, but an unpacking of experiences and the conceptualising of them. Similarly, the sidebar deliberately refers to "exercises" rather than "techniques" or "methods", and in discussions we talk of experiences being "as if" something is true rather than at face value, and so on. All because it's trying to shoot straight for the insight - rather than there being a "path" with a "teacher" and developing "powers" or whatever, all of which can turn out to be slightly nonsensical later (other than being an experience).

So, rather than tug at one piece and then another here and never really get to the foundation of this, I think later I'm going to write a response from a "ground up" perspective, and then you can pick at that.

I would still like to know why you can't read my mind, but some of the "gurus" can.

It's potentially a quite meaningless question. A more appropriate formulation of the question would be: why are you having an experience of this person "reading your mind", and not that person "reading your mind", and so on? From which we have:

It's completely up to you...

Oh well, perhaps not then! :-p

If I may just say - you seem sort of weirdly "offended" somehow. Like you were promised something in particular, and you weren't given it by this subreddit? Or that me, as a moderator here, has taken on the role of a guru or teacher, and not delivered to you what you aspire to? That's not really the setup though, and this subreddit isn't founded on a promise of quite what you seem to be assuming - for a reason. Which is, that none of that stuff matters much, when it comes to the underlying thrust of this, about examining the nature of "experiencing" (and of descriptions about experiencing). In fact, it's more likely to make you fall into a little dream instead. Anyway:

Now, when I say "guru and teachings" pattern, I might equally have said it was a "journey of discovery" pattern, or similar. It amounts to the same thing. By saying this, I'm not disparaging such experiences at all; there is nothing remotely wrong with having these experiences. I'm just trying to articulate a wider point, which encompasses all of this. Which is that they are "just" experiences.

It's like looking at the forms made by ripples in a puddle. And then imagining that there is some "world" behind those forms, going off on a big adventure where you discover the meaning of those forms and that world, encountering fascinating characters along the way, learning new powers, battling with entities, maybe being able to summon objects and circumstances, reaching great heights of achievement - and then:

You notice that all of that was still just differently shaped ripples. And:

You are the water and the ripples. And even the experience of apparently being a person-object in a world-place at all, is just a particular ripple within you - and actual-you are not an object or indeed anything particular, other than having the property being-aware (that is, having the experience of however you are "rippled").

Basically, the thing I feel that you are missing, is that it doesn't really matter what experiences you have, including all these experiences of "flowing love" or meeting "people with amazing powers" and so on. That's just more ripples, just yet more experiential content. It's all that the same level, with no one experience actually being more special or getting behind things than any other experience. What actually matters, I'm suggesting, is to notice the context of the experiences.

That is, to notice "that which 'takes on the shape of' all these experiences", the nature of all experiences rather than the content of any particular one. The "material" of experience, if you like - that actual, non-personal "you" which becomes those moments of apparently being a person in a situation ("as if" it were true; consistent with the idea of it, but not actually the true nature of it).

This is what things like that Feeling Out Exercise are trying to offer a way into, and what the experiences triggered by the two demo exercises are intended to point to, - drawing attention to a couple of the key counter-intuitive aspects of actual experience (it ain't about "powers" as such), leading to an appreciation of this context. Keeping it simple and stripped down, too, by carefully noting that any descriptions are themselves just further experiences. Thereby hopefully avoiding falling into a self-perpetuating dream based on one (related: if you haven't already, check out the Kirby Surprise interview linked in the introduction post, as a nice illustration).

I hope that helped clarify somewhat where I'm coming from here. Elsewhere, you seem to muddle up the idea of "intention" with being a sort of in-world personal "action", and have a notion that an intended outcome would mean there would be no subsequent experience of bodily action - no "hard work" or "effort" - but I think if you think of that from the perspective above, it should be clear how this arises from a misunderstanding of what is meant by those terms.

Are you really a puppet master of the physical dream world?

I think that was probably a joke reference, actually! :-) Especially if it was in amongst some Nefandi-related banter. I'm actually fairly careful to avoid doing anything other that facilitate discussion or unpack descriptions and ideas, because (as the sidebar says here) it's not meant to be about any particular person and their experiences - ideally, "no teachers or teachings". (And there's this basic issue with that anyway, as I've pointed out, and which we'll cover again below.)

But reality doesn't work that way.

Your response there is full of assumptions, though. In fact, the exact assumptions that are being pushed back against and explored. In particular, the idea there are individual people which have minds, that all exist as objects within a shared place, and have intent as some sort of "power" which varies in strength, with a struggle to win.

In short, it's based on the description structured around you being a person-object located within a world-place, with "the world" being a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended 'place' unfolding in 'time'". I suggest to you that this description is not accurate. Or at least, it is not fundamental. In particular, experience is not personal (even though it can be "formatted" in a way "as if" it was from a personal perspective).

Basically, you've answered with "reality doesn't work that way" to a suggestion that you are currently making incorrect assumptions about what "reality" is (you're using those assumptions to structure your response).

I'd also add: "intention" as some sort of personal willpower is not the sense in which that term is being used. It's not an act, or a wish, or a want, or a willing, because those would be things done as a person, an object. How could that even work? How could such a thing influence the world? Rather, it's supposed to indicate something more like a self-shifting of state, a "becoming".

As you say, experiences are meaningless.

They are not meaningless as experiences. Results are not meaningless as experiences. They are only meaningless in terms of some sort of aspirational descriptive framework where you "win the game" in a fundamental sense. However, experiencing is in and of itself meaningful, as a fact, independent of specific content. This same thing arises when the question is asked, "if it's all just awareness, then what's the point"? But that dry wording belies the fact that the only aliveness that there is, is awareness. All experiences being "made from" awareness, whatever you thought was the meaning of an experience in terms of a description about an experience, it was actually awareness itself that was meaningful.

You might even consider that our desire for apparent goals, including your inclination towards amazing powers and control, is actual a desire to resolve our patterning such that we have a clearer experience of simple awareness! So the very thing you are suggesting would make life meaningless, is actually the thing you are implicitly seeking now, that which is giving meaning to your actions!

You might ask yourself: so, what happens when you have an experience of being "all powerful"? Then what? Just more experiences. You don't "achieve" anything, ultimately. But that is fine.

EDIT: I suppose what you might take from this, is that no matter what adventures you have, you've already won. Right now.

Q: I've got a problem with the idea of not valuing some experiences above others. I have memories - I mean my best memories - places' I've been, emotionally intense times with friends - beautiful walks - those memories stand out to me as diamonds in my life, like, the times that showed me what life is all about, what it means.. I feel like there's ..some kind of meaning behind life that's..a glimpse of the higher dimension we come from maybe? I feel like ...there's levels -
Bottom level - unhappy times, fights with family, failures, times I felt bad, or bored and meaningless. I feel cut off from meaning, separate from this indefinable substance. Medium level - just taking pleasure or contentment in the day to day routine of life - walking to work on a sunny morning hearing the birds sing, joking with colleagues as I work, singing along to a song on the radio, just peace in feeling the sensation of doing something I'm competent in, getting lost in my body movements and focus (not necessarily intentionally - I did this before I'd heard "mindfullness" was a thing)
Top Special Level - the most intensely enjoyable or peaceful times - walks with people I love in a beautiful place, meetups with friends I love the company of, days when everything went right for me - I bought a book I was excited about, the sun shone as I read it in the park, intense romantic dates, amazing vacations to places with powerful energy (can't explain in scientific terms but felt it). I feel that some of these top experiences just shine out as..times I felt most connected to the meaning of life, times I knew what life was all about or who God was - that these people and places, these interactions, here now, are what life is supposed to be (even though the same people and places could feel commonplace in other contexts). Like they were times and places where the veil between me and God/meaning were pulled down. Having said that, I have a few problems (mild Autism, anxiety, and having grown up in a close-knit church community) that mean I've had more problems making connections than the average person, so maybe a person with average social skills would be more used to friendships and relationships - maybe some of this intensity was just me, as an animal, with instincts for human contact, hyper-focusing on the contact I did have because I had less of it than the average person. Maybe a person with the regular/average amount of friendships and romance wouldn't value some of the times I've had like I do.

Really enjoyed your comment. Some thoughts:

I've got a problem with the idea of not valuing some experiences above others.

That's not necessarily what I'm getting at, in this conversation. It's not about not valuing some experiences more than others. Some experiences are certainly more enjoyable, and experiences have different in-world meanings in the context of personal history and worldview. But that "pleasure" or "meaning" is part of the experience. (When I say "experience" I don't just mean the sounds and visuals of the moment.)

Rather, it's about recognising that all experiences are of the same type or nature: that is, they are all "shapes" taken on by awareness. Or metaphorically, you might say that they are all like ripple formations in a puddle of water. Now, some ripple formations may be more pleasing to the eye due to their association with other ripple formations, but from the perspective of the water/puddle, no ripple formation is "special".

Now, since when we are talking about "enlightenment" or at least recognising the "nature of experiences", we are really talking about that recognition that "all ripples formations are 'puddle' no matter what their shape", we can say that no experience is "special" in that context - hence, the idea of an "enlightenment experience" is flawed. The insight is not to be found in any particular experience, since the insight isn't about content, it's about context.

I'd add that the urge we all have to create descriptions involving hierarchies can sometimes make grasping this sort of idea quite difficult. Really, it has to be a sort of direct intuition as a result, rather than conceptual. (The problem with all conceptual thinking is it requires a division of things into objects, and relating them in "mental space" - even if not strictly a 3D space because there is "feeling-sensing" thinking - but here we are talk about something that is "before" division and relation.)

Your description of "Top Special Experiences", then, is interesting, because it moves towards that sort of "direct knowing" experience. I'd suggest, perhaps, that one way to understand why those experiences stand out isn't exact due to their content as such, but that in a way they are less cluttered, less rippled, and for a moment you are closer to experiencing (really: being) just the open water, or the implicit state of the water, unopposed.

This means that those experiences can be the most instructive (since they tip you off that your usual assumptions about the nature of "the world" and "you" may not be accurate), but I'd still suggest that they are not special in type. And it's not necessarily true that the experience -> insight, so those who chase those experiences thinking they can lead to something, are potentially getting distracted, thinking of it the wrong way around.

...maybe some of this intensity was just me, as an animal, with instincts for human contact, hyper-focusing on the contact...

Maybe your tendency to hyper-focus, in this area and in others, actually works to your benefit - since unlike other people whose ongoing experience is a big splash-around of ripples and responses, you are narrowed down on a specific set of ripples at any one moment. And so when what you are focused upon just "clicks", becomes direct with no interference, then you're just there.

Now, that may not be "special" in the sense I've been talking about above - but it's certainly pretty damn good! :-)

POST: Do not doubt yourself

[POST]

I have been lurking here for fun for quite sometime. Whenever someone expresses their doubt, I am excited that at least some people here have some semblance of rationality left in their mind. However it does not last. Often the same people who express doubt quickly go back to trusting the words of the cult leader, Mr. George. Do not doubt yourself. If you started doubting, keep doubting. I don't know what motivates this man. Maybe he's running some sort of strange psychological experiment on you all. Frankly, anyone who takes these ideas here seriously needs to go see a psychiatrist. I have seen far too much madness here. From people claiming to "jump" to pokemon universes to people claiming to have changed their gender. People desperate to change their lives are often "easy targets" for religious conversion. This sub is no different from a religion such as scientology. Only difference is that you get your mind brainwashed here for free. You don't have to pay for it. Please, get on with your life. Spend less time on the Internet. Breathe some fresh air, get some exercise, and spend more time interacting in the real world. Your mind will thank you for it.

[END OF POST]

Well, I'd like to point out that the sidebar does specifically say:

An open mind combined with healthy caution is the correct mindset for all approaches targeted at the subjective experience.Never believe something without personal evidence; never dismiss something without personal evidence.

If you've read any of the more detailed discussions, you should realise it's about the exact opposite of something you're are meant to just "believe" in. The general idea, in fact, is about investigating the nature of experience, and also the nature of descriptions about experience - ultimately without taking any description as being "what is happening" (that is, avoiding the "the reification of abstraction"). Of course, beyond that "meta" perspective, there's lots to discuss, and many different views to explore. And so:

You'll also notice that the sidebar mentions the concept of "active metaphors", which should suggest something about the overall idea. (Hint: the "dimensions" of the subreddit name aren't "places", although one should note that "the world" isn't necessarily a place either, etc.)

Now, a lot of this should actually be relatively trivial as a perspective, for anyone who has considered the relationship between experiences and descriptions, be they everyday assumptions or scientific models (with the latter the idea that a description was "true" was traditionally seen as nonsense). But, here, we have fun knowingly exploring the implications of it - and perhaps finding out some interesting things along the way, maybe something more than that. Anyway - given that it's summertime, I definitely concur with your suggestion to live life, breath fresh air, maybe some exercise, and thoroughly explore interaction with "the real world" - whatever that is, exactly. And as moderator, I am grateful for you taking the time to create a user account on a Friday evening specifically to post this PSA; it should be a good seed for weekend conversation.

TL;DR: Do doubt yourself, but doubt everything else too, or at least don't not-doubt it.

If we're going to conversate, you will have to address the actual content of my arguments.

Hmm, I didn't notice any arguments.

Where is the evidence for believing that you can change your sex or go into a cartoon universe by looking into a mirror?

That's a bit of a misrepresentation of the setup of the subreddit, I'd suggest. It's an inversion of it, in fact. I think you are arguing against your own concept of this, based perhaps on the subreddit name, rather than the actual idea. As noted above, there is no encouragement to "believe" anything. Generally, the idea is that there are a couple of activities one might try out, and then contemplate the experience of doing so, from various different perspectives. Beyond that, there's no particular viewpoint advocated by the subreddit - except the "meta" perspective again noted above, of course.

This works both ways, though: although no particular "esoteric" view is specified, neither is the "standard description" pushed as some sort of corrective response. (Note that you have to make a distinction here between the content of the comments that myself or anyone else might make, the ideas that appeal to them and are being explored, and the "official view" of the subreddit.)

In fact:

If you do have an argument, it seems to be that, contrary to your rallying call to "do not doubt yourself", you are condescendingly suggesting that people exactly should doubt themselves! That is, they should doubt their ability to use their own critical thinking to assess experiences and information. Also implicit within this, is that it is somehow dangerous to explore interesting ideas, as if one might be somehow captured by them. That seems to ignore the possibility that one can play with conceptual frameworks - try them on and even have fun with them, see how they play out - without having to "believe" in them. This subreddit is meant to be the start of personal creativity, not the end of it.

EDIT:

I notice you added an extra bit about an "insult to your intelligence" after I'd already replied, so I'll append this:

I know it's a metaphor. But the metaphors stop there.

They don't, though. The metaphors don't stop there. Whatever a "metaphor" is, exactly. Which is one of the points, as regards the nature of descriptions and their relationship to ongoing experience.

Why not tell them it's all just psychological tricks that have no bearing on reality?

Because it's not a psychological trick. And it exactly does have a bearing on "reality". Again, what ever that is, exactly. And so on.

I'm not quite sure what you are angry about here - other than perhaps the idea that some people might not agree with you, or aren't to be trusted with reflecting on their assumptions, or something like that. Regardless, it does seem a bit patronising, and not based on a close reading of the subreddit.

You are consciously evading my questions. Why do you allow people to place their hope on changing their lives with these "exercises" that have no effect on reality? This is no different from the secret. "The secret" does not work. This also does not work. The only difference is the woman who wrote the secret got rich off of it, while you are selling people hope for free. If you know very well that no one will change their sex through these exercises or actualize whatever else they want, why encourage them to do it? You know it will have no effect on reality, except maybe having them think something weird is going on by experiencing mild "synchronicities" through confirmation bias.

You are consciously asking questions which are disconnected from the topic at hand, it seems. For example, in discussions there is a clear framing in terms of "exercises", "experiments", "investigations" rather than "methods" or "techniques". It is regularly pointed out that an apparent link between an act and a subsequent experience is problematic, and cannot be assumed. ("Confirmation bias" has a specific meaning which doesn't quite apply to this sort of thing, but I know what you are getting at.) And so on.

In fact, the conversations are very much focused on the deconstruction of experiences and descriptions of experiences - in both directions - rather than believing that this or that, or what could or should or did happen. I say the content of the subreddit is mainly in the discussions, actually, and intentionally. In the case of your comment there, there are lots of hidden assumptions to pick apart - your use of the word "reality", for instance. What is that? And without having conducted the experiment, you have no idea whether such a silly little exercise might lead to an interesting experience, or not. (And "or not" is a result too: if nothing at all happens, there's something to conclude from that. Even if something seems to happen, then you have to check you aren't misreading it, or in what context you are interpreting it, etc.)

Otherwise all you have is a default description of the world, perhaps not one you've really thought about very deeply, and if you have so much faith in it - well, that is a belief in an unexamined conceptual framework, a bunch of thoughts, surely exactly what you are opposed to!

I don't see how the ideas and exercises here are different from the exercises that are in the book "The Secret." Mind you, I read that book and couldn't stop laughing for days. Just as I don't need to try the exercises in the secret to know that it's fictional, there is no need for me to try the exercises here. Again, you are still being very evasive. You don't sound too different from a "the secret" or "law of attraction" teacher. When faced with tough questions, they find endless ways to explain why it does not work.

A1: Just as I don't need to try the exercises in the secret to know that it's fictional
This might be the funniest thing I've read the past month. Thanks.

A self-styled asker of the "tough questions", eh?

So, apart from the idea that one can conclude something from not doing an experiment, especially one which requires zero effort - although it is of course perfectly fine to consider something ridiculous-seeming and therefore have no conclusion beyond that - you are also discounting that just the fact of participating and discussing the subsequent experiences is in and of itself valuable and leads somewhere. However, it's not just that you are assuming that you know the nature of the experiment and therefore don't have to do it in order to comment; you are also implicitly assuming that you know... everything.

This potentially makes you a "believer" of the worst sort: a believer in an unexamined and vague concept (of "reality"), with a belief that it doesn't even need to be examined. You "do not doubt yourself", I suppose. Which, in turn, is probably also responsible for you holding a view of the nature of the subreddit without having really followed it. Perhaps, again, you feel you "don't need to" in order to draw conclusions. To hold beliefs about it. Perhaps that makes you a "free thinker"?

Again, I'll emphasis: this isn't about a method or belief, and in fact those two concepts would be held suspect also. You are perhaps confusing this with a "law of attraction" subreddit. Or confusing your own concept with the-thing-itself.

Anyway, there you go.

I tried magic when I was a kid. It never worked. I matured and grew out of it. Why would I go back to having imaginary friends as an adult? If it never worked when I was a kid who did not have any "strong beliefs," why would it work now with my mindset?

Magic, imaginary friends, strong beliefs, mindsets - not really related to this, I'd say, although some might sometimes draw connections (which should then be picked apart of course).

You seem to think someone's trying to persuade you of something in particular, but they're not. In fact, what "it" is, is what is under investigation. You can join in with that, or not - either is fine!

I do like your writing style. It''s very "refined." But thanks but no thanks. I came here to set people free. Can't allow myself to be swallowed up by madness. I have compassion for you. Increasingly, it seems that you are the one that needs help more than any other person here.

Oh well. Thanks for your well-meant comments all the same. Cheers for now.

POST: Has anyone used dimensional jumping against somone else?

[POST]

Like used it to manifest somone dying or something like that?

[END OF POST]

Intention is quite powerful so it could be possible to negatively affect someone's life, however there's a karmic debt created that has to be accounted for.

Really? What makes you say that? Who or what does the accounting, how is payment enforced, and why would it operate in terms of our human conception of goodness or badness? Is there some external intelligence at work in this? So:

The notion of "karma" as some sort of ongoing tally of "goodness" shouldn't be taken for granted, I think. For instance, it might make more sense to conceive of it more like "the persistence of intentional patterns". So, if you intend an outcome of "bad things" for someone, then you may experience the general pattern of "bad things" in your ongoing experience thereafter (similar to how the "owl" pattern arises in a general way in the Owls of Eternity exercise). However, the solution to that would be to be more specific in your intention, to deliberately structure it with this in mind, thereby avoiding a generalised "bad stuff" patterning.

I think we have to be careful not to end up simply repeating things in a superstitious way - e.g. karma payback, magick is evil, all that - without digging deeper into the actual structure of those ideas. Personally, I'd say that there is nothing necessarily stopping you from harming "other people", no necessary reason why you suffer as a result of doing so. However, it's obviously not a very "nice" thing to do!

There's also the additional aspect that "other people" might be best interpreted as being aspects of you-as-awareness - your own extended pattern! - so you are really mangling your own state by doing things like this. If such power is available to you, then surely there are better ways to tackle whatever issue one is seeking to address.

Q: Really? What makes you say that?
My ability to track the path that energy takes was helped along by a near death experience I had last year.
Energy transfers mediums as easily as wind getting converted to sound when a breeze hits some wind chimes. There are no gaps or wasted space between the wind/sound even though they are two distinct separate paths of energetic travel.
Who or what does the accounting, how is payment enforced, and why would it operate in terms of our human conception of goodness or badness?
Human energy in the form of life and emotion transfers just as easily as wind on the chimes, without any gaps or wasted space between the energetic forms. For example, if I angrily honk at someone sitting at a green light absent-mindedly and it frightens them, my anger was transferred from me, to heat when my muscles hit the horn, to an electrical connection which created sound waves, which transferred to the person hearing them, resulting in another emotion of momentary fear. If you freeze frame that scenario, my emotional energy of anger still exists in the form of their fear, minus the heat lost in the transfer of that energy.
When I refer to "karmic debt," I'm specifically talking about the human energetic value that is present when a person initiates harm and causes some sort of distress, discomfort, pain, suffering, or the like to someone else. Just as water seeks its own level, energy will balance its self depending on the positive or negative charges surrounding the energy. That's not to suggest that the do-er of bad things will have bad things happen to them; I'm simply saying that somewhere down the line, that harm will be neutralized.
be more specific in your intention, to deliberately structure it with this in mind, thereby avoiding a generalised "bad stuff" patterning of your experience.
I think I understand where you're going with this, but the karmic debt I was talking about wasn't based on any superstition. It simply aligns with the laws of energy. There's no belief required.
Personally, I'd say that there is nothing necessarily stopping you from harming "other people", no necessary reason why you suffer as a result of doing so.
I completely agree. That's a thin line though. One could indeed manifest harm to other people without harming themselves, but that does not mean the karmic debt doesn't exist, it simply transfers to something else down the line. Nor does it mean that the creator of that harm won't have to experience an energetically-equal amount of emotional accountability when they face death. Does that make sense? Edit: When I say an "energetically-equal amount of emotional accountability" I mean that someone who manifested harm for society would be required to feel emotions in equal measure to the emotions they created in other people. The fear surrounding their own death, or the accumulation of guilt, etc.

Okay, so if I'm understanding correctly, what you are going for here is less like the general "negative energy" spiritual accounting concept, and more along the lines of a physics style "conservation of energy" principle.

However, aren't you muddling two different things here? That is, the abstract concept of "emotional energy" and the concepts of "kinetic and potential energy" as used in physics (as well as, perhaps, difference ideas of "charge")?

Regardless, we're left with the issue of tying such a model back to our actual ongoing direct experience. In physics, for example, "energy" isn't a real thing as such: it isn't observed and it doesn't do anything, it's pretty much an accounting principle which carries across different types of observations, as a handy connecting concept. It is used because it helps the sums work out - and the sums can be tested against actual (if somewhat constrained) observations, and the models tweaked accordingly. In this case, though, how can we tie this description to our direct experience? What specific observations can be made, to ensure that this description is worthwhile, and that we should be using it to judge whether there is actually a "karmic" issue to worry about? What would convince someone to follow it? While we might say that there is "no belief required" within the description, there is still some level of belief involved in the very assertion that this description is accurate!

To some extent, of course, this last part isn't really a problem: no description should really be taken too seriously, as "what is really happening". However, if we are going to assert a description is useful at all, it's appropriate to push back on it and ask in what way exactly they should be deemed as worthwhile or useful. (For example, the "meta" model of "experiential patterning" is useful because it can be directly experimented with and offers a simple conceptual connection to direct experience, even though of course it is not "true" as such.)

In terms of OP's post, it still remains open I think: in what way does the concept of "karma" actually matter to someone who wants to intend (what they interpret to be) a harmful outcome?

(It's just good to really dig into this, rather than to perhaps skip over our assumptions.)

Aside - I suppose it's worth us reminding ourselves that physical models aren't "what is really happening" either, of course; they are useful metaphors only. For example: the world isn't made from atoms, only "the world" (an idea) is made from "atoms" (a conceptual framework). So what in fact matters most about a "karmic" model is whether it is useful, rather than true, because it is inherently not possible for it to be true. At the moment, though, I'm not sure we've got much further than the idea that "intending bad outcomes might produce unpleasant penalties", which I think we have cast doubt on now, or "taking action always implies resultant change", which is a tautology.

Tautology is an excellent explanation.

Actually, to some extent this is the key point that we keep coming back to. That is, the nature of descriptions themselves.

All descriptions are to a certain extent "castles in the sky": the manner in which they are "true" is mostly in the sense of "conceptual truth", which is really just another way of saying their are internally consistent. This, as distinct from what we might call "direct truth", the actual experience that is present, now (although this is not just limited to the "sensory moment" that is now). The link between the two, we might term "observational touchpoints" - the ropes that link the content one experience (the experience of "thinking about concepts") to another (the experience of "this main strand of sensory unfolding"). So, my issue with the theory of karma outlined above - aside from my reservations of mixing different concepts of "energy", although I do get what you are going for there, which is that all experience must have a counterpart in the physical model if they are to share a conceptual space - would be that it is tautological in the sense of being primarily "conceptually true" (self-consistent) without sufficient "observational touchpoints" in order to make it useful as a pointer towards "direct truth". Basically, that it might ultimately be more of a narrative than it is a model, I suppose.

I don't see how they're two different concepts. Emotional energy is every bit the same energy identified in physics.

I think that "emotional energy" is generally used as a metaphor to describe a particular subjective sensation associated with an emotional state. Whereas in physics "energy" is an accounting principle associated with (loosely speaking) the position of particles in a particular context. These are two different conceptual frameworks, really. "Emotional energy" doesn't translate to a "physical world" energy unless we explicitly redefine it. Which we might be able to do, of course - but we can't just hand-wave it.

Where would emotional energy come from if not from physical energy?

That rather presupposes that the two conceptual frameworks are compatible, and/or that one of them (physical energy) is somehow "real" and foundational. The proper answer is probably that "emotional energy" doesn't come from anywhere in terms of "physical energy". And to some extent, from anywhere at all! Again, unless we redefine "emotional energy", to have a version of it in a physical model. This sounds picky, but:

The term "energy" is vague...

Not if we choose to be specific in how we are using the term, and in the mechanics of how it is being applied in our descriptions!

This presupposes that one must worry about their karmic issues at all.

Perhaps, but:

Even if we didn't worry about them; even if we just stomped along blindly without regard to the benefits or harm we're creating, the energy and its correlating effects can still be mapped out from start to finish.

This rather presupposes that there is such a thing as karmic energy at all! The effects are "only mapped out from start to finish" if there truly is such a thing, and right now its existence is what we are debating. If it doesn't exist, then there is no "mapped out".

In the end, all of it must be accounted for, energetically speaking.

Must it? Even if we translate "emotional energy" into a physical model, and say that energy must be accounted for (which is really just a way of saying that energy is never created or destroyed, standard stuff), there's still no reason to suppose that concepts of "harm" or "benefit" are connected to this. Now, one might say something along the lines of: "if you take an action, then that corresponds to a change in the form of energy, be that kinetic or potential, as heat or gravitational, or whatever". But that doesn't really mean anything for us, in terms of "harmful" or "beneficial" actions or outcomes. That sort of thing - moral judgement or interpretation - lies outside of such a framework.

If we ARE aware of the energetic balance in our lives, it still shakes out to even money. Either the individual had a net benefit or a net cost to humanity.

So far, though, this idea of "energetic balance" has no link to "goodness" or "badness", or other human conceptions of different types of events or situations.

I totally agree with pushing back on these concepts to determine their usefulness, but we can only tally the energetic profit/loss after everything is accounted for.

I'm still not (based just on this description we're digging into) convinced there even is such an energetic profit/loss, in the sense of one that matters in terms of good or bad behaviour, and good or bad experiential outcomes. There still seems to be a muddling between the concept of "energy" as used to describe configurations of matter with that used to describe subjective experiences of situations, which hasn't been overcome.

All that aside, though, there is perhaps a more important aspect of this as regards "dimensional jumping", which is:

• Why would intention - that is, a direct update to the facts of the world - incur any sort of karmic aspect, since it is “before” the sort of energy we’re talking about here?

In other words, since intentional change is not an action, surely it is in any case outside of a personal causality-based karmic framework, no matter how it is conceived of, and particularly in the case of a "physical" model like we've been discussing?

Instead, intentional change would perhaps be more like the reshaping of the whole landscape simultaneously, via the incorporation of a new fact or pattern. We might have a "karmic debt" in the sense that this pattern would now be a part of the landscape of ongoing experience until it was reversed, directly or by implication, but that wouldn't be related any notion of "good/bad" or even "physical propagation" type concepts, surely. I'd say that "karma", as the word is commonly used, probably wouldn't be an appropriate term for this.

But then, what type of "karma" would there be for such intentional (rather than physical) change, that would be a meaningful guide when selecting intentions and outcomes? That is, other than as a narrative that never really shows itself in actual experience. Is it, as you suggested earlier, perhaps just something that be ignored, since it doesn't actually manifest other than as a sort of story?

POST: Header Change Thought/Question

I'd move away from the concept of a "dimension" as a "place", and instead view it as a "state of experience" (that is, a particular set of facts and patterns from which your ongoing sensory moment arises). And the "you" who experiences this "dimension" isn't a you-as-person, but rather you-as-awareness.

That way, you can view yourself as having taken on a "person-in-a-world experience", but you never actually go anywhere, it's just that the content of the experience arising within you changes (like a 3D multi-sensory thought unfolding within an open aware space). Given this, it makes no sense to talk of what "other people" would be experiencing, because "people" don't experience anything at all. Rather, "people" are patterns which are experienced - by you-as-awareness. You can easily recognise that any thoughts you have about other people, or any other sort of external environment, are in fact just further experiences within you.

For example, note where your thoughts about other people and other dimensions-as-places appear if you do this:

Feeling Out Exercise

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

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

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

POST: An Experiment I'm Doing

[POST]

I doubt I'm the first person to do this experiment, though at least in my explanation, doing it will serve a dual purpose. For the past 16 or so hours, I haven't looked in any mirror/reflective surface. I'm doing this so I forget what I look like so I can only experience my ideal appearance (in thought) without any "this is how things actually are" image conflicting with that. I also thought this would be helpful for getting rid of the idea of viewing my body as the "center" of my experience. Even after having realizations of there being no separation in experience, the old perspective of your body being who you are can still come back. I figure with not remembering what you look like as much will help loosen the idea of "being a body" because that idea relies heavily on having a clear mental image. As someone who usually looks in the mirror 20+ times a day, due to being rather preoccupied with appearance, I already feel the effectiveness of doing this for just the short time I've done it so far - there's almost no resistance to feeling as though my ideal is true, because the opposite has no fuel to run off of. I will keep doing this experiment, though I don't know for how long.

[END OF POST]

One possible approach to this - or maybe something to use in addition - is, rather than to try to forget the mirror image, instead recontextualise it.

For example, shift your attention to the idea of a "background space" within which a "sensory moment" of experience is unfolding. From that perspective, an image in the mirror becomes simply a part of this overall 3D-multi-sensory moment-image, and belongs to it rather than to you. In fact, what you are is that within which all of it appears. (Note that when I say "the idea of" I don't mean to think about it; I mean to seek out that background space directly in your actual experience, now.)

To further emphasise this, you should include the "direction you are looking out from" in your attention. That is, if you were to be stood looking at a mirror, your attention is in the direction of the mirror. Now, in addition, extend your attention into the opposite direction, to the space which you are apparently looking out from. You'll typically perceive this to be a sort of "void" that has no end, and then you'll realise that this void is in all directions - again leading to the experience of a void/space with an image floating in it, with you as that void/space and also the image. (This was Douglas Harding's old trick for noticing your actual relationship to experiential content, mirror images included. His books On Having No Head and particularly Head Off Stress are still worth checking out.)

A version of this approach is described in the Feeling Out Exercise, which seeks to recontextualise both your sensory experience and your thoughts about sensory experience, and dispel the notion of anything being "behind" or "outside" them.

Even when I looked at "myself" in the mirror without being in the midst of a realization type experience, I didn't feel very much ownership of what I saw, because it didn't seem like me.

Somewhat like the image in the mirror is part of the "visual wallpaper" of the room; the images of your body parts as you move through the day are part of the "visual wallpaper" of the scene. Just because those images aren't "you", though, doesn't mean we can't want to adjust them. After all, our main strand of experience unfolds "as if" we are that body in that world. If the wallpaper in our house is looking a bit rough, we don't just go "never mind, that wallpaper is not me" and sit in squalor!

(The irony being that, in a particular way, the wallpaper in your house and the mirror image are in fact you - just not in the way we would normally think of it, and not in a way that is burdensome.)

POST: Letting go

[POST]

Any good advice on this topic? I know it's one of the most basic concepts, but this seems to be a really big fuck up for me. I made a very important jump and everyday that I wake up and nothing has changed or when check the thing that's supposed to be changed, and it hasn't, I feel like it didn't work and I feel really hopeless.

[END OF POST]

So, it's perhaps useful to see that "letting go" isn't something you actually do - although language tends to imply that. There's no technique. If you look for a method, you'll end up doing something else instead but calling it "letting go".

First, I'd think of it more like a not interfering after having intended an outcome. The idea being that when you have made a change, then it becomes "true now that this happens then" and any further tinkering amounts to counter-intending. That's why the final instruction of the Two Glasses exercise is as it is.

Second, there's "letting go" in the sense of non-attachment. Now, sometimes people say "detachment" but I feel that can get us muddled up with the idea of trying to be separate from what's happening somehow, which would actually be a sort of interfering or holding - the opposite of what you want.

"Non-attachment", then, would correspond to allowing the ongoing moment to unfold without obstruction no matter what its content - as above - but also means not trying to "make" things happen when intending. Intention has no inherent sensory component, after all - sensory experiences are always "results". Attempts to force or manipulate experience in order to "experience doing the intending" is basically an intention to create a particular sensation, and if that sensation is associated with your current state, you are effectively re-intending that instead of your target outcome.

Generally, it is probably useful to conceive of your current patterned state as the full definition of your world. That "world-pattern" consists of all the current active facts, and therefore fully determines the sequence of sensory moments that will follow. And so, if you successfully shift this via a "jump", then from that point onwards the new target fact has been incorporated and taken into account - even if you have experiences which aren't filled with joy or whatever afterwards, or passing doubtful thoughts or whatever (simply leave those alone).

For sure, you might experience synchronicities afterwards, just as a side effect of "patterning" your experience, but there is no reason why you must experience any indications of success prior to experiencing that actual outcome. Basically, this isn't a "signs form the universe" type deal. (In fact, in this view, there is no independent "universe" as we usually conceive of it.) "Letting go", then, becomes somewhat a matter of trust, acceptance, belief, faith and so on - but only in the sense that those tend to lead to you not interfering; they are not in and of themselves a cause of results.

You don't even know how much you've helped me George, thank you! This may sound like a stupid question, but now that I realize that I've been interfering with my intention big time, should I redo my jump minus tinkering?

Why not? Decide to have a clean slate, and begin your experiment again.

You can also play with carrying this over into everyday life: for example, lots of people move their bodies by straining and controlling their muscles, instead of, say, intending an outcome then allowing their body movements to arise spontaneously. After all, "body movement" is another experience like any other, the nature of it and its relationship to intention is identical, so that's a good way to practice. For example, sit down in a chair and then intend to be standing up - or to be standing over there by the door, whatever - but don't do anything about it, nor obstruct any movements that arise. By doing this you'll become aware of whether you are, for instance, habitually intending your current position and then having to strain to overcome it, or whether you are intending muscle tension (for "doing") as well as the outcome. (Which would be like intending "stay still" and "move freely" simultaneously, producing the experience of effort and strain.)

One might consider, then, that to intend these unhelpful ways is actually to regularly re-intend your current state, in preference to your target state. "Resistance" to change isn't necessarily about fighting back in obvious ways; it can be more like returning to an overall extended or postural pattern by unwittingly re-intending a part of it. (I don't mean to overstate this though: you are not undoing all your good intentions every time you struggle to get out of a chair!)

Don't get too hung up on that last bit though; there's nothing to be done about them, it's more about recognising the benefit of, and experimenting with, "ceasing to interfere" and allowing the moments between now and the outcome to unfold without obstructing.

Thanks, George! I really needed to read this. I've noticed that it can be hard to perfect the "detachment values" as I call them (I'm a programmer, I usually discuss this all like it's a program, makes it easier to understand). But I've compared it to hypnosis. If you are thinking to yourself "Okay, now I will be hypnotized", then it won't work. You have to just relax and allow to happen. It's not much different here. I wasn't able to get hypnotized for the first time until I was really tired and not really focusing on it. This is when it actually happened. Thanks for this thread, I really needed to read this!

Yeah, I sometimes think viewing things in programming terms - or other mechanistic analogies - can be a hurdle, perhaps, because it tends to imply that there are processes and mechanisms whereby one thing operates on another, which is not the case when we are talking about the nature experience (whether that is unobstructed experience or intentional shifting) rather than its content.

(Further thoughts:)

I do keep returning to a model whereby we have ourselves-as-world as a single patterned landscape which self-shifts, and is static in between such shifts. The only thing that "happens", then, is intention - and that is not a process nor does it have a mechanism. Your ongoing "unfolding moment" appears to be changing, happening, but really it is static from an overall perspective (we could say that "time passing" is a static pattern in our landscape).

Which is why you can't do anything in order to be non-attached [1], because any attempt to do so is actually an intention, a deformation or obstruction of the situation which was already there, an example of interference we are supposedly trying to avoid!

Actually, I suppose part of the problem with getting a handle on this is that people assume that in their daily lives they are always "doing" their movements and thoughts and so on, and this means they just don't have the concept of experience just happening "by itself". But if you pay attention to your everyday life, you'll find that this is very much what happens (and that's why doing silly little experiments with body movement can be quite helpful, to dispel incorrect assumptions).

__

[1] Again, I used "non-attached" instead of "detached" there to emphasise that there is no attempt to somehow separate ourselves from experience involved. That's what "detached" seems to imply for some people, even though it is meant to indicate detachment in the sense of "being okay with and non-resistant to whatever arises", rather than putting distance between the (apparent, supposed) experiencer and their experience. Having said that, I do tend to use those terms somewhat interchangeably myself.

POST: Which method to use to achieve future goal?

Just for super clarity, I'd probably highlight issues with the use of "unconsciously" with the word "choosing", because of how loaded that term is, and how varied its uses.

It's easier, I think, to reserve "choices" for intentions, where "intending" means deliberate selection and intensification of a pattern to make it relatively more prominent in our experience ("the intention"). I'd perhaps strip it back to simply: we can intend outcomes or facts - shift ourselves - but sometimes the extended pattern implied by those intentions is not anticipated.

For example, you might react to an encounter with someone you like but are shy of by intending them to "go away"; and they do. You could say that you "unconsciously chose" to make it so you never have a relationship with that person, but I think that doesn't really capture what's actually going on. "The unconscious" is a problem because people tend to think of it as both a place and a process, somehow separate from ongoing experience, but which has a mind of its own and does things - whereas it's really just a way of saying "aspects of your current patterning which are not unpacked into this expanded sensory moment", like Bohm's ink droplet analogy.

You are the only mind, and the state of your world is a static landscape that cannot shift unless you shift it/yourself. You are the only thing that "happens". So, "unconscious" in the sense of not being explicitly aware of what we have done - not having a thought about that - but not in the sense of there being something "happening" behind the scenes.

But then, of course, our entire state right now is of that "unpacked" type. Our current patterning is, other than this current "sensory moment", in the background rather then unfolded into explicit knowing (=experience). Only the current "sensory moment" or an explicitly chosen intention, while being intended or recalled, are not of that type.

Perhaps it's a better term to use overall, but it only makes sense if you truly know what you're doing.

The problem is, when we begin with these terms we've already created a hurdle for understanding it properly. "Conscious-unconscious", given that people tend to conceive of these things as "happening" independently in some sense, is already built upon an error and rich with unhelpful associations, some of which are very difficult to point out, to the extent that it's better to put them aside.

Of course, in casual conversation, unlike here, then we start with whatever way in might be easiest, and then try to lead things around. But at some point, inevitably, you have to just assert the viewpoint - either by asserting that there is such a thing as "intention" and building out, or by leading them through an exercise like Feeling Out and so on - and build out from that, as a parallel picture of things.

In these conversations, naturally, we're all about digging into these things, and I'm not particularly aiming at generating snappy few-liner descriptions that can be given to people without establishing a background first. However, a side effect of this tends to be the generation of new metaphors which can be helpful in that area.

Why would negative feelings arise if that's not what I'm focusing on anymore?

They are aspects of your current state, which will always have some patterning from previous intentions and implications - which typically become less conspicuous over time. (Remember, here, that the state is static, so more accurately they don't "become" less conspicuous, it's just true now that the pattern is less dominant across the static set of moments.)

With passing thoughts and feelings, then, just let them be and they'll just be left behind. Wrestling with the content of every moment is a sure way to get into trouble. If a thought or feeling persists, then intend the desired feeling. And, again, let it be too. You are not meant to be managing your ongoing experience in some sort of constant maintenance mode.

so it does seem like this could improve drastically as I keep putting more focus into it.

I'd say it's not necessarily about "putting focus into" so much as "do not subsequently interfere" - depending on what is meant by that ("putting focus"). This is something to experiment with a bit, but since your intentional reactions to surroundings can be in terms of a depressed state, you can end up recreating it. After which, when you notice this has occurred, you can re-intend feeling good again of course - but:

I'd like to caution against "keeping focused on" in some sort of ongoing sense, like a "forcing" more than simple one-hit "decisions". This can become another version of holding yourself in a fixed position in opposition to the moments that you have defined in your state previously. Intention can best be considered as as "redirection" or "assertion", not as a process that needs maintenance, otherwise you are in fact holding a moment, rather than modifying your state while avoiding obstructing the unfolding of your sensory experience.

"Putting focus into" in the sense of "intending when I notice that I have counter-intended" is perfectly fine, of course.

It's fine to invoke any concept, but we just have to be more careful than we would when discussing other topics - because in this case the thing we are discussing is also about the nature of concepts (or descriptions). Every concept comes with baggage, and accumulates more over time. Worse - "God" being a classic one, but "consciousness" too - many concepts turn out to be sort of meaningless, because we tend not to take the time to define them. (For example, reading "consciousness explained" type articles is often fascinating, because usually - inevitably - the article turns out to be about this other thing, but with it being labeled "consciousness".)

As you pointed out earlier, though, this just means we need to engage in a dialogue to whittle down what exactly we mean by the terms we are using. And I do think that, if we introduce the "meta" idea of "experiencing" as being independent of, the context to, any content, then we've always got a platform we can retreat to in order to regain our footing.

Anyway -

There's probably an interesting point to be made about whether or not to treat any content as "important" (or as "signs"). It's best to treat them just as they are actually experienced: multi-sensory 3D imagery, within awareness, with a feeling of "meaning" with it. Any further interpretation is itself a further experience: the experience of "thinking about" that experience.

Meanwhile, if you don't regularly re-imply something, then the pattern tends to fade, simply because other intentions towards desired "fact-patterns" will tend to imply the reduced contribution of that something, simply as part of the world-experience being fairly consistent. As I say, though, there's nothing wrong with regularly intending "being happy" or whatever, but this is not the same as manipulating or maintaining the ongoing sensory moment. It is more like "asserting a fact" into the background of experience, such that subsequent sensory moments arise in alignment with that, later.

The total simplicity of this does, ironically, lead to lots of verbiage in an attempt to capture it. Ultimately, we are talking about an undivided non-thing - but since words and concepts require division (that is, the breaking up of things into "parts" and then relating them within a "conceptual space"), we immediately create an error even in the attempt to capture it (if we are talking in terms of divisions, we are already not talking about the undivided thing), and flip from zero complexity to endless complexity.

Trying to talk about "awareness" suffers from this. It's not a thing at all, and nor is it even the material that things are made from, although that's still a useful metaphor. The concept "awareness" is immediately inaccurate, because simply the fact of dealing with a concept means we aren't talking about awareness-as-it-is, which is "before" concepts.

And talking about "intention" suffers from the same issue. Intention is not about entertaining thoughts or feelings or whatever. Intention is the reshaping of oneself, by oneself. "Entertaining thoughts" is a result - an experience. So it cannot be a cause. Experiences are results of intention, so if we find ourselves talking about something to "do", we are already talking about something other than intention.

It's actually better to start with the concept of a "state" and have intention simply be a modification of the state, with sensory experiences being aspects of the current state. That way, you have a nice clear model:

You are "awareness". The only inherent property of "awareness" is being-aware. Awareness contains all possible patterns, eternally. Awareness can be in a "state" where some patterns are more prominent than others. Your ongoing sensory experience is the sensory aspect of that "state". "Intending" is the name given to increasing the relative prominence of a pattern ("the intention") in your state, such that ongoing sensory experience reflects that (because it just is an aspect of that patterned state). All experiences are results. The only cause is the state/intention.

Of course, this inherently means that neither "awareness" nor "intending" can be described, since descriptions are themselves experiential patterns, and are "made from" awareness. Just like you can't build a sandcastle which is the shape of "the beach" and "sand", even though the sandcastle is both "the beach" and "sand". (And if you make sandcastles and label them "the beach" and "sand", they are still not those things, although it is likely we will get confused and start treating them as such. Which loops back to where we came in, with our unpicking of terms in order to be certain we meant what we think we meant.)

It's not really passive, though, although I get that the language seems to suggest it.

Saying that the only inherent property is being-aware is just to say that the "shape" of it is always inherently an experience. It can then causelessly shape-shift itself into any experience (but don't conflate experience with the current "expanded sensory moment" only; something I keep accidentally implying I must admit).

Sometimes, as a brief mental image even though it slightly misleads, I refer to "awareness" as:

• "The non-material material whose only inherent property is being-aware and which 'takes on the shape of' states and experiences; right now it has 'taken on the shape of' apparently being-a-person-object-in-a-world-place".

Which is more suggestive of the complete idea. Implicit in this description is that all possible patterns are present eternally, are always available, and it's a matter of the "relative intensity of contribution" rather than their existence as such.

Following from that, then: "intending" is the reshaping of you-as-awareness such that a given pattern ("the intention") becomes more prominent in its contribution to ongoing experience; "volition" would be a little bit of experiential or imagination theatre whereby you browse patterns and select one to then adopt more fully.

As always, we should highlight that experience just is and there's nothing "behind" is - and that includes this description, which is itself just an experience (an experience of "thinking about experience"). So, the description doesn't get "behind" experience or "explain" experience, however it provides a framework for thinking about the essence of a structured experience independent of specific content - it is closer to the "basic experience" - and is useful as a platform for formulating intentions "as if" it were true (which of course intensifies the apparent truth of the description, because whatever patterns an intention is asserted in terms of, is also brought into prominence, as part of its extended pattern).

To avoid going astray, though, so that we don't start thinking that this is "how it really works" or gives us a method or mechanism, we keep re-iterating that the only fundamental truth is the fact of "awareness", and all other aspects of experience are relatively true (patterning, temporarily) only.

The shape-shifting metaphor makes passivity go away, but the adverb "causelessly" seems to bring it back.

The issue here is one of language, again. Language requires that there be a "doer", a "doing", a "done". You can't really describe "movement" without it sounding passive unless you invoke a "mover" - but in this case we are talking about self-shaping or self-movement, with no "mover" distinct from the "movement", because of course you are the entirety of the experience.

As an attempt to illustrate this: move your arm. Attend to the experience. Do "you" actually "move" your arm, or does the experience of "my arm moving' simply arise? In what sense do you "cause" your arm to move? If you have an experience of "doing" the movement, then what causes that experience? Is it not itself a causeless experience, in terms of there being something within your experience that makes the arm move? Is it not the case that the entirety of your ongoing experience is a "result" and not a "cause"? Something to play with, anyway.

So, there's nothing "behind" it, but maybe there is something inside it.

Again, this is perhaps best viewed as an issue with language and conceptual thinking - which always involves arranging object-ideas within a conceptual space, almost like as sort of imaginary "thinking room". There are in fact no hierarchies or locations in what we're talking about here, but there's actually no way to talk about this, since thinking requires division and relation, which is "after" this.

So, really, we must simply accept that we are using metaphors to point to aspects of our experience, and sometimes those metaphors will apparently even clash or contradict one another in the details because they are all "wrong" to an extent. The descriptions we are using aren't "explanations" for our experience, they are our best attempts to communicate insights that are observed. "How things are" is never captured by the description, never are them; the descriptions merely point to them.

The implicate/explicate orders are one useful image, certainly. But: the implicate order is not actually intended to be spatially located at all, since it is "before" even the formatting pattern of "spatiality". It is useful to refer to it as "enfolded within" our experience, because it gives a sense of the relationship, but the spatial metaphor is not really accurate (since only spatially-extended experiential content has spatial extent and this is not that).

Similarly, the "patterning" model tries to use the concept of patterns or ripples, all existing simultaneously and summing up to a state. A bit like Moire fringes. The idea here is to use the minimum required concepts to represent a structured experience, whilst avoiding invoking spatial or temporal metaphors as much as possible. The "sensory aspect" is the current "unfolded" part of that total image, in this description: sensory experience is spatial, but patterns themselves are not. But again, that description is not "true" because no description can be; it is simply an attempt to capture certain aspects of experience such that they can be discussed and, then, used as formulations for intentions.

The summary, then:

Experience is as it is and is primary; descriptions are pointers to that and are themselves experiences, so it is not possible to have a model which is experience. There is actually no "how things are" or "mechanism" or "structure" which is inherent. Models are meant to be "effective" (that is: useful) rather than "true", so arguing about the models can sometimes be a distraction, and that's why the sidebar encourages conducting experiments.

Aside - Models are never "true" even outside of this more "meta" analysis, although unfortunately they are often presented as such at the moment by many people who really should know better. Even in the standard description, the world is not actually, say, made from "atoms". That model was never intended to capture "what is really happening"; it is simply a useful - "effective" - description for many purposes. "The atomic world" (a certain conceptual framework) is made from "atoms", but the-world-as-it-is, experience, is not. See, for example, two handy articles: The mental universe [https://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf] and What's bad about this habit [https://www.ehu.eus/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf].

When seeing this, it seems kind of pointless trying to meddle with whatever you're experiencing, because it's not seen so much as an impediment to get somewhere else.

Another way to say this is: If all things already exist, and they are brought into experience by intensifying them, then trying to tinker with the content of the moment is misguided, or at the very least it is limiting. There is no need to "transform" the current experience into the desired one; one simply needs to assert the desired pattern into relative prominence.

Furthermore, the very idea of trying to operate upon the "image" is (in this context) really in error, because the current experience is a result or sensory aspect, and is not the fact itself. That is, if the sensory aspect is the flames atop a stack of glowing coals, their shape reflecting the arrangement of the stones from which the flames arise and are a part, then trying to modify the flames, while it may adjust their position slightly, does not tackle the pattern of which the flames are merely a visual aspect.

You needn't be parroting positive things to yourself all day, but if it arises for a while, then go ahead. If negative stuff like "I look like crap" arises, then let that be there, just don't be interested in it. Does that sound accurate?

That sounds accurate.

The notion that one must always be "feeling good" or "thinking the right thoughts" - as passing aspects of experience - in order for the desired outcome to arise, is flawed. There are two aspects to that:

First, those feelings or thoughts are results. Like the flames above. Altering the flames does not alter the facts or the state, beyond perhaps a little intentional extended patterning. The flames are not casual. One moment does not cause the next moment: they are both images arising from one's state, which is a static definition which fully determines the sequence of moments (that is, between occasional intentions/shifts of course).

Second, it you intend a particular outcome, then at the moment of intending the state is shifted (because intention is the shifting of state) such that the new fact-pattern ("the intention") is incorporated. At that moment, it becomes "true now that this happens then", with the series of moments between now and then being fully defined by implication. But:

There is no reason why all those intermediate moments will be filled with "loveliness" and "joy" or "signs of success".

A silly example: If I intend to bump into someone I am attracted to, this may actually come about because I wake up one morning feeling depressed and hopeless, this lasts for a week, eventually I decide to take a walk and go for a coffee in that new coffee shop that's opened even thought it's not my sort of place and shake myself out of it, and they happen to be in the coffee shop.

You could say everything falls under that rule, since there is no division...

That's where the idea of this all being paradoxical comes in. It isn't really, though - the paradoxes lie in our attempt to construct a conceptual framework for it, not in "the thing itself". It's generally convenient to have "awareness" as indescribable, but notionally something like:

• "The non-material material whose only inherent property if being-aware but which 'takes on the shape of' states and experiences - and which has presently 'taken on the shape of' apparently being a person-object in a world-place".

but is it fair to say that you wouldn't be entertaining those thoughts unless you already intended the outcome in which the thoughts are related

I'd suggest that it's better to side-step this because it implicitly suggests a deliberate causation that isn't necessarily so, plus a notion of an initial starting point which doesn't exist.

If "awareness" is eternal, and all possible patterns exist eternally, then there is no time (in fact: no time!) where there wasn't a patterned awareness. In that context, saying that our experience (of "the world" or of "thoughts", the same really) is only because we intended the outcome is misleading, potentially.

If we reserve "intention" to refer to our deliberate intensification of a pattern, we're on better ground, and our current state is a the sum of all intentions and their implications (their implications given that the intention is a modification of an existing state). These intentions may not be about outcome events as such, though. If you intend the experience of the image of an owl in front of you, then that is an intention (bringing into prominence the experience of "an owl image" and also the extended pattern of "owl") but it is not necessarily a selected outcome. You have shifted your state, but the results are not so clearly defined as having intended an event.

Intentions, then, can be really quite abstract, and not necessarily structured as events or objects or world-facts - that's why I use the concept of "patterns", since it does not assume a spatial or temporal aspect.

From here, we can loop back to the idea that because there is no division, because the "world-pattern" is continuous and undivided, then if there is any "world-fact" at all, then there is immediately, by implication, an entire world. That is, if the world-pattern was a metaphorical landscape, then as soon as there is anything other than uniformity, any slight hill or valley, then there is immediately a full topology. This is why we can't say that it is the sum of deliberate choices, but we can say that it is the (effective) sum of all intentions and implications, even if those intentions are not in the form of "choosing world-events or world-facts" or whatever.

If the above explanation has any weight, then intention is the cause of you letting go of another pattern, right?

So, if the world-experience is to be a self-consistent thing, then bringing one pattern into relative prominence will, simply from the property of a continuous pattern, mean that contradictory patterns will be relatively reduced. If you select "happiness" into prominence, then that is also a reduction in "depression".

You don't "detach" from anything, though. I think I know what you mean by "attaching" to a sensory experience, but for clarity it's better to say that you increase the prominence of a pattern, and that pattern implies a particular sensory experience, subsequently.

There's also a bit of exploration to be done in terms of what something like "depression" is. If the way we change our state is by, essentially, "leafing through" potential patterns by a sort of "associative browsing" of the eternal memory of all possible patterns, there's an interesting issue to ponder. That is, there's perhaps a difference between identifying and increasing or decreasing the pattern which is associated with the word or concept "depression" (following the word!), versus identifying the patterns associated with your actual experience, and increasing or decreasing that (following the direct feeling!). They may overlap, but it isn't necessarily the case. Because experience and intention are "direct' (that is, there is no intermediary), it's important to actually attend to the pattern itself, rather than just a proxy, or at least ensure the proxy means-that you are addressing the pattern itself.

Aside - I'd like to highlight here that none of this is an "explanation" in the sense of explaining "how things really work". The overall insight is that there is no "how things work", no mechanism or method. What it does instead, is propose a conceptual structure which is the minimum required for discussing a structured experience without specifying any particular instance of content. And then, it is also a structure which can be used to formulate intentions and conceive of their potential impact, while avoiding the associations usually implicit in more content-based descriptions (of which this is the "meta" perspective).

POST: The world does not seem like a private dream

But I can't deny that this "world" does not feel like a private, subjective dream.

The sense in which it is a private reality or view, though, is not in the sense of it being a personal view. That is, it is not you-as-person who "owns" the experience, it is you-as-awareness who has "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world. This world which is patterned, typically, as an apparently "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time". The thing we explore is the extent to which that apparent default corresponds to some solid independent thing, as we tend to assume.

This can get tricky, though, because we are always investigating in terms of a perspective (a world view, plus a desire or lack thereof). For example, if you were to intend something from the perspective of a person, then the ongoing experience of a personal viewpoint is implied within your intention, because you have intended in terms of it. This includes intentions which try to wrestle with it, to transform it (since those are also in terms of it; they re-imply the pattern) rather than intentions which detach from it.

We have to keep this in mind, then when we are investigating whether you can have experiences "as if" it were a shared world and/or "as if" it was a private view. The main possible outcome is that there is nothing actually "behind" your experience (or rather: behind "experiencing"). Experience is patterned that-which-experiences; patterned awareness, you might say. So the only fundamental truth is that there is a property of "awareness"; all content is relative. You can't experience that lack of such a thing directly, though; you can only have experiences so varied versus your initial assumptions that it becomes obvious, by deduction or direct intuition, that it must be the case.

And so, we might conclude that there is no persistent "how things are", and...

My attempt to understand why and how it works is probably making it harder for me to find success in this, so I'm going to try to stop caring about how and why it works.

...there is also no "how things work".

Here, the notion of "patterning" is an attempt to have description which doesn't end up assuming or implying some sort of "mechanism", because apparent "mechanisms" and "how things work" are themselves simply patterning of experience.

One implication of this is that if you focus on a particular idea of "how things work" - whether you are seeking evidence for it or seeking evidence against it or simply thinking in terms of it, implicitly - then you tend to get experiences patterned accordingly, to some extent. (Making investigating somewhat difficult.)

And since it is all "you" (as in you-as-awareness), you can't really deliberately make yourself intend an experience that you don't commit to, don't really think is possible, or don't actually really like the notion of. It's hard to fool yourself into something you don't want, when there is no "outside" of you that you can use to fool.

"People as patterns" is one such unattractive idea, for many. Although it doesn't actually end up as solipsism, people often anticipate that it will, and that's an unattractive idea: that there is only "me". (Even though it is not that "me" that we are referring to.) The idea of an unstable, non-"location" world is also pretty unattractive idea for many, also.

To return:

But I can't deny that this "world" does not feel like a private, subjective dream.

Then it isn't (currently, in your understanding of the concept).

It is not ever "really" that anyway, of course, I suggest, but you can have experiences "as if" it were that (corresponding to your notion or description of such a situation). Doing so reveals the more important observation that, fundamentally, "the world" and "you" are not "really" any-thing, other than the experiencing of those apparent things. This is always true, and your descriptions and concepts about the world and you are "parallel constructions in thought".

Although - it would be good to ponder what it would "feel like", in your view, if it were a private, subjective dream. Are you anticipating that a simple wish would bend the world accordingly and instantly? What would be the signs of a private, subjective dream, for you? Because it might be that you are really thinking about something else, here. That is, a private, subjective dream where there is no stability - basically just a dim and transitory thought - rather than a stable one, that is like a bright and persistent thought.

Have you ever had a lucid dream where characters seem independent, have their own will?

This is a catch 22.

Somewhat, it may seem.

However, it is possible to commit to something without regard to belief or disbelieve, liking or disliking. So it's about no longer indulging in thinking about possibilities or lack of possibilities, wheher something makes sense or not, is appropriate or not. Instead, it's about treating it - as we might say - as a "dumb patterning system".

In a dumb patterning system, holding a pattern in mind - we might saying "thinking it" or "intending it" or "imagining-that it is true" or "thinking the fact that something is true" or "shifting state", although there's really no way to describe it - intensifies its relative contribution while, simply because there is only "one thing", intensifying its extended logical pattern while diminishing anything contradictory to it. It doesn't matter whether you "believe" in it or your view of it in moral or potential terms, therefore, so long as you don't spend a lot of time holding a contradictory pattern in mind (during the intention, or subsequently). An example of this would be, not so much believing, but resisting the urge to indulge in "doubting", in the form of imagining-that something contradictory to the outcome, or fact, is true. (Which is a sort of faith, really, I suppose; or a willingness to allow. Mentioned again below.)

This does lead to something else important, though. That is, that the exact pattern that you are holding, its form or content, does make a difference. You might say to me that, for instance, you have been "intending to win the competition" - but the thing you are actually doing may in fact not really be that, not in the sense meant above. The structuring you are using needs to correspond to the structuring of your conception of experience, in some way, in terms of meaning.

Just simply summoning a picture of you on a winning podium for example, probably won't do much, probably bringing about some coincidences in the same way that the owl exercise brings about the extended pattern of "owls" in a sort of general overlay.

[private, subjective dream] But I do think reality would be a lot more responsive to my intentions, and nothing would be outside of my control.

I suggest that a private, subjective dream does not have any specific inherent properties, because any content could fit into that description (including that of apparently being in a physical shared world). There is no difference in nature between a flexible lucid dream and everyday life; what's different is the level of inertia, the depth of the patterning (metaphorically speaking). However, that "depth" or "inertia" is itself patterning of experience, and one can experiment with it.

But it does take some commitment, which isn't necessarily easy to come by when the world seems "so obviously" a stable and external place (except when it suddenly isn't for a moment). I guess that's why people talk about needing "faith", since there often isn't any sensory experience corresponding to an outcome - until there is. (It's also why this subreddit, for example, uses the perspective of this being an "investigation", where nobody else's ideas, including mine, should be taken on trust.)

[lucid dream characters] as soon as I became lucid... and they were no longer autonomous as they were when I wasn't lucid, so it ruined the fun.

Well, there is something of a lesson in there, perhaps. It is however possible to create (or should I say, summon the patterns into experience of) autonomous populated worlds: "persistent realms" standard link, and so on. Basically the same as this current experience.

As I mentioned before, though, it's important to note that the dream comparison/observation isn't saying that "you are the only real person and it's all under your control". Rather, it's that you aren't real either. (Where by "real" I mean independent and external to direct experience, separate and solid and "out there".)

The only thing that is "real" - which is to say, unchanging and therefore always true - is the fact of the property of being-aware, or "awareness". This is something you could conclude from noticing the content of everyday mundane experience, of course.

I can't tell if I ever actually successfully intended something.

You can sort of "know" you are intending, but unless the result of the intention overlaps with the sensory aspect of the current moment, then there's no "experience" of intending as such. There is no "doing" involved; it's a sort of "shapeshifting" or "becoming".

This is true even of things like deliberately moving your arm: you intend the fact that your arm is going to move, a short time later the experience of your arm moving is encountered in the senses. As an exercise: move your arm, and try to find yourself "doing" it, find the "cause". (If you then ascribe it to you having a thought of "lift my arm", then take a step back and try to find the cause of that thought. And so on.)

Aside - To reemphasise, here, "intending" means "to increase the contribution of a fact or pattern to ongoing experience" and "the intention" is "the fact or pattern whose contribution is to be increased". (And the pattern or fact already exists, eternally.) There really isn't any good way to describe it in words, to be honest. It just is. Language tends to divide things into a "thing", a "thing doing" and a "thing done". Here, though, they are all the same. This problem also arises when trying to describe the nature of "you" (you are that-which-experiences and the content of the experience and its context).

POST: Base Patterns… "Shared?" patterns

I see /u/Scew has helpfully replied already, but I'm not going to read his response before writing mine, and that way we'll get a couple of angles on the same topic, and maybe even something to enjoy disagreeing about! Here goes -

Scene Setting

I think I'll begin by just layout out the bare-bones description of our situation, so that we're all talking in the same terms, and then I'll focus on the points your raise in your post. So, we have something like:

• "Awareness" is the non-material "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware. This fact is the only thing that is fundamentally - that is, unchangingly - true.
• Because awareness is "before" division and multiplicity and change, awareness is not an object; it is not a thing. Awareness itself has no edges, and it makes no sense to talk about "an awareness" or "the awareness" or "my awareness"; it is simply "awareness".
• Awareness can take on the shape the 1st-person experience of apparently being a particular thing, however it is always actually all of the experience.
• All possible facts, patterns and experiences already exist - and can be thought of as being "dissolved" into this awareness.
• What you actually are, is awareness.
• Your current experience corresponds to the distribution of intensities of these patterns, their relative contribution to your overall state.

To illustrate this to themselves simply, anyone can close their eyes right now and try to:

• a) find the "edges" of your current experience,
• b) find where "you" are in your current experience.

What you discover is that, although you are apparently "over here" and the screen with these words on is "over there", actually you discover that you are "everywhere". Upon closer inspection you recognise that the whole experience is "made from you", and that there are no edges to this experience/you; there is no "outside" to your experience.

It's worth emphasising here that the sense in which awareness "takes on the shape of" an experience is in the sense of a 1st person experience. This is not saying that "the world is made from awareness" in the same sense as one might say "the world is made from atoms" - as a spatially-extended place "out there" with "you" in it. Rather, awareness takes on the shape of "sensory moments" which are aspects of a state, a state which corresponds to a particular dissolved "definition" of the world - a "world-pattern".

Therefore, it is meaningless to talk about space and time outside of experiences. And, in fact, your thoughts about such things are themselves experiences formatted in terms of spatial and temporal patterns. If you are imagining an outside of awareness or experience, you are immediately "wrong" and that imagining is "inside" awareness/experience.

Patterns & Pals

For this next bit, I'm not exactly sure what you were asking, to be honest - hopefully the outline above will help tease out any hidden assumptions there might have been, and we can better pinpoint where there might be a misunderstanding. In the meantime, though -

it seems like there is a point where "base" patterns are defined and are not quite as easily controlled/altered/influenced via intent.

I think it can be helpful to outline some groupings, perhaps. The patterns that contribute to your current experience would include: base formatting (spatial extent, change), world formatting, general world facts, perceptual formatting, outcomes and event patterns, abstract patterns overlays, and so on - all giving one single resultant pattern or state.

Here, the base formatting could be viewed as being the most intense or deepest of the patterns - we're basically talking about the abstract patterns that mean there is such a thing as apparent "division" and hence "objects". To stop having an experience in terms of that is difficult - a void experience - because everything you intend as an action will tend to further imply those patterns! Which leads us to an important point:

Patterns become more dominant because either we intend them, or because our intention implies them. If you intend walking to the door, then that intention already implies the pattern of the room, the door, a body, plus spatial extent and temporal structure. In fact, one might say that every intention implies a whole world, because for an intention to have meaning at all, it must be part of an extended pattern, an entire context.

This is important to realise, because it flips our usual thinking around. It is not for us to examine the current world and then work out the best intention given that world - all we are doing, then, is re-asserting the current world. Rather, we select an outcome and implicit within that intention will be a world that has that outcome as part of its extended pattern.

It seems that it would make sense that the base pattern is a composite/aggregation of the many shapes/experiences/patterns from awareness.

From the above, we have that all possible patterns already exist, and any state is an aggregate of every pattern, just at different levels of contribution.

I don't think each pattern (me/you/others) would independently render/create all the content of experience for its entire private copy of the "universe".

First, "me/you/others" doesn't make sense in this context; there are no independent people at all. No person ever does anything. There is only "awareness" and it is the only power - which is, to reshape itself.

Secondly, that sentence implies that the world is "designed" - that facts are deliberately chosen. This is not the case. From a single intention, a whole apparent could be implied - that is, a sequence of experiential moments "as if" a world existed and you were a person in it. "Creation" is already done, remember; everything already exists. What is happening might be better termed as "recall" from a memory block, or associative thinking in the form of a strand of 3D-formatted multi-sensory thought. Meanwhile, there is no "mechanism" involved in this; nothing is "rendered". Intention is the only "mechanism" and is the only thing that ever truly happens. (See also: The Hall of Records for a metaphor of this type.)

Take the case of direct-entry lucid dreaming. You lie down comfortably, allow you body and mind and attention to release, wait patiently and passively until hypnagogic imagery begins: sparkles, shapes, image fragments, visual objects, eventually a scene appears, and then that scene pops into a 3D-immersive environment. From that single scene, that single 3D-immersive multi-sensory "frame" or "moment", an entire world is implied! For sure, it is based on the current relative distribution of abstract patterns active as your state, however the dream world, in terms of its "facts", was never deliberately chosen or designed. And yet no matter how far you seemingly wander, that world will have no gaps or edges.

So it is, I suggest, with this experience you are having right now - this experience taking place "as if" you were a person in a world reading words on a screen.

My question is centered around how these "infinite" shapes of experiences might contribute to the formatting (patterning) of one another.

So, I would suggest that they don't, as such, but just as you say, it can be tricky to keep our terms in line, and I think what you are getting at towards the end of your post corresponds to how I'm thinking of it. But to be super-clear, let's pick out a couple of things below.

Note: because of the nature of the topic, it's sometimes difficult to pick out what is being assumed, so sometimes we might say things that seem obvious, and sometimes it may seem we miss an obvious point. In other words: just pick away at whatever doesn't make sense, and obviously my own description might actually be inconsistent anyway!

World, Context, Division

Should I call this world level pattern a context, a stage?

I'd call it a state, because I feel that "context" or "stage" implies that something is happening inside of that pattern. I'd say that awareness is the context of all experience, which adopts a state corresponding to a particular relative distribution or intensity of all possible patterns, and that everything else is best considered as content. Between a intentional shifts, the state is completely static, and fully defines all the moments of experience. Even "time is passing" is a static pattern.

I take Awareness dividing (achieving multiplicity) to mean it is taking on ALL the possible shapes of experience.

Okay, but to be clear: when I talk of (apparent) multiplicity, I don't mean that it is splitting up into separate perspectives which are all "happening" at the same time. I mean it in the sense of you apparently being "over here" while the screen is "over there", even though upon inspection you realise that "you" are actually everywhere and all of it.

And: the only thing that is "happening" is your experience right now. "Time passing" is an aspect of the current experience, and does not exist outside of it. So there is nothing happening "at the same time" as this experience of the pattern being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

The State of George Washington

There is a shape of an experience of a George Washington who founded the United States.

There is, implicitly, and there is every other type of experience too, just dissolved into the background, ready to be intended into relative prominence, such that it becomes the current state/experience.

This is also a 1st-person perspective experience unfolding in time in "a world".

But it is not "unfolding in time" right now. And the 1st-person perspective isn't "in" a world. It is a state that you could switch to, and if you switched to it, then that experience would become what is "happening" now. At the moment, though, it is just an eternal pattern sat in the background.

That shape of an experience is only one of ALL possible experiences but is still "just" Awareness.

Right. So let's summarise this model so far:

• There is "awareness"
• Dissolve within awareness are all possible patterns, and those are eternal.
• By selecting a particular combination of patterns, awareness becomes a "state".
• That "state" might be conceptualised as corresponding to a certain list of facts - a combination of a particular set of patterns, at different levels of contribution - which define a world and a perspective upon that world, and therefore defines a certain experience.
• One such state/experience might be being-a-world-in-1790-from-the-perspective-of-George-Washington.
• Another such state/experience might be being-a-world-in-2016-from-the-perspective-of-djdu982.
• If a state is not activated, then it is not "happening".
• The "happening" of an experience amounts to, you might say, "scanning one's attention" across the moments defined by that particular state, basically unfolding it moment-by-moment into the senses.

So there could be a "me" state that has a world aggregation pattern that involved a George Washington pattern contribution.

So, if what you mean there is that there exists a state (an aggregate pattern) which corresponds to the experience of being George Washington, then yes that would be correct. In order to (apparently) be George Washington, awareness would "take on the shape of" that state, instead of the current state. From this we see that you-as-awareness has no permanent "me"-ness about it, other than being-aware and being able to adopt any state/experience "as if" it were true.

"George Washington" doesn't contribute anything, though, because he is not a being and doesn't create anything. There there is no "shared" aspect to the different patterns as such - they don't contribute, they just are and can be - but all such patterns are available to adopt as a (logically self-consistent) experience.

Aside - There's a whole tangle we can get into about "other people" and "other perspectives. The convenient placeholder for that is to point out that the world is not a "shared spatially-extended place unfolding in time" and instead is more like a "shared toy box of potential patterns and experiences". The benefit to this isn't that it is fundamentally correct (because awareness is "before" all time and space notions anyway), but that it avoids making the usual errors of thinking - e.g. that things are happening at the same time in parallel, or one after the other in sequence, when both of those descriptions are actually meaningless rather than wrong.

The "Moments" Metaphor

My assumption I guess is that all of these states are active.

To give ourselves a simpler way to conceive of this, we could temporarily move away from the abstraction of "patterns" and take a subset of the idea. Let's consider it as all possible "moments" being present, now - a "moment" being a 3D multi-sensory 1st-person frame of experience - but at different levels of intensity.

So, right now, both the moment of "I am sat here looking at this screen" and the moment of "I am in the kitchen holding a mug of coffee" are present, however the former is turned up to full brightness and the latter is dim. Similarly, "I am George Washington chopping down a cherry tree" is also present, but dim.

Would not all possible pattern combinations have actually been experienced by awareness, meaning activated and happens?

The problem here, is that you are still referring to things based on some sort of external reference time, which doesn't exist. Awareness doesn't have a record of history beyond its current state, as the eternal Now, and all so-called memories of apparent recollections of "past" experiences are themselves actually "moments", now (experiences of "remembering the past").

Imagine a landscape with a particular set of contours. I am a gardener who has no memory capacity. I modify the landscape. Where is the old set of contours? Perhaps I call hills in one region of the landscape "the past" and other hills in another region "now" - but actually the entire landscape is Now, and if it changes without leaving a trace in the region I've labelled "the past", then there is no record of it. Note: Even this description is incorrect, because its construction is based on a notion of an 'outside' time perspective.

Eternity vs Forever

Same question different wording: Would not all possible pattern combinations have actually been experienced by awareness, meaning activated and happens?

We might be tempted to say that, given eternity, all possible experiences must have been experienced. However, this confuses "eternity" with "forever". The latter has an implied time components; eternity has no time component, it is outside of, or "before" time.

Maybe this is where "dissolved" comes into play?

Right. So, referring now to the top of this comment, we have a better way to conceive of things. Rather than talking of the experience of all possible combinations occurring sequentially or in parallel, in time, we instead take on the notion that all possible "moments" (and patterns) are always being experienced, Now. At this moment, which is actually the only moment, you are experience everything, just with a different relative distribution of intensities or "brightnesses". All "moments" are Now, as This Moment, and it is eternal. Every "moment" is the experience of everything.

[Dissolved] I do not fully get this meaning.

The use of the "dissolved" metaphor in general is meant to be an accessible way of conveying that you can be experiencing something, now even though it has not been "unpacked" or "unfolded" into sensory objects. In fact, if you pay attention to your direct experience more, you'll discover that there is this felt-knowing which is like the "global summary" sense of your state, and it is that which is your "knowing" of your current moment, more than the visual and auditory aspects of the experience.

Dissolving & Divisions

Are the "dissolved" patterns like the many many colors on a painter's palette? can be combined in any combination or intensity. All of these colors are available to be experienced in any final "state", but does not become "active", or a state, or experienced, until the colors end up on the canvas?

That's a good metaphor - except that we want to avoid there being an implication of division or process. By this, I mean we don't want to depict the colours being "over there" and then we select them and paint a result "over here".

You'll notice that with metaphors such as the "imagination room", they are at pains to try to remove the separation between the "components", the "scene" and the "experiencer". Hence all that stuff about being "an awareness which 'takes on the shape of' experiences"; the shape-shifter as metaphor removes all sense of separation. However, we always end up having to introduce something of that sort because we need to convey that there is a potential within the shape-shifter, even though it is not his present shape.

Another approach to this is David Bohm's idea of the implicate and explicate orders, as described in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order. He uses the physical example of a column of glycerine. From that Wikipedia entry:

Ink droplet analogy
Bohm also used the term unfoldment to characterise processes in which the explicate order becomes relevant (or "relevated"). Bohm likens unfoldment also to the decoding of a television signal to produce a sensible image on a screen. The signal, screen, and television electronics in this analogy represent the implicate order whilst the image produced represents the explicate order. He also uses an example in which an ink droplet can be introduced into a highly viscous substance (such as glycerine), and the substance rotated very slowly such that there is negligible diffusion of the substance. In this example, the droplet becomes a thread which, in turn, eventually becomes invisible. However, by rotating the substance in the reverse direction, the droplet can essentially reform. When it is invisible, according to Bohm, the order of the ink droplet as a pattern can be said to be implicate within the substance. In another analogy, Bohm asks us to consider a pattern produced by making small cuts in a folded piece of paper and then, literally, unfolding it. Widely separated elements of the pattern are, in actuality, produced by the same original cut in the folded piece of paper. Here the cuts in the folded paper represent the implicate order and the unfolded pattern represents the explicate order.

No analogy is perfect for this - it is inherently impossible to have a metaphor which is complete here, because as soon as we make a division we are "wrong", which basically means as soon as we think about it we are "wrong". So the best approach is to consider lots of different metaphors which are "wrong" is slightly different, non-overlapping ways, and we eventually build up a direct intuition for the situation - like that felt-sense I was talking about - which does not need to be unpacked into mental objects; it is "immediate".

So same question a 3rd way, has awareness painted all the possible paintings?

Hopefully the exploration above has covered that in a way that makes sense: all possible paintings are here, now; it is not meaningful to talk of paintings in history, because awareness is "before" time.

Can there only be one shape or state that awareness has active?

Yes, but that state is infinitely complex of course - and yet totally simple: because it has no inherent division. Which leads us to...

The Simplicity of Experience

Once again, it is important to emphasise that what we are discussing above is a description, a metaphor, a "parallel construction in thought". It is not "how things really are" or "how things really work", because there is no "how things really are" or "how things really work".

Actually, the only thing that is fundamentally true is being-aware. Everything else is relatively true only - that is, we can have experiences "as if" they are true, by intending the formatting of experience or intending outcomes which imply a particular formatting of experience.

So, what we are trying to do in the above is produce a description which is the more flexible coherent model which makes sense - which can be used to describe any experience as a sort of general narrative, and which can be used to formulate intentions without implying a restrictive world-view. This is only one side of our explorations into "the nature of experiencing"; the other, primary one, is to attend to experience as it actually is, and therefore directly realise our situation, rather than just think about it.

From a previous comment:

Experience-Of vs Thinking-About

Awareness doesn't have a location - it is that which takes on the shape of experiences. Everything you are experience right now is it, and it is what you are. The body is an object of experience, awareness is the subject of experience. You don't need a body to experience, however experience requires a context for its content. Awareness is that context, and all experiential content arises within (and as) that context.

You can think about this forever, but it's really something that is directly realise. For example as in the comment above, say, where you close your eyes and try to:

• a) find the "edges" of your current experience,
• b) find where "you" are in your current experience.

and:

• c) investigate what your current is experience is "made from".

Those observations are the facts. Everything else must adhere to those facts.

The only thing that is "real" (unchanging) is "awareness" - otherwise known as being-aware, since it has no inherent structure beyond that property. Everything else is temporary, which is to say relatively real/true only.

You still seem to be reaching for a "realness" which is "behind" experience, but there is no such thing. That is the meaning of phrases such as "what is seen is seen". It's trying to convey that what is seen is what is seen - and there's no more to it than that.

Narratives and the like are just a way to formulate descriptions of what has been observed so far, of what is currently observed as part of the present state, and to formulate intentions. Beyond that, though, there's nothing "insightful" about them at a fundamental level. Fundamentally, there's just being-aware and whatever is currently being-aware-of. If you want to experience something, the only way is to think about it, intend it, in the 1st person, "as if" it were happening, until it becomes intense and stable, so that the "as if" persists. You don't do this - rather you become it, until it is fixed as (relatively) true. This is, in fact, your current situation, in aftermath.

basically keep pretending until it happens
this involves persuading myself
but who am i persuading?

No, not pretending or persuading like that. You keep splitting things in two!

Pause this moment. Now, think of a red car. Really, this is better phrased is "think a red car into existence within your perception, albeit a low-intensity one" - or "think a red car" for short. So, now you have a red car. Did "you" think of a "red car"? Where, exactly, in your experience, is this "you" that did the thinking? It is nowhere/everywhere. It turns out that "you" do not think the red car, in the sense of being a separate thinker. Rather, the red car is within you, you as a subject or context (and not an object).

If you were to keep "thinking a red car" it would become more stable and persistent as an image. Now, instead of "thinking a red car", you do "thinking being inside a red car". That is, you are not just seeing a red car from some outside vantage point, rather you are experiencing a full multi-sensory 1st-person frame of being in a red car. Consider what it would be like to hold that "being inside a red car" thought until it became stable, persistent, intense, brighter than your apparent present surroundings!

That is what is meant by intention until it is fixed. No persuasion, no pretending in the sense of a separate subject and object. It is a becoming-asserting or "thinking the experience something-being-true". (Language forces upon us a subject/object division here; we are forced to get creative in order to indicate that's not what is meant.)

it would require me to do some things to acquire the experience of being in a red car

Do some things - how? You "shift" yourself, there is no "doing", which means one "part" operating on another "part". And even then, language makes it sound like some sort of action, when it is not really. There's a risk, here, that you are being distracted into wrestling with conceptual shadows, both modern and old, which are intended to point to things, rather than be things you spend time manipulating.

i do things like go to the car rental place and rent a red car

Not necessarily. Yes, if you just set it as a fact. But if you truly stayed with the image until it replaced the current one, you would actually be in that situation. Of course, this might take a while, but that would be up to you, whether you'd persist with the experiment or not.

right but i can't do something that doesn't exist

Everything exists already. If you can think it, it exists. There is no other sort of existence. If you can think about or of something (from a 3rd-person perspective, like imagining a car over there, as a normal thought), then you can think it (from a 1st-person perspective, as we were just discussing). There is nothing more to it.

Again: to think of something is to experience it - in the 3rd person. All that remains is to think of it in the 1st person, and then you are "living it" rather than "thinking about it". It is identical in nature: intensifying imagery within awareness. (This applies to more abstract facts and patterns too; it's not just restricted to having an expanded audio-visual-texture thought, although it gets harder to describe beyond that.)

ok well i just want to focus on meeting radha

As in, because it would be a cool experience? Fair enough! :-)

POST: Repetition vs Detachment

I think one of the problems we have with this topic, is a lack of clarity as to what "detachment" means. What are we detaching from? Is it our desire? Well what exactly is a "desire", and what does it meant to be attached to it? Similarly, if we repeat an intention until it takes hold, we are led to ask what is an "intention" precisely, and what does repetition do that helps it to persist? And why would that result in an outcome anyway?

Without having answers to these questions, we end up having all these concerns about maybe undoing our intention inadvertently, perhaps worrying that accidentally thinking about our desire is spoiling our "forgetting" - all basically a type of superstition due to the absence of a definite model to refer to. (I'd say that the LOA stuff particularly suffers from this.)

It does seem a little simple that repetition might be a replacement for intensity...

So, increasing the intensity of a pattern could happen all at once or in stages, that seems fair enough. But where "detachment" comes in, would be not re-intending the old pattern, or intending something which implies the old pattern, or intending something which logically conflicts with the new pattern - such that the relative intensity of the pattern never reaches a threshold beyond which it becomes the dominant "fact". For things which "matter" more to us, or are related to things we experience all the time, I think it can be harder to not do this - because we're often continually re-asserting our current position all the time, and implying the larger state connected with it.

For a mundane example, say you've developed a slightly offset habitual posture, and you compensate for that by constantly, lightly intending against it with an upright tension as you move around. By doing this, two things are happening: firstly, you are preventing that habitual posture releasing and following though, but secondly you are re-intending the entire pattern of experience that is associatively linked to that upright posture - in effect, fixing a large part of your world into that state.

In other words, because the world is a single continuous pattern, holding onto or continually re-asserting one aspect can mean you are preventing the shifting of the state as a whole. Your habitual handling of even your body sensations can have an effect. This is why doing a daily releasing exercise is a good idea, I think: it lets your accumulated patterning unfold, but also it gets you used to the idea of allowing things to happen spontaneously and only occasionally re-directing things via intention.

So your idea of initially experimenting with something that is an "easier" goal sounds like a good move. If it is less bound up with your core moment-to-moment experience, it is much easier to not interfere with the new state while just going about your daily life.

Additional thoughts:

Trying to really intensify a pattern could also trigger a problem in this area. If we have an idea that intensifying something requires "effort", we will tend to bring about the "feeling of doing" when we are intensifying it - but that "feeling of doing" actually has nothing to do with this process! However, that "doing" experiencewill perhaps trigger all sorts of stuff associated with your current state. The intention itself should feel like nothing. An intention has no sensory component of its own, after all - it only has the sensory aspect of the target pattern, since that's all an intention is.

If the target pattern has a component that corresponds to the expanded senses in the current moment, then you will experience that component growing. (For instance, the intention "it is true now that I am getting very relaxed" will obviously produce a sensory experience right now.) If it is about some future event or a more generalised fact, though, then you might experience nothing other than an abstract "knowing that your are intending" - or maybe a shift in the background felt-sense of experience (since of course, the entire world forever is here, now).

So, the intention "it is true now that I will will next week's competition" will perhaps not generate any sensation in the current moment - although it might bringing a shift in the sense of a lightness and anticipation and confidence that wasn't there before, or similar. It is a challenge to not tinker with something since by definition you have no evidence for it in advance of it happening. Maybe simple doubt is at the root of a lot of this, the doubt that surrendering to "spontaneous unfolding" after our intention can lead to our desired outcome?

POST: Thoughts becoming actions

It's how things work anyway, and it applies to everything. I'm going to have a bash at expanding on that (just as an excuse to riff on the topic):

Until now, you have been moving your body by trying to "grip the sensations" while intending the arm to move. This is like commanding yourself to stay still and move at the same time - i.e. asserting you current position at the same time as asserting a new position. Instead, while meditating, you imagined (asserted) just the movement while not asserting you current position to the same extent - therefore allowing experience to shift towards it. If you really ceased asserting your current position more completely, I suggest the movement would have been more immediate - simply bringing the movement to mind would have resulted in a shift towards that position.

The relationship between this and "jumping"?

Well, your body is as much the environment as anything else. There is no difference between the process of changing your body's position and change your world's position. In truth, you do not actually move your arm directly at all! What you do is you "assert the fact" of your arm being in the air, at which moment the facts-of-the-world are immediately updated (perhaps with a time component), after which your experiences arise constantly with that new fact. This is exactly the same thing that happens with updating any other fact.

The essence of this:

• THE FORMULA - Act + Intention + Detachment = Shift
• Any "act", mental or physical, means what you have decided that it means, knowingly or unknowingly. This is the "intention", a subtle thought pattern that is a shadow of the desired end-state. (The "act" can be a thought, a physical movement, anything.)
• Your experience unfolds in accordance with the sum of these "intentions". (Meanwhile, the less you are continually re-intending your current state, the more time-efficient the shift to the target state will be.)

So maybe we can categorise things a bit:

• Usual Movements - If you grip your arm mentally (with the implicit intention that this means your arm will move), then the gripping is the act, but unfortunately it also opposes the movement to some extent (as well as generating tension).
• Efficient Movements - If you imagine your arm moving (with the implicit intention that this means that your arm will move), then the imagining is the act. You are going straight for the end-state here, and letting your experience shift freely, so there's no conflict.
• World Movements - If you pour a glass of water (with the implicit intention that this means a fact of the world will change), or imagine a scene vividly (with the implicit intention), either will result in a shift. A result is guaranteed, however its level of contribution to your experience depends on detachment and your intentions so far.

This is where the phrase "The Act is The Fact" comes from, suggesting that all acts are arbitrary and their meanings are flexible:

• RULE 1A - Assigning a meaning to an act is what gives it causal power.

Note also that the assignment of meaning accumulates (that's why you live in an apparently stable world) and can be broadened beyond deliberate acts. You can play with things like "the next time I see a red car, it means-that I will have a great day". And what is an act, other than the experience of an act?

So the more generalised version of this is:

• RULE 1B - Assigning a meaning to an experience gives it causal power.

As a sidenote, I have tried the glasses trick twice, the first time earlier this month as a test, with 'single' and 'girlfriend' as the subject. I chose this mainly because it would be the easiest thing I thought to see a change in, not because I was desperate for a girlfriend. When I did it, I did actually feel a shift, although I haven't seen any overtly massive changes since. The second test, last week, was 'low attention span' and 'complete focus', I didn't feel a shift at the time, but last Tuesday night, I felt a complete shift away from heavily valuing inherently useless acts and suddenly became overtly motivated to improve myself, and since then have felt extremely liberated and with a sense of peace and calm. Maybe I meant 'complete focus' in a different way that I intended?

The "complete focus" one is interesting.

Related perhaps: often we tend to assume that being "focused" towards a goal means "concentrating" - i.e. narrowing our attention. But actually, such a narrowing of your attention just deforms your experience and builds stress, opposing movement and preventing change. It's like the thing of trying to stand up while holding onto being-sat-down. It's better, I think, to consider "focus" as *intentional focus", meaning that you have an intention and you don't interfere with it. There's no effort involved in this. So I'd consider "feeling liberated with a sense of peace and calm" to be very much a symptom of being focused in the intentional sense: wide-open attention, clarity, effortlessness, clear direction.

As to the mirror technique, I'm not a fan particularly. I'd be more inclined to do the equivalent of your meditation-arm-movement - get into a relaxed state and summon imagery which means-that your desired state will be activated into your experience. It's fun to play with all approaches though, and see what works best for you.

So, I'll start off by saying there is no "creative intelligence" other than you, and nothing ever "happens" other than the movement of your attention.

For simplicity let's think of the world as a 3D landscape (a current overall pattern), and your unfolding experience is like your attention traversing that landscape, section by section.

Okay, so how is this landscape formed?

Pattern by pattern. Think of each intention as triggering a new pattern across the whole landscape, such that it is added to the current world, to form a resultant pattern which is novel (note: negative patterns can undo the contribution of positive ones). So we have something like this picture of Moire fringes. With that model in place, let's apply the following interpretation:

• Each pattern corresponds to a fact-of-the-world.
  And let's have some facts, which were created implicitly through combinations of previous patterns leading to the current landscape:
• (General:) "SP is a good person who finds happiness from friendship. All those friends live in SP's city."
• (General:) "SP is an ambitious person who wants success."
• (General:) "Events tend to unfold such that SP will be happier overall."
• (Event:) "SP's company is diversifying globally and will open an new branch in Alaska in June 2016."
• (Event:) "Another company suited to SP's skills will open in SP's city in October 2016 with great opportunities for experienced talent."

All of these can be "subconscious" in the sense that they have not been experienced as expanded into the senses yet, but they are all true at this moment. But let's say you have previously explicitly thought about your ambition, but not the friendship aspect.

So how does this play out?

If you were completely non-attached and allowed experience to simply flow, then in June 2016 would hear about the Alaskan branch, circumstances would be such that you either didn't go for the promotion or didn't get it, you'd hear about the new company in October 2016, get a job there and be very successful and love life with all your friends.

If instead you hear about the Alaskan branch in 2016 and try to push yourself towards that because you have already though about ambition, you will feel yourself intending in that direction against the momentum of the pattern, you may even encounter lots of "signs" about not doing it, nagging thoughts and feelings, events arising as hurdles, but you ignore it and push through. You spend the rest of your days in an icy landscape, the boss of the branch but all alone.

In no case is there an "intelligence" operating behind the scenes. It's simply a case of a patterned landscape being set up with biases in certain directions, and you later intending against it and experiencing the results of that. It is equally possible to have a "subconscious" which is setup against you and leads you to self-destruction (although most people have a default "survival pattern" I would say).

Just to preamble:

Fundamentally Wrong, Relatively Right

In my limited understanding of your model...

We have to be a little careful here, because (of course) every model we use is a metaphor, not the actual situation. To think about something, we necessarily have to cut it into parts, and then relate those parts in space, because our thinking is basically a "shadow-sensory experience". In this discussion we are talking about the thing that even thoughts are made of, it is "before" division and relation, before "space" and "time". In other words:

• As soon as we talk about this-thing and that-thing interacting, we are already wrong in a fundamental sense, but we can be right in a relative sense.

This is why we tend to end up with a few metaphors, each of which might seem to slightly conflict in terms of how it chops things up, but capture a different slice of meaning, if that makes sense. They are judged on their usefulness, rather than their correctness.

Okay, with that out of the way:

One Thing, Many Patterns, Varying Contributions

you immediately get the thing (and a cascade of its related patterns) but the "landing site" on the landscape may be closer or further away from the spotlight.

That's a really nice way to put it, yes. Inevitably, I'll expand a bit on it...

Another way to think about things is: in the daytime sky, all the stars are there, at their usual brightness, however one star (the sun) dominates them with its intensity.

Either this is the ultimate AnswerToTheLifeTheUniverseAndEverything or some top-secret viral mind-screwing meme you're developing and weaponizing for MI5

Why not both? ;-)

Okay, so this is much harder to describe than to actually play with. The main purpose of the "patterning" model is to break free of the idea of the world being "really like" your sensory experience, in such a way that it makes sense that you can use your imagination to make change, and assign meaning to acts, and have results "as if" there was a world out there that was being updated by them.

But really this is philosophy and metaphysics and you don't need to understand anything in order to use the conclusions, it just means you can answer questions about "why do this and not that?" and don't end up talking hand-waving new-age vagueness.

So, if I can control the dials of this cool Reality Mixing Console, what prevented me ("after" all this "eternity") from pumping up all the pleasurable patterns and turning down all the painful ones?

You've probably noticed already that pleasure is temporary, because experiential content is relative and changes. Pleasure and pain, I suggest, arise from how things are separated, the tension between one state and another when you resist the shifting of your world, not their content as such. The only way you can have eternal bliss is by dissolving all division, and therefore all content. But then, after a while, you probably have a thought and the whole thing kicks off again. (You can, however, feel contentment all the time, but that's a bit different.)

There's also that thing of: if you knew it was "all a dream", then you wouldn't mind so much what suffering happened in your adventures, because it would "all turn out alright in the end".

The classic "simple but not easy", to the extreme...

Well, it's "the thing", this, isn't it?

So, practically speaking, have you had the experience of being an "open aware space" yet? That's the first thing to go for. What we're after is to build the bridge between thinking-about and direct-knowing. After that, it becomes more obvious how things work.

Right now, you are literally experiencing all possible patterns. All that changes is their level of contribution to your experience. The combination is what's giving you the form of this present moment. As some of the patterns fade, their contribution becomes less, and the total pattern apparently shifts into a new form. Like the Moire fringes I linked to above. The fading of one pattern is the equivalent to a pattern moving across another in Moire fringes - see here.

A nice way to imagine this is as a stack of transparent projector slides, each with a different pattern. But rather than a light shining through, each slide has its own inherent glow; it is self-illuminating. You can turn up or down the intensity of the contribution of each pattern to the overall stack. Each slide corresponds to a particular formatting or "fact" and some of them can be quite abstract facts.

For instance, one "fact" might be the pattern called "time". That activation of that pattern will then structure the the total experience as if there was a sequence. Another "fact" might be pattern called "distance". Another, "colour", and so on. This means:

• The "gloop" and your "experience" are actually the same thing - and that "dark zone" is present too, at all times, since it is just our name for the more prominent contributing patterns.

In normal life, we have what you might call a "passing time" pattern. This is a static pattern, but it has the effect of producing the movement and change effect that the video above showed.

Since what we truly are is the stuff all this is made of - the infinite gloop is us - we can also intentionally shift the levels of contribution, and thereby pick out and adjust things we might call "the future" or "the past", and indeed adjust anything that might be called a "fact", either a general principle or a specific event. We can select a particular slide and modify the extent to which that is going to be a fact in our world, in effect swap one fact for another, and so on.

So, I'm not sure how clear that was, but you can see that fundamentally there is no particular structure. And even given the total pattern (distribution of contributions) you are experiencing right now, there are many ways we can slice that up conceptually when we are thinking about it. This is why we can say that the world-pattern is both static and eternal and moving and temporary, and so on.

I perhaps should have written 'intentional complete focus', but I knew what I meant.

That's all that matters. This isn't a message to some external "entity god"; we're not making requests of Father Christmas. The words are just a way to capture the essence of the idea you have in mind, create a form for it temporarily so that you can work with it. There is nothing external to you, "doing" anything. This is a "dumb" process: the moment you perform the act is the moment the update happens - it's just that you encounter what you've done later, like an architect exploring a building they have designed, seeing the finished product for the first time.

In case it's useful, when I first started the "spontaneous movement" thing, in my mind I thought of the initial step as deciding to "cease" or "stop generating", such that I was in what I thought of as my current "rest state". From there, since I was not intending any particular state, I could just create an imaginary cause and have it move my body.

So, I'm not honestly sure if I anything shifted, and by saying/thinking that, it more than likely hasn't, but even the act of typing this out shows evidence to me and makes me more inclined to believe. Which I know is a paradox, but oh well.

Yeah, well, you might as well get used to that! :-)

I actually migrated to this subbreddit through the Oneirosophy one, so I'm well aware of the nature of paradoxes, I just didn't want to get too cocky and say something to pretend like I have any idea :P

Haha, "migrated", I like it! Well, you know roughly where I'm coming from then (although I don't always quite agree with the content there). So don't hold back on "pretending like you have any idea". ;-)

Just a thought: remember, for this particular stuff you don't need to "visually-visualise"; you can just "feel-visualise". This is easy because it's actually what you use to direct your body anyway, even though you might be also gripping and manipulating in other ways. (If you weren't doing this, by which I mean the "feel", you would never be able to change state in terms of body position.) For instance, expanding "the feeling of you" into the room around you, including your body space, is usually pretty fulfilling (excuse pun), and good practice for everything else.

It's quite fun and exciting, isn't it?

Something else to do. For everyday living, it's nice to be open and spacious, but expanding out can imply some level of maintenance and an edge. So, imagine for a moment that there is already a background space which is infinite in all directions and passes through everything in all directions, and that this is the "openness" in which all experiences arise. Any one point is instantly the whole thing, in a similar way to how, if you put a drop of special purple dye into a pool of water, the water would immediately be purple. "Purple" would be everywhere. That's what this unbounded space is: the context, everywhere. To be part of this space, is to instantly become the whole of this space.

Now, just decide to be that background space.

When you say summoning imagery that means the same thing as the two glasses trick, what exactly do you mean? How do I imbue 'visualisations' with any of the same intent? Do I go 'I'm visualising the aftermath of what I wish to happen?' will it so, and then leave it?

Not exactly sure on the question, but... I'm saying that any act - mental or physical - means what you decide that it means, or takes on the power implied by its extended pattern. So when visualising an end state while implicitly deciding that doing so means-that it will happen (the default for most people): the act of visualisation = the content is true. Or pouring water which implicitly means-that the situation is being shifted from one state to another: the act of pouring = the situation is updated.

So visualising something and knowing it to be true is all that is needed, I think I get it.

Yeah, that's the essence of it - your world is literally solidified imagination; to visualise something and imagine-that it has certain properties is to literally create a "soft" object with those properties.

You can always simply assert a fact, which is basically to increase the intensity of the abstract pattern that is that fact. But because that is direct and there's not necessarily a sensory component to that, it's: a) impossible to describe, b) has no technique associated with it. So it's easier to assign properties to intermediate objects or events. (The visualising of an image is, of course, an assertion of its existence, but because we are focused on the content of the image we tend not to worry too much about how it is coming into being. Answer: it just is.)

POST: Jumped once. Haven't been able to jump since.

No matter how hard I try, I can't jump.

Isn't this perhaps the problem? Trying to make it happen?

Jumping involves detaching from your present surroundings and the situational patterns you are holding onto, to let them shift. If you are gripping them and trying to make them change, then you are preventing change. Decide your purpose. Lie down. Give up to gravity completely and absolutely. Let everything dissolve.

A little mind boggling to think about jumping to a dimension without a purpose therefore no true destination.

Yeah. Well, we call it "dimensional jumping" but it's more like you stay where you are and the world within your mind falls into alignment, maybe changing who else it apparently overlaps with. Even if you don't specifically think of wanting something, you do have background intentions that you are holding onto. (If you weren't holding on to them, they'd already have manifested.)

So if you don't have a destination, but let go, it's like the world will just resynchronise with all your current "held" intentions even if you're unaware of them. That's why I say you don't need to "try" and in fact "trying" will stop shifts happening. If you concentrate on something you want with effort, you are still "holding onto" that pattern in thought and not releasing it to sink down and get absorbed into your world.

So Korrin has the right idea:

• Optionally: If there's something specific you want, you can summon the feeling of that thing, deciding it is true, bringing it into mind. That pattern is held within you at that point; as are any other non-released patterns.
• Definitely: To have any changes occur, you have to completely and totally give up, detach from the experience around you and your feeling of the world. This releases patterns from being held in thought, to shifting into experience.

Hopefully that makes sense: it needs to be the opposite of trying. Letting go is what allows your world to shift. (Not just esoterically speaking; it's true of physical skills, solving intellectual problems, all that everyday stuff too. Letting go of an intention is what enables it to turn into an experience.)

we need to NOT have a purpose?

Not quite. And I'm going to emphasise "conscious purpose":

In order to get specific results that you have consciously decided upon, you must release them. Summon them fully, then release them. If you are content simply to have your world realign with your current "backlog" or your current "true will" then you can just do the releasing part. It's similar to magickal approaches like this, where you decide what's going to happen, and then don't interfere. If you lived every moment completely open and allowing, you wouldn't need to do the jumping process (letting go). However, that's pretty rare, so summoning the feeling-of-truth ("this <insert fact here> is true") and then releasing it is the next best thing.

What exactly do you mean by letting it go? You tell yourself something is true, then just stop thinking about it?

The general idea for a particular desire: You generate the feeling of something being a fact, really feel that it is true, and then release holding onto that feeling-thought, so that it takes effect, and go about your business as normal. It's like problem solving, where you think about the problem in detail intending to solve it, then leave it be, and later you find the problem-thought has evolved into the solution-thought. If you keep pondering the problem, you never let it turn into the solution. Doing a "jump" is basically an extreme version, where you are releasing your hold on your entire world, which increases the "available routes for manifestation", and lets the whole thing shift. Practically speaking, the more relaxed you are, the deeper you settle, the more like a wide-open space without obstructions you become, the better.

POST: Questions about Jumping & Jumpers (Serious & Respectful)

A1: When you jump, the other you enters the dimension you were in, because there was something the other you found better in the dimension you were in. My thoughts on escaping death are that your consciousness merges with one of yours from whatever dimension is most similar to the one you are in where you did escape, and if there isn't one similar enough, you will probably just die.

That truly answers my questions in that regard quite well. Thank you!

An alternative is to view it as shifting your attention.

If you imagine a grid containing all possible experiences, all possible moments you could have, the experience you're apparently having now is the one your attention is on. Meanwhile, your apparent life history is the trajectory, the sequence of moments, you follow across the grid. In daily life, just because your attention isn't on something doesn't mean it's not a part of you. As you focus on these words, you're probably unaware of your feet. But now you are aware of your feet. They didn't stop being part of you just because you were distracted.

So if you think of "all the possibilities" as being you, then you are always all the variations of yourself - they amount to your extended "body" - it's just that you are only focusing on one part. Until you realise what's happening and make a change, or the trajectory you're on hits an experience which doesn't have a next-moment. Imagine if the screen went blank right now and these words disappeared. You would suddenly be "thrown out" of the experience of reading my comment, back into your body and the room around you.

Having a near-miss experience is like that: You are in a car crash, there is no escape, there is therefore no naturally continuous "next moment" for you to experience after this - the screen goes blank, and you are thrown out of that experience, that part of you, and your attention has to shift to another part of you. So you experience a discontinuity, as you are shunted to the nearest available moment where the path continues.

That is a very concise and readily understandable explanation. My maze through Wikipedia from the initial Third Man reference ended on Jim B. Tucker and his, as well as his mentors/colleagues', work with children who remember "past lives". I have to say, his explanation, which expands on previous theories using quantum physics, as to how consciousness transfers from one body to another is the by far the best I read to date. That may not be saying much though, considering how little I've read on the topic.

Ah right, interesting. If you haven't already, you might want to sift through the two or three AskReddit creepiest things children have said threads. There are a few past-lives or similar curious things there.

Also, a few people remembering "beginning" at a later age. Which makes sense, perhaps: it is not necessarily true that you-that-is-awareness was always looking through a "human moment".

POST: What is jumping?

A1: Essentially, it is switching places with yourself in a different dimension.

Yea i mean thats pretty much as simple as it gets.

That's a way to imagine it, but I'm not sure that's what it is though, right?

Most people do agree that is what it is. It isn't fully understood yet, so we may find out in the future that this is incorrect but as of now, that's the most accepted theory (that I have found anyway).

The difference is probably just in wording, to be honest, in what we mean by "me".

I tend to think of it more as a shifting of attention, so that I am now looking "through" this experience rather than that experience - which assumes the "me" is that-which-has-experiences, and the rest of it (the body and the environment, which are the things that shift) is what-I-am-experiencing. This view fits better if you accept the idea that our bodies and thoughts happen spontaneously; we don't need to constantly be "looking through" them and managing them.

POST: [Serious] Share your stories with me?

Q: Deleted

Everyone's in the other dimension now...

In which dimension? Should we start keeping track of the dimensions? You could number them, name the changes and then try jumping again... This way you could have proof for yourself, since no one in the new dimension would know any differently, since in theory, they have always been in that dimension.

Tricky to keep track, I suppose, since not everyone who does this will see themselves as "jumping dimensions", so much as altering their personal universe or shifting their personal attention. The identification might fall apart with that, since it isn't actually dimension-dependent reliably.