TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 15)

POST: Sensory Reversal

[POST]

This evening I imagined, "If the physical world is an illusion, how can I come to access the world beyond illusion? Senses are all no-go's. What else do I have to work with?" And I thought, oddly enough, of senselessness.
So I closed my eyes very, very slowly. I watched as my vision, which seemed to take up the entire potential visible field, began to develop definite 'edges' The top and bottom of my visual field started to disappear into the lightlessness of closed eyes. And soon what remained of my vision was just a tiny, trembling flicker surrounded almost entirely by lightlessness until my eyes finally closed entirely. And I'd do this again and again, very slowly opening them back up, and very slowly re-closing them.
I started imagining an image of myself with two tiny, round TV screens floating in front of my eyeballs like the lenses of eyeglasses. And each of them was showing me a very slightly different perspective on the world in the same way that 3D glasses do to present a 3D movie.
And the interesting part really began when, as I slowly closed my eyes, I would imagine the screens compressing horizontally until they dissolved away, and as I slowly opened my eyes, the screens would emerge again and slowly expand. And I held this visual in my mind very strongly and probably spent no less than 15 minutes imagining that, as I felt my physical eyes close, the 3D screens were dissolving. I recommend you do this and pay special note to what you begin to 'see' when your eyes are closed.
The sensation settled in that as I closed my eyes, I was effectively opening my actual visual field to the "genuine" world -- and naturally when I felt like I was opening my eyes, I was actually covering up the real universe with a virtual screen.
What are the implications of this approach?
Well, it implies that the emptiness you see when you close your eyes is kind of "more real" than what you see when your eyes are open. This means that total sensory deprivation, including thoughts, would be the effective extinguishing of the physical world -- and also, therefore, might share similarities with the state of mind of an enlightened being. This may be intuitive, but what's (I think) profound to imagine is that what's left, the dark, scentless, tasteless, sensationless, thoughtless world you'd experience in total sensory deprivation, is precisely the state you return to in deep sleep, certain states of meditation, or death. When you close your eyes, you're looking at the "Real World" beyond illusion. The only illusion would be to imagine that you're seeing the backs of eyelids.
I found this to be very powerful to experiment with.
It also confirms strangely well with the scientific approach to the world which should make this practice a fairly accessible one for even skeptic-minded folks. Everything we experience, according to physics, comes at us as wavelengths of some sort. All of matter, all of our sensory experiences, all of existence, boils down to wavelengths. It's therefore, potentially, fairly easy for even the uninitiated to imagine their whole perceived reality as merely the massively complex wavelengths projected by a hyper-advanced 3D screen. Of course, it's hardly intuitive to imagine pains, scents, and visions as being projections of wavelengths, but it's approachable and comprehensible, I think, to a broad audience.
Another very interesting thing that can be done with this practice is to, while sitting in a dim-to-dark environment, perceiving all of the dark spots in your field of vision (shadows, black objects, etc.) as 'holes' in the screen. The nature of the visual field suddenly becomes very thin, 2D, and almost transparent.
Thoughts?

[END OF POST]

That's a fun approach. Like realising you've been wearing VR goggles all along. |8|-)

The Imagination Room metaphor was an attempt at something similar: to give you a way of looking at things which you can take around with you, seeing the sensory world as a floating mirage in the undefined space of...

The better version would be a "holographic space", but having the projection come from the "floor" is something that can be used to keep you, ahem, grounded during daily life.

An H.S. is kinda what you're approaching here?

Everything we experience, according to physics, comes at us as wavelengths of some sort.

I'd say you can ditch the "wavelengths" part, because one of the steps everyone has to take eventually that scientific experiments are just part of the sensory dream, as it were. And in any case it appeals to a more scientific crowd. "Observing wavelengths" is a story we experience that is made up of sensations and perceptions, so -

Instead, you can simply point out that sensations (images are harder, but sounds, bodily sensations, thoughts, emotional feelings) are all "findable" floating in your own awareness. You can literally sit someone down and take them through this, directing their attention at the different parts of experience, and they'll "get it".

What are the implications of this approach?

Vision is always the trickiest though, because it seems so obvious that "spatial extension" is a real thing outside, when it isn't. Your idea of imagining it as 'TV screens' you can push away is a good way to have people "stand back in their heads" a bit at the very least, maybe even actually learn that the visual content can be directly manipulated...

But what I'm really implying is something that goes beyond screens into a full sensory hologram.

Right! I do think it's easier to introduce the simpler version first - the "floor" in my room, the "screen" in your description. Because:

When we switch to talking about a holographic space, we're saying something a bit more: that the whole of the world is dissolved (non-spatially, non-temporally) into the background awareness, and that your 3D sensory experience is just what you are currently "selecting" with your attention. And by "the world" here, we really mean the patterns that we've accumulated within ourselves, as that space.

"You can literally sit someone down and take them through this"... I like that.

I'm always on the lookout for ways to communicate this. Another fun thing to try with people - which has worked pretty well - is the little exercise described in the post Outside: The Dreaming Game. It draws people's attention to the background space that they are. A variation on that is the "where is your real hand?" exercise, where you get people to try to point to their "real hand" (having explained that, even under the standard description, what they are experiencing right now is at best a "mind representation" of the world). If they point to their head (to indicate their brain), you ask them where their "real head" is...

The best approach, I think, remains simply lying down and giving up completely and absolutely. Vitally, this includes releasing your attentional focus to let it move as it wants - this is the real key. Given some time without being stirred by intention, the "space" settles out and naturally reveals itself to be open and unbounded. Looking for this interrupts it by deforming the space via attention; thinking-about this obscures it with the shadow-senses that constitute thought. This is why the whole "seeking" thing has to be dropped in order to be "enlightened", I suggest.

reading this post I pictured my vision as a 3d bubble in a 4 dimensional void, powerful stuff. But I would be somewhat cautious to labeling said void as "the real reality".

That's how I envisage the Infinite Grid thing. My current sensory experience is my 3D attention scanning over a 4D environment. It's always the the 'real reality', right? Just taking on different forms. Even 'void' is an experience of some sort.

POST: Some more lucid dreaming epistemology

I was talking about this over at /r/luciddreaming, responding to a post about persisting the dream (via spinning, looking at your hands, concentrating on a sensation, etc). Here's my comment:

My feeling is that all of these techniques are indirect - but they all have something in common. This occurred to me a while back when trying to improve my posture, and I realised that all the bodywork techniques were really about... expanding your feeling-sense or presence into the space around you, and everything else falling into line spontaneously. In short: maintaining a relaxed, open awareness that is expanded into the perceptual space around you. What you actually seemed to "do" to bring this about - a body action or mental manipulation - was irrelevant: you could actually just skip straight to it. In lucid dreams, if you let your attention narrow down into the body area, it's a sure-fire way to end the dream. Warnings not to contemplate the dream are essentially warnings against this. Maintaining tactile sensations, spinning around, looking at your hands, is a cheat to keep your attention open. (Implication: it's perfectly okay to think in a dream, so long as you don't mistakenly assume this requires you focus your attention down to the thoughts, thereby withdrawing yourself from the dream environment.)

So, next time you are in a dream, try expanding your sense of presence - expand your "you" and feel out into the dream, to that you are in open focus rather than narrow focus. Note, it's more of a relaxing-out than a forcing-out. Open attention is actually the default once you've got used to it, so what you are doing is leading yourself to cease constraining your attention. You can also try this in everyday life, since the situation there is exactly the same (except for the sensory content). What you'll discover is, your true situation is that of an "open, aware, perceptual space" in which experience arises - whether that's a waking experience or a dream experience. (This realisation allows us to make sense of experiences such as these [Darkroom Vision & Chef Hats & Dreams].)

The summary: avoid narrowing your focus when you do anything. Leave your focus open. This is a mistake we do in real life too (we "concentrate" our attention when performing an activity, rather than simply intending it).

...

The waking dream is dreamed that way; you've dreamed that you-the-character are restricted; experiments reveal this not to be the case. You can choose to dream a persistent, permadeath realm as a lucid dream if you want, and it will be pretty much like this waking life.

POST: Trying to hash some stuff out for myself, would appreciate your thoughts.

How does the oneironaut remain committed to any view in particular?

You get to choose your metaphor deliberately, and having experiences accordingly. It you don't choose or if you botch together an incoherent worldview, you'll find yourself in an incoherent world.

I think I'm just not convinced that manipulating reality is worth the effort because if normal and mundane things aren't real, why bother with trying to change them?

Well, they are only "not real" in the sense that there is no secret, hidden, solid world behind the scenes beyond the "habitual regularities" of experience. It's perfectly real as an experience, in the same way that a thought is a real thought. You can just leave things alone if you want, let your current patterns roll on...

But still, it seems like I actually can't stop manipulating reality.

You can let it alone by not updating anything (the apparent world will just run along its current trajectory). Experience will just appear in alignment with the facts-of-the-world as you left them. But it's also important to realise that you can't experience yourself doing the changing. To will is to change your own shape; you only ever experience the results, although you "know" that you are willing.

Basically I feel like there is no ground for me to take a position on that would make me feel that one way of perceiving reality is ultimately better than another.

Just choose one. For fun. You don't need to believe anything (belief isn't causal, it is simply what one thinks is worth intending, or assumes is happening anyway). You are right that there's no ground. Even your current "you" perspective is arbitrary.

There are no answers, only choices [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeC285uL6_w].

it's just that I have been taking "enlightenment" so freaking seriously

Let "enlightenment" take care of itself. Or: sit down and close your eyes and imagine that you are the empty space of the room, then expand it out. Don't think-about being that, instead actually imagine being it, adopting the shape of being it. Keep doing that until all you are is empty space. That's not quite it. :-)

But in waking life I seem to forget about this.

We let go of many things but often we forget to let go of attention. Check whether you do this: when you are doing something, such as looking at a computer screen, do you narrow your experience to it (focus your attention on it) or do you include it into your experience (leave your attention open)? Try the latter. Notice that you do not need to narrow your attention ("concentrate") in order to achieve things. It is intention that dictates what gets done, not attention. In fact, you'll maybe realise that the usual reason you narrow your attention - to block out distractions when trying to "focus" - is actually caused by narrowing attention. Distractions are actually a "here I am" signal to open out attention again, as are aches and pains, often.

Q1: This is interesting. I have noticed more and more that I feel like I am sometimes being sucked into the screen and I find myself straining or not paying attention to anything else. It's gotten to the point where when I'm done, I feel out of it. Like dissociated and separate from things. It's really uncomfortable. Do you have anything else to say about this?

I went through a similar thing. I suggest that, if you don't already do something similar, you adopt a daily exercise like the passive version of Overwriting Yourself. Basically, just lie down and let yourself - but in particular your attention - unwind without interference. If you narrow your attention down, what happens is that your whole body effectively tries to cram itself into that small space! You get very tense, and your body often ends up in what amounts to an emergency mode. Even people who know about "letting go" of their bodies and thoughts often don't realise that they are still controlling their attention, because attention isn't a "thing" or a "sensation", it's more of a filtering.

You shouldn't be controlling anything through effort. Your job is to "direct" and "let happen". So my general advice is:

• Before working, imagine yourself to be the background space in the room - actually "feel out" into that space.
• Rest the centre of your attention - "where you are looking out from" - somewhere along the centre line of your body. Perhaps halfway back in your head, or even in your lower body. Wherever feels good and like "home". (Probably at the moment you are "sitting" too far forward, right behind your eyes.)
• When you work at the computer, do not focus your attention onto it. Instead, leave your "space" open and allow your body to move at the pace it wants to.
• Do not not "effort" yourself. You are not meant to be physically wrestling with your work. If you leave your attention open, you'll probably find this subsides naturally. If you are in a calm state, you should feel that your body is "moving by itself".

I mention this all the time, but for daily body use I really recommend the Missy Vineyard book. Although it's ostensibly a book about the Alexander Technique (body use for actors, musicians, etc) it's actually a lot more insightful than that.

...

Hey, that's great - the attention thing is hard to describe, but once you've had the experience it all makes sense!

EDIT: You made a good point, which is that it's tempting to try and hold onto effortlessness or spaciousness by focusing on it, but of course that ruins it. You obviously can't "hold onto" wide-open attention by narrowing your attention.

POST: Dream is interesting

Have you checked out /r/luciddreaming? You might find that interesting if you haven't. Also I really recommend the book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner, it this area is new to you. It's probably the only non-beginners book on the subject that delves into the philosophy and status of the dream environment.

Yes, it's interesting to think that we might have given ourselves this role and forgot about it. Part of oneirosophy is recognising that you are "the dream" rather than the particular character you seem to be. If you've been practicing Buddhism and meditation, then I'm sure you've been thinking along these lines before: that what you truly are is a "consciousness" which is "taking on the shape" of a being-a-person-in-a-world experience.

i am the dream.. it also seems to mean that we are one with the world and the world is within us. if i understand you correctly.

Yes. Without getting in depth, I'd say that what we actually are is an unbounded "aware space" in which all possible experiential patterns are "dissolved". The moment you are experiencing now is just the combination of the various patterns that are active, the brightest of the patterns. You can think of this as similar to how the sun (the current moment) dominates the daytime sky, but actually all the stars are still there (all the other possible moments). This means that there is no world "out there". For instance, the room next door isn't "over there", it is dissolved into the background, here. Our ongoing experience is like a *strand of thought - it just happens to be a very bright, 3D-immersive stand of thought that seems to fill up our aware space. I've posted a long-winded version about this stuff before: The Patterning of Experience and A Line of Thought, maybe worth a look in a bored moment. The "imagination room" metaphor linked in the first post can be quite useful I think.

if the dreamer here could travel the same world we are currently residing? or the dreamer always travel in the dream realm outside the world we are residing?

I say there is no restriction. There is no difference between selecting an experience "somewhere else" or "here in this world" or even "another time in this world". It is all here, now, available. The trick is to ensure you are starting a "thought" which is seeded from this world, rather than a random creation.

POST: Anyone finding progress?

"Just deciding" is an assertion that something is fact. More specifically, it is like increasing the contribution to your experience of a pre-existing fact or pattern. (It is pre-existing, because it is thinkable; all patterns exist eternally.)

For all the reasons you identify, it is much easier for people to use misdirection for this, and use a mental or physical act and attach the meaning to it. In other words, we think a thought or perform a ritual which we have decided means-that a situation will occur, or that a fact is now true. (And we choose not to examine too closely that the thought or act itself came from nowhere.)

Elsewhere, I tried to encapsulate it with these snappy bullet points:

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

The problem you might be having is that this is all literally unthinkable conceptually, and you cannot experience yourself "doing" intention - you can only experience instances of it, of becoming it.

One possible illustration: if you were a shape-shifter, how would you describe the process of shape-shifting? You would just "become" the new shape; it's all you, so there's no one part causing the other part. Continuing with this: how would you work out you were a shape-shifter? The only way would be... to shift your shape. There would be no evidence of you being a shape-shifter between shiftings. Intention and deciding and all that, have similar problems. You are perhaps seeking to experience something that is "the thing 'before' experiencing".

POST: on accessing harmonic understandings in music without "learning" scales, chords, etc

Reminds me a little of this: Working With A Violinist [missing]

But that's just about allowing the physical movements to flow uninhibited and in the best way possible (without "making it happen"). That's an arbitrary limitation though, surely, borne of an assumption which limits intention. What's the difference, really, between intending to play a piece of sheet music and "letting it happen", and intending to create a new piece of music and letting that happen? It become about not obstructing what arises.

POST: Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is?

I do like Hoffman. His paper on Conscious Realism is worth reading, and slightly more sophisticated talk on the Interface Theory of Perception is well worth checking out. Another Hoffman link to check out: Peeking Behind the Icons, from his older book Visual Intelligence. It's basically a sort of modern-language retelling of Immanuel Kant's phenomenal and noumenal. Of particular interest from the perspective of subjective idealism:

Are my teammates conscious?
The phenomenal teammates are, like the phenomenal volleyball, my constructions. If the phenomenal volleyball needn’t be conscious, then why should my phenomenal teammates be conscious? What differentiates the two? For now, nothing of import- ance, so I can’t conclude that my phenomenal teammates are conscious. My relational teammates, like the relational volleyball, are circuits and software. But these circuits and software receive radio signals from my “real” teammates who are conscious, so that ultimately I interact with them. Thus the relational teammates are conscious, although my phenomenal ones are not.

Potentially this is rather begging the question, because in reality we don't have access to a "pre-simulation" version of what's going on, as described in Hoffman's metaphor. Whatever it is that dictates the behaviour of my "relational teammates", whatever has set them in motion, can never be accessed. Unless it turns out that this is... me.

...

It's important to realize what Donald is talking about is not subjective idealism.

Yes. This is true, but he does skirt with it elsewhere, because he doesn't consider the world as spatially-extended, and starts to suggest that individual perspectives can be separate. I wouldn't be surprised if he does something on it eventually - but it's a step that pretty much no public figure can openly take at the moment, because it just can't be proved by "given" evidence and has no context. Anyway - I find his step-by-step discussing and imagery pretty helpful in providing a path out of materialism certainly, physicalism definitely. Especially initially, it can be difficult to make the step from "knowing" a subjective idealist perspective but being unable to "think it". Donald's pretty helpful for this. But of course: each to their own. As you've pointed out before, it's usually helpful if a link is accompanied with some discussion on how it's helped you to shift your perspective, etc, to provide context.

Q1: Subjective idealism can never be proven using evidence. In fact, subjective idealism finds fault with evidence itself. Meaning, we cannot accept appearances as evidential because of our metaphysical stance. Appearances present us only with possibilities and not with "how things are." There is no "is-ness" behind anything. So how can such appearances serve as evidence?
I find his step-by-step discussing and imagery pretty helpful in providing a path out of materialism certainly, physicalism definitely.
I don't agree. He just refines it, but doesn't do away with it. He uplifts physicalism to a realm beyond appearance, but still keeps all the bad features of it intact: objective common ground and in-time causality. This is something the scientists have always done. They've been refining their physicalism. They started with the billiard ball idea of atoms, then refined it to "almost empty space" but notice, they never say 100% empty space, it's always "almost." Etc. So they refine it. Now they have a notion of virtual particles. Now they think particles and waves are not two distinct things. They keep refining it, but they'll never rid themselves of the constraints of objective common ground or in-time causality, because they base every endeavor of science on those assumptions.

I think Hoffman is further along than you think, but your points are valid. The extra bit: having recognised that there is no inherent meaning, no possibility of evidence, we become far clearer about the will. In fact I'd say it only makes sense following those other insights.

What amazes me these days is how I used to get worked over about will, but after I realized will is always-on, I can just relax and stop working myself over like a fool. I am always willing perfectly and naturally. I don't have to work myself over and will on top of will, so to speak. Taking relaxation into the scope of volition, and removing the start/middle/end times for intentions, that's done wonders for my state. Now I exert myself as if passive and I relax as if active. It's great. Activity and passivity are only deceptive appearances. I needn't be fooled by them.

Yes, you and I disagreed (it seemed) for ages about will being always-on, but it was primarily a language disagreement because of this exact thing - the hidden assumption we can make about "efforting". But of course, once there is a willing there's a pattern change which persists it, and is it. Passive = active.

Q2: In this talk he's specifically saying that reality is group-perception generated and then at the same time generated by one and then understood by many misinterpreters. Also, that misinterpreting doesn't matter for life. So it's quite contrary, but that latter idea is surely clear. I'd say that he's reserved in what he says IF he truly thinks more than what he says. I don't care if he does or doesn't, but it was definitely an interesting and well spoken piece. What's amazing me at this time in our lives is the convergence of this idea that thought and will make. It's becoming in young art that's being endorsed by corporations. That means it sells, but it also means that massive amounts of people respond to this type of idea.
I'm starting to get a little hope for humanity in that numbers of people aren't jumping on board with a school of thought, but are getting into a deep headspace of creativity and experience on their own terms. I don't know why we chose this idea to experience, but I imagine that it has to do with procreating consciousness in the from one many are begotten sense. I genuinely think that the smarter parts of the general population are starting to get it. The, "I am I" and the "Thou art" and the "We are". I expect to see a lot more people "coming out" in this regard in the next few years. It's time that everyone was told point blank and has to fess up to the responsibility that we're all truly that thing that people deem worthy of worship.
Check out this young man [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPt0LkdM8Bc] but shit, this might all be lame in another few years.

There's a good conversation with Donald Hoffman somewhere (will try to find) where he's sat having a coffee with a colleague, and they talk about how there's no way he could have gone into all this "consciousness" stuff until he had tenure and was safe. As time goes on though, I think it's going to become acceptable again to explore this stuff without ridicule, as even neuroscientists like Christof Koch are publicly discussing panpsychism, etc, as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

POST: Insights from Music

A1: I think the illusion is, is that you're never not in flow. The whole of experience is one big flow. Every thought, every movement, every breath, just happens, naturally and without effort. Even the discomfort and disregard and pounding and your flailing wildly, just happen, without effort. Even the illusion of not being in flow, is a flowing experience. The way to be in flow all the time, is to become aware that you already are. And hopefully, you just have.

Great!

POST: I'd like to correct something I said in my last post

It's worthwhile, I think, to distinguish between passing thoughts (which we might say arise from the current state) and intentional thoughts (which we might say are amendments to a patterns's contribution). So, passing thoughts don't matter, but intentional thoughts do - and what matters is the contextual meaning of those thoughts beyond just the standard sensory aspect. For instance, you might conjure the image of an owl in front of you. Now, do this for "an owl" and do this for "an owl next month". The visual and auditory aspects might be identical in each case, however the felt-knowing of each will be different. Relevance to the topic? That you don't need to let go of the idea as such, but the details matter. If the context of your idea is "an owl will happen soon", then holding onto that idea persists it as never happening, since you are continually re-asserting the fact of a future experience. Also, when you do something you can "know that it is done", thus implying its persistence, and then not have to continually hold it in attention. If you have the idea that ideas are transitory and need maintained while doing your intention, then you are implicitly intending that too, potentially.

POST: Solidity is reinforced through continuity

My theory is that we tend to live in a primary default dream and occasionally dream secondary or tertirary dreams...

When I was playing with the idea of "strands of thought", that's how I was thinking of things. It leads to interesting questions as to the importance of the primary strand. It's not strictly necessary that there is one strand which is more stable, bright, 3D-immersive than others - I can see no need for stability in and of itself, prior to its formation, since stability is required in order to have the ability to reflect upon how nice it is to be stable. However, it's probably inevitable that one will arise eventually and become the effective default to which other strands collapse, until that primary strand itself collapses. Following the collapse of the current apparently primary strand, I suppose either another strand will be revealed, or another strand will simply unfold from the logical fragments of the collapsed strand. "Experiencing" will always continue, being as it is the "container" for all strands of experience. The question really is: at the moment the strand collapses, are you identified with part of the content of the strand which is dissolving, and therefore you continue in ignorance of your prior experience? Or have you become identified with the "container" or the nature of experiencing itself, and therefore can knowingly continue, since your stability is now (almost) independent of content?

(Obviously, "strands" and "dreams" are concepts we are using. We infer they exist for our little model, but I'd suggest that the actual experience is simply one of ongoing content with no true hierarchy. The structure of experience needn't necessarily support a time-and-continuity framework at all.)

...

The experience-of-something is a real experience, but the "something" is not real beyond the experience of it. In the sense that there is nothing "behind" the content of an experience. Sand horses aren't made from "horse" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxtyM9mFMQQ], typa deal.

I was just think about you today. Where is TG I was thinking? I mean I know you're "out there." As for your comment, of course I agree 100% with that one.

Yeah, I've been keeping an eye on things, but not had much to say that wouldn't be just interjecting for the sake of it. Not that this usually stops me, mind you! :-)

POST: You are constantly shifting dimensions already

Let's not become yet another sub where people just post "shit they found"! (I know you have the best intentions, so this isn't meant to be against you. It's a more general response.) I was originally going to set up an AutoModerator rule as has been done elsewhere, which bounces posts which are just links or which have no additional input or perspective from the poster. But we generally don't get a lot of it anyway (maybe due to the guidelines or because people feel that it's not appropriate).

Bashar is interesting, but links to his stuff appears on every "non-standard" subreddit, and there's not much value in it unless you say how exactly it ties in with the subreddit. It's just spam otherwise. See for instance: a previous time a Bashar link was posted. It doesn't necessarily take much more than that (although more would be encouraged now, I'd say). For instance, do you agree that we are "constantly shifting dimensions already"? Do you think it's a useful concept? If so, tell us why and start a discussion. Have you actually used this perspective and got results which have been beneficial or interesting? (Personally I think it really muddles up a couple of different ideas, and actually makes it harder to conceive of how to make a deliberate change in your experience.)

You get the idea.

Muddle up in what way? Could you expand?

It effectively designates each "sensory frame" of experience as a "dimension" - which isn't very helpful. It is better, I would say, to designate a "dimension" as being a particular distribution of facts - or state - which implies a particular set of experiential moments, as a deterministic path. That way can reserve the concept of "shifting dimensions" as being for an intentional change of the underlying facts or state, which effectively defines a new deterministic experiential path "as if" we were in a different dimension. (In actual fact, we never go anywhere, of course. We just have different content arise in our open awareness.)

Things like surrender, allowing, faith and intention all make more sense under this model - and it ties in nicely to the observable nature of our direct experience too, and how it relates to intending (which is the only thing which ever happens). With this, rather than being only a sort of abstract concept with "frequencies" as the bridge, "dimensions" become more clearly about the patterning of experience itself/ourself. In the end though, all of this stuff is metaphorical. We have experiences "as if" it were true, just as we tend to have experiences "as if" the world were a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", rather than more of an "infinite gloop" with us the experiencing container. So we should all feel free to pick the descriptions that we find most attractive - just so long as we remember that this doesn't correspond to "how it is really, behind the scenes" (because there is no "behind the scenes"), and that sensory content has no causal power.

You're already constantly shifting dimensions = you're already constantly fiddling with your felt sense of the world via intent.

Although you shouldn't be, I suggest?

That's one of the aims to have, I'd say: to not be constantly thrashing your world around via reactive intention to the current sensory experience. Otherwise you are doomed to spend your life trying to "maintain a vibrational state", and so on. As for "dimensions", I feel that defining the term so broadly makes it essentially meaningless, since it means you are never "in" a dimension at all, again encouraging that "fiddling and forever maintenance" mindset.

But...

I'm of the "whatever works for you is good" view overall. The problem I have with Bashar (despite all the ET stuff which is fun but distracting) is that it doesn't really go anywhere in terms of leading to methods (or non-methods), or to realising the nature of your experience and so being able to build out from that. Now of course, the Bashar audience is not really the philosophical or metaphysical audience, nor is it the "post-magickal" or nondual audience, so it's a different perspective. For me, it kinda just adds another separate strand to the New Age / LOA realityshifting catalogue, rather than consolidating it into a useful worldview that connects to direct experience.

Every second you shift to a completely new and different objective dimension.

I'm not so sure where "objective" comes into this?

I feel the Bashar, although interesting in his thoughts, doesn't give any practices that might help people start thinking the way his teachings propagate. Correct me if I have missed any such practices.

He also doesn't tell you what a state is. Most importantly though, as far as I know he doesn't connect his concepts to your ongoing direct experience. Without that bridge, there's effectively no descriptive model (even one that recognises itself as metaphor), and so he can offer no practical approach other than vague notions of "frequencies" or "tuning in".

(When we say "practical", that doesn't necessarily mean actions - because actions are "before" experience in this case, since the root of it all is intention, and nobody can tell you how to intend. However, that itself is something that needs to be covered when talking about "dimensions" or whatever other scheme we're using.)

Q1: Maybe that is why most religions dissuade channelling? Because these other species can't fathom human limitations?
When Bashar talks, I feel like he's irritated at some of the "silly questions" that people ask, as if they should know such "basic things".
BTW, I have yet to understand what the importance or application of "metaphor" is in Oneirosophy.

I suppose that rather depends on what you think "other species" are, and what "you" are, and so on. But I think that organised religions (as distinct from the originators of the ideas that seeded them) dissuade channeling because it makes you your own authority. After messing about with such things, you are in danger of discovering that it is you who are, in effect, God - albeit a different sort of "God" than the one usually taught in church. On metaphors: It is my view that by deliberately adopting a metaphor (or a conceptual structure more generally) you can reformat or "pattern" your state such that your subsequent experiences arise "as if" it were true. Furthermore, there is no sold underlying substrate to our experience other than such patterns. (Of course, the idea of "patterning" is itself such a metaphor.)

Q1: So basically metaphors make it easy for us to believe or intend, right? So, that's what is contained in more religious and occult practices.
Furthermore, there is no sold underlying substrate to our experience other than such patterns.
Could you explain that in simpler language? LOL

Ha, sorry. So, the idea is that there is no fixed world from which your experience arises. Looking around the room you are in now, for example, you see walls and the screen you are reading this on, and hands interacting with the device (all assuming things are well). Generally, we assume there is a fixed and solid world "outside" that is feeding us this sensory experience. That would be the "solid substrate". However, we never experience such an outside world. We only ever experience... experiencing. And all of your experiences, although they might seem to be "about" objects and rooms and so on, they are made from this "experiencing", and everything arises in "mind". This is no solid world behind your experiences. What you have, in other words, are habitual patterns with nothing underneath them. The way to confirm this, of course, is to try to change that "patterning" and see if your experiences change accordingly - perhaps indirectly at first, such as repeatedly bringing about outcomes that you want, to the extent that it cannot be explained away by coincidence or confirmation bias.

Related: Three Dialogues by George Berkeley is one of the swiftest ways to get an overview of this idea. (He mentions 'God' later, but just replace that when reading with something like 'mind' or 'consciousness'.)

POST: Choosing not to exist

If consciousness became completely uniform there would be no "experience" but there would be "being". You probably can't say that this "exists" because there is no state or form, but it... is. Can you ever get to that stage? Not by intention I'd say, because intention is always formulated positively. You dispose of something by shifting to a different state - a replacement pattern or even a pattern of "empty space" - but that's just a change of the form of existence. But perhaps by detachment and allowing it to fade...

But that "zero potential" would not persist. It would be outside of time and so it would in a sense last "forever" but also "eventually" there would be the adoption of form and experience would begin again. The previous "mind" (by which I mean accumulated patterns) would be gone, and a new one would arise in its place. This has probably happened an infinite number of times already.

Short answer: temporarily and no.

Sorry, I've just been editing that response to make the hypothetical aspect clearer. I'm still not happy with it. The problem is that we can't describe in language something that is before time and space. Usually I leave this as "nothing can be said" since we can only talk in terms of "human formatting". And I think that is probably the basis of the answer: You can never conceive of non-existence and so you can never intend it; which means that you have always intended a continuance of experience, and so it will continue "forever".

Maybe another approach is better: When we go to sleep at night and enter a dream, why do we return to this world? Is it simply because we have held onto the context of it? Could we enter a dream world and then decide to "let go" of this world, remaining in the dream?

Going forward from that, could we intend a contentless dream? These are fairly common, but there still persists a subtle "viewpoint" and by its very existence all logical possibilities are effectively persistent, dissolved into the background and possible to activate. The mere existence of that viewpoint implies all possible worlds.

POST: Hindu Mythology Metaphor

[Reposting my reply from elsewhere, for completeness.]

Can a Mantra be a Metaphor?

Good question! Some thoughts: If we abstract these terms out into "patterns" then, effectively yes. To say a word is to trigger its associated patterns. Meanwhile, a metaphor is simply a named set of overlapping relationships (patterns), connected and associated with an unnamed set of overlapping relationships (patterns). To say the word "owl" is to trigger the associated patterns of "birds", "wings", "big eyes", 'tree branches", "Blade Runner Voight-Kampff Test", "Rachael", "night-time", etc. To think-about an owl is to do the same.

On archetypes

Gods and Goddesses, owls and archetypes, they are all just triggers for pre-existing extended patterns which cannot be encapsulated in a word or an image, but can be triggered or intensified by them. All possible patterns are here, now, in your experience - it's just that some are more intensely activated than others. To feel better (simplistically speaking) you want to allow the "bad feeling" to fade and a "good feeling" to become more intense. How to do? "Detach" from your current experience and "allow" it to shift; trigger a pattern which implies the desired state. Literally, you are a wide-open perceptual space with some experiential patterns more intense than others. You don't "heal" so much as "allow experience to apparently shift". More accurately: you can't change anything, you can only let the present pattern dim and intensify an alternative pattern by "recalling" it.

...

Hmm, as you have uncovered more "knowledge", do you think your approach to living has shifted?

I guess I'm suggesting: is your attempt to deliberately apply metaphysics effortfully as a manipulative tool maybe presenting a barrier to your success with it, whereas before you were more flowing your life via intention from within it? I think where we go wrong is that we try to work things out, we get hung up on technique, but the truth is... there is no mechanism. Simply deciding is all that is required. To decide something is to have the pattern of "something" in mind plus the pattern of "it happening". That is sufficient, provided you do not then block it. Everything else is just... stirring the water, splashing about, obscuring things, fragmenting ourselves and therefore our experience. Actually, there is nothing to know, no structure behind things, no solid substrate supporting the world beyond imagination.

Forget mantras for that maybe, you need to take a different approach. Check out the top two posts in this subreddit. Basically, you want to lie down one day... and never get up. Switch to being the background space. Only experience "getting up happening". I really recommend this book by Missy Vineyard for this. Specifically the middle section where she experiments with waiting for movement to happen by itself. That is what you are shooting for.

Extra bit: Mantras are only needed because we don't understand willing and so need a "second cause" to allow ourselves to make a change. But all change is just will, changing the shape of ourselves by... changing the shape of ourselves.

POST: PSA: Be careful when thinking about "I"

Yes, it's a language trickiness. It's sort of awkward to constantly distinguish between "Is" and "selfs", but unless you flag up the difference it is easy for a reader to become confused, thinking you are talking about a person being "God". There is no ego-self other than the experiencing of various thoughts, perceptions, actions and the subsequent thinking-about them. And the experiencer is "the open aware space" - which you might call God - who takes on the shape of experiences. As always, when we start thinking-about things we are immediately wrong and operating in 3rd-person metaphor (although of course that can be very useful). The difference between "i" and "I" is direct 1st-person (no-"person") experiencing.

I didn't know that what I needed to do was not think and just let things be.

Yeah, that's a big hurdle. I used to use the phrase "stop generating" to describe it (Although at first I would just think it a lot or try to do "stopping", which rather missed the point of my insight, eh.)

Realising that your default should be "allowing" with only occasional pattern creation-amendment is an important step.

What do you do now if things start getting out of hand?

If you haven't read the Overwriting Yourself post, check it out. The 'passive' version of the exercise is a nice easy way of letting things settle. Following that, decide not to 'force' anything, including your bodily movements and thoughts. Try and let them "arise by themselves". This stops things building up; lets them subside naturally.

What do you mean by pattern creation-ammendment?

Just setting something going by decision and imagination. Once you've set things in motion, you should leave them be (e.g. you request success in an endeavour, the pattern is now set, so don't tinker with it). You're only dealing in updates as required, or a regular keeping-on-track.

Otherwise I'm horribly depressed.

Yeah. I do find that if I don't stay 'present' - allow my focus to remain expanded out into the space of experience - my attention gets narrowed and I feel depression. Having things 'on the go' does tend to keep you opened out more.

I like your Overwriting Yourself post. I've tried something similar to this where I just imagine that my body is empty space but haven't played with it much. Your post clarified quite a bit. How experiential has all of this become for you? Is it all incredibly obvious at this point?

It changes your perspective to being far simpler. The most important thing is that it clarifies the difference between direct-experiencing and thinking-about, and you can more obviously take the perspective of the space in which both occur.

...

The mistake in contemplation is that you can't contemplate the "I". It is the environment in which contemplation arises; it can't be conceptualised or even pointed to. The urge is so great to "grab ahold of it" somehow. It's probably something that never entirely goes away, because it's inevitable to want to think and talk about it - in subreddits just like this...

I think it would be useful at some point to do some coverage about direct-experiencing and the difference between that and thinking-about. Various metaphors imply it, but I don't think we've explored it explicitly in any post. Which is unfortunate, since detached-allowing and knowing the difference between the two types of experiencing (really the one type, improperly understood) is fundamental.

POST: The Mirror-like Nature of the Mind & Why I've come to the conclusion that Oneirosophy isn't a good strategy

The basic strategy of some on this sub seems to be "well if I believe in my own power enough, then my unconventional perceptions are true"

Hopefully not, but perhaps you are right. However that's like thinking you can simply will things to happen or by "doing" things. But it's not quite like that. And more like you say. Like I said in an earlier post, it's more like triggering patterns (or "letting experiences through") which then arise in and shape subsequent experience:

• Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences. (Leave shapes on your "experiential filter".)
• Thoughts also leave traces, as in-form-ation, affecting subsequent experiences. (You can use this deliberately.)
• Synchronicity is the name for the experiential patterns which result.

This is the reason you should treat the subjective environment (as it were) as being almost mechanical and unintelligent in nature. Only you are the intelligence. You are basically you experiencing the state of your own mind, via the senses. Yes, you might think of it a bit like a mirror - or better, that your mind is a perceptual filter. So, not much good for "messages" since you'll just be seeing what you've been thinking and experiencing, as residual indentations on your filter - except that you might get some insight into things you are thinking in the background that you're not aware of. If you spend 20 minutes today imagining owls, as vividly as you can, as if they were in the room with you... you'll spend the next week encountering lots of owls. It's as if you have created an "owl-shaped hole" in your perceptual filter, and the "infinite light of creation" (or whatever) now shines through it, giving you owl-shaped experiences.

If you believed in a deeper meaning to what you were experiencing, you might think you were getting Messages From The Eternal Owls, who were answering your questions and prayers now that you had gained power over them. If you spent time imagining being King Of The Monkeys instead, you might get experiences which you would interpret in line with that. This itself is incredibly useful - and you can live exciting storylines! - but you have to be careful not to believe the thoughts and experiences which appear in your awareness. They have no deeper meaning that being-experiences. Which is great, because you can now understand what happens when you get paranoid, and what happens when you get arrogant. You can put that aside, breathe, and let things settle out into a more authentic pattern.

Never believe what you are experiencing. They are just... experiences.

EDIT: Surely this is exactly what Oneirosophy leads to? It's the natural conclusion to living life as a subjective environment? It's what lucidity reveals to you. Subjective idealism means there is no you, just that environment, and it makes sense then that it operates and responds as a swirling, responsive dream-space.

It's not even "as if" you've created an owl-shaped hole.

I say "as if" because the metaphor of the filter and the hole is that, a metaphor. Saying "as if" doesn't mean the experience is less valid, it just indicates the description of it is arbitrary. You are not really making dents in a filter; that's just a way of looking at it for the purposes of formulating intentions.

There's no harm in learning to exercise this. In fact, it ought to be encouraged.

Are you responding to the wrong person here??

I guess I don't entirely understand OP's distinction between "being-experiences" and "believing in" them.

As I understand it - and this may be me overlaying my own interpretation - OP's underlying point is that if you are unaware of the reflection-like, "as if"-ness mechanism involved in subjective idealism, then you can fall under the impression that you have become something, created something, or are in some sort of state. However, it really is just an appearance. There is nothing "behind" your experiences, therefore nothing to believe you are and nothing to believe you have done. This is of course much more powerful than believing you are God or anything else. Believing you are something comes with restrictions; recognising it's an "as if" experience doesn't. Language, for sure, but forums throughout reddit are swamped with people wondering what they "are", claiming to be this and that, and generally taking sensory experience and history recall as causal fact.

You can't live exciting storylines without believing your perceptions. Otherwise it's just some superficial fantasy.

I'm not sure I quite agree on the latter sentence. I'd say that if you understand the process then you aren't having a superficial fantasy; you are simply enjoying experiences. But your point of identifying with a psychological narrative - be it "infinite power" or anything else - is well made. So, the Owl Generation Process is completely mechanical. "Ponder them and they will come." The exception is if you obstruct the process by disbelief. Which you might then be tempted to overcome with belief - and that's where things go wrong. You can get caught up the the believing process you (think) you used to generate the effect.

If you recognise the process for what it is though, you can enjoy the Owl Experiences and without any additional troublesome beliefs. It's up to you if you want to fully commit to "An Important Mission Personally Given To Your By The High Owl Commander". (Personally I wouldn't - he's a right grumpy bastard.)

You can't actually be angry and see the empty nature of your perception at the same time.

If you aren't "in" the story then you can't really be having the adventure. Although I think you can dip in and out, personally. All I'd argue for is that people understand the nature of the process, and thereby have the ability to make choices. You don't have to use belief as a tool (as in with many magickal approaches) and then get stuck in it, if you've observed the mechanical-like nature of the process and approach things from that perspective.

Personally, I dont try to stay fixed in one worldview, so I dont have a problem with these inconsistencies.

Hi, I make the point elsewhere that there are no true divisions, it's a matter of where you "stand". What you say is true.

An analogy I sometimes use is the superposition of patterns: combine 100 patterns together and you've still got... a pattern. Which can then be broken down into a completely different set of patterns. Depending on what you want to accomplish or which aspects you want to highlight, you might emphasise the perspective of one "component" or another. But really, there is no separation. For basic "daily navigation" and accounting for deliberate synchronicity, this formulation (filtering infinity) is quite convenient. But it is nothing more than an "active metaphor".

Implicit in all discussions here is "it's nondual", I'd say, but there's nothing else to say if we just sit there with that! It's like saying "all is consciousness". As you point out, there is no answer.

"There are no answers, only choices", as Gibarian says in Solaris.

POST: Controlling vs flowing

[POST]

I think one area I was getting hung up until very recently was taking the idea of control and trying to apply it to every instant. This was making life unnecessarily stressful as I tried to intend something out of every perceived event. It was like I tried to rewrite the story as soon as something that didn't seem to fit was going on.
If you're currently doing this I suggest you take a breather. There's really no need to control every little aspect of life and honestly it's a drag. If you're always writing the story you can't properly enjoy it as well. Control works simply, you intend for an experience to occur and it does. That simple, no added effort necessary. Then after it's set all you have to do is be detached and let it all happen (the hardest part if you're still attached to the idea of the limited person).
So ideally, one can control the types of forms one comes into contact with, and then let go indefinitely for it to play out. You can be as specific as you want, but if you don't let go, you'll never get to experience it. You simply keep rewriting things over and over and over. The better you get at letting go, the faster your manifestations.

[END OF POST]

Good stuff. Right. For sure!

So you only need to intervene now and again, which just amounts to "deciding and allowing". Mostly you should simply be relaxed and enjoying the experience unfolding. For sure, sometimes it's fun to have little tools or visualisations for things, perhaps to make it easier to specify what we want, or to "outsource" the causality and circumvent resistance - e.g. as you suggest, by imagining releasing negativity via the breath or whatever - but it's always just us "deciding". Focused "control" is when you obsessively interfere; detached "directing" is when you occasionally intervene when you want to have a different experience. The more you let go of control and stop holding back the flow, the less the apparent time between the decision and its appearance in the senses, because you are no longer restricting the potential routes by which experience can arise. Holding back is essentially you preventing yourself relaxing into your natural authentic pattern. You default state should be relaxed openness and "allowing". That's what meditation should be for - allowing releasing. (Any experiences you might have are just yet more experiences, best just to sit a while and let things settle out). Just sit for a while and re-identify as the background awareness as in the original "Just Decide" exercise.

In the ultimate version, you don't really need to interfere at all because you are completely authentic and experience is always in line with your desires, the right events at the time time.

Summary of how it works?

• Deciding what will happen means you are triggering a 1st person perspective memory-pattern of that happening.
• If you were completely detached, that pattern would immediately become your experience.
• Because you are not, the pattern will instead blend with other patterns you are attached to, showing itself as first as synchronicity and eventually as a result that seems to arrive via a path.

EDIT: This prompted me to post my bullet-point summary of the memory-pattern view.

POST: Opinions on the use of Psychedelics/Dissociatives

Your final quote is interesting, it reads a little like the metaphor I posted the other day. Although I don't agree that there are spirits, etc, that are independent of us. Nor do I agree we're on some sort of learning journey. Maybe we were having pretend-games life-fun, but somehow we've forgotten we are always using ultimate power to do anything. Our experience is awash with synchronicity as a result. They seem mystifying to us, or somehow "important", because we don't realise we are splashing around in the puddle of our own existence, then interpreting the ripples as coming from elsewhere. We therefore have to be careful about interpreting anything as being "intended for something" or having external meaning. Even lifting our arms is a result of prayer (sorta) which just activates an ingrained habit, a sort of extended spatio-temporal memory that plays forward into experience. Moving your arm and encountering a synchronicity are the same thing, with as much meaning as the seed intention lends it. I've never dabbled in the psychedelics though, so always interested in people's experiences - since it definitely appears to be another way to allow yourself to let normally-filtered experiences in. Dissolve the filter substantially (belief, expectation, knowledge) and the raw creative aspect gets to shine through more (mediated by intention, perhaps, if you persist it).

[Limitation and Freedom] Why isn't one of those great experiences enough to be free forever?

Because it's just an experience; it doesn't have any "causal effect" on its own, except what you lend to it. Experiences don't change us in and of themselves, they just suggest a world of possibility. If we don't start intending from that new sense of freedom, it'll make no difference. As far as Mind is concerned, there are no bad habits or good habits. Any intention you have will result in a result, but more importantly: all the associations implied by the thought will appear also. That's why if you, say, pretend to be "Hercules" for his power, you would also find you had mood swings and trouble with your parents. Loosely, if you act "as if" something, you get all the implied benefits and downsides from being that something. It's this associative quality that can get us lost. We've already got stacks and stacks of patterns that are triggered by touching the edge of any one of them. That's what limits the voluntariness or complete control (and rightly so). If you think or do something that implies the existence of spirits, then your experience will accommodate accordingly. That's why it's hard to pin all this down into one coherent view - e.g. explaining why "commanding" something can work. The answer there: Saying the words implies and is part of an associative pattern linked to the resulting experience, when done with intention and confidence. You aren't doing commanding, you are bringing part of a pattern into mind and - like a memory - it is auto-completing across time, with you experiencing the results subsequently.

[Freemason's Adventure] So that was kinda neat.

Yeah, I mean, it can be really good fun. It just makes it so obviously dream-like! It then becomes very important to realise what synchronicity is though - because you can't be tempted to believe that your experiences and thoughts are true in some fundamental way. If you are interested in conspiracies (for example), you start seeing them everywhere. And it's not just imagined: people will look over at you more, your mail will seem to have been opened. And if you start fighting the conspiracy, it will just get deeper!

So that view on synchronicity is a good reminder to keep clear on the things you'd like to experience, and to take the present sensory world with a pinch of salt.

POST: Front/back of the mind, absence vs presence, "something what it's like of itself."

These are good areas to explore. Particularly how we literalise expressions by locating our thoughts or experiences, or our sense of "where we are" relative to other parts of the ongoing experience. In my effort to come up with metaphors which encourage us to "be all of our moment", here's my most recent. Again we are confronted with the reluctance to release holding onto particular sensations and regions ("the body" area and its sensory content) and how difficult it can be to give up on that. I don't think there's any way around that except, well, "absolute allowing" one day.

The Imagination Room

There is a vast room. The floor is transparent, and through it an infinitely bright light shines, completely filling the room with unchanging, unbounded white light. Suddenly, patterns start to appear on the floor. These patterns filter the light. The patterns accumulate, layer upon layer intertwined, until instead of homogenous light filling the room, the light seems to be holographically redirected by the patterns into the shape of experiences, arranged in space, unfolding over time. Experiences which consist of sensations, perceptions and thoughts. At the centre of the room there are bodily sensations, which you recognise as... you, your body. You decide to centre yourself in the upper part of that region, as if you were "looking out from" there, "being" that bodily experience. At the moment you are simply experiencing, not doing anything. However you notice that every experience that arises slightly deepens the pattern corresponding to it, making it more stable, and more likely to appear again as the light is funnelled into that shape. Now, you notice something else. If you create a thought, then the image will appear floating in the room - as an experience. Again, the corresponding pattern is deepened. Only this time, you are creating the experience and in effect creating a new habit in your world!

Even saying a word or a phrase triggers the corresponding associations, so it is not just the simple thought that leaves a deeper pattern, but the whole context of that thought, its history and relationships. Now, as you walk around today, you will feel the ground beneath your feet - but you will know that under what appears to be the ground is actually the floor of the room, through which the light is shining, being shaped into the experience around you. And every thought or experience you have is shifting the pattern...

...

Then I consider my vision....

Something to investigate here is whether you are trying to see, which reinforces vision as: a) a sense and, b) related to the eyes. Maybe see what approaching the world as non-sense-based, but perception or object based does. Instead of subtly seeking out experience, "let the world come to you". Sit back a little in your head, or identify with the background space, and let the images arise by themselves. I played a lot with vision exercises back in the day (Bates Method and so on) but in the end I figured they were all about learning to not hold onto your body and senses, and often relocate your sense of self to be less narrowed. The exercises were just a way of teaching yourself that things can happen by themselves.

It's funny how your permission is needed before things can happen "by themselves." ;)

Ha - words! But it's true. :-)

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. I'm trying to see the difference between sense and perception. I'm giving permission, yet it does not arise

Sorry, it's hard to describe!

I'm saying that, we never really experience sensations on their own, we experience objects. For instance - when I see a ball, I don't see a circle filled with colour except for a darker crescent at once side, or even a sphere with colour - I see a ball. The more we "grasp" with our eyes, the more we narrow our experience down to attempted seeing, with the restriction of the concept of eyes. When we sit back, we let the "world-building" aspect of ourselves create our surroundings spontaneously. To get a feel (literally) for this, sit in front of a table and close your eyes. Stay open and relaxed. Now, touch the corner of the table. Now, touch an edge of the table. Now, touch the other corner of the table. You'll find that you have a full "feel-picture" of the table even though you are not touching the whole table simultaneously - and you did not consciously build or maintain that feel-picture. If you focus on the sensations one by one, you limit this process. Seeing works in the same way. Your eyes dart about the place, "touching" different parts of the visual experience, and a world is built and updated and given to you. You are not mean to pay attention to this, control your eyes directly, or even be aware of your eyes. To do so at all deforms perception. I'd say that any narrowing of attention limits the spontaneity of "world appearance". You end up concentrating on a particular sensation, while inhibiting the big picture object-based experience. Let's try another way to describe this. What you are really after is to get "eyes" out of the picture altogether. The more you adopt the seeing-with-eyes and making-seeing-happen concepts, the more they will deform your experience. (Just like when you try to experience or control yourself doing something as you do it; it kills the natural flow.)

The quick way to do this is to check where you are "looking out from" and whether you are trying to force your world-experience. Experiment with locating your centre in different positions. See Seeing from the Core for a kinda summary.

What has your experience been with this technique?

When you think about it, it has to be simple!

It starts with just the world feeling more "open and there" and then you suddenly notice every now and again that things are "in focus" and it builds from that. Still catch myself trying now and again, usually after working on something, but then I "sit back" and it gets better. Big aim is to bring that attitude to everything!

Strange thing is, I realised I don't really navigate the world all that much by vision really; it's about "spatial feel". Don't know if that's the same for everyone else.

EDIT: The "let the world come to you" phrase is the one that I use to remind me of all this.

POST: Absolute Power

cosmicprankster420: oneirosophy is all about achieving lucidity, that's it, the rest is up to you in terms of what you want to do with your dream. There are lots of different methods to achieve it as well, but once you get it you cant deny it. While i too don't want to be a tyrant in my dream, their is an importance to having a willpower strong enough that you don't get overwhelmed by your own creation. But its also important to understand that figuring this is a dream is only the beginning. Beyond the surface level, there are many habits and beliefs in which we don't look at through lucid eyes. When i first created this sub i didn't realize some of the directions the other members would take it, but its been interesting none the less and i like hearing other peoples perspectives on this process even if i don't always agree with them. But some aspect of authority is important because this is YOUR dream, not mine, not anyone else's, but yours. While you don't have to be a tyrant, you want to be powerful enough so that your dream characters don't become tyrannical over your dream and have them call the shots to the point that you feel weak and helpless.

As /u/cosmicprankster420 says, it's about knowingly being what you already are. Any tweaks or exploration you do after that is completely optional. And: You don't need to waste time being frightened of things.

I am detached, but thoroughly enjoying where this story takes me.

Which is a privilege of the lucid, don't you think? How you explore the dream afterwards, that's a "personal" decision. You are of course constantly using your God-like powers, via creation by implication. By knowing this, you save yourself polluting your dream with unpleasant, unintended nonsense. I think that's the main benefit of the Oneirosophic approach.

POST: God is male; The Universe is female; The Self is the meeting of the two

I found a simpler way of saying what I was saying. A Universe without a God doesn't exist; but a God without a Universe doesn't exist either.

Or: God cannot experience his existence without a universe, by shaping himself as a universe.

Sure, that works too. But the male female dynamic seems to be necessary on some level. The goal seems to be to unify the two, but they need to each have their own sentience.

I guess: the world-as-metaphor - the whole of experience seems to be a play on opposites and reunification.

POST: But where did it all come from?

Patterns upon patterns upon patterns, dissolved into awareness? Raw potentiality/creativity, filtered/shaped through accumulated patterns, resulting in (equating to) sensory experience. All experience is therefore conceptual, archetypal. Also:

• Experiences leave traces which in-form subsequent experiences.
• Thinking is an experience which leaves traces similarly...

Where did these structures come from? Something akin to the way hypnagogic imagery turns into dream environments. There was an infinite amount of time for this to happen, of course. All you need is randomness plus slight inertia.

TL;DR: We are dreaming.

As there is no solid substrate behind the scenes, we can dream anything - including being confused, or experiencing an 'illusion', or dissolving into non-dual awareness, or uncovering the Super-Real Truth Behind It All, which includes maybe even identifying a solid substrate behind the scenes...

But all of those are just more experiences; there is no real truth to be discovered, except to realise the arbitrariness of it. That is why seekers keep on seeking: because they have chosen to be seekers, by self-imagining or by it being implied in their actions. Freedom fighters have to fight for their freedom, by definition. The dream always arises "as if" your approach or assumptions are true, and any metaphors you adopt will reformat the world according to your new "understanding". If you instead simply rest a while, stop pushing and prodding, the dream settles somewhat, and things become clearer, the apparent environment's responsiveness more obvious. You can't not-dream - so it's a case of choosing to have sweet dreams.

POST: How do you solve a problem like feedback loops?

All that would lead me to believe that it's in my best interests to find ways to 'collapse' the feedback loops around me - but I wonder if there's not a more direct way? Is it possible to instead reduce our dependence on feedback loops?

Hmm. Yes, I'd say. Because the feedback loop is a sign of you resisting learning by trying to control the process. When you learned your first language as a child, did you use a feedback loop? Was it "pretty tough"? I don't think there was a force of will involved there. Learning and problem-solving are just what the mind does, naturally, as part of its "structure" - unless you are holding onto your pre-existing patterns and preventing them modifying (or only letting them be modified in a controlled, limited manner - deliberately and consciously by "you"). The urge to manage and 'be aware' of things happening is a restriction that prevents progress in any endeavour. Perhaps all that is required to become, say, a musical prodigy is to give yourself a metaphorical bang on the head.

In any case, we're getting away from the point, which is not language learning!

No, but it's a good example of limited change in adults compared with spontaneous, effortless development in children. And one of the reasons adults have such a hard time is because they start thinking in terms of concepts like "impetus", "model" and "feedback loops" and approach things as if their ideas of how something works is how it really works underneath. Which is at the root of many problems people have with manifestation generally...

If I could 'contort my tactile sense field' in such a way to get instantaneous feedback, finding which contortions work and which do not would be drastically faster.

Why do you need the feedback? Can't you just ask for the end result and have it? Feedback is just an experience. If you are getting the experience of feedback, that's part of what you have intended...

But more often than not, my intentions do not manifest immediately - so maybe what I'm asking is this: how to better connect intention and manifestion?

I'd say that intention and manifestation are identical and that you are getting exactly what you are asking for. Manifestation is always instantaneous!

If I intend something to happen next month, it is true right now that it happens next month. The manifestation occurs immediately from the perspective of the timeless landscape of the world. Following the intention, your ongoing present moment then has the experiences as they are laid out. So if you intend something and you go through a cycle of feedback before you get the final result, maybe that's because you intended that whole process - by implication, through your expectation about how the world works. The structure of your mind dictated the pattern that your manifestation would take. To get more "direct" then, perhaps one must dispense with any notions of "the mechanism".

TL;DR: You need to intend to "skip to the end!"

POST: We talk a lot about getting away from the consensus on this sub, lets talk about methods of escape.

A1: mostly from no longer believing that what goes on in my imagination is fake and whats out there as being real
This type of observation is key. In order to undermine convention really thoroughly I need to become aware of my most subtle trends and the tacit, silent, unspoken reasons that underpin those trends. Another one from this series is the idea that there are objects that can bump into each other and displace each other, that compete with each other for space, etc. Another subtle idea is that whatever appears visually is more indicative of an outer world, and whatever appears to touch (body sense) is more indicative of an inner world. Example: I am itching (tactile sense disturbed), but I see no bug and no red area on the skin (visual sense is not in line with the tactile). I think, "ah, it's just in my mind." Then! I see a bug and a red spot (visual sense is disturbed), but I am not at all itching (tactile sense is peaceful). Then I think "Oh, I really got bitten just now, even though I don't feel the itch." So when the sense fields fall out of harmony, it's obvious that they don't all take on the same import in the mind as to what they may signify. The fact that I am aware of this is incredibly useful in breaking down convention. I am seeing how ridiculous it is to use one sense to mean that and another sense to mean this (this and that, that and this). It's totally arbitrary. Nothing is forcing me to think this way. And so on. There are more ideas/insights like this. They are very very subtle and they're generally very hard to notice, but noticing them detonates the convention much more than any kind of repetitive exercise. I don't think we can exercise our way to a sense of absurdity, and it's exactly this sense of absurdity that undermines convention. Still, exercise is incredibly useful as it often (if not always) serves as a fertile ground for contemplation which can then generate an appropriate sense of absurdity. So I am not really poo-pooing exercise as much as I am trying to put things in a perspective that I myself find very powerful in my own life. Of course what happens next is exactly as you describe, because once you for example stop thinking that imagination is fake and non-imagination (whatever the heck it is) is real, it alters how you live your life. So when you do find your manner of living grossly or subtly altered, that's a good sign that you've probably hit upon an authentic change of mind.

Good point. The whole identification of certain senses with your "spatial perimeter", combined with the assumption that events occurring within a certain timeframe after an intention defines your "temporal perimeter", is a powerful illusion. From elsewhere: It's great talking about the illusion of space and being connected, but unless I can look around and see it to be true then what's the use?

So I think we always need to start with our actual experience, and there are two aspects of it which are probably key:

• How do I come to mark out one area of my present moment experience as "me" and the rest of it as "not-me"?
• How do I actually create movements and thoughts - if indeed I can detect myself doing so?

And my answers are: That it seems pretty arbitrary how I divide up the world (I think of it as being divided but it isn't really when I look), and that I seem to just "want it" and a bit later the experience happens (so I just assume my limitations are based on sensation and distance and time). So I don't know about connected, but things definitely don't seem to be divided.

but the first "step" is instant

Yes. This is where our common mistake comes from. Our intention is a reshaping of the universe. Just because we don't encounter the experience until later, we think either we didn't cause it, or that our 'prayers were answered' by some more circuitous route. Similar to our conversation a while ago about inserting facts into the future. It is true now that I will find the bookstore "later".

We maintain a narrative that describes a causal domain. A narrative as I mean it is more than just verbiage.

Yes. It's basically part of the assumed belief- or habit-structure of our world that dictates the form of our experience.

Also from elsewhere:

(Random bits of comments I keep meaning to gather together. Excuse the spatial/level metaphors, obviously they are not actual.)

The room around you is just a floating image. Its true source is deep down, enfolded. We confuse our sensory experience for being "the entire reality" but in fact all the good stuff happens elsewhere. Perhaps we might envisage it as: All intentions, even if apparently directed at the immediate surroundings, actually insert themselves at the lowest level of reality, undivided, and then bubble up everywhere. Even if you just decide to reach out and pick up your cup of coffee, that decision actually goes "the long way round". The intention creates a ripple at the very fundamental level, which then shifts the universe, which is then experienced "locally" as an image and sensation of your arm moving and a cup being held. And because every intention inserts itself at the seed of the whole universe, you lifting a cup actually affects the whole of reality to a slight degree. If instead you had furiously smashed the cup on the ground, that violent intention might have shifted the whole universe slightly towards aggression: a painting in a gallery in Dusseldorf falls from the wall; a disagreement between two men in a bar in Iceland escalates into a punching match; a clear sky in Australia darkens and a storm begins.

It's deeper in the mind, more toward the sub- and un-conscious regions of our own mind right here. Of course I do realize that you know it.

Yeah. There really is no way to escape from spatial metaphors, eh! The "elsewhere" is enfolded into the "apparent here", it's all here - etc. One of the things I've been doing lately is deliberately 'being the space' and having present moment experience obviously floating within it, while maintaining the felt-sense of everything being in that space.

Donald Hoffman

Ah yes, I liked that talk. I came across his paper on Conscious Realism and Interface Theory a while back and found it quite capturing. There's also a really nice short video with him chatting to a former colleague about switching to this stuff once he'd secured tenure, attitudes toward this sort of thinking, etc, but I've not been able to track it down again (it was vimeo or whatever rather than youtube maybe).

What we change is relationship

Right, I like that.

The only time what you're saying is potentially true is if you've already taken up much of the known universe into your own being on a conscious level.

Yes, I agree. Actually, the image in my mind was of watching television news and seeing reports of things around the world happening. It is truer to say that smashing the cup with an "attitude" can affect the rest of your experience (the apparent world), not just the cup.

one really needs to maintain a special kind of relationship

This is the interesting bit. Shall we talk about that?

Is it simply a case of settling into that background sense, to connect with it? In other words, letting go of our hold on the present moment sensory experience to access the subtle layer?

Like the sun hides the stars due to its proximity and intensity, so the texture of sensory momentary experience obscures the background dimensionless felt-sense of the world. When I switch my perspective to background awareness, I am no longer identified with my body sensations or the concept of my body, and my intentions manifest swiftly. Recently someone mentioned how they "imagined their body was an empty shell" and would just command it to, say, find a lost object or jump a distance - and then let their body do it for them. (EDIT: I quoted it here [POST: [Proposal] Investigate How to Reprogram, Build a Wiki].)

Is this the sense in which we command change in the universe, insert a new fact and then let it bubble into experience?

Or maybe it's the only way? It's hard to say for me right now.

I'm thinking that it's the only way - that all ways are basically that way at their core. I use words like "background" and "dimensionless" just to convey it's not an object or a thing.

Is this 'switch' something vivid? Is it like a pop or a click?

No, you don't experience it like that, it's really a change of perspective rather than a click - like the feeling when you change which side of a figure-ground image you perceive. But there is a difference, because in figure-ground you lose the other perception completely. In this switch, it persists but differently due to context:

So, say there is a room full of furniture. Your attention "latches on" to those objects all at once. Then you switch perspective to be aware of the space of the room. You are now perceiving the space of the room, the objects, and the space in which those objects appear/that they occupy. Really, it's just a releasing of attentional filtering. If you're in-between perspectives at the moment, you may be experiencing something more like 'figure-ground' than 'figure-ground-and-space'. Additional thought: Because we are all of experience, we can simply do this by 'just deciding'. (That's why people like Greg Goode can say - look, forget thinking it through and convincing yourself, just take a stand as awareness and see what happens. If it works, you know this stuff is right.)

When I want to insert a fact, I just train myself to expect it. This is probably not as efficient as what you're doing.

It's much the same in the end. It just might take a bit longer because you are wearing down the opposition to it, rather than letting go of the opposition?

"It just might take a bit longer because you are wearing down the opposition to it, rather than letting go of the opposition?"; This is probably true. I know I am not nearly as unhinged as I could in principle be. So my changes tend to be slow, especially if they are something I consider significant.

Yes, that's something interesting: the more significant, the more it's a "thing", the longer to push past.

If you have a point A where you currently are (at all levels of your reality), and all you want to do is leave that point

That's a good image. Freedom from vs freedom to. The purpose of dissolving limiting structures is surely to make more routes - and more efficient routes - available for the change from "here" to "there" to arise. (Simple belief that a target will become your experience can itself do a lot of "softening" of restrictions, mind you.)

Complete freedom from all structure and restriction is - empty space? Or - things exactly as they are now. Depending.

EDIT: It's not an error that New Thought approaches were all about "ignore where you are, ignore the evidence, concentrate on the facts you want to be true".

...

I'm trying to do a short version of that overwriting exercise whenever I come across something where I am avoidant or fearful (in an out-of-my-comfort-zone way). This frees me up to make a proper choice about whether to do something or not, rather than just out of habit or because I'm just vaguely worried about it - and see things as sensory experiences rather than my assumptions about it. Hopefully the idea is to be more aware of the conventions I am following, less bound to them.

POST: Truthfulness as a quality of experience.

[POST]

Convention will tell us that truth is some kind of objective thing out there that cannot be denied. But the more i think about it, when some new information or event validates how you perceive the world their is a feeling of truthfulness to it. In other words things can feel truthful in the same way things can feel sad, happy, or frightening. 1+1=2 elucidates a feeling of truth where as 1+1=3 elucidates a feeling of falsehood. If our experience is fully subjective and their is no objectivity, this idea seems to make sense, we define what is true and what is false, but without any form of lucidity we do it in a blind way rather than being conscious of it

[END OF POST]

I've been playing with the idea of two truths:

• Direct Truth - Something that is true by direct experience, knowing and being. This is the truth of the facts of experience. The solidity of a table, the softness of a pillow - directly, experientially true - and so are world facts.
• Conceptual Truth - A story or conceptual framework which is self-consistent. This is when a pattern of thought "feels right"; it has narrative coherence. A system of thought can have conceptual truth even if it doesn't correspond well to direct experience.

There is a feeling associated with both. The first is what dictates the form of your experience. However, fully adopting the second can over time affect the first, as the patterns you fully absorb can deform the structure of your mind/perception. Fully absorbed conceptual truths become direct truths.

Now, do you want direct bullshit or conceptual bullshit? Cause it's all bullshit. And separating bullshit into two piles of bullshit is also bullshit.

I think you've over-called it here. It's the difference between thinking-about something and it being directly-sensed. Like talking about "enlightenment" and "awareness" and "everything is one" as ideas, versus directly being it. Recalling our earlier conversations about the felt-sense, etc.

Call it "direct experience" and "thinking about ideas" if you like. The reason I use the word "truth" is because that's how people describe this in general, and also the idea of "truth" in philosophy and logic (self-consistent). Call it "patterns as they really are currently" and "patterns you are thinking about". Of course it's all "made from" the same non-stuff, ultimately, but it's not very useful to reduce everything to that level constantly. It is the source of possibilities, but the fact is that people's ongoing moment does consist of patterns.

At this point you realize you don't have to regard anything as more or less fundamental.

Neither is fundamental, as such. It's actually a matter of location (here and there). That isn't the problem, the problem is the habit of confusing one with the other - of seeing one in terms of the other - that people confuse that a self-consistent conceptual framework with an accurate description of their experience. This blocks development, particularly by limiting investigation by studying the "qualia" experience. The use of the word "direct" is to indicate that there is no representation involved.

They're inseparable. You can't neatly slice experience into conceptuality and qualia. Your conceptual schemes influence how qualia appear and vice versa. If you want a point of power, if you like magic, it's actually more powerful to regard conceptuality as the more fundamental aspect. That's how and why incantations work. Incantations wouldn't work if conceptuality wasn't skeletal. Moving the bone moves the muscle and skin attached to that bone

Of course, at the base level, we agree with on this - it's how magick, and indeed everyday life, works - and we've covered it in earlier discussions. Hence it must be a matter of wording and getting the thoughts right. So, the problem seems to be with the word "direct". Now, with other audiences this word makes sense, because it brings peoples attention to what is (apparently) happening in the sensory world now rather than being off in ungrounded thoughts. The point I am conveying is that we must not confuse nice systems of thought with: a) the true reality, obviously, but also: b) the current state of the apparent reality, the ingrained patterns of the world. In other words, a good story doesn't mean that's how things are. We have any number of "good stories" in our minds which we take for granted, which are without basis. We can often see those "good stories" instead of what I'm calling "direct experience" of the patterns of the present moment and felt-sense. Of course, the fact that persistently thinking about something is equivalent to experiencing it, which eventually creates ingrained habits-in-the-world, is the icing on the cake.

All phenomena are not themselves. There is no direct experience.

Isn't it better to say something like: phenomena are themselves, as experienced, and that is all they are? For instance, a "tree" literally is that image over there + all the ideas you have about "trees". But there is no underlying, "secret causal tree" at the source of that.

To say that some experience is "direct" is to imply it is non-hallucinatory, genuine, authentic, and right. Now. Do you really want to suggest something like that?

Your points are valid but I don't think they apply to what I mean here. The core is the distinction between representational (one step removed) thinking which forms a self-consistent structure that is basically a castle in the sky - i.e. not bound to experience at all. "Direct" is just a handy (for most) word to indicate the difference. People intuitively understand a "directness" to sensation rather than thinking, when it's pointed out. Of course, at the next level of understanding, the word is less useful. I'm not sure what a replacement term would be for the different context, but "direct" is okay for that level. This is a general difficulty: That descriptions applicable to one stage of understanding have to be revealed to be "not quite the correct story" at a later stage.

phenomena are themselves Of course not. I hope you're joking.

What do you suggest "phenomena" are?

You're saying you can cleave experience neatly into representational and non-. I am saying you can't do that.

No, that's not really what I'm saying. This is actually a subtle topic, mind you. However, thoughts-about things are not the things themselves. Self-consistent theories about awareness are not awareness, and so on.

You can insist on a difference ...

This is where context comes in. At one "level" there is an apparent difference which seems obviously the case. Then...

Anything you want them to be, except themselves.

It depends what you mean by "themselves".

When I do this, the thing-itself is gone after I remove thoughts-about-it.

Right, the experience of something is the full thing (the image and all meanings). Bringing a thought up about it, we summon the meanings without the "external" image. So yes, for a "tree" or whatever, they are the same thing, it's just a matter of location.

So - when I speak of Conceptual Truth I am talking about were structures, associations or stories. So, a theory about something ("how it works" and "what it is really underneath") which feels true because it fits together like a puzzle, but in fact doesn't really point to anything.

The word here to use is perhaps "relationships". The framework is a set of fictional relationships between the thoughts. Again, though, we have the problem of levels of understanding - because if you truly accept a set of relationships, the world can start to seem as if it behaves according to them. That's feedback for ya.

I don't know if you realize this or not...

Right. That's what the felt-sense thing is about. The meaning of a tree is felt, known, because you are or become that. You experience that tree and all trees. The felt-sense is the facts-of-the-world.

Maybe I could only hear, because I didn't have the conceptual framework for evoking a sense of sight using volition.

This is a good one. Or even just the first time you saw a tree, you wouldn't see a "tree". You'd see... green blobby bit on top of brown uppy-down bit. Which is a good question....

How can it be possible for us to experience a tree for the first time?

I agree. But what you're saying is that you can somehow bracket the relationships and examine things outside relationships and still find the same things, just without the relationships. And I am saying, that's impossible.

They are entangled, it's true. It depends on the extent to which the story is accepted, absorbed, experienced. Maybe it's better illustrated by example. Say I have the story off: marble rolls along floor, hits marble, second marble rolls - this is cause and effect, this is momentum, this is energy transference. So in my mind I have a "conceptual truth" about it. With the senses, I just see two spheres rolling. But I felt-sense it as "marbles" and if I know about physics I felt-sense the event as a cause-effect, energy-transference. If I believed that marbles contained "motive spirits" then I would felt-sense the event as an interaction of spirit personalities, entering an agreement to exchange motion.

Aside: Today's random truths along with poor soundtrack [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgiwVYZM5A8].

When he experience this new way of forming sens-impressions, he really was confused and was asking questions about it to try to conventionalize his experience.

Interesting. We also have an extra trick here: that we experience experiences, knowing. When we go checking whether we "see" or "hear", then sure enough we do, but that's because we went seeking for that experience. When I "see" a door over there, normally I don't see it at all, I have a total door experience which isn't separated out into individual senses necessarily. The channels are learned to be separate. That arbitrary separation limits the nature of the experiences we have. For instance, it leaves no name for the felt-sense so people don't notice it; it leaves no name for the ability to feel-aware out into the space around you and into other objects and people (which we might call "presence"). In fact, apparently-personal experience really is about that feel-aware thing. Try withdrawing that sphere back into yourself, and you'll quickly discover you "go blind". You might still kinda see stuff, but it's like peripheral vision, and you don't have the sense of meaning.

You see shaded circles, and they're not rolling, they're just moving. :) But if you keep stripping it down, then the circles will need to go.

Yes, this is of course right. So here we go, we're getting to a better description for the oneironaught vs the everyday guy:

The difference between (what I called) Direct and Conceptual truth is simply the extent to which a pattern has become ingrained, stabilised, become a fact-of-the-world. This is of course a continuum; the two terms indicate the extreme cases.

So for example, I realize the cup is to the left because I can imagine it being in all sorts of other locations. I don't actually have to imagine it, just the fact that I can, if I want to, means I have tacit imaginary context that I am using to give meaning to the cup's location.

Yes, you instantly are aware of all the possibilities of "cup-ness", because that's what "cup-ness" is.

There is no experience that corresponds to the Direct extreme. I hope you realize this.

Sure, neither extremes exist, although the idea of the extreme is useful for gaining understanding at a certain level. If you are having any experience at all then you are experiencing a concept, albeit of an extremely subtle, low-amplitude form. I mean, even the concept of a "concept"... arrgg, there is no escape! Ah, but yes - take a step back, switch context.

I think it's dangerous.

Well, I think you and I have an ongoing disagreement about how to describe things. You seem to prefer a jump-to-the-end approach, whereas I see a staged approach as better. Depends on the audience, really

You're right that getting stuck at any conception is a risk.

Illusion

Always a tricky word. I like the "playdough of experience" metaphor though. :-)

...

From last week's episode of Constantine (spoilers):

Lily wakes up to rejoin the living world, but John and Ritchie remain in the construct. Ritchie wants to stay behind in his own reality, basically as a God, so who can blame him?
Constantine can. He warns his friend that he’s eventually going to go as crazy as Shaw, and that his decision isn’t about creating his own world, it’s about running away from the real one. Having regained consciousness, John pleads with Ritchie, still in his altered state, to come back to him … which he does after a few moments of hesitation.
Having found new purpose, Ritchie puts more effort into his teaching position, lecturing about humanity’s certainty of suffering, giving into cravings, and the possibility of inner peace.
-- Constantine Season 1 Episode 11 Recap

Maybe you should quit all this reality-messing, playing God, and just get a nice teaching job.

Do you really believe this?

No, but I do enjoy the show and it sometimes gives me a bit of food for thought. (And it's interesting when the topic of a TV show synchronistically relevant. Although in my reality I wouldn't be hacking the hands off innocent kids. Promise.)

I like being encouraged to question myself occasionally - particularly in "these matters". Because it's easy to go off-path.

You might prefer another quote:

Ritchie: “All this time you’ve been here, you coulda been building worlds. You coulda been redefining life and how we live it. Instead you gave into your weakness, and when you did, that’s the day you became obsolete.”

Q: I figured you were just testing me. It's a waste of time. I am well beyond all doubt.

But... aren't you tempted? Don't you think this might be a fascinating distraction? Given that the world you are experiencing right now is your creation anyway?

If I wanted a distraction that was really fascinating, I'd rather be distracted by massive displays of massive personal power.

But you already have (had) that power. And you chose this. It's difficult to tell how much of this we might have chosen previously. Have we burdened ourselves with an adventure which is nothing but challenge?

Perhaps the purpose of this is to teach yourself acceptance. That you will realise that you are struggling against yourself, that the power you seek is illusory, you have already made a decision against it, and it's simply a matter of you eventually giving up and accepting.

Or not. Who knows. ;-)

For the old decision to have force you have to ongoingly consent to it continually.

My "concern" would be that a person can be unaware of the old decision. This is an opportunity: I still don't like the "ongoing decisioning" language. So how about this:

• Our intention is the temporal landscape of our world, which we experience moment-to-moment, laid out timelessly. It is equivalent to the fact-of-the-world. To say "we have an intention" is just to say "my landscape is this shape", to say that what I am is this shape.
• To intend is to change that landscape. We intend by simply changing our shape, since the landscape is us. We become the result, even though the facts we have inserted might only unfold as sensory experience at some point in the apparent future.

So (being dualistic for a moment), your intention is the blueprint and to intend is to change the blueprint.

We can be aware of a result, which is now.

This is true. And I don't believe in irretrievable decisions. You might choose at one point a nasty outcome (unwittingly), but once you understand the nature of things, you can recognise this is a bad unfolding, and correct it. I was definitely a full-time idiot in the past. Now I'm just part-time. :-)

I love it though.

I know you do! I am resisting though. :-)

My main bone is that you think decisions are like some kind of brief bursts that can be dated on a timeline, like you can pin some decision to 6am Monday morning, for example.

There are a few things going on. Some certain intentions could indeed by tied to a particular time, where we say "I change this part of the landscape". Meanwhile, because the world reflects your nature, as you evolve by accepting and developing your ideas and yourself, there is a continual evolution of the contours of the landscape. Finally, in any case intending doesn't just insert a particular event. It inserts facts, which mutate the landscape as a whole. All of these are the same things, really, just particular cases. Appearances constantly change because: The landscape itself is evolving due to intending; We are "traversing" the intention landscape by unfolding and refolding "moments" from it. Again, these are basically the same thing.

As for changing the blueprints, you can have a blueprint for how to change blueprints. And then you can change that meta-blueprint as well. Etc.

Hey, I placed no restriction on the number of dimensions those blueprints have! ;-)

This is what I call decisioning. :)

Okay, we'll let you call it "decisioning" for now then, I suppose. ;-)

This is the level where most people would say I was going crazy, or, if many people experienced it with me, they'd say it was a coincidence and I have no moral right to claim what happened for myself as my own volition's doing.

Right. This is where the notion that our decisions happen "the long way round" is useful. You don't move the arm that you can see, what you do is insert a fact into the landscape such that you will experience "arm movement* in a second or two.

We had this conversation before, but it's worth us restating: That we place arbitrary boundaries on "us" and "world" based on apparent distance and body-sensation, and the self-created tension of "doing". This leads us to arbitrary see some experiences as results of ourselves, and others as happening to us. In actual fact, all intending affects the global intention/landscape, as extended time-and-space patterns (or more subtly). You might not deliberately intend the sunny day today, but at the very least you implicitly "decisioned" a weather system such that sunny days are possible. All kings, no subjects.

"You don't move the arm that you can see, what you do is insert a fact into the landscape such that you will experience "arm movement* in a second or two."; This isn't immediately obvious to me. I find the idea interesting. But how exactly is it useful? What can you do with this approach that you can't by thinking you're just moving your arm about?

It's vital, I think! We adjust the felt-sense not this current "arm experience". For practical everyday circumstances it doesn't make much difference, but seeing it this way removes the difference between creating humdrum physical motion and changing the weather.

Yeah, you're saying it's a good thing. But my question was, what can you do with this style of thinking that you cannot with the more conventional one?

Accepting it removes the attempt to experience "doing". It leads to effortlessness, wu wei. An leads to a direct knowing that the movement of your arm and the movement of the clouds are the same. So the benefit of it (on-theme with our earlier chat) is that accepting this will "decision" your experience into a better, clearer, more powerful one. More enjoyable.

Ah, finally. This is interesting indeed. Well worth the long trudge through however many posts we exchanged. I'll have to think about this more.

The trudge was the result. Have a play with it, be interested to see how you find it.

So do you live this way? I mean, you no longer think you're moving your arms about or whatnot, when your body is moving?

It's identical to that thing I was saying about "switching perspective" to the background (with the usual language caveats).

I do get caught up in "doing" now and again, but that is a reminder to switch. Before this, I was a major do-er of things. Everything was about applying deliberate tension.

Did the switch to fact-insertion thinking happen gradually?

Once I got to the "timeless landscape" thing then it seemed to follow, from the metaphor of the mirage and the desert and all that. But it took a while to connect it to the wu wei thing I'd been looking into years before and the whole thing about trying to detect when/where exactly I "do" things like deliberate arm movement.

LOL, you're still doing things. You're just more subtle and crafty about it, and more relaxed.

Ha, no there is a difference. I've done the sneaky-crafty thing too! It's the difference between the whole world moving together, all from/of/as that same place. The more I talk about it, the more I pollute it by implying something else. Always the way with me! :-) Refer to my original words and ignore the rest.

Even if the whole world moves together, you're still engaged in doing because you're guiding the world to just one destination among infinite possible ones. As effortless as you appear, you're still using volition. Inserting facts is using volition. Still doing. Just a subtle kind of it. Doing is that for which you take responsibility.

That definition of doing sounds a lot like decisioning! ;-)

I understand the concept, but to actually live like this is entirely different. This is the kind of thing that happens gradually over decades or lifetimes, but is expressible in a single sentence or two.

(Loosely speaking) you could see it as living from the landscape of the felt-sense, letting unfolded experience take care of itself. Just try adopting the idea by simple decision; see how it plays. "Imagine it is so" and see what happens.

But I can't conceive of experience as "itself." There is no "it" to me.

I know. Excuse the language thing!

I already do this when I do magical transformations. :) But when I move my arms and legs I still think the old / conventional way.

Right, it's the same. It's just about bringing it to the mundane.

POST: What is time?

[POST]

What is time?
Take a minute to repeat that question to yourself a few times. Slowly, ideally, so you can take a step beyond contemplating it intellectually and actually start investigating the reality you're experiencing presently.
What is time? How long is the present moment?
Stop reading, turn your head away from the screen, and actually spent a minute or two on that. I'll wait.
So it's a fairly unconventional thing to think about, and this is made obvious by how difficult it is to really contemplating the question using word-thoughts.
For me, the most basic way that I tend to think of time is as the perceived non-simultaneous, non-instantaneous quality of experience. Everything doesn't appear to be happening all at once in a single moment. Things seem "spaced". Well, that leads us to some questions: in what sense are all things not simultaneous and instantaneous? What do I mean that everything isn't happening all at once?
Well, it seems that I can remember things that have happened that are not currently happening, and I can imagine things that could be happening which aren't. But neither the past nor the hypothetical present or future have any genuine existence in what I'm actually presently experiencing, and so there would seem to be a sense in which I cannot really say that anything has already been or could be happening which is not presently happening. This is a fairly familiar concept to most, I assume. The past and future "borrow" their reality from the present.
So, since describing time as the quality of experience by which things aren't all happening at once, we're left without a satisfactory explanation for what time really is. Is time an illusion entirely? Well it certainly seems that things have happened "before" now -- it doesn't feel as though each moment, reality is essentially recreated as near-identical to before. But even thinking in this way presupposes the existence of time. It is difficult to think in ways which exclude a temporal aspect entirely.
If time is "real", we can ask ourselves how it came about. It doesn't make much sense to think of time as having had a beginning, because a beginning implies temporal causality (i.e. one thing provoking another by virtue of having happened before it so as to bring about a change). We could imagine a Self, or Brahman, or God, entirely outside of time, or experiencing a very "different kind" of time, in which causality is no longer a relevant factor. This is a bit like if humans experiences a film frame by frame, they might perceive one frame as -causing- the next, but from the vantage point of the True Self or God, all of the frames would be laid out and perceived "at once". But then, why should we perceive time in the causal way that we do?
What's perhaps interesting to contemplate, here, is that the linear, causal way of thinking about time is a relatively new one. Judeo-Christian ways of thinking, in particular, made the linear and causal way of thinking about time the cultural default, as you can learn about in detail elsewhere, because it is a way of approaching time that makes Original Sin and the Death of Christ genuinely applicable. Judaism and Christianity have uniquely emphasized the historical and conventional facts and their causal relationship with practitioners. Punishment and accountability only work in linear, causal time. Before this influence, however, the most common way of thinking about time was as cyclical.
Cyclical time is often thought of in the sense of Mayan calendar cycles, but this would be like thinking of linear time as the Gregorian calendar. Focus instead of the subtle quality of experience that cyclical time lends itself to, like the quality of experience that linear time lends itself to (i.e. strict causality, a determined and unchangable past and an unknowable future which cannot influence the present).
The quality of cyclical time is far more interesting than the linear, causal, conventional way. In cyclical time, causality is very different. Where on a number line 1 leads to 2, which leads to 3, on a circle, 1 can be said to lead to 3, but 3 can just as equally be said to have laid to 1. Thinking about this inverse in causality for a while is worthwhile. Whereas in linear time, the future is some empty, unknowable, non-existent void, in cyclical time it is granted a relationship with the present that is on par with that of the past. Events in your memory have "caused" the reality you're experiencing presently, but in a very real way, things that you conceive of as having "not yet occurred" have just as much influence on where you exist right now (though if you've got a mental image of the circle, the distance is obviously much greater between 3 and back to 1 again, ergo the less obvious connection in conventional ways of thinking). In cyclical time, the present moment is the re-actualization of something which has happened "before" and will happen "again" -- only the past, present, and future have all had an equal influence on one another because the concept of before-then-after causality doesn't apply here.
I find this a hugely interesting thing to think about. Maybe a few of you will read this and, seeing it fresher than I can, it will inspire further thoughts on the subject that I'm able to conjure. I'd love to hear them.

[END OF POST]

Good stuff. Something that fascinates me is the way we represent time in our minds metaphorically, and how that influences our approach to it. We literally experience time as represented in our perceptual/thinking space!

This is different across different cultures too:

• Western people tend to imagine time as running left to right on a "timeline", literally in front of them. Past is to the left, present is directly in front, future is off to the right. All time is visible and the causal nature of past=>present=>future is implied.
• Some other cultures have time running back-to-front (so to speak). The past is behind your head, out of sight. The present is directly in front of you. The future continues onwards into the distance. Here, the past cannot be seen and the future is obscured by the present moment. Causality isn't clear - only the notion that you must get past the present in order to access the next moment in the "future".
• EDIT: Just reminded that my Dad used to imagine time as a sort of simmering bubble floating off to one side. All events were sort of "dissolved" into this. It was an ongoing present containing all moments in time.

Think of how dramatically our approach to living can be altered by which visualisation we adopt.

...

"But neither the past nor the hypothetical present or future have any genuine existence in what I'm actually presently experiencing". I definitely disagree with this. What you're saying privileges the apparent over the latent in a way that isn't warranted upon closer examination. In fact to cognize a cup's location on the table I must have some sense of where else it could have been but isn't.

In fact, one of the basic errors people make - once they think beyond just things being "objects" - is to assume that a cup is just that visual image plus touch sensations. Actually, what we experience is an entire cup-ness which is entangled with its context.

Yea, but if you say it like this, it becomes hard to understand to anyone who isn't living in your own mind. That's why it's necessary to unpack this more if you really intend to be easily understood by other people.

Hmm. What I mean: So, cup-ness would be all previous experiences with cups, everything you have heard about cups, combined with everything you know about the current place where the cup is - all folded into a single knowledge-feeling.

...

Yes, I'm not too keen on the delivery myself - I'm not a fan of that whole 'channeling' thing - but the principles definitely and many other views are fairly in tune with 'this stuff'. It's put more straightforwardly than Seth and ACIM, for instance.

1. You exist.
2. The One is All and the All are One .
3. What you put out is what you get back.
4. Change is the only constant...

Except for the first three laws, which never change.

POST: Have any of you made it to the mental plane?

You'll need to expand a bit on what you mean by that.

in some occultism there is a hierarchy of the physical>astral>mental and spiritual plane. The mental plane is the one beyond the astral i think in this context

Ah. Isn't that where you go pretty much every night? By which I mean, the unstructured void space in which environments are created.

...

%darkblue%A1:%darkblue% Have you made it to a non-mental plane?

POST: Synesthesia and the deeper nature of qualitative experience.

[POST]

One of the common misconceptions that people make is that one needs a physical brain and physical senses in order to have experience. AKA You cant experience color without eyes, music without ears, smell without a nose etc. As someone who has multiple types of synesthesia i have realized this is not true at all. My main types of synesthesia are associating numbers and letters with colors, associating sound with color, associating color with sound, associating sound with taste, associating color with taste. The more interesting of the two for me is both associating sound with color and associating color with sound because it creates a really weird sensorial feed back loop. In other words in an internal sense, the distinction between color and sound are blurred and may both be the same type of experience filtered through different sensory experiential refractors from my point of view.
Whats really strange though is when i hear a sound which causes an experience of color, i dont see the color with my physical eyes, i feel the color within my sense of being. Same thing when i see a color and associate it with a sound. When i enter an orange room, i will experience the sensation of the note C flat, but i wont physically hear it, i will instead feel the quality of C flatness within my being.
What i've realized is that the idea of color only being a phenomenon associated with seeing and light or music only being a phenomenon associated with hearing and sound waves is yet another aspect of human convention. Orangeness and purpleness are merely qualities of mind beyond the category of seeing and light, because orangeness and purpleness can exist within sound as well as taste, smell, and touch. The five senses merely divide experience into separate categories in the same way a prism turns a white light into the 7 colors of the rainbow.
Here is where it gets really weird thought. Some of these synesthetic experiences i have posses no analogue to this particular phenomenological world. When i taste some sounds, sometimes they cannot be related to any tastes of food in this world, at best i can make vague approximations of sweetness or fruitiness, but there is nothing else like it. Or sometimes color schemes will invoke feelings of notes, chords, and instruments that have no basis in this dimension. I've been thinking today that my synesthesia may be opening up my mind to aspects of experience outside of this world, things thought to be impossible and incomprehensible. perhaps the reason we cant see into these deeper outer experiences is because we cling to the conceptual island called an ego or the idea of being a brain, which in its self creates the limited perception. But my synesthesia seems to be a doorway to some other mode of experience, in that i have these experiences in my mind and being but my five senses have no way to categorize them or fit them within their prism, like trying to fit a triangle through a square peg. I as awareness experience the triangle in my hand but my sense of sight is like the square peg in which it cant be filtered through to create a refracted experience.
What if when we are unconscious in deep sleep, we actually do have experiences, but because we are so rooted in our egos five sense interface, we have nothing to bring back from it. like fitting a triangle through a square peg. But through cultivating a certain type of awareness, maybe even non synesthetes can recognize the qualities of experiences light and color and sound and music as one pure experience. It is in a sense recognizing that one can have these types of experiences outside of sensory experience refractors, and perhaps defining the five senses as a kind of experience limiter, one may access deeper types of dreams and understand a level of being and a type of experience outside of the dimension of material conventionality.

[END OF POST]

[QUOTE]

Synesthesia
Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People with synesthesia may experience colors when listening to music, see shapes when smelling certain scents, or perceive tastes when looking at words. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes.

A person experiencing synesthesia may associate certain letters and numbers with certain colors. Most synesthetes see characters just as others do (in whichever color actually displayed) but they may simultaneously perceive colors as associated with or evoked by each one.

[END OF QUOTE]

So, the "five senses" could simply be a category scheme that we've become attached to, and filter through. This limits what experiences we have, but those limitations aren't inherent to experience at all. We are effectively choosing this channel-streaming. An article over at Aeon magazine talks about synesthesia being the natural state at birth. Does it get pruned back because we adopt or submit to the notion and experience of separate senses, when of course in "mind" there is no such distinction?

I've experimented with my senses quite a bit, and if I let go of seeing and hearing, it returns to a blended experience of "meaning". As soon as I try to see with my "eyes" though, for instance, my experience turns "eye-shaped" and vision seems "partitioned". If you go checking for sense separation, I think you imply its presence, and get what you are looking for. I don't have obvious synesthesia, but movements and patterns definitely have "sounds" associated with them, for example, and colours do have a mild texture to them. So, do you become more synesthesia-ish when tired or relaxed generally?

Q2: i honestly feel more synesthesiaish both when im relaxed, and in a more positive mindstate. Like if im worrying about some inner anxiety, im not noticing the external world as much and hence less associations.
actually the things you described might be a form of synesthesia, as it manifests in many different ways. The thing is, a lot of people who have it don't realize they have it, they just assume everyone else experiences the world the same way they do.

It is I think, but pretty mild. I hear sound effects accompany real life projectiles or for animated gifs, for instance, and the animation on this page about clustering illusions has white-noise/electronic-noise that evolves as the clusters form. Basically, it's like I do my own real-time Foley work (sound effects) for the ongoing movie of my life. Next up I need to master ADR (overwriting dialogue) for when I don't like what people are saying to me!

I've thought that those two ideas are potentially powerful for a bit of reality-twisting if applied in the correct frame of mind. It's a bit like a New Thought technique.

...

Supposedly, the word "capacitie" was originally used by the poet Thomas Traherne to describe an aware ego-less space in which experience arose (see here), then Douglas Harding took that and used "capacity" in his books:

Pointing Home
... looking inwards, turning the direction of your attention round 180˚ from the objects out there to you the Subject, to the place you are looking out of. Do you see your face? Do you see anything at all there - any colour or shape, any movement?
Looking in to the place where others see my face, I find no colour or shape here. I find boundless capacity or awareness this side of my pointing finger. This capacity is empty, clear, transparent. It is self-evidently awake, aware.
At the same time this capacity is full of everything happening in it: my finger, my view of the scene beyond, sounds, feelings…
I am now seeing Who I really am – seeing the boundless One at the very heart of myself, the One in whom the world is happening.
What do you find? Are you also looking out of this wide-open, crystal clear, awareness?
-- Experiments, headless.org

It's a really nice way of capturing it. It dodges the "potential for/of" problem. You are simply capacity, without qualification.

EDIT: My Spirit by Thomas Traherne here, excerpt:

I felt no dross nor matter in my soul,
No brims nor borders, such as in a bowl.
We see. My essence was capacity,
That felt all things;
The thought that springs
Therefrom’s itself.

...

*Q1: I think I pretty well explained my objections to defining mind as a capacity in my response to Utthana, but I'll touch on them again here.

1. Potentiality only makes sense in terms of actuality, and vice versa. Like light and darkness. To define mind as potential is incorrect in the same way it is incorrect to define mind as light.
2. A capacity is unchanging for eternity. You change and develop, but your capacity does not. Therefore, you can't be a capacity.*

I'd say that's why it's phrased as "boundless capacity". It's not capacity for a particular things, but open capacity for all experience - it refuses nothing, it has no restrictions. That way in which Traherne uses the term makes clear it is not an opposite: he does not mean capacity is structured or an object; it has no opposite because it is neither one side nor the other. Still, it was just another attempt for an author to use a novel word to imply something unlimited and without duality. These work for a while, then someone suggests the opposite and that it is limiting whilst the true nature of it all is without limitation. There exists no word that can't be shot down for having an opposite.

POST: Free Will and Predestination: Your Tyranny as Freedom for Others

Really been enjoying your post and comments. Your descriptions of the 'ultimate truth' of things is very clear, and that your world is a combination of your intentions-so-far. But also wondering, practically speaking...

You can choose to shift into the reality where that is already happening in their intent and in the process of unfolding. . . By implication, you can force it to be the case that someone falls in love with you freely, or becomes lucid freely, or commits suicide freely.

How does one choose or force, in your understanding? Is it enough to simply make the choice, is it a case of 'allowing' it because it is already your intention, or is there something more specific to do?

For example, how would you force someone to become lucid?

How do you raise your right hand into the air? If you give the (I think, not quite correct) answer that you tighten and loosen certain muscles, then how do you tighten and loosen those muscles?

I think those who move their arms by "tightening and loosening" are like those who think step-by-step to solve a problem. They are intending through graduation rather than intending the result and allowing.

I think that sometimes we have to give ourselves permission (or allow ourselves) to exercise certain intentions, but I think the intention to act is separate from the permission to intend to act.

Hmm. I've previously been unsure about this "choosing your reality all the time" view, but I think in the end it was just a matter of perspective.

• Where there is greater resistance to a direction, one must more deliberately intend.
• Where there is minimal resistance to a direction, simply deciding is sufficient.
• When there is no resistance to a direction, it is effortless and we are unaware of our creation, because we are simply experiencing our beliefs, manifesting spontaneously.

Because the final one involves no conscious act, as it were, I've shied away from calling it creation, but really it's just terminology. Essentially, all manifestation is a matter of adopting beliefs ("inserting and accepting facts" as I have phrased it) and your experiences will subsequently line up. Deciding and intending are just the experience of overcoming some belief push-back or doubt associated with a goal. The actual appearance of creations, the manifestation itself, is always effortless.

Would you agree?

I think the intention to act is separate from the permission to intend to act.

I guess it could have levels. There can be resistance to performing the act at all (resistance to using your power to achieve an outcome) and then the experience of the intention (resistance to the possibility of the desired outcome).

(Making someone lucid) ...ut to decide that, you need to be aware of what beliefs you are manifesting presently and what options you have instead and what they would feel like...

Yes, this makes sense. Forcing someone to become lucid is actually a matter of allowing yourself to experience then becoming lucid. I guess this doesn't need to be a two-step process necessarily. If you asset a new fact ("my fist will be clenched") you will get immediate feedback if there is a problem ("already clenched!"), just by doing the assertion and while pushing through it. Resistance might be factual ("already done!") or belief-based ("that's not possible!"), but either way if there is a barrier to dissolve or move through, it is revealed.

Yes. As a matter of preference, I would shift the emphasis from: "Where there is greater resistance to a direction, one must more deliberately intend." to Where there is greater resistance to a direction, one must more deliberately intend.

Agreed on the change of emphasis, since it better implies the resistance aspect.

It can turn out, quite suddenly, that someone you never suspected was in love with you or was a serial killer or is a master of divination.

Or, plot twist: all three.

We could view ourselves as "extended persons", expanded across a grid of all possibilities. There is an aspect of you corresponding to every possible situation or configuration. Which configuration you end up looking through as your "viewport" is a matter of intention. (Something like this [POST: Meta-switching realities ].)

Sure, that's a valid perspective. I think the ideas of individuals and realities and minds start getting uprooted if we talk like that and I was wanting to write something that was relatively palatable and useful within the context of individuals, realities, and minds.

And it is just a way of thinking about it - in the same way there is no such thing as a timeline, but it's a handy diagrammatic convenience. Intersubjectivity is the biggest stumbling block to acceptance of the dream-world view - are other people real? are actions which involve them ethical? If I am the active entity, is everyone else "hollow"?

Having some way of visualising an arrangement which allows for multiple perspectives where everyone can still get what they want can be helpful I think? Although none can ever be completely satisfactory.

...

If you 'get out of the way' then things will simply continue in accordance with your intentions-so-far, as encoded in your beliefs, habits and expectations. This is not a special state of affairs, therefore. Except that without interference your less firm intentions might fade and stop influencing events. Attribution of different intentions to different 'levels' is just an arbitrary division in thought. There is only one mind, one structure, one experience.

You can't get out of the way of yourself at the level of mind. You're not in the way to begin with. You are just you doing what you are doing.

Actually, I was using that phrase because the poster above used it. Not interfering to me means... well, see below.

What you're talking about is relaxing, which is not you getting out of the way. It is you doing something different. Effort and relaxation are just modes of manifestation that you do.

I disagree here. Given that we are not talking about the physical here! You can 'cease creating' or 'cease adjusting your creation'. Since what you created was created with persistence - momentum and inertia - it doesn't just disappear. However, doing this leaves you with whatever patterns you've created within yourself so far, perhaps unintentionally (as in, unwittingly). So it's not a return to some special state. Although it may allow you to see where you are more clearly. Effort and relaxation are experiences within mind - they are content. So that's not what I'm talking about. It's more akin to taking a break from splashing the water.

At every moment, you are maintaining the appearance of 'stable' things...

All content is manifested (more generally, all experience is manifested), for sure. And I get where you are coming from now. Along the line of, for instance, I can manifest the property of stability of experience, without being specific as to the content - just as I can manifest time going fast or slow, without adjusting the speed of individual apparent events.

The problem is that ordinarily we think that water has an actual natural way of behaving when we don't interfere... What I'm suggesting is that you see those rules as tentative commitments like external rules of reality.

Actually, water was a bad analogy because it's dynamic, it was that or the 'blanket metaphor'. But there's no thorough analogy really I suppose - - -

So yes, at the ultimate level I agree with you. At the ultimate level (excuse the use of the metaphor) there is no structure or non-structural - it's the "non-material material". It has no natural trajectory, because it is not a thing, and there is no context. I was still talking within our commenter's terms, I suppose. When I was referring to 'not interfering with yourself', I was not so bound up with mental and physical aspects and 'relaxation', but you are right that I was starting from something structural beyond simple 'open awareness' - I was beginning with the existence of the properties of persistence and momentum, although unattached to a particular object, and the notion of a 'held perspective'. Our original commenter was talking about dropping direct manipulation, but was really only dropping down a 'level' - basically identifying with the 'space' in which content appears while not interfering with (i.e. actually continuing to identify with and accept) any patterns that were already in motion. Treating them as special. Then, letting-go further drops you out of those patterns also. A further letting go might rid you of persistence. (Obviously, 'letting go' is a metaphor for a certain intended effect.)

What's interesting is that we can have aspects of creation that are apparently completely invisible to ourselves. Basically, 'facts in the world' that have an influence, but become so accepted that you just don't see them. Simple continuity being one of them?

...

It's never going to be easy. As soon as you start talking about anything other than 'formless awareness', you are talking about manifestation. And each person lives in a manifested world which matches their beliefs, which seem self-evidently true. Whatever you say will seem incorrect in their world, unless they are entertaining doubts. So you try and refer back to some more basic level - ideally just awareness, but then how to communicate that to someone who has thought and experienced only in terms of form, and particular building blocks at that?

So really we do just communicate with ourselves, to improve our own understanding (as ourselves and as other people). In the end, it's just talk, and if people aren't willing to go the distance with direct experimentation or full commitment, they'll just have 'Conceptual Truth' (a coherent thought system) but no corresponding 'Direct Truth'.

Awareness is only a reflective or beholding property of mind. I believe you're simplifying things too far by going for awareness as the common base. The simplest basis that still works adequately is mind, not awareness.

Which just highlights the difficulty with words. Depending on who I'm talking to, the words "consciousness", "awareness", "mind", "larger mind", "higher self" become appropriate - even if not appropriate to me. And the way you used "awareness" just now would be replaced with "attention" or "attending" or "self-awareness/consciousness", again depending. The problem with "mind" is that everyday folk often use that word for "their thoughts and feelings".

TL;DR: There is no universal word for the "common base", and all words imply an object or division when there is none. Although maybe we can just call it... The Common Base. Other traditions call it The Ground of Being, etc.

Yes, ordinary people have an incorrect view of what mind really is. But intuitively calling their attention to their own mind is bull's eye anyway

Yes, this is why in-person dialogue works best. You can detect how they are interpreting, and also refer directly to actual experiences than talking in the abstract.

Awareness is not overtly associated with memory the way mind is. Awareness is not associated with making decisions, volitional activity, the way mind is.

I often end up starting with "awareness" because it has no connotations, relatively speaking, except with "being aware". You can then add in all the other structured goodies. Begin with something like the passive process story of random experience leaving memory in turn affecting experience, and then build up to the "active", shape-changing stuff. Depending on the discussion.

On some abstract level there is ineliminable division. For example, when you assert lack of division, you're separating it from the possibility of division. So you're employing discriminatory, segmenting awareness here.

Well, exactly - I even went too far by using further words. "Not division, not unity" would be more accurate. And even then, that implies it cannot be, which is not correct...

All words have wiggle-room unfortunately. Take "belief". It is common now for people to take "beliefs" to be whatever story they say to themselves and others to make themselves feel better. Hence, "positive thinking" and The Secret. But that's not believing - that's hoping, and self-deception.

Yea, it has a connotation of passivity

Which is perfect, as a starting point.

belief is still a great term that should be used.

Not suggesting it shouldn't be used; just suggesting it needs to be redefined. As you say, understanding the true nature of belief is vital. Both of which highlight something important: communication of truth can rarely happen all at once; we often need to go via a series of half-truth stepping stones to build the bridge from people's initial (mis)understanding.

"Which is perfect, as a starting point"; I don't agree.

That's your lack of imagination. ;-)

Passive experience is the perfect starting point because that's where most people begin: experience leaving traces informing experience, while being unaware of it, assuming their world is "external". You can observe this and gain an understanding of the mechanism. From there, you can understand what reforming the world means: reforming yourself. Of course, that takes a but if courage. Belief is then redefined from "thoughts I have about stuff" to the actual structures which are affecting my experience / defining my world. In short, the memories or "facts" I allow. It's then clear what it means to change your world and how to accomplish this - and why some of the commonly promoted techniques usually do not work.

I agree, but I hope this isn't an excuse to give some seriously substandard ideas to newbies. It's wrong. Some newbies are actually highly seasoned practitioners from past lives and deserve better.

Which is why there is no single approach, and dialogues work best. There's no single best path because that implies a single starting point. As you imply, even getting someone at birth does not mean you can use a general approach!

It's got to be collaborative. And if people won't actually try to assert modifications to their world, if they only want to talk about it - fun though that can be, there's going to be little progress, beyond the benefit of passive absorption of new conceptual frameworks tweaking experience a bit.

What you're doing is assuming everyone is a moron and first start them with a flawed idea. Bad! You're following a model of school education where knowledge is given linearly from simple to more complex, building up and up. That's ineffective and slow.

You're totally wrong. ;-) It's not about people being morons, it's about being clear in your communication and building up from the broad picture - so you don't have to stop halfway and redefine what was meant by words like "belief" and "awareness". It's not slow, it's actually quicker than backtracking. If you're on the same pare, progress is fast because you get straight to the meat of the matter. Spira, meanwhile, doesn't have a model, he simply has a process which points out that you are not the "small self". It seems to work well. He doesn't seem interested in modifying the world after that, so those interested in making further changes must look elsewhere. But he's not selling "powers" or a metaphysics, and is pretty clear he is not personally interested in having a theory or a method. He's good at what he does; he's no good at what he doesn't do. Fair enough. So, give me "the most sublime conception", in your best words.

There are amazing people out there and you give them 1 to start?

I think I was pretty clear that in a dialogue you find your common ground quickly and progress from there? That's the approach of mutual respect. You keep suggesting that I'm suggesting a ground level, one-way broadcast type of thing when I'm not. You're arguing against a point of view that I am not actually advocating.

EDIT: Ah. See, they're not stages I'm describing.

As far as I'm concerned, the quicker we get to the good stuff the better - I'm not interested in being a teacher, I want to acquire additional tools - but we can always learn better ways to communicate the other stuff. I do however like your quote.

[QUOTE]

Here's what Vimalakirti Nirdesa says about this:
Purna replied, "Lord, I am indeed reluctant to go to this good man to inquire about his illness. Why? Lord, I remember one day, when I was teaching the Dharma to some young monks in the great forest, the Licchavi Vimalakirti came there and said to me, 'Reverend Purna, first concentrate yourself, regard the minds of these young bhikshus, and then teach them the Dharma! Do not put rotten food into a jeweled bowl! First understand the inclinations of these monks, and do not confuse priceless sapphires with glass beads!
"'Reverend Purna, without examining the spiritual faculties of living beings, do not presume upon the one-sidedness of their faculties; do not wound those who are without wounds; do not impose a narrow path upon those who aspire to a great path; do not try to pour the great ocean into the hoof-print of an ox; do not try to put Mount Sumeru into a grain of mustard; do not confuse the brilliance of the sun with the light of a glowworm; and do not expose those who admire the roar of a lion to the howl of a jackal!
"'Reverend Purna, all these monks were formerly engaged in the Mahayana but have forgotten the spirit of enlightenment. So do not instruct them in the disciple-vehicle. The disciple-vehicle is not ultimately valid, and you disciples are like men blind from birth, in regard to recognition of the degrees of the spiritual faculties of living beings.'

[END OF QUOTE]

(It does seem to me that you break this rule though - we often seem to reset to talking about The Common Ground as if one of us doesn't get it.)

I have it. In your language what you call "Common Ground" is just a stuck thought.

We are not seriously going to start discussing the phrase "Common Ground" when that phrase came from a discussion about there not being any suitable phrases so might as well just pick one like "Common Ground", are we?

It's not a "stuck thought" for me, although that is a good way to describe it when someone actually has a conception of the 'truth' that they attend to as fact, rather than a pointer to fact.

Is what you're pointing to a phenomenon (an experience)?

No. When experiences are dissolved, it is that-which-isn't-coloured-by-experience-anymore (it's not even "left', strictly speaking).

Potential is that which you know but don't experience... You've been saying "describe experience" like once or twice recently

I should be clear that by "experience" I mean it in its broadest sense. Not sights, sounds, and so on. "Knowing" is included too.

My problem with the "infinite potential" thing is that you can't know infinite potential as such. I can know potential from here, but not infinite potential. As with the "background" thing, to speak is to say too much: it is openness, a lack of limitation.

Non-production means whatever is manifest it manifests only 99.999% and never 100%. And non-destruction means whatever vanishes, it doesn't vanish to 0%, but vanishes to 0.0001%.

Whatever is "destroyed" (or dissolved) never truly vanishes, I agree. Memory, in its broadest sense, always persists. There is always a trace of existence. I disagree with the other, though. Unless you can answer me: What is 0.001% of infinity? Better to say: 100% of what manifests (as knowledge or experience) is manifest. What is not manifest (as knowledge or experience) simply cannot be spoken of.

Oh, I can do it in so many ways.

All good phrasings! Although maybe "God in whole and in part". Excellent.

So, given that intellectual understanding, how does you describe how to absorb it as a belief, and utilise it to change one's world?

My Spin

All is awareness. Awareness is neither form nor formless, it is simply aware. This is what you truly are.

Experiences are patterns arising in awareness. Experiences leave traces (via inertia / memory effect) in awareness. Those traces in-form subsequent experiences, and so on. This process is passive (although the creation of inertia was not necessarily). This is equivalent to the formation of habit and stability; this is equivalent to belief and expectation. These constitute the "facts of your world". To change your experiences, therefore, you must adjust or insert facts. This is equivalent to adopting new beliefs. It is not sufficient to generate thoughts-about these facts, you must viscerally know them to be absolutely true. This is done by "Active Assertion" of those facts; by becoming a world in which they are true. The whole structure of the universe is present right now, enfolded into awareness and directly accessible in the form of your "felt-sense" of the world. This process is greatly assisted by ceasing to identify with the content of experience, adopting a state of complete allowing. Identifying with an aspect of experience is equivalent to "holding on" to that pattern. At a minimum, this will result in resistance to change; at worst it will re-assert the existing pattern and entrench it further.

(Obviously skipping over some steps and detail here.)

Your Spin

Pretty similar, although probably differ in the approach details.

I tend to skip the contemplation and try to go directly for the target by assertion. Hence, say, that Overwriting Yourself exercise. The visceral aspect is important in my approach, because that is aligning your direct-knowing rather than just your thinking-about.

Couple of questions:

• How do you tell when beliefs have shifted? By experiences seeming more in line with your contemplations?
• After that, how do you approach making more direct, manifestation-like changes?

Great, here we go:

If all is awareness, what about the unconscious content that's below the level of awareness?

This is why we need to be careful. Awareness's only property is being aware. However, that doesn't mean everything is perceived as an image, sound, feeling all the time. So called "unconscious content" is with you right now, enfolded as the felt-sense.

If all is awareness, and you describe awareness as a mostly passive process, why do you suddenly talk about fact insertion? What is the non-passive element that allows for something as creative and imaginative as fact insertion? You jump to fact insertion without introducing that element explicitly.

I presented the connection between experience-memory-experience first, because it establishes how habits of experience are formed. Then I move on to inserting facts. In a longer description, I'd have talked more about "intention" and then linked that to modifying the felt-sense or particular components of it. That would be the step between the two. Also explore the difference between creating one-off experiences (single event fact) and creating habits (more general facts), and how even thinking repeatedly about something does establish an element of habit. Of course, the "passive" mode is actually the result of a previous creation, but it can be easier to say "here is the simplest rule of the world" and then "here is how we use that". Because realistically, most people don't want to remove the memory effect, they want to leverage it.

How can facts be inserted? Are facts mental fabrications to begin with? In this case they can be inserted, but also, in this same case facts aren't actually factual because they'd be subjective...

"Fact insertion" is basically the name for fully becoming a particular fact, taking an idea and making it true. It's the difference between thinking-about and directly-being. Of course, we're operating on the assumption that everything (all there is) is subjective. In this sense, fact insertion is really a change of location, from over here (apparent internal) to over there (apparent external) in the long run. Practically speaking, it's the transformation from an idea into the felt-sense, which will subsequently manifest 'over there' depending on the factual details.

If the universe is only a manifest set of coherent facts, this leaves out latent potential (a set of all possible alternative facts) which would then have to be outside the universe? Seems clumsy.

The latent isn't existent until it is conceived of, in this description. Possibilities are infinite, but they're not just sat there in a big list waiting to be read. It can be visualised that way, but there is not a pre-made grid of all possible configurations - unless you go looking for such a thing, perhaps. By "universe" - actually, it's better just to say "world". And world is the set of active facts and also memories. The felt-sense is the world in its entirety - non-local and non-temporal.

If I were to say something similar, I'd say the manifest (which you call 'the universe') and the latent potential are directly present in your own mind. This second half would be important to mention.

I'd go with that, so long as the 'latent potential' isn't seen as pre-made (we could argue this point I guess). I see it more like a creative ability, generative rather than prescriptive. That's how it seems anyway.

To me it sounds like you don't understand the nature of contemplation if you think you can skip it.

In the context of my original comment, I was trying to get at the idea that you don't have to individually uncover and dissolve your beliefs necessarily, if you find you can instead assert a new fact and have it become accepted truth. (If that doesn't work of course, then you have to feel out why.)

Obviously, contemplation is what leads us to be able to say the above in the first place! It's just not necessarily a required component for individual manifestations/whatever.

This in my way of thinking is the second leg of the two legged system: contemplation and meditation. Meditation is precisely adjusting of the facts in my view. Because what I describe as "meditation" is an active, magickal process and not just sitting around like a dead vegetable.

Right. Really I'm just implicitly saying that I'm talking about the second leg, and the first leg was completed 'some time ago' (or you've accepted someone else's conclusions on faith). But with some first leg mixed in - because if there is some dissolving going on while you assert, because if there is resistance and it then fades, you have basically been doing a meditation/dissolving on a limited belief without necessarily deciding to in advance.

Yes, but also by intuition, which you call "felt-sense" which is a very nice term in my view.

Yes. It's basically "knowing".

I contemplate the qualities of will. After a long time of this, I realize that will is always ever-successful in all its ultimate aims....

Right, that was really good. And your notion of "obstacles" is the resistance the felt-sense gives as resistance - contrary facts. Which may or may not be addressed.

In fact contemplation of the nature of the will can be said to dissolve the obstacle of the felt-sense that will is limited in scope and can only legitimately intend a certain narrow class of transformations instead of all conceivable ones.

Yes. One can insert a meta-fact (actually this must happen to some degree) of the notion that "this is a dream-like world and my Will always operates successfully" or somesuch.

Assertion: "It is a fact that facts of the world can be altered simply by assertion!"

Well, I'm so pleased my existence is approved! ;-) Well, the point of this is to have a discussion, to improve all our efforts.

Yes, belief is what dictates what you experience as the world - which includes the thoughts and actions you experience "doing", plus the forms and events which arise in the "environment".

It would be you redefining for others what was meant by the word "belief", right? The thing-in-itself is left untouched of course. They seem to be the same thing, but I like your phrasing. Pointing out a misconception, which changes the idea, or understanding, that the word points to. "Redefining" could be misconstrued as changing the definition without re-pointing to a particular aspect of reality.

I don't want to discard my reasoning ability. I want to leverage it. This is why contemplation is important. Contemplation synchronizes reasoning with experience,

That's fine, nothing against that. I'm all for the intellectual approach. It provides ideas, new avenues, which can all be applied or used as targets. And, y'know, it's all about personal preference too.

"Really I'm just implicitly saying that I'm talking about the second leg, and the first leg was completed 'some time ago' (or you've accepted someone else's conclusions on faith)."
Again this tendency surfaces. It's your tendency to think linearly in a step-by-step fashion...

Here you're off base. In that paragraph, I'm talking about 'making the change'. How you've come to decide to make a certain change, well that's a matter of preference or past contemplation - whatever. Also, assertion highlights any counter-view you might have against your target, so it can be dissolved at that moment, rather than before. It's a matter of preference really.

A lot of these processes run in parallel. Your contemplation may lead or your magickal transformation may be outpacing your contemplation, but these various processes of transformation of mentality run concurrently and non-linearly.

Sure. But it's easier to talk about things one at a time. It's like flying a helicopter: you've got multiple controls, and changing any one setting affects the others, so you're constantly shifting between approaches.

Yes! But I like how you say "felt-sense" because "knowing" is slightly washed out

Yeah, "knowing" has become fairly meaningless. And by "felt-sense" I mean something very specific.

Now, some time ago you were saying potential doesn't actually exist. It's time to remember what you said about the subtle aspect of awareness.

Potential as a 'pre-made path', yes. As a structure it isn't already there. Of course, awareness itself is infinite potential, infinite creativity. So anything could happen, is possible.

Nothing can ever be missing from latent potential such that it'd need to be added later on.

Right. Because awareness could take on absolutely any pattern at any time. I enjoyed your 99.9% computer screen imagery!

... you think decision is an event in time...

The decision is experienced as an event in time; the result or 'inserted fact' is true forever in all directions. "Decision" is just a name I'm giving to adjusting a fact of reality in this case. In effect, it becomes timeless itself because the decision does not persist, only the deciding.

Sure, but you don't have to give an impression, repeatedly, that they actually happen one at a time.

I wouldn't have thought you would have ended up with such an impression.

However, pre-made paths do exist to some small extent as potential. I call those "destinies."

Hmm. Okay, so your idea of "destiny" would in my approach be the inserting of a fact dated for the future ("Next Thursday I will discover a yacht") or just a general ongoing fact of the world ("I am a discoverer of yachts"). In both cases the fact is true now, because it is timeless, even though the corresponding experiences may apparently lie in the future.

"As a structure it isn't already there."
All possible structures exist as all-potential. Potential refers to all cognizables that are cognizable in principle. Since structure is something that we can cognize, yes, it's part of potential.

I still disagree with this. Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but it conjures up for me an image of a whole set of possibilities - options, from which a choice is made. I do not think those options exist prior to us asking for them; they arise 'creatively' and cannot be predicted. That is from experience (apparent). There is no pre-made map of the territory. Am I misunderstanding you?

(Practically speaking, I don't think it makes a difference, so long as their is no apparent limit to the possibilities in effect.)

So they are potential, but also pre-made in a sense, since they are preferentially elevated from other possible experiences that also lie in potential.

Neville Goddard would describe this as setting up a new deterministic path - but one that you could reshape, redetermine, at any point. Deterministic, but not fatalistic.

Oh, yea, they do exist prior to us asking for them.

In what sense do you think they exist prior to asking? (I am not thinking of a coherent and cohesive space.)

It works because all possible assumptions exist in seed form. When you water them with your resolve and attention, they spout.

Clumsy. How did all these "seeds" come to be? It is not required. By starting to act as if something is true, you have implied a fact, created a belief, and that is the seed, the pattern, which shapes ongoing experience. The more interesting question is: How did you get the idea for that particular "something"? Where did that idea come from?

Your final answer is the answer for "potential" too:

Potential is the potential for anything, not specific things. Potential isn't a thing, it's the absence of a thing: the absence of perimeters and limitations.

Potential isn't a set of things as you imagine. It isn't a set of pots, rather, it's a set of all types of curves, shines, volumes, etc. And it's infinite. It isn't things, but all things exist in it as well. But if you just see things in it, that's wrong. Potential that has only things and nothing else is incomplete.

Doesn't sound like a very useful description. In what sense is any of that actually experienced?

Q: For example, you see a cup on the table, but the cup could be somewhere else too, but isn't. And yet this sense that it could be somewhere else but isn't is integral to your perception of the cup relative to everything else. This is near potential, which is very easy to talk about, but most people don't think about it. Far potential is harder. Look at your experience now. You have a sense of tomorrow even though it hasn't happened yet. But there is a felt-sense that tomorrow is "out there", definitely coming. That too is potential. Near potential. Consider what it means for cognition to change. First what is cognition? If you start with something small, like a cup, what is it? What's implied in it? Spacial parameters, colors, sound, taste if you should be crazy enough to bite off its ceramic, a sense of resistance when touched, a history of how it came about, like if it's a ceramic cup, then this implies clay, and clay implies Earth, and so on. These contexts sprawl infinitely. If you follow them up first you navigate all the conventional and easy to understand stuff, but eventually you get into weirdness. For example, because all cognition is optional, we can conclude that the orderly sense we get from time can be replaced by a disorderly one. That's weird. And yet we know what is orderly because we know what is disorderly. Even if you don't experience any disorder for 3 long aeons, you need that knowledge to cognize order. It's like you know what light is because you know what dark is, and vice versa. So if you were in a perfectly dark room for 3 long aeons, you'd be able to cognize it as dark, dark, dark, for 3 long aeons, without the tiniest ray of light anywhere. This is possible because you know about the potential of light. So without light actually being present, just your knowledge of potential shapes the cognition you have. Cognitions are infinite, limitless. They include familiar things and unfamiliar. Orderly and disorderly. Contemplate what infinity means. For one thing, it means if you can conceive of it, it's there, included. And it also means your ability to conceive of things will never match infinity, because you conceive only via near potential, never far. You can see just a little bit beyond the horizon of what's familiar. That's all still near potential. Far potential is unknown, and even that unknown is needed to cognize and give shape to the known.
Edit: I forgot to explain change. Basically cognition is hard to separate into parts, but one arbitrary way we could think of it is as a moment in time. One cognition one moment. So each cognition is a snapshot of the known universe. How can it change? In fact, if it doesn't change, how can this be cognized? If something appears not to change, it means you have to know it can change, and yet it doesn't. This knowing what could be but isn't, is knowledge of potential, which is needed to experience change or constancy.

Interesting description.

Isn't this a subtle form of "belief"? In the sense that, what you have described isn't infinite possibility, so much as possibility implied by current and previous experience".

Cognition and parts: I guess there are no "parts" really, as there are no "moments" or "relationships", fundamentally - but one step up from that, there are relative parts and therefore relative positions, relationships. Without the (apparent) division, there can be no conception of difference, of change.

Going further: without the knowledge of unity, we wouldn't cognize division, but without the knowledge of division we wouldn't cognize unity.

Is unity really the opposite of division? Perhaps. But "unity" still implies an object, with edges. If all division ceases, what remains is not unity. Not-unity.

EDIT: And meant to say, you have described the experience of enfolded possibility, but not indicated how or if you can experience infinite possibility. You are just saying it is so, without evidence.

I think unity implies an opposite and I think it is still a subtle object. How could delineations ever be soften to the extent that objects disappear? It's a bit Zeno.

You can't experience it, but you still know it at all times. It's not obvious because it's the background against which apparent things acquire their meanings.

Right. Infinite possibility just means there is no underlying constraining structure. It is not a set of possibilities, infinite or otherwise - it is an absence of impossibilities, which is different. I don't think divisions turn into unity; they just dissolve as divisions, leaving the background. g'Night!

"Infinite possibility just means there is no underlying constraining structure." That's part of it. It also means infinite capability. Infinite potential has a positive meaning, and not just negative.

But it does matter that we define it in one direction and not an other. We might just say "absolute freedom" and dodge the whole issue. But if we understand "infinite potential" as being creation-to, rather than selection-from, then all is well.

When divisions dissolve background is not something that's left over, and I think you know why not. I hope. I know this point experientially and intellectually.

Haha, I knew when I typed that word that you'd pick up on it. Sloppy terminology from me! The Common Ground. But not "unity". Maybe we need a symbol. Like what Prince did.

You can't create-to something that isn't available for that purpose.

We should keep the levels right here. Actually, I think we wrapped this up previously and I just mis-phrased? My bad. Selection-from the opportunities implied by present experience and creation-to them. I've lost the thread, but I think my original point was that there's not some vast list out there of possible futures that we choose from; however the moment implies possibilities and overall they are not numerical constrained, so our views join up in the end.

The ground is in some sense the mind itself, however the mind isn't like Earth...

Yeah, "The Common Ground" doesn't mean "ground" in the way of "platform" or "earth". As I think we already discussed, it simply fulfils the need to have a phrase that basically doesn't say anything about that-which-cannot-have-anything-said-about-it. Not unity, not division, not this, not that, and yet all this and all that, etc, etc. So long as we understand what each other (doesn't) mean, all is well.

You don't understand what infinity means.

I do. And, effectively, it means the same as being undefined in this case. Infinite degrees of freedom is just freedom.

Nothing is missing or absent from "just freedom."

Quite so. It has no degrees, for degrees are limitation. The word becomes meaningless. (This is fun, but we both know what we mean I think.)

It has all possible degrees and all possible limitations. If it had no limitations -- that would be a limitation. In fact, limitlessness isn't absence of limitations, but your ability to choose your own limitations. And we're choosing them from an infinite pool.

How many sectors in a circle?

Infinity.

How much space in a circle?

As much or as little as you like.

How so?

Well, how big is your chair? If it's tiny, you can put lots of them in that circle. If it's huge, then not even one. If pay most of your attention to what's outside the circle, the circle is not even a dot, it's invisible. If you narrow your attention to what's inside the circle, you may not even be aware of its perimeter, thus again, the circle vanishes.

But that's using "chair" as a unit of measurement, surely.
Space is "uncountable".

If you say space is uncountable, it's like space is prohibiting counting. Space accommodates counting, but it's not restricted to any specific set of counting methods.

Space isn't doing anything (and by this I'm meaning the example of the space within the circle). You can count other things across a distance, but you can't count space itself. I can count the number of wooden metre sticks which bridge the gap between one side of the circle and another - but that's me counting metre sticks, not space. Actually, you can't count the extent of any object. You can only count the number of other objects adjacent to it.

Counting is pretty arbitrary. Since there is no strict requirement for it, you can do it whenever and whatever.

Man, you're one of those free-counters, aren't you! The counting equivalent of those Yosemite boys. We've drifted off topic really; my fault. I think the original point was going to be something along the lines of discussing the process of bringing things into "objectdom", but I've lost the thread now.

Healing:

I'd be interested to hear your take on that. Some people - here - seem to be all about trying to actually interact with "cells" and so on. Others just do a broader intention for the result, rather than trying to engage with the problem in detail. Traditions like Hoʻoponopono treat the outer world as reflections of our inner selves. So if you want to heal a hospital full of mental patients, you sit back in your office and contemplate what aspects of yourself they represent - heal thyself!. Which is a bit more like subjective idealism.

State of Zero
After Simeona's passing in 1992, her former student and administrator Ihaleakala Hew Len, co-authored a book with Joe Vitale called Zero Limits referring to Simeona's hoʻoponopono teachings. Len makes no claim to be a kahuna. In contrast to Simeona's teachings, the book brings the new idea that the main objective of hoʻoponopono is getting to "the state of Zero, where we would have zero limits. No memories. No identity."
To reach this state, which Len called 'Self-I-Dentity', one has to repeat constantly, according to Joe Vitale's interpretation, the mantra, "I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you." It is based on Len's idea of 100% responsibility,taking responsibility for everyone's actions (once again according to Joe Vitale's interpretation), not only for one's own. If one would take complete responsibility for one's life, then everything one sees, hears, tastes, touches, or in any way experiences would be one's responsibility because it is in one's life. The problem would not be with our external reality, it would be with ourselves.
To change our reality, we would have to change ourselves. Total Responsibility, according to Hew Len, advocates that everything exists as a projection from inside the human being. As such, it is similar to the philosophy of solipsism, but differs in that it does not deny the reality of the consciousness of others. Instead, it views all consciousness as part of the whole, so using parts of the idea of holism: any error that a person clears in their own consciousness should be cleared for everyone.
-- Wikipedia. Related book: Zero Limits, Joe Vitale

I've got a couple of things to write up - Problems Solve Themselves and Magick is Memory - but just not had much time to think them through and type 'em out.

Meanwhile I re-read a Philip K Dick short story the other day (I know you love him) and it has a nice metaphor for reality editing (posted it here).

In the story, the main character discovers a punched paper tape loop inside him. Experimenting with adjusting it, he finds that changing the pattern changes his external reality. The punched paper holes are akin to the memory structures of our minds. Tape over the hole (memory of belief) associated with chairs, then they'd not only be uncountable, they would be un-anything.

It's quite a good story for introduction people to the idea: what if editing ourselves edits the world?

...

[QUOTE]

The Buddha said, "Noble sons, a buddha-field of bodhisattvas is a field of living beings. Why so? A bodhisattva embraces a buddha-field to the same extent that he causes the development of living beings. He embraces a buddha-field to the same extent that living beings become disciplined. He embraces a buddha-field to the same extent that, through entrance into a buddha-field, living beings are introduced to the buddha-gnosis. He embraces a buddha-field to the same extent that, through entrance into that buddha-field, living beings increase their holy spiritual faculties. Why so? Noble son, a buddha-field of bodhisattvas springs from the aims of living beings.
"For example, Ratnakara, should one wish to build in empty space, one might go ahead in spite of the fact that it is not possible to build or to adorn anything in empty space. In just the same way, should a bodhisattva, who knows full well that all things are like empty space, wish to build a buddha-field in order to develop living beings, he might go ahead, in spite of the fact that it is not possible to build or to adorn a buddha-field in empty space.

[END OF QUOTE]

Well, it was worth our tail-end discussion after all, then. Yeah, I'm getting bored of agreement. Need to stirs things up again soon. Gonna find me some outrageous beliefs for next time which are completely unsupportable - and yet I shall. All politicians must be Tibetan monks in disguise then. They seem to be able to justify anything - and then justify the opposite a month later. We can be quite good at coming up with justification for what we want to do, for instance, even if the argument for doing it is itself nonsense. Choose an end point, find a path to it. That's basically what politicians do as a job.

Additional thoughts from earlier:

Is the final state of the mage the non-mage, or "magelessness"?

To be completely flexible, we have to let go of all patterns, all content. No structure, no memory (in the sense of habits), no beliefs. Those correspond to resistance. Only when there is no resistance encountered at all to intention or decision or desire will we have reached the ideal state. (We've touched a little on this before earlier in the thread of course.)

However, when we reach that state, of complete effortlessness, there would be no gap between wanting and getting. There would just be having. So does the idea of manifesting or manipulating the world - having power - even mean anything anymore at that stage? It would be a world completely aligned with your desires. There would be no 'magick' to be done. You would simply be receiving, with no asking required.

Being insistent on consistently letting go is not flexibility. That's renunciatory purism. Flexibility is when you let go or not, depending on what's wise. Just my 2c.

I don't mean it in hard-line way. We are free to adopt or dismiss patterns as we wish! I mean it more as the most reduced state, structurally and habitually, the apparent world could become. After a while, the first thing you'd do is re-introduce some structure again.

Thinking that mages manipulate things to get stuff is so materialistic. How about dancing.

Getting stuff is materialistic, having experiences with stuff less so. If we are about the experiences, then we are "dancing with yachts" rather than owning them. And I agree with your "art" comment. Magick should be "play" as well as "purpose".

Well, to the extent we're mired in conventionality our magick will not always be art. For example, if I have a disease I want to heal, that's not art. That's very utilitarian. There is no shame in that because I am not yet resolved to live as a perfect being.

Yes, that's why I said "as well as purpose". Because while there can always be an art aspect, sometimes there's just stuff that needs sorting.

Yes. Sometimes when I agree, I don't say I agree, but I just write a blurb that almost restates the same thing you said in my own words. It just means I agree.

Agreed.

...

Q: Sure, I accept everything you say as being true. But I also happen to believe that our minds and 'forcing' things have little to do with it. An experience is happening. It was happening just fine when we were small and our minds were just starting to develop. Our minds then were not shaping the experience but a result of the experience. Decisions certainly were being made, but not at the level of the mind. I see that as mostly being true even now. I don't see the manifestation you describe as something we can "do". Rather I see it as getting the mind "out of the way" so that it does not "interfere" with our "greater intent". That is "alignment". Anyway, when you talk motivations and manifestations, it is important to keep in mind what purpose and context they serve. That will define the boundaries and limitations.

Are you referring to "God's Will" here?

What is the nature of our "greater intent"? Is it some pre-birth intention by which we set ourselves in motion, but do not recall?

In that case, any direct interference we indulge in now would mean pushing against our own chosen purpose, our original desire. Instead of "asking" mode, we should rest in "receive" mode.

Q: I believe we grow in two phases. the first is to expand our imagination (everything is imagination) and the second phase is to turn that expansion into a stable reality experience. This cycle repeats forever, or as long as the desire for "experience" remains. We have intent, everything we are a part of has intent, existence has intent. The question is which intent are we trying to fulfill? Are we being who we are, or who our environment wants us to be? Both are valid types of experiences.

And, on intent, are we free to intend absolutely anything - both aligned with our selves or not - and those intentions have equal power?

In the context of "all realities exist" power would be the ability to to bring about a specific reality experience - reality selection.

Yes. So the question would be, is there something special about our original state/path, or are we free to change ourselves (beliefs) as we like, and adopt any path. Do we have a "destiny" at all, other than the intentions or end-points we set for ourselves?

what we "claim" are beliefs are also thought patterns that arise

Well, I agree with this - the word "belief" gets somewhat misused, perhaps. I see beliefs as the way you mind is structured at that moment. Thoughts that arise and events that occur will tend to be in alignment with those "beliefs" (structurings of mind). I see these structures as a feedback loop. Experiences arise (events and thoughts) which leave traces which in turn seed experiences, on forever and stabilising. Unless we use intention to change this, either indirectly (choosing experiences or creating thoughts which leave traces, changing your world gradually) or directly (amending the traces themselves, changing your world dramatically as a one-off event or a new general rule).

Often people talk of one's "True Nature" as a special thing. Are we born with a base structure that gets polluted over time? Or is there really no such base structure? The idea that we can adjust our beliefs suggests we can do anything. Although... we do have a base structure of "being a human, from these parents and in this environment".

The things we want to "learn" are desires we have that conflict directly with this resistance. The learning process is not about the achievement of a goal but in overcoming resistance.

That's a nice way to think of it. I am fond of the idea that desires are just parts of our nature that we have a resistance against, and so are not yet manifest in our experience. (Nobody ever had a desire for something they were already experiencing...)

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Don't confuse manifestations as existing separately.

Hmm, I don't. I say "in whole and in part" because, like it or not, we might be the whole, but we also simultaneously experience (the illusion of) being a part of the whole. That's why constantly telling people "they are God" doesn't help them very much. "Great! I accept it! But how come I'm still little me?"

Yes, all there is is mind, and all appears within it, with no fundamental division or separation. And you can directly experience this. But most people don't, and wouldn't see how to, because in experience it seems obvious we are separate, until we investigate it in a certain way or make the change deliberately.

To be honest, I don't think we have much to reveal to each other in terms of "the basic understanding", only wording - how we phrase things among ourselves, and how we explain it to others. But it's pretty apparent that this leads us to the "two truths", where using one view in a discussion based on the other is like saying something that is true but sounds false, or vice versa. I kinda hoped to uncover a way to join the two.

EDIT: The context of that discussion was about the wording, rather than the understanding, in other words.

Lots to explore in terms of what that means for life, in meaning and practice though. Hence "practical" exercises are something I'm keen on. I'm coming to think that the "right wording" is often the phrasing that leaves something out or doesn't quite line up - thereby revealing a gap through which the plummet into the abyss is revealed. So to speak!

Logical structures are castles in the sky, perhaps: they consist of organised pathways we can wander round, seeking to understand the basis of reality, but you actually have to jump off the track to experience the true underlying. To lead someone to understanding, you might have to give them a nudge, or place them on a path that goes nowhere, terminating in mid-air...

A good example is the whole "objects are transparent" insight - that sights and sounds float in awareness, but also are awareness, which means they aren't really any-thing. In words, each description misleads and excludes the other - only by leading to the gap between descriptions, to the experience it points to, can the meaning be truly grasped. (i.e. The meaning must be experienced, known directly, rather than thought-about.)

You're not wrong, and I suspect this has been known for a very long time. It seems to be the basic principle behind the koan, or the finger-and-the-moon, and there's even the likes of this as far back as the Vedas.

Agreed. That's the origin of the "two truths", etc, I think. I

It's only when you try to work around the language yourself that it becomes clear how potentially insurmountable it is. You can "feel-know" it and its complete simplicity, but you can't tell anyone who doesn't already know... because it won't make logical sense and they'll just think about it.

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I like the idea of a package word. I view it ("you") as problematic in that it implies a 'perimeter' which does not actually exist - but all words do this, whether spatially (nouns) or temporally (verbs).

POST: Thinking again about the concept of "Lucidity".

[POST]

I think i have come to a point where i am no longer interested in philosophical and logical debates between idealism versus materialism. This is mainly because i don't think this debate will ever end, and me pontificating upon it is nothing more than a samsaric oroboric cycle. The capacity for the imagination is infinite, and i realized the idea of trying to achieve lucidity by disproving materialism by argument is a waste of time. This is because no matter how good or solid an argument i cant make, the materialist can always dive into his imagination and counter it, and i can counter whatever the materialist throws at me, because of the depths of imagination.
I dont mean to sound egotistical here, but besides all the philosophical back and forths, i think what really makes me a subjective idealist or makes me feel lucid is just seeing existence from a different vantage point. In other words lucidity is a certain awareness of awareness that i don't think everybody has yet or ever will. I mean say i was in a non lucid dream arguing with a dream character about whether or not this was or was not a dream. We could argue endlessly about it, and i could convince the dream character he is wrong, but i have realized having a solid philosophical framework for subjective idealism is not enough to achieve lucidity. Lucidity is a direct intuitive knowing of the dreamlike nature of things, an actual sense of perception and not just a convincing theory. I'm certain now that the reason you cant convince most materialists is not just because they have a bias reinforced by eloquent mental gymnastics, they simply lack this type of perception. Trying to describe the non material nature of consciousness to a materialist is like trying to describe the nature of orangeness to a colorblind person. They just cant see it or feel it. And this is not simply wishful thinking in the sense that it feels good to think of the universe as a dream or a kind of faith, its just being a fish who has seen dry land and trying to explain it to other fish that haven't been above the surface. Language isn't adequate, experience is the key, just like you cant know what its like to trip on a hallucinogen by reading about it, you have to actually do it.
Its getting over that seduction of the drug "being right and the other person being wrong" that western civilization tantalizes with us. I've also come to realize subjective idealism creates a very different kind of epistemology. Rather than materialist living in an idealistic universe delusional thinking materialism is true, instead materialists live in a materialist dream within a deeper dreamlike universe, and there is technically nothing wrong about that in that it is just one part of the geography of the ideaverse, we have just become lucid and are trying to escape it, creating our own dream worlds rather then being stuck in someone else s.

[END OF POST]

Your point on the infinite depth of imagination and its connection to this is great. If our thoughts and our world are one and the same, and our world works according to something like this:

Make a decision that something is true, go looking for evidence that it is true, and you will discover that it is true (for you)
-- TriumphantGeorge

Well, then there is nothing to be done. Until a materialist decides and commits to becoming - or exploring being - an idealist, to having an idealist experience, then he will remain a materialist. His world will back him up with the corresponding materialist experiences and thoughts and logical reasoning. It is not really possible to describe the nature of idealist reality in anything but quite imprecise metaphors, and those metaphors are only meaningful if you have had the direct experience. Unfortunately, having the direct experience requires a prior commitment to it, a commitment that logic alone cannot induce - so it's circular. Hence the idea of providing exercises and thought experiments that are experiential rather than logical - just-deciding, switching off your senses, overwriting yourself, and so on. It's a way to short circuit all that thinking-about.