TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 7)

POST: Tell me your two-glass approach success stories, please.

Well, as you've probably noticed by now, the whole world seems to be able to fit inside your mind quite happily, so as long as the thing isn't bigger than the whole world, you're probably okay! ;-)

Or being even more to the point: all outcomes take the form of multi-sensory experiences in our perception, and no moment of experience is bigger than any other moment. Meanwhile, the "space" in which those experiences arise doesn't seem to have any edges, and therefore doesn't seem to have any "size". In other words, although a change might seem to be big from the viewpoint of content and its meaning, from the "meta" perspective of context it doesn't matter. No TV image is bigger than any other, and switching channels doesn't become more difficult just because the programmes on each are different genres. I wonder whether it would be useful to contemplate exactly what makes one thing "big" and another thing "small"?

I think it's definitely helpful to spend some time contemplating different "underlying formats" that experience could take, since they all imply different possibilities and probabilities (while still fitting in with your current sensory moment). That's where the notion of "active metaphors" comes in (see sidebar).

POST: Altering your reality questions/thoughts

For instance when I jump I take into account how my intended reality has imprinted on all possible observers.

So, to be clear maybe: Are you suggesting that you having the idea of there being other observers might make it difficult, because we conceive of some things as being "shared facts" rather than "personal facts", and imagine that this makes them harder to change? Or are you suggesting that there actually are other observers whose participation in the world makes it difficult?

The supporting question to ponder would be: Have you ever witnessed anything that wasn't your own observation, including the experience of seeing apparent other observers? Do we have any evidence that having the experience of perceiving "other people" can limit us in other aspects of our experience?

It's quite a common thing, the idea that we are in a consensual reality, a "shared place" where we all contribute to the overall set of facts. Can we be sure, though, that this isn't just something that our experience behaves "as if" it is true, because it's an idea we hold on to firmly (perhaps worried that the alternative is to let go of the notion of "other people" altogether)?

(Note: I'm answering this without having read the other replies - and I'm taking a slightly different angle than I might usually, to offer an alternative approach, which might seem a little oblique at first. Let's see where it leads. Added headings to make it clearer. Ran out of time for proof-reading, so apologies in advance.)

Other People Problem

The hardest thing I've come to terms with 'shifting reality' is how do the other people fit in?

It pretty much is the hardest thing, I think, but perhaps not for the reasons you suggest. Your language still, in effect, assumes the world to be a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" as your starting point. The best starting point is probably to recognise the nature of our direct experience. Exercises such as the one described in this comment can help. That is what it is fundamentally true. Loosely, you are "that which is aware and takes on the shape of states and experiences". However, by experiences we mean "sensations, perceptions and thoughts", we don't mean that there is a world all laid out in space going on and on; rather, the world is more "dimensionlessly dissolved within you". So, that is what is fundamentally true. What you truly are, cannot be described in words, because it is "before" division and change and other formatting structures, but it is "aware" and it is what becomes other things. For convenience, we might described it as an "open aware space" which has no boundary.

Now, we move onto what we're currently engaged in: trying to reach an understanding, by describing things in worlds and thoughts. But we have to realise that all our thoughts about the world and ourselves are also within that "open aware space". The world is already a structure in awareness, any thoughts we have about the world are parallel structures. What we are is what everything is made from, so any thoughts about that are it but cannot describe it.

The Beach

A metaphor I quite like is of making sandcastles on an infinite beach. If one sandcastle is the world, as a pre-existing sandcastle, then trying to think about the world is to make a parallel sandcastle which is superficially similar in certain respects, but is not it. Then, thinking about the nature of the world and self is like trying to build a sandcastle which accurately represents both "the beach" and "sand. It cannot be done! However, ironically, the failed representation is both "the beach" and "sand". In this metaphor, your true nature is the beach. Now, in that model, where is the "external world"? It only exists as a constructed sandcastle. It might be a self-consistent sandcastle, but no matter how intricate and convincingly detailed that sandcastle is, it never represents the actual reality of the beach and of sand. One can only be beach/sand, once cannot think it nor can one observe it.

So, summarising: what we truly seem to be - by direct observation - is an "open aware unbounded space" within which experiences arise as "sensations, perceptions and thoughts". The world, then, is like a strand of experience, like a thought you are having, albeit a very bright, stable and 3D-immersive one. Thoughts about the world are parallel, and do not actually describe the world or the nature of experience. They are, in effect, separate worlds of their own.

All in the Mind

So are you implying that essentially the world we live in is actually all in our minds and that you, in fact, do not exist in my world?

It is not your mind; it is simply "mind". Mind taking on the shape of a particular state or world-pattern, hence taking on the shape of an experience. This means that "you", fundamentally speaking, aren't actually a person. You are just taking on a "person-shaped experience" at this moment - you are adopting the perceptive of an apparent person, but that includes taking on the shape of all other apparent people too. A bit like selecting frames from a stack of all possible movie frames. However, this sounds a bit "dead", but actually the entire thing is alive with the aliveness that is you; it's just not a personal aliveness because it comes "before" the experience of people. That aliveness is unbounded awareness, and since that is "before" division and change, there is only one awareness (which right now is taking on the shape of an experience of being-a-person-in-a-world). "Reality" in this view is static and eternal, the only thing that shifts is awareness itself as it adopts new shapes for experiences, from the field of all possible simultaneously-existing experiences.

But the table must physically exist, right?

What does that mean, though? What does it mean for something to be "physical"? Refer to what you are actually experiencing, rather than what you are thinking about the experience (because there are many different ways to do that). The table might be said to exist, but only in the sense that it is a "fact" or "pattern" that is persisting. It has no solidity other than that. (The feeling of solidity is just a sensation floating unmoored in awareness.)

Limited to Speculation

ultimately we can only ever speculate and form theories and metaphors to explain this universe.

It's not even that, though. It's that the truth of the matter is that the nature of things is "before" theories and metaphors. Our metaphors are just parallel constructions. You never get to a deep understanding through thought, because thought itself is "made from" the thing you are trying to understand. Only by considering the nature of your thinking and experiencing, can you realise how things actually are. It's like an extra "meta-level" that comes before everything else. Fundamental truth with everything else just being relative, self-referencing truth.

do you think that, including our perception, every other physical object in this universe is all in our heads?

Well, not in our "heads", because our "heads" are within our experiencing. But everything is within our awareness, sort of dissolved within it, I'd say, like a list of facts or patterns (fact-patterns). That is just a metaphor though, of course.

The Possibility of Limitations

Do you believe that all limitations are in our mind when it comes to shifting reality?

There's no underlying structure supporting our experience so - yes, in effect. Although there is no solid underlying substrate to experience, there is obviously structure to it - it is patterned. So changing your experience involves shifting the relative intensities of those fact-patterns. Since those fact-patterns are made from you-as-awareness, the only way to do that is to shift shape - that is, to shift our state or "jump dimensions" in the main metaphor. How do we do this? The only way is intention. Between intentions, we are merely experiencing the unfolding of a deterministic path inherent in our current state. If we want to change it, we must change the relative intensity of (that is, "intend") a pattern (the "intention"). There is no other power.

If I was truly devoid of any and all limitations, to the point that I was "barely human" and that I knew...

Well, your "human" aspect is part of the patterning of your current experience. You are not a human, fundamentally, but you are having a being-a-human experience. So long as you don't dissolve that patterning, then you will continue to have that perspective even as the world itself apparently changes. (Note also: people tend to worry that their "humanity" is what makes them good and moral, and that if they lost that they would become evil. Actually, the pattern is overlaid on top of awareness, and awareness is fundamentally a sort of good aliveness. Hence all the stuff about the universe being "love" and all that.)

...could I live in a fantasy world, the same way I am living now? It's bordering on psychosis at this point.

You already are living as a person in a fantasy world. To change to another fantasy world involves, essentially, changing the patterning of your current experience. Adopting a formatting or an active metaphor, one might conceive of this as switching from one 3D-immersive strand of thought about a world, to another one.

Summary

• Fundamentally, what you truly are is an "open awareness" whose only inherent property is being-aware, which has taken on the shape of a particular state and experience.
• You can directly experience this to be true. It is the only thing that is certain and fundamentally true.
• Your current experience is of being-a-person-in-a-world. Or more strictly speaking, being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.
• The world is not a "spatially-extended place unfolding in time", although we might have experiences "as if" that were true. It is perhaps best described as a "world-pattern" which consists of a relative distribution of intensities of facts. These are relatively true.
• This "world-pattern" can be updated via intention. Only experimentation can prove this to yourself.
• The "world" overall might be better considered as a shared resource of possible experiential patterns rather than a shared place.
• There are other people, but they are part of the world-pattern. The person you are experiencing is also part of the world-pattern. The only intelligence or awareness is the one you are right now, taking on the shape of apparently being one of those people, but in effect being all of them.

To kick off, I absolutely agree that this is a difficult area to discuss. Basically, it just doesn't fit into language very well; we always end up circling the topic, pointing at it. As soon as you think or talk about it, you are in fact thinking or talking about something else - but as it. See the sandcastle metaphor, with its castles on and as "the beach" and also "sand", for example.

EDIT: This turned out to be a bit long, so I've divided it into two blocks. It meanders a little, but it means well. ;-)

PART ONE: Awareness & People

I realise that the only awareness you can prove the existence of is your own - but does it follow that the other people you experience in the world lack awareness?

The thing is, though, it's not your awareness. It's just "awareness", which is taking on the shape of an experience, the experience of being a person in a world, "as if" it were a person. So the awareness doesn't belong to the person; it's better to say that the "idea" of all people is within awareness - the "idea of a world" - and at this moment it has taken on, or unfolded, the sensory aspect of one part of that idea. So it wouldn't be that other people lack awareness; even you-as-person lacks awareness and is just a pattern. The only awareness, the only intelligence and causal agent, is you-as-awareness. If the content of experience shifted and took on the shape of some other person's perspective, it would still be the same you-as-awareness, but experiencing the sensory content from a different you-as-person perspective. At all times, though, you-as-awareness is in a state which corresponds to the implied pattern of the whole world, all people, laid out over all time, deterministically (until a shift occurs via intention, that is).

Are you saying that we merely can't prove other people have awareness or are you saying that we can be definitively certain that the only awareness in the world is our own...

I'm saying that the suggestion that any person "has awareness" is effectively meaningless - and that includes the person you are having an experience of being right now. Directly attending to your actual experience right now, you can observe immediately that "you" are everywhere, the entire experience is made from "you", that you are "awareness" - and that "you" have no edges and no outside. Furthermore, any thoughts you have about being a person or there being an outside also arise within that awareness, and that the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world is effectively a strand of thought too. In other words, it turns out that you have to take a step back from content, and contemplate the context of that content. It turns out that one must reconsider what "you" are, and what "people" and "other people" are. In particular, we must note that there is no perspective other than a 1st-person perspective. As soon as we starting thinking about things from a 3rd-person perspective - employing a "view from nowhere" - then we are immediately wrong.

Additionally, all thoughts about experience are themselves experience. When we think about "the world", that is in effect another world, and not the world of our main experience. We confuse our thinking about the world with our thinking of the world.

...and that the capacity to alter the world/other people through consciously intending changes in the pattern proves/indicates this? Which would make you, from my perspective, a sort of automaton?

Better to say "a pattern laid out in time" or something like that. This is just because "automation", to me, implies a sort of programmed "happening", whereas it's probably better to use the metaphor of a landscape of 3D-immersive snapshots that is laid out before us, and which we traverse with out attention, moment by moment. The only thing "happening" is awareness unfolding moments in and out of sensory form, and even that can be viewed as static, since we can conceive of "time passing" as a static pattern overlaid just as any other.

It's an uncomfortable notion for me, not that that precludes it from being true, obviously. But it does seem to make things seem sadder and less... consequential.

It's a common feeling. One interpretation of quantum physics, called QBism, returns to the notion of a subjective perspective. The implications of this are clear: that the subjective perspective in effect has a "private copy" of the world, and our experiences are in effect a traversal of memories not bound to an independent notion of time.

Excerpt:

"But could the problem of the Now lie in relating the present moments of several different people? When you and I are communicating face-to-face I cannot imagine that a live encounter for me could be only a memory for you, or vice versa. When two people are together at an event, if the event is Now for one of them, then it is Now for both. Although this is only an inference for each person, I take it to be as fundamental a feature of two perceiving subjects as the Now is for a single subject."
--- N David Mermin, Nature, 26 March 2014

The author chooses to believe that a so-called live encounter involves the overlap of two conscious frames, and at the same time. There is no reason to do so in the theory, except that he finds it preferable. Why would he prefer to do this?

Because abstract ideas are cold and lonely - whereas the direct experience of such an open, single awareness is vibrant and alive and pleasant. As we cease to grasp onto our apparent individuality as a "person", and by extension our status as an independent entity amongst many separate entities, our attention opens out. Instead of feeling like a Lonely God, we know that we are all people and the entire world, because we are the one and only awareness, which has taken on the shape or state of all of that. The release from this sense of separation - which is what "other people" implies - turns out to not involve being "one" thing at all, but rather no-things because "one thing with no edges" isn't one thing or any thing at all; it is "before" division and multiplicity and change.

So, looping back for a moment -

How to approach this is to consider that there is awareness or being-aware and that is what you are, but that have taken on the shape of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person. And the way to make this meaningful, is to pause and investigate your direct experience right now. Finally, we note that the only thing that is fundamentally true is that which never changes; anything that apparently changes is content, the only thing that persists throughout is the context, and that is what you are.

The person you think you are, and other people, can be said to be that, but it is more understandable to say that there is that, and then that patterns itself "as if" there were such things as people.

(Continues)

PART TWO: Intention & Mechanism

The nature of intending and how, exactly, you do that.

This is a really difficult topic, because it goes right to the heart of what we are, and the problems in describing that. Inherently, "intending" involves no mechanism, no division or parts, and hence no cause and effect; there is no action involved and therefore no technique. Which starts to sound uselessly mystical very quickly. I still think we can describe it with metaphors - however practically speaking, as with the recognition of the nature of experiencing, we can only really be it. Describing it in words never leads to the thing itself, although ironically it is the thing itself. One possible approach: If "awareness" is "being", perhaps "intending" could be best described as "becoming".

thoughts cannot alter the thing we're trying to understand any more than they can describe it.

Right. Because thoughts themselves are an effect; they are not a cause. If you deliberately think of something right now - how did you produce that thought? You just "did". Meanwhile, if you think the thought "move my arm" and then you experience your arm moving, the thought did not cause the movement; rather, you intended something and the pattern you intended was both the thought and the movement. The content of experience is always a result; it is the intention that is the only cause. But what is an intention? Well really, it is not one thing, any more than there is such a thing as a "movement" independent of there being a specific movement. Also, a movement is moving, it is the change in arrangement. So there isn't a "we" who causes a "movement" - rather, a change in arrangement occurs, and in language we say that "we" caused a "movement".

Thus, you can't just think to yourself, if you're white and you want to experience being a black person "I want to be a black person" and have it happen.

If you merely create the thought "I want to be a black person", then you've just summoned a set of words and perhaps some extended imagery into prominence. You have not thought change into the world, as the world. You have created a sort of parallel strand. (The Two Glasses approach is designed to avoid this - more later.)

However, there is an extra element to that - that is, because you are awareness, when you deliberately intensify any pattern by thinking it, then you'll likely see it overlaid upon subsequent experience to some extent. If you simply think "an owl" then you get a general overlay of owls incorporated into your existing landscape, with its extended pattern "shining through" wherever there is a plausible gap for it to do so. The implicit intention is "the owl pattern will become more dominant in my experience". What makes the difference between this sort of general patterning - which leads to synchronicity but not to what we'd usually call results - is to include spatial and temporal context, and to specifically include within the intention that this pattern applies to "the world". Sometimes this is explicit, sometimes implicit. It is enough that you simply know what you mean; there is no extra thing that needs to be done.

Note: I tend to use the word "intending" to mean the act of intensifying a particular pattern, and "the intention" to refer to the pattern being intensified. This means that, loosely speaking, an intention can always be described in the from "it is true now that ____", because all intending occurs now, regardless of the sensory moment being experienced. The entire state of the world is present here, now, all time and space, and every intention is a pattern overlaid upon the entire world-pattern, a shifting of the whole state. "Experience is apparently local; intention is actively global." Phrasing things in that form can help us be clear about what is happening: "It is true now that owls will dominate my experience from this moment onwards"; "It is true now that I will succeed at the meeting in November"; "It is true now that name-of-world-fact is new-value-of-world-fact"; and so on.

So to successfully intend something you'd need to access (back to the metaphor) the loom in order to change the pattern. And the loom isn't thought, it's the fundamental truth that "pre-dates" thought.

Yes, you might say that the loom is "before" thought, but you don't need to access it as such, because you are it. It is perhaps better to dispense with the "loom" metaphor, and say that all there is, is the material, and the material has the property of being able to fold itself under its own power. So, no fold in the blanket of material ever causes the appearance of another fold; it is the material itself which reshapes itself as the folds. It may do so in a way that produces a pattern whereby there is a "thought-shaped fold" and then an "event-shaped fold" side by side, but the first did not cause the second - that is an illusion brought about by our viewing one fold and then the other, and by our ignorance of our own nature.

Would it be fair to say that techniques like Two Glasses are intended as stepping stones or bridges between thought and the "fundamental truth" which creates the pattern you are experiencing?

The Two Glasses, specifically, misdirects you into doing something mundane while distracting you from what you have associated with it. Earlier, I mentioned the difference between thinking a thought about the world, in parallel, and thinking the world itself. The Two Glasses basically has you link two patterns to the glasses, and then uses our everyday intuitions about levels to diminish the intensity of contribution of one pattern, in favour of another. The reason the instructions indicate that you should use a single word, is that this forces the person to "feel out" for a word that best captures the sense of that situation - and this leads to them to actually connect with that pattern, having the word arise from that pattern, giving you a "handle" onto it which then becomes associated with the water level in the glass. The pouring of the water from one glass to the other (rather than just emptying one glass and then filling the other separately), leads to a transformation of state rather than simply a disconnected change in levels.

If you simply write a description on the labels without doing then, then you tend to get a more general patterning effect, as with the "owls". You have not really connected your situations to the exercise. Now, often the results can be the same, in cases where you (I dunno) just want to see more red cars and less blue, or something - but if you do that, you are working more at the level of pattern overlays rather than world-pattern adjustment.

Aside: One should really view awareness as containing all possible patterns, all possible facts. All patterns are pre-existing and are always contributing to experience to some extent - just at different relative intensities. In other words, all facts are true all the time, and all that changes is "how true" they are at any moment. Intending is the way we change the relative truth of different fact-patterns. Your current state, and hence world-pattern, is the result of all your intentions up until this moment.

Is there a clearer way to express "intending" and how it's achieved?

Well, I've had a go at it! :-)

Also, just feel I should mention that I enjoy your posts a great deal. It's a profound and fun topic to kick around - but god it's a frustrating one too, and you seem to have endless patience with johnny-come-lateleys to the subject.

Thanks. Yeah, I think it's a lot of fun to explore. Everyone's a johnny-come-lateley at some point, and every time we have a conversation about this stuff, it's always a little bit different, because everyone's coming to it from a slightly different history - new metaphors or ideas emerge - so I like to engage when I've got time. It's not like I've got the best and final description, after all; this is just me experimenting with how to formulate the same old thing in a modern way that makes sense to me.

(I do aim to write all this up as a proper essay post at some point soon, in a structure that builds up piece by piece, but for now let me continue along this thread.)

Meaning

So, most of these questions are actually "meaningless". I don't mean that in a dismissive way - the sense in which they are "meaningless" is in the same sense that it is meaningless to ask how many corners a circle has, or what colour "length" is, or what the radius of infinity might be. Another way of saying this, is that there are numerous "castles in the sky": self-consistent pieces of architecture with unique layouts. Many of these questions are like asking navigational information for one castle, based on the blueprints of another. In order to answer the question, you have to take a step back and look at the context of the question and not just its content.

Which is exactly how we have to proceed when it comes to understanding "dimensional jumping" and the overall understanding that it leads to. We find ourselves dealing with situations where it's not a case of not knowing something, and it's not a case of there being something but we can never know it; it's more like there is no "something" to know or not know. It is logically excluded from the architecture of the "castle" you are actually living in, versus the floor plan you have been looking at.

Solipsism

Let us take "solipsism" as an example. There are many definitions, but let's go with this one: "my experience is the only experience that is happening".

To make sense of this statement, we are going to look closely at what we mean by the terms "my", "experience" and "happening". If we were to discover that the statement is in fact presupposing entities or occurrences which we can not actually find in our experience, we would have to reconsider the meaning of our position - for example, if it turned out that "I" didn't have experiences at all, because I couldn't find an "I". Taking this further, when I examined what I truly meant by "experience", I might find that it is not as I had assumed - perhaps even to the extent that talking about "other people" was nonsensical from a fundamental perspective, because there were no people, at least in the way I had originally conceived of them.

More specifically relevant to your questions, though, is the idea of there being multiple experiences, and those experiences overlapping with one another. Now, we can think about this - but we immediately have a problem when we do that. Which is, that thinking about something inherently requires experience to have already been divided. If we then look at the "thought about experiencing" and assume that it has similar properties to actual experiencing, we will lead ourselves astray - because the properties of a thought are not the properties of experiencing, which "takes on the shape of" thought by dividing itself, but is not itself inherently divided. So, when we are talking about "multiple experiences happening and overlapping", we are looking at the content of thought when we need to be looking at the context or source of thought, to understand the true situation.

Exercises

There are two little exercises I can think of which might help with this. They are intended to generate an experience, an answer you feel-know rather than a verbal description:

1. "The End of the World"

Imagine a sphere floating in front of you. Now, contemplate the idea of being the surface of that sphere. When you first imagined the sphere, it was from a "view from nowhere". When you switched perspective, that first view would make no sense within the logic of "being the surface of a where". The surface of the sphere would not be able to think about its own context as a ball within a larger space. However, the "experiencing awareness" in the first instance is identical to that in the second - it has merely taken on the shape of a different perspective. Currently, now, you might consider yourself as having taken on the shape of the experience "being the surface of the sphere". Someone starts talking to you about what it is like to take on the shape of "viewing the sphere from space". You cannot understand it. You keep asking what the curvature of that space is, and how you get there, and so on, trying to understand your surface in terms of that space. However, this cannot be done. There is no curvature, and there is no way to get there via an action as the surface. Only by shifting and becoming the other view, can you comprehend it - and this must be done directly.

2. "The Place You Are Looking Out From"

You are currently looking at these words on this screen. Your attention is on this screen. Now, pause for a moment, and also direct your attention to the "place you are looking out from"; the direction that is opposite to the direction the screen is in. What do you find there? What does this mean in terms of the rest of the experience you are having right now? Does this have implications for the content of experience versus the context of experience?

Answers

I realise I'm not answering your questions directly, but hopefully you can see that: a) this is not really possible, because the answer is actually an experience rather than a verbal description; b) the process of looking for the answer is how you get the experience, so there's not much point in me just trying to say it. Make sense? Once the experience is shared, of course, then we are talking from the same understanding, and the same words take on a different meaning (and sound less obscure and koan-like). Can maybe go through the actual questions next time.

POST: Dimension jumping in the hands of the wrong people

The standard answer to this is that, in effect, everybody has a "private copy" of the world. There are no other people who can intend an experience for you - all experiences are explicitly or implicitly the outcome of intensions by yourself, deliberately or not. This doesn't not mean that you have specifically chosen everything that has happened to you; rather, it suggests that your experience consists of the patterns you have intensified, knowingly or unknowingly, plus their logical extensions. If, for the sake of argument, there were other people who could intend bad things as a part of your expeirence, surely you could solve this easily, by intending that they weren't bad anymore?

Firstly, just to emphasise generally (although you do pick up on this):

None of the things discussed in this subreddit should be just believed. There's no specific worldview that's being pushed, even - except the "meta" worldview that no thoughts-about the world capture the world-as-it-is. Everything else is up for debate. (For example: I, personally, don't really "believe" anything fundamentally, in principle, other than my own direct experience. Descriptions are useful, but they are parallel to the main experience. And so on.)

The idea, then, is that you put aside any assumptions you might have, pay attention to your direct experience as it is, contemplate it a bit more deeply than normal, draw your own conclusions. It's an exploration of "the nature of experiencing", albeit hopefully with some happy side-effects. But the getting of what you want isn't really the main purpose; it's more about the getting of why there was the experience of getting. But it always comes down to this, to reiterate:

• Never "trust" anyone in these matters, but don't "distrust" either; be a skeptic in the true sense. Take inspiration from others' ideas, then check them out for yourself. And if something doesn't work or make sense after you've given it a go, you put it aside. Or equally just don't bother in the first place, if it doesn't seem interesting or worthwhile; that's fine too. (Just don't draw any conclusion one way or the other based on not trying.)

I'm repeating that because the only way someone can cross the line between just fantasising about some concepts and actually experiencing something, is to actually do some experimenting. As I said earlier, concepts are just "parallel constructions" that give us a framework to think in - and that applies to both your everyday notion of the world and these alternative frameworks. They are not "true", the only thing that is "true" is direct experience. If you confirm things for yourself, though, you don't need to worry about that.

Let me say this, though: I am completely sincere about this topic and I wouldn't waste my time in discussions if I didn't feel others might find it interesting and beneficial too. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the language can start to get a bit abstract sometimes, especially at those times when the topic is based on an idea or observation that isn't being explicitly stated. The phrases get all "mystical" without any apparent grounding. And sometimes we're just pushing a philosophical line of inquiry to see where it goes, asking provocative questions that are a bit awkward. If stuff doesn't make sense, though, question it (like this). And if someone can't answer properly, then maybe they are talking bollocks! :-)

So, anyway -

But when you say things, like consciousness is eternal or I am the only one in existence, it gets me really trippy and I don't see how you or anyone could possibly 100% confirm that it is true.

To understand this, we need two things, I'd suggest:

1. The direct observation of what your ongoing experience is actually like, rather than what you think about it being like. This direct experience is what a lot of this is built on. Words simply point to experiences; if you've not had the experience of "a soft texture" then no description of it or idea based on it is going to be meaningful to you, for example.
2. To be clear about what we mean by something "existing". (Ponder this?)

It turns out that the first one leads us to think of the second one differently, since it adds a new context that is "before" our usual default understanding of the world. This in turn changes the type of metaphors we use to construct out descriptions. Specifically, we are confronted with the problem of pointing to something which is "before" our usual models. And that's where we start saying thing like "eternal", "undivided", and all the other things that it is not. Without the experience, though, and the philosophical line of questioning that follows from it, that seems like mystical nonsense that makes "zero "sense" - just as you say! :-)

One metaphor that helps us avoid being incorrect, even though it can't capture the actual situation, is to start talking about the world as a "shared resource of patterns" rather than a "shared place or environment". The more you experiment with things, the more you find yourself needing something akin to an "abstract patterning" and "private copy" framework in order to think about it. But that arises from the observations, created as a useful tool; it is still not something to ever believe in as being fundamentally true.

We all have layers inside us, and I always wonder about the hidden truths about other people, but I digress.

It's actually an interesting thing, forums like this, because I think most of the people we are having conversations with probably don't discuss this sort of thing with the people they know in real life. Even just the philosophical aspects. Not necessarily because it's secret; actually, few people are interested in pondering such things. This subreddit has about 7k subscribers - from the entire world. What are the chances of knowing another one of those people? And then, what are the chances you'd end up broaching this subject? Who knows what could be going on in the mind of passing strangers and random people in coffee shops! :-)

From my own experience, I know a couple of people, but not many are really interested in digging around. Most folk - and this is totally fine - are looking for some sort of technique to get a result, or are looking for enlightenment but think it is some sort of feel-good state, rather than a realisation of something.

You don't necessarily believe all these metaphors and other "truths" you speak of if you don't have any direct experience with it.

I find the whole idea of "belief" a bit of a distraction. It's in the same category as "existence". We assume we know what it means, until we actually look and check what it is that we mean!

The way I'd maybe separate it out is:

1. There is the fundamental truth of the "nature of experiencing". This is the context of experience. You can directly observe it because you always are it. This is "what experience is made from". It is always true and always the same. You can't really describe this in words, because it is "that which words and thought are made from"; you can only be it and know it directly. For convenience, sometimes it is described as the "open space of awareness".
2. There is the relative truth of what you are experiencing. This is the content of experience, arising in "open awareness". Typically, you might consider that there is:

• A "main strand" of experience, where you are experiencing being-a-person-in-a-world. This is a sort of 3D-immersive multi-sensory strand of thought which fills up your awareness.
• There is the occasional parallel strand of experience where you are thinking about the main experience. This tends to be sort of localised in a sub-region.

In both cases, these are coherent - they are self-consistent like a continuous pattern made from one piece of cloth - but because they have no inherent permanence, they change, they are not fundamentally true.

It makes no sense to talk of "believing" in something as such, because if you are thinking about something then it is a parallel strand. Meanwhile, if you are experiencing something then you know it. So there is a difference between knowing what you think about the world, and knowing the state of the world directly. You might say that every strand of content has its own "relative truth", and then there is the context which is "fundamentally true". Where it gets interesting, though, is that it suggests a certain potential: since the main strand is no different in nature to the parallel strand, then just as it is possible to use intention to pattern your thinking, it might be possible to pattern your main strand of experience in the same way. Your main strand, it could be suggested, is just a sort of unbounded thought unfolding in awareness, albeit a quite stable and intense one, and you can "think it" differently.

However, only personal experimentation could show whether that's a valid way of approaching it.

When I read these ideas and metaphors, I don't immediately take them as fact but I don't immediately disprove them either. I mull over them and sort of let them "float" around in my head. I never set anything in stone as a "fundamental truth" because as you said they are still only "parallel thoughts" about this world.

Right. That's how I treat these things. If you just view everything as "interesting ideas" that might come in handy, then you don't need to judge them in any fundamental way at all. In fact, it's sort of meaningless to do so. Their value is as a source of creativity and curiosity. After all, even concepts which appear to map directly to aspects of ongoing experience are not really "right", they are just "self-consistent" (although there often seems to be a tendency to treat them as being more deeply "correct").

I guess I jumped the wagon on this one and immediately thought about all the materialistic stuff I could get, when this is far more spiritual and about self discovery than anything else. I don't really know where to start though, do you meditate? If so, what are your techniques and how often?

I think it's totally fine to get excited about the possibilities! "Materialistic stuff" consists of experiences just like anything else, including spiritual stuff. Personally, I don't really meditate. I do a daily releasing exercise, that's about it. Lie down, let everything unravel as it wants without interfering. In terms of better perceiving our experiences, I think it's good to go for it directly: simply by attending to the experience you are having, and looking for that open space, you will shape yourself into it. So, spending time just closing your eyes, "feeling out" in to the space around you, and exploring the content of your experience - where "you" are, what sensations, perceptions and thoughts are floating in your experience, that sort of thing - is all good. The lesson we derive from that isn't that we find some ultimate state; rather we discover we are all states, and that we shift into any state by "taking on the shape of" that state. The fundamental truth is, funnily enough, always true!

You didn't answer the part of the question I was looking forward to lol, but I didn't expect you to either.

Well, you knew I was just going to tell you to explore things for yourself, right? ;-)

There's no confirmation of anything other than self-confirmation. You totally seem to get it: thinking about stuff is a different thing to actually exploring it. At the very least, I can promise you that it will be interesting and will add an extra layer to daily life that will make it more enjoyable; beyond that, you can extrapolate things and see how far you can take them, if you want to. The posts here and at subs like /r/glitch_in_the_matrix should act as a source of inspiration, perhaps.

Q1: Ahh, I'm surprised you don't meditate. I've been wanting to get into meditation for years but just never took the time to really delve into it and I couldn't find much time either. But I'm about to start practising a technique you mentioned in a post (I can't remember which post) where you told us to relax and turn off every sensation and just remain in that position for about 10 minutes before eventually trying to "will" your arm to move without actually moving your muscles. If I pull this off, I feel I'll have broken down a major barrier that's holding me back.
If you don't mind me asking, I'm curious to know if you'd feel comfortable sharing your "end game" that you'll hope to achieve, even if only vaguely.Sort of like in this thread which you may have already seen. If you don't want to then that's totally alright. But optic fibre is right, you're a unique individual and everyone on this sub seems to be entranced by your words and seemingly unbounded knowledge. There's a certain amount of mystery that draws me to you. I feel you'd be a real challenge to try and figure out in real life. I wonder what it would be like to know you in real life and I wish I did. Luckily we have this forum so we can all pool our ideas and experiences together to create a vast pool of knowledge. I find all the answers in that thread I linked, very interesting. It seems deeply personal to know one's deepest desires but it's inspiring and gives hope where it was initially perceived to never exist.

On meditation, well it sort of depends what you think it is and what you are trying to achieve - and there are many sorts. Lying down on the floor every day, sometimes sitting, and doing nothing - by which I mean ceasing to interfere with movement of body, thought and attention - is basically Zen meditation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza].

Generally, if someone is meditating in the hope of enlightenment, I'd say don't bother. (But I'd also say: don't pay too much attention to what I say!) Understanding the nature of experience is something you pretty much infer and then confirm. But it's worth doing something (daily releasing exercise) to get experience of allowing things to move spontaneously "by themselves", since that helps dissolves people's tendency to continually re-assert their current position, in opposition to the flow towards outcomes they have intended.

Ha, the phrase "end game" makes it all sounds like a nefarious plan for world domination! :-) Well, there isn't one. It's interesting in and of itself. Having these discussions can make it sound like it's the most important thing, but really it's not; your ongoing experience is what's most important. Having insight into our incorrect assumptions of how things are is great, but beyond that there's: living. I think we have to be careful we don't spend all our time contemplating and meditating, and forget to drink beer and go to art galleries (or whatever). :-)

There's a good book called Ideokinesis by Andre Bernard, a dance teacher who taught imagery and spontaneous motion approaches (it's related to this topic). At one point in a class, as Bernard is discussing his ideas, a guy asks "but what's this for?". And a girl responds: "It's for life!". And that is the end game and it's the only game, no matter forms it takes, I think. I have to agree, I think it's great that these communities can pop up, and people from all over the world can find overlap and exchange their thoughts and experiences. Even a decade ago, this wouldn't have been possible in quite the same way.

Q1: Ahh right.
Having these discussions can make it sound like it's the most important thing, but really it's not; your ongoing experience is what's most important. Having insight into our incorrect assumptions of how things are is great, but beyond that there's: living.
Yes I agree with you on this one. I must confess I think I might have let all this change my perspective a little too much. As of late, I feel like I've been thinking less and less about my future. I only ever vaguely think about my future but now it's like I'm neglecting it. Everything I experience in the current moment is almost like it's temporary or just for fun. Just another thing before I say good bye to everything. I'm not suicidal and I don't ever plan on committing suicide but I can't deny that I haven't thought about doing it just to see if there really is anything on the "other side" (haven't we all). For the last few years I felt like my future was this black cloud, it made me feel like I'd never experience it. Like I'd die or end up in some vegetable state. But that feeling eventually went away and now I find myself not thinking about my future at all. I can't help but let myself be absorbed by all this stuff, it's so intriguing. I know I mustn't let myself lose sight of the big picture, which is to essentially experience.
I've been over at /r/Oneirosophy for a bit and the stuff I read there just pulls me in, closer and closer. I think I'm letting myself get a little too carried away. I've planted these ideas in my head. I fear I want something I cannot have. I have my whole life ahead of me and I'm letting myself get carried away when I should really be focusing on enjoying life, instead of pondering how 'empty' and 'bleak' everything feels and asking myself can I really have something more than "this".
Regardless I know my perspective on life has changed radically over the past couple of years and my perspective will continue to change as I experience life. I wanted to ask you, what you think about the stuff they do over in /r/Oneirosophy. Why don't you think "enlightenment" is the way to go? When you die, do you simply wish to have the experiences you had in life and that's it? If I really wanted to go about, trying to find the cracks in reality and eventually pull it down, would I do that via meditation?
Thank you once again for your thoughtful answer, I'll be sure to check out that book when I have time :)

Everything you say is pretty normal, right? I think anybody who ponders the world and how things are, explores those thoughts. And it's even fine to get carried away with things - but keeping mind that thinking about stuff is also just another experience, a parallel construction, and the larger lesson is that there is no fundamental "how things are". It's if you find yourself dedicating too much time looking for "the final secret knowledge", when really the so-called mystery is just rooted in the fact of moving your arms and mundane everyday stuff like that, that you need to watch out. Experimenting, yes, because that is exploring experience. Just thinking about things, making up parallel fantasy worlds only, that's what we have to be wary of (unless we do it knowingly for fun, that's different; that's art).

As one of the originating mods of /r/oneirosophy, obviously I'm all for it! But it's important to keep it in perspective: those are philosophical discussions about the possibilities inherent in the subjective idealist view. Such things can be empowering, but only if they are used as creative inspiration for deliberate exploration. There is fun in just thinking things out too, but there's a reason that the sidebar here explicitly encourages trying out a couple of exercises, and underlines that explanation and descriptions are metaphors. Whether "enlightenment" is the way to go, kinda depends on what you think "enlightenment" is? It's becomes such a vague term I think. What do you think of when you read that word?

Definitely, I'd agree that having an understanding of "the nature of experiencing" is a good thing, but that's relative straightforward, albeit not easy to put into words: you are "that" whose only inherent property is being-aware and which "takes on the shape of" experiences. The real issue we face is, that we don't see the whole of our state unpacked into the spatially-extended senses all at once; this makes it harder to develop faith that intending = reshaping ourselves = shifting state = updating facts both now and then. In other words, that intending to move your arm (effectively: "it is true now that I will experience my arm moving then", where "then" is about half a second) is identical to intending any other experience ("it is true now that I will experience receiving my top grade then"). Again, only actual experimentation can reveal whether that is actually true or not. Thinking about it just produces yet more descriptive schemes (because that is what the implicit intention of thinking is).

...

those with good intentions and good deeds live in squalor...

All of this might be somewhat self-fulfilling, I suppose. However, it might be interesting to explore this bit: Which good intentions and good deeds, specifically? What counts as those? And how are those apparent people going about it? Also, what power would or could such people have over other people's circumstances?

If everything is in your experience, what are you doing about it? Wanting is fine, but that amounts to thinking-about the world - and often in ways that imply the current state rather than a target state. Note that, also, it might be the case that mere action doesn't help: the intention to experience acting is one thing, the intention to experience outcomes is another. And so on.

...Maybe if we take one strand of that and run with it? Specifically, the idea that "spirituality" is a good outcome for the world, in and of itself. (I dislike that term, it seems pretty much meaningless, but I can't think of another one that doesn't require lots of explanation.)

If one spends time studying the nature of things, what happens? One reaches a greater understanding of what ongoing experience actually consists of; hopefully, a clear and direct awareness of what you actually are as the context of experience as well as the content of experience is the result. But does this necessarily alter the content? Make the world better? Well, no, not inherently. Realising that, say, everything that arises in your perspective is made from "consciousness" doesn't change anything at all; it merely shifts your understanding of your nature and the nature of the world. There may be a bit of a shift due to relaxation and acceptance, but perhaps nothing substantial beyond that. Furthermore, you likely realise that content and consciousness itself contain no judgement about things being good or bad. It not only doesn't care, it doesn't even know what caring is. It doesn't actually know anything; it just is everything. Everything just "is"; one pattern is equivalent to another. Patterns are added to patterns, the world shifts, it has no intelligence in and of itself. You are the only intelligence and you are the only thing that "acts".

So at best, "spirituality" offers a new perspective on self and world. It doesn't necessarily lead to good or bad things; that's outside of its remit.

"Do you think there's too much suffering in the world?"
"I think there's just the right amount."

So a couple of thought-provokers:

• Having come to an understanding, after that is where the decision to do something or not, and what that something will be, becomes relevant. The understanding itself accomplishes nothing.
• If you want to be wealthy, maybe you just do have to become a banker or a lawyer? Because that's how you made this world! ;-)
• Perhaps trying to reformat this world is a mistake. You've already created this world as it is, unwittingly. Are you seriously going to completely disrupt the patterns of all these pre-existing people without their permission? That seems selfish.
• Equally, you could perhaps think about switching out of this experience and into another - but a moment's thought indicates that this amounts to the same thing: reformatting your experience is reformatting these people. Even more selfish! :-)
• Why does it matter so much to you, the way the world is, and your judgement of it? And are you not basically judging yourself anyway by doing so?

For convenience, I guess we should ditch the "soul" and "spirit" terminology, because I think it has clashing connotations, particularly in terms of being located in an independent space somehow, or within something, or whatever. "Nonlocal self" is a nice term, but I tend to go with something like "open awareness" simply because it has the feeling of being "before" arrangement in space; experiences arise within it, as spatially-extended senses, but it does not itself have a location nor extension nor boundaries. But anyway, I guess we're talking from the same idea really: that which experiences, and that which experiences are made from.

I suppose, first, we need to firmly recognise that if the world was the result of our cumulative intentions, then it was not done deliberately. Simply focusing on a pattern would intensify its contribution, and that in turn would intensify its extended pattern of logical implications. For example, if I focus on the existence of a tree, then that logically implies soil and water and sunlight and birds and an ecology: an entire world immediately springs from that thought, is implied by it. We wouldn't say that we meant to create that world; but nevertheless our act of increasing the contribution of one pattern did result in that world's (relative, apparent) creation.

So, now there's a world. For certain, you can't "escape" from that world - because you are not actually in that world. What can you do instead?

"if the world was the result of our cumulative intentions, then it was not done deliberately"
but it must be, mustn't it?

Hmm, I'll be clearer on that. I don't mind it's not originating from/as you; I was talking about whether you are doing it deliberately - having a conscious purpose in mind. So, if you are focusing on the image of a tree, but do not understand that doing so corresponds to intensifying a tree and triggering all the associations, then you have not deliberately created a world. When people talk about there being a "purpose" to the world they find themselves in, and the troubles they are going through, they are implying that there is a reason - a reason that was consciously chosen, to teach a lesson (or whatever). But that's not the case. The world you have ended up in, while a result of a series of intentions, was basically an accident, because you didn't know that you were intending or what the nature of the world is. The world is not intelligent - you are the only intelligence. So if you act out of ignorance, there is no correcting system that is managing things afterwards. The world itself amounts to a "dumb patterning system" that simply has its eternal patterns intensified or dissolved with no say in the matter.

in the same way that even if i died, why wouldn't i then 'respawn' in the same/similar world and carry on after the point at which i'd died beforehand.

No reason why not, necessarily. Although, if you have a firmly patterned idea of death being the end of life, then the logical implication of a death scenario for you might be that all memory of the current person is effectively lost to you, and the next thing that appears in your awareness is the experience of being born as another person. If your intention to live as your current person is strong, then perhaps instead of that you'd experience a discontinuity, such that the car crash suddenly didn't happen, or you survived after all, or whatever (perhaps with some collateral shift side-effects).

the only conclusion i've arrived at is to create the world with purpose

Right. And as you say, this is tied in with knowledge. The realisation that is required, to be purposeful rather than accidental (see above), is to understand the relationship between world, self and intention-implication. But having got that?

You are essentially talking about thinking new facts into the world, updating the relative balance of constituent patterns, or allowing this "world-pattern" to fade relative to another world-pattern which you seed with an intention.

...so i'd like to have the experience of creating portals and then the experience of overtly changing the world...

Which is where intending base formatting comes in, rather than just intending outcomes. The latter is simply overlaying a target pattern on pre-existing structures (giving "plausible results albeit by unlikely apparent routes"); the former would be a more "meta" targeting of the landscape of potential routes itself.

as in traveling: the motion itself is the structural 'route'; hence the 'portal' experience

I'd say you want to create a similar experience to an OBE, stripped of the "astral body leaving my physical body" concept, instead knowing-that everything is a movement of experience as a whole, and imagining-that going through a portal is a state transition. If you really spent time with it, I guess you could just choose a doorway and have that represent the state change (which is something that people do for minor facts anyway).

yes that's exactly what I think

Actually, the "Infinite Grid" animation was initially conceived of as a way to create a structured imagination object that could be used for changes via "translation" - it's not dissimilar to the "OBE you don't come back from" concept, if you think about it.

it's that switch from looking at something and then looking at something else
what do you mean by "translation"?

Yes, I meant "translation" in the mathematical sense rather than the language sense: shifting your location on the metaphorical grid of possibilities, while keeping your identity intact.

so how would you go about changing in to a new location? if I decided on a place where I went through and exited in a new location - how? changing base formatting so all I have to do is intend it
but that's easier said than done!

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? There is no how - it's just intention. You need to imagine-that it is happening until the relative intensity of that imagining is stronger than the things you have imagined (intended and implied) thus far.

...

Q3: I don't really believe in a "global conspiracy" (since such hypothetical people would be entirely selfish and could not work with others to rule all corners of the world together in a significant fashion, at least for very long), but about two years ago I'm pretty sure that Great Britain made it very difficult, if not impossible, to search for occult subjects online. It does make me a little suspicious about that.

Well, "esoteric material" was one of the "sensitive subjects" on the list for David Cameron's ISP-level filtering drive:

"As well as pornography, users may automatically be opted in to blocks on "violent material", "extremist related content", "anorexia and eating disorder websites" and "suicide related websites", "alcohol" and "smoking". But the list doesn't stop there. It even extends to blocking "web forums" and "esoteric material", whatever that is. "Web blocking circumvention tools" is also included, of course."
-- Cameron's internet filter goes far beyond porn - and that was always the plan, New Statesman, 23 December 2013

Now, supposedly those filters are opt-in, and there's been a lot of messing around in this are over the last couple of years which makes it hard to tell what exactly has happened, but at the very least the ability to select and block was probably but in place. Meanwhile, clauses in the current Draft Investigatory Powers Bill specifically deal with preventing companies from revealing that they have been ordered to interfere with equipment and data. Since it's accepted that this bill is an attempt to legalise behaviour that was already taking place - to normalise it so that it can be used more directly and openly - it wouldn't necessarily surprise me if blocking was already happening, silently.

So basically: it's not a conspiracy, it's a documented fact that the British Government has sought to create, and must already have put in place, filtering capability related to "esoteric material", which would include "the occult" and probably many other things which you and I wouldn't even consider that far from the mainstream. Whether it is active or not, and in what sense, is debatable.

Q3: I see. Thank you for this information. I figured that this was already happening on some level or another, and probably in many other places. Google is probably at least monitoring what information is being sought right now, and making trends and correlations with the data. Knowing that they also own sites such as Youtube, it would be really interesting to even look at a summary of their collected data. It is kind of scary, to be honest, and it is a vulnerability that most are not aware of, or don't care about. I'm slightly of the latter, but really only because I'm a nobody (at least right now).

It's a good idea to use Startpage anyway [https://www.startpage.com/], I'd suggest, just as a point of principle.

Of course, ISP-level monitoring of "internet connection records" and warrentless access to it by dozens of agencies, as mandated by the draft bill, is the important issue going forward. (Basically: that's everything, including location info and other data phones and apps send as part of their operation, any other bits and pieces, not just the things you specifically request as a user). See the summary on page 33. Note that terms like acquisition, interference, communication, transmission are not necessarily meant in the casual-use meaning of those words. Developments to keep an eye on at least, as a good citizen, I'd say. The ID cards project (really: ID database) was prevented a few years ago; same deal here. No point getting too paranoid, eh! :-)

Q3: Good idea. I actually make it a point for me to never own a smartphone; not only are they unnecessary, I just see it as a mistake/crisis waiting to happen. But oddly, so many people have them, and are oblivious to how vulnerable they are with them. I only know in real life two other people who don't have smartphones. It is just so weird to me, especially when I see everyone just having their eyes glued to them while I'm walking down the hall.

I've lost track of how many times I've had to dodge people walking down the sidewalk staring at their phones, not looking where they're going. Then there's this guy [https://www.nydailynews.com/2015/12/26/man-dies-after-walking-off-a-cliff-in-san-diego-while-distracted-by-electronic-device/]. The zombie apocalypse is already upon us.

Q4: That's incredible. I wonder what the official spin would be if Dodgy Dave was directly questioned about why society should be threatened by 'esoteric material'. It's all supposedly 'magical thinking' nonsense anyway so how could they justify this.

I think it's actually just part of a broader notion of anything that contradicts Conservative (the party variant rather than general conservatism) ideology. It's not specifically about being anti magical thinking - in fact, they are massively prone to engaging in it themselves, and not the "good" kind. It's not as if they are great followers of scientific evidence, after all; they regularly discard research and evidence and plough on with ideologically-driven legislation. They generally quite keen to silence all contrary narratives, even when from their own advisors, and scientific bodies generally.

Q4: I guess I should be glad that I now live in Canada but I wouldn't be surprised if the Canadian government already have (or are working on) something similar.
It's the mentality of separation that a certain kind of power often brings. The further removed from the 'common man' those in power become, the less they can truly identify with their wants and needs.
Instead they'd prefer a docile, easily controllable populace who think and therefore act within acceptable predictable parameters.
I remember a particular author - the name escapes me right now - who talks about the importance of being able to learn from within yourself (tapping into the infinite reservoir of information) as there may come a time when you might not have access to the 'outside' information required. I've always thought that the honing of this skill would prove exceedingly useful.

That's an interesting point about "learn from within yourself". I definitely think it's very important that a person knows how to reflect upon and explore their experiences and think through their meaning - rather than accept a conclusion given to them. Not that many people seem to want to do it, though.

It's definitely the viewpoint of this subreddit - try things out, ponder for yourself, don't take anyone else's word for anything (not because they might be misleading you, but because your own experience might differ or your own interpretation might lead to different conclusions). While it might be tempting to have others think on your behalf, in fact nobody can think on your behalf of your perspective. (So we shouldn't be too surprised when, say, power groups don't act in our interests: even if they aren't being selfish, at best they can operate on an simplified idea of who you are as a collective.)

POST: Is DJ basically about awareness 'De-patterning' and then its 'New-patterning'?

For clarity, we should probably emphasise that it isn't "one's awareness" - rather, it is just "awareness". This "awareness" is what you truly are, but it is not a personal awareness. It has no inherent properties other than being-aware. This is the only unchanging truth. Meanwhile, so-called personal awareness in its various forms - by which we mean states and experiences of apparently being you-as-observer or you-as-perspective or you-as-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person or whatever - are all actually just patterns/formatting of "awareness". This might seem pedantic, but it changes the level at which we consider things like "dimensional jumping". Which is to say, we must view it from the the level of context (the nature of experiencing as patterned awareness), which is "before" any content including formatting like "spatial extent" and "apparent unfolding". This means that absolutely all content is relatively true only, has no solid backing, and is subject to alteration.

(Of course, even the idea of "patterning" is a metaphor/formatting, but it is so abstract that it's probably the lowest level that corresponds to a sensible and self-consistent experience that can be talked about. Beyond that, you are probably not really dealing with experiencing a "world" anymore.)

I enjoy the way Nefandi explained it in one of their posts. Context being the stage, content being the play appearing to occur on the stage. So by formatting the stage, you set up the types of plays that can occur thereupon.

Yeah, that's a nice metaphor. Similarly: the landscape defines the available paths across which water may flow, and so on. (Although in both cases, there's an implication that events "happen". Perhaps better to conceive of a static form, across which attention "happens".)

At one point there was the idea of a "pattern stack" where the lower levels would be base patterns or formatting (like "spatial extent" and "unfolding change"), then perception patterns (sensory aspects like colour, sound, texture), the forms, then facts of the world, then movements, then outcomes - and so on. But then I saw that as too formal, and perhaps in danger of becoming a "how it really is" description. Far better to just fully embrace that you can pick any metaphor and render it "active" by intention/implication. Using a metaphor to formulate an intention also implies the metaphor, and you pattern experience accordingly simply by intending the outcome in those terms. Can you think of what you want to experience and see a logical connection, any connection, to your current circumstances? That's it, then. No real need to decorate it further. The world of patterns has no hierarchy or depth (those things being themselves just metaphors).

POST: found a new manifestation technique in a old reddit post in /r/lawofattraction

Hmm. It's seems like an awful lot of ritual for what it's doing, and a bit muddled too: "sending messages to the universe" mixed with "assignment of meaning to an object" mixed with "direct assertion of fact". I think you'd be as well just closing your eyes and asserting the fact of your desired outcome (in the general non-verbal format "it is true now that _____ then").

This is actually my problem with LOA generally: it lacks a structure because there's no underlying model, which makes it easy to end up doing things which have an apparent "structuriness" but are really more like superstition. The active ingredient ends up being incidental or even largely lost. Really, intention is the only power, and everything else is about structuring that intention. Without a clear structure or framework, you're potentially mangling your outcome, and you'd be better just asserting directly. In other words, despite the presence of a glass and some water, it's really more "owls" than "two glasses", and a compromised bird at that. The reason the Two Glasses exercise is structured as it is, is to acquire actual "handles" onto pre-existing patterns and then alter their relative intensity of contribution in a co-ordinated manner. Each step in the process is worded to allow that to happen, whilst distracting you from interfering or counter-intending. (Meanwhile, if you're curious, the original comment describing the Two Glasses exercise can be read here [POST: [EXPERIMENT] Glitch Generation Test, I Need Your Creative Ideas!].)

Which isn't to say the exercise mightn't be useful; but in terms of an exploration of the nature of experience, or even a straightforward seeking of results, I think it maybe obscures more than it provides, perhaps.

...Pretty much. I'd say it's more effective because the actions have a specific meaning, created implicitly via the way the exercise is structured, rather than just being a sequence of arbitrary movements. Remember: there's nothing inherently special about water, labels, drinking and pouring, for example. The key ingredient is the explicit or implicit assigning of meaning or intention to component objects and actions (these can be "physical" or "mental"). Unless your instructions lead you to do that, probably covertly, or you understand that specifically, then you're just moving some liquid around and writing some stuff.

Intention is the "secret" behind everything. Unfortunately, it can't be described or taught, since it's not really a method or a mechanism; it's just something you are and do. Ironically, it's how we always actually do everything that we assume we are doing by other means!

POST: Can you get stuck going in between or delayed?

Some metaphysics guys explained that I'm still coming through to the next dimension but idk

I like that. "Hey, who was that I saw you talking to yesterday?" "Oh, them? They were just, like, some metaphysics guys I bumped into between dimensions."

POST: On the 'acceptance' of facts via implying them

[POST]

Hello to all my fellow jumpers
I wanted to share with you all a simple but very effective technique that has given me some interesting results lately. As some of you may or may not have realized, accepting something as fact is a great way to make DJ work, but in many cases you might have found that wrestling with your beliefs to insert a new one can be as difficult as tearing down a concrete wall with your head.
Let me draw your attention to the following popular saying: "Dress for the job you want, not for the job that you have."
I've been a DJ-ing enthusiast for longer than I can remember, and let me tell you I must have wasted years walking in circles before it started to dawn on me how the subconscious works. In many occasions, by trying too hard and putting too much effort into trying to make my subconscious accept X as a fact, I ended up sending exactly the opposite message: that X was NOT a fact. If you are bullheaded like me and probably haven't been able to get DJ to work despite insisting, it's probably because you are falling in a similar pitfall.
So, what am I proposing here? Instead of working to insert a new belief, I invite you to experiment with the concept of working with them. What sort of clothing would imply that you have the job of your dreams? What sort of walking posture would imply to you that you have high self-stem? What sort of habit would imply that you are happy and fulfilled?
I invite you all to experiment a bit with this. Ask yourself the question: if you had what you want, what sort of little thing would change in your habits that you could do now to imply that you already have it?
If you have a similar method, please do share it with me in the comments. :)

[END OF POST]

A1: Acting as if is definitely something that's worked for me on a number of occasions. I've had experiences where I had no discernible way of logically getting something for a long period of time, and then by choosing to simply act as if I already had it, within a few days it presents itself to me, or something even greater. Sometimes it's met by a seeming negative occurrence, but the true outcome is that the negative seeming occurrence actually led to the greater outcome.

A2: Agreed. I'm going through a current life circumstance change. Under my old "little me" mind I'd be depressed and anxietized.. but this time feels different, there's a sense of unseen guided hand moving mountains. To my old single mind, this would be my life being destroyed.. but yet I know this to be the creative process opening "the ways" for water to flow and even greater experiences to be had.

Q1: Bonus: of particular interest is a dream that I had a few years ago in which I was looking for a computer component to install on my computer. I must have spent about 20 minutes on that dream searching for a store which sold the device without any success.
The more I searched and traveled across the dream city, the more it became like a maze and expanded & created more and more streets and buildings ad-infinitum. Until I stopped searching and materialized one in a question of seconds. My ceaseless searching kept implying that I had not found, and that in turn kept me running around like a dog chasing after it's own tail.

So true. It's the intention and its implications that matter, and intending outcomes is what's important. What we are really intending is always, at heart, an experience. If we intend looking for something, then that's what we get: the experience of lots of searching. If we intend something is found - or as you suggest, do it indirectly by intending something else that implies that it is found - we save ourselves a lot of traveling. This is also why in general life, we should intend where we are going, rather than intending the movements that theoretically should lead us there. The former directs experience towards the outcome, the latter simply guarantees some movements.

I'm going to riff on the topic a bit, and see if we can't get a bit clearer on the background context. Let's maybe wind back a little and be specific about what exactly we're doing, using our little patterning model:

Model Overview

• What you are is "awareness".
• Awareness is always in a particular state.
• That state contains - or rather implies - the full subjective definition of the world (the "world-pattern"), including all past and future moments, all of which are full determined between each intentional shift.
• A state actually consists of all possible patterns of facts simultaneously; patterns are eternal. What defines a particular state is the relative intensities of contribution of the patterns.
• The world-pattern also includes the base formatting of experience - for example, "spatial extent" and "time is passing" and so on. These structure the basic logic of the apparent world experience; they are by nature more intense, or deeper patterns, metaphorically speaking.
• When we "intend" a change, what we are doing is increasing the relative contribution ("intending") of a pattern of facts ("the intention") within the world-pattern.
• This re-patterning of experience is "dumb". There is no intelligence behind it; you are the only intelligence and the only cause.

This gives us a few things to consider:

Model Implications

• You literally get the pattern you intensify, overlaid upon experience, although this includes the felt-meaning of the pattern rather than just any sensory aspect you conjure up via visualisation or whatever.
• Direct intensification of an image, like an owl, will overlay the picture of an owl - and to a lesser extent its extended associated pattern - over all experience, without regard to spatial or temporal context. This is like drawing on a TV screen and the image shining through where there is a gap. This gives rise to what we would call synchronicity. The experience that arise tend to be "about" the target.
• Adding more contextual detail to the owl image will restrict the gaps in which it will appear; the more specific the image the more it tends towards corresponding to a particular event. This tends towards what we might call coincidental manifestation.
• Adding felt-meaning to the image - basically, conjuring the image while knowing that it means-that such and such will happen, makes the intention more specific still. This tallies more tightly with what we'd call generating actual outcomes.
• This is where the actual power is. It is problematic for people to think about, though, since this felt-meaning isn't really experienced as such, or at least not in an expanded way. It's a sort of background dissolved "knowing".
• Then, we have a variant where we imagine an intermediary object while considering that the object means-that a certain outcome will be generated. This is what the "sending messages to the universe" type rituals do.
• Finally, we can do a variant where we imagine or directly intend with the world-pattern itself (using mental, physical or even no objects). We summon up or imply an aspect of the world-pattern, and then imagine operating upon it.

All of these, despite the appearance of being different due to the differing experiences which accompany them, are actually the same thing: intending a change of state.

Model Considerations

So whatever approach we do, the question to ask ourselves is:

• What are we actually intending?

And sometimes it can be:

• Are we even intending at all? Simply performing mental or physical actions may achieve nothing at all, or at best the basic patterning that corresponds to the owl example (typically appearing as synchronicity). What is important is the intention which accompanies any action or non-action - and that intention actually is the outcome.

So, there is no inherent problem with updating the past or the future or the present, because it is all within the current state, now. [1] The difference between the owls and the Two Glasses, though, is that both of them simply overlay or shift the surface patterns without contradicting "plausibility" - plausibility being the base formatting of your experience (that of apparently being a person in a location in a world which is unfolding steadily). Now, one rule that emerges from this picture is that any particular state, between shifts, must be coherent: the world must always "make sense" because it is a single continuous pattern. This means that a shift of state must occur all at once; you can't be "standing on" one part of the pattern while trying to tug at another part, if those two aspects are logically dependent as a requirement for world coherence. In particular, since things that you "definitely know" - in the sense of having already experienced them or had them implied - are the most intense patterns of all, overcoming them requires a surrender of control of any aspect of experience which implies those things, as well as firm full intention of the new state. This, I suggest - perhaps coupled with incorrect structuring of intention - is why certain areas can be problematic.

Basically, then: full surrender of the current state, plus persistent but effortless intention (while avoiding implying any base formatting which would oppose the change), would be the avenue to explore.
__
[1] In fact, the reason the owls experiment is called The Owls of Eternity is because it often has the effect of producing experiences which apparently must have begun in the past, and even noticing things that "must have always been there" but you can't help but ponder.

...Good stuff.

People here are doing nothing but what other people are doing with LoA just with a cooler label

I'd perhaps disagree with that (although it depends on the "people" in question, of course). I'd probably say that the basic nature of experience is, obviously, exactly the same regardless of whatever subject we are talking about - be that LOA, magick, "dimensional jumping", all that. So in that sense, it's all the same. They are all different ways of structuring our thinking about it; and our ways of formulating our intentions. The world-as-it-is doesn't care about any of that, though, until we intend. But: some descriptions definitely lead to more productive pursuits than others.

So, basically the reality is not all that malleable as we so like to think and discuss or no one (that we heard of) has yet mastered the practical use of this world view.

Reality - or we could better call it "experience" - is in principle completely malleable because there is no external world or solid thing underlying it. However, if you, say, imagine-that there is a stable world which is persistent and has certain habits, then it's probably not sensible to assume that later a casual "wish" is going to overturn that. Rather, events are going to arise which are "plausible" although unlikely; the outcomes will be overlaid upon those existing stable patterns. The world will not break in response to your intention for a pay rise. So, you are going to have to do some unpicking of the "base formatting" to have completely discontinuous experiences, or completely release your attachment to that so you're not "standing on part of the rug while trying to move it". And you can totally do this. The problem is, it's a sort of not-doing and it can't be thought about, and ultimately you are destroying the coherence of your world experience if you push this. Even simple exercises like the owl exercise can really mess with your sense of structured reality if you push it a bit (because of apparent retro-causality and problems with separating out memories).

Additional aspect: People tend to keep their mouths shut if they get dramatic changes that go beyond "amazing coincidence", because it raises questions about what "you" and "other people" are, and the nature of the "sharing" of the world, and produces a sort of meta-world perspective that doesn't apply in-world. Only people who do things accidentally tend to pipe up. Have you listened to the Kirby Surprise interview linked in the introduction post? Worth a listen. (Also: his book has overlaps with the Anthony Peake stuff, so you might find that interesting.)

Sometimes I've got so tired of all this jazz that I wish I could have the experience of nothing having any experiences

This is quite a good description of that I think. If you've ever done lucid dreaming, you can switch to an experience of "just being" as "void", like that. Thing is, though, eternity is a long time - so to speak - so you will always switch back into a content-based experience "eventually".

Dying is "too boring"! :-)

I've read Anthony Peake also, the other book I think. I don't really go for his theory, but the overall notion of a "private copy" of the world and experiencing continuing regardless (albeit changing in terms of content) would fit in with the overall concept of this subreddit. Anyway - somehow, talking about this stuff makes it seem way more complicated and obscure than it actually is, right? Basically, it's just "the experience you are having right now" plus some direct attending and intending. Any moment can be designated "Moment Number 1" and we can begin from there, forget the previous stuff, the way I see it.

__

Oh yeah, picking up on something you said: I think there is a definite thing where people don't really want to push this stuff, even if there's something they supposedly really desire and they're really into the subject. And maybe that's sensible for some people: lots of folk get quite upset even with the owls or glasses exercises, and they're just about giving you a sense that there is "something going on" that doesn't match your usual description.

Perhaps being "overweight, bald, wear glasses" is, for some, better than having to deeply, truly confront that the world is imaginary in its fundamental nature, rather than just enjoy thinking about it and being an expert in the theory of flexibility? (Can't say I fancy that strategy myself, mind you!)

Q2: So, you are going to have to do some unpicking of the "base formatting" to have completely discontinuous experiences, or completely release your attachment to that so you're not "standing on part of the rug while trying to move it". And you can totally do this. The problem is, it's a sort of not-doing and it can't be thought about, and ultimately you are destroying the coherence of your world experience if you push this.
why would i make a reality where i am unaware of the nature of myself - unless i'm doing the 'discovering' now - but that seems silly to begin with
what's the point? i suppose when i become fully aware of the immediate nature of (self-created-)reality then i wouldn't ever again be nescient
but if i never was - why would i be now?!

Well, you are always your own nature, right? You are always what you are, taking on different shapes. What you are talking about, though, is having a representation of that nature, perhaps? Knowing about it rather than just knowing-being it. But that itself is just another experience!

Meanwhile, there being a "point" to something is an intellectual construct, an idea. Nothing actually has a point; it just is. This goes back to the assumption people sometimes have that the experience you are having now was deliberately, knowingly constructed - like, pondered and chosen and a self-aware manner: designed. But it wasn't. It evolved by intention-implication, basically. Every time you looked, you saw. Having a model, some self-reflection, now gives you the possibility of deliberately choosing, but even that is just more of the same. You don't really know any more about it beyond being; it's just that you've now got a "parallel model" from which to select patterns, also within awareness.

[But that itself is just another experience!] exactly - so why bother? why bother with the experience or the knowledge of the experience when it's so troublesome

It's not about the experience itself, though - after all, every experience is just a shape taken on by awareness. No experience is special, for sure. Why bother? Well...

What is special, is the understanding that an experience gives you. Having a pure "open awareness contentless" experience, or the experience of the facts of the world changing, tells you that your understanding of the nature of the world and of experiences is mistaken. And since your responses to any experiences arises from that understanding, the quality of the ongoing experience is changed. (For example, seeing yourself as a person "spatially-extended place unfolding in time" in markedly difference to seeing yourself as a patterned awareness within which sensations, perceptions and thoughts arise.)

So, the reason to bother in the first place: out of curiosity (since it's not really possible to anticipate the outcome of the investigation). Subsequent discoveries then retrospectively make it worthwhile, since knowing your nature and the nature of experiences makes everything inherently and directly more pleasant - and it's then not troublesome.

right - see - it's just utterly futile on this planet because the inhabitants are utterly devoid of any sense and just keep multiplying like locusts.

What inhabitants? Where? How?

the problem is nothing changes the fundamental pattern of the world.

Nothing changes it if you don't change it, for sure. Just having thoughts about it usually just generates synchronistic experiences about your ideas. You have to intend directly into/as the patterning of the world, to make changes in your experience of the world. You have to be mindful of whether you are increasing/decreasing/shifting the part of your state that is the actual world, rather than a parallel representation you've created about it.

i.e. no experience I'm having is pleasurable and the only planet I know is awful

Your thoughts about "the planet", perhaps. But your actual sensory experience of it? How is that as you describe? In what way, exactly, are you experiencing a world that's crap? Be careful that it's not mostly stories about a world that is crap. Do you need those stories to change in order to feel good? Why? And so on. Basically I'm saying: it would be a valuable exercise for you to pin down exactly what constitutes an experience of the world being crap, since that would your starting point for changing it.

is where lies the importance of that "accepting yourself" business, right?

Just to be clear, though, it's not "accepting yourself" in the sense of psychological acceptance. It's more about not counter-intending against the current sensory moment. To give a mundane example: say you intend to stand up and walk to the door, and this starts to happen spontaneously, but then you don't like the feeling of being automatic because you don't trust it, and so intend muscle tension in order to "control yourself" - you've basically counter-intended the state shift you intended earlier. Now, expand that idea to other changes in the world-pattern. Again, it's sort of "don't stand on the rug and try to move it at the same time".

the closest we've got at the moment as an actual method for doing so is the persistent realms concept, right?

Switch to a persistent realm and never come back? If you pause and think what radical discontinuous change would be like, that's pretty much it, right?

Although of course, you never actually go anywhere anyway - from one perspective, you aren't in the room you are experiencing now. You are never really anywhere; you just have experiences "as if" you are. And in that example, it's only a "lucid dream" because you later have the experience of waking up - it becomes a dream in retrospect (and because you did it knowingly of course and you've heard of "lucid dreams"). In fact, the idea that every morning we wake up and resume the experience we were having the previous day is really just a constructed narrative. The strand is triggered anew each morning - or rather, the morning is triggered anew within a strand. In all cases, then, the basic nature of the unfolding experience is identical, and we make up a story afterwards about its meaning, based on what we felt we experienced "causing". Perhaps the question, then, isn't so much how to generate an experience of an alternate version of the world, it's more what leads us to categorise it one way or another, and what causes us to revert to a previous experience?

I still can't see how something could come out of the "intending but not-doing and not-thinking-about and am-I-really-intending?" thing...

It's just a way of saying that all experiences are results, and intending is the only cause of change. So, right now, just decide that there is a sphere hovering across the room from you. Place your attention in the space where this spehre is. Now, just decide that this sphere has the power to make your body relax and your eyes see more clearly. See what happens. Did the sphere cause the result? Did you experience yourself cause the result? What caused the result?

...More later, but briefly putting aside the "condition of the world" stuff for a moment:

why bother in the first place?

You are personalising something that is not personal. Awareness doesn't "bother" or "make choices" - it isn't any-thing. That little description you linked to is just a metaphor, a little story, a way of poetically creating a sense of playfulness. It's not how it actually is. In fact, there just is no particular "how it actually is". The story of "God forgetting itself" doesn't mean forgetfulness in the sense of personal memory, necessarily.

it seems like a colossal waste of time to go about 'discovering' things i should already know! it's not even enjoyable

But awareness itself isn't discovering anything, as such, and is "before" time and experiences. Rather, it "takes on the shape of" the experience of discovering. The idea of something being enjoyable or not, a waste or not, and the whole notion of "discovering" - these are built upon the pattern of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world. Again, you attributing to awareness things which are actually just experiences made from awareness. In a standard physics description, would you say that an atom was responsible for choosing the shape of the objects of which is is a part? It's a similar argument.

You are like a "material" who which shape-shifts into states and experiences - and tugging on one part of yourself implies a movement of other parts. You wouldn't say that you choose those collateral movements. And in fact, you wouldn't say that you choose the main movement, because mostly you didn't realise what you were doing. Even when you do come to an understanding, that description is actually just a pointer to "that which cannot be described" - because descriptions are also just experiences, and so are choices.

...my comprehension of that turns into frustration at yet-again having to scratch around for something to do or know or experience to move on...

That's the tricky thing. Ultimately you discover that you can't describe yourself because you are the thing that the experience of "descriptions" is made from. But you always are yourself - and what you can do is discover all the things that you are not.

For example, one we come back to: if you close your eyes and "feel out" you discover that "you" are actually everywhere, in all directions. And if you pause and attend to the content of your experience, you find that although you are having an experience of "being here" and the world is "over there", actually they are both made from "you" and are inside "you".

So, if whenever we get lost in thoughts about experience, we can always come back to the actual fact of experience - now. And then we find that our descriptions are all floating as thoughts within that experience, rather than actually describing that experience. From this perspective, a lot of questions actually become meaningless. For instance, "why" questions only make sense relatively within with reference to particular content. In terms of the overall context, they are like "castles in the sky": they are self-consistent sets of thoughts, for sure, but they are just floating in the middle of nothingness, not pointing to anything outside of themselves. You are the sky, and those castles are made from you, and so you can never make a castle that captures you or explains you (you-as-awareness, that is).

If you explore that idea of "things having occurred (or not)" then you have to follow it to its logical conclusion, right down to the details of your personal experience, now, rather than just ideas about the world. Which gives us that the only thing "happening" is your sensory experience right now. There isn't a "past" or "future" other than the thought of it. There's isn't "a world" other than the thought of it. None of the things you are concerned about are happening right now "out there", in this sense. You don't need to get any fancier with the concept than that, I'd say.

One implication of this is, that wrestling with a particular aspect of experience persists it, because an interaction that doesn't have a transformative narrative to it simply implies that aspect all the more strongly. By basic patterning, even, if you spend your days thinking about things which irk you, you are increasing the "relative intensity" of those things, overlaying their patterns upon ongoing experience. In other words, there's a sense in which you have to forget it rather than fight it. You don't ever "solve" a problem - rather, you "forget" the problem and thereby shift to residing in the "solved" state?

Q1: Interestingly now that you mention it, in taking the "thing has occurred" to its logical conclusion, I discover that nothing implies it more than effortlessness, non-doing, and perhaps not even intending to change anything at all. I think in the mind of many of us there is deeply programmed the idea that life is like a steering wheel that we must constantly keep our hands on or it will derail.
My first connection with the ideas behind DJ was with this article [https://montalk.net/matrix/122/timeline-dynamics]. The article is from 2006 so I'm sure his views have evolved but nonetheless I think he hits close to the core idea with his "manifesting miracles" guide.
EDIT: I said hands off but meant hands on... witty mistake :P

Definitely agreed on steering wheels!

You're right there is a real problem with the assumption that ongoing experience needs "maintained" - which itself arises from the conflation of the "sphere of experience" with "sphere of intention", perhaps? That is, that the sensory experience I'm having right now is all I can influence and is all that is logged. Actually, it is maybe more accurate to say that my intentions apply "globally" and are overlaid over the entire world-pattern, and the current experience just being the part I am "looking at" right now. (Experiences are apparently local; intentions are actively global.) Because, in fact, you are experiencing the entire world-pattern right now, it's just that only one aspect of it is "unfolded" into 3D-sense, while the rest is "enfolded" or dissolved into the background and only experienced as a sort of "tone" or "global summary sense". Without that idea, we are doomed to continually "tinker" with any outcome that doesn't appear in our senses within a very small time frame, because we never come to understand that the world only shifts when we intend - and that our default should be hands off between intentions. The problem, we can't work this out in advance, because our descriptions have usually been built from just our local observations; we have to take a chance and experiment with intending wide.

Saved that article for later - thanks.

My early metaphor for time was that, implicitly, every possible moment was available, in a conceptual infinite grid (see: time travel version). That itself is related to the configuration/diagrammatic descriptions from Julian Barbour's The End Of Time and JW Dunne's The Serial Universe - although the idea appears in lots of places, including William Blake's "the bright sculptures of Los’s Hall". I think it's an old idea that keeps coming up in different ways. It seems that it is hard to make it stick, though, in people's minds?

Q1: I think it's an old idea that keeps coming up in different ways. It seems that it is hard to make it stick, though, in people's minds?
Truthfully, I find it quite amazing how certain ideas spread and take hold of large groups of people so fast and so easily (let's take for example, PSY's gangnam style) but some others barely manage to hold any traction. You could say well it's a song and it's catchy and whatever else, but I'm still inclined to think there may be more to it.

I'm inclined to think that also.

Q1: while the rest is "enfolded" or dissolved into the background and only experienced as a sort of "tone" or "global summary sense".
Follow up
This is an interesting concept. The "background felt-sense" perception that you talk about, that we constantly overlook. Tom(author of montalk.net) talks about it on an interview with Jason Demaskis, and even says that it is the most important aspect to reality creation/other things (at around 1:07:46 [https://youtu.be/X-HB1yc-HUk?t=1h7m46s], the full interview is worth listening to as well). How to go around changing the most basic/behind the scenes beliefs is a huge topic in itself. In my experience, I have noted how immersing yourself in a video game/film/book can for a time take your "background felt-sense" to another realm.
I noticed this effect when I watched the film Interstellar, because you are there in Earth with the main characters and then it slowly progresses to them leaving everything behind and even going to a higher dimensional space. Also after being immersed in a lucid dream for a while I tend to get a feeling of being some sort of indestructible deity which tends to go away after a while of being awake in the "real" world. Still, how you said, there's something that pulls you away from maintaining those "background felt-sense".

It also comes up in the philosophy and psychology aspects of Eugene Gendlin's work. He talks of a felt-sense for navigating one's current personal situation. However, as with the intending of outcomes more generally, if you approach this as the "dissolved state" of everything - the "global summary" of the entire state of you-as-awareness rather than you-as-person - it's actually much more that. It's both a huge topic, and not: in the sense that it's like having a pond with all the objects of the world in it "stored" in the same way, and therefore the same approach applies universally. The felt-sense actually is the world-state (all of it over all time), and your sensory experience merely corresponds to aspects of it that you have "unfolded" into perception. This means that you are literally experiencing the entirety of the world right now. Which is obvious, of course: since there is no "outside" to you, there's nowhere else for it to be, anyway. I actually think one of the things that defines a more "successful" film, is that it paces and leads the audience by creating a subtle felt-connection with them. It leads their felt-sense to become an ongoing global sense of the film as it unfolds. This is why there is a difference between films which are "designed" - a series of set pieces with connective filler in between - and those that are "woven" - a situation that evolves as the film progresses. It the former is like stamping an idea from nowhere onto the film; the latter is like drawing a thread from an idea and weaving it into imagery.

Note, both types of film can be enjoyable - but the "designed" film tends to like a fairground ride, where you're always aware you are watching a film, can feel the mechanics; you don't become so immersed in the story or characters. The "woven" film is an immersive world and leads you to be the film's world for the duration. For example: even if you enjoyed it, you can perceive that The Force Awakens was a "designed" film. It felt somehow shallow, like a sequence of scenes one after the other, and for a world-building franchise it somehow lacked "awe"; the making of the film was very evident in the final experience. Meanwhile, Interstellar definitely had its problems with characterisation and dialogue, but it absolutely absorbs you in a way that The Force Awakens does not.

Q1: I definitely feel what you mean in your example. While I don't read ASoIAF a friend once showed me a quote from the author which definitely resonated with me:
==It is true that I spend a lot of words in my books describing the meals my characters are eating. More than most writers, I suspect. This does draw a certain amount of criticism from those readers and reviewers who like a brisker pace. "Do we really need all that detailed description of food?" these critics will ask. "What does it matter how many courses were served, whether the capons were nicely crisped, what sort of sauce the wild boar was cooked in?" Whether it is a seventy-seven-course wedding banquet or some outlaws sharing salt beef and apples around a campfire, these critics don't want to hear about it unless it advances the plot. I bet they eat fast food while they're typing too. I have a different outlook on these matters. I write to tell a story, and telling a story is not at all the same as advancing the plot. If the plot was all that mattered, none of us would need to read novels at all. The CliffsNotes would suffice. All you'll miss is . . . well, everything. For me, the journey is what matters, not how quickly one can get to the final destination. When I read, as when I travel, I want to see the sights, smell the flowers, and, yes, taste the food. My goal as a writer has always been to create an immersive vicarious experience for my readers. When a reader puts down one of my novels, I want him to remember the events of the book as if he had lived them. And the way to do that is with sensory detail.
Now... the big question right now is, what effect does it have in one's immediate reality? If I read a lot of novels about civil wars and harsh survival conditions, enough that it alters my "felt-sense" of the world deep down, does that synchronistically nudge events in my life towards making me experience something like that? In some cases, I have noted a sort of "owls of eternity" type situation in which I run into more content relating to that particular felt-sense. The above question is important because it's a popular idea among "truthers" that movies & tv shows are used as a tool of "cultural modulation."

Great quote. Yes, I'd say that fictional content does result in a "patterning" of our ongoing experience too. And, this becomes ever more obvious if we relax our hold on our state and release our spatial attentional focus - because then our "thought strands" and "main strands" of experience are no longer so divided: to summon an image in strand is to overlay it upon strand. However, because of the nature of experience, I don't think it would be useful for "cultural modulation" by others onto you, since both the experience and the "modulation material" occur within you-as-awareness. You'd be doing it to yourself, really, in a fundamental sense anyway. For a classic read on patterning by fiction, check out Philip K Dick's essay: How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.

...

[Previous Edit] ...even there is no intelligence behind it, I - the character having this experience - am not acting fully consciously, or alone at all, as some people may understand this.

Well, you are never the character, you are always "awareness", but that doesn't mean you do what you do knowingly - by which I mean, having a parallel understanding in thought about what it is you are doing, or somehow pre-experiencing the results in detail beyond the specific intention. So, if you specify a particular outcome - say, intend an exact scene - then that is like you are defining the scene as fact by intensifying its contribution to the world. Now, because the world must "make sense", its pattern will simply by its nature shift to accommodate that coherently. You are the only intelligence, but that doesn't mean you have a thought-based knowledge of what it will be like to experience that world, beyond the intention, in advance. You won't know the details of the implications of that intention, until you encounter them subsequently. And if you don't even have an understanding of what "intending" is, you'll be even more confused. You are the only intelligence and the only power - but that doesn't necessarily mean you understand what's going on!

Which is what this subreddit is about, basically.

Dumb Patterning Aside: This is like if a mountain doubles its height in a landscape, the landscape doesn't have to "work out" or "know" how to incorporate the mountain, it is shaped as part of the change, just from being a continuous landscape. Now, imagine that you are a person on top of that mountain who "intends" it to double in height. Because you did the intending, you know the state of the mountain as it appears when unfolded into the senses. However, you don't necessarily know the state of the rest of the landscape, because it is not (yet) unfolded into the senses.

[Neville] didn't go all psychological about the past

Definitely I'm talking about actual world change rather than just psychological change - but: in this description of experience, it becomes hard to really say what "psychological change" means, and "the world" doesn't mean quite the same thing as it normally would. We're always talking about our ongoing experience, which arises within awareness, and there's no fundamental distinction in type between different aspects of experience. However, if we say that "the world" is our main bright 3D-immersive multi-sensory strand of experience, and "psychological experience" is the strand of thoughts and body sensations, then it's clear what we're wanting to change, and that we must intend appropriately - i.e. intend to the pattern of "the world" rather than any parallel thoughts about the world.

There's no trick to this, you simply make that your intention; it's like choosing to move your left hand rather than your right hand. There's no "way" to do one rather than the other. But as in that example, describing it in words makes it sound way more complicated than it is; it just is.

A1: I don't quite understand what is it that you're wanting to gain from this though?
On the one hand, it seems as though you're interested in the idea of changing your experience, but then as soon as you get that idea out there, you immediately shoot it down by condeming pretty much 99% of the people on the planet because you have some preconceived notion that the entire world has gone to shit...?
Remember that the way you're interpreting the world and people you know of directly impacts your experience within this life. What do you mean by fundamental pattern of the world? All changes tug at the strings of every thing else in existence, based simply on your changing of intention - so you have total impact over everything, as does everybody else. With that being said, some things are unlikely to change because something far-fetched would not make sense or serve you or those around you in any logical way... thus it is far-fetched. If you're wanting to experience a world that you feel better about, you need to choose reasons to feel better about it - your interpretations aren't something that happen to you, they happen from you, and they help mold your personal experience... regardless of how 99% of the rest of the human species behaves. Remember that humans are a minority of all the beings on the earth - and every single one of them has awareness, although their consciousness may be focused differently than a human's.

POST: [Two Glasses Method] How do you really know which words to choose?

The one that feels more right, perhaps? :-p

Really, it's not "right" as in "correct", it's "right" as in "appropriate" - feels like the situation, not feels like rightness. The purpose of the word is purely to provide a "handle" onto the situation. There are many different possibilities that could fulfil this criterion, but that doesn't matter. It's about what the word is pointing to, attached to, rather than the shape of the pointing.

TL;DR: Don't overthink this and fall into italicised "whataboutery" - after all, how can we really know whether our questions truly matter in actual experience, and which questions would be the right questions to ask?

Q1: Really, it's not "right" as in "correct", it's "right" as in "appropriate" - feels like the situation, not feels like rightness.
This reminds me of a scene in True Detective in which the character (Rust Cohle) talks about "smelling the psychosphere" and he comments how it feels like "aluminum and ashes", kind of exposing the way he "felt" about the world. Interestingly, if you've watched the show's first season, you'd notice the aluminum and ashes thing was pretty prominent during the season with several scenes in which the character(Rust Cohle) is shown drinking/using cans of beer (aluminum) and smoking (ashes). It's worth noting how he assigns this meaning to the world around him, but it really describes himself more than the world.
Found it! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3m30s&v=A8x73UW8Hjk&feature=youtu.be]

Ah yes, that's nice. I hadn't noticed the aluminium and ashes theme running throughout the show for Cohle's worldview (and world-sense) when watching it, but you're right. That stuff is why I much preferred the first season; while second season had other flaws, it really suffered from not having such a well thought out character perspective.

POST: If Dimensional jumping is real, how this subreddit works, then?

It is more accurate to say that we all are different dimensions, not that we are in them. A "dimension" can best be thought of as a particular "state", corresponding to a particular set of facts or patterns. As to what this means for "us all", that doesn't translate easily (or at all) into conceptual thinking, but the Hall of Records metaphor does provide one way to approach this.

Is there any experiences you created that were succeeded through the "hall of records"?

Well, the Hall of Records is intended primarily as a way to conceive of how experience is structured, as an alternative to the usual "independent people in a spatially-extended place unfolding in time" worldview (which is itself just a metaphor, of course). It does provide another way to conceive of experiences and outcomes, but it doesn't cause any as such - only intention does/is that. However, even just adopting it as a perspective does tend to loosen things up a bit, make everything much more dreamlike, particularly with "other people", but more generally you'll have experiences that are more like exploring "associative thinking" than a solid mechanistic place. Just try absorbing and intending the metaphor as "how things are", and see what happens?

To emphasise again: the exercises and techniques, if we want to call them that, never do anything in themselves - rather, they are a way of structuring intention, either directly or implicitly.

POST: What if someone I know does it? What happens to "my" them?

I care for my friend very much and I don't want to lose him. I know it isn't a physical body-switching thing, but if "he" goes to another dimension, what is left here? Does he vanish? Is what remains in his body a version of himself that didn't succeed in jumping? Does he switch with the version of himself in the dimension he jumped to?

So, in fact I'd say that your issue isn't really about what happens to him if a jump takes place - it's about what he (and you) are now. Basically, it doesn't work that way. You have to think of everything in terms of your own subjective experience. If you experience him doing a jump, then it is really your experience of him performing a jump - it is part of your "world-pattern" and is an outcome or implication of your own intention. Your friend doesn't go anywhere, because there is no "person" behind/inside your friend - he is made from "awareness", currently as images and sound and so on, patterned. Similarly, you are not a person either: there is no "person" behind your body, you are "awareness". Right now, "awareness" has taken on the shape of the perspective of you-as-person. You feel that you are you-as-person, but really you are always "awareness" and have "first cause" influence as a result.

It's like this is your "private copy" of the world - at this moment. There is no "outside" to awareness, and there is nothing "behind" the experiences you are having - except awareness. It's all you-as-awareness. Some other "time", "eventually", you-as-awareness might take on the shape of your friend's perspective, and have experiences from that point of view (and be mission controller in exactly the same way, but perhaps not realise it). But for now, you are effectively the god of your own copy of the world, and there is nothing else because it is made from you.

TL;DR: You can ponder a lot of metaphysics, or you can simply accept that it just doesn't work that way and so there's no need to worry.

Q1: Right now, "awareness" has taken on the shape of the perspective of you-as-person. You feel that you are you-as-person, but really you are always "awareness" and have "first cause" influence as a result.
this is why key exists in different 'places' at the same moment - it's just awareness condensing into certain forms

As soon as we start talking about multiple "moments" or "places" though, we are making an error. It's not that it's wrong as such - it's that it is meaningless, in the sense that this cannot be talked about conceptually. "Moments" and "places" only exist as an aspect of, part of the formatting of, an experience, and not outside of it. "Awareness" itself has no inherent properties other than being-aware - and so things like division, multiplicity, location, place, space, time are things that awareness can "take on the shape of", but it is incorrect to talk of those "shapes" being "in" a place or time, and so on. But so long as we keep in mind that we're talking metaphorically - and that although we might even pattern our experience with those metaphors ("active metaphors") such that we have experiences "as if" they were true, they are not fundmentally true - we get the best of all (ahem) worlds.

The main reason I bring this up in such a pedantic way, is that recognising this frees you from trying to wrestle to understand this - that is, create a parallel construction in thought which corresponds to it - because it is not actually possible. Again it's like trying to build a sandcastle which captures both "the beach" and "sand" - it is those two things, but it cannot contain them, and can never be identical with them. Descriptions and "understandings" need to be recognised for what they are: yet more experiences, on the same level, and not something which gets "behind" experiences.

couldn't that be all placed within one 'strand of thought' - i.e., a strand of thought that contains all the possible apparent multiplicity

I'd say that all the possible apparent multiplicity is within awareness, but of course you could have an experience "as if" all multiplicity is within a strand, perhaps even in some visual way - but that itself would be a selection from all possible patterns. We're really just tinkering with concepts here. There's only ever really "experience", and "strands" are just a nice way of talking about a certain type of overall experience where things seem "parallel".

yes, because there is no objective time in the universe - only relative time, which disappears as soon as i create a new 'experience'/'scenario'

I'd agree. "Time" is a concept, "change" is an aspect of an experience and doesn't "happen" outside of that experience, in the same way that a contour doesn't happen independently of the mountain, and a stream doesn't happen independently of flowing water, etc.

intending to eliminate all errors in perception

What counts as an error in perception? To me, I suppose an error in perception is to think that there is something "behind" experience. If one perceives an experience as being awareness and recognises that thoughts arising with that experience are also awareness, then one is not in error, since one recognises the true nature of the overall experience.

right, that is where one gets into an infinite loop of trying-to-apprehend that-which-cannot-be-apprehended and end up creating more and more fictitious scenarios without actually solving anything

Right - all at the same level, while incorrectly thinking that you are getting deeper into some hierarchy. Like seeing a coffee table and, examining it more closely, seeing wood, wood grain, molecules, atoms... but you are not getting deeper really, you aren't getting "behind" the table; you are just having different experiences at the same level.

...

We should bear in mind that "worldlines" and so on are just metaphors. You might have experiences "as if" there were such things, but there are not, in fact, lots of people in different threads. As soon as you envisage something in "diagrammatic" form in the 3rd-person (the "view from nowhere") you are immediately "wrong", in the sense that there no such underlying basis to experience - the though of it is itself just an experience, still within your perspective. You never get "outside" of you-as-awareness. Having said that, if these ideas are appealing and you absorb them, they can be useful for creating a worldview you like because it feels the most appealing and "understandable", or even to pattern your experience. And it does fill a placeholder when it comes to the unthinkable issue of "what are other people in terms of jumping". However, these descriptions are never "how things really are behind the scenes" (because there is no "behind the scenes"). Keeping this in mind helps us retain our flexibility of both thought and potential.

The Hall of Records metaphor tries to fulfil that purpose. A metaphor can't be right, but it can try to avoid or indicate the unavoidable error that results from trying to think about something that is "before" thought, is "before" the formatting of division and multiplicity (which are aspects of experiences, not aspects of the-world-as-it-is, necessarily).

...I guess it would be good here define what is meant by a "reality" and what is meant by a "you"? What do you mean by those terms? I think that's probably the root of our disagreement here (if there is one, and actually there might not be, fundamentally).

However, let's try -

However, you might be talking about the concept/pattern of which I was applying to reality. You'd be right in thinking its wrong (it probably is) but wrong in thinking theres no basis for this idea. Reality itself serves as the basis for all ideas.

Okay, so if by "reality" you mean "the main strand of experience", then what I would describe as "jumping" would be the imposition of a pattern onto that main strand. Essentially, "intensifying the relative contribution" of that fact/pattern in one's state, and there one's ongoing experience. Ideas for such patterns might arise in the main strand or in any parallel strands (by which I mean: thoughts). Basically, they come from experience in any of its aspects. I usually avoid the word "reality" because I think it's become quite a messy term that gets used for lots of different things, but I would say that perhaps: what is real is that which does not change. Following from this, the only thing that is "real" is "that which is aware" and "takes on the shape of experiences". The only facts that are always true and can be checked at any time by attending to direct experience:

• What I am is that which is aware - a sort of "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware, and which is not an object, and has no "edge" or "outside".
• I am having an experience, and I am aware of having an experience.
• Those experiences I have are "made from" me - I am that which "takes on the shape of" experiences.

These are really the same fact, of course, once you strip away the duality that language has introduced. So that leads to: reality == awareness.

No, because it [the senses] tells us there IS something outside our awareness.

Does it, though? Even your thought about an outside, is inside. We might say that not all of our experience is expanded out into a 3D multi-sensory format.

Your ideas on the nature of reality are simply an interchangeable metaphor just like mine is.

The important thing is, though, that it recognises itself as a metaphor - and that the-world-as-it-is can never be captured in a metaphor, because it at the same level as a metaphor. It seeks simply to be the most flexible way to describe patterns. It's not intended to be a theory of "how reality works" - but there is no "how reality works". The idea of there being a "how things work" exists in thought, not in the world.

It is a usefull patern used to trick your brain out of its own current patterns to test the boundaries of reality and cause changes.

What brain?

But you're right: the ultimate point of any metaphor is that it allows you to conceive of experiences that you could not formulate otherwise, and that having done so your intention will also intend that worldview by implication. World lines are good for that too - but we should be careful we don't start viewing them as "true" in some fundamental way. One might have experiences "as if" they exist one day, and then have experiences "as if" they don't another day. The way in which they exist, then, are as patterns of experience, not "out there" in some independent way.

The reason I go with the worldlines theory rather than your own is that their appears to currently be more data supporting the idea of mutliple realities...

What data? By which I mean, when pondering this sort of thing, what would or should count as data?

You're right: all we can prove (to ourselves) is the nature of our direct experience right now, plus infer from the experiences we produce what the limits are. Taking the two together, I suggest the is no stable truth in terms of objects or patterns. There is no solid underlying persistent substrate at all in that sense.

First Cause may be casued by awareness or it may not be. It may seem like First Cause is a concept that exists due to or awareness but since our perception of reality is flawed we can never say for sure if we were the ones behind the First Cause or if it was some other entity/pattern (or even that there isnt a First Cause).

First cause isn't "caused" by awareness, though: it is awareness. It's a phrase to describe that awareness is self-modifying - like a shape-shifter, you might say. Nothing "causes" awareness to change, and any apparent causes and effects you observe are in fact all "results" in that sense.

We could imagine this as being like a landscape of "moments" which can reform itself into a new pattern. A walker who explored the landscape subsequently would encounter one feature or moment, then another. To him, it might seem as if one feature "caused" the other feature - but in fact all features would be a result of the reshaping of the landscape: "first cause". (Note: the metaphorical landscape here would be a full static definition across all moments; and even "time passing" would be a static pattern, actually.)

I'd add that it makes no sense to talk of some other entity/pattern in this context. Those would be apparent interactions, but both the entity and the object it operated on would be aspects of the patterned landscape. The entity wouldn't cause anything; it's apparent actions would be a result. That's how I'm thinking of this, anyway.

EDIT: Quite a long reply but the first chunk is my main response to your points. The second chunk is an attempt to give a very loose outline of the "patterning" description. Thanks for the discussion!

Main Responses

Causes and Awareness

What I guess I'm getting at here is that if we are indeed aware there's something we have to be aware of that would cause this awareness.

I'd say that this is exactly where the "solution" lies, for want of a better term. What can cause awareness? Note that by "awareness" we have to be careful, and I deliberately don't use the world "consciousness" because that word has been kind of ruined. Different meanings of that word tend to get mixed up: namely "consciousness-of" (being aware of an experience), "self-consciousness" (identifying with a certain part of experience as "you"), and "consciousness" (a non-object material that just is). I'm referring to something like the last one here. So by "awareness" I mean a sort of non-material "material" - basically "that which is". It isn't "caused", it just "is". In fact "causation" is something at is "after" or "made from" awareness. Since awareness has no inherent properties other than being-aware, it makes no sense to talk of it in terms of spatial or temporal characteristics. Nothing can cause awareness, and nothing can cause experience.

Unfortunately, language and thought are themselves contents of experience, and although awareness itself is not an object, the contents of experience are. This is why we can't really formulate a description of awareness or think about it. It never "makes sense" in those terms. We can only be it and directly know/realise it. And that, actually, is how you come to adopt this view: not by working it out intellectually, but by attending to your direct experience as it is, and recognising its properties. Right now, you could pause a notice that - even thought you are having an experience of apparently being "over here" while this screen is "over there" - that in fact you are located "everywhere" within experience, and that your experience has no edges. For example, pause and direct your attention at these words. Now, direct your attention to "the place you are looking out from". What do you find there? Now keep going. What do you discover?

I also think that our definitions of "first cause" were somewhat different leading to some confusion...

Ah, right. I understand where you were coming from now.

Truth Behind Patterns

Altogether though I think it comes down to a fundamental disagreement: you believe there is no "truth behind the patterns" while I maintain there is. In the end I would argue that both methods are flexible enough to be perfectly valid. Let us just agree to disagree.

What I would say though, is that the patterns are the truth. Actually, what I'd say is that all that is true is "awareness" and the shape it has taken on. There is nothing else. If there was a "behind" to a particular pattern (made from awareness), then that "behind" would also be a pattern (made from awareness). It's a little like, no matter what thoughts you have about the world or about an "outside" to awareness, those thoughts are still themselves within and made from awareness. Thoughts about experiences are themselves experiences. Right - all at the same level, while incorrectly thinking that you are getting deeper into some hierarchy. Reusing an example: It's like seeing a coffee table and, examining it more closely, seeing wood, wood grain, molecules, atoms... but you are not getting deeper really, you aren't getting "behind" the table: you are just having different experiences at the same level. So we don't necessarily have to "agree to disagree" I think, because we are talking about slightly different things. Although I am saying that awareness has no inherent structure, that does not mean we do not at present have an accumulated structure from all the various intentions and their implications to date.

This description doesn't say there is no format or factual aspect to things - it simply says that all formatting and facts are open to amendment, and that this is possible because all current structure is you-as-awareness "shaped" into a particular, and the only true causal mechanism is the shape-shifting "first cause" ability of awareness to adopt a new state. If this were not the case, neither experience nor amendment would be possible (how could you interact across a boundary of type? how could you experience across a boundary of type?). So, we can absolutely adopt "world lines" as a pattern and have experiences "as if" they were true. And we can also adopt "a infinite gloop of all possible moments" and have experiences "as if" that is true. The default pattern for most people is: "independent people within a shared spatially-extended place unfolding in time", and so they have experiences "as if" that is true (and then think we are crazy for talking about all this stuff, fair enough!).

Outline of a Model

Anyway, I hope that's a bit clearer. The very loose bullet-point outline for the "patterning" description would be something like this, written as assertions for simplicity:

• What you truly are, is "awareness". Or for poetic purposes: an "open space of awareness which takes on the shape of states and experiences" and whose only inherent property is being-aware.
• Dissolved within this awareness are all possible facts, patterns and experiences - which exist eternally. All possible patterns are present and active within experience, always.
• Awareness is always in a particular "state" - even if that is a flat state where no patterns are dominant, corresponding to a "void" experience. A state includes all base formatting (including apparent time/space aspects), perceptual formatting, world facts, events and so on. This state defines the facts-of-the-world and hence your ongoing experience.
• A "state" can be said to correspond to a particular distribution of relative intensities of patterns. We might say that awareness "takes on the shape of" a particular state and hence a fully-defined state of experiences. This can be imagined as a sort of "landscape" which defines all moments across all time. "Time passing" is itself a static pattern, which can be likened to a fixed trajectory of attentional focus across a the landscape of moments.
• A "state", then, is fully defined and fully deterministic.
• However, the landscape can be "shifted" by altering the relative intensities of the constituent patterns. This amounts to awareness "taking on the shape of" a different distribution, hence a different state with a different deterministic set of moments. (This is where things like "dimensional jumping" fit in.)
• Such shifts are done by "intending". To "intend" is to increase the intensity of a particular pattern ("the intention"), either directly or by implication.
• "Intending" amounts to something like "thinking the fact of something being true", but it is not a thought with an object as its target - this is an unbounded "objectless, subjective" thought: one thinks it by "bringing it to mind" or "selecting the pattern" or "contemplating the fact". One is "adopting the shape of" a state that incorporates that pattern. There is no technique to intending; one simply intends. (It also can't really be described!)
• Practically speaking, one often tends to intend by implication, using misdirection. That is, one performs some mental or physical task (which is itself intention!) with the understanding that this means-that your target pattern is true. Examples can actually be as simple as simply "asserting", "declaring" or "commanding" that something is true. All it has to accomplish, is triggering into prominence that particular pattern by implying it - without obstruction.
• The world, then, is essentially a persistent or maintained thought of a world, shaped from awareness, which can be revised by thinking of a different world, again as awareness.

Again, note that the model isn't "true" - what it aims to do is be the most generalised description for structured experiences, the minimum model that "makes sense" can be thought in terms of. It captures the maximum scope of "as if" experiences and allows them to make sense, by going to a "meta" level that is "before" the world-pattern (but "after" awareness, of course).

To emphasise: what is inherently true is only ascertained by directly attending to experience as it is, now, and not by thinking about it. Which is why people meditate and stuff. But I think you can infer this understanding by repeatedly adopting a worldview, noting that your ongoing experience tends to fall in line with it "as if" it were true, until it becomes clear that there is no fundamental "how things are" or "how things work", other than the fact that you are 'that which is experiencing and experience'.

Whew. Okay, I think that covers my perspective as best it can be covered at present. It's nice to be pushed to clarify things anyway.

POST: You don't need a technique (and other patterns)

Soon enough this sub will abandon methods and rejoin the common use of the law of attraction.

...and then soon after that, someone will start a subreddit based on a metaphysical model again, because the attempt to follow "the law of attraction" quickly descends into near-superstition, in my experience. The law of attraction neither commits to a model, nor fully commits to the arbitrariness of all models. It's not the methods that matter generally, and that isn't what distinguishes what we discuss here. Rather, it's the clear and specific patterning of intention - and by extension any properly formed model or internally consistent technique - combined with an underlying focus on the broader nature of experiencing, and the ongoing exploration of those things.

I'm curious, were you the one that created the two glasses method and was it based on the law of attraction? Do you still use the two glasses method?

I did create it, as a response to a post over at /r/glitch_in_the_matrix asking for ways one might deliberately generate a "glitch". It wasn't based on the law of attraction - it was based on the pattern that underlies this description. But of course, everything, even moving your arms and legs, is based on (or rather is) structured intention and awareness, so there's a common root to all of this. The idea is that if you get familiar with the owls and glasses exercise, ponder them along with the metaphors given, then you have pretty much everything you need to be your own expert here.

POST: Another newbie, another "what is it all about?"

Still, it is not very clear what you are trying to do here.

If it's about anything, I'd say it's about putting aside assumptions and exploring things. The childish exercises, then, are simply ways of demonstrating to ourselves that our everyday assumptions are perhaps not particularly accurate, and triggering contemplation and further experimentation. So, basically, it's about having a questioning attitude, particularly about the default metaphor we use to describe the world (that it is a "shared spatially-extended place unfolding in time").

This all stuff is nothing at all special, this is just how our machinary of brains work.

Really? How does the "machinery of brains" work? (Please don't say it's an information processor!)

I have weird things happening to me from time to time. Doesn't mean anything special, everyone has their own share of weird stuff.

Well, it might mean something special. If you don't have a detailed description of how, exactly, "weird things happening" works, then who's to say, I suppose?

As far as science is concerned, all the experience we feel happens in our mind

What's a "mind"?

If you "jump" from this body, it shouldn't at all affect that body's brain, so it won't disappear from reddit.

The idea that you "jump" from a body is perhaps incorrect. That's not what is meant by a "jump". Even the idea that you are "in" a body is suspect, surely. And what would the "you" be that would be in it, anyway? I'm not sure what the link between this and "affecting the body's brain" is?

This reminded me of tulpamancy, except that tulpamancers know that it's all in their heads.

Didn't you just say that everything was just in our minds?

Come on, if you really dig deeper, you shouldn't even have a desire for a personal gain, since such a desire is also a mental construct you try so hard to eliminate.

Why shouldn't you have desire for personal gain? What is a "person", anyway? Why should you eliminate desire? And what's a "mental construct"? This sounds a bit superstitious, more than anything!

I'm interested in figuring out what consciousness is...

That does contain a hidden assumption that consciousness is a "thing"...

But immediately got frustrated by the amount of magical thinking.

...and actually, I'd say one of the things this subreddit does is explicitly try to avoid magical thinking, by unpacking it. It endeavours to take a step back, and instead of making assumptions about the content of experience, considers the context of it - that is, directly or indirectly explore questions about "the nature of experiencing" itself, and what the relationship is between experiences and narratives. In other words, to call into question not only "how things work", but also what it even means to talk of a "how things work" - as well as what you-as-experiencer is, and so on. Mostly, it's just people having some fun, though, of course, and not getting too arrogant about it! :-)

TL;DR: It's about exploring our experience, without presupposing anything, including the idea that we are exploring our experience...

Q1: Valid questions you ask and valud attitude you have. That's why I got excited once encountered this sub. Yeah, hard to say what is "mind", "consciousness" etc, this is why it is important to be open-minded. But what I see in the threads of this sub doesn't correspond to this spirit. You say you "unpack magical thinking" - I see people focusing on the procedure of techniques, not their essence. What struck me most is that some here apparently believe that they can travel in time or to parallel worlds if they focus hard enough. You are talking about being open minded and trying to understand things, while what I see is people believing they can achieve certain supernatural stuff and trying to do that. Yeah, supernatural stuff is unquestionably cool, but so many people already made the mistake of believing they can achieve it with none of them actually achieving it.

I think all of that is okay, though. Focusing on techniques, well that's the default approach for most people in life. In seeking to find a way to generate a result, they can find their way into a larger subject, as they contemplate the questions raised by the experiences they have. And things like "time travel" and "parallel worlds" - as ideas they are interesting things to take seriously, since they are like extreme versions of the concepts of "time" and "place" that we take for granted. We are led to cast a sharper eye on the nature of ongoing experience as it actually is, which can result in us seeing that many everyday assumptions don't really correspond very well with what we actually encounter in and as the world as it is lived.

The whole notion of "supernatural stuff", for example, might in the end be recognised as a bit of a meaningless category. You experience what you experience, the narrative that accompanies it is something else, and the idea of a "belief" might also collapse at the same time. Trying to achieve supernatural stuff, then, as a way of exploring the limits of experience, is as valid an approach as any other - provided it is pursued in a structured way. It can be quite revealing about what constitutes an "explanation" for an experience. So, yes - it is important to be open-minded, but for it to be worthwhile, you have to be completely open-minded. Now, this isn't about saying "hey, maybe magic is possible" or that sort of thing; it's about being able to accept that very fundamental concepts might be relatively true only. Perhaps even be willing to entertain the notion that there is no stable platform at all, no observer position from which the rest of experience can be considered at arms length.

Anyway, as the sidebar emphasises: we shouldn't accept something unless we have personal experience of it; we shouldn't dismiss something without personal experience of it; the "open verdict" or "null view" is the default. This guards against attaching oneself to the wrong answers, but also against committing oneself to the wrong questions.

Could be one of the ways to explore your experience, you're right. But...

Yeah, there is always a conflict when one is drawn to pursue a line of thinking because one is seeking a "non-standard outcome" with a strong emotional context, rather than "just" because one is interested in exploring "how things are". The two overlap, of course - however, it's not easy to balance saying that nothing is impossible in principle, but also emphasise that although investigations could lead to interesting discoveries, those discoveries might not lead to the desired outcome. The answer is, I think, to be completely sincere.

Endless stream of reports from people, most of these reports of no real value.

In what way are they of no real value? Generally, I'd say the value is in the discussion, not the posts themselves. This even applies to this conversation!

Shouldn't we at least try to categorize the experiences or filter them?

Categorise experiences on what basis, though? Categorisation implies a purpose. But a purpose implies a worldview. What worldview would the subreddit adopt?

Generally, the subreddit is quite careful not to advocate an official worldview, because a worldview suggests that there is a fundamental "how things are" and "how things work" that is there to be discovered (in the sense of there being a persistent underlying structure, that is). One of the essential ideas of the subreddit is that this is not necessarily true. (This is a sort of "meta" worldview though, of course.)

EDIT: See also this related comment [POST: What does r/occult think of r/dimensionaljumping], perhaps.

Q1: Generally, I'd say the value is in the discussion, not the post themselves.
I would make a thread but that seems egotistical to me and I see your discussion as reflective of my experience anyway because the world is my experience~

Yes, and that's fine. The submissions are there as a sort of host for an ongoing conversation, centred around the general topic as outlined in the sidebar, which continues across all posts. That's why it's okay that the same things come up again (the responses will be slightly different this time), and there's no "knowledge" that is being accumulated and fixed (which isn't as important as one might initially assume, as you know).