TriumphantGeorge Compendium (Part 9)

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).

POST: Any help?

This is probably one for /r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix, since it doesn't involve any deliberate attempt to make a change or experiment (the focus of this subreddit). As a general thought, though, when we find ourselves asking what something "really is" - e.g. is a dream where you aren't looking out of a bodily perspective "astral projection" - I'd say that what is "really happening" is whatever we are experiencing: the sensory experience is what is happening, with no true explanation "behind" it. Any descriptions or explanations we come up with, are parallel to that. So, someone might say "that's astral projection", but when you push deeper, "astral projection" will turn out to be just "the experience of apparently not being in a body" + a little story we made up. Similarly, someone might say that right now you are "an individual person walking around a shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time", but that too would be a little story. This is the essence of the subreddit, perhaps. See: the "imagination room" metaphor, for example.

...Hey, I remember!

So, my issue with those explanations isn't that they aren't useful or can't fit, it's just that they are promoted as being "what is really happening" rather than a metaphor (in the same bag as the "brain is a processor" metaphor and so on). They're a starting point, and it's only a problem if people interpret them as a conclusion. (In fact, I contend that there is no "what is really happening" in that sense.)

For OP, we can create metaphors in terms of "databases" which are "calculated" (but what "time" would that calculation occur in, since it can't be the same "time" that experiences occur in?) or a selection mechanism from static patterns (no calculation required, but where does mechanism reside?) and so on. These are all useful ways of thinking about things - and they are fun to play with - but they don't really explain things beyond providing a little story which fills a gap. They can't be used to make a prediction, for example. They are not "true" in a deeper sense. That "true in a deeper sense" is what is interesting. So those metaphors are a starting point for exploration, but mainly, in the end, they are a starting point for recognising the nature of explanations vs the nature of experiencing. (In my view, of course!)

that happens when your consciousness accesses the "future probable database" as Campbell calls it.

That sort of thing is good for triggering questions, definitely. For example: What is "consciousness"? In what sense can consciousness be "yours"? What is a "future" exactly, and in what way can it exist? What does it mean for consciousness to "access" something? In what way, by what, and where and when, are patterns "calculated"? The attempt to answer those questions is what makes the description useful, I think, rather than the content of the description itself.

In the end, I anticipate that where people get to is that descriptions don't matter at all for living life, except as a way of formulating intentions.

You're right, it's just inherently impossible to correctly explain a reality by using patterns from the "sub-reality"

Yes. I'd emphasise, though, that it's even more basic than that might initially suggest. That is, even concepts such as "reality", "sub-reality", the idea that we are "in" anything, that there are "higher" or "lower" realities, "physical" or "non-physical" - all suffer from the same problem. Which can be summarised as: thinking is itself just another experience, at the same level as any other experience. Even thoughts about "an outside" are also "inside" experience, including the notion that anything is "happening" other than the current experience, or the assumption that the formatting of experience (spatial extension and unfolding in time) corresponds to the format of... that. Glancing at that post, yes I'd pretty much agree with it, as far as it goes, and I have gone through the book. (There wasn't that much in it for me in that "a-ha" way, but it's a thorough description of that sort of structuring approach, and I found his personal history interesting.) But then: does it actually go anywhere, really? This applies to my own descriptions also.

Consciousness can do whatever it's capable of.

We always end up with tautologies like this: it all just is, is the conclusion. [Pasting from a comment elsewhere:] We can think about this forever, but it's really something that is directly realised. For example, we might close our eyes and try to:

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

and:

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

Those observations are the facts. Everything else must adhere to those facts. The conclusion is super-simple, but it's not object-based and so can't be described at all, only pointed to. But we can try with something along the lines of:

• What you truly are is a non-material "material" whose only property is being-aware, which "takes on the shape of" experiences, and has all possible experiences "dissolved" eternally within it.

Or similar. Beyond this, we end up just trying to create the most minimal description that includes the fact that "experience is structured in some way", while avoiding including errors by referencing any material, spatial or temporal terms.

When you pick everything apart, it seems to come down to just that. Awareness being aware of things.

And perhaps more strictly speaking: Awareness being aware of itself as things. Or rather, as the experience of apparent things.

But it would also seem unproductive and unlikely for consciousness to have all this experience going on, without gaining anything from it.

Doesn't this envisage awareness as something "other", though, that has aims and purpose independent from the experience you are having right now? It paints awareness as a being, rather than just being. Awareness, though, isn't a thinking and doing thing - rather, it's what the experience of thinking and doing is "made from".

(Pondering:)

It is important, I think, to not imagine awareness as being what the world is made out of - in the sense of there being a 3-dimensional place and it's made from awareness, with us within that place. Even more abstract descriptive schemes often contain that hidden assumption. This isn't the case though. There is only subjective experiences. Awareness takes on the shape of experiences, not places. Bringing it right down to the immediate: The current "moment" of 3-dimensional experience right now is of apparently being "over here" with the screen "over there", but a brief pause to investigate reveals that "you" are actually "everywhere" in this "moment". And there's nothing else. Consciousness can't evolve, because it is "before" time. Time exists only as an experience. This means that evolution and being productive and having a purpose - none of that belongs to consciousness. You can experience having thoughts and feelings of those things, but that is content, not context. We can have experiences "as if" such things are true, but they are only ever relatively true. The only thing that is fundamentally true, is being-aware ("awareness", not of anything specific). Awareness has no meaning as such. Meaning only exists in the accumulated patterns, relative to one another. It is helpful, I think, to make a distinction between this fundamental aspect ("the truth") and what is meaningful in terms of "being patterned as a human experience". Meaning is to be found in our current state, and not in our recognition of the fundamental nature. That recognition merely gives us an insight into our true situation, and lifts the restrictions which only exists in our narratives about ourselves (including the metaphors me, you and Tom employ for the purposes of discussion).

...That's just a shifting of definitions, surely - because we lack decent words for this, "consciousness" having been used to mean all sorts of different things. Broadly speaking, people use it interchangeably for three different things:

• "Consciousness-of" - The experience of being conscious of content, as apparently separate objects.
• "Self-consciousness" - The experience of identifying oneself with a particular part of that content.
• "Consciousness" - The non-material "material" whose only inherent property is being-aware and is not an object or personal, otherwise known as "I AMness". It is "before" division, multiplicity, change, any structure.

The first two are best described as "patternings" or "states" of the the third. When I use the word "awareness", I mean that third definition. When you use the word "consciousness" in your example, you are referring to the first one, perhaps with a hint of the second. I use "awareness" for this, because the word typically has less connotations. Although it is lumbered with sometimes being used by people to mean "within one's attention", at least you can then suggest that if one ceased to focus one's attention at all, it would be without boundary or location, which is a reasonable metaphor all on its own. While awareness might taken on the shape of an experience of apparently thinking and doing, it does not actually think or do anything in and of itself. It becomes a state, it does not do anything (which would imply a subject and object relationship) fundamentally. It "takes on the shape of" other properties, but they are not inherent properties of consciousness. They are temporary, and there is nothing "behind" them, no persistent solid underlying substate supports them. They are "just" patterning, at the same level, non-hierarchical. So, for sure, awareness might get formatted into the experience of "being an evolving digital system", but no aspect of that will be the "fundamental elements of consciousness" (as per the definition), although they might be considered the building blocks of a metaphor describing a particular pattern of "consciousness-of". Broadly speaking, if we separate things into content (the relative transient truth of structuring) and context (the fundamental unchanging truth of the nature of experiencing) we can keep things straight, though, I say. Aside: We have to tread carefully here anyway. As soon as we talk about, for example, an "evolving, digital system", we should pay attention to how, exactly, we are imagining this - by which I mean, right now. Do we imagine it from a "view from nowhere"? Are we seeing little cellular automatons doing their stuff, as visual thoughts in our mental space? How, exactly, does this translate to something in reality?

If we are not thinking of something as a 1st-person experience, we must consider how that 3rd-person view makes sense. Does that "diagrammatic" view ever get experienced? And then in what sense does it ever "happen" or even exist? And so on. The implication is that, if we imagine something occurring in an "objective world", then we are "already wrong" in a way. Although all of that doesn't deny us the ability to create useful or interesting descriptions, it does mean that trying to be "right" with them is pointless. They are just more experiences, at the same level. "Awareness" or "I AMness" can be directly perceived or known, then - because you are it - but it can't be thought about. The conclusion here is that we must be clear about the purpose of our thinking, rather than just (as we all do now and again) hand-wavingly assume that we are investigating "the nature of reality" or whatever.

...There's a bit more to it than that, though. We need to take care to notice not just what we are thinking about, but how we are thinking about it. It's this one step back, "meta" approach, that indicates certain things to us. Awareness, as described, isn't something that is comprehended; it's not an object. "Awareness" is a conceptual object, sure, but it's intended to point at something which cannot be conceptualised at all. It is "isness". There is no concept that can be "behind" Awareness. It is the direct "I AMness" that you know intimately right now. I'd say it is something you experience, rather than think about, but even the word experience implies a sort of subject/object divide. You don't "comprehend" or "understand" it. This is where all that "the Tao that is spoken is not the true Tao" type stuff comes from. It is the context, because without being-aware, this is nothing else. And remember, there is no "outside" to this (and no "inside") so it is actually meaningless (in the proper sense of the word) to talk of a "beyond". It has no location, no boundaries, no edges, no extent.

...that could be far outside the borders of our imagination.

Your imagination (and your experience more generally) has no borders. Go looking for borders in your experience, right now. Don't think about borders or beyonds, because all you'll do is imagine borders or beyonds inside experience. You'll be thinking a concept, rather than actually looking for borders. Actually "feel out" in your experience, as it is. There's an inherent problem, which is: thoughts are already divided and even the thought about "undivided" is a divided thought, an object in mental space which only makes sense when related to other objects. It is not possible to think about a subject - it is immediately "too late". It's like trying to make a sandcastle which represents both "the beach" and "sand". The sandcastle, like every sandcastle, is both of those things, but it cannot capture those things. There is no sandcastle which could do so, simply due to the nature of sandcastles. All we can do, is point to the fact that what we are talking about is, "not this, not that" (while being all things and nothing). Build sandcastles, and then attempt to draw attention to that which the sandcastle is "of" rather than "about". The direct noticing of this, though, is super-simple, and actually the simplest thing there is (and of course it is). So, when we think about there being "fragments of consciousness" or whatever, we must pause, and actually look at the structure of the thought we are thinking here. Does it appear in your mind like a little diagram, for example? What, exactly, is the imagery? And how, exactly, is that imagery meaningful in terms of the context of that experience? "Reality" is this, right now, 1st-person, and that is what must always be included into any picture. The subject of any conceptual object must be part of the consideration. Content without context is fantasy (albeit perhaps a useful one, and there's an argument that your main strand of experience is a fantasy also, just that it is a 3D-immersive multisensory strand of thought).

(It'd be good to do this from the ground up really, but lacking time, so let's just to-and-fro for now.)

I'd shy aware from calling it a "source" since that implies spatial and temporal aspects - but we have to be easy on ourselves here, since we can only talk around this, rather than capture it. So, I would be careful of the language perhaps, and give ourselves a pass!

Awareness "takes on the shape of" experiences, and so the context and the content are one, of course. Also, when you say "not-yet-conscious" what you surely mean is "not yet self-conscious" as in our earlier discussion - but it is inherently being, eternally. This "raw" state is a hypothetical state, though, because it is always in some "shape" or other. The reason to make the distinction between content and context in our description, is - as well as avoiding saying "all that is, is" - that it permits us to distinguish between what is always true and what is not. The reason why might choose to say that awareness is "outside" of content in a sense, is that it is not reliant upon it, it has no foundation. We're making a distinction based on property and persistence, rather than material construction. From this, we'd say that awareness doesn't evolve, because time is "within" it; it is not bound by time. Awareness is "eternal" (as distinct from "forever"). And all possible patterns and facts and experiences are also "eternal". There is no creation, "creation is already complete", only relative intensity of patterns changes, and even that doesn't not happen "in time". So, we might say that content evolves, because time is an aspect of that particular content - it would still be static from the point of view of awareness, though - but the property of being-aware never does. All content could dissolve right now, for no reason - reasons exist only relatively, as the structure of content, after all - but this context would remain.

To consider: When new molecules are formed, or when molecules are annihilated, do "atom" and "molecule" evolve?

And: If awareness and content are one, then what does this mean for your experience, this sensory moment, right now? (Again: if you start thinking about things in the 3rd-person to answer this, you will immediately be "wrong", surely.)

I can't bring myself to a solid conclusion about what awareness or consciousness is

There is no conclusion (in thought) to come to, about what awareness is - it simply is and can't directly known to be so, but it's in the manner of an insight, rather than a logical conclusion. It's a fact of this moment; one needs to switch to attending and intending, rather than thinking (which is just a deformation of your present moment really, rather than a revealing of it).

But one thing we should agree on is that humans are more aware than a bumblebee.

Human beings aren't aware at all. "Human being" is an experience that awareness can have. You are that awareness. The phrasing would go something like:

• "What you truly are is 'awareness', which is currently 'taking on the shape of' the experience of apparently being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person."

Now, we might be tempted to say that this experience is evolving, but actually I would say that it is not. It is static. What is apparently changing, is the sensory content, but from the perspective of an overall state, it is unchanging and deterministic unless shifted by intention. One might conceive of this as that there are all possible states, always present and active, but differing in their relative "brightness" at this moment (the eternal Now). The divisions we make between states, sensory moment, eternal patterns, and so on are essentially arbitrary though.

A couple of things, which are really the same thing:

• In my view, you must think about this from a 1st-person perspective, otherwise this is pointless fantasy. You must recognise that you are awareness, taking on the shape of this experience, meaning this shape of "moment". If you are thinking about it in an abstract, 3rd-person way, diagrammatic model kind of way rather than actually linking this to your current experience right now, then it doesn't lead anywhere, I would suggest...
• What is the purpose of this theorising?: We're basically just drawing pictures the mind, essentially in parallel to our main strand of experience. We never get to something "behind" that main strand, because: a) we are always working in parallel, at the same level, and: b) there is no behind. In what way do you think the two are connected?

My answer to that final question is: only by both being experiences in/as awareness. They are both made from "sensations, perceptions, and felt-knowing". One experience, the model, does not describe the other, the strand. Rather, the value of a model is that it may lead you to recognise something at a "meta" level: that thinking and perceiving are of the same nature. In effect, your main strand of experience is also a thought in and of awareness - albeit a 3D, unbounded, multi-sensory, particularly bright strand of thought. You are not in a world, you are having a thought of a world. All the time, as we consider this stuff, we must retain that "meta" step back and be aware of ourselves as context, notice what it is that is actually happening when we "think" or we "perceive": patterns in you-as-awareness. Otherwise we are getting lost in content and mistakenly consider experience to be something that can be "understood" or "solved"; it isn't.

EDIT: A question to ask yourself: do you feel that the world, or your experience of it in this current moment, is outside of you or inside of you? I don't mean what you think about this, I mean do you perceive that the current scene is inside of your perspective?

...Okay, so that's a nice description. It's seems fairly self consistent, it depicts a structured view that can be logically explored within its own terms; it's a coherent "castle". But -

• What is it a description of, exactly?

Pause for a moment, become aware of the room you are in, then think about your description. Then notice:

• Where is that description located within your experience?
• Where is the room located within your experience?
• How, exactly, are the two related?

Note: Don't think about those questions and construct an answer to them. Rather, directly observe the situation and report it - if you see what I mean.

...In all cases, though, I'd say you replied with explanations - referring to concepts - rather than your observations. I mean this much more simply: that you tell me what you are actually experiencing, rather than an interpretation using concepts (as far as possible).

• For the first question, I meant literally where in your experience is it - not a conceptual description.
• For the second, similarly.
• For the third, again, I mean literally, their actual observed relationship, rather than a description which you do not, in fact, perceive other than in the thinking of it.

Personally, I've never experienced a "being-level" or "being modified" or "experiences" being "generated" by "interactions". Do you see what I'm getting at? All that stuff falls within the first question, because once again we are engaged in "describing". With those answers, we are potentially answering all the questions in a way that obscured the answer to the first question, which would have made the answers to all the questions different.

...So we might say they're at the same level. One isn't "behind" the other one; they are both arising within the same "space" (using that term for convenience), "beside" or "parallel" with one another in that space (loosely). Now, to clarify things further - revisiting one and two: what are they "made from"? What is their nature? And do they differ? And if so, how do they differ? Again by observation, by directly attending to the experience of them, rather than theorising.

...And what is this "me", what is "me" made from? And where is "me"?

(Then we'll pick up those other bits.)

...Okay, so perhaps jumping ahead here (we can reel back if we've gone too far) -

So, although we use words like "consciousness" and "me" (or "awareness"), which objectify it for the purposes of discussion, it's really just isness or IAMness or "this/that" and so on. And "consciousness" and "me", being words or concepts, are also made from and within that, so we have to be careful to see them pointers to "nowhere-everywhere" - and not object-concepts which can be manipulated or used in models and descriptions. Now, remembering the "feeling out" exercise earlier in the thread, when we close our eyes and go looking, we find: that experience has no edges, no boundary, no outside; that "me" is not located anywhere, but is everywhere in that experience; that the present experience is entirely "made from" or "of" this "me".

So, looping back, we see that the relationship between the main strand of experience and our descriptions, the connection, is that they are essentially both experiences of the same nature. One is not "behind" the other, one does not "describe" the other; that idea is itself a concept. They are like parallel-simultaneous strands of sensory-formatted experience, like strands of thought, within you-as-awareness - although one of those strands is "unbounded" and "unlocated", making it the 1st-person strand which we end up identifying with as part of a "world". We conclude, then, that our experience of the world takes the form of sensations made from awareness, and there is nothing behind them at all - there is no outside, no levels, and no depth to our experiences. No world, as such. This is where I get that summary of: you-as-awareness "taking on the shape of" the apparent experience of being-a-world-from-the-perspective-of-a-person.

So -

• Descriptions don't matter. We are effectively directly imagining-that we are a person in a world, we are having experiences "as if" this is true, but it is only true as a moment-shape we have taken on, a thought we are having-being. Descriptions are just another experience.
• Descriptions don't matter - except in one way, which flips around the everyday notion of what a description or explanation is about. But first -

Pause now, close your eyes. Now, raise your arm. What was the nature of that experience? What do you actually experience? And: how did it come about? Again, from observation.

...Remember, though: observations only. Describe the experience itself, not any conceptualisations (which are another experience, as we have noted in the discussion above).

• Did you actually experience "interpretation of data" or "receiving from a system" or "being integrated"?
• Did you actually experience "utilising free will" or "reality reacting" or "the logic of a ruleset"?

Don't go beyond what is actually experienced.

...Okay, good. So, I'll suggest a couple of things and see if they fit your experience:

1. What constitutes this "1st person perspective" - when left uninterrupted - is the experience of being like an open space, with various sensations floating in it, phasing in and out. You do not actually experience being a body, as such; it's a scattered bunch of sensations, with a visual image floating in one direction, and sounds distributed around, and so on. Everything seems to be both "over there" and "here". If you place your attention on these words on this screen, and then decide to direct your attention to "the place you are looking out from", you'll find a sort of structureless void. If you follow this direction, it goes on forever, and in fact goes on in all directions. You cannot find a "person" anywhere in this experience - except when you summon the thought of a person: an idea or concept, which is itself an experience of course (of thinking about "a person").
2. When, as you just did, you deliberately make a change such as raising your arm - you cannot find the cause of that change. You only experience the "result". Even if you were to have the sense of "about to do this" or a thought of "I'm going to raise my arm", you'd have same problem: those would be results too, with no detectable cause, and they certainly didn't cause the arm-raising, since there is no overlap between them; they are one-experience-then-another. As you attend to this, you recognise that there is no cause; the change is self-causing. You "know" you change it, but you cannot detect any mechanism or method or "doing" - only a shift in the content of experience. You eventually conclude it is as if you, as awareness, shape-shifted yourself into a different experience, simply by becoming it.

As usual, the wording makes this seem involved and complicated, when actually the direct observation or experience of it, is just that it is (with nothing "behind" it).

I do believe that this is a little picture way of looking at reality.

I would disagree with your points, somewhat inevitably. :-)
Let's see -

First, I'm not detaching the "awareness" part really, I am saying it is reality. Not integrated - is it. And you are that. More importantly, it's not "things just happen for no reason". It's true that things don't happen for an in-world reason, because all those reasons are, in fact, results. The reason for all of those, though, is the one reason: named "first cause" or "intention" or "direct imagination" "unbounded thinking-that" or "awareness shaping itself".

The second part is where it all leads, because (as promised earlier) it changes what a "description" is. A description is not an explanation or an understanding of an experience, it is its own pattern in parallel. However, if you intend an act in terms of a description, then you imply the extended pattern of that description in your experience. You are intending the description as well as the outcome. In other words, the use of descriptions causes us to have experiences corresponding to them; continued use of a description stabilises the patterning of our experience in accordance with the description. This is contrary to the usual view that descriptions are independent patterns which reflect a separate, structurally stable ongoing experience.

This has the fun side-effect that whatever worldview you are playing with, you will tend to experience encountering evidence which supports it. If you change your mind and commit to it, the evidence will change accordingly. If you are undecided, the world will seem messy. If you "go meta" and start experimenting with the idea that the "imagination room" metaphor is almost literally true, you will have super-flexible experiences which confirm for you that there is no "world" or "system" at all as such - at least, not one that can't be instantly dropped as just a strand of thinking. (The same applies to the other "Active Metaphors" listed in the sidebar.)

It does makes sense for awareness to evolve and grow within and along with its entire consciousness system.

That's just a story, though. You can have experiences "as if" that were true, for sure, but if your pursue this line of investigation you'll quite quickly realise that you can have experiences "as if" pretty much anything is true. This is because intention is the only cause, and if you intend a description into prominence - or more likely, intend and act which implies a description - you will tend to have experiences which correspond to that description. All narratives about "evolving and growing" and there being "systems" - definitely, you can live that. However, whenever you pause and stop thinking about it, stop implying it, you'll notice that, still, all you are actually experiencing is being "awareness" which has taken on the shape of an open space with sensations (both thoughts and perceptions) floating in it. You never get outside of that. Which is why some people use the "you are the dream dreaming itself, the content and the dreamer as one" metaphor (although I think that "dream" has a lot of associations which can get in the way really).

Note: I've tried to be clear, but this can be a hard point to get across: I'm not saying that "an open aware space in which sensations arise" is fundamental either. That too is just a shape awareness can take on. There is no inherent structure to you-as-awareness at all. The only fundamental, persistent truth is the dimensionless, locationless, eternal property of being-aware. Furthermore, as I tried to highlight previously, but it's worth emphasising: although I'm using the word "awareness", I'm not using the word in the usual sense of word-usage, and definitely not an object; the word doesn't point to anything at all, not even "everything". It's a placeholder for "not-nothing, not-something", the context that is also the content but isn't either, and so on. "The awareness that can be talked of is not the true awareness", you might say.

So. As a "way of looking at reality", then, this is not "a little picture" or indeed any other size of picture. Regarding "pictures", though, all pictures are arbitrary, and you can have experiences "as if" any picture is true. You may indeed be having experiences "as if" it makes sense for "awareness to evolve and grow within and along with its entire consciousness system", but that is just a relative experience; you've not got "behind" anything and it has nothing to do with the nature of experiencing itself, which is "reality". And, we should note, the "awareness" of that sentence is not the awareness I have been describing above, by that nature.

TL;DR: All that is ever "happening" is this 1st-person moment of experience. If we think about other things happening outside of that, if we pause we will notice that those thoughts are actually just happening within this 1st-person experience too. There is no outside cause to this 1st-person moment. The entire moment is you, and you are its only cause. You can have experiences "as if" outside things are happening, but closer inspection always reveals that it is only the 1st-person moment that is happening, with nothing solid "behind" it. Descriptions are best thought of as potential patterning rather than accounts of a stable persistent world-experience.

But even the experience of considering these concepts/ideas is just another pattern happening on the same level as all other patterns.

Indeed, the experience of considering these things, is itself an experience, with nothing "behind" it.

Patterns interacting with patterns, or rather: One big pattern interacting with itself.

Or actually: not interacting at all, because it is "before" time, and it is static between shifts (any apparent change due to the pattern of "time passing" is actually deterministic, fully defined in the state).

So what about this sensory pattern of human experience? This doesn't seem completely random and structureless to me...

Not random or structureless - a pattern. The pattern that corresponds to "apparently being a human being in a world".

they're having the experience of, and are having the experience of describing and conceptualizing.

The patterns aren't having an experience though. Rather, you-as-awareness has taken on the shape of a pattern. Awareness has - or really is - the experience.

Aside - Ultimately, we throw away even the "awareness" concept and just say that what we are is the experience that is happening. However, it is much easier to progress by "restating the observer" and withdrawing to that position gradually. Even afterwards, the notion of "awareness" is still useful for the purpose of discussion, but we recognise that it is empty, just a pointer to the fact that experiences are experienced - or better, simply: "there is experiencing". However, "awareness + patterns" is the minimum structured model that "makes sense" for formulating descriptions which can be used as intentions.

And the patterns can increase or decrease entropy (decrease randomness, organize, become structures, give birth to more structures).

Hmm, I don't think that any of those things happen. Again, you can have experiences "as if" they do, but fundamentally there is no time other than the experience of time. The "imagination room" provides a little story which allows you to conceive of your experiences as you-as-patterned-awareness, but of course even that is itself not fundamental. In fact, the idea of "fundamental" is probably finally better replaced by the notion of no-hierarchy. But I've drifted a little bit there.

if there ever was a "beginning", which is another can of worms

A can of worms, indeed!

There was no beginning, because there is no time other than the experiencing of it. Awareness or "the fact of experience" is eternal (as distinct from "being around forever"). It is "before" time. This does make things tricky, because the correct conclusion is that there is no evolution and no cause, although we can take on the shape of experiences which are "as if" there was evolution and cause.

Awareness at the early, primal stage of these patterns is barely aware, as there is barely any content to be aware of.

If we get rid of the idea of "primal stages" and just say that it is possible for awareness to be shaped such that it just is. You can produce that sort of experience yourself, in fact. This is a description which gets close to it.

Information/patterns originate awareness, eventually organizing into a "pattern of awareness" which evolves and grows along with the "patterns of experience/content", working together as a system.

I don't think you mean "awareness" here. Patterns cannot originate anything (what are the patterns "made from"?). Patterns are awareness / awareness takes on the shape of patterns / experiences are patterned awareness. Patterned awareness is like a "static landscape"; it is not something that "interacts" or "grows' or "works together as a system". It is more like a definition that fully defines a deterministic set of moments; a current state corresponding to a particular set of contours. The definition is not read or processes or whatever, though - it is simply experienced, directly. But none of that matters too much, really, if we are clear about the purpose of our model. Our model isn't no explain how things are, because how things are simply is your current experience, nothing more. Rather it is not provide a way of conceiving, in the 3rd-person, of another experience which we might adopt in the 1st-person. Our thoughts-about an experience are identical in nature to our experience-of an experience. Having formulated a pattern we desire in the 3rd-person (via the direct imagining of it) we then adopt that pattern as our experience in the 1st-person (via the direct imagining of it). There is no "method" or "technique" or "how it works" or "how things are" to this - one simply does this, becomes it.

...We have to be careful with questions such as "why?", because one sort of "why?" implies a purpose, and purpose would be a relative truth only. But, here, I guess you mean the other sort of "why?", as in "how come this experience not another?", and really we are reaching for the answer to the question: "how can we change this experience to one we desire?"

For that, we return to: because it is the shape we have taken on. That is, that your current patterned experience consists of the accumulation of intentions and their implications. And the way to change the experience is to "shape-shift" ourselves, by "intending" (increasing the intensity of contribution of one pattern, "the intention", versus the others) which amounts to "thinking it" - but not of it or about it, more like "thinking the fact this-pattern-is-true". Meanwhile, the reason I wouldn't say "what is happening" is evolving, is because I'd suggest it is static between intentions, between shifts. If we shift to a new state, than that new state can have apparent evolution fully and deterministically defined into it, simply because it has a "time" pattern. It's completely fine to have "evolving" as part of the narrative we adopt, and to have experiences "as if" it were true - we just have to be cautious of seeing it as fundamentally true, because it implies a process, and the basic situation is "before" time and processes.

Okay, with all that said, we've come to the conclusions which can be partially summarised as:

• Reality = "awareness" = you = this whole experience
• Change = intending = shape-shifting = becoming

Which basically amounts to: "this".

In terms of a model, though, we can think of ourselves as a "shape-shifting material which can take on the shape of any experience/situation", knowing of course that this is an enabling metaphor and that actual situation has no inherent qualities at all other then being-aware.

Practically speaking, though?

To make changes, it really involves a sort of "direct thinking" or "direct imagination", where we "imagine the fact that something is true or happening" and this is equivalent to becoming that experience. As we've discovered in our discussions, theorising about it is really the adoption of another sort of experience - to actually grasp the truth of the matter, one must attend to it directly, play with intending/shifting, and grasp it with a sort of direct insight rather than by understanding. That's why this subreddit tries to encourage people to try out a couple of "childish" exercises, and have the experiences which might lead to reconsidering one's nature and destroy the notion of something "behind" things. Actually those "childish" non-techniques are it, really, since experiences are it!

...

Q1: I can have the experience of imagining a reality as though true.
i.e. 3rd person.
surely then it is simply a case of experiencing the imagining as though real - 1st person.
the trickiness comes from not getting caught up in the 3rd person and not accepting this reality as real

I'd agree. If we say that a 3rd-person thought (a thought about something) is a bounded, located thought, then a 1st-person thought (the experience of something) would be an unbounded, unlocated thought - a patterning of the subject as a whole. One might experiment, for example, with thinking wordlessly the thought "relaxed body" until it became true. That would be an example of patterning the 1st-person experience with the pattern "relaxed body". The result would be a shift in the content of experience towards a state where the pattern "relaxed body" was relatively dominant, without having "done" it.

Q1: yes
it's like wanting something - i feel a want in my 'body' until it comes true
i make it come true by either acting or it 'just happens', i suppose
where i am now is that i see something as real but i know it is not real so i want to experience something else - something qualitatively real in that it exists from a direct intention without me supposing that there is a subtle meaning
because anything that exists in regard to something else cannot be by itself true and must be an erroneous experience
and the only thing that i believe to be true is -
kṛṣṇakalā rādhā rādhākalā
i.e. my expansion radha then radha's expansion, this gopi, based on this. i use the thought-about a conversation between "key" and nam woo hyun with respect to me as a springboard to create a worldview.... :/

You-as-person are "Maya" too. All experiential content is "Maya". That's why this search for the "real" will never come to fruition. It's a recognition you have that applies to all experiences - that all experiences are you-as-awareness taking on the shape of an experience - rather than an experience in and of itself. For example, look around now and see that what your present moment is made from, is "sensations, perceptions and thoughts" in awareness with nothing "behind" them. Reality = this experience, this moment which contains everything, that is all. Any thoughts-about those experiences are themselves experiences, at the same level.

Standing outside, one looks out upon the scene before them. Beyond the house, a garden. Beyond the garden, a hillside. Beyond the hillside, the evening sky. Beyond the sky - "awareness". And then it is recognised, it was all awareness.

then i just have to have the experience of my choosing as all experiences are fictive in nature and the experience of everyone else being stupid is valid too

And equally: all experiences are direct experiences of the fundamental nature of reality (including experiences of apparently stupid people).

so in order to get a scenario that i want, wouldn't i just have to create the 'script' in-thought and then see it play out

You have to be careful of abstracting this, though; it's a matter of "direct imagination" or "direct thinking". By which I mean, you should consider this as a literal intensification of a pattern or fact or scene within your current "3D thought of being a person in a world.

So - and I know you'd didn't mean this, but it's a good example - you probably don't imagine writing a script, because you would then have experiences of seeing scripts being written (or elements of the extended imagery of that). It's possible to do it like this so long as you do so knowing-that it is a direct interaction with the world, but mostly I think people end up just having a parallel fantasy with isn't attached to the main strand of experience. Typically, then, what you do is, you intensify a desired "scene" (or "knowing of fact") as if it were actually happening (or true now) - and by doing so the fact of that scene happening is incorporated into your "3D world-thought". This doesn't necessarily mean you actually have to see and hear the scene; it's a sort of maximised felt-knowing of the pattern more than anything, from which visual imagery may or may not arise, as a side effect.

The word "incorporated" is important, I'd say: you should generally take the approach of intensifying into fact the desired final outcome, rather than any particular path towards it. Your strand of experience is already heavily patterned, and it will be naturally overlaid. If you focus on the means by which an outcome will arise, you often end up generating the experience of the means as your outcome, rather than the experience of the end. Of course, if you are feeling particularly adventurous you could aim to create a full discontinuity, without any apparent paths, jumping straight to the "scene" and having the world implied by the scene from that moment onwards, but that's something for you to choose to experiment with or not.

i had thought about that - like condensing my entire 'experience' of the 'the world' into one thought and then creating a new thought

Yes. And I'd say that this is the situation right now: the entire world is this moment, a single thought, static and fully deterministic between intentional shifts, and "time passing" is itself a static pattern as part of that thought's overall patterned state. A thought of a world. We tend to assume that our experience is just the "unfolded" visual, auditory, textural aspects, but actually we are experiencing the entire world in this moment, it's just that the "felt global summary definition" is a sort of background, dimmed, dissolved feeling, rather than chunked up into bright objects. It's all active now, though - as one single pattern. If this wasn't the case, there would be no meaning to the moment. (Simple illustration: when you see a car, you don't see a shape, you see "a car", and in fact a particular "car". The car is that felt-meaning rather than just the unfolded sensory aspects.)

So: if we summon a single 3D multi-sensory image, and that image has felt-meaning, then it actually contains a whole world implied within it. This could correspond to a revised version of this current world, or a completely new one. Pausing now, closing your eyes, imagine a man walking along a road. Don't draw the man and the road, just imagine-that there is a man walking on a road. A world has been created by this act, albeit not an immersive 1st-person one. Allow the scene to continue unfold without interference. Where does the man go? What do you find out about him? And so on. One might then ponder: what if I stepped into this world by allowing the scene to surround me? Or, what if I adopted the 1st-person viewpoint of the man?

(Not checked out Rupert Spira's activities for a while; thanks for the reminder link.)

one might ponder that...but that would be a ponderance ;)

Heh, a ponderance it would be, indeed! :-)

things only seem to change when i do something

Which is fine, an (apparent) mental or physical act which has an assigned meaning which is the outcome, is a perfectly legitimate (by which I mean an "unfolded" experience as the apparent act). The act itself is also a result, but having assigned causality to the experience of the act, the result is part of its pattern (the Two Glasses exercise uses this approach). The act doesn't need to be sensory - it can be simply an act of "knowing you are shifting" with no content in the moment at all - but I'd agree that it is generally helpful to have a sensory aspect or imagining that counts as the "theatre" of making a change.

the car is the subject and i am the object (of experience) but both are me

Actually, it's probably better to say that you are the subject and the car is the object - you can't find your edges, but you can find the edges of the (sensory aspect) of the car. But yes, it's all you anyway, so with that known the distinction doesn't matter.

since i just want one particular experience, i'll focus on that.

Good. Both from a desired outcome point of view, and also in terms of conducting an experiment and explore experiencing, that's good. You don't need a clear (visual) image; you just need a clear "knowing". Since we're talking about "direct imagination" or "direct thinking" here, the path doesn't really matter - just as if we draw a picture on a metaphorical flexible television screen, it doesn't matter what the story was that was being shown onscreen prior to it. We simply assert the new picture, and either that becomes the new starting point (extreme discontinuous case), or it becomes dissolved into the current programme and incorporated into it.

...By "knowing" I mean more that, for example, you "know" a fact even though you are not experiencing any sensory aspect of it, physically or mentally - sort of "objectless thinking". Not sure "order" or "timing" is necessary as such; but if you mean "fully summoning a scene as a fact" then, yes, that's definitely a possible approach, in the spirit of this "direct asserting" we've been talking about. Pursue that and see where it leads?

ultimately wouldn't all I have to do is to believe in something

What's a "belief", though? I'm not a fan of the term; its meaning it not clear. Ultimately, what you want to do is "think it until it is true", which is different than (as some people consider belief to be) "thinking that something is true".

Q1: Ultimately, what you want to do is "think it until it is true"
the problem I have is I constantly think it isn't true. so by believe I guess I mean I think that it is true and it will occur because I believe in it

Well, you really need to give up that bad habit, then! :-) Perhaps you could work on the meta-fact of "thinking things makes them true". That would capture the essence of it, the desired formatting of your experience, both in the form of a "belief" and the form of a "world-fact".

...In all of those, though, you are assuming you and other as separate, but this is not the case.

What you are is the aware thing that "takes on the shape of" this sensory moment, of apparently being "over here" and these words being "over there" - but a short pause, close your eyes, feeling out to try to find yourself, you find that you are "nowhere-everywhere".

What is real is: The current experience, specifically you-as-the-experience.

When you think about theories in attempt to describe reality, the experience of thinking the theories is true, but the theories themselves are not real (in the sense that the ideas don't correspond to anything "behind" experience; there is no "behind"). So, based on that perspective, let's try some quick snappy answers to those statements:

what is reality?

It is you-as-awareness having adopted the shape of whatever the current experience is.

what is true?

Only the fact of being-aware is unchangingly, fundamentally true. Everything else is relatively, temporarily, true only, for as long as it is the current experience.

what is real?

If we define real as "that which is always true", then the only thing that is truly real is the property of being-aware.

what is observed by me?

Being cute about this: yourself, as whatever the current experience is. You don't actually observe anything, rather you take on the shape of the experience of apparently observing something.

everything i see and feel is as a result of my environment

No, everything you see and feel is the result of you taking on the shape of experiencing "seeing" and "feeling". The environment is an experience you have adopted; meanwhile, "the environment" is a concept which does not represent anything outside of that.

i act and do things within my environment

You shape yourself into the experience of apparently being a body acting within an environment.

i sense things accordingly and act accordingly

You don't sense things, you take on the shape of the experience "sensing things", and then take on the shape of the experience of "taking action".

when did that occur?

Since time itself is part of an experience, and not inherently part of you-as-awareness, it never occurred in time. It is eternal (rather than "forever"). It is actually meaningless to talk of things occurring in time at a fundamental level. The "moment" you have currently taken on the shape of might have an apparent time aspect, or history, but that could shift right now leaving no trace, to a different "moment" with a different apparent history.

do I observe myself taking shape or am I actually the shape?

You are actually taking the shape. There is no "outside" to you, for you to observe yourself taking shape. I say that you take on the shape of an experience, to make it clear that you are not actually "over here" as a true external observer - rather, you are the whole experience, taking on the shape of apparently being "over here" and other stuff being "over there". As mentioned previously, if you close your eyes and pause and search for a moment - rather than thinking about this - you'll quickly discover that you are in fact everywhere and everything (which is also to so, no particular place and no particular thing).

so there is no difference between "me" and the ("my") environment

Right. There is no difference between "you" and "the environment". It is all you. To make the distinction clear, we sometimes say you-as-awareness (meaning the whole experience) and you-as-person or you-as-perspective (meaning that experience of apparently being "here").

then I can shape myself into the experience of apparently being a body who directly alters his environment
so no action really occurs beyond my belief in it - i.e. I only apparently act but I can also act without acting - receive the results of karma (action) without doing the work (कर्म करोति karma karoti - doing action)

I'd say that no action (or experience of an apparent action) occurs beyond your adoption of it as part of your current state or "shape", which is itself an accumulation of intentions and their implications. That - intentions-implications - could be interpreted as corresponding to the concept of "karma".

but things can also happen without my direct performance of an action-with-desired-outcomes - i.e. intention

Ultimately, you "think it" in the sense of "thinking that it is true" or "asserting it", and that's what increases its "brightness" or "truth". You are doing this anyway: if you perform a physical act with an outcome attached to it, then the physical act itself came from nowhere. The act was a "result" just as much as the outcome was; it was all one pattern, brought into experience. For example, if you pause now and think of a red car, the red car appears. How do you do that? Note that, even if you thought the words "red car" beforehand, that wasn't the cause, that too was a result, and so the question then becomes how did you think the words? Truly, you simply "became" them, or you might say you reshaped yourself such that those patterns, that experience, was brought into prominence.

performing an action thus sounds like duality in this context (because i would still like to do some actions but the result is not in any way directly derived from the action)

Not a duality, though, if you ponder it a little more. An action is an experience, you are experience, you are simply shape-shifting, causelessly. If the action and the outcome are not logically related in-world, that is okay - you simply adopt the notion that "this action" means-that "this outcome" happens, and that overall pattern is what is intended/asserted.

this is my stumbling block! i keep having competing thoughts - "there will be no red car" - and thus nothing changes :P

You really should give that up! ;-) So, you simply have to be more fully assertive. It's completely under your control, it is all you after all. You don't fight those competing thoughts, just as when you walk through a door in a room you don't spend time trying to fight the fact that you can see other doors. You simply purposefully attend to the door you want to go through, withdrawing yourself from, forgetting, the other doors.

POST: The 2 CUP method

If you just specify that a particular outcome will occur - e.g. that a particular sensory scene will happen which implies the circumstances you desire - then, in the basic "patterning" model of experience, the path will just be whatever is the most efficient between the two moments of truth, given your current patterning (which you might think of as the "list of facts" that are currently in play). By moments of truth, I mean: this moment, which is being observed now and so is definitely true, and that moment, which you have just fully asserted and so is now substantially true. All moments in between were less well-defined, less fully asserted, and so prone to shifting to accommodate other assertions. Note that "most efficient" doesn't mean that the path is calculated; it it is more like having two sticks connected by a loose elastic piece of string. If you plant the sticks at two specific locations on a landscape, the path of the piece of string will naturally fall and follow the contours of the landscape. And so...

If you wanted to more completely control the path between this moment and that moment (now and your outcome moment; the two sticks), you might consider introducing additional sticks which define some of the moments between now and then. This needn't be done separately - it could also be done by including aspects which imply a particular path in your outcome definition. For example, if you want a nice car but you want to receive it because your husband or wife bought it for you as a gift, you could include that in the "getting the car" moment. Generally, though, you have get comfortable with the fact that you can never "pre-know" everything that is going to happen - by which I mean, "unpack into the senses" in advance as a form of "pre-experiencing". Your life unfolding is that, really: the gradual unpacking of a pre-existing background patterned landscape. What "jumping" allows you to do, though, is assert the inclusion of certain points in that landscape, so that they are definitely incorporated. If someone feels the urge to over-specify, it's worth asking themselves why. Just by recognising it's possible to specify something at all, you are already in a better position than you would otherwise be. If you want to "pre-experience" your life, then you're basically saying you only want to live life after you've already lived it. Which is essentially death.

Aside - On the "dimensional inertia" concept and your mind "accepting" some things, it's worth remembering that patterning - and therefore "jumping" - doesn't just apply to the the events you are going to encounter, it also applies to the facts of the world more generally, and to your own sense of how things work. In other words, it is possible to work upon what feels acceptable, to work on the "how things work" itself - you can get very meta with this.

The intermediary steps follow from the assertion of the target moment + the truth of the current moment. So, they exist as a deterministic sequence between shifts. They become known when you experience them, in "unfolded" form, as you pass from this moment to that moment* - although you are always experiencing them in "enfolded" form really.

What, exactly, does it mean, to "assume" something? I suggest: it is a form of experiencing it, "then" as now, or rather "defining" or "asserting" it. It all reduces to basically "intensifying this pattern rather than that pattern".

Q1: It all reduces to basically "intensifying this pattern rather than that pattern".
yes that's right exactly. minimizing and eliminating ("forgetting") other patterns.

Right. There's no good way to describe it, because in describing it we immediately imply the thing that is meant to be fading - but, yes, it's fully switching to one pattern and "forgetting" (or "forgiving" really) all else.

If you want to "see something" then you just imagine-that it is present and use that as the basis for things. There's no difference in kind of the experience you have with mushrooms and without. "Consuming mushrooms and having an experience" could be considered a pattern like any other. Once you can leverage, certainly, but you could work on establishing alternative, more direct, patterns if you felt so inclined. Pure randomness is a concept, not a thing you ever perceive. The world-as-it-is doesn't have "pure randomness" in it; that is a parallel narrative. If what you are looking for is a causal connection between intention and experience, though, then repeated experimentation that pushes things to the limit is the way to demonstrate that. There's not much point in focusing on individual coincidences.

..."Prove" in what way? Of course, there is no place for "evidence" to be stored, but after observing a connection between the patterning of thought and the patterning of experience - and directly noticing they arise in the same space - then you're done. That's all you need. To prove it, you do it. There's no record that can be kept. By a more direct pattern (versus mushrooms), I mean that mushrooms themselves are just an experiential pattern with no cause "behind" them. You could perhaps directly assert a pattern to accomplish the same thing, with some dedication.

...The descriptive issue you're having is perhaps that, since the entirety of experience is "made from" you, you can never find the cause, because the cause is the whole thing, shifting. You will never find the cause within experience, because experience is self-caused - a shifting of shape. All you can do is note the intentions you make, and later recognise them appear as sensory moments. You can't manifest anything into "reality", because that implies a separation. The whole thing is "reality". Reality = experience = awareness = you. Right? Everything you experience, then, is a result, a result of intention, and since intending is just a shifting of experience, you never actually experience intending as such. So you only ever experience results, you never experience a cause. Cause and effect exist only as concepts. All there actually is, is taking on the shape of results.

If there's no difference from 10 years ago and today, then you should set up a business selling beauty products! ;-)

Well, of course, in the sense that you=awareness, your "true face" is completely unchanged in 10 years, or indeed eternity. Why didn't I think of it his before! The perfect business opportunity! :-)

As to the "why" question: it occurs to me that since there is no specific "how things are" or "how things work", then there is no particular answer to that question.

...

Q2: Hmm, so in this maner that would mean that "winning lottery" would eventually happen, on road ahead , even tho it could be after like 50 years or so. By this i mean, if i have made that kind of choice i have set "path" to it and it would eventually happen wright ?
And if we take in mind i chose to be "more lucky" it would eventually leading to winning of some sorts. Wouldnt it create like some sort of paradox in that way ?

What would the paradox be?

Q2: Damm you short term memory. Its a bit , but i will do my best to express my thoughts in English. If its impossible to understand please fell free to say that. Will try to explain. So let`s say i Wish for enormous success, so universe would start to turn things in a way i would achieve it. And in a same moment i would chose to win this jackpot, which also would be enormous success, giving chances that wining is slimmer than hair. So this would lead to success anyway, with 50/50 chance either building for example empire and gaining these (example: 20mil) or wining them after 20-30 years. Or getting both. In other words, if i wish and arrange universe for same outcomes with different paths would it make me land in completely different paradox , for example somewhere in middle ?

Oh, I see. Okay, let's go with this description: The "world" is a single continuous pattern, and by being single and continuous, it must always be "coherent" - that is, it will always "make sense". Right now, the world is in a particular "state", which means a particular collection of patterns are dominant. You might imagine this as being a landscape, with the contours being the current state. Your ongoing experience is like your attention gradually scanning across that landscape - like a landscape of "moments" defined by the current patterns which are active. Now, in addition to this we'll have the rule that:

• Experience is apparently local; intention is actively global.

Which means that although your attention may be on this particular moment of the landscape, if you intend something the intended pattern will apply to the entire landscape - it will shift to a new state, incorporating your pattern, and your experiences will be aligned with that new state from that point onwards, in a pre-determined way.

Returning to your point: If you wish for "enormous success" then that is a general pattern which is applied across the whole "world pattern"; the landscape is shifted right then such that subsequent moments will tend to have more of a "success" component. It becomes true now that you will have success then. Later, if you wish to "win the jackpot", then that pattern is applied across the whole "world pattern"; the landscape (which has already been shaped by the "enormous success" intention) is now shifted to incorporate "win the jackpot" also.

What is happening is, your world (this state, or landscape, or "world pattern") corresponds to the accumulation of intentions and their implications. Between shifts, the world is deterministic - the events you encounter are defined until you perform another shift. Every time you intend an outcome or a trend, the world shifts to a new state which incorporates that pattern, and a new deterministic path. If you intend something that is contrary to a previous intention, then the world is shifted such that the original intention is diminished. Avoid doing that, and it will remain.

So there is no paradox. The path of experience is never pointing in two different directions at once, just as a mountain in a landscape doesn't have two different shapes at once.

POST: I did the 2 glass method. Somebody explain why nothing happened.

The idea, really, is that you are the one who comes up with the theories (while keeping in mind the context of this, as described in the sidebar). But if nothing happened, then nothing happened - that's the result you got. If you want other people to chime in, though, then I guess you will "only" have to put a bit more effort into describing your target and process.

Q1: you are the one who comes up with the theories
but they're not, are they? they can't originate any theories since i create the possibilities of theories so all they are doing is selecting that which i have already created.... and even that selection is limited to what i want to see in others

From the perspective of OP, they are selecting them from what already exists, but everything already exists and was never created, by you or anyone else. From the perspective of you, now, then the experience of them apparently selecting, is a selection you are making (or have implied).

Q1: everything already exists and was never created, by you or anyone else
that's mayavadi philosophy that places Brahman ("infinite grid"), 'impersonal feature' as the highest existence
but I create that

How you gonna create that, begin that, when there is no time?

i create time - time is the means by which events occur but time doesn't exist any more than reality exists

Time is part of an experience. So, time would be part of the experiencing of an apparent infinite grid, but the infinite grid itself wouldn't exist "in" time; it exists as a potential experiential pattern, but not something that is "created" as an object. You might have the experience of apparent creation, but the object that is apparently being created already exists eternally as a pattern.

Q1: the infinite grid...exists as a potential experiential pattern
where?

Everywhere and nowhere. That's the eternal for ya! :-)

so you have no evidence that 'the infinite grid' exists :P

:-)

What do you mean by "exists", though?

If what you mean by "exists" is that exists "outside" of experience somewhere, other than as a pattern within it, then that is a meaningless statement: experience has no "outside". What I mean by exists is: one can have sensory experiences "as if" there is such a thing as the infinite grid. Can you have thoughts consistent with it? Then it exists as a thought. Can you have sensory experiences consistent with it? Then it exists as an experience. Thoughts and sensory experiences are both, in fact, experiences "made from" awareness. And in fact, the difference between a thought about something and an experience of something, is just the intensity, stability and perspective (1st vs 3rd person) of the experience. If you have thought about something, then at that moment you know that it exists. You cannot think about anything that does not exist. Because, essentially, the concept of existence makes no sense outside of that category.

How do you know that "existence" exists? Do you have any proof? :-p

Q1: one can have sensory experiences "as if" there is such a thing as the infinite grid.
but how can you prove that I did not create that concept?

Did you experience creating that concept? What exactly do you mean by "create"?

[did you experience creating] what difference would that make?

You are claiming to have created something. If you have never experienced creating it, then I'm unsure of what leads you to make the claim.

if i cease to exist - so does every other possibility of experience

How are you going to cease to exist? You are not an object, you are not content - you are subject, and context. If you never began, how can you end?

Have you experienced creation? How did you create something which, prior to that moment, did not exists and therefore could not be conceived of? The moment you conceived of it, experienced it as a thought, it already existed. The infinite grid is not superior to you-as-context, because it is that context, as are all and any other patterns. There are no levels here; there is no hierarchy. You exist and you are the existence of everything else. Being a subject doesn't mean that you don't exist, but it does mean you don't exist as an object, with a beginning and an end. You need to define "prove" really, but it is simple to demonstrate to yourself that you are the subject and the context, either by observing that you experiential content changes, demonstrating that you can produce experiences which show there is fixed content, or by simply attending to your direct experience: no edges, no location for "you", everything is made from "you". When you refer to your body having a form, surely you mean that you-as-experiencer has no particular form, other than being-aware, which is eternal?

i just want it

Want what, though? If by wanting you mean "thought of it", then did it not already exist?

so... 'the infinite grid' is a magical thing that has no creator and no cause and exists for the benefit of every being in existence?

As indeed does every pattern. It doesn't need a creator because it was never created - it is eternal - and it exists as the basis of a potential experience within and as awareness. I'm not sure I'd say "every being in existence", because being is not something that is "in existence" and there aren't many or even one being. But I suspect you are using the term in a common language way, so that's fine.

sure there is - me at the top, everyone else below me

Top... of what? What structure could there be, that you are on top of? Now, you might have experiences "as if" you were some sort of thing that was on the top of some sort of structure, but that thing and that structure would just all be patterns, at the same level, within awareness. No hierarchy fundamentally, only an apparent hierarchy relatively.

what content is fixed?

No content is fixed. I think I missed with the "no" - oops! :-)

i do have a form... otherwise i wouldn't have experiences - even if that form changes, the form is itself eternal

No. You don't have any inherent form at all; you "take on the form of experiences. Experiences == form. That is why it is actually better to say that you become experiences rather than have experiences. Again, you are not an object, so you can't think of yourself as a "thing". Only objects have form; subjects do not (inherently).

but when did it first exist?

There is no first, because that implies time as a container within which things are placed, at a fundamental level - but you are the only "container" (albeit without boundaries, and that doesn't just mean no "spatial" edges).

what is eternal? only i am eternal

You are eternal, but you are also potential for everything.

no form means no experience

No inherent form means all experiences are possible. Any particular form would be only one experience would be possible. You have no inherent form, but you are that which "takes on" forms (=experiences).

Q1: that implies time as a container within which things are placed
yes - brahman - 'infinite grid'

It's just one pattern of many (any!), though. You could equally have "infinite gloop" as a pattern, and have experiences consistent with that. The "infinite grid" is not a container in the sense of truly being a place where things are located, which is travelled; it is more like a "formatting" around which experiential content can be structured (and is itself content).

and it has no cause, is superior to everything and everyone, cannot be seen, cannot be defined and is the prime cause of everything including me... sorry, not buying it! ;)

Heh. :-) Except for it being the cause of you, perhaps, unless you mean "you", of course.

there are two 'me's?

Quoted indicates a reference to the concept of "you", unquoted indicates that-which-is-aware.

the concept is me
a part of me
but there is only one me

Yes. So in one sense it is not you (because it is just a pattern within you) but in another sense it is (since it is "made from" you). Realising the nature of things is about recognising the difference, or even that there is a difference. There is not even one you, though, because what you fundamentally are is "before" division and multiplicity (although you can "take on the shape of" an experience of apparent division). That's why we say that you are "awareness", rather than "an awareness" or "the awareness".

Q1: There is not even one you, though, because what you fundamentally are is "before" division and multiplicity
isn't that just me? कृष्ण kṛṣṇa

Me or "me"? :-) Yes, awareness = you = experiencing = . . .

Eventually, we just end up talking round in circles, because we're just using different words to point outside of descriptions, to "this / that". (Which, of course, is me doing the exact same thing yet again!)

...

Even then, I suppose we'd still have the problem of: what, precisely, is a placebo and how, exactly, does it work? (Just defining the term or categorising something as it, doesn't necessarily tell us anything about it.)

POST: Can keeping a journal help in Dimension Jumping?

Yes, it's a good thing to experiment with. Basically, by fully getting into a particular description while writing it, you are "patterning' yourself with it, just as with the owl exercise, with yourself as an "imagination space". People do this accidentally quite a lot. For example, they write a list of goals, then put it in a drawer and forget about it. A year later, the rediscover the list, and find all those things happened, even the unlikely ones in some way, although they didn't try to bring them about. And people who write fiction, who get really absorbed in the worlds and characters they create, can find that those situational patterns then turn up in everyday life.

...You could spend time writing about the grid, detailing how your experiences fit into it, and writing up a 1st-person experience of accessing childhood situations again. Really get into the 'feel' of it all. Then, sometimes, in a relaxed state, recall that and try to enact it.

...By "physically experience" do you really mean "1st person experience"? It just takes practice. You essentially dream your way into it, but it's as vivid as your present moment right now. See: lucid dreaming (Robert Waggoner's book is good), OBE (Don DeGracia's guide is decent), and also Neville Goddard for examples. In the end, it's all an imagining-that.

...You will have 1st-person immersive experiences! Before that, though, you will probably have sort of intermediate, detached experiences, as you get better at sort of surrendering and selecting. As referenced above, I'd pick up this book [Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner] and read this free guide [http://www.dondeg.com/metaphysics/do_obe.pdf]. Now, I don't necessarily agree with the interpretations of those, but the first one will get you into the topic (it's definitely the best non-basic book on lucid dreaming), and the second one has some useful exercises and perspectives (the "sparkles" technique is basically what you want to do).

POST: 2 glasses to make someone else's life better - selfish?

If im not wrong (George might correct me), you are not jumping to another universe, you are just changing your experience "as if", so you might change few facts in order to release her from cancer.

Agreed. As the sidebar hints also, you are shifting your experience, you are not going anywhere or leaving anything behind (because in fact, you strictly speaking aren't anywhere in the first place).

...What you describe seems much the same thing, though?

I perceive it differently.

Do you perceive it differently or are you thinking about it differently? There's a difference between those that's worth noting. The actual experience is of the content of your experience changing discontinuously. That is what "happens". Whether a change in experience is minor or major - whether a minor opportunity arises or a major world fact changes - it's still a shift in the content. Beyond that, we are talking about how to conceive of that change. "Reality" and "universe" are just concepts, we never actually experience a "reality" as such. Furthermore, we never actually experience "moving between realities" as such. What we do experience, is that things are apparently different now, compared with our knowledge of how they were previously.

So I would also say that it would be selfish because in the other timeline, she would still die of cancer

That notion of a "timeline" might be problematic, however. Where is that timeline? Have you ever experienced a "timeline" other than the thought of it, or the seeing of a diagram depicting the concept of a timeline? What leads you to think of there being timelines or other experiences that are "happening" elsewhere while your experience is happening?

you just chose to live in a timeline where she does not.

I'd be inclined to say that you chose to have a different experience. The conclusion that she is dying of cancer in some other place while you are here and she is well, is something that comes from your conceptual framework and not any actual experience you are having. The key to me saying: you are shifting your experience, you are not going anywhere or leaving anything behind is that it is an invitation to reconsider the what it means to talk about "me" and "shifting", and particularly "what are 'you'?" and "what is 'the world'?". Without answers to those questions - or at least a recognition that they are maybe problematic - our descriptions are always going to be a bit lacking. None of this necessarily the possibility of making changes, of course. However, it does affect how we describe this, and therefore how we might think about potential "moral issues" such as the one you've highlighted.

...Yes, I do realise that you don't mean a change over time. My issue with "timelines" is that it implies that we are "going somewhere" - to a "place" where the history was different. This in turn implies that events have to have "happened" in order to use to be in a particular state. This is not true. As you note, you can simply lie down and shift your experience so that subsequently it unfolds "as if" a different history informed it. "History" is an idea, though; what your actual experience is, is of an ongoing Now which contains all pertinent facts or patterns, now. It's not really problematic in a deep way, of course. After all, experience is king, descriptions are secondary. I just think it's important to recognise that all descriptions are "parallel" and arbitrary. Descriptions are themselves experiences - experiences of thinking - and are not "what is happening". Recognising this, our descriptions stop being limitations because we don't take them as "the truth". So, when people seem to be "naysayers" because they seem opposed to the idea that timelines and universes are the explanation or the basis for change, it's not that they are dismissing the possibility of change "as if" there are such things, or questioning the usefulness of those concepts. Rather, they are just pointing out that it makes no sense to talk of a description as "literally" happening. Descriptions are not deeply true.

Which arguably can still function in your experience shift description that you have been describing.

Ultimately, all experiences can be incorporated into the "meta" view, since they are not tethered by any descriptions (including the "experiences shifts" description). However...

The way I am thinking of it, the only "problematic" is the idea that "opportunities will arise that are themed to your efforts for change".

...I'd restate this as: "your state shifts and experiences arise according to your intentions and their implications and embedded assumptions". In that way we capture both the "opportunities arise over time" experience and the "I go to sleep and awake to discover facts have changed" experience.

POST: a different D.J.

Could you maybe highlight some examples, for illustration? And also maybe describe the difference, in terms of your own thoughts, between:

altered states of consciousness to enter an alternate reality, most likely with subtle differences.

and:

magical thinking and willing the universe to give things to you.

I'm inclined to think that both descriptions largely point to the same thing, but using difference conceptual frameworks. And part of the ongoing conversation in this subreddit has always been (in "this dimension" anyway, as we say) about the different ways one can describe one's experience, and how those descriptions can be leveraged. I think threads where people go into a bit more depth have usually tended to bring up quite a few different models or interpretations. That is, while the idea of experiencing change is a constant - the idea of bringing about some sort of shift in the lived facts - the ways that people are talking about it vary. Depending on who is participating at the time, different ideas are probably more prominent for brief periods. If you've only been subscribed for a month, that may seem more so.

Because every thread on this subreddit is full of people trying to naysay.

What are people "naysaying"?

sow doubt and explain why the other person is merely remembering things wrong.

Yeah, the "remembering it wrong" thing is usually something that happens in /r/MandelaEffect, not here. It doesn't add to the discussion here, and rather misses the point, so I'd encourage people to downvote it for not contributing, or report if it gets out of hand. I really don't think it's very prevalent on this subreddit though?

Please dismiss them.

But if he's remembering a different chain of events than you, and you're reasonably from this universe or a similar one, isn't it possible he's right?

The point is that the idea of someone having been in another "universe" and having moved to this "universe" is one particular model, and perhaps not the best one. It's problematic in that it is still based on some default assumption about our everyday experience, and the nature of "me" and "the world". What literally happened was that someone was having an ongoing experience "as if" one set of facts were true, and then suddenly they were having an ongoing experience "as if" another set of facts were true. Anything beyond that is conceptualising. The recognition that a description is a "parallel construction in thought" and does not actually touch the experience-as-it-is is an important one, and is ultimately what frees us up from hidden assumptions.

Note that I'm not using the phrase "as if" dismissively, I'm just highlighting that at no time does one actually experience an external independent "world" or "universe" at all. The only thing that is ever "happening" is: "experiencing". One infers that one has jumped worlds because of the assumption a "world" is a place, rather than an idea - and because of the assumption that "you" are a person, an object in a location, rather than an idea. Your actual experience of "you" is somewhat different than being an object.

It is worth attending to your experience as it is, directly rather than thinking about it, to observe its immediate properties. Extract from a previous comment:

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

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

The conclusions of this are the facts of your experience - the only actual facts, really; everything else is transitory.

...

A1: I agree, the sub has gone a bit off of the primary methods. But I believe there is a reason for this. The primary metaphors (mirror method / two cups) have some problems. These are not problems that are inherent with the method itself, but with the way the idea of 'dimensional jumping' relates to science fiction and pop culture. The result is people have a bunch of misconceptions and fears that are unfounded. This resulted in questions such as: What happens to the me in the dimension I leave behind? What if I get stuck in a dimension I don't want? etc. Typically to respond to these sorts of worries we have to explain that the techniques are only tools and aren't needed. Once people have an understanding of that, they tend to start exploring other techniques. This is somewhat unfortunate since the techniques are pretty solid, and the metaphor of 'dimensional jumping' is a very useful one. But ultimately it is all the same thing.

Well put, to the point. We're bumping against the limits of those metaphors, basically. So long as we don't confuse the metaphor with "the actual mechanism", this isn't a problem, but naturally when people first get into the topic, that can happen. This is a good thing overall: it provides a way into questioning our assumptions and starting a personal investigation into "the nature of experiencing", rather than simply accepting a worldview at face value.

When the current sidebar was written, it was meant to reframe things to anticipate that. If people last visited when the subreddit was basically the mirror method and not much more, then it probably seems like quite a change. In truth, though, it's just a recognition of how things were all along: there's an actual experience, and there's one or more parallel narratives about that experience. What's most interesting, though, is how a model might be used as a way to structure experience rather than just describe it.

I fall into the latter camp of scifi paranoid dweebs.

Those are the best sort of dweebs! :-)

As a recent arrival, then, probably something to note is that on this subreddit the main conversations generally happen in the comments, rather in the posts. When things are described as metaphors, it's not in the dismissive sense of "just" a metaphor - a clear distinction is being made between direct experience as it is and as we think about it. (See sidebar text.) Even our default working idea about the world is really a habitual metaphor heavy with assumptions rather than something we actually experience as such: that is, the metaphor of a "single shared spatially-extended place unfolding in time". We are cautious of falling into the trap of the reification of abstractions; descriptions are not literally true in some independent way, only usefully relatively true. Except, that is, for the only unchanging fact that there is: that is, the fact of being-aware or "awareness".

I found that the technique that works best for me is dissociating when I am falling asleep or sick with a fever.

I think everyone benefits from becoming dissociated actually - you stop grasping onto parts of your experience and therefore resisting changes overall. For sure, the more you are a "concrete facts" kinda guy, the more important that might be. One of the ideas of the subreddit is that by investigating and adopting different metaphors about our experience, we can in fact loosen that, and "pattern" our experience with a different worldview.

I just need to be cautious and give the caveat to other users that I approach this entire thing with extremely concrete definitions that will only help some and may hinder others.

Please do stick around. It's totally fine to be a "concrete thinker" and discuss things from that platform - you just have to be prepared for others with a different perspective on what "definitions" are apparently disagreeing with you (albeit on a "meta" level). They're not being naysayers really, they're just talking from a different description. And no matter what, we can still talk about our approaches and our experiences. Any ideas that are produced in subsequent conversations, you (like everyone else) can take on board (because you find them interesting or useful) or not (because you don't).

Q1: I am new to this thread and really enjoying the discussions! For now my sense is that the metaphors are a sort of 'user interface' that one creates first, and then uses it to do the jumping/shifting. So whatever metaphor feels most comfortable is the control panel that consciousness creates to move around.

Yes, that's quite a nice way to put it. I'd add, though, that the metaphors can also be a direct reshaping or reformatting of experience. So, you might have a metaphor of the form "I have this 'imagination object' and it has these special properties and acts as a user interface", but also you could view your experience of the world itself as a particular formatting of awareness - an 'imagination object' which can be updated directly by "rethinking" it. This makes sense, of course - that both "the world" and any "user interface" share the same nature. Otherwise, there would be a boundary of "type" and one would not be able to affect the other. (This is similar to arguments about matter and consciousness, and subjective and objective views.)

POST: Oh shit I'm convinced now

Is this all metaphorical then?

In the end, they are exactly the same thing - the metaphorical and the literal - and that, although it can't really be articulated, is ultimately what the subreddit is about. That is, exploring the "nature of experiencing", by performing experiments and questioning assumptions.

Changing the way YOU perceive things?

This "you" that perceives things, what exactly is it and what is its relationship to "the world"? And what is a "concrete thing", precisely? And so on.

POST: Seriously, is this real?

But how does science confirm it? And why do I need a candle to jump between the mirror thing? Why specifically a candle?

Well, "science" isn't equivalent to "real" or "true"; it's just a particular approach for exploring a particular subset of experience. How does science confirm that you are conscious and aware? It doesn't, and never can, because it's not within its sphere of applicability. Science, as usually thought of, is based around cataloguing a subset of experiences which correspond to the "objective world" container concept. That is, it can't really be applied to many 1st-person experiences, because it is "too late" for that; it filters out things which cannot be (apparently) confirmed by the (apparent experience of seeing or hearing) other people confirming it. However, that doesn't mean you can't conduct your own personal structured investigation using similar principles: perform experiments, observe results, repeat results, come up with a description. The only issue is that you won't be able to refer to a stable, external reference point - because the very existence of such a thing is what is ultimately under investigation.

Having said all that, some physicists do push at the "objective world" concept in their attempts to explain certain features that have been observed. Quantum Bayesianism, for example, recognises that the "objective world" idea is a relatively recent introduction, and that a model of quantum mechanics might benefit from putting it aside. See:

• QBism puts the scientist back into science - Nature [http://www.nature.com/news/physics-qbism-puts-the-scientist-back-into-science-1.14912]
• A Private View of Quantum Reality - Quanta [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150604-quantum-bayesianism-qbism/]
• What's bad about this habit - N David Mermin [http://www.ehu.eus/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf]

The last of these is an essay which emphasises how the concepts we use in science are abstractions, and we must be careful not to reify and treat them as "real things that are out there". That is why, here, we often make reference to the fact that descriptions are "parallel constructions in thought", rather than something which gets "behind" the world-as-it-is. Descriptions and theories are, in fact, also just more experiences at the same "level" as any other experience - that is, the experience of "thinking about a description". Finally, as an illustration of this last point, it can be useful to take a moment and attend to your actual experience, and distinguish between your true situation (that of the context of all experiences) rather than what you might think about it (which would just be more experiential content). See for example:

Feeling Out Exercise

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

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

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

I honestly think this is just a big joke. That, or people here are no different from people who believe in Gods and shit.

Well, shit is definitely real. If you don't agree, maybe try doing the two glasses exercise with roughage rather than water. I guarantee results!

More seriously, a difference between "people who believe in Gods and shit" and the topic of this subreddit is that they, in general, haven't had any actual experiences, haven't conducted any experiments. They just believe. Here, the idea is that you put aside what you think about the world (what you "believe") and conduct an experiment or two and see what happens. Results are what informs your view; whether there's something to this or not comes from trying it out. And the "something" in question might not even be what you assume it to be.

As the sidebar takes time to emphasise:

• It is for readers to decide for themselves through personal investigation and introspection whether jumping is appropriate for them or not.
• An open mind combined with healthy caution is the correct mindset for all approaches targeted at the subjective experience.
• Never believe something without personal evidence; never dismiss something without personal evidence.

Again, just thinking about things will only tell you about your own beliefs and assumptions, it won't tell you anything about whether something actually works or not, about the world-as-it-is and the "nature of experiencing". Of course, it is equally fine to simply dismiss it and not bother, seeing it as not being worth the effort. However, you can't reasonably conclude, then, whether it is possible to generate an experience, and what the nature of those experience might be if so. I mean, it's not like it's hard to find out: it is literally no more difficult than transferring water between receptacles. You've probably spent more time commenting on this thread than it would have taken you to just choose a target outcome and do it.

See it's this shit like this that convinces me this ought to be true. But, alright, if this is true, (I'll play for a while...) then how come you guys aren't alerting people that this could be a revolutionary life-changing shit? I mean, if more people researched on this, hell, we could be gods in control of our destiny. A bit too literally on that.

Well, I think that the underlying thinking and observations have been promoted at various times - Buddhism and other traditions are inclined towards similar ideas, and so on. However, there are a few issues when it comes to promoting research:

• It can only be explored personally, from a subjective or 1st-person perspective, because it is "before" the 3rd-person objective view;
• The default assumptions of our concept of "the world", the platform upon which we usually work through our ideas, is exactly the thing that you end up challenging - that is, the idea that the world is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time" with you as an "object" within it, as per the usual description.
• That in the end you can't actually think about this at all as such, because thinking is itself an experience, rather than something that can get "behind' experience.

Ultimately, then, you can't "understand" this sort of thing, can't comprehend "how it works", because conceptual understanding is "too late", and there is no persistent independent "how things work" in terms of a mechanism for experiencing. We are forced to confront the fact that "the world" is a concept that we think about now and again, which does not necessarily correspond very well to our actual experiences. The problem becomes, then, that descriptions of this are fairly meaningless without the actual experience. Descriptions are pointers to the experience - like "red" is to red, without experiencing red, "red" is nonsensical. That's why there's all this encouragement to actually conduct some experiments, and also why it is suggested that the eventual aim might not about event-based outcomes really, but about investigating the "nature of experiencing" itself (the nature of the-world-as-it-is and your relationship with it).

As this thread demonstrates, though, most people want to "work things out" in thought, rather than actually try something practically, particularly when that something doesn't have a certain outcome. (This tendency doesn't just apply to "dimensional jumping", I might add. People want to "pre-know" things before acting in everyday life too.)

POST: Like many other former skeptics on this thread, I actually had an absurd experience today...

Oddly, owls were chosen due to their relative lack of presence (at the time), although of course that's somewhat location dependent. They seem to be everywhere now, though (funny that). Of course, the point is to then choose different things, and do so repeatedly, and see what happens. Push it until it becomes obviously unlikely (or not, of course: the experiment could have a negative outcome). That's the only way to explore whether you are selecting experience from a 3D context (that is, noticing things that are already there in 3D space), or selecting experience from a larger context (a landscape of patterns, perhaps, an "infinite gloop").

POST: [theory] The header number does hold some value in dimensional navigation.

Hmm. Your calculation kind of assumes that dimensions are "places", like walking through a door to a room with your new desired fact, and that making a shift requires that the header number (room number) is randomly re-selected each time, like spinning a very large (really: infinite,) roulette wheel. This isn't necessarily the case. The important point is, that if we do something to change a specific fact in your experience, there is no particular reason that the number would change as well, because there is no necessary connection between the two facts, no explicit mechanism which forces a number shift. It might change, of course, but without a model that describes this, we can't even say that it is random. This means there is no basis upon which to make a probability calculation. Or at least, one must explicitly lay out the assumptions being used if you do so. [1]

The header number isn't special, it's just another fact. As for "getting back" to something, I'd say it doesn't really matter how many dimensions/states there are (if they were indeed countable), because you select them intentionally, not randomly. If you are shooting for a particular world-fact, you don't really care about the number, unless you are especially picky on the aesthetics of the header graphics.

[1] We can perhaps make some headway on "likeliness of header change" based on the intention used, albeit as just a hand-waving musing rather than anything predictive. For example, if the intention is "it is true that... my car will run perfectly from now on" then there's no obvious overlap with the header number. But, if the intention is "it is true that... the world is now a friendly place", then we could imagine that this broad target ("the world") and the description ("friendly") might result in a collateral shift whereby header number which appears more "friendly", has rounder shapes, or whatever. However, that's still assuming a clear connection which may not always be the case. If we view the definition of the world as a sort of blanket of material, and the folds in the blanket as the world-facts, then changing one fact (pulling on a fold) could have all sorts of collateral effects that aren't at all logical at allfrom the perspective of our usual description of the world, but do make sense at the level of "the blanket and the folds". That is, the world is a continuous, coherent pattern has implications all on its own.

no-way for people to go back

No, it's true, but that might not really matter. All you need, is the ability to turn your thought about what you want, into an experience of what you want. Since the thought is is the form of the fold, you've already got a hold of the part of the blanket you want to shape; you just need to intend the actual shaping. So, although you can't get back to a "how things were before" (and obviously you can't, because at this point you now contain folds of the history of your experience) you can always get to "how you want things to be", in terms of your ongoing experience. In principle, anyway.

yea but the butterfly effects would be random and no true happiness could achieved .. because all you will think is "I caused this"

Not random, though - they would be logically self-consistent (that is, the world as a single pattern would always "make sense"). Unpredictable, perhaps. But even then, you are not limited to intending specific concrete facts; you could also intend more abstract or global facts, such as "happiness" and "calm and order", and so on. What would "true happiness" be, anyway? And the "this" that you caused, isn't events "out there" in an external world; rather, it's moments of sensory experience. Which makes a difference, perhaps.

also... itsn't the world always in a logically self-consistent pattern??.. its just random to us with our limited vision

Yes, I'd say the world always has to "make sense". If something seems random, it's only because our description of things doesn't have connection between the various observations (we're back to the "blanket and folds" metaphor).

POST: Why does the header number always vary so little?

I quite like the "it's a side effect of how the number was chosen" thing as a story, but since "dimensions" (or experiential states) aren't actually numbered in some global scheme, there is no necessary reason why a number that we would judge similar would correspond to a state (or set of facts) that was similar (including the apparent fact of "the declared visual design tastes of Triumphant George"). Of course, one could go further and perhaps suggest that if one asserted that this relationship was true, then one might then have experiences "as if" number proximity and state similarity was a connected thing. We had a bit of a discussion about the 'random number generator' concept recently, worth having a read of it anyway, even if just to disagree with it. (Note that the initial comment on that thread recalls the story wrong, from my perspective, as you say.)

Only problem is that any result will be indistinguishable from...

Well, such is the fun of it all, I suppose. If we adopt the notion that all experiences are on an "as if" basis - with the only fundamental truth being the fact of the property of being-aware - then we shift, pleasantly, from trying to work out "how things really are" (the answer: there is no fundamental "how things work"), to experimenting with the limits, if any, of the relative truths we can adopt. As things progress, then it might become clear that there are no inherent limits (that is, that "your own pattern" and "other people" and any concept of "a multiverse" are indistinguishable from one another and, as "patterns within awareness", equally malleable), but the act of trying to prove otherwise is itself valuable, and a good strategy for demonstrating the contrary position via, well, exhaustion.

Thing is, though, that I'm coming from a paradigm of a "physical" reality...

Which is a good place to start. That stops being a paradigm of "physical" reality, of course, and very quickly becomes a paradigm of "experiential states", or similar. "Physical" reality tends to imply a persistent, structured substrate independent of experience - typically described in terms of a 3rd-person "view from nowhere" - whereas this approach very quickly tends towards a description like: "all that there is, is 'awareness' which 'takes on the shape of' experiential states", or some other frame which casts aside the subjective-objective boundary. This 1st-person (so to speak) perspective is important, because otherwise we get entangled with the idea that things are "happening" somehow "out there" beyond experience. The sense in which everything is always true to some extent, is in the sense of all possible patterns contributing to experience, always, now. But none of it is happening fundamentally in the sense of an out-there world, a "place" with "objects". And so on. The "physical" is a category used for thinking about some experiences; it is an "as if" notion only.

I don't think I can shake myself from disbelieving it through exhaustion...

By "exhaustion", here, I mean that one way to recognise that truth is relative (except the fact of "awareness"), is to generate for oneself experiences corresponding to many different conflicting truths, such that it becomes absurd that there is an independent "how it works", or even a "how it works" at all.

My idea is that "all is math"...

This is pretty similar to the "patterning" model (linked in the intro post, first summarised here). Although it's not so much that "all is math", so much that the minimum description of experience that "makes sense" - that could be said to constitute a "world" at all - is one of a coherent, continuous pattern. It says, in simplified form:

• The only fundamental fact is the fact of the property of being-aware or "awareness" - which "takes on the shape of" experiential states. What you truly are, is "awareness". Right now, you-as-awareness has "taken on the shape of" apparently being-a-person-in-a-world.
• All possible patterns or facts are present, eternally.
• All that ever changes, via intention, is the "intensity" or "relative contribution to experience" of patterns. The present distribution of intensities constitutes the current "state". A state fully and deterministically defines an ongoing experience (the entire sequence of sensory moments that will apparently arise as "time passing").
• Here, "an intention" is a particular fact-pattern and "intending" is the act of changing the relative intensity of contribution of that pattern. This is not done via an act (because an act is an experience); it is a "shape-shifting" of state.
• All experiences are on an "as if" basis. Any 3rd-person descriptions about experience are immediately "wrong" (and, of course, arise in the 1st-person as the experience of "thinking about experience").
• It is in principle possible to adopt any fact-pattern and have experiences "as if" it were true - and the thought of a fact is that fact (there is no external fact to which it refers).

Obviously, the purpose of this isn't just to create some abstract catch-all theoretical description. Rather, it's to provide a thinking framework within which target outcomes and intentions can be conceived of and brought into experience. There is no deeper reality than that, in any case. All patterns already exist, and to think them is to bring them into experience, essentially. The ultimate aim is to have an obvious and intuitive link or overlap between that notion and one's direct experience - an "of" experience rather than an "about" experience - as noted in things like the Feeling Out exercise, and so on.

...Don't buy what, though?

All things exist, it is implied in the model, in the sense of always being present (as "patterns" or abstract facts), but not necessarily contributing to experience. Anything we say beyond that is essentially meaningless. We just end up looping back to saying the same thing in different ways (your list there!). It is meaningless to talk of something outside of experience - because it, "awareness", has no outside; it is unbounded. It is "before" spatial extent, boundaries, apparent time, and so on. Inside and outside are "later" than awareness, than experiencing. And if you do think about such a thing, a separateness or externality, then you are having a thought about that within experience, as an experience. You can't escape this. (If you imagine escaping it, then that imagining is also an experience within/as awareness.) Basically, you-as-awareness are, right now, everything.

Note: you-as-awareness, not you-as-person.

It just is.

Or more to the point, I guess: it just is-not. But it still wouldn't be "outside" awareness in the sense that I mean it. Note that this "awareness" we're talking of isn't the same as what we might call "content-consciousness". You might call it something like "the non-material material which 'takes on the shape of' experiential states", or similar. This could be envisaged as a sort of non-dimensional blanket of material, whose only inherent property is being-aware or actually just being, and which can take on the shape of "folds" that you might call a state of experience.

So, the "blanket" cannot get outside of itself, since it is all there is. However, it could adopt a state where there were no folds at all within it (just "void", no content) and then adopt another state, and that second state would have no trace of the void non-experience. Or it could adopt state1 and then adopt state2 which contained no trace at all of state1. In a metaphorical sense, one could say that state1 was "outside of" the state2, but it wouldn't be in a spatial or located sense, but in a content-overlap sense. And of course, we're missing out here that the "blanket" would have sort of implicitly "dissolved" within it all possible arrangements of folds, meaning that state2 would always "really" overlap with state1 in some sense, and indeed every other state. That gets a bit clumsy though; it's easier just to say that all possibilities are present eternally.

Aside - When we say "and then adopt state2" we have to be careful to note that this happens not in time, because time would be an arrangement of folds - "time passing" would be another pattern. These "state shifts" are like "shape-shifting" where the target state could have a completely fresh apparent sequence of moments and "memories". What you really are, of course, is the "blanket".

POST: How long does the two glasses method last?

You don't need to meditate at all, as such; you are just pausing to bring to mind clearly the situations, current and target. Follow the instructions as written. Don't try to introduce any additional effort or "doing" that isn't asked of you. You don't need to "make it happen"; in fact the very idea of doing so runs contrary to the approach.

Treat it like you are doing experiments to see "how things are" - whether there is even anything to this - by selecting changes in your ongoing experience that you'd like. So, start maybe by picking social or work/school situations, and doing it for that. Nothing "reality rule-breaking", just things that would represent a good change. Then do it again for something else, and so on, until you can draw a conclusion and maybe push things further, if you feel you are accumulating positive results that can't be explained just by "it's a coincidence".

POST: My story

...to a time in my life when I constantly felt content?

This question is slightly off-topic for your post, but also very on-topic since it concerns how we might select outcomes: have you truly thought about what "being content" means to you? Since that's ultimately what you want to get back to, it seems. I think it's important to pay attention to how we conceive of our desires or target outcomes, because what idea we build the intention on might dictate whether it really helps us, even if it does come to pass.

For example, if we are bound to a particular concept of self based on how we imagine we'd would be viewed or categorised from the outside - such as being "gifted" or in some other way being perceived as not simply average - then we might think that contentment will come from shifting the world to reflect that self-image back at us, so that we can feel comfortable and without contradiction. However, that image is actually a fiction!

What you truly are is not that concept, and defining outcomes in terms of it might not be a good idea. It can reflect insecurity, which will work against contentment as you are still lumbered with trying to maintain it. It's better, perhaps, to drop the fiction and select outcomes in terms of particular situations and relationships. For instance, rather than getting back to being "gifted" or even some specific time, it might be a good idea to nail what, exactly, you want your future situation to be, and then think of it in terms of the events - moments of experience - that would correspond to that. Such as: receiving the notification that you've got into a particular MBA; having a phone call with your mother that resolves your relationship issues; etc. You get the idea.

Let's have a bash at this:

In regards to the model that this sub uses (open awareness space, patterns etc), do you view it as an absolute reality/fundamental truth of reality?

Generally I try to be clear, and explicitly mention when it comes up, that the only fundamental fact is the property of being-aware or "awareness" - and absolutely everything else is relatively, temporarily true only. In the sidebar it refers to descriptions as being "active metaphors", and that applies to "open awareness" and "patterning" also. They are descriptions which can be used to talk about experience (using them as "parallel constructions in thought") and even shape experience (by intending outcomes in terms of them), but they are not fundamental. What we have, then, is that there is no fundamental "how things are" or "how things work", other than "awareness". (We stop there, because it is simply meaningless to talk of the absence of awareness.)

Note that when we talk of "awareness" we are not talking about "consciousness-of" or "self-consciousness", nor are we referring to "an awareness" or "awarenesses" - only "awareness". That is, a property or context with no particular content. Furthermore, it is important to note that the concept "awareness" is not the "true awareness" (sounds familiar?). This is because the concept or thought "awareness" is an object, whereas actual awareness is not; and is in fact that which the concept or thought is "made from".

So, the "get out" here is that "awareness" is just our handy name for the context - that is, it is not actually part of any model except as a pointer to the context of the model and of experience (the model is itself an experience of course: the experience of thinking about a model). We could also just call it "experiencing" or something like that, to avoid the implication that it is a thing. Hence we sometimes refer to our experiments here as an investigation into the "nature of experiencing".

It just seems funny that we think we can use the information experienced in the dream to explain the dream itself.

That's because that information is also "dreaming" or dreamt. It is important to realise that an "explanation" or "description" doesn't get "behind" an experience; it is itself just another experience, at the same level. You are just having two experiences ("a dream" and "a thought about a dream") and saying that one "is the nature of" the other - but actually they are both just experiences, both a "shape of awareness". There is nothing "behind" experiencing.

So it seems maybe we can only view the universe through perspectives or "as-if" scenarios.

All there is, is "as-if" experiences - really just: experiences. The "as-if" part is because, as we said above, we make up a description and then we say that the experience is "as-if" that description was true. But then, the description itself is an "as-if" experience: an experience "as-if" we were a "thinker of thoughts".

This type of thinking pretty much says that we cannot ever know a "true reality"(whatever that means) and that we'll always be in the dark, which I'm fine with, I like a bit of mystery.

I'd disagree. You are "knowing" true reality right now. It's just that you can't capture it in a thought or a description. It is inherently mysterious in the sense that you can't understand it; but you-as-experiencing always are it. You know it intimately, fully, always. To recycle a metaphor from an earlier comment, the quest to "understand" true reality goes something like this:

• The Beach: The metaphor of the beach - about metaphors. It is not possible to build a sandcastle which captures within its form both "the beach" and "sand". However, the sandcastle is both the beach and sand. You can certainly label one part of the sandcastle "the beach" and another "sand", but the properties of those parts, being of form, will not capture the properties of the beach and sand themselves, which are "before" form. If you forget this, and start building ("thinking") further sandcastles based on those labelled parts, all further constructions and their conclusions are immediately "wrong", fundamentally, even though they may be coherent structures ("make sense") on their own terms.

And of course, the meta-metaphor above does itself suffer from exactly the same issue that it is highlighting in other metaphors.

Okay, not sure if I've correctly and fully unpacked what you were asking, so do pick up on anything I've missed or misunderstood - or am simply wrong about, of course.

Extra bit: One of the issues with trying to describe our experience is that language, and thinking in general, tends to require a structure consisting of an object and a thing done to an object. However, that isn't what your direct experience is like when you actually attend to it.

For example, rest your hand on your desk (or wherever) and close your eyes. Now, do you actually experience two things touching, "your hand" and "the desk"? Or is it more the case that what you experience is a single "touching" sensation, just "floating" there in your aware space? You might have a thought about it in terms of "my hand is touching this table", but the actual experience does not have two parts. Similarly, when you try to find the "experiencer" of that touching sensation, you can't find one. There is not "the experiencer" and "the touch experience"; there is just "the experience" or "experiencing".

(See also the Feeling Out exercise in that other comment I linked.)

Do you feel knowing this knowledge is to know "everything" or more specifically, the 'framework' of reality?

I suppose what it actually is, is realising there isn't a single specific framework. The fact of the property "awareness" isn't much of a structure to get hung up on, really! So I guess it amounts to a freedom from searching for that, and instead what you have is a sense of creativity freed from conceptual frameworks having to be absolutely true (because there is no possibility of that). You just are it - always.

Do you ever, even for the briefest of moments, wish you could "sedate"...

Well, I don't think there is a nihilistic theme to "awareness". Now, the concept "awareness" for sure is empty and boring at times, like all concepts inherently are. But you aren't living the experience of the concept, just as you don't live as your name or job title, you live as a person. However, I think it's probably the case that some people do try to live as the "understanding" - the collection of thoughts about it all - rather than recognise the whole point is that the thoughts were arbitrary in a fundamental sense, the sense of context, and you give up on them except for conceiving of experiential content.

I dunno, in a way nothing's really changed. In fact, literally nothing has changed in terms of the nature of your experience. It is only your description of experience that has changed, and with it a sense of what is possible. What's more, you've probably pondered the nature of descriptions as you went along, therefore you are less likely to get caught up in confusing one experience (ongoing sensory) for another (the experience of thinking about that). The relaxation that comes with that - that you can never "work out" what is "behind" experience because there isn't anything (there's no "outside") - makes for richer moments that are inherently meaningful as experiences, rather than only mattering because of how they fit into a habitual thought-jigsaw.

POST: Experiment to see if this is bullshit

What would happen if I got ten friends and we all checked the header number, then a couple of us jumps. Would everybody's number be the same as the one who jumped? I think the mods are fucking with you people lol

Those ten friends would be "inside" your own ongoing experience, though, so that wouldn't really work.

For sure, you might have an experience "as if" people remembered different numbers, or you might have an experience "as if" the number changed for you but everyone seems to only remember it the "new way". Either way, it doesn't prove anything, other than the "external world" assumption - that is, that the "world" is a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time" with "you" as an object with it - can be problematic when talking about (potential) changes in the (apparent) facts of subjective experience. You are probably taking the concept of dimensions too literally, as "places". The sidebar text is pretty clear about the appropriate attitude to take, regarding both the header number and the subreddit in general. But anyway, the experiment to see if this is bullshit or not is: to actually try it, in the spirit of an investigation, and see what happens (or what doesn't happen, of course).

POST: Matrix and Dimensional Jumping

If "you" are a person-object inside a matrix (that is, a world-experience fully defined by rules, facts and patterns) then it is a problem. If instead the matrix is within you, is a patterning of you (where "you" is now the non-object subject to all experiences), then it isn't. In any case, you don't start with the idea of a matrix and then view everything in terms of it. Rather, you start with your actual ongoing experience and see what fits with that, what is a useful description is. And actually you can use multiple, even conflicting models if you like - because none of them are "what is really happening behind the scenes". All that is really happening is: experiencing (including the experience, at the same level, of "thinking about experience"). Basically, there is no particular reason why "dimensional jumping" should (or should need to) fit in with the idea of a "matrix".

Thank you for your very illuminating reply. I guess in a world of infinite possibilities, if I start believing in an 'overlord' type matrix, my reality will start confirming that for me, as much as it would confirm a wholly dream-like reality if that was my firm belief.

I find "belief" a tricky, fuzzy concept to work with, but certainly: if you intend in terms of something, a worldview, you tend to get the extended pattern of that something by implication, too. See, as an example of a discussion on this, the Kirby Surprise link in the introduction post.

There are several tech billionaires (including Elon Musk) who are convinced we are living in a matrix-type "reality" or program and are funding research on how to break us out of it so some brilliant minds are pondering (and researching) the same questions as you are. And in regards to your last question: IMHO we are in fact breaking out of the matrix type programming (or whatever it is) by DJ'ing.

Hmm. Are those "brilliant minds", though, really? In this particular context, that is. Elon Musk is arguably a brilliant businessman - although time will tell on that, too - and an ambitious fellow, but I wouldn't put much faith in him as regards philosophy or the nature of reality and what have you. Nick Bostrom is the "simulation hypothesis guy" of the moment. However, as with "multiverses", this pretty much amounts to story-making. Even QBism, my favoured formulation along these lines, really can't be tested as such, only used as a perspective through which to view pre-existing observations. It's very easy to fall into the bad habit of the "reification of abstractions" in this area, conflating our ideas with "what's really happening", when what's really happening is that we are fantasising in our thoughts about an "out there" that isn't. All of which is a roundabout way of saying: with things like "dimensional jumping", I think it's best to take things at face value, direct personal experience, and hold back on thinking of it in terms of any conceptual framework - be that a matrix, a simulation, or even as our usual assumptions about being a person in an environment of any sort (that is, an object in a "stable, simply-shared, spatially-extended place unfolding in time"). And if we start off looking at things in a using a certain worldview or description, we should at least cast a skeptical eye on what, exactly, a "description actually is, in the first place, perhaps.

Without splitting hairs in terms of labels (I still maintain Elon Musk is a brilliant mind as well as businessman - a friend works at SpaceX and said he can talk astrophysics with the Ph.D's) my point is that The Matrix as people think it is is being studied and not just randomly pondered by some of the most successful businesspeople in the US. It isn't just a crazy question for reddit readers. Although I am way into mind science and other experiments, I believe in and am trained in as an engineer the scienctific method. So yes, I give credence to the fact people with billions want to study this beyond personal experiences people share online or in books.

That's why I linked to Bostrom and Christopher Fuchs so on - but, yes, for sure, it's certainly worth noting that the idea of a simulation-based worldview isn't just a topic that some people talk about on reddit. However, I do feel it's worth emphasising that in and of itself it doesn't mean much; you have to take responsibility for judging it on a personal level, because that is the only way to judge it. Because it is "before" explanations and observations. I feel that the "scientific method" (whatever that is now: it's a bit of a vague abstraction I think, as per Paul Feyerabend; I'm from a scientific background originally) doesn't really apply, with its assumption of a stable external independent substrate of some sort, although the broader category that we might call "structured investigation" certainly does. I'm with George Ellis that that quite fundamentally this is basically a non-scientific topic; it's a philosophical or metaphysical one. Ultimately, it still doesn't really get much beyond George Berkeley's variant of subjective idealism in his Three Dialogues. You can't really get away from the nature of descriptions themselves. People with billions just get to do whatever they want. In and of itself, I'm not sure that makes the "whatever" something to pay more or less attention to. When they are interested in pursuing a topic you find of interest though, it's definitely advantageous to have those people on side...

Anyway, we've brushed past two or three massive topics there, which would be deserving of a much deeper and more thorough discussion, certainly.

I think that if we keep in mind that thinking frameworks are just that, then it frees us to adopt the most flexible or open-ended metaphors while investigating for ourselves. The "life as dream" metaphor fits that bill quite nicely, I'd say!

Another thing is your insistence on the term 'experience' is something that I have pondered for a long time.

That's very interesting, about the roots of the Greek term!

The reason I often use the word "experience" is because it emphasises what is happening directly, it avoids implying a fictitious cause, and it can be used in a way that suggests that the experiencer is the experience - while conveying that this one fact of the matter is always true, regardless of the content of the experience. And so when we say life is like a dream, it's in the sense of saying that they are identical in nature, not just (as the comparison is used) to indicate that waking life can be similarly flexible.

Only 'problem' is that the dreamer protagonist has to figure this out while in the dream. ;)

And, what's more, there is no outside to the dream - so there is no "while not in the dream". Sneaky!

Basically, although it can't be truly articulated, we're reaching for something along the lines of: "What you truly are is the non-material material whose only inherent property is being-aware, and which 'takes on the shape of' experiences on an 'as if' basis, including the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world". All the other stuff about "not being a person" and the various metaphors of "sandcastles" and so on, the conceptual tricks we might use, are really an attempt to draw our attention to that directly, as well as indicate the impossibility of thinking about that. In other words, part of this is recognising that there can be no theory of this, because it is "before" theories, and theories are really examples of further experiences (the experience of "thinking about the theory"; it is not possible to think about what thinking is "made from"). That doesn't mean that creating theories is a waste of time though. While they can't be used to "explain" the nature of experience, they can, like the examples of "active metaphors" in the sidebar, be used to shape experience. The ability to do that is itself a direct experience of one's nature, and so is a type of explanation, in a way. (As is everything else, of course, but deliberately shifting things beyond of one's previous assumptions and patterns draws attention that fact.)

You are either the archer or the target.

Or you are the whole scene. You aren't the archer, or the target, or the action. Rather, you are the entire moment of "An Archer Shooting An Arrow At A Target". Upon examination, you discover that when having the experience of being apparently "over here" and the target "over there", in fact both "over here" and "over there" in the experience are made from you! Metaphorically, then, every attempt to take aim at the target of understanding experience, is an example of you shooting yourself in the foot (and every other part of you/everything).

POST: Understanding the two cups method/how to get more favorable results

Whether it be dimensional jumping (string theory)

That's not the sense in which this subreddit uses concept of "dimensions", though. See the sidebar text and links for details. This does seem to be more of a thesis on a particular variant of LOA, and appears to assume that this subreddit is something along those lines, which it really isn't. It's probably more appropriate for reposting to /r/lawofattraction, /r/psychonaut or even /r/occult, perhaps? Thanks.

However: If I had to summarise it quickly (even though to do so is a little misleading), the topic of the subreddit is more one of "practical philosophy" - related to investigating and leveraging the "nature of experiencing" in the manner of subjective idealism or nondualism.

To answer one point, though:

when asking them about certain principles behind the theory they are unable to give me any information….. information that is crucial to have success in Dimensional Jumping.

Well, they could always ask, I suppose!

However, information is not crucial to its use. In the sense of their being underlying principles which govern its use and explanations of "how it works behind the scenes", that is. In fact, there is no mechanism as such "behind" the exercise: it is pattern. The interesting thing is what it is a pattern of. Which loops us back around to: The nature of "descriptions" is one of the key issues being explored here (as an aspect of "the nature of experience" itself). And so, from this perspective of this subreddit, much of what you say would have to be challenged.

What, for example, is an "unconscious"? And for that matter, what is a "world"? And what is its relationship to "you"? And what is a "belief" exactly? And when answering those questions, how do the answers actually relate to ongoing experience, other than simply themselves being yet more experiences (the experience of: "thinking about answers"). And so on. Ultimately, there's a risk that these descriptions are precisely worthless, because descriptions - while useful for formulating desired outcomes, perhaps - are not themselves causal.

Again, there is no actual underlying mechanism for change. It is in this sense that information as regards some "principles" behind the Two Glasses exercise is not "crucial".

Did you ever consider that the two cups method is in itself a ritual?

I've probably considered all the ways there are of considering it! I suppose it might be described as a "meaningful act", but the meaning doesn't have to be deliberately assigned to it, through effort, in this case.

you have to our intention and feeling into the two cups method or it doesn't work.

No, you don't have to have intention or feeling for that particular exercise. In fact, attempting to deliberately introduce intention and feeling can be a problem. (If this is what, to you, a "ritual" is, then it is not a ritual in that sense.)

no intention or feeling behind it and it is not what you want then you are simply just pouring water from one glass to another.

That rather depends upon what you think the act of "just pouring water from one glass to another" actually is.

It's not like these methods involve a machine that rips a hole in the space time continuum like in a sci fi movie, they're ritualistic at best.

That's not really saying anything, though. In effect, all acts are ritualistic, in the sense of being grounded in metaphor and symbolism (or: patterns). But that is itself a metaphor, obviously. One might have an experience "as if" one is ripping "a hole in the space time continuum" - but then, all experiences are on an "as if" basis, ultimately. There are no "space time continuums" out there to rip, perhaps.

So to say that the other practices are not similar to dimension jumping, or that other methods can't aid in your dimension jumping is ludicrous.

Similar in what exact way, though? Without engaging with what "dimensional jumping" (as used in this subreddit) is, then it is "ludicrous" to talk of methods and practises aiding it. Essentially, you've just added a dollop of LOA-style meanderings on top - well intended, though I'm sure it is!

That literally made no sense at all.

You mean you didn't understand it, which is something different, so I'd be happy to clarify if need be.

POST: After I did the 2 cups method, my school ID photo changed....

You are dimensional jumping every moment, trillions of times per second, already. Doing two cups is just a method to try and do it more consciously.

I'm not sure that's a very useful way to think about it, since it seems to conflate apparent change in sensory experience (the observed seeming transition between already-determined moments which are aspects of the present state) with "jumping". It is more conceptually helpful, surely, to reserve "jumping" as a term for deliberate shifts in state, corresponding to the imposition of a particular fact or outcome. Otherwise the metaphor of "dimensions" no longer has any meaning.

So do you think there's a big inherent risk in jumping? Or that it's not that big a deal like I suggested.

No risk, beyond that of any other intentional act, since all change involves - well, changes. All change implies other changes as part of the accommodation of that alteration within your overall "world-pattern", since your ongoing experience is a self-consistent, coherent "landscape", rather than just random moments. There is no science-fiction or "monkey paw" story type risk involved, though.

So, George. I know this is going to sound stupid, but I need to jump as quickly as possible. I'm going to do the cup method tonight and I need results pretty fast (I mean, preferably when I wake up), is there any way to gaurantee this?
Edit: also, it doesn't matter how specific I want the desired outcome to be right? I want to write a lot on the peices of paper.

Not stupid, at all.

So, this topic is all framed as a personal investigation and the examples are called "exercises" rather than "methods" for a reason. That is because there's an exploratory element to all this - nobody can do experimentation on your behalf, nor guarantee anything for you. Hence the wording in the sidebar text. However, in "nothing to lose" situations - to be blunt: what does it matter? Just fully commit to the exercise as described, and see what happens. Be specific, though, I'd say - but remember that's not the same as being detailed, so don't bother with the hows and whys, just concentrate on the outcome (and whittle it down to the aspect of that outcome that matters).

Aside - Note that, in general the concept behind the Two Glasses is to leverage pre-existing patterns in order to (metaphorically speaking) shift the relative intensity of two possible situations. Thus, making one less prominent or likely in ongoing experience, and the other more so . Therefore, in this model, no "rules of reality" breaks are likely to be experienced, so frame your target outcome with that in mind.

Probably worth repeating this recent comment, which aims to clarify what might count as evidence of a "jump" versus just noticing things might be a bit flaky sometimes:

I would suggest that the only thing that counts as evidence of a "jump", is if the specific outcome you targeted subsequently arises in your experience. (And even then, in order to confirm that it is your intention that leads to an outcome, you'd have to perform the experiment many times, for many different outcomes.) Anything else is, at best, an example of a spontaneous difference between your present memory of an apparent past versus your present sensory experience. It's probably worth keeping in mind that, simply by engaging in experiments related to the possible flexibility of experience, you will be on the lookout for a "looseness" to things which quite possibly was always the case.

POST: Can you jump without using a method?

You might ponder whether the experience, the "sensory theatre", of performing a "method" is itself a result of some sort. However, a method (or applied metaphor) can have value in terms of structuring - that is, selecting or more fully specifying - a particular outcome or pattern, by leveraging your pre-existing patterns as part of its definition. Meanwhile, as you also point out, without some sort of activity you don't have anything to focus on: because if your intention or outcome would have no impact within your current sensory moment, then you won't experience anything at all when you make the shift. For example, if your intention was the form "it is true now that I pass my exams then", then you have no sensory experience of making that change, beyond simply "knowing" that you did so. This can make it hard to resist fiddling about subsequently (and probably counter-intending, or re-implying, the former situations as you go). And so, indulging in an experience of apparently "doing" the change, even that though "doing" is itself a result of intention (the intentional pattern "it is true now that I will shortly experience moving my arms and this movement means-that I will pass my exams then"), is beneficial in terms of helping alleviate that urge, perhaps.

POST: I'm ready to jump, I just have one thing I don't understand...

If you follow the implications fully, then there are no "other people" and there's not even a "you-as-person". Rather you are that-which-experiences and you have "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world. You are never talking to anyone in a fundamental sense; you are just having an experience "as if" you are a person who is talking to someone. As for coming back to your "previous reality" - you never really go anywhere anyway, you simply modify your ongoing experience (of and as you-as-experiencer or you-as-awareness which "takes on the shape of" situations, states and experiences) to align with an idea you have. So if you want to return to the previous experience, the thought of that "previous reality" basically is that "previous reality"

I was hoping for some classic George insight, thank you so much! So you mean my jump will sort of feel like a manifestation?

Well, I dunno - what does "manifestation" feel like? (I know what you're getting at.)

If we just keep it simple: all that changes is that some of the "as-if" facts about our experience become different, from that point onwards. Everything else is just a story about that, a description we make up about something supposedly "behind" the experience. (Those descriptions are, of course, also just experience: the experience of "thinking about experiences".)

So that might be the fact of some object showing up later (which wasn't expected to and wasn't going to happen otherwise, it seems), or it might be the fact of whether you are ill or not, and so on. For sure, it's always tempting to want to create some narrative about things happening "out there" somewhere, which lead to a change. But it's more accurate to simply view the world as a fully-defined pattern, one which includes the pre-determined set of sequential "sensory moments" which will appear. That's what you are changing: the sum of all facts and patterns, which exists now, and which you might call your current "state". Metaphorically, we can think of that state as being "dissolved" into the background of you, with only a particular "moment" of that state "unfolded" as a sensory aspect, in sequence. (Where "you" is you-as-awareness rather than you-as-person; that latter being just a "formatting" of experience, itself only a pattern.)

Q1: the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world.
Any idea as to why that-which-experiences has chosen to take on this particular shape?
Does Awareness actively choose what to experience, like a chef, a painter, a composer? Or is It more like a dreamer, a psychonaut, passively going with the flow of patterns (dictated by associations/implications), in an endless reverie?

Well, you are awareness - so if you aren't choosing and redirecting, then it isn't either. Which means it's more like a "material". Metaphorically: a "landscape" which takes on the shape of patterns, experiences, and whose only inherent property is being-aware - rather than an "intelligence" that does things. Hence why I sometimes use the phrase "dumb patterning system" (although the word "system" can be misleading too). So, if you don't deliberately redirect experience, by shape-shifting yourself to another state, then it's more like your second description. If you do deliberately redirect, then it's still like the second one, except that now you are taking on the experience of apparently being-a-chef-painter-composer and are using that identification as a platform from which to shape the rest. If you do this knowingly, though - that is, you actively choose, but you recognise that the "choosing" is itself a result, an experience, rather than a cause - then that's probably the best position to be in, since it accepts that there is no "higher" experience. All experiences are at the same level, and the fundamental nature of experience is being-aware (the fact of all experience, regardless of content), and self-shifting ("intending", "direct imagination", whatever) is the only cause.

I find it hard to identify myself with awareness. I see myself as a tiny subset of it, and I see awareness as something infinite.

It is infinite, but not in the sense of being an infinite expanse, not like a place. It is infinite in the sense of having no particular fundamental form; eternally containing all possible patterns and being able to "take on the shape" of them, making some patterns more "intense", relatively speaking, than others.

Surely, I'm aware, but I'm not aware of "everything".

Why not?

Are you perhaps conflating being-aware with being aware of something as an expanded, 3D, multi-sensory experience? It can be helpful to think of "everything" as always being there, but at a low "intensity" - sort of "dissolved" into the background of yourself. Like in the blanket metaphor below: all patterns are always present, but their relative contribution is different, and only one aspect of the full pattern is "unfolded" into sensory format at any one moment (in fact, that is what a "moment" is). The sense in which you are "awareness" is not the same as the phrase "to be aware of". The latter usually refers to a particular sort of experience. It would be better to say you are awareness as everything, perhaps. A fundamental problem we have here, though, is that this is something that inherently cannot be thought about (see the metaphor of the beach, later).

I can see that some aspects of my experience match my intentions, while others pop up without a direct assertion.

It's not necessarily the case that you deliberately intended anything. "Deliberately intending" is sort of an intended experience itself. There's a bit of a language issue here, but the way I'd suggest "intention" is interpreted is that: "an intention" is a particular pattern whose contribution to ongoing experience is made more prominent or intense; "intending" is the increasing of the prominence of a pattern. And so, "intending" isn't equivalent to "making a decision and then asserting that something will now be true". That is an example, of intention, perhaps. Furthermore, it's important to note that since you are not just a "void" state, you are already patterned. And so, any intention that you do make is done as a modification to that pre-existing structured landscape. Your intention will therefore also involve an increase of the extended pattern of that basic intention, plus an increase in any implied patterns. Every intention is a shift of the entirety of the state, to some extent. For example, if I intend that "it is true now that my arm will lift shortly" then I am also intending the full meaning of that assertion, plus effectively re-intending its full implications (of a body, of the formatting of experience as a space, of time, and all the other stuff). If I do it in response to a fearful situation, then perhaps I am also increasing the pattern of fearful situations - and so on.

So, if I'm all-encompassing awareness, where do those non-deliberated things come from? And why am I unaware of the intentions that brought them about?

Ultimately, I'd say this is about conflating "intention" (the shifting of state, changing the relative "intensities" of all possible patterns such that their contribution to ongoing experience is altered) and "doing things" as a person. They are not the same. The latter is an experience. Also, I feel that the phrase "all-encompassing" is still built on the idea that the world is some sort of "place" that exists in the same form as it is experienced, and that someone you are an object or container which has enveloped them. Now, that's okay as a metaphor sometimes, but it can be unhelpful. It's more accurate to say that what you are is the subject to all experiences; you are what the experience of anything is "made from". And so you don't really experience actually being a person-object in a world-place. Rather, you have experiences "as if" that were so - just as a ripple on a piece of blue canvas is not an experience of "a stormy sea", it is an experience of "a ripple on a piece of canvas" that is shaped "as if" there was a stormy sea. It might be useful to revisit some previous metaphors. We have:

• The Blanket: What you truly are is the "non-material material" whose only inherent property is awareness or being-aware, and which "takes on the shape of" experiences. Right now, you-as-awareness have "taken on the shape of" the experience of apparently being-a-person-in-a-world. This can be conceived of as a non-dimensional blanket, within which there are folds (fact-patterns) which represent the world (world-pattern or current state).
• The Beach: The metaphor of the beach - about metaphors. It is not possible to build a sandcastle which captures within its form both "the beach" and "sand". However, the sandcastle is both the beach and sand. You can certainly label one part of the sandcastle "the beach" and another "sand", but the properties of those parts, being of form, will not capture the properties of the beach and sand themselves, which are "before" form. If you forget this, and start building ("thinking") further sandcastles based on those labelled parts, all further constructions and their conclusions are immediately "wrong", fundamentally, even though they may be coherent structures ("make sense") on their own terms.
• Patterned States: All possible patterns exist eternally with and as awareness, and all patterns always contribute to ongoing experience. However, they differ in their relative intensity, their relative level of contribution. Note that patterns are not located; they are unbounded and everywhere-nowhere, "dissolved" into awareness. The current experiential state, then, is equivalent to a particular distribution of pattern intensities, which you might think of as a set of "facts" which fully define a world or scenario (although those "facts" might be quite abstract, sort of meta-facts). One of those fact-patterns is that of "time passing". That is, a particular state fully defines a sequence of moments which unfold deterministically unless the state is shifted again. In order to shift one's state, one must change the relative intensity of patterns, which is done by intending. In this metaphor, "an intention" is a fact-pattern which is to have its relative contribution to experience increased, and "intending" is the intensification of that pattern. There is no method to intending, no mechanism or act involved, and no cause and effect. It is akin to shape-shifting. One simply "intends". Intending is the only cause; all apparent causes are in fact results of intending, in the form of patterns within a state.

Also, check out the Feeling Out Exercise as an example of an attempt to change perspective, the point of which is to emphasise, by direct experience, that you are not a person - and thinking of yourself being a person who is some sort of controller is misleading. Rather, again, you are that-which-takes-on-the-shape-of-experience, and it just so happens you've ended up having become formatted as a being-person-in-a-world experience. And there is no "outside" to that. (I think I've used up my hyphen quota for the day, there.)

TL;DR: You can't have an experience of being "awareness"; all experiences you have actually are "you-as-awareness". A bit like how everything you see is made from "seeing", but you will never actually see "seeing" no matter what visions you have. An issue we have here with language is that it is structured to talk about objects, about content, and we are trying to talk about subjects, context. Hence having to introduce extra meta-level concepts, like "awareness" and, in our illustration there, "seeing".

Ultimately, the experience of being a non-local consciousness, however amazing, is just another arbitrary experience.

I'd certainly agree. There is no "special" experience that is elevated over any other experience. However, there is an elevated recognition, or insight, embedded within that exact point: that is, that all experiences are of the same nature, and that "experiencing" is what you are, rather than any particular experience. The subject or context to all content.

So, what exactly makes the patterning model (or subjective idealism in general) better or more helpful than materialism (where, similarly, we're at the mercy of dumb mechanical laws)?

Not "better", just differently useful. However, the point at which assumptions are made is "earlier" here. Materialism subjective idealism patterning-type, in order of shifting-back of the baseline assumption. And in this case, we are fully recognising the assumptions, and admitting only one single fact as ultimate (see later). We can probably be clearer here, beyond that. The "patterning model" isn't intended to be an explanation of experience. In fact, the very idea of an explanation of experience is meaningless - what with an explanation just being yet another experience: the experience of "thinking about 'experiences'". Rather, it's more of a "thinking structure" which contains only the most basic, and hence the least limiting, concepts which correspond to a structured - patterned, if you will - ongoing experience, such that we have, and such that we might desire. So it's a way to describe experience in a way that's as close to the straightforward notion of experience as a sort of rippled you-as-awareness (with nothing "behind" it, no assumption of any further objects independent of the subject, which in any case makes no sense once you examine your direct experience) and also as a way of formulating intentional change.

The nature of experience isn't something that is thought out; it is something that is directly recognised (although there may be some wrestling with thought, and some experimentation and investigation, prior to that; something the subreddit explores). That recognition is the starting point really, although you can proceed "as if" it were true and get experiences which correspond to it. The recognition being: the only fundamentally true fact is the property of being-aware. All other facts are relatively true only, which is to say that they have varying degrees of contribution to ongoing experience. For the sake of conceptualising this, we say that all facts or patterns are eternally present, just at different intensities. However, of course, that is itself starting from a "later" point, but - as with the "patterning" model - it is a reasonable starting point, because really we are using only discussing "apparent observer/experiencer" type situations, rather than void-awareness type states. Essentially, the "patterning" model (which isn't special, it's just a nice platform from which to discuss the more abstract basic properties of a structured experience, and the lack of limitation, while still being able to use language) says something like: what you are is "that which takes on the shape of patterns, but has no inherent or fixed patterned state, and this constitutes the structure of your ongoing experience" and "all experiences are on an 'as if' basis only".

Again: there is no theory of experience to be had, in the sense of an explanation of "what is really happening behind the scenes". There is only the structuring of experience - and a self-structuring at that.

Does this mean that jumping and manifesting techniques work only when the target is coherent with the pre-existing landscape and its implications?

Not necessarily. Although: yes, if you are simply going to intend an outcome without addressing its conflict with the current state (in which case you'll perhaps get lots of symbolic synchronicity and dreams, but no event or factual change). Something like the Two Glasses exercise obviously just leverages pre-existing patterning (to do with levels and intensities, transfer and transformation, association and assignment and so on) and doesn't deal in discontinuities and suchlike. It doesn't make any attempt to adjust the more abstract patterning upon which sensory content is structures; it only intensifies (so to speak) a particular "outcome-fact" in preference to others, with the rest of the "world-pattern" landscape being metaphorically dragged into alignment with that, like pulling a fold on a blanket of material (as before). Meanwhile, the Owls of Eternity exercise operates more directly, but deforming yourself with the extended pattern of "owl" without specifying spatial or temporal restraints - hence it's a bit like scribbling an image onto a television screen, only the extended patterning means that you get the full meaning, the symbolic associations, coming into play rather than just literal owls. Now, the lessons from those two exercises can be applied further:

In the first exercise, we are taking pre-existing localised patterns of the "landscape" and adjusting their relative intensities - selecting them form the landscape, and modifying their prominence. In the second exercise, we are intensifying a general component pattern across the whole landscape, everywhere and everywhen, in quite abstract fashion. Combining the two, we might consider how we could modify the general structure of the landscape we are starting with, the more abstract formatting rather than just particular outcomes or world-facts...

In short, this approach - which isn't really an approach, so much as a recognition of "self-shifting" independent of any particular "method" or apparent "mechanism" - needn't be applied just to events. You could apply to to the structure of experience itself. In that way, your intention - specified in terms of a particular interpretation of "landscape", such that the intention is basically "outcome + formatting" - needn't be limited by that pre-existing landscape, perhaps. Hence, in the sidebar, the reference to "active metaphors" and the notion of configuring experience to be in terms of, say, a sequence of moments floating in perception, a memory block, or whatever (leveraging Jorge Luis Borges's metaphors, for example). Or, indeed, a "patterning" of an "imagination space", or you-as-awareness.